* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Stuxnet blitzed 5 Iranian factories over 10-month period

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It's the legacy

"Now they know that the stuff running their plants is terminally unstable and insecure there might be some momentum to get rid of it."

Given the choice between commissioning new software (and probably bespoke software at that) for hardware that no-one can source anymore, or gluing up the USB ports to stop tossers poking infected memory sticks into the PC, which do you think management will jump for?

One third of Russians say Sun revolves round Earth

Ken Hagan Gold badge

3.4% (of) my arse

"The poll has a 140 million kilometre margin of error".

There, fixed that for you.

I've left the units in kilometres, because I'm not sure whether the El Reg unit of bullshit should be the "survey" or the "report". (The "gartner" is tempting. Anyone got any better ideas?)

Patent attack launched on Google's open video codec

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Dead Vulture

"Patent attack launched" ...

...or perhaps not, since it turns out that the trolls don't actually *know* of any patents that might apply. In fact, they are so far from actually having one that they are reduced to begging on the internet for help.

Locking antlers with a network Nazi

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I'm puzzled

"go to the site, rename and readdress up to five PCs to meet the newest conventions. Remove Office Pro and install Office Standard to ensure proper license compliance"

Yep. That's simple enough.

So who the hell configured their domain? He (for my spider sense tells me it probably isn't a she) is clearly an evil soul, but equally clearly knows enough to do the job and yet it never occurred to the management to ask this person *who they are already paying*.

Truly, er, ... interesting.

Malware endemic even on protected PCs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Survey?

The EU study appears (*) to be based on survey respondents and probably suffers from non-reporting by people who feel they have nothing to report.

(* The press release you linked to doesn't really say.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Almost all...

I expect "almost all" people admitted to hospital have something wrong with them too. It tells you nothing about the health of the general population.

Iranian web developer faces death over porn site charges

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Just a thought

Not to mention the behaviour of the police in "extracting" confessions from "suspects". (Does anyone here seriously believe that they don't queue up to "interrogate" suspected adulteresses?)

But we already knew all this. The whole authority structure in Iran is criminally insane by the standards of their own professed religion just as much as by any Western point of reference.

Sony tweets 'secret' key at heart of PS3 jailbreak case

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Please

Sigh! Presumably the person who downvoted your reply is someone else who doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're".

No 'tipping point' for Arctic sea ice - latest science

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Tipping Point

That doesn't sound any more likely than a future where you "finally admit" that he was right all along. Still, as long as it keeps us viewing pages, El Reg keeps getting paid for the ads, right?

Superphone system-CRACKING cable of DOOM ... is quite handy

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Indeed!

"I find it truly terrifying how few people do this."

I don't. You can't plug in a USB stick without physical access, and if your attacker has physical access then you are toast. Why bother with the bios-level security theatre?

Apple under threat from ... Windows tablets

Ken Hagan Gold badge

200 million?

So roughly 1 in 10 of the developed world will buy a tablet in that one year alone, eh?

Prices will have to fall *substantially* for that to be anything other than a tablet-maker's fantasy.

Facebook causes eating disorders in teenage girls

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"rid us of this scourge?"

That's a bit harsh on teenage girls. Did you get turned down, Lewis?

OpenStack: 'There will be only one Ubuntu cloud'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

There's more than one way to do it

It doesn't make "much sense" to offer Gnome/KDE/Xfce desktops and Writer/Abiword choices either, but they do. Until /Canonical/, rather than OpenStack, start talking about dropping Eucalyptus, I'd say this was a non-story.

World shrugs as IPv4 addresses finally exhausted

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Germany is going IPv6

That's splendid news for manufacturers of ADSL boxes (and similar). Last I looked, all the big manufacturers were deliberately not supporting IPv6 in their consumer ranges so that they could hit us all for new hardware when the switch finally took place.

Flickr thinks again about 4,000 pix loss

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So they expect to incorrectly delete accounts frequently then

Umm, I refer you to the comments that accompanied the previous story, but to summarise...

They should *expect* to delete accounts often enough that their ability to restore them is vital to preserve their business reputation. On that measure, even "once" is "frequent enough" and it is simply unreasonable to assume that human operators will never make a mistake.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: when Flicka gets bought

Really? A company's legal obligations are wiped clean every time it gets a new owner? Where do you live? I must avoid ever doing business there.

