* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

ICANN wants total control of DNS while breaking its own bylaws to block .africa probe

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Gimp

Yet another job for Ukrainian Victor?

....to bring light to the murk after a letter of encouragement and a suitable period of waiting, of course.

WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians

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Holmes

Re: Republican Moron.

Especially as President Clingon presided the administration that came up with the harebrained scheme of escrow keys and the Clipper chip (I won't go into summary execution of US citizens by "law enforcement" which saw a righteous uptick back in the Reno/Freeh days...)

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Trollface

Government wants P=NP, but only for itself!

Math says this is impossible? Hold Math in contempt of court!

The Government Digital Service: The Happiest Place on Earth

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Holmes

Rawhide!

Are they properly following ITIL best practices and PRINCE2 project management principles? Or are they rabidly biting the agile dog chew?

Surgery-bot can be hacked to HACK YOU TO PIECES

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Holmes

"We don't want this surgobot to go all Alastair Reynolds on you"

An application in need of the non-net-neutral-net, methinks.

MIPS quietly bares its processor architecture to universities

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Paris Hilton

So how do you access the graphics subsystem then? Do you hire a Maxwell's daemon to shift the bits or what?

Console makers game the EU Commission to avoid energy-use law

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Holmes

Re: Just wondering...

cleaner, and much safer, modern plants

Unfortunately Areva has trouble building those PWR 2nd generation euronukes and NIMBYs freak out whenever the hear the clang of Uranium in their neighborhoods.

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Re: Wrong argument

Reducing the number of transistors

You seriously were "work for one of the platform manufacturer" and actually believe transistor count went down?

Waste heat reduction comes from voltage reduction, skilled quieting of unneeded electronic elements or smaller transistors.

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Facepalm

Re: They are computers

Developers countered this by being more and more creative, and rising to the challenge by optimising their coding.

The Time Lord presents the PORTAL TO PROBLEMS FROM THE 80s.

Nowadays developers have got lazy, and expect speed-ups to come from ever more powerful hardware.

Someone around here also expects solutions from the 80s to tales of performance woe. Not noticing that what has been happening the last 10 years is a move to more processing units, not "more powerful hardware"?

Seriously, gramps.

Microsoft is BEATING Amazon's cloud revenues. Er, how?

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Growing clients every day without fail

I find this song hard to swallow and it risks leading to some barfights, too.

Eco-loons hack Thirty Meter Telescope website to help the 'natives'

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Re: Environment or profit?

Unfortunately you are always not wanted by someone wherever you go.

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Facepalm

I love my spotted owl rare.

deep love for the land

Should probably be rewritten to "irrational impulses of a possessive nature". These are probably the same people newly imported from mainland USA and full of hippie ideas who want to remove GMO papaya trees from Hawaiian premises because the poor ringspot virus also needs some love.

#WeAreMaunaKea sends forth hopeful message of global Aloha 'Aina - protect and restore land, and native peoples and their sacred places, or face biosphere collapse

Yes, planting native peoples and their sacred places sure is a guarantee against biosphere collapse. I wonder whether the triassic had native dinos and THEIR sacred places?

But it's 100% true that I would prefer nuclear-powered huge telescopes being blasted into circumsolar orbit on Nerva engines from oceanic platforms every 6 months, but we ain't there yet.

Ruskie hackers nab unclassified Obama emails

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Holmes

Yes, and?

The biter bit.

European "leaders" (some of them suddently interested into "secure" phones) are probably having a quiet chuckle.

Celebrated Pakistani female online activist Sabeen Mahmud dies in shooting

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Windows

Yet another hit by people supported by our oil-managing "friends against Putin" currently bombing Yemen because they want to kill shiis for no particular reason while senile tart McCain demands that the US "lead from the front" in playing Al Qaeda's air force.

Who was downloading smut in the office while eating ice cream?

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Paris Hilton

(or other illegal) porn

But ... how would you know?

Unless you were working in one of the Republics of Integristic Control, of course?

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Re: It's a pity that this wasn't publicised at the time

when the Times was worth reading and the Sunday Times published interesting articles about modern life

LIES!

Microsoft: Profit DECIMATED because you people aren't buying PCs

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Paris Hilton

I think it's just below the growth in monetary mass, so it's actually a retrenchment....

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Windows

Re: I think the real "news" here

Ask Napoleon. Or Hitler.

Does this mean Amazon is like Stalin?

(twirls mustache under an avuncular smile)

Bloke, 22, in knockoff Microsoft Xbox ring gets 18 months in the cooler

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Convenience?

Stuff your RFID card, just let me through the damn door!

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Re: Doing a Clarkson

Nice blog, where can I read more?

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Windows

Re: Ceterum censeo!

