Posts by Yorick Hunt

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

Re: The head of information security at TfL had their account hacked

"Oh, it's you? Right away!"

<hang up>

<call him on his listed personal contact number>

"Sorry, we got cut off. You were wanting a password reset?"

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

Cloudflare...

... The caped crusaders protecting spammers, scammers and malware vendors.

Yeah, I think I'd rather carress Nadella's nether regions than have faith in anything Cloudflare says.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Did Merlin use a spell checker?

Or would his have been an incantation checker?

Midjourney pivots from AI image generation to body scanning medical spa where patients bathe in 'golden light'

Re: "Avoid"?

Surely "expedite" would be more likely.

Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'

Re: Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy ..

So basically a re-hash/re-vamp of Proxomitron.

HPE offers VMware refugees a year off the meter

Re: Don't do it!

Oh, I dunno, it seems to be quite redundant.

Ransomware crims got a month-long head start on Check Point VPN 0-day that now has a fix

FFS!

You wouldn't trust your house keys to the local paper boy, so why use someone else's VPN (and pay them for the privilege)?

Roll your own and sleep easy. Of you need location obfuscation, rent a cheap VPS in the country of your choice.

If you don't fall for these extortionists' calls, they'll show up with USB sticks

... always accompanied by a corporate, in-office supervisor

Can't beat the security measures I experienced when visiting an air force base - being accompanied by a pair of submachinegun-toting MPs who were quite tech-savvy. This was after my employer had to supply them with both my car registration number and driver's licence number ahead of time, so they could let me through the gate.

The problem here is the corporate environment in general - where nobody knows what the person next to them is doing, let alone what another department has requested/authorised. The rapid turnover of staff in such environments doesn't help either.

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

Project Headroom

Max would be so proud!

23andMe inherits lawsuit over 'disturbing' DNA data breach

"a single actor making 1,300 login requests per minute from a single IP address"

Three strikes in ten minutes and both the account and the IP address get blocked from further attempts for 10-30 minutes, and the activity gets flagged for action.

Repeat performances from the same IP and it gets blocked for an hour, then two, then six, to give admins time to see what's going on.

Standard practice in small organisations (well, at least the ones I overlook), so why not in a multi-$million company?

MFA definitely for data as sensitive and extensive as this.

Is MFA inconvenient for you? Tough cheddar; it's time for you to grow up.

Qualcomm picks bad time to pitch a $300 laptop platform

Much like with netbooks of old, the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away.

"It'll do everything!"

^{... eventually}

EU moderation watchdog says social media giants hate taking down hate speech

It entirely depends...

... On who's being "hated" and whether the platform is for or against them.

Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI

Re: "Phenomenal growth"

Free Habanero-coated prostate exams (or pap smears) for every AI hypester! Yay!

Icon: method of delivery.

Re: "At this stage people need to stop blocking Google crawlers."

I think he posted an AI summary of his actual comment.

"Phenomenal growth"

Sounds like it's in urgent need of an oncologist. Excision (of AI) is the only cure.

Bare metal cloud servers now cheaper and more readily available than on-prem hardware, says Nutanix CEO

Jingle Bells!

Available if you pull the other one.

Interview a new car salesman and he'll tell you that new cars are cheaper and more readily available than used ones. Coincidence?

Minor edits to AI skills can make agents go rogue

What could go wrong?

Let me just hand this AR15 to my four-year-old granddaughter; I'm sure she won't do anything stupid with it.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

Re: Looks great, but....

"... Win XP SP2 skinned version of Win 10 IoT LTSC 2021“

Now you're talkin'!

Hopefully with the proper task manager!

Microsoft puts stability in the driver's seat with new initiative

No, sponsored content never has a comment link.

Google reimburses Register sources who were victims of API fraud

Remember, kids...

Pre-paid gift cards are there for a reason - you can't suck $17K out of a card which is only good for $100.

Re: smart man Fonseka

"... I do not see a jury siding with google on this."

Do you think they care? They (and the other megaliths) have been known to drag cases out to decades, irrespective of costs, with the simple aim of bankrupting the plaintiffs.

Exploited Exchange Server flaw turns OWA inboxes into script launchpads

Well, this might explain...

... all of my customers' web sites being pummelled with requests for /autodiscover/autodiscover.xml from all over the world over the past few days.

Of note is the user agent string;

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

No, none of the IPs were Google's.

Dude… where’s my password? Claude reunites forgetful stoner with $400k Bitcoin stash

"... freeing up humans for more complex and knowledge-based tasks.“

... like smoking pot, as in this case.

Execs admit AI makes them value human workers less

Re: Performative use, no duh

You deserve a pint for managing to dig that up in its entirety, and the uneducated oaf who downvoted you deserves a trip back to school.

macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel

Re: NetBSD

8-track? Luxury! We could only dream of an 8-track!

We had an old Tandy shoebox recorder running at a blazing 250 baud, and we were happy!

