I know you're not serious, or I hope you aren't, but how would they know the difference between you intentionally blocking transmissions and just not having stuff turned on?
Probably because it's not just computers that emit electromagnetic radiation. Even the mains wiring will emit a certain amount.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
Bearing in mind that the fourth amendment was drafted in 1776 - air transport, electronic timers and modern, relatively clean explosives did not exist. I suspect the counter-argument would be that this search is perfectly reasonable.
IMO it'd be far more reasonable if the search was carried out in front of you and then your luggage sealed before going through the conveyor belt towards the hold, but that'd mean rebuilding most airports.
And what are the current UK laws on creating and carrying around a obviously fake passport? You know... kind that would have big red letters saying "FAKE PASSPORT! NOT REAL! NOT A FORM OF IDENTIFICATION! FOR JOKE PURPOSES ONLY!" on it?
Who cares? If you're looking to acquire an untraceable mobile phone for criminal purposes, the crime of carrying a fake passport isn't a big deal.
But anyway. Since otherwise online purchases would be shut down, I expect there will be an allowance to use a credit card as identification. I doubt credit card companies will bother tying phones to the stolen cards used to purchase them, they generally just reverse the merchant's charges.
They've still got to deliver the phone to an address.
Unless it's being known as "the one that went over his head saving tens of thousands of dollars". If he can find some uses in their organisation where there is a comparable or better FOSS alternative then they could probably save lots of money.
Fair point.
There exist plenty of organisations where being "the one that went over his head" is a Very Bad Thing, even if it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
I would recommend that if you are going to go over the bosses' head to get something in which saves a small fortune, make sure that the thing you're getting in is pretty damn good. I've seen plenty of instances where F/OSS has been used "because it's free" when the commercial alternatives weren't terribly expensive and were dramatically better (Yes, I'm afraid there are still such products) - saving a fortune by implementing a solution that's so damn awkward that half the staff can't use it and the other half can just about use it but have no wish to is definitely not ideal.
I'd argue that in a shrinking economy, being known to your boss as "the one that went over his head" might be detrimental to your career.
Even if he gets an order from above to take F/OSS seriously with no hint as to what prompted such an order, he's going to wonder what prompted it himself - and "that guy who keeps asking to install Firefox" is going to be #1 in the list of suspects.
I actually administer a whole bunch of Linux systems, most of which authenticate centrally against LDAP but what a lot of Unix people don't know is that Active Directory does a lot more than just user auth.
Amongst other things, it stores a whole bunch of configuration details which member workstations apply.
By and large these are fairly small things like "Outlook is configured to use email.domain.com as the mail server; it's an Exchange server and Outlook should attempt to login with the same credentials that the current user is logged in with", "Internet Explorer uses http://intranet.example.com/ as its homepage", "The following packages are to be installed on the following workstations....".
Judiciously configured, you never need to deal with user questions like "How do I set up email?" or "What's the address of the company intranet?" - and if the answer to questions like that changes, the necessary configuration changes can be carried out centrally.
Most of these aren't a big problem if your company is full of reasonably technically-literate people. However, sooner or later you're likely to want to employ people for whom "understanding how to configure every aspect of a PC" is fairly low in the priorities list.
This is idiotic. Please tell me how many PCs had USB when Apple started shipping machines with firewire. That's right: almost none, and USB 2.0, which can barely compete with 1394a (on speed alone) wasn't even implemented at the time.
Not true.
Most PCs had USB ports - but Windows 95a didn't support USB in any form. Later revisions of Windows '95 added USB support but I don't know of anyone who successfully used USB under Win95.
Also, IIRC, the PS2 had a HDD before the XBOX, no? (Please do correct me if I'm wrong here... Wikipedia backs me up, but we all know exactly how much that is worth.)
Not sure, but if it was it was an optional extra. And most optional extras for consoles tend not to sell very well.
How is that more complicated than setting up a Windows server and MS Office?
Sure setting up backups and raid is "complicated" but, is there something magical with Windows and MS Office that makes that unnecessary?
/Hans
Two words for you:
Active Directory.
