Posts by Insert sadsack pun here

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Re: POP3. IMAP ?

That sounds a bit insecure to me. I have a secretary in Switzerland that prints out my emails. He or she or they - I have never met them, for security reasons - prints them in tiny font on rice paper, and then insert them into a yellow Kinder Egg container. The container is zip tied to the left leg of a pigeon that flies to my clifftop lair. The pigeon then reads the messages to me, and I dictate any required replies, which are returned in the manner the inbound message was received.

Uncle Sam accuses SpaceX of not considering asylees and refugees for employment

Re: I hate to say it...

"it's no [sic] too much braggadocio on my part..."

Apparently it was too much braggadocio on your part. Perhaps you would have got a less pretentious sentence correct.

Re: Doesn't make sense -- honest

"It would be hard to imagine that SpaceX's missile/rocket technology isn't controlled."

Maybe yes, maybe no. But just because the technology is export controlled, that doesn't mean a) that everyone working at SpaceX has access to it, and b) that only US citizens and permanent residents may have access to it.

A blanket ban on hiring certain people who are lawfully entitled to work in the US is illegal unless there is a laeful exception - as the complaint makes clear.

Verizon to 'sunset' Blue Jeans vidconf platform

BlueJeans...I haven't heard that name in a long time...

North Korean hackers had access to Russian missile maker for months, say researchers

Re: "It seems to fit both"

Trump is awful in every single way, and yet he was not and will not be a dictator. He won a reasonably democratic and fair election, he left office after losing another election, and (unbelievably) might return to power on the basis of a third election. He is being prosecuted in open court, there is still a free-ish press, the rights of assembly and free speech are in okay state, etc. That's totally different from Russia and North Korea. The US is very flawed and Trump worse, but it just isn't a dictatorship.

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Re: "Facial Recognition" is no worse than any other kind.

"The problem here is that what the police do is "lock people up". That's the police job. That's what they are trained to do. That's all they are trained to do. It's a blue-collar job: they aren't lawyers or social workers: they arrest people."

You're betraying your ignorance about actual police work here. Police officers arrest relatively few people. In Detroit specifically, there are about 10,000 arrests per annum, and about 2,000 police officers. That means the nominal average office is making an arrest every 2-3 months. It is just not the case that police work is a conveyer belt of arresting people, throwing them into custody, and then heading back out to arrest more people - whether you think that is a good thing or not.

https://detroitmi.gov/departments/police-department

https://www.vera.org/publications/what-policing-costs-in-americas-biggest-cities/detroit-mi

Brit healthcare body rapped for WhatsApp chat sharing patient data

Re: Whatsapp gave them a heady taste of efficient clinical communication

This is literally a persecution complex.

Old-school hacktivism is back because it never went away

"India in particular has been the subject of MTB attacks. The subcontinent was first hit in June 2022 followed by at least four sub-campaigns."

India is not a subcontinent. It is one of the 7 countries on the Indian Subcontinent (and Bangladesh is one of the other ones).

Chinese companies evade sanctions, fuel Moscow’s war on Ukraine, says report

Re: So what?

"The chinese did not impose sanctions against Russia, as most countries did not do."

They're using American technology and American products to supply Russia. That's so what.

Network security guy in extradition tug of war between US and Russia

It's not because of Ukraine

"FACCT was spun out from Group-IB last year – likely in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

You said this last time you reported on Group-IB, and you failed to consider your own previous reporting that Group-IB's founder and CEO is still in pre-trial detention in Moscow on dodgy charges. All that happened months before Russia's further invasion of Ukraine, and is the actual cause of splitting the Russian and foreign businesses.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/29/group_ib_ceo_arrested_treason_claims_russia/

https://www.forbes.ru/tekhnologii/466849-il-a-sackov-forbes-srazu-posle-moego-zaderzania-sostoalas-bol-saa-vecerinka

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-12-03/who-is-ilya-sachkov-russian-cyber-ceo-linked-to-2016-election-fancy-bear-leaks#xj4y7vzkg

Australia fines tech companies for exploiting foreign tech workers

Re: "the plethora of deadly creatures found in the one-time prison colony"

"It's all a question of perspective, and "Oz was a Prison Colony" seems a rather 'colonial' one."

