* Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

21278 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009

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South Korea faces $1bn bill after hackers raid national ID database

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: British Database

The point is that if you do issue a single number to everyone and use it for everything you can't assume it's a secret. There is no problem with using SIN as a unique key as long as you don't also think you can use it as a secret key.

It's like saying, hackers broke into a phone box and have obtained the names and phones numbers of everyone in the city listed in the phone book

Ada Lovelace Day: Meet the 6 women who gave you the 'computer'

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Never sure about this "role model" idea.

So I can do programming because Turing was a man?

Except he was a posh southerner and gay - so really only 25% the same - and I hadn't heard of him until I was at university.

It's like claiming I am somehow politically empowered because Cameron is a man.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

The debate was whether she actually contributed anything or was just a celebrity endorsement.

She was very well connected in the cool consumptive poets circle, which doesn't automatically mean she was an idiot. She did have a decent private education in maths,more than a typical rich girl of the era, but that doesn't automatically mean she was a genius.

Radiohead(ache): BBC wants dead duck tech in sexy new mobes

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Re: Ofcom .. concluding that it would be unfair to make the UK’s then 4.6 million receivers obsolete

Just rented a car with a DAB radio, every few minutes it would repeat a few seconds of the audio.

I thought my mind was going until I listened to "just-a-minute". Quite a surreal experience listening to just a minute with a 2second reverb - almost made it entertaining.

Stop ROBOT exploitation, cry striking Foxconn workers

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Re: Hmmmm

The future will be organising those machines.

Pick and place robots of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your SCSI chains.

Cops and spies should blame THEMSELVES for smartphone crypto 'problem' - Hyppönen

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: It's all over now

"A very British Coup", MI5 are reporting to the cabinet office on their spying on the new far left government."3 adulterers, 2 crooks, a couple of poofs and a communist",

"sounds like every cabinet since the war" says the weary cabinet secretary.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Google has since promised to do something similar with Android smartphones.

It ensures that you get 5years unless you hand the password over to the plod.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: 2-part security?

Or the plod accidentally erased them, or took blank phones from completely innocent people and are happier to have a story of "battling super cyber criminals needs extra powers" rather than "we are, and always have been, idiots when it comes to technology"

Heistmeisters crack cost of safecrackers with $150 widget

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Re: My extensive knowledge of nuclear weapons

British nuclear weapons of course used the far safer bicycle lock

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm

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Re: Heh

The $few100M diamond heist in antwerp had a vault door with a 6digit combination, except the janitor who locked up at night never bothered to spin the wheels to a random setting. It had a key that was uncopyable (?) and split into two halves for security, except they left it assembled and hanging up in a closet next to the door.

Irish data cops plan long soak in CASH BATH: Gee thanks, Facebook, Twitter, Google

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Be a terrible shame

If having to log all the Eu activities of Facebook/Google/Apple/Microsoft and all the other US companies that only do any Eu business in Ireland - comes to more than the carefully negotiate tax settlements

Hardened Hydrazine the source of Galileo satnav FAIL

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Still unclear, putting them in the correct orbit would all their on board propellant and involve such a long sequence of changes that they would probably be obsolete by the time they were on-station.

They still provide perfectly valid positions, but it's not clear if most receivers could handle the "way out of expected range" signals you would get.

They will probably have some nominal contribution as an extra timing reference - but it looks like it's an insurance job

Lies, damn pies and obesity statistics: We're NOT a nation of fatties

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Moving the goals?

Yes, that's why it is height^2.

BMI is a decent measure of a population's tubbiness, which is what it was intended as.

It's crap as an arbitrary "you are fat and unhealthy" vs "you are normal" line in the sand for an individual - unfortunately this is what is is used for

Want a customer's call records Mr Plod? No probs

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Although that just means, checking that the login was from the police - anything the police want is lawful under RIPA and the police get to decide what is commensurate

Red Bull does NOT give you wings, $13.5m lawsuit says so

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Re: Applies where?

Irn Bru next - unless it really is made from girders

Prez Obama backs net neutrality – but can't do anything about it. Thanks, Obama

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Re: A little wrong...

I have a patent on an improvement to an MRI scanner. Because we have a patent we can approach the $Bn companies that make MRIs and offer to sell/licence the technique.

Under your wonderful anti troll legislation all I would have to do is invent the rest of the MRI, secure a few $Bn in funding to go into production, get device approval across the world and set up my own manufacturing, marketing and distribution to compete with Siemens, GE, Toshiba etc. Just so the world can benefit from our noise reduction work.

That's the purpose of patents, to allow inventions to get used.

White LED lies: It's great, but Nobel physics prize-winning great?

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There was a claim that switching to CFLs added about 500,000 tons of CO2 in Canada because the heating effect of hydro-electric powered tungsten lamps was replaced by propane/natural gas.

Judge nukes Ulbricht's complaint about WARRANTLESS FBI Silk Road server raid

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Re: LMAO!

The feds hacked into a computer without a warrant and "found" evidence.

Could be a convenient way of extending Yetree to anyone the police/government don't like - just break into their computer and "find" some evidence.

US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: US is losing science race

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Re: USA is not that great in science really...

Because Luxembourg having a single nobel prize winners might statistically give them 100x the winners/population that the USA has - it doesn't follow that Luxembourg is 100x better at science than the USA.

Protesters stop ground breaking on world's largest telescope

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Re: Religion or Extortion

Building this has caused a few others to shut. The keck interferometer mode is gone because the operators couldn't get an agreement with the protestors that the small outlier telescopes needed to fill in the background weren't part of the main telescope - they had to count as separate telescopes and so went over the maximum number allowed with the agreement with the local god.

The site in Chile for the ELT is way better and doesn't involve anything like the same issues, but it doesn't attract the same pork barrelling that building in the US gets.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee defends decision not to bake security into www

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Re: RE: Charles 9 Both correct

Or if he had baked in security:

1, he would have got it wrong - even experts get it wrong so the chance of a regular programmer inventing ssl and implementing it correctly is zero. So we would have had a built-in faulty standard.

2, It would have been too difficult for anyone else to use/implement so we would have no browsers/servers outside CERN.

3, Without an infrastructure of certifcate providers the only response would be to use something like existing "x." protocol family security. Which would have involved governments. So anyone copuld have had a website if the postoffice approved your licence request.

4, It would have hit export issues. No web browser/server software could have been copied from the USA. There would have to have been government level negotiations for a "munition" to be transferred from CERN to other institutions.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: 45RPM

So should all PCs be ptarmigan shielded?

Should they only be housed in shielded rooms with door interlocks?

Should there be men with machine guns and dogs patrolling the building?

How much is Microsoft earning from its Android taxes again?

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: RE: And that is why mobile Windows is so shite - they want you to use Android

A number of people in this forum work in corporate IT for shops that are heavily microsoft dominated. So its useful to have the tools to connect to them natively.

Hot DRAM! Samsung splurges $15 BILLION on Korean chip fab

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

$15bn 150,000 jobs?

I had never thought of chip fabs as particularly hands on affairs

But doesn't 150,000 highly paid chip fabrication engineers look like costing you about $15Bn/year?

So assuming all that 10nm waferscale printing optics and excimer lasers are free then $15Bn is only going to cover the first year's salary bill.

Or will it turn out to have been totally fabricated by some regional development authority?

'Cops and public bodies BUNGLE snooping powers by spying on 3,000 law-abiding Brits'

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Re: Old habits die hard

He gets a reduced sentence.

The police force get to upward trend their key performance indicators with reference to incident response rate metrics

The offices get a pat on the back down at the rolled-up-trousers

The good people of kent feel safe that detection rates are up.

The real crims breath a sigh of relief that they aren't going to get caught

Less tax payers money is wasted on other court cases

Everyone's a winner !

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: So how did he vote on the original RIPA bill?

That's why they make him put MP after his name - you can't say you weren't warned !

Man brings knife to a gun fight and WINS

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Re: Shooting a robot

>"Until true conscious AIs are developed and recognized as sentient beings,

So more like shooting a senior Met spokesman then?

Marriott fined $600k for deliberate JAMMING of guests' Wi-Fi hotspots

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Re: Not sure if this is hotel rooms, or the conference centre though

When you are paying $20,000 for a trade-show booth and you need an internet connection to demonstrate your product.

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Re: Harvey's law

" it borders on the psychopathically suicidal."

It did say "in paris"!

Air-slurping solar battery will slice energy costs – boffins

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Re: "a patent-pending hybrid device ..."

Not necessarily, it's like inventing a rubber magnet and saying this will allow tires and electric motors to be combined instead of separate so it will be more efficient.

It doesn't say what the capacity is but it does so the life of the battery is comparable to other rechargeable, which is usually a lot less than the life of solar panels.

So this breakthrough gives you no way to tune the storage capacity for the application and you get to throw away the whole system in a year when the battery capacity has dropped.

Sea-Me-We 5 construction starts

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Re: GCHQ proof

Unfortunately that only works with foreigners.

While speaking slowly and loudly in English naturally allows foreigners to understand that only works for English - foreign languages aren't comprehensible by normal chaps.

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Re: Bugging a cable under construction

There isn't really any need to do super ninja submarine cable taps (which are rather trickier with a modern fibre cable than they were int he days of telephones) when the cable lands at a dozen countries who are all very willing to assisting their friends .

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

GCHQ proof

Alcatel-Lucent have insisted that all messages on the cable are in French rendering them completely unintelligible to British intelligence

Indian mom just loves it on Mars, tweets fave holiday snap

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Re: Congratulations India.

The $15M is what they charge commecially to launch something - they are doing very good business at that rate.

To put a 15kg science payload around mars meas lifting a lot more than that from the ground. The MOM craft was about 1.3T, of which about 60% was fuel, the rest is the booster engines needed to get it out of Earth's gravity, and into Mar's safely, the panels to provide enough power at that much further distance from the Sun and the communications feed.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Congratulations India.

The launch costs of the Indian rocket are $15M, - admittedly for only about 1/3 the mass to GTO of SpaceX.

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Re: Congratulations India.

And yet while you were living in those conditions your government was spending money on developing nuclear power, its own space launcher, the first computers, jet fighters etc. If only it hadn't invested all that money on high tech research then Britain wouldn't be the industrial and technological leader it is today..... sorry my mistake.

Still Britain did learn its lesson and spent £10bn on ending homelessness in the capital rather than wasting it on a running and jumping show.

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Re: Do you get what you pay for?

The imager isn't a main science instrument it's just to confirm where the science instruments were pointing and to provide a check of any odd conditions. There are enough high res imaging surveys of Mars from much better orbits to make adding a massive camera pointless and expensive in payload, power and bandwidth.

In reality it's actually there to provide some PR friendly images to show the public - like the cameras fitted to the boosters by Nasa/SpaceX.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Indian cheapskates!

A lot of it is accounting differences.

This doesn't count salaries of most university and governemnt staff working on the project. We would count the entire grant and the 150% overhead the university charges. We would have to sub contract all the actual manufacturing and generally to a defense contractor who was the single bidder.The design would also have to be to a number of conflicting Nasa/DoD standards adding more cost.

Also this is the cost of the payload - the cost of Hubble included things like operating the Space Telescope Sceince Facility for 25years and the salaries (+ university overhead) for all the grad students and post-docs working on the data.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Congratulations India.

When I first visited India in 1990 you could book an international phone call from a single city post office with 24hours notice. 10 years later in 2000 it had more Internet cafes and better cell service than I had in Silicon valley. 10 years after that it owns the international outsourcing/programming industry

If it had spent all that telecoms money on rice handouts it would be the same as Africa is today

FBI boss: Apple's iPhone, iPad encryption puts people 'ABOVE THE LAW'

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: 'Well how come you can't save this kid,'

Netflix is in court right now arguing that the government should need a warrant to access people's viewing records.

How do you expect the FBI to save a child if they can't monitor what TV shows everyone is watching in real time ?

Good grief! Have you seen BlackBerry's square smartphone?

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: "Oh and it comes in black and white."

There will be a special blinged "Ealing comedy" edition for the UK market

Feds: Cheeky scammers are impersonating us in criminal capers

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Realism

If you really want the authentic touch the email would force you to register for an online tax paying account on a site that only worked on IE6, and insisted on posting you a password 2 weeks later.

It would then require you to enter your bank details to transfer the money and not accept credit cards or paypal.

For extra verisimilitude it would keep firing popups asking you if - You are not claiming a foreign tax credit, except as a 'foreign' tax credit. (Warning: claiming a foreign tax credit for a foreign 'tax' credit, except where a foreign 'tax credit' is involved, may result in a fine of $125,000 and 25 years' imprisonment.)

4chan outraged by Emma Watson nudie photo leak SCAM

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I don't like radical Egalitarians.

They just want a world where eagles are in charge and can oppress non-eagles in exactly the same way

Fake tape detectors, 'from the stands' footie and UGH! Internet of Things in my set-top box

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Re: Law abiding Mongolians

Polar bears are big consumers of pirate Paddington

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Re: BBC documentaries Or Channel 4's Grand Designs

The stonehenge show was a co-prodcution shown as a 50min broadcast in Canada and 2x1 hours in the UK. Even more remarkable it was braodcast as part of an environmental program in Canada

Emma Watson urges UN to back feminism – trolls threaten to leak her 'nude selfies'

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Re: But will it make a difference?

Why do they always choose actors for this sort of campaign, their job is to stand up and tell made-up stories convincingly.

Microsoft vs the long arm of US law: Straight outta Dublin

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Re: Simple solution

Difficult to use Office365 if all the data is encrypted.

It's very easy to keep data safe if you don't want to read or write it.

A pile of disk drives and some thermite is generally acceptable.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: European data protection

The US government can make a request to the Eu company holding the data and try and get an Eu warrant. Them being a US citizen doesn't trump local law any more than being a Russian citizen gives Putin the right to send someone to visit you with a polonium tipped brolly.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: @ Robert Long 1

Microsoft Ireland is created solely for to allow them to run cloud services for Eu customers. Obeying local laws like data protection.

How would US consumers feel if US Toyota had refused to pay up for their American car troubles by claiming that they were a Japanese company and US rules and courts didn't apply to them?

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