It was a big worry for the British government that in the event of a nuclear strike the people they needed to maintain the fiction of continuing authority would actually prefer to be at home dying with their families rather than assisting the remnants of the state.
So, for example, there was a secret list of telephone engineers (all, at the time, government employees) who would be kidnapped at gunpoint in the event of a nuclear emergency and forced into their nearest bunker to maintain the telecommunications equipment.
>I almost can't believe we're talking about effective encryption being illegal
Then you must be very young.
Back in the days of telegrams, many countries had strict regulations regarding the readability of messages sent. The US wouldn't allow the export of software which permitted encryption with (symmetric) key lengths longer than 40 bits until 1996 when the limit was raised to 56 bits by the Wassenaar agreement. PGP was eventually determined to be legally exported from the US as a result of a court decision that source code printed on paper was protected as free speech (you couldn't legally at that point export the source code in electronic form, only as printing on paper). The late 1990s saw many governments agonising about encryption and although the commercial imperative was clear (in particular for electronic financial transactions), because of its military origins it was regarded as a hostile technology - there are endless proposals from various countries for key escrow systems (eg "Clipper Chip"). A proposed encryption system for the UK National Health Service was considered that included key escrow, presumably because it would otherwise be difficult for medical information to be obtained without a court order.
The last few years, in which encryption has been freely available (but little used), are very much the exception in the history of cryptography.
It's debatable in the same way as the audio quality of regular speaker cable compared with gold-plated oxygen-free copper cable is debatable. It's not a long debate.
If you look at the equipment the analogue-faddists are using, it is for the most part not the high-end audio equipment of a previous generation, but retro-reproductions of the portable record players teenagers used to have in their bedrooms, record players that sounded terrible then and sound just as bad now. The only thing that's changed is that there were a lot of genuinely hi-fi systems around in those days for comparison. These days tiny speakers with wildly exaggerated bass are the norm on pretty much everything you buy from mobile phones to TV sound bars; it's hardly surprising that the sound from a Dansette record player sounds better by comparison.
I still have the speakers I used with my pre-CD sound system and I don't regret ditching a turntable for the first model of CD player that was available - the sound quality is superior in every respect (noise, frequency response, dynamic range). Vinyl records are the audio equivalent of Instagram - washed out, artifically-coloured facsimiles of the original that have become a passing fashion.
Don't forget that the Telegraph is an extremely conservative newspaper which is very cosy with the British establishment.
The key phrases in the article, "the Daily Telegraph can disclose", and "a senior security official said", imply that the Telegraph has been explicitly briefed knowing that it will big up the story. You know the quotation:
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist (Thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there's no occasion to."
Mind you, the fact that they're talking about drug gangs is especially significant as on the one hand it's an attempt to deflect attention from the political nature of GCHQ spying whereas on the other it's suggesting that GCHQ has a routine role in what would normally be considered police work. They're obviously proud of their mission creep.
I don't know how Sony Pictures internal systems communicate, but I'm pretty sure they don't need to have direct access to world+dog in order to do so.
What seems to have happened here is that by network-based manipulation of external firewalls, direct communication routes were established between malilcious hosts on the Internet and internal systems. You can avoid that and still maintain e-mail communication by relaying your mail over something other than TCP/IP between your internal-facing and external-facing systems, for example.
And there are actuallly very good productivity reasons for restricting Internet browsing to dedicated computers on physically separate networks - it considerably reduces the amount of the day your staff spend on facebook and amazon.
I'm amazed the "Internet of Everything" mentality still prevails. It was a utopian dream of the 1980s and 1990s but we now have very clear evidence of what happens in practice with universal connectivity - a dystopian nightmare in which governments and criminals are in competition to gain the most effective control over people and commerce.
Perhaps we can ask Sony Pictures how their present productivity is looking compared to, say, RKO?
Actually, most people who buy stock are just speculators, however they might like to describe themselves.
If you buy newly-issued stock in a company, you're definitely an investor - the company gets your money. If you buy enough stock in a company to give you control and use that control to grow the business better than the previous management, you might be considered an investor. If you buy a small bundle of stock from an existing shareholder, you're not investing anything, you've just placed a bet - an indirect consequence of which is that the original actual investor was able to realise his gains.
>As far as monitoring of sent messages goes, the first rule is "If you're on someone else's network, they can see everything you do."
