* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

White House mulls just banning strong end-to-end crypto. Plus: More bad stuff in infosec land

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: OK...so public encryption gets banned...

PLEASE don't rely on anything home-grown as being secure as a cypher.

No need, there are plenty of algorithms out there that are (currently) secure. If the US govt or any other starts demanding back-doors in commercial products, then you can switch to a reference implementation of one of those algos and not give any keys to the government - where's their back-door then?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Sigh

You get a prize for the most egregious use of the slippery slope fallacy of the day.

Whatever your opinions on euthanasia (which are undoubtedly, far, far off-topic), the (overwhelming) evidence from the coutries where it has been legalised shows that what you are railing against doesn't happen.

Besides, if a government wants to get rid of people, it finds other ways of doing so that are less public. For example, Nazi death camps were kept secret for quite a while before people really knew what was going on, and most people thought reports coming from them were massive exaggerations right up until the point the first camps were liberated. And that was from a government that actively and publicly made a point of declaring those people in question "untermenschen", and was exterminating whole populations in their millions.

Modern governments just find more subtle ways of doing it, such as declaring disabled people "fit to work" and withdrwing their benefits and lettng them starve to death.

Poetic justice: Mum funnels £100 into claw machine to win single Dumbo teddy for her kid

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Holmes

Why the downvote? Was it not obvious that this was a joke? Does the downvoter doubt the veracity of my having seen this happen? Do they think that it is perfectly fine to give an infant cola? Or... Is that you again CodeJunky?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Don't worry, she made sure his bottle was full of cola first...

(I have actually seen this happen)

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Yor best bet is still to wait until they have filled the machines with fresh "prizes" and pick the one that is overloaded (because the minimum wage bod doing the filling gives exactly 0.000000 shits about it), then let gravity do the work when the claw knocks the toy on top into the chute.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Did she learn nothing?

It's a top song, I've seen them several times...

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Re: Did she learn nothing?

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Did she learn nothing?

She spaffed away £40 before they staff changed the setting to let her have the toy. She then saw them put the setting back, but then she still went back and pumped another £60 into the machine. What sort of idiot puts money into a machine that they already know is rigged, and have seen the evidence of with their own eyes?

Facebook staff sarin for a bad day: Suspected chemical weapon parcel sent to Silicon Valley HQ

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Re: "Here's hoping it's a false positive and things not having a escalated" [sic]

Bananas (and brazil nuts) are radioactive though. Bananas, due to thier potassium content, some of which is 40K, and brazils because they concentrate metallic elements from the soil in the fruiting body.

Radiation detectors pick up radiation, whatever its source; chemical detectors, on the other hand, would be expected to be much more specific and only trigger on the target, or things with very similar chemical and physical properties.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Sad state of affairs

My guess is gas chromatography / mass spectrometry, which separate all the compounds in an air sample and fingerprint them by their exact molecular mass. It is essentially measuring two things - the physical properties of a compound (formt eh transit time through the chromatograph) and the chemical composition (from the mass).

To spoof one of those, you'd need to find something with the same mass as the target compound, and which also behaves the same under chromatography conditions (i.e. same transit time, and fragmentation pattern). In practice, that means the same elemental make-up, but structurally different, but also structurally similar enough to be physically similar. Not a trivial task, and for things like nerve agents, you're probably also talking about something pretty poisonous.

Gone are the days back whe I was a student when mass spectrometers were the size of a room. Modern quadrupole machines sit on a desk, and I should imagine are also a lot cheaper.

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"Here's hoping it's a false positive and things not having a escalated" [sic]

Why? If it has been caught, and nobody harmed, then it could be reasoned that it is useful. There are plenty of nutjobs out there, and this would give law enforcement agencies something to go on to track down this particular perp and put him* and any accomplices away before he does anything else stupid.

*or her, but statistically, probably not.

Don't tell Alice and Bob: Security maven Bruce Schneier is leaving IBM

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One of the few individuals I have real respect for

He still sends out his monthly email newsletter, and it's still valuable reading for any technical professional.

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Not my problem, don't expect me to help.

Pretty sure we all want to avoid that. Our views of how to do it are different.

You can probably start by taking a look at the company you keep...

Johnson, Farage, Gove, Rees-Mogg, Redwood, Lawson, Banks, Murdoch, Barclay and Barclay, Rothermere... etc.

All ardent brexiters, all complete right-wing fuckers who'd sell their own grandmother.

