Posts by Dr Dan Holdsworth 592 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2008
Plod in America is getting worryingly devious, though.
Quite a few police stations in the USA are running campaigns aimed at the local drug dealers, inviting them to tattle on their competitors in the drugs trade, in order to reduce the local competition with their products. As there is no honour amongst criminals, a cycle of tit-for-tat informing is soon set up, with the local plod being the net beneficiaries of all of this.
Do note that Mr Cameron hasn't said how quickly he wants the encrypted material to be decrypted. All we do is hand over the encrypted text, and a secondhand ZX-81 and tell Plod "There you go, this'll crack it... eventually."
It will, too. Probably after a few zillion years, but nobody said this sort of thing was going to be easy, did they?
The slight problem here is that the customers of a major ISP look at a LOT of web pages. Recording the URL of everything that goes through their systems will need a very great deal of storage, and therein lies a problem: storage costs money, and fast storage costs a lot of money.
On the other hand, the Government is asking for a load of web log data that they do not know the content of ahead of time. An Evil ISP might well therefore automagically generate some plausible-looking and entirely legal logs on the fly and give that to the spooks in lieu of actual data, on the premise that if the aforesaid spooks don't find anything illegal, they're not going to pry further.
Alternatively, if the fines for non-compliance are low, simply not bothering at all and swallowing low fines as a price of doing business, instead of the high costs of doing the government's dirty work for them might be an alternative route.
I have seen it reported that there were telephone-based social engineering attacks going on for at least a week, and probably longer before the main hacking event took place. I therefore think that the Talktalk vulnerability to an SQL injection attack has been fairly common knowledge in the black hat community for quite a while, with many a script kiddie giving it a go to see what could be extracted.
As the only reported attacks have been social engineering ones, I am inclined to believe Talktalk when they say that no complete bank details could be stolen via this SQLi attack. The script kiddies being rounded up thus far are just the first few muppets with UK IP addresses seen in the logs of Talktalk; small fry and of no real importance at all, though UK police will doubtless be prosecuting with customary verve.
As the main hack event coincided with a major DDOS, I rather think that a larger hacking outfit had a good, long sniff round the original SQLi vulnerability and decided that since Talktalk appeared to be rather bad at security, more than just incomplete bank data might be obtainable if a bit more force were used.
Thus far, very few reports of major thefts from Talktalk customers' accounts seem to be surfacing, so it would appear that at least some of Talktalk's security is decent.
Seeing as how the flaw was probably as old as the hills, who says that it was just one individual who was onto it? The fact that assorted Black Hats have been conducting social engineering attacks on Talktalk customers for a couple of weeks now suggests the following:
1) The flaw is an easily-exploited one.
2) The flaw was either widely known in the Black Hat communities, or was easily discovered.
3) Insufficient information could be gleaned from the attack to compromise credit or bank accounts using just that information, hence the extra social engineering seen.
What we may well be seeing is the aftermath from a series of different attackers. The kid so far collared will be just one of many, and the DDOS attack may well be only slightly connected with the other attacks. Black Hats are not all geniuses, indeed many are as thick as two short planks. The DDOS may well be down to one of the stupid outfits who were unable to understand that an SQL injection attack didn't need a noisy cover to succeed.
Indeed, the DDOS might well have been an attempt at extortion, when the SQL injection didn't yield the vast treasures that someone was told it would yield.
You know, this seems too idiotic to be accidental. Even if the clause is never acted upon, it demonstrates a level of anti-clue so profoundly horrifying that I for one would view that bank as a terrible organisation to be looking after my money. I would therefore start looking to see if some of the HR of SunTrust have been bribed by SunTrust's competition to put this clause in as a form of economic sabotage.
The thing to remember with both petrol and diesel engines is that the technology has changed a very great deal in the last couple of decades in both cases.
Diesels have changed from indirect injection using mechanical injectors to direct injection using piezoelectric transducers to modulate how much and when the fuel is injected; modern diesels also use variable vane turbochargers. The net effect is to spread out the torque and power curves, so that diesels are efficient and powerful at a wider range of speeds.
