Posts by James George
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to David Hood,
Altho I am amazed at what you can do in windows browse boxes. Unless someone has been all UAC or AD, pasting into em frequently works.
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The bigger issue here is people such as Jacqui who have legitimate concerns about whether or not their details have been discovered by peeps that they need to keep such things private from.
The odds are great that Jacqui and co are safe. Only because the sheet sniffers and the sleazy debt collecting agencies and sordid 'private' detectives who employ them would never have conceived that the data they have been paying so much for was so easily obtainable.
Nevertheless Jacqui along with many others is rightly concerned about the confidentiality of her information. The issue is as much about whether the client believes they are secure as whether or not the data was compromised. So it behoves the MSD to pay whatever it costs for relocation of these clients, or whatever else is required to keep them feeling safe. -
OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Sacha,
Sorry I didn't come into here to have an argument (I signed up for the hitting yerself on the head class) but after many years of helping people use computers I have to say that for a person who spends a good deal of their days on computers as Craig & Deborah obviously do ( judging by the numbers of their posts), not knowing how to navigate a local area network is more like never learning how to put the car in reverse or refusing to drive on motorways, than not understanding about fuel injection.
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I must find it interesting that those who claim not to know how to navigate around a machine they spend a large part of the day using hold views generally in line with those some deem to be 'sheeple'. I volunteer showing people the rudiments of managing windows systems and have noticed the same thing. Those with inquisitive minds have played around on their system and can do usually already everything they need to. The computer illiterates are the ones who tend to accept what they are told by 'the people in charge'. they think that politicians have their best interests at heart because thinking otherwise hurts their brain, "and anyway did ya see those AB's win didn't 'we' do well, the world will notice little old NZ now".
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There is no doubt that Bennett is responsible for this farce. The "Self Service Kiosks" were introduced last year on the back of Winz staff cuts so that jobseekers could access vacancies without having to tie up staff by 'interacting' with them.
The kiosks were introduced by way of a national rollout with attendant free drinks and press releases for journos.
At some stage, doubtless out of due regard to Winz managers penchant for re-aranging the furniture whenever they are given yet another crazy command from oberSturmbanfuhrer Bennett, a decision must have been made to ignore the pesky requirement to pay an 'expensive' IT contractor to come in and change the local network's active directory every time the Kiosk was moved, expanded, or its PC swapped. Although that sounds crazy surely they must have an onsite secirty officer at each office, someone who can be trained to implement this trivial task. Or not. "After all" some moron thought to himself, "its not as if they can access the national network from these terminals, they're only gonna get the local data n whats that? Boring old accounts."
This is a classic example of the folly of mega departments; once they are created , usually by a larger organisation swallowing a number of public service minnows, the odds are high that most of senior management has no idea of the actual duties of the former small fry.That means they don't understand CYFS holds accounts with intimate details of their at risk clients on their local network. As far the managers are concerned Accounts are the mob who are always harrassing him when he wants to upgrade to the latest iteration of y-phone, and IT is the mob who won't knock up a quick app permitting him to do his job from under the table of the local strip club. (true stories from a mega bureuacracy I once did a lag in) but that was a digression.
I have had a bit of a play around on a kiosk while bored waiting for a quick client/winz interface but tho I noticed the vulnerability I decided not to push it too far lest the legendary MSD audit trail ID my activities. It looks as though I shouldn't have worried all the security is tied to the national client database which is what private detectives try to bribe idjit winz staff to get into.
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p.s. Mrs Malaprop rules OK!
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Sadly, I think most people have made an assumption that has lead them to conclude that the degree of crass illegality committed by NZ’s law enforcement agencies whilst enforcing the laws of a foreign country, has been somehow exceptional.
That is to say thus far most coverage has been conveyed with a subtext that the police, crown law office, SIS, and GCSB normally obey the rather loose constraints placed upon them to preserve kiwi liberties, but for some reason this time they did not, apparently because all of those organisations decided independently of one another, that the normal rules shouldn’t apply; just so that after a three decade hiatus, NZ could get down and dirty with amerika once more.
Whilst there may be some of that thinking I find blind acceptance of that rationale stretches the bounds of credulity too far for a cynic such as myself.Look at this another way. Q Apart from Dotcom’s disrepute in Washington, what else is there about this case that sticks out like the proverbial blackfella dog’s appendages?
A. One big one. Never before has any criminal case in NZ been sufficiently well-resourced to properly test every link in the chain of evidence.
Sure we’ve had the occasional richfella put in front of beaks before, but apart from the fact that usually the blokes in charge of investigating richfellas are secretly barracking for the accused and so in thjose few instances, have rigorously stuck to the letter of the law vis a vis evidence gathering (e.g. the hassles the SFO claim to be having obtaining all the evidence they need for the Hanover Finance investigation), few defendants or their legal mouthpieces consider such an examination of the evidence worth it. The huge expenditure of resources it would take would be unlikely to give much of a return since kiwi beaks are notorious for ruling that the probative value of evidence outweighs any dodginess about the way the evidence was obtained.
“No illegal search and seizure ‘loophole’ for you Hemi.”
I believe this has allowed a culture of corruption to flourish among NZ’s law enforcement officials.
Dotcom is going balls out to document the plethora of egregious misbehaviour incidents by NZ law enforcement, because most likely his case will be tried in an amerikan court where, despite post-2001 curtailment of liberty, much of the illegal search and seizure case law still remains.
