Posts by Peter2 2946 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Exactly.
The only way I can conceive of this happening is a Pointy Haired Boss changing the spec between the design reaching him and manufacture. (I can just see the thought pattern; If I change the spec on this one part it's half the price, and the one I tested in my office worked just fine...)
I can't see how else something this absurd could possibly happen.
BT claims Tii's designers used bare steel contacts which rusted.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the designers originally specified something which is corrosion resistant but expensive, only for it to be replaced with bare steel on cost grounds by a Pointy Haired Boss to "save money".
There are two methods that as I understand are already used to deal with this.
The first is that you let people get away with things for a set time period and then simultaneously arrest everybody at the same time.
The second is that you use the data gathered to mount "random" searches that happen to catch things which can be written down to "bad luck" by the criminals on the receiving end.
I'd imagine that they were going with the second option until the article that said "um, I think this is an FBI plant guys because of X technical reasons" started getting around and the network started going quiet, at which point they nicked the lot of them. I'd have been inclined to have kept quiet about the success though and seen if I could replicate it again, but presumably the criminals are so traumatised by this that the only people in the dark were the general public.
> Despite his technical wizardry, The Tech is not a formally trained computer engineer.
In a large IT department, I once had to go around and get what qualifications and certifications everybody had.
If we ignore qualifications in obsolete technology, the honest answer was "practically none", by which I mean 2 qualifications in something like 70 staff, one of which was a CCNA and one person with a degree in IT. The person with the degree was (and I say this as the line manager whom was allocating jobs) arguably the least productive person in the department.
There is a crying need in the modern economy for certifying self taught people have particular skills at an affordable price, without doing an irrelevant training course with a several thousand pound bill.
Fusion is probably going to take a couple of hundred years to make practical for power generation to the point it's going to displace other power generation methods, It's obvious that creating and maintaining a star in a box and then extracting power from it is not going to be an easy job.
ITER will probably have cost something approaching a billion a year in R&D and construction over the project lifetime and will have significantly advanced our scientific and technical understanding in the meantime, probably also generating lots of practical uses for the research (eg, radiation resistant materials , superconductors and electromagnets; given we are magnetically hanging the ball of fusion in place) long before we get a commercial scale fusion plant that can run for more than a few minutes at a time.
I'm probably not going to see a working commercial fusion power plant in my lifetime. However, somebody will do one day if we keep doing the research.
Meanwhile, Europe is spending >£5 billion a year for subsidies into burning biomass (eg, timber) to bump the amount of "green" energy produced up so that we can say that we aren't burning as much fossil fuels.
However IMO there's a stronger reason this isn't being done: nuclear power needs government backing. And government backing won't come if those reactors don't contribute to the other purpose of nuclear reactors: to provide bomb-making material (no matter how much they plead innocence). Thorium doesn't meet this criterion.
The issue is more along the lines that government privatised electricity generation to private companies who have been merrily charging the customers and then pocketing the profits instead of putting some money aside for building new plants. Governments are taking the view that if electricity generation is now a private sector thing then it's the responsibility of the companies not of the government. Hence the Hinkley Point development where EDF is spending £23 billion to build a new reactor and things like the essentially R&D reactor at commercial scale mentioned in this article.
Most banks won't lend £20 billion when words like "it should work" form part of the brief.
It does appear unlikely, doesn't it? That said, if it led to a single advantageous trade deal then it probably would be considered profitable. The question is whom is it likely to impress? I think we've moved beyond impressing the locals with our superior technology since most of them are building it for us.
Of more practical use would be building the thing with a duel role as a hospital ship. Global Mercy is a 35k ton hospital ship with 6 operating theatres and 200 beds operated by a charity; a ship built between the size of our new carriers (65k tonnes) to the size of a cruise ship (200k tonnes) could easily support dozens of times that capacity while also acting as a floating gin palace for boozing local politicians at parties on occasion. It would probably also receive considerably more appreciation and long term use from everybody involved in the former role than the latter.
