Posts by Xalran

Louvre's pathetic passwords belong in a museum, just not that one

Nothing new

Some years ago, France24 got hacked and was brought offline for a few days... (both the TV stream and all the social media accounts)

A colleague and me were asked to be ready to do a post mortem... We started looking at the press articles on the topic to get some backgrounf and one particular picture jumped out. from several articles.

there was some setup with a bunch of port-it on a cubicle separation,On some post its the passwords of all the social media accounts wer clearly readable. (along with the relevant accounts names)

We pointed that out to our $MANGLER telling him that it was pointless to do a post-mortem after a hacking when the new passwords could be read in almost all the articles found on Internet, and that the next hacking was probably already occuring or was hours away.

This was sent up the food chain... and we never heard about post-mortem ever again. (we also don't know if the passwords were changed)

So it's not surprise that the passwords on the security systemsat the Louvre are so simple. (because... reasons... the main reason being the guys at security are sub-contractors, rotates on a regular basis, and most of them are computer illiterate.)

I can also confirm the result of the 2017 audit and the W2K3 server for video, but I won't tell why I can do it.

For obvious reasons, there's a lot of stuff involved in the Access Control & Video Surveillance at the Louvre, and they have a massive overhaul project that was not really funded on that topic... that was expected to take 20 to 30 years to implement. (because... reasons... abd obviously by the time the whole thing is finished, it would be obsolete).

I guess now it's probably going to take less than a year.

BOFH: Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Re: There seems to be a Green·washing scandal every other week

Nothing new whezn you know the history... Total Energies was once upon a time called Total-Fina-Elf after the mergger of the 3 bits... and Elf has vast list of scandals

Oil Sniffer planes scandal

I couldn't find an English version of that one :

Elf Affair

It was one of the political and Industrial candal in France.

the whole history of Elf (now Total Energies) :

Elf

Trump's workforce cuts blamed as America's cyber edge dulls

Re: I'm not surprised

Hopefully, they haven't looked at al lthe *nix and Linux... they are full of daemon processes.

I suspect they'd burn at the stake all the computers that has them installed if they ever learn about it.

Senators accuse Smithsonian of 'illegal lobbying' over Discovery squabbles

Re: The grift is the point

With Trump's DOJ openly ignoring crimes committed by Trump cronies, and Trump pardoning anyone who pays him, they no longer have to worry about petty stuff like laws against bribery.

The supreme court ruled that He is Above The Law.

Since He is Above The Law, He can do as He See Fit.

Since the already have a large stable of capsules, what they deserve is yet another one...

Since the Bill mention a space vehicle that flew in space with astronauts...

I'd send them the Calamity Capsule.

Yes, the one that left 2 Astronauts stranded on the ISS because it wasn't deemed safe enough to bring them back, it meets all the criteria of the bill and doesn't need to be disassembled to be transported from where it's stored at Boeing to Texas, it can fit on a trailer, on a barge, hell even in a Dreamlifter of a Beluga (xl or not) for that matter.

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Re: MAC addresses

You can also spoof a phone number... It's part and parcel of every PBX (virtual or now)

Now it's harder to do than spoof a MAC as it requires a PBX (virtual or not) and an ISDN line.

And even if the A-Number (the caller) is spoofed, the PSTN will know better and use the real phone number for the billing.

As for the PPP that doesn't have any MAC. Most of the ISP use PPPOE (which obviously is Point to Point Protocol Over Ethernet) so there's a MAC address involved at the Ethernet layer.

Re: Shutting Up

Different system.

The US system assume you're guilty, and it's up to you to prove you're innocent.

The UK system (and most of the EU systems) assumes you're innocent until judged guilty.

Here in France you are assumed to be innocent until you're judged guilty by a judge/jury.

And you end up in front of a judge/jury only if there's enough facts collected during the investigation that prove that you may be guilty.

The Investigations performed by the cops are to get the facts, just the fact and only the facts. Then it's up to the Judge and an eventual jury to determine if you are guilty or not.

There's no secondary investigation, there's no discovery, and all the stuff found in US courts. (now the judge may request further investigation [again performed by the cops in charge] to clarify details or dig further) to help him reach a decision.

Re: MAC addresses

It's so easy to spoof a MAC address...

There's even commands in every router and many computer to change it... on a per interface or vlan basis...

