* Posts by streaky

1743 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2010

Openreach pegs full fibre overhaul anywhere between £3bn and £6bn

streaky

Re: Leased line

A cynic would suggest that they're trying to avoid rolling out fibre everywhere to avoid killing their leased line business...

Or keep destroying reliability of the internet so people don't (can't) switch to VOIP products.

Re-identifying folks from anonymised data will be a crime in the UK

streaky

where oblivious users will grant permission via installing an app and accepting terms to harvest data

Terms like that tend to be inherently illegal in UK contract law, terms would stick as if the illegal part doesn't exist.

WannaCry-slayer Marcus Hutchins 'built Kronos banking trojan' – FBI

streaky

Yeah, it's nothing to do with Snowden.

streaky

Re: Also Wannacry?

didn't we all agree last month not to carry equipment to USA?

We did indeed.

Re: stupid. I meant him - if you'd pulled that then decided to pootle about in the US at a hacker con you're just asking for threats of 10 lifetimes unless you confess.

It sounds unlikely. If you do this sort of thing you wouldn't be stupid enough to draw attention to yourself with either the malware cited or with wannacry, You just wouldn't. Unless you're a world class moron.

streaky

I expect better quality than WannaCry from my NSA.

The NSA hires people who don't know that printers watermark documents, I think you expect too much..

streaky

Re: Also Wannacry?

I've read the indictment, and it looks solid

Me too, it looks like a list of claims and zero evidence. Given how clueless US agencies are I'm more prepared to believe his friends who says it's mistaken identity - plus how stupid would you have to be..

streaky

Sounds credible.

It sounds fucking absurd honestly. Not to say it couldn't be true but it sounds absurd.

Go fork yourself: Bitcoin has split in two – and yes, it's all forked up

streaky

It's not a stock split at all. What's happened is basically the Scotland splits off from the UK and creates a new currency also called the pound scenario. You can call it the pound all you like but it's not a pound - and it has different trade volume, different market cap and different fundamentals. It's a new currency with the same name and they pulled some of the capital from the currency they split from. The difference is one of those splits has a long term prospect of ceasing to exist and all that capital being deleted - and nobody accepts it for payment.

Look out Silicon Valley, here comes Brit bruiser Amber Rudd to lay down the (cyber) law

streaky

Re: Not Very Bright...

Every time this comes up I like to boil the argument down to be more simple than it was the last time it came up.

Basically where I'm at now is "if it's that easy where's GCHQs paper on how it can be done easily and securely so we can peer review it". Nope, that's what I thought.

streaky

Re: Rudd's simple solution

Germany have sort of done this. No backdoor and no breaking of encryption, but with a warrant, they can install a trojan on a device and monitor it in real time.

Security services in the UK also have this option.

'App DDoS bombs' that slam into expensive APIs worry Netflix

streaky

Uhm..

Figured this one out have they? Glad Netflix told us this was a thing.. Oh wait it's not 1998 and we already know..

After we ran our article about the fate of .sk, the nation of Slovakia flew into a rage. And now, here's part two...

streaky
Paris Hilton

Yeah but where does Paris Hilton stand in all this?

Valley VC sues blogger after sex pest claims, discovers writer is a male tech biz rival

streaky

Re: No VPN?

Or AI, any of them.

Openreach asks UK what it thinks about 10 million 'full fibre' connections

streaky

Re: re: WTF?

What you're talking about here is faulty infrastructure

That infrastructure is faulty because it's copper and nobody makes it any more. The way to get it upgraded is for the network to be upgraded and the only way to have that is to make it economically viable by, I don't know, rolling out FTTP/H.

This nonsense is circular. I don't use 1gbps so lets stick with the gear we've got is why BT screwed up it's network activities in the first place. It went out its way to constrain the internet so it could constrain people to copper phone lines that don't need to exist because charging for line leasing is how it makes all its money.

That all being said I don't trust OR *at all*, the 21cn debacle proves just how low they've sunk; the money they've been given by central government could pay for an 80% fftp rollout multiple times over. Government should stop giving them money and if they want customers in 20 years they should have to invest and upgrade their network to get them.

UK government's war on e-cigs is over

streaky

Re: Jesus, NO!

A full ban on all forms of smoking and vaping in all public places is long overdue... but of course it won't happen, not while it's a tax cash cow.

Vaping is how you stop all smoking.

Also, grow up and get a grip. I don't like the smell of food some people eat on the train doesn't mean I bitch/winge about it or treat them like they're trying to kill me or argue that food should be banned.

