Posts by Mobster

Stop Pakistani content at the border, India tells media, tech biz

Ironic that while India bans media due to the current conflict, Pakistan allowed X which was banned before the conflict.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Just as companies are under no obligation to pay, similarly this organization is under no obligation to take their billboard down ...

Cisco's Smart Licensing Utility flaws suggest it's pretty dumb on security

One issue with Cisco is that in order to patch, you need a support contract to be able to download said patch. So having bought and paid for a product, which turns out to be defective and needing a patch, you now have to pay more.

Google, Oracle, Microsoft make their case for VMware migrations – HPE on the outer?

No mention of what, if anything, Broadcom and AWS are doing ...

Supreme Court won't stop Biden leaning on social media giants to tackle disinfo

Re: Dissent is not the same as lies

The US government does not (and cannot) order social media to suspend accounts or delete posts. It can provide advisories. The platform owners (Meta, X, etc.) are free to oblige or (in case of being forced provide user information for example) challenge in court. The first amendment has no bearing here, as the platforms are privately owned and the government has not forced anyone to delete any posts or accounts.

Pakistan punishes tax dodgers with new measures to ensure telcos cut off their mobile phones

It is the poor who can barely afford cell phones who will bear the brunt - political party leaders have always featured in all leaks of the super-wealthy hiding their wealth (e.g. the Panama Papers leaks), as have most of the high ranking officials of the military - I do not expect any of them to have any of their multiple SIMs blocked.

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

Re: her credibility for preaching & giving sermons on Christian values

Heritage of the Start by Sylvia Engdahl?

Dirty data shocks Indian taxpayers with huge bills

One wonders if PM Sunak's wife paid her India taxes this year with or without the 2 extra zeroes ...

White House and lawmakers increase pressure on UnitedHealth to ease providers' pain

Well, one big issue is why is there so much concentration of back-office health paperwork processing at one company? Whatever happened to capitalism and free markets? I think many (mostly politicians and lawyers who want to become politicians) prefer to obfuscate and confuse "markets" with "companies". In capitalism, it is _markets_ that are free, companies have to be regulated to ensure markets remain free. This collective confusion seems to have started with the Chicago school and a certain former actor who played at being president.

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to fix serious safety shortcomings found in report

The rot started when corporate safeguards, so necessary for a free capital markets, were done away with in the name of "making it easier to do business". Getting rid of regulations, such as prohibiting stock buybacks etc, and tying executive payment to stock price (a very volatile metric) ushered in a school of corporate management sharks who destroyed business. Engineers and people of tenure got laid off, manufacturing got out-sourced, off-shored, and everything else to save a penny to improve the next quarterly earnings statement. This led to the demise of many (GE, Westinghouse, IBM, Ford, GMC, etc.). Boeing is but one of the rotten apples in a barrel-full.

AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee

$5 per account, not per line? Then it would make sense to have each family member with a separate service provider.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

How did NEAR get the data to begin with? Their sources are the ones to look - legislation needs to target sources as close to the collection point of data as possible, not 3rd or 4th party data resellers.

Republican senators try to outlaw rules that restrict Wall Street’s use of AI

Re: Of Course

Well, Cruz's wife is a managing director at Goldman Sachs...

IT suppliers hacked off with Uncle Sam's demands in aftermath of cyberattacks

I keep waiting for congress critters to propose reporting security incidents before they occur - these are the one who were worried about driving under the influence on the information superhighway, for those of us who were around back then.

Cisco delivers a powerup to its switches for small and medium biz

The device comes with a perpetual license, so far so good. Are updates available without a subscription, for when the inevitable vulnerabilities are found?

Yet another UK public sector data blab, this time info of pregnant women, cancer patients

Re: Finally they thought of it

It is also possible the analyst was experienced, and was the only one for a number of locations - over worked and underpaid. You know, the kind you get when you achieve "synergies" and "cost optimizations" and "become agile".

