* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

AES-256 keys sniffed in seconds using €200 of kit a few inches away

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

So that's what "Pointless Albatross" is.....

I know.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

In effect "traffic analysis" applied at the bus level.

This may be either quite easy or quite difficult to counter.

Basically you need to keep a constant(ish) power level in the system. If that's possible then it will be more difficult to pick the signal out of the noise. Keep the data paths filled with dummy data so there are no (or quite shallow) spikes in the noise.

It's intriguing that they were able to chop the search space into byte size segments and thereby exclude a lot of it.

Clever but depressing, give AES256 seemed pretty strong.

IoT coverage for 95% of UK by 2019? We can't even do 4G, Sigfox

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

" industry is proceeding..nationwide IoT network..in place..commercial customers by late 2018."

Some people seem to think this will be one way IE it's SCADA without the SCA part.

Sorry but I'm baffled. AFAIK everyone who does this already has this level of access. Everyone who needs remote telemetry (and can afford it) does this already.

BTW the UK does have a private trunked digital data network already called TETRA. I think Tescos use it to link all their site internally and can allow break out calls between sites. Much cheaper than mobile phone charges.

So where is this massive market of people who a) Want to collect lots of data from lots of places about "stuff" and b) Can pay what this network will charge.

Or is this to implement tracking of all UK suspects citizens who don't have a mobile phone to track?

FCC: LEO ISPs A-OK

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Looking up the previous history of LEO and MEO phone providers.....

In the early 90s 5-6 companies said they wanted to do this.

3 got to launch of which Iridium was the expensive, with Orbcomm and Globestar.

Only Iridium delivered voice comms. The others went with M2M for driver dispatch, high value asset tracking and SCADA tasks using essentially SMS.

All went Chapter 11. Iridium got a big boost when the USG bought a lot of minutes for use by staff globally (provided they are not inside buildings of course).

OTOH with cable companies having virtual area monopolies in different areas of the US for internet access this story may have a different ending.

US Secretary of State: I will work with Russia on cyber security issues

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" both sides must mutually agree and abide by the rules of engagement, "

Good luck with that.

Anthem to shell out $115m in largest-ever data theft settlement

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"GDPR is not involved. Anthem is US based."

And won't start their infection of the NHS until after the UK leaves the EU.

Tech giants flash Russia their code blueprints in exchange for access

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

A pragmatic approach or government grade security theatre?

As noted above if you can't convert the source through the same tool chain and then do a byte for byte comparison, using your own comparison tools, and account for all discrepancies found then who knows what's actually running in the box?

And then of course there's the massive open hole of the Intel server admin co processor.....

Heaps of Windows 10 internal builds, private source code leak online

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Windows 10 Mobile Adaptation Kit, "

Bet you won't be seeing too many of those in the wild.

And plenty to chew on on the PnP and WiFi stacks I think as we get to see just how good those MS training for coders really are.

Latest Windows 10 Insider build pulls the trigger on crappy SMB1

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"The big wakeup call was the Morris Worm of 1988 "

Wow.

Next year the world can "celebrate" 3 decades of buffer overflows

Yay for that.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" good to know that they know what important stuff needs fixing."

They like to feel that if they take care of the little things you won't mind so much about the ongoing bandwidth they're soaking up shipping their "telemetry" back to Redmond.

Not working in my case.

I'm still p**sed off at this s**t.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

"U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO"

I stand corrected.

This does indeed encapsulate exactly what I need to express my opinion.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

We still seen to be missing the most valuable Emoji of all....

The "This is a piece of s**t" emoji.

Which I think would be a most valuable addition to the dictionary of visual communication.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"Home and Professional editions strips out the SMB1 server software exploited by the NSA."

But don't worry Fort Meade cube rats, MS will have left plenty more exploitable vulns in their code for you to use.

They always do.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

"Windows is the only OS that has succeeded in taking all the performance gains hardware

ever offered and keeping UI response times at the same levels since '95."

