Posts by 0laf 1735 posts • joined 25 Nov 2009
Possibly because the majority of interactions we have with AI systems end badly. Shite searches, shite email ordering, voice recognition that doesn't (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU), racist profiling, facial recognition that puts innocent people in a cell and scientists telling us that unless we're careful we'll be reduced to swapping out batteries for Terminators. What's not to like about AI
"What's driving a lot of these attacks is insurance - you can get policies against being attacked these days"
My understanding of insurance is that it will only pay out if you have taken all reasonable security steps. If you have been found to be lacking in patching, configuration or training your insurance won't pay.
Same at home, you can have very good cover but I con't think of any insurance policy that will pay out for burglary if you never lock your doors.
Too many organisations right now get away without doing even the bare minimum. Running a municipality without adequate IT to manage and maintain systems should be criminal incompetance in the same way failing to run health and safety on a building site is.
The outcome is the same these are life and death systems (not just emptying your rubbish and putting up bunting at Easter but social work, child protection and criminal justice) and must be treated as such.
Imagine if there was a criminal charge that would be levied against senior manager or officials of an organisation for allowing their security to be lax enough that they 1- allowed a significant and dangerous malware onto theri network and 2 - their systems were too poorly configured/maintained to allow them to recover from 1 in a timeous way.
If that was the case 1- security/maintenance would be much much better and these incidents would be much rarer, 2 - where an incident still happened no one would pay the fine therefore these incidents would continue to be rarer (bad business for the bad guys).
Things happen when the CEO or Mayor (whatever) has their arse personally in the firing line.
Aviation is very tightly controlled for the most part. It's probably safe to assume that this is a tried and tested way of carrying out this particular task on this vintage of aircraft. i.e. it works and works well.
I got a tour of an active Vanguard nuclear missile sub about 10yr ago. Even then the tech on the sub looked antiquated (70s). But it was old because it was reliable and hardened against emp etc.
Sometimes old stuff works better. As mentioned by one commenter it's a terrifying though that an aircraft might rely on a connection to the internet to do anything.
I have no problem with any user making silly mistakes like that. It's the attitude towards the person they have asked to fix the problem that matters.
If you are pleasent and polite and have made a silly error like putting an RJ45 in the wrong place or the USB in the network port (a common one), I will be delighted to help you out, have a chuckle with you about how easy it is to get these things wrong and give you a bit of advice for next time. I'll also know you're not a dick and will likely help you out faster next time.
If however you're are an arsehole your experience may differ.
When working ina school I was yelled at down the phone that a printer wasn't working (urgent, life threatening blah blah usual shite from a teacher). It was a 10min walk across the campus. I got there, was berated again in front of a class of 6yr olds. Went to printer, it was out of paper.
No apology, no acknowledgement of inappropriate attitude for such a basic fuckup.
I was using a dating site a few years back, I was not suprised to see a large proportion of the 'ladies' on the site were divorced teachers. And not with yours would I go near a single teacher.
‘Everyone can see that the US goal is to keep its monopoly in science and technology’ says Chinese foreign minister
Yep we all know that. And we know the Chinese aim is to gether enough intelligence and data, by pretty much any means, to help China establish a monoply in science and technology and expand it's political ideology.
And we know that corporations (FB, Alphabet, MS, Apple, etc etc) aim is to gether as much data as possible to efficiently exploit national populations as a free resource for revenue.
And we know the Russians and the Norks ......
Well I need not go on really....
Easy to point a finger at researchers for blaming their tools, but they are scientists not developers. It would be better if the tool maker produced a product that made it easier for lay-people to achive what they want without having to go through additional training.
But as another posted pointed out; in this current era of MS making changes to your configuration without proper warning (yeah yeah you publish your changes but to my users that's like changing one digit in a phone book and expecting them to notice) it's a significant risk that if you change Excel to not carry out this particular piece of autoediting MS will reenable it randomly with updates or just for shits and giggles.
MS should consider the implication (but I know they won't) that a significant body of professional workers cannot trust their product to process information which is of massive importance to humanity.
Wish NASA's lastest nuclear tank all the best.
Mars missions, yay.
My boy is 9 and super interested in space and space science. I'd much rather have these fantastic missions to interest him than his other ambition which is to be a fucking Youtuber.
Pints for all the steely eyed missile men and women (and anyone identifying in any other way but being a productive asset on the mission) on the project.
Just as an OS.
But it has to be part of a whole ecosystem to drive revenues so it acts like a rental car that is serviced and remodelled on the move.
no matter what you pay it's never really yours and MS feels it has the right to move and remove feature and functions as and when it feels like it.
Steering wheel on the left, nope this week it's the right, but sorry our borked patch put it on top of roof and only connected it to the rear offside wheel, on a Tuesday is steers backwards.
But it's super safe, although crumple zones and airbags only come with E5 licensing (I actually typed £5 licensing there, Freudian or what), if you're on E1 you'll get a cushion to gaffer tape to your head and a 4 leaf clover air freshener.
It's been a long time since I've seen a large company do security well. In fact I'm not sure I've ever seen it done well by a large company.
I've no doubt if any more comes from this story the response will be that this was a "sophisticated attack", "nation state" etc etc.
Then we'll find out through backdoor channels that the beancounters have once again been at it and that staff get no security training, security is neglected to pad the bottom end and servers went unpatched because no one would accept downtime.
They probably got nailed by a phish to the CEO that said "hey Bro forgot to send coolz pics to you clik here to download them, btw password is eg0maniac". The sort of CEO that demands domain admin access and unfiltered internet coz he's the CEO and problems are for others to sort.
What a shock. A recent (ish) trend towards unupgradable, unrepairable devices with non-replaceable batteries results in an upswing in dumping of those devices.
Whoda-thunk-it.
Nothing will change without legislation, and the politicians have big business to please, and big business needs regular sales. Devices with built in obsolescence is the model now.
Yeah 365 can be very very secure if... you pay an astounding amount of money for an E5 license + extras and then have a dedicated team to configure and manage the setup.
We can't afford E5 and we still have to have pretty much 1 FTE just working on keeping up with the changes MS push through every week.
It's a system build on shifting sand.
Teams has actually worked really well for us in the current crisis but I can see why consumers would prefer Zoom.
Where Teams falls down is dealing with the ad hock communications with members of the public. They don't want to use Teams, they want something simple that works with their family and friends too. That has meant WhatsApp until the recent Zoom outbreak. But neither Zoom nor WhatApp sit very well with DP law.
I often like to point out to the mentally challenged the biggest source of electromagnetic radiation around. I will often add that this source has been proved to be dangerous causing illness and deaths in large numbers of people. It's a known cancer risk, causes burns and is even known to start fires, kill crops and have a massive effect on the climate. Yet no one does anythign about it and no one complains. It's a conspiracy. That bloody sun has to go.
I had to fix the PC of the CEO of a car dealership chain early in my career. Once I'd removed the anal sex porn from his hardrive to free up some space it worked fine. I never said what I did to fix it, he never mentioned the loss of his stash.
They will have a "cloud first" policy like every other muppet. It took me months of persuasion to get our strategy to be "Cloud where appropriate".
I'm sure people in high places are trying to make Amazon realise the PR opportunity from cutting NASA a break for this particular SNAFU.
Stuck at home now and relying on Teams as well as the rest of 365.
Teams is working ok for me, I'e not had any reliability problems, meetings on it have run ok, but yeah big fecking notifications blocking parts of the screen.
But Sharepoint, supposed to be the backbone of all this stuff. Jesus H Crist it's awful, even the most basic features missing. Can I share a file? Yep. Can I share a whole folder? Yep. Can I share 2 files inside a folder? Oh no no no who would ever want to share more than one but not all files. We don't do that!
I know WhatsApp was rolled out as a crisis measure in lots of places a few years back during bad flooding but those USP that it had then have been taken on by MS Teams, Google thing etc. Whether you loath Teams or not isn't relevant at least you can have some oversight and control of it unlike anything from Facebook.
I ended up with a Lenovo workstation laptop to get a better keyboard. It's good but not as good as the old ones. I prefer a longer travel in keys and I'd rather have a physically bigger laptop to get this. Saying that they managed to fit a great keyboard into a Psion 5, so no excuses really.
Missing files are usually due to a fudged click and drag. I've done it myself especially on a trackpad.
We have had files go missing due to technical fuckups (normally some 365 related machine fart), I've never been able to prove files go missing due to malicious action. It's pretty rare.
Curiosity is usually described as a Nuclear Tank by El Reg hacks becasue it's really quite big.
Even the previous rovers Spirit and Opportunity which are normally thought of as being small and cute were actually pretty big, like a couple of dinner tables strapped together.
Virgin Media are still sending invoices to my other half 2yr after she cancelled. They won't talk to her about this unless she logs in through the cutomer portal, which she can't do because she's not a customer and she cancelled the contract.
I've told her to take it to the ICO since they are holding incorrect personal data which is unlawful. But she's too nice and can't really be bothered to deal with them since they were idiots when she was a customer, and have continued to be idiots.
Enjoy your fine Virgin.
Many have bids. Sure some of the larger capacity versions listed have fantasy figures attached but I'm surprised there was any interest at all.
I wonder if there is going to be much of a market for antique electronics apart from very early Apple kit and first editions of game changing hardware (Iphone 1, Razer, Startac, folding stuff).
Lets take some proper steps. You can't pass the liability on to your spouse to start a new business if you've been hung, drawn and quartered.
Not if you could kindly get the bastards who phone me to tell me I've been in an accident and put them in a gibbet cage until their bones decompose.
As always it gets harder.
Genuine emails generated from Office 365 look more like phishing emails than many phishing emails.
Then you have partner organisation who get compromised then you get phishin emails from people you know, on subjects you are expecting, mixed in with the general obfuscation caused by 365s spammy looking links.
I'm sure thre is an app for that in E5
Cloud based hosting, SAAS etc 'can' be much more secure than your on-prem setup. But the vanilla cheap assed entry level options will not be.
MS 365 can be very very secure. But only if you give everyone a fucking expensive E5 licence and have dedicated and trained staff running the security consoles that MS have designed using the shifting sands of the Sahara desert as a model.
If you think you're going to be secure by buying an F1 licence for everyone then sticking it in vanilla then you're going to be in a very bad place very soon.
The analogy I use with the non techies is that if cloud was a car, MS and AWS can make a very very good car, but you're chosing the specification and you're still driving it, and if you spec it with 3 bicycle wheels or drive it off a cliff MS/AWS are not going to take the blame for your mangled corpse.
People will hear what they want to hear and will convince themselves that what they think should be true is true.
Many people who pay for 'Autopilot' want a self driving car. The feature is called "Autopilot". "Auto" implies autonomous driving of the car.
The car really will drive itself largely without input from the meatsack in the seat.
Therfore it's not a massive leap for an idividual to decide that they have bought a self driving car. The marketing and the evidence thay have supports this, the small print is just legalise after all.
I would have to say is WTF is going on where we have 'beta' versions of software on two ton vehicles carring a large box of volitile chemicals.
That's lovely the option for FIDO2 etc will potentially make life easier.
But on the samer note how about enabling all the features in Sharepoint without the need to keep regressing to fucking IE11 because some features still need ActiveX.
I can see requests for this going back 3yr, how about a bit of effort on this?
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