Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • December 4, 2021 11:17 AM

@ Curious,

I don’t know anything about this below other than having read the tweet, but it looks to me like this pdf viewer that is mentioned, is used for academia stuff for viewing academic papers online, but supposedly it sort of records your reading habits, or so it is claimed:

This sort of thing has been going on to my certain knowledge for the past three decades.

I was aware of it first being told of it in the 1980’s as the reason why Big Phama and similar do all research “in house” including looking up citations, papers and patents. That is they would buy the databases via obscure front companies and similar and then only run them on closed and issolated internal networks.

The reason was to stop what are “side channel leaks”, just looking up a paper tells a lot about what a researcher is thinking, the more citations etc or the actual search parameters are a gold mine not just for industrial espionage but investors and speculators.

In the 1990’s I took on a technical role for a citation database supplier. I was warned several times that our major competitor collected the information in their online offering. Unfortunately they took over the company I worked for and there behaviour was confirmed when I went through the source code. It was the reason they and I parted company. As far as I am aware nearly twenty years later what little is left is “online only” so researchers in Universities and the like are being ripped off in all ways imaginable.

The “publishing industry” around science is one of the most dishonest market places there is and it’s costing research, universities and similar billions with it’s fraudulent behaviours very year one way or another…

They have even approached me some years ago to write a book… obviously I was somewhat flattered who wouldn’t be. However my sixth sense said there was something hinky… So I looked into what they actually did and phoned around a few people I knew… The result I was horrified by what I found out. A few carefully chosen questions over a nice lunch kind of confirmed what they were upto so after they paid the bill I said I had things to think about as to how I was going to rearange work scheduals to fit it in. Then led them on for a while before saying that I was realy to busy.

In short they wanted me to spend about a year of my life writing a book, which they would pay royalties on, but no advanced fee. I checked through friends in university libraries and they basically said it was a scam as they would only print up a hundred or so books in hard back and only try to sell them to Uni libraries in the UK at around ~two dollars a page so a very high income per item. However the royalties were based on the number of copies sold starting at cents and getting upto maybe a couple of dollars, but with penalty claw backs based on unsold copies…

Clive Robinson • December 4, 2021 8:54 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Right-wing activists are openly ‘weaponizing’ Twitter’s new private media policy

Several points to not just remember but burn into everyones brain,

1, A pendulum is either of no use or swings first one way then the another under external forces.

2, All technology enables societal pendulums, if good or bad at any given point in time is a societal not technical view point.

3, Sociatal issues can never be solved by technological means, only shifted temporarily.

4, When ever and where ever a pendulum swings there will be those that win by it’s current direction and those that loose by it.

5, Pendulums can swing in more than one dimension at the same time, even though it may not be immediately apparent, thus their path can appear unpredictable in the short term.

6, There can be more than one set of forces acting on a pendulum at any one time, thus their path can appear chaotic at all times.

The more people realy realy understand this the better society will be. Even if they only Grok the first three, especially the third.

Clive Robinson • December 4, 2021 9:57 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Are you sure you want to use Tor?

Long answer short “No you would be crazy to do so”.

The longer answer is more complicated, but as I’ve repeatedly pointed out in oposition to the fan-bouys that pop up then disapear Tor is designed either badly or deliberately to be insecure to the likes of traffic-analysis. This just demonstrates what I’ve been saying…

However it’s important to note,

“KAX17’s focus on Tor entry and middle relays led Nusenu to believe that the group, which he described as “non-amateur level and persistent,” is trying to collect information on users connecting to the Tor network and attempting to map their routes inside it.”

Is not telling the whole story which is of concern. Because either Nusenu is missing something important or is keeping it undisclosed for some unspecified reason.

As I’ve pointed out for many years here one mistake people make is not understanding the physical makeup of the internet with respect to geographicaly made “choke points”.

Without going into detail there are a few points were vast amounts of traffic go through a single geographical node. Bude Cornwall in South West England is a case in point. Many Satelite and sub-sea cables all come through a virtually unknown “single building”. There is a similar place in Australia and just a very few others around the world where nearly all the worlds non local traffic traverses.

Such choke points make certain types of traffic analysis very much easier and way way more effective.

What needs to be done is identify where these KAX17 nodes are located, and which choke points they are pushing traffic through. If this is done over time it will help show where the monitoring is most likely being done.

