Posts by Charles 9

Re: Is source code necessary to validate correctness?

Having an open codebase does squat against a hardware subversion (and El Reg has had articles about that such as subverted hard drive firmware), and given the importance of elections, you have to assume someone will have the resources to secretly subvert any voting machine maker to hide a secret code in a normal-looking chip that only gets activated on a secret code set at the hardware level, otherwise totally invisible. How do you battle something that resourceful?

Re: @Tom No, this is bad, really bad.

Not so easy. Taxes have three or four tiers (federal, state, county/region, and usually municipal), and these tiers usually don't talk to each other. And even within each tier, taxes may be assessed differently for different things. Take Virginia. Each locality has a different tobacco tax on top of the state sales tax, then you get areas that charge an additional tax for hot-served food, there's confusion over whether or not energy drink count as grocery or merchandise (merchandise has twice the tax rate), and then there's the sales tax exemption for medicine and the tax holiday in August for school supplies. And all it takes to change these again is for a legislature to pass another Act or a city council to pass an Ordinance.

AND the federal government is notoriously inefficient. So do you still believe keeping track of such a complicated tax structure (which is necessarily complicated because the country is complicated) can be "trivially" done?

Re: Short view?

Nope, because the newcomers have to associate with the incumbents, and guess who has their nuts. It's like writers and Word. Many would like to get away from it, but to get their stuff published, they have to go through the editors, and the editors swear by Word due to its annotation features. So if the only way to town is across a frozen river, you better learn to ice skate.

Re: What the what?

Not true. Every car that passed it altered the conditions of the road by driving through it. Furthermore, it's rare for two cars to be exactly alike in terms of physics when they pass over a wet road. What one car can pass safely another may not simply because they're lighter/heavier, have less downforce, balder tires, etc.

Re: How do you get the data out?

"Well, by definition they wouldn't be "compatible with Windows and NTFS" in that they wouldn't be mountable by Windows."

As in they'll work with the right program, a la TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt. And it would require a driver-like low-level interface to interact with the devices at the block level (like a low-level Hex Editor). And of course it would have to employ a robust encryption system throughout so that at the least contents can't be easily seen. Additional work would be needed to conceal the fact a secret filesystem is being used (namely, writing random data into all free space in the drive before creating it; that way you have the excuse of cleaning up the drive prior to reusing it, excusing the proliferation of random-looking data in the free space).

Re: cart before horse

At least if it goes down, it's quick to get back up. You can't say the same with underground wiring which can be broken up by a stray shovel or swamped by a flood or storm surge. Trust me, we checked the numbers and determined (especially on the coast with their high water tables) that it wasn't worth it.

Re: Is there a workaround or isn't there?

And replace it with WHAT, pray?

Because if one of the biggest names on the Internet is selling eternally-vulnerable unpatchable hardware, what does that say of every other supplier on the market? Rip and replace simply means someone else when you bend over.

Re: Shipping forecasts

Use an old computer-generated voice and turn it loose on a large local phone book.

I recall those desks with glass panels and racks in the chair well to sit CRT monitors so people didn't have to crane their necks to see what they were typing.

I think it's more a case of "Impersonating a Federal Officer" which, yes, is a federal offense (18 US Code § 912).

Re: How far off? @Gomez Adams

It may me geographically shorter, but it may also be temporallly longer due to traffic or an accident. If people change lanes frequently, it's usually because the lane is backed up and moving slowly, so going around may requiring traveling further in terms of length but also allows traveling at a higher speed, offsetting the loss.

So what happens when you get a law-vs-law clash, where a car is BOTH prohibited from driving too slow in relation to other cars AND prohibited (due to vehicle classification) from going OVER a specified speed? Especially when the minimum becomes higher than the maximum, meaning the car can't help but break the law now?

Re: Trust is supposed to be a two way street

Well then, you better get off the Internet, because that level of paranoia approaches Don't Trust Anyone, and since trust is required to perform any real communications...

Re: Do they have internet in prison cells?

"It's like this: a body is found with an axe poking out the chest. There is a criminal around somewhere, the murderer, and there are suspects. The criminal is a criminal whether or not they are a suspect."