That might apply in the US. The first rule in the EU is that they can see only what they've informed you they want to see, and only if doing that is proportionate. You can't in general snoop just because you own the wires.
Quite. Telephone exchanges have had live upgrades for decades - upgrading not only the code but the data structures while calls are in progress. What is "nuts" is to assume that systems *need* to be shut down for upgrades - that really is a failure of proper architecture.
For a country that believes so strongly in the free market, I can't see the economic logic behind providing any security for politicians. There's not exactly a shortage of candidates, so the correct free market response is to cancel all publicly-funded security for presidents, actual or potential, at least until the year of Cletus v Putin.
And I'm sure in a free market society, simple vanity wouldn't trump anything so fundamental as basic economics, would it?
The government were explicitly required to comment on this very aspect of the matter. Although they said they did not routinely keep data that would allow them to put a number on the number of trials that might potentially have been "tainted" by the transfer of data to prosecutors, they did confirm that they knew of "at least one" but refused to identify it.
In other words, the government are aware of a mistrial and are conspiring to pervert the course of justice and are prepared to admit as much.
While I think you meant "rein in", you have accidentally uncovered a bigger truth:
Presidents *do* want to "reign" and the worst activities of the NSA conspire with them in that aspiration because it's mutually advantageous to both parties.
>Didn't these guys have to take an oath to defend the Constitution?
I'm always amazed how Americans treat the Constitution like some kind of sacred text and then argue constantly about angels and pinheads.
If you're looking to distinguish between right and wrong, a religiously fundamental obsession with scripture is going to get you nowhere - it's better suited to defending the indefensible.
Even if some bewigged and berobed supreme priest deems it constitutional, it's still wrong - and that's what matters.
The Victoria Line has had automated train operation since it opened in 1968. All the driver does is push a button at each station to close the doors.
It's not really a matter of technology.
There is a safety issue in that there are no escape routes other than the unilluminated and electrified track meaning you'd need some on-board staff member to ensure that people could be safely evacuated in the event of an emergency.
The BUNCH vs IBM, Amdahl vs IBM, LANManager vs Netware, Word vs WordPerfect, Excel vs Lotus 1-2-3... The first big anti-trust case in IT was against IBM in 1969.
It may be seem different to anyone who arrived on the scene at a point in time when tech took its first Internet turn and there was enough virtual turf in cyberspace for everyone to have a piece of the action. However, most of those claims are now staked, so this is merely a return to business as usual.
>Scotland can now refuse (to honor all debts contracted in their names),,,
Indeed it could. And the rest of the UK could in retaliation destroy bridges, roads and other publicly-funded assets to an equivalent value if it wished and impose an excise duty on all Scottish exports to collect the interest.
Both would be equally senseless and neither will happen.
Not really to do with "BGP" or "IPv4" as such...
on
The IPv4 Internet Hiccups
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This isn't really to do with BGP or IPv4 as such, it's an inherent problem in the way "The Internet" regards addresses.
You might be able to get some efficiencies in IPv6 by incorporating formerly-unrelated address allocations under a single prefix. But that doesn't solve the problem of a continuously growing network, increasingly complex (and commercially controversial) peering arrangements, the fact that IPv6 addresses are actually larger and the fact that you're going to have to support IPv4 anyway in parallel with any IPv6 transition (I don't personally believe it will ever happen, but that's a different story).
You could, however, get rather more efficiency in core routing tables if network addresses only had a very transient existence and were related to the source/destination route to be employed (eg: look up a domain name, do some route pre-computation, allocate some addressing tokens that make sense to the routers on the path, recalculate the route periodically or in response to packet loss). That's not IPv6, though. IPv6 has the same order of dependence on every router knowing about every destination network as IPv4 does (give or take the slightly greater prefixing efficiency).
TL;DR - The Internet is getting bigger. Buy more kit.
I suppose it's inevitable that people who are writing code for their own interest, and not because they're being paid to do it, will spend their time doing the things that they find most rewarding - and documentation is never going to be high on the list. However, I do suspect the motives of some people who make their code publicly available - it's not about demonstrating how clever you are, it's about sharing the solution to a problem.
And there is definitely an element of the FOSS community that wants to preserve the mystique of the brotherhood - they rail against the iniquities or proprietary software yet behave as if they were members of a medieval crafts guild. That's the only reason why anyone would refuse to spend a fraction of the time they would otherwise spend patronising the uninitiated writing a simple explanation.
In 2004, the Court of Appeal in England ruled that it was OK to admit evidence obtained under torture into English trials, provided that the torture had been carried out elsewhere. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary at the time said:
"We unreservedly condemn the use of torture and have worked hard with our international partners to eradicate this practice. However, it would be irresponsible not to take appropriate account of any information which could help protect national security and public safety"
The Appeal Court ruling was finally overturned by the House of Lords the following year.
However, given the enthusiasm of the original judges and the Home Secretary of the time and the ever increasing use of the "because terrorism" excuse, I'm not sure that there would be similar hope of justice prevailing in the future. It's not just privacy on the line.
>You should not be allowed to just arbitrarily decide which countries laws apply
It's a long-established principle that you should be able to decide, as part of a contract, how disputes relating to the contract should be resolved. That includes things like alternative dispute resolution (arbitration, clerical courts, spinning a bottle...) as well as a national jurisdiction.
However, this only applies to the two parties.
You can't arbitrarily decide how a third party (such as the government of the country in which the contract is effectively executed) should treat you. Google, Apple, et al, can shift their earnings around the globe because of international accounting regulations to which governments, including that of the UK, have subscribed. Partly, they did that because they hoped that by competing with each other to offer favourable tax treatment, they could get international companies to relocate and make up in volume what they were losing in margin by dropping rates.
Surprise, surprise, small countries which get the greatest proportional benefit from headquartering multinationals are able to offer the lowest rates.
Blame your politicians, not the companies they are actually encouraging to behave in this way.
The Data Protection Act (DPA) means you have to be able to opt out of this kind of intrusive data harvesting and if the disabling of advertised functionality isn't covered by the Sale of Goods Act, it would seem that the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations would apply. The DPA applies to your relationship with the data processor (LG) while the functionality of the TV is the responsibility of the retailer.
The correct remedy would be to return the TV to the retailer and demand a refund or a "repair" and to go to the small claims court if they refuse. LG won't be happy when retailers start pushing back.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a big worry for the British government that in the event of a nuclear strike the people they needed to maintain the fiction of continuing authority would actually prefer to be at home dying with their families rather than assisting the remnants of the state.
So, for example, there was a secret list of telephone engineers (all, at the time, government employees) who would be kidnapped at gunpoint in the event of a nuclear emergency and forced into their nearest bunker to maintain the telecommunications equipment.
"For your own good", indeed.
>I almost can't believe we're talking about effective encryption being illegal
Then you must be very young.
Back in the days of telegrams, many countries had strict regulations regarding the readability of messages sent. The US wouldn't allow the export of software which permitted encryption with (symmetric) key lengths longer than 40 bits until 1996 when the limit was raised to 56 bits by the Wassenaar agreement. PGP was eventually determined to be legally exported from the US as a result of a court decision that source code printed on paper was protected as free speech (you couldn't legally at that point export the source code in electronic form, only as printing on paper). The late 1990s saw many governments agonising about encryption and although the commercial imperative was clear (in particular for electronic financial transactions), because of its military origins it was regarded as a hostile technology - there are endless proposals from various countries for key escrow systems (eg "Clipper Chip"). A proposed encryption system for the UK National Health Service was considered that included key escrow, presumably because it would otherwise be difficult for medical information to be obtained without a court order.
The last few years, in which encryption has been freely available (but little used), are very much the exception in the history of cryptography.
... but I guess a paper entitled "Indians Invented Nothing" might not be selected for presentation.
It's debatable in the same way as the audio quality of regular speaker cable compared with gold-plated oxygen-free copper cable is debatable. It's not a long debate.
If you look at the equipment the analogue-faddists are using, it is for the most part not the high-end audio equipment of a previous generation, but retro-reproductions of the portable record players teenagers used to have in their bedrooms, record players that sounded terrible then and sound just as bad now. The only thing that's changed is that there were a lot of genuinely hi-fi systems around in those days for comparison. These days tiny speakers with wildly exaggerated bass are the norm on pretty much everything you buy from mobile phones to TV sound bars; it's hardly surprising that the sound from a Dansette record player sounds better by comparison.
I still have the speakers I used with my pre-CD sound system and I don't regret ditching a turntable for the first model of CD player that was available - the sound quality is superior in every respect (noise, frequency response, dynamic range). Vinyl records are the audio equivalent of Instagram - washed out, artifically-coloured facsimiles of the original that have become a passing fashion.
