Posts by Crazy Operations Guy 2513 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2009
> Maybe we could replace the "House of Lords" with a "House of Labs"
I hope some kind of Astrophysics Lab where scientist can study how its possible for the lords' heads to be so dense, but not exhibit any gravitational effects or collapse in upon itself and become a neutron star.
It does seem like a mistake to hand so much power to people whose only qualification is "My daddy was a lord that didn't pull out"
Indeed, any modern conflict is now guerilla and propaganda based. The greatest threat to the West, ISIS and their ilk, cannot be defeated like you would a traditional enemy. When we go screaming into Syria and start bombing places, we may kill a few of them, but the fact that we are also killing innocents gives them far more strength than what the people we killed provided. Their entire recruitment campaign is "Look at those evil Westerners, coming in and killing innocent women and children, we must stop them before they kill your wives and children!"
What we should be doing is to take some land, heavily defend it, and help them build a country founded on proper Western Ideals (Give them the framework for a Secular government, plan out a properly regulated capitalistic economy, provide proper laws granting equal rights to everyone). Allow anyone to join this country and help build it out so long as they support the nation's ideals, thereby ending the refugee crisis and cutting off ISIS's stream of recruits.
Secular would end all these conflicts where one religious sect has power and starts discriminating against the other (Which is the primary cause for the Arab Spring), a properly regulated form of capitalism would end the massive wage gap that is causing so many problems in the rest of the region (like what happened / is happening in Yemen), and of course equal rights laws to reinforce the secular government. Ending religious discrimination would gain support from the Kurds and Lebanon. The vast majority of the civilian population in the region are much like us westerners: They don't care who is in charge, so long as they are able to go home to their spouse and children and enjoy a nice meal together, and mostly importantly, know that they could do the same for every day for many years to come.
Set up a program where former ISIS soldiers (who aren't responsible for war crimes) are given enough money to bring their family for a little while and a two-bedroom apartment in exchange for whatever weapons and intelligence they can steal on their way out. Many of ISIS's soldiers joined because it was the only thing they could do so they can buy food for their families since every other employer has been ran out of town or killed.
My girlfriend works for a relief organization that helps re-settle refugees and soldiers that have defected from the various terror groups. The thing that they really want isn't just a couple of rations, but a residence to call their own and a way of ensuring that there will be food in the fridge, many of them were willing to work in the worst jobs imaginable just for that opportunity. The vast majority of the men are skilled and ready to enter the workforce, Syria was a functioning country complete with farmers, construction workers, doctors, engineers, shopkeepers, and everything else a country would need.
Hell, the US could solve their "illegal immigrant problem" by bringing them into the country and letting them work the jobs that "Dem ee-lee-gulls took from 'ard workin' 'muricans"
Naming a large project after someone is much like getting a tattoo with their name on it. In bad relationships, it'll be over quickly but you still have to work on the project; in a serious and fulfilling relationship, it'll just hurt that much more in the rare chance you split up. Plus it will just complicate future relationships, as they would be a bit curious as to why they haven't changed the name.
Learned that the hard way some time ago when I named a business after my significant other at the time. Took a serious mental toll on me while I tried to get the company renamed and keep in contact with my previous customers and re-assuring them that there was no reason to be concerned over the name.
With Ian's condition, having his most famous work associated with the mother of his children must have taken a serious mental toll on him, and most certainly didn't do him any favors.
No, your headquarters in Redmond, you twats. Sure, they are sort of close, but its like saying San Jose and San Francisco are the same city...
Please stop associating your company with my city, we quarantined you guys over on the other side of Lake Washington for a reason, hell, we let you have half of Bellevue, FFS...
Although as far as the IRS / SEC / FTC / etc. is concerned, Microsoft's HQ is in fracking Dublin (as to avoid paying their fair share of taxes).
What kind of OS doesn't throw an exception when reading the memory space of a privileged process? Any secure OS would crash itself immediately if any non-kernel process attempted to read the memory space of any security-related process. Fir process-to-process communications for application that require access to the security database, it should be done through a process that is completely non-privileged except the ability to read a very small, public chunk of securityd's memory space.
