I tell them the imaginary colleague (victim, computer owner) they need to speak to is physically disabled, and is currently on the other side of the building, but is conscientiously on his way to talk to them. Then the scammers get restful music on hold, interspersed with periodic updates about the colleague's arduous progression towards the office to take the phone call ("he's on the stairs... oh he's valiantly struggling on the stairs...")

By tugging at the scammers' heartstrings, causing them to feel guilty that this disabled person is making the effort to talk to them, calls can be extended to half an hour or more with some ingenuity.

How many Libraries of Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan is that?

Maybe he's just testing the water, to find out what kind of reaction this provokes from the US. He clearly knows better than anyone what the consequences of what he's doing would be.

Until someone does a Gemalto, and swipes their private key database.

The British Government does it this way:

We have 'RIPA', the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 containing the scary "Part III": Investigation of electronic data protected by encryption etc. Power to require disclosure

In plain English, it says "If you have encrypted data, and you know, or have ever known, the key to that data, you have to decrypt the data for the police when they tell you to. And you're not allowed to tell anyone the police told you to decrypt the data, if they tell you not to." The penalty is 4 years imprisonment.

I was thinking interstellar

At minus 240 degrees C, the cheese won't be in very good condition.

At least it hasn't jumped on the Recursive Acronym bandwagon and called itself the Internet Of IoT.

Courtesy of our beloved prime-minister's entirely feasible encryption ban.

Well the article includes a car analogy...

But a better car analogy would be: "CatGenie can't run without SaniSolution, like a car can't run without Esso."

So if you want to use BP, Shell, or Total in your car - no can do.

It's the physicist clickbait equivalent of

"One strange, old trick helped me lose 165 LBs"

=

"Physicists Resurrect an Old, Strange Dark Matter Theory"

There is no option for 'I hate smartphones'.

While my friends boast about their new iphone7, I pull out my nokia 100 and tell them about the 30 day battery life while shining the built-in torch into their eyes.

Especially in the UK

If you think streaming 4k is bad, try looking at it from a post-production point of view.

Grading (colour-correcting) 4k on a Baselight system, in uncompressed 10-bit. That's 800 MB/s for 13 x 60 minute episodes. 37.4 TB, just for the actual footage used in the shows, let alone the rushes.

The post industry, already squeezed to the bone, is getting killed by this pointless obsession with pixel resolution.