* Posts by Christian Berger

4850 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007

GSMA denies latest Snowden leak

Christian Berger

GSM security is a strange beast

Particularly since only the last bit of the call is only encrypted. If you are an attacker on the network, you can easily get all the data, including the location of your victim. In fact you can even reprogram their SIM-card.

In fact you can even use a few synced SDRs and get the precise location of every caller in your neighbourhood. You simply determine the time of arrival of the data bursts and know where the mobile station is.

PlayStation Network blasted offline AGAIN. Just not Sony's decade

Christian Berger

Seems only fit...

...considering that that part of Sony probably is one of the largest promoters of malware in the world. Not only have they installed malware on literally millions of computers by using autostart bugs in Windows and their CDs, they still insist on you installing DRM malware in order to consume their music and films.

Although I'd prefer it if the problem was attacked at the root cause, the DRM companies. Companies like Macrovision or Irdeto which tell clueless executive that somehow their systems will lead to greater sales and reduced piracy.

A nation of CODERS? Yes, says UK.gov, and have some cash to do it

Christian Berger

Don't forget the ethical aspects

After all teaching children how to code is useless without them knowing why and what to code. Most of the problems with IT in our society is caused by programmers not thinking through what consequences their actions have. If you write a messenger which stores contact lists on some central server, instead of finding a decentralized approach, you are responsible for someone abusing that data and perhaps even raiding the home of someone, just because they had some the phone number of someone in an opposition party on your phone.

Code shapes the world. And better code can make the world a better place. People need to see their responsibility.

Dutch lawyers seek to overturn data retention

Christian Berger

If there was any evidence...

...politicians would bring forward that evidence instead of constantly talking about "abstract threads" or abusing children for their political goals.

The internet is less free than last year. Thanks a bunch, Snowden

Christian Berger

It's probably inequality.

The rich getting richer and richer both inside of countries and among countries causes tensions. The UK already had mass protests which were ignored when they were peaceful and only picked up by the media when there was property damage.

Of course the easy way would be to share. We'd need to tax the rich and feed the poor. We'd need to let more refugees in... but for the people in power that's obviously not desirable. It seems much cheaper to hire cops to shoot poor people than actually helping them. In any case it's the cops who get the blame.

VCs say Uber is worth $41bn... but don't worry, we're not in a bubble

Christian Berger

It'll be different than the previous bubble

When Facebook and Uber and whatever fails, they will be considered "to big to fail" and bailed out with public money.

So investors will be able to first turn their investments into hugely inflated "virtual values" and then maybe sell of a tiny bit of them to recoup their investment first, then when the whole thing goes down, they get saved by governments. At the same time they lend the money they got from those governments for their "virtual values" to those governments again, and, if they feel like it, negotiate a 90% debt cut, so they will be seen as heroes.

So you invest, let's say, a million, then claim the company is worth 100 billions, it goes bust and will be saved with 50 billions (which seems cheap). They give those 50 billions to the government and demand 5 billions back, because they are so nice. Effectively they exchanged a million into 5 billion without any risk or actual productive work.

This is why investment banking needs to be tightly regulated.

Ohh BTW in the case of Uber there's a special thing. Some countries, like Germany, have a highly regulated market for person transport services. With new transatlantic treaties like TTIP, Uber could simply sue Germany for fictional losses they believe they made because of those regulations.

Snowden files show NSA's AURORAGOLD pwned 70% of world's mobe networks

Christian Berger

Re: Well GSM was designed in the 1980s...

I am aware of various projects from simple "rouge base station detectors" to research into implementation and standard defects in GSM.

However if we could only siphon a small percentage of the money we spend on touchscreen phones, we might be able to find ways to circumvent the intrinsic problems of cellular networks. For example it's trivial to track a telephone in use, just by measuring when its transmission bursts arrive at various antennas. That's simple triangulation. Maybe, for example, we could combine direct sequence spread spectrum with public key cryptography. That way we could communicate without others being able to detect it. This would easily solve quite a bit of the problems of cellular networks.

