* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

This is no yolk. Newegg scrambles against rotten shell company claims

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"home theater PCs that in some cases cost as little as $8 "

Either a couple of 0 missing off that price or it's a no nmae phone with a really big magnifier.

Phone crypto shut FBI out of 7,000 devices, complains chief g-man

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International ACPO

Like UK ACPO, but with other languages as well.

Yeay.

As an ex-policeman once noted "Police work is only ever easy in a police state."

You might like to remember that, along with who you're working for.

Let's make the coppers wear cameras! That'll make the ba... Oh. No sodding difference

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why should plod behaviour change? If they do bad things and don't get punished why

should they care?

And only 1 person wearing one?

So how's that work?

"OK, Charlie you're wearing the plodcam today, so keep the nightstick on your belt for a change. Rest of you. Stay out of his line of sight if you have to give one of the perps a tune up."

Wowee. Look at this server. Definitely keep critical data in there. Yup

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

""We are deployed across a bank which is completely a cloud bank.""

Do the customers know?

AFAIK this is setting up various "trip wire" devices throughout the network.

All actual apps will ignore them and never access them (not quite sure how) but an attacker mapping the network will touch everything. At which point someone's in the hen house and, depending the order and locations triggered it can identify a "track" which may locate the node it entered by.

A kind of System Intruder Detector, so to speak.

Arm isn't saying IoT firmware sucks but it's writing a free secure BIOS for device makers

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Sounds good, but I bet the code monkeys will still f**k it up.

"Oh but it's soooo hard to work out how to use this new stuff."

Maybe if they'd done it right in the first place they would not need to.*

*Or if their PHB's had given a s**t about security to begin with.

US energy, nuke and aviation sectors under sustained attack

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"Staging targets held preexisting relationships with many of the intended targets.”"

So just like STUXNET then?

"initiating downloads of documents using Server Message Block."

Another feature of the NSA toolkit that works beyond Windows XP?

Looks like recon to work out what H/W they should focus developing malware for (if they don't have any in stock). Unless of course they are planning actual physical entry.

It seems someone is using the US cyber warefare play book against them.

For some reason I keep hearing the voice of Alan Rickman in my head saying "You ask for a miracle. I give you the FBI."

I'm not sure why. :-(

New phishing campaign uses 30-year-old Microsoft mess as bait

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Like quite a lot of MS stuff DDE sounds powerful and useful, but is actually powerful and

dangerous.

Dynamic Data Exchange. IOW breaking a complex task into a series of simpler ones driving each other through links at the user level.

AFAIK very few people have dug into the protocol enough to actually use it properly, except people who write malware.

Another clever idea that should have changed the world (and sort of has).

But not in a good way.

Boffins trapped antiprotons for days, still can't say why they survived the Big Bang

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Holding them for days at a time is impressive, given Neutrons last < 15 mins outside an atom

Before decaying into a Proton and an Electron.

So very impressive experimental technique. But it's true.

Big Bang --> X amount of particles + X amount of anti-particles.

stability of particles = stability of anti-particles (unless they hit each other)

--> either universe never gets beyond huge energy shower or somewhere there are huge piles of antimatter (what happens if this is true is a plot devices for James Blish's novel "A Clash of Cymbals.")

Unless "something" has stripped most (all) of that naturally occurring anti-matter out of our universe (aliens from another using it as a power source? Julian Assange? Who knows).

Sarahah anonymous feedback app told: 'You're riddled with web app flaws'

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Hmmm. Let me see if I can write the firms reply.

"We take the privacy and security of our customers/users/data sources very seriously and are studying the information we have been provided. We expect a patch shortly."

Time will tell what, if anything they actually do.

Jeff Bezos fires off a blue dart, singes Elon Musk and SpaceX

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Building a factory in 'bama will also have helped no end.

Blue will spout some BS about the talent pool there but the truth is this will keep the Sen Shelby, the "Honourable Member" himself, very happy.

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Re: ULA has not yet commited to BE-4

True.

And ARJ is officially committed to having the AR1 ready at the same time.

Except the NASA evaluation team that Congress requested visit both of them said ARJ is 18-24 months behind Blue.

