Posts by Doctor Syntax

Facebook hit two billion users today and SugarCRM reminded us you are Zuck's product

Re: Wider problem

"late middle age."

Thanks for that. I'll accept the description but still keep off FB and the rest.

Toshiba sues WDC for a cool billion bucks

What's the exchange rate between a cool billion bucks and a DUP?

Tanks for the memories: Building a post-Microsoft Office cloud suite

"No one mentioned Collabora Office Online."

It's available for Nextcloud but I didn't mention it as I haven't tried it. IMBW but I understand it's based on LibreOffice.

For this Cloud-based discussion, we’ll leave LibreOffice out of it

Why?

Clicks File. Ooh, look, Open Remote File is an option. Select that, Click on Add service. Google Drive is actually the first choice there.

If you don't want to put your business in the hands of MS or Google for storage you could always turn to NextCloud, either running your own copy locally or sign up with a commercial vendor to host it.

Met Police laggards still have 18,000 Windows XP machines in use

"A remarkable precise number for non networked PCs"

Don't confuse precision with accuracy.

AWS Summit London queues caused by security, not snafu

Don't security hold-ups count as SNAFU?

A minister for GDS? Don't talk digital pony

I suppose that the skills actually needed right now are negotiating skills and anyone with those will be in the Brexit crew.

Ride-snare: Lyft ruse helps cops cuff suspect in tech CEO murder case

Re: Timing

"Perhaps tackle him to the ground before the polite introductions?"

Just pick him up and give him a lyft to the cop shop. No reason for undue exertion.

Mozilla dev and Curl inventor Daniel Stenberg denied travel to USA

Re: Save the Planet!

"Maybe all this extra security is actually a cunning way to dissuade us from travelling"

Or a cunning way to disguise bumping overbooked passengers?

Blunder down under: self-driving Aussie cars still being thwarted by kangaroos

Pheasants. A lot better at gaining airspeed than gaining height.

Everything you need to know about the Petya, er, NotPetya nasty trashing PCs worldwide

Re: Since midday it is no longer possible for the blackmailers to access the email account"

"leave it open & monitor who accesses it?"

Yes. I can see why the MSP would want to avoid an aiding and abetting charge or whatever the equivalent is in Germany but the responsible thing would have been to have gone to TPTB and asked how the latter wanted them to handle it. I'd have thought that the answer would have been to keep it running to gather evidence and I doubt that it was kept running long enough for that to have happened.

"It just seems odd that there have been 2 separate attacks, using different 'tools', within just a few weeks of each other. "

Why odd? There have been malware campaigns for a long time. Then the EternalBlue and a load of other stuff went public a while ago. Add some time for the malware writers to incorporate it and there's nothing surprising at all that a couple of specimens using it emerge at more or less the same time.

"My cat delivers faster and more reliably than TNT."

Kittens or dead birds?

Re: Bring Back

@Mark

You do realise, don't you, that there are a multiplicity of other OSs and of CPU architectures? There are also other forms of networking semantics than SMB. Each OS, CPU and networking technology you introduce into the mix raises the difficulty for an attacker more or less exponentially. As the system becomes more difficult to attack even Windows systems gain from herd immunity.

Re: Let's blame Obaka's "revenge"

Bob, you really do make it difficult for us to take any of your posts seriously.

Re: Bring Back

"malware writers *would* cater for all systems"

It raises the bar for them having to deal with all systems. It wouldn't just be a matter of recompiling the same code.

Also heterogeneous systems can have different modes of operation. For instance drop the idea of using a browser - or anything else - to apply a GUI to your server-based application. [Pauses to allow millennials to stop hyperventilating at the thought of a GUI-free application.] Now you have an old-fashioned terminal application that can be run via a link with the semantics of an RS-232 link. That really raises the bar on trying to get an infection back from a PC to the server.

Re: Backups

"but there are plenty out there that silently do their work for weeks before activating"

Do you have a citation for the frequency of this? It keeps being raised but all the reported outbreaks seem to be pretty well instant or nearly so. According to TFA this one spreads for an hour before kicking in but that's very different to working for weeks.

