Precisely my thinking.

There's two possible scenarios if you set up such a canary, these are:

  1. You wind up in front of a judge. The judge shrugs his shoulders, says "He's got a point. Nothing in the law that says he's obliged to continue updating that "canary", as he calls it, and nothing in your letter that explicitly demanded he do that either". You walk free.
  2. The judge says "Whoah. Hang on a minute. The whole point of this law is to ensure that these letters are kept secret. I can see what he's doing - he's trying to come up with a clever way of following the letter of the law while totally ignoring the spirit. Well, that doesn't wash with me. Give me a couple of weeks - I need to read through the sentencing options to see what I'm gonna do with this guy. What should you do with your man? Oh, throw him in a cell, he'll be okay there. I'll call you back next month".

Think it won't happen? The judge's job is to interpret the law and apply it as best he can. Sometimes there will be scenarios which the law as written doesn't entirely cater for - which is where the idea of the spirit of the law comes in. It can happen, and even with a clever lawyer fighting your corner, there's every possibility it will happen. If you're taking ideas from sites like this and plan on using them to keep you out of prison - well, sooner you than me.

Absolutely right. Over the last decade or so, much of Microsoft's sales & marketing hasn't actually been done by Microsoft at all.

They haven't needed to.

"We're starting to receive files in formats we can't open" does it for them.

Historically, that resulted in Office upgrades; they're now using that leverage to push other upgrades (Office 2013 requires Windows 7 and Outlook 2013 requires Exchange 2007 or later). In the process, they're losing customers - Office 2013 starts to look like quite an expensive upgrade when you suddenly need to rip out your entire infrastructure

With any luck, the companies providing line of business software will refuse to support their product on XP.

> (The less charitable way of viewing it is that Debian sat back and let others do the heavy lifting).

Maybe. But doing the heavy lifting isn't really what Debian does. Frankly, they don't have the money.

Thing is, much of this isn't particularly sophisticated.

Hell, even the most basic change control process forces you to think about how you're going to do the job, what the criteria are for successful completion and how you're going to back out if there's the remotest sign of anything going wrong. That's noddy stuff you learn in a 3 day intensive ITIL course with zero real-world experience; there is precisely zero excuse for a trading firm not doing all that and more besides.

It's not as simple as "badly-tested code" - it's actually "badly-designed deployment procedure and insufficient oversight".

TFA is light on details, but other articles have picked up the details and explained them a bit better: basically, Knight Capital were running their code on a cluster of 8 nodes.

They used a flag to signal a module to run. A particular module had been out of use for some years, so the flag to signal that module was re-used for a new module.

With me so far? OK, this is all very nice. Except when they updated their cluster, one of the nodes was missed. It still had the legacy module on there.

From this point on, their cluster was a disaster waiting to happen. Once the flag was triggered, all 8 nodes did exactly what they were supposed to do based on the code they were running - but because one of them was out of sync with the code it was meant to be running, it did something else entirely. Everything else cascaded from there.

It would have been relatively trivial to add some sort of oversight to the system so as to stop it fast if what it was doing versus what it was meant to be doing were two different things - but Knight didn't do this.

I find this particularly ironic as I want David Cameron investigated over the Snowden Files.

"When asked politely by my national security adviser and cabinet secretary to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files - after first reminding us that they had backup copies in other parts of the world over which we have no jurisdiction. My national security advisor still insisted those files be destroyed, and now you all know why - it was so I could later use this action for my own political purposes."

FTF David Cameron.

Already happened, to great bemusement on the part of the Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/21/nsa-nick-clegg-guardian-leaked-files

Doubt it.

I'm offering evens that this purchase has just one plan in mind: Asset-strip the company.

I'd agree that complacency killed the company - but I'd disagree that "ignoring the iPhone" was the issue.

I'd say that "ignoring Exchange ActiveSync" was the issue. A cursory glance at Exchange ActiveSync would have told anyone who cared to look that here is a feature that is aimed squarely at replacing BES/Blackberry with EAS/(insert non-blackberry phone here). With the added bonus that as it's integrated with Exchange, there's no need to buy, install and manage a third-party product.

Yeah, OK, EAS may not be as sophisticated in terms of setting up device policies as BES, but the number of organisations that care about all those fancy "Look, gran!" features could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

From that point, it was only ever a matter of time before a phone manufacturer built a phone that integrated with EAS and didn't suck. Did RIM look at this and take account of it? Did they hell.

Two words for you: Patent portfolio.

Bullshit.

VHS won for a simple reason: it was adopted by the porn industry.

Same's true for virtually all technology. Hell, one of the reasons people started to read was because of an Italian book describing sexual positions.

> To back up a program you copy it to a source then copy it back and run it. No install programs that install malware. Windows users are just used to bad things.

Not always true, unfortunately. Quite a few mac applications come with installers if they're doing anything even remotely clever with the underlying OS - Parallels does, as does gimp-print.

It's not unusual to find that bothering to write an uninstaller in the first place - never mind one that actually uninstalls everything - simply never happens. Fortunately this is seldom a big problem, but it can be an annoyance nonetheless and if you claim it doesn't happen you're either ignorant or disingenuous.

("Ignorant" isn't an insult, BTW, it simply means "you did not know" - and there's seldom shame in not knowing something. But it's frequently used as an insult by.... well, I guess ignorant people. People who did not know that it shouldn't be used as such.)

The trick with Ryanair is you don't give them an opportunity to have a problem.

Which means:

  - You make damn sure you check in online and have access to a reliable printer to print the boarding pass.
  - You never check in luggage. If necessary, you purchase a cabin-bag sized suitcase (there's lots on the market and they're made to fit carry on allowance size down to the centimetre).
  - You schedule your time so as to arrive at the airport well in advance (something you pretty much have to do with ever increasing security paranoia anyway).
  - You check before you board whether or not you're allowed a separate bag for duty free purchases (depends on the airport for some weird reason).
  - You never, under any circumstances, attempt to board the plane with anything that isn't in your bag or in a pocket. Newspaper under one arm? Nope.
  - You check ID requirements before you leave. Many airlines are imposing policies regarding what ID they require before they board you that have nothing to do with passport requirements at your destination.