* Posts by Prst. V.Jeltz

3555 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2015

LockBit ransomware kingpin gets 4 years behind bars

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Re: Mikhail Vasiliev the “cyber-terrorist”

can hack the lock with a McDonalds coffee stirrer then it ain't by definition protected.

Who gives a fuck about the lock?

Are you saying its ok to steal something if you dont damage the lock? or if the owner forgot to lock it?

Not to mention that other shit you said about "its impossible to damage a computer with software" no doubt alluring to the fact that even if the system is totally borked the hardware is undamaged? Tell that to the people who died as a result of that software being interfered with.

you seem to be mixing up old school early hacker rhetoric from hackers who were just looking around out of curiosity doing no damage , with modern day extortionists who cripple vital systems demanding ransoms.

International effort to disrupt cybercrime moves into operational phase

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Re: Stop using certain products then

30 years in and Microsoft still hide filename extensions by default .

This is probly the number one way the criminals get people to click on exes in an email.

They even do it on server installs , who is running a server and wants the filename extensions hidden?

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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The arrogance! Isnt the customoer embarrassed that the fault was something too obvious for the script?

although a good script would include the blindingly obvious.

More than once I've been to a "boardroom emergency" where a laptop has just inexplicably died mid high level exec navel gazing session - caused by laptop running out of battery whilst plugged into switched off power socket.

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In certain situations I would ask the victim to try another PC , or better yet swap with someone.

You can then see if the fault moves or stays.

This rules out/in so many possibilities in one stroke - and one where the user does the work.

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A friend went for interview to be the overall admin of a small school network ,

Since the job was for their "network" , the downloaded a load of "Network engineer" questions , including a pre interview test on TCP , Routing , switches , etc etc

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Re: Hypothetical Example

Ive had it too ,

Sadly even though "all are equal" is correct , there is no correct answer , its whatever that company decides the directors priority is.

Maybe say you'd do both at once.

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I wrote it in the Grail Diary so that I wouldnt *have* to remember it!

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Re: I may have told this one before...

The clues in the name , they are there to reduce a person to a "resource"

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

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Re: PFY's responsibilities

The key swaps would be best done with remotely via software at random intervals , then the users do the physical key swapping for you.

Ruggedized phone group takes the Bullitt, calls in PWC as administrative receiver

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Re: Niche market

exactly what I came to say.

You can make your phone exceptionally rugged these days for about £10 down the market.

Slapping these protectors on phones and reselling them to companies at ten times the price is a bit of a gamble.

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

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Coat

Re: Catalyst 6500 story

Right on! theres that many home broadband routers lying around they should be put to use instead!

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Re: A Bit of Flanders and Swann

I did wonder how he negotiated getting funding / permission for his " started on a project to redesign the network and replace every piece of network equipment."

especially after the auspicious start.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

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Re: also: Rockstars

(developing in the language Rockstar).

I had to google that . That is awsome.

"Tommy used to work on the docs"

LockBit shows no remorse for ransomware attack on children's hospital

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Re: It's time

These are not millionaire international criminals cosying up to sympathetic regimes in order to have the spetnaz covering their back door!

. they're kids in their bedrooms .

In most cases if their IDs were known Interpol would pick them up from said bedrooms

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

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BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns

have we run out of jpgs and resorted to text?

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

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Re: This must rate as the most moronic management policy ...

I always assumed the conductive bits of these bags were inside the plastic , or outside it, to prevent this sort of thing.

Whats to stop a motherboard with a battery in it having the battery tracks / pins shorted?

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Re: Nine nines and an explosion

Presumably his thought process went as far as "what would be the best number of uptime?"

I wonder what his thought process would be when presented with "Well that will triple what we currently spend on servers due to have to create clusters and redundancy and such"

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We dont go for "uptime" records

We have a handful of Microsoft SQL servers that we reboot weekly, just so they can have a micro nap and feel all refreshed, is that a good thing ? are there disadvantages ?

