* Posts by IglooDame

48 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2023

Man who SIM-swapped the SEC's X account pleads guilty

IglooDame

"Council then took the spoofed ID card and entered one of AT&T's retail stores in Huntsville to acquire a SIM linked to the victim's account, says the complaint."

It is interesting to me that this was fundamentally a social engineering attack rather than a technical one, and was actually conducted in-person rather than remote/electronically.

Trump admin seeks to reclassify federal CIOs, opening door to political appointees

IglooDame

Re: The word you are looking for USA is...

Sure he has children and grandchildren, and his current wife for that matter, who were almost all rather conspicuous in his first administration, and while most were active on the campaign trail last year all are now are conspicuously absent in this one, except where absolutely necessary (Melania, at the inauguration under a hat that shielded a bit of her face from view) or on a fool's errand like Don Jr's visit to Greenland. Jared, Ivanka, Lara, and Eric all have submerged either after 2020 or this winter after the November election.

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

IglooDame

I can make or take a call with my refrigerator or washing machine, but still no flying car. It does seem like proof that humanity is made of up Ark B descendants, doesn't it.

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

IglooDame

Re: VPNs

I'm getting ready to fire one up and rent it out to my friends, who will pay me with homecooked dinners.

This comment started out semi-jokingly, but as I'm typing it is rapidly coalescing into a project plan in my head...

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

IglooDame

Re: "Dude Looks Like a Lady"

"I work with a trans"

A trans woman, or a trans man?

Rackspace datacenter infrastructure took 12-hour nap in London, Sydney, Hong Kong

IglooDame

They were always 'Backspace' when my company was using them.

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

IglooDame

Re: The only question remaining is ...

Indeed. In driving from Anchorage to Fairbanks (Alaska), most of the drive I could hit "seek" on my FM radio and it would silently cycle through the spectrum until I turned it off again. This was about 25yrs ago, but I can't imagine anyone's fired up any new FM radio stations along the way since then.

IT security analyst admits hijacking cyber attack to pocket ransom payments

IglooDame
Joke

One could see it coming, though; in his last review Mr. Liles was commended for showing excellent initiative, but his judgment was deemed to require improvement.

Apria Healthcare says potentially 2M people caught up in IT security breach

IglooDame

At what point do we simply assume that everyone's personal data has become available in some way or other on the web and mandate changes in the usage of identity for finance and other areas in order to mitigate at least some of the damage from it? In addition to C-level folks going to jail for reasonably avoidable breaches (or for failure to promptly disclose those breaches), that is.

/rant, because I know that the realistic answer is 'heat death of the universe' or possibly after that.

Dish confirms 300,000 people's data was exposed in February's attack

IglooDame

Oh goody, more free credit monitoring! Hooray!

I'm starting to wonder if there's any backroom deals between TransUnion/Equifax/Experian and some of these ransomware gangs, but that gives me flashbacks to when we wondered similarly semi-cynical thoughts about AV vendors secretly generating and propagating malware.

What's your Mean Time To Innocence – the time needed to prove that mess is not your problem

IglooDame

Re: MTTI?

I'm happy for someone else (or something else) to do it - I've plenty of other demands on my time that my employer is happy to have me do. And if AI starts taking over the rest (or even the majority) of my job-related functions, well, we're all a lot closer to eutopia or dystopia than I'd anticipated and either way I'm going to sit back and enjoy the ride.

IglooDame

Re: MTTI?

When the crime is effectively still in progress, everyone is guilty until their alibi checks out, one culprit is positively identified, or the outage ends.

I've been on enough of those calls to really like the term MTTI, but also to figure that one more pane of glass (ServiceNow or not) isn't likely to reduce my own MTTI for calls like that. Anyway my value to those calls usually extends beyond proving my (org's/component's) innocence, to guiding (sometimes herding) the combined troubleshooting efforts toward nailing down the true root cause and potential mitigations and fixes.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

IglooDame

They don't mention shrinking their C-levels at all, pity that as it'd be worth a few quid to the positive in the bottom line. And one certainly wonders what AI can do for that crowd, too.

Search the web at least once every two years or risk losing your Google account

IglooDame

Oh goody. I've created a new Google account for every Android phone I've owned, and used it for the bare minimum phone-ish stuff, so I'd prefer that Google do delete those accounts since they forced me to create them in the first place.

