Posts by a_yank_lurker

Swedish air controllers debunk cyber attack disruption theory

Ockham's Razor

Most failures of the power grid, traffic control, etc. will be due rather mundane reasons not cyber attack. Ockham's Razor says use the simplest explanation that fits the facts which will often be a very boring, mundane reason.

NZ hotel bans cyclists' Lycra-clad loins

@Dr Syntax - Many years ago I was talking to GDOT (Georgia DOT) about these types of trails. They are detested because they do not account for the very different characteristics of bikes and pedestrians. To be blunt, they are dangerous to both because a bike can easily hit speeds of 15 mph or more compared to a person walking at 2 to 3 mph. Both sides have legitimate complaints but they should be directed at the bureaucrats who moronically think these trails are a good idea.

Bikes are vehicles not pedestrians so any pedestrian/bikeway is an idiocy waiting for the inevitable face-off. Since bikes are vehicles, technically (in the US) the pedestrians should be walking on the side facing traffic aka the bikes but they never do.

Vinyl LPs to top 3 million sales in Blighty this year

With a horn and crank

Microsoft sues US DoJ for right to squeal when Feds slurp your data

Re: Hat's off

Slurp is getting some badly needed good will and is trying to position its cloud offerings being nothing more than an extension of one's hard drive with all the attendant legal implications. Slurp has made a big bet on the cloud and they need it to pay off. Customer nervousness about security, real and imaginary, can devastate the cloud especially if becomes apparent the ferals can peruse basically at will without the owner's knowledge.

Surprise! Tech giants dominate global tax-dodging list of shame

Re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Tax holidays are one time deals what is needed is major reform of the US tax laws.

You won't believe this, but… nothing useful found on Farook iPhone

one issue

The phone was an attempt for a precedent so the ferals would not need to do leave the donut shop or so they thought. The metadata would be grounds for some visits and an abbreviated session of 20 questions.

Re: Last line in the article...

Very simple answer to the last line, they are liars at best and at worst traitors.

Warrant-less email snatching by cops, Feds under threat by draft law

What about the two traitors in the Senate

Has anyone consulted the Senate's resident traitors (Burr and Feinstein) about this? They must be having a conniption fit.

Bay Area man forced out of his $400 box home

Real problem: "Loose lips sink ships". He needed to keep his mouth shut.

Re: The housing situation in the Bay is obscene.

In the metro Atlanta area, higher end 2 or 3 bed room apartments (1100 - ~1500 sq.ft.) rent for about a $1/sq. ft. or about $1300/mon. Renting a house is a little more.

Re: fire hazard

Or in SF's case, another way to shake down the unwanted human vermin and force them to leave.

Microsoft: We have a bullet ready for 12 competencies

Re: Not surprising

The cloud is mostly marketing hype. From a technical view, the cloud has some serious implications about data security. Depending on the industry, the cloud may a legal no go because of privacy laws.

Line by line, how the US anti-encryption bill will kill our privacy, security

Good Sense?

"Good sense might prevail in the Land of the FreeTM, but don't bet on it." With America's Native Criminal Class (Mark Twain) which is best at subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge (Czar Reed of Maine) I figure the final bill will be much worse than the current drafts.

Can you hear me now – over the picket line? Verizon workers strike

PHB on the loose

There has not been a major strike in the news for sometime. In many industries, the unions have been badly hammered by economic changes that have hammered the companies. So why did this strike occur; it seems like the PHBs at Verizon tried to push the union too hard and now they have a strike.

IP address clerks RIPE: Feds, come back with a warrant, er, web browser

@Doctor Syntax - Remember these are morons who would metaphorically shoot first before doing any preliminary work.

Bug hype haters gonna hate hate hate: Badlock flaw more like Sadlock

Re: Bah!

The problem is not that the bug exists and maybe quite serious - not expert enough to judge - but that it is heavily hyped. The hype may be taking focus away from even more serious security issues. Cry wolf too many times and the audience becomes rather jaded and sloppy about securing their kit.

