Posts by Chairman of the Bored

Apple leak: If you leak from Apple, we'll have you arrested, says Apple

Re: Arrested?

Arrested for civil dispute... Well, the United States has a very sordid past of companies corrupting law enforcement. Mainly during the earlier part of the industrial revolution... Union breakers who would modulate your orthopaedic health, provide free tooth extraction services and so forth - with the tacit or active support of law enforcement and local government.

Interesting our supposedly "enlightened" and "post industrial" fruity friends are experiencing a similar testosterone surge.

Leaking the anti-leak memo to Bloomberg

Simply brilliant. Whoever you are, have a pint on me.

Latest F-35 flight tests finish – and US stops accepting new jets

Re: Warfighter

Dispute Resolution Counselor? What a brilliant turn of phrase. It made me splutter coffee! I'm going to steal this phrase and apply it to myself. Have a pint.a

Back in my days as a Dispute Resolution Counselor, I had an opportunity to take notes for some flag officers at a tech interchange. Basically all the beltway bandits and septic think tanks were trying to get feedback on their hardware wet dreams from men who had actually been on the pointy end. I was just there to fetch coffee, zip flies, and take notes. Effen hillarious:

Septic think tank: "sirs! Do you want lasers? Directed energy?

Flag: no, all I want is a fscking radio that works!

Septic think tank: um... Pause... How about shape memory alloys? VTOL?

Flag: I want a fscking RADIO that WORKS! Beats table.

Septic think tanks: I know! Vertical takeoff sharks with freakin' lasers!

Two whole days of my life, gone.

You. FCC. Get out there and do something about these mystery bogus cell towers, huff bigwigs

Some links from you to look at

Open source 2G and 3G stack: www.openbts.org

My recommended SDR: https://www.ettus.com/product/details/UB200-KIT

Suggest getting the GPS disciplined TCXO option, the oscillator built into the B200 is suprisingly crap for a $560 radio. A $400 hackRF board will work but not quite as well.

Rasberry Pi to drive it will be ok as proof of concept; for real work an old i5 quad core laptop with USB 3.0 and a few GB of RAM is more than adequate.

Roll your own femto cell, do intercepts of SMS, whatever. Note that rainbow tables for GSM A5/1 crypto are available if you've got a few TB of spinning rust available and feel passive aggressive. Note I do not condone intercept and decrypt of messages not your own, etc, yadda yadda.

I built a femtocell a couple of years back with openBTS and an Ettus B210 because I needed a comms net in the middle of nowhere and equipping my people with 2G flip phones was the right answer - we had dozens lying around. Total cost was maybe $3k in materials and a man month of labor. Compared to the cost of deploying an APCO P25 radio net, the cost was in the noise.

Friend of mine teaches high school students about risks of online life and whatnot. She uses a beta version of the UMTS fork of OpenBTS to scare the hell out of the students by sending them uninvited SMS... Displaying all IMSI in range in real time, etc. Good clean fun and (one hopes) makes them think about what they expose online, so to speak. Yes, this IS done with informed consent; she's a white hat.

Bottom line? This genie won't fit back into the bottle. Not unless we develop truly secure standards and protocols for telephony, and what government wants that???

Sysadmin shut down the wrong server, and with it all European operations

Re: Funnily enough...

Thanks for the link! I like.

Re AC w SSH woes?

Stuff appens, you dust off, learn and move on. Something more than just leaving the port open must also be your problem; have a close look at sshd.conf

If you disable logins with passed, prohibit root login, and use only pre-shared keys the security of SSH is pretty tough to beat. Yeah, there have been some zero days in OpenSSH but I can say that about a lot of software.

For bonus points I use a nonstandard SSH port for my development and production environments. It doesn't increase security of the protocol per se, but the Chinese robocall activity on port 22 no longer obscures my logs. Now anything that tries to hit my ssh did so after someone did a proper port scan, which obviously makes me sit up a little straighter and think about it.

Live not in fear, SSH can work for you... The vast majority of the time... But configuration is key

Funnily enough...

...one of the very best techniques I've found for stress testing electronic hardware is power cycling. Do it hot, do it cold, do it at low and high voltage, do it while undergoing thermal shock. Do it at all corners of the design envelope. Use a big, ugly mechanical contactor with contacts that bounce like a hyperactive kid on speed. Add ridiculous amounts of line inductance. Put in parallel with a big, ugly motor load. Switch that on and off violently as well. Stuff will die, horribly. HW engineers will whine, switchmode supplies will scream. Mod design as needed and rock on. Very quickly you've got a much more reliable system.

