Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"... who has long thought that mixing thermite and inkjet printers is good idea."
The White Rabbit Project, starring the Mythbusters B team, had Grant Imhara demonstrate what happens when an unmodified inkjet printer has it's inks replaced with accelerates. The heat used in the normal inkjet printing process is enough to set the whole thing on fire.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't modern X86 (x64) basically RISC architecture nowadays?"
That's my understanding too. X86 is basically an emulation running on the RISC core. I thought that's what the microcode was all about, ie the CPU is a computer running a microcode programme to pretend to be a CISC X86. I wonder what it would be capable of if the X86 bit was removed or some other way of exposing the native silicon to programmers?
"will be mitigated over time"
I wonder if its this bit? How can hardware faults be "mitigated over time"? Surely only software can mitigate the hardware fault by working around it. Sure, patches with more time spent on them might get more efficient, but that is still never going to mitigate the slowdowns caused by the hardware fault workaround. Maybe Intels "over time" reference is about people replacing hardware on a time scale?
In other words, they can't get rid of the slow downs until the users buy new kit.
"Except, AMD and ARM designs are affected too -- which everyone seems to be ignoring. The initial reports that broke in the media said AMD and others were unaffected: this is not the case, as has been widely publicised."
That's because everyone is conflating 3 issues. The first one is Intel specific, the other two affect other CPUs to varying degrees and likely more difficult to exploit.
"There's no market for phones with a week of battery life, otherwise you'd see such phones that weigh a pound and are 20mm thick."
And yet almost everyone I know is always whinging about battery life on their phone or keeping calls short "because my battery is low".
"4 January: About the Meltdown and Spectre attacks: FreeBSD was made aware of the problems in late December 2017. We're working with CPU vendors and the published papers on these attacks to mitigate them on FreeBSD. Due to the fundamental nature of the attacks, no estimate is yet available for the publication date of patches."
Looks like they'll be late to the party with any fixes since they weren't deemed important enough to be told about it months ago like the big boys.
"Thats all very nice but what if drones go into each of the engines? A long shot I know but for a serious attack a 'cluster' of drones could be launched."
I suspect that even under ideal conditions, targeting a jet engine intake with any sense of reliability is going to be TOUGH. Doing it to two simultaneously will be near as dammit impossible.
Consider. Working in 3D space at distance enough that your drone(s) are mere specks aiming for a target maybe about 10' diameter (and also little more than a speck) with no background reference objects for ranging or perspective and said target is moving at 200+knots.
"That was when they thought they could build super high speed tilting train. The attempt was parked in the sidings."
All down to politics and lack of will to spend money. The tech was sold off and now we import Pendelino trains based on it. SOP for UK inventions.
"I don't know why people have this idea that Irn-Bru is unknown in England. Maybe they live so far south that they get their info from the French."
Yep, we always had access to Irn Bru right back from being a kid 50 years ago. Then again, Newcastle is further North than some parts of Scotland.
"Surprised we're not on the same on salt,"
We are. There are already Govt. threats in place over the salt levels in food. I find when eating out I need to add salt. Same when cooking. I need to add salt when using some pre-made ingredients when in the past I'd not have done. Tinned beans (of all types, not just baked beans) tinned tomatoes etc. all seem to have very low salt levels. Even OXO cubes seem to lack any salt nowadays.
"Plus, this fixes everything right?.. "performing a 360-degree review"... Sounds like they'll be chasing their own tails."
Nice, chasing their own tails doing a full circle. Whenever I see that 360 degree thing, I always wonder why they ignore the vertical axis. Looking around is ok, but you also need to look up and down. But I'll be snagging your chasing tails reference for later use :-)
"Because they're too busy nicking people who have just bought a second-hand car that has apparently used the wrong font on the plate, even with perfect spacing, and which has been driving around another part of the country for several years without difficulty."
Usually it's because the crappy ANPR cameras can't cope with any variation from the strict letter of the law in number plate design. Now that tax discs are gone, ANPR is how VED dodgers are caught so pretty much any number plate which isn't read by ANPR is seen as "suspect" and likely to result in a stop by any ANPR equipped plodmobile.
Non-standard plates have always been illegal, but when it was down to the Mk.1 eyeball, it was generally easily readable so they didn't bother with the minor offences so much.
"This work was supported in part by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 681402)."
One of the teams was an Austrian university so it's not a huge leap to realise one or more of the team or their resources was grant funded rather than a specific grant to do this specific research,
"MS have previously said that they would not support Win7 on new Intel processors like Kaby Lake. Throwing away your old CPU may not be an option for some corporates."
Does this mean Win7 won't run on Kabylake or just that they don't "support" it to the extent that some on-chip features or optimisations won't work and they won't be fixing that?
"If there's a problem with the silicon it goes well beyond OS unless a particular OS knows to look for that issue and develop around it."
Ah yes, the bane of FOSS driver devs. GFX cards especially seem to end up with multiple bugs in the silicon and have undocumented s/w workarounds in the drivers (not that they are documented much, if at all, anyway)
"Basically, as soon as Linus revealed that there was a kernel patch that would have a notable performance penalty, the whole thing was going to be exposed."
Not to mention the fact that as soon as a FOSS patch is released, the code is available for all to see and read, albeit in this case with the code comments redacted to make it a little more difficult. The various parties involved may have agreed to a dated embargo, but the source code can't be held back till then.
"Anybody at all "on the BBC" is likely to display utter ignorance, otherwise they wouldn't be working for the BBC or invited to speak."
There was a Reg guy interviews on BBC R4 at lunchtime. He seemed to be struggling with explaining it in a way Joe public would understand. He didn't sound too experienced at being interviewed, but then I suppose he's paid to be the interviewer, not the interviewee :-)
"Not to mention dishonest..."
I'd go further and call it lying. Corporate lying. The person writing the PR may have been writing honestly based on what they had been told, but at least some of the people providing the information either lied outright or lied by omission. Arse covering, plausible deniable, all adding up to corporate lying.
"Ticket reselling is a parasitic business model that is grossly unfair and should have no place in modern business."
And people think "disruptive business models" like Uber are a new thing? :-)
There's nothing new about people finding a niche as a middleman with little to no benefit to anyone other than themselves in the long run. The customers always end up paying more while the suppliers save a few pennies and make people redundant.
"I don't have any sympathy for punters or bands in this debate - no one is forcing punters to pay high prices, and the bands and their management are just plain stupid when they sell things too cheaply."
And yet many of these acts have taken political stances of various types over the years, eg Bono, so charging the market rate based on what touts get away with would only show them for the hypocrites that they might well be.
"Something I never understood is why someone wants to get the government deeper involved in something like this, instead of letting the free market solve it. "
The "free market" is what got us here in the first place. There is no "free market" when there is only a monopoly supplier.
"- Isn't encryption mandatory by PCI DSS? What are the consequences for them if they "forgot" to turn it on?"
If your PCI costs are a rounding error then you get cut off from the system until you pay for re-compliance and then get monitored and re-certified more frequently (at your own cost). If your PCI compliance payments and transactions costs are noticeable to the c-suite bonus grabbers, then you get a slap on the wrist and told not to be a naughty boy again.
"Strike one....Strike four."
Well, yes, those don't have the card details or direct access to them, but they are legitimate ways into a company system. It doesn't matter how a miscreant gets in, but once they are inside, most bets are off. Internal security is usually much lower priority than external security.
"Yes, for a Techie publication, this place does seem to have a disproportionate share of luddites."
Nah, just experienced (and jaded!) techies who can see through the bullshit and recognise a tin of baked beans in a shiny gold plated tin doesn't make them into magic beans.
There are already access systems and thumbprint readers so this new $700 lock is not new and it's anything but cheap. I'd bet an existing company making access systems now could knock out a consumer grade one for well under half the price and likely be more secure and still make a good profit at it. The fact they don't means there's probably not enough of a market.
"Either that or your express consent will be engineered around a popup with OK/Cancel buttons only. We all know users are trained to click on OK."
Or, like cable TV bundles, you have to click yes to the crap to get the few gems you want/need. Or it will be a sequence of yes/no requestors with the crapware nestled between things you do want, so you automatically click OK for all of them (yes, similar t what you said, users trained to click OK, but even more insidious)
"And NOT being able to talk about it honestly in a public forum because of anti-free-speech laws is JUST AS HEINOUS."
No one is not talking about it, but the language used can be polite and factual or it can be inflammatory. Which would you chose, you ignorant fucking bastard[1]
[1] One of those three words definitely applies, another probably applies and the third, well I have no idea whether your parents were married or not. Of course, I could have been more polite and said the same thing.
"The universe is a big place, with big being an understatement that the vast majority of humans cannot even begin to comprehend the magnitude of."
Oh yes! We thought the universe was am incomprehensibly big place and then we got the Hubble deep field images to blow our minds even more.
"Hell, you even believe that dinosaurs died out millions of years before the first man came along despite abundant proof (cave drawings, figurines, carvings, eye witness accounts etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc) that man and dinosaurs lived together."
Whoa! Verified citations please!
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