Posts by The Dark Side Of The Mind (TDSOTM)

Cybercrook claims to be selling infrastructure info about three major US utilities

Re: You don't store your TV in your front garden overnight.

Because proper security is hard and expensive, while convenience and speed are so cheap nowadays.

Around 1,000 systems compromised in ransomware attack on Romanian water agency

Systemic failure(s)

The Romanian National Waters Agency has had another blunder put under its belt recently - they failed to coordinate some maintenance work that left hundreds of thousands people without drinking water for a couple of weeks. This had extensive coverage in local media, at least.

This last one, coming at that short of a time, might (just might) be a coincidence.

The government still has to clean up on the management of various agencies, state run companies and other structures.

While there are a few very successful steps taken to date, there's a lot more to do, and the political climate is not encouraging.

Full disclosure: I'm born, raised and living in Romania.

Microsoft drops surprise Windows Server patch before weekend downtime

I saw what you did here.

Microsoft 364 trips over its own network settings in North America

"We will be using this incident to train our AI systems to ensure it doesn't happen again in the same way".

FTFY

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

Re: reading the 'g' as a '9'

That would confuse my password manager too :D

3.7M breach notification letters set to flood North America's mailboxes

Re: Fines are too easy..

I would add those non-critical entities that collect "secure" PID like SSN, ID/driver/passport numbers. That kind of information can land a person in very nasty situations if leaked. That it doesn't get into the headlines doesn't mean it's not a real thing.

Otherwise, I agree that stakes for data collectors (especially for those compelled to do KYC) must be set a lot higher.

We all live in a virtual machine, a virtual machine, a virtual machine

What could possibly go wrong?

Icon for clarity.

I recall a time when military used to develop their own solutions, highly redundant and as safe as possible for human designed stuff... many of those solutions found their use in business and public use.

FOSS was, and it still is, a huge reservoir of innovation and ingenuity that can be easily taped and used, with contributions eventualy finding their way out of military purpose.

Subscription licensing should be allowed only for business or private use, where the landscape is more dynamic than in military and where there are less time based constraints.

I'll take my lead padded coat, helmet and respirator.

The smiling figure of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds might work too.

Windows Security Update turns smooth NDI streams into jittery messes

Re: Windows updates fail so often, Microsoft qualify as a threat.

AI writes 1/3 of new M$ code, then testing is left to the users.

I don't envy my upstream support... though sometimes they seem to behave like what we're cursing here.

Italian hotels breached en masse since June, government confirms

Debating centralized vs decentralized ID systems

Establishing the identity of a person (be it either natural or legal) is a fundamental requirement for most forms of social organization.

The real debate here is who sits at the root of the identification process, who manages what additional data associated with the identity and who has the right to request specific information details and for what purpose.

For natural persons, like it or not, the government under the jurisdiction the person was born, bears the responsibility to register and maintain the identity. Having that as a starting point, I can't imagine a truly decentralized system of identity. I might be wrong, of course, and I am open to change my mind, given solid proof that this is possible.

For legal persons, the identity is also established by the government of jurisdiction, based on a foundational legal document referring other identifiable persons (natural and/or legal). Here too, a decentralized identity system seems unlikely to me.

The big elephant in the room is the system's design that has to be able to prove an identity without disclosing enough information to duplicate it for unauthorized purposes.

Here GDPR is a good starting point, but it's implementation is a major hurdle for many organizations.

Bringing politics into discussion only complicates things by orders of magnitude.

Blockchain as technology seems to be fit for the task, but the foundational block remains with governmental structure (federated or otherwise).

We already have a lot of building blocks, we just need to agree on what and how to build. I think that's the biggest hurdle.

Microsoft pushes Pull print, so you don't have to dash to the printer to grab the 'Fire everyone' memo

Centralized printing

I've had Canon SecurePrint at a company that I work for and it ran pretty reliable. Switched to Xerox printers and another centralized printing solution hosted in the company's cloudy premises and issues started to flow... after 5 years, the solution is getting more stable, but still throws a fit from time to time...

M$ seems to reinvent the wheel again, but the number of corners is still pretty low on theirs.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

I will just drop that here: "Outlook" was pronounced as "Out Of Luck" in some communities I have been... it might be still.

Re: Over the 20 years I have been here...

Closed source drivers lost many hours of my sleep too... I feel your pain.

My grandfather used a mainframe built with discrete bipolar transistors, ferrite memory (each bit with its own ferrite torus) and stored data and software on punched cards. He was a civil construction engineer.

