Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I think that any species that could crack travel over interstellar distances might also be able to produce robotic labour.

In the absence of (relativity and causality breaking) faster than light travel, it's a hell of a journey just to visit the closest star. The energies involved in acceleration and deceleration increase exponentially as you approach the speed of light, so practically anything is unlikely to be travelling faster than something like 0.1c.

The closet star to Sol is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.25 ly away. That journey alone at 0.1c would take 42.5 years, and that doesn't factor in time to accelerate and decelerate. If you kidnapped a bunch oif humans at birth and transported them there, they'd be in their mid-forties, and hardly great material for slave labour.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

I had the opposite experience; a telephone line extension patched into the master socket using CAT-6e cable (well, at least SOME of the pairs) which worked fine for a number of years.

The ADSL running over it (Talk Talk) started to get flaky (due to a problem with the street cabinet), and Talk Talk wouldn't get someone to investigate that until they'd sent an "engineer" to check for faults in the property (with a £50 charge to me if they found something wrong). I demonstrated that the modem wasn't connecting properly, and offered to plug it directly into the master socket to demonstrate that the extension was not at fault, but that the fault was outside the property. The "engineer" proceeded to unscrew the face plate and pull out the neatly spliced extension despite my request to not do so.

The fault was then proven to be outside the property, and I was left with having to work out which colours I'd spliced in before and re-splice them, AND the fuckers tried to charge me the £50, which it took me 20 minutes to argue over with their call-centre-operator in India, before they finally agreed it was their fault, and refunded me the charge.

Just one of MANY reasons I'd never again touch that company with a barge pole. Other reasons include a shitty connection speed, massive data breaches which they didn't bother to tell anyone about, and Dido Harding.

Russia's tiny quantum computer is (probably) nothing to worry about

It's Russian, surely the question is, can it run Tetris?

Re: The Missing FUD!

Modelling a simple, two atom molecule, is not the same as making it, nor is it the same as modelling a three or four atom molecule, the effort involved in which scales exponentially, I believe*. I googled the structure of novichok (or the supposed structure, I guess it's actually not published). It has 24 atoms in it. Any integer above 1, raised to the power of 24 give a large number, that is the number of times more qubits such a computer is going to need to do the equivalent task. For example, if adding an atom only makes the job twice as hard (and it's likely to actually be more than that due tot eh rising degrees of freedom), then that number is 2^24, 16,777,216. Multiply that by your original 16 qubits, and this suggests you're going to need something in the order of 268 million to just model that molecule's structure. This does rely on a number of assumptions, but you get the general picture.

And then, it certainly is not the same as modelling its interactions with other molecules, and especially not those involved in biological systems, which tend to be proteins with a very large number of atoms in them (typically tens to hundreds of thousands, IIRC). You'd need to include all of those atoms in your model. What's 2^100,000? The Windows calculator says "Overflow".

Things like Novichok only have "remarkable" properties because of their interactions with specific vital metabolic processes. I believe the mechanism of action here is to bind to specific active sites of specific proteins to prevent them from interacting with their normal substrates, and thus preventing normal signalling for nerves, leading to paralysis and death. Good luck modelling that with any computer let alone a "quantum" one with less processing power than a Z80.

This doesn't mean that this won't be an issue some day in the future with developing new and nasty poisons via computer modelling, but I somehow suspect the current way of doing things (making analogues of known poisons in a lab and seeing how nasty they are by exposing lab animals to them) will still be more effective for those individuals who are unpleasant enough to want to do such things.

*I stand to be corrected, but my understanding is that in computational chemistry, effort does not scale linearly with complexity, largely because the number of degrees of freedom is an nPr kind of thing.

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

Re: The

I would consider email to be insecure at the moment it reaches the mail server, and if the connection to that is unencrypted, then as soon as the send button is pressed. Given the security hygiene of many users, it's probably insecure as soon as they put finger to keyboard, slowly, with one finger, one key at a time.

Re: The

I've long been of the opinion that Outlook installations in corporate environments (or in any other large organisation) should come with a default install where "reply all" is not even available. It should be an additional optional install for people who REALLY need it, such as BoFHs.

Re: The

Personally, I prefer top-posting. The alternatives are to read the original email as an attachment (and other previous emails as attachments within attachments - it's turtles all the way down) or to have to read an entire email thread in order to even realise that what you are reading is what is being replied to and not an original message in itself. At least, with top-posting, you can easily tell what is the last thing said, where it starts and ends, and what came before it, in reverse-chronological order.

The fact remains that email was designed as, and is, a simple and inherently insecure messaging system. It's fine for its purpose, which is to send non-sensitive content easily and asynchronously to a recipient anywhere else. Its purpose isn't an end-to-end encrypted synchronous messaging system, for that, you'd want to use a synchronous end-to-end encrypted messaging system. I believe such things exist (and also that they scare governments, who use "terrorists" and "paedophiles" as an excuse to try to break encryption for everyone).

Complaining that email isn't encrypted is a bit like complaining that your car can't be used to transport five tonnes of bricks. It was never designed for that purpose, and trying to hack it to do so now is going to mean you end up with some monstrosity with reinforced suspension and no roadworthiness certificate.

Re: The

I stopped reading when you wrote, "Heck, ROT13 was new!".

That's ROT13 also known as Caesar's Cipher (well, actually Ceasar's Cipher is the generic superset). It very much was not a new thing in the 1970s. It was probably not even new in 1970 BC.

Re: The

Yup, email is stateless, each message is send-and-forget. There is no point in that simple process, where key exchange could take place, so it would have to be done beforehand, and keys fed into the sending/receiving of messages. Messy, fiddly, insecure, and no doubt error-prone. Anyone versed in security would be getting out their collection of red flags to wave at you at the mention of trying this.

Re: The

OK, down-voter, how would you propose to "securitise" email in such a way that the intended recipient can read an email, and nobody else, without the need for some sort of key-exchange beforehand, presumably by some medium other than email? How would you integrate that with a popular mail client in such a way that people actually use it and don't immediately complain that it is too complicated and that they don't understand it? How would you educate them about all the nuances of security, such as MITM attacks in key exchanges, key strength, issuing authorities, the difference between a certificate and an encryption key, and between symmetric and asymmetric encryption, and why "Password!" isn't sufficient?

Try "I'm going to send you an encrypted email, send me your public key please" on the sort of user who is going to accidentally email state secrets (in plain text) to Mali and see how far that gets you. Email's strength (and also its weakness) is that it is easily useable by anyone who can just about work a computer, and that includes a LOT of people who are otherwise not computer-literate, and, for example, think "the internet" is an AOL CD. It can either be secure, or easy to use, and it is very much the latter. If you want secure, use something else.

I'm no particular fan of Microsoft, but blame them for the things they are actually responsible for, not standards that they have had no input into.

Re: Whatever.

s/net/neat/ - I really wish el Reg would let us fix the typos in our comments when we spot them an hour later...

Re: The

You admit that Microsoft have nothing to do with the origin of email, but still it's somehow their fault? RFC 561 dates to 1973, two years before Microsoft even existed, and RFC 733, which superseded it, dates to 1977, and RFC 822 which superseded that, to 1982. The current RFC that obsoletes all of these, RFC 2822 is from as recently as 2001, and none of these specify a standard way to secure and encrypt messages.

Microsoft is not the author of any of them, all they have done is write a series of popular* mail clients, as have many others. The first email clients I used were elm and pine.

*popular as in well-used, not necessarily well-liked.

Re: Whatever.

I don't think IQ is a symmetric curve though, is it? There are people recorded with IQs above 220, but even our dumbest politicians would struggle to get down to -20. There might be some attempt to define it as a net bell curve, and it might approximate one, but it's going to be one with a long tail.

There's a bigger problem here

That is, the fact that people seem to think that email is a secure medium in the first place, and that they might be trying to send anything remotely sensitive, unencrypted, by email.

Even if they hadn't accidentally got the address wrong, the content of the emails would be open for any mail server they happen to pass through to read. Typically, that's going to be at least the sender's own ISP, some backbone addresses, and the target domain.

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

Re: Entra

entrails

noun

plural noun: entrails; plural noun: entrail

a person's or animal's intestines or internal organs, especially when removed or exposed.

This isn't going to directly cause a problem for devs...

...it'll cause a problem for sales teams when all the documentation (such as it is) is suddenly talking about setting up accounts in something that no longer appears to exist in their demo environments, and then us devs will have to be wheeled in to move their mouse pointers for them.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: Damn sight more common than might be thought...

