* Posts by Charles 9

16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Worried about election hacking? There's a technology fix – Helios

Charles 9

Re: It's total bollocks

"The bottom line is that a well-designed paper-based election is hard and expensive to hack without detection, with the costs and difficulty at least proportional to the number of polling stations."

But if an organization is big enough and determined enough (like a major political party or machine), then you still can't discount the possibility of insiders throughout the voting system as well as well-coordinated efforts to slip things through. Remember the Gilded Age. You also can't discount conspiracies of all the parties actually working in cahoots to subjugate the proletariat.

Charles 9

"districting should be handled by non-partisan independant authorities on a geographic basis taking into account only numbers of elegable voters, not demographics, to ensure equal representation."

As long as you get humans involved, someone's going to be nefarious enough to try to subvert them. Why not set it up by algorithm where color-blind head count is the only metric? Say require that districts be of equal numbers of people give or take a small number and then have ti draw out districts as compact in geographic area as it can until it's forced to reach out to get enough people? With no human intervention, there's almost no way to game the system unless you're into planned neighborhoods and districting.

Charles 9

Re: No, elections don't work this way

You underestimate the size and power of political parties (or as they were known in the Gilded Age, political MACHINES).

Virtually everyone in Malaysia pwned in telco, govt data hack spree

Charles 9

Re: re: obviously

I think it's a coverage issue. I see it in the Philippines where one company has better coverage in some spots than others.

Charles 9

Re: Hackers can afford to miss many times, only have to get lucky once

IOW, it's the old Castle Problem. The defenders must ALWAYS be lucky while the attackers only have to be lucky ONCE.

Charles 9

Re: I can see only the one solution

Nope. There's always SneakerNet. No, the only solution would be to ban computers, period, and go back to punch cards and mechanical processing. Let's see hackers steal millions of punch cards. It's the only logical solution, as anything that is easy to access MUST accordingly be easy to access by a resourceful imposter, like someone able to impress and then copy your key.

Slashing regulations literally more important than saving American lives to Donald Trump

Charles 9

Re: Yay Chump!

So you suggest replacing the airbag in the steering wheel with a shotgun shell? Or perhaps a metal spike? Would be unfortunate, though, for those who run into ghost drivers...

Charles 9

But what about blind corners? Can't use line of sight on those.

Charles 9

Microcells. They're perfect for scattering in concrete canyons where buildings block the more generalized towers and lower frequencies. Plus, the higher the frequency, the higher the data throughput, important as 5Gdata is being advanced.

Charles 9

"Since you principally care about line of sight targets (the car in front / behind you) it would seem that photonics would be a better solution."

No, because one of the concerns listed in the article is blind corners, meaning cars coming from a place normally OUT of the line of sight.

Hardware has never been better, but it isn't a licence for code bloat

Charles 9

Re: I think a lot of the developers could easily learn from the past

All fine and dandy if you can take your time on it. Flies right out the window, though, when you have a deadline.

Charles 9

Re: Very good points!

But now you see the tradeoff. Monoliths take up more memory due to code duplication, so it's less space-efficient, which can be an issue if you're running a bunch of them at once. It's basically a situation where there is no one answer for everything. After all, not everyone needs a compact all-in-one job like busybox, but if you had to work with a relatively tiny footprint, you'd see the point.

Vlad the blockader: Russia's anti-VPN law comes into effect

Charles 9

Re: Clean up your own users first...

"I don't want to block Russia wholesale as I have friends from there who return every couple of years, but I would rather not have to put up with constant noise from there. Same from China. You two nations have some of the toughest "clean&safe internet" laws out there, yet the most attacks on systems come from there. Ya listening Putin? Your subjects have been naughty, block them from getting out before you worry about what's getting in!"

You ever thought that these attacks of which you speak are actually SANCTIONED by their respective governments, given they're attacking the West? A kind of Plausibly Deniable Cyberwar?

Charles 9

They could just go whole hog and ban all unsanctioned encryption, and if you want to run a business in Russia, you must submit to the Mother or not do business, period. That'll make nearly all forms of encryption stick out like a sore thumb. Even stego's gonna be hard to get past a well-conditioned traffic sniffer.

Charles 9

Well, the state CAN exhibit control of all outside links since these tend to be done by trunk lines that usually have to go through them to approve. If there are few ways in or out, just like IRL, it's easier to guard them. I think that's how China keeps its Great Firewall working. Also, with fewer sanctioned passages, it becomes easier to investigate "holes".

Charles 9

What do you mean it won't work? All they'd need to do is ban all unsanctioned encryption. Then practically anything that tried would stick out like a sore thumb.

