Posts by TheRiddler

Spy school dropout: GCHQ intern jailed for swiping classified data

Re: re: How

OFFICIAL SENSITVE is very very different to SECRET. Please don't confuse people into believing there's any similarity.

For O (with SENSITIVE caveat) you need no more than BPSS. For long term access to SECRET you need SC and for TS you need DV. You can work at TS with SC for short term or specific operational purposes and likewise you can, under certain situations, work at S with just a BPSS or CTC. However practically that doesn't happen very often.

Either way O=S is not, nor has it ever been known as SECRET and they are vastly different security classifications.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

No she was a racist piece of shit as was agreed by the appeals court.

The FULL tweet was

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care… If that makes me racist, so be it.”

This is obviously and clearly inciting ratial hatred (as upheld by her original trial and the appeals court). Without the first bit you could MAYBE argue she meant it in the context you suggest but with the whole tweet it's clear. More than that, if it WASN'T meant in a racist way then why add "if that makes me racist then so be it"? SHE clearly underrstood and accepted that what she was saying was racist.

All that aside, the law is defined in Public Order Act 1986 Part 3 and she met the legal definition of Section 18 - Offence of using words, behavior or material. It doesn't matter what you think or believe, the courts found she met the legal test and was prosecuted accordingly. As she should, as she was a racist pig.

She also didn't go "The government sux, their policies on imigration are terrible and they should be brought to account." Had she been jailed for that, I would be agreeing with you, but she didn't. What she said was burn the hotels down with the immigrants inside. I don't see that as "critisizing the government", I see that as being a racist. That is absolutely something that needs a harsh scentence and considering the max scentence is 7 years I believe, I actually think she got off lightly.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: Really?

Wow, ok

Just a few of the massive annoyances.

The task bar has gone fron configurable to almost fixed. Single height? Check. Stacking my apps in the most annoying way and adding them to a drop "up" menu at the end instead of fitting it onto my taskbar? Check. Hiding options in the most ridiculously obscure places and placing useless, pointless settings and information no one cares about? Check (here's looking at you network config particularly). Local search doing Internet searches sometimes in preference to local searches? Check. The fact it hoses your information on masse to MS unless you run massive scripts to block it and remove it all? Check. The forcing of an online Microsoft account to install the OS unless you force the damn thing to not do it. Check

Don't get me started on the right click context menu removing "copy, paste, delete" for those awful icons. The fact that "create directory" doesn't appear now under certain right click scenarios as the menu is tailored to what MS THINKS you want to do. The fact that programs that used to show up on a right click now need 2 clicks to appear (like bloody REFRESH!!!).

I could go on and on. It's just an endless stream of enshitification features that objectively make the computer more difficult to use that require you to perform more clicks to do the same thing you used to do in less.

There are massive differences between 10 and 11 and I absolutely hate what they've done with 11. Can I use it? Of course I can. I'm an IT pro I've been adapting to the "new new" for 30 years. I embrace change and love new technology as a whole. But Microsoft just has Windows 11 so wrong. It's a horrible evolution in a direction I think most IT pro's can either stand and definitely don't want.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Re: What next?

You are being willfully ignorant.

They are not "almost the same size" as a simple caclulation would show. An AA battery has roughly 2-2.5 times the capacity of an AAA battery like for like (8.3cm3 vs 3.8cm3 by volume). There's no "conspiracy" here and competition generally keeps the manufacturers honest. The size of battery used is dictated by aesthetics and performance requirements, not some desire to "sell more batteries". Battery size is ultimately driven by chemistry, not by some ridiculous notion of industry collusion.

Government intervention and control is absolutely VITAL to protect citizen rights when commercial, capitalist companies have shown they not only act against the best interest of the individual (forcing you to buy new chargers every new phone "because") but also to society as a whole (e-waste). This notion, predominantly by right wing Americans, that Government intervention is always a bad thing is abhorrent and will ultimately lead to some very bad things. I'd even go so far as without Government control and intervention that humanity as a whole might be at risk if left to their own devices (see climate change).

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

Teams was just about usable until they've forced "New Teams" which is just part of the trend of web apps with a minimal GUI. It's absolutely horrible. Features are missing, it eats RAM, it's slow, randomly restarts and is just a horrible app.

I can understand that maintenance of these web apps might be easier, but the enshitification that comes along with it makes apps so clunky. Slower, with less features and with more bugs. It's just horrible and whoever thought this was a good way for IT to go should be first against the wall when the revolution comes...

UK government can't kick consultancy habit despite promises

Re: Priorities?

Surely it's less complicated than that?

As someone who has done plenty of consultancy for Government for me it's a simplye matter of money. I can do my job directly employed by the Government at Government rates which typically for my role is 50-65k if I'm lucky. Or I can do it in the private sector consultancy and get 85-100k to do exactly the same thing. Or if I want to really push the boat out and go freelancing and pull in 120-150 (or up to 200 if I'm prepared to travel into the City). I've looked at it many times it just doesn't make any financial sense at all.

