Posts by RW

The amusing side of this affair

When the Canadian constitution was repatriated from Britain about 40 years ago, the pols of the day inserted all sorts of high flown language into it.

These days, the honorable members of the bench are taking those words at face value, to the surprise and dismay of the current generation of Canuck pols. Particularly upset are the retards of the federal Conservative party, who are not much more than semi-fascist tea baggers. (As if any tea bagger were anything other than a fascist)

The same kind of judicial reasoning has led to a loosening of the laws governing marijuana, so soon Canada will be known as the country of a happy, stoned, sexually satisfied population.

Seen this kind of thing before

Though the details were vastly different.

My employer had in-house lawyers, but all they did was coordinate handling of legal matters and write headnotes (short summaries) of case reports. They never carried out courtroom work not did they even give legal opinions for our employer. For that, external lawyers were hired.

The root of these practices lay in the view of lawyers as "officers of the court" and the inherent conflict of interest between that and being a salaried employee. Just as in the situation described in this article.

An interesting wrinkle of the legal system.

A testimony to MS's crappy business model

Instead of simply writing the world's fastest, and most standards-adherent browser and letting it dominate the browser market by sheer quality, MS once again resorts to lock-in strategies via proprietary extensions and embracements.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that MS resorts to this tiresome and outdated tactic for any reason other than inability to actually write good browsing software - unlike Google, Apple, and Mozilla.

Why the coppers hate photographers

It's because they're doing things they're ashamed of and which are probably illegal. They'll deny it, but they know this in their heart of hearts.

When did the cops stop acting like public servants and start acting like uniformed thugs countenanced by law?

The golden lining to this cloud

The breeding population of the Highly Entitled, in this case thinking their Highly Entitled Status overrules fundamental laws of physics and biology (to say nothing of common decency toward others), will be reduced in numbers.

In about 30 years, look for newspaper (and Register) articles commenting on an unexpected improvement in public manners. No more butting into line at Starbucks; no more drivers with a cellphone glued to their ear; no more road rage. A paradise in the making, methinks.

Just as genuine hippies are now a highly endangered species, with only a few breeding pairs left in special refuges, so there will be special refuges for the few remaining Highly Entitled.

This is an old story in Oz

Donkey's years ago in the pre-internet age, there was some woman in Oz who had amassed an astonishing archive of printed porn in the name of "research". If my memory serves me correctly, it was largely hardcore stuff that Oz law strictly forbade the possession of, but her excuse was accepted by the coppers.

The rest of the global population had our doubts.

Oz needs a government that lets the djinn out of the bottle for good by legalizing all porn, drugs, nudity, and skimpy form fitting swimsuits for women. (The men all run around in their Speedos already, and have for a long time.) A law strictly forbidding men of the cloth from pronouncing, or inciting someone else to pronounce, on political matters wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Has no one heard of homonyms?

Or, to be slightly more precise but rather wordier, words that carry more than one distinct meaning?

Bear = furry animal that shits in the woods

Bear = to carry something

Gay = cheerful, having a good time

Gay = queer as a bottle of pink ink, also used as an insult

School kids have to know these things if we want them to grow up with a decent command of the language.

As for homosexualist, that's just El Reg indulging in some harmless word play. It also cocks a snoot at those who use that very same word in a serious way.

I have no sympathy with the marks

Well, maybe with the ones this dude scammed the first year or two, but not later.

Everyone who pays the slightest attention knows "if it's too good to be true, it isn't true!", so it's simply greed that led to the mugus getting fleeced.

Moreover, these 419 scams usually do a nudge-nudge wink-wink act to the effect that the scammer needs help to circumvent various laws. The victims tacitly agreed to participate in an illegal transaction: one more reason for my lack of sympathy.

What? Is there no "Big Book of Building Secure Systems"?

Hypothesis: all the information one needs to design a secure system is readily available online.

But that's just the trouble: it's online, and unless you are an astute Googler, you will miss some of it. Moreover, it's not integrated; it's bits and pieces here and there with nothing explaining how they all fit together.

What the world needs is a book (yes, a book, not a !@# website) that compiles everything known about building secure systems into a single coherent whole, so as to be an Infallible Reference that one can take to bed and browse before lights out.

The simple fact is that lots of systems are designed and built by idiots, and a single point of reference would serve several purposes: providing a source of integrated design criteria; providing a physical object to whomp the idiots over the head with; and providing lawyers with something they could point to and ask "Did you not follow the Big Book's recommendations? And if not, why not?"

