Posts by Voland's right hand

Iran satellite fails: ICBM test drive or microsat test? Opinion is divided...

“All the experts know that satellite carriers and non-nuclear surface-to-surface ballistic missiles are different structurally from missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads,” Ryabkov said.

Yeah sure. So this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-7_Semyorka has absof*ckinglutely nothing to do with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family)

Really?

Sure, a "repurposed satellite carrier" cannot be a nuclear deterrent. It takes 24h to bring it to launch condition so you cannot really use it to reply to an attack. It cannot stay in a ready condition for more than 48h (for most fuel types) either.

That, however does not mean that it cannot be used for a FIRST attack and more specifically to deliver a couple of nukes half a meg each into appropriate positions into near space above any country on the planet. Enough to put it back into the stone age for a few years courtesy of complete grid and telecommunications collapse and irreparable damage to most modern ECUs in most vehicles from harness EMP feedback.

It is something US has finally admitted to be a threat last year. It took NK launching their ICBMs to 1k miles altitude for someone to finally grok what is the real danger when David goes out and meats Goliath armed with a "sling with one stone in it".

EDGAR Wrong: Ukrainians hacked SEC, stole docs for inside trading, says Uncle Sam

Re: $4.1m?

they weren't very good at it

It is difficult to be good at it nowdays. Conditional probabilities calculations are applied to all trades which are right before and right after a SEC controlled press release.

If Bayes says that a particular trader is likely to have used insider information that person's file ends up on the cop's desk next morning if not earlier. Other country exchanges do similar things too.

As a result, to profit from insider info you need to act weeks if not months in advance - something that cannot be done just based on stolen PR.

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

Time to build it elsewhere

Time to build it elsewhere. Somewhere in space. Just in case.

Yes, you can remotely hack factory, building site cranes. Wait, what?

Re: How does "Offline" and "Wireless" fit in the same conversation exactly?

Brain rotting disease known as Realtime Embedditis.

Try explaining Postel's principle to an embedded controller engineer. At best he will listen and chuckle. Usually he will just ignore you and continue to write code which has absolutely no input validation and will fall over the first time something wrong happens. It will, however, be faster by 20 clock cycles and smaller by 10 bytes. That is essential, because if it is not the lamb will break the seventh seal and the world will end.

Ditto for DIY encryption. Nearly all uses I have seen were the result of "this will be faster and smaller than this very complicated reference implementation of a standard encryption scheme".

Spektr-R goes quiet, Dragon splashes down and SpaceX lays off

Re: Translations please

No issues reading it here :)

The initial announcements in the Russian press on the subject were rather interesting. Apparently the telescope is schizophrenic by design. There is a core and science package and you talk to them totally separately. The core is still talking albeit behaving erratically. The science package unfortunately looks like completely dead.

While at it, it is not a good week for Roskosmos. It looks like someone, somewhere is starting to get VERY UNHAPPY with tier 2 nations having space observation capabilities equivalent to the big boys. Egypt failed to get insurance for their observation SAT replacement to be launched by Roskosmos which is supposed to replace the previous one which suffered a fate nearly identical to Spektr-R.

I agree with the article - the likely root cause of both (and there will be more to come) is the embargo on space grade electronics which USA has been enforcing quite vigorously lately.

Poland may consider Huawei ban amid 'spy' arrests – reports

Re: Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego

Not really unpronounceable. Nowhere near the usual "zh" frequency for colloquial Polish.

Try this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrz%C4%85szcz

It was used by the WW2 resistance to verify that the person is a Pole.

Cops told: No, you can't have a warrant to force a big bunch of people to unlock their phones by fingerprint, face scans

An example of why some things should always go in front of a judge

The moment you get the government (any government) to decide the standards of evidence rule of law goes out of the window.

Unfortunately for every action like this one by this judge there are 20 done by the government to unwind the effect elsewhere.

This must be some kind of mistake. IT managers axed, CEO and others' wallets lightened in patient hack aftermath

Re: well, there's a bit of a big hint...

He's basically the Patrician,

You never know, there may be Mr Chrisophase data in that dump too.

Epyc move: Supermicro plunges into Cascade Lake’s Optanical waters

Obvious question...

How would you like your Cascade Lake sir? With extra chips or without?

