* Posts by Christoph

3313 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007

Kent Police handed domestic abuse victim's data to alleged abuser – a Kent cop

Christoph

Re: What about the solicitor?

Fined? How about investigated for professional misconduct?

Lock-hackers crack restricted keys used to secure data centres

Christoph
Mushroom

Re: Physically picking locks is nothing new.

Goes back to at least the mid 1940s. Feynman needed to get a paper out of one of a set of combination safes, but the person in charge wasn't there.

Knowing that person was a mathematician, Feynman tried a few obvious things. The safe opened to 'e' to six places.

He checked the other safes. They all opened to the same code.

The content of these safes was a complete duplicate set of all papers for the Manhattan Project. From 'First mine your Uranium' to 'Light the blue touch paper and RUN AWAY'.

He took a piece of paper, wrote 'Guess Who' on it, put it in the safe and locked the door again.

FBI's PRISM slurping is 'unconstitutional' – and America's secret spy court is OK with that

Christoph
Facepalm

La la la, I can't hear you!

The courts are refusing to hear any arguments against their position and then saying that they are in the right because there are no valid arguments against their position.

Snafu! BT funnels all customers' sent email into one poor sod's inbox

Christoph
Black Helicopters

Whoops, wrong address

Sorry about that folks, it should of course have all been redirected to gchq@btinternet.com

Woz says wearables – even Apple Watch – aren't 'compelling'

Christoph

Success of the Apple II

What made the Apple II a hit was not replacing cartridge game machines - others could do that.

What made it a hit in the first place, and distinguished it from the hundreds of other machines around at the time, was that it was the only machine that would run Visicalc, the first spreadsheet.

This was an utter game changer for accountants (who are the people who decide where the money is spent). They used to draw up accounts by hand - and redo the whole thing every time something changed, or was missed out, or was deleted.

If you showed an accountant Visicalc and then stood between him and the nearest computer store, you would have an accountant-shaped hole clear through you.

After that, a company that needed a computer would already have Apple IIs and experience with them.

Vinyl LPs to top 3 million sales in Blighty this year

Christoph

It'll never replace shellac.

Hey, Atlantis Computing. What the heck is this in your EULA?

Christoph

Re: Fighting back

Quite - any company that is that terrified of reports on their product must be themselves convinced that their product is of very bad quality compared to those of their competitors.

Why would you buy from Atlantis Computing when Atlantis Computing reckon their products are dire?

Prof Hawking to mail postage-stamp space craft to Alpha Centauri using frickin' lasers

Christoph

Re: No return

My understanding of Starwisp is that, being driven by masers, they would sent a slug of maser (radio) energy to meet it at the target star. That would be used to power up the circuitry to make observations, and also to power the return signal.

Starwisp is not a single postage stamp-sized chip, it's a mesh of wires with electronic nodes at the intersections. So it has a wide area for making optical observations, and for shaping the return beam.

UK cops trial £250k drone squadron

Christoph
Mushroom

Lewes?

"Lewes Operations Command Search and Operations Planning"

Will they be using this for surveillance of Lewes Bonfire? And if so, how does it respond to an 8 inch mortar up the jacksie?

Saturn spacecraft immune to mysterious Planet 9's charms

Christoph

Re: Personally I'm triggered.

"Where the sam hell are my @#$% gnome planets?"

Sod the gnome planets - where are the Clanger planets?

SpaceX's Musk: We'll reuse today's Falcon 9 rocket within 2 months

Christoph

Re: "Merlin engines"?

But Henry Royce was around a lot more recently.

Read America's insane draft crypto-borking law that no one's willing to admit they wrote

Christoph
Facepalm

require anyone who makes or programs a communications product in the US to provide law enforcement with any data they request in an "intelligible format,"

They had better rephrase that, it reads as that they must break any encryption which the user has applied to the message before sending it.

So if I encrypt a message with a one-time-pad created with a true random number generator, then I send the message and I destroy the pad, they must break that encryption. Good luck with that!

Microsoft drives an Edge between Adobe and the web: Flash ads blocked

Christoph

I have had Firefox set to require activation for Flash for ... months? Years? A long time anyway.

Oculus, why do you need to record our every move? Al Franken asks

Christoph

"I believe Americans have a fundamental right to privacy"

Wouldn't it be nice if the US government believed that everyone else in the world also has a fundamental right to privacy?