Christian Berger

Well GSM was designed in the 1980s...

back then the thread was a local attacker trying to get into the wireless connection from the base station to the mobile station.

Actual security never was an issue on GSM. It was, at best, be more secure than the analogue networks before it. There is no security against rouge base stations, there is no security against an attacker working at the phone company.

Maybe instead of having kickstarters for more of the same kind of bland touchscreen phone, we should do some research on mobile networks which offer some resilience against such a central attacker.

Pub time for NASA bods? Orion spacecraft test launch called off

Christian Berger

Spaceship? ...named Orion?

... queue music!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=F-p5A_GislM#t=11

There was a weird little German Sci-Fi TV show called "Die fantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion". It was mostly famous for having common household items as sci-fi instruments.

Sony employees face 'weeks of pen and paper' after crippling network hack

Christian Berger

And miraculously...

... the supposedly lowered productivity of those people will have no real effect on the real world. It's not like this affects any of the parts of Sony that actually do something... like building electronics.

Those are the parts of Sony we could probably live without, the parts which manage licensing rights, the parts that do marketing and advertisements.

Other than that, I don't believe Sony's IT department has done more things wrong than any other IT department of your typical mega corporation. It's hard to secure Windows desktops, the logical solution, switching to a few big application servers which get reset to a known good image every night is not wanted by some people.

Chromecast video on UK, Euro TVs hertz so badly it makes us judder – but Google 'won't fix'

Christian Berger

Actually it's not even 60 Hz...

.... but something crazy like 60000/1001 Hz, because when they stared with colour TV (called color TV there) they found out their chroma sub carrier was interfering with their audio sub carrier. Instead of moving the audio, they simply changed the framerate.... which actually makes monochrome and colour TV in the US completely incompatible if you go by the specs. It also means that a show produced at a monochrome station will play slower at a TV station that already switched to colour... and of course computers here and there use 60 Hz straight.

And of course they use this weird scheme were they cut off part of their chroma sub carrier by bandwidth limiting their colour difference signals in weird ways... which gives them the ability to squeeze their image into 4.2 MHz... while PAL can be limited to 4.33 MHz, without having to resort to such a low subcarrier frequeny and weird trickery.

Pity the poor Windows developer: The tools for desktop development are in disarray

Christian Berger

There's Lazarus

It's a Delphi Clone with all the bad bits left out. Therefore it's easy to write portable code for it which simply compiles on Linux, MacOSX and even Windows. And on each of those platforms you get a nicely statically linked application without any need to install.

Though I haven't tried it yet, it also seems to work for Android.

To be fair, Microsoft's offerings on the Windows development market never were on par with the rest of the industry. In fact up to the 3.x series of Windows it was not uncommon to develop Windows software under DOS and then just run it on Windows to test it. Even after that, Microsoft offered Visual Basic as its rapid application development tool. It required a framework to get your software to run and was essentially interpreted. Borland, for example, offered Delphi as a competitor product, which, just like Lazarus today, gave you fully compiled statically linked binaries you could just start.

Yes, UK. REST OF EUROPE has better mobe services than you

Christian Berger

The measurements are deeply flawed

They use cars to measure network quality. This means they only measure near roads.

Now if you are on a road, and you don't have a chauffeur, you most likely shouldn't use computers as you need to drive.

Much more important would be how well the connectivity is on trains. There you typically have the time to access the Internet. However nobody measures there.

Also you'd need to have different weights for different needs. For example I don't care about having 10 kbit or 10 Mbit, what I care about it having a decent connection with a decent sub second latency so I can use ssh or mosh.

The gender imbalance in IT is real, ongoing and ridiculous

Christian Berger

Some women aren't helping it

Here's an example of a "research project on 'gender inspired technology'".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5KhOKzIl_g

That's not helping it at all. That's just showing idiots as if they were representing women.

UK cops: Give us ONE journo's phone records. Vodafone: Take the WHOLE damn database!

Christian Berger

Wait? They gave out data about journalists?

