* Posts by woodcruft

17 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2017

Defense against the Darknet, or how to accessorize to defeat video surveillance

woodcruft

security concerns

I'm wondering if this technology could be used to disguise a couple of tough looking Russian guys with "Highly trained GRU assassin" tattooed on their foreheads and an interest in cathedrals from coming into the country.

The Dutch with their cannabis and tulips have always presented a danger to us Brits. We need to send our aircraft carrier without any aircraft over to Holland post haste and tell them to behave themselves in no uncertain terms....or else!

Can ye spare any 'digital change', pal? Blighty's ailing court service can't wait to hear from you

woodcruft

The HMCTS Digitisation Plan

Yet, assuming they didn't then the total cost of the software would be £17,033,000.00

Yes, but you need a grossly inflated budget of £140 million so that large amounts of it can go offshore to some Caribbean company subject to somewhat limited disclosure rules.

Said company then pays another company held by the family & mates of whomever signed out the money from the Treasury - for some IP or something bogus - and then "invests" it back in the UK in something like Westminster property.

Of course, the digitisation of HMCTS ends up a monumental clusterfuck because the budget has been blown.

But if you're the crook(s) you've had so much 'win' - loads of money plus an even bigger failure of a justice system to try and hold you to account!

I wish I was a British politician.

Oh, wait a minute, no I don't....they're human vermin.

Guess who's working on a health data-slurping digital tool? Bzzt! Nope, it's the UK Department for Work and Pensions

woodcruft

illegal - breaks data protection laws & human rights

The DWP force people to give access to their health records under threat of sanction now. Sanction means no benefit to ill people who do not comply. ie. "consent" is made under duress and hence illegal. Is now under GDPR and was before under UK data protection laws.

I'm currently battling them now and have been without any benefit or income since July.

Once they get your forced consent, you then get to go for an "independent" assessment done by a firm called 'Centre for Health & Disability Assessments Ltd.' whose shares are wholly owned by a US firm: Maximus Filth Inc. I think they're called. The assessments are usually done by a physiotherapist, so since I'm a diabetic with hypothyroidism with depression and anxiety the assessment would probably be better done by my postman, since he's more likely to be able to assess my ability to work.

Nor are they independent. CHDA Ltd. and the DWP occupy the same offices at Quarry Hill, Leeds, for instance.

Over half a billion is exfiltrated out of HM Treasury every 3 years to the US for this systematic abuse of the ill and disabled. I dare say Maximus book some of their profits in British Caribbean dependency shell companies & then back to London.

Let me state it for the public record: I'm quite sure that the man who set all this up is not corrupt or dishonest in any way whatsoever and nor did he do it for political advantage and personal gain. His name by the way is Right Hon. Ian Duncan Smith MP.

BTW:

$ host -tMX chdauk.co.uk

chdauk.co.uk mail is handled by 5 acp-ms-mcf01.atoshealthcare.com.

It's almost like they're related isn't it related isn't it?

You don't want to do much googling with regards 'ATOS Healthcare' unless you've got a sickbag handy.

Hands up who isn't fighting Oracle in court? HPE, for now, as Solaris support sueball tossed

woodcruft

Oracle's new business model (much like old one).

1. Give Solaris engineers their marching orders.

2. Use money saved in wages to hire even more lawyers.

3. Sue company providing much needed Solaris support to customers.

4. ???

5. New yachts all round!

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

woodcruft

Civil servants are confused

… Examples of other top level domains include .com, .co.uk, .net or .org."

.co.uk is a second-level domain not a TLD. They also might have suggested 2nd level domains of our ccTLD to UK domain holders such as .org.uk as being more appropriate.

Anyway, pleased to see the government evidently know what they're doing and I feel sure Brexit is going to be a remarkable success....which of course is absolutely nothing to do with why I'm leaving the country.

Tesla fingers former Gigafactory hand as alleged blueprint-leaking sabotage mastermind

woodcruft

Let me guess...

...after Tesla releases their next dire quarterly figures, Mr.Tripp's 'sabotage' will be to blame.

If this wasn't more Musk BS, then there would be a full-on criminal investigation with the FBI involved in order to encourage any others with ideas of committing similar 'sabotage'.

Have a guess how many competitors of Tesla would want to look at Tesla's 'secret sauce' for producing not many cars of poor quality that can kill you? Maybe some for the lolz but not for any competitive edge.

Oracle pledges annual Solaris updates for you to install each summer

woodcruft

Unimpressed

From the 1st para of Oracle blog:

"On January 30, 2018, we released the Oracle Solaris 11.4 Open Beta. It has been a quite successful."

