"Our motorways have cameras over every lane which track the numberplate"

Not quite true - not all motorways have these gantries with cameras over every lane, but it's true that automatic number plate recognition cameras are located alongside every motorway at least, and on major roads, in town centres, etc, and this feeds into a national database to enable the police to track any car for whatever reason (not just uninsured/banned drivers or car theft - in a few cases, demonstrators have been tracked via this system and stopped). See my other post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2727483&cid=39387461

These gantries do often have speed cameras as well, and in some cases there are average speed cameras.

Many petrol (gas) stations in the UK already have these CCTV cameras to catch people driving off without paying.

The interesting part about this story is the mission creep and data unification - once the CCTVs are in place for company reasons, the government creates another application of the data for its own reasons. Not a new story - once the data exists somewhere, the drive to get access to it is much stronger.

This all helps to turn the UK into probably the most surveilled country in the world... see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8159141.stm for stats from 2009.

This petrol station initiative is probably tying into the nationwide UK network of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras in town centrese and virtually all major roads (not just motorways/freeways, but every "A road" too). Usually painted blue and on high poles, these capture and OCR the license plate of every vehicle that goes past. This feeds into a centralised data centre for queries, data mining, and real time alerts, for both criminal and terrorist investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK

Khan academy is an excellent resource once kids want to learn and with some guidance from a mentor.

Sugata Mitra's self-organising learning environments are perhaps more general as they can be applied to any topic, and in fact they don't need an expert to provide the courseware or videos. Somewhat bizarrely, he just sets up small groups of children, provides an Internet connected PC per group, asks them a big question (e.g. who was Pythagoras and how did he advance geometry?) and lets them get on with researching it for 45 minutes.

See my other comment here for links and background: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2719455&cid=39326653

Sugata Mitra has been doing practical research for 10 years that involves children learning in groups of 4 or 5 through being asked a big question such as "can trees think?", "how does a GPS work exactly", etc, then being given time with a shared computer and broadband connection to answer the question, before having to explain it to a teacher. This is called a self-organising learning environment or SOLE, and appears to work for almost any subject for children up to age 10 or so.

He started with the well-known "Hole in the Wall" experiment where he placed a computer in the wall of a building on the street, and watched what happened - the children taught themselves English as well as how to use the computer. Later experiments involved leaving a PC with English biotechnology materials in a remote village with kids who only spoke Tamil, and telling them to get on with it. Remarkably, they actually learnt a significant amount of biotech.

See http://educationalurbanism.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/dr-sugata-mitra-from-the-hole-in-the-wall-to-sole-self-organized-learning-environment/ - his ideas on "the granny cloud" show how this could scale enormously using Skype etc to have older mentors encourage the children, and perhaps ask or help in creating the big questions that will drive the childrens' learning.

I really hope he gets a chunk of the prize - he is a true innovator and his technique can be applied both inside and outside schools, from developing to developed world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugata_Mitra has references - see his TED talk, he's a very engaging speaker.

First of all, standardise on a single distro so that the 99% of people who aren't Linux gurus can at least share solutions to problems. It's quite common to have hardware that doesn't work in some way, e.g printers, sound or graphics cards (3D performance), and it will be disastrous if everyone has different distros.

Secondly, I'd recommend Linux Mint - either the Ubuntu or Debian based version. It has a lot of simple but helpful changes for new users of Linux, but the Ubuntu/Debian base means an enormous amount of software is available. I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu these days, as it has too many regressions from release to release, and things that just don't work (had to abandon an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation as it froze every day or two for months, probably due to Intel drivers.)

The switch to kernel mode setting (KMS) for graphics cards in the last few distro versions is critical - in some cases this has really reduced reliability a lot, so I'd recommend you research this a lot... I ended up using an old ATI 9250 graphics card to be sure that Ubuntu (or Mint-based Ubuntu) worked properly - however doing this for a whole company would be painful. This is important given the popularity of Intel GPUs on business PCs and the crapness of Intel drivers post-KMS, but perhaps some research will show this is a non-issue with the latest kernels and X11.

The switch of most distros to GNOME 3 and/or Unity is also a big problem - these desktop UIs are very immature and simply don't work well for the sort of desktop usage many people are used to. Unity in particular is a research project that should have been left to mature for 5 years, not pushed into a long term support release - this is why a big chunk of Ubuntu users are switching to Mint or other distros.

