Posts by smudge 1007 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2008
Presumably to keep their security clearance they have to abide by the Presidential line.
Which part of "a recent executive order that targeted him and revoked the security clearances of everybody at the company" was unclear to you?
They now don't have any security clearance to keep!
"Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines," [said] the presidential missive.
So they are still saying that the 2020 election was stolen.
So why are they saying that Biden's pardons are invalid because they were signed by an autopen?
Surely they should be invalid because he was never President?
Idiots.
I worked at an outfit developing autonomous landscaping equipment (just a self-driving lawnmower for golf courses,
Please make sure that it keeps a lookout for a large, orange-coloured golfer with funny hair and a habit of rolling his ball into a better lie. And that it doesn't stop until it has cut him up into little pieces.
And if you think that isn't what US business will do, you're not living in the modern capitalist world of profit before everything.
I believe that's what happened last time Trump was in power.
The example I saw was washing machines, where Trump slapped a 10% tariff on imports.
The US manufacturers then saw that they could widen their profit margins - but, as you say, not by 10%, because that would be too obvious - and still undercut imports.
Apparently the price of tumble dryers went up as well, even though imports were not subject to tariffs.
The American consumer was shafted last time, and will be again this time.
Have been getting nag screens from M$ for quite a while now.
Perfectly good PC, but the CPU is not on their list.
So it'll be a new motherboard and CPU.
I should be able to keep the same memory. Don't run games so don't need a graphics card. Sound and network cards should be OK.
But no doubt I'll still have to convince M$ that I haven't bought a new PC, before W11 will activate. Last time I had to do this they demanded to see my actual orders for components, because they were adamant that I was running a new machine.
Interesting discussion here about when a machine is actually "new" or "the same machine". See also electric guitars, Trigger's broom, and the Ship of Theseus.
Seems to be my week for recommending books :)
I said earlier that I had just started reading Betty Webb's book, "No More Secrets" - and it has turned out to be an enjoyable record of her time at BP and at the Pentagon. Personal and non-technical, but gives a good idea of what wartime life was like.
The next book in my pile is "The Battle of the Beams", by Tom Whipple, which is about the development of radar during WW2. I just looked at the index, and the entry for RV Jones is very large! Might be worth your while having a look at it, if you are interested.
I don't actually read much about war - these two books just caught my eye last time I was in the library.
RV Jones went on to be Professor of Natural Philosophy (physics) at Aberdeen University. His lectures were popular. In one of them, he used to demonstrate conservation of momentum by firing a pistol using live ammunition. The story is that this came to an end the day the bullet somehow went straight through the wall of the building and narrowly missed the vice-chancellor of the university, who was walking past!
I once did a review of a company whose operational site was at St Katharine's Dock, at Tower Bridge, with all their stuff at a basement level below the level of the river.
They were setting up a DR site, and despite me telling them that they couldn't rely on the Thames Barrier, and also pointing out that they were on the approach path to Heathrow - a plane crash could take out a large area - they set it up just a mile or so downstream :(
But one idea we had was to keep data safe by keeping it in motion
I've seen that done physically. Late 70s, before PCs and online storage for everyone, even us IT types used to store physical copies of things - manuals, brochures, reports, design documentation, code listings, etc etc.
One guy I knew didn't have enough storage space, so he would get some large boxes, parcel up stuff that he thought he wouldn't need for a while, address them to himself, and then take them along to the "post out" location. A few days later they would come back to him.
Note that this only works in large, impersonal organisations.
He claimed to be inspired by mercury delay lines*, which really did store data in motion.
*I would say "ask yer grandad", but I'm old enough to be yer grandad and they were way before my time....
One imagines him sitting the offending CISOs down on his sofa and giving them a dramatic talking-to about their sordid cybersecurity failures, for public spectacle.
One doesn't. Having never heard of him, one looked him up when he was appointed Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. And discovered that he has the same qualifications for that job as my great-aunt Gertrude. None at all.
If the device receives signals from satellites on the far side of the Earth from it - as others have surmised above - will it have to allow for the signal being bent (and thus elongated) as it passes the Earth? (cf Eddington and the 1919 total solar eclipse.)
I know the effect would be very small, but then the timing has to be very precise.
Scanning SQUID microscopy or Magnetic force microscopy (MFM) while expensive, could conceivably map the magnetism on the platters with sufficient resolution to recover any bits if they are still there.
Even if it did work, and "recovered" some bitcoin, he'd still have to prove to non-techies, with an extremely high level of assurance, that what had been done was genuine, honest and trustworthy, and that he hadn't just made it up.
Now I suspect that he couldn't just "make it up". And so I'll ask the dumb question. Would he have to recover every single bit of the data for the blockchain to be valid?
It is not hard to imagine Musk taking a look at the Artemis program and the SLS and thinking, "That can definitely go."
I am sure that Musk will be looking to cancel anything that might compete with or disfavour his own interests.
The bust-up with Trump will come when Musk tries to cancel something that he didn't know Donnie already had his tiny hands in....
*Anyone else remember Coral66 and the Pink Peril (the language 'spec' - it had more holes than a fishing net)?
I worked with it on the Ferranti Argus 700 - that was a government, not MoD, programme. And on CTL/ITL machines (successors to the Modular One) - that was a pathology lab database and reporting system.
The Pink Peril rings no bells with me. But I do still have a copy of the HMG Official Definition of it - the Blue Book.
I have had the misfortune to work for Garry Hunt.
In the 90s, he was head of the management consultancy unit of the UK systems house Logica. It was chaos.
To be fair to him, it can't have been easy managing around 90 people - all of whom fancied themselves as management consultants, and thus had their own ideas about how the company should have been run!