Literally every anti-smoking group is on message now which should tell people something.

While USA is distracted by its President's antics, China is busy breaking another fusion record

streaky

Re: let me guess...

nothing I've read or heard in this field makes me feel like "all we need is to sit down and design a practical plant because the proof of concept is over there happily generating more energy than it consumes"

Designs for practical plants already exist. Some of them are a shot in the semi-dark with fairly solid science and reasoning behind them and are just engineering and funding issues (SPARC/ARC/TE's design for example) then others are more long term this will work it's just going to cost a lot of money and take all the countries on the planet to effect them and there's still engineering challenges that aren't explicitly money related (ITER into DEMO into commercial reactors).

It's not as if we're in a situation like with the Higgs Boson where nobody knew what would happen when LHC got up to full power. It's more like LHC when you knew that once you build it you could start smashing particles together and make data. When ITER is turned on it *will* make energy, it will make more energy than it consumes. The real question is will TE/SPARC et al short circuit ITER's timeline by doing what ITER sets out to do at smaller scale, or will those projects run face first into either funding or science brick walls with trying to make them work at smaller scale. The physics says no, it's more what the engineering says and if we make new physics - they're still wildly important even if they find new physics.

Also, Re: silly arguments.

Fusion reactors aren't self-sustaining, if you don't keep pushing fuel or energy into them they stop, that's why they're inherently safe - they are not bombs. The main problem with reactors is the preferred fuels ping off neutrons when they fuse (which is how they will create external energy) which can damage certain materials (good job we have fission energy and related nuclear materials science) and creating containment pressure (one of the big historical engineering problems with reactors which is improving every day hence why new smaller reactor designs are appearing).

streaky

Re: let me guess...

It's still 20 years away

Nope. UK project to get power to grid by 2030 looks to have reasonable science/engineering, if it can keep funding going. There's also SPARK/ARC at MIT and various other projects with sub-20 year timelines to at least demonstration reactor timelines.

Not that we shouldn't be building ITER, at least it has less chance of failure if everything else goes wrong (unlikely).

Maybe if news didn't keep talking about plasma experiments as fusion experiments *cough*'reg*cough* we might progress somewhere. Not that plasma experiments aren't useful but the language is all wrong and confuse the state of the art.

UK Parliament launches inquiry into NHS WannaCrypt outbreak

streaky
Black Helicopters

Inquiry..

If it doesn't begin and end with the NSA with a creamy filling of why the hell are there so many systems so out of date then we have a serious problem.

One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail

streaky

Re: Advice from Crapita?

Advice from Crapita?

Came to comments section just to say "you lost me a Capita" but alas..

US Senators want Kaspersky shut out of military contracts

streaky

Re: Vulnerable..

Another reasonable option. Personally I like to look at as reliable as I can find testing data too but I'm old so..

streaky

Vulnerable..

Their argument is that Eugene's company is vulnerable to Russian government influence

Well they are..

Same way as Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec, Apple, Amazon, (do I really need to complete this list) are vulnerable to US government not only influence but active measures to infiltrate, backdoor and compromise. As long as we have secret courts and secret orders this is going to be an issue - but even if they didn't exist tradecraft renders these systems vulnerable. There's zero transparency in the industry is half the problem, everything is closely guarded secret. No obvious solutions here.

I don't think there's a good solution to this. Even open source can't truly save you from this stuff. If we all hide in our corners we're going to have a serious problem. Until the US government finds evidence of wrongdoing they should keep it to themselves.

I personally consider Romania as neutral ground as you can get and use Bitdefender - though I'm completely aware that they're open to Russian and US asset infiltration and therefore also won't help defend from either the US or Russian states. I consider it safest middle ground though.

I don't think anybody can go around, especially in government and military ops, pretending this isn't a possibility.

Ubuntu 'weaponised' to cure NHS of its addiction to Microsoft Windows

streaky

Re: Not a *buntu fan, but more power to 'em!

The last 5 years or so though, I've not heard anyone mention it once, but I've noticed office printers being used less and less. Ours probably does less than a page per day for eight of us.

Yeah because it stopped being a buzzword and started being an actual thing. I don't think the drive towards PO actually advanced it anywhere either, it just naturally found its place.

London suffers from 'sub-standard' connectivity - report

streaky

This is something I've talked about before where something happens outside London and people pile in saying oh London gets all this money, in London the internet is great. It's not great. It can be great in the right circumstances.. BT et al don't give a shit though.

because everyone is crammed into flats with no choice in the matter

That's why you pick a block with hyperoptic installed.

