Posts by moiety
774 posts • joined Friday 28th August 2009 21:48 GMT
All this cunning software stuff...has nobody thought of just unscrewing the HDD and saying "it's broke" to the IT guy? You have a head start. Replace it with a similar looking one and you have more time to escape. Clone the disk and it'll probably never be detected (although that would need a power supply feeding into the back of a drawer or similar).
None of you guys will ever be James Bond. I won't be either because I fucking hate being shot at.
Re: This isn't the DM's style
Given the number of "OOh! Look at X...all grown up!" (ie, has sprouted tits) stories in the DM; I'm not totally convinced that they are the right people to be policing something like this.
I applaud the decision. In 10 years or so -when twitter is no longer around- people will wonder what the fuck their parents were talking about. It's good to have a reference -or at least a starting point- when it comes to searching historical terms. Due to the internet; language is moving faster...dictionaries have to step up the pace or die and give in to the Urban Dictionary.
Re: Moving my servers out of the US.
I wouldn't put too much faith in the Swiss...they've already rolled over for bank data; which was the one thing they were famous for protecting.
Re: @moiety I didn't feel, despite the accusations....
Just coz they're out to get everyone doesn't make it any better...
Re: I didn't feel, despite the accusations....
Me neither. I've always maintained that it's not paranoia if they are -demonstrably and provably- out to get you.
Re: Root password, sure, but why wasn't the data encrypted?
What's stopping people taking photos of the screens? There's usually a hack whatever precautions you take.
Users should store shit on their own local hard disk drives. 1Tb is £60 on eBay FFS...in text you could pontificate for fucking decades with that. Down to years if you want pictures; but even so.....
(I did get the 'money back' point, BTW).
Re: Please can you help out @ Maharg
Justin Bieberlake: Designer of the footwear that will take you into the next century. Or something of that ilk.
Re: no way
"Who says this and actually means it?"
Lots of people, I imagine. Possessions own you to a certain extent. With tablets, you have to keep them charged up; you need to clean up a premium space in your house (ie, near a power socket) for them to nest while doing so and you should devote the time to customising and security if it's going to be a useful tool. I probably would take this machine if offered for free (I have teenagers and spares of easily breakable kit are always welcome); but I wouldn't buy one...it's heavy, has crap cameras and I already am adequately tabletted up.
That said, I wouldn't take an iPad or iPhone for free because I don't like the ecosystem. I'd take 10 iThings for free because eBay, but I couldn't be arsed with just one.
Classic example of why you shouldn't trust the cloud. Some other fucker has his fingers on the off button and his motivations aren't the same as yours.
Good point. So you harvest as much as your technology can cope with. Maybe by just harvesting the metadata for -say- voice calls for everybody and only the content for persons of interest. And some data is redundant...if you're after a bunch of people for torrenting films, say, you'd only need 1 copy of the film for court however many users you're going after. So there are ways of reducing the volume of data you need to process; some requiring sacrifice and compromise; some not.
By the way; I'm just playing devil's advocate here a little bit. Governments legislating themselves the right to go through my private biz fucks me right off.
Re: Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it's failures
Simple question; but the answer is far from simple. For the same reason that pretty well every country in the world keeps a standing army -which is an organisation designed for EEEEEVIIIILLLL- nobody is going to unilaterally disband theirs because all the other foreign bastards have one. Same with spying operations.
There is no way in hell the US (in particular the US; due to their 'world's police' thing which doesn't go down too well with all involved parties) is going to stop any of this. If they say they are, then they will be lying.
Let's face it; it's the NSA's job to hoover everything. If PRISM is only hoovering up selected information then you can bet that they're trying to hoover ALL THE THINGS under a different flag. People bitch about lack of privacy; but when something happens -like the Boston marathon, for example- the cry changes to "Why didn't you see this coming?". Were I the head of the NSA you can bet your arse that I would be hoovering everything I possibly could...you never know which data nugget will harvest gold.
The more complete an information set you have; the better you can make your detection algorithms...you can simulate historical events with all the attendant tweets/calls etc. and see if you can find any common denominators; warning signs; tells; or sequences of events that lead to undesired outcomes.
That's the ethical part of course. There's commercial espionage and changing times (anyone else remember when drunk driving was funny?). What's perfectly acceptable today is possibly thoughtcrime tomorrow. So that's a worry. If the system was devoted to nailing terrywrists and that alone, nobody would give a shit.
The real problem is that the nature of the game means that the spooks cannot be transparent in their operations. It's the unknown factor that people fear.
Re: Don't get too excited
Yeah; my citrus polar bear repellent works 100% of the time. Haven't seen a single polar bear since I moved to Spain.
