Posts by Mike Hocker

Bio-boffins create world's first digital STD

some assembly required

"You don't really understand how something works until you can reproduce it yourself,"

Actually, reverse engineer it yourself. Sort of. Except they don't understand now all the little pieces work, or the cell wall all that well, and sort of ignored the information in the intracellular space, and.... but still, what was done is more than existed before.

Better than the syntho life wankers who completely ignore the cell wall as being trivial and immutable, you know, of the same ilk that claimed that the "junk" DNA never does anything.

Anyone who has done any firmware knows that it is that little piece you don't understand that will always byte you in the arse, or in their case, a chomp in a pubic place.

German education minister accused of copying in class

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Now, you just hire a cheap faceless Mechanical Turk on Amazon to rewrite the passage, put it through a plagiarism tester (since, you probably are too lazy to compare it yourself) to see if they did a good job, then publish.

Maybe there will be software to do the same rewrite sometime, but not yet (arms race alert! Plagiarism testers vs. plagiarism masking software!).

Indeed, the only ones that are caught now are those that cheated decades ago (before the new tech) and the ones that have not caught the new tech wave to obfuscate the pinched work.... and of course the ones that did the rewrite themselves the old fashioned time honored centuries old way, only keeping the key ideas and rebranding the ideas as their own.

How to go from the IT dept to being a rogue trader

Perfect Code

Spot on. I knew a bloke who wrote darn near perfect error free code. Of course, that meant it was viewed as easy to do and he wasn't going anywhere-- so he eventually left the company.

A further hint for rogues:

Good enough quick enough to meet schedules gets you further, even better if all the software is "self documenting" with just a few comments to jog your own memory when inevitable changes or fixes are needed. Never remove dead code. You'll remember it is zombie, but anyone else trying to figure it out will have no idea what the mystery code does and will fear to touch it. Don't update section comments either-- if anyone wonders why the comments don't match the code, it is because of "time pressure" when some change was made, or perhaps an oversight (be apologetic, since whoever is asking obviously has a least a semblance of a clue and is therefore useful and needs to be suborned).

Malware burrows deep into computer BIOS to escape AV

TPM

Is it time to actually implement real TCG TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in a systematic way yet? Sadly, even three letter American and UK agency machines are shielded only by security through obscurity though they are trying to improve the situation.

(it won't help anyone in China though, the Chincom government apparently does not allow the use of TPM, way too subversive and way too conducive to "social unrest" (nightmare bugaboo of bureaucrats in the middle kingdom...)).

Unisys gets 'stealthy' with secure virtual terminal

EAL4+

NSA's internal networks only run EAL4+? Criminy, here I thought they had some premier uber security....

'Indestructible' rootkit enslaves 4.5m PCs in 3 months

Phagekit

Or why not install a low level driver (a phagekit if you will) of your own, such that TDSS identifies a key piece of itself for destruction.... if the piece is system unique (i.e., only critical for TDSS and not for WinCrap/FanBois/Nix) it would be a lead bullet solution (leaves dead bodies around, vs. silver bullet when everything is pristine afterwards). Of course the response by TDSS drones would be to locate TDSS somewhere critical so the phage becomes fatal... but at least you aren't infected anymore!

Or have TDSS add its own control servers to its own blacklist... always a busy signal.

Iron-on armpit BO stench-filters 'ideal for modern lifestyle'

Warboffinry?

Or is that Warbuffoonery? Or maybe Warboffinbuffoonery? The Taliban can tell a westerner close up, since the westerner doesn't stink!

My hospital HAL - Google man moots syringe that says no

The Future is Already Here

In large practices they already won't permit 'off label' use of meds or procedures. So the physicians are merely robots following scripts... just hasn't been fully automated yet.

The point is that while one view is 'we must prevent errors by slavishly following protocols' another view is that 'slavishly following protocols can result in real injuries' since all humans deviate slightly from one another.

Italian Job sat nav driver cops £900 fine

Too narrow for a horse?

But wide enough for a BMW?

Yob said: "so precarious that he would not, as a general rule, take his own horses down because it was so narrow".

Seems like the driver got a bridle path haircut by the locals, who are now undoubtedly celebrating in the local pub.

US women protest for the right to bare

Go To Pless ?

