* Posts by Allan George Dyer

2546 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Allan George Dyer
Black Helicopters

Re: Thanks for nothing

Because they don't want to trespass on the CIA's turf?

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Allan George Dyer

Re: Unannounced security tests

Announce loudly. Anyone who listens is still learning by example as you tell them the features that tipped you off.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

Allan George Dyer
Trollface

Re: Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage

Are you suggesting that "drop" might be a less than ideal choice, perchance?

Signal adopts new alphabet jumble to protect chats from quantum computers

Allan George Dyer

Re: Hmmm, it's not just governments that exhibit magical thinking ...

"Does it really matter if your bank details are cracked in 30 years ?"

If it means I can forge the signature proving I've paid my mortgage, the bank might care.

Intel slaps forehead, says I got it: AI PCs. Sell them AI PCs

Allan George Dyer
Terminator

Killer apps for AI

Are you sure that's a good idea?

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Allan George Dyer
Trollface

Re: Should this be so easy?

@AC "Maybe the world should have adopted different connectors for the two different voltages."

No need for new connectors. The solution is easy*: North America & Japan must upgrade to 230V.

* easy, that is, for me.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Allan George Dyer
Gimp

Collecting sexual activity

Do they check the telemetry from the shock absorbers?

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Allan George Dyer
Coat

Re: ECO DECT

Is a "homeopathic doctor" actually a jug of highly-diluted bathwater from a doctor?

One person's trash is another's 'trashware' – the art of refurbing old computers

Allan George Dyer
Boffin

Re: "Bring Me to Life", as the nice lady once sang

Why would anyone need that many scatter cushions?

AI menaces superbug by identifying potent antibiotic

Allan George Dyer

Build a Cell Wall!

Build a Cell Wall!

(politically inappropriate? No, just a plant)

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

Allan George Dyer

Re: Lesson from history

Many of those Asian cities where motorbikes are so popular also have weather that really deserves the capitalisation. The riders wait out the worst of the monsoon RAIN under bridges and flyovers.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Allan George Dyer

Re: "we pushed that system out of the data center into the parking lot"

Does that explain the overhang on the old Regent Theatre in Norwich? I've wondered why it was like that. Bit of a problem for the house underneath, if they had had a film fire. Presumably they never did, given that the house is still standing.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

Allan George Dyer

Re: It's the hardware, innit ....

Why is Windows Hello a nice-to-have feature? My impression is that it has very confused ideas about MFA, but I'd like to hear a reasoned analysis.

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

Allan George Dyer
Coat

Re: "execute his target script 16384 times"

I think they might know that... now.

US police have run nearly 1M Clearview AI searches, says founder

Allan George Dyer
Big Brother

99.6% accuracy sounds good

Until you realise that, in a million uses, there will have been about 4000 false matches.

And Ton-That is reluctant to swear that it is as high as 99.6%

Hong Kong's state-sponsored SEO on national anthem strikes the right note

Allan George Dyer

You may well struggle, about the only achievement I can see is the Streisand Effect success of the HK Government bringing this to wider attention. This started last November when Glory to Hong Kong was played at the South Korea’s Rugby Sevens, possibly entirely accidentally. The Government and pro-Beijing politicians went ballistic, but mistakes at sporting events kept happening. The sporting teams are being threatened with disbandment if there are further errors. Have sympathy for them. In the latest incident, it appears that the Hong Kong Ice Hockey Association followed the instructions and sent the link provided by the Sports Federation and Olympic Committee of Hong Kong, China but that led to a Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau webpage on National Anthem which only led to the anthem when browsed in Chinese, unfortunately, the Hungarian organisers used the English version of the page and were unable to find the anthem. Perhaps the HK Olympic committee and government departments should be a bit more international in their thinking, or, at least, web-site testing?

However, this isn't a creepy change of "official truth". Hong Kong is not a Nation, so it doesn't have a National Anthem; since 1997, the March of the Volunteers has been played at official events, and that has not been controversial. There have also been various anthems adopted by the people to represent their city and identity unofficially. Glory to Hong Kong is simply the latest of these.

What is creepy is that the government often says HK is, or it wants HK to be, a financial, arts, technology, innovation Hub, but discourages any behaviour that might make it stand out from the Mainland.

Catholic clergy surveillance org 'outs gay priests'

Allan George Dyer
Coat

"identify gay priests, and providing that information to bishops "

Is this to make it easier for the bishops to find a date?

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Allan George Dyer
Coat

Re: Well they needed *something* to brag about at the time.

Did they get the termites to build it?

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Allan George Dyer
Headmaster

Re: Invalid comparison

@AC - "it can buy you almost 60x as many dollars. That's a 6000 99.99833% percent loss in the value of dollars over 60 years."

FTFY

Multi-factor auth fatigue is real – and it's why you may be in the headlines next

Allan George Dyer
Pirate

Re: The cure is ....

@vtcodger-"amputation of their mouse hand -- which is kind of drastic and probably illegal in many jurisdictions."

It is? Damn!

Lawyer mom barred from Rockettes show by facial recognition tech

Allan George Dyer
Headmaster

Re: MSG Restaurant

@Justthefacts - "They don’t employ dozens of lawyers. They employ 29."

That is 2.42 dozens, so it qualifies for the plural.

See the icon.

Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you

Allan George Dyer
Joke

Re: What!?

I was having difficulty remembering a different password for every site, but then I got an anthill, gave each ant a name and used those as passwords. It even works for frequently-changing passwords, the Queen is always laying new eggs.

For my online banking passwords, I plan to get a beehive, to be more secure.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

Allan George Dyer
Facepalm

Re: "Unless we call it Xmas"...

In that case, then use Χ when you type Χmas, don't be lazy and use X instead. Is this a tech site or not?

Damn, don't we get to use HTML entities?

This maglev turntable costs more than an average luxury electric car

Allan George Dyer
Coat

Re: Egoteric?

@GruntyMcPugh - "a mare of mine who also works for the BBC"

Very clever horse, does she also do gig work?

California legalizes digital license plates for all vehicles

Allan George Dyer
Devil

Re: Why?

@Martin-73 - "Would be handy for those annoying car parks with ANPR enforced nazism"

Are you thinking of a walk-through hack, changing the number on every parked car, so the parking company has to deal with all the drivers unable to leave?

Allan George Dyer
Black Helicopters

Very old idea

see this documentary.

How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm

Allan George Dyer
Facepalm

Re: I think we're reaching a point...

@AC - "if you have everything in one building (people, kit, processes and so on) you are a much bigger target...just let people work from home, decentralise your confidential information storing platforms and for fuck sake get rid of the massive buildings"

Yes, send all your workers home, then the attacker doesn't need to invest in a drone, they can sit in the neighbours' garden and launch an attack from there, and with all those workers, there are so many more neighbours to check out. Surely that is a much bigger target?

Isn't the lesson "don't rely on eggshell security"? Kudos to the team that noticed the "unusual activity", none for whoever thought the right MAC address was sufficient to allow sensitive network access.

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Allan George Dyer

Re: A centre for industrial decline?

Is that what they're calling it now? A cruel euphemism.

"We've designated your town a Centre for Industrial Decline."

"WTF - you've closed all the factories and mines, and made everyone unemployed."

"As I said, we've designated your town a Centre for Industrial Decline."

Microsoft says it's boosted phishing protection in Windows 11 22H2

Allan George Dyer
Facepalm

Wait, What?

"a future without passwords for authentication. Microsoft is embracing tools like biometrics – including fingerprint and face scans – and device PINs as alternative"

Doesn't Microsoft know that a PIN is a type of password - one that's easier to guess because it uses a much reduced character set? If they said, "we want to move to 2-factor authentication, with a simpler something-you-know factor" it would be more honest than this "passwords BAD, we are doing something DIFFERENT" hype.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Allan George Dyer

Re: What?

Cinderblocks are known as breeze blocks in the UK

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Allan George Dyer

Re: Clueless users

Didn't see anything like that in an address in HK in 29 years. It does remind me of references on some government letters. Was it a BFPO number?

Allan George Dyer

Re: Clueless users

@Primus Secundus Tertius - "British postal addresses are particularly variable"

FTFY.

Save me from forms insisting I enter a City (Hong Kong), State (Hong Kong), Country (Hong Kong) and Postcode (HK).

IT services giant Wipro fires 300 for moonlighting

Allan George Dyer
Devil

Have they thought of paying enough so that workers don't need another job to make ends meet?

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Allan George Dyer
Coat

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

The classic solution is daily backups.

(mine's the one with "Department of Post-Bolting Barn Door Closing" on the back.)

Allan George Dyer
Pint

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

@Martin Gregorie - Nice description. Makes it easy to see that from step 5 to step 10 there is only a single copy of F, which is the weakness of the procedure and probably contributed to the snafu. The classic solution would be using a Grandfather-Father-Son rotation (should we call that Grandparent-Parent-Child now?), so there would still be two older copies in the event of any mistakes. Alternatively, use a single scratch disk to make a second copy of F after step 3. Or do both.