So our AS/400 hero is really just helping beta test IBM HW... Just without the thanks.

Re: Moments like that let you know if...

Good way to look at it. Been many decades now and I haven't forgotten the lesson. Spent a lot more for a lot less elsewhere. (Should I slap in a gratuitous reference to DevOps forced fun or would that kill the thread?)

Moments like that let you know if...

...your leader is worth following. Screwups will happen. But will grace and a second chance happen as well? If you find these in a leader, make sure you follow that person.

Bet the admin here never, ever made the same mistake again; performance across the board probably amped up as the lesson drove home the seriousness of the job.

I encountered a great leader once, in my first year of college working in a copy and print shop. The owner - a recent immigrant from Lebanon working three jobs at once to get enough cash to bring his family over - always seemed to be a hard man. But one after one all-nighter running a $10,000 job I realized all too late that I'd screwed up the whole thing, and lost a major client. Margins are razor thin so we ate something like $9,600. When Mr. Hammad came in, I just had to press my "man up" button, tell him what I'd done, and wait to be fired. Instead he stared at me for a very long time, and took me in the back for a cup of tea. His one question - that still stings across the years - was "So... tell me exactly why you are so careless with our money? Our paper and supplies and our customers? Did you respect our customer? Is that what you want to be?" Then "I should fire you but instead I want you to stay here and show me who you really are" I wasn't fired and ended up running the business.

Guys and gals like that are tough to find, but the world really needs them. So try to be one.

Birds can feel Earth's magnetic fields? Yeah, that might fly. Bioboffins find vital sense proteins

Re: Wonder what effect ethanol has on the proteins?

Very interesting link; thanks! Strange time perception effect from the antihistamine. That being said I find working under the microscope itself has some strange effects on perception of time. I've accidentally pulled all nighters working QFN packages and repairing BGA. Suddenly I realize (1) that little hungry feeling means that I missed lunch ... dinner ... AND breakfast; and (2) wife is unhappy enough that Viagra ain't the answer to problem (3)

Re: Wonder what effect ethanol has on the proteins?

Interesting, I wonder what structural differences in the photo sensitive proteins cause different reactions with Viagra.

Years ago when Imitrex (counter-migraine) came out, it was by injection only. The side effect profile was so bad patients had to stagger into the hospital and have the first shot administered while a crash cart was nearby.

When I got it, I had the most extraordinary perceptual issues with light and sound. Not what I'd call an hallucination, bit more like acoustic and visual line noise. First at low level and then cranked to the absolute Max... Colors so bright in random spots they were intolerable. Hissing and popping noises. Huge pressure in the head, you start to think the popping is bone failing. And then... Silence. Migraine gone, some lingering nausea and fatigue. I was able to drive home that hour. But what a hell of a ride! Self injector worked for a few years, always with the same trip. Then the pills came out and work, and do not jack up your brain chemistry the same way.

Wonder what effect ethanol has on the proteins?

I could swear a few beers will eliminate whatever benefit my supposed direction proteins convey. After a very great many beers? Sometimes the next morning some poached eggs and blackened toast seems to help. Wonder if the eggs....

Linux Beep bug joke backfires as branded fix falls short

Re: Almost nobody even has beep installed.

Totally agree with you; trick is that with production systems a lot of people cannot frequently rebuild as I would, say, my home Linux and windows boxes.

I do spend a fair amount of time looking over the installed package lists on production boxes and asking, "what is this one... and this one... Do we really use every version of python since the beginning of time or is cruft accumulating?" And so forth. I actually schedule days for in-depth consideration of open ports, services exposed, etc. Sometimes the need for something passes and you get an opportunity to reduce your attack surface.

I'm sure this tool exists and I'm too dumb to know what it is, but if not here is my proposal: develop a script that crawls around and looks at last access times on files and associates these with installed packages... If all files associated with a package haven't been accessed in <defined> months, inform admin that maybe the package is unnecessary?

My PC makes ‘negative energy waves’, said user, then demanded fix

Clash of cultures

New-age intern told my master technician - a retired Marine Gunnery Sargent - that his chronic pain was due to something ... Mumble mumble ... Aura ... Wibble ... Touch healing ... Personally I think it's due to a lifetime of very hard service.

Gunny explodes, "Look here you [deleted] freak show! If you just so much as try to grab my chi, I'm gonna rip your ying off and shove it in your yang!"

Good news for him? I don't have to worry about this guy "feeling waves" off his computer!" Love that guy. Yes, he's throwing reason EEO is on speed dial, but love him anyways.

Microsoft: Yes, we agree that Irish email dispute is moot... now what's this new warrant about?

