Posts by Aslan

No sim, No sale!

No discrete removable sim, I won’t be buying it.

Check this out, pics of Miss Atomic Bomb from the Las Vegas News Bureau

Interesting how attitudes to nuclear reactors have changed. They are problematic, still, but the next generation of pebble bed reactors looks interesting.

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a-tourist-draw-in-1950s-las-vegas/375802/

"In true Las Vegas style, the city capitalized on the atomic spectacle. The Chamber of Commerce printed up calendars advertising detonation times and the best spots for watching. Casinos like Binion’s Horseshoe and the Desert Inn flaunted their north-facing vistas, offering special “atomic cocktails” and “Dawn Bomb Parties,” where crowds danced and quaffed until a flash lit the sky. Women decked out as mushroom clouds vied for the “Miss Atomic Energy” crown at the Sands."

S4 to S7 upgrade well worth it

I upgraded from a Samsung Galaxy S4 to a Samsung Galaxy S7. It was well worth it. In this hilly city the S7 picks up a decent signal 20 vertical feet lower than the S4. It gets better coverage in buildings, when turned sideways the S4 would tend to drop calls, the S7 has no issues with any orientation. The Wifi signal goes further and it's faster, the phone runs cooler, the GPS is faster and more accurate. The difference are huge and the upgrade was well worth it. Both are great, but the S7 is better by far.

Note, I would not have chosen the S7 over other current options because of it's lack of removable battery and glass back, but when they were two for the price of one, $338 instead of $676, I can buy a battery case to fix that.

Amazing there's still things to surprise us

Amazing there's still things to surprise us in 2016 from the natural world. Also surprisingly SciHub is still about, I found this out from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#External_links and found the full text searching the DOI https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.215101 http://link.aps.org.sci-hub.ac/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.215101 .

The Aristocrats

Yay

Yay!

Open a dispute with credit card company

Here in the USA sometimes a credit card company will offer special services in addition to simply a line of credit. I have a Chase Visa card and they offer 90 days of purchase protection. Chase while relentless bill collectors are pleasant when you pay on time. I've used the purchase protection in two instances. First I purchased a One Plus One aka discount Chinese flagship spec phone. The phone made a great tablet, but the cellphone reception varied with the atmospheric temperature to the point it was impossible to reliably use it as a phone. I went round and round with OnePlus about this wasting 16 hours with tech support enduring 6 system wipes and restores. OnePlus wanted to submit me to more of the same. I reported my problems to Chase and they said it sounded defective. They had me return the device and refunded my money same day. Second example. I tried an MVNO called FreedomPop and the first two months billing were fine, then a payment didn't go through, perhaps because I changed my billing address and didn't use the updated one. They cut my service off and refused to answer my calls over the holiday weekend. Yes, I understand people should get holidays, but they cut my phone off and refused to restore it greatly upsetting me. Finally on that Tuesday, They made me provide another card. They billed that, and updated the billing info. Then they charged the original card. The next month they billed both cards. I called them and they refunded it. It happened the following month. Again I called and refunded it, saying if it happened again I'd have to take the matter up with Chase. It happened again. Chase initiated a chargeback for me, and blocked FreedomPop from making any further charges to that account. FreedomPop refused to allow me to use their service after that and refunded me an additional months service.

I also like to make purchases through Paypal, they're even better than Chase in their buyer protection.

Here's some generic details of Chase's buyer protection with a CC. It varies per card.

https://www.chase.com/content/chasecom/en/card-benefits/benefit-details/freedom_vp/purch_protect_500_v1.html

Can repair, replace or reimburse you for eligible items in the event of theft or damage when items are purchased with an eligible Chase card or with rewards earned on an eligible Chase card

Coverage is in excess of any valid and collectible insurance such as homeowner's insurance, or other forms of reimbursement

Up to a maximum of $500 per claim and up to $50,000 per account

So I'm not sure exactly how it would work in the authors case, but he might be able to get $500 back and keep the Surface 4, and that would be a nice punch in the gut to Microsoft.

Congratulations Google

Congratulations Google!

