Then you either don't live in the UK or don't pay much attention. Adverts must be "legal, decent, honest and truthful", and failure to meet any of these requirements is grounds for the advert to be banned:
Well, that excludes anyone buying these in a bricks & mortar retail shop.
The shitty thermal paper used on most receipt printers is usually completely unreadable inside 18 months, and after 3 years I doubt anyone could say with any degree of certainty that it had ever even been a receipt.
No. Vista basic does not run Aero because it is not included in Vista Basic. My 4gb, quad core x64 based system is capable of using Aero, but if i install vista basic on it I still wont have aero. But Vista Basic IS a version of Vista. If that machine can boot and run Vista basic than it is a vista capable system, this lawsuit should be thrown out.
Thing is, when you go and buy a car, everyone knows that there are lots of optional extras and what you see in the adverts may not be what you get.
When you buy a printer, the manufacturer usually doesn't make a big thing about features which aren't included - they'll either point you to a higher model if you're looking for something specific or they'll point out that buried in the list of "Optional extras" is the feature you desire - provided you buy the option, of course.
Microsoft, however, were never particularly clear about marketing Vista. They certainly didn't make it abundantly clear that even if you bought the all-singing version, some of the "optional extras" required a significantly more powerful computer than was generally available at the lower end of the market at the time it came out.
Machines in question were in fact nowhere near new. Intel's 915 chipset for example (which was one of the chips later allowed under "vista capable") was released all the way back in June of 2004.
Not the point. Most users with little PC-specific knowledge can't reasonably be expected to know these things.
They certainly can't be expected to drill down into the chipset details for every little model number, look up that chipset, find out when it was released and use this to get a feel for how well the system will perform under Vista. Systems with 915 chipsets were still being sold until relatively recently.
I have RTFA but not the legal documents it references, so what I say here is based on speculating on a few lines in TFA.
It looks to me like any method patent which isn't specific to a particular lump of hardware which implements it (ie. a pure software patent, as opposed to, say, a patent covering a piece of software which is then loaded onto a device sold by the manufacturer) is invalid.
While 'Man in the Middle' attacks are certainly theoretically possible, but, has there ever actually ever been a verified MitM attack? Links appreciated if they exist.
That's an extremely good question. My instinctive guess is "probably not involving a mainstream use of the Internet, eg. online banking or shopping" - mainly because MitM attacks require quite a bit of effort and would be quite difficult to set up without leaving a dirty great trail. Far easier to get keylogging spyware and grep for "www.majorbank.com" or run a phishing scam.
Once you get into things like online espionage (being carried out by governments with lots of money and the will to ensure that the attacker is allowed to do their work), I wouldn't like to say.
I am pretty sure my workplace is trying to pull this off but it includes providing their own versions of certificate providers certs by controlling the client binaries.
It'd be easier to present a self-signed certificate for every HTTPS connection and simply install your own root certificate on every client PC. Easy enough when you control the client PCs.
Any SSL-protected connection assumes that you either control or have complete trust in the client PC you're sitting at and the system(s) at the other end. If either of these are not true, then you must assume that the security is compromised.
(Of course, in these days of spyware and keyloggers, you can't necessarily be certain you have control over the client PC and with the number of high-profile data security breaches, I'm not sure you can have much faith in the other end either. One time pads and their modern electronic equivalents - those things that some banks supply that look a bit like a pocket calculator and generate a number when you put your card in a slot -help alleviate the spyware issue by ensuring that your credentials can't be stolen, but they don't prevent an attacker from being able to transmit the contents of your session to a third party who may well glean enough information from that to telephone your bank and transfer money out.
Using infiniband or FibreChannel at 4 or 8GBps, it would take about 140,000 seconds or about 39 hours at full speed to transfer that data.
Assuming you can get data off the system(s) it's currently on at that kind of speed - and even then, indexing's going to be an absolute killer because you wind up doing a lot of seeking.
In the UK everyone has access to any footage anyone records of them on CCTV, whether the person recording is a private company, or the government. It's not exactly one-sided.
