Posts by Remy Redert
302 posts • joined Friday 2nd March 2007 14:42 GMT
Re: paradoxical?
Exact user location. I'm pretty sure 'somewhere in Germany' doesn't count as such. Besides, they can track that by ip anyways, no need for the phone to phone home with GPS data for that one.
Re: It's not even that...
Given the usual level of security in wireless and physical locks, I don't see that being much of a deterrent. Now maybe if you can get the car to message the user when/if it's unplugged (and when it's at specific charge levels, while we're at it) that kind of trick would be much less of a problem.
Re: What about shielding?
A small fleck of paint at interplanetary speeds would not just mark a window. It would likely put a hole a right through it.
However high speed collisions like that are easy to shield against with a whipple shield but you probably don't want any windows in the front.
As for breakeven. Don't forget that for breakeven in a fusion electric reactor you have to get your fusion and then convert the energy from that fusion into electricity. And thermodynamics being a pain in the butt you're going to be losing a bunch of energy to low grade heat there. The propulsion system has much lower inefficiencies and so reaches breakeven much more easily.
You put 200kW in and get more out in kinetic energy, so straight up ion will be less efficient. VASIMR will require a larger powerplant but I'm not sure if it can get a higher specific impulse out of the reaction mass.
I had to check the Youtube playlists for this and it turns out it was Defcon 19, not 20, that detailed just how broken chip and pin is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JABJlvrZWbY
It does not detail the process or methods of cloning a chip, however it does detail skimming them, it does detail how you can use the information from the chip to create a fully functioning magstripe from most chip and pin chips and yes, it details how you can get a point of sale terminal to transmit the PIN in the clear to the chip.
Just a nice note for the people who think rendering their magstripe unreadable will prevent people from copying the magstripe. For redundancy reasons your friendly banks included the FULL MAGSTRIPE on the chip which can be sent in the clear to the point of sale terminal. This was pointed out in Defcon 20 and only the most recent types of chip do anything to fix it.
Additionally, the majority of chip and pin cards will accept an offline authentication whereby they verify the PIN between the chip and the point of sale. Again, they send this data back and forth unencrypted. As for cloning the chip, while more expensive than cloning a magstripe it is very doable. The only reason it isn't being done much is because it's far less effort to just copy the magstripe and your PIN via the handily provided chip and pin system, then make a magstripe card and use it to commit your fraud.
By the time the bank catches on, the crook is a fair bit richer and long gone. They don't care who gets hit with the bill after all.
Posted in Fake fingers fool Brazilian biometrics
Re: Mythbusters
Yes, they got a 'secure' fingerprint scanner that had never been cracked.
It was fooled by the aforementioned photocopy. And every other method they tried. Their conclusion was iirc that it had only never been cracked because nobody had ever tried to.
Re: Hmmm
Don't worry. The first thing the place you upload your pictures to will do is strip all the metadata for you. Wouldn't want that getting out onto the web would we? might contain private information you see.
Re: I always wondered...
The trick here is the criminal's response vs the jogger's response. The jogger seeing the cops and the dog will stop, the criminal will run faster. The dog now has an easy way to pick out his targets that is convenient for the cops as well.
And what if the criminal stops as well? Well, then the dog did its job of stopping the criminal without even having to bite anyone.
Re: Fission reactors on Mars are not a *new* sugggestion either.
All good things come in threes. Don't pack a 500MW nuclear reactor for your ship's powersupply and engine. Pack 3 ~175MW nuclear reactors instead. And only use the power from 2 of them in your planned trip so if one kicks the bucket, you can still make it to Mars with only a minimal change in plans.
Physically separating the reactors might be nice as well, but that would probably because excessively costly for no real improvement in safety, not to mention make compensating for a failure a bigger problem because of off-axis thrust.
Then once you arrive at Mars, drop 1 of your reactors to the planet for use in the base. If it fails, you've still got a spare in orbit (But you'll probably want to bring that back with you to Earth as well. Plan for a failure). On the way back your ship will be a lot lighter and you can use atmospheric skipping to shed some of your excess speed on the way back to Earth.
