Posts by FILE_ID.DIZ

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

Re: Guns

Sorta.

That article only spoke to a civil suit. What isn't noted was if there was a criminal complaint filed for the same incident.

Re: Slow down there... They ain't starving

State Farm pulled 80-90 Billion in profit?

Perhaps revenue, but not profit.

Re: Slow down there... They ain't starving

If we're talking about State Farm, that's demonstrably false.

They are setup as a Mutual Corporation, meaning that their policyholders are shareholders. I recall back in the 90's getting dividend payments once a year. And outside of a check sometime in 2020, I haven't seen a dividend payment in a really long time because they have to bank more and more into their disaster funds.

And as a policyholder/shareholder, I do get to participate in their AGM, if I so choose.

State Farm lost $14.1 billion in property/casualty coverage in 2023. They lost $13.2 billion in the same sector in 2022. That's just one insurance company that I am familiar with.

Not sure how many companies be able to sustain many multiple billion dollar losses in the last two years alone a specific business category and NOT make changes to that business line's function.

People need to stop living in disaster-prone areas of the country or bear the costs of living there. According to NOAA that 40% of the US population lives in coastal counties with a population density four times greater than the interior of the country. [0]

[0] - https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-demographics.html

Cyberattack hits Omni Hotels systems, taking out bookings, payments, door locks

In some hotels that I've stayed, they've integrated the door key system with the reservation system. Seems like a smart play.

The problem it seems is that there was no redundancy, no "what if the internet or reservation system or insert some other system fails considerations/conversations. What's our backup plan? How do we go manual?

X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse

Re: Guardrails my ass

I don't know if you're referring to the illicit drug ecstasy (slang: X) or that shitty renamed website.

Musk probably agrees either way that goes.

Nikola founder faces ranch forfeiture following fraud conviction

Another Hindenberg Bullseye...

https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/

Icon... because well, they blew up a house of cards.

Also... Nikola was a SPAC listing. I don't think there's been too many SPACs that weren't outright fraud and/or just fizzled, leaving the fresh new owners of that SPAC's stock (lots of retail investors) holding a bag of shit.

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

Well, if I'm looking at something from 10 miles away "horizontally", then yes, all the heat between my camera and the object are at play.

But, if I'm on top of you, 10 miles away, then any "heat shimmer" effect is drastically decreased, given any localized heat shimmers are, well, local.

I mean, any modern satellite (read Google Earth) image showing the color and details of a car or window of a high-rise blow through your heat shimmer theory.

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

Given that private satellites are able to capture 30 centimeters per pixel from space (https://www.geowgs84.com/post/what-is-the-highest-resolution-satellite-imagery-available), I'm highly confident a lower altitude isn't going to bring in unknowable details that are otherwise lost.

You can make out quite a lot with that resolution.

That same article makes an unverified claim that some governments may have low single-digit centimeter per pixel resolutions already. You can read a license plate if that resolution does exist. If that statement about resolution is true, I'm sure China would be one of those countries with such technology.

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

That's because the wing-nuts in a certain circle of the US population are, well, crazy AF.

Sure.... that Chinese balloon could have been photographing stuff... but so do satellites, every frigging day! Both private companies and government entities. The private companies being the ones I'd be most worried about, since they will sell any image to any buyer. (Think of all those fitness trackers....) Governments tend to want to horde their data.

Sure.... that Chinese balloon could have been intercepting RF signals.... but so do a lot of other things, every frigging day! I mean, back in the day of satellite communications, crafty spies would setup shop "behind" the transceiver and listen to the RF beam's wide spread on the ground.

I'm quite positive that sensitive USG properties have thought of all the ways information can be leaked/gathered/etc. In fact, I'm sure they do it every day against other entities every day. I would think (hope) that anyway we can acquire intelligence, someone considers if we ourselves are also sensitive to that same method of leakage.

At least that's what a reasonable person should consider... and I do believe that those in charge of sensitive sites think of these things.Except in cases of a novel data leaks, such as the aforementioned fitness trackers. That's a solved problem now.

Europe loosens the straps tying Apple and Microsoft to tough antitrust rules

Re: mmmm

Neat trick.

Who the fuck uses Word often enough to warrant that non ADA-compliant key combo. I'd take Excel over Word every day.

