* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Aliens Blu-ray disc set

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Devil

And this is a problem why?

Seems like you want to pay more tax? Well, you know how.

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Alien

Re: Close ...

In my times, UFOs were still of interest and infused with a sense of wonder and revelation.

These days, people are so used to flashing signs everywhere, not to mention bleeping noises, levitating cats and similar ADHD shit that they would not recognize a honest-to-god ufological spectacle if their sanity depended on it and would probably not even look up from their PSP if it transformed the golden retriever in their manicured suburban garden into microwaved steak, its pitiful cries muted by the sound of the latest ultraviolent, amphetamine-fueled TV serial.

IT urine bandit fired and charged

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Trollface

Re: Which is the bigger crime really?

An alarming item to find on your hiring questionnaire!

Home Sec: Web snoop law will snare PAEDOS, TERRORISTS

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Stop

Anglo-Saxons, go home!

Technically, WWI wasn't the UK's business. And definitely not the US' business. Getting swept up in "anti-hun" propaganda doesn't count.

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Stop

Re: I'm thinking this means...

"Don't ask me how I know... ;-)"

I call rumormongering.

If you really knew, you wouldn't be posting here.

Also, what SSL traffic? DES, 3DES, AES256?

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Trollface

Of course, the Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) was relabeled from the Communications Capabilities Consolidation Programme (CCCP)

HTC sues fans for premature unboxing

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Paris Hilton

Re: These hackers got off lightly

Wouldn't he be locked up with Tom Hanks?

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Holmes

Re: ME NOT GET IT

Well, HTC should just give it a rest. As much as they would like to, they will never manage the fan-and-turbine-fuelled up-penting and thundering climaxing of a true Apple Unboxing Event!

sadfrog.jpg

What does the Titanic's sinking tell us about modern science?

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Megaphone

Re: due to his "scientific" antics in submarines

Just came across this yesterday. Entertainment (not to mention pandering to "class struggle" fetishists) before accuracy? I'm shocked!

http://www.paullee.com/titanic/jc1997goofs.html

Cameron does "proper science" in the same way as Tesla showing off in a faraday cage with strobing lightning around is doing "proper science".

Big Blue to handle SKA's Big Data about Big Bang

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Holmes

This means they will process radio astronomy data...

...not up to the Big Bang but up to the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is at +380'000y or so (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reion_diagram.jpg)

At €32.9m, this means 0.0024 per year. Cheap!

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

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Trollface

Re: It's only two more fricking Bytes

Camilla is a man's name!

Vote now for the WORST movie EVER

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FAIL

Re: Did not vote...

> District 9

> Walked out after 20 minutes

You know that movie was rated "R", right? How did you get into the theater?

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Re: Starship Troopers 2

There is a Starship Troopers 2?

tony_kornheiser_why.png

Top Italian OPERA boffin steps down after faster-than-light mistake

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Holmes

Re: Quantum mechanics disproves Einstein's special theory of relativity.

"Quantum mechanics disproves Einstein's special theory of relativity"

No it doesn't. By no means. Indeed, the point of Quantum Field Theory is to fuse them into a coherent whole. Which has by an large been outrageously successful.

Start reading up on QFT ASAP, please.

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Holmes

According to Tommaso Dorigo at

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/superluminal_neutrinos_opera_spokesperson_resigns-88534

"Two days ago a workshop was held at the Gran Sasso laboratories, where the various experiments reported their findings and discussed them. I have no report from the workshop, but it is clear that the superluminal signal of Opera is as dead as it can be. Following the workshop, the Opera collaboration is reported to have voted on removing Ereditato from the leadership position. The motion did not pass, but the voting showed that the collaboration was split, and this must eventually have led Ereditato to step down today."

Do not pay attention to the aopolectic Motl in the comment section.

Visa and MasterCard warn of credit card data breach

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Coat

Global Payments Download.

"She said that the attackers appear to have got through the existing knowledge based authentication questions used as security."

Yeah. The entry was "Joshua".

Mine's the one with old paper-based issues of Scientific American in the pockets.

Munich's mayor claims €4m savings from Linux switch

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Facepalm

Re: Short lived success

> old hardware

> unfinished OS

> inability to move towards post PC era

What the hell? Go back to Metro, marketroid.

