Posts by Gary

DARPA in useful, easily-achievable project shocker

Been there, done that, god the camper van

Me-thinks DARPA should contact Mr Peter Duffet Smith. Who demonstrated on the BBC (~1995) a working 'signals of opportunity' navigation system, built into an old camper van.

This consisted of, 4 wide-band antennas mounted on the corners of the van, a computer controlled scanner with phase comparators and an old, even then, PC.

This device could use any set of transmissions from known fixed sources to locate the vehicle to within 2 meters.

OK job done, time to put the van on ebay under $22m buy it now .

Rogue sysadmin sues SF for $3m

Missleading Story In need of correction

This story is misleading,

The users were not 'locked out of the network', they were just locked out of making any possibly insecure changes to the network.

At all times while Childs was under arrest there were no security breaches, no drop-outs in traffic and no failures.

Now I'm sure The Register printed this story right the first time around, so perhaps you can look again at the original and correct the current copy.

Now while I don't approve of Rogue Sysadims going off the rails and acting in a clearly paranoid delusional way. You have to wonder what pushed this diligent worker to act so strangely (Making routers self wipe if powered off, not having backups to passwords only held in his own memory etc). We should ask ourselves what duty of care his employers had over him?

I guess that is the reason for the suite.

RIP for unbiased reporting: hence the memorial.

Google on trial over Italian 'defamation' vid

Practice makes perfect

If Italy cannot play nice with common carriers, perhaps it google should remove the conflict of interest by offering service to that country.

Lets see how they like having every site registered with a .it domain de-listed. Be all accounts last Saturday's practice with blanket malware listing means they are ready to go.

OK .it are you feeling lucky... Well are you..

Clamshell 'iPhone' appears online

More Power!

Key advantage of this iPhonie is you can replace the battery without risking your warranty.

How an Italian judge made the internet illegal

Making this law Go Away!

Great, you want us all to register, Fine by me.

Be prepared for a S**T storm of registration letters, email, phone-calls, faxes etc. from the Billions of internet users out there who by the mere fact of owning a page on the internet with a headline are now in breach of Italian law.

Lets see who goes broke first, Us at one request each or the Italian gov, required to register, reply and confirm all that mail.

Overstock and Patrick Byrne sue New York over Amazon Tax

Taxes we don't need your stinking taxes!

All this says is yet again the global aspect of internet trade outpace's the ability of local gov' to gather revenue. Should not these people realised by now that it is futile to try and tax internet trade and moved to a collection scheme based upon the end user.

We already pay tax on Income, Savings, Fuel, Energy etc. Now I recognise that taxing out of state purchases is an effort to support local traders, who may also be making out of state profits. So why not follow the model of the Mail and Telecoms industry and declare a common trade balance. e.g.

Each trader reports the total of the trades they make to out of state addresses to a central federal unit. The unit then cancels all trades on a state by state basis, the deficit is charged to the excess-trade states and credited to those who's trade is under represented.

The same model could be used internationally (and is, see currency exchange) to balance out of country trade, and would have helped prevent the current situation where the US is basically owned by China because of the massive imports that it takes from that country.

Alien, because I have found no intelligent life on Earth.

Bulletproof quantum crypto dinged by implementation weakness

Quantum crypto too easy

So they worked out a complex way of getting partial key, great. But this becomes a man in the middle attach and prone to the issue that as soon as you leave or make a single mistake, you are noticed.

You still have valuable data, but now they know and will be after you.

From the depths of history (say about 5 years ago) there was a much better attack.

Quantum key transport relies on groups or orthogonal detectors at each end of the link, such that as each entangled photon is received one measurement (e.g. polarization) is randomly made and the result stored. Later the other party, making random measures on the entangled pair of each photon you got passes their result table (in the clear) to you. (no risk here as the table is just random bits)

By Xor'ing the tables together you get the crypto key to be used on subsequent comms.

Here is the weakness: the random choice of measure is just that random, it is the comparison of the two tables that results in a key. If you could fix the random choice of one party to a known string then you can know what measure they will make and then be able to listen in, do what they would do and pass on the result.

The easiest way to do that is simple, just send a burst of polarized light bright enough to blind one sensor of one party, before they get to exchanging keys. Then you know that from then on whatever random measurement choice they make the crypto bits will always come from the other channel.

Hard to explain, but easy to do hence looking for my calculator.