Need I go on?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Wishful thinking does not make good policy

And what does that have to do wth Brexit anyway

The link to brexit is a tangential, but important one.

When the scandal broke, and the EU imposed their sensible food safety restrictions on UK exports, there were some "eurosceptic" types who used this as ammunition against the EU to further their own political ambitions. I believe John Major referred to them as "bloody difficult bastards". Their agitating within the tory party caused such infighting and division, that they have been fghting each other over it ever since. Amongst those "bastards", several are still around and spouting their same divisive rhetoric, such as John Redwood and Nigel Lawson.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Not my problem, don't expect me to help.

The really evil weasel word in there is 'back'. Those hammering on about "taking back control" never had control (thank $deity). What the likes of Rees-Mogg and the other ERG loonies want is to take control. The stroke of marketing genius was to slip the word 'back' in there. I, for one, shudder at the thought of a world run to an even greater degree, by evil selfish bastards who want to tax the poor more and give it to themselves. Of course, if you look at what has happened to people like that over the course of history, when they get what they want, it rarely turns out so well for them in the end. There's only so long you can rule the plebs by consent before some bright spark comes up with a new machine for chopping heads off.

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Trollface

Re: They just don't get it

Look at the ongoing "election" for the EU President UK prime minister. The commission Tory MP portion of Parliament chooses a candidate and presents one name to the parliament two names to the party membership. The parliament party membership can cannot say yes, or no. If it says no, the commission can try another name. The elected parliament Tory party is a talking shop, paid for by our taxes unaccountable donors, which can't even agree on where it should sit a brexit deal in case it offends the French ERG and DUP. Total waste of oxygen

There, FTFY, no charge...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: They just don't get it

We don't elect the bureaucrats, we elect their patsies.

Presumably, you are talking about civil servants, then.

The EU has 32,000 of them. Whitehall has 332,000. That's right, 300,000 more.

People in glass houses...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: 41 good, 44 bad?

As people point out often enough, Ireland has never had a border

There goes that selective memory again. I don't know who these people are, but my guess is that they are the same people who think vaccines cause autism and that the Earth is flat, because there is plenty of evidence to indicate otherwise. A more cynical person might suggest that when you are losing an argument you just start straight-up lying.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: 41 good, 44 bad?

The border really isnt much of a UK problem. Never has been

The open border is part of the GFA. The GFA brought an end to the campaign of violence from paramilitary groups both on the island of Ireland, and on mainland Britain.

If you think this had never been a 'UK problem', I suggest you gather the friends and families of the victims of the Birmingham pub bombings together into a room and try to convince them of that point of view.

It seems that you appear to be suffering from a highly selective memory of recent history...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Wishful thinking does not make good policy

Interesting you bring up teh BSE scandal. The EU acted (corerectly) and applied the precautionary principle - no UK beef in the EU food chain until it can be proven to be safe. The same people who are among the ringleaders of brexit were the ones who complained the loudest about this. I wonder if John Selwyn Gummer's daughter would like to eat a chlorinated chicken burger? I also wonder how many people may have died from vCJD across Europe, if the rest of the continent had caved into the spoutings of the reckless brexiters back then.

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Re: @Loyal Commenter

Indeed, I believe it is El Naranja who needs to learn about reciprocicity, and until he manages it, the UK is not going to get anything even approaching a favourable trade deal with the US. You'd have more luck gettign Putin to extradite his GRB buddies like Tess is trying to...

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Re: TL; DR

@Aladdin Sane

I wouldn't bother trying to engage him with facts and evidence. He'll just keep switching argument, or claim that you have proved him right, when the facts show the opposite. If you're lucky, you can goad him into letting his mask slip and he'll make a nasty sexist comment that gets deleted by the moderators again.

Certainly never try to change his mind on anything, that way madness lies. He's not here to hear facts, just to push some more propaganda...

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Trollface

Re: This is the sort of thing that we should have been talking about

Thank you sir, may I have another? How about two?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: This is the sort of thing that we should have been talking about

Probably because they would have had 2 down-votes before I arrived.

Well, lets take my first post at the top of this article as an example; when posted yesterday, it quickly got most of the up-votes, however, no down-votes until this morning, and then exactly three of them (and still three now at the time of writing). There's a definite pattern here, with similar voiting patterns over a fair period of time (and I'm thinking it's probably been going on for a couple of years now). Of course I'm not going to suggest it's the same person with alt accounts. It's entirely possible that brexiters all move around together in their own little reality-distortion field, and there are exactly three of them, with exactly the same opinions on my posts. Statistically though, one might suggest that the culprit 'fess up. Obvious patterns being obvious, and all that.

