Posts by Robin Bradshaw 404 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2007
Whats the betting that these drives will have an undocumented debug serial port that will allow recovery of the key/password if you have a level shifter cable and the correct magic incantations:
http://www.llamma.com/xbox/download/ST310014ACE%20unlocking%20tutorial%20english.pdf
A bit like the seagate drives in the xbox 1
Avoid the hassle of making the electronics and enjoy ready made software platform you can customise, all the hardware you need can can be got here for $350 + cost of radio modem:
http://chebuzz.com/paparazzi/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1
Just add styrofoam plane, pressure sensor for release control and a time lapse camera and your done, it should even glide back to the launch site if setup right.
Ok some of this isnt entirely applicable to the vulture1, especially as the airframe id choose for such a plane would be a cheap EPS foam model plane, however if you want some data logging, photo taking and possibly a return to home feature so you dont have to go looking for it after release you should really have a look at the open source paparazzi UAV project.
http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Main_Page
Basically all you need to build a GPS guided remote/autonomous UAV at very low cost. Whilst the radio link they use for telemetry wont work over the distance you are planning its a modular design and im sure a better link could be substituted if you wanted real time control, it would probably also be possible to have it set up to make its run autonomously and glide back to home base allowing you to retrieve the photos/video without the hassle of going looking for it.
The group behind this presented at the Chaos communications congress in 2007 and demonstrated controlling a UAV over the internet the video is very interesting and can be found here
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6900719579308461104
or on your favourite peer to peer network etc as is creative commons licensed.
Are there any mobile phones out there that will automatically upload every photo you take to somewhere like flickr or your own media server at home or some such setup.
Then even if the cops smash your phone and steal your memory card you still have all your photo's?
Widespread adoption of such "backup" solutions would render the police tactic of trying to steal the phone moot.
It looks like despite the polices best efforts to ban all photographic/video recording in public someone did manage to video the assault on the man who died of a heart attack at the G20 summit, the video is available on the guardian website here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/07/video-g20-police-assault
You can send complaints about websites directly to the ACMA from their website here:
http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_90102
Aparently you are supposed to be an australian in order to rais a complaint but thats just a piffleing detail.
Aparently banned subjects are the following:
"Any online content that is classified RC* or X 18+* by the Classification Board (formerly the Office of Film and Literature Classification). This includes real depictions of actual sexual activity, child pornography, depictions of bestiality, material containing excessive violence or sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use, and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act."
Who is going to be first to complain about google, I bet you can find most of that there.
Am I the only one who thing the court have got their definition of publish a bit backwards resulting in a somewhat odd ruling.
From my point of view something is "published" on the internet at the point it is uploaded to the server and becomes available for anyone to read.
So yes re-publishing a libelous newspaper story on the internet may well make them liable to another libel action but only for that one publication (Ie the upload to the server) not everytime someone acceses that article on the website.
If their definition of publish wasnt so backwards the ruling would make sense.
Paris because even she isnt that backwards
Once foil lined taser-proof clothing becomes the fashion item to have this will all be a moot point, you'll just end up with an image of the foil lining.
I hope that if these machines become standard el reg will update its line of T-shirts to include metallic slogans that only show up on terrahertz scans :)
If your really posh you'll be able to afford a meta-material coat of terrahertz invisibility, that should really confuse the operators.
The health protection agency seem to have stumbled upon the reason why CFL lights are so crap at lighting up a room, they dump their energy into the room as UV light.
Perhaps some enterprising boffin could develop some sort of coating for the inside of the tubes that captures the UV radiation and re-radiates it in the visible spectrum (maybe some sort of phosphor based stuff would do it) then the lights might actually light up and work.
In other shock news a large range of cheap shoddily made chinese tat has been found to not work particularly well when compared to similar items that have had a little more care in their design and manufacture.
Why not just scrap termination fees and mandate that telecoms providers must terminate incoming calls, they can make their money from the fees they charge for outgoing calls.
A bit like the Severn bridge, instead of paying £2.50 each way they charge you £5 going into Wales and free to leave.
Unless all of the users of your network don't make calls you will still make your money, How asymmetric is the usage of mobile networks?
The basic problem with RFID is it was never intended to be secure, It was initally planned to be a radio barcode so it had no security features at all, ill it did was respond to its ID number and maybe send back a few hundred bytes of data, the reason for this simplicity is that it is constrained by the available power (it has to run on energy from the radio waves) and the cost of silicon.
So in essence it didn't do anything more than you could do with a sticker and pen, just stick a label on a box marked "box number 987654321, contents 100 pairs of socks, black" the information the chip was meant to hold was as secret as the label on the box.
Then when company's tried to move this technology into new areas they ran up against problems when they tried to store sensitive data on the chips, the chips were too small and to power starved to do any sensible sort of cryptography.
This is a problem and potentially more so than with paper tickets or banknotes, whilst the effort to break the security might be quite high once it is done it can be repeated for very little cost, as an example of this look at modchips for consoles, the first few revisions of the nintendo Wii could be chipped for a total cost of about £10, appx 90p for the blank pic chip and the rest to make a programmer, at least with a ticket or banknote the equipment to create a reasonable forgery still has a fairly high cost of entry, with electronics the equipment is always cheap so a hack can go from a small nuisance to out of control very quickly.
"yes termination fees are mentioned but in no way is Ofcom saying that it believes that everyone should pay for incoming calls and this takes up only a very, very small part of the document."
It may only be a tiny part of the document but then true evil doesnt always come in large well defined sections of highly publicised documents, the evil doers like to sneak it in without anyone noticing you see.
Termination fees are the best ways i can think of to ruin the mobile market.
Just equip the army with X0-1 laptops from one laptop per child, they can create adhoc wireless networks, they run on batterys and can be carried by a small malnourished child.
Or they could take lots and lots and lots of twin core cable with them to war and spool it out behind them as they go then use old field telephones at either end you wind the handle and the phone at the other end rings (as a bonus you can clip the phone to an insurgent genitals and crank the handle to administer a mild tasering)
How could they get it so wrong, In the time they have been faffing with this system nokia has gone from an almost unknown company to the biggest provider of digital communications devices in the world and has created, sold and retired many models of phone and added all manner of bells and whistles in the process.
Imagine if the military tried to do satnav they would all turn up in iraq only to find out they only had maps of croydon.
I have the solution for this, its not particularly difficult given that as a species we have already succeeded in using uranium for power.
What you do is this, You fire slow neutrons at thorium, the thorium captures a neutron and become uranium 233, then use the uranium to make heat and more neutrons for the thorium, all the uranium you could possibly want and more.
Whilst there are technological hurdles to this they arent the problem, the problems are a lack of political will, If we managed to make uranium reactors some 50 odd years ago we can make a thorium breeder reactor now.
How this for an idea, take the money the government are planning on pissing away on a national identity database and communications database and use it to research and build a thorium breeder reactor and once it work build lots more, lots of electric and no dead bats, its all good I tell you.
"Yezza and Sabir were originally released after the Police had not found enough evidence to ascertain that either was likely to use the manual for a terrorist purpose."
So it took the police 6 days to find out the manual came from the US department of defences public website and had had all the naughty bits redacted?
This law is so shot through with problems, the first being that our public library's are full of information "likely to be of use to a terrorist" that is such a wooly definition that it can be applied to almost anything from google earth to the highway code (lets face it you don't want to get pulled driving a lorry bomb because of a driving offence)
"This involved checking their social acquaintances, internet activities and background."
Since they had been arrested for suspicion of the offence of possessing information likely to be of use to a terrorist all the police had to do was find out if they had good reason for possessing this information, if they did there's no offence and they should be released, it doesn't take 6 days to ask why were you printing this? and make a few phone calls to confirm the given reason.
