* Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

2513 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2009

ROGUE SAIL BOAT blocks SPACE STATION PODULE blastoff

Crazy Operations Guy

"Most yachts operate on a very tight electrical budget."

And that is why smart sailors buy a hand-held radio to use in emergencies and when the main radio is turned off. It'll usually have a much shorter range, but long enough so that they can get out of the way if a larger ship is nearby.

FBI impersonated newspaper to finger school bomb threat suspect

Crazy Operations Guy

Why bother to impersonate a real newspaper?

They could have created a page purporting to be the 'Seattle Harald' or 'Puget Times' or something like that. Hell, they could have even published an article right from the FBI website as a press release and he would have still clicked it. Although if they were to have tried it through Facebook, they wouldn't even need to the suspect to click on it; simply posting it to is 'wall' would cause his machine to send an HTTP request to the destination next time he looked at his 'feed' (to create the thumbnail).

EvilToss and Sourface hacker crew 'likely' backed by Kremlin – FireEye

Crazy Operations Guy

"get around air-gaps by routing messages between local directories"

Then they aren't true air-gaps. Although seeing how some defense contractors set up their networks, I'd say the air-gaps are between the ears of their network security personnel...

There was one place that was too cheap to buy two machines for each of their high-security employees, so they installed a second NIC in each machine and placed a script on the user's desktop that would disable one NIC and enable the other.

Looking for a job in Europe? Experienced IT staff needed in UK, Italy and Germany

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Shortage???

It could be that the IT people currently working in these companies with open positions are working massive hours o overtime or are currently doing two jobs at once. Perhaps the company want to expand their IT services but only has enough staff to maintain what they currently have? They could also be looking for people to fill positions that are currently being filled by contractors or off-shore folk.

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Scary

I'd imagine that most of those people would be mostly the old white-beards and "Real Programmers"; especially those that have been with the company for many years and are the only ones that know how to get the legacy applications to work (Because they wrote them).

Voyager 1 now EIGHTEEN LIGHT HOURS from home

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Slight overdesign/overbuild

Sometimes I wish NASA would get into building servers; whenever they build something it ends up lasting 10 times as long than designed. But when HP/Dell/IBM/Cisco/etc build something, it barely limps a few days beyond its warranty date...

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: 18 light-hours in 37.2 years...

I think acceleration would account for the speed difference. It's been traveling for 37 Years now so all the little pushes it gets from its thruster have added up. Plus all the planets and other large objects its passed by have also given it some pretty big pushes.

Screw the guvmint, vows CEO of ubiquitous Korean jabber app KakaoTalk

Crazy Operations Guy

Government Spying

To be fair, South Korea does have a fairly dangerous enemy nearby who has a very powerful ally. Unlike the USA/UK who seem to be scared of shadows.

Cisco patches three-year-old remote code-execution hole

Crazy Operations Guy

Real network equipment should generate an ssh key on its own the first time its booted up (and before it turns on networking) and refuse connections from anything until you directly connect a serial cable to it and manually turn on remote management.

Adorkable overshare of words like photobomb in this year's dictionaries

Crazy Operations Guy

" Tinder for the dating app "

If that's what they were going for, they should know they spelt it wrong... The app name is spelled without the 'e', like a lot of idiotically named web2.0 crap (See 'tumblr' for a great example of idiocy).

Would you blow $5.6m to own a dot-word? Meet a bloke who did just that

Crazy Operations Guy

I've blocked every TLD longer than 3 characters, nothing of value has been lost

Some years ago, I blocked any DNS request for any name where the last component is longer than three characters (Was originally intended to prevent single-label names from getting outside my network) but now its blocking all this stupid gTLD bollocks (Also blocks .info, but was there anything worthwhile in there anyway?)

Chinese hackers slurp iCloud passwords, Apple's CEO jumps into his jet for China

Crazy Operations Guy

What was the point?

The Chinese government is just going to tell him the attacks weren't them despite whether its true or not. Its not like Timmy would know if they were lying anyway. Even if they did lie to him and he found out, what is he going to do about it?

Seems that this is just a PR event or 'Not Steve' is trying to recreate 'The Mouse That Roared'

Edward who? GCHQ boss dodges Snowden topic during last speech

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: They truly think we're all idiots

But then who oversees the overseers?

