* Posts by Charles 9

16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Google to bury indicator for Extended Validation certs in Chrome because users barely took notice

Charles 9

Re: This is hilarious.

No, STUPID humans are the weak link. If you tell them not to go to fake sites and they STILL happily divulge their life details to MostDefinitelyNotAFakeSite . cxx, at some point you have no choice but to acknowledge You Can't Fix Stupid, throw up your hands, walk away, and start praying he doesn't take you with him.

Canonical adds ZFS on root as experimental install option in Ubuntu

Charles 9

Re: I smell profit

But here's the billion-dollar question. Why this CDDL and not some other, already-existing license. Did they ever explain just WHY none of the other licenses suited them?

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Charles 9

Re: Others are at it

"Changing part of the equipment is not tampering, its repairing."

Changing part of the verified equipment for a cheap knockoff can easily be considered tampering (installing an unverified part) and against the terms of the warranty (which can be considered a service agreement with terms, conditions, and so on). Cuts both ways.

Charles 9

Re: Others are at it

What I'm saying is that, even if you try to get the law involved, they'll invoke user fault (aka tampering) to get around it and dare the law to counter it without every manufacturer bailing pug on account of losing money to abuse of the warranty policy.

Charles 9

I wonder what's happen when the manufacturers counter by bringing up warranties and issues of tampering (which is considered malfeasance and can therefore void warranties).

Charles 9

Re: Others are at it

"As far as am aware this is against EU regulations but they are doing it anyway."

Probably on the grounds that if they're forced to honor third-party inks, they cannot be held responsible for poor quality and breakages and as a result they'll refuse to issue a warranty as well as void any warranty service where a third-party ink is detected (on tampering grounds).

Charles 9

Problem with your claim.

You buy a book. Not on contract. The PAPER is your property but NOT the text within, as that's protected by copyright. Your access to the text within the book is under the terms of the copyright; for example, you can't make copies of the text and sell that on. You CAN sell or pass along the book, but all the rights tied to the book go with it.

You buy a car. That car has a computer in it, with proprietary software protected by contract. You can scrap the software and install your own, but if the dealer's garage learns of this they can pretty much tell you YOYO.

Same with the phone as it contained copyrighted software.

See, when you buy something that contains copyrighted material in it, it gets...complicated.

Charles 9

Re: They want control? That might not be a bad deal...

They DON'T want you to take risks because they figure they'll get sued no matter what the law says, fearing some sneaky lawyer will find some way to challenge the laws with another law and turn the whole matter into a messy and expensive court battle.

Charles 9

"But...the options were seemingly endless. I didn't poke and play because I didn't understand what the knock on effect or direct impact may be of my actions, but - and this is the important bit - I had the option. And, had I screwed it up, I'd have had no one to blame but myself and had that then meant costly repairs at a dealer, so be it, but....I could have"

But here comes the catch to your catch. Joe Stupid doesn't think that way, and stupid doesn't always mean poor. Lawyers can get involved, and they can be crazy enough to attempt to challenge the laws. Put simply, most companies with legal teams tend to have them as a defensive measure, as no company wants a long, drawn-out and expensive court battle against a plaintiff who's hired a lawyer on contingency.

Charles 9

"They don't make batteries. ALL batteries in Apple products are third party parts."

Not true. If they're made under a direct contract to Apple (like how chip foundries make CPUs for AMD--AMD does not own its own foundries, last I read), then it's second-party and generally considered close enough to first-party as makes no difference since most second-party contracts allow for the first party to verify the quality of the work. Think about it. Does Apple have its own chip foundries for its CPUs, either?

Rome wasn't built in a day, wasn't teased in a day, either: AMD's 7nm second-gen 64-core Epyc server chips finally land

Charles 9

1. Pics and certs or it didn't happen.

2. Something like that would be state-level tech of one form or another. Doubt you could compare to the Utah data center and maybe it's secret quantum computer.

3. You want me to be impressed with your claims? Say it can prove/disprove P=NP.

Neuroscientist used brainhack. It's super effective! Oh, and disturbingly easy

Charles 9

Re: Its all fake news

I don't know about that. Direct brain scanning could perhaps get past the one main obstacle to speech recognition: translation (as in things getting lost in translation). Sort of like how reading a text file directly is more accurate than printing it out and then OCR'ing it.

