Posts by elDog

Ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch, finance VP Stephen Chamberlain charged with fraud in US

Normally internal auditors make sure that the internal books are reconciled - that there are no gaps. This is just good business practice to show upper-level management and shareholders that the company is doing due diligence.

External auditors are required when a company (at least in the US) are publicly held or are under some type of watch. They can be more or less stringent than the internal auditors but they may decide to visit some dark corners where spiders live.

Auditors, internal or external, are not perfect and can be subject to pressures by companies and external interested parties (shareholders). Arthur Anderson.

Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don't call back when asked for evidence

Re: Blockchains are a wonderful tool .....

A "bewolf" is a Riding Hood disguised.

A "beowolf" has several meanings - one of which deals with clusters of processing/data nodes.

However, I like your image of bewolves lurking in the dark forests....

Re: Gold rush...

My understanding is that the current pResident of the USofA grandfather came to make his money supplying the gold-diggers with stuff. (That's how Levi jeans got started, too.) Some of that stuff were allegedly people skilled in on-hand/whatever massages. The grandson (pResident) seems to like that personal approach, also.

What a meth: Woman held for 3 months after cops mistake candy floss for hard drugs

Re: Why so long??

Because it took three months to come up with a cover story. Maybe they also felt they could shake some money and a guilty plea out.

Re: How many constitutional rights were violated ?

And how much will the officers and other state employees have to pay?

$0.00

How much will the taxpayers need to cover for the ineptitude of the LEO?

I hope a bunch (because this is Georgia.)

What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs

Leaving routers in dropped ceilings; unidentified phone lines; ...

Just recounting this for someone I might have worked with.

He apparently knew someone who worked at some company that was moving to a new location. That someone asked a neighboring business if he could run a TP through the dropped ceiling over the dividing wall for his router to get access to power and LAN. Friendly neighbor said "sure". As far as someone knows, that router is still blinking lights happily. (The credentials might be admin$ad...)

Another bloke actually left a second modem and phone line in a house that he sold. The purpose was to be able to do remote call forwarding without paying some crazy long-distance charges. The buyers happened to work for some spooky agency but it took a few months for a security scan to find out the leaky bits.

Or, this may just be hearsay.

Oracle sued by app sales rep: I made tens of millions for Larry, then fired for being neither young nor male – claim

Larry's Leisure Suites aren't cheap!

Larry may be but the suits are of the finest cloth.

This type of behaviour has been reported frequently for this company as well as for many others that have the same business model - "The Art Of The Deal" and "Screw Them All".

Using a free VPN? Why not skip the middleman and just send your data to President Xi?

The only way for the phone/carrier vendors to "curate" the vendors

Is to become the VPN supplier by default.

I'm not sure what Migliano wants to do here. Has he ever run, or have good knowledge of, the circuitry involved in protecting all of the networks involved.

I do think that the eventual path of personal privacy along with stuff like VPNs will be to entrust our souls to the suppliers and governments.

Perhaps that's what they want?

Amazon tries to ruin infosec world's fastest-growing cottage industry (finding data-spaffing S3 storage buckets)

Re: Is it that hard sir

And since we are all inured to yellow warning signs once we've seen a few of them. You need to make the admin/user work harder to turn on public access. Sort of a moving whack-a-mole that takes 5-10 quick mouse clicks to succeed. (Of course Amazon will be analyzing your mousey actions to see if you are you and if you are cognizant and not playing.)

Facebook's CEO on his latest almighty Zuck-up: OK, we did try to smear critics, but I was too out-of-the-loop to know

Starting to sound like a politician.

Weasel words.

Must have made enough billions to not worry about the truth anymore.

Sorry, Mr Zuckerberg isn't in London that day. Or that one. Nope. I'd give up if I were you

Govmints are just tiny fish in the corporate world

Get used to not getting your way. When most of your funding comes from the corps it seems that your leverage is not terrible good.

Besides, the people that put the guvmint representatives in place just don't really GAS.

UK rail lines blocked by unexpected Windows dialog box

"destination boards were ordered pretty much randomly..."

Well, just click on the header of the column you want to sort by and they'll be rearranged to your specs, sir.

You may need to jump about 12 feet in the air to click on the header, only to realize that they forgot to install touch/punch screens.

Re: "Why a copy of Office is needed on a PC tasked with showing line information is anyone’s guess"

Documenting VBA is pointless. Isn't the code self-explanatory?

