Posts by Bitsminer

SolarWinds takes a leaf out of Zoom's book, hires A-Team of Stamos and Krebs to sort out its security woes

Posture?

CSET will permit the Department to posture itself appropriately

You know, and I know, just exactly what picture would be appropriate here, but this is not a NSFW site so I will leave it to your imaginations.

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Re: disclose my contact list? Without the contact's permission?

The new terms include these two sentences:

You provide us the phone numbers in your mobile address book on a regular basis, including those of both the users of our Services and your other contacts. You confirm you are authorized to provide us such numbers.

This contradicts the quotes in the Update to the article. So, FB, which is it?

disclose my contact list? Without the contact's permission?

My contact list is names plus phone numbers. And a few addresses.

Am I at risk of lawsuit by those people for disclosing their Personal Protected Information to Facebook? Without getting their permission in advance?

No amount of Glasgow handshaking will revive this borked kiosk

What is "Glasgow handshaking"?

Is it a secret handshake?

Earth observation chief Dr Josef Aschbacher takes reins at European Space Agency

Re: Sercviceability?

Hopefully someone at NASA thought about "systemic problems", and properly convinced themselves that it was not the issue.

In other words, the other units won't fail the same way.

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

I once had an 8080 microprocessor explode on me.

It was the older white ceramic package with gold tin sealing the chip compartment.

I was debugging the firmware on the system with the cover open and it just randomly popped it's tin lid off in my general direction, with an audible pop, and started smoking.

We all wore safety glasses for a week afterwards. Then not.

Let the chips fall where they may: US Commerce dept whacks Middle Kingdom firm SMIC on naughty list

This is so Cold War 1970s/1980s

Anyone remember when Apple bragged about their (PowerPC based?) Mac being on the US export control list?

When exports of anything interesting from the US required a US export certificate stating the number of MTOPS* the device had? Even to NATO allies?

Or when your company would receive a request for quote for some spare parts from some Czechoslovakian company that had received something technical during one of several thaws in the relationships. Only to be told "no can do". Followed a few weeks later by a request for quote for some spare parts from some Swiss company that you'd never done business with before, but wanted exactly the same parts....

The playbook exists. Just repeat until done.

*MTOPS=millions of theoretical operations per second.

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

Re: Good news for the update laggards

Is it due to deferred updates, or selection of (choice) victims by the attackers? Did all 18,000 lose data?

Consider that the attack has been going on for months, did 94% of their customers defer updates all that time? I think I saw somewhere that the malware was distributed/available back in June.

We'll probably have to wait for an after-action report for all the technical detail.

Re: Limiting the damage

...and run USB sticks back and forth, no doubt.

Actually I sympathize. The risk of updates is approximately the same order of magnitude as the risk of not updating, especially in an isolated environment. Pick your poison.

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Use the competition?

Most mobile phone companies around here have repair crews equipped with....wait for it....phones linked to their competitor's networks. Because, obviously. Repair crews, obviously.

I wonder how long it takes Microsoft to switch to posting their status on GCP and Google to set their email backup plan to Office 362.

Until they're both down. Then, what?

Rogue ex-Cisco employee who crippled WebEx conferences and cost Cisco millions gets two years in US prison

Re: Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh

Perhaps he actually knew he was leaving a trail, and was actually attempting to prove a security flaw.

He did get a "bug" bounty. But not cash, just two years at the free hotel.

You've got to be shipping me: KatherineRyan.co.uk suggests the comedian has diversified into freight forwarding

KatherineRyan.ca is available! Register it today!

Seems like her friend's ex is trying to make a point.

Can't wait for her next show, to see how she handles this one!

Cybersecurity giant FireEye says it was hacked by govt-backed spies who stole its crown-jewels hacking tools

Sales pitches

"We were so valuable that we got hacked."

"We now have a better understanding of our customer's perspectives."

"We weren't the first (Cf Kaspersky) and we won't be the last."

"Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get."

"We take security seriously."

China’s digital currency finds its first cross-border payments buddy: Hong Kong

digital wallet?

also allow person-to-person payments by touching NFC-equipped smartphones that run the requisite wallet software.

So they've digitised robbery and muggings, then?