Dangerous

I'm surprised the command line in windows respects the return key, that would seem to be a dangerous mistake. Changing text copied to the clipboard is nothing new, I've seen it for years, on more than three different site, usually it's just an attribution as to where the material is from, but sometimes it's been nastier, trying to get me to subscribe to a publication, or a random ad for something else entirely is the worst I've seen.

Still I was smugly thinking to myself, I'd never copy text from the internet to a command line, except, no, actually I have. I played with several Hackintoshes, until I realized as nice as OS X was I wasn't going to pay through the nose to be a customer and Apple didn't want me as one. Their hardware's lovely, but why can't they put out anything affordably priced for the spec? Then I remembered trying to get Linux to work. Everything's fine, and each time you try it it looks like they really have made it into a functional OS this time that one could get day to day work done on, and then you run into that essential piece of hardware you need, that simply won't function, but it's kindof like this other one, so maybe if you download this development software and a compiler you could compile your own driver and get it working. Of course you can't do any of this graphically Linux programmers are fucking machoists that love obscure commands and flags. And sometimes there's a guide that almost does what you need, but it's incomplete or you need another version of a program and Linux is simply fucking hell. And yes I've copy pasted commands from the internet into a terminal as root in Linux, although only reviewing them so that I had a fair understanding of them.

Thus the only way I've found to get a functional Linux system is buy it from a system integrator who charges a premium for a working system, System 7, Dell, or one can waste their time obsessing over every little component of the system and ensuring it has bonified open source 'cred, or simply run it in a VM on Windows. In such cases Linux can be reasonably pleasant and functional.

So in short I could have fallen victim to this attack. Now I'll know to copy and paste everything to a simple text editor such as Notepad in Windows, which at least with the example, shows me the attack version.

It's possible to get energy from sound, just not very much

It's possible to get energy from sound, just not very much. I once heard an explanation of why no one bothered, If you took a football stadium full of fans for a full 3 hour game and converted all of the sound waves to energy it would only be enough to boil a teacup full of water. I heard this a long time ago and Google doesn't want to pull up anything remotely close to this.

Now, if we were talking about low frequency sound I'd find this a bit more believable, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZS3xOcalH0

Is this true EL Reg? If so, I think this topic deserves a more in depth article.

Mega has been dubious from the beginning

Mega's method of encrypted file storage has been dubious from the beginning, it seems it's much weaker than standard 128bit AES. It does a bunch of weird stuff with the encryption, and the rule of thumb with encryption, is that if you're doing it yourself, you're probably getting it wrong. Further Kim Dot Com was forced out of the company so one can assume it's in government control. All of which means it's not a great place to store files securely.

Now for legal files that don't compromise one's own privacy and one doesn't mind sharing with the world it can still be a useful file host. I simply wouldn't rely on Mega to keep access to anything secure though.

It's cool but ultimately not that useful. 1200x is necessary to see if a sample is contaminated with bacteria, anything less is a toy. I wonder though what's the lag from source to screen for realtime applications, such as soldering a circuit board perhaps? I know the answer would be very device dependent.

One must remember,

One must remember that The New York Times, Fortune, and many others have had ads or even the site itself hijacked to serve malware.

The Fortune one was particularly egregious, as Fortune had just started using a new tactic, they blocked people from accessing the site who used ad blockers. Two days after forcing people to turn their ad blocking off Fortune served them malware through their ads. Coincidence, surely?

I think I've seen some dodgy drug ads on The Register in the past, but I never recall them serving malware. Basically no site on the internet is to be trusted, and every site that serves ads will eventually serve malware.

Much better view here

Much better view here, fullscreen, with several more camera angles and technical chatter.

https://youtu.be/1lYZLxr3L4E?t=29m18s

Everyone's right, getting that bright it did initially look like a crash, but I think the key is instead of one booster doing about a three second burn, I believe it was 3 doing a 5 second burn? Much brighter than previous landing burns, much later giving the cameras less time to compensate. Looking at it live last night, the rocket came down over the barge in a cloud of fire so bright nothing could be seen. Then suddenly the cloud went out and in the inky blackness was the silhouette of the rocket. I was amazed.