At the rates the government pays for specialists/architects who have 10 years+ under their belts it's never ever going to happen. They might want to get rid of the consultants but there's nothing to replace them with as vacancies go unfilled when the role is being offered at 20-30%+ below market rate.

Training low paid staff to do the role also isn't going to fix anything. It works if there isn't a dearth of skills and experience generally within the industry but that's just not the case. Newly trained people can sit tight 6-12 months and then just jump into the private sector getting a nice 50% uplift to their salary. Or in certain areas they don't even need to wait, get the badge and jump.

Until Government get remuneration parity with the private sector there are just not enough people to fill the roles to take lower paid roles so the ones paying the most will always win - and thats not the Government.

UK plans to revamp national cyber defense tools are already in motion

Re: "ideas" -- "hypotheses" -- "experiments".............

This is so staggeringly naive and ill informed it reads like some Daily Mail rant again "dirty foreigners".

The stuff being launched from those IP addresses are prdominantly script kiddies running Nessus from their home ISP or if they're really sneaky "friendly" home nation script kiddies bouncing via a VPN.

All the stuff you really worry/care about at a national level will not originate from a known "eastern" IP address. It will far more likely come from a legit, in courty relay, a VPN in a friendly country, a "friendly" compromised server or even combinations of those things.

Banning and monitoring known bad IP's has its place (which is exactly what NCSC do incidentally) but arbitrarily banning whole country ASN's and thinking that's going to keep you safe is silly. Moreover it may lul you into a false sense of security and leave you more open to attack. It's something that may have been slightly useful 20 years ago but it has no place in a modern world as part of any viable security approach.

While I'm at it apart from the ridiculous scale you're talking about (you'd have to filter an route countless PB's a day) what you're talking about is something akin to the great firewall of China. Hooray for advocating that kind of control and intrusion into our traffic. It would certainly be GCHQ's wet dream but for privacy, not so much.

You don't need strength, you need to get a clue because what you're suggesting is demonstrably nonsense.

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

Anecdotal I appreciate, but I've had 2 AMD 7950's X3D fail in exactly the same way in the same system in under 6 months. Burnt out in one specific area of the chip and then fails to post. Plenty of pictures online of 100's of people experiencing the exact same thing on a variety of MB's and configurations. Wish I could say I was overclocking or something but it's literally stock clocks on everything with high end components throughout (Gigabyte MB and Corsair power)

Pretty annoyed by it :(

Japanese space agency spotted zero-day attacks while cleaning up raid on M365

Re: Malware and Exploits as a Service

Unfortunately we don't live in this utopic world that you talk of where IT department security functions are well funded and staffed with competent security professionals. After 35 years working in this industry, 25 as a security expert in multiple consultancies and private companies I'm flat out telling you that you couldn't be more misguided.

Cloud is not a magic bullet my any means but Microsoft have literally 1000's of security people working on their systems 24/7. In many companies, especially smaller ones, there's a handful of people in the IT department, none of which are security specialsts. Many want to be secure but have neither the budget or skills to do the work. For literally 1000's of companies going Azure and relying on MS to secure your data will be orders of magnitude more secure than staying on prem.

This ridiculous delusion that "cloud bad, on prem good" just needs to die. As I said, it's not a magic bullet but in this day and age even as a 25 year veteran I think I'd struggle to keep things as secure without a big budget.

Even 10 years ago, the average mean time to exploitation after a vulnerability was published was mostly measured in weeks. That means you had SOME time to work on patching things before you were attacked. These days it's typically measured in hours. That kind of timescale makes on-prem security increasingly difficult to provide. Of course you can do it, but it's likely MS will do it faster and better than I could ever hope to do it.

That ignores the triviality of actually deploying and configuring much of it (single click natively supported for most of Azure) and everything is fully integrated into the entire platform already.

Of course there's still many things to worry about and you can mess up the configuration just as easily with either approach but my experience and knowledge tells me that for the vast majority of the systems I've seen and secured, going cloud is infinitely more secure all things considered.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

If all the businesses in question are local businesses owned by locals who employ locals on a decent wage you absolutely have a point. But you rarely get local businesses in cities where most of these offices are employing local people for a decent wage. You also don't get ANY businesses other than large out of town subermarkets near the business estates they also frequent. Instead it's some massive international chain employing out of town staff for minimum wage where almost every penny of the money doesn't just go out of the area but as you say it literally goes out of the country.

I can't find the stat now so you'll have to excuse me if I misremember it. If you go to a local business where the owners live and work in the area and employ locals it's typical for 90%+ of the money stay within the community. When it's a Tesco or Starbucks or Costa, the figure is nearer 90% leaving the country.

The main reasons rich people want poor people in the office are because they want to retain control over us, they want to justify their sunk costs in buildings and they want us to prop up failing business models. They couldn't care less about local businesses, if any exist, or us. Countless studies have shown that WFH policies increase productivity in every single situation. There is no justifyable business reason for a return to the office other than the illusion of control. I've been WFH for 9 years and I can't imagine ever going back into an office now. I did it for 20 years and I hated every single minute of it. The fatigue, the monotiny, the inflexibility. It was just horrible.