* Posts by Adrian 4

2288 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2009

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Adrian 4

hardware access

It seems to be expected that if you infiltrate the hardware, the game's lost.

But is that actually true ?

What if you only ever dealt in encrypted data, and it was only unencrypted after a one-way link to a display device (so an infiltrated display device couldn't leak back to the internet).

Such devices even nominally exist .. Hollywood has conveniently developed non-working prototypes for us.

The question is, could you do all required datawrangling on encrypted rather than unencrypted data. Program code - probably yes. DB contents - probably yes. DB indexes maybe not. Some thought required. Discuss, preferably creatively.

Adrian 4

Re: So what happened to...

Lawyers being noted for their trustworthiness, honesty etc. right ?

Or even just staying bought ?

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Adrian 4

Do you have some issue with electric cars that makes you think petrol cars are immune from such control ?

UK digital network Openreach takes 15 electric vans for a spin

Adrian 4

"Doesn't work the same with EV. We need a serious amount of expensive infrastructure from day one, and it's questionable whether we could even manage the infrastructure for 100% EVs on the present basis."

But it will take years to lose the current stock of hydrocarbon vehicles, even with no new ones being built. Doubtless the end-of-life date will be put back a few times as reality bites. So, yes - a changeover will be quicker than the original growth of the current user base. But still slow, and, very likely, encompassing several changes of technology with refits or conversion bodges all round. Anyone still using those awful low-energy flourescent bulbs ?

Adrian 4

Why would your charging point (in the street) need a personal wire to your premises ? Eletricity's all the same. You just need a way to put it on your own bill.

It's Prime Minister Boris Johnson: Tech industry speaks its brains on Brexit-monger's victory

Adrian 4

Re: Disaster

Maybe Jo won. Bo's got the fall guy job.

Literally braking news: Two people hurt as not one but two self-driving space-age buses go awry

Adrian 4

Re: Its always the same

It destroys other buses to reduce the chances of meeting one accidentally ?

Adrian 4

Re: Perfection.

"With AI supposed to be safer and better than us mere mortals when behind the wheel,"

Well ... maybe. At least for the very specific and carefully orchestrated sort of hazards that it was tested for. If those are a high enough proportion of all incidents then the AI may well come out ahead on average, by reacting faster to that sort of threat. For less specific threats it may do less well .. but not often encounter them.

Lies. damned lies and statistics. And then marketing materials.

Adrian 4

Sure it will recognise it. Once it's been in the training data for a while.

If it hasn't been considered by the designers, then no.

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Adrian 4

cost

So how much would a pre-sales ticket to the moon cost ? Now that we have people buying tickets for an orbital flight, can anyone make a reasonable guess ? And when it might be fulfilled ?

And how much would have had to have been invested 50 years ago to be worth that much now ?

I bet it's not an insane amount (though, multiplied by 60,000, it would be a fair bit)

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

Adrian 4

Re: In the real world

We used to get them fairly regularly at a hackspace, where some members would download their films using the decent bandwidth.

Of course, since it would be unethical to track people's internet usage, we had no idea what to do with them.

Those facial recognition trials in the UK? They should be banned, warns Parliamentary committee

Adrian 4

Home Office

Where does one complain about the home office ?

They seem to be failing in every possible way, and have done for years.

Boris Johnson's promise of full fibre in the UK by 2025 is pie in the sky

Adrian 4

Re: unusable water cannon for the police, later sold for scrap at a £300,000 loss.

"Twat"

Ad hominem always loses. Now go away.

Adrian 4

Re: unusable water cannon for the police, later sold for scrap at a £300,000 loss.

"XR allowed to hold the city to ransom for ELEVEN days straight"

And someone gives a shit about that (other than the frankly irrelevant sity coin-clippers) ?

Good for XR, I say.

Nothing good ever came out of letting the City have control.

Adrian 4

Re: What is a BloJob promise worth?

"This casual attitude to accepting politicians lies is why were in this shitshow in the first place.

It's time they were held accountable

"

Bug report : el reg only allows me to upvote a comment once. Please adjust to +1000.

UK MPs find 'no technical grounds' to exclude Huawei from 5G networks

Adrian 4

Is Trump an ally, then ?

With friends like that, etc.

