Posts by Sir Runcible Spoon

BOFH: Follow the paper trail

"Fucking Gigantic Mushrooms?"

They only look that way after you've eaten them*

*Of COURSE I'm referring to the mushrooms, filthy child.

Re: Wot?

We're expecting a double-dose of 'suckered them in before carpetting them' next week :)

Re: I was lucky..

+1 for the new reference :) "dumbstruck babydyke"

Re: "black A4 photocopy paper"

All we need now is some silver toner

This sounds more list a meeting of Psychotics Anonymous :)

Laser probers sniff more gravitational waves from mega black hole smash

Re: Why LIGO Is a Scam

Didn't the article state that they managed to work out where the event took place because the detectors received the data 1.1ms apart?

That would mean that gravity 'propagates' at the speed of light*.

I don't think there is an experiment that can be made that would prove an instantaneous change in gravity at a distance anyway, how could you make the masses involved appear/disappear fast enough to be classed as instant?

*I'm assuming the maths(^H) works out here :)

It's only really a weak force when compared to its brethen. For us it still represents a considerable force :)

Lester Haines: RIP

Re: OMG End of an Era

I am genuinely shocked :'(

My thoughts are with his family, friends and colleagues - this place just won't be the same.

US plans intervention in EU vs Facebook case caused by NSA snooping

Re: The jist of this U.S. government intervention will be...

"The US isn't some dictatorship where the government can shake down companies for more tax money whenever they feel like it."

Which is why they are picking on their citizens (Civil Forfeiture)

PC market sinking even faster than first thought, thanks to Windows 10

Re: Knew it!

"Whats that? Erectile Dysfunction?"

Lol, that sounds weird enough to be true :P

No, it's Elite:Dangerous. A space-sim.

Re: VR

"The 90s called , they want their VR blurb & hype back."

The 1900's called, they want their attitude back.

The internet wasn't mainstream in the 90's when VR last reared it's head and I believe the display technology (both headsets and GPU's) have come a long way since then.

Re: Knew it!

"when they are done working, most people have real lives to contend with."

I can certainly appreciate this aspect of the VR challenge.

When I were a lad, I dreamt of having an immersive VR spaceship exploration experience.

Right now I could go out and build a kick-ass rig and play ED - I could even splash out for a real doozy chair to spend days in (built in commode etc.) - but that doesn't get the roof fixed or the patio cover built :(

So I haven't even upgraded my rig yet. However, with these cheaper VR ready cards and (once the second Gen headsets are out) cheaper headsets I might just take a punt on it for those few hours a week I might get to have a go. There might be a lot of people in that position - where large $£$£ expenditure vs time to use it isn't adding up - so cheaper kit that offers up a useable experience is bound to be a game changer.

Just my 2p though, ymmv. After all, everyone said tablets were a fad (including me) and since I got one about 3 months ago it's always nearby. Most useful aspect is not having to get out of my chair to look something up when required during a conversation with my wife - not exactly killer-app territory but it's very useful/convenient.

Re: Knew it!

I think that VR might just manage to create a bit of an upswing in the next couple of years, depending on how well it's taken up and the availability of applications that don't just involve head-shots for example.

To help things along AMD's latest 'consumer' graphics card is apparently going to be $199 and it hits the mark of VR readiness - that is a major shot in the arm for the VR industry.

Although by the time it gets to blighty that will be £200, a bit like the NVIDIA 1080 is retailing around £550 in the UK and $600 in the US :(

Don’t let the Barmy Brexiteers wreck #digital #europe

I've been here a while now, so therefore I must have dementia :)

"Uh... Did all that dripping sarcasm manage to miss you on the way down?"

Unfortunately the character of this article is all too plausible nowadays, so if I missed an obvious cue then it got lost in the weeds.

- I also just looked up Poes Law - that's it exactly.

Yeah, it sounds like he doesn't want his #gravy-train to end.

Tell you what Steve, it's people like you (progress no matter what the cost, full steam ahead regardless of who goes under the bus as long as I'm alright...at least until you are too old to compete in the pissing pool and you suddenly turn ultra conservative) that are the death of democracy.

What a twat-dangle.

Developer waits two years for management to define project

Re: My story is this...

"b) actually thinking that the deadline would still be applicable"

This appears to be quite common. Project starts, rough scope is set and rough plan and timelines agreed.

Then comes a couple of months of dicking around with getting the project in the system, changes to scope etc. etc. When it all finally kicks off they seem to think the original deadline still holds.

Now we just quote a number of days from 'kick-off' (i.e. when all the money and scope is agreed and it's all signed in writing).

Re: "While workers sorted out desks and networks and other niceties..."

I helped build a test platform in a DC in London, and there were only two small cages tucked away to one side where customer equipment could sit - the rest of the entire floor was empty - lots of football played with printer paper balled up and wrapped in tape ensued :)

Oh, and did I mention there was a pub about 10ft outside the door with a pool table and an excellent cook doing authentic Thai curries? Lovely :)

That is until M$ came along and bought the entire floor for xbox live :(

Surveillance forestalls more 'draconian' police powers – William Hague

Re: Mr. Hague - this is why we need a constitution

@veti : I'm not entirely sure you grasp what 'rights' actually are.

'Rights' are something people fought for, usually against powerful opposition and the only reason the powerful caved in and enshrined those rights was the implicit threat that something bad would happen if they didn't - i.e. through the use of force.

Now we are having our rights revoked - by force - and the majority don't seem to care enough about those rights to fight for them.

So yes, we are losing those rights (including the right to privacy) because the powerful care enough to fight to take them away from us, but the general population don't care enough to fight back - so we will eventually lose them.

That's how it works - it's all about checks and balances. The powerful have infrastructure, technology and money on their side. The general population have numbers and technology. They don't want us to have technology as it improves their chances of winning. It's that simple.

Re: Hollywood scenarios

Whilst an absolute bitch to configure, the Gauntlet firewalls back in the day were about as secure a firewall as you could ever hope for. The management let it down when compared to Cisco PIX's and the newcomer to the game with it's fancy GUI - Checkpoint - which was probably what led to its' demise.

However, what I noticed was that there were no *new* proxy-type firewalls coming along - all of the current crop of firewalls for Enterprise are pass-through type.

After going on a few courses with aforementioned vendors and meeting people who made me feel like a 3 year old chimp with brain damage in comparison, I discovered that there are ways to bypass pass-through type firewalls. Apart from the obvious back-doors that have been floating around recently I never did find out what that mechanism was, and it was proved to me on one occasion where I was asked to secure a laptop behind a firewall in a lab, and this chap (using another laptop outside the firewall) simply logged in to my laptop, using RDP (which was disabled) and used my webcam (which was disabled in the device manager) and took a photo of my astonished face as I watched my cursor wizz around my screen.

Now I think I know why there are no proxy-type firewalls left in the market :(

For those too young to have played with Gauntlet, it basically had a little bit of proxy code for each application you wanted to allow connectivity to. So there were FTP proxies, HTTP proxies etc. etc. The main point being was that if the incoming data stream didn't conform to the parameters of the proxy, it was filtered - so no buffer overruns - no SQL injections - it was pure whitelisted traffic and nothing else. This would probably be harder to do today since some of the protocols have developed and become a lot more complex, but it *could* be done - so why hasn't it?

Oooooklahoma! Where the cops can stop and empty your bank cards – on just a hunch

"I know that a lot of people are just going to focus on the seizing money. That's a very small thing that's happening now."

That's what stood out to me too reading the article. Are they planning on divesting you of your organs to sell on to the local hospital next?

Bing web searches may reveal you have cancer (so, er, don't use Bing?)

Paranoid?

And to think everyone* was once concerned that all this data collection would end up tracking your medical status and sold off to interested third parties.

*with a working brain

If The Register made reality music TV, this is what it would look like

Sir

Narrowed to six candidates - only 5 available to vote for, hmmm.

EU referendum frenzy bazookas online voter registration. It's another #GovtDigiShambles

Re: determine why its voter registration site crashed

If they had a half-decent load-balancer in front of the servers then huge demand shouldn't cause a problem.

Some people would be told 'we're a bit busy - keep trying' but it shouldn't actually break the site.

Please, someone, tell me they weren't running a single web server with no load control mechanism*!!

*I mean, if you know that is - don't just make it up :P

Q: Is it wrong to dress as a crusader for an England match?

Re: The BBC can get bent

"It's only a model"

"Shhhhh!"

That was the intro to Knights of the Round Table wasn't it?

Re: Full English

"In fact, in culinary terms, it's just a fucking offence full stop"

Right, you've gone too bloody far this time. I'm properly offended by your ill-educated character assassination of the greatest breakfast known to mankind.

Where's my pen, what's the address of that Points of View thing again - that still on?

BOFH: What's your point, caller?

One place I worked at I heard that some people (Salesy/Marketting types) were getting around the mailbox limit not by archiving their emails, but by storing them in the deleted folder (which hadn't had a limit set on it).

When the mail server finally ground to a halt and the deleted folders were purged of anything more than a week old, well, I wish I'd recorded the screams - they would have come in handy as a burglar alarm >:-}

Air-gapping SCADA systems won't help you, says man who knows

Re: What !

Perhaps they just substituted the word Gas (or electricity) for Voltage, either way it definitely looks weird seeing those two words together.

Universe's shock rapidly expanding waistline may squash Einstein flat

Re: Newtown, Einstein, and...?

Are we talking about the same Newton that was an Alchemist and (apparently co-incidentally) also worked for the Royal Mint?

TeamViewer denies hack after PCs hijacked, PayPal accounts drained

Re: Just say no.

re:#3 - I've given up trying to explain to people that 'The Cloud' is just a server someone else owns with no accountability to you.

Now I just tell them that if they put something in the cloud, it's the same as leaving outside somewhere, hoping no-one happens along and decides to pick it up.

If what they are storing has the same value as litter - then they should be good, otherwise please don't.

Take that, Mom! Turns out Super Mario Bros was all about solving complex math problems

Re: Guffawed, then fell silent

"Or packing your shopping bag efficiently as it comes off the conveyor (knapsack problem)"

Oh, you mean the Tetris simulator at the local supermarket?

re:Quadratic Equations

That's nothing, my goldfish can solve fluid dynamic equations in REAL-TIME!!

Swiss effectively disappear Alps: World's largest tunnel opens

Re: Wait for it...

Wait until you've had it drilled into your head a few times - then tell me it's boring!

Re: 73 different kinds of rock...

So, what was the third rock?

'Windows 10 nagware: You can't click X. Make a date OR ELSE'

Re: Windows 10 Pondering

"How do you guys feel about it?"

I'm gonna make a guess here and say that I reckon most people are a bit put out.

Re: Fit for purpose

For the person in the street (in the UK) I wonder if they (M$) could be taken to the small claims court for a payout?

Kill one of the processes, then rename its file before it relaunches - rinse and repeat - or will that 'break' Windows? ;)

Re: What date is good for you?

I have a laptop and a desktop both awaiting some TLC from me, but I haven't bothered to even turn them on since all this malarky kicked off. I'll turn them on when the danger's passed.

If they still fuck me about after that they're getting Linux (along with the other systems I've switched over since I couldn't afford to let them stew).

Hopefully, with AMD and Vulcan and HTC Vive all creating the perfect gaming storm that Linux has been awaiting all these years, I will only ever need Windows to do work-related stuff - which is on a work laptop and I couldn't give a stuff what they use on that. If it borks due to Win10 updates then I'm still billing for my time whilst I await a replacement - I can live with that :)

Shhhh! Facebook is listening

Re: This Settles It

You'll be needing this:

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

Queen guitarist Brian May releases virtual reality viewer

Re: 360° badger sett simulator

Can we get him to make a 360 of himself falling over? That way we can watch Another One Bite the Dust whenever we want!

Are EU having a laugh? Europe passes hopeless cyber-commerce rules

Re: creating a website that will attempt to list all those rates

"So you are pro-Brexit because we don't get enough European TV?"

Hardly, I was just pointing out that I, personally, don't feel part of Europe as much a part of the US. If I stick to UK News Channels, there is usually quite a few US based news articles that could be considered fairly local to the US and not really international news - likewise there's very little about what's going on in European countries (if they are mentioned not in much depth) - so I do watch a lot of European news channels (as well as the odd US one too just for reference).

"Also, I take it you're not a fan of French or Scandinavian crime drama on BBC4?"

Not a big fan of crime drama, but I take your point; although I didn't say it didn't exist, just that the ratio is heavily weighted to US based media.

My point is, I don't feel very European when I'm in the UK. If I go to Europe I usually end up coming home thinking that I live in a 3rd world country for a start. The *people* of Europe are great, and having close ties with our neighbours is always a good thing - but no not wanting to hand over our democratic rights to self-serving bureaucracies with nameless/faceless leaders does not make me anti-Europe - it makes me anti-control-freaks (whoever they might be).

We keep getting told we are better off in the EU and changing it for the better from within - which is a ludicrous concept to me. We are better served by striking out on our own again and re-writing the rule book as we go. Cutting the red-tape by about 50% would be a massive boost to our ailing industries.

Re: creating a website that will attempt to list all those rates

Something that's been annoying me about the pro-EU bludgers recently - they keep banging on about how great Europe is, and how we will all explode if we leave etc, - yet when do you see any (TV) programming from Europe on our televisions?

There's a reason why a lot of kids have taken up US gang culture - because we get so much US based television. Huge amounts of cultural influence these days is US based - not Europe.

So tell me again why they are so hot on Europe? It's quite clear they don't actually give a shit about European culture. They keep feeding us US brain-dead TV to numb the masses, whilst signing all our powers away to the corridor creepers in Brussels so that they can get a juicy retirement gig when the electorate boots them out for one expense scandal too many.

The whole system is so corrupt I'm sure there are MP's out there thinking it's too big to tackle, too insidious to pin down, and has too much money to fight - but grow a spine goddammit and take a stand! We're in the last chance saloon here, we need to be heard.

Re: They aren't entirely mad.

"they just said it just wasn't worth the cost of shipping it to the UK."

So how come all the cheap crap in the shops managed to get here all the way from China and still be cheaper than all the other tat?

Seattle Suehawks: Smart meter hush-up launched because, er ... terrorism

Re: Yep? Try nope.

@J__M__M

I'm with Dan on this one, when you create a security design you have to assume that the full build documentation could be leaked/stolen at some point, and you have to preempt that and put necessary measures in place to mitigate the risk (note I didn't say eliminate).

As far as I am concerned, especially with the nature of the organisations I usually design for, the biggest security risk to the environment is me. So I design safety measures into the system so that once it is up and running, should I suddenly go rogue and sell of the designs or even try to compromise it myself, there are measures in place to a) stop me and b) know that it's happening and how to stop it even if I do get in.

Insiders are a massive risk, and whilst obscurity plays it's part (i.e. people don't know what to hack if they don't know it exists etc.) it isn't *actual* security - it's just an extra measure to take to reduce the risk surface, every little bit helps.

Now, in the case of these meters, everyone knows they are remotely controlled and that the security on them is probably a joke. The obscurity measure is already lost. The only thing left to do is to ensure that all the other (actual) security measures are in place.

If they aren't telling people that measures are there, then you can be fairly sure they aren't. We aren't talking about them releasing detailed diagrams with IP addresses, physical locations, specific details about the ports and protocols - we are talking about the generic things that go into the security soup.

For example, their documentation mentions RSA and keys - has that actually been implemented or is it just sales blurb? Are they using encryption all the way? Are they using MAC address control? What level of monitoring is going on - are there tamper traps in the software that will start calling for help if the system detects unexpected activity?

One major advantage of a closed system where you know everything that happens is that you can set it up as a white list only - everything else is blocked from even getting SYN, ACK back.

I would bet my house that the meters being rolled out to the US are as secure as a sign on a 2ft fence saying 'please don't hack me, you'll make me cry'.

"Big brains will be applying mathematical tools to make the system secure enough"

And in the real world this would be closely followed by the bean-counters stating that full security measures are too expensive, re-do from start only this time spend 1/10th the amount you original said.

Re: @ Sir Runcible Spoon. One reason is because of the dogs

@Had, I realise that my post sounded like a question, I should have ended it with "Then why are they being *allowed* to fit them at all" :)

Re: Optional

One of those documents states that the system has been designed to comply with standards x,y,z etc. and that RSA and HSM's are involved, plus info that open standards are being used etc.

Then, at the very bottom, it states that the information in the pdf is trade secret!! Looks like a standard footer message to me and obviously not related to the information in the document body, as all it mentions are the standards that were used in designing the system, hardly trade secret.

Re: Or perhaps

My argument would be that if installing these 'smart' meters could result in the power grid being taken down, then why are they fitting them at all?

Pastejack attack turns your clipboard into a threat

Re: I think I'm safe, buuuut...

Ever since Micro$hite stuffed embedded codes in Windows (which is a fair while ago) I developed the habit of pasting everything into a text editor first to strip it of any formatting etc. before copying and pasting again into another document.

Goes all a bit awry if you don't :)

US 5th graders have a pop at paper plane record

Re: "another 100 to 150 grams of helium"

Simple.

Attach a balloon to a 1kg weight, put weight on scales.

Fill balloon until weight measurement reads 850g and you have 150g of helium in the balloon* :)

*I'm almost certain this is incorrect, but it sounds good. If you don't believe me, ask the mice.