Interestingly due to the “all roads lead to Rome” or more correctly “US” for the Internet it is less likely to be the US that is responsible for seting up these KAX17 nodes. That is they would get to see the bulk of Tor traffic as do Australia and the UK. So whilst I can not rule out the US or other Five-Eye members, they would be less likely than others to need to re-direct traffic through a choke point they control.

My gut feeling on no more than previous BGP4 “errors” is the Tor traffic is going in the Far East direction…

It’s probably wrong, but untill we actually “Map the CAT” –as we used to call it when looking for unauthorized nodes in corporate networks– we won’t know.

If KAX17 is sufficiently “on the ball” then by now they will have taken steps to hide their use of geographical choke-points. One of the best ways to do this is by creating logical choke-points between their nodes. With to hide what is going on, all the nodes being as near “vanilla” as possible, so looking at them will provide few or no clues. But with the KAX17 operators putting an “upstream” switch or router at the node that “copies” the traffic on one port to another port where it is enumerated out of sight of ordinary investigation (it’s not just the NSA that hide in unseen “router-land”).

Whilst “Internet routers” can be seen at the internet protocol level as they are in higher levels of the IP stack, things below the IP level can not except by certain physical law restrictions such as “timing”. That is an IP network at the physical layer can actually be sitting on a telco X25 network or similar where IP traffic gets encapsulated and then routed out of sight.

As you can see it can be a fun game trying to track it down. Importantly though just ElInt may be insufficient and “boots on the ground” needed, as in the case of you finding out about what actually goes on at Bude below what your IP tools can reach…

Clive Robinson • December 5, 2021 8:12 PM

@ Anders,

It’s why a whiley purson would as instructed from on high “first take backups”, then use those.

Microsoft pulled other tricks to try and stop “disk copying” working but the “games industry” was way ahead of them as were the “disk crackers”.

I actually built my own “disk analyser” for 5&1/4 floppies. Back then things were “less integrated” so you could remove the interface but keep the motor controler and head amps etc so read/write not just raw data into “tracks” but “quater tracks” as well.

So accurate disk duplication in those “pre and post” tracks was easily possible. As well as catching different write format codes on alternat tracks and similar nonsense.

Some old disks are now “unreadable” not because they are in anyway damaged, but because they relied on the lack of integration in floppy drives to do some of their tricks with their own special drivers…

Fun times…

Oh and as for hidden writing of user and company name, remember they took that idea into MS Office where it’s tucked away in that “funny four K” at the begining of the file that does to things,

1, Gives the NSA “known plaintext”
2, Forensic investigators “back trace” to a given machine.

Oh and a few more other things to catch out the unwary…

Remember it’s why I say,

Paper, Paper, NEVER data.

But even that is not 100% Microsoft subtally changed the shapes of their fonts with different versions of MS Office supposadly to take advantage of better printer technology. The reality is it enables even printed documents to identify which version of Office was used, so “faking” old documents needs not just old hardware but software as well…

Then of course is the question of what is hidden in the variable proportional spacing…

Clive Robinson • December 5, 2021 9:15 PM

@ lurker,

To get vax rates up our government is also propagating this part truth as a widespread belief that the vax will wholly prevent infection, contagion, morbidity, and mortality.

If people listened in their high school maths and science lessons they would know that “wholly prevent” is not possible, the laws of nature and probability do not allow it once something exists.

Entropy so far only works one way, and all work is inefficient. So genies can not be put back in bottles the way they were once they are out of the bounds of confinement.

Starting from there you can by a series of logical steps work out fairly well what is going to happen.

One thing people often do not get is “survival of the fittest” does not mean what they think it means…

It’s actually about “energy minimisation in changing environments to achieve a given objective” and why “nature” appears to love the 2/3rds rule[1].

As most should have heard by now there are these “R” numbers which is a change by time “ratio” and you get to hear “exponential growth” in infections etc. All it realy is is a percentage in a given time.

Easy to see in an uninfected thus novel population. But as people cease to be viable hosts due to death or immunity the available population starts to drop exponentially so at some point what is exponetial growth becomes exponential decay.

So even though the infectivity rate of a pathogen remains constant, the population available to it does not so the actual infection rate changes.

So for a pathogen to survive it must also change, so that hosts that were immune to it’s old form, are now available again to it’s new form. We call the process mutation. It has it’s own “R” rate so is proportional to the number of people currently infectious.