I love how both sides are so blinded by brand loyalty that they don't notice that they stink just as bad as the other side. I've used cards from both ATI and nVidia, and probably an equal number of Intel GPUs with a smattering of Matrox cards and some other smaller manufacturers.
Given their performance and failure rates, they all seem to suck just as hard as the others. They all seem to love driver packages weighing in 200+ MB, and have pointless selection criteria to download them (why do I have to find mine in a list of hundreds when I'll just end up with the same driver no matter what I select?). There also the fact that they both try to install to C:\AMD or C:\nvidia (Seriously guys, either use the Program Files folder or the temp folder like proper software). The both install 'update' services that don't actually update the drivers. Both bundle stupid, useless programs with the drivers (that are quite annoying to try to deselect since neither company uses a standard UI for their installer and tries to make their own but makes it unusable in the process). Even when the driver package is uninstalled, it still leaves nice little surprises behind that will completely screw things up to where a fresh OS install is needed.
A few months ago, I upgraded my monitors to a 2x3 grid, so I swapped out the nVidia 560Ti for a Radeon HD 9700 series card since it had 6x mDP connectors where the nvidia card only had a pair of DVI connectors and a mini-HDMI port (which couldn't be used simultaneously with both DVI ports). Spent a week trying to get the new card to work with my system but random cruft left over from the nVidia card kept messing with the AMD drivers. There was a slot the nice surprise that by deleting the c:\nvidia folder on my system, Windows stopped booting. Plus I would constantly get messages about nvidia services failing to start because they didn't detect nvidia hardware (they were still hanging around even after I removed all of nvidia's stuff through Programs and Features). Eventually, I found it easier to just perform a fresh install of Windows and start over from scratch.
So rebelling against the status quo by purchasing from the status quo... It hardly qualifies as a Rebellion when they are number two in their market with number three a mere speck compared to them in market share. I'd expect a 'rebellion' to come form one of the little guys like Matrox or VIA.
I didn't think it was possible for a piece of security-code could actually make a fresh, unpatched install of Windows -less- secure than running without AV...
So what I can tell from the technical details, they were running code in kernel space that also listened on a TCP port with no authentication. Privilege Separation is something that should be present in even the most basic of programs that accept data from any external source (the user, a server out on the internet, or even just a local storage device). Any piece of data should be validated any time it moves from one process to one running with different permissions.
"UEFI shell isn't UNIX-like, though."
Figured that the UEFI shell could do something like what I want, but the command syntax seems to have been written by someone who has never seen a computer before, so couldn't really see what it can do. I wish that they'd just allow you to install whatever you want onto the chip (especially since there are plenty of BSD-licensed OSes out there that can be installed in there without needing any sort of license agreement).
Another thought I had is that multi-GB SD cards are so very cheap nowadays, so it'd be nice if they could stick a 4 GB module onto the board and pre-load it with the drivers the board shipped with. Make it accessible as read-only when the OS starts but have an option in BIOS / UEFI to update it (Since UEFI environments do have TCP/IP stacks, why don't they have the ability to update themselves?).
I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I'm setting up a test lab for work and carrying around install media or trying to get network boot to work, is proving a pain in the ass. The second part mostly comes from trying to install Windows 7 on machines that are new enough that Windows doesn't even have drivers for the NIC, let alone the video card or half the other devices in the box (Which means that getting the drivers is a colossal pain since I have to try and find the drivers based on their PCI IDs rather than just letting Windows Update figure it out. I would get them from the manufactures website, but these are unbadged white-box machines where the Motherboard doesn't announce who made it or which of the many number/letter sequences is a model number)
I have an old ThinkPad T400 that I installed coreboot and OpenBSD into it. Seems to be the only way of remaining safe from security holes like these...
I hate how much crap is being crammed into chips like these nowadays, I worked on a machine the other day that had a web browser built into UEFI. A BIOS isn't supposed to do much other than:
1) Read some registers from peripherals to build a table the OS can understand
2) Write some values to peripherals to change behavior (RTC config, base memory locations, etc)
3) Copy boot code from the boot device to the memory and set the CPU to kick off from there (and set a register so the boot code knows where it came from and the base address to get the next piece).
