Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Boffin: Dump hardware number generators for encryption and instead look within

Re: Just tested it

Yeah and then the CPU optimizer kills your loop dead because it just doesn't do anything, does it.

(This comment will not set in the El Reg moderation queue for 20h)

This is not an arithmetical method. It gets "time" information from an outside oracle.

Arithmetical method == Deterministic RNG.

Now, let's think what the compiler or even the instruction-optimizing CPU will do with this weird workless inner loop.

Windows 10 passes 700 million, Office Mobile in a coma and Intune, er, cracks time travel

Re: Numbers

> requiring proprietary ActiveX extensions for Internet Explorer.

Don't awaken the beast who sleeps in strange aeons.

One Project to rule them all: Microsoft plots end to Project Online while nervous Server looks on

After Major Major Major...

We now have Project Project Project.

Why can't Microsoft into names that are actually names?

Facebook: Up to 90 million addicts' accounts slurped by hackers, no thanks to crappy code

Re: Facebook @ Work

As Mr. White says in Reservoir Dogs:

"A lot"

"used Facebook to authenticate the hacked users... oops!"

No I finally know what "use Facebook to login" is good for.

Absolutely nothing.

Re: "multiple issues in our code."

Going fast and breaking things has its downsides.

Re: They've had so many cockups, this is not news.

There is a rumor that Google-issued Captchas (v3?) will demand that you have a Google Account and a reliable clickstream on file that can be distinguished from a bot. So most of the Internet will be inaccessible to reticent deplorables unwilling to share their data.

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

Can't access the report

"An error occurred during a connection to defcon.org. SSL received a malformed Server Hello handshake message. Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_MALFORMED_SERVER_HELLO"

What's going on here?

Resident evil: Inside a UEFI rootkit used to spy on govts, made by you-know-who (hi, Russia)

Sysop has probably messed up and the phone-home happens anyway.

Forget dumping games designers for AI – turns out it takes two to tango

IgNobel-prize worthy

At least GOFAI symbol-processing based machines, possibly with genetic algorithms to get some creativity in had a fighting chance to build something of moderate interest in a formulaic way, but CNNs?

Next up: outysourcy subcontinent coders who deliver ingenious, quality-assured code that totally blows away what could be developed in-house.

That syncing feeling when you realise you may be telling Google more than you thought

Re: Shrug

Frankly, if there's one company I trust to not lose my data or spaff it all over the interwebs, it's Google - I know exactly what Google are doing with my data - trying to make money from me.

This makes absolutely no sense at all.

Maybe there is a Freudian undercurrent in this hogwash, but I can't find it.

Cisco sneaks hardcoded secret root backdoor into vid surveillance kit

UHU

If they forget about THAT, what ELSE do they forget about?

Guilty: The Romanian ransomware mastermind who infected Trump inauguration CCTV cams

Re: Great stuff

"By all means necessary"

Re: Prison Time

I don't think they need encouragement to lock up more people.

Clearly you haven't been to the US lately.

Corrupted machines for a corrupted administrative city

Each of their CCTV units consists of a camera attached to a Microsoft Windows-powered computer, and the cops noticed that these machines weren’t acting as they should.

I don't know what's surprising about that.

Developer goes rogue, shoots four colleagues at ERP code maker

Bah it's September

Female shooter Snochia Moseley, 26, guns down 3 at Aberdeen, Maryland, warehouse before killing herself

"The Aberdeen shooting comes one day after gunfire rocked two other workplaces. A gunman who opened fire at a Middleton, Wisconsin, software company wounded three people and sent panicked office workers scrambling to safety on Wednesday before being fatally shot by police.

In Fayette County, Pennsylvania, a gunman shot four people outside a judge's office and crowded courtroom on Wednesday before being killed by police."

That's bullshit. A gun is made for safely putting holes into things, and it does it exceedingly well and with great precision.

Re: So...

Actually, the medicaire/medicaid budget is about as big as the defense budget.

But maybe it's not being spent well.

Re: A gun is involved in every single mass shooting.

Isn't it time to make it harder to acquire firearms?

Here we go.

Dead retailer's 'customer data' turns up on seized kit, unencrypted and very much for sale

Re: Sue the landlords

America is already pissed at Canada. Let's get these B-2 started.

Remember when Apple's FaceTime stopped working years ago? Yeah, that was deliberate

Re: ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY!

Well, you can always post on twitter to keep the flame alive.