"I'm already holding the mouse in my right hand"

Musk sues law firm for overcharging Twitter when Twitter was suing Musk

For some reason, I have in my head an image of Musk introducing a tank full of sharks to another tank full of sharks and then getting in the water to encourage them to fight.

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

You are Nigel Farage, AICMFP.

What do you mean, you can't make a withdrawal from your bank?

Re: Can it just be delayed?

It's my belief that one has to actually demonstrate an understanding of the law to pass the bar exam. The fact that our Home Sec seems to keep having trouble proposing things that are actually legal calls this into question.

Re: Weird perspective

@CJ, when you can present something that even remotely resembles evidence to support your assertions, and indeed respond to valid points raised by others, without switching arguments, or repeating false ones, then you can join the adults' table.

Re: Weird perspective

When we argue against such people, we are not expecting or even hoping to change their minds. We argue against demonstrably incorrect views, so that other readers, who we assume are not idiots, can see that those views are false, and see the evidence against them.

Any deeply entrenched opinion needs justification, and not being able to adjust your views when new evidence comes to light is a sure-fire sign of faith over reason (this is also known as the scientific method). If we refrain from demonstrating evidence against sophistry, then the often beguiling but false arguments persuade others to also believe these things that are false.

You may then argue that it doesn't really matter what other people think, a person's beliefs are their own, and this is indeed true. However, when people act on their beliefs, against fact and reason, bad things are prone to happen. World wars, removal of women's rights, demonisation of minorities, that sort of thing.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Quite. I get to vote on who gets to be my local MP. Needless to say, we've elected a decent human being who isn't a member of the current "ruling"* party.

*It's actually their job to serve the electorate, not rule them, but that's not what they seem to believe.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Just to step in here, it's pretty obvious here, that everyone acknowledges that there is global food price inflation, and it is also pretty obvious that whet is being referred to here is the additional 50% food price inflation in the UK that brexit has been established to have caused. Word tricks and sophistry aside, techniques at which you excel, everyone can see and acknowledge that, except you.

Nobody is claiming that the UK leaving the EU has caused global food prices to rise, so you are arguing against a straw man there.

It has been established, beyond reasonable doubt, that it has caused UK food prices to rise more than global food prices, so to claim otherwise means taking the path of "unreasonable doubt".

So which one are you going for? Straw man argument, argument based on unreason, or pure sophistry?

I'm sure you have one of your usual techniques to hand, for example "proof" in the form of an opinion piece written by an ex-UKIP councillor writing in their parish newsletter, or equivalent, presented as inalienable fact, or the claim that you have previously "proved" this, and it is the reader's job to go and find, read, and agree with such "proof", if the claimed "proof" even exists.

We're wise to you, we've seen you here before...

Re: Can it just be delayed?

Yet, somehow, our current Home Sec. seems to have an actual law degree, and have worked as an actual lawyer, which goes to show something, I'm just not sure what.

Re: Can it just be delayed?

Grud alone knows what they'll find to replace Cruella with when she finally goes. Is Davros available?

Re: Subject Rights?

Profit, after taxes and shareholder dividends, minus IP licensing costs to the overseas parent holding company in the Bahamas. Rounded up, that's nought pounds and noughty-nought pence, please.

Re: Yay - yet more laws

Some of them, maybe, but you're more likely to find ones with an otherwise useless PPE degree, which tends to go hand-in-hand with former membership of the Bullingdon Club, and a school career at Harrow or Eton.

I'd say that having a Law degree goes some way towards proving the intelligence of the holder, but then there's Suella Braverman.

BOFH: Lies, damned lies, and standards

Re: This boss...

Not intelligent enough to walk away without asking questions.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

The result was often bug reports filled against product and/or docs, but we rarely had issues from customers.

And that, laydeeez and gennelmen, is an example of QA functioning as intended. It's to stop us devs from marking our own homework.

A QA tester like that is worth their weight in HP inkjet ink.

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

Re: Eh?

I use the troll icon, but still they bite...

Re: These people are idiots.

[citation required]

It's not quite like that, however. GDPR gives provisions for opting in to any data sharing you care to do, the main point here is that it is illegal to require it, or to make it opt-out. You might claim such consent is informed, but then you must be the only person who reads EULAs and has their lawyer give them the once over before agreeing to them.

Re: Eh?

Oh look, I garnered some down-votes during Russian working hours, but it looks like they're on a skeleton staff now...