Spectre & Meltdown never worked properly on AMD chips and there are no exploits circulating in the wild beyond AMD's documentation example of how a new feature could be abused to perform an attack, which comes alongside detection & prevention methods and a method to disable the feature if desired. Any software protections for Spectre also prevent it.
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-analysis-predictive-store-forwarding.pdf
I made loads of friends on IRC in the late 90s in various different communities.It starting getting a bit shitty towards 2005 though as a lot of communities started filling up with trolls and arseholes.
I think all communities on the internet started having the same problem at the same time to be frank.
I suspect that's mostly due to kids getting online as their parents upgraded to DSL for the entire house instead of a dial up connection for the parents only in the first years of the millennium.
The British empire countries could only sell their raw materials to Britain and could only buy manufactured goods from Britain.
That's not actually quite right. The Imperial Preference system copied the systems used by the USA and Germany at the time which is basically the same principle as the EU operates on today; tariff free to members and sodding huge tariffs and trade barriers to everybody else to advantage member economies over non members.
You've confused mercantilism with free trade.
Are you sure that you haven't? The publication of Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations in the 18th century is held as being the death of mercantilism, whereas the industrial revolution and the doctrine of free trade really got going in the 19th century.
Thanks. :)
Softbank is Japanese owned, so the appropriate time to intervene would have been at the point of sale from British owners. I'm not really sure what difference it makes to UK plc if it's owned by a Japanese investment bank or Nvidia to be honest.
Selling off British innovation & technology to non UK companies doesn't generate a strategic advantage for the UK. It does get a few billion in tax from the arrangement though which pays for panem et circenses.
To be honest though, in many areas we are in much the same position as France and similar during the 19th century. Our internal markets are of insufficient size to support many industries which are now being operated on a continental or worldwide scale. We are being outcompeted by foreign companies that either offer better products or have lower wage costs (or both) and there's precious little we can do about it to remain competitive without introducing barriers to trade.
The British preoccupation with "free trade" pretty much prevents this, despite it being is a relic of the 19th century where we were the first people to industrialise and "free trade" meant removing barriers for us to sell to people which let us run the factories of the industrial revolution for another couple of hours a day to meet yet another market after the factory had already been built and paid for.
In our existing context about the last thing we want is "free trade" since it means other people laying waste to our industrial base.
There is no UK interest in ARM because Softbank paid a stupid price for it, which they want to recoup.
The stupid price Softbank paid is for reference ~twenty years worth of ARM's yearly revenue and ~64 times their yearly profits. Softbank had presumably hoped to quadruple the licensing to make up for this, however when tried people started looking at switching to other things, and Softbank realised that they'd fucked up and started looking at selling ARM.
Therefore at the asking price it doesn't make financial reason for anybody to buy at the asking price which is roughly half the UK yearly defence budget, and which would be recouped circa 2085.
In fact, I suspect that the only people it would make sense to buy ARM for is Intel to maintain their chippery monopoly (which would surely be blocked by any sane competition authority) or AMD or Nvidia to expand their IP and to muscle their way into more markets.
So we are 15 years on from the point where the Labour minister responsible for the home office described it thus:-
"Our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope, it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes," he told MPs.
If all of their existing IT systems are flagged as being likely to fail then I suggest that the problem is probably more attributable to the leadership, management systems and processes which were known to be defective 15 years ago.
The only way your going to do better is to design a new system with new staff and new management, slowly transfer responsibilities from the old team to the new one and then dismantle the old wreckage afterwards; to judge from the sea of red status reports on all of it's projects the existing department shows no great signs of being likely to manage a structured transition to normality any time soon.
Blaming the minister in charge of the omnishambles of a department is probably not going to help since several changes of ministers clearly hasn't fixed the problem in the last 15 years.
Suppose you ran an exchange, converting bitcoins into dollars. People spend their money and buy Bitcoins. But also the number of bitcoins continually increases due to mining.So now try to cash out all those bitcoins using the dollars that was paid into that exchange. Of course you cannot, there are insufficient dollars available, you must cash out less than you put in. You must lose your money.
In my opinion, the major reason Bitcoins are popular is that they are a method of money laundering that allows criminals to extort ransom from people via lockware etc without getting caught by the police tracing the money.
I suspect that most money going into cryptocurrencies is proceeds of crime rather than investors.
Non-functioning ones like Chernobyl and Fukushima might be more of a challenge.
You can have either high intensity particles which have a short half life, or a low intensity particles with a long half life.
The problem in Chernobyl is massive quantities of long lived particles randomly strewn over the area which is over a long term harmful for people rather than a massive level of high intensity radiation in one place.
The level of high energy particles that you could get inside a functioning reactor is going to be a lot higher than one that's been dead for 30 years.
"care about maintaining their multi-decade customer base" matches one of the definitions of socialist, while controlling supply matches one of the definitions of state socialism.
I hate to break it to you Comrade, but several countries (including the UK) require companies to consider the actions taken with respect to the long term effects of their actions.
we can look forward to a glut of 7 year old 14nm tech flooding the market.
Well, that may not be such a bad thing.
Cryptominers have stripped the shelves bare of graphics cards, so an obvious thing to do would be to pick the last 14nm graphics card and knock them out in quantity. The production costs should be lower on older hardware as presumably less people want to build stuff at 14nm.
I'm an old school gamer and so don't keep up with graphics card releases unless i'm buying, but a brief look suggests that the last 14nm cards from AMD were 4 years ago and kick out something like 50-60% of the performance of the latest flagship cards released this year.
While obviously the last 4 year old cards only kick out a bit better than half of the relative performance of the latest flagship card, not everybody wants to spend a thousand quid on a graphics card; i'd be perfectly happy with a card that offers ~60% of the performance of a new card for ~20% of the price and I suspect there would be plenty of other takers.
And that assumes that they don't do a new 14nm design, or just overclock the crap out of the existing design and apply a much better cooling solution, in which case you might be able to wring a few percent closer to the modern state of the art. Or sell them as pairs or trios for use in whatever they call CrossFire these days which would happily put the combination somewhere near modern flagship levels of performance.
Whatever; there's still plenty of ways AMD can turn a profit using some older fabs that have less demand on them.
If you are a personal researcher and your charged $80 a paper and you want to read the couple of dozen papers published on an obscure subject then it can quickly get prohibitively expensive.
Now one wouldn't mind so much if the authors were actually receiving the proceeds; however they aren't.
have been suggesting that perhaps the things could go on roundabouts
Given that some drivers take "go straight over the roundabout" literially, I personally wouldn't put any kit in the middle of a roundabout.
This also ignores that you'd have to dig the road up to put the cables in. Much more sensible to one side of a road, behind a set of crash barriers.
But that's kind of the point - your average casual thief may be happy to swipe a phone or other small valuables, but is less likely to be willing to cause serious harm, and much, much less likely to have any interest in targeted severing of body parts.
But this is also kind of the point. I personally don't want it to be "much less likely" for any criminal (whether casual or not) to have any interest in the targeted severing of my body parts.
If they are participating in a hack on my employer and they want my admin account to help with that i'd rather than the hack didn't begin with them hacking my finger off. I want a situation engineered where the most stupid and sociopathic thief out there knows full well that there is absolutely zero reason to remove any of my body parts.
Anything less is likely to eventually lead to some poor git being mutilated if the reward is sufficiently in excess of the risk.
Probably because if you asked a group "Should we ban the discussion of politics during work hours" then the people who seemingly have no life beyond The Party will of course loudly scream no and denounce the majority of colleauges who says yes.
Hence you might as well just tell people "your employed to make money, not to chat about politics" in some form and have it over with. The sort of extremists that quit because of this are frankly not the sort of co workers that many people shall mourn the absence of.
Is there any safe place for SRP?
I think that this view probably finds majority support:-
Sex: Discussed (or enacted) with your partner in the bedroom.
Religion: Discussed (or enacted) at your chosen place of worship if you care enough to go, but leave people who don't believe in your particular sky fairy out of it. Yes, we know that you think everybody else is going to Hell. The chap from a different religion on the other side of the room thinks your going to hell because your a heretic to his religion btw. No, we don't care.
