* Posts by MacroRodent

1975 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007

Android's accessibility service grants god-mode p0wn power

MacroRodent
Unhappy

Re: Just. Frelling. Great.

> Windows phones are pointless,

I don't think so. News like these (which seem to be pouring daily) make me happier and happier that I have an old Lumia 710 - never mind lack of apps, it also means malware writers are not interested, and it does what I need it to do, so far. The only problem is the browser is getting so old it is starting to have problems with some web sites. In a year or so I will probably have to replace it for that reason. (But with what? none of the alternatives look appealing right now - with Microsoft looking like it wants to destroy what was good in Windows Phone, Android looking like a plague ship, and Apple overpriced, as you note).

How TV ads silently ping commands to phones: Sneaky SilverPush code reverse-engineered

MacroRodent

"require Microphone permission"

That's what I wondered about too, but apps frequently ask for everything, and I guess most users click through without thinking much about it.

Not sure how this could be fixed. Maybe allow microphone access only to apps that have the text "sound recorder" or "spy" somewhere in their name?

Hubble finds lonely 'void galaxy' floating in cosmic nothingness

MacroRodent
Coat

Clearly a syntax error

It should be

void *galaxy;

or

void galaxy();

(Mine's the one with K&R in the pocket)

Hold on, France and Russia. Anonymous is here to kick ISIS butt

MacroRodent

Re: Getting Tough

"Islamic fundamentalist" does not equal "Conservative," except in a few warped minds.

"Conservative" means someone who wants to keep things the same, or return them to some past idealized state. In the U.S. it seems to mean return to the unbridled capitalism of the 1800's and early 1900's, in Russia conservatives long for the return of the U.S.S.R., and the islamic fundamentalists want to return to the islamic society like it was about 1400 years ago... I would say they are the most extreme conservatives of them all :-).

iPad data entry errors caused plane to strike runway during takeoff

MacroRodent
FAIL

keyboards

My experience in entering any data with iPad (or other touchscreens) has been it is much more error-prone than using a real keyboard.I would not let it be used anywhere where safety-critical data needs to be entered.

Aircraft laser strikes hit new record with 20 incidents in one night

MacroRodent

mirror

"Make them fail to work if pointed upwards, at more than (say) 60 degrees."

A measure easily defeated with a mirror, while inconveniencing many legitimate uses, like pointing out details of frescoes in ceilings.

Samsung S6 calls open to man-in-the-middle base station snooping

MacroRodent

Re: Tinfoil hat time

US Corporation? The article says "... demonstrated the attacks on Samsung's 'Shannon' line of baseband chips ...". Samsung is South Korean.

Drones are dropping drugs into prisons and the US govt just doesn't know what to do

MacroRodent

Re: No need to develop...

Jamming and EMPs can be defeated by Faraday shielding the drone and using a preprogrammed route so it flies programmatically without outside input.

It will need a GPS antenna to follow a pre-programmed route, unless the drone flies by dead reckoning, which is inaccurate over any significant distance. A gust of wind would cause the drop to happen outside the prison.

MacroRodent

Re: Use a net, you idiots.

Not if the spike or blade is wider than the payload so that if the spike goes through so does the payload. Make the blade sharp enough, drop it from high enough, and gravity should be able to do the rest.

If the net is made of sturdy metal wire, just dropping blades on it wont cut it, unless they are really heavy, at which point you are talking about drones the size of a small helicopter to carry both the blade and the pay-load.

But such drones would be easy to spot by the guards far in advance. The smuggler loses the stealth advantage.

How to build a city fit for 50℃ heatwaves

MacroRodent

Re: And when best laid plans fail?

You couldn't survive a year in the UK without 'technology' like clothes and houses. So we're already well past that point.

Likewise in Finland, but that 'technology' is something even my great-grandparents could make given basic ingredients like wool, hides, wood, and a bit of iron. All things that could be sourced locally. But this also relied on natural resources (land, fisheries, forests, primitive mining) and not too many people. Can't go back to that now, and if the technological base now totters, we get apocalypse...

Linus Torvalds targeted by honeytraps, claims Eric S. Raymond

MacroRodent

Re: celebrity

"He wrote a strategy game, Battle for Wesnoth."

