Posts by Doctor Syntax

And! it! begins! Yahoo! sued! over! ultra-hack! of! 500m! accounts!

There's a serious need for a sufficiently cautionary tale to make its way into MBA courses as an example of the perils of bad security. Maybe this will be it.

Re: Looks like the beginning of the end

"Only a few more disastrous multi billion dollar losses and Microsoft might make them an offer"

Or maybe someone else. Where are Carly & Leo these days?

Sad reality: It's cheaper to get hacked than build strong IT defenses

Re: Wrong.

"Strong security is about hiring competent people"

...and doing what they say. If this means rewriting the colander that the servers present to the net be prepared to pay to do it.

Re: What about externalised costs?

"that means we'll still be in the EU until early 2019"

Yup, but how long would it take for a case to get through to court?

"You can replace 'calendar' with whatever you like - the OP was clearly just trying to come up with a simple example."

Of course. I was just taking his example in the same way. Whatever you use a service to store there's likely to be lots of criminal value in it beyond the login and financial stuff. What other examples do you want? Email server? Password store?

Re: What about externalised costs?

" We need to push our politicians to formulate laws and enable compensation schemes that make it too expensive to be cavalier about security."

The EU have done just this, effective May 2018. Thanks to the numpties it might well not apply here.

"If company A doesn't need your address and bank details, then the compromise is an inconvenience to the average user."

Really? A calendar as per your example? What's on the calendar?

Uncle Fred's 60th birthday next week? Ooh look, with got Uncle Fred's DoB. Is Uncle Fred identified in any further way? Does it have his email address? A little bit of information for ID theft and material for a more convincing phishing attempt - click on this e-birthday card.

Leave on holiday in 2 weeks time, return 10 days later? House unoccupied - nice.

Lots and lots of scope from a busy calendar.

Re: Sadly very true

"Get hacked and virtually no impact to reputation or share price."

The Yahoo hack might raise the share price. 500m addresses! Who knew?

London-based Yahoo! hacker gets 11 years for SQLi mischief

"Given that Yahoo outsource email for BT & Sky

I am not sure this is still the case. I think BT moved to something else at some point. Not sure - never used it."

Other posts suggest that BT only moved some of the accounts elsewhere.

Given that Yahoo outsource email for BT & Sky (any others) I wonder if they may be in breach of contract. If so there could be large damages involved. Maybe even big enough to get management attention.

"It is not believed to be related to Yahoo!'s half-a-billion account breach from the same year."

Another one? The recently reported breach was said to have been 2014, ac couple of years later and time, you'd think, to realise that they might, just possibly, need to do something about security.

If we can't fix this printer tonight, the bank's core app will stop working

Got on site one morning to find a SCO box pretty well jammed solid.

Some job had gone wrong overnight and was still trying to write a humungous log file. The box had been set up without partitioning the storage much if at all so the file was in the root partition along with more or less everything else.

Simply deleting the file wouldn't work because the program was still running; until it closed its handle on the file the disk space wouldn't be released. Deleting any files that could be spared didn't help much because the space released would be filled by the elephant in the room almost immediately.

It turned out that a SCO box with a full file system ran very v.e.r.y v..e..r..y slowly, probably because the file was buffering a load of stuff and choking most of the memory so everything else was trying to run in about 4K left over and thrashing. That made running ps to find the PID to kill more or less impossible.

And the box was a couple of hundred miles away at the end of a slow modem link - not that the speed of the line had much influence.

Eventually it got arm-wrestled into submission. I like to install Unix systems with multiple partitions, especially keeping directories that might grow, such as /usr/spool or /var separate.

"before I read the story let me take a wild guess"

Yup. Wild guess. This may surprise you to the point of disbelief but there were times when you only had one printer on the system. A big one. So big that it might have been assembled in situ if it was too big to get through the doors.

Re: Some time ago...

'You might need to explain to some of the youngsters here (I guess about 50% of the readership) what a "punched card" is'

I wonder if I've still got one or two. Just to show the grandchildren.

Re: Some time ago...

"The speed that the chain which carried the letters moved was such that if the chain broke, it could seriously damage the heavy metal acoustic cover."

