Posts by lorisarvendu 387 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2012
"Can you think of a plausible use for a windows feature that allows one type of file to masquerade as another for the purposes of being executed by mistake ?"
Well yes I can. To allow apps to be opened by double-clicking files with a particular file extension - arguably one of the most important innovations in GUI computing for 30 years. So important a feature in fact that every other graphical OS has copied it. I'm running Linux with an LXDE desktop and if I change a file extension to DOC, the icon changes to a big fat "W", indicating that I've got Libre Office installed. I am reliably informed that OSX also does this.
Ok so it goes wrong sometimes (note the default association of NFO files), but nobody could have anticipated it would be hijacked in the 21st Century to enable propagation of malware.
"Fix the OS properly, Microsoft"
Apart from the fact that you actually mean "Fix the OS properly Apple....Gnome...LXDE...KDE...Microsoft..." , what would you suggest? How would you redesign the graphical interface so that a user can easily identify files that open with a particular application, and then open that app by double-clicking the file...without enabling that feature to be hijacked by malware?
The problem is that many businesses receive hundreds of unsolicited attachments every day, quite often in PDF form. Almost all of the mail recieved at UK University Admissions Offices are of this type. If someone gets an email with an attachment that has "PDF" on the end, chances are they'll open it, especially if it has a recognisable PDF icon.
How do you prevent users doing this? Simply telling them not to open unsolicited emails is not the answer, since that will stop them doing 90% of their business. You can't rely on email server AV scanners, since the fact that corporate users are opening these mails proves that AV companies are having a hard time keeping up with the malware's changes in code.
The answer is to educate users in the concept of hidden file extensions, and the fact that a PDF attachment will not say "PDF" on the end, and if it does, then it's likely there's a hidden "EXE". Unfortunately this is a concept that the majority of users (who have been brought up on the Windows graphical "point and click" environment of the last 30 years) find difficult to grasp.
Oh and unhiding file extensions isn't the answer. We had a bunch of machines a few years ago with "hide file extensions" turned off by default. The result was that users would happily give their Office documents a name, save them, and then be unable to find them again. The reason? They were overwriting the ".DOC" or "XLS" on the end, so Word and Excel (which use extension filters) didn't show their files anymore.
The best strategy to beat this is to mitigate the effects by educating users into the wisdom of regular offline backups. The malware's going to keep spreading because users gonna keep clicking, and so long as people are prepared to pay (because they have no alternative), Cryptolocker is a success. There will be more like it.
Sure, regular backups aren't going to help recover that important file that you updated only 30 minutes ago, but if it's only the one file there's less incentive for you to fork out £4-600 to decrypt it. If you didn't backup several gigabytes of network files that constitute the whole of your business, then yes you'll pay silly money to get it all back, and that's the area where the malware thrives.
Ah yes, I was wondering about this. I want to buy a couple of Bitcoins in order to buy something online from a trader who only takes Bitcoins. With mining getting increasingly more difficult (and more people ceasing mining since it now costs them money in electricity bills), there are fewer people verifying transactions. So my retailer now has to wait far longer for the Bitcoin I've paid him to be verifiably his. Is that correct?
Say I purchased a laptop worth about $300, and I gave him a single Bitcoin (since that was the price he asked at the time). Several weeks later the Bitcoin is finally his, but the value of Bitcoins has now dropped to around $100. He's now out of pocket. If this has happened enough times (he's sold several hundred laptops) then he is now faced with a deficit to the tune of thousands of dollars. If he owes money to his suppliers, money that he now doesn't have, then he instantly goes bankrupt.
Of course if his suppliers also take payment in Bitcoins then he's alright, because he still has the same amount of Bitcoins. However as soon as we get to someone down the line who deals with their supplier in dollars, that person potentially takes the hit and goes bust...unless the price of Bitcoin increases, in which case they make a sudden and unexpected profit.
Of course the only way the instabilities in Bitcoin value affect anyone is when they affect the exchange rate. If everyone was using Bitcoin this wouldn't happen. However you only have to take a look at the past history of Bitcoin prices to see that from the outside it still looks like a very risky currency, and so people still seem to prefer to stick with the more stable dollar (or in my case, the pound sterling).
Personally I don't want to be forced to be involved in price speculation every time I buy or sell something. I want to know that if I buy an item now, or wait a couple of months and buy it later, I can reasonably expect it to cost roughly the same amount of £s or $s. With Bitcoin at present I can't do this.
This makes an interesting read:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/an-illustrated-history-of-bitcoin-crashes/
I think that a lot of the pros of Bitcoin (especially the potential to completely sideline existing currency transfer systems) are seen as threats by Banks and Governments. This already gives them a reason to want to suppress Bitcoin, and so I think that one day soon laws will be passed to make Exchanges and Bitcoin transactions essentially illegal, to the point where retailers will no longer take the currency, and without any way of using it to buy products, or convert it to cash, it will be strangled out of existence.
