Posts by DuncanLarge

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

What a load of bull

Re: When they came for the ...

> The IDF are terrorists because they indiscriminately bomb Palestinian camps

You mean Hamas bases built in and underneath such camps??

The rules of war allow a defending country to attack military targets. If civilians get in the way by will or by force then they may be willingly (by their own will) or unwilingly (by the force of the enemy using them as sheilds) in the line of fire.

This is not a movie or TV series where the whole war is brought to a standstill because some bunch of families are being held hostage by the enemy. International pressure has already made sure Israel is well aware it is in the limelight and will do more than usually required to shift the civvies out of the way.

But as wel all know from the leaked phone conversation where an Israili is trying to convince a Palestinian to move out of the flat they live in and go to refuge areas etc, over and over he tells them to, as soon that area will be targeted, the civvie male seems damn proud to have himself and HIS KIDS in the firing line as their deaths will look great on social media!

So when you have civilians willingly stepping in front of bullets and happily laying their still innocent underage children over the top of Hamas tunnel entrances, what are you supposed to to?

It's the trolley problem. Do you stop the war to avoid blowing up the little kid who is abused by his own parents by being placed as a sheild over a tunnel entrance? Or to save the hundreds of men women and children inside those tunnels, being raped, starved, tortured by an already understood to be inhuman group of men who hate women gays etc, risk blowing that kid up too?

Re: Conspiracy

> You got downvoted because, like all your posts, it was unintelligible garbage

Short term memory is obviously not working in you thus you never placed the facts into long term memory. EIther that or your recall is crap.

The attack this poster is reffering to has been proven and covered extensivley, on The Register no less and it is so simple and old that it doesnt need somethinga s modern asn an EV.

A large number of cars, especially ones with GSM modems are right now hackable and can have their brakes for example remotely operated or disabled.

The curse of fly-by-wire controls. It was even demonstrated on LIVE TV a couple of years ago.

Re: Conspiracy

> Funny that not so long ago I was heavily downvoted for saying that unfriendly state could install a backdoor in EV cars allowing it to remotely control the car causing it to crash or even cause battery to catch fire.

Why the hell were you downvoted for that? That attack has already been prven and covered in detail on this site and it doesnt need anything as new as an EV.

A simple device plugged into the OBD port is all that is needed, and GSM connected cars are hackable and controllable practically via the web. Proven. All becaise cars are an interconnected network of computers and subsystems that unsurprisinly, have zero concept of security.

Who is Tesla and why do you want to blow up her pager?

Re: Technology question

Simples

Intercept crates of pager models that are used by the terrorists. Barely anyone else will have them as they will use smartphones.

Pay people to open the pagers up, to "fix" an issue, they wont know they are basicallly just the paid help.

This "fix" can be a replacement battery, although pagers tend to use alkalines some may use li-ion. The new Li-ion battery is a "special" one. Perhgaps the protection circuit has been removed. Or you can just add in a board with a little banger attached.

Either way, you then update the pager firmware to short the battery or trigger the detonator on the board when you just happen to send a "special" pager message on the totally open easy to intercept pager "network". Shorted li-ion battery with no protection circuit = fire and bangs. Little boom box embedded inside pager = boom and bangs.

You might want to look up Stuxnet.

Dont underestimate the ease and ingenuity a state funded project like this can accomplish. Again, look up Stuxnet. Then watch Enemy of the State and ask yourself if you really know how these state funded groups which employ people out of universities etc operate and what they are really capable of. Once the SNowden stuff came out I rewatched Enemy of the State, which I had always liked, and understoood to be true(ish) but that post-snowden re-watch really makes the film seem more of a documentaty with thriller elements.

They all thought we we all idiots wearing tonfoil hats, linking double yolk eggs with Alien visitations etc. Post snowden they are in our camp.

And that's 3 recalls for Tesla Cybertruck in as many months

Re: "The terminology is outdated & inaccurate. This is a tiny over-the-air software update." - Musk

Maybe get your glasses checked and re-read the post?

