* Posts by Alan J. Wylie

645 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Aug 2009

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Bulletproof Coffee lacks bulletproof security: Nerd brain juice biz hacked, cards gulped

Alan J. Wylie

Previously?

So is this a different breach to the one they disclosed on September 15th?

https://justice.oregon.gov/consumer/DataBreach/Home/GetBreach/905485622

Military test centre for frikkin' laser cannon opens in Hampshire

Alan J. Wylie

black paint

several hundred gallons of black paint or alternatively several thousand Spın̈al Tap album covers.

Container ship loading plans are 'easily hackable'

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Would it be possible to destabilize a ship by reducing the cargo during transit?

ISTR part of the plot of a Neal Stephenson novel - one in the "System of the World" series, involved partially filled flasks of mercury on a galleon causing it to resonate, roll and sink.

What do Vegas hookers, Colombian government, and 30,000 other sites have in common? Crypto-jacking miners

Alan J. Wylie

WebAssembly

WebAssembly will be more efficient than plain JavaScript

NASA shoots for 200Mbps networks on swarming satellites

Alan J. Wylie

Trackers and Relative Distance in Space

Now why does that sound familiar?

Harry Potter to get the Pokémon GO treatment

Alan J. Wylie

Ingress

Hmm. Should I go and submit an Ingress portal for the top of Malham Cove?

Official Secrets Act alert went off after embassy hired local tech support

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Many Years Ago

In 1987

Opps - sorry - typo - should have been 1977.

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Many Years Ago

The early 1900 series computers had (possibly germanium) transistor memory and nil cores, and they were obsolete by the mid to late 70s (despite the ravings of people who used them).

In 1987 Computer Weekly ran a "Win-A-Computer" competition for schools. The entry I was involved in didn't come first, but as a "consolation" prize, an (IIRC) bakery company who was disposing of their ICT 1902T offered it to our school. It was the time of my "A" levels (the award ceremony was the day of my Physics exam), so I never saw it arrive at the start of the next term, but my brother did. It was never got to work properly, and when my brother left he took the core store box with him. It's now with The National Museum of Computing.

https://planet.davewylie.uk/castlerigg/

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Many Years Ago

Did they reallyl have ferrite core stores?

Some of them did. I can't remember which model they had - the one back at our office was an 11/45. WIkipedia confirms that the '45 could have core.

Alan J. Wylie

Many Years Ago

I was visiting a government establishment that had problems with its PDP-11 (yes, that long ago).

It was the sort of place where they had two different colours of line printer paper - one for secure state, and one for when they had visitors, and all the secure printout had to be locked away before we were allowed in.

We read in the memory diagnostics paper tape and ran it. It was unclear whether it was a memory board problem or the backplane, so we turned the computer off, unplugged the memory board, moved it to a different slot, turned the computer back on, toggled in the load address on the front panel and ran the diagnostics again. At this point one of the locals asked why we hadn't re-loaded the paper tape. "It's core store" we answered "non volatile". At which point panic took hold. "You mean that the top secret contents of memory don't get lost when we power off?"

We went away with after giving them the instruction that could be toggled in to wipe memory ("MOV -(PC) -(PC)" IIRC) and leaving them to re-write their procedures without making it too obvious that they had previously had a gaping hole in them.

Make America late again: US 'lags' China in IT security bug reporting

Alan J. Wylie
Alan J. Wylie

I don't need more CVEs

209 CVEs have appeared in the RSS feed overnight. Oh well. Back to work.

Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Old enough to have worked with the Virtual Machine Environment before VMware was founded

Exactly. Heck, I still remember George

Maximop too?

Alan J. Wylie

"experience and wisdom to share"

Yesterday one of my cow-orkers was running vimdiff inside screen over ssh when it "hung". I went over, first tried ^L (as you do), but that didn't help. ^Q did, however. I then had to explain XON / XOFF. Coincidentally I'm just reading ESR's Things Every Hacker Once Knew.

