Posts by swampdog 361 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2011
Therein lies the problem. Very few of us know how IT forensics works. I'd go so far as to say even "IT forensics professionals" don't know how it works. Sure, someone could pay me to image a disk and subsequently analyse it but I'd make a most unsuitable expert witness for either side: I'd be full of "ifs" and "buts". I couldn't in all conscience, sit there on the stand and say categorically (in terms a jury would understand) that fact X is true/false.
How does one image a hard drive when the computer is using a ram disk? Do you keep the machine on or do you kill the power? Unless I was present at the arrest (and even then I'd only have half a clue) I'd have no idea if this drive image is a crock, or possibly even fabricated.
I have no answers except to pose this: ?is all computer crime a diversion? Like life, crime involves money and power: better to chase that rather than one of the many tools which facilitate it.
Bit too heavy for friday :-(
Indeed. An engineer friend of mine once confessed while she was doing the beast with two backs.. her two house-cats used to compete to see which could leap off a wardrobe onto the fella's back. Cats don't tend to be clever but they are "savvy". After being batted away numerous times (by leaping too soon) the feline interlopers finally figured at which point they could land on his back and him not care, which would ruin it for her because while he was doing his (ahem) face she'd be staring into the unblinking eyes of a tabby or a devon rex.
I suggested a water pistol by the bed. Works a treat.
1) Have you ever, ever been unlucky? My road tax fell off my van minutes after renewing it. Camera. Instant fine.
2) An MOT is a certificate that the vehicle is roadworthy. If it ain't moving? You might as well lump it into (1) as a tax.
3) Ever had a car crushed? Sorry, it wasn't registered as insured in your name.. talk to fob off dept.
Under your new rules.. am I not allowed a party? Someone left a car on my back lawn. It wasn't taxed. No idea if it had an mot. Who's responsible? I waited a couple of weeks, applied for the reg docs then asked local plod: "fuck it, it's yours mate".
The above is an extreme example of "a parent may be in hospital". Get a grip!
I'd agree in principle though I suspect you must be young. Decades ago before "sorn" I had a traffic warden attempt to lift the cover off an off-road car. PCSO's and wardens are the same mentality. We knew he would be back. My mate owned a 1939 US army comms truck, one of those six wheel jobbies. If you were lucky it would crank raw fuel down the sidepipes then fire up. Told you to move mate.
ANPR only works for the masses. Buy a number plate with my reg on it and I'm in a whole load of shit.
Too right. My citizen 120D harks from when it was attached to an atari st. It's been flashing "out of paper" for over a decade. I just realised. It's about two years older than my marriage.
All hail the 120D, best way to tell the power has gone. 120D head sweeps! :-)
Am I going mad? Dot matrix don't have drivers. You fling stuff out of "the printer port". There may be some idiot who wrote a java app to map 7/8/9/24 pin onto (whatever) single/double/quad strike modes of various printers but it would be as useful as hens teeth in a bucket of sludge. Applications understood the nuances of various dot matrix, never the OS.
Well, it started with the labour govt just after the war. They created the NHS and the state pension. The idea was everybody would pay a bit out of their wages until they retired then they'd have a guaranteed pension. Well that worked well, from ringfenced (*) to "oo" (**) to "borrow against it(***)".
(*) govt
(**) govt
(***) govt
There is so much wasted. The NHS has screwed up my prescription every time for the last 5 months. Put two IT systems together (NHS + Asda) and what you get is a blame game. Extra appointments to the doc just to sort our paperwork. Doc should be curing folk.
Combine both those "practice manager" numpties and throw them at my mother. She's happily retired living all on her own. She was.
Around about the time I was born (60's) my father stopped being a "lawyer". All I know (from my mother) is he came back one day from court, fuming. There was was some miscarriage of justice and he could do nothing about it. He was so pissed off, he left his job & never did criminal work again.
"son", "never trust a lawyer". I can add to that..
Never put down to malice that which can be put down to stupidity.
Never put off until tomorrow that which can be but off until next week.
..uber are just one in a long line. For decades, all sides of the pond - those T&C's have been gibberish to normal folk.
It's barely even possible any more, to avoid the T&C's, even if you pay cash. Mind you, this new autumn of millennials can't handle cash. On the up-side I've had two cheap Mc'D meals this week. Seems they don't understand £2 coins.
I've given up with mine. She once had a bad experience as a budding typist on (what would have been) an old IBM twin floppy wordstar box. She then, as a budding author, purchased an amstrad PCW ??? (I forget) with a daisy wheel and one floppy. Oh, if only it had had two. She got muddled swapping disks.