Keep reading, even the most boneheaded student / PHB looking for easy access "solutions" should have a chance at reaching enlightment, we are nothing if not an egalitarian society. Meanwhile I will help you out with some Internet: RFIDiocy: It’s déjà vu all over again

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Windows

Re: RFIDs are interesting things.

One of these days, I'll make it unlock/lock my computer when I go away for a while.

BlueProxmity

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Windows

Ceterum censeo!

From Noirware (Hal Berghel, University of Nevada, Las Vegas), IEEE Computer, March 2015.

I have drawn an orthogonal distinction between a posteriori bad ideas (those that, in practice, just didn’t realize expectations) and a priori bad ideas (those that could or should have been identified as wearing a cloak of dopey by a competent knowledge-domain expert before any work began). Dopey a priori offerings become part of the disaster literature, and many are destined to be featured in eponymous documentaries. Not everything we can do is worth doing. The use of RFID in security-challenging is really a poster child of a priori misguided technology.

The last time I discussed this topic, I gave two examples: the use of RFID for keyless entry and transit passes, and the laughable Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) People Access Security Service cards (PASS cards) (https://cdt.org/files/security/20070124passcard.pdf). This WHTI PASS card is a particularly poignant example of how a government’s fondness for bad ideas can fill the military–industrial–surveillance–political–­media–prison–energy–healthcare–academic–thinktank–­corporatist–homeland security complex’s coffers.

...

RFID for keyless entry and pass cards are examples of TECHNOLOGY ABSURDISM: technology development that ignores, fails to appreciate, or underrepresents obvious negative externalities. Placing technology development in the hands of the unskilled, ill-trained, or poorly supervised pretty much guarantees that the resulting technology will fail to meet our needs and expectations and expose us to increased risk. Those of you who are software engineers and developers could write books about this phenomenon from your own personal experiences. It’s incumbent on all of us to remember that many, if not most, of the worst technological ideas were identifiable as such a priori. In the hands of bad leadership, technological absurdism drifts toward TECHNOLOGY NIHILISM that in turn drives subprime innovation of limited or ephemeral value. The National Security Agency (NSA) dragnet surveillance programs typify technological nihilism in this sense, and they’re linked to exceedingly poor leadership.

US judge lobs antivirus patents back to Hell

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Big Brother

500 dollar and Victor of Ukraine will invalidate this patent

2015 and doing business by the old means while everyone (state actors or not) are doing business with expeditious activity is kinda retro.

Evil Wi-Fi kills iPhones, iPods in range – 'No iOS Zone' SSL bug revealed

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Trollface

Heaven alone knows what it tries to do

It's probably just an iGideon Bible, don't be so neurotic.

Costa Coffee Club members wake up and smell the data breach

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Holmes

Re: I like Costa (Email Contact addresses should be required)

with information such as the address

Criticism of various supremacist organizations, gypsy gangs and Döner Oligarchs (and other orgs I will not name lest I be called names) must be pretty rare in Germany.

MEPs: Oi, Juncker! Hands off our science and research dosh

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Windows

He's a "catholic-socialist conservative" and has been politician like forever and been around the block a bit, has had his 5-minute moments of smooth talking but it's time top ride into the sunset now, he's fully out of his depth. The recent blather about wanting to "reindustrialize europe" (by decree?) shows a sad lack of understanding of economic realities, while the ECB money printers and the Obama fellators and Euro-Centralizers who are setting the switches of an insane policy on the borderlands of Russia are currently erasing any prospect of reindustrialization with extreme prejudice.

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Facepalm

Re: Just a thought

Well, "children are drowning in the Med" because YuropNATO unleashed a few hundred cruise missiles and "a no-flight zone" over certain countries. That apparently cost only 1.1 billion though. Cheap, if one disregards blowback into Mali, which blew back into Libya, which blows back into Italy.

The cesspool of lefty retardation that is Huff&Puff post should SHUT THE FUCK UP, too, because of liberventionist bullcrap like this: "Four months later, and the efforts Clinton spearheaded can now be declared a success." I guess the rimming will increase as the harpie is zeroing in on the presidency of Team America.

If hypervisor is commodity, why is VMware still on top?

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Paris Hilton

learnt the difference

So what is the difference? It's Microsoft shit, and as we know the same product name can cunningly hide vastly differing UX (different apparent colors of gastrointestinal upheavals), so in this concrete case? Is the "free" part yet another kind of bait-and-switch trick?

Comcast 'flees $45bn monster-merger with Time Warner Cable'

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Pint

WOAH memories

Can anyone remember the wet & sloppy merger of Time Warner and AOL? It was slated as one of the "biggest ever in history" at 164 x 10⁹ USD and a clusterfuck of (back then) giganormous proportions (in today's paper money, that would probably be more like 200 x 10⁹ USD, amirite?)