The only way to be sure is to follow the wires from the DSL cabinet in the exchange (since it obviously was a DSL line) to the house going through each and every roadside cabinet.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

I know it's Who Me ? and not On Call.

But here in France depending on the companies lockdown could be purely theorical.

For example, as I was On Call, I had a nice sheet of paper signed by the Head HR and the local CEO that got me free out of jail ( described as : Allowed to travel any where in France and outside, at any time, by any mean of transport available. On the other hand I was not allowed to enter our office building (access badges had been deactivated).

So technically the only place I wasn't allowed to be during the lockdowns was... at my desk.

Now I didn't use that paper, as the 1 hour per day self signed paper was more than enough for me to fetch food and stuff.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: Saved by apathy?

Personally, not really... But...

In my previous job, I saved several projects (and the attached project managers that came to me hoping I had a solution) with stuff that I recovered from the recycle bin...

Puny things like special cables with a 6 weeks lead time to procure, specific racking shelves for some specific switches or routers that are a PITA to procure when the one shipped with the chassis are lost...

Most of the time it wasn't even project I worked on.

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Re: in accordance with the law

The Intention of the Law was to get Discovery in Houston...

Following the Letter of the Law, Houston should get the Calamity Capsule... After all it flew in space with Astraunots in it,one way to ISS, before being deemed too dangerous to carry them back to Earth. And then it flew back from Space empty. It's available, and it's not going to fly again any time soon after that debacle.

The good bits :

- It's probably going to cost less than 80 Millions to have it in Houston since it can be trucked there on a regular truck

- All the spare money can be used to build a nice and shiny building around it

- Houston will get what the Magacongresscritters wrote in the law : a Spacecraft that went to space carrying Astraunots.

The bad bits :

- The Ego of will be stroked the wrong way

- They are going to look for blood over this affront.

Also we need to remember : NASA does own the other shuttles, but not the one at the Smithonian which ownership has been transfered by NASA to the Smithonian...

Re: Absolutely Correct, Senator Cornyn

IIRC it landed at LAX... and from there lots of disassembly (but none of Shuttle bits) was involved.

After all they had to make room by removing light poles, traffic indications and traffic lights on the path followed by the Shuttle towards it's final destination.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: Thus it is

There's organisations (in the private sector, multinationals) where manglers become such so that they stop breaking stuff at customer sites.

It's self preservation from the organisation to do it that way...

Once upon a time at a $TELCO equipment builder they had two promotion tracks... One for Manglement and one for Experts/Engineers.

Strangely only the manglement one progressed beyond a certain point.

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Who to blame?

I got dumped (On Call, 6 AM Sunday morning) into a conference call with lots of vendors (I'm not sure the exact numbers) of similar poor On Call chaps (poor because they apparently spent the night on the problem, and I only got called because in the path of the problem there wasrouter I was doing support for.)

When they presented the issue, they told me the call was more a matter of making sure everything was OK on my router, as they had obviously reached the end of a (long, since also apparently they had been investigating the issue since noon on Saturday), and wanted to get reassurances at that point.

I connected to the router and checked it's health, everything looked fine, no logs that shouldn't be there, no obvious issue... After reporting that they all went back into WTF mode and started to plan for some massive stuff with lots of Impact to the end upser (I didn't say it before, but it was for a mobile Network, and basically they were loosing traffic randomly on cells in a quarter of the country... the kind of massive outage that eventually make the news if somebody adds 2+2)

Since It was clear that they had explored lots of potential cases for the issue, I went digging deeper in the router and used some hidden commands that doesn't appear in the documentations... This showed me that on a specific card there was drops (as in packet drops) in the backplane...It's not an issue if it's a drop once in a while, but the number seemed high and I didn't know when it was last checked (getting the value reset the counter... a bit Schrodingerish, you get a count, but you don't know when it started counting [obviously if you loook for when the counter started you won't be able to get the count.And doing either resets the counter)

Since the router was a piece of backbone, beside the traffic that had the issue, there was a lot of other stuff (early days FTTH collection and Internet access, ADSL collection & Internet Access, lots of corporate L2 and L3VPNs) that might be unhappy if the obvious solution that came to my mind to check if there really was an issue was used : reset/reload the traffic card.

Anyway, I mentionned that the only thing that didn't seem right to me was these drops in the backplanes and I told them that my first move would be to reset/reload the line card, but since it would disrupt lots of other stuff, it wasn't my call.

