Well, that's OK then. I guess we can count ourselves lucky that they figured Royal Mail would be a bad idea with all the ongoing backlogs, postal strikes and lost mail.
I guess the use of TNT made it more likely than not that this CONFIDENTIAL PERSONAL AND FINANCIAL DATA ON 25000000 CITIZENS AND THEIR CHILDREN WORTH BILLIONS ON THE BLACK MARKET was going to reach its destination (at least if someone didn't realise what was in the package). How could they have known that the coin toss would beat them?
Here's a quote from an anonymous HMRC employee courtesy of an El Reg article about just how secure this internal courier system is:
Imagine an A4 sized envelope, with a set of gridlines printed on one side, three columns by 30 or so rows, making 90 boxes. When you want to send stuff internally between Civil Service offices, you get one off the pile, drop your stuff into it and scribble the recipient name and office number in one of the boxes.
You then leave it in a tray for the Internal Mail people to collect, it goes down to the post room and after a period of time elapses, it arrives at the destination. You get the stuff out, scribble out the last set of details and drop the grid on the 'to be used' pile.
There's no security, given that the grids are not stuck down, but sometimes you get the more security-aware users sticking a label across the seal and signing it, so there's some evidence if it's tampered with.
And the government will give itself a nice fat getout clause so that it's immune when it loses everyone's data, but any company or individual outside the government is in trouble.
They do not require any such get-out clause. The Crown (including all ministers, government departments and their staff) is constitutionally immune from any and all civil or criminal proceedings, and Parliament cannot legislate to change that.
The chancellor's excuse is "it was just a junior civil servant", which IMO makes his situation a whole lot worse. That civil servant could have been (and indeed may well be) a fraudster; having to breach some internal departmental policy that by all accounts everyone ignores and for which breaches are not punished would hardly cause him to change his mind if he were a criminal.
The data was copied and sent in clear breach of the agency's (and the Government's) rules. The last time I checked, it wasn't the Chancellor's responsibility to monitor personally all packages sent by Government agencies.
It is the Chancellor's responsibility to ensure that an entire database of sensitive personal and financial data on 25000000 citizens (and their children) is not kept anywhere where it can not only be accessed by some random junior civil servant (and most likely a whole pile of other people probably including numerous convicted criminals and illegal immigrants--both of which seem to manage to get jobs in important government departments) but be copied to CD and posted out of the building.Not only that, but a government minister should personally ensure that such a database is available on an extremely limited need-to-know basis with multiple levels of authentication required from multiple senior civil servants.
The NAO do not need the entire database (and indeed didn't ask for it--just the NI numbers--not sure why they'd need those though) sent to them. I'm no expert at all on communications (but am currently a political candidate), but, if they have to send a large database between government departments, I'd imagine it should be done over a secure public-key encrypted VPN. If, secure telecoms channels do not exist between government departments, it shouldn't be by a standard unrecorded courier service. Securicor would be a good start for such private data (incidentally, worth billions on the black market). Large databases might be personally carried by a senior civil servant on an encrypted hard drive requring biometrics, public keys and real-life keys with an armed police escort and means to destroy the disk.
This is not an isolated incident. The same department, HMRC, informed people last week that they had lost financial records for people with pensions at a certain bank. HMRC have lready lost databases on a similarly massive scale twice this year. Other government departments (e.g.:the NHS) do not have a much better track record. They have not learned from their mistakes.
The current cabinet seem to lack basic skills in common sense and computer literacy.
The home secretary, when asked whether this was an argument against ID cards, said "I'm sure someone else has has discussed that" (i.e.: I don't want to discuss it because I do not understand such technical stuff even though I'm the minister responsible for implementing it) then proceeded to bullshit on the fly about how ID cards would obviously use the newest technology instead of the "ancient computers" used by HMRC which would make it all safe and good. She was clearly floundering. The chancellor, when asked the same question in the Commons, said that the ID card database would be protected by a biometrics (the database of which, one assumes he is hoping they won't loose since changing one's account details is significantly easier than changing one's biometrics).
LOL. My excuse is that I was in a law lecture at the time so wasn't really looking at the screen lest the lecturer noticed I was on the computer and not listening.
Firefox doesn't do X, ergo no Firefox for anyone, anywhere!
Leaving aside your ad hominem attack, that is a straw man. I didn't say people shouldn't use it, just that their working on other things (e.g.: features) doesn't matter to me (and many other users) until the leaks are fixed. In fact I encourage others to use it, I have the t-shirt (literally) and fluffy toy mascot, and I've persuaded organisations to adopt it as their default browser on all their PCs.
millions of people are happily using Firefox
Including me I should point out. I've used it since the first public release (Phoenix 0.1) and it has been my primary (and pretty much only browser) since Phoenix 0.2. I have also filed many RFEs and bugs, but I'd rather the developers worked on debugging memory leaks before working on those (esp. as memory leaks are indirectly responsible for most crashes).
