Posts by elDog 1090 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2013
This seems to be the real limiting factor.
I can see the pulses going along quite well as each bronto (using the familiar) bites the next ones tail. But do they need to reverse direction to make it full duplex? Can the force of the bite convey additional non-binary data? Inquisitive minds, and all that rot....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
It's still kicking and probably has many of the same corporations and players supporting it - and more importantly being supported by it.
"DHS envisions the system, initially projected to cost about $4.2 billion and to be completed by 2021." (Guess that has slipped by already.)
"Last year, a subsequent schedule adjustment and budget increase of $354 million left the project without a planned date of completion." (Nice work if you can get it!)
This seems to be the common refrain in the Ballad of the Microsoft Excuses.
And, of course, we'll never know that it has been corrected. Until the next refrain is sung on the same problem.
Perhaps a their culture could embrace a better response than saying "sorry". Suggesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku
Java must be at least 30 years old already. The J2EE libraries that I worked with 15 years ago were creaking with their baggage.
Not sure I'd really like to see the output product from COBOL-68 (last version I knew) to a modern language. DATA DIVISION: OBVIOUS-123 meet obfuscation_xyz.
It made a bit of sense to me - a bunch of analog devices to control flow and digital to supply the inputs and interpret the outputs. I think one of the primal examples was solving the traveling salesman problem almost instantaneously while the digital beast (IBM 7094) was still slogging along.
But the allure of working with just clean bits (on/off) was too much and the Pacer went out the door.
https://www.analogmuseum.org/english/collection/eai/pacer_700/
would guarantee that you'll never need to worry about heat or eleccy again! Under several thousand tons/tonnes of equipment you'll be insulated from any temperature fluctuations (well except the upcoming solar super-nova.)
Not to sound apocalyptic about this stuff or anything.
I know you brits had your fling with BoJo but I think he's winged his way into oblivion (other than various lordships, etc.)
The US colonies still have a solid remnant suffering from partial genetic brain damage and will vote for a trump or bojo or their dead heros like Strom Thurmond or Mitch McConnell (is he dead?)
The pustule-faced trump seems to be able to milk his low-lying partisans for every $5 they have. One would hope that they couldn't pay for necessities like toilet paper if they didn't have those $5. No worries - there's shrubberies outside.
Content is generated by a whole host of methods. Very little (if any) is original. Using an AI to craft a segment of a melody or even the vocals won't really be detectable especially once its gone through the normal blending and transformations. A fools errand just to make the "professional" societies look like they have an important part in the process.
Of course this applies to all forms of art - text, visual, music. And it's just going to get more intense.
(Speaking solely as a programmer who's artistic output is wonderfully exceeded now by the AI "helpers".)
Back in the old days, the memory bits were represented by single magnetic donuts - my recollection is about 3mm. These lil bits were weaved into a large plane with cross-wires. Apparently, flipping a single bit on and off fast enough (milliseconds?) would heat the poor thing up until it expired.
In the only slightly less old days, we were able to achieve the same thing (destruction of memory) by flipping a unit of memory (then called a "word") - probably using the wonderful XOR operation.
I guess there wasn't much use for something like Rowhammer back then.
My first job (1968) was with a university department that was funded by ARPA - "The Socialization and Rapid Acculturation of Native Cultures" - all loaded by punch cards into the mainframe. Definitely not networked.
A bit later, I worked in Northern Virginia had an IMP (Interface Message Processor) as part of a testbed in the mid 70s. It was loaded with paper-tape and had the normal plethora of toggle switches to enter codes into memory.
A bit later I ended up with Berkeley and watched the incredible tsunami of innovation and interconnections that these networks opened up. Still amazed at the technologies and dismayed at the commercialization.
A lifetime ruined and a crappy credit score as a reward.
First of all, the credit scoring agencies are just as suspect for leaking personal information as many of the merchants.
But the company that accepts personally identifiable information (or other variations) should be held accountable for all the damage that can occur if that is used for nefarious purposes.
While this particular article is about exfiltrating this information, there are lots of situations where the companies in question also mis-use the information and cause harm (sharing with "trusted" partners).
I suggest a surety bond for every customer be placed in a trusted place (not sure what that is anymore) and any negative actions and pain-and-suffering penalties be paid from that accumulated bond. Probably $100,000 per customer? Also the officers and directors of said companies be held personally responsible for payments that exceed the bond amount.
