* Posts by Vic

5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007

Do you know where your trade secrets are?

Vic

The stupid move was to have the centrifuges on an accessible network and not just on an air-gapped local lab network.

The centrifuges were on an air-gapped network...

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Vic

Re: There should be no over-ruling this ...

So, we need someone to develop a "write-once" filesystem?

I'm thinking of shipping appliances that expose a filesystem over Samba/NFS/whatever, but are in fact git repositories underneath. Thus an over-write - even by Cryptolocker or its ilk - is just another commit, and can be trivially rolled back.

I suspect it will be dog slow...

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Vic

Arrange things so that specific categories of information can only be written by a specific process. Write requests are only granted on the basis of not only the user but also the application that requests the write

You've just described SELinux.

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US data suggests Windows 10 adoption in business is slowing

Vic

Re: did Microsoft kill it's cash cow?

[1] I can't think of a way to manage sendmail.mc via a GUI at present.

Webmin

...Modifies sendmail.cf, not sendmail.mc, unless you use the text editor within.

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Vic

Re: did Microsoft kill it's cash cow?

My mate is Linux god, seriously, what he doesnt know about Linux (any iteration) isnt worth knowing and even he agrees, you cannot use linux properly without it unless you just look at the web.

He's wrong. There are always GUI ways to do things, unless you're doing something particularly esoteric[1].

That said - if you're trying to use Linux for anything non-trivial, you'll end up at the CLI before you know it. It's a more expressive communication tool than a GUI, so it becomes the easy way to do things in short order.

And, of course, 14 years ago, none of the above was true.

Vic.

[1] I can't think of a way to manage sendmail.mc via a GUI at present. And that's probably for the best.

Vic

Re: did Microsoft kill it's cash cow?

how do you persistently set a mount point for a NAS share, such that it'll be visible not just in the File Manager but also in file selection dialogues, in Ubuntu and using only the GUI?

I cna't help you with stock Ubuntu, since I don't use it very often.

But in a Gnome2-based system - such as the MATE desktop, I believe[1] - you can add new entries by dragging the directory you want over to the Places pane in any file manager window...

You can also do it programmatically by editing ~/.gtk-bookmarks if that's your thing.

Vic.

[1] I don't currently use MATE, so I can't be sure. But MATE is so close to Gnome2 it rarely differs.

Vic

Re: did Microsoft kill it's cash cow?

The consumer expects to do everything through a GUI, and their are still plenty of examples in the mainstream distros where you have to resort to terminal and text editor to achieve something quite simple

Don't mistake advice to use the command line as evidence of that being the only way to do something; there's usually a GUI alternative, but the CLI is invariably a more effective way of doing something - as well as being a whole lot easier to descrive in a text-only forum...

e.g. the equivalent of persistently assigning a drive letter to a NAS share, which in Windows takes about 30s, in Ubuntu would involve plenty of Googling, firing up the good old terminal, editing fstab,

Or you could use the graphical tool that does the same thing. My distro of choice supplies fwfstab. I don't use it[1] - I edit /etc/fstab directly because it's easier and quicker for me to do so.

Vic.

[1] Indeed, I didn't even know of its existence until I started writing this reply. I can't imagine I'll ever use it.

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

Vic

Re: Clearly Typhoons don't have this problem

"That said, even TSR2 wasn't plagued by the sort of problems that F-35 has."

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

TSR2 had many, many problems - which was why I mentioned it. But it didn't have five out of six aircraft unable to fly during a test...

He described the avionics as "over-ambitious".

The whole aircraft was over-ambitious; it is an object lesson in why dumping every rôle you can think of into an aeroplane does not generally make for a useful plane. But the F-35 team had a dentist's appointment that day, and didn't catch up for homework like they were told to.

Lots of great aviation expertise came out of the TSR2 project. But no[1] planes.

Vic.

[1] There were, of course, developments based on what was learnt. But those were not TSR2s.

Vic

Re: Clearly Typhoons don't have this problem

They almost blow my windows out last night

Someone at Air France is in trouble...

But Typhoon is a one-trick pony, so there's a much higher chance of getting it working. Multi-role is much harder.

That said, even TSR2 wasn't plagued by the sort of problems that F-35 has.

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Vic

Re: Seriously?!?!?

the virtual "see-through-your-plane" helmet software, which is kinda new (but not in itself a terribly hard problem

I did some work with a company in Kent that did something similar.

That was 30 years ago...

Vic.

Vic

My dad keeps telling me about planes you allegedly could just start, and then fly them for a couple of hours. Does anybody know whether that's really true?

:-)

Vulcans on QRA were pretty good for a quick scramble - they would be airborne within two minutes. Not too shabby for a 4-engine bomber...