Yes, exactly, I'm glad someone made this point. The prison colonies were tiny and short-lived: most of them failed after a couple of years, and even the "successful" larger ones were only in existence for 50-60 years. Compare that to Australia's 120 year existence as a modern state, and the thousands of years of indigenous life beforehand, and it does like a particularly perverse perspective to emphasize one colonial aspect...

...and added to that, it's just hacky.

Ex-McKinsey IT director claims he was fired for whistleblowing

Re: Say it ain't so

Don't forget about the criminal charges in South Africa over McKinsey's engagement with the Gupta crime family!

https://www.ft.com/content/63385e68-e1ce-4c10-9a62-cb1be1ca30e5

Meta forced to sell Giphy, takes 87% loss in Shutterstock deal

I am very stupid

Can someone explain how Giphy makes money? Who is paying it and for what? As an end user, I don't pay. Is this some kind of ad tracking madness?

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

Re: Mixed feelings today

Federal prisoners do 85% of their sentence, at least. Holmes will serve many years.

"White collar criminal prisons" don't exist. You are presumably making a sarcastic and ill-informed to minimum security facilities. But they're not comfortable or enjoyable - it's prison, and as Holmes's sentence exceeds ten years she is not even eligible for minimum security.

She's going to be separated from her children and kept in a prison. Maybe she deserves it, but it's nothing to revel in.

https://www.businessinsider.com/white-collar-prisons-2013-12?r=US&IR=T

Re: Insufficient Evidence?

At the risk of providing a literal answer to a rhetorical question, it is #1. It can be proven that e.g. Holmes lied to Walgreens; Walgreens invested on the basis of those lies; and Walgreens lost money as a result. For investors not in the room when Holmes lied, who knows? But it's all irrelevant anyway, none of them will ever get anything back

UK cops score legal win in EncroChat snooping op

"surely the time to decide whether evidence was legally obtained is before the trial, and not afterwards?"

No. The trial itself is when to decide whether the evidence is admissible in the trial, and as part of that the court will - if it is asked - to consider whether the evidence was obtained legally.

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

Nice one, MeitY

23-year-old Brit linked to 2020 Twitter attack and SIM-swap scheme pleads guilty

I remember this incident. People couldn't believe that Kanye and Elon were tweeting deceptive nonsense to their millions of followers. And then, to make it worse, they got hacked.

Smuggler busted heading for China with dodgy GPUs … and live lobsters

But what was the charge? Eating a meal? Eating a succulent Chinese meal?

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Re: Smart Motorways, dumb drivers.

If you drive in a lane that has a red "X" sign above it, there's a fair chance your car is going to be crushed by the stationary HGV 300 metres ahead of you...

Marketing biz sent 107 million spam emails... to just 437k people

Well, you've got to keep your PECR up, I suppose...

40% of IT security pros say they've been told not to report a data leak

Bitdefender says: "Surprisingly, many impacted organizations say they have been told to keep the data leak confidential despite their obligation to report it. Over 40% of security professionals surveyed said they had been told to keep a breach under wraps..."

Yeah but hold on - there's not a legal obligation everywhere to report every data breach externally. Only some data breaches must be reported as a matter of statutory law to e.g. a data privacy regulator, or as a matter of contract to e.g. clients or vendors. If there's no obligation to report and the breach was immaterial - I don't see why maintaining confidentiality is a bad thing.

IBM, Kyndryl cut jobs even after cutting ties

Re: 100 Kyndryl employees in Austin TX?

"The sudden appearance of a mystery "file backup" program in my task tray was also noted."

Noted. I expect one to appear in my task tray too.

UK data watchdog fines TikTok £12.7M for failing to protect kids

"As anyone familiar with TikTok knows, it's not a healthy environment for pre-teens thanks to its bizarre gamut of user-generated content. Heck, it's not a healthy environment for any age"

This doesn't stop BBC Radio fucking One (which has a significant audience of 12-18 year olds) promoting TikTok through on air mentions in nearly every DJ's segment. It's a fucking outrage.

