* Posts by Dr Dan Holdsworth

590 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2008

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More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

Dr Dan Holdsworth

No, they won't share it. They'll just leave the entire database dump on a USB stick on a train unencrypted, or send it through the post on an encrypted DVD (with the password written on the DVD).

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Coat

Re: Just like buying a magazine.

OK, if we start from the situation of now, where porn is freely available to any sprog with the minimal wit needed to Google for it, then can we at the present time detect any real harm being done to kids because of this?

I personally doubt that any harm is coming to kids at all that was not equally prevalent a century ago.

However, if we now try to restrict kids from finding porn, then very quickly a couple of concepts will rapidly become prevalent:

1) The government are a bunch of control-freaks who want to control everything you see and do

2) These government control-freaks are in fact quite incredibly stupid and as long as measures are taken to avoid their gaze, they cannot do anything to us.

So there you have it. At a stroke, all respect for the rule of law is gone, replaced with the Eleventh Commandment: Don't get caught. Teach kids this, and they are likely to generalise. Dodging paying tax? No, nothing morally wrong with that at all, just don't get caught doing it. Breaking numerous laws? Nope, still no problem as long as you don't get caught, and if you are smarter than the really very stupid Government, you aren't going to get caught.

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Boffin

Re: The real hangup is an instinct for self-preservation.

I remember an incident from decades ago, whilst I was training to fly hang-gliders. The training involved a lot of top to bottom glides down hills, preferably those with a decent breeze blowing up the hillside. On one such occasion we were in the Dales, near Kilnsey, on one side of a big U-shaped valley. The wind speed was steadily increasing over the day, and when it came to my turn for a trip down-slope, it seemed that a critical speed had been reached.

Starting a hang glider flying is quite difficult. Merely jumping off a cliff is a recipe for sudden death; insufficient airspeed. The way you do it is to run downhill into a wind; when the airspeed gets high enough, the kite lifts you off your feet. On this run it didn't, and having run flat out down a steep slope and failed to get a glider to lift even a little bit, you tend to feel something of a fool.

This however was caused by the windspeed getting too fast. We'd gone from laminar flow down one side of the valley and up the other to turbulent vortexes spinning off the far side and actually briefly reversing the wind direction on our side of the valley; this closed down flying for the day.

The point I am trying to make is this: just a small change in conditions invisibly changes flying conditions from good to lethal. Large areas of the country will be completely off-limits to flying cars with only minimally-qualified pilots simply because these areas are potentially too dangerous. Flights over cities will similarly be forbidden; over somewhere like London the only safe crash zone is the Thames, and try getting an insurer to cover a flying vehicle that is actually programmed to ditch into a river in case of trouble!

This is what will, and does kill flying cars: insurance and difficulty. You cannot permit flights over cities, for fear of harming whatever is underneath the craft. You cannot permit flights over seas, or over rail or motorway infrastructure and so on, and you have to keep idiot pilots away from things like power lines. GPS isn't safe enough, Galileo isn't safe either, and so it goes on.

Self-driving cars are the best we're going to get.

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: I wonder if...

I would think that there is much more to this than meets the eye. I think that this whole event was staged now, at this date, for a very, very good reason.

There are people in this world who are, to put it bluntly, quite startlingly stupid. Such people look at an entire airport shut down because of drones and think "Kewl, I want to try that!". These people are often teenagers, and a sizeable number of these teenagers will very likely be getting drones as Christmas presents.

As soon as the morons get their Christmas drones, then unless the perpetrators are caught and a guard is put up at *every* UK airport to prevent the flying of drones near the airports, then an awfully large number of cheap Chinese mini-drones are going to be flown over, around and into airports next week.

We badly need a cheap, throw-away anti-drone system of some sort.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

We do have the technology. At ranges below 100 metres, a decent goose gun will do the trick.

A drone flying higher can be severely affected by flying a helicopter over it; the downwash will likely down the drone. Of course, you first have to find your drone, then clear all air traffic, then launch the helicopter and by then the drone operator will have achieved what they wanted to achieve (total air traffic shutdown) and likely scarpered.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Pictures?

Have you seen the normal picture of a UFO taken with a mobile phone?

Mobile phones generally have fairly wide angle lenses; they are designed for taking pictures of people or animals at fairly close ranges; zoom is generally non-optical so the more picture is cropped away, the lousier the image becomes.

So, the likely mobile phone footage of a drone buzzing an airfield will be a huge dark field with a tiny flickering, flashing light dancing around randomly somewhere in the field; this could be absolutely anything.

'Bomb threat' scammers linked to earlier sextortion campaign

Dr Dan Holdsworth
WTF?

There's a sporting chance that the people responsible for all of this are from a country where the law enforcement is patchy to say the least, unless someone big in the government is spurred into action. At this point the law enforcement reaction generally tends to overkill, with the emphasis on "-kill".

Quite frankly I rather hope that this actually happens to a few of this gang. Random extortion like this really ought to be stamped upon if only to force the perpetrators to up their game somewhat.

LG's beer-making bot singlehandedly sucks all fun, boffinry from home brewing

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Coat

Home wine kits also have other uses. One enterprising home vintner and forger worked out that there are people in this world who are daft enough to believe that wine is an investment. They buy bottles of rare and expensive wine, and keep them hoping that these will accrue in value.

Because the wine is so valuable, they rarely if ever drink the wine.

This cheeky chappie reasoned that if someone is never going to actually drink the expensive investment wine, then as long as the bottle and label are correct, you can put any old plonk inside the bottle and sell the whole thing on as an expensive investment wine.

He was finally caught by getting too greedy and not paying enough attention to getting the forgery of the label exactly "right"; when checked the expensive liquid in the bottles turned out to be home-brewed wine.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Beer in the Sodastream?

I once tried sticking sliced banana in a freeze dryer, after a quick sojourne in the minus-70 freezer beforehand. On the plus side, it did produce vaguely edible freeze-dried banana. On the downside, the texture was rather like discs of banana-flavoured plastic.

Still, a worthy experiment, unlike the time I told some Computer Science students that the local garden centre was selling large boxes of Nitrate of Potash which even lacked the now-mandatory flame retardants. Now that was a spectacular experiment...

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Coat

Re: A decade of poor configuration

Another university that shall remain nameless had, in the mid nineties, a fair number of unix machines of various sorts (very few Linux systems back then) all of which had unsecured X sessions on them. As a result, pranks of all sorts abounded; screen flips, random windows popped up on other peoples's X sessions, screen meltdown spoofs and the like.

All fairly detectable; all you had to do was turn round and look behind you for the most virtuously innocent-looking person in the room, and there was your culprit.

Mind you, the other trick often played was to log into someone else's system using rhost, start off a Netscape process (a notorious CPU and memory hog) and echo it back to your own machine. Hey presto, your system was still nice and responsive and someone else had a sluggish system with a foreign web browser process running on it. This generally lasted until the victims found out about top.

This is the beauty of universities; wonderful teaching environments, whether you want to learn or not!

Brit bomb hoax teen who fantasised about being a notorious hacker cops 3 years in jail

Dr Dan Holdsworth

All of this sounds rather like the fool has looked up a check list of some of the more notorious serial killers (of humans) and is busy working his way down the list.

History of killing small animals: check.

History of poor impulse control: check.

History of sociopathy and difficulty interacting with people: check.

Prison sentences for assorted petty crimes: check.

This man needs to be on the list of potentially dangerous individuals and ought to be ordered on pain of a fairly long prison sentence to always tell the police where he is living.

As sales slide, virtual reality fans look to a bright, untethered future

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Lack of decent content.

Actually, VR might well be something of a killer app for business purposes.

Take a lot of miserable staff in a big, open-plan office. Add in VR or AR systems so each team are presented with their own little space (a walled garden with a shady tree overhanging it would work fairly well), and add in headphones so the user can choose if they want to just hear chit-chat from their own team area, their own music or general noise.

Done well, VR/AR could also replace the usual forest of monitors with virtual windows hanging in space in front of the user; instant mega-big screen.

It wouldn't quite be a substitute for decent office space, but could improve existing poor office space somewhat.

