* Posts by Lysenko

986 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2015

More and more Brits are using ad-blockers, says survey

Lysenko

Non sequitur

I buy branded products, but that has nothing to do with positive advertising effects in the sense they are being discussed here.

I bought my last car because I know someone with the same model and I liked it. If I were in the market for a new laptop (or whatever) I might well be guided by fellow commentards. Adverts? No. If I buy a branded product after the company has inflicted advertising on me then the purchase is despite of their annoying behaviour, not because of it.

NASA funds new supersonic airliner research

Lysenko

To put it bluntly, the sky is full.

No, piloting/navigation systems are inadequate and unlike distorting space/time that is a technological problem rather than a physical one.

It doesn't make a blind bit of difference if two vehicles are 100m apart or 5km so long as you can maintain those distances reliably and the existence of aerobatic display teams (or even many military airlifts) illustrates that you can get a damn sight closer than that even now.

We are a LONG way from cracking this of course and it might well involve all aircraft under direct air traffic computer control, however it is still just a question of making incremental technology improvements rather than inventing entirely new approaches to the problem.

Lysenko

Key features missing...

Marketdroids, Consultants and other suits value face to face contact for several reasons:

* Harder for victims to read a novel during PowerPoint

* Exchange of aftershave vapours breaching Chemical Weapons treaties

* Intra-group status checking via overly large shiny watches

* Expense account embezzlement

* Lap dancing clubs safely distant from the wife/husband

* Duty free booze/fags

Schneider Electric building manager bug allows security bypass

Lysenko

Why not a mandatory setup question before first use?

What is the point of that? The answer would have to be hard coded. These things have to work on a private LAN (preferably air gapped) with no capability to contact certificate authorities or reference time servers etc.

As for the "real computers/OSs" bit, as I recall this system uses a MIPs SoM running Linux (a bit like a Raspberry Pi but slower, no GFX, less memory and more UARTs). Comparing it to a "real computer" is invalid. It is more like a high end washing machine in computing capability terms.

Lysenko

“allow Admin users to circumvent access controls”

That's some highly questionable phrasing. Admin users define the access controls (by design) so obviously they can change them[1]. Calling that "circumvention" seems a bit of a reach.

Shipping with weak default credentials is a valid observation, but also common practice. If you are going to ship a device with any standardized default credentials then it makes no difference how complicated they are because anyone can read your website.

[1] I'm familiar with (wrote) an app for a similar system that uses admin access to issue/revoke ACLs every 20 seconds.

HTTPS DROWN flaw: Security bods' hearts sink as tatty protocols wash away web crypto

Lysenko

How is that comparable?

Telnet was supposed to be secure too because it was designed with the assumption that the network itself would be secured and the great unwashed wouldn't be given a key to a room with a terminal in it. That model still holds in certain use cases. I continue to use telnet to commission embedded systems that physically have no TCP/IP network connectivity in production use and therefore cannot be compromised in that way.

Lysenko

Re: In other news

I think his point is that having telnet still knocking around long after it was supplanted by SSH for most (all?) purposes is analogous.

Don't expect AI to save our security skins, warns RSA boss

Lysenko

being respectful that is basically being polite.

How do you "politely" tell someone they are a clueless imbecile whose opinions are worth less than a used chip wrapper? Obfuscation and sophistry I guess. We should probably take inspiration from Java API naming conventions.

Zuck gets a Brazilian whack: Top Facebook VP cuffed in WhatsApp privacy kerfuffle

Lysenko

Re: Is it even possible?

I'm pretty certain it is not possible for a VP of a company like FB to decrypt anything. If they picked on a systems security architect or something then there might be a chance, but nabbing a suit is just futile grandstanding.

Google cloud wobbles as workers patch wrong routers

Lysenko

Precisely

... but given your position you might want to keep an eye out for black helicopters from the Advertorial department voicing heresy like that! The point of this article is clearly the agile MTTR demonstrated!

Schlock and .aw as Dutch net registry rebrands

Lysenko

Maybe they figure:

BV = Beverage = Starbucks = HUGE PROFITS AND TAXES !!! ... or maybe not.

