* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

'DNC hackers' used mobile malware to track Ukrainian artillery – researchers

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Big Brother

Bloomberg writer says this smells

Why I Still Don't Buy the Russian Hacking Story

Then there's the issue of the targeting software itself. Yaroslav Sherstyuk, the Ukrainian military officer who developed the application, reacted angrily on Facebook to the CrowdStrike report, saying he never published the software on any public forums and encouraging fellow Ukrainian servicemen to keep using the latest version of his app. Via Facebook Messenger, he told me that he didn't believe an infected version of the app even existed. "This is a hoax to scare everyone and make us go back to the old methods of targeting fire," he wrote. A CrowdStrike spokesperson did not respond when I asked if it had contacted Sherstyuk. He said it hadn't.

The spokesperson, Ilina Dimitrova, wrote that "it is indisputable that the app has been hacked with Fancy Bear malware -- we have published the indicators related to it and they have been confirmed by others in the cybersecurity community." CrowdStrike said that it found the infected app "in limited public distribution on a Russian language, Ukrainian military forum." I doubt anyone in the Ukrainian military would download software for targeting artillery fire from a forum. Typically, they obtain it directly from known developers such as Sherstyuk. If I can contact him directly, so can Ukrainian artillery officers seeking to improve their performance in battle.

Hence, it's hard for me to believe that this infected app -- found somewhere on the internet and likely never used by Ukrainian soldiers -- offers evidence tying the GRU to APT28. And that's even if one accepts the initial logical leap to the GRU, as opposed to any of the other Russian spy services also involved in the Ukrainian conflict. I sincerely hope that when the U.S. intelligence community finally produces its findings on the election-related hacks, it will be more convincing.

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Finding gay sauna addicts in places you wouldn't expect?

Sounds about right!

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Windows

Commence Arty Strike on this App Position!

This is getting more and more "out there" though, now the "fancy & cosy bears" are linked to the DNC "hack" which according to "Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan and whistleblower" doesn't even exist (audio, article). Will this train ride ever stop?

(Also, didn't Russia provide good satellite imagery to eastern rebels (and probably their own long-range artillery) anyway? Why APTify the mobiles?)

Chinese boffins: We're testing an 'impossible' EM Drive IN SPAAAACE

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If you follow every harebrained scheme that's being laid in front of your doorstep, you will never get anywhere....

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Re: Anybody able to do the math for me?

Well, I hear the US has found lots of money in an underground vault and Reagan-era SDI with space lasers and all that is baaaack. So who knows...

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Woah. From a far-out barely credible idea into "Space Neocolonialism" (what kind of resources are you going to exploit exactly and how and how is any of that a "race"?) in two sentences.

Wake me up when O'Neill Spacestations are being dropped on Australia.

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Re: It works this way:

Because probability waves.

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Paris Hilton

> "The model predicts thrusts of: 3.8, 149, 7.3, 0.23, 0.57, 0.11, 0.64 and 0.02 mN"

I think that should be uN?

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Thumb Up

Re: Anybody able to do the math for me?

Listen to the Kroes!

> The xenon ion thruster on Dawn is 9mN/kW.

And that's from accelerating stuff coming from a tank mounted on the spacecraft and asking Mother Nature to please conserve momentum, as is the local custom.

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Re: Nothing but the universe comes for free

> photon rest mass is tiny

The consensus is that it is 0. That's pretty tiny.

Momentum however, is > 0. Which is why "photon drives" work at least in principle.

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Windows

Re: Many Bothans died to bring us this plot device

I said "This failed undertaking is akin to that failed undertaking and for both similar claims exist"

The countpoint was "But alchemists succeeded elsewhere.". Which is irrelevant. Mr. inventor may be a good cook for example...

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Windows

"This has happened before. And it will happen again."

No, the energy consumed is radiated as heat.... why would the center of mass shift?

This reminds me of the times of the "Woodward Drive":

"The Alternate View" columns of John G. Cramer: Antigravity Sightings (March-1997)

Honorably, tests were done and the idea abandoned.

