Posts by Pascal Monett

Suspicion of villainy leads Facebook to ban cryptocoin ads

Somehow I doubt that anti-discrimination legislation is going to have any place in this particular picture, but I grant you that Facebook likely cannot prevent minorities (in the US) from creating a profile and using the site. Nor does it, AFAIK.

I maintain that Facebook is not obliged to support freedom of speech, nor is it required to apply court process to any issue it might face with respect to users of its platform - within the law, of course. So Facebook Stormtroopers bursting into a scammers' house and hauling him and his equipment off to a dark, dank dungeon are off the table - however satisfying that may be for some.

Allegedly.

Re: Guilty until proven innocent?

You're confusing government and private company. Facebook has no obligation to respect Free Speech, nor is it expected to deal with ads by respecting the criminal code.

Facebook is a private company, it can do as it sees fit and, in this case, I applaud The Zuck (hurgh! I actually wrote that) in restricting scumbag access to an unwitting population.

Should ISPs pay to block pirate websites? Supreme Court to decide

Re: "Blocking ip traffic is really difficult"

Um, don't think so. Put an IP address on blacklist and you're done.

I'm not an expert, but if you can do exactly that in the Windows hosts file, I doubt it can be any more of an issue for an ISP with trained professionals.

Re: Pass it on

"an automated system that blocks *any* site requested by *anyone*, without any due process to investigate whether the request is legitimate or not"

Oh, I see, you're talking about YouTube.

I do believe that the issue at hand is not yet including takedown notices by "anyone". This is a court order we're talking about. I doubt the courts would start sending orders willy-nilly just because Bill Cartier, watchmaker, thought it would be funny to shut down Cartier.com.

In America, tech support conmen get a mild slap. In Blighty, scammers get the book thrown at them

I've always thought that criminals should first and foremost be made to pay damages to their victims, meaning at least 100% of what their victims lost, whenever possible. Then, of course, they pay the cost of their court case, whatever that may be.

They get out of jail when they've paid up. If they can't pay (because they killed the victim), they never get out.

Seems to me that would simplify things greatly. Judge and jury must only find guilt. If guilty, definition of the amount to pay with the previous guidelines. No mucking about with how many years for a murder vs how many for purse-snatching. You're in until you've cleared your debt to society and that's all.

And, since you clear your debt on prison terms, son of rich daddy gets to stay in as long as son of cobbler for the same amount of debt. No external funding allowed.

Re: "they would get you on federal crimes"

Um, I don't think the FBI has jurisdiction on UK territory.

Yet.

I eagerly wait to see your check for $12000 to the Red Cross.

Re: "[..] the days when we could simply drag the bastards into the middle of town..."

Ah, the good ol' days. When men were men, women were obedient and whoever hung from a branch was scum.

How did it come to this ?

1,900 rotten apps bounced out of Google Play every day in 2017

I like the deposit idea - that would virtually kill multiple accounts overnight.

It would also cull small devs with nice ideas - but those might just slog on until they have the dosh to register. Hopefully it would also slam the door on worthless copycat submissions.

The real question is : how heavy would the backlash be ?

Watchdog: Uh, sit down, AriseBank. This crypto-coin looks more like a $600m crypto-con

BitCoin is in a storm, it seems

Looks like the honeymoon is over, and now BitCoin is being labelled for what it is : a perfect platform for scammers, thieves, criminals and drug lords.

Nothing is secure with BitCoin. Echanges are not subject to banking charters and are run by either rank amateurs who get hacked or hardened criminals who disappear with the loot. Blockchain is as well and and good, but it is not security since it does not prevent your wallet from being hijacked.

There are apparently many levels of vulnerability in cryptocurrencies, and a lot more work is being done in taking advantage of them than in fixing them.

I still think BitCoin is a good idea, but we need a BitCoin 2.0 that puts a lid on scams if this thing is ever to actually be useful.

Pour yourself a tall one, Juniper investors. It's lost money again

"revenue [..] was down 11 per cent compared to a year ago."

But. . but . . Cloud is everywhere ! Entire IT departments are being axed because everything is in the Cloud ! Soon we'll all be working on terminals wirelessly connected to it !

How can this be ?

Crooks make US ATMs spew million-plus bucks in 'jackpotting' hacks

Re: Physical access

Indeed. Quite disappointed when I read that. I was hoping for some newfangled card hijacked to make the ATM vulnerable from the outside or somesuch.

