Posts by T J

Opinion Piece

Not sure it constitutes news or should even be on El Reg in the first place.

This overcomplicated, slow, security-absent crap still exists?

I'm amazed.

People care?

MS's web experiment is dead and gone, like Apple's server experiment.

Apache and Nginx won.

Move on.

(Cough) Elephant in the (cough) room ...

It's still amazing me.

People think that Intelligence agencies TELL the public what they're doing.

NO. They DON'T. Not even if there is a REASON to.

Their business is secrecy. That never changes. It is their currency, their leverage, their life-blood, and their protection.

They don't tell you anything they don't want you to know. That 'you' is us.

For somebody to stand up and do this rubbish ... the agenda will become clearer down the track. But it's a stunt. It is a reasoned and calculated (or emergency) measure. It is not what it seems.

And on a related topic - I *was* gratified to see some posters on El Reg were of the same opinion as myself: The Wikileaks CIA 'leaks' are just a load of old, disused crap and they've long since moved on to more sophisticated hacks. This was just a golden opportunity to use the White Haired One's ego to publish a giant wad of FUD. Now anybody who isn't in on the joke is running to patch stuff ... that no longer matters. Not to Intelligence agencies like the CIA, NSA, SVR, GRU and the other handful that actually have some clout in the world.

Hello little newborn vector

So, basically Wikileaks has now become a publically known, willing channel for CIA FUD and misinformation. Perfect.

Well, gee, that was an impartial and unbiased article.

Yeah, um, how far......?

How far, really, is it going to get?

Ok Windows doesn't stand a chance, it blows away like chaff in the wind against any serious security hack. But major servers don't run on Windows.

OSX fares a little better with its BSD heritage, but it too isn't tooo hard to smash into. But major servers don't run on OSX.

They run on Linux.

They run on open-source software that has an entire world's worth of security experts and security theorists probing into its every chess-move.

There will always be holes.

It's just... there might not be all that many of them, in the end.

A challenge, but it's being taken up

Technology is two-edged, always. But here, I'm talking about the edge faced by the intelligence agencies, and corporate-owned "governments". It can fight back.

There are now strains of Android (let's just quietly ignore the hipster with the head shaped like a fruit trying to get our attention in the corner, and let's laugh at the random collection of ones and zeroes holding the four-colours flag as it gets kicked mewing and drooling out the door, shall we) that have Google's caring-sharing life-sucking tentacles removed, and have been hardened in other ways.

Ubuntu is becoming a popular handheld device OS.

There are homegrown efforts coming up that use other software, and indeed other hardware than the (cough cough) "major" brands do.

And online, the problems with TOR are being analysed out of the way (the entire paradigm sucks, because...), i2p2 grows and grows (...really, both endpoints need to be encapsulated within a network in order to be safe) and "illegal" - let's use the correct term: alegal - radio networks just keep popping up and refusing to be mole-whacked.

It's very annoying (for the surveillance sycoph... community), but some things are, albeit slowly, getting harder to find out, not easier. Bit like the MAFIAA discovering the public don't like being ripped off and neither do musicians.

Of course your standard thickhead won't care (and will continue using their real name on Facesucker, etc), until somebody dies or something big happens. But after that, suddenly they'll be on their car roofs beating their chests. FORTUNATELY, there will actually be tech there waiting for them with open arms.

Yeah whatever...

What's the chick's name in the photo? Come on....

Come on the great South, we're rooting for you

When the hell is South Korea just going to annex this bunch of clowns. China has already washed its hands of them, Russia couldn't care less, and the populace of the North will welcome it ecstatically.

Counting down.... counting dowwwwwn.....

Disgusting behaviour

Disgusting behaviour by the airport security apparatchik. An enquiry should happen, whether it reports or not - this should be high news.

But yes - don't let some little turd in a uniform compromise your data. Encrypt it on a hidden volume behind a guest account. OR, store your data client-side encrypted online somewhere, and grab it after you've got where you're going - this is what govfuckwiterments have reduced us to.

Fortunately while they are busy slamming each others' dicks in the door and snorting cocaine, they physically can't legislate the laws of mathematics.

This is.....

This is a piss take, right? This IS a piss take...... right?

And both of them stay crap

Regardless of their relationships, both their browsers continue to s*** me.

Chrome is so utterly bereft of features that it reminds me of Apple's garbage ("Let us think for you... even though we're hipster idiots.") But gee its flash bindings work nice!

And Firefox, with all its configurability and plugin ecology is a PIECE OF BLOATED PIGWARE that uses up nearly a gig of RAM when it's doing *nothing*. And its flash crashes if you breathe.