Why name a web site go to pless (.com)? Is Pless some kind of special beach for those desiring to luxuriate in the lack of garments? Maybe I've been writing too much dodgy firmware recently, need a breath of fresh air?

Crystal ball torches woman's flat

RoHS

If that was a lead crystal ball it is not RoHS... lead crystal might look nice, but everyone knows the only real crystal balls are made of quartz.

US Stealth bombers may get nuke-bunker nobbler for 2010

Reactive Ground Armor

So now the bunkers will need reactive surface armor plus interceptors-- presuming the big bomb isn't very well stealthed, and of course you know pretty much its target so the cone of target acquisition is pretty small so even the Iranians could make a go of producing an interceptor missile.

The only thing the bunker owner probably doesn't know with much accuracy is when the supersonic delivery will be made.

GPS-guided wreckers flatten wrong house

Tat Bazaar

The noobs probably stripped out everything portable of value to sell on the tat bazaar before flatlining the place. Maybe the owner ought to check to see if Ma's heirlooms have popped up yet.

eBay driving world's tomb raiders out of business, says prof

You only need a fake...

... that is good enough to fool your friends.

Although I have to agree at this point, no one would believe it was real even if it was!

Homer Simpson 'nuclear waste spill' panic at nuke sub base!

New Age Blokes

At first I thought he was talking about Real Luminous Dial Watches, you know, the ones with radium.

You have to be careful with these watches, since they will trip the nuclear-terrorist-detector-sensors in many places... but they do make excellent mother in law gifts.

Newfangled rootkits survive hard disk wiping

All those PCI cards

Some of which have BIOS extensions on flash, and some are writable. Cheap used mobo's, PCI cards, PCs themselves refurb'd by Johnny Botmaster....think about that the next time you buy used kit on the world's tat bazaar!

Oz bloke in underpants wrestles 'lunatic ninja' roo

Marsupial Outrage

Livetrapped a opossum once (they are carriers of EPM), put the cage in the bed of the truck, drove to work and opened the cage door (trap was a bit bloodied from trying to chew its way out), dropped the tailgate and the critter was gone 12hr later when I left work.

What is the problem with the story? Well, the working 12hr a day part!! Mines the one with a fanny pack full of provigil....

Pay cut consultations could trigger redundancy payments

Slash and Burn

The concept of reduced pay to preserve people working is seductive, but as has been pointed out the issue is that the pay never recovers. A better potential solution is to pay 20% less, but require 20% less work. This also doesn't really work, since the workload is not reduced, and if you can do 100% of your work in 80% of the time, you should be made redundant for being a slacker and gold bricker.

Interestingly, few if any companies realize how to run efficiently. The problem is the cruft processes that build up. If white collar workers are laid off, not all the processes can any longer be managed -- so some processes are discarded. Hello? Why were these wasteful processes still being done if they clearly were unnecessary as demonstrated by the process disappearance after a layoff? If management was more than a pack of dullards they would realize that processes should be actively pruned and the spare work hours put to good use improving products and increasing sales, or doing whatever it is that makes your work valuable to someone else.

The incompetence of the world's industry is astonishing (and we won't even touch the government, where an empire of useless processes is the preferred method for increasing one's pay).

MS warns testers to activate Windows 7 beta

Malware

"We looked at this some time ago and found that many sites that offer or claim to offer hack tools will try pretty aggressively to infect systems that connect to them with malware"

So if I try to connect without malware, I'm OK?

Regardless, if the objects containing Win7 are hashed out OK, then it is just the drive by infections that are an issue. So, use a live Linux CD and verify the hash of Win7....

GM Volt to get regular software-style updates

AWD vs. 4WD

4WD isn't going to force your car off the road into a ditch even in ice and light snow. If the user has a locking front differential, the story is considerably different-- but there are no production consumer cars or trucks with that particular feature (nice to have ARB front and rear lockers off road though).

With insurance rates the way they are, one car needs to do it all, and without AWD or 4WD it isn't going to make it in snow climates except for those rich types who can afford multiple vehicles.

And it is a pity GM is working on the Volt, maybe we need an open platform concept like the Borg from Google (comes with a free Android!).

NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution

Rubber Hose

Of course the NSA already has the source code, via the usual rubber hose / bribery / black mail technique. So does the FSB and the BND and .... probably only cost them a few minutes of the yearly budget. Why pay the CEO when the underpaid programmer will happily sell out for a fraction of a CEO?