I've touched that kind of hardware (still functional in 1991) with awe and reverence during my formative years as technician... but they were already on their last breaths that year already, even in my poor (at that time) corner of the world. Minicomputers built with a mix of TTL and MOS ICs were the backbone of my practical training... and at home I was playing on a ZX Spectrum compatible, learning Z80 assembler (just for the tricks it allowed on that machine)...

Still, about 12-13 years to retirement, and still confined to using windblows at work and at home... but at least my (already 10 y.o.) desktop runs only Xubuntu and I keep a couple of old laptops even older on the same distro to keep al those old joints lubricated :)

Ninite to win it: How to rebuild Windows without losing your mind

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

While LTSC versions might "buy" some years of slack, it's generally better to upgrade your PC if you're not technically inclined (or interested) to use Linux or BSD... Just sell the old hardware to those interested after you backed-up your precious data (and eventually licenses for some wares), invest in a upgradeable system (minimum 2 slots for DIMMs), buy the most affordable license for your OS (Oberlicht System) that covers your needs and move on...

In this great article (and in the comments) a Windows user can find enough hints to do a painless upgrade (software wise).

The penguinistas, the home-lab afficionados, the tinkerers - they will be happy to take that perfectly working hardware at a perfectly reasonable price to give it many years of use.

Bear in mind, though, that old hardware is less energy efficient than the newer one.

As always, the truth is out there, usually in some middle place ;)

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Re: BTDTGTTS

I wish the powers that be will just consider FOSS...

Some [and/or] most will drink the poison and ask for more...

#meow2

Re: ...better choices

Errata: please read "cockwobble" instead of "cockwomble"...

I wish you the best of luck... and your resident BOFH[s] too...

Just imagine being asked to run SAP [not Hanna] on a not-Redmond-bound machine used by a prominent managing committee..

Re: Resistance is futile

You might have forgotten the Cylons.

Re: Recall: Law Enforcement & Class Action Lawyer Wet Dream

Purity tests will be available soon...

How datacenters use water – and why kicking the habit is nearly impossible

What about re-using waste heat?

DCs are industrial assets that output "compute" products and waste heat. Why not using that waste heat to reduce energy (and water) consumption in another industrial or residential domain? There was a short article somewhere that described a (small?) DC providing heat to the municipal heating system nearby. AFAIK the silicon wafers are extremely energy intensive to create, requiring sizable chunks of power just to melt the raw materials... Similarly, metallurgy and cement production could benefit from direct heat contribution to their processes...

To me it looks like the Capex is a major driver of decisions regarding the design and placement of the DCs, while Opex is to be transferred into the price of the final product, regardless of the long-term consequences.

I could rant along those lines a lot, but it would be another waste of water and energy to power the DCs and infrastructure needed to provide me with such a marvelous fondleslab :P

Twigstats software sheds light on mysteries of Europe's old-school migrators

Re: Possible reasons for invasions not causing language changes in Britain

Vikings are the *masters* of a powerful text editor.

FTFY

Honored guest Bork visits Warsaw, Poland

Re: Windows never worked right

I remember reading somewhere (maybe here) that "Microsoft Works" is the greatest oxymoron. It was in a time when Bill was at the helm...

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Best of two is a melange

A Mikrotik with RouterOS at least Level6 and a bunch of OpenWRT One as access points... plus a person with decent knowledge to bind them all...

Google Cloud shows it can break things for lots of customers – not just one at a time

Re: intended to shutdown an unused network control component

This reminds me of the immortal words of Yoggi Berra (to Boo Boo): "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Re: 800MB

Or the 48k available 'cause 16k were ROM... Because CP/M wasn't available until Spectrum 3+ for pedestrians like me... and by the time it was available in my corner of the world, the world moved to 16 bits...

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Old proven ways with modern approaches

Smarter persons than me already mentioned inertial and celestial systems, as well as known ground references (optical and/or radio based). Adding signal analysis (polarization, power, timed variation and directionality) would be feasible with modern computational means.

I remember that gravimetric maps were considered "strategic and restricted data" on grounds that they were used to at least help ICBMs (and other flying contraptions) to get a reasonable "fix" on the map/path*.

With enough motivation, the industries will find solutions. Politics might interfere a while, for better or for the worse, but with proper incentives, education and training, it's achievable.

I'm an old fart that remembers the time before Internet was available to mere mortals and GPS electronics was carried in a pick-up truck, so I might have an optimistic bias here.

