* Posts by Chemist

2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010

Linux backdoor squirts code into SSH to keep its badness buried

Chemist

Re: The malware in this story seems to be of a level way above the usual windows effort.

"Actually I was totally taking the piss."

Yes, I know. I enjoyed it all the more !

Chemist

Re: The malware in this story seems to be of a level way above the usual windows effort.

Well I'm going to downvote you because although mostly correct in your statement you missed out 'rather secure' or better 'exceptionally secure'

Chemist

Re: NSA Trojan installed by other malware

From the Norton link in June

Risk Level 1: Very Low

Linux.Fokirtor Threat Assessment

Component Severity

Wild Level Low

Number of Infections 0 - 49

Number of Sites 0 - 2

Geographical Distribution Low

Threat Containment Easy

Removal Easy

Damage Level Medium

Distribution Level Low

How to relieve Microsoft's Surface RT piles problem

Chemist

Re: "although we're all going to have to get used to it" - hell, NO, NEVER, NADA, NIL.

""although we're all going to have to get used to it""

Oh no - those days are long gone !

BlackBerry to be throttled by own supply chain

Chemist

"a small market share compared to other manufacturers"

BMW in UK (2012) are 6.5% which given the number of manufacturers (~40) is pretty good. They are only bested by Ford, VW, Vauxhall although VW group are the real leaders with ~20%

Ricoh Theta 360˚ camera: Point and click immersive imaging

Chemist

Re: Close...

"but they cost thousands"

Hugin costs nothing and is excellent

IE 0-day plugged up but TIFF terror continues in November Patch Tuesday

Chemist

Re: 25! more vulnerabilities

"15,511,210,043,330,985,984,000,000 more of them" - have pity on him - he's just a Yahoo!

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_(Gulliver%27s_Travels))

The truth about mystery Trojan found in space

Chemist

Re: - all closed-source and all protected to the hilt.

"so a port to Linux is easier." - I imagine so much of 'our' software was in-house and much scientific software is written for Unix and nowadays Linux

Chemist

Re: cause headaches in finding open-source builds of current Windows-based scientific applications

Apology : I read it as 'capable'

Chemist

Re: cause headaches in finding open-source builds of current Windows-based scientific applications

"I didn't know Linux was incapable of running closed source applications."

If you're not joking -it does and I spent a great deal of my last few years at work running EXTREMELY expensive molecular and protein modeling programs - all closed-source and all protected to the hilt.

Want to BUILD YOUR OWN Tardis? First, get a star and set it spinning...

Chemist

Re: Time travel

"Of course neutrinos, and all other matter, can travel through time."

Agree. On the other hand photons don't experience the passage of time at all - interesting.

Chemist

"not very much but enough to require a colossal amount of energy to accelerate one to a speed faster than that which light travels at"

Not colossal merely infinite

SPACE, the FINAL FRONTIER: These are the images of the star probe Cassini

Chemist

Shows some of the difference between a .jpg & .tif

NASA state on their webpage that the photo shows the moon also as a slight extension to the south-east of the earth 'blob' - on the .tif image it looks to be so but the .jpg has artifacts which mask it . The difference in size between the files is 94MB/0.76MB so I guess that's a reasonable tradeoff.

(I did need to use my reading glasses at ~6" from the 1920x1080 display to see it though )

Chemist

Shouldn't it actually say...

Earth - mostly harmless

Ultimate electric driving machine? Yes, it’s the BMW i3 e-car

Chemist

Re: still don't get it

"They already have solar producing 25% of their needs"

They do not !

Solar being ~4% in 2012 as far as I can see, coal+gas ~65%, wind ~8%

http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/germanys-energiewende-the-story-so-far/ (English)

I heard a German boasting recently that "they produced almost all of their elec. from renewables" - talk's cheap

NO! Radio broadcasters snub 'end of FM' DAB radio changeover

Chemist

Re: DAB is pointless @Ben

"incurs a total bandwidth consumption of 1,382,400 bytes."

Are you sure ? I make it 1.38 GB

Microsoft advertises Surface, Excel with maths mistake

Chemist

"Hmmm and now try get a column containing 000846383 to load as text from a CSV."

It will in LibreOffice as long as ALL that column is to be text. You need to select the column in the import preview and change it's type from the pull-down menu to 'text'

With Excel I can't remember although I used to import VERY large CSVs once upon a time.

Chemist

Re: Quick one...

"how does Excel calculate if you have put the $ at the front of each number?"

Don't remember with Excel but LibreOffice ( presumably on a UK set machine) treats a number starting with a £ symbol as just that and sums to the correct value. Dollars and other currencies need have the cells/rows/columns formatted and then the unadorned number typed. A safer option really, in any case, is to format to use the 3-letter currency code USD, CHF, GBP etc. which also can be chosen from the formatting menu

Chemist

Re: The gift that keeps on giving

"Google could produce an alternative to FAT32/ExFAT"

There are many excellent alternatives but as most gadgets and new sticks/cards use one of the FATs then it would cause all sorts of problems to switch.