Must be fun in the pubs in Cheltenham on a Friday night.
They must be the largest employer in town. Where you work will be no secret - what you do is another matter entirely.
I used to work in non-spooky IT security. The first time I went down there - at about this time of year - I realised that my headlights weren't working, and I'd certainly need them for the return journey.
The guy I was visiting took me along to the local Ford dealer. Checking the car in, the dealer asked for a contact phone number, which I provided.
"OH! YOU'RE AT GCHQ!!!", he yelled.
I wished the ground would swallow me up. Then I looked round, and my GCHQ host was pissing himself laughing.
It's common knowledge.
I remember McAfee deploying an update that basically removed a key boot file from all windows machines (around the 2000's).
I was working for Logica at the time. It bricked most of the PCs and laptops in the company.
Fortunately, I was out of the office and offline that day, so I missed the update. And I made damn sure that the issue had been corrected before I reconnected to the company network!
Exactly 40 years ago, I was working for an IT company which supplied software for pathology labs in hospitals - basically databases of results of blood tests, urine tests, and other unmentionable things.
Quality wasn't very good, but, having been there for only a year, I was trying to improve it.
Feb 29 rolled around, so I sat back and waited for the phone to ring. Nothing. No complaints. Had we got through it? No. The next day, March 1st, the complaints came in.
At some time in the previous four years, before I joined, someone had added a "delta check" facility to the software. This checked a patient's latest results against their previous results, and raised an alarm if they were changing too quickly.
Whoever programmed the delta check had forgotten about February having 29 days every four years. So when it compared new results against older ones, it calculated the time difference to be 24 hours less than it really was... and all hell broke loose as a large number of patients were flagged as needing attention.
Only good thing about it was that eight years later, New Scientist magazine published an article which I had written about it. I had realised that in 1992 they would have an issue actually dated 29th February, so I submitted an article recounting the above leap year woes, and then looking forward to 01 January 2000 - one of the early mentions of what became known as the Millennium Bug.
The next week they published a letter by one Arthur C Clarke, saying "interesting article, but I described this problem, and a solution, in my book......". I later saw several very similar letters from him, on other topics, so he must have had a standard template that he just added the appropriate details to before firing it off to the magazine.
Windows 10 may be just over a year away from the ax, but its successor, Windows 11, appears to be as unpopular as ever.
The end of Windows 10 support is getting closer. Unless the company blinks, October 14, 2025, will be the end of the line for the Home and Pro editions of the operating system
On my planet, it's currently October 2023.
So, two years.
Always assume that the form may be filled by a dog or someone sitting on the keyboard.
In my first job, we had someone whom the dog would probably have outscored in an IQ test.
I don't think he ever actually sat on the keyboard, but he certainly did things to systems which you wouldn't have thought possible.
Invaluable, he was. If you want to make a system idiot-proof, first catch your idiot...
the case aspires to be certified as a class action that would represent an unspecified number of customers said to have experienced similar device failures or data loss. The class potentially consists of "tens if not hundreds of thousands of individuals" in the United States.
There's an opportunity there for someone to initiate hundreds of thousands of induhviduals into the secret, shadowy world of "making backups".
Can't find any details of the orbits of the 7 satellites that they are going to launch, so I will just make the observation that they don't have to be equatorial orbits.
I do know that satellites to be launched from Sutherland and/or Shetland - several hundred miles further north - are destined for polar orbits, or other non-equatorial orbits
In the scheme of "UK Gov Shitshows so far in 2022", this is a non-issue.
No. It is the tip of the iceberg. (Another lettuce to bring the government down!)
She admitted that she did it six times in the six weeks that she was Home Secretary for the first time. Presumably because she has been confronted with the logs showing these six events.
Follow-up questions which should be asked include:
- how many times did she do this during the 31 months that she was Attorney General? (for those overseas, that position is the most senior law officer in the government)
- how widespread is this practice throughout government?
I am not an expert in this area, so the detail of the article is beyond me.
But as a security pro (retired), my first question would be - is this putting all our eggs in one basket? Could it create a dangerous monoculture, where one exploitable vulnerability - possibly in the protocols themselves - could be catastrophically dangerous?
Will be interested to hear opinions.
Dowden said he planned to do away with "endless" cookie banners and only apply them when cookies pose a high risk to individuals' privacy.
And of course he has a simple, efficient, infallible, automated method of determining when a cookie poses "a high risk"?
In fact, before we get to that, he has a simple, workable, deterministic definition of "high risk"?
ENISA, which is soon to be dragged from its Greek home – split between capital Athens and the sunny island of Heraklion –
Last time I was there, Heraklion was the capital of, and firmly attached to, the sunny island of Crete.
What happened? Has there been another Santorini (pictured)?
Agree that it's an immortal album - and as mad as a box of frogs - but for me the best bit is "Aegean Sea".
Only a week or two I posted a link to it to a football forum, where a review of a game had said that our defence had "parted like the Aegean Sea". In correcting it - y'all know which sea it should've been ;) - I posted a link to "Aegean Sea", because the author is even older than me and often posts links to music from way back then.
I wonder if when that was introduced there were arguments about people wearing seatbelts believing they are safe and likely to drive with less caution?
I can't remember (possibly I am too young) to remember any controversy about seatbelts, apart from those who insisted it was better to be flung out of the vehicle.
But there was certainly a widespread belief, especially amongst motorcyclists, that Volvo drivers were dangerous, because their cars were marketed as and were perceived to be very safe, with consequential effects on the owners' driving.
I oppose any requirement to identify yourself, much less provide official documentation, for any day-to-day activities.
So you don't get cash out of an ATM or use credit cards or log into any system where you have to authenticate your identity?
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