Posts by Robert Helpmann?? 2585 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2011
Cryptocurrency and its exchanges are scams!
Ah, but are you willing to pay someone to stop telling you that? Me for example? Or I can tell you again...
Cryptocurrency and its exchanges are scams!
Or just pay me to make the statement on a regular basis. I'm flexible.
Cryptocurrency and its exchanges are scams!
Cryptocurrency and its exchanges are scams, no need to pay for someone to tell you that.
Right there with you. I have to sign PDF forms on a regular basis and the 2FA method I use doesn't work well with a browser, but I sure don't like Adobe's products. FWIW, I use Foxit.
Acrobat and it's massively overbloated ad machine can f#ck right off my boxes anyway. There are far less clunky and lighter-weight options out there that don't try to sell you things or keep popping up with "helpful" tips all the time. Most people don't even need a separate PDF viewer at all, now that most browsers can do it.
Let me see if I understand correctly, they've got a machine at the NSA that prints-out “secret” documents :o
Yes, because sometimes it is necessary to print material that resides on a classified network. As with any other equipment on said networks, those printers are not allowed on unclassified networks.
I supported Amigas on two of my first tech jobs. The first was an art school where they were used to teach animation. At the second, one was used for video sequencing. I had to replace its hard drive which was an adventure. I still have a couple of manuals I keep as momentos.
Using them felt very much before their time. Too bad they're being kept around now mostly for nostalgia's sake.
.. avoiding Microsoft altogether appears to be a good idea.
While I agree with you in principle, your reasoning doesn't hold up. As long as MS Office holds by far the largest share of the market, malware will target it. If an alternative grows in proportion in terms of users, especially if they are high value targets, the bad guys will expend resources to go after that, too.
I'm wondering at what point China is going to ... start implementing their own measures in the name of national security etc to the same extent as the West is doing.
You say that as if that wasn't what they and other countries have already done. Likewise, you imply that economic and military security are completely different and separate things when they clearly are intertwined. From the West's point of view, not just that of the the US, engagement has failed. Welcome to the New Cold War. It's better than a New Clear War, but it's still not a pleasant place to be.
Made in China is a turn off for me. Hard to avoid of course.
Made more difficult if buying online where the source of products is often not mentioned. I want to make an informed decision when spending my cash. If I choose to shop locally rather than abroad, I ought to be able to actually do so.
The Red Rail sees the train hover 30 feet above the ground with the track positioned above the vehicle.
I would hope that there are safety systems in place to prevent the cars from falling in the event of some sort of issue with the power or similar, but it seems that positioning the rail above the cars in a maglev system starts things off on the wrong foot. At best, it sounds needlessly complicated...
I did a couple of quick searches and found out this is being implemented in the north of China. They can have pretty strong earthquakes there. In the event of a collapse of this sort of system, the rail and accompanying support structure will land on the passengers, not the other way around. Not an ideal outcome.
"As always, we're committed to protecting the privacy and security of the people who use Twitter"
if people were actually committed, there would not be an issue with privacy or security
If people were committed, they would be denied access to sharp objects, stay sedated most of the time and have occasional interactions with hospital staff.
And when the medically unattended passenger is DoA it'll be a bit of a problem determining place of death.
I should think vitals would be monitored and logged as would location as the "delivery" progressed. This should be as simple as corelating two logs. I can only hope the human delivery compartments will look like giant pizza boxes and the tracking app will be licensed from Dominos.
Microsoft generally insists that users get more value from SaaS because it can be updated more frequently, doesn't need on-prem maintenance or hands-on admin, and … and well … cloud is just really good, okay?
This is like the argument that if you spend a lot more on things that you don't need or want but are marked down from their original overpriced amounts you are in some way saving money. In this particular case, it's also about the difference between purchasing something and renting it and it's pretty clear who comes out ahead in that scenario.
"Hey, Cletus! Hold ma beer and watch this!"
"Hold my beer!" is the redneck equivalent for "Once upon a time" except it only applies to tragedies. For dramas, instead use "No shit, there I was." For romance, something like "I was at my cousins' wedding..." works well.
The issue is more contentious than you suggest. A first amendment argument could be made by those whose reviews were deleted because critical of the xi book, less so by Amazon.
This wouldn't get very far as a free speech issue as Amazon's marketplace should not really be considered a public forum for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it is not the government implementing the restriction. Someone still might use it as a way to make a public point in other media, but a suit based on that alone would most likely be dismissed on the merits. Even given the possibilities brought up in the cited article, I doubt there would be much appetite among the Supremes to allow anything of that nature to stand longer than it takes to say "amicus brief".
...this was clearly just an extended joke.
So a bit like PowerShell's original codename, Monad? To me, PS is emblematic of so much that is Microsoft: allow customers plenty of time to learn to use a given product and then switch it out for something that does the exact same thing differently while promising improved performance and functionality but in reality just costs a lot of wasted productivity while users have to relearn how to do the exact same things they could do perfectly well before... Which MS product does this sound like? My expectation is that PS is about due for a replacement because it has a large enough user base to make it worth targeting.
I can see how this would be useful for most users in a given organization and definitely get that this might reduce bandwidth demands leading to a number of benefits. I especially like that they are working to address IoT issues, though they are vague on how they are attempting to address them. I am also curious how someone on the O&M side would benefit from this. I have worked in environments which require jump boxes to work on sensitive systems and they always, rather than making things better, instead lead to a different set of issues to solve. That's what this solution sounds like it would need. Perhaps VPN for some and this for most?
Same with the "more secure" claim. An altered or counterfeit physical DL would show up as such the moment the police ran the card, so how does that back up the claim of more secure? If it was more secure, it would be harder to fake or change. This is actually easier as more people have access to the equipment needed to change it and learning how is presumably a couple clicks of the mouse away.
Um, no ... it's not; it's simply "illegal entry".
I looked this one up because IANAL and wanted to check... Short answer is that if you have to open the door, you are applying force and this constitutes "breaking", at least in some jurisdictions. Obviously, practical definitions vary by jurisdiction within the US. I am not even going to try to address other countries' legal intricacies.
REF:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/breaking_and_entering
There are other ways to defend yourself. It's fine to allow Chinese or any other voices on Western social media as long as we know who is doing the talking. This is not to say there is no argument to be made for anonymous sites, but it seems a bit odd to me that what we call "social" media involves a lot of socialization with folks we don't know and have no way of finding out who they are.
#notapartymember
...running a script within Acrobat is no more stupid than running one outside of it.
Depends on the level of security you want to have. Applications like Acrobat are well known for having this capability and are attacked for that very reason. People get sent booby trapped documents all the time in hope they will open them. Not allowing Acrobat, MS Office and similar to run scripts by default cuts down on this sort of behavior being successful. You can still run scripts which can be vetted or blocked independently, but in general this is a good thing to turn off.
And I expect that the bad folks have rather more (and possibly better organised) resources for finding the vulnerabilities, as there's potential for serious monetary returns for them.
It is important to keep in mind there are other motivations than money when it comes to hackers. These inform what the targets are and what methods are used.
When I read miscreants stole four Bored Apes, six Mutant Apes, and three Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs, plus "assorted other NFTs estimated at a total value of ~$3m", all I could think of was this is like a CCG for adults who thought those were a good deal growing up. Before that, baseball cards and before that, tulips with maybe a few other bits of foolishness in between.
I worked for an arts college as one of my first IT admin jobs. I got a call from the dean of the 2D school telling me he had a problem with his printer and that it hadn't fallen from the top of his filing cabinet (his words). I arrived, took a look at the HP IIP with the front crushed in lying on the floor and agreed that it had indeed not fallen, as he had claimed, and got him a replacement ordered the same day. I was able to use the rear portion of the original printer and the front of another piece of moribund equipment to create a Frankenprinter. The freshly ordered printer enjoyed a more secure perch on a work table in the dean's office. All was well.
There's also the matter of the "one card" being literally that: a single card. I equate that with a single point of failure. What happens when some government jobsworth pushes a patch out to a bunch of authentication servers this thing makes use of which causes the lot to go down? Or someone decides it's a good way to protest a horrible and oppressive regime? Hilarity will ensue.
Any time I see an official statement that tells the world a company takes security very seriously, I am sure they did not, it caused them to have some sort of exposure and they are most assuredly not going to learn from the experience. How does making your customer base and their contact info tie in to good security practice? It's not like a bad actor could harvest that information and use it for spear phishing or gain access to their accounts through already-exposed passwords from other sites because password re-use is a thing. Just a couple of issues typically explained in any corporate security orientation.
as much as I understand the anger towards "poaching" employees, wouldn't it just be "supply and demand" at work?
If I understand the issue correctly, the issue is more that these employees have knowledge of trade secrets that China wants to acquire and that these employees are not legally allowed to share. Just a SWAG.
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