Posts by Voland's right hand

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

Re: "has never had a system where evidence...

If the laws of nature make it impervious to detection (which is the case for fine encryption), the laws of man and their servants stand up to attention, listen and shut the fuck up.

Samsung rings death knell for disk, gears up for QLC flash production

Death knell my arse

Any way I look at it, it is yet another step up on the ladder going down into the land of diminishing returns.

It delivers less in terms of capacity gain than what you have to over-provision in order to hit the actual MTBF and write cycle numbers even for consumer hardware.

So it is a death knell to rusty spinners some other time.

RDX removable disk has ransomware protection begging to be bypassed

Re: There was something newsworthy there

Can't you con figure any SAN volume to be write once if you want?

You can bake a similar service using a locked-down stand alone Linux machine with cold-swappable drives for the cost of less than 3% of the cost of the SAN. It is trivial to integrate with any existing backup software too - just make it export the "current backup" as filesystem. You can encrypt it or do anything else to your heart's content. The moment the backup run is over, unmount and mount the next one. "Freeze" the old one. Once a week/month/year/whatever, remove disk(s) containing the frozen snapshots and replace with fresh. There are like 20-odd ways to do that, none of which should take more than half an hour to rig and have running with no software costs and outright integration into most off the shelf backup systems (except the Apple TimeBomb idiocy which insists on Apple Only network shares to backup).

None of them will be used in an RDX shop anyway. It is a toy for people with more money than sense. Its cost per TB is ridiculous compared to both LTO and disk based virtual tape libraries.

Star Wars: Big Euro cinema group can't handle demand for tickets to new flick

Re: spoilerific

When #7 came out on DVD my wife and daughter bought me the DVD and I've never seen it!

I suggest watching Rogue 1 - it lives up to the expectations of the original 3 before Lucas has fully vandalized them. Compared to it Episode 7 is "Oops I did it again" (pretty much the same artistic value too).

Re: spoilerific

it looks as though every scene has appeared in a previous film

And? It has been a "Rehash for Milking" purposes exercise since episode VI. Step one. Blow a death star. Step 2 blow a bigger death star. Step 3 blow a fecking phenomenally big death star. So what is step 4?

Rogue one was a breath of fresh air exactly because it was not a milking exercise and it did not aim to leave (nearly) everybody alive for a next episode. It did not stick to "one major casualty" canon which the rest of Star Wars has to do in order to ensure there is continuation. I am not sure I will watch any of the continuations in the main sequence after that. They will frankly look lame.

Hitting 3 nanometers to cost chipmaker TSMC at least US$20 billion

His reply is "pretty soon, no more <enemy>".

They have a similar battle plan now, just with equipment. If you count the amount of anti-ship missiles concentrated in the area - you will gulp. It is enough to wipe through sheer numbers several USA carrier groups. Same for other ordnance and equipment. Sure, it may not be superior to either the Russian originals (where they copied it from) or some of the USA stuff, but there is a ridiculous amount of it in place.

Re: Well at 3nm it's a case of...

The issue with sub-10nm tech is not the possibility to etch it - that can be done. The issue is with long term stability of the product. When you have a feature which is less than let's say 50 atoms wide, a couple of atoms popping out of their places in the crystal lattice or swapping places with their neighbours is enough to turn the cart.

Atoms are not electrons, they do not move around easily. However, they do too. It is simply a matter of probability and some heat.

So while adding more transistors, etc 3nm smells like adding some planned obsolescence too. 28nm chips can run for decade(s). It is the capacitors which give up the ghost. At 3nm... Dunno... If it is regularly running at 70C+ (fairly common in a CPU under load) I have some doubts it will survive for more than 5-6 years.

You may not have noticed, but 'superfast' broadband is available to 94% of Blighty

Re: Warning : the below may contain irony....

I tried to make a deal with a policeman once, offered him £50 to not give me a speeding ticket.

That is the problem, you did not wait for his offer. You have to wait until he starts lamenting about how many Euros per hour are you doing above the speed limit.

