* Posts by Ken Hagan

8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Cops hate encryption but the NSA loves it when you use PGP

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Ah, Traffic Analysis

"No evil secrets but encrypted regardless due to ssh."

In fairness, the article was specifically referring to PGP rather than any other encryption and (as noted by earlier comments) the decision to use PGP to protect a given email is a far more conscious one on the part of the "target" than (say) simply using SSH for remote connections. (Indeed, the latter is almost de rigeur even amongst n00bs for remote terminal sessions simply because there are no examples on the interwebs for running a telnet connection anymore.)

But I think I'm right in saying that if that email is sent to a foreign (**) email server via a STARTTLS-ed SMTP session, the spooks probably can't even tell whether it uses PGP or not because the metadata was encrypted in that case too. (**Foreign in this context means not in a country where the spooks can ask their friends to issue a warrant to the owner of the server.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The more, the merrier?

If every man and his gran were to use it then yes, the information value of its being used in any given circumstances would fall to zero. That would rather destroy the value that the NSA guy claims he currently gets out of it. So, no, he certainly doesn't want everyone to start using it, which is why he immediately tried to taint "PGP use" with the brush of"only bad guys use it".

It seems to me that that what we have here is some FUD disguised as a "Well I never!" news story.

UK Home Sec wants Minority Report-style policing – using your slurped data

Ken Hagan Gold badge

That Minority Report reference...

I thought the point of MR was that you were prosecuted and punished for the crimes that you hadn't comitted yet. In fairness to the Home Secretary (yeah, I'm posting this just because I've never had a chance to write those words in that order before) I think she is still minded to wait until you've committed it. (If not, then we'll have to rely on the judges insisting on the correct chronological sequence.)

Boffins celebrate 30th anniversary of first deep examination of Uranus

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ice giant?

Back then, it was. The term "Ice Giant" was introduced in the 90s (after I, and probably most of you lot, had learned most of what we know about spaaaace). I sometimes wonder how much of my degree course is actually still true. (Most obviously, but surely not all.)

Sainsbury's Bank web pages stuck on crappy 20th century crypto

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Even if that is the case, it is quite a drop because Lloyds currently score an A.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=online.lloydsbank.co.uk%2F

Docker bags unikernel gurus – now you can be just like Linus Torvalds

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So a unikernel

"Sounds like a ROM based 8 bit computer."

Assuming it is running on some kind of hypervisor, a better analogy would be a process on an operating system that properly isolates processes from each other. See also http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html for other examples.

India just about accuses Facebook of faking Free Basics fandom

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Fakebook, er, Facebook needs to understand

Debatable. There's plenty of evidence that the education of women is at least as much a cause as a consequence of raising a country out of poverty and the internet is pretty effective at spreading new ideas to populations that are ready to receive them. (Ask any totalitarian dictator.)

It's 2016 and idiots still use '123456' as their password

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Nothing wrong with insecure passwords

Actually there *is* something wrong. Sites with no sensitive data should not ask for a password. Doing so trains the general population into believing that a password is an annoyance and the easiest way to deal with it is to use 123456 for all sites.

Then they are asked to choose a password for their bank account...

Sadly the commercial incentives are all wrong here, since sites that insist on registration (which is the usual excuse for demanding a password) can then spam your email address or flog it.

Waving Microsoft's Windows 10 stick won't help Intel's Gen 6 core

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Facepalm

"The thrust is very much the business user, with Intel citing one Gartner analyst claiming the chips make PCs part of businesses’ "overall security solution" with users "more secure and productive than ever"."

It must be really annoying to be a Gartner analyst who isn't a fucking moron. The chip just executes instructions. Security comes from the software you run on the chip. The last time the hardware actually made a qualitative difference to security was back in the 1980s when Intel moved away from real-mode. Even then, it took Microsloth half a decade to produce an operating system that actually exploited the new feature properly, and then another full decade to make that OS the standard version of Windows.

How to get root on a Linux box, step 1: Make four billion system calls

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "...because you have to cycle a 32-bit integer in the kernel around to zero."

"Suppose you pick a fast syscall and it takes 1us or so, and then the calling programme continues."

My reading of the article is that only specific syscalls cause the "usage" variable to be bumped, so you can't just pick a cheap one. I don't think the article actually says that explicitly, so I may be wrong, but it seems quite implausible that a 32-bit variable would be touched by every syscall and cause a problem when it wraps. Linux systems stay up longer than that.

The planets really will be in alignment for the next month

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Note for northern readers...

In our hemisphere, the arc goes the other way. Ta for the picture that made me stop and mentally stand on my head for a moment.

Microsoft herds biz users to Windows 10 by denying support for Win 7 and 8 on new CPUs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Question to Supplier of hardware...

You seem to have missed the bit where Intel and AMD promised to stop making such hardware.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The more they push

"...coming to me to install/learn Mint."

