Posts by 142 291 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2010
I've verified a laptop outputting very strong signal at 20kHz (see my post below). But what's interesting to consider - is there a way that a computer program could induce EM noise into either the mains or the environment, that would result in noise being induced into the input of a computer sound card's Analogue to Digital converter? Doing something with the monitor perhaps, etc?
Ok, just ran a test myself: thought so.
20,000Hz (sine wave)* being played out of my laptop (macbook pro), and being picked up by its built-in mic, what looks to be well over 40dB above the noise floor.
http://imgur.com/8pxFgjG
I've verified that this is not crosstalk in the electronics.
Macbook pros' speakers are woeful, and their mics are worse. If it can work on a macbook, it can work on anything.
[And I can't edit my post now, but of course I offer my most humble apologies for misspelling your name, oh uncapitalised one! ;-) ]
[*inaudible to me, though I can hear it on square waves due to distortion]
They'll be perfectly capable of generating / detecting frequencies well into the 20kHz range. Mic / speaker frequency responses are given as a tolerance - e.g. pro gear would be flat response between 50Hz - 20,000Hz, +/- 3dB, consumer gear 100-15kHz +/- 6dB (it varies a lot). That doesn't mean they can't detect / generate frequencies outside that range, it's just they'll be few dB less sensitive or powerful at, say, 25kHz.
Even the cheapest consumer soundcards handle 96kHz sample rates these days. And, to be honest, unless you're banging pots and pans around the laptop, not much else in an indoor environment generates sound in the 20kHz+ range, so I'd suspect there'd be less interference to handle than you might instinctively expect.
True, but the reinforcements required also add weight.
You have to remember what 9G means in practical terms - the forces on heavy internal components are immense. Engines have been ripped from their mountings on US fighters before. The 9G limit on the F16 was there to protect the airframe, first and foremost, not the pilot!
The problem isn't what you have got to hide today, but what innocent behaviour have got to hide tomorrow. Read up on McCarthyism. Things can change and they can change quickly, even in stable, democratic countries. If that happened in 20th century US is can certainly happen in 21st century UK. Imagine what would have happened had that rogue US politician had access to something like PRISM et al?
The highlighted post here is worth reading: www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/caeb3pl?context=3
Now I'm on record in el reg comments as saying that there's probably no point trying to avoid he surveillance as it's so extensive. Anything you do is a false sense of security in reality, short of unplugging completely or making things extremely unusable. But to say "what have you got to hide" is a different kettle of fish entirely...
Indeed. If leverage can be put in the right places - it is surprising how much of a change can happen. Remember the proposed Syria intervention. It was a foregone conclusion, with forces already moving into place, until a handful of Conservative MPs were convinced to speak out, leading to the entire alliance falling apart, until it was only France left, resulting in the incredible situation that it's now seemingly Russia calling the shots.
All because of 20 or so backbenchers going against the party line.
The justifications for this kind of widespread surveillance are even more tenuous, and it could be another case of dominos falling if some parliament was twisted into taking a stand against it.
This new logo is going to look far better on the "flat design" type of site that's becoming the norm. The old one was a tad too busy in that context. For the most part, this logo seems to look ridiculous on the yahoo home page - all the proportions and styles are wrong - it's obvious the page wasn't designed around it.
BUT - it looks pretty stylish in other contexts, especially with the inverted colours - I quite like it here: http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com
The sites not rendering properly would probably have been due to javascript errors because they were dependant on google hosted JS.
As for the odd redirects, could that have been because the sites were hosted in some way on google services, blogspot, etc?
The other thing I should add here, is that a user on another site was getting 60% packet loss pinging google during the outage over IPv4, but had perfect connectivity over IPv6.
El Reg have a very clear, years-old policy that all articles are published based on the conventions of the country in which it was written. In this case, it's clearly stated it's the San Francisco office issuing this article, so PST, and US English.
It's similar for their Australian office.
They don't have the personnel to convert every single article to make it sound like it was written in London - especially not at 1am GMT on a Saturday morning!
What I'm impressed by is that everything seems to have run perfectly once Google came back to life.
What do engineers/admins of these kind of huge systems like this think? I would have expected load balancers etc to have gone out of whack, after receiving normal traffic, zero traffic then 50% above normal, in the space of 5 minutes. That strikes me as the perfect recipe for a cascade failure we've heard so much about of late.
That's my instinct, I'll admit!
But short of going totally off-grid, I can't see how you're not ALWAYS giving away those essential liberties anyway. We're too far down this line already.
In terms of Google Now, one of the main things is how it collates your emails with your location. Given that your emails are guaranteed to be intercepted, and we already know your location is being tracked for the security services via your phone company, it makes little difference from a privacy perspective whether or not you're using something like Google Now. If they want, they're already able to easily mine all that data regardless.
At present, I've yet to see how we can effectively make it "as expensive and difficult as is humanly possible", in a way that isn't making it incredibly difficult and inconvenient for us to use the internet.
Most techniques I can see mirror TOR's limitations:
Very effective if used in a strictly controlled fashion, but the security/privacy benefits fall apart when you want to do something flexible.
True. But.
What I've been feeling lately is that, I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
There is no realistic scope of significant privacy in this respect, especially being based in the UK. Running my own email server is virtually no benefit, as emails are sent in the clear in almost all situations, always to US or UK based accounts. It's just not practical to get all your correspondents to use PGP or whatever, so whilst there's some advantages to using my own email server, in all likelihood all communication is going to get scanned anyway, and I'm pretty sure I've used enough trigger words that they'd get intercepted and stored by GCHQ/NSA.