The real problem (as mentioned) is finding the P2P call itself in the internet data stream. This is where a bit more skullduggery is needed and assistance [probably past tense] from at least a small group of the development programming staff, to embed a recognizable symbol string that can be picked off by one of the servers in the path (and ideally also weakening the encryption [also of course past tense] in non-obvious ways if the encryption is any good to start with).

Exploding core counts: Heading for the buffers

Cores Cores and More Cores!

Cores bobbing in a sea of memory.

Cores are becoming cheap like cycles. When there are thousands of them, the cores can be allocated to tasks rather than swapped to tasks. This is a valid paradigm when cores become essentially free, like cycles are for the typical PC user (if you ever look at the idle process, it is usually 99% for Joe PCUser).

A lot of businesses obsess about using every last cycle and core and wire under the floor, but really the objective is to maximize profit... which is not the same thing at all. But people think it is and support their mortgages by such a belief, so there it is.

US teen clocks up 14,528 text messages

Scheduling

If you think about it, SMS, IM, and email have the sterling advantage of not preempting ongoing processes like a phone call does. If you phone someone, they have to interrupt what they are doing to service your interrupt, and in the worst case you get the hoary old OS problem of thrashing from insufficient time to context switch.

Indeed, a lot of you all probably IM or text first before calling, to make arrangements to call w/o causing as much disruption (and/or to find out which number to call of the several almost everyone has). Or you would if you if you were a decent human and with the program.

All this talk of texting means great sales for those cell phone repeaters that sell for quite a bit of money, I can imagine the withdrawal symptoms of persons that find themselves in a house that has poor cell reception.... a house with a dusty antediluvian rotary, an old boob, and only a cat to talk to.

VeriSign remedies massive SSL blunder (kinda, sorta)

Near Worthless Certs

Last time I read the "I Agree" license from VeriSign, they basically said the cert was only worth what was paid for it if anything went wrong. Actually, the license is much worse, but that is a digression.

So what do they care if MD5 is used and customers lose vast sums, the cert issuer only loses the cost of the cert. There isn't much incentive to fix the problem until enough bad PR shows up.

I agree that the browsers should just reject MD5 based certs, or at least have a message popup that says 'site xyz is using a weak spoofable cert do you really want to business with clueless losers?'

US doc demands $1.5m for donated organ

What?

Isn't that supposed to be half pissed off? He only has one kidney left after all.... can't get the full sustained volume up like he used to.

Yes, I'm going now.

Raid yields 2800 'illegal' DS games copying kits

Encryption?

Two years of records? Never heard of encryption of records eh? You just can't trust your illegal sales channels to keep your identity secret-- what is the world coming to.

This sounds like a small fry, importing Chinese copying devices without being very intelligent. Just the seller on the end, till the manufacturer back in the homeland is suppressed rotsa ruck stopping the flow.

Chip boffins hone silicon-brain interface

Eternal Life

What the pikeys don't realize, is that by expanding thought processes beyond the bony confines of one's skull into silicon space permits a functional definition of eternal life (or maybe borg life, take your pick).

The idea is that more and more of one's thought processes are 'in silico' with only an anchor in the old organic wet part. If the wet part starts to fail, you add another shiny new wet part and gradually grow into that one, eventually discarding the old decrepit wet component. Voila' one can theoretically continue the stream of conscioness forever-- or at least till the next asteroid strike or bankruptcy proceeding.

The concept of retaining the wet part is partly due to the effects that are poorly understood in the way the wet brain works. With enough silicon, one could presumably emulate the wet part, although that appears beyond the near term state of the art (even more so as resource starvation slows research).

Of course, one could simply discard the old wet organic part altogether, but is one then human anymore, or a new evolved form silico sapiens?

Wikipedia self-flagellates over vanishing 'farmsex'

Forever?

It is hardly forever if there are logs.... or someone who cached the information.

Forever is when there are no witnesses, logs, cached information, or anything left. This is hard to do on the iNet while the black helicopter boys are vacuuming up information and saving it for a rainy day. Anyone expecting oversight to be permanent is a wikignorant wikidiot.

IBM chief talks change, and a little politics

Leadership

Palmisano is one of the few CEOs that actually seems to think, instead of floating to the top using just the Peter Principle.

High-speed train toilet attempts to eat Frenchman

RoTM?

