* Posts by Cav

384 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2018

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Kremlin accuses America of plotting cyberattack on Russian voting systems

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Re: An actual electoral mechanism to interfere with :o

Absolute garbage. Not a shred of evidence was presented in that movie.

Biden said his supporters should vote by mail. Trump said his should turn up in person. Both sets of voters, largely, did what their candidate suggested. It takes far longer to count physical votes than it does electronic, and they have to be stored somewhere. That's why Trump's early lead evaporated and why mail in ballots had to keep being brought in for counting.

It only requires a little thought to see the realities of the situation. But then, if Trump supporters were capable of even a little thought then they wouldn't be Trump supporters.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

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Re: Never

So, you want the content without paying for it at all? Why are you entitled to that?

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Re: "To blindly say "Pay or Ok" should be banned is ridiculous"

Targeted ads are, indeed, unnecessary nonsense but if that's the model a private company goes with then you either choose to use that supplier's product (the social media site) or you don't. Alternatively, you use it and take steps to protect your data. I use minimal, false details, layers of throw-away email addresses, don't provide phone numbers, use a VPN, use a privacy focused browser and ad blockers. Any site that refuses me access due to the use of the ad-blocker, that's fair enough and I respect that. I leave and find whatever I'm looking for elsewhere.

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Anyone that only uses social media to advertise their job openings is not worth applying to.

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Re: Great Idea!

Please stop using the offensive reference to rape. It isn't applicable, in any way. When it comes to these services there is always a choice. If you don't like what a supplier of any service does, then don't use it. It is entirely within your choice to decide to use Amazon or not, unlike rape, where there is no choice.

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Despite what many are commenting, it is a difficult situation. To blindly say "Pay or Ok" should be banned is ridiculous.

I'm rabidly anti-tracking and certainly not in favour of giving big tech free-reign. All choices should be clear and transparent. However, someone has to pay somewhere, unless you consider the likes of Facebook to be public services that should be publically funded...? So, either the user pays up front, for which absolutely no data should be shared with anyone else, or they get a "free" service supported by ads. And advertisers, rightly or wrongly, want to target ads.

No one has an automatic right to use someone else's property and that includes the likes of Facebook. They should be made to be absolutely open and transparent, and to not give 3rd parties access to data unless that is explicitly agreed to and confirmed, say, annually by the user. But Facebook belongs to Meta. If you want to use it then you have to either pay or agree to their terms and conditions.

So yes, regulators should enforce openness and transparency but, ultimately, if users want to use a service then they can either pay or agree to Ts&Cs. If they don't read those, and the information is presented in a readily accessible format, then that's the user's problem.

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Re: Great Idea!

Then everyone would have to pay and you automatically exclude those who can't afford to pay.

These services have to make money somehow.

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Re: Great Idea!

"the auctioneers don't pay me anything"

Not true, you get to use their service free of charge. You are paid "in kind" rather than receiving direct financial return. It's still payment.

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A minor point: "Flak" from the German FlugAbwehrKanone, not "Flack"....

And there is always a choice as to whether to use Meta's products or not.

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

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Re: deeper rot in the chocolate house

"Gemini was programmed with hidden diversity prompts"

No, it wasn't and the rest of your comment is equally conspiracy garbage.

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Re: Can't think why...

Go on, this has to be one of those failing AI's making this comment? No human could be that stupid?

OpenAI goes public with Musk emails, claiming he backed for-profit plans

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Re: Musk OpenAI and Microsoft

2 down votes. Is that you downvoting, Mr Muskrat? The comment is truth! How can nayone down vote it?

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Re: OpenAI Musk and Microsoft

"Not to mention, of course, that you have entirely missed the point: Assuming that what OpenAI have said is even remotely true it means that Musk's lawsuit has no basis."

That was the whole point of the article. They didn't miss it.

