Posts by Pascal Monett

'Nigerian scammer' busted after he infected himself with malware

The dangers of convenience

Once again the lack of proper procedures are the linchpin through which scum can ply their trade. Taking account details from an email means that you do not have a proper client db with the reliable data already inserted.

Which in turn means that your payment transfer system is probably a mess (no check on account number for an existing supplier ?) and errors like this will slip through unnoticed until you get an invoice unpaid letter and start wondering why - which is never the right reason to check your accounting procedures, but better late than never.

This is the kind of pain that will prompt more attention to detail. It is unfortunately a costly lesson, but there is a portion of the population that only learn by costly lessons (backups, anyone ?).

Windows 10 Anniversary Update is borking boxen everywhere

Re: a relationship ?

Ah, right, you mean Stockholm Syndrome. Got it.

Stealthy malware infects digitally-signed files without altering hashes

"Nipravsky reverse-engineered Microsoft's undocumented portable executable loading process"

And that is why you do not count on undocumented features for security when Internet connectivity is the order of the day.

The era of secret code is disappearing under the inexorable march of Internet connectivity and Open Source. It is now a security risk to not disclose your code and processes because that approach deprives you of all the eyes that can validate your code and ensure things will not become a major security failure.

Because the blackhats will deconstruct your code anyway, and they will find what you missed.

Private moonshot gets the green light from US authorities

"the Moon is a potential future source of rare earths"

They're going to have to find a way to deal with the very fine Moon dust if they want machinery to work in that environment.

How the HTTPS-snooping, email addy and SSN-raiding HEIST JavaScript code works

Breach, Crime, Heist

Just what is the statistical probability of such a coincidence ?

Oh, one in a million ? It had to happen then.

'ICANN's general counsel should lose his job over this'

"Maybe I'm naïve, but I hope they do the right thing."

Just one question : when has ICANN ever done the right thing ?

ICANN has a long history of publishing rules for the peons and then doing whatever they decide they want. Even the US government got told "shove off" when it tried to argue that ICANN has to respect something.

You think you've got a chance ?

I'll be following your time in court with great interest.

Classic Shell, Audacity downloads infected with retro MBR nuke nasty

Re: Also, a change to the MBR is 'before' any OS is loaded

I don't think so. The MBR was changed by the execution of the nasty. Besides, if no OS is loaded, how can any change be made ? Something has to run the code that makes the change.

Why this MBR rewrite could fly under the AV radar is beyond me. Is the MBR being regularly rewritten by the OS all day ? Don't think so. So why does MBR access not trigger a humongous red screen with nukular* blast in the background and big white lettering saying "HEY, SOMEBODY WANTS TO RECONFIGURE YOUR DISKS - ARE YOU SURE ???" and a nice red button with "FUCK NO" written on it to abort.

But no, apparently any piece of code can just go and write to the MBR. No problem here, no sir, carry on while I slow the Internet down with all the Flash checking I have to do. . .

* yes, I did write nukular on purpose

Microsoft adds new 'Enterprise Products' section to privacy policy

The policy came into effect on Tuesday, August 2nd

And that is the date where Microsoft has officially lost its mantle of OS maker and transitioned into Ad-slinging personal data slurper.

That is also the date where I will have retroactively dumped Microsoft into the same bag as Google and all other sleazy Internet companies who just want to milk my details to make their money. That you have to pay Microsoft for the privilege is just the cherry on the cake.

Thanks, Microsoft. It was an interesting quarter century and I am happy for what we had. I will cherish my Win 7 license for as long as I can string it out.

But we're done now. You have become something I cannot abide, and I will not trust you again.

Ever.

Simply not credible: The extraordinary verdict against the body that hopes to run the internet

Re: Umm, some balance please

Yes, let's balance. I don't give two hoots about corruption in the Olympic Committee or FIFA - they do not and will never affect me in any way.

I damn well care about my Internet and I am incensed every time I hear about how ICANN in general just doesn't give a flying monkey's about respecting anything so mundane as rules and regulations when it is the fucking global Internet that they've got in their hands.

It is literally criminal how they get away with blatantly saying "F U" to everyone's face and nobody lifts a finger in retaliation. I would send in the Marines and have them all shot for treason on site, no delay and no discussion.

$67M in bitcoin stolen as hacking typhoon lashes Hong Kong's Bitfinex

@Alan Brown

That attack was against the SWIFT system, diverting funds from where they should go. It was not an attack on funds in accounts. The system will be patched.

