Posts by Voland's right hand

IT's not an end-user service

It looks like gtalk (on steroids) for telcos.

Re: IMHO

By that logic any company which allows home office teleworking is criminally irresponsible because they cannot judge the person state of mind by putting him in contact with other human beings.

Err... I do not buy that. Uber is a sign of our times - office operations are largely virtualized. It is no different from any company which has minimized CO and has allowed teleworking.

Re: Will it apply to other technology too?

They are actually. There is a gigantic precedent body on this and it is not in the lock/safe manufacturers favor. All they can do is charge costs.

Re: New sticky labels bought - need to find use for them

I've had a set of USB keys in the car for over 6 years - loaded with music and never an issue with them.

Er... Where... Blighty? Sure.

That does not match my experience from less forgiving climates. +40 in the shade (> +60 in car) in summer and -15 in winter does merry hell with both electronics and plastics. An el-cheapo car stereo like the ones sold by Argos or Maplin (Goodmans and its brethren) which fully functional in the UK 10 years after purchase, has the plastics crumbling in 5 year time. A more expensive one (as was in my case - Pioneer) starts having some nasty current leaks draining your batter and ultimately setting itself on fire.

There is a reason for car spec electronics and plastics - the environmentals for some regions are really bad. Even in the glove box.

Re: Ah that's sweet

Looking at the calendar... taking off my glasses... cleaning them... looking again...

Nope, I am not having hallucinations, this is one month and 6 days too early.

Re: "Dinky little"

No mention of waterproofing

My same thought. I recently had a forced upgrade after junior went head first into a 1m deep rock pool on holiday with his non-waterproof phone in his pocket. So I had to hand-me-down my phone to him.

I opted for the M4 though. Looking at the pics it delivers better pic quality especially in low light), rest is pretty much the same spec-wise as this one. And waterproof to 30 mins in a beer glass.

Re: Stingray thieves

But how does it work when

Not an issue. Stingrays and other GSM (not bluetooth) impersonation systems work by having the correct crypto keys from the relevant GSM provider. In fact, they cannot work without the active assistance of the GSM provider.

In this case, the keys for the connection are not on offer so if it is correctly implemented a MiM or radio intercept will not give you access.

Re: Eh?

I'm sure a telescopic 4x30 sight off a mates nicked air rifle would do even better.

Correct.

You now can create an effective weapon capable of blinding a person for a considerable amount of time out of off the shelf components.

It leaves no traces, is absolutely silent and if the pulse is short enough there is absolutely no way in hell to "trace you back" following the "Sci-Fi effects" back to the orign.

Re: Linux vs Win10

Unlike Windows, 8G ram is available even on a 32bit install on a 64 bit CPU

Most 32 bit kernels shipped by distros by default have PAE mode enabled. The result is a hideous performance penalty immediately after 1G, but being able to address up to 32G on pretty much anything from P3 (or was it P2?) onwards. One of the first things I used to do while I still had 32 bit machines in use was to recompile the kernel to turn PAE off. For some CPUs (Via for example) the performance difference was clearly visible with a "naked eye" just watching the boot time. The other alternative is to force the install of a 486 kernel. That limits you to 1G, but it is so much faster than the PAE one, it is not even funny.

Re: Simple solution

submit it to both sites

Standard part of publication is a grant of exclusive rights. You _CANNOT_ publish to both sites. It is one or the other.

In any case, the el-reg article does not describe exactly why the researchers are _REALLY_ pissed off with El$evier. Scientific journals were never cheap. Only a very small number like Cell or Science have the circulation size to afford sane prices (orders of magnitude above other print magazines, but affordable for most libraries). So getting access directly to the magazine has _ALWAYS_ been outside the abilities of a single researcher. Like it or not, you had to deal with your university library, its loan system, etc.