US politicians want ByteDance to sell off TikTok or face ban

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Re: Choice

Not really. It's a choice. TikTok, itself, is not being banned. Having a CCP influenced owner of TikTok is. The choice is between a non-CCP influenced owner and a CCP influenced owner.

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

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Re: Don't give money charities you cry...

Exactly! Right before the next general election, the Conservatives will bribe the electorate with a tax cut and that electorate will lap it up and be fearful of "tax and spend" Labour while they whine about services being cut and, as this fool argues, not funding everything in sight.

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Re: RNLI vs chuggers

You're another that has no clue of the economic realities of the UK. The UK government, rightly, spent billions supporting salaries during Covid. They are paying bonuses to families during the cost of living surge at the moment. They are also capping the cost of energy to consumers and paying the difference between true cost and capped cost to consumer energy firms. Where is all this extra money you want spent supposed to come from? And don't give me that crap about companies not paying their share. Direct energy producers (i.e. the people pulling gas and oil out of the ground) are making a killing with surging costs but before the UK government started compensating distributors, consumer resellers were dropping like flies. The UK is massively in debt, although that debt is now falling. There isn't a bottomless pit of money from which to keep drawing. And please don't say tax the rich or tax companies. Do you really want to drive away investors? Who will fund these companies?

It's the same idiotic thinking as Red Robbo, of the 1970s, that destroyed the UK car industry. Oh they can pay more and more and more, until they collapsed and the idiots wondered where their jobs went.

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Re: just stop it

Just admit that you are selfish. You know perfectly well that people want more choice in where their money goes, and it's not into general taxation for government to waste on subsidies for companies that don't need them. As someone else mentioned, government may not see situation X as a priority. If I do then that's where I want to choose to send my money.

Are you really advocating for government to decide where your money should go?

I know - I don't agree with how you spend your money. So give it all to me and let me spend it more wisely. I'll give you enough for the basics of life but any discretionary spending of your money should be my choice, not yours. See how stupid that sounds?

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BLM = good.

Uncle Sam intervenes as Change Healthcare ransomware fiasco creates mayhem

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Why is Hugh Laurie dressed as Uncle Sam? He does do a bloody good American accent.

Dems are at it again, trying to break open black-box algorithms

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Re: re: Far too much worry in Canada and the US about the "rights" of the CRIMINALS

Which has nothing to do with this debate.

Nevada sues to deny kids access to Meta's Messenger encryption

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"I can kill you with a rock, or a phrase"

If a rock or a knife is just as lethal as a gun the why did we invent guns? Why not arm the police\army with rocks or swords?

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

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Re: Well that's interesting...

"second-oldest continuously functioning nation on the planet" hahahahahahahaha and what's more hahahahahaha!

Not even in the top ten.

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

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Re: Cue Daily Heil headline "Euro Court Won't Protect Our Children"

"having phones is a peace-of-mind issue to parents,"

But they don't have to have smart, internet capable phones. We gave our pre-teen a dumb phone simply capable of making calls and receiving texts. That's all they need for the peace-of-mind requirement. It's also cheaper for said working class families working those extra jobs.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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"Your phone has been stolen. How do you persuade them to block it's number for verification if they want to send an SMS to it to verify it's you calling?"

Use your provider's mechanism for locking the phone and then verify your account by other means. I've had to reestablish ownership of Facebook accounts for my teens on a number of occasions when they've needed to change their numbers, usually due to stalkers. You aren't limited to a single verification method. If you ask to verify by another method, at the point of trying to get back into your account, not when setting it up, then you can specify a list of friends who can verify you, you can provide your date of birth and identify friends based on their photos. or you can be presented with a number of photos and asked which ones you might have posted to your account. You can also use another device that Facebook will recognize. e.g. I login to Facebook on phone and desktop. If my phone is stolen, Facebook still knows about my desktop and will let me recover an account from that device.

Facebook doesn't need a phone number at all so why are people providing them? I don't have mine associated with my account which appears to worry Meta as they constantly bug me to add one. I use an authenticator app and an email address that I've had for decades and will keep for the rest of my life.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

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Re: Mostly moaning morons

"The claim that someone's business policy precludes anything with "AI"-capable something pre-installed even if it's not used and can be explicitly turned off sounds completely made up or overplayed. "

You didn't read or comprehend the article.

"I just want to make it clear that I cannot use this product at the company I work for because security will not allow for a by-default AI implementation to be a part of the product"

It has nothing to do with "any modern mobile OS, Windows 11, Edge, Teams, Zoom, GitHub, etc." at all. Security would not allow a product of the company making said product to contain code generated, or potentially exfilterated, by a pre-installed AI. I.e. security are protecting their product and intellectual property, specifically from an AI development tool.

DEF CON is canceled! No, really this time – but the show will go on

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Re: Voting Machines don't get Hacked

"It would also help if the CCTV didn't show a few people pulling boxes out from under tables" So where are they supposed to be stored?

Wikileaks source and former CIA worker Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years jail

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Cue the comments from the intellectually challenged for whom everything is a conspiracy and for whom the US is the worst regime in the world. You are clueless as to the threats we face from truly oppressive regimes.

In one thread we see people attacking fellow citizens who purchase products from slave-labor-using China but in the next China, Russia et al are not the threat, the US is. Either you're stupid or Chinese agents commenting on this article.

There's no need to fake CSAM evidence. Schulte is going away for the rest of his life. If the US were truly the oppressive regime that the idiots posting here say it is, he would have just disappeared.

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Re: after the FBI searched

"they are suspected of falsifying information by so many." You mean "they are suspected of falsifying information by so many idiots".

"leaked hunter laptop data has those types of images"

For which there is no evidence that it was actually Hunter Biden's laptop.

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Re: the list is growing

Perhaps they, Assange etc, should stop carrying out crimes against the state. i.e. our security. Anyone who releases information that gets our intelligence people killed or captured deserves to be disappeared.

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Re: Really?

"If it's an easy task to break encryption, how come organisations like GCHQ have campaigned to remove end-to-end encryption from messaging apps like WhatsApp?"

That can't be a serious question; no one is that ignorant.

There is a huge difference between devoting resources to cracking one specific encrypted message, file container etc and routinely cracking messages, i.e. snooping, on mass messages apps like WhatsApp.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

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Re: But ... I thought computers didn't do Scottish

"England is "down south", that's all it means."

No, it doesn't.

Guess the company: Takes your DNA, blames you when criminals steal it, can’t spot a cyberattack for 5 months

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The company rightly blamed the "victims". Don't reuse email addresses and passwords.

I'm ancient and even I know how to set up mail forwarding from throwaway email accounts used for different services. Many of my throwaways forward to other throwaways before reaching my real email account. No one deserves to have their data stolen but if they are foolish enough to reuse their user names and passwords then they really only have themselves to blame. Use unique credentials for each service.

5 months to spot a cyber attack. It wasn't a cyber attack that can readily be spotted. It used the valid credentials of users who stupidly reused passwords from other breached sites. How would you differentiate between a legitimate user logging in and someone else using their account? Once logged in, the criminals then accessed information that others had willingly shared with the wrongly usurped account.

23 and Me could have used IP address checking and mandated MFA but customers don't want that. Even after their accounts were accessed many are still complaining about the potential enforcement of such inconveniences.

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Nonsense. Beneficial genetic modification in humans is very tightly restricted and has been for years. Creating new clones of people will not be acceptable, even if the technology you mention was even possible, in decades.

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Absolutely! I belong to a number of genaology sites and there are endless people complaining that they don't want to have to use MFA, even after the 23 and Me issue.

Ransomware attacks hospitalizing security pros, as one admits suicidal feelings

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Re: I worked in cyber security and also in forensics, I have quit because of stress

"but also regulations that punish the victims instead of the attackers."