Chemist

Recalculate ?

"rows to the value of $500 were inserted into the spreadsheet but somebody forgot to press F9 in order to recalculate the spreadsheet formulae."

Why would you have turned off auto mode ? I rarely did even when I had huge sheets. Recalculate was pretty quick.

Even on this old 1.6GHz Celeron laptop using LibreOffice I've just altered the first value in a set of 400000 sine calculations each dependent on the another and it took < 1sec

Spies and crooks RAVAGE Microsoft's unpatched 0-day HOLE

Chemist

Re: Indeed, who *does* use TIFF as a common file format?

"Indeed, who *does* use TIFF as a common file format? "

It's used in photography as it's lossless , indeed I think some RAW formats are modified TIFF. Certainly photo processing software like the panorama program Hugin uses it internally for intermediates and can also export it.

Google's Nexus 5: Best smartphone bang for your buck. There, we said it

Chemist

Re: "90% of what's needed" external storage

"You can (apparently) easily use samba over wireless"

I certainly use Samba/the house file server via wireless to let my wife's Nexus 7 save/load stuff using ( I think - we're away at the moment) FileExpert > interestingly it only seems to allow onto the Nexus file formats that Android has apps that will open - must probe a little more

Thought you didn't need to show ID in the UK? Wrong

Chemist

Re: Hotels

"You may find that when you made the booking for the hotel in advance"

No, and as I have a motorhome I spend a lot of time on French campsites too - some ask for form filling but hardly any ask for passports.

"Switzerland you may do,"

Almost never, and I travel there by road a lot as we have a holiday home. Infrequently at the motorway crossing in Geneva. A few years ago (~2009) we crossed near Belfort on a fine road (E27) with brand new huge customs/border area which was completely deserted

Chemist

Re: Hotels

"This requires all hotels and other commercial accommodation to have foreign guests complete, in their own hand, a registration form and provide valid identification documents."

Well I've traveled to Europe, mostly by road, 3-5 times a year for the last 20+ years and I've never needed anything other than a booking number for a hotel, occas. filled out a form, hardly ever shown a passport (except flying) , maybe once or twice at the Swiss border - but always traveling back into GB

Microsoft in a TIFF over Windows, Office bug that runs code hidden in pics

Chemist

Re: Windows 7 & 8 users should be fine?

"Sounds like you need to Bing UAC...."

Surely you mean Google...

Indestructible, badass rootkit BadBIOS: Is this tech world's Loch Ness Monster? VOTE NOW

Chemist

""Also, one remembers that Stuxnet was spread by USB sticks."

The original versions used a modified autorun.inf file.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/stuxnet-lnk-file-vulnerability

Later versions used a vulnerability in how .lnk files were handled

"This means that, even with AutoRun and AutoPlay disabled, you can open a removable media device (USB) and execute malicious code without user interaction."

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2010/07/15/windows-day-vulnerability-shortcut-files-usb/

Chemist

"Also, one remembers that Stuxnet was spread by USB sticks."

AFAIK it wasn't spread by USB sticks that magically installed software - it needed autorun

Chemist

Re: Another case here?

Sounds distinctly nutty - these lines are a giveaway

"but there is a distinct, new humming in the computing room from the walls Could be something far out there like LAN over Powerline I'd suspect, as the outlets in the room are clearly magnetically charged too now? (wtf??)"

And his Android tablet - "The read-me and license files were all filled with scripts to keylog and steal photos, video and audio from the microphone" - or maybe that's standard

"My cellphone, my NON-smartphone cellphone got hacked."

Chemist

Re: a guy who's run Linux on a hard drive motherboard:

"He has a ucLinux kernel running on the ARM microcontroller on the HDD board (see the video)"

Quite a guy - I enjoyed that !

Chemist

Re: A little *too* clever?

@ John Smith 19

He seems to claim that audio is used just for C&C links although I find it all very far fetched. There's a forum on SANS

https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Happy+Halloween+The+Ghost+Really+May+Be+In+The+Machine/16934

in which the man himself (anon?) is giving some details which I have to say seems very confused. He's saying they are short of money for forensic gear and yet seems to be throwing new PCs at the problem.

I'd have thought a workshop/lab with even modest equipment should be able to check at least some of these claims.

The other startling claim is that this may have been affecting him for 3 YEARS.Oh, and "the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed.."