They will do this with the full co-operation and agreement of their assorted populace, the majority of whom do not understand Bitcoin and currently have no use for it. The various cons of Bitcoin (spate of burglaries, involvement in the Silk Road, relation to malware) will be trotted out as reasons why this evil virtual currency should be got rid of, the masses will agree, and that will be that.
I don't have any solid evidence for my belief that Bitcoin will eventually crash and burn, just a gut feeling. It seems to incredibly vulnerable to rampant inflation, you only have to look on eBay to see the silly money that people are bidding. I mean, $1200 for 2 BTC? It's possible that the increase in market value over the last few weeks is due in no small part to the spread of Cryptolocker ransomware, which demands your payment in either $300 of MoneyPak or 2BTC, whichever is the cheapest. However I believe that MoneyPak can only be purchased if you hold a US credit card, leaving anyone outside the US with BitCoin as their only payment option. When the malware first surfaced 2 BTC did equate to about $300, but that price has now doubled .
The optimism of a few years ago that soon every online retailer would accept Bitcoin doesn't seem to have borne fruit. Even if you do trade commodities for Bitcoin I can't see how you can run a business with the currency the way it is at present. There's less and less incentive for anyone to sell their Bitcoins since you'll get double your money if you hold out for another month....or quadruple. Imagine what would happen to a country's economy if the value of its currency doubled every few weeks?
The thing about Bitcoin however seems to be that it is capable of crashing every 6 months or so and then recovering again. So it may well last 10 years (though I'd personally give it another year for various reasons), but I can't see it becoming mainstream.
I'm watching the progress of BitCoin with great interest, especially stories like this. Unlike "real" currencies, BitCoin is essentially a closed system and so burglaries like this are really just the coins moving around that system.
If confidence in BTC crashes (which I'm inclined to think it will eventually) then such burglaries suddenly become non-burglaries, since the item stolen would then be worthless. The final fate of BitCoin may be for the majority of them to end up in the hands of criminals who then find that all they are holding is a few bytes of computer code that they can no longer convert to cash because there is no longer a market.
After all, if you steal something that has no value, have you actually committed a crime?
It's the speed of the propagation of light that's variable. Thus light travelling through a dense material like water does appear slower, but probably due to absorption and re-emmission of light by atoms. The actual photons themselves always travel at lightspeed. Thus in a perfect vaccuum light propagates at the same speed as photons travel.
Oh and the "stopping light" experiment didn't really stop light. it just stopped the information and then started it again:
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/01.24/01-stoplight.html
It's extortion pure and simple and we should never give in to extortion, as it only encourages more of the same. However if faced with the ruin of your business, most people would have no choice but to pay the ransomers.
I wouldn't mind if scams like this caused everyone to start backing up, but they don't. The ones who've been stung do, but nobody else will (even those reading Cryptolocker news items and going "tut tut!). Which means Ransomeware is a Proven and Successful Business Model.
The early adopters didn't take a high risk. They were minting coins at a fantastic rate, producing hundreds a week, all only worth about 25c. No risk involved. Plus nobody would try and steal your wallet since what they'd get wouldn't be worth the effort involved.
Now years later those early adopters can reap the rewards, not in cash because if you try and offload that many coins onto the market you'll cause another crash, but in services.
The reason nobody can find Satoshi Nakamoto is that whoever he, she, or they is/are, they have long retired to a tropical island with their millions.
Hell, I could have bought a couple of Bitcoins a year ago off eBay for £50, sat on them and then redeemed them for £300 a week ago...or £600 this week...or £1200 next week. If that isn't the sign of a Bubble I don't know what is. The only difference is that unlike other Bubbles BitCoin can burst as many times as it wants, because it will always reinflate. This (and greed) causes most people to hang on to their coins as the value keeps increasing. The only winners with BTC are those with the sense to sell up and get out when the price is high.
God I wish I'd bought those coins now.
Being in IT, I'm mostly sympathetic towards users who have lost data from virus attacks, and I do my best to help and educate them. But in my darkest hours I do get incredibly pissed off about the way they still treat IT staff as a nerdy joke, disregard our warnings and best practice advice, and then blame us for not preventing the catastrophe caused by their own stupidity.
Y2K was a big wake-up call for me. We had resources thrown at us in the preceding years to investigate and mitigate any possible disaster, and then when nothing happened (mainly due to us pulling out all the stops) the IT community was accused of having manufactured the whole thing. If disaster had struck we would have been accused of not doing enough to prevent it.
So if it's raining outside, the sky's particularly black, I'm in a bad mood, and you tell me that Cryptolocker's eaten all your files because you never took a backup (like I've been telling you for years), then I apologise for telling you I told you so.
