* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

Google, AWS IPs blocked by Russia in Telegram crackdown

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Re: MInor Correction

Spot the difference?

Nope. I do not.

Do not understand me wrong - they are as lawless as it can get.

The actual lawlessness, however is NOT at the level of laws and not even at the level of courts. It is at the level of enforcement. That is where people get killed, tortured, arbitrarily detained and suffer from a heart stroke which upon independent autopsy happens to be lung embolism from beating in the chest area combined with having a water heater shovelled down your throat and turned on if you are not signing the confessions. This is out of the front page of one of their opposition newspapers from yesterday by the way (CIA may take some notes as replacement for waterboarding).

Back to the actual law (not the wonders of Russian law enforcement).

They have the law, it was voted for, it passed legal review (it was challenged by SPs) and a challenge was not accepted by the constitutional court. Do we like it or not, the process has been followed so no point to parrot the Daily Mail please. I suggest following the entire thing from A to Z how it developed and reading the actual law, discussion, challenges, etc.

They actually have significantly higher protections on privacy of communications than us in their constitution and the law has been found to comply with that. Whoever wrote the cheat sheet for Irina (the law author) knew what they were doing. The escrow is for keys only. The data never officially leaves the SP until there is a court order. The keys are not the communication, hence the constitutional protection does not apply. This is the scary bit and this is what will inevitably be copied one day by us and others.

Their laws as written are something which is worth reviewing, reading and stealing ideas. In fact some of our politicians do that (and not pay copyright fees). All in all, UK is significantly more "lawless" in this area. There are more backdoors and holes in UK surveillance legislation than in a good piece of Swiss cheese.

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MInor Correction

Russia wants Telegram banished from within its borders, supposedly on national security grounds.

Actually, it is for refusing to comply with mandated national level key escrow. Instead of an Amber Rudd "backdoor for me only courtesy of right hashtags" (tm), they simply mandated that keys are escrowed and SPs (not the FSB) runs a data retention regime. Thus, if there is a court order at a later date, the encrypted data is taken from the SP, the keys from escrow are applied and the court order is fulfilled.

Telegram does not have any keys to put into the escrow as it never kept them - their service is designed that the keys remain with the user.

What we are observing is the result of this or (even worse) Amber Rudd style system in practice. It is only a matter of time until Mrs "All The Righ Hashtags" bestows a system like this on us. She already deployed the relevant means to enforce it on "anti-porn" and "anti-paedo" and "anti-piracy" grounds.

Ditto for the VPNs - if you trawl through their raves over the years Josephina Vissarionovna May wanted to ban VPNs for private individuals as far back as becoming a home secretary under Cameron. So, it is only a matter of time until we observe that one too as well as similar screws being put on any service where the keys are with a user.

US, UK cyber cops warn Russians are rooting around in your routers

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FBI has high confidence

How about FBI has EVIDENCE - to satisfy a prosecutor that a prosecution in a court of law may succeed. Real court. Anywhere in the developed world (preferably not USA).

If they really have it - then, we are talking.

Until then it is not even kettle paging pot. It is black hole calling a pot black. The best thing to do is not to listen to either one of them.

Net neutrality advocates freak out as lobbyists pull rug from California's draft net neutrality law

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Re: CA government is so corrupt

Cali-Fornicate-You's gummint is probably THE most corrupt institution in the USA, let alone half the world.

Based on this comment - you have not been in half of the world.

As my kids say after this summer: "We are entering Bosnia and Herzegovina. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious". Russia, Lat Am, Africa - anything and everything is more corrupt than the rather tame Californicating legislature. Even the UK house of lords.

Facebook admits it does track non-users, for their own good

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When non-Facebook sites add a “Like” button (a social plugin, in Baser's terminology), visitors to those sites are tracked: Facebook gets their IP address, browser and OS fingerprint, and visited site.

Not if Facebook is in the noscript kill list and that is one damn good reason for it to be.

Google to add extra Gmail security … by building a walled garden

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Re: Watchout Facebook is trying the same scam

What's hilarious, is that many of the same people get free email anyway from their non-US Big-Tech ISP.

Those are still run by Google or MSFT in nearly all cases. We have reached the point where 99% of ISPs do not have the competence to run a mail system.

UK spy agency warns Brit telcos to flee from ZTE gear

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Re: U.S. bans American companies from selling to Chinese phone maker ZTE

Different case. It is the old Iran sanction violation punishment reincarnated.

Not clear what is the issue this time, though considering that even thinking about doing business in Iran will put you on the banned list.

So much for USA signing up to "lift the sanctions" as in the so called joint plan of action.

Classic case of "I am altering the deal, pray that I do not alter it any further".

HPE donates 3 mini-supercomputers to UK universities boning up on Arm

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You obviously never ever sold a customer half a system in anticipation of removing a few raw hides and asking for a firstborn to deliver the other half.

France wants you to put lights and beacons on your drone

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Re: I'll add a light to my drone...

Come on, at least follow the tradition.

The Morse code should say: "Your Mother Was A Hamster" while the drone "Farts in your general direction".

On a more serious note - the beacon consumption is marginal compared to the rest of the package and the wi-fi bit requires virtually zero additional power/battery expenditure for a WiFi controlled drone. As far as proposals go this one is not entirely unreasonable technically.

Torvalds schedules Linux kernel 5.0, then maybe delays 'meaningless' release

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That depends on the definition of Progam.

If Program is anything in-kernel it breaks as regular as a couple of versions for the more complex stuff. Example - the changes to timer APIs and moving from an explicit callback to "container-of" style of obtaining the caller. That was a fairly major breakage in third party/out of tree modules.

If Progam is anything out-of kernel. Linux userspace facing APIs have had little or no changes since ~ 3.0. The syscalls remain the same and with the same args.

Latest F-35 flight tests finish – and US stops accepting new jets

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Re: Come to that...

he US State Department has issued public warnings declaring that the terrorists in Syria are known to have chemical weapons

They do:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b6a79ad7b2c1746085579e3e8b5f4daa15cee975/0_0_4000_2400/master/4000.jpg?w=1010&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=05e07cb973502d4df97f17782d512cd3

What do you think the two things on the left are? Christmas Presents?

This is ISIS, there was another Guardian/Observer photo-shoot where they were waxing lyrical over the New Syrian army bolting a similar contraption together, but they have now Stalinized it after a few people (including me) wrote to them about the appropriateness of cheering people being gassed.

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Re: Trial by fire

Has anything like this ever happened to US/Israeli strikes, from Iraq/Syria armies? No it hasn't.

Depends on the amount of "advisors" on the ground. There is a hell lot of them at the moment.

IMHO what we are seeing is exactly that - the effect of "advisors".

Once you take them into account the numbers start looking more rational. The sole exception is the American claim for 100% missiles hitting 100% targets. That is bullshit. You could see missiles being taken out in the live footage to start off with. On top of that, Tomahawk does not have that reliability. At least a couple of them should have failed just because the stars were in the wrong constellation and the phase of the moon or for some other unexplained reason. All the other numbers are in the realm of possible.

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Re: The only question is.... why does media believe and laud incompetent idiots?*

Is this tale true .......

We do not know. Yet. We will learn this week.

However, when Russians threaten with a document at Lavrov level, they may in fact be in the possession of it.

So if they claim they have the original of the tests, put the f*** cards on the table and Boris and Co will have some explaining to do.

Same as with the "staged" gas attack document.

Instead of shouting Borisenities (that should make it into the Oxford dictionary one day) at them, call their bluff. Cards on the table gentlemen, let's see what you have.

If not, it is them and Boris competing for Pinocchio of the week which is business as usual.

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Re: Billions for an "aircraft carrier"....

with no aircraft!

With useless aircraft. While no aircraft participated in the airstrikes in Syria on both sides, the footage from there demonstrated something a lot of analysis predicted when the F-117 came out - that Stealth will provide only a temporary advantage.