Hackers abusing digital certs smuggle malware past security scanners

Charles 9

Re: Certificate trust is broken

Well then, if you can't trust the root CA authorities, who CAN you trust?

If you answer, "no one," then Trent doesn't exist anymore, and without Trent, Alice and Bob can't find a way to trust each other. You've basically killed the Internet as a useful means of communication since anything can be changed into anything else.

Why are we disappointed with the best streaming media box on the market?

Charles 9

Re: Voice control

Sci-Fi, that's why.

Having a room respond to "Lights!" has been part of Sci-Fi for a very long time. Star Trek and the like popularized voice-activated technology in people's minds. Only thing is, for voice-activated tech to work, you need an always-receptive mic.

Charles 9

It's called a trade war. The content providers are willing to bleed a little now to try to control the field down the line. Until there's a winner or a truce, it's going to stay No Man's Land.

Charles 9

Don't be so sure. Credits to milo an HDMI 3.0 port will hit in a few years with a new, incompatible port design.

Charles 9

Re: What does it do...

Guess again. Not only is it a pain to search, but most of the content is recent and popular stuff. I use stuff like Amazon for more obscure stuff that's nonetheless in HD but not on BluRay. It's not like I buy the stuff anyway. A rental will suffice if you plan ahead.

Charles 9

Re: What does it do...

"And for those cases we have The Pirate Bay..."

And for the times when the movie isn't available in HD (if at all)? Trust me, I looked.

Charles 9

Re: Roku - crushing your aspirations of watching a movie

That's why I don't do my searching with the Roku. I use my computer to do the shopping, which then gets passed onto the Roku for actual viewing.

Charles 9

Re: What does it do...

Many providers won't allow HD or 4K content on PC without a protected media path. One reason I plunked down for a Roku stick (used, $25, comparable to Android boxes on eBay that top out at 720p, I have one). I recognize it's limits and work within them.

Virginia scraps poke-to-vote machines hackers destroyed at DefCon

Charles 9

Re: Virginia voting machines

But still vulnerable to hacking AND Kansas City Shuffle, which you can't discount given the size and scope of the political parties these days.

Charles 9

Re: Replacements

Machine-readable (in this case, optical) paper ballots. Most of Virginia made the switch before the 2016 presidential election. The foot-draggers are likely rural districts with shoestring budgets.

Not perfect (the readers are hackable, too), plus the parties are big enough machines to potentially subvert any trust chain.

Microsoft exec says ARM-powered Windows laptops have multi-day battery life

Charles 9

Re: Can you run win32 stuff on ARM-powered Windows?

If you read the article, you'll find that's exactly what they're working on.

Charles 9

Re: Microsoft FAIL

All right, then why haven't the developers of x86 software emulators (like in DOSBOX and MAME) been sued and ordered to stop development yet? That's clear-cut prior art at this point AND a potential instance of indifference and lack of due diligence, a potential avenue to challenge Intel's patents regarding emulation.

Facebook and pals to US Senate's Russia probe: Pleeease don't pass a law on political web ads

Charles 9

Attack ads will still continue; they'll just be more generalized to target whole parties or whole tickets (the parties themselves will just present blocs and convince their party loyal to vote the entire party down the line to try to get as many of them as possible elected).

And with the First Amendment in place AND a historic perspective that political speech is most in need of protection, the only solution to attack ads is a better human being. Good luck with that.

Charles 9

So basically, the core problem behind the problem is that, politically, most people are too stupid, and you can't fix stupid.

IOW, we're probably going to vote ourselves out of existence eventually.

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

Charles 9

I bet you an atomic bomb detonated 20 miles over South Dakota would change your tune. Or perhaps a superfluous farmed by ferrets and passed by a willing participant passing though JFK, O'hare, Reagan, and a number of other major transit hubs

As for 9/11, that was likely a dry run. If they REALLY wanted to hit hard, they'd have hit during the State of the Union address...using the plane carrying the hidden Cabinet member. With some sleeper cells, you could also take out the governors, creating enough of a power vacuum for a mass assault to work.

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

Charles 9

Re: Burglar lock-jammer...

"Good old fashioned mechanical keys could not be fooled, however."

But they CAN be PICKED...or JIMMIED...or any of a variety of purely mechanical means to get the door unlocked. And these are disregarding the quick-and-dirty solution preferred of car strippers (that being smash the window with an escape hammer).

Fresh bit o' Linux to spruce up that ancient Windows Vista box? Why not, we say...

Charles 9

Re: Begs the usual question...