War with the idiots of IT

Why couldn't you be bothered to do something sensible like provide all the computers with properly licensed copies of MacWrite II? If the users are supplying their own regardless of the legality why do you feel a need to stop them from getting work done? Now I'll agree they shouldn't have copied their own programs to the universities computers, or deleted the ones present. The obvious solution the the loud pronouncements of "Stop installing MacWriteII" was a dead end audio plug, it plugged into a lineout jack and had a little plastic cap on it. It made the Mac believe it was plugged into external speakers so it shut off the internal speaker. LOL.

I do appreciate your solution in the end with the Macs, it's quite elegant, and still allows the users the freedom to use their own software. I prefer working with environments like that. Give the users a clean image restored each day and let them do what they will. Not appropriate for all environments, but it works well for schools and libraries.

My experience with school IT was they insisted on running programs a year or two old with no patches installed. I requested they fix this, they refused. One of the assholes even had one of those new more than $1000 USD Apple LCD screens when they were first new right after the first ones Apple ever shipped, (Disregarding the 30th anniversary Mac) had been announced, and everyone else had CRT's which were absolutely fine really, but the money could have been better spent. Web browsers at the time were changing at such a rate that this would cause websites to fail to load and the old versions of the browsers were generally much slower than the newer versions. The solution was to disable their security software and install the updates (within the same major version) / new versions of the webbrowsers myself and put the security back in place afterwards. I also tossed a freely licensed image editor on the computers. By using a different computer each time I needed a computer eventually all the computers I had access to were within 3 months of the current patch.

I also had a way to redirect all my webbrowing through a site that wrapped it in SSL which opened up the full version of the internet instead of the censored blocked one the school provided.

They tracked down the students who changed grades (Most teaches kept a copy on paper) and the ones who stole the mice, but they never accused me of anything. I'm somewhat surprised by that. I didn't tell people what I was doing and I kept the prompts out of sight, I never actively touched IT's computers though I knew where they were and about them. This was a silent campaign against IT.

I was once accused of modifying the software on the computers by a friend, they often sat next to me and had caught a hint of what I was up to. I had really, really upset them one day. I played off the accusation totally innocent with a "I tried to install a copy of Bolo, (a game) at the start of the year, but it didn't work. I think there's something protecting the computers." They totally bought it.

I wish IT had been responsive to the students. I wish they had provided a good software environment, not just good computers. I'm proud of my accomplishments in 3.5 years of keeping the computers up to date while facing hostile IT.

I actually had trouble getting the Windows 10 nagware to show up

I had a friend who needed an OS because the previous one was crashing, of course they didn't have an OS disk and for some reason the Windows 7 key on the box was invalid. I looked around and found http://youngnewton.com/how-to-reserve-windows-10-on-pirated-windows-7/ which does exactly what one expects. If one activates pirated Windows 7 with "windows loader" Windows and Microsoft will both believe it to be genuine. While Microsoft believes it's genuine one can upgrade to Windows 10 and receive the full version and a genuine copy. So I'd installed all the updates on this pirated version of Windows including the nagware ones making sure it was "genuine", and 48 hours later I still wasn't getting the nagware popups. I had Windows 10 on a flash drive, but just because the computer passed antivirus checks didn't mean I was going to use my USB drives in it. So I had my friend get their own USB drive and had them plug it in, I ended up downloading the ISO direct from Microsoft and using their tool to copy the ISO to USB. It worked beautifully. The computer now has Windows 10 Pro with a legitimate digital entitlement issued directly by Microsoft. Still I was shocked when I couldn't get the initial Windows 10 nagware to pop.

DNT is not a valid option and not having it enabled doesn't mean one doesn't care about privacy. The FCC has declined to provide legal enforcement, and many ad networks ignore it. Simply blocking all ad networks, now that's effective. How do you like that Gavin Clarke? Are you convinced I care about privacy?

I like the idea of Brave. It offers users less intrusive advertising, or none altogether, while protecting privacy. No one has made website micropayments work yet, but this looks like it might. Content creators deserve payment for their work. I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out and am hoping it's a success.

No sim no sale!

