Posts by phuzz 6735 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
"Well I suppose its better than Napoleonic units"
He's not going to use units from someone who probably chopped off the head of one of his ancestors now is he?
(I assume that he's related to the French royal family on the basis that all of the European monarchy is inter-related and more inbred than an isolated village in the Forrest of Dean.)
"AWS can't distinguish technically between good uses of this and bad, so they want to stop all uses."
And it also has the useful side benefit of allowing countries like China and Iran to block Signal, so they're not going to get the entire of AWS blacklisted.
Just because there's some good technical reasons for what they're doing doesn't mean we should ignore the venal reasons too.
Don't forget they just dropped the Metrobus stop at Filton Abby Wood because they built the entrance too small for the buses to turn in.
By the time they actually start service the Metro buses will probably only be going between two stops a hundred metres apart.
Yep, slow and steady, that's the Bristol way.
"The best and only rational system would be a no-cost publishing service labs can access for free, being thus able to keep an eye on what is happening in their research domain. Unfortunately this doesn't create any profit, so it won't ever happen."
Nope, there's no chance of that ever happening. And by 'that' I mean people actually RTFA, not a free publishing service.
"patch distribution over the LAN [...] is something that pretty much everybody wanted at least 2 decades ago"
Well, there was always WSUS, but then if you've ever been a WSUS admin you'll understand why Microsoft decided to burn it to the ground and start over...
Why not use a straight-six piston engine as a fuel pump?
The trouble is in order to get (eg) 1kg of samples back to Earth, you need a craft capable of returning to Earth from Mars (never been done). It'll probably also have to carry enough fuel to brake into Earth orbit, rather than parachute down and potentially break quarantine. Plus you need something that can take the samples from the surface of Mars and into orbit, probably to somehow automatically dock with the return craft in Mars orbit (again, never been done that far from Earth).
The biggest issue though is that both of these craft have to be carried all the way to Mars, and the orbital rocket has to be safely landed, and all of this takes a massive amount of fuel.
Then you add on the fun little problems, like building a rocket engine that can survive the months long trip to Mars, the landing, and also survive several days on Mars, and can still ignite successfully and reach orbit. Exactly what kind of fuel do you use that doesn't need heating or cooling or compressing for that long, whilst still being as efficient as possible?
All in all it's a tricky set of problems, and will probably cost a lot of money to do.
For more info, here's a look at a NASA plan for sample return from thirty years ago, which goes through some of the problems (eg taking a parachute all the way from Earth, to Mars and back again was too much mass, so they designed the return capsule to just crash).
It reminds me of a similar problem, except this bit of kit had a on/off switch just next to where the power cable attached, as well as a 'power on' button on the front.
Needless to say, the presence of a power button on the front stopped anyone from looking for another one, until I was called in to find out why it wasn't working.
The trouble with a theory that there's no such thing as dark matter (and I will admit that dark matter sounds like a bit of a fudge), is that it doesn't explain the existence of a galaxy which behaves as if it contains no dark matter.
Of course, no one knows why this galaxy doesn't have any dark matter, but it certainly seems to behave as if all the mass in it is accounted for by the objects we can see. That is, the outermost clusters of stars orbit the core much slower than in other galaxies.
"Intel with the Intel P.O.S. IGP graphics"
Intel are now using AMD Vega graphics in some of their chips. For example.
I'm pretty sure that no generation ship in the entire of history of fiction has ever not had societal breakdown of some sort.
Oh, except maybe the Nauvoo in The Expanse, but that's only because it was re-commissioned before any of the passengers ever stepped on board.
And all the compromised routers, compromised servers, and compromised phones of course...
"Good luck playing that vinyl in your car on on the move"
You just need one of these!
(I'll stick to Bluetooth though, because MP3s don't get scratched every time you go over a bump...)
"a Voice over IP line, so cannot press tone buttons even if they wanted to"
What kind of shitty VoIP system can't pass touch tones? I've had to use some really terrible ones, but I've never found one that didn't work with touch tone menus.
There's another approach that requires a little bit of work before hand.
First you need a Windows VM. No need for it to be a recent version, or to be updated, a bog standard WinXP SP2 box is fine.
Find some remote access trojan, and save it on the desktop as "sekret passwords.txt" or similar.
When you get a call from a tech support scanner, allow them access to your honeypot VM, and wait for them to copy off your 'sekret' trojan, and run it on their own machine.
???
Profit!
It's not just that new phones are making the old ones cheaper, phone specs have been more-than-useable for years now. So a £150 phone can do everything that a two year old flagship could do, and can do everything the average punter wants.