But no, it's just boring old get-access-to-the-innards-then-profit.

UK infrastructure firms to face £17m fine if their cybersecurity sucks

"it is absolutely vital that they are as secure as possible"

Yes, it is.

Pity that the government is doing fuck-all to ensure that happens.

'Bitcoin heist' shock: Cops seek 4 for aggravated burglary in Midsomer Murders town

Re: If you are "clever" enough to make money from BTC

Nobody using BTC is clever.

I think the history of that mirage speaks for itself.

Intel alerted Chinese cloud giants 'before US govt' about CPU bugs

The only way the NSA is spreading anything is by getting hacked.

Re: Thanks Intel

It is the inevitable consequence of the term : multinational.

Intel is NOT a US company, it is a world company.

This is the obvious consequence.

Trump White House mulls nationalizing 5G... an idea going down like 'a balloon made out of a Ford Pinto'

"There is nothing that would slam the breaks [sic] more quickly on our hard-won momentum to be the leader in the global race for 5G network deployment screwing the US customer out of proper broadband more quickly than the federal government stepping-in to build those networks."

There, FTFY.

Oh, and Pumpkin Pie is biting Trump's hand ? Wow. Talk about wearing your loyalty on your coat. Nobody can doubt who he's working for now.

If you think that private-company-managed communications are going to protect you from the NSA, I have a bridge to sell you.

Fella faked Cisco, Microsoft gear death – then sold replacement kit for millions, say Feds

"169 Cisco switches and routers worth an estimated $2,344,860"

What ?!?

Are you telling me that a Cisco router is $5K a piece ?

For that hardware-encoded-password POS ?

You have gotta be kidding me.

Can't login to Skype? You're not alone. Chat app's been a bit crap for five days now

"the problem is limited to a small number of customers"

Of course it is. It ALWAYS is.

Only 1% of 300 million is still 3 million users ; not a small amount in itself, right?

And if 1% of those 3 million use 2FA and are affected, that's still 30,000 people.

So yeah, 30k people compared to 300M subscribers is small fry, sure. BTW, how many of you live in a town with 30k inhabitants ?

Just wondering.

You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen

"It's not quite that simple"

And just what exactly can I do about it ? Nada.

While I applaud any article that draws attention to the security deficiencies of The Cloud (TM), I cannot help but remain unimpressed at this latest expositional piece. Telling me that state actors have the means to create malware to spy on VMs I would have spinning on AWS instances is hardly that important when the NSA can just write a National Security Letter to Amazon and have Bezos send them the data.

Having another country capable of it does not really make a difference.

It knows where the gravel pits and power lines are. So, Ordnance Survey, where should UK's driverless cars go?

"a valuable contribution to us achieving our bold ambitions."

Actually completing a government IT project is already a very bold ambition.

Let's not mention on time, to spec and within budget. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

Lenovo's craptastic fingerprint scanner has a hardcoded password

I'm sure the guy who lifted your fingerprint from your keyboard totally agrees with you.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Tokyo crypto-cash exchange 'hacked' for half a billion bucks

@ Fruit and Nutcase

Anybody know how much Madoff cost us all ?

Indeed. I am in awe of how they are showing it to "the Man".

Great job guys, keep up the good work.

I want life to be boring, says Linus Torvalds as Linux 4.15 debuts

Now you have me interested. I want to see an enilopter. I really do.

All your base are belong to us: Strava exercise app maps military sites, reveals where spies jog

@ DougS

You might remind your female friends of a basic difference : IRL, someone has to meet you, or at least be told about you, before they think of looking you up. I doubt that stalkers choose their victims by perusing the phone book. If they don't know your name, they can hardly look up your address and they'd have to follow you home before they can correlate an address to a name.

Publishing personal info and travel data on a social site removes that sleuthing requirement. The stalker can just peruse the activities, select a woman he likes and dive into her life. Finding the address is trivial at that point.

Security through obscurity works very well in real life. Do you know where US carrier fleets are at this time ? Hint : don't try finding out - that will land you in very hot water.

Google slaps mute button on stupid ads that nag you to buy stuff you just looked at

"stop a site from autoplaying material"

Stopping autoplay should not be a per-website opt-in - it should be a browser setting default and you can opt out per website where you actually want it.

But that would put control back in the user's hand. Can't have that, now can we ?

