Posts by Ozchemist

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

UTOPIA

I wonder how this story will stack up against the "UTOPIA" episode about the $70M possum tunnel? Somebody, somewhere will receive a WWFN or WED award for sure.

ReRAM redo: UCL spinout scores £7M to push Resistive RAM

ReRAM

I wonder how this compares to the Weebit Nano Ltd (WBT:ASX) ReRAM implementation that is being fabed at Skywater.

The Weebit ReRAM has already passed early qualification, and appears ready for SoC applications.

Boffins hunt and kill cockroaches with machine vision laser

Scaling?

I have a problem with pigeons and miner birds - could someone suggest suitable scaling for the laser? TIA

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Before emojis .......

Well before emojis were a thing (in the 1980's) shorthand existed for interoffice communication.

There was the old standards - SNAFU, RTFM, WTF (or its extended version - WTFIGOH?!)

I had an paperwork exchange (pre-email) with my direct superior at the time who was "old school cool" and returned an expenses slip (for a "client lunch") that went something like :

= WTFIGOH?

== CL

= FECL!

== Y - FECL - T&J (the clients) WTGT "JP" (known house of ill repute) FT&A

= OK. WTF.......

Block claims ex-employee downloaded customer data after leaving firm

Not the first time, won't be the last time.

I worked for a large (the largest) multinational oil company back in the 1990's and held a technical position that gave me privileged access to all of their "trade secret" formulation data as well as sales and financial data. Privileges has been accrued over a number of years, and each times I changed roles they'd just add new privileges - so the data I could access just kept expanding.

I had a local account, as well as international accounts, into remote servers with remote (dial-in) access (which was rare for the company at the time).

I left amicably, a job change for family reasons, and was asked by my local manager "You haven't taken any information with you, have you?" - my reply was that "No, but if I'd wanted to take information, I'd have done it years ago and you'd never know - security is shit on these servers. BTW, make certain that, when I leave, ALL of my accounts/privileges are cancelled - I don't want to get a call from Corporate in 12 months!".

Three months after I left, I called up the local office and asked to speak to IT - and informed them that I still had remote access privileges on 3 of their servers - the local one and two international ones. Nobody had bothered to remove access or remove any of the privileges. I called my ex-manager and roasted him. I then called Corporate and advised them.

Their Corporate process was well documented - but never acted upon. The local and international IT groups rarely dealt with each other except for major hardware/software CAPEX or significant problems. And managers had a habit of passing everything to HR when an employee left - and HR had a "disconnect: with IT.

I hate to think how many other accounts remained active.

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Hard to enforce copyright if you can't find a copy.

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

Re: The State changed its tune

* By that argument I could make up any old crap and say "sorry, this is not measurable by the scientific method so you can't say I am wrong". *

Isn't that the basis of Russell's "Celestial Teapot" argument and Sagan's "Garage Dragon"?

Australia will force social networks to identify trolls, so they can be sued for defamation

Anonymous - I don't think that word means what you think it means

The LNP Govt in OZ quite frankly couldn't find their own backsides with both hands and a searchlight. And proposed legislation like this shows just how far out of touch they are with the reality of "managing" social media interactions.

Most social media account requirements for "real names" are easily circumvented if that's what you wish to do - so legislation like this really only catches the unprepared or unaware. If you wanted to set up to anonymously defame a member of parliament, or anyone else for that matter, then the process is relatively trivial.

Better still, don't just do it anonymously, do it automatically!

Conduct all transactions via VPN / TOR

Set up an appropriately anonymised Twitter / Facebook account outside of your country of origin (international legal exchanges are much more interesting to watch).

Write a bot script -

"Select name of politician/person you dislike from list"

"Append appropriate controversial comment - cross reference to their Twitter feed / Facebook page to see most recent stupid posting / controversial action"

"Append final disparaging remark"

"Repost to anonymised Twitter / Facebook feed"

Rinse/repeat for the political party / etc of your choice.

Preferably include "pointers" to offshore "bad actors" as a potential original source of the tweet / post - SCOMO and Co love blaming off-shore sources.

Sit back - watch fun.

Raspberry Pi goes 2GB for the price of 1GB in honour of mini-computer's eighth birthday

Re: Better options

Mostly for the "hackability" of the Raspberry Pi - open access to the GPIO and programmable support in the maker/hacker space. That's what's made the RPi such a success.