There are precisely two viruses like this that have been "eradicated" by medicine, in the entire history of humankind. Two.

And one of those is suspected of making a comeback in a related form.

"Immunisation" buys you time, not immunity. We can't get 100% of people to pay taxes or abide by the law, what makes you think we can get 100% immunised?

Like using one particular chemical in weedkiller or rat poison - doesn't matter how many rats you kill, one will get immune to it and breed a generation immune to it really quickly, or a branch of the same genetic family will evolve to take it over. Even if you legislate (as some countries do) that you MUST use 2 or 3 totally unrelated chemicals at all times and never deploy them singly - still there are rats. And still there will be diseases getting through that are related to those you immunise.

Hell, we offer flu shots to the elderly for free in my country - hasn't even dented flu-like diseases. Immunisation helps. Blaming those percent that choose to decide what they put into their own bodies is just peer pressure and bullying. And, guess what, if you were actually "immunised" you wouldn't be able to catch it from them, or the evolved strains...

Because, for 90% of business, the only guy who needs to care about the IP address is the IT department.

And they rarely deal with IP addresses and when they do it's mostly copy/paste from some spreadsheet or management program.

Nobody cares what the IP is, nobody memorises what the IP is (maybe fleetingly to type it in somewhere else, but pretty much that's a one-time thing. DHCP takes away all internal IP management apart from the occasional fixed static which is no worse than having asset numbers (which you still have to deal with).

As such, memorable IP numbering is not the problem. Never was. I don't know what the IP is of my external servers, I don't really care. I have them somewhere, no doubt, but who cares? You point the DNS at it once and you're done. You allocate the lease pool and you're done. About the only IP number the average IT team must know are the DNS servers and the default gateway (which is usually .1 for reasons that have everything to do with ease of remembering).

Large corporations don't have a guy memorising the IP's. If anything, they are even more in the dark about exactly what IP's they have and they use, because they never see them except in some asset management program.

When you go to IPv6, it's even less important. Just forget about it. Stick the IPv6 of your DNS into your DHCP servers and you NEVER have to know a single IPv6 address again. In fact, a lot of setups I've seen have this without even knowing - you can be running IPv6 without even realising until something goes wrong and you spot an IPv6 address.

Stop the damn excuses. Deploy IPv6. You want that many IP's, you need to have unwieldy numberings. If you want to assign, say, an alphanumeric code instead of a purely numeric one, it only helps for so long (and we'd have put all our IPv4's into hexadecimal if it didn't).

Nobody cares about SID's, MAC's, GUID's, UUID's, etc. and they are just as long. Get in the real world - where it DOES NOT MATTER how long the data is, your setup just uses technologies and protocols available today to make them memorable where they need to be.

Maybe we'll see a return to proper programming to go with this new technology, then. I doubt it, but maybe.

From the "geniuses of design" that brought you "drag the cd to the wastebin to eject it", "no physical cd eject button", "imacs with power buttons you can't feel on the back of them", "phones that you lose signal on if you hold while using them to call" and more...

Now we have "over-stuffed proprietary charger that overheats".

The problem is not so much technology as simple physics.

It's just THAT HUGE a distance between even stars, let alone cavorting around the galaxy looking for places that might - with a few years of resource collection - provide you with a usable amount of energy to get to the next place.

And on the way, stop-offs are few, far-between, hard to make profitable and stopping, landing and then taking off again costs an awful lot of time, effort and energy that you have to take with you.

The chances are that if anything comes near, it'll only be interested in using us as a slingshot onto somewhere more interesting and what's to say our solar system is particular interesting to someone who's coursing their way across the galaxy by doing that - or even that our sun is worth riding past for those purposes at all.

It's not a question of technology really - if you have the technology, we hold no interest to you, if you don't, we won't see you any more than you'll see us. And the distances and forces involved and to be overcome are just so stupendous.

And then you work out that even if there are a billion stars in a galaxy, and a billion galaxies, the chances of someone bothering to wander past us, even if they are looking for us, is so infinitesimally small that it pales into insignificance.

