* Posts by John Smith 19

16326 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

America's mystery X-37B space drone lands after two years in orbit

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"Given the relatively small size of its payload bay, it is unlikely that it carries any weapons.."

Technically the payload bay is quite big enough for a few warheads off an ICBM, or even a few nuclear shells wrapped in ablative coating with some kind of guidance package on them.

The political s**tstorm for deploying such a system would be huge. Real task for the X37b include.

Qualifying new surveillance technologies for long term exposure to space.

Qualifying individual parts as "space rated" (apparently very few companies make "space rated" LED's, which can be a problem if you are only allowed to use parts off a qualified parts list).

Deploying independent swarms of satellites to give a much larger signal collection aperture (like a grid of cubesats making a really big antenna)

Using its engine to do multiple plane changes to provide a sort of "surveillance on demand" service for multiple theaters of operations. EG Photographing Fat Boy Kim at his private North Korean villa.

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Astonishing what you can do when you take humans out of the loop.

2 years on orbit.

5 of 5 perfect landings

Not a fuel cell in sight.

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returned to Earth in a useable condition?

Google Long Duration Exposure Facility.

It's been a few days, so what fresh trouble has Uber got into now?

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"a rogue engineer exceeded his authority by coding and releasing Greyball, "

Good to see the "one bad apple" defense is alive and well.

European Investment Bank tosses €25m to MariaDB

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"just last year they invested half a billion euros in a Scottish wind farm"

What Reaction Engines could have done with that kind of money....

Instead they got £50m from George Osbourne about 3 years late with strings attached and had to find a partner before they got the money (instead of after, which seems to have been in the original terms but somehow got turned around). Hence BAe buys a 20% stake for a paltry £20m.

The EIB does indeed sound a very good thing for Europe.

So of course the UK will have nothing to do with it.

US Air Force networks F-15 and F-22 fighters – in flight!

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"That's a huge pod. In a day when cellphones are a couple of ounces, why is that so big?"

Good question. Possible explanations would be.

1)Chose a standard size pod and ensured it's got lots of room in case the development programme went sideways or future additional mods were needed. I note we know about the comms, but not what additional "sensors" have been added. Could be the 10cms of the pod length is the whole comms package, the rest for the sensor suite (which can also have high electricity and cooling needs, IE running a small APU in there).

2) 3 sets of triply redundant comms perhaps?

3)Better spacing for the phased array aerial elements?

One thing I've never understood. In an era of increasing satellite comm needs why don't more combat aircraft have a) Upper wing surface areas available for sky pointing aerials. b)Why they don't have at least one hard point for mounting a pod above the wing for upward looking "stuff"?

Of mice and migrations: How a rodent's DNA maps to architectural complexity

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TBH I'd expected more interactions

A fully connected graph is roughly n(n-1) cross connections, which is a lot of links.

But the basic point, that interaction are more numerous than most people would expect at first glance and doing something like chopping a whole wodge of them out and putting them into an off site cloud is asking for lots of trouble, stands.

TL:DR. Danger. Here be big f**king monsters.

You are not a beautiful and unique Snowflake which just picked up another hundred mill

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"its cloud-based data warehouse-as-a-service."

I think we've found it's elevator pitch.

Wheather or not it's a good elevator pitch only time will tell.

The question remains.

Who owns your data (I know what the answer should be, but is it)?

Can you migrate it to another cloud/server/whatever if you want to?

Whose laws does this server farm operate under exactly?

Sorry, Dave, I can't code that: AI's prejudice problem

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"Garbage in, garbage out."

And for those "data poor" neigbourhoods were people don't buy every PoS IoT to report on their lifestyle that translates as "Nothing in, garbage out."

The radio environment is noisy – so use the noise as a carrier for signals

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"Disney Research"

It's a Micky Mouse operation as far as I'm concerned.

BTW they are saying that -80dBm is the ambient level of power inside people's houses that this system can use.

It's the average level of broadband signals that people are being exposed to.

How to remote hijack computers using Intel's insecure chips: Just use an empty login string

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"It was a very similar bug that lets pirated Wii games to be played on the console."

How intriguing, seeing as how the AMT processor runs the ARC instruction set, which Nintendo also use.

Hmm.

So code not developed by Intel at all, but inherited from ARC?

But written by a total f**kwit?

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You have to wonder how such a collosal clusterf**k could possibly get through.