Re: The real blame goes to..

"it could be argued that the NSA protected the business world by keeping it a secret."

This is an argument for security through obscurity. The main problem with this is that you have to maintain the obscurity for ever. By far the best approach is for the vulnerabilities to be notified back as soon as discovered, fixed and the fixes incorporated in future products and in updates to existing ones.

The 'DUP' joins El Reg’s illustrious online standards converter

Re: Ulster Scots

"I think Welsh is simply Anglo-Saxon for Foreigner."

That seems to be the accepted explanation. But W & G often get interchanged - in fact it happens with the French for Wales. I think the A/Ss recognised the post-Roman Britons as Gauls.

Re: Let's not ask who really benefits from the Union

"There are many in the (mainland) UK would happily cut the cord"

That could have happened a century or so ago had it not been clear that the result would have been an extremely bloody civil war. It might have settled matters but at a much higher cost than anything that's happened since.

Re: didn't stick in your craw.

"Yet, bizarrely the majority of voters claim that's what they want. Obviously they don't understand how to fill in a ballot paper, or lie to pollsters."

Back in the day it was hoped that PR voting would ensure moderates and even cross-community parties such as Alliance would thrive. It didn't work.

Re: Dane Geld

"it does essentially come down to the fact that English/Dutch protestants invaded the island in the 1680s"

A bit more complex than that. You appear not to have heard of the Elizabethan plantation nor of the Ulster Scots (where do you think that name Paisley comes from?). Then, of course, the Scots did come from Ireland in the first place - there's been toing and froing across the North Channel since it opened up (e.g. Argyll is derived from the name of an Irish tribe). You simply can't put a marker into the chain of events and say everything that side is right and everything the other is wrong. Attempting to over-simplify a situation is a sure-fire way of making things worse.

I wonder when May will get deduped.

Re: Or half a million Archers

Surely it should be 1,000 Bernies.

Huge ransomware outbreak spreads in Ukraine and beyond

"and needs to get work done?"

Yes, they certainly need to get work done now to recover from this.

I take it you've no personal knowledge of Linux or other Unix-like systems. I've got a little secret for you. Most of those of us who use Linux have also had experience of Windows, including sorting out the problems it's caused for friends and family. We can actually reach an informed opinion of what actually works.

In my case I was using Unix systems to do real work years before Windows was thought of. Lab management, logistics management, industrial control systems, all grist to the mill.

Would it be too much to hope that Munich's Windows boxes get hit?

Re: Possible Password Generator to recover files etc

Useful if it works but AIUI that was for the original Petya. If that's the payload then fine but current reports say it isn't.

Re: The next stage

Try telling that to HMG. OTOH the comment about a Bitcoin exchange manager and bat sounds possible.

"someone talking about it attacking the MFT of NTFS - that's a more severe attack than the MBR."

Providing the files themselves aren't corrupted something like photorec reads the sectors, tries to work out what they are and copies the results out to fresh media. Obviously it depends on the extent to which the files are fragmented. If the files are encrypted then it depends on whether they're overwritten. The only experience I had with this was with ransomware that wrote out the encrypts as new files and deleted the old ones which, of course, just marked the files' sectors as free but didn't do anything to the contents. The only problem was sorting out real images from junk heap of odds & sods from the browser cache.

If it's just the MBR being encrypted then presumably something like Photorec should recover files. However according to https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ukraine-businesses-petya-ransomware/ it encrypts files as well as the MBR.

50th anniversary of the ATM opens debate about mobile payments

"Those tokens already exist; they are referred to as "money""

Whoosh!

Re: Cash rules.

"It is the work of the devil and I spent 2 years working in the industry."

You little devil.

Without cash how do you do a cash in the back pocket deal? Asked out of sheer curiosity of course.

Para 3... "depisit checks"

What's a check!? Damned Yank-isms!

What's a depisit?

Watchdog slaps NHS for failure to tackle correspondence backlog

Re: Bah!

"They should be jointly and severably liable. SBS and Sopra Steria cocked this up. Just send them the bill and leave it to them to sort out who pays what."

From TFA The NHS Shared Business Services is a joint venture between the Department of Health and Sopra Steria set up in 2004 to provide support services to the NHS.

It's not SBS & Spora Steria, it's DoH & Sopra Steria so any costs involved in working out how to split the costs will be at public expense, as will the cost of fixing it.

Former GDS head Mike Bracken quits Co-op

Re: Huge payoff for Mike...

OK, who remembers their old divi number? Ours was 1101 which seems a nice binary number if you're not superstitious.

Good

That was my first reaction. But then I read that he'd left to do whatever it is he does on a larger scale.

HMS Windows XP: Britain's newest warship running Swiss Cheese OS

"Most what? Warships? Banks? Pensioners?"

As far as I can arrange it pensioners round here are running Linux.

Isn't it called Windows for Warships?

We'll drag Microsoft in front of Supremes over Irish email spat – DoJ

Re: Why not start a relocate?

"So they definitely have contingency plans."

Presumably the German arrangements are part of those.

One day the US might look back with regret on the days when it had a tech industry.

Re: Doubling up

"I presume the suggestion is that there should be new US legislation allowing them to retrieve things held overseas without bothering to consult with that nation's government/law enforcement."

Given the attitude they've taken I'd have thought they'd want US legislation that makes it quite clear that the US's jurisdiction is limited to the US and that the appropriate treaty arrangements must be used.

Re: They already have a legal route

" Even if there were anything in Irish law to prevent Microsoft's US employees handing that data over if they have access then there's no way to enforce it."

1. Big fines - and even bigger if it gets strung out until next May.

2. Privacy Figleaf completely shrivelled out of existence.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

"The issue, overall, is fairly complex"

It shouldn't be. There are treaties in place which lay out due processes to be followed which would have enabled the relevant prosecutor to get the information they wanted without trampling on anyone else's sovereignty. For reasons best known only to themselves - arrogance, ignorance or indolence - the US authorities have opted to ignore them. The apparent complexity arises out of that.

"${US Co} contracts with ${NonUS Co} for data center and storage service located physically outside the US ... Where does the US government go for assistance when they find a US-based (alleged) criminal enterprise is using ${US Co}'s service for its email and data processing needs?"

To exactly the same place where they should have gone in this case. To the courts of the country where the servers are operating via the MLAT which exists for this exact purpose.

It's called due process of law. Of course other countries' courts might take a dim view of that well-known US abuse of process, the fishing expedition.

Software glitch led to London Ambulance Service outage – report

I particularly liked the way their fourth review was to review what they should have learned from previous balls-ups and didn't.

US engineer in the clink for wrecking ex-bosses' smart meter radio masts with Pink Floyd lyrics

"So the next time I'm drunk and hacking, I won't be bitter."

Just do it in the right spirit.

Re: A member of the University Rock Climbing Club

Amateurs. In my first year at KCL the Tower of London was taken over. Someone had noticed that the guard hut door opened outwards. Smuggle in a long enough length of rope...

Researchers blind autonomous cars by tricking LIDAR

Re: Interesting research

"outside ... its design parameters (since corrected)"

If I were to trust my life to an automatous vehicle (and with trials permitted on public roads I might have no choice) I'd want the design parameters to cover what actually can happen on the roads, however unlikely. A vehicle from one carriage way turning across another at a road junction doesn't sound like something that ought to have been outside design parameters in the first place. Correcting design parameters after obvious omissions have come up against reality isn't the best way to proceed. And just wait until one of these ventures down a Devon lane with passing places.

Idea to encrypt stuff on the web at rest hits the IETF's Standard Track

Re: Essentially it's a move toward untrusted hosting, which sounds like any cloud server to me

"Toss up between trust and major inefficiency."

You sound surprised that implementing something, in this case trust, should have a computational cost greater than not implementing it.

Google hit with record antitrust fine of €2.4bn by Europe

Re: Next up -Microsoft...

"Microsoft are constantly trying to force me to use Edge and Bing, just because I use Windows... How is that ANY different?"

Yes, other market abuses are available. But why do you expect a news article to deal with other issues which aren't in the news today (and if they were would have their own article)?