Even if someone consents to you killing them, cutting off their genitals and eating them, for some reason it's still against the law.

It's a bit of an extreme example, but the general principle here is that criminal law supersedes civil law. It's a crime, even if you signed a contract saying it's okay.

Re: Eh?

And here I was thinking that Prigozhin had dismantled his troll farm. I guess the GRB are still on the job, promoting Russian interests in the West.

See, that's how you troll right-whingers like CJ.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

It's all Thunderbolt™ now...

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

Re: Blank coins

They all were (Dahl was the writer of Tales of the Unexpected). This one was apparently based on a conversation he had with Ian Fleming, and was also aired first as an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." That series predates me somewhat, so I'm more familiar with the TotU episode, although I have seen both, what with AHP being rebroadcast repeatedly on free-to-air commercial channels.

Re: Blank coins

It was an episode of Tales of the Unexpected, aptly named, "Lamb to the Slaughter," where the put-upon house-wife murders the husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then cooks and serves it to the policeman who turns up to investigate. Don't know why this reminded me of that...

That may well have been the real-life establishment that Fawlty Towers was purportedly based on.

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

That's why you only get 5 different ads, but shown to you 1000 times. By the second time, I'm irritated by it, by the 1000th time, I've vowed never to by the service/product and boycott any business based in the same country...

I exaggerate only mildly.

Ads in mobile games

The article mentions ads in mobile games. If my experience of these is anything to go by, it'll be the same set of four or five ads that get muted and skipped as soon as possible and make me vow to never, ever, ever, go anywhere near the cruddy app the ad is promoting. By not showing those ads, they'd probably improve the popularity of the thing they're advertising...

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Paris...

I picked some examples there of languages I know a little of - it may be I just find French easier because it was the first foreign tongue taught to me at school (and only one to any reasonable degree). My understanding is that Portuguese is more complex due to having both Latin and Arabic roots, and has more tense than many other languages, Finnish is unrelated to (almost?) any other living language, so on those grounds I'm assuming is hard to learn, as there is no common ground to start from, and although I don't know more than a trivial amount of Japanese, my wife is a reasonably serious student of Japanese, and apparently, the syntax is completely different to English, especially the word order in phrases, the writing system is, as you rightly say, horrific, actually being at least three different writing systems mixed up together (I believe there are Hiragana and Katakana, which are native to Japan, and Kanji which are borrowed symbols from Chinese)

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Indeed, historical dates are problematic, and are a completely different problem to the one most people will experience with differing representations of contemporary dates. There's a reason why SQL Server refuses to let you put a value before 1st January 1753 into a Datetime column, although the "conversion resulted in an out of range Datetime value" error is a little annoying, especially if you are moving data from another storage system that doesn't enforce this restriction, and end up having to do some extra data cleansing.

I would have thought that "deciphering what this historical document is actually saying" is a whole other category of problem, though. Figuring out dates is one problem, truthfulness is another; for example, it was once "accepted fact" that cynocephaloi* exist in Africa, and they appear in all sorts of manuscripts.

*I refuse to spell this cynocephali, it's a loan-word from Greek, and the plural is "-oi".

Re: Keyboard Confusion

That's the Windows key and the plus key, not the Windows key plus the . key, as the OP was suggesting. Confused? You will be...

En Seine, s'il vous plaît!

Re: Paris...

You think French is an elaborate language? Interesting. Try learning Portuguese, or Finnish, or Japanese, or indeed any language that doesn't share a good chunk of its vocabulary and syntax with your native tongue...

Experts scoff at UK Lords' suggestion that AI could one day make battlefield decisions

I'm not sure we shouldn't let an automated kill decision loose on politicians. Oh wait, wrong chat...

Re: Is it technically possible ?

Wait for the automated sentry gun to exhaust it's ammunition and then attack the humans through the suspended ceiling?

Re: Is it technically possible ?

It's technically feasible for an automated gun to shoot at a target, that isn't what is in question. Whether it is feasible to have the gun determine whether it *should* shoot the target is another matter. It is a perfectly reasonable argument that only the battlefield commander may know the context of that potential target, and know whether the gun should shoot it. Even then, if all information were known, a gun can't make a moral or ethical judgement on whether to shoot. It's arguable that humans can't either; certainly not correctly every time, with the benefit of hindsight.