Stealthy storage startup wants to fly read-write heads closer to disks

I have some doubts here

The current head to platter separation is a minor miracle of aerodynamics. It is self-tuning and works extremely well. Your average drive head gets almost as much wind tunnel hours as a fighter aircraft. It is in fact an aerodynamic problem which is almost as difficult as wing around the supersonic boundary because you do not have real "wind" - the head "flies" in the air flow which is being dragged by the spinning platter. Once it exits the flow (too high) the lack of lift pushes it down, once it gets too close the lift force becomes bigger and pushes it back up.

I have some very serious doubts that a mechanical system under computer control can beat this.

New coding language Fetlang's syntax designed to read like 'poorly written erotica'

Re: Love the honestly listed 'features'

I've occasionally thought that abusive versions of error messages might help lighten the programming mood:

Unfortunately, we are long past the days when statlab (or was that minitab?) answered to "fuck you" on the command line with "Your place or mine?".

The world has gone politically correctness mad.

Moon trumps Mars in new US space policy

Someone read the Chinese Space program

Someone read the Chinese space program and realized that if they succeed things will get really really interesting in near-Earth space. As a result we suddenly perform a volte-face and are now interested in the moon again.

Now, let's see how long until they finally realize that neither the moon, nor Mars are of any LONG TERM space-political value. He, who controls L1, L2, L3, L4 controls all space economically feasible long range space traffic from and to Earth (and Luna for that matter).

German Firefox users to test recommendation engine 'a bit like thought-reading'

Poxz on both of their houses

Did I spell it right? According to the current tendency to feck up perfectly fine English Spelling so it looks like something out of Gansta Rap speak?

Just to say it again. POXz on BOTH OF THEIR HOUSES.

Russian spies used Kaspersky AV to hack NSA staffer, swipe exploit code – new claim

Re: The tag line

I believe you'll find is was (and in many ways still is) Spanish in the south.

Oh it is. Just during the period I am referring to (from when is this idiom) Spain did not exist as a state. The French have kind'a ... eaten it :) Late 18th early 19th century in fact. After that Russia left the colonies wither to the point where selling Fort Ross to Sutter was not really voluntary. If it was not sold, he (or someone else) would have taken it.

Re: The tag line

"towering, majestic Cranberry Tree"

Good try. What you missed is the history of the phrase. Russian cranberry is a bush half a foot tall (tops), growing in swamps (and very tasty too). American cranberry is different species - it is larger. Hence, when the first Russian colonists came back from what is today Northern California with tales of American cranberries nobody believed their tales about the New World and that is exactly where the "towering majestic Cranberry Tree" etymology from is. It originally stood for "Odious American Bullshit". Over time, the American has dropped out of it and it just stands for Odious Bullshit.

So as you see - your take on the translation failed. It is not just "absurd". The full meaning has American in it - from the days when California had French in the south, Russians in the north and not a yank in sight.

Re: The tag line

It is the wrong tag line. The right tag line would be:

Если бы, да кабы, во рту выросли грибы, так был бы не рот, а целый огород.

Or even better one:

В Америке знешь, клюква у них такая развесистая...

No, I am not going to translate either, they are not translatable as each will take half a page to explain (and the translation will result in a meaningless jumble).

Russia, America dig into tug-of-war over Bitcoin laundering suspect

Very astute observation

It's Greece, the cradle of corr..., sorry civilization after all.

Facebook, Google, Twitter are the shady bouncers of the web. They should be fired

Good observation, wrong selection of facts

The article was brilliant, pity for the constant mentioning of Reds Under Our Beds.

FYI Kieron, the Reds were the LAST in line in the US elections to hand facebook and Google the penny of hate. Both campaigns paid tens (if not hundreds) of millions in both online ads and to outfits like Cambridge Analytica for targeting information. It is also not just USA. Here is an example from this morning:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/05/negative-campaign-sites-scandal-shakes-up-austrian-election-race

Only a few million in play (which is a hell of a lot for a Eu election).

Frankly, compared to this, the 100k or so RT paid for promoting its stories on FB and Twitter as well as Putin loaning Marine 30M so she does not go bankrupt before a presidential election are a drop in the ocean.