US lawmakers eye internet 'kill switch'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh screw that

"the important lesson to learn from Egypt is to resist any attempts to implement this sort of national firewall"

Er, not really. The important lesson is that Mr Mubarak *still* got given the heave ho.

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, *his* enemy was the peopl and they were already inside the tent. Secondly, whilst internet services were down, telephones weren't and a few old-fashioned modems can puncture your firewall. Thirdly, if you want to organise a demo within an urban area, word of mouth is sufficient. You don't need to be able to chat to people abroad.

It's never national firewalls that threaten free speech. It's the credible threat of torture and death at the hands of the local police force. Mubarak has been toast ever since the army said they wouldn't shoot.

UK probes ebook pricing

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Complete Rubbish

If you re-read the comment that you were replying to, I think you'll find you are in complete agreement with the OP. Actual printing (ink on paper) and distribution (on lorries to shops) is not a big cost compared to editing, advertising and amortising the losses on all the advances that you paid only to find the author was illiterate.

In any case, anyone who thinks that "price" is determined by "cost" really needs to read a book on economics.

The future is analog (at least part of it)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

So "Digital music has failed"?

There was never any such invention. What has failed, is the response of the music industry to the fact that digital tech, devised for other purposes entirely and therefore totally beyond the control of the music industry, has caused the collapse of their business model and they haven't come up with an alternative yet.

Mr Music Publisher: You can go back to analog. None of your former customers will. Your business model is not their problem. The world does not owe you a living. If they are feeling charitable, then Oxfam beats Time Warner every time.

Mr Book Publisher: You're next.

Next smartphone tech? Predator style thermal cameras

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Add a VR headset

"... a relatively low pixel count will suffice [...] attached to a pair of glasses or a hat."

These are already available for firefighters. (Finding bodies in smoke-filled rooms, etc.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Pint

Re: flames

"One day, some micromechanical genius..."

Quite possibly, or skip the moving lens bit and simply craft a million micro-lenses directly onto the detector like an insect, which is why I won't say it can't be done and which might explain DARPA's interest. A friend sent me this the other day: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/01/new-material-blocks-light-from-exhibiting-diffraction.ars. If you can pick your lens material to have any optical properties you like, and then use some micromechanical wizardry to shrink the whole package down to the size of a postage stamp, even the plot of Eraser starts to seem plausible.

Beer, to drink whilst I sit in front of the warm fire you provided. :)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

35mm film

Near IR isn't useful for room temperature objects (Try working out kT/h for a few temperatures of interest.)

Current state of the (commercial) art is roughly VGA resolution with the pixels at 25 micron pitch for the 7-14 micron waveband. That's smaller than 35mm, but it isn't megapixel either.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Invasion of privacy

I think even wikipedia on a bad day is probably a more reliable reference than "Eraser".

No thermal camera can see through a wall. They are used for building inspections to determine heat loss through walls and if the walls weren't completely opaque to IR then you'd be unable to measure the temperature of the wall itself (since you'd see what was behind it) and so you'd be unable to assess heat loss. Google for some IR images and see for yourself.

Similarly, despite various rumours to the contrary, I'm not aware of any clothing fabric that is opaque in the visible but transparent in any part of the IR. On the other hand, close fitting outfits transmit body heat better than loose ones, so if IR cameras ever go mainstream it probably will have an effect on fashion. (You may have less luck googling for example images here. It isn't the sort of thing corporate types put on their web-sites.)

On the fashion issue, much the same probably applies to the (very) near IR and near UV, both of which might be accessible to bionic eyes later this century. (They don't suffer from the wavelength problem I allude to in another comment. I believe various species have been exploiting/enjoying these wavelengths for a few hundred million years, so there's stuff to see if you have the gear.) Bionic eyes *will* be developed for medical purposes, and will then come down in price to the point where they are available as "cosmetic" items for those who wish to upgrade their mortal frame.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Not in a phone

Speaking with just a tad of inside knowledge, there are two barriers. The first is cost, but this has followed a fairly predictable downward slide over the last twenty years and although no-one is offering anything below £1000 yet, no-one really doubts that there is a market and so it will happen. Lewis' timescale is about right and I'll probably be an early adopter because I work for a company that makes them.

