* Posts by Chronos

1257 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007

Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know

Chronos

Re: Polite notices

1. Any notice that has to have "Polite Notice" written on it probably isn't!

You miss the point of those. It's so the illiterate will read it as "Police notice" as if the rozzers don't have better things to do than concern themselves with some petty little arsecrack's passive-aggressiveness and nothing whatsoever to do with minding one's Ps and Qs.

Polite Notice We noticed you noticing this notice. It has been noted.

The one on my garage door simply reads "Daihatsu." I think that's fair warning that I have low range, difflock, a sturdy chain, an early start, no inclination to waste public funds dealing with anti-social halfwits and zero tolerance.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

Chronos
Devil

20MB pic...

...or it didn't happen!

I used to be a dull John Doe. Thanks to Huawei, I'm now James Bond!

Chronos

Re: Is it spying or is it problems with competition

Now, Martin, we're not supposed to figure this out. This is why cryptocurrency is being much maligned by various people with vested interests in state backed currency. If you decentralise the trust in a currency you remove control of it and, more importantly, the people using it which is what a certain Mr Guppy keeps saying. While he's not my favourite person in the whole world, he certainly has some insightful things to say on the subjects of monetary policy, cashless society and banks.

Chronos
Thumb Up

Wha-hey!

Er… hang on, isn't that what Google, Facebook et al have been doing for years already? Ah, but these companies are American! They would never misuse the personal information of citizens. They would steadfastly refuse to bow to the political demands and censorial whims of despotic governments and vested financial interests.

You cynical bastard! I love it.

I'm not convinced, though. This rhetoric about embedded spyware only tells me one thing: That, despite clamouring for de-encryption, despite bulk surveillance, despite billions down the crapper on decryption kit and exploits with uppercase names these people still have exactly zero idea what's travelling over the networks. I find that strangely comforting, especially as I personally fire up iftop every time my router seems to be working harder than I think it should be, only to find I've accidentally left a tab in a minimised browser window running some bloody marketer's idea of non-intrusive advertising.

As for hwa-way, who-are-we or wha-hey, I only learnt how to pronounce it when they started putting silly ads in the middle of Corrie and I lingered longer than is customary when t' missus was watching the damned thing. It was always hue-away before that.

What's the fate of our Solar System? Boffins peer into giant crystal ball – ah, no, wait, that's our Sun in 10bn years

Chronos

Re: Lucy is here!

A truly unique aural experience.

...for which we're all grateful.

Amazon Mime: We train (badly) an AI love bot using divorce bombshell Bezos' alleged sexts to his new girlfriend

Chronos
Alien

AMfM

His posts actually make sense if you read them all the way through and imagine it has been through online translate a few times. I'd imagine Go Ogle's Martian to English translator is a bit crap.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Chronos
Thumb Up

3&7

That could have been me saying that. On top of what you wrote for autonomous cars you can add "shelling out several grand when the battery dies" or, in Renault's case, never owning the bloody thing in the first place.

As for number five, many of those who said they wouldn't probably already do.

"That? Oh, it's a dog toy, Vicar. Yes, the vibration knocks all the tartar off his teeth."

I suspect by "robot" they mean "android". This is why this industry is leaking talent like a sieve: Even the experts don't know how to categorise their shit.

Sadly, your IoTosh going mainstream prediction fell flat judging by the number of those Ring video doorbells I see in my new, much sexier job as a parcel bloke (at least I'm getting exercise and decent money), usually on houses with pretentious names that begin with "High" which is probably what the sign-writer was when he painted the bloody thing if its legibility is anything to go by...

"No, sir, unless your fancy Internet of Vulnerabilities doorbell can actually sign for this and take it indoors, it's going back to the depot and you can collect it from there."

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

Chronos

Re: The real solution

@Cynic_999, I recall "fondly" doing just that with a shitload of Psion II mempaks.

What is needed is control of the physical WE pin on the flash. Just bring it out to a header and leave the link off and pull the bugger low with a 4k7 if the 0.005p of fitting a pin-link is prohibitive. Those two pins in between the speaker header which are always there but never used would do nicely with the advantage that on most mobos, there's already a logic 1 source available at that location for the positive side of the speaker. Pull speaker connector, bung pin-link on, boot to FreeDOS, Bob's your shouty uncle.

Dixons Carphone smarting from £440m loss as it writes down goodwill on mobile biz

Chronos
Holmes

The novelty has worn off.

We've reached "peak shiny." Most of the people who would upgrade their kit every six months have been run over due to wandering about in the road transfixed by the damned things.

Huawei exec out of jail, just as US accuses China of Marriott hack

Chronos
Facepalm

So...

Liberty and justice for all - except when the Mighty Dollar is at stake. That high ground is starting to look and smell like a dung-heap.

Arresting a Canadian was just stupid. Up to that point there was a reasonable groundswell of public opinion against Ms Meng's arrest¹ as political capital. Now it seems like six of one and half a dozen of the other. The PRC would do well to have a word with a decent PR agency...

¹ Let's not forget, though, that Ms Meng and Mr Kovrig are sentient persons, regardless of nationality, being used as stakes in a game where only the most extremely privileged can ante up.

Privacy, security fears about ID cards? UK.gov's digital bod has one simple solution: 'Get over it'

Chronos
Stop

Re: Dumbing down the general population

They succeeded above all expectations but in a completely unexpected way they didn't like: a majority voted for Brexit

Do you honestly believe that this was the undesired outcome? Look at it from their side: No oversight, no ECoHR, no ECJ...

The disMay is purely a front and explains yer wan's determination to push on in the face of, well, pretty much everyone else saying she's talking nonsense with The Best Deal For Britain™. The EU was a convenient place to hang blame but they always have the opposition as a backstop - or they would if it wasn't a rump government sitting to the right of the speaker now that the DUP have abandoned the sinking ship and she could trust the members of her own party not to emulate Marcus Brutus.

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Chronos

Re: Alternative solution?

Still irrelevant. Canada has no jurisdiction over a Chinese company. In fact, unless any US or Canadian resources were diverted through Huawei's shell company they have exactly zero grounds to detain a citizen of a foreign nation, regardless of that nation's status or involvement in a trade war with a straw-headed moron. Those sanctions only apply to subject citizens and corporate entities. Germany has flat-out told Arsenoise to go piss up a rope with them this time around. Ms Meng was just low-hanging fruit and they're relying on their "China Bad" propaganda to stop the general population thinking too much about the precedent this nonsense sets.

In Moriarty's Spin series of novels' timeline, the US is listed as a rogue nation by the UN. I think I begin to see how it got that status. If we're going to take the moral high ground, that pinnacle had better be built on solid foundations rather than a gilded turd sitting atop a load of self-interest.

Chronos

Re: Alternative solution?

Meng Wanzhou is accused of breaking the sanctions a number of years ago, not the ones introduced by the current US president.

Irrelevant. She didn't commit that "offence" under the jurisdiction of the US and wasn't on US soil upon her arrest. The arrest is blatant disregard for international law and needs rectifying, otherwise there will be no state visits by some very prominent European leaders to the North American continent for quite some time.

Chronos

Re: Assange is not a "professional secrets dealer"

How does he support himself when not an embassy guest?

On sunlight and love of his fellow man.

IIRC, it was alleged indiscriminate love of his fellow humans that got him into this fix. Edward ended up in Russia, poor Chelsea ended up in The Glass House. Exile or clink, they live with the consequences of their conscience every day and the world is at least a more honest place because of their sacrifice.

Julian's predicament, on the other hand, was wholly avoidable and came about as a result of something which had no contributive effects for humanity or Wikileaks at all: Him getting his end away. Without that, Sweden would have had no grounds to issue the arrest warrant - which not even Malfoy Major himself has suggested is outside the bounds of due process - and we wouldn't be hearing about this attention whore's antics every week.

Another 3D printer? Oh, stop it, you're killing us. Perhaps literally: Fears over ultrafine dust

Chronos
Facepalm

You know what's always fatal?

Being born.

Spammer scum hack 100,000 home routers via UPnP vulns to craft email-flinging botnet

Chronos

Re: Disabling UPnP completely isn't such a bad idea

Quite. I've removed miniupnpd from my OpenWRT builds and exactly nobody has complained.

Chronos
Facepalm

Don't disable UPnP, at least not on the private side of the router - you need it for streaming audio etc, wireless speakers and so on.

Oh dear. I suspect you're confusing it with DLNA, which is often called uPNP by people who really should know better. The universal probe'n'pwn we (the grown ups) are talking about is the protocol that allows any old munchkin's half-arsed application to poke holes in your firewall/NAPT.

Icon says it all.

Chronos
Holmes

Took longer than I expected

I've been saying for years that shipping routers with universal probe'n'pwn enabled by default is going to end in tears. That it's only a spambot, easily mitigated by using RBL dynamic allocation pool lookups, is really surprising given the scope for mischief.

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Chronos

Re: Great plan Timmy.

Especially when the core of your OS is built from code they built...