Microsoft to open first flagship Store beyond North America

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Trollface

Re: Keep on hating......

Microsoft will keep on moving forward. In case you haven't figured it out yet, things have changed in Redmond. New people, new energy, new direction.

Sounds like the newly hired marketroids are hitting the comment section?

FBI alert: Get these motherf'king hackers off this motherf'king plane

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Holmes

Just FTW.

The further along from 9/11 this ride with no brakes on the rape train goes, I'm increasingly going FTW.

It started with FTW from Anthrax attacks, FTWed-out on random unmotivated attacks on Afghanistan by President El Shrub, over-FTWed when Iraq was bombed to smithereens for the 100-th time since president Klingon went full retard after enjoying his interns (by the same El Shrub), FTW²ed when colored President Bendy-Wendy-Spine blew up Libya and FTW-ed out relentlessly when ISIS finally was internationally recognized (no, wait ... am I going too fast here?)

The sad thing is that people born in those FTW times will never have seen anything else and will think this is situation normal. As bad as being born into some kind Orwellian fantasy with added asshattery and dumbfuck stupidity.

White House cyber-general says US must be able to cyber-nuke the worst of the cyber-worst

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Holmes

Bad guys, good guys

"We need to have a larger toolset to go after what the bad guys are doing"

Infantile america, to the bitter end. Is it the fluorine in the water?

Thought your dept was on budget this year? THINK AGAIN, matey

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Holmes

Re: Huh?

You mean an automatic price hike is not actually a price hike?

Sounds like something Mario Draghi could come up with.

JavaScript CPU cache snooper tells crooks EVERYTHING you do online

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Re: From what I can tell...

Trolls aren't even trying anymore.

KABOOM! Billionaire fingers dud valve in ROCKET WIBBLE PRANG BLAST

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Thumb Down

Re: "Landed Fine"

How is it possible that in the year 2015 we are actually worse at orbital transport than we were in the 1960's?

Idiot. Learn to distinguish: Going UP and Coming DOWN.

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Thumb Up

I don't think this is the spirit of Tintin's gaily colored moon rocket

Shit's coming down FAST in the footage. And the barge is damn small...

Who runs this world? Sony Pictures CEO jokes about getting UK culture minister fired

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Gimp

snap taken in 1994 of a 22-year-old George Osborne with his arm around his pal Natalie Rowe. In 2013, she published an autobiography describing her time as a dominatrix

Why it's always OTHER people having fun? I should have studied less...

US Navy's LOCUST DRONE CANNON is like death SWARMED up

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Headmaster

Re: The enemy of my enemy...

I wonder how much the improvements in the USA's relations with Iran

Not really improvements as this can go either way with neocons/Israelis threatening a "small, circumbscribed aggression on Iran" at any time of the day for no particular reason whatsoever. I hope Russia delivers those embargoed S300 fast and extends credit as needed for more before someone decides to have a go because "the price is low so why not".

Additionally, US are helping Saudis bomb the shit out of Houthis in Yemen (and the UN is on board) because they have something to do with Iran, while AQAP takes large areas.

It's like a Neal Stephenson "I can't believe this would ever happen" novel of clusterfuck come alive. In 3D IMAX!

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Responsibility to deliver!

"We had to destroy the village in order to enhance the freedom of Amazon packetization to it!"

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Terminator

Re: oblig

More obligatory:

From " Weapon Systems of the Twenty First Century or the Upside-Down Evolution" by Stanislaw Lem (translated 1986):

Some of the pseudo-insects could pierce the human body like bullets; others could form optical systems to throw sunlight over wide areas, altering the temperature of large air masses so as to produce heavy rainfall or fair weather, according to the needs of the campaign. There existed "meteorological insects" corresponding to nothing we know today. The endothermic synsects, for example, absorbed large quantities of energy for the sole purpose of causing a sudden drop in temperature over a given area, resulting in a thick fog or the phenomenon known as an inversion. Then there were synsects able to concentrate themselves into a single-use laser beamer; they replaced the artillery of the previous century -- although one can hardly speak of replacement, since artillery as we understand it would have been of as much use on the battlefield as slings and catapults. New weapons dictated new conditions of combat and, therefore, new strategy and tactics, both totally unhuman.

For those who loved the uniform, the flag, the changing of the guard, standing at attention, drill, medals, and bayonet charges, the new era of war was an affront to their noble ideals, a mockery, a disgrace! The experts of the day called the new military science an "upside-down evolution," because in nature what came first were the simple, microscopic systems, which then changed over the eons into larger and larger life forms. In the military evolution of the postnuclear period, the exact opposite took place: microminiaturization.

