Posts by codeusirae

Meet the man who'll TAKE OVER if UK faces CYBER ATTACK

Enough with the cyber ********

Enough with the cyber-this, cyber-that waffle, only the technologically illiterate media ever use the phrase.

Ultimate Doctor Tom Baker REGENERATES, RETURNS to WHO

Tom Baker is still alive ?

I could have sworn I saw a report of his demise, has someone been messing with the timeline again ?

re: "David Tennant owned the role of the Dr"., Duffaboy

David Tennent gave it a fine performance, but Tom Baker was not of this world ...

'High impact' Gmail password security hole blew accounts wide open

XSS cross-site request forgery ..

"That hacker-controlled site also initiates a cross-site request forgery attack via XSS that tricks Google into handing over the victim's login cookie."

I thought the hack tricks the browser into handing over the login cookie?

UK defamation law reforms take effect from start of 2014

A defamatory statement ..

`Under the Defamation Act, a statement can be said to be defamatory if its publication "caused or is likely to cause serious harm" to individuals' or businesses' reputation. However, only if businesses have suffered, or are likely to suffer, "serious financial loss", can they bring a claim of defamation against commentators`

What happens if the statement is true, and subsequently the defamee was found to have perjured himself in Court.

SCADA flaws put world leaders at risk of TERRIBLE TRAFFIC JAM

The death penalty ..

Bring in the death penalty for hacking SCADA kit with USB keys.

Gartner: OpenStack in the enterprise? Ha ha ha, you must be joking

What Gartner won’t tell you about OpenStack ..

"What Gartner can’t – or won’t – tell you about OpenStack Cloud"

Riverbed: Market for optimising WAN is pale, sick. Let's switch to LiC

Re: I am highly skeptical

Coming up with lots of new acronyms and trying to sell product, give them the benefit of the doubt would you ..

The ZOD FILES: Climate documents from 2007 'must stay secret'

Re: Full transparency the only option.

"If we are to have any faith in the process .. as long as the process is shown to be honest."

So, when are the people who hacked the email servers going to come forward, what would be more transparent than that ?

"What do the 'Climategate' hacked CRU emails tell us?"

Re: Nothing to hide, nothing to fear

They leaked the emails, nothing to show for it, now what ?

Such scientific discussion ..

'historic climate discussions .. are required to be “open and transparent”.`

Private communications between private parties are and never were required to be public, regardless as to how they were leaked in the first place

"David Holland, the man whose FoI requests - refused by the Met Office - triggered the Climategate scandal"

The Climategate 'scandal' was triggered by the leaking of private emails by a third party to throw doubt on the climate change/global warming hypothesis. Any doubts of which of have been fully negated by a 2007 IPCC report, among others. None of these leaked emails have shown any evidence for the opposing view. As a parliamentary enquiry has also shown.

PlayStation 4 BLUE LIGHT OF DEATH blamed on power cords, TV sets, butterflies in China

For a minute there ..

"Sony has, er, narrowed down the mysterious Blue Light of Death issues plaguing some of its new PlayStation 4 consoles to possible issues with the hardware, software or firmware."

For a minute there, I thought it was something else ...

Barclays Online OFFLINE: UK bank site, mobile app go titsup for the evening

Barclays cutting operational specialists ..

"More and more people are choosing to use smartphones and technology for everyday transactions .. As a result of technological changes, we will be able to provide better service for our customers with fewer staff in our branches." ref

When three Linux journos go crowdfunding

Finding a Linux mag on the newsrack ..

Maybe the reason Linux mags aren't selling well, is the difficulty in actually finding them on the newsrack. Usually tucked in on the bottom, at the back, hidden behind free Windows and iPhone adverts ..

Boffins warn LIMPWARE takes the pleasure out of cloud

The CLOUD brought down by a single NIC card?

"A third paper, Impact of Limpware on HDFS: A Probabilistic Estimation (PDF) offers a detailed analysis of how a single limplocked component, in this case a single NIC card, can greatly degrade the performance of a Hadoop cluster. The paper also shows that Hadoop can't detect the under-performing NIC and therefore doesn't fail over to another."

One would have thought that the people building the CLOUD would have designed in such failure detection from the beginning. What effect would failure of component X have on the system-wide performance etc.

If this doesn't terrify you... Google's computers OUTWIT their humans

Enter the Matrix ..

http://www.hackthematrix.org/

Dell orbits Linux a third time with revamped Sputnik notebooks

How much is that in real money?

"The new Sputnik model replaces the old one and it's available for preorder in the US beginning on Friday for $1,249 [GB£ 775.08] with a Core i5 and a 128GB SSD or $1,549 [GB£ 961.25] with a Core i7 and 256GB."

File-NUKING Cryptolocker PC malware MENACES 'TENS of MILLIONS' in UK

Lurking Ransomware ..

"Lurking within the attachments is a Trojan called Cryptolocker, which when executed, silently installs itself"

Does this malware prompt for the admin password before installing or can it install as standard user?

Snappers attack Google Image problem, demand action from EC officials

Use a robots.txt file ...

"Photographers are seeing *massive* falloff in site visits. There's no need to visit a photographer's website when Google serves the image up for free." El Presidente

Can't see no reason they don't use a robots.txt file ...

Who is behind this lobby group?

Who is behind this lobby group, would their name begin with the 'M' letter ..

'Planned maintenance' CRIPPLES nearly HALF of all Salesforce instances in Europe, US

Salesforce lays off 200 employees ..

"Salesforce Marketing Cloud announced it is laying off another 200 employees — approximately a third of which are located at the company’s New Brunswick offices — following a round of cuts that last fall that affected more than 100 jobs." link

Linux Voice mag ..

Linux Voice mag ..

Wow. We’re 48 hours into the campaign, and I still can’t quite believe what has taken place. We wanted to get off to a good start, of course, but seeing the amount of buzz and activity around the internet is brilliant.

£15,000. Over 300 funders. Tweets being retweeted to tens of thousands of people. Articles on The Guardian website, MCV, betanews and elsewhere. Ben and Andrew giving interviews and taking part in podcasts. Nick Veitch, the creator of Linux Format, backing us with a lifetime subscription.

It’s incredible, but we still have a long way to go. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but spreading the word is vital here. We don’t have a big advertising budget, so we’re relying on the community to let everyone know – and when we succeed, we’ll be giving back to this awesome community. Thank you! ref

Linux backdoor squirts code into SSH to keep its badness buried

Fake Linux backdoor ..

"The malware ‪was used in an attack on a large (unnamed) hosting provider ‬back in May. It cleverly attempted to avoid setting off any alarm bells by injecting its own communications into legitimate traffic, specifically SSH chatter."

Makes no mention as to how this unnamed hosting provider was compromised in the first place, just another free advertisement for Symantec ...

Who will recover your data if disaster strikes?

Windows and Mac only ...

Windows 7, 8, Vista, XP, Mac OS Snow Leopard

'Scientists are coming to space with USBs which are infected'

@Microsoft Virus©

@Microsoft Virus©

Google Books case dismissed ..

Google Books case dismissed ..

In Authors Guild v. Google, Google's motion for summary judgment dismissing the case on fair use grounds has been granted.

In a 30-page decision, Judge Denny Chin, who has been presiding over the case since its inception as a District Court Judge, but who is now a Circuit Court judge in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, reasoned that Google's "Library Project", which involved scanning books from libraries without permission of the copyright holders: link

Stephen Hawking: 'Boring' Higgs Boson discovery cost me $100

Hawking hijacked event - how?

As an invited speaker at the Science Museum in a talk entitled "The Science Museum Presents Stephen Hawking", Professor Hawkin said this:

48:30: "I think the discovery of super symmetrical partners for the known particles would revolutionise our understanding of the Universe. I don't feel the same way about the Higgs Boson. Physics would be far more interesting if it had not been found. A few weeks ago, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert shared the Nobel Prize for their work on the Boson and they richly deserved it - congratulations to them both.