Back in the old days when dinosaurs lounged about, RoTM stood for "Rise of The Mammals". No one then believed in RoTM, or the T100 Exterminator...

And look what happened to the dinosaurs! Alligator steaks and snakeskin boots anyone?

Security vendors cry foul over exploit tests

The Freebie PSI-Secunia Product

Actually works fairly well if you want to find out which of your installed apps is outdated for patches. It runs too often in my opinion though, 1x/24hr should be enough but I understand why they run more often.

Many people don't see the elephant in the room-- when your application is auto-updated, how do you know the auto update is valid? Eh? Crack one update path to millions of copies of one app and you would be the instant hairy chested king of the bot herders!

Layoffs, boardroom reshuffles at Tesla Motors

Where does Musk get the Time?

to run Tesla between exploding rockets. Or maybe that is why they explode so often, not enough musk to go 'round?

The Roadster anyway is just a snap together, body from Europe, batteries from Japan, tires from somewhere else.... guess they only need 100 people to run the place and assemble the occasional car. Of course production reduction might not bode well for UK or Japanese suppliers...

Supersonic bizjets could have windowless flight decks

Reliability

How many passengers check before boarding to make sure the wings are securely duct taped to the fuselage? Well, they don't generally think about it since other failure mechanisms are higher than the duct tape failure rate.

The whole thing is about system reliability, when having a meat pilot causes more crashes than having a computer pilot, people will refuse to board planes with only an unreliable meat pilot.

Ballmer backs away from 'Vista Capable' legal row

Pejury?

...under penalty of pejury... ?

Is this the pre-Release Vista Capable version of perjury?

US House throttles citizen emails

Who is running their servers?

Really, the various markets had titanic increases in volume and they did not say "do your trade later, we're too busy now". Even the clearing houses managed to complete their work before markets opened the next day.

Maybe Congress should hire someone that has capacity on demand or whatever they call it now.

At least they aren't resorting to the tried and true paper letters (aren't they all lawyers that live on paper?). Save a tree, it is much greener to shred your emails than to shred your letters.

What's the cost of global warming?

100 year horizon??

Going back a bit over 100 years, people were worried about the future depth of horse manure in New York City wth the population increasing.

Well, it did not happen, technology intervened.

Presuming that tomorrow will be like yesterday might be all well and good for a model, but it beggars reality. Presuming that today's tech will still be used 100 years from now-- or even that humans are similar to humans now-- is an unrealistic modelling scenario. Why bother wasting the energy on the futile exercise?

The worst part is, bureaucrats are trying to use the bogus models to stifle development to accomplish a goal that only works if technological advance is also crushed. Hopefully, the meek shall inherit the Earth while the rest of us inherit the Universe!

New Yorkers to pay for RFID in driving licences

Puppies

Well, the number will cause a picture to pop up on the agent's screen (this could even be automated picture match) of the reputed license holder.

For a bit more cash, the buyer could get a 'vanity' number: when they go through, the wall screen (paid for with their dollars!) will light up with puppies, or save the whales, or some steroid toking "athlete" or some such. Of course the agent still gets the mug of the license holder.

Now that banks have imploded in NY and the gov is losing all that tax revenue, they need every dime they can get. Vanity RFID numbers... surprised EZPass hasn't tried it.

Why the US faces broadband price hikes

Satellite already throttles

Satellite links already throttle after a certain number of MB/unit time of use (i.e., try downloading a Linux distro on satellite and be prepared to wait all night, but UBoob works fine if the link isn't throttled yet).

Of course, the geosync latency kills any hope of using VOIP.

Throttling is better than a cap-- any punter using Tor will quickly quash the bugger app themselves, once they discover the 30Kb/s rate they gradually throttle down to, and the 30-600 minute "recovery time" to full speed (clearly spelled out in the contract of course). This method avoids any unseemly wallet raids by the ISP if the somewhat arbitrary cap is exceeded (900GB in Japan? Must be nice to be in a 1st world country...).

Hijacking huge chunks of the internet - a new How To

Mother of All Botnets

Hijack the path for applying updates to (name your application) as described for a variation of the recently described DNS flaw. How many people would have a clue about what is going on? Even running EtherReal/brouter and observing the traffic the tainting would be very hard to observe until the malware activated and did something stupid like trying to phone home to an alien IP address (it could hypothetically phone to a hijacked regular banner spam address and not be noticed if the hijacking lived long enough.).