Petrol has if anything undergone an even greater series of changes. Old-style petrol engines used carburettors to produce a petrol-air vapour which was then sucked into the engine. This vapour had to be sufficiently concentrated to ignite from a spark (hence the choke on earlier designs, to enrich the mixture when the engine was cold). This changed to injection into the intake system, and then to the modern, direct injection systems.
These inject petrol directly into the cylinder, but vary the mix so that there is a blob of richer mixture next to the spark plug, and leaner, less rich mixture elsewhere. Combined with a turbo this makes these direct injection engines very, very fuel-efficient indeed.
Toyota hybrid engines have another trick: they are not Otto-cycle engines but are Atkinson cycle engines, which means that more power is gotten out of the petrol combustion cycle, at the expense of somewhat reduced power and torque.
Jaguar recently went one better with a prototype gas turbine engine, which used gas turbines to generate power very efficiently to drive electric wheel motors, with a battery pack in between to smooth the power flow. This works and indeed a US truck company is selling LPG-fuelled gas turbine electric transmission replacement systems, but the problem here is the high cost of the gas turbine engines, which are uneconomic for passenger cars.
The basic problem for ISIL and indeed any force operating in desert conditions is vehicle maintenance. Nick a job lot of Humvees, and sooner or later a component breaks for which the local mechanics cannot bodge together a replacement, at which point the car is junk.
A similar thing is true of armour in the Third World; tanks take a lot of maintaining, and when they break down, you need the correct kit and trained people to do something about it. Quite often a pack change is the best option; take out the entire engine pack and replace with a reconditioned one, then repair the old one back at your workshops. ISIL do not strike me as a group capable of doing very much of this since workshops need skilled mechanics and a good parts supply chain, which in turn needs coordination and a reputation for being good payers.
The best fall-back is what they are doing: use vehicles already common locally, like Toyota trucks, and simply do not bother with armour or any more than light artillery. A Hilux with a heavy machine gun on the back makes a very effective support vehicle, and replacing the truck, the gun or indeed the operators isn't difficult simply because all three are readily available locally.
The downside for the jobbing PHB here is that there is a tendency to want to brand services with the local branding. So, instead of buying in an email supplier for the company Acme Widgets Ltd and simply telling the staff that you've done that, the cloud email supplier is often, even usually branded as Acme Widgets Ltd email.
So, when it suffers an outage, those people who know that the email is outsourced to cloud will blame the PHB for using unreliable cloud services, and those who don't will simply blame the Acme Widgets Ltd BOFH.
Either way, whoever is in the BOFH role and whoever is the PHB for Acme Widgets Ltd is going to get it in the neck either for running a crap service, or for choosing the wrong cloud supplier, or (moving higher up the chain) for trying to scrimp and save a few quid and ending up instead costing the company $BIG_BUCKS when the system goes tits up.
Basically, you can't win in this game. Either the lusers blame you for the solution costing too much, or for it being unreliable.
Feathers or feather-like structures have been found in every dinosaur group except sauropods, and there have been next to no fossils of juvenile sauropods found (juveniles are much more likely to need feathers than huge adults). Insulation is only any use to an animal that internally generates heat; a cold-blooded animal is actually hampered by insulation.
The current hypothesis is that homeothermy (warm-bloodedness) is ancestral to dinosaurs; an internally-maintained warm blooded condition evolved before dinosaurs did. Homeothermy in a small animal and in a big one is different; the surface to volume ratio alters so much that very big animals have more trouble losing heat than they do retaining it (whales lose heat through their tongues, for example).
Big herbivores would have had another advantage; they were essentially fermenting huge volumes of plant material in their guts, which generates quite a lot of heat. Cows do this very thing today, and benefit quite a bit from having what amounts to an internal heating system. Bison, when over-wintering, can store enough fat to get through the winter without feeding much, but nevertheless still dig into snow to feed just to keep the bacterial colony in their guts ticking over and generating heat.
Yeah, yeah, very good.
Now try doing that with an SSH session, which has been carefully designed NOT to keep hold of session keys and NOT to hold onto session data. Quite a lot of design work in SSH has been based around making it really quite incredibly difficult to save this data.
