Posts by elDog 1157 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2013
"Carroll says that the first port of call would ordinarily have been to alert FlyCASS, but the researchers opted against this since "it appeared to be operated only by one person and we did not want to alarm them."
The sole proprietor quickly notified his CSO who worked with the QA teams and ran extensive red/black tests.
Amazing that the US DHS and other federal agencies don't vet their vendors very well.
I'll take any wagers over 0.
Anyone know how hard it is to process many daily/weekly/monthly/yearly backups and selectively update one or more files on these?
I'm guessing everybody is going to say "Well they are in a vault and encrypted. And we'll probably never have to do a real disaster recovery."
(Says those who have never really had to roll-back full systems.)
Fine for XBox and Clippies and lots of eye candy.
Of course, the US (and other) governments have bought into the idea that a mega-corp is trustworthy. Perhaps the mega-corp actually bought their way into these governments?
It would take several more decades until we were introduced to DLL Hell and BSODs.
My first "computer" was a series of collators, sorters, and printers that read and punched cards that were fed between the beasts. All programmed with plugboards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard). Well, it wasn't "mine" but once I saw the setup at the American Management Association in upstate NY, I knew that's what I wanted to do. Still plugging the bits even now.
Right after the Bi-Centennial Exhibition
First we went to the Old Castle which housed artifacts from the mid-1800s and earlier. I remember everyone being particularly impressed by the fine craftmanship of the items, especially the medical equipment and the telescopes and microscopes. Someone said "They just don't make things like this anymore."
Then we walked over to the Air and Space Museum and saw a replica of one of the rovers - tin foil and plastic and tape holding it all together. Quality suited for the purpose.
Guessing out of hubris and laziness.
Many a neophyte programmer thought it would be much easier to write code to stay in one protection level (kernel) than go through the hoops of having another process handle the real work.
Remember when everything we wrote was at level-0 on the early micro-PCs?
I grew up with IBM-360s and learned to love the GE-600 series master/slave levels. Then they build the Multics machines from whence (somewhat) Unix was spawned. I love having the hardware tell me that I f'd up without having to read through a full kernel dump.
In the last few years the corporatists have been flooding the courts with amicus briefs - really just lobbying for their positions. This removes the impediments of the expertise of the regulatory staff to point out problems in these briefs.
There are so many good discussions about how this will eviscerate almost all regulation in the US. One has to wonder who is hoping for a totally non-functional government.
Microsoft values capturing customers far more than caring about security.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers
They are now just the typical company saying "Your security is our top priority" while actively (and I mean actively) not trying to secure your data.
The US and any other country should be ashamed of themselves for falling for these sales spiels. I'm sure there are lots of multi-$$$ kickbacks involved.
Very quick discharge rates and good recharge. Coupled perhaps with the newer flywheel energy storage systems that have been tested in ship-borne weapons.
Not sure I want to live in a world where we can all be fricasseed in a split second versus one where several grams of high-velocity kinetics are necessary.
While it makes some sense to totally circumvent the behemoth legacy purveyors of the health-care infrastructure, it is this very huge mess of pasta that masquerades as a "system" that will make the "patching" so difficult.
I'll just hypothesize that some of these systems are built using Oracle and perhaps PeopleSoft or SalesForce. All of these have so many installed versions that are somewhere on the updated software spectrum. Oracle, as an example, is infamous for making its software interfaces opaque - even after spending many $$ to get access to them.
I've used the dynamic patch technologies for 30+ years and it has become more and more difficult to make them work as the underlying hardware and software become more complex.
We want features, more features. We want pretty themes with too much white space and choices of mauve and fuscia.
We want animations everywhere and AI assistants so all we need to do is press the Start button (where is it now?) and the AI will take over for the rest of the day.
Security is for the IT department (who are vastly overpaid and are not in the next budget cycle anyway.)
I'm sure that their trust in some omnipotent CEO will prove redeeming.
No need for virus protection (biological or cyber).
I'm not sure I can totally trust The Register's parroting of:
Over the course of 2023, it was responsible for 599,000 surgeries, 349,000 urgent care visits, and 79,000 births. Ascension is driven by the Catholic faith and places special attention to serving the poor and otherwise vulnerable.
But if they want to open their books for audits, perhaps that would be a blessing.
because most of the press doesn't understand any more than what the suppliers PR is telling them.
