Posts by Charles 9

Re: The US is still in the stone age

And content to STAY that way, too. I hear many people don't like C&P because they'll lose the zero-liability protection with the signature cards (in the US, almost every credit card has zero liability if the theft is detected quickly). After all, if someone steals your card and knows the PIN, how can you say you didn't give the PIN to them? That makes you legally liable. And contactless has the stories of those skimmers, especially the story of the skimmer in Vegas who used a directional antenna to skim NFC details a block away. More people keep checks because it leaves a paper trail and out of order checks trip red flags.

Chip & PIN? Many would say, "You can KEEP it!"

Re: Note to El Reg

In which case, they'd rather have no NFC payments AT ALL. Walmart's steadfastly refused to add it, and many places have DROPPED support even before Apple Pay was added.

Re: Softly, softly..............

They may be able to boil the operators but what about the EU? Boil a rock all you want, it's still a rock.

Re: About that self-professed rational liberalism

Maybe, but the question's still there. If workers are paid peanuts, how will they (who are also customers) be able to afford your goods?

Re: VM for fun and profit?

"Redpill" comes from the Matrix universe. In the Matrix, most humans are lulled into believing the world they're in is real, but it's not. People who were scouted and took a "red pill" eventually were disconnected from the Matrix and exposed to the real world. Someone a few years ago proposed a malware which would transparently wrap the existing OS into a virtual machine which was then controlled by a hypervisor in the malware. Thus the reverse was also conceived: a malware that could detect the presence of a VM and, knowing this, found a way to break out into the hypervisor. Such a malware that could do that can be termed a "redpill," similar to the Matrix scenario.

Re: Much as I appreciate using drones for recognizance...

"Where it will get really interesting is when the solider is removed entirely, and a decent AI is left to control the drones and select or recognise the targets. That will trully reduce the cost of asymmetric warfare, and could be the beginning of the end for the cowardly brand of terrorism currently afflicting the world."

Then what happens when the terrorists get their hands on them?

"If someone's search history contains <insert comically-named skin flick here> then it would nice if that wasn't considered embarrassing so much as private and even more so if it wasn't considered perverted so much as normal."

Remember that the very concept of personal privacy is a relatively new thing: probably no older than about a century and a half for the ordinary joe. Basically, the smaller the community or the larger the reach of its people, the less one's privacy can be guaranteed. Privacy increased with the rise of cities that created a screen of other people and such, but with the increase of electronic communications, particularly those of an audio-visual nature, that privacy has dropped drastically. We're rapidly becoming the Global Village, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Even if they were past the prototype stages, VASMIR is not launch-capable, so you still need a way to get it up into orbit. Right now, the hope is to fit a VASMIR to the ISS, giving it an easier time with course corrections while putting the engine through some space trials.

Re: I won't even mention Quiet Comfort...

I've never been partial to overpriced Bose equipment. I find less expensive alternatives. And while they won't completely cancel out background noise, they do make a nice difference in a noisy environment like inside a conveyance. I personally keep a pair for air travel.

Re: The media strikes again!

Perhaps another reason is that identity theft is perceived as a fate worse than death. Shot to death, you're dead, game over. Identity is stolen, all that belongs to you is at risk, yet you're still alive to suffer all the consequences. Many would see living in helplessness as being worse than death.

Re: The rest of the story

The problem with the scenario is that, in spite of all the safeguards in place, a Trent is still needed. Thing is, as we've seen, Gene and Mallory have gotten smart and are now starting to target Trent in an attempt to subvert or impersonate Trent (think dodgy CAs). The bigger he is, the bigger the target is on his back.

Re: ipv6-literal.net not reserved.

Ever thought that it's both? That Microsoft is the cyber-squatter in question and that they did this so they can't be accused of breaking Internet conventions by internally routing an otherwise-fair-game domain (it's quite all right if they own it)?

Re: From the banks of the Thames River in (New) London

I suspect there will always be debate on both sides of the Atlantic when it comes to pronunciation. The best way to note it is that British English is more traditional but rather inconsistent whereas American English is generally more structured but as result things change.

I came to realize this when I had to pause for a moment to realize what was being described in a "gaol" and why I didn't recognize the pronunciations of words like Cheswick and Worcestershire, among other things (I describe it best as a lot of contraction, so much that it can confuse Americans).

