Posts by Doctor Evil

Meet TeamT5, the Taiwanese infosec outfit taking on Beijing and defeating its smears

Heroes!

Texas judge demands lawyers declare AI-generated docs

Pot, meet Kettle?

"[...] Unbound by any sense of duty, honor, or justice, such programs act according to [...]"

Pretty much how every lawyer I've ever had to deal with has acted too ...

NASA names astronauts picked for next Artemis Moon test flight

"'proud, happy, or thrilled'

You sound like the astronauts' wives in Apollo 13, trying to hit the right reactions for the media."

I thought that line was ftom "The Right Stuff", but maybe I'm conflating the two. Both great films!

Re: what do you call...

"...a Canadian in space?"

A Cannaut

(sorry!)

Re: When the Apollo crews were always all white men

"Were those the "best available options"?"

No, of course not. They had some of the best available options (female mathematicians of colour) in the back room, doing the calculations that allowed those missions to succeed.

It's a crying shame that NASA didn't see fit to train one or two of them up and send them aloft (nothing would focus the mind more on getting the numbers right than also getting to ride along), but those were the times that were.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

Re: Autistic People too

Well, I don't have any knowledge of C+ (never heard of it, in fact). I only have C++, so right there I'm disqualified and I don't think I'll bother applying.

Who writes Linux and open source software?

Not bloody likely!

So, Mr. Vaughan-Nichols, you think Microsoft have changed their spots, do you? Tell me, what's this all about, then?

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/21/microsoft_office_count_update/

No, it's not my dad's Microsoft, because I'm old enough to be your dad and I was writing programs on punch cards before there was a Microsoft.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: So, his "genius" is mainly..

Upvoted for "duck-billed platitudes'. Well turned, sir!

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Re: Classical music calms?

"I would suggest a loop tape of something by Kylie Minogue, like Locomotion. A few times around of that ought to disperse the crowd..."

Yabut ... they don't want to repel everyone!

Truck-size asteroid makes one of the tightest fly-bys of Earth ever recorded

Re: Fortunately,

Dan Quayle? Really? I wouldn't have thought him capable of thinking. Golfing, yes, but thinking? Rationally? And coherently?

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: Laziness and impatience saves the day

Came here to say the same thing; upvoted you instead. Have one of these on me (maybe a Big Rock Trad?)

Re: Annnnnnnd...

"But even when I pay with cash, many retailers will ask for a mobile phone number. Well, they don't really ask, while staring at the register they intone "What's your mobile number?" in a demanding tone of voice that assumes compliance. I've noticed that people automatically comply. But when I respond "No", there's usually a bit of comic relief when they hesitate, frown at me, and say it's for their rewards program or something like that. After a brief argument they give up.?"

They want a number? Give them a number ... any old number you can make up on the spot: yours, varied by a single digit, or a completely unrelated string of the appropriate number of digits, or anything in between. There: request satisfied with no need for argument or raised blood pressure. No privacy violation either. And it's not as if they're going to immediately call or text the number to test it. The cashiers are given their script and have to follow it -- but feel free to salt their data. I've done it for years.

FAA grounds all US departures after NOTAM goes down

Re: Just after Patch Tuesday? Hmmm.

For the curious ...

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/initiatives/notam/what_is_a_notam/Pilots_NOTAM_primer_for_2021.pdf

Example (from the reference):

IAP LOS ANGELES INTL, Los Angeles, CA. RNAV (GPS) Y RWY 24L, AMDT 5... LPV DA 628/ HAT 505 ALL CATS, VISIBILITY ALL CATS RVR 6000. LNAV/VNAV DA 632/ HAT 509 ALL CATS. TEMPORARY CRANE 342 MSL 5513FT EAST OF RWY 24L (2016-AWP-6554-OE

Re: Just after Patch Tuesday? Hmmm.

"I'm betting a 2000s era IBM mainframe emulating a 1980s IBM mainframe running an IBM mainframe OS from the 60s with an app written in System360 Assembly"

And if you've ever actually read a NOTAM, you would believe this to be true. They look as though they're intended to be distributed via teletype (as they probably once were?), character-limited to minimize the cost of transmission.

Re: "but which aren't known about enough in advance to publicize by other means"

My wife came up with that "Notice to Pilots" independently over coffee this morning -- except she suggested that they be called "PIlot NOTification" (or PINOT), with coloured suffixes for the gravity of the situation being notified about: you know, PINOT noir for life-and-death type stuff, PINOT blanc for more nice-to-know information, ...

I mulled it over while having my toast.

Cheers everyone!

(I'll get my own coat, thanks. It's the leather bomber with the aviators in the pocket.)

Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download

Uh-huh, right

So, the breach dump file is inaccessible without first registering/logging in. All they want is a username, password (hopefully not re-used, right?), and an email address. And then you can have access to the data.