Wooooohooooo! We can have ourselves a good old fashioned book burning. I suggest we postpone this till the 10th of May next year though, as that has traditionally been the day to burn "bad" books.
Instead of worrying what people of the UK are reading the government should be rejoicing that the people of the UK are reading anything at all.
My money is on the first things to be burnt are all references to nu labours monumental cockups.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071801912_pf.html
Oooops! Seems the washington post managed to scoop the defcon team, and if their description of the hack is correct it was done in a way more ghetto way than cloning cards with a magstripe reader, respect for that, if its true:
"Thieves took a legitimate paper Farecard with $40 in value, sliced the card's magnetic strip into four lengthwise pieces, and then reattached one piece each to four separate defunct paper Farecards. The thieves then took the doctored Farecards to a Farecard machine and added fare, typically a nickel. By doing so, the doctored Farecard would go into the machine and a legitimate Farecard with the new value, $40.05, would come out."
It would appear that that is basically the substance of the defcon talk, and the bit about mifare vulnerabilities appears to be mostly theoretical based on the recent mifare flaws.
Since all of this information is already public domain taking the speakers to court has only had the effect of publicising the flaws more widely than would otherwise have happened, if the transit authority had kept quiet then some geeks would have known of the problem, now the world+dog knows.
Paris because even she knows you cant put the genie back in the bottle
"The problem arose from the cross contamination because one lab did all the testing. However if they were only loading the DNA into a computer then the only risk of cross contamination is from the techs own DNA."
Are you sure? Cross contamination would cover contamination of any sample of DNA by any other sample of DNA, that would be the Lab workers DNA or any of the samples being tested, given that the labs dont do one DNA test then spent the rest of the day decontaminating the lab there is a risk that when "loading your DNA into the database" it could be contaminated by the evil crims DNA they tested just before yours creating an odd hybrid profile for you that could get you arrested for crimes you did not commit.
The fallacy of your assumption is that what is in the database is correct and only samples from crime scenes could be wrong, but contamination could mean that both could be wrong.
Are MP's aware the internet traverses the entire planet? and the content you are viewing might not be hosted within your country's jurisdiction? So potentially there may be bugger all they can do about it, except disconnect the UK from the internet.
I know lets just ban children from using the internet, it has a greater chance of success.
Paris cause even she is smarter than an MP
And the magic of tubes is if you make them really really strong and ramp up the pressure you can pump enormous amounts of crap into gigantic buckets, a bit like fibre to the home.
Porn at lightspeed! Its the way of the future, a very long way into the future if BT has anything to do with it.
Im sure this will cause a storm in a teacup and eventually end in legislation to stop it, weve already had the obligatory think about the children post:
"Or do you want your gaff blown up by some numpty who failed his chemistry o-level brewing up bio-diesel next to you kids' playroom?"
I salute this man for demonstrating the acceptance of personal risk, There are far too many people who wish to hand all responsibility for their safety to the government and absolve themselves of responsibility. What happened to this country pioneering spirit where people were free to kill themselves because they were responsible for their own actions.
Of course the really cheap way to make biodiesel is to buy a old wreck of a diesel car for a couple hundred pounds, strain the lumps out of the veg oil and run a mix of veg oil and real diesel, even if it eventually wrecks the engine the money saved in fuel is more than enough to pay for the old heap of a car.
Unless they are going to require kids to verify their age before firing up their favourite P2P client and categorise torrents with age restrictions then its is just a new form of DRM to annoy potential customers with.
Who cares if kids are paying to download unsuitable material from online content sellers, Just rejoice in the fact they are paying for it and not stealing it.
How many people are going to find themselves faced with having to fill in some extra stuff when they order and jump through some additional hoops and just think sod it ill grab it off usenet/bittorrent/FTP site/get a copy off a mate?