Probably not in phones, though. The longer wavelengths that give you images from room-temperature objects are around 10 microns, compared to 0.5 microns for visible light. That has an immediate effect on the size of detectors (because you can't shrink a single pixel much below one wavelength) and that in turn has an effect on the size of optics. A megapixel visible camera is only a couple of millimetres across and will deliver usable images with a bit of bent plastic for a lens. A megapixel IR detector is the size of 35mm film and so the associated camera isn't going to shrink much below SLR sizes unless you can work around the Fraunhofer limits. (That's going to be "challenging". Near-field optics continues to astonish anyone who took a traditional optics course at uni, but I'm not holding my breath.)

Assange relishes US banks 'squirming' over 'megaleak'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Assange is just unreasonable

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." (G.B. Shaw, if one can trust *any* attribution to this man.)

Scotland bans smut. What smut? Won't say

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: removing speed limit signs

If they removed speed limit signs, the national limit of 70mph would apply. No need to guess.

Of course, you'd still have to drive "safely" but you already have to guess what that means so in fact you've picked exactly the wrong car analogy.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Is this a problem?

Prosecutors neither made the original law, nor have the final say in what it means. Anyone who gave more weight to prosecutors than to judges or the law itself would be rather foolish.

Even if the law is unclear, a clear statement from prosecutors isn't going to help. It will merely give the illusion of clarity for the ill-advised. A bit like covering a pothole with a rug.

Aussies demand Poms cough up first 'Australia' map

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not quite the same

"We ... are grown up enough to realise that we wouldn't want to set a precedent."

There. Fixed that for you. (I'm reminded of a line in one of the Dangermouse cartoons where DM refers to "the Plundered Room of the British Museum".)

Personally I think it would be nice to have most of these objects "on tour" and the repeated claims of ownership by people aggrieved on behalf of someone else's ancestors are probably more of a block on touring than the (more obvious) financial barrier. This latest outburst is probably the sole reason why the map won't now be on show in Oz next year.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Birth certificate?

Do these people believe there was nothing and no-one of consequence in that land prior to Flinders' time? I thought such attitudes were considered a bit of a faux pas these days.

The only document that could reasonably be described as White Australia's birth certificate is the Act of Parliament that gave them independence. Comparable documentary evidence for Black Australia's origins are probably scratched on Uluru.

Panasonic puts rugged photography on the map

Ken Hagan Gold badge

3D gimmick

Depending on the implementation quality, 3D is unlikely to add anything to serious photography. But "snaps" aren't serious photography and I suspect the majority of Lumix owners take more snaps than serious photos. 3D might be just the thing for those baby pictures.

It's different from 3D telly. A typical telly program takes half an hour or more and the silly goggles, restricted viewing angles and headaches start to grate after a while. A snap might be enjoyed in less than 30 seconds before being passed around. I think that makes a difference and Panasonic might be on to something.

Are disk drives beginning to spin down?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

swap files on flash?

"swap files on it that might well be written more or less constantly"

If your machine is swapping more or less constantly, you've got bigger problems than flash lifetime. These days RAM is something like 20 quid per gig and there's no reason to even *have* a swap file for Windows.

Linux appears to benefit from being /offered/ a small swap file, which it hardly uses. As far as I can tell, the difference is caused by the semantics of the fork() call. This shows up in the memory manager as a risk of huge over-commitment, which must be insured against even though in practice it never materialises.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Cloud schmoud

It affects the kinds of drives being sold, which may affect profits, and the actual story here is a fall in profits rather than a specific claim about "number of discs sold". I expect the discs used for cloud-based storage will be optimised for capacity, on the assumption that the cloud will be a "write-once, never bother to read again" medium for most people.

Beeb gets the measure of the London Eye

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Headmaster

Capitalisation and precision, too.

Whilst we're here, the article's KiloJubs and MilliWales should be kilo and milli and quoting five places of precision for an area of forestry simply isn't credible unless they control the width of their landrover tracks to a disturbingly anal degree.

Your 1.19 MegaJubs is/are just fine, of course.

Leica S2 professional medium format DSLR

Ken Hagan Gold badge

17k + 5k + what?

