Posts by a_yank_lurker

Electrician cuts wrong wire and downs 25,000 square foot data centre

Re: opps

I am not sure it some of the cockups would result in a complete TITSUP. There are enough little things that could wrong that affecting parts of the system.

Predictable: How AV flaw hit Microsoft's Windows defences

Re: The MS platform is pretty robust these days, but it only takes one bad Apple

The real problem is that Winbloat tends force regular users to create a non-admin account. Most SOHO users never set this account up. Also, Winbloat does not have a decent app store/repository system for vetting and installing all software. This forces users to track down installers that are often loaded with crapware. Patch management seems to be hit or miss with Slurp to add to user woes.

Back to the article, it seems whatever Slurp is trying to do to improve security is being undermined by sloppy coding by various third party "security" packages. Rather ironic, a major Winbloat insecurity is absolutely not at Slurp's door.

Maybe the best solution for Slurp is to completely rewrite Winbloat even if it means breaking some PHB's favorite, excessively obsolete package.

Volkswagen blames emissions cheating on 'chain of errors'

Re: the only error is that I bought one of these

or a tax on stupidity.

Is VW the sacrificial lamb

US environmental policy often seems to be driven by pure politics. VW is an uppity German company making inroads and apparently not greasing the right hands. Therefore VW must be hammered for both their sins and the sins of the USEPA.

The US EPA is known to release a regulation without considering how one can properly test for compliance. The last time I checked the US EPA had regulation require flammable solid wastes be classified as a hazardous waste. But they had no test suitable for testing these wastes. I often wondered if someone should have sued the USEPA for the illegal disposal of paper - it is flammable.

No root for you! Google slams door on Symantec certs

Re: Google alarmist?

If one uses smartphones as an enhanced cellphone and limit one's surfing to minimal sites and never use it for shopping or banking most of the problems more or less disappear.

Re: What's the problem?

Or covert spying for some 3-letter agencies perhaps.

Silicon Valley's Congresswoman comes to the defense of Tor

Re: Well, everyone in the US knows

And the caliber of the local yokels is generally abysmal. In some places it seems the only qualifications are you breathe and are not on parole.

US House okays making internet tax exemptions permanent

Re: USE tax

Which is largely not paid because it is a pain to deal with.

To me the sales tax was more about the states losing tax revenue. Amazon did two things very well. They basically put a catalog based business online with sharp discounts. Its the price combined with reasonably fast delivery that makes Amazon formidable. The discounts are often larger the sales tax

Another problem for bricks and mortars in the US is retail space is overbuilt, there is more retail space available than can successfully filled. Amazon started with this was becoming a major problem and many retailers did not adjust to the changes. And that failed since Amazon failed mostly because of their own incompetence than because Amazon drove them out of business.

Adobe: We locked our customers in the cloud and out poured money

Re: "things have clearly settled down"

Adobe on the cloud is giving many a good reason to look for alternatives. The key is Adobe has feature mature products which are not likely a must have feature soon.

Still running IE10? Not for long, says Microsoft

Re: How many corporate pages will break

The timeline is about 6 weeks to upgrade non-compliant websites. This is somewhat different than XP EOL which announced at release and later extended. For many, the time line, particularly since there will about 3 weeks for working with the holidays seems a bit short. Now, if Slurp said, 1 July, no issue.

How many corporate pages will break

Has Slurp considered that fact that many internal enterprise websites may not run on IE11 and will require a major rewrite? Too many office drones will not be doing much work when the internal corporate site crashes.

Re: we have all these addicts and are going to stop selling them drugs...

It is probably more complex than that given Idiot Explorer's notoriously erratic support of the web standards. With some versions of IE (~6), the support was so bad that one almost had to write a web page twice: Idiot Explorer compliant and standards compliant.

The real problem is too many PHBs with a sort of workable idea demanded the coding was done to IE standards only and not web compliant. Looking at the scores for HTML5 compliance for major browsers at html5test.com, all versions of IE poorly support html5.

