Posts by J. Cook

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

Re: Shrapnel...

No, it's a management "I'm not buying a case that costs three times what the computer costs!" decision that ends up with them replacing the computer enough times to make the case a cost effective repair.

I did a contract job back when Code Red and Nimda where the scary monsters of the week, and got a tour of the local aerospace plant when the place had those two bugs burn through their network. We had to have the on-site tech visit most of the machines in the manufacturing area because the Cd drives were trashed from all the titanium and other metal dust, because they were not in a good enclosure. (tl;dr- a milling machine that carves turbine parts out of blocks of titanium costing more than a Cadillac is dead-lined because the ~$30 Cd rom drive in the ~$700 desktop can't install patches and is therefore excluded from the network and the ability to do.. anything.)

Re: Monitor

I've had (very low end) video cards pull that stunt on me as well; not a problem with memory, or the GPU, but the analog circuitry pushing the signal out the VGA cable had gone far enough out of spec that it showed up as a major color distortion on the monitor. (this was after swapping the damn CRT, obviously.)

There was also the time that some gorilla in a telco office managed to plug in a juniper line card upside down and forced it in; trashed a line card costing over 120K and badly damaged the backplane on the router chassis as well. (which was another 50K easily) My boss at the time was Not Amused.

Scanning an Exchange server for a virus that spreads via email? What could go wrong?

Re: Thing of the past, thank god! -users just do not get why you need to limit their mail to 2Gb

My direct manager two bosses back (aka 'Turkey', whom I've ranted about before) burned his ~2 GB quota within three months of starting, because he didn't delete anything at all, and wanted to be on *every* group and list the rest of the team had, including some extremely chatty groups. (I've been here at [RedactedCo] for ~12 years and I've only gotten quota warnings once.)

Fortunately, most of our users are reasonably decent about archiving old emails, and the few that actually do need open quotas are high enough up in the food chain that they get it. (especially the one that signs the paychecks, who is also the biggest space offender. :) )

Convenient switch hides an inconvenient truth

An anonymous Coward wrote:

thought it was funny, for the people who thought it didn't pass the bar, c'mon they're all good stories, let's not set the bar too high or people will maybe think twice about writing theirs for fear of being 'not good enough'

It's tricky to set the bar at just the right height- too low, and people step over it. Too high, and you hit their kidneys instead of the groin. /rimshot

*wanders off to start a week off early*

Re: Barrel Bottoms

... I have a t-shirt that one of our vendors was giving away at a conference that says "I'm here because YOU broke something." I wear it when I get called into the office on off-hours. :)

You dirty DRAC: IT bods uncover Dell server firmware security slip

Indeed; there have been more than a few stories published on this site about rouge sysadmins screwing over their former employers after getting walked out the door for whatever reason (usually things that would have been major "DO NOT HIRE" flags, or things that could have been corrected early before they were allowed to fester).

Fortnite 'fesses up: New female character's jiggly bits 'unintended' and 'embarrassing'

I have bits that go wibble wobble...

both attached to my chest, and crotch. (mildly overweight bloke here.)

*gets prodded towards the door* OW! I'm going, I'm going!

TLS proxies? Nah. Truthfully Less Secure 'n' poxy, say Canadian infosec researchers

Re: Unfortunately, there can be some good reasons for this.

Do you honestly believe that nation states are the only ones who MitM? The hardware to MitM an open WiFi access point is in the order of $100-$200, complete with YouTube instructions.

Yep. There's even a commercial product that does it. (WiFi Pineapple)

Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit

Re: Not everybody appreciates the cleaners - especially robot ones !

Paging Admiral Stabby to the port side airlock. Admiral Stabby, please make your way to the port side airlock.

(Yes, there is an entire set of posts on Tumblr about the adventures of Stabby, who started out as an enlisted robot and worked it's way up to admiral by several heroic (and hilarious) feats.)

Facebook: Up to 90 million addicts' accounts slurped by hackers, no thanks to crappy code

... and that's why I call it failbook. Absolutely no surprise here.

Salesforce dogged by protests, leaked emails, and guerrilla blimps on first day of Dreamforce

Re: Wait, what? Did I miss something?

At this point Babymetal are considerably more metal than Metallica

THIS. SO VERY MUCH THIS.

(for the uninitiated, imagine a girl's J-pop band getting into a tryst with the likes of oh, say, White Zombie, or Megadeth, or similar. Babymetal would be the love child born of that tryst.

(and they are damned good.)

The 2018 ThinkPad X1 Yoga: A bendy-legged workhorse walks into a meeting

... I'll keep my "suspend to disk" (aka hibernate) thankyouverymuch.

Eat my shorts, watchdog tells every city mayor in the US – FCC approves $2bn 5G telco windfall

Re: Just an attempt...

You are anthony ray and I claim my nickel. :D

Re: Is anyone surprised?

Yes. Unlike my fellow USAians, I do know a bit about our country's storied history (both good and bad- We've done some pretty monstrous things in the past and continue to do so), but felt that the slavery angle wasn't quite relevant to the discussion.

Re: Is anyone surprised?

Hello bevy of lawsuits.

Lawsuits? I seem to recall that there was a war over this topic (State's rights) some decades back.

Amid Trump-China tariff tiff, Cisco kit prices to resellers soar up to 25%

@Alan Brown

Trump isn't the first of his type, nor even the most original liar

One thing is certain: he sure is loud and annoying.

Secret IBM script could have prevented 11-hour US tax day outage

Ah, my tax dollars hard at 'work'. *sighs*

Baddies just need one email account with clout to unleash phishing hell

2FA won't save you, nor will Cloud services...

For now, the only alternative is layers of unpopular and expensive authentication to protect accounts or signing up for Office 365...

The past couple spear phishing attempts we've seen at [RedactedCo] came from O365 clients and compromised accounts.

A basement of broken kit, zero budget – now get the team running

Re: Not me, but ...

It turns out that he deprived some VPs of the coke and hookers that go with new equipment purchases and construction contracts.

That explains why the electric bills keep going up every year. Hookers ain't cheap. :D

Russia: The hole in the ISS Soyuz lifeboat – was it the crew wot dunnit?

Re: I still think it was done by a Russian technician

@bombastic bob: I am in (rare) agreement with you. (On a side note, I think I saw a crate or two of wolly underthings addressed to hell over in the shipping department. :) )

Seagate passes gassy 14TB whopper: He He He, one for each of you

Re: Secure erase

The "Secure Erase" leverages the on-controller encryption of drives that are compliant with the ATA6 command set (SATA and (IIRC) Ultra-ATA100/133 IDE drives), which is also why it's a 20 second drive wipe instead of a physical overwrite- the data is stored encrypted, and the secure erase command tells the drive controller to generate a new key which renders the bits on the platters into garbage, because you can't recover the encryption key.

The ATA controller has to support allowing the command (a great many don't!), and older drives don't understand the command anyway, so for wiping drives I usually go with my old standby of a 4 or 5 pass random fill with DBAN and a blanking pass at the end; (although even that's overkill; a single random pass and blanking ought to be fine for 95% of purposes. If you are paranoid, you should probably shred the drive anyway, which I generally prefer a trip to an underpopulated area with a nice backstop, and populate the drive with a series of dents and holes from rifles and other firearms. :) )

Was I the only one to get the sub-text?

Although considering my sense of humor is still firmly stuck in the 'toilet joke' era of maturity (I've _heard of it!), all I saw from the head line, byline, and closing comments were flatus jokes. :)

You know all those movies you bought from Apple? Um, well, think different: You didn't

Re: File sizes

Word of advice: use a pre-paid visa/mastercard/etc. when purchasing MakeMKV; I suspect that their payment processor might have gotten loose with card numbers, as about a month after I purchased it, there was a fradulent charge on that card I used to purchase my copy with.

Otherwise, it's a fantastic application for ripping Blu-rays.

Dust off that old Pentium, Linux fans: It's Elive

Re: If it's snappy on old kit...

@Peter Gathercole

Don't forget, the stock amiga had those custom chips in them which helped a lot with graphics operations back in the day.

I had the pleasure of getting an old A500 with multiple floppy drives back up and running for the owner; I was surprised the disks were still good, let along the drives.

Getting the IIgs I have back into operation, that's going to be tricky as a) It didn't come with an ADB keyboard or mouse (or 3.5" drives, and b) the gits on fleabay want FAR too much money for parts in even crummy shape. ("It's VINTAGE! We can charge $stupid for it and some schmuck will buy it!") Fortunately, there's a guy making modern bridge hardware for the input devices, and a plug-in box that'll emulate every drive ever made for that platform, and access disk images on an SD card.

Defense Distributed starts selling gun CAD files amid court drama

Re: No, this has nothing to do with the US First Amendment, freedom of speech

It's this simple: If anyone wants to provide a potentially lethal ANYTHING to anybody in the USA by ANY means, then that thing is subject to the law, be they local, state or federal. That is all. This issue will be sorted out at those levels, not at the level of the US Constitution.

...So does this mean that we have to fill out a crap-load of paperwork for such things as:

A shovel (https://abc13.com/man-beaten-with-shovel-while-he-slept-has-died/3432807/ , auto-playing video)

A kitchen knife (oh wait, that's also illegal in the UK.)

A screwdriver (Not the alcoholic kind, either)

A crowbar (Paging Gordon Freeman to the white telephone), especially beefy ones)

Just saying.

Re: Cute, but not for long

@ Anon, re: AR-15 lowers

The lower receiver houses the fire control group (trigger assembly), magazine well, grip, and stock. the Upper receiver is what handles all the pressure, and what the barrel fits into. (most people building an AR rifle buy completed, barreled upper assemblies, IIRC.)

While I didn't build my own AR style rifle, I did assemble one from parts purchased from a couple sources, including a 'stripped' lower receiver (which had to go through the same channels as if I was buying a fully completed, functional firearm) from a reputable manufacturer.

Re: Cute, but not for long

THIS.

People were making 'zip guns' in high school shop class for longer than I've been alive (40+ years) and looong before the internet was around.

And for what it's worth, people are *still* making functional (and safer!) firearms using materials commonly found at most hardware stores, using tools bought from the same place.

No, eight characters, some capital letters and numbers is not a good password policy

Re: I've always preferred ..

@Loud Speaker:

That's probably a combination of an IBM-ism, glue code to give the ol' dinosaur a 'modern' web access portal, and (willful) ignorance on the developer's part to modern standards. :)

I use a password manager for my own use; my work team at [RedactedCo] use a shared password manager web application.

Re: I've always preferred ..

@Queeg:

That's... a lot of effort for a password. (more so that what I used to use, which was a random keypress pattern ingrained into muscle memory. however, that has it's own issues... :)

My favorite secret type is a passphrase, if the system will allow spaces. Easy to remember, hard to guess, and as long as it's a decent character length, expensive to brute force.

Obig. XKCD: https://xkcd.com/936/

(FWIW, Active Directory running in 2000 Native mode and later will cheerfully allow spaces)

Cisco smells a RAT in Breaking Security's Remcos PC wrangler

Re: Talos says Remcos is a Remote Access Trojan (RAT)

Is the the same Cisco that impliments SSL decryption on its switches, through the use of fake PKI certs. Basically implimenting a man-in-the-middle attack.The client browser has to be configered to accept such fake certs and not just the Cisco ones.

Your links points to the Firepower module, which is nominally installed at the edge of a network (think firewall, or IDS/IPS). It's not something that they throw in on every single switch they sell- you have to ask for it. (and pay extra for it!)

Cisco also has such functionality on their Web Security Appliance (aka Ironport); the intention for installing these devices is that you generate a CA class certificate (subordinate issuer) from your enterprise's private CA, install *that* certificate into the WSA or Firepower, and configure a group policy or some other method to have your clients automatically trust that certificate (which they should if they already trust the issuing CA), and you should be almost fine. You'll certainly run into exceptions, like Java applets and scripting that don't leverage the OS's trusted certificate store, for starters, but by and large the end user won't notice or care, because It Just Works.