Flying to Mars will be so rad, dude: Year-long trip may dump 60% lifetime dose of radiation on you

Re: RE. Re. Shielding

Problem 1: lack of gravity, use a massive (8-12T) field so that the cells "see" a weak gravity-like effect.

Is this real? Even if it is, millenials won't like it as their nose rings and studs in various body places will be ripped out. "Sorry, you can't come as Space Pirate, you must be Enterprise levels of clean. And bring a tie."

Re: Shields?

Especially as it's the atmosphere that counts against cosmic rays ("shields up"). The magnetic field is useful against charged particles from the sun, certainly.

Can we just wait until we can upload minds into rad-hardened machines?

It would be so much easier than pretend we can shoot flesher bodies, which are always in flux and totally dependent on a planet-sized supporting environment, to weird cinder blocks orbiting out there.

No, that Sunspot Solar Observatory didn't see aliens. It's far more grim

Re: Jackanory

Where's Bombastic Bob when we really need him?

Don't you mean Alex Jones?

Re: Jackanory

That, and half a dozen other similar telescopes around the globe taken offline the the same day.

Citation needed. Next up: UN World Government.

Deliveroo to bike food to hungry fanbois queuing to buy iPhones

> the author being a leftie communist

Well, it IS about a Californian company, i.e. a company in a crazed goodthinker socialistic country with inequality on a level that can only please the caviar Democrat.

Imagine a whole queue of Guatelumbian maids queuing to get the latest overpriced Apple bling for the suave bearded gentleman / pretend-18-dressed lady.

Put your tin-foil hats on! Wi-Fi can be used to guesstimate number of people hidden in a room

Yeah, about that.

Using drones could open the technology to military applications. Such a system could help armies scout out how many enemies or civilians were in a particular building before ordering drone strikes.

You mean AFTER ordering a drone strike?

The Reg chats with Voyager Imaging Team member Dr Garry E Hunt

El Reg delivers.

Lots of goodness. Maybe it will inspire more women to really go into tech?

Btw, A Comet Revisited: Lessons Learned from Philaes Landing can be found in IEEE Software. As it is paywalled with a ridiculous price (USD 33 and the dollar has crashed yet, even), use DOI "10.1109/MS.2018.2801542" at the Hub of Science, Taiwan for a complimentary copy. You know the drill.

Equifax IT staff had to rerun hackers' database queries to work out what was nicked – audit

Re: Impressive consequences

that is just too much of a coincidence to be ignored.

That's 9/11 tier of coincidence to be sure.

Like finding a trout in your milk.

Git it girl! Academy tries to tempt women into coding with free course

Re: Schools need to step up to the plate

My Daughter would love to have done GCSE computing but her prestigious girls grammar school chose not to offer the course citing lack of interest.

These are not the eighties anymore. Find a club outside of school, do an online course, buy a computer/OS combination that you can tinker with, read a few books.

WTF!

Trump shouldn't criticise the news media, says Amazon's Jeff Bezos

is that a precedent you want to set?

That precedent has been set a long time ago.

His Saintness Abraham Lincoln was a quite ... italian ... in his dealing with the press. You may argue he had a war going, but then again, he had pretty much ninelevend his way into it so the morality of the whole situation may well be doubly dark instead of grey.

WaPo's motto is "Democracy Dies in Darkness"

Coming from the Neocon Post, this is not a warning, it is a promise.

Let the bombing of something begin.

New MeX-Files: The curious case of an evacuated US solar lab, the FBI – and bananas conspiracy theories

Re: Usual American drama

Alienthrax: Anthrax with Alien DNA.

Meanwhile, Mulder has been spotted in Salisbury.

Martian weather has cleared at last: Now NASA's wondering, will Opportunity knock?

Philip K. Dick was the Nostradamus of the 50s

> have you been smoking crack?

In 2018, the only way to stay sane.

This is no way to die...

Should go out in glory.

Next time, strap a kiloton-nuke to it.

When it has decided that enough is enough and all those hardware errors ain't worth it ... Ay Caramba!

GDPR v2 – Gradually Diminishing Psychotic Robots: Brussels kills Terminator apocalypse

Re: Please return to your houses

If we can't get cars to roll along roads without bashing things its hardly likely we are in any state to built AI's capable of managing in complex battlefields.

Don't confuse the ability to avoid hurting civilians and evading tort law with the ability to hunt civilians and ignore war law.

One of those is more difficult than the latter.

Yeah, I'm sure Israel will be not one of those who never want to see those. They are pretty progressive in new arms deployment and usage doctrine.

Luckily they are not beholden to EU politbots, which are moving towards the tipping point of becoming an endangered species anyway.

