Posts by John Smith 19

British snoops at GCHQ knew FBI was going to arrest Marcus Hutchins

"So this is what the 'special relationship' amounts to, is it?"

Yes, actually, that's exactly what it amounts too.

WWII left the UK virtually bankrupt so they sent a team of academics to ask the USG for a bail out.

Instead they got a $5Bn loan payable over about 50 years and a level of arrogance from the dept of prep school Aholes State Dept that sent the Foreign Secretary an enthusiastic supporter of the plan to build a UK A bomb :-(

But the clusterf**k that turned the UK into America's permanent b**ch was something often forgotten today. The Suez Crisis of 1956.

That said the UK has managed to barter some access into the US Intelligence and defense communities by virtually handing over it's specialist knowledge whenever they've requested it, including improving reentry warhead design and materials ("Gaslight"), helping them work out how the passive microwave bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow worked ("The Thing"), making speech channels work at 2400 bps with 1950's technology (in the 1950's) and a GCHQ researcher developing Public Key Cryptography before it was published in the open literature.

History. If you don't know it, you'll probably repeat it, over and over again.

"The answer is zero. When you are out on bail you are not allowed access to guns."

That may be the theory but as such a white collar criminal observed a long time ago "Rules are for the little people. "

Or maybe they still couldn't make a case against him even with Blairs extradition law

And it's ridiculously low standards of proof from the US side.

Be interesting to see if he trusts GCHQ ever again.

75 years ago, one Allied radar techie changed the course of WW2

It adds a whole differnt meaning to the phrase "terminal security" does it not?

Although the Americans did something like it with the Navajo based code they used.

And probably not so much as an overtime bonus for it.

Re: R V Jones

His post war work at the University of Aberdeen was also very impressive.

It's described in "Instruments & Experiences"

He had developed machines capable of nm movements (in air) in the 1950's, along with sensors in the femtometre range using capacitance.

Aberdeen was also at the time a world leader in single crystal growth methods.

His later work included active laser stability control for ever more precise metrology.

"'Between Silk and Cyanide' by Leo Marks."

IIRC he was the SOE crypto expert (he also wrote the Times Crossword).

His family owned the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road described by Helen Hanff.

His (anonymous) poem is the one used in the film "Carve her name with pride."

Some of the SOE codes had keys that were poems. To avoid the Germans working out if they were being pulled from a book of poetry (and brute forcing any transmission they recorded) he made them up.

Sounded like a bit of a character.

"I've just read 'Ian Fleming's Commandos' "

Then you know that the 30 Intelligence Assault Unit was (re)activated in 2010.

Thing is whose high tech kit are they looking to get their hands on?

An Issis commanders Apple?

What code is running on Apple's Secure Enclave security chip? Now we have a decryption key...

"but obfuscation to slow down attackers buys you time."

Except in the case of GSM with the passage of time obfuscation became the last line of defense and in the case of those garage door opener and remote car unlockers it was really the only line of defense.

Still better than Intel IME debacle.

What a f**k up that was.

Cut and pasting both the hardware (MIPS chip) and it's software without any apparent review, including the no password needed management account "feature."

As other's have noted the PIN (code number, whatever) should be the only shared secret.

IOW even if "Master Cracker X" has the code the system remains secure because the security is that it has no exploitable flaws (note that qualification. If they have physical access to the device it's game over) by sending it "hand crafted" packets of whatever, or inducing it to send them from itself that can then be analyzed.

Time will tell if this is indeed the case.

No public code review --> security by obscurity.

And we know how well that has worked in the past (I'm looking at you GSM, assorted garage door openers and car remote key system suppliers).

US DoD, Brit ISP BT reverse proxies can be abused to frisk internal systems – researcher

He sounds like he's done most people quite a service.

Of course it should not have been necessary. But in the UK it is.

"Clean feed" my a***.

Microsoft president exits US govt's digital advisory board as tech leaders quit over Trump

Wot . 2 pages in and no word from Bombastic Bob

At least none he'll put his name to.

Most strange.

"All Lives Splatter"

Agreed it's inappropriate, insensitive and no doubt offensive to a lot of people.

But isn't part of some of you also thinking "Nice troll" and "all lives splatter. Genius."

Of course you're ashamed of such thoughts, but it doesn't stop you having them.

It's only a problem if you start agreeing with them.

No, the cops can't get a search warrant to just seize all devices in sight – US appeals court

Funny how people b**ch about "probable cause" until 1 sec after they're on the wrong end of it

And then they b**ch it's not tough enough.

