Hooray

Hooray, There will be much rejoicing as soon we shall be able to blast through our monthly download limit in 0.1 of a second. Isn't technology wonderful.

Why such a complex creature :)

Would it not have been easier to start by modelling a simpler lower form of life, like politicians?

But seriously this is impressive, i look forward to the day I can design and simulate a custom worm on my computer then send off the models dna to a lab and get a packet of custom attack nematodes back in the post, it will be awesome.

Not going to happen

Tracability of IP addresses will never happen, if it did your ISP wouldn't be able to charge you through the nose for a fixed IP for your home server.

Its not like they will have been broadcasting AIS location data and you couldnt have just watched the ship here:

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/

It seems somehow easier to just watch it on the internet than trying to salvage the nav systems from the scrappers and read the data off it.

Not the only one wondering

Not quite the same but someone gave a talk at defcon 20 about the possibility of feeding data out of an x-plane simulation into gunradio to broadcast x-plane generated ADS-B into the real world, the flipside of feeding real world ADS-B into x-plane so you can virtually fly with real world planes did intrigue me thought, that could be fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk

What i have learned from this discussion

I think the one thing I will take away from this comments thread is the fact the United States doesn't appear to be particularly united, wouldnt it be easier to just agree on one set of laws for the whole country?

Oh BT let me count the ways i hate you

When I first moved into my house I arranged to get the phone line/adsl reconnected waited in for the engineer and all i got was a txt message saying it was all done, now im sure they had done something but they hadnt connected the phone as it was still completely dead.

Ringing them up and getting past the standard doom and gloom it will cost you £££ if its your fault i tried to explain that it was probably connected as far as the pole at the end of the street but that I needed it to be connected all the way to my house, some more waffeling about availability of engineers and I finally cracked and told the nice lady if you dont fix it im going to climb up the pole and hook up the pair myself.

The engineer and his nice fluke line break tester thingy arrived first thing next morning and sorted it out :)

Then last year I had a friend banging on my door asking "if i ever answered the phone?" to which i replied no but it hasnt been ringing anyway, which is how i found the AC ringing signal was broken and why I hadnt had any nuisance calls for a few months.

Reported the fault, the engineer turned up at the allotted time tested the line and confirmed it was broken but it was a job for the people in the exchange not him and said they would fix it and buggered off.

That evening I got a text message to tell me it was fixed so I tested the line and it wasnt. So I got to play some fault report ping pong with them, reopen the fault, their helpfull website shown me a nice picture saying its my equipment at fault and closing the issue, me reopening the fault etc etc

The fifth time I reopened the fault I had lost my temper and added the comment "for god sake check the line card at the exchange" to the ticket. That seemed to do the trick.

Oh BT I hate you so.

Righteous indignation

I know I should be more annoyed at the MOD screwing things up.

Sadly however I am just surprised we aren't discussing problems of the planes propellers getting tangled in the rigging, or difficulty procuring enough oak to build the carrier, hemp with which to rig it and incompatible cannon ball sizes .

I think the real story here is that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn published their paper, A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection as a PDF in 1974. That really is ahead of the curve :)

There are people deserving of this law they just arent going after them.

"Section 127(2) targets false messages and persistent misuse intended to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety."

Well if they have these powers why the hell aren't they going after ISP's with their outright lies like Unlimited* and upto 16megabit* and anything else that has an asterisk of bullshit after it. They are false messages that cause a great deal of annoyance and inconvenience.

And how about all the infuriating robocalls about loft insulation/ppi/switching utility providers/hearing loss claims and especially those twats with the awfull voip lines from india pretending to be microsoft support.

If your going to interpret a law overly broadly to increase your statistics you could at least do it in a way that benefits the public.

So much promise yet the end result will be smartphones that you cant remove the shitty operator crippled firmware from and computers that nickel and dime you for every little function because you cant install anything except through their app store, it may involve increased risk but ill take freedom over security.

Thats your problem right there!

"5Mb/s down, 1Mb/s up, for $40"

Thats why its not popular in europe those speeds at that price would make even talk talk look like an attractive proposition.

“USBs report themselves as fixed disk,” Niehaus told the crowd in his session, and therefore cannot be partitioned. “Special hardware” will therefore be needed to

Horse shit! Just because windows is brain dead and wont let you partition a USB stick doesnt mean you need special hardware, they just need to rewrite their usb removable disk driver so it isnt so stupid, partitioned usb drives work just fine under linux.

I think what they really meant is we wont let your drive work unless you pay us.

See its innards on youtube.

Mikeselectricstuff has an excellent teardown video of this on youtube here:

http://youtu.be/7xdajSS_cOU

Its a fantastic bit of design although im not sure its worth the asking price.

The cure is worse than the disease.

Perhaps the US should launch a secret black op to smuggle copies of norton antivirus to the iranians, that should set back their nuclear programme by years.

So have i got this right?

So what they are saying is they want the ISP's to ask for a cut of traffic coming from popular sites such as for example netflix, google, microsoft (for all the windows updates)

so what happens when these popular sites say no and route all traffic from the money grabbing ISP's to a black hole?

How long do you think an ISP would survive if you couldnt reach google/netflix/microsoft from their connection, and as has been noted who do you think would then buy what was left?

GPS modules that work

The uk high altitude society has a small list of known good GPS modules that work at high altitude

http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:gps_modules

Hypnotoad

And this is why they are dusting off and bringing back the Interception Modernisation Programme.

Once you strip away the fluff

Once you strip away the fluff of this press release it will more than likely turn out that boeing has contracted to build some android handsets to the NSA's Project fishbowl standards

http://www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/mobility_program/index.shtml

Presumably based on the SE android kernel

http://selinuxproject.org/page/SEAndroid

So more than likely somewhere like foxconn is going to make handsets for boeing for peanuts, boeing will then load their secure android firmware on them and sell them to the government at a $10k markup.

So business as usual all round!

How long until there is a facebook group for outing companies that do this sort of thing in a comedy twist on the companies disparaging themselves, and of course demonstrating their employees are muppets who ignore basic security, so their systems will likely be easy pickings.

My thoughts on android bootloaders FWIW

Would you buy a laptop that wouldn't let you install the OS of your choice? or whose warranty was voided because you installed ubuntu? No and neither would I.

Phones only have a reputation for being fragile easily killed devices because their boot-loaders are actively trying to keep you out, they have been designed to be that way. There is no reason at all that they couldn't behave more like the BIOS of a PC, by all means encrypt/sign the radio stack with the strongest crypto on earth, that's a good thing as messing with the radio could cause havoc on the network, but leave the application processor open and allow unsigned code and recovery from a bad flash.

That way the networks can be happy the radio isn't doing anything bad, and the customer can be happy flashing any old crap software to his phone safe in the knowledge that if it all goes tits up you can just hold the magic key combo whilst turning on the phone to enter the boot-loader and put some other OS on it to fix it. That would be great wouldn't it? No more having to lie to customer services to say it just died if you botched a hack, tech support could just point you to the instructions to put the official firmware back on the phone and tell you to call back if you still have a problem when running that.