Posts by Medixstiff

US cybersecurity chief: Software makers shouldn't lawyer their way out of security responsibilities

"And she suggested that the government hold companies liable for selling vulnerable products that criminals and nation states later exploit in cyberattacks."

The biggest exploiters of this being the US themselves? I wonder how quickly she would be disappeared if she tried saying this to the faceless men at certain US government agencies?

"Making software "secure-by-design," and thus putting the liability on the vendors to sell safe products out of the box instead of pushing that responsibility on to consumers and businesses, is a drumbeat that CISA has been pounding under Easterly's leadership."

See my previous point, or how about when the same country wanted Apple et all to build in back doors, but make it safe at the same time?

What I will find interesting is when AI starts going through code and then starts using the same lines of code because they "just work" and are the most efficient ones to use, will someone sue about using their IP and if so, will someone grow a brain and put into law, that AI generated essential code is exempt form copyright violations, so the world can move forward and away from previous coders dodgy or lazy coding practices?

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

I want the one that starts with "Hello, You have reached the Australian Federal Police..."

Australian FinTech takes itself offline to deal with cyber incident that caused data leak

Well so far I've been done as an ex-Optus customer, a current Medibank customer - this is where the SPAM SMS messages and phone calls really started ramping up, luckily Android phones have a SPAM call alert system - and now as an ex-Latitude customer.

It's getting to the stage of needing a full time credit reporting service along with the regular subscriptions for internet and mobile phones.

As it is, I've brought iiNet up on their IronPort SPAM not quarantining emails form dodgy iiNet support scammers, even though the feature is turned on.

I've also asked NAB why they don't currently offer 2FA through Microsoft or Google's authenticators, considering banks accounts are what most scammers are after.

Apple bags patent for folding phone that closes as it's dropped

This is where the EU needs to grow a spine and say, US you idiots have been drinking too much brake fluid again, we do not recognize these patents as they are like the vast majority of your laws and politicians, stupid beyond belief.

Foxconn expands Vietnam factories, perhaps to help Apple diversify beyond China

I wouldn't be heading to China ever again if I was a Foxconn exec, I might be taken into custody on false corruption charges or similar and then put on trial after 2 years.

Tesla fires gigafactory staff after someone made the mistake of mentioning unions

Well with the recall of 362,000 cars, Ford, Merc and GM coming higher up the ladder for their driver assist products, I'm sure the sacked staff will be laughing when they get snapped up by the opposition and watch Tesla falling even further behind.

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

Is it any wonder that PC sales are slowing, since multi core CPU's and SSD's came out, the refresh cycle for home users in particular is non existent.

We are well and truly past the bad old software bloat days of the Pentium era in the late 90's early 2000's.

Qualcomm predicts 2024 is the year Windows on Arm goes large

We bought an Arm based Surface for the CEO, everything was fine up until it came time to install the Fortinet VPN client, they had none for Arm.

As he's online at home and both of our external sites all the time, it was a deal breaker and sure enough was put back in it's box.

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

I did some contracting work for Arthur Anderson a few months before everything hit the fan for them and one warm Friday I noticed a procession of nice young ladies heading into the Server room to cool down after lunch.

I could not understand why the two IT guys had the biggest grins on their faces ever until said young ladies walked out of the Server room suitably refreshed.

What are server makers really doing to and for the climate?

Having dealt with HP, Lenovo and Dell notebook products, I can say HP are the worst for excess packaging, especially how many pieces of paperwork have their own zip lock bags, which whilst a waste., at least I use when I can.

Analysis of leaked Conti files blows lid off ransomware gang

"As of late February, Conti's primary Bitcoin address contained more than $2bn in digital currency, according to a Rapid7 report."

So if they know the address, how long before the US requests the funds be frozen?

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

Re: Software to arbitrate between two soldiers -- haven't they heard of rank?

And then the AI decides that to end wars one must end mankind and there you have Skynet.

BOFH: All hail the job cuts consultant

Reminds me of the number of times we have had company wide team building exercises yet none of the Manglement team did them...until last year.

One of the exercises was to to throw objects of various sizes into a box. There were two teams, each with two teams, one to guard the box and return whatever fell out and one to collect the returned objects to the throwers. And there was a line midway neither team could cross.

So the Manglers thinking they knew better went first and more than 5 minutes later they finished.

Now one thing the presenters said was you could use everything around you to help, so we folded three desks over and put them around the box so nothing would bounce out from the sides and back and then we threw the smallest objects in first and worked our way up, because when the bigger items went in first, everything else would bounce off them and out of the box.

36 seconds later we were finished and the looks on the Manglers faces ware priceless.