It also took advantage of a security hole, with an unprotected switch being exploited. That bank should have known better.

But okay, a hacker did get away with millions. Duly noted. I hope he knows how to run, because he'll be on the run for the rest of his life.

Yes, today money is virtual until you get some from the ATM. The difference between BitCoin and "normal" money is that banks are under a charter that has been hundreds of years in the making, and must respect financial obligations that have been polished and tweaked by law for centuries.

BitCoin, on the other hand, thrust itself into existence and, as its very first act, declared itself to be immune from all that legacy law and experience.

That is why you'll never hear of a bank hacker getting away with millions. There are breaches targeting user credentials, there are isolated thefts on one user account now and then due to insecurities with online banking, but there are no mainframe attacks on central databases. With BitCoin, there are.

Now that a judge has declared that BitCoin is not funny money, I'm just waiting for all the BitCoin trading to be force-folded into signing up for a proper banking statute world-wide and getting up to speed with what it actually means to be a responsible trader.

My guess is that all current BitCoin trading places will fold because none of them have any actual finance experience and actual banks will pick up where they left off.

Time will tell.

Post-Brexit spending freeze in UK is real, says enterprise distie titan

A market hiccup

Gonna be one looooong hiccup.

Reminder: IE, Edge, Outlook etc still cough up your Windows, VPN credentials to strangers

"Microsoft released guidance to help protect customers and if needed, we’ll take additional steps"

Microsoft released guidance - yeah, because all 350 million Win 1 0 users know about your guidance.

if needed, we’ll take additional steps - hint : it's needed !!

Foot meets bullet - again. This is karma for having stupidly decided to graft a browser into the OS for no technical reason whatsoever and not paying attention to the impact of internet-related bright ideas on core OS functionality.

Swede suffers shrinking penis after dentist fits mouthguard

"the plastic used in the mouthguard"

Keep that plastic for pool-based todger mishaps.

Make mouthguards out of ceramic.

If that fails, call in a psychiatrist.

Going! going! pwned? 200! million! Yahoo! logins! leaked! allegedly!

Re: Meanwhile....

Sure, mention it.

Standard Corporate Procedure, these days. She's far from the first CEO to bilk millions out of driving a company to the ground, and she certainly won't be the last.

It's private money. If the shareholders are stupid enough to give it away, it is literally in every sense their problem.

That said, I'll drive a company to the ground for a tenth of the price. Just saying.

Hitachi's Americas CEO resigns

"Jack Domme has resigned, with Ryuichi Otsuki already in place"

Well at least Hitachi didn't take months to find a new CEO, eh HP ?

Chinese Android smartphone firm: It packs a dedicated crypto chip

Shhh.

You're tech, they're Marketing.

Not the same universe.

300 million pelicans? Pah. What 6 billion plastic bags really weigh

Re: Enviromentalists are extrapolating

Right. Because the the Pacific trash vortex is just a tiny collection of a few bits of plastic debris. Nothing to worry about. Move along.

Windows 10: Happy with Anniversary Update?

Re: Bashing a machine with a spinning disk in it is definitely not a good cause of action

Yeah, but bashing a Windows machine with a spinning disc is highly cathartic and greatly reduces your stress levels.

Re: They can't win.

No, they can't. On the other hand, they did everything to put themselves in this situation in the first place. The guiding light has always been revenue, never proper protocols. As such, if MS had actually cut the cruft with XP, back when nobody had any other choice, and set down proper API rules and respected accepted browser specifications, the situation today would be a lot cleaner and programmers would have a decade's training in Good Programming.

They chose short-term money instead.

No sympathy.

Re: Windows 10 is good if you don't care about controlling your own computer or your privacy

Spot on.

An Operating System used to be the layer that could launch applications and manage the hardware.

Today it is an excuse to push ads, monitor users and create salable statistics.

I'm checking out of all this nonsense.

Liberata in £43m buyout by Japanese firm OUTSOURCING Inc

"The buyer is has spread"

There is absolutely no grammatical checker today that would let that pass.

No editor worth the name would miss such a thing.

That is the nature of journalism today.

If only it were Friday, dammit. I need a drink.

Australian spooks' email guide banishes MS Word macros, JavaScript

Re: We didn't take any risks, we just took the PC off that user

And that's all ?