Would that the two clouds of nerds (or... herd of clowns?) could get together and produce the One True Browser, instead of urinating over their respective audiences.

Sorry... what's that you say?

Adobe Reader I understand - I occasionally have to fall back to it when I'm not using Okular.

But, what's that other thing? I've never heard of it.

Good but Beware

Glad to see this inspired the inevitable usual dickh... intelligent commentary.

Whilst this approach is a GoodThing[tm] - the bastards should pay their fair tax share - anything that starts to look like World Government stirrings makes my blood chill. A Gordon Brown or Tony Abbot at the head of a world parliament.... kinda makes the nuclear exchange threat of the 60s pale into insignificance.

You can pay for anything you want

Apple never really came up with anything. You can get any gear you want - if you are prepared to pay for it. You always could.

The iPod was a perfect example of Jobbie's marketing insan... genius. Take an mp3 player, moronise the interface (and call it 'funky'), then add an 80G surface-mount spinner. Isn't this wonderful? And it only costs you $800! Just don't drop it.

The MacBook Air - we'll make it so thin that nobody can make a DVD-ROM drive for it... cos, you know, those things are like so dead, man. And they did die, true. About 5 years later. But then there's a little thing called heat-dissipation, but thats ok nobody cares about that. In the meantime, we are so sorry about your scorched testicles, Sir, but they were scorched by Steve so you really should be grateful. Give us $4500 for the new one with less Ball-Scorch....

Decades ago, in the luggable era, Hewlett Packard (I *think*, it may have been somebody else) made a luggable that you could throw over a wall onto concrete. They built it for the military, and it was one of the first devices with 'drop-sensing' that would park the spinner, and all the internals were gel-packed. It cost $30k.

Anything you want. Gimme yo dolla.

More reasons to shoot cyclists

Since the clown-clothed, space and privacy invading, jumped-up t*rds will no doubt use it, hopefully the gear will remain a bright, vivid orange. Makes the little bastards a lot easier to sight up...

Linux?

How the hell do you install the Linux one? If you've got root anyway then it's game over.

F**** Apple and f***** old computing shyte

I am not unique in this - I am an old, very experienced, still perfectly functioning software developer. My dreams are written in Python (it's more efficient than the old way).

And, I hate old computer hardware, ok? I can't stand it. It bores the living piss out of me. People who get enthusiastic about it generate a boredom field that ages concrete by millenia - they are dangerous, don't let them near bridges.

If it's seriously old - like valves-and-mercury era - then that's a different story. That stuff was space-lab frankenstein-lab evilgenius-lab glorious blinkenlicht power to the oversploog! But mainly because it looked really cool, quite apart from any boundaries it pushed.

Old, clunky and stupid plastic boxes, full of step-wise evolutions of green, crappy circuit boards, are your anus, frankly. Pants. Duff. Boring and spew.

And if it's APPLE, ooooooowwwwrrr, then it can REALLY get stuffed (down the curbside drain, with a roight goid kickun....)

Turnbull needs to pay ME...

...for having to watch his offensive head on my screen and listen to his bullshit. And the same goes for his party and the Liberal Party Lite (the ALP).

Whasis?

What's this "Googleplus" thing? Is it like the Red Cross?

Simplest solution...

...surely is just to remove their 'products' from all hardware, everywhere, and replace them with linux based ones?

Right, so it's just more guesswork bollox

Right, so it's just more guesswork bollox and in the meantime there is nothing actually wrong with TrueCrypt.

Nobody has addressed the elephant in the room - has AES256 been compromised? (Correct answer: no, it hasn't). TC is just a file-system handler built around AES256's one-way functions.

So, carry on people, nothing to see here (yet).

Oh and read this:

https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm

Avoiding disasters

So long as they don't accidentally make 'Quantum Of Solace' all should be well.

We are a nation of dickheads.

Hello... hello. IS this thing on....

This is really a bit.... sad.... overall. The rozzers have resorted to this. Can't be long before they (rightly) give up entirely and go after corporate tax frauds and other rapists like we pay them to.

Holy crap - behold the might of public memory! I'd nearly completely forgotten about old Whitedyed Man there!

Xbox? Really?

Players still buy Xboxes? Since Nintendo now call ALL the shots (and nobody is laughing anymore), Redmond is rapidly going down the gurgler, and Sony are busy shooting their balls off from every possible direction... I'm starting to find Xbox stories rather quaint.

Australians play Uncle Sam's pink oboe

Don't believe any of the old bollocks and hype about Australians being stand-up, defy-at-all-odds, revolutionaries - none of it was ever true, it was all propaganda, smoke, hot-air and bullshit, always.

As a nation we LOVE to bend over and take it right up the colon from the lowest, highest, or in fact any bidder.