Posts by trindflo

Email phishing crapcannon operators TA505 are back from the dead, researchers warn

Haven taken apart some of them, the links I saw connect to something that looks like a Microsoft 365 server and attempts to trick the browser into disgorging credentials saved in the browser.

Clearview CEO doubles down, claims biz has now scraped over ten billion social media selfies for surveillance

Re: Protection agains sloppy AI

Armed with scalding urine?

Re: Protection agains sloppy AI

My favorite AI depiction in old SciFi was the original release of rollerball where the idiot operator would just thump the AI until it spewed out something they wanted to hear or marketing gibberish.

Russian spies reportedly used SolarWinds hack to steal US counterintelligence details

Re: Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann indicted for lying to FBI during Russia investigation

You're talking about an indictment brought by Durham, the special prosecutor assigned by Barr (Trump's attorney general), as a parting gift to people trying to hold Trump accountable. I doubt that has blown anything up.

And this has exactly what to do with Solarwinds?

Windows what? PC makers have bigger things on their minds

driver/software compatibility

What makes me worried about windows *10* is driver signing. I think what TPM has done is limited operating systems to a small number of players (Windows and Linux) that TPM signs off on. The required signatures in Windows 10 drivers lead back to Microsoft, which I'm concerned has give Redmond a kill switch.

Open Sesame, says Google... to voice identification: Speech ID adds biometric security to call-centre bots

Re: Our customers are excited

someonething identifying him itself as, say, Jesse will answer the phone

FTFY

Want to check out Windows 11 but don't want to buy a new PC? Here's how to bypass the hardware requirements

Is it worse than 'support'?

Something new in Windows 10 is that all drivers must be signed by Microsoft. I haven't been able to confirm this, but it seems like since Microsoft owns the certificate that they have a kill switch for Windows 10. Unlike previous versions of Windows where you could perform tricks to keep them running, it isn't obvious to me that this will be possible with Windows 10. People who are willing to pay for the extra service can probably get extended certificates, but I'm not sure that will be an option for the rest of us.

Can anyone confirm this or (hopefully) show me the error in my thinking?

Re: Even better....don't bother yet!

No matter how outrageous the sarcasm, you generally want to use the Joke Alert icon or you might be taken seriously.

Re: Even better....don't bother yet!

Oh, I'd always offer to re-image it for them. Takes no time at all.

YouTube expands vaccine misinfo crackdown, nukes anti-vax channels for good

Re: Thanks to the Vaxxed

"the pointing / shaming / blaming" is happening on forums. This is denying people who want to spread misinformation an unchallenged bully pulpit. It is nothing close to anti-vaccine fanatics intentionally spoiling the vaccines so they don't work, which is the sort of thing that happens when an unchallenged preacher is allowed to foment irrational fervor.

Re: Thanks to the Vaxxed

The concern is that the hospitals become overwhelmed. Hospitals are doing a great job of keeping a percentage of people who contract the disease from dying. If the hospitals do become overwhelmed I can see an argument for treating the people who got vaccinated first.

Re: Thanks to the Vaxxed

I took a look at your PDF.

One problem I see with the reported deaths is that they are for all motor vehicles. I didn't see where that was broken down by cars (that have seatbelts) and other sorts of vehicles where they don't exist or are unlikely to be used: motorcycles, buses, taxis.

Another issue I'm aware of in the US is that after seatbelts became mandatory equipment there was an expectation that of course people would use them. It needed to be mandated and police needed to stop people for not wearing them; often the safety belt could be seen dangling out the driver's door. I assume the use in Great Britain also needed to be mandated at some point, but if not hats off to your nation.

Azure Purview is a preview no more: Microsoft is ready to sniff your sensitive data

Came here to mention what an unfortunate name they chose

But was beaten to it! Cheers!

And thanks to the author for dropping the hint ("sniff your personal...").

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

Re: *looks around quiet, crowded theater* FIRE FIRE FIRE!

OK. How's this: intentionally causing harm to others, even if only through your words, will and should be treated as the crime it is. The state has immunity for it when following specific guidelines (e.g. a judge at a trial).

