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Comment Pay peanuts (Score 4, Insightful) 193

Because businesses think software development in general, and especially web development, is easy. They hire monkeys and pay peanuts (or sometimes even serious dollars that could get them quality of they could recognise they were being taken for a ride), and we continue to see the most basic errors being repeated across most web sites. Seriously, the quality of web developers generally is absolutely appalling.

Comment Re: None of my cards have a chip! (Score 1) 317

In Australia, most transactions now are contactless (NFC) chip transactions, with PIN only required when the merchant hits a (merchant dependant) limit. With our without the PIN, it's faster than swipe plus signature. Without the PIN it's faster than cash. The US is basically a nation of paranoid luddites looking for an excuse not to move on.

Comment Re: Don't we (the US) already have that... (Score 1) 1291

This is only because they have not bothered to learn these things. My point really is, the ones who do not bother learning other fields should get off their bums and do so. Some of us do, and do repair or own cars, and do excel in second careers. And screwdriver? If a programmer really wants to scare a hardware person, the tool of choice to hold on approach to the server room is a soldering iron.

Comment Re: Don't we (the US) already have that... (Score 1) 1291

Actually a decent software developer can do most vehicle repair themselves, if they can be bothered to research it. The particular repairs described, however, are getting into the area where repairs require equipment that only the most dedicated motor mechanic geeks will have at home. Also, with both of those problems, there is a good chance it would need a new engine fairly soon, if not already. There was a time when software geeks were people who liked to fix stuff - any stuff - and just had a particular flair for coding. Don't assume that all software developers are one trick ponys.

Comment Good, I will make more money. (Score 1) 116

IAAL. I do mostly commercial litigation. Most lawyers do either mostly or entirely transactional work - negotiating agreements, drafting documents, that sort of thing. Usually when a client comes to me it is because one of the transactional lawyers stuffed up, or because the client thought they did not need a lawyer for transactional work. If you think all of this can be automated, I am sure I will be seeing you soon. Basically, you can fork out some money on a good transactional lawyer up front, or you can come to me and fork out a truckload of money later. Additionally, in nearly all of the litigation I do, there is at least one issue where the past cases do not quite cover the point. Then the lawyers have to figure out what the rule is for the particular facts. It is very rarely just a simple case of applying known rules to simple facts. That is without even getting to questions of proof and whether the witnesses will be believed, which is hard for a machine to assess.

Comment You might well have a legal right to demand this b (Score 1) 480

IAAL but TINLA, but you should see an intellectual property lawyer and ask for their advice on the following matters. These things do vary by jurisdiction, although some of it is based on the TRIPS treaty (required for WTO membership), so it is getting to be less different between the jurisdictions. Firstly, if you did this as a contractor, you quite likely still own the copyright, unless you signed an agreement saying you don't. In that case he client has a licence, the scope of which may vary, but not so far as to allow them to apply their own copyright claim to the exclusion of you. Secondly, what they have done is quite likely a breach of your moral right of attribution, especially if you were a contractor rather than an employee. There may well be scope for a nice scary letter from a lawyer to get them to behave.

Comment Re:good luck with that (Score 1) 247

Sometims their "geek" is the problem. I got copies of emails from ASIC (an Australian government agency) under FOI, in which their supposed Internet geek insisted an email address was invalid because it didn't end with one of the big 5 TLDs or a CCTLD. When you're dealing with that kind of rank incompetence, you have no hope of getting a reasonable outcome.

Comment Re:Write threatening letters (Score 1) 247

Unless the spammers know that he knows that he only gave the address to one company, so they only used one of the many addresses they harvested to spam him, casting suspicion on that company so he wont think to check his own PC, allowing them to collect a nice list of other email addresses from people he is affiliated with. That way, they get 100 addresses from 100 people, instead of 100 addresses from one guy with his own domain. /paranoia

I think, but am not certain, that you are being sarcastic. But just in case, spammers do not go to that kind of effort. They do not have time to go to that kind of effort.

