Posts by Graham Wilson

@D.M. -- Sorry, I apologise to all monkeys for the unwarranted insult.

Unfortunately, I lack the necessary vocabulary to adequately describe the woeful state of just about everything technical in Australia.

From a competent country of the 1960s that once valued science and engineering and could put rockets into space*, Australia has descended into a postmodernist dark age where scientists, engineers, technicians, trades people and common sense have all but gone the way of the dodo.

What's left is a Scaredy-Cat kowtowing society frighted of its own shadow and obsessed with the utterly trivial, a parliament run by accountants and lawyers--a place where no techie dare show his face--and where the Prime Minister's science adviser resigns** after having never met the Prime Minister whilst in the job. (Right, it just staggers belief!)

The Australian Parliament is a cesspit of the mind-numbingly dull who obsess over issues such as their newly-found religion of Environmentalism-sans-science--where wayward and strange beliefs are to the fore and facts irrelevant. Or in the independent-foreign-policy-free zone of Australia, they're to be found groveling to and ingratiating themselves with leaders of other countries. In their effort to please, and without any real concern for the actual welfare of the nation, not to mention the sheer delight and bemusement of their hosts, you'll find them signing away Australia's sovereignty by agreeing to any treaty or trade agreement that floats by.

In the race towards irrelevance, these sycophantic Cretins would leave Hyacinth (bouquet) Bucket of 'Keeping Up Appearances' for dead.

As if that weren't enough....

Where else in the world other than Australia would you find governments (of both major political parties) that, in a frenzy, sold off the nation's state-owned telco, Telstra, and replaced it with a market-based competitive model that was so totally fucked--failed so miserably to provide an effective competitive communications environment--that it now has to go groveling to the now-public company Telstra, et al, to buy back at least part of the communications network that it once owned for twice the price it initially sold it for?

...And I'm stuck here in Australia.

'Tis no wonder I'm lost for words!

_____

* Blue Streak missile, Woomera Rocket Range, Parkes Radio Telescope etc.

** http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/gillard-never-met-chief-scientific-adviser-penny-sackett-before-she-quit/story-fn59niix-1226010629170

Well, I still MS Office from time to time. But...

...it's still only Office 2000!

Why would I bother to upgrade it to the latest version.

- There's SFA change in the speller since O2K, that'a now over a decade ago.

- Similarly, there's no change in the grammar checker since O2K--a decade ago (Microsoft bought Grammatick, integrated it into Office then forgot about it).

- There's stuff-all improvements in the more sophisticated formatting options such as needed improvements to headers/footers and the integration of some DTP features etc.

- Font handling has gone hardly anywhere in a decade or so.

- With Office 2007 MS introduced the damn clear type fonts such as Segoe.ttf into office title bars etc. now titles and menus look fuzzy! (Talk about annoying--the only way to fix this is to close Windoze down, run BartPE, and copy Arial or whatever over the Segoe clear type which fools Windoze into believing Arial is actually Segoe--voilà sharp Office fonts on title bars once again).

- Latest version of Office has interoperability and other useless feature-creep that I'll never use.

There's more but that's enough.

Oh I nearly forgot, the Sun ODF plugin for MS Office v2 works fine with Office 2000 which means I can seamlessly interchange ODF files in Word or Excel with Open/LibreOffice.

All I can say is that you've more money than sense if yuh still upgrading MS Office.

@Anonymous Coward - Exactly and when will it be illegal to switch it off?

If the log file was obfuscated by a compilation process and the user disassembled the log then the act would almost certainly be illegal under the DMCA.

As I said above in an earlier post, switching off mobile phones is becoming harder and harder the effect being that people leave them switched on all the time. The logical extent of this is that if a phone manufacturer came out with a phone that you couldn't switch off and you tampered with it so you could then you'd be in breach of the DMCA too.

This might sound alarmist but there's precedents in the digital watch (where's the on/off switch on yours?). Moreover, try to remove a battery from an iPhone and you'll realize that it's pretty much integrated as part of the design. It's not out of the bounds of possibility that modifying such an integrated design or altering its circuit could be considered a violation of the DMCA. (After all modifying, altering or adding a switch isn't all that dissimilar to altering the on/off code in an ROM/EPROM which is forbidden by the DMCA, thus modifying any integrated package may be fair game for the rights holders.

