Posts by Paul Crawford

Re: Look very hard!

Also remember those Voyagers are using valve amplifiers.

Yes, OK I am talking TWT here for the final RF amplification and not a pail of KT88s in ultra-linear configuration.

Re: Maybe

If Tim Martin is getting hard on the Goat then it is even worse than I imagined!

Exactly - if its fuelled with cryogenics (LOX / Kerosene, for example) then its not for ICBM use. However if its UDMH and N204 or similar then its very, very, suspicious.

Re: "we will consider legislative changes that would allow such a move"

Sadly those bozos are typical of many countries, UK included, that have any sort of first-past-the-post system of election that magnifies differences.

Re: Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

Behind that is the possible case that /tmp is a ramdrive and small, while /var/tmp is expected to be on non-volatile storage and much larger. In the ramdrive case a reboot will inevitably wipe the directory even if the OS has no explicit step to do so.

Debian based systems like Ubuntu wipe /tmp on reboot only, where as RedHat based systems typically deleted from /tmp by cron job based on the last access time being a week or two ago.

If your current corporate choice is WebEx then practically anything, Skype included, is going to suck so much less it would be a joy!

Re: Hmm

If you have hostile software successfully running on your device you're already screwed regardless of the mechanism

What, like javascript from some shitty ad-broker? Sadly the web has brought such nasties on to machines and made them executable and for little benefit is so many cases.

Re: Confused!

The dB is a relative measure, specifically of power = 10 log10(P1/P2) but if you define P2 to be something fixed then it is an absolute measure. dBW has P2 = 1W, dBm has P2 = 1mW, etc, so:

0dBW = +30dBm = 1.0W = 1000mW

-10dBW = +20dBm = 1.0e-1 W = 100mW

-20dBW = +10dBm = 1.0e-2 W = 10mW

-30dBW = 0dBm = 1.0e-3 W = 1mW

-40dBW = -10dBm = 1.0e-4 W = 0.1mW

etc...

Re: Linux and out of date Windows machines

Some Linux distros are signed and can be used with secure boot enabled, but I think there can be issues with some propitiatory video drivers, etc, that break the trust-chain in such cases. In any case "secure boot" is only good at stopping some cases of root kits, and would not stop anyone capable of using Microcsoft's keys, for example, or of exploiting the generally piss-poor state of UEFI (or BIOS) firmware security.

If you are worried about security in general then a good starting place is the guidance at NCSC which cover many OS, not just Windows as one might expect, and including Ubuntu Linux:

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/eud-security-guidance-ubuntu-1604-lts

Re: And people look at me funny...

Just ask any one of those people to hand over their phone (unlocked) so you look through their internet history, read their text messages, etc. Suddenly they find that privacy is not pointless!

Re: ... and people ask me why I use Linux exclusively

My point is, these issues are terrible and all that, but how widespread are they really? How many people are actually affected by all these issues?

The bigger point, as others have mentioned, is this is happening with mass-market stuff like Intel sound and HP laptops. And it is symptomatic of a culture of poor (or non-existent) QA and attitude to its customers. They are not short of cash to do it properly, they choose to avoid doing it, it seems.

Now we all love a flame-war on Windows versus Linux but this recent spat of problems is due to a change in MS culture. 5-10 years ago we moaned abut the never ending vulnerabilities in IE, etc, needing patched and on the other hand how Linux struggled to get many items hardware to run, but very rarely did MS bork a mass number of machines.

Re: Weaponizing potential

Get a proper laptop with a proper APU and it will be at a very solid 0 nearly all of the time

So its just pissing away time & power running stupidly bloated code on the APU instead, but that is not showing up in 'top'?

Re: "MS have pulled the advisories"

I now can't find my arse with both hands!

Ah, such a schoolboy error! You need a map and both hands to find it.

Re: Is this libel?

Only if it is not true.

Can you see FB being willing to test any of those claims in court? Opening up internal emails and contracts to prove they were clean and these are simply malicious lies? Opening code to show how they use IP and WiFi SSID information?

I don't...

Re: "while the apps themselves are secure"

Exactly, why would Australia lean on secure app developers (who are probably outside of any legal actions anyway) when they can simply pressure local phone networks to force a system "update" to any phones they want to spy on?