I know I can buy a printer for a tenner, but what would it cost for something that could do justice to these snaps? Does "That Awful Puppy" need to start thinking about their other kidney?

Raygun dreadnought project reports 'remarkable breakthrough'

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Alien

Re: I'm not optimistic

"Offensive weapons that couldn't be defended (i.e. nuclear bombs on ICBMs) spectacularly failed to deter war"

Er, I must have missed that global thermonuclear war then. I think the Russians missed it, too. They seem *very* concerned that the deployment of an effective defence against ICBMs might be a problem.

"there seems to be no limit to the stupidity of military leaders and ..."

Welcome to Earth. You may come in peace, but don't make any assumptions about us. We're all bat-shit insane.

BBC rebuilds Civilisation in HD

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: That guy with the huge head

James Burke.

I enjoyed Connections at the time, though I was about ten and my father (who had a somewhat older perspective) felt that the connections were often no more than cover for the script's limited attention span.

Lame Stuxnet worm 'full of errors', says security consultant

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Spread too widely? Not well hidden?

(Sheesh! Pick one and stick to it, will ya?)

OK, so maybe it spread widely. That maximises the chance that it is brought into the target facility by an innocent worker at that facility, rather than requiring a Mossad agent. Guess which is easier, particularly if the developer isn't working for the Israeli or American governments?

OK, so maybe it wasn't well obfuscated. That's easy to say with hindsight. Didn't stop it spreading widely before everyone knew it was there and what target it was aimed at.

Maybe the developer knows more about their craft than these black hat experts.

Third party developers blamed for Windows security woes

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: same for everything

"I think ms would push more updates but they would want to charge for it so its cheaper for developers to just develop their own way of updating."

I doubt that very much, for commercial reasons. MS have spent ten years establishing Windows Update (and Microsoft Update) as *branded* update systems. If they start offering stuff from other vendors and one of the patches does real harm, that's real damage (however unfair) to Microsoft's own reputation. (That's not great in security circles, but it is better than most of the PC industry and better than one or two high profile vendors who Secunia have alluded to.) There's also the risk of a daft lawsuit, followed by a dafter decision, with MS paying damages for someone else's foul-up.

None of these concerns would apply to a Windows port of apt or yum.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: but but but

Secunia's point is that most recent concerns are *not* breaches of the OS. They are breaches of the end-user (personal data, like banking details) and the breach is between the outside world and applications running in the login context of the current user.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So...

"So you don't run any non FOSS on your ubuntu box? To my knowledge no non-free software is available from repositories."

I see from other replies that it is already too late to avoid this logical detour, but...

Firstly, what's currently available does not limit discussion of what would solve the problem described in the article. I can't see any technical or business reasons why non-FOSS updates can't use the same distribution mechanism as FOSS updates. As others have pointed out, the Linux repository system is all GPL-ed, and *surely* Adobe and Apple between them (to name but two interested parties) could support a public Windows port.

(Truth is, they don't care. They haven't yet twigged that security is an issue. They're about ten years behind Microsoft in this regard. Astonishing, really, but I can't see any other explanation that fits the facts. It would just be *so* *easy* to do much better than they do at present.)

Secondly, just as an example, VirtualBox includes non-free-as-in-speech components, but I pick up updates from Oracle's repositories.

Thirdly, I suspect you will find that the main offenders identified by Secunia are free-as-in-beer applications like the Flesh Player and ArseOverTit-Bat.

Bogus Kama Sutra presentation opens your backdoor to hackers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: boody traps

"Why should I read file extensions when software can do that and warn me?"

Er, because it doesn't? Well, Windows doesn't, anyway.

"Any file that is an exe dressed up to look like a jpg or .pps or .doc is pretty obviously a boody trap and should raise a few red flag and be treated with more caution than the regular nanny warning."

Fair point. Has anyone got a list of the AV programs that don't automatically quarantine such flagrant malware when "heuristic checking" is switched on?

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Paris Hilton

Double extensions

Microsoft eventually gave up on auto-running whatever removeable medium you stick in the machine. It was a daft idea and ten years of security holes eventually rammed the message home.

The same will happen for hiding file extensions, eventually. Till then, we have stories like this.

DWP will make feuding parents pay

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Encouraging

Yes, but then they could sue the other party for the loss. Marvellous! Just what the child of separated parents needs.

