Posts by Mayhem 380 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2009
The quiet insider word is that it all comes down to Titan ending up looking and playing too much like Bungie's new MMO Destiny, which they learned the details of when Activision set up the publishing deal with Bungie. So back in 2010 they started trying to redesign to differentiate themselves in the market, but now have apparently given that up as a dead loss.
Yes, I noticed Key being extremely specific about the GCSB never conducting any surveillance, same script as for Cameron and Obama when they were asked about the reciprocal nature of US-UK data capture.
I expect NZ is spied upon by the ASD, and we return the favour. Makes for perfect deniability.
As for the Southern Cross bugging - given the nature of what we've seen of atlantic cable taps, I wouldn't put it past the NSA to have already tapped the Hawaii end. I expect they want the NZ end for error correction on the bugging mechanisms.
Heck, I still remember being in a call centre the day that some muppet unplugged half the fibres in Takapuna by mistake on a Saturday afternoon in 2005 and broke most internet connectivity for NZ for 8-9 hours while they respliced them all. There are a lot of substantial service degradations that don't make it into the headlines that would have been perfect opportunities to install "upgrades"
What's the difference between being 'labeled a pirate' and being 'considered suspicious'?
Oh there are a whole bunch of use cases for the idea of Suspicious for a overarching monitoring service which wants to quietly expand its remit to grow the business.
For example, if you don't fall under the simple idea of Pirate then they can bump you up to the wonderfully evocative potential child porn trader or all the way to resembles known host of criminal sites.
That's what all the comment about burden of proof are about, and why under rule of law it should be the accuser's job. It is much harder to prove a negative, so making you prove that you aren't using the VPN for piracy merely removes you from the list of potential pirates. It says nothing about the other lists of potential criminals ... unless of course, you have nothing to hide ... at which point they get to ask "Why do you need a VPN" ... both exposing their lack of understanding of basic security protocols, and inviting you to bend over to all and sundry ...
I have a Plex server in London.
That has a iplayer channel that I can access from any of my registered devices wherever I am while travelling in Europe, and since iplayer is streaming to London and the Plex server is streaming to me, I can happily watch anything. Should work equally well in Australia, although I haven't tested that yet to determine performance.
@ammabamma
So a related question - assuming the virus writers are operating under an expectation of many of the above being present ... could this become a silent infection mechanism of a more savvy user?
After all, being used to not seeing ads means the user becomes complacent in terms of what is rendering on the page. The primary defences on a windows platform are 1/2/4 above.
Yet Adblock relies on a (relatively) trusted third party list which means what is blocked is known, and could in theory be worked around. To be fair, the vector above relies on a trusted ad delivery mechanism, so should be blocked at the source as I understand it. But if they are tailoring their exploits to language/platform/browser, then they are already being selective in terms of target, so it isn't a huge stretch to extrapolate further.
Inquiring minds would like to know.
Yep, but the key to possums is to hit em with the back wheel so the mess sprays out behind you, rather than under the vehicle. Even more fun on the gravel back roads.
Cue the mandatory rally ad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaoAkoLT274
On the other hand, Aussies learn early to swerve round wombats, which are pretty much indestructible mobile traffic islands...
Ahh, the classic I have a mirror therefore I have a backup idea.
Until it is pointed out firmly that all a mirror means is you will happily duplicate the missing file.
Or worse as I found many years ago, you duplicate the corrupted Master File Table, and lose everything on both disks.
Given Israel's history of industrial espionage, especially Mossad stealing all 200,000 original blueprints of the Mirage V from the French (including the engine plans) back in 1971, which they then used to construct the Kfir - I really have little sympathy for them getting spied on in return.
Speaking as someone who actually has an 80" TV (non-4k) in the lounge, anyone sitting closer than about 5ft from the screen will have much more serious problems than differentiating pixels. Preferred viewing distance is 10-14 ft. You can however comfortably separate pixels @1920/1080 from about 2-3ft away with good eyesight.
First things first, you *need* HD or blu-ray content to make the most of it - low res imagery looks horrible as the pixels are blown up to massive proportions. Particularly noticeable when streaming poor youtube content. The difference between SD and HD content from Sky is orders of magnitude, but there just aren't that many good HD channels.
Secondly, gaming when closer than about 6-8ft away (which fills your vision) is pretty much a recipe for motion sickness. The brain has issues coping with that much stuff changing that quickly in your peripheral vision. Just moving a mouse around up close is a headache. I end up doing something else while the controller batteries recharge.
Just wanted to say that dodgy puns like this (and the attention to detail in the delightful article that spawned it) is one of the main reasons I love el Reg so much.
Two. Two main reasons. And whoever writes the subheads on the front page has those occasional flashes of brilliance that makes whatever rubbish is in the story well worth reading.