If such an argument/extrapolation were to be made and the DMCA extended in this way by the courts then it would have serious ramifications for the electronics service industry, hobbyists and perhaps even scrap merchants who salvage parts from old machines.

@alain williams - May not die after these revelations.

Interesting, I'll check it out.

May not die after these revelations.

Can anyone tell me why one cannot switch off mobile/cell phones instantly?

I used to have an old GSM Nokia phone that had a detachable battery at the rear. The battery was detached by pushing a button on the battery which would release the locking catch and it would just slide off the plastic retaining runners (this made changing batteries a breeze).

If the phone needed to be switched off in a hurry (ringing in a meeting etc.) it was convenience personified, all I had to do was to reach into my pocket push the button release and slide it with my thumb about 1/8". The battery would detach from the supply contacts and the phone would be totally dead. To power up again, push-click and hit "on".

You can no longer do this in any modern phone that I know of, it's as if the manufactures/Telcos want you to log off only by the power button (which seems to take forever whilst it rings home and fucks around with housekeeping ('tis now the same crap procedure as powering down a PC or other possessor-based appliances with 'soft' power switches).

Does anyone know if this is part of the agenda to keep the phone logged on all the time? With making the phone so hard to switch off it would certainly seem so.

(BTW, I now overcome this problem on modern phones by placing a piece of thin bouquet-like ribbon under the battery and leaving the back off the phone. Just tug the ribbon and the phone's instantly dead. Sorry iPhoners and those who've sealed phones, lemming like you'll have to obey your masters.)

Don't know of any yet but methinks this and similar iPod news will create demand.

If there's a demand then sooner or later someone will develop one but I'd reckon we'd be unlikely to see any results for 5 years or so.

As the mobile/cell phone o/s monopoly (unlike Windows) is already broken, it should be easier for bit players to enter what will be initially a niche market.

(I hope so anyway.)

@ Anonymous coward -- Eh, the story a fabrication then?

If you're correct then, ipso facto, the El Reg story is crap.

Right?

...Lessons in formal logic for anyone?

@Aaron Em: Absolutely correct, and besides pot smoke, it's propaganda's work!

Besides pot smoke it's proof positive that propaganda actually works well!

You're spot on, but as we've seen many times before, even so-called level-headed techies fall arse-over-tit for the latest hi-tech fad, this being the latest in a long line and it certainly won't be the last.

Even Bill Gates once believed his own rhetoric that 640k memory was enough for personal computing and see what an unmitigated disaster that turned out to be, it must have have set computing back at least a decade or so. But what was even worse was that industry leaders with equal power and influence but who actually knew better didn't even challenge him on his ridiculous notion, whilst they seemed so ridiculous and limiting to many of us little non-entities that we nearly choked on them.

Almost by definition, notions, whether valid or otherwise, once uttered by high priests and gurus become unchallengeable by the mainstream. The fact is that once good marketing and propaganda end up commanding the orthodoxy, history has shown us that techies are even more gullible than the rest of the population.

The Goebbels effect* is alive an well, marketing the Cloud being just another prime example.

____

* aka emperor's new clothes syndrome.

@Nick Kramer : OK, but....

...Bletchley's a mercury problem to resolve first!

;-)

@Anonymous Coward (Glad to see.) Correct, it's just basic human empathy.

Jobs isn't one of my favorite people by a long shot but I wouldn't wish what he has on anyone, even enemies.

In the circumstances, it's just basic human empathy for someone who's ill (and pancreatic cancer is about as bad as the C-word gets).

There's precious little empathy in the world as it is.

@ A. Coward -- It's probably just as well that you are anonymous.

It's probably just as well that you are anonymous, otherwise we might put you in the stocks or pillories for all of Saturday.

@Hugh McIntyre -- Delay lines aren't the point, but authenticity is.

Delay lines aren't the point as there's any number of types nowadays. If you want high bandwidth then use fibre optic cable wound on a drum, medium bandwidth as in television--use 75 ohm coax or a glass delay line (a la TV sets), low B/W then use mercury or whatever has the right acoustic properties.

BUT THIS IS NOT THE POINT (AND THE REASON FOR ALL THIS DISCUSSION), WHICH IS THAT BY NOT USING A CRUCIAL PART (THE DELAY LINE) WHICH IS MADE IN THE SAME WAY AND THAT ALSO WILL FUNCTION IN THE SAME WAY THEN YOU UNDERMINE THE INTEGRITY OF THE PROJECT.

CHANGING THE MODUS OPERANDI OF THE DELAY LINE (I.E.: GOING TO ANOTHER TYPE) DESTROYS BOTH HISTORICAL AND FUNCTIONAL INTEGRITY. IT IS NO LONGER A CLONE OF THE ORIGINAL BUT SOMETHING ELSE.

@Vladimir Plouzhnikov - In absolute terms, I don't; in relative ones I think I am.

Good question.

In absolute terms, I don't. Nor is it logically deducible.

In relative terms I can make few deductions. The line of argument goes this way: (a) all my posts to this El Reg thread were read by the moderator and passed for posting, (b) a few thumbs-up and replies indicates what I was saying was interpretable. Cognizance has transpired. Whilst this helps me to answer, you've still no way of knowing that I'm not actually an automaton.

Whether the total level of Hg traces I've consumed over my lifetime has changed my IQ also is moot. The same could be said for elements Pb, Cd, Se, Be, and Cr (known small exposures to these) not to mention other toxic chemicals, PCBs vinyls etc. It's possible but to my own perception is that it would be small.

Of course, the best analysis would be better done by you (based on what I've written (but that doesn't help if you wanted my status 20 years ago.

But I do know it's midnight here and neurons are dropping off, concomitantly so is my cognizance.

>:-)

@Big-nosed Pengie - Thanks

Thanks.

Not seen Colussus yet but read much of the literature (although visiting is on my agenda).

BTW, above, @Ian Yates I've expanded on my views.

@Steve Hosgood -- Precisely correct! And cop this scenario.

...And don't start me on the 'Green Compact Fluorescent' problem. If you haven't heard of it, it goes like this. Some brands of compact fluorescents are now been sold as being 'greener' models as they contain less mercury than standard units.

Right, the light flashes on to even the dumbest of us (or so you'd think):

-- less Hg means that many globes are now failing in under 1000 hours--a standards incandescent's life (anecdotal info -- drop Hg by 50%, globe life drops 8k to 1k hours--i.e.: Hg amount/globe life is not linear),

-- yet they've a birth/manufacture/death energy requirement that's much higher than an incandescent,

-- and the manufactures can't believe their luck: less mercury, less cost per unit--as it's the only ingredient that no one will or has the guts to say that consumers have been short-changed on by actually receiving less,

-- thus less mercury automatically means more bulb sales (specifically as the nominal 8000 hours has now fallen to fewer than 1000 hours--AND it really doesn't matter doesn't matter (after all, globes now have less mercury) ;-)

-- NOR DOES IT MATTER that the TOTAL Hg in the environment has actually gone up (life - 8k drop to 1k, but say only 50% Hg drop per unit ==> net overall increase of Hg used.

Yet no one says anything (consumer groups, IEEE, engineers, electricians' bodies et al. Deadly silence from everyone--even Greenies.

The hypocrisy just staggers me.

Truly incredible!

@Ian Yates - You don't have to be exposed to its vapour to actually use mercury!

1. You don't actually have to be exposed to its vapour to use mercury--have you ever heard of containment?

2. Read peter 45's post. It's a good summary of the practical dangers. You might also consider reading my long post further down, it covers similar issues in more depth.

3. Don't forget we humans have used quicksilver (Hg) for thousands of years, we've now a damn good idea how to handle it in ways that do not make us sick.

4. Unfortunately, these ways often do not coincide with EPA, H&S or OH&S laws and we end up with the ridiculous situation that's happening at Bletchley Park (where it seems the integrity (authenticity) of the project will be smeared as a consequence of these laws).

5. In the '70s and '80s, when these laws were initially being framed, we 'precious' techies--like Pontius Pilot--washed our hands of the H&S problem. We weren't law makers or politicians and we didn't want to sully our hands with or lower ourselves down to the messy business of 'regulation'.

5.1. Now we've been bitten by it. Instead, of effective sensible regulation, we've been left with zealot-like overregulation or regulation that ties everyone up in knots to the point where nothing ever gets done, or both.

6. Not only have we techies lost control of the H&S legislation but those who've taken up its cudgels are a bunch of postmodernist, Golgafrincham-like technocrats whose lofty aims and ideals in life extent to little more than ensuring that workers' battery-powered screw drivers conform to 50-bulletpoints of regulation before being allowed onto building sites. Seemingly, it's this kind of logic that's behind the 'mercury at Bletchley' problem.