An excellent attack vector for the black helo boyz, remote implantation of spyware... with a rubber hose they can hijack a DNS, and with the same rubber hose a cert for a convenient SBGP gateway (did anyone notice how infrequently SBGP changes certs? Same attack vector as for the old nym servers, don't need a rubber hose though, just some NSA compute time to crack the key), and off they go with the MITM attack.

(even most corps use dual tunnel for VPN remote to "save money" (by sacrificing security), leaving one tunnel subject to attack. A bit of spear phishing and the CEO's email is accessible... and most of the emps.... a large corp is a nice big IP address target too.)

Surveillance Teddy nabs granny-bag robber

Who can you trust anymore?

Now the plushies are ratting too.

COBOL thwarts California's Governator

Complexity

The complexity of making the change comes from the vast mass of bureaucratic rules and regulations that are encoded in the payroll software.

You can't just cut everyone by a percentage-- the floor is usually the minimum wage, or sometimes 0. Changing a person by a percentage may cause a negative payroll for someone having to fork over child support (for instance), or time shifting weeks, or whatever. The result might also go below a cut line for medical coverage eligibility (try surprising someone with that just before some major medical work).

Most cases are simple, it is the boundary cases that snarl up the change and take the vast majority of the conversion time. There are legal requirements, contractual requirements, common sense boundaries (how long will you work when you have to pay each week instead of being paid?), handling people who have allocated 401K sums in odd ways, and on and on and on.

Secret of invisibility unravelled by US researchers

Who Needs Glass

when you have metamaterials at optical wavelengths. Just flow the outside scenery through an itty bitty hole in the wall, and keep the high thermal resistance wall in between.

Be able to save great gobs of energy that way, none of this Luddite thermally leaky glass rubbish.

American ISP flashes phantom bandwidth cap

Greed

Frontier provides fairly good service, but they are hardly cheap -- and that is before any greedy bandwidth fee grubbing.

I use 3-5GB/month and that is WITHOUT any video like UTube, or bandwidth hogging BitTorrent apps, streaming music, RSS... just work, and gobs of spam ads splattered on every web page visited. [having a head end IP address blocking capability would save 1/2 of the bandwidth by killing ads before they used the link. Oh, that is probably illegal somehow...]

The whole thing reminds me of Prodigy's (remember them?) ill fated idiot attempt to restrict the use of email-- by restricting people to a ridiculously low email limit per month. They went titsup eventually, partly due to failed attitudes like the one with email.

The bandwidth use should be limited to something like 3 sigma out from the median, so that 99%+ of the users are unaffected, but the outliers that stream CCTV security monitor video while running filesharing and downloading movies all on a 30Mbs link hit a ceiling.

Either that, or simply sell tiered customer end QOS and throttle the hoi polloi server path, so that those that pay for higher QOS get through with minimal latency, and the hogs have to just grunt and bear it while their packets crawl through the soda straw bottleneck in the server...

US woman celebrates cloning of 'precious Booger'

Imperfect Clone

Now, they should have first created a clone of the original mother (likely from the micro chimerae, as the original is undoubtedly wormfood now). Then, cloned the target using the original near (genetically) identical maternal clone for surrogacy.

Also, the epigenetics (all of several levels) need to be preserved.

OK, that's two patents the Koreans don't have.... all they built was a DNA clone... *yawn*... hard part is synchronizing all those bitches, or it was before. The rest is just scientific prestidigitation.

Intel bets millions on speedy DNA sequencing chips

DNA is only a fragment of the data

The pop media has convinced people that all you need is DNA, then you have the creature.

Well, there is the epigenetics (several layers), the mitochondrial DNA (and associated epigenetics), the celllular informatics and proteomics that are carried across the germ line (largely unexplored as people wander around in the DNA)...

Not to speak of phenotypical changes as that single cell expands into trillions of cells, including maternal modulations of the genetic expressions, maternal microchimerae effects which can extend for the lifespan of the "product", .... well, you get the picture.

Just when you thought you could clone Flicka, you discover that it is not so simple after all!

The return of Killer Chlorine

@AC more Chlorine scare

Clever about that electrochlorinator for the pool. Of course, it's still chlorine being used to kill the nasties... plus the 9-10KW-hr of energy every night (not just the 8 quid for the NaCl). But not having to diddle with the chemicals is an advantage.