The evil genie of using the Internet is out of the bottle and it is used to manipulate public opinion to a degree which TV and newspapers never managed. Bottling it back up is simply not going to happen. If there was a way to bottle the genie of hatemongering, then Faux, Sun and Mirror would have closed their doors long ago.

HPE server firmware update permanently bricks network adapters

Testing

Testing... We have heard of it.

Oh, I forgot: it's all 'cos 'we aren't an OS company'

Well, if you are not an OS company why are sticking your grubby incompetent fingers anywhere near a driver image, may I ask?

HP Inc exec: Yes, we'll put a bullet in the X3 device

Re: we are not an operating system company

If you are going to count acquisitions in here you might as well add Palm too.

As far as excuses go, this takes "The Dog Ate My Homework" and beats it into oblivion with a sledgehammer.

European Commission refers Ireland to court over failure to collect €13bn in tax from Apple

Popcorn

Popcorn, popcorn, popcorn!!!

A BELAZ sized bag of popcorn.

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

Hollywood being moribund

There is a SH*TLOAD of SciFi which was not even theoretically feasible to be filmed 20 years ago which can be filmed today. However, instead of filming let's say the Uplift War by Brin (which can make the mother of all blockbusters - way beyond Star Wars), they are doing what? Rehashing old films and regurgitating Marvell comics.

Bleaurghhhh... Where is the vomit icon (we need one).

Tech VCs sue Uncle Sam over President Trump's immigration chill

Re: Oh - comma - Really?!?

Who's whining? I'm on the winning side, remember?

Are you working in real estate by any chance? Earning more than 1M? Working in an industry producing toxic waste?

These are the only ones I see which are winning. The majority of people who actually frequent this site - not so much. Just the opposite. This is inclusive of us on this side of the ocean which are "stay at home contractors" and from time to time pick up jobs from American companies.

By the way, this is not because American high tech companies are doing the legendary "taking jobs home" as promised by the Orange Orangutan. It is because they are tightening their belts and are gearing for a long term negative growth forecast.

Re: Oh - comma - Really?!?

No thanks. I'd rather have a contractor that doesn't randomly capitalise stuff.

You never know, he can come up with a new Hungarian notation. Even a more obscene one than the idiocy MSFT bestowed onto us 20+ years ago.

Re: Oh - comma - Really?!?

Obama dumped a great load of these last minute "rules" on his incoming successor's head,

Oh stop your endless whining for $DEITY sake. Obama, if anything, tightened them and tried to ensure they are used for what they should be used and not buried in real estate. Entrepreneur visas have existed since Reagan (at least). All it takes to become a US resident is to butter the USA with a wad of greenbucks. The wad used to be 2M in size during the Bush days, no idea what it is now. I think it is 5 - can't be arsed to look. With the removal of this rule you can once again just bury 5M in US real estate and wave your shiny new visa around if you want to(*).

(*)_{Which is the real reason for Trump repealing it.}

Computers4Christians miraculously appears on Ubuntu wiki

Time to switch to BSD

I should spin up a couple of BSDs in the house and proudly raise a flag with the Beastie on it in front of the house. D(a)emon wearing basketball boots. Hmmm... this is appealing...

Dnsmasq and the seven flaws: Patch these nasty remote-control holes

It can be from the outside Internet

Their POC code requires both a query and a sequence of answers. You can run the POC only from inside. I could not be arsed at this time of the day to decipher the actual hex contents of the query(ies), it may be possible to create them as a side effect of running normal web code f.e. javascript.

The mitigating factors are that you have to guess what is it. Arm (dnsmasq if memory serves me right is used in wireless tethering on Android), MIPS32 (most routers), x86 (a few firewalls and an occasional internet device here and there), etc. You get one chance to try as the result is a crashed dnsmasq.

Personally, I would not risk it. I had only one instance in use outside lab work (my mom's house) and even that just got disabled and replaced by a proper adult bind + isc dhcp server combination running on the razzie which controls the cctv.

Internet-wide security update put on hold over fears 60 million people would be kicked offline

Re: A curated list of servers with outdated software?

Most of these are incumbent telcos outside the developed world.

No stick short of kicking them off will make them upgrade. They do not care as most of them are monopolies too.

