* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

If fast radio bursts really are revving up interstellar sailcraft, here's the maths

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Re: Astrophysicists think

How do you stop?

It's a Trump Run: You don't stop, you just keep going, emitting fast radio bursts

(Until the whole galaxy freaks out. Exactly as planned.)

MAC randomization: A massive failure that leaves iPhones, Android mobes open to tracking

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Windows

Re: "nobody trying to stop privacy invasions"

Do you not see the irony of that article? It's an article telling you that you have secretly been brain washed by the right so you question your beliefs (if that is what you believe of course)

100% This.

If it's the Guardian, there is likely wool being pulled over someone's eyes.

Guardian, The Economist, NYT, WaPo are the biggest reality resurfacing outfits out there. Straight from "How to Goodthink for Dummies" and sundry "officials who cannot be named" (i.e. MiniTruth) to the presses.

The worlds in a right pickle indeed.

America's Marine Corp steamy selfies scandal, a Senate probe – and El Reg to the rescue

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Windows

"The Senate Armed Services Committee wants answers"

What answers do they expect exactly?

Marines: Not a sharing, caring outfit full of multicutural/multigendered good-natured humans past their age of interest in all things sexual.

Compromising videos of female marines have been uploaded to porn websites, and URLs leading perverts to more material posted in comments under the vids.

Will this statement be upheld in a bar full of Marines?

Given these women are willing to risk their lives in the service of their country, it's a pretty poor state of affairs that a few rogue soldiers can cause them such grief and besmirch the reputation of the Corps.

Seriously, El Reg? You have become public spokesperson for the Marine Corps now?

We need the "tired Mario" icon.

Very related and probably illuminating:

NYT: Neuter the Marine Corps

The Love Boat: Deployed US Navy Has A Pregnancy Problem, And It’s Getting Worse

Royal Navy's newest ship formally named in Glasgow yard

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Trollface

Re: HMS Forth

> Available to the RN when not cruising off Sevastopol, no doubt.

I do think Weyland-Yutani would berate the minister in charge fiercely if that ever happened.

Oh my God, 911 is down. Quick, call… aaargh!

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Paris Hilton

Re: Of course, it's already designed and everything's been thought of....

Maybe the federal support won't be forthcoming?

I like it how the thingamabob is described as routing itself, like little ants being emitted from your phone, heading to precrime central, I mean preaccident central.

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Windows

Re: Why is the FCC involved ?

Under Obama the 911 calls would have gone through. The Rainbow-farting Unicorn told me so.

Under Obama, AT&T also had enough manpower and skills to tee the whole Internet traffic from its routers into the NSA datacenter. This seems to no longer be the case, must be Trump's fault!

THANKS, GOD EMPEROR!

Devs bashing out crappy code is making banks insecure – report

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Windows

Somewhat related

More horror stories by Robert Charette in this PDF. More by that guy at the dreamy-techno-eyed IEEE Spectrum.

Always good to bring to the daily feel-good meeting.

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Well, your set-intersection logic is faulty. I hope you stay away from anything serious.

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Re: Agile Payoff

Yes, it's called "shift and blame".

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Windows

Counter counter take.

It's all too likely due to the prevailing attitude of hiring the Pizza Delivery Guy to do "web stuff".

Preferable in "Node.js" because its "the new thing" and the sub-boss has a spotty-faced teen who likes it.

The low pay is an advantage. Because there is "pent-up demand" (anyone who utters that word construction: shoot on sight with a 12-gauge semi-auto) for low-pay people in high-skill jobs.And we want to work against that demand.

Shamoon malware spawns even nastier 'StoneDrill'

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Re: Mitigation?

QubesOS for the win!

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Re: StoneDrill malware sits in a victim's browser

Clicking on stuff?

IBM has cloud access to quantum computer 400 times smaller than D-Wave system

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Re: How does it work

Get a bottle of fine wine, light a fire in the fireplace, let the missus cook a fine dinner and read Scott Aaronson's "Quantum Computing since Democritus" for a fine introduction. Also, look for the comic strip "The Talk" by the same guy.

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Windows

I have a bad feeling about this

Why Quantum Computers Cannot Work by Gil Kalai, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Yale University.

