Posts by a_yank_lurker

Senators call for '9/11-style' commission on computer voting security

Re: Not The Real. Problem

As someone who lived in a state with endemic voter fraud, New Jersey, the pols are smart enough to make sure the numbers look reasonable. Thus there, if the fraud is done correctly, less votes than registered voters in all precincts. Chicago has been suspected of cooking (in Cook County) the election results for decades now and if so they have plenty of practice of doing it. They are not going to make so elementary a mistake as have too many votes for the number of registered voters. One common way of voter fraud is not to purge the roles of the recently deceased and have someone vote for them. This method has been done for decades in some areas of the US, North Jersey being one of the areas. Given that it is not very likely that the poll workers know most of the people in an urban precinct this trick is relatively easy to do. There are other tricks to do election fraud that would not show up in comparing the vote totals, percentage voting, etc. and would require an intense effort to stamp out.

What is over looked is most voter fraud is an effort to swing a narrow vote to other way in a state or local election. Given how US Presidential elections are actually done, a narrow victory could be swung by carefully done voter fraud in that state if the statewide vote is close enough. Typically this effective if the statewide race is decided by a few hundred votes or less. Get over a few thousand and this becomes more difficult to pull off. I do not remember what the margin in Illinois was but if it was a few thousand votes then I doubt Chicago voter fraud, if it occurred, changed the actual outcome.

The answer to whether voter fraud occurs in the US is yes it does and has been occurring for decades if not over a century. The real question is there the political will to stamp it out on both sides. Where I grow up it was the donkeys doing the fraud but that does not say in other areas the elephants are not guilty also. Also, the issue of 'Russian hacking' is an effort to hide the real problems with how elections are run in the US and that electronic methods leave a lot to be desired for vote auditing and recounts.

Re: A History Lesson

Yes, we learned from the masters.

A History Lesson

So a couple Congress criminals want us to ignore the fact the entire reason for this fiasco was their knee jerk reaction to Florida in 2000. What they forget to mention, the donkey county they had the most problems with had a ballot laid out by a donkey. Whether the layout had cost Gore any votes has always been pure speculation. But in the aftermath, instead of looking how to make paperish ballots less confusing the Congress criminals decide in their collective wisdom rivaling that of a flea that electronic voting was the answer. So an eighth-assed idea becomes what is done here combined with the typical incompetent implementation. What do you think was going to happen?

Note, Congress has had an abysmal reputation with many Yank humorists comparing them to criminals, fleas, thieves, etc.

Portland posts full report on Uber's dirty dealings with Greyball

Re: Never Used Them

As I noted earlier, I refuse to have cc info or even worse bank info on my phone. I work on the assumption something relatively small and carried with me is likely to be left somewhere, lost, or even stolen. The less it has on it the less harm it can do to me. I even go so far as to have a phone only email account and not my main email account on the phone. As far as using a taxi or similar service, I have no problems with a licensed taxi company when I need a ride. But the taxi companies often will take cash (sometimes only cash) and they do not require my cc to be stored on an app or worse with them.

Worse the Leisure Suit Larry's Minions and Slurp

Uber is showing itself to have a lack of ethics that make many despised organizations look saintly. One issue I had with Uber (why I never used them) is the requirement to use a mobile app with my cc on file. I prefer to keep my cc number closely guarded and not on a phone.

Equifax UK admits: 400,000 Brits caught up in mega-breach

Drip, drip, drip...

The dripping sound is the end of Equinefax. The true scope of this disaster is probably not known and the bovines in charge will do their PHB best to keep people from finding out. But the right court case and with discovery things could prove interesting.

Another month, another malware outbreak in Google's Play Store

Re: Useless Google

Testing apps, whether automated and/or manual, is at best hit or miss. The problem is there is no perfect, foolproof way to absolutely sure the procedures will catch all malware. You will get a rate of false positive/negatives but never perfect.

Google sued for paying women less than men

@Nick Z - Many have been suspicious of how large companies hide their mistreatment of groups. It is fairly easy to manipulate job descriptions and qualifications to make the desired discriminatory outcome look legitimate. And this is a company who fired a guy for saying Google has internal problems; what I think the real reason he was fired.

Unloved Microsoft Edge is much improved – but will anyone use it?

Re: And its only Windows 10?

Toss in Vivaldi and Brave and you have 5 very browsers to chose from.

Windows 10 Creators Update will add app-level privacy controls

Spyware-as-a-Service

There is one setting missing - permanently off. Also, the ability to remove Craptana, Imbecile Explorer, and the other unworthy - Edge.

Missed patch caused Equifax data breach

Re: admin/admin

Ah, Spaceballs with President Srkoob lol

US government sued by 11 pissed-off travellers over computer searches

Passwords

On a related note, I am probably stuck behind the Trump's wall because I do not know my email password, etc. as I use a password manager installed only one computer, a desktop.

Pennsylvania cops deploy electronics sniffer dog to catch child abusers

Re: Probable cause

"I usually try to put the dirty laundry right on top." - Now go to a sewage treatment plant for a few hours in the shit and see how smelly your laundry is. I doubt the average goon would have the stomach for the stench.

Homeland Security drops the hammer on Kaspersky Lab with preemptive ban

Re: Oh, come on

More like I do not believe the ferals about K because they are known, serial liars. Also, there are other AV products made outside of feraldom, if K is Putin's pocket who is say that the others are not in someone else's back pocket. So far, we have innuendo from the ferals alleging K is a bad boy but not even a whiff of smoke to back it up.

Re: If the US administration keep pushing China and Russia...

"Maybe the DoHS have just signed the death warrant of Microsoft and Google's supremacy?" As far as OSes, Bloat is probably much more vulnerable because it is closed source. Android, or a good chunk of it, is open source. It is much easier to hide backdoors in closed source than open source as only a small number people can ever see the closed source code. Open source, by design, allows any to review the code, compile it, etc. so in theory the backdoors could be found by anyone (in practice most do not review the code). All that would be needed is for a few countries to ban Bloat until it is open source and replace it with a Linux distro.

Apple may get caught in the crossfire.

Kaspersky shrugs off US government sales ban proposal

Re: Treat it as a reccomendation

Its not Der Donald I worry about but the mid-level flunkies with too much time and nothing to do. Given the nature of feral criminal law, el flunky will have an easy time finding something to charge you with that is a feral felony.

Ask Martha Stewart what she actually was convicted of (lieing to a federal agent) not insider trading. Her 'crime' was trying to protect her broker from being fired, so she told the ferals a couple fibs to protect her broker. Neither of them were guilty of insider trading, broker was guilty of talking to much, Martha guilty of trying to protect him. But the ferals announced rather loudly that she was going down for insider trading that they had to find something to justify actions.

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

@Nick Z - Agreed. Until we have a new set of discoveries/theories on par with electromagnetism or quantum mechanics, we will find ourselves trying to find gold in the mine tailings not in a new ore body.

Microsoft fixing Windows 10 'stuttering' bugs in Creators Update

Re: Sigh, Poor Ordinary Folks

"Also, crowdsourcing QA to a bunch of fanboys ('Insiders') isn't really a wise decision." - Slurp's epitaph on their corporate tombstone. QA needs to be done by people who know what they are doing and have well thought out testing plans. Letting random users 'find' and 'report' issues is a recipe for disaster. Slurp is relying on users actually using something to find an error instead deliberately trying it out in a controlled manner. Reporting issues from users is always problematic as many may not file a bug report especially if the process is too convoluted.

Confirmed: Oracle laid off 964 people from former Sun building

Re: I need new glasses..

I don't think you need new glasses, your version is more accurate.

Hi Amazon, Google, Apple we might tax you on revenue rather than profit – love, Europe

Re: even simpler

@Mark 110 - The problem with corporate taxes is they get buried in the cost of goods and thus ultimately paid by the consumer as part of the price. It is possibly more transparent to just have a sales/VAT at the point of sale to the consumer and no corporate taxes; I am paying them any way.

44m UK consumers on Equifax's books. How many pwned? Blighty eagerly awaits spex on the breach

Re: Crucifed

Thinking of signing up, not for the money to me but bankrupt Equinefax. Also, I would like to see the C-suite being roasted alive for crimes against humanity (not going to happen but I can dream).

UK Home Office finds £20m to throw at Oracle cloudy ERP

What Will Go Wrong

With an insultant and Leisure Larry working this fiasco something will go horribly wrong. The Three Stooges would more competent than these three.

Virginia scraps poke-to-vote machines hackers destroyed at DefCon

Re: Replacements

Another worthless machine that can not be audited properly.

Apache Foundation rebuffs allegation it allowed Equifax attack

An Attempt at Blame Shifting?

