Posts by Dillon Pyron

Webmail-creating Trojan targets Gmail

Multiple images

I recently saw a system that used six images in a 2x3 array to form the characters displayed. It only worked if all 6 images were up there. Yes, you can still use some 12 year old making 10 cents an hour in some fourth world country to solve it, but it makes the computed solution very difficult.

Using the pr0n suffer solution depends on having someone handy (pun not intended) at the time.

But ...

Let's do the math. You pay a kid 10 cents an hour. He/She solves 60 Captchas an hour. That's 60 drones who each send 5000 emails before getting shutdown (I'm being generous to Gmail). If they get a .1% hit rate at $25 profit, that's $7499.90 after operating expenses. But let's call it .01%. That brings it down to $749.90. And since you're "working" 24x7, that turns into a boat load of money. I'm in the wrong business. And that's from one kid (probably 2, two tweleve hour shifts, I'm a benevolent employer).

US phish feeder jailed for seven years

Retitution?

Since he probably pissed away most of the money (and spent the rest on legal fees), the banks will probably get pennies on the dollar. What he really needs to worry about is some pissed off cowboy getting his address after he gets out and getting his own pound of flesh.

The Feds give you up to six months to settle your affairs before reporting to prison. That's a long time for someone to track him down.

I wonder how they caught him. Did he not know that the cameras at ATMs record the transaction information as well as the pictures?

Oz foetus becomes Facebook star

Facewhatever

Lester, Lester, Lester. 1000 lightyears? I doubt very seriously your WiFi connection would reach that far, unless you have an ungodly Yagi. More than just a Pringles can.

Um, wouldn't that be a nude photo? I've never been there (I'd rather be sitting next to Lester in outer space), but I'm pretty sure nudes are frowned upon.

My Corgi Toby is 9 and 5, Ruby is 3 and 5. That makes him about 67 and her 24. I guess I can start pages for them. Both graduates of the Exmoor Academy (I even have the diplomas and pictures, complete with mortar boards).

Lester, I owe you a link to some USGP pix. Maybe I'll post them tonight.

NASA weather error sparks global warming debate

Hurricanes and warm weather

Actually, hurricane patterns can be accurately forecast by the fluctuations in three weather systems. I don't have the material handy right now (of course I take every copy of Ocean Navigator to work with me), but I'll mail Austin the information tonight. I think the three are ENSO, NAO and one in the northern tropical Atlantic, who's name I have forgotten.

Google spinmeisters defend video refund policy

Class action

This has class action written all over it. At 99 cents a whack, this would yield what the usual class member gets in a settlement, anyway.

I've used Google Checkout once. I don't know of any vendors that use it exclusively. That would be like only taking Visa and not Mastercard. It might work for the Tonys, but a theater would crater in a few weeks if it did that on a regular basis. Everybody and his pet dog Sparky uses PayPal. If Google had the market share that PayPal has, there wouldn't be a second place, just a third and fourth.

Student reprimands Facebook for bad manners and exposed code

Just don't use it

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If this is Web 2.0, I'll wait for 2.1.

Most of the code is written by guys (almost exclusively guys, it seems) who have never had to write real code for the real world. Testing seems to be a case of "why, check this out and tell me what you think". No walk throughs, probably no design analysis, very little specing. Nothing you'd find at a serious software company. Not that there are very many of them left.

If you're going to post on Facebook or MySpace, you might as well post the following information: home phone, mobile phone, home address, car license number, credit card number, DOB, mother's maiden name, SSN (or equivalent for your region of the world) and nude pictures. I recommend, however, that you Photoshop the pictures first to enhance those physical features that typically need enhancing. Or go to one of the fakes sites and get one of those guys to do it.

YouTube-Viacom trial turns comic

Timeliness?

Let's see, how many times does Comedy Central show Stewart and Colbert? Twice? Once at night and again the next day. So when the shows turn up on YouTube the next week, just how much are they losing?

"Mr. Redstone, since the shows first started appearing on YouTube, how have the ratings been affected?"

"Umh, erh, The Daily Show is up five points and The Colbert Report is up six."

"How has ad revenue changed in that time period?"

"Well, ah, ad revenue for The Daily Show is up eight and a half per cent and for The Colbert Report it's up seven per cent."

"How much of a loss does this equate to?"

Microsoft delivers critical fixes for Windows, IE and Excel

zero day

Haven't looked. How many zero day exploits came out today? The Wednesday after Patch Tuesday is traditionally Zero Day Wednesday.

RIAA: Pay as we say, not as we do

In the US

One of my colleagues won a case against a client who had stiffed him for $73,000. They did the same thing, not returning phone calls, etc. So he got a court order, which can be issued without the other party being informed, seizing assets. Went into their office and took the most of their computers and some miscellaneous office equipment. Well, at least he started to. When he and the marshals left, he had a check. He then sued them for legal expenses relating to the seizure. They paid that one up a little quicker.

