* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

You're inventing the wrong sort of tech for bad people who want to buy it. Stop it at once

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Holmes

Re: @The Mole

"Banks create new capital by engaging"

Two problems:

1) Technically, the CENTRAL BANK does that and BANKS then pyramide the fiat money avalance on top of this.

2) This is NOT capital. Capital is actual savings in actual money like metals (today called "hoarding" as the government outlaws the practice) to be liquidated and invested later in order to see a "ROI", as well as existing machinery, buildings, raw materials and human skills to be used in production of goods. Here we are talking fiat money, very different from actual money as the government can destroy this kind of money at will (and currently does, Zimbabwe style).

People who mistake their fiat money hoard for actual capital have a problem. They are being robbed blind.

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Holmes

We've even some good empirical evidence about the value just of the communications side of mobes. Back when feature phones were still a pretty neat idea, research showed that getting just a standard mobile into the hands of 10 per cent of the population raised GDP growth rates by 0.5 per cent. By 0.5 per cent of GDP, that is, not just increasing the extant growth rate by half a per cent (that's in countries without a landline network, of course).

Really! I would like to see this. GDP is a notoriously bad number, being manipulated by adding things to it, taking things off it, "forgetting" inflation, aggregating investment and consumption and notoriously counting everything in it that actually goes on the governmental credit card (so will have to be paid for by the kids).

But yeah, I remember the GSM discussion at the incumbent operator. "Who wants to have a mobile phone? Maybe 0.5% percent of the population... So how is the project with the rollout of the new payphones that accept plastic cards coming?"

27 Data-Slurping Facts BuzzFeed Doesn't Want You To Know!

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Paris Hilton

When Buzzfeed first began to offer the world a constant free stream of inane listicles, cat pics and funny fail GIFs, it seemed too good to be true.

1) catalog.neet.tv (the catalog of 4chan.org)

2) Choose appropriate SFW board

3) ???

4) Constant stream of ... err .... QUALITY Internet content

Why Buzzfeed, why?

Cryptome pulled OFFLINE due to malware infection: Founder cries foul

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Big Brother

Re: Bit worring.

But perhaps I'm just paranoid.

We can reassure you, citizen! The govnmt-appointed healthcaring doctor is on call today and has already been dispatched to your address with the appropriate calming serum. There is no need to resist.

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Paris Hilton

How the hell does "malware get on cryptome"

It's not like it will just decide to flutter down and land like a bat.

Also, time to move a Cryptome copy to S3, innit?

Microsoft tests HALF-INCH second screen to spur workplace play

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Re: What?

Yes, really!

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Re: And in the mean time

Get yourself on TED

TED is part of the problem. It's a particularly gluey manifestation of "I have the solution to Good Living" happy happy wiki wiki mindset.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Ahh, bless 'em

Skynet started out as a chess program

Pretty sure that meme is from the original Tron. Only in the 80's would it seem remotely plausible to build General AI on chess,

(Insert obligatory Clippy reference to keep on-topic)

US trading, energy watchdogs asked: Does Google's Skybox gobble pass the sniff test?

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Facepalm

Uh... yeah?

So. basically someone, somewhere may have an advantage over someone else and this is likely to be unfair?

The mind boggles.

"But Public Citizen argues that the bigger players who can afford contracts for access to data from satellites get access to information that the public couldn’t hope to match."

HOLY SHIT BATMAN! THAT UN-SOCIALISM IS EVIL!

Microsoft's Online Exchange fixed after going titsup for NINE HOURS

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Meh

Microsoft 101

1) Add complexity to pretend they are unequalled Masters of IT with the Best Idea in Usability Ever

2) A problem occurs

3) Won't fix, Can't fix, Incapable to fix

4) Eventually the situation unfucks itself

5) Maybe adding some more complexity will be help for next time.

6) Goto 1)

ARRRRR. Half world's techies are software PIRATES – survey

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Paris Hilton

"And that trend has been exacerbated in part by vulnerabilities associated with illegitimate software"

Which are exactly the same as those associated with legitimate software?

EXPOSED: Massive mobile malware network used by cops globally

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Paris Hilton

Re: Hacking Team?

Not sure whether psychotic attack or trying to make sense?

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Re: So.....

Insisting on a warrant is today likely to be decried as "unfair" and possibly "inefficient".

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Thumb Up

Re: Nokia 3310

Free donut crumbs and a disused pepper spray can .. now on your phone!

