Posts by BobTheIntern

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

"...a gesture once thought reprehensible"

Seriously? In my neck of the woods, it never stopped being reprehensible.

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Re: Customers are the security liability

And don't forget enroll a 2FA token into your favorite authenticator app from the 2FA Enrollment Portal which requires you log in first with your username, password, and a valid 2FA response.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Re: 1 in a million scenario

ACHTUNG! ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENSPEEPERS...

BOFH: Why's the network so slow?

Re: Just the other side of the railroad track

I mean... I'm sitting here on the bench...

NASA, Boeing opt to fly leaky thruster as-is for first crewed Starliner CST-100 mission

Re: Its just a O-ring...

I'm sure the pucker factor in that capsule on launch day will be high enough to cut rope.

'Return to Office' declared dead

Sort of like the argument that if you need the threat of eternal damnation to provide you with your moral compass, then you weren't a very moral person to begin with!

Re: Of course

... meeting my team once a week face to face is not a bad idea.

But this prevents one of the most obvious benefits of a fully remote arrangement: the ability to move somewhere not within easy (or even long) commute distance from wherever the company has physical offices. This is why I see hybrid as a weak solution: it is the worst of both worlds. I still have to commute so I cannot move outside of my area and now I have to figure out my kit for both the home office and the work office as I shift between the two locations every week.

Re: There it is

Not only is their incompetence exposed, but also the very reason for their existence on the corporate payroll when the workers under them demonstrate their ability to get the work done without some micro-managing martinet looming over their shoulders. These folks are scared spitless about their future career prospects in a full WFH context, as they well should be!

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

Re: Mergers and Aquisitions

Why not both?

After injecting cancer hospital with ransomware, crims threaten to swat patients

Re: A far better

While there are plenty of examples of poor cybersecurity practices in software development, there is little to nothing programmers can do to defend against an as-of-yet-unknown zero-day exploit or other mechanism of obtaining elevated system access.

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

I see the Four Yorkshiremen are alive and well in the El Reg comments section.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: All the more reason

Congratulations! You have won the Internet today. Take a bow!

Re: All the more reason

Given that the U.S. federal judiciary has decided a whole raft of case law on the basis of the Commerce Clause, it seems this "first rule" you've plucked out of the thin air in close proximity to your own posterior is far more likely to be "probably wrong".

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Does anyone really believe this has anything to do with the "safety of the children" rather than just being another excuse to expand the surveillance state?

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

Re: HP Smart is innocuous enough

To be clear, Microsoft will begin to phase out providing 3rd-party printer drivers alongside Windows from 2025 - 2027. From the El Reg article on the subject which you linked in your comment:

Manufacturers will, according to Microsoft, "need to provide customers with an alternative means to download and install those printer drivers."

So it's not as if you will no longer be able to install, utilize, and update 3rd-party printer drivers on a machine running Windows. Microsoft just plans to soon no longer take part in the process for you.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

I, too ask snarky, assumption-laden questions about people's backups, secondary backup in a separate format/system, and tertiary backups stored offsite (all as the 3-2-1 Rule of Backups suggest) with a near absolute certainty that they do not possess a single backup, let alone three of them with the various redundancies of storage medium/separate systems, and onsite/offsite backup availability.

I do not do this to be cruel or out of any sense of schadenfreude; quite the opposite, in fact. I empathize with their pain because I, too was burned by a hard drive failure many, many moons ago in my PFY days and lost a few years of stuff because I hadn't bothered to consider having at least a basic backup plan as a failsafe. What I did obtain in place of all of my lost files was a profound sense of the urgency and importance of backing up anything and everything which has any value at all to me. As they say, "If you don't have a backup of it, it doesn't exist".

We ask these questions already knowing the answer to teach that unfortunate soul who just lost 20 years of family photos what questions they need to ask and answer to and for themselves. I usually suggest they begin by ensuring anything of any importance "lives" in a cloud storage folder such as Google Drive/One Drive/iCloud on their local machine as a simple Poor Man's Backup solution which is (marginally) better than having no backups at all.

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

The United States Department of Education: We put the K-W back into educational KWALITY every day!

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation leaps aboard the AI bandwagon

I still have yet to see anything which tops Bill Gates experiencing a BSOD while presenting live at Comdex in 1998.

Here's a link to El Reg's remembrance article to mark the 20th anniversary of the occasion: https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bsod_video/

Lawsuit: We've got the stats to prove Twitter ax fell unfairly on older, female engineers

Re: A tough sell

Just as it would be worth burning your house down to enjoy the incandescence of you being consumed by the flames.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Re: Any colour you like

Thanks, Henry.

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: So, we're back to square one again

The most inaccurate thing about Idiocracy is that it is set 500 years in the future.

I give us 50 at best over here across the pond.

Malwarebytes may not be allowed to label rival's app as 'potentially unwanted'

Absolutely agreed! I recall reading warnings from antivirus software prior to running a scan which explicitly stated that any other anti-virus/malware tool(s) installed on the system *might* be labeled as a PUP just due to the nature of the software. (I'm guessing primarily due to the presence of internal databases containing numerous definitions/hashes of various trackers, viruses, and other malware - but that is just a guess and likely a poor one at that).

FCC questions ISPs' selective memory about data caps

Re: Which century are we in? Data caps on residential connections?...

Don't forget lobbying, campaign contributions, and outright bribery!

Python head hisses at looming Euro cybersecurity rules

Re: Something needs to be done to protect consumers

Barring intentional poisoning if that can be proven, under exactly what law(s) do you expect such a case would be prosecuted? Health department regulations don't tend to apply to individuals cooking in their own kitchens for non-commercial purposes.

