Posts by Pascal Monett

Beware WarKitteh, the connected cat that sniffs your Wi-Fi privates

Re: Aren't we jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly?

This is an Internet Forum - it's what we do.

Apple, Intel, Google told to stop being tightwads and pay out MORE in wage-fix settlement

Who ever said they would be sent to pick up litter at retirement homes ?

Send them to clean up the sewers. Let's see the TV crews report on that.

New twist in China Apple hardware ban riddle: THE TRUTH at last?

Yes, but that is the point. Normally it's the Americans putting up the hurdles, they're not used to having to jump over them.

Multiple user accounts coming to Android phones 'n' slabs

Interesting

Does that mean that I will finally be able to control what an app has access to in my vanilla Android install ?

I hope so.

DON'T PANIC! Satellite comms hacking won't be able to crash an aircraft

Re: Park a bunch of ILS marker beacons a few hundred metres short of a runway

I seem to recall hearing that security is a lot tighter around airports than one would suspect.

I doubt very much that one would have time to install any kind of hardware just down from the runway without receiving a visit from armed police before being finished.

Then again, maybe I'm being overly optimistic on the subject.

On the other hand, I very much doubt that taking over a plane via Wi-Fi is at all possible, even knowing some backdoors. The equipment is wired, the cockpit does not control the flaps via Wi-Fi. Or anything else, for that matter. And as far as physical presence is concerned, if you are standing in the technical compartment of a commercial liner, the plane has other issues than you taking over the Wi-Fi.

Network hijacker steals $83,000 in Bitcoin ... and enough Dogecoin for a cup of coffee

"a former employee was able to compromise a router using an old password"

It is frightening to realise that networks are too complicated to have a proper password renewal scheme that has any relevance.

I've worked in companies that force employees to change password every month. I can only imagine the chaos that such a measure would create in an ISP. Unfortunately, whereas in a private company I do not see the use of such measures, in an ISP there is a definite use case for it.

Microsoft throws old versions of Internet Explorer under the bus

"support websites that are coded using the competition's nonstandard features"

The competition's non-standard features ? From MICROSOFT ?

That is so rich, Croesus is spinning in his grave.

Americans to be guinea pigs in vast chip-and-PIN security experiment

Re: The reason Americans don't like it..

Funny how, when it comes to money, you guys can find a whole lot of reasons to not do it, but when it comes to guns, thousands of deaths per year are not reason enough to change.

Hey guys. We've got 1.2 BILLION stolen accounts here. Send us your passwords, 'cos safety

How is that supposed to work ?

They're asking for my password so that they can check if they need my encrypted password to find out if it has been compromised, is that really it ? And I have to pay for the privilege ?

Do they really think I'm that stupid ?

London cops cuff 20-year-old man for unblocking blocked websites

Well, given the available historical, the Police would have been called to quell a riot, a terrorist uprising would have been found and any coloured person would have been shot first then questioned after.

As has been pointed out above, the Police were not involved. It is the Copyright Goons of London that went in, having been given the right to harass private citizens by some law voted right after some politician got a hefty bonus for changing his mind.

If it had been about kiddie porn, or some other something actually serious, you bet it would have been the Police, but since it is corporate law that has been ruffled, our society has not yet decayed to the point where proper Officers of the Law need be involved.

"You do realise that not everyone in the media industries are on million dollar incomes yeah..?"

You do realise that these operations are put in place by the ones that are on million-dollar incomes, and they're NOT doing it for those who aren't ?

Snowden is FREE to ESCAPE FROM RUSSIA, say officials

The proper term is whistleblower

And the fact that the USA, long-standing champion of Justice and Freedom has, for the past quarter century, trampled over everything it used to stand for is reason enough to flee.

Ask yourself one thing : if Snowden's name had been Snowdenskiya and he had fled from Moscow with such a collection of documents outlining Putin's secret organizations activities, would you still be throwing the book at him ? I don't think so.

Well the fact is that Snowden had just as much to fear from his government spooks than a Russian version would have had to fear from Putin's gorillas.

