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WikiYawn

So, Wikileaks has dumped a whole load of US diplomatic dispatches on the web. What fun. What interesting tit-bits can be gleened?

Well, it seems like some US diplomats think Robert Mugabee, Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are all bad news. Fancy that. Who’d have thought it? Another diplomat thinks Prince Andrew was a rather forthright on a trade mission – calling the abortive fraud investigation a waste of time. What did this diplomat expect? Kissing babies and collecting flowers?

Apparently a lot of people on the Middle East don’t trust the Iranian’s nuclear programme and want something done about it. No kidding!

This isn’t news. There’s no conspiricy theory being confirmed. This is all an exercise in the art of the obvious. It might have been interesting to learn that South Korea and China weren’t perparing for a change of reigime in the North, but no, they’re on the case.

With no jucy conspiricy being reported, one might wonder what all the fuss has been about. So here’s a conspiricy theory about the conspiricy theory: The news media are reporting all this non-news to distract attention from some really interesting stuff buried in the 250,000 documents released. Perhaps, but given that (apparently) two and a half million American government employees have access to this stuff anyway, if there was anything really new to be found it’d be out in the open anyway.

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Error 0x8002007 installing Security Essentials

Good one this! If you’re trying to install Microsoft Security Essentials and it crashes out with Error 0x8002007, clicking on the Help link doesn’t really help.

If you read the technet blurb it relates to the Windows Update service not working, and if you believe this you’re going to waste a lot of time trying to repair it. I did. But the solution was really simple.

If you’re using Windows XP the Microsoft site will give you the Vista/Windows 7 version by default! Hunt around for the Windows XP 32-bit version, download that and it’ll probably work. Just don’t click the “Download Now” button because it doesn’t check which one you need – or give you the choice.

Some genuis programmers at Microsoft didn’t bother to check the version number as soon as start to run the installer. I wonder why not.

The one you get by default is:

mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-vista-win7

The one you probably want is:

mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp

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The Church vs the Establishment

The Bishop of Willesden, Pete Broadbent, has said the marriage of our future King (and his future boss) and Kate Middleton would “last about seven years”. He went on:
“We need a party in Calais for all good republicans who can’t stand the nauseating tosh that surrounds this event.”

I always thought the church took marriage seriously, but apparently not.

His employers, the Church of England, have said he was acting as an “individual”. ‘sfunny, I thought he was a bishop.

He’s since apologised. So that’s all right.

On the same day, the Bishop of Manchester, Nigel McCulloch, has complained to Ofcom that News Corporation’s full takeover of Sky “might lead to a harmful concentration of media power”.

I wonder – is he an individual or a bishop?

But Rupert Murdoch is confident that the takeover will not damage competition. So that’s all right.

 

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Google is innocent (ish)

So Google’s streetview cars have been driving around harvesting people’s email passwords have they? Well this is probably true. Let’s sue/fine/regulate them!

Actually, let’s not. They haven’t done anything wrong. What Google’s surveying vehicles did was record the wireless Ethernet radio activity as they went along, to get an idea of where the WIFI hotspots are. This is a really useful thing for someone to have done – there’s no other way to find out what’s really where than by doing a ground-level survey.

In order to determine what kind of service they’re receiving you need to record a bit of the traffic for analysis. If it’s a private service, this traffic will be encrypted so it really doesn’t matter a jot – they’d be mostly recording gibberish. If it’s an open, public service they’d get the clear text of whatever happened to be transmitted at the time if the luser’s weren’t using application-layer encryption. If some technological dunderhead decides to do a radio broadcast of his unencrypted passwords, Google (and anyone else in the vicinity) will end up receiving that too.

Look at it another way – if someone wrote their password on a big sign and stuck it in the front of their house, anyone walking down the road couldn’t help but capture it. Are the pedestrians doing something wrong, or is the owner of the house an idiot?

It’s no good the idiots bleating on about Google. That won’t give them brains. It might, however, give them some of Google’s money and this could be the real motive.

The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, has come up with some surprising statements about Google. But on review, they’re only surprising to someone understanding the technical issues here. Does this mean Graham is a technological klutz? It’s one theory – at times it seems like everyone the government appoints to deal with technology requires this as a qualification. However I think it’s far more likely a case of bowing to media/political pressure on the subject and wishing to be seen to be doing something about it.

Then, last Friday, Google signed an undertaking with the Information Commissioner’s Office to train their staff that they mustn’t do naughty things (just in case they were ever tempted). In return for this the ICO promises to leave them alone. Read it for yourself – it’s only three pages long.

http://www.ico.gov.uk/~/media/documents/library/Data_Protection/Notices/google_inc_undertaking.ashx

What’s sad about the whole affair is that the ICO is, first and foremost, a political/media driven entity even if there are some level heads at work behind the scenes. But what a waste of time and money…