Posts by Cynic_999

"... even if, as is routine these days, he will serve a maximum of half that time behind bars.

"

The word "routine" makes it appear to be something that is optional, and "these days" makes it sound as if it's a recent thing. Neither is true - sentences have comprised a certain proportion to be spent in prison and the rest out on licence for many decades (though the exact proportions have changed from time to time). The media always makes out that release from prison before the entire sentence is served is some sort of discretionary concession. It isn't, it follows mandatory rules of which the sentencing judge is well aware.

What am I missing?

Surely having your page file located on an SSD would achieve pretty much exactly the same thing?

Why the outrage?

Both UK and US have been re-routing Internet traffic for decades in order to spy on their citizens, so it's a bit hypocritical to get all upset when someone else follows suit. (There is no technical reason for your Internet data to get routed to Menwith Hill).

In any case, if this was really deliberate (and it may well not have been), then it was simply a denial of service attack rather than a spying mission because it stopped any TCP connection being made, and no data is sent unless and until the TCP handshake has completed. Had there been servers in Russia, China or Nigeria accepting the connection requests and pretending to be Google, then it would have been far more sinister.

Alternative

I bought a phone-sized projector containing WiFi, Bluetooth and an Android OS and was very impressed - pretty cheap as well. It's perfect for occasions when you need to look at a reasonable size image on a very portable device. The LED projection is bright enough to see in shaded daylight up to about A3 size, and in a dark room will project very watchable movies on a wall or screen several metres in size. Battery charge lasts over 2 hours of continuous projector use.

So my idea would be a phone with a normal size display, but with a projector lens on the edge for when you need to see some reasonable detail or display something to a group of people.

On what grounds?

The article fails to explain on what grounds the people running the server were arrested and on what grounds the server was seized. AFAIAA it is perfectly legal in Holland to run an encrypted messaging site, just as it is legal to communicate using PGP. So what laws had the people running the server broken? I would have thought they were making sufficient money from selling such expensive hardware & services that they would not have needed to be involved in anything criminal.

Ready for January

You'll find that this is being offered at that price for the mandatory period so that they can legitimately advertise it having a "99.9% discount" during the January sales and still charge $13000.

So ...

In America you have the protected right to carry automatic rifles and guns, but take a novelty lighter to work and everyone gets upset.

I'm not quite sure that Americans are able to differentiate between the things that can hurt them and the things that can't. And the disease seems to be spreading ...

Great new search feature!

I expect that not only does it index your entire HDD (taking a mere 10 hours during which your PC is too slow to be used), but it saves the index to "the cloud" so it is never lost. Also allowing anyone else + dog to search your HDD without your knowledge, even if your PC is not switched on. Handy for when the wife wants to buy you some porn that you've not seen. You can easily turn off that feature by going through 15 menu items that don't appear to be in any way related, instructions for which are clearly documented in 6-point type halfway down a 10000 line document on an obscure page of the Microsoft web site. Hidden beneath a pop-up EULA. But it switches itself on again after every update (and if you sneeze a bit hard).

Works the other way also

Leave your phone at home (or elsewhere) while you go out to commit an armed robbery, and it will provide you with a pretty reasonable alibi these days ...

Better yet, ship it to a friend in a distant city, who ships it back to you upon receipt, and your alibi gets stronger (ship it connected to a power bank if its battery would not otherwise last long enough).

Too complex to be true

I stated in the comments to the earlier article - if you have the resources to make a custom chip, then you would create a lookalike of a suitable chip that is *already used* on the MB, and substitute the bogus chip for the real one anywhere along the supply chain to the MB manufacturer. No board modifications needed, and nobody associated with the server manufacture will know a thing. The bogus chip would work correctly, but have extra functionality. Then there would be no outward difference in the motherboard and it could only be discovered by observing the unauthorised behaviour. Not even examination of the silicon would make it immediately apparent, because the bogus silicon could be marked with the correct chip ID and a bogus "new revision" number.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Embedding a chip in a PCB would require a completely new PCB fabrication process so is inherently unlikely (Everyone working in the PCB fab would have noticed all the new machinery and a complete change to the process flow). Unless the news agency can produce a PCB modified in the way claimed, I do not believe a word of it.

Why not

Do it all via Facebook?

In any case, it's always handy to have several different IDs in case one of them is rejected for something you really want to do.

Great news!

So the amount of free energy available in those beams are absolutely enormous. And available 24/7/365.

There must therefore surely be a few £million in government funding available to research ways of harnessing it. Doesn't have to be at all practical, the government just needs to be able to boast about how much it's doing to address climate change.

Empty assertion with no data to back it up

The article states, "... which derived the data from 87 billion measurements on 8 million devices between May and August this year."

But neglects to say *what* was measured. There is also no mention of *how* video streaming is degraded. As such it is akin to saying "Persil washes whiter." IOW a completely meaningless statement because it lacks any terms of reference. Maybe video quality is rated higher in some countries because the local YouTube servers are less loaded and it has sod-all to do with the mobile network. Or maybe it is rated according to users' subjective opinion and they have cuter looking kittens in that country.

Fax machines are inherently more secure that t'internet

It is highly difficult to hack into a fax machine (you have to physically cut the line - you cannot "T" into a fax communication because it's bidirectional with the same frequencies used on both sides so you usually have to insert a hybrid in-line to separate Tx from Rx), and it is impossible to do so from outside the country.

And if you do manage to hack the machine, you'll only get the real-time faxes sent to & from that particular machine from that time on, not a database of the past 10 years' email correspondence from all users on the server.

All the security and reliability issues mentioned are due to failings in the way faxes are used and is no different to Internet based communications. Yes, an unattended fax machine is a security risk. So is an unattended logged-in terminal, or an unattended printer or an unattended filing cabinet. And if the fax does not get to the person it is supposed to get to, that's a failing of the way it is managed, not the fax. Exactly the same can happen to an email (or snail-mail) - e.g. when the recipient has left or away on holiday, or when they delete your email without reading because it's buried amongst last night's spam, or when it is sent to the wrong email address and not forwarded to the correct person. Or when the email server crashes after receiving the email and gets restored using last weeks' backups.

The fax machine sends back confirmation that the fax was correctly received and printed which works 99% of the time (if it is out of paper or has a mechanical jam it will send back an error to the originating machine, but a few other failures can occur that result in an "OK" response with nothing printed). It cannot confirm that anyone bothered reading the fax, any more than your email receipt confirmation means that anyone actually read the contents of your email rather than e.g. the confirmation being automatically generated by a computer running an email client behind an empty desk (which like the fax, would be a problem with the configuration and/or policy, not emails in general).

I'm unexpectedly impressed

Well, there is a heck of a lot of pretty good technology there. The optics seem to be particularly sophisticated - way better than I expected to hear. I'd really like to see the result. The projection of IR dots and camera pick-up to map a room's dimensions also seems to be a good way to go (except for those who like very dark décore in their room), although the test will be in how well the processing can interpret the data. In fact processing speed is likely to be the major make or break. If the final result lags too badly it will just end up inducing motion sickness.

If the hardware works as the description suggests it should, and if there is software that can make good use of that hardware, then I think it will be worth the steep asking price, albeit not something everyone could afford to spend on something as unnecessary as video gaming.

I may just end up raising a company purchase request. For R&D purposes. I'd even put in some overtime (working from home).