* Posts by DropBear

4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

Malware scan stalled misconfigured med software, mid-procedure

DropBear

Re: Been there, seen that

"There are other ways to mitigate the risks, such as isolation and tight network controls, so it's all solvable."

Well yes, but that would assume that there is at least one person in that entire hospital who has any clue about what he's supposed to be doing. A ludicrous assumption if I ever saw one...

DropBear

Re: Reseller and IT dept

"You mean, like earning pocketing tons of cash without fear of any consequences whatsoever no matter what they screw up and how badly and playing golf?" TFTFY.

Lyft, Uber throw Texas-sized tantrum over Austin driver law

DropBear
Unhappy

It is chillingly scary that a mere decade was apparently enough to make "potentially guilty unless proven innocent" not only acceptable but actually vocally and near-unanimously endorsed in the UK. Well either that or we're swimming in hypocrites around here - but that's hardly conceivable now is it...

New Firefox versions will make you activate all new add-ons – except one hacker favourite

DropBear

Re: Flash gets a stay of execution...

"So why hate Firefox?"

Because it's still incapable of playing back anything x264 (aka only actual real-world HTML5 video format you can get anything in) on my OS.

Watch it again: SpaceX's boomerang rocket lands on robo-sea-barge

DropBear
Joke

Re: Wait, what?

Oh, of course it's all Photoshop. The shadows are all wrong...

Wasps force two passenger jets into emergency landings

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Not the first time

Well, you could always just install those covers they mentioned while stationary. Of course, then this happens instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroper%C3%BA_Flight_603

You can always rely on the Ancient Ones to cock things up

DropBear

Well, some will definitely attribute concerted breakdowns to the Ancient Ones or maybe proto-Skynet - the others may have heard of the clumpiness of chance... :)

The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card

DropBear

Re: To be fair

"We did a lot to make your language the Lingua franca the world over"

To be fair, he's right. They _did_ invent the internet - and then suddenly there was only _one_ international language everyone speaks for better or worse...

Wi-Fi network named 'mobile detonation device' grounds plane

DropBear
Trollface

Next time: "Quadcopter Remote"...

I am Craig Wright, inventor of Craig Wright

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Explanation

It is all a bit too Gonzo for my poor 1-bit brain.

Your mother has a smooth forehead, Klingon language lovers roar at Paramount

DropBear

Re: no Klingons

Yes, good to know that Latin Is In Fact Not A Language. WTF are these people smoking?!?

Galileo in spaaace: France's 'equivalence principle' satellite

DropBear
Pint

Re: Force is not acceleration....

Well, if we are studying a heavier and a lighter body in the Earth's gravitational field, then it's already a three-body problem, and one should not attempt to tackle problems that don't even have analytical solutions on a Friday afternoon!

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Magnifico!

...so what was the launch vehicle thinking on its way up? "I've got to break free...?"

Move over Amazon Alexa – Samsung's hot assistant bot Otto's trying to build an empire

DropBear

Re: Is this article...

Exactly. I admit there are times when I really don't feel like getting up to flick a switch, but most of the time a lengthy monologue feels much more tiresome than that one click...

SpaceX: We'll land on Mars in 2018 (cough, with NASA's help)

DropBear
Trollface

Re: "...the US government has strict rules about decontamination..."

Meh, why get bogged down with frivolous details like capsule sterilization...? Just send the spacecraft to Mars straight through the Sun...

Hubble spots ice moon orbiting dwarf planet Makemake

DropBear
Trollface

It's a silent "r". Only pronounced but not written...

Kaspersky cracks CryptXXX, throws lifeline to ransomware victims

DropBear
Trollface

So, if one pays the ransom, does the malware return any bitcoin it has stolen too? Or if it managed to steal enough, does it start decrypting automatically? Crucial informations missing in the article - I'm so confused...

Facebook's own TLS cert used by crooks in double logon phish

DropBear
Trollface

I knew not having a FB account would pay off some day...