Basically the argument seems to be that the "steered quantum evolution" will be subject to noise in just the right way to not reveal Mother Nature's nonclassical cards, no matter what.

We will see.

Japan's Venus probe power plight panacea: Turn it off and on again ...and again and again...

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Re: "and will try turning them on then off again over time"

It's JAXA, they are not there yet.

If we must have an IoT bog roll holder, can we at least make it secure?

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Windows

Hah!

your kids not getting job they wanted because someone guessed the name of their password and started tweeting racist stuff

Sounds more like a problem with outright PC fascism and company-oriented virtue signaling than anything else.

But I hear Blue Bird Cookoo Cage is being purged with extreme prejudice in any case, wait until the AIs deploy. There won't be racist twattering anymore.

UK govt's £17.3m AI-boffinry cash injection is just 'a token amount'

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Paris Hilton

Re: Sex Robots!

It is already very 2017-ish to have a sex robots department. What would Brian Aldiss say? And do you have to watch out for dangerous mechanized organs?

Also, this is probably problematic to various communities due to permanent microaggressions inherent in the permanently visible on-campus signage.

Has your spouse stayed on after Mobile World Congress? This sex doll brothel might be why

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Nothing for the wimmin?

I came here expecting to hear about male dolls.

We found a hidden backdoor in Chinese Internet of Things devices – researchers

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Trollface

Re: FFS since when is a GSM to VOIP gateway...

Contribute the the ever-changing definition of IoT: Define IoT

... 86 pages PDF!

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Re: Are you surprised????

> Nothing bad, nothing good, just the law.

Actually bad.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Surprised?

That's as likely as going to happen as having fully open sourced PCs, down to the firmware....

"Devices with a network ports" (because I do not like the meaningless IoT designation): Always behind firewalls, with an IDS in the vicinity, walled off, on separate VLANs, in "novelty" roles, or "as open as possible".

Then again, there are "mobiles"....

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Paris Hilton

Re: I realized there is a self-describing acronym for use of IoT...

Your PC is not connected to the Internet?

Smart meter firm EDMI asked UK for £7m to change a single component

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Windows

Re: That doesn't sound ridiculous

Indeed.

It may be just a case of "I am afraid of big numbers" (a usual attitude seen in muh bossman) or it may be a case of overcharging (a usual attitude promoted by muh bossman) or even discombobulated, money-burning project execution . Probably and as usual, it will be something in between these three points on the triangle.

US-Europe Privacy Shield not worth the paper it's printed on – civil liberties groups

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Facepalm

Nothing to do with Obama, no sir.

> why they believe President Trump's recent executive order on immigration undermines the agreement

Not ex-Presidente Obama's order to "go ahead, sharing is caring" to the TLAs.

Can one really "undermine" an "agreement" that is based on fakery?

Fireball in Tasmania: Possible CubeSat re-entry sparks alien panic

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Swamp Gas!

So why doesn't this happen every other day?

Or is Hobart rarely visited by aircraft?

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Re: Seeking expert knowledge

Excellent question.

This stuff is moving far more slowly (7.8 km/s) than interplanetary rocks normally do (Near-Earth Asteroids between 20 and 40 km/s, not at all normally distributed according to this paper). This is likely to result in a longer, yellower event.

Two million recordings of families imperiled by cloud-connected toys' crappy MongoDB

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Windows

Re: Easy Way to Have the Problem Addressed

What IS the people's problem with Putin?

Without Putin we would see Russia a stomping ground for US kleptocrats, neocons and super-imperialists who can't croak fast enough, the US with boots on the ground in Syria even under Black POTUS, drawing "red lines" while abrading the country to house foundation level with DU rounds -- and possibly even Hillary, who is literally the wench of Babylon with added pizza delivery service, in power.

Be thankful for small mercies.

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Childcatcher

Completely unrelated

All of this is Not Nice but can anyone explain to me what evil miscreants will do with several months of kids talking to their bears?

(Let's just listen to some Message To Bears because why the hell not.)

Germany, France lobby hard for terror-busting encryption backdoors – Europe seems to agree

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#OscarsSoWhite, really?

> Trump a fascist talking point

Oh my how tired.

"That man has done real, quite possibly terminal, damage to democracy as practised in the Western world for the past 75 years."