Analysts join the call for Microsoft to recall Recall

Re: "letting the user scroll the archive of snapshots"

I found that search prefers to search the internet before local resources.

I found that out as just after booting I was using search to launch notepad, it took me to bing!

I would use the start menu but thats broken and unusable these days. I pin my essentials to the task bar

You want us to think of the children? Couldn't agree more

Re: Article 8 of the ECHR

> But I fort we di'n 'ave to doo all that Uuuurup noncesense any more cos we got Brexit done and kicked out all those forriners! We can doo wot we like!! Fuckemall!! RULE BRITANNIA!!!!11!ONE

The ECHR has as much to do with the EU and Brexit as a Carrot has to do with a bag of paper straws.

Thanks to Brexit, most people know know more about the ECHR and the terrible cost of Tony Blair making it our highest, unelected and unaccountable court.

Apart from you.

Re: Parental controls

> which bizarrely ended with the aforementioned call for banning phones under 16

How would that rob a kid of their future?

What does a kid under 16 need to do with a mobile phone and constant access to the internet that I couldnt do in 1996 when I was 16?

I'm now 43, work in IT with a BSc in Computer Science and own my own home (due to luck I might add as the prices are crazy even for me). I didnt have access to the internet at home back then and had my own 486 running at 66MHz (it had a whopping 8MB of RAM too) and anything I wanted to do on the internet I simply did when I could, at school or in later years, at home when permitted by my parents, during the days of dialup. Even when I did have a phone it only sent SMS and calls and played snake and when we had broadband installed at home, there was no such thing as wifi and no way my dad was going to drill holes to run a network cable from the router to my now much more powerful PC (AMD running at 333MHz with 64MB RAM, sweeeet).

I did mostly everything offline, even building my first PC from scratch, offline. It wasnt really very hard at all, I used a book and other knowledge. When I needed something off the web, I downloaded it when I had the oppertunity from school or university and simply carried it home. Nothing actually hindered me, it was just a bit slower. Heck I even applied for my first IT job after Uni using a laptop hooked into my mobile phone via serial cable, dialing up to my ISP (which I signed up to myself) to download and upload emails at a whopping speed of 1Kb/s and I was being charged by the min too.

So, what the hell is so essential for a kid to have a mobile phone with constant internet access < 16?

Answer: nothing. It's something they find cool and exciting and they become someones product. They also "need" it so that other kids will acept them, a behaviour I happily ignored when I was that age. There are plenty of kids around the world right now doing way more than a mobile phone touting 14 year old, and they dont even have internet access at home. They get it from libraries and schools. Most of the kids you are talking about are simply learning how to abuse, be abused, be a product, follow the corwd and get a better score on candy crush. Thats what these devices are marketed to them for.

Re: I'm surprised that there is no HTTP header...

> Let's face it, 99% of sites would be fine to honor an "under 10, under 14, under 18, I'm not a degenerate"-equivalent HTTP header

They wont. We asked them not to track us with a similar header and guess what, it went ignored as the data is worth more that way.

Same with kids. SIte has to choose between losing money vs letting a kid watch something that perhaps the parents if they bothere to are would not want them watching? They'll take the money and run. The kid is just data in their logfiles, they may as well not exist.

Re: In the good old days..

TV and books may have been the "problem with kids" of the day, rock and roll too, but Social Media and constant access to everyone else’s opinions/thoughts from any culture no matter the compatibility with the one you are in, is very very different.

With TV you had what, 4 channels? 5 channels later on and then Sky TV. All of that regulated. All the "nasty stuff" was post watershed.

With books, you had a slooooooow medium. It took time to read and you had buckets of time to think decide and act. You could even put the book down halfway through, sit on it a week and come back. Or you could put it down halfway through and decide "Nah, thats enough of that".

With Rock and Roll, unless you are the "Dancing Priest" it's very likely that the dancing and music will end at some point and you will go to bed and be made to engage with society and your education again.

But with social media, you have none of what I have described. The platform informs YOU of what to watch and react to next. There is no regulation, what platform holds uploaded videos before review by the regulators? Maybe in China. There is too much data, too much to regulate and too much to control so any controls are always inadequate. Social Media isnt even something you have natural barriers against, for example, if we used the internet only at home, perhaps even a-la dialup with having to log in every time, you would have access ONLY at those times allowing you to have oh so much time offline. But no, we put a constant connection in our pockets and the teens etc have zero restrictions imposed as to when they are online, it's constant. THEY have to FORCE themselves to be offline to get a break from the algorithms and the cyber bullying etc. THEY have to do it, with their WILLPOWER which is hard to do when you are made to be ADDICTED to the platform by its INTENTIONALLY designed to be addictive algorithms.

Think of it this way.

Many people are happy to enjoy an adrenaline rush. They may go skydiving and all sorts of other things. This is addictive, but even an adrenaline junkie has many barriers in place that can help them avoid the next skydive. They have to work, the skydiving is expensive and must be BOOKED for a specific time etc etc. This enforces their off hours. But imagine if skydiving was like the old dialup internet, but we developed the tech to skydive, at will, anywhere and any-when for next to nothing even for free. On the bus, in the classroom, anywhere and any-when. Suspend your disbelief for a moment as you imagine people randomly skydiving through a bus, just think of the adrenaline rush effects. Just think of the algorithm that makes you want to do it more and more.

Do you think thats good for the brain?

Do you think that is in any way similar to a bookworm reading loads of books, or watching live TV?

The internet and social media are VERY different and we let kids onto it thinking it's a good idea. Facebook won’t stop under 12s logging in, even though it's against the usage agreement. They are worth too much.

"Teen angst", always confused me as a teen.

I was supposed to have it, being a teen. Instead I was totally normal.

All the other teens however seemd to be from another planet entirely.

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

> How reliable are Minidiscs over time?

No issues so far. They are MO so much less delicate than other RW media.

> I know the data versions of the drives (NetMD)

I think you mean MD-DATA. NetMD was a USB transfer method for copying music faster than real time to disc. MD-DATA was the data storage version allowing approx 340MB?

> They're optical, so should be fairly resistant to magnets and static.

Actually MD's are magnetic. They are read optically and written with a compination of optical and magetism. They are made of a material that will change its magnetisation only when heated to a specifi temp, which is where the laser comes in. The laster heats the disk and that allows a magnetic moment to be recorded onto the disc. Once cooled that magnetic moment can not be changed. A MD is totally immune from external magnetic fields (although perhaps extremily srtong ones might have an effect).

The disc is read optically as the light from the laser is twisted by the magnetic fields.

Re: Have they been hacked?

> Yet modern USB flash drives seem to die if you look at them.

I had a 54GB flash drive that was used all of 3x in as many years die sitting on a shelf for 1 year or so, I didnt even have to look at it.

It was dead as a dodo.

I've had a little 2GB sandisk die and come back from the dead as well! Still works but I dont trust it. I dont trust any of them.

Re: Have they been hacked?

You'll find that most of the issues with writing are due to the old media.

Re: Have they been hacked?

> Worse, drive timings vary, so not all drives will work in a given device

All 3.5" drives are standard. They dont have different RPM, if they do thats because they have a fault.

5.15" drives did have different RPMs.

The only differences between 3.5" drives are those that are fully schugart drives (practically EVERYTHING) vs those that are not fully schugart (IBM PC). Many drives support both with a jumper.

A Gotek supports both with a change to its config files.

Re: Curious what the floppy replacement will be?

> The easiest replacement might be a purely electronic device that emulates a floppy disk

It's called a GOTEK and you can have one off ebay for £20-30.

It is a drop in full replacement for a 3.5" floppy drive. YOu plug a USB flash drive into it containing floppy images (it supports a very wide number of floppy image formats) and select which image to mount.

It is fully hardware compatible witha 3.5" floppy drive, simply plugs into the usual floppy cable.

They are used to replace floppy drives in all sorts of industrial systems as well as retro computers.

Easy

Just swap the floppy drive for a Gotek and a flash drive and you are done.

