Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
but the implications is that they were not even aware of being under this creepy surveillance.
De-anonymization of a data is a criminal offence in the most recent data protection legislation. It will be entertaining to observe the fallout if someone files a challenge.
The Tu-144 was a straight visual ripoff
Bollocks, Tu has retractable canards allowing it lower takeoff and landing speeds and better manoeuvrability at approach speeds. Concorde does not.
Does this look identical:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/T_YCUvu8ykQ/hqdefault.jpg
versus
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45644000/jpg/_45644490_-5.jpg
The aerodynamics and control especially in subsonic flight are quite different. Engine positioning significantly differs too, wing profile is different, etc.
They look similar only to someone who has ABSOLUTELTY NO clue like the Daily Mail. If anything Tu looks more like the Valkyrie, not like Concord. The whole canard assembly is also still till this age ahead of its time by the way.
The normal pattern for a hack this size is gloating attribution,
Not necessarily. The so called consortium for investigative journalism actually PAYS for data dumps which are "interesting". How much - we do not know, but I suspect that it is in the 6 digit range.
One of the conditions is not to make a lot of noise before it is given to them so they can analyse and coordinate the release. If you gloat you cannot get paid.
An interesting side effect of running a business in a tax heaven is that there is no way in hell for you to obtain a warrant in a developed country jurisdiction over data theft. The relevant treaties are not in place and that they are not in place is exactly what is allowing tax heavens to operate.
A false positive can be handled by using human staff
Sorta.
It will be mortuary staff handling a false positive in a car image recognition system if the car moving at 75mph mistakenly identifies the signs and banisters on a sharp turn. They make a pretty good place to sticker the images over too.
So if Google execs were to travel to Canada they might be liable to arrest.
This is in addition to the local ones being liable for a contempt of court.
On more than one count - it can geo-fence the source to ensure that .ca gets the right result regardless of which target domain is being queried.
But nope in this case, adults were involved,
No, in this case, PR consultants were involved. They got a gigantic piece of positive PR out of this. PR to which you and me are continuing to contribute.
Think of all the PR which would have been lost as a result of a gag and god forbid negative PR generated.
Think of all the other bottles with 10K stickers on them waiting for the next sucker with a fat wallet.
Which is why pre-1942 wine
It still has lead. Plenty of it in fact. The inter-war period predates the high performance low cost diesels developed during the war so nearly everything that had an engine was petrol driven.
This is on top of the lead deposited by unscrubbed output from coal burning plants and coal burning stoves in every house. In fact, the latter was probably a much bigger net contributor to early lead contamination in agricultural produce than the lead in the petrol.
I would much rather have an occasional alpha or beta particle from residual radioactivity than lead thank you. While there are DNA repair mechanisms to deal with low level breakage from radioactivity, there is nothing to remove lead once it gets into your system.
The first part is reasonable and is basically the modus operandi of most technology R&D departments
Slightly more complicated. Based on my experience of doing this in several companies including a Valley one the situation is as follows:
There is a specific modus operandi which is localized to CS and electronics and US (and/or companies which are US owned).
1. You are NOT allowed to search for existing intellectual property. Looking up existing patents in your field for an engineer is a sackable offence.
2. If you KNOW about related IPR you MUST excuse yourself from the project. Not doing so is a sackable offence.
3. You are not allowed to comment about any knowledge you have on existing IPR to other co-workers (as in that post). That is also a sackable offence.
The reason behind this is the tripling of damages for wilful infringement in USA patent law. Due to most US electronics and especially software patents failing the obviousness test as per Eu patent law this strategy works. Shit just gets re-invented on the cheap and then it is (in a worst case scenario) non-willful infringement, in most cases lawyers manage to wiggle out on minor technical differences.
One thing you do not EVER do is get someone who has touched a piece of IPR to declare that it is to be ignored. The company legal depts enforce this without mercy.
Thus, I find it difficult to believe that an Apple person who has had a brush-up with Qualcom IPR (as per Qualcomm complaint) has instructed Intel to do this. It does not ring true. As far as an Apple person who has NOT been anywhere near a Qualcomm cell modem asking Intel to do this - it is business as usual, but once again - least likely to be said in the open. Stuff like this is said internally, but never put in writing outside a company in a communication with a supplier. So once again - this sounds like flying pigs revving their engines for take off.
This all is quite different from Chemistry, Biology, etc where any piece of R&D starts with a literature search. There inventions are usually for real so you cannot just reinvent it on the cheap as in CS.
"Intel instructed to ignore IPR".
