Posts by charlie-charlie-tango-alpha
35 posts • joined Tuesday 28th June 2011 15:10 GMT
Relativity in lego
Very nice. But I think Andrew Lipson beats him. See http://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/relativity.html for example.
Re: a plea
"contacted"
a plea
Please dear Reg, use english in your reporting. The phrase "The Register reached out to Facebook" simply made me cringe. Yes, I am an old fart, yes I am being finnicky, yes I know what you think it means, but it is nonsense. It irritates me almost as much as "going forward" and other such twaddle.
There, I feel so much better now.
Re: The 'request filter' is signature driven
"random data generators, random traffic flows, leave your PC browsing on its own whilst you go to the park"
Interesting idea. Now how, exactly, would you get your PC to "randomly browse" in a way that would look anything other than stupidly robotic and predictable?
Posted in Nationwide Banking off-line
Nationwide Banking off-line
http://www.nationwide.co.uk/contact_us/service_availability/service_availability.htm
Seems to have been off-line for a while. I first tried about an hour ago, but of course it may have been down before that. Mobile banking and payments also down.
interesting snippet
Back when I first installed FW/1, I was puzzled to find that they wanted the external IP address of the device before they would send the licence key (I assumed that the key would be hashed to that address in some way). No entirely happy with that, I stuck mine behind a NAT device so that the external address I gave them was drawn from RFC 1918,
Re: I'm reading that Mandiant report right now....
They are quite well embedded over here too. See http://www.cesg.gov.uk/News/Pages/Cyber-Incident-Response.aspx for example.
Posted in Paper computers: Not mere pulp fiction
Re: Paper wins
Seconded: http://baldric.net/2011/08/14/in-praise-of-dead-trees/
Re: Who gives a donkeys...
Actually, no I would not. Not ever.
Re: Bumpkins!!!
You clearly are not from Norfolk or you would know that a Norfolk "boy" is actually a good old "bor".
I, however, do live in Norfolk, and we are not all "bumpkins".
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: 386?
"Linux never supported the 286 or earlier."
Well, the linux kernel didn't appear until 1991 and Linus built it for a 386/486 target (he was playing with Minix 386 and was frustrated with its limitations).
However, somewhere in my loft I still have a copy of v2 of Xenix (an MS licensed version of Unix) dating from the mid 80s which ran on a 286. The earlier version ran on 8086 I believe.
Check that keyboard
Interesting that your pic of the "prototype keyboard" shows a rather, errm odd, layout. Looks as if someone has been prising off the chiclets and re-seating them.
I had one of these back in the late 80s when I was working in HMT's IT Unit (and shorty before I joined CCTA). It was a rather nice piece of kit. Light, good battery life, excellent screen for its time, and robust too. I used to carry mine around in my briefcase bungied onto the back of my motorcycle. It came loose one day and bounced down the Wandsworth road on the approach to Vauxhall. Brieface a bit battered, but the Liberator still worked perfectly.
I'm note sure the office Lisa would have coped as well.
Re: Consumer VPNs Exist?
Yes. If you a re a reasonably savvy consumer (and of course, as a Reg reader you are, right?) For the price of a cheap NAS running debian hanging off your home ADSL router you can set up openVPN and tunnel out through that from wherever you may be. Or you could spend a few more quid and set up the tunnel end point on a rented VPS somewhere. Just check the terms of serrvce first.
Re: Not Really
"Probably just paranoid (adjusts tinfoil hat), but I do know that about 85% of the intrusion attempts on my various networks originate from China."
No. You mean that "85%" (or whatever) attempts have source IP addresses in Chinese address space. You have no idea whether the /actual/ source is in some other place and is simply using chinese IP addresses as a cover. In the same way you have no idea of the /actual/ source of any DDOS attack - all you see are the multiple IP addresses of the compromised machines which form the 'bot.
"false flagging" is probably more common than most people believe.
Re: NUMBER of people!
Missed it. But I can never resist the temptation to correct poor grammar.
Re: NUMBER of people!
Errr. "fewer" people.
Well, someone had to say it.
Re: @YAAc
No. He means PV. At least he does if he is talking about the old vetting system as seems likely .
PV = Positive Vetting.
DV = Developed Vetting.
