Posts by Ken Hagan

NSO Group's Pegasus malware was used to spy on Dubai princess's lawyers during child custody dispute

Re: How about Android?

Both Android and iOS are insecure by design. The underlying OS may be securable but the end-user model is that the person holding the gadget van do anything they like. Since most end-users are clueless about IT security, this is about as secure as MS-DOS.

The fix is an explicit distiction between being a user and being an admin. Both OSes could do this but have chosen not to.

If MS want to play in the phone space, they should just release Normal Windows and point out that, firstly, a domain-joined phone could be managed by Group Policy, which might appeal to corporates, and secondly that even a stand-alone phone could be more secure for children simply by with-holding the admin password from them.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Re: "We've bought this setup and now you must make it work"

Failing that, I hope you kept the packaging. Try mitigating your loss by flogging it on eBay.

Does that mean it is OK to pay only 70% of the premium then. That's worth knowing. Thanks for the info!

Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Re: Good to see

I don't think it is reasonable actually, because they've restricted 11 to the subset of processors that can do all this extra security in hardware. Having done that, they ought to be able to redesign bits of the code to exploit the new processors. Apparently they haven't got round to that yet.

Telegraph newspaper bares 10TB of subscriber data and server logs to world+dog

Re: 10 TB

Perhaps the leak includes every below-the-line comment ever posted by a given user. That could easily add up to 10TB of largely meaningless data, regardless of which publication is involved.

Re: Flim flam

I'm sure El Reg can manage a follow-up question on this subject.

Microsoft does and doesn't require VMs to meet hardware requirements for Windows 11

Re: Computer Says No

There certainly is slightly more. TPM isn't the only hardware requirement and someone (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/why-windows-11-has-such-strict-hardware-requirements-according-to-microsoft/) made an argument a while back (August) about how cohesive the new requirements were. For example:

"If it supports MBEC, generally, it's in. If it doesn't, it's out. MBEC support is only included in relatively new processors, starting with the Kaby Lake and Skylake-X architectures on Intel's side, and the Zen 2 architecture on AMD's side—this matches pretty closely, albeit not exactly, with the Windows 11 processor support lists."

A few things have changed since then, apparently motivated by the uproar rather than any technical objectives. I suspect that the original driver for these requirements was purely technical (getting rid of some clunky legacy code and enabling everyone to take new processor features as given) but that ever since the marketing folks got wind of it the requirements have been watered down and it is fast becoming just an arbitrary list of randomness.

Re: Virtual TPM is evidently possible,

And "they" are working on it: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=103946

Want to check out Windows 11 but don't want to buy a new PC? Here's how to bypass the hardware requirements

Re: Security update

I would expect an update, possibly with an empty payload, just to confirm that the update system works.

Microsoft shows off Office 2021 for consumers ahead of the coming of Windows 11

Two ways to read that

"However, we know some customers still prefer a non-subscription version of the core Office apps for PC and Mac, which is why we're releasing Office 2021."

Yeah! That'll fix those bastards...

NASA halts Mars comms for two weeks as Sun gets in way of Red Planet

Re: Comms relays?

Relays are hard because of the inverse square law. On Earth you need a massive dish to receive the puny signal from your probe. You also need a powerful transmitter so that the puny dish on your probe can pick up the signal. Putting that infrastructure into solar orbit and keeping it powered up for years on end (to amortise the cost) is beyond us at the moment both financially and (I imagine) technically.

Some really carefully targetted laser beams might be able to do it, but they'd need essentially perfect collimation and pretty mind-blowing steering to match.

'Quantum computer algorithms are linear algebra, probabilities. This is not something that we do a good job of teaching our kids'

Re: A high level approach

Well certainly if you have to operate at the level of wavefunctions to program a quantum computer then they might as well not exist. Only a handful of people will *ever* be able to program them.

Sure, thousands of people each year get degrees which require them to be able to compute the answers to simple QM problems, like atomic orbitals or geometrically trivial scattering problems. (I was one of them once. Not sure if I could do it now. It's been a few decades since I had to.) However, that's the equivalent of "Hello, world!", inasmuch as the form of the problem is completely standardised and all that changes are the values of mass, velocity, etc. You are conceptually miles away from solving a problem that no-one has ever tackled before. That sort of thing is research-level QM and the number of people who ever master it is probably about one in a million of the population. (I'm guessing there may be several thousand alive on the planet right now. I'm pretty certain there aren't several million.)

China demands internet companies create governance system for algorithms

Good luck with that!

With ML, even the machine doesn't really know hot works and the boundary between the algorithm and the training data is rather fuzzy, so my take on this announcement is that China wants foreign tech giants either to hand over all of their IP or to cease operating in China within 3 years. Maybe both.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Re: David Olson Database

Surely any half-decent compression scheme will eliminate the storage costs anyway, and an embedded system only needs to extract one time zone.

Storm in a tea cup? This isn't even drizzle.

Ofcom unveils broadband switching plans, but providers claim it's not so easy

Re: Multiple services?

Absolutely. This really sounds like a solution to a problem that no sane person ought to have. If I want to migrate to a new connection type, I want to run them side by side for a short while to make sure I'm not left with nothing. A system that allows the (untested) new suppluer to disconnect my old (tested) connection sounds like the worst way to manage such a switch.

Fake 'BT' caller fleeces elderly victim of £30k in APP app scam

Re: then transferred to the 'safekeeping' account, which was the offender's

They ought to teach this in schools. It wouldn't take very long. You've just done it in about two minutes.

Samsung is planning to reverse-engineer the human brain on to a chip

"The brain is made up of a large number of neurons, and their wiring map is responsible for the brain's functions. Thus the knowledge of the map is the key to reverse engineering the brain."

That sounds like a hypothesis we need to test, rather than a predicate for future work. But hey, if someone else is paying...

If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place

Re: Sounds like a cry for help.

Is an internal cloud really a cloud?

(Probably an article or two in answering that question, but it seems pertinent at this point. What are you gaining from just on-prem? What are you losing from Real Cloud?)

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Personal heaters

We had one in our house, until we noticed it.

Judging from the other comments, there is clearly a level of understanding about electricity which is above "you need to join the metal bits up" and below "you need to hide the metal bits once you've joined them up".

Clegg on its face: Facebook turns to former UK deputy PM to fend off damaging headlines

This struck me as the most obvious missing piece from EL reg's quick bio. Yes, Nick actually became leader of his party on a ticket of opposing ID cards, on the grounds that they were an abomination unto Om, er, Privacy.

Then he got a job with Facebook.

I'm still baffled.

Apple, Google yank opposition voting strategy app from Russian software stores

Free as in beer, but not as in speech

If phones weren't such walled gardens, Putin would have to target the spp rather thsn the store it was sold through. Still, I cannot really argue against the idea that local laws apply. If Russians don't like it, they need to change it. In a civilised country, you'd do that by voting but, alas, such countries are so rare.

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Re: Moronity factor of nearly 100 mD

For a less partisan choice of unit: the Darwin.

One Darwin is a degree of stupidity that would, in the correct circumstances, cause you to be removed from the gene pool.

Also, if you manage a level of more than one Darwin without being removed, you are said to be super-idiotic.

De-identify, re-identify: Anonymised data's dirty little secret

Re: Now locational data published is shifted to a nearby point.

" (the cabinet, that is)."

Oh. A pity you clarified that.

Re: "NHS Data extracted will be pseudonymous" says Tory Government

The fact that they felt the need to invent a new word to describe their actions is quite telling.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Re: Could be used to cause harm!

...including their rulebook.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

Re: DarkBasic

Parse error. The OP used "teaching" as an adjective, not as a verb.

Re: Interesting

MIT's Scratch has been translated into loads of languages, as have several derivatives such as Berkeley's Snap. These are block languages and so also avoid the punctuation problem. They are also free.

Once you've learned them, you are probably ready for something like Python, which is also free. If you get even deeper, the Linux toolchain is free and so is Visual Studio's Community Edition.

So I am rather puzzled to understand why anyone thinks there is a market for a non-free language for teaching.

Dissected: A dropper-as-a-service miscreants pay to push their malware onto potentially 1,000s of victims

Of course, the fact that your mobile phone doesn't even support the notion probably isn't helping.

"It's OK kids, Uncle Google and Aunty Apple use MAGIC to keep you safe on the internet, so you don't have to worry/learn."

"Even so, the fact that most, if not all, Linux users do not work with an admin account, something that is virtually impossible to do on Windows without an IT department to manage things"

Really, this no harder on Windows than on Linux, and hasn't been for many, many years.

The big problem is that 99% of the population do not understand the need for having separate accounts for normal and admin use. If there was *one thing* worth teaching the nation's schoolchildren about IT then this is probably it.

Facebook: Let us tell you WhatsApp – we don't want to pay that €225m GDPR fine

Re: Your data is worth $40

Or at least, they reckon they can find another mug who thinks it is. Remember, as long as they find someone else to sell your data to, for more than they paid for it, they are quids in.

Google is designing its own Arm-based processors for 2023 Chromebooks – report

Re: Ask not for whom the bell tolls....

That bell has been ringing for 30 years, but Intel haven't heard it because it is drowned out by all the Ker-Ching!! of their own products.

Re: If only

Not quite. Google would still need to upstream all the code needed to make Linux run on this proprietary chip. Until that is done, I don't care how well it runs their walled garden.

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it dared to mention the trademarked word 'zeta'

Re: "The Greek alphabet is currently protected legally"

You jest, but trying sticking a lowercase "i" at the front of your product name and see how far you get.

Boffins find if you torture AMD Zen+, Zen 2 CPUs enough, they are vulnerable to Meltdown-like attack

Meh

Based on the extensive list of caveats outlined in the article, I'm afraid that I cannot take this seriously as a vulnerability. You already have the access you are "gaining" and there are certainly easier ways to exploit it!

Hacking the computer with wirewraps and soldering irons: Just fix the issues as they come up, right?

Re: Computer O Level

The examiners, then as now, can only award points for things in their mark scheme. If the qualification is designed badly enough, this can decouple the best candidates from the best grades.

Apple didn't engage with the infosec world on CSAM scanning – so get used to a slow drip feed of revelations

Re: Pot Kettle Black

We need a whoosh! icon.

I was offered $500k as a thank-you bounty for pilfering $600m from Poly Network, says crypto-thief

Is that $500k in cryptocurrency, or hard cash?

If it is that easy to steal, it isn't worth $600m.

Jury tells Apple to cough up two days of annual profit in 4G/LTE patent damages retrial

Re: This seems extra shady

The original owner has to give them up (to the extent required by FRAND) before they are part of the standard. When sold, their value is their value as FRAND IP. I don't see why property can't be sold at a market rate.

Whether that market rate is $300m is another question. That seems quite steep for an idea, but I'm not a radio engineer so I will wait for comments from those who are.

Also ... I assume that Samsung, Panasonic and LG are also being hit at the same rate for the use of their old IP. I hope they were paid enough when it was bought off them.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Re: the text editor for granddads

vi will not be there for you on a Windows box. Then again, perhaps you won't be there either.

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Re: I could see where this was going

Actually, I didn't. It's so long since I dealt with actual cash that I forgot that the new notes are all plastic.

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

Re: I would like to add...

I think the true answer to that question would probably drive you to the brink of suicide so ... Of course not!

Palantir abandons any attempt at curating nice-guy image with 'Global Information Dominance Experiments'

Re: Eh?

It means they have Dominic Cummings writing the bullshit. Sounds like he wrote the recruitment flyer, too.

It's time to decentralize the internet, again: What was distributed is now centralized by Google, Facebook, etc

Re: Bullshit article premise

That's not what decentralise means. Taking control away from the US does not imply giving it to someone else.

Re: Bullshit article premise

Android and Chrome would just fall back on their open source forks/ancestors. Drive would be an annoying loss, not because other cloud storage providers are not available, but because I suspect most people only keep their data in one such basket. The Gmail /service/ is hardly irreplaceable, though again I suppose it depends on your backup regime.

All considered, the pain of losing Google would be felt almost entirely by people who were depending on it for an essential service but never thought to pay for it, let alone hedge their bets. My sympathy is limited.

Boffins propose Pretty Good Phone Privacy to end pretty invasive location data harvesting by telcos

Re: What about 911 autolocating?

If I'm calling 911, I probably didn't anticipate it. Besides, W3W should not be necessary.

https://www.revk.uk/2021/08/review-how-emergency-services-handle.html?m=1

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Web is already 30

Upvoted for your spelling of insightfulness.

Scientists reckon eliminating COVID-19 will be easier than polio, harder than smallpox – just buckle in for a wait

Re: What do you mean no Apocalypse?

Interesting, though you are comparing "covid deaths despite global lockdown" versus "influenza with little intervention" so I don't think you can conclude that the diseases are similar in severity.

GitHub's npm gave away a package name while it was in use, causing rethink

Re: domain name system

Java piggybacks on DNS, so doesn't actually have to solve the problem.

8 years ago another billionaire ploughed millions into space to harvest solar power and beam it back down to Earth

Re: Tall poppy syndrome

Those instant replies are backed by established science and easy-to-follow calculations. If you take that as proof that you are on the right lines then you are a classic (and probably irredeemable) conspiracy theorist.