Note the following text in the above-linked article: Woodward's published measurements, which appear to have been done with considerable care, record a mass reduction of several milligrams as measured using signal averaging techniques to a statistical accuracy of 10 to 15 standard deviations. He also reports a number of systematic checks which are in good agreement with the predictions of his theory.

Okay. The BBC would probably have been breathlessly reporting about new possibilities in Space Drive Technology...

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Re: Time for a change

Yeah at some point in time, we will be selling them the fried mars bar.

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Windows

Re: Many Bothans died to bring us this plot device

What Alchemists did is not particularly relevant here.

can come up with a good explanation for the results that people are seeing but in the meantime

Here is one: UNKNOWN MEASUREMENT ERROR.

This is a device into which you pump a LOT of energy and then check whether there is force at the boundary of the instrument sensitivity.

Check out those measurements here: Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum

In particular the graph at the bottom (hotlink).

Shazam! Linear Curve Fit! (Why not logarithmic? It looks logarithmic to me!!) Now are those measurements of up to 80 micro-Newton consistent with an unknown systematic error source and a curve fit that is firmly on the y=0 line? Why, yes, absolutely!

I don't even know why the authors suddenly descend into the Bohmian Interpretation of QM which is now residing solidly on the graveyard of ideas (predictions are different from standard QM), some old farts regularly trying to revive it notwithstanding... it's not very seriousvery crank.

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FakeDesigns, Inc. a company registered in Unicorn Land

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Many Bothans died to bring us this plot device

I can't even hear it anymore.

An long-winded explanation of the EM-Drive's absence of power: here

Although if any physical (as opposed to practically usable) effects were indeed confirmed (a long shot), well, that would be interesting. Not holding my breath.

"This technology is currently in the latter stages of the proof-of-principle phase, with the goal of making the technology available in satellite engineering as quickly as possible," said Li Feng

I guess Alchemists' gold-generation procedures were in the latter stages of the proof-of-principle phase, too.

NIST requests ideas for crypto that can survive quantum computers

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Headmaster

sensationalist

YES!

Quantum computers are best suited for Optimization problems, classic examples being the "Travelling Salesman Problem" or TSP.

NO. There is no indication that Quantum Computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.

See: BQP

And also: MUST READ COMIC

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Holmes

Re: Private Enterprise Has Started

> Luck shouldn't be a factor in robust encryption.

You wish.

It isn't proved that prime factorization doesn't lie in P after all...

How Rogue One's Imperial stormtroopers SAVED Star Wars and restored order

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Facepalm

Re: stormtroopers being fodder

> chose to fight

Against what exactly?

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Windows

Re: Two things bothered me

> the lack of theme tune at the start

No this is EXACTLY CORRECT. The fanfare stuff is so laden with Lucas letdown events that it wouldn't have been appropriate. It tells you "this is new!".

> poor CGI of Leia

People complain about this but in the end it's not so bad. It can pass for the couple of seconds and triggers the uncanny valley effect, same as for Tarkin really. But in the end, it's not worse than bluescreen leftovers in movies of old.

Now, let the management types of the Empire run the Death Star with no designers and no plans. Idiots from the Coruscant Imperial MBA churn institute...

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Re: Critique

> the awkward and forced love interest of the female lead

What.

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Windows

Re: How many Stormtroopers does it take to...?

Well, in Dune (the novel!) Sardaukar, the emperor's praetorian guard, immediately turn up in a "we officially strongly deny the presence of" role and are suddenly very interested in going up against these Fremen guys who are the only ones in the universe on challenger-worthy badass levels (I think they were thinking about some genocide operation lest there be competition but didn't get that far before a shift at the top occurred)

Jimbo's inpho stuffing service has more.

Frankly, none of this is meant for a family-friendly Star Wars universe. Imperial super-soldiers vs. rebel super-ISIS, probably all on drugs and behaving like rabid dogs? Nah. I would LOVE to see Fish Speakers though...

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Windows

Re: Critique

...or maybe you have just gotten older!

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Re: How many Stormtroopers does it take to...?

> Sardaukar from the Dune series, terrifying and nearly unstoppable.

But then you wouldn't need Vader to come and put mop-up operations on the rails again.