I know/hope that this was just a joke, but running VB scripts/macros in production code anywhere is asking for fragility and breakage and lack of accountability. Next time use logo.

Here's a search engine for all you boffins and eggheads that makes it easier to learn science

Links to Semantic Scholar, Sci Hub - great research idea to combine these!

https://www.semanticscholar.org/

https://scihub.org/

Elsevier's legal T&C: https://www.elsevier.com/legal/elsevier-website-terms-and-conditions

(They haven't closed down PLoS yet.)

Patch me, if you can: Grave TCP/IP flaws in FreeRTOS leave IoT gear open to mass hijacking

The normal response is: You get what you paid for.

However even tho FreeRTOS is free it is still a much better deal and security risk than those black-box proprietary and more expensive solutions.

Of course the huge fly in the ointment is that the actual vendors using an OSS solution won't want to pony up the resources to fix these problems in their end-user products.

Hunt for Red Bugtober: US military's weapon systems riddled with security holes – auditors

Sort of like the USSR wanting to leave the Pentagon intact in case of war

because it was considered the weakest link in the chain of command.

Of course this was from the 80's and I'm sure everything has been tightened up nicely since then.

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

For me It's Innoreader (inoreader.com) which gets me to El Register pages, along with about 30 other feeds. I want just the headlines, ma'am, and then an abstract (if available), and then the full article.

As this article says, this subverts all the tracking bits scattered throughout our meals - just like I want it to.

Now this might be going out on a limb, but here's how a branch.io bug left '685 million' netizens open to website hacks

Thank you uMatrix. It won't even let me go to the branch.io site.

Now, if I were into tinder and other hook-up sites, I might disable these checks. I might also not wear protection when establishing contact.

Haven't updated your Adobe PDF software lately? Here's 85 new reasons to do it now

Re: FoxIt Reader

There are 100's of alternative PDF readers out there. Probably 20+ readers/editors.

PDF is just the format for a file that can be rendered somewhat faithfully.

The readers/editors will all have potential faults in how they handle strange stuff in the incoming file. Each one might be subject to compromise. Don't think that Adobe is the only bad actor, just because it has usually been so.

A web where the user has complete control of their data? Sounds Solid, Tim Berners-Lee

Re: Retroshare

Thanks for that. Worth studying.

Now, if I can only find my dongle that opens my container that has my encrypted keepass locker...etc...

Re: Just...

Ah, HTML Dog and other variants of HTML editors that dogged my life from the early 90's well into the ought's. Of course Mr. Microsoft didn't think these technologies were worth investing his billions in....

In the end I submitted my new markup using PPT or recycled hollerith cards (with the punched holes painstakenly filled in when necessary.)

Trump's axing of cyber czar role has left gaping holes in US defence

Re: Stupidity or cunning?

King, Tsar, Kaiser, Caesa - whatever.

The dump would be happy wearing those emperor's robes.

(Since he doesn't know how to read and couldn't care less, I doubt he understands what happens to 90%+ of the various emperors and their spawn.

'This is insane!' FCC commissioner tears into colleagues over failure to stop robocalls

Poor FCC Commisioner Rosenworcel. She will now be inundated and the carriers will laugh.

I get 1-2 per day. Try blocking before the repeat calls come in.

How do the carriers make money off these calls?

Along with spam emails, could there be a $0.05 charge per transmission after some limit (100?) per day?

Obviously Mr. Telecom AJ Pai doesn't feel the pain. He's probably still garnering money from his various stings representing the communications vultures.

Have I been pwned, Firefox? OK, let's ask its Have I Been Pwned tool

Re: One fox to rule them all

Hoping against hope that my tongue firmly implanted in right cheek would be noted.

Oh well, I'll try to be a bit more circumspect next time.

One fox to rule them all

I do think this is a good step forward. Of course I worry about putting all my hens in one basket since there are several avenues of attacks on ffx installations.

Somewhat aside, I feel that my reliance on the google architecture (chrome, gmail, search) is more of a privacy threat than other players. Should I go back to IE7?

America cooks up its flavor of GDPR – and Google's over the moon

I'd take the negative comments even further. This is a license to slurp/steal/

Any rule/regulation/law that this current US administration puts in place has only one purpose: To remove the rights of normal people and to increase the power of the currently powerful.