So collection can work. Of course, sending somebody over with a baseball bat would be more entertaining. And probably more effective in delivering "the message".

Sony threatens to evict naughty gamers from Home

vs MS

Wow, is Sony slipping up? We'd never hear MS admit that they can track you to your home. Not that they can't. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they can tell who's playing the Xbox 360 by matching button patterns.

Not that I'm worried, I don't game. And I don't have Vista.

Google denies Oz-blurring black op

Images?

You mean they wouldn't have been there last year for on site reconn? And what are they going to do, drop bombs on it from 10,000 feet?

OTOH, the "terrorists" could be as dense as the guy who was googling safe cracker instructions while I was on site.

Forensic data stolen in server theft

Police reports?

Are police police reports a matter of public record in the UK? If so, guess who's highly guarded secret location just got outed.

I too find it ironic that a server has been stolen from a security company. Not a laptop, not a disk drive, but a whole server. How does that get out of the building without being noticed? This has all the marking of a Monty Python skit.

"Good evening, officer"

"Good evening. Say, what's that you've got in your pants?"

"Oh, it's nothing"

"Looks like something to me"

"Okay, actually I'm very popular with the ladies, if you know what I mean"

"Oh, in that case, carry on" wink wink, nudge nudge.

Land Registry denies ID fraud risk

Tejas records

Hmm, I can go down to the Travis county courthouse look up anybody's records. Mortgage and deed filing. Tax assessments. Reported sales prices. Plans. Plat maps. Liens. All for the amazingly low price of FREE.

Or I can wait about a year and do it online. They don't have a solid price on it, yet, but they are looking at offering a one time charge and an annual user charge. The one real pain is that there is no requirement that sales prices be recorded. Which is a pain when it comes to determining FMV for tax assessments, especially on the pricier houses.

Intel and Symantec team up on 'bare metal' security

DRM and TPC

MS has a lot invested in TPC. It will load DRM at the hardware level and, in theory, prevent anyone from breaking it, regardless of application or OS. OTOH, it may just break a competing OS. Imagine if MS owned the patents to the interfaces for TPC. Everybody who thinks this couldn't happen please return your heads to the sand.

'Hush drive' hand-launch spybot for US special ops

Handgrenade weight

The current US Army issue handgrenade weighs about 340 grams (12 ozs). This according to Jane's. Six munitions is an okay load.

But a laser designator would be dandy. Much better than having a manned aircraft loitering. Or having some poor sap spend three days sneaking up on his target and then hoping some goat herder with an AK doesn't walk up behind you. Or find out that your "friendly" cell leader left yesterday.

Ex-CA boss Kumar checks in for 12 year sentence

Training for new skills

Most of these "prisons" have programs to teach new job skills to the inmates for their eventual release. He'll probably learn how to work on cars or something similar. Like becoming an installer for Verizon or as a firefighter. Or both.

Droid pilots beat humans at air-to-air refuelling

Ever been there?

It's bitch hard and scary. And I was in the back seat watching. The Navy puts the the drogue on the tanker and the probe on the fighter. The Air Force puts the probe on the tanker and socket on the fighter. Quite hairy to watch a 25 foot sword coming at you. The fighter pilot has to hold position while the probe driver puts it in position. Kind of like taking a running f*ck at at 6 foot doughnut from 25 feet away.

Yahoo! tops! Google! on! customer! satisfaction! survey!

How? do? you? handle? Which?

It's all part of the Yahoo! culture. I've heard from people who work there (not friends, just at a party) that some people there are actually amused by el Reg's Yahoo! headlines!

Telecel Zimbabwe to lose its licence

Limited internet infrastructure

With limited internet infrastructure, we don't have many spammers and scammers coming from there. I really don't see any value of Zimbabwe as a country. They can't even screw up properly.

Buffer the Overflow Slayer v. the ActiveX Files

Come to my website

Good friend, I am welcoming you to come to my website and exploring the newest in gameing inovation. I am providing a unversal translator software that will be making your gameing experience wonderful.

www.you-r-0wn3d.com

Thank you, Gen Obala Ngani, former deputy assistant minister of finance

I am also having $20,000,000 (twenty million dollars) to secretly export from my country.

Motorbike crash man fails to notice loss of leg

Blood loss

Losing your leg below the knee would result in massive blood loss. I'd be surprised if he hadn't fallen off the bike in another minute or so. Traumatic amputation requires immediate attention.

Do we have verification from an independent source? I'm not calling bullshit, just a little skeptical.

Porn company Perfect 10 sues Microsoft

Wrong targets

Shouldn't they be suing the sites that are posting the ripped off images?

