* Posts by Voidstorm

68 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2018

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Apple sues 'amoral 21st century mercenaries' NSO for infecting iPhones with Pegasus spyware

Voidstorm
Big Brother

I have to ask this ...

... Which governments, in practice, *haven't* NSO sold to, and

Of those not sold to, did they all have something better at can opening of their own already?

Don't think the tinfoil Faraday Cage is gonna work on this one, Jack (Ryan)

;) 8)

It’s not true no one wants .uk domains – just look at all these Bulgarians who signed up to nab expired addresses

Voidstorm

Re: Should we just be phasing out .co.uk

Well, you can't really blame somewhere like Tuvalu (*.tv) for making dosh from it's domain space; the real problem is the aspect of "regulatory capture by greed".

Remember those infosec fellas who were cuffed while testing the physical security of a courthouse? The burglary charges have been dropped

Voidstorm
Facepalm

These days, the stupidity of both governments and petty officialdom seems utterly limitless, and this incident merely reinforces the old adage "The law is an ass".

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Voidstorm

Re: So, to sum up. . .

By the admission of their own mouths, the Leave campaign lied to the electorate.

If that wasn't a huge factor in the result, why not poll again??? /lol

Voidstorm
Childcatcher

Re: So, to sum up. . .

Hell, the original referendum was a 38/36/26% split between leave, remain and fucked if I know.

How that becomes a quorum "majority" from the electorate is beyond me. It's more like a hung parliament...

oh, wait.

Johnson et al totally fear that a second referendum, far from reinforcing their position, would go the other way, as posters elsewhere have hinted that a million new voters would likely overturn the first result.

Given the scale of BS spewed by the leave campaign, that would not suprise me.

Which is why they are pulling this undemocratic shit.

YouTube algorithms mistake sparring robots for animal cruelty, gamers snooped on via Xbox AI, and more

Voidstorm
Black Helicopters

also #JokeAlert

See, Mother? I told you the telly was recording everything we said!!!

Get the Tinfoil out, quick!!

*twitching eyelid*

/lol

Seriously, however, this probably does run foul of the GDPR. Watch corporate slurprats go "No Fucks Given".

Pokemon Go becomes Pokemon No as games biz Niantic agrees to curb trespassing addicts

Voidstorm
Joke

You have to wonder if ...

... the conspicuous racking sound of a shotgun slide would get their attention.

Good luck catching the Rottweiler with your pokeball, bud.

Brits are sitting on a time bomb of 40m old electronic devices that ought to be recycled

Voidstorm
Black Helicopters

While that's all well and good...

... I'm still using an HTC Incredible S.

I don't need a wrist-mounted mini desktop computer where a phone will do, sort of.

Since most of what I do on that is phonecalls and texts. :]

Don't ask me how old the thing is, either...

Overseas investors eat the UK tech sector for Brexit: More cash flung about in 7 months than the whole of last year

Voidstorm
Devil

Re: Wouldn't you say . .

...someone's been reading the nastyparty playbook :]

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

Voidstorm
Black Helicopters

Of course...

The bit we seem to be allowing to pass uncommented is the claim that the corprats were slinging backhanders to Significant Local Officials.

So, of course, an excellent way to divert attention from that is to fire the whistleblower.

It happens, no?

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Voidstorm
Pirate

Coming to a solar system near you : Weyland-yetani Moon and Asteroid mining.

By the way, can you just nip to these coordinates and have a dekko at that location? Don't bother with masks, it's perfectly safe...

'AI is not the cause, it’s an accelerant. The pace of change is challenging' Experts give Congress deepfakes straight dope

Voidstorm
Big Brother

Politics : "We must see to it that our lies are the only ones people believe"

Freedom : *chokes on the hypocrisy*

When virtual mittens sell for thousands, of course gamers are ripe targets for cyber shenanigans

Voidstorm
Holmes

I have this fabulous tulip bulb to sell you, for the mere cost of a house.

Value is perceptional.

Even the value of hard goods is subject to supply and demand, and virtual goods are no different, in truth, than a tulip bulb, a house, or a gold bar, or a bitcoin.

If a virtual object is hard to obtain, it will have value to somebody.

It has taken work to create, or skill to obtain, or luck to find, so it has value as a target for crime.

Kenshi: Sandblasted sword-punk D&D where the dungeon master wants everyone dead

Voidstorm
Pirate

Re: " the dungeon master trying their darnedest to kill you"

on the contrary, our job is to *not quite* kill you. ;)

Not wanting to share Facebook's fate, Google puts devs on data diet, tightens lid on cookie jar

Voidstorm
Facepalm

Summary...

Google slurpage to continue;

Ad Blocking to be disabled;

Third party dev's to be hindered.

Riiiiiiight. Great News! /sarcasm

We ain't afraid of no 'ghost user': Infosec world tells GCHQ to GTFO over privacy-busting proposals

Voidstorm
Mushroom

" Jake Moore, a security specialist from infosec biz ESET, opined: "This makes a mockery of the fundamental basics of encryption. Not only is it going against what privacy is all about: if you create a backdoor for the good guys, the bad guys won't be far behind."

"

This. When will the idiots-in-power realise that you can't keep the "master key" out of the wrong hands?

Wannacry was enabled by a leaked NSA system breaker, FFS.

They NEVER LEARN!!!

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Voidstorm
Trollface

Re: And that, ladies and gentlemen...

Of course, that means your DNA is now in the hands of whatever unscrupulous bastard fiddled with the package

Voidstorm
Joke

Re: I will not attribute your post to malice, never.

Remeber that even if "It looks like a duck, it swims like a duck, it quacks like a duck, its mother and father are both ducks" it could *still* be a bloke in a dress.

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

Voidstorm
Black Helicopters

Governments hate having their secret naughty behaviour made undeniably public, right?

That makes me look at the so-called criminal prosecutions of this fellow with a very jaundiced eye indeed; he's publically shamed the whole US government, who were up to no good, and now they are hitting him with the biggest stick they can find.

UK's planned Espionage Act will crack down on Snowden-style Brit whistleblowers, suspected backdoored gear (cough, Huawei)

Voidstorm
Mushroom

Re: An interesting test...

Or, to put docs data another way :

38% of the electorate voted "Leave"

36% of the electorate voted "Remain"

28% of the electorate voted "Fucked if I know"

Is it truly a suprise to anyone that a consensus can't be reached, either in public or in parliament?

The tories ran with the part of the vote that suited their agenda.

To call it a majority when 64% of the electorate DID NOT CHOOSE that action is, frankly, offensive.

and the decision to run with a non-binding vote from less than half the population is continuing to bite us all in the ass...

Voidstorm
Black Helicopters

Re: people who "betray" Britain

The true problem with this sort of "fudgislation" [that word reasonable and its ilk, etc] is the uses to which it may be put not simply by the encumbents [who are bad enough] but by an unanticipated future regime.

After all, the people only get input about who forms the government ONCE per five years, these days.

And, of course, talking about impeaching a legitimate government could be construed as ... yes, you guessed it... treason, which is defined as "whatever we say it is".

This sort of broadbrush lawmakiing is the worst kind, even if you trust the idiots that passed it in the first place...

Voidstorm
Joke

Re: Official Secrets Acts?!

Ignorance is no excuse <read this in a Judge Dredd accent for best effect>

And

The innocent have nothiing to fear

Caveat

Nobody is innocent until "they" decide they are.

<Translate "they" into whatever quango came up with "the next thoughtcrime">

;)

Voidstorm
Joke

Ze future Geshtapo government zanks you very much, Herr Javid.

Now, verr is ze Madonna viz ze Big Boobies?

Uncle Sam to blow millions on mind-control weapon tech that can be fitted without surgery

Voidstorm
Thumb Up

Re: Firefox

Also Macross ;)

Guess what shrinks when it gets cold and then you shake it around a little? The Moon. We're talking about the Moon

Voidstorm
Angel

Re: Cause?

Sloshing of the Soup Dragon's cave contents matey ... ;)

Hours before Congress backs robocall blocking law, guess what the FCC boss suddenly decides?

Voidstorm
WTF?

Just looked up...

the phrase "Regulatory Capture" in a dictionary and the entry said...

"See FCC"

/LOL

Japan's mission to mine Mars' moon is cleared – now they've filled out the right paperwork on alien world contamination

Voidstorm
Alien

Re: Die hard

... as seen in Species2. Until they figured out that sickle cell anemia was handy for killing the Mars Strain.

If you're ever lost on the Moon, Ordnance Survey now has you covered for Apollo 11 anniversary

Voidstorm
Joke

Re: Eagle-eyed?

"Read all about it! Moon replaced by giant inflatable for the last twenty years! Film at Eleven!"

Amazon’s Away Teams laid bare: How AWS's hivemind of engineers develop and maintain their internal tech

Voidstorm
Holmes

"Pathalogical avoidance of accepting responsibility when the shit hits the fan"

Google can't innovate anymore, exiting programmer laments

Voidstorm
Joke

"The inertia and infighting within an organisation scales [?exponentially?] with its workforce size".

