Posts by Doctor Syntax

US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day

Re: One word:

"I've seen backups that IT didn't know how to restore"

If it isn't tested it isn't a backup.

Re: Presumably the fuckwits in charge ...

"Hopefully this will now change."

Hope springs eternal.

Re: Presumably the fuckwits in charge ...

"I have never worked with pipeline systems, but my guess would be that their is some need to extract billing and operating data from the product delivery system and probably some need to input some commands at times. So a completely separate system might be difficult/impractical/impossible"

That pipeline has been in operation for longer than an internet-based control system seems feasible. It has been proven to be operable without exposure to the net. It has now been proven to be inoperable with exposure to the net.

We can, then, eliminate impossible and impractical. Difficult, maybe. Probably an option you left out - inconvenient. But far better than what they've got now.

Re: That reminds me...

Measuring things properly is hard. And that's in laboratory conditions.

Re: The Internet...

"Run the comms along the pipeline for the most part, and not connect it to the internet."

Have you no idea of the number of executive bonuses you could pay with the amount it would cost to maintain that when all you have to do with the internet is pay the phone bill?

"and that it wasn't due to some lower down rogue employee"

In such circumstances it can always be shown that it was some lower down rogue employee.

Even then it might only happen in some cases after some examples are made which will probably take tome to drag through the courts.

Re: In 1964 ...

"probably kind of expensive and not all that reliable"

But not too bad compared with the current situation. Apart from anything else, where do you magic up all those road tankers when you need them? And if you succeed, where do you magic up the tankers to replace whatever it was they were doing before?

Re: Lessons learnt? I doubt it.

Go on, you know it'd be a good "Who, me?".

Re: Lessons learnt? I doubt it.

"they lack managers who will do the job they were hired to do"

It might be managers doing what they were hired to do - cut costs.

Re: One word:

"security is an after thought and can be cobbled on later if needed"

I wonder if sometimes these systems start out as secure and it's convenience cost-saving insecurity that's cobbled on later.

Re: One word:

Errrm....

That was two.

Namecheap hosted 25%+ of fake UK govt phishing sites last year – NCSC report

Re: Not Surprised...

The business model depends on customers putting up with it. If the business model depends on locking customers it it's easier to get away with. From a customer's PoV, don't rely on ISP email offerings.

The one email address I have that receives frequent spam - which gets reported - is an old Hotmail address. Apart from SEO and the like service offerings* the phishing spam it receives is almost entirely pretending to be from one of the numerous Microsoft email brands. A check in the server spam folder shows that almost all other phishing spam such as advance payment scams is trapped and virtually none of the fake Microsoft mail is trapped. I'd have thought that there should be sufficient reports for NCSC to start having a quiet word with Microsoft to tighten up.

NCSC need to have words with their own marketing department. Earlier this year the responses to reports started including links to their own puffery making them look just like phishing emails. The link in TFA to the report is non-functional with JavaScript blocked. Given the point made in the report about JavaScript framework poisoning they really should know better than to (a) depend on JavaScript so heavily on their own site and (b) send out emails pointing to it.

* These generally get a response pretending to be a supplier questionnaire designed to suck them in before gently leading them to the conclusion that they've paid good money for a crap spam list.

Re: "a 28.8 per cent share of known UK government-themed phishing sites"

"there's a good change the government is going to come and have a word with you."

As HMRC is one of the frequent sites spoofed I look forward to Namecheap, its management and board being subject to frequent and searching audits by them.

When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?

Non sequitur alert

"it would make more sense for companies to just fix the bugs themselves and then commit them back to the project ... Often a company's employment contract will insist that it has complete ownership over all intellectual property that an employee creates."

There's absolutely nothing in the second part of that that stops the company committing back to the project. The company owns the IP and can do with it as it wishes.

There could, however, be a problem with companies who claim IP ownership of what employees do in their own time.

"If an open source maintainer gives up because it's not fun and not worth their time, there's little you can do other than fork it."

And the ability to do that is because it's open source. I remember looking at the description of some S/W, thought it might be useful to the business I worked for and then the company that wrote it got bought up by Microsoft and that was the last I ever heard of the product.

I'm reminded of the situation where we had some commercial source code but not enough to compile the full application. After having the second Friday lunchtime interrupted by a bug in a weekly program run I spent the afternoon working through the code to find the bug. Even after reporting it to them, including how to fix it, it took a few weeks before we got the revised binary. I wouldn't be surprised if the same dodgy coding practices were hidden in more of their programs.

"Companies paying a commercial vendor for their software can typically pressure them for a bug fix, and it's unlikely that the commercial entity will vanish overnight."

That's a couple of fairly large assumptions. Apart from the bug being assumed to be a feature.

Quantum computing: Confusion can mask a good story, but don't take anyone's word for it

A strongly frustration-free Hamiltonian was doing quite well in Spain yesterday.

He might do quite well at Monte Carlo asa well in a couple of weeks' time.

Re: What is QC?

"QCs make a lot of money"

A colleague bought a house previously occupied b a QC & said they kept getting debt chasing letters for him. However both he & I were in a position to observe QCs at work and we both knew who he was, I wouldn't have rated him as one of the more able ones.

