Posts by frobnicate

PortSmash attack blasts hole in Intel's Hyper-Threading CPUs, leaves with secret crypto keys

Javascript

runs on _your_ machine.

Mmm, yes. 11-nines data durability? Mmmm, that sounds good. Except it's virtually meaningless

Oh, man

> Erasure coding is one such method. Reed-Solomon coding is another.

Reed-Solomon coding *is* erasure coding.

> The second way is to store multiple copies of the data across multiple locations.

And so is N-way replication too! They are all erasure codes.

Registry to ban Cyrillic .eu addresses even if you've paid for them

Re: They did not even get that one right

It all makes perfect sense, once you realise that "ею" is instrumentalis singularis of "she"—that's what they are doing to Europe.

As Tesla hits speed bump after speed bump, Elon Musk loses his mind in anti-media rant

Another bullet point

(anent "It's you that then takes it personally.", etc.): whatever you publish, find somebody who managed to learn the grammar. No hurt feelings, it's just a bit of news and advice!

Fleeing Facebook app users realise what they agreed to in apps years ago – total slurpage

How is it possible that an app

can record SMS meta-data in that highly compartmentalised Android OS (just SSH onto your phone to see)? Unless users clicked a "grant permission" button, in which case why do they blame the app?

FYI: AI tools can unmask anonymous coders from their binary executables

Re: Tables, nearly Code-Free State Machines, and future Requirements Compilation

You just described how professors work. "Tables" = "machine code".

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

"neither Meltdown or Spectre is much of a threat to a home user"

Spectre can be invoked by a javascript in your browser.

Butt plugs, mock cocks, late pay and paranoia: The world of Waymo star Anthony Levandowski… by his kids' nanny

Ah, Oakland...

where the ghost of Hans Reiser dwells.

Report: Women make up just 17% of IT workforce, paid 15% less than men

Given that women are paid 15% less than men,

why isn't everybody hiring women? A large corporation would overthrow your typical government for something like reducing its payroll by 15%.

Open-source defenders turn on each other in 'bizarre' trademark fight sparked by GPL fall out

"three years of being unable to arrange a meeting"

Ah, so Golgafrincham's B Ark and its ablution-happy captain did land softly.

It's artificial! It's intelligent! It's in my home! And it's gone bonkers!

"hand crafted with love, dedication and high ideals..."

... of killing humans in a battlefield as efficiently as only good engineering can do.

Parity: The bug that put $169m of Ethereum on ice? Yeah, it was on the todo list for months

"Ethereum prices are currently $330 per coin...

... and have risen slightly since the Parity snafu."

This community *does* deserve everything that happens to them. Reminds one of the immortal passage from Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions:

"But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2000l. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again"

Paradise Papers were not an inside job, says leaky offshore law firm

"that Russia funded Facebook and Twitter"

Here is a real bomb: Russia, on the direct orders of Putin, funded all recent US governments by buying US Treasury bonds to the tune of 100B! And China... oh hell, we are doomed.

'The Queen' is showing Geneva how to be polite on public transport

"the horde just stand there staring at you expecting you to vanish in a puff of smoke"

Have you tried to err... speak to them, to inform about your plans to alight?

Robot granted Saudi citizenship has more rights than Saudi women

The same robot.

One wonders what this even means. No firmware upgrades so far?

'Israel hacked Kaspersky and caught Russian spies using AV tool to harvest NSA exploits'

So, did Israeli intelligence find a Russian-improved version of Stuxnet there?

What is the cyber equivalent of 'use of force'? When do we send in the tanks?

"The United States needs to define a new set of international rules"

Just read this sentence slowly and carefully. No reason to read any further, it only gets worse.

Linux kernel hardeners Grsecurity sue open source's Bruce Perens

Only righteous is protected.

"No court of law has ever established that a statement implying a false assertion of fact is constitutionally protected speech".

And I naïvely thought that shouting "Goldbach's conjecture is false!" in a crowded theatre is perfectly legal.

Linus Torvalds pens vintage 'f*cking' rant at kernel dev's 'utter BS'

Re: As I've said before ...

@bazza,

Rust safety features (as well as similar features of other languages) are mostly irrelevant in the context of kernel development. They rely on the underlying model of fully separated protected address spaces. And kernel's task is to *implement* this model, so it cannot rely on this model. The bugs in the Redox where not some kind of wild pointer dereferences or use-after-free-s (these are eliminated by the language), they were perfectly legitimate memory accesses, but they still caused crashes, because the memory locations in question happen to contain page tables or DMA setup structures, etc. That is, those were not typical "segfault" kind or errors, they were logical errors, from which Rust protects no better than C. (And yes, such errors can stay dormant for years.)

I spent (<counts with fingers...>) about 10 years doing kernel programming for multiple operating systems and I can say that chasing pointer errors definitely wasn't anywhere close to the top problems.

Re: As I've said before ...

The amazing progress of Redox OS includes re-writing the kernel from scratch, because existing virtual memory sub-system caused multiple memory corruptions and crashes in user land (https://www.redox-os.org/news/this-summer-in-redox-15/) that developers couldn't fix. So much for "safe" languages.

Snopes.com asks for bailout amid dispute over who runs the site and collects ad dollars

"in danger of shuttering”

So they plan to pour concrete (facts) over each other?

Linus Torvalds may have damned systemd with faint praise

Last time

Last time Linus sounded a faint praise (of BitKeeper), git was born. Step very carefully, Mr. Poettering.

'Trash-80' escapes the dustbin of history with new TRS-80 emulator

"one line" games?

Didn't know TRS-80 had APL.

Ex-FBI man spills on why hackers are winning the security game

"disabuse ourselves of the notion puncture the comfortable thought bubble"

This is what happens when one is too preoccupied with purpling one's prose to do editing.

Crims shut off Ukraine power in wide-ranging anniversary hacks

Re: How sure this is not hype

Once you learn that diesel fuel that runs the Ukrainian army is mostly supplied by the very same foreign power, which that army is purportedly fighting, you will start understanding how things work there.

App proves Rowhammer can be exploited to root Android phones – and there's little Google can do to fully kill it

ECC is entirely irrelevant in this case

because with Bithammer one can flip correction bits as well. This all has been tried already.

Trump vs. Clinton III - TPP looks dead, RussiaLeaks confirmed

the civilian ones are saying it's Russia

The civilian agencies got access to the presumed secret evidence that the government used to place the blame? Or they just happily echo-chambering each other, 17 or more times?

The only bit of concrete technical information I was able to find in all the reports was that the source IP was in Russia. Yeah, the chain of VPNs used for attack had last hop from Moscow, so what?

Democralypse Now? US election first battle in new age of cyberwarfare

"delivered selectively, out-of-order. and out-of-context..."

You mean, how the way media *always* does it (due to the fundamental limitations on the format)?

Blighty's telly, radio watchdog Ofcom does a swear

So "Fenian" is an insult now?

Bloody English imperialists will do anything to keep noble people of Ireland enslaved.

Alleged buggy software wrongly flunks wannabe lawyers from bar exam. What happened next won't shock you

It would be a nice turn

if in the course of the trial it were found that they didn't pass the bar after all.

Boffins decipher manual for 2,000-year-old Ancient Greek computer

Does it start with

/* XXX fix this hack in the next release. -- Gnaeus. */ ?

Bloke flogs $40 B&W printer on Craigslist, gets $12,000 legal bill

"leaving Britain to fight alone as the only remaining power against the axis powers."

Ever heard of the Eastern front, where Axes kept 9/10 of their manpower?

Judge torpedoes 'Tor pedo' torpedo evidence

"The FBI had seized the system in February 2015 and ran it for a few weeks"

This, given strict liability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability) for the subject in question, means that the FBI officers committed a felony, right? Their intentions doesn't matter.

Future civilisations won't know how the universe formed

All this

according to our theories about formation of the Universe, based on evidence that we collect from within our event horizon. So we are perhaps as clueless about real evolution and age of the Universe (relative to the older races) as inhabitants of these yet to be created planes are relative to us.

BBC bypasses Linux kernel to make streaming videos flow

With any luck...

they will re-dicover RDMA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_direct_memory_access) just 15 years late.

Sunday Times fires off copyright complaint at Snowden story critics

"... are never, ever written down..."

So, they are passed down the generations orally, like the Homeric cycle? That would explain a lot in the otherwise hilarious history of British intelligence.

Won't even mention the CIA part. After all, the Cone of Silence turned out to be real.

Saudi Arabia to flog man 1,000 times for insulting religion on Facebook

Re: "right to freedom of expression"

> At the risk of being a pedant, a government cannot grant rights.

I find it hard to believe people still subscribe to this 18 century nonsense about "natural rights" (which was a politically charged agitation piece in the first place) ignoring all the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary. Systems of rights and responsibilities are always created by authority, from the earliest theocratic villages in Mesopotamia to the European parliaments, created by the kings to curb nobles.

Why has the Russian economy plunged SO SUDDENLY into the toilet?

In the mean time, rouble regained 30% against dollar, raising from 67 to 52. The prophesies of doom continued unabated on both sides.

Hacker-hunters finger 'Keyser Soze' of Russian underground card sales

Re: All this stuff emphasises...

They guy is Ukrainian, lives and operates in the Ukraine. But wait, he knowns Russian, hence the mafia state is clearly behind him.

Work in the tech industry? The Ukraine WAR is coming to YOU

Please remind me what

> where the countries annexed by a EU or NATO member during the last 30 years?

This is exactly the point: NATO bombs remote nations from the Bronze Age back to the Stone Age *without* providing the inhabitants with health care and pension system, not to say about allowing them to freely move into invaders' own countries.

Echopraxia scores 'diamond cutter' on the sci-fi hardness scale

It's nice to see

that this generation of sci-fi authors continues to read simpler of S. Lem's texts. Watts, for example, producing novel after novel based on "Fiasco".

Tricked by satire? Get all your news from Facebook? You're in luck, dummy

It's only logical...

... after decades of using smileys and laugh tracks on TV to identify "humour".

Russia to SAP, Apple: Hand over source code to prove you're not spies

the software they're running was compiled from the source code

If building and comparing binaries is beyond their capabilities, the West is safe.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 claimed lives of HIV/AIDS cure scientists

Mandatory KAL007 reference

Here is a more relevant reference for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812 .

We're ALL Winston Smith now - and our common enemy is the Big Brother State

"books about pneumatic blondes"

This must be a reference to Huxley. Brave New World is certainly at least as relevant as 1984, but alas, lacks the cheap thrill of terror.

Traditional RAID is outdated and dying on its feet

Re: Eh?

> You are quite right, you can't rebuild a 4TB single disk in minutes. It's utterly impossible.

It is entirely possible and reasonable. There are 2 ingredients here:

0. Parity declustering. In a parity declustered array, e.g., 8+2 RAID6 can be used to stripe data across a large number of drives, say, 100 (rather than 10, as in standard RAID). This means, that only a small fraction (10% in this example) of each drive has to be read during rebuild. See Holland's thesis (http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/Declustering/Thesis.pdf) for details.

1. Distributed spare. By allocating spare space on each device, a fraction of *total* array bandwidth can be used for rebuild. That is, the wider is the array, the faster is the rebuild.

The funny thing is that this technology is 20 years old.

Muslim clerics issue fatwa banning the devout from Mars One 'suicide' mission

Re: It is rather sad

I beg to differ. Fundamental Hellenistic heritage are not natural sciences, but humanities. And this was preserved through the entire history of the Roman empire and bootstrapped Renaissance. Homer and Plato were studied and commented all they way down (vide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemistus_Pletho). And there was no need for Italian cities to re-establish trade: it was never broken. In fact up to 12 century, Naples, Amalfi, etc. were *part* of the empire, formally, politically and economically. Funny enough, Naples was even a staunch supporter of iconoclasm (if I still know my Gibbon).

It is rather sad

that people persist in this silly anachronistic nonsense started by the 18th century propaganda, which chose Byzantium as a strawmen monarchy. There was no need to keep the "knowledge": up until 1453, the continuous tradition of Hellenistic education and scholarship was maintained in the Roman empire and its capital---Constantinople. There was almost at all times cultural exchange between the empire and Western Europe (sometimes, alas, in the form of Crusades).

French drug dealers regretfully announce 'temporary closure'

Re: Allô ?

But "parking" is already French: it stems from ye Old French "parc", so it just returned back home. Actually, about 75% of the modern English vocabulary is of Romance origin.

Scientists discover supervolcano trigger that could herald humanity's doom

The wrath of Vril-ya!