COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

I was watching a video on BBC4 about Einstein and Quantum Entanglement and it reminded me of Schrödinger's cats in boxes. Instantaneous transmission! Who's to say it won't happen.....
Janet and Harry achieved better than a gyg per second eventually when they were communicating with subs and surface vessels in Battle Space experiments they were doing for the Australian and US navies. The hold-up was a commercial processor that could handle the speeds. I think they did it by using multiple processors finally.

[Tizer]

Apple could have avoided all this trouble if they'd simply made the slowing down optional and allowed users to decide for themselves which was more important, longer phone life or a faster phone. As they chose not to tell users about it I believe they did it deliberately to make people upgrade to the latest phone.
`Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones' LINK

[Stanley]

I saw that report, cunning wheeze like Google ceasing to support old android systems in January forcing me to buy a new phone. And then we worry about Huawei! The disrupters are closer to home.

[plaques]

Huawei!. Some years ago, more than I care to think about, it was common currency that computer programmes had got so complex that you would need a bunch of Ph,D's working for weeks trying to unravel a comparatively simple programme. Ie: reverse engineering to see how it worked was becoming impossible. It was for easier to write a new programme than to unravel an old one. Now that Huawei! has taken the lead the Americans are playing catch up but are still years behind. The security threat may or may not be real, nobody knows, but if the US could get everyone to stand still until they caught up with Huawei! it would give their industry a tremendous boost. The security problem would still be there only that it would be our friends the Americans who could hold us to ransom and not some foreign country like Russia or China. Either way we are piggy in the middle becoming professional victims.

[Stanley]

P. I often think back to an American friend of mine who was a linguist fluent in Arabic, Russian and several other languages. 40 years ago he worked at Menwith Hill for the then anonymous NSA and even then was data gathering by listening via satellites to conversations in places like Omsk where he monitored esoteric things like taxi radios and telephone conversations. He was the man who first brought the 'Echelon' project to my attention. (LINK. My mention of that name has almost certainly been picked up by intelligence services who watch for the use of keywords. Don't worry lads, I am no threat!
He wanted out but couldn't leave so he made sure he failed his regular lie detector test and escaped to run a chain of restaurants here in the UK.
This is why I say that the disruptors are closer to home. The present campaign against Huawei is more to do with the US paranoia about the growth of China's economy which now rivals the US. We are regularly fed the line that the POTUS is the most powerful man in the world. How long can this be considered to be true?
Closer to home, Janet and Big Harry told me things about the use of data years before it became public knowledge. Since then it has increased exponentially and will continue to grow. In short, resistance is useless!

[chinatyke]

And you think you live in a free society?!!

I'll put it the other way around - you think I live in an oppressive society!

[Stanley]

In terms of digital security you are dead right China.
On other matters, you also have a point. I commented the other day in connection with the sovereignty argument used by the Brexiteers that we have very little 'sovereignty' if you accept the definition that what it actually means is capacity for independent action. Ask a single mother on benefits or wage slave! That privilege is reserved for royalty, the Establishment and the super rich.
That's why we are always referred to as 'subjects' and not citizens.

[Tizer]

`Equifax: US charges four Chinese military officers over huge hack' LINK
`The US has charged four Chinese military officers over the huge cyber-attack on credit rating giant Equifax. More than 147 million Americans were affected in 2017 when hackers stole sensitive personal data including names and addresses. Some UK and Canadian customers were also affected. China has denied the allegations and insisted it does not engage in cyber-theft.

Announcing the indictments on Monday, Attorney General William Barr called the hack "one of the largest data breaches in history". According to court documents, the four - Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei - are allegedly members of the People's Liberation Army's 54th Research Institute, a component of the Chinese military. They spent weeks in the company's system, breaking into security networks and stealing personal data, the documents said. The nine-count indictment also accuses the group of stealing trade secrets including data compilation and database designs. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang denied the allegations on Tuesday and said China's government, military and their personnel "never engage in cyber theft of trade secrets". He said China was itself a victim of cyber-crime, surveillance and monitoring by the US, Reuters reported...'.