I do not understand something

US Constitution forbids ex post facto laws: see Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 (federal laws) and Article 1, Section 10 (state laws). Indeed one of the major gripes the colonists had about England was the crown's propensity to retroactively make sundry things illegal and then subject people to judgement... Hence the explicit constitutional language.

So in this case it sounds like the fed wants Microsoft to bend over and submit to the CLOUD act even though the CLOUD act post dates creation of the data in question? Wouldn't that make any information so obtained a poisoned well for any subsequent criminal charges?

If anyone wants a perfectly good constitution, go ahead and take ours. We haven't used it in years.

*Thunk* No worries, the UPS should spin up. Oh cool, it's in bypass mode

Re: My one win over beancounters

Insured against EMP? Nice!! I've got to go check to see if that applies. Be good to know.

For whatever it's worth my homeowner's policy specifically excludes damage caused by nuclear war. Some how I think my homeowner's cover is the least of my worries at that point.

My one win over beancounters

In gov't service...

Whole rack full of Best(TM) UPS units with failed lead-acid batteries inside. Spent over one year fighting beancounters over purchasing replacements; the beancounters kept using "OMG!! They contain lead! Panic immediately! Oh, dear - the Californicators will all die of lead poisoning!!" As their excuse for inaction. Power failures and lost data? Oh, heck yeah. Did the multiple system failures help with the purchase? An emphatic "no".

So what I did was work with the vendor to create a new part number for something called a "self-contained DC power supply". Turns out that anything flagged as a battery is on the USA's "No buy" list. But SCDCPS? Good to go! That's how I became - at least until my next screwup - hero of the team.

Are meta, self-referential or recursive science-fiction films doomed?

To understand recursion

You must first understand recursion

--Stephen Hawking (supposedly, I've seen others cited)

Intel admits a load of its CPUs have Spectre v2 flaw that can't be fixed

Suggested title?

Exploitus interruptus? Damn, couldn't pull it off in time.

Hold the phone: Mystery fake cell towers spotted slurping comms around Washington DC

Or...

... probably just as likely some Billy Bob "borrowing" the stingray from work to see if he can figure out what the wife is up to... Some script kiddies with OpenBTS and a Hack RF, etc...

Who had Intel in the 'discrimination lawsuit' pool? Congratulations

Other side of the story

Well, that's why we are entitled to our day in court. Except for many employment contracts, we never get there.

Re: She did it to herself

Ok, I see your point but you are assuming that she knew during her tenure how badly she was compensated. From the article it appears she only had the information after querying her manager.

This is why management loves secrecy! In most organizations employees are prohibited or at least discouraged from discussing compensation, supposedly because of privacy concerns. But in my experience it's mainly to cover some line manager's ass.

I will never forget my first year in a professional job, working for the US Govt - supposedly an enlightened employer. My program manager (white) was able to burn six weeks of leave on maternity leave. When put black lead computer scientist asked for the same - and bear in mind that she'd already earned it - the full request was denied, supposedly because of some upcoming field tests. Fair enough. But we accidentally stumbled on another black professional who had problems getting full sick leave. Interesting.... Time for more research.

Long story short, after one year of stonewalling the FOIA requests and demoting agitators to crap jobs, we got summary data that confirmed we we're working for racist dickheads. Many of them. One was removed, several promoted to sinecures. From that time forward everyone kept a weather eye on metrics.

Without data you have nothing. Collect data!

Damn, you're more cynical than I am!

@AC, Part of me wants to disagree with your analysis about how the complaint will be dismissed, and the complainant neutralized. You paint a bad picture, but I've actually seen this one colored in a few times. So what the hell, have an upvote for honesty!

Microsoft's Windows supremo Terry Myerson is now Terry BYE-rson

One good sign for MS

They didn't fire Myerson after his first project cratered. In this day and age a zero defects mentality when it comes to employee performance seems all too common, and leads to risk aversion and group think. At least it looks like there was some flexibility for Myerson, at least once.

Have to strike a balance of course because at the other extreme a high tech firm is not an employment house for the villiage idiots.

Shaking up the Nad Men: Microsoft splits up into 'cloud' and 'edge'

Re: Hmm "the Nad men"

I actually like the 'nad men in the title. (Not for that reason! Brain out of gutter, sir!)

It's just that now when people get laid off from Microsoft we can say they got kicked in the nads.

Microsoft Store adds ‘private audience’ apps to its Store

Re: How can we tell?

Simplicity itself- if the product or service you depend on is backed by a firm that went titsup or cancelled the product... What you have installed is the final, definitive version. Everything prior to that was beta.

