Posts by doublelayer

Amazon exec's husband jailed for two years for insider trading. Yes, with Amazon stock

Re: Got too greedy yet.....

I doubt it, but it doesn't matter much. The comments about the people investing favorably apply just as well to the unfavorable ones. No insider, not much information, all public information.

UK tells UN that nation-states should retaliate against cyber badness with no warning

Re: That's a delusional idea

Both suggested approaches are dangerous because they are large files which could burden your server with bandwidth needs, increasing your bill and/or providing an attacker a method of launching a denial of service on you. A file designed to decompress to a much larger size is a more reliable method of getting there because it's only a few kilobytes egress from your server but, unless they clear up properly, takes gigabytes of their memory. Other approaches are to use your firewall rules to frustrate them. One functional approach is, instead of blocking them, allow them to initiate a TCP connection (send a synack) then ignore the rest of their packets. It will take them longer to time out the connection and in the meantime you're holding one of their sockets.

Re: That's a delusional idea

"That said, does that mean I can now launch attacks against France (OVH), Canada (OVH) and the US (AWS, Google, Azure) for hosting people that try to breach my websites? Or maybe get some compensation from these operators for not even checking for users with excessive 404 returns?"

Obviously not, but also don't complain too much about the lack of checking. They can't break an HTTPS stream any more than someone else. They don't know if those are 404s or 200s. The only way they could do that is to take information from the VM and break all its encryption. Since you operate websites, I'm sure you're aware how annoyed you would be if someone you used did that to you.

What they should do is have a more rigorous system for automatically registering abuse complaints, which could actually make a larger dent in the problem. But since we know they won't do that, just make sure the inevitable robots aren't finding the obvious holes they're thinking about. Or another useful tactic is to replace some file that you don't have and gets frequently requested with a zip bomb. I've found that works pretty well.

FTC approves $61.7m settlement with Amazon for pocketing driver tips

Re: So, let me see if I get this correctly

I think they likely did involve a team of programmers. That logic isn't simple enough to do by changing variables. After all, they have to do something if the customers didn't tip well enough some day so the drivers couldn't see that they were having their wages stolen, probably increasing their variable rate temporarily. That requires something to be done on ongoing data. They theoretically could have implemented that by telling the programmers to implement an abstract function that took a lot of parameters, but probably they wouldn't have gone to that much effort.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Re: The echo chamber at work...

"So a genius self-publicist with zero background in the hard science let alone bio-science is now an expert on mRNA vaccines.. I dont think so."

Nice strawman. Of course he's not. He corrected a person who knew nothing and whose statements were complete rubbish.

Imagine what you would say to me if I wrote a comment explaining that you are a mutant cucumber plant. I'm guessing it would be along the lines that there is no such thing and that you are A) moving around, which plants tend not to do, B) have a genome typical of humans, and C) do not have cucumbers growing out of you. I think you could manage to write this rebuttal without being an expert on cucumber horticulture. When the bar's on the ground, you don't have to jump very high to clear it.

Re: Critical Thinking

I've seen it done in a variety of ways. Usually, the less organized and more sincere the effort is, the better it turns out. Some critical thinking exercises took the form of example documents making claims where some were obvious rubbish, which acknowledges the problem but that's pretty much it. The better ones are just pointing out logical fallacies and letting students find them in claims. I also recommend class debates where students can find those fallacies in each other, and hopefully also their own arguments to improve them. Unfortunately, as much as that approach is tried, it works best when the students are interested enough to pay attention to that lesson and keep tracking things down.

Re: A new human race indeed

"You forgot about the auto-updates from Bill Gates."

One tried to install, but it ended up in a bootloop so I replaced it. Open source to the rescue. Now has anyone found a driver which lets me connect my vaccine bot to this USB port I had installed a while ago (XKCD)?

Re: In a stockyard...

They're probably using the non-epidemiological meaning, I.E. prevalent, not requiring external influence to exist. In strictly epidemiological terms, it is much worse as it is not in a steady state, but it meets all other requirements for endemism. Which area? That would be North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some areas do continue to require external influence, E.G. Taiwan. Australia is unclear but may be able to reach such a state. It is hoped that vaccination programs will force it out of epidemic territory into endemic territory and eventually into nonexistent territory, but that's going to require a lot of people getting the jab. To anyone reading this who can get it and hasn't, it's safe. Lots of people have verified this, myself included. Join us.

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Re: Hmm, awkward

"Typhoid Mary lost her liberty for egregiously refusing to believe that she was highly infectious, evidence be damned."

She did indeed do that, but she wasn't exactly given a workable alternative. The requirements originally set forth for how she could regain her liberty were going through an experimental surgery which had killed people and not working as a cook again. As that was her primary experience and the only one which would pay enough to keep her temporarily out of poverty. Meanwhile, other carriers who protested less were not isolated and infected others as she would have done. This doesn't necessarily make her isolation bad, but one has to admit that such a harsh protocol applying only to one person is at best unproductive in producing a health benefit.

On the topic of Pakistan, it is definitely coertion, and I'm curious what your definition of "forcing" is. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. I know that, whenever I'm in conversation with someone who refuses to get the vaccination, I have a strong urge to force them to get it after about five minutes and it's probably a good thing I don't have one with me because I would inject them there and then, probably doing it wrong and wasting the shot. However, doing something like this in a forceful way could bring with it several problems, including a probable increase in vaccine hesitancy next time. Since the article points out several other vaccines they haven't taken, next time is basically right now. Therefore, I would, despite my preferences for immediate vaccination, recommend that a more diplomatic approach be taken for now. Should that fail, perhaps a better approach for a forceful method would use an easier method of identifying people rather than hoping that all communications companies had perfect documentation.

Whatever you've been doing during lockdown, you better stop it right now

Re: Podcasts?

"Is there some sort of podcast RSS-like program I can use to queue them up and then forget about?"

Yes. Podcasts are one of the original purposes of RSS. Podcast feeds are RSS feeds with audio or video files linked in the articles. You can find programs which do the refreshing and downloading on most platforms. I suggest Antennapod for Android (check FDroid for it) as a nice free start option or the included one for IOS. If you don't end up liking those apps but still like podcasts, there are about two hundred alternatives to be found in the app stores. There are desktop clients too.

"And would it work on my bedside clock-radio?"

That depends what your clock radio runs, but if it has an internet connection, quite possibly. Or if it can act as a speaker for something else, you could run it on that.

You will find a bunch of podcasts exist out there, and a great many are rudimentary or uninteresting, just like everything else on the internet. Still, I've found a lot of them which I enjoy, especially while I'm doing other things where I can't be reading The Register.

It's completely unsupportable. Yes, we mean your brand new system

"If you allow your back office tech stack to dictate tech choices for your core products you'll have a company that can't compete or evolve."

I disagree. If you're like a lot of businesses, your back office tech staff know a lot more about the options than the people managing them. In turn, those technical managers know a lot more than any other department. Ask a financial person whether cloud is suitable for this deployment and all they can do is look at numbers provided by someone else. The tech staff and management should be able to tell you what cloud services they would use, what non-cloud alternatives exist, and eventually generate the numbers for the finance department. The people who generate those numbers are usually making the decision by the numbers they send, so you really need them to know what they're doing.

"Your back office is not unimportant and ppl shouldnt draw that conclusion simply because I say it shouldnt drive your tech choices. But efficiency gains should drive the cost and focus down over time for those support systems."

And depending on what "efficiency" means, that could kill your core service. Business people understand about long-term survival needs, where they will have to take lower profits for a while in order that they continue to have a revenue stream. They don't always go for that option, especially when they don't care about the long-term viability of the business, but they at least understand what it is. Efficiency which reduces quality is dangerous, and it is not difficult to explain this to someone else.

"In the story in the article, I would have refocused the team on the product platform (assuming those skills werent there to begin with) and thought long and hard about my dependence on skills for 'mainstream' systems that didnt make me any money. They had effectively invested in skills and capabilities that didnt offer a competitive advantage."

This is the dangerous part of your recommendation. The focus only on the things that make you money. Most of a business doesn't make you money, but it does permit the existence of the part which does. You have to look at each part that doesn't make you money, decide whether it is needed, and for the most of them that are, how you're going to pay for it. Lots of those things can be outsourced safely, but each outsourcing carries costs as well as benefits.

It's the responsibility of people like CIOs to do that kind of analysis. They have to be connected to their "back office" work because nobody else is going to do it. They need to know what outsourced IT is like, and whether the company can handle the costs involved. Outsourced support is sometimes doable but carries risks as described in the first reply to you. Outsourced administration is usually not because it involves a lot of information you need if ever something goes wrong. Outsourced hardware (AKA cloud) is reasonable but you have to spend some time checking out the financials because the cloud providers won't protect you. Outsourced design can work if you have someone internal who can take designs from multiple people and deploy them, but if the outsourced design people are doing that, then it's hard to replace them when needed. Outsourced development will work in the short-term but you could end up with a dependence on the provider if you're not careful right now. Those are things that somebody has to know and decide, and the operations people who never worked with it won't be familiar with the details.

Wine 6.0.1: For that one weird app on that one weird Mac

Re: Easier to run a VM

I know of at least two frameworks out there for copy protection which will look for and break on a number of indicators of virtualization. When I find such software, I refuse to run it, but it does exist.

Y'all ready to get back to the office this October, Facebook tells staff in the US

Re: Why?

A few attempts to study how productivity changes when working from home have found that it negatively affected people. Perhaps some companies are using those. If they are, they should probably know that another set of studies found that it had no impact or even improved performance, and there hasn't been much of a study about how much of the negative effect is due to people who would choose to go back to the office anyway. I'm guessing they all have some kind of metric for deciding these things, that the metric concerned hasn't been verified to make sense, and that they're going to make decisions anyway because which businessperson wants to read a statistician's report?

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Re: DSL Modem, RPI, DynDNS

It's not the Raspberry Pi that's the main problem in the suggestion. Everything involved is prone to failure and indicates a misunderstanding of Fastly. As compared to Mythic's deployment, the suggested system is a lot more fragile.

Re: DSL Modem, RPI, DynDNS

That would be much more reliable, wouldn't it? No way the stuff could go down unless it was emphatically your fault, right? Nobody else could fail you. Well, except for your DNS provider, which has also had a period of not working after an attack, your ISP, which could break your service for any number of technical or financial reasons or could cut your connection for running a server they haven't approved (depending on your contract), your power, which could fail because a transformer responsible for your circuit decided it's tired, your HTTP server which could run out of threads pretty fast when someone decided to spam a login page with credentials, your storage because people have been requesting a lot of different files which the small amount of memory can't cache so it keeps going to the storage and wearing it out, or the board itself when it overheats and throttles performance so often that the server isn't running very well anymore.

No change control? Without suitable planning, a change can be as good as an arrest

And also don't be simplistic

"Anyone who has worked in medium or large organisations will know that there are three levels of change control when it comes to code: (a) the organisation doesn’t have any, (b) the organisation has change control but does it sub-optimally, and (c) change is managed well."

And anyone who has worked in more than one knows that there are a lot more than three options and there's not a nicely compartmentalized right one. What the article lumps together as option B includes a lot of different ways to do change control wrong which have no similarity to one another. It's not three buckets. If we're being simple, it's a one-dimensional scale with the best points being somewhere in the middle.

You can have no change control. You can have change control which doesn't require notification of others or thorough attention to the required steps. That's what the article mostly talks about when it's describing incorrect application. But you can also have change control which is too strong, either because nothing can get done because change control is too onerous (and if that happens, don't expect stagnation, expect circumvention), or change control which puts a lot of responsibility on people unrelated to the change requiring a lot of explanation of the change to people who won't understand it and certainly won't identify problems. Or you could have change control which is implemented correctly in the sense that changes have to be reviewed but is incorrect because the focus is on approval by committee and not the method of anticipating or responding to problems.

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

Re: Just think and consider for a moment ...

"So they're being charged for distributing/running the handsets that the FBI etc. used to gather intelligence."

While this could theoretically be entrapment if the FBI's agents were particularly connected to them, I'm guessing most if not all of those people were distributing the equipment after getting it from others. If the FBI didn't sell them directly to the distributors, they couldn't have suggested it.

Re: Fabrication?

I think this is unlikely. Could someone find out who this is through extremely dogged research of several companies' files (not public), interviewing people in prison, tracking financial payments, and finally identifying someone with sufficient information to give up the new identity of the person they've identified? Maybe. It would take a while and it's not as easy as people here seem to think it is, but it could be done. I don't think that criminal organizations' petulance will rise to that level of interest when they could already be planning to assassinate the much more easily identified FBI and AFP personnel who did a lot more. Yet often they don't bother to spend the resources on killing those people because doing so carries no benefit--those people have already done what they didn't like and someone would replace them--and it also carries cost and risk.

A job well done

This is a great job by law enforcement in many countries and demonstrates the usefulness of thought-out targeted attacks as a method of identifying and tracking criminals. I applaud those who did this and I hope they're able to continue solving crimes like this. If we needed extra points to prove why encryption and security aren't the enemy, this is an excellent one. By hard work and actual policing, the FBI and its friends have done a much better job than they could ever hope to do by mass surveillance.

Law enforcement has methods of hiding people who help them. Also, this guy wasn't known by the criminals--they just wrote code for a company which interacted with them. I'm pretty sure most of those caught recently have never heard of them. Those caught a while ago might have, but weren't told who it was. They'll likely be safe.

Everything Apple announced: Tor-ish Safari anonymization. Cloaked iCloud addresses. Cloud CI/CD. And more

Re: Gotta sell new hardware

True, but that is because anyone running IOS 14 can upgrade to IOS 15 whenever they want. The overlap is useful so people remain secure while watching 15.0 and 15.1. If they're still using IOS 14 even when 15.1.2 comes out, maybe it's time for them to install it.

Re: Forced unlock?

If you unlock by biometrics, they are allowed to force you to submit the biometrics by taking the phone and forcing your finger on the sensor or showing it your face. Those who don't like this may only use a passcode or may use the shortcut to disable biometrics in a worrying situation, but in that case, they'll have to enter their passcode once to show the ID. They can be recorded doing this to obtain the code for future use. Failing to show the ID may itself be punishable and certainly would result in further intense questioning. I wouldn't use this feature either.

Re: Gotta sell new hardware

True, although they do patch old versions of IOS which are running on devices which don't run the latest, I.E. they don't patch IOS 13 but they do patch IOS 12. In any case, they are extending that protection to IOS 14 now even if you can upgrade, so that complaint was valid but is now closer to resolved by their decisions.

Re: Gotta sell new hardware

Not arguing that point, just exactly when it comes into effect. I have one of the Macs that isn't going to get the update, but it's still functional. I will still be comfortable running Big Sur on it for a while before security updates stop and I relegate it to offline Mac OS and Linux for online tasks.

Re: Gotta sell new hardware

Apple does tend to provide security updates for their operating systems even after releasing new versions. The machines they don't support will eventually become insecure, but it's not immediate. The only thing that will happen immediately on release is annoying banners informing users that new app updates are available but you can't have them because the OS update is required.

Why Apple is not Tor

"When browsing with Safari, Private Relay ensures all traffic leaving a user’s device is encrypted, so no one between the user and the website they are visiting can access and read it, not even Apple or the user’s network provider."

About that. The user's ISP is cut off this interaction, but the rest of that's likely wrong or definitely wrong. The feature supposedly integrates with Safari. Unless that's just a brand name for a disconnected feature, there's a good chance that the only traffic which goes through the system is traffic generated by Safari. That is the important stuff if you're worried about people stealing or compromising your data, but it isn't all of it. The rest of it includes plenty that can be used to fingerprint you. That can help to reassociate your traffic with your device if the attacker is sufficiently motivated.

The more important part is the suggestion that Apple can't associate your traffic. It's complete rubbish. They can do so by comparing logs of traffic usage. Such techniques are used for Tor already, and they work there too, but they're not reliable when used there. The reason: in order for it to work, the attacker must operate all the relays in use and Tor is made up of a bunch of independent relays so you have to spend a lot and hope that the random path generator has put the victim in your sights. Apple's system doesn't use independent relays. They operate every one of them. They can easily use attacks like this if for some reason they decide to. That is without considering that they could just log while forwarding your connection from relay 1 to relay 2. It's not using an open source protocol, so we can't confirm that they're not.

This is not a Tor-style privacy protection. This is an Apple VPN. It's probably fine as a VPN, and if that's all you need, it's probably safe to use. Just don't expect more from it.

Apple settles with student after authorized repair workers leaked her naked pics to her Facebook page

Re: Details

"Imagine Apple is turning out "privacy" widgets on an assembly line. A few isolated but dramatic failures is not nearly enough to critique their QA department. They need to do better, but at the same time they may *already* be doing better than any hypothetical competitor. Of course they would say that, but just because it appears self-serving doesn't automatically make it false."

This is missing the point. The problem is not that Apple has problems, everybody does and will, but that they're claiming superiority and using that unproven allegation as a measure to prevent third-party repair and regulation of their repairability.

You like analogies, right? Here's one for their argument. You work in a technology-related field, I assume. If you don't, assume for a moment you do. I do as well. I can be trusted to treat data with security in mind, but you're an unknown quantity who should not be trusted. Because I am better than you, you must not be permitted to work without my approval. By the way, my alleged superiority can't be proven by anyone because I refuse to give out any data, and I have a history of breaking clients' systems some of the time. You would definitely do worse; I should have a right to prevent you from working. That's what Apple's trying to do. This doesn't prove that they're worse than everyone else, but it does prove that their assurances are false and that their claim to decide whether repairers are approved is invalid.

"Or you can encrypt you local drive on a MacOS device but who does that."

A lot of people, because it's now in the setup questions and opt out. And it's enabled on IOS as long as the device has a passcode, which the vast majority does. All of which doesn't help you if the repair people ask for the codes, which they do.

Re: Details

"You missed about five million important points in your analysis."

As useful as that comment was in enlightening the person who wrote the original comment and those of us reading it, perhaps you'd care to list some of the important points? You obviously know what they are. Due to comment size limits, perhaps you can split it into five posts of a million reasons each. I assure you we wouldn't mind.

Re: Details

Let me clear up the problem.

"My point stands. Apple and vendor failed, but would an independent repair shop do better? Maybe yes, maybe no, it all comes down to details."

The answer is no. An independent repair shop would not necessarily be better. Some could do the same. However, that is not an excuse for Apple to ban them on privacy grounds when Apple-certified people are doing just as badly. That is the argument. Not that independent repair is always better, but that the excuse provided by Apple for not allowing it is completely incorrect as proven by this example.

Proof-of-space cryptocurrency Chia triggers HDD sales boom in Europe

Re: Just great

But proof of work actually benefits somebody, because it's hard to produce fake transactions fast enough to slot them in. Very costly, yes, but at least there's some purpose to it. Proof of space is not very helpful for anything. If they wanted to do a lottery system, they don't need to make empty drive space the method of deciding how likely you are to win. They could just do a straightforward lottery and forget the drives except for chain storage. It wouldn't be any weaker from a security perspective, although it's already weak enough that I wouldn't put money into it.

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

Re: Pay to Crim

Yes, technically, but who cares? The investigator who agrees to supply someone with explosives to see if they're really willing to blow up people but provides inert blocks is also failing to provide the agreed goods, but fraud doesn't matter when the buyer is a criminal. When investigating a crime, the police aren't responsible for fraud.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Re: Changing times

I'm glad you found one of them has some mental activity going on. Whenever I've tried such logic on people who believe in that or similarly bizarre theories, electrical or technical limitations are always dismissed. Either the conspirators are much smarter than me and know how to do impossible things or I'm just stupid and can't realize that technical things are much better than I thought they were.

Chinese app binned by Beijing after asking what day it is on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre

They're weirdly touchy

At this point, the Chinese government is not making much sense. Everybody, inside the country and out, knows that the government murdered a bunch of protestors and they know when that happened. Everybody knows that the government's actions are designed to minimize something, and the Streisand effect is strong with this one. I have to wonder exactly why they consider it so important to hide the event when it's far too late to deny its existence. I shouldn't advise dictatorships on propaganda, but at this point it makes more sense for them to just embrace the evil or at least lie about some details rather than trying to lie about the whole thing. The rest of their propaganda, both internal and external, is at least a bit more disguised. It's a weird decision for this to be the only thing about which they take the North Korea route.

Tiananmen Square Tank Man vanishes from Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, other search engines – even in America

Re: What's in a phrase?

What are the advantages of that? If we want to restrict who can add information, it makes more sense to have a public wiki with a difficult process to gain edit rights. A hidden entry point in case that gets censored, sure, but the main thing could easily be public.

Re: Call me paranoid....

I doubt that very much. I'm guessing a feature implemented so it works in China's censorship regime got expanded to cover everybody else too. Bad enough that they're operating there, but extremely unacceptable that they're extending any of it elsewhere. They say it was a mistake, and it does sound plausible to me, but that doesn't make it more acceptable.

Re: The DuckDuckGo boast

It's not really their fault that they use Bing as a component. If Bing blocks it, they didn't make any decision. The people at fault are the one who blocked it and the manager who either knew it or went to some effort not to know it (loop a few levels up).