But then again, I keep it pinned to my taskbar, so unless I have 12 screens like some traders do (finding where the mouse is hiding can't be fun), right-clicking the Excel icon on the taskbar is easier than those key combos.

Waymo services driverless car software after Phoenix truck collision

Stupid Computers.

Improperly towed is a different statement than illegally towed.

If I had to guess - since the vehicle was towed backwards, it was a rear-wheel drive vehicle and the front wheels were locked to an angle (other than TDC) by the steering column lock, causing the front of the vehicle to shift out a bit to the side.

The tow truck driver chose not (for whatever reason) to place the front wheels on dollies.

I can tell you that in my city, relocation tows for temporary No Parking areas (construction/tree trimming/etc) are pretty rough if you have AWD/4WD or have your parking brake on. Every tow I've seen with an AWD/4WD vehicle, the rear wheels aren't dollied and the vehicle is dragged down the street with the rear wheels fighting who gets to spin forwards and who is relegated to spinning backwards. (No locked differential I guess on those few examples I recall.)

Improperly towed means that Waymo was still at fault for failing to detect the otherwise legal condition, albeit "different".

Also, proof positive that computers do exactly as they're programed... since a second Waymo car performed an encore performance just minutes later.

Wonder how or why the Waymo car didn't pay attention to the likely lit amber strobes of the tow vehicle.

QNAP vulnerability disclosure ends up an utter shambles

Only relevant if you're planning on hanging one of these off the internet at-large.

Don't do this, ever. With a QNAP or any other device that is not purposefully designed to be a security/edge device. Even "security/edge" devices have critical vulnerabilities... SSL-VPN seem to be the flavor of the day.

On a private network with trusted devices on it, they're relatively safe devices for home use.

Sure, your home computer could catch something and then they move to a vulnerable QNAP...

Deepfake CFO tricks Hong Kong biz out of $25 million

Re: Root cause

Exactly - I think back to the case where Citibank accidentally wired $900M USD instead of about $8M USD back in 2020 to several lenders. They intended to make a $8M USD interest payment, but someone at Citi accidentally paid off the entire Revlon loan.

Oopsie.

That took a lawsuit that Citi lost (weird NY State law at play) but they won on appeals.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Re: Pardon?

Not if you have the proper controls and of course the consent(s) in place, preferably buried deep into all the paperwork a patient (eventually) and/or an authorized party to the patient, (eventually) signed. (However, IANAL, so YMMV.)

For example, https://avasure.com/telesitter/

Where I know this is used is for patients who may be in some type of altered mental state (psychos, postictal state, dementia, so on and so forth). This allows for directly monitoring patients, making sure that they're safe in their bed, to prevent any fall injuries or getting lost and possibly confused/angered.

Helpful when hospital rooms are designed so that it's not very easy to peer far into a room, even with the door open.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Re: Easy way to teach FB a lession

There are 13 named authorities operated by 12 entities. There are, as you noted, a lot more.

In fact, there are currently 1,771 instances as of 2023-11-30T04:09:07Z according to https://root-servers.org/.

There appears to be 32 on the UK island. (None apparently in NI.)

Re: Easy way to teach FB a lession

You're just hosting a resolver with root server hints.

If you were to host a root server, you need to host the root zone locally which is conveniently listed here - https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone.

Re: Easy way to teach FB a lession

Resolver is the correct name for what you setup.

Re: Easy way to teach FB a lession

You know that the "root" servers only resolve the (g/gr/s/cc/etc)TLDs, right?

The root servers take the query "facebook.com", and says, here's the list of COM. name servers. That's all they do, all day long. Billions of times a day.

com. is solely run by VeriSign Global Registry Services - https://www.verisign.com/company-information/index.xhtml

Just saying.

Plus, you do recall that the internet, and DNS, is designed to work/route around outages. In fact, no one notices one iota that if you're a Hurricane Electric customer on IPv6, you likely can't reach the C root servers via IPv6 because of the ongoing Cogent v HE war.

PS: VeriSign, through mergers, also runs two roots too, A and J

Adobe sells fake AI-generated Israel-Hamas war images – then the news ran them as real

AL isn't a makeup artist or a graphics artist. It simply conjures crap up.

Re: What

It worked for tracking lettuce [0], it MUST work for images too!

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/business/walmart-blockchain-lettuce.html

Worst than fine print is the classic bait and switch.

At least with fine print caveat emptor rules supreme. Shysters and grifters are just scum who refer to themselves as politicians in certain circles.

To facilitate the transfer of currency from another's wallet to their wallet?

Metadata... yea, that'll solve the problem

Curious how this "metadata" survives a social media (re)post or reproduction in physical media or on other online publications' websites.

Of course, conscientious publishers show their sources for images - but that doesn't translate in social media well. One just has to consider all the "sponsored" posts by "influencers" that neglected that tidbit.

By stating the source is "AI Generated"... kinda ruins the point of using the photo for a real article about a real event. No one sees "artist's rendition" from either of the Iraq wars. Court room illustrations stand as a counter-example... but those are clearly not life-like.

And this also requires the readers to read the fine print, which I find many people don't do. It seems to be a lost art these days.

Hell, even this website's articles seems to have recently added a bold banner for older articles (or at least I just started to notice it). Perhaps because people find it difficult to care to look at an article's date of publishing, which tends not to be in the largest of fonts.

Atlassian cranks up the threat meter to max for Confluence authorization flaw

Re: Humble question to those affected or at risk

Because sometimes people with no other skill than a company credit card and authorization to use it, think they can solve a problem without considering what it is that they're doing.

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

Re: Meanwhile the other killer is allowed to walk free?

Even encouraged (according to a friend I know) in a certain areas in the state of Utah and other places where that religion is vigorously practiced.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

I guess someone had to...

come up with a crappy 757 replacement.

I really disliked my EWR-HAM flights.

Nothing like a jam five people deep in the lone single aisle next to the lav with the service trolley trying to push through.

FUCK THAT SHIT!

AMD says it'll jump through Uncle Sam's hoops to sell AI chips to China

Apparently business abhors a vacuum too.

US Air Force burns more money on electric flying taxis

Re: alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters

It was, wasn't it...

alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters

Ol King of the Hill reference.

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: "address concerns of being replaced by AI"

No. Thank. You. Imagine an AI in position of moar "power".

FUCK THAT.

It's already bad enough that the smooth brains are happily following the tunes of the Pied Piper's Internet of social media(s).

Google, DeepMind accused of 'stealing the internet' to create Bard AI chatbot

Re: Yes and no

That's demonstrably false.

Google's Cache feature is a quicker (than archive.org), but single point-in-time snapshot for each search's hits.

Example - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://hello.com/

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

Re: To Marketing: a Boot to the Head!

Need an upgraded video. Apparently there's a thing called "Power Slap". Was at the local watering hole last Friday and this was on one of the TVs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDQaq0_cqAg

--> Because obviously that'd be an own goal in Power Slap?

Microsoft must have hired the former marketing department of Citrix...

...who notoriously renamed EVERYTHING every few years. Apparently to justify their existence.

OpenAI pauses Bing search feature over paywall bypass abilities

Well... might not be that simple.

Google, Bing and DDG, for example, maintain lists of their bot's IP ranges. Google, Bing and DDG also seem to use FCrDNS with a specific domain (googlebot.com and search.msn.com) and DDG uses duckduckbot-X.duckduckgo.com where X is an integer it seems.

Bing bot IP ranges - https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json

Google bot IP ranges - https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json

DDG bot IP ranges - https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduckbot/

And as the saying goes - the "good guys" always have to be right. The bad guys (in this example, trying to circumvent a paywall) just have to be right once.

And I have to imagine that writing a middleware to update whatever application(s) is/are responsible to allow spiders in based on third-party provided, non-RFC standardized formated IP data might be harder than just looking for a UA string. At least until someone in the bean counter department notices.

Meta teaches AI image model to stop generating human fingers like a drunk Picasso

Generative architectures, Meta says, often have trouble with human hands because they try to fill in every bit of information without a conceptual basis for the scene.

Like most ChatGPT answers.

Out with the old, in with the new – Accenture declares AI is 'mature and delivers value'

In Crisis mode?

There was a Bloomberg interview of Julie Sweet published in October 2021.

I'm going to snipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwTkqYG7N3k&t=256s this great quote where she says that they (Accenture) doesn't take on clients in "Crisis Mode" who aren't willing to set aggressive goals (gaol for employees?).

