Clive Robinson • June 6, 2020 12:38 PM

@ Pink Floyd,

Appart from the obviously false name you are hiding behind, have you actually read what you have written?

Do you realise what it makes you sound like?

Your last sentance in particular with it’s phraseology makes you sound like a certain type of extreamist and thus actually calls into question your stated reason for posting.

As for “i.e. do yr job” that makes you sound dictitorial as though you believe you have some entitlement to authoritarian behaviour, which you just as obviously do not have in life.

As with similar postings in the past your post says rather more about you than I think most here would care to know about you.

Clive Robinson • June 6, 2020 3:24 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, SpaceLifeform, MarkH, ALL

re: COVID19 zoonotic report between Minks and Humans

You might be interested in this BBC-Science article,

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52775386

It’s about environmental destruction and zoonotic transfer, and starts by pointing out that in a quite short period of time humanity has avoided five noval pandemics, but the sixth got us… (kind of Russian roulette with the bullet in the China chamber).

Interestingly when you read down it gives a path from bats to pigs discovered in 1999 where half eaten fruit covered in bat saliva dropped into areas of a pig farm built into recently deforested land. The pigs ate the saliva covered fruit and in one of them the disease crossed over… It answers a transmission path question that came up on this blog a week ago.

Clive Robinson • June 7, 2020 2:10 AM

@ name.withheld…,

I’d argue the ideal diet consists of raw fruits and vegetables, sea foods based on seaweeds and kelps are also a great source.

Our ancestors ate such diets and they were much more varied than today. But sea food is one of the few ways certain required minerals such as iodine and salt make it into our diet without “fortification”. But even fresh water fish are essential to our diets which religion in Continental Europe effectively monopolized and made mandatory[1] and profited by nicely.

Importantly though what often gets left out of the raw/whole food versus cooked/processed food debate is our ancestors had a much wider set of enzimes to process raw fruits and vegetables than we do now (we’ve even lost a stomach). So we can nolonger eat the diet our ancestors did. Also the fact that cooked food is more easily utilized by our bodies, thus we need not eat as much or as frequently. Which frees up time for other activities.

Importantly though increasingly we “civilized humans” don’t have the enzimes, as we loose them by genetic processes. Thus we have become increasingly reliant on “cooked food” which may be one cause of hyperglycemia thus type two diabetes especially with root vegetables. Thus some members of society become genuinely intolerant of not just raw foods but certain types of food altogether, and via the usual genetic process they become a larger part of our “civilized” society.

I know it’s not PC to say it but some races of humans have genuine differences[2]. For instance over several millennia ago those who moved into the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere had an issue with water bourn diseases. Thus population sizes would get to a certain smallish –village– size and collapse.

Somewhere between two thousand and four thousand years ago the development of beer making, that boils the water in the mash process killed many water bourn pathogens thus alowed larger population centers, often around religious institutions that had the excess manpower to make beer brewing feasable. However along with beer came a toxin “alcohol”. Due to accidents etc whilst intoxicated those without tolerance to alcohol became less geneticaly prevelant. However beer drinking allowed larger population groups of just about 40,000 people in Europe, before water bourn diseases became sufficiently prevelent. Thus the increase of manpower in such large towns alowed other skills to be developed such as white smithing and painting and the making of fine finish and luxury goods.

However in Britain things became slightly different. People joke about the “National drink being tea” where as the “Continentals drink coffee”, tea contains chemicals that just happen to also act against other pathogens that boiling water alone does not kill off. Thus population sizes in Britain started to quickly exceed the 40k limit, and with it the excess manpower to make industrialisation move from “artisanal manufacturing[3] to machine driven manufacturing.

Over in Asia where tea was also drunk they also had large population centers due to tea but the drinking of alcohol was actually quite rare. The result is intolerance to alcohol still runs around 50% of the population and due to modern healthcare reducing the fatality of accidents and such that can result from intoxicated behaviour it’s less likely to get removed from the genetic pool. Whilst this might sound unfortunate, it’s actually the Europeans that you should feel sorry for. Because genetic traits generally have a number of reasons to be in a societal genome. Thus by gaining a tolerance to alcohol what have the various European gene lines lost?

After all to gain tollerance to eucalyptus leaves and the high quantaties of poisons in them, the Koala bear had to significantly limit it’s brain capacity as well as eat almost continuously, thus they are effectively an evolutionary dead end with very low survival prospects.

