Posts by Chairman of the Bored

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

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?

RDP connection from score system to home?

I sure hope that's not what I just read, because that raises my WTF knob to 11.

FYI: There's a cop tool called GrayKey that force unlocks iPhones. Let's hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands!

Re: "...when the device, a 4x4x2-inch box, is stolen from police..."

Stole all the cameras? That takes cajones.

My local precinct in Baltimore had a potted pot plant, I guess for training and familiarization? Some crackpot stole the potted pot.

Inviting nearby exoplanet revealed as radiation-baked hell

I sent the article around the office...

...and am now just waiting for the snowflake contingent to moan about the infographic showing a phallic protrusion violating the peaceful vegan planet's safe space. I wish I were kidding.

Air gapping PCs won't stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers

E-field coupling through Faraday cage?

Think there is an error in the article; no way you are getting electric field coupling through a Faraday cage. Magnetic? Yes. With effort and short range. Im too lazy to check the research myself, but there you go.

Grumbles something about magnetic coupling from fluorescent light ballasts into instrumentation inside Faraday cage... Screwed up measurements... Perfectly working product stuck in test past deadline fixing what wasn't broke... Feelings of rage... WTF do we have these stupid screw looking bulbs anyways?

Developer mistakenly deleted data - so thoroughly nobody could pin it on him!

I misread part of the text as...

"[...] one Friday afternoon five *beers* ago [...] Thats usually the start of data problems, in my experience. Not that I admit anything.

I have a hazy recollection of being called in to back something up after the proper backup software did not work and doing something like 'sudo dd if=/dev/sda<wrong> of=/dev/<mission critical volume> bs=4M status=were_screwed'

Honestly cannot remember if that was before or after using the intoxicants. And that, your honor, is how it happened

Europe is living in the past (by nearly six minutes) thanks to Serbia and Kosovo

Re: US grid to float high in freq:

@AC, all posts - thanks for the insight; genuinely learned something about the time beasts that used to rule my life.

US grid to float high in freq:

Regulatory bods to let grid drift generally higher in freq to improve stability and reliability, conditioned on the assumption nobody cares about grid-based time:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/the-smarter-grid/power-system-experiment-in-us-means-clocks-will-speed-up

During peak demand the US grid would always run a bit slow, by fractions of a percent, and then run high at night to compensate. My high school had these massive IBM clocks in the hallways, looming darkly from the ceiling. One outside every classroom and all running running in inhuman lockstep. Awful "bang" every minute when the hands would move. Imagining you were in some sort of penal or mental facility was not difficult. I think they were on grid freq and could swear during some classes that freq was actually tens of percent low.

Sneaky satellite launch raises risk of Gravity-style space collision

Re: According to the linked article

Right; thanks for clearing that up. Wondering how tough it would be to make an inflatable corner reflector

I'm not sure I understand the gripe

The four comsat launched in this exercise are about the same size as a 1 unit cubesat (10cm cube) of which literally hundreds are on orbit. Per international agreement (United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) these either require deorbit thrusters or an orbital altitude low enough that drag will cause reentry at most 25years after their 3-4 year service life is up. Generally, small SATs below about 600km will decay in that timeframe.

The problem with cubesat is that you hitch a ride and therefore do not necessarily know at design inception bahere you are going to be. A significant number have ended up in orbits with decay times over a century:

http://spacenews.com/1-in-5-cubesats-violate-international-orbit-disposal-guidelines/

So I wonder if the real issue is whether some damned fool put these in meo or geo, thereby burning a perfectly good orbital slot allocation.

Note that the worst debris problems up there now are due to China scragging a weather sat testing an ASAT system and the Russian satellite bonking into an Iridium sat. Other than that mess most space debris is due to booster upper stages breaking apart, separation debris, etc

A ghoulish tale of pigs, devs and docs revived from the dead

Re: Love it!