Space policy boffin: Blighty can't just ctrl-C, ctrl-V plans for Galileo into its Brexit satellite

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Thumb Up

Actually, this may be a well-disguised win

Think, if you will, what a high-grade positioning system is actually good for. Most civilians will just carry on using assisted GPS and quite like it, since it does everything required. The various armies will similarly just carry on as normal. The only thing that will be very affected will be the UK Home Office's plans for road pricing.

Road pricing can be done many ways, but if you are a moderately dim civil servant without much conception of how bloody devious the general public can be if money is involved, then a road pricing scheme involving Galileo looks like a really, really good idea. Civil servants have a certain rigidity of thinking that means that once they set off down a certain path, they do not deviate even under severe pressure.

A lack of Galileo therefore means that we, the vehicle-using public, may well have ducked a bullet here. The easy road-pricing system is denied the civil servants; they will therefore have to do something that civil servants really, really hate doing: thinking for themselves. This and Brexit ought to keep the meddling little elves of the Home Office very busy for quite a long time to come.

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: TUBE

I remember the tricks of getting PCs to ork with dodgy peripherals. Some places had but one keyboard that was fully working, and this keyboard travelled around the room being plugged into machines to let them start without error, after which the usual keyboard got swapped back in again. Keyboards that threw errors on start-up check quite often worked perfectly otherwise, you see.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Back when I worked for a rather dodgy ISP in Accrington, we had continual virus problems. Strangely though, these always followed a fairly well defined infection pattern which led me to believe that the user has a lot to do with computer virus infections.

Virus trouble always started in Sales or Marketing, and spread from one to the other. Then the same few senior managers would get infected machines, then some of the Web designers. Not all, and always the same ones.

Over in the NOC, the database engineers on completely susceptible Windows machines never got viruses. Neither did any of the engineers, but then we were using RedHat Linux.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Push volume button to mute

On older Vauxhall cars, the headlight control was a rotating dial on the dashboard. The interior light control was there at all; to turn the interior light on, you pulled the entire headlight control towards you.

You could always tell a Vauxhall that had been a hire vehicle, because it would always have a dirty mark around the roof light where people had tried feeling for the control switch, and hadn't found it...

Dr Dan Holdsworth

If this is a corporate machine, then the user should not have had the admin rights to install anything, and should not have any data sitting on the (encrypted) machine in any case; furthermore the local antivirus and anti-malware software should also have been active.

In such a case, I would quarantine the machine for "further tests" and proceed to scan the hell out of the local drive to make certain that nothing actually got onto it, whilst making the user cool their heels waiting for this to run. Kicking about for 20 minutes is generally unpleasant enough to get the message about not visiting dodgy sites over to users without actually harming anything.

Sacked NCC Group grad trainee emailed 300 coworkers about Kali Linux VM 'playing up'

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: I know it's unlikely

To be honest, this sounds like a small amount of prankster stuff, and quite a lot more Dell hardware being a bit crap. Add in a luser who is paranoid and hey presto, said luser goes into ultra-defensive mode and tries to attack the employer for not having protected her.

A more mentally robust person would have either tried to discover the prankster and returned the favour, or else simply fired off pranks randomly in the hope of hitting the original joker by accident. Do enough of this and the entire group will get a local reputation as a bunch of "work hard, play harder" lunatics whom nobody wants to mess around with.

I am however surprised that the base OS was Windows for all of this. Yes, it is the corporate OS of choice, but surely a security consultant would want to start off by securing the hardware and base OS and about the only thing that'll do that is an old-school Linux such as RHEL or similar. The thing here is that the firewall can be very precisely controlled, and SELinux can also be used (although mainly to generate grey hairs on the head of the operator).

If the base Linux OS worked OK, then I would blame the Kali Linux underlying it. I don't have much experience with Kali Linux, but I would imagine that it isn't going to be very stable if used aggressively; but surely then this is the point of using virtual instances of Linux? Set up a stable VM, snapshot it and play around with the snapshot, then when something goes wrong you reinstate the known-good original.

Well that's just spliffing: UK Amazon merchants peddling Mary Jane

Dr Dan Holdsworth
FAIL

I'd have been very tempted to buy some and have it sent to them in a gift-wrapped box, together with a stern note regarding not sampling the produce before combing the web...

Wombats literally sh!t bricks – and now boffins reckon they know how

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Boffin

Re: IgNobel prize incoming

You'd be amazed what has been researched over the years.

Many, many years ago a chap by the name of Pickett did sterling work in the field of insect sex pheromones and how these might be used to control insect populations (if a male is flapping around with antennae full of sex pheromone, he isn't going to find many ladies).

Somewhat later, I did the same only for potato cyst nematodes. For a mercifully short time (until the videotapes were recycled by my PhD supervisor for recording Eastenders, or Pobl Y Cwm or something), I was the proud owner of the world's most boring sex-related videos.

Sex-related because this was film of male nematodes responding to scent gradients of sex pheromone on agar plates. Boring, because a male nematode in a hurry with love on his mind (and since males don't eat as adults, they always have love on their minds) travels at a few millimetres per minute, and to see any real speed the videos had to be watched on fast forward.

The research, whilst worthy of an igNobel, never got the publicity it deserved through not being around in the days of Youtube, not that this prevented the famous TCP Sliding Window video becoming famous (this was also recorded around this time).

Scumbag who phoned in a Call of Duty 'swatting' that ended in death pleads guilty to dozens of criminal charges

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Black Helicopters

Re: Hostage situations...

One useful way around this trigger-happiness of US police would be to add in some more technology. Specifically, when responding to an incident involving a report of armed suspects, send in a robot of some description which doesn't look in the least little bit human, and which is not armed with anything in the slightest bit lethal.

This de-escalates the entire situation; if the suspect is innocent then they will comply with the cop talking through the robot's transceiver to put their hands into the handcuffs and kindly walk out and say hello to the SWAT squad.

If on the other hand they are armed and want to shoot something, then they can have a briefly entertaining time blowing hell out of police property that isn't alive and the shooting of which is no more than criminal damage, after which the human police will point guns at them and demand surrender.

This sort of thing ought to help reduce the carnage caused by police who think that they have no alternative save shooting.

Samsung 'reveals' what looks like a tablet that folds into a phone, but otherwise we're quite literally left in the dark

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: How they test matters

This sounds a lot like Apple and their extremely comprehensive handling tests done on the iPhone X, which because it was so super-secret all had to be done indoors in controlled conditions. Conditions which included making sure the hands of the test users were always dry, not-slippery and not likely to fail to get a grip on an all-glass extremely slippery and extremely impact-sensitive expensive shiny thing.

Which stole the crown of most expensive thing commonly dropped and broken from the likes of Samsung and Faberge et al.

Chinese biz baron wants to shove his artificial moon where the sun doesn't shine – literally

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Suitably Qualified and Experienced Personnel...?

He would appear not to know what he is talking about.

If you look at moth trap collections on different nights of the lunar cycle, you will start to see a pattern (allowing for cloudy nights). Quite a lot of life forms are sensitive to moonlight; in fact I would say that the majority from insects to animals to a lot of plant life are sensitive.

Now, I'll grant you that a new constant moon isn't going to have all that much effect, especially not when compared to street lights in a city, but it is going to have some effect and not none at all.

UK.gov to press ahead with online smut checks (but expects £10m in legals in year 1)

Dr Dan Holdsworth
FAIL

Re: VPNs

Opera Mobile has or had a free VPN solution. Even if that has gone, plenty of new ones which can be used to surf porn (and which also serve up adverts in order to fund themselves) will spring up, along with a crop of malicious VPNs which infect your hardware with viruses.

The kids won't care, just so long as they can get their jollies.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

You're missing the entire point of the legislation. It isn't supposed to stop children finding porn at all; it is supposed to appease the neo-Puritan nitwits who think that anything pleasurable is bad and seek to control everyone else's lives, presumably to make them as miserable as their own existences.

Said neoPuritans generally don't have much of a grasp of technology, so a gormlessly stupid law that is easily circumvented is all that is necessary to convince them that Something Has Been Done.

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: It's only a matter of time...

I know a chap who used to use the names of his cats as pseudonyms for email lists. One day, a telemarketer phoned up and was most insistent in wanting to talk to "Tiddles", even after it was explained that Tiddles had not signed up to this new email list for a couple of good reasons.

Firstly, Tiddles was a cat, and secondly Tiddles had died a decade earlier hence was unavailable for comment. Such is the intelligence of telemarketers that these snippets of essential information took quite a while to penetrate.