Thus it should be clear that as the infection numbers rises the muation numbers rise, thus the mutation that adapts against immunity the best becomes dominant for a while, then another mutation takes over.

At the right R numbers this goes on indefinitely and that is when a pandemic becomes endemic.

The only way to stop this is be faster at making hosts in a population immune than the pathogen can mutate.

The important point to note is “in a population” the smaller the population the easier it is to make them immune, because the mutation rate is consequentially lower in small populations.

Thats why quarantine works, it gives the pathogen no hosts way faster than it can mutate, therefore its only options are,

1, Ceases to exist
2, Become dormant
3, Switch hosts

Obviously the last is the least desirable and the first most.

Sadly the larger the population size the way more likely the last option is…

It’s also the most likely way this pathogen started…

Knowing these details and having the R numbers population size etc alows you to fairly accurately model the broad brush strokes.

I pointed most of this out back in the begining and it’s why I called for very local area lockdowns, that have due to stupidity not happened.

We could have been rid of SARS-CoV-2 in a little over a month if we had taken decisive action at the begining…

Now it is not just mutating at an uncontrolable rate, it is also swapping hosts so disease reservoirs are building… So it is now endemic much to the financial delight of certain vested interests…

Entirely predictable, just from understanding simple percentages.

[1] It’s actually not 2/3rds but close enough for most. It’s actually based on “e” which is all to do with percentage change, so pops up everywhere by simple implication of growth or decay by a steady ratio with time.

Clive Robinson • December 6, 2021 4:21 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

What is being sold is “Getting Back to Normal” as the ultimate direction when “Not Dying” is the true goal.

Whilst yes for the individual “Not Dying” is the real name of the game, what is that of the State?

Whilst it might appear to be “Getting Back to Normal” it’s not, nor can it be, they alowed a significant change has happened and now there is no going back.

There’s a new reality and a price to pay for political stupidity.

That price will be not just the onwards cost of jabs, and the flip side of lost opportunity cost, but worse, it will almost certainly involve loss of life a lot of it.

Not only will some die through lack of vaccine, but even in those vaccinated many will die earlier than they would have, whilst others will suffer a lingering disability or new autoimmune disease that will rob them of a life they should have had.

1xjabs, 2xjabs and 3xjabs keep you from dying. They do not prevent you from getting sick, infecting those around you and do not prevent you from getting sick again and again and again.

If you are even alowed to purchase the jabs, which many can not do so. The poorer societies in the world where life is already short and often brutish, become just a useful to some disease reservoir. So not just making the disease endemic, but also brewing up new mutations to be profited by, such is the mentality of some.

Worse we still do not know and can not know for another century, what this now effectively endemic disease will do to the lives of children yet to be born. Will it become a childhood disease that makes you very sick and kills one in just a thousand or two. Or like the flu or common cold it is related to, an annual specter of death scything through the population taking an early toll on those not rich enough to pay the pipers.

But it gets worse, society is changed, not just by the direct effects of the disease, but by the scheming of those corrupt beyond common understanding. We glibly name it “Disaster Capitalism” but in reality it is not the honest application of wealth to create utility thus further wealth in turn. No it is a dishonest and usurious preying on people to prevent them being anything other than itinerant serfs beholdent to those who now seek rent on their very lives.

Such is the price of political vanity and dirty back room deals.

Clive Robinson • December 6, 2021 6:22 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

This is fairly long and technical, but one can get the gist of how hard it is to find bugs in the cpu.

It can be fun…

I had the joy of finding then tracking down a fault on a microcontroler back in the mid 1990’s and it took more than a little time.

I’m not supposed to say the part number or manufacturer even today but I can say this, it was a very new top of the range part at the time that we were using because we hoped it would save development time on a time critical project for a very major customer who wanted everything on it… I was in charge of the small software development team and playing “fireman” for other teams including mechanics PCB design and the all important LCD design.

The microcontroler would these days be called an early “System on a Chip”(Soc) and it had an inbuilt serial port peripheral, that very occasionaly did not read data. As we had it on hand built prototypes on matrix board with ribbon cables and other flying wires including the head from the emulator board. It was put down as being an anoying “dry joint” or similar problem, when infact it was not.

The reason it did not show up very much on the prototypes used to do software development was two fold,

Firstly for most of the software development we used a dirty little trick which was to just “loop back” the TX to the RX on the chip.

Secondly that the emulators used high stability Xtal master oscillators…

So the software was almost fully developed without incidence.

So when we moved to actuall PCB’s that were populated with “production parts” it was more than quite late in the design cycle…

The production part in question was that instead of high stability xtal oscillators used on the emulators and mid to late design peototypes, it was a “ceramic resonator” instead.

Ceramic resonators have a much lower frequency tolerance than XTAL’s thus when you had one in one a mobile device and one base device they could be quite a few kHz appart unlike the XTAL’s.

It was only then did the communications problem through RF modems show up…

Well you can guess what kind of emergancy it caused and why people that sort out such issues get called “firemen”.

Well testing eliminated the radio modems in fairly short order as firstly the problem disapeared when the On-Board Chips were replaced with sockets and hooked back upto the emulator. Likewise the “hot wiring” the TX to RX from the seperate chips with flying leads showed the problem continued.

So the problem was in the chip. As I was software not hardware I got selected on the “fresh eyes” principle along with one of the senior hardware engineers to test “voltage” and similar around the Oscillator circuit, and we could not find anything that was in anyway out of tolerance or misbehaving. Another senior engineer that also was software was tasked with looking at the serial port side of things.

Well I wrote some test software that looped back data from one chip’s through the TX to the second chip’s RX got reflected by the second chip back out it’s TX back to the first chip’s RX. I also brought out various error conditions onto the LEDs so we could see when errors were detected… I noticed that the error did flicker very occasionaly when running on the emulators but it did not sync up with any data values that is it just appeared random. For the other sebior engineer to test with I programed a couple of now very precious PROM parts and tested them. It became clear not only was the error rate much higher, but importantly that the errors were “cyclic” in nature, and when displayed on an oscilliscope produced what looked like a 1bit sampled sinewave… I mentioned this and that it was unrelated to the data to the senior engineer when I handed over the units for him to test.

A few water cooler conversations later we realised that the problem was the frequency difference between the oscillators on one chip and the other chip… But also depending on which was higher in frequency dictated which data path the errors were in… Which was most odd to put it mildly.

Well as you can imagine faxes were flying backwards and forwards between us in the UK and the manufacturers Hong Kong design office which was not helped by the fact that we could not speak Chinese and their written English though good was not “expessive” enough in a technical sense so there was a little “lost in translation” going on.

Anyway one bleary eyed morning a bunch of faxes had come in from around six seperate teams in Hong Kong and we were passing them back and forth between us trying to “fathom the riddle of the sands” as it were. I said to Steve “just exactly how does this port work? as I’m not seeing it!” as I held up a one of the faxes. He started explaining and as we talked it through we eliminated things bit by bit working backwards from the CPU and it looked like we were about to eliminate all of it… When that illuminating look appeared.

The problem was in the early late edge detection sync circuit.

Overly simply you clock the data internally at sixteen times the data rate into a shift register, and you sync up to get the edge transition around eight using a pulse swallow or inject circuit. You look at which bits show the transition and adjust accordingly. This way your receiver clock stays synced to the transmitter clock. You do it the same way with a “bit banger” software serial port only you use counters not a shift register as software Inc/Dec are easier than ShftUp/ShftDn (LSHFT/RSHFT).

Steve realised it was in effect only “counting one way” thus could sync to a higher frequency but not a lower frequency so the errors were appearing at the difference frequency between the two clocks, hence the 1bit digitized sinewave seen on the oscilloscope.

We sent a “question” to ask if this had been checked to the HK office. Not much later an urgent fax arived from the manufactures UK office to say that ten ion laser corrected parts were on an aircraft and would be hand delivered to our office as soon as they had cleared customs…

Problem gone, and apart from a file box of very faded faxes and data sheets and photo copies of log books there is very little to show. Oh other than a “Which Best Product” award a first for the company I worked for and a letter from the customer saying they were putting it on their “rental list” because of that. It was the first and only one of the product type they ever did, which made the product quadrupoly unique.

That forth unique factor… Even though I had not designed the software to meet a standard none of us were aware it should meet, it passed with flying colours as an “Office exchange” or PABX…

Clive Robinson • December 6, 2021 6:55 AM

@ Winter,

It will take some time before people can be made to forget this.

I do not want people to ever forget it.

For two good reasons,

1, Society needs rid of such thinking.
2, Society doe not need it happening again.

Because in both cases it can lead in only one direction “the death of society” as we know it.

