Posts by FrankAlphaXII

NASA's classic worm logo returns for first all-American trip to ISS in years: Are you a meatball or a squiggly fan?

I'm actually from the Space Coast, I lived there for about 30 years, and I've never liked the Worm Logo. It sucked then and still sucks now. When they brought the meatball back (mostly to cover up the Bicentennial Star on the VAB, more than 20 years after 1976) it was a great day. The meatball looks much better, the Worm looked like something a Federal Agency would come up with to look "sci-fi" and "cool"

'That's here. That's home. That's us': It's 30 years since Voyager 1 looked back and squinted at a 'Pale Blue Dot'

Rights issues probably. Unlike the other US Federal military and paramilitary organizations NASA's images aren't in the public domain for most uses, and they're very particular about employees being used in commercial material.

From their media usage guidelines:

NASA Content Used for Commercial Purposes

For more information on using NASA content for commercial purposes, please read NASA Advertising Guidelines. Any questions regarding use of NASA content, or any NASA image or emblem should be directed to Bert Ulrich of the Multimedia Division of NASA's Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For information on NASA involvement in documentaries and films, please see documentary and fictional film project guidelines.

If the NASA material is to be used for commercial purposes, including advertisements, it must not explicitly or implicitly convey NASA's endorsement of commercial goods or services.

If a NASA image includes an identifiable person, using the image for commercial purposes may infringe that person's right of privacy or publicity, and permission should be obtained from the person.

Current NASA employees, including astronauts, may not appear in commercial material.

Commercials and promotional content cannot be filmed on NASA property

If I'm not mistaken, Dr. Porco is currently an employee on the Solar System exploration committee so unless they go find her CalTech faculty official photo, which may also be copyright, its not something they can use.

You know the President is able to shut down all US comms, yeah? An FCC commish wants to stop him from doing that

Sounds like typical CoG/ECG stuff to me, and that should scare you

Continuity of Government's something I know real well, working in the emergency management field. There's some really terrifying shit in the CEFR (Code of Emergency Federal Regulations) and the (mostly) classified annexes to NSPD-51, Enduring Constitutional Government and others scattered throughout the various executive orders, CFR and USC. I'll leave you with this, and I'll say they don't make em like Senator Frank Church anymore:

"The President has the power to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, call reserve forces amounting to 2 1/2 million men to duty, institute martial law, seize and control all menas of transportation, regulate all private enterprise, restrict travel, and in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all Americans...

Most [of these laws] remain a a potential source of virtually unlimited power for a President should he choose to activate them. It is possible that some future President could exercise this vast authority in an attempt to place the United States under authoritarian rule.

While the danger of a dictatorship arising through legal means may seem remote to us today, recent history records Hitler seizing control through the use of the emergency powers provisions contained in the laws of the Weimar Republic."

--Joint Statement, Sens. Frank Church (D-ID) and Charles McMathias (R-MD) September 30, 1973

Alphabet's 'love rat' legal chief David Drummond ejects after 18 years at web goliath, no golden parachute attached

Re: Or Brooks, "It's good to be the king."

I don't think anyone's suggesting anything non-consentual, at least I didn't read anything non-consentual into his behavior. At the same time abandoning your child while he's ill to go have a threesome in SF with some side-chick(s) is a pretty trashy thing to do though, no matter how you measure it.

Scumbag lawyer for a scumbag company acts like a scumbag. In other news, Ursines defecate in the woods and the Bishop of Rome is Catholic. Film at 11.

Service call centres to become wasteland and tumbleweed by 2024

Automated service management and the elimination of the contact center is just like the supposedly paperless office, they keep saying its going to happen, and then create five new forms. Considering how fucking clueless end-users and automatic troubleshooters are, I don't think those of us who work in any kind of customer facing tech support position have anything to worry about.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Good job Arizona!

You'd figure Arizona, a very conservative and pro-business state, the home of Barry Goldwater and John McCain, would be the last in the Southwest to do something like this. It sounds like garbage from the People's Republic to the west.

I wonder how many Electrical Engineers who are working as contractors or direct reports at Intel, Micron, the Air Force or Fort Huachuca/US Army Intelligence and Security Command should be very afraid that some tin-pot bureaucrat with all the power of a petty czar might just decide to scour linkedin and come after them too for the high crime of misuse of a non-regulated title.

It just blows my mind, its something that New Mexico would likely do, and something Nevada would do if there was a means of laundering money in it, but then again, we kind of value having two national labs, two directorates of the Air Force Research Lab and an Intel fab, pissing off engineers isn't exactly conducive to being a competitive place for that.

I'll tell you what, what the Navajo ought to do is let Arizona know they're full of shit and that this gentleman is welcome to continue being an electrical engineer for hire from their territory, and if New Mexico's State Government or one of the Pueblo Governments was smart, we'd do the same.

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Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

Re: Have to ask...

Very true. Old timers around here would probably agree that he's almost as predictable as Eadon was in that regard. Bob's more entertaining though, I rarely agree with him but every now and then he's got some diamonds of wisdom mixed in with the turds.

Mike drop, DXC-ya later! Lawrie immediately ejects as CEO from IT outsourcing giant

Re: Accenture was not tied to Enron

"The market will decide whether the company lives or dies. And that's fair enough"

Wow. You must actually believe that. How cute.

Or, more hopefully anyway, is that a code for "vacuous corporate raiding investors who don't know what they're doing aside from screwing over the employees and long term investors, and have no business having anything to do with how a corporation behaves dictate whether a company lives or dies"?

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

How does a third equal single figures?

See title.

My math isn't the greatest but two thirds of a hundred would be 66.66... the remainder of that would be 33. That's not single digits, and I strongly doubt that IE has anywhere near that high of a marketshare except in corporate environments where crappy halfbaked enterprise software still requires it.

Just sayin'

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

I'm sure it's been said...

But the only meaning of the word Gimp that I know is a slang term for a submissive in a BDSM context.

To put it in San Franciscan: They're kink-shaming and erasing the identity of those that participate in a BDSM lifestyle by changing the name to this, so I suggest the "Digital Object Manipulation and Mastering Experience", or DOMME. It gets rid of any ableist baggage and allows those involved in BDSM to proudly identify with the project.....

Yes yes, I'll see myself out. Mine's the one with the riding crop in the pocket.

Outraged Virgin slaps IP trolls over dirty movie download data demands

I think I've seen this movie before

This is basically what Prenda was doing isn't it? Buying copyrights to smut, seeding it, and then threatening to sue people who allegedly downloaded it.

I hope the same thing happens with these upstanding parasites too.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

Think of the Children (and the spies!)

Its very telling that the UK's ISPA is so dead set against this, because it'll make collection efforts targeting the unencrypted DNS by GCHQ that much harder. I expect that the usual suspects here in the US will as well, especially ARTIFICE (Verizon) and LITHIUM (AT&T). And unlike President Annoying Orange here who thinks that NSA/CSS and the rest of the TLAs are out to get him, neither Johnson nor Hunt is that paranoid over in your little slice of hell.

Facebook staff sarin for a bad day: Suspected chemical weapon parcel sent to Silicon Valley HQ

BW not CW

Huh. I'm kind of amazed that none of the pedants here have pointed this out yet, but Ricin's a Biological Weapon, its specifically a type of protein called a Lectin from the castor bean, and its horrendously lethal. Inhaled LD50 is like 3-5 µg/kg.

Re: Go crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy...

In case you non-Punks miss the reference:

Dead Kennedys - Chemical Warfare

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

FTFY

You forgot something, Apple offered a breakthrough, game-changing and exceptional multi-axis monitor orientation device at a more than reasonable price with enhanced privacy features that far outpace the VESA stand competition.

San Francisco votes no to facial-recognition tech for cops, govt – while its denizens create it

One rule for me, another for thee...

Seems to be the Bay Area mantra.

Sure, they'll fuck everything up for you, but don't count on seeing any of the bullshit they're inflicting on the rest of the world there because they're too preciously diverse and woke for it. Outside of California its foreign policy, amirite?

Ignore the noise about a scary hidden backdoor in Intel processors: It's a fascinating debug port

Re: Hmm.

The way I read it was that it not only required root, it required physical access on top of it, and that's a step above even root.

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Working as a continuity and emergency management contractor I can tell you no matter how good any professional is, devs included, if its not specified and outlined, its not getting done, that likely takes extra work/extra time and nobody rides for free. Plus, there may be a reason for why they didn't ask for it. It might be a stupid reason but its still not worth giving away your time and labor when it very well might just aggravate the client since it wasn't something they asked for. Maybe they're regulated and have to have things done a certain way (PCI, SOX, HIPAA, Title 13, EO 13526) or have security measures that you don't have need to know for that they'll add later.

None of this is to defend shitty practices, bad code, or bad QA, but when you're not told it needs to be done and you're getting paid a pittance even if you think its utterly stupid to not do whatever, it probably won't get done unless you run into the world's dumbest freelancer.

Academics publishing papers, who are universally seeking tenure (which is about the antithesis of temporary or freelance work), are probably the absolute fucking last people I'd ask about anything to do with a freelance job or the gig economy.

Ever used VFEmail? No? Well, chances are you never will now: Hackers wipe servers, backups in 'catastrophic' attack

Re: The first rule of backups

I always thought the first rule of backups was that if you don't validate your backups, you don't actually have one.

Re: Um

Of course, in the US Kangaroo Court system its the appeal series that actually matters.

Almost £5k for a deskslab: Microsoft's Surface Studio 2 hits UK

Workstation prices for consumer hardware, no thanks

For more than a Z4 or Z6 workstation with Xeon processors and Quadro GPU hardware, the pricing on this thing is insane and it doesn't look like its all that serviceable given how small the chassis is. I mean I could be wrong, there are small form factor PCs out there that are just as easy to work on as a traditional tower but I don't know for certain and I'm not likely to find out, since most people I know would buy the workstation, a gaming PC, or a Mac instead.

Its obviously targeting the more money than sense and form over function crowd like a good deal of Apple's garbage, and while the tilty display thing is sort of interesting, it looks like its something that can get messed up easily and definitely not worth almost $5k for older hardware.

Mumsnet data leak: Moaning parents could see other users' privates after cloud migration

Re: Mumsnet penetrated

I know they had an issue with Heartbleed, but I'm not sure anyone actually exploited it. To be fair, its a forum for middle age (mostly) women to whine about everything wrong with society and those damned kids, its not quite a financial institution or communications provider.

Dear humans, We thought it was time we looked through YOUR source code. We found a mystery ancestor. Signed, the computers

Re: Seen this plot before

Gotta keep an eye on your girdlesprings and the side-warbling that they cause when installed too close to the gargleblaster.

See Icon Description

It was the exaterrestrials. We'll call 'em Lemurians, unless that's copyrighted by the Theosophical Society or the OTO. If that's the case we'll call them the Star Fairy Tribe.

I'll write a detailed description of why with tons of pseudoscience and occult crap for the low, low price of 39.95, paid monthly.

Who cracked El Chapo's encrypted chats and brought down the Mexican drug kingpin? Er, his IT manager

Re: The FBI paid him back in return for his services

It tends to suffice, this is the kind of guy that the Marshals don't move to a place like San Diego, Phoenix, Vegas, Los Angeles or Albuquerque on an S visa. He's a sysadmin that ran part of the communications infrastructure of a multinational criminal organization, it won't be too hard to find him a job.

Unless he does something on the more stupid end of the spectrum, like stay in touch with sketchy family members who are in the cartel or prone to being violently or non-violently influenced by them, he'll likely be fine somewhere like Cour d'Alene or Springfield, MA working for one of the Native American development corporations like on one of their non-classified government contracts so the USMS can keep tabs on him easier.

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

Re: Very, very nice

Psh....They want Windows 10.

Why? Simple. Its the best, Windowsiest semi-intelligent phone OS evurr!!

Poor people should get slower internet speeds, American ISPs tell FCC

Its a lefty-liberal plot!

>>"....not to promote competition among multiple providers in areas already receiving adequate service"

Because free markets are Socialism!

If we have competition in the market the next thing you know they'll be taking our guns, raising taxes and forcing our poor, downtrodden and horribly persecuted billionaires to pay more than a minimum wage laborer, which will lead to those hateful democRATs forcing us to eat tofu and bean sprouts made by married homosexuals while praying to the Marxist Islamo-Mexican devil and Lenin, before finally herding us into Soros-brand death trains to the FEMA death camps guarded by black helicopter flying UN troops from Venezuela and some other shithole countries that I don't know the name of! Sad!

MAGA! Lock her up!

Make sure President Putin Trump protects those poor, patriotic, and long suffering communications companies like Comcast, AT&T and Spectrum from possibly having to give up even 5 cents of their hard earned billions of dollars in profits a year by competition based on their merits! Do you love freedom, apple pie, processed cheese, the Grand Old Party, baseball and America? Or do you want the Islamic Mexican-Canadians, RINOs and Soros to win?

If you love America, then do everything you can to save Comcast from having to provide adequate services to the poor, because if you don't, the immigrants taking our jobs and women win and we're all headed to the camps.

(I hope its clear but this is pure sarcasm. It was hard to write but I hear this kind of shit on a daily basis from the idiots I'm surrounded by)

Lenovo superdishes not-so-superdosh for Superfish superloss: $40 waiting for you if you bought adware laptop

That they do, even if you blow away the four(!) "recovery" partitions.

I bought a Lenovo once, right around when they did this Superfish bullshit. It was the first and the last time. This thing had four extra partitions, only one of which had recovery data on it. Its not like the other three had something like a UEFI hardware diagnostic program (like what HP's been doing on their Probooks and Elitebooks for a while now) either. There was something on them, it was big enough to have a full headless OS and then some on all three extra partitions.

Being the not exactly paranoid, but not exactly clueless, person that I am, I started digging around and asking what the deal was. Funny thing is that I've yet to get a straight answer about what it was from the manufacturer. Lenovo have told me several different stories about them and none of them make sense. Fortunately the HDD failed after about a year and its been a paperweight ever since. I never trusted that machine because of any of that and I won't ever buy another from them.

Dell may have awful support and abysmal components, and HP are fucking expensive (if you want decent warranty support anyway) with only marginally better components, but neither one of them fling malware at you if you format the hard drives because the installer stubs are hard coded into their firmware.

IBM's Ginni Rometty snipes, er, someone for being irresponsible with data, haven't a clue who

>>You have to wonder are they a tech company any more?

No, they're an acquisitions company (see: Red Hat) that dabbles in Mainframes and buzzword laden marketing, as well as their semi-lucrative business of selling parts of itself to Lenovo.

How one programmer's efforts to stop checking in buggy code changed the DevOps world

Re: 'Unimpressed by Oracle'

I think that Oracle just has more money than sense, which isn't an uncommon condition around tech companies.

Plus they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to management and stewardship of most, if not all, of their non-proprietary projects. It certainly seems like everything they touch that wasn't invented by them they lead to ruin, or they make things so difficult for developers and users to deal with that it winds up killing whatever project or product. At least with FOSS, you can usually fork it.

About the only exceptions I can think of are Java and ZFS, and even that's complicated.

Re: Jenkins?

I've done volunteer QA on a number of FOSS projects and I'd have to agree, but its still something to be encouraged to the development teams.

No, looking over your own code is not really QAing it, but it does help us out if the developer takes a few minutes to have a look at their work before we get it so any obvious issues get fixed and we don't have to waste our time on them.

It doesn't always work out that way (especially with some developers who behave as if they shit excellence and piss greatness, and act like finding a bug and suggesting a fix is a personal attack on their character) but it is helpful and can save a lot of time.

Dell upping its margins again: Precision 5530 laptop will sting you for $13m. Yep, six zeroes

Re: It's an Apple move

It was because of the way that the forces were color coded at the Louisiana Maneuvers just before the US entered the second world war.

Traditionally, the British Army and the Armies of its dominions and colonies (especially India) was colored red or pink, and it still is if you look at their flag. Blue (or sometimes Black) were always the enemy. The Prussians/Imperial Germans and Russians wore blue, as did the French. The British Army always made plans to deal with any of them hence the OPFOR color was blue. Matched the uniforms.

General Douglas MacArthur, control freak that he was, convinced General Marshall, Admirals Stark and King, and even FDR that it was some British or in some versions Nazi, Japanese or general communist bullshit (or to remind Stalin who was top dog in yet other versions of the story) and that he demanded the US War Department start color coding our forces blue on our maps with the enemy being red. OPFOR became red, and is still red to this day (I was in an OPFOR unit, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, as my first permanent party assignment. We're always red on the BLUFOR maps and such at NTC) which was convenient in the Cold War given the Soviet propensity to use the color red.

Green are neutrals which we consider friendly but don't have any kind of operational control over. We tend to use it nowadays for Islamic governments and movements that we usually have a strategic alignment with (since they tend to use green in their symbols) like the Iraqi Army and the ANA/ANP, with the Jihadis and Iranian SOF being colored black or red depending on who they are and who's doing the coding. I've also seen purple being used for them, usually for stuff like the Mahdi Army and Iranian militias in Iraq/Syria or Hekmatyar's people in Afghanistan because while we've had to kill them in the past and they're still not really "friendly" and you probably don't want to lead a patrol through their territory, they're not usually trying to shoot at us or bomb us....for the moment anyway.

We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

So what? You can install whatever DE you want anyway.

I've been using KDE a long time, I use it on FreeBSD and even on TrueOS, and if I'm ever forced back onto using Linux for anything its a simple su dnf install @kde-desktop-environment away.

'Pure technical contributions aren’t enough'.... Intel commits to code of conduct for open-source projects

So, in other words, a way to eliminate competition for wrongthink and thought-police everyone else. Lovely.

While you shouldn't act like a dick or ask others to put up with someone being a dick, these things are just a way for people fluent in HR-speak and manglementese to eliminate people they feel are a threat to their agenda using the banner of inclusion and diversity. Can't have precious feelings getting hurt now can we? Unless you happen to be white, a man, or heterosexual, then you're the unholy trinity and can go fuck yourself.

There's something I've learned from working in the real world, rarely does a place that actually gives a shit about diversity and inclusion have to shout about it unless someone's using it as a way to get rid of threats to their position. I don't see AMD going "full SJW" (I hate the term but if the shoe fits) and they're run by a middle aged Asian woman.

And its cute that Intel's doing this. Go to any of their Fabs and take a look at just who's working there. All the empty virtue signaling in the world doesn't change the fact that they ran a lot of women out in the past couple of years while keeping a CEO around who had been fucking one of the female techs that they laid off.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Might be a REALLYgood time to fork CentOS before IBM pulls an OpenSolaris on it. Same thing with Fedora.

Kind of sad really, when I used Linux CentOS and Fedora were my go-to distros.

London flatmate (Julian Assange) sues landlord (government of Ecuador) in human rights spat

Re: "Iron Mike Pence"

Maybe in Pence's own mind, if he can string a coherent sentence together that someone didn't write for him and I have my doubts about that.

I've been saying that exact same thing since the whole fiasco started.

It just shows how much our "friend" here knows about geopolitics. Sweden isn't a NATO member. The Swedes used to try to get radar locks on the SR-71 back in the 80's and were successful a number of times when they got the SAAB JA-37. The UK is and has been since the beginning, they're also one of the stronger members of the Alliance which has a definite interest in keeping the US happy. Sweden also has a fairly tough extradition treaty with the US, and I doubt they'd extradite someone over what can be considered a Political crime or allow an extraordinary rendition on their territory.

The UK has a very loose extradition treaty with the US, where basically if Uncle Sam wants your ass they're going to get you from the UK in all but a very few and long fought cases. And I strongly doubt that there would be much, if any, resistance from the Security Service or whatever you call Special Branch nowadays to the CIA yanking someone off the street.

And really, even if the US decided to say fuck it and sent somebody to kill him, they'd do it, embassy or not. The Special Collection Service and/or the artist formerly known as US Army Intelligence Support Activity have quite likely been inside the embassy he lives in while he's been living there. They're very good at it. Ecuador isn't a huge target, but they do have a number of human and drug trafficking routes which do warrant some attention. Simply put, If they wanted him dead, he would be but he's not that important, however much he thinks he is.

Assange is a prick, but this is insane. Something I learned when I was a kid is that you don't shit on your own block unless you're prepared for the consequences. Apparently our six toed alleged rapist never learned that very important lesson.

If I were Ecuador's foreign ministry I'd have a few burly diplomatic security types toss him out the front door into the waiting arms of the filth.

Given the constant state of anarchy and systemic attention deficit disorder that the Trump administration embodies, they would likely never even notice unless someone from the Met goes on Fox and Friends to talk about it, and I really don't think that CIA's SAD or JSOC are about to go do wetwork in the UK.

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

I'm glad that bodily fluids and wastes have always been outside of my scope of support or would immediately void a warranty, and in the Military we weren't too concerned about any of our collection devices getting pissed on (or shit on for that matter), considering that birds really liked building nests on the fixed ones and they're not the cleanest animals in the world.

That syncing feeling when you realise you may be telling Google more than you thought

Re: ADD Another FYI

Yep, and Alliance Data's Epsilon owns Abacus, the ad database that nobody knows about which Doubleclick also owned.

I'd honestly be more worried about Alliance Data Systems than Google. Google gets scrutinized. Alliance really does not and they have so much data on everyone that it would make your head spin, and a huge majority (basically everything that isn't in their credit card business) of it isn't secured all that well

Re: Automatic Sign-in? How else can Google get us:

You're not missing much on Medium besides a lot of whining from spoiled millennials who think that not getting their way or that their free range organic latte and avocado toast is cold is racism and/or sexism and that the world owes them a free ride when they've never worked a day in their mollycoddled lives, so consider it a blessing in disguise.

I've found that people who are actually doing something about actual injustice and putting themselves at risk to do so, instead of whining about it and doing the perpetrators a favor by exhausting public opinion are rarely after the victimbux for their Patreon from their Medium posts.

Re: Well, that's it

And you think that matters at all to Google? It doesn't. I deleted my Facebook account three years ago and I still see echoes of it all over the place. Considering that Google is more pervasive than Facebook, I'd imagine that you'll be seeing reflections of your old account til the day you die.

Plus, they have enough data on you and get more on you constantly through third parties that even if you never use another Google service in your life they can still monetize you. And they certainly will.

I will say its cute that you think that somehow makes a difference and that somehow you're important in the grand scheme of things.

Re: @ArrZarr - Shrug

Kind of funny, I've been using it since Phoenix myself, and have been alpha and beta testing since Firebird 0.6. Its my daily driver and I don't really see myself using anything else if I can at all avoid it.

As much as I love Fx, you're displaying a remarkable selective memory if you don't recall the memory leak issues which existed from 3.7a4 (the first WebM release) until about Firefox 10. Google spreading FUD about that and Mozilla doing nothing about it to counter it, because Google was paying our bills at the time, is what drove Chrome's adoption really.

Now the UI backflips, I have no idea what they mean by that. Aside from hiding the title bar and making it look like Chrome, which can be disabled in three clicks, it hasn't changed much since Firebird, warts like nested tabs in the preferences menu and all. Plus, you could always change it if you didn't like something or use a theme. I used Nautopolis until Quantum came out and dropped compatability for it.

National Museum of Computing to hold live Enigma code-breaking demo with a Bombe

Good deal. Hope it works well.

Very cool. If it wasn't in the middle of the night here I'd definitely be checking it out. Hopefully they'll make a recording available.

Now as cool as this is, what would be even more impressive is a demonstration of the SIGSALY, which was the first encrypted telex and telephone system that Roosevelt and Churchill used to communicate with the WWII equivalents to the modern Unified Commands during the war, but it would take some doing to get it to work for an actual demonstration. It was a fairly touchy system even when it was being used all the time.

NSA still has the one that was installed at the Pentagon at the National Cryptographic Museum (I've seen it but I'm not sure if it works, its not powered on) and I'm not entirely sure if that's the only machine left in existence, it very well might be because I can't find anything clear about what happened to the one that was at Selfridges in their sub-basement. I'm assuming that GCHQ, the Australian Signals Directorate, or even the TNMOC might have one somewhere, there were like 12 of them by the end of the war, but I can't confirm where any of them besides the one at NSA wound up.

Searching for the term SIGSALY on the TNMOC webpage doesn't return anything, the Crypto Museum organization's rather good article on the system doesn't say what happened to the actual hardware and NSA's public facing article on SIGSALY doesn't specify either.

The Reg takes the US government's insider threat training course

The hell?!?

Since precisely when is El Reg "The Reg"? If part of the new design involves changing how El Reg refers to itself, I take back precisely everything nice I've said about it. What's next, are we going to lose our measurement system?

I don't like it.

HPE pulls sheets off largest Arm-based supercomputer Astra

Re: A significant article

Supercomputers aren't usually profitable, nor are they really supposed to be. They're machines built to show off potential capabilities than anything a normal customer is going to use for something in production, except when that customer is like TLA/TLA, a research university, or one of the National Labs.

Also, keep in mind that HPE is the least profitable in terms of earnings per share of the Hewlett-Packard spawn (HP Inc, HPE, and DXC). It was like 8 cents in July. HPI was at like 50 cents and DXC was around two bucks.

None of this really matters though, if SNL wants to try this then they're going to try it. Sandia really doesn't care about the IT market's fluctuations and what the beancounters say. They care about advancing the state of the art no matter what it costs. They're an incredibly cool place to work because of things like this, if of course you can put the whole weapons of mass destruction thing aside.