* Posts by Charles

267 publicly visible posts • joined 30 May 2008

Page:

Automated profiling tech is crap, says Home Office

Charles

Re: light aircraft

Well, that was just a blunt impact. What if it was instead a detonate-on-impact with about 100 kilos of high explosive (which isn't much heavier than the average man so could probably be done by a lone pilot)? Plus you don't have to worry about checkpoints and roadblocks and can probably fly low enough to stay under the radar's line of sight.

CERN declares Large Hadron Collider perfectly safe

Charles
Stop

@Colin Morris

Because, by the rules of science, you can't be a theory without significant corroborating evidence. Otherwise, you're still just a hypothesis.

Pirate Bay bitchslaps Swedish law with SSL

Charles
Unhappy

@Colin

And suppose the servers the Swedes will be using to snoop will be hardened against DDoS using "bulletproofing" methods?

HP throws Tru64 code to Linux fanciers

Charles

Re: The reason there are so many filesystems for Linux...

I don't know about ZFS. Don't some of the fundamentals of ZFS kinda go against the Linux filesystem design? Besides, it seems that even on Solaris, ZFS has some teething troubles. Anyway, has there been any word about further exploring XFS, which is already available for Linux?

EU Commission plots to end rip-off Britain online

Charles

Absolute Truth in Advertising

What the world really needs is a law that demands that any form of advertising (print, broadcast, internet, etc.) be forced to tell the entire, absolute truth with no exaggerated claims, no deception by nonstatement (IOW, if there was a condition involved in a sampling, this condition must be made clear), and no fine print. In America, this would be akin to testifying before a judge. But the idea is that advertisements, being appeals to the public, should be subject to strict regulation to prevent unfair influence. Only the facts should influence the buyer.

Ransomware Trojan code break 'impractical'

Charles

@Martin

I"m pretty sure the money trail will simply lead to a hostile or indifferent power, and there would be nothing you could do, as it'd be impossible to extradite or maybe even prosecute the originators. For all we know, the government could be getting a cut on the side so as to keep quiet.

@Joe: A lot of the insecurities of the OS don't come from the OS but from the user. You could make the most secure OS in the world, but an incompetent user could simply turn off all the security systems as annoyances and still get owned. That's the big problem with Windows. There are areas where ease of use and security clash, and in those cases ease of use usually has to take precedence; otherwise, the user finds it unbearable and won't buy the product--look at the complaints about Vista User Access Control. Linux is no panacea, especially with the unskilled user. There are still privilege escalation bugs and the like.

Charles
Alert

Looks like a win-win for the cybercrooks.

Because this cyber-extortion employs technologies already used in the real world for security reasons, this racket essentially puts the security experts at the receiving end of the problem--the trickster becoming the tricked. Apart from preventive measures, any attempt at the cure would be worse than the disease itself, since anything used to try to break the malware encryption (that's right) would just be turned around and used in those real-world encryptions protecting those oh-so-vital files.

Better to simply write off any malware-encrypted files as shredded and start over.

Next thing you know, these cyber-criminals will start encrypting the files AND then start shipping them off, piece by piece (since they're encrypted when they're transmitted, they'll be indistinguishable from Internet noise) to the virus writers (or some associated party) in an attempt to further extort or even exploit the victim.

AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic

Charles

Alternative advice to Firefox users.

If you *really* have a problem with AVG's SafeSearch feature but insist on using Firefox, consider trying out the Firefox 3 release candidate. SafeSearch won't work on this version of Firefox, so even with AVG8 installed, SafeSearch stays disabled. In any event, the handy NoScript addon keeps the bulk of trouble (and bloat) out of my way.

As for scanning ahead for malware, here's a possible angle: multiple payloads (so as to try as many angles as possible). AVG may be able to detect and block one or more of the payloads, but you could still be owned by the unknown or zero-day payloads. By scanning in advance, any site that has even one detectable payload can be blocked, and by blocking you also reduce the likelihood of being hit with an unknown attack.

FTC wants to hit the spyware guys where it hurts

Charles

@Michael

It should be noted that the Controlled Substances Act works in a similar way, classifying controlled substances by "Schedules" and allowing these schedules to be amended without the need for a full Bill. However, any attempt to create a new committee to handle this will immediately get "Bureaucracy" and "Pork Barrel" labels stuck on it in an age where the federal debt is growing alarmingly high (and interests are being held by hostile powers) and the economy isn't in the best of shape, so it's lose-lose.