Don't forget that the Telegraph is an extremely conservative newspaper which is very cosy with the British establishment.
The key phrases in the article, "the Daily Telegraph can disclose", and "a senior security official said", imply that the Telegraph has been explicitly briefed knowing that it will big up the story. You know the quotation:
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(Thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to."
Mind you, the fact that they're talking about drug gangs is especially significant as on the one hand it's an attempt to deflect attention from the political nature of GCHQ spying whereas on the other it's suggesting that GCHQ has a routine role in what would normally be considered police work. They're obviously proud of their mission creep.
I don't know how Sony Pictures internal systems communicate, but I'm pretty sure they don't need to have direct access to world+dog in order to do so.
What seems to have happened here is that by network-based manipulation of external firewalls, direct communication routes were established between malilcious hosts on the Internet and internal systems. You can avoid that and still maintain e-mail communication by relaying your mail over something other than TCP/IP between your internal-facing and external-facing systems, for example.
And there are actuallly very good productivity reasons for restricting Internet browsing to dedicated computers on physically separate networks - it considerably reduces the amount of the day your staff spend on facebook and amazon.
I'm amazed the "Internet of Everything" mentality still prevails. It was a utopian dream of the 1980s and 1990s but we now have very clear evidence of what happens in practice with universal connectivity - a dystopian nightmare in which governments and criminals are in competition to gain the most effective control over people and commerce.
Perhaps we can ask Sony Pictures how their present productivity is looking compared to, say, RKO?
Actually, most people who buy stock are just speculators, however they might like to describe themselves.
If you buy newly-issued stock in a company, you're definitely an investor - the company gets your money. If you buy enough stock in a company to give you control and use that control to grow the business better than the previous management, you might be considered an investor. If you buy a small bundle of stock from an existing shareholder, you're not investing anything, you've just placed a bet - an indirect consequence of which is that the original actual investor was able to realise his gains.
>As far as monitoring of sent messages goes, the first rule is "If you're on someone else's network, they can see everything you do."
That might apply in the US. The first rule in the EU is that they can see only what they've informed you they want to see, and only if doing that is proportionate. You can't in general snoop just because you own the wires.
Quite. Telephone exchanges have had live upgrades for decades - upgrading not only the code but the data structures while calls are in progress. What is "nuts" is to assume that systems *need* to be shut down for upgrades - that really is a failure of proper architecture.
For a country that believes so strongly in the free market, I can't see the economic logic behind providing any security for politicians. There's not exactly a shortage of candidates, so the correct free market response is to cancel all publicly-funded security for presidents, actual or potential, at least until the year of Cletus v Putin.
And I'm sure in a free market society, simple vanity wouldn't trump anything so fundamental as basic economics, would it?
The government were explicitly required to comment on this very aspect of the matter. Although they said they did not routinely keep data that would allow them to put a number on the number of trials that might potentially have been "tainted" by the transfer of data to prosecutors, they did confirm that they knew of "at least one" but refused to identify it.
In other words, the government are aware of a mistrial and are conspiring to pervert the course of justice and are prepared to admit as much.
While I think you meant "rein in", you have accidentally uncovered a bigger truth:
Presidents *do* want to "reign" and the worst activities of the NSA conspire with them in that aspiration because it's mutually advantageous to both parties.
>Didn't these guys have to take an oath to defend the Constitution?
I'm always amazed how Americans treat the Constitution like some kind of sacred text and then argue constantly about angels and pinheads.
If you're looking to distinguish between right and wrong, a religiously fundamental obsession with scripture is going to get you nowhere - it's better suited to defending the indefensible.
Even if some bewigged and berobed supreme priest deems it constitutional, it's still wrong - and that's what matters.
The Victoria Line has had automated train operation since it opened in 1968. All the driver does is push a button at each station to close the doors.
It's not really a matter of technology.
There is a safety issue in that there are no escape routes other than the unilluminated and electrified track meaning you'd need some on-board staff member to ensure that people could be safely evacuated in the event of an emergency.
Actually, nothing has changed.
The BUNCH vs IBM, Amdahl vs IBM, LANManager vs Netware, Word vs WordPerfect, Excel vs Lotus 1-2-3... The first big anti-trust case in IT was against IBM in 1969.
It may be seem different to anyone who arrived on the scene at a point in time when tech took its first Internet turn and there was enough virtual turf in cyberspace for everyone to have a piece of the action. However, most of those claims are now staked, so this is merely a return to business as usual.
