Posts by Cynic_999 2855 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2013
"It wouldn't work. As any fule kno, any true hacker brought in to help could reverse any and all that in thirty seconds, tops..." ... by furiously typing in reams of machine code interspersed with cryptic Unix commands to patch running programs as they read and understand megabytes of raw hex values cascading down 15 different screens at the rate of 100's of lines per second ...
Hollywood has taught me that most code is green, but malware always executes in red.
"I would never give that kind of answer but I'm really assured that *every* recommendation I give is writen and all the people in the board are awere of it. If they decided they know better how to manage the IT department, in the end I have something to recall them of it and say "Told you so..." .
It's really great when your only consideration is for one aspect of the company. You can then afford to adopt such an "I told you so" approach if everything possible is not done to advantage that single part and something goes wrong as a result. If you are running the entire company however, you would soon realise that many compromises have to be made, and some things have to be run at sub-optimum levels so that other things work better. Crossing the road carries risks, so if your only concern was safety you would prohibit people from ever crossing a road, and if they ignore you because and someone got run over while going to the shop to buy your food, you can sit high on your horse and say, "I told you so ...."
I see what you are saying, but to use your own analogy, would you really be happy with a babysitter who painted your living-room purple and replaced all the meat in your refrigerator with vegetables and nuts because in her opinion purple was a far better colour than magnolia, and eating meat was unhealthy or unethical?
Sure, you can recommend certain things to your boss and explain why you think they are necessary, but at the end of the day if the boss says that he wants people to be able to transfer data via USB sticks, you will have to actively facilitate it.
If you are paying the bill for a service, keep it in your name. I cannot really see the problem though. If the registered subscriber is alive & well, they can cancel the service. If they are dead or incapacitated, cancel the DD and Sky will have to chase *them* for the money, because AFAIAA Sky do not have contracts that give separate names for "subscriber" and "bill payer"
Hydrogen effuses about 1.4 times faster than helium, but has about half the density of helium (H2 molecular mass=2, He molecular mass=4) and so has quite a bit more lifting power - which allows the envelope to be thicker (heavier). In addition it should be possible to put some sort of apparatus in the balloon that generates replacement hydrogen either by a chemical process or electrolysis, or maybe compressed in a small cylinder.
The usual way IME is apart from the usual DOB and "memorable question", my bank asks questions regarding recent and/or regular transactions. "Which supermarkets do you usually shop at?" "When did you last withdraw cash from an ATM?" "Have you bought a lottery ticket online over the past week?" etc. Of course it is possible that the fraudster has a copy of my bank statement that is less than a week old, but far less likely than knowing my DOB or family details.
When you are dealing with something that is part of a large infrastructure, the maths is not quite that straightforward, because both the per-unit cost of provisioning and also the desirability of the product is dependent to a large degree on the total number of units in the infrastructure. Consider that the invention of the first telephone proved completely useless until a *second* telephone was built. The desirability of owning a telephone grew in proportion to the number of telephones in existence.
Yes, there is extreme porn easily available on the Internet. No matter what a parent does, when their child reaches the stage of development that they become interested in sex and porn, they will access such material whether the parent permits Internet access at home or not. Many kids these days see their first porn pics and videos on a friend's mobile device at school. OTOH they will already have had a lot of exposure to extreme non-sexual material in everyday TV and films, and so will view it in a similar way - i.e. it is make-believe and nothing like real life. Unless the child has far worse problems, seeing such material will be less harmful to an adolescent than being told the story of Little Red Riding Hood (and other violent fairy stories) was when they were 6.
The flip side is that those same phones are often the thing that tips off the carers that the abuse is taking place, and then is used as evidence to catch & prosecute the perpetrators. Think how many cases have been reported where the giveaway was a text message seen by someone else. In the past the kids would meet up with adults in cafes and arcades and it would never be discovered at all. The real cause has nothing to do with technology, it is because a child or teenager who feels unwanted by parents or carers will seek out adults who *do* give them attention and want their company. If a parent does not look after their child properly, it won't be long before the child finds an adult who is more than willing to "look after" them, and when the situation is such that (a) child is a willing participant at the time, (b) both parties have a vested interest in keeping it secret and (c) the parent/carer is not too interested in what the child is doing, then electronic evidence is by far the most likely way it will ever be discovered.
Hmmm. Seeing that there is about one child killed by a "pedo freak" every 3 years across the entire UK, there are vanishingly few people who have had to talk to a class of kids about such a thing even once in my country. YMMV in the "land of the free," but even so cars are still many thousands of times more of a risk, so prohibiting children from crossing the road by themselves would make more sense than banning them from accessing the Internet alone. Banning a child from doing things that they want to do usually means that they will do them secretly and so get no guidance at all. A child who feels able to discuss most details of their online activities with an interested parent is likely to be far more safe.