I mean don't get me started on CGNAT, but hyperoptic..

AWS Summit London queues caused by security, not snafu

streaky

Okay...

Do I have to be the one who points out that all those people parked up outside are a terrorist target in and of themselves? Put them on a plate why don't you.

Oh wait security theatre doesn't work does it..

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

streaky

Re: A question

I can't believe we're still on this because there's one correct way of dealing with spaces and tabs. Before code use tabs, and for end of line indentation use spaces. Works in all situations and all time zones.

It amazes me there's still people clueless enough to use one or the other.

Using spaces alone makes a MESS, and it smashes all over user preference.

I still haven't found what I'm malloc()ing for: U2 tops poll of music today's devs code to

streaky

I mostly code to..

Bryan Kearney sets so..

I know a lot of devs with very crappy tastes in music so I recognise the data presented.

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

streaky
Terminator

Said it before.

It's a standards track problem.

The standards track says stronger crypto more [all] of the time.

The government can bitch about this all it likes but it's the reality of the situation. This shit can't be weakened, it can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with.

That's why I have no problem voting Tory - they can want it all they like; they aint getting it. Even if they hypothetically did (which is an absurdity for all sorts of reasons) - you'd just make those platforms irrelevant. On the internet services are like pop groups, a year or so after they're popular you forget they existed because you're on the new thing.

The open source community is nasty and that's just the docs

streaky

Re: Have they surveyed other groups?

The nature of IT attracts sociopaths, always has.

No it fucking doesn't.

Most IT is a meritocracy and open source software is especially so - sociopaths fail, badly, in meritocracies because you have to put in the work. Indeed if you ever read any of Hare you'd know this is exactly how you can spot them in the work place - they're serial work avoiders. They want all the pleasure and none of the effort. In the periphery of open source sure it's plausible could attract them - when you have non-software org management and that sort of thing but most open source is devoid of extraneous project management so it's hard for these people to hide themselves. Plus ultimately there's zero gain for them; and it's all about the gain.

EU axes geo-blocking: Upsets studios, delights consumers

streaky

Re: Axed Geoblocking

What? You think most of the EU don't speak or understand English?

Apparently you don't. I very clearly said native speakers.

streaky

Re: Axed Geoblocking

Most UK providers have now implemented the EU rules and tried to sell it off as if they were being generous themselves.

Which is why they cover more than the EU. Sure.

Can't speak for the rest of the EU on competition, we were doing fine until BT were allowed to purchase EE - there's plenty of networks to go around. Problem with most people's plans is they expect the network to subsidise their phones for zero upfront.

streaky

Re: Axed Geoblocking

Yep, the American content publishers will gladly lose 500 million people as potential customers, and give European content providers the upper hand in the EU.

Nothing to stop them staging a demonstration and releasing a movie or five 4 months late or completely pulling a few that maybe they knew wouldn't do well just to make a point. I'm in no position to gauge their anger on this though - but hypothetically they could just say screw it for a whole bunch of content. When the UK leaves the EU there's going to be no native English speaking countries (past tiny markets anyway) in the EU and there's financial reasons alone why that could be a thing.

English speaking studios are going to I'd imagine rethink their approach to the EU market which could mean many things - but automatically assuming it's going to be good for consumers is extremely naive; do you even know who these guys are? It's probably going to cause all kinds of issues for EU based studios too.

streaky

Re: Axed Geoblocking

Sadly after 2019 this will not apply to UK.

Wouldn't get too excited. It prevents blocking within the union, it doesn't prevent the union itself being treated as a third class citizen by publishers and studios. Nor does it prevent studios refusing to release at all within the EU.

Also most UK providers already provide better roaming deals than the directive requires over a wider area than the EU, just by market forces (funny that).

Harmonised letters. Is this 1942?

+ They're not gonna touch the US on piracy.

Your data protection thing, have you even read the GDPR?

Britain's on the brink of a small-scale nuclear reactor revolution

streaky

Re: Underground

Read up on Molten Salt reactors; Intrinsically safe. IE: if it all goes horribly wrong switch everything off. The salt will "freeze" when it approaches room temperature; As a bonus they are not High pressure reactors so no massive pressure vessel containment. In fact you can run them at a slightly negative pressure which helps contain any unintended emissions.