Most observed (note - I am not saying confirmed as both sides are throwing propaganda at each other) kills were courtesy of Buk-2M operating in "Stealth Killer" mode. Missile goes up to pre-defined coordinates and looks in a "pre-programmed direction". At that point its own radar head turns on and it looks DOWN on the target. When looking from ABOVE all currently existing Stealth aircraft including the F35 have only a marginal radar signature reduction. They are, in fact, no different from a pre-historic Mig-23 or F-104 radar-wise. The missile comes down on it like a sledgehammer and there is one F35 less flying.

The only way to deal with this is to go back to the days of Gulf-War 1 and Kosovo and jam anything and everything. At which point who gives a shit that the aircraft is stealthy or not. In fact, the aerodynamic disadvantages required by stealth make it easy pray to Gen-4 dogfighters like the EuroFighter, Saab, Mig-27+, Mig29 and the Rafale.

While Americans can afford wasting money (or at least they think so) on a development of superweapons that will be obsoleted shortly, countries with lesser GDPs cannot. In fact the biggest losers as of this weekend are in this order - Russia (the Su-57 program) and Nato participants in the F35 program. The ones laughing all the way to the bank are the French with the Rafale.

There is another lesson in this. We are fixated on Russians threatening to sell S300, S400 and S500 to Iran and other "rogue states". Wrong fixation. While we have continued to fixate on this they have sold their real "anti-Stealth" solution to 20 odd countries, half of them "rogue states" and in quantity - 20+ units to some of them including North Korea. To add insult to injury we have now provided them with real-life footage on how that sh*t works under real conditions so they can sell more. And they will (despite Almaz Antei being under sanctions since MH17).

That thing can fire with its radar taken out, it can fire on vis with the main radar inactive, it can fire blind to pre-defined coordinates and judging by the footage it can do it in the exact way it takes to remove an F35 out of the equation.

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Re: Trial by fire

Somehow, dunno why,

One more thing.

Just re-read the news. If anyone is brazenly lying it is the yanks. "100% of our missiles reached their designated targets" my arse. They f**** fail on 2-5% of launches for unrelated technical reasons to start off with with no air defense to oppose them

The live footage I managed to dig out was a turkey shoot at mid range. So the if anything the anti-F35 weapon (the Buk) the Russians have developed has passed life firing tests on something different from a civilian airplane.

All in all there are two options here:

A) Both sides are lying so we do an average which is ~ 50%. That still does not good for the West.

B) The Russians have learned the trick that when one of your opponents is obviously lying, you, by telling the Truth which the locals can see on the ground score an automatic propaganda victory with the local population. That looks as a scenario looks even worse - they turned the tables both military and propaganda wise.

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Re: Trial by fire

Somehow, dunno why, I would take declarations of a 70% kill rate against incoming missiles by Syrian state media with a large grain of salt

Errr... Dunno. For Damascus the 70% number is quite likely. Homs - we do not know, can't find any evidence. On Damascus and evidence - go and get some of the live footage. It made a hell of a depressing sight. If Trump has any Russian backhanders/Interests Almaz-Antei (the makers of Buk) are one of them. Best advert for it I have ever seen. On the positive - it was an OBVIOUSLY upgraded Buk to M2 spec or higher. Not 30 years old hardware. More like 2 years old.

You cannot mistake it for anything else as the picture is different from most other missiles. It is a dedicates stealth aircraft killer by the way.

Fire, up it goes - very very very high, mostly straight line. At that point it supposedly disengages earth control and engages own radar head. You can literally see the missile weaving a bit for a while until it grabs the target from ABOVE, then DOWN it goes in a straight line like a sledgehammer. Bang. 0.7M (if Storm Shadow) or 1.5M (if Tomahawk) taxpayers money jizzed over the Syrian countryside. And again. And Again. And Again. One shot, one kill. Delivered in a way where the F35 and all other "stealth" aircraft are practically non-stealthy - looking from above. So thanks god it was not there and it was just cruise missiles. The losses would have been ugly.

