Posts by Chozo

She's just a Cosmic Girl but UK.gov is dangling £20m to have Beardy Branson's 747 launch satellites from Cornwall

Is there a pilot in the house?

Quick look on google earth measures the runway length at about 2600m/5300', isn't that a little short for a fully laden 747?

Amazon Alexa: 'Pre-wakeword' patent application suggests plans to process more of your speech

Re: welcome to the future of voice assistants

Frosty Freddy the fridge full of fun & frivolity stared at the battered remains of a Talkie Toaster on the table... whirred & blinked... So your a Soy kinda guy! why didn't you say?

You have the right to remain silent...

<alexa> volume set to 0%, transferring all funds to offshore account, deleting records

Pre-programmed actions and a trigger phrase would be more useful

Controversial American bigwig in London... no, not Trump: HPE ex-CEO Meg Whitman to give Autonomy trial evidence

Borders on the cruel & unusual? No maybe about it.

Listen in quiet horror as Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie croon about dogs in pain and chickens hit by a train

https://youtu.be/O6B9ZdVFGck?t=94

Supra smart TVs aren't so super smart: Hole lets hackers go all Max Headroom on e-tellies

Re: TL:DR but plus one for Max Headroom reference

We'll be right back with more wacky fun at el-reg right after these blipverts from our friends...

https://youtu.be/PJP-Ilw_xaY

Uncle Sam wants to read your tweets, check out your Instagram, log your email addresses before you enter the Land of the Free on a visa

First rule of interogation...

Ask the suspect a question you already know the answer to

Sunday seems really quiet. Hmm, thinks Google, let's have a four-hour Gmail, YouTube, G Suite, Cloud outage

It ain't over yet

Air Force One is expected to land at London Stansted Airport at 09:00 BST. So expect a Big Mac® shortage as well.

DigitalOcean drowned my startup! 'We lost everything, our servers, and one year of database backups' says biz boss

All providers keep an automated eye on resource usage for any shared system, goes with the territory and is generally a good thing. Further down the food chain however especially with budget & free web hosting providers yes some do go nosing around your file system looking at code and content.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: Why not Cinderford?

Imagine Deliverance with sheep

Germany mulls giving end-to-end chat app encryption das boot: Law requiring decrypted plain-text is in the works

Plain text on demand...?

Yeah like that's going to help said John with the long moustache while dogs barked and finding himself unable to fly searched for an umbrella.

Millions of personal files exposed by insurance biz, serial web hacker strikes again, and more from infosec land

Baltimore wierdness

Baltimore city hall, the mayor's homes and her attorney were raided by the FBI & IRS in April this year as part of an investigation into what can be best described as creative accounting and now much of the evidence and email correspondance has been scrambled by ransomware.. Just seems a bit hinky

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

You have to wonder...

Three years ago my Eco-warrior neighbours persuaded me me to buy a environmentally friendly recycled polyester fleece. It was a bit expensive but nice enough and wore it with pride for doing my bit to save the planet. Fast forward to last week and they are in my face about micro-plastics and how my favourite piece of clothing is killing the planet... they haven't spoken to me since I pointed out it was them that sold it to me.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Re: Golden Rule of Audit

Real boats rock, show me a smooth running operation and I guarantee somebody is papering over cracks - Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam

Now Chinese-made drones rubbing US govt up the Huawei: 'Strong concerns' DJI kit threat to national security

Angel Has Fallen

Movie coming out where drones are used in an attempt to assassinate the US president, do you think somebody is paranoid?

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6189022/videoplayer/vi449887257?ref_=m_tt_ov_vi

UK's planned Espionage Act will crack down on Snowden-style Brit whistleblowers, suspected backdoored gear (cough, Huawei)

Are there any countries that accept UK citizens seeking asylum ?

Giga-hurts radio: Terrorists build Wi-Fi bombs to dodge cops' cellphone jammers

Oh let me count the ways...

The only limit on methods for triggering a device is human ingenuity.

Let's check in with our friends in England and, oh good, bloke fined after hiding face from police mug-recog cam

Even when you do have a positive identification it's sometimes not a lot of help...

https://youtu.be/NEBruJ3TGMs

Put a stop to these damn robocalls! Dozens of US state attorneys general fire rocket up FCC's ass

It's a weird world we live in... a sales drone asks for my email & phone number at the supermarket checkout and am expected to give both up freely,

but when I ask for theirs in return they call the cops on me...

AI can now generate fake human bodies and faces, OpenAI to share a larger GPT-2 model, and more

Re: Who knew acting/modelling would be the first to go?

Terry Pratchett apparently... In discworld prequel 'Strata' (1981) one of the humans mentions they got an acting job portraying a robot because the AI actors were to perfect.

I've had it with these mother-fscking slaps on this mother-fscking plane: Flight fight sparks legal brouhaha over mid-air co-ords

Re: Tangential pub debate

Apparently there is a corner of Yellowstone where you can demand a trial by local peers, the loophole being the area is now federal park land with no residents...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinandrews/2017/11/26/icymi-you-can-get-away-with-murder-in-part-of-yellowstone-national-park/

Here's a race condition we can get behind: Neural net learns to keep up with 'skilled' amateur track driver in robo-ride safety experiment

Sigh... Formula one set to get even duller then

Radio gaga: Techies fear EU directive to stop RF device tinkering will do more harm than good

First they came for my guns, now they want my soldering iron

Hurrah for Apollo 9: It has been 50 years since 'nauts first took a Lunar Module out for a spin

Fifty years later...

No closer to my beach house on the moon but have managed a manual docking on Kerbal

BT 'UK's most powerful Wi-Fi'? Why, fie, for shame! – ads watchdog

Much as I hate the idea of defending them the ability to get internet access through other BT customers routers at no extra cost does give them an edge. Albeit you have to blur the definitions of range and coverage a bit and the swap-over between access points is not quite as seamless as adverts suggest, but hey that's marketing for you. The other thing and I am surprised BT does not push this is "power" of security. Ever since the debacle where black-hats completely reversed the v2 HomeHubs and published the keygen online BT did raise its game significantly. It takes your typical script kiddie neighbour what.. 3 weeks to brute force a SKY or TalkTalk router compared to modern BT router taking significantly longer.

Use an 8-char Windows NTLM password? Don't. Every single one can be cracked in under 2.5hrs

Have you ever tried to guess the shape of an object from its shadow? , it's the same sort of thing but with numbers and an odd form of math called Modulo arithmetic. The attacker can see the shadow of the password and generates billions of combinations till it finds a 'shape' that matches. Then and only then is that combination tried against the target computer.

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

I feel radilcalised just reading this thread

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

You would think that in this cell-phone obsessed society there would be some grainy video footage of a drone in flight near the airport taken by a member of the public. Perhaps even some thermal-imaging footage from the Police to lend credence to the story. Maybe it is not drones at all...

Oh Deer! Poacher sentenced to 12 months of regular Bambi screenings in the cooler

Re: Well there is always...

Don't forget the infamous Disney Nasty mentioned in The Young Ones...https://youtu.be/m4uuasUO1eE

Windows 10 can carry on slurping even when you're sure you yelled STOP!

You could go back to running DOS

Doom: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins

Re: It was great fun

My sentiments exactly, sometimes you just want to get your gun off. No emotional involvement with characters or complex mission profiles, clan stats, nagware for micro-payment upgrades. Just you against impossible odds screaming in the face of death long into the night. If it moves KILL IT!

Brit bomb hoax teen who fantasised about being a notorious hacker cops 3 years in jail

Matrix 101

This is why you start with OpSec and all the major boring training sh#t before you learn KungFu

'Say hello to my little vacuum cleaner!' US drug squad puts spycams in cleaner's kit

Given the amount of money involved the cartels have probably bugged the DEA & law enforcement in general for years. Alas slim chance of getting any data on that from a FOI request. Whilst at first this appears to be non-story as I have been on fleabay to get cameras that fit inside coat-hooks, shower heads and my shoes.. oh wait However in a paranoid world where the bad-guys are also tech savvy then a listening device that does not broadcast instead having weeks or even months of internal storage capacity makes more sense. The drawback being you need something bulky to hide it in.

Amazon robot fingered for bear spray leak that hospitalised 24 staffers

"I've found if you leave something in a condition where people can hurt themselves, people will hurt themselves. Even if they have to go to extra effort to do so."

Florence Ambrose - Chief engineer aboard the "Savage Chicken"

Tumblr resorts to AI in attempt to scrub itself clean from filth

Re: Spare A Thought

Indeed spare a thought. Places such as chess.com with 20+ million users employ full time staff just to keep the smutty avatars under control.

Laptop search unravels scheme to fake death for insurance cash

Re: I thought Igor was just the lab assistant

Ah no, that's cousin Igor you're thinking of.

In Space, Still: 20 years since Russia hurled first bit of floating astronaut hostel into orbit

Out of this world

Off-Planet file storage.. where do I sign up?

Bloke fined £460 after his drone screwed up police chopper search for missing woman

Re: Video Link

I thought the Police Air Operations Manual stated a minimum altitude of 800 ft above the highest obstruction within 5 km of the aircraft when flying at night? The data overlay on the video suggests that the police may of been way below that limit.

I'm not defending the drone operator IMHO he's a pillock but if the police pilot is at fault should they not be reprimanded as well?

Big Falcon Namechange for Musk's rocket: BFR becomes Starship

Re: Long Shot

Larry Niven called dibbs first... Ringworld chs. 4-5, 24

Imperial bringing in budget holograms to teach students

Re: Real Genius

A true geeks movie ;)

Falling montage : https://youtu.be/CfL8N_bDo1E?t=276

FYI NASA just lobbed its Parker probe around the Sun in closest flyby yet: A nerve-racking 15M miles from the surface

Burning question

How long does it take to flash roast a sheep in a vacuum at that distance from the sun?

Russian computer failure on ISS is nothing to worry about – they're just going to turn it off and on again

Just going to to turn it off and on again

Tovarish, get me the hammer...

Pain in the brain! Kaspersky warns of hackable brain implants

Re: suspicion

LarryNiven's Tales of Known Space series circa 1968 specifically mentions hackable brain implants.

Further back there is 'Aelita: Queen of Mars' a 1924 silent film however that used external mind control helmets.

Florida man won't be compelled to reveal iPhone passcode, yet

Puzzled

So why can't we have a second password for "Opened Under Duress" situations as is common with many building access control systems?

NASA chief in Moscow: 'We will fly again on a Russian Soyuz rocket'

Alternative News Translation

To save the space station we have to fly the Soyuz or reveal the existence of the US secret space-plane program...

Chinese biz baron wants to shove his artificial moon where the sun doesn't shine – literally

Smoke & Mirrors

Concerns of oriental overlords with death rays aside, a dish that size would be awfully good at receiving comms transmissions. Be they from low power devices such as cell-phones or tight beam microwave links as demonstrated way back in 1975 by the Aquacade/Rhyolite spy-sats

Top Euro court: UK's former snooping regime breached human rights

Re: Stopped??

For the security conscious whether they be simply paranoid or engaged in nefarious activity one must assume everybody... from the government down to your next door neighbor is keeping tabs on you. Here at work we have an email alert setup that tells us when the MAC code of certain phones appear on the wifi network. Postman, Sandwich van driver, Boss etc.

The eyes don't have it! AI's 'deep-fake' vids surge ahead in realism

Merging Faeces , oh the posabilities...

Nelson Mandela giving Hitlers speech at the 1938 Nuremberg rally

Bin Laden sings the Blues

Vintage Dr Who remastered without Bonny Langford

PPI pushers now need consent to cold-call you

It's a start

Now if they could just get the TV licensing people to stop the harassment and threatening letters.

Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle

Cubicle Life

I was at a job interview early 1990s and all was going well until Itsy & Bitsy glove puppets appeared over the partition behind the HR droid. Still have nightmares about tribes of Sylvanian families appearing on my desk carrying post-it notes for my attention.

NASA eggheads draw up blueprints for spotting, surviving asteroid hits

Sounds like a job for the US Space Force

I'll get my pressure suit, it's the one with the Space Sharks patch