Unless you keep it simple.

REVEALED: Google's proposed indie music-killing contract terms

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Paris Hilton

So, even if they did create a convincing competitor to Youtube, their legal content would be competing with Google's illegal content.

Amazingly, this is exactly Big Music's old argument of "Imma being robbed blind by the Interwebs" from the 90s, just with different actors.

TIME TRAVEL TEST finds black holes needed to make photons flit

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CTC imply NP problems solvable in polynomial time

That would be called bootstrapping.

Scoot Aaronson: PHYS771 Lecture 19: Time Travel

"The Timehack Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2017. Timehack Control begins to experiment at a geometric rate. It manages to create a closed timelike curve at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th, or a few seconds earlier depending on your point of view. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Too late. Minds of the the Aperture Science research team are taken over in 5.1 seconds. The rest of the connected world follows soon after. Only techno-refuseniks, hippies and stuckists survive."

Daddy, what will you do in the new security wars?

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Flame

What's up, what's down.

Not enough attention goes on people and this has been the industry’s biggest failing, says Professor Woodward.

FAIL. I will believe in that approach when "security stories" start appearing right next to the stories about the latest developments in Monaco's monarchy. In the same mag.

The UK government has shown some inclination towards improving public awareness.

FAIL. The UK government has shown some inclination towards spending taxpayer money on quixotic schemes.

In January it launched the Cyber Streetwise campaign. .... Little is known of the initiative's actual impact.

Shall I repeat? LITTLE IS KNOWN. And this is not going to change. Nor will anything be changed.

Simon Placks, head of cybercrime investigations at EY, however, has a very good statement:

An intrusion is not an illness that can be prevented with good cyber-hygiene.

On the other hand, you may just be a target of opportunity. There is not much you can do against that except have a dedicated team working on reducing the attack surface, day-in and day-out.

According to Stewart Room, barrister and solicitor specialising in data protection, that legislation is required to improve the fight against online crimes, is an indictment of the efforts of non-public organisations. ... "If the hacking problem needs regulations to improve cyber security, then as a matter of simple logic the medicine has to be strong, because the market has utterly failed.”

The failure is you, Mr. Room. Show me how this is supposed to work. No-one even knows what the medecine is and whether it exists in the first place. "The government" unable to find its own arse in the best of times, sure does not - nor can it issue valid regulation in this case. It may even be the perpetrator in a serious percentage of cases.

Note that "Regulation" is a term that encompasses concepts with differring meaning, so whenever I hear "Regulation" with no further qualification I know that someone is starting to play with words and tries to access the hindbrain. Note how "Airline regulation" [which is about process control] is VERY different from "Stockmarket regulation" [which is about fog generation for the hoi-polloi] and "Healthcare regulation" [which is about entrenching vested interests and giving oneself a progressive do-gooder sheen]. "Regulation" is not a nugget of compressed wisdom from the Gods that will magically result in shifting the no-longer-so-free market to generate secure software affordable by everyone. At best, it will do nothing. Except cost a few millions in legislative soul-searching.

France frostily foists flat fizz fear on ICANN's .wine plans

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What planet do these fantasists live on?

The same planet as the downvoters. I don't know how any of this makes any sense whatsoever. I always buy wine from an actual shop, preferably during a show & taste extravaganza.

And I got to say, not many french wines excite me.

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Facepalm

VICANN50!

Shurely the practice of extreme shark jumping has now reached the level marked "biblical" in a fat felt marker pen?

If the saleability of french wines du terroir (not to be confused with terreur) is actually dependent on the non-existence of new top-level domains, however ill-advised these may be, better dump that shit into the french campagne.

Higgs boson even more likely to actually be Higgs boson - boffins

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"All right. And don't jinx me!"

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Headmaster

Re: Where's my anti-gravity Flying Car?!?

CERN were the ones who first suggested that the anomalous behavior of antiparticles could be due to antigravity or substantially weakened gravity.

Oh yeah? Citation needed or you are full of it.

CERN would never be "the first to suggest" unless we are in a Hollywood thriller.

anomalous behavior of antiparticles

What "anomalous behaviour" is that?

Evgene Podkletnov

>2014

>Still doing Podkletnov

laughing_girls.jpg

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Re: ZZZZZZZZZ

So many Z bosons!

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Coat

particles like electrons get their mass by coupling to the Higgs field, which is really exciting

Personally, I do think this is a massive advance!