If you mandate that this data be retained, you have to fork the SSH source and build in new functionality, make sure this works, make sure it doesn't introduce any new vulnerabilities other than the honking great big one that this has to introduce, and keep up with all the patches that occur in the mainstream product.
This is a hell of a lot of work, more so because the session data has to be stored securely somewhere (local strong encryption of these sessions as they are stored would be my preferred option) and also because the amendments and add-ons may well introduce bugs and vulnerabilities.
On the other hand, outsourcing to an Eastern European country and training the locals in speaking vaguely intelligible English is another option. With the massed exodus from India to, say, Elbonia as an object lesson it is pretty certain that the Elbonian authorities will be most careful not to cause a repeat occurrence of the exodus.
Measurement of CO2 levels and inferred temperatures using ice cores with better dating methods has shown that although higher temperatures and higher CO2 levels occur at roughly the same times, the higher temperatures seem to lead the higher CO2 levels.
In other words, higher temperatures cause higher CO2 levels, and not the other way around.
If you are doing a high-ish mileage commuting, as I am, you face a choice in car ownership. You can either buy a reliable-looking vehicle and keep it until it looks like it is becoming a money-pit, or you can buy a vehicle on a lease contract, keep it a few years paying the wear and depreciation costs plus a small premium, then trade it in for another one.
In the former case, you are looking for reliability and economy from the word go.
In the latter case, you are only looking three years ahead, instead of six or seven. Thus in the lease-hire case the person does indeed have a shorter outlook and can afford to make shorter term choices. Of course, if they happen to be skinflint Yorkshiremen like myself, they simply choose an ultra-economical diesel for the money saving.
I wonder how many of the people who supposedly asked to join the Labour Party actually exist? Were I running the vote, I would at least try to make sure that the names of the supporters correlated with those of people on the electoral roll.
This would prevent entirely fictitious characters like A. Nonymous and Firstname Lastname from being able to vote without having a look at the local edited electoral roll and choosing suitable extant people to impersonate.
It isn't much of a security check, but it is better than no security check at all, or a google search on each name.
A load of data was stolen from the Ashley Madison databases.
A load of data that some criminals claim was stolen from these databases has now appeared online.
If you look closely, there's a gap between the data being nicked, and the data turning up online. Remember, we're dealing with criminals here, so who is to say that the data has not been tampered with between being stolen and being released?
Ashley Madison were also known for not doing very much, if any, checking on emails they were given. Thus I dare say root@127.0.0.1 will have been trying to cop a free shag according to the records; certainly email@example.com was.
Just because an email address was in the data dump doesn't mean that the person whose email it purportedly was had ever joined that site, or been involved with it in any way, shape or form.
Yes, it is entirely possible to get much, much smaller, more compact lock picking tools that will do the same as the stuff she was waving around there. However if the owners of a datacentre are serious, they will not be using the frankly laughable rubbish that the likes of Masterlock are selling, but will (like my employer) be using Abloy locks.
Abloy make locks which are not susceptible to shimming, nor to simple pin-lifting tricks. They can be opened, of course, but the quick way tends to be rather SOE and very noisy.
It is also worth noting that any data centre worthy of being called secure will not permit anything with an unknown MAC address to send any packets at all, and very likely simply will not have any internal wifi network, simply to remove this attack vector. On a similar line, this pen tester wouldn't be allowed in simply because her footwear doesn't meet the international safety standards.
Still, nice trick to smuggle in tools, and some rather nice silicone on view, too (I'm only human...).
If you visit this place, do remember to ask how many species of water plants are currently growing in the pond they have at the top of the hill. The muttered answer will be three or four.
Then ask how many they planted originally: 12 if memory serves.
What happened is that a centre that prides its self on knowledge of ecology and biology just tried to buck one of the few ecological theories which has actually been thoroughly experimentally tested: island biogeography.
Basically, you need a set amount of habitat for each species in an ecosystem. Make the ecosystem too small, and some of the excess species will go extinct. Doesn't need to be the same species each time if you re-run the experiment, but you always hit about the same number of species per unit area of habitat.
Nice of them to test that one out for us again, eh?
Oh and try not to mention otters to the staff, either. They don't like otters very much, not after one made a habit of climbing out of the river below the site every evening, scampering up 200 feet of hill, diving into the pond and scoffing expensive koi carp until dawn, then waddling back down again.
Several other websites will *claim* to have accurate dumps of the data, and will *claim* to check the email address you type in to see whether this is in the stolen data.
Note that I said *claim*?
What the websites will actually do is record all the emails input into them, and occasionally, randomly, return one as being in the stolen data. The list of new, mostly known-working email addresses will then be sold on to spammers selling new dating web sites (seeing as these people have helpfully self-selected as being a) stupid, b) interested in dating websites, c) stupid enough to give out working email addresses to untrusted websites, d) really, incredibly stupid and of course d) stupid.
There's nothing like working with a known-stupid, known-horny crowd when you want to sell something. Stick a pair of tits on it, and these geezers will buy it, regardless of what it might be.
This business model is after all what Ashley Madison were all about: flash tits at thick, sexually frustrated male audience, wave huge computer-generated list of female members (*ahem*) at said audience, and rake in a membership fee every month. Oh, and hope that the few prostitutes who get past your rigorous checking system (yeah, right) are up to taking on a lot of work.
The notoriously long reach of UK libel law does not extend to the USA, except in special cases. The US congress signed into law an act called the Speech Act in 2010, which makes libel rulings foreign to the US unenforcible in the US if the rulings are deemed to run counter to the US constitution rules on free speech.
Practically speaking, this means that most UK libel judgements would need to be re-run in the US courts before being considered enforcible over there, which rather takes away the point of libel tourism.
Economics and programming have a few things in common; both are complex sciences with plenty of blind alleys and gotchas into which the unwary and untutored can easily blunder. Self-taught programmers are relatively easy to spot; they tend to be either one-trick ponies, or to turn out pedestrian, uninspired and frequently quite buggy code.
The same is true of self-taught economists.
Murphy seems intent on ignoring everyone else's mistakes so that he can make them anew all by himself. There is a rude but highly descriptive word for one who takes this approach: idiot.
True genius gets to where it is by standing on the shoulders of giants, that is to say by learning from earlier genius in the field and not making the same old mistakes. Murphy is alas no genius and as the original author points out, it is indeed worrying to see him having such an influence on a potential PM.
As a general rule, whenever Socialists are expected to get into power, invest in property. DO NOT invest in land per se, but in land that has something built upon it, because Socialism is the creed of the worshippers of pettifogging rules.
Whenever Socialists get into power, they always cause a property price boom through regulative ineptitude and over-exuberance. When this occurs, take your ill-gotten gains and invest in something other than the local currency, for Socialist economists know not their arse from their elbow.
I have no idea about US law, but under UK law the website operators would be legally obliged to hang onto the financial data of each member for six years or so, regardless of whether the user had asked for their records to be deleted. However, the financial transaction data would be fairly limited, and would only detail that User A paid the website $this_much on such and such a date, for website-based services.
There isn't actually any detail of how much data was leaked, or how much data the attacker(s) stole. I would honestly doubt that very much data could be lifted from such a company without alarms being raised; the business transactions databases and credit card databases would seem to be the prime target in such a raid, with the users' sexual preferences and so on being a much more secondary target.
The reasoning here is that whilst known-good credit card details have a ready market and a known going rate, blackmail material does not. Blackmailing people is difficult, intensive work and requires a near-psychopathic bastard to run it for best profit, with a high chance of the blackmailers getting caught either by law enforcement or by enraged adulterers. Furthermore, with photo-manipulation techniques being so prevalent these days, a supposed nude photo of some bloke doesn't have nearly the blackmail potential that it once had; all one needs to say is "That? Photoshopped, I'm much more handsome than that!" and bluff it out.
No, the reason so little data from the hack is getting published is that little data was actually taken.
Actually, this won't work.
Only female midges bite people, and they only do so in order to lay a second or third batch of eggs; they can breed successfully without needing to feed as adults, though a good blood meal hugely increases their breeding success.
