Posts by druck

Wi-Fi baby heart monitor may have the worst IoT security of 2016

Re: Prize winning security

Maybe AC works for an IOT company.

Decade-old SSH vuln exploited by IoT botnet armies to hose servers

Quite often these devices don't support key only login. But if they do, it is better than using a password.

BT will HATE us for this one weird 5G trick

LED street light fail

We have 3 street lights near the house, and since they went LED the level of light is intolerable, and we've had to fit blackout curtains. They have also made the roads less safe at night for all users, as with the familiar orange street lighting you could tell if a vehicle was approaching while still around a corner, from the white light of the headlights, now the street lights are also white there is no extra warning.

What’s the link between Brexit, cloud and open source?

What's the Prize?

No gift, no graft!

NASA opens ISS to private sector modules

Time for a bit of renovation?

Once SpaceX (or other commecial companies) are able to do the ferrying of equipment and people up to the ISS, it might well be time to retire the Zarya and Zvezda modules. Firstly because they are the oldest, and secondly how long can we continue to work with the Russians the way things are going? They did threaten to fly them off and form their own station if the ISS was privatised, so good luck to them.

UK cops failed to act on Canadian intel on child abuse

No Ore

Well taking time to consider whether its genuine evidence, has got to be better than just jumping in and arresting everyone who had used a particular payment gateway like they did with Operation Ore - resulting in 33 suicides, and thousands of ruined lives.

Roboats hunt 'mines' and 'submarines' on Ex Unmanned Warrior

Re: These devices are why it pointless to spend billions on 3 or 4 new nuclear subs

They used to chuck thousands of sonar bouys out the back of Nimrods to track Russian subs in the north sea. I company I worked for in the 90s was involved in the automated database that recorded where they were dropped. Deployment by little drones isn't going to give that sort of coverage, and the sonar bouys only work when they at depth in the "sound channel", so how they get there isn't important.

Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA. Repeat, Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA

XScale not just a StrongARM

No, Intel developed the DEC's wonderful StrongARM further, somehow managing to end up with the lowest instructions per clock of any contemporary ARM architecture variant, with lots of needless register use barriers. Let's hope they just leave the ARM core the hell alone this time.

Skype for Linux users can crash-test video calls in v1.10 Alpha

Not forgotten - deleted

I forgot I had Skype on a couple of Windows laptops, until on several occasions I found it had just started up on its own, without being in any of the start-up methods. This Windows 10 style force it down your throat whether you want it running or not, prompted me to seek it out and delete it from everything I own. So there is no way I'm going to any version of Skype near my Linux systems.

Internet of Things botnets: You ain’t seen nothing yet

Bleedin obvious advice

Always put IOT devices behind a router with a good firewall, and turn off uPNP so they can't worm their own way out.

Linus Torvalds says ARM just doesn't look like beating Intel

Re: ARM is not very popular as desktop

It night not be very popular, but I've been using one ARM desktop or another since 1989, and doing ARM on ARM development with them.

Re: Is Linus's vision really this narrow?

Well you could say Linus doesn't have that good a crystal ball for seeing the future, take his very first post about Linux back in '91:-

It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

Linux today works on a slightly larger variety of hardware and architectures :-)

Turkey blocks Drive, Github, OneDrive in bid to kill RedHack leaks

Re: Not an expert

Wanting free trade in Turkish products* is a little different to allowing 70 million more people the right to live in the UK.

*Including leather goods, which are surprisingly high quality, and could sell in their own right without the fake designer labels.

Yahoo! spymasters! patent! biometric! online! ad! tracking! IRL!

Billboard Blocker Plus?

"But while these billboards represent a step in the direction of the digital age, they lag far behind their online counterparts in a number of respects," Yahoo! says in its patent application.

Well just like online, we are going to have to come up with ad blockers for billboards now.

US govt straight up accuses Russia of hacking prez election

Re: The proof is in the reciprocity of Russian foreign policy

@AC - the UK's membership of the G7 and UN Security council doesn't count then?

Re: The proof is in the reciprocity of Russian foreign policy

@Yet another EUtard AC.

I for one am glad we are leaving the isolationist bubble of EU membership, and will be able to resume our position as an independent country at the top table of nations, where we can have a direct influence such matters. As opposed to first having to try to hammer our a common position with 27 other states holding wildly different views, and then let a vast inflexible bureaucracy do the talking for us.

Early indications show UK favouring 'hard Brexit', says expert

Re: Three things you can do about this Brexit nonsense

Once Article 50 is triggered there are only two outcomes, we leave with a deal in place, or we leave without one.

If there was any possibility of the UK parliament voting to stay if it didn't like the deal, what sort of deal do you think Europe would offer? They'd offer even less than the sod all they are promising out of spite at the moment.

Re: Three things you can do about this Brexit nonsense

How about these three things:-

The majority has voted to leave, there isn't going to be another referendum, get over it.

Or these three things:-

You can either try make a success of it, carry on whinging forever, or emigrate to your beloved Europe.

AT&T pilots dedicated IoT mobile network

Re: If your IoT things...

IOT devices needing their own cell connection such as smart meters, shouldn't be using over 1GB a month. Voice recognition devices should be using WiFi and a land line. But what does LTE-M offer for the extra cost over the standard network? Guaranteed QOS? Other magic fairy dust?

Or is this just another way of screwing the users of smart meters, not only do you have to pay for the meter itself, but now have the cost of a super expensive data connection passed on to you as well.

GDS shouting matches so severe team takes to talking by hand signals

I'd like to use a hand signal to pass on to GDS our appreciation of how little they are doing with £450,000,000 of our tax monies ------------------------------------------>

Ofcom kicks off 5G auction consultation

First they steal terrestrial TV frequencies, now satellite comms.

There are other things than bloody mobiles.

Google's home tat falls flat as a soufflé – but look out Android makers

Chands wrote:

Because of course the SD card is going to be as quick as internal flash. NOT. I've used a class 10 SD card on my phone and notice the apps working noticeably slower on SD rather than internal.

What crap! It really doesn't matter, just put all your old photos and vast music collection on an SD card, which is plenty fast enough for this, and keep the phones memory for applications which need quicker storage.

The web is past peak innovation: It's all negative returns from here

@Wilseus

Get a microwave leak detector, as the seals on a 40 year old model are likely to be shot. That may also be why your WiFi gets slower when heating up a meal!

Dutch bicycle company pretends to be television company

Re: Doesn’t always work

It didn't work for me, I got a 48" for a bargain from Tesco Outlet via ebay, and while the box didn't show any obvious signs of damage, the top left hand corner was smashed. They were out that model, but offered to replace it with 43" smart TV, which managed to get delivered unscathed. While it was a few inches smaller, it does allow my children to watch endless loops of CBeebies programs on iPlayer, and Toy Story films on Amazon Prime.

Plusnet outage leaves customers unable to stream Netflix. Horrors!

Not all bad

Well I've been lucky and not experienced any of the current problems. Got a phone call yesterday from PN offering to upgrade me from the 52/9 (previously 38/19) to the 76/18 service, for £2.50 a month less than I'm currently paying. It was supposed to start from next month, but it's gone live today!

Yes, I'm always complaining about the lack of encrypted emails, but the increased upload speed will make fetching emails via a VPN much faster.

Wow, RIP hackers ... It's Cyber-Lord Blunkett to the rescue for UK big biz

Re: Ah, it's the same guy that gave us Job Centre Plus

And he is the despicable individual that did the most to try to introduce ID cards under the Blair government.

Steer well clear of anything he is involved in.

Brits: Can banks do biometric security? We'd trust them before the government

Re: I wouldn't expect

The banks will claim that cross referencing against the police database isn't possible as they only store a hash of the fingerprint, and not the full data*. However, there is nothing to stop the police taking their full fingerprint record from the database and performing the same hashing operation on it, then matching against the banks hashes.

* The company implementing fingerprint verification for to replace library cards and meal payments at my wife's school also tried to peddle nonsense, so it's pretty widespread in the industry.

Re: Am I too cynical?

Nick Ryan wrote:

This is the same Visa that has the totally waste of time and annoying "Verified by Visa" "security" program? Quite apart from the lack of real security where the entire password is stored in plain text somewhere (otherwise asking for character 1, 2 and 3 of the password wouldn't be possible)

I've never seen Verified By Visa ask for anything other than the full password, where as several of my bank do ask for single characters

What Verified By Visa would do is silently ignore anything after the 10th character when setting up the password, but then fail verification if more than 10 characters were entered. I didn't realise this was why my 12 character passwords were failing, so I used to just do a password reset every time too.

Two Sundays wrecked by boss who couldn't use a calendar

Re: Powering up in the right order

alannorthants wrote:

The problem with this is that it is an incredibly complex problem to solve (you have to define all of the hardware and software dependencies in order to allow the systems to restart in the correct order) and requires some specialised equipment to automate the equipment power-on.

Networked PDU's aren't that specialised. Each socket can be controlled by sending commands over ssh.

Google: There are three certainties in life – death, taxes and IPv6

Re: Try getting IPv6 from any major ISP's.

No sign of PlusNet having IPv6, but then we are still waiting for any form of encryption on email protocols - for about 8 years now.

Azure is on fire, your DNS is terrified

Re: The cloud strikes again

ma1010 wrote:

Someday perhaps I'll understand why people and businesses want to put their own data on computers that belong to some corporation in some distant location which depend on the Internet to work at all.

But even if you can conjurer a justification for using the cloud, why that could? Some company with a massive IT infrastructure who decides to make some money on the side by renting it out as a cloud perhaps. But a company who's very foundation is a blood sucking leech like vendor lock-in, and continuous turning of the screw on licences, has now built a cloud - isn't the alarm bells ringing?

Nest offers its thermostat in three new pretty colors!

Re: Fuck that

Bullseyed wrote:

I'd like a camera to monitor the inside and outside of my chicken coop. I'm not going to buy and run a server to do that.

A server is no longer some big noisy power hungry box covered in blinkenlights, a Raspberry Pi for a couple of quid is all you need, and you can run it off a battery too.

UK Labour man Owen Smith: If you wanna be a leader, you gotta stop with that lens

Tweeting logins are the least of the man's worries. Despite the large proportion of Labour supporters who voted for Brexit, he wants to fight the next election with a policy of rejoining the EU - which would mean no opt outs, no rebate, and having to join the Euro - even the most rabid remainder would have to admit we'd be vastly worse off with that deal than currently.

Spoof an Ethernet adapter on USB, and you can sniff credentials from locked laptops

Re: Yes, that's one of the bad design decisions of USB

Christian Berger wrote:

Obviously the sane way to go would be to have dedicated ports again. Connect printers and scanners via Ethernet, connect input devices via some sort of overclocked PS/2, and have a special port for mass storage devices. That way you could essentially eliminate all harmful device spoofing...

That wouldn't stop this at all, as long as its port you can plug a programmable device in to the port, it can be compromised.

A better way would be to ensure that network cards are only recognised when plugged in to the machine's internal expansion bus. It takes a longer than 13 seconds to get the cover off the machine and swap a card over, can't be done when powered up, and is a lot more obvious to anyone watching.

Spinning that Brexit wheel: Regulation lotto for tech startups

Re: One day we will revisit this with hindsight

Warm Brew wrote:

If there is a genuine threat to dramatically increase the central EU budget, we can walk away from the EU at that point.

In case you hadn't realised we are leaving now.

And if, as has constantly been claimed, we can expand our trade perfectly well with the rest of the world on the basis of WTO tariffs for as long as is necessary, we can do this as easily within the EU as without while we see what transpires.

The deals we want to make are not on the basis of WTO tariffs, and we can't sign up to any sensible trade deal with non EU countries while in the EU.

OpenBSD 6.0 lands

Re: W^X is for weenies on Von Neuman machines

The StrongARM was the first ARM to have separate instruction and data caches with no automatic synchronisation, which broke execution of code written in to data areas as well as self modifying code, mainly affected games.

But with RISC OS being a friendly place with hardly any malware over its history, a friend of mine wrote a very clever bit of code called StrongGuard which detected attempts to execute code in memory that had been modified in the data cache, and synchronised the instruction cache. It the cache syncing was quite slow, but as the old code was coming from ARM 3/6/7s and the StrongARM was between 20x and 7x faster, games still had to be slowed down to be playable.

Europe to order Apple to cough up 'one beeellion Euros in back taxes'

Brian O'Byrne wrote:

The money goes to the Irish revenue commissioners, regardless of what happens elsewhere in the EU.

But then the EU will reassess Ireland's economic performance and send them a massive back tax bill, just as they did to the UK a couple of years ago.

Big data busts crypto: 'Sweet32' captures collisions in old ciphers

Change keys

Just make sure you negotiate a new session key after transferring significantly less than 2^64 bytes of data (say 2^30 bits).

Top digital Eurocrat issues non-denial about hyperlink non-tax

James51 wrote:

We don't leave the day Article 50 is involved, we leave at the earliest two years afterwards.

No, Article 50 is about negotiating a post exit trade agreement with the EU, which can take up to 2 years. The actual exit is achieved by repealing the 1972 European Communities Act, and the UK parliament can do that any time it likes.

Nuclear fallout shelter becomes cloud storage bunker

Re: Storage in Paris

The data might be safe underground, but you won't be able to access it if the employee's can't get in while the city is in lock down.

Xeon Phight! Phight! Phight! Nvidia says Intel cheated benchmarks

Re: Same old, same old.

Well, just follow the advertising revenue...

Same old, same old.

Expect Intel to rubbish ARMs in data centres with a comparison of the latest Xeon E7 verses the ARM2a in my old Acorn Archimedes 310.

Wanna build your own drone? Intel emits Linux-powered x86 brains for DIY flying gizmos

I blow raspberries at it

Nothing you couldn't do with a Raspberry Pi for a tenth of the price, and have more payload from not having carry around bigger batteries to power an Intel chip.

Microsoft: You liked Windows 10 so much, you'll get 2 more in 2017

Re: Only if it works.....

After you get board of looking at 91% for a few days, you'll power cycle the machine, it will then boot back up and say its restoring the previous OS. After another reboot, which will look fine right up until after you log in, you'll find a completely empty black screen with nothing running, not even the task bar. You can ctrl+alt+delete and bring up task manager, and use that to run other things, but that's it. No amount of trying to use Windows 10 boot repair will fix it.

If you then are contemplating a OS reinstall, make it Linux Mint this time, you wont look back.

Perlan 2: The glider that will slip the surly bonds of Earth – and touch the edge of space

Re: 90,000 feet

Gliders are the cyclists of the sky; hard to see, unpredictable, and many display no respect for the rules everyone else sharing the sky has to follow.

Also just like with any article on cycling which causes the two wheeled militants come out in force, it seems the gliderists are flocking to the site to down vote any GA pilot talking sense.

Well down vote away, at least while you are pressing buttons down here, you wont be terrorizing others up there.

Simply not credible: The extraordinary verdict against the body that hopes to run the internet

The New FIFA

I'm waiting to see if Sepp Blatter gets made the new life president of ICANN, after all, there is no one else more qualified.

Windows 10: Happy with Anniversary Update?

Re: Don't care!

Not upgrading to Windows 10 is a bit like Brexit. When the EU announces more harmful directives aimed at creating all encompassing super-state, you can just sit back and be glad you got off that train at the last station.

RM to resell Apple, Lenovo, HP, Dell to YOUR children

Schools should have..

...stuck with Acorn. ARM based tablets would have happened a decade earlier, and UK IT education would have still been the envy of the world.

Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate

I don't know what I was smoking yesterday...

...but I decided to try to upgrade an old Windows 7 HP Pavillion laptop, on the basis I'd just put an SSD in it, and still had the original disc in case it went tits up.

This was despite trying out Windows 10 on an even older HP netbook about 6 months ago. I kept finding it switched on after doing upgrades in the middle of the night until finally one upgrade got stuck, and after rebooting, it supposedly rolled itself back, then it booted to an empty desktop. Attempts to repair it resulted to it not booting at all, so now it runs Mint+Mate faster and better than it ever did with any flavour of Windows.

On the laptop just like with the netbook the automatic upgrade downloaded 3GB, took hours to get to 87% then stayed there indefinitely, and on rebooting returned to Windows 7. I still had the media creation tool on an SD card from trying to fix the netbook, so tried that, but luckily it wouldn't accept the 100% genuine licence key from the sticker on the machine, and that brought me to my senses.

Now W10 is no longer free, I'll never be tempted to try it again.

Seagate's south UK factory hasn't a future but HDDs do (it hopes)

Re: Sad day for Havant, Portsmouth, and Hayling Island

You can't blame this on Brexit, it's a dying technology.

Although if the EU was more concerned about technology than agriculture, we could have been enjoying paying £2000 a family per year to subsidise the Common Storage Policy, allowing French peasant engineers to still make magnetic core store to add to the European data mountain.