How about using the telephone, or calling in at your local Post Office? Both alternative systems and both available.
>Scotland can now refuse (to honor all debts contracted in their names),,,
Indeed it could. And the rest of the UK could in retaliation destroy bridges, roads and other publicly-funded assets to an equivalent value if it wished and impose an excise duty on all Scottish exports to collect the interest.
Both would be equally senseless and neither will happen.
This isn't really to do with BGP or IPv4 as such, it's an inherent problem in the way "The Internet" regards addresses.
You might be able to get some efficiencies in IPv6 by incorporating formerly-unrelated address allocations under a single prefix. But that doesn't solve the problem of a continuously growing network, increasingly complex (and commercially controversial) peering arrangements, the fact that IPv6 addresses are actually larger and the fact that you're going to have to support IPv4 anyway in parallel with any IPv6 transition (I don't personally believe it will ever happen, but that's a different story).
You could, however, get rather more efficiency in core routing tables if network addresses only had a very transient existence and were related to the source/destination route to be employed (eg: look up a domain name, do some route pre-computation, allocate some addressing tokens that make sense to the routers on the path, recalculate the route periodically or in response to packet loss). That's not IPv6, though. IPv6 has the same order of dependence on every router knowing about every destination network as IPv4 does (give or take the slightly greater prefixing efficiency).
TL;DR - The Internet is getting bigger. Buy more kit.
I suppose it's inevitable that people who are writing code for their own interest, and not because they're being paid to do it, will spend their time doing the things that they find most rewarding - and documentation is never going to be high on the list. However, I do suspect the motives of some people who make their code publicly available - it's not about demonstrating how clever you are, it's about sharing the solution to a problem.
And there is definitely an element of the FOSS community that wants to preserve the mystique of the brotherhood - they rail against the iniquities or proprietary software yet behave as if they were members of a medieval crafts guild. That's the only reason why anyone would refuse to spend a fraction of the time they would otherwise spend patronising the uninitiated writing a simple explanation.
In 2004, the Court of Appeal in England ruled that it was OK to admit evidence obtained under torture into English trials, provided that the torture had been carried out elsewhere. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary at the time said:
"We unreservedly condemn the use of torture and have worked hard with our international partners to eradicate this practice. However, it would be irresponsible not to take appropriate account of any information which could help protect national security and public safety"
The Appeal Court ruling was finally overturned by the House of Lords the following year.
However, given the enthusiasm of the original judges and the Home Secretary of the time and the ever increasing use of the "because terrorism" excuse, I'm not sure that there would be similar hope of justice prevailing in the future. It's not just privacy on the line.
Indeed. Look in awe as the honest citizens of Greece and Italy pay their taxes without demur.
I think you'll find that the concept of "country" and "citizen", insofar as it applies to people and not capital, is what got us to this point.
>You should not be allowed to just arbitrarily decide which countries laws apply
It's a long-established principle that you should be able to decide, as part of a contract, how disputes relating to the contract should be resolved. That includes things like alternative dispute resolution (arbitration, clerical courts, spinning a bottle...) as well as a national jurisdiction.
However, this only applies to the two parties.
You can't arbitrarily decide how a third party (such as the government of the country in which the contract is effectively executed) should treat you. Google, Apple, et al, can shift their earnings around the globe because of international accounting regulations to which governments, including that of the UK, have subscribed. Partly, they did that because they hoped that by competing with each other to offer favourable tax treatment, they could get international companies to relocate and make up in volume what they were losing in margin by dropping rates.
Surprise, surprise, small countries which get the greatest proportional benefit from headquartering multinationals are able to offer the lowest rates.
Blame your politicians, not the companies they are actually encouraging to behave in this way.
Don't worry. IPv6 will solve the problem by ensuring those end-of-line internet-connected systems aren't internet-connected any more...
No. Not in UK law, I'm pretty sure, though IANAL.
The Data Protection Act (DPA) means you have to be able to opt out of this kind of intrusive data harvesting and if the disabling of advertised functionality isn't covered by the Sale of Goods Act, it would seem that the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations would apply. The DPA applies to your relationship with the data processor (LG) while the functionality of the TV is the responsibility of the retailer.
The correct remedy would be to return the TV to the retailer and demand a refund or a "repair" and to go to the small claims court if they refuse. LG won't be happy when retailers start pushing back.