If I hadn't read the background behind the site on here first I would have assumed it was a clip form a new comedy/science show, "Dom Jolly does chemistry"
I just wonder how long it will be before all those involved are arrested and detained for 42 days for aiding terrorists by showing how chemicals can go bang.
Unless your washing machine is so old you have to crank it by hand it will be a cold feed machine.
These machines only have one water inlet hose which you connect to the cold water pipe, the water is heated entirely by the electric heater within the washing machine.
I believe this is partly due to the fact washing machines are designed to not waste water so they dont really draw enough water for the hot water to make it through to the machine (the stuff in the pipes will be cold)
It is therefore simpler to just fill with cold water and heat it with leccy.
Mines the anorak
If you fancy having a go at building your own GPS guided UAV have a look at the paparazzi website here:
http://paparazzi.enac.fr/
A rough estimate it would cost you somewhere in the region of £600ish to build one.
There is also a video on google of a talk the paparazzi development team gave at the 23rd chaos communications congress demonstrating its capability's you can watch here:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6900719579308461104&hl=en
It definitely on my wishlist for when I have some spare money to waste :)
The subject of the security of mifare cards grabbed my interest after I watched the presentation at the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress on Mifare security.
The video of this presentation can be found on Google video here:
http://tinyurl.com/5ph496
There is also a short video discussing the wider problems this discovery causes rather than just the technical aspects of it here:
http://tinyurl.com/5p7zbx
They are well worth watching.
Grisoft, the makers of AVG anti virus, were right.
Their linkscanner software that attempts to download the entire internet and scan it for viri/trojans/other malware is obviously what we need to hide our browsing amongst the massive volume of downloading that linkscanner does.
Huzzah for AVG unintentionally making the internet safe from phorm
Following hot on the heels of the "invisible shed" boffins in spain have unveiled their plans for a "shed of silence" which warps acoustic waves around itself making it invisible to sonar. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7450321.stm
Once this is perfected the use of sonar by the military will be obsolete as all the submarines will be protected by their own shed of silence and sonar will only serve as a means of giving away your position.
Rumours the mericans are thinking of combing the shed of silence with the invisible shed to create a prison in cuba you cant see and cant hear the inmates screaming cant be confirmed, due to the evidence being invisible and silent.
"one in five jobs in data and network cabling go unfilled, a shortfall representing 61,000 jobs in the UK alone."
There is a reason for this shortfall, and it isnt a lack of skills in stringing cable round a building, its because its a comparatively low paid job that involves working all round the country, think sky installer rather than system administrator.
Basic job requirements being things like being small enough to crawl through conduits with a string tied to your belt and ability to drill holes in walls.
Don't get me wrong, I think its a great idea to try to offer training to people in prison, with a view to getting them back into society in productive jobs. But to all the daily mail readers wailing about not getting training for free this isn't exactly putting them through a degree, its a 70 hour course, so what, 2 weeks of 7 hours a day on how to pull cable and crimp connectors.
You too can probably get a job like this by just checking at local employment agency's or asking you local cabling company for a job., but since you are reading the register I'm assuming you already have a better job than this.
Forget the porn he had mp3's on his site, send him to guantanmo for copyright violations. We all know pirate music is the worst crime on earth.
Oh and where are the pictures, the thought of a woman painted as cows intrigues me , even if she was just painted as a cow that makes it a must see photo.
I cant help wonder if this will work.
For the AV vendors this will be like the holy grail of trojans.
I imagine they will be falling over themselves to capture this from the wild and analyse it just to prove how they are the best anti virus vendor in the world and once the signature of it is out there the stasi may as well just send an email telling the subject they are under surveillance and could they please email any incriminating information back to them.
I just hope the stasi also monitor all German emails for keywords, it would be much good sport registering a few German webmail accounts and sending dodgy emails between them ("Gunther have you received the castor beans" "yes Fritz and we are beginning ricin production immediately" etc etc) to see if you can provoke them into sending you the trojan.
