Posts by Halfmad

It's time to track people's smartphones to ensure they self-isolate during this global pandemic, says WHO boffin

Re: Makes no sense

You need to build that list first, good luck brave soldier.

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

You win the hero medal, which bunker do we deliver it to?

Vimeo freezes accounts after malware hunts for logins, coronavirus map app infected with evil code, and more

Dig deep, dig quickly

There's a lot of normally bad news being buried at the moment.. It's a good time to own up to stupid mistakes over customer data.

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Re: Popcorn time

Taxpayers will as we'll foot the bill.

Our 'solution is killing us in a number of areas' IBM said about doomed £175m Co-Op Insurance project

Having dealt with both these companies from an IT perspective nothing about this failure or the cost of it is surprising. They honestly have no scooby what they are doing.

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Seems insane

Staff have proven their worth, saved the company from going under and the response is to dump them and outsource.

This will come back to bite Maersk, we all know that but some execs will get bonuses for this - shareholders should be up in arms if they had any sense. Any repeat of the issues and that company is gone.

Rotherwood Healthcare AWS bucket security fail left elderly patients' DNR choices freely readable online

Re: Basically, we will share this data with anyone we want.

Basically " you are our asset to use as we want."

The Ghost of Windows 10 Past shrinks back as Microsoft's axeman tiptoes ever closer

Re: Windows stability fix

If you do need to use Windows. The last thing you want is to never get updates as you'll be ever more vulnerable to actual malware, rather than just the malicious OS itself.

Credit Karma's enriched: Turbo Tax daddy Intuit snaps up personal finance platform for $7bn

Re: Don't like this outfit

Really? Duchess?

You've watched too many episodes of Archer.

Huawei unfolds latest shot at the phone-tablet hybrid with reinforced hinge and reassuringly Xs-sive price

Target market?

Not sure there is one, I don't know anyone who's said "I wish my phone was just a bit bigger, I'd happily pay twice as much with a greater chance of faults occuring".

Not even sure the local "look at me" crowd want one of these at this point.

Don't use natwest.co.uk for online banking, Natwest bank tells baffled customer

Better than ours, about 10 years ago we were told we had to go into a branch and meet with a mortgage specialist. When we did they opened up the same page on the back site we had, they then called the public mortgage centre number and handed me the phone..

To this day I have no idea why we were asked to go in, it was a waste of 3 hours out of work.

We know what you did last summer: MGM's hotel spinoff lost 10.7m guest records and now they're on hacker forums

The important question remains unanswered.

Was the confidentiality of customer data of utmost important to them and did they take information security very seriously. Without those hollow words I won't be reassured.

Oi, Cisco! Who left the 'high privilege' login for Smart Software Manager just sitting out in the open?

Re: Perspective

you are making a lot of assumptions on how these are configured in different businesses.

Low right, high risk - this shouldn't have happened.

'An issue of survival': Why Mozilla welcomes EU attempts to regulate the internet giants

Point they are probably making is that this is for discussing the topic, not the appearance of those in it.

While I may or may not agree with you around her spectacles, it's not the right forum for that debate. Let's stick to the content of the article itself rather than go down the tabloid route?

Cache me if you can: HDD PC sales collapse in Europe as shoppers say yes siree to SSD

Re: Define primary

I only have SSDs and M.2 drives in my PCs but have a NAS with plenty of rust in rotation on it as my pet hate with the newer drives is you generally don't get any warning before they are dead.. at least with mechanical ones you'd typically start having performance issues or bad block warnings.

Tutanota cries 'censorship!' after secure email biz blocked – for real this time – in Russia

Censorship, de-platforming.. increasingly common in the UK and USA sadly.

Steve Jobs, executives shot down top Apple engineers' plea to design their own server CPU – latest twist in legal battle over chip upstart Nuvia

Re: Foot meet gun, gun meet foot

To be vaguely fair, Apple if nothing else have innovated how they package and market products to the masses. When I repaired apple products in the 90s it was pretty niche, outside of a few Macs in schools and at designers there were precious few using them.

iMacs, iPods and clamshell ibooks changed that rapidly. I can't think of any equally rapid rise in market share other than perhaps Samsung and Huawei in terms of hardware.

Tens of millions of biz Dell PCs smacked by privilege-escalation bug in bundled troubleshooting tool

Re: Remind me again:

I've never, at home or work failed to wipe and reinstall/image Dells. HPs, Lenovo etc. Hell we even did this with iMacs back in the 90s.

It's just good to know you are starting from a specific point with all software that's deployed known. I don't trust vendors not to sneak stuff on.

B-but it doesn't get viruses! Not so, Apple fanbois: Mac malware is growing faster than nasties going for Windows

Re: It's an obvious target, no?

Look, I use to repair Macs in the 90s and early 00s. I like Macs but that's a pile of garbage you've written. Either you lack awareness with regard to equipment specification and performance or you, like many others had your heart set on a Mac from the start and were just trying to justify it to yourself.

It's incredibly rare for Mac to be better value in terms of hardware than any other PC vendor, the only one who occasionally is worse is Alienware.

Arm gets edgy: Tiny neural-network accelerator offered for future smart speakers, light-bulbs, fridges, etc

Re: Oh No...

Legislation, trust and crossing fingers that not security researches proves they are doing it?

These truly are the end times for TLS 1.0, 1.1: Firefox hopes to 'eradicate' weak HTTPS standard by blocking it

Re: @RM Myers - "We decided on a global fallback"

I don't think they care, browsers are increasingly aiming at home users now IMHO.

Time to patch your lightbulb? Researchers demonstrate Philips Hue exploit

Re: It only takes one

Get your free Smart Meter today

(paid for by you through taxation and billing.)

Researchers reckon 500k PCs infested with malware after dodgy downloads install even more nasties from Bitbucket

Re: Instant karma

or photoshop elements if you want something more like actual photoshop but without much of the stuff you never used anyway.

Affinity looks like it does more than elements though, good spot.

'Windows Vista' spotted doing a whoopsie over EE's signage

Re: Why use Windows?

That's just poor system management, there's no reason for it to do that. Assuming anyone actually has responsibility for making sure the systems are updated etc.

Yahoo! hack! payout! nearly! approved! and! the! question! is! how! to! spend! 60! cents!?

The irony..

of having to pony up more personal information to get compensation for a loss of it.

If only 3 in 100,000 cyber-crimes are prosecuted, why not train cops to bring these crooks to justice once and for all, suggests think-tank veep

The problem is these days we don't have politicians thinking long term, they can't see past the next election so long term strategy is out of the window on pretty much every area of governance.

If it's not going to be a good news story during the next campaign then they see no benefit in it.

Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard

Re: Gold plated cables

iPhones are good value - if you keep them long enough and sell them before they become bricks, like every other so called smart phone.

WTF, EFS? Experts warn Windows encryption could spawn nasty new ransomware

Re: This fails to surprise me...

and not having domain admins browsing the internet using IE 11.

Capita Education Services accidentally spaffs email addresses in Helpdesk snafu

Re: Oh for fucks sake

Honestly because adults shouldn't need this sort of common sense check.

Sometimes we need staff to be clever, or work elsewhere.. like Capita.

Hospital hacker spared prison after plod find almost 9,000 cardiac images at his home

Re: Hacker?

hacker

/ˈhakə/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1.a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data.

2.a person or thing that hacks or cuts roughly

Clue is there in number 1. Just because he wasn't wearing a hoodie doesn't mean he's not a hacker.

Unlocking news: We decrypt those cryptic headlines about Scottish cops bypassing smartphone encryption

Re: Just wait until after Indyref 2

Nah they'll be shut down as we won't have any money to pay for them.

Problems at Oracle's DynDNS: Domain registration customers transferred at short notice, nameserver records changed

Sounds to me as if they wanted all of the accounts gone before the end of the quarter, so **** customers we need a clear quarter without you lot so we can get on with the firing of staff.

Why is a 22GB database containing 56 million US folks' personal details sitting on the open internet using a Chinese IP address? Seriously, why?

Re: Lord Almighty.

Also the security guy could well have been pointing and shouting about this for years, from my experience..

UK data watchdog kicks £280m British Airways and Marriott GDPR fines into legal long grass

Re: What's the point?

