* Posts by Version 1.0

5376 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Don't be too shocked, but it looks as though these politicians have actually got their act together on IoT security

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Re: Optimistic

In general when you see statements like "bipartisan legislation in the US, with industry backing" you can assume that the consumers are getting screwed - No, I'm not complaining, it's just the way things are.

Overhyped 5G is being 'rushed', Britain's top comms boffin reckons

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SNAFU again

Didn't we go through this series of arguments when 4G was introduced? Forget about the technical pros and cons - this is a sales and marketing issue as far as all the vendors are concerned. Eventually 5G will get sorted out and everyone will forget about this.

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

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Meh

I think we can blame the operating systems

The operating systems all say that they are going to "reformat the disk" and so the average user is going to think that they have done the right thing. It's way past time for the operating systems to offer an "erase disk" option that actually does what it says it does instead of just clearing the file table.

What today links Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram – apart from being run by monopolistic personal data harvesters?

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Re: Twitter down?

I agree and sympathize too but we have to realize that this is the internet, electrons rattling around in wires and electro-magnetic fields ... it's generally more reliable than carrier pigeons but, like pigeons, you can't complain when it doesn't work occasionally.

Uber driver drove sleeping woman miles away from home to 'up the fare'. Now he's facing years in the clink for kidnapping, fraud

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Facepalm

This is America, everything is legal in America until you get caught.

What's puzzling about this is that Uber is still around ... they simply fire the drivers and blame them but look back at how many times that Uber has been caught doing horrendous things - is their corporate HR policy based on The Art of The Deal?

UK digital competition review: Forget money, we should consider 'balance of harms' during tech mergers

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Facepalm

NO!

"balance of harms" is this worlds excuse for pitiful bad behavior ... it's like saying that slavery is good for the economy, rape helps boost the low paid worker population, it's OK to pour coffee over a beggar if you give them a quid, etc etc .. the fact is, there is good behavior and bad behavior, and just because you are good sometimes, don't in any way excuse that fact that you are bad other times.

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

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First W10, then Brexit, and now Bombastic Bob is getting more up votes than down votes ... our world is spinning out of control ... Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

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Re: You beat me to it ...

"The main aim of the EU is to prevent other nations wanting to leave." - I'm amazed that, give our behavior, they haven't kicked us out already. The UK is acting like a weasel in the EU's underwear.

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Pint

Re: Effects of food import tax

"With no foreign workers allowed" ... but we'll still be letting Irish workers in ... OK, with the planned ERG Hard Brexit probably not, so we'll have to rely on the DUP, the Welsh, and the Scots to fill in the worker requirements. It's BRexit not UKexit isn't it. If I had written an essay 40 years ago in my school English Class that told the Conservative/DUP/ERG Brexit tale as fiction, then I would have expected to get a -F grade - Plot? ... none, Brains? ... none, etc etc. UK politics passed the pitiful stage a while back.

I was going to check the "Joke" icon for this post but given the current politics I'm heading for a beer, I'll feel much better.

Astroboffins spot hefty pair swinging together. What? Um, we're talking about record-breaking massive binary stars...

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Re: Why binary?

With a bit more gas Jupiter might have ignited and made us a binary system ... but it didn't happen - when you look at all the possibilities in the galaxy you become aware just how amazingly unique our solar system and our little blue dot is.

On the eve of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft confirms Windows 10 can automatically remove borked updates

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I think it does that now - we have one W10 laptop that reboots when it feels like it for a day or two. Will MS eventually extend this new feature to remove problem applications like Libre Office?

Airlines in Asia, Africa ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after second death crash in four-ish months

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Re: Background

The problem is that you have to realize that there's a failed sensor - but the software believes that the sensor angle is right and so - given two sensors - if one says that you are about to stall then the software will believe it first and go into anti-stall mode. You can say that the pilots should just take over but it's not that simple - a sensor's lying - which one? What do we trust? Flight control systems are so automated these days that commercial pilots don't spend a lot of time flying by the seat of their pants anymore and when the system goes into kamikaze mode you're fighting the software and the bad sensor - you don't have a lot of time to turn the software off, figure out which sensor is good and which one should be ignored when the plane is taking off and only a couple of thousand feet up.

