Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: First responders, heh? - A Motorcycle Responder (Ambulance) responds...

"perhaps to cover a reasonable length of beach/coastline and related inland areas during peak holiday season, acting as the arial equivalent of motorcycle response to the helcopter's equivalence to a conventional ambulance, get there quickly, stabilise the casualty until more help can arrive."

That's the idea they base the bullshit on... but , from the company website:

Range 30km

Endurance (Flight time) 30 minutes.

Maximum airspeed 40kts (74 km/h) = FP2

Cruise speed 30kts (56km/h)

That was my point, it rules out most real-world uses. Basically you have to get there first (say, on a truck). With a realistic air time of 20 minutes (to allow for a safety margin) all you can do is take a peak and get back down. It's not the equivalent of a motorcycle or a helicopter, it's at most a scouting device for the support truck that gets it on site and refuel it every half hour. Better take a small, cheap unmanned drone.

Unless what you're doing is looking for a missing person, in which case I suppose the truck+hover pack is a cheaper alternative to a helicopter. Considerably slower, though, and you can't lift...

Maintenance is required every 100 hrs too, I don't see this being cheap to operate.

Re: "...another upcoming Steve Jobs movie"

Because it will sell.

Sounds like you have a hammer

That problem looks awfully like a nail from where you stand, I gather. That's an extremely convoluted scheme with a number of accidents waiting to happen. BitCoins are going to put off a lot of people; piggybacking on TOR actually makes the potential vulns add up. TOR was built to be somewhat-synchronous, which is good for surfing but is a hindrance when it comes to mail-like activities. And XOR? C'mon.

There is a thing currently being developped, called GNUnet, which is supposed to be a secure and anonymous P2P protocol with messaging capability built in. Maybe that's closer to the mark. It's embryonic for now, but who knows? There are also other asynchronous networks (freenet and the like) that have working messaging systems; I'm told FMS works quite well, for example. These networks are content-agnostic and have peer caching built in (it's their operation model actually: each peer stores a bit of the whole network, which becomes entirely decentralised), which makes them exactly what you want to build by bolting fido onto TOR, only better (built-in is always better that bolt-on).

In any case with the use of asymmetric encryption the need for spam mitigation is less evident. You encrypt for one specific recipient, meaning that you cannot just fire off one message with 2.76 gazillions of recipients and let the backbone cope with the strain: you actually have to encrypt your message 2.76 gazillion times and send them separately; much more costly. There may still be spam (there probably will) but probably much more targeted, much lower volume. So much less of a hassle.

Re: might pause and think again.

> Just because the app exists may mean those that might be stupid enough to do it might pause and think again.

Of course not. Teens (and older) were "sexting" well before Snapchat existed (well before the word "sexting" was ever invented by the media, in fact). Snapchat may or may not have made things worst recently (my money is on "didn't change a thing except for the wallet of its operator"). Snapsave won't make a difference either.

Actually I'm pretty convinced that all these apps come and go without changing one bit either the number of nude selfies sent OR the number of them "leaked". There's always ways to save these and post them on 4Chan, and always will.

Ultimately, leaked selfies have very little impact (unless part of something bigger such as systematic bullying - or the authorities meddling in very creatively moronic ways, such as registering every recipient and the sender as a sex offender). I would say it carries about the same "life-ruining" potential as "that day Millie wet her pants in PhysEd". But I may be wrong: it has to do with (mildly) naughty bits, so it's probably straight to hell or something.

Re: rubber hose

I guess in that case the whole point of private communications is to _prevent_ the rubber hose / waterboarding cryptographic attack...

Other than that I guess you're right, a single key pair is probably enough, unless you want to go for the "plausible deniability". Which won't help once in Gitmo. Which is one of the place That Snowden will never be sent to, honest, after all he's but a lowly, unimportant 29 yo hacker with no important information at all, no siree. Honest. Unless you want to voluntarily hand him to us. Lovely country you have here, would be a shame if something happened to it, wouldn't it? But hey, no pressure, it's up to you really.

Same here.

But not before I had already stopped reading, because this article lacks the usual comedic value. It's just a plain old bitter rant. Misrepresentation of facts in a thoroughly unfunny manner. A study on tediousness. Must (and used to) do better.

Re: "The law is an ass."

> So that's at least 50,000 people who now need to be put in chokey for possession of CP then!

Possession AND creation, because there was a local copy made in the browser cache at the very least.. Yes, that's stupid, but look at all the previous cases, the CPS always went also for creation, on these grounds.

Re: (And what do molecules have to do with gene sequences?)

DNA and RNA-related stuff is referred to as "molecular genetics" (sometimes "molecular biology", although the latter is somewhat wider and includes the science of proteins, too). That's because they study the molecular basis of heredity as opposed to phenotypic traits (which transmission is much harder to predict -or work out backwards, as the case may be). DNA strands _are_ (extremely large) molecules, indeed. That would be something that gene sequences have to do with molecules, don't you think?

Re: Does anyone else

I certainly do.

"Activist investor" my ass, the guy's built a fortune gutting and dismembering companies for a quick buck, shafting both employees and other shareholders in the process. And crying like a little bitch when someone resists the shafting, apparently. Pond scum, barely above patent lawyers and credit card fraudster, if at all.

Re: I am going to take an unpopular side here (pengwin)

>the problem with digital files is you can copy them over and over and over

Which you can't do with a CD, surely?

BTW a CD is just digital data egraved on a physical medium, so there's no fundamental difference between a CD and what you call "digital files".

@murph RE: receivind end

> [China] shouldn't complain now they are on the receiving end.

The receiving end of what? Of being sent back to the stone age as suddently gov agencies need to communicate via smoke signals, store data on engraved stone tablets and perform rocket launch calculations on an abbacus (although... that's been invented by the Chinese, wonder if they put a backdoor in that)?

Or on the receiving end of having to have all tech purchases approved by the FBI as it turns out that litterally EVERYTHING has parts made by a firm that doesn't pass the purity test?

To me the US state agencies concerned, not China, appear firmly anchored on the receiving end of this nonsense.