* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Trump's cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient 'easily hackable website'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Re: "Let's make America reasonable again !"

"Roosevelt's New Deal policy is said to have been pretty reasonable (very few of us will have direct experience, as this was back in the 1933 to 1938 timeframe). "

So 7 decades ago.

" protecting West Berlin during the cold war."

That would be the Berlin airlift of 1948.

However as a practical matter military planners gave West Berlin a survival time of hours should WWIII start. It was surrounded by East Germany. For some reason it also meant residents were exempted from compulsory military service, which attracted a lot of young people to the city.

More recently the US has been home to $T (1x10^12) deficits, repeatedly dead locked decision making in both houses (because of a system that ran district councils in the 17th century does not really work for the biggest economy in the 21st), multiple bank bailouts and multiply misguided foreign invasions, at least one of which blatantly lined the pockets of one former SecDef.

Let us not forget the infection of the US Legal system that is THE PATRIOT Act and the continual running of the Guantanamo Bay prison, most of whose inmates were never subject to due process .

(if you were offered a bounty equal to 2 years pay wouldn't you be thinking about who you knew who looked a bit "suspicious"? Especially if you had a friend in the local police force to do the arresting.) as well as the vast personal data hoover that is the NSA, which shows no restraint and no signs of being restrained by any outside body and which has already caused the DEA to lie about its sources since to admit they were the source would admit it spied on US citizens.

I haven't gotten onto the assorted collection of SEL's that is the Religious Right who will no doubt continue to ensure the US has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy of any "developed" country.

Reasonable? to misquote Rorschach "I'd expect more sensible behavior from a Romanian orphanage full of retarded children".

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Let's make America reasonable again !"

You'll have to remind me the last time America was reasonable.

That's a goal so far above the current state of practice in US politics as to be almost inconceivable

Alert State : Delusional.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Do the Ruskies have footage of Giuliani also paying prostitutes to piddle on each other?"

Obviously depends if that's his sort of thing.

Plenty of other embarrassing s**t they can record him doing instead.

Cross dressing, crushing, sounding, adult babies etc.

The trouble with this "dodgy dossier" (to coin a phrase) is it sounds like the sort of thing Trump would do and 'ol straight-as-a-die Putin would get him recorded doing.

But is it real, or is it just written just to sound real?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"this Circus of Buffoons providing hilarious entertainment until impeachment. "

Whereupon The D will tell you :-

a) I did a brilliant job

b) I was betrayed by those around me.

c) My advisors were just not smart enough to carry out my vision.

d) You knew what I was like when you elected me. IOW It's on you (the voters).

e) All of the above.

Trump is what the American people asked for. Time will tell if he's what they wanted.

But f**k me sideways it's cold day in Hell when the best the only 2 parties with a serious shot at holding the Oval Office can spew up is Hilary and Donald. Sounds like the name of a quite dire sitcom. Lazily written, implausibly plotted, unconvincingly acted. :-(

"Circus of Buffoons" Hmm. I like that.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Balance of probabilities?

Never subscribe to cunning what simple ignorance and laziness can explain.

Looks like a badly maintained website because it is a badly maintained website.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

A *lot* of infosec seems to be about "process"

OK so he doesn't know how to update a CMS but he should have someone who

a)Checks for updates

b)Installs them

c)Checks the new install does not have the same vulns.

The point his company does not seem to have such a person in place is not a good sign.

There are 2 philosophies on IT web sites. Keep your best devs for you clients or showcase your best work on your own site. Both are reasonable PoV. But as a customer I'm thinking "If you can't look after your own site, why the hell would I let you look after mine (along with Ex Mayor of NY == IT Guru ??)

Everything wrong with IoT (and how to fix it) – according to Uncle Sam

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Still looks like a s**t idea to me.

But I think a lot can be done in present law, like is a net linked webcam with a hidden hard coded user ID and a couple of 5 year old vulns "fit for purpose" ?

Should the supplier be liable? Well if he sells in the US he should, should he not?

Boffins turn timid mice into psycho killers – by firing lasers into brains

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

If I were paranoid I'd ask who funds such research.

If I were really paranoid I'd ask who would like to fund such research, now it's shown such "positive" results.

Thanks, Obama: NSA to stream raw intelligence into FBI, DEA and pals

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

"Department of Energy? That well known establishment of international spies and spooks

For reasons far too complex and stupid to follow all the nuclear weapons R&D labs are under the DoE.

Hence anyone who might be talking about weapons design or enrichment is definitely on their "We want to know more about them" list.

MIT brainiacs wrangle 2D graphene into super-strong 3D art homework

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Was I the only person who thought they're like the Fermi surfaces of metals?

Not sure if that's common maths or simply coincidence.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Worse than that.

This is a 3d model made 10^7x bigger in plastic so they could test it in the press.