$4M a month? There are sites that make over $4M a week. It's been claimed that the "adult entertainment" industry makes more on the net than the rest of the net put together. I find that kind of hard to believe, but I don't find it hard to believe that it's the leading money maker.

UFO lover 'lost three ton asteroid in office move'

Have you seen it?

Has anyone actually seen it? Or has he kept it under wraps? His insurance is going to want serial numbers before they pay on a mysterious disappearance.

US wiretap plan will leave door open for spooks and hackers

Encryption

If it's worth the NSA's time to look at it, it's worth my time to encrypt it. At present,I don't think they have the capacity to break it.

Now if only someone will produce a VOIP product (computer to computer) with stream encryption. Something like what the NSA and CIA uses at present.

World's oldest person pops clogs at 114

99 and 2 days

My goal right now is 99 and 2 days. That will get me to my 75th wedding anniversary. But first comes June 21, 2030 and our 50th.

Qualcomm loses general counsel

Personal reasons

That means the board let him have it without lube.

Novell owns Unix copyrights after all

SCOX

You mean NASDQ. Right at $.44, down 72% or so. Volume 6M, average volume 164K.

If you understand anything about American gang culture, you know why I'm having a tear drop tattooed under my eye.

Silent bandwidth battles at BT

That's ISDN

Jim, most telcos refer to BRI as an ISDN service. Southwestern Bell/SWBC/SBC/AT&T does and has. And a T1 is T1 (but nobody calls it E1, for what I can only guess are chauvinistic reasons). Interestingly, most of the T1 installations I've seen over the last three years have been fiber.

Spammers debut FDF spam

By the time you see it, it's too late

Usually by the time you see it, it's too late to take advantage of most p&d scams. You can try writing put options, but the market is often illiquid. You also run the risk of finding yourself investigated. While it's true that most likely nothing will come of it, you'll have legal expenses to cover. And, "most likely". Many, many people have gone to jail on the backs of circumstantial evidence.

Germany enacts 'anti-hacker' law

Re: remind me

Yep, can't take any of my computers with me. Even my personal use computer has things like netstumbler on it.

Hmm, I wonder. I've got a Windows laptop that only has the nessus client on it. Is that a "hacking tool". It doesn't do anything to the network. All it does is talk to a very large Linux box behind my firewall that can probe a network quite efficiently. But that's located in the US.

Yet another poorly written law. That will have so many exceptions written into it that it become indecipherable and toothless. But it will keep computer crime out of Germany.

I'm guessing that companies like ISS IBM will be bailing out of the German market.

Sprint helps fuel parental panic

The children

But think of the children!!

If you get busted for public urination, you can wind up being required to register as a sex offender if the DA chooses to elevate the charge to indecent exposure (google "Williamson County Texas prosecuter" for the chances of that happening). Any largish city has plenty of guys (and a few girls) who find themselves needing to take a leak while making the 2 mile walk from the bar to their car.

And what will you do if you find that your kid is walking by a sex offender's house? Call the cops? This is just another paranoia inducing "service". I'd rather have credit watch from my credit card company (which I don't have) or road side service from my mobile carrier (which I don't have). Free? As if anything were "free".

BT rubbishes BBC bandwidth throttling reports

Usage limits

How much BT Vision would one have to watch to hit the GB limit? Or does that not count against your limit, since BT is providing it?

Accusatory minds want to know.

Facebook quells fears over code leak snafu

I wonder who might have done that

Imagine, after all this uptime, that a server is "suddenly" "misconfigured". What could cause that? Kernel rebuild? Apache rebuild? Application install? $5000?

NASA inks deal for Shuttle replacements

Whither SSTO?

Where did DCX and the X-33 disappear to? There was some very promising technology for a reusable single stage launch vehicle. This offered us decreased cost over the longhaul. Like the Shuttle, the initial expense was higher, but as you got more launches, the price per launch goes down.

I noticed that at no point in the article did you use the world "aging".

Firefox leak could divulge sensitive info

That's funny!

"As usual, the best workaround in the interim is NoScript, provided the site exploiting site has not been authorized to run javascript. ®"

That's really funny. I'll bet if you do that, they'll also have a list of your NoScript whitelist and blacklist. I'm guessing that these exploits can be tagged into any suitably vulnerable site, so that could actually be a hazard.

Now that's not very funny!

Moto Razr² debuts in US... almost

$300? WTF!

Makes the iPhone almost look palatable. But I can get it with 3G.

Peterborough bloke warned over 'offensive' t-shirt

Current t-shirt collection

"Let's get drunk and screw"

"When in trouble I call 1911" with picture of a Colt 1911.