Connected car data handover headache: There's no quick fix... and it's NOT just Land Rovers

Re: This needs some input from the DVLR

"hey look, you press a button and the front windows go up and down".

Now I have the guys from Bad Obsession (Youtube "Project Binky") doing the "windows go up! Windows go down!" gag. :)

Supermicro breathes in, shimmies a PB of Intel flash into one rack unit

... I need four five of these. And a betting pool to see how fast certain departments at [RedactedCo] will take to fill the damn things. :D

Surprise, surprise. Here comes Big Cable to slay another rule that helps small ISPs compete

Re: How to lie with statistics?

When consumers were willing to pay for service above what Sprint offered, Sonic was formed to take up that slack.

Which is also why laws got put on the books to keep Google Fiber out of a bunch of US cities, and lock out municipalities from offering internet access as a service as well, ignoring the fact that a lot of munis have put their own infrastructure in because the telcos either wanted too much, or flat out refused.

My area is served by exactly two companies: the local telco (centurylink *spits*) and the local cable company (Cox *spits again*) Neither company appears to want to invest in running fiber to households or even to neighborhoods, with last mile being high bandwidth copper.

When we heard that Google was thinking of using our area for a fiber rollout, we were ecstatic- $70/month for gigabit internet? head and shoulders above what the cable company could provide (while they offer 'gigabit' service, it's almost double what google offers, it's shared with everyone else on the line, it's not guaranteed, and there's still that pesky 1 TB/month data cap. Oh, and it's not symetrical. uploads are throttled to 20 Mbit.)

Should I infect this PC, wonders malware. Let me ask my neural net...

Re: Double-Edged Sword of Progress

@Jay Lenovo: I see what you did there with your username. :)

Maybe we'll get lucky and it'll be a benign AI with a cuddly avatar, like PDCL or something.

But probably not. It'll probably be Skynet.

To quote a famous dinosaur movie: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"

Profit-strapped Symantec pulls employee share scheme

Re: "a publicly usable statement"

Probably empty platitudes and hot,smelly air out of some PR flak's bum.

*grabs coat and walks briskly out the door*

Wait, did you hear that? That rumbling in the distance? Sounds like... a 16-socket IBM Power9 box shuffling this way

Re: A Computer

Considering how damned heavy the 550s are, I expect these to be a three-person lift for each part of a fully populated machine.

(needs a 'big iron' or POWERlifter icon. :) )

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

Re: what the fuck does PC LOAD LETTER mean?

@Anonymous Coward:

...Or custom text, such as "FEED ME JELLY BABIES!"

There's a very short PCL script you can feed to a printer to set the idle display to whatever you want, too. I'm fond of "SKYNET CONNECTED, AWAITING ORDERS" or "INSERT COIN" or "BBQ SAUCE LOW".

Best part is, if someone objects to your practical joke, power cycling the printer clears it out.

Re: This is normal in every human endeavor.

@Rich 11:

I did that at a convention I was working- the room that I was lugging gear into had presence sensors set up for the lights, and I had a helper with me as we pushed our cart full of gear to set the room up. I pushed the cart in about 6 feet, yelled "AZIZ! LIGHT!" and as I snapped my fingers, BOOM! the lights came up. It was timed just enough that my helper cleared two feet straight up from the surprise.

AI, caramba: NetApp pits scaly A800 ONTAP beast against Pure's AIRI fairy

There is no price/performance data for ONTAP AI but we imagine millions of dollars are involved. AI at this level does not come cheap.

"If you have to ask how much, you can't afford it." :)

Ever seen printer malware in action? Install this HP Ink patch – or you may find out

... Do these firmware updates auto-brick the printer if non-HP carts are used, like previous firmware updates?

asking for a friend.

(and seriously, who the hell exposes a printer to the internet?)

New Zealand school on naughty step after ransomware failure

Re: Old School

You can, but you'll be viewed as an old fuddy-duddy for clinging onto tape like that. (Bog knows I've been called that and worse!)

