Posts by bexley

Crispest image yet of Ultima Thule arrives on Earth, but grab a coffee while the rest downloads

2Kbps

Thats what I get on my three mobile with "UNLIMITED" bandwidth in my area.

If that is the best that a 4G provider can manage over a distance of a few hundred meters from the transmitter / rx then i'd say 2Kbps from a space ship is pretty good.

Woman sues NASA for ownership of vial of space dust

no

no they dont own the moon. I don´t own the desert in Jordan either but the small vial of purple sand that I brought back with me is mine.

I paid for the transport to get there, I went out a collected it and I brought it home.

I don´t really understand why NASA are being so up tight about this though, maybe to discourage further resales of things that they made possible to collect and would prefer to keep for their own research or display.

It will make for a great provenance story at auction if she gets this back though.

ISO blocks NSA's latest IoT encryption systems amid murky tales of backdoors and bullying

Re: Interesting times.

A Nest smoke alarm is powered by AA batteries so low power consumption is desirable

Philips hue remotes (light switches) are powered by cr2030 batteries....

Once again, UK doesn't rule out buying F-35A fighter jets

Re: Why go totally F-35?

Because for every aircraft type you need a whole roster of engineering and technical staff, with one of two types you obviously need far fewer staff, fewer spare parts, fewer support contracts, fewer test and development projects, few weapons integration programs.

The F35 is something of the holy grail for the cash strapped air forces of the world, yes it is a very expensive capital expenditure but the operation expenditure is relatively low compared with operating a mixed fleet.

Anyway, mixed fleet of what? In almost every conflict of the past 30 years, the air space has been contested with Russian Surface to Air gear. That has necessitated a stealth capability that the Super hornet does not have. Russian and Chinese air defences are getting better and are available for purchase by our usual adversaries so Super Hornet is not actually a logical choice as it cannot operate over heavily contested airspace, is old and is a generally worn out design which is why everybody is buying the f35.

Our carriers can only operate f35 anyway, nothing else will fly from them unless we buy some mv22 osprey which highly unlikely.

It would be lovely to enjoy access to a vast range

Australian Feds cuff woman who used BTC to buy drugs on dark web

They can´t sniff out crime on the dark web

If they could then they would be arresting everybody and there would be no more crypto currency drug deals. She most likely used monero anyway and not bitcoin, since most market places prefer the anonymous monero over the volatile and traceable bit coin.

The cops are their ¨we see everything¨ lines are amusing.

They detected the drugs in transit using the same techniques that customs have always used.

If you are buying drugs on line and for some reason have to get it sent to your house, don´t order across borders.

Even within the EU they do a lot more checking, in the Netherlands they pretty much open every single domestic package and have a look inside. I once had a book that somebody sent me from india confiscated. I could never get to the bottom of what the problem was as they destroyed it and refused to discuss it further.

It was just a book.

Age checks for UK pr0n site visitors on ice as regulator cobbles together some guidance

this is going to be least effective possible option that they could have gone with

Does anyone really think that this is going to stop anyone going to pornhub?

Kid´s old enough to want to look at online porn are old enough to circumvent this preposterous legislation.

The old political tactic of just banning everything because they cannot work out a viable solution like, oh i dont know, educating people, enforcing the natural order of things that make parents responsible for their own children, locking down kids devices, but most of all, educating them and affecting real social change from ground up.

This is not going to work and I can´t believe that they are actually going ahead with it.

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Label your servers!

This is one of the reasons why you have to label servers but almost nobody who works in corporate IT ever does.

Label the damn things and then you can tell what it is at a glance.

It's 2018 and… wow, you're still using Firefox? All right then, patch these horrid bugs

Re: Dear Mozilla, there's more to life than security

The Guardian makes your firefox crash? I would consider that an advantage to using firefox, you can avoid the daily outrage generated by far left ¨journalism¨ and lead a happier life for it.

The guardian! I ask you...

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

three letter agency interference perhaps?

I expect that intel are being instructed to leave this backdoor open

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

perhaps alot of people consider gmail compromised anyway

so why bother

I suspect that some of that 90% of people not using 2factor auth already known that gmail is utterly compromised and is inherently insecure anyway so why bother having to reach for the phone every time you log in.

Sure, a lot of people use it in blissful ignorance too.

Switching away from gmail is hard to do as even the very best secure alternatives lack some of the most basic of gmail features.

Memo man Damore is back – with lawyers: Now Google sued for 'punishing' white men

Are saying that the student union bar is a whites only establishment?

Don´t be absurd, please. Having a black students group or a muslim students group is playing identity politics. If we everyone to equal standards then by rights, there ought to be a white students group too.

But no, for two reasons, that would be racist and I doubt anybody of any consequence really wants a white only student group.

Only idiots, the feeble minded and the mislead engage in identity politics.

I hope that he wins

He didn´t say anything wrong, he, as far as we know, did not do anything wrong.

All he did was dare to challenge the regressive liberal narrative which is destroying companies.

Facebook's send-us-your-nudes service is coming to UK, America

ah, this sounds like a good idea,

I mean what could possibly go wrong when you put all your compromising photos onto facebook servers and most likely have to hand over the rights to those images in the process.

Facebook have been such angels with respecting peoples privacy in the past.

Algorithms, Henry VIII powers, dodgy 1-man-firms: Reg strokes claw over Data Protection Bill

Re: A problem for democracy

A problem for email list hoarders you mean?

Me emailing a person within a company does not constituent my wish to sign up to their marketing email list. So many companies auto add any and all email addresses that they encounter to their lists that it is beyond absurd how many emails I get at certain times of the year (trade shows and traditional product release dates).

And there is no small print for me to read and accept before sending an email to a person either.

It is about time that those bastards were held to account.

Knock, knock? Oh, no one there? No problem, Amazon will let itself in via your IoT smart lock

What could possibly go wrong?

This is on of the stupidest things that I have ever heard.

The only sensible way that this could work out is if the drivers can only open a secured delivery area in your property, such as a mail box big enough to take a package. A kind of DMZ for your home if you like.

Letting them have a key to your house? I almost do not believe that this is a real story.

Linus Torvalds' lifestyle tips for hackers: Be like me, work in a bathrobe, no showers before noon

shirt and tie

I know a guy that can´t work properly unless he is wearing a pressed shirt and tie.

I pity him.

My problem is that If i get to 3pm and am still not dressed or showered, I start thinking, well, there is not much point it washing or dressing now, i´ll do it tomorrow.

US government sued by 11 pissed-off travellers over computer searches

these exploits are worthless

No be means Black people but is afraid to say it.

lol, ¨people of colour¨, what has the world come to.

If we must be PC about it then how about ¨People of African ancestry¨ or simply African Americans

Ad blocking basically doesn't exist on mobile

and lets not forget

host file lists, I have not seen an ad on my phone for years.

WannaCry-killer Marcus Hutchins denies Feds' malware claims

hosting defcon in the US...

...seems a bit of an oversight by the organisers.

Better to host in a more neutral country in future, one that is not prone to this sort of thing.

Virgin Media admits it 'fell short' in broadband speeds ahead of lashing from BBC's Watchdog

absurdly over subscribed

I amm all for network efficiency but virgin take the piss. Im making these numbers up but i suspect that they are not far off.

local network segment can support 20 customers at advertised speeds. they sell it to 200 customers and attempt to make it all fit by packet shaping, throttling? unfair use and peak time capping.

all of this rendered my vm 50Mbps connection unusable unless i set an alarm for 3am and stayed up till 9am.

the underhanded way they do it annoys me, all of the speed test sites seem to be exempt from their rules and it does take a bit of know how to identify the problem.

i have never before nor sinve experienced such a farcical network connection service in all my days. i bailed as a result of moving house.

I now have 150Mbps with none of the above rubbish, it works all of time peaktime or not, no bandwidth caps or fair use crap for 30 euro a month.

and they install brand new coax from the cabinet to my house. I had to move countries to get it though. The Netherlands may have its problems but internet access is not one of them.

French general accused of nicking fast jet for weekend trips to the Sun

what the point of being in charge of an airforce....

....if you cant benefit from perks like taking the company car home for the weekend?

I don´t see anything wrong with this, as long as aircraft availability for maintenance and operations was not affected (it wasn't) then whats the problem?

Distro watch for Ubuntu lovers: What's ahead in Linux land

Re: SAMBA

Yeah, it used to work fine in previous versions but samba is totally fucked in Mint 18.1, even after you install it you have to manually set permissions on some config files.

It´s as if it was never tested, not even once.

Thankfully, there is a community that makes solving these problems as simple as googling it.

there is real value for us in windows being the most used OS

most of the malware is targeted at windows versions due in part at least, to them being so widely used.

This is fine by me but if Linux were suddenly the most widely used platform then a lot of malware authors would turn their attention to us.

Let windows take the flak, i´m happy to be the Linux underdog.

LastPass connectivity snafu locks out Brits from password manager

its been doing this for weeks

in the netherlands

Hotel guest goes broke after booking software gremlin makes her pay for strangers' rooms

This is why we should not use debit cards...

....linked to bank acounts. pre-paid debit cards are the way to do online payments if you cannot use iDEAL or paypal.

Something similar happened to me once and I was stranded in another country with an empty bank account and no means to access it anyway as the card got cancelled.

The bank would not send me a new card to anywhere but my home address. Not much help as I was on another continent.

From them on I never used a debit card linked to my bank account in anything but an ATM.

Windows XP crashed too much to spread WannaCrypt

Re: Funny

I have noticed that my doctor has XP on her desktop and uses IE6 to connect to some medical encyclopedia (google for doctors or whatever).

I wonder if actually, the satellite offices were an attack vector being more likely to have a lower security policy / no security policy compared with a big hospital with an IT department.

I obviously have no idea how or if her GP PC is connected to a larger NHS network. I did ask but she had no idea and wondered what the hell i was talking about.

Trident nuke subs are hackable, thunders Wikipedia-based report

the report might be speculation but....

...they are running those subs on windows xp.

Windows XP.

And very low paid naval personnel.

Nest leaves competition in the dust with new smart camera

only cloud recording...

...which you have to pay an monthly fee for.

They get all your data, from your home, with facial recognition and you pay them for it.

TRUMP SCANDAL! No, not that one. Or that one. Or that one. Or that one.

Re: Ha Ha

Is your desktop on the public internet / has your ssh port forwarded / NAT´d through the firewall?

British prime minister slams Facebook and pals for votes

Re: Dear prime minister...

While I agree with you quite a lot there are some additional factors to consider.

1) the cops cant watch them all. Think how many people that would take. Lets say that a team of 4 people is needed to keep watch on a suspect. They cant work 24/7 so they need to work in shifts. Lets say that 4 shifts of 4 working 24/7 and factor in 1 more shift of 4 to cover absence and holiday. Now multiply that number by the the number of suspects on the watch list locally, and then nationwide, and then internationally.

We would need a exponential increase in the number of cops., 4 or 5 times the size it is at now.

2) I have heard stories of rivals within the muslim communities sending anonymous tip offs about their rivals, business rivals or people that they do not like into the Police, naturally these amount to nothing and are time wasted for the cops.

3) Islamophobia, this one is pretty common, a guy with a scraggly beard, sandles and a dish dash moves in down the road. Other occupants on the street are reminded of all the bad things done by similarly dressed people. They call the police the moment that he does something suspicious like putting the rubbish out late at night.

There is a guy near me that I don´t like the look of, I can easily imagine seeing his grainy face on a CCTV image after some atrocity however, my own common sense prevails and I have not called the Police with some paranoia fuled story about him.

Not everyone has common sense though.

I would venture, as many other have, that living under the threat of terrorism in one form or another suits most governments nicely, it makes it far easier for them to tighten their grip on us.

I expect that the reason that anyone suggesting that perhaps our foreign policy might have something to do with islamic terrorism coming our way is ridiculed and mocked outrage ensues is because that foreign policy is often designed to produce the results that we are seeing.

Drugs, vodka, Volvo: The Scandinavian answer to Britain's future new border

2500 liters of booze eh?

that´s 11 million well spent.

More surveillance in the UK / Eng;and is a most unwelcome prospect, Scotland has no land bordered with the EU so I dont see why this is such a big issue. If scotland leave the UK and join the EU, just leave the border as it is and perhaps do some spot checks on the roads.

Same in NI. When fighting a war with the IRA, the border was never a big problem and remained open throughout and the EU (with no land border) hardly represents a bigger threat than the IRA did.

Sysadmin finds insecure printer, remotely prints 'Fix Me!' notice

these are all a bit weak

SO far all of these anecdotes have been a bit weak. I suspect that most of us cannot actually reveal the biggest fuck ups that we have seen due to maintaining a thin veneer of professional courtesy.

I have been witness to some mind melting levels of incompetence over the past few years that have resulting in a rather large and previously successful business going out of business, it would make a good story but i doubt that anyone would believe it.

Instead we are just dredging up questionable stories from 15 years ago or telling fibs.

UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vuln to raid IT

these exploits are worthless

this is not a ¨cyber attack¨, this is somebody with admin privileges clicking on something they should not have done.

Some local files being encrypted really should not be a problem these days for a decent IT department, they should have it all puppetised and be wiping and rebuilding those machines now, or this morning, whenever this started.

If their databases have been encrypted then lets hope that they have tested their backup strategy and have already restored this last nights backups

Leaked NSA point-and-pwn hack tools menace Win2k to Windows 8

these exploits are worthless

They are from 2013 and they couldn´t sell them, nobody wanted them. They want the xero days for win10 etc..

Don´t be fooled into thinking your alright because you have win10

Remote hacker nabs Win10 logins in 'won't-fix' Safe Mode* attack

Re: Encrypted HD, right?

physical access required therefore we can just add this to the myriad of other ways in for a physical attacker.

I'd still like to see this fixed though, a modern OS should be as hardened as possible and kept up to date as often as required. I'm currently watching a documentary on nation state hacking, zero day, it's very good but the length of time that zero day vulnerabilities go undetected and the even when they are detected MS are sluggish to respond, is worrying.

Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Philando Castile shooting vid: It was the police – sources

disturbing

They all just had to sit still at gunpoint in the car and let the man bleed out, nobody rendered any help to the victim.

The lady seemed pretty calm too. Shame the lead up to the event was not filmed so we dont really know what happened although you have to assume that the cop car had a camera filming it all.

Sad times, not going to get any better with a large number of cops being shot in Dallas, the cops are not exactly going to be less twitchy after that.

Friends with benefits: A taxing problem for Ireland in a post-Brexit world

Re: Amsterdam...

you simply hire native legal staff and use native legal consultancy services, of which there is a thriving industry in the Netherlands on account of pretty much every major multi-national having a large office there.

The school system in the Netherlands places a huge emphasis on teaching English, they recently began teaching it to year 1 students.

For commerce, It is normal and common to have two contracts, one in english and the other in Dutch, the English one being as close a translation as can be. There are legal mechanisms in place to facilitate this as they understand that virtually nobody wants to or will learn Dutch considering the limited value and absurd sounds you will be required to make.

Ireland for cheap labour, call centres etc... but the serious stuff can be done in Amsterdam. It is a mjor european hub, very easy to get to from anywhere in europe and easy to live and work in and let's not forget about that lovely 30% tax break that they give skilled foreigners to come to work there.

Schlock and .aw as Dutch net registry rebrands

BV is....

....the dutch version of a Ltd company

Linux lads lambast sorry state of Skype service

It works for me

I had a call with a windows user yesterday and it worked fine

Leak – UN says Assange detention 'unlawful'

Regarding the current chair of the UNHCR

THe UNHCR is currently chaired by a Danish bloke with a Canadian Vice Chairperson and an Ethiopian women.

http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e450976.html

Makers of Snowden movie Citizenfour sued by ex-oil exec

Quite right too, I also suggest that we sue James bond.

Blighty's telcos set to CHOKE off another fistful of piracy gateways

Re: Errr

where do i begin....

Amazon are big enough to be in the same group of companies that have a fat pipe right out of their data centre and into the intelligence agency cloud.

You need to use a credit card to set up an aws account which unless you have obtained on under a different identity, makes you very easily traceable should the need arise.

It's too much hassle for the average internet user to do, they will simply move on and in some cases go legit.

Amazon, can at any time, apply their own blocking methods and since they are american, probably will at some stage.

it's a nice try but far from ideal. Your ssh tunnel is commendable though, providing that it terminates somewhere safe and out of reach, say russia or india perhaps.

Hollywood: How do we secure high-def 4K content? Easy. Just BRAND the pirates

I'll put the tinfoil hat on then

this shill has successfully diverted the discussion away from the technical solutions tondeal with this new rrm issue and into a lengthy and largely unecessary 5 pages of why its not theft.

Fondling slabs during takeoff WON'T end in a fireball of death - report

How will the cabin crew be able to confirm that the device is in flight mode?

You can't trust everyone to ensure that their devices are in flight mode by themselves, not everyone knows how to do it and even those that do can make a mistake. I've landed before and suddenly felt my phone vibrate as a text came in when I was pretty sure that I had flight mode on.

What about devices with buggy operating systems that cant be trusted to do what they are told.

There has to be a way to jam the frequencies of gsm . wifi etc without also jamming the critical flight systems?

Lenovo to ship all new PCs with Start Menu replacement

Uninstall

I got a new lenovo y500 the other day and spent the first 2 hours of ownership uninstalling about 20 applications that they had put on there.

Macafee would not uninstall either, ran the uninstaller from controll pannel but it remained and I had to go to the macafee website to download another specific tool just to remove that shite from my computer.

Then onto tackling windows 8 only to discover that UEFI has damaged the ability to easily install Linux on another partition.

It is technically still possible to do but requires lot's of editing of grub files to get it to boot.

Things have gone backwards

New blinged-up 'iPhone 5S' touted by Jobs FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

fingerprint

will that fingerprint be 'backed up' back to apple servers and therefore whichever intelligence service wants it?

Snowden dodges US agents in Moscow, skips out on flight

patriot act

As i understand it, this is legal under the patriot act.

It's about time that was repealed and that politicians stopped using patriotic acronyms to target peoples patriotic sense of right and wrong to make grossly offensive laws palatable.

That and using terrorism to justify everything.

British LulzSec hackers hear jail doors slam shut for years

Re: Got off lightly

With the kiddie porn, was a he a pedophile or are we talking about some 4chan pictures?, i'm fairly sure that this lot are part of the 4chan crowd and one visit there will give you an idea of the sort of pictures that get posted for shock value, its not a CP den.

Sounds like they threw a net out and trawled to try and beef up their case as much as they could.

The prison sentences are shockingly long, regardless of how much time they might get off. Prisons have been around for an awful long time and we still have a problem with crime. It is reasonable, by now, to assume that prison is not a viable solution to crime.

These boys need helping to become more responsible citizens not locking up. There are better ways to deal with this than prison.

If one of them did turn out to be a pedophile though then I consider that the kind of thing that prisons are useful for, you cant cure or train somebody to not be a pedophile so locking them up seems the only way to deal with that particular problem at the moment.

Lulzsec, if nothing else, helped to harden the internet, some companies are taking better care of our data now.

Top tools for junior Linux admins

I like to use 'watch' quite a lot to give me a live output of commands like 'du -sh'

It's not very pure and it's been a while since i used it but when i was first faced with a linux server i found webmin to be a life saver until i learned how to do simple thing like add a user or restart a service.

I like 'iptraf' too for a quick look at whats going on with a nic.

'startx is also quite an amusingly obscure way to start the desktop, always makes me smile when a new person see's me do that when they have spent the past 45 minutes fumbling around trying to do something.

My advice to new comers is always to use linux as your main os for a while, no dual booting or having a VM on your windows laptop. The problem with that is that as soon as you hit a problem that will be faster to get around by going back to windows, you'll go back to windows and learn nothing.

Dive in, be prepared to do some reading to be able to get yourself up to the same level that you are with windows. Once your there then you will find that you can do an awful lot more with linux.

I found Debian to be a wonderful and easy to use linux, i recommend it to anyone and personally i find it much easier to use that the redhat's out there.

Education Secretary Gove: Tim Berners-Lee 'created the INTERNET'

teaching is a skill in itself

I have met plenty of decent enough engineers who are terrible at training others.

If you know how to teach properly (and being a trained academic teacher does not necessarily mean that you know how to teach properly) and you can research your subject matter then you can teach anybody anything at all.

You don't need to have a degree in computer science to teach people computer related subjects, the ability to coach and train is way more important