The web site (www.wesnoth.org) states (currently at front page):

"Twelve years ago, David White sat down over a weekend and created the small pet project that we know today as The Battle For Wesnoth. At the time, Dave was the game’s sole programmer, working alongside another person, Francisco Muñoz, who produced the first graphics. As more and more people began to contribute in the years that followed, the game grew from a tiny personal project into the extensive one we know today."

The "Credits" page lists ESR as a significant contributor:

* Eric S. Raymond (ESR) - Macro library reorganization, major UI makeover introducing lightweight transparent popups and linger mode, maintainance tools for WML, eight campaigns lifted from UMC, one all-original campaign, editor refactoring, many many code cleanups, and svn-to-git migration.

But that does not really justify claiming he wrote the game.

I don't deny ESR is a programmer, and a good one, but his celebrity rests really on his writings and open-source advocacy, not his software.

MacroRodent

celebrity

Not sure how much esr is a celebrity programmer, rather than just a celebrity. His fame rests largely on two literary works: editing the "Jargon File" into book form, and writing the "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (I have bought copies of both). At one point he tried to get the Linux kernel devs to replace their build scripts with his supposedly superior build system, was miffed when they did go along, and apparently collected his marbles and went away as far as Linux kernel is concerned. His page lists various small pieces of open source software, but he does not appear to now participate in any of the larger ones.

Microsoft's OneDrive price hike has wrecked its cloud strategy

MacroRodent
Windows

Re: Just binned my Office 365

Probably some executives at MS thought they were still enjoying the near-monopoly of old. News: they don't, at least as far as cloud and mobile is concerned. Unlike with the Windows desktop OS, jumping ship to an alternate cloud provider (or just back to local storage) is easy.

MacroRodent
FAIL

Wonder if legal problems

At least where I live, Lumia's were widely advertised with the promise of bundling 15Gb of free OneDrive storage. Taking that away might catch the eye of consumer protection agencies. No doubt there is some fine print somewhere which allows Microsoft to renege on its promise, but the local consumer ombudsman has in the past often taken a dim view of such tricks, when ordinary people are concerned.

Of course, allowing "unlimited" storage was a stupid move on Microsoft's part, I don't care if they replace that with, say, 50Tb. But 5Gb for the free account is too little in this day and age, when you can get 2Tb drives at your local supermarket for 100€. I currently have a total of 40Gb "grandfathered" from their various older free offers, when they cut that to 5Gb it is a pain.

Linus looses Linux 4.3 on a waiting world

MacroRodent
Linux

ext3

Note that ext3 file system support was not removed, because the ext4 code can also handle the older file system automatically. There is a good description of the issue here: http://lwn.net/Articles/651645/

US Senate approves CISA cyber-spy-law, axes privacy safeguards

MacroRodent

Re: Goodbye Cloud

it will be impossible for any company (or government) in the EU to legally allow ANY processing of personal data to be done in the US or on a computer system owned by a US company.

So now it would be a very good time to start an European-only cloud business! Not that it will really help very much to safeguard privacy, since various EU governements will want to snoop too, but it would help EU companies use cloudiness and still obey EU laws.

Balloon-lofted space podule hits 30,000m

MacroRodent

Re: Wi-Fi and a bar?

How else would you impress your Facebook friends with a status update from 30km up?

Wailing kiddies face Xmas Legogeddon

MacroRodent

Re: Looking for alternatives?

There is K'Nex which is compatible with some interesting extensions, and I guess also others.

Lego had better not play any artificial scarcity games...

Future civilisations won't know how the universe formed

MacroRodent

Re: Just ask Dr. Who

In the episode, the Doctor himself suggests we google "bootstrap paradox". The wikipedia article by that name says the idea comes from Robert Heinlein's story "By his Bootstraps" (1941), which is earier than Moorcock's.

MacroRodent

so contrary to the science fiction staple where we meet a vastly more advanced race of Old Ones, we may in fact be the Old Ones.