(punchcard and paper tape veterans are welcome to chime in here)

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

Re: Have I Been Pwned ?

ElRegistro

Because lessons weren't learnt.

I remember the grand old days of the "sort routine wars," when it was universally agreed that the humble bubble sort was to be relegated to the annals of history. And so it was...

Until newer batches of programmers started trickling in, with no knowledge of battles past, and no experience with anything less than an i3 with many gigabytes of RAM.

All it took for MD5 to re-surface was some PFY stumbling across a routine and thinking "gee, this sounds like a good idea!"

IBM asks DBAs to trust AI to act on their behalf

Re: LLM Training

"Manager: 'Hey, Dave, you know about AI and stuff, right?'"

Interestingly enough, that's almost precisely how I landed a DBA role a couple of decades ago.

Manager saunters over with a printed sheet of what (from memory) was an SQL stored procedure.

Manager: "Do you know what this is?"

Me: "They're SQL queries."

Manager: "Great! You can take over as the database admin!"

(insert facepalm here)

ShinyHunters claims dump puts 119K Vimeo emails in the wild

Ummm...

Why exactly does analytics involve e-mail addresses?

Bug of the year (so far): Nasty cPanel vulnerability probably exploited as a 0-day

Re: Far kmee!

"Yorick: But I'm an experienced programmer! 'This is the sort of thing you learn on your first day!'"

... I haven't got time to piss around fixing someone else's code; I'll just re-write the whole routine(s) properly and get a 30% size reduction and 50% performance improvement at the same time.

Far kmee!

"... the application that was attacked does not properly sanitize user-supplied input."

Who the eff doesn't make sure everything (including data from internal calls) is sanity-checked? This is the sort of thing you learn on your first day!

US clarifies mobile hotspots part of foreign router ban despite rarity of American made consumer kit

Oh, go on!

Just ban everything imported, including 'phones!

And make it retroactive - you know how insecure older unpatched devices are.

Betting shop bug ends in kidnap plot as staff turn ransom artists

There's just no honour among thieves.

American farms have a new steward for their safety net, disaster programs... Palantir

Eeeeedjuts!

Need I say more?

Musk bets Tesla's AI future on Intel node that isn't finished yet

Re: Translating Muskese

Levers? Isn't everything supposed to be touch and gesture based these days?

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

Re: It already is in the wrong hands

The seller's not necessarily in China. Alibaba is analogous to eBay or Amazon; anyone can sell on the platform, irrespective of their location.

I don't know what's worse though - the fact that the data has been "let loose," or that it was collected in the first place.

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Re: Great!

What happens when your machine decides to curl its toes up?

Microsoft closes book on rogue Windows Server 2025 upgrades

Correction

"The company has had a difficult few months decades in terms of software quality."

FTFY.

Boeing deliveries soar past Airbus for the first time in years, but this is no time to unbuckle your seat belt

Re: How many of those orders will get dropped?

Thank you, Earthling.

Orbital datacenter startup CEO admits launch economics don't fly, presses ahead regardless

"Nothing is impossible...

... to the man who doesn't know what he's talking about."

Still, as long as the VC cash keeps coming, he'd be a fool to concede.

Google battles Chinese open-weights models with Gemma 4

Re: e4b

"... I wouldn't be surprised if, INA couple if years, majority if such AI would be run locally... "

I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that. There's no way the "tech bros" are going to let their cash cow troddle off to greener pastures.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Re: Great article!

"... increasingly unhinged social media posts..."

"... occasional tendency to go on long, ranting monologues in person as well..."

Is his name Donald?

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

As if we needed another reason...

... to scrap and re-install the OS on every new HP device.

When 80℅+ of the included "free software" is useless bloat, it's not even worth spending time trying to remove it all - nuke & re-start is the only solution.

Lightning-fast exploits make it essential to patch fast, ask questions later

How about...

"Write software properly, release it to the public later?"

This vicious cycle of "write crap, issue patches later" shouldn't be allowed to continue.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Factory on Mars.

Products transported back to Earth using interstellar hyperloops.

Icon: Musk's passport photo.

Australia to datacenter operators: BYO energy, pay your way, build green, or stay home

Hong Kong raid nets 14,000 counterfeit hard disks

Who still makes spinning rust these days? Did they stick Seagate labels on WD drives or vice-versa?

Fake SSDs and flash memory have been a thing for ages - it's relatively easy to bludgeon the controller to show 2Tb when it's an 8Gb device.

But making HDDs just to re-brand them?

Google offers ‘vibe design’ tool that you can shout at to create a UI

I don't think any usable UIs will come from what most people would be shouting at Google.

Microsoft Copilot boss Mustafa Suleyman to chase superintelligence

Re: At what point...

Never.

The more bloated their bank balance is, the more they want to inflate it.

These creatures don't conform to nature - to them, greed and gluttony are the commandments.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

¡AI caramba!

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Re: Somerset

"Only one way to deal with these escalations - Put the kettle on & have a cuppa."

The BOfH skills are strong in this one!