Posts by David Shaw

NSA asks Congress to permanently reauthorize spying program that was so shambolic, the snoops had shut it down

Re: never left

Yes Mahhn, I agree.

When we had the 'open' Telco Standards Development meeting on "lawful interception of telecommunications", the (natural) group photo of the hard working engineers, in the usual nice seaside conference place, had telco engineers diving for cover, behind bushes - palm trees etc - shouting "No Photo, NO PHOTO!"

fine, whatever

My worry is, China is leading the way to the social-media metadata-ranking society-privilege model, and I can see the rest of the democratic nations eyeing-up the autocratic nations with envy, and having urgent committee meetings on how soon can we implement this sh!t

did I just forfeit my right to a bus-pass?

All roads in US cable biz GTT's Brit network seem to lead to Menwith Hill

Re: I Remember the Early Days of Menwith Hill

the old COMINT system was UKUSA (1947 agreements online somewhere) which morphed into 'keyword-driven' ECHELON "E" based at Menwith since 1954 compulsory purchased farms (according to open published parliamentary reports) with five-eyes running it, UK, CAN, NZ, AUS as 'junior' partners

later "E" went for global take 99.9999% of world telecom traffic, from around 1966 when focus was taken from just the Soviet threat...France later was a bit miffed about economic atacks of this spookery (Thomson-CSF/Brazil deal that was undercut, Airbus etc) , also Germany (see Enercon/Kenetech wind-turbine design as examples that might well be "E") ...

...which hence morphed into the current tiered-partner agreements with (matrix of many many partners) getting more or less of the full-take (according to Snowden's docus) depending on reciprocal sharing etc etc

The whole BT network was admitted in court in the 1970's to be plumbed directly into & through the National Security Agency Field Station F-83 , though the BT engineer said he'd introduced the maps by mistake, and could he have them back please!

The BT YHTS Hunter’s Stones in Stainburn forest is absurdly used by internetters as a geocache location, whilst the next hop along YTIL Tinshill, North Leeds, looks very crumbly as the atomic blast resistant concrete tower is succumbing now to decades of Yorkshire rain.

(Duncan Cambell has written well about this overtake, over collect, over the years. However, I'm sure it is all legal nowadays, and sovereign governments can do whatever they like)

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Re: And so here we are

And those AIS laptops, I have bought AIS ...., Abramovich! ,....... with the correct MMSIs. (oops, TMI)

So reading further, these are likely AIS RX & display Laptops, as USN policy was to keep AIS 'OFF'

https://gcaptain.com/u-s-navy-ships-to-turn-ais-transmitting-on-in-high-traffic-areas/

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Re: Heavy...

TimBL did a lot of his early CERN computing on that Compaq luggable!

before he got his neXt cube thingy, so it did some useful stuff.....

How powerful are Russian hackers? One new law could transform global crime operations

AC in the event of an all out cyberwar we have been and remain in, an all out cyberwar & information war since at least the last decade

I'm sure that this "self standing RU internet" was mentioned recently on Russian TV as a parry to a potential disconnect from world interbanking.

What with Kashmir having its complete digital infrastructure cut for various 'democratic' reasons, and the global information war blended with often ludicrous (but highly propagandised) sanctions wars, I think UK should develop its own stand-alone systems too, maybe even Scotland ought to be planning theirs...

Apple loses FaceTime patent appeal again. And again. And again. And again. And again... yes, it's the fifth time

Re: Hypocritical?

VirnetX is CIA

ancient internet history involving SAIC and the US intelligence community "netEraser" comms program

look it up, it's all openly discussed, probably eighteen years ago, from memory

New British Army psyops unit fires rebrandogun, smoke clears to reveal... I'm sorry, Dave...

Re: The internet was a nice friendly, honest place ...

I like how the Daily Mail referred to British Army 6th Division 77th Brigade disinformation unit

Is that the 77th official title, or do they give a different moniker to each person who asks?

It’s certainly not Tim’s fault that humanity is flawed, and that they are co-incidentally using his excellent systems, protocols etc for not just trillions of dollars of web focussed business, but some are abusing the phase space for warfare aimed at the general population, or autocratic regimes, or both.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Cheltenham, carry on doing what you are good at - but read some sense from time to time too

According to the Daily Telegraph "5VEY met in London on Tuesday to discuss plans to give law enforcement agencies (= spooks, who rarely share anything with the police, really hardly anything) to give "lawful access" (=more overcollection) to encrypted emails, text messages and voice communications" ....there will be a joint communique

5VEY claim it is because Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple, Slurp/Google are increasingly using encryption on their platforms...