So as the extradition decision is reviewed we should prepare for more of these disclosures of malfeasance, and remember that there is a strong likelihood that rather than these being the exception, most likely these are standard operating practices for NZ’s law enforcement agencies whose methods are rarely, if ever, properly examined. -
Let me get this straight, the legitimate Mullah Omar lead government are the baddies eh Russell? Even though amerika invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because amerikans wanted an easy head to kick after the anti-globalist world trade centre action and they picked what they thought was an easy target.
Forget that no Afghans were anywhere near the WTC or the pentagon when amerika was getting some payback, George Bush & co selected them so they had to go.
I remember Mullah Omar, the legitimate president of Afghanistan, at that time a sovereign nation, offered to allow the bunch of Saudis that the US had framed for the job, to be extradited if amerika could just put up some evidence.No, not the made for TV fantasy translations of Osama bin Laden giving his opinion as a structural engineer of what caused the two towers to collapse, actual usable in a court of law, objective proof. Just like with Kim Dotcom really.
Omar was under no obligation since his government hadn't signed any ass licking treaties. But that didn't matter Afghanistan was selected and copped the brunt of amerikan angst at finally receiving a little payback for the millions of humans slaughtered across the planet to further US interests.
But according to Brown the subsequent invasion; the rape slaughter and looting by assorted mercenaries from any country eager to kiss bush butt, wasn't the problem, the Afghan administration was.
I suggest you read a book by a bloke called Abdul Salam Zaeef "My Life with the Taliban"
Zaeef was with the Taliban right from the beginning, he is a devout man of great character and honesty who eventually won the respect of his captors in Guantanamo Bay - oh so he must have been a terrorist then? No his crime was that he was a diplomat, he reluctantly agreed to take the role of Afghan ambassador to Pakistan. The amerikan agents who treat Pakistan like it is their personal fiefdom, arrested him, ignoring his diplomatic status and shipped him off to Guantanamo Bay. Big mistake because the man's popularity among Pakistanis and Afghans is so high even the amerikan installed puppet government of Afghanistan demanded his freedom!
Anyway the book documents the rise of the Taliban, how it came into being and exactly the awful state the US gangsters left the nation in after it was no longer needed for a battleground against Russia.
Read it and you may begin to comprehend the injustice that New Zealand has been party to for the last 11 years.
Lying liars tell a mob of garbage about the Taliban. Just this morning on TVOne an englander televison 'personality' interviewed an englander 'Otago uni security expert' about Aotearoa's involvement in Afghanistan. It was pitiful. My old man who got sucked into fighting for englanders for 6 years would have rolled in his grave, it was so bad.
In typical englander fashion the fault for the kiwi deaths lies at the feet of guess who? The Hungarians. Disgraceful and yet so so typical. Exactly the same type of thinking that will have englander 'commentators' whining about cheats or 'sledging' when they get dicked at Lords today. Everything is someone else's fault.
How did NZ come to this where we let those types back into our decision making processes? -
Perhaps if Brown & co had put an equal amount of effort into investigating those news broadcasts by the BBC, CBS & A-J english, that are just trite regurgitations of the talking points daily foisted upon us by the governments of the nations that instigated the murderous and unwarranted invasion of Afghanistan, it may be possible to take the nit-picking over the SBS coverage more seriously.
Still, Brown knows if he reduces the debate to poor little kiwi battler being bullied by big bad aussie media outlets, he's prolly onto a winner; no matter what the truth of the issue is.One surviving child said she saw lights of other US soldiers in the yard while her family was being massacred, Brown and co reckon that is dodgy reporting eh?
Meanwhile, according to Brown, a kiwi 'reporter' who claims third hand statements passed on to him by the US soldiers he is in bed with - sorry embedded with, is obviously more credible .But the big gobsmack was the crazy notion that the US government subsidised Stars and Stripes, whose editorial offices are in the process of being moved to Fort Meade that would 'just coincidentally' mind you, put the editorial offices in the same facility as one of the military’s main public-affairs operations, is an independent publication free from US government interference.
Maybe Brown would like to argue that point with Congress who have just further regulated Stars n Stripes future in the “2013 Defense Authorization Bill”.Stars & Stripes may be independent on a few side issues such as whether or not vets get decent hospital care, but they are not objective in their judgements about major US policy matters.
Eg
When wikileaks published its release of Afghan data, the Stars n Stripes 'ombudsman' was prevented from discussing any matter concerning US troops that arose from information contained in the Wikileaks release. This is exactly the same restrictions as those put on the State Department and the Department of Defense.
Their readership is actively involved in the murder & rape of Afghans every day. As if that fishwrap is going to publish any news story by any journo that doesn't, at least tacitly, support this horror.Claiming that Stars n Stripes isn't an apologist for US war crimes is about as silly as saying that Rupert Murdoch's kiwi lackey doesn't expect to get his own way on things like the closure of TVNZ 7, when he donates big bucks to a political party's campaign funds.
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Hard News: The Huawei Question, in reply to James George,
Continued from above
There may be a number of hardware makers snapping at Cisco's heels, but the last time I looked, Cisco still controlled the bulk of IT networking & communications software. OpenFlow the open source tilt at Cisco & is probably more of a long term threat than any single corporate entity. Still there is no doubt Huawei does have Cisco concerned. I apologise if someone has already posted this article on the Huawei challenge to Cisco.True, the US intelligence community have a special interest in this case; Cisco et al have been at Homeland security's beck and call since 911.
In return for which they have grabbed a mob of new business. Spies spying on spies spying on spies. None of em use much HumInt nowadays; it's nearly all electronic, and very expensive.
There is much about the $1 Billion taxpayer subsidy of Telecom's fibre to the door rollout that is worthy of trenchant criticism, but the Huawei purchase is not one of those instances.