Pascal.

Thank you for noticing.

It's been damm hard work to figure out ever more creative ways to burn those cycles and fill your disk capacity but time and again our team has stepped up to the challenge for the Corporation.

<signed>

Windows 10 Development Team.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Those interfaces hardly work at all under hybrid tablet mode."

Your failure to understand that some people do not share your PoV probably explains your rising number of down votes.

Perhaps a significant number of readers view the lone-hacker-sitting-in-a-coffee-shop-writing-awsome-code-on-their-tablet trope to be bu***hit?

Lordy! Trump admits there are no tapes of his chats with Comey

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"How in the world did this snake-oil salesman get to here...?"

Well to slightly mis quote Marlene Dietrich

"The people wanted a leader. They got a leader. "

Wheather or not he's the sort of leader they wanted only time will tell.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Trump's done lots of deals in the construction business...

He's more a "person" guy than a "technology" guy.

And he's in the moment, not a real deep planner. What's said is said and tomorrow it'll all be different.

Not like Nixon, always working out the various directions, friends to have, friends to dump etc.

But while the theatre of public opinion may run on sound bites, in Washington people store up comments and actions. Anything can (and will) be used in evidence against you.

Trump either believes himself to be completely immune to this or thinks he's got more control (and more dirt) than anyone else.

I'll note the oath does not talk about defending the President. It talks about "Defending the Constitution, from all enemies, both foreign and domestic."

IOW the President is not the most important thing to be protected, it's the Constitution.

That implies the President sacrifices themselves to protect the Constitution.

No way can I see Trump doing that.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Vote Republican. "We Got Nothin"."

That's so unfair.

The D has already selected his slogan for 2020.

"Keeping America great."

It's simple. Say it often enough and people will think he has already made America great again.

Genius.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Holmes

"He's not a professional politician. "

He is however a bully and a bluffer.

You may not like Comey, but he called the D's bluff.

Too bad the best alternative the 'crats could come up with was Hilary.

Too bad the US system seems to make any kind of thrid party virtually impossible.

Tory-commissioned call centres 'might have bent data protection laws'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

I've had a chance to see the Ch4 report

and it's pretty obvious to anyone who's been on the wrong end of one of these people that it's a sales call, not a "Survey" call from both the questions and script around them.

The product being sold is either a) The Conservative Party" or b) The actual candidate in that constituency.

And since these are marginal constituencies (especially in Wales) I'd say there is a "public interest" call for the CPS to prosecute to clear the air and make sure the last British election was run cleanly and fairly and that Teresa May "almost won" on a level playing field.

Because if she didn't you'd have to wonder how badly the Conservative Party would have been thrashed. 28, rather than 8 below an absolute majority perhaps?

Conservative manifesto disappears offline – then mysteriously reappears

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"According to "Mogg" you cannot call it a shambles, that is something totally different."

Shambles is (IIRC) "The mess left in a slaughterhouse at the end of a days work."

OTOH if you treat "slaughterhouse" as a metaphor for the results of the last UK election, with the Conservatives absolute actual majority destroyed by Labour (in Scotland and elsewhere) and the Lib Dems coming back from the dead, then "mess left" is a pretty good metaphor for the Conservative party.

IOW Conservative Party --> Shambles is metaphorically true.

However current thinking seems to be to keep May in the job till after Brexit, and then blame all failures on her (even if David Davis and his team delivers anything close to Brexiteers delusions aspirations. A mission even Jim Phelps would have rejected as impossible).

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

@ Walter Bishop

And those are their more sane policies.

The big one coming down the pike is likely to be the fact that a lot of DUP supporters work for the NI equivalent of the "Federal" government. As such they have been subject to the nationwide sub-inflation-rate pay cap for the last 8 years.

This makes them very unhappy.

And what makes DUP supporters unhappy makes DUP MP's unhappy. The joker in this pack is the UK government has a formula for fairly sharing funds to the regions. Any increases to NI requires matching increases to Wales, England, Scotland as well.