Trust me, the thought crossed my mind. Actually I was more focused on how to make the body disappear. Question - if you shoot a guy for ranting in all caps ... Do you need to use a silencer?

Re: Love it!

That's dark and scary. Think we need to start drinking immediately.

Secret is out

@Bob, one of your mates must have spilled the beans. I asked an IT manager how things are going...

IT: "Like a duck"

ME: "What the fsck?"

IT: "You see us gliding gracefully across the lake. Underneath the feet are paddling like hell"

Love it!

You've confirmed some of my deepest, darkest suspicions about what really happens when I grovel and beg for old data to come back.

Sometimes, though, it comes back on its own. Like my night of the living dead:

Supposedly in this one govt agency emails - once purged off the exchange server- are gone forever. Of course that's utter BS because if management wants to pop you for misconduct they can suddenly get not only what you've written, but even stuff you only dreamed of after a few stiff drinks. Mere mortals do not get their lost emails restored.

Imagine my surprise when I opened up outlook after a prolonged server outage and magically found my mail spool transported ten years into the past. Instead of my working set of spam, I was seeing one specific day in 2005 all over again.

Here's the part that keeps me awake: email on the top was in all caps, title screaming: "YOU ARE LATE FOR A MEETING!" Problem is the guy who sent it - one nasty piece of work - had died shortly after sending me that.

So where the hell is he, and am I late for a meeting upstairs or down?? Is the weather uncomfortably warm??? Speak, ghost of the server, speak!

Sheer luck helped prevent mid-air drone glider prang in Blighty

Re: Soooooo.

@nursing a semi,

Nice! But didn't get a rise out of the pilot I ran it by. Former fighter pilot. Said "the only luck here is with guys who cannot fly. You're lucky there are guys with balls and skills like me overhead.". Oi!

Q: how do you know if there is a fighter pilot in the room?

A: don't worry about it, I'm sure he will tell everyone quickly

We all hate Word docs and PDFs, but have they ever led you to being hit with 32 indictments?

PDF signatures?

I did a social experiment: at the time of the experiment I worked for a really huge org with an absolute fetish for signature chains. Big, big govt. Anything you can imagine required at least five electronic signatures in a PDF - no matter how inane. Personal record was needing 15 signatures to operate an FCC part 15 transmitter outdoors. FFS! Oh, where was I?

Experiment? On every document I created I made damned sure my electronic signature was invalid. Hundreds of documents. I made sure Adobe would scream about signature errors on every opening. Care to guess how many times a question was raised? That's right... nada!

Re: How the mighty have fallen

No downvote. I understand your sentiment entirely and I'm sickened that we have holiday camps for the wealthy and sheer hell for the rest. But I've know too many sexual assault victims to wish that on anybody. Maybe we can compromise on a hard labor regime? Maybe make these bastards earn their keep by patching holes in roads, cleaning up harbors, etc?

Re: Well, you see, now there's the problem...

Simple solution I've seen: have two bookkeepers. One keeps a clean set for the tax man and banks, the second - paid in cash - tracks the kickbacks "donations" and cash income. Make damn sure these guys never meet.

Guess Manafort was too cheap to do a proper job.

Pro tip: if you find yourself in a situation where you DO know both bookkeepers, GTFO.

Re: How the mighty have fallen

No downvote b/c I agree that it's a great article and that Manafort got himself into a serious jam. But I cannot support the notion that sexual exploitation of convicts is a legitimate approach to punishment in a supposedly civilized society.

That being said, his class ends up going to a minimum security country club instead of the hellish club fed that would await the rest of us.

Is this why Facebook is such a toxic dump? HP, HPE sued for 'leaking chems' into office site

If it had been any other California school...

...I'd say go fsck yourself... Clean up the rad waste legacy left behind by your nuclear weapons labs... and then maybe we talk about a little PCBs in your dirt.

Stanford is a weird case though. In the 70's they supposedly eschewed profiting off of classified defense research. But then in the 90's they had to pay back US Navy for defrauding the Office of Naval Research throughout the 80's. Something doesn't compute?

IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile

Re: agility

@disgruntled yank,

"Scram masters" - THAT is a truly wonderful turn of phrase, one I shall use every time I see yet another scram master leave moments before their nitrogenous waste hits the rotary aspirator. A pint, sir!

Obligatory link: Hitler teaches agile

Absolutely NSFW

https://youtu.be/pO8ezfQoz3s

Trump buries H-1B visa applicants in paperwork

As much as I'd love to see action on this...

...the proposed remedy is completely BS. Administrative equivalent of a Potemkin village. If Trump were serious about doing something here, the lottery system would have gotten an overhaul instead of adding more paperwork requirements that outsourcing firms will merely write some Word macros to overcome.

My reasoning:

There are 85k or so H1-B visas available in a given year USA graduates about 300k STEM grads / 90k-ish engineering grads - 85k is not a drop in the bucket. With roll overs and exemptions the real number is probably far in excess of 100k.

Employers bid against the lottery pool, and the large outsourcing firms go for tens of thousands at a time; last numbers I saw were about 40pct for a handful of firms. If you are a small business with a legit need for a handful of specific foreigner's skills (in my case, specific local language expertise) you are frozen out and have to move that work overseas - an added knock-on offshoring effect.

What's the point of an H1-B-like program? Twofold: you want your businesses to have an ability to leverage truly unique talent, and you want to create a citizenship path for truly gifted foreigners so they can set up businesses in your country and hire a boatload of your own citizens. Allowing outsourcing firms to dominate the visa lottery serves neither objective.

If I'm an outsourcing firms it costs me nothing to stuff the visa "ballot box" as my application fees for unsuccessful applications are refunded.

This is federal law - and a truly bipartisan fsckup. Could it be the chief executive does not have the testicular fortitude to confront Congress on this and just signs EO to make it look like progress?

Cali cops' Clue caper: Apple technicans, in an iPhone repair lab, with the 1,600 silent 911 calls

Maybe the AI panicked...

...upon seeing particularly ham-handed techs, the iSpies' internals said, "screw this! Im getting outta here!" And called for assistance

Amateur astronomer strikes it lucky with first glimpse of a Supernova

Got to admire the amateur...

...most really cool discoveries seem to start out with "gee, that's strange" rather than "eureka!". The hard part is not dismissing an observation that looks strange as "noise" or "error" and actually investigating the cause. I believe a pint is in order.

Bad news: 43% of login attempts 'malicious' Good news: Er, umm...

Quick suggestion to take it easy on your logs...

...change your default SSL port to something like 223. You've obviously disabled root login over ssh, require key-based credentials, etc already.

Obviously this does not increase security in any real sense against a human attacker as nmap will see your new port... But in my case avoiding port 22 eliminates about 90pct of the robocall activity I've got to wade through in my logs.

Any crap activity I've got on new ports is from a person or bot that actually bothered to map my net, and that tells me something I should know right up front. Key here is to improve your signal to noise

Three in hospital after NSA cops open fire on campus ram-raid SUV

Re: Ever try to hit a driver in a vehicle on the move?

Thanks... Totally agree that he's got a massive, shiny pair. I think he knows that he made the right choice but there will always be that "I shoulda, would, could..." going on inside.

What the movies never show is how sick you get when something goes down... No matter what the outcome... And what it's like for the rest of your life.

Bottom line I guess is that you've got to do the very best with what you know at any given moment.

Re: Ever try to hit a driver in a vehicle on the move?

An excellent, excellent choice.

Former office mate had a problem with an inbound vehicle. He was manning a .50 but did not engage because doing so would have sent rounds into a souk. VBIED strike. He's missing both legs now ... Constantly getting surgeries for complications. Sole survivor from his vehicle - not a burden I think I can handle. But he didn't take out the civilians. Maybe 1-2sec to make that decision. File this under, "sometimes life sucks."

