Posts by Woodnag

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

My guess is that RTO will be monitored on divisions that Amazon wants to prune anyway with the message "TRO or leave". Cheaper than layoffs. Then, middle of next year, layoffs to clear the remainder.

Meta back at it, harvesting Britons' public Facebook, Insta feeds for AI training

Re: Objection!

Not true, if a FB account user tags you in a group photo.

Windows 11 users still living in the past face forced update, like it or not

Re: You will do as you are told

No forced updates on Win10/11 either if you run InControl to set the upgrade parameters.

https://www.grc.com/incontrol.htm/

1.7M potentially pwned after payment services provider takes a year to notice break-in

Very seriously?

Why is the first statement from companies with terrible intrusion detection along the lines of taking security very seriously?

Key aspects of Palantir's Federated Data Platform lack legal basis, lawyers tell NHS England

Re: Is opt-out even legal?

An opt-out option is worthless if the opt-out is ignored. And it will be, partly because it will be very difficult to discover that a particular patient's data is shared, and partly because the punishment will be a cost of doing business fine 7 years later but no redress.

If this sounds too cynical, ask yourself who has received a custodial sentence as a result of the Grenfell disaster, final report out now.

Gelsinger opens up about Intel troubles amid talk of possible split

Re: The sting in the Tail

At least the keyboards will be clean.

Zuckerberg admits Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Fire!

Actually it is legal to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Hate speech is also legal. The exception to the 4A is speech that incites immediate violence. So "I wish Fred would die painfully" to a bunch of friends is fine, but saying to a crowd "I want y'all to go and beat Fred over there to death" is not.

https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-series-yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/

"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down..." Zuckerberg said.

So not exactly pressure, then. Z was asked, and he agreed.

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

Re: Banana Skin?

Much easier to profile people with access to both work and home activities... and MS owns LinkedIn too.

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Reg trolling

Also, the sentence Meanwhile, "Twitter is trying to sue the World Federation of Advertisers because its members are failing to advertise on the site." is not accurate.

Try "Meanwhile, Twitter is suing the World Federation of Advertisers because its members colluded to stop advertising on the site."

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Re: Yep yep, the priviledged attitude

"The reason startups work is because the people work like hell."

The motivation is the reward if the startup exits successfully.

Google isn't a startup, and it lays people off. Loyalty and motivation work both ways.

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

But why do things only get done around election time?

It's not getting done. It's getting promoted before election time to push the idea that the Ds are for you.

Ignore what politicians say or promise. Treat them based on what they do. This could have been dealt with a long time ago.

UK semi industry exposed to supply chain risk, China state ownership

It's too late

Exactly what semis to produce, to have a chance of profitability?

This is nonsense virtue signalling, along the Make Britain Great Again line.

Presume that there's a ban on Chinese components (which can't include TSMC in the ban, so not Taiwan, without everything grinding to a halt). There's no margin in discretes, and commodity stuff (op amps etc) are well covered by TI, ADI, Microchip, Philips, ST.

Go complex ICs, and existing patents will kill you, with no competing portfolio to negotiate with.

The whole exercise is pointless anyway unless you plan for a fab, for which $1B is warm up your seats money.

How to ingeniously and wirelessly inject malware onto someone's nearby Windows PC via Google's Quick Share

fuzzing

"...the duo decided to create a fuzzing tool to probe Quick Share for Windows. While this did lead to some reproducible crashes, it didn't provide them with a hoped-for usefully exploitable bug. It was possible, for example, to repeatedly crash Quick Share on Windows by sharing a file with a filename containing invalid UTF-8 characters..."

Looks like Google didn't bother to do a fuzzing then.

Microsoft really wants those old Exchange 2016 servers put out to pasture

MS change the protocols so older versions of Outlook aren't supported. This forces people to upgrade otherwise perfectly useable earlier versions of non-subscription Office. Been there, can show the badge.

Microsoft punches back at Delta Air Lines and its legal threats

Re: Delta are incompetent

The crux of the lawsuit is the "gross negligance" of Crowdstrike pushing out an **untested** patch which broke **every** system.

Maybe Delta's IT org was crap, maybe they should have accepted help from MS whatever to recover faster.... but that is irrelevant to the gross negligance issue.

MS is introducing a straw man to change the conversation away from the, to say it yet again, gross negligance issue.

If you deliberately puncture my car tyre, offering a quick repair service doesn't change the fact that you deliberately punctured my car tyre.

CrowdStrike unhappy about Delta's 'litigation threat,' claims airline refused 'free on-site help'

"Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions – swiftly, transparently, and constructively – while Delta did not."

Er, nope.

How about: "Should Delta pursue this path, CrowdStrike will have to explain to the jury why CrowdStrike took no responsibility for its update and clearly didn't test it on even a single hardware platform before release, as evidenced by the diversity of hardware platforms that failed."

Japan mandates app to ensure national ID cards aren't forged

Re: Lest we forget ...

And the mandatory app will require permissions to access all sorts or stuff on the phone like contacts.

Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

Re: Unfortunatly your canary is really a (dead) parrot

Considering the diversity of hardware setups around the world that crashed, the update was likely not tested on any real-life machine at all, just pushed out.

Clearview AI reaches 'creative' settlement with privacy suit plaintiffs: A conditional IOU

letting the company go bust

If Clearview is liquidated, the assets being sold include all that lovely PII.

UK and Canada's data chiefs join forces to investigate 23andMe mega-breach

Information Commissioner has a time machine!

John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, said: "People need to trust that any organization handling their most sensitive personal information has the appropriate security and safeguards in place. This data breach had an international impact, and we look forward to collaborating with our Canadian counterparts to ensure the personal information of people in the UK is protected."

Difficult "to ensure the personal information of people in the UK is protected." after the fact, shirley?

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Yeah, sure. Nothing changed. Pinky promise.

Weird. Just tried that with your example and got SAAB 3-Sep.

OpenAI tells employees it won't claw back their vested equity

off-boarding agreement?

Why would a resigning employee sign an off-boarding agreement?

Tesla layoff circus runs into fourth week with another round of cuts

Who would work for Tesla when they enter the upcycle?

Mr Musk has declared that he has no loyalty to his engineering staff.

Tesla has to restructure "about every five years"?

So exactly why would a talented engineer take a position there?

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Alternative OS?

Just installed a nice alternative OS yesterday. Windows 11 Pro with cruft removed from ISO first by tiny11builder (https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder).

Burn ISO with Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) to remove OOBE etc.

Disable TPM, secure boot, hibernate in the BIOS before install.

This installs as local account. Remember to use no password (return) to avoid the 3 recovery questions, and *don't connect to the internet during install*.

Now run O&O ShutUp10++ to remove spy stuff that's not useful to you (https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10)

Now run O&O App Buster to remove Windows Apps you don’t want (https://www.oo-software.com/en/ooappbuster)

Change sleep mode from Modern Standby (S0) to S3 Standby so that the computer really is in standby not just pretending

Disable Fast Startup. With fast startup enabled, computer in sleep mode will wake up when network does a search (WOL).

Now connect to the internet and let it update.

There's more, but that's the basics for a nice Windows machine without most of the unecessary.

US legislators propose American Privacy Rights Act - and it looks quite good

It's worthless. Two massive loopholes

1. Small businesses with less than $40 million in revenue are exempt from the APRA.

2. The legislation gives individuals the right to sue for privacy harms, and disallows mandatory arbitration in claims involving minors or a substantial privacy harm – set at $10,000 – or specific physical or mental harms.

For 2, if there's a flagrant abuse, how do you prove a monetary damage?

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

Re: Troubling developments

My FreeNAS (never upgraded to TrueNAS) runs a treat, but the two mirrored USBs with FreeNAS keep crapping out as USB sticks get unreliable with MLC. Annoying to repeat a scrub and get more corrected errors. So I see why going to SSD was chosen.

Biden to inject Intel with CHIPS fab cash 'next week'

This will quietly collapse in a year or two since the US doesn't have the process engineers to staff the facilities.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Re: The owner has two Ferraris. They have that kind of money

A service manager told me some 6 months ago about a current model Lambo waiting 3 months for tyres. Different sizes front/rrear of course.

Microsoft Copilot for Security prepares for April liftoff

Just say no....

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot]

"TurnOffWindowsCopilot"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot]

"TurnOffWindowsCopilot"=dword:00000001

Microsoft: Copyright law didn't stop the VCR and shouldn't stop the LLM

Re: What an absolute joke of an equivalence

Zactly.

VCRs were largely used to time shift programs for personal use, which is why they passed the court tests.

If a VCR was used to make a new film for commercial use from 100s of snippets of existing films (analogy to LLMs), that would be illegal.

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

voluntary redundancy?

Slap me if I'm wrong, but in UK isn't it the *job function* that is made redundant, not the body performing it. So voluntary redundancy is legally a no-no.

Data watchdog tells off outsourcing giant for scanning staff biometrics despite 'power imbalance'

It's worse than that. Here's the actual notice from https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/serco-leisure-operating-limited-and-relevant-associated-trusts/

TERMS OF THE ENFORCEMENT NOTICE

By no later than the date three months from the date of the Enforcement Notice Serco shall take the following steps:

1. Cease all processing of biometric data for the purpose of employment attendance checks from all Relevant Facilities (and not implement biometric technology at any further facilities).

2. Destroy all biometric data and all other personal and special category data that Serco is not legally obliged to retain, including any such data stored by, or on behalf of Serco (including instructing SWT Software Limited to delete any such data held on behalf of Serco).

The destroy instruction is very vague. ICO really don't know what Serco is "legally obliged to retain"? Why is any of this illegally grabbed bio data under some unstated retention requirement?

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

I Spy

So if they go bust, a third party can buy the rights to all that lovely telemetry, existing and ongoing...

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

Shirley if you got married it wouldn't "strengthen her case to remain here" but give her a right to do so, after the proof of valid relationship tests?

Southern Water cyberattack expected to hit hundreds of thousands of customers

Re: National insurance numbers?

Sure... but TFA says "Southern Water has admitted between five and ten percent of its customers had their details stolen..."

National insurance numbers?

Why did they need national insurance numbers in the first place? Why did they retain them?

ALPHV blackmails Canadian pipeline after 'stealing 190GB of vital info'

Curious...

How can the security measures not notice 190 GB being pulled?

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

cafés close for lack of lunchtime customers

The Apples and Googles have canteens, so local lunch places close anyway.

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

.aand then, go here to see if it is supported by DD-DWT

https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/

Re: Explain again to me

Kingwin, among others, make SATA to IDE Bridge Board Adapters. Amazon etc.

FBI recruits Amazon Rekognition AI to hunt down 'nudity, weapons, explosives'

Re: The right to bare arms?

Nice Walther in the pic though...

AI-driven booze bouncers can ID you with face scan

When linked to payment method as you say, a good way of building up a lot of different pictures of everyone's faces to improve identification in future...

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Re: If government contracts with Fujitsu

These were mostly private prosecutions. The mechanisms for PPs and lack of being able to contest "the computer said so" evidence is a major problem.

US Navy sailor swaps sea for cell after accepting bribes from Chinese snoops

"The Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly shown it will freely break any law or norm to achieve a perceived intelligence advantage".

Let's rephrase that:

"Every country has repeatedly shown it will freely break any law or norm to achieve a perceived intelligence advantage"

Cybercrooks book a stay in hotel email inboxes to trick staff into spilling credentials

Solution

Instead of training every staff member, simply pre-vet all emails and auto-respond to ones with links and/or attachments telling the sender to re-send without them.

Also convert all incoming to plain text before passing them on.

US warns Iranian terrorist crew broke into 'multiple' US water facilities

Considering US/Israel spies sabotaged Iranian cyclotron PLCs, you'd think the follow-on plan would be to ensure that the favour couldn't be returned...

California commission says Cruise withheld data about parking atop of a pedestrian

Re: In fairness

In fairness, if a human driver dragged a human body under their car the human driver would be prosecuted.

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: I think the WFH rate will creep up

Close.

Two choices:

1. Work from home, but we're flattening the salaries to lose the regional allowances for areas with high cost of living, on the presumption that you can move to a cheaper area.

2. Train you replacement who will work from home in a country with lower salaries.