Not particularly important if you're just starting up and you're a small business with only a handful of staff, but if your business grows dramatically, the centralised administration provided by AD is a lifesaver. The closest Linux has is the building blocks (which are just that - building blocks which require a lot of work) like cfengine (if you want something semi-cooked) or shell scripting and SSH (if you want to roll your own).
Samba isn't bad, and the NT 4-type domain it can simulate solves many of the problems, but AD is still streets ahead.
The only thing I can think of is dealing with forgotten passwords, which will require restoring the system and losing whatever was on the laptop and not backed up.
They're probably working on the basis of the commercial top-end version of PGP. This includes key recovery so forgotten passwords don't mean the laptop needs to be wiped - but it's not cheap. The price quoted sounds about right from the last time I looked into it.
The DPA is one of the few generally excellent pieces of legislation in the UK. It's just a shame that the Information Commisioner's Office that enforces it isn't as active as it could be. But it gives you quite a bit of power to take on companies yourself.
It's an excellent piece of legislation - but it's also one of the most widely misunderstood and poorly enforced.
It's been used by utility companies to avoid doing things - even though doing such things wouldn't be a breach of it anyway.
On those rare occasions it has been enforced, companies fined have openly admitted that it won't affect their bottom line because they'll pass the cost onto customers.
Exactly. They claim that the can search "every document attached to an e-mail.. -- to see if it matches a list of illegal images. Apparently, they have never heard of SMTP-TLS, POP3S, etc.. Or perhaps they have and they are just like many others -- selling snake oil.
SMTP-TLS and POP3S are pretty bad examples, because they secure the connection but you're still likely to be talking to a mail server that you don't control, and therefore can't guarantee isn't connected to such a thing.
That being said, this is yet another case of "Product which doesn't need to exist and offers little to no real benefit being sold to idiots with some superficially-plausible benefit." Spend any length of time working as a systems manager and you'll see dozens of these.
Right now my favourites are products which make it possible to manage a whole network full of computers at any level from "Make this change to every PC in the business" through "Make this change to this subset of PCs" down to "Just this specific PC". 90% of them require an Active Directory domain.
I noticed that "Gamers should have the right to resell the game" was put in the list of "Illegitimate complaints" with the justification "Not saying reselling programs is right or wrong, only that it is not the function of DRM to make it hard or easy to do this, it's a separate issue."
Regardless of whether the function of DRM is to make this easy or hard, with most current DRM systems, reselling the game is made hard as a side-effect of the DRM. Whether or not that's intentional is something we could argue about all day, and very hard to answer definitively unless one has insider knowledge.
One of the legitimate complaints was: If a program wants to have a limited activation system, then it needs to provide a way to de-authorize other computers (ala iTunes).
If such a de-authorization system existed, then reselling games would be dead easy. In fact, it could even be made to work if the original owner "forgot" to deauthorize their game before reselling it if the authentication part of the DRM was done online.
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9 seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0 fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.
But with Google, you don't get to negotiate scheduled downtime (which wouldn't normally count towards the percentage downtime calculation). It happens when it happens and if that impacts you, tough.
And 7 days free service for a system that's only up 95% of the time? Big deal. In 30 days, that's a 36 hour downtime period. If you're lucky, the 36 hours is spread out across the month entirely out of your business hours and nobody really notices it. If not....
The only practical way this will ever work is coercing hardware manufacturers to stick to more specific standards. In practice, ACPI hasn't solved it.
Historically, the most stable, reliable computer systems have by and large come from companies that produced both the hardware and the software. Solaris, AIX, z/OS, VMS are all examples of this.
I'm not saying it's impossible for the scenario with Microsoft not producing the hardware to work, but I'm not sure it is when Microsoft insist on writing software which tries to be so damn forgiving of every crappy bit of hardware - particularly when they're big enough these days to tell hardware manufacturers that failure to follow the spec properly is their problem.
This has been proven over and over so many times, eventually someone in the courts should notice. SCO finally fell, unfortunately the RIAA has bigger war chests.
The entire legal system is set up on the assumption that everyone (with the possible exception of the defendant) is by and large fairly straight up.