So if everything I do is going to get scanned, analysed, and correlated to NO benefit to me, why don't I let everything I do get analysed in a way that IS beneficial to me, by opening myself up to Google Now. It is incredibly convenient in ways you never expect.
It strikes me as far more logical to take all the benefits that I can, rather than crippling my internet functionality for an illusionary increase in privacy.
When I CAN guarantee total privacy in what I do online, I'll jump at it, but for the moment, I don't see what I've got to lose.
"I doubt we'll hear anything more from him. Russia has made it clear that they expect him to keep his mouth shut"
I wonder is this for the best - he's already given all the information he has to the WP and Guardian (they're taking their time to publish it at their leisure), so the if he stops talking it won't stop the information getting out. But it stops the story from being about him, and moves it back to being focused on the NSA & co.
"sparse documentation"
I was under the impression it was hefty documentation in this case (more-so than before). But of course if they only publish excerpts from the docs, I can only take their word for that, and can't argue against you.
*sigh* If only it was possible to organise a massive, coordinated/distributed reverse engineering attempt, to try and figure out what the hell is really getting intercepted and stored, and what's not...
Reading the blog post makes it all the more understandable why companies like Google take the PR hit of shutting down popular services that aren't a clear benefit for their core purpose, even if the financial costs of keeping it running aren't significant.
Keeping old services running must continually gum up the management process of the overall operation, and really tie-up good personnel that could be better utilised elsewhere...
Good point!
Rather than it getting lost in the comments, it's probably worth you sending email to lpage@theregister.co.uk, reminding them about that for the future!
El Reg is never normally shy of repeatedly kicking tech companies in the teeth to make sure things like that are never forgetten!
As I'm sure Mark '...Bitch' Zuckerberg would attest!
Yes! Unreal was exceptional - I've loved every game in the series except Unreal2, but Half Life was released in the same year, but is surely the best single player FPS game ever. So many scenes from it stick in the memory, and anytime I hear the menu, health or charging sound effects, I'm instantly taken back to being lost in damp tunnels looking anxiously for head crabs -This doesn't happen me with Unreal.
Bizarrely, both games somewhat lose the plot 75% of the way through!
Audio doesn't take up that much space, especially with compression. Even in the 70s you could encode intelligible speech with well less than 5kbit/ second, just using delta modulation. And you don't have to store the silence between words that presumably makes up the bulk of most phone calls.
Even without compression - assuming 8kB/sec* it's still more than feasible - here's a back of the envelope estimate someone did (I suspect he's underestimated the number of phonecalls): http://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-phonecalls-made-in-a-year-in-cloud-storage-so-it-could-be-datamined/
It's running the analysis that'd be a PITA - that would be a phenomenal amount of processing power - and would obviously need more processing power the more compression had been applied to the audio. Again, though, given the surprising fact that storing all the phone calls for a year is feasible, there's probably ways to optimise it!
*(that'd be 8bit, 8kHz PCM mono uncompressed - a tad better than normal phone quality)
yep. I'm willing to believe it's a case of mostly well meaning people creating something that has unintended consequences. Like you say, they're probably all like Reg readers - many probably ARE Reg readers. We're all guilty at some point, of going too far with tech solutions to meet our own goals as programmers, admins, etc, etc and losing sight of the big picture for other stakeholders. It's no different here.
The issue is that if it's that easy for someone like Snowden to release info of that's in our interest, then it's a real problem if someone who's not as well meaning gets his hands on the data (or is in charge of the data). It doesn't matter if it was made FOR the quelling of dissidence, it's the fact it could easily be used to do so that's the the issue.
Incidentally, does anyone know how well paid the NSA folk are? I know it's been said here repeatedly that GCHQ pay pittance.
"If there were a better way to get around, something would have evolved it."
That doesn't stand to reason. Animals have evolved dozens of ways to get around. Flying, bouncing, jumping, slithering, jet propulsion(-ing), swimming, wading, squirming, crawling, hitchhiking...
Some animals that have evolved "wheel" type mechanisms for use during escapes, as it's the quickest way to get down a hill, with zero energy use.
However the reason it hasn't evolved as a means of movement is that, in situations other than these gravity propelled systems (where the entire animal rotates), the wheels would have to turn independent of the body of the animal. That would mean the animals evolving a completely different anatomy, and the intermediate stages of this evolution would not offer any advantages to the animal, and instead huge disadvantages.
Yep. They were certainly designed as bunker-busters, so they needed a high level of accuracy. It surprised me too. Perhaps the sheer density of it means its momentum over rules the aerodynamics? But I remember reading about its accuracy from a reliable source*
*a google search is throwing up plenty of questionable sources saying 25ft, but I can't find this reliable source. Don't purchase an Orbital Kinetic Bombardment system without doing your own due diligence.
Nope. You're wrong. Satellite parts routinely survive reentry, and they're flimsy compared to a solid tungsten telegraph pole.
This technique isn't merely a thought experiment - they would impact with the severity of a tactical nuclear missile, with accuracy measured in feet with existing technology, and have been considered for deployment by the US military - The only reason they haven't been is that it's too.expensive to get that amount of mass into space.
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