Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
I am surprised they have not just had him assassinated alread
That would only fuel their critics. Much better to have Snowden as a fugitive, he's already fallen off the edge of most newspapers' short-term-memory and been forgotten by the general public, but the NSA can always warm the hunt up again if they need more gung-ho publicity or a bargaining chip with Putin.
And a taxi strike, the drivers with the the official medallions are protesting about Uber in Paris as well. Uber reckons business this evening was 9x normal. How will the licensed drivers cope, it's hard to drive when you've shot yourself in both feet.
Of course, if some cheap plan that allowed a few KB of data per day for pennies were available I can see gadget manufacturers creating devices to use it for SMS and/or twitter, thus upsetting the phone companies who rely on selling unnecessarily expensive data plans to smartphone users...
you'd need to pick a different addressing scheme than phone numbers
Not necessarily. E.164 defines a 15-digit numbering scheme for worldwide phone numbers, with a max of 14 digits for national numbers. Even allowing for "illegal" numbers such as ones that begin 000 or 999 there's still likely to be some 46 bits of address available, which is about the same as the MAC address range. Most devices wouldn't need to be individually addressible anyway, so some number sharing would be possible.
You wouldn't have to overpower an existing signal, most digital TV systems are watching for new channels, and will pop up a "new channels found" box when they see one. You can usually turn it off, but by default it's on. Call it "free porn" or "lottery channel" and there'll always be someone who'll switch to it, just to see what it is. That would be enough to download & run an embedded app. Cable systems would require injection into a head-end somewhere, but that's unlikley to be too difficult.
Just charge overnight when demand is low
The problem isn't quantity of power available, it's getting it to the charging point. At 125kW for a single "charging station", you could be looking at upwards of 2MW grid connection to each site. Easy to do in a technical sense, certainly, but not cheap and unlikely to be practical (or pretty) if you need one every 50 miles along a motorway, where you find conventional filling stations today.
Let's hope no-one tells them about petrol stations.
I think most fire brigades would much sooner deal with a fire in a petrol station than a fire in a warehouse full of charging Li-Ion batteries. Petrol tends not to spontaneously combust in storage, either.
After all, the petrol car arose because this wonderfully easy to use liquid fuel was discovered
And let's not forget that cars only make up a small part of road traffic, so even if a new infrastructure is created for them, the old infrastructure will still have to be there for HGVs, etc. There's also little chance that air travel will ever be able to work on electricity, so some sort of liquid fuel will be required.
Overall it makes far more sense to develop renewable liquid fuels than to go back to the dead-end of battery-electric cars for mass transport.
some major stumbling blocks:
4. A 'swapping station" would need to have a large number of batteries on charge, ready to meet demand. To be cost-effective you're probably looking at swapping hundreds of batteries per day. That's way beyond charging with some 'spare" energy from renewables, you're looking at major grid infrastructure. Maybe if the swapping stations were in the Drax or Sizewell visitor carparks...
5. What would the planning folks say about a warehouse with 100+ full Tesla-style Li-Ion batteries stored? I doubt the local fire brigade would be keen to have it on their patch.
and as for the actual cost of the electricity isn’t that great and it’s far better to build it into the price of the car., it sounds great until the government realize how much fuel duty and VAT they'd lose if everyone were to go electric. Then the supercharger sites all get hit with tax bills based on the number of cars charged per day, we'll see how long it stays "free".
Seriously? The "I don't see a problem, perhaps it's you" defence?
No, the "The women I work with don't make pointless generalisms" defence. I do know some women colleagues who have a problem with some of their male colleagues. I have problems with those same colleagues, they're patronizing and/or arrogant pratts. As a whole I haven't heard female friends complaining about anti-woman bias in IT, that includes my wife who would arguably be most likely to be honest with me about it.
However, you can expect that an agency like that will at least keep to its government-given mandate, and not cross those lines.
Serioulsy, you believe that? Are all Americans that naive?
Edward Snowden saw this, and decided to reveal this to the world.
Indeed he did, and in doing so he not only crossed the lines of his mandate, he completely ignored it. And the solemn oath he had sworn to his nation to protect it.
There are ways to blow the whistle on this sort of thing which leave the guilty some way to save face, many of which require some self-sacrifice with no reward, but by "revealing it to the world" Snowden chose the "hey look at me, I'm such a great guy saving you all from this" wannabe-hero approach. Not so smart.
if the phone chooses that base station as the strongest, having it transmit on just good enough power
Not what I meant. The base station can still transmit on full power, but it would ask the phone handset to reduce power to a minimal required level.
That will make it harder to find the phone, not easier. Cell phone base stations can use the power negotiation to determine the phone's distance, and if they are using a directional aerial to triangulate the phone a stronger signal makes it harder to identify the "null" which pinpoints the transmitter's direction.
What they should be doing (and probably are) is to have the phone reduce its power to the lowest level where it can still be communicated with, the amount of signal reduction will identify distance, and the weaker signal is much easier to locate directionally.
the command "rm -rf / tmp/*" (note the significant space).
We had a case a while back where people started complaining that they couldn't find some of their files. Initial investigations showed the free space on many disks gradually creeping up.
