Posts by Version 1.0

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

Goodbye data privacy

I expect that they will start monitoring coat-hanger sales nationwide now, it's OK to buy guns but it may soon become a crime to buy a coat-hanger.

Back-to-office mandates won't work, says Salesforce's Benioff

Warping from home

Oops, I wonder if that's a typo? Working from home is not as easy as working in the office in most circumstances but it saves the company all the money that was being spent to keep the office clean, warm or cool and decent. But if this is the way we're going will it fix the current issues that we are seeing? Will the government start promoting working from home in Rwanda as an excellent choice?

But the other side of this is that the Government is currently complaining about increases in worker pay and working from home will "fix" that for them, it might result in a lot of "working from home" jobs in the UK with workers employed by companies outside the UK because they are so cheap to employ - that could cause the unemployment rates to drop as fast as the wage rates. I am afraid that all of the current changes are going to suck badly.

Cisco warns of security holes in its security appliances

So my password is still safe!

It's a strong xkcd password

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Internet vs Renitent

The Internet was created to renitent (resist and survive) and it worked very well for years, but now we have "upgraded" so many things that this incident is no big surprise. This environment applies to everything I work in and with new "features" making data easy it's sold as "So Great" but then something stupid happens and we see this style of issue ... it's normal these days, we're busy creating problems and solving them but originally the Internet was designed and built just to avoid problems and work like that for years.

Amazon fears it could run out of US warehouse workers by 2024

Re: Amazon own goal

The just situation just has Amazon illustrating it, we see these issues in many other work forces that are treated poorly ... the situation that can be fixed easily by making the work environment decent and the workers happy to get to work everyday.

Investors start betting against Bitcoin with short-trade products

LOL, reminds me of seeing Steve Miller when he toured the UK, Your Cash Ain't Nothing But Trash ... was this predicting bitcoin?

But you can profit from crypto if you can push the price down to 2014 levels, buy a bunch of Bitcoins and then push the price back up to 2021 levels again. The main function of bitcoin has been to make "investors" (manipulators) very wealthy.

Abortion rights: US senators seek ban on sale of health location data

Re: The

The Republicans are saying that they all support the "Pro-Life Community" but they are keen on keeping the Death Penalty going even though there are a horrifying number of executed people with virtually no real evidence that they committed any crime before they were executed.

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

My advice for Biden

If Biden were to pardon Julian Assange when he arrives, and return him home to Australia, then I think the world would start to compare Biden to Carter, essentially a politician with a good attitude. Assange basically only gave everyone access to information about many terrible actions organized by George W. Bush with encouragement from Tony Blair, and now Putin is joining the club.

Originally I thought Biden was a shitty politician but these days, watching all of today's political actions I'm starting to think he's good. "Good?" who knows, but look at all the other idiots today.

If you're using older, vulnerable Cisco small biz routers, throw them out

Re: Amazed

Essentially, if you are going to have a connection to the Internet then you need a separate firewall - lots of machines are safe when you write rules that only allow their specific access ports. It needs to be a separate hardware firewall like pfSense etc ...

"For their next act, they'll no doubt be buying a firewall running under NT, which makes about as much sense as building a prison out of meringue." -- Tanuki on ASR about 30 years ago ... getting hacked is nothing new these days.

Big Tech falls in line with Euro demands to fight bots, deepfakes, disinformation

Re: Beware dragons

So will Rees-Mogg's current plan to axe EU laws will result in the elimination of Article 16?

All the arguments around the EU and Brexit in the UK seem to be just designed to keep politicians elected so I expect that bots, deepfakes, and disinformation will just keep going like they have all the time in the past. People who use them will not eliminate them will they?

Look to insects if you want to build tiny AI robots that are actually smart

Thank you Katyanna!

Anyone coding in this environment, or a related one, needs to download and read the published paper, It's an excellent description and reading it will help everyone think about what they are doing and how it might (or might not) work. Understanding the environment and the way things work is a huge help when you are trying to get things working and coding. The paper is very helpful - that's a feature of so many published papers in every field you might have to work in... for example, this view is very helpful whether you like it or not (LOL): Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes. - Richard Hamming

Re: The largest multicellular organisms on earth.

