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* Posts by sillyfudder

10 publicly visible posts • joined 3 May 2013

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

sillyfudder
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Re: Suddenly, Advertising!

Unless all your "personal browsing" is routed to your own home network (using mobile openvpn to pivpn in your house), and then goes out via pihole set up to cut out mobile advertisers and using DoH.

I realise that using this methodology conveniently routes ALL of my home and roaming internet activity through a single path which is a downside if anyone was genuinely interested in me. But I'm in the UK and mildly inconveniencing mobile provider/ISP/UK government information gathering (as a boring law abiding individual) brings me some satisfaction.

If I was really paranoid I could set up a second pivpn for mobile use which would routes out of my home network using openvpn as well, but like I say I'm not /that/ interesting.

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Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

sillyfudder
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Re: Why a 3D printed gun?

PISNIG - problem in shooter, not in gun.

Only an idiot would expect to shoot a fully automatic gun accurately "from the hip", but from prone position, with bipod/tripod, they can be accurate.

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Wake me up before you Gogo ... so I can jump out: Kenyan MP takes on aeroplane flatulence

sillyfudder
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Re: Internal pressure

For those amused by the tales of trumpet above.

Amuse yourselves further by googling 'singletrackworld picolax thread'

A story of a similar medical misadventure once related to the users of a bicycling forum.

Historical flatulence, well told.

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Fourth 'Fappening' celeb nude snap thief treated to 8 months in the clink

sillyfudder
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ivan5,

I suppose you think that people whose email accounts get hacked should just have written messages on their shaven heads and let their hair grow?

Do you have this attitude to all victims of crime or just the ones where there is a salacious angle?

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Senior judge: Put AI in charge of reviewing social media evidence

sillyfudder

For a discussion of the root of the issue (in the UK), everyone should read: The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken.

I'm tempted to believe (Like Dr. Syntax) that the comments in the speech were not as completely tone deaf as they appear. But the speech was definitely misleading about some aspects of the size of the task.

From the press coverage, in at least one of the recent cases referred to, the accused and his defence actually told the police exactly what messages to look for (messages sent to the accused by the complainant after the alleged offence had taken place).

They kept asking for the same evidence for (I recall) 2 years. only for it to be "discovered" the day before the trial, which was then cancelled.

Reading messages from a few days either side of the alleged crime should not take hundreds of hours (for the types of offence being discussed between people who claim to have met only recently).

Its like suggesting that the police collect all available cctv in the area for the last 2 years, and then watch it from the start, instead of looking at the time of the crime.

Nonsense on stilts.

(PS I can understand the difficulty if you were investigating e.g. a financial crime that may have taken place over several months or years, through several different messaging services. But that is not most cases)

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GitLab.com melts down after wrong directory deleted, backups fail

sillyfudder
Facepalm

not just rm

I created typo-geddon once using chown.

As root, I tried to give my user ownership of files from my current dir down (./)and instead put in the space of doom and changed ownership from root on down.

I realised the command was taking too long after about 3 seconds and hit ctrl-c.

I genuinely thought I'd got away with it at first until the machine had to reboot, and a lot of the fundamental stuff that ran the machine (IBM AIX) got read from disk again.

The box itself could be done without for a while so my boss at the time got me to mount the drives and undo a lot of the damage manually to reinforce the lesson (which I've never, yet, had to relearn).

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TERROR in ORBIT: Dodgy rocket burp biffs International Space Station off track

sillyfudder

Twitter comment from someone who knows

Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) ex ISS commander, tweeted a couple of things about this:

"While re-powering the Soyuz after 6 mos it's possible to inadvertently activate its attitude control & fire the thrusters."

"No real harm done, it happened during Expedition 7 too, just wastes a bit of fuel, and Soyuz has plenty."

Doesn't really sound that alarming?

On the other hand not sounding alarmed is part of his job :O)

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Ex-NASA boffin dreams of PREDATOR-ish tech in humble microwaves

sillyfudder
Happy

Obligatory

XKCD .. What-if edition:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/131/

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Legal bible Groklaw pulls plug in wake of Lavabit shutdown, NSA firestorm

sillyfudder

Re: Privacy is key to Groklaw

Plus 1 for hammarbtyp.

She's just a private person who feels violated, (and uses the example of a burglar rummaging through her belongings to express this).

You should read her own comments rather than the registers rehash before commenting about how she is an idiot for thinking email was secure.

She seems to be concerned because privacy is an enormously important part of being human, but has been casually and routinely violated (en masse) for no purpose.

I completely agree, but she puts it much better.

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Fraudster gets ten years after selling fake 'ionic charge' bomb detectors

sillyfudder
Mushroom

Dowsing

For all of those asking how these things passed testing ... They probably did.

These are "dowsing" devices and unless the test is double blind (ie. with no-one in the room having any idea where the search object is located, including the observers) they do _seem_ to work.

Dowsing uses the ideometer effect (and a device to amplify these tiny involuntary movements .. an antenna on a hinge in this case) and can easily convince people that they are receiving an external stimulus.

James Randi says that the dowsers who get tested for his million dollars prize are always the most sincere and completely convinced that their powers are real, and the most surprised and difficult to convince that they aren't (even after failing a fair test that they agreed to in advance).

Read Randi's website for examples of how people can convince themselves that dowsing works.

Its no excuse for this massive charlatan, but it might explain how others fell for it.

For the guy who sold them .... he should be put in a ploughed field to try and find the "off" button for a massive explosive device on a timer with one of his own toys and a shovel.

On live TV.

I'd even Sky+ it :)

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