* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Influential Valley gadfly and Intel 8051 architect John Wharton has died

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Holmes

Re: History

As I understand it, no code was lifted "wholesale" from CP/M to QDOS.

However, the basic principles (not a secret) and interface (evidently, this being a clone) indeed were. Code underneath was hacked anew, and if the mystery was too great, a debugger would be used to inspect what CP/M was actually doing in there. It's a honest-to-God reverse engineering effort by Tim Paterson that every backstreet China dev shooppe would recognize. And maybe a few Open Source projects, too.

There is no need to polarize.

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Thumb Up

Re: The original open source?

Pretty sure no one really wants to hear possibly misremembered history from one who was THERE

Epic post, thanks for sharing.

Why not write a letter of misremembrances to the Computer History Museum?

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Holmes

Re: Re : A conspiracy theorist might see a pattern emerging

Well... Charles Babbage and John von Neumann are dead too.. .so...

John von Neumann was actually ashkenazi enough to do IT as a sidequest.

TalkTalk hackhack duoduo thrownthrown in the coolercooler: 'Talented' pair sentenced for ransacking ISP

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Holmes

"individuals of extraordinary talent"

Sounds like a Harry Potter sidequest movie.

RIP Bill Godbout: Cali wildfire claims the life of master maverick of microcomputers

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Pint

Ow old times.

I was unware of Bill Godbout but I need to toast this guys' work & life.

While we are reveling in nostalgia, here is a review of an MIT press book on the Minitel system.

The inferno moved with terrifying speed, and it appears Godbout either didn't get the warning alerts or was overcome before he could escape the conflagration.

Yeah. Talking about letting "Hellfire" loose on the "Homeland". Maybe it's Putin? No wait, he's busy directing "Masha and Bear" and posting on Facemook (or so they say, especially that Mueller guys who seems to be probing harder than a Grey). Okay.

Microsoft menaced with GDPR mega-fines in Europe for 'large scale and covert' gathering of people's info via Office

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Re: "The Dutch authorities are working with the company to fix the situation"

The word "compatible" has a special meaning in the computer industry: good enough for salesmen but not good enough for actual screen bashers.

So Libre Office will not be a practical choice until the vast majority are using it.

Because everyone needs the funky razmatazz of mental disorder driven formatting overkill to bash out a (nowadays practically white, illustration laden and mostly content-free) robo-memo about some shit organization that no-one cares about.

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Re: government using cloud-hosted

It's not entrapment if the perp is already doing the deed without you egging him on.

Something OT from the depths of time: Judge Jackson is a big fat idiot: But MS is hardly in the clear

Microsoft slips ads into Windows 10 Mail client – then U-turns so hard, it warps fabric of reality

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Re: WTF?

Poverty is relative.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean hackers won't nuke your employer into the ground tomorrow

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Re: Excuse me.... but,... is that YOUR backdoor?

Why are PHBs commenting here and will no-one rid us of their pesky presence?

Scare Force: Pakistan military hit by Operation Shaheen malware

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Re: Belgium, man.

Could also be that Fakir guy who makes people mad as hatters with poison darts.

Oi! Not encrypting RPC traffic? IETF bods would like to change that

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Meh

A step in the right direction. I guess.

From Convenience over Corrected to Encrypted Convenience over Correctness.

RPC will stay as evil crud, but if you must have it... by all means, encrypt.

OK Google, what is African ISP Main One, and how did it manage to route your traffic into China through Russia?

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-> Routing through RusChin: Fiasko

-> Routing through USUK: not Fiasko

Why?

Irony meters explode as WordPress GDPR tool hacked, cell network hack shenanigans, crypto-backdoors, etc...

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Windows

For once, given WordPress' reputation for lax security, it isn't the content platform's fault. Instead the problem comes from a third-party plugin called WP GDPR Compliance, which is supposed to indicate if a website is breaking the EU rules.

So, some utter idiots haven't understood that "GDPR Compliance" is not about software and can't be done by a "plugin".

Oh yeah...

with the cops can't even keep track of their own firearms.

After "de-policing" and feeding military gear to Mexican mobs, is laxity in cop stalls another leftover from the Obama era?

FYI NASA just lobbed its Parker probe around the Sun in closest flyby yet: A nerve-racking 15M miles from the surface

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Re: Units

Farenheit is NOT an anachronism.

It's "Fahrenheit".

FAHR-EN-HEIT.

To be pronounced with a German accent.

Chappy.

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Go

Do it again, but harder!

