Posts by Stoneshop

Boffins could tune telescopes to listen to lasers on Mars

Re: The Hall Effect, Polarized Light and Instantaneous Universal Communication

Blahblahblah. Another pile of pseudoscientific bullshit waffle from FSS.

If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky

Re: Never had a problem with my own PCs

Two Antec PSUs that went wonky, first one after just under a year, the other about half a year later. And one motherboard (some ASUS socket 754 iirc) that started to dislike half its memory. Apart from that, just external influences like a lightning strike across the street killing a soundcard and modem.

my 2 and a bit year old MacBook Pro is still working perfectly,

That's hardly an endorsement. Kit like that should last at least five years, else I'd consider it 'not fit for purpose' with a subsequent claim against the manufacturer.

The most-intensively used systems I can call my own are all Thinkpads of varying age, none younger than those five years. The only problems I have to deal with is a reluctant chipset fan (not the primary CPU fan, and once it's past POST the system apparently doesn't care about it stalling again) on an X61, and the batteries on two 701C's being, quite understandably, rather expired. Somewhere in the past I had a T23 and an A21 joining the choir invisible at age 7+, and an X22 that was loaned out, subjected to a puddle of soft drink, improperly cleaned and only handed back after several days. It did keep going for about three months, but finally ceased to be. An X30 is still in use 24/7.

Microsoft encrypts explanation of borked Windows 10 encryption

Platform

The most common usage around here is that it's the entirety of hardware, OS and "middleware" (urgh), ready to run the user applications.

Us techies understand it as implying it's something rather shaky high up with a lot of scaffolding underneath.

Re: Decrypted :

They have brought back another unwanted feature for me, a refusal to hibernate or sleep.

You're losing sleep over W10's lack of encryption, or its level of spying? There's a solution for that.

Brit hardware hacker turns Raspberry Pi Zeros into selfie slayers

Re: I want one to block facebook and whatsapp

When other people are using your WiFi then you are to a certain degree being their 'ISP by proxy'.

My router, my rules. Also applies to ad networks trying to route packets in.

If people are paying for connectivity, they can expect sites to be blocked or not according to their wishes. If they don't, tough shit.

Re: I'm wondering

You would be getting into legally questionable territory with spoofing.

Would proxying be a problem? You're not altering the data, or redirecting the connection, just adjusting the connection speed.

Full WiFi speed in, 56k out.

Re: Bit of a self righteous prick then!

Aren't you ever bothered by a selfie-stick-wielding hipster in front of a landmark, or forests of arms waving smartphones in front of you when at a concert?

Do read the article carefully and try to glean his motivation for building this device.

Sued for using HTTPS: Big brands told to cough up in crypto patent fight

Nice try, but you can simply query the server what transport encryption it supports. In fact, that's the first thing that gets done on trying to establish a secure connection, so that the server and the client can agree on one.

Re: Here is a suggestion to America

You all need your bloody heads looking at!

... through the opening that appears when it is separated from the previously-attached body.

(and you mean "looked at")

Hello Barbie controversy re-ignited with insecurity claims

Re: The Great Unwashed are not so paranoid

There may well be children's privacy on a few million minds, but the, what is it now, one and a half billion or so farcebook users simply outnumber them several hundred to one.

Millions of families hit in toymaker VTech hack – including 200,000+ kids

And with any luck you'll be sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months. Dunno about being recycled as firelighters.

Peat. Hmmm, whisky.

HTTPSohopeless: 26,000 Telstra Cisco boxen open to device hijacking

a trustworthy member

You missepled "thrustworthy". Worthy of thrusting onto the scrapheap.

Which, apropos of not very much at all, reminds me of the prank a couple of friends pulled off at an event. It started with a Cisco 2900 and a pickaxe, which turned the 2900 into a very dented 2900, nearly split down the middle. The circuit board was removed and two 8-port desktop switches fitted, so that 14 ports could still work. A few strips of sticking plaster were applied to cover the more ragged edges of the case, and then they casually walked in to the event NOC, to have an uplink activated.

As the network team tended to use 2900's as field distribution switches, they understandably assumed it was one of theirs and collectively went rather pale. Demonstrating that the switch still worked when plugged in added a good pile of incredulity to the paleness.

128GB DDR4 DIMMs have landed so double your RAM cram plan

Re: "48-bit limit is baked into the AMD64 spec"

Yeah, and we were limited to 640k in the 286-486 days, then came Extended Memory pushing it up to 1 MB

The 286 was already capable of 16MB, but DOS, running in 8086 real mode, could only deal with 1MB, of which the area from 640k to 1M was used for the BIOS, controllers and a window into expanded memory if you had that. Everything over 1M was designated as extended memory.

Several other OSes of that time were capable of using all available memory without having to move back and forth between real and protected mode.

And of course there were also other architectures that weren't saddled with icky design decisions for the sake of backwards compatibility that few people actually used.

Re: Just to be pedantic...

Memory DOES come in power-of-2 sizes, always has been, always will be. Width, as seen from the bus, will be a multiple of 8, or 32, or 64, and address size will also be a multiple of 2 because of the way address decoding and address mapping between memory banks works.

None of this disk drive sizes marketroid malarkey.

Sneaky Microsoft renamed its data slurper before sticking it back in Windows 10

Re: Great!

It doesn't hurt to know how and when to use command line tools, but need them? No.

You clearly haven't kept up with what the major distro's offer via GUI.

You don't say

But Windows 10 is bad for your privacy, and it is damaging Microsoft’s reputation as a trusted consumer brand.

Contender for the Understatement of the Year award.

HPE to open private London drinking club

Re: The Garage

Considering the distance they've put between the current HP* entities and the legacy of Bill and Dave, that would be a most unfitting name.

Green rectangles are the new rounded rectangles

Re: a. freaking. green.rectangle.

"I don't want to live on this planet anymore"

When tackling problems, any problems, one should start at the source. In this case the whale stick burners and joss song hummers, plus any that have comissioned them to burn and hum, plus those that have accepted the result.

'B' ark, hold 17.

Re: Do what?

Yes

Nest defends web CCTV Cam amid unstoppable 24/7 surveillance fears

Re: Explainable power dip between on and off

You're right, I misread. But even 30mA is quite a lot for a single indicator LED. There's a few other bits that apparently get turned off, but not much.

Re: Yet more unsubstantiated clickbait

Maybe it transmits only a heartbeat.

Which is just a single, small, packet every second or so. Even the traffic LEDs on a simple network switch will tell you the difference between heartbeat and a video stream.

Re: Explainable power dip between on and off

If the power LED (turning from green to red to indicate 'off', instead of just plain turning off) draws 300mA, that cam would make a nice table lamp.

Indicator LEDs don't need to draw more than a couple of milliamps, 10mA if you want a nice bright one. Whatever the NEST cam is doing, it's not actually turning off.

Plusnet ignores GCHQ, spits out plaintext passwords to customers

Re: Why isn't there an RFC

And you expect the ones that need that advice to actually know what an RFC is, be able to find them, read them, comprehend them and follow up on them?

Why Microsoft yanked its latest Windows 10 update download: It hijacked privacy settings

Re: @Stoneshop re: A bit slow on the uptake, eh?

What, you think running linux means you can't be snooped upon?

The word 'decrease', does that mean 'totally prevent' in your dictionary?

For sale: bridge, as new, low mileage, first owner.

Re: It's good but...

adblocks exist, but they're for the morally vacant signalling that this is not the way in which I'm inclined to support your website

Re: @Stoneshop re: A bit slow on the uptake, eh?

So you let other people's attitudes dissuade you from decreasing the area through which you are snooped upon?

<sarcasm>My heart bleeds for you.</>

“We apologise for the inconvenience.”

I would so like to see this message written in fire in letters thirty feet high on the far side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet of Preliumtarn, which orbits the star Zarss, which is located in the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine.

And made out of correctly stacked MSFT executives doused in petrol.

Re: It's good but...

Okay, you can reset it. But just like MSFT can apparently 'accidentally' disable the privacy setting on the AdID, I don't think it's beyond them to 'accidentally' re-enable a 'reset' AdID, or generate a new one that then just happens to become correlated with your old ID.

Re: It's good but...

Windows 10 is making me seriously consider getting a linux for the home pc

A bit slow on the uptake, eh?

not the place to rant about MS being total bastards because it just shows them as incompetent.

So it's OK because they're occasionally merely incompetent bastards, and full-blown proficient bastards at other times?

Re: It's good but...

It's not that they messed up and had to reset the Advertising ID setting to what it was before, it's the fact that such an identifier is assigned to W10 users in the first place. Google Anal-ytics has the "decency" to work via a separate domain, which can be blocked. Making it part of the OS turns it into a different kettle of fish.

Whoever thought that up should be fed, genitalia first, into a meat grinder.

Next year's Windows 10 auto-upgrade is MSFT's worst idea since Vista

Another vector

Recently, Windows Update on my dad's laptop (this one, and his desktop PC are the only W7 systems in my care) b0rked. Several MSFT fixing tools chewed on the problem, but failed to correct it. So finally I put a new disk in, installed W7+SP1 (and Mint next to it), told it to fetch updates, AND VETTED THEM ONE BY ONE. All updates mentioned in one of the replies here or in the other W10 articles were unchecked and hidden, as well as any of the other updates that smelled even vaguely suspicious. The Do Not Want settings were applied to the registry, and only then were the remaining updates applied.

Still, powering up the lappie to hand it back last monday, it showed that &^%*&$^*^!! "Get W10" icon in the notification area. Investigating, it turned out that there were a couple of entries in the Task Scheduler related to GWX, which were terminated with extreme prejudice.

I ddin't have time to investigate the source of this particular GWX invasion, but told my dad not to click on it if it ever reappeared (he fully understands why, so I don't expect problems there) and let me know.

Arrgh.

Cyber-terror: How real is the threat? Squirrels are more of a danger

Re: Cyber Warfare vs things that go boom

Take a few these out and watch the chaos.

As demonstrated on the Crimea peninsula quite recently.

Video malvertising campaign lasted 12 hours? Try two months

"Publishers now have no idea who serves what ads on their websites"

To even things out, I have no idea either, both who serves what ads on whose website, and what these ads might show if they were shown.

Sounds fair, right?

Re: ADS

If they don't offer another method, one that is acceptable to me, to get that 'exclusive content' then yes, they can stick it where solar irradiation is non-existent.

Irish electricity company threatens to cut off graveyard

Hooked up wrong

Instead of one of the occupants spinning in its grave and generating power, they've connected the coils backwards which are now adding rpms to the body.

Malware caught checking out credit cards in 54 luxury hotels

Re: Banking harvesting malware

industry standard Microsoft Windows.

Industry Standard: that would mean the widely used and broadly supported Itanicium too, instead of x86 or ARM. Lets those payment terminals double as handwarmers.

Hillary Clinton: Stop helping terrorists, Silicon Valley – weaken your encryption

Traffic analysis

It's nice if you know the content of the messages, but knowing who sends what when is a good start. The British used it in WW2 already for Axis radio messages, with unusual message levels or message lengths being indicators for higher priority for deciphering.

The Da'esh know this, and therefore use a phone just a few times before dumping it, so well before any of the spook organisations would become aware of it being used for nefarious purposes. The fault there was not using plain text messaging, the fault was dumping it where it could be recovered and too close to where the attack took place. Recovering the phone led to checking when it was used and where the messages were sent from/to, which again led to the raid in Saint Denis.

Re: Pity the Americans...

I think an interesting voting system would be that allocates a number of points to each voter, who then can assign any number of points in favour of or against any of the candidates. So, with a 10 point quotum as an example, one might vote

Candidate Not Just No But Hell No: -5

Candidate Fairly Sensible: 1

Candidate Monster Raving Loony: 4

And with it, proportional representation, not first-past-the-post

Who's running dozens of top-secret unpatched databases? The Dept of Homeland Security

DHS - Department of Homeland what already ?

Department of Homeland Stupidity, of course. Duh

How TV ads silently ping commands to phones: Sneaky SilverPush code reverse-engineered

Re: No Problem

... and my phone is the dumbest one on the market.

So, a Trimfone with a GSM module tacked on?

Re: Surreptitious DMTF?

sounds outside of human hearing in the first place?

It is generally accepted that HiFi reproduction should go up to 20kHz with a maximum roll-off of 3dB. Sure, a lot of people won't be able to hear frequencies that high, but quite a few do, even when over 25. I had a housemate bang my door when I was testing my speakers' frequency response, and had left the generator at about 23kHz afterwards. My own hearing went to 19.45kHz back then. And it's not just straight high frequency sound reproduction that matters, there's also all kinds of step response matters that come into play.

Anyway, even if an average TV sound system would start to roll-off at, say, 15kHz, it would still be possible to send info to a phone at 17..18kHz, only at higher levels so that it can still be picked up. Only with digital filtering can you effectively create a sharp-ish cutoff at a particular frequency, but that has to be built into the TV's sound processing system. And why should the manufacturer do that?

Cat discovers GNOME desktop bug

Re: That's nothing

Not monkeys, or we should have seen several Shakesperean works come out of Redmond by now.

Tech firms fight anti-encryption demands after Paris murders

Re: WRONG

just like Allies did to send message to French resistance - *any* message could trigger the worst.

But, quite like an OTP, you need to get the meaning of the code message to the recipient(s) via a secure channel beforehand.

"Blessent mon cœur d'une langueur monotone "

Uber Australia is broke: 'We don't pay tax because we don't generate revenue'

Re: Fuck off Uber.

Bullshit law.

If that's your opinion, you go and change the law, not dodge it (or encourage others to)

Tinder clone TanTan lets wire spies locate lovers

Isn't that exactly what they wanted?

Depends on their sexual preference, I'd think.

Today is not the day to search for a beautician in Russia

Cvrpr bs pnxr gb qrpelcg

It's just ROT13.

Hubble finds lonely 'void galaxy' floating in cosmic nothingness

Re: Expanding space

For values of 'alone' that mean 'alone, excluding that what might be found in their own galaxy'.

Re: A bit confused here...

to be able to see any other galaxies.

Rather, to determine that some of the stars they see are actually galaxies.

Reg reader achieves bronze badge, goes directly to jail

Re: Holy shit!

Silver gets you on the Special Watch List

I'm currently wearing a Casio Waveceptor Illuminator. Is that special enough, or do I need to get Dave Scott's Bulova Wrist Chronograph?