* Posts by FrogsAndChips

864 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jan 2015

Page:

US bitcoin bomb threat ransom scam looks like a hoax say FBI, cops

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Wandering totally offtopic

To me it's WFH. First time I've seen WAH is in the post I'm replying to.

UK spam-texting tax consultancy slapped with £200k fine

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Not according to the ICO. See sections 31-36 of the ruling (link in the article).

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: max fine

That happened between July 2016 and October 2017, so pre-GDPR.

For anything that happened since May 2018, ICO could now enforce max fines of € 20M or 4% of turnover, whichever is *larger*, so it will be possible to hurt those scammers much harder.

Supernovae may explain mass extinctions of marine animals 2.6 million years ago

FrogsAndChips Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: surfing on the stars

See https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ for the reference on lethal dose of neutrinos from supernovas.

Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Do people really need reminding buses are still running?

This morning the ETA signs showed a message along the lines of "traffic information unavailable, please check at tfl.gov.uk", so it was quite obvious that buses were still running.

Little FYI: Wi-Fi calling services on AT&T, T-Mobile US, Verizon are insecure, say boffins

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Been that way for years

They need full volume because these days they hold the mic to their ears...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/13/no_seriously_why_are_you_holding_your_phone_like_that/

Domain name 'admin' role eyed up as latest victim of Whois system's GDPRmeggdon

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: how many form submissions?

The same as the number of unanswered emails sent to whichever false contact address a spammer would give the registrar in the first place.

Your point was?

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: "The DPA is the UK implementation of GDPR"

DPA 2018 is the UK implementation of GDPR.

Data minimization was already one of the principles of DPA 1998.

NASA's Mars probe InSight really has Mars in sight: It beams back first pic after touchdown

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Oh, I wish it could be Black Friday every day-aayyy, when the wallets start jingling but it's still a week till we're paiii-iid

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile in western France...

reduced from 12 euros to 12 euros

That's not what I call a bargain.

Talk in Trump's tweets tells whether tale is true: Code can mostly spot Prez lies from wording

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: @ nagyeger

The Ecole Normale Supérieure is actually the golden highway for future politicians and high-level functionaries.

Its primary mission still is to train high-level academics (teachers, researchers), hence the large number of Nobel Prize recipients for the science-oriented ENS. The training of high-level civil servants is more recent.

Ecole Normale just used to be a generic name for the institutions in charge of forming teachers.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

"anyone could use this approach to construct a lie detector for a specific person"

I'm not worried, all my public statements are lies anyway.

Infosec's Thanksgiving turkey triumvirate: Tesla, Tumblr, Trump (as in Ivanka)... and tons more

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: The Washington Post called them "Ivanka Trump’s personal emails"

From the WP article:

Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules [...]

she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account.[...]

Trump used her personal account to discuss government policies and official business fewer than 100 times — often replying to other administration officials who contacted her through her private email, according to people familiar with the review.

Another category of less-substantive emails may have also violated the records law: hundreds of messages related to her official work schedule and travel details that she sent herself and personal assistants who cared for her children and house,[...]

Trump continued to occasionally use her personal email in her official capacity [...]

Trump had used her personal email for official business far more frequently than known, according to people familiar with the administration’s review.[...] “She was the worst offender in the White House,”

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Slow decline ?

If you look at the charts for the last year, you will actually see both: a free fall at the start of 2018 THEN a slow decline since March...

When selling security awareness training by email, probably a good shout not to hit 'reply all'

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

That's true for O365 webmail (and can be changed in a single click). In Outlook the Reply and Reply-All buttons are the same size, Ctrl-R is just Reply, you need Ctrl-Shift-R for Reply-All.

Actually 95% or so of my replies are Reply-All, so I wouldn't mind it being the default. I just happen to know when I'd better do a simple Reply and when I should put recipients in Bcc (rarely, as part of my job).

But sure, let's blame the tool rather than the users who still can't grasp a few simple concepts 20+ years after the email entered our daily lives.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Holland was clearly making a point..

If sending to more than three people (or more than 1 domain) then any decent client should default to BCC

In my organization we frequently have triparty exchanges where everyone could contribute. BCC-ing everyone would just make it impossible for people to know who they need to reply to. But I agree there should be a soft or hard cap on the number of recipients, above 10 you can be almost sure that some people don't belong in a discussion.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Holland was clearly making a point..

He could (and maybe he did?) have replied all but moved everyone except the original sender to Bcc, thus doing his best to avoid reply-to-all-geddon. That's how you make a point and show how it's done.