Five million years ago insects only had three legs as you can see in Quatermass and the Pit, documenting the arrival of Martian insects on the Earth.

Japan makes online insults a crime that can earn a year in jail

Re: I approve

Yes, but it looks like the UK Government is making protest an offense these days so the cops are probably just doing what their bosses are telling them to do.

America edges closer to a federal data privacy law, not that anyone can agree on it

GDPR+

I think that we are seeing the General Data Protection Regulation starting to work in Europe so it would be very nice to see it enhanced and have a vast effect on the current data theft world. I expect that it would create a very different Internet environment and generate a vast amount of corporate complaints ... but if companies are going to fight it then it tells you what they are doing every time you visit their websites and never click on data acceptance.

This is currently documented on Bruce Schneier's cryptogram website - https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/

Heineken says there’s no free beer, warns of phishing scam

Re: In Victor Borge voice

So free beer is like free sex ... you're going to be paying for it for a long time. You will be telling all your friends, "I am a drinker with phishing problems" - Brendan Behan (icon) updated to today's world.

Lenovo opens doors on first in-house European factory

Re: Tables have turned

We're currently looking at an economy that resulted from the West opening factories in Asia (not just China). Decisions like that seem to offer many advantages but create a lot of problems down the road.

Azure issues not adequately fixed for months, complain bug hunters

"Why did it take five months for Microsoft to mitigate a vulnerability..."

When a bug is discovered, if it is fixed quickly then everyone is happy ... including anyone who's accessing the user data via the bug because when you fix something quickly then it's very hard to verify that you haven't just moved the bug somewhere else. I expect that when Microsoft saw the bug, the programmers started looking at all the other areas in the code that it might have affected, planning to try and implement a complete fix, not just the first of a few months bug fixes.

Sure, five months is an issue but it's much better than quickly creating a bunch of new vulnerabilities.

Giant outsourcer keeps work from home, loses tax breaks. Government says 'good riddance'

Re: This sets a dangerous precedent

" ...and then where would our poor farmers be... "

In the days before "Farmers" we were all just "Hunter Gatherers" ... these days a lot of them are just home workers writing malware to do their hunter gathering. Certainly this is all Madness these days but I see nothing suggesting that it's going to stop anytime soon.

The PainStation runs Windows XP because of course it does

Re: Pain

NO, XP was very functional in the working environments (are you just a game player?), I saw a lot of software created on the XP systems that worked well and even ran FORTRAN, it also had good multiple language support so lots of people used it worldwide.

Vista was a very nice graphical improvement, it's "problem" that users complained about was that it started to require user security and the changes made it difficult to hack compared to earlier operating systems - essentially just problems that were resolved by creating Windows 7, where everyone setup both a user account and an administrator account - a mainframe security standard.

I don't play games, I spend a lot of time trying to help students and researchers get things working so all of these "painful" and "evil" complaints just need to get resolved in my world.

Crypto market crashes on Celsius freeze, inflation news

Crypto == Getting screwed. FTFY

Microsoft pledges neutrality on unions for Activision staff

"rumors he left over a workplace affair"

LOL, that reminds me when I first had a "company car" in the early 70's and a week later the sales boss was getting his car repaired so he took mine in the afternoon, promising that I would get it back in the morning. It was not a big deal for me, only about 40 minutes to walk back to the apartment and when I got back to work the next morning he gave me the keys back, his car had been fixed.

But later that afternoon, when I got back into my car to drive home, I saw two high-heel shoe prints in the ceiling over the back seat - this was my first job so all I did was laugh back then.

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

Re: Social media is killing us

It is a source of much embarrassment to me that I was distracted by a combination of Usenet, Western European history, and writing ... instead of wine, women and song." -- Matt McLeod, in the Monastery

Wireless kit hit by supply chain woes in Q1, China lockdowns blamed

Is this devolution?