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Justified

In other words, it feels like $300 of profit margin and if you hold it to your ear, you can just about hear the Punkt management laughing all the way to the bank.

Python lovers, here's a library that will help you master AI as a newbie

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Boffin

Re: Yet another opportunity

My PhD supervisor used to derisively refer to what he termed "Statistical Stamp-collecting". This was 20 years ago, and even then it was possible to start off with a decent-sized biological database of a few thousand data points per treatment, and run an ANOVA analysis comparing each sample to every other sample, and do so whilst one nipped down the pub for an only-slightly extended lunch break.

Actually working out what the results actually meant, that was the tricky bit, as was deciding whether or not the experiments were well enough designed to support the inferences you could statistically "prove".

These days, of course, we have the famous meta-analysis. Not got the time or budget to do work yourself? Need a few more papers published to go for that professorship? Easy, munge together several other groups' work without a thought to the rigor of each experimental method, fire it all at something statistical (Like Kruskal-Wallis so not bright spark can point out that the data aren't parametric) and hey ho, a-correlating we shall go.

New Zealand border cops warn travelers that without handing over electronic passwords 'You shall not pass!'

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: I'm getting to the point now

Why bother carrying data at all?

Strong encryption exists, so you just keep the data in an encrypted enclosure somewhere on the net, and open a VPN to it whenever you want access.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Have fun!

I wonder if Customs would like a copy of my personal virus collection, helpfully packaged in various ways including self-extracting zipfiles...

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Devil

Re: Have fun!

Look, just take the path of least resistance here. The people who are doing the searching are not geniuses, they are just poor slobs doing a frankly rather miserable job on not so very much more than minimum wage. The monkeys have their country's law on their side, and they have instructions to use the law to do what they have been told to do.

Butting heads with morons is not smart. Butting heads with morons who can pretty much do anything they fancy to ruin your day is extremely non-smart, especially seeing as said monkeys are doing a boring job for not much money and will welcome any entertainment. You do not want to be entertainment for a border force monkey; you want to embody grey tedium so that your merest presence induces somnolence and indifference.

So, the monkey is expecting everyone to have a phone. Easy, get a Chinese brick of a phone with a SIM which will roam anywhere, and an address book with only the telephone numbers you need in it. Put a storage card in if you like, but make sure it has some tedious and not very good photos on it, plus some generic music. Keep a printed sheet of the exact same phone numbers in your pocket, for if the phone breaks. If the monkeys want to scan it, then the monkeys can scan it and more power to them.

You don't win against border agents by confronting them. You win by out-thinking them, and the way to do that is to just capitulate and let them steal something worthless and unincriminating.

UK ruling party's conference app editable by world+dog, blabs members' digits

Dr Dan Holdsworth

The solution of the true BOFH in this situation would be to keep track of which devices attempted to edit the data, and once each device has tried to save the changes, to present JUST that device with the edited data and keep the data unedited for everyone else.

This permits the would-be hacker to think that they have made an unauthorised edit, go onto Twitter and crow about it, and end up looking like a complete twerp when nobody else can see their edit. Since most of these script kiddies are doing this as a form of social display, contriving to let them make themselves look like idiots in public is a fairly sweet revenge.

Brit startup plans fusion-powered missions to the stars

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Mission energy requirements....

I agree, this sounds like an investment scam on much the same lines as the Moller Skycar or whatever it was Steorn were wibbling about.

The first step towards doing anything interplanetary is improving on rockets for getting stuff into orbit. The techno-beanstalk technology is about the only thing that will work here, and it is just about within our current technology. What you do is use normal rockets to get a hub station up to geostationary orbit, then you start lowering a line of super-strong cable down towards the ground, using some sort of counter-weight to stop it dragging the station down.

When you have a line from ground to geostationary orbit, probably terminating at an artificial island in the Pacific, you start reinforcing this until you can send loads of a few tonnes from ground to geostationary orbit. At this point your costs of getting stuff from ground to orbit drop by a couple of orders of magnitude, and the safety of doing so increases tremendously. At this point, space tourism becomes possible (you have to be thinking of the money-making aspects of all of this), lunar colonisation becomes much easier, and once you have a moon base a mission to Mars becomes a going proposition as well.

The whole problem here is that space, even low earth orbit, is hostile to humans. We need complex life support to live up there and even then, solar storms emit huge amounts of radiation. Humans off the surface of the earth need somewhere to hide, and a few tens of metres of lunar regolith are one good place to be. The moon is a good jumping-off place for interplanetary missions because there's almost no atmosphere and much lower gravity; you can build complicated stuff on the surface there which can get to lunar orbit quite easily, and thence to interplanetary space, but on the moon is a much more forgiving place for humans than is free fall.

Once you have your beanstalk, lunar base etc then you can start looking to get to Mars. At this point I'm not really seeing a reason for not using the Orion drive; it works, it is simple and away from Earth radioactive contamination is going to get pushed away on the solar wind.

DEF CON hackers' dossier on US voting machine security is just as grim as feared

Dr Dan Holdsworth
WTF?

Re: Graveyard voting

Yes, democracy was famously so popular in places like Chicago that the occupants of quite large cemeteries would lurch down to the voting booths to cast their votes, sometimes several times!

HMRC contractor scores IR35 payout after yet another taxman blunder

Dr Dan Holdsworth
FAIL

The UK Tax Code is hideously over-complicated

In most countries including the UK, civil courts are mostly there for when someone's got something wrong. That HMRC are being forced to go to court so many times regarding tax matters merely shows that the tax code they are trying to apply is too complicated to be useful.

Simplifying the UK tax code would seem now to be a priority. I would think that after Brexit, the Civil Service will rapidly start to realise that without a continual drip-feed of new regulations from the EU to apply, they shall have to start thinking for themselves and at this point will realise that simplifying their own jobs is a priority.

If they do not do so, and they won't for a while, there will continue to be a steady series of these sorts of cases.

Oz government rushes its anti-crypto legislation into parliament

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Interesting take on the legislation

This already happened once. Australia decided to get tough on internet gambling, so the various firms supplying this need to Australians simply off-shored their servers to south-east Asia, frequently with only very minimal downtime, and carried on as before.

Australia lost the hosting profits and the taxes that the gambling site operators paid, but did not otherwise impede business in the slightest.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: They know not what they do

I rather think that the intelligence agencies were hoping to be gifted with a slightly better way of planting sniffers onto internet backbones and into ISPs, and therefore asked for moon-onna-stick in the belief that the politicians would water down any proposal to more or less what was wanted.

Unfortunately nobody ever thought that the politicians were stupid enough to try to defy the laws of physics and mathematics, and demand back doors in encryption.

Who's hacking into UK unis? Spies, research-nickers... or rival gamers living in res hall?

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: These aren't DDoS attacks

Solutions exist to prevent torrenting; tricks such as having a device on the Halls network which listens for torrent connections, then sends a spoofed hangup packet to each end of every torrent it thinks it sees. Evil, and very effective.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Do they need to hack a UNI anymore?

Sometimes the attacks are subtle, elegant and amusingly pointless.

At a university that we shall call the University of Elbonia some years ago, some Computer Science undergrads obtained images of the fingerprints of the head of department by means devious and sly. They encoded these images into a buffer overflow attack in Postscript, conducted against the Computer Science printers, and managed on Friday night to reprogram these printers so that somewhere on every sheet of printing was a copy of one of the Head of Department's fingerprints, printed in very pale greyscale.

This was left in place over the weekend, then reversed using the same vulnerability on Sunday night. The CS staff were later quietly informed of the vulnerability and how to patch it.

Sysadmin misses out on paycheck after student test runs amok

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Naming Scheme

A certain now-defunct ISP I could name used genera of owls for DNS machines, genera of spiders for web systems and different archaic container names for file servers. However, a university I know of, in the search for short, snappy hostnames had a web server named Virus.

A flash of inspiration sees techie get dirty to fix hospital's woes

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Upsetting non-techies can be hard

I am reminded of the time a lawyers' office decided to try and speed up their secretarial work, by getting the lawyers to do some of the text processing themselves. Given that they had an office full of luddites and two-finger typists, this was a non-starter until someone had the inspired idea of using speech-to-text software. Most people had their own private offices so noise wasn't an issue.