Surprise, surprise: AI cameras sold to schools in New York struggle with people of color and are full of false positives

Re: AI and satellite controlled gun

"advanced camera", "terrorist", "machine gun", "pickup truck", "satellite", "artificial intelligence", "face recognition"

They forgot "lasers" and "agile development".

Don’t panic, but five jet drones just used their AI to chat and collaborate while in flight

The imagination of El Reg commentards is commendable

...and not a word (yet) from AMFM.

Kudos to "The Oncoming Scorn", "trevorde", "macjules", "Tom 7", and "Maximum Delfango".

The best imagining. Period.

Ever had a bogus call from someone claiming to be the IRS? A tax scam ringleader just got sent down for 20 years

Oh Texas

Up here in Lower Canuckistan, the local government-furnished press (a.k.a. CBC) had to prod the local national plod (a.k.a. RCMP) repeatedly. And publicly.

Until they responded. With a "promise" to work with their Indian counterparts.

That was a couple of years ago. No charges yet, and no-one expects any, ever.

DeepMind's latest protein-solving AI AlphaFold a step closer to cracking biology's 50-year conundrum

Arugula

So, why does it taste so bad? Is it a folded protein?

A little bit of TLC: How IBM squeezes 16,000 write-erase cycles from QLC flash

Re: What about caching flash writes to extend the life of flash?

I think the manufacturers are working their spec sheets very carefully instead.

Seagate "Barracuda" flash drives for consumer upgrades are rated at total writes of 600x the capacity of the drive. Which is pretty good as long as you don't do video editing all day long, but spend your time reading El Reg instead -- meaning the disk is idle.

Enterprise drives are about 3x better write endurance, if my math is approximately correct (Nytro 1351 series, just to pick a product.)

The end user can also adopt these strategies: keep the drive less than half full; use big RAM as a buffer to reduce writing rate; sleep more often.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

USB?

Perhaps it is a USB stick dropped by a Brobdingnagian?

And of course it is a security test. Don't, whatever you do, plug it into your PC!

Re: ThE TruTH iS OuT TheRe

Someone finally used that icon!

Police warn of bad Apples that fell off the back of a truck after highway robbery

'allo Tim?

Would you like your mobile phones back?

Just send 66.6 bitcoin to the following address.....

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Re: Oh fsck off

What next? People with erectile disfunction complaining about the term "floppy disk"?

I have it on (unattributable) authority that some locations on this planet refer to 3.5 inch portable diskettes as "stiffies". Because they are not "floppy".

One more for The List.

Microsoft brings Trusted Platform Module functionality directly to CPUs under securo-silicon architecture Pluton

Re: My next laptop ?

Installing Linux or a BSD is considered an attack (on Microsoft revenue).

UK, Canada could rethink the whole 'ban Huawei' thing post-Trump, whispers Huawei

Re: Will it really change things?

The US intelligence people were opposed to much of the Chinese technical product imports before Trump. I think Trump seized this as a useful tool to bash Xi with in demanding a "better" trade deal.

There has been continuous pressure on multiple countries at many levels (PMs, ministers, bureaucrats, intelligence people, military people, the phone companies) by the US and related parties to push the Huawei-is-dangerous line. Because backdoors, seen and unseen, etc etc.

I don't think Biden will change this. 5G and related are (perceived as) a key economic driver for the West.

Re: Arresting officer decides not to testify?

Actually Meng is not on trial. This is a hearing to decide whether she should be sent to trial in the US. The judge can still issue a subpoena for the said officer to testify, but as he is reportedly now living in Macau that may not fly.

And the RCMP officer in question is alleged to have disclosed "technical information" to the US FBI, he wasn't the arresting officer. The defence wants to prove "improper" procedures between the customs/border security people and the police and the US police. That might open the door to a sufficiently egregious civil rights violation to void the extradition request.

FYI: Alibaba Cloud says it has robot sysadmins that swap faulty disks in four minutes

Re: Hierarchical storage management

Massive Array of Idle Disks.....MAID.

SGI was selling that a few years ago. They bought some company, and relaballed it as their own. Not sure they sold much. I did have a quote from them once. For a petabyte, back in the days when that was a lot of storage.

If you google it, there is even an article from El Reg from a few years ago, and some papers from 2002.

IIRC, there was no robot, just electrically switched SATA drives, and some erasure coding.