Ultimately Equinefax is responsible for the website and for proper monitoring of all activity on the site. While the attack may have used an bug in this or that third party code does not absolve them of doing their jobs. Apache is responsible for fixing and providing updates/patches in a timely manner once they have been notified, which all evidence points to Apache being responsible.

Daily Stormer binned by yet another registrar, due to business risks

Dark Web Maybe

My only concern with registrar shopping by TDS is that will probably drive them to the Dark Web were they will be harder to monitor. Sometimes it is better to let the real slimes have their store front where they can be monitored than to drive deep into the woods where they are more difficult to monitor. Otherwise, I find their problems amusing in an ironic way.

Everyone loves programming in Python! You disagree? But it's the fastest growing, says Stack Overflow

Re: Usefulness

@pete 2 - The Python formatting rules for blocks actually mirror what is consider good programming style in other languages. Where I work our default formatting is identical to the Python indentation for blocks. This is done to make following programming logic and scope easier to follow. All Guido did was to take best practice and make it a requirement for identifying block scope.

Usefulness

Python has a couple of traits that make it very useful for those who program as a secondary function. Its syntax is relatively easy to understand, it has a lot of very good libraries available, and being an interpreted language it is easy to experiment with code to see what a fragment will do. Plus, it is not 'teaching' language like Basic or Pascal. It was designed to a general purpose language suitable for a wide range of programming problems.

But like any programming language there are areas that it sucks at.

Red panic: Best Buy yanks Kaspersky antivirus from shelves

Yawn

To quote the Bard - "Much ado about nothing". So the feral TLAs do not lean on local AV producers to provide information via their products. Given the behavior of the ferals one might believe that they fear Kapersky accidentally discovering their spyware/backdoors and publishing them.

Surprising nobody, lawyers line up to sue the crap out of Equifax

Re: As has been said often before

Elsewhere someone suggested nailing the C-suite to a tree in lieu of prison. I wonder if we could douse it with gas (petrol) and light a match.

Re: So, time to settle on some insulting synonyms for Equifax

When you make Slurp and Comcrap look like paragons of customer service and ethics you are pretty low.

Equifax mega-leak: Security wonks smack firm over breach notification plan

Re: US consumers - we're all screwed

If it does go class action, I would like to see a settlement that drives out of business. Also, I would like the DO(in)J actually do something worthwhile and nail some the C-suite for vacation in Club Fed. That is the only way companies will take notice; no job with the possibility of prison.

Oracle throws weight behind draft US law to curtail web sexploitation

Re: Aren't there already enough laws?

There are more than enough laws to nail someone. While Section 230 protects ISPs and sites from suits it does not mean the flatfeet can't use the two brain cells they have to use the information in the ads to try to apprehend the miscreants. If someone is using an ad they have to provide some sort of contact method. If they are using chats, troll the chats (which has been done successfully). However both require the doughnut eaters to done actual work.

Stand up who HASN'T been hit in the Equifax mega-hack – whoa, whoa, sit down everyone

Oh Well

There goes my credit rating. I wonder if they can go negative? </snark>

Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email

Re: Just imagine the next case ...

@Jason Bloomberg " invented an email system" - All the judge agreed was that he wrote an email system not the he invented email. The judge noted that assigning appropriate credit to all who deserve it for email is not a trivial task. In essence, this issue in this case of invention is sufficiently murky that reasonable people often will often give credit to others for their more fundamental work on email systems. This clown refused to acknowledge that was significant prior art (including what many consider functioning email systems as we currently understand email) prior to his program. Techdirt's commentary noted there was significant prior art and they stated their belief his claims were BS as he did not invent email only built on what was there.

Re: Only the best will do

They have Fauxahontas as a Senator, why would they not elect him. He has a prime requirement for them: he is a liar.

HPE waves bye-bye to 36 years of executive experience

Should We Set Up a Pool?

Should we set up a pool for the date the board fires Meg Whitless and the new CEO announces HPE is filing for bankruptcy?. Maybe two two pools.

Climate-change skeptic lined up to run NASA in this Trump timeline

Skepticism

Science is based on skepticism not dogma. There are problems with models and data sets. The models have not been particularly accurate with historical or current data. A bigger problem is the extent, quality, and completeness of the data sets. The problem is our current data sets do not have any indication of longer term cycles of century and millennia length. Through solar variability (Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age) and the actual human effects are murky.