Re: Indeed

You are railing against how the law actually works. If you have evidence of police collaborating with criminals you should present your evidence to the next higher authority: I believe that would be the FBI in the US and National Crime Agency in Great Britain.

Re: Indeed

Yes. If you are being uncivilized, civilized society needs to deal with you, or society breaks down.

Yelling "FIRE" in the crowded theater is the classic (and outdated - it was more like a nightclub) example.

Police go to great efforts to collect speech involving the planning and execution of crimes, and subsequently imprisoning people for that speech. We really don't want the authorities to wait until the crime is being committed: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-29-mn-48977-story.html

Re: Hating hate is still hate...but tolerating it is insane

Perhaps when 'I' choose what is intolerable and to enforce my own sense of justice, I am incontrovertibly wrong. When 'we' decide what is intolerable it is a legal system. We, long ago decided torts are intolerable. If someone is advocating torts as a reasonable political tool, they are a problem and the state has a duty to preserve the peace.

It seems to me that what Anonymous has done here is to put light on crimes being planned. Anonymous would have committed crimes if they were doing this to just anyone or if they set about destroying things. When you do certain things to criminals, you have limited sorts of immunity. For instance, subduing and holding someone is called false imprisonment...unless you are holding a criminal for authorities (but you had best be sure they were actually committing a crime or you will be in deep pucky.)

The legal systems in all English speaking countries I know of support citizens reporting and under some circumstances preventing crimes.

You don't need to hate someone planning a crime to want to report and possibly stop them and let the authorities deal with them.

Ransomware crim: Yeah, what I do is bad. No, I don't care. Yes, infosec bods are all mouth and no trousers

Or engaging the assistance of privateers?

As I'm reading about Russia tolerating the activity so long as Russia isn't targeted, privateers is what comes to mind. That sounds like what Russia is, in effect, doing. I'm sure there are factions in many nations who would be OK with hoisting the jolly roger and going after Russia similarly provided they got state impunity and an expectation of riches.

I don't think that is actually a great solution as it would give Russia excuses to do other things, and it trains people to be jerks. My understanding is that piracy stops being an issue when pirates no longer have safe ports, but I'm not sure what you are supposed to do with pirates when you can't strong-arm the ports into cleaning up their act. What possible downside is there for Russia when they send their citizens a-viking today? Bad press in the UN?

If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up

Re: If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking

I'd like to get smarter, so please disabuse me of my misunderstandings.

I was just looking at the Voyager I imaging of the spot (a time lapsed image taken each rotation of the planet so that the spot appears stationary with respect to the spacecraft). From that imaging it appears there are several laminar flows on the planet all traveling West to East (implying a planetary rotation that matches Earth's) and one very dark flow just north of the spot in the contrary direction (East to West).

Doesn't a vortex tend to form when two contrary currents pass by each other? In my ignorance, I would be looking for the cause of that apparent East to West (relative to the spot) flow and expect the spot to be driven and controlled by the intensity of those currents.

EurekAI... Neural network leads chemists to discover 'four new materials'

Re: They keep saying how important the human is to this process

I see what you did there.

They keep saying how important the human is to this process

I can't help but think the human needs to be there in order to patent it and not a lot more.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou admits lying about Iran deal, gets to go home

Re: Concerning

Have a vote, but the plea agreement was all that anyone was going to get while a couple of Canadians got older on something less than a 3 year vacation.

Facebook overpaid FTC fine by up to '$4.9bn' to protect Zuckerberg, lawsuits allege

Always remember that privilege literally means private law

I never noticed that. Thanks!

(from thefreedictionary.com):

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin prīvilēgium, a law affecting one person : prīvus, single, alone; see per in Indo-European roots + lēx, lēg-, law; see leg- in Indo-European roots.]

Technology doesn’t widen the education divide. People do that

Or the west coast of the US

I suppose I needed to know that.

https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511

' The lesson asked employees to be "less white," '

You want to discourage the primates from hurling their feces at each other. Telling them one target is OK will not end well.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Re: No MS account

For me it is that they want to be my password manager. That feels way too much like I'm being Borged. I want to buy a product from Microsoft and not have them installing themselves as some bawab. What if they decide I've been naughty and shouldn't be allowed in?

Stressed-out IT workers, software devs – we're not being funny but have you tried rebooting your breathing?

Recent acolyte

This deep breathing is something I recently discovered myself. Perhaps if I wasn't so arrogant I might have remembered sooner that I'd learned this from Jack LaLanne decades ago.

What was different for me was that I was watching my blood pressure and dreading getting on medication. I'd gotten morbidly obsessed with it and was tracking with spreadsheets when the obvious hit me that it was taking way too long for my stats to recover after any exercise. And I started breathing in an exaggerated manner. This is what Jack LaLanne referred to as dynamic breathing: https://www.facebook.com/officialjacklalanne/videos/dynamic-breathing-with-elaine-lalanne/949604392037894/

I do it particularly when I exercise and during the recovery period. If you are monitoring your blood pressure and have some regular exercise you do, and your doctor hasn't expressly warned you against breathing, give it a try and see if you notice a difference.

RAF chief: Our Reaper drones (sorry, SkyGuardians) stand ready to help British councils

inviability cloak

Nice.

Re: "What might they currently use aerial surveillance for?"

For the record, I haven't supplied any downvotes, but you seem to have replied to yourself because of a downvote and might not see what you just said. To paraphrase: People who have nothing to hide, hide nothing.

Without writing a book on the topic, the problems with a totally open society / totally intrusive spying network are generally that it leads to abuse by tyrants that get control of it, and it promotes antisocial behavior as it gets used for personal vendettas.

It can be empowering for say an environmentalist to be able to study military level surveillance to find illegal mining or logging operations. If that also empowers the neighborhood scold to study the backyards, heat signatures, and personal records of all visitors to someone they don't like, then the price is too high in my opinion.

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

For what offence

Felony level stupidity? Something this anti-social will be treated to as many different charges as ambitious prosecutors can think of. It will be the job of the defense to whittle it down to a few.

The charge I don't see their royal selves escaping is reckless endangerment.

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

Re: A Solid 40%...

I'd like to offer a different example.

My understanding of the history is that the mastermind of Gallipoli, Churchill, was so demoralized that he resigned his commission to join the infantry and pay the price for his mistake. It doesn't seem like Churchill, the Australians, or the Turks would have ever forgotten. On the other hand, the war of 1812 was white-washed in the US for something like 150 years.

Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge

Re: Make them pay

Exactly. If you don't trim your trees, the city will come in, do it for you, and hand you a bill at whatever rate the city costs its workers. Abatement rules would seem to be the way to go. The timetables between complaint and action would be different for an electronic age.

Report: Microsoft is thinking about splashing $10bn on Discord to slot it next to Skype, Mixer...

They didn't just ignore Skype

They centralized Skype, and that is what killed it. When they centralize Discord it will suck just as badly.

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

Thank god I work for a company that makes something

"work at the company ground to a halt, with employees unable to access their emails, contacts lists, calendars, documents, or Microsoft Teams."

because of course we don't actually do anything; our job is to talk about things getting done and enable others.

While Reg readers know the difference between a true hacker and cyber-crook, for everyone else, hacking means illegal activity

It isn't the word 'hacker', it is the concept

If you consider yourself a hacker, you can do things with a computer that most people cannot.

If you're nerdy enough to master odd details about computers, most people will have problems guessing your motivations.

Cue fantasies about a mad scientist up on skullcrusher mountain. Who knows, you might even feature as an avenging angel in some of the fantasies. See the movie: Brazil.

Microsoft tells Biden administration to adopt Australia’s pay-for-news plan

Re: Original Big Bad?

Or the original robber barons along the Rhine.

Nominet faces showdown with British internet industry: Extraordinary vote called to oust CEO, board members

Re: Too little, too late.

I'm not sure what you meant.

An olive branch is the usual proverbial peace offering. A fig leaf sounds like what Haworth was offering was a warm G-string.

OTOH, you might have meant exactly what you said.

I was targeted by North Korean 0-day hackers using a Visual Studio project, vuln hunter tells El Reg

Re: Incredible

Just a little more sophisticated than Eurasia, Eastasia?

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

Re: Staking out the culprit

We really think he was trying to be "green". When the PC was unplugged and plugged back in, it was not configured to reboot. Therefore the guard was saving the planet by powering off the machine. Just our best guess. We were never told that was why; we just got that we should never setup a sneaky camera like that...even in our own cubes.

Staking out the culprit

ALTAIAGFFA. A colleague was running an unofficial, but necessary server at his desk that would go dark in the evening. He was convinced someone was turning it off in some misplaced desire to do some tree-hugging. Denials that anything like this was happening were immediate and stern, so he set up a camera on his machine (they were a little bit rare at the time). He was treated to a fish-eye close-up of once of the guards as he leaned around the back to apparently unplug and plug the machine back in. I'm sure it's no surprise my colleague got a good chewing out for using surveillance.

Trump administration says Russia behind SolarWinds hack. Trump himself begs to differ

Not bad, I prefer to think of him as Dishonest John

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Dishonest_John

Right-to-repair warriors seek broader DMCA exemptions to bypass digital locks on the stuff we own

Re: Yes, but ...

The state owes its citizens a fair playing field, but does not owe its businesses the right to maintain profit margins. Having different customers pay different amounts for the same product is an important goal in maximizing profits. The company owner you worked for managed to pull this off, at least for a while. That should be considered a windfall profit. IBM used to be the king at this sort of thing.

Remember Ask Jeeves? It's still alive, kinda, and Google seems keen to show it the door once and for all

Any way to opt out of IAC properties?

I remember Ask quite well. Useless wrappers and hijackers. How about just giving us an option in Chrome to block IAC? Put it in the expert settings so that it obviously not Chrome/Google pushing the idea that IAC are well-known leeches that probably help spread infections.

Regarding the sins of Google vs. Ask, they are qualitatively different in my opinion. Google does provide something useful. I never felt I received anything of value from Ask, and I've never felt I was fighting active infections from Google they way I felt I was battling to keep Ask off of machines I've been responsible for.

Secretly installing toolbars is like using a gun in a crime. That is a behavior that has crossed a line.

Five Eyes nations plus Japan, India call for Big Tech to bake backdoors into everything

Re: Nope.

Don't vote you up often Bob, but you are spot on.

Question: who set up this game? Corporations, Marketeers, Politicians, or Political "consultants". Or have we chosen our own perdition with our contradictory demands?

Here's US Homeland Security collaring a suspected arsonist after asking Google for the IP addresses of folks who made a specific search

I'm supposed to feel good about this?

"These data demands represent less than 1 per cent of total warrants and a small fraction of the overall legal demands for user data that we currently receive"

so if this bothers me, I should take comfort they are doing over 100x what I think they are up to?

And this is for law enforcement - much like the old phone company, Google, et. al. have no trouble listening in for their own purposes.

Facebook rejects Australia's pay-for-news plan, proposes its own idea: How about no more articles at all, sunshine?

Youtube video shell-game

It is all part of youtube making money. If the person gets you to stay on their video for a certain amount of time it might be possible to monetize it and become a millionaire ... or more likely a nickelaire. If it is any consolation, the person making the video is being "bait and switched" at least as badly as you.

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Re: Opportunities Galore For Competing Browsers

Fork 'em

Re: the circle completes

Don't be evil...until you metastasize.

Securus sued for 'recording attorney-client jail calls, handing them to cops' – months after settling similar lawsuit

Re: Intent

Sort of like the beadle in Oliver Twist?

Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business

Re: Asset stripper

Yeah that's right. Asset stripper. The money he appeared to have recently made in real estate is now looking like a lot of promissory notes all about to come due. Sort of like someone who takes out a reverse mortgage. Not exactly genius level real estate.

Care to guess at the next act? All those farmers he's been starving out in the mid-west? Want to bet whether he and his buddies are about to head west to do some more great real estate deals? Some leveraged buyouts all the while never quite getting to black ink?

Trump backs Oracle as potential TikTok buyer

writs piling up

I may share the sentiment, but won't hold my breath. Has any country punished a previous leader outside of a revolution or being defeated in a war?