Posts by 2460 Something

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

I used to rave about Tesla, about how visionary Elon Musk was, how amazing SpaceX was. When the Thailand cave rescue incident occurred. Knowing nothing about cave diving I saw the early offers and prototype and was very impressed that this group of engineers would put time and effort into figuring out a solution to safely get those kids out. When he was told it wouldn't work (and also being told to stick it where the sun didn't shine), I initially defended his outburst, though as it carried on, I had a major loss in respect for him.

Since 2018 the guy has gone massively downhill, just one crazy thing after another, lies upon lies and more lies (standard Trump behaviour) and it feels like he now has gone full on evil mode.

It's sad really, as with that amount of money and influence, why care about screwing others over? He could have focused on making the best possible products and used it massive wealth to make the world a better place.

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: Really?

@codejunky

"To have any deal that doesn't come with security guarantees would require 2 honourable parties."

"It depends what you mean by that. If the US has economic interests in Ukraine then the US is more interested in protecting the peace. If the US sends troops to Ukraine with the bloodthirsty lot who want to keep the war going and drag NATO into it then you are looking at WW3."

Trump is just trying to profiteer from his position, nothing would go 'back' to the American people, it all would go to make him, his family and his sponsors/controllers richer. Trump is Corruption with a capital 'C'. He will grift, lie, cheat and steal anything from anyone to make more money. This is the person who kept going to his 'MAGA club' to grift millions not just throughout his presidency, but also after as well.

"Putin is full FSB, a fascist dictator who murders his opponents (both political and otherwise) at home and abroad."

No disagreement there. So why did the west provoke him with Ukraine and why is the west so bloodthirsty to keep the war going? Not willing to directly get involved but also not wanting it to end?

Nobody did anything to provoke Putin, he is an evil bloodthirsty dictator. He invaded Ukraine in 2014 to steal Crimea, and because nobody did a damn thing he continued to destabilise the Donbas and surround regions with both deployed military (dressed as civilians/seperatist fighters) and massive amounts of funding along side disinformation campaigns.

"With proper Ukraine support, Russia wouldn't stand a chance."

It would take more than economic messing about. For one Europe is worthless in this war without the US, our 'leaders' have made that clear, so cutting off our nose to spite our face is stupid. But also the only support that will 'win' the Ukraine war for Ukraine is NATO declaring war on Russia, and NATO is not willing to do so.

I disagree. Europe has already provided more financial assistance than America. America has provided $106bn aid that directly benefits Ukraine, about 50% of this is in the form of military hardware/missiles etc... Europe has provided $145bn so far, with another $53bn committed. Given that Trump/Vance/Musk had a little paddy party and threw their dummy's out because Zelenskyy didn't grovel at their feet, there is much more we need to do, as Europe, to support a democratic nation on our continent from Putin, a mad, vicious, rabid dictator.

"The big problem is Trump"

Of course. He is trying to end a war everyone wants to continue. He must be bad to try and stop the killing. Horrible horrible man. Note that there was no war during Trumps first term and he is trying to end this war. So he must be bad man because the blood thirsty say so.

I think it's time you and musk put the waccy baccy down, it has obviously already affected your ability to see what is right in front of your eyes. Trump couldn't care less about the war, other than his puppet master Putin has told him what to say and do. Putin wants the war over, with the current areas he has invaded declared 'Russian' so he can save face at home for his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Putin will happily carve up Ukraine with Trump. And both would extract as much as possible from Ukraine.

There was no 'war' during Biden's term either. Yet all them continued to pursue military engagements abroad (it just wasn't declared a 'war'), the increase in conflicts with Iran (in which 100 American soldiers were killed) are directly at the feet of Trump. The disastrous 'deal' with the Taliban that the orange buffoon apparently negotiated and agreed to and the fallout from that, is directly his fault. Biden's hands were tied in many respects because people be stupid, he couldn't counter the deal without dropping massive forces back into a very long engagement in Afghanistan.

Trump is not a savvy businessman, he is just fortunate to have inherited stupid amounts of money from his father. He has declared bankruptcy 6 times already, He is a serial sex offender, a fraudster, a felon, a snake oil salesman grifter, who has realised just how stupid MAGA are and is extracting from them everything he can, along with every other idiot who wants to buy the favour of the Emperor.

Re: Really?

To have any deal that doesn't come with security guarantees would require 2 honourable parties.

Putin is full FSB, a fascist dictator who murders his opponents (both political and otherwise) at home and abroad.

The only real 'solution' that I can see, is that Europe massively steps up support of Ukraine, UK enters much closer ties with Europe and we no longer buy anything American. All purchase of Russian gas in any format is banned. All weapons, vehicles, aircraft we build in European countries. With proper Ukraine support, Russia wouldn't stand a chance.