Shouldn't journalists be among the group of people where it's near impossible to make a case against privacy? I mean journalists have sources to protect.

Suffering satellites! Goonhilly's ARTHUR REBORN for SPAAAACE

Christian Berger

The German Equivalent was/is Raisting

In the 1980s a sci-fi series used to have a shot similar to this one in the opening titles:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdfunkstelle_Raisting#mediaviewer/File:Erdfunkanlage_Raisting_Panorama.jpg

I think their original dish, hidden beyond a radom, recently got a newer radom and now houses a museum. http://www.radom-raisting-gmbh.de/

Mysterious BEAM outside London Googleplex ZAPPED

Christian Berger

No it's because

...when you break them, you'll have mobs of angry nerds trying to get you.

Christian Berger

Most likely a hoax or misunderstanding

A static electric field is hard to maintain under real life conditions. If it's to strong it'll build an arc and even if it's weak objects will gradually discharge themselves, particularly in moist situations, also large metal plates in public spaces are usually grounded for lightning protection.

Cables in the ground cannot be the cause as even if they are not explicitly shielded, they are shielded by the ground.

We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

Christian Berger

Feels like going into the wrong direction

It feels far to much like a "typical desktop system" than an actual useful system. It starts by not showing the boot logs, a misfeature I've never found a reason for. It uses Pulseaudio, probably the least usable sound system ever devised on Linux and probably the only one where setting the volume on an application changes the master volume in a rather unpredictable way.

It seems like so much effort is wasted on features nobody ever cares about and which later turn out to be colossal security bugs.

Get a job in Germany – where most activities are precursors to drinking

Christian Berger

The BBC once had a nice insight into working in Germany

Deutsch Plus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lk9rS7n-4Q#t=823

Just listen to the cheerful music.

Over the series Mr. Antunescu a trained graphic artist, gets a job as a runner, mugged and finds a girlfriend.

Christian Berger

BTW if you are thinking about moving to Germany...

I know a company that's looking for a decent programmer with some knowledge of networking.

Here's the ad:

http://www.hfo-telecom.de/karriere/stellenangebote

It's an interesting job in the VoIP area with a diverse range of tasks requiring problem solving skills. So one day you might just be debugging VoIP calls for customers finding out what happens if CPE gets a new IP address while the telephone is ringing, while on other days you might be looking for a bug causing T.38 fax negotiations to be mangled in horrible ways.

Speaking German is of advantage, but it's a simple language.

Ohh I nearly forgot, the company sponsors 3 festivities with free alcohol a year. :)

The next big thing in medical science: POO TRANSPLANTS

Christian Berger

We'll need to wait for studies

However unlike other pseudo medical treatments this actually could be plausible.

What we need now are decent quality studies.

And no, even if this can be a treatment to certain conditions, it doesn't mean that sanitation isn't one of the greatest achievements in health care. The situations where you have to little bacteria in your guts are rare, for example after a long treatment of antibiotics. Normally we all have a decent amount of gut bacteria. The gut normally regulates itself rather well.

Androids in celluloid – which machine deserves the ULTIMATE MOVIE ROBOT title?

Christian Berger

Well it's missing the "Analoge Haluzinelle"

It's the holographical woman here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVk18BJdHgM

(there are English subtitles to turn on)

That's all folks! US TV streaming upstart Aereo files for bankrupcy

Christian Berger

I think it all was mostly about their attitude. I mean they should have clarified what the difference between them and a cable company was.

Cable companies pay the stations... and in return get part of the ad space! (in the US system)

This company, at least the way it would have been legal, didn't pay the stations and didn't demand ad space.

Maybe Aereo's plan was to eventually run their own ads or to sell their user data, otherwise they would have refuted the claims they are a cable company.

Christian Berger

They should have done it differently

Simply sell "housing" for your servers which not just includes power and cooling, but also terrestrial reception. Then set up a separate company which offers ATSC terrestrial receivers which are able to stream, either for sale or for rent.