So you have a choice, spend £300+ on a brand new phone, or spend £100 on a brand new phone that can do all the same stuff. The expensive phone probably has bigger numbers (eg CPU speed), but not anything that most people will notice day to day.
So why go for the flagship models?
Microsoft has long been large enough for different departments to be effectively working in opposition to each other.
Look at the way the Windows team try and introduce a coherent new design every so often, only for the Office team to create their own separate GUI system.
Or indeed there's the parts of MS who are working on Linux compatibility (like the bash subsystem, or the HyperV drivers in the Linux kernel), presumably unnoticed by their sales division.
So yes, the left had of Microsoft doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and neither of them have any idea what that tentacle over there is doing...
It looks like it was separately discovered by other people as well:
https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2018/shofel2/
"but then someone published the 0day bug two days before our 90-day disclosure window was set to expire on April 25th. Oh well. Yes, this is the same bug that is exploited by fusée gelée, and that was just leaked by some other group (but we found it first)."
They also have a github page with enough instructions for those with a certain amount of technical knowledge to boot linux on a Switch.
https://github.com/fail0verflow/shofel2
"who ever thought it a good idea to sell the US' most advanced aircraft to a weakly aligned country with GDP of $11,000 per capita, led by a despotic ruler elected on an Islamist ticket?"
Did you read the bit in the article about Turkey being in a really handy position to bottle up most of the Russian Navy? It's basically a bribe to keep them as potentially the enemy of our enemy.
I once unplugged one of the six power cables going into an HP blade enclosure and the entire thing powered off. Thirty seconds later I was having to deal with an irate boss, but he did calm down and agree that they were specifically supposed to be redundant PSUs, and so perhaps it wasn't entirely my fault.
We eventually traced it to a bad PSU that would only take about 20% of it's rated load before failing. Thanks HP.
"This person was able to social engineer access to peoples accounts. So this does seem to be quite easy to do. So, we are all at risk then, and has it already happened to people by others who want to remain under the radar ?"
Yes it's pretty easy to do. Yes, someone could do it to your account (but if you're not the head of the CIA, your threat level is probably lower).
It's not really under the radar though. Social engineering has been part of the hacker toolkit since before there were home computers (the old school phone phreaks got very good at it), and it's still the easiest way to get access to a system. If you've not heard much about it before it's probably because it's so widespread that nobody considers it worth mentioning.
I managed to BSoD Win10, but that was a bad stick of RAM. Not cheap stuff either, but it managed to reduce Mint to a screen full of random colours when I tried that, which I guess leaves Windows slightly ahead, because at least it gave me a readable error message.
students seem to be actively discouraged from taking a wider interest in any aspect of a subject outside their teachers' knowledge.
To be a (eg) biology teacher, you need at least a degree in the subject, preferably a masters or PhD.
The syllabus on the other hand, is set by a civil servant acting on the orders of a politician. Who do you think has a better grasp of the subject?
Or to put it another way, would you prefer your kid to pass their GCSEs/A levels, or to know the names of some blood vessels? And which do you think will get them a job?
You know what bar staff would appreciate more? A robot that went around picking up empties.
You don't need to take booze to the punters, they'll queue up to get it, but people will almost never bring their empties up to the bar (although you should if you want the bar staff to like you). Use the robot to do the boring grubby job of grabbing empties and filling the glass washer and leave the pouring and serving to the fleshy meatbags.
There's also the usage (of whois) for individuals of, for example, "is this acme-service.com website associated with the real company, or some impostor?"
I'm guessing most companies will opt-out of the data-sharing restrictions (ie they will share their full whois data) for just this reason. It's something like getting an EV certificate, but presumably cheaper.
The James Webb is supposed to be launched on an Ariane 5, although that is supposed to be replaced by the Ariane 6 in 2022 or so. It's possible it might end up on a SpaceX rocket.
Who knows basically. At the current rate of progress we'll be able to just drag it up a space elevator and give it a shove.
"who's going to pay?"
Well, on one side you have BT, well known for pinching pennies wherever they can, and on the other side you have their customers, most of whom are locked in and have no other option but to pay whatever BT charges.
I think we can all guess who'll end up paying.
On the subject of PCI, my local Sainsburys has added extra cameras to all of the self-service checkouts.
They're up above the checkout, and seem to be positioned to get a good view of what is being scanned and put into a bag. There's a screen next to them.
Thing is, they also perfectly capture the card reader, and even if they might not quite have the resolution to read the card number, you could certainly tell what PIN someone has typed in. I assume that this footage is being kept for at least some length of time.
I'm assuming whoever OK'ed them has never heard of PCI at all.
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