SSNs are not unique. They need to be re-used given the small range of possibilities.
9 digits, some of which are pre-allocated and possibly known by other means.
If there is a common hashing or encryption algorithm, easily deduced from the product of that algorithm.
Based on an earlier post today, it was revealed that Microsoft's practices also involve trying to open up encrypted zip files.
Perhaps this is only done when the nasty zip reaches the Azure folder and not done in semi-real time via the firewall, but the temptation to peek inside packets while in transmission must be strong.
Unless you (the consumer) has entered into some special non-sharing agreement. And unless your provider also has explicitly said that they will not share with *any* third party (including network and data services), your data will be examined. The robe will be removed, the probes will be inserted.
This is true for all the major vendors (Amazon, google, Microsoft/Azure, ...) Just today a story about how Microsoft actually opens password-protected zip files to look at the contents. That's getting pretty damn personal.
The USofA does have HIPAA (mostly written as if it's a large mammal: HIPPA) which protects (sort of) health information. Very poorly enforced and very hard to use.
Just to add the obligatory: As all of this data is munged together into these wonderful AI "models", your name, sex, last act, etc. may come bopping out - all without any way of attributing to any actual incoming data set.
Yee Haw - it's the wild west, again!
If it hasn't already begun while it was still in some TS trials.
I'm still wondering if they have solved the problem of BadUSB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BadUSB) where a device gets to tell the host what it is, leading to some unintended consequences. AFAIK, there are no software or controller-resident solutions for this.
SOP - Standard Operating Procedure
It is totally normal for the US to contract out much of its R&D and most of the production. The thrust of this breathless article seems to imply that there is DANGER in doing this.
Yes, the sensitive information needs to be protected but that is true whether for a government employee (military service or otherwise) or civilian contractor.
You know, something with an imaginary component.
While I applaud their move to providing cloud-based services (when they work, when they are fully functioning), I think they are also pushing away a whole segment of lowly developers that targeted the Windows environment, or at least included it in their cross-platform releases.
Slowly, slowly, over the last 15+ years, I've migrated to another platform (not Apple based), and have found the tools and environment to be at least as good and much more useful for multi-platform development. Maybe that's why MS has pushed WSL, but it seems strange to have a bloated whale under a slim-and-trim OS just to try to stay on the same hardware.
I'm thinking there's been a sea change at Microsoft.
For several decades most of MS's intellectual property has come by absorption from outside products and projects.
In the last few years there has been an apparent openness to sharing and be participatory rather than controlling.
I will welcome this while still harboring a sense that I'd better be checking the rear-view mirror fairly frequently.
Removing the controlled/centralized servers from the equation allows a lot of flexibility. But it also means that there is no central repository of "truth" that can be used to restore state when needed.
I've found it ironique that the world beat a path from the big iron implementations to networked mini/micro solutions with a stop along the way for "client-server". We're mainly back in the client-server world again with most of our data and logic existing in the cloud, and controlled by the cloud operators.
I did have over 1,000 BTC at one point. I leveraged that to multiples of other coinbase and items. Ethererum was a good staging for some of these transfers.
I sent an encrypted USB drive to FTX with probably $100,000,000++ of digital coins. They did give me a digital receipt. But since then I have heard nothing and cannot access my gold.
Dear Amy - Am I screwed?
(I didn't want to name specific platforms, but could suggest Windows, FaceBook, Lotus, Oracle, ....)
Some other forum-style web sites seem to have a lot of users that just post a twitter link. Following the link gets you into the musky world where I don't want to go. I rail against this but am told that "well, everyone posts their important stuff on twitter - we need to use it. Most of these posters are just too damn lazy to pick up some original content out of the tweet and include it.
Gripe, bitch, snarl, off to bed.
I cut my teeth on BAL on an early IBM 360 and haven't regretted a single new language learned since (excepting COBOL and RPG).
Also, don't forget JOVIAL (Jules Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language) which may have pre-dated Pascal (not sure.) We had to do our software prototypes in JOVIAL when the I-86 Ada compiler from DEC wasn't ready yet. Those were the days....
In this case, the fines should be many times higher and the fees extracted should be able to offset the costs of the victims' time and expenditures.
There should also be a public registry of which firms/individuals have offended. This would probably be a bigger deterrent to future lapses in good judgement. A few $100,000 for big companies is just a bump in the "cost of doing business".
But just like Gates's OS, Apple didn't really want to be seen as just another *nix variant until they had milked the proprietary OS angle for a few decades.
Personally, I'd love to see a large jump in the evolution of these server/desktop OS's that takes the best and leaves the accumulated cruft behind.
Lot's of otherwise smart people like the walled garden and some very good tools. Good thing that many of us couldn't afford their offerings or they'd be much more popular.
I actually started coding in "B" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)) after starting in assembler and FORTRAN on the GE architecture. It's been fun watching the evolution of these sets of languages and hardware capabilities for so many years.
Thank you, Ken.
A large swath of the US gov't uses Okta for identify management. And the contracts must be huge.
Tying a breach like this to a loss of government assets and assigning monetary damages to the VC owners would be very difficult. There is no top-to-bottom accountability.
In the end the taxpayer is screwed by the perps via loss of identity and services, and then screwed by the gov't to try to remedy the situation. Win-win for some, lose-lose for us.
Also, this is called "Process Manager" when it is brought up. The old "about:performance" is still there with something called "Energy Impact" - I guess somebody's attempt at mashing metrics into one item.
The only fields are "Name" (includes URL and tab name), Memory (!!! I have an entry labeled "GPU (42044)" which is listed at 5GB and uses 10-20% processor.). There appears to be a button on the far right labeled "Actions" which does nothing for me.
I'll always want more metrics. Please keep them coming.
"If Twitter itself were to ever suffer a breach, a foreign threat actor could leverage their control over Twitter's code to deface or hack these sensitive government websites," according to the report.
Since Melon Husk owns twitter it appears that the threat is already there. As Pogo once said: We have met the enemy and he is us.
And it's open source with a very active community. You can run local-only or sync to any number of devices via most cloud services.
I do miss many of the UI features that I had gotten used to in Evernote. Since Joplin is Electron based it seems heavier and doesn't have as many features. Still you can't beat the price (0) and the support.
Something about foxes and chicken houses.
Major banks in the US teaming up to create a payment alternative to paypal (also a fox) and avoid scrutiny while chowing down on the chickens (clients).
Yum, yum. Capitalism at its best!
"Even before detecting a possible IT intrusion, Lloyd's has been in the infosec headlines since late August after making changes to its policies that will soon prohibit its syndicates from covering losses arising from certain nation-state cyberattacks and those that happen during wars."
Not only that, but if the USSR (aka the rump Russia) has declared certain areas of the world its own (Ukraine and most of the 'stans), then there really can't be a "war" - just another putting down of an insurrection.
Sounds very much like the plan in the USofA with the (r)epuglicon party playing the part of the putinistas.
With a tiny bit of legal chicanery, Lloyd's should be able to legally weasel its way out of any reimbursements.
That loverly page you're looking at is built based on initial HTML and then modifications to the DOM (Document Object Model). Each mouse movement/click can cause elements in the DOM to be activated. Each activation may need to phone home to get the proper content to display.
Watching how long some bloke hovers his (or her) mouse over a particularly attractive part of someone's anatomy may get recorded, but "Only for improving our website and performance."
Thank you for a serious reply to my flippant comment. I've gotta stop doing that!
Python has become a very important language in systems that are powering the machine-learning world. In my little knowledge it seems that most natrual-language-processing (NLP) uses Python to run the low-level tools (mainly C/variants and CUDA logic.)
I might have expected perl to be the glue-type language but it got stuck in a mud-hole a few years ago.
And do it within a current human's lifetime. I understand that 42 was the answer to a silly question. Now I want to know what 42 really means - beyond that silly question and lots of maths.
Aren't we in the realm of designing an AI that can ask another AI a question that can't be answered - even if both are considered the "god" AI?
(This is based on the question: Can god make a stone so heavy that god can't lift it?)
..... Knew I shouldn't have had a glass with my lunch ...
I would say that you get what you paid for, but these contractors (their companies) are getting $200+/hour.
And there is no accountability to the contractors or even the gov't COs who authorized the work. So if 1 or 10 or 20 assets were compromised - what's the penalty?
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