Clive Robinson • December 6, 2021 4:30 PM

@ Ted, MarkH, Winter, ALL,

Did Clive think that the ‘state’ had found Cleo earlier, but she hadn’t been allowed to be recovered until the ‘state’ could justify retrieving her via parallel construction?

Err no.

My comment was to point out the more unlikely a set of circumstances sounded to be on the surface, the more, certain types of people would claim “conspiracy theory”.

The simple fact is “magic thinking” happens by people who do not for some reason wish to understand.

As a fake example of the problem that however describes it nicely. In one of his books Terry Pratchet talks about a Cheese Rolling Competition[1] and why a certain young lady who is probably the best cheese maker in the area does not put her cheeses into the event. It’s because as,she is also in a position of authority as the local “Witch”. Thus she would be accused of using magic if she won, but would loose respect if she did not…

A clasic example of “Why you can not win when you are in a position of authority”, so should not play. The ITsec version being the immortal words from the 1983 film WarGames, where at the end the WOPR computer says “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”.

[1] Yes in England we do have the quaint but dangerous sport of cheese rolling held in the county of Gloucester at Cooper’s Hill near Brockworth. The annual Spring Bank Holiday “Wake”[2] event has been historically described as “A score of young men chasing a cheese over a cliff” (pressumably as an excuse to help find a wife). Whilst not actually a cliff it is a steep 650ft slope down which a full sized ~4kg “wheel” of Double Glocester is rolled and can reach speeds in excess of 110kph, which certainly puts it in the “unstopable munition” energy range, and some people actually cartwheel or spin faster which is a sight that has to be seen to be believed, especially when they pick themselves up and walk away eith a smile… Whilst it once was the preserve of young village lads, it’s open to anyone who has apparently had their brain amputated 😉

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cvuktushEhY

Supprisingly the “butchers bill” is not as high as you would expect… Such supprises do happen as I’ve mentioned befor, I found out myself when unintentionally descending 300ft down part of The Devil’s Staircase in Glen Coe one year.

[2] Contrary to what many people might think by association the word “Wake” is not about sadness and death. It actually means “to celebrate life” and to an extent “rebirth” or “spirit / essence rising”. Which is also what the word “spring” used to mean, hence the “spring wake” was a celebration of the winter brought to life for summer.

Clive Robinson • December 7, 2021 8:29 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

I’ve known SS7 to be insecure for decades, and have mentioned it here a few times.

But stories about Mitto AG have been circulating for about half a decade, but no real evidence was given (as is still the case).

It kind of started as Mitto AG not just established itself, but had a meteoric rise to being a major player in SMS traffic handling. People did not see where the resources were comming from for such growth so “shady backers” similar to those we now know about for Crypto AG were speculated.

I’ve previously mentioned the power for surveillance what some call “SMS 0” messages have, and where they can be found “built into the specifications”.

I’ve also mentioned in the past the Five-Eyes “finessing” inyernational phone standards to enavle easy surveillance by the use of FUD and the likes of “Health abd safety” arguments.

After all how can you argue against “think of the children” style arguments when the representatives of the WASP nations are playing “tag team” to run circles around you and make you out to be some heartless anarchist fiend or lover of terrorists?

That’s the reality of what goes on.

Did Mitto AG managnent know what was going on? Very probably not next to nobody knew in Crypto AG. Likewise think of AT&T and those locked rooms in certain exchanges.

Also I know British Telecom were in it upto their eyeballs for years and have mentioned it from time to time.

Our host @Bruce worked for BT for some years, do you think he even had an inkling? It’s just one of the reasons when he sold his business to them I advised him on this blog “cashing the cheque” quickly might be wise.

Heck we know Mossad actually used IBM as cover for “field offices” around the world as I’ve mentioned befor I caught them out at it back in the 1980s. Any sufficiently large organisation can be used as a cloak in many ways, much to the shock of those incharge of the actual organisation when they find out (often to late to do anything about it).

So consider the origin of this story is Bloomberg, they have a bad habit of poor editorial control, and a liking for sensationalist corporate gon bad stories. And lets be honesy here they get technical information /details badly wrong (remember the spy chips on motherboards story).

It’s entirely possible SMS 0 has been pushed at a Bloomberg journalist and spun up by using Crypto AG and Google style arguments into a corporate “dark cabal” conspiracy story. Rather than the more prosaic but more concerning Five-Eyes “doing what they do” and have done since before they existed (read up on eavesdropping on telegrams going back into the Victorian era).