Virgin Orbit lays off 85% of staff as funding deal falters

Re: Meaninglessly diluted and overrated brand anyway

"Those were the days..." ...when he was fraudulently extracting subsidies from the UK Government, and he was convicted for it. He's turned over a new leaf since then, of course: now he still extracts subsidies from the government, but he does it completely legally!

Re: Where is the support?

Cornwall Council already chucked £10 million at the "Spaceport". How much more taxpayer money do you want spent on this?

Attackers hit Bitcoin ATMs to steal $1.5 million in crypto cash

" they've now got a reason to walk away from the business, shut down their servers..."

...and all their books and records will be destroyed, which is really unfortunate for a cross-border bitcoin atm operator...

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

"So we don't accept submissions from Russians, but they're completely free to use the code? That's choking what, exactly?"

The point is to isolate, disrupt, and exclude the Russian high value electronics industry in *all* its interactions with US markets and US IP.

The guy is frustrated and stamping his feet? Good - that's the point. Getting cut off from GitHub isn't half as bad as having your ciry bombed, as has happened to many Ukrainian devs in the past 9 years.

"Given the apolitical stand of software..."

This is naive. The purpose of these sanctions is to choke Russia's domestic electronics industry, because the Russian military needs it to continue its 9 year war against Ukraine.

"better and more IT retaliation would be to route all access via one IP filter so international news access for Russian citizens is automatically part of gaining access to the rest of the world"

Russia is not North Korea or China. There is a high rate of smartphone access and the Internet is pretty cheap. Although Roskomnadzor does block some websites, generally speaking there is easy access to a ton of foreign news media in the Russian language.

The problem is not a technical one of lack of access. The problem is that Russians either don't trust those media sources or that they don't care - just like most westerners don't care what's happening in Yemen or the Sahel with western arms.

"It's a stretch to call Germany's reparations substantial"

"In 1945 there was very little left of Germany to perform reparations with..."

...and much of what there was was loaded onto trains and sent to the Soviet Union.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: brightness adjustment needed

"Did that refer to the monitor or user?"

That is, indeed, the joke.

Feds arrest and charge exiled Chinese billionaire over massive crypto fraud

It's completely inexplicable that an alleged fraudster was drawn toward Trump's inner circle, as if it had some kind of gravitational pull for grifters. :|

Now Google to shove its answer to ChatGPT into Gmail, Docs, apps via APIs, more

Re: Gah

The problem with AI-generated text is that it's so verbose and waffly. It takes fucking ages to parse out what it's trying to say, and half the time it's wrong. And now you can have two different bots emailing each other to talk bollocks ad infinitum!

'Robot lawyer' DoNotPay not fit for purpose, alleges complaint

It's interesting that DoNotPay tried to discredit the lawyer that filed suit against them by saying "this guy has personally received millions in class action lawsuits". So...you're saying he's been proven right a lot in the past and is very successful...?

Welcome to Muskville: Where the workers never leave

"just because he's evil, that doesn't mean he's stupid. I'm sure Kanye has interesting ideas sometimes."

Kanye in the past has been very self-deprecating, insightful, intelligent, and creative. Unfortunately, in recent years (and since the traumatic death of his mother) he has totally gone off the deep end. He's obviously completely unbalanced. I think he is mentally ill, not evil - but he is doing evil things.

US government says Silicon Valley Bank depositors can get their cash on Monday

"no losses will be borne by the taxpayer"

"...That’s in stark contrast to 2008, when the US government poured billions into failed banks"

Just as an aside, the taxpayer certainly bore a risk of loss in 2008, but the federal government ended up making a USD 15 billion profit. Although that might or.might not have been wiped out by inflation, it's not like taxpayers ended up paying out tons of money to save fat cats...in that instance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008

Re: Am I wrong in my thinking here?

"That means the run on it was frankly for nothing and the bank was solvent, no?"

Not exactly. Solvent means you can pay your debts as and when they fall due. "I've got a £1000 cheque in the post" doesn't mean you're solvent if you have to pay out £50 today.

SVB seems to mostly have had a cashflow problem rather than a net asset problem - but tbf that's kind of a big deal when you're a bank.

Re: What did he know two weeks ago?

