Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: Remember the war

Not to mention we've been doing non-stop crossings of the Atlantic for decades now with and without Voyager, it's a lot quicker than landing and taking off several times on the journey and reduces the likelihood of something not working after you've turned the plane off.

There is a minor "reality" check here.

Range of 1000 miles without drop tanks or refuel.

So it either has to suck from the Private Financing Initiative Bastard or do one or more landings along the classic Lend-Lease route.

Re: Ime Archibong

Maybe. "Ime" in most Slavic languages is "name" (some minor pronunciation and spelling deviations from language to language). So to someone who is profficient in "Великий Могучий" or "Не Мамата" languages this sounds almost like "My name is Bong, ArchBong".

Re: Short Notice

I wonder if the next thing we see is a rail gun used as part of a missile / asteroid defense shield.

I'd rather not - it will spend most of its time rotated 180 degrees opposite to any potential incoming asteroids.

I mean being able to hit an inbound projectile with a massive enough bolt from a rail gun

This will work only if the asteroid is solid enough. If you have a large chondrite rock or a piece of a comet core consisting mostly of ice it will absorb the impact or let the slug go right through. Though on the positive side, these are likely to disintegrate in the upper atmosphere so they have to be really big to do any damage.

Or Jimmy Savile being allowed full access to a hospital mortuary.

Come on, not all forked trees in GitHub are dead. Some are still twitching.

Re: And the weather is not very nice either

All the educated classes are leaving for somewhere safe

And where is that somewhere safe?

To a country which is making a point that all immigrants are bad and has its current policy formulated based on an election or referendum fought and won from the position of rabid xenophobia? Or one that does not. Oops... sorry... the latter does not presently exist. The lunatics are running the asylum nearly everywhere.

Re: All your open source code

M$$$ is the worst company, it makes products worse and they are dying a slow death as soon as they get bought.

Nothing specific to a Microsoft. It is the standard in large companies. In fact, MSFT is not the worst in here. By far.

This will continue being the case as long as M&A based "innovation" in the USA is more tax efficient than internal innovation and R&D. The bean-counters will ensure that.

Re: Boss said leave it alone.

Also, snooping on phone conversations in DC would be a smart move for any foreign spookhaus.

The issue with that is that in order to actually snoop on conversations and data a Stingray type device needs the cooperation of the telco. It needs to be able to ask the network for encryption keys. Otherwise there will be alerts all over the phone that the network is insecure and some phones may refuse to use the network without an end-user confirmation (OS/Customization dependent).

If a foreign power has hacked Verizon, ATT or Sprint to the point where it can get crypto keys a Stingray near the White House is the least of the potential worries for USA.

Re: the dogs bark, but the caravan goes on

"The cat listens, but continues to blatantly lick its crotch.. In public"

That's not a proverb - it is a quote from a fable where the cat pinches a huge slice of ham and is being chastised by the cook. "You bad kittie, do you have no shame, and so on". And the cat continues eating regardless. The morale is: "there is no point chastising if you cannot back it up with a stick".

I agree on the "if it was a proverb" though :)

Re: Used to be a day in the strife on the Balkans 10 years ago.

Hint: Serialize all capital equipment.

Does not help. As I said - the "national minority". The one that is common across most of this part of Europe forming anything between 7 and 11% of the population. It is not all of them by the way. In fact it is a very small fraction which gives all of them a bad name. To be more specific - they have "family trades" and there are clans which live of nothing but petty theft - it is the familial trade.

The stolen bees were killed outright, honey harvested and sold on the closest market and the hives burned. There was absolutely no intention of keeping them and absolutely no traces.

Bingo.

As a matter of fact it does not need to hack ALIS. It is sufficient to prevent an update of data into ALIS by whatever means for an aircraft to refuse to fly. Last one I heard was 45 days.

Additionally, ALIS also has mission assignment and command functionality. So if you do not have a link at least some aspects of getting an aircraft ready to go out and kill someone or something cannot be done.

It is truly what it is - "If the wars were fought using the Cloud". Who, when and how in NATO countries agreed to it needs to be tried for grand treason and hanged. Publicly.

Re: A President-For-Life Communist Country? Read Some History Please.

Sorry Karl Marx. There must be a viable response to abusive, parasitic, negative 'capitalism'.

As my dad used to say "You got your history lessons wrong lad. What we have here is not communism, it is theocracy".

1. The manifesto of the communist party is an ideal to subscribe to. Especially the bits which were plagiarized verbatim from the Sermon on the Mount.

2. The first volume of Das Kapital actually makes sense. There are some conjectures which are a bit far fetched, but it is not far off. In fact, it is in use till this day in a lot of economic theory and social analysis work.

3. By the time you reach the 3rd volume you are in WTF land - it is on par with the dinosaurs walking next to the humans in a Kentucky theme park.

4. Lenin syphilitic drivel, Mao "localisations", etc can be only believed in. They defy logic. That is why you saw in USSR posters "WE BELIEVE IN THE BRIGHT COMMUNIST FUTURE". We believe. Period. Nothing more. Nothing else. Because anything less will actually make you doubt it. The only way to accommodate it was to fervently believe.

5. Zhdanov, Stalin, Pol Pot - that is Torquemada and Co. If belief is not sufficient, the iron maiden and the heated gloves will assist.

We are not yet clear which bit does Xi drivel fall into 4 or 5, but it is there. Something along the lines of the scribblings of the priests in Torquemada employ (or his own) discussing the number of devils sitting on the top a needle.

Back on your conjecture on innovation. You are wrong. Period. Innovation is constant and happens even in the most repressive regimes.