That way you'd have 2 completely legal businesses nobody would complain about. The fact that they marketed it as a service was the main problem.

Windows Phone will snatch biz No 2 spot from Android – analyst

Christian Berger

Given the fact that Windows phone is incompatible to Windows...

... I doubt that. Windows CE at least had the advantage that it was similar enough so you could port some applications or you could get a Visual Basic programmer (yes lots of commercial software was written in that) to write for Windows CE.

Now moving either to Windows Phone or Android means that you'd have to completely renew your software. Your old software won't work, you need to get new one. Companies will have to buy whatever they can get their software for. It's probably much easier for software companies to find Android programmers in the price range they can afford. There's just more of them around. Plus nobody knows if Windows Phone will be a long term strategy by Microsoft or yet another flash in the pan. Android seems like something that will be here to stay, at least for the next 10 years, so it is worth a bit of investment. Nobody knows if Windows Phone will even exist in 5 years.

Microsoft could have gotten it so easy, by just porting a stripped down version of Windows to mobile phones. They could have built a x86 emulator just like the one they had on Alpha (OK that wasn't done by them) and you could have gotten all the normal legacy Windows software to run. With that they would have gained that market in a flash. However that would have meant to acknowledge that Microsoft is mostly about legacy software.

Some people may find it bizarre, that people who run old Unix shops can just sit back and relax. They probably already run terminal servers for over a decade, and adding a mobile device just means installing some ssh client on it. (or mosh if you want to use it over GPRS)

Leaked screenshots show next Windows kernel to be a perfect 10

Christian Berger

It's not like many people complain about the Windows kernel

It's probably by now means particularly slow or bad in any way. It does have some interesting ideas like "Personas" which would allow you to have different APIs.

What people complain about is the Windows user space. It stops supporting old software and drops vital features while gaining irrelevant ones. The user space is where most security bugs lie. If you'd just install cygwin directly on top of Windows, you would probably have a rather decent and secure operating system.

Google Contributor: Ad-block killer – or proof NO ONE will pay for news?

Christian Berger

Will they still track you?

I mean few people mind the ads, they mind the tracking by Google. This solution still means all requests will be known to Google.

The cloud that goes puff: Seagate Central home NAS woes

Christian Berger

Why would you use a NAS with just one disk?

I mean you should at the very least have a RAID... particularly since large harddisks are still more expensive per Terabyte.

Two driverless cars stuffed with passengers are ABOUT TO CRASH - who should take the hit?

Christian Berger

Completely unrealistic problem...

As this problem has already been solved 100 years ago.

1. You put the cars on rails

2. You divide the rails into blocks

3. You devise a system which counts the number of trains/axles going in and out of that block

4. You close off the block when one car got in and open it up again when it got out

5. You enforce the rules by multiple systems

I've seen such systems working driverless on underground stations. It works like a charm, even without sophisticated computing equipment.

Webcam hacker pervs in MASS HOME INVASION

Christian Berger

This is one example of the difference between...

...an "informed Society" and an "information Society".

An "informed Society" would have people knowing the basics about networking and default passwords, they would then configure their devices accordingly and perhaps even ban them from accessing the Internet.

An "information Society" simply outsources all of those things to the manufacturer and expects it to somehow magically make everything secure with a cloud service.

An "informed Society" uses data networks to exist, an "information Society" can only abuse them.

Where the HELL is that Comcast technician? Finally – an app for that

Christian Berger

Not sure if they are actually complaining about the technicians

I'd rather assume they got that for not upgrading their networks and throttling their users while mandating for a non free Internet.

Of course to the normal user that's just "Youtube doesn't work and the technician didn't do anything about it".

GOTCHA: Google caught STRIPPING SSL from BT Wi-Fi users' searches

Christian Berger

To do something about it, we might need to give it a "terrorism" spin...

We could be saying something like, "All that collected data could be used by terrorists". After all BT and Google are collecting lots of data which can/will be misused eventually.

Britain's HUMAN DNA-strewing Moon mission rakes in £200k

Christian Berger

DNA living on?