Dot-word TLD registration closes tonight, maybe for many years

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The LHC of the Internet, like?

“It’s time measured from here in years but not a large number of years. It’s probably a small number of years but I can’t pin it down greater than that because we’re running an experiment.”

tired_mario.jpg

NDS says Beeb's Panorama emails were 'manipulated'

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WTF?

Anyone care to explain what in the world causes standardized SMTP headers to be translated to french???

China's censors out in force as coup rumours spread

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Big Brother

More on this here if anyone's interested

"Crisis closes in on China's inner circle": http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/NC27Ad04.html

and also:

http://tealeafnation.com/2012/02/a-pictorial-guide-to-chinas-politics-left-v-right/

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WTF?

"Bo has often been held up as an anti-reformist Mao revivalist, who promoted “Red Culture” in Chongqing – a return to Cultural Revolution era patriotic values."

Woah. China is industrialised now, so no need for inefficient and destructive forced production methods. He could just go full-out on Marxist Obscurantism. Still, another few hundred million dead and history forcefully erased? Who needs that? No wonder he is being bampfed out.

Raspberry Pi supplier coughs to ship date delay glitch

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Pint

Paperwork.

If this was Russia, people would be blaming Putin for running interference.

A million TVs to go dark across London

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Angel

So lots of babies in January, then?

100 EARTH-LIKE PLANETS orbit stars WITHIN 30 LIGHT-YEARS!

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WTF?

Re: Fermi Frightens Me.

"Of all the worlds out there the simulated ones should outnumber the real ones"

"Of all the worlds out there the ones where I have 20 million quid in my account should outnumber the one where I have 20 quid. WHY DO I HAVE 20 QUID!!!"

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Go

Krugman! Kind of the Economists!! I have a quest for you!!!

Well, kicking that one off would certainly make Keynesians and Central Bankers cream their pants. 100 trillion quid of money printing is sure to kickstart the dead economy something fierce. Even the Military-Industrial-Complex should not be against this one. They don't even need to bomb asians, sun people or sand citizens and get beautiful mansions regardless.

FUND IT WITH IMAGINARY MONEY!

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Holmes

Re: Only 30 lightyears ...

> And why should infect another ecosystem?

Maybe because that's the whole point of everything. It's called LIFE, Jim!

"This robotic infection vector actually though it had free will. How bizarre!"

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Alien

Re: Fermi Frightens Me.

"Where ARE they?"

Clearly pacified for their own good by some kind of Space Obama.

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Trollface

Re: Genocide

1) That woukd be "xenocide"

2) Damn bleeding heart greenside liberals at it again? Sod that! LAUNCH CAPSULES!!

'Ugly' MongoDB defies NoSQL death rumour

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FAIL

Re: Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

"It acts as a glorified concurrent file access method with record granularity for most uses."

I mean, this kind of opinionated FAIL has to be read to be believed.

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Thumb Down

Re: Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

"anyone with half a clue about database theory and who values their data"

Faggotry from about 10 years ago, now?

Female Chinese astronauts must have no scars, straight teeth

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Unhappy

This ain't no Battlestar, then!

How sad.

Paedophiles ‘disguise’ child abuse pages as legit websites

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Thumb Down

Check into the doctor's for acute paranoia, will ya?

"If I'd not been there ... "

Then what?

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Paris Hilton

Sharers gonna share

So does that mean the bizarre URLs like "muiblackcat" in the server log are not actually from bots?

Sitting down all day is killing you

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Trollface

BOFH fodder!

"What's that? The server is down?

I don't care mate. Mandatory health time for making coffee is NOW. Deal with it.

What's that? Wait, I will transfer you to my union rep... that's better. Bye now."

OAP sues Apple for $1m after walking into store's glass door

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Unhappy

Re: An awareness of what glass is...

I am sure a glass door can be present a random difficulty in a day's series of events.

“The defendant was negligent... in allowing a clear, see-through glass wall and/or door to exist without proper warning,"

I hope Apple Designers have thought of all the proper warnings for functionality that is sure to exist in things Apple sells and that can expose your privates.

Mobile operators mourn death of embedded 4G

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WTF?

Previously on Battlestar Marketica: Clothes now produced industrially. To be stopped at all costs!

"To be stopped at all costs."

I missed the sarcasm tags, so I gotta ask "by whom"?

BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH

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Trollface

Emptying the backroom cupboard.

Well I just finished taking apart a HP laptop with nonfunctional screen, two ACERs about to fall apart and a DELL Inspiron from before the war with fully dead batteries.

I now have a large bag of metal/pastic/mainboard/cabling/screws trash as well as an assortment of loose CPUs, TFT screens, harddisks [the 20GB IBM Travelstar from the DELL rattles, so I think the heads aren't properly parked], RAM SODIMMs, two WiFi modules and an ATI Rage module of 2001. As well as a Li-Ion battery packs.

The recycling center beckons.

Can I do anything useful with the WinXP/Win2K keys?

Ten... new games you may have missed

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Meh

Re: consol fanboys

>2012

>Playing on console

Enjoy crappy graphics and controls made for illiterate soviet peasants with bilateral frostbite.

EU runs to WTO again over China's mineral hoarding

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Big Brother

"The China-US rare earth games"

A rather interesting writeup around here: http://atimes.com/atimes/China/NC24Ad01.html

In the requisite ironic counterpoint that seems to accompany almost every China sanctions story, a dismantling of Chinese duty and quota barriers would push down global prices and, perhaps, strangle these Western rare earth investments in the cradle.

As the Chinese government pointed out, only half of its 2011 rare earth export quota was subscribed, implying that there are limits to the pent-up global demand that can keep prices up to a level healthy to Molycorp and Lynas' investments.

A study by Technology Metals concluded that every rare earth element will pass into permanent surplus by 2017 or earlier.

The key issue is not access to the raw material, or even processing technology. The heart of the rare earth kerfuffle lies in Japan and its efforts to maintain its economic and diplomatic relevance as it is overshadowed by China as Asia's leading exporter and growth engine.

Congress warned that military systems may already be pwned

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Big Brother

The National Socialist Pride Gap

*Dr. Michael Wertheimer warned that the US is also facing an increasing intelligence gap, as not enough citizens have the skills of online defense. In 2010 there were just 726 computer science PhDs awarded to US citizens, and only 64 of them signed up for government service."

Phew. That means only 64 are faffing around in jobs of no great relevance to the advancement of security. Lucky.

As Gary McGraw said in an interview in IEEE Security & Privacy: "Ultimately I believe that the government is way behind when it comes to cybersecurity. But I also think that the Obama administration has made important progress since the days of the at-first-classified CNCI. They might even have caught up to 1996! Only 16 years to go."

Baffling barcode-on-steroids stickers plaster the Earth

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Big Brother

Re: Just a rumour

PASSING MESSAGES AROUND IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!!!?

And what does the government do?! Asleep on the force lever, as usual!

Record-breaking laser pulse boosts fusion power hopes

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Considering the losses must be important, it probably corresponds to a largish kitchen.

440m2 screen has fewer pixels than iPad

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Holmes

So who pays for that there wonder?

Verizon spectrum deal savaged in Senate hearing

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Holmes

"Demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

"But Wall Street doesn't own the spectrum for which Verizon wants to acquire licences. The public does. And so any deal such as this one – joint agreements included – should be structured to benefit the owners of the property being licenced."

Well...

"The public" owns nothing. Spectrum is not even a property (can I steal it from you?). The one who "controls it" is some guy sitting in a federal office building. He writes the right-to-use contract, then money flows into coffers at the treasury from whence it goes to unspecified stuff. Some of which are really, really bad for the supposed "owner".

"The public" can only benefit if someone actually offers that spectrum for use and the devices that use that spectrum are available. Whether the situation that ultimately develops is good, acceptable or plain bad is rather hard, if not impossible, to decide as one unfortunately has no way to observe alternate realities in which different decisions were taken.

"We know that both Verizon and Comcast, as well as the other cable companies, believe that they are acting in the best interest of their own businesses and shareholders. Yet, we need to ensure that consumers' best interests will be served in the long run."

But one cannot know how to do that. It probably won't happen by giving a carrier an exclusive license to a spectrum band that they may not use though. But it will not happen by listening to unions either.

Nvidia shows off first 'Kepler' GPUs

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Happy

Re: Power consumption

Ceterum censeo, that would be "quadratically with voltage"

You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do

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Happy

Yeah, it should at least have a friendly "Advice Dog" image somewhere.