No, no, no! It's a drunken skip shag between the Mach microkernel and the BSD userland and nothing to do with Linux or GNU at all. I can see why abandoned big cats for their code-names; some people obviously couldn't resist lion about it...

Chronos
Facepalm

Re: "secure" boot is *EVIL*

Yeah. Do let us all know how you get on with the TSA when they want to know what you've got on the Purism device/s.

I'll moon them from afar. I'm not subject to the laws of The Land of the "Free," nor do I have any immediate, i.e. in this lifetime, plans to visit which is a shame because there are many things about your country I would absolutely love to experience. Your barbaric penal system is not one of them, though.

Chronos

Re: "secure" boot is *EVIL*

Not often I agree with Shouty McShoutface - and this is no exception. If you buy into the Apple ecosystem, you only have yourself to blame when you realise it really isn't your hardware. You may now own the materials it is made from but the fancy shiny it is wrapped in and the firmware remains licensed

The problem right now is that x86-64 is no more trustworthy with IME and PSP, not to mention the speculative execution flaws. If only there were someone making thin'n'light machines with Coreboot on them...

Oh, wait...

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

Chronos
Devil

Re: Quite.

I think you'll find that's "Matiz," which is a very small Daewoo sub-compact car that people whose Model 3 electro-jalopy hasn't been built yet use to get around...

Also makes a damn fine backup when a) the battery dies as li-ion cells are wont to do, b) the utility company has stolen all your charge to boil all the neighbourhood kettles or c) they've pushed a firmware upgrade that e.g. swaps the function of the brake and accelerator pedals.

Woke Linus Torvalds rolls his first 4.20, mulls Linux 5.0 effort for 2019

Chronos
Thumb Up

Re: “I didn't want to make a pattern of it,”

All he has to do is link to this from the same site, no rant necessary.

Solid state of fear: Euro boffins bust open SSD, Bitlocker encryption (it's really, really dumb)

Chronos

Re: Fed up with these nonstop security issues

And, therein lies the problem.... the "miscreants" would probably never know anything about this let alone exploit it if these issues were never made public to begin with.

Security by obscurity, compounded by the fact that the underlying issue is pretty much the same thing. Please hand in your geek card at reception.

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

Chronos

Re: I stopped right here...

Systemd!

Devuan, Debian+sysv-init, many others that I haven't tried because Devuan is familiar enough to me that I didn't see the point...

Don't conflate Lennart's pet project with Linux. As an aside, I'm wondering if the corpse of SCO isn't twitching again since IBM bought Red Hat. Big Purple.

Chronos
Coat

Re: Broken, yes... and not fixable.

Did MS actually ORIGINATE anything at all?

Clippy! :-)

Chronos
FAIL

Re: I stopped right here...

yep NEVER any QA issues in the world of Linux!

Ah, bollocks, balderdash and tosh! There is no such thing as "Linux" as an operating system. You want stability? Run Debian stable. You want a decent desktop? Mint. A server? Debian. Paid for support? Dead rat/SUSE/Oracle or any number of vendors who would love to bite your arm off at the shoulder.

What you're talking about, my anonymous commentard, are distros. Some are good, some are mediocre, some are bad. The point here is you can CHOOSE, which is something MS don't want you to do with Windows. How many times have 7 users been plagued by GetWinX and trying to keep the spyware out? Choose to run Windows 7? We'll make your life difficult until you capitulate and learn to love Cortana.

When was the last time you saw a GNU/Linux distro telling you that update to Dead Rat 10 or GTFO are your only options?

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Chronos

Where's Rutherford?

Admittedly he was born in Kiwiland but the father of nuclear physics? How cool a title is that?

It's been a week since engineers approved a new DNS encryption standard and everyone is still yelling

Chronos

Re: Tough

Most users aren't going to notice when Firefox or Chrome automatically start using DoH first (if available) rather than your defined settings, and will only fall back to standard DNS if DoH fails.

Already happening in Fx; see network.trr.* in about:config.

What we really need is some opportunistic crypto that doesn't attempt to identify the endpoints. For a start, it'll make encrypting SNI so much easier. Once you have your secure channel, then do verification and close if it fails. You've only signalled your intended destination to one host rather than lit a huge neon sign for any old nosy bugger to slurp.

Making Google, Cloudflare or Quad9 your one-stop shop for DNS really isn't protecting anyone's privacy, a problem which exists in both implementations.

Disclaimer: Stubby user, so I'm probably biased against DoH, not that I can't see DoT is riddled with exactly the same issues.