Charles 9

Re: Yeah, good luck on that

Does it still stand because people actively honor it or simply because it ended up obsolete soon after it was ratified (with the rapid ubiquity of metallic casings and from that self-contained cartridges and eventually machine guns)?

Unnecessary and terrifying? No Man's Land seems to indicate that it wasn't really that much of an obstacle.

Charles 9

Re: Facebook with brain hacking capability ? Run for the hills.

Even if the defender is prepared, they're in a fixed spot and cannot resupply. The attacker still has access to reinforcements and can be patient to find other ways in (like Alexander at Tyre).

Charles 9

Re: Upside

Hmm, did you also get the news about Burger King launching the Impossible Burger nationwide this week?

PS. Yes, this news is real, and no synthetic reality may be required to create a vegan burger that tastes better than one made from cows.

Charles 9

Re: Let them dopamine themselves to death

I see your Ark Ship B and raise you one Captain Peter Peachfuzz.

Charles 9

Re: Facebook with brain hacking capability ? Run for the hills.

But in any given siege situation (snd this would count as one), the attacker usually has the advantage.

Alexa, can you tell me how many Chinese kids were forced into working nights to build this unit?

Charles 9

Re: Children?

Not to mention that competition stems from the fact that one's dishonor is the family's dishonor, too. And one wonders why the suicide rates in Far East countries are so high...

Charles 9

Re: Plausible Deniability

What if they're doing the same or worse, meaning ALL roads lead to Hell?

You can easily secure America's e-voting systems tomorrow. Use paper – Bruce Schneier

Charles 9

Re: Americans just don’t trust their governments as much as the UK and Australia

The US was FOUNDED on a distrust of government. Thus why the government was made the way it was. The Founding Fathers just happened to underestimate either American greed or American stupidity.

Charles 9

Re: Hacking an election as an engineering problem

"Attacking the voting machines themselves doesn't scale as well."

So you attack a chokepoint: like the manufacturer, where the mole strategy HAS been used in the past.

Charles 9

Re: Sure there are potential exploits against paper

Less isn't enough. Most legislatures require an overwhelming majority (say two-thirds) to be able to make any permanent changes to the government (such as amend the Constitutions and other foundational documents). And each state they pwn will make it easier to do the same to the US Congress (which is currently too even to do the same thing).

Charles 9

Re: Sure there are potential exploits against paper

What about at the state level, since it's the state legislatures that draw up the districts that then determine how the Representatives sent to Washington are voted? Remember, the Census is coming up, and after that the states get the results which in turn are used to draw up the maps.

As for being able to corrupt so many districts at once, you underestimate the sheer size of the two major political parties in the US. Otherwise, a third party with a lot of backing would've wedged its way in by now.

Hey dudes, we need to start living together in Harmony: Huawei puffs up new distributed OS

Charles 9

seL4 is not performance-oriented. All memory operations must go through the kernel: even something as simple as DMA (a common performance booster and essential for latency-sensitive stuff) breaks the formal proof.

Remember, in a decision between performance and security, performance wins because they'd rather be on time than right (as they cab BS around a wrong answer but not around a missed deadline).

Facebook faces class-action sueball over facial recognition pic-tagging tech to tune of $35bn

Charles 9

Re: Every year...

No, because the other side can always win it BACK. And unlike The People, they lack scruples.

SpaceX reveals chain of events that caused the unplanned disassembly of Crew Dragon capsule

Charles 9

Re: RE. Re. why is anybody surprised

So which is worse: your O2F2 or my ClF3, seeing as how both of them are exceedingly dangerous? I would think ClF3 is worse because it's more stable at STP (O2F2 decomposes rapidly in STP).

PS. I would love to know the particulars of A. G. Streng's attempt to mix the two.

Cloudflare punts far-right hate-hole 8chan off the internet after 30 slayed in US mass shootings

Charles 9

Re: Teach the value of life.

Unfortunately, this is one argument that can't help but have moral implications. It's in its own way a Trolley Problem: no matter what you do, something bad's going to happen because there are always two lives involved (even if one of them is in potentia, which is in itself an argument for whether or not that counts as a right to life). There are plenty of other argument points to be made: the option of adoption and the potential regrets there, too; the possibility of pregnancy complications that can also have long-term or even fatal consequences; custody issues when the mother is herself a minor; social costs concerning population and support for the helpless, and so on. And many of them have knock-on effects that cause them to affect other aspects of society, including potentially total strangers.