DARPA pilot-ware unflappable in wing-fling damage test

Charles

Not a bad trick.

Although DARPA's current plans are for strike aircraft, real world concerns will probably see this software find a home in our current line of limited-use drones, and in our current line of drones, any kind of disaster recovery is a good thing. So the bad guy makes a near-miss on a Predator or the like and knocks off a few pieces. With this software, as long as it's still controllable, the drone can limp home and get patched up--less expensive than a full-on replacement.

Oh, and to whoever said the only casualties in a mechanized war are civilians, here's to hoping these advances reduce the chance of *any* casualties: civilian or otherwise. Better two machines wreck each other than two men, after all. And until further notice, there will still be a human C&C, so there will *always* be a human military target.

British pilot makes first supersonic stealth jumpjet flight

Charles

@Edward

KISS doesn't work with jets anymore--not in the age of highly-accurate SAMs that can chase planes virtually to the edge of space. A fair chunk of the complexity of the F-35 program stems from its design and stealth philosophy--to reduce the odds of being seen by the enemy and likely shot down. Some of the additional complexity is in the cockpit--it's meant to improve the pilot's situational awareness (and that's big in a jet--normally, it's the one you *don't* see that gets you). Other things that affect its up-front costs are actually meant to reduce its maintenance (and long-run costs).

IBM's Power6 slaughters world+HP in transaction cranking

Charles

@Herby

Why does simple math dictate that POWER is better than Itanium? And as for Apple moving to Intel, it was because PowerPC was innovating too slowly and Apple was being eclipsed by PCs sporting fresh AMD64 and Core technologies. So they decided the best way to contest the PC was to use the PC's own hardware...*their* way.

US bars ID refuseniks from planes - but not ID losers

Charles
Dead Vulture

Unbelievable...

No more to say to that. Like the icon, it's just *sick*. Similarly sickening is the fact that this will likely come to naught against a domestic terrorist with no record and a valid ID, anyway.

Phoenix chokes on 'clumpy' Martian soil

Charles
Stop

Mars is currently out of Human reach.

For those who believe we could send a person to Mars, one must realize that those probes being discussed took the better part of *nine months* to get from Earth to Mars. Imagine having to pack sufficient food, water, air, and other necessities for what will be essentially a year-and-a-half round trip.

There's also the matter of work cycles. Thanks to good design and prudent resource management, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers have been working long past their useful lives...and much longer than any human could stay on the red planet given the limited life-sustaining resources that could be packed not just for the lengthy round trip but for the stay there.

To put it simply, NASA and the ESA recognize that getting a person to Mars is not very high on the priority list. Put home concerns first, they believe, and I agree with them...especially when the general public thinks the money is best spent on concerns on good old terra firma.

Charles
Alert

@H5N1

Two reasons.

One, the rockets that launch these things to Mars can only lift so much at a time. Make the payload too heavy and the launch could catastrophically backfire, much like you see in those stock films of early rocket tests. Many people don't realize just how lightweight these probes actually are.

Two, the Martian atmosphere is much thinner than the Terran one. This has an adverse effect when it comes to radiation. A good chunk of the rovers involves the Martian version of sunblock.

US air force chiefs sacked in robot-armada brouhaha

Charles
Stop

Re: The US Air Force should be disbanded

There will always be a need for land-based aircraft. Land-based aircraft are much more economical to operate than sea-based aircraft, as they do not need the additional structural support needed for catapult takeoffs and arrestor landings. Given a near-enough friendly airfield, land-based aircraft are preferred. Most bomber craft are Air Force, too, due to their size. In fact, the Air Force is a lot more than just attack craft. Most utility aircraft (AWACS, tankers, etc.) are controlled by the Air Force.

Optical boffins cut the cost of quantum cryptography

Charles
Stop

@Steven Hunter

It goes to quantum mechanics. First off, quantum readers can ONLY be rigged to read photons coming in rectilinear OR diagonal, and there's no way to know in advance which way they'll be coming in, especially since they're being transmitted in a mix of the two and they're only going through once. Because there's no way to know how the photons were aligned when they're read, any attempt to resend them (such as through an MITM attack) introduces additional error--enough to make it noticeably compromised and thus rejected. Only when the error is too small to have been intercepted is the key reconciled. That's the basics to the approach. And as this quantum exchange is only used between known parties at this time (due to technological limitations), as long as they share one secret, they can expand securely on that secret.

Page: