* Posts by brooxta

168 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2009

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Rise of the Machines: FIRST HUMAN VICTIM – 2015

brooxta

Advances in AI

Maybe it's because we haven't invented actual positronic brains yet? How on earth are feeble ARM/MIPS processors meant to cope with the moral quandaries posed by modern society? No wonder the first law is going out of the window.

Will we ever can the spam monster?

brooxta

Re: Block port 25 by default

A surprising number of UK ISPs supplying residential services leave port 25 wide open (although, granted, they may be throttled - I haven't stress tested the connection!). From my (limited) experience it seems that north American ISPs are more diligent on this matter while Australian ISPs are similar to their UK brethren.

Ports 465 and 587 with accompanying authentication protocols are definitely the way forward.

Having outgoing port 25 blocked by default but the possibility of it being opened at the customer's request seems like a reasonable way forward.

Man brings knife to a gun fight and WINS

brooxta

Re: Was he a Jedi ???

This is not the lifeform you are looking for.

Blighty: Welcome your new, faceless MI6 chief – Alex Younger

brooxta

Alternative career

Well if things don't work out with the new job I think he could have a promising (orange) lollipop-man career ahead of him.

Cable guy, Games of Thrones chap team up to make Reg 'best sci-fi film never made' reject

brooxta
Meh

Re: Putting the Mars into Marxist

Hmm. I was wondering about re-reading them and this has put me off somewhat. Still at 99p maybe it's still worth a punt on the first tome to see if I concur.

Super Cali so litigious, Uber is the focus. Even German judges say it's something quite atrocious

brooxta

Super Cali El Reg Headlines

"Super Cali" El Reg headlines are so repetitious.

Maybe! they're! the! new! Yahoo!, with rhyming now the focus?

If they're published often enough it could become hilarious,

"Super Cali" El Reg headlines should be repetitious.

The Schmidt hits the brand: Apple's iPhone 6 is a year late, scoffs smug search supremo

brooxta

To 20111 and beyond!

Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google for a very long time!

Don't tell Larry.

Fake tape detectors, 'from the stands' footie and UGH! Internet of Things in my set-top box

brooxta

Australia?

Looks like Australia fell off the bottom of the internet...

Funny given that Neighbours is one of the most popular shows pirated in the UK.

The sound of silence: One excited atom is so quiet that the human ear cannot detect it

brooxta

> Schrodinger's phonon?

Someone tell him to turn it off, we're trying to do science in here.

Starship Troopers beat Aliens, Robots AND Chuck Norris to WIN in a FIGHT

brooxta

Chuck

But what would happen to the rankings if Chuck Norris were in a revealing outfit?

SHINY NEW GADGETS! No, we're not joking, here's a load of them

brooxta

> Panasonic certainly created quite a stir.

I think it will just be a flash in the pan.

Airbus developing inkjet printer for planes

brooxta

Re: Silly idea

Your metallurgy must be longer ago than you realize

Fair cop guv.

Airbus has introduced laser welding on aluminium sheets long ago for the A380. With the right alloy and right welding parameters, you get a better strength-to-weight ratio than with rivets, which are a pain from a production engineering point of view.

Rivetting is a pita, not just for production, it can be a source of corrosion leading to fractures during the working life of the aircraft too.

And I take your point about laser welding on Airbus products, although that's quite a lot of qualifications for what turns out to be a relatively small part of the A380's fuselage. That being said I too expect the proportion will only increase.

However, imagine having to laser weld every dot of the structure in 3d as you print it. And when it comes to the jet engine turbine blades... after you sir!

brooxta

Re: Silly idea

When it gets to the stage where "ink jets" are in fact "atom jets" then you might have a process that could produce viable aircraft. Until then 3d printing for most aerospace applications, without significant treatment regimes afterwards, is just plain not going to work.

Those treatment regimes (annealing etc) would lose you most of the convenience of printing anyway. It's been a little while since I did any serious metallurgy but I hate to imagine the physical properties of aluminium that has been ink jet deposited. Consider the fact that planes use rivets rather than welds to hold them together because welding weakens the aluminium alloy too much and you get a sense of the problem.

The degree to which the alloys in aircraft depend on strict atomic-crystalline arrangements on a large scale for their structural integrity is very impressive especially when you realise you bet your life on the fact that it is so and will remain so for the duration of your flight let alone the lifetime of the component.

US! govt! ordered! Yahoo! to! hand! over! user! data! or! pay! $250k! fine! PER! DAY!

brooxta

diminishing returns

Presumably the more these stories hit the press the less actual outlaws etc actually use these services for anything significant. So the more the govts trawl these sources the more they are focusing on innocents and the less they are gaining useful intel on actual terrorists.

These broad tools appear only to make the "security" forces jobs harder in the long run.