Originally we were making all the chips and components in the countries using them to build the products but then corporate owners started to make much more money by selling all the manufacturing abilities to cheaper countries and buying everything we need with only a week or two deliveries to our markets ...

So originally we were "Farmers" growing everything we need to stay commercially alive, but now we're returned to just being "Hunter Gatherers" and so we're seeing the old problems these days. But it will all be solved when China gets the delays eliminated? If China does a Putin on Taiwan and everyone protests, then what will we see in a few years? We're just Hunter Gatherers these days having the old problems when we couldn't catch anything.

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Re: jumping out of plane with no parachute

It's like just jumping out of the plane with a parachute and say that the problem is solved before you try to land.

Re: Where were the procedures ?

I saw a database designed back then for XP, the company sold the medical-grade software, demonstrating the database functions with a sample of 5 clinical subjects. The buyers all thought it was great until they started using it and the number of database entries went from 5 to 100 or more ... accessing the data dropped from 5 seconds to 50 seconds or more.

So often software is written and shown to "work" but never tested to the limits and is not fully documented, resulting in the problems described in this article and the company saying that reporting the problem was a stupid user complaint.

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Vinyl vs CD

And CD's work so well in a car! The biggest benefit is clearly no bumping and jumping as you drive but also, if you get pulled over for speeding, then just pull the Bob Marley Natty Dread CD out, and put a CD in playing the Enigma Variations and it will be a very brief stop without a vehicle search.

OMIGOD: Cloud providers still using secret middleware

Re: "they also add new potential attack surfaces"

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

- C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

NASA to commission independent UFO study

Intelligent Life exists

I believe that NASA is the sole evidence for the existence of intelligent life in the solar system, or even on this planet. Certainly there is some suspicion of "alien spacecraft" but mostly it's on social media these days and is only seen as visualization errors in the past. The only solid evidence for intelligent life on this planet, beyond NASA, is revealed by listening to Brian Eno everyday.

Emotet malware gang re-emerges with Chrome-based credit card heistware

Re: "they came back in full force"

It's not just "user stupidity" ... companies and organizations are busy sending emails via lots of other sources, talk to someone you've worked with (.edu, .com, ,gov domain) and then get an order in a HTML attachment from a totally different domain that you have to visit to accept the order.

So much is busy making everything easy to use, not safe.

Microsoft trumpets updated HR-friendly policies (that comply with recently changed laws)

Re: Non compete

Treat your employees well, pay them a decent salary and listen to their thoughts and comments, treating them with respect and they will keep working for you without any threat of voting against your continuing to be the prime minister company director - no risk of them jumping into your competition when you treat them with respect - you can see that this works whether you like it or not.

Intel freezes hiring for PC chip team, cites 'macroeconomic uncertainty'

70 years ago we were told ...

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years." - John Von Neumann, circa 1949.

AI chatbot trained on posts from web sewer 4chan behaved badly – just like human members

Re: One no, other yes?

You think that there are people on 4chan? Sounds like the 4chan AI model was trained on chatbots to show how chatbots behave.

Next major update of Windows 11 prepares for launch

Re: Nothing of appeal

You think that Windows 12 might be better ... well maybe. But will your kids be running Windows 81 when you retire? Just another 69 updates ...

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

Re: Optimisation...

Looks like this will optimize malware deliveries as well. All these companies suggesting this will be an "improvement" update are probably just seeing it as a way to make more money from users, not actually assist users. It will be much easier to deliver bigger adverts and collect user data as users do more "faster".

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

This probably means that we will not be able to take a UK charger into the EU ...

Feeling highly stressed about your job? You must be a CISO

Re: And we're back to the 1990s

The reason so many people jumped into this business in the 90's was that the computing industry started selling the idea that there were lots of new well paid jobs ... they succeeded, kids got "qualified" and everyone was told that the computing industry had plenty of workers so companies could start upgrading and jumping into the new networked environment, expanding the internet everywhere by buying and installing the new systems.