Why have a regulator and properly fund it?

£2M a year is a limit they should not have..

The Six Million Dollar Scam: London cops probe Travelex cyber-ransacking amid reports of £m ransomware demand, wide-open VPN server holes

Linux has it's own problem, underlying issues here are a culture of not funding and/or caring about information and cyber security.

If they did at most they'd be back up and running already and saying "we lost X amount of data, sorry ICO".

Instead they are still down, still clutching at straws and in PR damage limitation mode.

Intel teases NUC-leheads with new desktop-class graphics systems and a fast i9 CPU

Re: Displacement??

It's a good tactic when you don't want to compare actual performance though..

Autonomy did count some hardware sales as marketing costs, ex-finance bod tells High Court

Costing HP a lot of money this.

Apparently at least 35ml of Magenta each day per lawyer.

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

Almost guaranteed to have no patching, no contingencies, poor backups (or limited) and potentially outsourced chunk of IT.

The fact their external points were unpatched and poorly configured is a massive red flag, basically they don't test their own stuff, so that means realistically they now need to pay over the odds for someone to do all that for them, to tell them what they don't know - that they don't manage their systems or understand the risks they are running.

Watch as Senior Management don't get sacked or resign over this.

Re: Flabbergasted

It's not change management if you don't change anything, ever!

Say GDP-aaaR: UK's Information Commissioner pours £275k fine into London pharmacy's teaspoon

Re: exposed to rain, doesn't mean they aren't readable

On 100% of the paper?

It's something the El'Reg readers are totally inconsistent on. They may be experts on database tech, auditing etc but the basics - go right over their heads.

They didn't even list an estimate for the number of people, that means it was all binned prior to ICO investigation, or the ICO completely failed to push them on it. Either of these is bad for the data subjects.

I 100% guarantee the average punter off the street would have been able to get some identifiable information from that pile of papers, it's not as if it was submerged in a swirling swimming pool.

Re: RTFM

I did read it - exposed to rain, doesn't mean they aren't readable.

We've had incidents involving sewage and still managed to get information and contact those who's documents were affected.

Unknown number of people?

Nonsense, nobody, ICO included bothered to check.

Just shows how seriously they take it, if they don't know - they can't inform those involved. That's a failing both by the company and the ICO.

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

Re: Windows 3.1

Much like our infrastructure team who used the phrase "transient network issues" for literally anything they worked on, whether it was network based or not, it was always TNI.

Heck the time they turned off the server room air con by mistake was also put down to it..

Re: To be fair ...

and in the 90s the engineering firm I was an apprentice at didn't realise the one A0 plotter we had was business critical despite everyone using it day in, day out. Until of course it packed in during a large print run.

The solution? Should at the lowly engineering apprentice who's somehow ended up doing all of the IT for the company..

Some things never change!

Hold my Bose, we can do premium: Sennheiser chucks pricey wireless cans at travellers

Re: oh no!

USB C isn't just more convenient it's better in almost every way tbh!

Want to live long and prosper? Avoid pirated, malware-laden Star Wars free vid streams – and pay to watch instead

Re: I'm safe

Lucas didn't involve his (ex?) wife with the script for these and she's the only reason the original trilogy wasn't a complete bloody mess.

Log us out: Private equity snaffles Lastpass owner LogMeIn

Ouch

Time to look for alternatives then.. there's an el'reg article that needs a 2020 version!

Half a billion here, half a billion there – pretty soon you're talking real money: US Congress earmarks $425m for 2020 election security

Re: Just use paper

That's the thing I don't get, if they just said "we're going back to paper for elections" it'd be far more secure straight away. Only issue is training staff, having premises available etc but that should be relatively easy as those machines had to be placed somewhere for the vote anyway.

US elections always seem to have issued caused by technology..

WhatsApp chaps rapped for crap app group chat zap: Infosec bods find a way to nuke messages, fix issued

Re: Why?

Raising Arizona

Genuinely thought he was very good in that.

Valuable personal info leaks from Facebook – not Zuck selling it, unencrypted hard drives of staff data stolen

Re: Serious compliance problem

If it included a single EU citizen then yes it did.