Posts by Pascal Monett 18239 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And that means the technology is maturing. That's supposed to be a Good Thing (TM). It means that standards are easier to put in place, which in turn allows for more ubiquitous usage of said tech.
Let's put it this way : when gravity modulators can be had for a dime a dozen, it will be sad for all those rockets we won't need anymore, but we'll be regretting them in space.
Just give me an option to chuck a few dollars to sites I like. I don't mind using my VISA, and I certainly prefer they know that I have given them the dough.
That way, when I log in, they can say "oh, here's our sponsor coming to see us, get rid of those ads on his page".
If I pay money I generally see no benefit in being anonymous to those who get it.
Let it not be forgotten that Intel has lovingly baked DRM into said 7th gen chips - for the ease of use and reliability that all users crave, right ?
Not compatible with Win 7 ? Not a problem here - I'm in the process of transitioning to Linux anyway.
And without DRM if at all possible.
It's a bit ironic. Progress has transformed our PCs from towering, heat-belching monsters to cool, near-silent and immensely more powerful tools, only to give us handheld scorchers that sometimes even catch fire.
I really do hope that we'll get room-temperature superconductors some day. It will be a blessing in more ways than one.
Can only agree. Trusting one's backups to a startup would be the worst possible business continuity choice one can make.
Then again, it's probably only slightly worse than the backup choices most companies seem to make these days. It might even actually work - until they fold, that is. Or until something screws up and they lose data.
After all, all clouds have lost data up to today. Some only a bit, some have lost everything. Do you really want to roll those dice ?
Since Windows 1 0, Microsoft has added to the malware attack vector list with QR codes in BSODs, stuffed up their own update system, stuffed thousands upon thousands of users' PCs with flaky updates, and now this.
Congratulations, SatNad, you're really pulling all the stops out to keep the hackers happy !
Win 1 0 : nowhere on my PCs ever.
"multiple keys, one held by each of the branches of government"
My dear sir, do you realize just how daft such a proposition is from a security point of view ? Do you really think that one key per branch of government is not going to leak from at least one of them, by stupidity, oversight, forgetfulness or any combination thereof, in less time than a hacker needs to code a Hello World hack ?
Looks like it's a dream, all right. Go to the US, work your ass off for a dozen years or more, and get chopped like so much dead wood.
Thank goodness there are all those unions to keep employers in check . . oh wait, silly me, unions have been emasculated under Regan. Nothing is defending the worker any more. It's just capitalism all the way down.
Is IBM becoming the next HP ?
Or the change imposed by a close fly-by of Earth could send it careening too close to the Sun and get it ejected from the solar system entirely.
Don't know, not an astronomer, but theoretically it should be possible.
The much more likely outcome is that it will just smack into our home planet someday. Maybe over the ocean, so as not to harm anyone, but within sight of some camera or satellite, so we can get high-resolution footing out of the explosion. That might focus some minds on the issue before it is too late.
And we're supposed to believe that all banks have low-security, 3rd-party routers with default passwords connected directly to the Internet that are responsible for all this.
Well grab the popcorn because if some brilliant hackers have finally found a way to milk the millions in serial attacks, then saying "it ain't us" won't do for long.
Security is a journey, and part of that journey is going to be SWIFT upping its game to not accept transfers from insufficiently-secured banks. Have encrypted keys that are regularly changed and so on and so forth. Do something.
Because right now money leak this is starting to look like the Las Vegas Lottery counter - always climbing.
What it will destroy is your mile-high revenue generated by the difference between slave wages and the obscene prices you sell your stuff at.
Right now, the little people - you know, those serfs you expect to walk upon - could do with a little less bad news and a bit more local funding for stuff that actually needs to get done. You whine about destroying Europe, but you never hear "no" from your banker, now do you ?
What is destroying the economy of this world is the unjust pooling of money in the hands of the few who already have way more than enough, and their subsequent influence on law and political policy that ensures the status quo is not changed.
Pay your taxes - they fund roads, hospitals and schools and I doubt very much that that will destroy Europe.
If that is the case, isn't that "fog" also made of baryonic matter ?
If not, it would mean that dark matter is undetectable but can act on electromagnetic emissions.
Between quantum stuff and this, science is seriously starting to err into dark magic territory.
Side note : a million degrees ? Yikes.
Well I have a root string, a website-dependant string and I tack on the year I created the account.
So, if we say that my root is "golf" (duh, it isn't), then my password for El Reg could be golfEL2016 if I had created my account this year.
I have a password manager as well, I use it for sites which I prefer having extended security on. Sites like these, with only forum activity, are not sites which I feel need to have a 32-bit salted cipher.
And I will not buy that chip on that basis. I am certain they will muck it up, it will be hijacked by hackers, used as a malware insertion point, prevent me from viewing my legitimate content locally, and so on and so forth.
DRM is not only evil, it is inherently stupid because it never considers all the use cases and defaults to "NO" if there is a doubt - meaning people can be cheated from their own content.
My house is my castle. What I do in it is nobody's business but mine, and I will not condone surveillance imposed by anyone, especially not Hollywood & Co.