Except ... I don't know who's behind breached.vc -- so why would I trust them? What a great way to harvest live/active email accounts, possibly with a useful password (for the lazy).

Anyone else want to be the guinea pig here?.

Patients wrongly told they've got cancer in SMS snafu

computer-related

"This was an isolated computer-related error for which we are extremely regretful, and steps are being taken to prevent a reoccurrence."

Well, of course it was.

Except, you know, computers do what they're told and rarely make such mistakes of their own volition. So there's someone responsible behind the scenes, and that person should probably be answerable for it, to explain how this happened and specifically what steps are being taken to "prevent a reoccurrence".

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Re: What The People are Saying

“Maybe now they will consider moving to cloud.evil. Isn’t that right Mr. Bigglesworth?” Dr. Evil, Cloud CTO

I cannot recall saying that, but it does sound like me.

FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried charged with fraud by just about everyone

Casino rules?

Maybe they should just apply the same rules to the crypto sector that already apply to casinos. There's a lot of commonality there:

- it exists outside of the conventional financial system

- it's an out-and-ouit gamble (ok: speculation)

- the house always wins

- organized crime takes a real interest in it

Hmmm.

Telling the truth?

"We allege that Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto," said SEC chairman Gary Gensler in a statement.

You know, those two elements aren't necessarily contradictory and SBF was well-positioned to know that. Not that FTX wasn't a house of cards, but the crypto sector could, in fact, be so unsafe that it would make putting money into a Ponzi scheme look like a hedge.

/s

The cubesats lost in space from Artemis Moon mission

Failure rate

Counting partial successes only reduces the failure rate to 38.2 percent, indicating that for such small, cheap and off-the-shelf satellites, six-out-of-ten isn't that bad.

Yes, it is. Statistical expert Meatloaf has publicly (and repeatedly) indicated that the line of demarcation is "two out of three ain't bad" so therefore, by inference, a 60% success rate is bad.

How bad? Well, worse than good.

Is it Friday yet?

FAA wants pilots to be less dependent on computer autopilots

Sorry -- you're wrong: Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger.

I rest my case.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

You are not alone!

"I've never had a problem with them but then as an ex-pat I have to talk in "RP" English if I want to be understood. I don't think the researches at Amazon had any idea of the extent of regional accents in the UK.

Obligatory

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Hardcore Salary

Genius! Your immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Bit klunky, but...

I don't mean to be condescending (and certainly not pompous), but ...

Swiss drone-busting eagle squadron grounded permanently

Different approach?

I wonder (he mused aloud) if eagles could be trained to carry a net to and drop it on said drone ...

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

Re: Modest proposal.

"Take a bow and introduce yourself 'Mastodon'."

Mastodon is, indeed, the elephant in the room that no one's been talking about.

(I'll get my own jacket. It's in the trunk.)

'Chief Twit' Musk delivers bathroom furniture to Twitter HQ ... but not Tesla results

Re: Something of a nitpick

The "Founder" ... better

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: For some definitions of "easy"

Anyhow, sounds to me like there's something flaky about your hardware or Linux set-up?

Not impossible, but it's a vanilla-grade relatively ancient Acer laptop which ran under XP just fine for well over a decade until I formatted the disk followed with a clean Mint Cinnamon install (1 version back). The update to v21 this year went smoothly. But it could be my set-up ...

I've run into other issues besides software installs -- mainly occasional system freeze-ups when reviving from sleep. The main cause I ran down and resolved (I thought) but once in a while it still happens. So it could be my hardware ...

Or it could just be Linux. Nah -- it doesn't happen to you, so that can't be.

For some definitions of "easy"

"Linux is also easy to use. Even now, people claim that Linux is hard to use. That just shows they haven't used Linux in decades. Once upon a time, you had to master shell programs to install programs and get work done. That hasn't been true this century. Just like everything else, today you get Linux software with a click and install front-end."

Erm, no. When the "click and install front-end" fails with a relatively cryptic message about a missing piece and you have to google for what it means and what to do about it and then "sudo apt get" from the command line for the missing piece, you have just crossed a line that the average user will not put up with. And yes -- that still happens today.

Mint Cinnamon v.21 user

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

Re: Oh please spare me

I agree with your comments and I upvoted you accordingly -- but the implication of the message "Your browser is being managed by your organization" when you are an individual home user and not expecting this is absolutely "Big Brother"-ly.

So is the follow-on message "Updates disabled by your system administrator" (they're not; the option of changing the setting from "Automatically install" to anything else is). The only other locked settings I've found in the Mint version are the options of making Firefox NOT be the default browser and of checking to see if it IS the default.

However, the messaging to the end-user is suboptimal and I was taken aback initially. The combination of Firefox's hardwired messages and the removal of options by Mint (for arguably benevolent reasons) can leave a perhaps naive user with a poor impression.

Improve Linux performance with this one weird trick

zswap change rocks!