If you've ever wondered whether the FCC boss is a Big Cable stooge – well, wonder no more

Re: Stacking the house of Cards

Well, theoretically, you have three years before that'll have a chance of happening, because as long as Trump is President, Pai is what passes for a good government stooge.

Here we go again... UK Prime Minister urges nerds to come up with magic crypto backdoors

"meeting these fundamental social responsibilities"

The fundamental social responsibility of government is protecting its citizens, not snooping on them.

Keeping the peace means feet on the ground, visible police presence by affable and polite constables always ready to help while keeping an eye out for shady behavior.

It is costly, doesn't catch everything, but it is civilized and respects the privacy of the innocent.

It was once said : "I prefer to let a hundred criminals free rather than jail a single innocent".

My, has time flown by . . .

You had one job, Outlook! Security bug fix stops mail app from forwarding attachments

"file attachments were getting cut out of messages when forwarded to others"

GOOD.

Can we also have attachments stripped from Reply To All messages ?

This culture of resending everything with just a little FYI on top is seriously getting on my nerves.

GitHub shrugs off drone maker DJI's crypto key DMCA takedown effort

Re: It's somebody else's computer

And for the life of me, I can't understand why people are so prompt in throwing data at it.

Education on this point is going to be long and painful, and there will be tears before things get better.

Just because clouds have silver linings doesn't mean you can ignore the dark thunderstorm brewing within.

It's 2018 and… wow, you're still using Firefox? All right then, patch these horrid bugs

"could be exploited by dodgy webpages to execute malicious code within the browser"

Not if you have NoScript (or equivalent).

As usual.

I'm a bit tired of all these articles on browser vulnerabilities that never, ever mention JavaScript blockers. They are the first line of defense and, in my view, they are as good as Star Wars ISD shields. Nothing gets through unless you allow it.

So yeah, maybe Firefox has some security issues in the core, but NoScript is the active energy shield that is protecting it and it is impenetrable.

Let's get JS blockers on all the other platforms, shall we ?

Mass limit proposed so boffins can tell when they've fingered a brown dwarf or a fat planet

Re: Can't something be done?

Yes : educating people that Science has no social or sexual connotations and none should be inferred. A black hole is a hole in space/time that is black because no light can be emitted from it. End of.

That education will likely take until the heat death of the Universe, though.

Re: Arbitrary?

Because until such time as we have a complete definition, we still have to classify the discovery.

It wouldn't do to throw everything in the "Undefined" folder, and we can't reasonably put it in "Supermassive" either (or "Sun-like", etc). So we have a category that requires refining, but we still need the category.

£60m, five years late... Tag criminal tagging as a 'catastrophic waste' of taxpayers' cash

I concur

The only lesson that has been learned is that government wanks are ab-so-lutely incapable of defining an IT project, let alone managing one. Those who have learned that lesson are the taxpayers, not the government wanks.

Dridex redux, with FTP serving the nasties

"compromised via DDE (a popular vector late last year); or in an Excel file"

Any mail I receive from someone I don't know that has an attachment goes directly to the round file.

I find that that simplifies things enormously and saves me a lot of time as well.

If that person has legitimate reason to contact me, they'll write again and a conversation will start from there.

Meltdown/Spectre week three: World still knee-deep in something nasty

Ummm

As far as Microsoft is concerned, there is only one version of Windows.

All users of other versions have already been told to take a hike.

America restarts dodgy spying program – just as classified surveillance abuse memo emerges

So much for the Land of the Free

I pledge allegiance to the Flag

of the United States of America,

and to the Oligarchy for which it stands,

one Nation under the NSA,

lobbied for,

with surveillance and snooping for all

Re: "I think in the court of world opinion Trump is already proven a bit of a liability"

Congratulations, sir, you have just been awarded the Understatement of the Week trophy.

Your restraint is admirable.

Is the writing on the wall for on-premises IT? This survey seems to say so

I followed the link as well

One thing I remarked on that page was this :

The survey represents approximately 1,000 completed surveys from pre-qualified IT decision-makers primarily based in North America, Europe and Asia

Given that the top results concern everything trending in the Cloud these days, I'm guessing that those 1000 "pre-qualified" (?) IT decision-makers were not working for companies that have only 20 employees.

So this is a survey of 1000 large companies with hundreds of employees or more, raking in tens of millions per quarter. And we're being told that IT is going to be extracted from on-premise.