Brainwave-controlled drone racing is here

DropBear
Trollface

I'm pretty sure I could control a quadcopter reasonably well without any hand-controls - just stick a small tilt sensor based remote on the top of my head an let me tilt it in the direction I want to fly in...

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

DropBear

I would have expected...

...the article at least mentioning that the proprietary (but presumably faster) fglrx graphics driver for AMD GPUs no longer works in 16.04...

DropBear

Re: SO,

"Your brain gets used to it very quickly and it's nothing to worry about. Really."

No. Mine doesn't. Really. Tried. Several times.

What the world needs now is... not disk drives

DropBear

Re: Good riddance

Actually, I think HDDs are at least a magnitude more reliable; I honestly can't recall when was the last time I had even a bad sector on one, let alone any more major meltdown. Most of the time it's a gradual process and the rest of the stuff outside the section that went bad can even be recovered easily - just plug it into anything, mount, read, done. SSDs, on the other hand seem to be basically guaranteed to suffer sudden catastrophic failure within a few years, when their internal firmware juggling the silicon drops the ball for any one of a million reasons and chances are you'll recover nothing after that.

Ten years in the clink, file-sharing monsters! (If UK govt gets its way)

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Actually, no @dan 55

Believe it or not, I had one rejected simply because I indicated I can recognize the author simply reading the article without having to look at the name. In these words, nothing more, nothing less. Go figure...

NYPD anti-crypto Twitter campaign goes about as well as you'd expect

DropBear
Mushroom

"Labelling the police as generally bad with just a few okay ones is no way to proceed in this argument..."

I really don't give a f### about the argument - I'm simply conveying my (and my circles of friends') experience with the police. No-one but greedy thugs go there, and you can count on them to be nowhere around when someone raises their fist at you (personal experience) but you can be sure they're camping that one section of road with a speed limit 50 miles below anything any sane person would agree to (also personal experience). So yeah, FUCK THOSE BASTARD PIGS. They're not there to "protect" you, they're there to beat anyone into submission who seems to be disturbing one of the entirely arbitrary state-mandated rules a suitable candidate for this afternoon's entertainment for a power-freak who KNOWS he has full impunity to fuck up real good anyone he pleases. So yeah, there's no thing horrible enough that could possibly happen to them that I would not applaud and cheer for enthusiastically - and I'm not even living on the same continent as those two poor buggers - the police is simply a universal constant of evil...

DropBear
Facepalm

Get real, that's not even in the same city as the ballpark. Fixed:

Cops are generally 'bad eggs'. But they are people and so some are good people with a genuine sense of duty and an honesty desire to 'protect and serve'.

AA battery-sized Arduino

DropBear

Cute but a bit meh...

I'll tell you why nobody did this before - because the utility is rather limited when one wants to do _anything_ other than measure a temperature and radio it away. The PCB is enclosed in the battery box (and it better be in a closed box because not much else is keeping it there) and any I/O you'd want to do you'd have to wire through that - meaning you might as well keep your PCB next to whatever else you're connecting to. The gimmick of stuffing the thing next to the batteries only has notable advantages if there's nothing else connected...

Mitsubishi 'fesses up: We lied in fuel tests to make our cars look great

DropBear
Trollface

Re: EU?

...for a ridiculous moment there I though we were talking about coating the cars on the outside with some sort of "special oils" to reduce surface drag even more...

Clucking hell! Farcical free-range egg standard pecked apart by app

DropBear

Re: As Robin Williams said

Or, if the information is supposed to be subject to publicly inquiry somewhere, you could have an app that would pull in and AR-overlay live sponsoring information over politicians viewed with a smartphone. Now that's an app I'd ACTUALLY download...

Google's 'fair use' mass slurping of books can continue – US Supremes snub writers' pleas

DropBear
Flame

Absolutely. And home taping is killing the music industry! To the pitchforks, people!!!

Chinese con-artists cop to US military counterfeit chip switch caper

DropBear

Re: Alternative...