You didn't take the servers offline to scour them for virii ? No in-depth analysis of all network shares ? Just re-image the affected PC ?

And you think you didn't take any risks ?

Ignorance really is bliss.

Australia to spend a billion bucks and seven years on SAP project

Re: only if they signed up to follow the above

And only if you have a fully-equipped dungeon to deal with the people who still stray from the path.

US state sues Comcast for $100m in row over 'worthless' repair plans

Re: if they're decent people

That seems to be the whole problem.

FBI electronics nerd confesses: I fed spy tech blueprints to China

Re: Veteran technician...

Veteran tech and he uses absolutely every single electronically under-surveillance tool known to Man ?

And working with inside knowledge of the NSA ?

He should go to jail just for that.

You think Donald Trump is insecure? Check out his online store

Nah, Mexico.

Re: Everything he ever built someone else paid for.

Everything he ever conned someone else into paying for.

FTFY

Google-backed Thread, OCF form alliance for Internet of Things sanity

But it will unfortunately rebound thanks to all the friggin' idiots who would die for a chance to control their lighting and heating from the slab grafted to their hand.

F-35 targeting system laser will be 'almost impossible' to use in UK

Re: ISD$400,000

Wow, a helmet costing four hundred thousand Imperial Star Destroyer dollars.

That's what you call a sky-high bill !

In other news . . .

US restrictions on the F-35 fighter jet's flight authorization process will make it “almost impossible” for any country to launch them without per-flight White House approval.

But keep paying monthly to maintain hope.

All roads lead to Rome as Irish seminary gripped by Grindr scandal

It's nice to hear that, whatever the orientation, there are still some people able to treat serious matters seriously.

EE roaming outage hits Brits basking abroad

No can do. Phone grafted to hand. Signal keeps blood flowing. Without signal, world is dim and grey. Can't enjoy holidays if can't see it through phone screen while streaming to Facebook.

Think of all the selfies that are lost ! Won't somebody think of the selfies ?

Floods hit India's IT hubs, wash away some credibility

Re: what they've outsourced is completely out of their control

When the cloud gets wobbly, what exactly is it that you control ?

Re: what they've outsourced is completely out of their control

Time is going to teach companies the harsh reality of that statement. The Cloud is still bright and shiny new, and yet I cannot count the number of times that I've heard "all you need is to set your SLAs properly" as a response to anyone questioning the value of handing over control of your data to a 3rd party.

As if SLAs are going to get to Azure back up in less than 15 minutes after an admin put in a wrong DNS command. Or, in this case, drain all the roads and get everybody back to work on time.

SLAs work when everything is all right. When things go down, all you have is a phone number that might not even answer. You can rant and rave and shout over the phone about your SLAs all you want, your service will be down until it goes back up and you can do nothing about it.

You’ve left too many VMs lying about. You’re a very naughty boy

On the other hand, if you're serious about redundancy, it seems to me that you have to have a solution ready if/when you need to switch from one to the other.

Mirror, mirror on the wall: Is Acronis backup truly the fastest of them all?

"It only takes 35.6 minutes to back up a 180GB virtual machine with Acronis"

Great ! I'm going to set it up on my Pentium with a 10MB LAN connection to my NAS. I now know that my 250GB will be backed up in no more than 48.6 minutes !

Can I sue if takes longer ?

Juno turns around and heads off to graze Jupiter's clouds

I understand what you are saying, but where is the logic in giving a planet-specific name to the same mathematical position ?

Are we going to end up reading about apoton, apoturn, apocure, apomede, apores, apoDA14 etc, in other words one apo- for every single planet/dwarf/moon/asteroid we have a satellite orbiting ?

That'll get tiresome rather quickly, I think.

Windows 10 still free, even the Anniversary Update, if you're crass

Re: the same people who where complaining about eol on Windows XP

Not all of them.

I was happy to move to Windows 7, and very happy with the 64-bit version. So many things are a lot better on 7 than on XP that you'd really have to be stuck on XP to stay there.

I have no desire to surrender my PC to Microsoft. It works the way I want it to, and I really, really do not want MS to fiddle about with it because I just know that they'll stuff something up at one point or another.

And I do not trust any company with access to my disks, especially not US-based ones.

Give .gay to the gays, roars exiting ombudsman

"the ICANN board is not obliged to follow its governance committee's recommendations"

Well duh. The ICANN board has no obligations and, when it does, it just decides that it doesn't.

And somehow, nobody has arrested these assholes.

No need to panic, says SwiftKey, as email addresses, phone numbers appear on strangers' screens

"The vast majority of SwiftKey users are not affected by this issue"

Oh good, nothing important then. Not to worry. Carry on.

Sorry, but if only one user is affected by this issue it is still important to get it solved.

Go on trying to PR your way out ; anyone with a brain has already marked you down as an outfit to avoid.

Of course, given the number of people who don't have a brain, your future is still bright.

Dem-owned-crats: Now its congressional committee is hacked

"the attacks are likely the work of a Russian-based group"

Sure. And the Sony hack was from North Korea.

Ah, Americans. Always blaming somebody far away for all their troubles. Because it absolutely couldn't be a home-grown group using a Russian-based VPN anonymizing service, oh noooo.

Google and Microsoft are playing catchup with AWS's cloudy power

"Google took 7.4 per cent of the market but grew 80 per cent."

Once again we witness the use of percentages to try to make something more important than it is.

If you had written "Google took 7.4% of the market, going from a little bit to a little bit more", it wouldn't have seemed so impressive, would it? But that's what actually happened.

I sell an apple today, tomorrow I sell 2 apples. Wow ! I've increased sales by 100% !

It's only 2 apples.

Try not to repeat the hyperbole, ok ? Canalys is the marketing company, not El Reg. Get back to biting, please.

Capita was always going to axe staff under Project Vincent – sources

Let us all give thanks

Let us all give thanks to Neo-Liberalism, that wonderful theory of economics that has removed the power of decision from governments to place it in the hands of multinationals.

Free flow of goods ? Check. Governments have to let everything in because nothing is made locally anymore anyways.

Free flow of the workforce ? Check. The workforce is now flowing to South Africa.

Free flow of capital ? Check. Revenue is now everywhere except where governments can tax it.

A better world for all ? Check. It's a much better world for all 1%ers.

For the rest of us, it's seriously starting to suck though.

Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Update tweaked to stop you disabling app promos

And so disappears the Personal Computer from Microsoft history

"a feature which allows Microsoft to install "recommended" third-party apps and links on the Windows 10 Start menu. In the past this has included apps like Candy Crush Soda Saga, Flipboard and Twitter"

Sorry ? An OS vendor that decides to install commercial 3rd-party products on MY computer ? And no lawsuit is coming out to put a stop to this nonsense ?

From a country whose citizens file a suit if their coffee is too hot, I find that a bit rich on both sides. But really, I think it is high time to file a class-action suit defining what an Operating System is and is allowed to do.

Because installing Candy Crush without my permission is the last straw. Now it's pitchfork time !

It's time for a discussion about malvertising

"The ad networks see no percentage in ensuring clean ads"

And soon they will see next to no percentage regardless.

Someday someone will come up with the concept of Trusted Ads, and that one will take the market.

Then we will be able to turn off our adblockers.

But not before.

WD disk revenues spin slower as its flash fireworks go off

"Unless Seagate gets seriously into the flash business"

Because there are HDD vendors out there that are not planning to get seriously in the flash business ?

Come on, Seagate is not planning to die, now is it ?

Someone (cough, cough VeriSign) just gave ICANN $135m for the rights to .web

And the added benefit is the large drop in stupid emails trying to get me interested in something ridiculous because all that inane activity is being posted on walls which I don't have.

I like Facebook for the fact that it has drawn all the idiots together and keeps them mostly in their own little ball pen. It's like having a soundproofed kids area in a restaurant. You can enjoy the food and the service without being annoyed by all the shrieking.

Argos changes 150 easily guessed drop-off system passwords

Wait a minute

A customer found a weakness in employee password use and protection, signaled it and was not immediately blamed and brought shrieking into a ridiculous lawsuit ?

What is the world coming to ?

China decrees it will grow world-class enterprise vendors by the year 2025

"who would bet against the Council's edict becoming reality?"

Anyone betting against China in the long-term is a fool.

Twenty years ago every was calling them copiers. We were laughing at the quality of their products. Sometimes we still do. There will be nothing to laugh at the day China is dictating international commercial treaties instead of the US - and that will happen.

It'll be interesting to see the influence of the Middle-Kingdom's growing power on those commercial agreements. One can only wonder what they will do with the concept of privacy, for example.

Today, it is still the US calling the shots in international treaties of all kinds. Soon, it will be China. Get ready for it.