A

1)Intel employs at least one developer who is a total f**kwit

2)Intel employs no code review process whatsoever for a system that will run code which will be very difficult to alter.

B

1)Intel management were approached by some part of the US Intelligence Community to ensure an advanced persistent threat exists in as many possible processors as possible on the planet that cannot be circumvented by "the bad guys" (as opposed to the real goal of being able to spy on anyone's PC use, anywhere, anywhen forever).

2)Intel management agrees to do so.

I'll leave others to decide which one sounds more likely.

US copyright law shake-up: Days of flinging stuff on the web and waiting for a DMCA may be over

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TL:DR fair use is fair use.

I know that's a meaningless tautology but if it's good enough for the British Prime Minister..

Actually that is sort of the issue. One says a site shouldn't post because it's got people to check posts and the pix are clearly copyright. OTOH is it FU? The other says the holder should check for FU before sending DCMA takedown notice.

So one's got the emphasis on the holder, one on the site to check FU, or perhaps the poster should check?

Universal continue to demonstrate that there is no corporate Ahole like a publicly quoted company (legally a person in the US remember) spending stockholders money on layers to defend "corporate freedom," IE the right to do what they want, when they want, to whoever they want.

Amazing new boffinry breakthrough: Robots are eating our brains

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WTF?

Just a note. This is a SURVEY of ATTITUDES.

IE It's what people think will happen.

Now what would be more interesting is how what people think will happen matches with actual evidence of what is happening.

Which might be more optimistic.

Or not.

BT to pay £22m in interest to rivals in ethernet overcharging case

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Interest rates for business debts (which this is a form of) are set by statutory rules in the UK

But if some of those disputes run back a decade it mounts up.

Damm right companies should exercise their rights to charge such interest. Effectively BT have treated this as an interest free loan IE free cash.

BTW in the business debts payment lead the UK is the 2nd slowest, Only Italy pays slower.

But on the upside post Brexit the UK will be in a league of its own on business bill payment.

'A-Team'-style tactics: Legit tool welded to kitchen sink to make off-the-shelf snoop kit

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It's been known for years.

Most flexible tools have a variety of uses. and most don't come labelled "especially handy for use by criminals."

Industrial plant robots frequently connected to the 'net without authentication

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"apparently to do with cycle statistics all sent to a server via FTP"

Sadly I can actually believe that.

Eliminate the "annual service visit" and allow continuous monitoring. Even better (for PHB) you can eliminate the light on the front panel that says "request service call. Machine needs attention" as well.

In fact while we're at it we can do remote updates in case we need to upgrade (or rather the customer pays for an upgrade) to the software. No authentication needed as no one else knows what it's for or even if it's on the net.

All at the minor cost of creating yet another gaping wide door into the machines core software.

The road to Hell is not paved with good intentions. It's paved with "convenience."

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Lest you think there are no criminal possiblities

"Nice factory you got here. Be a shame if one of those 'bots was to go crazy and start wacking people with some of the metal it's supposed to be working on. What you need is some sort of protection against that happening..."

Not just violent pranksters looking to cause trouble.

Legal note.

This is extortion, not blackmail. Extortion is where you threaten to do (or not do) something to someone directly. Blackmail is where you threaten to reveal (or not) something to a third party.

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WTF?

"83,000 robots researchers found exposed to the public internet,"

Seriously WTF?

Who in their right minds would think this is a good idea?

The answer is probably they thought it was a convenient idea, which is of course much better.

Backed up with a big dose of "Well no on knows it's there and if they find it they won't realize it's a big old robot that lift half a tonne and swing it through several metres so where's the harm?"

Dark-web pedo jailed after FBI and co use vid trick to beat privacy tech

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"an anonymizing network, such as Tor, "

Just a reminder this is not an endorsement for Tor, other anonymizing networks are available.

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"Control the server to get the users is much more effective than spying on everyone"

What makes you think such laws to enable that have anything to do with actually catching law breakers?

Paedos, terrorists, money launderers and organized crime are the excuses they trot out to have such laws.

Not the actual reason.

HackerOne says 'no' to FlexiSpy stalkerware bug bounty program

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This is trickier than it looks.

And it always was.

The company is legal, even if it's products are distasteful to many.

turn the problem on its head.

The app spies on innocent people.

It's compromised. Now not only does your creepy partner/ex/friend/boss have access to your data, so does any other bunch of bad guys. Flexispy is nasty but legal and HackerOne's stance initial stance should have been the one to retain.