Cambridge
Ross is an interesting guy and has some talented co-workers and students. But he is vehemently, and vociferously, anti-spook. So not surprising he is not on the list. Shame really. He might have been a useful counter to the possibility of group think.
Oh the irony
""Moving departmental websites onto GOV.UK will, in due course, realise significant savings for the taxpayer,"
Exactly the same argument was used about binning open.gov.uk (the first single portal into government) following the Gershon review which closed CCTA.
Guess who I used to work for, and what I used to do.
Wrong
"this latest scheme puts the intelligence services directly in touch with the private sector for the first time,"
Rubbish (or CESG/GCHQ flummery). Both CPNI, and its predecessor organisation, NISCC, have long had direct contact with private sector organisations.
See https://www.cpni.gov.uk/about/Who-we-work-with/Information-exchanges/
Re: From the article and comments, we can deduce 2 things;
late 50s...
Re: Idiots
"I would have thought Linkedin would have attracted users with some level of sense"
Now what on earth gave you that idea? It's a social network.
Posted in Google farewells apps in spring clean
Re: How can anybody now justify using Google APIs?
I can lend you a disk drive. But you'll have to source whatever software and OS you used yourself. Now PCK tape would be a bit trickier.
no such thing
"In a closed session Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller, National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Stephanie O'Sullivan briefed the politicos on the current state of the cyberwar."
What war?
A plea to the Reg if I may. Whilst it might suit the americans (and some people in the UK) to talk about internet based "attacks" as constituting a war, there is no such war and the public is ill served by the media reporting in a manner which suggests there is.
Please stop it.
re: You know.....
One upvote from me on that. I wouldn't trust them any further than I can throw an elephant.
Eh? What does that mean in english?
I'm with Mike
Like Mike Cardwell, I too run my own mail server. And for some few months now I have seen exactly the symptoms he describes (my logs show "lost connection after STARTTLS from unknown[178.107.44.76]" for example). But the problem was intermittent and I never got around to sniffing the traffic as I had promised myself I would. The problem is compounded by the fact that I use my own X509 certificates for TLS (so the certs are not signed by a separate certificate authority) and the mail client I use on my phone (k9mail) seemed to have problems with that. So, I wasn't /exactly/ sure that t-mobile was at fault. Now I am. have banged off a complaint to T-mobile via the forum (and pointed out that my contract is shortly due for renewal).
I run my own mail server because I like being in control. If my network provider interferes with my traffic, then I am not in control. So I'll get some PAYG SIMs to try others.
re: Kindle?
I agree. Dead trees make more sense. http://baldric.net/2011/08/14/in-praise-of-dead-trees/
professional incompetence
That'll be the same BCS that doesn't understand why you don't send security credentials in email then?
http://baldric.net/2008/09/25/gun-foot-shoot/
Xfce is the way to go
Like many others I have shifted to Mint. In my case, LMDE with Xfce. LMDE because it is Debian based rather than Ubuntu and Xfce because it matches the way I prefer to work rather than the way somebody else thinks I should work. And with luck the Xfce guys won't feel the need to fsck with the desktop in version 5.0
@it's not the money
Have to have a wife??? What, even the female staff?
@it's not the money
...have to have a wife????? What, even the female staff?
Methinks your neanderthal prejudices are showing. Whiche means you'd fail selection.
That photo reminds me of the classic Sunday Sport article of a few years back. When they first printed the picture (of a Lancaster iirc), it bore the headline "WWII Bomber found on moon." A week or so later, they published the same picture without the aircraft under the even better headline "WWII Bomber on moon disappears."
Posted in RAM prices set to 'free fall'
Pah, call that expensive
Back in 1980 or 81 I (OK, my Department) paid over £17,000 for 96 MB (in two boards, one of 64, the other of 32 MB) for a crappy DRS 6000. Oh, and the system board with a 40 MHz processor cost about 15 grand too.
Excellent value for money from ICL as always.
thank you, but I must correct this
As the "guy who managed all the websites" at CCTA in the mid to late 90s I am grateful that anyone remembers this. But this post could be taken to mean that I migrated from Widows to Linux. What I actually did was replace a bunch of aging Sun kit running Solariis 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5 with cheaper Dell kit running Redhat (4.2 IIRC).
So I moved from proprietary unix to linux.
But I heartily agree that there is /much/ more room for FLOSS in HMG systems.