Top AI execs tell US Senate: Please, please pour that regulation down on us

IglooDame

"Having seen how agencies work in this government, they usually get captured by the interests that they're supposed to regulate. They usually get controlled by the people who they're supposed to be watching,"

I very rarely agree with Sen. Josh Hawley, but this happens to be one of those rare times.

"I have a different idea. Why don't we just let people sue you?"

And just like that, we're back to the usual. I don't think it's a bad thing for them to be liable, but there's absolutely no way it's reactive or coherent enough to be the only regulatory mechanism.

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

IglooDame

Win11 is actually Win10 SE, so they count as one version.

Well, that's my day ruined. I'm actually waiting for Win13, then? sigh

NASA freezes ice-hunting cubesat Moon mission for good after thruster fail

IglooDame

I can't imagine a use for a flashlight near the sun, but then again I'm not a NASA scientist or engineer and I do expect they'll come up with something clever.

Toyota's bungling of customer privacy is becoming a pattern

IglooDame

Also, the headline Just because you can make gun parts with 3D printing doesn't mean you should is more than a bit misleading; the reported issue doesn't seem to have had much to do with how the parts were created and more with the fact that they can be used to make semi-auto firearms fire full-auto. There are plenty of other semi-auto gun parts that are eminently suitable for 3D printing, and perfectly legal to do so (at least in my USian location).

Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO

IglooDame

El Reg really needs to add some sort of "sitting back and grabbing the popcorn" icon.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

IglooDame
Flame

Re: When do people understand that cash rules?

3.5W is hardly a fire-starting amount of power.

Challenge accepted!!

Alien rock causes cosmic disturbance in New Jersey home

IglooDame
Joke

Given Russian Army artillerist tendencies over the last several months, it seems prudent to explore the possibility that our New Jerseyans have an unexploded cannon round in their home.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

IglooDame

Re: IglooDame

Indeed, I daresay most women, web administrators included, are not into inflicting pleasure upon bottoms for fun or profit, nor into being side pieces for married men. Language, it's such a bastard, eh?

IglooDame

Re: IglooDame

Yes, Mistress' bedroom is more precisely what I communicated to the real estate agent. The typical term on this side of the pond is indeed "master bedroom" (not master's bedroom) which is why I originally left out the apostrophe in my comment, and mea culpa as I should know better by now.

And mistress of the household, not extramarital mistress, in case that requires further clarification. As for the basement being a wine cellar or a dungeon... both, yes. It's not actually an igloo, but sadly not a full-sized castle either, so one has to make do.

IglooDame

Being despondent about the renaming of master/slave drive jumpers way back when, I was even moreso when I heard a real estate agent referring to a 'primary bedroom' of my home, so I saw fit to correct him: It's the mistress bedroom, thank you very much.

IglooDame

Re: Scones

Maybe it's a Dwarf-made battle scone?

Dell reneges on remote work promise, tells staff to wear pants at least 3 days a week

IglooDame

It seems clear that the end of the pandemic and the current spasm of industry layoffs has finally enabled the C-suite folks to get back to not giving a damn about their employees or (if I'm trying to be overly charitable) to assuming they know what's best for their employees despite mounds of evidence to the contrary.

The world of work is broken and it's Microsoft's fault

IglooDame

Re: Shorter week?

Sure, if the AI bots were up to the task. But this is Microsoft we're talking about, and I greatly fear their anticipated solution is going to be some variation of artificially intelligent Clippy. "It looks like you're trying to avoid a meeting. Would you like help?"

Meta CEO doesn't Zuck at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, apparently

IglooDame

If I was as universally despised as Zuckerberg and had as much money and time available, I'd be passionately learning martial arts as well, in the hopes of making myself a not-quite-as-easy target. Though I sincerely doubt I'd be winning any medals for it.

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

IglooDame

And when staff comes back in for three days a week and productivity doesn't improve, presumably they'll insist on all five days in person? Are they going to be able to ignore productivity going down when everyone is back in the office for most of the week?

Spoiler alert: Yes, and yes.

Miffed Googlers meme on CEO's $226M pay award amid cost-cutting campaign

IglooDame

And so (in a fair world) they get lots of money when they sell (to prospective stockholders, an acquiring business, or whoever) what they built, but as company leaders they still didn't/don't warrant a couple hundred million dollars in annual compensation.

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

IglooDame
Terminator

As long as AI isn't being made to 'read' the novelizations of War Games, The Matrix series or the Terminator series (or SF literature of a similar vein), I'm okay with it.