Nearly a million retail jobs will be destroyed by the march of tech, warns trade body

Lysenko

Exactly.

Those multi-million DARPA efforts can barely even walk properly. Yodel want guys who can slot an Amazon box between the posts at Twickenham from 30 paces and make a credible effort at Discus and Shot Putt. Robots? Meh.

Lysenko

"Hiya mate! You wouldn't believe the deal we've got on Norton Antivirus.."

No need for annoyance: just ask if it can do Hyperconverged DevOps or something. That's guaranteed to bore your victim into silence - especially if (s)he actually knows what you're talking about.

Lysenko

Nope, that'll be done by robot.

Too much CapEx. No need to invest in hardware when there is lots of instantly disposable wetware to exploit, exhaust and discard.

Lysenko

A shift to more valuable jobs in analysis...

A shift to more McJobs drop kicking boxes around Yodel sorting warehouses I think you mean.

New York judge blocks FBI demand for Apple help to unlock iPhone

Lysenko

Thus it's not a matter of rights, just convenience...

The rights in question here are not citizen's rights to privacy, rather Apple's right not to be unwillingly conscripted into government service by the court.

Apple has no standing to complain about any law enforcement organisation anywhere hacking into its devices so long as it is authorized under local law. The key difference is that the Italian court are not demanding that Apple actively assist and enable the hacking attempt so there is nothing for Apple to legitimately protest about (countries aren't bound by EULAs except in so far as they choose to be).

Dell's $67bn slurp of EMC gets green light from EU antitrust bods

Lysenko

PC Company...

...buys NAS box manufacturer. Can't say I'm surprised the authorities aren't overly interested.

Donald Trump promises 'such trouble' for Jeff Bezos and Amazon

Lysenko

Re: surely the word 'hypocrite' is an immigrant...

Assuming you an NBI (Natural Born Idiot)[1] then the prohibition won't apply to you. Locking you up in an internment camp somewhere in Nebraska and waterboarding you will do for the time being.

[1] Naturally NBI status can't be finally ruled upon until the recently assassinated member of the Supreme Court is replaced by a sufficiently reactionary demagogue, obsessed with the original intent of ancient manuscripts[2].

[2] No, I don't see any irony. What are you talking about Mr Ayatollah?

Lysenko

That is a transparent slur...

...the book is called "My Life" (La Mia Vita).

His daughter is Jewish, he just wants to make the trains run on time.

Lysenko

surely the word 'hypocrite' is an immigrant...

Damn right it is, and not just any immigrant either ... it's GREEK!! You've seen the news. Europe is being invaded by head chopping jihadis and they are all coming through GREECE!!

As a precautionary measure the USA should prohibit words like: hypocrite, idiot, moron etc. until we can figure out what these "Greeks" are up to !!

Lysenko

Freemon?

... are you sure that in't supposed to be "Freeper" ?

Raspberry Pi celebrates fourth birthday with fruity version 3

Lysenko

Re: Still 100MBit Ethernet

You might find the:

http://www.banana-pi.org/m3.html

...a better fit for that. Gives you proper 1Gbps Ethernet (i.e. not thunked over USB internally), double the RAM, double the cores and SATA support. About £42, inc VAT.

Worldpay outs self as provider of easy-to-crack payment services

Lysenko

Four...

...because in some cases "upgrading" the devices is impossible by design as the threat model they were designed to resist is the possibility of someone installing changed code after the unit was certified and manufactured.

Some chips (PIC16's, for example) have 'fuses' built in specifically to ensure that once the firmware is programmed it can never be changed or read back again.

Microsoft scraps Android Windows 10 bridge, but says yes to Objective-C compiler

Lysenko

Objective C ??

I thought Apple were already phasing that out in favour of Swift?

Toaster cooks network and burns 'expert' user's credibility to a crisp

Lysenko

Opposite way round

I used to do network/IT stuff for a County Council as a contractor back when NetWare owned the market. Another outfit came in (mates of a Councillor, naturally) and promptly underbid me while ridiculing the Token Ring and 10-Base-2 systems in two of the offices. You can imagine the drill: "This guy put in fragile systems. Star wiring is the where it's at. He's ripping you off on call outs intentionally. He's an amateur" etc.