My personal objection to basing policy on the CAGW is what if it is proven false? Many of the goals can stand on their own right as we should be trying to leave the environment in better shape than we found it. Thus reducing one's carbon foot print, lessening one's overall impact, etc. are good personal objectives.

Big Tech fumes over Prez Trump's decision to deport a million kids

Huh?

DACA was killed by the courts as being illegal. So, Trump either complies which puts the 'Dreamers' at risk of being deported or there is another round of lawsuits. But given Silly Valley's consistent abuse of the H1B visa program it is not surprising they would prefer to keep cheap contractor labor.

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

@mort - Bad UI design is a known killer. What the study is saying is much of the UI 'research' is not based on trying to understand how users actually interact with the site but on what looks cool to graphic artist. Good UI design should try accommodate both young eyes and geriatric eyes that do not work so well these days. This means fonts, font colors, background colors, visual clues, etc. need to carefully considered. Also throw in color blindness and other lifetime visual issues and many 'cool' UI designs are flatly idiotic because many will have trouble using the page.

Too often in IT there is a tendency to ignore human biology like visual acuity, hands, etc. which limits the range of valid options for an effective interaction.

A big ask for any nerd, but going outside (your usual data sets) can be good for you

Drowning is a sea of 'data'

'Big Data' and 'data mining' as presented are nothing more than buzzwords to salve the clueless PHBs why their competitors always seem to clean their clocks. Understanding your product and your likely customers is conceptually not very difficult. But takes some clear thinking with some data analysis to understand how both are related. The problem is that many are substituting aimless number crunching for analysis. Analysis uses number crunching but is not number crunching as a good analysis goes beyond numbers to try to understand behavior and needs.

Re: Gave me a laugh

"So what do you suggest? Ouija boards, reading sheep entrails, crystal balls, navel-gazing?" - probably cheaper and just as inaccurate.

Google's Hollywood 'interventions' made on-screen coders cooler

Reality?

How about a few grey headed types and some balding types with children and grandchildren might make the depictions a bit more realistic. All they have done is remove the hoodie, given the guys a shave and haircut, dress them in more normal clothes, etc. Still 20 something clueless children.

Crypto-busters reverse nearly 320 million hashed passwords

@Adam 52, the lists are already readily available so it not as if the really bad guys could not get their hands on them on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The two goals were to make the website operators more aware of how their bad practices contribute to the problem and make users aware that short, reused passwords are recipe for personal anguish.

Paris Hilton inflates cryptocurrency bubble some more, backs Initial Coin Offering

Cryptocurrencies and their Ilk

I am wary of any cryptocurrency and their ilk. Not because of any inherent flaw or concerns over them as an exchange media. But because I do not trust governments to make them illegal, which I expect to happen fairly soon 'to protect the ...'; in reality to protect our corrupt overlords.

Oracle staff report big layoffs across Solaris, SPARC teams

Re: Timing

At too many companies being cattle heading to the slaughterhouse would be a massive improvement in treatment.

Timing

Leisure Suit Larry picked an interesting weekend - Labor Day Weekend to spring his nastiness. For the unfortunate there is never a good time but to pick the traditional end of summer holidays and the start of the school year seems to be extra vicious.

Deputy AG Rosenstein calls for law to require encryption backdoors

Shyster Stupidity

Given the average shyster over here has problems with basic arithmetic I am not surprise at the near Congresscritter level of stupidity here.

Microsoft's fix for web graphics going AWOL? Disable your antivirus

Re: Who'd be a web designer?

@Ken Hagan - The problem apparently only affects Imbecile Explorer 11 which would indicate that Slurp has screwed up again. Edge and earlier versions of Idiot Explorer apparently do not have this problem.

The advice to turn off AV on Windows is horrifically stupid. The best advice is use a different browser.

NYPD head of IT doubles down on Windows smartphone idiocy

then finest what?

@AC - From someone who watched them up close and personal for may years, the answer is corruption. Most US big cities are corrupt cesspools from top to bottom and have been for decades, particularly in the Northeast.

Criticize Google, get fired: Spotlight spins on ad giant's use of soft money

Re: Surprise

The elites in all countries have been making sure they have their fingers in the pie in all the right places. Usually they prefer less visible rolls and migrating between government, think tanks, and select industries as the political winds shift back and forth. They have been doing this for centuries if not millennia.