We'll build Elon Musk's Hyperloop ... if you lob us ONE-MEELLION dollars

Chemist

Re: No chance in hell

"Only because they treated the leather with fat (to protect it from the sea air) "

I think if they'd not lubricated it with fat the leather would have worn out faster than the rats could get at it

Chemist

Re: No chance in hell

$15M/mile for loop

£200M/mile for HS2

Windows Azure Compute cloud goes TITSUP planet-wide

Chemist

Re: "calling into question how effectively Redmond has partitioned its service"

"And no surprises I've received at least 4 down-votes,"

You probably received them because your post was rather unclear about what you meant - indeed I'm still not sure either. What would you like the default to be ?

BTW even I could restore the OS and the extra software I use in ~30 mins without touching my personal files.

It doesn't help posting as AC either as there is a certain AC around who trashes Linux ALL the time

Chemist

Re: "calling into question how effectively Redmond has partitioned its service"

" It's stupid that by default Linux distro's only create a single filesystem. "

Some do but certainly not all. I've never experienced a single partition install in years In fact I installed OpenSUSE onto a 16GB pendrive the other day - not a live CD but a full install and it defaulted to a 6GB partition for the root system / and a 8GB for /home - the only change I made was to suggest a swap partition on the stick as well ( this was an experiment to have a full mobile Liniux 'machine' that I could carry from machine to machine. Apart from being a little slow to boot ( the stick's access time is rather slow) it seems to have worked very well

Win XP? Your PLAGUE risk is SIX times that of Win 8 - NOW

Chemist

Re: That graph suggests

"Actually even XP has had far fewer vulnerabilities than say OS-X or an Enterprise Linux distribution...."

You have mentioned this before (MANY times) - you were trying to be misleading then and are so now

Dark matter: Good news, everyone! We've found ... NOTHING AT ALL

Chemist

Re: I sort of wondered

"Just a few hundred years ago the earth was the center of GOD's universe & was flat"

A VERY common misconception, but not true.

Chemist

Re: perhaps dark matter/energy is cosmological philogiston

As a chemist can I say phlogiston not philogiston unless you're really trying to incorporate philosophy into it

Crypto protocols mostly crocked says euro infosec think-tank ENISA

Chemist

Re: And the number of people affected is..?

"I couldn't point to any commercial organisation which uses it"

I worked for a major pharma that mandated encryption for data transfer between any contract research organisation or collaboration.

Chemist

Re: Cross platform security kit

They do also require 3 random characters from an additional password input via pull down menus

I

Shy, bashful HUMPBACK DOLPHINS expose themselves to boffins

Chemist

Re: grammar nazi in action @Chemist

"A whole Dent, or only Arfur Dent?"

Nice !

Chemist

Re: grammar nazi in action - furthermore ...

"blithely swimming the waters off northern Australia, according to boffins."

playfully swimming (playfully) the waters off northern Australia, according to boffins

Fixed

Chemist
Joke

Re: grammar nazi in action @Chemist

"Some mates said you do killer sardines"

Don't get the tin with the Dent in it

Chemist
Happy

Re: grammar nazi in action

"it hasn't just miraculously materialised out of nowhere..."

Are you ... sure ?

Easy come - easy go (Can we have a HHGG icon ?)

Digital radio may replace FM altogether - even though nobody wants it

Chemist

Re: I think something needs to be done

"I guess people don’t want innovation anymore"

People quite like improvement ! Innovation has to do something useful in real life to be commercial

Chemist

Re: Digital is not the same as DAB

"ow comes with DAB as standard and the first internet-enabled car radios are making an appearance so expect digital radio listening in the car to grow sharply."

Except that most people find their car radio is often useless on DAB, I know mine is. SO just because cars are being fitted with them doesn't mean that the DAB stations are being used. For that matter my car is fitted with self-parking but I'll never use it.

Until DAB radios are cigarette lighter sized and run for 12 hours on one AAA battery like my Roberts FM set they're useless for hill walking too.

Surface 2 MYSTERY: Haswell's here, so WHY the duff battery life?

Chemist

Re: Not to hard to figure out

"It seems to be smaller than most Linux distributions...."

That's a stupid comment even by your standards as I'm sure you know most Linux distros ship with MASSES of user programs. FYI I've just generated a custom distro using SUSE Studio (brilliant) and with all the software I want it is a 270MB download

Black hole boffins close in on gravity waves

Chemist

Re: Impressive work

"It always seemed obvious that a GW detector near a big particle accelerator should be picking up feint but repetitive pulses when the accelerator was running."

I don't think the minute amount of protons being run around the accelerator even with relativistic mass would generate any measurable gravity wave esp. as ( AFAIK) the usual detectors probably wouldn't be tuned to the frequency of any such wave. A single bunch of protons at the LHC must have an orbital rate of ~10000 orbits/s

FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS: Microsoft faces prising XP from Big Biz

Chemist

Re: A major flaw

"but give the 18 month support cycle for Ubuntu "

Ubuntu != Linux