I can think of no explanation for systems with glaring design errors like this one and the many others we regularly read reports of, except that the information is far too scattered.

But what's the point of tracking?

I have a privately held opinion [*] that the marketers are delusional when they think their snooping on browsing can be used to sell things to us masses. Being professional liars, they lie to their clients as often as they do to potential customers, and the efficacy of browse-tracking is one of the bigger lies.

Something like the music business, the marketing business impresses me as having a dead/dying business model they are desperately trying to keep afloat.

The real use of tracking cookies (and other such features) is to facilitate simple snooping by employers, police, and other do-gooder (sometimes do-badder) busybodies who do not understand the word "private".

[*] No doubt my privately held opinion is on record with Google.

The internet is not a children's playground

Instead of assuming that a website is safe for children by default, wouldn't it be smarter to assume they're all "inappropriate"? Instead of trying to filter out the dirty pictures (etc), when a child is online filter out everything unless it's specifically marked "safe for kiddies".

The system would work: no one selling porn, sex toys, incorrect political opinions, profanity, etc is interested in children because they are sexually immature (I hope!), don't vote (ditto!), and are likely already experts at swearing. There is no profit in mismarking sites as safe when they aren't.

Parents who are concerned could then install Nanny State software to carry out the universal blocking.

IOW, only let the kids see websites specifically set up for them.

But in truth, we all know that attempts to filter the web aren't really about "protecting the children". Governments detest the free and uncontrolled exchange of political opinions on the web, exemplified by the US government currently having cows over the recent Wikileaks release of classified information. I bet the CIA and its partners in crime would love to have a big red switch labelled "internet" that they could simply flip to the off position.

@ Sarah Bee

Our Divine Moderatrix is absolutely right. Every legislator on the planet knows that most of what arrives in the in-box is mass produced garbage that means very little. In the old days, they called programs to flood legislators with messages of a particular p.o.v. "a letter writing campaign", and you may be sure that the results were (a) instantly recognizable to the secretaries sorting the mail and (b) largely ignored.

As I understand it, an efficient office would sort the mail on a given issue into four piles, which would then be weighed: mass mailings for; mass mailings against; individual letters for; individual letters against. An individual letter was considered perhaps 100 times more significant than a mass letter as an indicator of public feeling.

I'm pretty sure today, all letters are given an additional significance factor of 100 against email of all sorts.

Moral: if you actually have an opinion on some matter, write a proper letter to your MP or Congressman or Senator or Member of the Outer Cabal. In many countries, letters to legislators do not even require postage.

But remember to keep your letters as short and sweet as humanly possible. The few times I have written to Ottawa (both to the then-Minister of Justice) I merely said "I support the government's efforts to bring in such-and-such legislation." If they are really interested in my position, they will ask for more.

"representatives of advertisers ... argued against strong privacy protection"

Of course they did! They have a vested interest in the matter.

But when has Microsoft ever demonstrated that they understand that a PC and the data it holds are private property, not fodder for the deluded snoops of the advertising business? Not since Win3.1, perhaps.

Would a burqa be acceptable???

One of those ones with only a little mesh window for the eyes, otherwise all-enveloping, similar to a nun's habit. After all, it covers shoulders and knees — and all else, for that matter.

@ Randall Shimizu

Four-digit PINs are not universal rule. Mine is 12 digits long right now, at Royal Bank of Canada.

Bank staff did warn me, though, that if I travel, I'd have to change my PIN to a short one because many ATMs outside Canada simply won't accept a 12-digit PIN. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I'm shocked and horrified

To discover that LoveHoney, the UK's wonderful sex toy site, (lovehoney.co.uk), doesn't carry the Magic Wand.

Perhaps this is a commentary on the difference between American passion and British?

Lovehoney does have, however, a variety of other massagers, some of quite sinister appearance.

@ JaitCH

My guess is that NuLabour had read "Government for Dummies" or "Creating a Surveillance State, for Dummies", plus "The Miracle of the Database, for Dummies".

Being dummies themselves, from top to bottom, they believed in its entirety what they read. People of only modest intelligence long ago learned to be skeptical of overblown claims, but not NuLabour.

I'm awaiting news that Brown read "Affirmations for Dummies" and spent five minutes every morning in front of a mirror chanting "I'm the most intelligent guy, I'm a superb Chancellor, ain't I just wonderful!"