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Better than a PM

I love the objective simplicity of tracert / traceroute: just a series of pings with an incrementing TTL. Brilliant!

IT recruiter settles claims it snubbed American workers

Agreed. It would be better to lock the H1B visa holder to a specific industry or profession and provide a reasonable time period in which a terminated H1B employee can find other employment within their field. There would need to be some guardrails in place to prevent abuse, such as the new position also needing to be H1B-eligible (without having to restart the entire process), but requiring someone to leave the country because they get laid off or ask for pay comparable to their peers is inhumane.

Eric Idle tells infosec world to always look on the bright side of life

Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Lovely plumage, innit?

Can we have your liver then?

Marketing biz sent 107 million spam emails... to just 437k people

Re: Seriously?

But what about poor John and Jane the Janitors, who knew nothing of what was being done in the offices they were paid to clean in the evenings?

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

Re: So they removed the impossible?

He's just pining for the fjords.

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Re: Botched Aircon

> TWO heat pumps? You were lucky!

I didn't know that the Four Yorkshiremen worked in IT...

Watchdog urged to sniff out any collusion, deception in rent-setting algorithms

Re: Let's think out side the algorithm....

This one of the serious problems with the practice of Civil Forfeiture in the US: law-enforcement agencies share in the proceeds of any civil forfeiture action their officers initiate.

Former Microsoft UX boss doesn't like the Windows 11 Start menu either

I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!

Sephora to pay $1.2m to settle Cali privacy law claims – and why this is a big deal

Re: I have but one question

Also, what constitutes a Third Party or Partner organization?

I would hazard that Zuck & Co. would argue that InstaBook is FaceGram is WhatsItToYouApp... which is to say it's all Meta.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: £sd

>> And the Beatles used it in a song (Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds), it was all about money, not about drugs.

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Google hit with lawsuit for dropping free Workspace apps

Are you referring to "artificial imitation processed cheese food product" or a thin square of yellowish (technically) edible plastic?

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

MongoDB has come out with "Queryable Encryption" which may alleviate that particular issue (while potentially enabling others, of course).

https://www.wired.com/story/mongodb-queryable-encryption-databases/

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

Wasn't it Steve Jobs who said "if your (Apple) device doesn't do what you want, then change what you want", or is that just apocryphal?

Researchers claim quantum device performs 9,000-year calculation in microseconds

Re: light pulses which exhibit quantum uncertainty

I read this years ago and have been searching for a copy of it for some time now. Brilliant!

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Re: Porn's effect on real life

Allowing a legal market for kiddie smut in any form incentivises perverts to risk creating more of it for profit motives beyond their existing sick compulsions. Setting aside for the moment the idea of the minor(s) in a given pornographic image not "minding" (with great difficulty), the poor kids depicted in subsequent batches of child porn will certainly mind!

But it's not as if the monsters creating this filth are out there asking for consent in the first place, are they? The Squick Factor of your thinking on this is off the charts.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

You can live on the edge with a slightly more complex version affectionately known as "bash roulette":

alias roulette='[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -f $(shuf -n1 -e *) && echo "BOOM" || echo *Click*'

US Supreme Court puts Texas social media law on hold

Re: I wonder what would happen if...

> If a state wants to pass such a law, what would happen if all the sites affected by such a law just blocked all the IP's from inside that state from accessing their resources?

The Texas state law also attempts to prohibit social media companies from not allowing Texas-based users to access their sites.

Good luck with that one!

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Re: OpEx vs CapEx

Ah, I see you have the machine that goes ping!

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Re: Strikes me as similar to the case where browsers...

Indeed. For extra measure, they encrypted the data with the highly complex and ever-so-secure Base64 encoding. Our own El Reg covered the whole kerfuffle in a recent (15 Feb 22) article:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/15/missouri_html_hacking/

Cooler heads needed in heated E2EE debate, says think tank

Re: @msobkow - Finding the middle ground in this highly polarized environment

Stay tuned for the possibility of aspiring dictators who didn't figure out how to subvert the democracy and got voted out before they could entrench themselves, but yet somehow managed to secure reelection so that they might have another go at it.

ITC judge recommends banning toner imports that infringe Canon's IP

Re: Epic names

>>> Really, if you see a credit that's Chinese with a little translation, hit pause and see if you can make out what it says. Some are amusing to the point of "is the translator taking the piss?"

A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli!

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

Re: Dogfooding

Mr. Wiggin: Good morning, gentlemen.

Clients: Good morning.

Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these...

Client 1: Excuse me.

Mr. Wiggin: Yes?

Client 1: Did you say 'knives'?

Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.

Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?

Mr. Wiggin: ...Does that not fit in with your plans?

Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.

Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn't fully divined your attitude towards the tenants. You see I mainly design slaughter houses.

Clients: Ah.

Mr. Wiggin: Pity.

Clients: Yes.

Mr. Wiggin: (indicating points of the model) Mind you, this is a real beaut. None of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows incommoding the passers-by with this one. (confidentially) My life has been leading up to this.

Client 2: Yes, and well done, but we wanted an apartment block.

Mr. Wiggin: May I ask you to reconsider.

Clients: Well...

Mr. Wiggin: You wouldn't regret this. Think of the tourist trade.

Client 1: I'm sorry. We want a block of flats, not an abattoir.

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

I think Russians know when they're being lied to. They can see the newsreaders' lips move.

I am reminded of the old trope in (usually comedic) film where a news presenter from a communist bloc nation is shown reading news of some event in the film as filtered through propaganda censors while an arm holding a pistol pointed directly at the presenter's head is clearly visible on-camera.

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Calm down, Satan.