Something I have also considered as a likely explanation of the Fermi paradox, with the proviso that this applies to our galaxy only (other galaxies may be older), and out galaxy might contain also other civilizations born within a 100 000 year or so time window, and far enough that we have not detected them yet (they are across the galaxy, maybe).

Sets up an epic battle a few million years from now, when our networks of colonies finally encounter each other...

MacroRodent
Happy

Just ask Dr. Who

The episode a week or two ago was prefaced by the Doctor explaining a scenario where a time traveler goes to meet Beethoven, and finds he does not exist. However, he has all of Beethoven's music with him, and proceeds to "feed" it to Beethoven's contemporaries, playing Beethoven. So who ultimately wrote the music in this case?

Same thing with the universe...

Linux kernel dev who asked Linus Torvalds to stop verbal abuse quits over verbal abuse

MacroRodent

Re: YoLotD

Well, I guess I was too dense to realize you are an expert Linux user talking only about the Linux desktop not having momentum. My humble apologies. YoLotD has now been stored to the acronym database.

MacroRodent
Linux

Re: YoLotD

Linux has no momentum.

Not if all you see are desktop operating systems. In other areas, it is fast becoming the default OS. There are already probably far more running Linux kernel instances than Windows, but you don't see them directly, In fact, you may actually right now own several Linux-based devices without realising it.

It is world domination all right.

MacroRodent

Re: The problem is, usually Linus is right

you cannot go and expect your kernel patches to be accepted without a heavy dose of scrutiny.

Technical criticism is one thing, and necessary. Being abusive is not. By now, the Linux developer community consists of technically excellent people with a thick skin. But they scare away technically excellent people who don't stand personal insults, which is a loss for the Linux community.

Woman makes app that lets people rate and review you, Yelp-style. Now SHE'S upset people are 'reviewing' her

MacroRodent
Mushroom

Re: only one suitable comment

Your worst enemy can create a profile for you*, add a story about how you lost your job because of allegations of abuse, give a fake phone number so you never find out about it**,

Moreover, the Peeble web site faq says removing yourself from Peeble is considered a future feature!

I suppose you can try to convince Peeble to remove the abusively created profile manually, but it will probably take time to convince them it is malicious, and meanwhile all the world will see the fake profile. So a really evil attacker can spoil your reputation at a critical moment, does not matter if the page is removed a day later.

Microsoft and Google ink SECRET TREATY to end all their patent wars

MacroRodent

Android has always used a native Linux file system for its internal storage, but it has had to support VFAT for SD cards.

MacroRodent
Holmes

VFAT extortion still alive?

My guess is that any of the relevant patents, FAT springs to mind, only have a few years of life left

Shouldn't that have been expired by now? The European patent info for EP0618540 B1 says

Application number EP19940105169

Publication date Dec 12, 2001

Filing date Mar 31, 1994

Priority date Apr 1, 1993

(link: http://www.google.com/patents/EP0618540B1?cl=en&hl=en)

and in Europe, patents are supposed to run for 20 years after filing date (not granting date, as used to be the case in USA).

But possibly there is some obscure rule that keeps it alive :-(.

MacroRodent

Probably

Is this the beginning of a cosy cartel forming between Apple, Google and Microsoft ?

Probably. The same way you never see major car manufacturers wage patent war on each other. Another way to put it is the industry is maturing.

MYSTERY PARTICLE BLASTS from Ceres strike NASA probe Dawn

MacroRodent

Re: A giant ancient starship?

You mean like the Shadow ship found on Mars (in Babylon 5). Better not dig it up...

Is Windows 10 slurping too much data? No, says Microsoft. Nuh-uh. Nope

MacroRodent

Slurping communications, why?

From Microsoft's page (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/online-services): When you communicate with your friends, family, and business associates, like text messaging (SMS, MMS, etc.) on a Windows device, we have to get the content of the message to deliver it to your inbox, display it to you, enable you to reply to it, and store it for you until you delete it

If I use SMS or MMS, only my cellular network operator needs to handle the message. It is none of Microsoft's business. E-mail should go via Microsoft only if I use their Outlook (former Hotmail) service. If Microsoft is routing all communications though their servers, they are actually inviting various kinds of legal trouble: Requests from law enforcement, complaints from privacy watchdogs, etc.