I choose the device, I choose the service provider. Sim cards make this happen. On networks without sims such as Sprint in the USA, Sprint will often refuse to activate customer owned devices which are fully compatible with the network and in some cases the exact same model is being sold by Sprint.

Let's have "No sim no sale!" as the slogan of the technically literate.

"If you'll allow your humble hack to think aloud, Apple is being asked by the public to contradict itself." Looks like darn near 100% of the commenters who know about the issue disagree with you here Shaun Nichols if replacing the fingerprint sensor was such a security disaster then why did it brick the phone after an update and not after replacement of the module?

Clause 57.10 REAMDE

Because Amazon wants a cut of T'Rain

"...Around this time there was an airport security scare in which some fuckwit entered a concourse by walking upstream through an exit portal, bypassing the security checkpoint. As always happened in such cases, the entire airport had to be shut down. Planes waiting for takeoff had to taxi back to gates and unload all passengers and baggage. All the passengers had to be ejected from the sterile side of the airport and then turn around and pass through security again. Flights were delayed, and the delays ramified throughout the global air travel system, eventually racking up a cost of tens of millions of dollars. All of which could have been prevented had the one TSA employee posted by the exit—an employee whose sole purpose in being there was to just keep his fucking eyes open and stop people from walking the wrong way through a door—had actually done his job. Richard was fascinated. How could even the laziest and sloppiest employee screw this up? The answer, apparently, was that it had nothing to do with laziness or sloppiness. It was that Mogadishu copper thing all over again. The neural pathways required to accomplish the seemingly easy task of identifying a pedestrian walking the wrong way through a door had, in the brain of this employee, been uprooted a long time ago and zip-tied onto those used by some other, more important, or at least more frequently used, procedure.

And so they started up the first APPIS pilot project, which went something like this. They shot some consumer-grade video of Corporation 9592 employees walking down a hallway. They spun that up into a demo, which they showed to several regional airports that were too small and poorly funded to afford fancy, expensive, alarm-equipped one-way doors, and thus had to rely on the bored-employee-sitting-in-a-chair-by-the-door technology. They parlayed those meetings into a deal that gave them access to live 24/7 security camera footage from a couple of those airports. The footage, of course, just showed people walking through the exit.

They patched that footage into pattern recognition software that identified the shapes of the individual humans and translated them into vector data in 3D space. This made it possible to import all the data into the T’Rain game engine. The same positions and movements were conferred on avatars from the T’Rain world. The stream of human passengers walking down the corridor in their blazers, their high heels, their Chicago Bears sweatpants, became a stream of K’Shetriae, Dwinn, trolls, and other fantasy characters, dressed in chain mail, plate armor, and wizards’ robes, moving down a stone-lined passageway at the exit of the mighty Citadel of Garzantum.

The High Marshal of the Garzantian Empire then made an announcement to the effect that huge amounts of gold could be earned by, honor bestowed upon, and valuable weapons and armor handed out to anyone who nabbed a goblin attempting to sneak in through said passageway. Characters who volunteered for this duty were issued a special instrument, the Horn of Vigilance, and told to blow it whenever they spotted a wrong-way goblin. Extra points were handed out for actually confronting the goblin and (of course) engaging it in Medieval Armed Combat.

Now, in all the entire (real) world’s airports put together, the number of people who got into concourses by walking the wrong way through exit doors amounted to maybe one or two per year: not enough to hold the attention, or assure the vigilance, of even the most rabid T’Rain player. So the APPIS system now sweetened the pot by automatically generating fictitious, virtual wrong-way goblins and sending them up that tunnel at the rate of one every couple of minutes, every day, forever. Some balancing had to happen—the value of the rewards had to be tweaked relative to the frequency of wrong-way goblins—but with a minimal amount of adjustment they were able to set the system up in such a way that 100 percent of all the wrong-way goblins were apprehended. The total number of wrong-way goblins that had to be generated per year was about two hundred thousand—which was no problem, since generating them was free. The trick, of course, was that a tiny minority of those one-way goblins were not, in fact, computer-generated figments. They were representations of actual human forms that had been picked up by airport security cameras as they walked the wrong way into airport concourses. In reality, of course, this happened so rarely that testing the system was well-nigh impossible, and so they ran drills, several times a day, in which uniformed, badged TSA employees would present themselves at the exit and show credentials to the bored guard and then walk upstream into the concourse. In exactly 100 percent of all such cases, some T’Rain player, somewhere in the world (almost always a gold farmer in China) would instantly raise the Horn of Vigilance to his virtual lips and blow a mighty blast and rush out to confront the corresponding one-way goblin: an event that, through some artful cross-wiring between Corporation 9592’s servers and the airport security systems, would cause red lights to flash and horns to sound and doors to automatically lock at the airport in question.