The rest is a (detailed) computer simulation.

To make real actual 3d Graphene it looks like you might as well build a set of manipulators to pick up fragments in a low H atmosphere and bring the close enough together that they form bonds directly.

The big takeaway seems to be their model does model the behavior of the 3d shape they printed despite being 10 million times bigger and made of photoreactive polymer, not Graphene. So maybe other materials fabricated with these shapes may have superior properties to using the bulk material.

So 3d printed geometries may be able to outperform the same material in bulk.

Who knew?

Elon's SpaceX gets permission to blow up another satellite or two

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"Nor were US/Russian/EU/Chinese/Brazilian government RUDs"

And since we're being honest about this let's also have in the first 3 F1 launches which also went bang at various flight stages.

The idea is that as you get better at things that's meant to happen less frequently.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

"release that amount of energy over the course of probably about 30 hours of flight."

And if it explodes you get to release it in a few seconds.

Yes turbo pumps are high powe devices. Not high energy. That's why some launchers are starting to run battery powered turbo pumps.

However in the 8 decades since they've first been used in a rocket their design process has got considerably better.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

"When you have basically a massive flying bomb travelling supersonic, "

Not very well known fact about space launch.

The amount of energy needed to put 1 unit of mass into low earth orbit is the same as that burnt in the fuel to take it on a round trip between London and Australia (Bono & Gatland, Frontiers of Space).

Yet somehow all those "massive flying bombs" manage to fly that trip (and equally long ones) every day without blowing up at an average of 1 in 20 flights.

Funny how that works, is it not?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Pint

"judging from that masthead photo, Musk is a mere youth with bumfluff for facial hair"

Nicely plaid piece of "Bluff old duffer"

I raise a glass.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

They're not failures, they're "learning opportunities".

Quite true.

SX like to say it's all engineering but I suspect a fair bit of this has involved pushing well past what's in textbooks.

The technical term for when you're discovering new things is "Science"

And Science does not make discoveries on schedule (outside of a DARPA funding pitch of course).

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"who can forget the very first Ariane 5 launch..."

Indeed. A masterclass in fu**ked software engineering. But note also it was a case of "If it's not broke, don't fix it." In fact the SW should have been stripped out.

However 74 launches later they have not repeated it.

"SpaceX have done a good job so far, let down in one accident by a faulty component, and by pushing the envelope on rocket fueling in the other one."

Actually it's starting to look like they have had a recurring problem with COPV's (which BTW have historically had a pretty good safety record on all other LV's)

"All done on a budget a lot lot lot lot smaller than Ariane or Atlas had."

True, although it had long been suspected that industry cost models (which institutionalise mediocrity), government cost plus contracting and purchasing regulations (also "Just return" for European projects and the US practice of a contractor in every Congressional district), not to mention the "sub contract everything" meme multiplied the cost of such a project.

Surprise, surprise. The answer turned out to be yes.

The problem is the Aerospace Corporation have a thing called the "5/8" rule. A failure with in 5 launches of initial launch is probably a mfg flaw. At 8 or above it's likely a design flaw. This is the 2nd time a COPV issue has destroyed a payload (and it looks like the third serious incident they've had with COPV's).

That's looking to be a bit of a pattern.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" wonder why people latch on to the very rare failures of SpaceX"

Because they are not that rare.

F9 has now had 2 in 36 failure rate. You could argue it's 1 in 35 as the 2nd never got to a launch, but the satellite owner whose payload got turned into confetti would probably disagree with you.

Atlas V has 51 straight launches without a failure and manages to launch about 1 every 1-2 months..

Ariane 5 has 74 launches since its last failure (early dec 2002). about 1 every 2-3 months.

You can argue that's the price you pay for innovation but SX has a hell of a back log and some have already swallowed the hit and gone with other launchers.

Oh ALIS, don't keep us waiting: F-35 jet's software 'delayed'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

"ALIS' adventures in Blunderland"

Upvoted for originality.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"US$500k a plane to cover the specialised nature of the design and manufacturing process..."

And the testing.

Got to be passed by all the relevant MilSpec entries.

Of which I'm sure there are many.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I'm sure I read somewhere that the F35 doesn't do well with big amounts of water vapor "r."

Not sure about that. IIRC that was the issue with one of the F117 stealth bombers over Sarajevo.

Turned out the stealth coating was just fine in the Middle Eastern atmosphere but over soggy Europe it broke down.

The crew thought they were flying a radar invisible aircraft.

They weren't.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"temperamental when ground crew plug their Panasonic Toughbook diagnostic laptops"

Back in the day a UK company called Husky computers used to make rugged laptops. One of the more novel accessories they provided was a 19pin plug to connect to the Rapier SAM for on board checkout (AFAIK Rapier was the only design win for the Ferranti designed F100 bipolar microprocessor)

Never saw any stories about connection failure.