After initial training of the software, everything seemed fine. The senior secretaries found the system effective, but some preferred typing. The lawyers were more of a mixed bag. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't and no amount of training changed this. Until a pattern slowly started to emerge...

Failures to recognise speech were much rarer in the mornings and late afternoons, and commonest right after lunch. Eventually the fault was discovered to be that whilst humans can understand almost any other accent best out of three, machine speech recognition software really struggles with "Lawyer after lunchtime drinkies".

Short of training the system on lawyers both sober and tipsy and thus having to admit that lawyers drank physiologically effective amounts of alcohol over lunch, there was very little that could be done, and eventually the matter was dropped in favour of trying to teach lawyers to type.

Russian volcanoes fingered for Earth's largest mass extinction

Dr Dan Holdsworth
Boffin

The Siberian super-volcano didn't just spew out lava and this hellbrew of halogens; it also chucked out an enormous amount of sulphur dioxide, and more importantly the entire volcano complex erupted through Carboniferous coal measures. If this new research is correct, then the vulcanism couldn't really have been much more destructive, because not only was there a super-volcano polluting the atmosphere with ash, dust and sulphuric acid particles (causing a volcanic winter of epic proportions), but the volcano was also spewing ozone-destroying chlorine gas AND on top of all of that had chucked out enough CO2 into the atmosphere to make the oceans slightly fizzy.

Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by algae living at the ocean surface. Most ocean-living life breeds via a planktonic stage right after hatching, which tends to live where the food is, right at the ocean surface. Pretty much all of the trilobite species bred that way, and the combination of CO2-poisoned oceans and UV light finished their entire phylum off.

The Deccan traps coincided with the dinosaur-killer asteroid, so it is hard to see which had the greater effect on life on earth. Those events did cause a world-wide wildfire and dust-induced ice age, and there was some effect from the asteroid hitting sulphate minerals and releasing sulphate into the atmosphere, but the KT-boundary didn't see this huge CO2 release, and the oceans were much less heavily affected. The KT-boundary event was also much shorter, only a few tens of thousands of years if that, rather than a million years of volcanic eruption.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: All a bit unnecessary?

I rather suspect that the moment a war against an opponent who is even slightly clued up about positioning systems goes hot, that opponent will start doing their very best to both jam the signals. A slightly smarter opponent would also, in addition to signal-jamming, start launching false-flag terrorist attacks against major players like the USA and Russia, to encourage them to think of Galileo as a national security risk.

I am however surprised that the EU is not more mercenary in its approach. The UK cannot get automatic access as a member state, but pay-for access given a set of conditions such as partial upholding of EU military goals and not attacking EU allies could surely be arranged. Indeed, using Galileo as a bargaining chip to keep the UK and its really rather potent military on the EU's side ought to be a goal of the EU.

'Oh sh..' – the moment an infosec bod realized he was tracking a cop car's movements by its leaky cellular gateway

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Oops

Actually it has been known for quite a long time that in the UK at least, the police radios were operating on a set of frequencies that nothing else was permitted to use. Now, certain TV receivers can be repurposed as software defined radios, and whilst these cannot decode police radio transmissions, they can determine the strength of these transmissions and use the strength to determine the distance of the transmitter.

If you are a criminal about to do something naughty, such a McGuffin is a very useful piece of kit, since it warns you if there is a police officer (or rather, a police radio unit presumably closely associated with a police officer) in the immediate vicinity. If this is the case, then the prospective scofflaw can alternatively choose not to break the law whilst in the presence of police officers.

The devices are marketed in the UK via the usual shady channels, and are described as a way of knowing if emergency vehicles are in the vicinity so that the user can get out of their way. The use of the things is described as "Being in a grey area", which approximates to "If a police officer catches some twerp with one, search the suspicious probable felon and his car immediately and obtain warrants to search his home forthwith".

What happens to your online accounts when you die?

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Get a Power of Attorney

Having had to work through things like this when my father died, and with the prospect of having to do so on my mother's demise, I can honestly say that this sort of wuckfittery is standard and normal. When someone dies, a legal process is set in motion which is constrained to follow a certain course, the steps therein being responses to age-old con tricks played to gain control of living persons' money.

So, you have to go through a series of steps to obtain a death certificate; when you do so I would strongly advise obtaining a dozen or so legal copies as this is cheaper at the time of issue rather than later. Most financial institutions will do precisely zero unless and until they get sight of a certified death certificate; this is legally mandated. Once they have a death certificate, some behave efficiently, some require prodding and some flap around like wet hens and have to be prompted every step of the way.

Once all this has gone through and you have obtained final accountings of all the deceased's assets and debts and have paid them all, then you can make a list of everything they owned and stick it on a probate form. It is the making of the list that is the difficult bit; gathering all the info is the time-consuming part of it. Actually filling the form out is dead easy, especially as the instructions and guidance are pretty much idiot-proof. Unless everything is horribly complicated or you have the IQ of an aubergine, you don't need a solicitor to hand-hold you through filling out a form.

Obtaining probate then gives you a certificate of probate. Once again, obtain a number of certified copies of this since no company will move unless they have had one of these certificates in their hands; they are legally required to act this way. They are not legally required to act like incompetent idiots who have never even heard of the concept of customers dying; this is merely part of the (dis)service that many offer.

One useful trick I found for applying boot to buttock in such cases is the Letter of Instruction, which is a letter with that wording as a title, signed by all executors, declaring who you are, what has happened, what certified proof you have and what you want to happen. Generally this gets things moving nicely.

Boffins get fish drunk to prove what any bouncer already knows

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: so they drink like a fish?

I'll have you know that a friend of mine decided, many years ago, to find out just what a drunken duck looked like. This was on the campus of York university, an area of land reclaimed from bog. It consists of artfully landscaped fields and ponds, with the zen-like landscaping effect being largely ruined by 60s architecture and undergraduate students. Many turn to alcohol to numb the anti-aesthetic effects of this mixture.

So, one afternoon Phil decided to experiment on the local ducks, using a supply of cheap vodka and some extremely ancient bread crusts to absorb the alcohol. The local ducks, being made of sterner stuff than most avians, took to alcoholic breadcrust with great gusto, and soon filled up on it.

The effects were interesting. A drunken duck has trouble balancing, but is so low to the ground that falls don't hurt. It also has difficulties with walking in straight lines, but can swim perfectly happily, albeit in looping circles rather than straight lines. The flight characteristics of drunken ducks were not tested, mostly because Phil was laughing too much to even attempt to get this duck into the air.

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Hey!

I'm afraid that experiment has been done, repeatedly, in Glasgow. Buckfast Tonic Wine is a pretty good substitute for any of the aforementioned mixtures; it contains sugar, ethanol and caffeine in stupid proportions, premixed.

Not for nothing is "Buckie" locally known as "Wreck the hoose juice".

Dropbox plans to drop encrypted Linux filesystems in November

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This sounds entirely like a company which wants to reduce the amount of testing it does each time an update is brought out. Unfortunately for them, anyone who is using an encrypted Linux partition on a laptop is going to get hit by this, and will have to find an alternative supplier.

Changing cloud storage suppliers is a lot of faff and trouble, so even if they do reverse this idiotic decision, a lot of people will avoid them for a very long time just from inertia.

Has anyone any suggestions as to a less pig-headed cloud storage supplier?

Stress, bad workplace cultures are still driving security folk to drink

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Curiously American

Where I work, a major UK university, if you do not take all your holiday entitlement you can expect a meeting without coffee with HR. Partly this is bureaucracy, and partly this is a mental health thing: work stresses people, and getting away from work de-stresses them.

Hence, the edict from on high is that You Shall Take All Your Holiday Leave, or else.

Amazon meets the incredible SHRINKING UK taxman

Dr Dan Holdsworth

Re: Just say No to Amazon

There is no stipulation in English law or indeed ANY law anywhere that any person, body, company or whatever should seek to maximise its tax bill. There is however a stipulation that a company should strive to maximise the profits for its owners whilst staying within the law.

Thus if the law permits a company to avoid tax by paying its employees with shares, then the company is more or less obliged to do that.

Ms Hodge is being extremely silly by effectively bemoaning a company acting entirely within the law. If she doesn't like it, she ought to see about changing the law which permits this trick.

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