Strikingly similar to the rule within the current USSR. Same philosophy guiding the BrExit, Russia, Trump, etc?

The curious sudden rise of free US election 'net security guardians

Not digging deeply myself, I wonder how much of your supposed privacy you need to give up

to use these services?

It seems pretty obvious that you're going to be passing a lot of nominally private email traffic through these benevolents' portals. Between the various intelligence agencies of virtually every country on this planet and the ISPs, platforms (fb/google), and scanners/skimmers installed on our devices it seems that all my unworthy-of-attention ramblings are already well vetted.

Adobe forks out $4.75bn for Marketo in massive marketing mashup move

I love these conglomerations of vultures - easier to blacklist them all

I had noticed in the uMatrix link blockers increasing coexistence of some of the Adobe and marketo requests. Apparently they will band together to spy on us much more effectively.

Also easier to blacklist them now.

US State Department confirms: Unclassified staff email boxes hacked

Why is there even another "unclassified" State Department email system?

Every employee and probably every mole and other rodent has their own personal accounts that they access while inside the confines of an official DoS premises.

I think the real damage is that careless staffers will "inadvertently" copy emails and attachments from the secure channel to something that is more friendly to outside snoopers.

Too bad that the knowledgeable career staffers were purposefully kicked out or rendered non-functioning by our KGB-installed president. None of the earlier spy thriller novelists could have predicted this planned chaos.

Salesforce supremo Benioff buys Time magazine for $190m

That's why Meredith Publishing is targeting the XX chromosome set

They don't tend to be as critical or care much about stuff like real world events.

My house has lots of informative mags on cooking and fitness and health and hearth/home - most by companies like Meredith.

Not wanting to say anything negative about the wonderful missus. We just have different tastes. Obvious since I actually read El Rag.

It's September 2018, and Windows VMs can pwn their host servers by launching an evil app

I'm safe since I still use IE3.0. No one targets me anymore.

Besides, that makes me a honking old man with no assets. Sort of like Linux in the old days - not enough return on investment.

Wannabe Supreme Brett Kavanaugh red-faced after leaked emails contradict spy testimony

It's been so damn hard to find qualified people to run the US gov't.

Scraping the bottom of the pork barrels with Kavanaugh. Of course the rest of the WH staff will have been masticated and regurgitated many times over while this new RW implant will be happily doing someone's bidding for decades to come.

Who is that someone? Not the normal Heritage/US-RW groups. Maybe not the Murdoch/Koch/Mercers. Maybe a larger conglomeration that is also trying to topple the UK, NATO, EU. Maybe.

Google responds to location-stalking outcry by… tweaking words on its BS support page

Re: Location? I've nothing to hide, so why should I care...

Agree - it's not the opt-in/out person that gets caught in the information dragnet. It's also all the communicators/referrals from that person that are vacuumed up for analysis/marketing/actions.

Re: Google's full of it

Isn't that the best way to deflect criticism? Tweak a few words, tell the users that you (google/etc.) care about their wishes, and screw away?

Or just mount a HUGE campaign to say that all the critics are stooges of FAKE NEWS!

Democrats go on the offensive over fake FCC net neut'y cyberattack

Re: I remember...

I think some deeper delving would find that the web/network administrators had been told to return 401/500/whatever errors to queries that weren't praising the FCC/Pai/Dump.

CADs and boffins get some ThinkPad love

I've gone from the A21 to the T42P to the W701 to the P71 (last year)

My general criteria for an upgrade is a better than 2-to-1 improvement in memory, storage capacity, screen resolution, and speed. Usually I get around 3-to-1. These have all been solid machines, travel a little bit but are also remoted-into.

Every time a new model comes out it has a different keyboard layout. In my 20 years of ThnkPad usage I get accustomed to a certain fingering. The P71 layout is the most problematic and I have to keep hunding for the Delete key.

I've slowly moved all my laptops (including a bunch of R models) to Linux (Mint) with great outcomes.

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

Perfect ending: Makes perfect sense. ®

We all don't know that this is not necessarily the way it is, or isn't. But, Trust Us(c). 'Cause first of all, we do no harm to our shareholders.

What do a meth, coke, molly, heroin stash and Vegas allegedly have in common? Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicolas

Another affluenza victim, shirley.