Clive Robinson • December 7, 2021 9:53 AM

@ Ted,

Re,

“…co-founder of Mitto who allegedly led a side enterprise…”

Him and hundreds others…

You don’t need access to Mitto AG’s network to do this, never did long befor, still don’t now.

You just need access to the globe spanning SS7 network or any SMS port where you can format the SMS message directly.

You can even do it from a hacked mobile burner phone as there realy is no security at all in the system once you have access to the baseband to network modem.

Back many years ago when various UK Mobile phone networks were selling “bulk SMS access” they used radio modems that I had worke on the design of back in the 1990’s. If you knew how to connect the radio modem (actually designed for Amateur / Ham use) that spoke X25 you had unfettered access as I demonstrated one day to a company I had worked for in the 80’s.

Back then every one was using Phil Karn (KA9Q) open source software often as a network stack on Microsoft OS’s like Win3/MS-DOS, even the MS ones that came with the OS that were crap implementations of what MS had nicked from BSD.

In the UK the first successful independent Internet Service Provider “Demon” was using a hacked up version of KA9Q… They were not happy when I and a couple of others pulled together what we now call a NAT Firewall to multiplex a small office of computers onto a single IP address and “shock horror” make an AX25 Radio Network Gateway to the Internet… Apparently it was not in their service terms so all they did was “grumble” but we switched to another ISP when they tried upping the fee…

The big elephant in the room of telco network security is “there is none” it’s all based on “physical access control” from back when the telecommunications networks were owned and operated by ONLY government entities. Deregulation and opening up of the market that started in the 1980’s not only blew their over priced monopolies out of the water it permanently sunk any hope of getting real security in telecommunications networks.

We are stuck with non-secure protocols that “trust all who connect” to them. Worse many are in effect “text protocols” that you could hand type on a terminal into a “Packet Assembler / Dissasembler”(PAD) that buffered it up to send synchronously using HDLC, rather than asynchronously via RS232-C over ITU logical signalling V.8bis over V.24/V.28 electrical interfaces.

It realy is a game of “squeak the magic words and the door will open” that Alibaba and the Fourty Thieves started with “open seseme”. You just have to “talk the talk to do the walk” through any one of probably thousands of doorways these days and just drop a dime with a smile…

Clive Robinson • December 8, 2021 1:08 PM

@ Ted, Winter, ALL,

Is the US VP being paranoid about not using Bluetooth earbuds?

I’m with @Nicholas Weaver on this one.

But with regards

… even a president needs a phone.

Provably not true, the position of US President long predates the ideas of communications by the “movment of charge”[1].

In the UK there is the old saying of,

“The monarch does not carry money”[2]

The reason being in times past it was an official job to hold the Royal Purse, and it was given to “the groom of the stool” who after several historical twists and turns since Henery VII these days is better known as the First Lord of the Treasury[3] or just Prime Minister, who still recommends members of the monarchs “privy council”.

The point being “Heads of State” don’t need to carry anything other than what they personally chose to. That is there is a “functionary” or “office holder” that is technically tasked with carrying just about every thing else.

For instance that “nuclear football” briefcase carried by a millitary officer, is alledged to have a couple of books, a “Gold Code” card known as the “biscuit” and MilStar communications equipment all weighing in around 20kg. There is no reason why the US President could not carry it themselves if they so wished… In fact it’s known that a couple of Presidents used to carry the biscuit in their jacket pocket. But at 20kg who’d want to carry it when somebody has an “official position” to carry it…

So back when phones were not even lugable there was and still is a communications officer for the official communications. Especially as US Law requires a record to be not just made but kept.

As for personal phones there was the famous “Obama-berry”, and that required rather more than a casual personal choice to be in the Presidents pocket…

[1] Interestingly though a lot of people try to say that one person who was a US President was key to getting the ball rolling on “movment of charge”.

[2] This is actually more true of the US President, it’s a standing joke in the Secret Service that the President “Never buys a round, that’s the job of the purse carrier” implying it’s the “nuclear football” carriers job as they are Military not Secret Service. Actually it’s known that the current UK monarch Queen Elisabeth II, does on occasion carry a purse in her handbag and she has been seen to use money around Balmoral in Scotland.

[3] The actual “Chancellor of the Exchequer” is the Second Lord of the Treasury.

Clive Robinson • December 9, 2021 12:35 PM

@ Winter, Ted,

It is extremely difficult to kill rats faster than they can multiply if there is food. If you want to get rid of rats, get rid of the food.

But what do you eat if you have got “rid of the food”?

The solution is “segregation”…

If a rat can not get at the food you have stored because they have no way into it, then you get to eat for as long as the stores last whilst the rats starve.

It’s exactly the same principle in both physical and information security.

Just keep the rats out nature will take care of the rest.

Think about ransomware, if the rats get in then you have to pay the price.

Properly issolate and segregate your systems and the rats stay out of them so you don’t have to pay.

If you put in a “ground floor door” in your secure systems, you know darn well at some point some idiot on a “smoke break” will prop it open with a fire extinguisher, and leave it propped open when they’ve done… So the rats just “walk on in”. The same applies to information systems.

Oh and remember,

Yep, that’s why I try to update my software.

Realy? That’s kind of like taking on staff from the Mafia these days… They don’t prevent problems they just move the ones you’ve got, break things, help themselves to what they fancy, and then add new problems for you to worry about.

Clive Robinson • December 9, 2021 2:32 PM

@ Winter,

We in the Netherlands pay close to 40% of GDP in taxes and income inequality has not changed much in the previous 4 decades. So I think this goes pretty well, comparatively.

As you well know North West Continental Europe has been a bit of an anomaly re Taxation.

It used to cause quite a bit of strife in the North Sea Oil Industry when I used to work in it some “cough cough” years ago.

Clive Robinson • December 10, 2021 6:02 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Remember “OMG KH does not use ear buds” from the other day?

Well, you are not the only one,

https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/something_for_the_weekend/

Where,

1, Bin diving,
2, Smart grid listening,
3, NRO and SPOT,

Get mentioned indirectly and even possibly “ball mill shredders”…

Clive Robinson • December 10, 2021 8:37 AM

@ Ted,

Are the engagements between Biden, Putin, and the world at large bearing fruit?

Ask yourself a question…

Why did things only start happening after the “big money men” behind US Politics started getting burned? For instance like the Colonial Oil cartel members?

Me thinks some politicos are getting “lent on” by the “Financial Mafia” that owns 90% and do not like “others hands in their pocket or till”.

I think it’s sometimes called “Real-politic”, or “Where the Robber baron, meets out on the toad”.

Clive Robinson • December 10, 2021 10:17 AM

@ Ted, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Did The Register really call Intel “Chipzilla”?

Yes, and for good reason, what I and others call them won’t pass the Four Utered Curse Keyword” Filter…

A little bit of knowledge first,

Algorithms in hardware are 5-500 times faster in”Aplication Specific logic Integrated Circuit”(ASIC), 5-50 times with “Field Programable Gata Array”(FPGA) and the like, than software on a General Purpose CPU or even GPU.

It’s why Bitcon mineing machines went from CPU to GPU and then FPGA, or these days almost entirely ASIC based.

Intel used it’s “cash pile” to buy up one of the largest FPGA manufacturers, so it is now arguabbly at the top of FPGA companies,

https://ee-paper.com/intel-and-xilinx-compete-for-the-worlds-largest-fpga-to-jointly-promote-the-continuation-of-technology-and-civilization/

https://www.bisinfotech.com/top-5-fpgas-manufacturers-in-the-world/

Now we know that Intel have plans to integrate Very Large Scale FPGA tech directly into their CPU systems for people running “Enterprise” or bigger applications that require performance well above that of current super-computers.

So a bit of many decades old history,

It’s been claimed that Chairman of the Board of International Business Machines (IBM) once said,

“I think there is a world market for about five computers”

At a time when IBM made more punch card tabulators than any other company and were happily selling them to anyone who had enough money (Nazi Germany being one major customer).

But the prognostication was wrong and thr like of the University Computers and the “Liones Tea Houses” LEO1 showed there was a market for what became known as “Big Iron”. Importantly market protectionism and the building of monopoly behaviours was rampant and realy needs to be remembered.