I doubt it would live on the moon considering the harsh conditions. And unlike living beings a hair cannot repair itself. It'll just gradually decompose into carbohydrates.

Hewlett Foundation lays out MEELLIONS on security

Christian Berger

45 millions!?

You could probably advance the science of proof assisted language enough to provide a well usable language, then implement an operating system and a browser in that language. You'd still have enough money left to provide free courses to learn about it.

Of course the money will be spent on patching already broken systems... which will be obsolete in 2 years and replaced with systems that have exactly the same flaws as there were no decent more secure platforms out there as a well known and usable alternative.

I mean seriously, 45 millions, that easily gets you 20 people working just off the interest rate. That's easily the manpower to develop and maintain a decent unixoid operating system.

Countdown contestant pays homage to IT Crowd's Moss

Christian Berger

It's on the 2014-11-17 issue of it

for all the people who want it look it up.

USB coding anarchy: Consider all sticks licked

Christian Berger

Serioiusly where is the problem?

You need to have access to a USB device in order to re-program it. If you have that you can just as well open it and replace the electronics...

If your computer is taken over in a way to re program your USB device... you have probably already lost.

NOKIA - Not FINNished yet! BEHOLD the somewhat DULL MYSTERY DEVICE!

Christian Berger

The most boring product they could think of

I mean seriously, it's a crowded market, and that launcher might not be enough.

Nokia's N1 fondleslab's HIDDEN BRILLIANCE: The 'Z Launcher'

Christian Berger

Makes sense and is totally logical.

Scribbling letters works even on small screens, and minimizing the amount of input you need based on your previous history makes sense. Similar ideas are found frequently in collapsible menus and input fields that automatically suggest common inputs.

So yes it's nice that someone with a bit of experience looks into at least one problem of "smart"-phones.

The real killer feature would of course be if it had an open bootloader and a PC-BIOS so I could install any operating system I want.

The Nokia ENIGMA THING and its SECRET, TERRIBLE purpose

Christian Berger

It's most likely something to plug into your TV or perhaps some pico basestation

Nokia already has had lots of experience with "things to plug into your TV" with their rather successful line of analogue and digital satellite receivers. They even supplied 2 generations of equipment to what's now known as Sky Germany.

Plus they even used to build rather decent TV sets. They had nice pictures... but broke rather quickly. They had Level 2.5 teletext decoders, which had buffer overflows so one of the _many_ patches was a software update to the teletext decoder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext#mediaviewer/File:Teletext_level1_0_lebel2_5.jpg

Facebook, working on Facebook at Work, works on Facebook. At Work

Christian Berger

Well... they've gotta make money

Even the workplace hierarchy data can fetch lots of money, after all recruiters have lots of money.

I'm sure even other people would pay quite a lot for access to that data, after all when you have a problem with your ISP, calling a technical staff person and telling him you were given his number from $boss_two_layers_above can help.

Plus this puts Facebook in a position where they know even better what a company is doing, probably even better than the company itself.

Pre-digital computer 'cranks out' Fourier Transforms

Christian Berger

Re: Fluid analogue Computer

Actually the Z1 didn't use relays and it never was a full blown computer.

Mechanical calculators were quite common, they were still in use in specialists applications like cash registers well into the 1980s.

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/mechanical_calculators.html

Electronic analogue computers are also rather cool. They allow you to interact with differential equations.

You could, for example, patch in the differential equations for air flow over and under an airfoil. You could then set it up so it'll calculate a series of example air flows each one starting at a different height. You get a number of lines representing the air flow. If you have resources left you can make the computer even draw the shape of the air foil on the screen. This all is on an oscilloscope screen drawn dozens of times per second.

Now the clever thing is that it's calculated in real time, and you can build in some pots to be able to interactively work with your model. You can, for example, change the rotation of it or other parameters giving you a good idea of how it would behave in the real world. Of course even the best equipment won't get you more than 4 digits of accuracy, but it's a fast and quick way to solve differential equations.

