* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

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Re: How much?

Hm... we had to deal with a Mr Jones, who was Regional Head of Security. He was an unholy trinity of financial auditor, Stasi officer and red team.

If the cash receipts in the store were down £10 at close-of-business on Monday, and up £10 at close-of-business Tuesday, then he'd be waiting at the shop door at 8am on Wednesday wanting an explanation for the £20 discrepancy. You can bet he'd have actually arrived at the store at 7am, had commanded the mall security (successfully) to let him into the back-of-house areas, and he would have spent that hour trying to pick the locks of and jemmy open the back door, jemmy the stock room windows, remove the extractor fan covers... he was the kind of a person who carried a large brief case around with him, said to contain a 6-cell MagLite, step-ladder, crowbar, screwdriver, lock picking set, smoke bombs, and a calculator with a roll printer. The last implement being the most feared of them all.

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Cardax locks should be on the front and back doors of ALL co-loc cabinets, along with rack top web-cams facing front and rear. If you can't lock the room, you lock the cabinet.

Physical access control should be part of the lease agreement.

Life in plastic, with a classic: Polymer £20 notes released into wild sporting Turner art

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Re: Offensive?

I understand that the old cotton £20s are recycled as soil improver.

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Ah! What flavour is this one?

Lamb, perhaps?

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

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Re: Adversarial attacks

(c) Massive

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Re: Adversarial attacks

At a block of flats that a friend lived in, they released the remote door lock by pressing # on their phone - the call button could be linked to a mobile or a landline as well as a dedicated door-com handset. All very clever.

But realising that the panel at the door was listening to the noise coming through the speaker, and knowing how most phone circuits have a feature known as sidetone which feeds microphone signal back through the earpiece, I just ran up the DTMF app on my phone, cranked up the volume and played the gate tone to the intercom. Door open, even if no-one picked the phone up at the other end!

The building management company changed it all about 6 months later, and the new panel wasn't susceptible to that attack any more.

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

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Re: "bridging designed gaps between...engineering control systems and human interface"

Now if you could get control of the tow mules, you could cause some grief.

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Re: "bridging designed gaps between...engineering control systems and human interface"

Yeah, you do can do a lot of damage in a very short time

And they said IoT was trash: Sheffield 'smart' bins to start screaming when they haven't been emptied for a fortnight

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Re: Drones don't work in cloudy conditions

That's Sheffield fucked then. Hang on, hang on... how did they get all those HD aerial shots for Doctor Who then? Was that all CGI? Or helicopters?

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The council's reputation can hardly be described as stainless.

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Re: Something seems wonky in that sentence

Complete disregard for humanity...

Is the new leader of the council called Tim Shaw?

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Re: How about...?

The bin lorries are powered from an onboard generator, fuelled by the combustion of waste.

Put an AI on board, give it a "survival instinct", it can navigate the most efficient routes and find the richest sources of fuel from the network of sensors in all the bins ... big pair of mechanical claws so it can grab the waste bags and feed itself.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Unless there's some kind of EU or UK government grant for tree planting schemes that they can tap into... after all, money doesn't grow on them.

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Re: How is that going to work?

What a load of rubbish!

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Re: How is that going to work?

However it MAY result in data that enables a more efficient planning of services - by knowing which bins fill up more quickly, they can provision more in that area etc etc.

Because asking Trigger (and his broom) where people drop litter and which bins fill up quicker was too much like hard work.

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

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Re: Maybe the FBU shouldn't have sabotaged FiReControl then

I think they might have started a flamewar.

OK, which Dombås stuffed Windows 10 to bursting at Swedish flatpack flinger?

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Hours of amusement...

One game that we played to while away the long winter evenings was to get into a group and give the IKEA catalogue to someone who opened it at random, picked an object from the page and read the name out. The rest of the group then had to guess what the said object actually was, chair, bed, cup, light etc. If anyone guessed correctly, they took the catalogue & the poor devils that guessed wrong had to down a nubbe of whatever brännvin the Swedish postgrad student had bought on her way back through duty free last time. Rinse and repeat until last man standing and everyone else is comatose.

Psst. SANshine, fancy a bit of shared block storage on Azure?

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Re: Ever more complex

The cloud is a high level concept.

When you look at it at a low level, you find it's made up of lots and lots and lots of fog.

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

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Re: A Neural Network ?

Or as I prefer to call them, neuralgic networks.

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Re: "the prangs may occur between the years 2131 and 2923"

Ah. The so called "Butterfly Effect".

Well, we have now taken action to prevent the aforementioned effect from interfering with our calculations in future and we have, err... well... killed all the butterflies. I think that's a sensible move, don't you? Yes. Statistically prudent.

Steve Jobs, executives shot down top Apple engineers' plea to design their own server CPU – latest twist in legal battle over chip upstart Nuvia

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Re: The future

The o/p is virtually the script of that whole film in a nutshell.

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Re: The future

Paycheck.

Social media notifications of the future: Ranger tagged you in a photo with Tessadora, Wrenlow, Faelina and Graylen

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Dicks lick sick. Yes.

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I'm part asparagus...

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Re: Ministry of names...

I feel sorry for Bracken Deckard.

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Re: "All names are "made up" in one way or another"

Sony, likewise. Made up because it just sounded right.

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Re: Another horror story

Fook-Mi and Fook-Yu?

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Re: Vanity names?

A Sioux?

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Re: Brigham?

Ah yes, my old retailing entrepreneur pal, Brigham Bysell.

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Re: Ministry of names...

I worked with a Maurice Travailler some years ago.

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Re: Ministry of names...

The name "Ford Prefect" is nicely inconspicuous...

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

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Re: Adobe = shit.

Adobe is a type of clay, a hut built from that clay and the specific type of clay brick that said hut is built of.

Adobe. Brick. How appropriate.

Come to Five Guys, where the software is as fresh as the burgers... or maybe not

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All the way... Or is that the black toppings rather than the red?

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Ah yes. Extreme sucking.

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Re: upstart?

A Royale with cheese.

Researchers reckon 500k PCs infested with malware after dodgy downloads install even more nasties from Bitbucket

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Re: Instant karma

It gets worse when you're in research. The go-to toolbox for assembling figures for publications and lectures, used once in a blue moon, but which you buy monthly - 12 months at a time. Hey, we're not making money using these tools you know.

EVERYONE wants Photoshop and Illustrator to make their figures though.

Not any more, matey, not any more.

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You mean they hoover with a Dyson?

I've heard that in Australia they even sellotape things with durex.

EU tells UK: Cut the BS, sign here, and you can have access to Galileo sat's secure service

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Re: foot, shot.

"You folks planning on going back to Imperial units of measure?"

Blasted rebels.

Aren't you a little short for a StormTrooper? Under 187.96cm.

Something, something, something... Dark Side... something.

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Avenue 5 is pretty close to it, TBH.

That's what makes you hackable: Please, baby. Stop using 'onedirection' as a password

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I find...

it rather annoying that so many websites have a very low figure for the maximum number of characters e.g. choose a password between 8 and 14 characters long. Why? Presumably they don't store them in plaintext, so there's not going to be an excessive overhead in storing the characters because the hashed version is going to be longer still. Then there are ones that refuse to accept other characters such as "-" which is useful for breaking a randomly generated string up into memorable groups. Then there are those that must have capital letters, can't have capital letters, must have a non-alphanumeric, can't have a non-alphanumeric, must have numbers, can't start with a number... Gah!!!!

Why can't people learn to use the pattern and max/min length attributes on input type="password" tags, that can then clue browser based password generators in to the rules required to generate a valid password for that site? In fact, why do some browser based password managers NOT make use of those attributes?

Vulture discovers talons are rubbish for building Lego's International Space Station

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Re: "a pain when using the pieces to create something new"

How much for the little girl?

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Limited play potential indeed...

There's plenty of potential for recreating scenes from a film for example, taking advantage of LEGO's primary feature, i.e. its take-apart-ability.

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

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Re: Can't stop smiling

* Personal Roadwatch 1800.

Apparently they say they are starting to decommission the sensor heads and now rely on certified GPS receivers. In my mind, a step backwards. There was also Trafficmaster Y2Q which used the same network of sensors.

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Re: How easy it is to fool

Tsk! EVERYONE's a Captain Kirk.

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Re: Can't stop smiling

There's still the old "AA/Vodaphone Roadsmart" network of roadside average speed radars. Used to have one of their receivers... Now that was a functional UI. Just a simple dotmatrix single digit LED display to indicate direction and 3 LEDS to indicate distance.

Elon Musk shows world that he is truly awful at something

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Oh, he doesn't seem to have much trouble getting anything up. It's coming back down that's the problem.

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Re: Award-winning

I used to have an audiobook tape of Christopher Lee reading James Herbert's The Fog.

I didn't make it to the end of Chapter One before losing consciousness; ever.

On the plus side, I discovered the cure for insomnia.

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Re: Can't you stick him ON rocket(s)?

An EDM version of "Urban Spaceman"... I'm all ears (said Spock).

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

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Re: 3 laws for AI

Hey Siri! What are the three laws of robotics?

Ohm's Law,

Sod's Law and

Cole's Law.