Not really. We legislated to make encryption ineffective against criminal investigation several years ago with the RIPA.
Furthermore, you can encrypt email all you like (and anybody with half a brain who's planning anything untoward would be encrypting, writing in some sort of code or both) it doesn't prevent there being a whole bunch of logs which show that user@example.com is regularly exchanging email with osama@binladen.com.
It seems the judge did not ask for, nor got sufficient evidence, which points to ($#@$ stupid) lawyers/barristers representing the cases.
I doubt it. The whole point of this particular part of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was to overcome with legal force the issue that it is now possible to store a bunch of information - potentially information which reveals criminal activity - in a safe to which physical access is literally impossible without the key (which is essentially what an encrypted file is).
Of course, depending on the crime in question, if that's the only evidence that exists you may be better off just telling the police that you're not giving them the key, they will never get it from you, please go forth and multiply. You'd be facing up to 3 years in prison but if you're hiding information which would get you life in prison, it seems like the only sensible option.
I wonder if it's illegal now to just forget. "I'd love to help you officer, but I guess I just forgot it!"
IIRC, that's been the case since the RIPA was first proposed. If the police come knocking and say "Give us the key", the burden of proof is on you to be able to show that you can't. (How on Earth you're meant to prove that you can't give them something like that is your problem).
Failure to give them the key can lead to 3 years in prison. There was also talk of a proposal whereby if you discuss the order to hand over the key with anyone, you can get 5 years in prison.
(All of this is based on several-year-old memories from articles in The Register, YMMV, IANAL, OMGWTFBBQ).
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're not serious, or I hope you aren't, but how would they know the difference between you intentionally blocking transmissions and just not having stuff turned on?
Probably because it's not just computers that emit electromagnetic radiation. Even the mains wiring will emit a certain amount.
More specific the Fourth Amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
Bearing in mind that the fourth amendment was drafted in 1776 - air transport, electronic timers and modern, relatively clean explosives did not exist. I suspect the counter-argument would be that this search is perfectly reasonable.
IMO it'd be far more reasonable if the search was carried out in front of you and then your luggage sealed before going through the conveyor belt towards the hold, but that'd mean rebuilding most airports.
And what are the current UK laws on creating and carrying around a obviously fake passport?
You know... kind that would have big red letters saying "FAKE PASSPORT! NOT REAL! NOT A FORM OF IDENTIFICATION! FOR JOKE PURPOSES ONLY!" on it?
Who cares? If you're looking to acquire an untraceable mobile phone for criminal purposes, the crime of carrying a fake passport isn't a big deal.
And getting hold of a pretty convincing fake shouldn't be that hard.
People in Britain don't vote against parties who threaten civil liberties. They vote against parties that threaten their mortgages
Ah, in that case I think the problem will be solved some time around the next election then.
But anyway. Since otherwise online purchases would be shut down, I expect there will be an allowance to use a credit card as identification. I doubt credit card companies will bother tying phones to the stolen cards used to purchase them, they generally just reverse the merchant's charges.
They've still got to deliver the phone to an address.
Can you recommend anywhere with a sane government? I'm not in a position to move right now but getting citizenship somewhere might be an option.
Most of the rest of the EU, and if you're already a UK citizen you're entitled to live and work anywhere you like in the EU.
Unless it's being known as "the one that went over his head saving tens of thousands of dollars". If he can find some uses in their organisation where there is a comparable or better FOSS alternative then they could probably save lots of money.
Fair point.
There exist plenty of organisations where being "the one that went over his head" is a Very Bad Thing, even if it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
I would recommend that if you are going to go over the bosses' head to get something in which saves a small fortune, make sure that the thing you're getting in is pretty damn good. I've seen plenty of instances where F/OSS has been used "because it's free" when the commercial alternatives weren't terribly expensive and were dramatically better (Yes, I'm afraid there are still such products) - saving a fortune by implementing a solution that's so damn awkward that half the staff can't use it and the other half can just about use it but have no wish to is definitely not ideal.
I'd argue that in a shrinking economy, being known to your boss as "the one that went over his head" might be detrimental to your career.