Spot the grammatical error staring at you like the proverbial dog's 'nads. I'd say that gives a pretty good indicator about how much Oracle 'cares'.

Further down:

"Some new features in this release are:

...

* ZFS Scheduled Scrub

..."

Bleeding edge stuff: a shell script and cron job.

From a FreeBSD 11.1 box's /etc/default/periodic.conf (which was probably committed years ago) :

daily_scrub_zfs_enable="NO"

daily_scrub_zfs_pools="" # empty string selects all pools

daily_scrub_zfs_default_threshold="35" # days between scrubs

#daily_scrub_zfs_${poolname}_threshold="35" # pool specific threshold

Also no mention of a Solaris 12 which kind of confirms it's zombie status.

Somebody mentioned Oracle's Solaris "team". I'm not entirely sure 'one old bloke with Alzheimers' constitutes a "team".

Elon Musk's latest Tesla Model 3 delivery promise: 6,000... a week

woodcruft

Re: Replacing the batteries.

> Are you high? Engines degrade over time with wear and tear

> on the drive train, on the valves, maintaining compression etc.

> Do you really think that when you stick a 10-20yr old car*

> on a dyno it will generate the same bhp?

As it happens, initially engines are a bit 'tight' which will mean some losses to friction and lower mpg.

I tell you, you're talking horseshit if you think a modern engine with 160k on the clock is going to develop significantly less power than when new. I'm talking a normal 4-stroke car engine made by people who understand QA. ie. the Japanese manufacturers.

Just for the record. I studied mech/man engineering. It seems you watch Clarkson, absorb whatever old pony he has to say about cars and regurgitate it.

woodcruft

Re: Replacing the batteries.

> This report

> https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-data/

> Shows that Tesla's can lose around 10% of charge after

> 160,000 miles. How much power does your Petrol/Diesel

> engine lose after that sort of distance?

err...none, whatsoever.

Interesting that Tesla's lithium ion batteries seem to last forever, whereas nobody elses seem to; including the ones in people's 'phones.

I feel sure the genius that is Elon Musk must be telling the truth and all the scientists and engineers are wrong about the degradation of chemical batteries. /s

UK surgeon suspects his PC was hacked to target Syrian hospital

woodcruft

Re: "The details are a bit light"

"Accusations like this are better left unsaid, especially when Russia is involved"

I suppose you think that now some dingbat (ie. me) has speculated on the 'net that the Dr maybe a British intelligence asset, it's just a matter of time before Putin's men hunt Dr. Nott down and exterminate him, Salisbury-style.

I'll double down. I also think our Royal family are actually alien lizards.

I give you: Camilla...and yet you require more proof?!!

You obviously haven't been following the news lately. A very reliable publication that I read, the 'Daily Hate', has been indicating heavily for the past week that what I say is as things currently stand.

It's just a matter of time before the Royals are dealt with by MI5 and you will see some heads with familiar faces planted on the railings outside Buck House.

woodcruft

Re: "The details are a bit light"

AC says:

"I wonder, is there anyone investigating Dr. Nott for supporting what are likely terrorist factions? Just because our govs do it doesn't mean we can, or can we?"

Don't be silly. It's fairly likely that the doc is a British intelligence 'asset'. Pretty good cover doing surgery and right where the action is, which is where you want eyes on the ground afterall.

I'm talking as someone whos uncle worked for military intelligence during the war whilst a medical student. Involved rounding up GIs who had gone awol from their regiments which were then parked up waiting for D-Day.

What would you do as a GI? Hang around in camp and wait to eventually get shot at on a Normandy beach or do a bunk to Soho and live it large with 'hookers and coke'?

Part of my uncle's job was to make the former rather than the latter seem like the more attractive option. I think you get the picture...things wouldn't have ended too well for the guys who went awol.

Someone mentioned the Hippocratic oath. My uncle qualified around the end of the war and was soon sent to Malaya but not as a medic but 'acting' Major in a 'regular' regiment. Job description can best be described as: 'enhanced' interrogation of captured Chinese guerillas.

His medical knowledge would have come in handy then but not for healing purposes; rather the opposite, in fact. My uncle's Hippocratic oath got put on the back-burner at that time...right next to the Geneva Conventions.

Nobody has won a war by namby pambying about. You go all in. Always.

Which is why I don't have a lot of time for this "Our guys are the good guys" load of old pony which is regularly trotted out - especially by politicians, who tend to like to shout their encouragement from a comfy office located safely behind the frontline.

woodcruft

Re: EXIF data?

I think the good doctor might know his arse from his elbow when it comes to anatomy but when it comes to computer security? Probably not so much.