I just got off the floor and my house is still shaking. It was the squadron of pigs which took off from the airfield next door and went hypersonic at under 100 feet altitude above me. They were in a hurry to provide some nuclear warmup to the inner 3 circles of hell where Lucifer was observed snowplowing the frozen moat.
What an utter load of bullshit.
just look at what the locals use. toyotas.
The ones with Sugar daddies. The ones without use Isuzu and (less often) Mitsubishi. These are the vehicles I meant when I said that there are better 4x4s for the purpose of off-the shelf adaptation.
As far as the FoxHound - it leaves (as some people noted) a lot to be desired in terms of reliability. For the money in costs the army could have bought the same number of Boxers which are infinitely more capable, infinitely more versatile and offer better protection too.
You would think that if a wheel is properly put on then it doesn't matter what conditions it's subject to,
Not the case if the vehicle in question has had armour and accessories bolted on top of it in excess of the manufacturer weight spec.
Normal landy weight is 2 tons +/- a few 100 kilos for different specs. Max payload is 1 ton (and only for some of the models, most models is lower).
Commercial armour kits (loved by mobsters) are 500kg or less so they are well within that spec. Army armour kits, however are 1.5 tons bringing the kerb weight to 3.5 tons. That is way past the suspension and wheel mounting specs so it is not surprising they suffer from material fatigue and breakage.
Landy is the wrong vehicle to try to armour to a modern army specification. There are other 4x4s which have been designed with significantly more room for extra weight and which have special suspension, wheel and transmission options. There is no way the UK army will buy any of them though as this is to some extent a matter of national identity/pride in addition to 50+ years of incestuous relationships in the procurement department.
Actually, if you look at it, any off the shelf 4x4 is the wrong vehicle for modern army operations in the first place. Russians carefully observed our trials and tribulations in Iraq and Afghanistan and retired ALL of their personnel vehicles to be replaced by new ones for a reason. Germans, AFAIK are doing the same. French are also building new ones. You cannot get the required specs unless you design it from the ground up. Trying to bolt on armour on a commercial 4x4 in the 21st century is in the realm of first degree idiocies to start off with. The Landy as an army vehicle needs to be retired - plain and simple.
Revealing exactly what was smeared all over the internet during the 2016 elections
The issue is "By whom".
RT was not alone and in fact, it was just a miniscule fraction of the influence.
It is impossible to reveal what they added to the 2016 stench without dragging into the open the various other efforts such as the Cambridge Analytica targeted Trump adverts, paid for (by both campaigns) Macedonian manufactured fake news as well as the targeting into which facebook and twitter feeds to inject them and many, many, many other things.
If that Pandora's box is opened, it will be inevitable that the even smellier Referendum Pandora's wheelie bin is opened and tipped onto the Westminster front lawn.
It will be inevitable that the 20+ elections (that is just by Cambridge Analytica) which UK and USA paid to be influenced lately will add extra smelly maggots to the rubbish pile.
Not a single one of the currently elected politicos or mainstream news outfits would do this - it is a political death wish to do this.
"Do you consider Russia Today to be a regular media organization?"
They are as regular as the beeb. The beeb in one of the languages of countries where we still try to exert influence is an interesting sight. You need to listen to their their Persian or Russian services for a while to understand the real gripe the powers that be have with RT. RT is a mirror image of what we have been doing to "THEM" for 50 years - Beeb foreign services, Radio Free Europe, etc. Similarly biased and similarly serving its pay master.
You can see some of them on the London Subway. King's Cross if memory serves me right.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=london+subway+russia+today+advert and switch to images.
I am not surprised they are so coy about them as there is nothing particularly controversial about them. The whole thing at this stage is a blame game combined with a case of "Taleban leader finding his new bride is the village bicycle".
No it is not.
The house of Lords takes a lot of the functionality which the constitutional court takes elsewhere.
In fact, a Constitutional or a High Court if entrusted with overruling the parliament if they have gone off the deep end are significantly more reliable set of checks and balances than the House of Lords.
Unfortunately, in order for them to work they require a written constitution - something to work off so they can send the parliament to the pharmacy to get some purgative when they swallow a Stalin by mistake. So this does not apply to the UK which is still competing with Saudi for the title of the last country on the planet to adopt a written constitutions (at this rate, Saudi will blink first and have one before the UK).
Why cant we have an elected upper house and get rid of the useless morons like this!
Two chamber systems are usually designed to establish checks and balances. The more common option worldwide is to have regional reps as the second chamber. That is not applicable to the UK as UK is not that diverse regionally. While it has 4 "parts", within each of these parts the interests are not nearly as distinct as the regions in let's say Russia or even France.