You missed a few bits out:
1. They're not obliged to reply to your request immediately - and they're not obliged to pause their normal operations between the day your letter demanding information arrives and the day it's replied to.
So if it takes 30 days for your letter to hit the top of the pile and tapes are recycled after 28 days, there's nothing to give you.
2. There are plenty of examples of all the CCTV cameras in an area being mysteriously "out of service" in areas where something politically sensitive is going on.
3. The law is very badly enforced. I know of no widely publicised case where an organisation has been punished for not properly honouring a request for information - yet I can't believe this hasn't happened yet. Hell, it's happened to me.
Yes, but whenever a subject involving storage comes up some numpty announces "I can store all that for $2k!"; I've even seen raging arguments based on people pointing out that no, it'll cost quite a bit more than that.
Granted, in governmental terms that's still a blip on the balance sheet.
If it went to court, any customer in the UK would be able to get away with terminating their contract on these grounds. I would recommend a formal notification of terminating the contract, the clear reasons why and the promise that this would be resolved via legal action if they chose to pursue you. I would also promise legal action if they in anyway impeded my freedom to move to another ISP.
This won't happen just because it's front page news on a few news for nerds websites - put simply, not enough people know about it.
It needs to be in the more hysterical tabloid press as frontpage news : "BT SPIES ON MILLIONS OF CUSTOMERS!!!111oneoneone" type of thing - every day for a week. Then we'll see some real action.
Otherwise you're just one customer in a sea of millions who don't know enough to give a fuck.
does anyone know why they have to implement it with cookies and redirects? (according to wikipedia)
couldn't they have done this silently and leave users completely unaware of it?
As far as I can gather, it's not BT doing the dirty work. They simply route all HTTP traffic through the Phorm system, and their processes are set up so there's no way to filter whose traffic gets routed that way.
By the time it reaches the Phorm system, it may well not be associated with any specific BT user - Phorm don't know who has what IP address - so the only realistic option for them to use something at the application level.
If anything, it's an indictment of our data protection laws that customer rights can be so easily signed away - all that needs to happen is for BT to include in their next bill "Oh, by the way, we're updating our terms and conditions, please check our website for further details".
I've worked in a school myself. I don't claim to know it all (it was a private school in the UK, so most of the problems associated with state-operated schools in inner city areas simply didn't exist) but I did take a few things from it. Take them with whatever salt you think is necessary.
I think you need to speak to your partner about discussing this with some of the better teachers rather than with/.
The reason I say this is that contrary to popular belief, teaching is not an easy job, and unfortunately it's not an exact science.
Like many professions, teachers are fairly easy to come by. Good teachers, who can engage their pupils and get ideas across efficiently, are a lot harder to find.
Having said that, most good teachers know full well how good their colleagues are. They won't tell a parent this, but as a partner you may be able to get a chance to speak with some. Find out what it is they need - you may be surprised.
And don't be too disappointed if you find that educational software tends to fall into one of two categories:
1. Written by software developers. Dead easy to set up, support, manage and deploy but unfortunately not so good at getting ideas across.
2. Written by teachers. Appalling to set up, keeps on falling over for no apparent reason, deployment across an entire network requires going to every PC in turn, inserting a CD and typing "D:\setup" and all attempts to script this fall flat. But very good at getting ideas across.
There's a slight (to my eyes, at least) halo around the head. The best way I can describe it is it looks like you're staring at a cardboard cutout of the head on the background.
Early chroma-key special effects used on TV and film show exactly the same sort of thing. Doesn't seem to be so bad on more modern work.
Video games can provide the illusion of guitar proficiency much more quickly and easily than learning to play properly.
I'd love to play an instrument well but I have all the innate musical talent of a tom cat undergoing castration. I'd spend hours working and at the end of it might just about be able to pluck out "twinkle twinkle little star".
* 1,037,000,000 passenger trips a year. * Ticket price varies roughly in a range of 2-4 GBP per trip. * That comes to maybe 3,000 million GBP annual revenue.
Not quite as simple as that, because of things like travelcards (1 ticket good for unlimited travel for a day/week/month) and season tickets, but yes, I'm sure it pays for itself.