And the biggest problem is really time. What if we're late developers, and everyone else has already been and gone? And quite how long would you need to explore a galaxy once you got the technology to hop around it, and are you still going to be strolling around in a billion years from now? Probably not. The chances of two such civilisations coinciding are small, the chances of them meeting are small, so it's not at all surprising.

More likely, our view of quite how unlikely it is is so underestimated because of our limited view of the universe that we just don't understand how optimistic we're being to even suggest the possibility.

Galaxy-hoppers would laugh at us from our one-planet, night-sky observations from which we're trying to extrapolate the entirety of existence for a universe.

That said, I firmly believe that there's other life out there somewhere. I just believe, even more strongly, that the maths says that the chances of us meeting it are so tiny that it's not worth worrying our "haha, just ONE planet? That's all you managed?" heads about it.

In the UK? Yes, it can be. Ask your insurance company.

And many uses of vehicles, including licenses, are covered by a "not for hire or reward" clause. Not to mention it being standard insurance boiler-plate.

Same for private pilots. Unless you've got a specific "passenger-carrying" licence for your plane/car, you're probably NOT allowed to be compensated for more than the reasonable costs of petrol (i.e. a friend agreement). The other exceptions are things like volunteering for a charity but even then the definition is so close you can't even (legally) take a chocolate from your passenger for the ride.

What the law is on deliberately obstructing a road as a licensed professional driver, I'm guessing is a LOT worse, though.

In case you haven't noticed - that already happens, to everyone.

Not only that, if you have a passenger-carrying license, you are given even less tolerance over speeding violations.

The fact that it might take two or three such violations to actually revoke a normal license if neither here nor there - if I was to just stop in a road and do 5 mph, I would be pulled over and penalised. Why not taxis? Just because they are doing it in protest?

If nothing else, it's childish and counter-productive. Nobody uses taxis! So we're going make all the taxis in London participate in a protest that makes them useless and damages other driver's ability to travel! That'll get me on your side, whether I'm a passenger or driver....

Only the U.S. and Canada practice tenure, even in the upper echelons of education.

Look at the statistics, neither are particularly "advanced" compared to other nations on Earth that don't practice it. And sometimes, the statistics show both as being quite "Meh" when it comes to education and research. When they "win", they win only by scale, not by overall performance.

Everywhere seems to have got by without tenure, and - in fact - my European teaching friends have a healthy fear of "American-style" education coming to their lands (the UK is already considered to be "American-style" to them), because it's usually accompanied by a drop in standards and expectations such that it appears to be doing something.

If tenure showed itself in statistics, I'd be right behind it. It doesn't. It's a formalisation of an "old-boys network", and, personally, I can't imagine anything worse.

That's what the audit mentioned in the summary - and several dozen previous articles - will show (and has already intimated, in brief, that there's nothing obviously wrong with it but it can take years of analysis to have confidence that something this large is clean).

Keep up.

You obviously know nothing about cryptography, nor the methods used to break them.

Rolling your own crypto is the WORST thing you can do. And automated analysis of "encryptions" like that are not only more feasible than breaking AES, but they stick out like a sore thumb when you do any analysis... that's the point - encryption is hard, and one of the hardest bits of encryption is stopping ANY sign or pattern of the original data showing through.

Even cryptographers wouldn't try this. Use something that's been attacked for 20 years or not at all.

However, personally, I'm more suspicious of exactly why EC cryptography started being pushed JUST BEFORE this whole NSA thing and is still seen as the only solution for it (especially regarding perfect-forward secrecy, whose only non-EC methods are incredibly computationally expensive and thus not being deployed).

To a suspicious mind, it looks like when you think the trick is happening, it's already been done.

Cyber-squatters pay more money for domains than you ever will.

Hence, Nominet has really just offered a product preferentially to it's prime (if unethical) customers.

And to think we complain about ICANN not being completely "International"... Nominet doesn't even represent the interests it's supposed to at all...

However, technically, the UK's identifier for everything else is actually "gb", hence we should have the ".gb" instead of ".uk".

But, first-come, first-served which is pretty much the mantra of anything to do with grabbing domain names despite the complete irrelevance of having a "particular" domain to modern computing.

£100 (GBP, notice, not USD) per hour in a school (note, UK schools are schools, for children, not universities or colleges)? You must be kidding.

And beside that, the box ran maintenance free for 5 years. The only changes we ever made were to block specific things we suddenly decided now needed to be blocked (and thus would have the same cost on the Smoothwall solution).

That was one of the points that stopped us buying - the fact that we'd not needed to maintain the "prototype" machine and it has just kept running. There was even a "what happens if the box dies" plan that never went into action because, well, it's still running now for all I know.

Please note also that Smoothwall will often charge a lot more - i.e. for a 19" rack mount box to install this junk on, and initial purchase price. The last quote I saw for a similar-size school this year was £9000 all-in for the first three years.

Given the 2 hours to build it (even compiling Squid from scratch to do transparent proxy properly), the other stuff it did, and the old office server it was running on, I work that out at £4500 an hour. If I was earning that, I wouldn't be working for Smoothwall or schools...

Indeed. My greatest use of Open Source, freeware, shareware and other kinds of "free" software is "what if"-type questions. They would be difficult to answer if all that existed were paid-for commercial solutions that you were then tied into.

Do we need Smoothwall in our large school? Hold on, let me bash out a squid + DansGuardian + iptables setup on an old office machine - look, it does roughly this. Great, should we buy the "commercial" product or is this more-than-enough for what we need (and I usually get both answers over time, depending on where I am)? Actually had one school use my box for 5 years rather than pay Smoothwall nearly a grand a year for updates.

Whoops, we're out of MS licenses and we bought a load of netbooks - there you go, have LibreOffice. While you're there, tell me what's wrong with it and why we couldn't just use that everywhere. Nobody ever came up with an answer to that, which really makes me question why we pay MS for Office.

My last one was digital signage. The school I work for had Powerpoints exported to MP4, then put onto a USB stick and plugged into an LG TV with looping turned on. Looked horrible but did the job. They knew it was the bare-bones and were looking for an all-in solution.

I put in a Xibo box as a test and asked if that was closer to what they wanted. Overnight, the LG TV become attached to a PC running Xibo Client. We've tested it running over RDP from a VM and even off a Raspberry Pi. It's bridged the gap between "an old TV showing something" and "stupendously expensive site-wide digital signage system" nicely. And in fact will probably be as far as we go. If we end up having ten displays showing more than 3 or 4 different schedules, I'll be amazed and it will indeed be time to move to a more commercially-supported package. But for now? A £100 TV and £25 for a RPi box with appropriate cabling. Seems to do the trick quite nicely.

We were going to buy a helpdesk system (don't quite know why). Stuck GLPI on, nobody's ever complained and I've been using GLPI for nearly 10 years in various places.

The beauty of open-source stuff is that you can prototype for free, find out whether there is some element that you will NEED to pay for (i.e. better customisability, more scalability, commercial support, etc.) and not worry about the licence interfering at any point. When you throw it all out, or push a working system into wider deployment, the licensing doesn't really affect you. The only point is does affect you is when you try to commercialise it yourself.

My first reaction upon being asked to do something is "Can I find a bit of free/open software that will do that?". If I can, then we can judge our real needs and requirement. If I can't, nothing lost - and it probably is something that takes a lot of commercial backing to make viable, but at least I know that.

Especially in schools, some bits of free/open software are ubiquitous precisely because they are "good enough" - GIMP, Irfanview, Audacity, Blender, etc.

And when prototyping anything, I tend to find someone's already beaten me to it, and usually by cobbling together open components.

Even the open-source projects, most of the time someone's just cobbled together a lot of other open-source projects and their functionality and just lumped them into one convenient package or written a front-end that relies on dozens of other projects in order to reduce the strain.

If the NSA *AREN'T* using open-source (or some agency-equivalent in a private secure codebase) in a modular manner to build both hardware and software for their "one-off" kinds of devices, then they really need to pull their finger out.

TL;DR

(but wrote you off as a nutter anyway)