Posts by vir
349 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2016
Bill Gates joined on stage by jar of poop as he confesses deep love for talking about toilets
Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier
Goodnight Kepler! NASA scientists lay the exoplanet expert to rest as it runs out of fuel
Alexa heard what you did last summer – and she knows what that was, too: AI recognizes activities from sound
Nope
"There is no way to recover the audio"
...until another team of researchers discovers a way to contextually reconstruct spoken phonemes with 99% accuracy.
Great "use cases" guys. Alerting you when your washing machine is done? There's already a 100dB buzzer on it for a reason. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but they already make wi-fi enabled washing machines if you want it to post to your Twitter feed.
GCHQ asks tech firms to pretty please make IoT devices secure
Samsung’s flexible phone: Expect an expensive, half-bendy clamshell
Re: I still think a bifold device will be a market failure
Maybe they'll be a holdout though; they sacrifice a lot for a thinner form factor. You'll say that the phone could indeed be thinner when unfolded, but you can't fold one of these up and shove it in a pair of tight jeans like it was nothing.
Facebook's new always-listening home appliance kit Portal doesn't do Facebook
Re: "Facebook doesn't listen to, view, or keep the contents of your Portal video calls,"
Yet.
The FAQ "Does Portal Have Ads?" contains the ominous response:
Portal does not have Facebook ads at this time [emphasis added, but not entirely necessary].
Conveniently, the Portal TOS are not readily accessible - just the improbably "Frequently Asked Questions" for a product that hasn't been released yet - a great example of Pynchon's maxim: "if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers".
Re: Yeah right
Exactly: when it comes down to it, they really don't care about the actual data stream; it's far too diffuse to justify the bandwidth or storage cost. What they really want is the condensed version that flags preferences, demographic data, economic indicators - the kind of info their ad machine can really use.
There's enough wiggle room in their statement to hide a whole elephant's weight in data gathering and enough bad-faith moves on their part to deny them the barest benefit of doubt.
Uncle Sam gives itself the right to shoot down any drone, anywhere, any time, any how
Wi-Fi Alliance ditches 802.11 spec codes for consumer-friendly naming scheme
Re: I hope they don't let manufacturers "spice up" the names
Oh, they'll do it. A new naming convention that has essentially no relation to a technical standard? Brace for "Wi-Fi 6+", "Wi-Fi 6 MAX", and the inevitable "Wi-Fi 8-ready", "Wi-Fi 8-compatible", etc.
Reminds me of the time an over-zealous marketing writer decided to "bump up" the spec on one of our products from IP66 to IP67 and I had to explain that no, that doesn't mean that it's 1.5% more weather resistant.
Astroboffins may have found the first exomoon lurking beyond the Solar System
Why waste away in a cubicle when you could be a goddamn infosec neuromancer on £50k*?
The Reg takes the US government's insider threat training course
Silence! Cybercrime's Pinky and the Brain have nicked $800k off banks
Lights, camera, AI-ction! Robo-drones turned into spies, er, filmmakers
Re: "The drone travels slowly at 7.5 metres per second"
There's someone in my neighborhood who pops up a drone from time to time. A DJI Phantom in all likelihood but it's too high for me to really get a good ID and I don't care enough to find out for sure. It is fairly loud - about the same sound and intensity as a gas-powered weed whacker - and really stands out because you're not expecting to hear that kind of sound coming from above you.
DraftKings rides to court, asks to unmask 10 DDoS suspects
Spies still super upset they can't get at your encrypted comms data
I'll say it again: these guys have been watching too much Silicon Valley. They're convinced that eventually a group of nerds is going to be talking about who would win in a fight between Superman and a black hole and one of them is going to say "wait...but what if we just..." and create a NEW MATH that will allow only good people to decrypt message intercepts.
You can buy Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins' mansion for a cool $13m
No, eight characters, some capital letters and numbers is not a good password policy
I still think that capital letters and special characters are more trouble then they're worth. I haven't trawled through any big password dump files, but I'd be willing to bet that the majority of number/special character requirements are fulfilled by adding a 1 and/or ! to the end of a "normal" or easily guessable password and that capital letter requirements are fulfilled by capitalizing the first letter of same.