Indian government to Twitter: Stop offshoring and outsourcing – or risk losing legal protections

Re: The world’s most-populous nation

I came here to say the same thing. I know this law is taking India in a Chinese direction, but that doesn't make them the same. Maybe one of us should send them a corrections email.

Can a 21.5-inch iMac beat the latest-and-greatest M1 model in performance? Kinda

Re: Aunt Agatha benchmark

The largest chunk of time in that challenge is probably the boot time plus any delay in finding the word processor in the UI. If we used a device without the features of modern computers to cut the boot time, we would probably beat the XT because saving on a floppy is slow.

Apple: We didn't take commission on 90% of App Store sales and billings

Re: Charm offensive

Web apps versus native apps is already Apple's argument. They're using your argument to support their walled garden. Keep that in mind.

Web apps are inconvenient for lots of reasons, which is why most apps are still native. While the systems exist for JS to do most of the things a native app always could do, most web apps don't really function like native apps. Most of them are tied to a backend service which does all the work, don't maintain persistence of everything, require network connections where a native app doesn't, or just run more slowly. Many app developers who like using JS use a framework where they write the frontend in that while keeping backend stuff in whatever on-device language they like. That often makes for a better user experience.

Re: Why not Amazon?

Well, if you're accepting Apple's logic, because Amazon's products are physical and not digital (excluding those products which are digital and still use Amazon payments), they don't come under the requirement. Or maybe just Amazon wouldn't accept it and they know it.

Re: Revenue $15bn, cost $100m

Apple pays for it. Out of their general revenue. Because they think it benefits them. They also charge the participants for some of the costs and could increase the ticket price if they needed to. It is not a value to the vast majority of developers on their platform who don't go to it and it has nothing to do with their store as it preexisted the store.

Remember Anonymous? It/they might be back, and it/they are angry with Elon Musk

"You often drive 400 miles without stopping to discharge/recharge occupants?"

It depends where you live, but if you're in a country like the U.S., Canada, or Australia, yes many do. Since you used miles, I'm guessing you are in the U.S., so you should know how much of that country there is and how long it takes to drive between major cities. Picking two cities that are in the same time zone, driving from Dallas to Chicago is a trip of about 970 miles and you'd probably recharge twice during that trip. Using a car which can refuel faster means you don't have to delay so much. It depends whether you expect to take such a trip and whether you care about the delay while charging, but there's an easy example to prove it happens. Many other city pairs are a lot further apart.

G7 nations aim for global 15 per cent tax on big tech and bin digital services taxes

It stands for off-shore financial center. Otherwise known as tax havens or where to hide your cash.

The policy of truth: As ransomware claims rise, what's a cyber insurer to do?

Re: Something intriguing

All that is fun, but let's be honest, it takes a lot of time and we programmers are lazy. The evil ones are too. Why go to the effort of manufacturing sneaky drives with a complex disconnected script which watches filesystem activity and implants itself only to find that it doesn't work because the users used something unpredicted when the script was written when you can email someone an executable and ask them to run it? It takes a lot of effort, time, and money to get those drives manufactured and sold and it's also a path someone could use to track you. Don't overthink it; the ransomware people aren't.

Re: What about theft?

It depends on your policy and how good they are at deciding it's your fault so you don't deserve payment, but maybe. In that case, they pay you for the loss, not the criminal.

Re: Rank pedantry

"If they are incompetent, how is the situation deliberate? That would be malice..."

Not necessarily. A decision not to have a reliable backup system because it costs less to insure against ransomware, and of course that's the only reason why one might need long-term backups, is very incompetent but is also deliberate. Failing to consider the need for backups at all is incompetent and not deliberate. That is the difference.

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

In my childhood, I was advised by a person close to me who shall remain unidentified because they're nice that this box was the CPU. Admittedly, they did make it clear that you turned on the CPU box in order to compute, but they didn't explain what CPU meant and I kept using the term until I learned on my own about the parts involved and realized how ridiculous it sounded.

Latest on iCloud storage 'outsourcing' lawsuit against Apple: Damages class certified

Re: Read it and weep

I disagree. It implies that Apple runs the system on which it is stored, which they do. It is encrypted as well for security. It doesn't suggest where Apple stores it, and renting servers from Amazon and storing it there doesn't change that. If I contracted you to store some data, then sued you because the building you put the tape in was rented from someone else, does that logic make sense?