Clearly someone has been looking at the "cash up front and let the lawyers slug it out in court" model that we know and love from the world of patents.

Google Apps contracts promise no 'scheduled downtime'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Who's their ISP?

Surely this kind of offer is only interesting to those who already have contracts with several ISPs, carefully chosen so that they use different sets of cables running into the office (which of course has a whole-office UPS for when some tired JCB driver decides to plug your mains supply into your internet pipe.

Such people exist, but probably not in large numbers. I suspect this is mostly about bragging rights.

No court order against PlayStation hackers for now

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: reality check

"They will use any possible avenue to stop it - just like any other company would."

Indeed, and I have no problem with that, but the point of the story is that the judge's decision makes it increasingly unlikely that this *is* a "possible avenue". My top tip for Sony? Next time, try a possible avenue. They're so much easier to walk down than the other kind.

Watson beats humans in Jeopardy! dry run

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: the Turing test

You may choose to define intelligence so that the Turing test doesn't measure it, but it measures what *I* mean by intelligence. (The sad thing is just how many human beings would fail.) In fact, it's probably the only test of intelligence that we know of.

Had the machine built its own database (and written its own rules) by listening to the unstructured raw input that we call "real life", I'd be impressed. As it is, this system appears to have had a "small" set of rules pre-programmed in and then merely demonstrated how far you can go with just a small set of rules. That is usually surprising to a lay audience, but to anyone with a background in the physical sciences, it isn't telling us anything we didn't already know.

California's green-leccy price system will stifle plug-in cars

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Reality strikes

So another taxation regime "designed" to encouraged this week's chosen behaviour looks like it might have the opposite effect to that intended. Who'd have guessed? Not the politicians, of course. They've demonstrated time and again that they have no understanding of either free market economics or human behaviour.

If you want a zero carbon economy by 2050, tax fossil carbon (and nothing else) at source, at a flat rate, with that rate on a 40-year long escalator from "zero" to "prohibitive". Taxation at source is simpler to administer because there are only a few hundred sites where fossil carbon comes out of the ground or into the country. The flat rate avoids anomalies like the one described in this article. The escalator means that everyone gets adequate warning of the future economic playing field and can have switched out their fossil-fuel-burning infrastructure on a natural maintenance timescale before it becomes too expensive.

But that requires sticking to the tax plan, so that people can make their purchasing decisions around it. Sadly there's always more votes to be had by tinkering, because that makes you look like you are doing something. In practice, all you are doing is punishing people who did what you wanted them to do last time you tinkered.

Otellini yawns at Windows on ARM

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Of course there is more than that

"If devs compiled to low level byte then it largely doesn't matter what architecture is underneath."

Binary translation of non-self-modifying user-mode x86 code is no harder (and no less efficient) than JVM or CLR code. (The hard part about full virtualisation is in handling kernel-mode code and self-modifying code. The former just isn't an issue for applications and the latter is both detectable and extremely rare, apart from a handful of well-known framework libraries.) Therefore, we already have an architecture-neutral machine code format. It's called x86.

Obviously I don't know if that's what MS plan to ship, but it has been done quite a few times in the past and at least once by MS themselves, so the only reasons not to offer it would be political ones. It will be an interesting test of whether MS actually want Big-Windows-on-ARM to succeed.

Custom ICs in small numbers to be cheap as (normal) chips

Ken Hagan Gold badge

A long term prediction

Many years ago, software development was a painfully expensive business. Access to the machine was the major bottleneck and so anyone who actually had to program for a living learned how to "measure twice, cut once" with their untried code.

Then the hardware got so cheap that everyone could have their own box and run their programs in a debugger. The economics turned on its head and the smart approach became "cut twice and throw away the one that didn't fit". Modern bug-ridden software is the result. Above a certain level of reliability, it simply isn't cost-effective to find all the bugs before you ship to the first paying customers and sometimes it is never cost-effective to fix them, because you can make more money by adding new features and selling to a wider customer base.

The same will happen to hardware. It'll take a couple of decades, but it will happen.

HTML5: An antidote for Apple App Store-itis

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: groks

How old? Well "groks" is in some *very* early versions of the jargon file. That would argue for someone around 50 or later. Perhaps you are too young to know that.