Ericsson report details how it paid off Islamic State

Re: Ironic

We have to do bullying, cyber security, anti money laundering and other training every 6 months at work (home loan lender)

Scrolling down the list, right clicking and opening each section in a new tab, going about our work and then answering the questions save so much time.

Multi-level marketing corporation that sells weightloss products sues ex-exec over 'fraudulent' Dell deal

Re: Friends

Yeah when I was younger and dumber a customer of mine - because I worked in retail computer sales - asked me along to a seminar of theirs and after the first 5 minutes I knew it was an Amway type pyramid scheme where those up top get all the money.

APNIC: Big Tech's use of carrier-grade NAT is holding back internet innovation

Good old APNIC flogging the IPv4 thing again.

For the best part of 2 years they were sending out "IPv4 addresses are being bought up at an alarming rate" emails like a dodgy real estate agent trying to sucker you in to buy x amount of said dwindling addresses, on a weekly basis along with all the other useless drivel emails about electio0ns etc. that they were spamming us with so we re-directed them all to deleted items and had a calendar entry to check when our products were due for renewal.

Rolls-Royce consortium shopping for factory sites to build mini-nuclear reactors

Re: lets build more fukishimas, but in all the cities...

So that's where our Aussie gummint workers and pollies learned it from.

Naggers?

US Senator Marco Rubio calls Intel cowards for scrubbing remarks about Xinjiang and apologizing to China

So Senator Rubio is definitely heading over to China for the Winter Olympics then?

Or is he too gutless to stand up for what he believes in? But would rather try score easy points attacking someone else or a company.

As the third doctor in the joke says: I like working on politicians because they are spineless, gutless and their heads and a-holes are interchangeable.

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

When we first rolled out our Win10 pilot program machines, I advised one Manager that she might want to swap out her keyboard, when she asked why, I mentioned that it's probably 5 years old and you don't know what food or skin cells have made their way into the keyboard and not all of the skin cells would be hers.

About 30 minutes later my boss advised me that the Manager had asked for a new keyboard.

US grounds investors in Chinese drone maker DJI over 'Xinjiang human rights abuses'

Re: Those that live in glass houses

Don't forget Saudi Arabia, where everything is filtered through the University....unless you just happen to work for the UN, in which case they have their own internet via satellite.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

It still gives me a chuckle when an a-hole to everyone, sends out an email, realizes their Oops moment and then can't understand when we try to explain that the Recall email feature only works on the companies mail Servers, not external companies mail Servers.

There's no Huawei back now: Biden signs law that forbids US buyers acquiring kit on naughty list

"The Secure Equipment Act yesterday, legislation that prevents US regulators from even considering the issuance of new telecom equipment licenses for companies deemed security threats"

Considering the number of times our Cisco equipment wouldn't work with other Cisco equipment, add Cisco to the list.

We've replaced most of our Cisco networking kit for Dell for roughly a third of the price and are slowly replacing other kit as we find suitable alternatives.

Judge tosses NEC's claim that Oracle salespeople tricked it into using the wrong software license prior to audit

As someone that's gone through many an Oracle audit and sit down to discuss licensing, Oracle can EABOD.

At one stage we had to rethink the CPU configurations for our new Blade's after sitting down with Oracle's own people, they then had the gall to state we had violated the licensing and we had fun and games showing them all the communications where they stated what we were doing was correct.

Then there was the audit 3 years ago where we ran the scripts, they again accused us of being wrong, we sent them communications again and then heard nothing back for two years.

Or the fact that their own installs turn just about every feature on and you have to then turn them off or they shout license violations.

HPE picks Taiwan as 'global strategic hub for next-generation technology'

Considering China's been agitating Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, I still think it's monumental stupidity that no-one seems to be thinking about moving some of the supply chain back to countries that China isn't close enough to bully or block off from the rest of the world.

Honeymoons last a couple of weeks – the same goes for any love for the IT department

Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your IT department is, when there's the senior Manager that likes to build his own kingdom, while white anting every other Manager and the IT department, until they either retire or a new CEO comes in and they realize they can only get away with things for about 6 months, so they jump ship rather than get the boot.

Been there a few times, I put the wind up the last one when I mentioned that staff do 95% of the workload and Managers are usually there to make the hard decisions and sign off on documents etc. then when he tried to respond - this was in front of his entire department mind you - I said "So when are you getting on the phones to show us how it's done".

He wasn't happy, I didn't care and I also got plenty of drinks bought the following Friday night.

REvil gang member identified living luxury lifestyle in Russia, says German media

Re: If they know who

I'm sure there's one or two people in the Russian Police or a similar organization that would prefer to have a talk to him about how easy it would be to make him disappear into a Gulag versus greasing a few palms to keep him out of said Gulag.

IT outsourcing: SLAs, patches – and how uptime funk's going to get to you

I used to work for the biggest outsourcer in Australia before moving on to my last employer.

My new boss always fell for the sales speak, so we started going with him to meetings...which ticked off the vendors because all of a sudden we could shoot down what they said.

We also eventually managed to get the boss to see, that they will always present their A-Team with the certs experience etc. but would send the B-Team or lower to site because it's all about cost cutting.

Don't even get me started on the contracts and how we would pick those apart.

How to keep a support contract: Make the user think they solved the problem

My two favourites to use were:

Carbon Based Error

Nut loose on the keyboard.

Both everyone around them would get way before the victim did.

There are 875 million good reasons why the paperless office won't happen soon

My last role was at a home loan lender, we pushed for paperless because we were printing a couple of tress a day worth of 200 - 300 page loan documents.

Nearly 2 and a half years later we had a document management system in place, mainly because of the legal side of things making sure all the relevant laws were kept to, privacy protections were adhered to etc.

In the first month, staff started noticing content started missing from the document, a few characters on one page, then whole lines of info, so of course we panicked and called the vendor and got the "We've never seen this before" response.

It took them nearly 6 months to sort out the issue and in that time we had to go back to paper printing and scanning them in as separate documents in a file share.

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

This was going on 12 years ago.

I remember when I was working for the biggest outsourcer in Oz at the time, that Canon and HP both realized the money is made on the consumables, hence why inkjet MFP's were being sold at AUSPost stores for $59 and Laser MFP's for $99.

Nine floors underground, Oracle's Israel data centre can 'withstand a rocket, a missile or even a car bomb'

But can it survive a brain fart?

Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS

I expect if he tried to go the whislteblower route, he'd end up like Epstein, unless they get him out of the country altogether.

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

We rolled out some brand new Lenovo X370 Yoga's a few years back and people started complaining that their LTE connections would intermittently drop out.

Three other staff looked at the issue before I got to it, updating the firmware/drivers wouldn't work, Lenovo said they've never seen it happen before.

So I took one of the SIM tray's out and with the notebook on it's side, noticed the SIM would move slightly when I slowly inserted the tray to see what was going on.

Stuck the tiniest bit of bluetac under the SIM and problem solved.

Then did a two page email with photo's to Lenovo support with the CIO and Ops Manager cc'd in, on how to fix the problem.

Never had the issue on any other Lenovo's after that.

Apple warns sideloading iOS apps will ruin everything

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Back in early Windows XP days quite a few years back, members of a local Perth Linux community went to court to claw back the $'s for having XP supplied as part of buying a computer, they lost the case because the Judge decided that Linux was not an operating system and that the law specifically stated that computers in Australia must be sold with an OS.

US nuclear submarine bumps into unidentified underwater object in South China Sea

Re: Other scenarios

Alternate 3: Deep Rising was real.

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

Back in 2010 when the AUD was at parity with the USD, I had to buy a copy of VMWare Workstation.

On the US site is was $199AUD and the AUS site it was $299AUD.

So I bought it from the US site. Not even a few days later the other techs all were forced by the US site to redirect to the AU site and pay the higher price.

Now considering there's no support in that pricing, that was just pure greed on VMWare's part and if there was a way I could live without needing at least some of their products for work, you bet I would do so.

Clearview CEO doubles down, claims biz has now scraped over ten billion social media selfies for surveillance

Good luck getting my ugly mug, my Failbook profile has a chimp scratching it's head as my profile pic. Which is usually what I'm doing when a user comes up to me with one of their "why would you do that" issues they have caused.

I only have the account for keeping in touch with my sisters family overseas.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

It's even better when your Devs hard code path's, credentials and give themselves Admin rights for the test environment then don't go through their code and come back with "It works in Dev" when they roll it out to Prod and the inevitable starts happening.

Too bad none of the Dev teams I've worked with got bollocked by Manglement when it all went Total Inability To Support Usual Production.

No the Ops team would get that privilege and the Devs never apologized afterwards of course.

A most uncivil display in New York's Civil Court

When Yagan Square was first opened here in Perth, someone didn't think to disable the touch screen on a very large display.

Whereupon some joker decided to play a P*rnhub video on the display.

Maker of ATM bombing tutorials blew himself up – Euro cops

Meanwhile downunder in Wait Awhile, we had some people three years back yanking out ATM's with an SS Commodore ute and to my knowledge they were never caught...or perhaps they were caught for something else which is why it stopped suddenly.

BOFH: Pass the sugar, Asmodeus, and let the meeting of the Fellowship of Bastards … commence

We had a Test Lead that decided to change the existing permissions setup we had where you could tick the boxes of the roles, to making new roles named after a persons job description.

Unfortunately the Dev. team didn't actually sit down with the worker bees, just the Mangelment Team, so inevitably on day one the Help Desks streamed in from staff that could not longer do their jobs.

Of course when that happened, his response was "They shouldn't have that access" and the Manglers started getting staff asking how were they meant to do such-and-such which the Manglers didn't realize staff did, because all they do is make a few harder decisions and sign stuff, the staff do 95% of the workload after all.

Anyway after a few days it was decided to push role changes and merges to the Ops team because the Dev. team could see the wave of changes heading their way and didn't want to deal with it.

Four months later the Team Lead's job was made redundant but we were still feeling the after affects 5 years later until I left in April.

Lenovo blames 'firmware' issue for blank-screened Smart Displays, says Google's working on a fix – 6 months after complaints started

Lenovo don't seem to be having much luck the last few years.

We bought new notebooks in 2018 which worked fine for the first year before the SSD's started failing.

It took us quite a while to work out it was the Union Memory drives after finally starting to see posts in Lenovo's forums from other people having the same issue.

Out of 144 notebooks, we replaced the SSD's in 80% of them over an 18 month period and earlier this year moved over to HP X360's thanks to the problems this SSD issue cause.

We had been buying Lenovo notebook's and desktops since before I started there in February 2010, so were definitely a long term customer.

LA cops told to harvest social media handles from people they stop, suspect or not

Re: Not sure about that

Two tools our Credit management staff used all the times were Facebook and e-Courts.

e-Courts because unfortunately a small percentage of our customers did stupid things - check out Jamie Quirk's adventures in Kalgoorlie as an example - and if they were going away for a stretch in W.A's prison's, then of course they wouldn't be paying their mortgage and the Mortgagee In Possession team would have to get ready for another house to sell.

Facebook because we always had a percentage of recalcitrant customers that would do things like request $10,000 be taken out of their Superannuation accounts because they were at risk of having their house being taken over, then - true story - blowing $5,000 on hookers and drugs in a weekend bender, then when they came into our office and the Executive Manager for Credit asked if they were going to at least pay the other $5K, telling him no they were going on another bender, all because they posted on their Facebook page how they had this great bender or flew to Bali instead of making their promised payment or at Easter and Christmas not paying because they had to pay for eggs or presents.

Australia rules Facebook page operators are legally liable for user comments under posts

Re: You can relax.

I was being sarcastic of course.

The guy is a huge waste of space. He threatened to kill his own kid and had to take off from W.A. because the Police were after him and his wife's family didn't take to kindly to his threat about his own child.

If Dylan James Dudley Voller is reading this, Please stop giving WAPOL officers my address.

In July 2020 I started receiving OHMS and other letters assigned to Dylan James Dudley Voller.

I sent them back RTS as per usual but by September 2020 I got sick of continually getting them, so I did a Facebook check on his name and found three pages for him.

One was his artists page, one his personal page that had not been updated in years and one about how he was going to get on with his life.

I then used Western Australia's eCourts page and using his Facebook details found that he had multiple court cases for no authority to drive, assaulting a Police Officer and driving an unregistered vehicle.

So I ended up going to Mandurah Police station and they stated they would stop them coming through.

Everything was fine for a few months, then they started up again.

Fast forward to three weeks ago and I was speaking to my next door neighbour who is Aboriginal - and a great bloke - and found out that Dylan is his ex-son in law, which is how he got my address in the first place. I also found out other things about him and why he is no longer the son in law.

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

I was working at setting up a small network for a client, went outside to get a cable tester and when I came back, one of the monitors decided it was going to commit suicide and flames were licking at the ceiling, so I grabbed the nearest extuinguisher and drowned everything in powder.

That worked...unfortunately at the time, no-one was aware that dry powder extuinguishers are really good at eating electronics, so 6 months later all sorts of weird gremlins started popping up.

Penny smart and dollar stupid: IT jobs slashed in US, UK, Europe to cut costs – just when we need staff the most

Re: Smoke and mirrors.

"Then when they rehire it will be in lower cost centers (India, cough cough)."

Maybe look at how TOLL group is faring this year after they outsourced thier IT to India.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

This reminds me of my first job in retail, one of the guys had just built a PC with Windows NT on it and said how it was so good no-one could crash it.

So I inserted a floppy disk in the drive, formatted it and from a DOS pronpt ran a dir command whilst it was still formatting, then watched his faced when a BSOD appeared.

International Bullying Machine? Big Blue seeks exposure of corporate canary

If it gets to the point where the guy haves nothing else to lose, I hope the document anonymously gets sent to news outlets, shared on Facebook and the like.

Then see IBM's reaction when the negative publicity starts biting them hard.