So like I said, it's complicated.

Charles 9

Re: Rampage killers' fixation on small arms *lowers* the body counts.

Not THAT MUCH harder to do. That's MY point. Take one means away and people will just pivot to another. Make something hard, they'll come up with a way to make it easier. I mean, people in the far east kill themselves MUCH more than in the West in spite of considerable efforts to prevent it. Where there's a will, there's a way.

"In all other circles we make pretty heroic efforts to reduce the chance of bad things and to reduce their effects should they occur. Why are guns so much more important than (eg) cars?"

And yet people STILL die (in large numbers) in car accidents. Sometimes, you just can't fight physics. People can exploit that for other's detriment.

Charles 9

Re: @Charles. So, since 1961 ...

They DID leave vital things out. They also blurred out labels if needed (Adam Savage once lampshaded this by calling two chemicals "blur") and censored technical names (often in a funny way). Oh, and they DID prove the bug bomb thing to be true, though they did qualify that it may have been exacerbated by using more canisters than actually needed.

Charles 9

Re: @Kiwi ... "You can [..] draw a conclusion that bad actors are going to [..] do bad things."

So how do you teach people who don't want to learn and if push came to shove would rather fight you than surrender?

Charles 9

Re: Guns or the people using them?

You can own an AK-47 built before 1985. People can and do own fully-operable tanks (an episode of Adam-12 demonstrated). About the only thing stopping a private party owning a nuclear weapon is availability of the components: particularly yellowcake.

Charles 9

Re: Guns or the people using them?

Under the rule of law, you're going to need 2/3 of each house AND 38 state legislatures to agree. In today's hyper-partisan world, you're going to need a crisis of existential (or at least 9/11) proportions to get them to agree. Otherwise, they're willing to just pin the blame for America's decay to the other side, meaning decay works FOR them, not against them.

Charles 9

Tell that to the Korean storekeepers during the L.A. Riots. By most accounts, the ONLY reason the mobs didn't just storm those store in number exactly WAS because the guns they owned could do just that.

Charles 9

Help was REFUSED. Like Rohrshach, they just looked back and said, "No." Often it's because the potential benefactors have been previously betrayed: once bitten, twice shy.

You've never met a real dead-ender, have you? People kicked out of school early. People not even McDonald's will hire. People turned away by churches and charities. People for whom the ladder of upward mobility literally has no rungs. Not that it matters, as often they don't have the aptitude to climb it.

Denying it doesn't make it less true. What is society supposed to do with the hopeless rejects?

Charles 9

Re: inspired by 8chan

You do. You just don't realize it because many other countries don't try to blend cultures together, resulting in culture clash. Even Switzerland tends to segregate it's multiple cultures.

Charles 9

Re: So, since 1961 ...

"Or is this how we should expect politicians to behave now."

It's pretty much how we ALWAYS expect politicians to behave, as a sociopathic streak is pretty much a prerequisite. Thus why politicians are considered first among the three people you learn never to trust (the other two being televangelists and used car salesmen).

So a lot of American culture is PROUDLY "You're on your own. If you can't hack it, too bad, Game Over, better luck next life."

Charles 9

Re: Guns or the people using them?

"When you culture means that you are so piss-pants scared of your neighbour that you feel you have to have a gun, you need to fix your culture."

I can't recall a time when a culture fixed itself from within prior to it collapsing and being changed from without.

"The solution is within your reach, in your hands even."

Wanna bet? You've never been to the likes of El Salvador, have you? There are plenty of places where the options are pretty much reduced to "go criminal," "go elsewhere," or "die."

It's heads you win, tails you lose as Microsoft introduces CoinFlip™ for Windows 10

Charles 9
FAIL

No, if it flips edge, the entire machine will Halt and Catch Fire. About the only way you'll convince the world to stop using Windows.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Charles 9
Thumb Down

Re: Estonia tells you who in government has been looking at your data

"knowledge is the burden of knowing whats happening to you without the power to do anything about it. it's actually disempowering in that instance."

I disagree. Otherwise, what's the power of blackmail? "I know something you might now want the world to know, hmm hmm?"