Since they were clearly at loose ends they went with it, and I remember clearly the Alcatel guy saying alarms were disappearing faster than he could see on his supervision platform while the Huawei and Nokia guys both explaimed that they both saw all their base stations and RNCs back.

I didn't check on the aftermath of the whole thing but I think the card got replaced ASAP after that.

the fun stuff, is that when they called me, they really didn't expect I could help them solving the issue, they just wanted to close a door in their investigation.

DEF CON hackers plug security holes in US water systems amid tsunami of threats

Re: KISS principle as applied to municipal water systems

It means what I think it means...

Basically some water suppliers in various French areas have already been forced to move to a fiber access instead of a good old PSTN line due to the dismantling of the copper infrastructure.

Orange is not France Telecom anymore, and it can say FSCK to any governmental request to keep the PSTN up and running.

Especially since Alcatel... well Nokia... and Ericsson have both left the PSTN business years ago and their respective equipments ( 100% of the PSTN exchanges in France, E10B3 or AXE10 ) have been EOL for more than a decade.

Re: KISS principle as applied to municipal water systems

Maybe in rural 'Murica it's still possible to get POTS lines...

Here in the Land of the Frogs it's been impossible for more than a decade and a half.

It was still possible a decade ago, if you knew how to coax both the salesdroid (and find the right one, a former FT salesdroid) at the France Telecom... erm... Orange store and the system he's using to create the POTS subscription. Since then Orange has announced that POTS/PSTN lines were not available anymore. ( that was something like 8 years ago )

There's even locations where they have started pulling out the copper wires (so even ADSL/SDSL is not an option, it's Fiber or Fiber, even for a simple thing a phone only fixed line)

There's a website where you can see when your copper lines are going to be removed... Mine goes away in 2027. ( but since I have FTTH It doesn't matter )

It's also more or less the same in most of EU and UK, POTS lines and the attached PSTN are ggoing the way of the Dodo.

Euro Commish on US lobbying against EU DSA rules: 'Our standards are not up for discussion'

The main problem they seems to have is getting the numbers... From what I read on the topic, the number the BLS issue are mostly educated guesses.

They don't have an unemployment office at the federal level where every unemployed gets to register (either by himself and/or by the company that let them go) to look for new jobs, and receive some money (for a time) while doing so like we have in each European Countries.

Re: Someone calling his own personal social network "Truth"...

I'm not sure Nero ( and most of his sycophant ) has the patience to read either...

I guess they all have at least some level reading ability as they can sign stuff with something that's not an X, but I'lm not even certain they have the level you would expect from people in their position.

Oh, and I would add Farenheit 451 to the reading list.

BOFH: If you can't beat the AI, let it live inside you

Re: Further fitting FYI

I'm sure the BOFH or the PFY will find a way to use thewhole thing as an embedded cattleprod.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

At 7 years old, while I didn't have any computer (I had to wait a few more years for an Oric Atmos before moving pretty fast to an Amstrad PC1512), but I knew what computer was as there was an IBM mainframe module on display in a shelf at home. (obviously of the lamp/vacuum tube kind, since she got it after getting her IBM Mainframe Operator certification from IBM years before my birth)

Meta calls €200M EU fine over pay-or-consent ad model 'unlawful'

Re: A world without social media?

Just for the fun of it. ( obviously don't take my answers too seriously )

How else would morons fill their time?

They would go to the pub and actually socialize with each other... it would raise the moronic level overall ... Maybe to the point that some leave the moron level.

How else would brash 'celebrities' and 'influencers' make their mark?

the real celebrities would find ways, like going back to the good old tabloid paparazzi shotrs... as for the influencers, they would need to actually find a real job to earn the money they earn.

How else would politicians, and two-bit self-declared statesmen, offer knee-jerk reactions to events and, of course, keep themselves in the public view?

Presse Conferences and Press Releases... yes it's more work and it takes more time to diffuse through the world at large, but it's similar.

How else can the marketing industry grab attention for minimal effort?

I have faith in the marketdroids, they will always find ways... And actually it will be good for them, as they will have to put some decent effort into producing things that grab our attention.

How else might plebeians experience the joys of being followers?

there's no joy in being a follower except in a few circumstances (say in a Tour de France Peleton, where you work less than the guys in front against the air... and even then you' probably prefer being in front as it would be a chance to win the stage )

How else may 'the followed' feel important?

with the exception of the so called influencers that needs a following to be alive, the rest probably don't give a $FSCK.