I wish I were kidding.

Any social media accounts to declare? US wants travelers to tell

Re: Wonder how many State Dept employees would make the cut?

Hopefully not the one I dated, mate. If so, drink this --->

Wonder how many State Dept employees would make the cut?

I dated one, until I realized she was b@tsh!t crazy. Wait, there is no blank on the form for that. Good to go!

Apple, if you want to win in education, look at what sucks about iPads

Meh

For people questioning what educational objectives are met by using tablets, Chromebook, etc in middle school classrooms... You're missing the point

Teachers have to use the tools issued to them, good bad or indifferent, and have my utmost respect for their efforts.

Why the electronic devices? In suburbia, local governments compete for population (tax money) against each other. One of the biggest selling points of a locality for yuppies is "how good are the schools?"

Metrics such as number of devices per child, number of "digital classrooms", the age at which children enjoy the glories of "digital classrooms" then serve as proxies for school system investment. Every school system doing relatively "better" than it's peers will spout off all such metrics on their malware-ridden and poorly designed website.

I wasn't born this cynical, I learned it in school. And I've reinforced it by volunteering to teach an odd class as needed...

$0.75 – about how much Cambridge Analytica paid per voter in bid to micro-target their minds, internal docs reveal

Total idiots

Who's got time for all this "learn about who the voter is" or "what flavoring do we add to our brand of BS to make it tolerable"?

Where I come from we cheat for real.

The right way to do it fill out a stack of ballots however you like, and then print out little slips of paper with names on them of voters you suspect won't vote (*) or you know to be dead, incarcerated, etc. In "friendly" precincts any old name will do.

Load up some vans of homeless guys with promises of cash, cigarettes, and cheap booze (**) and make sure each knows who he is supposed to be (***), and drive em from precinct to precinct to vote.

That's how to cheat like a boss... You don't ask who a punter is, you freaking TELL him who he is.

Notes:

(*) A couple of bucks will usually suffice to keep an average inner city American from voting or vice versa. Quiet word from union boss can do the trick, too.

(**) Pro tip: Make sure you give the cigs liberally as you drive, but do not issue any intoxicants or cash until all the voting is done.

(***) Attempt to make sure the same ID is only used once per precinct

Super Cali goes ballistic, Starbucks is on notice: Expensive milky coffee is something quite cancerous

Sigh

Sister-in-law is a certified, left coast, card carrying Californicator. She absolutely will flip out about this.

Maybe going nuts over every jot and tittle in the press is unhealthy? Whatever happened to eat, drink, and be merry?

I told her that despite eating nothing and thinking only wholesome thoughts... She will eventually die anyways. And it will look really stupid when she's in the hospital dying from absolutely nothing. At least I will know what's going to take me out!

Apple iOS 11.3 adds health records for battery, people too

Steve Jobs handling battery issue?

You're olding it wrong!

'Tis the season: Verizon first in line to flog Palm phone resurrection

Graffiti

Probably the first time a decent "handwriting" recognition software was shipped for a mobile device. When you look at how modest it's hardware requirements are, you realize that it's truly a feat of software design and implementation.

Other than my HP-48 calculator my palm was my only truly indispensable piece of kit in the late 90's. And do NOT get me started on the death of HP calculators...

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

My boy's Cub Scout troop sent an email invite...

...for their annual formal dinner. Part of the email said we would have "erotic foods" I hope like hell that's a spell chucker artifact. Begs the question... Who trained that things AI?

If I wrote spill chuckers...

...or perhaps decent macro viruses what I would do to advance humanity is use the tools to help my fellow man.

My goal to is to seek out and destroy euphemisms. Euphemisms prevent clear understanding of issues and I believe allow weak-minded managlers to avoid internalizing responsibility for their mistakes.

Based off whatever passes for my career, the following substitutions will be made:

Negative patient care outcome > patient died

This is only a representative sample of the data > I'm lying my ass off

Departure from controlled flight > plane crashed

Controlled flight into terrain > pilot fscked up

Radical departure from structural integrity > it broke, badly

Some minor program transients > contract gone, abandon ship

This employee requires a bit more time for training > village idiot

You're being made redundant > hey, business is slow and I need as much cash as I can scrounge for my own blow habit, so see ya.

No spilling needed

Just communicate using nothing but acronyms. That's what the government does.

I once got a product back from the field, and nearly everything I needed to know about the return was written in acronyms:

WTF U SOB! THIS POS IS NFG!

It even rhymes.