Corvallis and most of the other techies hated this idea because of its sheer bogosity, which was screamingly obvious to any person of technical acumen who thought about it for more than a few seconds. If their pattern-recognition software could identify the moving travelers and vectorize their body positions well enough to translate their movements into T’Rain, then it could just as easily notice, automatically, with no human intervention, when one of those figures was walking the wrong way and sound the alarm. There was no need at all to have human players in the loop. They should just spin out the pattern-recognition part of it as a separate business.

Richard understood and acknowledged all of this—and did not care. “Did you, or did you not, tell me that this was all marketing? What part of your own statement did you not understand?” The purpose of the exercise was not really to build a rational, efficient airport security system. It was, rather (to use yet another of those portentous phrases cribbed from the math world), an existence proof. Once it was up and running, they could point to it and to its 100 percent success rate as vindicating the premise of APPIS, which was that real-world problems—especially problems that were difficult to solve because of hard-wired deficiencies of the human neurological system, such as the tendency to become bored when given a terrible job—could be tackled by metaphrasing them into Medieval Armed Combat scenarios, and then (here brandishing two searingly hip terms from high tech) putting them out on the cloud so that they could be crowdsourced.

The system, despite its bogosity—which was fundamental, evident, and frequently pointed out by huffy nerd bloggers—immediately became a darling of hip West Coast tech-industry conferences. APPIS had to be turned into a separate division and expanded onto a new floor of the office building in Seattle, which conveniently had been vacated by an imploding bank. New ideas and joint venture proposals rushed in, like so many wrong-way goblins, at such a pace that the APPIS staff could scarcely blow their Horns of Vigilance fast enough. The underemployed nerds of the world, impatient with the slow pace at which Corporation 9592’s in-house programmers bent to their demands, began to generate their own APPIS apps. The most popular of these was a system that would accept low-quality video of a corporate meeting room, supplied by a phone, and transmogrify the scene into a collection of hairy, armored warlords sitting around a massive plank table in a medieval fortress. Whenever a meeting participant lifted a bottle of vitamin water or a skinny nonfat latte to his or her lips, the corresponding avatar would quaff deeply from a five-liter tankard of ale and then belch deeply, and whenever someone took a nibble from a multigrain bar, the avatar would bite a steaming hunk of meat from a huge leg of lamb. PowerPoint presentations, in this scenario, were turned into vaporous apparitions hanging in numinous steam above a sorcerer’s kettle. In the first version of the app, the horn-helmeted avatars all said exactly the same things that the corresponding humans did in the real-world conference room, which made for some funny juxtapositions but wore thin after a while. But then people began to create add-ons so that if, for example, someone’s clever new proposal got trashed by a grouchy boss, the event could be rendered as a combat scene in which the hapless underling’s severed head wound up on the end of a spear. Large swaths of the global economy were, it now seemed, being remapped onto their T’Rain equivalents so that they could be transacted in a Medieval Armed Combat setting. Demonstrable improvements in productivity were being trumpeted every day on the relevant section of Corporation 9592’s website (by a medieval herald, naturally, and with an actual trumpet).

Richard insisted, only half in jest, that he wanted to see 10 percent of the global economy moved into T’Rain. Or at least 10 percent of the information economy. But since the information economy had now got its fingers into just about everything, this wasn’t much of a limitation. Factory workers watching widgets stream off the assembly line, inspecting them for defects, ought to be able to metaphrase their work into something way more neuron grabbing, such as flying up a river valley on a winged steed, gazing into its limpid waters at the rocks strewn up its channel, looking for the one that contained traces of some magical ore..."