From the late 1950’s onwards “Big Iron” manufacturers like Burroughs started to appear, their systems were unafordable by all but governments and the largest corporations hence only IBM, and later Amhdal, Perkin-Elmer, etc appeared abd they all used “vender lockin” with propriatary interfaces and the like with huge anuall licence fees to make vast profits and also steal their customers software designs…

The likes of DEC and other “Mini-Computer” manufactures joined in. Again with “lock-in” by default. It was actually the democratisation of computing by Intel’s 8bit CPU chips that alowed the “Home and Personal Computer” market that sky rocketed in the 1980’s that brought about the end of this sort of “vendor lockin” starting in the 1980’s and was mostly gone by the turn of the century. So every one thought that the end of “lock-in” was gone for good…

Intel fought AMD and lost for good reason, and a small English Company that started at Cambridge called “Acorn Computers” has taken over the world because of their ASIC technology developed by a small part “Acorn Research Machines” that got sold off and became “ARM” with a very unusual business model.

Intel, can not compete on a level playing field any longer and their mainstay x86 has long since crashed into a wall of their own making, and they know that bo matter how many cores they put in a chip performance is not going to scale and ARM are eating up what was once their main market.

Which is why they bought into FPGA and why they want as much “vender lock-in” as they can get.

Unfortunately the stupidity of “Cloud” is giving Intel this on a “gold platter” and they are going to abuse it to the maximum untill legislators start jailing their execs, as even the largest fines in the world won’t stop them when they have a foot hold.

And that’s what this addition to the Linux Kernel is all about, they are trying to get into a podition by stealth where they csn then blackmail any corporation or legislative house to give them what they want. The big looser appart from “we the citizens” will not be ARM or China, but Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other large cloud providers. Who will just pass the “Intel Tax” back down the line…

But one thing is almost certain is that both Intel and the US Gov entities will use it for “technology theft” for both Corporate and National benifit.

To see why have a look at the history of “Masked Programed” CPU chips and microcontrolers. Even now you have to agree to hand over any technology to them otherwise you don’t get your parts.

Originally this was done by COCOM then later Wassner Agrement to control the disemination of technology to those the US did not want you a foreign company to do, in competition with US companies…

You’ld get told “crypto restriction” or similar nonsense and if you did not do as you were told “no chips”. So you got the 40bit or less treatment whilst US companies were alowed 80, 96, or more bits…

I can explain further if you want but this post is long enough already.

Clive Robinson • December 13, 2021 8:25 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

do not expound further, as it is most certainly classified.

Sometimes the obvious is classified, and they get away with it for years.

Clive Robinson • December 15, 2021 4:02 AM

@ ResearcherZero,

I mean what is wrong with facing a possible future with a small chance of being slightly on fire?

To quote a song,

“For forty thousand years I’ve been the first Australian”

And,

“I am the ancient heart, The keeper of the flame”

Australia was ecologically managed by people that had worked out how to be it’s guardians. Then unfortunately,

“I stood upon the rocky shore, I watched the tall ships come”

And those that claimed the knew better and still do devistated the place.

Australia is not ment to be “green” those words,

“I came from the Dreamtime, From the dusty red soil plains”

Tells you something…

Canada had a similar problem, they did everything they could to stop fires. Each time though fires happened and each time they were worse. Untill someone realised that lots of little fires most of the time is what nature was designed for (see life cycle of some fir cones).

So now men go out and set small fires to keep things as nature intended, if not slightly better.

Both Australians abd West Coast American’s need to think about that. And the corresponding lesson,

“If you don’t manage the land inline with nature, then the land will manage you inline with nature.”

Back when I was young, in “Englands green and pleasant land” I saw every year “the burning of the stubble”. Many people said on their opinion it must be wrong for various reasons such as unsightly smoke, and these days carbon foot print. The point those arguments miss and that my great grandfather and his father in the 1800’s knew, is that fire does many things, it is natures pesticide and fertilizer. It kills harmful bugs through rodents and rabbits quickly and efficiently without poisons moving up the food chain into us. Likewise it also quickly releases valuable chemicals that enrich the soil without causing massive ecological damage that chemical plants that make fertilzer do…

Sometimes the old ways are better than the new ways especially when “mother natures” hand is on the wheel.

Yes having eucalyptus trees around your home looks and smells nice and gives pleasent shade. But a full grown eucalyptus tree is saturated with high octain oils[1] and cyanide. Neither of which you would be alowed to store adjacent to your home if they were “chemicals” from an industrial plant.

[1] I once saw an assesment of the energy available by “combustion” from a full grown eucalyptus given in sticks of dynamite equivalent… The numbers were large enough to think “surely this can not be right?” but it very probably was…