Take the dashboard too literally and your brains might end up all over it

Re: Data sources

For a good read, check out the chapter in Freakanomics about how teachers in Chicago game the student attainment exams. Interesting lesson on data falsification and the artifacts one leaves behind when attempting to be "clever"

Red Hat is in the pink: Cracks $3bn revenue run rate as subs take off

Even more importantly

The Red Hat guys I work with care about MY business model and how the OSS can be best employed to move me forward. Very different from, say, IBM which is a one trick pony with a broken back selling 'business transformation!' constantly. Good to see them healthy. I'm not not sure I've wrapped my head around systemd yet.

How do you make those darn code monkeys do what you want? Just give 'em a little nudge

Re: Zapp Brannigan writes

Nice. My problem is that I leave my women like I take my coffee: cold, dark, and bitter. Similar to my experience with DevOps so far!

Problem is...

...the average manager who grasps at the buzzword of the day to "transform his organization" is generally not the kind of guy or gal who provides inspirational leadership.

True leaders are like eagles... Beautiful, powerful, majestic. And of course an endangered species.

Sysadmin wiped two servers, left the country to escape the shame

You got to know when to run

Just out of high school I worked briefly at a steel mill in the electrical shop. They had these "little" 1 to 10MW aux generators that ran on gas to handle peak loads. Part of my job was to synch these to mains bus before closing breakers. I failed, and one of the synchronous machines ripped off it's mounts and left the shop. For the most part it went dark. I quit real fast and did a GTFO before the metal workers - paid by the piece - arrived to perhaps literally tear me from limb to limb

April FAIL as IETF's funny-but-dodgy draft doc arrives a week early

Released early?

Perhaps a commentary on Arthur's innumeracy?

Three, sir!

NASA fungus problem puts theory of 'Martian mushrooms' on toast

Suggested title...

There's a fungus among us!

FBI raids home of spy sat techie over leak of secret comms source code on Facebook

JTRS waste

My father was a Ranger, then a civil servant, and finally a contractor. So he got to see every side of the US defense industrial complex, as have I.

He would speak of the "three D's model" of acquisition and administration. I've found it accurate.

The USAF is "dazzling". Nobody can spend money like the Air Force; even the blades of grass on the golf course are gold plated. NRO falls into this bucket. If you nick $340k I'm amazed they even notice - that's probably one day of golf course upkeep for a single numbered Air Force.

The Navy is "deceptive". These guys never tell you what they really want. Everything is a mind game, and everyone is treated abusively - esp sailors and contractors.

The Army is "dumb". No explanation required. That explains JTRS.

Naughtiness?

@DJO,

How's this for technique? New property management bureaucracy in place. But I'm doing an urgent test and need to liberate a spec an and take it into the field right now! No time to fight the pencil pushers.

What to do? Grab the spec an and walk it up to the security desk like a boss. Tell the guard to watch after it a sec... "Real important that nobody takes it... We will all be in dheep schitt!" Hit the men's room, return, thank the guy and walk right out the door with it. That, sir, is proper tradecraft.

Re: High End Radios Are Disappointing In Appearance

@Jimbo,

A Rohde and Schwarz FSW series signal analyzer / receiver with all the software needed to handle, say, 802.11 protocols and Bluetooth + intercept antennas will set you back about $400k US.

https://www.rohde-schwarz.com/us/products/test-measurement/signal-spectrum-analyzers/signal-analyzer-rohde-schwarz/pg_overview_63665.html

Totally worth it if you need the expensive ultimate in test and measurement receivers. And I used to be an HP bigot, back before they sucked...

Had one at work. It had its own room, and was the domain of The Master Technician. We engineers MIGHT be able to use the system if the master tech felt that we were sufficiently competent. And morally pure. You did not bring drink into the room. You did not bring food into the room. You did not think impure thoughts in the room...

Radio costs .gt. $200k?

But worth absolute zip? I give you the US Army JTRS. $15billion failed development program. Yes, that's with a "B". Nothing to show for it except billions in continued orders of legacy radios.

http://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2012/08/pentagon-shutters-joint-tactical-radio-system-program-office/57173/

So, yes, it's easy to hold a $200k radio but you might want to wash your hands when done...Oh, wait - Boeing's JTRS ground "mobile" radio prototype was 90kg. Hold in your hand? Um, no.

Maybe in some muddled way this luser was actually a patriot trying to hurt our enemies by giving them crap radios?

Horn star Sudan, last male northern white rhino, dies aged 45

Not just the megafauna being attacked...

...many African and Indian game keepers are being shot by poachers. For a while there it was something like one per week.

Game wardens trying to defend endangered animals put it all on the line; must be hard to sneak and peek in the bush with their big brass pairs clanking.

A pint, gentlemen.