How else could people enjoy the thrill of joining in 'viral' cascades of nonsense?

It would stop the stupids from ending up in hospital or dead over an idiotic viral challenge. ( It won't stop all of them as some will still go for idiotic challenge after a round of pub crawling but it would limit the scope & scale )

How else could 'the woke' ply their trade?

How else may Zuckerberg, and similar people, revel in their deep contributions to culture?

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Re: How can Starmer be so daft?

I don't think the USA came up with the adaptor for internal use when it comes to the SCALP/Storm Shadow or the Hammer... Since those are French/English styff launched from planes.

Re: How can Starmer be so daft?

Oh they were nice, in southern France, near the Rhone valley, in an area known for it's geological faults and earthquakes...

Forces de Dissuasion

BA 200 Saint Christol

The second link is in French, but it has the coordinates of all the former silos and what they became (when they were reused)

Re: Snag

It seems I haven't... at least with planes...

In other domains, I'll neither confirm nor deny.

Re: How can Starmer be so daft?

For tihs frog it took less than 10 Seconds... on our side of the Chunnel we all know that the Rafale is one of the two parts of the nuclear triad. ( we lost one part when I don't remember which clownzident decided to close the Plateau d'Albion nuclear missile silos, so now e just have the SSBNs and the Rafale )

And honestly, it shouldn't be that hard to adapt both the B-61 and the Rafale to talk to each other... just look at what the Ukrainians have been able to do when it came to adapting planes and stuff to be launched by planes so that they could work together.

The hardest part is probably going to allow Dassault/Thalès engineers near a B-61 and allowing American armament companies near a Rafale... to work out how ti make both talk to each other.

Re: Snag

The RAF could buy a boom equipped tanker to support the F35A, but that has the cost associated with the purchase, maintenance and training of the flight and ground crew, plus you need at least 2, because aircraft do go unserviceable.

The RAF is already leasing (because the A330MRTT are not bought by the RAF) a plane that can have a boom installed... Since it's already installed on the same plane in other air forces.

It's just a matter of adding the boom to the existing ones, there's no need to buy a fleet of specific tanker.

Re: Snag

Actually it's a non issue...

Contrary to what is implied, the A330MRTT can be equipped with a boom and has already been succesfully used to refuel F-35A during tests for the lost KC-X program.

The fact is that right now none of the UK A330MRTT has a boom.

As for the boom, it's called the Aerial Refuelling Boom System and equips the Australian, Emiraty, Saoudian, Singapourian and Franch A330MRTT.

Seing that it's already an existing configuration, it's probably not that hard to add a boom to the UK tankers from the engineering point of view... It's probably going to be more difficult from a parliamentary/finacial point of view.

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Land of the Free - to be shot

Here in the Land of the Frogs, it's along the same line... but also worse.

Sure end up with a massive amount of paperwork if they draw their gun.

If they even start waving it towards somebody, it leads to even more paperwork... and if they end up having to actually shoot (warning shoots at first) it's more paperwork... and a routine investigation from the police des police to check if the warning shoots was an appropriate reaction... And if they have the (bad) luck to actually hit their intended target, they end up with an Everest of paperwork, a judiciary investigation and an extensive police des police one... Basically in the Land of the Frogs cops use their guns as the last resort after they have been shoot at or have been threatened enough.

(there's exceptions to the rule... when you're looking for a terrorist that bombed a RER that's hiding in the hills near St Etienne, since you're a Gendarme and not a cop, you have military ROE... and if the Hierarchy order you to shoot first and ask questions later when you find him, you execute the order. You know the amount of paperwork will small and nobody will bother you.)

French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools

Re: Le Mayor de Lyon: My advisors tell me there's an alternative to zis Americaine software...

actually no...

The current Lyon Mayor is a Green ( as in Ecologist ), he doesn't need any advisor to take decisions that will make the life of the people that elected him miserable.

He makes this decisions alone and the rest of the staff just has to make it possible, even if it's just a wet dream.

I haven't looked exactly where he stand in the Green Mushroom, but he might be deep enough in to want to avoid buying stuff from multinationals that use nuclear power to feed electricity to their datacenters. ( yes we have a few that got elected that are that deep... we even have some that when you take into consideration everythig they say would like us to go back to the stone age. )

Re: I can understand the wish, but...

well, there's always Discord, Zoom, Cisco Webex, and many more that do the same thing... They are just less integrated with MS email solution.