The clearest indicator that the numbers are not off is the amount of pictures for short range AA/close in defenses speaking over Damascus. All the media is repeating same shots from the same "one got through".

The close ins appear to be have upgraded too. The pictures in the media (both Russian and Western) are from that - pretty, but not informative. Classic case of journos going for "whoaaah, shiny" - so you do not see what is really happening.

Again - that appears to be upgraded. The pics look like Pantsir-S1 firing in both modes (autocannon and short range missiles).

So at least for Damascus (where there is enough alternative and amateur footage to see what has happened) the figures are more or less spot on.

The positive part is that it was not really 30 year old hardware - 2M is relatively new and Pantsir-S1 is pretty much off the production line. The negative is that the mode of operation of the mid-range defense pretty much negates stealth and demonstrates it with gusto. It also appears to work.

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Re: Trial by fire

Last but not least.

One target was middle of Damascus (supposedly research facility), the other one - supposedly manufacturing and strorage was UPWIND from Homs - 10-20km looking at the map. The wind last night for Syria was East-North-East changing to East in the morning. That target was right upwind from a city with 200K people at the edge of its suburb zone.

That is not just jerk-off. It is criminal in its stupidity.

By the way - that was the one which the Russians have allowed UK and France to exercise on.

Most likely whoever negotiated the locations for target practice KNEW there is nothing there. Otherwise if we did not openly lie that it has something to do with chemical weapons, Syrians and Russians would be collecting dead bodies in Eastern suburbs of Homs with mining equipment.

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Re: Trial by fire

They successfully negotiated a target practice run against 2 designated facilities

Just reading the reports on both sides and applying my old skills from the days when I lived on the other side of the wall. In those days I bought the local Communist party rag and a copy of either New York Times or IHT. Scratch out anything that differs, the rest is likely to be true. The sole difference is that now we have two "Communist Party" rags - from either side, both lying like there is no tomorrow.

So, based on applying this technique the picture looks pretty bad. 70% shot down using 30 year old equipment. The newest system the Syrians had was Buk (which is quite good by the way - the only losses Russians had in Georgia were from that). The rest was museum exhibits. They still shot down 70%+. The Russians stood down their systems (once again).

If that is the performance the odds against S400, S-300 and Pantsir-S1 for close-in defense and/or their naval versions look in the "suicide mission" territory.

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Re: The only question is....

corbin is a madman in his own right

Madman or not if he does not accept the challenge and carry it through successfully we are screwed.

May effectively demonstrated that she can do anything she bloody pleases and the Parliament has about as much say as the Chinese Parliament.

I already wrote to my MP congratulating him with his new role in the world. I suggest you do too.

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Re: Trial by fire

It did not. They successfully negotiated a target practice run against 2 designated facilities.

A trial by fire against an Arab run air defense system is not really a trial by fire.

By the way - I hope it stays that way.

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Re: The only question is....

Question has been answered last night - She did. The parliament has officially been told that they can f*ck off and have no say in a May's world.

If you are not scared you should be. Compare the usual pictures of her sitting depressed with the 4 pot plants and the pictures of her positively glowing last week. We saw her smile for the first time as a prime minister - in anticipation of a possible WW3. Postcoital glowing look in a premonition of WW3 setting... Jesus wept...

F35 did not participate, they fired around 30 cruise missiles and 70 stand-off ones. The latter so UK and France can pretend to participate too. Now Trump can pretend that he has jerked-off successfully on Faux news. Provided he does not try to continue to jerk off we can congratulate the Russians for successfully negotiating and maneuvering out of a WW3 scenario while dealing with lunatics.

All targets were in the "destruction of evidence" category. You have a team from OPCW on the ground, you are in a position to request immediate access to a facility which the Syrians are obliged to grant in under 24h under their 2013 "bail" conditions and what do you do - jerk off...