That suggests one of those statements is not going to happen.

Time is money for ULA and they need to get Vulcan started so they can start the process of retiring production on both Delta IV and Atlas V and eventually Delta IV Heavy.

National Audit Office: We'll be in a world of pain with '90s border tech post-Brexit

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"things won't change unless we get Trump in to build a wall."

Unfortunately that's the one option that everyone's trying to avoid.

I don't know if people in NI had to carry ID cards during the troubles, or if they still do.

But what about visitors from "The Mainland" IE the rest of the UK?

Those "Transitional arrangements" people are talking about could last a while.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

But, but, but

<gollum>

We wants it.

We needs it

We must have hard Brexit.

</gollum>

I think the UK has found it's next Foreign Secretary following the reshuffle.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"It's going to be a total failure."

Correct.

Aside from the 70's era ICL mainframe CHIEF system and it's almost unknown 4GL (how tough can that be?) the big joker in this pack will be the fabled border-without-checkpoints that will be the Republic/NI EU/UK border.

Apparently it will use "technology" to stop any unauthorized crossings without needing people to be stopped.

I have no idea how this can be made to work.

Unfortunately I don't think the UKG has either (certainly not by March 2018).

Plants in SPAAAAAAACE are good for you

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"colonising other planets the engineering challenges are going to be a minor part"

True.

But it's taken a long time to get to this stage.

The joker in the pack is what are the drivers for people wanting to go to (say) Mars?

The question that's been phrased is "If you're going to Mars for a 'better life', what is that 'better life'?"

And will most of the people for whom "Life on Mars" would be a better life be allowed to go?

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There's got to be a lot more of this if humans want to live on other planets.

And it's well past time this research was started.

Face it. The human race is not going to spread across the universe on an endless supply of MRE's*

Officially "Meal, Ready to Eat," unofficially "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians." Not exactly a promising sign of quality Cuisine.

ARM chip OG Steve Furber: Turing missed the mark on human intelligence

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It's been clear for decades you won't get brain power consumption with digital logic.

Digital --> transistors hard driven to conduction or switch off. Definite 1 or 0. Up to GHz clocks

--> Fan in / fan out < 10:1

--> Stages driven by clocks and transfers controlled through latches

Brain --> Much more probabalistic. Multiple inputs trigger, or prevent output firing. mV, not volt, + switching levels

--> Fan in / fan out < 10 000:1

--> No central clocking. More like an event driven system.Maximum frequency 10-15Hz

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Spikes and timing. This was worked on by Carver Mead's team in 1989

But it seems no one has taken this work any further

Wanna exorcise Intel's secretive hidden CPU from your hardware? Meet Purism's laptops

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Open message to Intel. Security by obscurity does not work. C'n'P chip design is bad too.

This laptop looks like the best that can be done about an idea that might have been done with good intentions but whose implementation has been a complete clusterf**k.

Canadian govt snoops emit their own malware detection tool, eh

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Canada. What all North America could be like..

Without a huge herd of drug addled gun toting trigger happy loons living down South..*

*The US definition of "mass shooting" is "more than 5 people involved." So far the US has had 326 mass shootings this year. I think the US will do something about this quite soon.

They will probably raise the number of people you have to shoot to qualify.

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"automatically recognizes the various file formats.. and triggers the analysis of each file.”

Errm.

Should that not read "reads file name and checks claimed file type against internal evidence" to start with?

Otherwise it seems a tad trusting.

Cautious thumbs up, provided a)It's available in source code b) No hidden functionality in library "black boxes" and c) 3rd party libraries sent with it can be swapped out with own (or freshly downloaded) copies of them (and compared with them).

Sorry to sound paranoid Canada, but y'know, signals intelligence agencies have a bit of a reputation.

Nothing personal. It's just people don't trust them. :-(

We talk to Tron artist Syd Mead: On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"was invented at Sanders Associates "

Didn't they do a lot of deeply classified DoD stuff? Radar, ECM, Elint?

Not surprised they are got taken over by BAe.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"My recollection is that they were using first generation Cray computers to do the work. "

Actually TRON predates that.

