* Posts by DropBear

4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

US government pushing again on encryption bypass

DropBear

Re: The problem was that the data pile was ALREADY too big

"They had flagged various pieces of information about these people before, but hadn't put it together"

They have zero interest in "putting everything together" - I mean I'm sure they'd love it to have pre-digested pre-crime warnings but as things are they don't even try; they're not interested in drinking from the garden hose, what they want instead is no faucet to exist that they can't open instantly any time they feel like it...

SpaceX starts nine-day countdown to first flight of the new Falcon

DropBear
Thumb Up

Kudos to SpaceX for sorting things out the proper way (in six months, as opposed to, uhhhh, six decades give or take as NASA did after each of their "incidents")!

Hacked Japanese space probe sends back first pictures of Venus

DropBear

A 400km : 440,000km elliptical orbit...? Whooo boy, that really is a bit of swinging right there...

Bitcoin inventor Satoshi 'outed' as Aussie, then raided by cops – but not over BTC

DropBear

Re: Once I take over the world...

"I'll personally flog..."

So how do you reckon one should get across the point that the bloke is neither confirmed to be Satoshi nor confirmed _not_ to be Satoshi, in the context of a news item which might appear to suggest that he is in fact positively identified as the person in question...?

US Navy's newest ship sets sail with Captain James Kirk at the bridge

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Stabilty

"Is this running Windows for Warships? "

Shouldn't those be called, y'now, "Portholes"...?

Google says its quantum computer is 100 million times faster than PC

DropBear

Re: sorry, not a geek but

So, is this a bit like the difference between spending a week to painstakingly analyse a complicated surface at high resolution to find its minima versus chucking a model of said surface out in the rain for a few minutes and simply see where the water pools...?

Battery-free IoT sensor feeds off radio waves

DropBear
Trollface

Re: How do you tell them apart?

" they'll all come with a unique serial number"

You mean like Ethernet shields for Arduinos that still come with a MAC address on a sticker that you're supposed to kindly hardcode into your software yourself...?

Kill Flash Now: 78 bugs patched in latest update

DropBear

Re: no, they're cunts all right

"Personally I switched to Sumatra a long time ago..."

Smart choice. It's the _only_ thing I know of that actually can load in a timely fashion hundreds of megabyte's worth of those stupid image-laden PDF product catalogues some firms insist on having. Now, imagine my surprise when just the other day it actually failed to display a few pages in a fairly small PDF (only a few pages, but all of them horrendously large images)...

Windows Phone won't ever succeed, says IDC

DropBear

Re: Why do people pay these people

"This is less about the analysts being muppets"

Except a prediction that only works "barring unforeseen circumstances" is an utterly useless one - the whole point is unforeseen circumstances are guaranteed to arise in anything but the shortest of terms. Which, basically, implies exactly what has been suggested: the predictions are useless, and those making them are muppets unless they either manage to accurately foresee the unforeseen or admit they cant's actually predict s##t.

France mulls tighter noose around crypto

DropBear
Facepalm

"According to Le Monde, the (in French) extension of the state of emergency could also stretch to requiring all rental cars to carry GPS, expansion of public video surveillance, two-year telecommunications data retention, and approval for police to use IMSI-catchers (like the Stingray devices used in America)."

Okay, that's it. It's official. FUCK France.

Smart telly, router, app makers have left a security hole open for – drum-roll – three years

DropBear

Someone with some common sense might realize that building their smart TV with the "smart bits" as some sort of pluggable / unpluggable card (that includes the wireless parts too) would widen his market - most people would be just as happy with their shiny new smart thing as they are now and would leave it in, while us the tinfoil hat brigade consumers with some common sense could just unplug the card, replace it with the also-supplied dummy plastic cover and keep using the telly in "you connect an input signal, switch to that input, and I'll display it" mode. I can hardly think it would raise the overall costs with more than a few cents, and there's way more variation in price between seemingly similar models even now...

DropBear
Devil

Re: Lettuce prey...

Strangely, Sam and Fuzzy's fridge - the one allegedly "possessed by Satan" - suddenly starts making a lot more sense...

Work on world's largest star-gazing 'scope stopped after religious protests

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Bad Old Days

"The moon is a scared obj obj obj a arrghghghg hghh "

Oh diddums... what is it this time, the Vogons or Galactus? Din't I warn you to stop telling it scary bed time stories?!?

DropBear
Facepalm

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When your only real power is blocking other people's constructive initiatives...

BOFH: Taking a spin in a decommissioned racer? On your own grill cam be it

DropBear

Points for creativity! I was merely expecting the manglement to end up _wrapped in_ the tarp they might try to look for a car under - this is much better...