...did anyone not notice that the widespread increase in platform encryption came AFTER the Snowden revelation of widespread overcollection by 5VEY (and their multitude of tier partner agencies)...it is an effect

so, for some rational discussion, we head off to https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/aclu_on_the_gch.html

I suspect a bit of typing by the 6th Division, 77th Brigade of Disinformation on all of these online platforms, so let's get to US academia, Jon Callas at Vanguard, part One of a Four part takedown of this particular GCHQ proposal. Cheltenham, carry on doing what you are good at - but read some sense from time to time too - ta muchly

https://www.davisvanguard.org/2019/07/the-ghost-user-ploy-to-break-encryption-wont-work/

David

Satellites with lasers and machine guns coming! China's new plans? Trump's Space Force? Nope, the French

I found an open, non classified, NATO science doc, long time ago

that suggested using microwave vircator amplifiers, emits terawatt (short) pulses into a directional antenna, can be driven by a Sakharov device. (there are other docs around such as this RG from Romania ; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40777537_Axial_Vircator_for_Electronic_Warfare_Applications

Now, where in sat might one find a nice cool high-vacuum like environment, meaning that a virtual cathode amplifier/oscillator could be pointed at something nearby (not needing the ground station and the associated distance inverse square power degradation) (inverse square can be defeated a bit by laser conducting plasma channels - but actually having a simple & compact terawatt or two in space means that I'm pretty sure that these will already be in orbit....)

so machine guns in space against a terawatt input to an antenna with gain tuned to a particular target's 'notch' frequency - who will win?

Elon Musk's new idea is to hook your noggin up to an AI – but is he just insane about the brain?

Re: Enjoy the choice

When I first came to the current research centre around 1995, there was a guy down the corridor who was experimenting with cycling helmets (well it looked like a modern one) and nanovolt low-noise amplifiers and lots of external skull probe sensors....

it seemed to work, move a fuzzy mouse cursor a bit, certainly lots of promise but my colleague basically disappeared , presumably got a better offer from the 1995 Google/Microsoft/.Mil, I haven't ever dared to look where he is...

Office 365 verboten in Hessen schools: German state bans cloudy Microsoft suite on privacy grounds

Re: Has the PATRIOT Act been repealed ?

privacy, transparency are fast becoming illusions under overwhelming National Security budgets. it is even suggested that El'Reg's editor sits on the UK's DASM committee. ( 'D'-notice committee, hopefully in order to explain the 'and Social Media' aspect to important people who have apparently banned the name 'Pablo' )

keep up the good work!

Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal

Re: U.S.P?

nice that the new Ryzen Zen2 will work in a current mobo (450 chipset) with AM4 socket, so I have some Ryzens on order.

I also bought an interesting (bargain) Core i5-9400F, happy until I realised that although it has the LGA 1151 socket of the previous gen intel mobos, infernal have tweaked the microcode so that it will only run on their latest 3xx mobos, so I have to buy a new £90 mobo for intel. (Can't buy a refurb as I would need to update the bios to run the 9400F, or borrow a cheap eighth generation intel CPU from Amazon for a couple of hours to do this job) Further, once I have changed my intel CPU, and its new mobo, I guess Microsoft will want me to buy a new Windows license, as I will then have substantially changed my setup!

AMD is so much more reliable, less gougy, their RX 5700 XT is amazing value for 1440p gaming .... tho' PCIe5 is coming soon, so hold-off on the big $$$ mobo upgrades

It's a fullblown Crysis: Gamers press pause on PC purchases, shipments freeze

Re: downturn

yes, waiting for Zen 2, but there are price cuts in the previous (current) generation Ryzen products, so I might get a cheap 2700X for one of the home PCs;

the intel reply to AMD (so far) seems to be a reasonably priced 6C/6T Core i5-9400F (no iGPU) which I'll buy for another of the home PCs when that price stabilises

no rush to MOBO upgrade as PCIe 5.0 is coming next year

Chrome ad-blocker crackdown preview due late July. Here's a half-dozen reasons why add-on devs are still upset

Re: Then I have to stick on Firefox...CABF

pi-hole will make (many ads lighter) happy browsing

https://pi-hole.net/

Shut the barn door: UK data watchdog tells MPs mass slurping by firms is a huge risk to privacy

privacy, it's a war!

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier

so , anyway, I managed to find enough cash to buy an Apple iPhone SE. Bought it in the applestore, then asked if I could use their wi-fi to set it up.

30 minutes later, I had a crowd of apple sales droids around me asking what I was doing, as I was drilling down into every single decision tree of the "Settings"

I then gave a mini-lecture on how their product was not inherently bad, just needed a bit of tweaking to get it almost privacy enhancing, and that the overpriced iPhone was better than the competition, which I still judge true, since my Nexus One days of being a nice - but not secureable alternative OS, others may be able to handle slurpOS better than me.

in iOS, try Settings/Privacy/Location Services/System Services/ for fun things to configure, Significant Locations is very helpful!

still some questions remain:Why do iMessages need their crypto enabling silent SMS from a UK based server? why not a German or RU or US server?

Why do I keep getting "Suggestions" enabled, when I regularly lock them down...iCloud Notes, Game Centre, iCloud Keychain recently auto-turned ON

anyway , enough of the Fruit, who *almost* allow a bit of privacy, and over to The Slurp, the richest data mining entity that I have ever seen

I regularly update Chrome, as one should, but each update apparently tweaks the user privacy in usually a negative way, obfuscated way?

I'm currently at v.75.0.3770.100, which allows as default many suspicious items, typically a new hazard for every little update on desktop Chrome at least

quickly looking at a few glaring examples of 'mass slurping' at the start of chrome://settings/

"Other Search Engines" - long list (are they 'accidentally' BCC'd with any search queries to default Search provider?)

Then, in Advanced of "chrome://settings/", the fun really starts

"send usage statistics" telemetry = everything, or just 'nearly everything'?

"Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed", "background sites continuing to send & receive data", "unsandboxed plug-ins"/apps & TSR's? "install handling protocols", e.g. P2P almost trojan behaviour, whilst "your clipboard" ctrl C+V is being regularly scanned for text and images, (and they will be likely scanned for facial rec and location & other metadata) and any "payment cards" remotely backed-up in case you need further badverts & profiling of your entire life

"Site Settings" "Microphone", "Camera", "Location", NEW: "any sensors data" (which might have the granularity to reveal which letter/number is being typed, even when you are not using Chrome)

imho 'ASK first' is not sufficient protection as can get double-tap 'ask+yes' background pop-unders, historically, and at least Chrome still works when everything is locked down tightly

who even needs an Alexa with anything running stock Chrome in the room, potentially slurping everything, then sharing covertly VERY widely

Firefox , if you look closely, in their settings can even "run studies" on your machine, when they feel like it , we all know what study "pref-flip-screenshots-release-xxxx" study did on my PC, yes/no/maybe?

"Mass slurping by firms" say the ICO is not only a huge risk to privacy, it is a war, against the general public, and you can lose actual money

locking things down does have an effect - I checked with a mate, in May 2019, his vanilla undefended iP6 against my iPSE, we went to vodafoe's website at same time on same wi-fi AP, we were both offered a new home fibre/ADSL service pop-over as we landed, but strangely my price was a tenner a month cheaper than his offer - beware data driven surge pricing... I think it has already started - but the endpoint is quite scary. Go (underfunded) ICO

/rant

Blighty's online pr0n gatekeepers are begging for a regulatory beating, says digital rights org

apparently filter is INDEFINITELY SUSPENDED, 'till after exit at least...

A spokesman from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said er, we forgot to ask someone , and when we mentioned over coffee at The Council that our pr0n firewall was just about to launch - we strangely discovered that it is an illegal system, so it is apparently indefinitely suspended until we do the same with 'ooman rights

/S

quoting from Gizmodo.com

According to Sky, a government spokesperson did not deny the indefinite delay and confirmed that culture minister Jeremy Wright would deliver a statement to the House of Commons on Thursday morning. Apparently, the problems are not technical. They’re legal, Sky wrote: “When laying the BBFC’s guidance in Parliament in late 2018, [the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport] failed to notify the European Commission as it is required to, undermining the legal basis of age verification.”

well, whatever next?

Freaking out about fiendish IoT exploits? Maybe disable telnet, FTP and change that default password first?

Re: But surely

Yes, I also add a copy of Wireshark to all my friend's PC's as I'm building them, in the hope of convincing some malware that they are in a VM, being studied.

I like to add the odd tar-pit too

Re: How many home users *need* the admin password anyway ?

So how do you setup your WAN connection and at the very least DHCP scope on the LAN

with a second, higher quality Router that costs a bit more than the telco CPE (with its hardcoded telco backdoors, usually). The second NAT'd router is as protected/updated as possible, and the amazing pi-hole does the DNS-hole for the 25% of un-needed packets, and can optionally do the DHCP on the LAN

fritzboxes, Apple Extremes are reasonable choices for the second layer, and you can put a pfsense appliance inbetween the routers .... I tried

maybe others will recommend other devices, I was pleased to see that although the fruity company has stopped making their shiny routers, they did update the firmware last week (OK, two weeks ago "AirPort Base Station Firmware Update 7.9.1" of 30th May 2019)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210090

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

Re: Error in article, no PCIe4 slots here?

I was following closely the words that Apple said about PCI on their expensive 28 core apple cheesegrater, - whilst I was about to invest in a Ryzen PCIe4.0 capable PC mobo, but yesterday I noticed that PCIe 5.0 is stable and being readied for widespread launch in 2019.

looking at https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/05/30/pcie-5-released/ with PCIe 5 being quadruply faster than PCIe 4.0, I think I will skip PCIe 4 entirely and go for the much faster solution (making do with a bios upgraded PCIe 3.0 mobo with the short tracks PCIe4 enabled, for a while)

Apple *might* be being very clever, and have implemented PCIe 5, but aren't talking about it, or perhaps they simply want to start reselling Xeons to gullible videographers before the wave of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 Series (Castle Peak) high end desktop chips, with 64 cores apple, and 128 threads apple, are released.

I do have the last alu apple cheesegrater, still chugging away on hexacore xeon 3.33GHz but I think I will be able to build my own DIY pc to run way faster than that 'new' 28 core Xeon (something related to Intel Xeon W-3175X?) will evolve [note: that Intel Xeon W-3175X is PCIe 3.0)

remember rule 1 of shiny apple purchasing, never buy any new product until at least revision 1.1, or better v.1.2

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

"Freedom Gas"

obviously I took that chemical discussion of freedom gas to be tounge-in-cheek, but what if the DoE was somehow referring in doublespeak to something scary and elemental?

https://off-guardian.org/2019/05/30/watch-opcw-leak-explained/

nice video, thread-jack obviously, but for some reason the mention of historic Freedom Fries sent me off to read Robert Fisk, Peter Hitchens and other respectable journos. (opcw is in den haag, next to europol & the new zealand embassy, they have confirmed the leaked document)

back to merriment....

Google relents slightly in ad-blocker crackdown – for paid-up enterprise Chrome users, everyone else not so much

Re: Is it time....

all of my friends are getting a "christmas" pi-hole, it did take me an hour to install the first time as my first choice of address range for the DNS-sink turned out to be outside the range available from my router. (needed to plug into a TV to re-adjust the fixed piehole IPv4)

it has a high WAF as I have shown the family how to allow the odd blacklisted CDN that slows down pie-holed ecommerce sites like GAP & Boden. One click on the local management page and full speed shopping is available again.

the 'best' Pi is officially the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Quad Core CPU 1.2 GHz ('used' on AMZN warehouse deals at £24 today), best OS 2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch-lite.zip 300MB on a class 10 £8 32GB microSD, I added a £1 heatsink to both the Pi CPU & i/o chip, as it was running at about 50 celsius. (the 3B+ would be a bit hotter, and there were some mentions of it being a bit less reliable than the Pi3B, when running pi-hole)

many of my Mozilla installs have started to delete Privacy Badger as soon as I reinstall an 'approved' version, so feck'em , pi-hole the whole house it is! [and I have professionally met representatives of the spooky CABF, certificate authority & browser forum, they are (a bit) more open now - but I think suggesting that everyone should start using pi-hole will simply help CABF in speeding their openness, a big improvement to the local useable internet]

other wins from my first week of pi-hole install, I now notice so many microsoft pipes from Samsmug devices that have had outlook allegedly removed, that I know I have to dig deeper!, perhaps eventually moving from android to ARK OS when it is released.

i'm not using it to counter state surveillance, [you're always welcome chaps/chapettes with a mission], but I think I could easily notice a particular pwned device in the house with the new pi-hole data

more install data here https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/#one-step-automated-install

do I need a pfsense appliance as well?

When two tribes go to war... Intel, AMD tease new chips at Computex: Your spin-free summary

I've just built an DIY AMD PC system from all the very cheap leftover bits in Warehouse Deals,

have put a £20 quad-core AMD something in the £20 AM4 mobo , so that I can flash the bios, then put in the lowest spec Zen2 Matisse Hexa-Core 3.2 GHz when it is released later this summer. It's working great 'till then for email etc

I'm not sure if my mobo can be flashed to PCIe 4.0, for at least the M.2 and first PCI slot - I've read that X470 and B450 from Gigabyte has just allowed this retrospective upgrade, when paired with the matisse cpu range. Those with a bigger budget can look for the X570 and B550, but they are just incremental upgrades from last-year's models.

(this "AMD 50" story had a mild positive benefit as the RX 570 that I bought for about £100, came with two free games, associated with the fifty years promo)

We'll hack back at Russians, declare UK ministers in cyber-Blitz blitz

I had once saved a tweet or similar from a USian 5-star general who publicly declared that he wanted to bomb hackers, fight packets with exotherms

it was vanished before I got a copy, and also , bearing in mind how the US Navy was always dominant in cyber training and cyber deployment, including recruiting all the RIF'ed sailors that could type, is there a particular phrase which renders the article quote "Forn Sec Jeremy Hunt vowed to retaliate" into the more accurate actualité of "vowed to retaliate first , before being attacked" as they've been doing that already for ages

Giga-hurts radio: Terrorists build Wi-Fi bombs to dodge cops' cellphone jammers

Re: Diretional antenna

A team of radio ham types took a standard USB stick, put it at the focus of a large parabola, on top of an Italian alp, then beamed wi-fi down Italy for many hundreds of kilometres. The ‘only’ trick was to re-write the protocol slightly to allow for wider packet timing...

...the last I heard, they were negotiating with NATO to borrow another alp with a troposcatter array

Bad guys use any available tech, from PIR , to radio-shack handies, to the actual exothermic stuff itself....luckily they are increasingly rare, in our ever safer, richer world. Media rarely puts things in context.

The plane, it's 'splained, falls mainly without the brain: We chat to boffins who've found a way to disrupt landings using off-the-shelf radio kit

Re: As any valdal kno...

True, and I broke this particular thing around a decade ago, but I didn't publicise it

Russian bots are just for rigging US elections? They hit home, too: Kid stripped of crown in TV contest vote-fix scandal

Sad but true that Russia has a corruption problem, always has had, and always will have.

Nevertheless, a good article, you just missed a couple of related news points; until this voting scandal kicked off, Alsou was supposed to present the results of the Russian jury & people's vote on Saturday's Tel Aviv song-fest for Channel One (UK Katy Boyle's job in the past), I think you can see why Channel One has suspended connections with the glamorous Алсу Рали́фовна Абрамова-Сафина.. . voting, bots, hmmm at least this time there is evidence

and you missed the trivial fact that not only is she married to an 'illionaire, but Alsou's dad is also an 'illionaire

RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

Re: Hypershambles

completely unrelatedly, more 'classic media'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY (Tom Lehrer "poisoning processors in the park" )

written circa early 1950's when he was working as a mathematician with all the other mathematicians at the world's largest employer of mathematicians!

It's 2019 and a WhatsApp call can hack a phone: Zero-day exploit infects mobes with spyware

bugdoor found, compliments

now hunt for the next one

Home Office cops an earful for emergency network feck-ups - £3bn overbudget and 3 years late

Re: Shambolic

Well, I did write a one page memo many years ago about Tetra, sorry Airwave_1_PSK

tetra sigint and I found quite a few faults then - but I couldn't compete my accurate reality with whoever was buying people lunch (and promising jammy Tetra 2 QAM tomorrow)

this competing system, with data, has always worked a bit better tetrapol sigint in (most of) France & Spain, tho' why does Lyon Pol use tetra?, lots of good restaurants in Lyon - is that a clue?

Oh, and UPS have been dropped from most BTS, simply because the commercial power availability is rated as quite high, several 9's , in fact under normal circumstances. What the gov might not have yet worked out, in that rare case of "not normal circumstance" when your commercial power is co-incidentally out, that you might want to co-ordinate police & SAR (large comet arrives, unexpectedly) or Mi5 when Russia invades Salisbury, or the Johnson Riots kick-off. Plan for the worst, hope for the best , or have UK really run out of money?

NSA foreign spying, biotech snooping, Hamas hackers bombed, airline cams, and much more from infosec land

before or after

to be fair, American does tend to certify products beforehand as "safe" e.g. Wifi 802.11n(*), whilst EU tended to rely on markets & manufacturer self-certification, now getting a stronger emphasis on "privacy by design" and "security by design" since around 2017 in a nice sunny island called Κρήτη Krētē(**)

which is better? IoT based on direct 5G routing (new seriously 5G Huawei 8K television with integrated wireless home 5G router) is bound to be safe!?

(*) https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-certified-n

(**)https://ec.europa.eu/commission/news/cybersecurity-act-2018-dec-11_en

Oh dear. Secret Huawei enterprise router snoop 'backdoor' was Telnet service, sighs Vodafone

bizness

and (seriously) ten seconds ago Vodafone Italy just texted me an offer for a HUAWEI Mate 20 lite for 8 euros per month for 30 months.

er... no thanks, it *might* have a backdoor

UK comms watchdog mulls 5G tweaks: Operators want moooooar power

no 5G in Russia soon

as Russian TV is complaining that all the 5G frequency bands are owned by the russian military.... probably applies to a few other countries too.

... in parallel there's quite a bit of fake news manipulation going-on in many & varied uk & us fora about how 5G will affect the human body, at a cellular level, calcium ion made up guff, (no cited research but much shouty "panic!") is there any reason why a particular (state or business actor) group is trying to sow anti-5G hysteria?

Bug-hunters punch huge holes in WPA3 standard for Wi-Fi security

Re: Again?

a substantial number of the standards development engineers that I have encountered in communications technology standards development have apparently both overt and covert agendas; there be squirrels.

I think it is even legal nowadays, but it wasn't when I first noticed the subversion.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Re: Need more court challenges

re: "But if if you're a foreigner,..." very true

a very, very, senior colleague of mine from work (CERN at the time) was frogmarched out of the US Border Area (which seems not to be the US so none of that 'amendment' constitution stuff applies anyway) and sent back immediately to Geneva because the CBP at the time asked him a few questions.

Charles Angry (accurate pseudonym) was not impressed, I don't know if he showed them his 1984 physics nobel prize, or just his weekly teaching contracts with MIT & Stanford etc. but he was evicted, for a week or two until diplomacy was brought to bear. I haven't been back since either - tho' I really like the place.

How do you sing 'We're jamming and we hope you like jamming, too' in Russian? Kremlin's sat-nav spoofing revealed

"Misinformation coming from Russia"

shouldn't that just be "Misinformation coming from" "any military/anywhere"

after all, that is their job, (there's a vaguely related joke here) https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/russiagate-catoon.jpg

(about half of America will not find it funny, sorry resistance or orange-fruitcake, whichever)

answering (literally) your rhetorical question - my attempt goes "Мы набиваемся битком, и мы надеемся, что тебе нравится набиваться битком, также'"

the good news, however, is that with compass, glonass, egnos, a-gps and galileo, there is no longer a single point of failure! Phew'

Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices

Re: here's REAL pisspoor dev practices

https://syssec.kaist.ac.kr/pub/2019/kim_sp_2019.pdf

er... rather a few errors in 4G infrastructural systems

here's REAL malware

https://shadowhammer.kaspersky.com/

a targeted attack on a million ASUS's , signed using a 'real' ASUS certificate, downloaded from the real ASUS website, sniffs a lot of a Nation State APT attack who's parliament now permits illegal acts for NatSec.

meanwhile, according to https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/03/article/the-eu-bows-to-systemic-rival-china/

all of this digital protectionism is too little, too late. get over it.

ProtonMail back up in Russia after regime chokes access over 'terrorist activity'

it is all about the nudges

I use ProtonMail quite a lot, partly for historic reasons as I was in the team that wildly abused Protons in the 80's.

Mostly PM is (deliberately) used for swapping recipies and shopping-lists (dogfood/catfood etc not exothermic shopping).

As an accidental observer of much recent & ancient russian language news output, sadly many of you have been led a bit astray by the deliberate cluster 'nudges' , it is not your fault , the nudges are well designed and high bandwidth.

Big Russia IS an autocratic, kleptocratic government, always has been, always will be ... you might be surprised tho' that the press is apparently freer there than in other parts of the world.

Just one example. In the Russian TV 'Channel One' equivalent of BBC's Question Time, they have an embedded American panel member, [ a genuine valid Putin hating US journo called Michael Bohm], and they let him explain his point of view on all the major stories - in Russian - to the Russian people. The intelligent people on the panel then have a quiet chat with him from their point of view. There is a debate, (sometimes shouting at Michael and/or each other) not a mere 'balanced' soundbite show, where everyone says apparently exactly what the deliberate cluster 'nudge' is telling them to say that week.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/12/07/moscow-police-question-american-journalist-michael-bohm-over-registration-a59864 (judge where the Moscow times is actually written, and the trillion dollar budget behind it) 95.215.189.12 , talos say it is NL but 404 my other queries

I agree that evil Putie might well be secretly subverting aspects of our society. So find the evidence you spooks, that's what you are supposed to do - you are not supposed to implement old soviet techniques upon our western 'free press' until the Russians are actually better and more open than us. (by some measures, not nudges)

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

Re: Five eyes

Who needs Huwaei 'non-backdoors' (digital network intelligence non-collection risk) when Dodgy-Dave invited the People's Liberation Army 'top spooks' for RAF Cranwell training, for 18 months, recently!

"the pair suprisingly spent 60% of their free time examining ballistic missile warning radars at Fylingdales"

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/699736/Espionage-secret-mission-RAF-Chinese-guests

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/claims-chinese-officers-spied-british-ballistic-missile-radar-base/

"at times they would visit another location" I'm just guessing here but er.. isn't Harrogate halfway between Lincolnshire & Whitby (if you sensibly avoid Hull) so just 40% of their spare time was likely spent underground?

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/revealed-nsa-built-a-10000-sq-ft-tier-iii-uk-data-center-in-2011/

Fylingdales also does ELINT, SIGINT, and now CHIN-INT, as does the NSA base which it is alleged is now downsizing (humans at least), tho' perhaps if they weren't welcomed into MH with soda and cookies, they might have had excellent fish n' chips at Irton Moor, GCHQ Scarborough.

I think the odd transatlantic fibre termination shelf in Southport is a bit further down the list for foreign spooks' access plans when they can spend their lesiure time being welcomed inside our critical military infrastructure

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

Mast sharing?

In España you get about eight individual masts per hill , as each provider is sovereign.

Does UK have mast/antenna sharing yet, even if just in rurality?

Last point, density of smart devices with radio inside is already big enough that they could create a peer to peer mesh using a postgrad written waveform. How would that overlay the ‘no coverage’ areas? I think it could work well.

You could have the mesh as Trumpton’s 6G radio, allow , of course, the devices to regularly forward their metadata to our KGB for security purposes, so they wouldn’t immediately need to downvote the ‘milliwatt’ mesh idea without thinking about it a bit.

A lot easier to sell a mast to a community when one of its waveforms (mesh) sends a thousand times less ERP than the current masts. Also just explain the inverse square RF law, that “5G brain glioblastoma” will grow infinitely slower when the naughty antenna is much further away, on top of a pole. Don’t mention the terminal, unless it is to point out that mesh would decimate, decimate, decimate the power levels from a mesh handset compared to an 1+ GSM , into their lughole.

Schneier: Don't expect Uncle Sam to guard your web privacy – it's Europe riding to the rescue

Re: When the Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth...

allegedly, according to an economics guy on BBC Radio Four "Toady" program this morning,

facebook have realised that privacy is their future - self deleting posts, evaporating likes etc etc

mostly because it has been too easy for privacy engineers to look into the history of the fb ledger, and see all/enough of the micro-targeted stuff and enough psyops nudge stuff, that the big Zucker now realizes all evidence must be deleted, as soon as he has monetized it, but before it can be used agin' him

apparently

Need a 1TB microSD for your smartmobe? Come April, you can free up storage space in your wallet and buy one

or accidentally spend your cross border pr0n stash

https://www.amazon.co.uk/US-Mint-Quarter-Covert-Compartment/dp/B0036VJHXG

Australian prime minister blames 'state level' baddies for Oz parliament breach

Trust me Aussie PM, almost every bedsit in the world possesses this capability

Yes, and here's a youth who has blogged about pwning a nation, very similar to Australia, actually extremely similar to Australia , just without the extra "a" and an "l" - this game playing geek helpfully provides the terminal commands for scanning your own country, probably not advised at present.

https://blog.haschek.at/2019/i-scanned-austria.html

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Nice. Not much platinum here, but I did find a bar of iridium in a cupboard, rather a lot of iridium!

