Everyone knows that regulation are burdensome and a net drain on the economy. If people cannot trust their banks, it just means they will live with the consequences of their decisions. Weak men who cannot calculate risk should not have money anyways. I for one look forward to a return of wildcat banks, massive fraud, and increased market panics.

The Tory government policies are very unfortunate, pigheadedly ignoring basic math and reasoning. Backdoors do not work.

Several issues come to mind. Where is the City in this? I can't imagine all the financial infrastructure in the UK will be happy about weaker controls over security. What would Lloyds or Coutts say regarding government mandated backdoors?

UK has set a stronger policy of government support of the private sector with cybersecurity as well. They would be giving that up. NCSC and other governmental organizations and regulators have been remarkably effective at promoting a new path forward for the British economy. This places all their good work in jeopardy.

I must expect Labour will make hay of this as well. The Tories will be destroying good jobs. Britain cannot afford many more tech positions or firms leaving for the US or Canada.

I logged in after more than a decade to say this:

MLK didn't write the Constitution.

You can just take those hotgrits and gnu it, you insensitive clod.

Nope.

Computers will follow programmed Chinese walls. Traders will behave unethically / illegally whenever it suits them.

There are plenty of companies that pay good money for red team exercises, and even have their own red teams (Microsoft has a very highly rated one for example). So if breaking in to systems and networks is what interests you, you can do it legitimately, make good money doing it, and even get sponsored training doing it. SANS has a whole track of courses for red team training.

Thing is, you don't get called a hacker in popular media when you do that since the term "hacker" is used to mean someone breaking the law with computer related things. You are an Information Assurance/Information Security professional. Your skills are the same as what they call a hacker, even your methods, the difference is you have been hired.

Now combine that with the fact that the US has more functional law enforcement than Russia and does at least make some attempt to squash cyber crime and is it any surprise we don't see as many in the US?

Password resets don't send plain text passwords. They send a link that can be used to reset the password, a link with a short life generally.

That aside you think it is easy to pay off someone at Google to access e-mail? Try it. What you'd discover is that first most people are fairly moral, you may not be, but most are but second that places like Google have some pretty series security controls in place. A random employee can't just go and access someone's mail. I don't mean they aren't allowed to, I mean there are controls in place to keep them from doing so. Such a thing is monitored and requires authorization. You'd need to compromise more than one person, and that's pretty hard, certainly more than a "mild challenge". Particularly given that your target it a password reset for some random person's account.

You seem to be applying 20 year old thinking to the modern IA landscape. Yes, back in the 90s it might have been easier to compromise someone at the local ISP that had all of 10 people working at it and no security controls at all to get in to the mail server. Well part of the changing world and the "cloud" nature of modern services is that's not your target anymore. By and large mail is hosted by big providers, who have some of the best blue and red teams in the business working for them. They are hard targets.

While e-mailed password reset links are not the best way of doing security, they are plenty good enough for the value of what they are protecting. The resources required to compromise such a thing are way in excess of the value you'd gain. So people aren't going to try.

Well first off forgive me if I don't believe your "I'm such a l33t haxor" stories without a bit of proof. I have encountered more than a few people in my career who have supposedly done all kinds of nifty shit, yet have trouble doing even the most basic IA related tasks.

Second, things have gotten more secure than since the Internet started. Source routing is something blocked on almost all networks, switches have replaced hubs (and switches are hardened against things like ARP poisoning now), most systems and networks have stateful firewalls sitting on them, and so on. What worked in 1995 is not very likely to work today.

However the biggest of all is as I noted in my first post: E-mail is generally encrypted between provider and person today. The biggest e-mail platforms, Gmail, Office 365, etc do encryption to the endpoint. When you check Gmail, be it via web browser or your phone, Google encrypts the session with TLS and your browser/app decrypts it. That means any data theft on the target's network or the ISP is out, it is encrypted.

So you are then left with the e-mail host, the company sending the mail, and maybe the transit providers supposing those companies don't encrypt e-mail between them (which they often do). If you really think you can hit Google, well then let's hear how that would go. Lay out the theoretical framework for how you'd get in to their systems to be able to monitor data in transit.

So no, sorry, this isn't an easy task to accomplish. You'd be far more likely to succeed in attacking the target's computer (as ever) in which case crypto doesn't matter since it is decrypted on their system. Of course neither would a reset e-mail since you could just capture the passwords directly.