Perhaps she was ultimately referring to "AI" (Really, machine learning, but who's counting). And yes, if you continue on that video she talks about their profit motive with their engagements a few seconds later, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwTkqYG7N3k&t=310s

Microsoft Windows edges closer to SMB security signing fully required by default

Re: This will be exciting

Install FileZilla FTP Server. At least that product is actively supported and runs on supportable OSs.

Also, Windows XP supports SMB Signing. Just saying.

Re: Win7 and other old stuff?

Yes - Windows 7 supports SMB Signing - Enforced. The policy is called "Microsoft network client/server: Digitally sign communications (always)" in secpol.msc. (There's one policy for Microsoft Network Server and another for Microsoft Network Client.)

Signing has been available since Server 2000, FYI.

This is actually improving security.

Getting windows boxes to dump all its creds with SMB signing not enforced is a relatively simple MITM attack that is used to laterally move in an environment by crims.

This doesn't use certificates. And as for the overhead, couldn't quantify it for you, but I know we didn't notice it when we enabled it.

Windows 11 puts 'disgusting' Remote Mailslots protocol out of its misery

One of my customers has an enterprise application that still uses mailslots to this day.

In fact I learned a lot of about mailslots trying to troubleshoot a loss of connectivity after a patch in 2016. I had to write a group policy company-wide to change the behavior of mailslots due to the security patch. And I recall there was another monthly patch for Windows 10 clients in 2018 that once again broke mailslots and that caused issues with their enterprise application and Microsoft had to come out with another patch for the patch.

What a miserable protocol.

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

Zuck has majority voting in the boardroom. His Class B stock gets 10 votes per share. Plus another holder of class B shares, Moskovitz, has a voting agreement that stipulates that he'll vote the same way Zuck does.

As of the end of Q4 (December 31, 2022), there were 2,225,763,078 Class A stock (publicly traded) and 366,876,470 Class B stock (not traded). With 10-to-1 voting power, that ~367M shares votes like ~3.67B shares, dwarfing Class A share's voting power.

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Re: The solution to this problem is exceedingly simple, and is being overlooked by everyone...

What are you, someone from the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying? [0]

[0] - https://reason.com/2019/01/02/judge-confirms-that-oregon-engineer-has/

Freedom for MegaCortex ransomware victims – the fix is out

Who gives a shit about how long an intruder was inside your network. So long as you can validate that data was not compromised, eg: they just want to steal your shit for secondary ransom. Your extended backups are generally quite valuable.

If your backups weren't valuable, why would these criminals bother fucking with your backups? I mean, time is money - crims have new targets to fuck.

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Re: Those are privately owned

Correct you are, except that the police doesn't need to give that homeowner a "Ring" branded camera. The brand doesn't matter whatsoever.

In the case of Ring video, in the TOS, you grant a right to Amazon to do whatever they want with that content. They have accordingly resold that right to both private and public entities for their purposes.

Since Amazon has a right to those videos and has agreements to provide those videos to various government entities, the Fourth Amendment no longer applies. This would be no different than a security camera of a private business that recorded a crime and the Police used that video to identity the criminal and further use that video in a Court of Law.

Speaking further about cameras which a Government installs, one has to look no further than the botched surveillance of Robert Kraft (plus 30+ others) vs Palm Beach County/Jupiter Beach PD for recent, prior case history.

Terraform Labs and crypto bro Do Kwon face $57 million court case in Singapore

Re: Just Pull a Carlos Ghosn...

All correct - but there still is no extradition treaty between the two countries.

And if you're running from the law, beggars can't be choosers. I mean, look at Edward Snowden.

Just Pull a Carlos Ghosn...

... and flee to Lebanon?

You're Shipt outta luck: App sued for treating delivery workers as contractors

Re: Surely some mistake here?

Don't forget that Visa (in the most optimal scenario) can take 2 x swipe charge and 2 x merchant surcharge for a "single" transaction.

AWS warns of demand slowdown as customers seek to cut spend

Your statement presumes that those organizations haven't been subsumed by the lure of all those "SaaS" features that various clouds offer, "bonding" you to their cloud (using the same icon) with the fragrant (but elusive) lure of "cheaper pricing and quicker development" prospect...

Origins of mysterious marsquake settled: It was a meteoroid what done it

Two movie references. Three if you include the porno!

Maybe the Arachnids from Star Ship Troopers were on to something - instead of sending fragile drilling probes that can't go more than a couple of inches - we should just hurdle asteroids towards Mars, we'd get a Deep(er) Impact.