There was a bypass - in the days when I did science for a living, abstracts and search indexes used to be relatively cheap and you could always ask the researcher directly. Under the terms of publication with most publishing houses the researcher was entitled to give X free copies of their paper directly to other researchers (terms used to differ varying from X per year to X total). I remember in the pre-Internet days my dad having pre-printed stacks of his papers in his office and sending off a couple in the mail every week or thereabouts.

If memory serves me right (I may be wrong here), at the same time El$vier created their paywall, they also changed the terms of the publishing agreement. The right to directly supply your own papers upon request is now severely restricted and in some places non-existent. This is what pissed off people really bad - you now have no choice but to pay and the payment scheme is such that even Harvard has difficulties affording it.

Re: Interesting idea

To be secure, anonymous datasets need to be under NDA to specific customers

Not good enough.

The only thing which is good enough is that anonymous data is treated the _SAME_ as non-anonymous for purposes of enforcing all current contractual, financial and data protection regulations.

So, sure, data can be sold. Just the buyer takes every single data protection obligation as if it was not anonymous. After that it also complies with relevant financial ones if the data has financial relevance - same - as if it was not anonymous.

NDA does not cut it here, you need to re-set the legal reqs on data sales making anonymous and non-anonymous equivalent.

Re: Maybe that is what comes of...

Everything to get away from Java:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

Putting aside java's (dis)advantages as a language, it is very difficult to evaluate a job candidate who has grown up on a java diet (very well described in the aforementioned Joel's rant, I am not going to repeat it - read that instead).

Re: Anymore proof needed that

What does Windows 7 do that requires phoning home?

You missed the point.

If it calls home as apart of Windows Update. If it does this using a serial number or source IP address which Microsoft does not like they brick it. In fact, they started doing it with Windows XP. I happen to have an Eastern European pirated XP SP3 build on a CD somewhere which I use to demonstrate it to "unbelievers". You install it, it works fine. You run Windows Update and it gets bricked. You initially get the "this is pirated, buy windows warnings", then it stops functioning altogether.

Re: Well, so much for the loitering nuke theory

Not necessarily. Depends on what nuke size did they managed to build.

If they did manage to boost a fission device to a few 100kt yield using Sloika or any of the other pre-3rd idea/Ulmann-Teller approaches it does not need to re-enter. It can blow up where it is and EMP-knock out an area the size of New England off the map into the stone age via EMP. It does not need to stabilize - just send it the "blow up" command.

Re: And don't let the door hit you in the ass

It is not when the camera is pointing in her direction. That is her dear self in all her glory all the time.

Re: "The end [..] looks to be near"

Who told you that the body will not be reanimated with some more money from Leisure Suit Larry?

it depends how it is done

Most SMTP server certificates are self-signed. You do not know how to trust it. Similarly, most people that happily run secure SMTP servers with self-signed certs will balk at the 200 quid you need to shell to Verisign for a cert which has been marked to allow usage other than web servers multiplied N times your mail relay count.

I suspect that this is nothing but another one of their continuous anti-competitive ploys to move everyone either to Google services or failing that to one of their few remaining cloudy oligopoly "competitors". Same as, for example, deliberately sabotaging greylisting - you have no choice but to run brute force anti-spam using methods that are at no cost to (surprise, surprise) Google if you are to receive mail from them. Same as not implementing delivery failover to v4 MXes if v6 is present - so that if you happen to have v6 you have to have the infrastructure resilience of a small oligopoly to get mail from gmail and so on.

It is just dressed into a security dressing, but so are Facebook track everyone cookies too (according to their Eu court depositions).

Re: Caveat emptor

You actually pay for a USB ID. It is not a "free of charge" service. Stealing one is fraud, plain in and simple.

Now, the measures taken by FTDI to battle the fraud are a different story. Some of their stunts are very questionable indeed.

Re: If only it wasn't M$

There are two aspects to it.

The first one, which is catering to people with disabilities - that is definitely positive.