Oh, and remember all that nasty hydrogen we produced while making our breathing oxygen? Well guess what, a nuclear reactor has no problem whatsoever using hydrogen as a reaction mass. Burning your reaction mass is for chumps, real men use nuclear reactors to heat their reaction mass!
@John Smith 19
While the Chernobyl reactors were low energy density compared to PWRs, don't forget that being graphite moderated they have some rather large safety issues. Positive void coefficient means the reactor will increase in power in the event coolant starts to boil at the wrong places or coolant channels become clogged, causing (partial) meltdowns and similar issues.
For a true low energy density reactor, you need a design that is limited by heat coefficient like the PBR and gas cooled. Those can suffer a full loss of coolant and full loss of control rods without melting down. They just get really hot and dump their heat passively to the surrounding air. The hotter they get the less power they produce.
Re: Weird
They're not at a server farm though. As noted, 1&1 does not have any server farms in the area, just a support centre/helldesk.
And while a dedicated server farm is no doubt weather resistant I wouldn't want to test my datacenter's resilience to hurricanes for the first time with me inside it. Let's see some datacenters get hit by F5s and survive more or less unscathed first.
Anybody got examples for the above yet? Wouldn't surprise me if it's already happened before.
Posted in Another systematic SCADA vuln
Re: German style?
These would be the same Tiger tanks that regularly not just broke down during movement, but whose transmission was actually prone to exploding and setting the inside of the tank on fire?
As good as German engineering can get, I'm not sure I'd use any of their late war tanks for examples.
Re: "if you pass the Star Trek-like Kobayashi Maru"
Actually, semantics difference there. You can pass the Kobayashi Maru, you cannot win it. Just because you lose the scenario doesn't mean you can't pass the test. It just means your ability to win wasn't what was being tested in the first place.
The Star Trek Kobayashi Maru was after all a test of character.
Re: Stupidity is a luxury
If it's anything like the TAN SMS system used by my bank, changing the phone number requires either going to the bank in person, with the bank card and ID or going through a lengthy process involving snail mail and verification from the old phone.
Update on exit
How hard is it? Take Opera's approach to updating. Don't tell the user to drop everything and update now, ask the user if he would like the update to be downloaded and applied on exit/restart automatically. You obviously need the pop-up unless you've allowed the program to update automatically but now you can just decide whether or not you want to update and then continue with what you were doing either way.
Then when you're done with what you're doing, you close the program and it updates itself. This would make updating many programs so much less painful (I'm looking at you, Windows.) I would install updates a lot more frequently if I could just tell all my programs to go ahead and download their respective updates, then install them sequentially and shut down.
Alternatively, get with the times and allow programs to modify files in use so you can take the Linux approach. Start the program AND install the update at the same time without every updater having to worry about how to handle this without breaking something.
re: Alternative option
So if someone deletes a tweet, you're expecting Twitter to go back through all of its backups to delete the tweet as well? I don't normally even do that for files I delete in backed up folders when the back up is attached or live on the server, let alone going through my archives to delete every single instance of the file.
Then there's also the issue of Google cache and a number of other caching sites (Internet archive anyone?). Twitter should act as the user expects it to, so change the 'delete' to 'Make slightly harder to find'. Let's face it, once you post something on the internet be it via Twitter, Facebook or your own website, it's there to stay and there's nothing you can do about it any more in the same way you can't unsend an e-mail or stop a snail mail letter from going out once you post it.
@Dave Bell
That was a Streetview car passing by, or someone with an Android phone and location services enabled. In fact, it was probably several people doing the latter.
Google probably have some quite precise maps of wifi hotspots throughout most of Europe and the US.
Re: Strongest indication yet!
And those strong indications have been getting stronger and stronger. Sooner or later someone's going to spot some of them Higgs bosons and then we'll be able to replicate the results and start working on practical applications. Expect anti-gravity within a few millennia!
@Jon Green
Yeah, a moon except for the part where it's not orbiting the gas giant either, which is one of the bigger prerequisites for being a moon in the first place.
Posted in Plasma drive starts with pee
re: What the
Well, that depends on how powerful this drive is compared to other plasma drives already out there. The fact that it can use almost anything for fuel gives it a big advantage though. If you have to choose between using water or xenon for reaction mass, the former is considerably cheaper and easier to store in bulk quantities. The only reason not to use it is because mono-atomic hydrogen and oxygen have a tendency to eat almost anything they come into contact with over time.