Comment Re:Is it fixed? (Score 1) 247

An please note that there are other ways of compromising email addresses; e.g. using them in plaintext on a compromised access point or a mail server between you and the company but outside their control. If you want to proove this you have to be absolutely sure about the security of the address and check that every connection is (at least) encrypted.

This is not correct. Spammers and scammers always take the easy approach. It is simply too hard for them to compromise addresses at these intermediate points for it to be worth the effort to these people. It is much, much easier for them to compromise the holder of a large list of addresses, either directly, or via social engineering. To say there is another way that it could have happened is not to disprove the most likely case. A person who fell backwards into a volcano could have just lost their balance, but the person with the smoking gun standing 10 feet away is still going to prison. I have seen one case in Australia where one federal agency (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission - which is fairly universally known within the legal profession as the single most incompetent government agency by far in the country) compromised its entire database. A spammer was spamming for his fraudulent "university" and "charity", which was subsequently shut down by, it seems, Victorian education authorities. The spammer got hold of one of ASIC's databases of contact details, including email addresses. There were several complaints from users who did what the submitter did - had unique addresses for each organisation they deal with - and all received the spams at only the ASIC address and at none of their other (sometimes hundreds of) addresses. ASIC continue to deny that to this day and run the same bogus excuse you are attempting here. Some of the addresses were even obscure. ASIC actually likes to think it's qualified to advise on security too - it's a joke.

Comment Re:Speaking of Sodom... (Score 1) 1774

Teaching children religion at all is child abuse. Why, I hear you ask. There are many religions, and with the exception of omnitheistic religions, they all believe all the others are wrong. At the absolute best, only one can be right. But statistically speaking, a person taught a particular religion as a child is much more likely to adhere to that religion throughout life, to the exclusion of any other. That means the choice was made for them by their parents, rather than by rational and reasoned thought. And in most if not all cases that choice is wrong. That makes the teaching of religion to a child a form of indoctrination or brainwashing, done before the person has a chance to rationally form their own view, with the result that they may never be able to do so. No person ever has the right to do that to another, not even a parent. Especially not a parent. They are in a position of trust and responsibility, and grossly misuse that when they teach their children a particular religion.

Comment Re:It has to happen (Score 2) 154

What happens when they have IP data or licensed data that is being hosted by a cloud provider, or company to company lawsuit. Court case starts

IP in the cloud is worse to deal with than you can possibly imagine. For starters, when somebody grants you a license to use IP, as often as not (and especially in the case of IP licensed to big companies) the licence is restricted to a particular country. This is in part because your IP is a different thing in each country, governed by different rules. If you go storing licensed IP in the cloud, you don't know where it is going to end up - you have a very good chance of breaching your licence. If you think "that's OK, I'm not storing somebody's licensed IP", think again - unless you are wrote it (or are simply using somebody else's IP without a licence, in which case you have the problem anyway), then you are.

Then you have the problem that you likely haven't got the first inkling as to how intellectual property works in the, most likely third world country (if not now, then eventually), where the data is going to be stored.

If you're dealing with confidential information, can you be sure some minimum wage flunky you have never even met is not going to be prepared to sell it for enough money to keep them and their family in comfort for years to come? Can you be sure the law in the country where it happened even cares? The criminal element that wants to sell your private data isn't so much sitting behind a keyboard in their mother's basement writing viruses or using skripts to break into your systems - they're getting jobs at places like Google in their data centres, possibly with a fake resume with their buddies giving fake references.

Then you have the "cloud provider goes out of business or discontinues the service" issues (which are worse if the data is in a proprietary format).

The biggest problems with the cloud are not technical issues (although there are technical issues any time you keep your data "there" rather than "here"). The big problems are the law and people issues. From that perspective, the cloud is a huge risk. If you are capable of safely storing your data and maintaining your systems without the cloud, then you should do so. Leave the cloud for people who cannot look after themselves.

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