Outage at EE wrecks voice calls across the UK

Alan J. Wylie

BT Mobile are having problems, too.

https://twitter.com/btbusinesscare/status/917743049299677184

He's no good for you! Ofcom wants to give folk powers to dump subpar broadband contracts

Alan J. Wylie

It's not quite as simple as that. At one place from which I connect to my VPN, packet loss on the VPN at peak times is far greater than packet loss going directly. Seems to be some sort of deep packet inspection attempting to throttle torrents / Tor / streaming, but it makes trying to read my e-mail when I can't get into work because of the recent train strikes almost impossible.

It would be easy for an ISP to whitelist bandwidth measurement services and claim that everything is fine, whilst still providing a very poor service.

Foiled again! Brit military minds splash cash on killing satellites with... food wrapping?

Alan J. Wylie

Kessler syndrome

The Chinese blew apart a satellite back in 2007, but creating a greater number of objects runs the risk of the runaway Kessler syndrome

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

Alan J. Wylie

Hubble catches a glimpse WASP-12b, an almost pitch-black exoplanet

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Evidence?

But Vangelis got there first: Albedo 0.39

Users shop cold-calling telco to ICO: 'She said she was from Openreach'

Alan J. Wylie

Years ago the ICO were absolutely useless - reports of abuse disappeared into a black hole.

These days, they want to give the impression that they are trying harder. They are at Glasgow Central Station today giving advice on Nuisance Calls.

https://twitter.com/ICOnews/status/907210589684019200

Alan J. Wylie

Equifax mega-leak: Security wonks smack firm over breach notification plan

Alan J. Wylie

Re: I tried placing a fraud alert for myself with TransUnion

https://www.equifax.com/cs7/faces/jspx/login.jspx

Request Attributes

Name Value

_HKHACK_ yes

Alan J. Wylie

It's so secure

that if you're called O'Reilly it won't let you enter your name.

Nor Mountbatten-Windsor

.UK domains left at risk of theft in Enom blunder

Alan J. Wylie

Surely if both victim and thief have Enom accounts, you just use the same trick to steal the domain back again?

Step 5 of the M group's advisory (linked to in the original article):

(optional) Immediately transfer the domain elsewhere by changing the IPS tag and registrant email address making the domain extremely difficult if not impossible to recover without a manual intervention

15 'could it be aliens?' fast radio bursts observed in one night

Alan J. Wylie

$ units "10 million trillion trillion joules" "tonne tnt"

* 2.4284104e+21

Kim Jong-un - eat your heart out.

Terry Pratchett's unfinished works flattened by steamroller

Alan J. Wylie

Re: A man is not dead while his name is still spoken ...

El Reg still puts out the overhead I believe

Indeed. Lester Haines too. I just hope the FF extension keeps on working with Multiprocess and WebExtensions

Alan J. Wylie

Re: I'm touched by the weirdness of this request...

He's the polar opposite of Stephen Donaldson who is also a hilarious fantasy writer but much less deliberately so

Two words: "Clench Racing"

Alan J. Wylie

"steamroller named"

I think there's something missing there: steamroller named Lord Jericho

Calm down, internet. Elon's Musk-see SpaceX spacesuit is a bit generic

Alan J. Wylie

"Not a movie prop, honest"

Obviously. If it were a movie, there would be a ring of lights around the edge of the visor shining onto the actors' faces and blinding them.

Antarctica declared world's most volcanic region as 91 new cones found beneath ice

Alan J. Wylie

And does the radar have sufficient resolution to differentiate between cones and pyramids?

Hotspot Shield VPN throws your privacy in the fire, injects ads, JS into browsers – claim

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Roll your own?

I roll my own, but as well as the geographical aspect, using a big VPN provider also means that your traffic is mixed in with everyone else's, rather than a single IP address being solely associated with you.