Payrise to counter 8 yrs of sub inflation pay rises x all UK public sector workers --> Lots of money.

Vblock tags in Vxblock: Move is a 'simplification' for punters

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

Exciting news but missing reaction from one major player.

The Head of the NSA commented "This is great news. Anything that makes our job easier is good for us and good for America."

WikiLeaks doc dump reveals CIA tools for infecting air-gapped PCs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"pointless albatross"

What do you know about pointless albatross?

It's not even ready for release yet.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Hacked the snack machine and stole $4K of goodies.

Proper BOFH behavior.

Allegedly.

Fujitsu loses Dimes amid plans to save dollars

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Check her LinkedIn

Is she "Open to new opportunities?"

Although isn't there meant to be some Irish serial killer in Galway they can't find?

Genoans flout terror ban with bumper basil hand baggage policy

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Superb headline opportunity wasted.

"Cristoforo Colombo Airport is anti-Pesto."

V. Poor work El Reg.

NASA? More like NASAI: Brainy robots 'crucial' to space exploration

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

The classic scientist algorithm "That's odd, we should assign some resources for more study"

The tricky bits are buried in how exactly do you define "odd", "some" and "resources" ?

Starting with the the point that one persons outlying (but valid) observation is another persons probable instrument error.

And that's the easy part. You can just crunch it overnight on a NASA server farm.

The SoA for on board space computers is roughly a Power PC running about 400MHz flash drive (NASA never seemed to like spinning rust on orbit). Capacity isn't too much of a problem but main memory is also fairly limited. I'm not sure if NASA has run any GPU's or GPU arrays on orbit yet. Very handy to have in this sort of situation but difficult to get in rad hard Mil Spec versions.

Keep in mind that beyond Jupiter by the time a probe has sent back a report of something interesting and NASA has a)Agreed it is interesting and b)What to do about it

the phenomena could have disappeared. If the mission is a flyby then the probe may already have gone past it.

Exciting times.

Ailing Brit chip designer Imagination Technologies up for sale

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

How many British readers even knew they existed?

And for bonus points.

How long with they exist for.

Queen's speech announces laws to protect personal data

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Don't do deals with Orange Men. And I'm not talking about the DUP.

I see what you did there.

Don't you know that May's er "special" relationship with the D "will bring Yuuuuge benefits to the UK?"*

I'm sure he'll probably tweet something along those lines any day now.

*Not fake news as it is not claimed he has tweeted this, just that he might.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" (It is already mandatory for new build towers to have sprinklers.)"

I think one of the recommendations of the 2009 fire report was sprinklers outside the block spraying into the gap between the cladding and the building.

At least 3 (and probably more) things had to fail to turn a fridge fire (WTF makes a fridge catch fire?) into a RL reboot of "The Towering Inferno". :-(

Any one of those not happening could have broken the chain of failure and saved the day.

But they all did.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"or is it actually useful as external insulation?"

In theory the insulation is meant to reduce heat losses and gains.

But you've got to wonder how effective it is if it's standing off from the building surface and apparently nothing stopping the airflow.

IOW a chimmney lined with combustible insulation that's just about fire resistant.

It's hard to conceive of a more effective way to turn an ugly (but highly fire resistant) building into a human incinerator, short of spraying it with napalm and setting light to it.

According to the Torygraph the difference between this stuff and the properly non combustible insulation was £2/ Sq metre. Apparently the grade they used is made in the US but no longer available for use there.

A building material too s**t even for the US to use.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"Allegedly, it wasn't mentioned because no date has been set so far."

I think a date was proposed, but it clashed with his planned visit to Dallas.

And I'm sure HMG wouldn't want him to miss that visit.

It's a light wind breaker. Appropriate wear for a light picnic on a grassy knoll.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"And what about being offline and not risking to die in a building that caught fire?"