Up until the end of Troughton's tenure, the series was on TV for about 43 weeks a year. That's Doctor Who every Saturday all year round, with only 10 weeks off! We never had it so good!
From 1970 onwards, that figure dropped to 27 weeks, less than half the year, so no wonder Pertwee has so little air-time despite his 5 years on the job. Tom Baker has to stick it out for 7 seasons to make an appreciable dent in Hartnell's record.
By the time the 6th Doctor comes along, the show's only on for a quarter of the year - 13 weeks - and it stays that way until it's cancelled in 1989. Then it comes back in 2005 for...13 weeks. Admittedly those 13 weeks are all 45 minute stories, so we're kind of back to 1970s screen-time.
Then in 2009 the 10th Doctor's "Specials" year is only 6 weeks long, as is the first half of the 11th Doctor's 7th Series (including Christmas Special).
2012's a little better, as so far we've had 8 weeks, and there's a 50th Anniversary and Christmas Special still to come. But those halcyon days of the Doctor taking up a sizeable chunk of the viewing year are long gone...
This is the basis behind the old Twin Paradox. One twin speeds off in a spaceship on a round trip to Alpha Centauri, while the other twin stays on Earth. Conventional wisdom says the twin who travels ages much slower than his counterpart on Earth (assuming he travels fast enough for significant time.
However the paradox appears to state that each twin sees the other twin accelerate away at great speed, according to their own frame of reference, so why doesn't each twin arrive back younger than the other?
The resolution to this is that although it appears that each twin experiences the same as the other (i.e. sees the other accelerate away), they actually do not. The twins are not in identical frames of reference. One twin (on the spaceship) experiences more acceleration than the other. He also experiences a journey to Alpha Centauri and back, involving changes in velocity. The other twin remains on a planet circling a sun.
In your example the clocks on the Earth and on the Probe also have valid but not identical frames of reference. The probe experiences additional acceleration (up to 25% of C) whereas the clock on Earth experiences the same acceleration due to the planet's gravity.
As to the amount of time dilation the probe would experience, at 25% of the speed of light (assuming the probe accelerated to this speed very quickly), if the probe's round trip took 10 years, then when it arrived back on Earth its clock should read only 9.68 years.
Kim Stanley Robinson gets round the difference in day length by having the clocks "stop" for 40 minutes between 12:00 and 12:01, producing a period of time referred to as the "Martian Time Slip". It's really the only practical way to keep measuring time using the same units as on Earth while still accounting for the difference in day length.
The important thing is that humans could still do things like measure speed (kmph) or schedule meetings at prearranged times, providing they allow for the Time Slip if any of your measurements extend over midnight.
Of course we'd have to throw Earth months and weeks out of the window as the year would have 668.59 days, and no convenient 28-day moon. We'd also have to figure out the Martian equivalent of leap years.
I've been trying to point this out to friends for years, but I just get shouted down as a "Denier".
Kind of like a guy with a bad leg infection, the Doctor puts all his energy into attempting to save the limb, and none into researching what prosthetics and changes to his lifestyle might be needed in the even of amputation.
"Mine has been sitting in the attic for months. Mainly because of problems that you shouldn't have to deal with on such a device (The USB shares bus-bandwidth with something else - the SD or the Ethernet I can't remember - and as such can lose USB packets [read: All your devices crash and stop working] silently without any clue what went wrong... "
[digression] Are you sure? I had that on mine and was convinced it was the pi. It wasn't. It was the power supply. Even though I'd plugged it into 3 separate USB plugs (and the USB output of 2 TVs), as soon as I ran it off my Samsung phone charger (output 3A) it became as solid as a rock.
Yes the Ethernet shares power with the USB (since the Ethernet actually is a USB device). The Pi would appear to freeze, but that was because the mouse (USB), keyboard (USB) and network (also USB) would all drop.
It wasn't until I tried it with an XBMC distro that the penny dropped - I noticed the online clock was still working. Ergo the OS hadn't crashed, but it had no I/O to the outside world, so it looked like it had. [/digression]
Re copyright. This has already been addressed before in "The Lion's Tale":
http://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv57/lion.html
You're only infringing copyright if you copy the film or attempt to show it for profit. Purchasing the film acetate itself is not a problem.
In fact technically (since it should have been returned to the BBC back in the 60s) the film is stolen property and anyone who sells or buys it is committing a crime, although (see above) practically the BBC would never do this, otherwise nobody would ever offer any old 60s TV programmes up for sale ever again for fear they would have to blow most of their profit on a defense lawyer.