But consider: an 8 character password with all four character types in play - lower case letter, upper case letter, number, special character - has 72^8 possible passwords (give or take, ignoring any disallowed special characters); somewhere in the region of 7.2E14. If we remove the requirement for upper case and special characters, the number of symbols drops to 36 but we can maintain the same keyspace size within an order of magnitude by adding one additional character and even quintuple it by adding two (1E14 for nine characters and 3.7E15 for 10). If we allow lower case letters alone, the keyspace is still 1.4E14 with 10 characters. What's more challenging for the user: remembering what special character/capital letter/random numeral they jammed into their password, or remembering one or two more characters?
Yes! Thank you! I do quite a bit of purchasing at the company I work for and every supplier needs a new user account with a password. What's my username at this site I haven't visited in six months? Did they let me use my email? Was their password minimum 6 characters or minimum 8 characters? Did it need a special character? One of them requires a password that is EXACTLY 14 characters long. Another requires a special character within the first four characters. Just give me the option to check out as a damn guest.
OMG! Battle looms over WTF! trademarks
Apple leaks rekindle some hope for iPhone 'supercycle' this year
Re: I've said this before
I just got a 2850mAh battery case for my 6 and haven't looked back (or forward, for that matter). I can't go on about this battery case enough; my phone's internal battery hasn't dropped below 90% - even when I forget my charger on overnight trips. And when the case battery finally dies, I'll just...buy a new case for $40.
I believe that many people on here are similar - once performance hits a certain level, there's really no need to upgrade for the sake of upgrading. Decently bright and crisp screen? Acceptable camera? A fair amount of storage space? Checks email and opens websites? Great, let me know when they release a phone that interfaces directly with my visual cortex.
You want how much?! Israel opts not to renew its Office 365 vows
Re: Microsoft's response
"Better understand their requirements"??? Here ya go:
They want to be able to have a system they can rely on without worrying about being held hostage to price hikes or "updates" that they can't refuse and that break things or change functionality to the point that they lose time and work trying to figure out how you "made things better". They're confused because "updates to your software" are things that up until now have been included in the purchase price instead of being a perpetual money sink.
Bloke hurls sueball over Google's 'is it off yet?' location data slurping
Bitcoin backer sues AT&T for $240m over stolen cryptocurrency
A Fool And His Money...
I'm not saying that he deserved to have his money stolen, but safeguarding $24MM with SMS 2FA even after a previous attempt had been made by the same vector is not my version of smart. The fact that he's now trying to get a 10x return on investment via jackpot justice is the icing on the cake.
Hackers manage – just – to turn Amazon Echoes into snooping devices
The vulnerability here isn't that a modified Echo could be used to spy on you if it could somehow be infiltrated into your home; it's that a modified Echo could be used to eavesdrop on other completely stock devices in your home as long as it could get on the same network. Given the security state and broadcast area of most home networks, I'd say that it was a more significant vulnerability than the article let on.
Reason #344 not to get an Echo.
Time to party like it's 2005! Palm is coming BAAAA-ACK
Almost 1 in 3 Brits think they lack computer skills to do their jobs well
It's because the programs and services that are for entertainment and shopping; i.e. things that companies want you to use are tested and refined to make sure that they're relatively pleasant and easy to deal with.
The programs that are for work - the time-tracking software, the inventory management system, the invoice filing cloud service; i.e. things that companies know you need to use for contract or regulatory reasons are only tested just enough to make sure they don't crash too hard.
Edit: I can see someone here works for BigTime.
Denial of denial-of-service served: There was NO DDoS on FCC net neutrality comments
Chip flinger TSMC warns 'WannaCry' outbreak will sting biz for $250m
So net neutrality has officially expired. Now what do we do?
Smart bulbs turn dumb: Lights out for Philips as Hue API goes dark
You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened
Re: Most of us knew that this was going on
It's the very recent concept of needing to have security implemented into consumer products. Most people's idea of security is the $30 deadbolt on their front door, their home security system, or shredding credit card statements before putting them in the trash. All of those are well and good, but they're defenses against an adversary who has physical access and who has specifically targeted you for the purposes of stealing tangible items or discrete pieces of high-value information (e.g. SSN, credit card info, etc). There's just no concept of defense against an adversary who can take what they want from half a world away and wants to know the intimate details of your life to sell over and over again.
The consumerate (new word) needs to adjust to the paradigm of approaching the selection of consumer products as doing business with an active adversary who is giving you functionality or a price break or both in exchange for insight into your personal life with the intent of monetizing it. That the information you give up somehow enhances the functionality of the product or makes your life better in some way is merely sugar on the pill. Everyone who gives up a little bit of their privacy whenever they purchase something will soon learn that they no longer have any secrets. And those who claim that they "have nothing to hide" will come to find that the most innocuous-seeming information can come back to haunt you in ways you didn't think possible.
Even a glass house is better than one filled with monitoring devices; at least you can see who is watching you.
Swiss sausage sizzler 4.0 hits 200 bangers per hour
Within Arm's reach: Chip brains that'll make your 'smart' TV a bit smarter
Re: How will it be used?
Exactly: plenty of good use cases out there as mentioned in the article. Security camera that doesn't fill up GBs of space on nothing? Sounds good. Interfaces that can detect when you're interacting with them and respond back? Cool. But there's absolutely no way that these won't be used as the shiny bait to get you to agree to put more and more surveillance devices in your home at your own expense. I want to be the paranoid one on this but time and again it's been borne out. The extra ironic part is that this hardware, which ostensibly removes the need to communicate with the cloud by putting capabilities on board, will just be used to reduce the amount of heavy lifting Google, Samsung, et. al. will have to do on their end and you're the one paying for the upgrade. Every one of these devices will ship with clauses buried in their EULAs/ToS that make you give permission for the device to phone home for "troubleshooting" or "diagnostic" purposes, to "enhance user experience", or even - just putting it on the table - "to provide relevant advertising". No way to disable the "feature", obviously.
Did you even sweat, tho? Plaintiffs told to amend claims in Apple headphones suit
Great Scott! Bitcoin to consume half a per cent of the world's electricity by end of year
Agile development exposed as techie superstition
US border cops told not to search seized devices just for the hell of it
Boss sent overpaid IT know-nothings home – until an ON switch proved elusive
Re: Loopy.
Even loopier:
The university I went to would contract students to go and troubleshoot problems with other students' computers in the dorms. Mostly stuff like setting up to print to the school printers. I once pulled a ticket for a network connectivity issue and walked over to check it out. At that time, all the dorm rooms only had one ethernet drop even if there were multiple students living there, so the school would provide a 4-port switch. I go through my checks, computer on, yep no connectivity, look under the desk for the switch, lights are on, follow the ethernet cable out of the switch...and back into the switch. Reinserted it into the wall jack and everything went back to normal. Easiest ticket I ever had.
'Alexa, listen in on my every word and send it all to a shady developer'
Apple's QWERTY gets dirty, leaving fanbois shirty
Recording Industry Ass. says vinyl and CD sales beat digital downloads
Your source must be different from mine. Garner's Modern English Usage:
Comprise.A. And compose.
Correct use of these words is simple, but increasingly rare. The parts compose the whole; the whole comprises the parts. The whole is composed of the parts, the parts are comprised in the whole. Comprise, the more troublesome word in this pair, means "to contain; to consist of"...
C. Comprise for make up or constitute. If the whole comprises the parts, the reverse can't be true - e.g.:
"Of the 50 stocks that comprise [read make up] the index, 40 had gains....
D. Comprise for are. This is an odd error based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of comprise. E.g.: "They comprise [read are] three of the top four names in the batting order of...
Maybe a BrE vs AmE issue, but its the Recording Ass. of America, so I'll take Garner's advice on this one.
UK's data watchdog seizes suspected Scottish nuisance caller's kit
Re: Can someone please
Physical access was easy if not entirely legal; the antenna was, as I understand, usually mounted on top of a house or garage with the coax snaking out of a window. As far as DF, they had a directional antenna mounted on top of a van and would take bearings from several locations as they drove around. Turns out the General Post Office and MI8 did something very similar (without the pin-in-the-coax trick) back in the '20s and '30s with MI5 taking over to help find German spies operating within the UK, pretty cool!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding
US mulls drafting gray-haired hackers during times of crisis
For certain skill sets, you can do pretty well. In the Navy, at least, surgeons, chaplains, etc go through Officer Development School, aka "Knife and Fork" school where they learn basics like "what the ranks are" and "how to put on a uniform". It's 8 weeks long and while there's a minimum level of fitness expected, they also realize that a 50 year-old isn't going to be doing pushups in the surf. Pay isn't anything to write home about but I've run into doctors who come in as captains making $100k a year. Factor in bonuses and they might be closer to $150k.
Techies building UK web smut age check tools: You'll get a spec next week
Re: A lot of you are *very* keen on protecting your access to smut
A friend of mine who used to work in a video store told me that there were two types of people who rented porn movies:
The guy who slips the porn in with a stack of five or six nature documentaries, action movies, etc.
The guy who proudly slaps "Anal Bum Blasters III: Blast From The Past" down on the counter and asks: "you got anything new back there?"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
