Posts by Version 1.0

Sweden 'secretly blames' hackers – not solar flares – for taking out air traffic control

Public vs Private

Hacking, DDOS etc is not going to stop - we have to remove public access to what should really be private networks like a/c traffic control.

Apple's tax bill: Big in Japan. Like, $120m big

So unfair

As we all know, Apple has been unprofitable for years - they just never make much money so why is everyone hounding them with these unfair tax assessments? Poop, poor Apple,

World's largest internet exchange sues Germany over mass surveillance

SSDD

Like in many countries, the German government is – theoretically at least – not allowed to spy on its own citizens.

As we've seen for 60 years now (ECHELON et al) all these laws are meaningless - can't spy on your own citizens? Ask your friends to do it for you - they will be glad to help since they have the same problem that you can help them resolve.

Everything is legal - although what good it has ever done is a bit of a mystery.

New ISO standard kind-of explains how to ignore standards

Standards

"A few years ago, Friday, October 14 was World Standards Day. Or, at least, it was World Standards Day in *some* countries. However, in America, the celebrations were held on October 11th. In Finland, World Standards Day was marked on October 13th. Italy planned a separate conference on standards for October 18th." - from my sigmonster file.

Brexit will happen. The EU GDPR will happen. You can't avoid either

Re: Johnny Foreigner

Having spent several years in the 70's working on building sites out of term time at Uni, I'm perpetually amused at the attitude to Johnny Foreigner these days - at that time most of the workers were Irish (claiming to be IRA) and told the best jokes.

Of course, these days the Irish jokes are all too "racist" to laugh at or repeat in public.

Alleged hacker Lauri Love loses extradition case. Judge: Suicide safeguards in place

Fair enough USA

So does this mean that we can start extradition proceedings against a few American bankers and politicians?

T-Mobile USA: DON'T install Apple's iOS 10, for the love of God

Re: Testing? We've heard of it.

Absolutely - I'm sure that the products were "tested" but the problem is that testing and discovering faults/bugs/inconsistencies is a messy process and when the reports come in saying things like "battery life is shite", "my motherforking camera stopped working" etc etc - then the people running the testing process discount the reports - clearly the user is an idiot is the general conclusion.

They then fire the user from the beta forum for abuse etc and continue listening to all the reports that say it works great.

Testing? We've heard of it.

Apple is getting more like Microsoft every day - actually it's the whole industry. First Microsoft forgot that not everyone uses the built in camera, then Samsung forgot to batch test their systems, now Apple ... "It worked with AT&T and Verizon so what's the problem?"

I've said it before here and I'm sure I'll say it again - these days everyone tests to see if it works, nobody tests anything to see if it fails. So ...

The law of Version 1.0: If you don't test to try and make it fail ... it will.

Great British Great Bake Off gets new judge

Re: WTF?

LOL - 24 down votes? I'm laughing all the way to the cookie jar! OK, I love the show but I'm still trying to wrap my head around this in El Reg but I still maintain that the comments are better than the story.

WTF?

IT angle? Really?

Come on El Reg - WTF has this to do with anything? I can't even get a sniff of IT out of the story (sic).

It seems these days that the comments sections are often so much more interesting than the stories. I guess I'll have to wait for the comments to fill out and come back later.

EU ends anonymity and rules open Wi-Fi hotspots need passwords

WPA - There, that's fixed it.

Yes your honor, we had a password in place and never gave it to anyone.

Oh, WPA can be broken in 10 seconds, I'm sorry I didn't know that - but we followed all the rules.

I guess we must have been hacked - not our fault.

It's OK for the FBI's fake hacks to hack suspects' PCs, says DoJ watchdog

unsympathetic but ...

He's an idiot on two counts, a - making the threats, and b - getting caught so easily. I'd be more sympathetic to the authorities if I thought that the hack would stop there but realistically, its use is expanding daily. Posted an article criticizing the president? Get hacked - you "might be" a threat. Express doubt about a sanctioned police killing ... ditto, the list goes on.

Pass the 'Milk' to make code run four times faster, say MIT boffins

Re: Interesting

From the link "Milk simply adds a few commands to OpenMP, an extension of languages such as C and Fortran that makes it easier to write code for multicore processors.

No worries then - I can continue using FORTRAN.

Yelp wins fight to remain morally bankrupt

Money talks?

I wouldn't use Yelp if the paid me - over the years I've come to believe that virtually all user created content in sites like Yelp, Expedia, Amazon etc is crap. Sure, there's some honest reviews there but you've got to look really hard to find them.

My belief is that 90% of the reviews out there are typed by bots hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard 24/7 with the hope that eventually they will create the complete works of William Shakespeare.

'What this video game needs is actual footage of real gruesome deaths'

Let's try this with other games

All flight simulators should have bodies strewn about the landscape every time you crash ... and God only knows what would really happen in SIM CITY.

It actually will be Obama who decides whether to end US government oversight of the internet

Re: I'm with the dickheads on this one.

It's unlikely - Cruz was born in Canada which constitutionally make him ineligible for the presidency .

Re: How is Ted Cruz not a serious politician?

Serious? If Obama had been against this then it's a certain bet that Ted Cruz would have been for it.

Logins for US Navy, NASA's JPL among US gov logins sold on deepweb

Better use them quick

Virtually all of the government accounts require a password change every month or so - anyway it's a sure bet that by the end of the day these accounts will either be disabled or honeypots.

Non-doms pay 10 times more in income tax than average taxpayer group

In other News ...

Rich people pay more for food than poor people - Rich people incur restaurant bills several magnitudes greater than the cost of a burger and fries every time they eat ...

THIS INEQUITY HAS TO STOP!

Great British Block-Off: GCHQ floats plan to share its DNS filters

Who uses the ISP DSN anyway?

The first thing I do on any setup it to ditch the ISP DNS servers and use multiple DNS servers from different organizations. Google, OpenDNS etc.

Action Fraud warns of fraudulent anti-fraud warnings posing as Action Fraud

We had about 20 phone calls today and one of them was from a customer ... we were totally stunned! We haven't had a customer actually call us for weeks. it's all e-mail these days.

VW Dieselgate engineer sings like a canary: Entire design team was in on it – not just a few bad apples, allegedly

Actually the canary in the coal mine sang its heart out while all was well, and keeled over and fell of the perch when things were about to get very bad.

I would be amazed if this wasn't known at some levels within most of the other car companies - my dealings with the auto industry in the US were involved with a project at one company to purchase cars from other manufacturers and give them a complete shakedown to see exactly how they performed. The engineers running the program were very smart folks - I just can't see VW coming out with a super clean diesel engine and none of the other manufacturers asking themselves why their engineers can't make clean engine.

Student charity's ex-IT boss in the cooler for stealing $1.3m through fake tech contracts

References ?

I'd love to see his work history - this sort of behavior is rarely seen in isolation ... I'd put money on him having done this before with his previous employers.

Spoof an Ethernet adapter on USB, and you can sniff credentials from locked laptops

Re: That didn't take long...

And if your business attracts the attention of state-level adversaries with deep pockets, heaven help you...

No use looking for help there. As far as ubiquitous USB devices go, it strikes me that most of the commentators here don't get out much.

It used to be that when you attended an academic conference, the proceedings were a thick paper book. I haven't been given one in ages now - every conference for years has just handed out a USB drive... so handy, all your targets gathered together and hacked as soon as they get back to their rooms and read the proceedings ... and then VPN (for security ha ha) back to their office.

Public masturbation not a crime declares Italy’s top court

RE: Classroom shuffle

I remember when (we're talking 60's here) at least half the class was competing in several different events - volume, repetition, location etc on a daily basis. It seemed pretty harmless at the time but nowadays, if you see a kid staring at the desk in class you assume that they have their phone out.

How times change.

EU court: Linking to pirated stuff doesn't breach copyright... except when it does

Re: silly rules

"The link has nothing to do with the breach."

This is the point that law makers and enforcers have studiously ignored for years because it's far easier to bust the link maker than find the person who is actually committing the offense.

A nice long pub crawl is good for your health, if you stay on your feet

RE: We study this every week

Maybe - but have you been grant funded? If you have not had a Grant to fund your work then nobody will give a toss and you'll get zero publicity. However, once you can get a grant to fund the study you will be set for life and can sell your story to the Daily Fail.

Read the damning dossier on the security stupidity that let China ransack OPM's systems

Re: Chinese hackers stole documents

Omar - you have to be new here - have you never read the BOFH?.

Stuff like this happens all the time - upper manglement orders middle manglement to make their life easier and fix it so that they can run the office from their phone. Middle manglement tell the techs what they want. The techs say, "but this is a security risk" and the middle manglement tell them to do it anyway because the PHB has ordered it.

But maybe they just outsourced the whole project to the lowest bidder ...

Re: What on earth was going on over there? (offtopic)

I would appear that HRC's mail server was a lot more secure than the official government systems. Frankly this whole aspect of the 'merican presidential race is baffling - we're supposed to hate HRC because she ran a mail server and love DT because he doesn't even read e-mail, let alone run a mail server.

Re: Uh - how about a bonus of 20% of net pay after 5 years without a hack?

That's a great incentive to cover up any hack.

Inside our three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party

Who are Apple?

I don't think I've bought anything from Apple since the White Album ...

CIA-backed big data firm Palantir says secrets pinched by investor

Business as usual?

Business Ethics - just another oxymoron. I rather suspect that they all deserve each other.

Delta computer outage costs $100m

That's a nice round figure ...

Of course "costs" is theoretical since they will probably find a way to write off the incident against taxes so it makes sense to push the numbers up as much as possible.

FCC goes over the top again to battle America's cable-box rip-off

Cable is dead

The only thing keeping cable afloat in the US is ESPN - and they are showing signs of jumping ship. Essentially cable is dying as all of the entertainment options realize that they can make more money plucking the customer themselves.

Cable needs the cable boxes to stay alive so it's going to be a bitter fight.

BA check-in system checks out: Staff flung back to cruel '90s world of paper

Re: How very dare you

it takes time for the computer engineer from India to get to the UK to try switching the system off and on again...

It would be a lot faster if they didn't fly via BA.

QANTAS' air safety spiel warns not to try finding lost phones

Re: Methyl Isocyanate

I've always though that it's odd that Methyl Isocyanate is not on the list of "banned on a plane" substances.

Google plots cop detection for auto autos

Re: Oh good grief

...and then hit the brakes, slowing to a speed that impedes progress but isn't slow enough to make overtaking easier.

I would assume that they are just trying to avoid getting nicked for patent infringement - it would seem that if you detect an emergency vehicle you must now ignore it to avoid infringing on Googles patent.

Spinning that Brexit wheel: Regulation lotto for tech startups

What's next?

If you are worried about Brexit then simply moving to Ireland - or even Scotland - would seem to be an easy precaution. No real need to move any further at this stage and both counties have decent beer which is more than you can say for Canada.

Childcare app bods wipe users' data – then discover backups had been borked for a year

Re: So much for Due Dilligence...

"What person smart enough to make backups in the first place fails to check to make sure the backups are useable?"

A fine sentiment - but it's no use checking the first few backups - you have to check every backup to be certain that it's all working correctly. Of course nobody does this.

It make more sense to maintain multiple backups via unique services/methods in the hope that not all of them will fail at the same time.

Cooky crumbles: Apple mulls yanking profits out of Europe and into US

Re: Very patriotic

No - they will bitch about the 40% tax rate but by the time they have taken all the deductions it will be closer to 10%. In America it's not the tax rate that's important, it's the deductions that really make the difference.

Re: "Taxing company profit is just asking for tangled avoidance schemes"

Taxes pay for things that companies and people need - security, clean water, fast network access and the infrastructure to support civilized life. If Tim Cook really feels that taxes are bad why doesn't he simply move to Mogadishu ... I'm sure that with only a tiny kickback he could pay even less tax there.

Watch SpaceX's rocket dramatically detonate, destroying a $200m Facebook satellite

Re: cant see much

O2 doesn't burn - it helps other things burn a lot faster but you really can't tell what was happening internally from a video.

MedSec's 'hackable pacemaker' report autopsy: Bombshell crash claim in doubt

Incorrect

"The whole point of the security industry is to build trust by protecting systems."

I don't know where you got that idea from - these days the whole point of the security industry is to make money.

IBM swings axe through staff, humming contently about cloud and AI

IBM managemant plan

IBM is being run for the benefit of its managers - they will reap fat salaries and a decent retirement / golden handshake from this as the company slowly sinks beneath the water. Think of the Titanic, with the captain throwing ice cures off the front of the ship hoping that they will form an iceberg.

BT boils over, blows off Steam, accuses Valve of patent infringement

Re: As ahistorical as an American hearing about foreign lands who "suddenly attack"

Once again - a comment that's longer and more informative than the El Reg story.

+1 to you sir for effort.

US appeals court slaps down FTC, AT&T walks free, cats and dog living together, mass hysteria

For it's next trick ...

AT&T will sue the FCC to escape regulation there too. Eventually this comes back to what the Congress decides can be regulated - I'm not holding my breath on anything happening there anytime soon.

More banks plundered through SWIFT attacks

NORKs?

One of the issues with SWIFT about 15 years ago was the insistence by the US that details of all money transfers via SWIFT be immediately provided to the US intelligence services. So there should be a trail to follow, and generally with the theft of amounts of these magnitudes these usually a few bodies too. So where's the money ending up? The NSA probably has a pretty good idea but has been remarkably silent so far...

So who's out there looking nice and healthy, building weapons, infrastructure, armies etc while simultaneously being under embargoes, sanctions etc that should have the effect of limiting economic development - and apparently with the talent to pull this sort of operation off?

USBee stings air-gapped PCs: Wirelessly leak secrets with a file write

Re: Air-gapped...

Oh? How do you transmit information back and forth that's not well-suited for a brain, then, like a large data table?

Floppy disk, mag tape, paper tape, CDROM, punch cards ...

But that's not the point - the point here is that ANY device can be compromised given enough effort by an individual or group with the desire (need) to do so. For most of us the chances of this happening are infinitesimal - but, in some instances, this is a real concern.

Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it

At its closest pass, whatever distance it is, would its orbit around the sun be affected by earth's gravity and maybe make it come closer next time?

It's possible, but just as likely that it would move further away. You can calculate it but there are still many unknowns so the results are not certain either way.