And most of the public won't understand/care about the technicalities. It's sort of like how we buy cars (as an example). If it looks pretty and sharp and I can afford it today, then let's go! A year or so down the road it is crap - restart the process.
People with too much money and lusting after some new glitzy thing.
Looks like another large SUV in our small parking lots. Gets dirty on our mountain roads. Apparently has loudspeakers in its carriage to make it sound like a mean machine.
Perhaps if they install the coal smokers and beef up the sound system, they can convince the 0.1% of locals who are MAGAts to buy one - but those 0.1% can't afford them.
Not just as a punishment against enemies but as upholding the laws of the land. Still lots of room for improvement but I'll take what I can get.
That consultant sounds like he was operating in a self-delusional bubble - one where he was so important that everyone would accede to his wildest/stupidest whims. I, and I'm sure many who read/comment here, have had access to and control of extraordinarily important government and corporate information. It takes a off-kilter brain to go to the steps that this person did. But once he started his slide, it was all the way to the bottom.
Makes it much easier for the crooks to mark what belongs to them.
Apparently CISA has a sense of humor:
"Instead of relying on user input when naming files, developers should consider using a ransom identifier for each file and storing the associated metadata separately"
And this is why they've fought so hard to have a Republican majority at the FTC.
This will definitely go all the way to the Supreme Court which has 6 out of 9 justices aligned with the Republicans and against the common people
along with analogies to those pesky things that infect our bodies.
I actually worked on Windows NT on a DEC Alpha - trying to port a graphics editing program to that hardware. The big/little-endian stuff was a complete nightmare.
There may be occasional lapses in IP mappings, etc. We call that "friendly fire."
The biggest problem in the US, at least, is a totally wild-west capitalist system where the biggest Vulture Capitalist can buy multiple health-care facilities and strip them of any costly IT departments that may try to deter these attacks.
I've witnessed two of my health-care providers in the little state of Vermont be rendered helpless by these attacks - in one case causing multi-week denial of services. These small (by international norms) organizations just don't have, and don't want to pay for, the resources to protect themselves.
Pity the small practices/practioners across this poor country (the US).
then the EPA could never take action against that company?
If the head of the FBI once flew on an airline owned by United and manufactured by Boeing, then the FBI could never investigate those two companies?
Lewis Carrol - more material for you!
and trying to figure out if a single change will impact thousands of other lines of code, and given this is usually DoD - how it would impact our national defense.
I've spent too many years looking at huge projects with so many dependencies and hundreds of devs that come and go and don't understand the entire code-base - they can't!
I understand that fears of AI failures are real and have been seen. But the same/worse happens with a developer who doesn't have the mental bandwidth to be perfect (that's me.)
Hard to get some new whiz-kid to look at a COBOL-68 program, though.
I'm guessing you could ask some AI engine to examine the whole corpus of a mainframe inventory/billing/HR system and have it spit out at least the basic functions that the system was supposed to provide written in some high-level pseudo code to be turned into Rust, Go, whatever.
Totally agree with your points. I have written way too much code in B (predecessor to C), C/C++, and Perl (along with many years of various assemblers.)
All of the languages that require a separate set of definitions that are independent of the implementations are a real PITA.
I'm writing mainly Python now because of the very rich ecosystem. When I see most of the libraries/frameworks available in Rust, I'll start my move.
That's possible also, but I think and hope that much of the original code has been refactored many time over the past years.
I know one of my more pleasant tasks (really!) is to go back and look at my older code base that is still in use and see if I can make it cleaner, more effective, more error-proof.
of an existing package?
Assuming that much of the conversion is using translations of existing functions, algorithms, and methodologies. Which would have been well debugged in the earlier implementation.
I'll still guess that Rust may be slightly easier to develop for new projects given its very good error checking during compilation.
""With respect to documentation, if the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share. We will continue to cooperate fully and transparently with the NTSB's investigation.""
I'd forbid Boeing to sell any more planes into the commercial market until they come up with the documentation.
Military/black programs - we'll never know.
Just like trying to rein in "AI" it's impossible to stop the flow of data/information once it is in the wild.
Huge penalties might work if you can catch the perps. But many of these types live in countries that don't exactly care what other nations think.
We need to look towards a future where all known data points are public. Every person, every location, every bank account, every personal interaction, etc. If it isn't this, then it'll be massive state firewalls blocking data transfers.
What will our world look like then?
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