You do not publish such information and sit back counting on Justice when your country has denounced the Bill of Rights, rejected the Geneva Convention on specious terms and has secret tribunals deciding things without proper oversight. To do so would be simply stupid in the extreme.

True fact: Hubble telescope spots ZOMBIES in SPACE

Wow

A supernova can blow the outer layers of a dwarf star off.

Now that is food for thought !

Now even Internet Explorer will throw lousy old Java into the abyss

Re: The folks who have problems are the ones downloading pirated music, movies and warez

Bullshit.

The folks who have trouble are the many, many people who have computers and don't know how to avoid those problems.

They are folks for who a computer is a calculator with a screen, and they already have trouble with calculators.

They are people who have had this clunky, noisy thing plopped on their home desk by relatives telling them that they can see their grandchildren with it, and it works - more or less, but it is really confusing.

Not everyone is an IT engineer and you shouldn't have to be one to use a PC. Unfortunately, these days you do if you want to avoid trouble. And most people just don't have either the time or the inclination to do that.

Reducing the world to a bunch of pirates or saintly YOU reflects very poorly on your level of humanity.

Help Australia's PM and attorney-general to define metadata

They know exactly what they want, but they don't want to make it public before it's too late to do anything about it.

Passing themselves for idiots is a brilliant scheme - you don't expect an idiot to do anything really serious. Meanwhile they can go about drawing up plans for a new panopticon without being hindered by revealing questions.

SCORE: Rosetta probe hits orbit of duck-shaped comet

Awesome

That is all.

(icon in honor of those involved, obviously)

Edward Snowden's not a one-off: US.gov hunts new secret doc leaker

It means that the data is kept secure in an extreme fashion, requiring two people to input passwords simultaneously (think Golden-Eye two-key access to the arming mechanism), and people who do access can only access the data that their authorizations subset allows them to, access being monitored automatically with red flags sent to monitoring personnel when out-of-line access requests are made, monitoring personnel who will then investigate the demand and compare with previous out-of-line demands - make too many mistakes and you're fired.

A V.I.P. watch list, perhaps ?

With a golden membership card ?

Whoops, my cloud's just gone titsup. Now what?

Comparing a cloud outage to a power cut ? Really ?

That's like comparing theft to copyright infringement.

If your problem is power, then what you need is a backup diesel generator (or however many are required to cover your needs). Insert it into the grid, fill it up, put it on standby and you're done, apart from the regular maintenance and trial runs. Frankly, apart from the cost, this is a no-brainer operation (and yet, some still manage to fudge it up anyway).

That is peanuts in price and hassle compared to a cloud outage. Even if you do go for a backup cloud operator (and we're talking big budget operations right there), there will be a boatload of problems to deal with on the spot when (not if) it happens.

There are internal procedures to devise, which will need to be amended after the first live-fire event (because there's always some difficulty that was not taken into account).

There is (company) user training, because said procedures need to be understood and implemented in an urgent situation. There is proper warning and communications, because the switch cannot be made before it can be, and (company) users switching manually on their own willy-nilly is going to create its own special brand of havoc.

There is monitoring that the switch has taken place and that operations are once again in a working state. What are the metrics ? How to measure them in a time of crisis ? How to ensure that all required functions have been taken into account ?

Finally, there is recovering from the outage, and the decisions that need to be taken - mainly do we switch back again, or do we only switch when this cloud fails ? After the first live-fire event, maybe previous policy decisions will be reviewed in light of performance before and after the switch.

Then there will be the accounting fallout, because all of this hoopla will be quantified and cost-assigned, and the next board meeting will be a live-fire event of its own.

No, comparing with a power cut doesn't even begin to do this kind of thing justice. It is a very poor comparison.

IBM can't give away its chip business: report

Normal

Making things is so last millennium.

This millennium it's all about thinking up something slightly different than before (on a mobile!), patenting it and then suing the pants off anybody making anything like it.

Watch this Aussie infosec bod open car doors from afar

Oh, bother

All these things we had to make our lives easier have now become potential security holes that put us at risk.

Plugging those holes is going to take years and oodles of money. I have to buy an Audi A8 if I want to have a secure car ? Ouch !