>>Firefox doesn't do X, ergo no Firefox for anyone, anywhere!>millions of people are happily using Firefox
Including me I should point out. I've used it since the first public release (Phoenix 0.1) and it has been my primary (and pretty much only browser) since Phoenix 0.2. I have also filed many RFEs and bugs, but I'd rather the developers worked on debugging memory leaks before working on those (esp. as memory leaks are indirectly responsible for most crashes).
Does it still have memory leaks? Nothing else matters (esp. new features) until they've fixed those. They aren't *quite* so bad on Linux but my friends who use MS Windows have real problems with this.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a cat does chase mice because it finds it fun (especially as they often don't seem to eat their prey). It finding it fun (even though not hungry) would of course be evolved though to make certain that it does eat and to keep its hunting skills up, etc. Or, actually, just because that is the best way to ensure it catches prey (especially when it is first left to fender for itself), as opposed to relying on it being conditioned into associating chasing rodents with getting a meal.
One can wear a white poppy to remember the dead without supporting any glorification of war, in particular, redemption, i.e., the stated belief of the British Legion that sending soldiers to fight is always good (regardless of the morality of the conflict) because those who die killing others go straight to (Christian) heaven. The white poppies were first made in 1933 by war widows (following attempts as early 1926 by them to get the British Legion to decouple remembrance from glorification and redemption).
BTW, http://google.com/ doesn't have a special logo on it for me (in the UK) and I did override the automatic redirect to the UK page.
Do the editors bet on which option will win in/. polls and are half of the votes for the CowboyNeal option actually by CowboyNeal repeatedly clicking his mouse. Inquiring minds want to know.
I'm not saying it was the funniest joke ever but it wasn't that bad for/.. Maybe you just didn't get it. At risk of stating the obvious, the OP was saying that he won't let his money go near anything that was anti-Jewish, and I was, in a parody of anti-Semite conspiracy theorists, saying that he had no worries as the Jews control all the money. Does that help?
I really don't like having to put disclaimers on funny posts but way to many mods on this site evidently just glance at posts before modding them or don't realise when people are being funny/sarcastic.
Tour Guide:Research suggests that the origin of this, as well as many other phenomena designed to cause confusion, was a software company called Microsoft.
Tourist:You mean the satanic religion that worshiped the one known as Bob?
Tour Guide:No, this is before Microsoft was technically a Satanic religion, although leading theorists are still in hot debate over whether or not they ever exhibited non-Satanic behavior. They produced operating systems, of which Bob was one that had a very short life after no one bought it. Anyway, following the demise of Bob, Microsoft caught on to the idea of forcing all new computers to come with their new window-based operating system (known confusingly as "Windows") which caused hours of torment by doing the opposite to the user's wishes and constantly succumbing to what was known as the Blue Screen of Death.
In order to patronise and confuse their users (or The Used as Microsoft worshipers preferred to call them), they labeled everything in their operating system with the prefix, "My" (e.g.: My Documents, My Computer), thus causing many suicides in tech support call centres after the staff tried to explain to callers what they meant by "Can you open your My computer on your computer's desktop?"
Use links2 -g (that's graphical Links with images). That's what I do when I need to do something quickly that doesn't require heavy JS and the thousands of open tabs in Firefox are slowing it down quite a bit. Apparently you even get tabbed graphical browsing if you use links-hacked but I haven't tried that yet.
On DSL, I never experience pages loading at all with links (as the split second between my clicking a link or pressing return and the page loading doesn't mentally register).
There is also the little problem of the Fifth Amendment: "no person shall...be deprived of...property without due process of law". The government are depriving the EFF of their potential property (court damages) retroactively after their case has been filed by declaring the defendant immune from suit. I don't call that "due process of law".
Here is the bill that the Bush administration and telcos are demanding be passed. It retroactively bans any court from hearing any criminal or civil case (including those pending) against "any person" if the Attorney General (or anyone to whom he delegates such power) declares that the defendant's action "is, was, would be, or would have been intended to protect the United States from a terrorist attack".
This effectively gives the Executive the power to halt any court case.
Bush already introduced a retrospective amnesty act in the form of the Military Commissions Act which exempted Bush and those working for him from prosecution under the War Crimes Act for acts committed before the commencement of the MCA.
As for bills of attainder (legislation outlawing a person or organisation rather than their actions), try declaring yourself a member of Al-Qaeda in the USA and see how long it takes before you are detained (or carted off to Guantanamo Bay).
Keep up. Your head of state declared two years ago that "[the U.S. Constitution]'s just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Before someone points this out, I am well aware that they are only being sued ATM but my point is they probably would have been charged with something by now if the prosecutors didn't have their hands tied by the perps.