Seriously, rebels stopping Sardaukar? No contest."A New Hope" would have ended immediately.

This is not the Real World, get over it!

Energy firm points to hackers after Kiev power outage

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Trollface

Meanwhile, in the Empire

According to sources not only Russia, but also China and Iran may have had their hands in what can only be described as the Great Electoral Rape And Democracy Destruction Extravaganza of 2016. (Why not North Korea and possibly Maduro? That would at least complete the Axis of Evil lineup.)

[Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell]l said the issue should be investigated in “regular order” by the Senate intelligence panel, which is “fully capable of handling this.”

McConnell’s comments put him at odds with Arizona Sen. John McCain and other Republicans who have joined with incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in calling for a special committee to investigate efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in U.S. elections....

McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Russian interference in the election threatens to “destroy democracy,” adding that a select committee is needed to find out exactly what Russia did and what effect it had on the election.

“We need to get to the bottom of this,” McCain said. “We need to find out exactly what was done and what the implications of the attacks were, especially if they had an effect on our election.”

He said: “There’s no doubt they were interfering and no doubt that it was cyberattacks. The question now is how much and what damage and what should the United States of America do? And so far, we have been totally paralyzed.”

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Re: A serious threat.

Hacking these systems is a really good way of inflicting a lot of damage. I'm not saying this example IS an attack. But it is an obvious target.

A better way of inflicting a lot of damage is waltzing in with a few pounds of C4.

King's College London staggers from outage, replaces infrastructure services head

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Re: there but for the grace of God...

"The hard Bit Error Rates (BER) on SATA disks are far higher than on Fibre Channel, SAS, or SSD disks."

Why should that be the case.

Excepting SSD, this sounds like the manufacturers "inject" some problems to drive customers to the "reliably pricey solution"-

MH370 hunters call for new search of extra 25,000km2

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Re: but the search has to date cost Australia over AU$100m.

Woah how sub 50 IQ must one be to downvote that?

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Re: but the search has to date cost Australia over AU$100m.

> opportunity cost.

Economically absolutely correct but this IS the century of Keynesian stimulus.

Get ready for backdoor taxation!

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Alien

Re: Conjecture

I'm not saying it was aliens, but....

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Holmes

Re: it would have had to be done one day anyway.

Yeah.

So, 0.8% of Australia's F-35 program (planes they can't even use unless the Chinese are setting up bases on the mainland)

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Re: Conjecture

Why would you think that far?

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Alien

Re: Congratulations!

In the next episode of Star Trek, you will get two androids, "Data" and "Metadata". "Metadata" gets captured by the Borg collective and analyzed to death, blabbing all the intimate details of what goes in crew quarters after 20:00. "Data" goes on an eating binge, becomes fat and toxic, then in the end drops into the Hadoop trash compactor and gets leaked into space. Then lawyers board the ship. THE END!

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Alien

Re: it would have had to be done one day anyway.

> AU$100m.

Not even real amounts of "money".

This will increase the search capabilities in any case and teach people in the usage of tech, software and statistics. Go for it, I say!

Could be we find R'lyeh by accident, if the stars are right.

Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

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Re: Bummer

Haskell is pretty good. Just going through the phonebook "Real World Haskell" now. Really slowly. Hell yeah. But theorem provers like λProlog (or even bog-standard Prolog) attract me too....

Haskell is like "that girl." You know the one...

You never really went steady, but you'd run into her from time to time while knocking around in disreputable joints, usually late at night, every several months or so. She looked so hot, so sleek, so sexy, so expressive, so exotic. You'd end up back at her place and the night would just... take off. A complete blur of hot, sweaty, feverish, delirious, fumbling passion. You'd do things to each other... you'd do things to her, she'd do things to you... things that you're not even sure have names, that you're pretty sure are illegal almost anywhere. Even her kinks have kinks --- and after one of these nights, you'd realize that you yourself had a lot more kinks than you. And it wasn't just physical, it was --- cerebral. Ethereal. Transcendent. But it would all whiz by in a blur, and by morning you'd find yourself lightheaded, a bit confused, and stumbling homeward to your regular gal....