Huawei and Intel hype up AI hardware, TensorFlow tidbits, and more

Re: Brave New World

Fakes (deep or shallow) are a temporary boon to spin doctors

It will take one or two sufficiently loud bloopers for this to backfire and people to stop believing anything they see.

This one should have been the prime example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sviL113eOU - it is the video purporting to be of the infamous Buk in Donetsk.

Cars, buses and even a huge transporter with a missile launcher AND NOT A SINGLE LEAF MOVES. The trees by the road are European poplars. Their leaves tremble at the smallest convection including the one generated by the heat of the sun on the leaves. A bus or a truck passing by will make the whole tree move. However, instead of moving they stand serenely and motionless like the USA flag on the moon in vacuum.

As far as fakes go this is as fake and as brazen as the Trump video. It should have made it as the first example of great fake into the news. However, because this would have contradicted the narrative, any voices questioning its veracity got shouted down. And it is being a boom to our spin doctors indeed - all the way.

Not to worry, there WILL be another one which will blow up in someone's face on prime time TV. It is only a matter of time. Once it happens a couple of times people will stop believing anything they see (including proper documentary footage).

Re: Deepfakes

When real money is spent? I think you've been got and you don't know it.

Even if real money is being spent, we still notice for human subjects. Look at Rogue 1, the computer appearances off Moff and Leia were not particularly convincing.

Real money, however can generate inanimate objects very well already as well as mix them into videos of background (+/- further generation). I have pointed elsewhere in this thread the infamous Buk in Donetsk video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sviL113eOU as an example of something generated. In addition to the issues with the background (no wind and trees do not move), it as well all other videos, I have seen from the "Buk trip from Kursk to Donetsk" sequence on Bellingcat contains a SMOKING GUN identifying them as generated fakes. To be more exact it is the lack of smoking GUN EXHAUST (pun intended). The software used to generate them could do inanimate objects very well and had models of various ancient Russian vehicles programmed in, but it could not generate smoke. Not surprising as smoke is hard. Very hard.

As a result, the smoking gun appears in the first video, 10 seconds into it. Zhiguli (not even Lada), model 1 (which makes it 40+ years old), carburettor engine designed to work with leaded petrol only, cruising past emitting whiffs of fresh air. As someone who clocks 12K miles in Europe with a significant chunk of them in Eastern Europe each year I can say only one thing - BOLLOCKS. Any of the surviving examples are run by people who cannot afford lead replacement additives and have busted rings, no compression and burn oil on par with petrol. It should have looked like Admiral Kuznetsov going somewhere in a hurry.

Further in the video - UAZ and other antics. Behind the transporter. No smoke.

Roundabout, Eastern Europe, cars accelerating across it. Every single car has perfect compression and for the diesels a perfectly working DPF. In a war zone in ex-USSR. No smoke.

The video is as if all cars in the video have freshly came out of the new UK regime MOT and had a passing score. BULLSHIT. All other videos I watched are the same too. Disclaimer : I got bored at some point so I have not watched them till the end.

Smoke's equivalent in face/body deep fakes would be hair (especially long one) in motion. That is almost as hard as smoke and there is a reason why the current crop of deep fakes is usually limited to relatively static stuff.

This will not last long - modern animation software is getting very good - I watched some software produce successful realistic models of both mountain river flow and hair movement on a dancer last month. We are just getting into it, as they say "watch this space".

Computing boffins strip the fun out of satirical headlines

The findings are specific for the germanic sub-group of the indo-European languages

I am glad that someone in the west finally pays some attention to mathematical linguistic analysis. For the part of the world which used to be on _OTHER_ side of the Iron Curtain a lot of this is yesterday's news.

First of all, they have been paying serious attention to mathematical linguistic analysis for many decades (*). In fact, when I was in high school, one of the reasons geeks bothered attending the CS and Math competitions was that they were co-located with the mathematical linguistics ones. Lots of lovely ladies from the grammar high schools with language orientation. Cough, cough, snigger, snigger... As a side effect, geeks like me attending the CS junkets ended up picking some bits about language by osmosis (facilitated by the rivers of wine and beer in the local restaurants after the competitions ended).

