* Posts by John Smith 19

16326 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Pentagon fastens lasers to military drones to zap missiles out of the skies

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"given enough power, given enough beam quality, given enough altitude,"

in a package small enough to fit on a drone that isn't the size of REL's Skylon

Good luck with that.

A note on mirrors.

Conventional polished surfaces can do broadband reflectivity in the 70-90% range.

Fabry Perot multilayer mirrors can achieve 99% reflectivity in a narrow bandwidth IE specific colour and can (in principal) be made in large sheets.

Narrow bandwidth light is what lasers generate.

For fsck's SAKKE: GCHQ-built phone voice encryption has massive backdoor – researcher

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

In all seriousness what will the UKG *really* be using for it's voice calls?

Because it surely can't be this PoS.

I note that the Joint Speech Research Unit (part of the GPO IIRC but bound to have links to GCHQ) was doing voice over 2400bps in the 1950s

I would not underestimate their technical skills.

However what they are applied to is down to their PHB's.

It's the difference between British soldiers and the MoD.

One group is highly professional and focused, and the other group tells them what to do.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

asdf

"You think the Russians care about a US or UK subpoena? Keep thinking only your countries Intel agencies will have access to any back door."

Indeed.

It's not the details of the backdoor that matter.

It is the fact that a government mandated exists at all.

And once enough back ground knowledge exist finding it won't be that hard.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

@a_yank_lurker

"It seems like they all want slurp all communications without considering that 99.99..9% is absolutely not germain to terrorist or criminal activity "

Oh dear. : (

This has nothing to do with the story they tell their political "masters" to get funding.

Data fetishists collect data because they believe more is always better.

It's not a policy, it's a disease.

Inside Intel's CPU-level multi-factor auth (and why we've got deja vu)

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Down

"We just hope nothing compromises the ME at the heart of Intel Authenticate."

Let me see.

Embedded processor and instruction set that bypasses (and therefore cannot be removed by) all operating systems

With built in connectivity to the outside world.

Can you say grand target?

Facebook Messenger: All your numbers are belong to us

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

“Facebook M” starts listening in to all your conversations

F**k right off right there.

I loath the idea of government agencies doing this.

The notion I should allow it for a for-profit American corporation (money making and government access through THE PATRIOT Act) makes me want to vomit.

Bigger than Safe Harbor: Microsoft prez vows to take down US gov in data protection lawsuit

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Putting a muzzle on the US government

Interesting idea.

French say 'Non, merci' to encryption backdoors

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"vulnerability by design," I do believe she gets it.

And they are part of the G8, as opposed to the Netherlands, who isn't.

Put your private parts on display if you want to keep earning a living

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

BrownEye's marketing moto

"We are everywhere."

What do Angolan rebels, ISIS widows, Metallica and a photographer have in common?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"devout anti-Communist" ..human rights violations on a massive scale are likely around the corner

Too right.

The Formosas running Nicaragua as their personal property.

Noriega of Panama. Less a "Cold warrior" and more a "Booty warrior" by some accounts.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Jonas Savimbi?" "big halfwit who wants to kill everybody"

Sounds about par for the course for most of these murderous dictatorial f**kwits.

I guess the families flogged the last of the blood diamonds and looking for a source of revenue.

Huffing and puffing Intel needs new diet of chips if it's to stay in shape

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Different economics

"Intel cannot get the profit margin it expects (of over 50%) in any area where it has real competition. Fabbing chips for other companies will be unlikely to produce returns over 10%. IOT chips are unlikely to give returns of over 20% due to the competition from ARM based chips."

Interesting.

On this basis Intel's problem is neither it's technology nor it's products.

It is Intel's sense of entitlement. There expectation they can charge that kind of markup in areas where there are substantial competitors already in place.

Intel's core skills are making chips. They make the best Intel processors on the planet. Logically they should leverage that and start making the best ARM chips on the planet.

But until they get over themselves that's not likely to happen.

What's clear is sometime in the next decade we'll be down to the 1 atom FET and at that point everyone's technology will be on a level playing field.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Oh dear Intel are not making as much profit as they are used to

And I care because?

Intel owes it's supremacy on the desktop to MS and vice versa. While MS still has the death grip on the file formats PHB's insist have to be used (because they can't figure out how to override the defaults and open real open source standards) they'll be alright.

But if you're doing a clean sheet build of a new software system and you don't give a stuff about it being "Intel inside".....

Telecity shuffles off London stockmarket

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Note THE PATRIOT Act now applies to anyone using them.