The proof is in the pudding

To wit, this reader finds the comments more illuminating than the original article in a surprising number of cases. At the very least, the comments add to the articles context that would otherwise be missing.

The moderation rules, such as they are, seem to have encouraged the growth of a remarkably good group of commentators, who add considerable luster to El Reg.

Steady as she goes (with a bowl full of tasty pudding to snack on).

@ Defex

That lawyer-politicians should pass laws is really no surprise. Law, statutory law in particular, is what they were taught, so that's what they see as the solution to all society's problems. It's rather like chiropractors: all they know is spinal manipulation so pretty well no matter what your problem is, they see manipulation as the solution.

I am endlessly amused when a law is passed to outlaw some newly recognized Bad Behavior, followed by self-congratulatory smiles all round by the lawyer-pols and their partners is stupidity, the bureaucrats. Passing a law agin' something has never stopped anybody from doing what they want.

@ Mike Richards

Prince Charles may have his heart in the right place, but sad to say he doesn't seem to have the brains to actually do the job. There's a horrible fire hall he was involved in the design of, and it's a fucking travesty:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/31/prince-charles-fire-station-poundbury

"More than adequate capacity" - whazzat?

More than adequate for _what_, pray tell? Giving enemas to elephants? [Sorry, dear Moderatrix, but that phrase burbled its way to the top of my mind without malice aforethought.]

That sure sounds like some kind of spin to me.

Wouldn't BT be further ahead in the long run if they actually tried to deliver plenty of bandwidth instead of trying to pack a hundred pounds of <whatever> into a fifty pound bag? Packet shaping is simply the response of a company that knows damned well their network isn't up to the job.

@ Phen

"Imagine a world where your browser was set to "Ask me about every cookie", but you couldn't change it. That's basically what this proposal boils down to."

No, it doesn't boil down to that at all. It boils down to "Advertisers! Stop tracking online browsing with cookies!"

Advertising, like politics, spin doctoring, counterfeiting, and the forging of art and antiquities, is just another form of professional lying. We all know that advertisements and their claims (both implicit and explicit) are complete nonsense, and no right-thinking individual pays the slightest attention to most adverts. Except, perhaps, to see what specials the grocery stores have this week.

The real suckers in all this are the businesses that pay for advertising. I doubt it does them any good whatsoever. After all, historically the Hershey chocolate company never advertised their signature "Hershey Bar", and sales were good. And condoms, which all adults outside convents know about, weren't advertised until 1970 (in the US). Yet sales were good and brand awareness, while not exactly widespread, certainly existed.

What all this leaves is a black hole regarding financing. I'd really prefer a micropayment system, myself, and be done with cookies, ads, and all the rest of the advertising companies' infrastructure.

The real appeal is games

I beg your pardon!

In this household, Wine has value because it keeps alive ancient Win3.1 and Win95/98 versions of programs that have never been bested in terms of interface design. Saying this may cause the collective Register readership to piss themselves laughing, but Lotus 1-2-3 (a Win3.1 version) remains my preferred spreadsheet because of its straightforwardness and ease of use. No version of Excel nor later version of Lotus is as good, and OpenOffice isn't either.

The real question is what Linux versions Wine 2.1 will run under.

Just like Microsoft

Sounds just like Windows.

A notable example of Redmond's inefficiency, in that it takes them thousands of employees to do what a relative handful of siesta-loving Spaniards to do.

Very old news

Back in the day, when MS released Win95, it couldn't read backups created under DOS 6, which itself underlay Win3.1 in its various manifestations.

That MS should once again mess up backup comes as no surprise at all.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Off with their heads!

If I had Carrollian "Queen of Hearts" drag in the right size, I'd have put it on before keying that.

Something I notice time and time again about these stories concerning official malfeasance relating to data: no one is held responsible. No one is jailed, no one is suspended without pay, no one is charged, no one forgoes any pensionable time, no one takes a hit of any kind. At the very least, the head of any public organization that missteps with data should be denied any bonus for the year.

Maybe the time has come for an internet-fueled mass expression of disgust at this nonsense, be it a careless hospital sending email or a police force ignoring FOI requests. Enough angry letters to newspapers and MPs and ministers and maybe, just maybe, something might change.

Or maybe, better yet, it's time to institute a citizens' database of public employees who have fallen down on the job: name them and shame them, starting with the people at the very top. Something like the CRB or the kiddy-fiddlers' database. Can even be based on hearsay and gossip: that's what the UK gov has done, no?

