Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Ransomware drops the Lillehammer on Norsk Hydro: Aluminium giant forced into manual mode after systems scrambled

Re: insecure by design

Fortunately didn't have to do the Nord end, but I built a wire wrap PC board to send detector events to it with 1us latency - not sure how I would do that on 'modern' hardware

Re: insecure by design

>How much do you want to bet they were using Windows 7 / 10 on Intel systems?

Instead of Norsk Data

Actually they might be, we had real time control systems in the late 90s running on Norsk data mini computers - with no plans to replace them.

Vengeful sacked IT bod destroyed ex-employer's AWS cloud accounts. Now he'll spent rest of 2019 in the clink

Re: Voova should take some heat here...

So even a well intentioned admin could have destroyed this company with a typo ?

And then did it himself instead of just posting the login details online for some random vandal to use.

IBM servers crashed in Q4 – just sales, not the mother of all outages

Re: Hardware or software problem?

Having to employ an IBM consultant to tell you what IBM parts you needed was their main business innovation

Re: Why?

I'm still using 'core' memory and sold state 'disks'

Re: There's just no reason to buy IBM

>And will continue to decline as traditional mainframe shops move their workloads off the mainframe onto the cloud, or local linux boxes.

But to be fair how were IBM to know that this personal computer stuff would be invented and used by business

Sorry, Linux. We know you want to be popular, but cyber-crooks are all about Microsoft for now

Re: Really?

>If a business has to rely on a "mission critical" VB app, then they can either rewrite it in a real language

If only there was some way of protecting a computer program that didn't depend on the language it was written in. Perhaps some sort of system that operated the computer and dealt with things like security and limiting what resources a user and program had access to.

I think there is a kernel of an idea there....

This ain't AI, it's a goddamn arms race – but US shouldn't get too heated, Congressman warns

That's the university's complaint.

As far as the INS (and the Trump voter on the Clapham caltrans) is concerned, a postdoc at Stanford and a minimum wage crystal report monkey at Tata are the same and come under the same visa rules.

At the moment we accept the best students from anywhere in the world, train them and then kick them out of the country as soon as they get their MIT/Stanford/Caltech PhD in AI - then complain about foreign countries "stealing" US intellectual property.

I don't hate US tech, snarls Euro monopoly watchdog chief – as Google slapped with €1.49bn megafine

Re: So what's next?

No but he might decide that Boeing needs some help against those communist Airbus

Re: "what's going to happen to that cash?"

It's a cost of doing business so is deducted from their tax (snigger)

Basically fining a foreign company is a way of transferring money from their home government to yours - it's why it's so popular.

Google takes a page from Microsoft of old and revives browser ballot on Android

Re: Windows-N

The user's don't choose (directly) the phone maker pays for the licence.

For them it's great, buy a Samsung / Motorola / etc high end phone and get all app stores, buy one of the better cheaper Xiaomi, Huawei, etc ones and you don't get all your lovely apps.

In a humiliating climbdown, Facebook agrees to follow US laws

Re: "prevent landlords, employers and money-lenders from bypassing anti-discrimination laws"

Because you can already do this in the real world. Run an ad for a job at labour party hq in the gruniad but not the Jewish chronicle and you are discriminating

Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes

Re: Software as a panacea, they used it before to sell us clean Diesel engines

Yes it can make flying amazingly safe.

Of course you could go back to the days of piston engines and carburetors and pilots taking star sightings and hoping to find land before they hit cloud.

First, Google touts $150 AI dev kit. Now, Nvidia's peddling a $99 Nano for GPU ML tinkerers. Do we hear $50? $50?

Re: WiFi

EMC approval for a raw board is a pain. Especially when you need the same board to work in N countries.

On the back there is an unused pad with solder mask for a shield and what looks suspiciously like tracks to a pair of pads for antennae. So perhaps in rev2

Sign of the times: Mirai botnet strain fine-tunes itself to infect digital signage, projectors

Re: Some good news.

Or a sign that you're running skype

Hey, US taxpayers. Filed your taxes? Good, good. $500m of it is going on an Intel-Cray exascale boffinry supercomputer

Re: $500.000.000

Especially since the current head of the DoE promised to close the dept as an example of government waste if he was ever elected.