The microarmies developed in two stages. In the first stage, the unhumaned microweapons were still designed and built by people. In the second stage, microsoldiers were designed, combat-tested, and sent to be mass-produced by "construction battalions" of nonliving microdesigners. A phenomenon known as "sociointegrative degeneration" displaced humans first from the military and later from the weapons industry. The individual soldier degenerated when he ceased to be an intelligent being with a large brain and grew increasingly small and therefore increasingly simple, or when he became disposable, a "single-use soldier." (Some of the antimilitarists had maintained, long before, that modern warfare's high mortality rate made "single-use soldiers" of all the combatants, with the exception of the top-ranking officers.) In the end, a microfighter had as much brain as an ant or a termite.

...

The strategical-numerical superiority of the computer-produced echelons finally forced even the most competent of commanders, including field marshals, into retirement. A tapestry of ribbons and medals on the chest was no protection against being put out to pasture. In various countries, at that time, a resistance movement developed among career officers. In the desperation of unemployment, they even joined the terrorist underground. It was a malicious trick of history -- no one deliberately planned it -- that these insurrections were crushed by means of micro-spies and minipolice built on the model of a particular cockroach.

This roach, first described in 1981 by an eminent American neuroentomologist, has at the end of its abdomen fine hairs that are sensitive to even the slightest stirring in the air. Connected to a special dorsal nerve bundle, the hairs enable the roach to detect the approach of an enemy, even in complete darkness, and so to flee instantly. The counterparts to these hairs were the electronic picosensors of the minipolicemen who concealed themselves in cracks in old wallpaper at the rebel headquarters.

Sysadmins, patch now: HTTP 'pings of death' are spewing across web to kill Windows servers

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Mushroom

Almost nothing but venom and bile and for what?

This kind of remark is a great example of the modern mindset of the know-nothings freshly shat out of university: Any insecure shit is ok as long it is patched eventually (and is FAST), we let wild coders dump unvalidated stuff from the internet through kernel-level drivers (but we have RAPID TIME TO MARKET), runtime checks are never needed, all code is equally good, and it's all kumbaya from here.

The problem is not the patch. The problem is that this thing exists in the first place.

HERE IS YOU CRAYOLA NOW STEP THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD.

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Holmes

Frankly, I look at this clusterfuck in utter disbelief.

Oh well, at least the number of "IIS sites in operation" will go south.

Labour policy review tells EU where to stuff its geo-blocking ban

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Thumb Down

Asymptotically approaching extreme newspeak now.!

What's called (propaganda-friendly term) "geoblocking" really means "freedom of licensing".

I think Orwell wrote a whole book about how coercive action can actually be relabeled as "freedom", "peace" and "choice" (well, he seems to have missed the last one but then again the marketdroids had not yet gone full retard back then)

If you think Europe is lots of countries with even more languages, then the reform is coercive.

How the hell does this make sense? OH NO, IMMA BEING FORCED TO SELL.

Next up: If you think the UK is a lot of town with even more local traditions, then the reform is coercive.

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Paris Hilton

Re: EU's Digital future (Nightmare)

So you are for geo-blocking while bemoaning that fact it is not possible to geolocate accurately in case of digital goods? HOW!

Don't tell me you were against "country of origin VAT applies" before being for it.

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Re: Meanwhile, in the real world...

far less money being available for local material, while a wave of generic hollywood and euro-pap does far better

I have been alive long enough to have hear this argument being recycled for >30 years. Either taxpayer money is always found to "fulfill a pressing need for local cultural diversity" (aka. vote buying of the "creative types" because no-one is actually interested enough for the product to make economic sense) or else the market is totally not as bad as continually portrayed.

Google’s plan for WORLD DOMINATION takes shape. And it begins with a patent

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Holmes

Re: This shit is patentable?

Actually building a model and demonstrating its use according to the patent would. Right?

If that were the case, patents on "business procedures" and on "how to distract a cat with a laser pointer" would be rightly impossible.

And I am talking about IEEE Intelligent Systems or AI Magazine, not to mention books about multirobot coordination here.

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Thumb Down

This shit is patentable?

Pretty sure I have read of this ÜBERGENIUS idea about 30 times in the last 20 years. Literature search too hard of Patent Retards?

Don't collect bugs, invest in fly-spray says bug bounty operator

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Re: So Be It and IT

Does the internet and world wide webs and alternate media sources have to do everything?

It is our only hope. But they don't dispense satchel charges, so something more may be needed.

One way or the other, "it's happening" soon, fellow amanfrommars

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Paris Hilton

Interesting...

What kind of diagrammatic notation is that?