This DRM malarky never ceases to annoy me to no end. I buy my films, and I have to put up with imposed trailers (that are laughable five years later) and those bloody FBI warnings I shouldn't even see since I BOUGHT THE DAMN DISK.
So I buy my content, thank you very much, and then I rip the hell out of it, put it on my NAS and watch it the way I want to see it.
They can stuff their DRM where the sun don't shine.
"how many sysadmins have found rogue Wi-Fi access points in the businesses they work for?"
Not comparable issues in my mind. Bringing in a Wi-Fi thingy and hooking it in to the network is easy enough - they're cheap, rather easy to set up and also easy to keep inconspicuous. If the network admin is not whitelisting connected equipment, then anything goes anyway.
Climbing up to the ceiling to replace a light is not inconspicuous, and the hardware is less easy to get (won't stop a determined attacker, though). Obviously, once in place it'll be a devil to notice, but it still falls under whitelist control (if that is in place).
With a minimum of attention, network access shouldn't be possible, which would reduce the attack to DoS-levels - still a nuisance, but not really a security issue.
I avoid it like the plague, but in all honesty it is rather useful in keeping all that stupidity in its own little pen.
There was a time when it would be my mailbox getting spammed with chain letters, so-called inspiring nonsense, bullshit warnings, stupid permutations on urban myths and all that moronic shite, and I would have to wade through it all and delete, delete, delete. Now it's all on Facebook, which I can just never go to.
So thanks for that, I guess.
"2,000 requests per second in a single TLS connection. In our experiment, we were lucky to detect the first collision after only 25 minutes (220.1 requests)"
2,000 requests per second is 120,000 per minute, meaning 3 million in 25 minutes.
Could someone explain what 220.1 requests is supposed to be ?
Because if they managed to get their collision in only 220 requests, or even 220 100 requests, then this thing is more dangerous than they say.
And that is what needs to change before Apple (or anyone else) can stop cutting prices even more.
China is on its way to wealth similar to ours. They are fast-tracking everything we did before : pollution, work conditions, the works. Check out a film about our Industrial Revolution if you wish to learn more - in those days workers who got their hands crushed, mangled or cut off by unsafe machinery were just fired, no compensation.
We did those things. Now Chinese workers are experiencing the same. They will rise against it as well. Then it will be India's turn, then whatever else comes next.
Ultimately, as in everything international, it is up to the local population to decide if they accept a given set of conditions or not. We can tell them about what we think they should do, but only they can decide to actually go about doing it.
I'm all for Chinese workers to tell Apple & Co to stuff it and lock prices, but I know that then, Apple & Co will just take their business elsewhere (yay Capitalism!), so the workers will end up out of a job instead of having kept the little they had.
What I really wish to know is how exactly is Apple going about getting its cost cuts. Is it calling them up and saying "How much further can you diminish costs next quarter ?", or is it - more likely I guess - "Cut costs by 5% next quarter or we move to India" ?
It's the latter I would find disgusting - but not surprising.
They see everything going through their pipes, they can do what they will with it and you have no idea what they are up to, nor much of a recourse if you don't like it.
The least they can do is provide proper network security and functionality, and doing so for the customer means keeping the house in order.
The fact that an Australian ISP has government-issued surveillance equipment is not surprising these days, even if it is a bit disappointing. I'm sure it is just one of the many - although I'd be interested in a per-country comparison of how many ISPs do have such government surveillance on-premise. Maybe that could be one point of a Freedom Index chart ?
Is that some local specialty ? When you're summoned to court, aren't you (or your lawyer) generally supposed to be there ?
Daft as it sounds to me, I note that the general rule of self-representation has been respected (ie you lose). The phoning it in must really have tickled the judge's funny bone (in a "Ah so that's what you think of my court ?" way).
Personally, I wouldn't wait for the guy to "hand over" the relevant papers justifying how much he sold. With behavior like that, I'd send in the plods and have them tear the place apart to bring back every slip of proof they can get. I wouldn't trust that guy not to doctor the evidence (not that he seems smart enough to do it right in the first place).
But maybe that's the thing - the judge is handing him another length of rope, waiting to see just how he'll try to hang himself with it. Hmm, yup, sounds much more satisfactory in the long run.
And that there is specifically the problem : confusing having a drink with getting smashed.
For fuck's sake, if you can't have a drink without getting full-blown tanked then by all means, don't drink. It is already socially frowned upon to be unable to speak coherently, piss one's pants and act like a bloody fool. That point is already a given, as is lying in a drunken stupor on the sidewalk. You're flogging a dead horse, is what I'm saying.
Responsible adults are talking about having a drink, with friends, in a pleasant, cultivated atmosphere of détente and cordiality.
Take your raving drunkenness elsewhere. You are not welcome here.
No safe level of smoking either. And now we are being told that bacon sammies are even worse.
Shall we just lay down and die now ? Oh, silly me, of course not. That would deprive government of years of tax income. No, we should obviously live our lives in religious ascetism and die the day of our retirement - that way Gov gets all the revenue and pays none of the costs.