Phishing miscreants THWART securo-sleuths with AES-256 crypto

brooxta

Sauce

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

"Encryption done properly works." So they haven't managed to do it properly yet. They will.

Use home networking kit? DDoS bot is BACK... and it has EVOLVED

brooxta
Coat

Re: Cars and computers

I think it's called reverse (gear) engaging.

Mozilla certification revocation: 107,000 websites sunk by untrusted torpedo

brooxta

Re: If you still use a 1024-bit RSA key such as PGP, it's time to start using ECC-based keys

Why downvote the parent? It's an absolutely valid point. If you disagree then please provide some links to alternative mainstream ECC-enabled PGP-type applications.

Beer in SPAAAACE: Photographic PROOF

brooxta
Boffin

The plan was for "a sealable 530ml container purchased for £3.50 from Tesco" according to previous coverage of this mission. But I agree, either the Lego hero is actually larger than life in real life (there's something to mull on over a (real life) pint) or else Tesco ought to be had under advertising standards/mislabelling.

Verizon hit with $7.4 MEEELLION fine for slurping users' privates

brooxta

Re: How the board laughed....

@dan1980

Settling out of court isn't sending a very strong message to either Verizon or other companies who are either currently engaged in similar behaviour or contemplating it.

As far as I am aware there was no court action, just the FCC investigation and the resulting conclusions which were accepted by Verizon because they paid the fine. That is quite different to settling out of court when a case has been brought.

brooxta

Re: How the board laughed....

The financial cost is not high for them, as you point out, but management have very publicly been found to be breaching the rights of their customers and admitted their guilt by agreeing to pay the fine. That is still serious.

Verizon is not a company that can just dissolve and come back again under a new brand. They need somehow to make amends. Perhaps it's too much to hope that it won't be by just sweeping it under the carpet...

Security rEsrchRs find nu way 2 spot TXT spam

brooxta

Re: Punters

@ChrisS4

They say they added tweets to simulate clean SMS data. Well done!

They cleaned up 200,000 tweets to act as an additional source of non-spam. That is additional to the non-spam they harvested from the cellco's network.

brooxta

Punters

Did the cellco concerned get permission from all the customers concerned before using their private non-spam messages in this research?

CNN 'tech analyst' on NAKED CELEBS: WHO IS this mystery '4chan' PERSON?

brooxta

Re: "We've all done these things"

> in a flash

I see what you did there. Have an upvote.

Google: let's build our own quantum computer

brooxta

Re: One day soon, in the not too distant future ...

What happens then? Will it sublime into a cloud of vaporware?

Uber alles... nein! Germany imposes nationwide ban on taxi app

brooxta

They think it's all...

Does this mean it's all over for Uber?

Epiphany hits Raspberry Pi founders, users

brooxta

Re: That name...

Not sure it's confusing, it just makes clear where the code has come from. "Web" with a lightweight GTK interface promised for the RPi's hardware combined with the preference for a name with "pi" in it somewhere makes the choice obvious.

Google has spaffed more cash on lobbying this year than Big Cable

brooxta

Re: On Google's side on this issue

When it comes to the internet Google _is_ the incumbent and pretty much everyone else is small fry.

Rubbish WPS config sees WiFi router keys popped in seconds

brooxta
Joke

Re: n00b here

No, I'm pretty sure that's an El Reg headline.

brooxta

Re: Dumb question here

Most routers don't use https for admin logins, so if someone has cracked your WPS and is listening to all network traffic they can scrape your admin password. At which point all of the above warnings are true.

The same thing applies to mac addresses because they can be spoofed quite easily. And if you're listening to traffic then you know which MAC addresses to try spoofing.

The WiFi range thing is a very useful limiter on your network's exposure. However there are many easy ways to boost signal strength (eg the infamous Pringle can method) and attack a network from otherwise unfeasible distances. Just because your iPhone can't see your home network halfway down the street doesn't mean it's impossible to access your network from there.

brooxta

Re: Just switched off WPS

<big bad wolf>

All the better to hack you with!

</big bad wolf>

brooxta

WPS

If I'm not flashing with DD-WRT or OpenWRT then disabling WPS is one of the first things I do with a new router.

I'm obviously out of touch, though, because I had thought WPS was well known to be extremely dodgy already. Did someone manage to fix it for a while?

Server sales show signs of slight surge

brooxta

Slight surge

Also in the news this week:

mild terrorism,

damp English summer,

odd zombies,

halfhearted hype.

Kaspersky backpedals on 'done nothing wrong, nothing to fear' blather

brooxta

Balanced sound bite

> Finding the balance between privacy and surveillance is probably never going to be sorted in our lifetimes. It's a tremendously complex and convoluted issue, and it's questionable if the intricacies can be covered in a handy sound bite.

