Posts by oldtaku

So how do Google's super-smart security folk protect their data?

Yes, password manager

This jibes with other studies that the more you actually know about security the more you're likely to use a password manager and generate huge random passwords for each site. See https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/09/security_of_pas.html , http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/27/security-experts-keep-safe-online-password-manager-seven-things , etc. Even a text file qualifies as long as you're using really random long passwords.

But there's still a substantial group of Dunning-Kruger types who know just enough about security to be dangerous and think they're smarter than that and come up with bizarre password or phrase generation schemes. I know one of them. He has to use password reset quite frequently because his algorithm is so clevar he can't reproduce the passwords reliably. Or maybe that's a feature! Also fairly sure if I got one of his plaintext passwords I could figure out the basic scheme... Except for the too clever by half bit.

Ashley Madison made dumb security mistakes, researcher says

They just didn't caaaaaare

This is my go to answer.

Wireless insulin pumps that are trivially hackable? They just didn't care. Cars you can hack crucial driving functions on through entertainment system or OnLive? They just didn't care. Target? OPM? Etc.

They think security is too annoying so just do a cursory, laughable, intern level half-ass half-baked home grown thing. Because they figure even if they get hacked all they have to do is offer one year of credit reporting, which is a total scam and they get cheap because it's basically just a free trial for LifeLock or Experian. The AM emails have execs going 'we really should improve our crappy security' 'lol yeah we probably should' lololol.

The only times suits ever learn are catastrophes like this or huge penalties because, being sociopaths, they don't give a single shit about their customers.

Stench of confiscated dope overwhelms Catalan cop shop

Oh yeah, this is just terrible. These 4000 marijuana plants are reaaaally bumming out our officers, man. Why, we can hardly work with these 3000 marijuana plants and it's soooo unpleasant, dude. 'Who will rid me of this troublesome pot?' they cry. These 2000 plants are a total bummer.

Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston

That's too generous

nobody in parliament nor among the various departmental heads that demanded data retention understands how the networks operate: "They just don’t get it", he states.

I think it's slightly different... they just don't care. Oh I'm sure some of them can't even use email, but they can't all be this ignorant. This lets them have their cake and eat it too. Like Ashley Madison claiming they didn't store credit card entries - technically true because they were offsite, but easily accessible. They can claim they're not storing your browsing history while making it trivially reconstructable.

Malware menaces poison ads as Google, Yahoo! look away

Thanks for this in-depth look. It's the reason I run Ublock and NoScript even on sites I like, no Java, no Flash. Can't trust their ad network at all - not their fault, but whoever they're using for ads is less cunning and evil than the Russians (even Google) and nobody's really doing much about it because they just don't care that much. This article just really drives that home.

In addition, even the non-malware ads are so bad as far as terrible scripts and bloat (like the Verge's 1000:1 crap:content ratio) that whenever I run without blockers on other people's crapboxes it's a whole new, terrible ghetto web. How can you people live like this?

So subscriptions and Patreon are all I'm willing to do. Think about it, Reg.

Angry Birds maker Rovio takes aim at staff, axes a third of them

Aren't they making more money from merch than games now? I hope so, because they obviously have no idea what make Angry Birds so appealing in the first place. They haven't been able to replicate it since, and Angry Birds 2 is absolutely terrible. There are some good mechanics in there but the F2P crap completely kills the 'one more time!' factor.

What Ashley Madison did and did NOT delete if you paid $19 – and why it may cost it $5m+

Re: They have a point

From their leaked email they were definitely aware - execs making jokes about how they should improve their security lol.

That's definitely not going to help.

Does Linux need a new file system? Ex-Google engineer thinks so

"On the other hand, why not just put the effort behind the development and porting to Linux of the Hammer2 filesystem?"

Practically, it'd be more productive if everyone got together and worked in perfect harmony on the UberFileSystem. But helping debug some else's already 3 years overdue file system isn't nearly as fun as writing your own new one. And it's the *nix way to have 5 projects when you could have 1. I can't blame him.

Sure, why not.

... as long as we can default to ext4 and pick others based on our level of devil-may-careness. And as long as you don't kill your wife.

Now Ashley Madison hackers reveal 'CEO's emails and source code'

"No, that data dump is totally fa" *SMACK*

Avid Life has been lying their ass off about this hack and filing fraudulent DMCA takedowns on people talking about it. This second dump seems like a bit of a smack in the face about that, especially given the 'Hey Noel' message.

Surprise! World stunned to learn that AT&T is in the NSA's pocket

"We lie constantly, to everyone, even under oath," Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman, reaffirmed.

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

Oh c'mon, nothing about abort, kill, peek, poke, inject, grind?