Budget 2018: UK goes it alone on digital sales tax for tech giants

Chronos

Re: A tiny step in the right direction

Think about the tax on insurance policies

That one is a particularly regressive tax, especially when applied to things like motor insurance and buildings cover which are legal or contractual requirements for many of us. VAT on utilities when many people are in fuel poverty is utterly insane.

The other one that really grinds my gears, literally, is paying VAT on fuel duty at the pump. It's value added tax and I see no value in dead money going to the government for idiots like Crapita to waste which, incidentally, did not seem to be a casualty during this period of austerity when everyone was supposed to be sharing the pain.

It would make a huge difference to people's confidence in the system if it were fair and the proceeds were not being squandered.

Chronos
Coat

Re: Brexit coin

Okay, don't groat over it...

Chronos

Indirectly, yes. We buy something, a portion of that something's cost is advertising. Advertising costs go up, so do the prices of $THINGs.

Microsoft promises a fix for Windows 10 zip file woes. In November

Chronos

Windows Search

Isn't that the bit of 7 that slowed everything to a crawl until you disabled indexing? It's that long ago I can't unforget since there's a script that runs on my PXE server after a doze infection that disables all the problematic services and I haven't had to do it manually for yonks.

Congrats from 123-Reg! You can now pay us an extra £6 or £12 a year for basically nothing

Chronos

Re: OK. Calm down. Fake news etc.

I suppose if you squint and look at it a bit sideways you could have a point. The fact remains that a company whose core business is that of communication miscommunicated a policy change. How do you know the droid you spoke to has it right and it's not just a "FFS, tell them anything, I can't handle all this crap on a Thursday" directive from middle manglement?

Competence? They've heard of it. Lovely name for a girl.

Chronos
Flame

Re: OK. Calm down. Fake news etc.

Not really fake news if they sent the bloody e-mail, is it? They created the news, El Reg is just reporting it.

Please remember this is not Twitter or Facebook so such euphemisms as "fake news" mean sod all here. This is more a case of "no smoke without fire" in that, if they can't get their own communications right, how the hell can anyone trust them with theirs?

Chronos
Thumb Up

Re: Speaking of domain hosting

.. how is the experience with Mythic Beasts, anyone?

Superb. As well as them being my registrar and secondary DNS I also have email with them after I got fed up of having to renumber every time my ISP pissed me off and, for two quid a month (inc the dreaded VAT), it is rock solid.

They also host usenet.org.uk pro bono.

Chronos
Thumb Up

Re: I want to move away

Mythic Beasts

Exactly what I was going to say. At this point I really don't know why companies like 123reg still exist given that Mythic Beasts are cheaper, have customer support light years ahead of anything this lot can offer, do pretty much everything you could possibly want or as little as you require and know what they're doing.

That last point seems to be a USP. Quite how the domain name and simple hosting sector got AOLified I really can't fathom.

PC version of Linux 4.19 lands with PC version of Linus Torvalds: Kernel handed back to creator

Chronos

ObNitpick: Would that not be SPI? I²C is serial clock and data.

Spotted: Miscreants use pilfered NSA hacking tools to pwn boxes in nuke, aerospace worlds

Chronos
FAIL

Are you reading this, Five Eyes?

This is exactly what was predicted. Even William Gibson predicted state sponsored malware leakage which, make no bones about it, is what this is, long before the Internet became widespread, albeit in fiction. Kuang Grade Mk 11, anyone?

At the risk of a logical fallacy, I suspect this is the tip of a very large iceberg. And they want us to trust them with back-door encryption? Not on your sodding nelly!

Brace yourself, Britain: Health minister shares 'vision' for NHS 'tech revolution'

Chronos
FAIL

The NHS is under funded!

So let's spend more money on worthless white elephants.

And they wonder why there's voter apathy?

Softcat warns of Brexit cloud forming over UK tech, vows: If prices rise, we'll pass them on...

Chronos
Flame

Already USD == GBP

...in this sector, at least. Now they're looking for an excuse to gouge us even more? Softcat? More like Fatcat.

Bastards.

Finally. The palm-sized Palm phone is back. And it will, er, save you from your real smartphone

Chronos

All that's old...

...is new again. Tech progress is a big circle. Once it comes around again, you don't quite notice that it's USP is what you had 20 years ago (Nokia 8210? Ericsson T68i?). So it is with this.

My $DEITY, it's a small 'phone that works for making calls! Why did nobody ever think of this before?

The thing that differentiated Palm from the rest was PalmOS. Not WebOS, which was the Prè's downfall, but good old low res PalmOS with Grafiti. This is just another Mars bar reboot with Android shoehorned into it which, for using the virtual koybred (best I can do on a touch screen), will be bloody useless.