Politics: Discussed (or enacted) at the local lunatics asylum (Or the Party club if these are differing establishments) but again you can leave everybody sane who doesn't want you practising another round of "divide and conquer" between them and their friends out of it.
Really, it's all just fiat currency. Gold only has "value" because we all think it does.
Nope. Gold has always and will always have a relatively high value because it looks pretty and is easily worked with basic hand tools into pretty jewelery, and has a low enough melting point that it's feasible to melt in a pot over a coal fire with some bellows.
If gold suddenly lost 100% of it's value overnight then the value would spring back up as soon as crafters started buying it up en masse to make jewelry. And that's before you even start to consider it's rather good electrical properties.
If twitcoins lose 100% of their value then they are going to remain worthless because they are inherently worthless. The current expansion in value likely largely represents people buying them as ransom payments for criminals demanding payment via that method as they are one of the best ways of doing money laundering to avoid getting caught.
Mirrors don't actually work against high power lasers.
About 50 years ago when the Americans were playing around with that chemical based airbourne laser somebody wondered what'd happen if you used a mirror, so they tried it.
And I don't just mean any old mirror as in a nanometer of reflective stuff behind a bit of glass. No siree, they took it seriously and did it properly. A whacking great block of aluminium which was polished to be perfectly reflective with a proper heatsink on the back.
It lasted a fraction of a second. While 99% of the energy was reflected initially, the remaining 1% was enough to cause distortions on the surface at which point 2% gets through, then 4% and so on, with each step taking a minute fraction of a second.
Off the top of my head, I recall that a ww2 era lee enfield was designed to withstand a pressure of something like 50,000 psi when fired.
Fifty thousand pounds per square inch of pressure.
Personally, I get a plumber in to deal with water pipes pressurised at like 50PSI because I don't want the risk of coming home to my home having been converted to an impromptu swimming pool. There is no way any sane person who is unqualified should be producing anything designed to resist pressures that are over one thousand times greater when that pressure is generated within 4 inches of your head.
I mean, hello darwin award..!
A 20 Megawatt LASER has no defence against it.
Yes, if we did figure out how to build one then it'd be quite effective. Existing systems have outputs measured in kilowatts though.
I'd also suggest that "no defence against it" is wrong. Lasers are inherently line of sight weapons, which means that they have to share the battlefield with things such as artillery that don't require line of sight and so can shoot from ranges greater than the curvature of the earth would allow you to target. Even if a laser can fry artillery shells then the opposition are just going to increase the number of shells being fired until they saturate your defences and blow away your laser emitter.
If that didn't work then 20 megawatts is quite a lot of power; as in 1/30th of the output of a very stationary nuclear power plant. If you add several units to deal with my artillery shells them i'm going to start blowing away your power lines/plants and your ultimate weapon is going to be a bit of a flop, and your plebs are probably going to get a bit upset at all of their lights and heat being knocked out.
Alternately...
Put a software restriction/AppLocker policy in place on your box with a default level of "disallowed". Then allow programs to run from %program files%, or a subdirectory. Select the "don't apply to admin accounts" option.
Hey presto, if you receive (and run) an bit of malware then it now can't actually execute even if you run it, and would just harmlessly pops a message saying "Sorry Dave, I can't do that". This applies to locker malware, and also to trojans you might run from a USB stick or CD.
If you actually do want to install something that you've downloaded, then you just right click and select "run as admin" and it'll work as normal. This is perfectly secure and doesn't require you to then do anything else. It also uses built in tools available free of charge on every windows computer on the face of the planet.
Well ok, somebody who's never seen a roundabout might not know how to use it, having ignored that section of their equivalent of the highway code because there wasn't one in five hundred miles of anywhere they were expecting to drive. Fair enough.
Surely for the cost of a safety campaign which will inevitably miss the people you need to reach you could just liberally cover the roundabout with one way signs pointing the right way? And if the locals are confused by the "give way to vehicles already on the roundabout" thing then post half a dozen signs saying that on the approaches just to be sure.
That depends.