@Jeffrey Nonken

He is not, because I am...

Re: Who told them?

They did not have Dark Star to clean things up.

Almost. Saudi Arabia is ruled by the (extended) royal family but mostly they assume power by virtue of religion, given they have Mecca and so much that is valued by Muslims. Not that it means much in terms of protection of historical value:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_early_Islamic_heritage_sites_in_Saudi_Arabia

(Just to add that I have little religious interest, but see the destruction or re-writing of history as an unforgivable crime against our descendants)

Re: there is an absolute right to privacy, which there isn't

First, let's include commercial spying, aka data harvesting, in the mix. What "right to privacy" applies to NSA and GCHQ that does not apply to Facebook and Google?

It should apply to both, but equally FB/Google don't have the powers to alter your life like gov agencies do.

Next there is the POPD - Plain Old Physical Domain. What "right to privacy" does online trawling breach, that a telescope on a pier above a crowded beach does not?

That is pretty much targeted - one beach, and a given time-window when you might expect something is going to happen. The police, etc, have been doing that sort of thing for decades and most folk see it as a perfectly reasonable balance between privacy and crime prevention.

Bulk surveillance is recording every beach, all the time, and then being able to do a search at some point for where you have been. See the difference?

Re: There appears to be an assumption

I really doubt it. If you look at the stats for under-age pregnancy in the UK, which one might think would be correlated to badly planned sexual behaviour, it has dropped slightly in the last 20 years while the availability of pr0n (and associated moral hand-wringing) has rocketed.

So bugger-all in the way of evidence-based policies here.

Re: CPU Back Doors For National Snooping...

Would you trust the Intel random number generation instruction?

Would you trust there are not already undocumented op-codes, even hidden in plain sight such as said random value, that recover part or all of previously used AES instruction's keys in some obfuscated form?

Re: The best bacon

I agree almost 100% - but would go with smoked every time.

Re: FFS

Really, if you have someone on the inside of your network then messing with a scope is not going to be the most productive way of causing chaos, not by a long chalk.

Re: @tfb Gendered Connectors

Earth pins (in the socket) are just weird--anyone care to hypothesise (or explain) why they were invented?

No idea, but two thoughts are:

1) It was an after-thought added to an existing design when folk realised how much safer earthed systems are.

2) It prevented the mating of a non-earthed plug to force upgrading to match the infrastructure (where as a 3rd hole would not).

Re: robo-Rembrant [sic]

And you would not believe what Hieronymus Bosch will do to your ass. Getting medieval is only the start...

Re: Retrieval time

And said time also depends on your bandwidth and the volume of data to be restored. Unless you are just re-populating an AWS instance, of course.

I think it was the opposite - the pilots *assumed* the plane anti-stall would stop it stalling, but below a certain hight it disengages as it *assumed* they would only fly that low in an attempt to land.

Re: Chef!

Some of the English fizz is actually very good, and at a recent blind-compare Champaign versus sparkling wine tasting I was at they were pretty much on a par according to most of those present. As always, chose a wine based on two simple test results:

1) You like the taste.

2) You are prepared to pay the corresponding price.

Simplez!

Re: "Support for open firmware is, arguably, a niche consideration at the moment"

Maybe if the gov mandated at least 5 years of security fixes after end-of-sale they might change their tunes on supported open software. Oh, and big GDPR-like fines if they don’t deliver just to encourage a bit of proper compliance.

Re: yard/mile on our roads for some strange reason

Because of the extraordinary cost of changing all signs and then having to deal with most cars in the UK having mph as the only (or dominant) scale for a decade or two afterwards.

You are far too kind!

Re: mesh together

And hopefully in a low enough orbit that they burn up in ~5 years no matter what.

12k at launch, probably 2k unresponsive after 1-2 years and no active option to track them or to manoeuvre them..

And free() doesn't

Unless you were Nelson Mandela

Never seen on for real but you could give it a try - no worse a gamble the most. Also you can put your own distro on it as it uses relatively 'open' hardware so practically every Linux will have working drivers for all parts.