Trojans gotta catch them all.
"but the one that bit her so badly she needed stitches a few months ago was a Westie."
Westies are evil little critters, they are ony suitable for making slippers out of.
On a more serious note, There is a problem with the idea of mandatory chipping.
It would be relatively easy to enforce mandatory chipping if dogs were like consumer electronics all being churned out of relatively few factorys that are easy to inspect and control. Howerver dogs have the odd property of being capable of self replication, at least they do when you keep both versions of a given model of dog together, this property makes it quite difficult to regulate the production of dogs.
Compare with the production of games consoles, Imagine all consoles had to be serialised and the details of the purchaser recorded, simple enough to do at the point of purchase, but if you could put 2 consoles side by side and they would, over the course of a few weeks, produce a third unserialised console the whole system becomes alot more difficult to enforce.
Im all for chipping of animals as it makes them easy to identify and if my cat were to go missing i know the chip will increase the likelyhood of my being reunited with him. However mandatory chipping of animals will do nothing to stop the breeding and illegal fighting of dogs, since the people who are running dog fights obviously dont care about the law. So i doubt they will be worried about not chipping their dogs.
Paris - cause shes a ...
Im not entirely sure if it was my comment you were commenting or or just this story in general, but what I was trying to get across was that while section 82 of the criminal justice and police act gives rights the police to keep and use fingerprints and samples to prevent and detect crime, it does so with restrictions, that is among other things the prints or samples have to be taken in the course of an investigation to a crime for them to be legally kept.
To me at least it seems the judge has made the decision that photos are a sample so they can be kept and processed, however in making this leap he seems to have extended the rights to cover photos without also extending the restrictions that go with those rights.
If they had fingerprinted him on the street, since they were there incase of trouble rather than investigating a crime, they wouldnt be allowed to keep or process the fingerprints.
Im sure its different in the legal world but to me it seems if you are going to infer a right from existing legislation the restrictions should also go with it.
If you had also extend the restrictions, then the police may still have had the right to take the photos as they are in public, but they would not have had the right to keep or process them into crib sheets :
http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/8584/cribdh7.jpg (Mark Thomas is H)
for who to go after at legal demonstrations.
That picture is a screen grab for the excellent film "Taking Liberties" about labours errosion of civil liberties since they came to power.
"The judge ruled that the taking of the photos did not infringe Woods' rights, and that the retention of the photos could not be considered an interference if DNA samples, a much more personal record of identity than a photograph, could be lawfully retained."
So because of one poor bit of law (the fact the police can take and retain your DNA even if you are innocent of any wrongdoing) it follows that they can keep your photo on record to produce crib sheets of known protesters?
I believe that by making this leap of logic the judge has ignored the wording of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, which is the act that makes it legal for the police to retain fingerprints and samples.
The relevant bit of that act (section 82) is:
------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) Section 64 of the 1984 Act (destruction of fingerprints and samples) shall be amended as follows.
(2) For subsections (1) and (2) (obligation to destroy fingerprints and samples of persons who are not prosecuted or who are cleared) there shall be substituted—
“(1A) Where—
(a) fingerprints or samples are taken from a person in connection with the investigation of an offence, and
(b) subsection (3) below does not require them to be destroyed,
the fingerprints or samples may be retained after they have fulfilled the purposes for which they were taken but shall not be used by any person except for purposes related to the prevention or detection of crime, the investigation of an offence or the conduct of a prosecution.
-------------------------------------------------------------
So the police may be able to keep fingerprints and samples "where fingerprints or samples are taken from a person in connection with the investigation of an offence"
So assumung the judge intended a photograph to fall within the scope of a sample what offence were the police investigating when they photographed the arms protester?
I suggest that since no offence was being investigated the police have no more right to keep his photograph than they would to retain his fingerprints or DNA if they had been taken in the same circumstances.