What theocracies across the ages have failed to do, is to convert innovations (especially ones which contradict the holy scriptures) into products and put them into mass use. Going back to the USSR and the soviet block - their scientists usually discovered the same things as the west at roughly the same time. What they failed was to put them to use and/or build the appropriate gadget out of the discovery and especially - bring it to Joe Average cittizen.

Re: Major Overreach

Some forms of computer generated humor are trivial.

For example, most proverbs have two logical components - a premise and a conclusion. Split them and run a random generator to match the parts. We did that in high school in 1984. Some of the products of that experiment are still doing the rounds in the country where that was done.

It's in the queue - for non-compliance with their data localisation law and for failing to comply with key escrow (same as Telegram).

They voted for legislation which is very similar to GDPR and forbids any data transfer of personal data outside Russia unless that country has a data protection equivalence treaty with them two year ago. LinkedIn already bit that bullet and is banned.

F**book has a compliance notice by end of this year to comply with both data protection (itself) and key escrow (same as Telegram) for its messaging and its subsidiaries. If it is non-compliant by then there will be no Facebook. By the way, based on the fact that the compliance has been shifted to end of year, Facebook is quite clearly trying to both comply and/or negotiate instead of pretending Russia does not exist ala LinkedIn or taking a hard line ala Telegram.

Depends. Was the AI written by Tesla?

We will know for sure after we read the next article about "drone rams a fire engine at speed".

Re: Bye bye Apple?

Surely the answer then is not to entrust your "security" to Apple and to move off to another well known platform upon which you could, if necessary, sideload Telegram or whatever else.

Actually - just the opposite. Moving to apple's platform itself (facetime, iMessage, etc) is the safest bet. Apple cannot and will not compromise its own platform.

Re: Mapping plan

Autoconfig is a big fail

Should not post before the 4th espresso.

I meant Autoconfig + RA. Both. They need to be dead and buried and fully replaced by DHCP. They made sense in the 90-es when the protocol was designed. In 2018 they are a solution looking for a problem. Both of them and especially RA.

Re: Someone probably knows where it is/was

it might reveal classified capabilities of (let's say) Navy sonar equipment.

There IS equipment in the remote parts of the South Atlantic, South Indian ocean, South Pacific and around the Antarctic. It was put there after the Vela Incident. Data from that equipment is regularly donated to search and rescue as was the case with the recent Argentinian submarine incident.

While its exact locations are classified, the fact that it is there is not.

So if there was anything loud enough for it to be picked up, it would have been used. Doubly so considering that some of it is operated by Australia.

Re: maybe they should just...

maybe they should just use an operating system that NEEDS no anti-virus!

Even if it does not need it, it is obliged to run it. That is what the standards for computer infra in the DOD and other agencies say.

Re: I do not imagine Apple will take long.

Actually, GDP per capita has dropped like a stone in the last few years,

Correct. It is still way better than anytime in 1905-2000 period though and our endless posturing around sanctions provides a very easy target for Putin to blame for any decrease. In fact, he does not need to - even their opposition voted unanimously to class enactment of sanctions as an act of war - both in first and second reading (as of two weeks ago).

So once again, if we are THAT interested in a regime change there some reconsideration is needed. By the way - if you listen carefully to the yesterday interview of the British ex-deputy head of NATO we should really think of it.

One particular case which needs addressing in our propaganda is trying to stick everything on Putin himself. Let's face it - it is quite often not him and even if it was him, he is teflonated. So it makes more sense tactically to nail a person who really can be blamed and hope that the gavno which has gone all over the place after touching the fan stick on the boss too. A good example of a case like that would be the MH17 press conference and evidence.

Re: Well, duh

Nice try. Got any proof,

As a matter of fact yes. Just go there and have a look. I did - I had a job offer so I took the family down to Dublin exactly a year ago.

The wife had a look and put a veto on it with a very simple reasoning: "There is no way in hell we will be able to get a house within 30 miles with our resources if we have to queue in with all the bankers which are moving into the new offices on the riverfront".

They are there for you to see - just walk down Hanover Quay. If you have a look on streetview, it is from right after BrExit day when they started raising the old buildings. They are now nearly to roof level and will be ready for use by BrExit date and there are more of them in the queue. Very few of them are shared blocks - most are bought stock by banks. If anything will have "tiny figurehead offices", it will be the city, not the other way around.

Re: Being honest about data-collection isn't an option anymore is it ?

Oh it is. But not if you are a slime.

I got an honest and compliant GDPR notice two days ago. JUST ONE - out of all notifications, popups and mails in my mailbox.

It was from Kasperski - they forced an update on the app with a name change so you had to go through the GDPR screens to reactivate it on the phone. What is remarkable is not them doing it. The remarkable part is them being the only ones which followed the law (so far). There was a separate marketing, separate data collection consent and the app agreed to function exactly as it should with no functionality cuts if these two were not ticked off.

Re: Optional

unaudited because "muh trade secrets"

Unaudited is the least of the problems. In 99% of countries and jurisdictions there is no official test cases and there is no test suite - this is left to the contractor.

Nowadays, the pornographer

Time to watch "The People vs Larry Flynt" again.

I guess no one told him that hacking his countrymen was a no-no but hacking the rest of the world was ok.

Spot on. And it will continue to be as long as the reverse is true.

Re: Tortuga bound

Whilst there’s no crew to take hostage, there’s a big ship to loot (i.e. cargo!) with no-one getting in your way.

And where you are going to offload the loot I may ask? Into the fisherman boat they used to get to the ship? Yeah... Right...

So as far as Somali pirates are concerned a robotic ship is a totally useless target.

Now, network pirates... That is a different story. A robotic ship or any sort of tampering with ship navigation (including the ones crewed by meatsacks) has the potential of damages where twin towers pale by comparison. mv2 is a bitch. Even if the values of v are rather low (compared to an airliner), the m compensates for that with gusto.