Posts by DCFusor

UK MPs' disinformation sub-committee is sure to bring Facebook chief to heel (in Opposites Land)

Re: "threats to democracy".

He's suggesting regulation as an alternative to being broken up....

Leaky Martin will be livin' la vida lockdown: Ex-NSA bod cops to taking home 'up to 50TB' of hush-hush dossiers

Re: Big collection

Way back when I worked for DEC, NSA Ft Meade was one of the places we'd sometimes get a call from. They'd let you in with just about anything, at least at first, being that a computer repair guy needs a scope, some spares, some diagnostics and suchlike. They didn't have a regular or preventative maintenance service contract - they did their own stuff when they could. So we got to charge them by the hour at then-princely sums.

We turned it into a huge profit center. What went in - never came out. Nothing, because at that time, no one knew what IC chip (almost all memory was core, but still) - might have held a secret picked up inside. You'd better not have a fancy zippo, even.

Pretty soon they had a real good selection of spare parts, and nice Tek 465 scopes (I learned not to take my well calibrated and very stable one in after that - the replacements were never quite as good). And once they realized that, nope, we couldn't take anything in without some real special footwork with the bureaucracy. It was fun while it lasted. It was probably a bit different if you worked there.

But other places in the intelligence community I worked after that - even if the guard knew you, they'd check your badge - no monkey pictures got in at all. They used to be serious. Now it's all probably younger punks with today's set of "IDGAF" attitudes.

Easy-to-hack combat systems, years-old flaws and a massive bill – yup, that's America's F-35

Re: Sunken cost fallacy

Everyone seems almost deliberately arguing things that while true, utterly miss the point.

It's a jobs program for the MIC. It's pork to hand out for congressmen. Nothing else matters, it doesn't need to work or be on time - that would reduce the effectiveness of the original purpose.

It took quite a fight to force the AF to keep the A-10 - whose pilots never have to buy their own drinks if ground pounders are around. For a reason - low and slow lets them hit the bad guys and not the good guys.

Even if it worked, the F35 would suck at close air support - a mission the AF hates to admit is required, as they hate to admit they alone can't win conflicts. Those other missions they think they have for it are better done with other airframes already.

There is no point in stealth if you have to go low and slow to ID the target. It's not invisible at that point. All it can do is deliver limited ordnance and run away fast. Running away - now that's what the AF wants! Along with too much money, of course.

That would be if it worked. But see above - no one wants that except a few foreign customers duped into the program.

Oracle asks Supremes to snub Google's Java API copyright protest – and have a nice cuppa tea, instead

Oracle didn't invent SQL for starters, has C code for which they include the standard headers, and numerous other things that if they win, they could be sued for doing - much more of the same thing - that IBM and others have done.

Windows.h is kinda large all by itself.

Oh, they support POSIX too. So by some of the liar interpretations of open source such as the one SCO used, they need to make 100% of their other code - including this - open source!

See how disruptive this can become with lawyers involved? Everyone needs to use headers from other code to interoperate with it and be useful on any opsys whatever. If an opsys wants to be usable without needing completely custom application code for every little thing, it itself needs to comply with some standards.

Copyrighting a standard is horribly bad ju ju. Haven't we all railed about similar issues with hardware standards that turned out to have submarine patents on them and companies coming out of the woodwork demanding excessive royalties on things like dram or radio parts? Similar issues here.

Brexit jitters fingered as UK consumer PC sales collapse

Or negative - cost of storage space and difficulty finding all your junk when there's more to fish through ;~)

Ever tried to sell a used PC? Not saying it should be, but they devalue in price so fast it's nuts.

I see reasonable laptops on ebay for << $100. May as well keep a backup if that price (minus shipping expense and other fees) is all you're gonna get.

Maybe those few who do sell and those few buying them super cheap (I have my eye on a Dell i-3 laptop machine priced at $20 w/o a drive - half the price of a raspberry pi, but with a keyboard, and display) are why there are fewer new sales - maybe the Brits are smart! And this would also account for flash sales not tanking as badly as well.