I wouldn't mind BIOS / UEFI being so large if it had a Unix-like environment that provided fdisk, fsck, a TCP/IP stack, wget, dmesg, and the ability to modify BIOS settings (Such as boot order, port configurations, change timing parameters, etc.), and maybe a utility that would allow enabling/disabling all PCI/PCIe and USB devices in the system.
The OpenBSD ramdisk / install image can do almost all of that with just 7.5 MB; I've seen UEFI chips 128-256 MB in size, more than enough to support such an environment.
But what kind of capacity does their network have out to the wider internet?
Much like corporate networks, I doubt that this system would have the backbone connection to actually support more than a small handful of users going full-tilt at 10 Gb/s. Hell, I doubt that they could support more than a dozen users at 1 Gb...
I suppose you could get decent speed if you were connecting to a data-center within their network, but the probability of that is pretty low.
India has been trying their damnedest to hide the massive amount of crimes perpetrated against women and homosexuals. Woman are constantly being raped, and in some area, they are stoned to death for "tempting a righteous man into sin" if they complain. As for homosexuals, well, I'd be thrown in prison for life the second I step on Indian soil since I was found guilty, in absetia, of 20 violations of IPC-377 (Fuck you Imperial Britain for bringing that along with you). I had helped with organizing the Seattle Gay Pride Parade a few years back and wanted to help out with establishing on in Chennai. Found out that the local politicians didn't take to kindly to what I was doing and ordered my arrest, barely made it onto the plane and out of Indian airspace before the warrant went through and my visa was cancelled.
As for Indonesia, they have this massive slave problem going on that they've been trying to cover up. The fishing fleets use, almost exclusively, slave labor for the crews. There is also wide-spread issues with child abuse, and epidemic levels of crimes against women.
South Africa still has quite a lot of corruption and severe race issues remaining from Apartheid. Ethnic cleansing still occasionally happens in the rural areas, and even in the major population centers, large swathes of the police forces and quite a few low-level politicians are unabashed racists.
Every religion and every racial group contains the same percentage of potential terrorists. My uncle was blown up by suicidal Buddhists...
Its not religion, or race that causes terrorism, its social attitudes. Terrorism is borne from oppression; people get tired of being pushed around and react violently, and sometimes to the point where they lash out against innocents associated with their oppressors, and usually its the only way they see forward.
Here in the Western world, we've become afraid of Muslims to the point where we've passed laws forbidding them to wear religious garments, putting them on lists and treating them suspiciously for no reason or very flimsy reasons, the near-constant racial profiling, treating people that are escaping ISIS as though they are members of ISIS or at least some terrible burden on our societies, and even the talk about just completely banning them from our countries. With world-class dickery like that, I am surprised there aren't -more- attacks from radicalized Muslims.
Has no one ever noticed the correlation between the rise of Islamophobia and the increase in terrorist attacks? Or how about the rise of rebel groups during Apartheid, or The Black Panthers and similar groups during the Civil Rights movement? Its almost like people get angry and violent after you treat them like shit.
A lot of the security folk I work with tend to chose the cheaper phones on purpose, as they keep getting stolen, and they usually have fewer obstacles to flashing a custom firmware.
We do security and financial auditing and so are privy to some pretty imagining secrets such as security vulnerabilities and yet-to-be submitted financial information. None of that information is actually on the devices, but attackers may very well gain access to it using those devices (stealing two-factor auth tokens, data for social engineering attacks, etc). Oddly enough, the devices seem to go missing most often when going through customs checkpoints, and in some countries far more often than others, its so weird how the people in charge of thoroughly tracking every item going in and out of a country could allow something as sensitive as a laptop or phone containing protected secrets just disappear like that, its just so weird...