It was eventually traced to a timed (cron) job that was run to clean up debug output on some test systems. It contained something like "rm -rf $(DEBUG_LOG)/" and there was one code path where DEBUG_LOG was an empty string. Didn't help that the lab systems had NFS mounts of many development trees, either.
One of those times when all the effort put into the backup processes really paid off.
Ah yes - let someone else do it. The rallying cry of the apathetic and irresponsible since days of yore.
I take it you didn't read the article's byline, then? Or maybe it didn't ring any bells?
shouldn't we be congratulating El Reg for living up to the principles of the 4th Estate?
What, publish the muck before someone else gets paid to do it before you can?
brave enough to actually inform (some of) the public
What's brave about it?
The fact that this is happening is surely no surprise to anyone. Spies spy, it's their job. I'd be more worried if I found out that GHCQ staff just sat around analyzing the world's newspapers each day.
El Reg claims that the info is already in the hands of the bad guys, so they might as well tell us about it as well. If their assumption is true then this looks just like they didn't want to miss out on the fun, no journo likes to be "scooped", especially if it's going to be by the Grauniad or the Daily Fail. Of course, if their information is false, and the details weren't widely known, then publishing them may put the lives of the workers at these sites at risk, to no obvious benefit for anyone. Either way it seems pointless at best, and perhaps the sort of article better left to New Statesman than an online IT rag.
Will this be sizeable in realworld terms, or the Ofcom "a few weeks' profits" kind of sizeable?
The fine should be 10x the estimated cost of the time lost by the people they spammed, plus the full cost of the police investigation required to catch them. Also confiscation of all material used in connection with the activity, including the premises.
Think of it as upgrading the M4 from 3 lanes to 25 lanes.
The M25 exceeded it's 10-year future traffic forecast the day it was opened, it's still playing catchup. The risk is that the same will happen to 4G. Adding 10x the capacity won't help if 100x the number of users all jump on to get the "superfast" broadband they can't get from terrestrial DSL.
For all intents and purposes, IPv6 _is_ IPv4+
Not what I meant.
If you give an IPv6 packet to an old IPv4-only stack, it's reaction will be "WTF? Discard packet". There is zero compatibility between IPv6 and a pure IPv4 stack.
I was thinking more of some bastard half-breed mongrel of a protocol with extra address bytes, perhaps stuffed into the payload, such that an IPv4+ system could recognise and process an IPv4+ packet correctly, and a pure IPv4 stack would at least be able to punt it to an IPv4+ gateway system "looks like this one's for you, Fred", from where it could get routed on its way. Such an interim system would at least allow for rapid upgrades to equipment because new stuff would be compatible with old so mix'n'match would be possible. In maybe 15-20 years there would be so little pure IPv4 left that it could evolve to a clean next generation.
I wouldn't for a moment describe it as desirable, pretty, or a proper long-term solution, and I know that purists are probably having apoplexy right now, but it could have been done. Look at how the phone network managed to evolve from "Mursley 315" to E.161 direct dial international without having to replace everyone's phones. It went through some ugly interim mechanisms, and no doubt could be better if designed from scratch, but it worked for practical day-to-day use. IPv6 was designed by purists who assumed that they could just "change everything" when the time came. They picked revolution over evolution, and got left behind by the rate of internet growth.
If it only breaks "some"variants of all these, won't that just hand a commercial advantage to those vendors whose products don't break?
Like it or not, CGNAT is the easiest way to provide an adequate level of internet access for the vast majority of people who want nothing more than email, Tesco online, and surfing for porn. I can see ISPs starting to offer 'standard' and 'premium' service, with standard being CGNAT. I'm still half expecting someone like Google or Cisco to come out with an "IPv4+" which offers tolerably compatible address expandability, without all the IPv6 bells and whistles.
Why do companies like @eBay or @Target NOT encrypt sensitive personal data? Let me hear one single good reason.
How about because for things like addresses they need to be able to decrypt it, which means they need to store the password, and that can be stolen like any other piece of data. Encryption is only useful if you don't keep the key anywhere near the data, which is tricky if you need to be able to retrieve the data automatically, as distinct from asking a real person to type in their key.
Doesn't matter if they got the salt too, the idea of a salt is that each password is hashed diferently, so they can't just store a dictionary of hashed strings which they can compare against. They'd need a dictionary per possible salt value. That is unwieldly and slows down any attack, which is general is the best you can ever hope for.
You also have to consider the reviewer's own characteristics. I would ignore complaints about slow servivce when made by an american reviewer, since americans expect to have all three courses thrown at them in 20 minutes, but a similar complaint from a french reviewer would make me wonder.
Someone moaning about poor service when they paid 99 euros for a room in a city centre hotel has probably got some unrealistic expectations of what that will buy. In general a review that has precise details is more likely to be useful than a 1-lone "we loved it", etc.
Tripadvisor is a useful service but, as with all advice, you have to make your own mind up.
As you said, the problem with e-cigs, from the government's point of view, is that they lead to a reduction in tax revenue
But have a much larger reduction in healthcare expenditure. Why else would governments spend so much money on persuading people to quit?
Don't let me spoil your conspiracy theories, though.
