Posts by smalldot

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

Re: It’s not just M$

Right. There once was a man who said the same. Ed Snowden, his name was.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Re: there's nothing particularly wrong with Windows 11

I have no major complaints with Windows 11 Pro. It works just as well as Win 7 or 10 did, as long as that TPM/hardware requirement is met.

I used to look for separate drivers when installing Windows. Motherboard chipset, CPU, audio chipset. Not needed anymore. Even HP Laserjet printer works after three clicks: add printer, select found printer, OK. Games run fine. Hyper-V virtual machine for banking tasks to keep them separated from other apps. Windows sandbox for opening suspicious links or meme sites found in Reddit. I encrypt my documents locally before syncing to Onedrive (there's an open source app for this).

For coding stuff my projects live in Ubuntu WSL that runs containers and linux apps, and VS Code integrates with them. Microsoft has done good work improving WSL under Windows.

Could I do all this with Mac OS or Linux? Yes, absolutely.

US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight

The US and UK may come to regret they didn't murder Assange. They could have poisoned him using some nerve agent, while tightening sanctions against Russia. Just to remind Putin who is the boss.

Seriously though, the number of people who have publicly called Assange a rapist shows how well the propaganda machine works in the West. Another example was how the media claimed Assange was paranoid and crazy in his Embassy prison. That he believed the walls had ears and everyone was spying on him. Next thing we know a Spanish court detailed how the Americans had paid the security firm responsible of protecting the embassy. They installed cameras and microphones everywhere, even the toilets. Assange whole life in the embassy was livestreamed into the US. Including confidential discussions with his lawyers on the court case against him.

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

Re: Only 2 years?

Maybe it was offset by the rise in productivity. Three months without calendar reservations and Teams, woohoo!

Five Eyes nations plus Japan, India call for Big Tech to bake backdoors into everything

I'm just going to say it

I hope the five eyes force their technology companies to adopt this proposal. Maybe then more people would start to use open source alternatives. Or maybe then European companies would get a boost in their hopeless attempts to compete with giants who have unlimited cash to spend.

I can 'proceed without you', judge tells Julian Assange after courtroom outburst

Re: Blackmailed

US Espionage Act only only needs an answer whether secret information was published or not. Obviously Wikileaks participated in publishing of that information, which means there is no defence for Assange in US court. Assange is on his way from one court of clowns to another.

What price security? Well, for the US ban on Huawei/ZTE kit it's around $1.8bn, and you're going to pay most of it

Re: Chinaware Infestation

May I suggest a podcast called "Malicious Life". Ran Levi is an amazing host and the episodes contain his analysis of cyber security topics. In two latest episodes (season 3), Ran tells the story of the Great firewall of China. And how it was built. Ran Levi interviews people and tells what happened. He leaves it to the listener to make their own judgement based on facts.

Can you guess which companies competed against each other to get to build China's totalitarian surveillance system from ground up when China's internet market opened two decades ago? Who made lucrative deals to provide network equipment, engineered monitoring of every Chinese net user and connected Chinese police and authorities to the system? Who trained Chinese engineers to operate and continue expanding the system? Answer is Western companies of course. And Nortel made more deals than anyone else.

Franco-German cloud framework floated to protect European's data from foreign tech firms slurpage

Re: How will they build it?

No doubt it will be a bloated and costly project. But the indirect cost of surrendering our data to the US and China is probably higher. There's a reason why those countries don't allow any foreign cloud business to grow on their own ground.

Doom Eternal: Reboot sequel is cluttered but we're only here for the rippin' and the tearin'

Need to mention Sigil

Many people here liking and still playing the original versions of Doom. Should check out the new levels John Romero released last year, called Sigil.

Re: Too much platforming

Yep, platforming was my only serious complaint with Doom Eternal. I just had to keep playing. After a few hours I learned the controls and could start enjoying the battles. Best part is there is no need to follow the story, kill anything that moves is still all that is needed.

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

Still the same internet

I have seen many detailed and graphic videos from Afghanistan or Pakistan where an AC-130 or helicopter gunships kills people. In each case they take great care to kill everyone in the area. Doesn't matter if people were armed or not, trying to surrender, run away or hide. Everyone gets killed. The last alive are hunted down one by one. Bodies are fired upon one more time, to make sure they are dead.These videos were widely shared by media and the same internet companies. Lots of people cheering in the comment sections.

So is the Christchurch video any different? Yes and no. It's all subjective.

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

Re: Boo hoo

Your understanding is correct as far as the original ETSI/3GPP standards definition goes. But there are countries that have national legislation saying emergency calls will not be allowed unless the phone has a SIM card (and transmits the identifier of said card to network). A quick Google search says UK is a country where a valid active SIM is required.

I understand the need to reduce hoax calls by trying to identify idiots who makes them. But this can make a costly lesson for people from other countries who are used to having an extra phone laying around just for emergencies.

SentinelOne makes YouTube delete Bsides vid 'cuz it didn't like the way bugs were reported

Not surprised

Remember the Youtube video that was 100% white noise, and received five copyright claims? After reading that story I started mentally placing all articles about Youtube in the "entertainment" section.

On Kaspersky’s 'transparency tour' the truth was clear as mud

Can we see the original evidence first?

Where is the evidence that Kaspersky products are in any way more harmful than competing AV products?

I have understood that AV programs are risky because they 1) constantly download updates from the internet, 2) accept any type of code or binary input to scan, and 3) attempt to decode or uncompress the input binary or even run it in a sandbox to see how it behaves. It's not difficult to believe that a serious attacker could try to use the AV product to attack company networks.

But why would any AV company knowingly co-operate with government spies? That would be commercial suicide. Their whole business is based on trust. All the US has to do is to publish evidence on Kaspersky working with Russian spies, and the whole world will instantly uninstall Kaspersky AV. Or is it perhaps so, that soon we will learn about another NSA tool that uses Kaspersky AV to infect target machines?

Promising compsci student sold key-logger, infects 16,000 machines, pleads guilty, faces jail

Re: How is a keylogger illegal?

I think all keyloggers need to hide from virus scanners. The AV companies cannot know whether a program is used legally or not, they will trigger an alarm for every keylogger they find. Not all users are clever enough to know how to set an exception (white-list) in their AV scanner tool.

How I hacked SIM cards with a single text - and the networks DON'T CARE

possible to block?

I thought it is the telcos themselves who update SIM card contents using SMS commands. Is there something to prevent telcos from filtering SMS messages based on content? In other words, if SMS is an over-the-air command to SIM and it did not originate from operator's own server, delete it.