Microsoft warns against SMS, voice calls for multi-factor authentication: Try something that can't be SIM swapped

What's the worst-case scenario?

"...I believe they’re the least secure of the MFA methods available today," said Weinert.

Which is why the US Government uses it. To authenticate me for web-based updates for a fast-track border crossing smartcard (with RFID) that arrives in an RF-proof carrying case. The card is smart, and I like to think that I am smart, but, you know.....the rest isn't so easy to believe.

More evidence your work/life balance has gone to $%£*: Atlassian says user-interface interactions show hours tacked on to workday

Elephant in the room

It's a joke when Atlassian, of all companies, makes statistical inferences about use of their products.

The activities captured included events such as creating a document or commenting on a code review.

The time spent clicking, and waiting and waiting, then clicking again 5 times (with attendant waiting), to get a simple Jira issue opened, or cross-linked, or a report written is just too much. Jira is such a piece of 1990s work. Yuch.

It's no wonder people have to work longer. They are waiting for Jira to catch up to their slow human reflexes.

San Francisco approves 'CEO tax', hopes to extract up to $140m a year from corps with wide exec-staff salary gap

The Law of Unintended consequences applies

Fix the low median by firing a few of the lowest-paid employees.

And, you're done.

Russian jailed for eight years in the US for writing code that sifted botnet logs for web banking creds for fraudsters

Intended loss

resulting in over $100 million in intended loss.

That's not a result, that's wishful thinking.

So much is wrong with that statement.

CERT/CC: 'Sensational' bug names spark fear, hype – so we'll give flaws our own labels... like Suggestive Bunny

edits

Is frumious bandersnatch taken?

Can we stop megacorps from using and abusing our data? That ship has sailed, ex-NSA lawyer argues in new book

Re: Cookies

I thought this category was for essential cookies that are essential for the site to work make money.

There, FTFY.

Facebook tells academics to stop monitoring its political ads for any rule-breaking.... on privacy grounds

2020 subtract 2004 equals, uhh, clickety clickety, 16.

Poor man only has eight fingers, so he is correct, base 8.

Come on, Amazon: If you're going to copy open-source code for a new product, at least credit the creator

Re: Amazon is a dick slap

You have to divorce Bezos to get a cent from him.

And the number of people who will successfully do that is limited o just one! The other 7.8 billion of us won't get anything.

Welp, it is the season for silicon mega-mergers... AMD rumored to be in advanced talks to buy FPGA slinger Xilinx for $30bn+

Re: Not Surprising

Question for shareholders: is management spreading themselves too thin working on such diverse product lines?

NVIDIA led the GPU revolution from mere display cards to GPUs being a central part of computing today. Could/would they have done that if they were protecting a large-volume CPU franchise at the same time? Tech history has many stories of diverse companies killing off or crippling new products because they would replace/cannibalize their existing product lines. NVIDIA had one line of business, and focused on it very well.

GPU is very difficult to design, build software for, and sell. NVIDIA does all this very well. AMD/ATI does this very well too.

FPGA is very difficult to design, build software for, and sell. Xilinx does all this very well.

CPU is....etc etc etc.

Can AMD management handle all three (CPU, GPU, FPGA) at the same time?

I doubt it; they'll try, but it is a seriously difficult issue. Look at IBM, they are starting to divest unmanageable products/services. Look at Intel, selling off McAfee, and, years ago, network lines.

When IBM bought RedHat, the nay-sayers were rife, predicting the demise of the whole franchise, with good (historical) reasons. It hasn't happened yet, but will.

AMD is following the same road.

A freshly formed English council waves £18m at UK tech industry, asks: Can somebody design and run pretty much everything for us?

Did they define the purpose?

Is all this money going to be spent on a defined system, with a useful purpose, within a defined schedule?

Is that asking too much?

Oh.

Groq is hard to grok but reckons its AI chips roq: Ex-Googlers' unorthodox design now shipping to customers

No. It infers that you lose.

Hootsuite melts ICE deal after staff revolt: CEO vows not to divide biz like agents divided families at the US border

Re: Snowflakes

OK, let me spell this out for you.

We have different points of view.

And to be sure, this argument could go on longer than a HN Rust rant.

Well, maybe not.

Re: Snowflakes

The need for a pejorative is because this is The Register comments section.