African samba queen: Don't cut off pirates' net connections – cut off their FINGERS

Nah, throw them into an arena with a pointy stick - last one out only gets his head chopped off. Televise it, of course.

I'm sure it would blow all records of audience, too.

Who will kill power companies? TESLA, says Morgan Stanley

I would love to use solar panels

Except I refuse to pay such a price for something that only has a 20% efficiency rating, and doesn't last a decade at that rating.

I went to a few solar panel vendors, and listened to the spiel but was not really impressed. Except by one guy who had the guts to state very clearly that solar was for rich people because if you want to do anything else than heat water, you'll be spending more on hardware then you'll get back from it.

I like that kind of honesty. I'm looking forward to becoming rich so I can vindicate his words.

In any case, I'll consider solar when they get their efficiency up to at least 45% for a price I can justify to myself. And I want the reliability to go up a lot too. And while I'm at it, I want a chest full of gold doubloons.

Six MEEELLION gigabytes-a-year space 'scope wins funding

Of course, no other telescope before it has ever been used for real astronomy, just for taking pretty pictures.

Nice to know that. With all we've learned with the pretty pictures up to now, I can't wait to see what we'll learn when we finally start doing real astronomy !

Hacker crew nicks '1.2 billion passwords' – but WHERE did they all come from?

I'm guessing that, in a majority of those 400k+ cases, the website is for a small company and the developer is also responsible for procurement, storage, sales and maybe even marketing, because he's alone or with maybe an associate.

Also, they probably operate under the assumption that they're too small to interest anybody.

Verizon to FCC: What ya looking at? Everyone throttles internet traffic

Perfectly right, this street should absolutely go both ways.

The given tariff is for a certain bandwidth, say 10mbps. So my monthly payment is for 24/7 access at that bandwidth. Any time my bandwidth drops for any reason, my monthly payment should drop by the proportional amount of bandwidth I have lost.

So if my connection drops to 2mbps every evening for 4 hours, that means that 4 out of 24 hours I am losing 80% of my bandwidth. So, I should have 24 hours at 10mbps, meaning 240mbps total, but I have 200+8 = 208mbps instead, meaning 86.7% of my so-called unlimited bandwidth.

Therefor I should pay 86.7% of the agreed price.

Maybe that would incite telcos to go and lay more fiber to ensure 100% availability.

White Hats splat Black Hat chats: Talks on home alarm flaws and Russian spy tools axed

It's time to cancel and bury BlackHat conferences

It would seem that anything interesting gets cancelled, so it looks like it's time to cancel BlackHat.

Publicly at least.

I expect BlackHat to go underground if they ever want to get on with things properly. Right now there are way too many people overseeing their activities and imposing restrictions under cover of perfectly defendable reasons.

I suggest that BlackHatters should no longer communicate publicly either the location, time or program of their activities. Keep a list of interested people, only accept newcomers based on referrals, encrypt email with a 4096-bit key from a one-time pad, etc.

It's time to go dark, gentlemen. The limelight is obviously not suited to your conferences.

Google on Gmail child abuse trawl: We're NOT looking for other crimes

Re: "append additional strings onto a modified executable "

Which is why you always check the MD5 hash and the size of the file to the reference size, which any serious website is going to post alongside the MD5.

If either one do not concord, you bin the file.

So MD5 is not really broken, it's just not secure enough on its own.

Why no one smells a RAT: Trojan uses YAHOO WEBMAIL to pick up instructions

True, but don't forget BYOD and managerial access exceptions.

Evidence during FOI disputes can be provided in SECRET

"[these rules] do not undermine principles of justice and fairness"

So, now it is official : the land of Justice and Freedom has already shed the Freedom part and has now dispensed with Justice as well.

Now it'll all be National Security Letters, secret tribunals and kangaroo courts. When is Congress going to be dissolved ? It's not like anybody would object to sending them all to Guantanamo anyway, no ?

And all that for a commercial company that does not want to be known. Well I think that a commercial company that does not want to be known is a company that deals in shady business and should be shut down.

But for the fact that the USA is being run by companies now, so it's all par for the course.

NASA tests crazytech flying saucer thruster, could reach Mars in days

Re: " we do not know how the human body reacts to different gravitational fields"

What makes you say that ? We've been to the Moon and back. The men that went came back fine and their entire trip was monitored, if I am not mistaken.

Crumbs! Holiday phish based on genuine hotel booking surfaces

Indeed. I am just back from a holiday trip to the US. I had booked and prepaid a hotel room in Los Angeles via a web site that I supposed was a US entity - since it was the hotel site. I was very surprised when a charge showed up on my credit card details for a certain sum in dollars from an entity based in Hungary.

I was able to match that line with the hotel room cost, but only after I had found an obscure reference to the bank name on my confirmation email. Nothing explicitly said my transaction would be handled in yet another country, and the total was not exactly the same.

This is not good customer service. People should know exactly how their online transactions are being handled, and ideally the receiving bank should be clearly labelled.

I am fast becoming a devoted follower of the IBAN transaction method. Seems much safer to send the money via bank transfer than to use credit card details that can be scammed.

Windows Registry-infecting malware has no files, survives reboots

"a tool Microsoft uses to hide its source code from being copied"

So, the registry is finally unveiled to be the ultimate tool in the virus writer's arsenal.

Well done, Microsoft. You alone, of all the OS vendors, have thrust this abomination of an excuse on its end users in replacement of the trusty .ini file, and now we get to see it's ultimate defilement.

Maybe we can hope to get back to text file configuration now ? I mean, apart from DRM, copyright enforcement and embedding our OS configuration with endless amounts of hidden keys that can be used for God only knows what, there's nothing the registry does that an .ini file could not do, right ?

So, can we finally declare the registry to be a security liability and get rid of it ?

Nah, won't ever happen.

Good luck with those AV tools !

END your Macbook SHAME: Convert it into a Microsoft SURFACE

Apple legal department behavior pretty much is, though

And as soon as Apple decides this little project is infringing on their shiny, shiny image, you can bet that this Kickstarter will be punted to a judges' feet to be squashed.

After all, even officially-recognized Apple fan sites have been squashed before, and they didn't even try to make money off it. This project not only attempts to make money, but does so by destroying the purity of Apple product and, in the process, making it look like a Microsoft product.

I just cannot see Apple stand by and let that happen.

Cisco patches OSPF bug that sends traffic into black holes

Doesn't mean he's wrong, though.

Danes cram 43 Tbps down ONE fibre using ONE laser

Seven-core fibre ?

Doesn't that mean that the fibre is actually seven fibres bundled together ?

Sounds like it does, and this website all but confirms it.

So they're doing the transmission over a bundle of seven fibres, not just one. Which does not detract from the impressive success, but it does mean that it is not a test that has a hope of being replicated in the real world unless the fibres that are currently in the ground are also seven-core ones.

Somehow I doubt that they are.

Windows 8 market share stalls, XP at record low

Congratulations ! You've earned your fanboi cheque today.

Go buy a Twinkie and let the adults discuss about facts.

Quicker, easier to fly to MOON than change web standards ... OR IS IT?

As long as you include <nsa-access> by default, you're good.

Microsoft's Euro cloud darkens: US FEDS can dig into foreign servers

Re: So whose email do you use then

My own.

Web site hosting + email does not cost all that much, in the end, and you don't even have to bother with the web site if you don't want to.

I have my own web site hosted by a company in Switzerland, ironically enough. My web host guarantees email hosting and anti-spam/anti-virus measures in the basic package, for free.

No, I am not totally paranoid, and I took up this website pseudo-hobby years ago before all the hoopla about Snowden and the NSA. It just so happens that now, in the post-Snowden era that we all live in, I am quite happy that I made that choice.

Oh - and I don't leave my mail on the servers, I download it all and keep it locally.

Eat that, NSA/GCHQ goons !

PEAK LANDFILL: Why tablet gloom is good news for Windows users

Re: Told ya!

Um, Microsoft has been selling new OSes to people who already them for decades, so I fail to see your point.