Brits rattle tin for 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

Christoph

ero emissions?

And exactly how are they generating the hydrogen, transporting it, storing it etc. with 'zero emissions'?

Also, how is the hydrogen stored in the car?

Hi! Up here! I'm your Amazon drone. Do you mind if I land now?

Christoph
Black Helicopters

“Watch out!” ?

Or would it be: "Out of my way, puny human!"

Oz uni in right royal 'indigenous' lingo rumpus

Christoph

"indigenous Australian people/s"

How do you pronounce IAPs? Something like 'yaps'?

Because it will inevitably be shortened - only extreme pedants will refer to 'indigenous Australian people' every time they reference them.

Bloke coughs to leaking US military aircraft blueprints to China

Christoph

The story seems to say that he got other people to hack in from outside - where does it claim he was a Boeing employee?

"Su, who worked for a Canadian aerospace company"

Japan loses contact with new space 'scope just weeks after launch

Christoph

How high is it? Is it in one of the main debris zones?

Police create mega crime database to rule them all. Is your numberplate in it? Could be

Christoph

Re: Show Me My Minority Report

"innocent until proven guilty" implies you're accused of breaking a law.

Cameron has specifically said that this doesn't apply any more.

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'”

Comms 'redlining' in Brussels as explosions kill up to 30 people

Christoph

UK government explains "This could be avoided if you let us track every single thing you say or do" in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

Telling your wife why you were fired is the only punishment

Christoph

Many people have been arrested after they took their computer in for repair and criminal-level porn was found.

The (mostly) blokes who do the repairs do have a tendency to search for *.jpg to see if there's anything juicy that they can copy off. Not all of them, but enough that assuming they won't is a very bad idea.

How Microsoft copied malware techniques to make Get Windows 10 the world's PC pest

Christoph

The easier way to block it

Install GWX Control Panel to clear out all the settings and files automatically and to watch for attempts to reinstall them.

Glasgow boiler firm in hot water for cold calls, cops £180K fine

Christoph

Re: Glasgow boiler firm in hot water for cold calls, cops £180K fine

"Why don't the directors pick up the fine when a company has behaved unlawfully."

You mean these people?

Flying Scotsman attacked by drone

Christoph

Head-on collision with the cab window is not exactly something you'd want to try, however strong the window is.

But greater problem - if the drone owners think flying near enough to a train to collide with it is OK just because they wanted a close look, what happens when they spot an interesting looking car doing 70 on a crowded motorway? That could easily cause a multi-vehicle pile-up.

Brits seek rousing name for polar research vessel

Christoph

By the time they've got it built ...

... it will be the "Where did all the ice go?"

Christoph

Re: Pimm's

Gin and Tonic

UK Snoopers' Charter crashes through critics into the next level

Christoph

Economic well-being

"Under the current wording, data access will also be allowed if it is in the "economic well-being" of the country."

I.e. the economic well-being of the big companies. So this authorises any amount of spying on Trade Unions. And on anyone who wants to change the way the capitalist system runs, such as reducing or even slowing down the economic inequality that lets the 1% own most of the country. Or anyone who objects to TTIP. Anyone who objects to the government stealing the crutches from cripples by cutting disability benefit.

Or basically anyone who inconveniences the super-rich in getting richer.

Christoph

Re: Typical Labour

If they don't like being called Snoopers then perhaps they shouldn't keep snooping on people? And demanding more powers to snoop even more on more people? And then complaining that they still don't have enough snooping powers and need more?

UK fella is a multimillion-dollar cyber-hustle mastermind – US DoJ

Christoph

Hey, we've set up this great payment scheme where with a few pieces of information about someone we can set up a payment from them without them needing to actually be present or sign anything or give any form of verifiable authorisation!

What? Someone used it for fraud? Who could have predicted that?

DARPA to geeks: Weaponize your toasters … for America!

Christoph

Re: "DARPA's mission is to create strategic surprise"

Well, it isn't all spent on that. The main purpose is of course gigantic profits for the arms firms. But there's also the massive payoffs to make sure that the politicians keep voting them the funds, the attacks on anyone who objects, and of course the critically important bribes and propaganda to make sure that there's always at least one war somewhere to test out the new toys, to use them up so that replacements have to be bought, and to show the public that all that defence money really is needed.