Are there learned things in volatile RAM that will need relearning and slow performance for instance? (just guessing)

We also recycle the SQL services periodically , which is basically same thing .

Any thoughts anyone?

UK government plans to spend over £100M on AI ... but copyright code is held up

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Re: Skip steps

Thanks , I was gonna ask for a TLDR

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

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Re: Being remote is career limiting

I've lived by the seaside for 50 years.

You forget its there for years at a time .

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

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Re: Fuses?

yet millions of people do that every time they board an airliner

Yes people trust in other people or machines sometimes . When They Have To !

Theres no point blindly doing it when you dont have to.

The two situations are completely different.

Why not implement a virtually free , possibly invaluable safety measure?

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Re: Fuses?

"then there won't be one in the simulator either"

And how far do you take this quest for realism? flame throwers to simulate the cockpit being disintegrated with burning jet fuel?

The school of thought that "oh they cant have an emergency stop button on this big metal dancing cow because real pilots dont have that" is ludicrous

Its not like they are going to end up issuing pilots licences to pilots who think that button is a real world option.

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Re: Fuses?

I'd have thought a big red stop button , as is the convention on most large mechanical machines, might be available to Shirley , even if it did detract from the realism . Perhaps they could style it in the form of an ejector seat handle.

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Re: Wrong defaults

I still think it a little wasteful for 100 people to check a file 100 times , surely the server itself could check every so often and inform all the people who wanted to know ?

... unless they were all checking different files of course.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

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"changed the numbers to make it look like the postmaster was a thief."

I assumed they were chnaging the numbers to correct the system's errors to prevent "make it look like the postmaster was a thief." , and the ones sacked / jailed were were Fujitsu inevitably fucked it up .

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Re: Talk is cheap, where's the £?

"Didn't know anything about it guv". Please note that this is not a suggestion for the current UK government to implement

They might not have made it corporate law , but that is certainly internal government policy.

This is why they have a these "Cabinet Reshuffles" every 5 minutes that ensure a minister is never experienced or capable in the role, from their pov it

-pads the cv and furthers their carreers , without the need to prove / do / know anything

-prevents any responsibility for anything with the "Didn't know anything about it guv" getout clause.

.

A clause used multiple times over the course of this Horizion business with a procession of home secretaries.

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Re: Talk is cheap, where's the £?

The answer to that is "Yes they did know" , according to that ITV drama they had teams of people manually going through postmasters accounts at night secretly correcting the errors the system had put in.

I believe thats not just a dramatisation / poetic license thing .

I wonder if the crisis was limited to Fijitsu UK though , and the CEO in Japan found out only recently , but I guess with this dragging on for 20 years they surely must have herard something in the press if nowhere else.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

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Re: A wasted trip

"I'm stood here in front of the bloody thing, you lot aren't.

But they are looking at the same thing on a shared screen , so they are in effect there.

If they're the router experts and a screen of gibbesrish is telling them that , who are you , as a subordinate , to question that?

Could be many factors you dont know about .

The gibberish could be telling them "Dangerous heat levels in the PSU" which they have previously seen cause a fire.

That said a polite enquiry just for enlightenment might be nice ,

and also because the "turn it off an on" is a rarely not worth trying

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

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only 30 years ? seems longer with all the versions we've had since then .

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Flame

Re: WFWG 3.11

"The 32 bit TCP/IP worked OK. NetBeui wasn't so good."

You should try setting that up on a bunch of remote workstations when the server guys have totally fucked up setting the switches up and you're not allowed to look at them .

Time and time again "Oh it was set on half duplex 10mb, silly me "

"Well thanks for sorting that after only 3 months of bitching by me and the staff"

I had to rewrite the autoexec to try and try again to load the various components as the connectivity was so shit they'd normally fail on first load.

Tesla hacks make big bank at Pwn2Own's first automotive-focused event

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That *is* the grown up version, previously it was "Phat stacks"

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

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You can make similar cockups with the /MIR function of Robocopy . Its reluctant to follow Microsofts version of symlinks though.

