Posts by Version 1.0

Whoops, our bad, we just may have 'accidentally' left Google Home devices recording your every word, sound, sorry

Re: "... accidentally turned on during a recent software update, "

Modern testing is done to demonstrate that the app "works" - if you are testing it to see if it doesn't work then you will be fired. That's modern management managing modern apps.

US voting hardware maker's shock discovery: Security improves when you actually work with the community

Paper ballots are reasonably secure and provide a means of verifying the votes to detect any security failures after the election - America hates paper votes.

China slams 'dirty' America's 'clean network' plan, reminds world of PRISM snoop-fest exposed by Ed Snowden

Re: All money is theft!

"China brought itself up to date by stealing IP from USA" - yes, but remember that the reason all the American IP got to China was because American businesses were so busy making a ton of money by moving their production lines from the US to China.

I have a friend whose company moved the computer production from the US to China, they sent him over there for two years to help get it set up, teach the Foxconn workers in Shenzhen to design new boards and diagnose problems. Then they returned him to the US and fired him.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Re: Wrong tool for the job

We get purchase orders from distributors and corporate customers sent as excel spreadsheets and HTML files every few months. But we get malware infection attempts via spreadsheets and HTML files almost every day.

Angular framework support brings Microsoft's Visual Studio into line with its way cooler little brother, VS Code

Another Feature (see icon)

Microsoft keeps adding "features" to Visual Studio and each "feature" adds complexity, requires more space on the computer and makes it hard to use. I use 2017 and while I have tried 2019 a couple of times, I always end up uninstalling it and returning to 2017 which is a pain to use compared to earlier versions - but it is usable. It has a lot of decent diagnostics and coding help, but it includes a ton of "features" that slow things down if you try to use them.

Writing applications with Visual Studio is like using Heroin, it makes you feel great when you are coding but then Microsoft adds a feature and you start to want to try a new drug feature.

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

No more Chinese, it's OK.

I'm sticking with Sushi, Aloo Gobi and an occasional Veggie Biryani in future.

Re: A hard nut to crack?

So what phone is Trump using these days? I guess he's gone back to an old Nokia so no more posts on Twitter?

What a good eye-dea: Battery-less, grain-of-sand-sized 2.4GHz transmitter to help save your eyesight

Re: People don't like batteries

Good in the medical world, good for science too - think how easy it will be to track bees and butterflies etc now, essentially they will all be carrying Bluetooth phones (LOL).

But there are some other uses of the technology too - spies and professional hackers are going to find this useful...

Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again

Re: It's a Boeing

So maybe Qantas will start flying the 737 Max.?

Re: Pilot training

It looks like Boeing screwed the FAA the first time around but overall you can trust the FAA, they are a very well organized and honest bunch, sure, they could have done better but I expect that they are working on making sure this never happens again.

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

Re: Outsourcing

And a machine gun is perfectly secure when used correctly too - that doesn't mean that we should be handing them out to kids.

HPE's Azure Stack Hub future 'in doubt' as US staff canned, SimpliVity team cut, India picks up the pieces

I'm still using my 16C calculator

But I would not buy anything from them these days. My company bought one of their new printers, when it works it works OK but then sometimes it just doesn't.

Re: Business as Usual

Definitely, they were just fired, not "terminated" godfather style.

Living on a prayer? Netgear not quite halfway there with patches for 28 out of 79 vulnerable router models

Re: Who give's the bad guys access to their router's web server?

Because the code was written by a young programmer, they would be much better off if they employed a hacker with the promise of a nice bonus for each device that they could hack off the production line or the old stock cupboard.

The old devices are probably not being updated because they were coded in C and the current version of Visual Studio doesn't compile the old code.

Try eBay - gear with a Cisco sticker is cheap

Fixed it for you

GRUB2, you're getting too bug for your boots: Config file buffer overflow is a boon for malware seeking to drill deeper into a system

Buffer overflow, a "traditional" issue

In the early days of writing code I was debugging an interrupt driven keyboard reader for ZCPR and I saw buffer overflows, it was an easy fix after I woke up in the morning after dreaming about the code to build a circular buffer and watch the pointers. I've never seen buffer overflow issues since because I had to fix them very early in my life - I'm guessing that young coders these days are taught new languages all the time, but not how to code properly? Applications are getting larger and larger, it's not a problem these days because everyone has at least 5Gb of memory, larger applications have more room for bugs and larger buffers so there's no need to worry about buffer overflow ... until it overflows.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

Dona Sarkar, the previous head of the Windows Insider program, has said that there now more than 16.5 million Insiders testing preview builds for Windows 10 - is this 16.5 million expert programmers and users or is it 16.5 million idiots who signed up because their phones had issues, their x-box wasn't letting them cheat games, or maybe they just signed up by mistake?

Re: Quo vadis Microsoft?

Looking at the way the Window 10 functions, it's clear that the people writing it have never designed an operating system from scratch, they have just been fiddling with old code and re-writing it to keep the management happy and force everyone into the rainy cloud world.

Re: Monitor Scaling

And almost as fast on on i5 as Windows XP on a 286.

Windows 10 made Windows Vista look really good

Windows 7 is excellent, it's as secure as Vista but easier to manage and works efficiently while being very easy to write and install programs. It's a clean environment, not as pretty as Vista but it's nice and friendly to use.

Window 8 was built for touch screens, entertaining and a pain to use but at least it works reasonably well although it looks too much like a phone and doesn't work as well.

Windows 10 is an utter disaster, it steals everything you do and is a complete pain in the butt to write applications in the Windows 10 environment. Notably is runs moderately well when running on a four core CPU, almost as well as Windows 7 running on a dual core CPU. I'm writing code for Windows 10 and it's horrible - yes, I can get the applications to run but an application that runs well on XP through Windows 7, runs slower on Windows 8 and 10, I can "fix" this by recompiling it in a Windows 10 world and its installation size jumps from 200kb to 4Mb.

Mexican cave relics suggest humans were populating the Americas up to 17,000 years earlier than thought

Re: YDP

Clovis First is a good example of how western archeologists are much happier believing theories instead of evidence. I'm happy with theories but I only see them as someones ideas about what happened, I don't see them as anything more that that.

Definitely, the Younger Dryas impact (probably in Greenland) looks like it may have removed not only the mega fauna but also virtually all the evidence of human occupation in North America, washing most of it away. When you look at the genetics of humans today it seems quite possible that humans have been floating around the world for at least 100,000 years - something that western culture denies could of happened because there's no (white) evidence of it; but genetics suggests that humans were not just isolated in little groups throughout history.

Of course it's all just guesswork, there are no posts on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter back then, all we have is pictures on cave walls.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

Ask John Choon Yoo

Don't ask the experts, pick a lawyer who will translate the law into something that allows you to torture any website that you want.

We've heard of littering but this is ridiculous: Asteroid dumps up to 50 quadrillion kg of space dirt on Earth, Moon

A Recent Heavy Bombardment?

There's evidence for the Late Heavy Bombardment about 4 billion years ago so this is relatively recent. All of these theories suggest that occasionally the Oort cloud outside the solar system may be disrupted and result in some trash running around the inner planets. While it's interesting to see if the Lunar evidence supports this, it would be very interesting to get dates on impact craters on Mars, maybe that's what caused Mars to be the lifeless planet that we see today.

Twitter Qracks down on QAnon and its Qooky Qonspiracies

Exactly, QAnon is a Republican re-election strategy - banning QAnon will wake up Trumps voters.

Re: Wait what?

Republicans are the Deep State, look at all the things they accuse the Democrats of doing ... they are all things that the Republicans do; building huge deficits, gerrymandering, stealing votes, threatening military takeovers of state by Federal Troops, cancelling Medicare etc etc etc.

They know about all these things because they are the experts at doing them.

Capita's bespoke British Army recruiting IT cost military 25k applicants after switch-on

Re: Next step: outsource the whole military to Capita...

Just conscript Crapita management...

FTFY

A normal SNAFU?

I'm always seeing stories like this, has Capita ever done anything that works? By "works" I mean something that benefits the customers, not the corporate management bonuses.

UK intel committee on Russia: Social media firms should remove state disinformation. What was that, MI5? ████████?

Re: seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU Referendum

There were a lot of discussions about Russian influence on the Brexit referendum during the run up but the brexiters were saying at the time that it was just remainer rubbish.

It's July 2020, and your PC or Mac can be pwned by a dodgy Photoshop file – Adobe emits critical patch batch

It's patch day again

Today's patches fix (or move) today's bugs - see you tomorrow.

An axe age, a sword age, Privacy Shield is riven, but what might that mean for European businesses?

It will be interesting to see how this works out, when the EU privacy rules first rolled out a lot of websites closed themselves down to foreign visitors in the US, many have since opened up to EU visitors but now it's all changed again. After January 1st a few UK sites might need to block EU visitors until they can demonstrate that they meet the data privacy requirements.

Computer misuse crimes down 9% on last year in England and Wales, says Office of National Statistics

There are also crimeless victims ... every time Microsoft releases a Windows 10 update.

Twitter hackers busted 2FA to access accounts and then reset user passwords

2 Fiddle All

I have always refused to setup 2FA for any account, it's just another hacking challenge but protects nothing because it's just an illusion of security and isn't too hard to work around.

Finally, made it to the weekend, time to breathe, relax, and... Cloudflare's taken down a chunk of the web

Re: Well that explains it

I saw it happen (working from home), I went and got into the pool with a beer and when I got out everything was up and running again. Problem Solved!

The internet is designed to be 100% reliable but I am never surprised when things like this happen because "designing" it to be reliable doesn't mean that everyone sets their access up to be 100% reliable. But generally any issue like this is fixed quickly.