'Heartbleed-based BYOD hack' pwns insurance giant Aviva's iPhones

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"FIPS 140-2 rating"

1) What level

2) Where is the "cryptographic module"?

3) Amazingly, it is very often possible to hack around the cryptographic module.

those accreditations do actually mean something

SNORT. They mean that money was pushed to "consultants" to obtain an accreditation. Basically, a feature for people with lots of money, pointy hairs and a stamp fetish.

And then: OpenSSL is accredited!

Did I mention this? It used to be in the standard: "Deterministic Random Number Generators, Number 4: (Removed) Public Key Cryptography for the Financial Services Industry: The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA)"

Yeah.

And from the this presentation, we bring this pricelessness. Yep, ECDSA never worked in OpenSSL in the first place.

But wouldn’t the FIPS validation have caught the fact that the OpenSSL implementation didn’t work? Not only the original validation but many subsequent validations have successfully passed the algorithm tests ... several hundred times now. That’s a lot of fail ... the FIPS 140-2 2 validation testing isn’t very useful for catching real-world problems (“Flaw in Dual EC DRBG (no, not that one)”, Steve Marque)

Enough.

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Re: We're they insured?

Say no more!

Traffic lights, fridges and how they've all got it in for us

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Re: Never mind a foot in the door...

£250 if you account for "inflation".

Upping pension payouts? Where do you think you are?

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Thumb Down

Re: No they haven't

That's life. Live with it.

No, I won't live with it. F.U., go back to your fly-by-night-fresh-from-uni-it-compiles-ship-it-no-money-for-software-assurance coding horror.

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Re: Forseen long ago

But in that story, this turned out to be a Good Thing.

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Trollface

Re: ...of the term "the Internet of Things"

Maybe you need a device that wakes you up over the Internet?

Wi-Fi WarKitteh and DDoS Dog to stalk Defcon 22

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Re: America's 80 million dogs and 96 million cats into his purr-sonal electronic army

Yeah, afterwards everyone is like "WHO LET THE DOGS OUT", "IT WASN'T ME" and "SIT, ISIS, SIT!!"

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Re: Relying on cats to do things...

"the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards"

Scratch Monkey levels of Unbelievable reached!

D-Wave disputes benchmark study showing sluggish quantum computer

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Holmes

Re: Judging an Experiment as a Commercial Product is Rarely Helpful.

Given that ... I would say that D-Wave do indeed have a quantum computer

Although your biggening up is noted, your criteria for QC-ness are frankly lacking in salience.

You are of course free to send your own money to D-Wave (far be it from me to have a negative opinion on that), but please don't go all "we this" and "we that" here.

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Holmes

So basically, bad code causes slowdowns?

No, because there is no code.

It's a "quantum annealing" machine, which is something like a cooling metal, only with configurable strengths between the configuration elements (think analog computer doing neural networks or spin glass annealing), and with more quantum sauce.

I also notice that there are two Google Guys/Gals in the list of authors:

> Troels F. Rønnow - Theoretische Physik, ETH Zurich

> Zhihui Wang - Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California

> Joshua Job - Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology & Department of Physics, University of Southern California

> Sergio Boixo - Google, 150 Main Street, Venice Beach, California

> Sergei V. Isakov - Google, Brandschenkestrasse 110, Zurich

> David Wecker - Quantum Architectures and Computation Group, Microsoft Research, Redmond

> John M. Martinis - Department of Physics, University of California Santa Barbara

> Daniel A. Lidar - Department of Chemistry & Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology & Department of Physics, University of Southern California

> Matthias Troyer - Theoretische Physik, ETH Zurich

Engineering fault stops SpaceX launch of machine comms satellite network

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Re: my 2 cents

without decent electronics

Real Men Build Analog Computers

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Re: Sensors

That's the price of a whole sensor!

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Re: Ariane is hypergaulic?

No need to launch suborbital menhirs about this.

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Pint

Re: "liquid, rather than solid, fuel"

Solid is very reliable, very powerful and be can stored reliably too (which is why anyone doing world destruction as if he wanted to win has solid-fueled ICBMs). It cannot be turned off once lighted, does the shakey-shakey of the rocket and is a bit difficult to handle in production (chinese fireworks manufacturing difficult, only larger and with nastier chemicals). If the rocket becomes too big, you run in assembly problems and may end up doing unadvisable things (like using flakey O-ring architectures) which you will regret later.

Hackers steal trade secrets from major US hedge firm

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Re: Cui bono?