KARMA POLICE: GCHQ spooks spied on every web user ever

MacroRodent
Big Brother

Done commercially all the time...

The AD networks seem to be doing a good job of exactly the same thing, judging by how spookily accurately the online ads that web pages display respond to my browsing behaviour. Like earlier this year when I was looking at some reviews of TV sets, very soon almost all online ads I saw were about TV sets...

iOS 9 update set to bork 'hundreds of thousands of EU businesses'

MacroRodent

Re: but?

I have to ask if the iZettle testers signed up to the betas you know ... just in case there were some changes that stopped their app from working?

If I were an iZettle + iOS user, I would obviously steer clear of iOS beta versions, because that little device is the doorway money comes into the enterprise and hiccups could mean big losses. iZettle is typically used by small-time vendors, because the up-front cost is much smaller than with "official" payment card readers, and these people usually do not have backup for it, except cash.

It's alive! Farmer hides neglected, dust-clogged server between walls

MacroRodent

Re: "The farm decided to go with a more modern, off-the-shelf software solution."

In terms of the hardware, it is surely now possible to provide the same processing grunt in a box that requires *no* air cooling (except for exposing the case to room temperature).

True, any modern smartphone has more processing power than that Pentium server. However, implementing the same functionality using modern languages and software engineering methodology would result in a much slower system, unless you go for a bigger system ... that requires cooling.

It is like booting Windows: for the past 30 years it has seemed to take about the same time, regardless of the increase in the power of the computer I run it on! What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.

Blood-crazy climate mosquitoes set to ground Santa's reindeer

MacroRodent

Bah, they are already there

There are already so many mosquitoes in Lapland in the summer it is hard to believe adding some makes difference... in any case, mosquitoes are benign compared to blackflies, the real insect terror of Lapland. Whereas normal mosquitoes feed on you with something like tiny hypodermic needles, the blackflies of Lapland bite off pieces of your skin. Tiny pieces, but you will be attacked by hundreds of the tiny devils at a time... Somehow the reindeer survive.

Shedload of security bugs squashed in iOS 9 – what the hell went wrong with iOS 8?

MacroRodent

Cure known but will not be used....

Any system where the bulk of the software is written in C, or the C derivatives that share its low-level insecurity, like C++ or Objective C, will have buffer overflow errors until the heat death of the universe.

There are secure languages, and I do not only mean slow managed languages like Java or C#, that proactively prevent memory errors. For example Ada, the "Wirth langauges", etc. They just aren't fashionable. Yes I know that some low-level code like drivers cannot implemented with a totally safe language (except these languages often provide loopholes that can be used when absolutely required), but the bulk of the "userland" code could be written in safe compiled languages with no performance loss.

This new new chip will self-destruct in less than 10 seconds

MacroRodent

Re: no residual footprint?

Those shards will weather into sand in next to no time.

Beaches are one thing, but in organic soil a glass shard is as sharp as new after 50 years. Saw this firsthand when digging in my backyard. Some previous owners decades ago had dumped trash there.

MacroRodent

no residual footprint?

and then be effectively removed from the environment with no residual footprint,

"Ouch", say the barefooted hurricane survivors stepping on the glass shards... Glass splinters are evil as litter, since they never decompose.

Let's NUKE MARS to make it more like home says Elon Musk

MacroRodent

The day-night cycle being very close to Earths is a major plus for raising crops,

Not to mention humans! We are hardwired to something close to 24h cycle, and deviation too much from it causes health problems.

MacroRodent

Re: The chances of anything coming from earth are a million to one he said.

the biggest nuke ever to go be exploded by the humanity removed from the map (all world maps are wrong still showing it) the north island in the Novaia Zemlia archipelago.

It did make quite a crater but did not remove the island. You can see it in a Google Earth image (unless Google is also in the conspiracy...).

MacroRodent

Re: Greenhouse gas

The last thing the Martian atmosphere needs is more carbon dioxide as >it's already >95%

If the goal is to make Mars warmer, you need more CO2. After you get a thicker and warmer CO2 atmosphere, you could try growing plants. It might also allow humans to go outside wearing only a respirator and warm clothes, instead of a full space suit.