The big problem is Trump, unfortunately, if you look closely, Putin's hand is so far up that every time Trumps lips move you can see the fingers. I can quite see America suddenly pushing to remove all sanctions. Trump is a disgusting traitor and these past few days have made me wish that the guy hadn't missed.

Ex-SAP CTO walks away with €7.1M payout after scandal

Re: Executive bonuses

The older I get the more 'socialist' I think I've become. The only thing that is rewarded in our current environment is greed and who you know. Given a few months usually these 'leaders' who leave in these circumstances quietly turn up in another ridiculously lucrative role. I don't know what the answer actually is, but there are a number of things I would love to see.

CEO level pay should be linked to the lowest paid workers. Nobody needs to be getting paid in the millions, and if you want to be paid more, then you have to increase the pay of everyone who works for you.

Make politicians accountable for what they say, lies should be called out and there should be actual penalties for it.

Remove the legal requirement that shareholders comes before everything else. Primary focus should be on the customer, your staff and overall wellbeing of the environment you operate within (including supply chain). There should never be an event where you cut staff so you can still pay dividends.

Universal Basic Income - Get rid of all this us vs them, Stop the oligarchs/corporations being able to blame 'others' for taking all the cookies. (The cost of 'benefits' is far less than the oligarchs/corporations steal from the economy every day, Amazon paid 17m in corporation tax last year .. on 27bn UK turnover).

Increase tax, As of last year I'm on 6 figures, which is crazy to me and I acknowledge that I am very very lucky, but I'm happy to pay more proportionally in tax so that everyone in society is better off. The higher income gets the more the tax rate should increase, i.e. above 500k, make it 90%.

Prevent fiscal drag, tax bands should raise with inflation.

Get rid of all tax loopholes, just make it simple. Stop all Irish/Dutch Sandwich systems.

If you are an ex-HMRC who set the tax rules to then there should be a conflict of interest prevention so they cannot just jump across to advise corporations on how to 'legally reduce tax burden' - No, just pay your damn tax.

Get rid of tax havens, especially the ones that we have direct input to.

If you are making money in this country you should be paying appropriate tax in this country. There shouldn't be ways to hide wealth for the rich. Transparency for everything, no more hiding behind corporations/trusts.

The government should be building significantly more social homes, which are then not sold.

I want education to be free for everyone, especially upcoming generations. They shouldn't be getting saddled with 50k of debt, which for most just becomes another lifetime tax.

I want healthcare/NHS to actually be brought back up to standard, removing all private money grabs (PFI contracts, Massively inflated agency costs).

Yes, we might get a load of rich individuals decide to go live elsewhere, that's fine, long term it will working out much much better for everyone that stays behind. Corporations are not going anywhere, no matter what they say, as they will go wherever they can make money.

Anyway, I think I need a nap after that rant.

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

HR or Steve's Boss

I do wonder who actually stuck the knife in, I don't see how his boss, knowing that he had already offered to help and been soundly rebuffed, would not have stepped in before losing an employee. I have been in a similar situation and my direct line manager went to town on them for not involving IT up front and then having the temerity to blame us for their screw up.

Assange psychiatrist misled judge over parentage of his kids, US tells High Court

Not so, Sweden has happily handed people over to the CIA, without any judicial process, who were subsequently tortured https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/05/cia-rendition-help-european-leaders.

The whole point of hiding in the embassy was because he was quite sure that as soon as he touched down in Sweden, the US would lodge an extradition request and charges would be dropped. The primary reason being that it would be much harder for the US to extradite him from the UK. As soon as the US realised they were not going to be able to get him via Sweden, they lodged an extradition request and Sweden dropped all charges.

Ultimately whether you like him or not, he should be as protected as any other journalist, plenty of the ones in this country distort and manipulate fact to tell their own story, he was exposing many many US atrocities and war crimes. That doesn't mean he is a nice person, frankly he sounds like a proper muppet, it also doesn't mean the US should be allowed to be anywhere near him.

Remember those wacky cyberpunk costumes in Hackers? They're on display in London this week

I loved the film the first time I watched it, and I've watched it a couple times since. Overall, I really don't think it's that far off the mark. In real life hackers have shut down power grids, nuclear plants, banking networks .. .. and on and on. Anything that is computer controlled (and these days there is a lot more) has a potential to be hacked. Systems doesn't even have to be directly connected to the internet, resourceful (and in the case of the nuclear plant, let's be fair, most likely state sponsored) hackers will find a way.

To top it all off, damn did I have a crush on Jolie. In fact, I'm quite tempted to dig it out and have another watch today.

NHS-backed org reacted to GitHub leak disclosure with legal threats and police call, complains IT pro

Requirement to report the breach doesn't stop just because they have fixed the problem. If there was a breach that required the ICO to be informed, they are legally required to inform ICO within the set timescales.

Crane horror Reg reader uses his severed finger to unlock Samsung Galaxy phone

One has to question why you were testing 'dead' fingers. At what point did that come into the QA/Acceptance criteria?

Re: It would have been more interesting...

My thoughts as well. As it stands it's still pretty cool (and gruesome) but no security risk unless it was registered whilst attached and still working afterwards.

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

Re: “one of his major successes”

Seems to me you are responding to a Jim Butcher styled holder of a Denarius, in which case they will quite happily watch the world burn.

Not just Microsoft: Auth turns out to be a point of failure for Google's cloud, too

Redundancy

And this is another classic example of why you should never settle on just one cloud provider for services that are critical. It isn't a question of 'if' it is a matter of 'when' they have an outage, as to even get to being an outage it is going to be massive (smaller stuff they have internal redundancies anyway so end user likely never even knows).

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump's Twitter account days before 2016 US election

Digital Trail

I doubt they would have done other than they admitted that they had a potential digital trail, so best to report it to prevent comeback.

Who fancies a six-core, 128GB RAM, 8TB NVMe … laptop?

Takes time

It has a price reduction for Ubuntu as you don't need to pay for the Windows license.

How the CIA, Comcast can snoop on your sleep patterns, sex toy usage

Re: But which router to choose?

Have a look at the openwrt table of hardware and choose one that fits your budget/needs.

FTC ready to give back tech support scamming money to the bilked

Re: Surely they have a record of credit cards debited...

Not only is it crass, but you just know it will be set up like many actual scam emails that have gone before ... maybe they are just assuming that because they fell for a real scam, they will be just as likely to input details on a new 'non-scam' link.

Those that have had details compromised will hopefully have new accounts so although they have the scammed account information it may not be active. However, they still have other contact information. Maybe try with the banks they held the compromised account with so they can work out an automatic credit option.

Crowdfunding scheme hopes to pay legal fees for Marcus Hutchins

Re: Who is benefiting

I find it difficult to not be paranoid in instances like these. Not am I paranoid, but more am I paranoid enough?

Mirai copycats fired the IoT-cannon at game hosts, researchers find

Ransomware is different to DDOS though. In the one they potentially have something of real value to 'trade', that being the encryption key. In the other they are forcing you offline, but there are steps you can take to mitigate, prevent, circumvent.... etc etc.

We have had 1 bad ransomware attack, a user ran an infected payload on their laptop, which was connected to their home and team areas, everything was encrypted. Thankfully we have a decent backup system, so we simply restored everything from shortly before the incident (after blocking their laptop from the network till it could be cleaned). We have also been hit by a number of sophisticated DDOS attacks, once we analysed their attack vector we started putting steps into place to reduce it's impact and subsequently negate it entirely.

If we hadn't had any backups of those filestores though, I can quite imagine the CTO agreeing to pay the ransom on the chance we would get the data restored.

I am assuming that they are trying to hold providers to ransom to make money? Surely people don't pay up, just improve security, fix vulnerabilities and move on?

If any target become known as a company that would pay up, they would be inundated with attacks.

Elon Musk among 116 AI types calling on UN to nobble robo-weapons before they go all Skynet

Re: What about

Do you have any citations for these?

Apple bag-search class action sueball moves to Cali supreme court

Re: When will this bosses realise it works both ways?

@DrM

I'm not sure 2 people understood your joke :D

What weighs 800kg and runs Windows XP? How to buy an ATM for fun and profit

Re: Is anyone surprised.

Part of their security is limiting access of them to known people, but any of the 'mobile' ones in random shops would still have a higher number of people who have physical access to the box, and I'm sure given enough time....

Unless absolutely stuck somewhere, I won't use an ATM unless it is fixed into the side of a building (preferably a bank). These freestanding ones just seem too accessible to ne'er-do-wells. If I have had to use one I am constantly checking my account for suspicious activity.

Guess who's hiking their prices again? Come on, it's as easy as 123 Reg

Even when they were one of the cheapest I couldn't bring myself to use them due to the significant amount of horror stories from others that had....

This goldfish and its steerable robot tank will destroy humanity

Re: Obligatory

All goldfish are indeed evil. If they ever start on their path to world domination we are all doomed.

Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon's lawyer, UK supporters rally around Marcus Hutchins

Re: Do you work in IT?

That seems to be the real solution. The USA is just another oppressive regime and should be added to the do not travel list. Nobody should be hosting any IT related conferences there,

Capita's smart meter monopoly is owed £42m by industry

That, coupled with how easy they are to hack, is the reason whenever they call me up trying to push me one I tell them to (very politely) go away.

