John Smith 19 • User • The Register Forums

Sports Direct hacked last year, and still hasn't told its staff of data breach

Thursday 9th February 2017 08:24 GMT John Smith 19

Sports Direct introduces new staff uniform.*

It makes a bold statement about your corporate identity and is easy to clean.

*Price deducted from you pay over the succeeding months.

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Ex-NSA contractor Harold Martin indicted: He spent 'up to 20 years stealing top-secret files'

Thursday 9th February 2017 08:11 GMT John Smith 19

Re: Just a "compulsive hoarder", allegedly

So less Snowden, more McKinnon, but without the looking for evidence of UFO's?

But in America sad is not better than bad.

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F5's Big-IP leaks little chunks of memory, even SSL session IDs

Thursday 9th February 2017 08:07 GMT John Smith 19

"31 bytes of uninitialised memory.” So

Someone can't read an interface specification properly

Someone can't implement an interface specification properly

It was too much of a performance hit to zero the right size block of memory.

Shouldn't most interfaces be implemented as state machines with the baseline code written by a tool and that code rarely needs tweaking?

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Revealed: 'Suicide bomber Barbie' and other TSA quack science that cost $1.5 billion

Thursday 9th February 2017 08:03 GMT John Smith 19

"The TSA is a jobs program for the otherwise unemployable -"

And helping luggage crooks be more productive.

It's not known as the Thieves Support Association for nothing. *

*Unless they started putting CCTV in the TSA luggage inspection areas.

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Thursday 9th February 2017 08:01 GMT John Smith 19

Clearly someone has been studying the GSG9 playbook.

As described in "Shoot the Women First."

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Android Wear: The bloatware that turned into gloatware

Wednesday 8th February 2017 19:17 GMT John Smith 19

Yes that's very clever,

What exactly does it do for me and why will I pay $WTF to do it?

Technology push can sometimes take people in directions they never realized they wanted to go.

But a lot more lasting success seems to come from finding out what people are unhappy with now and just doing something to fix that.

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Small but perfectly formed: Dailymotion's object storage odyssey

Wednesday 8th February 2017 18:30 GMT John Smith 19

I had forgotten about DailyMotion

Perhaps it's time to check them out again?

Good to know there are large storage solutions that don't originate from Trumpville.

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Conviction by computer is go, confirms UK Ministry of Justice

Wednesday 8th February 2017 18:25 GMT John Smith 19

"defendants who opt into the online procedure." OMG An HMG computer system you have

to opt in to use.

In the conventional use of the term, not the weaslly inverse logic method of CMD for ISP to not filter your content.

But let's keep in mind the 2 word to watch out for where gumint systems are concerned.

Mission creep.

Today fare evasion (but it's still a criminal, not a civil offense). Tomorrow....

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The best of Reg readers' David Hockney-style logo redesigns

Wednesday 8th February 2017 18:10 GMT John Smith 19

Fortunately all entrants managed to retain the key feature.

The viciously hooked beak for

Tearing into PHBs

Cons-sultants from Strategy Boutiques with their paradigm de jour.

Politicians whose (lack of) temperance of view is matched only by their ignorance of the subject they are spouting on about.

Nice work. Although IRL I don't think the Sun's readership on Merseyside is going to rise anytime soon.

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Revealed: Malware that skulks in memory, invisibly collecting sysadmins' passwords

Wednesday 8th February 2017 12:28 GMT John Smith 19

Youtube vid from about 2013? "Living off the land" Derbycom

IE not writing to disk.

Looks like someone's not checking what's running on their critical servers very often.

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Honeypots: Free psy-ops weapons that can protect your network before defences fail

Wednesday 8th February 2017 09:16 GMT John Smith 19

Yes a server with little or no user traffic would be pretty suspicous.

Sot he devils in the details in making it convincing.

Excellent article

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UK uni KCL spunks IT budget on 'reputation management' after IT disaster headlines

Wednesday 8th February 2017 09:08 GMT John Smith 19

"The important information to glean here is the exact cause of the failure."

Sometimes called a "root cause" analysis.

The SW upgrade was the final event in the chain.

Break that chain anywhere before that and it would not have happened.

Examples being

Why no regular testing of backups? Why no test SAN to check software updates? Why no hot backup system? A single SAN,even with data stripped across multiple hard drives and with multiple PSU's is still a single point failure if the control software is bricked.

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Tuesday 7th February 2017 14:51 GMT John Smith 19

"either backed up shit or hadn't been tested for their ability to actually restore "

Here's the thing.

Untested backups are not backups.

They are a lucky charm you stroke for good luck.Management that does not require this to be tested regularly is incompetent to the point of delusional.

They should work, but bitter experience taught me they don't always.

Yes it's time consuming to prove what should be a null result (backup restores original data) but imagine how good you feel when you find out it doesn't before you need it?

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Pulsating white dwarf described as a 'dynamo' found, no, not in the back pages, 380 LY away

Wednesday 8th February 2017 08:57 GMT John Smith 19

"Should that not be in fact 10124009 Brontosaurus?"

No.

It should be 10124009 Brontosauri.

Brontosaurus is the singular.

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Wednesday 8th February 2017 08:06 GMT John Smith 19

So it's a sort of On / Off star then?

Mines the one with a copy of "Ad Deepness in the Sky" in the pocket.

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Facebook investors yell at CEO: Get the Zuck out of our boardroom!

Wednesday 8th February 2017 08:52 GMT John Smith 19

Sadly unlikely to end in the way that it did for Conrad Black of "Torygraph" fame

"Blackie" was stripped of his Lordship and sent to jail.

He famously referred to minority shareholders as "terrorists"

The truth is it's usually the Board you should be worried about.

These characters seem to only hold large share blocks due to generous (sometimes obscenely generous) compensation packages then proceed to line their pockets further while the company turns to s**t.

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Russia (A) bans web porn as a 'bad influence' (B) decriminalizes domestic violence – or (C) all of the above?

Wednesday 8th February 2017 08:45 GMT John Smith 19

"Now the two dear leaders have a mututal love in for each other."

Well the D certainly sounds very impressed by Dobby's ~~dictatorial~~ no nonsense approach to government but I'm doubtful it's mutual.

I think Dobby has the D pegged as a lightweight with the attention span of a goldfish.

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Australia wants to jail infosec researchers for pointing out dodgy data

Wednesday 8th February 2017 08:30 GMT John Smith 19

Those of us living in the UK, USA and Canada ....

You missed a <sarcasm> tag there.

This sounds like a CYA law, possibly preceded in private by an "Oh s**t" moment as someone pointed out to them how p**s poor their anonymization process actually is.

But I'm with earlier posters. Let me say it loud and clear.

IT'S NOT THEIR DATA, IT'S YOURS.

If a government insists you supply this data they should be aware of a)How it can be misused and b)How to store it securely.

If they can't maybe they should not be collecting it in the first place?

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Sloppy iOS apps expose 'encrypted' user traffic

Wednesday 8th February 2017 08:04 GMT John Smith 19

Isn't this boiler plate code that should be dropped in and left alone?

Apparently not according to some devs.

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Phishing: Another thing we can blame on Brexit

Tuesday 7th February 2017 23:54 GMT John Smith 19

"ikely to pay up,..healthcare, government, critical infrastructure, education, small businesses."

"Extortion is my business"

Signed

E.S. Blowfeld.

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Feds snooping on your email without a warrant? US lawmakers are on a war path to stop that

Tuesday 7th February 2017 23:52 GMT John Smith 19

Who is Sen Cornyn

And what has the FBI got on him?

Or is it that all R-TX Senators are ignorant SEL's ?

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Virtual monopoly on UK cell towers and TV masts up for sale

Tuesday 7th February 2017 14:59 GMT John Smith 19

Actual broadcast has a lot of advantages.

Like GPS it has an unlimited number of viewers / receivers.

Decent data rates mean your PVR will have no trouble. recording it.

Between better image quality and a viable PVR will most readers want to waste bandwidth like that or use it for downloading stuff they can't see on a channel?

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NASA's Curiosity puts cat among the climate pigeons: Lack of CO2 sinks water theory

Tuesday 7th February 2017 08:23 GMT John Smith 19

Excellent result.

Yes it looks like they are missing something.

Which suggests we are about to discover something new to add to climate models for all planets.

I will note 2 points.

Below triple point water sublimes from solid to vapour but doesn't water vapour act as a greenhouse gas, even if it's not "concentrated" into droplets?

How deep would carbonate deposits have to be to be invisible from space? Is there enough time for that cover to blown over or otherwise form on them?

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Boffins build laser satellite data link

Tuesday 7th February 2017 08:16 GMT John Smith 19

IIRC typcial NASA "housekeeping"* data rates back to Earth are about 10kbs

So not much of a change.

*Stuff like battery cell temperatures, RCS tank pressures and temps, switch settings etc. Not the Mbs data stream for the science stuff.

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Intel's Atom C2000 chips are bricking products – and it's not just Cisco hit

Tuesday 7th February 2017 08:12 GMT John Smith 19

A time when diversity in the ecosystem is a good thing

But of course how can you know if all those different mfg's boxes don't have the same chip (or copy of the chip logic) inside?

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Tuesday 7th February 2017 08:06 GMT John Smith 19

"I hope Synology are ready to help us."

Wouldn't it be an idea to call them first?

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Trump's cybersecurity strategy kinda makes sense, so why delay?

Tuesday 7th February 2017 08:02 GMT John Smith 19

"Responability" without authority (to make it stick)

is BS.

Just saying.

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Police drones, robo surgeons and chatbot civil servants. What could go wrong?

Monday 6th February 2017 17:09 GMT John Smith 19

Truly a nightmrish vision

and you thought AMFM was harmless.

You fools.

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Microsoft's DRM can expose Windows-on-Tor users' IP address

Monday 6th February 2017 15:04 GMT John Smith 19

"Come now! This started with XP's "product activation" feature and has been "

Doesn't this date back to "Paladium" and "Trusted computing," where MS mean "Trusted by Big Corporate customer to prevent unauthorised access to any of their documents off site unless you pay them big money and/or a senior manager."

In theory DRM could be used to allow individual artists to be receive micro payments and ensure you only pay once for something but each individual person does have to pay, rewarding creativity.

But IRL what are the f**king odds of anyone implementing a system with such goals?

Somewhat smaller than the googles revenue root of FA.

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This many standards is dumb: Decoding 25Gb Ethernet and beyond

Monday 6th February 2017 14:55 GMT John Smith 19

Whenever I see stuff like this I think.

Couldn't you have just drawn a table instead?

Who knew that the days when people had to play find-the-loose-thin-Etherenet-cable-at-2am where a happy time.

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Infosec bods: This is a backdoor in Skype for Macs. Microsoft: No.

Monday 6th February 2017 14:40 GMT John Smith 19

Did not ask for

Do not want

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Trump's new telecoms chief bins broadband subsidies for the poor

Sunday 5th February 2017 23:20 GMT John Smith 19

"Sweet" Pai already starting to earn that non exec VP post.

"Regulation"

He's heard of it.

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New SMB bug: How to crash Windows system with a 'link of death'

Sunday 5th February 2017 18:19 GMT John Smith 19

Shouldn't most protocols be implemented by state machines?

IOW most of the code gets written by a tool.

So a missing option would appear as an item not ticked off the list of states.

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Sophos update borks systems at London NHS trust

Sunday 5th February 2017 07:52 GMT John Smith 19

scan for application vulnerabilities just once a year

Icon says it all.

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UK.gov slammed by Parliamentary types for 'dysfunctional' infosec

Sunday 5th February 2017 07:39 GMT John Smith 19

little oversight of the costs and performance of government information assurance projects

And yet the amount of information HMG wants people to give up continues to rise.

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Brexit White Paper published: Broad strokes, light on detail

Saturday 4th February 2017 23:15 GMT John Smith 19

"The French farming lobby gets listened to seriously in France, "

The difference between the UK and a lot of Europe is that in a lot of Europe farming is a part time occupation, with lots of people doing it in addition to their regular jobs.

In the UK that seems to be confined to BBC presenters.

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Thursday 2nd February 2017 17:34 GMT John Smith 19

TL:DR We want it all but we want to keep the same prices as now from the EU.

The most despicable thing about this is not the biggest political, whole society affecting change in a generation is being made by a PM with no elected mandate.

It's why it's happening.

To keep the Conservative party together.

To stop supporters going to UKIP

Because the Home Office could not do their f**king job over decades.

The only criticism you will see in many British newspapers is that 2 years is too long and the Brexit needs to be harder.

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Thought your data was safe outside America after the Microsoft ruling? Think again

Saturday 4th February 2017 15:20 GMT John Smith 19

"Unless you go the full totalitarian, and run a private security state"

That is not the nuclear option.

That would be the 1 clause act suspending The Senate and Congress and instituting direct rule from the Oval Office.

IOW "Thank you for your service but if you're not in the Cabinet you're not needed. Please vacate the building in the next hour. "

But no one would be megalomanical enough to do that in the 21st century in the most powerful country on the planet, right?

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Saturday 4th February 2017 08:01 GMT John Smith 19

And while THE PATRIOT stands it always will.

IIRC the MS thing was a non US citizen not in the US and (I think) it was a MS subsidiary in Ireland.

Bottom line. You can't trust a US company, or it's subsidiaries, to keep your data (business or personal) private from the USG, and the USG does not need a reason to ask for it.

"Privacy is dead" says the creepy Eric Smidt.

He would. It's in his interests that people think that already, so Google can keep pushing further toward making it so. Creepy is clearly a student of Lenin and "pushing in the bayonet" till it meets steel.

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Rupert Murdoch rips up his own fondleslab foundry

Saturday 4th February 2017 15:07 GMT John Smith 19

"Was 'The Chancer' (Murdoch Sr) in charge"

Of course there's always the question the boy Murdoch had a hand in it as well.

People remember the Alto but can't seem to do any better than it.

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Uncle Sam probes SpaceX – but crack nothing to be alarmed about, we're told

Saturday 4th February 2017 08:05 GMT John Smith 19

Andy Pasztor

Not exactly known for his balanced reporting on SX.

Read with 50lb of salt handy.

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GCHQ cyber-chief slams security outfits peddling 'medieval witchcraft'

Friday 3rd February 2017 22:04 GMT John Smith 19

"sophisticated state sponsored hacking and pervasive technical surveillance. "

Now those are what I'd call Advanced, Persistent Threats.

Neither look like going away and both attack privacy and anonymity, both of which are essential to allow the democratic process to operate effectively.

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Friday 3rd February 2017 21:56 GMT John Smith 19

"proper information security governance. Which we ain't gonna get." Until after the event.

Sadly not necessarily even then.

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US tech giants take brave immigration stand that has nothing to do with profit whatsoever

Friday 3rd February 2017 20:41 GMT John Smith 19

"money a setter costs vs a min wage operator, "

Perhaps it's because in Germany running a CNC is viewed as a job worth having and they don't just put anyone in charge of one?

One of the worst legacies of the (formally) strong trades union environment in the UK seems to be the continuing preservation of "demarcation and differentials" between who does what and how much that job is paid.

Not surprising when you consider one of the first efforts at collective bargaining was met by deportation to Australia, under what was effectively an anti terror law of the time (I wonder if it's ever been repealed?).

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Friday 3rd February 2017 08:57 GMT John Smith 19