7. In the time we techies were doing our Pontius Pilot routine, the anti-science-ers, soothsayers and postmodernists convinced the world that everything technical, chemical or scientific is super-dangerous or has evil intent. It's why the subheading of this El Reg 'Bletchley Park' article (below) is subversive, even if it was meant in jest by the writer.

"Will omit deadly 1940s mercury-based memory"

8. Why? Because the Cretins mentioned in items 6 & 7 have, over a generation or so, scared the shit out of the population when it comes to many things technical. Society, with respect to matters of science and engineering, is now becoming scared of its own shadow.

8.1. Thus (as indicated here), over a period of about the last 30 years, mercury has gone from a potentially dangerous material that needs to handled with care to one that's now classed as 'deadly'.

8.2. Suddenly, 'deadly' mercury is being elevated to same status--at least in the minds of the public--as truly deadly life threatening products such as VX nerve gas or botulinum toxin when in practice it is nothing of the sort. Not only is this unscientific but also, it's dishonest and deceptive in the extreme, as things in science have actual measures put on them, whereas here we've the emotive, non-extensible philosophical notion 'deadly' applied to mercury. By definition, all simple notions in philosophy, good, ugly, beautiful; etc., exist intrinsically without measures; for example, 50% of 'good' is meaningless.

9. Moreover, their marketing is slick and masterful. Armed with wonderfully sensitive technologies invented by us scientists, techies and engineers such as the gas chromatograph and mass spectrograph etc., these zealots are marching all over the planet measuring things and publicizing the results, often out of context. For example, the extreme sensitivity of these instruments will detect a few molecules of say dioxin but detecting them several hundred metres downwind of a normal campfire is meaningless (as camp files always produce small amounts of dioxin), yet such results are blown up out of all reality and presented as a crisis. This is not science at work.

10. Like a four-year-old's belief in Christmas, non-technical lawmakers become goggle-eyed at the technology and enshrine meaningless nonsense and gobbledygook into law. In the meantime, those of us who understand the scope of such measurements, are left out in the cold.

11. As I see it, it's incumbent on all of us nerds, techies, scientists and engineers who know and understand the facts to make a stand to stop our descent back into the dark ages. Making our displeasure known over the 'fake' mercury-less computer that's about to be installed at Bletchley Park would be a good place to start.

@AlistairJ--Do you own a mirror?

Do you own a mirror?

Check note to yuh mate A.C.

@Yobgod Ababua - No comment.

1. Intro/abstract : http://www.dsto.defence.gov.au/publications/scientific_record.php?record=9736

2. Silicon Trojans: http://dspace.dsto.defence.gov.au/dspace/bitstream/1947/9736/1/DSTO-TR-2220%20PR.pdf

3. Trojan Detection Using IC Fingerprinting from IBM: http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/1e4115aea78b6e7c85256b360066f0d4/f6e86bf32ce991d68525723c005c8be6?opendocument (download PDF from page).

4. More on why it's an existing problem: http://www.mil-embedded.com/articles/id/?3748

http://www.mil-embedded.com/articles/id/?3748

@The Unexpected Bill -- Nor am I

Nor am I, but then I'm not doing anything much more subversive than annoying other El Reg users with long posts, thus not in the league where it matters. And of course that goes for most people.

Nevertheless, the matter is of concern for increasing numbers of organizations (see my reply to Yobgod Ababua).

This issue is primarily about the way technology is evolving. In some ways we're not fully in control of it, as some say 'technology has, at least in part, its own autonomy'. Fifty years ago, years before the PC, all electronic equipment came with circuits/blueprints, for equipment to be sold without them (or at the very least) ready access to them would have been unthinkable to everyone, manufactures, service industry and consumers alike. It was the accepted norm that the service industry would have access to circuits and no one would have questioned otherwise. Today, this would be equivalent to Microsoft issuing source code with Windows, back then manufactures protected their equipment in other ways: radios, TV sets and even valve (tube) boxes had their patent numbers stamped all over them.

No one really thought of licensing programs until Seymour Rubinstein had the bright idea of licensing the WordStar word processor, and then this idea only proved feasible because compilation obfuscated the programs source code--something not possible with electronic circuits--not at least until the integrated circuit came along which gave the manufactures of hardware equivalent of compiled source code (in that it was hard to reverse-engineer an IC).