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A programming error?

Don't forget that AF447 went down because of a sensor error too - when the sensors give bad readings the software seem to always assume that the sensors are correct and the pilots are not - and so the software puts the plane into the ground - it's no big deal for the software. Human pilots, on the other hand, generally struggle to not put the plane into the ground. Sure, we occasionally have pilot errors too but pilot errors that cause a crash are extremely rare.

Small Brit firms beg for 'light touch' as only half are ready for digital tax reforms due next month

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"Two months notice" ... please could we have two months notice for the other government cock up? Starting to look like we'll be lucky to get two weeks...

Nah, National Cyber Security Centre doesn't need its own minister, UK.gov tells Parliament

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A British government?

Gosh - us folk overseas didn't realize that you still had a British government? Are you sure you have one? Parliament looks like a bunch of public schoolboys playing in the classroom when the teacher fails to show up these days.

Packet switching pickle prompts potential pecuniary problems

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Re: Back in my NetWare days

We had the same problem - the UK accounting folks wanted direct access to the US accounting so we were ordered to install an ISDN connection for them ... after the first months $1200 bill they decided that it wasn't that important.

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

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I'm not complaining

Back in the 90's I was at a January conference in Washington, DC when my company boss told me that their installation engineer was sick and I needed to fly to Melbourne Australia to install a system that had just been delivered. Installation and training would take about a week - I said that I'd only bought a coat and a change of clothes to the conference, he said, "No problem just get what you need."

So I switched my tickets, flew down to the Australian summer and bought a new summer wardrobe - it was hot, so I picked up a couple of Akubra hats too - they have lasted so well. When I returned I submitted my expenses with a note that the instructions had come from the company director. No problems for me.

That marketing email database that exposed 809 million contact records? Maybe make that two-BILLION-plus?

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Re: How about a change?

blank.org has been secure for years.

Liz Warren: I'll smash up Amazon, Google, and Facebook – if you elect me to the White House

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It's not just Google, Facebook and Amazon that are the problem

The real problem is that the larger the corporation gets, the easier it is to avoid paying taxes. It's endemic - remember that in the US corporations are people too - for many people in the US, taxes end up being voluntary unless you are poor, or middle-class - then you need to pay. Warren's proposal will piss off the people running both parties.

FBI warns of SIM-swap scams, IBM finds holes in visitor software, 13-year-old girl charged over JavaScript prank...

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So society prosecutes a 13 year old for Javascript but lets Equifax sail off on vacation.

No guns or lockpicks needed to nick modern cars if they're fitted with hackable 'smart' alarms

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Re: Pandora

If you remember, all the evils and miseries were let out of Pandora's box ... but the reason that we didn't all leap off the cliff was that false hope was let loose into the world too ... unhackable right ?

Tech security at Equifax was so diabolical, senators want to pass US laws making its incompetence illegal

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Re: Why would they do anything?

Just look at what's happened since the hack, big bonuses and retirement for the executives, they fired a few of the low paid techs and now it's business as usual - their share price is rising again.

No need to worry, it wasn't their data that was lost was it? These companies make money by selling information about third-party entities so security was always relatively insignificant - what they really worked hard at was making people pay to access the credit profiles.

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

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I went 62m up to the top of the Monument (Great Fire of London) last year and was surprised to find that cell phone service was much worse at the top than the bottom.

Guess who's addicted to GitHub, busy on Slack, stuck in 2015? No, not another hipster: It's the Slub backdoor malware

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While I may bitch about starting Firefox and Chrome and seeing nothing for a minute while they update, you are correct - automated patching is the only real defense. I wonder what other groups are getting hacked or monitored by this approach - we've got a lot of faff running around this month, could there be other fingers in the pie too?

Me? I've stopped reading the News, it's too depressing most of the time.

'Java 9, it did break some things,' Oracle bod admits to devs still clinging to version 8

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Updates

It's not a big deal really - when did an update not break something? Don't panic - there will be another update soon.

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

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Thumb Up

Re: It is too late

I see emails from various old friends names @yahoo.com all the time but when you look at the email headers they are all originating in Asia - but all that means is that some spammer found an open relay. Significantly most spam arrives during working hours which suggests to me that the majority is coming via hacked computers in the corporate world.