But the discovery of the new particle came at a personal cost. I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs Particle wouldn't be found. The Nobel Prize cost me one hundred dollars." link

Europe, SAVE US! Patriot Act author begs for help to curb NSA spying

Your viewing habits spied on

@ doronron: "You may think your viewing of this article from Britain to elReg in Britain is not spied upon by GCHQ, but look again and you'll see most of the page dressing comes from US servers and hence your viewing of this page and all the identity info it contains, has been logged by GCHQ in direct violation of the law."

Why do I have to connect to all these sites in order to view a Guardian page? ..

ajax.googleapis.com, scorecardsearch.com, edgecastcdn.net, fastly.net, guim.co.uk, optimizely.com, quantserve.com, resource.guim.net, revsci.net, static.adsafeprotected.com, static.chartbeat.com, wunderloop.net ...

Chinese Bitcoin exchange disappears, along with £2.5m

Chinese Bitcoins ..

"Chinese Bitcoin exchange GBL has shut down, taking with it over 25 million yuan (£2.5m, $US4.1m) of investors’ money, in another warning to those who don’t look before they leap with the digital currency."

Will GBL be able to spend these Bitcoins or will the blockchain declare them invalid, or what?

Obamacare Internet Explorer only ..

Obamacare Internet Explorer only ..

Not only that, the form consists of a 20 page 3MB PDF file, that you have to download fill-in and then SUBMIT, no chance of correcting your work as you go along, what a shambles ...

"This online application is built and tested for use with Internet Explorer. Using other browsers may cause the form to not work properly."

'Important: The "submit" button does not work when used with the Macintosh Safari or Google Chrome browsers. Please do not use Macintosh Safari or Google Chrome browsers with this application. We are also not able to support the use of this form on Ipads or mobile devices at this time.'

This although the PDF was created in Adobe InDesign CS6 on a Macintosh apparently ..

https://apps.state.or.us/mbs/landing.jspx

FLIGHTMARE! Inflight cell calling debuts, dealing heavy blow to quality of life

Always on ..

Is it possible to book a talking or non-talking section?

"El Reg is willing to bet that a lot of passengers aren't wild about the prospect of having some loud git shouting down their mobile phone for hours at a time."

Why do these gits see the need to talk at such a volume that you'd think they were holding a conversation with someone on the next bus over?

Yet ANOTHER IE 0-day hole found: Malware-flingers already using it for drive-by badness

Sophisticated zero-day in-memory payload flaw ..

Has the word bug been replaced by flaw in the current lexicon, like sniper has become sharp-shooter, mercenary has become private-contractor and bombing has become 'delivering ordnance'.

Blighty's banks prep for repeated kicks to cyber-'nads in Operation Waking Shark II

Attack of the cyber stress test ..

Would this 'cyber stress test' consist of simulating a massive DDOS attack from a vast army of compromised Windows Desktop computers?

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/distributed-denial-of-service-attack

Microsoft advertises Surface, Excel with maths mistake

Re: The gift that keeps on giving

Why not just split off the Office division and then sue the third party companies that include Office in their product, double dipping at its finest ...

Bletchley Park vows to upload secret World War II code-cracking archives

Re: Ahem…

@Richard 20: #"Bletchley Park, the British wartime code-breaking center". Perhaps the author is American, but my understanding is that 'The Register' is still a British organ. TIA.`

Well, it was Harvey Keitel who boarded U-571 and captured that Enigma Machine that saved the war. Even though the British really boarded U-110 and really captured the Enigma Machine. Besides which it was the Poles who provided an earlier Enigma model ..

The secrets of Bletchley Park

Why the haste to shut-down Bletchley Park and dismantle the equipment so soon after the second world war?

BOFH: GOATSE? No, I said goat fetis... you know what, forget it

I don't believe it ..

Goatse, you actually wrote a whole article on goatse, I don't believe it ...

Oooh! My NAUGHTY SKIRT keeps riding up! Hello, INTERNET EXPLORER

Princess Robot Bubblegum ..

@ShelLuser: "Well, there isn't anything directly explicit to be seen there but yeah; I wouldn't watch that while being at work."

You do realize that 'Princess Robot Bubblegum' is taking the piss out of Anime?

"Only a hypersexualized nerds fantasy can save humanity, by sleeping with it"

http://www.rockstargames.com/IV/#?page=videos&content=princessrobot

--

re: the comments on this regarticle, I haven't laughed so much in ages ...

Re: my favorite Internet Explorer Commercial

Should have choosen this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX8yrOAjfKM

IT finance bod coughs to slurping £130k from customers' accounts

WTF: do they have no procedures or auditing?

Yea, they got the account manager to carry-out the audit ..

Snowden: Hey fellow NSA worker, mind if I copy your PASSWORD?

Retrospective Reuters arse-covering ..

"A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden .. said a source close to several U.S. government investigations"

Who told Reuters and can we believe them? What does Snowden have to say regarding leaked passwords, how and why did the 'agency employees' cop to revealing their passwords. Besides, a competent tech admin don't need passwords.

"Reuters reported last month that the NSA failed to install the most up-to-date, anti-leak software at the Hawaii"

What 'anti-leak software' ?

Polygraphs are pseudo scientific nonsence ..

"if you've been polygraphed, you're an insider and you are presumed to be trustworthy,"

Has anyone ever done a double-blind test, how many false positives, how many false negatives ..

How Google paved the way for NSA's intercepts - just as The Register predicted 9 years ago

Just who is spying on your computer?

"U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

"Thousands Of Firms Trade Confidential Data With The US Government"

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-14/thousands-firms-trade-confidential-data-us-government-exchange-classified-intelligen

"Government Built Spy-Access"

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/06/government-built-spy-access-into-most-popular-consumer-program-before-911/

Enabling the on-demand data centre with SDN

What Network Virtualization is?

A software emulator running on networked hardware emulating a virtual network, running all your virtual machines in the virtual cloud on a virtual ...

AT&T turns spying on customers for CIA into cash waterfall – report

Secrets of room 641A

"The CIA is expressly forbidden from undertaking intelligence collection activities inside the United States 'for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of US persons,' and the CIA does not do so."

Then what the f**k are all those fiber optic taps in Folsom Street used for?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/presskit/ATT_onepager.pdf

Dodgy Kaspersky update borks THOUSANDS of NHS computers

Resources for an update bork-checker

@DaLo: "How many companies, let alone NHS trusts do you know that have the budget and resources to employ an AV update bork-checker?"

Maintain the one Windows image that's rolled out across the organizatiion and impliment your own patch cycle. Include a roll-back mechanism for patches that bork the system. Test the updates before adding them to the image. Would take about one-man-days work.

Microsoft, Facebook: We'll pay cash if you can poke a hole in the INTERNET

Flaws in the Internet ..

There's nothing wrong with the Internet, the flaw resides in the flaky software at either end ..

Sysadmins: How do YOU protect your networks against 'friendly fire'?

Corporate firewall grenade?

@Duncan Macdonald: "In military terms, the corporate firewall is like the AA defenses around a base - it protects from hostile enemy aircraft but cannot protect from someone rolling a grenade into your tent - to protect against that you need additional security."

Given today's design philosophy, a corporate firewall is as much use as asking people 'are you carrying any grenades' before letting them enter the base.

To continue the analogy, given the accuracy of current missiles, a fixed base is a liability, better to keep the whole army mobile, never in the same place two days in a row and never-ever lets the locals onto base.

Virtual perimeter network ..

"most people are anticipating a world in which .. external parties will be accessing applications from both inside and outside the physical organisation boundary."

Design your system so as there *is* no inside, everyone accesses the system through VPN running off of a hardware token, and a full and irrevocable audit trail at the server end.

Microsoft in a TIFF over Windows, Office bug that runs code hidden in pics

U.S. Navy's warship of the future runs Linux

@anonymous: "Actually the US military and the British Army and Navy overwhelmingly use Windows. Specifically because of historical security concerns around Linux. Google 'Windows for Warships'"

"U.S. Navy's warship of the future runs Linux"

http://www.dvice.com/2013-10-24/us-navys-warship-future-runs-linux

"Sunk by Windows NT"

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13987