Posts by cyberdemon

In the West, we're worried about shooting down drones. In Russia, drones shoot you

Re: Personally

> Oh, and as for the Illuminati - we're not interested. It's so much easier and so much more fun to see just what direly incompetent politicians we can inflict on people. World domination? We're in it for the lulz. It's funny watching people vote to be kept poor, ignorant and powerless.

Remind me who the ukranian presidential favourite is?

Then again, an airhead actor is probably better than a self-righteous "businessman" with serious vested interests.

Mary McDonnell for US president anyone?

Re: We're doomed.

@jellied Eel

I'm not so much worried about re-purposed RC aircraft (actually the one in the video was a lot more than that, given that it incorporated the gun as a structural element into a quite innovative fixed-wing VTOL design, with an unusual control scheme, which I suspect is what's behind the patent).

I'm far more worried about what well-resourced large corporations can do with government backing and a manufacturing supply chain geared up to produce by the millions. Imagine that thing, but with the same on-board AI computing power, "thoughtful product design" and mass-production efficiency of the DJI Mavic.

* ActiveTrack allows you to track "subjects" effortlessly * Utilises FlightAutonomy technology to sense obstacles up to 15m away, so the Mavic can "avoid" accidents * Forward & downward vision sensors let the Mavic hover precisely indoors or in places without GPS * New OcuSync transmission technology with a range of 4.3miles for video streaming * all for a bargain price of £900 * just add explosives

Those things are quite terrifying in terms of what they could do if someone decided to turn them into a weapon. (imagine a swarm of them coming at you like a Cylon missile strike, each one independently picking and tracking its own target)

Luckily though, DJI have made them into "unhackable black boxes" that always obey local government airspace restrictions, and could never ever be used for anything nefarious. Isn't that nice of them?

Actually, DJI drones cannot be used in any UK defence contracts, since the things are so murky in terms of what they are really doing inside.. plus of course they are in constant encrypted communication with China via the phone app that you MUST use if you want anything beyond basic manual 2-stick control. When you consider that all major chinese companies are "encouraged" to have a "party committee" at board level to ensure the company is serving the interests of the party, you can see why the UK/US militaries are worried about using their tech.

There's been an arms race going on, but because we were so distracted by those pesky terrists stealing our oil, we have failed to notice the starting gun.

Like I said, we're doomed.

We're doomed.

In the west, this kind of "innovation" is gets you thrown in jail. In russia, you can be granted a patent on this shit and the state will buy it.

I dread to think what's going on in China.. Since they don't post on YouTube we won't know until they come humming round the corner.

What brexiting twats like Gavin Williamson fail to realise is, we have no "hard power" to use. If it came to war, we would stand a snowball's chance in hell. It's one thing shooting at poor uneducated arabs who have nothing but antique and makeshift weaponry, but we really have no idea what it's like fighting a war with modern weaponry on both sides. WWII is almost gone from living memory.

Call me a tinfoil-hat-wearer, but I'm pretty convinced that there's a little club of powerful russian and chinese men somewhere, who are rubbing their hands with glee after their little game of psychological operations and divide-and-rule.

Britain's "sovereign" parliament is in complete disarray and will probably never be able to make a decision on anything ever again, America is still trying to impeach its lunatic president, and little fascist parties are gaining ground all over Europe.

Honestly, I can see western society collapsing all on its own even without direct foreign intervention. Then someone steps in to "keep the peace".

When it all stabilises, we will wonder what this notion of "freedom" was, before quickly putting it out of our minds for fear of being flagged for unusual behaviour by the AI powered surveillance state, and getting a visit from the thought police.

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

re: downvotes

The downvotes are from people who know full well that Facebook and Whatsapp have voice calling, but still insist on using traditional calls because they are a) more reliable and b) aren't being slurped by Facebook to build a dataset for the next robo-caller AI.

We prefer that only GCHQ gets to spy on us, with their low-tech wire-tapping systems that they installed at Vodafone et al a decade or three ago, which only records people they are already interested in, rather than -everyone-.