All your data is now available for the USG's inspection.

Your permission is not required and your awareness will not be allowed.

Watchdog says yes to BT's EE takeover deal. Shrugs. No 'significant' harm in it

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

"We get to see a Willem Dafoe/Kevin Bacon deathmatch."

Excellent.

The Green Goblin takes on the guy from what was basically "Death Wish TNG"

Bring the popcorn.

Murderous necrophiliac kangaroo briefly wins nation's heart

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

You know the theme song.

"Stiffy, Stiffy, Stiffy the bush Kangaroo."

True story. The guy who played the kid in the series (a long time ago) said quite a lot of his scenes had to be shot carefully to avoid anyone noticing that Skippy was pretty rampant most of the time. Not something you really think about with most animals.

And so I bid farewell to another part of the innocence of my childhood. <sniff>

UK Home Sec stumbles while trying to justify blanket cyber-snooping

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

@Bernard M. Orwell

"hmmm... Many posts with a single downvote, yet a single upvote on this one. I sense a familiar presence......"

Yes it looks like our favorite apologist for state surveillance is out and about.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Trollface

Re: A necessary evil

Do not feed.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Well she could but "We wants it because...

""We wants it" is Gollum."

Correct. But nothing conveys the unlimited, unbounded desire for possession (in this case of all users data, all the time, forever) quite like Gollum's monologues.

Interesting you refer to him as Gollum, when the characters name is "Schmegle." Gollum being who he is turned into by his lust for the Ring.

Kind of like the list of sock puppets Home Secretaries who turn into instant fanbois for this once they enter office.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Well she could but "We wants it because...

We wants it" would make her sound like a power mad dictator with a Stalin sized desire for control of everyone.

Which might make people disinclined to pass this Bill without drastic reductions in powers and gagging.

Nevertheless that's the bottom of data fetishism. The believe that more data is always better and all data (all the time, stored forever) is best.

Put that way does it not sound like a delusion caused by a mental illness?

Improve, automate, rinse and repeat: All aboard the starship DevOps

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Nordstrom here in the US"

Exactly.

I doubt their management give a stuff about what OS is being run, how many VM's it's hosting or what the development language or package is.

But I also bet they get very annoyed with systems fail, upgrades don't happen on time or upgrades have bugs, and they've hired managers who will to the necessary digging to find the root cause, get it fixed and ensure it stays fixed.

IOW DevOps is the process IT developed to get the result. If something else worked better they'd to that instead. It was not imposed on them by the Board as "The Next Big Thing."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Hilarious reading. Thanks.

I wonder how many dev teams in the UK can actually deliver tested software anywhere close to the numbers they gave for schedule & budget on a project?

My feeling is until you get to really big teams, whose resources make them effectively a large software house in their own right, very damm few. :-( .

And if you can't deliver the software on anything like the schedule and budget, but mostly the schedule. How can you say "I'm going to need another half dozen VM's to run regression testing by day X with this configuration and by day Y we'll take them down and need Z configured for production" when you have no clue what X, Y and Z are (in all honesty).

I suspect in 10 yrs time we'll find a small handful of companies (whose core business is not IT) have been doing this all along, but since they just got on with it and had no desire to tell anyone about it they never shouted it from the rooftop.

But maybe I'm wrong and this is the start of a glorious new world of gradually (and constantly) improving applications.

Engineer's bosses gave him printout of his Yahoo IMs. Euro court says it's OK

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Expectation of privacy on company supplied systems in the workplace.

Zero.

The trouble is there comes a point at which workplace employee surveillance monitoring can become so ubiquitous (motion tracking sensors under the desk at the Torygraph anyone?) the only limitation becomes the employers resources and what they think is "reasonable."

Robert Maxwell recorded his Board members conversations and I'm not sure if that was actually illegal under UK law. So ceiling microphones doing real time speech recognition flagging key words?

Yes I think the best way to describe such a work place corporate culture would be diseased

We know this isn't about PRISM, Matt Warman MP. But do you?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Because then it'll be a quicker trip to the ECHR or ECJ to get a drubbing."

Interesting strategy.

Personally I'd preferred it get chopped up (from about 200 pages) and a large number of its gagging provisions (starting around ss54 IIRC) be removed.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Options, options.

1) Warman has done enough background reading to say something stupid and keep repeating it

2)Waman has a naive faith in the British security services and does not understand "filter"==query on f**king huge database of everything

3)Warman has been bought

4)All of the above.

There is no "none of the above" as I'm pretty sure those options cover any reason he'd say what he said and keep on saying it.

They are data fetishists. This is not a logical policy. It's a disease and one day it will be recognized and treated as such.

UK NHS-backed health apps 'riddled with security flaws'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Checklist security is easy, "

Except what they are saying is that all tested apps violated 2 bad coding rules at a minimum

The question is why can't they be written right in the first place.

Call of Duty terror jabber just mindless banter

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I've seen a couple of episodes - because I didn't believe it was as bad as I'd heard."

True but to give some credit to the shows creators it might just perhaps get some of the users of the millions of US owned Windows PC that have no AV installed to think "Perhaps I should get something installed."

And maybe the US botnet population goes down a bit.

No promises. Just maybe, a bit.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

See what happens when you think CSI:Cyber is a series of training films?

'Nuff said.

DataCore scores fastest ever SPC-1 response times. Yep, a benchmark

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"multiple cores in a multi-core processor to handle IOs "

Sorry but it's taken how long to get this technology working?

Open Web Application Security Project issues new secure coding bible

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"Developers are responsible for insecurity."

True.

Always.

And to the reply "The PHB made me do it." Make sure you have a record of supplying them with an analysis of what happens (especially how much money) will be lost if the project goes live with their planned arrangements and security is breached.

Future Snowden hunt starts with audit of NSA spooks' privileges

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Scary too

"In such a large outfit there must be staff open to bribery or blackmail. So what exactly have the Russians, Chinese, ISIS and the Mafia walked off with (or maybe inserted, deleted, changed)? If the incompetence is really so great, one need hardly bother with conspiracy theories to get seriously worried..."

Especially as someone hacked the whole USGov personnel system (including all those 163 page vetting forms for security roles where you tell them everything about yourself).

Investigatory Powers Bill: A force for good – if done right?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"..process has revealed 5 extremely intrusive powers" "is nothing short of a major scandal."

Correct.

It is.

Will you do anything about it?

Will you find out who bypassed both Houses and effectively treated Parliament with (complete) contempt.

I doubt it was the Home Secretary of the time who initiated this, as I doubt they even understand what they were being told (if indeed they were told anything) about it.

Let's keep in mind this didn't stop 7/7 or the killing of Lee Rigby despite both groups being on this system and it's supposed justification being the prevention of such incidents.

So how big an incident does it have to be before "the system" actually starts flagging a serious danger?

7/7 took 54 victims. What's the limit before the potential body count of an incident will be investigated? 60? 70? 100 potential victims?

Americans massively back call for more police body camera tech

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

Folks there is 1 obvious argument that makes any argument against wearing them redundant

You have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, officer.

Right?

You want more cameras in shops, offices, buildings, why don't you show how good they are?

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"And so are the stats on black vs white violent crimes. "

Not going to quote old Trumper, are you?

IRL most crimes perpetrated on a racial group are committed by members of that racial group.

IOW most crimes committed on White people are committed by White people, the same for black, hispanic and other ethnic groups.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

Re: War on police in USA? Depends.

"Actual officer deaths due to firearms, for instance, are lower than ever -- after a post-Prohibition high point in the mid-1970s, the trend has been for fewer and fewer officers killed. 2015 looks set to be one of the safest years yet for police officers."

Goddamit you're won of those intellectual types who bring those facts to an argument.

Ought to be a law agin it.

Signed

A Hillbilly.

Microservices are not the same thing as components

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"yes each with its own non public facing internal api. "

Irrelevant.

Pretty much all the data indicates a lot of trouble is caused at the "unit" level due to misunderstandings between different units and the amount of coupling between them (like Windows handle-to-windows passing a shedload of data between lots of functions, each of which can mess with any field (not just the ones they are designed to alter) to create interesting bugs to find.

So let's multiply the number of interfaces in the system and grow the testing time exponentially

Yay, I'm loving it already

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So if I've got this straight

Instead of designing a system with 1 external API you build dozens of little systems each with it's own API (which you're designing as part of the overall system).

I think someone should send him a copy of the collected works of Glenford Myers.

He seems to have re packaged "composite design"

ISPs: UK.gov should pay full costs of Snooper's Charter hardware

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"although i do think you are being rather unfair to vermin. "

True.

Vermin are like the aliens in Aliens.

These "people" are more like multiple copies of "Carter Burke," without his ending.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Standard web logging ve The Machine from Person Of Interest

" It would require that an Israeli company create it as closed source and ISPs place it on their servers or as a hardware sniffer box."