1) No matter how closely they match the look, I'm pretty sure the one who forged the counterfeit can always tell where the difference is

2) It's quite trivial to shove any of the chips into an appropriate test socket and do a JTAG boundary scan or similar - I really doubt these were any kind of "half-functioning" rather than "dead plastic with pins" sort of duds...

How much faster is a quantum computer than your laptop?

DropBear

"My, what a lot of cynical people we have with us today."

And it's a bloody good thing too.

Cynic (noun):

- "a person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons." So basically anyone with actual functioning eyeballs.

- "a person who questions whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile." I certainly hope so - when exactly did questioning things become unfashionable outside countries with "beloved leaders"...?

UK authorities probe 'drone hitting plane at Heathrow'

DropBear
Childcatcher

Re: Terrorists will use drones

You forgot to add doors to the list of things that absolutely need to be banned - after all, while domestic accidents do exist, the overwhelming majority of all that dangerous stuff that can happen to you lies on the other side of a door! Imagine how much safer we all would be and how many lives could be saved if nobody would ever leave their home!

DropBear

Re: Play "chicken"

Thankfully, drones are (still) exceedingly rare to fly in flocks, and passenger aircraft that can't land with one engine out (worst case) are even rarer.

Google yanks Chrome support for Windows XP, at long last

DropBear
Mushroom

Re: No problem here

Started sticking to Firefox 28 and Chromium ~48-ish on, yes, XP ever since Firefox threw a hand grenade through the browser window and Chrome started telling me which extensions I'm allowed to install for my own good. Couldn't care less about what they do or don't "support".

Grab your Hammer pants – it's the '90s again: Facebook brings Virtual Reality back

DropBear

6DOF is not relevant

...and never will be for the mainstream market. Most people have no desire to leap out of their chairs and stumble around in their home (or buy an even more expensive and seriously space-hogging "free walk" accessory), and to be honest your neck doesn't have all that much "travel" sitting in a chair - you can peek around corners just as easily with a controller or keyboard, with much less effort. Sure, there will be a few going ape for all that "freedom" but the bulk of the market will never progress beyond putting on a headset (if at all). At any rate though, as long as VR is beholden to the book of faces and / or keeps snooping on my every move and / or demands a king's ransom, I'm not interested at all.

Bay Area man forced out of his $400 box home

DropBear
Joke

Re: Prevention is Better than Spontaneous Combustion

Well... your bike probably has some sort of LED light for visibility and since nobody uses actual dynamos to power those these days, it probably contains a Li-ion battery - see? Fire hazard! As for the plant of pot, well pot has a long and distinguished history of being smoked, so that's no doubt a guaranteed hazard.

Intel takes aim at Arduino with US$15 breadboard

DropBear

Re: low voltage

There are Uno-compatible (with an actual Atmega 328 on board) stamp-sized "Pro Mini" boards that can be had for 3-4 bucks and also work on 3.3V (down to 1.8V). This thing is nowhere near compelling enough to sway anyone - it is slightly better on most fronts, but only a little better, not enough to make a huge difference; if 16MHz is not fast enough for you, 32MHz won't be either, and if you can't fit into 2K of RAM, 8K is only marginally better. This won't be enough to overcome the massive inertia of "simply using an actual, ubiquitous Arduino"...

Flying Spaghetti Monster is not God, rules mortal judge

DropBear

So what exactly is the definition of a "proper" cult? Not including ludicrous bullshit in its holy texts is clearly not it. Is that it's meant to be "taken seriously"? How does anyone prove what the intentions of writers of other religious texts were...? Is there a required "poof of faith"? Since when, and how does that even work?!? Ah, got it - it's probably a "real religion" if and only if it pays taxes...

USB-C adds authentication protocol

DropBear

Re: This sounds like a good thing

Actually, on first read, this says nothing whatsoever about cables. It does say _chargers_ could be identified, but USB is point-to-point - there is a host and a device, no third parties on the wire, so a cable has no place to get in on the action. Tying pins here and there could just about be crammed into the spec later, but full fledged communication cannot occur with a cable unless it IS the host itself - in which case you cannot talk to any potential hosts in the charger itself (well technically you could try to make the cable some sort of one-port hub, but I don't see any evidence of that here). This seems to be all about authenticating _chargers_...