"Utmost importance"????

This shibboleth regarding protection of children from harm at all costs is so laughable it's....well, laughable. It's an unbalanced attitude perhaps due to saccharine memories of childhoods that never were and the idea that the little darlings are angels made of snowflakes.

Someone really needs to put the cat among the pigeons and work out the monetary value of a child's life cut short prematurely, then compare that (and the number of such lost lives) with the cost of the many insane, unbalanced provisions made for their protection. (Some of which provisions are actually detrimental to the proper development of children.)

And as for the internet: instead of assuming the internet, the web in particular, is by default "safe for children" with only "adult" sites earmarked, how about we do it the other way around? Assume that everything on the web is only suitable for adults, with the exception of specific sites marked as safe for the kiddies.

Grumpily yours....

Next on the list....

Recognition that many (most? all?) jobs, sports, and other activities involve some degree of risk of death, dismemberment, disease, or injury. And then cancel all the ludicrous health & safety regulations that try to wrap all members of the population in cotton wool for their protection. H&S regs are probably the purest expression of nanny-statism, with the sub-text "we know better than you how you should lead your life."

IOW, no more coppers standing by the side of a pond while someone drowns, lest they themselves get injured. No more bans on cheese rolling, three-legged races, and other traditional sports. And so on.

And think of the savings that will result from firing innumerable bureaucrats and turning them out to find real jobs.

@ oldcodger

Quoth the codger: "Another limp wristed whitewash does NOT send the correct message to the thousands of public service employees who are still failing to safe guard other peoples data."

Oh, shit, not that crap again! Howsabout let's stop "sending messages" and use the language to state unambiguously the objective?

Whatever the means used to communicate it, it's clear is that "the correct message" isn't getting through to the working level. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets lost in a cloud of bureaucratic instructions that working level employees simply don't have time to deal with. Where I used to work, they had a policy and procedures manual a good 4" thick, but only managers had a copy and the grunts had no idea what it contained. Bury an important objective in a tome like that, and no one is going to even notice.

Time, perhaps. to revert to sending each employee (including dimwit managerial types) a personally addressed letter from the Big Boss stating in as few words as possible what's required. Send it by Royal Mail to their home addresses, too, so it's clear it's not just more bafflegab from HR.

Which leads me to wonder if maybe it's HR departments and their bureaucratic ways that are the real stumbling block. Oh, yippee, a chance to screw over the useless twits in HR!

@ Jlocke

You and I agree that the statement

"in many areas of business that if you can’t measure something “quantitatively”, it will be difficult to raise the quality objectively"

is, not to be too coy about it, sheer unadulterated bullshit.

This kind of statement is emitted by people who simply don't know the business they are in. Not knowing it, they can't tell if they are doing well or badly. Some of these people are accountants, others are lawyers (maybe), and yet others are managers who haven't a clue what their company really does or makes.

It's just like New Labour: substitute box-ticking by idiots for intelligence and then be deluded into thinking you understand the situation.

I'd be very curious to know what the internal culture of BP is, given their well's oily diarrhea all over the Gulf of Mexico. Betcha dollars to donuts that the managerial ranks are filled with beancounters whose only quantitative measure of anything is "how much does it cost?" and whose cri de coeur is "can't we do it cheaper?"

Flame icon because this kind of managerial idiocy is a real hot button with me.

What _real_ men use

https://www.nipplefunwear.com/products/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=0&products_id=17

RD&H

A fundamental issue

It's just fucking music and movies: entertainment; nothing more. Stuff that makes not a whit of difference to anyone's health or safety. And the industries that generate this trash are fairly small in the context of entire economies. Oh, I know, Hollywood would like us to think that they are the center of the economic universe, and it appears they've managed to persuade any number of people of this, but saying something and conning a few suckers into believing it doesn't make it true.

Why on earth is the heavy hammer of criminal law being prostituted in the service of mere commercial entertainment??? Just who have the media companies successfully bribed? These are companies with more money than they know what to do with, with a very long track record of ripping off the very artists they claim to be so concerned about. Maybe it's true that the real motivation is that the loss of the excessive profits acquired thanks to their dubious ethics means they'll not have as much money for nose candy.

Britain, according to the headlines I read, is seriously afflicted with feral teens stabbing all and sundry, yet its government assigns scarce (soon to be *much* scarcer) law enforcement resources to entertainment.

This is plain nuts. Time for government to say "we're repealing all the criminal laws about copyright and you guys are on your own. We have more important things to do."

@ Richard Steiner

To your list of meritorious Win3.1 apps, let me add Improv 2.0 (never, alas, really finished), Lotus 1-2-3 release 5 (the single best spreadsheet program), and FontMonster. Also WordPerfect 5.1, the best word processor ever written.

However, these will all run under Win95 & Win98, which are far more stable OSes than Win 3.1. When I was using Win3.1, I'd have to shut it down and reboot two or three times most workdays because the GUI heap would become corrupted. I learned that the instant I saw *any* "funny" on the display, to save my work and reboot.

If you want to run these inside Linux, your best bet is probably to use Virtual Box, as Wine is glitchy in its handling of older Windows software.

Let's not forget what was really wrong

TJX and its subsidiary brands retained card numbers and PINs in their insecure systems. Just who was the dimwitted marketing wonk who thought this was a good idea, the news has not said, but a stunt like this has all the earmarks of a marketing wonk thinking he could do "research" on the customer base.

First rule of organizing any business: keep the lawyers, the accountants, and the marketing wonks in cages in the basement and never ever let them initiate anything. If you need their advice, then fine, let them out into the daylight for a half hour or so, but keep their hands tied behind their backs so they can't grab the levers of authority.

Jobs, because he's a marketing wonk in some sense.

@ disgruntled yank

Our Divine Moderatrix is fully sane. She is the epitome of sanity, the standard by which all others are measured. I will not, however, rush to her defense, as she is fully capable of defending herself against all comers.

Dealing with Register readership has acted as a vaccine.

Edward Tufte

This unspeakable, vile excuse for a human being needs to read Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

If the population at large is unable to comprehend graphs and tables, the correct cure is better schooling, not stupid attempts to yet further dumb down the data. These skills aren't rocket science, and even significantly sub-normal intelligences can learn how to read a graph or a table of information if (big if!) they are taught well and they are required to put forth the effort necessary to learn these skills. Yes, I know that among the Raving Earth Mother Brigade the concept of requiring innocent snowflakes to actually exert themselves in school and meet predetermined standards is anathema, but such is life.

Terrain view still available

Under "More"

Whew! I use terrain view a great deal, as it happens, in spite of the fact that many of the names sprinkled on it are seriously misplaced or are duplicates or mark a large area with a single point. To say nothing of the innumerable watercourses and lakes that are not marked blue, and that many watercourses, lakes, mountain peaks, and other geographic features are unnamed.

Google may think that Google Maps is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but baby, they've got a long way to go before they get up to an acceptable standard.

"If we stop now you've wasted all the capital investment"

An absolutely classic economic fallacy. It's the same fallacy that leads to being nickled and dimed keeping an old car running: "I've spent so much money on it now, I have to spend more to recover those costs."

Does Johnson realize how stupid this sounds to anyone with an IQ over, say, 75?

Incidentally, this also exemplifies NuLabour's inability to say "we have made a mistake."

You forgot per capita statistics

I noticed in a news article about this that while evil Washington DC asked for data 123 time, even eviller Ottawa, Ontario asked 16 times. As the US has about 10 times the population of Canada, this means that Canada is asking for data about 35% more often per capita.

Statistics, gentlemen, statistics!

@ Ian 31

Don't worry about Lenny's fondness for melon. I used to have a cat that adored cantaloupe; after eating a slice for breakfast, I'd put the rind out on the sundeck and the cat would spend an hour gnawing away at it.

Nice cat; sadly, run over by a speeding car one dark night.

Summary

1. Why sensitive data in a spreadsheet of any kind? Because spreadsheets are the vehicle of choice for ad hoc data analysis.

2. Why emailed to El Reg? Because of that goddamned autocomplete feature. Microsoft, in their drive to dumb down the computing experience for Joe and Jessie Sixpack, have a nasty habit of implementing features like this without thought for the downside, and the habit has spread far and wide. I'm a reasonably intelligent person, but even so have been bitten on the ass by autocomplete from time to time. The problem is compounded because the To: text box probably isn't big enough to show all the data entered, and the programming is too mickeymouse to auto-enlarge that box.

3. Why a fuckup? Because the culpable party was probably not trained/educated in safe data handlng techniques. Because instead of having people on staff specifically tasked with carrying out ad hoc analyses, everyone is deemed capable of doing so. You hire idiots, pay them idiot wages, don't properly educate them, and what you get is idiot behavior. A variant on the old garbage in, garbage out scenario, if you will.