Simulation reveals all Japanese will have the same surname by 2531

Re: Don’t Call Them “Surnames”

The French all caps surnames was something I learned to hate when setting up user accounts, especially as they insisted on NOT using a comma to denote the fact that they had a habit of putting the surname first!

I had loads of accounts that needed renaming and it took me a while to figure out why they were doing this.

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

Re: So much MS BS spin. Privacy? or minute by minute monitoring of a Windows 11 system?

> Settings experience

OMG, please, please tell me they dont call it that!

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

I have XP SP3 installed on a much more modern Dell machine with a Xeon 3.something GHz 4 core CPU and 16BiB of RAM simply so I can use a DDS3 tape drive to read DDS1/2/3 tapes at work.

A Windows 2022 server with backupexec 22 installed was not able to do it as the windows driver for DDS drives seems to not support anything below DAT72 drives, which is really annoying as there is no real reason why it shouldnt work as they are just SCSI tape drives at the end of the day and the generic driver supplied by microsoft is called dat4mm.

So XP was chosen as it is the latest version of Windows that still has a fully functional NTBackup which along with backupexec can read these tapes (Backupexec uses NTBackup format). The main WIn 2022 server handles LTO and tapes the DAT72 dive can read.

This Dell has 1 PCI slot but is mostly PCIe. NO big deal for XP, it was perfectly happy as long as I set the UEFI to enable CSM and I had to use SP3 as an SP2 install disc would blue screen after installation. SP3 is lightning fast on it and with a driver from Nvidia for the Quadro card I put in I get a decent resolution for the 22" Dell display port monitor.

Several devices were obviously not recognised, HD Audio being one, but I dont need that. USB3 support too, but the motherboard has USB 2 ports as well so thats how I transfer the recovered data off.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

Re: Every single time someone mentions tape...

Never had a problem with tapes. I have DDS tapes from 1990

Re: Nice to have the little piece about optical media once a decade

The problem with the holographic discs were the lasers. As compenets they had to be tiny and were simply not really useful.

This new disc uses 4 lasers for different stages of reading and writing and as comp[onents they are more usable.

What they did here was find a way a BIG laser diode can make marks way smaller than its wavelength. None of the holographic systems could do that.

Re: Missing important use cases

> And Blu-ray failed to make the same splash exactly because at that point, many people had an Internet connection that was good enough to just stream whatever they were interested in.

The actual reason more like this:

1. VHS made home video popular, not DVD.

2. SVHS failed because people already had VHS and didn’t care enough to have a new machine and tapes just for a better picture

3. DVD came about and now the public were ready for a picture upgrade, also eventually getting DVD recording too. The old tapes were old by now, SVHS just was too new with not enough benefit. DVD went into a market ready for such an upgrade.

4. Bluray came out, like SVHS it has struggled because even with people having HD TV's most people don’t care about HD enough to stop buying DVD or swear they can’t tell the difference, still! It is well known that DVD sells better than bluray, thus many shows and movies ONLY get a DVD release as it’s cheaper to make and buy and makes loads of sales. If it were just "the age of streaming" that caused blueray to have less sales, why are people still buying loads of DVDs?

It’s all in the numbers. The films and TV shows getting physical releases don’t just sit on the shelves and evaporate, they have to sell otherwise they wouldn’t be produced in the first place. I mean FGS, Audio CD is still everywhere and all bands, at least the ones I listen to, release new albums on Audio CD and even Vinyl too. Super Audio CD? DVD Audio? Didn’t grab the market, no longer made besides some SA CD's for classical markets. DVD Audio fizzled out and was simply replaced with Video DVD that had the audio and video (such as a concert) on it! Same quality, more standard.

Audio CD, still made and sells. DVD Video, still made and sells. Bluray still made and sells well enough. UHD bluray still fairly new and does sell to enthusiasts and those who care enough about 4K TV's to actually want to view 4K on them.

As for streaming, well, that has been getting some bad rap as of late with hikes in subscription costs and the inclusion of adverts. People went to streaming NOT to escape DVD, but to escape ADVERTS. WE ALL WENT TO NETFLIX TO AVOID ADVERTS. Plus, we were told that EVERYTHING would be on streaming, yet a decade or so later, and we have adverts and FAR FROM EVERYTHING, with things vanishing randomly, even when you were told you OWNED IT FOREVER.