I have a better deal: the charges against AT&T are dropped in exchange for them testifying against the NSA and GWB. Oh wait...GWB appoints the prosecutors and judiciary and the NSA know all their dirty secrets..never mind...
No, like this (which is a real ad mentioning terrorism by the same protection racket, FACT, that the other one is parodying--I'm not sure which is worse).
This has being going on for a decade. AFAIK, they are still been fined daily amounts of millions of euros for not paying the EC's fines for non-compliance from both 2004 and in 2006. I understand that those weren't court judgments but the EC has a sort of semi-judicial capacity unlike member states governments. I think MS will pay up now, but if they don't they probably don't have many more chances left before their assets start getting seized.
The fines will increase (exponentially I believe) until they pay. The court can freeze and seize their European assets and they have much of their money within the EU in Ireland as a US tax dodge. Also, the EU is by far MS's largest market. Not complying would be a BAD idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the use of TNT made it more likely than not that this CONFIDENTIAL PERSONAL AND FINANCIAL DATA ON 25000000 CITIZENS AND THEIR CHILDREN WORTH BILLIONS ON THE BLACK MARKET was going to reach its destination (at least if someone didn't realise what was in the package). How could they have known that the coin toss would beat them?
Here's a quote from an anonymous HMRC employee courtesy of an El Reg article about just how secure this internal courier system is:
The chancellor's excuse is "it was just a junior civil servant", which IMO makes his situation a whole lot worse. That civil servant could have been (and indeed may well be) a fraudster; having to breach some internal departmental policy that by all accounts everyone ignores and for which breaches are not punished would hardly cause him to change his mind if he were a criminal.
It is the Chancellor's responsibility to ensure that an entire database of sensitive personal and financial data on 25000000 citizens (and their children) is not kept anywhere where it can not only be accessed by some random junior civil servant (and most likely a whole pile of other people probably including numerous convicted criminals and illegal immigrants--both of which seem to manage to get jobs in important government departments) but be copied to CD and posted out of the building.Not only that, but a government minister should personally ensure that such a database is available on an extremely limited need-to-know basis with multiple levels of authentication required from multiple senior civil servants.
The NAO do not need the entire database (and indeed didn't ask for it--just the NI numbers--not sure why they'd need those though) sent to them. I'm no expert at all on communications (but am currently a political candidate), but, if they have to send a large database between government departments, I'd imagine it should be done over a secure public-key encrypted VPN. If, secure telecoms channels do not exist between government departments, it shouldn't be by a standard unrecorded courier service. Securicor would be a good start for such private data (incidentally, worth billions on the black market). Large databases might be personally carried by a senior civil servant on an encrypted hard drive requring biometrics, public keys and real-life keys with an armed police escort and means to destroy the disk.
This is not an isolated incident. The same department, HMRC, informed people last week that they had lost financial records for people with pensions at a certain bank. HMRC have lready lost databases on a similarly massive scale twice this year. Other government departments (e.g.:the NHS) do not have a much better track record. They have not learned from their mistakes.
The current cabinet seem to lack basic skills in common sense and computer literacy. The home secretary, when asked whether this was an argument against ID cards, said "I'm sure someone else has has discussed that" (i.e.: I don't want to discuss it because I do not understand such technical stuff even though I'm the minister responsible for implementing it) then proceeded to bullshit on the fly about how ID cards would obviously use the newest technology instead of the "ancient computers" used by HMRC which would make it all safe and good. She was clearly floundering. The chancellor, when asked the same question in the Commons, said that the ID card database would be protected by a biometrics (the database of which, one assumes he is hoping they won't loose since changing one's account details is significantly easier than changing one's biometrics).
LOL. My excuse is that I was in a law lecture at the time so wasn't really looking at the screen lest the lecturer noticed I was on the computer and not listening.
>>Firefox doesn't do X, ergo no Firefox for anyone, anywhere!>millions of people are happily using Firefox Including me I should point out. I've used it since the first public release (Phoenix 0.1) and it has been my primary (and pretty much only browser) since Phoenix 0.2. I have also filed many RFEs and bugs, but I'd rather the developers worked on debugging memory leaks before working on those (esp. as memory leaks are indirectly responsible for most crashes).
Does it still have memory leaks? Nothing else matters (esp. new features) until they've fixed those. They aren't *quite* so bad on Linux but my friends who use MS Windows have real problems with this.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a cat does chase mice because it finds it fun (especially as they often don't seem to eat their prey). It finding it fun (even though not hungry) would of course be evolved though to make certain that it does eat and to keep its hunting skills up, etc. Or, actually, just because that is the best way to ensure it catches prey (especially when it is first left to fender for itself), as opposed to relying on it being conditioned into associating chasing rodents with getting a meal.
BTW, http://google.com/ doesn't have a special logo on it for me (in the UK) and I did override the automatic redirect to the UK page.
