Posts by tlhonmey

Re: Stalin would be so proud of him

Sorry, I didn't notice you guys had replied. Mr. le Roux denies having been behind Truecrypt, but given that the terms of his agreement with SecurStar effectively prohibited him from being involved in any further work on E4M-based software that would be his expected answer regardless.

Meanwhile, the guy who wrote the software on which TrueCrypt was based went from encryption enthusiast to encryption professional to online gambling to online prescription sales to arms dealing and the exact extent of his quasi-legal and illegal activities was difficult to pin down because he made heavy use of both TrueCrypt and encrypted communications throughout his entire organization.

And then the TrueCrypt Foundation closes up shop right around the time the authorities finally nail him...

Yes, it *could* have been someone else providing funding who merely wanted people to *think* it was le Roux.

Or it could have been merely one of life's truly bizarre coincidences. Stranger things have happened.

But, of the various theories for who could have been the TrueCrypt Foundation's big, anonymous backer, le Roux seems to be a rather reasonable conclusion.

Regardless, the point was that if someone's making millions on illegal activity, they'll fund the creation of whatever tools they need to continue that activity most profitably, be that drug transport vehicles and drones, or guns, or effective encryption software. So banning the average citizen from having various tools just because criminals use them denies the vast majority of the population whatever benefit they might get from using them while merely inconveniencing those who intend to misuse said tools.

Re: Employees hold all the cards, it’s too late…

I can't say as I've noticed any decrease in watercooler chatter just because it's now done via messaging apps.

I think perhaps the generation that grew up without lots of easy, real-time communication that wasn't face-to-face just doesn't understand how the folks who have been texting each other since grade school can possibly socialize that way.

It's more a question of whether your people socialize with each other than of whether they do it face to face.

Even without the anti-trust concerns... There were a large number of proprietary network protocols back then. They're pretty much all dead now except for niche uses.

Why? Well, it seems that in the world of communications, anybody being allowed to use it to talk to anybody else is a massive advantage that's difficult to offset with trivial things like efficiency, elegant design, or often even performance.

Re: Rechargeable batteries and also "non-supported hardware"

These devices already exist. They just cost more. If repairability and open software platforms are important to you then just go find them.

Purism's Librem 5 is the newest open platform phone that's just entering the market. Be warned though, it'll cost you about twice as much as the comparable closed hardware.

And if you mandate longer software support terms for closed hardware you'll see a similar price jump. Writing security patches isn't free. The price of the device when you purchase it includes the expected cost of providing support for the specified term. Extend the term, you raise the price. It's that simple really.

I remember seeing little, metallic, stick-on grille things for cell phones that were marketed as a way to prevent the radiation from entering through the ear canal during phone calls and causing brain tumors.

Thing is, according to the research on the subject, cell phone frequencies don't cause cancer or brain tumors... They cause cataracts, but only at significantly higher power levels than are commonly used in phones.

Re: Keyboards

My favorite trackball is still an old Kraft from like 1989. Connects via serial port, so it takes some finagling these days, but the sensors and switches still work beautifully. Only problem is the lack of a scroll wheel. But I haven't found a good replacement. All the modern ones have too much damping on the movement so you can't just flick the ball to move the cursor to the other side of the screen.

Re: I'm having headaches

It's a very subtle effect. Nothing the Randi foundation would be particularly interested in. The people who claim to be influencing inanimate objects in any significant way or throwing energy across thousands of miles are probably delusional. Even thinking about it as sending energy is probably incorrect as the human nervous system is not capable of the kinds of power output required to actually do that. More likely it's some kind of harmonic effect.

The human body emits some fairly significant electromagnetic fields, and some people can learn to sense them at close range, and control their own to a certain degree. I have seen some electromagnetic devices used in chiropractic and massage practices for detecting cramped muscles and pinched nerves and similar maladies. In many cases I can detect the same things by touch. I have a cousin who can find them within a few inches without touching, but I'm not that good myself.

I don't practice my Reiki as much as I probably should, but when giving a massage I often get comments that my hands feel burning hot, even from people who know neither what Reiki is nor that I'm capable of using it. Out of curiosity I've checked the actual temperature of my hands in such circumstances and it doesn't seem to actually change, so the sensation must come from something else.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of delusional people claiming phenomenal cosmic powers and just outright fraudsters preying on the credulous. But I do think it would be interesting to plaster a good Reiki practitioner and his subject with EEG sensors and see if we can get a glimpse into what's going on.

Re: Human deviousness

A Rubber Mallet and a piece of silk will fry an SSD quite nicely if used properly.

Re: Ah!!

We have dyed diesel in the US too. But you'll only see it at the filling station in rural areas with lots of farm equipment.

"*may contain: buttholes, eyelids, feet, other shit we found on the floor

Pay for decent food - America is a lesson to us all"

Um... You *do* know what sausage casings are made of, right?

Re: Opsec blunders and the hybrid laptop

"I would have thought online Credit Card losses were covered by the issuer. "

It is. Limit of liability for false charges on most credit cards in the US is $50.

However, the merchant's agreement with the card company generally also requires them to keep card data secured, with automatic penalties for failure to do so. I've seen agreements with penalties as high as $50k per stolen card number. That'll bankrupt a small business pretty quickly.

So... any malicious people just have to schedule their departure for the day after the end of the conference...

Also note that not accepting jobs via USB doesn't do a lot of good unless you also block physical access to the ports...

Re: True to tradition

Cutting him in on it might not have been enough to prevent it, but it might have been enough to make him wait until they were installed in the rest of the building.

Don't mess with the BOFH or your desk will eat you...

Re: Being on a placement myself...

The thing is that as the pace of technology increases, the Universities have fallen farther and farther behind.

At this point the knowledge you get from a university programming course is likely to be at least ten years out of date by the time you graduate.

Re: Humor is in the truth of it

The proper thing to do is not to increment, but simply to add a character to the end. Which single, random character you added is pretty easy to remember, and you've been practicing the rest of the password for 90 days so you won't have forgotten it, and eventually you have a 60 character monstrosity of random characters and everyone wonders how you ever remember such a thing.

On the other hand, anyone with an IQ above about 80 and a penchant for destruction can probably come up with a reasonably effective device just by wandering through the local home and garden store and looking for products with brightly coloured warning labels and reading Wikipedia articles about them. Weapons-grade explosive devices were being manufactured by the Chinese out of horse dung and charcoal while London was still an abandoned Roman fort.

If they get the design from a well-known book instead then, at least, it will be more easily recognizable and more likely that the local bomb squad can disarm it if they manage to find it.

Re: HDMI CEC support

You're misunderstanding. The kernel is indeed modular and can load just the drivers that are actually needed. For that matter, you can build just the drivers you need if you don't want to deal with having all of them lying around and decide if you want them built-in, or just have them available as modules to be loaded as needed. Most distributions build every hardware driver that's not horribly unstable and include it as a loadable module. That way stuff works when you randomly plug in something new.

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

And when those specifically-written laws are broken, who investigates and assigns punishment?

Oh... Right... The same group that was breaking the laws in the first place...

And if you dig through the records of such incidents, you can find a lot of public outrage, usually coupled with, at best, a slap-on-the-wrist type punishment for the perpetrators, and the law goes right on being abused as soon as the incident has faded from the public eye. The bureaucratic entity in charge maybe has some of its pieces swapped out for other pieces with different names, but that perform exactly the same functions (if public outrage is high enough), and business continues as usual. Wash, rinse, repeat, until everyone knows that the law does not apply to the enforcers of it.

You need look no further than the fact that this particular incident appears to have been part of attempted reprisal against a whistle-blower. The message is clear, "Tell anyone about illegal or immoral actions taken by the police, and there will be retribution, even if we have to do morally and/or legally questionable things to get it." It would not surprise me at all to find that this story was leaked on purpose so that anyone thinking of talking to a journalist would know that the authorities would do everything in their power to identify them. And the probable, forthcoming lack of punishment for those involved will reinforce that.

No, my friend, the only way to prevent laws granting this kind of power from being abused is to not write them in the first place, because the population is too gutless and has too short a memory to actually do anything about it if the abuse clauses in the law are ignored.

There were a few prior to the advent of USB that used a parallel port. But the drives themselves were still more expensive than the average user usually wanted to spend. They usually stuck to floppy disks.

For the more adventurous souls, the hardware to let you back up to audio cassette was relatively cheap and/or easy to build. You can reliably get about 2MB on a 90 minute tape that way. Which was about the same as the highest capacity floppy drives, but audio tapes were much, much cheaper.

Re: @JLV @Bob Dole: Tough Cookies...

This was *exactly* what happened with the IBM PC. You'll note that those "cheap knockoffs" are what made home computers a thing. Without the open BIOS API that let more than one manufacturer make hardware, we'd still have a computer market where you had to choose what manufacturer to buy from based on the program you wanted to run because they wouldn't be nearly as broadly compatible as they now are.

Re: Red tape

Sounds a lot like what sales tax is turning into here in the US. Only here you also have to contend with differing tax rates for different services. As an example, the tax code which applies just to a small computer repair shop is in excess of ten pages in my area, and contains gems like a different tax rate for removing software from a computer than for installing software on a computer...

Re: I don't see how this is censorship

Ah, but in traditional harassment law, the penalties are applied to the harassor, not to the owner of the communication medium through which the harassing communication passes. This law is the equivalent of imposing a fine on the telephone company for not being able to prevent obscene voicemails from getting through.

As for how someone could use it for censorship: It's easy. Say you have a Facebook page I don't like. This law doesn't apply to it, but I file a complaint anyway. First several with Facebook (which will ignore them because I'm just being an ass) followed by one with the AU government that Facebook is ignoring it. Facebook then has to dig out its lawyers and audit logs and pay associated costs for an investigation (which finds nothing.) Technically they could sue me, but it's pretty easy to do all this from a false, untraceable identity.

So, I've just cost Facebook a few thousand dollars defending itself from a spurious allegation regarding your page.

Now I do it all again. And again. And again. With modern technology I can have a steady stream of complaints rolling in, possibly even from valid identities depending on how much I want to pay for it.

Facebook's reaction to these tactics in the past has been pretty consistent. Your page will be removed. They don't care about free speech. They won't continue to pay thousands of dollars a month in legal bills to stand up for you just on principle. Your page will be gone without my ever having to reveal who I am. And I can continue to use these tactics against you wherever you attempt to host your content next as long as they have some presence in Australia.

Plus there's the fact that the goal here isn't endgame censorship. The goal is to get the people to regard the government telling them what they can and can't post or read on the Internet as normal by starting with something that most people don't have a problem with. They'll come around for another nibble of your free speech next year.

The average tactic of the stereotypical patent troll is not to find a patent that you are clearly infringing and sue you for it. It's to find a patent that you arguably *might* be infringing, and then threaten to sue you and intentionally drag the case out as long as possible in court, thereby costing you millions in legal fees and lost work time if you don't agree to pay them a few hundred thousand to go away. Most of the time they don't even win their cases, but they've still cost you years worth of sitting in court. They can bankrupt your company without having a valid claim, and sometimes without even actually identifying what you're actually doing that violates the patent.

Re: @qtcoder (was:systemd? Do not want.)

Check out the "Open Phoenux". Doesn't really meet your "just a telephone" requirements, but you get to run a real OS on it instead of that Android crap. Not sure if it'll run BSD, but it does run Debian or Gentoo.

Re: Dog Roll

Well, I know they're sold in the United States. They're not generally called "Dog Rolls" here though.

Re: "Piracy based emulation"

"Piracy-based emulation" would be an emulator which uses a pirated copy of the original console's internal ROM. Such emulators do exist.

However, it is the position of most console manufacturers that *any* emulation without an official license is piracy, even if it uses a "clean room rewrite" of their ROM. This assertion doesn't stand up in court as it's exactly what all the IBM-PC clone makers did back in the 80s and 90s; but it doesn't have to if Apple is willing to simply ban all such emulators from their devices.

The moral? Buy an Open Phoenux and run whatever you darn well please.