Still a modest barrier to exit then, at least in the minds of the would-be apostates.

Microsoft are presumably betting that most people won't have a Linux-y friend that they can go to. Based on today's market share, they might be right, but the internet can help you find friends so what we're (they're) really dealing with here is the growth of an invasive species in an ecosystem (non-business users with little or no legacy software to worry about) that has no natural defences against it, and that can undermine such cosy assumptions at exponential speed.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

You *will* allow Win10 on your domain !!

So if a business hires new staff and needs a new PC or two for them to use, the choices are either to use an officially (and rather pointedly) unsupported OS or get used to managing a mixture of Win7 and Win10 machines on their domain.

Clearly MS were *very* upset by the XP experience where everyone vaguely corporate elected to downgrade their licence on a new PC. It will be interesting to see how poor the unsupported experience turns out to be. Since modern silicon tends to include an entire GPU (and cheaper machines tend to depend on it), there's scope for it to be "pretty poor indeed" if that GPU gets no support.

Still, it's no different from any other service pack.

Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: No mention of Prolog?

I think Prolog is usually reckoned to be in a class of its own. My recollection is that you just say what you know about the problem and let the compiler write the actual program for you. Sadly, the only known implementations are people.

Nvidia GPUs give smut viewed incognito a second coming

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I imagine NVIDIA are in the clear

"I cant see any reason why the NVIDIA drivers should go round randomly clearing frame buffers just in case."

Because if they don't, someone can write a low privilege application that just goes around allocating frame buffers and saving the "uninitialised" contents as a bitmap and posting the bitmaps off to the NSA. For the OS (or driver) not to wipe memory before passing it to a new process is a COLLOSAL security failure that has been LAUGHABLE since the 1960s.

All modern operating systems handle this problem for RAM by maintaining lists of dirty pages and having a "zero fill" task that wipes them clean before transferring them to the free list. It happens whenever there is free time (waiting for I/O perhaps) or, as a last resort, at the point of allocation. Since the last resort is hardly ever reached, the cost to the interactive end-user is effectively zero.

A GPU driver could use a similar scheme and (as already mentioned) certainly has the bandwidth to make it affordable.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Video driver clearing memory

"IMO in this case the bug lies squarely with Chrome: if you go out of private mode, you erase ALL of the stuff you did until then."

Chrome probably did. If the OS (driver land) lies to you about having wiped and discarded frame buffers, there's not much an app can do. Drivers should never give a buffer to a new app without wiping it first. Apps should not have to write code to work around the possibility of the OS not doing its job. I put the blame entirely on the GPU driver.

Come in Internet Explorers, your time is up. Or not. Up to you

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What kind of survey?

There is not the slightest possibility that the sampling is not skewed. For starters, it is skewed in favour of those with nothing better to do with their time than answer a survey, unless they paid for the data in which case it is skewed towards those for whom that level of payment is higher than their normal hourly rate and towards those who don't know what "hourly rate" means.

This line of argument, of course, applies to all surveys. Doesn't mean it ain't true.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Stuck with old IE?

I don't see anything here asking for continued support. I do see one or two people trying to explain why that is an issue. Specifically, they are trying to explain it to the holier than thou fuckwits who reckon that because you took a sysadmin's job that involved MS kit you are also taking on moral responsibility for the state of that kit.

For most of the techy population, turning round and getting another job isn't the easy option that some would like to believe.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: If

What tying? FWIW, the "oddity" you mention is the only case where it was necessary to upgrade the OS in order to get the latest IE and the fact that Microsoft's HTML support is part of the OS has never prevented third parties from offering alternative browsers with their own rendering engines.

Oh, and it is hard to talk about Microsoft's "mistakes" in this area when their strategy of turning the browser into a platform succeeded so well that it knocked every other browser vendor out of the market for several years.

They may be evil but give them credit where it's due -- they are (or were) good at being evil.

Microsoft’s Get Windows 10 nagware shows signs of sentience

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: GWX isn't the problem.

"the 10 years of support pledge"

That support was only ever for the latest service pack.

The latest service pack is called Windows 10.

Now if you don't *like* the latest service pack, or if it breaks a load of your stuff, that's a completely different issue...

Discworld fans stake claim to element 117

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Because 117 is a halogen...

118 probably ought to end in -on for similar reasons. Skipping over helium, we have neon, argon, krypton, xenon, radon and <118>.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

The rules had better not say that. Walking down the group we have Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine, Iodine, Astatine and <this one>. The "ium" ending is traditional for metals and most of the trans-uranic elements to date have been metals, but 117 is a halogen and any self-respecting chemist would insist on a name ending in -ine.

Smartphone hard, dudes, like it’s the end of the world!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Next week, I shall review the Large Hadron Collider for Gizmodo."