As for chlorine dioxide, it's claimed to be pretty effective. I use it to kill fungus in my horse's feet (White Lightning(r), for white line).

I'm sure some epidemiologist in the pay of Brussels can prove that chlorine dioxide soaked chickens is bad for someone, something, everything, or maybe the Earth As We Know It though, since it isn't a francophone invention!

Blighty's electro-supercar 2.0 uncloaked today

Calculations

"Example: 20 kW, charge time 5 minutes, lasting for 4 hours of driving:

The recharge power P needed is 20x(4/5)x60 = 960 kW.

At 3x400 V, each Ampère delivers 1.2 kW. Meaning that for a recharge power P one needs a current I of P/1.2 Ampère. For a paltry 960 kW as above, 960/1.2 = 800 Ampère are needed.

For those weaklings in math, here is the combined formula for the current needed:

I = 20x(4/5)x60/1.2 (in Ampère). Good luck!"

Well, lets skip the 3ph, and use just 1ph.

30KW is a better average to use for continuous power with all the electrical stuff now a days.

4 hours is a reasonable driving time (350KM), recharge is 10 minutes to 80% and use the 80% to provide 350KM (that is, ignore the 20% final charge that takes a long time, and one cannot use on a long trip anyway w/o waiting more than 10 min to recharge).

P = (30KW)((4hr)(60min/hr)/(10min)) = 720KW (rate for 10 min, or in energy, 120KW-hr).

So, for a 240 mains, for 720KW, I=3000A (for a 10min recharge)

For a 7700 feed (pretty common), I=94A, reasonably low

Out of curiousity, a typical house with 200A service (about 50KVA) would take around 2.4hr to charge the runabout at 100% utilization. Don't everyone in the neighborhood plug in together, or the area will go dark due to overload....

More reasonably, at 240v/50A (12KW), it would take 10hr to recharge 120KW-hr (100% efficient recharging etc.).

As for refueling stations, we don't know now what the best architecture for power conversion is-- but it probably is not a high current feed with expensive thick metal cables, and we certainly don't want more mass in the runabout for thick intermediate cabling. More likely is a long multicontact rod or maybe a multicontact slide in plate with multiple taps that mates closely to the battery pack (minimise mass in the vehicle, protects the contacts from electrocuting bystanders, has multiple taps to reduce the weight of the multiplicity of converters (lower voltage differential, lighter converters, vs. more then one of them), etc.). Indeed, the bulk of the converter mass ought to be off vehicle so that the (generally unused) mass isn't toted around while driving...

Japan kicks off electric car format war

Charging in minutes?

Take a lot of minutes.

You either end up with a relatively low voltage (say, 415 3ph) and heck of a lot of amps (now you need large bars to get those amps into the battery, adding weight and switching) or a very high voltage (several KV) with many less amps, but now need to down covert the high voltage to battery voltage.

And convince the unwashed that they won't be electrocuted if you go with high voltage (which at least can be reasonably downconverted to battery level, and doesn't require massive copper or aluminum cables).

There isn't any magic to the transfer of energy, hydrocarbons have a high energy density; hard to quickly pump that number of KW-hr through wires into a car though it can be done. The marketdroids have so far been successful in convincing people that only an itty bitty zip cord would be enough to charge a car in minutes...

Google taunts 'losers' with secret Android code

Shouldn't that be...

"Google Developer Challenged Team" since they seem able to alienate the free labor they so desperately need?

Or maybe the 50 finalists are in a race to be hired, and the also rans are clearly losers who can be jettisoned.

Google (and everyone else) seem unable to develop a meritocracy forum scheme, where one can set the "merit" cutoff to prune off the losers when searching for information. In this case, gooble would set the cutoff so only the top 50 can advantageously communicate (everyone else can read and fume but not comment), but toss the rest a bone... in the form of an unsupported SDK.

Instead, it's like, why bother. Lots of work being a point man, little reward and high mortality usually. Might be interesting to look at when the free labor battalions have finished sweating it out.

Mine's the one that says: "In a bear market, I only have to run faster than you!"

Could pen-sized GPS jammers paralyse UK shipping?

Stinger missile

More likely a HARM if you really want to nail that GPS jammer...