Remember the original IBM XT and AT PCs? These discrete-device PCs came with both a complete set of electronic schematics and a published source code listing for the BIOS--something unheard of today. Back then it was normal to have source code, now possession is taunt amount to stealing it--but in the meantime we've lost out to a new proprietary world, and also we've killed of a whole service sector without so much as a whimper just because technology has enabled us to obfuscate both hardware and software.

How far you allow technology to be moved from the people into the proprietary corporation is still up for debate. Irrespective, humans have lost out in this process--at least in part. However, none of this was easily foreseen let alone actually debated by society, but obfuscation that new technologies offered was lapped up with glee by manufacturers.

It's these unforeseen outcomes which it is said to give technology its partial autonomy.

.

@Yobgod Ababua - Wish I could fully agree with you.

Wish I could fully agree with you.

You're correct about the CNC process and 3D printers and the production processes etc. However, I wasn't specifically referring to them anyway. Sorry if I didn't make this fully clear (I was actually referring to substituting superficially identical chips but which have super-set instructions into production lines for manufactured equipment. (How chips are actually made is somewhat irrelevant to the topic, thus a wide-ranging discussion covering everything from silicon compilers, tweaking/reprogramming microcode, designing chips with internal bond-outs etc. etc. would serve little purpose.)

The fact remains that synergies that result from different and improving manufacturing processes are making ASICs easier and cheaper to produce, hence the easier it is to obfuscate what they actually do. In fact it's an issue now and increasingly more so as time goes on.

Let me skirt around specific sensitive stuff by giving some ancient and trite examples.

- The Intel 8085 and Zilog Z-80 are essentially identical to many programs written for them (similarly the Intel 8088 and V20). However, the Z-80's super-set instructions put it in a class apart for programs that are specifically written for it, the 8085 knows nothing of them and an 8085 system will crash unless a substitute 8085 library is available. Even then, emulation cannot always substitute as some functions are just too different. Unlike the known differences between an 8085 and Z-80, especially designed ASICs can contain super-sets that are very difficult to find.

- Today, the operation of many chips are disguised/obfuscated by labeling them incorrectly, or omitting labeling or deliberately removing them, such nefarious activities have been going on for many years. As chip design becomes cheaper so do the super-sets become easier to disguise and manufacture, eventually hidden internals will replace all labeling tricks. Just think back to the days of the false parity chips on memory--a chip designed with no other function other than to fool the system (and user) into 'thinking' that it/he had 9 memory chips when in fact it was only 8. It was a nasty unethical deception and remains so (but memory manufactures actually got away with it).

- Many electronic appliances, TVs etc., contain ASIC ICs with factory setups that are even unknown to the service industry (many common instructions you will be given but try to find how to increase the line or field scan drive amplitude and you'll be almost certainly be stymied). The facts are that these hidden techniques are already in service, the next step will be much tighter integration within the chip itself.

- And that is happening already. For the most part this is to ward of one's competitors, but taken to the logical next step it'll soon be commonplace to have chips whose parameters aren't fully published but also neither will swathes of hidden super-set instructions. Take Linksys routers for instance, the WRT310N etc. have special unpublished talk-home features that are inaccessible to normal users and whose exact purpose remains obscure. Why this issue hasn't been more controversial also remains unclear.

- Nowadays, chips are incredibly easy to produce when compared to say 20/30 yeas ago, moreover there is a plethora of suppliers and often the source of the silicon cannot be guaranteed or easily identified with any certainty let alone properly authenticated for function (least w/o very considerable effort).

- I don't see hidden architectures in ASICs as part of some massive conspiracy, it's just that it's developed in similar ways as to what happened over compiled code. If all that Microsoft had to write Windows with was a basic interpreter then the whole issue of product authentication would either not exist or would be very different indeed. Just as compilation makes it very difficult to reverse engineer code, easier access to ASIC design and development will provide much more opportunity to obfuscate their function.

That said, I've had to investigate 'louseware' within ASICs, although I can't be more specific.

@Ken Hagan - Absolutely correct but for a moment think of the ramifications.

Absolutely correct, but for a moment think of the ramifications and difficulties of documenting such changes let alone authenticating them in specialist or secure applications.

Unless some well implemented and well accepted protocols are implemented then I'll predict it will quickly become become a nightmare (not dissimilar (and probably more so) to the much implemented and longstanding practice 'random' software patching where the words 'change control' and 'documented' are seemingly unknown).

>:-)