Imagine surviving WW3, rebuilding computers, opening up GitHub's underground vault just to relive JavaScript

Re: I can see this in the future

Luckily it's all JS code because virtually nobody these days can read FORTRAN or APL, but in 500 years people will still be coding in JavaScript?

Hopefully someone has added a programming Rosetta Stone to the collection, wait, let me pull some punched cards out of my coat pocket and add them to the archives.

Twitter admits 130 A-lister accounts compromised to promote Bitcoin scam after 'social engineering' attack

Re: Follow the money?

The only country scamming for money is North Korea and they are very good at it - which is odd because this scam wasn't that efficient. Rather than tracking the total amount, how many transactions were there and when did they take place?

But when a scam like this happens all we know is what happens, knowing who's behind it is just guesswork.

Oh sure, we'll just make a tiny little change in every source file without letting anyone know. What could go wrong?

Re: Not quite a 'reply all'...

These days the attachment is CEO_pay_details.docx.exe

Twitter says hack of key staff led to celebrity, politician, biz account hijack mega-spree

Re: Who could possibly have done this?

I find it odd that the hackers are apparently boasting about how they did it, I wonder if they are just diverting attention from the source? If a hacker worked for an organization that had this hack waiting for the election then they could have made a little money by selling it to their friends...

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Re: Why?

There's more going on here than we can see, "stealing" the vaccine would not be a huge benefit because once it appears it will be public very quickly. So maybe this is being done to have some other effect?

Yes, it looks like it's Russia but it's hacking so it could be someone making it look like Russia.

Who benefits if Russia is accused? Probably not Trump so maybe the US political system will flip over again but could Russia be trying to make Bidden look attractive to boost the Trump voters again?

Fact is it's too early to know and jumping to conclusions when we don't know all the facts is stupid.

Re: Why?

"the West *NEVER* participates in espionage" ROTFLMAO!

Finally done with all those Patch Tuesday updates? Think again! Here's 33 Cisco bug fixes, with five criticals

Todays bugs fixed

443 bugs fixed - does anyone think that there are not more bugs out there undiscovered yet? Or that implementing 443 bug fixes in one day will not lead to a few new bugs, where one bug fix interacts with another bug fix to introduce a new bug that we don't know about yet?

Bad news: Your Cisco switch is a fake and an update borked it. Good news: It wasn't designed to spy on you

Follow the money

Shop for them via a google search, it looks like they cost about $2000 but you can find some for $800 ... if someone's capable to build their own Cisco switches I wonder what else is out there?

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Re: This is a good example of why programs are so buggy these days.

Ops, sorry my phone just updated itself while I was typing.

This is a good example of why programs are so buggy these days.

Asking someone to write code on a whiteboard is easy to do but doesn't really demonstrate everything. When I started you had to demonstrate that you could flowchart a problem, and in my mind that's always been the principal issue with coding, once you are confident that the flowchart is correct then you can write and debug the code to achieve the results that the flowchart documents.

If you just ask someone to code in front of you then you end up with good clean code from the person that gets the job but without any evidence that some logic issue in the code has not been missed; debug it and you show that the code is fine, not that the code has not missed some internal logical issue. Of course buggy code is not a big problem because any decent app can download an update in a few 4fv6 77ior0r9o362g!@#^ HGT^&(

Google: OK, OK, we pinky promise not to suck Fitbit health data into the borg. Now will you approve the sale?

Re: A shame

When Google started opening the Fitbit door, the company "updated" their phone app to a horrible mess.

Rust code in Linux kernel looks more likely as language team lead promises support

So Window 11 will be bug free?

If Microsoft is saying "why we think that Rust represents the best alternative to C and C++ currently available." then what's the plan? Eliminate those buggy human programmers and use AI to write the next version in Rust?

All languages are the potential for bugs somewhere, but it's us programmers who actually create them, usually by not thinking that strings can overflow or that storing passwords in the cache might be a mistake, etc**10.

Collabera hacked: IT staffing'n'services giant hit by ransomware, employee personal data stolen

It would be interesting to know how this happened - I expect that it was just an email slipping through the virus checks. Releasing the "how it happened" information would help other people prevent this from happening to them - every day I see emails arrive with interesting attachments:

P.O 567934.zip (P.O 567934.exe) , 0072635_20200713_pdf.ace, PON991197.doc, Payment details.zip (Payment details.exe), Invoice_376102_INC.xlsm, English_Court OrderCASE#036886890678.iso, etc.

Reporting live from Gartner pandemic watch: IT spending is shrinking by X this year, I mean Y

Re: Wow, what insight

Unlikely - they are busy spending money on customs declaration and goods import/export apps. You really think that Cambridge Analytica will not make a few mega tons of money?

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

You kids were playing with vi, the rest of us were happily using line editors and writing strings as arrays.

Better get Grandpa off Windows 7 because zero-day bug in Zoom allows remote code execution on vintage OS

Re: Presumably...

Bugs are a Microsoft marketing feature, the marketing folk love them because this will move more people into their data collection systems (aka Windows 10). They will not fix it because it's making them money.