Well you can forget that idea. We're humans, not robots, and all the shit we take daily means we need to smoke and drink to not effing snap and murder the a-hole next door on a weekly basis.
Maybe if you eased up on the scare announcements we'd not need to drink so much ?
Bah, just kidding. We'd drink anyway.
From the results of the study, it seems the participants went "so that's all it is ?" and went off to have a real one twice as often.
In other words, it was a training simulator that built their confidence that they could deal with it.
Well done, I guess.
In other news : teenagers still hormonally attracted to sex despite puritans' best effort.
The huge anomaly was actually caused by lack of common sense and non-existent correlation between local readings and solar activity.
In order for any sort of aurora to occur, the sun must have surface activity - activity which is at a low point at this time. So correlating whatever reading with current sunspot activity would have nipped that alert in the bud.
Plus : auroras in the UK night sky ? When was the last time that happened ?
Edit : by Jove, apparently it does happen, albeit rarely. My gast is flabbered.
Autonomous cars apparently have no difficulty in detecting other cars and measuring their movement vectors. If said whatever-your-pet-hate-is has a vector that puts the autonomous vehicle in danger, I trust that it will be able to avoid a collision by braking before entering the danger zone.
The major issue, apparently, is reacting properly to road conditions, not other drivers.
Nice to know that the data will be stored in a nuclear bunker. Unfortunately, the bunker is in Paris, a city with a history of terrorist attacks and no end of Hollywood destruction.
I would think it would be a better idea to set up a data storage area just about anywhere else. From the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne to the livestock-infested areas of its center, there are many places in France to choose from where a terrorist would have zero chances of being interested in blowing something up, mainly because there's only cows or crops as far as the eye can see. And nobody would think of nuking crops - that's counterproductive.
Of course, most of those places are likely boring as hell because there's naught to do outside of work hours, but we're talking about data safety, not employee entertainment. Put a data center in that kind of area. With all the money put into rehabilitating an underground bunker in Paris, I'm sure you could have built a data center in the Meuse without any more trouble than occasionally having to wait for a cow to move out of the way.
Looks like we're going to have to face it : Mars only has some water at the poles - and not enough to sustain a planet-full of colonists.
That, along with the eternal issue of the thin, non-breathable atmosphere, is going to make a colony on Mars a very difficult endeavor.
Indeed they should. Most companies of more than 100 employees do, because they have enough money to get an IT department in place that will properly prepare and configure the network to allow for it. Of course, sometimes said big companies will still spectacularly fail (eh, Target ?) and then everybody will point and laugh because everyone knows they had the means, they just didn't put the proper effort into it.
Nonetheless, most companies are less than 50 people, and most of those companies do not have an IT department because not enough budget. Or worse, the CEO thinks it's a good idea to appoint a family member as IT manager because various stupid reasons, so an incompetent twat is in charge, backed by the might of family ties.
Those companies are really at risk, because either the CEO is convinced he knows what to do because he can program an Excel formula, or his nephew knows all because of all those hours on Playstation instead of getting a degree. Either way, the only thing that actually saves them is their obscurity, until the day it doesn't because some PEBCAK downloaded a Locker and ended up encrypting the companies' sole file server (that has no usable backup, because obviously).
In the end, I think it's just Capitalism at work. The healthiest companies survive, those that cannot identify threats and define mitigations fail. Isn't that what Capitalism is all about ?
Independently of the fact that facial recognition in public areas has been demonstrated to be useless, I am tired of this immediate jump to more surveillance in our daily lives just because there is a hint of a threat.
Yes, terrorism is bad. Yes, loss of life is tragic. If, however, we are going to transform our society into a series of roadblocks with security checks at every corner and nightly curfews, then the terrorists have succeeded in destroying our way of life beyond their wildest dreams.
For me, this is proof that the whole canoodle is nothing but a carefully orchestrated smokescreen to enable pork-barrel contracts and personality building.
A government branch simply cannot have "missing" accounting controls. They are ACCOUNTABLE.
The IT spend shambles starts right there. Somebody needs to bring that house back in order, and Brexit is NOT going to help.
Too bad you didn't have such foresight when you created the tools in the first place.
That is why you do not create malicious tools to subvert common standards. That is also why you do not consider yourself above the hoi-polloi when it comes to the risk of being hacked yourself. Finally, that is why when, despite all the dangers, you do decide to go ahead and create such malware tools, you do not go and put files on an internet-accessible server.
But sure, it was more practical for the spooks to be able to readily download the latest version from whatever location they are at in the world. And yes, I understand that the tools need to be DevOpped super fast because of the changing nature of the target.
Unfortunately it was also more practical for the hackers. And now said hackers have offered it to the world, which means the basic scum are going to get access to nuclear-weapons-grade exploits way before they could code it on their own. So the NSA has given a booster shot to all the misguided, money-grubbing lowlifes of the world.
I guess you can call that job protection, in certain circles. Thank God it's all legal, right ?
Microsoft never "falls back". That would be to admit defeat and allow the errors of the past to continue. Microsoft will only boldly go forward, forging brilliant new errors along the way. And now everyone gets to experience them directly thanks to the ever-changing code base.
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