Game of Pwns: Hackers invade HBO, 'leak Game of Thrones script'

Re: Game of Thrones?

@phuzz

Icon, that is all.

It’s 2017 and Hayes AT modem commands can hack luxury cars

Re: The one domain where IoT shit cannot linger long

One of the main concerns of the very easy to hack smart meters is that you can easily tell a households habits, and hence when they are not in.

Security should be the number one concern of any IT appliance, unfortunately it generally feels to be last minute, rushed and under-appreciated.

Firefox doesn't need to be No 1 – and that's OK, 'cos it's falling off a cliff

Faster

I haven't found this to be the case. I used to exclusively use FF, but I started using vivaldi and chromium instead as FF always seemed to be quite slow and quickly starts using excessive amounts of memory.

Breathless F-35 pilots to get oxygen boost via algorithm tweak

Re: Why oxygen generators?

I suspect that the weight/space is a big part of it. If you base it off flight time of 2-3 hours that would be fine. But if you then include in-air refuelling for longer flights .. how do you refill the tanks at the same time? So you would then need bigger tanks to cover long flight scenario ... at some point this just becomes unfeasible.

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

Maybe they will just have to tow a line of tin cans for their backup instead?

Stop all news – it's time for us plebs to be told about BBC paycheques!

Re: Scrutiny...

Nah, they are routing it through their off-shore accounts, nobody will be looking at them too closely.

Security robot falls into pond after failing to spot stairs or water

Re: Perhaps...

Maybe he was just running away from Yoda...

Truck spills slimy load all over Oregon road – drivers slip in eel slick

Icon says it all. I got some very strange looks from colleagues ..

Man facing $17.5m HPE fraud case has contempt sentence cut by Court of Appeal

Re: Automatic halving of sentence

The joys of a stupid system. Remember for other sentences you can get 50% reductions for 'Good Behaviour' as well. Pointless to hand out sentences that don't, in reality, last as long as they say they will.

Blighty's prosecutors slammed for failing to deliver savings on electronic tagging

Re: No Understannd

Always reminds me of independence day...

You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?

Better mobe coverage needed for connected cars, says firm flogging networking gear

They can't even get ubiquitous coverage throughout the UK. How exactly do they think this is going to happen across the entirety of Europe?

Viking storms storage monastery wielding 50TB SAS SSD

Re: My first thought..

Should be some more LTO editions out soon ....

I really do think capacity is getting to the point where you cannot feasibly backup to tape, so you would just have to multiple sites with multiple copies of the data.

Re: Why write bandwidth matters

But you can then take into consideration that if your swapping out 12TB SAS drives then your increasing your capacity by four. You could choose to have three quarter less drives, or remortgage the UK and fully populate the arrays.

It would look so pretty....

Re: 50TB! I'll take twelvety.

The good news is that with these sizes entering the market in a few years it will be the norm and smaller SSD's should hopefully start dropping down to reasonable prices per TB for SME/Home use.

Re: Yay!

This was my thought when I saw it as well. Little ambiguous so thank you for the additional link.

Twitter will no longer snaffle data allowances on Virgin Mobile

Re: Net neutrality please

I completely agree. It is ridiculous to include these monopolistic companie as freebies if they don't offer the same to all social media platforms.

How will this be recorded?

Who has access to this data and what are the data sets?

How long will this data be kept for after the billing cycle is complete.

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

I would have thought it all comes down to the difficulty to acquire legally at a reasonable cost vs the difficulty of pirating. Services like netflix, amazon prime, spotify make it much simpler to say I want to watch/listen to that and I can stream it to my current location. It would be interesting to see what the level of piracy is on music/films available on a streaming service vs those that aren't.

Google blows $800k on bots to flood the UK with 30,000 'articles' a month

Block away

So now we just need some software that auto-blocks any google bot generated advertisements news.

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

Re: Nice story, bro.

You quite clearly demonstrate that you know absolutely nothing about how an AC unit works... nor indeed how a data centre is designed. If you have never utilised or understood either why post such drivel?

I know that if I knew sod all about something .. I would just keep my criticisms to myself rather than demonstrating to all and sundry my complete lack of knowledge. Of course if I wished to learn more about said topic, I would read up on data centre designs or even post a nice comment asking others to explain the mechanics of the situation.

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

Ahh, MS, Thinking of the children! It is a shame they didn't also think of Skype's current user base, who were quite happy with it just being usable.

Nothing could protect Durex peddler from NotPetya ransomware

If they don't effective protection, how can they advocate that others do!

European MPs push for right to repair rules

It isn't that people don't care about it, it is that non-replaceable has become the norm.