NSA approves Samsung Knox for use by TOP SECRET g-men

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: The Mind Boggles

No, you're thinking of the other group of xenophobic old white dudes wasting our money (I think the politically correct term is 'Senator' or something)

Lords take revenge on revenge porn publishers

Crazy Operations Guy

Might be a good way for the NSA/GCHQ to get back into our good graces

Since they have the capabilities, I would like to see them break into these sites, and replace each entry with a picture and personal details of the person that posted the images. Turn the whole website into a directory of "Terrible people that under no circumstances should you ever trust"

ISPs handbagged: BLOCK knock-off sites, rules beak

Crazy Operations Guy

An arms-race that will never end

The fight between Rights Holders and Infringers is a fight that will never end. The only thing that ever change is how screwed we, the innocent consumers, are from all the collateral damage.

Ex-US Navy fighter pilot MIT prof: Drones beat humans - I should know

Crazy Operations Guy

Google already depends on Ford to produce their cars (The Google self-driving vehicles are modified Ford Fusions). Google might be able write software for the vehicle, but they'll never build 'em themselves. I would venture to guess that its a cooperative effort between the two companies with each researching different aspects.

I would have a very difficult time believing that Google would want to plow billions of dollars into construction of factory facilities, hiring proper experts, and building up the proper Government / Partner connections when they can just help Ford.

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: "The idea of Dronecode is for a common, Linux-based software platform"

There plenty of free true RTOS's in a variety of licenses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_real-time_operating_systems

Crazy Operations Guy

"The idea of Dronecode is for a common, Linux-based software platform"

For the love of god, why? Why would anyone in their right mind use a multi-tasking OS for flight operations rather than a true RTOS (I know Linux can be configured as a Pseudo-RTOS, but its a hack at best)

FCC looks to boost next-gen wireless networks with 24GHz study

Crazy Operations Guy

We wouldn't need as much bandwidth

We wouldn't need to break into the upper frequencies if:

*websites were designed properly and didn't push a bunch of junk phones can't understand

*Advertisements didn't constantly attack your connection trying to download new data.

*We settled on a single standard, no more of this WiMax vs HSPA, GSM vs. CDMA, etc. Preferably something royalty free.

*Frequencies were allocated by location, not carrier (IE, a tower's antennas will receive all carrier's signals and separates them in the base station itself) along with my previous point, it could open up quite a lot of spectrum

*Scrapped most of the analog radio and TV channels and instead pushed them over something like Multicast over HSPA+ and not require a license.

Internet finally ready to replace answering machine cassette tape

Crazy Operations Guy

Maybe they could use Skype, or somethign similar?

They could always limit the bandwidth for the audio (Or use Comcast) to simulate the bad quality of a land line with dropped packets. Then they could expand the service into video by doing something like re-record the music videos by way of pointing a VGA-resolution webcam at a television.

French 'terror law' declares WAR on the INTERNET itself, say digi-rights folks

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Participating in terrorist activities

What about blowing up bridges in the middle of Paris to prevent the advance of German troops?

Batman in the frame to take on Steve Jobs

Crazy Operations Guy

I thought the 2013 movie was already a sequel to 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'

Ancient Brits 'set wealthy man's FANCY CHARIOT on FIRE' – boffins

Crazy Operations Guy

"It is a once-in-a-career discovery,” enthuses Dr Jeremy Taylor, Leicester uni archaeologist.

Holy crap, that is depressing...

This isn't a sci-fi movie: It's a human-made probe snapping a comet selfie

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: The Future

I think its a sign of how advanced humans are in that we *don't* have flying cars. Consider how bad a lot of people are now with cars that move in 1.5 dimensions, imagine how bad they'll be when they can operate in 3 dimensions?

Don't wait for that big iPad, order a NEXUS 9 instead, industry little bird says

Crazy Operations Guy

The timing isn't going to affect much

Anyone that was going to buy and iPad will buy the new iPad anyway and anyone that was going to buy the Nexus will buy a Nexus.

The only thing that will be affected will be all the release dates on articles praising/trashing each tablet, and even then, those have already been written.

Secret U.S. 'space warplane' set to return from spy mission

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Does it actually do anything

I think its more of 'If we don't spend all of our budget this year, they'll cut it next year' type of thinking that is endemic to Government / Defense folk.

Or closer to the Cold-War thinking where a scientist would come up with some crazy idea, it'd get leaked to the other side who'd think that it was actually being built, so they'd come up with a counter-measure for it, which would be leaked and then the first side would try and come up with something to counter-act that, repeat ad nauseum. Sometimes those thing will be built (Think Czar Bomba, the B-2 bomber, massive underground bunker facilities, etc; then there is the insanity that was the PsyOps crap, like the US funding pop-art painters to counteract Russian realist artists).