Rather more useful would be a review of the next generation collider, including details of what particles it can find, so that we know whether it is worth buying one.

Use of big data can lead to 'harmful exclusion, discrimination' – FTC

Ken Hagan Gold badge

GIGO ?

I've always understood this to include "bias in, bias out" as a particular case. Students in the hard sciences are taught about systematic error which is similar. Do the business studies crowd have nothing similar?

GCHQ mass spying will 'cost lives in Britain,' warns ex-NSA tech chief

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Right answer, wrong reasons

"collecting everything then applying the rules retrospectively"

I took his argument to be that the useful intelligence is not in the stuff that can be collected en masse. You get it only if you pull resources away from the mass slurp and put them into picking targets and following them more closely. If that is the case, there can be no "retrospectively" and the mass slurp costs lives because (believe it or not) the spooks' budget is finite.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The man is absolutely right!

Given the increasing public disquiet at mass snooping, it won't be long before the needles are indistinguishable from the straw. That, surely, is the worst aspect of this policy direction -- it creates far more dissent and mistrust than it uncovers.

Firefox will support non-standard CSS for WebKit compatibility

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It would be far better if they added such support *conditionally* on the browsing machine's DNS suffix *not* matching the website under view (at least to some level in the hierarchy).

Real end-users get the support they need for broken sites. The authors of those sites get a slap in the face. Everyone's happy.

Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It is SO Obvious: Unobtainium...

"onethirteenium, onefifteenium, oneseventeenium, and oneeighteenium"

But they are already called those names (albeit in Latin). We're looking for ones that aren't crap.

UK says wider National Insurance number use no longer a no-no

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

Hmm. You make a statement of fact and you (currently) have one downvote but no explanatory reply. The possibilities would seem to be:

1) The fact is considered to be false, in which case some supporting evidence would appear to be in order since your claim is one I've heard before and I rather suspect you are correct.

2) The fact is considered to be irrelevant, in which case someone really needs to learn about primary keys before voting.

3) Citing facts is considered to be something one simply doesn't do, in which case someone is on the wrong site.

OK, number 3 isn't very plausible, but I was really struggling.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Pros and Cons

"It does however illustrate the fact that from time to time there is a genuine need for the state to identify its citizens..."

Equally it suggests that such times are rare. In addition, it suggests that a population that had just spent the best part of a decade battling against fascists were extremely keen to put such mechanisms beyond use.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "confusing? awkward?"

I'd say carefully ambiguous rather than confusing, and less awkward than asking for his name and being told Esmerelda Weatherwax(*).

(* Don't know where that reference came from, but a big "Hi" to Terry from Roundworld.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Relax, John, you are a 50% shareholder in the marriage and therefore your wife is yours and the good lady's husband is hers. Likewise, you can inform her that, also, a man is a woman with a bit extra on the front.

EU reforms could pave way for smells and noises to be trade-mark protected – expert

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What use is this?

A smell is a volatile chemical that has reached your nose. A sound is a wavefront that has reached your ear. Neither is durable, although the means of production might be. Then again, the means (recipe) would be subject to copyright, so there is really no need for this extension.

Are we really going to have a load of lawyers claiming ownership over chunks of the natural world simply because they had the necessary absence of scruples to register the claim first? Would it not be simpler to find the twat who came up with this idea and punch them in the face until our fists bleed?

The Firewall Awakens: ICANN's exiting CEO takes internet governance to the dark side

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: so can someone please explain ...

"few things I've read recently trouble me as much as this article"

Really? The guy is so dreadful that even his own government, which *desparately* wants to hand over control to ICANN, felt unable to do so. He's now wandered off into the pocket of one of the internet's worst enemies (rather proving the point) and will disappear into oblivion as soon as they realise that he can't deliver.

North Wales Police outsourcing deal results in massive overspend

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Same job + middleman = higher costs

It wasn't always true. There was a time when doing almost anything in the public sector (including nationalised industries) involved layers of crap inserted by special interest groups. This system had evolved over previous decades with weak politicians repeatedly reasoning that spending a bit more taxpayers money was always easier than tackling the SIGs.

When the time came for this insanely inefficient system to collapse under its own weight, transferring those functions out to the private sector actually did save money because the private sector wasn't doing the "same job" and was probably cutting out more middlemen than it inserted.

Something similar was true in the private sector as well, with many distinguished names in British industry making so little money that they were actually worth less than the equipment they were using. The result here was asset stripping, where observant investors bought a company, sold absolutely everything, and walked away with a tidy profit.

Sadly, in both cases you are dealing with a one-off. Privatisation and asset stripping haven't made much *financial* sense for several decades. Opportunities for asset stripping are extremely rare and privitisation only persists in the public sector because too many politicians are innumerate fuckwits who have somehow managed to get degrees in (politics, philosophy and...) economics without actually being able to count.

