Posts by NetBlackOps

Accounts whistleblower blackmailed Autonomy for a payoff, Mike Lynch tells High Court

I'm not so sanguine about that. It might be equally said, "HP, you are not in the US anymore." The rules are (quite?) a bit different on that side of The Pond.

Microsoft tells resellers: 'We listened to you, and we have acted' (PS: Plz keep making us money)

Re: Seriously

Those of us considered smaller resellers keep going through this where a firm thinks they can internalize the profitable sales, not lose very many sales that were a result of those smaller resellers, and extract some extra income in one form or another (e.g. internal licenses) and off said firm goes with a better balance sheet. From decades of experience, it never works out that way. It always has the opposite effect. I've no idea where they get this idea, it certainly isn't from historical data of IT firms. I used to think that MBA programs were about using case studies but somebody seems to have black holed the ones on this.

I severed ties with MS a long time ago as I saw the iterations of this already looming. The funny thing is that they approached me concerning becoming a partner, with all the supposed benefits, rather than the other way around. I've never lacked for clients, just by word of mouth alone. Adverts, promotiional material, &c? Nope.

[Final straw for me with Microsoft: Never had a competency nor a certification, outside the military, in my life. Demonstrated results seems to matter more to clients. Frag off!]

With heroes like BT and Openreach, who needs villains? ISP lobbyists' awards continue to vex

I kinda like the Darwin Awards although that's pretty self-selecting by the participants and the awards committee, once said committee stops rolling on the floor laughing!

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Re: Poor education

Back in the '70's, assembler was the second language I learned on the System/370. Fortran was my first which was okay, given my mathematical bent, but that second made it eminently clear what a computer could, and just couldn't, do. C and the rest to follow, as well as explaining CPU's and such to fellow techies, was a piece of cake forever afterward.

I don't think that'll help with the rest of the population though, no matter how many RasPi's and Learn to Code programs we throw at them. I've even met a frightening few that simply can't put together an ordered list of anything, even including how they start their day from laying in bed to going out the door. Yeesh!

IBM torches Big Tech's get-out-of-jail-free card, says websites should be held responsible for netizen-posted content

Some things never change.

IBM providing hardware, and now software, to one of the world's worst surveillance states. Back on my personal shit list IBM.

Re: Seems reasonable

The other part is "My ox won't get gored by this ..." type of thing. As you observe, you can kiss user content on smaller sites goodbye. IBM could care less about that.

Remember Stuxnet? You'll endure its hated-by-critics sequel if you don't patch your holey Siemens industrial kit

Re: Attacker could execute arbitrary commands through websockets

Well, I wouldn't and I'm legally insane. [Truth.] But, apparently doing exactly that is something done all the time in The Real World. Go figure.

JavaScript tracking punks given a thrashing by good old-fashioned server log analytics

I can live with this.

Take the bus... to get some new cables: Raspberry Pi 4s are a bit picky about USB-Cs

Re: Potentially User Fixable???

I remember that one for my TRS-80 Model I. I also has quite a few soldered hacks in both my Amiga 1000 and 2000 for all sorts of purposes (Kickstart, upgraded Agnus, etc.).

Re: "the Pi is not a toy but increasing used for serious jobs"

Not a knee jerk at all here, just a realist. That whole cheapest component shtick works in anywhere but in The Real World, the one where that's what I'm used to dealing with at all levels of systems design and implementation. Go back to that autonomous car example and really look at where the components were designed and sourced from and then get back to me on how great they are in use. Now the stuff I design and build for my own use spares no expense when it comes to systems that are critical but no one else gets between the purse and my control-freakary.

BTW, I do have exactly one RasPi, a ZeroW used for exactly nothing. Powered on once to make sure it works and tossed in a drawer for when I find that roundtoit for a project here. Other shit keeps getting in the way. I like them, as an embedded engineer. I'm also waiting for v1.1 for all the kinks to be worked out. That RasPi 4 would become my new Internet connected device. Crack it or even melt it down, meh!

Can you trust Huawei... or any other networks supplier for that matter?

Re: You can read my SMSs but you can take my WhatsApps from my cold dead hands

"Hemmings said that while plenty of western technology companies get involved with military and security work, the difference is that they can choose not to – unlike Chinese ones."

When I read that, first thought was Patriot Act, especially in light of the fact that non-compliance with a National Security Letter, let alone a FISA Court warrant, results in prison time without the benefit of even going to court. We've already seen companies shut themselves down rather than even try to fight. The only reason Microsoft is still in their fight is that it was a federal judge overreaching and that's percolating up the judicial process. If the federales has used either of the above, Satya would be staring through jail bars right now and neither he, nor his lawyers, would even be able to say why.

A related observation, what is Freedom House smoking/dropping? I do pay attention to Australian news (APAC is my favorite beat) and they should be farther down the list, closer to the US, on the basis of what's happened recently. Typical NGO.

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

Re: so the moral of the story

I use the exact same procedures that are required in the turnover of classified materials and their repositories as required by the US DoD. If someone has a problem with that, good luck in court. Requiring the passwords be changed is exactly the same as requiring that all safe combinations be changed. The Book exists for a reason.

Huawei website ████ ██████ security flaws ██████ customer info and biz operations at risk: ███████ patched

Re: irresponsible non-disclosure

Precisely.

To Huawei: "Responsible disclosure? I've heard of it. You don't get it, do you?" Methinks they may have a bit of a problem with certain elements of the security community, here on out.

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

As someone who considers pretty much any solution a database, at least from an architectural standpoint, I loved Embarcadero. Even did testing for them for a while. The licensing costs, as with MSDN, are simply out of reach and have been for some time.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Why, yes, the universe is equipped with a critical need detector.

BOFH: What's Near Field Implementation? Oh, you'll see. Turn left here

Damn! I want one!

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

Re: Skeletons

The next step is to insert "probes" into the net during training to see the shifts that are occurring in the weighting of the net as you train it. They either aren't aware of the technique (fairly new) or just haven't found their roundtoit.

In Rust we trust: Brave smashes speed limit after rewriting ad-block engine in super-lang

Re: Lost cause

Don't give them ideas!

Your server remote login isn't root:password, right? Cool. You can keep your data. Oh sh... your IoT gear, though?

Re: This is a controversial opinion, no doubt, but....

On the contrary, I've seen a lot of IT where default passwords were the norm. That's with 48 years experience and has only increased as the years have gone by, not decreased.

NHS Wales flings £39m at Microsoft for Office 365 and Windows 10

Re: I must strongly object ..

Powerpoint: Destroying productivity one (l)user at a time.

Micron: Look, we've resumed trade with Huawei on a wee 'subset' of DRAM

Re: Backfire

And it's not going to take them all that long in the doing. While the total quality of the engineering labor force is rather uneven, they have at least as many, if not more, good to excellent engineers as all of the US. Something that gets missed in these sort of political-economic calculations.

Please stop regulating the dumb tubes, says Internet Society boss

Re: /etc/hosts restricts access into my private property

I've had a proxy for years (over twenty) that dynamically rewrites HTTP(S) on the fly so substituting a locally hosted web site/page for whatever hosts I wish to block/trash isn't at all hard. Started as blocking blinking text, cookies, javascript, &c.

Re: DNS isn't needed if you already have the IP address

IFF (IF and only iF) you can get to a TOR gateway.

Re: "A very strange thing for Parliament to do [..]"

Google need only pass a hash value corresponding to child porn to some Authority and you will be in a world of hurt. And it need not be officially, it could be some "woke" employee who targets you with one or more planted files. it's been asserted on more than one occasion that governments, specifically their intelligence arms, already do this amongst other bad actors out there.

Just mentioning it. There's a reason I'm a stickler on computer hygiene.

Last time I looked, just yesterday, government doesn't hesitate to allow itself privileges that are withheld from the citizens. Heck, they grant them to their crony capitalists as well.

Chrome ad-blocker crackdown preview due late July. Here's a half-dozen reasons why add-on devs are still upset

Iridium is my goto privacy browser for now. I'm also in a wait-and-see mode on where they're taking it after Manifest v.3.

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

Re: yes, well, but...

I agree that Chinner is right as my thoughts have already been there for a while. The whole OS architecture needs a re-think in light of modern hardware developments but I still don't see that happening. It's the old war of good enough against the amount of resources required to re-engineer the beast(s) for peak performance, which is basically what underlies what Linus is saying in the list.

Bollocks or brutal truth: Do smart-mobes make us grow skull horns? We take a closer look at boffins' startling claims

Re: How many checking?

No. All mine are in my spinal cord.

Now you can have a twist of 2019 in your 2012: Microsoft goes back to the future with Edge on Windows 7/8

Re: Hahaha, no

'Twouldn't matter here. Spybot Search & Destroy throws an immediate pop-up whenever Microsoft tries to turn it on here. I refuse, natch.

Ubuntu says i386 to be 86'd with Eoan 19.10 release: Ageing 32-bit x86 support will be ex-86

I just go to my stuffed storage locker. People already know.to drop their old equipment off to my computer graveyard.

*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k

Re: Deranged?

Pen test, annual no less and you'd recognize the named individuals from El Reg articles, included in my considerations as were the API requirements. Shrug. Some of us really do this sort of work, with governments and corporates alike, and have done for an awfully long time.

Re: Spot On

With the weapons I have at my disposal, those (idiot) requirements take an hour, at the most, to implement into the code of the database(s). I do quite a bit more than that, as a matter of course, in the design and implementation to insure integrity and validation of the data and data structures. Always have.

Cyber-IOU notes. Voucher hell on wheels. However you want to define Facebook's Libra, the most ridiculous part is its privacy promise

Re: All hail the Emperor Zuck

Having been locked out on a subsequent second account as well for not having a cell phone number, that's very possible.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Re: Rock, hard place etc.

A-bloody-men. You do not upgrade anything without extremely careful consideration as you can easily toss reproducibility right out the window. Given the amount of data they generate in a day (heck, hour or less really), having to go back and retrieve archived data and also run them through freshly upgraded tools isn't done at all, if it can be avoided. Instrumentation is given exactly the same level of consideration.

What's up at Microsoft this week? Windows 10 builds of course, Skype screen sharing... zzzzz... New Flight Simulator?!

Re: Elite controller

Single player is just fine and thank you! I wasn't aware of this one. Non-Sci-Fi flight simulators I have in abundance having collected them since the debut of the original FS in 1982.