Ever try to hit a driver in a vehicle on the move?

Not easy. That's why I like fairly high caliber, full automatic weapons.

Mines the one with all the 7.62x51 NATO rattling around in the pocket.

Oi! Verizon leaked my fiancée's nude pix to her ex-coworker, says bloke

Logger is just mad because....

....the other guy "got wood" and he didn't.

Methinks the lady doth sext too much.

Kentucky gov: Violent video games, not guns, to blame for Florida school massacre

Something is definitely f'ed up with our society

When I was a kid I had a lot of access to firearms. And like everyone else I had good and bad days, good mates and bullies. But if problems needed solving ... at most we would use our fists. Maybe a knife but that's more for show and intimidation t. I grew up in an absolute hell hole of a rust belt town. But at some level we still respected life. It literally never would have occurred to me to use a lethal weapon... Nor did it seem to occur to very many other people.

I do believe that video games desensitize people to killing. Why? Because I see many parallels in the dehumanization of enemies in the games to what I've experienced in military training. Taking human life is an inherently unnatural act. To make men (or boys apparently) go over that line you've got to objectify the enemy and normalize violence. I grew up blasting aliens. That's ok because they are not human... Then we get zombies. Human, but that's ok because they are possessed. Now we no longer pretend in games at all, we "whack" humans at 100+ frames per second. That's ok?

Well, maybe not. There is a slippery slope here. Looking back at basic training.. similar. Hell, the US Army is using a first person shooter game as a recruiting tool!

At this point I'd say gun control has got to be part of how the problem is addressed. I don't need a high capacity mag semiautomatic rifle for hunting or sport. If I can't get a varmit on a single shot, my marksmanship needs some work. Lacking highly lethal small arms will not make one's murderous impulses go away but maybe we can reduce the carnage.

Yes, addressing violence in media and games... Addressing insane gun laws... Neither is a complete solution. Something is very wrong in society. But you've got to start somewhere.

My one fear of gun control is the fact that our police are armed to the teeth and not particularly trustworthy. That may be a problem.

UK names Russia as source of NotPetya, USA follows suit

So even if the attribution is correct...

...and I said "if", mind,...

What purpose do these verbal "blasts" serve? From my perspective they're as effective as wet toilet paper... Useful as boobs on a bicycle... You get the picture.

US govt staffers use personal gear on work networks, handle biz docs on the reg – study

Simple but bad explanation

Been there, seen that. Did it? Your honor, I plead the fifth.

These people- by and large - are not stupid. They know the policies and risks. But their gear is crap, support is worse, and they are still expected to accomplish their mission - whatever it takes.

You want it done real bad? It will probably get done real bad.

Bet you any other hellhole of compliance-based mentality and mind numbing bureaucracy will be the same. Sad, really.

Military techie mangled minicomputer under nose of scary sergeant

Re: I am pushing the button

Pinned to machine for four hours, with massive internal bleeding. Poor bloke had one hell of a day. GE got off easy... I think the 10mil rupee settlement is something like $150k US. If this had been UK or US they'd have been nailed but good.

At what point does it occur to management to find the main and cut it?

Another war story....

...if you're gonna build something with a BRS, make sure it can be TESTED without causing all hell break loose. If it's not tested, it doesn't work. Guaranteed.

Working around a big, hairy power supply. 40kV @5A is memory serves. Insulation breakdown, arc to ground. Not a happy little arc, a pucker up and make a diamond ... mean ... freakin' bright and scary arc. Overcurrent protection? Crowbar? Nope!! Senior tech, an older gentleman, does a highly athletic vault over workbench - must've cleared it by half a meter - pirouettes, hits BRS. Nothing happens. That's when it got real. Post mortem? BRS was never connected. Never tested, either.

Re: Simply Baffling

I can see the reasoning... In a panic people can forget to undo the guards. But that assumes one practices and drills enough to get muscle memory in the first place.

War story - when I had periodic, all-expense-paid travel to a very sandy, hot locale in '04 through '06 I saw two very different approaches to handling sidearms on base. Unless the nitrogenous waste is actively hitting the rotating aspirator, we (Marines) keep our pistols on base in condition 4 - magazine well empty, no round in chamber, weapon safe. So does the Army. Sand and crap gets in your weapon, and you are constantly cleaning it. That's life. Unless you're Army, in which case you put a piece of foam in place of the magazine to keep the weapon clean.

Guess what happens when it hits the fan? Army will shove the mag right into the foam and get a free paperweight. I don't know if anyone died due to that particular bit of stupidity but I can easily see it happening.

Guarantee someone somewhere died because in their stress they couldn't get the guard off a BRS

Mines the one with lots of lube. See ya.

In a briefing to some very senior officers...

Acronym FFF should have been explained as "Fast Fault Finder". I briefed it as "Final Fsckup Finder" My boss looked like he was going to shoot me until a flag officer laughed himself silly and shouted, "Fsck yeah! That's what I need.". Suddenly my boss looks real friendly. How odd.

Winter Olympics website downed by cyber attack

Food for sex!

That would have made marriage a hell of a lot easier! Thanks for the tip.

Boffin rediscovers 1960s attempt to write fiction with computers

What would Watson write???

About the same, but with slight changes:

IBM (LION) HAS BEEN IN TROUBLE FOR A LONG TIME. ENGINEERS (TREATED LIKE DOGS) MAKE NEW PRODUCTS BUT COST TOO MUCH. THE HERO, LION, MANIPULATES CONGRESS USING CASH, WHORES, AND BLOW TO OPTIMIZE H-1B VISA AND TAX POLICIES TO LION'S ADVANTAGE. THE HERO, LION, KILLS THE VILLAIN, DOG, WITHOUT A FIGHT. THE HERO, LION, THUS IS ABLE TO OUTSOURCE AND/OR MAKE DOG REDUNDANT. THIS MAKES WALL STREET HAPPY, AND THE HERO, LION, CASHES OUT OPTIONS. NOW THE HERO, LION, CAN AFFORD HIS OWN WHORES AND BLOW. THE VILLAIN, DOG, LIVES OUT IN THE COLD.

Such wonderful progress!!

Intel adopts Orwellian irony with call for fast Meltdown-Spectre action after slow patch delivery

Don't know what all y'all complaining about...

...I actually liked Shenoy's comments so much that I printed them out.

You see, there is a lot of bullshit in the world. So much that one can drown. But the bullshit that threatens us is always contaminated to a greater or lesser degree by "reality" and "common sense".

This particular Intel bullshit, in contrast, is absolutely pure and unadulterated. It's a work of art. From a genuine bullshit artist. Show some respect!

ASA tells Poundland and its teabagging elf: Enough with the smutty social ninja sh*t

Before we knew it was an actual company...

...our internal software group named themselves "megahard group". They had a nice, massive, cylindrical sign thrust rigidly at attention by the doorway... With two spherical shrubs planted at the bottom.

Complaints? Zip. Even the older women would grin at the sign... You've got to have real balls to display one like that these days!

Re: I like mine like I like my cocoa

I must be doing it wrong then.... I leave my women like I take my coffee: cold, dark, and bitter

Intel 80386 queen Renée James quits as chipmaker's president

80386... When the PC clones really took off

Must have been a riotous ride at Intel during the shift to the 386. Younger guys probably do not understand what it felt like to live and work through the tectonic shifts in tech at the time.

286... Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM PC/AT. Compaq and Gateway (remember them?) were growing fast but most businesses were a little skeptical. 10MB hard drives were a status symbol as much as a tool. Still, IBM was getting scared and tried to re-establish their monopoly using their awful PS/2 machines with their proprietary microchannel bus. The PS/2 was supposed to be the bridge to the 32 bit multitasking future, but it was really just an attempt to return industry to craptivity. Industry answered with EISA and then PCI... That's when the 386 hit... Win 95 became something somewhat useful... And the modern PC market was born. IBM got kicked in the teeth, and Intel had to move cash to the bank with conveyors. Good times.

It all came flooding back to me just a couple of years ago. I had to repair and upgrade a box run by a microcontroller. Opened it up... And saw a 80186 staring back at me. 186. Tools? Debuggers?

Documentation??? CORRECT documentation??? What doubly-damned ring of hell I had arrived in?! Be careful wishing for the good ole days... They can come back!

Tech biz boss slipped Detroit's IT chief bungs in restaurant bathrooms to bag software deals, prosecutors claim

Shake on it?

Excellent turn of phrase. Could also try "achieve better market penetration"; "Detroit's up and coming politician"; "greasing a govt official"; "after a wet, stiff drink..." Too easy.

Seriously though- this is Detroit. Where the weak are killed and eaten. If this is the most significant crime that took place on that day I'll eat my hat...

Crooks make US ATMs spew million-plus bucks in 'jackpotting' hacks

And the left side of the intelligence distribution gives us...

...years ago my college had a freestanding ATM kiosk mounted on a steel pole near a road.

Two men decided to uproot it and drive away using a pickup truck and some steel cable. Secured cable only to the rear bumper. When the driver punched it the bumper fell off. In a panic, they left the scene... Leaving behind the bumped and license plate.

Twilight of the idols: The only philosophy HPE and IBM do these days is with an axe

"What is IBM?"

Out of the mouth of babes...

When I was a kid I remember 'IBM' was synonymous with 'computer'. DEC, Wang, Compaq, whatever were by far second tier and second class.

Fast forward to 2017... My pre-teen daughter asks, "Daddy, what's IBM? What do they do?"

How the mighty have fallen!

FYI: Processor bugs are everywhere – just ask Intel and AMD

I don't think people realize how much it costs to fab

Some numbers for you... Bear in mind I'm an analog guy so I cannot speak to very small process nodes. For me to do a mixed signal design at 180nm, costs break out as follows:

Design NRE - $$$. Disciplines here are requirements development, requirements verification, functional decomposition, functional allocation, circuit synthesis (schematic capture), nonlinear circuit modeling, physical layout (chip artwork), further modeling. So for a simple HV op-amp you've got about a man year or two in before you talk to the fab. That's a quarter to half million, burdened rates. If the design is digital we would do an FPGA implementation first (*)

The cheapest way to fab is use a "shuttle run" where you team up with other vendors and split the cost of the mask between yourselves. A mask exposes perhaps 100mm x 100mm area; you might get 20mm x 20mm of this for your work, with a yield of perhaps 20-30 good die when it comes back. In one to two months. Cost at 180nm is around $25-50k. Faster? Pay more.

Now you have to saw, package, test. Typically the first mask or two is a no-go. Full functional plus HALT/HASS testing will consume another man year or so, and requires capital equipment. Call it an additional quarter of a million plus any additional mask sets - and this assumes the design is reasonably successful.

So that's why a simple circuit can push up to the million dollar level quickly, and timelines are long compared to, say, software innovation.

(*) Essentially any digital logic can be implemented in FPGA fabric. Microprocessor designs generally get prototyped and tested that way before a design goes beyond prototype phase There are numerous ARM and other"soft cores" you can license, tweak,and incorporate into your FPGA. One very interesting multicore microcontroller - the Parallax Propeller P8X32A - is wholly open source and you can use this in your own FPGA. See: https://www.parallax.com/microcontrollers

Downsides? Vastly more power hungry than custom silicon. Typically slower. Really expensive. Large. But of you insist your micro is the one true micro to rule them all, that's where you start.

Fun things to play with are the Xilinx CoolRunner CPLD and Cypress PSoC devices. A mere mortal can afford them, and quickly learn that doing custom digital is really, really hard.