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Re: five nines...

looks like five nines is a pretty long way off still...

Nah. You just need to line up five aircraft on the tarmac so that their nines join up...

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The F-35A is just a money pit with no bottom.

It does, however, have one positive thing in its favour.

It's better than the F-35B...

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Re: Bureaucratic obfuscation?

Translation: On average a pilot will get 15 hours flight time before the plane kills them.

That's actually not a problem for the F-35.

Given the rate at which it burns fuel, you'll have exhausted your entire GDP long before that 15 hours has passed.

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Re: This is how the US is preserving its air superiority

The F-35 seems to me like someone never bothered to ask those questions of it

I disagree.

Someone quite clearly asked those questions - and the response was along the lines of "yes, that will do for starters"...

Vic.

I am Craig Wright, inventor of Craig Wright

Vic

Re: Tiger Blood

If this guy isn't Charlie Sheen's long lost twin, who is he?

From the article, I'm guessing at Charlie Sheen's dealer...

Vic.

Michigan electricity utility downed by ransomware attack

Vic

Re: How hard can it be....

to have a clever bit of software running, that intercepts ALL inbound emails from external sources, and EDIT them such that all links are turned into plain text before they are allowed through to their original destination?

It's about half a dozen lines of perl.

How long do you think you'll be arguing with your users before you disable it again?

Vic.

Daft draft anti-car-hack law could put innocent drivers away for life

Vic

Re: "...UK is at 70mph..."

Six lane motorway, M3 I guess. The slow lane was at least 70, the middle lane was 80-90 The fast lane was 90-100 mph. It was *very* relaxing.

I drove that motorway on Saturday afternoon. All six lanes came to a complete stop - because there was an accident on the hard shoulder, well off the carriageway. Three of those lanes are in the opposite direction...

I have no idea why people need to stop and look at an accident. But it really pisses me off...

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Vic

Re: Modification should be legal...

Your other authoritarian claptrap aside,

There's a reason if in aeronautics everything that flies needs a proper certification and usually you're not allowed to mess with systems.

CAP 733 details how the permit-to-fly system works in the UK[1]. You most certainly are allowed to build, repair and modify such systems.

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[1] Other countries have similar rules.

Who you callin' stoopid? No excuses for biz intelligence's poor stats

Vic

How rhetorical is this article?

Are the answers really not obvious?

Modern Management™ uses statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination.

Thus no-one is going to go to the big boss with an idea when it's clear there's a moderate-to-strong chance that the "inspiration" found in a data set is actually just random chance. And no middle-manager is going to want to justify to his boss why his output for the month is no more and no less than was churned out by the BI tool .

People want tools that make them look good. They don't want tools that make them look incompetent or irrelevant. So flashy UIs and buzzword-bingo rule the roost; actual analysis doesn't matter any more.

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Re: Pearls to swine!

I have had the misfortune to work for Managers who proudly profess they dont need to understand what they are managing, merely manage it properly.

I firmly believe that such a creature is possible; a sufficiently-skilled manager could get al the technical know-how from those working for him as required.

I've never met one, though...

Vic.

If the Internet of Things will be SOOO BIG why did Broadcom just quit the market?

Vic

Re: IoT will creep in

I suspect that my 'luddute' attitude to IoT is not alone here.

I suspect most of us here are quite happy with the idea of networked sensors.

It's the "putting it all on the Internet" bit that sticks in the craw...

This IoT architecture saves you having to have some sort of server appliance on your network - but the security cost to avoid that seems somewhat excessive to me.

Vic.

Score one for the patent trolls: US appeals court says it's OK to shop for patent-friendly judges

Vic

Re: Have an upvote!

The ability to select a court that is biased indicates that the system is broken

I think the more fundamental problem is that certain courts do appear to be showing bias.

If you didn't have any biassed courts, jurisdiction-shopping would pretty much[1] be a pointless exercise...

Vic.

[1] The only time this could make a difference is when one party is sufficiently financially disadvantaged by the selection of a court that he cannot fasibly continue. Courts should take note of this sort of thing.

Heathrow Airbus collision 'not a drone incident'

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Re: Reality Check

Depends on the cardboard box:- they come in sizes from smaller than a matchbox to the size of a packing crate - and in materials from very light card to multi-ply heavy duty stuff.

Indeed they do.

And how many times have you seen a cardboard box lifted by a thermal? IME, it only happens directly above a bonfire - and even then, it won't attain much height.

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Re: Reality Check

but they can be as large as a cardboard box in a strong thermal.

That would have to be one hell of a thermal. You're not going to see any aircraft flying in such conditions...