So the three main reasons I love the Reg...
Barkeep! A round to the Reg team on my way out!
Ahh, so that's what happened.
I actually used Essential Travel for the past five years, found them a good and reliable inexpensive travel insurance provider for a worldwide multitrip policy.
And they no longer exist, as of some time in the past year - I was unable to renew my policy in January as the new company simply didn't support anything other than package holiday cover.
I wonder if the previous lot got flattened in an acquisition, and the underlying setup was so bad it was safer to start afresh. Certainly the old website was terrible, both to use, and from a coding viewpoint. And as demonstrated here.
It means he's heard of Jokes, and knows that good Jokes bring the mythical Upvote, but hasn't really understood how they work, so is building his own imitation Joke based on what he's seen used before in the hope of getting some sympathetic Upvotes.
aka ... the Cargo Cult, where primitive tribes built fake wooden airstrips after WWII to try and attract back the military aircraft bearing Cargo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Easiest way to clean a keyboard is to put it in a mesh bag and put it in the dishwasher (ideally without all the dirty plates)
The mesh bag is just to collect any keys that fall off in the process, to save hunting around to see where they went.
Put it in a hot water cupboard for a day or three to dry properly, good as new.
@Gordon 10
I suspect you missed a unit there - a standard 500ml bottle of coke contains 900kJ or 210kcal.
Somewhat more worrying is the 53g of sugar, which is around 40% of the RDA for men.
Which is roughly equivalent to one standard dairy milk bar (ignoring the fat content, which is substantial).
Not that that is likely to stop me drinking a shedload of it, but it does explain why I don't drink as much any more unless I'm working hard.
@AC
The key to the obesity epidemic isn't the sugar in soft drinks and chocolate though. Those are obvious targets, and few people consume huge volumes of them without awareness of the consequences.
The key is in the steadily rising sugar and fat contents in just about everything else you eat. Since salt, sugar and fat trigger favourable taste responses, manufacturers of processed foods add more and more to "enhance flavour", especially for low budget foods that don't taste particularly good without the additives.
Which means you end up blowing out your RDA by noon without even realising it, and a low income family has very little choice in the matter.
The solution isn't as simple as cooking your own food, although that helps, but in paying attention to what you eat and how much of it, and a lot of people simply don't know or don't care to do that. And cooking your own food is expensive - in time, in energy, and in raw ingredients, not to mention transportation and storage of bulk ingredients. Which puts it out of the reach of many of the worst affected, especially pacific islanders.
(This of course doesn't cover genetic and racial predisposition towards metabolising particular foods due to differing biological reactions and intestinal flora - eg. asians and alcohols)
@Matt
I think you mistyped some words, so I fixed up your post for you ...
"....Good work, Ed....." Oh, so you want hypocrite jihadis western media outlets to carry on brainwashing the gullible into good little Muslim suicide-bombers minimum wage workers, or maybe you'd prefer that the influencers and their brainwashed followers were stopped by a drone strike? Would you prefer the jihadi western followers to give up their jihadi capitalistic ways when their leaders are exposed as hypocrites or when the followers get arrested and thrown in Gitmo for the rest of their lives? Maybe you'd prefer it if the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, MI6 et al all downed tools? Complete fail.
@sam bo
You can talk about translation all you like, but the original Italian phrase is Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate, and being latin derived, Italian is quite precise in meaning, which makes translation straightforward. The modifier "All" clearly applies to the word "Hope". English word choice is down to the translator, hence "Abandon all hope" instead of say "Leave behind every hope", but the context and grammar is clear.
Lasciate - second person plural of the verb to leave or deposit. "(You) Abandon"
Ogni - masculine plural adjective each or every. "All"
Speranza - noun. "Hope".
Voi - pronoun. "You"
Ch' - Che - pronoun - who or that. "that"
entrate - present impersonal. "is entering (this)"
Well, on IOS - both phone and tablet, GTA III is 688MB, Vice City 1.1GB, so I'd expect SA to weigh in at somewhere around 2-3GB - a standard pc deployment was around 4.5GB and they can probably do some funky optimisation to reduce that.
Of course their finances use electronic bank transfers.
The difference is that the money tends to route via Governments which breaks the trail nicely.
Saudi Arabia for example, or in the case of the IRA towards the end of the war ... the UK government.
How else do you think they manage to pay for the arms they need? Suitcases full of cash are heavy and too easy to trace.
@Ian
I sadly have to agree with you here - they need to clarify the laws related to "reasonable expectation of privacy"
After all, the red tops seldom get successfully sued for the pictures taken by paps, and most of those constitute fairly direct invasions of privacy as far as the individuals are concerned.