Been watching this rumour with amusement for the last 6 months, and there's been a lot of conflicting reports. Like the "large cache of old films cargo" story seems to have been debunked a few months back. The fact that 106 stories are missing, and (allegedly) 106 have been found tells us that if there is a grain of truth to the rumour, that grain is well hidden and the rest is just wish-list. Because we will never find 106. Part 7 of The Dalek Master Plan - "The Feast of Steven" (actually the original first Doctor Who "Christmas Special") - was never recorded onto film and never sold abroad. So the number of 106 doesn't originate from someone in the know but from fan speculation. As I suspect is "where" it comes from and "who" has found it.
It's quite possible something has been found, but the BBC has kept quiet for various reasons. The main reason being that if you're negotiating to buy old Doctor Who film, you don't want other Collectors getting wind and offering a price you can't match. The BBC may be a big corporation, but it has a budget like anyone else, it's pockets aren't bottomless. There are Doctor Who fans out there who would love to get their hands on cans of film containing stories that no-one else has (or is likely to) see, and some of them could easily outbid Auntie.
Then of course there's this rumour: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-10-06/doctor-who-newly-discovered-missing-episodes-to-be-released-for-sale-this-week
Who knows? (lol). Personally, you can keep your old scratchy Hartnell. I'll be over the moon if only Troughton's "Web of Fear" or "Evil of the Daleks" is rediscovered.
Internet banking is a boon for me. I work all day so don't want to waste a lunch break standing in a queue, and anyway I don't need to. My pay goes in automatically and my bills come out. I transfer £50 a month to my son's account for his pocket money, and pay my credit card bills. It's even better now that I've found an app on my phone to do it. Drawing money out can be done from any cashpoint.
The only time online doesn't help is when someone gives me cash...but my wife works for a bank so she can pay it in for me.
Funnily enough she works for Lloyds/TSB!
Not impressed with the woman with accounts at two different branches, who knew about the split, knew what would happen, did nothing (like request one of her accounts to be moved) and now whines because they're with two different banks. And the Reg posts this as a legitimate complaint about the split?
How do you know there's no sign of Series 8 yet? Just because they're not filming yet doesn't mean it's not on the way. Series 5 was filmed in Sept 2009 and subsequently broadcast in April 2010. Plenty of time for an April 2014 start. The Christmas special has yet to be filmed. Expect that to start around July this year.
And whose enthusiasm is flagging for the series exactly? Final viewer ratings are on a par with Series 2, 3, 5 & 6, and as for the 50th...an Anniversary special and the docudrama "An Adventure In TIme & Space"?
Think about it. If they want a regeneration in the Xmas special then they'll have to start filming by July at the latest. If we're not going to see the 12th Doctor until Series 8, and they want that in April 2014, then they'll have to start filming in Sept this year at the latest. They'll have to announce the 12th Doctor before then, or it'll leak out from fans watching location filming.
The Public announcement of Matt leaving may have just happened, but the BBC will have known about it for months, in order to prepare for Series 8. The 12th Doctor will already have been auditioned and cast, probably way back in January. Matt Smith auditioned and got the role at least 6 months before it was announced in January 2009.
Trust me. The 12th Doctor is already out there, unable to tell anyone he (or she) has got the job.
Foreign students in UK Uni often rely on Msnger to chat to home, and they can use the web-based version, which enabled us to stop deploying the app across our student PCs. Unless I can't find it, Skype doesn't seem to have a web-only version, meaning possible mass-deployment for us (and continual upgrades).
Although the Hammer movie is very good (actually it's my favourite film of all time), there was a lot cut out of the original series in order to fit the story into a 90-minute movie. There's one very subtle scene where the camera pans slowly across the archaeological dig, while in the background you hear the news on the radio, and it's all War this and Conflict that. Foreshadowing of the revelation that the Martians have instilled the human race with their own aggressive warlike ways.
It's also interesting how Quatermass changes between the TV series and the film, reflecting the social changes in Britain between the 50s and 60s. In 1958 he's very much part of the parternalistic establishment (he goes to his Club), but by 1967 he's portrayed as a socialist working-class boy done good, disdaining an invitation to Breen's own Club.
Reminds me of a tale. My wife's work colleague had a PC problem so the wife said I'd be glad to take a look. Went out and it was the old "insert boot device" problem. Went into BIOS and no drives showing. At that point I asked her if it was under warranty. She said she thought so. I said ok, it's most likely one of two things. IDE cable dislodged, or drive power cable dislodged...but it could be a drive failure, and if it's under warranty I'll invalidate it by opening it up. I asked her to check and if it wasn't under warranty, contact me again and I'll come and sort it. Never heard any more from her. Asked the wife months later what happened. She checked with the woman, and it turned out the PC was out of warranty, but they "didn't like to bother me again". So they called in a bloke out of the paper. He took the lid off, pushed the IDE cable back in and charged her £35. I would have done the same thing for a couple of cans of beer.
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