AI beats astroboffins at sniffing out fast radio bursts amid the universe's clutter

Re: This is surely completely safe

Indeed not. I still prefer stuff from Interzone or even Lem's His Master's Voice (which is ruined by a contrived ending apparently meant to shovel the problem of Things Actually Are Different Than You Assumed into the reader's face, but what can you do)

US military chucks $2bn at AI, Google touts machine-learning data search, and more

Talking about war, are we at War?

"Yuval Noah Harari": There is nothing inevitable about democracy. For all the success that democracies have had over the past century or more, they are blips in history.

Well, we are already at the point where democracy has degenerated to the point where bullshit is served up cold (including "Anonymous Op-Eds" in the NYT pining for Bush III ... the mind boggles) and the public has to eat it and vote for it, or else. And the people in power will import a new populace and shout from all outlets that it's a good idea if that is what it takes. Worthy White US Politicians start to notice that they are being killed off by Very Left Hispanics in the polls as the make-up of the population shifts to something more like Venezuela. I cackle.

Talking of Total Control through Technology, after weeks and weeks of USUK and France slavering for an attack on Syria and relentless telegraphing that a false flag chemical weapons attack is coming, Youtube has just killed off Syrian news channels pour cause de "Violations of the Terms of Service" ("Net Neutrality" is no match for the Neocon Imperative of Total Social Justice). I have lived long enough to see 1984.

Re: "smart enough that they can be thought of as aides or ‘colleagues’ to the military"

Ayyyy LMAO

Revealed: British Airways was in talks with IBM on outsourcing security just before hack

Sadly in this case, it was obviously not working well.

make all relocate... Linux kernel dev summit shifts to Scotland – to fit Torvald's holiday plans

Re: Rocks are the same...

But is due to continental drift and what are the relative levels of natural radioactivity?

Supermicro wraps crypto-blanket around server firmware to hide it from malware injectors

Lolwhat?

Cloudera and MongoDB execs: Time is running out for legacy vendors

Strongly beholden to the millenial vibe

"I'm coming close to my four-year anniversary [at MongoDB]," said CEO Dev Ittycheria. "I would say the antipathy towards the legacy vendors has never been higher. So we do see customers very, very motivated to move off their legacy platforms as a function of their relationships with those vendors."

Nowadays, it's all about the "feelz". (Use the amygdala, Luke!)

Including moving off a well-working database system to some crazy donkey "document cache" (because always remember: When you’re picking a data store, the most important thing to understand is where in your data — and where in its connections — the business value lies. If you don’t know yet, which is perfectly reasonable, then choose something that won’t paint you into a corner. Pushing arbitrary JSON into your database sounds flexible, but true flexibility is easily adding the features your business needs.)

Neutron star crash in a galaxy far, far... far away spews 'faster than light' radio signal jets at Earth

Re: Just a side note

The universe has an equal mass of antimatter to matter, it's just that antimatter still exists in the same state as it was created in the big bang. Its gravitational influence is negative, anti-gravity if you like, and this has kept it in its most fundamental form, very small, sparsely spread and practically undetectable, as on the rare occasions it does have the misfortune to have not gotten out of the way quick enough, its energy release is minuscule and far beyond our ability to measure.

Nice unaccepted personal theory, bro.

Meanwhile in the Real World:

Inventive Alternatives to General Relativity getting removed from premises by new data:

April 30, 2018: Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity: New observations of extreme astrophysical systems have “brutally and pitilessly murdered” attempts to replace Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Zumalacárregui, a theoretical physicist at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, had been studying how the discovery of a neutron-star collision would affect so-called “alternative” theories of gravity. These theories attempt to overcome what many researchers consider to be two enormous problems with our understanding of the universe. Observations going back decades have shown that the universe appears to be filled with unseen particles — dark matter — as well as an anti-gravitational force called dark energy. Alternative theories of gravity attempt to eliminate the need for these phantasms by modifying the force of gravity in such a way that it properly describes all known observations — no dark stuff required.

At the meeting, Zumalacárregui joked to his audience about the perils of combining science and Twitter, and then explained what the consequences would be if the rumors were true. Many researchers knew that the merger would be a big deal, but a lot of them simply “hadn’t understood their theories were on the brink of demise,” he later wrote in an email. In Saclay, he read them the last rites. “That conference was like a funeral where we were breaking the news to some attendees.”

Re: Relativity - Great! But what about String Theory, Dark Matter and Dark Energy?

Your scepticism is duly noted but that's why this project is still ongoing.