Now, granted, there is a level of power that allows one to disregard blackmail and the like, but that's a highly sanctified tier that few can actually reach. If you're not one of those few, like they say, a little knowledge can be dangerous.

Charles 9

Re: So where is the antidote ?

How do you know Bob is really Bob and not Gene?

Charles 9

Re: RE: encryption from my PC to its destination PC/server

Didn't Bruce Schneier provide a counter to the "Trusting Trust" argument by using a second compiler from a vouched or near-vouched source so as to trip up and evil compiler?

Get ready for a literal waiting list for European IPv4 addresses. And no jumping the line

Charles 9

Re: IPv6 is here

"That is the number one factor. They see no need. They don't bother learning. They don't bother doing."

Or, to use the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Their infrastructure is based on IPv4, is probably pretty comples, and likely contains enough essential legacy hardware that moving forward is an issue. And without an IPv6 internal network, accessing the IPv6 Internet is going to likely involve additional hardware and definitely some additional jiggery-pokery that invites Murphy's Law to strike.

So if you want them to migrate, allow them a way to do so without having to do any of that with an essentially turnkey solution.

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Charles 9

Re: In answer to his question

"Have dealt with many wimps (used to be their king at one stage!) - many would fold long before they fainted."

Then they aren't real wimps. REAL wimps would faint first, meaning it's impossible to get anything from them as anything even remotely resembling violence (like an angry dog bark) would make them a gibbering mess if not outright unconscious.

"...every one breaks."

Depends on what you mean by breaking. Given people have willingly committed suicide instead of surrendering, I would think there are some who would simply endeavor themselves, regardless of circumstances, to make it so that when they break, they shatter and become utterly useless in any event. Even if totally bound and helpless, they'd probably tap hysterical strength to tear their own bodies apart and bleed out.

Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again

Charles 9

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

"Software written for lazy fools is rarely worth using, in my experience."

But that's YOUR experience, and you're in the minority.

Charles 9

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

Because different file types can have the same magic numbers. Take ePUBs, ODF documents, and so on. They're really just repurposed ZIP files so a magic number search will mistake them for ZIP even though there's more to them than that.

Charles 9

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

And the older MacOS's used special case-sensitive four-character identifiers, both for the type of file and the program used to create it. It's a trade-off, really. Making the file type easy to chance means they can be re-purposed more easily but that very mechanism can also be exploited.

Researchers find development and conservation aren't mutually exclusive

Charles 9

Re: So what they're saying

"Especially if you ignore the land use changes that would be required to support an all-vegan planet."

What kind of land use changes are you describing that wouldn't be for the better versus a meat-eating diet (which is notoriously terrible in resource consumption versus plant diets)? Otherwise, why wouldn't thing like the Impossible Burger be turning up ecological interests.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's two-dozen government surveillance balloons over America

Charles 9

Re: RE: AC

"The overdose problem with street narcotics is because of the variable amount of the active drug in the sample."

AND the fact unscrupulous dealers have been swapping out the drugs for more potent stuff that's still easier to get. Fentanyl overdoses have been increasingly common. There's also the truck of swapping for stuff not intended for humans such as swapping out several mg of heroin for just a single speck of carfentanil (WARNING: that stuff is only meant for use with large animals such as bears).

PS. Even if drug markets went legit, there would still be a black market for people who want the stuff cheaper, without pesky taxes and so on (think the stolen cigarettes being sold back in Goodfellas).

Lyft pulls its e-bike fleet from San Francisco Bay Area after exploding batteries make them the hottest seat in town

Charles 9

"I photograph homes for estate agents and every home that has been subsidized by the government is torn to bits. People (mostly) take care of things they own. If it belongs to or is paid for by somebody else, not so much."

Is that because someone else is footing the bill or because the people being subsidized are of the type who wouldn't care even if they DID own it free and clear. I see plenty of free-and-clear houses and cars and such that have been pretty badly beat up. For them, as long as it's a roof over their head or it runs, they don't care.

Trump continues on the warpath: Now US tariffs cover nearly everything arriving from China

Charles 9

Re: Trump likes winners

But who's going to stop them when it's their own sovereign government blessing it and fabricating the details to anyone who dares to ask?

Ah, the joys of sovereignty...