"But this makes little sense, as immense cryptologic and analytic resources would have to be deployed at interception centres to decrypt and analyse SSL"
Why would they bother doing that? They're the government. Surely leaning on the SSL certificate issuers would be easier and more productive.
As a Telefonica customer I already am penetrated every day...the *second* I joined up they sold my email address to every bastard out there.
Posted in Meet your new martyr: Edward Snowden
Good story, but you're forgetting one thing...the press are still pretty pissed off about their personal phone interceptions, so might not be as cooperative as usual when it comes to the (coming soon, probably) hatchet job.
The only surprising thing about this is that people are surprised. All those acres of computers are for what exactly? Crysis?
Facial recognition isn't the problem. Running your entire life through Google servers is.
Re: Seriously though,
They should use real seals. It would be much funnier. Or possibly penguins.
Re: Micro USB charging
Those watches with one-shot batteries are probably going to lose their waterproofing as soon as you replace it...it's often done with a pressurised case.
I had a 200m G-Shock crap out on me in the shower, once, for exactly that reason.
Re: Meh.
Mt Gox has a .com...that'd be the obvious next move. Let's hope they've got some other TLDs too.
Not everyone is an American...particularly on a British IT site.
Also not everyone rolls over automatically. While the end result might be inevitable; there is no value in making it easy.
Microsoft chap...anything that needs extra clicks to do the same thing you used to do in less clicks is something you should not do. Simple really.
The bit that suprises me is people happily opening a PDF fom the NSA. I'm not going to look at it until I convert it into something less toxic than PDF.
@Peter Simpson 1
You may find this helpful (there is a show desktop button in the (disabled as default) quick launch bar):
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/add-the-quick-launch-bar-to-the-taskbar-in-windows-7/
...also this:
http://classicstartmenu.com/
That's what I was going to say...considering the complete arse the US have made of things (taking the rest of the world's economy with it) the sensible thing to do would be to keep the fuckers as far away from Bitcoins as possible.
Re: The scum fleecing the dumb
Wow.
Re: Beards are Best?
Much more dangerous than food debris (I eat like a human, and food very rarely touches my beard...don't want to waste food, mostly) are the dangers of short cigarettes (roll-ups) and a predilection for the most dangerous Chinese lighters I can find on eBay...quite often end up setting bits of my beard on fire.
"...all the other cloud-based intelligence Google and its ilk are hoping to deliver to us - functionality which costs us nothing more than our privacy."
You say that like it's a trivial thing. How many divorces have been caused -or at least enabled- by Facebook? You never know who's going to be accessing and using the information; nor what they will do with it.
"costs us nothing more than our privacy; and potentially life, freedom and/or everything you own". Fixed that for you.
If he as as successful as he claims, he could cause his own phone to be made; with whatever specs he likes.
Re: +1
I also loved the tagline. +1. Well done.
I will agree to Cameron's proposal...
...provided that he maintains the naughty list and fields all queries about it by himself. No staff. That should keep him out of our hair and -who knows- he may even learn how the internet works in the process.
Re: Flawed Survey
I showed how little I'm happy to share by not bothering to click on the link then moaning about it in El Reg comments. Do you think that counts?
Re: Good joke, more of this please
That's what I was thinking. Great plan to poke a nuke-armed nutter. What could possibly go wrong?
Re: The widespread belief that lithium-ion batteries don't suffer from “charge memory”
Presumably Petr Novak sells battery management software.
What I've read about Li batteries is that the cardinal sin is to run them completely out. Anyway; the memory effect is minuscule, according to the article.
Re: Hmm...
The police are bound by duty -and paid pretty well for- looking out for the weaker members of society. That clearly didn't happen here; despite photographic evidence (on the internet yet!). Whether they couldn't be bothered; were covering up for the Superintendent's son; or just plain lost the paperwork (I am speculating, of course...I don't know why the investigation didn't go ahead) the job of the police clearly did not get done in this instance.
While your Straw Man argument of throwing everyone involved into prison to be ass-raped is misrepresenting my argument somewhat; if the police fucked up then the people responsible should accept the responsibility and the consequences...whether that be written warning; sacked or whatever. If it was a deliberate cover up then -fuck yes- prison is an option.
More importantly than that though, the dead girl and her family deserve a proper investigation and they should damned well get one...it is a service that they have already paid for and haven't received if you want to look at it in strictly social contract terms and not get into a concept as slippery as justice.
Cheaper than that: A Parrot 2 is £260-ish on eBay right now; comes ready to go with 720p video and you can fly it from your iThing or Android tablet/phone. Relays live video back to the device, to be stored there or on an onboard USB stick.
I had a look at the parts and I reckon (after a fairly cursory look) that you could put together something a little more industrial (and with full-fat 1080p video) for somewhere in the £150-200 region. More if you want night-vision, of course.