Reminds me of outsourcing call centers. That became very big, and then people starting hating it, and now it's not so big any more. This is going to be the same thing.

You get a lawsuit! And you get a lawsuit! And you! Now Apple sued over CPU security flaws

Nonsense

Apple is being sued because lawyer sharks smell blood in the water, so they strike.

Intel has acknowledged the fault, as have other chip makers. If there is anyone to be sued, it's them.

Suing Apple is just because everyone knows that Apple has more money than it knows what to with.

Text bomb, text bomb, you're my text bomb! Naughty HTML freezes Messages, Safari, etc

"Do not use for bad stuff"

It is interesting to observe that highly intelligent people capable of finding such loopholes are nonetheless hopelessly naive when it comes to judging human character.

Did he really think that just saying "don't do bad" would be enough ? Well, as the first poster demonstrates, it isn't.

And Oracle E-biz suite makes 3: Package also vulnerable to exploit used by cryptocurrency miner

Nothing to see here people, move along

Given the amount of money Oracle extorts from its victims customers, I highly doubt it will let any amateur butt in on its turf.

After all, only Oracle can squeeze Oracle users. There is a minimum of dignity to be had.

Capita's UK military recruiting system has 'glitches' admits minister

They might have, but given that they apparently didn't do any serious testing, we might never know.

I am honestly in awe of all these government projects that fail so publicly and completely and yet nobody is ever, ever sacked on any side.

If I go to a customer site to do a job and I bungle it up like that, I'm pretty sure that 1) I won't be paid and 2) I'll never set foot in that place again. I might even be liable for a lawsuit.

But these guys waltz in, pick up the contract, pocket the money, distribute bonuses and, when the time comes to deliver, mumble sheepishly and put their hand out for more money in order to correct errors that never should have been there in the first place.

Okay, I know UK government has a specialty in not being able to decide what it actually wants, endlessly changing specs and otherwise making life very difficult for people who actually want to get the job done, but I would think that the military would be less prone to endless waffling and more focused on getting what they need, knowing what it is they actually need in the first place.

So I tend to think that, in this particular case, it is Capita that screwed the pooch big time. They should know better.

But that won't keep them from getting another contract in the future, right ?

That's what I don't get.

Come on, people, there is enough history to demonstrate that you might as well gather ten local, small providers, give them the contract and see what happens.

Given how much money you've already wasted, it couldn't be worse, and it just might be better.

Lenovo inherited a switch authentication bypass – from Nortel

Re: "Code Reuse is A Very Good Thing."

Indeed. Shit code from 2004 is still alive and kicking.

Goes to show that companies are never actually auditing their code ; they just wrap more layers around whatever works good enough to be sold. There is no oversight, no overall plan. It is not possible to have a framework in place and check every code addition against said framework to ensure proper and safe functionality.

And let's not mention code that depends on disappearing GitHub libraries, right ?

This whole code thing is already out of control. And now we have DevOps.

IBM kills Global Technology and Global Business Services: It's all ‘IBM Services’ now

IBM “has the most skilled, [..] IT and business consulting professionals in the world.”

Sure, right up to the moment they lay them off, or disgust them enough that they leave on their own.

Storage slingers say: Don't sweat Spectre, Meltdown SANitation

Well, if you didn't ask any question, it's not likely you'll get an answer.

Customers reporting credit card fraud after using OnePlus webstore

Sorry, but no

I do use Paypal now and then - when I don't have the choice to use anything else.

Visa is my preferred payment method, because when something goes wrong I have my bank to talk to. My bank manager knows me, knows my account and has been following me for the past ten years. If I tell him something is wrong, he will look into it.

Paypal ? You can send a message, right. Then you pray that Paypal does not decide that it's your fault and bans you for it. No office to go to, nobody to talk to via phone. Just a webpage, and a prayer that someone is awake and not pissed off on the other side.

Childcare is a pain in the bum and so is HMRC's buggy subsidies site

Um, I think you missed the part where they're not the ones impacted - the parents are.

So they are definitely not eating their own dog food. They're at the restaurant with a fine meal. The parents are the ones eating the dog food and they're none too happy about it.

Facebook, Twitter supremos ditch Disney as biz steps on their turf

Lines are being drawn

Industry titans are squaring up for battle. Who will win the media this time ?

As usual, not the consumer.