This should be what happens when all cops go on fishing trips.

Let's be honest. The problem here is the cops aren't smart enough to catch one gang banger. Is that because a)He is a master criminal. b) They are too dumb to catch him in a way that stands up in court?

Hmmm.

I don't know if he did it, but I do know they didn't do their jobs for the money they get paid.

President Trump to his council of industry CEO buddies: You're fired!

" it's almost like it went around the circle and met the other extreme on the opposite side."

Funny how that works, isn't it?

The key point is not wheather the person who's stamping on your face is a Fascist or a Communist.

It's the stamping itself.

"1) The rioter can't win an argument with an uneducated skinhead. "

That's fair except for 2 things.

The "uneducated skinhead" drove his car into a crowd of rioters.

In fact they were not actually rioting but standing around in peaceful protest.

But if what you described had happened you'd be right.

I like to remember that the root word of "ridiculous" is "ridicule" IE to mock.

The "Alt Right" like all extremists and bullies want to be feared, when they should be laughed at, mocked and show to be ridiculous, both in their logic and their actions.

""For every CEO that drops out of the Mfg Council, I have many to take their place." -"

"Cut off one head and two will grow in it's place."

Was I the only person who saw the D his inauguration raise both arms and thought "Heil Hydra."

"Jon Ronson's rather excellent book "The Psychopath Test" is a very interesting read, "

Although it's about a good bit more than that.

Running the PCL-R on people can be quite interesting, Are they 0,1,2 or 3 on each question?

Although obviously Trump is a 0 on #20 (criminal versatility) because he's not been charged with anything (unlike the inmates of the maximum security slammer Dr Hare worked in).

Or at least not found guilty of anything, which I'm sure he would argue is exactly the same thing.

"Oh, and another thing: Robert E. Lee was a goddamned traitor. "

I suspect that might have something to do with a sense of "Peace and reconciliation" following the American Civil War. Letting bygones be bygones and all that.

Kind of a "We're all Americans now, not North or South" idea.

It lead to the birth of a nation (in several senses of the phrase).

"Trump is clearly in the early stages of dementia."

I can understand the appeal of this line of reasoning, I really can. It promises an end to his behavior and a return to sanity. It's a simple solution.

My old History teacher taught that you should always be very wary of people who offer simple solutions to difficult problems.

And blaming Trumps behavior on dementia is a simple solution. Let me suggest other reasons for his response to this situation.

a)They are part of his voter base, although his views may be a bit liberal for their tastes. Like this guy , Trump does not believe in laws, he believes in borders.

b) He lacks any empathy with others. The feelings normal people would feel at hearing of the events and their perpetrators simply don't exist in him. IOW his reaction to an advisor saying "Mr President you have to make a statement condemning this behavior by the alt-right" is "Why?"

Stalin said "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic," but that's not quite detached enough.

For the gated-community-raised-pre-school-bully-turned-construction-speculator one death is also a statistic. "I never met the the girl (although she's cute). I didn't know the girl and I'm never going to know her. Everything else is fake news," as the D might put it.

FTC wants AT&T to kick in $4bn to help balance US budget. Why? Some dodgy ads or something

"I do think the advertising is less deceptive."

Not just the advertising.

The UK actually has a thing called "The Unfair Contract Terms Act"

Care to guess what it's purpose is?

Sadly it seem HMG has never prosecuted any of its con-tractor companies under this.

Berkeley boffins build better spear-phishing black-box bruiser

"our detector extracts the feature vector for that URL "

You mean the parameters of the URL?

So in English they set up a lookup table keyed on the URL (can you say "pearl script"?) and every time the NIDS reported a wrong 'un it checked to see if they were going there and if the parameters looked sus enough to suggest the back end of a phishing attack IE the start of malware coming in.

Obfuscation in academic papers can be down to a)Too long in academia b) English not a first language c) BS detected.

I'll note (from the abstract) they did detect a spear phishing attack their test enterprise had not even previously noticed and their work load was 1/9 of other systems. And as they note it can be circumvented by going to HTTPS, which in a less trusting internet should be SOP. That said you should have no expectation of privacy on a job PC. It's not yours. It's theirs.

However since this is not my thing I'll leave the other 19 pages till I have nothing better to do.

But my first thought was "Doesn't a company this big reconcile the from line with actual email addresses (at least internally) ? Don't they disable outgoing links unless they are whitelisted?

Wisconsin advances $3bn bribe incentives package for Foxconn

That's a shedload of money. The obvous question "is it worth it"?

True answer.

It depends.

Construction jobs. How long? 1 year.

The actual permanent work force. How big? Average pay?

Knock on supply chain jobs. Sourcing components from US suppliers. How many? Will they use US?

Of course if you mean if you count the effect on the D's "industrial policy" it's going to be Yuuuuge.

UK.gov is hiring IT bods with skills in ... Windows Vista?!

Obvious question. What's in or around MK that needs a bod with DV clearance?

I've no idea.

What weighs 800kg and runs Windows XP? How to buy an ATM for fun and profit

Is anyone surprised.

These boxes have a very long life.

That said tracking who accesses them should be easy as the list should be quite short.

But probably is not as short as people think, or as well maintained as they expect.

New NIST draft embeds privacy into US govt security for the first time

Can't imagine such a document from the NIST's counterpart in the UK, the BSI

Not with the former data fetishists sock puppet Home Secretary as PM and her replacement data fetishists sock puppet Rudd (which conveniently rhymes with "dud," like so many of her predecessors) or "Little Miss Marginal" if you prefer, although that won't stop her going for the top spot when May finally is allowed to quit decides to "spend more time with her family"

Comp sci world shock: Bonn boffin proposes P≠NP proof, preps for prestige, plump prize

"And P=NP is completely irrelevant to crypto in general. "

Posted by someone with absolutely no understanding of the subject they are posting about.

"..to prove either that P≠NP or that P=NP. Not one has succeeded."

So the answer remains "maybe" ?

Space boffins competing for $20m Moon robot X-Prize are told: Be there by March 31 – or bust

For comparison (these are all fully fuelled masses): Apollo 11 LEM: 15,200 kg MX1: ~600kg*

Indeed.

When your payload size drops to 1/25 of an early LM the size of rocket also goes down quite a lot.

Even more amazingly they did not increase Saturn's payload with hardware, just improved changes to operations (including on board software).

There's a fascinating paper by Logsdon & Africano about it. 50% of the improvement was due to varying the mixture ratio of the upper stages in flight from high thrust/lowish Isp to lower thrust/high Isp.

Keep in mind it took (at its peak) nearly 5% of the US federal budget to do it in 9 years.

So doing it on budgets that would be (literally) accounting errors in NASA's Apollo funding is astonishing.

While it's true that a lot of space rated hardware is now available OTS it's coming from traditional Big Aerospace suppliers, at traditional prices. IE "Hooow much for this? WTF? $500 for a bolt?"

What has changed is the very much more detailed knowledge of the conditions along the whole journey and on the Moon itself. Read AC Clarke's "A Fall of Moondust" to realize how much wasn't known at the time.

UK govt steams ahead with £5m facial recog system amid furore over innocents' mugshots

Now was that Buttle or Tuttle?

I'm not quite sure.

Mines the one with the DVD of "Brazil" in the pocket.

Re: So it's basically...All your face belong to us !

Soon citizen, soon.

<Signed>

Big Brother.

You know this is the Home Office

"request can be turned down if it meets the highly ambiguous and vague standard that retention would serve "a policing purpose." The police themselves get to decide if that is the case."

Not to mention the HO's presumption of "Give us the tools and we'll do the job." Unfortunately in their view (and by "them" I mean the small cabal of senior level Sir Humphries, " and their willing tools, who are behind this) the job is having something so everyone can be locked up.

And the presumption is (and will continue to be) it's better to keep DNA/fingerprints/faces/blood/sweat/tears/whatever forever because to a data fetishist more data is always better

This is also probably related to the problems of setting up the Norther Irish /RoI border-that's-not-a-border-despite-them-being-in-different-customs-regimes. Apparently HMG reckon "technology" will deal with this.

I saw that thing "The Prisoner." I wonder how many of these people growing up saw that closing shot of Patrick McGoohan's facing hitting a set of iron bars and thought "One day all the UK will be like that."

Welcome to HMP UK.

Celeb-backed music gambit rebrands as 'Roxi', prays for IPO

" the brainchild of serial music entrepreneur Rob Lewis"

IOW Telling a very good story and turning people with a lot of cash but little knowledge into people with rather more knowledge, and rather less cash.

<d vader>

The fail is strong in this one.

</d vader>

London council 'failed to test' parking ticket app, exposed personal info

So yeat another case of "Don't re-check system generated data that's been read back in."

This of course will go on happening until PHB level staff are made seriously accountable (IE have to pay it themselves or do jail time) before anything really changes.

How to build your own DIY makeshift levitation machine at home

"But it's convenient and Arduino's are cheap as chips "

That's the real story of this.

Acoustic levitators have been around for decades and have been used to do things like measure the properties of balls of molten Silicon and high temperature metal alloys.

But they've always been ruinously expensive and a PITA to make and keep working.

Obviously the sample size in this is tiny, but modern instruments are much more sensitive, so can work with much smaller sample sizes than previously. You can also run property studies one after the other, instead of simultaneously. Slower, but a great deal cheaper.

Defra recruiting 1,400 policy wonks to pick up the pieces after Brexit

"has previously called for policy and legislation to lead technology and not vice versa."

OMFG.

That would be step change in how the HMG actually seems to do business, where a new IT system will (automagically) bring about improvements in costs and service delivery.

But IRL

<gollum>

We wants it. We needs it.

We must have hard Brexit.

</gollum>

The future of Python: Concurrency devoured, Node.js next on menu

" with every thread competing to see who could get the biggest slice of the processor."

Until one of the procedures on the massive case statement (swallows all them messages and the whole system goes TITSUP).

There's a reason Windows eventually went preemptive, other than NT being built by a team with experience of writing an actual production grade OS.

"it's a BAD idea to..force Python to do things it shouldn't be used for in the FIRST place. Right?"

'Nokay

A remarkably balanced and sane PoV. A lesson that should be taught on all CS courses.

But IRL...

You get people trying to write an OS in FORTRAN.

And then the fun begins....*

*I know it's stupid. You know it's stupid. But the Board spent a shed load on that new (cross) compiler so it's going to get used.

Let the death march begin.

There's a reason Unix has this idea of "one program per job" and "pipes" to link them.

In effect the OS is a part of the system that lets you build a "processor" (of "stuff") out of smaller, more easily debugged parts.

Or for those used to the IBM iSeries "Readers" and "Writers"

So the 80's are back. Co-operative multi tasking.

Because the Windows event loop showed it works soooooo well.

Guess who's hiking their prices again? Come on, it's as easy as 123 Reg

So what's the "reason" for this price hike?

Brexit?

Because y'know it's what everyone else is saying...

Raising minimum wage will raise something else: An army of robots taking away folks' jobs

"I'll use the self service checkouts, but if it's not, I'll opt for a human cashier, "

I think that's sort of the idea.

Y'know, load balancing?

"how bad..fucked up to create a world where robots taking all the jobs is somehow a bad thing."

Who has to imagine?

It's happened.

"Pay your workers, shareholders and taxes fairly and don't rip off your customers."

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

That is all.

Creepy backdoor found in NetSarang server management software

It does look like the companies development and distribution servers have been compromised

Which is the nightmare scenario for Windows update users.

"Set up a shadow file system in the registry"

WTF?

Would that be even possible in any other main stream OS (that didn't have an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink "database" in it)?

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

Spray radical alkanes up there... Harmless, except for the toxicity and all that.

Demonstrating why humor on the interwebs is so difficult to pull off.

That and the fact you know nothing about the chemistry involved.

Hint. CFC's are non toxic and you need rate{recombination] >> rate[splitting], which it isn't.

That's what makes this problem so difficult.

Place your bets: How long will 1TFLOPS HPE box last in space without proper rad hardening

"I'm not sure where you are getting your figures from. "

Umm. Mars has no magnetic field and an atmospheric pressure about 1/160 that of Earth. The ISS "storm shelter" is about 0.5% of the Earths atmosphere equivalent.

To get the equivalent protection of the Earths atmosphere at ground level on Mars takes a layer of regolith about 3m thick.

As for where I got my information this guy, who should be quite well informed on the subject.

Big legacy tech companies in UK govt start to feel pinch – report

Unless you're a BT or DXC shareholder are you really bothered?

I'd like to see no IT con-tractor holding more than 5% of any governments business.

But while governments remain in thrall to the fantasies of "one stop shops" and "single points of blame" that's not going to happen is it?

US prosecutors demand data to unmask every visitor to anti-Trump protest website

Disproportionate? Let's see. 200 protesters charged. 1.3 IP addresses wanted.

Can you say "fishing trip" ?

Still at least they haven't invoked THE PATRIOT act and just taken the information.

Yet.

Ol' Donnie really hasn't gotten over the rather thin turn out for his inauguration.

Except for the protesters.

You wouldn't believe that someone who ran such a divisive blame-the-victim campaign could have such a thin skin. :-(

The fact that resources are being wasted on this matter tells me the protesters were right.

As for the D and the worlds least favorite Norman Cook tribute DJ. Two stubborn donkeys with nuclear weapons sounds like a bad day for the planet to me.