Something ate Google's 8.8.8.8 at about eight in Asia's evening

Crazy Operations Guy

And this is why I set up my own DNS boxes

At first I just used a pair of Pentium 2 boxes with OpenBSD installed running the native 'named' and a script that would pull a copy of InterNIC's root.zone daily. Now I have upgraded them to a pair of Atom machines, added a script to remove all those crappy gTLDs that are springing up nowadays, and added a couple of firewall rules to block all DNS traffic except from those two boxes (Making me immune from all that DNS change malware).

Snapchat 'hack' pics mostly clothed user snaps, odd bits of legacy pr0n – report

Crazy Operations Guy

reinforcing my rule of Internet Content

'If you want something on the internet, it will only stay up as long as you are watching; if you don't want something on the internet, it will stay there forever'

Activist investors DESTROY COMPANIES. Don't get me started on share dealings...

Crazy Operations Guy

For Point #1, I think a better solution might be to set limits on how much you can sell in a day, so that if you plan to sell a large amount, it'll take you weeks to dump it all, potentially screwing yourself if you do a big sell-off (tanking the value before you've finished selling).

EU privacy boogeyman unleashed by the very people with boogeyman-slaying weapons

Crazy Operations Guy

If your business model requires duping users into giving up information, then maybe your company shouldn't exist in the first place...

You can ring my #bellogate. EMAIL STORM hits 29,000 hapless UCL students

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: I work for a large company...

Using reply-all on an email that was sent to a large list should be a fire-able offense anyway... Also, expanding very large mailing lists before sending, BCC'ing large distribution groups, and overly-large signatures.

EE TV: Network snubs 'Auntie's antique' for mobe-happy set-top box

Crazy Operations Guy

Why do companies still hang on to traditional broadcast TV?

With all this crap going back-and-forth around streaming services, I'm surprised no one has actually scrapped the traditional broadcast model and tried to fight Netflix/Hulu/etc on their own turf. I figure they could set up two different modes with their service: a 'playlist mode' that would mimic current TV channels and would stream newly released episodes at their regular time. Then you'd have your 'on-demand' service to be similar to Netflix with the added benefit of being able to view recently released TV shows (rather than the 1-year delay with Netflix).

This would give many benefits to both ISPs and their customers, such as:

*More bandwidth available for the last mile since cutting traditional TV would free up a lot of spectrum on the wires

*lower operational costs for ISP (greatly reduced equipment complexity)

*ISPs get better data to send to advertisers / production companies get much better ratings info

*Much better selection for the customer, plus viewers no longer have to worry about DVR'ing shows if they can't see them at the normal broadcast time

*Cable companies can avoid becoming just a bit-pipe and Netflix eating their lunch.

LTE's backers vow to KILL OFF WI-FI and BLUETOOTH

Crazy Operations Guy

Hopefully you can turn some of the features off

I hope you can turn the various features on and off individually. I like having separate Bluetooth, WiFi, and GPS chips (well, modules on a SoC) in my phone, not because I use them, rather because I don't and I can turn them off when I don't need them without affecting my ability to send/receive phone calls, email, and the occasional text message.

Monster banking Trojan botnet claims 500,000 victims

Crazy Operations Guy

@Joe Drunk

Indeed. Anything that can run code can be compromised, a harsh lesson we've been learning lately with all of these internet-of-things vulnerabilities.

APPLE still building fanbois CULT HQ in Cupertino, it seems

Crazy Operations Guy

Not as green as it could be

There's a good reason why buildings aren't designed as circles. Doing so wastes a lot of materials to transport water, power, and data around. There is also the issues with the greatly increased surface area producing an exponentially greater load on the climate control systems.

If they really were trying to be green, then a dome would the most efficient building design, but it would reduce the number of exterior windows and we all know how, even inside of the company, that status symbols are the only things that matter.

'Apple Watch' sapphire glass maker files for bankruptcy protection

Crazy Operations Guy

Welp,

time to start buying stock in Corning...

Meg Whitman: The lady IS for TURNING. HP to lob printers'n'PCs OVERBOARD

Crazy Operations Guy

I can't find it at the moment, but I remember someone releasing a report that HP toner (After being extracted from the cartridge) was more expensive per gram than pure, uncut Colombian cocaine.

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: "But if almost no-one has an HP tablet"

That's kind of the point, if HP were to make a decent tablet that can be used both at home and at work, users might be inclined to buy one rather than carrying around a work laptop and their personal tablet (especially if they get a discount).

As for Knox / other BYOD stuff, they work, but my point was to make it so much simpler so they company doesn't have to do it themselves.

Yes, they really need to get into telephony. Ultimately they should hope to be a 'one-stop-shop' for a company's technology. Make one call and everything IT is good and done. It'd be good for them, as you mentioned, from lock-in.

