Posts by Alan Brown 15099 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Experience of previous long-lead defence procurement decisions involves mothballing things you ordered and then forget what you wanted to do with them, and after a few years of expensive storage selling them to somebody you hope won't use them against you, for a fraction of the money actually paid."
Running costs for having the stuff sitting around ready to use is easily 100 times the purchase price when you factor everything in. If it's been sitting in a warehouse at least it's not costing much.
Also: what makes you think something hasn't been sneaked into the avionics on such sales to ensure it CAN'T be used against you?
Is buried at the end of paragraph 6 - Indonesia is operating a "pay to receive" SMS system.
Which means that TXT spam is not only irritatting, it's expensive. (I'm surprised that some irritated recipients haven't "discouraged" the senders in rather personal ways, given how hot-blooded a lot of Indonesians get)
Increasing the price of SIMs won't make a blind bit of difference while that model persists, so hopefully the carrots include zero-cost to receive and the ability to filter TXT messages.
Who needs the NSA? There are a lot of volunteers on the site and many of them have more than sufficient abilities to track down a script kiddy.
A inpromptu BBQ party on the miscreant's front lawn works wonders for making the point about anonymity on the Internet.
WRT other comments: just about all forum sites have holes and virtually all the holes are in the forum software itself (wikis are particularly bad). In most cases user details get lifted without even touching the security of the underlayng webserver.
"Actually it happened on a military base where I was serving many years ago, after a sentry fired a waning shot into the air. IIRC, the sentry followed the protocol, but the bullet hit a completely innocent person quite far away. Fatally."
In several countries, firing "warning shots" into the air will see you jailed.
Warning shots go into soft ground or are done with blanks. Anything else is terminally stupid.
(Now consider that a "pass" for armed police at UK airports is a 30% hit rate, when given indefniite time to aim and are allowed to use anything onhand to steady the shot.)
Speaking of the "chinese hackers" meme:
ALL the attacks I see originating from chinese netspace are from networks I'm aware are thoroughly pwned by externals (something the NSA leaks made abundantly clear btw) and are identical in form to those seen from other parts of the world.
The first rule of cracking is to cloak yourself in several false flags.
Why would the chinese be stupid enough to launch trcaeable attacks from their own territory when even the dumbest script kiddies know to bounce through a dozen proxies first?
The largest danger comes from (dis)organised crime groups, not from foreign governments.
"The vast majority of these devices are used on private networks and any obvious data leakage would be easily detectable and if found (just once) would destroy a manufacturer's reputation for good."
Which is exactly the point I made to my employers. We do monitor what goes in and out the gateway so such activity would show up pretty quickly.
"You cannot trust a word this slime company tells you. They have already proved that they will sell customers down the river for a profit, and we are supposed to trust they would not do the same to the Chinese/Americans/any other power that asked?"
Now that we know your opinion of BT, please switch the topic back to Huawei
And bear in mind that the Great Firewall of China is built with Cisco kit.
Huawei's UK auditing unit is specifically setup to catch vulnerabilities and is done by staff who have access to (and the ability to compile) the source code. There are code vulnerabilities showing up all the time in various pieces of code (noone writes all their own stuff) and sometimes the vulnerability is in the method used by everybody, so they have their work cut out simply making sure various issues don't show up in Huawei kit.
This is a lot more access to the internals that Cisco or Juniper give the staff of their UK operations.
If the UK government wanted to audit this stuff for internal use they should do it in house. This whole things smacks of more red scarisms to try and take attention away from the herd of elephants int he room and the man hiding behind the curtain.
SInce when are UK.gov uying the vast majority of the kit?
If they wish to audit it, then go ahead - but that's not going to stop private companies (such as BT) from buying thieir kit by the containerload when the price is right.
As for Cisco, when their "list" price is 120% higher than what most large suppliers sell the stuff to Joe Random off the street for, you know they're not being sold because of the actual performance (Not that Cisco are the only ones who have "retail" prices that only the terminally stupid (or civil servants) would actually pay.
Huawei is a little cheaper than the Cisco kit - and they don't anally rape for things like 10Gb HBAs (who on earth can justify 1500 quid when 3rd party compatibles are 400 and whitebox ones are 150?). The massive savings come into effect when you realise you're not vendor-locked.
"The problem isn't really come from any technology people use. That's all about awareness and security management applied to the system."
The (flawed) assumption is that people with access to the systems have authorisation to do so.
This same flawed assumption is seen in BGP4 - which has been locked down a lot in the last 20 years - and in the world's phone number routing system (which has not and is subject to repeated hijackings even today - if you think bank coverups of security botchups are common you haven't seen anything.
"But if some brave outfit does set up a local broadband service, suddenly they might find an exchange which BT said was "not economically viable" for BT DSL finds itself getting DSL courtesy of BT. And the tiny little BT competitor ends up going out of business. What a coincidence."
Don't bother saying "Might" - it's happened multiple times already.
It does seem the fastest way to get BT broadband in "notspots" is to setup a sham company to sell local broadband, sign the locals onto it, then make a PR release and watch BT drop everything to get in there first.
The point is that GCHQ operated within the _letter_ but not the _spirit_ of the law. That release was very carefully worded.
OTOH there is also the issue that UK police have been pulling similar stunts to circumvent wiretap warrant requirements by asking GCHQ to provide the wiretap intelligence and then getting warrants based on that is provided.
Once it starts coming out exactly which cases are involved, a number of convictions will be overturned, leading to quite nasty individuals being back on the streets thanks to some cowboy playing shortcuts.
British law may not be bound by constitution, but UK judges take a very dim view of this kind of shenanigan.
"But once its fuel cells are depleted it looks like it will become space junk orbiting the Sun"
It's not as if there's a dearth of natural space junk already doing just that. Apollo asteroids spring to mind.
LEO junk is a problem because there's so much of it in a very limited plane.
This raises the questions:
Is the autopoiot trusted enough to do this in shitty weather?
What is the failure/go-round rate compared with flying in on fully manual control?
Fuzzing the landing is also applied to civilian ILS autoland systems for the same reason - it was tearing up the same strip of runway.
The US security services have done it extrajudicially on a number of occasions to a number of website owners who have "interesting" information they wish to pry open, especially in the immediate wake of 9/11
Just because you don't need an exit visa doesn't mean that they don't keep a close eye on people of interest in order to prevent them leaving the country.
Liquid fuelled rockets have a much smoother ride to orbit. Solids are rough as hell on people and equipment.
_That_ was (and is) one of the major objections to putting peple on top of Ares (or any other solid-fuelled stack)
That said, solids are a hell of a lot cheaper - none of that pesky LOX to handle. Just be sure your flight spares are packed away securely, as you might need them more often.
(All this assumes we don't hit tipping point with all the junk in LEO making ascent to higher planes difficult. It seems to be getting closer)
Because doing that summoned the operator in the old pre-dial days.
I'm not ancient but I've lived in a couple of places where phones had crank handles and you had to listen to the morse-coded ringing to work out if a call was for you, or the neighbours or the bloke 2 miles down the road,
"whereas Cable TV is extremely commonplace in the US."
For the quite simple technical reason that multipath reception on NTSC signals usually made people go green (literally).
This isn't such a technical issue with the digital terrestrial formats. 60 years of real-world experience means they had good incentive to make sure this doesn't happen.
"In one case we were approached about whether in a power failure our back up generator could be used by local authority sites ..."
Even if you said no, they can and will requisition the units if they want them (eminent domain) and leave you to argue the finer points in court later.
The fact you were asked means that someone's probably got plans filed away somewhere to do just that.
"So why do emergency generators run on diesel, not petrol or (best of all? ) LPG?"
Some do. It's also possible to run them on mains gas - but it assumes pressure will be maintained.
BTW calling them emergency generators may be a misnomer. When power draws get high and utilites are squeaking, they'll often pay large consumers more than the cost of running the generators simply to get off the grid for a while - it's in situations like this that using gas-fed gensets shines (again, this has happened a lot in Telcos)
"It's not unusual for a genset to fire up during a power failure, run for a hour or so, then cough and splutter to a halt as the sludge and stuff get drawn through the filters."
One of the reasons to run your gennies for at least a couple of hours every tuesday AND to have an alternate feeder/filter set plus spares - at least that way you can clean one set while the other's still in service.
At least one setup I know of continually cycles fuel through the filters and back to the tank in order to ensure there's as little contamination sitting there as possible.
(Both of these setups are common in Telcos, they know a few things about both batteries and backup systems - how loud do you think the screaming would be if you lost dial tone along with your power?)
"It's more like they have the spies. "
The technology you mention is all openly documented or readily purchasable. The chinese don't suffer from "Not Invented Here" and will more than happily use/adapt someone else's designs if they work for the task at hand.
ISS doesn't look much different from an old USSR tin can, it's just got a few more cans tacked on than MIR did.
You may be right, but the chinese are also very interested in robot tech. not everything in space can be done by a human, especially when it involves long duration stuff.
I suspect they'll use people to work out how to do things and then design a robot to do it repeatedly.
"no-one has come up with adequate shielding ideas yet."
Wrapping the habitation sections in water tanks solves a lot of the issues, it's just that water is pretty heavy even if it is the ideal shielding material.
Longhaul flights like that aren't going to happen easily unless Orion-class nuclear launchers are used. Chemical launchers simply aren't up to the task.
Disclosing the fact that there's a secret gag order in place is likely to put you in prison - and the difference between FIS and a superinjunctions is that one of criminal vs contempt of court
The same thing applies to RIPA requests in the UK. Even disclosing the fact that a request has been made is a criminal offence punishable by a couple of years in pokey.
Other countries have similar legislation.
BTW, there are worse things than having spooks on your back - tax departments have legal powers that spooks can only dream of, including their own courts presided over by the tax derpartments, not judges.
It's a franchise model. See http://www.starbucks.co.uk/business/franchised-stores
Franchisees have to buy the product from starbucks and pay royalties, etc. they are also responsible for their own tax affairs - it also means that boycotting the shops hurts those local businesses far more than the corporate backoffice. Things are far more complicated than a few soundbites might suggest.
(Starbucks in the USA is not a franchise op)
It appears that starbucks USA business model has been to beat everyone else in a given area out by attrition (there are places in the usa where there's a starbucks on all 4 corners of an intersection), and then reduce the number of stores plus jack up prices. Such activities would be actively curtailed in the EU.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