To go off topic I have been wondering if wearing a cap with high power infrared LED's on the peak of it would mess up photos or video taken by the police in such circumstances, I think it should work with video cameras but digital cameras might have an IR filter in them.
Black helicopter because the jack booted thugs are getting stronger by the day
Using the bios password to secure data is a really bad idea, your average end user is crap at rembering passwords so more often than not bios passwords are only effective at locking the owner out of there own machine.
This is usually followed by the user phoning tech support for the machine and becoming apoplectic after being told how much a password reset will cost.
So they then set about finding someone who will hack the password for them for less than the fee tech support charge.
This ensures that there is a market for hacking laptops and at the same time ensures that laptop passwords are innefective.
Even the ATA passwords on hard drives arent totally effective, certainly the drives used in the xbox could have the password bypassed:
http://www.llamma.com/xbox/Unlocking%20Seagate%20Xbox%20Hard%20Drive.htm
I guess theres no real answer to security when the end user is the problem, but perhaps having a remote keyfob to activate your laptop (like the one for your cars alarm/immobiliser) would improve things, its easy for someone to forget a password, but they are less likely to loose a fob on the same keyring as there car keys.
"The European Criminal Records Information System will set out the technical specifications so that police can get easy-to-use records from forces in other countries."
You just know this will end up with them printing the requested criminal records off and popping them in the post after the software to allow interchange comes in 5 times over budget and still doesnt work.
The upgrade will be to fax them then send the hardcopy in the post.
"I think I'd rather have a Goverment that knows everything about everyone rather than a Government knowing nothing and my friends and family not returning home one day."
Alpy I dont think you understand how opressive regimes work.
When the goverment know nothing you are free to go about your business and be content in the knowledge that you, your family and friend are safe and will return home when you wish to.
When the government knows everything is when people start dissapearing because they dont agree some aspect of the opressive regime.
The law that caused all this problem is absolute bollocks, of the sort that only a politician can manage.
If being in posession of knowledge that could be useful to a terrorist is illegal then you need to round up everyone with an A level in chemistry, anyone with a train timetable, and youd better shut all the public librarys as they have a wealth of information you could use for evil.
I wonder how long before they come for me because I have a copy of "the art of war" by Sun Tzu - the ancient chinese version of the Al Qaeda^H^H^H Mujahideen training manual.
You can no more ban knowledge useful to a terrorist than you can legislate against the tide coming in, its been a while but I assume they still teach redox chemistry in science class at school? Perhaps they should ban rugby, that teaches you to avoid being tackled to the ground while carying an object (be it a ball or a bomb) to your intended target (be it the try line or target) although admittedly it doesnt teach you to avoid being shot in the head for having a suntan.
Still theres light at the end of the tunnel, once the lethal skunk smoking hoodie wearing yoofs realise that knowledge of chemistry is illegal and subversive they will likely pay more attention in science class.
It makes me ashamed to be British.
From the summary of the court case section 42:
"None of this is intended to suggest that the disclosure of an individual's private address under FOIA does not require justification. In the present case, however, there was a legitimate public interest well capable of providing such justification. Thus, for example, there is evidence which suggests that one MP claimed ACA for a property which did not exist, and yet further evidence may demonstrate that on occasions MPs claiming ACA were letting out the accommodation procured from the ACA allowance."
Intriguing it would appear that at least on MP is going to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
I cant wait :)
I declare your playmobil porn illegal, not only does it depict a depraved non consensual act but the large stick could potentially cause serious anal damage and with a dog thrown in for good measure that's bestiality too.
Consider yourselves under arrest and go and report to your nearest police station.
Its a good job mifare the technology underpinning the oyster system has been broken, before long i suspect it will be possible and relatively easy to snarf someone elses oystercard data (laptop and reader in a bag then spend a day on the tube in close proximity it people with oyster cards in their pockets) then you will be free to travel as someone else (and run up a bill on their tab)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
