Posts by pointyhairmanager

Bash on Windows. Repeat, Microsoft demos Bash on Windows

But it's not April 1 yet!

I would suggest some hack at el Reg pressed the "publish" button a few days too early?

TalkTalk CEO admits security fail, says hacker emailed ransom demand

Ignorance across the Board!

It is a telecoms company, so you would think there would be executive IT or technical presence on the board would you not. Or at least someone who might know something about the technology behind this (since the CEO obviously does not). Not so! Ms Harding's lamentable level of ignorance of all things technical seems to be echoed across the board - at least the executive board. The wider non-exec "jobs for the boys" board does include someone whose day job is being CTO for Nielson, but there seems to be no executive responsible for things technical. At least not in their job title.

It would not be quite so bad if this were the first time Talk Talk had been targeted and found wanting on the security front. But alas it is not as you can see earlier this year in http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/mar/14/talktalk-fraud-victim-compensation-data-theft-responsibility

If it turns out to be as bad as it seems, it is frankly time the ICO got serious with rogue companies like Talk Talk who either cannot or will not take the security of their customers' data seriously. And the CEO of this shambolic enterprise should surely be fired immediately: To lose one's data once is unfortunate; to lose it twice is careless.

Anatomy of OpenSSL's Heartbleed: Just four bytes trigger horror bug

Re: What is heartbeat used for?

It is really ping for TLS. If you have ever run an ssh terminal session and had it drop after 5 minutes of idleness, when you have forgotten to run a "ping localhost" or "watch date" you will know why.

The reason for variable sized packets (and such large packets) is allegedly to enable an application to use this protocol extension to find the maximum size of packets it can send along the connection without fragmentation.

Patent trolling cost the US $29bn in 2011

Just a Shakedown

The real hassle is that with lawyer costs of $200k - $1m facing you to get a summary dismissal (in Deleware at least) even if you *don't* infringe a patent (via the hideously expensive "discovery" process), it is very often in your interest to settle for several hundred thousand dollars as soon as you are served. So it is little more than a legal shakedown really.