Even if he gets an order from above to take F/OSS seriously with no hint as to what prompted such an order, he's going to wonder what prompted it himself - and "that guy who keeps asking to install Firefox" is going to be #1 in the list of suspects.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=999923&cid=25423895
I knew there would be an answer like this.
I actually administer a whole bunch of Linux systems, most of which authenticate centrally against LDAP but what a lot of Unix people don't know is that Active Directory does a lot more than just user auth.
Amongst other things, it stores a whole bunch of configuration details which member workstations apply.
By and large these are fairly small things like "Outlook is configured to use email.domain.com as the mail server; it's an Exchange server and Outlook should attempt to login with the same credentials that the current user is logged in with", "Internet Explorer uses http://intranet.example.com/ as its homepage", "The following packages are to be installed on the following workstations....".
Judiciously configured, you never need to deal with user questions like "How do I set up email?" or "What's the address of the company intranet?" - and if the answer to questions like that changes, the necessary configuration changes can be carried out centrally.
Most of these aren't a big problem if your company is full of reasonably technically-literate people. However, sooner or later you're likely to want to employ people for whom "understanding how to configure every aspect of a PC" is fairly low in the priorities list.
This is idiotic. Please tell me how many PCs had USB when Apple started shipping machines with firewire. That's right: almost none, and USB 2.0, which can barely compete with 1394a (on speed alone) wasn't even implemented at the time.
Not true.
Most PCs had USB ports - but Windows 95a didn't support USB in any form. Later revisions of Windows '95 added USB support but I don't know of anyone who successfully used USB under Win95.
It's PC hardware all the way.
Also, IIRC, the PS2 had a HDD before the XBOX, no?
(Please do correct me if I'm wrong here... Wikipedia backs me up, but we all know exactly how much that is worth.)
Not sure, but if it was it was an optional extra. And most optional extras for consoles tend not to sell very well.
How is that more complicated than setting up a Windows server and MS Office?
Sure setting up backups and raid is "complicated" but, is there something magical with Windows and MS Office that makes that unnecessary?
Two words for you:
Active Directory.
Not particularly important if you're just starting up and you're a small business with only a handful of staff, but if your business grows dramatically, the centralised administration provided by AD is a lifesaver. The closest Linux has is the building blocks (which are just that - building blocks which require a lot of work) like cfengine (if you want something semi-cooked) or shell scripting and SSH (if you want to roll your own).
Samba isn't bad, and the NT 4-type domain it can simulate solves many of the problems, but AD is still streets ahead.
The only thing I can think of is dealing with forgotten passwords, which will require restoring the system and losing whatever was on the laptop and not backed up.
They're probably working on the basis of the commercial top-end version of PGP. This includes key recovery so forgotten passwords don't mean the laptop needs to be wiped - but it's not cheap. The price quoted sounds about right from the last time I looked into it.
The DPA is one of the few generally excellent pieces of legislation in the UK. It's just a shame that the Information Commisioner's Office that enforces it isn't as active as it could be. But it gives you quite a bit of power to take on companies yourself.
It's an excellent piece of legislation - but it's also one of the most widely misunderstood and poorly enforced.
It's been used by utility companies to avoid doing things - even though doing such things wouldn't be a breach of it anyway.
It's been ignored wholesale by British Telecom (who got away with it because police "don't think they intended to break the law" - really? Can I use that as a defence?).
On those rare occasions it has been enforced, companies fined have openly admitted that it won't affect their bottom line because they'll pass the cost onto customers.
Exactly. They claim that the can search "every document attached to an e-mail .. -- to see if it matches a list of illegal images. Apparently, they have never heard of SMTP-TLS, POP3S, etc.. Or perhaps they have and they are just like many others -- selling snake oil.
SMTP-TLS and POP3S are pretty bad examples, because they secure the connection but you're still likely to be talking to a mail server that you don't control, and therefore can't guarantee isn't connected to such a thing.
That being said, this is yet another case of "Product which doesn't need to exist and offers little to no real benefit being sold to idiots with some superficially-plausible benefit." Spend any length of time working as a systems manager and you'll see dozens of these.