Top Linux distros drop fresh beats

Re: Style is optional

Try the solution(s) in https://mxlinux.org/wiki/xfce/changing-border-size-with-xfce4-window-manager/

It's not straightforward but it might work.

Google dumps 12,000 employees after project probe

Re: Working from Home might have a big advantage

The advantage might be less than one expects, as office buildings often have more efficient HVAC and lighting than average household can afford these days. Also, a lot of trades involve expensive specialized equipment that can't be easily and/or securely lugged to employee's home.

Sure, for plain administrative tasks, working from home *can* be an option, but the reduction on emissions argument must factor in the impact of energy consumption and utilities at the residential level. That would make an interesting study.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Bit ridiculous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_ite_domum

Re: Bit ridiculous

"1. Isn't God female"

Helloween stated that about that same time...

https://youtu.be/15G7Lpbidos?t=22

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: cattle-prod category

Cattle-prod category: users that went through lecture, visual and practical training and still miss-report what they actually did when complaining that the product/system doesn't work.

Sadly, you have cattle-prod category users almost everywhere, with slightly elevated chances to find them in middle to upper manglement.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: It's often an IT decision made to save IT $$$

It's often an upper manglement decision made to save $$$ to improve the bottom line after talking with a M$ trained $ale$per$on... IT receives a note that their budget was reduced by 30% (or more).

Zero-day vuln in Microsoft Office: 'Follina' will work even when macros are disabled

Nice one. Our "creative" marketing and "digital" departments might be a bit ruffled by that, though.

Given the fact that the alternative is dire, I might not care this time about the "business' views".

Have a cold one on my tab :)

Ransomware encrypts files, demands three good deeds to restore data

Re: I couldn't have said it better myself...

... but I could:

Just wipe the disk and install BSD/Linux... No need to "uninstall".

Supercomputer to train 176-billion-parameter open-source AI language model

Re: I reckon the first 40 years are the worst.

Only the years from 5th to 20th are to be feared. First 5 are giggles and obsessive care, then after 20 they usually get more or less independent... and less of a nuisance. Also, everything that you do (or don't do) in the 5-20 interval will be used at least once against you at some point more than once (if they survive the first time).

I'm a terrible parent, probably. Time will tell. The same goes with all training models (time and telling), albeit seemingly a bit faster.

Cisco inferno: Networking giant reveals three 10/10 rated critical router bugs

Re: Here is a bug fix....

Meraki is all nice and cozy until you get the bill(s). And they get you by the ovoids with licensing their dashboard... at least yearly.

Research finds consumer-grade IoT devices showing up... on corporate networks

Re: Depends what else is in the dishwasher

Fingers from undisclosed owner, stuck in RJ-45 ports.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Re: I'll continue to use good grammar whenever I can.

Good grammar deserves a pint.

In space, no one can hear cyber security professionals scream

Re: "If it asks whether you want to play a game, may I recommend you select 'no'"

If you accidentally select 'yes', then make sure you choose to play 'tic-tac-toe' instead of 'Go' or 'Chess'.

Windows 11 will roll out from October 5 as Microsoft hypes new hardware

Re: disable the TPM in the bios?

Most mid to big corps are making heavy use of TPM (mostly for Bitlocker, but not only).

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Re: I've lost my google mojo.

Just don't google it. Many others did and lost too much time sifting through advertising and youtube links.

Re: Consumption

Most of EU (if not all) states have VAT.

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

Of all the names...

"Nicolas Papernot, co-author of the paper and an AI security researcher"

Paper NOT Nicolas?

Is it broken yet? Is it? Is it? Ooh that means I can buy a sparkly, new but otherwise hard-to-justify replacement!

Re: Don't recycle that display yet

"You only have one????"

I have only one now because I was giving the other ones away as gifts to some techie friends... But that was around 10-12 years ago.

Autoforwarding in Exchange Online falls over due to a problematic spam rule deployment

Re: Yeah

With only 5 years to catch up with yours and noticing that today is Friday... have a cold one from me.

At least we can glimpse more bearable days ahead of us.

Boffins improve on tech that extracts DC power from ambient Wi-Fi

Re: Proof of concept

Oh, Casio... The devices they make are so underrated... I love their reliability and (often apparent) simplicity.

Your private data has been nabbed: Please update your life as soon as possible while we deflect responsibility

Re: Fake PII FTW.

Even better, make it that of their competitor's MKTG/HR/CEO.

Scientists stumped by strange X-rays from Uranus

Re: Not to be confused with ...

Uranus, black holes, auroras and sunshine... What a funny sounding weekend!