Now of course, since I've made the observation, has that collapsed the quantum unreality field in the way that observations are wont to do? Will those triple-downvotes stop happening, and (assuming it's one person), whoever is making them will randomise the timing and number a little, to be less obvious? However, having pointed that out, will they not change their pattern, to avoid making an indication that they know they've been caught out? Wheels within wheels, eh? What a quandary to be in, it could fair turn a fellow mad.

TBH, though, I don't really care about up/down votes. Opinion polls can be easily gamed, can't they, as we found out in 2016?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: This is the sort of thing that we should have been talking about

Isn't it funny how, when @CodeJunky turns up, all the posts criticising brexit suddently get exactly three down-votes?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Wishful thinking does not make good policy

Aka lost so freaking hard that you dont want any criticism until an impossible and unrelated situation occurs.

Are you seriously comparing the actions of a criminal gang (that got caught and prosecuted) with the wholesale, offical and sanctioned food safety stnadards in the US that are clearly much lower than those in the EU? If you can't see the difference between someone breaking the rules and getting caught, and the rules being shit in the first place, you are blind.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: @Loyal Commenter

Bull but go on.

A strong argument, you've got me there.

And so the anti-foreigner zero sum argument. Trade deals are a reciprocity good. Crying there are more people on one side is stupid.

Missing my point - in such a deal, the stronger partner (and I'm using population here as a measure, but economic strneght is just as vaild) has the better negotiating position. Negotiations with the US are going to involve agreements only on things that benefit the US - we can see this with the way they are currently trying to strong-arm China (and failing).

Chlorinated chicken = bad but chlorinated salad = good.

I don't recall adovcating chlorinated salad. Nice straw man. Chlorinated chicken is not the only issue with US food safety (and in my mind not the worst). I listed some of the others, you ignored them.

Waa waa Iceland.

Well, you brought them up. Did you have an actual point?

the EU because its a supertanker with too many captains and no clue

Your opinion. Would you like to back that up with facts? You can't claim simultaneous lack of democracy, and too much democracy from over-representation.

"Iceland is a 'special case', due to their very small population" Not being 27 countries. Yup.

Nice editing of my comment there. Icalend is very sparsely populated, yes, but also has a lot of mineral, and energy wealth, somethign that they are willing to trade with China, as they are both things that they have in excess to their own needs and which China wants. Also, these are things we do not have.

Wernt [sic] you arguing for trade deals?

Nope, I beliive it is you who insinuated that we are at a disadvantage from not having a specific trade deal with China (whilst Iceland does). Are you switching your position on this, like you habitually do with your arguments?

Actually we hold one of the important global financial trading centres.

Not for long, once we've left the EU, that will go to Hamburg, Dublin and Zurich. Companies are already moving as a result of this idiocy. Once we lose passporting rights (which will happen if we leave the common market), those left in the City of London will incur costs when dealing with the rest of the EU (the world's largest financial market). Financial businesses operate on margins, they will move to where those are lowest, and this won't be London.

So why do remainers do that?

[Citation required]

I don't recall remainers harking abck to the days of Empire (I've seen quitters claiming it still exists though, seemingly thinking Britain still owns India et al)

Leaving the EU doesnt take us back in time.

When you are talking about international treaties, scientific cooperation, trade, regulatory alignment, law enforcement cooperation, and the institutions built up around all of those, it does. it takes us back to teh point 40 odd years ago when we didn't have those things. Except, of course, we also won't have ouer own institutions either, since they have become long redundant. For instance, we no longer have a whole section of Whitehall filled with trained and experienced experts devoted to negotiating international agreements. We have ($deity help us) Liam Fox instead.

stop fantasizing that leaving takes us to the 19th century.

I didn't claim that it did, I pointed out that people advocating it seem to think that the rest of the world is still in the 19th century. The world has moved on, we shouldn't be harking back to some imaginary halcyon days of empire that never actually existed, no matter how large you write it on the side of a bus.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Wishful thinking does not make good policy

I would rather eat EU horse (and have done so willingly), than any US meat. I'm not particularly keen on eating stuff that's pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and then washed in bleach to counteract the woeful food safety standards.

