Posts by cmaurand

23andMe settles class-action breach lawsuit for $30 million

Yawn. The cost of doing business. Penalties should inflict pain.

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

Mostly I stopped using Windows

I still have a Windows 10 laptop running and I have a Windows 7 virtual machine (need to build a win10 virtual), I mostly run Linux. I have a desktop machine with a lot of cores so I can run windows if I have to. I stopped using Windows, when Windows started forcing updates whether I wanted them or not. I've managed to stop this behavior, but it still bugs me about them. I run Linux 99% of the time and I have a drive with Linux on it for that laptop. Mostly I use windows for zoom and the occasional time I actually need MS Office which is not often.

Russia tested satellite-to-satellite shooter, say UK and USA

If I want to kill a satellite

I don't need to blow it up. I only need to drop it out of orbit. Attach a rocket motor, point it down and light it off, or better yet, just take a couple hundred mph off of it's orbital speed and let the atmosphere do the rest.

We also have weapons up there including lasers. We have ship based lasers (already deployed) and we have them small enough to mount in aircraft. A hypersonic missile can't outrun a beam of light.

How did you spend your time at university? Pizza, booze, sleeping? This Oxford student is snooping on satellites

State actors aren't listening from the ground. Line of sight in the vacuum of space.

CSI GitHub: That big outage last month? It's always DNS. Or it was Kubernetes. Maybe it was a heady blend of both

I thought the MySQL bit was more interesting

From the way it was framed, would I be outside the bounds of propriety to suggest that's a dog whistle that's Microsoft saying, "We're going to switch all this to SQL Server as soon as we can?" Just asking. each has it's advantages. I've used both.

Chrome devs tell world that DNS over HTTPS won't open the floodgates of hell

Re: Won't be used in upcoming builds..

check out dnsdist by powerdns. high availability proxy for dns that answers dns over https queries. use that in combination with their recursive dns server. done.

Re: Missing the point

If adblockers would take delivery of the ad and spill it out on the floor instead of displaying it, then they wouldn't know you're blocking ads.

Re: Of course it won't

You could deploy powerdns's dnsdist in front of your own recursor. it does dns over https and you can set that in chrome's preferences. dns over https is bs

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

These are the reasons why I stopped using systems that use systems. If I wanted to use windows, I would. Systemd is a pig.

Big bang theory: Was mystery explosion over New York caused by a meteor? Dunno. By a military jet? Maybe...

How about an X37 on re-entry?

Re: military aircraft ...

Whatever they say about a military aircraft, it's not entirely accurate. An F-15 is rated a mach 2.5. An F-14 was rated at machine 2.3+. In reality, the F-14 was faster than the F-15, but the F-15 had faster accleration. The F-14 would climb to 56K ft. Like it was nothing. Getting to 60 or 6th was not hard. If you want to fly over much 2, those are the altitudes you need to be at.

Plattsburg, NY is an air national guard base. very poosible to have something like that there.

Massachusetts city tells ransomware scumbags to RYUK off, our IT staff will handle this easily

Someone got phished. This is how it starts. This is how they get a toehold. We used a system whereby we external snapshots on a device that could spin up any of the snapshots as a virtual machine. The system also kept those snapshots on a private cloud and could be spun up from there as well. Wi Dows has enough vulnerabilities that once on a machine, that's all it needs.

Googlers hate it! This one weird trick lets websites dodge Chrome 76's defenses, detect you're in Incognito mode

One of the reasons I don't use Chrome any longer

I try not to use Chromium either. Google is turning on a feature that beacons to Google whatever link you clicked on. They don't need a javascript tracker or some such to make it work. You also won't be able to turn it off. Then theres DNS over https which is an effort to capture all of your dns traffic, too. Google is also turning off the ability to disable it. their implementation sends all of your queries to either Google's or Cloudflare's DNS servers. make centralized tracking of you even easier. Moreover all the browsers use Google's webkit (Safari, Brave, Vivaldi for example) except for Firefox.

Even Firefox is putting in DNS over https, but you can disable it or change where it sends queries.

Punting chrome and chromium

Y2K, Windows NT4 Server and Notes. It's a 1990s Who, Me? special

Re: All hash prompts look the same

"And, as always, the question has to be asked - why did he even have a remote root prompt into a server, rather than using sudo?"

Redhat seems to like it that way. I've noticed it with all Redhat derived distros. sudo is not even installed by default.

Privacy? Watchdogs? Fines? Whatever, nerds, more people than ever are using Facebook and filling its deep coffers

More bots

More bots are using facebook than ever before.

Google settles a four-year age-discrimination battle with 227 engineers by dishing out... $11m

Google is laughing all the way to the bank

They've already made all that money back in profits. A lawsuit like this needs to extract real pain from a company. This will change nothing about Google's hiring practices. I'm over 40. I go for an interview. Inquire after the interview. "Another person was a better fit." That's all they have to say. The victim has to prove the offense. The words used keep the employer from being sued. The penalty should have been 111 Million or even a billion dollars. Meanwhile, Google claims a shortage of engineers and goes for H1B people. It's BS.

