Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: They haven't since about 2007

"If you mean no espresso machine, fair enough. If you mean the iPhone 5 has feature parity with iPhone 1 then I'll have some of what you're smoking please."

True. The iPhone 5 has cut and paste, for a start!

More seriously, AC's point was that the iPhone 1 had significantly fewer features than pre-existing smartphones, has set the trend for other smartphone makers to cut features, and that smartphones are just getting back to where they were in 2007.

I don't know if AC is right but I do know AC meant that because I tried that newfangled thing they call "reading his post". Not that I expect it to gain significant traction in El Reg's comments section...

Re: Bastards....

This story has fuck all to do with software piracy; the fuckers disguised their nasty as oft-downloaded stuff, is all.

Although I do seem to struggle to gather any significant amount of sympathy for people who try and download cracked MSOffice copies: it hurts the competition. Just get OpenOffice or LibreOffice or any other in the myriad of open source office software around, it's not like there's a shortage.

Re: If it's not broke...

> There is also FTPS

I don't usually consider FTPS a separate protocol; it's still FTP

> a software bug leading to rights escalation and so could just as easily affect SCP/SFTP.

Indeed. Especially SCP, which is known to be vulnerable (which is why most "scp" clients actually use SFTP under the hood).

Re: The usual, inflating the crimes.

> However, on each item there was a load of links, but he would leave all the others active and the file still avaliable.,If that's true, then that;s really not "making every reasonable effort".

You have to remember that MegaUpload was a file locker. That is, you could upload content there and access it from wherever you wanted. Nothing prevents you from putting your entire collection of copyrighted music and films in there, for your own use*; what was deemed illegal was the subsequent distribution of links to world+dog.

The _distribution_ of the link only, because obviously you'd have to retain a link for you to access your own stuff. So the appropriate remedy to a copyright infringement by link distribution would be to remove the distributed link.

Removal of the material on the server is not appropriate, as it's perfectly legal for anyone to put copyrighted material up there in what wasn't called The Cloud yet. Plus, MegaUpload was probably technically advanced enough to have de-duplication going on like crazy, which means that they most definitely did NOT host 349,076,454 separate copies of Never Gonna Give You Up.

So, the distribution of the links was a breach of copyright. When notified, MegaUpload removed the infringing link (which was infringing only in that it was distributed, remember). There was no real way nor reason to remove the file from the server, so this wasn't done.

Seems pretty reasonnable to me. Then again in the opposite corner we have people who think that 120 years of royalties is still too short to provide adequate remuneration to the shareholders, so clearly we don't have the same understanding of the word "reasonnable".

Re: I'm sorry, can someone explain?

> Samsung fanboy perhaps?

Not particularly, no. I don't own any end-user product made by them (although I am well aware that some components of my stuff may come from them).

> Not shocked at the advertised stalk-mode camera?

It has a camera cunningly camouflaged as big black lens protruding in the middle of a bright orange plasic band, if that's what you mean by "advertised stalk-mode camera". What does it have to do with anything (apprt from being somewat ugly)?

> half-arsed coding during the weekend for Internet-facing software by C++11 hackers freshly out of uni

Where it would be an improvement... Copy-pasted PHP with a dash of horrendous java seems to be the norm. Developpment has to go through a committee of non-technical people, charged with putting together a spec. Of course it ends up beeing a mix between Miss Marple's understanding of computers and the latest fake gizmo they saw on NCIS, only even blurrier. They outsource that to the lowest bidder, they usually get a quick-and-dirty rehash of a database frontend the contractor had lying around, and then starts the haggling period (~a year) in which the committee asks for a mod, the contractor applies a dirty patch to make it more or less happen, lathe, rinse, repeat ad nauseam. And then when the committee is satisfied with the Frankenstein monster of a clusterfuck it has become, they call in the tech people and say: "It costs us 250000 so you'd better make it work".

It's good that we have a zero-tolerance policy about people showing up at work when sick, because if someone was to sneeze too close to the servers on which these horrors are running, Dog knows what would happen.

Re: unlike in the UK.... @Tom13

I think you'll find that by the time the US got involved in Europe, USSR had pretty comprehensively thrashed Germany. All the valid troops were busy on the East front trying to contain the Russians; all that was left on the West "front" on D-day was a shell of concrete vaguely manned by kids and geezers. The last real westward effort of Germany was the Battle of Britain, which they lost to the Brits.

The US did beat the crap out of Japan, that we can all agree on.

Re: Sensible to Suggest Ways of Blocking The Spread?

> But what else should one do in mitigation or prevention.

Offline backup. NAS and Dropbox don't count.

Re: This is nonsense of the highest order. (Mad Mike)

> So, it is critical they keep Windows position, even if they have to give it away for free.

And if they DON'T give it away for free but keep charging $40, which OS do you reckon will replace Windows?

In any case from the home user point of view they DO give it away for free, as you generally can't get a windows-free machine for less than a machine with Windows pre-installed*. The channel is taking the hit, not the end user.

As for enterprise, a lot more arguments come into play, especially with bundled and volume licensing the OS is often free, too. Plus, in a big organisation jumping OS is not a decision you make based on few bucks per machine.

*there are exceptions but they are few and far appart

Re: What kind of numpty actually clicks on adverts on the internet?

The City of London Police and the BPI, it would seem.

Re: backups and...

> Am I mistaken in thinking that if the Linux box was managing the copy-on-write with snapshots (say every hour/day etc...) and exposing the filesystem as SAMBA (or whatever) to a windows guest, that cryptlocker would come in and mess up files (I am assuming users home directories), but since copy-on-write , the old version would still be around?

You're mixing things. CryptLocker will attempt to encrypt every filesystem that is visible to the machine it's running on. A secure way to do it would be to have the host perform a snapsot of the VM every now and then, without involving the guest at all, and with no access -no write access at least- from the guest to the snapshot. That's usually built in the virtual machine manager, for a very good reason. If the guest OS (Windows) is the one requesting the archiving writes, then it's at least partly vulnerable as the malware will be "aware" of the existence of the "archive" filesystem and will attempt to encrypt it as well. SAMBA especially sounds like a bad idea, FTP is probably easier to lock down.

In short, as long as the system running the malware has write access to the "backup", you're toast.