The current system in the UK has over time gravitated towards long term interests versus short term instead. As far as choices go it is not such a bad choice and it has worked as a good set of checks and balances lately. I found it it quite admirable when the Lords gave Osborne a bloody nose in the middle of his quest on fleecing the poor to make the super-rich even richer. They also put up a pretty good show against every single attempt by Josephina Vissarionovna May to move us towards a Stasi run dictatorship.
Sure a lot of the Lords are useless and/or show up only if their party twists their arm to show up (hello Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, how many times did you vote and for what? It is still better than an elected chamber.
If you need an example of elected upper+lower chamber clusterf*** have a look at USA and the house of representatives. It makes a fine (if not the best) example why it is a bad idea to have upper and lower house elected based on similar criteria with similar terms in office.
Genius. Gimme that shotgun and let's start taking out the cameras first.
A camera is totally pointless unless it is dumping somewhere remote enough for it to be unaffected if it is destroyed first. A camera with a SD card is useful only if it is concealed in which case you do not need 256GB - it should be positioned and recording only if the main CCTV circuit has met its Terminator.
Perl shows its origin as an amalgamation of tools,
Unfortunately, Debian went politically correct at some point. If you pull one of the older versions - let's say Potato and execute dpkg --status perl you will see the Description as: "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister".
Not far off. Any feature you can think of - it has it. And then some (provided the feature makes sense in a loosely typed language so if you are expecting brainf***, sorry generics, look elsewhere).
Pity they now have "Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language" instead. It sounds humourless and stale.
Perl has two main issues:
1. Multiple ways for everything. Multiple ways to do control structures, loops, etc.
2. Lack of good tools to enforce style. There is a plethora of tools to do that for c and java and some languages like pyhton have them as a part of the standard and toolchain. Perl has none.
When you combine 1 and 2 keeping a project with a consistent style becomes a major nightmare. It takes absolute dictatorship to do so which in turn always causes aggravation in the people who work on it.
The issue which the code snippet in the article tries to illustrate is not a bug, it is a feature. Perl was originally built around regexps and till this day is the undisputed king if you need to live and die by the regexp. Any other language which needs to employ regexps ends up with similar mind-bending drivel which is also necessarily more verbose and limited in terms of features. F.E. if we try to rewrite that code in python or java it will not look any prettier.
As far as pet hate subjects, Delphi IMHO is clearly the absolute leader. I have never ever had to deal with anything requiring so much useless labour to get anything done and producing such abysmal results in terms of size, speed and stability of the final product.
The current economic model for containers is a Bosnian cop.
Brother, you are doing 60 Euro per hour above the speed limit. Let's make it 30 especially for you because I like you.
So a "misbehaving" app simply pays a higher per-use bill until it stops to misbehave. This system works so I do not quite see a point in replacing the B&H "toll collector" hiding in a bus shelter where you cannot see him with his Western European equivalent (*).
(*)A traffic cop analogy coming from Israel is one of the funniest things I can think of. It is the only country where I have seen a traffic cop gunning down the motorway with the gas into the floor, blue light and siren still being overtaken by taxi drivers. On both sides.
You are not far off. A number of Western Democracies use software written in Eastern Europe. Canada comes to mind - at least some of their voting software was written by Sirma in Bulgaria.
Nothing wrong with it too. I would trust it more than software written by a local company which has openly declared that it will deliver the victory to one of the candidates - I am leaving the actual US election year, the company in question and which of its execs said that as "exercise to the reader".
Paper ballot elections are not secure from tampering either.
They, however, allow something which is nearly impossible to achieve using a computer driven election without network connectivity. All candidates as well as registered independent observers can count, recount and tally the ballots. That is simply not on the menu with US elections at present - the election process is opaque. People vote, the tally is declared. You have to fight with a court order to get individual precinct data and/or recount (something Stein learned the hard way).
From that perspective, the idea of "do not connect voting machines to the Internet" is actually counterproductive. Connect all of them. Disallow any incoming communication though (on multiple levels). Transmit the contents of the "ballot box" out via multicast multiple times (every few seconds until the election officials declare it over and turn them off) - so ANYONE can grab a copy and do the tally themselves. THAT is the only way to make a voting machine election approach a paper one in terms of document trail and ability to verify the tallies.
Not even that.
It now shows prices (for all means of transport) if you do search in maps. Any other method is long forgotten. So it is not even "Get me cheap fares to russia in may?(*)". You are getting that info fed to you (killing any remaining travel aggregators in the process) do you like it or not at the point where you are doing travel planning.
I wish they did it earlier though - It would have been useful for my Xmas planning - I would have optimized the trip to one stop less and used public transport. Taking the train to go and take a stroll around Vienna surely beats the usual nightmarish experience of looking for a parking spot during the pre-Xmas rush.
(*)Manafort? Why are you awake at this time and looking at flight prices...
Think what it means. If I want to put up a poster in the window of my own house, expressing my support for some candidate or cause, are you willing to call the cops to make me take it down?
You missed the point - you are still allowed to put a poster. You are not allowed to take money for putting it. There is no first amendment USA issue either as you are not prohibiting free speech. The prohibition suggested is on making money off free speech.
In either case, any such prohibition fails to address the root cause. It was not political ads which were sponsored by the Russians. It was posts - some paid for, some "volunteer" driven which promoted socially divisive topics and increased polarization further making the angry white men of the mid-west more likely to vote. Quite clearly, the Russians came to the same conclusion as Michael Moore and Cambridge Analytica very early on and worked on it.
No ban on political ads will succeed in countering such an election influencing strategy. In fact, nothing short of outright 100% censorship of all posts will suffice (not sure if even that will manage to do so).
For an inventor
Stop calling him an inventor. There is fuck all new in his submarine. There is absolutely no inventions as defined in IPR law in it.
He simply scaled down some WW2 era blueprints as used by recreational sub builders and failed to build them twice, barely succeeding to produce something half workable on the third attempt.
The biggest damage to a car seat is from buttons and other uneven features on the clothing which covers our posterior.
When buying a second hand car it is quite easy to see if the previous owner used to wear jeans with buttons on their wallet pocket and/or a large wallet - the traces are self-evident. In fact, for one of my cars, I ended up telling the dealership to order new driver seat upholstery if they want me to buy it. It had only 70k miles on the clock and was otherwise in reasonable condition - except the driver seat. It had a hole in the driver seat upholstery from the previous owner wallet + pocket buttons.
I do not see how a metal butt which only sits up and down will test it. It needs to sit, wriggle for a few hours, then get up, then do it again.
If I were a competition regulator I'd be looking long and hard at an attempt to control news publishing by using a near monopoly in the web search space.
AFAIK the Knitting Lady is looking at it based on complaints from some of the usual suspects in Germany. None of the English speaking media even dared to consider emitting a squeak which speaks volumes about the power of the G00G.
Twitter, Facebook, Skype: they are all wonderful sources of evidence.
Indeed. It is surprising how incompetent were some of the people involved to use any one of these and leave a trail of evidence as wide and long as the Chicago Loop on them.
The money laundering and tax aspect is quite interesting though. Reminds me of Al Capone and his demise.
They think they can get away with selling mid range crap at an exorbitant price.
Your attitude can be easily corrected by spending a few months on beanbags somewhere in the valley. Once you get intoxicated on the lala air in lala land your perception will be altered accordingly so you will accept any ideas originated from the beanbag pile in the teletubby room as the new normal.
It won't matter by March 2019
Of course it will. It is setting up pieces into position to be able to raise punitive tariffs after March 2019 on any multinational STILL having their HQ in the UK and/or operating out of the UK.
Hopefully (from the Eu perspective), it will be unnecessary - if there is an agreement in place and UK plays ball by the general Eu rules. If, however, UK does not play ball, anything and everything is a fair game to ensure that it cannot compete with the Eu. If, for example, UK provides "unfair" state aid to corporations HQ-ed in UK, Eu and WTO rules allow the Eu to apply appropriate measures to compensate - such as tariffs. It just needs to have the appropriate paperwork in place to do so.
This is simply setting the scene so they can do it. It will not be the only case too. I would expect a whole raft of cases on various UK policies which were candidly overlooked while it was being a member to start their way through the workings of Eu bureaucracy until the end of the year (*).
While our esteemed BrExit leaders would like to paint this approach as punitive and vindictive, it is not. It is simply Eu putting THEIR interests first. As expected.
(*)IMHO, it is also the clearest indication that the Eu has little hope of an agreement being reached.
Wrong argument and wrong issue my friend.
In a Single Party system you are not supposed to be rich unless you are of the appropriate rank in the party.
Traceability of transactions in such societies serve as a check to ensure that Joe Average has not accumulated wealth beyond the level he is allowed to have for his caste and position of his strata in the social system. It is theocracy taken to the extreme - with caste system and complete and full integration of church and state. There is a reason why the Soviet posters said: "We BELIEVE in the Bright Future of Communism"(*). Workers, priests, high priests and on top of them the aristocracy(**).