This technology is going to take so long to develop the cash might as well go on fusion research. It's the classic electric cars versus hydrogen problem. If the money isn't misdiverted to pie in the sky solutions to simple problems we'll get a proper solution earlier. Fusion is a proper solution (not to say that ITER et al are the correct path to that proper solution).

Any time water is used to cool reactors you have the problem of generating hydrogen and oxygen in the fail condition. This isn't how reactors should be built - and I say this as somebody who is pro nuclear.

The AGRs were a sensible path in reactor technology, shame we tried to build them all at once rather than building a technology demonstrator plant to iron out constriction issues first. In the end Thatcher killed the long term project of course.

streaky

Re: Underground

"Wasn't Fukushima a "fail-safe" design?"

Nope. There's very few reactors operating commercially that are considered fail safe by even old standards. By modern standards.. Even the modern reactor designs aren't fail safe per se.

In the wake of Fukushima the Swiss have voted to phase out their nuclear energy. That should protect them against tsunamis.

Yeah but it won't protect them from France charging them through the roof for power they generate cheaply via... nuclear power.

streaky

Re: Placed underground you say ?

Putting nuclear stations underground doesn't solve any issue that can't be fixed with good design. Only difference would be they're harder to get to if there really was a bad accident.

Nuclear power doesn't have many issues, it's disposal that needs sorting out. This shouldn't be a thing until that is dealt with. I've long been a proponent of deep borehole disposal but it's not ready for commercial use yet and we shouldn't be rushing ahead with new power stations beyond what it will take to prevent blackouts without it.

Phishing scum going legit to beat browser warnings

streaky

Re: So it just goes to show...

.. and certificates aren't a way to identify parties as respectable - nor validate servers as secure.

PKI was never intended, designed or expected to fulfil that role. The problem is people trying to bend it to fulfil that role. Getting what are and should be legitimate certificates for legitimate domains is and should be easy - and cheap.

I don't know what the solution to the other thing is but it isn't PKI or at least it isn't PKI alone. Education will play a huge role obviously. More crypto is good. We should stop trying to shoehorn more general identification technologies into the thing that seeks to provide a secure communication channel between endpoints. DNSSEC probably has a part to play in identification more than PKI.

Britain shouldn't turn its back on EU drone regs, warns aerospace boffin

streaky

Re: Here be snowflakes...

Most aviation regs are internationally agreed at UN level. What we're talking about, or rather what they're talking about is UK selling drones to the EU. This is a nonsense.

If the EU puts something in its regs that's bad for the UK (which happens with every single EU reg there is) - it might kill a fledgeling industry like say, I don't know, Amazon's drone delivery project which is happening in the UK right now. The EU's airspace-specific rules have no place covering this post-brexit. If people want to sell gear to the EU post-brexit sure they'll have to follow EU regs, like they have to follow EU regs to sell electrical equipment or follow US regs when sending cars to the US.

This is just the way the world works.

The UK should simply rule that anything legal to be sold in the EU is also legal in the UK

Who says EU regs will be superior on this? Faulty assumption. Look at the electrical regs for proof why this argument is invalid. Plus the EU still thinks they're smart, we might want the fight.. Or we might not.

Samsung Galaxy S8+: Seriously. What were they thinking?

streaky

Re: With the Samsung Galaxy 8 implementation - yes.

Both are 1 factor authentications, both are inherently insecure for different reasons

I love that the public debate has moved enough that we've got here - wonder when the phone companies will pick up on it.

PIN plus iris. Password plus fingerprint. Fingerprint + iris + PIN + RFID fob for the terminally paranoid. Auth related things shouldn't be about pure convenience, especially in the climate we live in.

Bloke charged under UK terror law for refusing to cough up passwords

streaky

Re: "used only in extreme terrorism cases"

used only in extreme terrorism cases

It might well be, no way of knowing. Problem is schedule 7 isn't for this. There's nothing stopping them taking a screwdriver to the devices to make sure there's no explosives in them - THAT is what schedule 7 is for. If his legal reps don't get him off fairly sure he needs better legal reps.

Re CAGE more generally, I've heard these guys - they are terrorist apologists - but that shouldn't be what this is about.

Sencha packages web UI widgets for enterprise React devs

streaky

Never forget

When ExtJS was a thing..

Microsoft to spooks: WannaCrypt was inevitable, quit hoarding

streaky

If Linux thinks forced security updates are, on balance, the best route, why not Windows?

Because Microsoft have form for shovelling out things that aren't security patches - and FWIW that people trust Microsoft with the NSA about as far as they can be thrown. The real problem is here is arguably closed source critical infrastructure.

