* Posts by John Sturdy

595 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jan 2008

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Euro ISP club: Sure, weaken encryption. It'll only undermine security for everyone, morons

John Sturdy
Black Helicopters

Re: Not a moment too soon

I don't think that's what they're trying to get. This is more consistent with wanting to watch all data from all people, to find people who can be accused of something but who are not yet known to the authorities.

Oops, wait, yeah, we did hand over photos for King's Cross facial-recog CCTV, cops admit

John Sturdy
Linux

Time for some openstreetmap mapathons?

Not that all of the cameras will necessarily be visible to the public, but people could start marking the positions of those they can spot, on openstreetmap, as described at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made=surveillance.

There are already a few marked in the area: https://kamba4.crux.uberspace.de/?lat=51.5320529&lon=-0.1206259&zoom=17

(It would be interested to seeing whether those watching the cameras will spot that people are looking for/at the cameras and making notes, or indeed whether police on the ground would spot it. I'm not sure whether this means it's better or worse to do it as an organized mapping party.)

Eight-hour comms lags and shock discoveries: 30 years after Voyager 2 visited gas giant Neptune

John Sturdy
Childcatcher

Closet approach?

I'm intrigued by the idea of a spacecraft making a closet approach to a planet. For fear of defensive inhabitants?

(Now I've said that, someone will probably edit the original...)

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

John Sturdy
Coat

At least Cloudflare were open about the reasons, unlike Galileo, a nominally public body.

DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web

John Sturdy
Boffin

In the longer term...

In the longer term, assuming that similar but more effective software does eventually go into common use, it may become more plausible to deny that real nude photos that have "escaped" are real.

Meet the new Dropbox: It's like the old Dropbox, but more expensive, and not everyone's thrilled

John Sturdy

One specific thing put me off Dropbox

I was a moderate user of Dropbox, until they got surveillance supporter Condoleezza Rice onto their board, and now I hardly use it at all (in fact, it's just a matter of finishing my migration from it).

Russian Jesus gives up food to meditate on how he can improve crypto messenger Telegram

John Sturdy

Re: Sherlock Holmes

No, he was too intelligent for that.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

John Sturdy
Boffin

Re: Why would a layer you aren't supposed to remove

Or even make an ordinary phone with magnetic (or tongue-and-grooved) sides and a screen that goes right to the edges, then with suitable software you could tile any number of them together for the screen size and layout you want.

EPIC demand: It's time for Google to fly the Nest after 'forgetting' to mention home alarm hub has built-in mic

John Sturdy
WTF?

I'm surprised it wasn't noticed before

ifixit seem to have missed this one, although they've done some other Nest products. Surely someone must have taken one apart, and noticed the microphone? Or is it such dull device that no-one expected there to be anything of interest inside it?

Twilight of the sundials: Archaic timepiece dying out and millennials are to blame, reckons boffin

John Sturdy
Boffin

An internet-readable sundial

There's a wall sundial in Pembroke College, Cambridge, designed by Dr. King. When there was a computing research lab in sight of it, someone wrote an online sundial reader: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/sundial/

Accused hacker Lauri Love loses legal bid to reclaim seized IT gear

John Sturdy

Re: Does he not have a point?

"You want him to have an off-site backup as well? There are trust issues with off-site backups."

Yes, definitely. Especially if he's doing something that he's aware may "come to the attention of the authorities". And, assuming the backup is encrypted to the same level as the original, I'd trust an offsite USB stick or SD card that the authorities won't find more than a drive that they will find. It doesn't have to be left with a person who knows him; it could be under a stone somewhere in the countryside around his village, for example.

John Sturdy
Joke

Re: Something not ringing true here ...

Maybe get some firmware from Volkswagen / Bosch to detect the non-normal usage?

John Sturdy
FAIL

Re: Is this how far we have sunk?