China has 50 hackers for every FBI cyber agent, says Bureau boss

IglooDame

Wray said the Bureau blocks over 15 million unauthorized connection attempts each week.

I get that the FBI probably is legitimately under-funded given the threat, but c'mon, bots banging away on your firewalls' telnet and SSH ports testing common usernames isn't really justification for more new hires, it's just the price of being a relatively high-profile target for script kiddies. Hell, your honeypots should be happy for the attention.

President Biden urged to appoint AI officers to regulate this shiny-shiny tech

IglooDame

Re: re. appoint AI officers to regulate this shiny-shiny tech

I assume it will be headed by Old MacDonald.

NASA tweaks Voyager 2's power supply to avoid another sensor shutdown

IglooDame

Real men eat onion, leek and egg pie...

Blargh. Glad I'm not one of those, then.

IglooDame
Pint

Can you imagine getting hired on the Voyager team as a PFY and figuring you'll have a few good years of it to start your career, then carrying on with it till retirement, then reading a decade or so later how the younglings are still eeking out another year or three out of the probes?

I can't either. Good show all around.

ChatGPT hasn't been around for long and Nvidia already wants to put a leash on it

IglooDame
Terminator

If you listen really hard, you can hear John Connor somewhere smiling.

Mandiant's 'most prevalent threat actor' may be living under your roof – the teenager

IglooDame
Joke

This feels like it shouldn't be news to any parent (or in my case grandparent) here.

Though those of you that might be raising (or have raised) this particular flavor of hellion, do cheer up, at least they didn't turn out to be lawyers.

Techie sacked after jetting to tropical island on sick leave

IglooDame

And worse, his social credit score has taken a massive hit as well.

How was Google boss's 2022? He got paid $226M as stock awards kicked in

IglooDame

I'd like to think that if it were me in that position, I'd at least be covering my personal security bills out of my own pocket. Admittedly that could be the paranoia talking, rather than some semi-profound embarassment at making more in a single day than most of the people that I (in my little fantasy) lead make in an entire year.

Microsoft pushes for more women in cybersecurity

IglooDame
Happy

I feel like I'm doing my part, at least.

That 3CX supply chain attack keeps getting worse: Other vendors hit

IglooDame

Re: "Tapio was fired by the board [..] shortly after the breach"

Firings are nice, but not necessarily scary enough. Criminal convictions, though, that tend to get one's attention.

NASA solar satellite burns up over the Sahara desert

IglooDame
Pint

Cheers to solid service. Pity it couldn't have been sent off in a more appropriate way, into the sun proper. But at least it went out in a blaze of glory.

Pentagon shoots down UFO rumors but says 650 cases are still pending

IglooDame

Re: Hmmm

Plus swamp gas. Don't forget the swamp gas.

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

IglooDame

Re: Remember folks.

Indeed! I consider myself fortunate to have learned that lesson right at the end of my first (post-military) job, and in a not too nasty way. Relatively good local MSP, positive leadership, etc, and I gave them two months' notice because I was moving across the country. They immediately zeroed out the training hours I'd earned via sustained high billable hour percentages. I asked my boss about how he was thus effectively encouraging everyone to use up the training hours and then provide the minimum two weeks' notice, and he essentially shrugged and told me 'It's just business'. Message received, and lesson shared with all the teams I've led since then - take care of yourself and your own interests because when push comes to shove, you're just working for a business and usually dollars outweigh sense.

Microsoft not a Teams player as admin center, 365 service suffer partial outage

IglooDame
Alert

Oh the horror

I was going to be sarcastic, talking about not being able to get into one's email, but I read that Outlook users can (must?) use OWA as a workaround and that really is a horror.

Facebook puts a price on privacy for US users and it's not enough to buy a cup of coffee

IglooDame

Blech

If we apply for our tiny share of the fine, is it a "Fool me once, shame on you..." situation? Would I be giving them personal data (the form requires a snailmail address) that may then get used/sold, despite the "The personal information you provide below will be processed only for purposes of effectuating the Settlement" disclaimer?

How does Atlassian hope to actually improve Confluence and Jira? AI, of course!

IglooDame
Coat

*shudder*

"As is always the case with analytics products, Atlassian promises searing insights will be yours once you're up and running."

Searing insights, now 50% more artificial!!

US citizens charged with pushing pro-Kremlin disinfo, election interference

IglooDame
Joke

I'm okay with California seceding if they take Florida with them. Hell, we'll probably lose the one to plate tectonics and the other to global climate change soon enough anyway.