I suspect this drive will mainly be used for station keeping and limited manoeuvring of stations, since it allows them to use what would otherwise be waste products. Conversely, most long range starships would probably have sufficient recycling in place that there wouldn't be any waste products to launch out the back if at all possible.
Posted in Code glitch floored Reg reader altimeter
@Robert E A Harvey
Except for the part where the balloon won't lose enough lift for that before it bursts due to internal overpressure. If the rate of climb drops to 0, you're already too late with your launch as the balloon has obviously burst.
They should know the pressure at which their helium balloon will burst so they can set the pressure and thus altitude for the launch a bit below that. You could use the rate of climb as a back-up to ensure that if the balloon doesn't make it to the target height for whatever reason and doesn't burst either, LOHAN will still launch.
@Lee Dowling
Let me correct you on a few points, since you seem to have failed physics and/or orbital mechanics.
1) Capturing junk satellites and other debris is relatively easy. Yes, it's moving around at many kilometers per second but SO ARE YOU. Match orbits and you can just grab the debris while it's at nearly 0 relative velocity. If you know where the debris is and have the delta V to reach it, retrieval is trivially easy.
3) Fuel in this case is the wrong word. The one you're actually looking for is 'reaction mass'. You see, many of these satellites have to expend small amounts of reaction mass from time to time, for station keeping and avoiding collisions with one another. If you can refill that reaction mass you can significantly extend the useful life of a satellite. Of course satellites aren't designed to be refillable so... Good luck with that.
Re: WTF?
By that comparison, everyone who's wireless got snooped would have lost their connection while it was being snooped.
A better comparison would be you leaving pictures or letters out in the yard and someone taking pictures of them without your consent. Now you both have a copy of the text or image but no theft took place.
re: Thermodynamics
If only we could revolt against our evil thermodynamic overlords and overthrow their monstrous reign of terror and inevitable thermodynamic doom.
Re: Death from the skies
And you will find, as per the Mythbusters experiments, that a free falling bullet has a terminal velocity sufficiently low that they are very unlikely to cause serious harm, let alone kill anyone.
The problem isn't bullets (or in this case balsa wood trusses) falling straight down, it's the ones fired at an angle that drop from the skies with still sufficient speed and thus energy to penetrate the skin.
Interference
No, they've found that these devices could indeed pick up noise from LTE transmitters, but that 1) The devices are already designed to cope with significant amounts of noise, even on the same band and as such 2) Would only be noticeably bothered in very rare cases.
So there's no reason for them to care.
Posted in CRACK made by quakes FOUND ON MOON
Re: Look at all the craters
And that is why you would want to build your facility as deep underground as is feasible. Not only does it help protect against the inevitable small impacts, it also gives almost 100% protection from those nasty cosmic rays and other sources of radiation out there in space. Living long term on the surface of the moon seems like an excessively risky proposal.
Posted in US Navy preps railgun for tests
re:That's a long time
That's 6 to 10 rounds a minute for a naval battleship sized gun. The smaller anti-missile guns will produce a lot less waste heat, be a lot smaller and thus take a lot less power to fire and recharge. You can expect the anti-missile versions to fire a couple of rounds per second.
Still not very high compared to currently CIWS solutions, but then railguns can be considerably more accurate so they won't have to spray 50 rounds at an inbound missile and hope one will hit.
@KrisM
This would be like when we switched to microUSB, manufacturers would no longer need to ship chargers which meant less cost, smaller packaging, etc. They never did deliver on that one either.
What will happen is that manufacturers will now start to ship 2 chargers. One wireless and one wired. And increase the price a load to compensate.
Re: What's the surprise?
The assumption up until now was that a comet of its size, having been repeatedly passed by the sun in the past and becoming smaller in the process every time, would not survive such a close encounter with the sun.
Now in a few thousand years when it comes back again, then we'll be able to get a really good understanding of just how these things work, because we can observe the same comet having another go at the sun.