Revealed: Mystery 7-year cyberspy campaign in Latin America

Culprit

Assuming feral involvement and the nature of the campaign, I would look at the CIA as the lead. However, given SA politics I would not rule out a local actor leading this with possible support from friendly foreign spooks.

VMware finds back door for US military mega-deal, but Nutanix, Citrix protest again

Feral Government

The ferals often try to write specs that force vendor lock-in whether there is a real technical justification or not. If you have been around feral purchasing you know this is the game. Often the competitors complaint are correct; the specs are written to lock out most vendors and provide the favored vendor the best possible chance to ink the deal

Whether sole-sourcing is legitimate in this case, it is hard to say without the specs. But knowing the ferals and the game, I tend to doubt sole-sourcing is legitimate.

US government pushing again on encryption bypass

No

AC - Exactly right. Either the cell is so small as to be very difficult to find and monitor or they are relatively well known. The San Bernardino tragedy was planned and executed by a husband and wife team probably with some help from his family. The only way they would caught the attention of and get the donut-eaters to move would be someone to make a credible enough report. Otherwise the planning was done in person.

Social media snitching bill introduced into US Congress by intel bosses

Subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge again

So a couple very, very, very dim congress critters think that there is a magic wand for monitoring terrorists. First off, one of the simplest ways to avoid detection is to have a code prearranged. Two people talking about flowers, if done properly, will keep the spooks confused and an automated system will fail. Dumber than a flea should read some US history. Prior to Pearl Harbor one of the Japanese consular officials in Hawaii had weekly phone call to Japan and the subject was always about flowers. Even the very dim US military intelligence did surmise the conversation was encoded and was not about flowers.

This would probably overburden the various inept 3-letter agencies with more garbage.

Libertarian hero: 'Satoshi Nakamoto', government funds, the NSA and the DHS

Who created bitcoins is a riddle wrapped within an enigma borrowing Churchill. It is also a game that many will continue to play probably for many, many years. Unless the creator(s) come forward with unambiguous proof, it will probably be a parlor game like the real identity of Jack the Ripper with many inane theories being proposed and a few very plausible candidates being mentioned.

Brit-American hacker duo throws pwns on IoT BBQs, grills open admin

Re: New acronym proposal

The general use case for IoT aka idiot devices is to slap a Internet connection on a perfectly functional device. Toasters, grills, 'fridges, etc. work perfectly fine without any Internet connection and there is minimal need for them to be connected. The main reason for the idiot devices is manufacturers are looking for a marketing hook that can be sold as a truly new "feature". Since very few appliances have any connectivity it seems to be a "good" idea to add it.

Think you're all done patching? Not if you have any Apple gear

Re: Feeling left out

Use a rolling release distro and you will get patches and upgrades rather regularly.

It seems the is a patching flu going around, there is an Android phone update making the rounds also.

Microsoft pitches lobotomized Cortana for iOS, Android handsets

Pointless

Slurp most be desperately trying help their 3-letter friends/minders. It will never be installed on any device I own.

IT salary not enough? Want to make £10,000 a DAY?

Wrong Gig and Wrong Country

10,000 / day which is $15,000/day. A couple of months or so in Blighty every year even after the tax frauds get shake one down should net at least $150,000. I have the wrong gig and am in the wrong country at those rates.

Battery-free IoT sensor feeds off radio waves

Not that new

Nikola Tesla did something like this about 1900. He used radio waves to power light bulbs. Using radio waves to transfer energy has been done. Now whether it is all that practical remains.

Google says its quantum computer is 100 million times faster than PC

Speed

Computational speed tends to open up areas in computing that were deemed to difficult to implement because of the available processor speeds. Though with most tasks the limit is often not hardware but wetware.

US Navy's newest ship sets sail with Captain James Kirk at the bridge

Re: One missile hit and it's all over.

Actually sloping sides increase armors effectiveness. However, I doubt the Zumwalt has any real armor. Modern warships designs are unbalanced with more offensive capability than they can absorb.