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

Re: The Other One

That would be great.

Military-tech upstart Anduril pushes further into NATO with German arms maker deal

And it pisses EU governments and companies off.

There's several EU governments that are trying to wean the EU armies of all the 'Murican infection and that kind of supposedly commercial agreement pissed them to no end.

There's also quite a few companies that are supposedly working on cooperation between several EU countries in the military topics that are pissed.

I guess there's more month of uncertainties for the MGCS and the FCAS... Since the Krauts want to suck more of the 'Murican military milk ( and get swindled out of massive amounts of money along the way ) while others tries get as much as possible done locally.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: "web interface ... a back-rev browser that doesn't complain about certificate errors."

The Toshiba laptop I kep for a looooooong time (a dinosaur... Pentium with MMX with Windows 95) was kept for it's SCSI PCMCI card and the all important X.25/V.24/X.21/V35/V.36 box attached to it that could be used both as a protocol analyzer for those all important ( at that time ) Telecom protocols and a traffic generator for them too.

It stayed around me for decades ( and nowadays it's probably rotting in a crate forgotten in a recess of the office ) because I was the only one able to make sense of what those pesky protocols were doing.

The Toshibas from that time were indestructible.

Microsoft cuts the Windows 11 bloat for Xbox handhelds

Re: 2Gb available to games

Actually I think it's 640Kb, not 640Mb...

Because old 8086/8088 only had 512K unless you bought the extension to 640K.

Mbs came with the 80286/80386... .

I remember the time I had a 486 with 768Mb... becausse I got cheap (free, bound to be scrapped) 256Mb DIMMs... when the norm was 256Mb and 512Mb for the highe end stuff.

Gb came with the Pentium D (aka the heat generator that had two processors on a single chip) and the rest is history.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Concorde being a museum piece is the only reson why Nero lifted that ban... Since the only reason why that ban was put in place was because 'Murican plane companies couldn't compete with the British Flair & the French Inventivity mixed together. Tven the Soviet couldn't compete at that time and just stole a set of concorde plan ( not the final version ) and built the Concordsky from them ( and had many issues due to the fact that it wasn't the final set of plans )

The only country looking at civilian supersonic flight right now is 'Murica.

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

PCM link

I spent an afternoon following a PCM link through (almost) all the DDF of a $TELCO building housing several PSTN exchanges once.

That PCM link from Hell didn't want to go up ( at Layer 2, so we knew the issue was physical ) and was a link towards another $TELCO building a few Km away also hosting several PSTN exchanges...

In the end it was a misalignment in one pair on one of the DDF, 20 second of unwrapping and rewrapping the cable and the issue was solved once located.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: So the IMEI is now be supposed to be somehow transmitted into "the cloud"?

In France it's in the hand of the cops... If you give them the IMEI of the stolen phone they make sure it's added to the stolen phone list... at least for all the French operators, since they have a single common list. ( and maybe the international list too )

Re: Nice non sequitur there...

The network itself checks that when you try to connect to a telecom network. It's part of the built in stuff that's been there sinnce 2G.

To be allowed on a mobile network the terminal equipment ( parse that as phone ) has to send the IMEI and the IMSI in one form or another depending if it's 2G/3G/4G or 5G.

That's how $TELCOs SIM-Locked phones when SIM-Locking was a thing. They were checking the IMEI and the IMSI and if the phone IMSI was not matching with the Phone IMEI in the database they didn't authorize the phone on the network.

you can't really change the IMEI, even with software... Since it has to be part (in one form or another, nowadays in 5G only something encrypted derived from IMEI and the IMSI is sent [I won't go in more details, you can read the 3GPP specs] ) of the first messages exchanged by the phone to connect to a PLMN.

Re: So the IMEI is now be supposed to be somehow transmitted into "the cloud"?

no, it's still written in a ROM at the factory and can't be modified easilly.

Chagig the IMEI means that you eed to locate the right chip, unsolder it, transfer all it's content, except the IMEI, on a new chip, put in that new chip the IMEI you want, solder the new chip...

So not something that can be done in a hurry.