Do you get the feeling the LM design, coding and test process is FUBAR?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

Re: National security

"We see you are using an ad blocker. LM Logistics Services is entirely supported by advertising. Please disable you're ad blocker to proceed with mission planning or logistics replenishment. "

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" whoever finds it can probably look back and KNOW where the aircraft has been"

Absolutely not (as I'm sure LM would tell people)

No one has any idea of the protocol used to transfer the data.

Any notion that dullards future insurgents could get into the system, let alone ready that data is quite absurd.

Honest.

IBM: Hm, medical record security... security... Got it – we need blockchains

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Actually I've been thinking about a ledger system that you can't just edit the files of.

This might have it's uses.

But correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't TCP/IP invent to allow large numbers of grossly incompatible computers to share data?

Strike January: Fujitsu staff gearing up for more industrial action – Unite

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Regional was the way to go when you could get sympathy strikes in other companies.

But today national organization to stop a whole company like Fujitsu, or Capita, is the way to go.

Not advocating industrial action, merely pointing out the best way to run it.

Terry Pratchett's self-written documentary to be broadcast in 2017

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"unexpectedly poignant"

You're watching the brain of a man who was a great satirist and whose work was loved by millions gradually turn from porridge (as Alan Turin put it) to blancmange.

I think most people who aren't actual psychopaths would find that quite poignant.

NASA taps ESA satellite Swarm for salty ocean temperature tales

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" mysterious deep currents in the Eastern Pacific "

I think you'll find that current is called the "Conveyor."

It's driven by a salinity gradient.

Which is disrupted by large quantities of ice falling into the ocean.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Astonshing.

Come on this is very high level boffinry.

I mean, being able to do the conductance of thousands of cubic kilometers of ocean.

From space.

The oceans are huge thermal flywheels so knowing where different parts of them are at regarding temperature at any given time is definitely going to improve GCM climate models.

Excellent work and I hope the results start being incorporated in those models as soon as a near full data set is available.

Renault goes open source with next-gen electric buggy you might generously call 'a car'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Waymo. So called because

with it Google will have waymo data about you.

Google services are always "complementary"

Not free.

NGO to crowdfund legal challenge against Investigatory Powers Act

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

The bill has to pass because HMG have been doing what it legalizes for decades.

Something which would still be just a tinfoil hat wearers claim before Edward Snowden.

However hopefully some of it's clauses can be moderated and maybe the Supreme Court can review it's view that "Oh it's alright, it's not "collected" till a human actually listens/views the surveillance"

Let's never forget the real inspiration of this process. As the Cardinal put it 400 yrs ago.

"Give me 6 lines from an honest man and I will find something with which to hang him."

You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"Thee part that says that a publisher has to pay all costs, even if they win in"

If they are not a member of a recognized regulator and don't submit to arbitration.

And does not come in to force until a Regulator is set up.

This is what you get if you have UK governments running scared of Murdoch and believing the claim that it's "The Sun Wot Won It" BS.

Newspapers should have come under fair reporting laws in the UK decades ago. They didn't. Self regulation has proved to be BS for Murdoch titles and the Mirror under Robert Maxwell.

They did it to themselves.

Why the UK is unlikely to get an adequacy determination post Brexit

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"The.. browser data collections will be of great use to a future government t"

Of whatever stripe that government is.

Hard right

Hard left

Doesn't matter.

The bureaucrats have thoughtfully collected a dataset for any politician to use.

The only safe option is not to collect this data to begin with.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

her stated intention to make it a manifesto commitment to withdraw from the ECHR.

Personally, this scares me. A lot.

It should.

A lot.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"We as a nation. Wasn't that what Brexit is supposed to be about?"

Oh you mean (it's just) Boris banging on about "Taking back control" ?

Seems he mean the Home Office taking back control (of bulk data sets).

Just to reiterate the UK Supreme Court view in a nutshell.

"Bulk storage of personal data is just fine. It's only if it's used in bulk that there might be an issue with Article 8."

No one else in Europe agrees. But then some of those countries (both North and South of the Iron Curtain) lived through what happens when the state is allowed uncontrolled bulk data collection.

D-Link sucks so much at Internet of Suckage security – US watchdog

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"D-Link have a significant US presence, are small enough to be a great test case, "

Indeed.

D-Link are low hanging fruit in this and the fact they have a significant US presence means the FTC can do them some financial damage. I'd be very strongly surprised if D-Link have a leg to stand on and I doubt they will be the last unless US mfg's show very clear signs they are moving to toward making their products more secure and more updateable.

It's well past time every company that made an internet connected product factored in an upgrade program as part of it's product development plans. If the hardware runs Linux it's not a black art, it's a package manager. Hard coded passwords are a development smell. It's (barely) defensible if no one knows how to avoid it but that fact is it can be avoided, and once avoided the approach can be reused for the next project. Why is it that only the crap code ever seems to be reused?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

AC without AC icon.