But Mexicans and Canadians are Americans.
Do the editors bet on which option will win in /. polls and are half of the votes for the CowboyNeal option actually by CowboyNeal repeatedly clicking his mouse. Inquiring minds want to know.
I'm not saying it was the funniest joke ever but it wasn't that bad for /.. Maybe you just didn't get it. At risk of stating the obvious, the OP was saying that he won't let his money go near anything that was anti-Jewish, and I was, in a parody of anti-Semite conspiracy theorists, saying that he had no worries as the Jews control all the money. Does that help?
I really don't like having to put disclaimers on funny posts but way to many mods on this site evidently just glance at posts before modding them or don't realise when people are being funny/sarcastic.
Uhhh...Yes. That usually is the reason why people read or watch fictional books and films: modern life is pretty boring.
Tour Guide:Research suggests that the origin of this, as well as many other phenomena designed to cause confusion, was a software company called Microsoft.
Tourist:You mean the satanic religion that worshiped the one known as Bob?
Tour Guide:No, this is before Microsoft was technically a Satanic religion, although leading theorists are still in hot debate over whether or not they ever exhibited non-Satanic behavior. They produced operating systems, of which Bob was one that had a very short life after no one bought it. Anyway, following the demise of Bob, Microsoft caught on to the idea of forcing all new computers to come with their new window-based operating system (known confusingly as "Windows") which caused hours of torment by doing the opposite to the user's wishes and constantly succumbing to what was known as the Blue Screen of Death.
In order to patronise and confuse their users (or The Used as Microsoft worshipers preferred to call them), they labeled everything in their operating system with the prefix, "My" (e.g.: My Documents, My Computer), thus causing many suicides in tech support call centres after the staff tried to explain to callers what they meant by "Can you open your My computer on your computer's desktop?"
Well...your money won't be because the evil Jew bankers have it all and they are using it to bring in the New World Order.
Note to Mods: That was supposed to be funny.
Seriously though, you (the parent) might actually have a reputation to tarnish unlike the prospective puchasers of Facebook (Microsoft and Yahoo)...
Use links2 -g (that's graphical Links with images). That's what I do when I need to do something quickly that doesn't require heavy JS and the thousands of open tabs in Firefox are slowing it down quite a bit. Apparently you even get tabbed graphical browsing if you use links-hacked but I haven't tried that yet.
On DSL, I never experience pages loading at all with links (as the split second between my clicking a link or pressing return and the page loading doesn't mentally register).
There is also the little problem of the Fifth Amendment: "no person shall...be deprived of...property without due process of law". The government are depriving the EFF of their potential property (court damages) retroactively after their case has been filed by declaring the defendant immune from suit. I don't call that "due process of law".
Here is the bill that the Bush administration and telcos are demanding be passed. It retroactively bans any court from hearing any criminal or civil case (including those pending) against "any person" if the Attorney General (or anyone to whom he delegates such power) declares that the defendant's action "is, was, would be, or would have been intended to protect the United States from a terrorist attack".
This effectively gives the Executive the power to halt any court case.
Bush already introduced a retrospective amnesty act in the form of the Military Commissions Act which exempted Bush and those working for him from prosecution under the War Crimes Act for acts committed before the commencement of the MCA.
As for bills of attainder (legislation outlawing a person or organisation rather than their actions), try declaring yourself a member of Al-Qaeda in the USA and see how long it takes before you are detained (or carted off to Guantanamo Bay).
Keep up. Your head of state declared two years ago that "[the U.S. Constitution]'s just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Before someone points this out, I am well aware that they are only being sued ATM but my point is they probably would have been charged with something by now if the prosecutors didn't have their hands tied by the perps.
I have a better deal: the charges against AT&T are dropped in exchange for them testifying against the NSA and GWB. Oh wait...GWB appoints the prosecutors and judiciary and the NSA know all their dirty secrets..never mind...
No, like this (which is a real ad mentioning terrorism by the same protection racket, FACT, that the other one is parodying--I'm not sure which is worse).
This has being going on for a decade. AFAIK, they are still been fined daily amounts of millions of euros for not paying the EC's fines for non-compliance from both 2004 and in 2006. I understand that those weren't court judgments but the EC has a sort of semi-judicial capacity unlike member states governments. I think MS will pay up now, but if they don't they probably don't have many more chances left before their assets start getting seized.
The fines will increase (exponentially I believe) until they pay. The court can freeze and seize their European assets and they have much of their money within the EU in Ireland as a US tax dodge. Also, the EU is by far MS's largest market. Not complying would be a BAD idea.
BTW, the legal detail is over at Groklaw (basically the court sided with the EC except a minor point about the EC giving too much power to the MS appointed monitoring trustee) and there is a joint FSFE/Samba press release. Also, the the court published the full judgement and other court docs.