I think they may have sunk a bit further, with the smear contained in "Private data, including photographs of vulnerable children, from an autism charity and Treehouse School" --- if he's picked up data about autism-related education, it's likely to include information about schools at which the children may be classed as "vulnerable", and if he's done "wget" on a school website, it's likely to include photos with some of the pupils in them. But the way they've mentioned it looks to me like they're hoping the Daily Mail will pick up on that and infer that the photos were indecent.

John Sturdy
Big Brother

Re: Does he not have a point?

In his situation, I wouldn't want the hardware back, except to do a bit of post-forensic forensic examination of my own. I would assume keyloggers or similar would have been planted at a low level in the systems. (It might be interesting to examine the machines to see what has been done to them on behalf of the state, but I wouldn't trust them for real use.)

It also seems odd (although not implausible) for someone of his learning not have kept important files backed up, so perhaps there is something more complicated to this.

Have a gander at this: Amazon agrees not to act as Silicon Valley's foie gras dealer

John Sturdy
Big Brother

So selling the liver of geese force-fed on cannabis is going to be right out!

STIBP, collaborate and listen: Linus floats Linux kernel that 'fixes' Intel CPUs' Spectre slowdown

John Sturdy
Boffin

Re: He should hug off and mind his own business

"Posix" has been used as a synonym (see http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/POSIX_ME_HARDER).

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

John Sturdy
FAIL

Mostly nice, but can't an on/off switch be just that?

So with the fingerprint reader in the on/off button, if you need to read a fingerprint again once the machine is running, can you do that without it taking it as "off" and switching itself off again? Maybe short touch for fingerprints, long for on/off? Or touch vs push?

I get annoyed with my work laptop (Dell) putting the power light inside the on/off button, so if you want to see whether you've held it down long enough yet, you have to put your finger only half-way on the button as otherwise it covers the light up.

And thinking of accessibility for the blind, separate buttons for "on" and "off" so you don't have to be able to see the display or take some other action to find out, to know whether you're switching it on or off, would surely be better anyway.

That's one of the aspects in which my first ever laptop, an Epson PX-8, was more advanced than most that have come after it: a proper slider switch with a positive action for on/off. You knew where you were with that! Not that in fact I have a problem with switching laptops on or off accidentally, but still putting more functions into that one control seems a bit like expecting your car's ignition key to control the windscreen wipers too. (The other way it beat modern laptops was that it had a carrying handle built in.)

Cisco sneaks hardcoded secret root backdoor into vid surveillance kit

John Sturdy

Re: 3 Letters

I'd like to think that a company that large would have all the usual development practices in place, such as code review, so I find it hard to think that it would be accidental. I suspect you're right.

London's top cop isn't expecting facial recog tech to result in 'lots of arrests'

John Sturdy
Coat

Not completely useless, depending on the actual aims

If it keeps them away from the scanned areas, and the force concerned isn't so concerned about anywhere else, that may still count as a success. So keeping the top 100 targets out of London may be good enough, from London's point of view.

Windrush immigration papers scandal is a big fat GDPR fail for UK.gov

John Sturdy

Re: So those Windrush landing cards needed to be held for maybe 120-150 years.

It isn't a new word; it means to administer digitalis / digoxin to someone (a heart drug derived from the foxglove plant). Admittedly I was a little puzzled to see it in this context.

Bosch and Daimler jump in together on driverless vehicle tech

John Sturdy
WTF?

A "new friend"? "Your plastic pal who's fun to be with?"

PACK YOUR BAGS! Two Trappist-1 planets have watery oceans, most likely to be inhabitable

John Sturdy

Re: "why does the artwork always show a scenery which is pretty much unlikely?"

Or a quarry in Devon, like where Blake's Seven found themselves repeatedly.

Heart of darkness: Inside the Osówka underground city

John Sturdy
Big Brother

Another opened bunker

Bunk'art, in Tirana, is a museum and art gallery built in the main Cold War bunker of the Albanian communists, and is fascinating to visit.

(And, although not a bunker, in the same city, the old secret surveillance centre The House of Leaves is also now open as a museum, with a lot of old wiretapping and other bugging equipment on display.)