AI copyright row deepens: Stability VP quits in protest over 'fair use' excuse

If I buy a copyrighted work, use it to teach myself, then I produce a new "transformative" work, then it is ok. How does this differ from me buying the work, but using it to train an AI model, and then using the model to create a new transformative work?

India warns ecommerce 'basket sneaks' and 'confirm shamers' their days are numbered

Very blatant subscription trap

There is a national chain of gyms in the US, the name of which is the same as that of a major city on the West Coast. They have a very nice web site, very nice and functional mobile app and make it a breeze to sign up for a subscription.

To cancel, one has to go to the app or web site, fill in forms, choose or decline to watch a video about cancelling, and finally reach a web page that shows all their particulars with a QR code - keep in mind this is all being shown on a page presented by _their_ web server. Then one is asked to print said web page, and mail it via the post. So, hooray India and perhaps the US can learn from this.

Man arrested in Northern Ireland police data leak as more incidents come to light

Re: I understand why but it's a bit of a bullshit charge

That is where the US does better in my opinion - prosecuting for having information that was not obtained illegally would be almost impossible in the US. I understand your bit about criminal organizations not handing out membership cards, but that is what the police are supposed to do, find out who are members of terrorist organizations, not just charge anyone with innocent information that could have been used by a terrorist organization.

Why securing East-West network traffic is so important – and how it can be done

Re: bad example

Can you show where the original posted states the intrusion at Target was via embedded computers? Also, a hypervisor is not necessary for SDN - while SDN might have been birthed due to widespread hypervisor use, it is by no means solely restricted to that. Even bare-metal networking kit can support SDN technologies.

China – which surveils everyone everywhere – floats facial recognition rules

Re: "help police crackdown on criminals and improve security"

Democracies do as well, but their citizens can openly criticize them for it. Try that in China and let me know how it goes.

Supreme Court says Genius' song lyric copying claim against Google wasn't smart

They could have claimed they were the copyright holder for the lyrics that included their watermark ... maybe ...

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

Re: "Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute"

What about replication in a geographically distant location like they are doing in the cloud?

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Serves Google right

Google still has to treat the account as if it is live.

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

Has Amazon? Only for the free tier.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

I know this is an old'ish article but I am sure there is more here than meets the eye. Jamal Khashoggi was working for the Washington Post when brutally murdered in Turkey by Saudis.

UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content

Re: hyperbolic nonsense

I can give you an example, it is right there in your last bullet point. A school has more than one child, and usually there are many parents involved in a given school. Now imagine one, just one parent, going off and "taking legal action" because they, and they alone, feel that the bill was violated. Not likely to happen? Look at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/10/vicky-hartzler-nephew-same-sex-marriage-republican-tearful. At least in my quoted case the one lonely "but think of the children" moron was badly outvoted.

NOTHING trumps extra pizza on IT projects. Not even more people

My previous job was at a large financial institution. The execs got high on "digital transformation", took junkets to the US West Coast to "learn to be agile". Productivity ground to a halt around the tremendous increase in "agile" related ritual, and budgets going towards master of ceremonies of said rituals (no number of scrum masters or agile coaches can help you if you do not have enough people working ON the product). I left said company and joined one of the FAANGS. The company I joined was one of the ones the pointy haired bosses from the first company had traveled to to "learn how to be agile". Now my teams are much more consistently performant, and I have yet to poison my ears hearing the words "Agile", "Scrum", "scrum master".

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Bit klunky, but...

Well, he never told Musk it was too complicated, he explained the number Musk was looking for (RPC call count), and then provided Musk the reasons why the app was slow. CEOs thinking it is red flag when told by engineers at their company that things are too complicated for said CEO to understand should consider it a red flag, a red flag that the CEO is at the wrong place in the company.

UK forces Chinese-owned company to offload Newport Wafer Fab

Re: Amtrak

Why would _any_ government agency be making money? The job of a government is to provide services which private capital markets are not suitable for, precisely because private capital markets are in the business of making money. You have plans to require emergency services turn a profit?

Toyota dev left key to customer info on public GitHub page for five years

Re: Public cloud service

Does not sound like it was someone within Toyota, it was a software contractor.