Second, the analysis of English (and Germanic language subgroup) humour comparatively to let's say Russian (as well as other Slavic languages) is something that has been done and dusted decades ago. The "funny bit coming at the end" is specific to English (and other languages from the same subgroup). In Russian it can come anywhere as instead of "situation" humour it is predominantly "multiple meaning/positional" humour. They still grok situation humour though, they just consider it second rate. As a result English humour can be translated into Russian (Jerom K Jerom translation is as good as the original) while Russian often cannot (Russians are rolling on the floor laughing at a Chekov play while English are crying in tears about "how tragic"). Things get even funkier once you go into Turk languages and other languages with different grammar structure compared to Indo-European.

In any case, applause and let's have more of that instead of throwing everything in the AI meatgrinder.

(*)_{The area has a lot of interesting results like for example you can use language analysis to figure out who influences whom. In fact, you can get a much better idea than from social network activity, especially if you combine it with modern statistical methods and modern number-crunching.}

It's raining, then? Hallelujah. Big Blue super 'puter sharpens forecasts

Re: 3.5PB of Spectrum Scale parallel access file storage

I also wonder when they will be able to accurately tell me what time it is going to rain,

I can give you the answer my mom gives to this question. She is a retired met with 30 years of experience starting in the military and continuing with 20+ years of working in civilian aviation. The quote is actually about the UK Met office, but it is 100% valid here:

"When they raise their eyes off the computer screen and look out of the f*cking window".

It's the weekend. We're out of puns for now. Just have a gander at China's Moon lander and robo-sidekick snaps, videos

Not a chance

More of that!

Not any time soon. As long as gearing for an offensive war is mandated by the USA (4% GDP is gearing to attack someone, there is nothing defensive in it) there will be none. There will be no money for it.

Further to this, the actual military spend is more. If we include sanctions related loss of income incurred on _OUR_ side it is in the 5-7% range now even before we go to 4% GDP NATO mandated budget. The same is valid for the "adversary" - they have no choice but to match our spend and they have to incur losses in a similar manner. In fact, when you add all the numbers if is the cost of fighting a BIG war already without any of the infrastructure and economical "benefits" of war footing.

What you see is the natural result of a defensive military budget at ~2% GDP (2.3 in 2017) with no "hidden" additional loss due to sanctions. They have money to spend aplenty.

We _WILL_ see more of that. Naturally. From China.

But not from us. Unless key European governments finally do some logical conclusions from David Petraeus words about NATO and Putin and act on them (no point to expect USA doing it). Quite funny - he is saying what I have been saying for the last decade :)

Fake news? More like ache news. Grandma, grampa 'more likely' to share made-up articles during US election

Re: Another example, just today - one of hundreds

Ukraine has a huge pro-Russian, != actively-working-for-Russia part of it

As an example the majority of the population in Serbia, Bulgaria and Monte-Negro is pro-Russian. It does not mean that it is actively working on their behalf. Similarly, their counterparts which are "on our side" are usually not working on our behalf either. That means both intentionally and unintentionally - in fake news amplification terms. As they tend to be more aware about the other side culture, history and current affairs they make for a poor medium for fake news social media amplification.

There is a long history in stretching the "sympathy" to a stitched up "collusion and collaboration" sticker. Senator McCarthy is a good example. Similarly, there is a long history of f***ing things up by through the assumption that "sympathy to us" stretches to "collusion and collaboration". Take every second intervention in recent history and every intervention in Afghanistan as an example.

As far as Ukraine demographics, provided that voter turnout is evenly distributed across demographics (it usually isn't - west is more politically active), they GUARANTEE pro-Russian majority in parliament if all of its territories including Crimea vote. In fact, even without Crimea it will be ~ 50:50. The current hunta has a plan for that - it was quite entertaining observing their foreign minister waxing lyrically about disenfranchising all of the population in Donbass and Crimea after they are returned because they can "pervert democracy". That was all in the presence of the USA ambassador who was nodding in agreement and smiling full hilt.

In fact, the plan is partially in action already to rig the incoming election - their election commission decided to close all foreign voting stations in countries which house a predominantly pro-Russian refugee population. That is a 750K+ vote rig. USA congressional gerrymanders should take some lessons. This happened on Wednesday this week if memory serves me right. Not covered by our media of course - contradicts the "democratic narrative".

Re: Or, just maybe...

I notice that someone has now been going through my previous comments - before this thread - methodically downvoting them.

There are a couple of patriotic trolls which start from a comment which is opposing the official view and will downvote systematically from there onwards. Not sure if they get paid for this, as a site El Reg is probably way down in the priorities of the 77th Brigade (we should buy the Reg staff a beer or two for uncovering the original details on that unit, one virtual attached).

Re: Or, just maybe...

Just saying.

First of all, you forgot the sarcasm tags. As a result, the humour deprived part of the commentariat which did not notice that they need a towel to wipe the sarcasm oozing out of the monitor voted you down.

Second, selecting opposition to the "government approved media narrative" for snark purposes may have unintended consequences when "our" enlightened governments dons asbestos pants and goes lying full hilt while deploying Integrity and other mobs to support their narrative. Ditto for the opposition when they trigger the Internet Research faecal launcher. Works for a while, but when the final results come in, the egg ends up meeting face with a nice smack.

For example, I suggest reading the original documents of the OPCW Syria mission. They are quite clear that the last 3 alleged nerve gas incidents including the one that caused the massive rocket ejaculation have proven presence of Chlorine on site, no nerve gas decomposition products on site taken by the OPCW itself and extensive presence of nerve gas decomposition products in the samples "supposedly" collected on site and submitted to 3rd party labs abroad. Read the docs themselves:

https://www.opcw.org/fact-finding-mission

So actually, OPCW says that there was no nerve gas and it goes to within a couple of millimetres to declare that the samples were tampered with. That is what the reports say - do we like it or not (*).

Quite funny how this did not get reported in the news by the way.

So back on the subject - there is a BIG difference between fake news and opposing narratives. Opposing narratives can and will be verified one day. It is a reality of today's world - everything is stored in at least one computer and anything that is stored will end up leaking or being hacked. Additionally, there is quite often an independent 3rd party source of information like for example the marine transponder tracking for the Crimea incident. Real fake news of the kind which I often get from my mom (and other grandma age people are sharing) has none of it. It is outrageously fake.

(*)_{It is expected as a combined Chlorine + Sarin delivery can exist only in the delusions of a humanities graduate. A chemist (which I used to be in past life) will choke on his coffee seeing that as an idea.}

Re: Respect my authoritay

Too many old people were raised to unquestioningly respect authority media.

This is an "enlightened west" problem. The "trust in media" ratings start at 60% in USA and slide as you move east dropping to a wopping 31% in Russia and sub-30% in Kazahstan.

Makes the populists and Internet Research Agency jobs much easier. The amount of "truth punctuation" they need to insert in the stream of scheisse to make their narrative believable is on an order of magnitudes lower here than in the East.

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

Re: I guess plod IQ problems are universal...

Probably want to be firing off a request for information (suitably couched in legalese) to MediaTek or Qualcomm

Even if they made it, Motorola has the data. Take the box which your phone arrived in. It should have a sticker with all MACs and IMEI. Older, battery equipped phones also had one printed underneath the battery.

Further to this, even if it was Mediatek or Qualcomm making the chipset, the actual MAC is out of Lenovo/Motorola range - it has been programmed by the factory. Once again - leaving a data trail.

That is done by the manufacturer and it KEEPS the details exactly because of requests like this from law enforcement.

I stay by my original assessment. Das Plod is either fumbling the ball here or there is something else at work like f.e. a grey import with reflashed numbers.

Re: I guess plod IQ problems are universal...

Whats the relationship between MAC address and IMEI number?

They are all written in the device flash at the same time at factory. This includes both the wifi Mac and and the Bluetooth Mac.

The manufacturer has all of them in their database and getting the data takes a couple of seconds once you come with a court order.

Das Plod (excuse me for my Pidgin German) are not following the proper Ordnung. There is something fishy here (grey import with re-flashed identity?) because if they have the MAC, they would have had the perp by now. There are countries where modifying the Macs and/or the IMEI permanently is a specific criminal offence on the books. This, will be coming here too. It is only a matter of time.

Hubble 'scope camera breaks down amid US govt shutdown, forcing boffins to fix it for free

Re: How many Shuttles could have been kept operative..

That would not suffice.

It is funny how short people memory is. Shuttle with the flight profile restrictions used for the last missions after the re-entry disaster would not make it to Hubble orbit and back. This was part of the "safe" profile discussions after the accident.

So frankly, we are back to the drawing board in any case and the need for a proper orbital tug. Something which is long overdue.

Drone goal! Quadcopter menace alert freezes flights from London Heathrow Airport

Re: Yet another...

african or european?

Chinese. If there was one at all.

Re: pictures?

