* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Dear America, best not share that password with your pals. Lots of love, the US Supremes

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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""overzealous prosecutors" "

Is there any other kind in Trumpistan?

Rejecting Sonos' private data slurp basically bricks bloke's boombox

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This is actually the customer-data-is-also-a-product-we-can-sell business model.

How much does this s**t cost to buy?

Fuming Qualcomm smashed with 23 BILLION DOLLAR fine in monopoly abuse probe

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So a good day for High Frequecy MnM traders with a headline like this.

Seems the old "Microsoft Tax" wheeze (or cousins of it) are still popular in IT land.

Swiss banking software has Swiss cheese security, says Rapid7

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Two..agencies couldn't contact a bank about security..why..still have a business licence?

Because it's not a bank?

Unlike a real bank, which is basically a large IT operation with a banking license.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

It's 2017 and near unrestricted queries in a specific data type field are still a thing.

Fail.

Just fail.

Magic hash maths: Dedupe does not have to mean high compute. Wait, what?

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I thought about dedupe but only down to the file level.

Obviously operating down to the block level is going to be more involved.

Oz military megahack: When crappy defence contractor cybersecurity 'isn't uncommon', surely alarm bells ring?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Still none of that matters if the data being protected is not that valuable.

Only this presentation is from the "Australian Signals Directorate "

Which (I'm taking a wild stab here) is the Aus miltary version of the US NSA (which people forget is also a military operation, despite all the suits being worn).

So I'm guessing they (and their sub-contractors, and their sub-sub-contractors) have something a little bit more important to guard than last weeks Fosters consumption figures. *

*Which is only important if you're another lager mfg (IMHO lager is mfg'd, not brewed).

Look! Over there! Intel's cooked a 17-qubit chip quantum package

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So, still not really got an actual programmable architecture then?

Looking over the Wiki entry on this that's can test 2^17 states simultaneously.

If the wiki article is correct then "programming" a quantum m/c is more like the programming of an FPGA than anything else, where you have a quantum gate array" whose connectivity map is the "program"

Interesting side note in the article that the first go at this used "spin" as a parameter and actually dates from 1968 !

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

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"Size of crypto software: 25kb" "Size of 47 mandated back doors: 25Tb"

Govt archive of everyone's kitty pix 700 EB

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

Encryption..has borked that balance..rendering ineffective the..force to back up a legal warrant

<profanity filter off>

Bullshit

</profanity filter off>

Every jurisdiction I know of makes failure to hand over passwords or encryption codes under a search warrant issued in that jurisdiction a crime.

So (maybe) do jail time if you hand over or definitely do jail time if you don't.

If you've got enough evidence to get a warrant you can definitely put someone in jail regardless of their crypto, and if you've got the computers still on you can probably find the keys in memory.

They want warrantless spy-on-demand snooping, regardless of the danger to everyone's privacy and money.

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"unlike public key encryption, which has easier key distribution but is less secure "

And yet Sky Digital is all distributed by RSA encryption remains unbroken.

And I think there's a very significant market in breaking that system.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"There in is the conundrum. For some reason, he believes it's possible "

I used to think that.

But no longer.

These people simply don't care if this makes every US computer a massive treasure trove if such a system is mandated.

Their "right to know" trumps everybody else right to privacy.

At least inside their own heads.

It's not a sane policy. It's a personality disorder

El Reg was invited to the House of Lords to burst the AI-pocalypse bubble

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Minsky's "Weather analogy" pretty much nails the whoel "Deep learning" business.

Other classics are "regression equations" derived from data sets.

Algorithm chomps on X MB of data and comes up with N term equation. Plug in X value, get Y value within Z %

But WTF does that mean?

What are the real parameters (that could be measured) to give the dependent value?

And does this equation hold outside the test range? No idea. We don't have a data set for that.

Before you think this sounds nuts a common model for turbulence in CFD sims is the "2 factor" model," where you twiddle 2 numeric values.

They have no connection to the actual physical reality of the problem being modeled.

'Israel hacked Kaspersky and caught Russian spies using AV tool to harvest NSA exploits'

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And so "The great Game" continues

In days past the Her Majesty's Admiralty employed the likes of Sydney Riley to spy on the Bolshiviki.

A century later some of the players have changed but the Game continues.

Only now everyone who has a PC may be involved.

