Posts by Wayland Sothcott

So what's the easiest box to hack - Vista, Ubuntu or OS X?

@Mike

I agree that they should allow a more real world challenge. Known valnerabilitys should be allowed, afterall, if they are known then surely they should be fixed.

The fact that the attacking computer has a user and the victim does not have a user seems a bit unfair. Also the use of a crossover cable seems a bit limiting. Perhaps a hub might make things more interesting, for that matter a router would be even better. Everyone in the world could hack and defend against everyone. It would be just like the real Internet. Hang on....

Ofcom says yes on more TV ads

Can they make it a legal requirement

that I have to watch the ads?

Perhaps they can DRM the programs so you can't skip the ads? Perhaps that's one of the promises of IPTV?

Paris because she probably likes the ads as much as the programs.

Brown: Jack Bauer spook horde to tackle terrorism

Remember the Cones Hotline?

When you spotted a suspicious traffic cone loitering by the side of a busy motorway, you were to report it on the special confidential cones hotline.

We are now urged to phone the special Confidential Terrorist Hotline if we see someone who might just be an innocent burglar casing up a joint but who could also be an evil terrorist planning his next suicide bombing. I have memorized the number 0800 789 321 just in case.

Stop sign because we don't have a traffic cone.

Ohio voting machines confiscated in criminal investigation

Thy take all the misery out of making tea

They are as much use as the Tea making machine Farther Ted bought Mr's Dole, who of course rather likes all the misery of making tea.

They basically don't do anything that needs doing better and are open to being tampered with.

Cambridge brain touts wind-n-server combo farms

@Trog

You're right. I have been banging on about how devices wasting energy in the home are actually neutral if you also have your heating on. Obviously if you have your aircon on then they are wasting energy as the aircon works harder.

Non-techies don't know the difference between a Megabyte and a Gigabyte so would not recognize that the latter takes a lot more energy to process. Thankfully hardware is staying at about the same performance but becoming more energy efficient. We should also see some improvements in software energy requirements as that gets speeded up. It amazes me how quickly a Vista laptop drains it's battery, so that will have to be fixed too.

Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90

I will miss the great man

I loved Rendezvous with Rama and Childhoods End really affected me when I read it at age 13.

I also read a quote from him that in future there would be less violence in the world due to better communications of live video by war reporters. Shame about that one, right on one of the two points.

I will miss not having him alive in the world.

Jodrell Bank offloaded on eBay

Science already knows everything...

...so why do we need instruments to look for more stuff?

The fact is that the more you know, the more there is to know. You can't tell where knowledge might lead, which might be scary for the government. It's unlikely that £2.5 Million would scrap this if there was not an adgenda to do so.

I have signed the petition http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/RadioAstronomy/

and expect to be ignored. I think that must be the point of these. Get's you to feel like you have done something when you have really done very little.

Portsmouth student peeled in potato laptop scam

Scams target the dodgy people

The buyer knows the deal is a bit dodgy but greed carries it through. It's a sort of nudge nudge, wink wink between the buyer and seller. The seller does not have to come up with a convincing story and the buyer by the same agreement accepts the obviously fake reason for selling.

Serves him right. Very brave to admit it though. I feel sorry for the government employee who lost their laptop though, it could have my data on it.

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

@Mozilla / Firefox / Adblock

It's not really about adverts, they are on the sites already and can be blocked. Phorm probably not planning to alter existing ads, simply modify their own ads having got a website to place them.

The real problem is their monitoring your datastream. They can sell on marketing data derrived from that regardless of weather you have opted out of ads. With their servers in that position they could do a lot more than they are currently talking about. Ofcourse ISP's are also in that trusted position, but instead of taking the risk directly they have let a 3rd party do it without altering the ISPs original function.

There have been many calls for censorship of the Internet as well as monitoring. You may not be able to get foreign sites to take stuff down fast enough for your liking but you can cirtainly control your domestic ISP. You can't not have a domestic ISP unless you use satellite. But then it would be very very easy to feed Interferance into a satellite from an earth station.

People might say use an encrypted or Tor service but then that's going to be easy to block and outlaw.

The Internet probably has about 2 years left before it becomes something else But at the rate things are going, so will everyting else.