Crazy Operations Guy

Splitting is the wrong thing to do

Splitting their business up is the wrong direction to go. In my opinion, the problem with HP is that they were already too fragmented. They are in the unique position to build a truly unified network. Some ideas I had:

*iLO in desktops and laptops, especially if those interfaces could be used to connect back to the home office via an SSL VPN or something allowing full remote control of systems no matter where they are. Perhaps use iLO as a boot method to turn the device into a thin client and connect to a machine wiht iLO hardware

*An asset management device that would allow network devices to configure themselves based on the device plugged into each port. The same device could push a configuration to the connected system as well to point it to the nearest printer and letting the device know which printer it went to.

*Adapting the iLo protocol to be used for VDI (I know quite a few IT departments that would kill for an OS-agnostic VDI solution).

*Making iLo free (A company I worked at ended up going with KVMoIP appliances since it would be cheaper than activating iLo on the servers)

*Build WebOS into the BIOS of system, giving the user a full diagnostic environment or even a client/server for iLO, right out of the box.

With the proper set up, you can end up with a scenario where a user brings in an HP tablet from home and connects it to the corporate network, at which point the asset management device recognizes it and reboots the device. Once the device has rebooted, it would connect to that employee's VDI instance over iLO, giving them full access to their work environment without endangering the network or its data. Then the user can go about their day going to meetings around the building or to different building while being able to print to the closest printer without needing to configure a thing.

FLASH drive ... Ah-aaaaaah! BadUSB no saviour to plug and play Universe

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Already out there, called "U3" and "startkey"

I have yet to figure out why USB drive manufactures thought that anyone would want that crap anyway. All I want is an array of bits that I can manipulate over USB, not a crap ton of shovel-ware that screws with my machine despite me not having done anything more than plugged it in.

Crazy Operations Guy

USB device manufacturers should either be locking the flash memory on the devices or installing some kind of microcontroller (Or possibly an ARM chip, given their extremely low cost for the lower-end models) in there to verify the data getting written to flash.

Since I do hardware hacking in my spare time, I'll usually pull open a freshly purchased device, look up the datasheet for its USB controller and then blow the write fuse, doesn't bother me so much since firmware updates for USB devices that affect the controller are rarer than hen's teeth. If I can't, then I'll mark the device as 'insecure' and it never touches my secure network.

Ice probe peers at hidden BOTTOMS of oceans from SPAAACE

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Ice

If you just show them evidence like that, then yes, they will still deny the concept of man-made climate change under the banner of correlation =/= causation.

The problems in convincing them is that:

1) the only way to conclusively prove that climate change is man made would be to create a whole new earth that shared our history, sans humans.

2) People rarely change their beliefs, even more so when doing so would reveal a very harsh truth, like how its probably their fault (People hate feeling guilty)

3) Some of the people on the 'climate change is man-made' side are goddamn crazy and are scaring people off

4) People see conspiracies everywhere and the fact that a few well-meaning scientists were caught faking data gives them a lot of evidence towards a conspiracy existing

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Volcanos

Well, 'Volcanic Activity' can be anywhere between Krakatoa-level eruption to a tiny little sulfur fart from between some plates.

MAC BOTNET uses REDDIT comments for directions

Crazy Operations Guy

Taking down gateways is the stupidest method of trying to solve a problem, much like curing a disease by just treating the symptoms.

For something like this, they should have just kept the service running and allowed the machines to communicate with the CnC server while the police investigated and observed until they gathered enough information to capture everyone involved at once and dismantle the bot-net in one fell swoop. Taking down these posts only encourages the controllers to move things deeper and deeper until it becomes impossible to track and trace.

Atlas snubbed! Ad blocker says it can kill Facebook's stalker tech

Crazy Operations Guy

@Entrope RE: VMs

You are aware that most tracking nowadays is done on the server-side and by using the same VM over and over, you end up presenting the same GUID/Browser_ID every single time, unless you are re-installing your browser every single time.

As for security, your VM will only protect from the most ocmmon pieces of malware; I've seen some experimental exploits that take advantage of the 'Guest Additions' on the VM to launch an attack on the host (especially since both the client and server halves run with the highest permissions). I wouldn't be surprised to find state-sponsored attacks using these methods to infect machines.

Apple blacklists tech journo following explicit BENDY iPhone vid

Crazy Operations Guy

If you can't say anything nice

they won't let you say anything at all...

George Clooney, WikiLeaks' lawyer wife hand out burner phones to wedding guests

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Oh irony

My point wasn't that they share the same views, just that its laughable that she expects information to not get leaked and that she should expect as much from defending Julian.

Crazy Operations Guy

Oh irony

Woman who is defending a man who ran a website that thrives on leaking information is trying to have a leak-proof wedding...