X-ray specs: Signal whizz JMA Wireless claims to have solved indoor 5G, everyone

Adrian 4

Re: Dreaming of the future that could have happend years ago

Considerable effort has already gone into ip address reassignment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IP

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

Adrian 4

You might expect that flight crew have read the technical bulletins.

It might be unreasonable to expect them to understand the system design so well that they can defeat the system by carefully tricking it into not being able to do what it's designed to do.

20-20 hindsight.

Adrian 4

It's not a broken corporate mentality. It's a fully working corporate mentality : profits above everything, especially other people.

Adrian 4

Re: never mind air miles, what about cash...

'The love of' is the bit usually forgotten, leaving just 'money is the root of all evil'. This may be Pink Floyd's fault. It may also be true, but misses the real point.

Firefox 68 arrives with darker dark mode, redesigned extensions dashboard

Adrian 4

Re: "the test is borked, or (more likely) this is challenging for many web designers"

Or pale yellow / lime green on white, like the distributors of the default .bashrc.

Internet imbeciles, aka British ISP lobbyists, backtrack on dubbing Mozilla a villain for DNS-over-HTTPS support

Adrian 4

Re: Do you have a link please?

Clearly, whatever the policy regarding use of children, in that case there was not sufficient oversight. Never mind the police - Ben Wallace is in the frame for prosecution there.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

Adrian 4

Re: Cognitive Conflict

I nominate ISPA for discouraging DNS security.

I don't believe they're required to effectively block politically unpopular sites. Because that would be impossible. They're just required to implement the approved scheme that claims, falsely, to do that. Which, of course, as is the nature of such things, works only for certain chosen circumstances.

This major internet routing blunder took A WEEK to fix. Why so long? It was IPv6 – and no one really noticed

Adrian 4

How about

'millions, if not billions of addresses will receive your announcement'

it's got form.

Here's a great idea: Why don't we hardcode the same private key into all our smart home hubs?

Adrian 4

Re: The drop-bear...

I thought it was a reference to the upside-down slashes. But I see that was an invention of the commentard.

DeepNude's makers tried to deep-six their pervy AI app. Web creeps have other ideas: Cracked copies shared online as code decompiled

Adrian 4

Re: Different strokes?

There are a number of blokes (especially certain russian horseriders and orange american blimps) that would benefit from this experiment.

Who's got a copy to try it with ?

Former UK PM Tony Blair urges governments to sort out online ID

Adrian 4

Re: Yeuch...

What's so great about a strong leader who's wrong ?

Buckminsterfullerene sounds like the next UK Prime Minister but trust us, it's in fact the largest molecule yet found in interstellar space

Adrian 4

It could be pocket fluff.

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

Adrian 4

Re: An alternative border is obvious

But magic pixie dust works fine for other self-created problems, like IR35. Why shouldn't it work on borders, too ?

All you need to be sure is not test it very well.

Red Hat signs off last set of numbers before it is likely gobbled by IBM

Adrian 4

Will they assimilate Poettering before he creates any more shit ?

There's that phrase again: JP Morgan CIO told Autonomy's first HP boss it was 'a shit show'

Adrian 4

Re: Class

Really ?

It made me think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ConFe-wSLc

You're Huawei off base on this, Rubio: Lawyers slam US senator's bid to ban Chinese giant from filing patent lawsuits

Adrian 4

Streisand effect

"The move effectively bans Sugon – a leading Chinese supercomputer maker, and its chip-designing subsidiaries, from buying American technology without permission from Uncle Sam."

Cue a new generation of chinese supercomputer chips which will drive Trumpton further into a technological backwater.

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

Adrian 4

Re: You can be burned out,

Nobody's perfect. Don't expect them to be. Sometimes stuff gets to you.

At least he doesn't monkey-dance around the stage for PR.

Hot desk hell: Staff spend two weeks a year looking for seats in open-plan offices

Adrian 4

Re: Hotdesking is awful?

Do beancounters hotdesk ?

No ?

Ever wonder why ?

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

Adrian 4

Re: This was always May's toy

"I'm not even sure the masses of the mostly computer illiterate will manage that. It'll sound too complicated and scary."

Of course they will. It will be called 'facebook private' or somesuch : leaks data to FB, takes no setup, works via the social media exemption.