If everybody survived and they want to figure out if who just dammed near killed several people and closed a major road as a result of dangerous driving then yes; lots of forensics to support a prosecution. But if a car has driven into a tree and the driver and passengers are dead?
Have you ever seen what a car looks like that's wrapped itself around a tree doing 30mph?
If not; ever done an emergency stop? Assuming so, you probably felt significant deceleration (probably 2g?) for around 2 seconds and everything on the dash tray, seats etc went flying, right?
If you hit a tree at 30mph then you get approximately 150g worth of deceleration, meaning that anything not structurally part of the vehicle is going to instantly become a missile. Allegedly you could at one point fool the Tesla autopilot with a box of tissues; so any innocuous item (such as a chocolate bar, water bottle) that was fooling the system would become a high speed missile inside the car and so wouldn't have been where they left it.
Even if you had a weight tied on with string; a 10gramme weight at 150g would weigh 1.5kg for a brief moment; and I suspect that neither the string nor the knot would have held those sort of forces. The police and fire brigade probably just cut the car apart, found the corpses not in the drivers seat when they transferred them to the ambulance and then called a scrapyard to take the wreck away. They certainly wouldn't normally do any kind of forensic examination of the vehicle.
You are free to do all of that. However, if you tell somebody else to put a fork in a toaster and it kills them then you'd be done for either murder or manslaughter.
You can repair a blown fuse with a rusty nail and will generally only kill yourself. However, if you sell the device to somebody else and it kills them then again, your on the hook.
Likewise when Tesla talks about total automation for cars and then sticks in a dramatically oversold lane-keeping system with cruise control then they remain on the hook.
The idea of banning private prosecutions is without doubt or exception the most stupid suggestion that I have ever read.
A "private prosecution" is literally any prosecution launched by anybody other than the state. Let's say I suggest that you are a child molester and get a national newspaper to print these deliberately false accusations which causes you to lose your job.
You would no longer have any ability to use the criminal justice system to gain recourse by suing me because that would be a "private prosecution" which you'd banned.
You would have effectively have near totally abolished the rule of law. Contracts would no longer be enforceable. If your employer decides he's not going to pay you anymore? You can't take him to court and demand payment. You supply goods and somebody refuses to pay? No recourse.
The issue with these prosecutions is not that the Post Office were allowed to bring these prosecutions, it is that the people responsible for the prosecutions have behaved illegally, and the solution is to apply the law.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/25/section/3
Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996
(1)The prosecutor must—
(a)disclose to the accused any prosecution material which has not previously been disclosed to the accused and which might reasonably be considered capable of undermining the case for the prosecution against the accused of assisting the case for the accused , or
(b)give to the accused a written statement that there is no material of a description mentioned in paragraph (a).
So here is a simple case; the prosecution did not comply with A, and they committed perjury in providing the statement at B. They have broken literally dozens of laws and gratuitously abused every underlying principle of how the Criminal Justice System works by their misconduct.
The solution to this is not abolishing the law, it is to prosecute every person who was involved to the maximum extent possible of the law, and in every case to hit them with the maximum possible penalties.
No state actor is likely to admit executing a concerted supply chain attack on the Linux Kernal. Even if they did pull something off then it'd probably look the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL; it is certainly not going to be submitted by bugInsertAttempt@nsa.gov
I mean, you do realise that these are entities that produce perfectly plausible covers for people when they want them, complete with totally legitimate credit cards, passports etc as a matter of course? No online only community has a hope of totally preventing infiltration by government because all of a sudden with nation state level resources things in the security landscape that you thought were certainties may become uncertain without warning.
In an ideal world, yes this would and frankly should be dealt with in court.
The problem is that in the real world only a minority can actually afford to go to court. And the minority that can afford to go to court are typically those doing the abuse, not those receiving it.
This is actually a problem with the court system; it has the best justice that money can buy. If you are a multi millionaire then you can get perfect justice but if your on the minimum wage then your stuffed.
Various organisations such as unions which should nominally help solve the problem are more interested in building palaces for their C suite or donating their membership subs to political parties so they can play national politics rather than doing anything useful for the membership, so few sane people are willing to join them.
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