I'm with BT's infinity (FTTC) but hardly ever use P2P so don't notice that throttling. If it's an issue, surely a solution would be to go via a good VPN so that BT cannot identify the traffic? I download about 300GB per month on average, but the limit seems to be the speed of the servers I'm downloading from rather than my line speed. If I start a second download from a completely different server while downloading at (say) 25Mbps, the second download ramps up to that server's max without affecting the speed of the first download at all. Only if I start a third download is the total likely to max out my line speed so they all slow down
I see no sense whatsoever in making a person responsible for someone else's deed just because they did not require a password. If you allow someone free use of your camera, or even your pen, and they use it to infringe copyright, how can that be deemed to be your fault?
A spate of phishing emails we received a few weeks ago worked as follows: an email to one email account has a header suggesting that it should have been delivered to a different account on the same (company) domain. The body suggests that it was sent by a lawyer and has an attachment purporting to be a defence document relating to "your criminal prosecution". The person receiving the email is thus quite likely to be a work colleague of the person the email was "supposed" to be delivered to, and may be curious as to the criminal prosecution alluded to. The fact that almost everyone in the company got a similar email at the same time rather gave the game away.
It's not necessarily to do with bad passwords. Low-paid employees are often given the means to access a corporate network so that they can do any grunt-work that the suits don't want to do - such as when data entries or system changes becomes urgently necessary on a Sunday evening for example. Low paid employees can usually be bought for an affordable price - and telling someone a password would not make the average person feel terribly guilty about having committed a terrible crime.
Have a read of the AAIB bulletins and you will realise how much work and effort goes into *any* major aircraft accident investigation (http://www.aaib.gov.uk/publications/bulletins.cfm). This is done not in order to apportion blame, but to find whether reasonable corrective actions are possible to reduce the risk of it happening again. Not only the primary cause must be identified, but also the secondary causes and ways to improve survivability. It's not good enough to determine that the pilot flipped the wrong switch or ignored a warning light, it must also be determined the probable reason *why* the pilot made the mistake, the so-called "human factors" side that looks into the limitations of human senses and brain.
I never found temperature control for colour film developing (neg or slide) to be too much of a problem. I filled the kitchen sink with water, adjusted by the taps till a floating thermometer showed about 5 deg above the correct temperature. All the bottles of chemicals would sit in that sink for an hour or so before the start, and I added a bit of hot now & again after the temperature had fallen to keep it correct - the required temperature was not much above room temperature so it didn't cool down very quickly. The developing tank sat in the same water during processing. Temperature control to within half a degree or better throughout the process was easily attainable.
I have not seen 3D printing being touted as a replacement for traditional methods for mass-production. I use a 3D printer, but only for one-offs, prototyping, proof-of-concept or making marketing mock-ups. For those purposes it is great - from CAD design to physical object in hours rather than weeks, and with no tooling or other charges, and all carried out by a single person. When everyone is happy with the design, big money is handed across for tooling and the production runs use traditional methods. However we are now far more confident than we used to be that the first production prototypes will work first time without costly modifications.
It's one thing to publish comments on the Internet, it's quite another to have your every comment minutely analysed with the results of that analysis potentially sent to strangers or people who mean you harm. Then there's the very significant risk of an incorrect analysis that you are depressed or suicidal being sent to someone who has your best interest at heart, but who causes you harm as a result of the misinformation. Chemotherapy may be beneficial to a person with cancer, but it can do a lot of damage to a person who is healthy.
India will likely reap more in the long term by selling satellite launching services to other nations than it spent. Also you need to consider the fact that the USA has plenty of ghettos and poverty - especially in states such as Louisiana, so you could just as easily make the same criticism of NASA.
The creation of new TLDs is becoming silly, and is obviously just a money-making scheme. If we need a .wine TLD, then we will no doubt also be needing a .beer domain, .tea, .coffee - and while we're at it how about a .burger and .kebab TLD as well? Obviously the major retailers and producers of those commodities will feel they have to buy a domain or lose market share, and so instant money for almost zero work for the TLD administration organisation.
I have had several Linux versions that have crashed after installing a new driver or application - true they don't have a BSOD, but instead just lock up or fail to boot. I would expect Linux to have fewer issues because there are far fewer combinations of software and hardware for Linux to cope with - simply because a huge amount of hardware either cannot be used or can only be used with reduced functionality because Linux drivers do not exist.
It would certainly be a valid argument if you were defending an allegation that you were in breach of copyright, and no doubt Mr. Murdoch's lawyers would argue the opposite. The winner however is frequently the person who hired the most expensive lawyers rather than the person whose argument is correct.
I don't see that as a flaw at all, any more than it is a design flaw that anyone with physical access to your kitchen has the ability to switch off your freezer or operate your kettle. Like your kitchen, it was designed for *personal* use, not as something for use by masses of untrustworthy strangers.
I disagree with the entire premise of the article. It is impossible to have hardware segregation to prevent malware attacks because the hardware cannot know the legitimate purpose and scope of an application. If hardware were to completely prevent any user application from accessing the mass storage devices for example (as is suggested in the article), most of the applications we need would be impossible. As it is, modern operating systems *do* prevent access by applications to physical I/O - applications can only use hardware by going via an OS call. But that does not prevent files being deliberately corrupted or deleted, because there is no way for the OS to know whether a call to modify or delete a file is what the user desires to do or is a command issued from malware that the user is not intentionally running. And memory is segregated and allocated to processes just as described - any attempt to read or write outside the bounds allocated will result in an exception trap. As most Reg readers will know, that's what the "Out of memory error" meant in WinXP etc., not that you had insufficient RAM!
My surround system did not come with a mic or way to change the settings apart from usual user volume controls, but my PC sound card driver setup allowed me to plug in a microphone, place it at the listening position and input the relative distance of each speaker, after which the setup application played tones of various frequencies through each of my speakers in turn and set up the levels and frequency equalisation of the sound card's driver accordingly. It even reports if a speaker is wired with the wrong phase so you can swap the wires (or ask the application to swap the phase instead). I play almost all films & music via my PC, so it worked a treat.
Sure, I've experienced one or two movies that had brilliant surround sound, and for those I am pleased I installed 5.1 But they are very few and far between. Most BlueRay disks that boast surround sound use the rear two speakers for a minute or so during the opening titles (or even only for the menu background music) and you never hear a peep from them again.
So let me get this right - you plug your Xbox into a television set, and then by spending £24 you can watch television on that same television? Could you not cut out the middleware and connect your TV aerial into the socket in the back of your TV set instead of the £24 dongle?
Still, if it catches on, I might come up with a USB dongle that you can plug into your PC and then use your mouse, keyboard and monitor as a computer.
The practical aspects of a lekky car would work for my normal driving routine, but the finances will not. OK, so I would save £3000 or so a year fuel costs - but the price difference of the car means that it will take 5 years to break even, by which time I'll probably be needing a new battery for the lekky car at a cost that will take several more years to amortise away. I doubt that an electric car is inherently more expensive to manufacture than an ICE car - quite probably cheaper - so hopefully as sales volumes increase the price will come down to something that will make them more cost effective.
On an FTTC connection, my speeds are such that the small percentage that might be lost via the throttled FON makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever. It is extremely rare that the server I am downloading from can reach even 50% of the 75Mbps download speed that online speed checker sites indicate my connection is attaining.
You get a unique BT login and pw to use BT Wi-Fi hotspots, and I had assumed that whatever data you downloaded under your personal login would be added to your domestic data usage - so you would still be charged if logged on to your own hotspot. I have an unlimited BT Infinity account, so pay the same no matter how much (or little) I download, so I've never gone into it to find out for certain.
All very emotive - but why stop there? Why should social workers be the only protected species? Surely debt collectors should also have access to the database in case they get attacked. And taxi drivers should be able to see if the address they have been asked to go to has any criminal connections. Perhaps fast-food places and pubs should have early warning of potential troublemakers and all retailers should be able to flag an alert when a person with a child in tow uses a credit card belonging to a scumbag suspected paedo? In fact, why not publish the entire government database on the open Internet - after all (all together now) - "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
Meanwhile, in the scenario you gave, social workers may not have online access to the PNC, but they can pick up a telephone or email a public protection officer prior to a visit who is able to query the police database - and that officer would be able to say "risk" or "no known risks" even if not able to give away the exact details.
No, that was achieved when the LEA found where Freedom Hosting was located a year ago and took them over. They then installed a javascript exploit on TOR servers that previously hosted child porn so that people who accessed those servers with a browser that had a particular javascript vulnerability would send their real IP address and their network card's MAC address to an FBI server. A TOR update that fixed the vulnerability was coincidentally released a week or so before the FBI's exploit went live, otherwise I suspect that many more people would have got caught in the trap.
The cost of FPGAs are insignificant when used only for product development. After developing the hardware in the FPGA, you can build a few prototypes using them to field-test, and it costs virtually nothing to make incremental changes - hardware updates are distributed and implemented in the same way as firmware updates. This greatly improves time to market, because you can develop your hardware almost empirically. Once your hardware is running correctly and reliably in the field, you can invest in an ASIC to bring the unit cost down for mass production. Sure, you need to do some simulation and testing to ensure that the logic will not suffer from race conditions etc., but that is nothing compared with the exhaustive specifications, simulations and test vector generation required to design an ASIC based product completely from scratch.
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