If/when we find the balance then a handy sound bite becomes a possibility, useful as a point of reference. Until that happens sound bites only represent a particular point of view.

Also, I'm not sure that the issue is convoluted. I think people's understanding is generally convoluted and often confused or inconsistent because the issue is nuanced.

Experimental hypersonic SUPERMISSILE destroyed 4 SECONDS after US launched it

brooxta

Re: "Happily no one was hurt"

Maybe the American military-industrial complex relocated the Island Of Sodor to Alaska?

VMware's MARVIN emerges as 'EVO' for branch offices and web-scale rigs

brooxta

Behind the times

Wot? No IPv6 config options under networking?

Your move, sucker! Microsoft tests cloud gaming system that cuts through network lag

brooxta

>Ingenious, most players won't even realise that they're being controlled!

Yep. In modern America the game plays you.

Apple slings fanbois' data at Chinese servers in China Telecom deal

brooxta

"Disingenuous"? You're going with that?

"If they're making out that the data is protected and secure that's a little disingenuous because if they want to operate a business here, that'd have to comply with demands from the authorities," said Jeremy Goldkorn

It's more than disingenuous, it's the lie that everyone swallows when they sign up for cloud-based anything anywhere, not just China.

Giving your old Tesco Hudl to Auntie June? READ THIS FIRST

brooxta

It's not your auntie June you should be worried about

... it's who she passes it on to afterwards.

After all, auntie June is probably not going to have the elite hacker skills necessary to discover the undeleted files on the (emulated) sdcard. So you're safe for now. But only until she sells it on eBay for ££.99 (excl p&p).

And then you're both done for...

It's time for PGP to die, says ... no, not the NSA – a US crypto prof

brooxta

Re: He's right! PGP sucks to use!

@Joe Harrison

Its practical use is that it serves as a working system for many tech-savvy types, and also as a standard for other systems.

PGP was invented years ago and it was an enormous step forward, even though it was as tough to use then as it is now (in fact tougher - ever tried using it on a 386?). The thing is that the problems it set out to address then have only become worse in the intervening time: now there is not just the concern that it is possible to exercise mass-surveilance on populations in the "west", but the proof that it is in fact happening.

I don't know what the next big step forward will be or where/who it will come from, but I do know that it will need to give us at least what PGP does. Otherwise it won't be a step forward, but rather backwards.

The experts tell us that cryptography is hard and good cryptography is even harder. From my experience I would tend to agree. The question is, is it worth it? And attempting to answer that question leads you on to other rather bigger questions.

brooxta

Re: Not saying PGP is perfect

> And how do you trust an email or key server?

That's what the fingerprint is for. You use it to verify that what you downloaded is actually correct.

brooxta

Re: Not saying PGP is perfect

You don't need the whole certificate/key in a qr code, you can send that as an email attachment or download it from a web page or key server. The qr code would be useful for the key fingerprint though, which should be much more manageable. You would then use the fingerprint encoded in the qr code to verify you had downloaded the right key.

brooxta

Re: He's right! PGP sucks to use!

It might suck to use for all the reasons he gave, and yes SMTP sucks because it was designed without security in mind, but there is one reason at least why PGP absolutely rocks:

You can use it to encrypt a message to send via just about any medium. And you can verify that security independently of the infrastructure you used to communicate.

As soon as you start to build a monolithic "secure" system you lose that independence, which is a big loss.

In every secure system I am aware of (and I should say that I in no way consider myself an expert in the field) there is always a trade off between convenience and security. You can have more of one but it means less of the other. If this guy has come up with a way of increasing the convenience without losing any of PGP's security then I'm all for it, but if he's advocating the opposite I don't want to know.

Totes AMAZEBALLS! Side boob, binge-watch and clickbait added to Oxford Dictionary

brooxta

Re: Each year we get the 'new words' announcement...

Re @Pet Peeve

That's right. It's kind of the ultimate listicle for word-geeks.

Boffins brew TCP tuned to perform on lossy links like Wi-Fi networks

brooxta
Unhappy

"TCP/IP protocol"

Grrrr.

Who needs hackers? 'Password1' opens a third of all biz doors

brooxta

Re: Correct horse battery staple

> 'N^a&$1nG' could be cracked in approximately 3.75 days

That was the most worrying part of the article!

New voting rules leave innocent Brits at risk of SPAM TSUNAMI

brooxta
Trollface

It's all part of the rise of the corporations - a necessary step. Haven't you read any dystopian sci-fi?

Murder accused DIDN'T ask Siri 'how to hide my roommate'

brooxta

Re: I'm more impressed

Probably best not to turn the microwave on, unless you want to burn your phone... but that usually means something different.

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