The second one - there is social aspect to software. Somebody needs to understand your code, somebody needs to support it, it needs to be documented and you need to be able to handle bug reports and interact with other links in the software development chain. If we assume that the target is core software development, that means requirements, documentation, testing, QA and release teams. For every severely anti-social developer you need the time of someone with "Special Needs Teaching Assistant" skills to handle the fallout and the fallout quite often is at thermonuclear levels.

I have a couple of friends who specialize in dealing with that and I have heard quite a few horror stories.

We have VCs/Entrepreneurs in the area who hire autistic brilliant people because they can abuse their social ineptitude to extract brilliant code while paying them a fraction of their worth. Once these Leeches sell the company, someone needs to come and clean up the mess and the mess is all the same every time: software that nobody can understand besides a couple of people who cannot explain due to being off the scale on the A spectrum; software that cannot be released; complete breakdown between development, QA, release and test, etc.

That is, of course, if the A spectrum is not dealt with at first and allowing for A in hiring is less that 1% of the resource required. You have to allow for the remaining 99%. If Microsoft is doing that - KUDOS. If not, this experiment will end in tears one day later down the road.+

Re: They passed over the Levi stadium?

More seriously, who'd ever want a nuke to communicate? Who with?

Or ex-wife. If your name is John Sheridan. Though the Norh Korean ones are a bit too small for that - need to add 600Mt or thereabouts.

Re: Time to move to La Palma

The other half (winter) the weather conditions are too bad to observe

Hmm... I was there for Xmas this year. 11 days - 10 clear sky ones at night. Only low clouds way lower than the summit of Roque of Los Muchachos where the telescopes are.

The weather there is cyclic subject to the usual North Atlantic Oscillation effects. There are a 2-3 years every decade when you get whacked by a rainstorm every week in winter. The rest is fairly clear. I have been in the area a couple of times a year (usually in winter) since 1999 and you get the occasional nasty 2-3 wet winters. The rest is OK.

Hawaii, while generally better off than La Palma gets its fair share of storms too. Just not in winter - late summer and autumn. Realistically, Hawaii, La Palma and other civilized, but not light polluted places with good infra in the northern hemisphere all suffer from this. If you really want "no weather issues" you need to look at some of the mountain deserts in China and Mongolia - similar conditions to Atacama, just much, much, much colder in winter. When you consider the logistics of putting a telescope there you realize that you might as well contend with a wet winter like 2002-2003 on La Palma now and then.

Re: From the linked report

Alarms.

You cannot get a monitored alarm company to monitor anything but a dedicated BT copper (and only copper) line in the UK on a consumer product. On the continent copper alarms have been extinct for decades - you cannot get one. It is all cellular or dedicated radio. In the UK you cannot get a cellular monitored alarm unless you are a business and even then they saddle you with it as an adjunct to a primary copper contract.

Why is this the case... Well that question warrants a competition commission investigation + OfCom investigation. Why this investigation has never happened warrants organized crime investigation.

The real issue is that orbits degrade.

The real issue is that orbits degrade.

It is at 500 km up, that is relatively high so the drag is not very great. That is several years before it re-enters due to drag which is comparable to the shelf life of an early tech nuke.

It is also in polar orbit so it is guaranteed to pass over every single "target" area within a day or two. It also does not need to correct its orbit regularly to be an effective weapon - there is bugger all difference between it re-entering aiming for a major capital of your choice from 500km or from 300km. Equally effective, the sole thing to differ are the burn parameters which need to be transmitted once by the ground station right before attack. Similarly, even if the ground station needs telemetry before that it, can ask for it once - before attack. The likely target areas are hundreds of miles across so it does not need to be precise either.

With this orbit and this behavior, the odds are it is what the Norks are building. Even if they did not launch it this time, one of the next launches will be a live loitering nuke which will nicely nullify the fact that their launch pads are vulnerable and they have no subs and no bombers.

Re: “Surgical titanium is quite distinctive,” Alien8 wrote.

he kept the titanium as a souvenir.

