Posts by TsVk!

Reg readers have spoken: 93% back move away from Microsoft in UK public sector

Re: Proprietary file formats

The issue is really with highly integrated proprietary systems. Even before 365 they refused to meaningfully support CalDAV, effectively making Outlook the one and only client for business.

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

Yes, added. Thanks for the prompt.

Collapsed Arecibo telescope to be replaced by school

Should just turn the whole site into an extreme skate park. Use the revenue to build another one. :D

Infosec still (mostly) a boys club

Where are these women we should be treating equally?

In almost 20 years at this computer lab we have only had one woman apply for a role here, she was pretty newly qualified. We offered it to her but she was not prepared to move here for the job as she just wanted to work remotely which is impossible with our air-gapped systems.

Literally not another female has applied.

In fact I've never met a heavy nerd, Linux loving, network head, coder in my life... does even such a creature exist?

Whole article seems like hokey to me, based around an assumption of discrimination rather than a reality of general female interest in the field.

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

I had a similar progression, give up on earlier Gnome and KDE desktops and moved to Cinnamon. In the last 6 months it's got all buggy and started crashing so I moved back to the new KDE. Couldn't be happier. Stable and much easier to navigate than before, less voodoo required.

UK Prime Minister Johnson knows not when 400k+ deleted records from police DB will be back

Re: Johnsons fault or click bait?

Calling a group of people individuals, to prove that it is an individual persons fault is mocking our intelligence. Pure semantic fuckery.

It was clearly a cascading systematic failure as you highlighted.

Google won’t let Australia have shiny new toys unless it picks apart pay-for-news plan

Aussie guvmint are muppets.

NewsCorp are puppeteers for Aussie guvmint. The two are interconnected. The conglomerate supports the incumbent government by running smear campaigns against it's political enemies and overlooking corruption reporting while the government rubs it's back by protecting it's monopoly, helping kill off competitors and now increasing it's revenue.

Been going on for too long, it's a sad state of affairs.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

Well it's good for little ones

Teenagers are smart enough and savvy enough they will find porn when they want. There's no stopping that.

This tech could stop little kids who are just after Thomas the Tank Engine and My Little Pony vids ending up watching casting couch vids by accident. I agree the onus is on parents to monitor their kids internet use, but no sane or sober parent is going to sit with their kids and watch that stuff the whole time they are watching it.

So, maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Google scolded for depriving the poor of privacy as Chinese malware bundled on phones for hard-up Americans

Isn't Android open source?

How would we stop people changing open source software and doing whatever the hell they like with it? Isn't that the point?

I might be missing something here, but it seems like people want Google to change stuff that isn't under their scope of power.

Microsoft engineer caught up in sudden spate of entirely coincidental grilling of Iranian-Americans at US borders

Re: And the consequenques fo failing to act?

White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi movements do not have the 11th most powerful military force in the world and are not backed by billions of dollars of oil money. They do not have the real power or wherewithal to pose a significant risk to the US public on home soil.

If left unchecked Iran does. It is a powerful country, not just some funny little dessert nation.

Underestimating your enemy is poor form. I can tell by the amount of downvotes on my initial comment that the majority of people don't understand how serious this confrontation could be and what a full confrontation with Iran would mean. They think they would totally be safe from any harm in their isolated 1st world society. You can be thankful that your government is not so naive.

And the consequenques fo failing to act?

One can just imagine the backlash if border security did not tighten itself against potential Iranian threats and there was an attack on sovereign soil.

"Why didn't you see this coming?"

"Well, we did. But people didn't like us trying to stop it. Sorry guys..."

"Boooo! Traitor!"

Braking bad? Van with £112m worth of crystal meth in back hits cop car at police station

Re: Meth or ice!

That powder you speak of is probably amphetamine sulphate, aka speed. Not the same thing.

Got an 'old' Tesla? Musk promises 'self-driving' upgrade chip ship by end of 2019

Back to the Future?

Looks like an updated Delorian. Maybe that was the plan.

Remember that crypto-exchange boss who mysteriously died after his customers' coins disappeared? Of course he totally stole them

Wrong career...

I should have been setting myself up to "die" in this manner since school.

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

No one said a word whilst quietly being shafted?

I would have been questioning my pay packet on the very first week I got stiffed two and a half hours, not waiting almost seven years and then calling a lawyer. Seems a bit stupid really.

It woz ransomware wot did it: ConnectWise spills beans on cause for day-long outage

fuck up done right

Seems like they did a pretty good job recovering from what could have been a devastating attack. Bravo.

Baffling tale of Apple shops' 'non-facial' 'facial recognition', a stolen ID, and a $1bn lawsuit after a wrongful arrest

I seriously need to get falsely arrested at 4am, I'm in the wrong industry.

Aussies, Yanks may think they're big drinkers – but Brits easily booze them under the table

Typical that statistical academics aren't able to defferentiate between cause and outcome.

All that raising the price of alcohol will do is cause people who are already experiencing social and psychological issues to experience financial issues as well. Widespread alcohol abuse is clearly a symptom of unhappy people, not the cause.

It's not your imagination: Ticket scalper bots are flooding the internet according this 'ere study

get people to put their names on tickets and make them non-transferrable

Event tickets are non-transferable in Australia, no problems getting in to see your favourite bands. ID must be presented with ticket to get in. Easy.

US could do the same, but I bet that breaks some sort of constitutional something according to someone.

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

Hundreds of millions of pr0n sites, blocked 50... Mission accomplished.

Well done Britain. (golf clap)

Newsflash: Twitter still toxic place for women, particular those of color, Amnesty study finds

words are not violence

Not in any English dictionary.

I'm not sure who's failing more. Twitter for hosting so many twits or Amnesty for trying to stop imaginary violence.

Oz opposition caves, offers encryption backdoor compromise

It's all about busting druggies.

It's the same as the metadata retention laws they added a couple of years back. The aim is almost purely to stop people using the internet to buy and sell drugs.

That's not speculation, there are solid figures that show that is what has primarily been done with metadata. They got a few tax evaders and stuff too, but no terrorists to speak of, which was what the new laws claimed to be all about.

But those gosh darn druggies just won't stop hey, they started using VPN's and USB bootable OS's and now the police are well... stuck.

MIT to Oz: Crypto-busting laws risk banning security tests

Australia does not exist in a vacuum

So it might be illegal for an Australian person/entity to disclose a discovered backdoor in the future, but the rest of the world will be under no jurisdiction to follow such nonsense laws and will be actively searching for and exposing these vulnerabilities... just because they know they exist.

Challenge accepted!

Microsoft lobs Windows 10, Server Oct 2018 update at world (minus file-nuking 'feature') after actually doing some testing

Re: QA in progress...

Why would you attempt such folly at day 0?

Your public service is appreciated.

From today, it's OK in the US to thwart DRM to repair your stuff – if you keep the tools a secret

Banning sharing the tools is optimistic

Once someone creates a hack tool for whatever device or DRM there will be no stopping it when it hits the open internet, no matter what the law says.

We've seen this already with firmware for game consoles and the (in)famous KMSpico.

The fact that people will use this to seize their own rights rather than others is a triviality.

Oz to turn pirates into vampires: You won't see their images in mirrors

whack a mole time again

They are never ever going to be able to stop piracy no matter what they do. The internet by it's very nature is interconnected. They might be able to make it more difficult for the older generation, but younger users are tech savvy enough that there is no way to restrict them.

But as explained by our illustrious PM last year;

“Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,"

Fun times in Imaginaryland.

UK.gov to press ahead with online smut checks (but expects £10m in legals in year 1)

They ould just ban all pr0n and then not enforce the laws

They can just DNS block all pr0n like they do pirate sites in Australia. Then everyone can change their DNS and continue as normal.

Fogies in government feel good because they did something to mitigate a perceived threat, people don't care because nothing has changed.

Win win.

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

Less costs more?

Too much for what it is... at half the price I'd give it a go.

‘Very fine people’ rename New York as ‘Jewtropolis’ on Snapchat, Zillow

Re: Trump bashing inaccurate here

Yeah, but only a ginger can call a ginger a ginger.

Patch Tuesday heats up with pair of exploited zero-days squashed – plus 58 other vulns fixed

Re: 70 updates with no restart?! What magic is this?

Whether or not your machine will start again remains to be seen...

Amnesty slaps Google amid crippled censored China search claims

Modus operandi

Google provides a censored and skewed search result for everyone else, there's no logical reason for it not to do so for China as well.

Just another day...

Atari accuses El Reg of professional trolling and making stuff up. Welp, here's the interview tape for you to decide...

I'm a little disappointed to be honest. I have high hopes for this console. Maybe the company is just totally shit at PR (techie in a single room for years on end alien syndrome) and the console will be decent when it finally makes it to the public.

Jury is still out here.

'Vigilance' hacker charged over Minnesota government attacks

Re: Don't do the crime...

if ya can't keep ya mouth shut... geez.

Alleged dark web drug baron cuffed – after he flew to US for World Beard Championships

never would have won the comp anyway...

shooting out of his league again.

Facebook posts put Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli in prison as a danger to society

The bloke is a clear narcissist and sociopath, it just may be he'll have a run in with HIV in prison... that would be sweet irony.

FBI's spyware-laden video claims another scalp: Alleged sextortionist charged

He's going to be very popular in prison... oh the games that will be played.

'Public Wi-Fi' gang fail in cunning plan to hide £10m cigarette tax fraud

encryption?

Seems strange to go to such lengths to use different networks and then send everything in plain text. Sigh.

Pokemon Go Directly To Jail if you hunt here, says Oz Justice Dept

Lawmakers must make up laws, it's self serving...

To the point where it's impossible for an ordinary man not to be a criminal. Just look at QLD.

Exit-tel customers can't even upgrade their plans to stay

Trying to milk those who do stay with them too.

They tried to put me from a $70 a month package to $108... to provide exactly the same thing.

When I told them to get stuffed and tried to cancel my service they tried to charge me an additional months service at $108 from the day I cancelled. I told them I'd see them in court before I paid the money, and the tune changed.

Good riddance.

Swapped to a small local ISP now, giving me the exact same speeds as I had with Exetel... except when I call them up I speak to the same young Aussie bloke on the phone. Costs me $10 more a month than before. I can live with that.

Dallas Buyers Club doubles down on Oz Torrenters

This just the test case... and also the true purpose of meta data retention laws being introduced in Australia. I'd bet my left shoe on it.

FBI boss: We don't want a backdoor, we want the front door to phones

Criminals have the right to hide their activity from the Police?

I think many people here are being closed minded about this topic.

If the police have enough suspicion and evidence to approach a judge and get a phone tapped there is probably a very good reason for this. Who would want to stand in the way? Certainly not me.

It's not being suggested that we hand over all our phone data freely. Stop waving the freedom flag (before you wear it out and compromise other serious privacy issues) and look at the issue at hand.

Vulture South party: the winners and grinners from our limerick comp

Something I notice about boffins,

in fact this happens quite often.

When asked for creative,

they resort to expletives,

Which I think is f#%*ing awesome.

Gameover ZeuS adds nasty trick

with a flick of a switch...

the best work around for all of these phishing/social engineering tricks;

.exe files can only be run from C:\Program Files... Group Policy

This has curbed my companies malware infection rates by 90% in the last 3 months, and makes us highly resistant to this attack also.

They don't recognise us as HUMAN: Disability groups want CAPTCHAs killed

Re: They're useless anyway

I've seen a great new captcha type verification that solves this. A simple question like "Which of these are dogs?" and 8 pictures with dogs and cats. Click on the dogs and in you go... Works very well.

As far as small sites go it's a great solution, but once larger sites start using it it's not random enough to keep out the hackers/spammers though.

Google accounts for quarter of US internet traffic – report

Re: And it's 2084?

Yep, one decent solar flare to frazzle every microchip on the planet, that's all it takes....

Could be today or tommorrow, or next week, but it's more likely to happen than not (some say).

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

Violent/child porn is clearly an exposure issue and people who are interested in this do need pulling up.

If 'normal' people want to watch porn it is a freedom that should not be monitored, I agree. But that is not what this legislation is about. It's about tackling sexual perpetrators before they commit crimes and harm real people. I am fully in support of that. However, having child safe filters by default at an ISP level. That could be seen as deprivation of human rights. (right to information) I guess the UK gov't can add that to their recent war crimes also on they dossier...

Just to note though, this will not work. People who browse illegal content and commit online crimes use ways of channeling data that ISP's cannot stop or log. It may stop a few (which I guess is better than none), but it will fail, badly.