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

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Re: I'll file this in the ...

It's a good example of how you can use a sensor - sensors are everywhere. Suppose you don't like Google listening to your cellphone microphone ... and you disable it. Feel safe now? .... But the phone still has an accelerometer so it can still listen to you if you take the same approach as they are documenting here.

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

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Re: DISGUSTING

Uber is a corporation, in the US corporations are very rarely charged with causing deaths because corporations aren't people, "Corporations don't kill people, people kill people." There were no people involved, it was software/hardware that caused the homicide, the Uber driver just failed to stop it and that's an accident, not a crime in the corporate world.

If Uber get away with this then there's no reason for them to worry, they can disable the breaking systems completely and just speed through town like a corporate bowling ball delivering their passengers to their destination in minutes.

That's the "anti" view anyway - but the real issue here is that our society has stopped caring about the fate and well-being of everyone except the wealthy. Do you think we'd even be having these discussions if the Uber had T-boned a Bugatti and killed the driver?

UK Ministry of Justice: Surprise! We tested out biometric tech in prisons and 'visitors' with drugs up their bums ran away

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I wonder how many of those "running away" were either wardens or hired by wardens to make deliveries?

The infamous AI gaydar study was repeated – and, no, code can't tell if you're straight or not just from your face

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Re: Anon for obvious reasons

While I'm not saying that you are wrong, can you name any study of anything that doesn't have a bias of some kind?

Adi Shamir visa snub: US govt slammed after the S in RSA blocked from his own RSA conf

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Re: couldn't get one or couldn't get one in time?

Not really, the passport and immigration service was not affected by the shutdown - I applied to renew my passport three days prior to the shutdown and it arrived two weeks later.

NSA may kill off mass phone spying program Snowden exposed, says Congressional staffer

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Same old, same old, oswald ...

The metadata collection has been going on for many years, all Snowden did was to get the media to wake up and look at it (shock, horror, zzzzzz). This reporting is accurate, it's just a move in a chess game to distract everyone from reality. Intelligence services have never killed off anything off the record ... Mandy Rice Davies applies.

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

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Alien

The Later Lite Bombardment?

Sure, this sort of risk is worth scientifically evaluating but the chances of it happening are extremely low unless the oort cloud gets disturbed - occasionally a decent size chunk of rock will amble along but the chances of even getting one large enough to make a small crater are vanishingly small. Personally I think the risks to the planet come far more from human stupidity (climate change, politicians and social media idiots) than the occasional alien throwing stones at us.

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Re: Of course not, you need the whole team

Don't forget Michael Bay, he'd make a big difference.

Cheap as chips: There's no such thing as a free lunch any Moore

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Happy

Re: We can't separate them easily anymore

Works for me, I just replaced my old HP laptop's spinning disk drive with a new SSD and Moore's law kinda kicked in - way faster and good for another few years.

UK.gov's Verify has 'significantly' missed every target, groans spending watchdog

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Re: What a surprise!

For the people who designed the system, registering is easy - you just get one of your personal secretaries to do it ... they don't understand why anyone would have problems documenting where they lived 10 tears ago (typo sic).

McAfee: Oops, our bad. Sharpshooter malware was the Norks' Lazarus Group the whole time

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Re: "state hackers weren't smart enough for false flags"

In this game you hide some things and leave others out in the sunlight - when the malware is discovered in the sunlight people often stop looking under the stones nearby.

For example, here's my guaranteed method of always hitting someone with a snowball. You make two snowballs and you throw one at them in a high curve, the target person will watch it as it comes down towards them to make sure it doesn't hit them - so you throw the second snowball straight at them and you'll hit them every time. It's never failed me.

UK banking was struck by one IT fail every day for most of 2018

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Re: IT Failure?

It was just "the cloud" ... face it, the main function of cloud computing is to generate income to the "cloud providers" reliability is just a competitive feature that aids sales. If you move to the cloud then you're moving all support and reliability to the cloud ... and we all know what clouds do, don't we?

WannaCry-hero Hutchins' trial date set, Microsoft readies Google's Spectre V2 fix for Windows 10, Coinhive axed, and more

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Re: We the Rabbits ...