As to the Cole, her damage and near sinking shows the weakness of unbalanced designs. In boxing she would be described as having a glass jaw.

It's nearly 2016, and Windows DNS servers can be pwned remotely

Re: SMH... Edge was promised to be better, safer and without the baggage!

Someone must really hate the NORKS, nobody so evil they deserve the Slurp.

Kill Flash Now: 78 bugs patched in latest update

Re: Sigh...

@ Ledswinger - The flash crew are actually rivaling Congress for the stupidity. It is probably driven mostly by PHBs who have not had the pleasure of a class action lawsuit or criminal investigation aimed at them.

Is ATM security threatened by Windows XP support cutoff? Well, yes, but …

Re: Why is this a problem?

Basic rule of security, if it is connected in some way to a device on the Internet it is on the Internet. ATMs are connected to the bank's computers so they know customer PINS, accounts, and balances. These computers are also accessible via the Internet for online banking. Therefore ATMs are connected, albeit, indirectly to the Internet.

Now getting access to the ATM and doing something is probably very difficult. But in principle and with some sloppiness, bugs, etc. an ATM could be hacked from the outside and the inside.

And true there much easier ways to defraud people and the bank than attacking the ATM itself such as skimmers. And this lowers the possibility of an attack on the ATM.

Who! would! want! Yahoo!? How! about! Verizon!?

Bargain hunting?

Parsing the buzzword bingo, it sounds like Verizon is saying, not now because the price is not worth what the "assets" are worth. If Yahoo is less greedy may be we might buy if the price is about a $1.

Pirate Bay domain suspended thanks to controversial verification system

Re: Hold on...

I think the issue is LEOs are notoriously lazy and anything that interrupts their hourly visit to the donut shop can not be tolerated. That are good reasons to hide WHOIS details from the public and good reasons to broadcast them far and wide. Also, most hosting firms demand a payment, usually by credit card, that indirectly gives a contact to someone who should about the site and its actual owners. So, when the local goons stop stuffing themselves with donuts and actually do something they might in a few hours or may be days learn who is the funder, owner, webmaster, etc. But that will never do.

Windows Phone won't ever succeed, says IDC

How many pints, err kegs

These projects are not worth the paper the they are printed on. Most seem to be from a drunken game of darts at the local watering hole with the "analyst" being well past blitzed. For all we know five years out the top smartphone OSes could be in order Android, Ubuntu, iOS, and FirefoxOS. Do I believe this will happen, no. There are too much time for any prediction to of much use extra that the smartphone will continue to mature with sales curve flattening out or even dropping some.

IBM bats away Australian sueball over billion-dollar-blowout

@sorry - The incompetence exists in industry also. Badly written, ever changing specs are a code wrangler/s worst nightmare of rework, scrapping, and starting anew with due date never moving.

James Clapper has found another reason why he lied about NSA spying

Re: Clapper... how about firing his ass for starters..

I regard Clapper as vermin to exterminated like all vermin.

Lock up your top-of-racks, says Cisco, there's a bug in the USB code

“The vulnerability is due to insufficient handling of USB input parameters. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted USB parameters to be processed by the kernel of an affected device”

What exactly does the buzzword bingo mean? It could be read as the drivers are garbage.

McAfee Security Manager lets anybody bypass managers' security

OOPS

This sounds suspiciously like SQL injection or some real sloppy coding.

Microsoft drops dogma, open-sources Chakra JavaScript engine

Only on Winbloat?

Sort of new Slurp, open source sort of and only on Winbloat. Have they heard this iOS or this Android thingings on something called a smartphone? I doubt it.

Lenov-lol, a load of Tosh, and what the Dell? More bad holes found in PC makers' bloatware

Re: New machine?

@Fihart - Linux applications are a mixed bag of excellent to horrible but so are Winbloat applications. Often users do not spend enough time to learn the Linux application to see if it as good or even better than the Winbloat application it is replacing. Often, just the layout of the GUI is enough for many not to look any further.