German lodges todger in 13 steel rings

Christoph

Did they first try using a thread?

Did they try the usual method for rings stuck on fingers? Pass the end of a piece of string under the ring, then wrap it all the way down, then unwrap from the top sliding the ring along as you do.

A penis is presumably more compressible than a finger since there's no bone.

Final Euro Parliament vote on passenger name records delayed

Christoph

"home addresses, mobile phone numbers, frequent flyer information, email addresses and credit card details."

And anything else they can think of that might be useful for identity theft?

When all that lot gets hacked the fraudsters will have a field day.

Alien studs on dwarf's erection baffle boffins

Christoph

Re: Hmmm..

It hit something solid underneath and bounced back up?

Christoph

Re: Happy to see

There was I. digging this hole

Hole in the ground, so big and sort of round it was

There I was, digging it deep

It was flat at the bottom and the sides were steep

MAME goes fully FOSS

Christoph

Re: @Blue Pumpkin

Plugh

French parliament votes to jail tech execs who refuse to decrypt data

Christoph

The tech companies have always made it clear that they will cooperate with law enforcement demands for access, on condition that:

1> It is a proper legal demand with all required signed warrants, not a random fishing expedition.

2> It is possible for them to do - to break the encryption on that one message.

3> It does not open the door to decryption of everybody else's messages without proper judicial oversight.

If the French are not satisfied with that then it directly implies that they are intending to break at least one of those conditions. Would they like to publicly declare which one?

BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans

Christoph

"Whittingdale said the changes would be hurried through via secondary legislation"

Thus avoiding proper parliamentary scrutiny to take out the most blatant of the problems in the hastily-written legislation.

"those who enjoy Sherlock or Bake Off"

And are too clueless to type 'Sherlock torrent' into Google.

Forget data thieves, data sabotage will be your next IT nightmare

Christoph

Could be a bit worse than that. Shouldn't be too hard to get the USA to bomb someone based on false information - it's already happened at least once.

SpaceX Falcon 9 grounded by 'sledgehammer' winds

Christoph

A CEO who listens to the engineers

NASA could learn a lot from that

NSA boss reveals top 3 security nightmares that keep him awake at night

Christoph

And all three of those absolutely require strong crypto with no backdoors.

Investigatory Powers Bill lands in Parliament amid howls over breadth of spying powers

Christoph

Re: Welcome to Totalitaria

Freedom is slavery

You're a cybercrime kingpin. You need a new evil lackey. How much do you tell them?

Christoph

Have they checked sales of white cats?

Safe Harbour v2.0 greenlights six bulk data collection excuses

Christoph

So which of those excuses will they be using to cover industrial espionage on European companies which is then passed to their US rivals?

ICO fined cold-call firm £350k – so directors put it into liquidation

Christoph

SCO vs. IBM looks like it's over for good

Christoph

Standing desks have no effect on productivity, boffins find

Christoph

I thought the point of standing desks was to improve health, not to improve productivity.

I hope there are still a few bosses who consider their staff as people rather than as productivity units.

Yelp minimum wage row shines spotlight on … broke, fired employee

Christoph
Facepalm

Re: Trump?

So you want Obama to interfere? To use his presidential power to force companies to pay higher wages?

And that will satisfy the people like you who blame everything on Obama? The people who complain that he is overusing his powers (by using them far less than other presidents)? That he is a nasty socialist who is undermining America by doing things like expecting better conditions for workers?

Met Police hands £250m to CSC in IT outsourcing carve-up

Christoph
Mushroom

Atos?

Well there's no need to worry about whether or not the outsourcers are competent or not. They've included Atos - the people who certified people on the point of death as fit for work. They know for certain the outsourcers are not competent!

Also shows their opinion of the general public, that they'll give more work to those buggers.

Child tracker outfit uKnowKids admits breach, kicks off row with security researcher

Christoph

Re: Leaving Aside The Obvious.

"And the basis for impugning Chris Vickery's motives are, aside from a desire to misdirect the attention of observers, what, exactly?"

Security researchers are less likely to check out that site, find problems, and report them. And if nobody reports problems that proves that there are no problems, doesn't it?