Posts by Destroy All Monsters

'Super-powerful' Flame worm actually boring bloatware

Re: Why don't you get it already?

> most of the time endangering their life in black hat forums and darknets

Blackwater "Operator" Antivirus? I would buy it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus

"Mimivirus, short for "mimicking microbe", is so called to reflect its large size. Mimivirus possesses many characteristics which place it at the boundary of living and non-living."

Similarly, Flame possesses many characteristics which place it into the genus of bloatware, media players and nagware.

Boffins build all-silicon CNOT gate

"the photons have to be indistinguishable so as to maximize their interaction"

I would says the photons [two quantae in the photon field, really] have to be indistinguishable so as to be able to interfere.

If they are distinguishable, you are back in the classical case. This quantum can be labeled #1, and this one #2. The cat is either dead. Or not.

In a vague sense, the universe's datastructure indexes stuff by the system's state, then history. If particles have the same state and exchanging their history does not allow you to distinguish them, they go into the same bin. This applies even to complex systems such as alpha particles.

Researchers find backdoor in milspec silicon

Re: @EC: Real but greatly overlayed

> nonsense

Your refutation is duly noted.

Re: I don't think that this is a world first.

The late Saddam had a network-rooting HP printer. Or so I hear.

I'm sure the MSM circuit and popular press (not to mention all the behind-screen self-styled national security tacticool operators) will go into overdrive, with Richard Clarke pumping out "chilling", "eminently believable" and "eye-opening" prose. Oh well.

Re: Not overplayed

There's stuff called Requirements Engineering and Independent Verification and Validation. "Hey can you account for this stuff here on the die? Whaddya mean, 'no'?"

Can you just drop in a whole submodule into a floorplan given to you by the customer w/o anyone noticing? Hard to believe.

Re: type one HOG

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN?!!

Tony Blair comes back??

Olympic Wenlock plod cops condemnation from Amazon wags

Yep, that thing sure is something for the SCP foundation.

BBC uses lifted Iraq war photo to depict Syrian slaughter

Really?

Do we really need a "copyright violation is theft and straving artists" angle on this kind of stark incompetence by the BBC which seems to be designed to push for another "NATO humanitarian intervention by DU distribution" in a country no-one knows anything about?

I don't think so.

"Thanks to technology lowering the costs of production and distribution, we are all creators now, and we need our rights protecting against their unauthorised, unpaid use by media giants - who want to use our work for no cost and at no risk."

I detest the concept of "creator" and the idea that one should have pennies shoved into one's bank account for every crap one comes up with. Because of "rights". Sod that.

Assange loses appeal against extradition to Sweden

Re: You know..

Why can't I link to images with the 101st keyboarder "operator" section proudly showing off their additional chromosomes.

"sexual harassment and rape" ... "the UK Supreme Court rule"

Ah yes. Smear, entrap, then find some gimp to act on it.

Well, President Obomba has not yet personally (but oh so very morally and with the gravitas required of decisions pertaining to state terror) okayed a Death Note on Julian yet, so we should be grateful.

Publishing barons: Free speech a 'cloak for tawdry theft'

Re: Eroding Copyright?

How about 0 years?

Or do we really live in a society where people won't buy stuff off the guy who made it? I don't think so.

Re: Of course!

It's the old trick of controlling the discussion, then leading it to where you want.

Fedora aims cloudwards with Beefy Miracle release

I just managed to install F16, WTF!!

Netherlands jumps off ACTA train

Netherlands off the Fail Train?

Finally some *good* news today.

Super-powerful Flame worm could take YEARS to dissect

Re: Years to dissect?

That sounds like something hanging around on Amigas. You sure that's the right target?

zlib and SQLlite, huh?

They didn't use any software under the GNU license, so no obligation to share code. Well done.

Re: FOI request

You will never know. The black budget is currently at USD 50 billion YEARLY. You can put a few excellent developers into the small interstices, then buy them a nice, large house on the coast so that they STFU.

Then one day, an old bartender starts talking to you about this programming project...

Japan to get Android phone with built-in radiation dosimeter

The Terminal Beach

We read (with suitable correction to unit naming ... FFS EL REG!!)

"µSievert/h suggests that the detector is a dosimeter measuring radiation dose from all sources as opposed to an actual Caesium-137 detector which would be expected to read in Becquerel."

