Sign in / up

* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Page:

2013: A Space Odyssey - a cosmological review of the year

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

Do not forget the 0.2 milliJoule neutrinos drilling our southern pole

2 0

Slurp away, NSA: Mass phone data collection IS legal, rules federal judge

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Mushroom

What the FUCK am I reading from the berobed one?

"Like the 911 Commission observed: the choice between liberty and security is a false one, as nothing is more apt to imperil civil liberties than the success of a terrorist attack on American soil," he wrote"

Barring the fact that anyone citing the 911 Omission Commission, handpicked by the powers in charge to STFU and get with the program is suspect, we may paraphrase:

"Fascists want more fascism and are eager to hang on to any moralpanictrain to reach their goals so we need more fascism to not let any moralpanictrain leave the station, which will undercut fascists."

RIGHT! THAT'S IT - EVERYONE GET OUT, LAST ONE CLOSE THE DOOR.

the choice between liberty and security is a false one

Yep, apparently it is not false in the sense of "decreasing liberty will not increase security" but false because "we need less liberty to have more security". It is thus decided. You can now use Benjamin Franklin as a generator drive.

I'm pretty sure that disgusting cockroach John "it's not torture if we do it" Yoo cannot be far behind with punditry and opinionating, leaving a trail of slime.

7 0

BEASTED: Apple fined $666k in Taiwan for iPhone price meddling

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

The seventh iSeal

" copped a festive shoeing ... US$666,700 "

Clearly a "beastly" shoeing, but then I heard that "6" is a lucky number in asian lands?

Well, our evangelicals will probably looking through Revelation NOW, looking for signs that Jobs is somehow connected to the Apocalypse of St John. Well done, Taiwan. Occupy Xtians!

2 0

Who's the best-built bot that makes the US military hot? SCHAFT!

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Downvotes? Are there optimists here tonight?

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Angel

Re: Skynet coming too?

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind...

...because it would suck too much!

That would be a saying by the Machine Pope then?

All hail His/Her Positronic Illumination! Praise Be!

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Holmes

You forget the upcoming super-recession, just prior to a fat serving of NEW HITLER. It's gonna be hilarious.

1 2
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

That naming!

Anyone acquainted with the excellent japanese anime series "Patlabor" (Basically a cop show with comedy in which cops get to drive giant robots around Japan to catch other perps driving giant robots used in construction tasks for example) knows that "SCHAFT Enterprises" is the dark-side slimy megacorps which unleashes dark-side robotica onto the unsuspecting public, like the J-9 Griffon:

The Type J-9 Griffon is an experimental labor developed in secret by section chief Utsumi (aka Richard Won) for Schaft Enterprises Japan. The Griffon is a high end proof of concept labor that surpasses all labors during its introduction in 1999. The Griffon, nicknamed the "Black Labor" by non-Schaft employees, is highly agile and capable of performing near human movement, something that many other labors lack. In its original configuration, the Griffon becomes the first labor capable of unassisted flight, although the flight system is in its early stages and causes substantial damage after a crash landing. Its raw power allows it to disable labors entirely by hand. The Griffon, piloted by a young boy named Bud Renard Harchand, makes its debut by attacking the 1999 Tokyo International Labor Show. The Griffon easily defeats Shinohara's new AVS-98 Economy and proves a match for even the AV-98 Ingram, its primary target for combat data.

Really it's like Musk named his company "Weyland Yutani" then proceeded to shoot stuff into space.

Imma gonna get more popcorn!!

5 0

Joke no more: Comedy virty currency Dogecoin gets real in big Xmas heist

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Wow so greenback. Much Yellen! Such inflation. Wow.

Well, the government would be doing something similar if ... oh wait ...

5 2

Android, Chromebooks storm channel as Windows PC sales go flat

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Headmaster

Oh yeah?

1) Macbooks to expensive/complex for Joe Bloggs. What's funny about that?

2) The Googlers in Mountain View are not the target market for Chromebooks. What's funny about that?

7 1

Torvalds: Linux devs may 'cry into our lonely beers' at Christmas

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Holmes

Attention deficit disorder and the Xbox generation

"Fast forward five years"

ITT: Young whippersnappers who think technologies are grown in seven days.

"Fast backward five years" and it's even only post-financial-crisis. Try fast forwarding from the mid-90s.

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Headmaster

Re: Windows is so great

Don't open the wounds about why in heaven and hearth Yurop is arsing around deep in the eurasian continent.

It's like it is 1840 again.

The reasons for the British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the late 1830s are many and varied. They mainly revolve around what one of the 'victims' of the event referred to as 'the Great Game'. This was the name given by Arthur Conolly to denote the shadow boxing between Russia and Britain for influence in Central Asia for much of the 19th Century.

Ok, install on!

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Paris Hilton

The mystery of the mystery posts.

What is their meaning? Did anon not take his meds?

5 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Adjectives

Why so negative?

Enjoy life a beer lonely while pondering over the content of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/em1 with nary a documentation in sight and google bringing up Oracle docs of all things!!

10 1
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Thumb Up

“Nothing really exciting stands out” which is “just how I want it”

Excellent!

Stable as she goes.

15 1

DJANGO UNCHAINED: Don't let 'preview' apps put you off Fedora 20

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Liveblogging "At the Fedoras of Madness"

"Avahi is another Lenart Poetteing idea - like Pulse audio and systemd. These aren't bad ideas at all, but the implementation of each one has been a big headache. So submitting a bugzilla report that Lenart must address is a good way to slow/prevent the next 'Poetteing invention' from causing havoc."

Avahi... OUT!

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

Liveblogging "At the Fedoras of Madness"

Oh man. Clearly the FAT DEATH has moved from the Java Enterprise "Community" to the lowly sysconfig world.

Not enough with DBus and NetworkManager, now I need to fight another bubbling servitor monstrosity from the nethermost abysses of integrated functionality, which should forever have been kept away from seeing the light of day:

The systemd fallacy

And this is the first thermos of coffee for today....

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Pint

So....

Tiling window manager revival when?

2 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: "a decent upgrade for Fedora fans"

Nah, surely it's supported for 12+ years, just like Windows XP, isn't it?

Of course not. Are you some kind of weird coelacanth?

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Windows

Don't remind me

Xlib and Xt Intrinsics ... it was regular torture porn back in the early 90s. Complete with the 5 kg manuals. I also remember a weirdish sorta/kinda "object-orientation in C" style. Then gcc crashed.

Shit, I'm old.

2 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

KDE installed!

Now if I only could get friendly with the mysterious DBus.

0 0

British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing receives Royal pardon

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Big Brother

Re: Unjust conviction on many levels despite being 'right' at the time.

Well, quite a few of the nomenclatura were jewish (including Trotsky) while the Red Army strung up jews for being "for the capitalists", so what's the problem?

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Big Brother

Re: The man in the high castle

"The Man in the High Castle" is more exploration of PKD's question of "what is real" than anything else. Excellent reading, read at least once every few years.

"The Plot Against America" is still on my reading list.

Do not forget Robert Harris' "Fatherland", and also watch "It Happened Here".

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Trollface

The man in the high castle

"many of us might not be free to enjoy the season"

Not into a gradle-to-grave welfare-warfare well-regimented state when you can drive your Volkswagen Mark IV at 160 kilometer pro stunde down to London in order to enjoy Weihnachten with the rest of the very anglo-aryan family?

Come on now!

You would probably still get Krugman talking up the economy on Deutschlandfunk, so there is no escaping that iffyness.

4 5

Ho, ho, HOLY CR*P, ebuyer! Etailer rates staff on returns REJECTED

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Trollface

Re: Facebook

But in this case, there actually was content, though not for long.

9 0

HP clampdown on 'unauthorised' server fixing to start in January

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: The unexpected consequence?

Excellent.

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Enter the clown with transferred embigenned relationship loyalty

"but the support doesn’t match the breadth and depth of HP’s support expertise"

Currently being rightsized, apparently, so there might be a match soon (unsure whether from top or bottoms).

"nor does it give our partners the added loyalty from an ongoing relationship built over time between HP and the customer" (shortened for sematic clarity)

So there is a relationship between HP and the customer, which somehow adds loyalty, which is then given to partners?

What the hell does that mean?