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Holmes

Re: OpenJDK free?

As I can see, yes, it's licensed under GPL + linking exception.

Of course, consult company lawyers before goinf into production etc.

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Re: You know

But hasn't everybody moved to Java 8 now?

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Megaphone

El Reg article declared as #FakeNews

What we Need is Standardised Non-OSS Licenses

If you’ve followed the recent (fake) news, you’ve probably already heard it. Oracle is “massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences”

After a quick check on the source (The Register), here’s a more realistic, probably more accurate version of that headline:

"Oracle is thinking about auditing 1-2 companies that massively ran the commercial Java extensions in production without paying"

There, fixed. Also:

"@timbray @AmbientLion Public Service Announcement: Don't believe everything you read in the Register.

— Brian Goetz (@BrianGoetz) December 17, 2016"

So who's right?

(And BTW, this thread seems to be full of wannabe sysop of the Entirely Clueless But Verily Opinionated Variety, no wonder IT Ops are despised so much).

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Holmes

Re: If only it goes the way of the dodo...

What's your problem?

You seem bereft of any actual knowledge, but have major anger issues, why are you posting (instead of taking your pills for example)?

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> The fact that my bluray player runs java is the reason I rip all my blurays

WTF does that even mean??

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Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers

OpenJDK: Probably no

Microsoft Andorid Tax: Probably yes

But you never know until a lawyer rings....

This is your captain speaking ... or is it?

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Re: Umm, ok...

> a complete and utter titsup of all avionics systems

Probably easier to "forget" a Tribble in the overhead luggage storage space.

If it only existed.

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...on EasyJet!

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Headmaster

Re: Whoa, hang on

In this thread: People discussing applying rowhammer from the in-flight entertainement system, theoretical possibilities of hacking just barely above subspace tachyon aether injection techniques, not realizing that "physical one-way link" are actually bog-standard two-way links (otherwise it would be called "tapping", right?) and other curiosities that Fox Mulder would be interested in.

GO BACK TO YOUR GEEK CORNERHACKERSPACE, FFS!

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Windows

Re: Whoa, hang on

And that's all fine until it turns out an unhandled buffer overflow in SNMP allows your "non-secure" request to hack the software on the "secure" system, right?

Sure and pointy ananas will emerge from your fridge to attack you at night.

Listen, making stuff up and declaring that there is a "potential exploit there" is all fun (and I indulge in this too) but, really. How about "you can't even overflow the buffer" (unless the CPU is not doing what it should in which case you may go home in any case)

> firewalls

Firewalls are a duck tape solution to restrict general purpose interfaces to some subset because one cannot fiddle with the general purpose interface. How about you don't even need a firewall?

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Re: Whoa, hang on

It's not like it's exactly complicated to implement a hard one way link to feed speed/altitude/heading/location with zero possibility of anything going the other way.

This.

Hell, at [redacted] we implemented an exchange between secure and nonsecure parts of the ground network where the nonsecure part would ask for new data using an SNMP packet, and the secure part would eject the data as needed. It's not rocket science!

All these airgap theatrics seem to come from people who are entirely unsure that a computer can be designed to be a controlled, manageable and entirely inspectable device (yeah that costs), not some weird semi-intelligent goodie cobbled together by crazed junior coders in self-modifying JavaScript (yeah that costs a lot less).

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Windows

I don't really feel the force of this exploit

"If all of these attacks are applied at the same time, a malicious actor may create a baffling and disconcerting situation for passengers."

Flying and passing the security theatrics is already baffling and disconcerting, a bit of monkey business will hardly be noticed.

Why don't people secure their IoT gadgets? 'It's not my problem'

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Holmes

It's a fscking Gremlin!

You better feed it every day new patches before 00:00, or you will bear the consequences.

There are already enough problems to solve in a low-tech house and a normal life.

Why not buy a golden retriever instead?

Los Angeles to extradite bloke from Nigeria after scores of city workers fall for phish scam

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Not Putin for once?

What a relief!

Rogue One: This is the Star Wars back story you've been looking for

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That Bothans were involved confirmed as #FakeNews