Who says it's funny. I use the question in all seriousness since it pretty much determines whether I actually use this software or not? For those of us with sizable Steam collections (most of which are Windows-ONLY), it becomes a make-or-break decision.

Charles 9

Begs the usual question...

Can it run Crysis (given sufficient hardware)?

Is the FCC purposefully screwing up US school broadband projects?

Charles 9

Re: As Always

Some business transcend governments into transnational entities that can play sovereignty and economies of scale to their advantage. Those are the kinds of firms I refer. The usual winners of Winner Economics.

Charles 9

Re: Socialism

Schools are often run BY the governments, placing limits on their activities to avoid taxpayer gripes or even Constitutional questions (see Dress Code debates).

Charles 9

Re: School -- Let the parents know what's happening --> write to their Con-gressman

Mail rooms are normally near the trash rooms or the furnaces, and email boxes have automatic filters. That's why letter writing campaigns have so little impact these days. They're blocked at the gates. The only effective method is to go in person, and with today's world of employment, doing that risks one's livelihood.

Charles 9

Re: As Always

Here's a retort: Would you rather it be some big shot private enterprise there to help you, especially when you're not in a position to help yourself?

Whois? No, Whowas: Incoming Euro privacy rules torpedo domain registration system

Charles 9

Re: Trouble both ways

Bit what if the spoof site can demonstrate a legitimate beef, making it a protest site which offers more protection?

See, it can cut both ways, and there is some unfortunate overlap, meaning collateral damage is inevitable, so which direction would you prefer government to err?

Chinese whispers: China shows off magnetic propulsion engine for ultra-silent subs, ships

Charles 9

Re: I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again...

From dictionary.com:

" 1. a combining form meaning “first,” “foremost,” “earliest form of,” used in the formation of compound words (protomartyr; protolithic; protoplasm), specialized in chemical terminology to denote the first of a series of compounds, or the one containing the minimum amount of an element."

You forget. "First", "foremost", and "earliest" can be applied to a collective, so there can be more than one prototype as they can be referred as a group. The importance of the singular in the word really only applies in chemistry where it refers to the first step in things like a reaction chain.

Charles 9

Re: I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again...

"But there can be only one prototype"

No, because there is nothing in the definition that specifies that there can only be one "proto", unless you can prove otherwise. A prototype simply means it's a pre-production unit. If you want to get more technical, if you make another one, the previous one may no longer be considered a prototype and is instead a reject.

So long – and thanks for all the phish

Charles 9

A spear-phisher may be willing to jump through the hoops, especially if posing as a DISTANT correspondent so a face-to-face meeting would be impractical.

Charles 9

How do you go about enforcing such a policy, however, given that executives, by definition, are already at or near the top of the business structure? IOW, they're the ones usually setting terms in the first place.

US voting server in election security probe is mysteriously wiped

Charles 9

Re: If you could get remote Admin/root...

Even when it's UNPLUGGED?

Fore! PCI Express 4.0 finally lands on Earth

Charles 9

Re: El Reg left hand, meet right hand...

Not so fast. Word is coming down that those drivers are PCIe 3.0 x4, not PCIe 4.0.

IETF mulls adding geoblock info to 'Bradbury's code'

Charles 9

Re: What shall be the code for

Probably 404 Not Found because at this point they're into Nineteen Eighty-Four territory and denying it even exists (which is why it wouldn't be 410 Gone).

Charles 9

Re: DVD drives allow up to 5 region changes before locking in

"Ok cool. So what you're saying is that if my kids break a DVD by leaving it lying about, I can get a replacement media for my license at a nominal rate to cover the physical media and postage? Same for moving formats between VHS/DVD/Blu Ray (not remastering, just transfer at same quality)? Where do I sign?"

Contact the publisher, and you probably need to send in the cracked disc.

I know this was possible with Nintendo cartridges in the past. Specified it in the manuals, usually on the back page with an order form (cost $10 back then IIRC, about $2 for a new sleeve, and so on).

Your shoe, chewing gum, or ciggies are now your extra password

Charles 9

Re: More keys = more SPOFs

Ever thought that's what you WANT since losing any one could mean you're already compromised? Better to fail safe, IOW?

Charles 9

Re: I lost track somewhere

So use something you're nigh-guaranteed to have. A watch is generally good because it's tricky to nick something so close to one's person. Me? I'd flip it off.

Malware hidden in vid app is so nasty, victims should wipe their Macs

Charles 9

Re: Z/OS

Some of these games ARE grown up. They play games like that for a living. Look up Major League Gaming and the term PROFESSIONAL gamer.