Would YOU make 400 people homeless for an extra $16m? Decision time in Silicon Valley

Oh, he's not a Bay Area tech bro or VC... that makes it harder. Those guys wouldn't hesitate an instant, and would then grind the now homeless residents into soylent for an extra $160k.

Virtually no one is using Apple Music even though it is utterly free

Yes, it is terrible, and they made iTunes even worse to do this (who knew that was possible?) I wouldn't use it even if they didn't charge $9.99 a month.

AIDS? Ebola? Nah – ELECTRO SMOG is our 'biggest problem', says Noel Edmonds

Just think, if Bonny Prince Woo Woo Charles ever takes the throne, this is your new Secretary of State for Health. Time to have a pint to the health of the old girl.

Re/code apologizes for Holocaust 'joke' tweet

They definitely have an internal chat/locker room where they discuss stories and make terrible jokes like that if they're like every other media organization on the planet. Except you guys of course - you just do those in the article titles.

Don't want Windows 10 FILTH on the company network? Step this way

The IT Union

"If you're a corporate IT person, though, the last thing you need is for your users to be randomly upgrading their desktops and laptops. You presumably have Windows 7 or Windows 8 there for a reason – and that reason is because you have a set of standards that you know how to support and for which your service desk and PC support teams are trained."

Ahahahahaha *sob* Excuse me gotta wipe a tear from my eye here. Corporate IT is still back on XP because they wanted to control everything with exactly these policies - so now they're so busy doing stupid unnecessary gruntwork that they have no time to upgrade the entire company - and they're terrified anyhow because the dirty secret is that IT knows barely more than the casual users and way less than anyone who actively manages their own PCs at home. So they enshrine it as some sort of sacred priesthood like this. We're back to mainframe days.

SourceForge goes TITSUP thanks to storage fault

Be funny if some of that malware they love to add to project installers bit them in the ass.

Comcast: We're twice as fast as Google's 1Gbps Fiber (for x4 the price)

4x the cost, and having to deal with Comcast. Chances are they'll never show up for the install. And if they do they'll burn your house down. And they don't then you'll never get anywhere near the claimed speed, and you'll have have a cap even though they swear it's not a cap.

Basically, lost me at 'Comcast'.

Cunning goldfish avoided predator in tank for seven years

They clean it once a month but...

The goldfish was in the large unlit filtration /tank/ under the main tank. They clean it once a month, but it's huge, 3m x 5m (don't say how deep), and dark. Apparently this guy just hung out away from where the cleaning was going on. But this time, someone thought he saw the shadow of a largish fish moving in the darkness (which must have been a fairly AHHHHHHH moment). And when he went looking with a flashlight saw this guy just hanging out down there.

Farewell then, Mr Elop: It wasn't actually your fault

Conspiracy theory

MS hasn't really fired him... they've just sent him out to destroy yet another company for them to buy for pennies on the dollar. Shall we see where he goes?

Cortana threatens to blow away ESC key

These are the same dumbasses who thought it would be great to put the Fn key where the Ctrl key should be, so I'm not surprised at all.

Swordfish fatally stabs man after man stabs, fatally, swordfish

GOOD

Just imagine this were you walking by and some aggro a-hole chav just leaps off a balcony and sticks his knife in you (hur hur) just because he thinks he's all f@#$ing special because he's one of 8 billion f#$ing ape-roaches infesting the planet.

At this point the swordfish is worth far more than this dickhead. It's a bad trade.

All-Russian 'Elbrus' PCs and servers go on sale

'all Russian'

Well, I guess it's all Russian if you consider variations of western stuff with some mods to be all Russian.

Cue the Russian Comment Brigade on how the PDP-11 was actually copied from the Elektronika K180 series instead of the other way around.

Windows 10 bombshell: Microsoft to KILL OFF Patch Tuesday

Yeah, I'm fine with constant stream of patches IF you don't have to reboot for them. OPtherwise I'm still only gonna reboot every few weeks.

MIPS quietly bares its processor architecture to universities

This might help counteract some of the 'ewwwwww Cell processor' reaction people have when you say MIPS/PPC these days (if they even know what you're talking about, and didn't have a PPC Mac). The horrible architecture wasn't the CPU's fault, really!

China weaponizes its Great Firewall into the GREAT FIRE CANNON, menaces entire globe

'The researchers are also convinced the Chinese government is directly behind the Great Cannon's operations.'

It has to be. Besides the technical similarities, they wouldn't tolerate else anyone messing with their search engine like this. Especially not for so long.

Google Ads go NUCLEAR, foist exploit kit

AdBlock

Sorry to belabor this again, but since sites keep whingeing at me about it - once again, this is why we can't trust any ad network on any site. Even if I like the site and want to support it, I know they have no control over the crap that gets served up by their ad network.

I support many sites with subscription or Patreon (and variants), but ads will continue to be treated like the diseased filthy slags they are.

Light the torches! NSA's BFF Senator Feinstein calls for e-book burning

You're more likely to kill yourself with The Anarchist Cookbook than anyone else.

Feinstein probably just became responsible for another hundred self-inflicted injuries and deaths now thanks to the Streisand Effect as every moron who hadn't heard about it yet digs up a copy.

Day FOUR of the GitHub web assault: Activists point fingers at 'China's global censorship'

If there were any doubt at all before (there wasn't much), there's no way Baidu, the Chinese Govt search engine, could be 'hacked' for four days without orders from the Chinese Govt.

Feds cuffed for allegedly PILFERING Silk Road drug souk's Bitcoins

What a name

I'd like to note that even by American standards 'Carl Mark Force IV' is quite the outre name. Up there with Wolf Blitzer.

Adobe lifts sheet on Dropbox-style doc sharing cloud

You might as well just put on your stuff up on github. It'll be faster and no less secure.

OpenSSL preps fix for mystery high severity hole

The real question...

The most important thing - what catchy name will they give it?

Patch Flash now: Google Project Zero, Intel and pals school Adobe on security 101

Better yet, just uninstall Flash entirely. I haven't missed it since almost everyone and dog supports html5 video now. It's not worth having a weeping security sore that no amount of bandaging can fix.

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

Why not just use a decent app (Scrivener comes up often for good reason) then just export to Word to deal with the mindless drones?

Boffins baffled by the glowing 'plumes' of MARS

Dissapointed!

We were guessing the Reg headline for this, and I offered 'MARS passing GAS? Baffled Boffins give various theories the SNIFF test.'

Shall I send you my CV then?

STINKY nerds: Sick of horrifying chums with your terrible BO? Nosey Google wants to help

When people say it's funky working at Google's offices, this is what they mean.

#VultureTRENDING: YESS! It's Pantsr, the Sharing Economy super app that delivers on the BOTTOM line

Someone at El Reg knows entirely too much about shimapantsu.

Top smut site Flashes visitors, leaves behind nasty virus

Oxford Comma Me, Baby

It's so El Reg that an article about porn would result in a (mild) grammar flamewar in the comments.

Verizon says 40-hour outage was outage to end all outages

They just don't care. They're Verizon.

It's just Verizon. They don't give a f@$# about their customers - treating them like crap is just a business principle, and they think that'll work fine in the cloud space too.

Since they actually have customers, and those customers haven't left over this, apparently they're right.

FCC: A few (680,000) net neutrality comments lost in 'XML gaffe'

It's not like they were going to pay attention to them anyhow. 700000 comments count less than $7000 in (many) someone's pocket from Verizon.

Sony Pictures hack is Hollywood's 'Snowden moment' say infosec bods

Snowden Moment

So, a couple months of panic and outrage, then back to business as normal.

Russian internet traffic detours through China's Frankfurt outpost

'errors'

Yeah, 'errors'. No honor among cyberthieves.

No one wants iOS 8 because it's for NERDS - dev

Just catching up with Android

Almost all the features in this are things that Android had in 2012. What a totally uncool reason to upgrade. I'll just sit here eating my gluten free free range anti-allergenic peanuts till Steve's spirit touches my 5th chakra.

Sapphire glass maker's woes caused by Apple relationship 'breakdown'

Well what did you expect?

If you dance with the Devil then either you're going to be fabulously wealthy (and then he'll Get You later) or you're going to get burnt. You knew that going in. Suck it up. You gambled and you lost.

Google's Eric Schmidt's shock confession: Steve Jobs is.... MY HERO

Jobs got away with a lot of outright illegal activity. He just didn't care if it was illegal, because he was Steve Jobs. And then he died, pretty much untouched by consequences for any of it. As an evil CEO, Schmidt's gotta admire that. Except the death bit.

Iliad won't take no for an answer from T-Mobile US

Pepe Le Pew

Ah, Mah Cherie! http://bit.ly/ZvA2bV

DEATH TO TCP/IP cry Cisco, Intel, US gov and boffins galore

And of course it'll have content DRM built right in. That's the primary reason they want this. HDCP-alike right at the network and transportation layers.

What's the point of the Internet of Things?

The point of the Internet of things is to collect more salable data on you, push more ads at you everywhere you look, and monitor every aspect of your life for productization and law enforcement purposes.

Google isn't doing this for your benefit.

Own a Cisco modem or wireless gateway? It might be owned by someone else, too

Thanks, NSA!

Of course they knew about this but said nothing so they could exploit it themselves.