Samsung's dimmer Galaxies can make calls when locked, cabled

DropBear

Interesting, but I saw no evidence of any of this happening on my S2... I only see the one MTP interface listed.

How to not get pwned on Windows: Don't run any virtual machines, open any web pages, Office docs, hyperlinks ...

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Hey

Double-ROT13 has been successfully attacked ages ago. If you insist using that ancient thing, a minimum of ten or twelve rounds is recommended.

The future of Firefox is … Chrome

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: buyin

" It's not as if they're tinkering with something that you've physically paid for."

You seem to be confusing recovery of costs with going back on one's own mission statement. Do you think the folks writing LibreOffice wouldn't get yelled at loud and hard if the next version of LibreOffice would suddenly turn out to be a sheet music editor...? Or perhaps you're suggesting that simply because it takes your money, a software vendor would never dream of "tinkering" the wrong way *cough*Microsoft*cough* and/or would be more receptive to complaints...? Wait - you're serious, aren't you...?

Half of people plug in USB drives they find in the parking lot

DropBear
FAIL

Re: Truth in Advertising

""or was purchased brand new,"

In which case, the risk is so tiny, it really isn't worth bothering with. Because if we are going to that level of paranoia, then it is unwise to turn on any electronic device at all. Cos hackers might have altered the firmware, and the NSA may steal my belly button."

Haha nope. Personally have seen photo frame (also appears as USB mass storage) with "funny stuff" hoping to autorun already on it at purchase, brand new, out of factory. Wasn't even a proper noname brand either. Sorry but that risk isn't anywhere near "tiny" at all.

DropBear
Linux

Re: Safe for me

"NEVER plug a found Thumb drive in."

Care to elaborate on why not, seeing as how if it manages to infect the non-networked storage-less OpenWRT it will find itself plugged into, I probably have much more serious problems than a USB drive...? Oh, and if it zaps it that's a horrifying total loss of about $15 - I'll pay that much for the entertainment value...

PC market shambling towards an unquiet grave

DropBear
Joke

Re: crying wolf

Well they clearly showed about 10% decline - which means in ten years, there will be exactly zero PCs sold! ...isn't that how statistics works?

Aluminum-wrapped robbers fail to foil bank

DropBear
Trollface

Re: In the old days...

Social engineering FTW - figure out what _other_ objectives are monitored from the same room, pick an easily accessible one and dispatch a couple for some hot hanky-panky at the same time - then while all operators crowd around that one monitor, you may pop the safe unnoticed...

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Tin foil hat

"It is important to make use of the Faraday effect by plugging your tin foil hat into any nearby socket.

If out walking it would be wise to mount a 4KVA generator in a trolley so that you have your hat powered up while you walk."

Absolutely, grounding is a must. But for the same reason, what you need outside is not a generator, but a reliable earth connection - I recommend dragging along a large metal ball chained to a suitable ankle...

Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things

DropBear

Re: Do not speak of what thou knowest little....

Actually, I just fixed my last TV last year, and it was literally my TV - it just refused to turn on at some point and I wasn't going to leave it at that. The CRT discharge thing (which I absolutely refused to do - I'm a chicken for sparky stuff) scared the hell out of me, so I just kept my distance. In the end it turned out to be the PSU mono-chip (clue: half of it found blown clean off, luckily with the markings still readable) but it started right back up nicely once that was replaced. It's not a thing I would enjoy doing regularly for a living though...

DropBear

Yes they are, and Kaylee is the living proof. Well, for moderate amounts of "living"...

How Remix's Android will eat the world

DropBear

Re: Thinkpad... ...ARM apps

The thing is, a bunch of "thinkfluencers" saying so still doesn't make this the future.