* Posts by Boy Quiet

15 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2019

Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware

Boy Quiet

Will phone compromise become obsolete?

How long before this becomes irrelevant. Add an AI to your phone and instruct it to randomise you. It will turn off your cell and Wi-Fi you with a vpn to another location, logging you onto Wi-Fi there etc. fake images of where you are create multiple random conversations etc. overwhelming any surveillance with ‘chaff’.

Is there not also a "mesh’ system where phones talk Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi or am I in another ‘quantum’ universe ;-)

Meet Pi-CARD: Serving up a digital assistant on Raspberry Pi

Boy Quiet

Re: If RPi5 why not...

YES a phone has all of those things.

BUT as far as I know I cannot directly load my code onto my phone, without going through something that has proprietary terms and conditions.

Yes my c or c++ compiler has them but given I use it a lot it’s worth going through the licence terms and conditions.

But the T&C of phone OS have to be accepted with every update. And last time I looked there were 70+ pages. And I believe we saw a recent case where someone signed up for a free trial of a web service only to find they were debarred from legal action when injured in that company’s physical space.

Rant over

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Boy Quiet

Re: rm -r *

Grandad here! (First program 1969 prints banner of girlfriends name - now wife) - computer life lesson 1 don’t run important stuff on someone else’s machine, 2 keep your own backups. Old software runs for a surprisingly long time if kept in a silo. 1990’s accounts software still runs fine. Windows 7 off-line still good, Excel 2000 why not. A little ‘c’ programming (Borland anyone) to help out. You want the web ? Use you phone or iPad just leave my machines out of it :-)

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Boy Quiet

Have a Mullard 10W valve amp

I have a Mullard 10W valve amplifier sitting in my garage that I built for my Duke of Edinburg project in the mid 1960’s Think the soldering may need ‘touching up’ now. Another project for when I ever get round to it. I’m 76 now so possibly an heirloom project for my grandchildren !

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

Boy Quiet

Seems strikingly similar to art. The original artist just needs to (e.g. paint) and may give it away for a meal. Most such art sits around gathering dust, the few reach dizzy heights of financial transactions but the artist doesn’t get any (usually dead by then)

Licensing is not the silver bullet as enforcing it is beyond the means of many.

And saying it’s a socialist or communist thinking is too simplistic. I often wrote code just for the intellectual exercise of solving a problem. Sometimes I gave it away somethings I deployed it in my own licences code.

I’m not sure what I’m saying here other than ‘it’s complicated’

Borky shark: A deserted airport and a Raspberry Pi feeling poorly at baggage claim. Welcome to 2020

Boy Quiet

Re: It might be a while before some of us pass that way again

I’m not sure that’s always the case.

From a hardware point of view the shock to a system is at power up.

And even software For example I ran about ten windows 7 “machines” on vSphere on the “one task per machine” requirement. And unless a critical update forced a restart, some of those machines were never rebooted. In an 18 year period some of those machine never fell over. Probably the “one task per machine” is the clue.

If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is: Nobody can decrypt the Dharma ransomware

Boy Quiet

As an old man of computing, first program 1969, and thought networks were pointless, my comments are probably not worth much but here goes anyway.

If you Data is not on media you own, it’s not your data anymore. If you keep your backups online (powered up and attached to the machine) they are not backups. Every few years as the price point comes down buy larger disks, copy your data, and put the old disk in the equivalent of your socks draw.

You will loose data , just not all of it.

Fancy renting your developer environment? Visual Studio goes online

Boy Quiet

Re: The Cloud is just a 1960s mainframe model for the 21st century

I agree you can write code that apparently does not use a library buts it’s challenging.

I wrote my own PLAN compiler back in the day and even then some instructions were “ interpreted” by the exec.

Also there is an interesting article ( the reference escapes me at the moment) that showed how to permanently and undetectably hack a ‘c’ compiler.

To see what code you actually have, one needs to decompile the exec to its machine code. Well good luck with that on any large project.

Boy Quiet

Re: The Cloud is just a 1960s mainframe model for the 21st century

The “trouble” comes in several forms.

From the built in obsolescence of my phone where apps I’m using cease to work, to no further security patches for my os (Windows 7 I’m looking at you) to no patches for the compiler and it’s library.

Even writing code in “lowest level” C there is some dependence on Libraries and don’t even start me on Java.

And our young aspirational coders need these “cloud” credentials on their CVs to even get an interview.

I believe Aurther C Clark said that when we no longer know how something works we will start believing it’s magic. Sigh!

'Peregrine falcon'-style drone swarms could help defend UK against Gatwick copycat attacks

Boy Quiet

Rotors are the weak point

If the Falcon has a large Brillo pad in each claw , it could tangle two rotors. Taking out two rotors on the same side should be enough ( so it cannot fly on chinook style) but “controlling”where it come so down still a problem.

Another thought - the magnets inside a disk drive are very powerful (disassemble one and “Ouch!”) would that be enough to disrupt the flight control electronics?

When one of NASA's sun-studying satellites went down, AI was there to fill in the gaps

Boy Quiet

Re: Neural nets

As a thought experiment that sounds interesting

As a real experiment which AI engine would you use.

Also I’m thinking any AI that correlates data one way between two devices, should also be trained to correlate data the other way - so in theory your infrared thermometer will (via the AI) produce the images your Gen1 NoIR cam would have taken.

Boy Quiet

I do not understand why just because an AI used historic data to work out a correlation it’s being called “fake”data.

Much more interesting to me is did they / will they create the inverse AI using the data from the MEGS-A before it went down to predict what the other instruments readings would be.

If so we could have software redundancy when we cannot afford to have hardware redundancy.

Enjoy the holiday weekend, America? Well-rested? Good. Supermicro server boards can be remotely hijacked

Boy Quiet

It seems elemental that any organisation would have at least one outer DMZ where all ports are closed by default (block all) and specific rules to open required ports.

If the organisation takes credit card payments in the UK, it’s a PCI requirement and no QSA should sign off a site without checking the actual firewall config not just the policy document.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Boy Quiet

Re: What is overflowing?

Many years ago I was a software programmer and the ICL 1904 I was using at a client site stopped working. We were much closer to the hardware in those days.

The engineers ran a test and I poked my nose in asking about the results. I deduced addition was faulty, and persuaded them to do an addition (on the switches !! ) they did and told me I was wrong.

8 hours later they replaced the addition unit and all worked. when I asked what they had added it was 1 & 1 Had I specified FFFF and 1 it would have shown the problem - carry in bit 8 was faulty!

Still reminds me to specify exactly what I want when testing.

Fortune favours the Brave: Privacy browser chap takes gripes over adtech body's website to Irish data watchdog

Boy Quiet
Unhappy

Cookie Monster or proxy server

Has no one created a proxy app that filters what the cookie can send, replacing any personal data with a generic avatar?