I'm over 40. I've been dealing with age discrimination for the last 20 years.

America's latest 5G drama: Spectrum row bursts into the open with special adviser fingered as agent provocateur

Re: It stupidity anyway

I agree as well. When I first underwent certification training for line of equipment, I was given the rule of thumb; the higher the frequency, the more it acts like light. at the time we were talking 2.4 and 5.8 and that 5.8 would give near line of site, because it would reflect off of things while 2.4 was a lower frequency and it needed line of site. Also part of that rule of thumb is that the signals wouldn't penetrate solid water. A rainstorm is solid water as is a tree. 24 GHz would be good for setting up short hop meshes which, I think, is the idea.

2001: Linux is cancer, says Microsoft. 2019: Hey friends, ah, can we join the official linux-distros mailing list, plz?

Re: They are now the Voyager Borg

He doesn't need to go there. He can code from his jail cell. He just needs connectivity.

Re: The Borg

That's what "forks," are for.

We've Falcon caught it! SpaceX finally nets a fairing half after a successful Heavy launch

2 out of 3 is not bad

At least Musk is trying something new. NASA sure isn't. I expect NASA to come up with something truly cutting edge like a new propulsion system that get get craft up to speeds that make interplanetary travel feasible or maybe solving the problem of gravity.

Re: 27 Merlin engines

Or 9 WWII Navy PT boats. 3 merlins in each one.

Chrome ad-blocker crackdown preview due late July. Here's a half-dozen reasons why add-on devs are still upset

Opera uses the chromium engine. The only browser thaf doesn't right noe is firefox.

IEEE says it may have gone about things the wrong Huawei, lifts ban after US govt clearance

Re: Security concerns?

We're talking about a company owned, essentially, by the communist party in China according to this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/technology/who-owns-huawei.html

Its ownership is rather murky, but the point is that all Chinese companies are required to assist the Chinese government in intelligence operations. read: spying. What is to stop Hawei from building a backdoor into the operating system for the core switches they produce allowing all communications across that switch to be monitored or worse, permanently disable that switch thereby ceasing all communications for that switch? Now replicate that across all of the switching offices that contain Huawei equipment and your country's telecommunications are dead with no recovery but replacement. Call me paranoid, but I'd rather not take that chance with the security of my country with hardware/software from a country that is not exactly my friend and clearly belligerent in some cases.

Re: Security concerns?

nah. the governments aren't interested. Google and Facebook are watching you. The government only needs to go to them to find out what it wants to know.

Third Soyuz does not explode while auditors resume poking around NASA's big rocket SLS

I don't think we've achieved light speed, yet. :-)

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

Machines shouldn't be killing people

Asimov's 3 laws as far as robots go. Artificial Intelligence isn't intelligent, yet. It's ok at pattern recognition, but that's bayesian math. decisions still have to be programmed in by someone intelligent.

still, though, machines should not be killing people, ever.

Apple, Samsung feel the pain as smartphone market slumps to lowest shipments in 5 YEARS

$1000.00 is too much for a phone. I just ordered a battery and a back for my current phone.

UK cautiously gives Huawei the nod for 5G network gear sales

Re: No one buys telecoms services based on how secure they are

all it takes is one out of band management box to be connnected to the internet in your scenario. Otherwise, a backdoor in the switch or the switch simply sending usage data home to china would be a problem.

They did it! US House reps pulled their finger out, voted to restore net neutrality in America!

Re: Technically

But you know the old saying: "If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con', what is the opposite of 'Progress'?"

Regress

Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity

Minor correction

That would be the Internal Revenue Service, not the Inland Revenue Services

disclaimer: I am in no way connected with the IRS.

Memory slump and smartphone boredom deliver one-two punch to Samsung's bottom line

I'm not ready to pay $750 for the cheap version of a phone that's not all that great at making phone calls. I haven't seen anything in them justify the huge price jumps.Tempted to just purchase a new battery and a new back. That's $22.00 plus shipping. There's certainly nothing in the phones that make them stand out from the previous 3 iterations of it.

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

What could possibly go wrong? This is a security problem, especially if the libraries included with the package are out of date, or worse, hacked. This is a solution looking for a problem and it creates a raft more. Even worse, it's another example of trying add in yet another layer to kill performance.

Make America buy phones again! Smartphone doom 'n' gloom crosses Atlantic to cast shadow stateside

Yeah, $1,000 is too much for a phone. Smartphones are good for a lot of things, but making phone calls isn't one of them. With 5G coming, it looks like I'm going to get a battery and a new back for it and wait. It's working "ok" for now. Not great, but ok. It was never great and the latest and greatest is certainly not worth $1,000.00

Cheers

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Re: 10203

Quattro Pro

Nearline disk drive demand dip dropkicks Seagate: How deep is the trough, how deep is the trough?

Re: SSDs are the default now

I would agree. I have no desire to purchase any more spinning drives. New servers get HDME SSD's. I haven't looked back. Spinning drives have too many moving parts to fail.

HDD's are dying. SSD's are ascending

Want to spin up Ubuntu VMs from Windows 10's command line, eh? We'll need to see a Multipass

I see all your points, but ...

I have two solutions in place. I have a windows machine running virtualbox. commandline, folder sharing, gui, etc. I've been using it for years. so to multipass...yawn. The second solution is a small machine that is running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with KVM installed. I have Windows installed in a virtual machine for whatever I might need out of Windows. None of my old copies of Office will activate any longer, but OpenOffice and LibreOffice fill that void along with Thunderbird for email. I'm not in want. I have an app for my Canon DSLR which will only run on Windows or Mac so that's why the virtual. The only thing that doesn't work on Linux is Spectrum''s flash app that it uses for it's streaming service. I'm not missing anything there.

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Re: Google are cunts

If you're using Google's browser, they're getting your search data. You don't honestly think the browser is not sending your search data to Google do you? and what about DNS or HTTPS? Not only do they get your search data, they're going to get all your DNS data, too. You don't thing Google or Cloudflare are offering free public DNS for nothing do you? I won't even get into the fact that both of those services don't update when they should and have very high latency. Soon Google won't allow you to override the dns over https settings. I don't have any trouble with Firefox, though they signed on the the DNS or HTTPS, too. You can disable it. I run my own resolvers locally.

Re: Google are cunts

I have never been able to understand why the ad blockers ever blocked anything rather than redirecting the content to /dev/null. That way the upstream never knows if the ad gets shown or not. Then Google wouldn't be trying so hard to force feed us ads. Look for people to start running ad-blocking proxies. Yet another layer.

'The inmates have taken over the asylum': DNS godfather blasts DNS over HTTPS adoption

This is about control

This is about control and making it easier for corporate and government tracking and getting records for DNS searches without actually raiding someone's machine. Nothing more. DNS over TLS is already defined and solves the problem. Thankfully, there are coming implementations of DNS resolvers other than Google's or Cloudflare's that will do this and changing your browser to user your own or a public one other than Google's or Cloudflare's. Call me paranoid, but I don't trust either company no matter what they say publicly.

The solution is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Moreover, Google and Cloudflare are going to send out normal un-encrypted udp requests to the root servers and then to the authoritative servers for any domain, then encrypt and return the results. the HTTPS protocol is slow and now we'll have yet another layer to add more latency.

This is all BS

Google and Cloudflare want your dns traffic. That's what this is about. A one stop shop to see what you're looking at and to send you a more targeted set of ads and propaganda. If you don't think that traffic won't be logged, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you in ... They are going to dcrypt that traffic and make normal DNS requests to authoritative DNS servers scattered throughout the world. This solves _nothing_. Google's DNS resolvers are slow and don't take updates very well, either. I've had them return incorrect information for hours even days after the TTL on a record had expired. I run my own hosting servers. The have TLS enabled and they can take requests over TCP. The main security problem that is not liked is that DNS traffic uses UDP and not TCP. UDP can be faked easily. simply moving to a TCP based model instead of a UDP based model. As Paul Vixie said, this problem has already been solved. It's up to each OS vendor's resolver to use the more secure protocol if it's available. At any rate, it's going to slow DNS to a crawl.

Just one Corretto, give it to me... AWS brews its own blend of Java with free long-term support

Re: Ahhh..... if we Italians...

C like names, too. C#

Microsoft's implemenation of Java.

Cheers

PC makers: Intel CPU shortages are here to stay ... for six months

I haven't bought an Intel CPU in over a decade. AMD has generally been a step ahead of Intel in terms of technology the entire time.

HP Ink should cough up $1.5m for bricking printers using unofficial cartridges – lawsuit

For HPink this is the cost of doing business. They made way more than 1.5m for what they did. Moreover they can write off the fine from their taxes. Some would say this was slap on the wrist. I think it was more like an itch on their little finger

New age discrim row: Accenture, Facebook sued by sales boss for favoring 'new blood'

We hired the other guy

He was a better fit. It was between you and him. It was tough decision. Have you ever heard that? That's age discrimination. They said all the fright words to say it wasn't age discrimination. I'm 61 years old. I lost count of how many times I've heard that one.

Lately all I can get is helpdesk which pays squat and requires all sorts of knowledge. blecch. I've gone from CTO to peon in 20 years.

Google freezes Android P: Get your shoes on, tire-kicking devs

Just what I always wanted

Just what I always wanted: another update that will slow down my device even more and shorten its battery life by another helf.

Oy

ISP popped router ports, saving customers the trouble of making themselves hackable

Re: Only an id10t...

"Pray tell, how was this port opened in the first place and, more importantly, how did the ISP close it without a backdoor?"

if it's actual telco equipment, they can do it by SS7 out of band management.

Facebook caught up in court battle with Amazon and pals over 'ageist job ads' that targeted young

Not actually. What I really wish that I'd done was gone to school for something like heavy equipment repair. Those folks are always in demand. Now I'm an unemployed IT worker only a few years from retirement who probably won't be able to land anything but a helpdesk job or something in retail because I'm over 50

Unclip your pager and bag from your belt: We need to make room for a battery-powered 1TB HD

A spinning drive in something portable that's going to get bumped around...really? What year is this?