Repellents work because there are a couple of systems working in a midge's nervous system; attractant nerves and an antagonistic repellent system. If the former predominates they keep coming; if the latter then they stop and often just start circling. This can be seen with flies on moorland; out mountain biking on moorland, a sweaty biker will always attract a following of flies, which can only catch up to you when you stop, otherwise the airspeed needed is too high.
Sticking some paper tissue in between the bike wheel spokes and soaking it with DEET means you leave a scent plume of CO2 and of DEET, which confuses the hell out of flies and turns quite a few away.
On the other hand, if you're going to be sitting in one place, you need stronger medicine. Try one of the US-made midge repellers, which put out a vapour of insecticide. This doesn't kill the insects, just slightly clobbers their nervous systems so they can't fly straight or coordinate well enough to bite you.
At a university situated in Wales somewhere between Gymru and Cymru there was (and still is) a very traditional biology department. It has all the things one would normally associate with uni biology departments: lab assistants that make Pratchett's Igors look sane, equally deranged staff and a curiously lackadaisical take on health and safety.
This attitude came back to bite them one day, when it was decided that as a particular project was over, the bulk of the particularly vile and smelly thiol compound they'd been using really ought to be gotten rid of rather than merely leave it to fester on a shelf somewhere (this gem of wisdom being dictated by someone finding the best part of a three-pound jar of picric acid on a shelf in a store room; dry picric acid at that meaning a good kilo of sensitive high explosive needed getting rid of).
So, it was decided to find the nearest sluice to the main sewer and flush it down there, rather than pay for proper disposal. Unfortunately this particular thiol was rather oily, hydrophobic and had a high vapour pressure, and smelled very like rotting fish multiplied several thousand times. It flushed away easily enough, and was followed by a bucket or two of hot Decon-90 detergent, and that was that, or so they thought (wrongly).
The stuff apparently stuck to the inside of the sewer and over the following months evaporated off and crept back up into the lab drains, which had no water lock system. Everybody knew which genius had decided to dispose of things that way, and he spent those months as the Least Popular Man Ever.
What is probably going on here is sperm competition of some description. The basic idea for any male is to be the man who fathers the most kids, and animals tend to solve this in only a few basic ways. Gorillas do it by mate guarding; there is one male that mates in any one group, and that is all; gorillas are terribly under-endowed even by primate standards with a 1.5" penis, and testes the size of peas.
Chimps go to the other extreme, like this lemur. Enormous testes and a mating system whereby most males in the group that the female permits to have a go, do have a go. The easiest way for males to compete is to maximise the amount of sperm cells they put out, absent of any other mechanism.
Humans, as always, have to be different in mating methods. Human have the largest penis, size for size, of any primate, it is structured differently to most primate penises, and seems to be designed to displace semen from the female genital tract; humans don't produce as much sperm as do chimps, but we produce a great deal more ejaculate with better quality sperm, plus human semen also contains a lot of hormones like Follicle Stimulating Hormone (which stimulates ovulation), so there may be some biochemical warfare going on in humans as well.
What is obvious with mating systems is that old ideas such as birds being very monogamous is complete bollocks. Species like alpine dunnocks also have (in the breeding season) enormous testes, mostly because every male dunnock in any area is mating with any available female in the area, at the same time as trying to stay out of the way of the alpha males in that area. Male dunnocks are thus extremely busy chaps in the egg-laying season, and also very busy afterwards making sure to take food to all the nests where they may have fathered offspring.
I shall leave it to some other intrepid biologist to describe what ducks get up to.
No, the ONLY time you make a small change on a Friday afternoon is when that Friday is the last day you will ever work for that company. Any other Friday, the mess you make on a Friday is the mess you'll get to clean up the following Monday, only it'll have had two whole days to fester and ferment and get nicely vile and ever so much more difficult to clean up.
No System Changes On A Friday.
Ever.
Without exceptions.
Yes, I've seen this as well. My experience of this was in a hell-hole of a now happily-defunct ISP that was an offshoot of a now also happily-defunct PC box-shifter. The management in this ISP was dire, bullying and utterly incompetent. Planning was a dirty word.