I do have respect for people taking a principled stand. Such as the people who want to sell a software service to an apparently legal US government entity authorized by the US Congress, observing the principle that they treat all persons and corporations and governments equally. (While observing export control laws, Magnitsky laws, etc.)

You don't appear to have thought of the rights of the sellers of such software.

I also have respect for people who object to mistreatment of illegal ("irregular") migrants. I think they should do it in the correct forum---the political forum.

Re: Sympathy for the devils

"Biz is biz, if you don't want to do biz with all comers, apparently legal or not, then don't do biz."

OK, you got me, the apparently legal or not is ethically and morally incorrect. I should not have put in the "or not". I withdraw that part of the statement. That was a mistake. I made it. Ooops.

I agree with much of your remaining argument, e.g. banks have to do their diligence on customers. And

it's possible that some of the managers themselves may object to ICE's policies and actions

Of course they do. I do.

I am not saying they don't, shouldn't or couldn't. My position is such objections belong in the political realm: "email/phone your local congresscritter/MP/PM/POTUS". If you push your views on your employer, they can push back.

Re: Sympathy for the devils

So, the US government and a handful of US states are capital punishment states, along with PRC, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and other well-known highly liberal entities.

I don't hear these employees complaining about such clearly unethical practices in those countries/states. Does HootSuite do business with those entities? And the employees remain silent?

So there is my what-about-ism response to your micro-aggression.

Re: Snowflakes

ooh another yapping dog trigger word

I believe the term is dog-whistle.

But, no, to me a snowflake is just a very very fragile thing, and labelling a person with that term is just being pejorative without intending any left/right connotations.

Perhaps you can suggest a better pejorative.

Sympathy for the devils

Truly, the employees who wish to usurp the authority of the US Congress, the US Federal court system, and ultimately the US Supreme court, over the actions and policies of the US Homeland Security department, of which Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a mere footnote, is arrogant and presumptive.

There is a lot to complain about DHS and ICE behaviour in treatment of legal and illegal immigrants to the USA. There's a lot of reporting on this topic, some of which is actually accurate.

A handful of Canadian snowflakes should not be telling the CEO of their employer and their board of directors (who represent the interests of the owners of the company) how to leap, how high to leap, and to which music to leap to. Biz is biz, if you don't want to do biz with all comers, apparently legal or not, then don't do biz.

A corollary to the employee's (reported and apparent) position: If the company doesn't agree with your political stance, they can decline to do business with you too! Or in other words, in the words of that famous TV Personality, "You're Fired!".

Frames per second? Windows Terminal brings back text animation with the VT100 blink

Retro was astonishing

We had a couple of installation engineers from Isilon come by, setting up a small storage cluster (Infiniband back end, Ethernet front end).

They required a "VT220-compatible" console to configure the system.

We provided a "VT220-actual". They insisted on taking photos. We complied (contrary to company policy, of course).

They were tickled. We were, like, "so what? We've had these for years/decades!"

Moonshot: Making spaceships with Microsoft's refreshed HoloLens 2 nerd goggles

LM

and the latest incarnation has seen some tasks completed 90 per cent faster, according to Shelley Peterson, Lockheed Martin's principal investigator for augmented and mixed reality.

And I have some oceanfront property in Outer Mongolia to sell you too.

Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons

What I want to know is...

Am I in it?

If I am not, then am I a nobody? I have mixed feelings about either possibility.

Don't pay the ransom, mate. Don't even fix a price, say Australia's cyber security bods

yes, ransomware hackers do provide customer support

https://www.theregister.com/2015/05/20/teslacrypt_ransomware_scam_dissected/

The chutzpah of the crooks knew few constraints. They took on the role of tech support staff, resolving problems they were instrumental in creating.

Forget Terminators, says US military, the next-gen AI battles will hinge upon net infrastructure, not killer robots

Extending the lifecyle

$100M+ contract for "the best infrastructure that will still be around in 50 years."?

This looks like the chickens have contracted the foxes to design a henhouse good for 50 years. The lifecycle of the foxes is thereby assured.

What rhymes with 'boom' and is veritably raking it in thanks to the coronavirus pandemic?

Re: people like "easy"

Also rally.video is a maybe. I was on their beta list but have not yet tried it.