So, streaming is now starting to lose out to DVD and bluray again. Even Disney has released SW expanded universe stuff on DVD and bluray to try and capture new subscribers to Disney+.

Not everyone is a sheep mate, we can’t all be herded and follow the herd to the next fashionable thing. Many who do, get bored of it and wander off back to where they started or somewhere near it (people still buy books printed on dead trees would you believe!). Some like me watch the herd and follow after they finish making a mess of things, or I stay put. And people like me have MONEY to spend. Thats why Audio CD etc still havnt died, and why vinyl popped back.

Re: 100 layers?

There are not 100 separate layers. The layers are made during the burning process, you only spin coat one thick layer of material and burn the data layers into that.

> There's a reason all the optical backup/archiving formats, including the various MO formats, have long died out while tape is still standing.

Tell me the reason as CD/DVD/and BD-R are still everywhere and used as such.

> Where it has to compete with tape.

Not hard to do, the only way tape wins over optical today is capacity. Thats it. Remove that, giving the discs as much or more capacity as a tape and it wipes the floor with tapes due to its random access nature.

Not even LTFS would stand a chance.

Tape, with its shell will however have better durability, but with hard coatings even a disc is nearly impossible to sctarch and the disc takes up less tom than the tapes.

Also, one major selling point over tape is the disc is random access.

Tape isnt, even if you use LTFS you still need to wind the tape back and forth.

When CD came out there was also DAT and DCC, tape formats that had the same audio quality (or close) as CD and that could also seek to find a track. Thing is the CD went to the selected track immediatly, while the tapes took a few seconds to wind to it.

> Erase hundreds of terabytes with one simple scratch!

If you are able to make a scratch. BD-R are nearly impossible to scratch without intentionally trying to do it!

But a HDD is easy to kill just by accidentally dropping it. An optical disc would just need to be wiped clean after picking up some dust from the floor.

Re: Read/write speed may be the barrier to adoption here

> where did they top-out? Around the 2.6Gb mark for double-sided platters IIRC

Where have you been? Try 33 GB per layer.

besides, its not about how fast you spin the disc, christ a CD can spin faster than you can blink, but the data density that affects the speeds. As this media is very dense youll just spin it like a 1x CD and get a throughput that will saturate any IO connection we have today.

> The problem is that you're not really sure on the longevity until you've stored it for a while.

Well yes but everyone will expect acelerated aging tests instead. Tests that are done on CD/DVD/BD-R, LTO tape et, but oddly not done on HDD and flash devices.

Re: Yawn

> By the time it arrives, flash storage will be cheaper per TB, orders of magnitude faster, smaller, longer lasting, and physically more robust.

And pigs will have learnt to fly drones.

> longer lasting

I cant belive that for a second, nobody is loking at archival flash. They all claim up to 10 years simply because they have no clue. ALl they know for sure is if you write to it only ONCE, that data will stay put for a very long time. But the more you use the device, the weaker it gets, to the point that it may hold data only for a few weeks!

If they were looking at actually defining the longevity of flash, I'll take that statement more seriously. Otherwise it;s all just a coin toss and by the time we get these optical discs we will still be tossing the coins.

> cheaper per TB

Thats the big con with flash. It never actually gets cheaper, just bigger. I want 4GB SD cards for 30p dammit!! A DVD+R is waaaaay cheaper than flash.

> smaller

Christ I hope not! microSD is small enough thanks!

> physically more robust

Even a CF card will survive being driven over, I dont think there is much more room for imporovemnt here.

Re: I thought we learned...

Wow, I have never ever seen any optical disc rot at all.

You must live on Venus. Or, you have shoddy discs.

I find apart from the known isue with old 90's CD's pressed in the UK by PDO, the only case of further damage seems to be in the US. Something about your harsh environments (perhaps the air conditioning) or they were made in the US by substandard factories (princo discs, you''l be better off with paper!).