Selling a tablet to a household full of PCs works quite well. Madame will enjoy a less cumbersome machine on the sofa instead of sitting at a desk to consult her favourite shopping sites, Junior will enjoy surfing in his room instead of the living room and Julie will adore spending hours lying on her bed in private with Facebook instead of enduring Junior watching over her shoulders in said living room.

Because 95% of users don't actually need a PC - it's just that until tablets came out, it was all they had.

Re: Yet today, the PC is king

No it is not, not anymore.

The PC has lost its crown, and most analysts acknowledge that.

It will not disappear, keyboard+mouse is still the best interface there is for actual work, but the heady days where the PC commanded all the attention is gone and will never come back.

And, of course, you can connect a keyboard and mouse to something other than a PC anyway, so the PC is going to end up relegated to the back office/content creation role it was destined for.

Tablets and phones are good enough for 95% of users anyway. As long as they can Like that kitty video, they're good.

Has Europe cut the UK adrift on data protection?

Re: not a single member of the general public has ever voted for what we have in Europe today

Sorry, but that is simply untrue. Every single country entering the EU had the possibility of asking its citizens if they agreed, many did - some with negative results (ie Norway, of course).

Since that time, there have been a few referendums to have citizens decide on key points. You can find a comprehensive list here.

But your opinion is nevertheless quite interesting, it demonstrates exactly how you consider the EU. Maybe that is the reason your government wants to leave it.

Brilliant move !

Yes, make it the fault of everybody else that the UK leaves the EU.

That way you'll be able to continue blaming the EU for whatever antagonizes you in the next twenty years.

'Things' on the Internet-of-things have 25 vulnerabilities apiece

Re: I work in IT

It seems we agree that someone has to do it.

It also seems that if one is not willing to hand over his private life to potentially dodgy security systems without any guarantee that it works, then one is "outdated" and only good to be put out to pasture. It's the new version of "if you're not with me...".

Well put me out to pasture then, neither of us will miss the other.

However, you will have to agree that things are not getting better on the Internet. We saw Google go from benign to worse than Microsoft. We saw Facebook blatantly and publicly make every possible move to invade user privacy and the sheeple keep using it. Now we are witnessing the creation of a new invasion path that is going to put Internet surveillance inside our very real life.

Excuse me if I am not 100% confident that marketers or insurance companies are not going to get their grubby mitts on that data and use it extract yet another pound of flesh from me.

I'm done believing that the Internet is a benevolent entity only preoccupied with my well-being. The Internet is now a digital slum. The only people I trust are the ones I know personally. The only sites I have a modicum of trust in are the ones I have been visiting for ages already. Everyone and everything else is the enemy until proven otherwise.

Especially corporations and their marketing.

Re: Depressing

You had hoped for a more positive attitude ? On the forums of a site that says it bites IT ?

If we are not positive (generally speaking), it is because a lot of us work in IT and we see how it is done, especially at the decision-making level. Then we run this fad against our reality-checking process and the result we see sends us to our nuclear fallout shelter.

But hey, go and be part of the live bug testers. Somebody has to do it, after all.

Recording lawsuit targets Ford, GM in-car CD recorders

Re: "Obviously they are designed to copy CDs already owned by the driver."

Obviously not, they are designed to rip any CD that is placed in the unit.

That means that you pick up your friend who brought one of his CDs with him, he places it in the unit and bang! copyright piracy takes place.

Or worse, the nefarious criminal organization buys a car with this functionality, rips out the unit and uses that in a vast underground piracy ring thing like the criminals they are. The American Way (tm) is insulted that that can be even possible, therefor many lawyers must buy new cars with these units in order to verify the claims and devise the lawsuits that can bring back American Freedom, and more cocaine.

Re: Hard Time Make Them Envious of Hard Disks?

Shhh !

Stop giving them ideas !

Microsoft stands on shore as tablet-laden boat sails away

"I rather like the Windows 8 interface on a fondle slab"

Nobody is criticizing Win8 on finger-driven devices, that is what it was made for.

What people are having trouble with is a finger OS being forced on a proper PC. That does not work.

"Far more of an issue for Android than Windows these days"

Isn't that an issue only when you accept downloads from unauthorized sources ?