PC market shambling towards an unquiet grave

Re: Old Story

History is repeating itself, this time with PC's while earlier it was with other products. During this period there will be more consolidation/shake-out. Another reason for the market stability is many users do not need the latest version of Office for example. Their needs are met perfectly a version 2 or 3 releases back. So there is no compelling software release that will obsolete their current kit.

Half of people plug in USB drives they find in the parking lot

@Everytime - True, the sample population is skewed so conclusions have to be carefully drawn about overall behavior. The high percentage that were picked up and plug in is indicative that this is real problem with users. Will it higher, lower, or the same - I do not know but this indicates that if enough, say a hundred or so, infected USB sticks are sprinkled about a parking lot carefully the odds of a few being found and plugged into a computer are about 100%. The scenario the envisioned is the infecting a network via a USB stick, which will likely only take one, and how likely is this to happen if enough are scattered about. A potential security nightmare for any organization.

Re: Safe for me

Whether autorun is on or off is not relevant. The relevant point is the stupidity of installing unknown USB stick in any computer.

America's Intelligence Transparency Council to meet for the first time … behind closed doors

Orwell would be happy

A transparency council that meets in secret to produce secret recommendations.

Lotto 'jackpot fix' code

Re: is hard to rig

"So a place like Chicago where the democrats are in power they are able to do some things like bringing out the dead to vote. Likewise in some states where republicans are in power, they have enacted voter ID laws - claiming to combat the imaginary problem of voter fraud" - The dead voting is by definition voter fraud so it is not an imaginary problem especially in Chicago or some counties in Colorado were there more voters than residents old enough to vote.

Re: is hard to rig

The joke over hear is the most reliable donkey voters are the dead. If the voter rolls are larded with bogus voters it is easy to find someone to vote for the deceased or imaginary voter.

FBI, Apple continue cat-and-mouse game over iPhones in New York

Re: Moving off shore

It was not new legislation but using existing admin state regulations to block the merger. I think they did try to address the tax implications of the merger but think there were other important issues such as the combined size of the new entity.

Re: If at first you don't succeed...

@scrubber - The meta data tells who was contacted (or the phone numbers at least). Any competent flat-foot (all 5 of them) would know that these numbers need to be run down and the owners/users contacted and questioned. The angle is "how do you know x" and "why would x and you be in communication". So will roll and talk.

Re: Morton's Fork

Yank here and I never believed the feral's lies in the People's Republic of California or the in the current case. The feral's are precedent shopping so they can side step America's Native Criminal Class (aka Congress).

An upvote following HL Mencken's observation about the dimness of too many over here ("No one ever went broke by underestimating the tastes of the average American")

This year's H-1B visa lottery jammed full in just six days

Re: In my experience, there's always a shortage of the highly-skilled workers ...

The real shortage is not of highly-skilled workers or workers willing to learn new skills but the a tendency of the PHBs not to spend money on staff training and to look a salaries as pure cost to be reduced. There will always be a "skills-gap" because there is always emerging technology that one needs to learn about to stay current. Mastering a new technology takes time and practice. The short cut is to hire someone who supposedly has the training versus training the current staff.

The disadvantage of sacking the current staff is they know where all the gotchas are located that the new person would not know about. Retraining the staff keeps this critical knowledge available. The adage "penny-wise, pound-foolish" is apt

How Remix's Android will eat the world

Re: "Remix OS with...

Even so, most home users have a very limited need for business applications. Thus, except for the 3 or 4 times a year they need one, they can happily use any OS. The fact that most consumers treat Winbloat phones with a big yawn should be an alert to the fact they have figured this out. Winbloat for home users is more likely to survive by inertia than because consumers are clamoring for it. Businesses will likely stay strong Winbloat users because of the old legacy applications that only run on it.