You only need 60 bytes to hose Linux's rpcbind

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"Verified that it's running on all interfaces of MacOS 10.11.6. "

Double plus not good.

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"All hail His Spaghetti Code!"

As it happens I worked for a company that had a SW package written for them by an outside SW house.

PHB had the choice of the model their CASE tool used (expensive) or the code it generated (cheap)

PHB bought the generated code. I had to help maintain it.

So I know how s**t generated code can be.

OTOH Lex and Flex also implement FSM (what did you think an "automaton" was?) for the "symbol" recognition process. People seem OK with using them. something to do with using a table based designed with the code actually being an interpreter that decided what the next state the program should be in. PITA to write for humans, but quite easy to generate in SW.

Maybe because they don't do lots of goto's but rely on a state table design?

You post is funny because it's often true, which is why I upvoted it. when they are done right FSM's can provide clarity, as long as you retain the model of course.

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It seems no one likes writing data validation code

So yet another piece of software can get hosed fairly easily.

I really do think a lot of protocol code should be written by an FSM writing tool. Yes some protocols are too complex to accommodate inside one but most are not and you can check for obvious mistakes.

Fortran greybeards: Get your walking frames and shuffle over to NASA

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""I will need some more business in six months time"

The software-house-as-bug-creation-machine paradigm.

Not so sure it applies to in house S/W, although I've no idea where this thing comes from. Worst case is it's written by the back end of a 4GL (some of which produced filthy code. GOTO'S TO GOTO'S. Just awful).

Establishing a known baseline sounds like a desperate waste of time in the days of agile but I'm well aware of just how dumb I can be. Having it means if it all goes pear shaped you can always roll back.

Medicine would be a very different discipline if the first line of the Hippocratic Oath read "Just start cutting until something looks like it's working"

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"A lot of 3d problems can be mostly..in 8 bit but only a few bits need to be calculated in 64bit "

I'd guess being able to separate those sections out, and re-code them in a safe way, are the tricky bits of the task.

But since I'm not a 'merican it's strictly an academic exercise to me.

I recall the chapter Steve Connell wrote in "Code Complete" getting to implement the DES on an original spec IBM PC (4MHz) to code a 9600bps data stream at real time rates, and how many times he re-wrote it to get the speed up he needed.

Personally the first thing I'd do would be to bench mark it so I knew it was working properly to begin with. That way I'd know any errors later on were mine and I could always roll it back to a known good version. I know "It's been running for decades, how can it have bugs in?" I'll leave people who've used CFD codes for decades to answer that one.

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I think this needs a good backronym for CODGER

COde Development by Greybeards to Enhance Responsiveness?

In fact Project CODGER sounds like it could be an ongoing programme.

But I'm sure others could do better.

Leaked: The UK's secret blueprint with telcos for mass spying on internet, phones – and backdoors

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Evil flourishes in darkness

AFIK most "statutory instruments" are instruments of darkness.

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"technical capability notices" sounds like a kind of "statutory instrument" to me.

Preferred tool of the Dark Lord Mandelscum.

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"Why are the British government such a bunch of complete arseholes? "

They're not.

However the cabal of high level data fetishist civil servants (who seem to infect mostly the Home Office) but any of the assorted spy agencies see no reason why it can't (or rather shouldn't) be done.

Inside their heads more is always better. All (recorded all the time forever) is best of all.

Stuff the "safety" BS. This is all about "Give me 6 lines from an honest man and I'll find something with which to hang them."

ISPs must ensure half of punters get advertised max speeds

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It's a start.

But of course it depends on how many will take their ISP's to whoever needs to be reported to.

SpaceX spin-out plans to put virtual machines in orbit

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Re: Cosmic rays are going to fuck up your VMs.

Good point.

The classic demonstration of this is a shot taken by a camera as it passes through the "South Atlantic Anomaly"

The image is quite brightly lit up despite the lens cover being closed due to the storm of high energy particles, usually Protons IIRC.

On the up side the cells of modern memory are much smaller than the pixels of a camera. On the downside the amount of charge they have to gain or lose before being flipped to the opposite state is much smaller.

ECC DRAM is mandatory and all the usual embedded tricks (watch dog timers, solid memory management so rogue processes don't scribble over good code and data) would be mandatory.

3D printing and drones are the tech del día at Spanish startup fiesta

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"I assume that they would be tethered to a tanker via a hose . "

You might like to look at how big modern fields are.