There seems to be no evidence of malfeasance at all - yes, he worked in the dark world but then so do the police ...

Band banned, Tarka arrives on Windows 10 and Visual Studio hits RC status

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Meh

What does Microsoft actually DO these days?

We've had years of them introducing new products and then dropping them - sure, you may think that you own a nice Surface laptop today but it will be gone in a few years, replaced by the next "new" thing. Windows 10 is hanging in there but it's still not reliable (except at slurping your data) and it's widely hated - most users would upgrade to Windows 7 if they had a chance, Visual Studio get an "upgrade" every 18 months but all it does is shuffle the deck, add a few cards and leave a few in the trash can.

It's not your imagination: Ticket scalper bots are flooding the internet according this 'ere study

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When I bought tickets to see the Rolling Stones back in the 70's at Earls Court, you had to send them a cheque in the mail and then a week or so befoe the show you either got the cheque mailed back to you or tickets - I got six tickets and we all went down to see them with The Meters - a fantastic show!

The point is that delay between issuing the tickets and knowing that you had a seat made a big dent in the scalpers - you can'r resell a ticket that you don't have, and if everyone knows that the tickets have not been issued (or guaranteed to be provided) then any "tickets" on sale are fakes and you can track down the "resellers" and prosecute them.

Correction: Last month, we called Zuckerberg a moron. We apologize. In fact, he and Facebook are a fscking disgrace

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Unhappy

Welcome to the modern world

Nothing is illegal unless you get caught - and then you just say sorry and walk away. Facebook will suffer no penalties for breaking the law - hardly anyone does these days, you just move on to the next project/victim. Unless of course you are poor - then you pay the price - poor people should know better, rich people/corporations just have to apologise for making innocent mistakes.

Three-quarters of crucial border IT systems at risk of failure? Bah, it's not like Brexit is *looks at watch* err... next month

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Pint

Re: Schadenfreude Popcorn

I've given up worrying about it - I'm heading for Project Beer ... it's the only sensible path left.

Moneybags Buffett on ditching Oracle stake: I don't think I understand where the cloud is going

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I don't always agree with Buffett's statements but when I look back at his actions over the years he's never been that wrong. If you don't understand an environment that you'd be just gambling to invest or work in it. Most modern "investment" companies act like legalized gambling companies, "Give us your money and we'll make you rich (unless of course - check the small print - we don't)."

Who needs malware? IBM says most hackers just PowerShell through boxes now, leaving little in the way of footprints

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It's a feature that we requested

For years people complained that UNIX system were much better than Windows for system administration because so much housekeeping can be automated with a small shell script - Microsoft listened to us and along came Power Shell ... and the hackers are demonstrating what a powerful shell script can do to the system.

"Live and Learn" used to be a phrase everybody used, but who learns from history these days?

Jeez, what a Huawei to go: Now US senators want Chinese kit ripped out of national leccy grid

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Re: Lobbying

It's just a side effect of a "Black Swan" government - sure, lobbying is a part of this but generally it's the politicians in power "playing to the base" ... wait until 2020 when election season rolls around - it will get much worse.

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Chinese food is slightly different all over the world, the cooks adjust it to meet local expectations ... much like what we call "Indian" food - everyone cooks up what the locals will buy.

'God, Send Mobiles,' the industry prayed back in the '90s. This time, 5G actually has it covered

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Coverage? We've heard of it.

But will 5G coverage be any better than 4G?

China's tech giants are a security threat to the UK, says Brit spy bigwig

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Re: Suppliers

Once upon a time, many many years ago, we used to make the kit ourselves - but then corporations figured out that they could make more money by moving production elsewhere - the UK used to have a solid electronics industry but it's just evaporated over the last 50 years. We've lost the ability to make the kit and there's no serious interest in building the infrastructure (and education system) to support UK production any longer - all the chums running the country see that it's more profitable to close down UK based companies and move the design, development, and production overseas.

This has been going on for a long time.

Amazon Prime Air flight crashes in Texas after 6,000ft nosedive

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Re: I'm going to speculate...

More likely air frame or catastrophic engine failure - the TSB will figure it out but it will take months.