All of this was combined with the ridiculous blooper when UK got caught at the UN last night using a ruse which whole of Europe teaches their kids when they are in kindergarten to avoid doing what is known as: "The guilty one runs unchased." The polling in some Eastern European countries for believing what UK says on Salisbury was as low as 13% two weeks ago. I would expect it to be under 5% - all of this self-inflicted. Same for Russia - we actually gave Putin yet another 10% or thereabouts of public approval rating. We also fell in public for a trick which even 7 years olds in Eastern Europe smile and avoid. Idiots...

If Corbin has a pair he will be calling a confidence vote. My guess is that he has not grown one yet so she will achieve her aim of replicating (at a May scale) her idol's post-Argie success against Labor.

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it's called socialism

No, its classic capitalism.

Neither. It is an accounting fraud plain and simple. Misrepresenting the debt level to fib the credit rating.

Exactly what the Greeks did.

It will be interesting how many of those are around. This dates from the same period when the UK Government sold all of the Green Goddesses as well as the snowplough and road construction equipment from the country strategic reserve. I enjoyed the quality snowploughing delivered by it during the winter of 2011-2012 while travelling through Europe (some of them were even still with UK number plates). I believe the replacements including the equipment presently used by the Highway Agency have all been bought on PFI.

So it will be quite interesting how much of the REAL UK debt is concealed this way and how far are we really from a Greek Style financial incident. The official number is 222Bn which is 1%. I smell a rat - it is probably more.

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Brown & Blair financed the Voyager tankers by their trademark con-trick of PFI,

Cough... Sputter... Cough... Sputter...

This is not called Trademark trick. It is called "Greek Accounting".

Having ended America's broadband woes, the FCC now looks to space

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In Client States? Yes of course. Whatever the master says, the slave does.

Whois is dead as Europe hands DNS overlord ICANN its arse

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just remove content of those fields from the DB or replace it with the AS#.

That is exactly the information which IPR trolls need to throw seize and desist and threat letters.

They and specifically the entertainment industry lobby are the ones behind the current ICANN position as this will mean that they will now have to use a proper court order to make the SP disclose the end-user information.

Go away, kid, you bother me: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla kick W3C nerds to the curb

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Re: W3C dead?

They were maintaining a pretense of propriety, in a similar way as the applicable IETF groups. Nothing is decided in the standards body, everything is decided in a backroom deal. Example - the whole mpeg/H263 affair in IETF.

It is cartel behavior just by another name. Theoretically some of these issues can and should be a competition/cartel issue. Though usually there is nobody surviving to complain.

Apple leak: If you leak from Apple, we'll have you arrested, says Apple

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Re: "...an employee leaked a link to the gold master of iOS 11..."

Geezuz H. Are they really that stupid?

As far as Apple is concerned even the fact that there is now a Gold Master and the iOS 11 is ready for shipment is classified information.

The only other place where I have seen that much stuff "classified" was USSR.

UK health service boss in the guts of WannaCry outbreak warns of more nasty code infections

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Re: "and started putting in place disaster recovery measures "

The only way to deal with IoT, Medical and Industrial systems is: Firewall 'em all, god will recognize his own.

NHS still has not learned the lesson.

Anon biz bloke wins milestone Google Right To Be Forgotten lawsuit

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Re: The Government has Decided what is Relevant to You

Good luck with that.

Why? It happens every day. Everywhere. Everyone and their dog has embraced the idea of post-truth and has a history editing department. Sometimes you cannot find material that is only a day or two old any more.

Facebook scandal: EU politicians should aim for straight answers, not star witnesses

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Re: Get the engineers in

Just because you think all engineers are some kind of socially awkward

When the engineer lies about not knowing something it is quite easy to get him for contempt of court. Hence, they usually do not.

When a middle manager lies about not knowing something, it is possible to nail them, but quite difficult. So they tend to measure the amount of "I do not know" which they deliver and try to use this only as final get out of jail trump card.