Scumbags cram Make-A-Wish website with coin-mining malware

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

It may not be a "think of the children" article, but it still appears naive from the author to suggest that a scumbag who makes a living planting malware on misconfigured websites would think twice before infecting a charity site. Do we really expect these guys to have any moral sense at all?

Using a free VPN? Why not skip the middleman and just send your data to President Xi?

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: BBC account with a listed physical UK mailing address

Huh? Last week I had to create an account to access iPlayer on my TV, all I needed was an email address, no name or physical address was ever asked.

Between you, me and that dodgy-looking USB: A little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Did you accept the USB?

Reformatting won't protect you against malware at the firmware or chip level.

British fixed broadband is cheap … and, er, fairly nasty – global survey

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Is this Time Warner's site?

You can download DRM'd videos from Netflix so you can watch them later when you're not online or have a crappy connection.

Bill Gates joined on stage by jar of poop as he confesses deep love for talking about toilets

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: What does this mean?

I read that as 0.05 of a USD cent. Or to put it back in context, 5 cents per day for 100 users.

HSBC now stands for Hapless Security, Became Compromised: Thousands of customer files snatched by crims

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Surprised at the amount of data...

that they were able to steal just from credentials stuffing.

I'm on the UK version of the website, if I log in without 2FA, the only information I'll be able to access is my account numbers, those of my payees, my transaction history and my postal address (the latter by downloading a statement). All other information (email address, DoB, phone number..) is protected by 2FA, so the security of the US website must be absolutely terrible if that's not the case.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: new dongle

Just walk into a branch, they'll hand a shiny new one to you in 30 seconds, won't even check you're a customer (it's useless if you're not anyway).

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: This man knows more about AI than he does about hype

And let's not forget VR's avatar from the 2010s: "Augmented Reality"

Solid state of fear: Euro boffins bust open SSD, Bitlocker encryption (it's really, really dumb)

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: manage-bde.exe -status

Here's what it says, how do I figure out what encryption it's using?

Disk volumes that can be protected with

BitLocker Drive Encryption:

Volume C: [OSDisk]

[OS Volume]

Size: 165.60 GB

BitLocker Version: 2.0

Conversion Status: Fully Encrypted

Percentage Encrypted: 100.0%

Encryption Method: AES 256

Protection Status: Protection On

Lock Status: Unlocked

Identification Field: Unknown

Key Protectors:

Numerical Password

TPM And PIN

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Dumb execution to be sure, but:

True in a sense, but the assumption behind disk encryption is "Losing a drive is bad, but if it's encrypted then recovering the data without the key should be near impossible". My company downplays the severtity of laptop/phone losses when the device was off and Bitlocker enabled.

The article shows that some implementations leave you vulnerable to 'easy' data recovery even if encryption is enabled.

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Pascal, you should look into his contributions in fields of mathematics and physics.

There were also the Louis Pasteur, the Marie and Pierre Curie, and the Gustave Eiffel (ok,this one was more an engineer than a pure scientist). All in all, scientists were not that underrepresented on banknotes.

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Missed one!

Will the culprits incur CAPital punishment for this crime?

AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: "SwiftML [..] can perform as accurately as DFT programmes in some cases."

Maybe that's a case of "finding the solution is hard, but checking it is easy"? Say the AI is right 50% of the time, in those 50% cases you can quickly confirm the solution, in the other 50% you're back to the classic method but have hardly wasted any time.

Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: NO ONE wants to be that loser

"Because you're confusing macro with micro."

I'm not confusing anything. I know full well that if I'm the one behind the wheel, I'll choose to save my kid and sacrifice 5 strangers. This doesn't change the fact that the society would be better off if self-driving cars ruled the roads.

"The Trolley Problem tends to force the "you" part of the problem."

And this is precisely why it's pointless to try to solve it for the whole population.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: "a bit of intellectual masturbation, innit"

How was El Al 1862 a trolley problem? As you said, the plane lost 2 engines, became uncontrollable and finally crashed in a tower. It doesn't appear that the pilots had to make a decision of whether to crash into the tower or the nearby school/hospital/prison/lawyers' office.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: So...

See the original comment which was already comparing the value to society of young vs. elderly. I was simply providing a different view to it.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Jaywalking

Just curious, how does "give way" go further than "don't run people over"? Had you considered a third option like "knock them gently out of the way"?