I'm not sure a couple of blurry pixels zig-zagging occasionally across a shakily-held video

Do you realize HOW MUCH CCTV is at Heathrow. This is not Gatwick where the runway is in the middle of a field. One of the runways is BEHIND Business T5, Long Term T5, Enterprise and other car rental car parks. All of these have CCTV coverage which as a side effect also covers the runway behind it. The other one is adjacent to various repair/engineering facilities with coverage as well.

So if there will be footage it will be anything like shakily held.

I am calling a mass psychosis bullshit on this one or someone about to miss his flight and doing an "exam bomb". This time. There will always be a next time.

Smartphones gateway drug to the Antichrist, says leader of Russian Orthodox Church

but old style watches are surely the domain of the antique-wrist.

You should have googled that before posting.

He has been spotted with a 36K+ (yes, you read that right) Breguet a couple of years back. Something most city traders have no money to afford.

https://rublev-museum.livejournal.com/307806.html

Lost in translation

Sigh - someone needs to read the WHOLE original interview and needs to know Russian PROPERLY.

The way the Orthodox church has been using the word "дявол" (devil) is also a synonym for "изкушение" - enticement. It is not just in Russia, it is the standard use in all Slavic orthodox countries whose language I understand (and that is pretty much all of them by the way). It is also the way things have been for 300+ years.

Most of his rant is about addiction and how addiction removes our personal freedom. He starts with alcohol, goes on about drugs and finishes with gadgets. He does go (and quite correctly) into what the benefits - communication, information, etc while pointing at the cost we pay for being enticed this way - our freedom. On par with alcoholics. What Beeb quotes is towards the end after this.

While he is a bit overzealous in his point, a lot of what he says is VALID and there is a huge part of the el-reg commentariat which will upvote him for the same expressed as a comment on this forum. The same part of the commentariat will also equate Google and Facebook with Antichrist.

_{Disclaimer: I serve Voland (whose name Kirill keeps mentioning in vain) and I am sitting in the corner, not doing anyone any harm and I am fixing the petrol lamp.}

Fly me to the Moon, let me play among the stars. Do you think we could get another probe to land on Mars?

The drill bit story had TWO leaks, not one.

While someone on the ground accidentally drilling a hole in the side of the thing, and then attempting to patch it seemed the most likely scenario, whisperings in the Russian media pointed to an American astronaut getting handy with a power tool on orbit.

To be fair, that was promoted only by Kommersant which never revealed its source. We can call it Leak No 1 dated 12.09.2018·

While Roskosmos never officially refuted it, I suspect that it managed Leak No 2 from the internal investigation on the 13th of September which stated literally: "To drill it from inside after assembly you need a drill bit 50cm long which is not in the ISS inventory."

What makes it interesting is the amount of attention our media paid to the Kommersant drivel and how carefully did it manage to ignore the other information which was published immediately thereafter on a site with audience comparable to the first one. I smell someone on OUR side seeing a good opportunity to demonise the enemy, grabbing it and running with it. An analysis of the tweets and rewtweets of this one will make a very interesting read to see WHO exactly was pushing it.

It'll soon be even more illegal to fly drones near UK airports

Re: "Fire in a cinema".

There is a single picture published by several newspapers with no followup.

First page of the Daily Beobachter if memory serves me right.

Jeep hacking lawsuit shifts into gear for trial after US Supremes refuse to hit the brakes

Re: So...

don't buy network connected vehicles?

Not enough. Most vehicles try to connect to the network by various clandestine ways nowdays.

The "phone app" shipped for your vehicle is actually a proxy and most manufacturers tell you very little about what it does. AFAIK only BMW is fully honest telling you what it is going to send to the mothership and the list makes for some scary reading. Nobody tells you what can come the other way around and with an OBD-2 interface on the back of the stereo and the stereo running an obsolete 3+ years old build of Android nearly anything can come that way.

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Re: Dot-EU domains cannot be bought or renewed outside the union?

But May rejected EEA membership,

The eea rejected Britain joining so that idea is moot from the start. To put it bluntly, the chance of Britain joining any trade block after Brexit is nil. The rest of the world has been watching how Britain has tried to exempt itself from every regulatory requirement in the EU for the last 30+ years. It asked for special treatment every time it could. Rebate, ids, shengen, cap, endless back and forth on privacy, surveillance laws, etc. It will all be remembered the same way norway remembered it and went into straight "no f*cking way" mode on eea.