There isn't much reason for 95% of NHS desktops to not be something that's more security focused and that should probably be the real discussion.

streaky

This is why winplebs must be on mandatory forced updates

No, this is why WSUS is a thing. Also linux.

Re forced updates, it wasn't all that funny when ubuntu pushed a broken security patch last month and took out many many servers.

UK General Election 2017: How EU law will hit British politicians' Facebook fight

streaky

Re: A question

it certainly isn't for UK businesses wishing to continue doing business with Europe

I can list many ways it won't be.

A few examples:

* ring-fence EU citizens data and treat it as required by GDPR.

* Don't deal with EU citizens (at all).

* Ignore the GDPR entirely - it's not exactly as if it'll be verifiable and if something happens and they make a case out of it what's to stop you telling the EU courts to go f**k themselves.

That's just a small sampling of the many many options available to UK business when we leave the EU (and incidentally those options apply to most EU regs).

Almost nobody post-brexit is going to pay attention to the EU GDPR when we leave unless the government is stupid enough to keep it as part of our laws, which I find extremely unlikely. Most US business won't play to those standards so I doubt UK business will.

streaky

Re: A question

The UK could repeal the EU DP laws (RIPA is a good example of this, it has been rejected by the EU courts and the ECHR several times as being illegal / breaking human rights doctrines) and sent back to the UK Parliament for re-working.

Most of these cases have been fought under The Charter (EUCFR) as opposed to the directives, it's not clear if that will continue to apply. For UK citizens in the UK the GDPR will not apply post-brexit and *that* is why the point this article is trying to make is moot.

Attention, Asus RT wireless router owners: Patch your gear now to squash web hijack bugs

streaky

Re: Get patching

AdvancedTomato - based on shibby's builds but with a way way better ui.

America 'will ban carry-on laptops on flights from UK, Europe to US'

streaky

Just. Stop. Flying. To. The. USA.

It's not that simple here's why:

Most western nations copy-paste these security standards when they're higher standard than what they have from the US. Give it a few weeks this will need to be corrected to "Just. Stop. Flying." - and I'm fine with that.

The issue with this rule is that either x-raying of hand luggage isn't up to scratch pretty much globally - in which case what the hell are we doing - or what's stopping people doing something like putting an RTC wake-up on the laptop to make it trigger the bomb somewhere over the north pole.

RBS is to lay off 92 UK techies and outsource jobs to India – reports

streaky

Re: To be fair...

92 is a lot to fire by any standard. It sounds like they're getting rid of the entire tech workforce, or at least an entire department of it.

RBS are going to pay dearly for it, some day, some how.

Reminds me of this classic Gar1t sketch though.

America's mystery X-37B space drone lands after two years in orbit

streaky

Re: Agreed [ 0.5*15*(18000^2) = 2.4e9 J]

One of the reasons why the comments section of this site is so lovely : The Express commenters would have noticed the correlation of the landing with the 10th anniversary of Madeline McCann vanishing. In the Mail, you'd probably get people arguing about how many migrants you'd fit in the payload bay.

Almost any speculation about what this aircraft does is on that level anyway. Ion canons are almost as ridiculous. There's sensible reasons why it's for looking at things rather than breaking things but even then the U2 is still a thing largely untroubled in most of the world.

Signals could be a thing; could be a comms relay (supporting deployments providing coverage in a way that's manoeuvrable and tunable).

Military satellite test bed makes sense too - and frankly that's what the US military says it does. Though honestly I'd say a military look-down satellite where you can upgrade it whenever you feel like and put it where you need it is a hell of a thing.

It's barely even worth speculating without at least an indication of where it's operating. If one knew that one could start narrowing it down.

European Investment Bank tosses €25m to MariaDB

streaky

Re: "just last year they invested half a billion euros in a Scottish wind farm"

The UK is a large investor in the EIB (we put up the same capital as Germany and France). We get little back from it. I'd assume when we leave the EU we'll pull all future funding - and if they behave themselves we won't recall all those loans.

Re: Reaction Engines funding - you don't think we've given the world enough shit for gratis without throwing that in too? Plus RE Ltd is well funded enough.. For a company without a functioning product they're making plenty of bank. Plus FWIW BAE systems is a great fit for them - besides making aircraft they're positioned to take advantage of first use (military) sales.

We are 'heroes,' says police chief whose force frisked a photographer

streaky

Re: Again?

The question is this - how many times are ACPO going to need to put out guidance on this before forces start paying attention.