Yeah, I'm not here to do PR for bank execs, but maybe the guy just wanted to buy a (third) house? It's a bit low to imply wrongdoing merely because he sold some shares.

Re: Fire sale to other banks?

"can anyone just buy it and write them self a loan"

That's exactly the concept behind "pocket banks" in Russia, Ukraine and India. You (an oligarch) set up a bank. You push your companies' employees, other shareholders, vendors, clients and maybe (with the appropriate brown envelopes) local governments to open accounts there. You then arrange for the bank to lend various other companies controlled by you a ton of money. Then - and this is the subtle bit - you just don't pay it back, and you let the bank fail, screwing over depositors and the suckers in government that have to bail everyone out.

Ukraine is currently pursuing Ihor Kolomoysky for a cool USD 3 billion over the way he ran PrivatBank. Naturally he denies all misconduct.

https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-s-privatbank-wins-key-battle-against-oligarch-in-london-court/30218228.html

Catholic clergy surveillance org 'outs gay priests'

Re: Religion

That dating app was just resting on my smartphone.

Re: One Question

TBF if anyone could bring an app back from the dead, it would be the Catholic Church

Privacy is not an absolute right. Sometimes there is a public interest in breaching privacy. Catholic priests are influential people who promote and raise funds for an anti-gay, anti-consensual sex organisation. They're also quite insistent on the importance of personal behaviour. If their personal behaviour contradicts what they preach - there could be a legitimate public interest in exposing that.

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

Re: Not taking sides but...

"What would happen differently if they were sold then?"

People would wear them and get some use out of them. If they're just burned, then 100% of the resources that went into them would be wasted.

Ericsson fined for dodgy Djibouti dealings and warned over Iraqi indiscretions

Re: America thinks it owns the world

"What the effing hell does America have to do with Ericsson doing business in "China, Indonesia, Kuwait and Vietnam."

Ericsson is quoted on NYSE and borrows money in the US. If you don't want to follow US laws prohibiting bribery, then just don't do business in the US...

1) the CEO is being a bit cute with his references to historic conduct. The problem that he is paying more than $200m to resolve happened on his watch. Ericsson spent a lot of time and money negotiating a sweet deal that avoided Ericsson being convicted and reducing the financial pain. And now because Ericsson wasn't straight with the Dept of Justice, the company will be convicted (which will make it very difficult in public procurement - like when they want to sell to state-owned telcos), and they will cough up ANOTHER $206 million.

2) Ericsson just laid off 1,400 people in Sweden. How many of those jobs could have been kept if the company didn't have to take the cashflow hit of throwing away another $200 million?

Such a shame they funded dodgy politicians and possibly Islamic State, shareholders (ie your pension fund) lost value, and honest workers lost their jobs - all because some sweaty salesmen wanted to take a shortcut.

To the Moon? Emojis can be financial advice, says judge

Re: emojis used in certain situations can only "objectively mean one thing" – financial advice

El Reg and you missed the point here:

"Although the literal word 'profit' is not included in any of the Tweets, the 'rocket ship' emoji, 'stock chart' emoji, and 'money bags' emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment," Marrero wrote.

The judge didn't say it was advice, they said it was a promise of financial return. The defendants aren't being accused of giving unlicensed or poor quality advice.

"Isn't the only reason people buy baseball cards as collectables is that they think they will go up?"

1) No. Some people just like to have them because they're fans. The name "collectable" as opposed to "sellable" is a bit of a clue.

2) in any case, the test is not whether the value of the thing will go up, but whether the buyer reasonably believed the value would go up as part of a common enterprise with the seller. Sotheby's will never promise that your Van Gogh will go up in value, and if it did, it's not because Sotheby's was going to be doing anything about it.

Uncle Sam to block Adobe absorption of Figma over monopoly fears

Re: "Figma co-founder Dylan Field said this wouldn't happen"

Maybe Adobe should have bought Ligma instead.

Africa's internet registry has sometimes needed financial assistance to keep operating, could fail, warns ARIN head

Re: Oh look, someting in Africa is being mismanaged.

Silly comment. Nominet just had its own governance problems. This is not an Africa-specific problem.