Newspaper kills 'what was fake' column as pointless in internet age

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Sad, but true

I'm not sure that society ever cared much about truth when it conflicted with short-term social or political prejudices. Gresham's Law applies to journalism, too.

However, this (and flaky money) are just examples of cheating and in recent years we've started to understand when cheating pays off and when it doesn't. (The "we" being economist, sociologists, anthropologists and others working fairly independently as far as I can see.) The future is not quite as bleak as you might imagine because there are long-term benefits to pursiing the Truth and long-term penalities for settling for easy falsehoods.

--

"Nullus in verba."

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: There's the problem....

It won't remain profitable for ever. Eventually even the dumb-fucks who pay silly money to ad agencies will realise that there is no such thing as internet advertising. Once that happens, there is no longer such a thing as clickbait.

Ads on telly? Yes, you had a captive audience. If you made a good ad, people would remember.

Ads in the high street? Yes, people would pass the same ads every day and if they were any good and there was a hold-up on the road then they might actually bother to read them.

Ads on the web? Sorry, you've lost me there.

How to feed and raise a Wikipedia robo-editor

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Define false

Is a false review (or wiki article) one that is factually inaccurate, or one that the author believes is factually inaccurate, or one that is factually accurate but the reader believes to be inaccurate.

Or, this being prose, not mathematics, is it more than one of the above at the same time.

Define your terms and *then* tell me whether your algorithm is 90% accurate.

Bigger than Higgs? Boffins see hints of bulbous new Boson

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Pint

Re: If it looks like a Higgs...

What a shame that this wonderful comment is buried on page 2.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Coat

Re: Syntax Error

There's no missing (. There's a superfluous ).

Annoyingly, it is the first ) that is the superfluous one, but you'd need one hell of a compiler to (reliably) get *that* good an error message.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Something new in physics. Finally!

No, not in the least like Newton's laws. Those have a well-defined domain within which they are a reasonable approximation that is easier to work with than SR or GR or QM. The things that the {super}-{string|gravity|symmetry} people have played with for the last 50 years are less easy to work with and so are only worthwhile if they explain stuff that the standard model does not.

Each time we get a discovery that rules out (say) supersymmetry variants, the corresponding body of work into that variant might as well not have been done and in a century's time may only be known to one or two people working in a history department.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Something new in physics. Finally!

I disagree. Finding this has required nothing more than engineering. You build the accelerator. They come. Explaining it might be worth a prize, depending on what it is, but probably only one and perhaps not even that if it turns out that the necessary theory was laid down by someone who is now dead. On which subject ... I think you meant "something new in particle physics" because the rest of physics has been getting along just fine for the past half century, thanks.

Having said all that, I share your excitement that something might be about to happen and I'm glad that I'm not a particles theoretician right now -- it must be quite nerve-wracking knowing that your entire life's work might be about to be consigned to the bin marked "interesting, but wrong".

Microsoft steps up Windows 10 nagging

Ken Hagan Gold badge
WTF?

What kind of person goes on a tech website and downvotes the suggestion that one should take a backup?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Respectable?

"The problem with foisting an update on unsuspecting users is many wonder what broke..."

Why mince words? There are *definitely* devices out there that have driver support for Win7 but not Win10. (It is really rather common with printers and scanners, despite the fact that these are exactly the sort of devices that should be just a user-space protocol layer over a standard USB link.) If you forcibly upgrade everyone, you *will* deprive some of your users of the use of some of their hardware. It is really only a matter of time before the lawyers get involved.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: They're not helping themselves here.

"I've never seen it from my personal first-hand experience, which tells me either people are doing it wrong or are lying."

Er ... GOSH !! That's quite an ego you've got there.

It looks like some of the other posters here *have* seen it happen, so by your logic that must mean that you are doing it wrong or lying.

Windows XP spotted on Royal Navy's spanking new aircraft carrier

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"many UK government systems process classified information and as such can only use systems which have been acredited up to that level "

An interesting mode of failure here: If it takes longer to certify the fixes (or replacement) than it does to discover the vulnerabilities, your certification system actually makes the system less secure than if you just took the vendor's word for it and upgraded anyway.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Meh

Well, exactly. UK broadband access to anywhere outside a city centre is pretty crap. Can you imagine the data rate you'd get in the middle of the South China Sea?

Windows' authentication 'flaw' exposed in detail

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Ahh, Modern Education

Nowadays, it is a Harry Potter reference. Do keep up.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Never say never

"the decision to allow NTLM to survive beyond 1996"

NTLM has been deprecated since pretty much that time. If you are complaining about support for it, may I be the first to point out that samba also supports it and therefore any system that can run samba (which I think includes all the BSDs as well as Penguins) is necessarily a piece of shit.

Or have I mis-understoof your logic.