Christian Berger

It's actually not normal Fourier transforms...

but discrete Fourier transforms, therefore that machine can work without integrators. Essentially what it does is to sum sinusoids. Must have been a nice tool for certain tasks.

Christian Berger

Re: be careful about calling it Non- or Pre-Digital

Well the number of gears doesn't matter. It doesn't count steps you could also build it with rubber wheels. That part of the machine is only there to create gears running at n*x steps of speed.

Christian Berger

Those often work by disk integrators

Not sure if this one in particular does, but the ones I've seen work by disk integrators. Essentially to do a Fourier analysis you need to calculate the integral of (x*sin(w*t)) with w being the frequency and t the time.

This can be done by disk (or sphere) integrators. They work like this:

You have a disk (let's assume it's horizontal) which can turn, for example it can follow your input signal. If you input signal goes up, it'll turn in one direction, if it goes down, it'll turn into the other direction, if it remains the same, the disk will stop.

On top of that disk, there's another, smaller disk mounted on an axle which can move to the left and right. The small disk pushes against the larger one in a way so the small disk turns with it.

Imagine the big disk revolves in one direction at one speed. If you move the small disk from left to right on it's axle, it'll turn in one direction on the left side, then gradually get slower as it approaches the center of the big disk where it will stop, before going on turning into the other direction at increasing speed. If you are a mechanic you can calculate that the speed of the small disk is proportional to the speed of the large disk multiplied by its position.

Do that twice for every frequency, once for the real part, once for the imaginary one, and you'll have a nice fourier analysis.

Google Glass: Even the people who stand to MAKE MONEY from it hate the techno-specs

Christian Berger

It cannot be done by Google, it cannot be done now...

Google is restrained by its mindset to centrally process and store every Shannon of information it can get about you. This is how Google works.

However this is not how we want our glasses to work. They are primarily supposed to be working for us. They are supposed to store their data locally or on servers I own and they are supposed to do what _I_ want them to do.

For this we'd also have to have computer literacy. People would have to be able to understand computers. We are not at that point now and we may actually move away from that point.

Mayb, just like in the 1970s and early 1980s, we should first look at specialist markets. We should build computers in the hundreds, so we can experiment with them, without being limited by marketing. That way computer literate people can have such devices and find out ways in which they could be used sensibly. We'd need sensible ways to work together with little communication, just like Unix enabled us to do.

Walmart's $99 crap-let will make people hate Windows 8.1 even more

Christian Berger

Re: Hmm, it's small

"It's $99 at the retail level. You guess how hardy it is."

Hmm, plastic and good design are rather cheap. That's why we do have 2000 Euro laptops which break apart if you look at them, and laptops like the Elitegroup G320 (or something) which, though extremely cheap for that time, could take some serious beating.

Quality is no longer correlated to price.

Christian Berger

Hmm, it's small

If they didn't include a huge bezel around the display, this device could actually have lots of use when you install Linux. I mean it's easily powerful enough to ssh into your server and the resolution is not bad. 16 gigabytes is plenty of space for an operating system.

The more pressing question is, if it is crap hardware. This usually cannot be judged by the specifications noted there. The quality of the hardware mostly depends on build quality. How well is it designed. How well can it take some beating. The question is, is it made to last.

If the build quality is decent and you install something more sane than Windows 8.1, it might be a rather decent small laptop, much more usable than any Android or iOS device, but also much more portable than a normal size 13" laptop.

PROFESSORS! PROFESSORS! PROFESSORS!

Christian Berger

Back in the 1990s...

Microsoft propagated the idea that you could somehow productively use a computer without being able to program or learn a command line. Now they complain about not getting enough programmers.

Please Microsoft make up your mind.

VINYL is BACK and you can thank Sonos for that

Christian Berger

And yet again Sonos managed to sell cheap Chinese kit...

...at extraordinary prices.

I mean it's not that hard to build a decent record player, probably not even at the sub $50 price point of cheap Chinese ones, but charging £329 for one is outrageous.