I've worked in enough large organisations to "accept that as an axiom, Captain"

Which doesn't make it any less hard to do a decent job in spite of corporate bullshit, either :)

Zero arrests, 2 correct matches, no criminals: London cops' facial recog tech slammed

Voidstorm
Holmes

Re: Surely though

"Does our new Home Secretary have an unlimited budget?"

As far as its suits their political agenda, sure they do. ;)

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

Voidstorm
Terminator

There's always...

...some government asshole/idiot somewhere willing to use shit like this, regardless.

It's like a universal constant of human behaviour : "Somewhere there's always a big enough idiot in charge to do *anything*".

"Bad" people/organisations/governments do whatever crap they think they can get away with, right?

MPs slam UK.gov's 'unacceptable' hoarding of custody images

Voidstorm
Holmes

Re: DNA

Funny how the Nasty party wanted out from under that niggly protection of our fundamental rights, eh?

Brexit is so wonderful! /sarcasm

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

Voidstorm
Black Helicopters

Re: A Better System

Frankly, if a household has opted out of an ISP filter, then age verification from that point of access should be unnecessary, anyway.

The gubmint has enuff snooper lists already in hand...

Voidstorm
Paris Hilton

Re: Porn is too widely available

Somethiing tells me that the pimply youth of the UK will be the *first* ones to inventively find all the bypass techniques. That's how technology generally works, right? ;)

Seriously, why would any competent netizen voluntarily put that age verification info (credit card, passport, <insert other juicy data nuggets>) into a single-point-of-data-breach hive that's connected to the Internet?

Especially when said hive is acting-as-agent for the outsourcing gubmint? /lol

Oracle suspects Pentagon fell for a JEDI Prime trick: Amazon now accused of luring two officials with jobs

Voidstorm
Facepalm

Globally accessible centralised single point of failure...

"For those not in the know, JEDI is a massive $10bn cloud services contract that will migrate the entire IT infrastructure of America's military to a single cloud provider."

What could possibly go wrong, one asks? //facepalm

Just how rigged is America's broadband world? A deep dive into one US city reveals all

Voidstorm
Pirate

Re: Finally!

"Oh look : a speed test is being done!" *routes that traffic via superduper hi priority megafibre* "WOW, AMAZING RESULTS, your broadband is fine at 45MBps"

"Oh look, they are back to netflix" *hits the Nobble Button* "Jeez this sucks chunks, its like 3Mbps now"

The absence of net neutrality permits the above not so jokey scenario.

Yes, I'm a confirmed skeptic when it comes to monopoly telco assholes.

HMRC opens consultation to crack down on off-payroll working in private sector

Voidstorm
Mushroom

Re: Risk vs Reward

The HMRC know damn well they can't nail the big corporates, who cost the Revenoo (spit) tens of billions per annum. They're too big to touch, so they go for low-hanging fruit ..

... The little guys? Easy targets.

The worst part?

HMRC's Retroactive Application : if a contractor tried that shit on their invoices, they'd be laughed out of court.

Blood spilled from another US high school shooting has yet to dry – and video games are already being blamed

Voidstorm
FAIL

Oxymoronic...

The kind of kid that can't differentiate between the fictional world of games and the real world is the core issue.

So the tired old trope about videogames shoots its own foot right out of the gate.

The *kids themselves* are the problem, not the guns, knives, explosives or whatever else they get their hands on to commit mayhem. Including their hands.

Of course Mummy and Daddy's precious angel isn't fucking unhinged, oh no! /sarcasm

There's the problem right there : parents not being attentive to their kids going insane, with utter ignorance of a problem under their noses.

Open justice FTW! El Reg fought the law – and El Reg won

Voidstorm
Thumb Up

Basically: No, you don't get to do reams of naughty stuff and cover it up while each case against said naughty stuff drags on for years and you keep doing your underhanded shit all that time while getting off scot free.

This ruling says "Nope, not letting you hide your overarching bentness on a case by case basis. Everybody can see all your shit now and make up their own minds".

Pentagon on military data-nomming JEDI cloud mind trick: There can be only one (vendor)

Voidstorm
Facepalm

BOFH : Oh look, a single point of weakness. *clickety* Snigger. ;)

TSB outage, day 5: What do you mean you can't log in? Our systems are up and running. Up and running, we say!

Voidstorm
WTF?

"Load Balancer Errors" is the clue

Having been a client-server Java developer for many years, this is the sort of thing you get in a postQA environment when you rollout a live solution and the stress-test hasn't been done well, and the stress-testing environment doesn't replicate the live one sufficiently effectively.

The internal resource shortages (threadpool, database connections, config problems etc are good examples) don't truly manifest themselves until a *genuine load* hits the *live techstack*; even with the best will in the world.

The fact that all three front end layers (Web, App and In-branch clients) are evidencing "Javabean" errors speaks to problems at the server layer of the architecture; hence the restrictions on number of logged in clients => less chance of server resource exhaustion.

Clearly there are issues with the not-so-adequate scale of the backend infrastructure. From experience, these are the hardest to assess from the point of view of a development team; even if the solution is properly written and tested, and passes QA, the live environment can hilight resource problems where the infrastructure isn't well provisioned.

And thats assuming a perfectly solid Dev/QA process, into the bargain

Hookup classifieds ad sheet Backpage.com seized in Feds shutdown

Voidstorm

Quote : "I have no problem ... and locking them up forever"

Funnily enough, there was a group of people about whom a very similar expression was made.

Who was it now....let me think. Aha. They were called "Jews"

The people branding them scum of the earth? ... The Nazis in germany in 1938.

The problem with your sentiment? Apart from freedom of everybody being eroded one statute at a time, and the sex workers getting forced into the shadows by this shit?

Backpage aren't selling the kids. They are what you might call a third party platform. Like Amazon. Twitter and many others. The madness of these Orwellian laws will not stop at backpage.

No sir.

Voidstorm

Exocet missile used to kill pit viper, whole Zoo destroyed by "Accident" (not)

The genuine issue here is that the US statutory authorities were advised that an explicit and visible crackdown on **sexwork generally** would not result in public support.

They were informed that if the narrative were spun as being "anti-sex trafficking of minors" then bills such as are mentioned in the article could easily be passed.

Lo and behold.

The size of the problem being *ostensibly* targeted has long been overstated by three orders of magnitude (The FBIs own case statistics bear that out). A huge population of NGO's has grown up on the back of this anti-trafficking rhetoric, getting millions of Federal tax dollars a year, for a problem with a magbitude of hundreds of cases, based on rehtorical claims of hundreds of *thousands*.

When you look into which organisations are behind the political figures, a disturbingly puritanical list of anti-sexuality, anti-sexwork groups comes to the surface. Don't take my word for it, go look yourself.

Thanks to the breadth and looseness of the legislation, a woman who is a sexworker, entirely voluntarily and excercising her own free choice todo so, can be arrested for (driving herself across a state line) er we mean "trafficking"

These laws in effect dispense with burden of proof, and leave the arrested person facing asset seizure and federal penalties of decades in jail for "trafficking" *herself*.

Yes, It's that bad.

If I were to say to you "Better 999 innocent people suffer, than 1 guilty person go free" you would be rightfully horrified. Yet that is *exactly* the mechanic behind these laws, as they are legislated and being applied.

They're after the pit vipers, sure, but nuking the zoo is the "silent agenda behind the one they're waving the big red flag for".

Go look at it, crtically. Then imagine your daughter/sister/aunt/mother is a voluntary sexworker. Like the majority, if you listen to sexworkers own accounts, are.

Now that's a bad trip: 880k credit cards 'likely' stolen by Orbitz hackers

Voidstorm
Mushroom

Re: The fines need to become much higher

Until the fines exceed the cost of security, there will be no incentive to fix stuff like this.

UK.gov told: Draw up code of practice for cops bulk-slurping car plates

Voidstorm
Joke

So, In a Blofeldian world...

The police national computer has records of practically any journey any car makes for at least two years.

Or "We know where you went last summer".

I'm wrapping my car in tinfoil, matey :) ... Hang on, there's the door... Oh, it's the special patrol group...

Facebook confirms Cambridge Analytica harvested profile data

Voidstorm

Interesting note...

The Whistleblower has had his farcebook account suspended, if his tweet on the matter can be believed.

I smell a Wumpus somewhere...

I couldn't give a Greek clock about your IoT fertility tracker

Voidstorm
Joke

Re: On heat...

It also means you could never show your face in Tesco's again, either. Badoom-tish. :)

Voidstorm

" Brings you trully natural feeling in mouth"

Alternatively : "Chinese kung fu theatre bring deep feeling in me". ;)

Brit film board proposed as overlord of online pr0nz age checks

Voidstorm

Or, in another scenario...

"Wrap them chairlegs in newspaper, Mother, they're inflamin' me ardour!" (Works best in a slightly posh accent) :)

One guy's porn is the other guy's art. Nobody else is entitled to be my moral censor : that's my job, not some government appointed control freak.

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