Or we could develop decent spacecraft by then and go look it up with a probe while it's still far far away.
@peter_dtm
Don't know about the visa issue, but broadband over 12 miles is easy enough via either a wireless link or a semi-permanent cable. 12 miles of shallow fiber to a permanently anchored ship shouldn't cost that much compared to the cost of the ship itself.
Pirate radio broadcasts fall under international treaties wrt regulated radio broadcasting so are much easier to tackle, I suspect.
@Lydonator
I see nothing illegal with what you describe. Of course if Samsung did decide to do this, nobody would buy Samsung TVs any more because they can get a TV from a competitor that doesn't insert ads when turned on.
TVC doesn't have any competitors yet. Once (if) the broadcasters catch up and start doing live IP broadcasts as well, TVC is likely to lose a lot of people because the broadcasters can do with less ads, better quality, etc. at the same profit margin
@trt
No, the whole point of the article is that the toilets don't suck. If they did there wouldn't be a problem.
Posted in Steam games forum down amid hack fears
@Lee Downling
Of course if you squat in a house, the legitimate owner can't use it which doesn't happen in software piracy. More importantly, if the company that sold you your house goes broke, you don't suddenly lose access to your house. Similarly, you don't need to check in with said company every time you want to enter your house.
Rental is a bit closer, in that when the company renting you your house goes broke, you might be thrown out. Even then it won't happen suddenly and you don't have to ask said company for permission to use your house every time you want to go in.
As for stealing games. I find myself pirating games when I'm uncertain of a game's quality and there is no (reasonable) demo to try it with. Then yes, I will pirate the game to test it.
@Sir Runcible Spoon
That is no mere exhaust plume, that is a cloud of rapidly expanding plasma, created where the air inside the railgun is pushed aside by the projectile and turned into plasma by the enormous electrical energy required to propel said projectile.
This heating in turn causes the very air itself to combust, oxidising the nitrogen in the air. Then there's the minute amounts of material being torn off the railgun's rail and the projectile itself in the process of firing and after exiting the barrel, you get a considerable shockwave from the supersonic projectile throwing up dust.
Posted in Earth escapes obliteration by comet
re:One big bullet, or a shotgun blast?
Indeed, the total energy transfer will be approximately the same. However because the chunks have a much larger total surface area, they will experience far more drag in the upper atmosphere and because they have a much smaller volume each compared to their surface area, will experience more severe and deeper heating.
So while the planet will receive the same amount of energy total, most of that energy will be wasted into the upper atmosphere as the chunks burn up instead of falling to the ground and killing people.
1 big rock == 1 big crater, lots of dust, dead people, etc.
hundreds of small rocks == Most burn up on entry, those that don't burn up completely leave a few small craters scattered across the landscape. Some people might get unlucky and get hurt in the process.
Posted in El Reg in SHOCK email address BLUNDER
Fired!
Is what the culprit needs to be. No, not that way. Out a cannon!
Re: Archive
He did, but someone changed the file formats since then and it's impossible recover from the backup as a result.
@Absent and Ilgaz
Absent: You meant the problem where you could bridge the electrical gap between the 2 antennae, causing a serious reduction in sensitivity? Because as far as I can see with the new design it still has 2 antennae and an electrical gap placed where it can be bridged to detune the antennae. And we're still dealing with antennae meant for different wavelengths so bridging the gap is likely to be a big nono still.
Ilgaz: Pick your android phone. Any android phone. Now instead of typing your request into the google bar that should be on your homepage, press the little microphone icon instead and issue your request in the same natural language you would have used for the iPhone.
Admittedly, it will not offer to call the nearest restaurant for you, but it will show you a list of Google search results including a link to the map so you can see where the nearest restaurant is. Apple has polished things a little and made some improvements to the functionality that the Google boys haven't yet but the big thing they're going on about with the natural language searching? Yeah. Google and Android were there first.
re: Any relation
Seems unlikely. He didn't try to get himself killed with those helium balloons after all.
re: Get drunk or catch a cold
Once this stuff because well known and well researched enough, it might eventually become accepted. Especially if we can make it work reliably and quickly.
Start with applying it to addicts and overdosers, then gradually expand its use from there once we have a good handle on any side effects and risks associated with the meds.