3 0

RSA comes out swinging at claims it took NSA's $10m to backdoor crypto

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

A nice reading complement

A psychological history of the NSA

During these wartime years, the NSA grew from 33,000 to 72,000 employees, and was fast developing into the massive bureaucratic spy organization it is today. Organized much like the American corporations of the era, the agency employed a top-down structure that emphasized company loyalty and blind compliance with superiors. The more it grew, the more resilient this structure became.

Peter Ludlow, a philosopher at Northwestern University, pointed to the sociologist Robert Jackall’s 1988 book, Moral Mazes, for a description of the rules that govern such bureaucracies: “(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.”

“The NSA is nothing if not a 1950s-style bureaucracy,” Ludlow told me. “The consequence of that is you’re almost guaranteed to do evil.”

4 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Big Brother

Where do you get the idea the NSA's job is to make sure US companies have tools to "not get slurped by evil commie or french or persian spies"?

Is that stated anywhere else on the internet, except in your comment in this thread?

I don't believe that's ever been the NSA's job.

Maybe. But if you want to make your comms somewhat secure (in the 80s or the 90s, say), who you gonna call? That's right, the friendly government bureau who knows about those things.

You want Internet wisdom? I call on ... JIMBO:

The Mission

Role in scientific research and development

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Big Brother

Re: A bit of perspective

A hard-working Reinhard Heydrich with a terminal to the NSA cloud in his office.

Yes, not nice.

This is also what most people don't get at all. From here to the end-of-fiesta the stepsize is only ε - it is not confortably large as the pundits and "business as usual" types of the MSM assert.

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Trollface

Re: Truism

Simply saying they "[relied] upon NIST" is utterly inadequate, given that NIST provided no proof of the security...

Actually, RSA was using it even before NIST was done with approval, maybe even before the approval process was even started.

From the reuters article:

RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with the proceedings.

6 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Trollface

Re: Truism

The Album of the soundtrack of the trailer...

Interviewer: An excerpt from Carl French's latest film. Carl, we're all a little mystified by your claim that your new film stars Marilyn Monroe.

Carl French: It does, yes.

Interviewer: Who died over ten years ago?

Carl French: Uh, that's correct.

Interviewer: Are you lying?

Carl French: No, no, it's just that she'e very much in the public eye at the moment.

Interviewer: Does she have a big part?

Carl French: She is the star of the film.

Interviewer: And dead.

Carl French: Well, we dug her up and gave her a screen test, a mere formality in her case, and...

Interviewer: Can she still act?

Carl French: Well... well, she-she's still has this-this enormous, ah-ah, kinda indefinable, uh...no.

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Snowden? Maybe not. Probably not.

Note that contrary to the article, Reuters did not say or imply that the bribery info came from Snowden:

Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.

It is "sources familiar with the contract", which is someone else.

Check it out again

We also read:

RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with the proceedings.

Aha.

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Holmes

Because their job is (was?) ALSO to make sure US companies had the tools to net get slurped by evil commie or french or persian spies. Hence the stadardization effort for DES and later AES, accompanied by efforts to persuade people to make the key maybe not too long.

6 1

HP: This Xmas, get the SACK... and not the one filled with presents

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Devil

Re: If HP Execs didn't make $19 BILLION dollar cock-ups on a regular basis...

A very small violin plays for the megastructure that cannibalizes itself to put more lard on the head.

One can only hope that "activist shareholders" will soon deploy their shark fins for a wakeup call.

6 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Holmes

Re: Morals

To be honest, sometimes you have to get rid of people to keep the ship afloat at all, even though it may be a "damned if you do - damned if you don't" problem. Been there, done that. On the other hand, there was zero "middle management" in our case.

In a sane economic climate, this shouldn't be much of a problem.

Unfortunately this short recession is far from over.

4 2

We don't need no STEENKIN' exploit brokers: Let's FLATTEN all bug bounties

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Pint

Well no. They would not be FORCED to pay up when a mysterious call from a stranger arrives.

On the other hand, they could put money & time into assurance efforts. No more half-arsed coding during the weekend for Internet-facing software by C++11 hackers freshly out of uni, but bill accordingly.

Or it could come down to: insurance.

Good processes? Low premiums. Shite processes? High premiums. Fly-by-night? No insurance (but maybe the customer is indeed happy with that).

It would be like high-reliability engineering, really.

4 1
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Holmes

Not the same guy, guv!