Personally I'd expect the crop sprayer to be capable of independent flight.

What you have in mind reminded me of a design in an old book I saw ("Spies in the Sky" JWR Taylor) from Germany in the late 70's called the "Peewit." Looked like a short wide cylinder with a 2 blade rotor on top. The thing seems to be continually fueled by pumping fuel up the hose to it.

RF pulses from dust collisions could be killing satellites

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"I though the laws of physics were being broken as I read electrons all have the same mass."

Not strictly true.

In a vacuum they do. Inside a crystal lattice you get into ideas around the "virtual mass" of the electron (and holes viewed as "positive electrons"). You also get into the idea of rest mass and changes in momentum so the question then becomes what voltage have you accelerated it through?

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"you can actually unroll a reel of sellotape in a vacuum to get X-rays, without DARPA"

Essentially DARPA paid to have that core process turned into a disposable package you can use on the battlefield.

I understand this has been known for decades but it was DARPA that provided the funding to turn it from a lab curiosity into a practical device. I think it's had a Register write up. It's certainly been mentioned in comments.

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Impact --> dense plasma --> charge separation due to differential velocity--> RF pulse

Strong enough to kill some satellites.

OK the process seems reasonable but the shear strength of the effect is astonishing.

It's like that DARPA man portable X-ray machine that basically uses static electricity to generate the high voltage.

But then that's the thing about hypervelocity impacts.

No one sees them coming.

After years of warnings, mobile network hackers exploit SS7 flaws to drain bank accounts

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Time for "Signalling System No 8" ?

It's been what 4-5 decades since first roll out.

You know certain TLA's have had to have been in through this path for decades.

Those telcos that don't use IP protocols also need to adopt defense-in-depth and can no longer assume that the next node they send to (or receive a packet from) is benign.

It may be a less trusting world for telcos, but it's a safer world for their customers.

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AIUI SS7 was meant to end the ability to impersonate a remote exchange by "seizing a trunk"

Which seemed to be a core tactic of phone phreaks.

And in the 1980's it did.

Because it was out of band and "digital."

In 2017 I'd suggest the background knowledge about how GSM works is a lot more widespread and the options to access a mobile network (for a wide variety of definitions of access) are a lot broader than the 1980's.

Let's go live to the Uber-Waymo legal war – and see what's happening

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So how many staff were at this "Otto" company?

$680m pays for a small army of nerds.

Of was it just him?

And a note that $250m was a stock option, not a recruitment bonus, no doubt well below what Uber reckons their stock is worth.

But since Uber is not yet publicly quoted and has multiple issues that $250m of stock might not be nearly quite as valuable as the powdered Unicorn horn Uber think they are.

My first signing bonus was a bottle of champagne. I never opened it as I didn't think a new job was that worthy. I'm still waiting for that occasion.

Intel's data center boss Diane Bryant logs off

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"Bryant, will be taking a leave of six to eight months to deal with unspecified family matters. "

Before returning as "Matthew" ?

It is what we're all thinking, is it not?

Gig economy tech giants are 'free riding' on the welfare state, say MPs

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Re: A long time coming

And I see we have a serial downvoter here.

Some apologist for Uber?

ATM security devs rush out patch after boffins deliver knockout blow

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"connecting the ATM to a criminal-controlled network connection"

Would that include most banks in Eastern Europe and America?

Cabinet Office losing grip on UK government departments – report

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@JapPatel3

Posted like a true Civil Servant.

Never use 1 adjective where 3 will do just fine.

Proving once again that editing is still a useful skill, but little practiced.

US Navy developers test aircraft carrier drone control software

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"the MQ-25 will now mainly be used for topping up the tanks of manned aircraft"

Until the top brass realized that would (slowly) start to make "Naval Aviators" as a breed extinct.

But note it's easy to upgrade because it's a got a framework already on board.

Is it my imagination or is this thing quietly acquiring capabilities faster than the F35?

Desperate VCs are pretty much just throwing cash at Rubrik now

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Or torch the place and fake his own death after trousering the money?

Just saying.

UK patent troll protections tweaked – lawyers exempted

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More difficult to be an inventor in the UK

But then you can't patent software.

Core blimey! 10,000 per rack in startup's cloud-in-a-box

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30Kw a rack?

My how times have changed.

I think DARPA were talking about a Petaflop to simulate human intelligence.

So how much can you put in a rack of these?