There is an “extend your life diet” that is largely raw foods that are low in simple carbohydrates. Tests in animals suggest such a diet would add as much as a third to life expectancy. The problem however is that it requires a very very large quantity of not very palatable plant material to be eaten thus much extra time a day is required for attending both ends of the dietary tract. So what you can in longevity, you kind of loose by eating unsatisfying foods etc.

[1] Monasteries had “carp/fish pools” in which “friday fish” were grown. What many do not realise is what carp are quite happy to eat… Yup it sounds nasty because it’s livestock manure, which contains large quantities of “partialy digested” food which encorages fast growth in various fresh water fish that are effectively “bottom feeders”.

[2] You might want to look up “death by casava”, like a number of plants and especially fruit pits casava contains cyanide. There are effectively two types of casava those lower in cyanide and those not. But even the lower level casava still needs to be processed before it becomes edible to some humans that have an increased tollerance to that form of cyanide. In the animal kingdom it’s not hard to find the end result of cyanide tolerance, just look in a eucalyptus tree, where you will find various creatures, the most well known of which is that Australian mascot the very much endangered Koala bear (the eucalyptus is a highly inflamable plant as well as having leaves full of cyanide, thus it is a serious health hazard but it does smell nice).

[3] The word “manufacture” actually means “to make by hand” however with changes in society and time the word to many means almost the exact opposit as in “to make by machine”.

Clive Robinson • June 7, 2020 3:13 AM

@ MarkH,

I think of those soldiers, who did so much in that conflict without hope of narrow personal gain, with humility and gratitude.

Both my parents were likewise in WWII, my mother was involved with RADAR at a level which she could not talk about, but she did express some fairly strong opinions on the man who claimed the credit, and also changed his name to get “ancestor grandeur”.

My father was in another theater of war around the other side of the globe, he was in the signals but again did not talk much about what he did. He was however a keen photographer as well and from those I was able to trace some of what he did, and it was not what his “pay book” rating would suggest.

Both my parents refused the medals they were entitled to on principle and I guess some of those principles have rubbed off on me.

Even though both of them died before I was an adult four decades ago I still remember them almost daily, more by what they taught me about what it means by being a “responsible” member of society than anything else.

As the old British Civil Service ethos had it, to present the truth “Without fear or favour”.

Clive Robinson • June 7, 2020 11:35 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, MarkH, ALL,

With regards animals, Corona Viruses, infection, and disease.

The basic facts are there are many corona viruses out there and they mostly infect wild animals, often but not always as some kind of intestinal tract disorder. Thus the symptoms are mainly the likes of diarrhea and sometimes vomiting from inflammation of the intestines or stomach (gastroenteritis). The severity and length of the symptoms vary a lot depending on the animal species but as a very very rough indicator the symptoms start 12 to 48 hours after being exposed to the corona virus and last around 3 days or so. There are various transmission vectors but animal excrement is one.

In humans we appear to only be susceptable to four that produce “common cold” symptoms, as well as SARS (2002), MERS and COVID-19. All of which infect the respitory tract.

Thus for testing scientists were on the look out for animals that are human respiratory system analogs. That is when infected with SARS-CoV-2 it’s their respiratory tract not intestinal tract that effected.

There have been various papers published not all in english and their appears to have been a “lost in translation” issue.

Thus some livestock have been infected by SARS-CoV-2 but not in a way suitable to be analogs for humans in testing. That is they don’t get COVID-19 signs and symptoms.

It appears that some have taken that to mean that as the animals do not get COVID-19 signs and symptoms they can not be infected by SARS-CoV-2 which is not true.

What we have found is some creatures auch as rodents and those of the “cat” and “pole cat” families do not only get infected by SARS-CoV-2 they also get it in the respiratory system sufficiently similarly to be used as partial analogs thus suitable for some types of science testing “hamsters” being one such spieces used in transmission studies.

But what of animals not suitable as analogs for testing, can they act as not just vectors but reservoirs of the virus? The answer is as far as we know is there is nothing to stop that happening, in fact it would be reasonable to assume there might be, but it is early days for this virus so we just do not know yet…

Thus there is an important difference between testing animals to find analogs for humans, and testing animals to see if they can be a human healthcare issue.

So caution is needed by all when reading papers, especially when they have been translated.

Clive Robinson • June 8, 2020 5:09 AM

@ Iamar,

Personality of a computer

It’s not a new technique, but it’s certainly not talked about very often.

I’ve heard about it being used as an “arm twister” in the UK, by investigators. In essence they claim it’s proof positive of usage, but at best it’s actually circumstantial and may not even be admissable.

I suspect the reason it’s not much talked about is it only realy works when people do not know about it.

Also unless a user is extrodinarily carefull their hairs, finger prints and DNA traces end up on the computer. However such tests take time and money which runs against investigators budget constraints, so a little “arm twisting” may be faster and less expensive, thus get a conviction on a case that might not be of sufficient “crime value” to meet an investagative bar on resources (another reason for criminals to keep their crimes “low value”, “across jurisdictions” and thus effectively unrelated so the multiple still remains below the various jurisdictions bar limits.

However any investigator has to be carefull, there may be a reason why a computer is set up a particular way, that has nothing to do with the alledged owner. For instance there are utilities available that “set up environments” for people to learn in etc. That is when you go on a course all the computers are usually set up the same way, school and college issued computers likewise. Not just the utilities but setup scripts for them can be found on the Internet.

As for things that indicate where a computer has been such as WiFi and other network information, again if it’s at certain places like train stations, airports, major education establishments and other public places then this information can be found out and fairly easily faked.

If the laptop appears to have been used in an airport when the alledged user was giving a talk or some such a hundred miles away then Opps that is going to come out during discovery and that’s going to make a conviction difficult.

Thus some one who is fairly smart that knows about this, can set up a machine to be unlike any others they have and have geo-tells pointing to places they were not.

In London it is known that some of the smarter young criminals swap phones and travel cards and even clothes to make “tracking” them not just difficult but distinctly unreliable.

Thus this technique is like “mains hum in audio recordings” and “cell tower pings” it only realy works against those who do not know about it, and in fact can work against an investigator if the person under investigation not only knows about it but is sufficiently smart to exploit it as a form of alibi etc.

But a realy smart criminal would get a second hand computer with cash load it up with “free software” off of the internet in some anonymous little place, then disable various things like WiFi etc and not use it for a year or two, before using it for anything illegal.

One way to get things like WiFi not to work is to boot with an older version of Linux from the front of a magazine, that’s been put on a USB drive and boot directly from that with the hard drive disconnected…

One of the mistakes less smart hackers make is being daft. They get used to having a custom environment and the latest tools and libraries because they are “l33t”. Smarter types learn to live with older “out of the box” or “out the back of a book” setups. They will also know how not only, not to leave their hair, fingerprints, or DNA on the machine, but actually have other peoples that are entirely unrelated to them on it…

Learning how to do this is not exactly difficult, however it needs a quiet thoughtful and meticulous person who knows firstly how not to create other evidence against themselves, and secondlt also how to “set up a legend” for the tools they use, that points another way for investigators to disappear down a rabbit hole.

Clive Robinson • June 11, 2020 2:26 AM

@ FA,

We still have malloc() and free(), and they are perfectly OK as they are.

And when did calloc() come along, and why?[1]

But you have mistaken my intent with,

I get sick of the repeated claims here (and elsewhere) that C is an unsafe language.

My point was not to “bash C” that historically had a horrible job to do, but for people to realise that “data left in buffers” as a security issue has been known probably longer than their working lives…

Thus as usual Intel has no excuse for the “go faster stripes” mistakes they have made for so long now the “Xmas Gift that keeps giving” will continue to do so for some time to come.

I’m on record here for saying that people should not use Intel’s internal RNG for various reasons (the design is sloppy, and they use “magic pixie dust thinking” to try and hide the mistakes behind a crypto algorithm).

However I had not realised that Intel’s sloppy security thinking had gone on further with features down stream of the RNG…

Would I have made the same mistake, well having had more than my fair share of experience designing “letterbox buffer” dependent systems, I would have pointed out the security risks… But I would probably have been overruled by some “go faster stripe” obssessed managment droid and more senior managment with a “market share” objective in mind.