IIRC 30+ years ago, when GSM (2G) was brand new IMEI blocking was sold as the way to make sure your phone couldn't be used by a thief... and all the operators told you to keep that number around and give it to the police so that they could send it to the operators for blocking.

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

Re: High end laptops are a problem, not a solution

I miss my VAIO T2... While it didn't meet the first requirement

Well it definitely met #2, being 1.2Kg at a time when laptops were usually around 3Kg and met #3 since that was one of the reasons why I bought it : being able to X-Window/SSH for a whole day without havig to plug it ad far enough from the back of the servers to avoid edig up with a cold... whiole being small enough to be put on top of stuff where a regular laptop (at that time) wouldn't fit and light enough to be carried around for hours.

Sadly the fondleslabs killed that kind of laptops and it's impossible nowadays to find a decent 10 or 11" laptop (well it's impossible to find any 10 or 11" laptop)

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

I agree.

The only equipments allowed on Wifi at home are the mobile phones and the tablet. All the rest goes through switches connected with Cat5, Cat6 cables or fiber (Obviously the fiber is the FTTH link).

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

By flying F-104, B-58 and friends, ince the only supersonic planes they had around where fighters and bombers.

I stumbled on a paper : Effect of sonic boom on people: St Louis, Missouri, 1961-1962 through a search.

Apparently they flew between 31k and 46k feet

For reference Concorde was flying at 57k feet (and could go higher), but the fighters they used were unable to go that high ( though not by much ) the Hustler (B-58) could go that high though...

But they probably loaded the deck by flying at the regular airliner altitude, which is much lower than where the Concorde flew.

Lets be honest, the main reason was that it was not possible to let the Frogs and Rosbeefs parade their technical prowess all over USA (and the rest of the world) when Boeing, Lockeed, McDonnel, Douglas and co were unable to build anything comparable.

The ban basically killed the Concorde production, as all the American companies at that time had some ordered, but they cancelled the order when the ban occured. Which left only AF and BA dealing with the few they already had delivered... After also cancelling their orders.

Even when the Concorde flew, peasants couldn't afford the ticket... in modern money it would run at more than 10K€... [last price 2 decades ago was at 5K€]

And remember there was only one class : Luxury Cramped Cattle.

[understand that as small cramped seats, no cabin luggage, not much legroom, but with champagne, foie gras and caviar instead of a soft drink and some semi-stale stuff that pass for food in current cattle class]

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

creating a complex solution to a simple problem...

Really, creating an hex map of the world and locate somebody in a given hex ?

What about using something that already exists and is already used (at the lowest level : to route calls and IP traffic) in all the cellular mobile networks around the world : CGI.

That's Cell Global Identity. It's something built around 4 components : a Code for the country, a code for the Mobile Network Operator, a Code for the location area ( that's a group of base stations ) and a Code for the cell identity.

You'll note that the whole thing does not provide a location in itself, just that a mobile is located in a specific cell in a specific mobile network in a specific country.

There's way for the specific operator to know the precise location, as the exact location of the antenna covering the cell is a known value, but it's not contained in the CGI.

The wikipedia page has all the information :

CGI

Plan to keep advanced chips from China with tracking tech gains support in Congress

Re: The new El Clásico - Politicians v. Reality.

They are the last country that sticks to (their very own version of) Imperial for everything... Even UK saw the light decades ago and went with metric (while keeping Imperial around for day to day things).

And even if the chips can phone home, IP address localization is not foolproof...

Lots of US companies bought IPv4 ranges from LACNIC and AFNIC (and even from RIPE) for US usage due to the lack of available ranges in the US.

Which localize them... in Africa or the Pacific area with an US physical address.

Metal maker meltdown: Nucor stops production after cyber-intrusion

Because nowadays everything is controlled by a computer including a furnace or a rolling mill.

And that computer has to be networked just because there's software updates... And nowadays it means downloading the update from somewhere in the Internet.

(in the old days you would have received a floppy [or more than one] from the furnace/rolling mill manufacturer or from the embeded computer one with the update... but that's not the case anymore)

Now companies don't see Industrial IT as critical as accounting IT, so it's less protected... When it can... Because the computer controlling the mill/furnace might be a specific device with a specific operating system in it that has no security built in, and you have to make do with rigorous firewall rules to protect it.

Think of all those systems as being like the cheap Chinese surveillance cameras looking at your front yard you bought and that was pwned several time already

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

Re: And then there was 2

Gold plated.