When a C-suite member lies brazenly and openly about not knowing what is going on they usually get off the hook. There were plenty of examples of that recently, I will not quote the exact ones.

India completes its GPS alternative, for the second time

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Re: Why would mobile phones or TV be affected ?

As mobile phone mast are NOT transmitting the same signal

In 3G they may do it and it is used for improving signal to noise ratio.

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Re: Why would mobile phones or TV be affected ?

What requires precision timing in mobile phone

Both 3G and 4G require it. The radio layer in 3G stops making sense if you do not have precise timing, 4G is even worse.

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But that’s enough distance to help India launch missiles, like its 5,000-km-range Agni-5,

ICBMs have significantly less need of GPS than usually advertised. Now their supersonic (operational) and hypersonic (work in progress) cruise missiles...

Cloudflare promises to tend not two, but 65,535 ports in a storm

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Re: Bad idea

and keeps Mr Murphy far and away, then it will work.

Not really. There are regular issues if you try to access the reg from the Deepest Darkest Eastern Europe. It mis-detects multiple connections coming from a single CGNAT IP address for a DDOS attack on a regular basis and starts asking stupid questions followed by failing the connection.

GCHQ boss calls out Russia for 'industrial scale disinformation'

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Re: Bude

Assuming you have those samples. It'd give agents something to do, collecting tap water, spring water or well water around top-secret laboratories that don't officially exist per OPCW's CBW verification programme.

Not water. Air. And we did it all the time. We are doing it now too. So do they.

The official job of the lab which got caught in the 1990-es selling Novichok on the black market was to collect air samples around all sites and check if there are any leaks to call in the clean-up and investigations team.

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Re: Bude

Couple of points.

You are deliberately mixing in strawmen arguments.

On your points:

Point 1 - Maybe.

Point 2 - Mixing, diluting and spraying sheep has nothing to do with this case. The LD50s and the amounts differ by 3+ orders of magnitude. The amounts available for analysis are not even in the microgram range.

Organophosphate residual analysis is a well known discipline For ones with fluorine modification in the organic portion which were invented after all western chemical weapons programs were officially closed? I very seriously doubt it. They hydrolize differently. Sure - you may use some of the old Porton Down data, but you will need to synthesize it and re-establish baseline running some experiments.

However to identify a particular general formula or formulation - ie to be able to say this is Temik or Round-up or for that matter VX is a lot simpler

Can you stop shuffling strawmen? The GP was repeating the Daily Mail drivel that we can identify the supplying lab to its post code. Gas Mass and the software which does the frag analysis for the Mass Spectrometry portion will often give you the formula even when the formula is unknown. That's its job. It does not give "quantity" for any of the compounds detected.

It cannot give you a definitive signature for "source". For that you need samples and calibration curves and sufficient amounts for "legacy" chromatorgraphy detection such as IR spectrography on the detector. I have worked with this for a few years - definitely long enough to tell you that you simply cannot get those from a residual trace smeared on a (supposedly) door handle. You need a sufficient quantity to work with.

And personally when virtually every countries - you mean like the current Eu rotating presidency which said black on white in writing that: "The British have only provided hypothesis, suppositions and maybes. They have failed to support it with a single shred of evidence and fact. We are not doing anything until they do. Sometimes, the only way not to repeat the Daily Mail propaganda is to be able to read 4-5 languages.

The reality is - even Eastern Europe is presently kept in line solely by the threat of "sanctions" (no, I am not kidding, that is how we treat allies). If we provided tangible evidence, that would be unnecessary.

I will leave the tap-dancing in the minefield separately - I suggest you get a proper analysis of their propaganda and how they shifted internal propaganda efforts for the last decade. It makes an interesting reading (and something our dolts have failed to read).

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Re: Bude

Apparently the OPCW's reference strutures were provided by Iran.. Who seem to be getting along nicely with Russia at the moment. If Iran can synthesise it, how many other states could?

As many as you like. The shit was synthesized in a chromatography lab (place usually not equipped for proper toxic compound synthesis) by a lab technician during the affair when it was sold to the mob in the 1990-es.

This is IN THE F***ING FILE. The one USA and UK government got in 1996 by a whistleblower and which is available on Scribd for everyone to read.

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Re: Bude

Secondly there are labs all around the UK and Ireland alone can identify this stuff, and tell you where it was made (down to the factory and batch in most cases) and all I'd need to do to book a test myself is ring my dad's mate..

Dude, the difference between you and me is that I actually did an MSc in Chemistry and did phosphoroorganics. You are suffering from an overdose of an NeuroToxic Gas known as Durachok-2018, usually transmitted by contact with the Daily Mail.

1. In order to get a "signature" you have to have a sample. I did not know we have successfully managed to infiltrate Russian chemical weapons program and get a sample from each and every lab there, each and every batch. If we have, where is the proof and why are we having this conversation to start off with?

2. In order to "get the signature" you need a minimum amount of the compound. While you can get a yes/no via gas-mass, the signature which you are describing requires micrograms (at least) quantities so you can get the ratio between the different impurities. It is impurities which provide the trace so you are dealing with trace quantities of a trace of poison.

3. The trace will differ less than 30 minutes after exposure to air. Both phosphororganics and the typical impurities from their synthesis react with moisture in the air, acids and bases. You need to replicate the same process to get a comparison. So to make things interesting the trace from something that has sat for 30 minutes on top of skin will no longer match a trace of something you have taken out of a vial 30 minutes ago. Sure, you can try doing some modeling, but for that you need grams of stuff and a herd of lab animals to build a baseline to feed into the computer model - effectively violating the chemical weapons convention and reinstating Porton Down to 1950-es level.

4...

5...

6...

I can continue for pages here - I studied this only a year after the "Chemical Weapons" course in the University becamee "Toxic compounds and toxicology" so I actually got the tail of how to do this stuff. I have also worked for real doing crhomatography before money and health issued forced me to switch to the Dark Side - software and IT.

All in all, this is a technical rag, please go and spout your drivel in the daily mail or wherever you have been paid to replicate the daily mail. Or at least learn some chemistry and how analysis of this stuff is done before spouting utter rubbish.

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Re: Bude

The depressing thing is that even with CCTV and all the advanced technology and skilled police *cough* it's easier to try and knock off a(n) ex spy and his daughter

We still have failed to prove that they were the target. We do not even know how it was done and where it was done. If they were the target and they were attacked at home (as you describe) they would have not been alive. Neither would be the cat. Nor the other cat (there is a lot of running gags around the press in Eastern Europe about it being a Russian GRU colonel Koshnkina).

Do not even get me started about destroying evidence (the cat) and the fact that MI5/6 and CIA both knew that the compound in question is in mob's hands since 1996.

Not to mention the much less targeted approach,

The sh*t in question is supposed to be (I still have not seen an official LD50) so toxic that even traces on belongings from the Skripal's son being snuffed in Russia in late 2017 should be enough to produce the picture we see - including traces on the car and the plane which brought Julia from Russia.

The reality is - we do not know. However we have everyone posturing because it serves the political agenda.

We should figure out what happened to a level which would satisfy a prosecutor and drive it from there. Yeah, I know - this means Borish shutting up which is possible only if you lock him up.

UK rocket-botherers rattle SABRE, snaffle big bucks

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Finally, a piece of space news on the 12th of April

There are dates like 20th of July, 12th of April and 4th of October that should not be forgotten.

Especially on The Reg. End of the day it is supposed to be a tech rag.

Worried we'll make ourselves extinct? Let’s be scientific about it

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Re: But aren't we supposed to be dead by then?

Err...

Did you check the transit times for the USA 6th Fleet and Charles De Gaulle to the Eastern Mediterranean?

The date may not be that far off (for once).

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Re: Well ...

In Syria and Salisbury, evolution will favour those less susceptible to chemical poisons. And so forth.

Evolutionary pressure works in two cases. A) bottleneck event - for example black death (genetic markers from that are still detectable in Europe) today. B) constant pressure - for example spearfishing has made groupers on cyprus evolve a lovely lizard green coloration so you cannot see them in the sea grass unless they move.

I think both Syrians and drained swamp dwellers will disagree with either.

On a more serious note, there is little natural selection pressure of either type being applied so evolution has indeed stopped.

UK defines Cyber DEFCON 1, 2 and 3, though of course doesn't call it that

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Yes but how do you prevent them, or deal with them when they're happening?

It is in the table - create a different level talking shop which has no powers to do anything besides having a circle-w*nk. None of the business, infrastructure, etc have been mandated to have some level of preparation so the only thing which they can is continue w*nking up to a QUANGO level and beyond.

Actually doing something requires preparation and some of the preparations will need a very serious level of checks and balances to be enacted. You may need to flip the switch disconnecting a significant part of the country from the net, filtering brutally half of the traffic or even shutting down networks. Giving that ability without control to someone who is so desperately trying to be a pale copy of an "Iron Lady" is a recipe for disaster. Giving it to a lunatic taken out of a steam-punk novel (if god forbid he becomes a prime minister) - doubly so. This needs to be done properly and properly codified in law.

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The table is bollocks

Just copy the homework from the Russian boy next to you. They have a better education system so they usually get their homework done to a higher standard.

Do we like it or not their critical national infrastructure legislation as voted 2 years ago is at the moment the best in class (until Israel comes up with theirs - there is a rumour they are working on it).

The criminal responsibility for people who fail to secure infra, the mandatory kill/disconnect switches by design to ensure that attack can be mitigated, the mandatory replicas of key systems like root servers, etc - you name it.

We may not like what it says (especially the possible anti-democracy and censorship secondary uses), but from the perspective of defending a country from a DEFCON1 level attack it actually says exactly the right things.

Just copy it and stop w*nking.

British government to ink deal for yet another immigration database

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Continuing to waste public money

There is simply no way to have an effective immigration control system in a country without a mandatory identity system.

You see a guy in the street. How can you enforce an identity check on him as an immigrant in a country where identity is not mandatory even for driving licenses while driving?

It is a classic "Love Cake, Have Cake, Eat Cake" moment. It is time to admit - there is NO CAKE.

Penis pothole protester: Cambridge's 'Wanksy' art shows feted

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better they see graffiti than suffer a car incident due to a ruptured tyre or something.

You mean like them going over the handlebars of their bike under the car overtaking them?

This is Cambridge(shire) we are talking about. 95% of households have at least one cyclist. It is a location where kids cycle and most of the potholes are exactly within what is considered cycle lane.

Whoever draws it should add an obscenity addressing the council to every pothole in fluorescent yellow for good measure.

Data exfiltrators send info over PCs' power supply cables

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Not really

I expect a proper(inline) UPS would stop it.

Not really - if your PC goes from 30-40W (usual x86 desktop idle) to 120W that will show up on the other side of the UPS. It is current which is being pulse modulated here, not voltage.

The only thing which a normal UPS may do in this scenario is to decrease the effective bit rate a little bit.

You need a rather special power supply to defend against this - one with a constant current draw which discards all "unused" power by heating the air, water, charging - whatever. Normal UPSes do not do that.

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Finally, an application for a Smart Meter

After that, it's pretty simple, because all the attacker needs is to decide where to put the receiver current clamp:

There is already a government mandated one - it is called Smart Meter.

The true victims of Brexit are poor RuneScape players

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Re: Lots of Independent readers in today :)

For a service like Jagex, an exchange rate drop is usually strongly advantageous - the majority of their customers likely being outside of the UK.

Game is not a service from a financials perspective. Its primary costs are graphic design, world design and AI/interaction software development. These are incurred where they are located and they are 100% UK based - off the A14 in Cambridge.

The cost of servers are secondary. We can look it up in their accounts in Company house - these should be in a different item line so we can guess the staff costs vs service running costs ratio.