Having said that, I don't believe London would continue to exist as a reasonably successful city for more than a week or so if the system were to completely collapse.
Sounds like the government decided five nines wasn't as important as cutting the bill in half... as well as one of the former parties to the contract.;)
Probably because each extra guaranteed nine adds a phenomenal amount in cost, and there is nobody on Earth who can change that.
Sooner or later, you have to be pragmatic and say "We may have the occasional bit of downtime, but accepting that will be a damn sight cheaper than trying to reduce the downtime any further".
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."
Douglas Adams said that of Windows '95. Some things never change.
Microsoft has made (some small) improvements in these areas. But they're not off the hook by any means.
I fear it is too late.
Until application vendors are prepared to work with the tools the OS gives them rather than try and reinvent the wheel by applying their own hooks deep into the OS (I'm thinking particularly of DRM within games here, but there's plenty of other things to which this argument could apply), the existing security model isn't going anywhere.
whether or not MySQL is more or less secure than Postgres is another matter altogether
Now that statement puzzles me.
If your systems are designed for maximum security, the database is on a separate server to the application, both servers are firewalled to only allow known-good connections through, the connection between application and database may if necessary be encrypted, the user the application connects to the database as will only have the permissions it needs (and indeed won't even be able to establish a remote connection as any other user) and the application should always be using parameterized SQL queries..
All of these things can be done just as easily with MySQL as Postgres.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you either don't live in the UK or don't pay much attention. Adverts must be "legal, decent, honest and truthful", and failure to meet any of these requirements is grounds for the advert to be banned:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4353055.stm
- Marmite ad banned from being show during children's programs because it "terrified children"
And there's plenty more examples:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/21/crazy_frog_off_air/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/dec/10/advertising.media2
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/12/asa.advertising
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/kate-moss-mascara-advert-was-misleading-asa-rules-395805.html
Well, that excludes anyone buying these in a bricks & mortar retail shop.
The shitty thermal paper used on most receipt printers is usually completely unreadable inside 18 months, and after 3 years I doubt anyone could say with any degree of certainty that it had ever even been a receipt.
Wouldn't having sex with them be borderline doing it with a gorilla?
Oh, so you've met my ex?
No. Vista basic does not run Aero because it is not included in Vista Basic. My 4gb, quad core x64 based system is capable of using Aero, but if i install vista basic on it I still wont have aero. But Vista Basic IS a version of Vista. If that machine can boot and run Vista basic than it is a vista capable system, this lawsuit should be thrown out.
Thing is, when you go and buy a car, everyone knows that there are lots of optional extras and what you see in the adverts may not be what you get.
When you buy a printer, the manufacturer usually doesn't make a big thing about features which aren't included - they'll either point you to a higher model if you're looking for something specific or they'll point out that buried in the list of "Optional extras" is the feature you desire - provided you buy the option, of course.
Microsoft, however, were never particularly clear about marketing Vista. They certainly didn't make it abundantly clear that even if you bought the all-singing version, some of the "optional extras" required a significantly more powerful computer than was generally available at the lower end of the market at the time it came out.
Machines in question were in fact nowhere near new. Intel's 915 chipset for example (which was one of the chips later allowed under "vista capable") was released all the way back in June of 2004.
Not the point. Most users with little PC-specific knowledge can't reasonably be expected to know these things.
They certainly can't be expected to drill down into the chipset details for every little model number, look up that chipset, find out when it was released and use this to get a feel for how well the system will perform under Vista. Systems with 915 chipsets were still being sold until relatively recently.
I have RTFA but not the legal documents it references, so what I say here is based on speculating on a few lines in TFA.
It looks to me like any method patent which isn't specific to a particular lump of hardware which implements it (ie. a pure software patent, as opposed to, say, a patent covering a piece of software which is then loaded onto a device sold by the manufacturer) is invalid.
While 'Man in the Middle' attacks are certainly theoretically possible, but, has there ever actually ever been a verified MitM attack? Links appreciated if they exist.
That's an extremely good question. My instinctive guess is "probably not involving a mainstream use of the Internet, eg. online banking or shopping" - mainly because MitM attacks require quite a bit of effort and would be quite difficult to set up without leaving a dirty great trail. Far easier to get keylogging spyware and grep for "www.majorbank.com" or run a phishing scam.
Once you get into things like online espionage (being carried out by governments with lots of money and the will to ensure that the attacker is allowed to do their work), I wouldn't like to say.
I am pretty sure my workplace is trying to pull this off but it includes providing their own versions of certificate providers certs by controlling the client binaries.
It'd be easier to present a self-signed certificate for every HTTPS connection and simply install your own root certificate on every client PC. Easy enough when you control the client PCs.
Any SSL-protected connection assumes that you either control or have complete trust in the client PC you're sitting at and the system(s) at the other end. If either of these are not true, then you must assume that the security is compromised.
(Of course, in these days of spyware and keyloggers, you can't necessarily be certain you have control over the client PC and with the number of high-profile data security breaches, I'm not sure you can have much faith in the other end either. One time pads and their modern electronic equivalents - those things that some banks supply that look a bit like a pocket calculator and generate a number when you put your card in a slot -help alleviate the spyware issue by ensuring that your credentials can't be stolen, but they don't prevent an attacker from being able to transmit the contents of your session to a third party who may well glean enough information from that to telephone your bank and transfer money out.
Using infiniband or FibreChannel at 4 or 8GBps, it would take about 140,000 seconds or about 39 hours at full speed to transfer that data.
Assuming you can get data off the system(s) it's currently on at that kind of speed - and even then, indexing's going to be an absolute killer because you wind up doing a lot of seeking.
In the UK everyone has access to any footage anyone records of them on CCTV, whether the person recording is a private company, or the government. It's not exactly one-sided.
You missed a few bits out:
1. They're not obliged to reply to your request immediately - and they're not obliged to pause their normal operations between the day your letter demanding information arrives and the day it's replied to.
So if it takes 30 days for your letter to hit the top of the pile and tapes are recycled after 28 days, there's nothing to give you.
2. There are plenty of examples of all the CCTV cameras in an area being mysteriously "out of service" in areas where something politically sensitive is going on.
3. The law is very badly enforced. I know of no widely publicised case where an organisation has been punished for not properly honouring a request for information - yet I can't believe this hasn't happened yet. Hell, it's happened to me.
Yes, but whenever a subject involving storage comes up some numpty announces "I can store all that for $2k!"; I've even seen raging arguments based on people pointing out that no, it'll cost quite a bit more than that.
Granted, in governmental terms that's still a blip on the balance sheet.
Besides, only 140TB (or 20 TB)? That's child's play for any competent DB admin, never mind only about $2k worth of hardware to hold it.
Assuming that none of it's been put into the archival system yet, that means they're dumping 140TB on it in one go.
You index 140TB on $2k worth of hardware and come back to me when you're done. Hopefully I won't have died by then.
If it went to court, any customer in the UK would be able to get away with terminating their contract on these grounds. I would recommend a formal notification of terminating the contract, the clear reasons why and the promise that this would be resolved via legal action if they chose to pursue you. I would also promise legal action if they in anyway impeded my freedom to move to another ISP.
This won't happen just because it's front page news on a few news for nerds websites - put simply, not enough people know about it.
It needs to be in the more hysterical tabloid press as frontpage news : "BT SPIES ON MILLIONS OF CUSTOMERS!!!111oneoneone" type of thing - every day for a week. Then we'll see some real action.
Otherwise you're just one customer in a sea of millions who don't know enough to give a fuck.
Why not just switch to another ISP? Nobody is forced to use BT.
Because half the other ISPs on the market are openly using this, the other half probably are but haven't announced it.
does anyone know why they have to implement it with cookies and redirects? (according to wikipedia)
couldn't they have done this silently and leave users completely unaware of it?
As far as I can gather, it's not BT doing the dirty work. They simply route all HTTP traffic through the Phorm system, and their processes are set up so there's no way to filter whose traffic gets routed that way.
By the time it reaches the Phorm system, it may well not be associated with any specific BT user - Phorm don't know who has what IP address - so the only realistic option for them to use something at the application level.
If anything, it's an indictment of our data protection laws that customer rights can be so easily signed away - all that needs to happen is for BT to include in their next bill "Oh, by the way, we're updating our terms and conditions, please check our website for further details".
I've worked in a school myself. I don't claim to know it all (it was a private school in the UK, so most of the problems associated with state-operated schools in inner city areas simply didn't exist) but I did take a few things from it. Take them with whatever salt you think is necessary.
I think you need to speak to your partner about discussing this with some of the better teachers rather than with /.
The reason I say this is that contrary to popular belief, teaching is not an easy job, and unfortunately it's not an exact science.
Like many professions, teachers are fairly easy to come by. Good teachers, who can engage their pupils and get ideas across efficiently, are a lot harder to find.
Having said that, most good teachers know full well how good their colleagues are. They won't tell a parent this, but as a partner you may be able to get a chance to speak with some. Find out what it is they need - you may be surprised.
And don't be too disappointed if you find that educational software tends to fall into one of two categories:
1. Written by software developers. Dead easy to set up, support, manage and deploy but unfortunately not so good at getting ideas across.
2. Written by teachers. Appalling to set up, keeps on falling over for no apparent reason, deployment across an entire network requires going to every PC in turn, inserting a CD and typing "D:\setup" and all attempts to script this fall flat. But very good at getting ideas across.
And is also owned by Intel and produced under the brand name XScale, though rights to the chips have also been sold to other companies.
There's a slight (to my eyes, at least) halo around the head. The best way I can describe it is it looks like you're staring at a cardboard cutout of the head on the background.
Early chroma-key special effects used on TV and film show exactly the same sort of thing. Doesn't seem to be so bad on more modern work.
Video games can provide the illusion of guitar proficiency much more quickly and easily than learning to play properly.
I'd love to play an instrument well but I have all the innate musical talent of a tom cat undergoing castration. I'd spend hours working and at the end of it might just about be able to pluck out "twinkle twinkle little star".
Back-of-the-envelope calculations:
* 1,037,000,000 passenger trips a year.
* Ticket price varies roughly in a range of 2-4 GBP per trip.
* That comes to maybe 3,000 million GBP annual revenue.
Not quite as simple as that, because of things like travelcards (1 ticket good for unlimited travel for a day/week/month) and season tickets, but yes, I'm sure it pays for itself.
Having said that, I don't believe London would continue to exist as a reasonably successful city for more than a week or so if the system were to completely collapse.
Sounds like the government decided five nines wasn't as important as cutting the bill in half... as well as one of the former parties to the contract. ;)
Probably because each extra guaranteed nine adds a phenomenal amount in cost, and there is nobody on Earth who can change that.
Sooner or later, you have to be pragmatic and say "We may have the occasional bit of downtime, but accepting that will be a damn sight cheaper than trying to reduce the downtime any further".
Or, to put it another way:
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."
Douglas Adams said that of Windows '95. Some things never change.
Microsoft has made (some small) improvements in these areas. But they're not off the hook by any means.
I fear it is too late.
Until application vendors are prepared to work with the tools the OS gives them rather than try and reinvent the wheel by applying their own hooks deep into the OS (I'm thinking particularly of DRM within games here, but there's plenty of other things to which this argument could apply), the existing security model isn't going anywhere.
whether or not MySQL is more or less secure than Postgres is another matter altogether
Now that statement puzzles me.
If your systems are designed for maximum security, the database is on a separate server to the application, both servers are firewalled to only allow known-good connections through, the connection between application and database may if necessary be encrypted, the user the application connects to the database as will only have the permissions it needs (and indeed won't even be able to establish a remote connection as any other user) and the application should always be using parameterized SQL queries..
All of these things can be done just as easily with MySQL as Postgres.
What else could you do?
That's exactly what I'm saying! If you've got the best platform, and no one wants to buy it, you suck at selling stuff.
History is littered with the corpses of companies that had great products but were lousy at selling them.