It is true that Grenfell House killed in 1 night more than double the people that all the terrorist incidents in the UK in the previous 12 years have killed.

And there's a potential 4 000+ other buildings that are at risk of their cladding going "whoosh."

And there have been persistent warnings from an all party group on this issue since 2009 that have been ignored.

But, y'know, "Terrorism, innit."

And inside Conservative Central Office can you doubt they are thinking "Well that's one seat we won't have any trouble taking back."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"Smart Meter Bill"

"smart meters will be offered to every household and business by the end of 2020"

Hopefully most of which will say "My 6YO could hack that PoS" and tell the offeror where to stick it.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"But then again Phil's in hospital and the first race at Ascot is at 2:30."

You do wonder has she asked "Driver, can you put on the Blues & Twos ?"

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"So what's happened to 'backdoor for all encryption' then?"

Citizen.

We note from your comment that you are failing to apply the principles of "Double think" correctly.

Please review the relevant section of the Citizenship Manual, as a repeated failure will require you to report to the Ministry of Love for more extensive re-education.

<Signed>

Big Brother.

Humanity uploaded an AI to Mars and lets it shoot rocks with lasers

John Smith 19 Gold badge

NASA actually makes quite heavy use of AI

In the sense of task scheduling and planning problem diagnosing systems.

Not exactly HAL but handy for lightening the routing burden of looking reams of stuff for any suspect patterns (or rather looking through those reams for a pattern after something has happened).

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Headmaster

"remotely like flight hardware before we leave ESA."

Actually no.

Although it's called the European Space Agency it's not directly tied to the EU.

And Canada is also a member.

PLATO mission to find alien life is given the thumbs up

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Now that we have some actual baseline data...

Perhaps we should refine the spec to look for actual Earth type worlds.

IE mass = M(e) +1/-0.3 Orbital period 3-500 days in the 5-500 Light range for example.

Just a thougth.

'No decision' on Raytheon GPS landing system aboard Brit aircraft carriers

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Read it as "JPALS emits an email burst of data that allows the approaching aircraft..."

And thought

"S**t. After Windows for Warships....

Outlook for fighters."

Obviously my bad.

BTW. That data burst may be encrypted but wouldn't it's operating frequency and its very existence indicate a carrier was in the area which could be found by direction finding?

Gov.UK pops open tin of AI and robotics research cash

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

The auto pilot for the Skylon spaceplane sounds suitabley high tech

So probably won't get a penny.

Canadian sniper makes kill shot at distance of 3.5 KILOMETRES

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

12 000 inches --> 1000 foot offset?

Can that be right?

Testing out one of those new DARPA super-duper scopes?

BMC and CA in agreeable acquisition talks – report

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I think you give them more credit than they deserve"

They are probably the biggest SW company most people have never heard of. $13Bn is no small mound of cucumbers.

They do focus on the legacy market, however I'm not sure how much actual upgrading their products get, because that would require them to hire devs and that costs money.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Then they could merge with MicroFocus and ASG

I think that (in their own way) MicroFocus is still quite innovative.

Hacker exposed bank loophole to buy luxury cars and a face tattoo

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Holmes

"* CB and YB use the same backends, accounts and processing, "

G'day

That's right the Yorkshire Bank, the national bank of the land of Whippets is in fact owned by the National Australia Group.

With, it would appear, hilarious consequences.

Ego stroking, effusive praise and promise of billions: White House tech meeting in full

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Pint

So where's the rest of the laws the 'pubs want to pass with their massive majority?

Enquiring minds.....

Beer, because that's about the most useful thing most people find about pubs.

US Air Force resumes F-35A flights despite not knowing why pilot oxygen systems failed

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"so someone explain why Lockheed..won out over Boeing's offering"

Well that's the talent of LM.

Time after time they might lose the competition, but someone it's there aircraft that got built.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"Lockheed Martin displayed the F-35 without incident, "

Was anyone else thinking "Is presentation, not demonstration."

It's not so much a jacket as more a chest piece.