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: "companies would most likely rather employ full-time vulnerability researchers"

Yeah, I am puzzled about this too.

Is being employed no longer considered a good thing?

Kujawa reckons a kitemark scheme for federally approved industry seal for software testing would offer an alternative means of weeding out security bugs from the software ecosystem.

Yeah, FIPS approved and everything. 100% security tested SEAL OF GOVNMTAL APPROVAL.

The real world just doesn't work that way.

3 0

Nato, UN, NGOs slug it out with namespace biz bods: IMHO... STFU

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: NATO = UN Agency?!

Of course. Did you think it was the US "protection" outfit of Yurop?

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Headmaster

MUH PROTECTION!

Can anyone in the taxfeeding heaven tell me what this is about except people having too much time on their hands while their taxpayer-provided paycheck arrives unbidden in their mailbox?

0 0

Feuding fanbois in a flap over piracy haven in new iOS 7 jailbreak tool

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: Ethical

Hush!

1 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Coat

What!

access a local alternative app store called Taig

Hosted in Ireland?

1 1

US Department of Justice details Kim Dotcom evidence

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Holmes

Your correspondent has just re-watched Donnie Brasco and so cannot help but think sitting behind a keyboard and logging on to a web site rather lowers the bar for “undercover” work.

Quite so. But these are the times of remote-control operators being "traumatized" behind their screens while they blow up wedding parties in Yemen. Pass out the purple cyber hearts!

14 1

You've got $60k: So, 2013 sporty Corvette, or a year of AWS's new I2 beast?

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Holmes

Re: Cost efficiency

Have an upvote.

Someone is doing the ROI analysis.

That someone will find amazon's offer is good value.

Because amazon is not offering vanity/consumer goods like corvettes here, they want to sell this to business types.

No-one needs big boxes by Dell not yet written off gathering dust in the corner because the project came to an end but the servers and the sysop that comes with it didn't magically disappear. Well, I guess you can sell them on eBay or give them back to Dell for refurbishment, but still...

Btw does anyone know what "1 CPU unit" in amazon speak is? I think it is less than a real CPU ... it may be the "hyperthreaded" peer only.

3 1

Mozilla: Native code? No, it's JavaScript, only it's BLAZING FAST

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Holmes

Java's "Enterprise" coding style is the ultimate in slow, unreadable, bloated, crap.

That may be so but what is Java's "Enterprise" coding style?

Pretend this is a job interview question.

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Trollface

And apparently none of them has even heard of "D"

It's like a Japanese sergeant, holding out forever on a pacific reef, while the world moves on.

0 0
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Windows

Re: Yeah right

ITT: People hoping that these newfangled "Virtual Machine" languages just went away so that they can get back to the well-remunerated job of getting some work done in original K&R C.

Until the nurse rolls them back into their room.

5 0

How much did NSA pay to put a backdoor in RSA crypto? Try $10m – report

Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon
Thumb Down

Re: Re Mr Snowden

> I have met Germans who had brushes with the Gestapo.

Guess you must regret not having been the Gestapo.

10 1
Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
Reply Icon

Re: @VernonDozier: What the hell am I reading?

A blast from the past

Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 15:54:20 -0400

From: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor)

Subject: Newsflash: PGP approved for export of strong crypto

[Just in case you haven't already heard...]

Hello Friends,

Around here, this is what we call "pretty good news." The other good news is that it's NOT April Fools Day (yes, this is for real.). Best of all: no key escrow! :)

Have a Pretty Good Day,

dave

................................. cut here .................................

CONTACT:

Mike Nelson

Director of Corporate Communication

Pretty Good Privacy, Inc.

415.524.6203

PRETTY GOOD PRIVACY RECEIVES GOVERNMENT APPROVAL TO EXPORT STRONG ENCRYPTION

SAN MATEO, Calif., May 28, 1997 -- Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. (www.pgp.com), the world leader in digital privacy and security software, today announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce has approved the export of Pretty Good Privacy's encryption software to the overseas offices of the largest companies in the United States. This makes Pretty Good Privacy the only U.S. company currently authorized to export strong encryption technology not requiring key recovery to foreign subsidiaries and branches of the largest American companies (see list of companies below).

The approval allows Pretty Good Privacy to export strong, 128-bit encryption without a requirement that the exported products contain key recovery features or other back doors that enable government access to keys. More than one-half of the Fortune 100 already use PGP domestically to secure their corporate data and communications.

"Now we are able to export strong encryption technology to the overseas offices of more than 100 of the largest companies in America, without compromising the integrity of the product or the strength of the encryption," said Phil Dunkelberger, President of Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. "We worked closely with the State Department when they controlled the export of encryption, and are now working with the Commerce Department. And we have never had a license application denied."

The license allows export of strong encryption technology, without government access to keys, to the overseas subsidiaries and branch offices of more than 100 of the largest American companies, provided that the offices are not located in embargoed countries, namely Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.

"As far as we know, Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. is now the only company that has U.S. government approval to sell strong encryption to the worldwide subsidiaries and branch offices of such a large number of U.S. corporations, without having to compromise on the strength of the encryption or add schemes designed to provide government access to keys," said Robert H. Kohn, vice president and general counsel of Pretty Good Privacy. "Pretty Good Privacy still opposes export controls on cryptographic software, but this license is a major step toward meeting the global security needs of American companies."

The U.S. government restricts the export of encryption using key lengths in excess of 40 bits. However, 40-bit cryptography is considered "weak," because it can be broken in just a few hours. Generally, the U.S. government will grant export licenses for up to 56-bit encryption if companies commit to develop methods for government access to keys. For anything over 56 bits, actual methods for government access must be in place.

Pretty Good Privacy's license permits the export of 128-bit or "strong" encryption, without any requirement of a key recovery mechanism that enables government access to the data. A message encrypted with 128-bit PGP software is 309,485,009,821,341,068,724,781,056 times more difficult to break than a message encrypted using 40-bit technology. In fact, according to estimates published by the U.S. government, it would take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single 128-bit message encrypted with PGP.

"Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. has been working diligently to ensure compliance with the export control laws. Clearly, the Commerce Department recognizes the needs of reputable American companies to protect their intellectual property and other sensitive business information using strong cryptography," said Roszel C. Thomsen II, partner at the law firm of Thomsen and Burke LLP.

"User demand for strong cryptography is growing worldwide," said Marc Rotenberg, director of Electronic Privacy Information Center, and a leading privacy-rights advocate. "This is just one more example of the need to remove obstacles to the export of the best products the U.S. can provide."

Companies that are approved for the export of Pretty Good Privacy's strong encryption should contact Pretty Good Privacy's sales office at 415.572.0430 or visit the company's web site at www.pgp.com. Companies that are not currently on the list of licenses obtained by Pretty Good Privacy, but would like to gain approval to use strong encryption in their branch offices and subsidiaries around the world, should also contact Pretty Good Privacy at 415.572.0430 for information about how to be included in future government-approved export licenses for PGP.

About Pretty Good Privacy, Inc.

Pretty Good Privacy (www.pgp.com), founded in March 1996, is the leading provider of digital-privacy products for private communications and the secure storage of data for businesses and individuals. Pretty Good Privacy's original encryption software for email applications (PGP) was distributed as freeware in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann, Chief Technical Officer and Founder of Pretty Good Privacy, and allowed individuals, for the first time, to send information without risk of interception. With millions of users, it has since become the world leader in email encryption and the de facto standard for Internet mail encryption. Over one half of the Fortune 100 companies use PGP. In order to provide only the strongest encryption software, Pretty Good Privacy publishes all of its encryption source code and algorithms for extensive peer review and public scrutiny. The company can be reached at 415.572.0430; http://www.pgp.com.

Immediately followed by

Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 18:46:08 -0400

From: "Tom Betz" <tbetz@pobox.com>

Subject: Re: Newsflash: PGP approved for export of strong crypto

On 29 May 97 at 15:54, Matthew Gaylor wrote:

> SAN MATEO, Calif., May 28, 1997 -- Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. (www.pgp.com), the world leader in digital privacy and security software, today announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce has approved the export of Pretty Good Privacy's encryption software to the overseas offices of the largest companies in the United States. This makes Pretty Good Privacy the only U.S. company currently authorized to export strong encryption technology not requiring key recovery to foreign subsidiaries and branches of the largest American companies (see list of companies below).

Hokay... does anyone know the exact date the NSA cracked PGP?

3 1

Page: