Posts by David Roberts

Serious question about MANPADs

A MANPAD was ruled out because it couldn't reach the altitude of the airliner from a ground launch.

Google has not been that helpful so far, but the propellant seems to be solid (as discussed above for Trident) so presumably could power the rocket above the theoretical ceiling if there was any left to burn.

Now presumably the ceiling is above ground level at the launch site so the safe ceiling for airliners is higher above e.g Mont Blanc or Everest than it is above e.g. the Dead Sea.

If so (and budget militia have a strong track record of repurposing civilian vehicles as military vehicles) is it possible to convert a "ground launch" missile to launch for example from a modified civilian aircraft thus increasing its effective reach?

As I said, serious question. Is this factored into the safe ceiling for commercial aircraft?

This does of course lead onto the thought of a civilian aircraft equipped with a proper air to air missile but presumably this level of ordinance is tracked far more closely than bulk produced low cost hand held devices.

On a more positive note

It is good to see an IT business with strong financial numbers ploughing some of the profit back into product development.

Perhaps the next step is to go legitimate and offer fully encrypted local and cloud storage and personal PC protection against other malware?

Wonderful stuff

Can I have some for my roses?

A man with a shotgun is as nothing....

.....compare to a potential terrorist armed with a bottle of spring water approaching airport security.

Armed response every time!

Internal testing?

I can see that internal testing of certificate creation, validation, revocation etc. can require bogus certificates.

What I fail to understand is why test systems with bogus certificates were exposed to the Internet.

Surely the main issue is the management and firewalling of the test and development systems to prevent them leaking onto the Internet?

Is it just me?

Nobody else seems to have considered the main application - recording body location, movement and posture through a bedroom wall. Yeah, probably just me.

Should be good, presumably, anywhere a WiFi signal can be received through a wall. Including apartments and semi-detached and terraced houses. I may just have to flatten out my tinfoil hat and use it to paper the outside walls.

Which leads me on to wonder what impact the foil covering on insulation such as Celotex has on radio waves, and if this isn't much then do I need an alternative to tinfoil for my hat? How do you signal proof party walls, and ceilings and floors in multi-storey dwellings?

RF-proof wallpaper might becone a big seller. Now, why has my mobile phone stopped working?

Ummm.....if this is based on reflections then can you use mobile phone transmissions to map through walls? Why am I calling you? No real reason, just checking up on the strange sounds from next door....

Time for the medication, probably.

On the other hand....

.....the small piece of code which set the values for they key parameters in the software to set up the emissions profile was configured by two very pissed off programmers kept behind over a public holiday because a management cock up had made the project run late.

As is often the case they were the only technical people involved in the project beneath 15 layers of increasingly clueless management, most of whom were from Marketing.

So they wrote an obfuscated regular expression to set the values. When the code was viewed they said "It's just simple maths - obvious, really." Nobody wanted to admit they didn't understand simple maths so it passed the limited review and went straight into production to meet the project timescales.

For the first few weeks the programmers waited for someone to challenge them because it was such an obvious "Fuck you!" ploy but nobody mentioned it and they were redeployed onto other mismanaged projects and since they didn't care about the company and the management they eventually drifted off into the mists of wherever pissed off programmers go, and were lost to history.

Yep - I could believe that.

From the comments thus far...

.....all these guys have to do is walk into a Comcast store and give the list of cancellations to their new best friend who can share in their business success.

Shave every day?

Why? Trim once a month is much more efficient.

Also, beard growth is natural, as is head, leg and armpit hair. Keeping hair short enough for easy cleaning is sensible and hygenic but why shave your face every day (and for some people, armpits and legs as well)?

Nothing as sad as a fashion victim.

On the subject of money, Tim

Came across this the other week in the Grauniad,

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/18/interest-rates-rise-bank-of-england-chief-economist-andy-haldane

" Indeed, Haldane believes the Bank may have to do more than that. As emerging economies slow down, sucking demand out of the global economy and depressing commodity prices, what Albert Edwards of investment bank Société Générale has called a “tidal wave of deflation” could yet be unleashed.

With interest rates already at a record low of 0.5%, the Bank has little ammunition left. So Haldane believes it may eventually have to think much more radically – perhaps even levying a negative interest rate. He says that this might be made possible if central banks could harness similar technology to that used in the virtual currency Bitcoin. Instead of grubby notes and coins, consumers would pay and be paid using electronic deposits on their phones or computers – and their banks could then penalise them for failing to spend that money."

Is it just me, or is this really scary stuff?

Redefining money (sorry, cash) from the mainstay of the black economy and a support for sagging mattresses to a government controlled electronic token system which can be taken away again if not spent? So many things wrong with this - at the moment it seems to me to be more like the tokens mines used to pay miners and which were not freely tradeable, being only redeemable at the company store.

Big question - would this still count as money i.e. freely tradeable tokens for keeping score?

Watching it now in Australia

Yes, it is shit.

TL;DR

Late to the party, so haven't read all the comments, but a couple of points.

(1) I get the impression that they measured BMI now, not when the porkers were allegedly getting all the action. Too much shagging makes you hungry?

(2) No mention of sexual orientation. Allegedly gay people can be more promiscuous than straight people at times. So is the conclusion that fat people are gay?

Mine's the one with the Medium label......

Does my old heart good.......

......to see someone else testing with HELO sailor. Ah, memories.

Old news?

Or is this in addition to the theft of a storage device from Lloyds Bank containing details of RSA customers reported 3 days ago?

Raspberry Pi?

Not much point in locking down router firmware if you can build your own from a Pi!

Two factor security?

We've encrypted this password (insecurely stored here) in a secure store.

Does make you wonder about all the other sites who think they have strong security. Did they use a standard package, and if so which one?

Kudos to the researchers. Shows that you need to do more than just use a secure password store; the whole end to end process needs to be audited with a fine tooth comb.

Automatic updates?

As far back as my admittedly failing memory goes I was always advised to set WU to automatically download but not install updates.

I could then see that updates were available but wait for a few days whilst the braver/more foolhardy tried them out. If the patch wasn't withdrawn or replaced then it could be installed with fair confidence. Some seem to categorise this as security stupidity (why?) but it seems a sensible balance between blind trust and no patching.

A year or so back the number of bad patches seemed so low that I finally switched to fully automatic despite the occasional unexpected overnight reboots.

Early experience of W8 persuaded me to go back to the old settings.

This again looks a sensible strategy, given the W10 upgrade approach.

There are plenty of guides on which patches to hide/uninstall to remove the W10 badness and associated telemetry. I have done this and so far see no signs of any bulk download. Just waiting now for the patches to be up-issued with new numbers. All this cocking about by MS has done is make me extremely reluctant to apply patches because of misleading or missing descriptions.

However readers here are generally very computer aware and thus a vanishingly small percentage of the total user base. Illustrated by the constant testimonials to the health giving benefits of Linux and the total lack of adoption by the general public. Face it - 90% or more just buy an Internet and use a Google to access it. They are helpless victims and the big corporations are well aware of this.

I expect to move to W10 at the end of the free period, assuming that no more major hidden "benefits" emerge. I use Windows because of a few specialist devices only supported by Windows or IOS. I have not had great success using VMWare to connect these devices through Ubuntu to a Windows VM.

At one time I always ran dual boot and spent a significant time using Linux on the desktop but at the moment it does nothing for me that Windows7/8.1 does not do at least adequately. Only the W7 system is currently dual boot and Ubuntu only gets fired up to update on the rare occasions when I remember. So stuck with Windows by default.

Ramble....ramble.....

TL;DR sadly no point in complaining. Nobody is listening.

Beer because I now need one :-(

Just a shot in the dark...

.....but is this the time for the old chestnut "If we'd had your mother with us we could have hidden the Uzi"?

Money laundering?

This is a strange one. From the account published here it looks like benefit fraud and tax fraud are obvious charges, unless of course his employees were in some way exempt from paying taxes and he was declaring the income and paying tax and NI.

Does that particular charge carry more draconian penalties, perhaps, including confiscation of all proceeds wheras tax fraud involves paying back tax plus penalties?

Also no mention of any charges against employees (presumably they didn't also work in his Mum's bedroom). Were they perhaps offshore where they couldn't be targeted?