4. Why not encrypted? Sheer incompetence on the part of those specifying the email software, along the lines of Jonathan Carlaw's analysis. It seems obvious that email software used in critical applications (e.g. law enforcement) should have encryption turned on at all times. If this means that coppers can't email their mistresses to arrange a lunchtime rendezvous, so be it.

5. Why not have all this stuff corraled inside a network with no connection to the outside world? I don't know.

On the whole, it sounds like no competent, experienced IT person was in a position of authority to dictate system features. Perhaps the lesson is that being higher in the hierarchy than someone else does not entitle managers to override technical decisions made by underlings.

Wotta mess.

What worries me....

What about the pad thai (Thai: ผัดไทย) at my favorite Thai restaurant?

Do I need a note from Jobsie to order it?

Ecological niches

They exist in commerce too, and Ebay, in its drive to convert itself into a fixed-price overstock/firesale/end-of-line emporium, has abandoned the niche it once had a monopoly in.

Build a system that works like Ebay did back in, say, 1997, be satisfied with a large stream of small payments, and the punters will beat down your doors.

Do large gubbermint IT projects ever succeed, anywhere?

Or is it that gov.uk has a particularly poor track record in such matters?

From a strictly sociological point of view, it's a matter of interest how gov.uk has developed its uncanny knack for IT fuckups. Is this a holdover from the days of a classical education qualifying civil servants to decide matters they don't comprehend?

Democratic government

A commentator once said that one hallmark of a truly democratic government is the presence of multiple independent centers of power within government.

It is good to see that in Britain, the bolshevist principles of Labour have not yet extinguished such independence, and that at least the head of the stats department is able to give the lying pols a public tongue lashing for their misuse of statistics.

Too bad the advisory council on drugs isn't the body tasked with setting drug classification and policy.

@ Graham Marsden

Quoth he: "The problem is that Politicians generally have damn all experience of the business world ... This has been seen time and time again with billions of pounds of public money being pissed away on useless or ill-designed projects, yet still nothing is done to fix the underlying problem."

The root problem is at least one level deeper than "have damn all experience."

What kind of person thinks that they are qualified to make decisions on matters they know nothing of? *That*, my good man, is the problem. Gordon Brown and his cronies have no hesitation dabbling in technical issues they are simply unqualified to pass judgement on. Be it the legal categorization of cannabis, the construction of a nation-wide health IT system, or legislation to curb music and movie downloading, they haven't a clue. Not one.

Indeed, if you wonder why Britain is in such a financial mess and likely to become bankrupt any day, ask yourself, what were the Broon's qualifications to be Chancellor, the man who holds the purse strings? He probably has very little, if any, qualifications for such a powerful position.

Vote for the candidate who says "I don't know everything."

As always, actions speak louder than words

"We(I) apologize" is not enough. Without action to remediate the resultant problems and to forestall repeats an apology is just empty words.

In this case, the following actions seem appropriate:

1. If the malefactor acted contrary to well-publicized, established policies, fire her(him).

2. If such policies exist but were not communicated to staff, fire whoever is responsible for the failure to do so.

3. If no such policies exist, fire those having ultimate authority over IT policies.

4. Under all circumstances, give the council head at least six months suspension without pay. His is the desk the buck stops on, so let it actually stop there.

5. If it is demonstrated that an unqualified person was hired to oversee IT security, decimation of HR would seem to be in order as well.

Maybe I've got the details wrong, but the general principle of insisting that overpaid managerstake responsibility when things go south would seem to be the Correct Approach.

But I suspect that this incident is due to a less obvious, far more pervasive problem: there are too many IT shops for the number of _qualified_ people to oversee. Hence, a lot of IT operations are overseen by unqualified incompetents. What's the answer to this? I'm really not sure, but hiring only those with MCSE certification is definitely not the way to go.

Maybe it's time for the minister in charge of local government to summon all council heads to London and give them a good dressing down, telling them that they _are_ responsible and that if anything goes wrong in the future, they _will_ lose their position and benefits and they _will_ be blacklisted from any further employment in governmental management, including quangos of all types. Draconian, perhaps, but it's time the overpaid drones in charge be held accountable for what they are in charge of.

Knowing Labour, however, I have no expectation of such a hard-nosed approach being taken.