Posts by Version 1.0

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.

FYI: Someone's scanning gateways, looking for those security holes Citrix told you not to worry too much about

Re: And I'm supposed to be surprised

It would be very suspicious if there was a report that nobody was scanning gateways.

If the Solar System's 'Planet Nine' is actually a small black hole, here's how we could detect it... wait, what?

Re: Five to ten EARTH masses

I would have thought that we would have already seen it by now as a result of it eating lunch out there and emitting the scraps as radiation.

If you haven't potentially exposed 1000s of customers once again with networking vulns, step forward... Not so fast, Palo Alto Networks

Re: Bugs love "features"

LOL, of course - you write your rules to allow access to the ports and addresses you trust and you drop everything else ... but then a "feature" allows its packets through without documented exactly what is happening.

Bugs love "features"

In general the people writing firewall code understand all the risks and "drop-all" is the default rule. But when teams are created to add "features" you're dealing with completely different attitudes so bugs will creep into the code.

Email seems lost in the post? You might be a Tsohost customer

This is becoming normal

Every day now I run into little issues out there, services that worked like a charm yesterday slow down today or just give up. Prior to Covid-19 we used to see less than 1% of all email as spam and malware, these days it hits 40% some days, just a little issue for me but I can see where this can badly affect other businesses if you are used to logging in in the morning and seeing a dozen spam messages but then it jumps to more than 500 and the phone starts ringing every two minutes, pick it up and the first thing you hear is; "Don't hang up the phone..."

Road trip on Mars: Thrill as Curiosity rover races up to 0.06 miles per hour. Marvel as it takes a mile-long detour

Re: Flat Mars-ers

So I suppose you think that Red Dwarf wasn't a documentary? Is Arnold Rimmer actually dead? Of course not!

GCHQ's cyber arm report on Huawei said to be burning hole through UK.gov desks

Time to take a step back.

The solution to all these problems is to return to the days when we built our own gear instead of trying to buy it on the cheap from some other country. Buying cheap foreign telecommunications gear killed the UK telecommunications industry, resulting in engineers loosing their jobs while the people owning the companies selling the "cheap" phones started buying themselves an island or two in the Caribbean.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

But "bugs" are normal these days

Today's software environment (look at Android phones) is that you write code and if it looks like it works you release it. No need to check that the code is completely bug free because you can release an update tomorrow... the "problem" that the management and bean counters see is that verifying that code is bug free costs money and takes too much time. Why bother doing a comprehensive test when you can post an update tomorrow?

As for Boeing's problems, do you think that anyone running the projects has ever read The Mythical Man Month?

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

We hear these stories all the time

And it's always portrayed as poor behavior - it certainly is, but we never ask ourselves how come this keeps happening? How did we bring these kids up to be such racist monsters? What happened to them as children that makes them think it's alright to behave like this today even though almost everyone agrees that it's bad? Sure, we need to deal with the problem but we need to ask ourselves what we did that caused the problem.

Three UK: We're sending you this SMS to warn you not to pay attention to unsolicited texts

Re: Care to guess...

An how many will just delete it? All this Covid spam (texts and phone calls) is getting deleted without even bothering to open it, no wonder tracking is failing.

But spam calls and texts have been around forever now, and no government has done anything to force the service providers to eliminate it - it's theoretically illegal but nobody in control of it cares. Freedom of Speech has just become Freedom of Spam.

It's not a Windows 10 release without something breaking so here's a troubleshooter for your OneDrive woes

Re: Again?

Alumoi, you need to realize that all Windows customers and users are beta testers. That's been the way that Windows started working once Windows 8 arrived. Now the beta user feature has been extended back to Windows 7, Microsoft added their Edge browser to my Windows 7 machine last week but luckily, since it's Windows 7 it was far easier to remove than the "feature update" to my Windows 10 box.

I am not seeing any issues at all

Oh wait, it may be because I'm running Windows 7 Pro. I am considering "upgrading" to Windows 10 but I'm very busy at the moment so I wouldn't have time to fix all of the upgrade issues. I guess I'll just stick with an operating system that works.

UK government shakes magic money tree, finds $500m to buy a stake in struggling satellite firm OneWeb

We got Brexit dumb

Darn auto-correct - is this just an example of the direction that we're heading in?

Will it work or will it not? Too early to tell really but it would be interesting to see how many government ministers and advisors currently hold shares in the enterprises.

Euro police forces infiltrated encrypted phone biz – and now 'criminal' EncroChat users are being rounded up

Re: So...

It simply documents that "encrypted" communications can not be assumed to be private... it's no big surprise.

Microsoft sees the world has moved on, cranks OneDrive file size upload limit from 15GB to more useful 100GB

Good point "... the world has moved on"

Meanwhile SETI is still searching the cosmos for signs of alien intelligence, I wonder if they are looking for files this size?

How long would it take to download a few 100Gb files from galactic societies halfway across the cosmos? Of course once we've download 100Gb locally from Alpha Centauri they will have to try and decode it... is it a database, a disk image, alien porno,or has an alien hacked their cloud and all we've done is pick up their download?

I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer

Re: Tribalism

When you grow up in the Caste world you are told that it's the way the world is, you may reject the view in public but it's very hard to escape the environment, it hangs in there with your attitude to life. And this makes it easy to get a job working for public schoolboys who love your inbuilt and unseen biases.

Working for the public schoolboys makes it appear that they have no biases, they don't need them because they are using yours - welcome to the British Caste system.

Firefox 78: Protections dashboard, new developer features... and the end of the line for older macOS versions

Re: works here, for now

I checked my version when I read your post and FF moved to 78.0.1 - it works, I like FF but all these updates are a little scary sometimes.

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

They might start with Rust but today's generation of new programmers will end up trying to rewrite the kernel in Python ... doesn't anybody think that rewriting the kernel in any language will result in a new world of bugs?

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Re: No Sh*t Sherlock

There's a lesson to be learnt from this, deleting the database means we'll have to learn it again, It sounds like the database is an excellent example of how AI and machine learning fails so why are we deleting it? It would make a lot more sense to keep the database to enable us to analyse failure and errors and make sure that we don't make the same mistakes next week. I guess we'll just keep making the same mistakes.

Yes, Prime Minister, rewrite the Computer Misuse Act: Brit infosec outfits urge reform

How effective has the law been?

I see attempts to log into our mail server every 10-20 seconds from all over the world, illegal under this act but what's the point of even bothering to call anyone about it? Nobody cares, in terms of stopping crime I think it's less than one milli-percent effective.

Brit police's use of facial-recognition tech is lawful, no need to question us, cops' lawyer tells Court of Appeal

Re: Mask

Sure but if you are going to wear a CAT'S mask make sure it's Mungojerrie or Jennyanydots, not Macavity because if the cameras see you wearing a Macavity mask they will know that you're a master criminal who can defy the law, you are the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair but when they reach the scene recorded by the AI, you won't be there and they will just say, "Well I guess that AI face recognition isn't always accurate."

Re: 22%

A 22% false positive rate is very accurate when compared to current government policies.

There are DDoS attacks, then there's this 809 million packet-per-second tsunami Akamai says it just caught

Re: And the next step...

You can report IP addresses to ISPs but nothing ever happens.

Do you really think that anyone would believe a call today that says, "We've detected that your computer is infected, please download this file to clean it up"?

The tip of the iceberg

I'm seeing big increases in malware delivery attempts at levels that I have never seen in 20 years, an attack like this looks normal. Worldwide Covid reactions are changing how many people work and cracking the door for attacks, thefts, and malware deliveries - we need to start working on a new Internet, what we have today is effectively broken, filled with spam, malware, and everyone's personal data being sold from one company to another.

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

Re: Body language

Suspect A: "Oh look there are cops, I'm scared let's get out of here"

Suspect B: "Don't wave your phone around, put it away or they will get upset"

Suspect A: "OK, I'll post on FB later, let's head over to the coffee shop"

Cops: "Those blacks (I say it nicely) are acting suspiciously, arrest them"

China's internet watchdog freezes 10 too-trashy online video services before they undermine socialism

China needs to learn from the West

Trash TV and "unhealthy content" can get you reelected and help you convince the population to vote one way in a referendum in the West.

Belief in 5G conspiracy theories goes hand-in-hand with small explosions of rage, paranoia and violence, researchers claim

Re: There is only one way to settle the 5G question.

So how did the Brexit referendum work out? It was an easy decision wasn't it with no issues at all... hahahahahaha

Windows fails to reach the Finnish line as Helsinki signage pleads for help

Sure, Windows 10 is great when it works - until it doesn't.

Remember Vista? A great secure OS - until you tried to use it.

Re: Sledgehammer, meet nut.

Windows 10 is not a heavyweight OS, it's just a massive sized app, far larger than any functional OS. And as for all these borking messages, remember the days of Vista? Windows 10 is worse then Vista, it's user fiendly (sic).

We were already secure enough for mass remote working before COVID-19, boast IT pros

And when Wi-Fi first appeared nobody thought it was a big risk, they were correct because initially there were too few Wi-Fi systems around to be worth hacking but then times changed and people started encrypting transmissions after the hackers started digging in. A couple of months ago too few people were seriously working from home to be worth hacking, that's changed now and if working from home becomes the new normal then the opportunities and the holes in networks will expand.

C is for 'Careful now', D is for 'Download surprise': Microsoft to resurrect optional Windows 10 updates as 'Previews'

Fixed it for you

Once connected, users can are sliced, diced and view their finances are viewed in a variety of ways

Windows 10 spends a lot of time sending "diagnostic" information back to Microsoft, would you really trust them with all your financial information and bank accounts? So maybe you feel OK trusting Microsoft but what about next weeks Excel hack?

Folk sure like to stick electric toothbrush heads in their ears: True wireless stereo sales buck coronavirus trends

Earbuds ...

... provide all the music and news that a bear needs when they wake up in the morning.

With intelligent life in scant supply on Earth, boffins search for technosignatures of civilizations in the galaxy

Re: Evidence?

If we really believe that life will be similar to our on another world then we should be checking for facebook and twitter postings too. But maybe "life" could be like ours but very different, does anyone remember the intelligent alien locusts in the movie "Independence Day"? They had invented UNIX but that didn't make them like us ... or maybe, these days, it did?

What does London's number 65 bus have to hide? OS caught on camera setting fire to '22,000 illegal file(s)!!'

Re: There's a reflection in the screen.

All scenes inspired by Blade Runner - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7iJPwrsw0

Australia's Lion brewery hit by second cyber attack as nation staggers under suspected Chinese digital assault

An Attack or a Screwup?

There's no way to really know but it sounds like a typical situation where someone (maybe working from home and connected via VPN?) checked one of their email accounts and opened an attachment that seemed to be from a supplier... maybe Newlabel.img to see if the new labels looked good, or maybe proforma invoice.zip (proforma invoice.exe), Enquiry.lzh, New Purchase - June.zip (New Purchase - June.bat), VALIDATE HERE.html, awb_1446275724_invoice-receipt.xlsm ... etc etc - these are just the ones I've received (and deleted) since lunchtime.

If you are connected to the internet in any way then you have the potential to be under attack. Everything flowing through the internet must be checked and quarantined if there is even the slightest possibility of infection.

Ex-director cops community service after 5,000-file deletion spree on company Dropbox

Backups? We've heard of them...

They were stashing corporate data in the Cloud with no backups, I assume that the Judge may have had something private to say about that - it would explain the decision.

There are two types of users in the world; Those who have lost their data, and those who are going to lose their data.

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

He was elected by the electoral gerrymandered college, he lost the popular vote, but in the US they don't try and get the poor to vote "for" them, they are busy making sure that the poor can't vote against them (or even vote at all).

Boffins find that over nine out of ten 'ethical' hackers are being a bit naughty when it comes to cloud services

It's the 2nd internet amendment

We're created the Cloud, it's got a vast number of risks and dangers but we insist that everyone has the right to carry one around, either concealed or over their shoulder. The article is just documenting its design features. Sure, the hackers are doing bad things but everyone needs access to the Cloud don't they?

A well regulated Cloud, being necessary to the security and profits of large companies, the right of the people to keep and bear access, shall not be infringed.

Looking for a home off-world? Take your pick: Astroboffins estimate there are nearly 6bn Earth-likes in the Milky Way

Call and ask for help

Maybe if a world that was never hit by an asteroid hears us then they will send a big spaceship to pick us up, probably piloted by a T-Rex (not Marc Bolan). Be careful though, it might only accept travelers who are chocolate coated to make a nice snack when they arrive on the new Earth-like world.

Now you've done it: Cyber attack targeted Australian brewery 'n' dairy biz Lion

And old Billy the system administrator, the first time in his life, why he's gone home cold sober to his darling wife. He walks in the kitchen, she says you're early Bill dear, but then he breaks down and tells her the pub's got no beer. - Slim Dusty

IBM blames 'external' network provider, incorrect routing, traffic flood for its two-hour cloud outage

We'll find out on Friday

El Reg will probably post an anonymous answer describing the issue ... maybe the PFY's phone battery was down to 60% so he plugged the phone into a USB on the back of main router and nudged the network fibre cable out of the socket?

Scottish cops dangle £6m for help understanding 160TB treasure trove of structured and unstructured data

This will not help

It sounds like they want to replace detectives with AI - they think it's easy to use AI to catch the criminals even if AI can't accurately identify them.

Yeah, great start after sacking human hacks: Microsoft's AI-powered news portal mixes up photos of women-of-color in article about racism

Re: Be afraid

You're right, I'll get BRAZIL out and watch it tonight.

Singapore to distribute wearable contact-tracing device and won't rule out making it compulsory

Re: Care and maintenance

Put it on top of your phone if you are in the US and don't want the phone company track you too.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

He used the wrong excuse

/joke

Three years in jail for burning the wrong mast - OK sure, it was stupid but maybe he should have just told the court that he was doing it to check his eyesight?

The mast was just a little issue really when compared to burning an entire country by being stupid and worrying more about your popularity than peoples lives.

IBM quits facial recognition because Black Lives Matter

Re: Good on IBM

I agree - the whole world western is facing the possibility of a change at the same level that we saw back in the 15th and 16th centuries, hopefully a restructuring of society towards universal better attitudes and behavior. The potential for any corporation (remember that in the US corporations are "people" too) that moving to the attitude that doing good is better than just making a profit and buying a few islands from the natives for the owners holiday home.

It's interesting that these changes are now possible, and that the Renaissance (a massive change in the Western world) was a result of the world recovering from the Black Death.