A lot of this is like stock market pundits. Every single day if there is movement, they have to come up with a "because" - which is often whatever would most confirm their audience' confirmation biases, and which certainly has little to no connection to facts (else they'll all be too rich from trading to bother with talking in a studio). It's the same argument as "why don't psychics always win the lotteries".

Blow 'em Huawei: Rival Fujitsu tops Chinese array in flashy SPC-1 benchmark brawl

At the price per IOP ratio, I wouldn't call that blowing away, exactly. More of a sucking sound.

Autonomy trial judge gets SaaSy with HPE's lawyer over vital accounts fraud claim

As a single percent

They are talking about ~ 125 mil in revenue brought forward when it would have actually been paid them over time.

But paid how many billions for the company? 11 bil?

Anyone numerate would be having quite a chuckle over ~ a 1% issue.

Sure, a bad day at the office, and one any sort of due diligence should have caught but...

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

Re: I sure would

I was just admiring your careful wording in the original statement.

Thought about going into politics? /joke

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

Re: Batteries

Inside the passenger compartment....??? So when you go to refuel it, you put the hose in through a door or window? No wonder the downvotes.

Spyware sneaks into 'million-ish' Asus PCs via poisoned software updates, says Kaspersky

Re: Nation-state operation

Kaspersky, who got into a fight with a certain nation-state because, at least IMO, their tools discovered its attack code, when no others did. Thus banned from that state, with bad vibes spread as widely as possible. Yet it picks up on this. As Spock would say "Interesting".

And now this.

I find it most informative that NO AV suite seems to pick up on any state actor's malware anymore.

And we all know that any nation worth the name is creating and distributing it, no exceptions. You can't blame just one - it's a big club.

Telling that kind of truth to power seems rather dangerous to a business these days.

FAANGs for the memories: Breaking up big tech's biggest isn't a matter of if, but of when

Ah, yes, "national security", that bastion of nationalism. Which some consider evil all by itself.

But not me so much - I like that there is competition for control, that if this nation becomes too repressive, you could bolt to another.

This is perhaps something new under the sun, in that FB and some others, may as well be "nations" with no place to bolt to from there - that's bad.

That all these services and their recommendations strongly tend to create echo chambers and promote angry division is certainly bad, however, and I will in no way defend them.

I will, however, point out that the "national security" services have their bread buttered in a particular way themselves, and even acknowledge that they lie for a living! So while they are indeed "persuasive" in their ability to bring force - legal or otherwise - to the table, I don't see that as an improvment.

I see it as yet another grab for power - they are just as evil wanting to shut down competitors in control of the narrative as the outfits they want to shut down.

In other words, why limit this idea of "too much power in one place" to a few big companies? They are bad - we can all agree on that. Are they the worst? Would the suggested replacement, even less transparent or bound by law (it's all a secret) - be better?

Why not rein them all in? The more recent hoaxes perpetuated on us have had involvement by ALL of the big companies, but were backed by these same unaccountable government entities that now want control over the companies...Doesn't anyone else see the problem here?

National security has long since been redefined as that which promotes the status quo - things that hurt the various gov bureaucracies "hurt the national security" even when it's damned obvious that those gov entities needed a spanking by having their own crimes revealed. Yet the whistleblowers revealing their crimes "hurt national security". They didn't hurt mine, and I'm part of my nation. They hurt some of the bad actors who claim THEY ARE the nation. Nope, they're just supposed to be servants of it.

Super-crook admits he nicked $122m from Facebook, Google by sending staff fake invoices for tech kit

Re: It took TWO YEARS to notice 122 millions in extra payments?

Yes, the way most large companies are organized - and it's hard to get this right - there is one set of people in charge of basically ordering stuff, receiving it, testing it and so on - usually they'll send instructions to "accounting" or "procurement" who will do the order, and then pay the bill later on.

Note that the group needing the gear itself and the group handling the money may never meet or even be on the same continent, there is no check of "did this thing I order come in" other than the gear guys asking accounting.

But if no one at the gear level ordered a thing, which then does not arrive - they have no knowledge or reason to tell the money people that what they never asked for never came....

This is a classic man in the middle attack....

What's holding up the 5G utopia in Britain? Quite a lot, actually

Re: Not an expense

Y'all listen up here - John Fen , mage, and Commswonk know their stuff (I spent some time as an RF engineer myself). This is a huge outlay that will only really serve those who use the shiny to distract themselves while walking into poles and streets. The rest of us would be perfectly happy with fiber to the premises. and might not even mind sharing some normal wifi to the street and next door (it's widely done where I live to have a guest wifi access enabled).

Some of us, due to virtually no coverage to our rural households of any G at all, think this is yet another way to siphon money we will never get any benefit from. Some of us have stopped bothering with mobile phones and the associated bills entirely, in fact - you still need a landline to get or make calls where I live.

(Mountains of SW Virginia)

Re: Remote areas

The serial downvoters on this obviously do NOT live in truly rural areas. Where I live - it's about 1/4 mile between driveways, and there is no coverage at my home AT ALL unless you get in a car and drive to the top of the nearest hill - about a mile. Visitors freak out when their toys stop working.

I have DSL over copper here...and let them onto my "broadband" which costs $80/mo for one megabit up and 4 down.

And exactly one choice of ISP, not counting satellite with huge latency.

The problem is real, and we who live in the undense areas - the ones who you know, produce pretty much everything you city folk need to survive in your dystopias - from food to electricity to taking your garbage into our landfills, are a bit tired of paying out all that tax to get ... in return.

Shame on those who think we don't matter. You might find out differently should we stop playing patsy.

Brit Police Federation cops to ransomware attack on HQ systems

Updates desired

It would be wonderful if The Reg DOES follow up on this to see their response vs what happens for we less connected beings.

We fought through the crowds to try Oculus's new VR goggles so you don't have to bother (and frankly, you shouldn't)

Re: Missing the point

I thought is was refreshing for once to see a product simply panned instead of damned with faint praise, or its faults ignored. This doesn't happen often enough in the tech biz (or most others) - the Reg is better than most, but few really let 'em have it when they stink. Kudos.

New Zealand cops cuff alleged jackasses who shared mosque murder video, messages online

Re: The Wedding Crasher

Sting's "Murder by numbers" might have an explanation, or the recent financial events. Above a certain size, it's not illegal or immoral anymore in our world...the Just-Us system seems to act like that, anyway, and the media mostly just go along. Even here you get a downvote for pointing out the obvious.

Are Oz and NZ the same nation? So how was this guy a nationalist? Crazy, evil, religious bigot, racist, sure. Probably a few more I left out.

There are haters out there that wish the actual right wing would accept them, but nope - anymore than progressives think Antifa is a really neat idea. Accurate language matters.

Please stop discrediting yourself by trying to push your agenda using some horrible event as an excuse, it's disgusting to attempt to leverage tragedy, even though it's all too common. I know no "right wing" people who think that this was cool and I know a lot of them.

As for censorship, I agree with the above - let the nutcases self-identify, they will drive the good people away from themselves - and discredit their own ideas. If you worry the losers will instead gather a following, maybe you should work more on teaching morals and critical thinking instead of indoctrination in schools.

Our Skyborg (actual US govt program) will be just like IBM Watson, beams Air Force bod

Loyal Wingman

Is already flying. Wonder if the left hand knows what the right is doing here?

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-loyal-wingman-takes-flight-afrl-kratos-xq-58a-valkyrie/

(there are lots of links, that's just google's first one)

PuTTY in your hands: SSH client gets patched after RSA key exchange memory vuln spotted

Serial ports on windows

Boy do you ever nail that one. Back in the day when we were forced to write code to set up my customer's embedded stuff, always via serial, we did that battle..and it was ugly.

At least linux has /dev/serial/by-id and friends. Glad I moved to linux quite a long time back.

Now writing serial interfaces that don't require guessing which com port your thing is on is easy, instead of, pinging all the com ports to see if one responds as you wish, and so on, not to mention that other than the VB OLE/activeX object, it was hard to get to a port at all, at least back in the day. It was kind of embarrassing having a VB dependency in a C++ program...

Re: "Sure, the latter lets the terrorists"

If the competition has to clone your design, they won't be competition for all that long. If you really are the goose that lays the golden eggs, just lay another. The customer we did embedded product development for had people (you know which country) cloning their stuff. Usually took 6 months or so, and we rarely even set the bits that make it hard to extract the code from the uP. Because we had a reputation the cloners couldn't match with the real customers (phone companies and architects in this case) - and by the time that other countrie's vendor had a clone - we had a newer better product out, usually cheaper too. We just left them in the dust.

If you can't compete, GTFO.

I see why the AC now...

Re: "basically operated by one volunteer in charge of a small team of volunteers"

Downvote must have been from Boeing or a sub, seeing a ton of that on other forums, where it's just obvious the post doesn't deserve it - and usually wouldn't get one. Nowadays, it seems the PR/Marketing dept of many outfits seems to think they can just censor and keep on doing things wrong profitably.

Bonus for LPL reference - I've recently been entertained by him myself.

The choice really is between "no review possible" as NDAs aren't even offered for that most times, and "at least a little" - maybe a lot. I'll pick the latter every time. I think it's really good news that now and then someone sponsors this sort of thing, as most OSS projects can't afford it. And well, I do speak most of the programming languages if I need to scratch an itch, but it's not that common that I fix someone else's code. Bugs are HARD to find by inspection, but when a bug or vuln is found, they're often easy to pinpoint in the source...but only if you have the source.

Try getting source to Boeing's MCAS code - wanna bet it's not available at any price or with any NDA?

Even without full design info that would allow you to inspect the whole system for system class errors.

The knives are out for cloud gaming as Nvidia flashes blade-based box packing 40 RTX GPUs

Hard to say how that flies

"allowing customers to play the latest games with all settings turned to 11 without having to spend tons of cash on enthusiast-level hardware"

Has human nature somehow changed in that competitors aren't always looking for an "edge" and willing to spend money to get one? Try to buy talent with bucks? I've yet to see any sport where that can be done where it isn't widely done.

Those little-bit better golf clubs, that tweak on a faster car, sports shoes, the best computer for gaming, even the best scope for long distance rifle shooting. It's a long list indeed, and often rules authorities make rules against it, which is either futile or worse - people leave the "sport".

Marketing guys live in a bubble. Sometimes there are enough others in there to make it work, but it's not as common as they hope.

Welcome. You're now in a timeline in which US presidential hopeful Beto was a member of a legendary hacker crew

Re: IF, and I stress the IF ...

So, any human, then? Don't know of one not diagnosed with mental problems that don't care about me and mine.

As a conservative, watch Tulsi Gabbard, the only anti-war candidate - being suppressed by her own party (no doubt the MICC in general). I'd probable vote for her myself, but - you'll see the corruption on both sides of the aisle if you pay attention to how they smear and attempt to destroy her.

Despite a perfect record of intervening at great cost in blood and treasure to create failed states worse off than before (including us!) - even the libs insist we must intervene in all states with dictators (would that include our own?).

What a circus, you can't make this stuff up. I feel sorry for the Onion as reality has overtaken them.

Yeah

As if the bipartisan McCain-Feingold isn't how the government was handed over to anyone with the bucks. McCain was always a traitor and a loser, given too much credit.

What insight! So much corruption enabling - a true American Hero for supporting the MIC by losing lots of planes. With friends like that...

A man who never saw a war he didn't like. How good for all the cannon fodder, foreign and domestic. What a guy.

Divisie messaging?

Really? Identity politics - which needs to know what victim groups(s) you are a member of (using racism, sexism and all other isms), is the divisive one for most of the people I know.

I'd prefer Martin Luther King's vision - judge someone by the content of their character.

Thing is, there's not simpleton drop-down list for that, you need to be able to think critically, and have some judgement.

Obviously too tricky for the "progressives" who still pay attention to those isms while projecting that others are worse. This is not what I find as far as facts on the ground to.

Re: Nice

Wasn't even a real hacker, just a noisy hanger-on. So we know his act..but then, being a pol, we kinda already did. Just good at the "look at me me me" game.

Don't be too shocked, but it looks as though these politicians have actually got their act together on IoT security

When there is bipartisan agreement

And wow, industry on top, the results are always....

Let's look at history. Bank deregulation - shortly before the big financial disaster. Check.

McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" Check.

Quite a few others but I won't bore you. It always seems to mean delegating power to industry. Money is speech and all that.

Sam Clemens had it right. We're safer when they're not in session.

And yes, updates...the first zero day gets you all.

We find an issue of security. So we send an update to the device that has a security issue. Surely there's no way that security issue would allow some miscreant to send that device an update that was...a security issue.

These guys are smarter than that, or one would hope, I know at least a couple of them are. So we're back to my usual cynical "cui bono".

I'll save you typing it into google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

It's rarely been violated in recorded history.

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

Ah, it was easier before they all had on board cpus

Then users of the penguin could just dd to the drive from /dev/zero.

Then along came behind-your-back wear leveling and sector remapping, reserves held back to replace failing sectors and so forth.

And oldie but goodie, I think one can assume it's only become more interesting since, with big SSDs as well. Bunnie and Xobs on what's really in flash devices:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

And now there are even rubber duckies, although at the price, I doubt people are selling them cheap or leaving them around much other than for targeted pen testing.

https://shop.hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky-deluxe

I've been downvoted here before for pointing out that the flaw in USB that has it "believe" a device is what it says it is cannot be fixed and keep back compatibility. I'm still correct about that.

A regular format, despite a wrong statement above, never did much more than erase the "allocated" bits in the filesystem. Maybe if you formatted to a completely different filesystem or did a complete write-read error check, but I've seen some tests that then put the original data back, sector by sector.

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

As I've found out, Archtech

Pointing out that evil is non-partisan is unpopular here - let the votes on our posts tell the tale.

It's always that other guy's fault. Delusion of those wanting to deflect all blame.

Swiss electronic voting system like... wait for it, wait for it... Swiss cheese: Hole found amid public source code audit

Re: Relevant xkcd

Yup, even nuking it from orbit wouldn't be sure - some clown would just reintroduce it. Makes fraud easier by far - even if the machines aren't wrong, something has to collate and sum it all...in some office you aren't allowed to witness using code you can't see run by people with a stake in the outcome.

Re: Meanwhile in Venezuela...

My county WAS using electronic voting by WinVote. As I'm well known in this small town (pop of whole county is around 20k) for my expertise, they allowed me to "test" - with them present - if I could bork a machine and make it count wrong. Took way under one minute. Xp underneath....and you were already "in" as admin. Typical. They went back to paper. Yay!

Which can still have fraud, it just leaves more tracks, as in Broward County Fla.

UK joins growing list of territories to ban Boeing 737 Max flights as firm says patch incoming

An already safe...

I haven't run the numbers, but given the small number of these so far, and the corresponding small number of flight hours, wouldn't the crashes so far put this among the very most dangerous commercial aircraft in the past few decades? The "optics" seem really bad here.

Astroboffins spot hefty pair swinging together. What? Um, we're talking about record-breaking massive binary stars...

Re: So what is interesting about this object?

Just a little pedantry. Massive stars don't "have to" burn up their "reserves" because they are massive.

The DO burn up their fuel quicker if they are more massive and self-gravity makes them more dense before something else disrupts the collapse. Minor complaint, but a poor use of language. No one is making them "have to" and indeed, if disrupted, they don't do so.

Liz Warren: I'll smash up Amazon, Google, and Facebook – if you elect me to the White House

Re: It's not just Google, Facebook and Amazon that are the problem

That's quite the trick, though. It's a genuinely hard problem. "All it takes" is for every government in the world to agree on something - pay tax where you make the money, for example.

Which has never and probably never will happen - the only thing governments agree on 100%, ever, is, if I'm bigger, I get what I want or I start a war and get what I want. Teenager behavior at best.

There always has and always will be at least one that says "give me a little tax" and I'll let you off the rest.

As now.

What's sick is that I as a tiny company can do the same stuff. But since I'd have to set up an office in such a country - I hear there's one near the UK..it'd cost me more than I make, vs the pocket change it is for the big boys.

Just like it's just as illegal for me to steal bread or sleep under a bridge as it is for a homeless guy.

Only I have plenty for food and a nice roof (not to mention access to legal representation) so...

But the law is "fair"!

Solve that and a heck of a lot of other problems get solved along the way. I'll root for you.

Re: I see the next scandal brewing...

Of course, but like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.

Pres doesn't have the power

At most the bully pulpit - and that only if the media lets him have it.

A chance remark by Trump about affecting a certain telecom merger and it's all against the law all of a sudden for the president to even suggest such kinds of things - it's not his domain if the press is against him, as it quite obviously is now.

The very corps involved here ARE the press for a lot of people...and the grocery store.

We'll see - and we do see - who actually wields the power here. Worldwide in case you haven't noticed who pays how much taxes and where...

How'd that MS breakup go? Seems to me they won in the end and are still MS, not broken up - broken yes, but they did that to themselves.

EW is never going to get elected anyway, as per the identity "victim points" fraud she's committed.

And it's not a guess like it is with the current baloney making headlines.

Hate to appear cynical, but an honest and even-handed assessment of current events sure looks like it.

Schneier: Don't expect Uncle Sam to guard your web privacy – it's Europe riding to the rescue

Re: One niggle

My software consulting firm worked for one of Mark Warner's (D) VC startups when we was a "self-made venture capitalist*" (long story, but that was his line). Before he was governor of VA and then Senator with a lot of pull in the Senate. He was actually a nice guy before giving in to the system capturing him. Took him at least 30 seconds longer to set off my BS detector than any other politician of the time. (sometimes even an entire paragraph)

He wasn't the least bit ignorant of how the web and tech things work...that's not the problem for a lot of politicians, they know quite well, and those who don't have staff that do - their world runs on this stuff.

They also know where their campaign is buttered.

The recidivism rate for incumbents is as high as it is for reasons.

*looking into where the self made initial money came from is...illuminating.

Unless you want your wine bar to look like a brothel, purple curtains are a no-no apparently

Silly situation

But the comments here win the internet at least this AM. Have one on me, people, it's good to start the day laughing.

It's a hard drive ahead: Seagate hits the density problem with HAMR, WD infects MAMR with shingles

Re: Meanwhile, ssd marches on relentlessly

And even not under full load, often enough. I really care about that here, in a solar powered installation. The spinning rust spins down when not in use, for one thing. Powered up, it seems the SSD's get warmer than the rust does, and they are smaller too. A 250gB SSD from Samsung draws more power than a 2.5" 2tB drive from Seagate here.

@Vince - two words. Tape drives.

What everyone uses for your use-case of max capacity/price.

There are things spinning rust is a step up from, you know.

'Java 9, it did break some things,' Oracle bod admits to devs still clinging to version 8

Re: Java, meet Python

Funny, but no one expects that perl5 code will run in perl6 (Rakudo would be a better name for the new language perhaps), and perl5 is *still maintained for real*.

Whereas to run the Java for a Chinese Virtual Network Analyzer I bought, that has roughly zero chance of being updated, ever - I had to install an older JRE on my linux system and set it as default instead, since unlike the shebang line in perl, this isn't automatic in Java it would seem. I'm not a java programmer, so it took a bit to get it going again (or I could just throw away >$300 of hardware).

Helpful link: http://ask.xmodulo.com/change-default-java-version-linux.html

I actually have more luck with perl running cross platform without debugging everything for each one. But that's just anecdotal and I write good code and ensure I think about that a little when doing it.

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

The reg wanted to see a police review?

Of the code? Does anyone honestly think the police can review complex code with any better accuracy than...$many_colorful_expressions_possible?

They could evaluate the car with the code, put it to some tests, perhaps...at whose expense?