Is Kazakhstan about to man-in-the-middle diddle all of its internet traffic with dodgy root certs?

DropBear
Facepalm

Oh dear...

Look, I know Einstein said time can flow at different rates in different places, but to explain this kind of slowdown, there needs to be a supermassive black hole in the middle of that country (and a couple of other countries, come to think of it)...

Industrial control system gateway fix opens Heartbleed, Shellshock

DropBear

Trying to "stay secure" sounds a lot like trying to climb an untied rope in free-fall faster than it's falling to avoid hitting the ground; ie. a nice ideal but an oxymoron nonetheless. Granted, the sort of shenanigans described in the article doesn't help at all - but even in its absence, even the best security will only get you from "ludicrously unprotected" to "merely vulnerable". Even if you religiously apply every new patch as soon as it comes out, you're perpetually open to attack from anyone interested enough in the time-frame between the discovery of the latest hole and the release of a fix for it. Strict patching and doing nothing both work best if no-one is actually trying to get in; once someone wants to, _both_ are a game of Russian Roulette, the only difference is the number of bullets in play. Patching - a smart thing to do, just don't expect it to change anything whatsoever...

Boffins could tune telescopes to listen to lasers on Mars

DropBear
Joke

"firing a laser from (say) Mars and receiving it on Earth would need a Bloody Big Telescope."

Augh! Won't someone think of the poor aircraft pilots - now laser-flashed not only from below but also from above?!? Irresponsible scientists at their best...

Are you the keymaster? Alternatives in a LogMeIn/LastPass universe

DropBear
Trollface

Two layers of ROT13 encryption is serious stuff, in some places you could get in trouble for using it...

DropBear

Re: Compromised host tolerance?

"You can access KeePass on your phone and do a manual copy / paste onto the bad host. You're only risking one password then, I don't really see any other way."

That last bit can be made remarkably less painful using a remote-input device like InputStick...

Brit hardware hacker turns Raspberry Pi Zeros into selfie slayers

DropBear

Re: Bit of a self righteous prick then!

"Aren't you ever bothered by a selfie-stick-wielding hipster"

And of course none of those will simply snap that picture(s), connectivity or not, leaving the software to auto-upload it wherever as soon as it gets a connection - which in this case is as soon as they eventually move a few meters away (not something they'll know to do before they actually would have decided to do it anyway)? That did nothing to prevent the action itself you seem to condemn; or is it just five-year-old level "YEAH! I really showed them this time!" vengefulness mixed in with some smug sense of superiority...?

DropBear
Trollface

Re: I'm wondering

Absolutely - as long as the victim has a recent but not very up-to-date Dell laptop...

Darkode 3.0 is so lame it's not worth your time reading this story

DropBear
Facepalm

Overconfident much...?

I'm sure there will be no evil-doing on the net after this, ever, as that guy seems to imply. What next, world peace...?

From Zero to hero: Why mini 'puter Oberon should grab Pi's crown

DropBear

"retargeting to a custom FPGA-based CPU"

...aaaand that's where they went wrong right there. There's no such thing as a cheap FPGA - probably the biggest reason they never caught on all that much with the amateur crowd. They are simply overkill for all but the most surgically specific Heavy-Duty-This-Is-The-Real-Deal-Application that honestly needs that kind of grunt (or flexibility), and so pretty much anything a DIYer might want to do is better served by a much less complex and orders of magnitude cheaper MCU. Or, if it involves things like file systems, a GUI or somewhat more elaborate networking - one of today's dirt-cheap multi-core ARM SoCs. An FPGA is a wonderful thing... if you want to learn about FPGAs, but otherwise definitely the wrong tool for the job for the average enthusiast - sorry, "maker".

Mozilla: Five... Four... Three... Two... One... Thunderbirds are – gone

DropBear

Re: Nylas N1

...you only need to also host the API and sync engine (beside the actual "mail client") and you're all set, huh? Yeah, well, no thanks...

DropBear

Re: They keep trying to spin off Thunderbird

"We can't quite throw the bag of kitties in the river while y'all are watching - so could y'all please just look away already, nothing to see here, move along folks..."

DropBear

Re: telnet pop3.superfrog.com 110

...so are we at the "Pine should be enough for everybody!" level yet...? Just asking...

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Mozilla awash with money IIRC

"nearly impossible to get bugs fixed"

*sigh*... show me ONE open source project that doesn't drag behind itself at least one serious and massively reported / requested (and often near-trivial to implement) bugfix / feature request in a state of eternal limbo for 3 / 5 / 10 years or more. Many dozens of them more likely. These days I rarely even bother to report / request any - pretty much every time I try, it turns out the report already exists slowly rotting away without as much as being closed with a belligerent "wontfix". It's just the reality of the day - apparently we can't resist throwing out existing code for brand new shiny fast enough (and reimplementing the wheel yet again in the process), bugs be damned. Who needs software that actually works...

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo good two go

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Wow is this slow.

Taking bets now for first to actually arrive: Galileo startup, GIMP 3.0, heat death of the universe...

RSI Videofied is a 101 in how to build IP CCTV and alarms with zero security, zero encryption

DropBear
Trollface

Re: I don't know about you . . .

The new patch will surely be completely impervious to hackers - the serial-number-derived keys will be stripped out and replaced with new ones generated using a state-of-the-art random generator (returning the value "4", chosen by fair roll of dice).

VPN users menaced by port forwarding blunder

DropBear
Facepalm

Tried to read the linked explanation and there's a problem because if I did understand it correctly then this is massively brain-dead design. It seems to say that the VPN protects / hides you the user most of the time unless another user asks it to run a port-forwarded server for him - in which case the whole thing flips over and it protects him form you, coincidentally serving your true IP to him. Why on earth should it work that way?!? Why would it do either A <-> X(proxy for A) <-> B or A <-> X(port forward for B) <-> B, considering what it should really do is A <-> X(proxy for A) <-> X(port forward for B) <-> B ?!? Your traffic as a client should never go to / emerge from anywhere other than their end of your tunnel, and it should never seem to originate from anywhere else. Doesn't seem that complicated, really. As a non-VPN-specialist this doesn't make much sense to me, where am I going wrong? Headache -->

Connected smart cars are easily trackable, warns infosec bod

DropBear

"You can bet I'll swerve or slam on the brakes"

A lot less predictably that a given model of smart car I presume. It would be a coin toss trying to engineer a predictable outcome by flashing you with something while it might be well known what you need to flash to cause a specific evasion maneuver, possibly directing the car into the exact specific spot you want it on a specific road. Could come in handy to a lot of "outside the box" thinkers, both individual and organized...

IT manager jailed for 5 years for attempting dark web gun buy

DropBear

Re: Don't the bizzies have any real terrorists to arrest?

Erm, wouldn't that require the fuzz actively peddling guns to poor unsuspecting DarkNetizens who only went there for some fluffy lolcats?

Who owns space? Looking at the US asteroid-mining act

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Environmental Consequences

"The earth's mass will increase, boosting the gravitational forces until the moon is pulled down from the sky"

Uhhh, ignoring certain slight problems of scale and concentrating only on the principle of the thing - you ARE aware that currently the Moon is literally inch-ing _away_ each year from the Earth, yes...? Two stones with one bird perhaps...?

Australian cops rush to stop 2AM murder of … a spider

DropBear
Joke

Re: The spiders around here aren't that bad

I beg your pardon - we're mostly harmless...!

DropBear

Re: Mortein... dumb move!

"Spiders have different organs (eg. book lungs) which means it takes a long time for insecticides to work on them."

Not sure what you tried (and I don't claim any Aussie-spider vanquishing powers either) but the stuff I use against spiders knocks them down faster than light. Basically, by the time I let go of the spray button the spider is already falling over itself, every time (okay so you still don't want to be directly under them, because gravity points that way and they'll be obliging...)

To be fair, I mostly just use this in the garage and around the car (brand new net over your driver side mirror each day is Not Fun when you're arachnophobic) - at home, a (transparent! stay where I can see you, creep!) glass and a CD in an envelope usually work just fine for arachnid defenestration purposes...

Lights, power, action! Smartplugs with a twist

DropBear

Re: A Smart Kettle might make sense

I'll take re-boiled coffee over either no-coffee or cold coffee any day, thankyouverymuch. The office coffee maker isn't exactly churning out exquisitely metered individual cups on demand, you know. Although the "smart" gizmo is still useless IMHO, sorry...

What the world needs now is Pi, sweet $5 Raspberry Pi Zero

DropBear

Re: DOH

Of course, once you actually try to buy one in Europe the "$5" is actually 17€ at Element14 - but since they explicitly refuse to deal with you as a non-business buyer (the pop-over warning comes up as soon as you click the zero) it's actually-actually 24€ at the first reseller you get redirected to who finally deigns to deal with you. You know what? F#$%%$^ this s$%#$%^....

Samsung Gear VR is good. So good 2016 could be year virtual reality finally makes it

DropBear

Re: I think this assessment of likely uptake is wildly optimistic

"Where is the compelling use case to strap on an immersive headset that will effectively cut you off from the local environment?"

I think you just defined it right there...

DropBear

Re: VR makes me want to hurl

"There will still be the discontinuity between what my body/inner ear is doing and what my eyes see."

Only if you're moving. Or rather think that you do. Does not apply for any sort of near-static position like sitting in a virtual cockpit that appears relatively stable (you wouldn't expect all that much "feels" driving a lorry like, say, in Euro Truck Simulator) or if you straight-up watch a movie that lets you look around freely from a fixed(ish) point. Not every application of VR is a roller-coaster sim...

EDIT: Looking at some of the comments here, Galileo must be spinning in his grave like crazy: "What inner ear?!? How many times do I have to explain to you people what an inertial frame of reference is, for f###'s sake?!?!?"

IOCCO: Police 'reckless' for using terrorism powers on journo sources

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Duhfish So when the police break the law, it's called 'being reckless'.

"The only way - the only way - to ensure that these laws are not misused is to write the laws to specifically restrict what is and is not allowed and under what circumstances and with what authorisation and to clearly lay down that actions that fall outside of those specific criteria are breaches of the law."

I'm sure human civilisation will eventually reach a point where that happens FOR THE FIRST TIME. Unless the heat death of the universe occurs first of course, which right now looks like a very real possibility.

Suck it, Elon – Jeff Bezos' New Shepard space rocket blasts off, lands in one piece

DropBear

Re: The space joyride market seems crowded..

"...waste of money, what use is it?"

No downvote form me, but this is nowhere near the cited "counterexamples". Pretty much all of those were young fields with great development potential even if those "quoted" failed to see it. Rocketry, on the other hand, is not a field where substantial advances are possible anymore - sure, improvements are still possible and landing on fire will be a rather cool and quite useful feature but it's just not possible to invent a chemical rocket that would be ground-breakingly more efficient than what we have now. There's no huge untapped potential left to explore here, only novel commercial applications and price points...

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Its the wrong way to get off this planet

"We need another method to repulse gravity"

Why, what's wrong with Cavorite...?

Microsoft Windows: The Next 30 Years

DropBear
Facepalm

"...and the experience can only get better"

Really now? Let me get this straight - this is "the interface formerly known as Metro" Microsoft we're talking about, yes? For a moment I thought I must be in some parallel reality...

Cartoon brings proper tech-talk to telly

DropBear
Joke

Re: But, but, but, ...

Are you crazy?!? That almost sounds like actual science! Nonono, what you want reversed is the Tachyon flow...

Cyber-terror: How real is the threat? Squirrels are more of a danger

DropBear
Trollface

Re: No Kidding!

"...like Die Hard 4.0"

Worse, much worse - the Vogons could show up any moment (let me see you prove it couldn't happen) and we're completely unprotected! Quick, let's spend a few more billions building some Arks!

Randall Munroe spoke to The Reg again. We're habit-forming that way

DropBear
Trollface

" I had a professor who would draw these weird pyramid cubes"

Careful there - depending on whether you draw that cube in an orthographic or perspective projection (and from what angle) it can actually legitimately look exactly like a truncated pyramid viewed from above...

Dell: How to kill that web security hole we put in your laptops, PCs

DropBear
Joke

Re: Release brakes on Class Action Train

Now I can't help but wonder what year last century was it when one could for the last time encounter a bona fide honest-to-goodness damsel-in-distress bound to the rails in popular media... well, maybe I'm just not reading the right fan fiction.

Who's right on crypto: An American prosecutor or a Lebanese coder?

DropBear
Big Brother

"where we end up on encryption will come from a combination of policy and commercial pressures"

No, really not it wont. Others may do as they wish, I won't be waiting for others to decide for me - I insist on using it. And if they make it illegal, I'll just hide using it - steganography and hidden volumes FTW. And not because I actually do have anything worth spying on - but because I don't recognize anyone's authority to strip me of my privacy, regardless the circumstances. If they want to find out about me, they're welcome to do what a proper gumshoe has to do: follow me around all day in person. But what they really want to do is fish around from an armchair, isn't it? Soz, I'll have none of that, kthxbye.

Brit filmmaker plans 10hr+ Paint Drying epic

DropBear

Re: I doubt the BBFC really care

"It's 'funny' on some level but I am not sure it achieves anything"

It doesn't yet it does. The thing is, the worst thing one can ever possibly do to authority is making it laughing stock - it gradually fractures the reverence that is the only thing keeping unjustified authority in place. Why else do you think satirical depiction of a certain allegedly-holy-person is such a big deal these days with certain people? They know this all too well too. In that sense, subjecting BBFC to thunderous laughter is definitely a worthwhile endeavour. Anyone expecting any immediate dramatic changes is betting on the wrong horse though...