Over coffee, it was briefly considered that we should powder it, then sprinkle it as a thin layer - deepfake/create a new K-T boundary somewhere interesting. In 'old science labs' like mine, where you had nuclear research reactors & accelerators, it's rather a good idea to first stick a geiger-counter in the back of some of the older cupboards, you wouldnt believe the amount of ...

Q. What's a good thing to put outside a building of spies? A: A banner saying 'here we are!'

Re: Spanner in the works

the article in the Sun yesterday about Philip Hammond's failed trade talks with China, due to Gavin's spear-rattling at RUSI on Monday, make your point fajensen.

Confirmation appeaed in the FT today, there was supposed to be a high level declaration this Sunday, which now might not happen because of ourempt gun-boat threats?

who needs trade deals with billions of ppl?

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Re: Yay landfill!

@gene "Garmin because the maps are STILL about 15 years out of date in my area"

i complained to Garmin about this, whilst driving on a motorway in Spain that didnt exist on my 'garmin with lifetime-update maps(tm)', their response was extremely silly

"We are not responsible for errors caused by our Map Provider, "We simply provide the hardware platform for their maps" (praphrased slightly - but I got the message to foad)

So I now use Slurp, sorry Google, as at least it is somewhat useful to use all the stolen (crowdsourced) data from all the android handset tracking, with a bit of an overlay.

Fujitsu pitched stalker-y AI that can read your social media posts as solution to Irish border, apparently

Re: Completly missing the point

driving through the Mourne mountains one day security checkpoints. They were not fun

a bush on the roadside got up and pointed about twenty SA80's at me

Squaddie with very very large lethal weapon " What side of Belfast are you from? "

Me, (hopeless at troubles geography, east or west is best?) " Er.... Leeds "

and I wasn't shot, so it seemed to be the right answer , back in the days.

I did meet the guy (RSRE Malvern) who conceived & developed the first ever ANPR, for use at checkpoints in Norn Irn, and it was specifically for security use, (when designed anyway), and worked really well, a very neat design with the twin decision paths. ('Bob' gamed two competing teams for the recognition technology, both delivered, so both features were added into the first system)

The Swiss border, that I cross regularly nowadays, is stuffed with ~5GHz (or 60GHz?) transponders - typically & solely aimed at trucks, trucks have an LED bar. The actual 'Zoll office booth is quite often empty, most of the day - but occasionally they jump out of a bush at you, many miles from the actual crossing point. They have much smaller weapons than the paras, thankfully.

France have seriously mobile Douanes flying squads, who can be found 100 kilometres from any border, inspecting TV sets in transit for the prise peritel??

What's Farsi for 'as subtle as a nuke through a window'? Foreign diplomats in Iran hit by renewed Remexi nasty

Re: Seems like standard diplomatic practice

Yes, it was probably a retroreflector(*) that modulated the reflected RF, based upon the local ambassadors' audio changing the cavity dimensions slightly, almost the first RFID. Лев Термен also seemed to have invented remote infra-red beam bugging, attacking the windows of various western embassies in Moscow. Wikipedia mentions further that he first thought of (and demonstrated) interlaced scan TV, as used in PAL & NTSC, further fame!

(*) nice picture here of a quarter wave antenna & microphone in "the Thing" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Bugged-great-seal-open.jpg

iPhone price cuts are coming, teases Apple CEO. *Bring-bring* Hello, Apple UK? It's El Reg. You free to chat?

Re: "Our users are hanging on to their iPhones a little longer"...

I actually have a few landmines here in the Research Centre; someone thought that it'd be nice to build a simple cheap 'ground penetrating' radar with 500 Watts CW at a few Megahertz, having tuned the RF to a nuclear resonance of some particular nitrogen bonds in the plastique. I built the tin box, filled it with landmines, and from not very far away blasted with high power, got no coherent responses. Did manage to get really good 'remote NQR' return signals from a bottle of di-nitro-toluene when that was tried instead.

er... I prefer experimenting with things other than deflagrating hardware nowadays, tho' maybe I should try my rNQRradar on a spare fruity 'phone?

I can't remember why, but my iphone speaker emits the dulcet tones of Joe Jackson et al , never get tired of hearing this as my ringtone