Why? A debimeter might be expected to read in Becquerel (decay events / second... basically Hertz) but that unit is not going to help you know about Cs-137 around you. It would also be meaningless to the civilian. Sievert, with a suitably (magically?) calibrated detector to be able to somewhat meaningfully extrapolate to the effects of the hunk of meat holding said detector, are at least somewhat usable (still a difference whether the Cs is on your skin or in your gut though.)

And how do you determine the distribution of Cs-137 or any other radioactive material in trace amounts anyway? Do you look for beta decay at precise energies? I suppose not. I suppose one grabs dirt, chemically binds any Cs, then measures the activity of the extract, preferably over a few minutes to get good numbers.

Now, can we know more about how the chip magic in this phonedosimeter works? Does it use a camera to look for luminescence? Does it look for bit pattern errors in vulnerable memory cells? What? My dosimeter still has a tube and it's not cheap even though it's clearly a mass-produced piece of plastic-encased use-once electronics, with integrated irreplaceable battery.

BBC report urges Halo troops to end bloodshed in Syria

What no Zeon?

Damn. I was hoping for a real Space Nazi Flag. Oh well, guess the olde german red-white-black design of the Principality of Zeon might be too obviously evil. Baby blue, that's what it should be.

As for Syria. Hmmm, they may have trouble with Qaeda types (good) but are not on the side of Israel (bad). They are not _Our_ Bad Guys (bad). They are also Shia in there (bad) allied with Iran (double plus bad). They also torture children (bad).

They can be bombed to smithereens by the North Atlantic Jerkoff Club (good) but Russia is their ally because of that Mediterranean port (BLOCKER ALERT)!

On the other hand, we have Bahrain ... quick, look over there, someone is exploiting Miss Lohan again!

People-powered Olympic shopping mall: A sign of utter tech illiteracy

Re: Are Americans that much more energetic than Brits?

> 1 (one) step would generate 120Ws

Only if everyone is jerking off in resonance with the floor infrastructure!

In the "western world" it's called "campaign contributions"

Pfff... bribery is a totally normal business practice down south or in sandy lands and is attacked only if people of the progressive persuasion are feeling the strong Sunday-morning urge to fix reality by inventing scandals and the laws that go with them, preferably applied world-wide.

As for Siemens, I thought they sold everything off except the fridge-making business?

UK cookie law compliance takes effect today

Re: How this should *really* have been done

Kick out the people and Euro Parliamentarian Fogies and hand the the saved tax feeder sustenance back to the civvies.

Vatican in pact with Microsoft to initiate world's youths into Office

Re: Odd that they didn't choose another OS

Eve tried it once and it resulted in a sh*tstorm for everyone.

And a voice rose in the desert, claiming "Developers, Developers, Developers"

Who is in charge over there? I think father Enoch Root needs to kick in some doors!

MySQL's growing NoSQL problem

Re: No means no

Quite so.

It's all like there is a new barber in town.

What happened to the old BerkeleyDB btw?

Re: Insert pithy witticism here

"It also says that constraints clauses are parsed but ignored."

LOLNO. MySQL sometimes behaves like a pregnant camel with gout but not here.

How zombie LulzSec exposed privates' love lives with PHP hack

They also confused "embarrassing the military" with "annoying singles"

Sunshine nudges asteroid into odd orbit

It begins!

Sunshine? They would say that!

Canary Islands host long-distance quantum teleportation

Yes ... and no

"Knowledge of things happening in advance" is not the correct metaphor to apply. You just need a judicious extension of probability theory:

http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/lostcauses.html#I

http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/probably.html

I won't add a boffin icon because I'm unfortunately not too well in the saddle in all this. Hopefully I will be at some future time... (as if!)

Re: I *think* I understand how this works ...

Don't be fazed, it's just a scalar product with fancy greek letters. All is linear algebra ... which is a hint that something may be missing, natch.

Re: Ok, perhaps I am being dumb...

It has "The One" written on it.

Nein, Nein, Nein!!

1) We have a typo, commander! It's "Einstein", not "Einsten".