-Neal Stephenson - REAMDE

Are these numbers really that surprising?

Given the annoyance that are ads, and the fact they they're spammed everywhere is it surprising at all that normal human behavior causes a lot of them not to be seen? When an ads blink, move and flash I don't want them on my screen. When it starts making noise or shifts my content around the page I block it entirely. I keep the browser narrow so it doesn't load ads on the sides of the page, I scroll past the banner at the top of the page, and don't look at the ones underneath. Everyone can open lots of tabs these days, and you know sometimes you forget why you cared to open them in the first place and close them without looking at them. Then there's the half page of advertising below the page, why would I ever look at that. I'm sure there's some bots involved somewhere, but what percentage of ads not viewed for at least one second is simply normal human behavior?

I've seen good ads on the web, one was a single line text ad from Google telling me about a tech conference in my city I was unaware of, it was an open source one. Another time I was trying to fix a pump and again I think it was Google had a display ad for the exact part I needed. So in both cases a bit creepy, but if I and other people were served more such ads I think we'd be more inclined to have a look at them.

If it can be linked it should be linked. The host of the content is responsible for making it available, hiding it, or protecting it.

We've got the title of the song in the headline, but not the official music video? Well here's the uncensored work it refers too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1S0Bvz3NHo . What can I say, I appreciate all the hard work the girlies put in.

When the USA lies to it's own people, why would the Europeans believe us?

What is wrong with companies that they can't fix security problems in 90 days, and this is a security company we're talking about? If it's not a secure product it should be pulled from the market.

See the article on Wired

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/new-discovery-around-juniper-backdoor-raises-more-questions-about-the-company/

I like the Register I do, and Wired is usually the place with puff pieces, but if you want the hard info, to know who discovered what, the timeline of events, and what was actually going on with the code and why the nonce matters see the Wired article.

Down with 2FA

I appreciate hearing about HTTPS leaking password length and other data. The call for 2FA is excessively annoying. Every day I'm forced to use two separate devices for 2FA that I'm forced to use and didn't want. If I enabled 2FA on everything I'd have to have 4 devices with me at all times including being forced to carry a Windows laptop 24/7. 2FA is a major fucking headache that slows me down and wastes my time. I appreciate having it available, but I loathe being forced to use it.

This does harm legitimate businesses

I work for a business that people call after seeing our ads on TV. To me this does indeed sound like they just banned direct debit, pre-authorised cheques. The regulations with what you can do with those payments were already quite restrictive. They aren't very popular, but some people particularly older people are more comfortable using them. Some of these older people are idiots, they're worried about giving their credit card numbers out over the phone. LOL. If an adversary gained the checking account and routing numbers along with the name and billing address which we collect as we must to ship our products, there would be so much more fun to be had with those than a credit card.

Pre-authorised cheques are a hassle, especially with callers who can't read the numbers because they're written funny, but in the end we accept them for most things because our callers want us too.

Have you ever sold something and tried to get a caller to mail you the check? "The cheque is in the mail" is one everyone's heard. You put just as much cost into dealing with those customers as everyone else, and perhaps 30% of the time you get the cheque within 2 weeks. What are you supposed to do when they finally send the cheque in 6 months later and the price has increased? Depending on what was for sale that can destroy margins. That's why we want the Pre-authorised cheque on the phone, besides, that's usually at least 10 days faster than mailing it in, and who wouldn't like to get what they bought sooner rather than later.

I'm going to have to look into this and see if this does indeed mean what's been suggested here.

Non OEM chargers at fault

The batteries in I devices are massive in comparison to average batteries in a non Apple device. The iPad pro has a massive battery compared to the standard iPad. The standard iPad charger puts out about 10 watts I bet the charger for the pro is double that.

I expect what is happening is people trying to recharge these from non OEM chargers that are poorly designed. The pro sucks down a massive amount of power, the charger which handled an iPhone just fine heats up an the the voltage regulation which was just barely in spec previously starts jumping all over the place. This screws with the digitizer in the touchscreen. A hard reset works as the physical buttons are not dependent on the digitizer.

I've owned usb chargers that operated out of spec like that before. Ok for most devices, but not some.