Re: How long until the new referendum will be called?

Unfortunately, there is no point to call it now.

The root cause is not BrExit related. The people discussing the second referendum (most of which are middle class) FAIL to understand populism. The way populism works is by delivering its agenda as a stream of shit punctuated by specifically selected pieces of truth in key locations. Joe Average Citizen sees the pieces of truth and happily consumes the stream in between.

That would not be an issue if the opposing narrative was run from a truth perspective. The problem is that it is not. Plain and simple. At some point during Tony Bliar's rule we swapped places with Brezhnev and Suslov and the centrist narrative which also happened to be the government one ended up as an endless stream of lies(*). These are supported via an orchestrated social media campaigns and "influencers" on government payroll (same as it used to be in USSR).

Changing it to truth at present is not going to work either as people are conditioned that it is a stream of lies and treat it as "expert opinions", "f*ck business", etc.

It will take a combination of a very rude awakening with nothing in the shops and no salary/benefit checks combined with the powers that be actually SWITCHING the narrative back from Brezhnev/Suslov mode to a truth based one for things to change. Prior to that it is pointless to do it and let's hope we survive to the point where it can be done.

(*)_{I already went through the Crimea "Blockade" as one example of such "lies at scale" narrative. It's not the only one. Pretty much anything significant in the last 2 years foreign-policy wise has proven to be in the same category - where the prime minister dons asbestos knickers and proudly quacks while bottom is trying to conflagrate.}

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

life as hard as possible for the UK regardless of the there is no cost to the EU.

Fixed it for you. That is definitely on the agenda. Can't blame them as some of the things done by May government are in the same category.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Any IoT device

I beg to differ, I finally found a useful one.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01D8LY77Y

Cheaper than half of the "normal" thermostatic radiator valves on the market, sane manual mode, Bluetooth support, support for controlling it from Linux (there are scripts on github) and most importantly NO F*CKING CLOUD!!!

Huawei CEO defiant on security claims, vows to be so good, 'no market can keep us away'

Re: How does this work after "Brexit"?

So do we have to pick which country to have the trade "deal" with because they all know that we are "over a barrel"?

Not really. We can have a trade deal with any country.

Now, what the benefits and the terms of it would be is a different story. Very different one...

I believe the Eu has demonstrated what does it mean discussing the sharing of a banana with a 800 pound Gorilla. Anyone with delusions that a Third World(*) country will have more productive discussion with China or USA, please share what you are smoking.

(*)_{Or quoting Margaret Thatcher quote about USSR: "Upper Volta with Nuclear Missiles"}

Apple blew my mind – literally, says woman: MagSafe plug sparked face-torching blaze, lawsuit claims

Re: Her Lawyer quite obviously studied chemistry in the US education system

The ignition source would have been the spark, the fuel would have been her hair and face. Ouch.

What was the magsafe adapter doing inside the mask?

Her Lawyer quite obviously studied chemistry in the US education system

adapter ignited the oxygen in the mask she wore for her chronic

You cannot ignite oxygen period. You can ignite something _AND_ oxygen with the increased oxygen partial pressure contributing to things burning in a way they normally do not burn in air.

Oz cops investigating screams of 'why don't you die?' find bloke in battle with spider

Re: Ticks and Lymes disease

Getting them to drop off after they've bitten you wouldn't save you from getting Lyme disease

As well as tick viral encephalitis. While the British Isles are not officially listed as an area (rest of Europe is) I would not chance it. The aftermath is not pretty (to say the least).

UK has its dangerous species too. Not a lot, but they do exist.

In boring, grey, temperate UK, the most dangerous creature you're likely to run into is a dairy cow or red deer – neither of which actively seek to do people harm – so such a response to a spider here would naturally be mocked.

AFAIK adders are NOT extinct yet. Though their bite is usually not fatal and you have to live somewhere really out in the sticks to run into one.

There are also a set of lovely, protected creatures called bats. If you think that you will live long after an untreated bat bite you are up for a rare treat (pun intended). It's called rabies and while the land-walking mammal population in UK is rabies free, the bat's aren't and there have been a number of fatalities over the years.

The glorious Brexit uncertainty: The only dead cert on data rules for tech biz in 2019

Re: So what businesses are coming *to* the UK following Brexit, in preference to the EU?

Estate agents to Russian oligarchs and gangsters?