Re: Anybody here use Google Wallet before?

Uptake's been a touch slow for two reasons:

1) Supported phones were pretty low at first. Due to card company recalcitrance, you not only needed the right phone but the right network, too, which kinda sucked. When the S4 came out, card companies allowed it because of the Secure Element, but Google managed to leverage more leeway bit by bit. When Android 4.4 came out and Host Card Emulation, the number of supported devices jumped since the implementation was now independent of network or the Secure Element. More or less, if a device had a compatible NFC unit and could run 4.4, it could now support Wallet (shame it can't be backported; there are more NFC-enabled Android devices you could support if you could).

2) Retailers have started getting a touch wary about contactless payments. Fears of data skimming and hacking have them wondering if they should be covering their butts. Combined with the slow uptake, some places that once accepted contactless are now dropping it.

Re: RE: nitroglycerine.

"Metalic Lithium contains both an oxidiser and an oxidant? Allowing it to release energy without using an external oxidiser like 'air'?"

Actually, yes. It is capable of producing what's called a self-oxidizing fire. Certain other metals like magnesium have the same properties, as does thermite by design. Plainly put, asphyxiants don't work on them which is why they can burn even in oxygen-poor environments like underwater or even in vacuum.

Re: Except that the article has got it entirely wrong

I would be more inclined to accept a SIM-less device if the switching mechanism was outside the control of the manufacturer. If what you say is true and the "soft SIM" is really a programmable SIM, then this might inspire third parties if they can ink MVNO deals with the primary carriers and so on.

Re: Pencils

"And clothes - people can use them to conceal weapons."

Forget clothes. At this stage, we'll have to ban the human body. Recall that a few years ago someone managed to hide and detonate a bomb concealed...let's just say where the sun don't shine.

Let's face it. We're almost to the point where one person can ruin the world. Which means no government will trust its citizens since just one could be the one that destroys them. The operative phrase is rapidly becoming, "Don't trust anyone."

Re: The law suits...

Because you can't trust the PIN pad not being switched out or otherwise tampered with?

"USB OTG and a memory stick?"

Not an option since using OTG blocks charging, and since using OTG puts additional load on the battery, this is one place where it's NICE to be plugged in, only you can't.

I also insist on removable batteries. Not only is it a safety feature in case the battery becomes faulty or a pull is needed to reset a device, but it allows for aftermarket upgrading if you don't care about bulk like I do.

Re: Where is Binder?

Binder is part of the base OS. It's the thing that handles what Android calls Intents. The Intents are IPC messages that say you want to do such and such. They're also what prompt you to pick a program to handle things like Market links, SMS messages, and so on unless you set a default. What the article is claiming is that something can hijack the intent chain so as to call up system-level functions and use them to hack the device.

Honest question: Can this hijack occur with just a URI or does it require some kind of app installation to perform?

PS. It may interest you to know that Binder is an inherited thing. It comes from OpenBinder which was in turn originally developed for BeOS (now that brings back memories).

Re: Cut'n'paste

Point is the camera can detect things not normally visible to the naked eye, and these camera CAN and DO capture infrared since they can see the infrared emitted from remote controls and the like. Removing the IR either takes a filter layer or software post-processing.

The point being that while one biometric can be fooled, if the system can simultaneously check for several different biometrics (check for a pulse, moving eyes in the right color, breath, voiceprinting, et al) as well as create dynamic tests that thwart preimaging (asking for a blink, an answer to a simple generated question, etc), then it should be possible to take "faking it" past the practical limit for most adversaries. And you might be able to deal with the gun-to-the-head scenario (which will exist regardless) with a duress sequence: one that not only alerts authorities but also releases traceable dummy data, making it seem you're letting them in.

Re: Not for Fanbois.

"Europe is not so bad if you consider it a nation."

It's still considerably denser than the US. Key cities in Europe tend to be more evenly distributed. The geopolitical structure of Europe not only helps this but also affects the economics of wiring up, since each country only has to deal with its respective areas and don't necessarily have to agree with the neighbors.

I'd be very interested in an Internet distribution map of countries like Canada, China, and Russia (these are single countries comparable to the US in land mass). Based on what I've read so far, though, they too have their faults: particularly lopsidedness.