Chrome web dev plugin with 1m+ users hijacked, crams ads into browsers

Alan J. Wylie

Copyfish too

Our Copyfish extension was stolen and adware-infested

Exactly the same. Phishing attack, credentials compromised, "Copyfish was updated to V2.8.5", "started to insert ads/spam into websites"

Don't make Aug 21 a blind date: Beware crap solar eclipse specs

Alan J. Wylie

Don't be like the gullible and superstitious

Knock pilgrims warned of eyesight damage

Apollo center fundraiser: That's one small check from man, one giant leap for our peace of mind

Alan J. Wylie

T Shirt?

but no vest (waistcoat). That would make an excellent addition to the kickstarter.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gene-kranzs-apollo-vest-9045125/

Oracle's FS1 storage array fades into cloud like tears in rain

Alan J. Wylie

"Tears in rain"?

Surely "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"?

Beware, sheep rustlers of the South West of England! Police drone spy unit gets to work

Alan J. Wylie

Seeing as I'm now several chapters into Charlie Stross's "Delirium Brief", I wonder if they can be upgraded to SCORPION STARE capability?

Fake Newspaper steals Reg design to spruik storage upstart

Alan J. Wylie

Re: The Delirium Brief

but frankly the current news cycle is (Neocon) Delirium Brief enough for me

Charlie had to re-write it: "BREXIT broke my next Laundry novel"

Alan J. Wylie

The Delirium Brief

On a very slightly related note, Charlie Stross's "The Delirium Brief" came out yesterday, and mentions The Register within the first couple of chapters.

Hey, remember that monkey selfie copyright drama a few years ago? Get this – It's just hit the US appeals courts

Alan J. Wylie

reductio ad absurdum

If an animal triggers a (concealed) wildlife camera to take a picture - who owns the copyright?

+1

My thought exactly.

Extreme trainspotting on Britain's highest (and windiest) railway

Alan J. Wylie

Re: There's a Cog Railway up Pikes peak

An 875bhp Peugeot 208 would be a little more exciting

To bring this thread back onto a computing topic:

Audi’s Robotic Car Climbs Pikes Peak

Alan J. Wylie

Re: 1,097m (3,599ft)

The Mount Washington cog railway in New Hampshire climbs from 2000 ft ASL almost to 6280 feet

There's a Cog Railway up Pikes peak: 14,115 ft (4302m)

Software glitch led to London Ambulance Service outage – report

Alan J. Wylie

Oracle "Recycle bin"

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28310/tables011.htm

The recycle bin is actually a data dictionary table containing information about dropped objects. Dropped tables and any associated objects such as indexes, constraints, nested tables, and the likes are not removed and still occupy space. They continue to count against user space quotas, until specifically purged from the recycle bin or the unlikely situation where they must be purged by the database because of tablespace space constraints.

Alan J. Wylie

Braking news: AA password reset email cockup crashes servers

Alan J. Wylie

But there *was* a breach, just not customer data

https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/879289823835639810

A follower just advised they recently notified @TheAA_UK about 13GB of exposed DB backups. It's not clear if they ever notified customers.

https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/879323722963968001

https://twitter.com/TheAA_Help/status/879334595828883456

This incident was related to the AA shop & retailers’ orders rather than sensitive info. It was rectified and taken seriously.

UK parliamentary email compromised after 'sustained and determined cyber attack'

Alan J. Wylie

Is it related to last week's news that Russian hackers are trading MP's credentials?

Russian hackers trading stolen email addresses and passwords of 1,000 British MPs and top officials online

Microsoft founder Paul Allen reveals world's biggest-ever plane

Alan J. Wylie

Re: Hang on... Nuclear

Charlie Stross:A Colder War

"The Convair B-39 Peacemaker is the most formidable weapon in our Strategic Air Command's arsenal for peace. Powered by eight nuclear-heated Pratt and Whitney NP-4051 turbojets, it circles endlessly above the Arctic ice cap, waiting for the call.

Schiaparelli probe crash caused by excessive spin, report concludes

Alan J. Wylie

Ariane 5

lander rotated at a faster acceleration than expected

Some similarities to the Ariane 5 Explosion, where an accelerometer value in a 64 bit floating point value overflowed when converted to a 16 bit signed integer.

GPU-flingers' bash: Forget the Matrix, Neo needs his tensors

Alan J. Wylie

Re: What's a tensor?

+1 - exactly what I was going to post!

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