Project Lyra: A feasibility study for a mission to the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua

For the first option, we use a mission concept that has been previously proposed by a Keck Institute for Space Studies report for exploring the interstellar medium. It is essentially a rollercoaster ride The spacecraft is first sent on a trajectory out of the Earth’s gravitational field using a large rocket, for example the Falcon Heavy, Space Launch System, or the Big Falcon Rocket. The spacecraft is accelerated to such high velocities that it is not only thrown out of the Earth’s gravity field but has enough energy to fly out to Jupiter. At Jupiter, the planet’s gravity decelerates the spacecraft with respect to the Sun. ... our spacecraft has been decelerated so much by exploiting Jupiter’s gravity field that it is now on a trajectory that it is falling towards the Sun in an almost straight line, an extreme roller coaster ride, although it takes over a year to fall. Of course the spacecraft will not fall into the Sun but would move away from the Sun once it has passed its closest point to the Sun. The spacecraft gets very close to the Sun, about 3 solar radii or about 1.5 million km. At such a distance, the solar radiation is about 20,000 times higher than what you receive during a sunny day. Converted to Watts per square meters, the power per area is about 15 MW / m². This is higher than the power per area inside a fusion reactor. To avoid that the spacecraft melts away, a heat shield is used which is similar to the heat shield of the NASA Solar Orbiter mission, which fill fly close to similar distances to the Sun and is currently undergoing testing. Now, at the closest point to the Sun, the spacecraft ignites a solid propellant engine it has been carrying all its way. In orbital mechanics, you get the biggest “bang for the buck” for a rocket engine, if you ignite it at the closest point to the central body. Hence, the whole idea of falling so closely to the Sun is to ignite the engine at the closest point of approach and then to be propelled away from the Sun with the maximum “bang”. The spacecraft flies away from the Sun at the incredible speed of about 370 km/s. At this speed you would get from London to New York in 15 seconds. Note that this is the speed you would need for a mission duration to ‘Oumaumua in 8 years and a launch in 2021. The spacecraft will have a velocity at infinity of 55 km/s and is therefore much faster than ‘Oumuamua with 26 km/s. The spacecraft would fly pass ‘Oumuamua in 2029, taking images using a telescope at a distance from the Sun of 69 Astronomical Units (Earth-Sun distances). At this point ‘Oumaumua will be a black object in front of the blackness of space. Where the human eye would fail, a telescope and other instruments will suck in the electromagnetic waves that are nevertheless emitted by ‘Oumuamua. The data will then be sent back to Earth with an antenna powered by nuclear radioisotopic generators, a chunk of Plutonium whose heat is transformed into electricity. Finally, the data is transformed into images. What will we see?

The Lyra paper is Project Lyra: Sending a Spacecraft to 1I/'Oumuamua (former A/2017 U1), the Interstellar Asteroid, Andreas M Hein, Nikolaos Perakis, Kelvin F Long, Adam Crowl, Marshall Eubanks, Robert G Kennedy III, Richard Osborne arxiv.org/abs/1711.03155

Bloodbath as Broadcom slashes through CA Technologies personnel

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Re: As ye sow, so shall ye reap

Jack up licence fees, hoping that most customers are too dependant on the software to switch.

Software development slows down, gets integrated into anonymously-named buzzword of the week enterprise suite thing.

This is what Atlassian does and they haven't even been bought.

UK rail lines blocked by unexpected Windows dialog box

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Mushroom

Isambard Kingdom Brunel now rotates in his grave!!

> Yankee software shit on British screens

> Screens made in Taiwan anyway

> "Engineers" with the skills of room maintainers led by the nose of penny-pinching management types thinkfluenced by fad propellers, no longer building machines but just "downloading" stuff to a very generally used platform and hoping to hell it works

> No-one knows how to fix stuff or is even aware that there is a problem

OUTSOURCE THE WHOLE NATION!

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Re: What about node.js interfering at Reading Station?

It's the new techno-televangelist screed!

REPENT!

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Re: Windows

> Why Windows in the first place on a system with a narrow functional requirement?

The only reason would be to use F#

Russian computer failure on ISS is nothing to worry about – they're just going to turn it off and on again

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Paris Hilton

"It's running NikitaOS 2.5"

Any good info on that gear??

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

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Headmaster

Naysayer sauce but where is the beef?

In other words, there has not been any significant conceptual progress in AI for more than 30 years.

I'm sorry but that is completely wrong.

If nothing else, we have learned that a lot of problems can be semi-successfully attacked by function fitting. and theoretical work is advancing.

Judea Pearl has advanced the causal revolution like a bulldozer, electrifying the field that dogmatic statisticians have kept sterile since the early 1900s.

Rodney Brooks has been working rather well on advancing robotics.