I know there's this idea that anything not encrypted is super vulnerable but really, then about what you are saying: How to you mount such an attack? Suppose that someone requests an account reset from Amazon and it is going to their Gmail account. Where do you propose to intercept the message? You think you can realistically hack in to the servers or network at either company? If not there you'd have to get in to one of the tier-1 transit providers. These are some pretty hard targets. Other than that the only thing you could target is the lines themselves. Of course it is a bit difficult to physically tap fiber, in a conduit, and is a bit conspicuous.

It is far less feasible to intercept plain text traffic than many geeks make it out to be. It is not impossible, a state actor can do it, or the ISPs themselves of course. But for J. Random Hacker? Pretty close to impossible. Particularly if you are talking e-mail which these days is normally only plain text between providers, and is sent encrypted to the end user. Getting to tap that traffic would be very difficult, and I'd argue someone that did would ahve higher value targets than a password reset e-mail.

It probably varies state to state but in AZ, your car is listed on your insurance. While the liability insurance is for you operating a vehicle, and applies even if you drive another car, your car is still listed on your insurance paperwork. It also helps determine the rate. If you have a high performance car, you are going to pay higher liability insurance than someone with an econobox.

So if you found a car driving around, and couldn't find a record for its insurance, good chance the owner is uninsured. It is possible that they are and just neglected to add this particular car (though that could mean the policy wouldn't cover them, which would make them effectively uninsured) but more likely they don't have insurance.

Not saying I support this spy cam crap (particularly since a private company is running and as with speed cameras they'll try to game it) but it would be something where if you run a car's plate and it comes back as not in the system 99%+ of the time it is being driven by an uninsured driver.

Look the metric prefixes up: Giga, tera, etc are base 10. Giga means 10^9, not 2^30. They always have, they predated widespread base 2 usage. The standard SI prefixes are for base 10 as that's one of the big ideas behind the SI system is using base 10 for all units.

Now there are base-2 prefixes that have been introduced, those are Gibi, tebi and so on. If you want to talk base 2 orders of magnitude, you use those.

However using regular base-10 SI prefixes makes sense since basically everythign else in our computers uses that. When a processor says 3GHz it means 3 billion cycles per second, not 3,221,225,472. When a network is "gigabit" it means 10^9 bits per second, not 2^30. When we say DVDs are sampled at 48kHz we mean 48,000Hz not 49,152Hz. It makes sense to display our storage likewise. About the only area where the base-2 prefixes make sense is RAM, since it is actually sold along base-2 boundaries.

There are lots of things in the world with stupid names that are not accurate tot heir actual traits for various reasons. However when it specifies a given item then it makes sens to KEEP USING IT rather than to try and change things and screw people up.

An area you see this all the time in is ammunition. Many, many bullets have names that don't match their actual size. For example .380 auto isn't .380 caliber. The bullet is .355, the case is .373. So no matter which measurement you are using, it is wrong. However the round is called .380 auto, so we keep calling it that because people know what it is.

If you really care about isolation, like the kind we are talking about for SIPRnet and so on then you need to use data diodes and controls.

A data diode is a hardware device that only allows transfers in one direction. That way you can make sure that when you are bringing data in to the network, no egress can happen, and such. They are very specialty, and very expensive.

However more important than that is proper controls. That means policies and procedures that are followed rigorously. You have to make sure that people are extremely careful with how data is moved from one network to another and what data is moved. You need a process that specifies things like who can decide data to be moved, who approves it, who reviews it, how this is all done and so on.

If this is really important, well don't try to do it yourself based on some posts on Slashdot, you need to hire some experts. You also need to spend lots of time in the design and planning stages, you need to careful consider and document how everything will be set up and all the controls in place.

The reason they might not bother in Phoenix is most of the time, it isn't a problem. Also it isn't a problem for the bigger jets with bigger engines, it seems, just the small ones. Well those are a somewhat new phenomena. 20 years ago if you wanted to do a jet a 737 was about as small as they got. You either used that or went with a prop plane for really short routes.

The last big expansion to Sky Harbor was in 1989, before those little regional jets were a thing.

While HEVC is probably going to be useful in the future, since it does offer good compression and the licensing is likely to get sorted one way or another, VP9 is useful NOW. Google will send you videos in VP9 format if it can since not only is VP9 Google's format, but it gets better per-bit quality than MP4/AVC. Well given that Youtube is, by far, the big name in video hosting for the 'net, makes sense to support it. On top of that, Netflix has started making use of it as well. They are the very biggest commercial streaming service. So between the two it is a massive amount of use.

I can't see why you'd want to add HEVC, which is brand new, still having licensing issues and thus has next to zero adoption before VP9 which is already a major force. I mean shit even Edge supports VP9 these days. Safari and IE are basically the only browsers that don't these days (and IE is deprecated).