Lucky escape there for Bart , although hopefully the 2.5 petabytes of storage was backed up.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

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Headmaster

common parlance

'how it works', it only say 'how to use it'.

I often find these two phrases used interchangeably sadly .

"How does it work?"

"you push this button"

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

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propping up the AS400 rack to prevent it from toppling over and almost sobbing with the effort of having done so for most of the night.

Well you gotta give him his due , he's taking reponsibilty for his actions pretty heroically

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

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Re: Please Re-Read the Article, Carefully

Yeah - badly

I'm not saying He was installing further UPSs in unsuitable spots. We know he was uninstalling it , but after being told WHY , how could he let that happen ? he didn't even have the 'crane' present .

Did he think "Hmm, I've been told installing it high makes it unstable , I'll just yank the rails out to exponentially magnify that effect while I wander off to get the trolley to uninstall" ?

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Re: Human Nature

two brain-farts

did he? it sounded to me like he made one cockup , was told his error before the problem went all the way , why it was an issue , and to correct it ,

...and then he went and did the same thing again but went all the way , and some.

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FAIL

jes** chr$%!

That is possibly the dumbest sequence of events I've read about in "On call" or "Who me?"

I gathered from the headline what the issue would be, little could I imagine the scale of the fuckup and , dumbassery that caused it.

It beggars belief .

The kid is told exactly why you dont put weight high up and to move it down , and then proceeds to let that happen.

...and to cap it all brings several racks over like those "Forklift in a Warehouse" fail vids you see online.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

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Re: outSHONE

It may be too late at that point!

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

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Re: Installation

which is different to live remote access to the financial system

this ^

Os it even remote access? Surely this data is uploaded to some central database where the term "remote" doesent really apply and obviously the host system has access to it .

Exactly the same as when you submit a tax return on paper to HMRC , once they receive it they *could* get the tippex out an fuck with it.

Or are they remoting to the box in the PO and altering "yet to be submitted" accounts ? who knows!

They need to define in these hearings exactly what "remote access" means in this instance because everybody probably has a different interpretation.

How 'sleeper agent' AI assistants can sabotage your code without you realizing

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Re: Detection and response

If the AI is advanced enough to engage in subversion it wont necessarily sneak its efforts into the developer's code , it'll just write its own and put it out there

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Visual Studio manages to sabotage my code without AI assistance.

When doing a lot of string manipulation during web scraping it often decides to help out and alter the strings to make them look nice :(

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

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Re: Web Complexity

Now thats how a web page should look!

https://www.w3.org/Amaya/

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Re: Building software is hard...

legalised bribery. got it.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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Holmes

Case in point.

Its usually used with the S yes , but the Z is allowed. You cant lose marks for it. Cambridge

Now let me blow your mind , the word "speach" doesent exist, its "speech". That's right , the ugly bastardised simpleton American spelling is the correct and only one. Look it up.

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People not realising "anonymize" is actually a legit UK spelling I can imagine but ...

*That’s our made-up portmanteau of “The Register” and “anonymize”, not a typo as some readers have recently assumed.

Seriously? This place has really gone downhill . Must be some stiff upper manglement guy attracted by the Reg's more high brow serious journalism of recent times.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

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Joke

Dead mans shoes career progression

Alvin: " We definately have to fire the boss - he's not trustworthy . I'll be at my desk polishing the CV "

A BOFH is born.

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Sounds like they were lucky to get away this just that bandwidth throttle , given the picture painted of the culprit and the knowledge / access he would have had.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

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publication of a manifesto at election time, to be printed and distributed equally for all parties

Thats exactly what ive always thought

You could even make it a standard layout with polices on a,b & c all at the same place in the running order .

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Flame

overhaul of how political donations are made

political donations should be outright banned .

It beggars belief that this sanctioned bribery is allowed to occur.

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Its amazing the upper echelons the level the average job tenure seems to be a year or two.

Presumably this is to prevent anyone getting good at their job , or being able to implement positive change , and also to limit blame for anything.