PayPal decides fining people $2,500 for 'misinformation' wasn't a great idea

Banks can do this all day long. Banks can freeze your accounts for any of a number of different types of suspicions they may have.

The web's cruising at 13 million new and nefarious domain names a month

Do any of these NOD list generators make their lists available openly?

Here's how 5 mobile banking apps put 300,000 users' digital fingerprints at risk

Re: Assuming they were properly hashed

Why would they be hashed? If they were indeed hashed, then what is the point of having them in the first place? Hashed keys provide no benefit to the holder...

Cloudflare tries to explain why it protects far-right forums that stalk and harass victims

Re: What's the desired outcome?

A bit of an inexact analogy. I see CloudFlare more like a security company in this case and people are putting up hateful signs on their own property. Should the security service allow itself to be hired by said people to protect their property?

UK blocks sale of chip design software company to China

Re: The footrest

I cannot say whether this is being done at the behest of the US, either wholly or in part. However, after the Tony Blair / Iraq saga complete with dossiers and whatnot, it is widely accepted that the UK is the USA's footrest. Perhaps stooge would suit better if you find footrest too strong a word.

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

Re: emoji

First amendment does indeed apply to interactions of the state with individuals. The key point here is that the state cannot compel an individual's code to be cause for sanction, as said code is considered a form of expression and the state is prohibited from retaliating against protected expression. As such, it calls into question whether the state even asked for said individuals to be sanctioned to begin with or if that was just GitHub trying to be "proactive" in some form or fashion. Laundering money is illegal, writing code to do so is not. Eventually GitHub will realize it.

Google, Oracle cloud servers wilt in UK heatwave, take down websites

Re: cooling failure?

Actually DNS is not hosted in a single zone or even a single region by Amazon.

Leaked Uber docs reveal frequent use of 'kill switch' to deactivate tech, thwart investigators

That something like the business Uber is in a good thing, and inevitable really, is more or less a given. The efficiencies gained (price reduction, driver freedom regarding hours etc.) were bound to happen.

That such a momentous occasion had to have criminals that ran Uber at the helm is what makes me sad. There was an opportunity here to create a revolution and become heroes, but Uber, like many others, became too greedy. The politicians, of course, acted like they always do, no surprise or sadness there.

Nokia Bell Labs identifies six key technologies for 6G

Canadians would have been happy even with 3G considering the recent Rogers outage.

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

Re: JS & trust?

I am not sure why it has to be JS. The specification calls for use of JSON, which is an object specification scheme, not JS, which is a programming language.

McKinsey thinks quantum computing could create $80b in revenue ... eventually

You had me at "Thinks"

Governments opt for XaaS, dump datacenters in droves

Of course Gartner is also telling governments on how they will so much better off putting their services in someone else's hands.

Huawei claims it’s halved the time needed to build a 1,000-rack datacenter

Re: The US has done its job well..

The difference is that blasting US manufacturers or intelligence agencies while in the US will not get you arrested or sent for re-education. Now try that in China.

Microsoft warns partners to revoke unused authorizations that drive your software

GDAP

Resellers should giddyup on to the gdap.

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Re: Amateurs

Your job involved shooting ping pong balls every day? Now I am almost jealous ...

Another ex-eBay exec admits cyberstalking web souk critics

Re: How?

With a $57 million buyout, the former CEO would be needing a job ever again, not even as a shift manager at McDonalds. It is the former CEO, immediate executive staff, and the board that need looking into,

US Navy told to do a 'supplemental' integrity investigation of $2.5b Dell deal

Well, companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Dell etc. hire plenty of people coming out of the military. That lets the current military personnel see the candy that awaits them if they play nice.

AWS CEO: We're not spinning out, likely to seek acquisitions

AWS should buy VMware :)

That will give it multi-cloud management products and an already established on-prem/hybrid presence.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

A huge problem for Linux desktop usage, especially in the corporate World, is that most decent desktop distros are unfortunately free - and MBA style thinking is of the type that free = bad. Now engineers on the other hand .... :)