Queue baa, Libra: People will buy what Facebook's selling. They shouldn't, but they will

Adrian 4

Anything with animated lighting or stylised DRLs (or, indeed, DRLs at all) ?

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Adrian 4

Pathetic.

Off for 5 secs

On for 8, off for 2

rinse and repeat x 4.

What's so hard about that ? For something you only have to do when you dumbly screw up the setup. ?

Wimps.

Yubico YubiKey lets you be me: Security blunder sparks recall of govt-friendly auth tokens

Adrian 4

Fit for purpose

Governments prefer security with built-in-weaknesses, so these should be just the thing for government use.

Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam

Adrian 4

Re: Talking of which ...

'Has this happened often?'

Often enough to have a specific name (for at least one form of it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent

'AI is not the cause, it’s an accelerant. The pace of change is challenging' Experts give Congress deepfakes straight dope

Adrian 4

Wise words

"David Doermann, a professor working at the University of Buffalo’s Artificial Intelligence Institute, summed it up succinctly: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on,” he told the committee."

Goodness me. The committee must have been astonished to learn of this. What a revelation !

Adrian 4

Recognising doctored technology won't happen - it's an arms race between fakes and detection.

This is a good thing - it will take a while, but eventually everybody will be as suspicious of video as they already are of simple photos.

Hacking these medical pumps is as easy as copying a booby-trapped file over the network

Adrian 4

Connectivity ?

Having just returned from an unwilling stay in an NHS hospital, my concern at this exploit is pretty much zero.

There are plenty of patient monitors, IV pumps etc. with an option for network connectivity. And absolutely zero actually connected ones.

The vast majority sit there on a stand next to the patient with an uncancelled alarm bleeping its life out. An earache for the patients but I don't think the staff even hear them : they bleep so much they just block them out.

This makes me very unhappy. It's like a compiler warning : if you habitually ignore it, how will you see the one that matters ? The blame belongs equally between overworked medical staff and unthinking manufacturers who make their systems bleep by default at every little whimsy, but good system design it is NOT. And danger from unprotected network ports irrelevant.

Perhaps in some big american hospital that can afford a monitor for every bed (only a few % need one) they do plug them in. I suspect not. And maybe wifi versions are coming, but if notification over wifi to a central monitoring console is their thing, I won't be a customer.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Adrian 4

But whoever heard of a bean counter that had their own beans counted? They're immune from that sort of thing because their work is far too important to be compromised by saving money or efficiency. After all, accountancy is the entire point if the organisation. Science, medicine, customers, all that sort of shit is just there to make beans.

No backdoor, no backdoor... you're a backdoor! Huawei won't spy for China or anyone else, exec tells MPs

Adrian 4

Re: Personally I'm quite relieved

i do hope Mr Lamb continues his question with all the other suppliers to the UK telecomms market. I suspect the others are likely to be a lot less convincing - or trustworthy - than huawei.

There's a reason why my cat doesn't need two-factor authentication

Adrian 4

Sooner or later, the 'proper' IT pro will find themselves locked out. If they're worth their salt they will then find another way around it. The brighter ones will leave that workaround in place.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Adrian 4

Re: BANG!

"My geography teacher: former olympic javelinist (ok, analogy falls down a bit there)"

Geography teachers always have a crossover with sports. Something to do with field trips, I understand.

The best and worst of GitHub: Repos wiped without notice, quickly restored – but why?

Adrian 4

Re: Command/Control channel flag?

Doesn't bode too well for github's Package Registry system if they don't like bots pulling from it, does it ?

Adrian 4

Maybe hosted services are more reliable than a random desktop. But not more reliable than a couple of proper backup systems.

Github is a distribution system, not an archive. Obviously so, since it's Someone Else's Computer.

Losing your github archive should be about as exciting as losing your web page : a minor annoyance requiring a few minute's work to correct.

If it's not, you're doing it wrong.

Musk loves his Starlink sat constellation – but astroboffins are less than dazzled by them

Adrian 4

Re: Reflective?

They're intended to be cat's eyes for musk's space-going tesla

Google may have taken this whole 'serverless' thing too far: Outage caused by bandwidth-killing config blunder

Adrian 4

Re: Whatever happened to distributed computing?

A fail-safe system always fails by failing to fail safe.

-John Gall, 'Systemantics'