The typical drone -- quadcopter -- won't get carried off because its not in the slightest bit aerodynamic

If you're in a thermal, the whole air column is moving. So a drone which is able to balance its own weight - i.e. one which can fly - will get lift just as any other aircraft would.

Vic.

Samsung's little black box will hot-wire your car to the internet. Eek!

Vic

because the company would be able to see how safely you drive.

This meme annoys me beyond words.

I've trained with P1 pursuit drivers. They are the safest drivers I've ever seen. By a significant margin.

So how would these devices rate such people? They use rapid acceleration in all axes, and use speeds appropriate to the task in hand, regardless of the posted limits...

"Whatever you can imagine doing with a smartphone app, you can do with a smart car app," Zinchenko says enthusiastically.

I can imagine contracting malware from a smartphone app. I have a sneaking suspicion that Zinchenko may be completely correct.

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Vic

Re: So funny :-)

Smaller insurance quotes? That won't happen.

I've been buying car insurance for rather more decades thatn I'd like to admit to...

My premium has always[1] been about £350, whatever car I own, whatever cover I select[2]. Except for last year's policy which was about £240.

I have only ever made one claim on my insurance[3] - that was in the year before my last renewal. And this year, where I haven't made a claim, my renewal is back to £350...

I am convinced that car insurance companies are simply insane.

Vic.

[1] I'm ignoring my classic policy, which was for a very restricted mileage.

[2] My choice of vehicle and cover has changed somewhat over the years, and to some exent has been influenced by what I can afford. but you'd be amazed how that really doesn't correlate...

[3] I had a split in my windscreen. Don't know how it happened, but I got a new one for £80. Which was nice.

German prof scores €2.4m EU grant to crack software on your bicycle

Vic

they're no more likely to fail than a brake cable is to snap

Whilst that might be true, it's a long, long time since any road car[1] had a single brake system. Braking systems are designed such that any single failure will leave you with a functional, if degraded, capability. So a brake cable snapping leaves you with brakes - is this true of the wireless replacement being touted?

Vic.

[1] I *think* I once had a car that had a single system. But I'm not certain - it was a while ago. That car was built in the early 1960s.

Game of P0wns: Malvertising menace strikes Pirate Bay season six downloads

Vic

Re: Where's our ad industry rep when you need him?

Lets see the staunch defence of the ad industry

He's busy on the downvotes...

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Was there anything else in all the rambling?

Just one thing - "use an ad blocker".

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F-35's dodgy software in the spotlight again

Vic

Re: Anyone seen the rabbit hole?

Can someone enlightened on the subject explain to me how the f*** does a USA mil-only cloud based maintenance system work for an export fighter

That's a future disaster. We haven't got there yet.

So far, we're looking at whether or not it's possible to get the thing airborne when you're the manufacturing country. And it's not looking good...

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Vic

and out of production for 20+ years. No new UK tradesmen trained on the airframes since 2009. No from-new production of the engines. No significant systems upgrades since the mid-2000s.

There are, howver, plenty of trained craftsmen in the country who could have resurrected the Harrier if necessary.

Yep, buy Harrier.

Whilst not exactly a bright move, it would still make more sense than buying F-35.

What we should really have done is to hold BAe's feet to the fire to deliver the modular carriers they sold us, and then either work out how to retro-fit a boiler, or else fit EMALS. But that would involve having a government with a motto that wasn't "go back to your constituencies and prepare for non-executive directorships"...

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Re: For just a few $m.....

I'm also quite good at software and believe I could comprehensively program the 'You just crashed' flashing LED, for just a few $m more.

What a pointless exercise. "You've just crashed" is not a message any pilot needs - the evidence is already apparent.

What you want is a "you're about to crash" flashing LED. I suggest using a 555 for that...

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Re: Hacking opertunities

Detect an fault on a minor sensor, better be safe and shut down the engine just in case.

I don't think you'd need to hack ALIS for that...

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Re: Just trust US. We've been flying by the seat of our pants for a long time

Well naturally. There is a reason the F-22 is not being exported to anyone (not even close allies like Australia). It is the pinnacle of combat jets (and with a price tag to match)

Given the never-ending cost-overruns on te F-35, I tihnk it might be premature to consider the F-35 as cheaper than the F-22...

Vic.

Hackers so far ahead of defenders it's not even a game

Vic

Re: Bad Grammar

One of the dead give aways of a phishing email is often very bad grammar and spelling

But not always.

I've had a bunch of phish emails lately which look *very* much like genuine LinkedIn invitations. And if they'd sent the emails to an address I'd ever given to LinkedIn, I might[1] have been taken in...

Vic.