Why?

They go where estate will GROW in price so they can invest the money that is being laundered out of Russia.

The likelihood of real estate market in Britain having any long-term growth in a hard-BrExit scenario is in the sqrt(-1) territory.

Re: The only thing certain is

The dumb thing we did was triggering A50 WITHOUT A PLAN. Fixed that for you.

I am more and more convinced that it was deliberate too. Teresa May's goal has always been a "No ECHR" which can happen only in a "chaotic BrExit" scenario. Anything she says to the opposite is in the realm of "The Lady dost protest too much" zone.

She will now get exactly what she wants as a minimum and maybe even what she dreams of as a stretch goal (described in V for Vendetta - they got the gender there wrong).

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

Re: Wait, what?

"Also, not opening emailed applications as a system administrator helps a lot"

The rest of the toolkit* has an extensive collection of privilege escalation tools revealed in previous analysis by other AV and security players. What user ID will you open an infected email is irrelevant. If you are an idiot enough to open it and click on the attached spear-fish payload or spear-fish link you are as good as dead even if you have disabled any and every right you can think of for this luser.

_{(*)if the discovered functionality is what it is, I struggle to see the point of having something that cannot defeat secure boot}

Re: What I want to know

What I want to know is which vendor ships with secure boot disabled in this day and age and which government has it disabled on PCs running Windows.

The last time I have come across a laptop which came with secure boot disabled from factory was in October 2012. Everything after that had it enabled.

Dunno, it's probably me missing something, but I do not see the point of having this functionality in a rootkit except for "tick the box" purposes. Who are the potential targets?

China's loose Chang'e: Probe lands on far side of the Moon in science first, says state media

Next up - send some colonizers to the Moon...

The moon is a harsh mistress you know...

Re: CNSA has a nice logo

I'm sure Roddenberry would approve

We will see. It is a textbook example for a trademark lawyer. I suspect Rodenbery junior phone will be ringing off the hook once USA wakes up with volunteer sharks to take the case.

Slap for Slack chat app after US, Canada chaps zapped in Iranian IP address map whack

Re: Weaponizing potential

"...Slack’s Electron client is so CPUGPU hungry..."

It re-uses browser components which are GPU dependent and it itself is GPU dependent. 15% is typical for an older Intel because of that runt Intel pretends to be a GPU.

Get a proper laptop with a proper APU and it will be at a very solid 0 nearly all of the time. It's the same with Firefox, Chrome, etc. Because the browsers (and their libs) finally learned how to use a GPU, even an ancient E-series looks better than some relatively recent Intel laptops.

It is 0 here:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"| uniq

model name : AMD A12-9700P RADEON R7, 10 COMPUTE CORES 4C+6G

EU politely asks if China could stop snaffling IP as precondition for doing business

You are mixing two completely different issues.

1. Chinese theft of IPR

2. The "unfairness" of the IPR monetization process in the western world.

Those two have very little to do with each other.

London Gatwick Airport reopens but drone chaos perps still not found

Re: Fire and forget ...?

It would seem to be possible to program

Only if you know the airport very well.

Re: Alledged Photo of drone

Difficult to judge size from this as it is unclear how far it is from the terminal. Can be quite big actually...

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

Re: Something doesn't fly right with this story

But the source of those could be fun.. Especially as they were used to attack Syrian/Russian assets from ISIL controlled

Nope. Aleppo province. Our "good" guys. So actually, we can just ask a friendly "first responder" for the appropriate information.

Sadly, they don't have Pantsirs,

Theoretically, that is not such a bad idea as its ammunition is supposed to self-destruct at a fixed distance, same as on the Kashtan. Practically, I would not rely on that. 20mm autocannon is great at a military base with an exclusion area put in place after mortar attacks. Civilian airport - not so much.

It will be more interesting to see the spec of what was used in the World Cup or some of the latest Israeli toys. They are designed to operate in the middle of an inhabited area which is actually a hell of a design problem.

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Re: Send in other, bigger, better armed drones?

You may ask how much per hour does it cost to fly a Typhoon,

How much per hour to mount a spare one on a truck is the right question. If there is no ground version to start off with.

Apple yanks iPhones from sale in Germany – and maybe China, too – amid Qualcomm spat

Plague meet Cholera

Plague meet Cholera, Cholera meet Plague. Enjoy each others company and Pox on both of your houses.