Employees are just corporate food.

Re: Or, and here's a counter-opinion...

AC, that would have been a good extension to the article in El Reg.

Police lab wants your happy childhood pictures to train AI to detect child abuse

I can remember being a minor in a normal environment, that these days might be seen as "an exploitative, unsafe situation" because my family stopped at a pub in Oxfordshire, put me in a wheelchair and we all sat in the pub garden. My uncle drank his beer then put it down on the table and went inside to the toilet ... so I picked up his beer and drank it. Everyone laughed until my uncle came back and saw his glass was empty.

Amazon accused of obstructing probe into deadly warehouse collapse

Re: So... this is why Baldy

"Amazon is like a drug" - no Amazon is nowhere nearly as nice, if it wasn't so risky I'd vastly prefer smoking a little weed and listening to CSNY, the Floyd, and Edward Elgar than visiting the Amazon site every night.

To cut off all nearby phones with these Chinese chips, this is the bug to exploit

Re: The Terminator

Back in those days when you found a problem in a device then you worked to fix it, in this example you would probably just replace the chip with a new version, but these days you work to make them buy a new device.

I was working for a company in Oxford back in the 70's that found a problem with their tape decks, so I reworked the 8048 coding to fix it - I just fixed an 8-bit integer overflow (LOL).

46 years after the UN proclaimed the right to join a union, Microsoft sort of agrees

Re: A necessary evil

I've always supported unions which I believe is a result of growing up in school outside a coal mine where kids walked around barefoot because their dads were miners and they couldn't buy their kids new shoes when the kids shoes fell to pieces. The parents preferred working hard to feed their kids.

Taiwan claims ‘breakthrough’ in EU semiconductor cooperation talks

Re: I don't get the China invading Taiwan hype

The issues between Taiwan and China seem to be just political views, talking with people in both countries I always hear that they see themselves as Asian, not two sets of fighters. Both have different political histories but they all seem to just see that as the past these days.

Remember that movie when Deckard tried to kill Roy Batty and then falls off the roof, but Batty then saves Deckard's life even though Batty is about to die ... both people are different when the government talks but Batty sees the two of them as the same and Deckard is so happy when he figures it out too. That's similar to the Asian views of each other.

US, Europe move to secure access to Taiwanese tech

Re: Appeasement

I agree ,but "appeasement" is always sold as working in the short term but virtually never works out ... look at how things are going on these days ... these "oven ready" days being 2020 - 1066 locally in the UK.

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Malware delivery workers all install AV software to make sure their deliveries can pass through, so the child porn folks would probably install the software to get their images through it. We're all running around saying "this is good" and "this is bad" but nothing's going to change in the world until we admit that humans have the ability to be stupid.

Researchers claim quantum device performs 9,000-year calculation in microseconds

"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork" - Sam Ewing

Watch out for phishing emails that inject spyware trio

It's not just Excel

But email is a normal hazard these days, we see infections delivered in attachments daily. This is the email environment ... it's nothing new. Here's a monastery sig when this first started years ago ... "I would like to shake the hand of the man who first decided that e-mail clients should slice, dice and run arbitrary programs. Then I'd like to stir, blend and puree his hand.

These days "security" is just a feature, not a requirement.

Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with updated, supported tech

I've never seen blue sky that didn't become cloudy ... and when it gets cloudy we normally see a thunderstorm.

Ransomware attack sends US county back to 1977

Re: China is a Russian "ally" -- Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure

If I was in Russia and creating Malware I'd make it look like it was from China, and if I was in China creating Malware I'd make it look like it had Russian origins. But if I was in North Korea writing malware I'd add some indicators to give people both of the two "sources" to everything.

Malware is everywhere ... this is malware-change these days, all organizations need to start assuming that they will be hacked and all their data lost, moving to an environment where there is zero-zero access to their data from outside and only read-only access internally. Update the data internally via a keyboard with multiple inaccessible backups.

Sure - this is not going to be easy but malware is easy so everything harder is safer.