Accidentally wiped an app's directory? Hey, just play the 'unscheduled maintenance' card. Now you're a hero

"all DOS messages have been formatted for a 40-column screen"

Somehow, as technology advanced, error codes alone grew towards the 40 character mark.

Philanthropist and ex-Microsoft manager Melinda Gates and her husband Bill split after 27 years of marriage

"It's very much his way or the highway."

I suppose it might be a way of ensuring the money's spent on what it's supposed to be spent on. So easy for one of a head of government's numerous partners to get ideas about gold wallpaper otherwise.

Don't be mean

Think about the mode.

Or to spell it out, wealth concentrated in the hands of the few doesn't benefit mankind if vast numbers are in poverty.

When I read about people raising "incredible children" I wonder why they didn't raise them to tell the truth.

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

Re: Visual Basic

You mean something like Borland C++ Builder?

Re: Horse manure

"probably indoors too"

Only if you keep the windows open.

"So does the community edition of Delphi"

No it doesn't. Not even my ancient Professional copy of Delphi has done that for years.

No Linux support.

Lazarus is where it's at.

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

Re: Use of floating point numbers ?

The much maligned Imperial system of weights and measures had little islands of binary sanity. Apart from ha'pennies and farthings in currency there were pounds and ounces (binary ratios are particularly suitable for weighing) and stones, quarters and hundredweights. It was just the bridge between pounds and stones which was irrational.

British bank TSB says it will fix days-long transaction troubles tonight

"The company should be aware of the negative publicity that outages can generate, with the problems of 2018 having caused the previous CEO to lose his job and cost the bank £200m."

It needs to cost a bank far more than £200m before lessons get learned.

'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

Oh, look

Only the second (and third) post. I suppose it makes an improvement on a first post going so massively against the grain.

Re: F**k It

The move was audacious.

Broadband plumber Openreach yanks legacy copper phone lines in Suffolk town of Mildenhall en route to getting the UK on VoIP

Re: "The handset will plug into a router"

Until there's a power cut. That's where the original, still connected handset comes into its own.

"The legacy copper network has proven particularly expensive to maintain as the cables and telephone poles used are exposed to the elements, and thus susceptible to weather damage."

My telephone connection is entirely underground except for the green footway boxes connecting bits of underground cables together. My neighbours' connections are all strung from posts for the last few 10s of metres. If/when fibre connections replace them are made my guess is that all of them, including mine, will be overhead.

Privacy activist Max Schrems on Microsoft's EU data move: It won't keep the NSA away

Simple rule of thumb. If your data is processed by any large business it's probably not private and if it's processed by a US corporation or other business with a SU exposure it's certainly not private.

Gone in 60 electrons: Digital art swaggers down the cul-de-sac of obsolescence

Re: That's a feature, not a bug

"gives more money to the content creators"

Maybe. To the publishers, certainly.

I wonder whether 2021 digital technologies will still be available in 2031.

FTFY

Re: Technology repeating

Nothing new under the sun.

It's still an over-elaborate and dubiously reliable solution to an already solved problem.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

I finally gave them the start of the Unix epoch and it kept them quiet. If enough people did that maybe they'd get the message that they're being treated with exactly the amount of respect they deserve.

Re: Usability?

"Once again the addition of more security will result in more work for the user."

Translate that to "the most minimal password the user can contrive".

Re: Are these people real?

The question to ask is why do these bastards want a password? If it's to protect my interests then I'll use a random string of characters and let KeePass do the heavy lifting. If it's for some arcane purposes of their own (hello iPlayer BBC Sounds) it gets Passw0rd1 or something appropriate.

China sprayed space with 3,000 pieces of junk. US military officials want rules to stop that sort of thing

Re: China does not care what the USA says

"They will only change if debris falls on Xi Jinping's head."

I see Beijing is just about within reach of the the current bit of pending fallout. A touch of Karma is all that's needed.

Which? warns that more than 2 million Brits are on old and insecure routers – wagging a finger at Huawei-made kit

Re: "white-label devices sourced from China"

That does assume there is such a thing as secure kit as opposed to the choice of kit whose insecurities have been discovered and kit whose insecurities remain unknown. Yes, I'm feeling pessimistic today.

Re: Tech is slowly taking control.. because we let it.

"Here's a suggestion to ISPs: supply non-configurable routers."

I'm not happy with that idea. My ISP in effect did that. They "upgraded" remotely and took away my ability to run admin level. They've frozen me out of being able to make changes to the DHCP settings I had in place. I suppose the best thing would be to replace it but then it's a matter of finding smething that's neither a load of cack nor over-priced. In my case overpriced would include paying for an included wireless access point as the location of the master socket isn't the best place to get a good signal out.

JET engine flaws can crash Microsoft's IIS, SQL Server, say Palo Alto researchers

MicroSoft's response

Go away, little people. Stop bothering us.

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: What part of that so people have issues with?

It might be a case of "Mission accomplished, everyone else: as you were.".

Signal banned for booking obviously targeted ads? That story's too good to be true, Facebook claims

No, just one house. A blue plaque on the other.

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

"Does that make the entire blockchain illegal?"

If it does it will probbly make it more valuable. Such is the way of the world.

Yahoo! and! AOL! sold! for! $5bn! as! Verizon! abandons! media! empire! dreams!

4.4 + 4.8 = 5

That's not a media empire dream, it's a nightmare.