Ghost in Musk's machines: Software bugs' autonomous joy ride

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"If software is vulnerable to errors such as buffer overflows,..it's written in a language"

FTFY.

Yes SPARC and Gnat (both Ada derivatives) are more secure but IRL you can write C in any language.

It's a question of how much effort you have to make to circumvent interior checks.

But note.

Sooner or later your HLL will have to talk to the H/W, and what's inside those libraries will probably be written in assembler (unless your process is essentially a compiler back end in hardware, like a Java machine) which won't be subject to the same level of security.

The automotive industry does have C coding standards (MISRA) that are compiler neutral. There are a set of 24 requirements IIRC (and the Toyota auto throttle mishap happened because they didn't follow them)

It comes down to wheather a mfg is willing to follow them, puts in place mechanisms to ensure they are followed, and understands what happens if they are not.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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So the testing problem is to think like a computer, thinking like a human driver

and work out where it's making conceptual errors.

Hmm..

So I guess they'll need to pair up a couple of developers, one with Aspergers, one without for both views of the code.

1,000 jobs on the line at BAE Systems' Lancashire plants – reports

John Smith 19 Gold badge

The answer to "we have no choice but to elect fools."

The UK electoral system means the only person who's selection you can control is your direct MP.

So forget "the big picture."

Choose an issue you really care about.

Which party supports that the best?

If <incumbent> vote for them else vote for runner up to get them out.

IRL your choices are a)Keep the incumbent in b)Remove them.

The odds on bet is the runner up last time. Under the "First person to turn up" system the UK has tactical voting is pretty much the only option you have.

Remember, even the 26000 Labour majority in Glasgow can be toppled, with a sufficiently large sense of outrage, as the SNP had over MP's expenses.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"we have no choice but to elect fools."

Unless of course you step forward and insure that a non-fool is at least an option?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

"why get at all upset about our defence industry?"

Indeed.

Was it not the blessed Maggie who said "The Market will provide."

HMG basically has nothing approaching an actual "industrial strategy" except (more or less) let any company be bought by anyone who's got the money. That includes not prioritizing local companies over price, unlike those rascally furriners like the Fwench or the Jermans.

Which may explain why most of the British water, gas and electricity and steel industries are heavily foreign owned.

Incidentally how many of those foreign aircraft types have an equivalent mfg by BAe?

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Astonished BAe's CEO not been straight round to No 10 to have words with May.

Handy ability for a CEO of a war tech company to have, isn't it?

Here's the thing.

Arms is always a boom-to-bust business with Cost+ (or Cost++ if it's a BAe product) looking to get some contract off another government for one thing and another.

It's long been know as the most expensive £ for jobs industry in the world.

Hitting 3 nanometers to cost chipmaker TSMC at least US$20 billion

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"So 1-2 atoms thick. I suspect this will go up, as the current has to flow somewhere. "

You might might like to look up how a Metal Oxide Semiconductor transistor actually works.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

Well at 3nm it's a case of...

Mo' Chang, mo' problems.

But seriously. Keep in mind if the line width is 14 atoms then the oxide thickness is usually 1/10 that so 1-2 atoms thick.

Someone must be thinking "Y'know perhaps we should try making these by building things up, rather than chopping stuff away."

Of course, that's when it gets really expensive.

BAE confirms it is slashing 2,000 jobs

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"But cutting jobs from ye olde Detica? "

Indeed.

I'd forgotten Smith Associates changed it's name after Billions Above Estimate bought them.

Could it be?

Could they be IDK "Rever TUPE'd" back to government?

And by "government" I mean a specific part located around Cheltenham.

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""The redundancies will take effect from 1 January 2018.""

Live by the defense contract, die by the defense contract.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"I dont know why an aeroplane company is running a cyber security business, "

Well it could be they want in house capability due to their very super secret defense work.

No, I'm fu**ing with you.

What you've got to know about BAe is they are a government con-tractor.

IOW their core skills are

a)Talking BS to Ministers. b)Talking BS to civil servants c) Concoting plausible (but probably unworkable) defense concepts that will cost billions to develop d) Having staff who can fabricate (after all they are meant to be a mfg company :-) )the necessary paperwork to prove all work has been done and how much it costs, so they can get paid.

BAe bought "Smith Associates" who were (and probably still are) hand-in-blouse with GCHQ for the boxes to install in ISP's for on demand snooping serious national security investigations.

