Posts by Version 1.0

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now: Brexit tea towel says it'll just be the gigabit broadband

Re: Drying

There's research that demonstrates that the air blower hand dryers distribute viruses much faster than towels, the viruses are just blown around.

While hype merchants push chatbots, CIOs are saving up pennies while expecting a recession, reckons study

Re: Overexuberance

Software applications have been skiing down the slopes of social media for a while now, the possibility of an avalanche is getting larger every year.

Duped into running bogus virus scans at Office Depot? Dry your eyes with a small check from $35m settlement

And what about the others?

We used to see thousands of little popups on websites saying that "a virus has been detected, download a removal tool" but has anyone ever chased those faker adverts down?

Basically if Office Depot had been an internet company and done that they would have gotten away with it, but instead because they are a real store that the cops and lawers can visit so they are being sued. It's so much easier to chase brick stores with addresses than internet stores - so tcan get away with anything on the internet.

Assange lawyer: Trump offered WikiLeaker a pardon in exchange for denying Russia hacked Democrats' email

Re: Sufficient grounds to dismiss?

I don't disagree, but why so many Anonymous Coward postings here? Are we watching a Trump vs Assange argument on-line?

Putin is entirely trustworthy - in the same way that the hangman checks the weight of the subject, the length of the rope, the correct knot, and the depth of the drop to make sure that he gets the desired results on the public stage with a smile on his face.

These days do you know, and can prove, who the sources are of anything delivered via the Internet. Assange always posted what he was given, he never investigated the sources enough to know for certain what the sources were although the FBI is convinced (without access to Assange) that the source was Russia

It was Trump who publicly asked the Russians to hack the Democrat systems prior to the election.

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

And tomorrows hack will be?

Our web site host recently switched to LE and renewed all of our website certificates without even once asking for a verification - absolutely nothing so I do not trust LE at all. Sure the certificate may be good but who actually owns it? There's no way to know.

This change simply swaps one problem for another.

Among those pardoned by Trump this week: Software maker ex-CEO who admitted hacking into rivals' systems

Re: King Trump

Oh yes, but the Tories used the Tory/Lib Dem coalition to destroy the Liberal Party - that was the whole point of the coalition for the Tories, they used it to ram Tory politics down everyone's throats under the illusion that the Tories were now "liberals" ... LOL, cough, choke.

King Trump

It's entertaining that Trump is busy restoring America to the status prior to the American Revolutionary War of Independence. The country is now ruled by a King again.

What's coming next, a change in the law because forcing a President out of office after two terms is betraying democracy and the will of the people?

The US and the UK are suffering from the same political nightmare, Johnson's next move will be to remove the Fixed-term Parliaments Act so that politicians can force elections when their popularity peaks - the universal principal in US/UK politics now is that elections are undemocratic because they are ignoring the will of the people when they elected the current candidate.

Instagram influencer fools followers into thinking Ikea photoshoot was Bali holiday

Re: Stole my idea

When I worked on building sites as a young kid I used to see "trained carpenters" using Birmingham Screwdrivers all them time, they were very highly trained paid.

Now Internet Society told to halt controversial .org sale… by its own advisory council: 'You misread the community mindset around dot-org'

Re: Transparency

I expect that a lot of spam and malware sources would be very interested in purchasing .org domains because the TLD is trusted by default in a lot of code and users minds. Unfortunately, using the internet these days is like being flushed down the toilet and floating in the sewer.

This sale will just make it worse. But it's not a big deal I guess, there's money to be made and that's all that matters, who cares about users anymore?

Ring in the changes: Mandatory two-factor authentication, login alerts, targeted ads opt-out after punters voice privacy gripes

Re: "allow users to opt-out of sharing personal information"

LOL - you must be old Pascal, companies do not run on the principal of "providing a service" to their customers any more.

Nowadays a company is in the business of extracting data from the customers and selling it. fI you are working with a "good" company than you are a sheep, waiting to be shorn. Most of us are just a lamb being fattened and heading for the slaughterhouse.

Severe vuln in WordPress plugin Profile Builder would happily hand anyone the keys to your kingdom

Re: What's Happened to Programming?

Remember the days when every function written had a comment block that stated exactly what inputs were expects (and the code tested them) and what the function output was? SHIT (Super Highway Information Transaction)! I haven't see one of those descriptions in years.

"Vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins are not uncommon"

SNAFU, it's not just WordPress - this is normal everywhere - I bet most readers will see the article title and just move on, this is nothing unexpected. I would be amazed to see a story titled, Completely Bug Free Application Plugin Released with a report that nobody has managed to hack into the plugin for eight weeks!

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

AI, Asteroid Intelligence?

All it takes is one more Oumuamua zipping through the solar system to change the paths for better or worse - the calculations are probably right if nothing changes but we don't know that anything will happen - still it's worth keeping an eye out for it. But anything could happen, maybe something will hit the moon and knock some chunks off that would then head our way, or a close pass of Jupiter could change the predicted path.

Talk about high tech: Tens of thousands of Cali marijuana convictions to go up in smoke, thanks to algorithms

Re: Make America Great Again

Make America Grate Again (there, fixed it for you).

This is America

We need to see the algorithm - does it take the persons skin color (sic) into account? Throughout the US, if you are black and high you are much more likely to be convicted so we should see a black majority of of convictions eliminated ... but I wonder how it's going to work?

I hope that it's fair but I'm not going to assume that it is.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: two kinds of people ...

There are users for have lost all their data with no backups; and there are users who are going to...

Early adopters delighted as Microsoft pulls plug on Mobile Backend as a Service. Haha, only joking – they're fuming

Re: Yea - give me that random stuff

One of the features of "continuous integration" is a better class of bugs - coding these days is all about looking priti, accurate functions and error free coding are things of the past.

Google burns down more than 500 private-data-stealing, ad-defrauding Chrome extensions installed by 1.7m netizens

LOL

So the crime here is that they were sealing the data from users that Google is collecting and selling? The advertising business has become a swamp, "users" are just little bits of data floating on the surface and big hippos and alligators swim around looking for the best bits to eat.

A dirty dozen of Bluetooth bugs threaten to reboot, freeze, or hack your trendy gizmos from close range

BLE bugs are proffitable

It's time to buy a new round of BLE devices everyone.

Another week, another bunch of Windows 10 machines punched by a patch

Let's take a holliday cruise

Here's your room sir, don't worry about the water on the floor, the ship is being patched at the moment, the patches that were applied yesterday caused a small problem but it will be fixed after we set sail. Oh wait, there's water in the ceiling light fixture, don't worry I'll report that and it will be patched before we arrive in Hawaii. Please note that the small print in your vacation contract states that we are not responsible for water damage to your luggage.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

Give your kid a WiFi Pineapple to play with and their cell phone use security will shoot sky high and they and their friends will learn how the world tracks and hacks everyone's phone while leaving no traces.

Re: The obvious result of this

You'll learn a lot. But the poster they released is excellent evidence that shows why the police are incompetent at catching hackers, malware delivery and bank fraudsters. They simply have no idea about the difference between bad actors and modern technology.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Pascal has always been great

I remember the excitement when Turbo Pascal was first released, prior to that I had been using Oregon Software Pascal-2 because I could write a program on a DEC RSX11M system at work and then recompile it at home on MSDOS or vica versa - sweet! I still occasionally write in Pascal to demonstrate code because it's readable even if you are not a Pascal programmer.

Voatz of no confidence: MIT boffins eviscerate US election app, claim fiends could exploit flaws to derail democracy

Re: I'm baffled

And how many times has your phone updated it's apps - I see about 3-4 updates to something every bloody day, security is an illusion, phone app security doubly so ....

If you're running Windows, I feel bad for you, son. Microsoft's got 99 problems, better fix each one

Adobe Flash

It doesn't have bugs, it is a bug. It has to be one of the worst applications ever.

Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump

Re: Pot calling Kettle?

There are too many people who don't get off their arses and vote, then complain when things don't go their way. - I agree, but it's politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that keep telling us that their victory is democracy in action and any opposition to them is antidemocratic. A 30% approval is politicians in action, not democracy.

Dual screens, fast updates, no registry cruft and security in mind: Microsoft gives devs the lowdown on Windows 10X

Not Windows 11 then

It sounds more like Windows 10 Millennium Edition.

Fake docs rock real docs: Ex-Wall St guy accused of conning medics out of £27m for bogus cryptocurrency fund using faked paperwork

I'm not going to disagree but the reality is that it's not just cryptocurrency investments, in the financial world this is much more common in everyday investment frauds and much bigger. The real issue is that governments everywhere claim that business is over-regulated, a problem that they claim they will fix but the frauds are generally only found by the victims, almost never the regulators who only get called in at the last minute to document the losses.

Astroboffins agog after spotting the first repeating fast radio burst that pings every 16 days from another galaxy

Re: Carefull

Maybe we could send a star ship out to investigate...

And then the report comes back, the entire system was discriminated but had held a super powerful alien race, buildings everywhere - one building had a broken window that was flapping in the solar breeze and knocking against a device that looks like it might have been an old mobile phone. As the window touched the screen it seems to have been making a post on some alien app called Tentaclebook.

(On the Beach updated).

Super-leaker Snowden punts free PDF* of tell-all NSA book with censored parts about China restored, underlined

Re: But isn't the big guy in America a Russian stooge?

I think the Russians are just pulling the strings on a puppet. I doubt the Trump is aware of it at all ... never mistake malice for incompetence.

Re: America had a choice

I wonder if the US pushed him to Russia for a reason? Maybe they were worried about what else would become public if Snowden returned to the West? As a result now probably the Russians are the only ones who know and they are keeping it under wraps.

Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid, step out of line, the men come and take you away - Buffalo Springfield

Crypto AG backdooring rumours were true, say German and Swiss news orgs after explosive docs leaked

It is not news

Come on, you would have to be a typical innocent to have ever thought that every encryption corporation was not "owned" in some way. Every government is pushing for backdoors in all encryption methods because they can't break the encryption - MRDA applies and has always applied.

But encryption is OK, most common encryption methods are not broken in public at least - you might be safe from the wife, your employer, or the police but someone somewhere can read it if they want to but they are never going to admit it in public.

Forgotten motherboard driver turns out to be perfect for slipping Windows ransomware past antivirus checks

Working on the internet used to be a wonderful experience, these days it's like walking through the zoo with no bars on the cages and a hamburger stuck on your back. Users are just tasty morsels going for a walk.

Beware, Tesla might take away your car's autopilot if you buy its vehicles from third party dealerships – plus more news

What's next?

Support for Tesla Autopilot ends in January 2021. After January 14, 2021, Telsa will no longer provide software updates or Autopilot for cars with windows.

Latest battery bruiser Android from budget Moto G range appears ahead of MWC after an Amazon whoopsie

Battery life is an illusion

It's the apps running on the phone that take the most power, are you running google maps and navigating, keeping Facebook up, exchanging pictures via a cell phone link, or any other power hungry app? Remove all apps and the phone life improves immensely.

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

It's not going to fix much

So users will still be able to be prompted to download .img files and open them - it must be safe, all the best malware is available via HTTPS.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

That's a winning idea!

Maybe headphones with #MAKA built in so we can select the idiots we want to dispose of - I'd buy those!

Maker of Linux patch batch grsecurity can't duck $260,000 legal bills, says Cali appeals court in anti-SLAPP case

Re: Walled Source

Sure, but what corporations do is what they think they can get away with.

Android owners – you'll want to get these latest security patches, especially for this nasty Bluetooth hijack flaw

Bluetooth impeached

It's going to be patched, it's just a bug - nothing odd about this - Bluetooth has been acquitted! Yes there's is a vulnerability there but the Bluetooth device was trying to get elected continue discovering its headphone connection so no crime has been committed.

My phone Android gets updates every day - so I'm confident that most of yesterdays bugs have been probably fixed - I expect that they will fix today's bugs tomorrow. I'll get my phone out of my coat pocket and check for today's updates now.

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

Re: If you want to do Low-Latency properly ...

You write in assembler, everything else adds latency.

Microsoft reorg places Surface evangelist Panos Panay as boss of Windows too – report

Will touch-screens become mandatory?

The MS Surface concept seems to me to be an attempt to chase Android outside the phone market, I would hope that this doesn't mean that all MS systems will now slide towards tablet interfaces by default. When you look at Microsoft's management over recent years it seems that their products are only a means of generating a nice retirement bonus for the executives.

Once upon a time, choosing a computer to work with was a fascinating exercise that everyone devoted a significant amount of time and effort to choosing the best fit, nowadays it's like walking through the store trying to decide, do I want ripple or smooth toilet paper?

'Tens of millions' of Cisco devices vulnerable to CDPwn flaws: Network segmentation blown apart by security bugs

Security

See, Cure, IT.

Best done with a taser applied to the RJ45 connection.

Outlook more like 'look out!' as Microsoft email decides everything is spam today

It's not serious?

It was probably just this morning's update that cause the problem, don't worry they will get it fixed and move the bug somewhere else in the next update. The official line is that software applications are so reliable these days because they are updated regularly, but what does that tell you about the quality of the code?

Brendan Behan quote updated for the modern world, "I have never seen a situation so dismal that a software update couldn't make it worse."

Malware infection attempts appear to be shrinking... possibly because miscreants are less spammy and more focused on specific targets

Not True

Malware attacks move around, we're seeing an uptick locally in the US and our mail server malware/virus detection system is picking up about 200% more at the moment than a month ago. It's not a problem, just a load on the server and given what I've seen in the past, I'm reasonably confident that the attacks will drop off in a week or too. And that they will be back.

I see attacks come and go depending on local circumstances, storms come through and the incoming malware count goes up, probably because they think that the malware will get through the backup mail servers easier when the main server goes down for a while. School terms start and the malware count goes up, because the administration workload is heavy and people open emails without thinking.

Oh buoy. Rich yacht bods' job agency leaves 17,000 sailors' details exposed in AWS bucket

Re: The advanced tools are somewhere for sure

The yacht company doesn't really care, it's not their customers details that were lost, it was just the workers so it's not going to affect their sales income very much. El Reg, check them out at the end of the year and see if who gets a nice bonus.

School's out as ransomware attack downs IT systems at Scotland's Dundee and Angus College

Re: Can someone possibly explain...

I agree, I'd do that too. On the plus side, if they are telling everyone to reset their passwords then it's a good bet that they were backed up well, have done a quick restore and are resetting the account access.

Cover for 'cyber' attacks is risky, complex and people don't trust us, moan insurers

You are all missing the point

Insurance is all about making a profit. Insurers do the statistics and calculate the costs of damage and how many people will be affected. If the total annual cost is likely to be 50 million a year and they think that they can sell a million policies then the average cost of a policy will be about 800 quid.

But remember to read the small print at the back of the policy that states on the front page that you have a million quid complete coverage. The back page will make it clear that the policy does not cover related costs, it will say things like it only covers the cost of replacing the computers damaged by the malware, provided that the computer was worth forty thousand and there's a thirty thousand deductible - per computer. Any losses in your bank accounts are third-party losses and are not covered because the loss occurred in another location not owned by you.

AI snatches jobs from DJs and warehouse workers, plus OpenAI and PyTorch sittin' in a tree, AI, AI, AI for you and me

What's next?

A sex robot? Are males going to be replaced by robots buying their semen on Amazon?

That's a downside I guess but it means I can spend more time at the pub and Jeff Bezos will be richer, there's a golden lining in every Cloud application. But if AI is that good, I think we should allow AI in the polls too - I'd vote for AI to replace both parties in the next election and handle the exBrit negotiations (can't say Brexit anymore) with the EU, NATO, UN, and WTO. AI would mean that everyone can spend the summer in St. Lucia instead of sitting at the negotiating table.