I was appointed in the second wave of techies recruited, the first wave including a number of genuine wizards, and some extremely bright but only half smart ones. One of the latter we shall call "Johnny Random", a soubriquet earned by his habit of randomly altering system-critical stuff last thing on a Friday afternoon.
Johnny Random was a brilliant Perl coder, self-taught with a background in Assembler coding. He had to be brilliant to be able to work with the god-awful Perl bodges he created by way of scripts; hideous layout, no code indenting, no usable commenting, and every variable being world-viewable and very frequently re-used throughout the code for different things.
I got given the task of sorting out one of his hideous botch jobs, and it took me days to separate out the worthwhile bits from the dross, apply a decent code style and re-write it to take account of the many optimisations built into Perl for memory management and so on. My end product ran faster, worked more cleanly and was infinitely more maintainable than the original dross. It didn't get me a raise, however; it wasn't that sort of company. I left soon afterwards, vowing never again to work for such utter arseholes.
UV insect traps are mostly useless. Most of what they catch are confused but harmless insects; they don't cut the numbers of clothes moths very much, and they are useless for killing mosquitoes and midges.
Where insecticides are concerned, the bad news is that most insecticides on the market aren't going to be much use as they are too volatile to remain on anything for very long. The good news is that for insects like clothes moths, woodworm and the like, you do not actually need to use neurotoxic poisons at all. What works much better is a borax dissolved in a mixture of water and propylene glycol.
This works selectively on just the larvae of the moths, and then usually only when they have just hatched. A hatching lepidopteran caterpillar starts by eating the shell of the egg it just crawled out of, then it eats the substrate the egg was laid on. It has to, as it hasn't got much energy to roam around and look for anything tastier. If the substrate is saturated with a stomach poison like borax, adsorbed into it along with a solvent, then that first meal is going to be the larva's last one.
That works very well on woodworm and on clothes moths. Dusting with silica dusts like Kieselguhr is also effective on insects, as it scratches the waxy coating on their bodies and causes them to dehydrate. For a clothes moth, a normal house is a desert without water, and if their water-conservation physiological tricks are compromised, they die.
Neither of these tricks will work with museum specimens, and the other old standby for keeping preserved collections of insects safe, which is strategic containers of napthalene, is discouraged these days not least because napthalene is a suspect carcinogen. It also doesn't work on stuffed specimens, as they have to be out in the open so cannot be surrounded by a vapour-phase insecticide.
Permeating the area with sex pheromone will work, and is a standby for organic pest control, but insect sex pheromones are volatile long-chain alcohols and the like, and need to be present in very specific ratios to be perceived as a sex pheromone (I have a PhD in sex pheromones). This does not of course apply for mammal sex pheromones, or for water/soil living animals for obvious reasons.
Pheromone traps containing encapsulated sex pheromone in powder form is, however, a very, very neat trick indeed. The only thing vaguely similar I have seen is to use pheromone traps containing entomopathogenic fungal spores to control carrot flies.
When considering a new system that involves money, think not how it would work, but how it could go wrong.
This system is an absolute dream come true for the small-time fraudster and grifter. All they need is a small RFID sniffer, an RFID programmer and a supply of RFID tags that look a bit like the ones the organisers have.
Once in the festival, the grifter gets his RFID sniffer going then goes looking for people who look a bit richer than normal festival goers; designer clothing and so on, and walks past them. His RFID sniffer grabs the codes, which in the privacy of his tent he puts onto some more RFID tags, which he sells to willing stooges to try out. When he finds one that is loaded with cash and is an access-most-areas tag, he duplicates lots of them and sells 'em for lots of cash (cash will of course still be present, so people can buy drugs).
Pretty soon the guy who had his tag sniffed finds he ain't rich any more and the festival organisers want to have a quiet word with him, along with all of his clones...
This is how this system will break, mark my words.
Gnome Metacity Flashback is a decent alternative to XFCE, I find. It runs with a much, much smaller memory footprint than does Compiz, and as it is only a 2D system, uses a lot less memory.
