or... a young Iranian guy wants to see his mum in germany and seeks diplomatic asylum.

This aircraft had modern rolls royce trent engines - these come with an online 24x7x365 service back to Derby in the UK where all engines that are flying around the world are monitored in close-to real time using an independent comms facility to that of the rest of the aircraft. They will know if the engines powered up/down and what their status was at the last moments before contact was lost. I imagine the Malaysian Authorities are keeping a lot of the data under-wraps at the moment and I would assume that a lot more is known about the aircraft than is being released to the public right now.

I can only guess at your daughters age, but at some point she'll go online - either at your nicely protected home network or indeed at her school or friends rubbishly protected network. The issue with Windows XP past April 2014 is that any serious security problems will be NEVERDAY (a cute phrase that sounds like 0-day) where security issues will never be fixed. It won't take long to browse through the flash games site before a browser injected malware will find its way on to the machine.

The problem with techies is that we think too much about the network, the AV, the machine - but less about the user and how they will use the machine in a way that we couldn't possibly predict. So the real ecomonic argument is not about GBP300 for a netbook, but the opportunity cost of the stress and hassle when your daughter loses all of her homework, photos etc because some cryptolocker malware wants 1bn Bitcoin (market rates will go down as well as up) in order to unlock the data.

if it were me, I'd factor in a replacement at her next birthday.

mod up parent - that would have been useful. I tried to use the Dell Install-DVD-creator software after the first proper boot of the system (I always whine at family members who don't bother to do this) and after trying it 3 times and with a small pile of DVD's in the bin, I gave up. It was always failed the creation of the last DVD in the set

What's interesting is that the Windows 8.0 install took about 8 hours to get everything working (wifi was nasty) and then a further couple of hours to try and get v8.1 and resolve the wierd driver updating problem (Dell updated a minor SATA driver that was newer than Windows 8.0 believed possible which left Windows believing it was not fully up to date and therefore not ready to go to 8.1) .

The Fedora 20 install a few days later only took a few hours of my time and worked out-of-the-box.

Would love to try it, but after Dell updates and Windows Update had a fist fight on the new christmas present laptop for mum-in-law it meant that neither update system could complete all the updates thus leaving the OS in a position that it would not offer 8.1 in the store. Coupled with no obvious way to back out of the problem (no install DVD, and install-creator fucked up 3 times) - I gave up and she got Linux. It's not all Microsoft's fault - Dell's tools simply didn't work, however, there shouldn't be competing methods that you can't obviously switch off for doing things like this.

The funny thing is she doesn't even know she has Linux. She used to use Thunderbird, Firefox and libreoffice on Windows XP and so it just looks the same for her.

The EMV (ISO/IEC 7816-3) standard allows for a change PIN function that will take a 6 digit PIN. Some banks around the world operate with a 6-digit PIN.

This article explains the difference between the Scottish NHS and other parts of the UK. This is becoming a political hot potato in the run up to the 2014 Referendum for Scottish independence from the UK because whilst the English NHS is suffering huge setbacks after much of the service was privatised, Scotland's NHS was more tightly controlled by the devolved Scottish Government and less was outsourced to private consortia.

Even though Scottish tax payers pay the same as those south of the border; they receive much better treatment, free prescription drugs and many other benefits.

at my local OWASP chapter meeting some months ago, we did a show of hands about how many people had reported via the pay-for-security-bug middlemen organisations rather than contacting the vendor/website directly. About 30% put their hands up. I was quite astounded although, having been threatened legally myself when I was called in a bug found on an eComm website then I would no longer go directly to the owner of the system unless I had a contract in place already. The money is apparently quite good; so long as you don't care who is using the bug...

why would you bother storing hashed and salted credit card information? The only thing you could do is match it against the credit card used on the next transaction - but what does that really get you? The hashed/salted card number would be usable again (if hashed+salted properly)

I'd agree with this analysis because there were some massive interuptions with middle eastern internet comms when the SEA-ME-WE_4 cable was apparently snagged by ships at anchor of Alexandria. Interestingly, Egypt actually arrested 3 men for cutting though cable off Alexandria in March this year. makes you wonder what they were actually doing.

luckily computing power and searching ability has increased a little bit in the last decade. Sure, the pilot programme was able to take clear photos of the football fans as they went in (I seem to remember the volunteers were given free stuff as an incentive). In 2005, the London Underground tried out the technology with not great results but that was an awfully long time ago.

even older news! I saw the anglo-dutch company Logica demonstrate this at a PSV Eindhoven football (soccer) match where it picked a dozen volunteers (who were photo'd before the match) out of the 20,000 strong crowd using the stadiums own crappy cctv footage - this was in the early to mid 2000's. It wasn't perfect but was above 90%.

Sadly, the UK is way ahead when it comes to CCTV technology.

I used to be a tech interviewer at a large UK technical consultancy in the 2000's and we frequently received CV's from Indian nationals that you could hold up to the light and see that the CV's were exactly the same and had exactly the same cut 'n paste text. This led to a pretty massive review of the recruitment process.

We also discovered fake UK companies setup purely to "employ" young middle class Indian graduates so they could get their Visa and then jump over to a large UK firm. These firms were on their CV's with faked up job roles - it was a total abuse of the visa system.

That's definitely true. A UK political programme on TV last night that was focussed on the thorny issue of Scottish independence ended up talking about the US and their spying intentions. Even the politically mixed audience, who had been arguing from different positions all through the programme, joined in condemnation of the US for unwarranted spying on personal communications.

The ECU is usually on the passenger side of the car near the glove box. There's well known augmentations to the ECU (or replacement ECU) attacks in order to drive a car away. Even BMW had a flaw in their ECU that allowed an unauthenticated person to create a key (from a blank) in the car. That attack (if you look at the CCTV images on the link at pistonheads) had attackers using the passenger door to enter.