Today I get the feeling "in public" means "viewable from the neighboring hilltop with a small telescope for a lens and clearly reflected in a shiny metal object outside".
Upskirt photography is fairly offensive, but in many countries it isn't technically illegal.
Within the Schengen area, you won't need to show a passport at the border if travelling by land.
Switzerland you may do, depending on where and how you enter the country. Once you leave the Schengen area, you always hit a border post where they should check documents - that's part of the agreement for the free travel area.
Taking the eurotunnel, its a 50/50 on if you get checked at the border - we had a minivan full of people waved through on the way out as "too hard" but all were individually checked on the way back into the UK for example.
Flying you always do, as they don't have separate entry points for Schengen flights and other EU flights.
In terms of accommodation - every hotel,hostel, backpackers and even campsite I have stayed at in Europe has taken a record of my passport, whether in a heavy tourist area or rural. The only ones that didn't were when we rented accommodation, at which point only the lead name needed to provide ID.
You may find that when you made the booking for the hotel in advance, you provided ID. I know my details are saved with a range of websites so they automatically get sent through and I don't have to fill them out each time.
@Joe Montana
Zone 1 is a ghetto for commercial fibre as well, and even having money to spend doesn't help - we've been waiting almost 14 months for a symmetric 100Mb fibre line to be run into Piccadilly thanks to an overstuffed pipe.
So far there is a 20m gap between our building and the street box that has taken 8 months to attempt to get a new pipe run through. A more useless pack of wallies I haven't met.
It also doesn't help that there are only two groups licenced to pull fibre in central London - Virgin and BT. Ours is a Colt circuit, but we still need Virgin to do the last mile, or 20m in this case.
@AC
To be fair to the environmentalists ... most of the wilderness areas in that part of NSW are now National Parks as they were the main forested areas left. Which means of course the red tape has expanded - unauthorised fires and habitat destruction are kind of frowned upon in National Parks.
The other main reason is that eucalypts tend to grow over winter, when water is plentiful, and dry out as summer comes on. In summer the fires race through the canopy and char out the understory, but the dry trees are generally unaffected because the fire doesn't stick around long enough to hurt the growing parts. End result, a short term clearance followed by an explosion of growth.
In winter, with damp trees, the fires tend to burn slower and stick around longer which damages the growth buds and boils the water in the trunks, which splits the trees open and makes them vulnerable to pests. End result, a lot more dead trees and poor regrowth.
Or more likely ... how about the locals try NOT building houses on ridges in heavily forested areas.
The Blue Mountains get bushfires. Every year. Everyone knows this. Most of the mountains between Cessnock & Sydney were left as wilderness because of the fire risk, not because the NSW government at the time had a particular mania for preservation.
This is nothing to do with environmentalism, or global warming, and all to do with urban sprawl and the encroachment of housing into many areas previously deemed too high risk to build houses in.
Actually if you look at the photo beneath, you can clearly see an Alt Gr key, and the Euro symbol is still the third symbol on the 4, same as a normal UK keyboard.
In other words, unless the author was talking about a built in soft keyboard and not the external keyboard ... I have no idea what he was on about..
If its anything like the Wincor Nixdorf machines we used to work on - once you have access to the top half of the machine, you have access to all the hardware.
The ATM controller is simply a little windows embedded PC, usually a Beetle, which you can swap components out in relatively easily (dead PSUs were not uncommon). Occasionaly we'd yank the whole PC and drop in a replacement. You can do anything via diagnostics once it is opened - change the value of cash bins, spit out notes, send test comms up the chain etc. It is all logged though, which uploads remotely, and you can't clear the logs easily.
However this is a complete fail from an operational point of view - the controller section is totally separate to the cash drawer below, requiring a different pair of keys to open - one we held and one the security guards who load the machine hold. Also, every time we did any work on the box, we had to have a security guard present - precisely because of the potential for cash to be dispensed.
(Or most often, we'd have to pull out the cash bins to extract the remains of several hundred dollars in bills chewed up in the mechanisms - that goes in a sealed back back to the bank)
If anything I think the above poster is correct - we're probably talking about the dodgy little third party machines that charge for transactions - they are built to a significantly lower standard than the top line bank models.
>> Parker sought to explain how individuals known to MI5 have gone on to plan, or in some cases execute terrorist plots
Name one. Go on, state When you learned they were plotting, What they were plotting, and How your evidence was what secured the country. You can avoid the exact specifics of the methods, but surely if these people were so bad, they were lawfully arrested for their crimes on our soil right?
Oh, the crimes are international. Or they were. So what did you actually do that was useful?
Provide the mass public with a single tangible bit of evidence that ANY of this mass information gathering has been of specific benefit to the country. It can't be that hard to pull out one case that won't harm your sources.
Or are we still talking about environmental activists, journalists, or friends and family of the above, all of whom have been stitched up by the various forces that don't like their behaviour. Or the bugging of political conferences so you can get an understanding of opposition views?
I have never forgotten seeing a LAW on the wall in the firearms section of the main Gart Bros store in Denver back in 91 or 92. Apparently it was considered a hunting weapon.
"Look ... a moose"
BOOM
<holds up shreds>
"Got em."
As for the rest, I recall flying back from Japan in 94 or 96 with a carry on bag full of interesting items.
On being stopped by the scanner, he opens my bag, pulls out several throwing stars, a folding knife, a polycarbonate knife allegedly designed not to show up on xrays, a set of brass knuckles, several thousand BB rounds and a few other similar things my military obsessed homestay had given as mementos. He then pulls out my old all metal pentax SLR & lens boxes, looks them over, and puts everything back in and I board the flight.
Apparently all that simply indicated "teenage male" and was classed as harmless fun in the days of airport sanity. Still have most of them lying in drawers back at the family home I think.
Much better to wait until its Olympics time again, and hold up all the UK & US political types.
"Oh I'm sorry sir, I know you had stadium tickets, but you see they appeared to be forgeries and we were worried about terrorists. You can go through now. Yes, yes I know the race has finished, but I'm sure you want people to be safe"
Hah.
I've had a lot of runins with Natwest Business banking lately.
They have a browser based malware scanner of some form that runs in the background when the user logs in. If this detects what it thinks is malware, it disables the users account, and then their system deletes the user.
We have to recreate the account from scratch from another admin account, and then wait a week for the pin code to be sent out by their central mail centre. There is no way to speed this up.
Upon receipt of which the user logs back in, triggers the system again, and the account is promptly redeleted.
We phone the helpline and they simply advise that Malware X was detected on IP Y for that user.
The IP is the public gateway for our network. The malware X isn't detected locally, nor on our virtual desktops. We ask for info on specifically what malware was detected. "I can't tell you that".
How was it detected? "I can't tell you." "You can't, or you won't?" "I can't tell you that either"
Is there a second line team I can speak to? No, it is based in India, and doesn't talk to end users.
Can you advise how to get around this? "Install Rapport. We provide it free and it will protect your pc" The user is in a Citrix desktop, via thin client, they don't have a pc. "Install Rapport. It will fix it"
We tried logging in via Chromebook and guest adsl link. Same result. "Install Rapport" "How?!!"
All they record for diagnostic purposes is User, Malware family, Public IP & DateTime. Really freaking useful, not even specific to strain of malware.
Eventually we replaced every item of hardware in the office, rebuilt every accounts user's Citrix profile, and reinstalled windows from scratch on their machines and a month later the system finally gave up deleting the accounts. Only took three months of new account every other week.
Actually, Google searching for those names and "The Treehouse Gang" gives me no useful results whatsoever.
So no, I have no idea what you are talking about.
Although being as ad hominem attacks are the most effective and honest form of persuasion, you have completely convinced me that you are right and these guys are certifiably kids in a tree.
Fool! Don't use your <faulty site>, you should use my <perfectly honest site> instead.
After all, <person who runs site> is a known (Skeptic/Apologist/Reliable Source - delete where inappropriate) and his opinion is far better than <your previous suggestion>
Why can't you use some critical thinking and look at <proper site> like all sensible people!
Most countries in Europe have laws requiring hotels and hostels to record the identity of their guests, using either a passport or internationally recognised ID document. The UK, Germany, Spain & France are definitely included, it may even be an EU wide law in exchange for the opening of borders.
At no stage do they actually hold on to the document though, it is simply handed over to the clerk who confirms your identity and records the number and type of document, then hands it back with the room key.
As I understand it, the records can be accessed by police or border control services when required, usually for the purposes of tracing missing persons.
Sure beats the biometric registration that the US insists on for foreigners, with all 10 fingers and photograph.
I'm sure that will *never* end up misused ...
To be fair to the KGB, I suspect that the west did regularly plan unprovoked first strike tactics during the cold war.
And then filed them under the *completely insane* category, and put them to one side.
I mean, I would expect the US military to have plans to invade most of the countries of the world filed away somewhere. They are a military after all - it is their job to plan for this stuff, along with modern civil war scenarios, and what to do when Canada finally has enough and invades again.
If the President turns around and says "We need to invade Afghanistan", you need to be able to quickly say "sure, here's what needs to be done and who we need to talk to" while frantically cleaning off the dust.
The problem of course comes in when the policy making types start thinking that the existence of these plans mean that such a decision is likely to be successful, or if the plans are removed from context and handed to the Great Leader with a note saying "see what wikileaks our great spies found ... we must strike first!"
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