[1] Actually malloc() is becoming less and less fine as time goes on[2]. The interface on calloc() is actually a bit more subtle than malloc() over and above most peoples “it’s just a malloc() followed by memset()” thinking, and for good reason. Because it alowed for subtleties in non power of two memory width sizes –IBM, Gec, Burrows etc with multiples of 12bits hence “octal” etc–, also large Virtual Memory systems that malloc() can not. Remember size_t is technically data bus width bound as are all “simple pointers”[3] whilst the address width is not, especially in certain types of computer designs[2]. Though trying to work that out from reading the standard will make your head hurt as it requires “Alice through a one way looking glass” thinking 😉

[2] Even Intel’s early IAx86 chips had this issue, hence the segmented design of 64k blocks in a 1M space. There are “super computer” designs out there, that have memory architectures that are essentially unbound for most practical purposes thus need an equivalent paged, segmented, windowed, keyholed, etc address space. Because even 64bit addresses are limiting for some data sets.

[3] Simple pointers as “absolute addresses” are on their way out and have been for a few decades data sets are too large and getting bigger. Thus it’s best to think of simple pointers as “offsets to complex abstract pointers” where the complex part is hidden from you for good reason. Even the early Unix developers realised they had problems with addressing data in storage as the “hidden life behind inodes” shows. Likewise URL’s that are in theory “unbounded” have limitations, and how we deal with them now will have consequences in the future, a lesson that inodes etc have taught us.

Clive Robinson • June 15, 2020 5:38 AM

@ RealFakeNews,

Why so many software developers think they can write a single line of code without having a plan for the system design, I’ll never know.

It kind of depends on what level you are looking at.

As a designer of embedded systems for more years than I care to remember (I started when the Z80 was considered “the best thing since sliced bread”) there was a lot of code that was almost always thr same but not quite. This code you could write almost blind from the hardware specification.

Eventually you realise that with sequential code systems there are two almost hard and fast rules,

1.0, Firstly all code that actually has any semblance of a usable function has three parts

1.1, Setup,
1.2, Function,
1.3, Teardown.

Importantly is the realisation that this rule applies through out all code thus programs, functions and sub functions have the same three stages (this includes the lowest of the low like device drivers).

2.0, Secondly, is the important realisation that there are two basic types of program,

2.1 Filters.
2.2 Persistent.

That is filters run a specific function and then terminate naturaly, whilst persistent remain and do not terminate naturaly. That is the top level “function” block in a filter is markedly different to the function block in a persistent program and is generally a control loop that calls filters. The important thing to remember is what type of control loop you use (that is if your loop is one that, 1, goes through all conditions in turn, or 2, one that if a codition is true performs a function then breaks back to the top of the control loop).

Either way what you end up with is a “Pyramid of Code” the top of which is very specific to function whilst the bottom is very general thus specific to method.

The next realisation is that as a rule of thumb code that is method such as device drivers etc have a very high degree of commanality, thus you in effect can reduce the number of code lines at the bottom of the pyramid to form a truncated diamond. Where what was the tip of the pyramid is very predictable, and likewise the bottom of the now truncated pyramid is likewise very predictable.

In non embedded systems programmers actually often have all of this work done for them via a BIOS, OS, and programing libraries. Likewise the initial “setup” phase of the program is done by the BIOS or OS loader, also the later parts of the “teardown” phase that do the clean up and restor of resources such as memory and I/O.

But that still leaves all programers the choice of program type and if not a filter then the choice of control loop type. An experienced programer on just reading the introduction or overview in the specification should in most cases know the answer to these two decisions. They will also probably know what major functions are required thus can produce the “stubs” the high level control loop will likely need.

But the majority of non embeded programmers are writing supplemental programs or functions to existing programs and systems, where the likes of interfaces are already established and code reuse of lower level functions encouraged (perhaps rather more than it should).

So many programmers are in effect playing in a “join the dots” type environment which dictates to a very great degree what they are going to do. That is their degrees of freedom are very much “tied down” or if you prefere “boxed in”.

If the programmers were not effectively “boxed in” then most of these modern programming style paradigms just would not work. Especially those that are very much more abusive to team members than they need to be. Such abuse is rarely of any practical use other than it plays into a certain type of managment ethos/style born out of the fantasy of story telling you get from the likes of “Startrek” which spawned the “Make it so” ethos amongst others. I won’t go through them all but at root they are nearly all adverserial and come from story books, films, TV shows and sports, and contain an explicit or implicit bullying process. None of which are particularly conducive to what should be a thoughtful process using scientific and engineering methods. Which is why experience shows more often than not the cause of failure in large projects is such methods where the bullying process has become a significant if not overriding factor. To look at it another way “you can not manage complexity by blindly hitting it with a hammer”.