Of course the big difference, that you're blithely ignoring here, is that the horsemeat smuggling was done by criminal gangs whilst the shite they eat in the US is legal there. Come back with that argument when there are no criminals in the US.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: @Loyal Commenter

Yes, of course, we can do deals quickly, if we want bad ones. Do you honestly think that the Orange One will allow a deal between the US (350M people) and the UK (75M) that isn't biased strongly in favour of the US, including lowering our food standards to meet those of the US, and allowing US health companies to carve up the NHS (at the moment, it's British companies being allowed to carve up provision of services in the NHS)?

The EU hasn't yet done a deal with China, because trade negotiations are tricky things, and the EU is a complex collection of nations, all with differing needs. Iceland is a 'special case', due to their very small population, energy self-sufficiency from geothermal, and mineral riches. There were pretty obvious benefits for both Iceland and China in the deal that they made. What would the benefits of such a deal between the UK and China be? It's not like we've got oodles of mineral wealth to export, and I don't think you'd be able to sell immigration as a benefit.

It's also worth pointing out the very obvious stumbling block that if we do a trade deal with the US, we are unlikley to be doing one with China because the US and China are currently engaged in a trade war. If we bend over for Trump, there are bound to be terms in any such agreement such that our deal won't allow circumventing of his tariffs on China, which in practice will mean adopting the same tariffs, meanwhile China isn't exactly going to deal with us unless we remove those tariffs. Fantasy, meet reality.

One final point - that "always being known as a trading nation" thing went away at the same time as the empire we built on the back of it. Deluding ourselves into thinking it's still the mid 19th century isn't going to do us any favours (and to be fair, "entire history" covers a few centuries at best, when we weren't an outpost of Rome, at war with France, at war with Spain, etc. Not to mention the trade we weren't doing in the middle ages, whilst central Europe was flourishing.)

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: 41 good, 44 bad?

The UK pays the EU more than twice as much as it gets back in "grants", it's one of the biggest net contributors.

I know, and I'm sure you do too, that the money paid into the EU budget doesn't just go back to member countries as grants. It goes towards running the various organisations and agencies that form the Union. Many of which we are still going to need after we leave (such as the medicines agency, or nuclear regulatory agency), and are going to have to do ourselves, shouldering the entire cost, not splitting it 28 ways. Once you factor those costs in, that 'net contributor' amount will sound like an absolute bargain.

And I haven't even started on the economic benefits of the common market, and negotiated trade deals with third countries that mean that the treasury receives much more in taxation from a thriving economy (more than enough to pay for our membership many times over), or have you conveniently forgotten the main reason for joining the then EEC in the '70s? Does the phrase "sick man of Europe" mean anything to you? Have you actually looked at what portion of the UK's budget goes to the EU, compared to our other costs? The recession when we leave will mean that many times that amount of money stop going into the treasury. Of course, you won't be bothering to read at this point, as I've no doubt triggered "project fear"...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

A viable agreement, with low or zero duties, and technology to do the spot checks, is a very workable solution.

I believe that's called a "customs union" - something we are currently in and don't necessarily need to leave, but Tess decided that we should, along with the Common Market, because for some reason, she decided that the ability to "do our own trade deals" is more important. Of course, this completely ignores the fact that not only will we be able to make trade deals on our own, but that we will have to with any country we want to trade with, and won't get them on more favourable terms than we currently have with the bargaining power of the largest trading bloc on the planet. We might find that after the first couple of painful experiences, we don't want to be doing our own deals after all...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: No problemo

Looks fine to me...

Say, any of you guys want to buy a bridge?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: "if Europe agrees to a Brexit transition period"

...I need to proofread my posts better, or come back and re-read them within that magical 10 minute time slot...

Insert the following words in the appropriate places to make sense of the above:

didn't
an

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: This is the same 'think tank'

After all, it's not Bozza who's racist against the Irish. It's his dad that called them 'bog trotters' on HIGNFY isn't it?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: This is the sort of thing that we should have been talking about

But 17 meeeelion people voted to go on a dream holiday of a lifetime. How dare you suggest that they might not all want to go to Bognor.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: "if Europe agrees to a Brexit transition period"

My understanding is that Tess went cap-in-hand to the EU to beg for a transition period (to kick the can down the road on the Irish border, because nobody can find a magical unicorn), to which the EU were quite accommodating and agreed, despite it not really being in the best interests of the other 27 EU member states, because it creates uncertainty about where, and how porous, the external borders are.

Tess then took this to parliament (who she hadn't bothered to even consult beforehand) and got kicked in the teeth because it feature enough unicorns. Cue the gutter press vilifying the EU for idea that was not theirs in the first place...

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

This is the same 'think tank'

That is funded by a prominent brexiter, and is unable to give any costs for their proposals...