Twitter: We also made a shedload of cash from Russia's trolling during US White House race

Re: A sad state of affairs

I am with ya. I have done fruit picking and agricultural work in my college and school days.

I always giggle when I listen to ranting about "they (for a given value of they == mexicans, eastern europeans, etc) have taken our jobs" by some borderline obese slob over a pint in a pub.

He will not survive a day of proper agricultural work - even easy one like let's say picking plums for supermarket. Quota per head is 350kg. You pick the stuff which is reachable by hand (no mechanization), then it is the guys' job to shake off the rest off the tree. The more ladies you have in your team the more trees to shake. If you have 5, you are looking at shaking off more than a ton per day, every day for up to 40 days as long as the season lasts. I literally passed out on the tree from exhaustion once and fell off it. And that is an easy one - I am not talking about the really nasty jobs here like picking apples (the f*** things bruise just by thinking about them) or god forbid rose petals for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals where you have to start at 3:30 am every day.

It is valid not just for the Orangutang, but the majority of his (and other similar populist types') supporters too. They scream: "they took our jobs" while most of them would never do the immigrant's job in the first place.

Re: Free market

Free market it may be. For sour grapes.

The Americans fear (they actually have no proof that this happened for real) that Our Friend The Bear did to them what they have been doing to Latin America since the 19th century and to the rest of the world since WW2.

In the meantime Our Friend The Bear is laughing watching how the fear is eating them from the inside.

The amount of money the Bear spent above board is a rounding error in the election spending. Hillary spend 1.5B if we do not count the primaries, with the primaries north of 2Bn. Trump spent less but also a substantial amount. 100K on facebook and twitter ads promoting RT news channels is a mosquito bite in the midst of a feeding frenzy on the savanna. It is however sufficient to put the bitten in paranoia mode - what did that mosquito have? Denge? Malaria? Or some unknown horrible disease.

I wonder what would happen

I wonder what would happen

Contempt of Congress which in USA is a criminal offense and applies to the subpoenaed person - usually the CEO. While the C suite in USA can get away with anything short of murder, congress has introduced special rules for themselves. They actually can make it hurt.

Nadella says senior management pay now linked to improving gender diversity

Today,

Nothing new about it. Not particularly American problem either.

For example, most Eastern European countries had different entry criteria for men and women to try to balance things. As a result, it was relatively easy for a guy to get into life sciences or for a girl into physics while the opposite took straight As and sometimes even that was not enough.

USSR went even further. It had equalization quotas based on nationalities. They were defined based on percentage of the population. As a result nationalities with higher than average education level like Jews had trouble getting into the top end universities even with straight As. At the same time some of the more "obscure" minorities pretty much just needed to show up. So, it is not surprising that the USSR equal opportunities program is always quoted as a classic example of anti-Semitism.

One of the first things to go after the fall of the wall was the equal opportunities program.

I have no opinion what is right or wrong here - history shows that BOTH approaches (leaving things to itself and affirmative action) have their downsides.

30 strong fingers but still no happy ending for robotic back rub

Wrong idea Dabsy

Now that sounds like a lot more fun than undergoing systematic elimination by Cyberdyne T-800 Model 101s. Not so much "I'll be back" as "I'll rub your back".

You have not seen real massage Dabsy. You need to go to the Balkans or even better - to Turkey. There, the local Terminator will terminate you, disassemble you and reassemble you in one piece in about an hour if they are in a hurry, up to four hours if you want a full "annual pre-MOT service".

It is not "I'll rub your back", it is "I will separate your back into pieces and if you leave enough mullah in the tip pot I will be kind enough to put it back together". The experience is one in a lifetime (for a westerner) and the results are amazing. All of this is provided that you are not scared to undergo the procedure (the average UK dweller will have a brown pants moment at the idea of a entering a Turkish Bath and facing some of these guys. Hint - they are BIG).

So, coming back to T800. If the aforementioned masseur (or should it be masseuress?) can do REAL massage it will not be far off from a T800 in its damage potential. No thanks, I will actually leave that job to a human for now.

Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine

Unlike the twin power modules, AC sequencer and extra power supply in those SUN boxen!

I am surprised this passed the applicable USA and EC tests. Though, on a second thought, Ultrasparc 2 - that is from the days before the the universal 100-240V power supplies when US vendors fitted a "Eu PS" which should have been called "Eu PoS" in their gear to sell over here. There were some Eu spec models which had 5%+ failure rate reaching 20% for the worst cases (some of the turn of the century dot bomb darlings who were unfortunate to get the early Flextronics PS for Eu).

Ex-sperm-inate! Sam the sex-droid 'heavily soiled' in randy nerd rampage

Re: Poor Samantha

Repaired is not the correct technical term.

The correct technical term is "decontaminated". That is prior to any decisions to repair or not to repair.

Helium's for balloons and squeaky voices, not this 10TB Toshiba beast

Re: Stay Clear

Sorry to hear that your supplier lied to you...

Most suppliers allow you to get an RMA only via their automated forms using account info from registration and/or proof of purchase. They also happily ignore Eu directive.

Example - More Computers and Amazon in the UK. More is a year for everything and the directive be damned. Amazon is even less - it is usually a month. After a month you are supposed to deal with manufacturer. However if the manufacturer does not want to deal with you - f.e. Toshiba or Huawei you have a dud on your hands and no recourse whatsoever.

Stay Clear

There is no warranty service in Europe.

I had a 3TB drive fail within the officially declared warranty. The supplier refused to take it back as it was over one year and it was supposed to be Tosh Europe to handle it. Toshiba Europe sent it back to me as they do not do ANY WARRANTY on their hard drives. At ALL. In fact, it is possible to guess that as entering serial numbers/models in their warranty service website for Europe answers with a doodle on a stick.

So, no thanks. While I may use it for stuff like laptop drives things are deemed fully depreciated in a couple of years they are on my blacklist for any NAS and server drive purchases. No thanks.

Amadeus booking software outages smack airports across world

Re: 'we experienced a network issue '

agents only using IE7

You are overly-optimistic, the full functionality till this day requires a terminal and is usually used via a terminal.

The UK isn't ditching Boeing defence kit any time soon

Go with Easyjet, their aircraft are Airbus

Not just that.

SleasyJet plan to still fly after B-day and have a rather Sleasy plan revolving around the dual cittizenship of their major shareholder (I wonder how long until this is shot down by regulators one way or another).

Ryanair has no plan B for B day - they have openly stated that they intend to relocate all flights out of Stansted and cancel all internal UK flights.

Don't the W.T.O. get involved in things like this?

Not in military procurement or anything with a national security clause. WTO does not have a say in these.

Out, damned Spot! Amazon emits Echo ball with screen, inevitable ever-listening mic

"Alexa..."

"Ok Google..."

"Hey Siri..."

"Xbox..."

"Hey Cortana..."

An AI orgy in the making...

EasyJet: We'll have electric airliners within the next decade

Why or why?

It is targeted at sub-1.5h flights like Paris-London.

For that distance a propeller driven aircraft (especially in pusher config like Piaggio P.180 Avanti) has nearly identical door to door time as real or "fake" (like their design) turbojets.

While the design is quite cute, a scaled up pusher with a couple of electrics in the back is likely to beat it on all counts - up front cost, time to market, maintenance cost, etc. We have learned how to make relatively quiet propeller aircraft so the noise should not be an issue.

¡Dios mío! Spain blocks DNS to hush Catalonian independence vote sites

Re: Having their cake and eating it

the hard border, the trade deal negotiations, the economic self-reliance.

1. Who told you the border will need to be hard. This is not British Leave of "keep the smelly Eastern Europeans" out.

2. Trade deal negotiations. Again. The intention is to join the queue for Eu and jump the queue for joining the Eu by having all laws in a state fit for purpose and already using the Euro.

3. Economic self-reliance. The reason Spanish government is ready to start a Spanish Civil War No 2 is that IT IS NOT SELF RELIANT. Catalonia is. Rest of Spain keeps sucking money from it. While taking from Catalonia more than it gives back is a venerable tradition dating from before the War of Spanish Succession, it has never been a case of "If Catalonia Leaves, rest of Spain financially goes under". Until today. That is the reality today. That is also why the central government is refusing to allow Catalonia to collect their own taxes (the way Basque does).

