Posts by Kevin McMurtrie
450 posts • joined Friday 15th June 2007 18:33 GMT
And next
H840 revision 2 would shorten nicely to "Hate 42".
Re: Erm.
No PIN is needed. Most ATM cards also work as credit cards, and retailers don't need to perform any security checks on credit cards if they're willing to pay high transaction fees.
Contract
The catch is in the contract worth $2000 - $3000 that's bound to the phone. The telco asks you to keep paying even if the phone they gave you is incapable of functioning. The telco and manufacturer are well defensed against continuous warranty repair claims. They keep your phone for two weeks each time and send it back as "operating as expected" while you keep paying the contract. The other option is legally fighting the contract. Nobody wants to risk that on a Facebook phone. (And why I will never buy from Sprint or Samsung again)
IKEA furniture bot
Open box
Plug in
Wait for motion to stop
Rotate interlocks
Unplug
Re: A similar argument applies to Time Travel - if it were possible, they'd already have visited.
Time travel would be possible with infinite computational power. Traveling back in time would be a matter of examining the state of the universe, reversing its path in a virtual environment, and then entering that environment or overwriting the present with it. Altering the present from the past would be calculating what changes a past event would have and then applying them in the present. Altering the future would be predicting what changes would be needed to arrive there and applying them in the present. You could argue that it's not really time travel but, if done well enough, there'd be no way to know the difference. Extremely narrowly scoped examples can already been seen on the Internet, in history books, the financial market, and in good brain washing. The scope of such hacking will increase over time.
NSA DEBUTS 'DIGITAL LIFE' ROBO-HOME AND SECURITY TECH
There. Fixed the title for you.
Posted in Boffins explain LED inefficiencies
Fricken lasers
Manufacturing is driving costs too. An LED's layers are built at very high temperature so a big chip would warp and crack when cooled. This limits production to small sizes on synthetic sapphire. I suspect that one reason that the US DOE is looking specifically at higher intensities is for using LEDs to pump lasers.
Re: Great firewall of China
Unfortunately, large countries with well maintained networks must also use APNIC allocations. Blocking the constant stream of intrusion attempts from China, Korea, and Taiwan isn't as simple as adding a bunch of /8 CIDRs. Australia, New Zealand, and Japan should tell APNIC to get their crap together and release all of those giant IPv4 blocks with invalid registrations. Electronic intrusions and espionage attempts would drop instantly.
If you can't create tech, criticize it
This is like a new version of the old phrase, "Java != JavaScript." This time it's "Java != browser." There's nothing at all wrong with having Java installed on a system. It's one of maybe a dozen execution environments that are on a typical machine. All of them are safe to have installed yet all of them can destroy your computer if told to. The problem, as usual, is with browser plugins. Plugins are a gateway to a large and complex codebase that hackers will try to exploit. Sun tried to create a Security Manager to constrain untrusted code but, as with Flash, the complexity has gotten out of control.
1) Set all plugins to "on demand" so they don't execute unless you click them.
2) Don't click them unless you know what you're running.
Hi-C
Most effects are seldom noticed because the battery stays within normal tolerances. I've found that the charge history has the biggest impact when running the batteries at high currents. It's not always the classical memory effect, but how material in the battery packs together or crystalizes. For example, a NiCd race car battery that has been partially discharged, idled, and then slowly recharged puts out maybe 1/3 the current of one that was run dead and rapidly recharged immediately before use. SLAs have similar issues with how the sponge lead forms. Finding documentation on this is tough and experimenting on lithium batteries means destroying them (and maybe other things nearby).
Re: TicketMaster "Ticketfast" Charges
£2.50 sounds like a bargain. US Ticketbastard fees are commonly 50% the ticket price, even for expensive events. Disgust and lack of a box office keeps me away from most concerts.
Disbelief
Pics or it didn't happen
Instead, use buggy routers not yet known to be buggy
This is another case of the government outlawing a symptom rather than a cause. Rather than mandate quality and security reviews, one they have outlawed one company known to make easily exploitable hardware. With this stupid mentality, the winner will be the least tested manufacturer.
Self-inflicted wound
Korea's networks have always been a mess of infected machines and botnets. My bet is that a few C&C servers for those bots were hacked and provided with self-destruct code; all the dead machines were bots. If so, thumbs up to whoever did it. My firewall logs just got a lot shorter.
Delivered
This is great news. Now AT&T can provide slow and overpriced Internet & TV bundles to 400 times as many people.
The other kind of taking back
What happens when you buy one of these devices and then the whitespace becomes used up? Maps for urban areas show TV frequency usage is nearly complete. Is the device returnable, bricked and useless, or do people hack it to trample licensed frequencies?
I use a rooftop antenna for TV and I'll probably have to buy Internet from a point-to-point wireless service. Comcast and AT&T won't deliver decent service by wires but the regional geography works well for wireless. I worry about what happens when these devices get hacked to use spectrum that isn't available.
Noise
Sample aliasing creates a huge amount of noise. A fast 8 bit DAC is more accurate than a slower 14 bit DAC for high frequencies. That 3.1mW power draw, if correct, is amazing.
RF DACs don't need many bits because they're usually receiving very noisy signals. If you took a very snowy analog TV image and converted it to a 256 color PNG, it would look pretty much the same.
Fine now
I've always considered PayPal to be unsafe for transactions because it's lacking consumer protections. Partnering with a good solid system like Facebook solves all of that.
Re: More critical reading is needed
Try reporting hacking incidents and it's clear that the Chinese government is all for it. To start with, the network contacts for Chinanet and many of the Chinese schools have been fake for about a decade.
South Korea and Taiwan are probably involved too. Maybe not directly or intentionally, but they have incredible numbers of bots that are constantly hacking away at every IP address on the Internet. As with China, the network contacts for HiNet (Chunghwa Telecom) and KORNET (KT Corporation) are not functional.
pause/rewind/skip
So they've never heard of local buffering? They're probably sending 2Mbps - not a big deal to dump into flash.
Duh
"But to use the malware removal tool you have to install Java and this is perhaps not the best idea especially since the language has become a prime target for hacking attacks of late, as Sean Sullivan of security software firm F-Secure notes."
Install Java but don't enable the browser applet plugin. Java by itself is no danger.
Re: Explicit Kill Switch
All cars should have a mechanical handbrake that kills the ABS power when lifted. It's not such a large kill switch to unsafely disable the car but it's enough to stop when the electronics are malfunctioning. (I've been in Cavalier with crap electronics. If the ABS says you can't use the brakes then you really can't use the brakes. The pedal pops up with more force than even the pedal can withstand.)
Peeps
I looked at the PDF briefly (as fast as it could scroll) but didn't see how this relates to humans. Perhaps The Reg could bring out the Playmobil set for those of us with a short attention span?
Re: Glass platter
I opened up some of those IBM "Death Star" drives and I recall the platters being incredibly strong and more flexible than aluminum.
Yet another bad research paper
I don't think I've ever seen TCP run at 1/30 efficiency except when selective ACK is off and hardware is failing. Making my ADSL2 or WiMAX connection 30x faster would break the known laws of physics for crappy telcos. I could turn down the ADSL S/N ratio until I'm burning away my all FEC bits and I'd only get 1.2x throughput. Maybe they mean that their protocol has 1/30 the latency of TCP on a network that's heavily congested with TCP traffic? If they've come up with a super-polite traffic-avoiding network protocol then they can expect people to tune it to be greedy like TCP.
Not in the clouds but the sand
Hopefully this fourth wave finally drags Yahoo out to sea and buries it. They're a vast digital ghost town of run down services with no inhabitants. Their web portal is a complete wreck of ad content that hijacks the page layout. It won't load reliably without an ad blocker yet links don't work with one. How is this same portal is going to safely collect data to build an "interest graph?" I see maybe two Yahoo e-mail addresses a year that aren't a 419 scam, phishing scam, or spam from yet another person with a stolen Yahoo account. The ROI of firing the anti-abuse staff should be clear now.
Getting warmer
My smart meter is useless for finding ways to save energy. What works much better is going around the house with a handheld infrared thermometer. One big warm spot traced to an Onkyo slave amp that was consuming 150W in standby mode. Some wall warts were running hot enough to justify replacements. I also know where the insulation has fallen off from under the floor.
Re: dedupe
Hash before encryption is it. Nobody will know what is in your original and personally created data but the hash matches will allow for reverse lookup of known files. Very small files could be brute-force decoded. It's not great privacy.
Big hashes do create false positives sometimes so there can be data loss. Sure, it's a chance of 1 in an nearly infinitely big number, but the amount of data in the world is nearly infinite too. Math says that a smaller number of bits can't represent all the patterns of a larger number of bits.
Payback
Google rose to power by leveraging free software (and stolen content) like no other company had done before. Companies claiming it was unfair were left in the dust. I'm curious what Google will do when China does the same back to them.
Re: Why are they backing up to a Flash Drive in the first place?
A USB drive can be used to bridge the air-gap protecting a critical system. It works well because it's a manual process that can't run itself while everybody is away. Of course, you need to keep an eye on the details or all of that security is pointless.
Bendy bricks
Bendy Korean phones? We need new slang. I call my Samsung Galaxy SII a 'brick' because it's a solid rectangular mass that often performs no function except being that mass. I can send it to Samsung for warranty repair but then it comes back completely 'bricked' and needs the ROMs re-flashed by Sprint. The next generation is going to think we're nuts when phones are flexible.
Click to activate
You should set ALL browser plugins to only activate when clicked. Plugins are used for complex tasks that HTML 5 can't handle, and complex tasks always have bugs.
Re: Time to prepare for more cases of electromagnetic hypersensitivity?
Luckily, 60GHz won't penetrate your your head. Crawly skin is still theoretically possible if the WiFi transmission pulses happen to sync with your nerves. (Sensitive people should try setting a 1000ms beacon interval.)
A mix tape of hair metal ballads for you
This tech was a big deal towards the end of the 1980 decade when analog cordless phones talked to your landline base station at tens of MHz and Radio Shack still had electronics. First cordless phones had a sliding frequency switch on the handset and base. Next they had a frequency hopping button on the handset. Finally they hopped frequencies themselves. No multiplexors, no QAM, no side bands, and no codecs; just simple 1980s analog processing. Good luck with the trolling.
Posted in USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013
If it was...
Dialup: USB 3.0v.2
DSL: USB 3.02+
WiFi: USB 3.0g
Cell: USB 3.0 LTE
Apple: Corona Cord
Windows: Enterprise USB
Intel: Penngrove
Audi: 2013 USB S3
Bargain bin: USB 3.0 v2.2 ultra speed 1000GHz
Government: USB 3.0 Section 521, Article 134.5.c
Re: What do you do with it afterward?
Disposal? It's another form of inert solid carbon atoms. You can buy low grade sheets of it called "pyrolytic graphite" at electronics stores. It feels a bit like paper but can be infinitely sliced horizontally like mica. Hold one side of the sheet to a candle and it will burn your fingers. Place it over a very strong magnet and it may levitate. Those small sheets are used for spreading heat in high power microelectronics.
And next to Polaroid
I'll set up a kiosk where you can drop in a Polaroid and get a digital image, converting those misguided gifts back into something useful. For a few more pennies I'll send it to Shutterfly where they'll have backups of backups of backups keeping the bits safe and ready to convert into a new retro gift.
Re: resistance
Figure out how to make magnetohydrodynamic headphones. I'm sure they'd be technically awful but for audiophile junkies they'd be worth their weight in oxygen-free gold.
Only spam works at China Unicom
There hasn't been even a slight glitch in postscan, spam, and intrusion attempts coming from China Unicom to my firewall. The official contact "abuse@cnc-noc.net" still doesn't work. Its a surprise that outgoing packet rejection still needs to be done on China's side.
Re: Hurry up Google - switch off H.264 on YouTube.
I have yet to see tests showing that VP8 is more efficient than H.264. Would you rather pay your regional telco monopoly more money for more bandwidth?
Efficient codecs that play at 60 fps are REALLY hard. That kind of research is not within the realm of your average open source developer.
Don't hold your breath
Many of us with the "Epic 4G" version of the Galaxy SII still have unresolved issues with the phone after over a year. GPS radio dies, cell radio dies, Bluetooth dies, WiFi/3G/4G goes to sleep while in use, the notification light doesn't work, it destroys batteries, and the soft keys don't always work. The camera works well but forget about using it as a phone or data device. Samsung repair says it "passes all tests", even when they have returned it to me dead, and Sprint has never been more helpful than removing bad software patches installed by Samsung.
Re: I wonder if there is a way to process atmospheric CO2 into graphite?
Bonding the carbon and oxygen atoms together produced the energy that's running the world. At least as much energy is needed to pull them back apart. There are solar powered devices that are not only capable of pulling the atoms apart, but can self-repair and self replicate. They're called plants.
GE not visiting the electronics store much
They're called "synthetic jet" fans and they're already on the market.
It's the caption's fault
"A really, really, really big hole (click to enlarge)"
-click-
-click-
-click-
Posted in Ten four-bay NAS boxes
For when the world isn't perfect
I use NAS for backups so I like to see some protection against the usual problems.
What happens when a power failure interrupts writes? What happens when the NAS is in redundant mode and a disk fails? Does it send an e-mail, blink an LED that will never be seen, or pretend like nothing is wrong? What happens when a failed drive is replaced? Can bundled drives be replaced under warranty without long downtime? There are plenty of NAS out there that claim RAID 5 protection but are unusable for days when something goes wrong. I recall and old D-Link and a more recent LaCie 5big that needed to be wiped clean and shipped for warranty drive replacement. Even if they had simply sent me a new drive, they would have needed days to rebuild too. I don't like being without backups for days/weeks so I end up buying a different brand of NAS and giving away the old one when it comes back. What a waste of money.
Shrinking the font size on stone tablets
This two dimensional surface nanotechnology is cool but the third dimension in hard drives remains enormous. Memory circuits that could be laid down in thin layers would have more storage even if the two dimensional density of each layer is very low. More research there, please.
Not clicking that
"Kindsight therefore has a vested interest in talking up the malware threat..."
That's not what's tainting the results. Most people would never install Kindsight's software. Those that would have likely installed many worse things.
Going MTV
You can sum up what the iTunes universe should do in just two lines.
iTunes - Gather a big list of media and play it.
iTunes Store - Figure out what you like and sell you more.
Neither does a good job at those simple core requirements. Shoveling more iCloud at it isn't the fix.
The other first
When are you Brits going to stop calling the second floor a "first floor"? "First above the ground" makes it, from any rational point of view, the second floor. I can see the French doing it to preserve quirky ancient cultures and all that, but this is a bleeding edge, high tech, serious online publication here. Even computer nerds know that an element at index zero is the first element, not the first after the zeroth.