Mint has a sane strategy for GNOME 3 which involves recreating the GNOME 2 UI on a GNOME 3 base (Cinnamon project, aka MGSE), as well as letting your retain GNOME 2 if you want (MATE, not yet mature). Most importantly, Mint as a project listens to its users a great deal, so it is less likely to take decisions that screw up the user experience (e.g. Unity.)

It's not uncommon for sites to get hacked (one every 3.5 seconds is the current rate), and in some cases this is so they can host a phishing form (which is why the US government took down JotForm.com).

Given this draconian approach to removing some phishing forms, and given that's it's tough to completely stop hackers, it's clear that this could happen to any site, or to cloud services that host your content under a shared domain (maybe even Tumblr or Pinterest).

The only protection is not to host sites with US-based registrars.

I would hope that EU-based registrars for .com etc should be safer from this sort of action - can anyone confirm? Failing that you could go for a country domain.

I did read the article, although quickly, and I wasn't very impressed with it. See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2622556&cid=38711478 for some of the errors. The mention of GPUs is really irrelevant to security, and most useful for crackers.

By "standard library" I really mean something like phpass that is written by developers who are highly security-aware. PHP's built in libraries probably don't qualify on that score.

phpass will work on almost any version of PHP, and can use MD5 or SHA1 if that's what's available.

Password stretching: the article's point about iterating 1000 times creating 1000 times the collisions is theoretical, as there are ways of implementing stretching that don't have this problem - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_stretching for non-collision-prone stretching options.

There are many web hosts still using PHP 5.1 or 5.2 - requiring a recent PHP 5.3 isn't really a solution for many people.

Mod parent up, the article is quite good.

A more general and simpler answer though is to *always use a standard library* - see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1581610/how-can-i-store-my-users-passwords-safely/1581919#1581919 for a good answer.

Also ensure that your password storage is one-way hashed, and *salted* with a random salt (different per user) and uses *password stretching* (i.e. iterates the hashing function thousands of time to make brute forcing much more expensive). See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1987632&cid=35150388 for more on password stretching including phpass, the gold-standard library for PHP used by WordPress, Drupal, etc.

Most importantly, never write your own password storage - you are virtually guaranteed to get it wrong. Apart from the above issues, what about timing attacks (Zend has an article about this from PHP perspective.)

Unfortunately I need Adobe on my work PC to enable comments - don't think Foxit handles this. Foxit 5.0 was a bit crap (broke in some ways) but 5.1 is better.

Thanks for the pointer to Okular, this might be a good option on Windows. Included in the KDE for Windows installer: http://windows.kde.org/download.php

Mod parent up - Okular looks like a really good option for Windows covering PDF, XPS, ePub, Mobipocket, CHM, etc. Rather a large download if it's your first KDE app on Windows (80 MB to download, 200 MB installed), but disk space isn't expensive these days and other KDE apps will be small downloads. There is even a standard Windows-style installer.

Unfortunately I get the message "requires an OpenGL card" on Windows XP SP3 with an NVidia GTX260, which definitely has working OpenGL. I've seen reports of this problem on MacOS too.

Hope Supergiant Games can fix this - since this is a web-delivered application, I'd hope they can grab hardware/OS details, with user permission, to help in resolving the issue.

Do you have a pointer to the registry key that needs to be changed?

I do use Ubuntu at home so I'm aware of the apps available, which are mostly the same as Debian, and about 30,000 in total: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#cite_note-14

However there are now over 100,000 iPad apps (see http://socialtimes.com/iphone-ipad-available-app-count-around-400000-now_b65291 ) - some of them will be junk, but judging by what's on the iPhone there are many useful apps, games and other content (videos, magazines, newspapers) that aren't on Debian/Ubuntu.

It all depends what you consider useful of course - if you want scripting, software development, servers, and an open desktop, Debian is more useful. If you want games, productivity apps, multimedia, etc, an iPad is more useful.

Some of the benefits come from battery life - an iPad is ARM based but unlike ARM netbooks has a huge base of applications. Some other benefits seem to come from the lack of 'computer admin' and the full-screen model.

One big downside of an iPad would be the lack of a shared filesystem, particularly when using multiple apps to make use of a larger app such as PhotoShop. This is unlikely to change, which is why people end up using Dropbox as a shared filesystem, though not every app supports it.

Virgin is really no more of a "fibre network" than BT's FTTC (Infinity) - they use Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) like every other cable operator, so the fibre turns into coax between the Virgin building and the customer premises (hence the Hybrid).

Of course Virgin like to lie about this in their marketing and claim they are all fibre...