BAe are famous for walking away from the Blairs National Identity Register Card scheme. In hindsight because it had other bidders. Why compete when you can be a sole source and can fabricate unauditable invoices for stuff (National Security).

Real Mad-quid: Murky cryptojacking menace that smacked Ronaldo site grows

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Only they're not "running" this code are they?

You are.

On your PC/Slab/phone/Slate/whatever.

Three words: Synthetic gene circuit. Self-assembling bacteria build pressure sensor

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Bit too late. This stuff has been going on for some time.

Most notably with biobricks

This technology is not confined to a laboratory.

They are not the first bacteria to mfg objects. Sandstone, for example is made by bacteria.

But 30 years after KE Drexlers "Engines of Creation" it's a bit disappointing this is viewed as impressive (which it is).

Rattled toymaker VTech's data breach case exiting legal pram

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

As far as VTech is concerned it's all your fault.

You know our site is insecure.

You know the link is insecure.

You know your data is personal.

So any loss of it is not our fault.

Frankly I'm astonished some other devious motherf**kers haven't tried this BS before.

But you can bet they won't be the last IoT supplier to do this.

Leaky-by-design location services show outsourced security won't ever work

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

FB strips data so photos effectivlely C M. Zuckerberg for the next 70 years. Accident?

Of course what they do with that location data before they strip it is anyone's guess.

And OSes that leak this data.

Accident?

Google business is knowing your business.

Whenever Google does something (like Android) the only question is "How does this increase the amount of information that Google can collect about most people who use it?"

The answer is "Quite a lot."

Calm down, Elon. Deep learning won't make AI generally intelligent

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

Toyota scheduler run by 24 bit bit map of tasks, wheather they are live or dead

And bit map is not protected against "random flipping"

Which (it turns out) is a thing in automotive electronics.

Once you know these 2 facts it doesn't seem too difficult to predict this system could FUBAR quite easily.

Which it did.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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@Rebel Science

OK you got me to click the link to your blog.

Well played.

I can safely say that's an experience I haven't been missing, and won't be repeating.

With 3 posts as a sample and 2 utter s**t this NN has all the training data it needs to form an opinion.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Here's what we know...

Human brains are made of large numbers of cells with interconnections (fan in or fan out) ratios up (but often a lot lower) about 10 000.

As are every other multicelluar organism I'm aware of.

Transistors on chips have fan outs/ins < 10.

We think we're intelligent so we know this architecture works.

There is little evidence other architectures can do things we call intelligent on the scale we do them. Most "AI" projects I've looked into seem to scale up very badly.

BTW Something people forget about language. It evolved (by people) to be spoken to people.

IRL The fact I could spout a 14 word sentence that has 47 parses would be met by the person I was saying it to along the lines of "WTF are you babbling about? Were you on a Texas hill? Did this guy have a telescope? You're talking bo***ks"

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Or at the very least ignore b) and fail not to feel threatened and outraged by c)..."

I used to work with a PhD candidate in Philosophy.

She hated dealing with non-philosophers on complex moral issues because they would always take a dispute of there PoV (which is kind of what philosophers do) as a personal attack.

Anti abortionists (although of course they would call themselves "right to lifers") were a particular PITA to her.

New coding language Fetlang's syntax designed to read like 'poorly written erotica'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Confusing English-like syntax and unhelpful error messages"

I think we have a winner for the next hipster language.

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Some people...

have waaay too much time on their hands.

Fending off cyber attacks as important as combatting terrorism, says new GCHQ chief

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Perhaps they could start by making sure their exploits are still under their control?

Unlike the NSA, at least some of whose are not .

UK spy oversight body updates rules to include right of appeal

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"so in reality we are stuck with data fetishists adding more powers "

FTFY.

What makes you think this has anything substantive to do with people who can actually be removed?

Rudd will be the 9th ( ro 10th) sock puppet to say whatever the cabal who deal with this tell her.

Let's go live now to Magic Leap and... Ah, still making millions from made-up tech

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"That's one Tragic Leap for Rony Abovitz, one giant scam for mankind."

Nice.

"Origin story" my wrinkly old bottom.

That would be HC Andersen "The Emperor's New Clothes"

My jacket. Isn't it magnificent? The shop said it's the lightest, warmest, coolest coat I would ever wear. I can barely feel it when I put it on.....