Naturally I lost the contract and they refused to pay for about £5k of work. I wasn't feeling too charitable. Particularly since no-ever asked WHY I chose to stick with 10-Base-2.

New guys come in one weekend, rip out all the coax, start putting in CAT5. Unfortunately someone tipped of the planning department. You can't go punching holes the size of coke cans through the walls of a Grade 1 listed building. That's why I had coax in there in the first place. Oops.

Official: Toshiba pulls out of European consumer PC market

Lysenko

Samsung?

I wouldn't swap my 900X for anything else I've tried (except maybe an upgraded model) and that includes the Dell XPS15, MacBook(s) and Lenovo ThinkPad my immediate colleagues use daily.

Apple fires legal salvo at FBI for using All Writs law in iPhone brouhaha

Lysenko

Makes you wonder how Irish Terrorism didn't take over the world in the 70s...

There never was any. Not according to the FBI[*]. The phrase you were searching for is: "Heroic Freedom Fighters".

A segment of the US population were/are still so obsessed with their revolution that they're ambivalent at best about British soldiers getting blown to bits. Plus there are lots of votes to be had around Boston.

[*] Neither the FBI nor the State Department ever registered the IRA as a terrorist organisation.

Got Oracle? Got VMware? Going cloud? You could be stung for huge licensing fees

Lysenko

...typically these are the people that have not used the right people database, processes and tools...

FTFY

PosgreSQL/EnterpriseDB

'I bet Russian hackers weren't expecting their target to suck so epically hard as this'

Lysenko

Presumably...

...error logs full of faulty parameters that couldn't quite match the syntax needed to trigger "full retard" but came damn close.

Bill Gates denies iPhone crack demand would set precedent

Lysenko

Re: Apple has access to the information, they are just refusing access..

If we produced ionizing radiation we would of course monitor it because there is Health & Safety legislation that explicitly requires that.

The key point is "legislation". The elected representatives of the people enacted a law. There is no problem with that. In this case it would be the same as passing a War Powers Act and implementing conscription.

The problem here is an Executive refusal to tackle the political costs of legislating and trying to use the Judicial branch as a back door.

Lysenko

Apple has access to the information, they are just refusing access..

No, Apple do not have access to the information. They have the probable capability to obtain the information if they elect to do the extra work required to retrieve it.

This is like saying I have "access" to the Radiation levels within a Bank data centre. I monitor power, temperature and humidity so I could probably adapt the system to monitor radiation as well. There is a world of difference between that and being conscripted to implement it against my will by Judicial fiat.

NASA's Orion: 100,000 parts riding 8 million pounds of thrust

Lysenko

What?!

Noooo ... this is the age of DevOps!! I'm sure they'll be uploading new software builds with state of the art twitter widget updates while the countdown is in progress. We don't care about failure anymore remember? "Mean time to remediate" is what we're measuring now.

See upcoming conference and regular advertorials for details[*]

[*] Terms and conditions apply. Your life may be at risk if you fail to recognise bullsh1t when you hear it.

Become an Andre Previn in your time: DevOps for star conductors

Lysenko

smokestack of software application development

The smokestack is there to dissipate the noxious fumes when your rushed (agile, continuous delivery) and inadequately tested (automated unit tests only) project crashes and burns for the fiftieth time I presume?

HP Inc Elite X3: Windows 10 phablet for enterprise-y types

Lysenko

written over the last 20 to 30 years, all on .Net

.NET in 1986?! I don't think so. VB was around 1990 and .NET ten years after that.

US DoJ files motion to compel Apple to obey FBI iPhone crack order

Lysenko

Ubuntu is just as subject to US law...

No it isn't. Open source isn't subject to any national legislation. If the US tried this (again) it would go the same way as 56bit key limits. I used to have a nice sideline bolting proper crypto into some US products crippled by retarded export rules ... and that wasn't even open source.

Lysenko

Nope...

Three reasons:

1) Whatever trick Apple pull to get at the data (if they do so) they'll almost certainly plug forever in the next release to avoid a repetition.

2) If the US Congress tries to legislate to prevent that they'll very quickly find out the true meaning of "globalization". Huawei, YotaPhone and the rest would just love to take Apple's business.