30 years includes work by Hofstaedter too, so GOFAI has had its advances.

Solid state of fear: Euro boffins bust open SSD, Bitlocker encryption (it's really, really dumb)

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Holmes

All together now....

"PROTECTING YOUR DATA IS OUR FOREMOST CONCERN"

Microsoft trusting these devices to implement Bitlocker has to be the single dumbest thing that company has ever done.

I don't think so, compared to all the security pratfalls over the ages apparently implemented by TOP.SKILLED COMPUTER SCEINTIST this doesn't sound so bad.

In memoriam: See you in Valhalla, Skype Classic. Version 8 can never replace you

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Re: DO NOT FORCE US ONTO THE NEW VERSION!

"The fact that they are not planning on retaining chat history is, not just stressful, but traumatizing for some, who may have lost loved ones and their communications with them, on Skype."

While the corporate helicopter leaves the embassy roof, you hear a voice on the radio:

"You fucked up. You trusted Microsoft."

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Re: A new graveyard?

The Black Hole!

From Saggitarius A* to Sad Guitarius MS

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Re: in memorandum

No, this mourning was channelling the PHB.

Google flings $25m at Social Good AI contest, Baidu's whips up neural-net camera to treat eye diseases, and more

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Windows

What sad times are these when random ruffians can say "AI" to old professionals.

“Our residency program is a way to broaden opportunities in the field to a more diverse set of researchers and spread the benefits of the technology to more people than ever.”

Roger the Shrubber, is that you?

Always on the lookout for business opportunities, eh.

We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

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I dunno. Wayland seems the best bet to get out of X Window System land, and so should be supported.

"Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it."

If you are "over the idea", embracing a complexified, messy and really 80-ish windowing system is a winning proposition.

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Roid rage or crack?

> all 2D and FLATSO and "Gnome 3-ish".

Just switch the icons.

Unsure why you can't log into Office 365? So is Microsoft

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Re: So the 365 in Office 365 means...

The number of hours between submission and resolution of your tech support ticket??

If you get a better Dominatrix than Miss Microsoft, the delay between submission and resolution need not be extended. Unless you WANT it that way.

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Re: Incomprehensible complexity

What will our grandchildren do when the "Mending Apparatus" itself breaks?

It may come sooner than you think.

Book Review: Joseph Tainter - the Collapse of Complex Societies

TLDR: Joseph Tainter argues that the root cause of civilizational collapse is because of overinvestment into and declining marginal returns on complexity. Societies invest in complexity to solve their problems and typically need to expend ever more organizational and physical energy to maintain that level of complexity; eventually, this expenditure undermines their material base, opens up a large potential gap where they could reap the exact same benefits but at a lower level of complexity (and cost), and the likelihood of collapse converges to one.

You can read excellent summaries of the book by Ugo Bardi, and Joseph Tainter himself.

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Trollface

Don't have the source code for your productivity apps?

You ain't gonna debug that problem, even if you stay over the weekend.

Especially if they have been complexified like a breakfast of a lard & muffin addicted 25 stone american.

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Re: Crippled by Office 289

I wonder whether there is a Fado song about cloud migration and the subsequent disillusion.

Sensor failure led to Soyuz launch failure, says Roscosmos

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Re: "can the fault detection system work fast enough. "

What are you guys even talking about? Do you think a fault detection system has to run tensorflow computations?

Goodnight Kepler! NASA scientists lay the exoplanet expert to rest as it runs out of fuel

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Windows

Can anyone shed light on how the recommendation soundbites are obtained

I didn't think spacecraft were generally powered by a few gallons of 4 star?

You now imagine Kepler warming itself by an oil barrel full of burnable material salvaged from abandoned housing in Detroit.

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

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Re: wait how!?

Sealed envelope with ticket mailed from an undisclosed moscowite address.

AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry

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Windows

Remember the gold old times

...when "ML" stood for "Metalanguage"?

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Holmes

Hmmm....

Another technique known as Density functional theory (DFT) is needed. It uses complex quantum chemistry calculations to map the density of electrons in a given area, and requires heavy computation. SwiftML, however, can do the job at a much quicker rate and can perform as accurately as DFT programmes in some cases.

"Taking a wild-ass guess can do the can do the job at a much quicker rate and can perform as accurately as trying to model the problem from first principles."

Well, yeah. Although using "accurately" here is frankly an evil abuse of language.

Microsoft to staff: We remain locked and loaded with US military – and will keep adding voice to AI ethics debate

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Stolz der Nation! I told you Sovietism had infected everything. I'm not crazy!

“We want the people of this country and especially the people who serve this country to know that we at Microsoft have their backs. They will have access to the best technology that we create”

But anything beyond that....

