Posts by ardichoke

Ex-HP boss Carly Fiorina sacked one week into new job

Re: Trump? Who's he?

I'm not sure why everyone is so worried about Donald Trump. He's just doing what every other presidential candidate does. He's saying whatever it takes to get elected, he means none of it, and we're none the wiser as to what his policies actually are.

The scary thing is, people truly believe this in spite of the evidence that politicians actually keep a majority of their promises, suggesting they're not quite as disingenuous as we all think they are. I'm not sure what I'm more scared of in this case, that Trump is lying about everything and we have no idea what he would actually do as el prez, or that he's telling the truth. Either way, Trump 2016 makes me long for Canada 2017.

(Recent analysis of politicians and their promises to support my comment here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-keep-most-of-their-promises/)

Michigan electricity utility downed by ransomware attack

LBWL is the height of incompetence

A few years back, we here in Michigan got a massive ice storm that knocked out power all over the place right around Christmas. Lansing got hit with the worst of it. BWL took WEEKS to restore power to their customers (I, myself was only without power for about 5 days fortunately), all the while providing ZERO updates to their customers through their website, social media, or any other outlet I was able to find. Despite the state of emergency, they only brought in a couple of extra crews from other utility companies to help with the repairs. Oh, and their director left with his family to go to New York on holiday right after the power outage started, real classy move there.

Meanwhile Consumers Energy (a larger, corporate utility, as opposed to BWL which is city-owned and operated) brought in dozens of additional crews from multiple other utility companies including ones from many states away, and shared timely updates via social media and their website. They had their customers back online in a much shorter time period despite having a much larger area with many more customers that they had to deal with.

I'm not one for privatization of public services, but when the public utility starts screwing up this bad, maybe it's time to consider it in that particular case. BWL is sadly incompetent. I will be so glad when I no longer have to deal with them.

Re: Your usage information was safe before "Smart Meters"

Irrelevant... As a current (soon to be former) customer, LBWL doesn't have any smart meters. I doubt they even have a plan to roll them out. They only managed to figure out how to post on social media in the last year or two.

15 MILLION T-Mobile US customer records swiped by hackers

Re: Compensation - via another screwball

Not to mention the credit monitoring agency in question is owned by Experian, AKA the company that was compromised in the first place! Plus, from what I hear, you have to fork over a CC number for the "free" service and canceling at the end of the free period is a pain in the rump to do. It's almost like they're letting themselves be compromised as a way to drum up credit monitoring business. Talk about a conflict of interest.

Vigilante VXer FIXES SOHOpeless routers

Re: Neuromancer?

Bit late, just catching up on my Reg backlog, but have a beer for referencing one of my favorite all time series of books.

Definitely Count Zero though.

Security for those who know they can't win the security war

TrueCrypt? Really? It's been discontinued for undisclosed reasons under mysterious circumstances. Last I checked, the leading hypothesis was that it was a warrant canary type move. I wouldn't trust any data to TrueCrypt at this point...

+1 for SpiderOak though, love that service.