Bavarian town rescinds Hitler's honorary citizenship

Key difference between Hitler and Churchill is Hitler followed a deliberate, planned genocide. Churchill never advocated such a policy nor carried one out. Churchill's attitudes to the Empire are completely out of step with our sensibilities but were not unusual before WWII.

The area bombing of cities in WWII, in retrospect, was not worth the casualties suffered by both sides in Europe. It basically made the civilians more determined to see the war through to victory and civilian morale was much more durable than pre-war theorists believed. Area bombing of Japan was more effective economically because the natural dispersion of Japanese industry in major cities but I do not think Japanese civilian morale was negatively affected by it.

Re: Oh, Adolf...

The late William Patrick Hitler, US Navy vet, and long time resident of Long Island, New York. His sons still live there according to Wikipedia.

Re: only 71? bah!

@Kurt Meyer - I believe part of the reasons Hindenburg finally appointed Hitler Chancellor were the Nazis had the largest (minority) bloc in the Reichstag and the fact many leaders of the other parties in the initial coalition badly underestimated Hitler. Hindenburg was German patriot and tried to do what he thought best even when he was wrong. Hitler was able to seize power after Hindenburg died and effectively combined the Presidency with the Chancellorship. into one.

Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things

Re: OOh missus! - engineers carry tool cases

On this side we call them monkey wrenches. One time I was working with German colleague and I handed him a monkey wrench. He said: "Ja, ein Englaeder". The Germans do not have a very high opinion of anybody else' engineering skills.

Read America's insane draft crypto-borking law that no one's willing to admit they wrote

Catch 22

If there is a mandated backdoor, aka hacker entry port, what does that do for companies and people who must keep client/patient information secure. Does this mean online banking, online medical portals are illegal because their lack of security violates other laws such as HIPPA?

If Stupidity Were a Crime

These two dim bulbs are trying to make stupidity worthy of the death penalty for treason against the humanity.

Look who's here to solve the Internet of Things' security nightmare – hey, it's Uncle Sam

Power Grab by Bureaucrats

First question for the ferals is: "Do you know what you are talking about?" Second question for the ferals is: "Do you even know what the real problem is?" I doubt they can answer 1 affirmatively ever. As for the second, one of the major issues is in patch management of IoT devices by the manufacturer which is generally no existent. But the real issue for IoT is why is it needed in most cases other than as a marketing gimmick.

Fake CEOs pilfer $2.3bn from US biz pockets in three years – Feds

Internal Controls

It seems like many of the scammers are trying to hit an amount that is in the sweet spot; enough to make the scam worthwhile but not enough to require running the approvals up the chain. Fake invoices and the like probably have going for decades but not always spotted or reported.

FBI Director defends iPhone 5C unlock tool that's obviously going to leak into wrong hands

Re: Trust in me, only me ...

Reminds of Reagan's comment about the most scary phrase in the English language: "I'm from the government and here to help." The ferals have shown themselves to more interested in protecting their power and prestige than in such mundane ideas such as justice, privacy, and freedom. This whole episode reeks of a feral power grab.

As far as protecting the "secret", the ferals not very good at that either with OPM hack, numerous moles, Foggy Bottom's total indifference to protecting secrets for starters.

Microsoft rethinks the Windows application platform one more time

Re: And that was dumb

Slurp forgot what the major premise of Winbloat was - the ability to install 3rd party software that user needs for a task at hand. The user determines what is installed and what features they want and are willing to pay for. This "legacy" software is still quite functional and useful to too many users for the users to abandon it in favor of a unbaked, quarter-cocked, incompetently executed App store.

App stores work on phones because there was no real important legacy apps to contend with. Google and Apple were smart enough to make it easy for developers to get apps to the users.

Repositories work in Linux because they are more flexible than App stores. The Ubuntu ppa and the Arch AUR allow people to provide applications outside of the official repositories through the package manager.

White House flushes away court-ordered decryption like it was a stinky dead goldfish

Re: Feinstein and Burr, ...