[chinatyke]

China has denied the allegations and insisted it does not engage in cyber-theft.

... Geng Shuang denied the allegations on Tuesday and said China's government, military and their personnel "never engage in cyber theft of trade secrets".

I can't understand why any country bothers to deny it!

[Stanley]

I tend to agree China. See the Snowden papers and other reports..... As far as I can see they are all at it.

[Tizer]

Mind boggling!...
`Why Amazon knows so much about you' LINK

[Stanley]

Janet would have liked that article. She warned me about all this over ten years ago and went further, she said that four companies (She named them, Amazon and Google are the ones I remember, the other two I have forgotten because they have such a low public profile) were bent on taking over the world. I believed her at the time and realise now that she was correct.

[Tizer]

If the companies weren't all tech ones then she may have included Glencore, the global commodities company. It has been seen as `wanting to take over the world'. It's also one of the main businesses responsible for getting us into the climate predicament.

[Stanley]

I seem to remember they were two tech companies. I have heard of Glencore and would have remembered them I think but it's a long time ago....

[Tizer]

Firefox has beefed up its protection against trackers and I've had it show a warning a few times that it has blocked a social media tracker. Now I've had a different warning, one I haven't seen before, telling me it had blocked a `fingerprinter'. The warning came when I clicked on a thumbnail of an item on an Ebayer seller's page. I looked up fingerprinter and found more information in these Firefox pages:
How to block fingerprinting with Firefox LINK 1
Enhanced Tracking Protection in Firefox for desktop LINK 2

Firefox by default is set for Standard Tracking Protection but it also offers Strict Tracking Protection and I've switched it to this out of curiosity. It warns that this can interfere with the functioning of some web sites on my PC but I'll see what it's like for real!

[PanBiker]

Yes the messages have been oining me as well of late, I have resisted so far in enabling all the features.

[Stanley]

I take reassurance from their messages, I haven't enabled the enhanced version but remember with gratitude that it was a warning from them which enabled me to escape from being conned by a very sophisticated scam a couple of years ago. More power to their elbow!

[Tizer]

I can't have much confidence in UK and US security when I see reports like this...
`Data breach hits agency overseeing White House communications' LINK

`Thousands of mobiles and laptops lost by UK government in a year' LINK

[Stanley]

Has anyone any experience with password managers or any advice about them?

[Tripps]

A former neighbour who was a software developer though I was foolish not to use one.

Being cautious, and really not too inconvenienced by using different pass words- I never did.

In the event of a problem - can you honestly say to your bank for instance, that you have never revealed your password to 'anyone'? I am assuming that you need to tell your real password to the program supplier.

Be good to hear from someone who knew about this.

[Pluggy]

If you sign up to your browsers native login service - Firefox Sync for Firefox, Google account for Chrome or Chromium and a Microsoft account for Edge it pretty much does what a password manager does and more besides. Technology has overtaken the password manager in my book.

[Tripps]

If you sign up to your browsers native login service - Firefox Sync for Firefox

More complication - and I've just realised that the bank sends me an access code to either my mobile of my land line phone which I must key in before they will let me in. I doubt Firefox can cope with that.

I'll just leave thing as they are.

[Stanley]

Thanks Pluggy, that's what I have at the moment, Firefox remembers my passwords.

[Tizer]

In the event of a problem - can you honestly say to your bank for instance, that you have never revealed your password to 'anyone'? I am assuming that you need to tell your real password to the program supplier. Be good to hear from someone who knew about this.

I don't think anyone has responded directly to this comment by Tripps. He's expressing a concern that I share - if you give your bank password to Firefox, for example, you'll be breaching their terms & conditions which require you to not give them to anyone. Then if money disappears from your account they'll say it's your own fault. Am I missing something here?

[Stanley]

I write mine down and only use it on the phone....
The site is terribly slow this morning, posting is like wading through treacle. Not a problem we have encountered lately.
[I've checked, connection speed is normal and other sites are OK.]
Later, at 05:00, it has recovered and is now on normal speed. Earlier I reflected that it was dial-up speed and how many people still have to endure this even today?