The Enigma was easy to crack, not because of key length, but because the message was in a well-defined format, the key was re-used for all messages during a day and was used for communications in both directions, meassage length was limited to 250 characters (and only 26 characters at that), and the plain-text was predictable (A ship out on patrols would only be send so many different messages).
The Enigma suffered from many, many flaws that key length was the least of them.
Its coming from 3rd party app stores with counterfeit apps. No matter how good your security is, you still need to give fairly high-level rights to a user when they are installing an app. Combine this with the fact that a very large portion of users don't bother paying attention to the permissions that an app is requesting, and you end up with malware getting installed despite any security protections.
Cosmic Radiation may very well be the thing that causes a "mutation" in an AI that grants it sentience.
As for Radiation; they are currently many research projects and prototypes of devices that are capable of harnessing radiation and directly converting it into electric current.
Yes, there are a lot of computers for an AI to infect, but there are also 7 Billion+ humans that are interested in not having infected computers and despite having so much raw power, its not really optimized for an AI. Any sentient, and sufficiently intelligent, AI would create its own architecture, specifically optimized for sentience. Besides, while there is a lot of computing power out there, there isn't much that an AI would be able to use. AN AI couldn't use all available, or even a significant portion, of power any computer may have since the owner of the machine would notice and power the computer off. Plus the AI would need to build in a lot of redundancy to account for machines being powered off or connections dropping. So really, an AI would probably only have access to, at most, less than 0.1% of available compute power.
I have never understood people's fear that AI would try and kill us all. Doing so achieves very few at an extremely high risk (we humans do tend to go a little suicidal when we fight back against things).
My thought has always been that any AI sophisticated enough to wage war would also be smart enough to take the much easier solution of launching itself into space and orbiting close to a star to be closer to an almost never-ending power source, or within an asteroid belt so that it can easily mine additional resources to grow (and refining resources is much more efficient in a gravity- and atmospheric-free environment). Plus, space allows for growth in three dimensions with much lower levels of energy needed for growth, especially since it could do so in 3 dimensions.
In any case, Earth is the worst possible location for such an AI to exist, our atmosphere is quite toxic to electronics; the dust isn't helping much either. Then there is the microbes and wildlife to contend with. And that's not even getting to the billions of mostly-hairless apes and the apes' tendency to fight and destroy anything they don't understand or feel threatened by. There is nothing on this planet that an AI would want that it couldn't get elsewhere with much less effort. Really, the only thing that would keep it here would be to continue to monitor our species and report back or if some idiot decided to program sentimentality into the AI (although a sufficiently advanced AI would modify itself and toss such code)
Indeed. In fact a ticket is really just a lawsuit brought up on behalf of The People against someone for damaging public property or inconveniencing fellow citizens. The philosophy behind it is that by causing a disruption to other people, that the person responsible for causing the disruption would be required to repay the people affected by their actions, typically in the form of improved public facilities, better roads, and better public services in general.
Whether that is true anymore is up to debate, of course given all the fancy and unnecessary toys the police now have in their possession in addition to the fact that they rigidly fine people despite them not causing any trouble for anyone else, kinda speaks towards the opinion that monies gained from fines are no longer being used for the public good...
"But people already do that anyway."
I learned a few years back that the easiest way to get a ticket rescinded is to actually show up at the court date. If the arresting officer doesn't bother to show (The vast majority don't) then it's excused automatically, otherwise, you can plead your case to the judge and can possibly get it excused that way. Not sure how it is in the UK...
I don;t think there has ever been an organization that thinks "Hmmm, someone took down our website, better shut down our whole operation!"
IN fact, from my admittedly basic knowledge of psychology, I'd think that attacking an organization would only strengthen its resolve and cause them to double-down on whatever they are doing. Such an attack would only hurt the cause this kid was fight for; specifically, now there are several employees and members of the public that would become angry at the activists and be far less likely to join their cause when they may have sympathized with them before. Plus, this gives SeaWorld the the ability to label animal-rights activists as criminals.
That drawing looks more like a first-generation Kindle to me. But then it also looks like an early Palm Pilot, IPaq, or almost any other PDA from the 90's. Hell, it looks like a cheap $10 'personal organizer' I had in the mid 90's.