What most people complain about is either a very specific missing feature on the nearest Linux equivalent, their favorite Winbloat application is not ported (not whether there is Linux equivalent), or the Linux equivalent is unfamiliar even though it has all the features desired. IMHO, specific missing features is only one that is often valid. The other two reflect the user's laziness or incompetence in most cases.

Re: Build your own or White Box

The OEMs are probably getting either a fee to install it or a cut of any sale from the bloatware aka malware.

Build your own or White Box

There are two options available: build you own or buy a white box. With both you largely will avoid crapware foisted on you by Dell, et. al. Also, one has more control of what hardware is used.

Smut-seeding Prenda Law ringleader must sell home to pay $2.5m debt

Re: Normally....

I believe there is a maximum limit on the number, value, and type of property one can keep/rent in bankruptcy. Hansmeier will be allowed to have a house or apartment if the value / rent is below a certain number. I believe this number varies based on the state. If his home is worth more than allowed I think he would be forced to sell and move into a cheaper home.

Re: Normally....

US Bankruptcy Courts have no jurisdiction over professional licensing. However, some professional licensing may be affected by bankruptcy.

Re: The only downsides

Unless fraud on the court is done (mostly hiding assets), there will be no criminal actions from the bankruptcy court. At this point, the proceedings are purely a civil matter. But if Hansmeier stupidly tries to hide significant assets the court can make its displeasure felt. Given the size of the bankruptcy, I suspect some of the creditors are trying to do a little poking around to see if anything shakes loose - this is legal.

Happy Days

It is nice to see the courts slap any Prenda goon around.

For those not familiar with US bankruptcy laws. Chapter 7 is the liquidation of almost all assets with the proceeds used to pay the creditors. One gets to keep a vehicle and a few other necessary assets as approved by the court and allowed by law. Chapter 13 is basically a court supervised repayment plan. One pays the court a predetermined amount even month and each creditor gets a payment from the court. Typically Chapter 7 results in the creditors getting less money total but all of it at once.

The bankruptcy court is used to dealing with scoundrels who try to hide assets; it is a violation of federal law to do so. When one files, one must make an accurate accounting of all assets and debits to the court. The court is more interested in the assets and any attempt to hide them or otherwise abuse the system.

Russia's blanket phone spying busted Europe's human rights laws

FSB vs NSA/FBI/CIA

So the argument is the Russians, under Yeltsin, enacted a law mandating the installation of snooping gear from the FSB. While in the US, this is done without any real oversight or control. I submit both governments are morally wrong but the Russians have the integrity to say this is how it is while the ferals try to hide it.

Work on world's largest star-gazing 'scope stopped after religious protests

Re: Shooting themselves in the foot

There something about the a vote in Hawaii being declared unconstitutional recently by the US Federal Courts. I wonder if there may a be a federal angle to this because of Hawaiian government itself playing loose with due process.

Re: this is a bunch of watermelons who want to stop anything

Hawaii is a donkey run sewer not elephant run. Same stupidity different branding.

Smart telly, router, app makers have left a security hole open for – drum-roll – three years

Re: Easy Updates

@Sandtitz - Thanks. It appears then the manufacturer can make updates a fairly seamless operation or nightmare. It problem depends on how much experience the manufacturer has with computers.

Easy Updates

How easy is it for any user to update the software on these devices? I ask more from ignorance because I do not own any IoT devices so never looked into the issue.

If they are not easy to update for technically literate user, which would not surprise me, then they would be practically impossible for the unwashed masses.

Senate asks DHS: you don't negotiate with terrorists, but do you pay off ransomware?

Feral Government

So the dumber than fleas (Mark Twain) expects the totally clueless to have an idea of how to handle ransomware. I am not so sure that a successful ransomware attack against the feral government would not be blessing. They would not be harassing anyone for a few months as they try to clean up the mess.

To improve the feral government mismanagement they need to hire a few PHBs. Yes there is something worse than a PHB.