OTOH "The Last Starfighter" was essentially done on a Cray 1, at a phenomenal (for the time) 1/24 of real time.

Which saved the film makers a ton of cash.

A magazine article of the time said basically all the systems for Tron were (more or less) bespoke (or heavily moded) number crunchers.

Pixel 2 tinkerers force Google's hand: Secret custom silicon found

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Custom silicon of unknown purpose, made by Google. Hmm. 3 little words.

Intel Management Engine.

And 3 more

F**k right off.*

*Today it's Google brand phones. Tomorrow....

Do fear the Reaper: Huge army of webcams, routers raised from 'one million' hacked orgs

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Code monkeys X don't-give-a-f**k PHBs X time to market --> IoT

It's not that this s**t is so insecure.

It's that it's so easy to make it significantly more secure (EG change the standard install build, remove default passwords etc).

The case of the disappearing insect. Boffin tells Reg: We don't know why... but we must act

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"Now, if GM could develop some pest-resistant crops, that would serve much better"

Funny you should say that....

There are really 2 use cases for GM.

1) Monster agribusiness (whatever Monsanto are calling themselves these days, but also people like Bayer and a fair few other chems companies who happen to be located in Germany) wanting to lock farmers into their seeds, but with their seeds "Special Sauce" (C Andrew Orlwski), usually higher yield (if you use their brand of insecticide/fungicide/herbicide/anythingelse-cide).

2) The kind done in what are basically the "National Laboratories" of various third world and Far East countries to hard wire infection resistance, insect resistance and improved nutrition into the crops themselves (while preserving their fertility).

One is aimed at improving the lot of the farmers in those countries, the other improving the dividend to the companies shareholders.

Same techniques, rather different goals, and rather different outcomes.

BlackBerry Motion lurches into UK stores

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"removing Facebook extends battery life, just as removing a tapeworm..people require less food."

My point exactly.

But my suspicion is people will go with the phone with the pre installed data slurping, battery draining app because they simply cannnnn't live without it.

But then I'm just not one of those people who feels the need to post a status change from "sitting at my desk" to "taking a dump" while it reports my location location every second

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Let me suggest "Exciting" is not something you want in a phone?

How about

Long battery life

Good call quality

Reasonably dust and fluid resistant

Not to heavy.

Standard headphone jack.

Just a thought. No doub most people will prefer the umpteen megapixel camera and the permanent FB connection instead.

NYC cops say they can't reveal figures on cash seized from people – the database is too shoddy

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" toss the whole rotten law, but I feel a favorable outcome is far from guaranteed."

Not a new observation.

Remember folks most people don't want to govern others.

So it's a question of who do you get to do it to you?

Unless you're prepared to carry out Plan B

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Re: How seizure laws ever stood -- -- the test of constitutionality is beyond me.

Easy.

They just invoked the "Four Horseman." * and y'know, public outrage did the rest.

Naturally with the implied (but not actually stated) "promise" that "We'll only do it to bad people."

But hey, in times of budget cuts how you gonna keep the doughnuts supply coming?

*Drug dealers, money launders, paedophiles and terrorists

Japan finds long, deep tunnel on the Moon

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

it's a 50*kilometre* tunnel.

And it's under 10s of metres of rock.

So a) Living room should not be a problem and b) Radiation protection should be more than adequate away from the entrance (which I'm guessing could be quite big as well).

Red (Planet) alert: Future astro-heroes face shocking adventures on Martian moon Phobos

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

"But like my man Fiddy said..."

"Get settled or die trying."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Guessing it's worse than a spark off a nylon carpet on a dry day.

By quite a lot.

AIUI all the Apollo expeditions were during the 2 week lunar day, hence no chance to observe "charge separation" in action.

It sounds spectacular.

But not in a good way.

Facebook tackles race hate problem head on with programming tool

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"shifted their focus to proving the opposite –..data races under specific circumstances."

A nice demonstration of the "Other way around" principle. Nice work.

As for

"but this kind of concurrency problem has been sidestepped altogether decades ago"

I might agree.

But how many people use "Erlang, Rust, Go, Scala." ?

And which ones will still have a developer pool you can actually recruit from in a decade?

Review: Magic Leap and Fantasy Funding Fiasco

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

Wow. Such epic BS.

And remember supposedly competent investors have p**sed away > $1Bn (probably not theirs of course) on this bu***hit.

Mohawks fling patent infringement sueball at Microsoft and Amazon

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Trollface

Red man speak with forked tongue. *

Remember MS's bankrolling that decades long Linux troll suite?

*Yeah, not in the least PC I know.

Yes, British F-35 engines must be sent to Turkey for overhaul

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Must listen to Captain Lockheed again"

I have not heard of this item before.

Intriguing.

The Register. Come for the IT, stay for the album recs.

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"The Starfighter to Germany, "

Made by the predecessor to LM, mfg of the F35

In fact LM (and it's predecessors) has something of a record where (whoever won the contract) they ended up building the aircraft that flew (starting with the F104 and the SR71).

Funny how that's worked, is it not?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Oddly it seems the Take Back Control brigade are the ones most in favour of that."

Funny how that works, is it not?

This is another example of how "The Special Relationship"* works

*(C Rabid Xenophobia Publications T/A The Daily Heil)

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"With the F-35 I'd imagine the flight control system masks any issues from the pilot."

Except the reports seem to be saying the handling turns to s**t around this range.

Which for what is a 4th (or 5th) Generation supersonic vehicle does not sound good.

Let me guess the RAF advice will be "don't get into situations where you fly at prolonged periods at transonic speeds "

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"But probably not for much longer."

Ho ho ho.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Re: Turkey is a NATO country. But probably not for much longer.

Texit?

EU: No encryption backdoors but, eh, let's help each other crack that crypto, oui? Ja?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

f**k me sideways. "EU Commisioner accepts backdoors weaken everybodies security"

Shock horror.

I'll leave aside how long it's taken the EU to accept this fact and note that IRL Euro plods have always had multiple ways to compromise crim comms (at different levels) provided they had actual evidence of a crime being committed.

Actual secure comms within a criminal group is very difficult if you're

a)Involved in large scale crime

b)The authorities are aware you are involved in large scale crime.

Once that happens using cheap PAYG phones won't cut it.

Don't expect any change from the data fetishists of the centre for most evil in government UK Home Office any time soon, who will continue not to give a f**k about privacy or (personal) security.

The Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"According to a presentation from Amazon I attended, the Echo does process the trigger word locally

using a cyclic 20 second buffer "

Well that does sound reassuring.

Except that Googles implementation sometimes doesn't quite match their stated goals.

Remember the driverless cars and their ability to collect WiFi network IDs as well?

They didn't happen to mention how long the raw voice data is retained for, did they? Or how long it keeps recording before it cuts off, deciding you are no longer talking to it?

WPA2 security in trouble as KRACK Belgian boffins tease key reinstallation bug

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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" Fucking nonces."

Probably best not to.

DNA as storage? Old and boring. Boffins now chaining monomers

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"worth pointing out,,RAM, from magnetic core days onwards..generally had destructive reads"

Although IIRC most core systems did not.

Personally I see this for archival purposes, hence like tape or backup disk, not real time updates or live DB storage.

That said if you wanted to make multiple copies of really large chunks of the entire human knowledge base you're going to need something very compact.

Ex-TalkTalk chief grilled by MPs on suitability to chair NHS Improvement

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FITTYHS? Failed in Tech, Try Your Health Service.

Hmm.

Definitely better, but not quite there yet. If only you had a vowel or two after the Y.

I'm convinced there is a term that will perfectly sum up the PHB who's f**ked up publicly and jumped ship into a cushy little number in some part of the public sector.

Hackers can track, spoof locations and listen in on kids' smartwatches

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Helping you keep an eye on your kids when you're not around.

And by the sound of things the whole f**king internet can watch them as well. *

I wonder if they are playing the VTech game of T&C that tell you all data sent at owners risk to their privacy etc etc.

*So handy for the organized nonce planning their "cruising schedule" for them and their van.