[Ed P]

Gremlins!

But seriously after 7/8 years things fail. One that could cause an issue is the CMOS battery is in the process of dying – check if the date/time on the pc is correct.

[Ed P]

I need to reprise what you have written to eliminate spurious impressions.

a) You complain that Forumite and only Forumite autorefreshes your screen. No one else has this problem.

b) You state that this happens on each and every computer in your household

c) You infer (use of 3G and caravan) that it happens at multiple locations and also on the mobile.

There are no apparent common factors in this tale unless you are using the same monitor or the same router/access point in each and every case.

[Ed P]

I’m missing something; as conflating your first and second examples there seems to be no ambiguity.

[Ed P]

So a Hard Brexit is now nearly inevitable, or is it?

A hard Brexit means a hard border with Eire – even if is the EU that applies it and not the UK. The DUP continue to make it clear that if necessary they would bring  down the Government in that situation. So it now looks like new Election or new Referendum.

[Ed P]

I’m very pleased with the Brother Printer. It was a breeze to set it up in Windows.

I wish I could say the same about setting it up as a wifi attached printer in Linux. I hate CUPS as the database had nothing that looked like this printer! In the end after much hair tearing I found this very simple setup (that needs sudo to launch it and pulls in many hundreds of megabytes of dependencies – probably for the unwanted scanner part).

Strangely although earlier CUPS found the printer without issue when USB attached, the CUPS install locked everything up and needed a hard reset!

[Ed P]

In C++ you could say:

SomeType *ptr = someAddress;
SomeType &ref = *ptr;
assert(&ref == ptr);

The assert will be true

[Ed P]

I stand by what I said:

&Avariable passes the address of Avariable, and the action of a call-by-reference function is to pull out the value contained in that memory space and use it in the function. If the function then changes Avariable it also changes the value stored in the calling routine..

In your ‘by reference’ example the value stored in that address is changed by the action of the function, whereas the similar function does nothing in the call by value example.

This is harder to write than to do!

[Ed P]

I should change the headline to “Grounded Turkey” as all F35 Turkeys have just been plucked.

Gizmodo Link

[Ed P]

It perhaps would have been better if I had also said that the actual thing passed in call by reference is the ‘fixed’ variable address (&) and the current dereferenced value for the variable sitting at that address. Although nothing you do alters the address inside the function any changes made to the variable are applied to the value at that address.

[Ed P]

No: Check out ‘pass-by-value’ and ‘pass-by-reference’ again.

The first just assigns a value to something passed to a function, and never passes it back to the calling program. The second actually passes a dereferenced pointer to the variable in the calling program. When that ‘pointer’ hits the function any changes made in the function are in effect made to the variable in the calling program. Nothing in fact is ‘passed back’!

The referenced variable could perhaps be considered a global value with scope limited to just the calling program and the function.

[edit] It is really worthwhile getting the concepts of pointers, pointers to pointers etc and their dereferenced values as these are very important and powerful concepts in C/C++ and most other languages that allow direct memory manipulation. In fact they are so powerful that C#  makes you jump through hoops to use what it terms unsafe code.

[Ed P]

What REALLY annoys me about both a hard & a soft Brexit is the completely untrue claim that we will have full control over our borders.As usual a load of lying politicians.

Unless we cast Northern Ireland off into an Irish never-never land, the Ulster/Eire border will remain as a completely open border between a (disjointed) UK and the ravening hordes that Faragh claimed would come from the EU.

This is the real elephant in the room that the media and MPs are deliberately not bringing to the attention of the public!.

[Ed P]

More analysis of Bloomberg’s article is given here by Ars.

Summaring this interesting article, I gain the impression, that although the ‘Bloomberg Method’ could be used, it would be much easier just to use the same approach that the NSA used to attack Cisco equipment (i.e substitute a subverted board in the supply chain.).

The article also says that while firmware attacks on the BMC would be both possible and undetectable, why bother when the Supermicro software is so buggy and itself prone to subversion (inadequate update controls – no signature signing of updates etc)

[Ed P]

No – Sweeney is first and foremost a journalist, who is not afraid to go where others fear to tread.

Quite frankly IF Government agencies are blocking appointments based SOLELY on the individual previously working for the Beeb then it needs to be exposed.

Tbh, I would find such action difficult to believe. There are many reasons that someone would fail to make a selection shortlist, and when a large list has to be culled,  quite a few of these are fairly irrational e.g. doubts that someone is a ‘team-player’. However prior employment (unless unsatisfactory or irrelevant) is never in my experience one of them.

[Ed P]

If he can prove this allegation, he should write to John Sweeney!

[Ed P]

Code Google has a mixed bag of introductory through to highly cutting edge code.

[Ed P]

The ElReg link was missing:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/08/smart_camera_which_wtf/

[Ed P]

The US Digital Millennium Act (DMA), actually makes it illegal to remove encryption on software in order to see what makes it tick/work. I guess it still allows you to perform uninformed modifications on an item that you own.

I am uncertain what parts of this idiocy have been adopted into UK law, but I’ll confess I just ignore such carp as being irrational, and irrelevant as I am not actually trying to break copyrights.

In theory none of these restrictions apply to the IoT as all (?) are based on open software, and manufacturers would face some expensive legal issues if they tried to use the DMA. (almost certainly the Free Software Foundation would come into such a court case as an interested party).

 

[edit] for balance it is not just Xiongmai that have insecure systems, but also ‘reputable’  companies such as Samsung ElReg article

[Ed P]

Thanks for the link. I actually had that file arrangement in my main system, but I had not replicated it in the VM clone! Probably why the clone showed no issues with the update.

[Ed P]

M$ has ‘fixed’ the file deletion bug and re-released 1809. I think I’ll wait!

[Ed P]

Bloomberg have come up with a different example in a Telco, but no detail and nothing to verify their report.

However, this US Government report on US DOD vulnerabilities is perhaps more relevant to the original post. If the US have these problems we have got them in spades given our Government’s outstanding ability to oversee IT projects and manage avionics!

[Author]

Posts