We all know the feeling when we get several billions in our bank accounts - it's just really hard to think rationally. And there are all our new friends who want to help us deal with the trauma and stress.

I understand that in the country/state where he was nabbed along with miss "Fargo" (of Wells and Fargos fame) just appearing to court in a car worth more than the possible bail-bond means he/she can walk free on personal recognizance. Of course, looking at that wasted face, he'd always be recognizable.

Henry - quick - make a big donation to the Trump Organization. All your legal (federal) worries will be absolved.

Brain brainiacs figure out what turns folks into El Reg journos, readers

Re: Me ? Pessimist? - OpenVPN?

I thought we were all supposed to install something else now.

Can't remember the cute name. Perhaps Ethereal, no - that's WireShark.

Oh, Wire-sumthin.... WireGuard - https://www.wireguard.com/

I think my PIA OpenVPN vendor is thinking about moving to WireGuard but these things take time, and a reason to do so.

Julia 0.7 arrives but let's call it 1.0: Data science code language hits milestone on birthday

Re: Gaston Julia

However Julia is named, I'll never complain about seeing Julie (or Julia) Roberts face. These are two very different people but obviously someone is an equestrian.

Congresscritters want answers on Tillerson's rm -rf /opt/gov/infosec

Re: We all know the US doesn't need cyber-security...

And vlad promised donnie that russia would take good care of any secrets stolen from the us.

Fortunately the israeli's are looking into all of this, as are the chinese, spectre, and plutonians.

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

Re: Code

Agree. And I have so few computer resources (only 2^16 ports, etc.) that I don't want to waste precious CPU cycles looking for local ports that are open.

Actually, another problem is the incredible hits these scans make in my logs and debuggers.

Oracle's JEDI mine trick: IT giant sticks a bomb under Pentagon's $10bn single-vendor cloud plan

Interesting that Oracle worries about "lock-in"

"Summing up its position in a statement to The Register, Oracle said that JEDI “virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more” at a time when cloud technology is changing at an unprecedented pace."

That's exactly Oracle's model - hook them and then lock them in. Maybe the DoD in this procurement was just using Ellison's example. And, of course, Oracle has been a real laggard in trying to play with the cloud.

Pleasant programming playground paves popular Python path

Re: Excellent

"Python is very useful for corralling large data sets using numpy etc."

I think that is true of almost any language - it's really the availability of good libraries (NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, etc.) that makes the job doable. Of course having a good clean syntax and constructs to call these libraries is best.

Now about those missing {}...

Get drinking! Abstinence just as bad for you as getting bladdered

"For best health results, chase your dolma with red wine."

I read that as "For best health results, chase your dogma with red wine." Absolutely!

Amazon, ditch us? But they can't do without us – Oracle

Re: Of course they're still spending... commissions?

I believe Oracle has some pretty stringent claw-back clauses in its contracts with salespeople. If someone has bought a luxury yacht and nice manse based on paid commissions, they may find themselves back on dry land with no home.

Trump 'not normal' FCC commish reveals amid Sinclair-Tribune mega-media-merger meltdown

I'm not religious, but if it pleases you god, deliver us from this evil

that infests the white house and much of the congress.

Other countries - please take heed of what is being done to our once proud country and don't let the oligarchs around the world (US/russian/elsewhere) destroy our experiments in democracy.

Revealed in detail: World powers stuff spyware kit, how-to guides in dodgy nations' pockets

99.44% of these security systems are equipped with phone-home

Depending on the outfit/state that is supplying these "systems", virtually everyone will have the capability to tell the seller who's doing what and to whom.

Not that this is critical since most closed systems rely on backdoors to monitor/update software. The krims will have already discovered the backdoors before the sellers can put their monitoring infrastructure in place.

Happy 10th birthday, Evernote: You have survived Google and Microsoft. For your next challenge...

Re: Emacs org mode not mentioned?

Leo-Editor - thanks for that mention. I loved me some ECCO and Polaris PackRat and before that PC-Outline (TSR).

I have around 10,000 notes in EverNote and have worried about their proprietary system. It'd be interesting to see if I can put a bunch of these in Leo.

However, I do think the server-based concept of EverNote is very useful for synchronizing across my many devices. Plus a web interface.

Every step you take: We track you for your own safety, you know?

Re: "Safe place"

Or a bit of a assault on privacy of the nice lady in the next-door manse waiting for the "postman" who only rings once...