Posts by _gh_

Attorney sues Microsoft for $1.75M, claiming his email has been useless since May

Re: real lesson

But it is his domain. (see the screenshot) He's been paying for it for years according to whois.

He's employing MS to manage his email which for the vast majority of small companies is the only rational choice. Even if you are big enough to have an IT team managing a mail server, especially with a legal firms retention requirments is an expensive pain.

Fortunately I've never had to deal with the O365 support org but if they are anything like the Azure org I wish him luck. I've only once ever managed to break through to a real MS staffer, and then it took 8 weeks. And at that point they confirmed what I had discovered empirically 6 weeks before (for backups of SQL databases using Azure Recovery Service Vaults an IOP is 8MB and so those 5000 IOPs for the premium disk hit the bandwidth limit of the machine at less than 100 IOPs) about 5 seconds after I re-iterated the issue for the umpteenth time.

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Re: 07734

Missing the 70s by 2 years my Casio FX180P is still in use - as it was released in 1980 it's probably still 70s tech - though the move from LED to LCD was a huge improvement for my high school/uni budget. From a new 9V alkaline battery each week during a levels to a pair of AAs every 5 years or so at Uni and ever since.

Canadian ISP Rogers falls over for hours, takes out broadband, cable, cellphones

Re: Don't you love their way of communicating?

Not sure about the rest of Canada but the age of POTS is dead here in North Vancouver.

We were to be moved to fibre based phone service so my last reason to maintain the landline went about a year ago.

Now I have to ensure that my ISP & cell provider use different backbones so that at least something works when the next outage occurs. Given that Rogers is trying to buy my ISP something is going to change unless the govt blocks it.

Basically it means that we'll be down to 2 providers for consumer ISP/Cable/Mobile Telus (that share a load of infrastructure with Bell) a telco that became an ISP & IPTV provider and Rogers a cable co that became a telco / ISP ...

Dig under the skin of the other providers and they use one of these 2 for infrastructure.

Info on 1.5m people stolen from US bank in cyberattack

Re: Identity theft protection services

When the offered "protection" is one of the credit bureaus I sign up for it because they already have all the headline data. That said I've never received any notification about "the dark web" from them. And of course not exactly top performers on the data protection front.

The service offered by my bank turned out to really be a marketing rather than security tool, by a marketing company - they wanted to install an extension to "verify" all web-sites (the Ts&Cs allowed them to profile and market the data). I never installed it.

The only dark web data that they provided were alerts based on Troy Hunt's HaveIBeenPwned site and even then the alerts were weeks behind the alerts from Troy.

Fitbit recalls Ionic smartwatch for burning fat – literally

I went through 6-7 in 2 years before I gave up and got another brand. They were always v. good about replacing them to the point where I thought they were too good at replacing them and should perhaps just manufacture the devices to be more reliable.

In the end I thought that most fitbits probably got binned or passed on after a short time which was why the engineering was not good enough for actual use (>3 months).

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Tactile computers

We were developing a system for taxi dispatch back in 90/91 (or rather the initial dev had disappeared and we were investigating whether we could rescue the project)

To do that we had to bring the server and one of the clients back to our office (the joys of early PC networking systems). Anyway we thought the devices were a typical PC beige until we touched them and stuck. After carpet bombing them with all the misco PC cleaners we had it turns out they were a rather elegant grey and the yellowed beige was a result of living with the dispatchers, a crew of 4 chain smoking women who could track all 60 cabs and their pickups for the next hour plus re-routing in their heads

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

i suspect the fb apps all try to very aggressively phone the fb servers rather than take a breather and try in a few minutes and flatline the infra-structure.

once had a client set up a monitor on their site that broke and so called and downloaded one of our heavier pages every second while the site was "down" - rather than the usual once an hour til we blocked them

Echelon gets the upper hand: Scores final nod for 100MW bit barn campus in Arklow, Ireland

1-stop shopping

Who says it isn't five-eyes branching out. How much easier to do the data intercepts if you own the site and get the clients to pay to maintain it.

Let's spin Facebook's Wheel of Misfortune! Clack-clack-clack... clack... You've won '100s of millions of passwords stored in plaintext'

Re: Sigh, once again (it's about weekly) I ask ...

That's the horrible method that HSBC canada used until recently - now they use an even better method where I have to talk to their call centre when I change my phone. Such a joy.

Oh ffs

Well scrap the security awareness training. A system in place for years, accessed by devs for that period of time nobody thought to question the presence of passwords when their security policy probably makes sharing passwords a disciplinary offence,

It's probably there because once upon a time someone wanted to be able to see the problems specific users were complaining about and no-one could be arsed to write a properly audit trailed time limited token (at some point someone does need to see what the complaint is about and most companies are averse to screen sharing (though that's getting better).

It probably also means that all the 2FA defences have a bypass in place for users within their campuses - what could possibly go wrong - 200 million IDs & passwords - clear text probably only 1GB all zipped up.