The outfit you're looking for was called "Dettica" but is now part of BAe systems and was called in (eventually) by StalkStalk when they discovered one of their data breaches.

So you can look forward to a closed code snoop box supplied by Call Me Dave's favorite (the CEO has unrestricted access to the PM, something even the CEO of LM does not enjoy with the President AFAIK) defense con-tractor.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Re: Depressing.

"I think the chap you should be looking at is Charles Farr Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Head of the Joint Intelligence Organisation at the Cabinet Office"

He'll definitely be in this "coalition of the willing" (as Shrub liked to call such undertakings).

But he won't be alone.

It comes down to this.

Forget the "right" and "left" tags. That's BS where this is concerned.

There are simply those who believe in the democratic process and those who don't. These are the authoritarians.

So far the authoritarians seem to have built better cross party support for this. The appeal is of course "It won't affect you, you're in power."

The fools who listen to this never seem to realize a)They don't control the system. They have no real power over it and b)When they leave office, they have even less pull than they think they have.

These systems are like the results at the end of "War Games."

The only winning move (for privacy and freedom) is to not build them in the first place.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"tight safeguards.." "powerful Communications Data Request Filter is not abused."

Except.

It's a government mandated distributed database with remote access (well it's distributed, how could not have remote access).

Abuse is guaranteed.

BTW that phrase "Communications Data Request Filter" just wreaks of some civil servant weasel told "We can't call it a database, we can't call it a database"

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"Why would that be a bad thing? Civil servants would have to run the show. "

Where do think this is coming from?

Something like 8 UK sock puppets Home Secretaries have pushed for this since at least the time of Blair (which is probably about the time MI5 actually set up the system this law is designed to legitimize)

Most of those Home Secretaries would not know a database from a hole in the ground.

This comes from a collection of vermin unit within the Home Office and various current and former heads of GCHQ, MI5 & MI6

Ready for DevOps? Time to brush up on The Office and practise 'culture'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Must get managemetn buy in."

What usually kills these sorts of cunning plans.

GCHQ mass spying will 'cost lives in Britain,' warns ex-NSA tech chief

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So that's what it takes to get a senior ex spook to tell the truth.

Take their security clearance and kill their consultancy business.

Useful to know.

I rather doubt we'd be hearing from him if this didn't happen first though.

As for lawyers...

No lawyer wants to learn about technology. It would hinder their ability to spout such utter bu***hit with a straight face.

Dutch govt says no to backdoors, slides $540k into OpenSSL without breaking eye contact

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I wonder if Cameron uses E2E encryption.

The true answer is of course "I don't know. I'm far too important to worry about such thinks. That's for the oiks to deal with"

End to end encryption.

You'll miss it when it's gone, Mr Cameron. *

*Especially if (for example) someone were to snag a copy of your memoirs in transit and dump them to the public a day before publication,

Trustworthy x86 laptops? There is a way, says system-level security ace

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Intel "All your operating systems belong to us."

Microsoft please take note.

It's like the end of a love affair between two psychopaths*

*The default "corporate personality" of publicly quoted companies.

Anything better is entirely down to the characters of senior management either a)being decent human beings (not merely thinking they are) or b)wanting their companies behavior to better than their private behavior.

IMHE both are as common as rocking horse droppings.

Here – here is that 'hoverboard' you've wanted so much. Look at it. Look. at. it.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

A fun thought experiment on battery capacity.

Is to picture an electron as a cube about 10 pico metres on a side.

it takes roughly 6.25 x 10^18 of these per second to make 1 amp.

Now work out how big cube that is.

Modern batteries still have a long way to do.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I always thought the control problem would be much worse than balencing on it.

Once you're more than a leg's length off the ground you're in deep trouble.

Not that this thing will get anywhere near that.

Still waiting for the one using the the nN spermatazoa motor and a supply of ATP.

Oh well, maybe next decade.

US Marines kill noisy BigDog robo-mule for blowing their cover

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"..just one critical piece missing,.small size, quiet, ecological & very dense source of energy."

Read the article.

It was the quiet part that turned out to be the problem. The Marines didn't seem to have trouble with it's range or it's terrain ability.

I smell a project with no early input from the military and the devs thinking any small engine will do, because that's the easy bit, right?

Turns out to be the main fail.

Boffins unwrap bargain-basement processor that talks light and current

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

@Dr Mouse

"As they should. This is a novel, innovative manufacturing process."

No it's not.

Using a standard foundry process was part of the exercise.