The only thing that was odd recently was I opened up a commercial DVD that I hadnt opened in about 10 years. The disc was, misty. Like it had permanant condensation on it. I was like, "OMG I finally have found a case of degredation", only I noticed that whatever it was casta shadow on the reflective layer. It was on teh surface and, my finger smudged it. Something oily on the disc! So I simply gave it a light wash in the sink, just a damp soapy bit of tissue and it was clean as a whistle.

Then I looked at the inside of the case, it was in there too. I wiped that away with some IPA this time. Then I found out that some case plastics outgas and leave oily residue on themselves and the discs. Turns out the deposit on the disc is harmless, but unless cleaned off will caurse read issues. That mate is the only time Ive seen anything that gave me cause for concern about optical media and it turned out to merely be an annoyance in the end.

For comparison, my discs, pressed ones are in a typically heated UK livingroom which obviously has no AC. The burned media are in cases, spinles and the oldests are in a few binders which use plastic sleeves. These are kept out of sunlight and are zipped up for months on end.

ONly 2 discs showed issues when doing an error scan, Tesco branded DVD+R DL discs. The errors had not even got close to being uncorrectable but are above my threshold for concern, thus they were burned to new discs. The errors were at the edge, at the layer transition. My Verbatim DVD+R DL and BD-R DL also show an uptick in error rates at the edges but it's hardly anything to worry about.

Re: I thought we learned...

> CD+R and CD-R wars!

Never happened. There was only ever CD-R.

DVD has - and + formats which are still both made today. + is superior.

Re: I thought we learned...

> But the other bit I learned was that the CD-R might not be readable in a drive from a different manufacturer so I always checked the CD-R in a drive from a different manufacturer...

That has never happened, ever.

Re: I thought we learned...

> the last time we had optical media that promises of it's durability and longevity almost never panned out

Which was?

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Totally agree

I totaly agree.

What drives me mad is that with all this wasteful multi-core GHz and fast insecure connectivity methods like thunderbolt (oh, it becomes secure if you run additional software, which you can just disable) is the fact that the primary use of this power is to hide the lazyness and inefficient coding, non-existent testing and downright terrible design choices of people who only muck this stuff up because it is cool to look "new".

Take systemd for example, totally bonkers design made by a laptop user and foisted upon everyone by default even on a server. Unpredictable, non-repoducible boots and shutdowns. My home PC boots in unpredictable amounts of time because of it and it may take several mins or less than a second to shut down just because systemd is systemd.

My 486 was bloody faster :D

Re: THIS!!!

> A nice responsive user interface benefits lots of users - and thankfulky the threshold of clicking an icon and getting a near instantaneous response have been passed some time ago for most of us.

Anyone not running windows, yes.

The number of times I've seen windows explorer get into an unresponsive state, then gets killed by some watchdog, only to be responsive for a few seconds then enterst the unresponsive state again and the cycle repeats.

The usual fixes?

sfc /scannow?

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth?

Nope...

Re: THIS!!!

CAD worked just find 20 years ago on systems that had only just busted through the 1GHz barrier.

Much of your software is so bloated and inefficient you have to have multiple cores just to conteract it.

Only a few algorithms actually benefit from faster CPU's such as raytracing, for that your really should be using a GPU anyway. CAD is only needing it because of two reasons, acutal new processes or requirements or bloat, UI bloat, unoptimised code.

If CPU's are so fast why does it take 10 mins to log into windows 10? What is it doing? Nothing useful, trust me I've looked into it.

Slowing down the password hash functions to confirm a correct password is standard security practce to make brute forcing attacks expensive.

iPhones take it further making you wait hours or days before getting another chance to try a PIN.

That is established practice, not matter how good your passwords are, a system that doesnt add delays into the password hash functions etc means the difference between trying 1000 passwords a second and 100,000,000

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

Re: 3.5" floppy discs are not analogue.

> 3.5" floppy discs are not analogue.

YES they are.

They use frequency modulation and as far as I know a sine wave is not digital.

The C64 datasette (cassette drive) was as close to a digital tape you can get, but it still recorded parts of an analogue waveform into an analogue medium, that of magnetic particles.

It is not possible to move from a 1 to a 0 in zero time, thus it is not digital (the media). It is not possible to record a 1 and a 0 on an analogue medium as it can store any intermediate value, thus th logic 1 you stored earlier may have a absolute value of 500mV (when read by the head) and a logic 0 following it may be at -500mV, but then the media has a bad spot and only alowed a logic one coming after your perfect ones earlier to be at 450mV and the following logic 0 end up being -372mV. On a DIGITAL medium, you will never have that problem.

Digital media must only store discrete digital values. Not even todays flash media can do that, as again, flash media is ANALOGUE. The universe is not digital, such ways of looking at it are artificial. We thus read back our analogue media DIGITALLY by deciding the RANGE at which we have a logic 1 or a 0.

The C64 recorded fast electromagnetic pulses to the tape, but due to the nature of the uiniverse, thost pulses, that square wave, became an analogue waveform. Thus the C64 datasette has a circuite to read that analogue waveform off the analogue medium and "square it up" into the pulse train.

Floppy discs are analogue, as are HDD's and SSD's. We read and write to them in various ways, storing and retreiving analoge values and waveforms, which we then process into a digital bytestream. When a floppy disc drive has pre-amplifiers involved in reading and writing, well, there you go, floppies are analogue.

Optical media however can do that, the marks made on optical media are either there or not there. We dont care if they are deep or shallow as long as they are there or not there. The data is actually not encoded in the marks themselves but in the changes between them.

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: PGP exports

> Ah, remember the crazy times in the 90s when exporting PGP was seen as a federal crime and Phil Zimmerman had to print the source code as a book to get around it?

Good times...

China updates national computing plan with calls for more edge, storage, memory, and … Blu-ray?

Re: ODA

We have nothing like that here in the UK.

We in IT sometimes hire an "apprentice".

Anyway, the data I'm talking about cant be touched by anyone without the right clearances.

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Re: NerdRageQuit

Exactly, any idiot would surely know that you should write a script to go off a few years AFTER you were chucked out. :D

UEFI flaws allow bootkits to pwn potentially hundreds of devices using images

Re: Hasty UEFI, not vetted properly, with weaknesses

> Did you ever try to repair a computer with a messed up SSD or hard drive, plus UEFI and BitLocker?

YES oh god dont remind me!

I had a machine that was not bitlockered but HAD been using Intel fake raid, which all got messed up with macrium reflect images not supporting Intel fake raid and the users also messing up the machine thus requiring me to restore an untested image to the machine rather than having them sort out the driver issues they created.

Ended up with a totally borked UEFI and windows boot config. Took me most of a day to sort out as windows recovery environment as usual was totally inept and useless, guides on the web on how to regenerate the windows boot config on the "newly and manually created in Linux EFI partition" all didnt work as they only worked for specific versions of windows.

It was a bloody mess of browser tabs and lost of reading and failures. I was very nostalgic about the good old MBR days, with a boot loaded installed in the first sector of a drive or partition.

My home systesm still use that.

On paper UEFI looks great, but thats on paper. The paper is not what was implemented by far.

Re: BIOS/UEFI security

> that MUST be pushed in order to update the firmware

Thats why a set a BIOS password, sure they may not always be secure but anything that does not understand a BIOS password will be scuppered.

Re: Unavoidable

> But then if you’re not using a picture then Shirley not vulnerable?

It may not be YOUR image, and YOU didnt put it there. THEY did. Thats the point.

Re: There is a *really* simple solution to this...

> Folks who don't want the guffware can put their own stick in with whatever pre-boot crap they want

They will solder them to the moberboard mate

> If an attacker can get a file into the EFI partition then you've got more problems than dodgy image processing by UEFI.

Thats totally trivial. It's a R/W FAT32 partition. If you are lucky something software based in the OS may try to monitor or write protect it but a user merely has to run something as admin to let code modify anything anywhere on a HDD.

It's one of the reasons why I'm against UEFI, it should ALL be in ROM. We have big ROMs these days, why is an unreliable partition needed?