Liability for issues caused by poor code is an ongoing problem - this merely throws it into sharper relief.

The corporate veil needs to be pierced in many cases. A fine is often a small cost of doing business.

5G is 'ready' once you redefine 'ready'... and then redefine 'reality'

Re: I'll wait for version 3 or later...

+1 for a new colorful description of a maltruth....

Re: 5G factories, 5G remote surgery, autonomous cars and real time gaming

Same biz case as any other idiot tax collector - ooh, shiny, pay me more.

That's about it, and it's not even very shiny.

One senses desperation. Desire for subsidies and so forth. Convince the dumb pols to pick our pockets for our own good (as if they needed more excuses).

How to make people sit up and use 2-factor auth: Show 'em a vid reusing a toothbrush to scrub a toilet – then compare it to password reuse

Re: The real question

Some people are dumb enough to use "login with facebook"?

If you can do that, then the attack surface is a little bigger.

Re: Wanting to use 2FA is one thing...

I don't have one (or the associated monthly bill). But I heard right here at The Reg that if you give one of the biggies (FB was named) your mobe number for 2fa, they then use it for other things, it's an excuse to data-mine.

Frankly, I'm not vain (or rich) enough to think most of my accounts are worth the effort to run a password attack on. For those...well, yeah, I do careful management indeed. But that's not the bulk of the passwords/logins I have by a huge fat margin.

I'm even the type to have set up a separate, small, debit card account to use online - people do have that number - but I never keep more than a couple bucks in it until just before I click the "place your order" button. Nice thing online banking and a good banker let you do. I set up the underlying account to DISABLE overdraft protection...which banks hate as they get fees from that, but...hackers, have at, most you're gonna get is around $2...while leaving some trail back to yourself. I did this because I was once hacked - and that guy did time in the greybar hotel as a result. Don't get mad...get...well, you know.

Google sells 'predictable' storage costs: $120k for a year before you get a foot in the door, though

Ever notice

That the really big guys, who actually have vast amounts of *meaningful* data (not just packratting) are 100% on-prem?

Most outfits that think they are in the "big data league" really are not. Many are just unaware of the real meaning of "big", or simply hold onto data in hot storage that is at most of historical interest - not that it stops them from feeding irrelevant data to models to train them.

Yeah, I'm a skeptic of clouds, cold-calling stockbrokers (well, all cold-callers, actually - not one has ever been for my benefit in dunno, 6 decades?).

No one cares about your stuff like you do. The myth is that some cloud provider has more expertise per buck than a local highly qualified sysadmin and programmer. It's a myth. When they fall over, you wind up hiring such to fix it, since their underpaid largely H1B staff can't and don't really care.

And of course, it's an emergency, and you have to pay at least triple for these high skilled consultants to not only learn all your operation from scratch, but then fix the immediate issue, usually then letting them go rather than fixing the causes of that issue.

Your own guys care. Yes, it's hard to hire and retain good ones - and even know the difference. You think that's easier for a big cloud outfit where on top of the other insults, you're just one of a crowd in cubicles? Do the best tolerate that treatment? Do you really think cloud providers have better line-level talent? I have this spare bridge...Call Oracle for details.

But for the quarter that the cloud didn't fail, some MBA gets a bigger bonus, for saving money - in the short term. Yeah, that thinking is how all great, highly profitable outfits came to be. Oh, wait...

Did you know?! Ghidra, the NSA's open-sourced decompiler toolkit, is ancient Norse for 'No backdoors, we swear!'

Re: why on Earth give this away for free to everyone on the planet

One of the worst parts of working for the oxymoronically named "Intelligence Community" is that if you succeed in doing something cool, it has to be kept utterly secret - if the "bad guys" know (how) they've been pwned, they fix it. It's why sources and methods are the real secrets, though most things that are classified are simply done to hide some misfeasance.

On the other hand, if you screw up and it gets out, it's on the front page of every paper on earth.

This makes job satisfaction - and talent retention, as well as acquisition, much more difficult.

All smart nerds like props when they do something cool. No matter their politics.

So you're partly right.