Right now my favourites are products which make it possible to manage a whole network full of computers at any level from "Make this change to every PC in the business" through "Make this change to this subset of PCs" down to "Just this specific PC". 90% of them require an Active Directory domain.
I noticed that "Gamers should have the right to resell the game" was put in the list of "Illegitimate complaints" with the justification "Not saying reselling programs is right or wrong, only that it is not the function of DRM to make it hard or easy to do this, it's a separate issue."
Regardless of whether the function of DRM is to make this easy or hard, with most current DRM systems, reselling the game is made hard as a side-effect of the DRM. Whether or not that's intentional is something we could argue about all day, and very hard to answer definitively unless one has insider knowledge.
One of the legitimate complaints was: If a program wants to have a limited activation system, then it needs to provide a way to de-authorize other computers (ala iTunes).
If such a de-authorization system existed, then reselling games would be dead easy. In fact, it could even be made to work if the original owner "forgot" to deauthorize their game before reselling it if the authentication part of the DRM was done online.
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9
seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0
fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.
But with Google, you don't get to negotiate scheduled downtime (which wouldn't normally count towards the percentage downtime calculation). It happens when it happens and if that impacts you, tough.
And 7 days free service for a system that's only up 95% of the time? Big deal. In 30 days, that's a 36 hour downtime period. If you're lucky, the 36 hours is spread out across the month entirely out of your business hours and nobody really notices it. If not....
Sounds like famous pervert Gary Glitter.
The only practical way this will ever work is coercing hardware manufacturers to stick to more specific standards. In practice, ACPI hasn't solved it.
Historically, the most stable, reliable computer systems have by and large come from companies that produced both the hardware and the software. Solaris, AIX, z/OS, VMS are all examples of this.
I'm not saying it's impossible for the scenario with Microsoft not producing the hardware to work, but I'm not sure it is when Microsoft insist on writing software which tries to be so damn forgiving of every crappy bit of hardware - particularly when they're big enough these days to tell hardware manufacturers that failure to follow the spec properly is their problem.
This has been proven over and over so many times, eventually someone in the courts should notice. SCO finally fell, unfortunately the RIAA has bigger war chests.
The entire legal system is set up on the assumption that everyone (with the possible exception of the defendant) is by and large fairly straight up.
Not really. We legislated to make encryption ineffective against criminal investigation several years ago with the RIPA.
Furthermore, you can encrypt email all you like (and anybody with half a brain who's planning anything untoward would be encrypting, writing in some sort of code or both) it doesn't prevent there being a whole bunch of logs which show that user@example.com is regularly exchanging email with osama@binladen.com.
It seems the judge did not ask for, nor got sufficient evidence, which points to ($#@$ stupid) lawyers/barristers representing the cases.
I doubt it. The whole point of this particular part of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was to overcome with legal force the issue that it is now possible to store a bunch of information - potentially information which reveals criminal activity - in a safe to which physical access is literally impossible without the key (which is essentially what an encrypted file is).
Of course, depending on the crime in question, if that's the only evidence that exists you may be better off just telling the police that you're not giving them the key, they will never get it from you, please go forth and multiply. You'd be facing up to 3 years in prison but if you're hiding information which would get you life in prison, it seems like the only sensible option.
I wonder if it's illegal now to just forget. "I'd love to help you officer, but I guess I just forgot it!"
IIRC, that's been the case since the RIPA was first proposed. If the police come knocking and say "Give us the key", the burden of proof is on you to be able to show that you can't. (How on Earth you're meant to prove that you can't give them something like that is your problem).
Failure to give them the key can lead to 3 years in prison. There was also talk of a proposal whereby if you discuss the order to hand over the key with anyone, you can get 5 years in prison.
(All of this is based on several-year-old memories from articles in The Register, YMMV, IANAL, OMGWTFBBQ).
This guy explains it WAY better than I can.
He explains it well, but the evidence suggests that he's not exactly voting with his wallet.
Right now, the only message he's sending is "I hate being screwed over by the games industry. Here, have some more money".