Microsoft cuts back on Windows keys after pirates grab booty

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Pint

"These changes help us mitigate piracy while helping us serve of legitimate customers."

Indeed, a good serving of legitimate customers will help the bottom line.

And why do they hand out so many keys? Are reinstalls from the stupid "Product Recovery Disk" not actually possible? I have to confess that I haven't had the pleasure to freshly "install" in recent times.

Hong Kong scientists claim 'self-charging' graphene battery

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Holmes

There is no Maxwell Daemon

>Collecting ambient energy

You never, never, ever "collect ambient energy". You can merely use the [potential] energy differences between two points. Like in building a dam.

Giant planet pileups in far-flung star systems: Computer says yes

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Pint

Clearly!

You should sue the living daylights out that astro dude! Quatronic damages!

That MYSTERY Duqu Trojan language: Plain old C

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Big Brother

Re: A few notes

Checking the comments on http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duqu_Framework, we find:

*A commenter called "SCooke" says:*

Re: That code looks familiar

It's easier to figure this out if you consider vendor sourcing. The work was probably done by a government. And, whether the software was sourced through a US agency or whether a US agency itself was the creator, the net result is the same: you're looking for a major GSA-contracted firm who A) has clearance, B) has a compiler team, C) has a track record of providing similar product to the US government, and D) has a compiler codebase that looks kind of unfamiliar and not mainstream.

The likely suspects fitting that set of criteria are IBM, Microsoft, SAS and SAIC. All the others (remnant AT T, HP, remnant SGI... who am I forgetting?) incorporate a considerable amount of fairly recognizable shared compiler code in their offerings. Since you've disqualified Microsoft, my bet is on IBM.

I don't think it's SAS, because their compiler codebase is ancient. I don't think it's SAIC, because for them this would be a fairly difficult project. Three reasons why I think IBM.

First is that IBM has a library of bizarro options to select from. There's an internal HLASM-to-C frontend. There's all the CSet descendants. They've got research versions of damn near everything. (I'd try getting ahold of the ia32 version of CSet - probably hard to come by, but out there). They've also got a Windows source license, and if you were going to write a virus, that's always handy.

Second is that IBM has a history of doing projects like this. If there was a federal bid, they almost certainly would have been a bidder.

Third is that the project could have been run out of IBM Haifa. A number of the old IBM AV team probably either were there or ended up there, so it wouldn't be too far out of their wheelhouse. And if you wanted to build a state-sponsored virus, you'd almost certainly want to build it in a country who already has near-active hostilities with the intended target for the virus such that those acts of aggression don't become de facto acts of war for you.

If you want to dig into that, have someone from IBM wander through the employee-written and internal software libraries for all the preprocessor frontends for various languages and compiler backends that output to ia32. Probably none of that is inherently secret. I bet you'll find something that produces similar output.

*A commenter on the Securelist called "2esoskwahom4" says:*

sniffing from wrong direction, what does history tell you?

both "As400tech" and "SCooke" handed you the best hints.

A few years back I worked at East Fishkill long enough to meet eggs rubbing elbows with the 'black' GSA guys working down in Endicott and Watson (mostly the latter). The big topic at the time was exhorbitantly hi-priced memory being frantically consumed (we knew it was NSA, we realized later for upgrading Echelon to make it's data more transparent for future TIA transactions) post-911.

A cyberop like this would inevitably end up at big blooze' shop for the reasons scooke mentions: NOTHING gets thrown away by Endicott's hacks (a somewhat frustrating problem for workers needing access to boxes), their library of tools is as incomprehensibly massive as it is old. Indeed, Watson has not infrequently sent researchers there first to get their feet wet.

This probably initiated at Watson under NSA aegis, followed by research of tools at Endicott's library, then a handover to Haifa after payload completion. It's unrecognizable because NSA would demand that; any self-respecting beemer hack would know to hit up Endicott's libraries to make it so.

That said, it might be a little naive thinking any ibm'er you ask is gonna be successful convincing one of the mustier Endicott hacks to pony up from their libraries. scooke is right none of it is officially secret - but it frequently is VERY proprietary for some of them. A handful of old Endicott hacks still spend more time there than at home. That should tell you something about their priorities. It's all who you know. 'n no, I don't.