The moment you show wealth you were not supposed to have in the ex-soviet block you are reported to the local shaman, sorry communist party secretary and your house is raided, because earthly riches are sinful (unless they are a dacha of a central committee member of course).
(*)If you have read the holy teachings, the Marx and Engels manifesto of the Communist Party reads like a utopian dream (very similar to some early Christianity teachnings with stuff outright plagiarized from the Sermon on the Mount in places), the Das Capital first volume mostly makes sense, second goes into WTF land and third is definitely completely into the surreal. To accept anything beyond that like Lenin syphilitic drivel and the crap concocted on top of it in the following 70 years you need to fervently BELIEVE. Your BELIEF needs to be at the level a monk believes in the tears of the Madonna on the fresco in the cathedral being real and not damp condensate. At the level the evangelicals believe in Rapture. And beyond.
(**)State Religions do not tolerate competition - this is why Communism was persecuting other religions with such fervour. It is something which the western historians hate to admit too as it may insult some of the local fanatics.
As an old Pirelli advert said: "Power is Nothing Without Control".
Single and Single-ish party states exercise very heavy control over the economy via a combination of monetary and fiscal policy. It works only because the exchange rates and prices goods (at the very least for key commodities) are fixed. Anything that allows to bypass this mechanism faces the full power of the repressive state apparatus, because it challenges the state power by eroding its control.
Doubly so if it is relatively anonymous so that the state cannot trace transaction originators.
which effecively means the system has a back door, one would think.
Not really. All large networks have such a backdoor - it is called the NMS and/or the routers in complex networks. They have no choice, but to know the topology. Attacking them in a protected network is usually non-trivial as there is little or no exposure surface. The NMS works out of bounds and the routers are configured to talk routing protos only between themselves.
This is no different from an NMS setup - proper topology is available only on the management interface which should not be inband (it should be out-of-band on a separate network). If you have managed to break in from the outside and all the way to the NMS the network is completely toast anyway. So this is not different from plenty of other setups. In fact, I have seen this before - isolating every single port on the network as a separate subnet and disallowing any discovery mechanisms out of it.
The first time I saw it was 15+ years ago - as an approach it showed up at the same time as 802.1q or shortly thereafter.
What was missing at the time was combining this with per-user policy. If we combine this with today's tech - namely 802.1x authentication + software control of the network you can easily combine per-user access policy and per-user policy driven isolation down to a port. Not difficult and not particularly revolutionary. The only "revolutionary" thing here is shrink-wrapping it as a software package and/or appliance.
That allows you to keep a register of domain name owners, and pass details to the police or trading standards. It doesn’t allow you to make it available to everyone who types in whois mydomain.eu
Not if this is a contractual condition which is the case for any ICANN approved registrar - they are supposed to relay the contract terms on the end-luser.
So while there is no policy or law that mandates whois, the contract by itself is actually sufficient in theory. In practice - there is so much legislation conflicting with the contract that it is about time for this to end up in court.
The Baltic states are all NATO members. They all have large Russian-speaking miniorities.
Majorities actually. If memory serves me right - in two out of three, though they have had massive Russian immigration to the rest of the EU so it may a minority now. We will see the next time they run a census.
So if the principle of self-determination is to be applied... Yeah, I know, ain't such principle - it applies only if we would like to damage someone. Also, the Baltic countries have taken care of this by disenfranchising Russian speakers and keeping them off the voter rolls as an underclass without full rights. So any vote is pre-rigged. Their laws make some very interesting reading and some of the gems in them make you wonder - how the f*** did we allow into the Eu someone who effectively has apartheid style legislation.
We are treaty bound to defend them.
Actually, we are not. We would be treaty bound to defend them if they are attacked. If they attack someone first, we can and should tell them to fuck off. Which is exactly the case here as they both shipped all of their own ex-USSR manufacture weapons as well as being conduit for other NATO countries doing that during the Chechen wars. They also provided instructors from "ex"-army personnel too (about as ex as Russians in Donbass). This continued after the first war started and they have left a very thick trail of evidence and witnesses doing so as they thought that being NATO members allows them to bear-bait to their heart's content. Anyway you look at this, international law classes what they have done there as an act of aggression so we have the right to tell them to go screw themselves if the Bear decides to pay them a visit. Unfortunately, we will not and they are continuing with the bear baiting too.
There is if you use Exchange of Office365.
Same for most MTAs. However, for a long list of reasons most production mail installations are configured to accept self-signed certificates and most have no support for certificate caching. This should have gone away with DANE, but that has not quite happened.
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