Depending on the backing storage, how it's configured, and a few other variables. shadow copies can offer some measure of fast recovery, at least on a Netapp (snapshots are read-only by design), and if caught before they are purged off the filer ([RedactedCo] had theirs configured for three times daily, for seven days, 5 weekly, with monthly backups to tape)

I have no idea if a windows server can prevent ransomware from messing with shadow copies if a client is infected but not the server itself, and frankly I'm leery of testing it even inside a fullly isolated sandbox.

Build your own NASA space rover: Here are the DIY JPL blueprints

Re: Space rover

Ian Emery wrote:

I look forwards to seeing someone riding a suitably upscaled version to work one morning.

That would be awesome, but a) work would be over before I got there unless I did some major re-design/upgrades on the powertrain; and b) not sure if it's street legal.

SMS 2FA gave us sweet FA security, says Reddit: Hackers stole database backup of user account info, posts, messages

Re: Visa

I'm not saying that Verified by Visa sucked, but it could take the chrome off a trailer hitch. SMS as second factor is... a touch more secure than that. (to make a clothing comparison, VbV was a string bikini, and SMS2 is at least a jacket or a thick t-shirt.)

and TBH, 2FA is a pain in the butt no matter how you slice it, but it's one of those 'how much risk can we accept' things.

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

I'm surprised no one has made a peep about Toredo (and other 4to6 and 6to4 protocols).

Some Anonymous Coward said:

SBS 2011 switch off IPv6 and the following happens

•Microsoft Exchange services fail to start

•Server hangs at “Applying Computer Settings…” (can eventually logon after 30 – 60 minutes)

•Network icons show as offline

SBS 2011 uses IPv6 for internal communications

I can attest that Exchange running on a full server 2012 R2 install breaks horribly if you shut the IPv6 stack off. (and I do mean horribly. Plus, MS Support won't touch it until you turn it back on.)

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Re: Logic bombs are unprofessional

The surest way to get a boss and possibly the whole company into trouble is do exactly what he requests. Nothing more, nothing less. No need for logic bombs, or fiddling with expiration dates.

I had to do something very similar to that two bosses ago- I'm pretty sure the CIO got tired of seeing my name appear in his email inbox as I CC'd him on something my direct report was trying to force me to do that would have been exceptionally detrimental to the company on a while and I was trying to explain why I was not going to do it, verging right on the point of insubordination.

Those were dark, dark days.

Flash, spinning rust, cloud 'n' tape. Squeeze. Oof. Hyperconverge our storage suitcase, would you?

I wacky-parsed 'BOHH Labs' as 'BOFH Labs'.

Clearly, I chose the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

2FA? We've heard of it: White hats weirded out by lack of account security in enterprise

Re: @AC (and @ShelLuser)

We have users lock themselves out all the time at [RedactedCo]; they log in on a different workstation using one password, forget to log out of it, log in on a different workstation, change their password, and wonder why they keep getting locked out regularly.

as far as escalating timeouts, the built-in mechanism for Active Directory that handles lockouts only gives a threshold (# of bad passwords in a certain time period) and a duration of lockout that has to occur before it automatically unlocks you.

We've looked at a couple self-service applications, but a lot of them want to install a GINA on every single machine in the environment, and some others are... dodgy at best.

As Corning unveils its latest Gorilla Glass, we ask: What happened to sapphire mobe screens?

Re: Otterbox Defender

I can also testify that the otterbox defenders are an excellent protective case for the large part. I've had one on my iFruit 5s and 6s since getting them, and the phones are in near mint condition despite having been dropped onto tile floors, banged around, and somewhat roughly handled. I'm actually on my second case for the 5s after breaking the main latch on the previous case.

I will also state that the particular Samsung Galaxy 5S I had was special- it survived getting flung into walls twice when the Thing that was my boss at the time pissed me off. (both times the unit flexed enough that the back and battery popped out, but the phone itself survived with a couple scuff marks on the side of the case. The screen remained intact much to my surprise.)

Boffins mix AI and chemicals to create super-fast lab assistant

Re: Things I wont Work With

... or at least survive some of the reactions, if I remember that chapter correctly.