Posts by Teal Bee

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

Re: Unsuscribe

Lock it. Lock it now. This is the friendliest message I'm going to send, while I look for ways to get OP banned from Email for gross social misconduct.

Microsoft isn't fixing 8-year-old shortcut exploit abused for spying

Re: Microsoft is right

This article is specifically about those users who check. What you said is correct but it's barking at the wrong tree.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

And in 2021, Let's Encrypt let a root certificate lapse, disrupting major websites and services for devices that hadn't been updated.

This is false. The only things that broke were a handful of (mostly unmaintained) websites and one obscure BSD variant.

Let's Encrypt had done everything in their power to minimise the disruption, they were completely transparent throughout and provided clear guidance for administrators on how to deal with this long in advance.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

> type set by the variable name

It could be worse – type set by the operator between two variables.

Re: C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

To me it sounds more like a figure of speech, used in the hope of conveying the seriousness of this issue to an audience which may be complacent or even comfortable with the status quo.

This gives me some hope that C++ has a chance to evolve and thrive. As long as Bjarne doesn't pull a Perl 6 in the heat of the moment, that is.

OBS-tacle course: Fedora and Flathub's Flatpak fiasco sparks repo rumble

Good points, although there's a big difference in the details.

The Snap store (and CLI) prominently displays whether a snap is official or not, whereas Flathub obfuscates this information and users have to actively look for it.

Misleading statement

The article states: "the official Linux package is a Flatpak" ,but this is not at all what the linked download page from OBS says – it mentions Ubuntu packages in the same sentence.

Poor reporting.

Palo Alto firewalls under attack as miscreants chain flaws for root access

Re: It's become that any company with a product that has firewall/security/defender/etc.

>They're always going to be accessible by the outside world

I disagree, being able to ping a firewall is in no way equivalent to it being "accessible" to the extent described in this article.

The fact that it's located at the border is also irrelevant as long as it doesn't expose any services to the outside world.

The only issue with Palo Alto is that they employ PHP developers to develop its management interface and then allow said interface to be accessed over anything but a serial interface. If it can be accessed over Ethernet then it will be accessed over the Internet, whether you intended that or not.

Cryptojacking, backdoors abound as fiends abuse Aviatrix Controller bug

>Aviatrix Controller is run by approximately 3 percent of all AWS customers, [...] a relatively small proportion of all customers.

That's still a large number of them when multiplied by the number of AWS business customers, estimated at around 1.5 million.

I can't blame a researcher for publishing exploit code that is already in the hands of bad actors. Yes, this may enable a few script kiddies to do some damage, but those aren't the kind of people who negotiate ransom payments and employ money mules.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: Cost is a thing...

>The only thing the Pi has that the N100's don't is GPIO.

And HDMI CEC, which is as critical as it gets for media center use cases.

How Chinese insiders are stealing data scooped up by President Xi's national surveillance system

Re: Chinese are born entrepreneurs, unfortunately

>'stopped clock right once a day'

It's twice, right?

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: There is a better model

> Kernel version: 5.4

Better at running obsolete software?

Hugging Face puts the squeeze on Nvidia's software ambitions

Re: Those prices don't seem too competitive

I used to wonder if DO has a profit sharing arrangement with the spammers, it was that bad.

Nowadays I get more spam from Gmail than all the other providers combined.

The .io domain isn't going anywhere anytime soon amid treaty

.google is longer and has been allocated based on a different set of rules.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

Re: Guinea pig

My vote goes to beescript!

Re: RE: deliberate spite

You're right, but Oracle is still the asshole in this story.

They could set up a "JavaScript Foundation" and donate the trademark to it for the benefit of the community. Not only would this improve Oracle's reputation, it would also benefit everyone else by removing the very real danger of litigation.

It could be a win-win situation, just like selling or renting out an unused house benefits everyone involved.

23andMe settles class-action breach lawsuit for $30 million

It's to protect against involuntary... dissemination of ones genetic material.

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

Re: ipv6

>I'd say 50% of [non-UK] traffic is ipv6 in recent times.

>Clearly many isps and service providers [outside the UK] are rolling it out, even if [every British ISP] isnt.

There, fixed it to better reflect reality.

'IT failure' hits blood tests as another critical incident declared by NHS

It's low as in “a low amount of money enters your pocket every month”.

AMD reverses course: Ryzen 3000 CPUs will get SinkClose patch after all

It's always nice to see a manufacturer sticking to their reputation!

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Re: No kidding?

>HP may not stop until he's dead

This comment did age well.

Delta: CrowdStrike's offer to help in Falcon meltdown was too little, too late

...thanks to CrowdStrike, who took the systems offline preemptively.

This all sounds like posturing to me, on both sides. One of them will back down, and my bet is on Delta to do that since they clearly have never tested a disaster recovery plan or even restoring from backups.

What if it were ransomware? Who would have Delta sued in that case for their inability to restore service after weeks of downtime?

CrowdStrike's monumental failures are responsible for Delta going down, but not for if failing to get back up for so long.

Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

Re: WTF did I just read?

They may have integration tests as well, which are written by the same developers who write the software and the unit tests.

One can't generally expect a developer to write adversarial tests against their own code. If they knew which corner cases to test for, then they would have written the original code to account for these cases instead of wasting time writing extra tests.

Unit tests are crucial when making changes to existing code, but they are useless in catching bugs. For that you need a QA team.

Re: Hurting investors

Shareholders are owners... of their shares. They don't have any involvement in the day to day operations of a publicly traded company.

Publicly traded companies play by very strict rules as a condition of having access to the general public's money.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: MICROKERNELS?

No. First because whatever supervisor runs in ring-0 also needs to grant the antivirus ring-0 access no matter what, or else a virus can cause the antivirus to crash and have unfettered OS access.

That's the whole point of marking that driver as boot critical – you absolutely don't want the machine to keep functioning without it. The OS is irrelevant in this equation, the customer has already decided that protection is critical by installing an EDR, and the OS has no say in this matter.

(And second, for the simple reason that microkernels are only useful for academic research and can't run any practical workload, be it benign software or malware.)

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

The previous kernels won't help when there is a driver update, since driver updates are applied to old initramfs images.

Single user mode is not useful because the system has to boot first, and that means loading the drivers. Even if this weren't the case, users would never be able to reach that point simply because single user mode would be disabled in any environment managed by competent administrators. Otherwise, anyone in proximity of those machines has root access to them, which is irresponsible.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Re: Earns 160k a year??

If you have something to offer (your skill) then it is your responsibility to put a fair price on it.

I doubt you overpay the grocery store whenever you feel that the stuff you bought is worth more.

And no, this isn't some apples and pears comparison.

Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT

[commenting on the linked post]

Qt was licenced under GPL many years before Unity and GNOME 3 were an idea in anyone's mind.

Qt was LGPL before either Gnome 3 or Unity started development.

The rest of that post is just nonsense and an attempt to fabricate historical events that never happened.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: The next....

>the Beeb's Domesday videodisc project of 1986 not so much

I have used the Domesday videodisc this year.

Making a faithful copy of the disc and writing an accurate emulator for the computer should still be feasible for those skilled in the art.

Australian billionaire wins right to sue Facebook in the US over scam ads

Re: "won the right to sue Meta"

"Reputable end-of-life processors" invariably means that these batteries end up discarded somewhere to be processed by the environment.

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: It's the only way to be sure.

We've gone full circle!

I suspect that sudo (the Linux command) will end up like its poweroff and shutdown contemporaries – just a symlink to some systemd binary, and most users won't even notice that it's gone unless they actually need some advanced feature.

Three cuffed for 'helping North Koreans' secure remote IT jobs in America

Re: Laptop Farms?

It has to be a real device because many companies install some form of device management and endpoint security on employee laptops, and those will pick up a VM and may raise an alert.

It is not mentioned that she purchased any of those laptops, I suspect most of them have been sent to her address by the employers themselves.

Nix forked, but over politics instead of progress

Re: Home directories

>I can 'cd' into one directory and the C and C++ compiler automatically change to the version required for that piece of software.

direnv is a wonderful program that does just this for bash. It needs an .envrc recipe in any such directory, or at least one of its parents, for it to work.

I don't know if Nix uses direnv, but it sounds very similar.

Re: familiar

This is an accurate analogy.

I guess the downvoters only know git from web interfaces and never actually interacted with it directly.

JetBrains is still mad at Rapid7 for the ransomware attacks on its customers

>Publishing this information was just malicious.

The only malicious party here is the one that added a severe vulnerability to its product. No matter how you spin it, Rapid7 have not added any vulnerabilities to any product.

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

Re: Limited Exposure To BSD ...

>Is it ifconfig, or ip today? devfs or udev? oss or alsa?

ip, udev, and alsa have been around for 24, 20, and 25 year respectively.

If anything, Linux changes at a glacial pace.

InfluxData apologizes for deleting cloud regions without performing 'scream test'

Re: DBA's priorities

Well said. No matter what the contract says, the data owner is always responsible for the continuity of their data.

Not the database service provider.

Not the backup service provider.

The owner.

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

Re: Quick Sanity Check

One of the few comments worth reading.

Indeed, getting access to a program does not automatically make somebody a recipient of the program. If an employer installs Linux on servers, then employees logging into those servers do not get any rights to programs found there, irrespective of licence.

The fact that so many software vendors make source code freely available to the public has blurred the distinction between recipient and user in people's minds.

WAN router IP address change blamed for global Microsoft 365 outage

Re: Why

My guess is general housekeeping or network consolidation. Since networks are allocated in blocks, perhaps Microsoft engineers allocated a block that was too large for that network, then realized that less than half of those IPs are used and decided to allocate a smaller block and free up a portion of those IP addresses.

With the current deficit of IPv4 addresses, it makes sense to optimize their usage.

Strong support for Snap and Ubuntu Core as Canonical meet IRL

>NIH

You have conveniently decided to ignore the part where Snap predates Flatpak, but don't worry – it looks like you're not the only one.

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

Great news

The missing pieces for truly secure boot on Linux are finally starting to appear one by one.

Now distributions need to start bundling a basic initramfs with the kernel image and sign the resulting file, then offer loadable initramfs extensions for situations where the basic initramfs is not sufficient.

With the added TPM functionality we should be able to implement passwordless (from users' point of view) disk encryption like every modern OS offers.

Finally, no more waiting minutes for GRUB to unlock a disk in multi-user environments!

Court papers indicate text messages from HMRC's 60886 number could snoop on Brit taxpayers' locations

Re: This is how SMS works

>How else can the call/text be routed to wherever the phone happens to be today?

The same way a Skype message gets delivered to the same phone without revealing anything about its location, not even the country.

Microsoft blocked TSO Host's email IPs from Hotmail, Outlook inboxes and no one seems to care

Re: But, but, I'm too important to care!

Hetzner do have an abuse form (https://abuse.hetzner.com/) and they are vigilant when it comes to following up on complaints. I know because I've complained to them in the past.

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

The difference of course is that walkie-talkies were't transmitting unless you held a physical button down.

They were also less likely to end up paired to an adult's phone, where private conversations may be taking place.