“When it comes to the US military, as a company, Microsoft will be engaged”

"Captain America" ("Engage, Engage!") from Generation Kill seems to have found a new job?

The 'roid in Spain drills mainly on the plain: Plucky Brit Mars robot laps up sun, sand and, er, simulated science

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Re: One thing Brexit won't hurt

> rules-based union

What does this even mean?

This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet

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Alien

Re: X has always scared the hell out of me...

There's just something about the thing that seems so fundamentally weird that I've never been able to feel good about it.

Since the early 90s.

But as long as the stars ain't right, we are safe.

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Windows

Re: Now, if this were a Windows exploit...

> Now, if this were a Windows exploit...

Let Microsoft be ripped to confetti by an antitrust lawsuit with the cash stash distributed to various OSS foundations and let Windows be open-sourced.

No talk before that.

Not get off my lawn, I have doge and AKM.

The D in Systemd stands for 'Dammmmit!' A nasty DHCPv6 packet can pwn a vulnerable Linux box

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Megaphone

Please El Reg these stories make ma rage at breakfast, what's this?

The bug will come as another argument against Systemd as the Linux management tool continues to fight for the hearts and minds of admins and developers alike.

Less against systemd (which should get attacked on the design & implementation level) or against IPv6 than against the use of buffer-overflowable languages in 2018 in code that processes input from the Internet (it's not the middle ages anymore) or at least very hard linting of the same.

But in the end, what did it was a violation of the Don't Repeat Yourself principle and lack of sufficently high-level datastructures. Pointer into buffer, and the remaining buffer length are two discrete variables that need to be updated simultaneously to keep the invariant and this happens in several places. This is just a catastrophe waiting to happen. You forget to update it once, you are out! Use structs and functions updating the structs correctly.

And use assertions in the code, this stuff all seems disturbingly assertion-free.

Excellent explanation by Felix Wilhelm:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1795921

The function receives a pointer to the option buffer buf, it's remaining size buflen and the IA to be added to the buffer. While the check at (A) tries to ensure that the buffer has enough space left to store the IA option, it does not take the additional 4 bytes from the DHCP6Option header into account (B). Due to this the memcpy at (C) can go out-of-bound and *buflen can underflow [i.e. you suddenly have a gazillion byte buffer, Ed.] in (D) giving an attacker a very powerful and largely controlled OOB heap write starting at (E).

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Re: Not possible

This code is actually pretty bad and should raise all kinds of red flags in a code review.

Amazon is at this point a money-printing cloud machine with a grocery store in the parking lot

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Re: Indeed

Wall Street was disappointed with the numbers overall, as Amazon shares were down 7.7 per cent at $1,645.56 in after-hours trading.

Wall Street is waiting for the next free-money fueled pyramid scheme which isn't forthcoming.

Brace for impact.

Oh, and Bezos could help Belgium buy the stupid 34 F-35s they want for "defence" (more like hangar sitting, a new practice, possibly a fetish, now in fashion in military circles). The deal is priced at 6.5 x 10⁹ USD. Initial cost only of course, but kickbacks included.

The Register Lecture: Great gravitational waves! LIGO's next cosmic act

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Re: Computing Power

Actually you have to simulate your merger with various parameters until you find a good match for the signal. A way to properly compute this was only discovered in the last 5 years so as I remember from an article, maybe on Quanta Mag.

Apple boss decries 'data industrial complex' while pocketing, er, billions to hook Google into iOS

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Devil

He expressed marked interest in market interest...

... followed up by perfoming a bloody cash hoggy at the conference while assuring everyone that their data was safe.

It only took Oz govt transformation bods 6 months and $700k to report that blockchain ain't worth the effort

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Our position today, and this is an early write-up, is that blockchain is an interesting technology that would be well worth being observed

Like a famous cat, it is neither alive or dead until observation happens.

AMD's shares get in a plane, take off and soar to 12,000 ft – then throw open the door, and fall into the cool rushing air

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Nothing to do with AMD in particular

Such stock market noises are akin to the groan a submarine emits as collapse depth is reached.

Worrying Windows 10 wrecking-ball weapon weirdly wanders wildly on worldwide web

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Paris Hilton

Re: How?

available only to Windows operating system components

Maybe Edge browser?

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Black Helicopters

Ever-morphing killer bug more persistent than an Xenomorph in a Space Trucker cargo ship

Now, could it be that that bug hunter has "sources" at the NSA?

Also:

“Microsoft has a strong commitment to security and a demonstrated track record"

Okay ... "Microsoft has a strong commitment to cash flow and a demonstrated stuck record"