Posts by JLV

An anniversary to remember: The world's only air-to-air nuke was fired on 19 July, 1957

@Baldy50

which is also why, much as it is horrible, the risk from current Islamic fundamentalism needs to be kept in context - it is nowhere near the threat level of the USSR <=> US/Western confrontation. Or indeed the number of deaths that came out of it.

Not to be complacent, but we've outfoxed the USSR, surely we can outfox a bunch of moronic backward zealots whose idea of PR includes killing lots of people of their own religion and starving the economies of their host countries in the Middle East. It'll take time, many innocents will die and it will often seem like the world is getting ever worse along the way. But they will lose and the world will move on.

Hacker shows Reg how one leaked home address can lead to ruin

just keep your head down

A few years ago, IIRC, a university research project coupled CCTV footage to Facebook tagged pix, with an off-the-shelf face recognition software.

Their identification rate was about 30%. I assume it's way higher now, with more tagged pix and better software. Hopefully FB has upped its game to mass scanning of their image data, but I wouldn't count on it. I wonder what Google Image Search is/will be able to "contribute" to that as well.

This is the kind of crap that we howl about when we learn that our governments are doing it but we actively participate in doing it to ourselves ;-)

If you do have to be on FB, you may want to skip your address and DoB. And minimize photo tags.

All's not lost - as someone else said - as long as 95%+ of people are much more permissive in what they share, random attackers will tend to gravitate to the easier marks. That's not unlike what you see in home security - most locks or alarm systems* can be defeated, but why would a bad guy pick one of the harder targets at random? They'll go for the easy ones first.

So your best bet is to appropriately paranoid wrt to what you feel you have to lose if you get powned and/or what an attacker might gain from doing it.

And extra cautious - including not being on FB - if you lean that way, more relaxed if you don't care much. Just as long as you know where you stand.

* you don't have to try very hard where I live, police response time to a burglar alarm is about 20 minutes.

How's this for irony? US Navy hit with $600m software piracy claim

Re: Bend over and think of England. Or Trump. Okay, let's make it Trump

>best bit?

Nah, that's the sodomy bit.

Your antivirus doesn't like Ammyy. And fraudsters will use that to RAT you out (again)

Re: I dunno if this would work...

That's a good idea. But I think it's what the hash signatures you see on some downloads are used for. Of course that supposes you can ensure that your good hashes are stored elsewhere and secured against manipulation.

Sobering incident. Both for someone wanting to distribute software and someone installing it.

I always think that the less sites you trust as download sources, the better. App Stores are OK by me, so are the open source repos for Linux and Port/Homebrew (Mac). Past that... I need to really need that software.

PyPi, the Python script repo is another worrying example. Not sure how much vetting, if any, is taking place on uploads. Yes, you can read what you download, but install scripts have already, as sudo, run by then. And it doesn't take many lines of Python to make a mess.

Keep up the pressure on the telcos, Canada

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

> I think that makes you a fucking monster.

Fuck you too, Trevor. That's not what I said, if you'd bother reading it correctly. What I was referring to is research that shows that bureaucracies, corporations and groups of people in general tend to dodge moral constraints because it is "no one individual's fault". I didn't say it was right, or desirable, I just said that applying sociopath to a group isn't helpful. And is, in fact, rather stupid, like a good deal of your statements here, except for our common frustration with Telcos and their ability to get their way at everyone else's expense.

But, eh, go ahead if you want to put words in my mouth.

p.s. your lack of politeness here certainly shows I've "struck a nerve" too ;-)

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

Here's a median income chart from stats Canada. By your own logic, pretty much _no_ area should be wired, because almost no metropolitan area in Canada has 100k income. Pretty sure the Alberta ones will drop out next round.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil107a-eng.htm

Sociopath, from dictionary. a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

There is a whole branch of psychology concerned with group-vs-individual behavior, you can start with 'Bystander effect' and work your way up. Bureaucracies do not behave as individuals and confusing the 2 is not productive. Individual empathy or altruism should not be expected from a corporation. Might happen, but don't count on it, it's just not their function. If you hand them over some regulatory capture, of course they'll act on it. So don't.

If you were to say that reserves are underserved in Canada, whether in comms, education, food or many other metrics and if you were to attribute that, at least partially, to racism, then sadly, I would agree. But regarding the rest of the Canadian public, to claim that a telco cares about your skin color rather than your $ is a bit of a stretch.

Basically, you started with very good points, I loved your previous article about the subject. Then you tarnish it with bizarre rants. I assume you know way more than any of us about wiring up communities and you certainly hit a nerve when you criticize our Telcos - we generally hate them. But you are still getting panned on all your posts here. Wonder why?

Stick to the facts, leave your emotions out of it - we, your readers, understand engineering and regulations and you have good points. Leave the Noah Chomsky-ing to the Discovery Channel.

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

Hmmm, Trev, I live here too. Well-off doesn't necessarily mean white. Plenty of middle class Asians.

How we Canadians choose to treat First Nations (PC for 'Indian') may not be much to brag about, but otherwise you are injecting a bit too much racial angst and mea culpas into your arguments. Let's stick to the facts, they are damning enough towards the Bells!

You also need to differentiate truly isolated communities, with say 50-60 km to the next _small_ community (your Polar bears) from towns that are underserved but could reasonably well be sped up. You kinda do, but <1M is almost everyone in BC, except for Vancouver/Greater Victoria. Yet, much of the province is reasonably clumped together (say >10k), compared to the truly isolated like say Bella Coola. With goodwill, and minus the telcos' stupid lobbying, 90% are probably coverable. The last 5-10% are gonna be a bitch though.

Also sociopath is a bit of a stretch even towards our telcos. We were stupid enough to give them the regulatory rope to hang us with, they are taking advantage of it. No more, no less. Sociopath implies abnormal behavior as opposed to the predictable behaviour of a rational actor when presented with an opportunity to enrich themself. The truly dumb thing is allowing lobbying to drive so much of politics, be it from unions or corporations. Not an uniquely Canadian trait, unfortunately.

McCain: Come to my encryption hearing. Tim Cook: No, I'm good. McCain: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you

Re: @JLV "democracies benefit from alternating parties being in power"

Interesting analysis. Dunno about splits, and I rather doubt that the religious right will go away.

If faced with yet another loss (gotta remember no one thought Brexit was gonna pass though) could the Republican Party instead amend its primaries' rules to reduce the capacity of outliers (i.e. unusually religious folk) to push forward candidates that will be unacceptable to the larger American electorate? And indeed to members of their own party. Cruz being just one of several examples. Too much religion in politics makes many people worried. And it certainly made the founding fathers uneasy, hence the 1st amendment.

It would be extremely difficult to clip the zealots' wings without being seen as unjustly disenfranchising people who, while I don't agree with them, or even like them, should still be allowed their democratic opinion. But their right to their opinion should not necessarily grant them the right to hijack their party's nomination process. If only to avoid that party predictably ending up in opposition.

Have any other countries successfully changed their nomination procedures to avoid these effects? I realize openly voting for candidates is not the norm so examples are few. More mainstream Reps voters voting in primaries would do it but is unlikely to happen.

Re: Dear Senator McCain

>jail

Methink you should look up Trump University. Might be Clintons are sleazy at times, but Trump is a 21st century used car salesman as far as I am concerned. And Trump being anti-elite? Positively Orwellian in hypocrisy.

Too bad for Reps. It sucks that Dems are likely to win again because... well democracies benefit from alternating parties being in power. But as long as Rep primaries choose candidates w ever more right, ever more white, religious, ever more old views, then thats going to make winning real hard in actual full population elections.

Especially in an US that is turning less white. Trump was not the worst of those to choose from, which is scary.

Nearly old, white, centrist, male, happy not to be living there.

Re: "he picked Palin as his running mate. "

A Dunce Prize, you mean.

Google's Nexii stand tall among Android's insecure swill

Re: Samsung

Agree. Therefore, funny that Salesforce is making them the reference Android, innit? Wonder what they're smoking thinking.

Starbucks bans XXX Wi-Fi

Re: Pathetic

Task tssk. I lived in the US from 77 to 86 and first set foot back on the North American continent in 94.

If you think *$ coffee is bad, you should have seen the slop that used to be the norm in the US before coffee culture took off, largely helped by that chain.

This is in a land where a presidential candidate not too long ago proudly proclaimed that he only ate the bright yellow "mustard" they serve on hot dogs. Given that presidential hopefuls, except for Nader, are all rich lawyers or at least rich, I rather doubt he was being honest (something prez candidates are also rarely guilty of). Still...

Depends on context

As an occasional visitor, not a librarian, I have seen people surfing porn twice at my public library, on monitors that are viewable from a broad vantage. Personally? Don't care much, it was rather lame porn. If I was with my kids I'd probably use that as an example of people not to emulate.

I suppose some people have no computer access or no home. And/or remarkably little respect for others.

While one could argue that a library shouldn't censor (though I certainly wouldn't fault them in this instance if they used a suitably specific and narrow blacklist) I really don't see why a commercial open space entity has to put up with these lowlives on their free offerings.

I'd have an entirely different view on a hotel carrying out this type of filtering however.

Hyperloop One lynched in hangman lawsuit

Re: what this company needs is a

Is this where they blindfold you, put you in a "Hyperloop capsule", but then have a truck drive it 2 or 3 km away before letting you out?

Claim that the extra time is because the capsule sealing lock mechanism is still under development and needs manual opening/closing each time. The blindfold is because there is proprietary tech that "just an NDA" is not good enough for.

I dunno why anyone would want to be reinstated into this nest of vipers, if their claims are true. Or would deserve to be if they are not.

Tesla whacks guardrail in Montana, driver blames autopilot

With all due respect to Tesla, which I rather like, this would be a bit "early adopter" / v1.0 for me to rely overmuch on their autopilot. Give it 2-3 yrs.

At most a short takeover during a long highway ride, if that. Coming back after one too many at the pub would be nice too, except you'd still get busted @ a cop check so sobriety's likely the better bet.

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

Re: Well there is a point to this

>drug-addicted rocker

Judgmental much?

David Lee Roth comes across as quite clever, and witty, on the M&M explanation video. Probably someone I'd respect if I had to work for him.

IoT puts assembly language back on the charts

Hmmmm....

Why does letting loose a bunch of programmers doing willy-nilly Asm on IoT make me think of ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrm8usaH0sM

i.e. what could ever go wrong here, when we can't even manage security with higher level languages, let alone C, most of the time.

You can’t sit there, my IoT desk tells me

The Refold

Not sure about the rest of the idiocy of a no-doubt quite expensive (shush, a mere $150 USD) cardboard box.

But their website can't be arsed to display anything until you enable Javascript. And even then their actual website is 2 levels down in the scripts-that-get-loaded-by-another script, the bane (and justification) of NoScript.

Odd that, for a hipster tech outfit, they've never heard of graceful degradation and they may just get on the nerves of their target demographic.

Sure got on my nerves.

Bad blood: US govt bans bio-test biz Theranos' CEO for two years

Re: Denial: It's not just a river in Egypt

Oh, I see. Let's do an MVP, mostly without the V part of it, see if people are interested, and if they are we'll actually make it work.

But it's not some random e-commerce or social network idea, or a 90s RAM-doubling utility scam, it impacts people's health directly.

You're right, if, as is likely, some of those many tests resulted in some really bad patient outcomes (death, for example), then whoever participated in this fraud should be held criminally accountable. Not to mention, I suppose, investor lawsuits.

I suppose it could have been taken as a bad omen that Theranos is pretty darn close to Thanatos.

Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies

why stop there?

Movies have ratings.

Videogames too.

Internet should have ratings.

Age-rate all books, newspapers and mags as well. God-fearing ones get an automatic G (all ages). Unrateds? Burn them.

Children are thought of and civilization is saved!

I'd have thought AO should be penning articles putting forward the excellent views of such a prominent Leaver.

Oracle says it is 'committed' to Java EE 8 – amid claims it quietly axed future development

Re: Die Java Die

I agree and I dislike Java for those reasons. I'll add "gratuitous overuse of design patterns by community" and "frequently mired in version dependency hell" to its sins.

However, if you want a widely-used general-usage OS-agnostic compiled language for enterprise applications (not systems, that would be C, C++) then, unfortunately, that rather leaves you with Java for the moment. Barring COBOL.

Yes, yes, some other languages may yet step up. C# if MS distrust is overcome? Swift, if suitable. Go? Rust? D has been around for a while and hasn't trended up.

Plus, there is an ecosystem of very good apps: Apache, Hadoop, graph databases, etc..., despite the language. Android. All sorts of biz-critical J2EE apps. University trainees.

I suspect we are stuck with Java for a while yet.

Sociology student gets a First for dissertation on Kardashians

Re: “Why do men (the use of the term misogyny implies that)

Followed by 'Patriarchy'? Methink thou art splitting hairs ;-)

I don't mind feminists - in fact I rather support the ones that don't dislike men on principle. I just think her comment was uncalled for. And that equivalent thoughtless public remarks about women has landed many a guy into hot waters.

“the culture they exist in is still very much rooted in misogyny and inequality”

Hold on!

Why do men (the use of the term misogyny implies that) get blamed for the vapidity and stupidity that follows these folk and their followers like a cloud?

That'd be like us blaming women for random male-oriented thrashies like Soldier of Fortune and WWF Mania.

Show me that a majority of editors and content deciders for People, OK, Hello, Us and sundry other thrash publications are men, out to manipulate women, then, yes, I'll go along with your judgment.

Otherwise, sister, you can take your generalization and stick it up your bum, along with your degree!

⌘+c malware smacks Macs, drains keychains, pours over Tor

Yeah, but there are legitimate reasons to accept run-this-even-though-it-was-downloaded apps at least on demand, as you yourself just explained how to do. Since the article specifically said the infection entry context wasn't known, Gatekeeper need not have been blanket disabled. What about, for example, a compromised but previously benign 3rd party app that needs an install exception? I install little - every new proggie is a risk - but not much of what I need is on the Apple app store.

Let's be careful and not just smugly trust that Apple's security is foolproof.

Wealthy youngsters more likely to be freetards than anyone else – study

News at 11...

"Well-off youngsters most likely to be cocaine users. And to have voted for Remain!!!"

New phones rumoured as BlackBerry cans BB10 production

:-t

I must be the only one with an actually discontinued phone here, this being written on a Classic. Will keep it while it lasts, love the keyboard and the OS, don't miss apps that much.

Past that? I've already tried Android, via a Nexus 5. Didn't like it at all. I'd give WinPho a try, if it had a future, but I doubt MS's competence and commitment on mobile. Probably back to an iPhone then. Truth be told, that isn't that harsh, except to the wallet.

I think Chen is doing what he can with a very bad hand. The blame rests squarely on those who fell asleep at the wheel from '06 to '11 or so. BB10 launch wasn't all it could have been, not nearly. But the takeaway is that launching a new mobile OS is just very hard right now - you need apps, polish and a huge base of Googleable how-to-do-xyz articles from day 1. Sure looks like years of mobile OS duopoly going forward.

Sad for BB employees too.

Fear and Brexit in Tech City: Digital 'elite' are having a nervous breakdown

Dumb question, but I confess I dunno UK specifics.

Cameron has announced his future resignation, which in many countries would result in general elections, after a new party leader was chosen. But, if I understand correctly, you vote in a local MP from a party and the PM is the leader of the party with the most MPs.

In the case of the UK, once the Conservative successor to Cameron is chosen, are there new general elections where the public get to vote for PM again (because well, not the same lot)? Or is it all internal to the Conservative party and the winner of its leadership contest automatically becomes PM? I assume it's #2.

Re: Looking the wrong way

>globalisation in general

+1

Not to mention technical progress, which will massively accelerate as job-specific AI matures. Looking just at Uber and self-driving cars, for example, there is little doubt that we risk seeing entire chunks of jobs disappear in the next 20-30 years. Taxi and lorry drivers for example. But also reduced demand for entry-level accountants, less retail salespeople, etc...

This will be hard to adjust to and it is by no means obvious that new jobs will appear to replace all of the old ones. In a perfect world, our respective electorates would be able to respond in a thoughtful fashion, rather than Luddit-ing away or just blaming all of their politicians and choosing to elect nitwits like The Donald.

The signs aren't good so far. But democracy is a surprisingly robust system, despite its flaws.

Re: So any company that trades with an EU country has to open their borders to EU inhabitants?

+1

And, another reason I think the Europeans will miss the UK is because the UK was pretty good at shooting down the more obviously stupid European initiatives, like France's longstanding desire for corporate tax homogenization. This loss of common-sense examination of the subsidiarity principle will be a loss for the EU as a whole, methink.

But that doesn't change much to the fact that a Brexit-ed UK will either

a) trade with the EU in a lot less integrated manner, having to go through a lot of Fortress Europe's trade red tape.

b) have preferential access status, as negotiated by Norway and Switzerland. However, "negotiated" in this case means pretty much having to put up with many of the same rules as everyone else and also paying some level of membership dues.

I suspect it will come down to b) and the net benefit is not obvious, except to British nostalgia. Shooting down strawmen like Hoberman, who well deserves it, doesn't magically result in magical ponies roaming the countryside, the author's opinion notwithstanding.

There is another option, which is that the Brexit concept becomes sufficiently unpopular (in the strict sense of the word) for the whole thing to be brushed under the carpet and Article 50 not being invoked. That might be an attractive solution, but in order to preserve democracy, it would have really have to be a strong, legitimate, grassroots movement. Not just the "we'll ask you again until you give the right answer" kinda crap that the Europhiles pulled on past referendums like the EU constitution votes. So I also doubt that will happen anytime soon.

BTW, I realize that one of the European fears about Brexit is that it becomes contagious. If the economics of it are as fraught as some of the gloomier Brexit scenarios, perhaps the end result will be just the opposite. With the UK having taken on France's traditional role of showing others which policies are best avoided.

Those Xbox Fitness vids you 'bought'? Look up the meaning of the word 'rent'

MS takes foot behind shed. Shots heard.

You can be my wingman any time! RaspBerry Pi AI waxes Air Force top gun's tail in dogfights

See, this is why we should think 20 times before continuing commitment to the F35 system.

This AI may or may not be that hot in real life. Seems a bit too good to be true, to be honest. But, at some point, they are going to be good enough. The whole "but you need to have a human in the loop" is also a red herring.

Yes, you need a human in the loop to fire on blended civilian/enemy locations, like we've seen in the last 20 years. But, if, instead of shooting up 3rd world opponents, we move to a hot war with China (not advocating that in the least, but let's face it, that's the only excuse for the F35) then anything flying that doesn't respond to IFF as friendly will be fair game.

In an all-gloves off fight with a technologically savvy opponent there is no guarantee whatsoever that autonomous AA combat drones wouldn't massively outperform humans in say 2030 - 10 years into the F35's active service. I am thinking mostly area denial - air defense over a territory you want to deny to your enemy's air force. You don't need much - if you can field drones cheaply enough, your enemy won't be able to replace their pilots no matter what the human-over-drone kill ratio is.

Drones may not in fact be that efficient by then, but if they do we will have way too much sunk costs to re-arm.

We just don't know. Just like a dispassionate analysis of battleship survivability in 1935 would have flagged that they were at risk of becoming a liability (well, actually Mitchell said that in '21 and got canned for his efforts). No one ended using them for much except shore bombardment. Or the superiority of fully mechanized forces over static infantry formations - that was also pooh-poohed by Western armies - sunk costs in Maginot Line.

25,000 malware-riddled CCTV cameras form network-crashing botnet

@Dadmin

>"End of" what? You couldn't be more wrong! Plus my phrase uses incorrect English.

Seems kinda ironic to me that you go ballistic about that bit of English usage. Given your copious use of CAPITAL LETTERS and random cussing which make your rant way more credible. Not.

Not that I find any great amount of actual useful info in your post either.

I would argue that you may need (or at least want) to access a security camera remotely in many cases. That's, hum, one of their basic use cases, at least for home gear. How exactly that is to be carried out, how to protect it with your router, what the safety measures are and what is best practice, many would benefit from knowing.

Maybe it's as simple as picking the right vendor (one that patches their gear) and installing those patches.

Maybe there is no way to actually do it, but I certainly wouldn't take _your_ word for it. Or the equally douchy's "once you've become educated enough" AC. No wonder our profession is public-perception-challenged.

Twat!

'I urge everyone to fight back' – woman wins $10k from Microsoft over Windows 10 misery

Re: puzzled

Up voted you, good point. But, IIRC, maybe another state, someone took tobacco company (ies?) to small claims. Company fought back tooth & claw, with lawyers, hoping to avoid a precedent. And won. 5-10 years back, also USA.

Re: puzzled

Ho ho, not so fast. The key here is that a) she didn't agree to upgrade and b) once she did it wouldn't work and impacted her livelihood. That's what made her case winnable and $10k worthy. You might have a good case if you got hit by last month's "implicit consent dialog close" upgrade but you probably would have to show significant impact to you or your business to get near the 10k payout. A simple "W10 sucks and I didn't know it" wouldnt do.

Still, from the sound of it, a number of small biz did get pretty thrashed from last month's W10 upgrade, so, yes, it would be nice if California residents small claimed that. Might put a screeching halt to their sneakyware. A customer-critical computer out for a day would quickly add up to $$$$.

Do US small claims courts findings trigger precedents? Or will the next cases start from scratch? Could someone set up a wiki walking users through the necessary filing steps and docs?

Quick note: Brexit consequences for IT

Re: What a shambles already ..

"Discovered"??? By whom? It's been a well known fact of supermarket distribution for decades.

Hope there won't be too many "unexpected discoveries" after Brexit, but right now I find it odd how gloomy y'all are. Surely a lot of this was common knowledge before, wasn't it? I mean, it'll either work out or not (I suspect the latter but not overwhelmingly so - the sky won't fall down) but none of these possible impacts should come as "news".

News is when the actual outcomes and terms of EU affiliation start rolling in. And that's months away.

Utah sheriffs blow $10,000 on smut-sniffing Labrador

>I wonder what the Internet smells like

Ask Jen.

What kinda porn constitutes the "public emergency"? Regular, legal stuff, which is watched in their opinion by way too many people? But is... legal?

Or did they buy a 10k pooch to hunt for kiddie porn? Which is illegal but a bit like needle in a haystack for a dog-based approach because much less prevalent geographically.

What if they search you, find a big stash of legal porn and the missus files for divorce? Can you sue them?

Should be sued by their taxpayers for egregious waste.

US House to vote on whether poor people need mobile phones

Re: gummint shouldn't pay for anything

Color me confused.

>I'm sick to death of the government taking my hard earned money and giving it away to lazy fucks

Then, this is you again:

>Has to get government cheese - really!

>ask for help and then claw your way out through hard work

Please decide. Do you think the government should never help? That would kinda meant you not getting any cheese, wouldn't it?

IMHO, even if one takes a fairly dim view of welfare, some things should be considered:

- For better (IMHO), or for worse (in your opinion?), people are not intentionally allowed to starve or die of curable illnesses in advanced countries. So, government is going to pick up the bill some ways down the road. Is it going to intervene at catastrophe time, at great cost, or is it going to do some cheaper prevention?

- Sometimes people just get down on their luck temporarily. Helping them may transform them back into tax payers at some point. That seems to have been your case and consider that not everyone has a family to help them out.

- One should be very careful not to transform the children of one generation of poor people into a another generation of poor. Promoting upward mobility is to the benefit of the general tax payer.

Having said all that, unbridled welfare spending sometimes creates massive problems - witness the banlieues around Paris (I lived there once). Or the projects in the US. So you do have a partial point - Canada's welfare spending is low by French standards, but I would be uncomfortable increasing it to French levels unless we were achieving Nordic, rather than French, social outcomes.

The question is not whether the government should help, but how it can do so without promoting too much dependence. I don't think a basic cellphone subsidy is a bad idea - think of how hard it is to look for a job without a way to be contacted. Subsidized broadband is waaaay more debatable - I am thinking more YouTube watching is going to happen than creative usage.

As many others have stated, this is microscopic peanuts in the US budget. Many other things should be considered first to save money, including pension reform & means testing, trimming down some of the military industrial complex's more egregious white elephants. Cutting subsidies to farmers and gold plated public servant retirement plans would be on my list as well. Not this.

Basically, you don't lose votes by cutting off service to the poor. They don't vote enough and won't lobby your ass out of office either. However, you will lose votes on Medicare reform or anything that upsets the unions. Trying to ditch that pig of a F35 will have lobbyists funding your opponents no matter what.

To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, as a politician, your safest bet is therefore budgetary restraint theater of this sort.

Sea of outrage after 'migrant-spotting app' turned out to be bogus

Re: Anybody daft enough to install this...

No need to be all cynical and snippy. There have been pretty useful dev-led solutions in things like refugee re-unification and disaster relief. A lot of open source stuff is not primarily about money though it may have self-promotion as an incentive.

If you insist on dismissing all open source as junk, which is your prerogative, that primarily leaves you with one consumer operating system these days that is not open source based in any form ;-) Hint: it is not universally loved by its users.

Not sure how well this app would have worked out in practice, but there was nothing wrong per se with wanting to help. Something similar was attempted with Steve Fossett, IIRC.

What was wrong was a) the team misrepresenting (rather pointlessly) the current state of the app, instead of stating it was a prototype. And b) whatever the team's error of judgment, all sorts of journalists in prestigious publications not doing their job correctly.

Yes, yes, we know about journalistic deadlines, but...

Didn't anyone check it out before singing its praises? Are we getting to be that gullible and lemming-like? No one a fan of Hans Christian Andersen anymore?

Kill Flash now. Or patch these 36 vulnerabilities. Your choice

Re: ¡Ay, caramba!

interestingly, I have a similar issue on my printer, a Brother with wifi capability. Configuring the wifi access password requires you to plug in a USB cable and then run their config utility which is ... Java based. Once the wifi login info is entered, you can delete the whole thing.

I avoid Java whenever possible and Java on Mac does not uninstall at all. And it actually also chokes on just turning off the Java applet capability, insisting that you need to be an admin to do it on other users' accounts. Never mind that I am the admin, using sudo. Instead of installing Java, I was thinking of launching the java configuration from a Ubuntu vm but there is no Brother config app for Linux.

However, I saw a Linux-oriented posting where someone saw that the printer actually runs an http server and you can you just enter the wifi info using a browser (if you are connected by wired at the time), bypassing the need for their config app. It's complicated, but it works. Need to try it on my printer.

Lesson learned? - sometimes what the config client talks to is still http/html-based, under the covers.

Re: Adobe *still* can't get the name of Apple's OS right

better:

"A critical vulnerability exists: Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Chrome OS."

Lester Haines: RIP

So sad, way too young to go.

His articles were certainly among those who set this site apart, in a very good way and set the tone for clever levity and tech acumen.

My thoughts and condolences to the many people close to him.

Apple quietly launches next-gen encrypted file system

Re: Case..

True, but still less of a mess than going from case-sensitive to insensitive, I would guess ;-)

Slightly offtopic, but anyone have a clue what the upcoming more anal Gatekeeper settings mean in terms of Homebrew/Macport? We can still get our lovely OSS goodies, right?

Let's Encrypt lets 7,600 users... see each other's email addresses

Isn't there a plugin available - for at least some email systems - that would require a manual confirmation if a CC list is bigger than an arbitrary threshold, say 100?

To err is human, and it is rather silly that it is so easy to get caught out by this type of error.

Microsoft to buy LinkedIn

I rather dislike using corp-speak if it can be avoided.

But in this case... synergy???

Even allowing that Linkedin is fairly dominant in its niche, what benefit do either parties derive from being together? What does LI do for MS and vice versa? They seem orthogonal in concerns unless MS wants to build a "community" for itself. Kiss of Death, as mentioned, still seems to apply - LI is goona be "less cool" and 26B is a biggish chunk to faff on a very questionable buy.

Bet LinkedIn shareholders are :) $$$ :)

Nad is a hard guy to pin down. You think him smart: Win 10 giveaway, Linux mssql, BSD, net core.

Then he signs off on sheer stoopids that are way more visible: Win 10 install nagware & telemetry. And now this?

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image. Repeat. Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image

Ah, my bad. Last I was looking at it, fairly casually, I saw mostly Ubuntus, AMIs and even some Windows stuff. Missed the BSDs :(

I stand corrected, but still think BSDs have a massive visibility gap in cloud & vm stuff. Vagrant/Chef seems to be mostly about Ubuntu for example. You are right in that it exists, but if you don't know to look for it, it is easy to miss. Azure usage is bound to improve that.

Take any combination of Googling <tech> ubuntu vs <tech> freebsd. Where tech in chef/vagrant/aws. You'll see 2x-3x the hits, easy, on the ubuntu searches. I assume it would be even worse on a specific Stackoverflow search.

Anyway, learned something, thx.

Poor lil mascot. Hope he's got some really warm clothes handy ; - )

Nice to see BSDs get some cloud love because they seem very suited to that type of use. Hopefully AWS will follow.

TeamViewer: So sorry we blamed you after your PC was hacked

>I'd use a much more colorful adjective than "careless"

You are preaching to the converted. However, you misunderstood what I was saying.

Far as I understand, TC can be set up to allow remote connections over the internet. Those connections do not a) require TC to be manually started on the user's computer and b) do not require confirmation by the user that she accepts a connection.

Ease of use.

But, given that folks have repeatedly shown that they love 1234 as passwords, then, by default at least, another layer of protection on the user's computer should have been the need for manual user intervention to allow the TV connection to take place, at the time of the session being initialized. I think this is precisely what another poster mentioned wrt this hack - TV can be set up quite securely, it's just not its default mode.

(when I installed something similar on my work machine, the first thing I did was to set it up as launch-on-demand, not as a background service)

I assume (hope) TV had other safeguards in addition to a password, but were they 120% guaranteed never to fail? Apparently not.

Basically, don't trust your users to have good password habits - you know some won't. And you know that they will reuse their passwords. That's just the way it is. Run an attack tree scenario with more than 100 users and see if you don't get a fail on some of them.

Now, of course, that may come across as unfair to us poor IT folks. But what is now the risk to TV, the company, business because they assumed users would know better? This is not a Sony PSN account that they were protecting and trust is was TV's main business asset.