[1] I wouldn't - but that's because I'm paranoid. If ever I get an email that wants such data from me, I always check the headers first. Most people don't, of course...

UK authorities probe 'drone hitting plane at Heathrow'

Vic

I see the little misunderstanding here. You seem to be implying that they should not be flying anything at all, while in fact there is a designated area for this specific purpose - as long as they fly under 400ft.

No, I'm not.

I'm saying that, when the OP claimed that Richmond Park is "far outside the airport airspace", he was simply factually wrong.

I'm saying nothoing about what may or may not be flown from there - simply that the statement is cobblers, and trivially proven to be so.

Vic.

Line by line, how the US anti-encryption bill will kill our privacy, security

Vic

Re: OK, I'm inclined to think it's just stupid, not evil

Petrol, not diesel

Diesel, not petrol.

Diesel actually doesn't set light with a torch

This video disagrees with you. That's the first one I found - having done similar myself, I knew there was bound to be one.

Petrol has a tendency to conflagrate and burn your face off. Diesel, with its much higher ignition temperature and lower volatility, is somewhat safer in such situations..

Vic.

Remain in the EU and help me snoop on the world, says Theresa May

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Re: When May opens her gob...

EVERY b*llsh** detector on Earth goes up to 11!

Not mine. Mine went sproing and bits came out long before the needle had a chance to move...

Vic.

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

Vic

Re: The past is un-dead

the annoying thing is how much semi-obsolete help is floating around, and gets pointed to as the answer to the question you didn't quite ask.

The bit that annoys me is when you follow a link to a forum where someone has asked the question you wanted to ask - and all the replies are either "I don't know" or "I fixed it" (without explanation)...

Vic.

Ad-blocker blocking websites face legal peril at hands of privacy bods

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Re: A blocker to block the anti-blocker

Servers can always tell if something is requested or not

From a third-party website?

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Re: Lots of people hate adverts...

But, if there's going to be advertising, wouldn't you rather it be for something you might be interested in than for something irrelevant to your life?

Indeed I would.

But that's not what I get - all I ever see is adverts for stuff I've just bought and don't intend to buy again.

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Re: Serverside

But if the site has exclusive content, you're left with a take-it-or-leave-it scenario.

Very few sites have exclusive content - and that number is diminishing by the day.

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They have to charge like that because you have to take into account the users who won't abide by paywalls. Once they go up, many users go away

It strikes me that you could do a pledge system; have a sign-up page where users can commit to paying either a fixed amount[1] or maybe even a volunteered amount - then, at the start of the year, if there is enough pledge money, the adverts go away for a year for everyone. If not, they remain.

Vic.

[1] The site could suggest an amount - e.g. the expected ad revenue divided by the number of us badge holders.

Vic

Not a real website

It's not[1].

Probably. I never checked.

Errr - no. Nor I. Honest...

Vic.

[1] Yet...

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Re: @FF22 no one pays attention to them??

A long time ago i took note of a series of good ads. Brits of a certain age will remember the Hamlet ads - witty and even a fragment of JS Bach. As far as I was concerned it never did them a bit of good because I've never smoked.

And how many times have you reminded other people of their advert?

That ad and many others of its ilk were advertising masterpieces - they got *us* to republish them. How many times have you said "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label"? Look how many times you read the word "Simples" in forum postings. And who is this J. R. Hartley anyway?

So despite not being a part of their immediate target audience, do not for one moment believe that you were not influenced by the campaign, nor that your seeing those ads did the advertiser no good; the opposite is clearly true...

Vic.

Will Comcast's set-box killer murder your data caps? The truth revealed

Vic

Re: One word.

A monopoly requires:

1. Comcast to be the only seller of the service.

2. Comcast to have no current or potential rivals.

3. Comcast's service to have no close substitutes.

In general, that's not the case. To constitute a monopoly in most jurisdictions, a provider needs to have significant sway over the market - with the level of that control being defined slightly differently depending on where you are[1]. Having no competition is not the criterion; it is having no effective competition that triggers monopoly provisions.

Vic.

[1] For example, Out-law.com's page claims that " dominance has been found to exist where market share is as low as 40%."

'Impossible' EmDrive flying saucer thruster may herald new theory of inertia

Vic

If we were supposed to fly, God would have given us wings

If we were supposed to fly, God would have given us a bigger wallet...

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Re: I don't believe this has an exhaust. That's what all the excitement is about.

EmDrive produces a reproducible effect

That is not yet clear.

Several groups have claimed to reproduce the effect. Just as several groups claimed to reproduce cold fusion. They were wrong.

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Joke

Re: question

One of the questions being asked is if they will still get the same output from *even less* energy :)

The Homeopathic Drive?

Vic.