UK government data protection is a shambles

Even with errors it still works...a bit

The understanding that there are errors means they have the opportunity to cross reference and equire of the person for correct information. I know when mainitaing my customer address book that there are errors. It's important to correct errors pointed out by people and make updates to phone numbers etc. I have had experience of our district council losing information due to having me on the database twice because of different spelling. Sometimes it can work in their favour by billing you twice for a parking fine, 2nd one will have grown into a huge non-payment fine. Ofcourse I don't mind paying it, after all, it's good for the community.

Pentagon rattles sabre at Google's Street View

I am always amazed what you can find on google earth

The other month when the Reg went looking for Black Helecopters really opened my eyes. I would just naturally have thought they would have had google clean those up, possibly as far as pasting fields and trees over the areas. But then it might be difficult to get an Internet server to alter it's content. In which case you simply reprogram the worlds routers to point to a dummy server. As may have happened to YouTube the other day.

Tool makes mincemeat of Windows passwords

DMA or Direct Memory Access

For many years periferal chips have had a high speed mode where they dump data stright into RAM bypassing the CPU. This usually occures during CPU wait states where they can control the address and data buses. However I would have thought that it would only have access to a limited area of RAM devoted to the DMA process but I don't know.

I expect the technique of accessing an internal area of a 'computer' that has been unencrypted will work on everything including Chip 'n' Pin machines. I would say this needs a hardware solution. Perhaps we need an encrypted CPU, one who's instructions are actually carried out encrypted so it's impossible to tell what it's doing until it's done. This may be logically impossible, I can't get my head round it.

Ofcom scuppered 61 pirate broadcasters in 2007

Pirates lose equipment and are skint

Pirate radio stations are always short of cash and build stuff on a budget. That's sort of the point. They often have their gear confiscated by authorities or stolen by other operators. It would make no sense to spend too much on it. If the pirates stopped fighting each other and invested in some better gear and got some smarter technologists involved then they would do better. The great thing about FM is that it's so easy to do and for people to tune into. Compare that with online streaming with all it's different protocols and compatibilities.

What could emerge is a standard streaming, say shoutcast, that plays just on TCP/IP and does not need a Windows compatible client. A simple daemon that could be integrated into any device with WiFi and a headphone jack.Then a domain suffix that all radio stations would hook up with. Sort of like a global radio dial.

It would be a simple matter to pick up this stream with WiFi and rebroadcast over FM.

Paper clip attack skewers Chip and PIN

Liability Engineering

Who's fault is it if a forged signature is accepted. The bank. Whos fault is it if a PIN number is fraudulently used? Your's for letting someone know your PIN. Chip and Pin has been engineered to shift the liability away from the bank and onto us.

So far only the machibes have been hacked. Pretty easy to get your hands on one really. Next the chip will be exposed and it's memory read with a scanning electron microscope or maybe just a finer pointed needle.

If they keyboard passes unencrypted keypresses to the CPU then maybe the card passes the private key unencrypted through it's registers.

The arogance of the people promoting chip and pin as uncrackable is simply asking for trouble.

Gov boffins to carry out simulated London dirty bombing

Why tell us not o worry?

So that when the real terrorists do it we will think it's government scientists and not try do report it.

Secret printer ID codes may breach EU privacy laws

Freeview box

I bought a Freeview box, but they wanted my name address and postcode before they would sell it to me. I chucked the £40 on the counter and walked out with the unit. The checkout girl was gobsmacked. I have since realised why they were doing the governments licence fee intelegence.

If you have a pay as you go SIM card then you assume it's untracable. Especially if you got the phone at a boot sale. However people will have your number on their phone. So the spys only need to ask someone you have called whose number it is. Chances are they will have put your name against the number.

The advice here is buy second hand and only use the printer/device for your subversive stuff. Use another printer for your business invoices with your name and address on them. hehhehe.

That Wi-Fi network you thought was secure? It ain't

MAC address security

A combination of MAC and WEP security is plenty to keep out someone just looking for a free Internet connection. There will always be a belkin54g on your site survey you could use. However WEP security is cracked in a couple of minutes with the right tool and MAC security simply requires some sniffing and a WiFi with a cloneable WLAN MAC address. Lots of these have the feature on their user interface.