Victims that don't defend their user's data deserve to be punished. And how do you imagine that any form of regulation, in the West, would have any effect on attackers in Russia, China and North Korea?

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

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Re: Right

"do-good politicians that find the production of electronic devices to cause pollution"

You make concern for the environment sound like a bad thing. Your statement is economically correct but idiotic with the "Do-Good" element.

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Re: Right

Most people can't afford 2000 whatever for a TV.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

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Re: @Andy The Hat - Big brother is creeping up behind you.

Wouldn't pass any standard of reasonable test.

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Re: Big brother is creeping up behind you.

Yes, why? If you don't like the current speed limits then vote for different politicians.

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Re: Big brother is creeping up behind you.

"if can only be a matter if time."

And rightly so. Easy to avoid. Don't speed, don't turn without indicating and be considerate of other road users...

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

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Re: Manchester Road

"Man Chest" makes sense.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

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Re: Fascist pigs now targeting kids

Let me guess, you are this guy, aren't you?!

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Re: Fascist pigs now targeting kids

I'm on the spectrum - an Aspie. I work in IT. I don't break into other people's systems and extort them, releasing private data if they don't comply. Nor do I get violent when things don't go my way.

This scumbag is where he belongs.

UK government woefully unprepared for 'catastrophic' ransomware attack

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Re: Expense

"God knows what its being spent on, but the money's there, but not the will or intellect."

Anyone with half an unbiased brain knows what the money has been, and is being spent on. Billions spent on paying people during Covid have not just been paid back overnight. Ditto for the funds made available to companies. Then we have the cost of making up the difference, to suppliers, in actual cost versus fuel charge caps. PLUS the direct payments to the population made to help them with the surging cost of fuel that resulted from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. UK debt increases are now slowing and debt is now failing as a percentage of GDP.

Millions of Xfinity customers' info, hashed passwords feared stolen in cyberattack

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Re: In a more direct way...

That's conspiracy theory level ridiculousness. Any company that is breached potentially loses customers, share prices can fall, fines are levied and they potentially have to pay for identity monitoring for a year, for millions of customers.

It's just an insane suggestion.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

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Re: Jedes Schrift'l ist ein Gift'l

"In Europe, when someone repeatedly does the same mistake at work, you can say "Please do it right, or there will be a problem" - no issue. Using that phrase in the United States Of America is like you being the mafia boss or James Bond villain petting his cat on his lap speaking those words, so it is interpreted as a near death threat. "

Garbage. I'm European, living both in the US and back in Europe. Your examples are nonsense.

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Re: Jedes Schrift'l ist ein Gift'l

"say "ass" any more in the United States of America due to the extreme Political Correctness of some people being offended"

It isn't political correctness. It's Puritanism of the conservatives. In progressive, "politically correct" areas, "Ass" is perfectly fine.

Microsoft seizes websites used to sell phony email accounts to Scattered Spider and other crims

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"That should solve the global cybercrime problem, right?"

Is the author, stupidly, saying that Microsoft shouldn't do anything?

Cloudflare dishes up the stats on internet traffic in 2023

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Re: Yet more Twitter snark.

Conspiracy nonsense. Brands, and anyone with any morals, just don't want to be associated with anti-semitic Nazi sympathisers or platforms that give space to cretins like Trump, Andrew Tate and Alex Jones.

There are no "attacks". Freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom from consequence. Just as Musk has the right to give voice to the scum of the earth, everyone else has the right to boycott it, advertisers included. If the idiot wants to give said scum a platform then they can pay for it or he can fund it. No one is talking of talking Twitter down. They are just using their own freedom of choice whether to use it or not.

Nearly a million non-profit donors' details left exposed in unsecured database

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"does makes one wonder how often this is done deliberately."

Only if you are paranoid with no knowledge of how much reputational damage such incidents cause.

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