3) Any legislation like the above throws Android under the bus as well, which would just result in Ubuntu mobile becoming relevant again.

Hubristic American pretentions about "universal jurisdiction" are just that. China and Russia are not going to cave in just because the "greatest country on Earth" [sic] decides to wave its dick about ... even if Captain Combover himself is the one holding the dick.

OnePlus X: Dinky little Android smartie with one or two minuses

Lysenko

See...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/13/oneplus_oxygenos_team/

SpaceShipTwo ready to slip the surly bonds of Earth for Virgin Galactic

Lysenko

what technological use is there for this?

It is designed to enhance overall investment in the tech sector by diverting cash from sports cars, handbags and shoe manufacturers.

Virgin Galactic might come up with something valuable to humanity as a spin off from this project. Louis Vuitton never will.

Facebook and Twitter back Apple's privacy stance

Lysenko

...cooperating with me is a good idea....

This isn't about cooperation with a search, it is about compelling someone to do positive product development work by judicial fiat.

Whether the resulting product is a good idea or not is incidental to the question of whether the court has the power to hijack labour like this in the first place without congress first nationalising the company or enacting some sort of conscription.

Lysenko

The 4th amendment argument is not particularly relevant here - is it

Agreed. It isn't relevant to the substance of the matter, but under other circumstances it could be a speed hump on the way to a authoritative ruling.

I was just pointing out that the FBI want Apple to do this with the complete agreement and support of the owner of the phone in question.

Lysenko

the iPhone owned by Syed Farook...

It wasn't owned by him. His employer owned/owns the device, he merely used it. The distinction is important since it impacts on whether 4th Amendment protections against unlawful searches would apply if the warrants were somehow invalidated (they wouldn't).

SAP’s Byzantine licensing leaves its customers feeling exposed

Lysenko

Re: PowerBuilder.....

That thing still exists?! I thought VB and Delphi killed it off around the turn of the century. You'll be telling me DataEase is still in business next ;)

StorPool CEO: 'We do not need another storage product'

Lysenko

Re: Hmmm...

It was definitely a Proliant (P60, original Pentium) but your year correction is very probably correct.

Lysenko

Hmmm...

So, run some software on commodity hardware/disk arrays which can either serve up raw files or do some intermediate processing on them before delivery?

Novell NetWare V3.x with some NLMs on a Compaq Proliant circa 1992. I'm not feeling my paradigms shifting.

Can DevOps be applied to the whole company?

Lysenko

GDS !!??

Seriously? Is this some kind of practice run for April 1st?

Hey British coders: DevOps – you're doing it wrong

Lysenko

Re: It's okay...

Consultants? Well, maybe ... but only after you've attended conferences with "thought leading" speakers to help you pick the right confidence trick and insult combination.

Lysenko

“Our hypothesis is that change/fail rate doesn’t matter.”

... my hypothesis is that this person is an idiot. In many development sectors MTBF is all that matters because "remediating" the failure isn't a software issue. eg: crashing a plane, emptying the wrong bank accounts, overheating a greenhouse, flooding a factory floor ... etc.

DevOps, if it has any relevance at all, is a methodology for people that think "software" automatically means: ECMAScript, AngularJS, REACT, iOS, node.js and hyperconverged cloudy dockers.

MIT boffins' code scans your health claims, tunes plans for bosses

Lysenko

Re: The US health insurance industry

"Health care" is a giant socialist scam. Ted knows that all you really need are kevlar knee pads.

Trade union threatens work-to-rule action over HPE Lancashire job cuts

Lysenko

Is that a good thing then?...

Giving Civil Service unions a shock? Definitely.

Having worked for MOD, DoE and DTI (on the payroll, not as a contractor) I am absolutely in favour of giving the PCSU a cattle prod to the 'nads.

Unfortunate for the staff, but if they had been operating in the real world they would be familiar with the fact that the average length of a "permanent" job is 4.6 years generally and less than that in the tech field.

Lysenko

HPE’s lack of openness and unwillingness to make concessions...

...is par for the course for a private sector organisation, but a nasty shock for Civil Service unions.