But how to justify getting all those extra expensive disk packs? Telling the boss, "it's in case I make a stupid mistake" would probably be career limiting. However, the backup is when the disks are most heavily used, read and written from end to end, and therefore the most likely time for a fault.

Kylin: The multiple semi-official Chinese versions of Ubuntu

Allan George Dyer

Re: Traditional, Simplified or Both?

"I can't tell the difference unless they are side-by-side"

To be fair, quite a few are the same, there's not much to simplify in 一二三.

"I don't have any hardware suitable for testing handwriting input" How well it copes with the available device(s) would be an important question in itself. I've tried with a mouse before (dreadful) and the most popular Windows-based pen input devices have (or had, maybe it's changed) no Linux drivers. For many people, handwriting input on their phone has become their preferred method, they might respond well to the same experience on a desktop.

Allan George Dyer

Traditional, Simplified or Both?

I would assume Simplified, given the Mainland connection, but it would be nice to be certain, and both would be a definite advantage. Also, how is the support for handwriting input?

Bootnote: I'm also named after the kylin, 戴雅麟

Smartphone gyroscopes threaten air-gapped systems, researcher finds

Allan George Dyer

Re: Air gaps are all about physical security

You beat me to it.

WhatsApp boss says no to AI filters policing encrypted chat

Allan George Dyer

Re: Time for WhatsApp to put its money where its mouth is

@AC

(1) using email as transport doesn't give me any assurance about the identity of the sender. If there is something additional (e.g. a GPG signature) giving that assurance, then that probably relies on published, persistent keys, which you claim are an attack entry point.

(2) no, I'm not. I wouldn't use ordinary email alone for something that sensitive. Your point was?

Allan George Dyer

Re: Time for WhatsApp to put its money where its mouth is

@AC - Have I missed something? With no published or persistent keys, there is no way of telling who sent you a message, or even if it was the same person as the previous message.

There is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter

Allan George Dyer
Trollface

Re: Translation.

@Doctor Syntax - "easier than having to worry about whether your printer is local rather than in head office 2000 miles away"

So no worries walking 2000 miles to pick up your printout?

Printing is one of the few tasks where knowing the location of the device serving you is always going to be significant.

icon - I'll just pick on the poorly-chosen example and ignore the significant points.

Outlook email users alerted to suspicious activity from Microsoft-owned IP address

Allan George Dyer

While I agree simple country filtering can block most miscreant attempts, there is a danger of locking some people out of their accounts permanently. I've recently relocated to a different country, and while I tried to update my address for the most important services before leaving, there are others I didn't get round to. Then there's the accounts where I need to receive an SMS on the old number before I can login to update the details... even with roaming, the message might take longer than the 10-minute window to arrive.

So, make the default safe for most people, but have a fallback mechanism for the edge cases.

UK signs deal to share police biometric database with US border guards

Allan George Dyer

@Barry Rueger, SundogUK

What if you're both right? While the vast majority of firearm murders are inner city gang related, they are still outnumbered by accidental shootings by acquaintances and family members using legal weapons.

Is there a name for subtly changing the category of a statistic to claim your debate opponent is wrong?

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Allan George Dyer
Go

Easier to remove one. Where would you find a free page of the 'other' colour, unless I'd been there first?

If you didn't store valuable data, ransomware would become impotent

Allan George Dyer
Big Brother

Re: The other option....

@Fading - I think you needed this icon, once each for the world population:

Allan George Dyer

and no assumption that every place has a postcode at all.

Allan George Dyer
Joke

Re: So instead of...

@Doctor Syntax - "I enter my name and delivery address. That's in my own memory where it's not open to a ransomware attack." - Yet. Someday soon Google is going to announce a brain interface where they can access your memories.

Icon - I hope!

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

Allan George Dyer
Joke

Re: It's not dead.

I think you forgot this icon...

HP pilots paper delivery service for Instant Ink subscribers

Allan George Dyer
Big Brother

Re: Paper isn't required due to the cost of ink

I considered that, but then I noticed Instant Ink was a monthly subscription, and additional pages require an internet connection.

Safer to get a laser printer instead. At least I'll still be able to print a letter begging my ISP to reconnect me.

Indian authorities issue conflicting advice about biometric ID card security

Allan George Dyer
Facepalm

Could they be less specific?

"exercise normal prudence"

Is there any phrase they could have used that would convey less information about what they expected people to do?