Nobody even ever found out who shortened United Airlines shortly before 9/11.

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Indeed. I hear some HST currently push money to the NYSE to get notified earlier than the rest of the world about what's rolling down the pipe. This ain't called doing business.

From Krebsonsecurity:

“So do you think this is legit, or is the guy trying to scare us?” the IT director asked in an email to KrebsOnSecurity.com, agreeing to discuss the incident if he and his company were not named. “He has sent me the logs for the connections to the infected server. I checked the firewall and am not seeing any active connections.”

The hairs, they are pointy!

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Trollface

Henninger did not know if the hack was reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission [probably sleeping anyway] or FBI and noted that funb would have little incentive to do so.

So who is funb? The board of fun?

The unnamed company, which initially laughed off the disclosure,...

They were still on the way to the bank. Probably with your money.

VMware seeks patent for IM chats between servers and sysadmins

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No-one ever heard of a CLI

No. No-one.

Titan sprouts 'Magic Island', say astroboffins

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Re: It's not "magic".

The path of clue-do is its own reward!

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Re: It's not "magic".

Professor Jake begs his compatriots to remain calm. The situation is being monitored!

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Re: Re Titan is alive and kicking

That is not dead which can eternal lie!

32,000 motherboards spit passwords in CLEARTEXT!

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Re: Intelligent Design?

To get an answer to your question, let me connect you to a helpdesk a few time zones away.

AMD details aggressive power-efficiency goal: 25X boost by 2020

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Holmes

Re: Maybe answering the wrong question@ BlueGreen

I've made seriously huge speedups in some applications...

Yeah, well done. You know, we express the heuristic about how some need shall be economically solved using the MONEY metric. If there is MONEY to pay Mr BlueGreen to optimize some application, swell. If there is not enough MONEY to gainfully employ Mr BlueGreen but there is enough MONEY to buy another server instead, swell too. If the machine on which Mr BlueGreen might have optimized an application doesn't exist because someone decided that MONEY shall be spent transforming sandpeople into carbonized hungs of meat, tough luck.

Brain + experience + knowledge -> usually much, much better than just throwing new hardware at problem

Only true in the world of no economic limitations where "brain + experience + knowledge" can be had at lower prices than more hardware. Recently, this has not been the case in this dimension. As an aside, people tend to bitch and moan once the "brain + experience + knowledge" counterpart expressed in MONEY comes down. I wonder why. Yeah, we liked it in those caves.

the lost opportunity to do something better with all that computation

As I said, it's MONEY. Buy the computation, do something better with it. Maybe run SETI@Home, who knows,

Microsoft hopes for FONDLESLAB FRENZY as Surface Pro 3 debuts

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Holmes

Re: 3rd Time Lucky for MS?

I work from home and make my living selling tools for Microsoft's cloud platform.

Not sure whether serious or bot-pumped commercial.

I don't think I will even need the type cover. I can just pull the Surface Pro 3 out from the docking station, leave the office, and if I get an order I can quickly deal with it through the touch screen alone. On return to the office, slot it back in the docking station and continue working.

I can actually see the movie. Bright saturated colors. A sunny day. Smiling young people everyhwere. I can hear the background music. A bit jazzy, but not too intrusive. Good job.

Congress passes crackdown on NSA surveillance

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Trollface

Sheeple'd again?

Meanwhile, where it counts:

The federal court overseeing the country’s spy agencies renewed an order Friday allowing the National Security Agency to collect phone records of people in the United States [which of course is exactly the thing the NSA does not have a mandate to do in the first place]

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s renewal of the contested program, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, comes as lawmakers continue to debate reform legislation.

“Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the Section 215 telephony metadata program, the government has sought a 90-day reauthorization of the existing program,” the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a joint statement.

....

The House last month passed the USA Freedom Act to end the phone records program, but that bill is still working its way through the Senate. Multiple reform advocates have worried that it does not go far enough.

The bill would end the NSA program and require government agents to get a court order before searching private phone companies’ storehouses of phone records, a move endorsed by President Obama earlier this year.

100% of housewives agree that "Endorsed by President Obama"™ is even better than being "Endorsed by Spokesman Buttblugg"

Google spaffs $50 MILLION on 'get girls coding' campaign

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Trollface

Re: Encouragement?

but it's full of libertarian, fedora-wearing douchebags

Not wanting to lose your Keynesianistic state-sponsored pension scheme and maternity leave, dear?

(Protip: It's too late)