@A_been
Nokia vs Apple, Nokia wanted triple damages because they considered Apple's infringement of its patents to be will full (ie, they knew about the patents and then went and didn't license them anyyways).
Samsung may be suing over FRAND patents, but they could also have some patents specific to Apple's 3g implementation that weren't included in patent pools because they work as extras or add-ons to base 3g?
Posted in BOFH: No, the Fabinocci sequence
@Vincent Ballard
No. This is not in fact how a Halon system works. What you're describing is a CO2, Nitrogen or similar noble gas system. Halon works by chemically binding the free radicals as they occur inside the fire, similar to how oxygen reacts with them. This effectively poisons a fire while (in a properly designed system) remaining far below immediately toxic levels.
Halon 1211 is typically only used in hand extinguishers because of its higher toxicity compared to Halon 1301, which is used in room flooding systems. Toxicity of the latter is almost exclusively caused by reactions at very high temperatures which shouldn't occur in your typical server room fire because the Halon system will put the fire out before it gets that hot. Breathing gear is only required when reentering the room because of the combustion products and the side effects of the halon 1301 (Which include giddiness and impaired perception. Not things you want when inspecting fire damages, especially not if there might still be a risk of reignition)
So staying in a room when the halon flood system activates, while disorienting, is unlikely to actually be very hazardous to your health. That said, the BofH's system is probably dumping enough halon in there to flood out the oxygen. Never trust a system designed and operated by the BofH and his PFY.
Posted in Mars trips could blind astronauts
re: 2001...
You are aware that spinning sections are in fact the only reasonably easy to do approach to generating long term artificial gravity in space? There's plenty of fiction in Space Odyssey 2001 but the spinning artificial gravity section is not.
Other examples of the same used in fiction can be found in at least Babylon 5 and PlanetES. Others can probably provide more examples
Posted in Mars trips could blind astronauts
re: Simples
Better solution. Put a nuclear rocket engine in orbit, fly to Mars in about a month, less if it happens to be in a favourable position at a time. This also helps reduce the risks from radiation, micro-meteorites and various random failures as a result of equipment decaying over time.
Actually, put 2 nuclear rocket engines in orbit, so that if the first suffers a failure while it's idling in Mars orbit, the second can come to the rescue. Use SpaceX's cheap rocket lift capability to put the required parts and the manpower needed to build it in orbit and you can probably have one for the same cost as the planned return to the moon.
re: Wither IE
From what I understand, TLS 1.1 is available (Uncertain on 1.2, it might be as well), but TLS 1.0 is the default.
As noted, the only browser that both supports TLS 1.2 and uses it by default is Opera.
re: cc protection
Yes and no. You are effectively covered because you can in fact dispute the charge with your credit card company.
You aren't covered because Paypal will then freeze your account, all the money in it and send you a bill for the amount you disputed + fees. I've personally had to take them to court over this when they refused to refund a fraudulent transaction, I had my bank pull it and they froze my account and sent me a bill. Small claims court here in the Netherlands found them in the wrong and gave them a 100 euro fine for every day my account was frozen, starting 14 days after the judgement was passed.
@Gary B.
You mean the air planes typically flying at kilometer or more above the ground? You know, a good distance away from the Lightsquared 4G implementation?
Some supplement may be necessary for landing guidance, like ILS and its radio beacons.
So no, this really won't be a problem for the next gen air traffic control systems. Especially since those GPS systems haven't been deployed yet and as such have absolutely no reason not to have sufficient filters.
re: Fatality or futility
You mean the 3 TEPCO employees who died in the earthquake? Can't really blame the nuclear reactor for a crane collapsing on people.
100,000 people, most of which can return to their homes before the end of 2012, with the damaged reactors under control and clean up under way in the areas that were contaminated with radioactive isotopes that haven't already decayed to nothing.
School children going to nearby schools where the radiation count is 5 times the prior legal limit? Source please? Nothing I can find substantiates this at all.
re: I am a freetard
This is about copyright infringement. Torrents for GPL/CC/CL and such licences do not break normally break the copyright provisions in those licenses so there is no problem and you should not receive any nasty letters for them.