".308 holes make invisible souls" with a picture of a Remington 700

".50BMG, reach out and touch someone" with a picture of a Barrett

"I didn't climb to the top of the food chain to become a vegetarian" Salt Lick BBQ

"QQQQ"

"Will not hack for food" DEFCON 8

"I am Jack's overwritten stack pointer ..." DEFCON A

"This T shirt is a munition" with the encryption algorithm. This is a really old one.

"This T shirt is banned by DMCA" with a version of deCSS.

"Francis Uticus Cornelius Kirkland University" stacked vertically, with the first letter of each word in red and the rest in black.

"Eating out is fun" This was the advertising slogan of the Texas Restaurant Association in the 60s and 70s, only this one has a pair of shins splayed out.

Cops taser crap-smeared Oz clubber

Diseases

Plenty of diseases to go around from that kind of behavior. e. coli, norwalk, hep, HIV, etc. To say nothing of an officer or three getting smearing in the substances. He was obviously inches away from alcohol toxcicity and those people are incredibly difficult to contain.

In Tejas, LEOs and health care providers (which includes all EMTs, which means all firefighters and EMS) are required to be vaccinated for Hep A&B.

US punters gobbling up mobile data

Voice charges

Yes, mobile users are charged to both call and receive. Unless your provider decides otherwise. But since most everybody is on a minutes plan, the carrier only makes out if you don't use all of your minutes (or a fair chunk of them) or go over. I'm paying about $.10 a minute, but if I bought a pricier plan, my per minute rate would go down. And AT&T gives free mobile to mobile between AT&T customers and if you buy into their new "Unity" all in one plan, you get free calls to and from all AT&T customers, mobile and land.

Hacktivists attack UN.org

SQL injection?

That's one of the first things I demonstrate! It's incredibly easy and the skiddie tools make it even easier. If you've got the cash and can set up a convincing "company", you can buy some really good ones from **********.

If they haven't patched that one, there are tons of others that are still open. Some people think that just because their server is branded as "secure" that they don't have to worry about the underlying applications. Fools, suckers, sheep, 0wn3d. All apply.

US Customs gets kill-droids for Caribbean

And the response time is?

So these drones can spot the illegals crossing the border from miles away and get close enough to get very nice pictures. But by the time Border Patrol gets their, the illegals will be in Phoenix, having a cervasa and laughing at the toothless Reaper.

My tax dollars at work.

iPhone thumb trim hoax gets online media buy-in

80 wpm

I can type anywhere from 80 to 100 words per minute on a typewriter, where you need to do little things like carriage returns.

QWERTY is easy to use once you learn how. I touch type.

Who remembers the Write Hander? Is anyone actually using the Dvorak?

Net bride Aussie kidnapped in Mali

Russian brides

Most of the offers I get a for Russian brides. After all, "Russian women know their place in the home and how to please their man". And they are all knock down beautiful.

But my wife won't let me get one.

Securo-prof claims to invent new, much deadlier dirty bomb

You don't even have to kill anybody

How many people in the US died from eating contaminated Peter Pan peanut butter? I had almost finished my jar when the warnings came out. And I had been giving Toby (my Corgi) his meds with it for several months.

But people panicked.

This latest report is sure to spark fear in the hearts of the great unwashed masses. "Oh, oh, something with a .00001 probability of happening just might have a .0001 probability of killing me. I'll run and hide right after I finish eating this fat and cholesterol laden Big Mac and extra large fries."

Web designer-turned-hacker avoids jail

Suspended sentence?

In Tejas, a suspended sentence means an 8 foot drop on 6 feet of rope.

Again with the sensitive information

Another stupid luser keeping unencrypted sensitive information on a publicly accessible site. While I'm opposed to the "blame the victim" defense strategy, these people (generic, not just this case) are fools.

ATI driver flaw exposes Vista kernel

Accidental?

Did he accidentally release, not knowing that the flaw hadn't been patched? Or did he get tired of waiting for the patch to be released and finally out them? The world may never know.

My current customer has "hacking sites" blocked, and I wouldn't want to be seen on astalavista anyways.

Evesham boss changes tune on tax break scheme

foot in mouth disease?

Aren't you Brits having a serious outbreak of foot in mouth disease? Oh, wait, that's hoof and mouth disease. Never mind.

Google starts charging for storage

Say what?

$500 a year for 250 GB? I can get a 1TB NAS box for about that price. Or a 250GB USB/Firewire drive plus a night in a downtown London hotel. They have got to be out of their minds. I'm starting an online storage business. Any operation that pays for itself instantly and keeps the profits flowing is a great business model. And I don't even have an MBA.

Outlook grim as Cloudmark update crashes email clients

False positives?

What do false positives have to do with the issue at hand? It seems like Cloudmark was crashing Outlook, not producing falses (negatives, positives, who cares?).