Someone gave her one of those motorola (x-files era) flip top phones. When it died I bought her a samsung gt-xx (gingerbread) smart-phone. "Ah! Computer!" she thought and promptly went to tesco to buy a cheapo phone on their tariff that has a flip-top (because that would work the same). It didn't so she doesn't use that either. I suggested the internet. I offered to pay for it. Nope. Demon spawn!
If ever I plugged my laptop into one of her tv's, she'd bin it.
Lifts! :-(
Tsk. Place where I worked the lift hated me. It would stop two inches above the floor, partially open the doors then go out of service. I could hit the sensors on the doors to make then open fully then they'd close - out of service. Call facilities. Two days later it would be working, for a bit.
I discovered, if I did the above but prevented the doors from closing, once out, they would open fully - out of service. I could then bounce up & down into/outof the lift to make it sink back those two inches to level with the floor. Back in service. I also noticed the lift would be more likely to misbehave as the day went on, more specifically after lots of use. No need to call facilities for a two day wait.
This went on for months. The fluid in the hydraulic ram was corrupted. Perhaps if they'd given facilities "intelligence" they wouldn't have always come to look at the problem 6am when the ram was cold.
"The only thing I have seen that might do a better job on an intruding cat would be a Jack Russell."
Depends on the "russell". I've not seen one for years. Back when I did, 50% are cute fluffy things, the other were rats and sometimes needed a kick to disengage their teeth from your shin.
..has just triggered a memory from when I was a kid. Some might say four decades ago although my wife would say yesterday.
Where has all the white dog poo gone? Is there a special "wdp" dog that no-one buys these days or was there something special which happened back then to make standard dog poo (sdp) into "wdp".
Seems like a plan; after all, these moaners must be very boney. They obviously can't use plastic because I bet there's enough ingredients in a credit card to make both camps apoplectic. Tap 'n' bonk is obviously out for the same reason. Keeping with linen implies cotton and we can't be allowed to think "plantation". Metal money has all the old fashioned industrial baggage so it does beg the question..
These people can't have reproduced in order to be here today. Logically, they must have had their minds altered since birth because otherwise it requires holding a contradictory life view. No sane person would do that. Thus they are either mad (so off to the loony bin with them) or they've had their minds tampered with by aliens.
There's one like that on the A611 (dual) off M1 J27. It's fun. In the evening you can sit at the roundabout lights (at "the beginning") with a boy racer. Give it some beans off the lights and boy(*) racer will go tearing off up the hill. Now lift and stay at 70mph. Meanwhile boy racer has hit the top of the hill, triggered the "slow down" sign and the lights go red. You can go sailing through the lights at 70mph just as they change to green & he's stationary. He can't catch you before the next roundabout when more restrictive speed limits come into force. They hate it!
(*) and girl. They're not immune.
Cable Modem: EuroDOCSIS 3.0 Compliant
Boot Code Version: PSPU-Boot 1.0.20.1391
Software Version: V1.01.11
Hardware Version: 1.03
(*) Caveat. The only thing plugged into it is a physical cable going to all my own kit internally - ie: dns/dhcp/wireless is all done internally.
I couldn't agree more. I was once tasked with making an aix system "linuxy". The first issue was to build a reliable gcc because the freeware gcc would crap out on large builds, spuriously producing object files with no code inside. Now, they could have given temporarily given me a (then new) unprovisioned power 6 box (destined to become a new oracle server) but instead some wag with the ear of those above trotted out that "give the devs crap" twaddle. I got instead, a standalone dual core power 5 box with 1G ram and iirc it would take upward of 40 minutes to build gcc 4.0.2 - except it didn't because of the afore-mentioned freeware gcc bug. There was about a weeks worth of debugging to get an initial, reliable gcc built but actual time spent was more than two months.
The NHS one drives me nuts. The landline is unplugged due to spam. I disabled voicemail due to spam. I block unknown callers due to spam. I told my surgery until I'm blue in the face to release caller-id before they call (I know they can, a nurse did it once & ditto in a couple of other circumstances).
My theory is not patient confidentially, rather they haven't got a proper telephone setup. They don't "nat" through to a single phone number which comes back to the front desk. You call 'em back on that released number & you're straight back to the phone that called you. I think that's the real reason why.
We had to remove a door which opened the wrong way in our house and being of the older persuasion it was nigh-on solid wood. Bit of 2by4 plus some large shelf brackets and instant desk.
There's a self assembly plywood computer desk circa late 1980's buried under some dust. It has bowed about 3 inches and all it has on it is an Atari ST, a couple of ST monitors and one of those ST "slab" hard disks: 100mb £400. I find it real hard to chuck stuff because I don't like waste. Next to it, the ST printer (Citizen 120D) is still powered, attached to my old firewall (FreeBSD 4.x) box and has been flashing "out of paper" for over nearly two decades.
Nothing wrong with an old door! :--)
My wife's cat, when I first met her (the wife that is*) used to treat a litter tray like a dog burying a bone in a sandpit. In compensation for there never being any litter in his tray he took to using any coiled up wire he chanced apon: failing that, a pair of shoes.
I suggested we get a cat-flap pronto. Unfortunately our new abode was a first floor flat so I ended up constructing a complicated climbing frame so he could get in and out.
(*) She wasn't my wife when I first met her. That would be a wierd.
Not necessarily. I got a littering ticket in the post. All that was on it was the time and registration plus "threw cigarette butt from car window". Registration was wrong. You'd think that would be the end of it. Nope. Just got another ticket with the registration "corrected" to match mine. The time put me in the middle of gridlocked rush hour half a mile from the supermarket I went to, where (luckily) I still had the receipt for less than ten minutes after the offence. Not possible to even drive from the offence to the supermarket in/at that time, let alone buy all those goods and get through the checkout.
Then I just get blanked by them, leaving me with "pay the fine" or "pay double later" or "take it to court and pay more plus expenses". Given that it would have cost me a f*ck sight more to travel all the way back to a court appearance, I wussed out and stumped up.
I am still annoyed about it and it happened about four years ago. I am not so annoyed as when I got fined for failure to display road tax. New disc fell off the windscreen. It was on the floor only minutes yet in that time some twat spotted it. That was over twenty years ago and I still fume about that one.
Kudos to anyone who has the tenacity to fight back though!
Many years ago I saw a generator in Aldi stores for either £129 or £229 (I forget). It just begged me to purchase it but my missus forbade me. Admittedly she did have the logical high-ground in that it would be useless to us but she has never been sat drinking beer in the back of a small boat..
..where the guy had constructed a home-made generator out of a Colt Suffolk mower engine, a fan-belt and an alternator, all mounted on a piece of wood. As we clamber aboard my mate catches the throttle and before you can say "f*ck me it's disappeared over the side", it had vibrated itself off the deck into the river.
My home UPS was killed by a couple of (for want of a better way to describe it) "bullet" power outages: On/Off many times a second. The UPS couldn't switch fast enough and if I was lucky the servers would power off. The unlucky servers would be in an even bigger mess.
I never scoped my UPS. It was enough to plug a mains light bulb into it and see it flickering so much it was only just one shade brighter than yellow. I've never replaced it because we still get such outages. Plus the fact they scare me. I still have a scar from a 6v VW Beetle battery!
I had a wierd one with clonezilla. My laptop hd was failing so I replaced it with an ssd to give it a new lease of life. The ssd is half the size. It's amazing how much crud you can get rid of when you decide to.
Restored to the ssd and lost eth0. Repeat. Ditto. Eventually decided to sit down and look at the problem which turned out to the the selinux security context on a single file.
# chcon --reference=./ifcfg-lo ifcfg-eth0
This is irritating for the fact I can't restore it to a VM. The laptop has a bonkers partitioning scheme which the vmware bios won't grok: blank - nada bios "he no work!" so I'll never know if it was a one-off glitch in clonezilla or (more likely) a final spanner from the dying hd.
Sometimes wierd shit(*) just happens.
..you won't get it back. At one authority we used my own gigabit switch because some fool had decided to save some cash by reusing a defunct server room netgear 10/100 switch before the gigabit wall socket. We were to transfer a lot of data over the weekend so in went my switch. Friday afternoon, we set the job off and left for the weekend.
Come Monday, the weekend staff had inserted themselves into my switch.
So, by his reckoning the problem has been around for at least some 300 years. Govt's have come & gone and very generally speaking life has improved since that time. As a historian he must know that life improved less well for those under a draconian thumb.
They (the management) were all for cancelling the Electronics A level college course I attended after the first year because one student dropped out. I managed to wangle an unemployed (self taught) friend of mine onto it by the pair of us blatantly lying about his qualifications: he had none so we had to! The two lecturers and the other students were all in on it. The former because of their pay, the latter because we'd have been stuffed for getting into university.
You don't just cancel a course just because the numbers have dropped below an arbitrary threshold!
Needless to say, that kind of shady management got the college where it is today. College -> Poly -> University.
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