And to anyone standing beside it.

Re: Fired?

"Remember, in the 60s they expected these systems to be replaced within ten years."

Not necessarily. But they expected it to be SEP. They probably expect storage to be cheap enough in the distant future so they'd eventually be able to afford a couple of extra characters per field.

Uni student cuffed for 'hacking professor's PC to change his grades'

Re: Really??

"One less idiot to worry about, out in the wild."

Really? He's "a business major with a concentration in finance". He sounds like someone who'll go far in his chosen profession.

UK copyright troll weeps, starts 20-week stretch in the cooler for beating up Uber driver

"Get used to life being different."

Let's hope one of his new friends was related to a recipient of one of his letters.

From the linked Torygraph report: "The driver later had to go to hospital and was prescribed antibiotics for the pain."

Either misguided prescribing or misguided reporting. I wonder which.

Re: 20 wks in prison! He's a kid for fucks sake!

"One person got it....will anyone else?"

Some of them never do.

Pull the plug! PowerPoint may kill my conference audience

Re: This is why you leave the laptop at the back

"Never use your own machine on stage."

OTOH I've seen relying on the lecture room's machine be a little...difficult. This was back in the days of slides. There was a 35mm slide projector and an ancient epidiascope (no, spill chucker, not an episcopalian) which would take very large glass slides. The lecturer brought along glass slides which were too big for the 35mm & not big enough for the epidiascope. It ended up with someone suspending the slides in the gate of the large projector with sticky tape. IIRC the lecturer belonged to a department which shared that particular lecture room.

Re: If it can go wrong...

"After hours of PowerPoint presentations she wanders on stage with some notes and just talks to the audience."

I used to do more or less the opposite. I had a carousel of slides in my office. I could pick it up, collect the projector and do an introductory talk on forensic science with no notes because I'd pitch it at any level of audience from a school class to CID training as required.

Re: This is why....

7 - Leave the lectern. If there is one, don't even stand beside it. Put your large font crib sheet on it that you can walk over to whilst talking, and quickly glance at if you need a lead. Show determination and confidence.

It used to be the case that people would be bound to the lectern. Then the occasional person would avoid it and, of course it looked special. Eventually all presenters avoided it. I've often wondered whether, after a series of such presentations it would be more effective for the presenter to stand behind the lectern and look authoritative.

Re: Similar experience

"white is a vague reference to what the color of this board may have been at some distant point in time, mid grey would be a better description"

We had a nice new supposedly highly reflective screen so it would be legible without taking too much care over blackout. A cleaner wiped it over with a not too clean cloth. The streaks and dribbles were there for ever.

Re: Ho Hum

"Never stand in front of the audience with a computer presentation unless you've tried it out there first."

Trying out there it'll work fine. It's then that matters.

Presentation methods in decreasing order of reliability:

Blackboard.

Whiteboard. There's always one pen that's dried up and one which is solvent based and can't be wiped off without the special solvent that's not there.

Overhead projector. Fine until the bulb goes.

Slide projector. The remote fails or an automatic timer cuts in. Or else the bulb goes.

Powerpoint. The embodiment of Murphy's law combining not one but two electronic devices, a remote and a projector bulb.

"Diffusing what we hoped might develop into fisticuffs"

This might work but defusing might be a better approach.

Jeremy Clarkson and Co. rise to top for Great British Bake Off replacements

Re: £75m tent for sale, includes cookers, vacant possession

"music"

This one always amazes me. Imagine you're a composer and someone comes along to commission a theme tune. "What's the show about?" "Baking." Where would you start? But they nailed it.

"Bring back Tomorrow's World, I say."

It would only be brought back as dumbed down dreary nonsense. Look what happened to Horizon. TV is now aimed at an audience of goldfish.

Re: £75m tent for sale, includes cookers, vacant possession

"Andrew Neil on This Week wondered why on earth C4 would pay so much for the show without securing the talent"

I'm wondering whether C4 will still take it. I'm waiting to see it offered back to the Beeb who'll want a couple of million knocking off the price and the original presenters insisting on a pay rise to go back. Karma.

British unis mull offshore EU campuses in post-Brexit vote panic

In my day universities were institutions. Now they just seem to be brands.

@ Uncle Slacky

Shouldn't that be alma pater?

Cosmology is safe and the Universe is one giant version of the Barbican

Re: Pedant alert

"The only real differences between the big bang and a regular explosion is that regular explosions don't create spacetime and the temperatures were so high molecules couldn't form."

And there's nobody around to say "I only told you to blow the bloody doors off".

"For now, cosmology is safe."

For now....

Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

Re: Hats off to El Reg for leading the way by never showing any ads

"did you forget DevOps already"

As far as possible, yes.

Re: stop being annoying

"they mind them being annoying"

And carrying malware. Of course if the ads were guaranteed to be simple passive text that would solve both problems.

Shopkeeper installs forecourt khazi to counter mystery Dublin dung dumper

Put the CCTV on Youtube. It'll either shame him or having him identify himself be demanding it be taken down.

Sysadmin gets 5 years for slurping contractor payments to employer

Re: hmmm...

"hundreds of years ago and then kept having new things tacked on to it with more weighty sentences for those who can't pay for a top lawyer"

Hundreds of years ago you could be hung* for not being able to pay a fine. I don't thing they've added more weighty sentences than that.

*Or beheaded in Halifax.

Plusnet outage leaves customers unable to stream Netflix. Horrors!

“and we do suggest to our customers to look at a dedicated email provider if they want to look at something more encrypted or secure.”

Very sensible advice. Having email independent from the ISP makes it much easier to jump ship from the ISP. Having your own domain independent from the email provider also makes it easer to jump ship from the email service.

Half! a! billion! Yahoo! email! accounts! raided! by! 'state! hackers!'

Re: Dilemma

"Use an online hosted email address or run your own server locally."

There's a range of options. One is to use a small, specialist hoster. Unless it's the sort of thing you do for a living yourself they're going to be better at securing things themselves (see Charles 9's post above) and small enough to care - it's their livelihood.

Re: What is this I don't even

"Hackers strongly believed to be state-sponsored

What does that even mean!"

It means "We do everything we possibly can to defend against ordinary hackers but state-sponsered - well, you can't really blame us for that." Wrings hands. Or was that washes them?

BT Openreach boss wants you to know that deep down, they care

Re: Good day to say this.

"They seem to work on the basis of having large numbers of badly trained idiots breaking stuff randomly"

And the faster you want fibre roll-out to happen the more staff have to be brought in and the less training they'll get.

Report: NSA hushed up zero-day spyware tool losses for three years

And when we insist on magic backdoors that only we can use they'll be perfectly safe because we can look after all that stuff.

Zuckerberg to spend $3bn+ to rid world of all disease by 2100 (Starting with Facebook, right?)

Re: surely the enviromentalist dont want all disease cured @gazthejourno

"A tad radical and fundamentalist be that solution, gazthejourno"

I think Gaz has an advantage over you. He knows about Arnaud Amalric.

Re: And the elephant in the room...

"Yes, my plan is to check out around 70; that seems to be the point at which my parents stopped enjoying life."

OTOH both I and SWMBO are in our 70s and still functioning. When you get into your 70s you might find you stuff to do - such as looking after grandchildren.

Re: Yet another rich asshole's vanity project

"Many diseases, such as polio and rubella, which we could have had eradicated by now, are undergoing a resurgence in the developed world because of the influence of anti-vaxxers"

At least smallpox got eradicated before the nutjobs joined in.

2 in 3 Millennials block ads

I thought it was said the millennials didn't mind because they'd been brought up with such things. Maybe there's still hope for the human race.

Windows 10 backlash: Which? demands compo for forced upgrades

Re: if my primary school maths serves me correctly...

"but the alternative (as seen from XP) is them supporting a lot of old versions till the end of time"

They're still supporting XP? Someone didn't get the memo. Is it you or me?

Re: Damage is done

"there is no appreciable migration to apple or Linux"

There is, however, an appreciable migration to mobile formats. Just where MS can't get traction.

Re: Microsoft's attitude is arrogant at the very least !

"like there banking"

Dammit "their". I swear clicking Submit changes things.