Bloke thrown in the cooler for eight years after 3D-printing gun to dodge weapon ban

If he is barred from owning a gun, how can he legally buy ammo?

You know, those explosives wrapped in brass, with the bullets wot kill people.

Surely that's more important than a piece of plastic that he downloaded?

Paris, cos even she can see this glaring loophole..

xHamster reports spike in UK users getting their five-knuckle shuffle on before pr0n age checks

Re: Reason?

No, the reason is that Mrs. May and her ilk believe in stable government, 1984 style. That means mass surveillance so that they can arrest anyone who disagrees with them.

This is just an excuse to further that cause.

Wow, what a lovely early Christmas present for Australians: A crypto-busting super-snoop law passes just in time

Re: "Ship! Come back!"

Unfortunately Adam, I don't think the government really cares THAT much about the 'bad guys' :(

What governments REALLY worry about are the masses. If people en-masse got angry, they could make themselves a completely new government.

If some 'bad guy' blows up a hundred, or even a thousand people, it's not really a problem for a government, in the grand scheme of things. It may even help them, by keeping the masses afraid of such things and persuade them to give up some of their freedoms.

The kinds of people who do mass surveillance are only interested in the software used by the masses, i.e. facebook and whatsapp (at the moment).. If you went and used some third-party app that implemented the Signal protocol but didn't pass on your keystrokes to GCHQ, then you would perhaps be flagged on some watch-list or learning system for being an 'abnormal' person, but really they are not that interested in you unless you can communicate with millions of people..

London Gatwick Airport reopens but drone chaos perps still not found

Re: "environmental rights terrorists"

No, the last two do not apply to these jokers. All of those bullet points come under the heading:

Terrorism is a violent action that:

IANAL, but this reads to me that they must all be "violent actions". If there is no violence, or at least wanton destruction, then it can't be "terrorism".

- Interferes with or seriously disrupts an electronic system

e.g. blowing up subsea internet cables in the Bristol Channel or deliberately dragging an anchor to destroy them. (I worry about this sort of thing bringing the UK to a standstill at some point.. No more "cloud"! Most big shops can't even take Cash without the Internet.)

- Creates a serious risk to the public’s health and safety

e.g. throwing caltrops or burning bin bags off of motorway bridges. The M25 turns into a car park with just one breakdown.. Imagine the chaos someone could cause deliberately.

--

Whereas this drone, if there even was a drone, was just flying somewhere in the vicinity of an airport, probably minding its own business. It's illegal, due to the proximity to the airport, but not "terrorism" by a long shot. The only "terror" was caused by the media and airport management when they shut the whole place down at Christmas on a knee-jerk!

TBH, all of this sounds to me like an excuse to "crack down" on drones in general, because the government sees them as a hazard. I think Mrs. May would like all of them banned except for her own manhacks authorised police drones.

Re: Fire and forget ...?

An inductive charging mat might come in handy?

Resident evil: Inside a UEFI rootkit used to spy on govts, made by you-know-who (hi, Russia)

Hardware button?

Most UEFI motherboards (certainly mine) have a dedicated hardware button at the rear I/O panel which is something to do with flashing firmware. I believe one can insert a USB stick with a firmware image, and hold the button down at boot to flash it without a screen attached.

Would it not therefore be trivial to require this pre-existing hardware button to be pressed EVERY TIME the firmware is flashed? I.e. if you try to flash it from windows, it lights up the button and says "please press the button on the motherboard to continue with firmware update".

Would this not thwart (almost) all malicious UEFI firmware images? (perhaps not the kind installed into laptops by security services as they pass through airports in the more dodgy countries i.e. China, Russia, Israel I am looking at you..) but certainly it would no longer be possible to do this remotely..

Yes it might make it very slightly more annoying for the PFY in the data centre who has to update 1000 racks with a new firmware, but at least he gets overtime for it!

UKIP flogs latex love gloves: Because Brexit means Brexit

Non-binding it may be, but we're still doomed.

With the amount of vitriol swirling round since the vote leave campaign, if the government tried to back-pedal now there would be civil unrest..

But then again, when we actually leave, there will still be civil unrest because we won't be able to buy enough gas to keep the power on, and the price of food will have doubled because we fundamentally don't have enough land to grow our own, and we can't import spanish grain to make our supposedly 'british' meat & dairy..

In a country so precariously balanced that it risks societal collapse if the Internet went off for a few weeks (in my humble opinion), this is a truly horrifying prospect!

At which point, thanks to the wonderful way global finance now works, the pound could go the way of the zimbabwean dollar.

The only answer is to build yourself a fortress, buy up all the property at rock-bottom prices with your off-shore assets, and then wait it out while the proles murder their neighbours for the last tin of baked beans. But that only works if you're rich like rees-mogg.

No, seriously, why are you holding your phone like that?

(deliberately?) stupid meters

Apart from the reasons discussed already (1: being switched off remotely, either for "load-shaping" by your supplier, or "cyberattack" by anyone else.. 2: having my data slurped and sold to any and all interested parties 3: being locked into a particular supplier 4: being made to pay a variable rate depending on the suppliers's ability to supply...)

The other reason I hate smart meters, and would never consensually have one installed, is that I don't trust them to read accurately.

The old electromagnetic meters read "true RMS" by virtue of a magnetic force acting on a spinning disc -the moment of inertia of the disc will ultimately average out any transients.

Smart Meters on the other hand, are purely electronic, and don't necessarily read True RMS (because they employ discrete sampling).

There was a huge fiasco last year with Smart Meters over-reading. I don't know how much of it has been fixed now, and which meters are OK..

They would sample only at the peak of the mains voltage sine-wave. This is a problem for any device whose front-end component is a bridge rectifier (this includes most LED lights, most laptop power supplies, and cheaper desktop power supplies without PFC).

Current only flows through the diode bridge when the mains voltage is higher than the DC capacitor voltage, and that only happens at the peak of the mains waveform. But the "smart" meter would sample the peak current, and assume that it was sinusoidal and in-phase with the voltage. But in reality, the current at everywhere else but the sampling point, is near zero.

Thus, smart meters would over-read by several times for LED lighting in particular.

see: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/06/smart_meters_prove_dim/

Foot lose: Idiot perv's shoe-mounted upskirt vid camera explodes

Smoking boots

Congrats to El Reg for finding this gem for the 'Bootnotes' section.

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

Git for Business

Which obviously is totally incompatible with actual Git, and requires Silverlight. But it has an app for your Zune.

Dinosaurs permitted to mate: But what does AT&T Time merger mean for antitrust – and you?

Re: "The US approach maximises consumer welfare"

@Andrew: Even with that simplistic definition of Consumer Welfare, it does not necessarily follow that prices will be lower under a monopoly.

Russia appears to be 'live testing' cyber attacks – Former UK spy boss Robert Hannigan

Ivan, it's called sarcasm.

Is Microsoft about to git-merge with GitHub? Rumors suggest: Yes

Re: GitLab

First I've heard of Gogs. It sounds interesting.. I will give it a try.

Also, please forgive my above posts in favour of GitLab, as it's the only good (though admittedly slow) not-GitHub I know/knew.

Re: Everyone simply leaves

The only tricky part is migrating all the extra bits that GitHub itself provides, e.g. issues, comments, wikis, continuous integration etc.

For that you need an import tool that uses their API e.g. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

Re: Forgot an option to Q2

It should at least have a CowboyNeal option

Re: I can't think of anything much worse

completely agree - this would be disastrous for GitHub. But that might be the plan.

This all sounds about as healthy for GitHub as the time when Microsoft had installed a stooge CEO to dump the share prices but definitely weren't about to buy Nokia, because that would almost certainly be illegal. And then they did.

I am personally convinced the only reason Microsoft bought Nokia is because Nokia had a dangerously good debian-based smartphone OS which they wanted dead: Maemo

Don't forget the old mantra when it comes to open source: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

GitLab

Is the best alternative to GitHub that I know.

It is properly free (there's a debian package for it in sid), so you can host your own private instance if you wish.

Also where are the 97+ who voted "Good"? They need to come into the comments section for their flaming.

Then again, astroturfing isn't a new thing to Microsoft.

UK.gov's use of black box algorithms to decide stuff needs watching

Re: AI in government?: Accountability

That's the trouble with 'deep learning' style heuristics - they are utterly inscrutable, because the entire 'algorithm' (if you can even call it that) is completely dependent on the ENTIRE DATASET that it was trained on. That often amounts to Petabytes, and cannot possibly be audited. If the dataset is skewed (e.g. in the same direction that our society is skewed) then the resulting 'algorithm' will be skewed the same way. So it solves precisely nothing.

That said, I am quite worried about the "age of accountability" affecting well-meaning humans (e.g. teachers, doctors, police) being compared against machines and being expected to act like robots. The last time I dealt with police, they were scarily algorithmic, probably because they themselves were scared for their own jobs if they didn't follow their programming..'

As for GDPR - it limits the use of deep learning by "accountable" authorities like the police/HMRC/you/me/etc but anyone already operating outside the law/domicile is unaffected. So the likes of Facebork will get away 'scot' free, selling your data to all and sundry, mining it to determine your political preferences, and brainwashing you with Brexit/Trump/WWIII propaganda.

EmDrive? More like BS drive: Physics-defying space engine flunks out

One side of me says "why is the physics community even entertaining this idea - it was obviously B0110cks from the start" and the other says well, where would physics be if we all discounted out-of-hand any ideas which at first glance, appeared to be utter bollocks.

But on balance, my suspicion is, it's bollocks.

Supreme Court to dig into Google's very cosy $8.5m deal with lawyers over web search leak

What's wrong with this?

Shurely the residents of Cyprus could do with the money?

Now where did I put my glassses

Javid's in, Rudd's out: UK Home Sec quits over immigration targets scandal

Re: Rudd: You've been played

Lack of what a normal person would call competence, is a specific job requirement for the vast majority of our MPs, it seems.

As I see it, there are two types of British Politician / Civil Servant:

* The Visionary: Highly intelligent (more than they appear), often deceitful, scheming. There is only room for a handful of these, as they tend to conflict. Mrs. May falls into this category.

* The Lackey: Acts as a sock-puppet / attack-dog for a Visionary. Independent thought is an undesirable quality. Amber Rudd is so far along this end of the spectrum that she was prepared to throw herself under the bus to save her mistress..

Mrs. May is the most deceitful / malign 'Visionary' I have ever known in British Politics. I strongly suspect that during the Brexit referendum, the only reason that May backed 'Remain' was so that she could poison the campaign from the inside. Nobody liked her anyway, so they would vote against her.

It's the only thing that makes sense given her actions: Even before a Brexit referendum was even on the cards, as Home Secretary Theresa May was trying to bring us out of the European Convention on Human Rights, drafting the Investigatory Powers Act (aka Snooper's Charter) which I'm sure she knew full well was illegal under EU law, and fighting against the ECHR for powers to lock people up indefinitely without charge, which she conceded to 90 days, but was defeated and tried again with 28 days..

What I don't understand, is why the Pundits seem to think Rudd's departure is a blow for the pro-EU lobby.. If Amber Rudd truly held pro-EU beliefs, maybe she has finally realised that she has been played by Mrs. May?

Upset Equation Editor was killed off? Now you can tell Microsoft to go forth and multiply: App back from the dead

Kill it

I don't like the idea that there's a 17 year old binary within Word that even MS don't have the source code to.

It's time they replaced it with a proper LaTeX editor anyway!

Better filters won't cure this: YouTube's kids nightmare

Re: 70's disturbing TV

Ok, after having watched some of the videos referenced by TFA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlNKi5etxhk), this is a lot weirder than the Moomins!

Re: 70's disturbing TV

I wasn't around in the 70s but i found The Moomins pretty disturbing in the 90s!

How many times can Microsoft kill Mobile?

Re: I disagree.

> Windows Mobile - from 7.5/7.6 on was actually quite a nice way to use a phone

You're having a bubble bath?

MAEMO was a nice way to use a phone - really nice. Doubled up as a mobile SSH terminal, even had X11 forwarding support.

Unfortunately, Microsoft murdered it and its mother Nokia in an ultimately doomed attempt to push Windows Mobile!

Google diversity memo: Web giant repudiates staffer's screed for 'incorrect assumptions about gender'

Newspeak..

This.

Not to mention the Doublethink. It is almost a crime just to express an opinion that doesn't align with the HR/party line these days...

About 7 years ago I was on a graduate scheme in a UK company which produced traffic light controllers. I had placements in Hardware (Electronics/Embedded), Software, Operations, Urban Traffic Control, Business Development, Legal, IT and HR.

When I was on my placement in HR, they were busy preparing an Equality & Diversity policy, and I was brave/stupid enough to get into an argument with the head of HR.

The policy encouraged so-called 'positive discrimination' towards minority groups, and I asked why it was necessary or even legal - She was quite offended that I had asked these questions, but said it was because "there are no women in engineering", because they are discriminated against - and the more the company could do to offset that, the better.

Then I pointed out that despite her having no such policy in place previously, there were 4 women in the hardware/software engineering departments (out of about 25 engineers total) - which is not exactly parity but far from her claim of *no* women - but I notice in her HR team, of about 8, all of them (except for me) were women.

She got quite angry/red and claimed not to have known about the 4 women in engineering (which I found hard to believe from the head of HR) and we got along about as well as cats for the rest of my employment..

The problem, like others here have said, is much earlier on. It's pointless and quite counterproductive to try and make underqualified women feel 'entitled' to a job in tech, because recruitment should always be on merit. The problem is education, and making women and girls feel entitled to an *education* in tech.

The worst case of gender skew was my computer science course at uni. Out of an intake of about 200 electronics / computer science students, 3 were female. And now we blame employers for the lack of women in tech??

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

"cunning as a shithouse rat"

Indeed. 'Stupid' is reserved for those who actually believe anything she says..

Welcome to the Rise of the Machine-to-Machine. Isn't it time to 'block off' some data ducts?

Sod MGS2

I remember Deus Ex

(like The Matrix, there was only one Deus Ex)

OnePlus cash equals 5: Rebel flagship joins upmarket Android crew

Re: No microSD port?

> microSD port has an advantage without relying on cloud backups when your phone breaks.

This.

When I mentioned on the OnePlus forum that the reason I think the lack of MicroSD is a mistake is because I want to be able to BACK UP MY PHONE, the response from the fanbois was literally this: "Your microSD card may fail at any time, but the cloud never rains"

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

That just epitomises where the whole tech industry is heading though: Don't worry your little heads about keeping your data safe - your data is safe with US - it's OUR data now! >:}

FUKE NEWS: Robot snaps inside drowned Fukushima nuke plant

Re: Go nuclear

@bad_beaver:

> Also, comparing natural levels of radiation that our miserable species has adapted to with a reactor meltdown seems ever so slightly off

I'm not so much talking about the immediate vicinity of a meltdown - that's probably quite dangerous (although the 'Fukushima 50' are all still alive, and 'the most radioactive man in britain' who gazed down the piles of Windscale while it was on fire and was subsequently banned from touching his wife/kids, lived to a ripe old age) - I'm talking about low-level emissions into the global environment - which are far more costly to control than meltdowns.

ALARA says that ANY emission, no matter how small (even a microgram of tritium up your air extraction stack) must be mitigated as far as reasonably achievable (i.e. to the Nth degree). Most 'low level' nuclear waste is actually just barrels of paper overalls. When a worker goes into a "potentially radioactive" area (i.e. there is no radiation detectable here, but just in case - ALARA you know) then they wear disposable paper overalls. New ones every time they go in. What happens to the used overalls? Well they MIGHT be contaminated. So they are then very expensive low-level "nuclear" waste. Such is the hyperbole of ALARA.

Meanwhile, open-air nuclear BOMB testing was happening regularly up until about 1990. This released uncountable orders-of-magnitude more than any nuclear power plant could, meltdown or not, straight into the global environment.

Yet power plants get slapped in the face for releasing the odd GBq of tritium. (Bequerels as a unit makes everything sound bad because it is so tiny - it literally means one atom decay per second. There is about 1GBq tritium in your average glow-in-the-dark keyring)

The trouble with radiation, really, is that it is invisible yet eminently detectable. Your enviro-hippie can come along with a detector and say LOOK- RADIATION - It's all over the place and it's coming from THAT PLANT. Is it dangerous? You've only got him to ask..

Re: Go nuclear

@AC: My point is, low-dose ionising radiation is a hell of a lot better for us than most people (including yourself apparently) seem to think it is. As I say, we have lived with it on this planet for millions of years. Life has evolved to cope with it. Nanoparticles, on the other hand, have only been around for a few hundred years. Nor has CO2 ever been this high since some mass-extinction event.

Why do we close nuclear when the alternatives are so much worse?

Re: Go nuclear

See icon.

Unfortunately the vast majority of the population would apparently prefer to die a slow death from nanoparticulate emissions from coal and diesel. Or boil in their skins when the power goes off and the air conditioning stops. Or be incinerated by their own lithium-ion backup battery. Or be crushed to death in an all-too-common 'freak' accident involving a wind turbine.. (those things are huge, and have been known to come off their shafts, roll down hillsides and demolish schools/villages)

The alternatives to nuclear power are far more dangerous - but human psychology ignores the frequency of minor disasters and obsesses over extremely unlikely major ones that have yet to happen. See road vs. air travel, etc etc.

The reason that most reasonable people who are opposed to nuclear power give, is that it is too expensive. However my counter to that, is that it is because politicians are obsessed with making the public feel safe, while being ignorant of the psychology that says people see something with a lot of safety controls and assume it must be super dangerous.

This idiocy can be summed up in one acronym: ALARA. This is the belligerently lazy regulatory principle that governs emissions of radiation into the environment. Basically, nobody has defined a safe limit (not even the natural background that we have received from the sun/earth for all of the millions of years that us mammals have been on this planet) - so nuclear operators must keep emissions "As Low As Reasonably Achievable". Meaning if some elf'n'safety parasite comes along with some new way to reduce your radiation dose to staff/public, even if they were already orders of magnitude below background, you are legally obliged to do it. Cost is specifically exempted as an excuse.

This regulation only applies to nuclear power. The fact that a coal power station of the same generation capacity puts out more radioactivity up its smoke stack thanks to trace amounts of Radon gas in coal, is apparently of no consequence.

If only the IAEA would pull their finger out and define a safe limit for radiation exposure.. Considering evidence from Japan I expect they would be surprised and embarrassed. There's even a reasonable body of evidence to say that very low doses of radiation are actually beneficial to long-term health, which challenges the ridiculous "linear no-threshold" model..

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

Me too, except I actually care who I'm paying..

> Might be an uncommon opinion, but I actually pay for the good/services I use...I dunno call me old-fashioned I guess.

If I thought that any of it was going to the people who actually make the goods/services that *i* use, then I would (and do) pay.

However, I'm not particularly into the mainstream manufactured crap that is where most of big-media invest their funds (apart from their next ocean-going yacht), so I guess that makes me middle-class.

Half the time, if I'm after a particular film / piece of music, it's not available from any paid services - and even if it is available, the content mafia just pocket the money anyway - it's not like the original creators are going to be making more music/films if they are long dead (but copyright is Life+95 years thanks to the Mickey Mouse Act).

So half the time I'm forced to stream anyway. But the other half the time, if the paid services were charging a reasonable rate based on the cost of delivering their service (i.e. maintaining shed loads of hard disks, and a ton of bandwidth) then I would happily pay the requisite 50p per film / 5p per music track, with at least 50% paid to the artists unless I ask to pay them more because I really liked it, then artists would get paid properly and I would buy a hell of a lot more content.

As it happens, I bought a subscription to Magnatune, which has exactly this model. But that definitely makes me middle-class.. <_<

Former GCHQ boss backs end-to-end encryption

Sock-Puppet..

I'd love to see a report on how many times each MP has voted against the party whip Chairman May.. (Data here?)

I'd put money on Amber Rudd coming bottom of that ranking.

GSM gateway ban U-turn casts doubt on 7.5-year prosecution in Blighty

@ alien overlord

No, he didn't break the law, because it hasn't yet been proven that he did. Innocent until proven guilty?

Meanwhile, apparently the regulator who made up said law, is considering whether this is infact a stupid law which should be repealed.

If Ofcom does repeal the law, then is it still worth spending public money deciding if this man broke it or not?

France and UK want to make web firms liable for users' content

Re: Your Bed..

Not my fscking bed! I never voted for her..

(except once, in a referendum, but that doesn't count)

Honestly, I think the only reason for Theresa May to have been on the 'remain' side of things, would have been to sabotage the campaign from the inside because she knew nobody liked her. Her entire agenda has been authoritarian from the get-go: even before the whole brexit thing was on the cards, May was campaigning to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, because she wanted to be able to detain people indefinitely without charge. I mean, we all thought Jacqui Smith was bad..

This is the woman who gave us the National Crime Agency (not seen much about them lately, oddly enough) I wouldn't be at all surprised if, had May been elected last week, then she would be busy closing all regional police constabularies around the country and replacing them with a centralised NCA, with powers to do whatever they liked, to whomever they liked, with zero accountability.

I didn't watch SS:GB, but it probably had a similar plot..

We missed a collective bullet.

Yo, patch that because scum still wanna exploit WannaCrypt-linked vuln

UPnP maybe?

The same thought struck me, too. Nobody would knowingly expose SMB to the internet, surely.

I don't know, but maybe there are software nasties out there which are mapping SMB ports via UPnP? Apparently it can be done from javascript, so maybe some web browsers will allow a web page to create port mappings without your knowledge?

On my BT router, UPnP is enabled by default and allows applications to map any port they like through the firewall. I can disable UPnP, but there is no way that I know of to list the services that are being forwarded.

There ought to be a WPS-style button press or web confirmation needed to allow programs to map ports with UPnP.

Secure Boot booted from Debian 9 'Stretch'

Re: UEFI needs to *JUST* *DIE*

No, the whole of UEFI needs to die. It's a bloated pile of crap. Can you tell me any useful features it adds over BIOS?

I can tell you a few *unuseful* (and downright insidious) features: One: Intel Management Engine. As of UEFI, Intel-based chips can no longer be used in real-time systems, because the OS is effectively inside a VM, being scheduled by Intel's evil firmware. Said firmware is running a full network stack, and can intercept packets without the OS's knowledge (see Intel Anti-Theft)

Two: Obfuscating and eliminating third-party scrutiny. It is no longer possible to have a bootloader free from Intel signed binary blobs. (secure boot or no secure boot). See https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel

Three: World-domination for somebody? If there are backdoors in UEFI then it has all kinds of evil implications..

The only real *use* for UEFI is to protect the triumvirate of Intel, Apple, and Microsoft from any present/future competition.

Intel's buggy Puma 6 chipset earns Arris a gigabit-modem lawsuit

Re: "Arris opted for a chipset from Intel's rival Broadcom in its latest gigabit cable modem"

All that needs to happen is for Arris to file a claim against Intel, for the damages it had to pay out under the class action, its costs for defending the suit, plus additional damages to its reputation. The judge in THAT case would be making the call as to whether Intel's shit silicon was Arris' responsibility.

IANAL, but I suspect Arris would have a good case!

Toshiba's nuclear power plant business runs out of steam

Re: Too cheap to meter

Yep. But I can give you one reason why nuclear is so ridiculously expensive:

ALARA

According to international regulations, all radiation emissions from nuclear plants must be kept "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" for anyone's definition of "reasonable" (which explicitly excludes cost) so if someone comes along and criticises your plant design, saying that you could have reduced the public's exposure from this many microsieverts to a few less microsieverts by spending a few million quid here and there, then it's back to the drawing board for your design. (for perspective, people living in Cornwall receive milliseiverts per year i.e. three orders of magnitude above this argument)

Note this only applies to nuclear - Coal puts out more radioactivity than nuclear (accidents and bombs included) simply because of the trace amounts of Radon gas in the millions of tonnes of the stuff that they burn each year. If they were held under the same regulations, then Drax et al would be very unhappy indeed. (although they are slowly converting to burning trees from south america instead, because that is so much better)

Then you have the 'decommissioning industry' (which I am paid by, so I better not give it too much vitriol) who will leverage 'ALARA' to undertake more and more expensive operations in the interests of reducing people's exposure from naff-all to fuck-all.

What needs to happen, is for the IAEA to pull their damned finger out and define a safe limit for radiation exposure. With the current regs, if a nuclear plant gave you a dose equivalent to one dentist's x-ray every 10 years, there would be an international emergency declared.

It's no wonder that nuclear is so expensive.. Perhaps we should make emissions of CO2, NOx and particulates "ALARA" too!

'Webroot made my PCs s*** the bed' – AV update borks biz machines hard

Some people still use Anti Virus?

Seriously - if you're a user, just don't run suspicious files, don't browse dodgy websites, and make sure all your important data exists somewhere that is NOT accessible to your computer on a regular basis. If you DO find yourself in need of browsing dodgy websites (for whatever reason) then make sure you are using a whitelist script/flash blocker, or a virtual machine. And if you don't understand how to do that, you'd best get a clue before going anywhere near said dodgy websites.

And if you're a business - don't give users sufficient privileges to cause any damage unless they thoroughly understand the above and are prepared to take responsibility for it!

Antivirus programs IN GENERAL should be considered harmful. The entire AV industry/culture needs to die. At best it lulls users into a false sense of security - (NO antivirus software can ever be perfect, so no matter what super duper AV you bought, you are still vulnerable.) and at worst, it's just a racket. (Users should NOT be trained to trust anything that calls itself an anti-virus program!)

So-called "real-time" or "on-access" antivirus is essentially installing a rootkit on your machine, interrupting the basic system calls that programs rely on e.g. fopen() and replacing them with their own (in this case buggy) code. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE WORST VIRUSES DO, and it's the reason why antivirus software slows down your machine, and why if you have more than one AV software installed, it causes a world of grief, because they are both trying to usurp the same syscalls.

The only "anti-virus" that I ever use is Clam, which is the traditional "scanner" type which just recursively traverses directories and looks at files one by one - it's handy for sanitising backups of machines I don't trust, or screening suspicious files.

Trump signs 'no privacy for non-Americans' order – what does that mean for rest of us?

Re: Trump has become more deranged

How exactly does one 'prepare' for a third world war? :(

Europe mulls treating robots legally as people ... but with kill switches

Re: "Freelander Woman"

Laputan Machine

.. I am not a..!

Pirates, pirates, whatchu gonna do? Advertisers cop a visit from PIPCU

Re: Tyrants

Don't worry: Now that we've "Taken back control", we can, er, lose even more freedom thanks to the regulatory oversight that we won't have in future.

Chairman May can sell the police, and whatever the f**k she likes to the IP tyrants (and anyone else who's bidding high), in an effort to keep the money flowing round while keeping the proles under control!

Meet the Internet of big, lethal Things

Re: Milking It

I know COMAU are quite good - TUT in Finland were able to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2sRReKA0OA

And as I say KUKA were quite cooperative in the end.. We were able to do the same thing with a Kuka robot, but it was not quite as good as TUT's performance with the Comau, and we had to buy some expensive software that really doesn't do very much.. Basically we used the "RSI" (Robot Sensor Interface" which is designed for sensor-corrected movement such as computer vision etc) to "correct" in the entire workspace, based on the position of the haptic pen. This is the only way we managed to get real-time positioning.

I don't know how TUT did it with the Comau - maybe they had to do a similar hack.