Smarter than the average.

And they say Marketing never talks to IT.

Apple's CEO Tim Cook declines invitation to discuss EU tax ruling with Irish parliament

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

It took the EU 3 years to agree to let HMG lend Reaction Engines £60m

Apple looks like they did a sweetheart deal with the Irish govt.

A sweetheart deal needs 2 people to agree to it. We know what Apple got from it (an obscene amount off their legitimate tax bill). What did the Irish govt get?

And the effort they are making is still more than the HMG have taken against any of CMD's old friends.

NASA plans seven-year trip to Jupiter – can we come with you, please?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

That's a lump of metal (probably Nickel Iron) 200Km in diameter

Scrap dealers will kill for that kind of deal.

How the NYE leap second clocked Cloudflare – and how a single character fixed it

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

OMG "reviewing its code for time calculation problems

They have found bugs in their code.

And are reviewing the code base for others with the same pattern.

Isn't that how all developers should do it?

Joe Public likes drones and regulations, finds UK.gov 'public dialogue'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"UK drone use is fairly innocuous"

Until a government department starts getting involved.

That' won't be so innocuous.

US cops seek Amazon Echo data for murder inquiry

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"A microphone in every room, listening 24x7, all connected to a service you don't control. "

But wait till you see their new streaming video system. Something like this

In theory echo should delete everything it hears between commands (it's not a command) and at most log when and what command was requested.

In practice??

And best of all you pay for your own surveillance.

Barcodes stamped on breast implants and medical equipment

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

Implants to have ID numbers on them.

I thought this was SOP for medical bits.

Seriously. It's taken till 2016 for the NHS to work this out?

How Google.org stole the Christmas Spirit

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So in fact it's not "DonorsChoose"

It's DonorChoose chooses.

But TBF it's tough to front end Google and get to the money before they do.

Any psychopath MBA would applaud the exploitative cunning creative brand marketing of the organization.

Peace comes to troubled embedded-Linux-for-routers community

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

This sounds liek some good news for Xmas.

Stronger together?

Chinese boffins: We're testing an 'impossible' EM Drive IN SPAAAACE

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"The ironic thing..the chinese to take up a technology the americans explicitly threw away"

I looked up the history of this stuff a while back.

Back in the 70's the US was looking for the next generation of reactors. Knowledge of the liquid salt reactor was mostly at Oak Ridge, while other labs knew more about the liquid Sodium fast reactor.

The US put all its funds on the LMFR.

Turned out Sodium is a real PITA compared to LBE (although I doubt the US knew this at the time), the world did not run out of Uranium a) Because it's got lots and b) Because reactors took longer and cost more to build than expected. AFAIK all the 2nd generation reactor designs had troubles. I'm not sure how many of them actually got built

Then 3 mile island happened and US utility companies learned how you could turn a $1Bn asset into a $2Bn liability.

So 40 years later the PWR remains the #1 reactor type on the planet, despite most of its design decisions being tailored for powering a submarine at 1/10 the size.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"The Chinese might only be claiming they will test this drive in space"

Quite correct.

The Russians played this prank on the Americans in the 50's with the "nuclear powered bomber"

The Americans played it on the Russians with SDI.

Both with hilarious consequences as they say.

The trouble is that for a good strategic deception (which is what these are) you need something that's

a)Too important not to investigate

b)Needs vast resources to do so. IE multi $Bn budgets in today's money.

In principle an EM drive could be tested by a few cubesats. Say 1 for the drive and a couple to act as observers. Varying the shape of the chamber might need a couple more.

I don't think there's any size limit either up or down. If you can make their thrust exceed say 2x the air drag (still the largest single force on a satellite below 1000Km, everything else is smaller) then all you have to observe is do they (or at least one of them) break orbit and start flying toward whatever you've aimed it at or not?

Actually there is one high spec option which is to make the chamber walls superconductors. That would be really crank the price. You could spend $m on that.

Still not really going to bring an economy to it's knees though, is it?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

Some people think it sounds crazy, some don't

But I'm kind of guessing that if the Chinese Academy is investigating it it's because

a)Some very VIP has required them to.

b)They know something others don't

While it's possible it's I'd guess if there was any obvious way this could be shot down it would have already been done.

Space is the logical place to test this and in principle a crewed station is an excellent position to do so. Let's see what happens./

Christmas Eve ERP migration derailed by silly spreadsheet sort

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Extract, Translate & Load on Xmas Eve.

Genius.*

I smells a bonus at stake or a PHB with zero home life at work.

*Smart move about the no "lessons learned / wrap up " meeting afterwards.

Microsoft scores nearly $1bn non-compete contract with US military

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

Wow, $1Bn up front.

Nice work if you can get it.