It's not The God Emperor. "Democracy" has been raped silly by Clinton and Bush. Then dealt a terminal blow by the legendary black actor "Obama The Establishment Construct" in his role as sassy, at-ease POTUS.

Always remember that people didn't vote for Trump, but against Hillary. And for good reason.

Cloudbleed: Big web brands 'leaked crypto keys, personal secrets' thanks to Cloudflare bug

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Holmes

Re: They all laughted!

Use violence on the mockers.

Anyone who has code w/o asserts in it is a fscking loser.

Same goes basically for types, but there I make an exception because the most lovely programming languages are unityped (for evidently historical reasons as they started off as fast hacks on New Ideas in the 70s).

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Affected

> ashleymadison.com

> ashleyrnadison.com

Top kek

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Re: Not sure if it's Ragel or the dev whose at fault here.

"You're reading a badly formatted HTML page. You come across an unclosed img tag right in the middle."

"Is this testing whether I'm a bad FSM code generator or have inlined lousy code, Mr Ormandy?"

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Thumb Up

Nice writeup

Should go into the "entirely avoidable IT Chernobyl events" dossier.

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Re: xhml5

Yeah.

If only there were programming languages in 2017 that checked for buffer overflows....

I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court

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Re: My $0.02 worth

Its not just about "routine" actions, as part of my job I was required to destroy hard drives. Had any of them contained evidence then this would be a criminal offense, contract or no contract.

Can't be a criminal offence if you didn't know about the hard drives' content, dude.

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Re: Double Standard for Directors and Employees

> An example many reading this have seen is a profitable company "locking" out it's workers in an attempt to make the company even more profitable

You need to explain how that magically happens.

> even when such actions cause the failure of global financial systems.

Failure doesn't come from there. Look for "govnm't money printing" and "austrian business cycle theory".

> If you are the IT department, you are an executive and equally immune to being held responsible for your actions.

That's just not how life works.

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Re: Company bosses attitude towards their IT people

Actually I also sometimes deal with sanitation right after installing antivirus and doing business analysis. It's an important job and someone has to do it.

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Childcatcher

It's a New Age!

"Given the responsibility to not behave like an immature wrecker" is now actually "Given the authorization to behave like an immature wrecker"

How fast can you say "thrown out of court"?

Google to annihilate online trolling with ... tra-la-la! Machine! Learning!

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Trollface

What a world to live in!

Before Trump: Artificial Intelligence is Racist.(will white self-flaggelation never end?)

After Obama: Doesn't matter, we will use it to squash toxic/racist comments!

I expect this to be deployed in "safe spaces" to administer a rightful tasering to anyone exhibiting more than his share of daily illiberalism.

Deutsche Telekom hack suspect arrested at London airport

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Paris Hilton

So, not Putin?

If this goes on, he will have to sell his hollowed-out, democracy-destroying volcano inhabited by leather-clad goons and slavic ballbuster dames who are also good in bed.

What a loss in standing.

Radioactive leak riddle: Now Team America sniffs Europe's skies for iodine isotope source

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Windows

Re: Comprehensive test ban treaty

First rule of modern "journalism" and modern "politics": Whatever happens: Russia.Or even better: Putin.

(Maybe because if you run it together, it gives "Prussia")

Even Trump has regressed to the mean. Nicky Haley seems to be as abysmally dumb and incompetent as Samantha Power, if not worse.

Now, here's the details from Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty: Background and Current Developments - Mary Beth D. Nikitin, Specialist in Nonproliferation, September 1, 2016

Russia ratified the treaty on June 30, 2000. In September 2005, Russia reportedly stated that it intends to continue to observe the moratorium on testing until the CTBT enters into force as long as other nuclear powers do likewise, and expressed its hope that the nations that must ratify the treaty for it to enter into force will do so as soon as possible. In November 2007, according to Itar-Tass, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “confirmed Russia’s unchanging support for the treaty as one of the key elements of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and an effective nuclear arms limitation tool.” In September 2009, Dmitry Medvedev, president of the Russian Federation, said, “we need to encourage leading countries to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty as soon as possible in order to ensure its ultimate entry into force. That is very important. A Russian scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences raised the prospect of the CTBT’s collapse in an article of November 2010. Claiming that Britain and France have ratified the treaty but do not have a moratorium on testing, that the reverse is the case for China and the United States, that India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan have done neither, and that only Russia has ratified the treaty and has a moratorium on testing, he argued that:

"if the treaty has not been in force for fifteen years [i.e., since it was opened for signature in 1996], it is difficult for Russia to be the only nuclear power which complies with its terms and conditions in full. Russia’s official position is to support the CTBT’s entry into force. However, Russian experts tend to focus on the pessimistic scenarios of CTBT collapse. In the near future, Russia could face a difficult choice between the political dividends the CTBT affords and the military necessity to upgrade its nuclear.capabilities"

(This is going to take a bit to appear as evidence indicates that I'm currently on El Reg's Deplorables Watchlist)

Facebook scales back AI flagship after chatbots hit 70% f-AI-lure rate

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"all voters are dumb and also facebook"

And then the rise of fake news, after they got rid of the humans curating it and replaced it with algorithms that quickly went awry and blew up a major election.

Unless you are alluding to some facebook moderator election I think you are just repeating bad talking points.

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Windows

Welp!

Some experts fretted that if China opened up a lead in AI, the West would be doomed to lose World War 3. Others suggested that whichever superpower lost the AI arms race would relapse into a state of primitive technology feudalism.

Woah the hype of the Cold-War "5th Generation" is back. I remember well. "We are doomed! QUICK, REAGAN, GIMME MONEY!"

Back then the press was generally against WW3 though. Nowadays, it seems so-called "journalists" ejaculate heavily every single morning over the thought of Tank War Europe ("the nuclear deal") or "Limited Nuclear Exchange And Then We Win" in the Pacific.

I'm eagerly awaiting further developments. It's gonna be hella rad.

L'Internet des objets: French firm Sigfox inks deal with Telefonica

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Trollface

Re: Boringly, it's...

That should be

"L'entre-réseau d'objets"

Sounds like a the title of a Schuiten & Peeters "oeuvre".

Come to think of it, their (frankly great) "Robik's Cube/Network" comic came just as the Internet emerged from the garages. Weird.

UPS & drones: Delivery company launches UAV from truck

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Re: Coming to a neighbourhood near you soon...

You mean in addition to some neighbour's completely over-the-top SUV being started to great atavistic engine noise every 10 minutes?

Google bellows bug news after Microsoft sails past fix deadline

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Windows

Re: Security is Job One at Microsoft

No company would say 'our motto is "be evil"'

Wait until I start mine.

You might be surprised.

Is your child a hacker? Liverpudlian parents get warning signs checklist

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Trollface

"Monitoring tools you've put on the computer might suddenly stop working"

Carrie! CARRIE!

Love lambda, love Microsoft's Graph Engine. But you fly alone

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Holmes

Re: From an ignorant, long-time DB designers's viewpoint...

In a sense but in the olden databases the edge/node structure came directly from the on-disk layout.

Here the graph is the conceptual idea. Underneath there may well be reused table-structure handling/indexing routines.

Additionally the use of the "lambda" in the article sounds like name-dropping, I don't see why one would not just call them "procedures".

In colossal shock, Uber alleged to be wretched hive of sexism, craven managerial ass-covering

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Windows

Management types away from the coal face

You know you have a very high probably of meeting a nincompoop loser sociopath in expensive clothing (they also have some kind of smooth speech pattern and a studied relaxed demeanor, very bizarre). Everyone is weirdly friendly with him/her/it and C-level management thinks he/she/it "does a good job" and is "a most indispensible piece of the network". Meanwhile, good people touching his/her/its sphere of influence leave, if they have any sense.

Put a bullet to his/her/its head the only change in the company function is that there is menu too many in the cantina.

Huge if true: iPhone 8 will feature 3D selfies, rodent defibrillator

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Windows

Re: The Unbelievable Truth

US journalists must currently feel likewise.

US "journalists" are the problem as they make up bullshit faster than a cattle truck laden with bovines that have coli bacterium gut problems. I necessary, it is declared "leaked" as opposed to "stitched together from whole cloth while recovering from last night's ethanol overload paid for by some Washington Insider".

The last shooting war they got us into wasn't fun and is still ongoing, the next one will be the last.