Posts by Robert Carnegie

Re: Get s bag of D20s and Scrabble set

I've got three dice.

One rolls 0, 1, or 2.

One rolls 0, 3, or 6.

One rolls 0, 9, or 18.

The total is a number 0 to 26 which I use for any letters required in a password.

Re: Ah. Well, ahem...!

I once tried to set an account password on SCO UNIX of "moscow". I was young and reckless. I was not however in the pay of Russia, but for a short while I thought they thought I was.

"Must not repeat a letter" is the password rule that annoys me most. Equal with "We do not tell you the rules before you try to set a password".

But your plan is probably covered by the first 500 attempts of any hacker.

Call me paranoid - when I need a new password, I spend about five minutes rolling dice.

Re: The future is coming

I'd say canary for the sacrificial devices whose function is to indicate that jamming has occurred.

In the "Rivers of London" book series, police constable Peter Grant wrestles with the practice and consequences of magic, Harry Potter with a lot fewer jokes. One consequence is that magic reduces active microelectronics to sand. Apart from ritually sacrificing pocket calculators to appease "spoiler", Peter proceeds to buying a lamentable number of cellphones, running particular software, and leaving them around so that when one of them stops working, he knows that some magic happened in that place.

I don't know details of the case but I assume that he attacked the candidate's web site using a substantial botnet, or an exploit which consumes the web server's resources disproportionately to the cost of generating the exploit, or both. There also will have been steps taken to conceal the identity of the attacker. Apparently this failed, and probably the sophisticated parts of the attack can be rented, cycbercrime as a service, but there is more to it than just running "ping" over and over again.

Re: Prior usage

None of this really explains what Yggdrasil was doing in 1975. I think being bothered by a squirrel is one mythological answer.

Re: In a stockyard...

It's not endemic yet, it's pandemic, but what was meant is "epidemic", disease running amuck in your country.

I think it goes:

Outbreak: uh oh.

Epidemic: It's spreading everywhere in one country.

Pandemic: It's spreading everywhere in the world basically,

Endemic: it's spread. At that point, it may be geographically limited. Or it may still be everywhere.

At any point it ought to be stopped, but someone in authority has to get off their backside and bother people.

To answer your question, each state is declared by the World Health Organisation, and only when it has been the case obviously for some time.

https://www.physio-pedia.com/Endemics,_Epidemics_and_Pandemics

covers the levels. I think I also saw a chart at WHO, or it may have been Wikipedia. This page also has a claimed WHO chart of steps towards a pandemic, but this may be specifically for a new influenza, going from birds / pigs / mink / kangaroos to person-to-person.

Re: Complex CAPTCHA

I haven't looked, but evidently it's a joke that you didn't get. In the "Terminator" film series, robots exterminate humanity, John Connor leads the resistance, and an Arnold Schwarzenegger robot is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, who is his mother, before John is born. Then next time, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a goodie robot fighting the baddie robots.

So, do not help the robots to find Sarah Connor.

Re: Thank you

They're having network problems...

Re: "we do not send items to landfill in the UK"

I think "owned by a third party seller that went bust, A isn't allowed to sell it on its own account, and no one wants it back" was one formula offered for this outcome.

Re: Meltdown...

Nothing responds well to getting the wrong voltage applied to it.

On the other hand, a power brick naturally produces different voltage depending on the load - I think - unless designed not to. I'm currently looking for a replacement of one that does that (for TV box, not PC) and I'm just assuming that it was cheap. But won't be now.

Re: Aren't Pet Microchips enough?

I just saw a bit on Quora about a cat which IIRC went for unsuccessful physiotherapy, X-Ray and... CAT scan?... for a limp that turned out to be its ID microchip worked into leg muscle. I think the chip was rather trickily but successfully removed, and with more physiotherapy, the cat's fine.

I think I remember I used to run PBRUSH.EXE. I thought that was "Paintbrush". I run PBRUSH now I get "Paint". Maybe I am misremembering "Paint 3D sounds like too much work" as "MS Paint sounds like too much work".

https://superuser.com/questions/306540/paintbrush-or-mspaint-executable-file/306542

...explains how by various tricks, trying to run PBRUSH gets you Paint, but also maintains that they are just the same thing. Hmm.

Maybe at some point in a series of Windows upgrades in place, there was an older PBRUSH and a new PAINT on the same system, from different Windows versions, and I preferred PBRUSH.

Re: tribbles, how to remove?

Have you tried running a mower over the grass around your tree to pick the seeds up before they sprout? Or is that what broke your last mower? Does it come off the tree as fluff?

A little reading indicates your tree is indeed female and evidently on good terms with male trees nearby, so, perhaps a giant polythene tree condom would work - on your lady rather than the local toms - but fitting it on looks like quite a job, possibly involving drones. I'm not sure what other contraception may be available for trees.

Re: Just ban all crypto currencies.

My impression is that cryptocurrency is something for people to gamble on INSTEAD of the stock market. But that stock market trading is, do to speak, rigged by "the house" anyway - or rather, by fancy computer systems which do buying and selling in a tiny fraction of a second, and which make Bitcoin mining look like printing naughty "ASCII art" for money.

It was a different time ;-)

But at this time, a lot of pubs and restaurants are "The Prince Edward"...

Re: Did I read that right?

Not popular... How about rats, then? Rats are not popular, but I expect that an agency of creative thinkers on animal cruelty can do things to rats that you won't want to think about.

Re: Not a CFAA issue

Put all the servers that don't want their information scraped in the .scouts-honour top level domain. You literally have to send "scouts-honour" to get any access to data.

Another approach is for entry to the server initially to encounter a screen that goes "I promise not to do naughty things on this server". You have to click on "Promise" to get through. After that, it's set in a cookie.

I thought the standard of measurement of Bosoms was a pencil.

How many if us will it take to support your Bosoms?

Re: Thermostats

When the fairly large, glass pyramid styled "St Enoch Centre" shopping mall was built in Glasgow, Scotland (opened in 1989), a newspaper cartoon portrayed a neighbour stopping by to ask how the tomatoes were growing.

A day or three later, someone reported they actually were growing some tomatoes in there.

If you're thinking it could be something else, I only heard about the tomatoes.

I think that British buildings which were found to share the unfortunate feature with the notorious Grenfell Tower of being clad in candle-wax were told to get guards in to patrol through the place watching for fires, till it could be fixed. And as far as I know, they still have the guards. So... if the data centre supports human life now, then they may do that.

Re: Change of paradigm

When you refer to "laws passed almost exclusively for Google" - by your examples I think you mean "laws against Google", though that isn't the only way that it goes.

For instance, "the right to be forgotten" compels Google to suppress information in search results, which they did not want to do.

Re: Coventry Scenario?

It was mainly Hitler I'd suppose?

Re: iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s are different things

I think I estimated already that since iOS 12 is hosting COVID-19 contact tracing software, it will be supported now until - if - that crisis is absolutely over. But as far as I can tell, they don't announce that to the public - but they do publicly release point updates for security and maybe other bug fixes. You just don't know when they'll stop doing that.

Just one dependency? ;-)

Re: Notepad++ is genius

I think years ago I had a reliability problem when using it to convert file encoding type of ridiculously large text data files - but using the 32 bit version may have contributed to the trouble.

So

You have open specifications and implementations of security, to address this.

...once you get past having government-issued security WITH government backdoor (Clipper), and treating effective security products as restricted weapons and a crime. The thing with PGP for instance. And also, knowing about any of this.