Two-day Bitbucket borkage has devs tearing their hair out

John Sturdy
Coffee/keyboard

There's always batbucket! https://batbucket.org/

One more credit insurer abandons Maplin Electronics

John Sturdy
Thumb Up

Although gloating may not be nice in itself...

I'm always pleased to see the prospect of fewer pay-to-stay retailers in business. If Maplin's disappears, I hope that any replacement that takes their niche will have a more ethical management.

Google touts Babel Fish-esque in-ear real-time translators. And the usual computer stuff

John Sturdy
Big Brother

Yes, eventually, but...

As phone processing gets more powerful... yes, but you won't like it with the present level of battery power density, unless they drop this slenderness fad and give us a nice chunky phone again, perhaps with hot-swappable batteries.

And I suspect there'll be government pressure against it, from many governments, because of the enhanced privacy it'll provide. Maybe even some legislation on some weird pretext, such as classifying it as a munition?

Gov contractor nicked on suspicion of Official Secrets Act breach

John Sturdy
Big Brother

No comment

No comment. What more could I say?

It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild

John Sturdy
Flame

It's still a Lenovo

I stopped trusting them from the Superfish incident, and no good characteristics of the hardware will override that.

US government: We can jail you indefinitely for not decrypting your data

John Sturdy

Perhaps by "hash" they mean file size? Which, after all, is a hash, albeit not a very useful one for most purposes. For the government's purpose, in this case, they might find it rather useful: "The sizes of the encrypted files are the same as the sizes of some encrypted porn images. Therefore the files are encrypted porn images, because hash collisions are so rare."

European MPs push for right to repair rules

John Sturdy
Childcatcher

I'm sure a little "lobbying" from the industries concerned will change the MEPs' minds, and they will declare anything repairable to be dangerous (in case children eat the batteries, or something like that; actually that one is a real risk but banning removable batteries isn't the right solution).

Why don't we have a "brown envelope" (or currency notes) icon?

Tesla death smash probe: Neither driver nor autopilot saw the truck

John Sturdy
Meh

Re: Bleh

The explanation of anti-submarining bars (on the rear of trucks) that I remember from when they were relatively new was that they wouldn't stop the accidents from being fatal, but at least the car occupants wouldn't be decapitated, thus improving the reputation of the road transport industry.

US laptops-on-planes ban may extend to flights from ALL nations

John Sturdy
Black Helicopters

I'm sure that's not the point

As others have pointed out, this looks like it's really about separating you from your equipment, so that keylogging firmware can be installed (the "evil maid" attack).

UK ministers to push anti-encryption laws after election

John Sturdy
Black Helicopters

"Known to the security services" doesn't narrow it down much

We commentards are probably all known to the security services (at least in the sense of "in a security service database"), for posting on a site known not to agree with everything the government says.

UK's 'homebrew firmware' Chinooks set to be usable a mere 16 years late

John Sturdy
Linux

If it's not expensive enough...

If the control software isn't overpriced enough, people will guess that it's actually an unauthorized re-badging of Ardupilot... which has been able to control multi-rotor craft for some time now.

Confirmed: TSA bans gear bigger than phones from airplane cabins

John Sturdy
FAIL

Re: Disappointing

I think it's probably more to do with separating passengers from their laptops, for convenience in raiding the laptops (planting keyloggers, like the first stage of an "Evil maid" attack, perhaps?).

Or perhaps they really do think it's better for people to put electronic devices in the hold. Remember Lockerbie? Well, it didn't happen over US territory, so I perhaps they dismiss that as irrelevant.

This is where UK's Navy will park its 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers

John Sturdy
Boffin

Why is fog such a problem?

Why can't a modern ship dock in fog? Isn't that one of the things differential GPS was made for?

Land Rover's return: Last orders and leather seats for Defender nerds

John Sturdy
Boffin

But it could be fixed by a redesign of the front end of the bodywork, like the Belgian "Minerva" variant with a sloped front.

World eats its 10 millionth Raspberry Pi

John Sturdy
Big Brother

Re: How many houses per cat?

There being more Pis than Pi owners is to balance the survey finding that there are many more householders who consider themselves cat owners than there are cats.

So how many Pis per cat?

Big brother icon, because the NSA is sure to be tracking your cats via your catflap computers, and sending the results to MI5.

Get orf the air over moi land Irish farmer roars at drones

John Sturdy
Happy

The Occupiers' Liability Act

I'm sure there'll be a way round this for the farmers, involving putting up a notice under the Occupiers' Liability Act section 4(2)(h) disclaiming any responsibility towards trespassers. Well it works for everything else, or at least you'd think so going by the number of such signs around the place.

Fujitsu pivots from chips to leaves with salad-as-a-service

John Sturdy
Happy

Salmiakki lettuce?

If their genetic engineers can get the lettuces to produce ammonium chloride, the produce may keep a lot longer, and be more popular with the Finns.

Search for MH370 called off after new theory about resting place is ruled out

John Sturdy
Boffin

Re: Commercial Aircraft Locations

The problem with a telemetry system that can't be turned off by anyone on the plane is that it might overheat and catch fire, but switching it off (even if that means pulling a breaker out rather than a normal switch) may prevent a class of accidents.

Crumbs. Exceedingly good cakes, meat dressing price hike in wake of the Brexit

John Sturdy

Since their pay to stay, Premier Foods have been a company I'd be delighted to see go under, in the hope that whoever moves into their niche will be an improvement. I'm not going to notice their price hikes, because I've not bought from them since then.

Anti-smut law dubs PCs, phones 'pornographic vendor machines', demands internet filters

John Sturdy
Holmes

Prudishness, or business?

Who could have lobbied for such a law? Prudes and numpties, or publishers of hard-copy porn?

That would be a strange alliance.

TV anchor says live on-air 'Alexa, order me a dollhouse' – guess what happens next

John Sturdy
Alien

Re: "CONFIRM"

Perhaps, like the Minds in the Culture universe, the assistants should choose their own names.

If only our British 4G were as good as, um, Albania's... UK.gov's telco tech report

John Sturdy
WTF?

Don't knock Albania

Phone coverage isn't the only thing they do better than us; for example, their cafés are much better too. (In fact, Albanian friends assure me that if their café culture wasn't as good and people got out of the cafés a bit more, they could have a really thriving economy. But I think economics may be a bit more complicated than that.)

But seriously, it is embarrassing for the UK when you consider that a fairly poor and very mountainous country beats us at coverage.

Bluetooth 5.0 emerges, ready to chew on the internet of things

John Sturdy
Big Brother

This could worry the spies

If you get a large enough mesh, it will increase the communication that avoids going via ISPs, and hence reduce the amount of storing and filtering.

On the other hand, it's a radio protocol, and a published one at that, and so implicitly observable by anyone who joins the mesh.

I wonder which way that will play out? (My guess is neither; that areas of mesh won't grow large enough for this to be much of an effect.)

Sysadmin denies boss's request to whitelist smut talk site of which he was a very happy member

John Sturdy
WTF?

In what kind of company can "to converse with clients" reasonably be given "as the reason the site needed to be whitelisted"?

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

John Sturdy
Happy

Re: They had one job....

And also, for those working at a higher level, Edward Luttwak's "Coup d'Etat --- a Practical Handbook".

Accessories to crime: Facial recog defeated by wacky paper glasses

John Sturdy
Boffin

Still better...

We need e-paper spectacle frames, so appearance can be changed on the fly.

Iceland's Pirate Party wins 10 seats, will need unlikely coalition to rule

John Sturdy

Indeed; and those politicians are, on the whole, keen on even larger organizations such as the EU, taking the power even further from the people. The EU, in particular, seems keen to promote the idea that smaller states (such as nations, or even smaller ones where democracy has already been shown to work well) must inherently be at war with each other; which is very convenient for them.

On the other hand, modern communications has started to shrink the world, in the sense of bringing more contacts and information into reach, so effective democracy could become workable on a larger scale than has been done so far; and developments such as Pirate Parties and DemoEx show that there is an alternative to "government as distinct from citizens".

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