Of course all this FUD is purest bollocks - drones uniformly sound like a swarm of bees and it would be absolutely impossible to stalk someone without them knowing about it (without getting into *major* cost for high-res kit and the oomph to lift it). With 'domestic' dronery if it's close enough to do the stalker any good; the stalkee knows all about it.
Re: Hmm...
I dunno..."investigate it properly or else" doesn't sound too unreasonable, as Anonymous statements go. There's photographic evidence and they could have just broadcast the names and let the baying pack go at them.
"We do not approve of vigilante justice as the media claims. That would mean we approve of violent actions against these [alleged] rapists at the hands of an unruly mob. What we want is justice. And that’s your job. So do it." - Anonymous
Seems fair enough to me. Surprisingly mature for Anonymous. Have to say that I agree with them on face value; and if someone's favourite son is being shielded then this is absolutely the right thing to do.
Re: Banks makes you think
My favourite author. He might want to consider volunteering to test this stuff:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/03/27/scientists-find-treatment-to-kill-every-kind-cancer-tumor/
Re: This is all too familiar.
"Every time you touch some device they tend to think it's then your responsibility for the next ten years, and if it stops working next month it's because you did not do "your" work properly last time."
Oh my god yes. I threw a new sound card into somebody's machine once. A YEAR LATER he phoned up swearing because his screen had gone funny and this was somehow my fault. As a bonus, it was 10PM on Friday when the wine had breathed and we were about to start the film. The cuntbucket's video lead had come loose, it turned out. The 300 viruses and multiple toolbars didn't help either.
I don't touch hardware these days, and I cite this as the reason. Nothing to do with the fact that I'm getting old and everyone has laptops; which are fiddly little bastards.
Re: Spamhous must really be hurting those parasites
@handle - that's not necessarily the case. Spamhaus is the reason I can't use a desktop email server (which I started after an important ISP-server email disappeared into the blue costing me a large wad...with a desktop server, it gets delivered, or you get an error message...either way you know whether it got through).
They do have a very high-handed attitude...it's basically "fuck you if you don't like it; but you're not sending emails from that (ISP's) IP range". And it's not just spammers who are effected. I admit that I'm probably a minority here; but they did put a serious spanner in my day-to-day operations.
Re: rise your hand those who want to see Kaley Cuoco in 4k ?
@Eddy Ito - You're only talking about films though. The same 4K and 8K kit would make for a superb video wall with a live feed from the roof (or somebody else's roof if your view isn't that hot); and using it in that context it's good that you can't see it all at once. Makes it more interesting.
Re: Great services if used properly
6) Keep a local backup, in case internet goes titsup
Google are tightening the screws
Adblock blocked; RSS reader gone; and -on a more personal note- YouTube doesn't seem to work on an 'unregistered' (with Google Play) Android device. I used to enjoy watching "People are awesome" videos in the pub...very relaxing.
Something else that's vaguely sinister is that a lot of apps are ONLY available in Google Play: Firefox for Android, for example (well, I'm sure that it can be obtained elsewhere; but Mozilla downloads are done through Google Play; which is a little disconcerting and indicative of some sort of deal in the background). Not surprising - Google does chuck money at Mozilla- but disconcerting, given Mozilla's 'we're independent' stance.
The condition for using Google Play is that you have to "register your device" before anything works and I just didn't like the sound of that.
The only reason I'm mentioning Google Play is that there seems to be shenanigans going on and that is indicative of a wider problem. I can't blame Google for axing the RSS reader and Adblock...I'm surprised they were involved with either as they don't really jibe with their business model. Google are tightening the screws and I expect this to continue. Also, as Ragequit pointed out, cloud services are very much at the whim of someone else who isn't necessarily providing that service out of the goodness of their heart. Local stuff all the way for me.
RSS reader is no problem anyway. Here's two:
WINDOWS:
http://www.feedreader.com/
ANDROID:
http://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=RSS&fdid=de.shandschuh.sparserss
Re: Adblocker is your friend
There are adverts on the internet? When did this start?
Namecheap for me every time. You should never host where your domains are anyway...keep 'em separate.
Megaupload weren't even in the top 20 of piracy choices at the time they went down. They might have been good for 5% several years before, before they got all wanky and laden with javascript.. 5% is purest fiction. Sounds more like MPAA (etc.) statistics rather than even an approximation of science. The 8 billion iPod etc.
Re: Lastpass for me
Keynote NT for me: Free tree-style note taker; stores everything in one file that can be encrypted. So you only need to remember the password to open the program and you can have a different and fiendishly complicated password for every service. Remembering shit is the computer's job. And as the file is encrypted, it's safe to sync to Dropbox or wherever, so losing your hard disk is recoverable from.
As a bonus you can have alarms on notes, so it reminds you of stuff too.