2) "to transmit information instantaneously"

Not so. Information is always transmitted at "c" in the best of cases. Correlation in the measurement of a shared state does, however, not need information transmission. Consider a black card and a red card. If Alice and Bob each have one, and Alice checks the color of her card, how much time did it take for Bob's card to take on the other color? Exactly. If quantum, the colors are not even fixed before at least one side is measured (which makes things interesting as either Alice or Bob can measure first depending on the reference frame) but you get the idea.

Still, this is good engineering stuff.

Wallace & Gromit teach Oz kids to respect patents

People living off the IP fantasm organize an IP exhibition - Shocker.

I wonder whether The Wrong Trousers were patented before Wallace "invented" them? Did he check with the patent office? That's going to be expensive♫

Titsup WHMCS calls the Feds after credit-card megaleak

Errr....

Don't you always leave the salt in plain text in the files?

ICO: Managed to comply with Cookies Law? Go help the other kids

I it doesn't work, just ask for more money.

"Now if you're a private business, then the worse that happens is that you lose some of your revenue that day. But if you are offering services to UK citizens and you are introducing something which denies them access because it does not work properly, there are all sorts of issues for government, local authorities or even NHS websites, that a retailer would not face."

The wholesome aire in the velvet-clad king's seat upon the civil servant mountain must be rarefied indeed, sire!! God bless!

'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8

YOU SUCCESSFULLY UPLOADED LOLCAT IMAGE!!!

"interactive live tiles bursting with useful information"

The tweet generation. In your home, on your desktop and inside your OS.

Can we get Gnome and KDE to do three-point-turns, too, now?

Please?

Resistance is futile? Memristor RAM now cheap as chips

Re: This is going to be fun

I don't think HP owns the patent to a new production process of a passive device described in the 70s.

Cloud mega-uploads aren't easy

Re: ::shrugs:: Cloud storage is a tired, meaningless meme.

Yes Jake.

But on the other hand, no-one mentioned latency?!?

Noise can improve quantum computing, says ANU scientist

Intredasting!

So is he using a mixture [probabilistically mix a photon from system A with one from system B] to enlarge system B into a system C so that even when you get info about the state of C by measuring the photon, you still get to keep the original B?

Does Britain really need a space port?

Re: Ken MacLeod's wet dream

The gripping hand of the problem is, don't you need mucho fusion power for this kind of launcher?

Microsoft to devs: Don't ruin Win 8 launch with crap code

Re: If it looks like a turd...

Okay, but how does one manage to get reamed by a walled garden? Like on the desktop, the metaphors don't mix.

You are comparing two product lines, the one from the DOS side and the one from the DEC side, and where's NT 3.1, 3.5 and W2K?

For me, it was W2K - "last known good" on the DEC side.

Senator probes NASA airfield deal for Google's jets

Sod those mentally decaying jerks from the festering hill.

Maybe they could throw in a demand to get full listing of rendition flights. No? How about to have Dick Cheney hand over all the document that he disappeared ... Oh, okay then.

In related news, it is heard that the US is paying Pakistan USD 1 million a day just to let warcrap into Afghanistan unmolested.

And this is is still chump change.

Whitman said to be planning massive HP job cuts

neo-GOP?

I didn't realize the GOP went anywhere. Still orbiting the drain. fielding ridiculous crud as presidential candidates.

That party should have split into at least 4 directions a long time ago as they have some good stuff in there. Like HP I suppose.

Pinterest valued at $1.5 BILLION, bags $100m in funding

Re: Waiting...

Too much paper money looking for interest, ANY interest. A certain percentage of that money is your pension fund.

Meanwhile, interest rates are kept low, low, low and money gushes out of central banks like coke out of a colombian drug outfit.

Watchdog tells Greenpeace to stop 'encouraging anti-social behaviour'

Re: As soon as I saw "hippies" in the headline...

No, only on the IP Fetish Shock Jock. Please.

Re: Right, that's it

I would but I have to admit to my math skills are no longer up to scratch after years of web fiddling.

Also, one might have to add Mandarin to one's toolbox as the prospects of nuclear engineering jobs in the "Western World / The Coalition / Freddom Block" are bleak.

AWS CISO needs permission to visit his data centres

Re: like banks

"companies only put this sort of security theatre in place after something nasty has happened"

Pretty ridiculous statement. They put this sort of "security theatre" (actually not theatre; this is well-founded policy) in place once competitors may eat their lunch once something nasty happens.