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: NO ONE wants to be that loser

and NO ONE wants to be the victim of a drunk driver.

Over the last decades, road casualties have largely decreased, thanks to better cars, tighter regulations on speed and drugs and a general awareness that the road is not a jungle. Now we can achieve another step by removing the human factor. There will still be casualties because no algorithm is perfect, but we can get pretty close to 0.

As others have pointed out, stick to a few simple rules and don't try have a solution to all situations: protect the passengers (they have put their trust in the car), stay on the road, brake, don't swerve.

Doctors face difficult choices every day, and our societies as a whole have accepted that not everyone can always be saved, however hard it is for the dead's families. Why wouldn't we accept it for cars?

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: They May Have Gotten It Wrong

@Spazturtle

in order to avoid a tree that has suddently materialized in front of your car (*), leaving you no time to brake but just enough to swerve towards the pavement.

(*) yes, the tree is a joke, but there have been recent reports of idle youths in Morocco throwing big rocks from bridges onto approaching cars, so it's not entirely hypothetical.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Who's gonna buy it?

@Voyna i Mor

Bang on.

No 1 root cause for accidents lie between the wheel and the brakes. Eliminate that and you will make the roads statistically much safer.

An autonomous car follows the road rules, doesn't drive when tired or under the influence, doesn't think it drives better than the other cars, and can react much faster than a human to an obstacle appearing in front of it.

All these trolley problem variants are extremely marginal situations, and whatever their outcomes the number of victims will be peanuts compared to the lives saved by self-driving cars.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: cats fare worse than criminals

Cats ARE criminals.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: So...

That's the problem with these binary choices, they don't allow for much nuance. In the 'young vs. elderly' situation, people will assume the elderly is a pensioner whose costs to the society (pension, health...) outweigh their current contribution, whereas the young person still has a lot of potential.

Note that another scenarios favors the higher status (which often correlates positively to contribution to society) or executive-type persons.

Also, if your 'selfie-taking, facebooking, instagramming twerp' is jaywalking, they'll be categorized as 'unlawful' and deservedly Darwinated.

Cathay Pacific hack: Personal data of up to 9.4 million airline passengers laid bare

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

There are 2 types of companies:

- those that have already been hacked

- those that have already been hacked but don't know it yet

Oz to turn pirates into vampires: You won't see their images in mirrors

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: You already know what happens next...

The recent $5 bn EU fine to Google has *nothing* to do with GDPR...

SCISYS sidesteps Brexit: Proposes Irish listing to keep EU space work rolling in

FrogsAndChips Silver badge
Pint

Re: I'm not sure it's that easy

@Jason: my thoughts exactly, thanks for saving me the post, have this! ->

Microsoft points to a golden future where you can make Windows 10 your own

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: everybody's got a DVD drive

Laptops come less and less equipped with optical drives.

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Removed, for how long?

Has MS promised that every part you remove won't come back in the next update, forcing you to uninstall it again?

UK.gov withdraws life support from flagship digital identity system

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Tried it also last year. Went quite smoothly with RoyalMail, although the photo ID verification was done with low quality selfies that bore little resemblance to my passport picture.

Then SWMBO tried it and failed. Tried again once or twice, making sure the photos were as crisp as possible and matched her passport hairstyle. Fail again. Tried another provider, failed again and gave up.

Gave me zero confidence in their verification process.

SpaceX touches down in California as Voyager 2 spies interstellar space

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Presumably you're not using ...

I didn't know CERN had invented TCP/IP?

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: Even the boffins aren't sure.

Fortunately, someone has been keeping count:

https://www.xkcd.com/1189

Whose line of attack is it anyway? Cyber-assault whodunnits harder than ever to solve

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Surely you're able to tell the difference between "our servers were attacked by this widely available toolkit, so we have no idea who's behind it" and "Dutch police find 4 Russian guys with diplomatic passports, in a Lada with WiFi antennas directed at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons headquarters"?

New theory: The space alien origins of vital bio-blueprints for dinosaurs. And cats. And humans. And everything else

FrogsAndChips Silver badge
Boffin

"deoxyribose, in a chain that forms the backbone of DNA and RNA"

Err, no, you'll only find deoxyribose in DNA. The clue is in the names, *Deoxyribo*Nucleic Acid and *Ribo*Nucleic Acid.

HP Ink should cough up $1.5m for bricking printers using unofficial cartridges – lawsuit

FrogsAndChips Silver badge

Re: old school

Next step is to teach them arithmetics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

Page: