Posts by Pete 2

square feet in round holes

You can see why few people actually *want* to return to a company office. And why most companies don't want them to, either.

In London, office space is piggin' expensive. The basic rent in the centre satrts at about £50 per square foot per year and can be double that in an area that is actually pleasant to work in. Add business rates and service charges and the price goes up to £80, at least.

Just a basic desk + chair and cat-swinging space is said to be 95 sq.ft. ('pollies for the old-fashioned units) so it costs at least £8k for each desk.

I doubt that anyone is so naive to think that saving would be passed on to employees as a pay rise. However, it might just stave off the time when administrative staff become so expensive that it is cheaper to replace them with an automated system.

Oink!

> "Give them some food and some friends and they're happy. Pigs are quite similar to people."

Apart from the being happy part.

Supposition!

> a customized version of the iconic Apple media player that could not only deliver music and video, but also hold other hardware. The purpose, Shayer reckons, was to create a discrete Geiger counter that could also pass as a media player.

So it was only a guess that the iPod would host a radiation detector. That function doesn't sound very plausible to me. Would they go around "the city" waving their iPod at people, or what? Though it would be a good cover story.

Given that an iPod is primarily a storage device, my guess would be that it would make an innocuous bug. Since iPods already had a microphone, there wouldn't be much point making them audio bugs. However due to being commonplace, they wouldn't raise much suspicion if spotted lying around somewhere - an office or laboratory, perhaps. Somewhere with a lot of, say, radio activity (as opposed to radioactivity). Especially as WiFi was starting to be popular around 2005.

As for a modus operandi, we all know about "lost and found" thumbdrives. Devices that are left for unsuspecting but targetted individuals to find and plug into their computers out of curiosity. This could be similar, but less suspicious as it wouldn't need to be plugged in to anything. Just have the "mark" find an iPod that looked lost, pick it up, take it into their secure work environment and it sniffs the internal WiFi. Even inside shielded building.

And better still, it plays music!

Too hard, too frequent, too unreliable

> About 60 per cent of the web application holes used were deemed critical

It seems to me that the basic problem is that systems are not designed with upgrades and patches in mind. You can play the IT support conversation in your head.

Hi CIO, I.T. here. We need to take the whole corporate internet presence offline to perform a vital security patch

CIO But you did that last week!

No, that was the office system and that was because of a bug in the email server

CIO And the week before that

That one was the database

CIO Dang! So how long will we be offline

It's hard to say, in theory only 30 minutes but more likely an hour. If things go pear shaped maybe a week.

CIO I'm not signing off on that. Cant you check the patches on a non critical computer first?

We tried, but it failed. Our web suite is running version 4.10.122b and the test systems are at 4.10.121a so (obviously) it didn't work

CIO No, you'll have to wait until there are more bug fixes, then we will take the system down and install all of them

Don't you remember last November when we tried that and it took 2 weeks to restore the service?

CIO My mind is made up. We were sold this package on the basis of 99.999% uptime. That's a 25 second outage per month. You lot in IT blow through an entire year's worth of downtime every week. Find another solution <click>

Frying tonite

> 120w wired charging said to fill the 3500Mah battery in 23 minutes

120 Watts for 23 minutes sounds like a hell of a lot of power to fill a piddling little 3.7V 3.5Ah battery.

The energy from the charger comes to 2760 Watt*minutes, while the capacity of the battery is 3.7 * 3.5 * 60 = 770 Watt*minutes. Does the other 2000 just cook the battery?

On trusting trust

An online exam for pen testers. What could possibly go wrong?

a stranger approaches ...

> controversy over its Chinese ownership for broadly similar reasons to American dislike of Huawei

Hello TikTok

Errrr, hello Mr Trump

Nice little business you've got here

Why thank you

Yes ... it would be a shame if something happened to it

Happened? Like what

Well, for example if we I decided to ban it

Why would you do that?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe we would decide it was a security risk - what with it not being american [ stands up, salutes, sits down again ]

But it isn't.

Well, we don't know that - what with it not being american [ stands up, salutes, sits down again ]

What can we do to assure you it's OK?

Hmmm, how about you sell it to me us. We'll give you a fair price what with it not being american [ stands up, salutes, sits down again ]

.... how about $1? Seems fair

That's not very much.

It's much more than it will be worth when we ban it. What with it not being american [ stands up, salutes, sits down again ]

Oh!

The support "get out"

> and the machines did not work in quite the same way.

Which leads to one of the most popular responses from software support teams, when faced with an irate developer who has just wiped their (only copy) entire disk.

"Well it works OK on our system"

If it ain't broke

the team were using an update command sequence ...

It got worse. After the momentum management manoeuvre, gyro B was erroneously left in its high-gain setting (thanks to a change in command procedures)

Do it yourself

> The new "Security Research Device" (SRD) is a full iPhone that adds shell access so that security researchers can give it a thorough going-over.

Surely the sort of "security researcher" who was any good at finding _real_ exploits would be able to gain shell access, without any help.

Agree to disagree

> George Glass, head of threat intel at infosec biz Redscan, opined that these exclusions (from the CSEW data) made the survey of limited use,

However the Office for National Statistics takes a different view. According to them:

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) provides the better indication of the volume of computer misuse offences experienced by the adult population as it captures incidents that go unreported to the police. This can be seen by the large difference in the volume of computer misuse offences between the two sources.

Is this an example of the "two watch" problem - which one is correct?

2021 a space impossibility

The 25th anniversary of when the project started.

Excellent work NASA and by "excellent" I mean being able to stretch a $500million project out to $10 billion

If there was a Nobel Prize for project management, they would undoubtedly win. Although in the same vein, those Nobels would also be running decades late and massively over budget, too.

Is that a job?

> we place it on a shelf. Then every day for a week we walk past it, and we start seeing things we didn’t previously see

Maybe some joker sneaks in at night and moves things around on the shelf?

The Ryanair model

Salesperson: Certainly, here's a cheap phone. You won't find one cheaper - guaranteed.

Oh, the battery is an extra £60 plus fitting charge

A screen, you say. By all means .... kerching £100 more please.

Great. Now, would the customer like some software to go with their new phone .....

Aid and comfort?

Where should a commercial company draw the line between active collaboration in destructive and deadly technologies and passive assistance in making a military more capable of delivering those functions on its own?

Specifically making weapons is one thing. How about allowing military operators to use all the civilian functions that are available to everybody else.

ISTM that armed forces all over the world gain specific and quantifiable benefits from commercial software, from Word to Google search to the internet in general. There are even military TLDs assigned.

Is there a line to be drawn and if so, where? I do not claim to know the answer, but the question is reasonable.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water

> The so-called "unmanned underwater vehicle" must have "the ability to sense, interpret, and understand its local environment, and then respond autonomously to that understanding"

Can it be shark-shaped? Possibly with a you-know-what attached.

Lies, damned lies and official statements?

> British, French and Dutch law enforcement agencies to have been used by around 60,000 people

> British police claims that all 10,000 of EncroChat's UK users were criminals

but only ...

> 746 arrests. I.e. about 1 in 15 UK users.

We know that all reports of "cyber crime" are bigged-up. Both in extent and sophistication. Is that the case here, too?

60,000 users each paying £1500 per 6 months, comes out at £180 million a year to the owners of this network.

If that is the true value of a covert mobile phone network, I cannot imagine that it will be down for long (esp. given what the operators will have learned from this). Nor that such networks do not operate elsewhere. In other parts of the world.

Should we expect further reports of other "busts" in other countries - the USA being an obvious one. Or are those networks just better run and can avoid detection.

Form or function?

What would interest me is a description of what new things I will be able to do with Mint / Debian / Ubuntu / any other new linux distro, that I was unable to do before. What "killer" apps it now contains, that weren't there before? What functions that previously were difficult or convoluted have been made easier? What giant strides have been made in the documentation (OK, that one's a joke).

I am sure it is nice to know that the colour scheme has been diddled with - that we can now have yellow folders. But if that makes it to the list of newsworthy features, I feel there isn't anything more significant that would entice me to upgrade.

Just sublime!

> each SPARROW will melt ice from the surface of these moons to create steam.

Have they missed a step: ice -> steam. Or is the atmospheric pressure really that low?

Say or do?

> After getting nearly 4,000 responses

So all this survey did was ask some people (ones who stepped forward to tell the researchers how virtuous they are?) what they did. That is a long way short of having actual evidence that they weren't lying, mistaken, exaggerating or didn't understand the question. ISTM that surveys are far too unreliable to base any course of action on.

In fact, I asked 8,000 people online if they thought surveys were accurate ...... they replied in the affirmative to whatever question anyone who is willing to pay me for the results, cares to ask them. Of course, it might just have been one person or a 'bot, that responded 8000 times. I guess we'll never know.

Hit where it hurts

> the job of helping Amazon “to more effectively pursue civil litigation against suspected criminals

So in other words having a reputation as a tat bazaar, filled with low-quality knockoffs, is finally beginning to affect the bottom line.

Or was it that eBay objected to Amazon muscling in on their turf?

Hot LOX

> The test will see the tank filled with water to simulate the liquid oxygen

apart from the real contents of the tank being some 200°C colder in practice. As we would have hoped NASA had learned from the shuttle, materials behave differently when cold

Toasty!

> a maximum TDP of 250W

Those of us who remember 1990's science fiction series will be aware of the Video Toaster.

With each of these chips generating up to 250 Watts of heat, there could be a resurgent secondary function. Just imagine: camping out in the datacentre late at night, sitting in a circle around the server. Recounting tall tales while chomping on warm marshmallows fresh off the heatsink!

back .... up!

> an 18-month community order along with 80 hours' unpaid work.

Hopefully the unpaid work won't be as a systems administrator for one of her ex-employers

(Although 80 hours unpaid work doesn't sound like a punishment. It sounds like the week before a deadline)

Who's watching whom?

> The FBI also obtained 500 images from an amateur photographer who had documented the protest.

With citizens happy-snapping everything that moves, the case for state surveillance seems pretty thin.

Either that, or it wouldn't add greatly to the volume of evidence collected: publicly or privately

Summed over its lifetime

> Its service module, containing power generation and conditioning, control and communications, is a rebuild of the one used by XMM-Newton, which goes some way to explaining INTEGRAL's extraordinary longevity

So that's what differentiates INTEGRAL from other research satellites?

Bigger! Newer!! Better???

> accelerator support for the Habana Labs Gaudi AI Training Processor – this last one mentioned by Torvalds as accounting for a large chunk of new code.

I have to say, none of this makes me want to rush out and upgrade.

Still fighting WW2

> “in some sort of air-to-air dogfight”

Does anyone still do that? ISTM that the modern version is to get within 50 miles of an adversary and then fire a missile at it

Smart freezer - code frozen!

> promised to issue software updates for a full decade after the release of a device

But what other services do they rely on?

If there is third-party stuff, then they are just as much a part of the product as what the vendor promises hopes to support. But if they close down, raise their prices, get bought, go bust, are hacked / pwned / blacklisted, rely on other (fourth party?) stuff or generally can't be arsed to keep their code working properly then your premium fridge is just as functional as a bargain basement version.

This is exactly the same as for every other "smart" device: TV, vacuum cleaner, cat feeder, doorbell and probably electric car, too. While they all might have the intention to deliver on their marketing promises, experience tells us that in the end: they don't. Whether it is a phone that stops getting updates or security patches after a few months, or a car that gets "premium" features locked out when sold second-hand. It turns out that all vendors of "smart" kit are insincere shysters.

We all know about buiilt-in obsolescence. But the new obsolescence comes in the form of an OTA update - or lack thereof.

Be annoyed, the country needs more noyds

> but developing for Android still has annoyances

Such as deadlines, bugs, managers, change requests and users?

Adi.eu

The website for leaving the EU

An immobile solution

> An IRS-enabled element like a wall ...

I think the idea of hauling a wall around, just to jam someone's mobile phone, would be a bit of a giveaway.

Although all this seems to be doing is reflecting the cellphone radio frequencies back, out of phase with the incoming one. The wavelength of an 1800MHz mobile signal is only 16cm. So you would only have to move the mobile phone a small amount to be away from the nulled out point. What would this wall do, if there were two cell towers that a phone could connect to?

Even if the wall has the ability to track the position of a phone down to 1cm or so and can do that in real-time, there must be easier ways to futz with someone's signal.

Designed to go BANG!

> yet another setback

Hardly. The only thing of importance that has been lost is time - and maybe 1 Raptor engine. These test bed rockets (although "rocket" is a misnomer since none of them have got off the ground¹ yet) are disposable rigs positively intended to find the weaknesses, faults and places for improvements. It is far better and much more cost-efficient to discover all these faults now than when these things have payloads or people on them.

Experience is another word for mistakes, learned from.

[1] in a controlled fashion

double think

> before the deepening coronavirus crisis prompted IBM to re-think what clients actually need

Or possibly before the deepening crisis prompted IBM's customers to re-think what they needed.

Give yourself a promotion

The best backdrop? Your boss's office. Or better: their boss's office.

If it doesn't instill fear and uncertainty in whoever you're videoconferencing with, at least it might make those who don't know you, personally, think you have more seniority and power than they would wish to challenge.

Minimum spec?

> 32 cores and 64 threads at 3.7GHz

The problem with giving developers (does Torvalds count a a developer? probably not) ultra-high spec kit is that it disincentivises them from writing efficient code. I understand that resource consumption is waaaaaay down there on the list of priorities for code mungers - probably even lower than fixing bugs or writing documentation. However, when we are told that Linux is "lightweight" and will run on ½GB of memory and 1GHz of CPU then it would be nice to have some confidence that this sort of box would do meaningful work.

And what could be more meaningful than the head honcho adopting it for their daily lambasting of all around them?

Going while the going's good

Loverro is head of NASA's manned spaceflight division. A part of the organisation that has been developing their latest Space Launch System since 2011. A project that will build and fly 3 manned missions for sure and more planned but not confirmed, after that. The rockets are cobbled together from old Shuttle left-overs and will still cost around $2 billion per shot.

Compare that with Space-X. The company has gone from zero to manned operations in 10 years and expects its crewed Dragon flights to come in at $160 million a pop - due to the inherent reusability of their system. With a design capacity of 7 crew per launch (though I doubt it will ever cram that many in - at such a low cost, why bother?)

If I was head of NASA's manned operations, I'd want out before other people in the organisation start making these sorts of comaprisons, too.

Afterthought Perhaps a higher-up has already had that conversation with Loverro. Something along the lines of "Hey Doug, you do realise that if this Space-X flight succeeds, we're going to can your manned missions and just buy seats with them instead?"

A taste of its own medicine?

> Speaking in the first person, the computer is pleading for an operator to assist with whatever malaise had befallen the thing.

Maybe all it needs is a nice hot cup of tea-flavoured beverage.

(I wonder if anyone has switched it off and back on?)

The other bane ...

> A permanent annual licence costs £44.90 per year

... is software subscriptions. Essentially holding your content to ransom.

Software security is intended to stop outside agents from doing this without the user's consent. But people are forced to do this by legitimate companies.