The Obama-era cyber détente with China was nice, wasn't it? Yeah well it's obviously over now

Chronos

Re: China

Name one national government that isn't evil. Chronos's comment was meant to put down the US, period.

No! It was meant to put down blind faith in western "democracy," i.e. the pre-selected choices we get to elect the usual bunch of corrupt incompetents every single time, as the epitome of human advancement in government. You completely missed the point when I switched from "The US" to "The West." While we're lobbing rocks at China, we're not sorting our own shit out. "Better than them" == "dryer than the sea" and is no cause for celebration or declaring the job done.

This little island and Europe are currently deadlocked in a battle to see which bunch of corrupt incompetents gets what slice of the pie to waste - and waste it they will, whoever wins. Granted, they won't have big limos and massive security retinues - oh, wait...

So no, I'm not chucking rocks at the US. I'm chucking rocks at the people who meekly accept this system that only delivers misery time and again, myself included as my sole contribution to protesting this situation is to refuse to take part aside from making snide comments on El Reg. At least you folks have write-ins on your ballots, for all the good they do...

Chronos

Re: China

But it's all a joke, right?

No, it's the lesser of two evils. Just because the West's excesses aren't as visible as China's doesn't make them any less evil. Satirising these excesses are probably the only recourse we have at this point - until, that is, people like you come along and try to stop us with silly hyperbole. For example:

and re-education camps for religious minorities

Sounds like Gitmo to me.

Now that's reductio ad absurdum done properly.

Chronos

Re: China

@hplasm: Spooky. That's exactly, word for word, what I was thinking when reading that comment.

World's largest CCTV maker leaves at least 9 million cameras open to public viewing

Chronos

Re: The problem is...

- The Xiongmai CCTV controller software is a _large_ stripped monolithic binary, but it actually contains a number of subcomponents (an OS within an OS?) and whilst attempts have been made to obfuscate what is in there, GPL symbols abound, as do the signatures of a number of GPL packages

Aye, the infamous "Sofia" binary. Realistically, the only way to secure these things is to filter at the gateway by MAC. Even then, a malicious local operator could easily break into the things or a zombie Windows box could deliver the payload, change the MAC with the nvram utility that is present on these things and bypass the filter.

It's a shame because the hi3518 with the OV9712 sensor is a pretty capable little night vision system. If they opened the source for these things they'd probably sell millions more of them, especially if one were able to set up only rtsp, motion alarm (I have a listener daemon for XM alerts which spawns an ffmpeg 30s recording) and a simple control panel for the settings. Add MQTT instead of the XM proprietary alarms while we're at it...

On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others

Chronos

This is exactly the sort of thing that keeps us coming back here time and again. People who have received a humour bypass are going to be offended, usually because many a true word is spoken in jest.

For the intended audience, it is pitched perfectly and poor taste is infinitely preferable to none at all.

Chronos
Thumb Up

Re: "oh boy"

He was a genius at marketing bullshit and convincing people to follow him.

I wish I could up-vote you more than once for this. Woz is the engineer¹. Ive is the designer. Jobs was the sales droid. It just happened to be a particularly persuasive sales droid with a built-in reality distortion field generator and zero scruples. Cook isn't quite the salesman Jobs was but all the hard, ground-breaking work has already been done. All Cook has to do now is whisper "new iPhone" to himself in an empty bar somewhere and the free marketing comes piling in.

¹ Actually, Woz is an über-geek, despite his Masonic connections. The epitome of non-greedy techie nice bloke with roots in the early phreaking and hacker culture and the naivete that usually accompanies those traits. Many of us can relate.

The fur is not gonna fly: Uncle Sam charges seven Russians with Fancy Bear hack sprees

Chronos
Mushroom

Slightly below average temperature war.

I'm beginning to wonder if certain parties on both sides have looked back, seen all the money that was made and advances realised during the Cold War and are trying to return to those days. I certainly wouldn't put such a motive past Arsenoise and our very own Old Grey May-or would like a bogeyman or two if she's to undermine online encryption. Vladimir Vladimirovitch is quite happy because it makes Russia look like a superpower again and everything is gravy.

Icon. It doesn't really matter that yet another generation of kids will go to sleep wondering if they'll wake to a blinding flash followed by vaporisation or radiation sickness.

Volkswagen links arms with Microsoft for data-slurping cloud on Azure

Chronos
Devil

New model

Volkswagen Up! Down. Up! Down. Up! Down.