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Deluded"? How about "greedy" or "preadatory" or flat out "confidence trickster" ?

I guess it depends at what point the founders realized their plan was a)completely impossible or b)Infeasible in less than a couple of decades (either to mfg or, in the case of that phone charger, to work).

Let me suggest that few people in the world have so little understanding of how any of it works that they believe in "technology" in the way a medieval peasant belied in "magic."

Despite the ability to acquire a crash course in nearly any branch of technology through the internet and access if this sounds like complete BS.

It seems people quite like being ignorant.:-( .

NASA tests supersonic parachute, to help us land on Mars

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"I am curious as the weight of the chute that is required to slow the object down. "

Depends on the heat load.

IIRC normal parachute nylon is about 70g/m^2 but high temperature materials are more around 700g/m^2 (the HIAD demonstrator was "loosely" a parachute type material).

But Mars Sea Level is 1/160 that of Earth Sea Level, so what would be a baking temperature for an Earth entry could be quite survivable with just Nylon, even though you're slamming into it at very high speed.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Supersonic parachutes have a limited number of uses.

Supersonic parachutes designed to deploy at pressures 1/160 of Sea Level even more so.

Historically the big ones are

1) Nuclear weapons deployment from supersonic aircraft

2) Entry to planetary or lunar atmospheres (IE Mars, Titan, Venus, Jupiter).

IIRC the last article I read on the subject was penned by someone at Sandia labs, who don't have a keen interest in planetary exploration. Which may explain the coyness on design.

Exciting idea as Mars atmosphere is so thin you need huge sub sonic 'chutes

Hey, IoT vendors. When a paediatric nurse tells you to fix security, you definitely screwed up

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"It can now cost less to bribe (or otherwise influence) the regulators to look the other way."

You wouldn't be an American, by any chance?

That would be the American model of health "care."

In current affairs news: Teen boffin with lots of potential crafts electric honeycombs out of oil

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"The boy done good."

Let us hope he channels it into something positive.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Charged electrode reacting to an oil film you say?

Puts me in mind of an eidiphor projection TV system.

Identified a phenomenon.

Identified new features others had not studied

Developed theory of how it worked.

Tested theory..

Let's hope he can keep it up.

Australia approves national database of everyone's mugshots

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Looks like the Aus data fetishists have been taking lessons from the cabal in the Home Office

Actual problem.

Local police forces too slow in providing mug shots.

Options.

1)Improve data flow with better hardware links (National Broadband?) Scripts to extract pix, prep for secure transfer of known felons.

2) Photograph everyone "because we can." Storage is cheap enough to do so.

Do phrases like "Grossly disproportionate" come to mind? This sounds like the UK's ANPR network, with unlimited data retention.

Biochem boffins win the Nobel Prize for cryo-electron microscopy

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"a specimen of amorphous ice,"

Which sounds pretty astonishing all on its own, as it implies you have less of a signal from the solvent (water) to remove before you get to the unscrambling the data from the proteins .

Impressive stuff.

And £900k buys a fair amount of rollmop Herring as well.

Keybase Git gets keys, basically: Secure chat app encrypts your repos

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Once someone can generate a collision to a hashing algorith it's time to start retiring it.

If anyone less than a government can do it now you can bet it's already been done by at least one government for purposes of exploit insertion, because the people most likely to be signing stuff already are those they are likely to be interested in.

Call it the "Price of privacy."

Here's a gentle guide to building JavaScript AI in web browsers. Totally not a scary thing

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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This being Google, how much data does it send back to them?

And if it doesn't will it continue to not send back data in future releases?

That said, curious to see how RL facial recognition matches the stuff in the movies.

Open your doors to white hats before black hats blow them off, US deputy AG urges big biz

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

""We in law enforcement have no desire to undermine encryption. "

And yet that's exactly what you're doing.

But let's be real what he wants is warrantless invasion of peoples data on demand.

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

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"what point in..society..acceptable to declare your own ignorance..be proud not to know something"

My study of the British suggests among the Upper Classes it's been "forever"?

While "The Lower Orders" have striven to behave like their "betters" and adopted a similar disdain for knowledge in most forms.

Ever noticed how the British tend to pronounce "intellectual" (with or without the air quotes) with a sneer?

I'm not sure who coined the term "The arrogance of ignorance" but it certainly applies to a significant sector of the "ruling" class.