1. These things are not titanium (usually). They are various alloys.

2. They are _PROPERTY_ of the NHS (ditto for other health services in Europe). They in fact are entitled to come to visit your earthly remains in the morgue, open you up and _REMOVE_ all prosthetics because they cost a fortune and are recyclable. You do not own them. Period.

3. While the rest was believable, him keeping surgical implants as a souvenir is even a bigger porkie than everything else.

Re: Arbitrary?

It is arbitrarily self-imposed by himself onto himself as the means of not going to chokey for skipping bail.

I would not be surprised if some of the people who donated for his bail fund sue him if he shows he nose outside the door too.

Re: No legal force

That is definitely the case, but you are missing the point. You are trying to make a reasonable argument against propaganda (the UN agency is just the mouthpiece for one).

That does not work.

Propaganda always wins - like in Syria - all those 2M refugees are running from Asad and nobody is running from the wonderful vision of society envisioned by Erdogan marionettes or Al Nusra front. Nobody is running from ISIS either. It is just Assad, Hezbollah and the Russians everyone is runnning from and if they just stop doing what they are doing the country will return to its rosy normal state and wake up in a rosy propaganda glow.

In any case, on the visual part of propaganda - El Reg, shame on you for the unfinished photoshop. AssAnge (TM) has 6 fingers, not 5. The pic got the cat right, the face right, the suit right, but failed to edit the number of fingers to the correct value.

Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you

Yesss... you know the world has gone mad when you have German, sane and politician in one sentence.

Dunno, but the first thing that came to my mind was: "Now Witness the Firepower of this fully Armed and Operational Battle Station"

Re: 'Faulty Router'

One faulty router brings the network down?

If it starts announcing gibberish instead of what it is supposed to announce as routing updates - why not.

There is bugger all protection at the routing protocol level for most internal gateway protocols. OSPF has none by design (no, do not talk to me about the admin weight hack in Cisco IOS the person who invented that should be shot), ISIS is not much better, iBGP is usually unfiltered as well and let's not even talk about various protos that used to be popular with with BT CTO like PBB and PBB-TE.

The solution in this case is to have good "view"/"analysis" of the routing protocol state and KILL the router from the wall switch right away to localize the failure. I am not going to comment on BT and either one of these.

Re: Numpties

while the latter protects us from our own government.

You forgot to add that our own government inhabits the other wing of the same lunatic asylum as most of the commish.

Looking at the amount of rust on that bucket they have a very long way to go until it can qualify for production equipment.

-EAGAIN

Re: This is not killing people (yet)

That's because Turkey is a backward, corrupt shithole.

You are dangerously underestimating them. Nothing to do with that. It is the same as allowing or prohibition of any counterfeit goods. It is a question of political expedience.

The more dead kids wearing counterfeit life jackets end up being washing up on beaches, the more Turkey can pressure Eu and USA to drive its agenda. Last time a dead toddler washed up on the beach we were ready to hand them 3Bn to drive their agenda to reincarnate the Osman empire.

It is the same as with any other counterfeit goods. Selling "specially vetted components" to the military is an extremely high value racket which only a couple of usual suspects have access to. As a result any attempt to counterfeit (in most cases just relabel) that will get you 20 odd years in a place nobody knows about. Mislabeling the same components for health or residential use - who cares, it is not politically expedient to persecute the culprits, it will damage our relations with the tat producing countries _INCLUDING_ Turkey.

Turkey is one of the biggest manufacturers after China and the Far East and is also a major producer of goods that are "not to spec" (that is polite description).

It manufactures anything and everything starting with textiles, going through Bosch hand tools, Renault and Ford vehicles and finishing with military hardware including _OUTSOURCED_ F-16s.

Based on first hand experience with quite a lot of their consumer goods, the "CE" label on them is quite often outright fake and quite often so is the country of origin label (labeled as produced in one of the Balkan countries while in fact done in a slaveshop using Syrian refugee labor somewhere in DyarBekir).