UK libraries dumped 11% of computers since 2010-11... everybody has one anyway, right?

That's an unfair stereotype.

Not all job centers are full of rich lazy graduates posing with their macbooks "working" on their screenpaly/art/startup project while living with their parents.

Re: large print mills&boon

I would google braille porn - but I'm at work.....

Re: What support?

Perhaps the government believes strongly in evolution ?

Just gradually up the complexity of any forms required to get food and we will eventually (and with a certain amount of natural wastage) evolve a race of super inteligent northerners.

Then we can all go and eat those organic Waitrose fed eloi

Understandable

Memo 1:

We need libraries to access government e-services on e-internet in e-gds e-bah-gum

Memo 2:

Dear grey haired local volunteer librarian

You are now responsible for securing your computers against GDPR, CP, N Korean Cyber Ninjas, secret KGB plots to undermine the election for the allotments sub-committee and dealing with mad locals who write to the council about microwaves from the computers causing autism.

You could contract cap-gemini-capita-oracle-beelzebub to do this, or just get rid of the computers and go back to large print mills&boon

UK code breakers drop Bombe, Enigma and Typex simulators onto the web for all to try

Re: Explain like I'm five ..

That was really my question.

Was the flaw in enigma enough to crack it or was it only possible due to poor opsec?

The user error stories are legendary. The guy who used HIT/LER as the initialising codes everyday for the whole war, sending the same weather reports in enigma+merchant codes everyday, highly formulaic greetings and sign offs etc

(sorry to hijack thread, posted replay by mistake)

Re: Explain like I'm five ..

You can feasibly explore the key space with a modern computer.

But the encryption doesn't contain any hash checks or magic numbers so can you determine you have cracked it - except by getting a plausible plain text message in German?

If the message was the stream of buzzword filled gibberish sent out by say the MoD is response to questions about its latest IT fiasco would you know you had solved it?

Re: And no mention of the best emulator?

So the world's worst crisps can be used to make a long range wifi antenea AND a military grade (silver medalist) encryption system ?

Understandable why they are such bad crisps

Re: I may as well say it

No need, if you're using encryption you already are a terrorist, organised crime paedophile.

What made a super high-tech home in Victorian England? Hydroelectric witchery, for starters

Re: turning the lamp off would mean lifting an electrified vase

>Free Mercury though, with current flowing through probably causing it to heat up?

A pool of mercury with a wire in it is a very low resistance source. it's also a good heat conductor so you aren't going to heat it up noticeably.

Mercury at room temperature has bugger-all (ISO unit) vapour pressure and its health risks are wildly over blown (organic mercury compounds on the other hand are real fsckers)

Re: 300m-tall?

Ob Brexit lie - now we are leaving Europe our dock towers will only be 1/3 as high !

College student with 'visions of writing super-cool scripts' almost wipes out faculty's entire system

Re: Drive mirroring.

Done that on a fancy new "can't lose any data with this beauty" raid system.

It seems that WindowsNT and the Raid bios number drives differently.....

Re: find is your friend

I always use: find | awk 'print the command' > doit.sh

Then examine the doit for Murphy and his law, fix any odd edge cases manually and ten run that.

>Never gets old the tales of some fresh out of college/university student with bright ideas only to kill off a system or two.

Some student in Finland wiped out his minix install when he accidentally connected his dialup script to /dev/root_partition instead of /dev/modem.

And instead of reinstalling he decided he would get this home made alternative really working

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

Re: "the item the author of the article fails to address"

So wouldn't watching this be illegal in the UK ? And in fact get you imprisoned and then deported if you have any other heritage?

Or is extremist material only when the wrong religion is doing the killing ?

What do WLinux and Benedict Cumberbatch have in common? They're both fond of Pengwin

Since it is the Gnu tools running on the NT kernel it isn't really Linux - if anything it's GNU/Windows

Overhyped 5G is being 'rushed', Britain's top comms boffin reckons

Re: Well then

Unlikely, it is much cheaper to buy modern integrated kit from Hauwei than try and cobble together disparate used 20year old systems from the UK

Well then

If he is so smart can he tell us how we are going to force millions of customers to upgrade their $1000 phones for no good reason ?

Blighty's most trusted brand? Yeah, you wish, judge tells Post Office in Horizon IT system ruling

Re: This is a disgrace

Isn't criminal libel rather expensive for the perpetrator ?

Or would it just be perjury ?

I seem to remember that banks get very apologetic for wrongly bouncing a check - because falsely declaring to the world that the customer is financial untrustworthy is very expensive in libel court.

Can't do it the US way? Then we'll do it Huawei – and roll our own mobile operating system

You already can, lineagos and fdroid

Open source

"It could, of course, use Linux or one of the BSDs or other open-source kernels, "

Or Android.....

Brit rocket wranglers get Reaction they wanted after rattling SABRE

Because when a foreign military steals your technology to make hypersonic cruise missiles it's very important to be able to send them a threatening solictor's letter.

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

Re: " Its stock price, by the way, has plummeted..."

Controlled decrease into terrain ?

Don't be too shocked, but it looks as though these politicians have actually got their act together on IoT security

Pork time

the bill would require any federal agency to only buy products from companies that met those guidelines.

why-a-one-room-west-virginia-library-runs-a-20000-cisco-router/

From an earlier program: " Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), which passed out several billion dollars to help upgrade broadband networks across America "

The bidders for the project included Cisco ..... and only Cisco .......

Big and Blue: IBM boss's wage package shrinks in 2018 on her own recommendation

Re: Non-business travel costs

>Remind me again why she can charge non-business travel costs to the company? WTF?

Suppose she was driving herself and was kidnapped by evil forces and forced to do the same magic at Oracle that she did for IBM......

Holy sh*tsnacks! Danger zone! Edinburgh Uni's Archer 2 super 'puter will cost a cool £79m

Re: For that money...

> how to compute the answer as well.

The answer is easy !

The question, .... now that's going to need something whose mearest operational parameters this is not worthy of calculating

Open-source 64-ish-bit serial number gen snafu sparks TLS security cert revoke runaround

Why is this a big deal?

It seems odd that 63bit is a terrible lapse in security allowing certificate serial # to be guessed by every passing script-kiddie for the lulz

While 64bit was a super secure defence against even the most black clad of North Korean cyber-ninjas for the forseeable future.

Seems an odd coincidence that MAX_INT on most systems is exactly the correct key length for optimal security

China still doesn't want iPhones despite Apple slashing prices, say market watchers

Who cares about the average man in the street?

Have you ever tried to get rich by selling stuff to the average peasant ?

Just ban Huawei

Then they will be forced to buy iPhones

Does anyone have the number of a good political lobbyist in Beijing ?

NASA's crap infosec could be 'significant threat' to space ops

Anybody check the actual systems?

It seems that the report reports that Nasa's reports didn't report the right reporting terms in their reports

I seem to remember a space telescope where NASA quality teams carefully examined the quality reports of the manufacture's quality teams - but nobody looked at the actual mirror.

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

So all goods from the Eu (and countries the Eu has deals with) enter without duty.

All Eu nationals are allowed free movement in the UK

However all exported goods are subject to whatever tarrifs, inspections, delays etc on the other side.

UK citizens are allowed into the Eu only with a visa

I'm not entirely sure how this defn of "taking back control" will go down with the Tory leadership committee.

Re: "There is actually no law against cannibalism in the UK."

You might need a letter from the vet stating what antibiotics it had been given.

A neighbor had to give their horse some pills but first had to declare that the animal wouldn't eventually be used for human consumption.

ps. When adopting bunny rabbits from the SPCA don't ask "how much per pound?"

UK joins growing list of territories to ban Boeing 737 Max flights as firm says patch incoming

Re: AoA sensors are a probe or fin on the side

>With only two sensors, if one is broken then you cannot tell which one is right,

This is in a way worse. It has two sensors but the suspect system only uses one, another part of the flight control system uses the other. So if one fails you flip a coin, if it comes up heads the plane stalls.