It's worrying that a badly configured client could give away the keys to your network to a man-in-the-middle attacker. WPA and a Radius server is just the sort of security that a company would use. Anyone cracking that rather than connecting to the nearby belkin54g would be up to really bad stuff.

It makes sense to keep your power low and keep all Access Points on the ground floor or even the basement. If you have them high up in the building then even a little Edimax 7209 with standard 3db antenna can be used from 1km. Keeping your signal from straying from the building also helps with interferance, you don't get so swamped with everyone elses signal.

ISP data deal with former 'spyware' boss triggers privacy fears

TIA FIB CIA MI5 NWO BnQ

I love the black helicopter angle. So the ISP goes, "cool! advertising money, nice, thank you, here is your info feed". But there is no advertising, it's part of TIA (Total Information Awareness, BBC1 Sunday 9pm The Last Enemy) which is part of the bigger NWO (New World Order - see Alex Jones Infowars) plan.

It's the marrage between government and big corporations. So quicker than getting a law passed that forces the ISP to hand over this live data (see RIAA and Music Copyright ledgeslation requiring ISPs to inform on Downloaders) you simply pay them for it! Very smart. It would be a good (I mean evil) plan to pass some laws as well.

But I digress into the land of TV fiction and Internet conspiricy theorys....

We need spybot antispyware for ISPs

Need to run Spybot to disinfect your ISP. They have been sneeking spys into your PC for years and those in the know run antispy software. Where as more ordinary PC users (who do not read Reg) suffer.

By placing the spy inside the ISP they have really taken control. Imagine having your HTML scrutinized and modified as you surf the web. If the optout/optin is by Cookie then they can better identify the user. Each user on a home router would have a different cookie since that's via the browser.

I expect my ISP to simply be a pipe to whatever Internet server I am looking at. I do't expect the content to be filtered and coloured on the way. If they do start doing that then I can see sites offering https versions just so you know you are getting the real thing.

As with everything, the ordinary simple person will be directly affected in the intended way and the few smarter people will work around this. We are all a bit ordinary and simple at something and they usually get us. My weakness is those letters that come through the post saying I may already have won £1,000,000. Get me every time.

Eye-o-Sauron™ man-tracker masts now fully online, says DHS

Fit guns

The camera is automatically trained on the man sized object. With a gun fitted the terorist could be shot, manually or automatically. I expect it will be popular on many borders once it works on the Max border.

Have a look at this thing you can get from Samsung. I wonder if LG do one?

http://www.news.com/2300-11394_3-6140088-1.html

Skull and crossbones because you are defending against boarders.

Google mounts Chewbacca defense in EU privacy debate

Back in Freeserve days...

I noticed that I was sharing the same IP address as one of my friends who was posting on the same forum. The forum was using IP addresses to tackle a problem with people posting under different names. It seems that we were somehow running under some kind of NAT with Freeserve being our 'Router'.

If you use a service like email which identifies you then at least that server knows what your dynamic IP was at that time. An authority with a large enough reach to be able to look at all logs from all servers would easiliy be able to trace your path.

Remember you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, yeah I recon!

UK rattles 'three strikes' filesharing sabre (again)

Take the power back

It's not about Rock Music. It's about the government using powerful media groups to gag Internet trouble makers. The government does not really care much about piracy. Howver the Govenment cares about the BPI and mainstream media, mutual back scratching, helps get the right message accross. The BPI will lean on the ISP's and the ISP's will lean on the users. It may not be effective for stopping piracy, virtually everybody does it.

So if the Government wants to silence an Internet user, it can do so through the ISP. They don't have to give the real reason, music piracy will probably do it. Courts are not required. If the user complains I am sure they could find some child porn or terror manuals. Remember they will have a spy on your PC so they can load this stuff for the police to find.

Better stick to Linux.

ADSL M.A.C number not issued

If BT refused to release your phone line to an ISP then you would have problems reconnecting. If you really are a P2P person then it's unlikely that your neighbours will want to share Internet with you. You could use a Cable or WISP company but the blacklist would probably prevent them from connecting you.