As reported elsewhere, their proposals also require Ireland to give up EU standards on various things an adopt UK standards instead, and for the EU to open up access to VAT reporting within the EU to the UK (after we've left it) to prevent fraud. Both are things with obvious problems, and are about as likely as Boris Johnson lasting as PM until 2025...

Observation: Slow-burn space HAL 'em up fires adventure game genre into the exosphere

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: No Steam? No Thanks.

Yeah, my interest was piqued right up to this point. Just... why?

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: How brainwashed have the majority of you become??

I didn't read very far, but let me pick you up on the very first thing you claim:

Every cell in our body communicates by small electrical signals

This is incorrect. Electrical impulses are only used by nerve cells, and then, only internally. Inter-cellular communication betwen neurons is done chemically, which is why the word neurotransmitter exists.

It appals me that there seem to be so may posters on here that think that the vaguest mis-remembered passing knowledge of something scientific qualifies them to spout off long tirades that are simply put, very wrong. We live in an age where access to knowledge is more available than ever. When I was growing up, we had to learn stuff from text books, but now it seems that the ability to critically judge the difference between information and bullshit is gone, and the same weight is given to conspiracy nutjobs on twitter as it is to peer-reviewed scientific journals, which are all available online, often free of charge.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: "concerns that have long since been put to bed" ??

The same amount of energy being transmitted over a 2.4GHz wave (about 122mm) is now being compressed into about 3-4mm waveform.

Lets hope you never find out what wavelength visible light is at, eh? Better turn all the lights off now in case you get hosed down by them.

Just my 2 cents.

Would you like a refund?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

iterally no safety testing for this wavelength of microwave

Yeah, it's not like physicists know exactly how IR radiation at this frequency behaves and interacts with matter. And radio-emitting equimpent never has any safety testing does it?

I think maybe you need to go away and educate yourself a bit about the EM spectrum before you make more of an arse of yourself in public.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Are you all climate change deiers too?

How similar to climate change deniers who can't see or smell it and aren't dying straight away so it must be nonsense.

Yeah, it's not like the physcial mechanisms behind global warming have been known about for 150 years, are solid science, well proven, and well understood in the scientific community, whilst at the same time, there's aboslutely no known or postulated scientific explanation for why 5G is going to make all our heads explode, is there?

It's like the difference between saying, "if you hit yourself in the head with an iron bar, it'll hurt. I know because I was stupid enough to do it and so was my friend, we have videos of it, and signed documents by the A&E staff saying we dented our skulls" (peer reviewed documented experimental science), and saying "I heard hitting yourself in the head with an iron bar will give you magical powers. Why don't you try it?" (magical thinking). If you can't see the difference there, you have no business "trying to science".

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Next thing these idiots will want to ban water as you can drown in that shit!!

Don't you mean DHMO? (see above...)

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: We have them here

There's a big spray-painted anti-5G graffito which I pass on my way to work each day. One wonders how much damage to the evironment and to their own lungs the sprayer did whilst painting it.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

These days, when someone says 'AI', they usually mean one of two things (or a combination): A statistical model based on some sort of "neural net" (or model thereof) that is just a fancy way of modelling something using maths, but not getting it quite right or understanding how it works, or a big ol' database with some fancy indexing on it. Often with some dodgy speech recognition bolted on, that only deals with simple, well formed sentences (and doesn't work if you're Scottish) and comes nowhere near actual natural language processing with all its idioms and ambiguity ("I saw a man on a hill with a telescope" - could get messy, I should probably use an actual saw and do it indoors.)

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Re: "...before I get bored of watching Homes Under The Hammer."

Dabbspool?

Sneaky fingerprinting script in Microsoft ad slips onto StackOverflow, against site policy

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Re: Disrupting the business model of sites that you value

If that means a site is broken and I cannot view their content... I simply never use that site again.

That, or hit F12 to open the dev console and add the display:hidden attribute to all the popovers that try to cover the screen when scripts are disabled. Independent, I'm looking at you...

Eggheads have found a positive link between the number of racist tweets and the number of racist hate crimes in US cities

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Depends entirely on what you mean by "causal relationship".

You can easily construct the hypothesis that nice weather causes increses in both, and that there is a common cause between the two things. You could then do further studies to test this hyposthesis.

A better example would be the correlation between the decline in pirates and global warming.

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: But let's not forget...

I think your post may have gone over the heads of some people there...

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc

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Not just fake news, but M&S fake news...