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

Popcorn

A car is not an vacuum cleaner.

It is a complex device with tens of thousands of parts going into it. As a result, building cars in this day and age is a massive cross-border trade exercise. Car manufacturers source 70%+ of what goes in a car outside their organizations and usually (in Europe) across the border. It will be interesting to watch Mr Leave Business Poster Child trying to sort out his supply chain to build anything that size and/or complexity. That calls for some Popcorn.

Twitter to upgrade from micro-blogging to milli-blogging with 280 chars

Re: Twitting Twitter

I wasn't aware that 'twit' was the noun for a person that tweeted.

They miss-spelled it. It is easy to make a one letter mistake.

Why Uber isn't the poster child for capitalism you wanted

WTF did you smoke this morning?

Are you trying to tell us that Bell, Paramount Pictures (of the 1940 FCC case) where socialist or created in a socialist environment?

Brit broke anti-terror law by refusing to cough up passwords to cops

This is the CAGE that defends the rights of terrorists like Jihadi John

Even if he was the late Bearded Wanker Johnny himself, this does not free us from the obligation to apply due process and the list of various rights (which do not exist in Britain anyway[*]) such as presumption of innocence, right not to self incriminate, etc. This is what makes us fundamentally different from Bearded Wanker Johnny and his mates. By the way do not even get me started on his extra-judicial termination without an appropriate death penalty in absentia being served onto him by court.

[*]_{The only concept of fundamental right in English law comes from the EUHR convention. There is NO other right which is considered fundamental and irrevocable - something which "Parliament is Sovereign and Shall Not Be Bound" has proven by amending the original Bill of Rights of 1689 until there is nothing left of it. Reading it is a very educational experience for anyone claiming that UK has a stable legal system and a rule of law.}

"you have the right to remain silent"

Who told you you have it in the UK?

UK does not have fundamental rights and more specifically presumption of innocence and right to not self-incriminate.

It is a side effect of UK being the only other country besides Saudi Arabia which does not have a proper written constitution. Parliament is sovereign and shall not be bound. As a result when the governing party decides to sneak yet another erosion of rights into law books there is nothing there to stop it except the EUCHR and EUHR convention. You now know why Josephina Vissarionovna May is so desperate to get us out of it. By the way, a UK Bill of Rights is not a replacement, because it will be amended and eroded the same way the original Bill of Rights was amended over the years. Via "Parliament is Sovereign and shall not be bound".

Brit military wants a small-drone-killer system for £20m

For that amount of money, I can pocket 10M, pay 500K for Boris folly sitting in the garage somewhere around London (the second hand German water cannons) and rig it on a 360 degree mount with laser/visual targeting. In fact, more like pocketing 15 mil - I do not see how you will need more than a couple of mil on the prototype. Even with QuinetiQ markup.

RF jamming

2-120kg is more than sufficient to fit an Rasperry or Arduino based autopilot. In fact, the computing power a drone can carry nowdays is perfectly fit for the purpose of targeting and homing in on the CIWS.

So jamming helps only against people taking the piss. It will not stop people taking a couple of kg of high explosive instead.

The real solution here is neither shooting, nor laser, nor jamming - they have the issue of range. Their range is too good so you cannot use them close to the shore and in-port.

The real solution, however is all around a ship all the time. It is called water. I have yet to see a 2-120kg drone which is capable of surviving a mining grade (not the wimpy ones used by the police) watercannon. Range is also perfectly appropriate - > 100 meters on specialized versions so a bow and aft mounts can cover even a ship the size of Queen Lizzy.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdt9WctqK4o

Anyone with a drone capable of surviving this, please come forward.

There is an existing cheap and shipping (with a sizeable install base) navalized version: http://piratesafe.com/

Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders

Re: Mock while you can.

Sadly, eventually any group that persists at a task will increase skill levels.

Not if there are no survivors (which is the direct result of forgetting to scrub GPS metadata from pictures taken for propaganda purposes).