MacroRodent

No problem for the next quarter (-millenium)

there's no (or not enough of a) magnetic field to protect what atmospheric benefits there might be from such a nuke-a-thon from being blown away by the solar wind.

But how fast would that happen? It took a long time for Mars to dry up to its present state. The effects of drastic terraforming would wear off, but if that takes thousands of years, it might still be seen as worthwhile. Perhaps a way to maintain the benign climate could be found in the meanwhile. Maybe slam some icy asteroids or comets into it now and then?

MacroRodent

Greenhouse gas

Musk didn't explain why why should nuke Mars' poles,

The polar ice caps contain lots of frozen carbon dioxide, that is why.

Sign of the telly times: HDR shines, UHD Blu-ray slides at IFA

MacroRodent

Re: UHD Blu-ray is already sunk

Well, for me I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of occasions when a problem with an optical disc or a player has prevented the enjoyment of the content in the past 20 years.

I suspect you do not rent or borrow disks then. I agree a bought or self-burned disk that has been stored carefully has no problems, but our family often borrows disks from library, and they often have glitches when playing. All too often there are circular scratches (the worst kind for DVD and other optical disks), probably due to fault or perhaps just dirt in some patron's player.

The rarely used DVD-RAM used to specify a cartridge, very similar to what 3 1/4" floppies used to have. If that had been the standard for all DVD:s, they would have been nearly eternal. Which is probably one reason they are cartridge-less.

Hacker mag 2600 laughs off Getty Images inkspots copyright claim

MacroRodent

Is a random ink splatter

... even copyrightable in the first place?

And what if two people splatter ink and get a very similar result? Who is plagiarising whom? As usual with copyright corner cases, the mind boggles...

Perhaps the AIpocalypse isn't imminent – if Google Translate is anything to go by, that is

MacroRodent

Re: Dog Food

My first reaction went like who is this Alpo and what has he done now? "Alpo" is a male first name in Finland. Having "I" and "l" look identical in common fonts is indeed idiotic.

MacroRodent

Selling machine translations

Last year it was reported in the main Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat that Amazon had started selling Finnish-language e-books that were translated with Google from English classics. The samples shown were obviously hilarious or groanworthy. I have no idea if they kept doing it, one probably needs a Kindle to check that (no trace on the Amazon web site when I looked just now).

Krebs: I know who hacked Ashley Madison

MacroRodent

Re: salted duplicate check

No, that is NOT correct. In fact, storing your salt in the database alongside the passwords would be bad practice. You store it elsewhere and just query the database for the salted hash, not do it all on / within the database. All the database needs is the hash, not the salt.

In any case, you need to store each user's salt value in plaintext so that you can use it when the user logs in. From this point of view, it is irrelevant if it is the same database, or a separate one for the salts. So all the salt values are available if you want to check if the user's candidate password is already in use by someone else.

MacroRodent
Boffin

salted duplicate check

How do they tell how many users have the same password, if they're using salts, PBKDF etc and not just MD5 or SHA1? Weak.

If salted hash is used, the salt values for all existing passwords are necessarily stored in the authentication database along with the hashes. So the check for same password simply salts and hashes the candidate with each of them and checks if the resulting hash is already in the database.

What Ashley Madison did and did NOT delete if you paid $19 – and why it may cost it $5m+

MacroRodent
Big Brother

Re: But... do people *really*

Many people live in apartments/flats/tenements. AC's comment re 5 or 10 m accuracy would smear the location across many possible units. So plausible deniability there.

On the other hand, if you live in an even slightly isolated location, GPS location (or a location deduced from WIFI hotspots or cellular towers) may reveal your true identity even if you used a fake identity for registration. Does not have to be a mountaintop in Montana, just a house with enough space around it to make the nearest neighbour, cafe, or a busy street over 20m or so away.

Windows 10 market share growth slows to just ten per cent

MacroRodent

not cause for celebration

winning nearly six per cent of a global market in a month is quite a feat.

Considering how it is pushed as a free upgrade, with an "update" icon pushed to even Windows 7 machines, that is not such a wonderful feat.