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Comment Re:What's the solution? (Score 1) 205

And how would these rating agencies select the code they were going to audit?
They can't audit everything, so they would prioritise... Vendors would pay to have their code audited, and perhaps try to corrupt the process to get a better rating. OSS code would not be able to pay to get audited, and thus would never have a rating at all.

There are already various governments operating such schemes, they are extremely expensive and slow, with the final result being a small cartel of incumbent suppliers where the "approved" versions are horrendously out of date and often suffer from known vulnerabilities.

Comment Re:What's the solution? (Score 1) 205

Not being able to figure anything out is a bad thing, the more complex your system is the greater chance of there being bugs, and if your system is important or widespread enough then *someone* will take the effort to figure it out and probably understand it a lot better than the people tasked with running it.

Having a complete understanding of how a system works should not allow that system to be compromised if it's well designed. Never rely on obscurity.

Comment Re:Seems like a 180 from their previous views (Score 1) 193

The iPhone 3G was released in 2008, if you've been using it for the past 2 years then it was 4 years old when you *started* using it...

While it's true that Apple obsolete the hardware fairly quickly, using microsoft as a counter example is ridiculous... Microsoft were pushing windows mobile 6.x when the iPhone 3g came out, the hardware this ran on is also obsolete and cannot run current windows versions, and unlike the iPhone old apps won't run at all on current versions. Windows phone 7 came out in 2010, and this os (as well as the hardware it ran on) has already been abandoned.

Apple are probably the least terrible when it comes to obsoleting the hardware.

As for trusting google, that's just as bad as trusting microsoft... But at least with android, you have the option of custom non-google rome.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 193

Microsoft are terrible at long term support in the phone market...
Windows mobile was completely dropped and replaced with something totally incompatible...
Windows phone 7 was short lived, and replaced with something incompatible and most (all?) windows phone 7 handsets cannot be upgraded to 8.
It seems windows phone 8 is no better than android, with several devices running 8.0 not getting the update to 8.1.

If you want decent support on a phone, get a handset that's well supported by third party android rome. Or even go for Apple, they tend to support their handsets far longer than most other manufacturers.

Comment Trust... (Score 1) 89

So how do you trust a company? Profit is their primary goal, and if they feel that hiding a breach like this will be more profitable than disclosing it that's exactly what happens... Meanwhile, you now potentially have to also trust some criminals who have already demonstrated their willingness to commit blackmail.

Comment Re:wait (Score 1) 240

The malware may be gone, but the machine is still vulnerable and prone to being reinfected at any time...
When the hacker loads his malware into memory, he may also patch the vulnerability in the process so that someone else doesn't step on his toes.

Comment Re:white males should (Score 1) 593

The only way for an employer in this field to increase diversity is to discriminate against whites and asians...
The majority of qualified applicants are white or asian, there are virtually no black applicants applying for these jobs just like there were virtually no black students attending the appropriate study courses.
The employer can only employ qualified individuals who actually apply for the job, if only 1% of applicants are black then it stands to reason that only 1% of employees will be. The only thing the employer can do to change that is to discriminate against the other 99% of applicants.

Comment Re:Who gives a shit? (Score 1) 593

There is a lot of peer pressure in school, and this drives people into classes they wouldn't necessarily choose otherwise... School is actually a pretty poor environment for learning anything because of this, kids who work hard get shunned by their peers, smart kids get shunned by their peers, kids who dare to choose a subject thats not seen as appropriate for their gender get shunned.

Comment Qualified applicants (Score 1) 593

And what percentage of qualified applications were black or female?
If they never apply, they can never get the jobs... That's nothing to do with "diversity" or "racism", indeed most people who fling around accusations of racism in the industry conveniently ignore that theres a lot of asians working in the field.. The reason for this? They actually apply for the jobs and are qualified to do them.

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