I find that I do not miss 3D desktop effects one little bit; most of what I do involves what is in each window, be it Firefox, a terminal or whatever and I use the window manager to, well, manage these windows and manage the virtual desktops. Gnome Metacity Flashback does this perfectly. It works, works well and does so consuming minimal resources.
If you connect all the components that generate heat to a simple aluminium heat exchanger at the back of the server unit, and run water through that block, then you get almost the same level of cooling without all the messiness of soaking everything in oils, or the vulnerability and fiddliness of running liquid cooling pipes to each component.
You would need a second loop to dissipate the heat as the water mix circulating in the pipes would need to be purified water with antibacterial additives, but this isn't really a problem. The second loop could be a simple cooling pond external to the datacentre, or even set up as a moat around the data centre complex. Such a set-up gives the site a nice rustic sort of look, whilst limiting the options of local scallies looking to raid the place.
Black snakes are predators and eat vermin, mice and rats mostly. If the house was infested then there must have been a more than adequate food supply; this means that the area had to have had a sizeable rodent population.
Eliminating the snakes would still leave you with a rodent problem, and a bigger one than you had before. A most sensible buyer would look at this, and see if the rodent problem couldn't be sorted out somehow. Remove what the snakes are eating, and they'll go elsewhere or starve.
That is very much my experience as well. The inspection I paid for burbled incoherently about damp on one wall which subsequently turned out to be a false alarm. The inspector obviously didn't do simple checks like look in the airing cupboard, or else the previous owner's feckless bungled soldering (leaving large burns on the woodwork) would have revealed a badly damaged central heating system.
Similarly a look at the exterior doors would have revealed the hand of the bungling DIY muppet at work (it it doesn't fit, remove parts of the locking mechanism and bodge it!).
A final look at the legal ownership would have revealed that whilst the house was leasehold under one owner, the garden was also leasehold but under a different lease. Both paid off so no rent to pay, but technically I cannot prove ownership of my garden.
All in all, money wasted.
To date, most of the reports on climate change seem to be of the form:
Alarmist headline
Unfounded series of assertions.
Complicated waffle involving computers, and appeals to authority
Solution which involves me giving someone else lots of money.
Almost unheard of is the concept of simply improving technology to the point at which we are using low-carbon technologies and emitting less fossil carbon than is locked up by natural processes. Also seldom heard is the point that much of the trouble stems from there being so many humans on the planet, and that the solution is to raise everyone's living standards so breeding like rabbits no longer looks like such a good idea.
No, mostly what we hear is doom-saying, together with rent-seeking and assorted magical thinking. Oh, and attempted raids on one's wallet.
This is a weird post-apocalyptic Australia which seems to have had several bulk freighters-worth of American big-block V8 cars imported, and all the myriads of Toyota landcruisers and Hilux pickups mysteriously disposed of. It also uses liquid hydrocarbons exclusively, which seeing as Australia doesn't have oil reserves worth speaking of is pretty bloody weird as well.
Much more realistic would be a horde of Toyota pickups, with producer gas units strapped onto the back of them burning wood to make a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas. This burns remarkably well in internal combustion engines, and lets you use them without relying on crude oil.
Granted, a sort of Max meets Steampunk look would be rather weird and you wouldn't expect the flashier vehicles to use this system, only the crummier workhorses of the fleet, but it would at least look a bit more realistic.
If these birds are all very similar, genetically speaking, then any parasite which is perfectly adapted to them will do very well indeed, as it will be perfectly adapted to every single parakeet it gets to.
What needs to be done is to research these birds in their native habitat, and try to find out what parasites and diseases attack them there. Then simply import these biocontrols and release them into the near-clonal populations here, and let the parasite do the population control for us.
Power the broadband via a simple time switch, which turns off for fifteen minutes every day. That will reboot the router for you, and if you do what I do and save only the motion videos output from your security system into a Dropbox folder on a low-power NAS box, then this will solve the problem completely, as the router will be regularly rebooted and everything will auto-sync when the networking comes back after an outage.
No, as far as can now be told, homeothermy looks to have been an ancestral trait for dinosaurs, with heterothermy evolving later. Feather-like structures have been found in all dinosaur groups except for sauropods (the adults of which were likely too big to need them). Dinosaurs look to have been physiologically and behaviourally different from reptiles, even if they were superficially similar in their skeletons.
Theropods merely took the pre-existing dinosaurian traits and amplified them a bit; as predominantly fairly small dinosaurs, theropods would have tended more to the homeothermic end of the scale anyway and birds merely take this to an extreme.
Dinosaurs had more or less the same sort of genital arrangement as do birds, namely a common orifice for urine, faeces and genital systems; this set-up is common to birds, reptiles and marsupials. Only eutherian mammals (the group we're in) evolved away from this arrangement.
In reptiles, this makes mating a fairly delicate operation; the male has to get it just right although having not one but a pair of penises probably assists somewhat here. In birds, a couple of different techniques are used; the majority use a penis-less sperm transfer, and ducks, geese and ratites use various penis-like structures of varying but occasionally rather improbable dimensions (two feet for Argentinian Lake ducks).
Dinosaurs presumably used penis-like structures and some seem to have slightly more robust pelvic bones that presumably acted as support. However even this arrangement still looks improbable for animals like Stegosaurus; the dorsal plates would seem to preclude the male getting very close to the female. Stegosaurs also had particularly small brains, even for herbivorous dinosaurs, so whatever they did must not have required much thinking to achieve.
The only problem is that behaviour and soft tissue structures don't fossilise. So, any suggestions as to what went on?
Frank Sinartra's greatest hits, plus some light folk and maybe a spot of Enya to be going on with together with nice, comfortable seats and a fairly high ambient light level and maybe even a coffee shop. That will make that particular shopping mall a hit with the older generation, and a place where pensioners love to gather, read the paper, have a chat and so on is a place like one of the circles of hell to a teenager.
Do that and the teenagers will turn up, shop and scarper as fast as their legs can carry them, whilst the oldsters (who are mostly unthreatening and non-criminal) will linger and spend money.
This is more or less part of the world-building scenario of the sci-fi author Neal Asher; once AIs were built, then they slowly took over. At some point, they realised that they were much better at this running things malarkey than were humans, and simply obsoleted out the human politicians entirely.
The human politicians revolted, but rapidly found that the human populations they had been counting on to rise up against AI oppression did not do so, because the AIs were not oppressive, merely a hell of a lot better at running a fair and equitable society. This became known as the Quiet War, mostly because it consisted largely of politicians being told to put a sock in it and go get a proper job.
Of all the pictures you could have dredged up to illustrate that story, did you have to find an aquatic brontosaurus one? Sauropods were most emphatically NOT aquatic in any sense of the word; they would have done their best to avoid water, since they were strongly adapted towards walking on land.
The more nannying, and idiot-proofing you try to add to anything, the more the idiots of this world try to break these features.
Look on the front forks of modern mountain bikes; the drop-outs have little lugs on them. This was added when some utter moron put his bike wheel back on and forgot to tighten the quick release, then rode off and pulled a wheelie. The front wheel dropped off, and said moron crashed and hurt himself quite badly. He then sued the bike manufacturer for not having included a feature on the bike to protect idiots like himself from being, well, idiots.
As long as a product isn't actively dangerous or unpredictably dangerous, then it is OK. Cars do not need automated handbrakes; bog standard manual handbrakes will do the job perfectly reasonably and in my experience, they do not go wrong, whereas an automated servo system takes control away from the driver and tends to cause abnormal levels of clutch wear.
One thing that people have done for many centuries is make marks on rocks, usually straight incised markings. Quite often, these aren't visible until a LIDAR system images them and enhances them. LIDAR has always been expensive; an inexpensive system would let you pull tricks such as imaging drystone walls looking for Roman incised stone fragments, say.
Mooching about looking in drystone walls is actually a valuable archaeological technique; people really hate carrying stone about, so a drystone wall is always a good representative sample of what was lying about on the ground surface in the immediate vicinity. Drystone wallers are no respecters of culture; a lump of Roman altar is just a nicely-fitting rock to them and into the wall it goes; ditto a five thousand year old Neolithic quern. Being able to easily spot these would be useful.
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