On an old laptop with 4 MB RAM and a spinning rust hard drive running under Mint 20.3 Cinnamon, I just enabled the zswap change ( (2nd-to-last paragraph) with 2x compression (not 3x) + Firefox cache switch from disk to memory cache, and the difference is ... phenomenal! Cool!

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

Re: Is it called the AE35 unit ?

" Time to find Persis Khambatta and Stephen Collins."

She's ... somewhere out there. Sadly.

Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100

Re: Mozilla and its stupid numbering scheme

"The fact is has so many plugins is not a good indication - it means after 100 frickin' versions so much is still missing from Firefox."

Nope. It means that this product exceeds its competitors in one huge respect: flexibility. If you can easily extend the product to do what you want -- or load something that someone else has written to accomplish that -- then the base product's design is nothing short of brilliant.

If you look at the plethora of plug-ins available as features that are missing from the browser and try to write them all in, it very quickly leads to a bloated product which is slow to load and clunky to use.

The way Mozilla has (largely) done it is to allow users to extend or modify the browser's capabilities themselves. That way you don't have to live with it and put up with it if you don't want to -- but you can if you do. I say largely (but not always) because there have been a few missteps along the way, but by and large Mozilla continues to adhere to this philosophy.

See?

"Like the Mozilla Thunderbird project, it's completely lost its relevance."

So, because YOU don't find it useful, therefore it's useless for all. Interesting perspective.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird for archiving POP emails so I can clear my web cache -- and for searching through them for older information (something I did again just yesterday). For my purposes, it's quite a useful tool.

As a long-time Firefox user (2+ decades), I still appreciate the product even as I realize that it has limitations and that I don't always agree with the direction of current development.

"Long may it continue."

Amen to that! Congratulations and have one of these, Firefox development team!

Elon Musk says he can get $46.5bn to buy Twitter

Wait, what?

"Elon Musk says he can get $46.5bn to buy Twitter"

Wasn't tweeting something like that what got him into hot water with the SEC in the first place?

Ex-eBay security director to plead guilty to cyberstalking

Re: Who will

... rid me of this turbulent priest?

"I will, sir."

"Shut up, Baldrick!"

YouTube terminates account for Hong Kong's presumed next head of government

total nitpick

"At the election, 1,454 members of a committee dominated by pro-Beijing politicians and tycoons votes."

My old high-school English teacher drummed into me that subject and verb should always agree and I cannot escape the tyranny of his pedantry even after 50 years! Help m-e-e-e-e-e-e!

One white cat and a volcano short of a Bond villain: Rocket Lab's Peter Beck shows off the 'Hungry Hippo'

rocket name

We didn't spend six years developing it just to end up calling it "Mister Evil", thank you very much! Throw me a frickin' bone here!

Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication

Google has been trying really, really hard for a number of years now to get my mobile number. Always denied. Now they've come up with a novel way to force the issue: 3 options for 2SV, 2 of which involve giving them my number and the 3rd of which is unduly onerous. That'll be it for me; I can browse YouTube anonymously (until they disallow that too) and there are alternative throwaway email and other services out there.

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

Re: caused door keycards to stop working

I've not seen it mentioned here but have elsewhere: apparently the access card readers didn't work for the security cage in the (shared?) Santa Clara data centre containing the relevant servers and they had to use an angle grinder to open the cage to gain access.

On Facebook, perhaps?

Microsoft warns: Active Directory FoggyWeb malware being actively used by Nobelium gang

FTFY

Chief security adviser Roger Halbheer says best protection is to 'get off AD FFS'

Yes, Microsoft Access was a recalcitrant beast, but the first step is to turn the computer on

The first step

Hah! I had one like this just today!

"The phone charging base is dead. Can you come look at it?"

A couple of minutes later ...

"Never mind. They just forgot to switch the phone on." (And in the background: "It's the little red zero-one button on the right ...")

FYI: NASA appears to have scooped dirt from an asteroid 200 million miles away and plans to bring it back home

Congratulations, NASA!

Awesome accomplishment! Hope the huff-and-puff thing worked out and you can bring it on home again soon.

We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down

Depends

Do Easter eggs (innocuous ones) tick?

Q: What’s big, red and pulses UV light into the cosmos three times a night? A: Mars

Or else

Mars isn't exactly a "monolith" (along the lines of TMA-1), but perhaps ...

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Re: "writing code" v. solving a problem

Unfortunately, that damned "time is money" thing does tend to interfere with the analytical and synthetic processes of high quality problem solving. This is often where the stress comes in.

You're not getting Huawei that easily: Canadian judge rules CFO's extradition proceedings to US can continue

Re: Here's the thing...

"The CCP may send spies and other covert agents to [...] break her out of jail and whisk her out of the country"

Actually I'm more than a bit surprised that this hasn't happened yet. I fully expect(ed) it to, given the lenient conditions of Ms. Meng's "detention".