Not necessarily. The criminal may be the same as the victim: in this case, a Darwin Award Winner trying to play with axe juggling.

Re: maps.me uses openstreetmap

2D-only. A similar app already exists in F-Droid which by default is FOSS.

I'd prefer one that has a horizon perspective, better suited for driving navigation.

Re: HumInt and SigInt both require wisdom

"Confirmation Bias is approaching data with a personal bias and so wrongly confirming that bias. What I meant is more innocent, more common, when we approach data with no expectations and yet still misunderstand it. Normal human error."

Confirmation Bias IS Normal Human Error. Bias is an inherent human trait based on experience. We can't help but be biased because experience shapes perception, subconsciously. IOW, we can't help but be biased just as we can't help but measure speed in relative terms: there's no absolute reference point to check otherwise.

Re: Put up a net

And the next thing you know, the drones will just cut the nets. Either that or the prisoners start hoisting themselves up to rip them down and use them for escape attempts.

Re: Underground

Actually, south-facing windows make sense in the Northern Hemisphere because in the winter you want as much sun as possible to stay warm, and the sun tends to be heavily to the south in the winter, creating a shallow angle. In the summer, the sun is more to the north so comes down at a sharper angle which you addresses with features like porches and overhangs.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the directions are reversed, so you're better off facing windows north.

Re: Not "Linux commands"

Uh...what Radio Shack?

Re: I wonder how that works from a technical standpoint

In my experience, most of them coped by producing drink coasters and (sometimes dangerous!) frisbees...

After what you mentioned became a perennial complaint, drives started coming with internal buffers capable of holding a few seconds worth of burn. They also came up with techniques like BURN-Proof to help cope with recovering gracefully from an interruption.

Re: ICANN is using internet community money to lobby against the internet community !

Fair enough. Now tell us how we can wrest the power back from them? What cards can the community still play?

Re: yawn

The problem is that all the temptation amounts to crying wolf. Wake us up when one of these technologies actually hits the market and is actively undergoing real-world use. Until then, what use is it for us to know about something that may never pan out?

Re: T-Mobile to update 13 non-Nexus phones to Android M

I've seen "Coming Soon" signs covered in cobwebs, so I'll believe it when I actually see it.

Re: @AC

Or a RAID-0 where one of the drive firmwares has been pwned. Basically, trust on the Internet is a pipe dream yet you need trust to make communications work, meaning we're basically screwed. ANY trust system we can think up, someone else can subvert (like using shills to subvert a Web of Trust).

Re: Major niche OS

Babylon 5 mainly used the Amiga not just because of the 3D rendering and CGI but also because it was possible to overlay said CGI on top of the recorded footage thanks to its support for genlocks (in a day and age when video compositing hardware capable of keeping all the footage in sync was really hard to come by). That said, due to the limitations of the hardware, it's now pretty easy to see when the footage is composited instead of taken straight from film.

Re: Opera 12.16 is still the best browser, despite 3 years of neglect.

I find this odd, given that I use Firefox and Steam and have no issues. Perhaps an add-on is messing with steampowered.com and causing a redirect loop.

Re: 'Easy' ways to get and validate keys

"The obvious way to get the right key is to meet in person and exchange keys - or at least key finger prints. The less obvious way is to read and understand how the chain of trust works."

And then you run into the First Contact Problem. How does Alice know Bob is really Bob and not Mallory if Alice has never met Bob before? And if she tries to use a third party, how can she know Trent is really Trent?

Re: Is the Windows 10 forcefd upgrade even legal?

Didn't a few countries try that already only to come back?

Re: Paint balls vs CCTV

"However, it is a felony to engage in a straw purchase - buying a gun for someone (usually a felon) who is not legally allowed to possess one."

But it's kind of hard to prove the gun was straw-purchased and not stolen as the former owner claims, and under the Sixth Amendment, it falls to the government to prove the straw buyer's lying.

Re: I have to disagree on the Amiga version being bad.

What about Reactor? It had that distortion guitar music tied to a BIG speaker.

Re: Or you could just...

But this project goes one further. It's an attempt to build a computer that is open both in software and in hardware: with every bit of electronics open for scrutiny, including chip innards (which Lemote devices cannot fully assure).