The TLAs probably have enough to destroy either one with one well placed and timed leak. Also, the fact they are both trying to protect their beloved Stasi from a well deserved prosecution should say what they really are - traitors.

Wanna be a DevOps expert? You’ll have to be a Red Hat expert first…

Problem

What if the system one is using is not Red Hat? I doubt the certs would mean much there.

Homeland Security report hoses down energy-sector 'cybergeddon' talk

Reality Check

The North American energy grid is vulnerable to both natural causes and man-made issues. The DHS threat assessment may be accurate in the sense a cyber attack is not the most likely cause of a power outage faced in the US. But it may badly underestimate the effects of a cyber attack compared to a lightning strike. The first is probably very difficult to assess and plan for but the second is well known and can be planned for.

Adobe preps emergency Flash patch for bug hackers are exploiting

Flush Flash

This is ridiculous, the only common security failure common to most OSes is flash.

Twitter spends $10m on rights to cover Thursday-night NFL games

@allthecoolshortnamesweretaken - I would add both. Twitter is trying to be relevant when their core users probably do not care that much about sports. The NFL only got a paltry amount when in years past these deals would be for much, much more.

3D printers set for lift off? Yes, yes, yes... at some point in the future

Question

3D printers have hyped as one of the next big thing. But they appear to be a semi-niche item for both businesses and consumers. Not everyone will need one and many others will only need their capabilities very, very infrequently. Also, will the economics of one-off production make sense for many items.

Truly crap exhibition dumped on Isle of Wight

Yawn

Having been to many sewage treatment plants, I think I will pass on this exhibit. However, it is fascinating to watch peoples' reactions when one describes a what it's like to work in a shit plant.

Google-funded study concludes: Make DMCA even more Google-friendly

Copoyright

The entire copyright system is broken. It does not serve the creators only the media companies who often own the copyrights.

JAXA confirms ASTRO-H breakup

Orwell would be happy

"JAXA believes an anomaly on board the satellite" - what is an anomaly? Hardware failure, sensor failure, programming error? Other failure? Design flaw? Or does it mean they do not have the foggiest idea what happened and are resorting to buzzword bingo to cover up their ignorance.

Microsoft lures top Linux exec from Oracle to Redmond

Re: They have hired top Linux people before

As others have noted Windows is not the cash cow it once was. Slurp may have a couple of adults in the room.

The market has shifted from classic desktop type applications found in businesses to personal apps found on phones and tablets. Many of the apps require Internet access to be functional while the traditional business applications were often mostly stand alone products that do not require Internet access to function. Add that many browser based Cloud SaaS do not have any OS requirements, just an browser that is reasonably compliant with HTML5/CSS3.

The adults realize as OSes and their ecosystems are less important it might behove Slurp to start using/supporting other OSes if they wish to stay relevant.

SEC chair blasts Silicon Valley for its hokey valuations

Re: Here here

It seems like every 10 to 12 years there is a tech IPO bubble as people "invest" in the latest fad. To be fair, many of the companies involved are not scams but have a real business idea/product to sell. Whether the public likes the idea/product is the key and many companies will fail. The problem is the hype surrounding the fad makes too many not do "due diligence" and assess whether the business has a viable business plan.

Also, some of the IPO valuations smell of a form penny stock pump-and-dump tactics. The companies are not worth 1bn but more like 1 to 10 million.

Tesla books over $8bn in overnight sales claims Elon Musk

Re: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

@BitDr - Electric cars have always had the ability to perform on par with IC powered cars throughout history. The major issues they have historically fixed have been range, recharging time, recharger accessibility, and battery life. Tesla appears to have solved the range and battery life problem. The recharging time may be solved, if the 15 min recharge times quoted are accurate. This leaves recharger accessibility as the last major hurdle.

Most traditional car people like Bob Lutz flunked automotive history. Electrics, hybrids, and even steam powered cars have been around since the early days of cars. None of the key technology is conceptually new.