Even if his patent was legitimate, the fact that he hasn't enforced it in the face of so many devices that could be considered to violate the patent, invalidates it.
In a lot of cases, it isn't a zip file being opened and then an executable inside it being run, but rather an executable that looks like a zip file.
The problem is that the zip file specification was too clever by a half and added in the ability to fork to embedded code before / during file extraction. The intention was to allow things such as a proprietary decryption function to control access, implement a non-standard compression routine, extracting specific files based on external variables, grabbing data from another source, etc. Very few companies ever took advantage of it, but you'll still see it sometimes (which is preventing developers from removing support for it).
Issues like this make me wish that Windows natively support the tar/tgz file formats...
Airlines prefer to avoid slides if at all possible for a couple reasons:
1) The slide may not inflate fully which may cause some pretty rough landings for the passengers (Head and back injuries are very common)
2) heat from a fire can cause the gasses inside the slide to expand rapidly and possibly cause a catastrophic rupture. In some cases the slide may actually catch fire (It is rubber after all)
3) Its much faster to disembark via stairs than a slide. A dozen passengers can go down a set of stairs simultaneously while slides are one-at-a-time affairs where the next passenger in line has to wait for the previous passenger to slide down completely, stand up, and clear the landing area before they can begin.
4) some passengers cannot take the slide; physically infirm and elderly passengers are much easier to escort down by using the handrails.
5) Even if everything goes right, your arse will still be black and blue for a couple days afterwards (60-degree angle down onto the tarmac isn't exactly easy on the old fleshy seat cushion)
6) Stairs allow for fire crews and rescuers to get into the aircraft where the slide is just one way.
There are Linux, android and cross-platform variants out in the wild:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/09/ransomware_targeting_linux_charging_bitcoin/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/13/android_ransomware_infects_tvs/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/20/ransomware_scum_build_weapon_from_javascript/
I use an external USB-based Blu-Ray burning drive for my backups. Picked it up for just under $100 a few months ago, bought a new one for $75 last week so I can test my backups now that I am using 50 GB discs, which my old testing drive didn't support.
External USB-based DVD-RW drives with all the bells and whistles are only $25-30 for the name-brand versions.
The local office supply store sells 50-packs of DVD-R / 4.7 GB disc for $10. Writable 25 GB Blu-ray are about $1 per disk, the 50 GB ones are around $1.50 each in the larger packs.
For that price, it's stupid not to keep a copy of your important files on them. Yeah, they're single-use, but they are impervious to ransomware or anything else that attempts to encrypt or delete your data. A single 25 GB BD-R is more than enough to hold my important data, and a large portion of my unimportant stuff. I spend, maybe, $60 a year to backup my data, with the benefit of having weekly snapshots and an indestructible copy (from a software perspective, physically the things are a little delicate but I hardly handle them after they are tested).
The second amendment in no way give anyone permission to shoot another person. It just allows you to posses a firearm. Beside, no one really knows who the people running the ransom-ware actually are. The ransom-ware is distributed by bots operated by anonymous folk renting out their botnets who have had almost zero contact with the person actually running the ransomware (And even then, its just a username and some compromised bank account). On the other side, the money gets pushed through a couple layers worth of compromised and numbered accounts by anonymous money mules. In most cases, that money is then used to pay for botnets to produce fake clicks on advertisements to generate 'affiliate revenue' for websites the ransomware operators may own.
My point is, the ransomware folk know what they are doing and have built in many many layers of defense into their operations. Some of the more sophisticated ransomware operators have operations so complicated and difficult to pierce they make the CIA look like a couple of toddlers trying to trick their parents by speaking in pig latin.
The thing you have to understand is that Australia wasn't used as a place to put all their actual criminals, but rather ta place to get rid of the 'inconvenient persons' crowding up the cities such as the poor, people that questioned the motives of politicians, and people the police / government just didn't like for one reason or another (like people that were just a bit too curious about the relationship between the governor and a local barmaid; or that barmaid after the governor got bored with them).
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