He would also be better employed trying to stop people blowing up other people with high explosive, rather than stitching up the bits afterward.

But then medics have never been particularly keen on preventative medicine. No glory (or money) in it.

I was also glad to read the other day in the MSM that our brave boys along with our American master^H^Hallies armed with our super-smart missiles have flown over 4000 sorties and not killed or maimed one civilian.

Shove that in your pipe and smoke it ,Mr Assad and Mr Putin!

Oracle UK's profits have more than halved

woodcruft

Re: You can only get away with a screw you attitude...

@a_yank_lurker - you're bang on. A whole pile of folks jumped on to NoSQL largely because reading Ted Codd and getting to grips with database design, normalisation, indexes or even SQL etc. that is required in designing and running a relational database was just a bit too much like hard work.

So they jumped onto Mongo and all the rest of them. Of course, it's all ended in tears and a fairly brutal lesson in why you have got to know your Codd before you implement anything that resembles a database even if it's not relational.

woodcruft

Re: You can only get away with a screw you attitude...

IIRC, the UK govt used to spend over a billion with Oracle annually. I would have thought that the days of "We need a RDBMS for these 5000 records....let's give Oracle a ring" have been slowly and surely disappearing since the crash ~10 yrs ago.

Of course, after picking up Sun's corpse, they would have sold you a wildly expensive Sparc box to go along with their softs.

Now, Solaris is on life support and will die in a few years; shortly followed by any kind of investment in Sparc.

What are you then left with? A database and associated tools that has already been largely replaced by postgresql, mariaDB etc. along with a second-rate cloud offering.

Larry, hang on a bit before buying your next megayacht....I think your company is circling the drain.

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

woodcruft

Re: Time synch

As you say, this report seems overly concerned with how some very rich banks will cope should GPS disappear and the poor dears hence be unable to time their trades. My suggestion: they should buy a clock.

Failing that they may want to avail themselves of this thing called NTP (network time protocol) available for free on the 'net.

Other assorted freeloaders need to buy maps and learn how to use them. Any ocean going mariners carry sextant, clock and tables. Planes can get around without GPS too.

Another day, another Spectre fix slowdown: What to expect if you heart ZFS

woodcruft

ZFS performance hit? Surely he jests.

I saw the headline and thought: that's funny, I didn't know FreeBSD or illumos had yet produced patches. ie. systems where ZFS is native.

That's because they haven't and this merkin/"systems engineer" is testing his Franken-stack consisting of VMware, Ubuntu, ZFS, NFS plus other arbitrary members of kitchen sink and coming to conclusions about how cpu microcode updates as supplied by VMware affects ZFS performance on his "house built on sand" ... that hopefully resembles no other in the known universe.

TL;DR: He's an idiot and wait for FreeBSD to produce patches for meltdown/spectre and them to be tested in the real world rather than matey's "lab".

Dyson backs Britain plc with $2.5bn AI and robotics investment

woodcruft

Re: What about Brunel? (and dozens of others)

To mention an acknowledged lying purveyor of overpriced tat with IBK in the same sentence, makes me as someone who studied mech/man engineering and was an associate member of IMechE, want to reach for the sick bag.

Dyson's an "industrial designer", a phrase guaranteed to make any chartered engineer shiver.

His company's (suitably huge) marketing department is happy to throw around the term "engineer".

When the "engineering genius" Dyson came up with his 400 quid hairdryer, his marketing droids got to work and explained to the press that the company had employed 400 "engineers" for 3 years to design a hairdryer that cost over 10 times as much as it's competitors.

His outfit sort of reminds me of a certain company in Cupertino. The only difference being that he gouges his customers for 10x the going rate for similar crap, rather than the 2x which is customary in Cupertino.

The idea that "4000 engineers" are going to up sticks and move down to the nether regions of Wiltshire is delusional. As is the idea of his private university educating 100s of "engineers" on the grand sum of 3 million a year donated by his company as a tax write-off.

If I had continued with my mech/man engineering and become chartered, the last thing I would want to do is help Dyson scamming his customers when i could get 100k pa minimum doing something interesting - which would almost certainly be abroad and tax free.

If you Brexiteers haven't noticed yet, this country doesn't have a manufacturing industry and wanking off to Sir James Dyson will only carry you so far. Stand assured, I'll be thinking of you when I move to Europe next year.

BTW, he hates the EU because they made it the law that household vacuum cleaners can only draw 1.6KW rather than the power of a Saturn V first-stage,

tl;dr: Try googling "asa dyson misleading" for lols.

OT: perhaps instead of giving folks like him the moniker "Sir" we could perhaps:

:%s/Sir/The c*nt known as/g