Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Well yes

That's the reason I didn't register (that, and I don't really want a touchpad anyway).

But if one wants (one in a million chance to) score a free fondleslab, the attached e-mail annoyance is easily filtrable...

I liked it

Actually I found it quite entertaining. Handbags at dawn etc...

Re: they're saying

>The weasel wording in Sony's PR gives one the impression that they're saying Anonymous were responsible for stealing PII

Thats what they are saying, in essence. They're not saying that Anonymous did it, they're saying that the Anon attacks diverted their techies' attention, allowing the "PII" (yuck) to be stolen. Which might or might not be true, but doesn't reflect well on Sony's security procedures in any case. "our security people were so busy looking at a dog pissing on their shoes that they didn't notice the burglars ransacking the house". Security at its best.

(I know that I'm pushing it a bit and that it not _that_ simple, a powerful DDOS attack is not something you can completely ignore when your business model relies heavily on fast connectivity, yadda yadda yadda, no need to point it. The fact is, the systems were too easily pwned, data was insufficiently hashed, no-one thought that checking logs after the DDOS could be a good idea, etc.... In short: LAMEST. EXCUSE. EVAR.)

Re: a million miles from Windows

How's life in 1992 mate?

Re: Re: Maginot line?

You mean they didn't use the right kind of bombshells to suitably stiffen the Maginot line? I'm not sure about that, it was thick and strong, stiffly erected and quite intimidating. But size and stiffness, although important, are not all, you also need to stick it in the right spot. Although one could argue that the stiff Maginot line was deliberately placed in the front, to trick the Wermacht into penetrating through the Belgian backdoor, thus luring the UK into joining in the fun.

Imagining cliché-costumed actors roleplaying the whole thing in fast-motion, to the tune of Yakety Sax, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Organic dust

Organic "dust" (like flour, but also straw dust etc) is quite flammable when in suspension in the air. Where I grew up, explosions due to dust were one of the most feared dangers during harvests as they are capable of destroying large and expensive equipment. Basically some dust in suspension causes a rather small explosion, which brings more dust in the air, leading to a big kaboom, even in comparatively small and air-deprived silos.

Scaled up to match the volume of that shed, I can imagine a HUGE explosion indeed.

There would have had to be some organic dust in there to begin with, but it's not hard to imagine that there could have been some (residues? Empty shed used as storage?), and you don't need much. the limiting factor in smaller silos is the quantity of air, not dust.

Name?

"The Register Undercover Investigation Team"

Just drop the "investigation" part. The RUT has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

@ AC

"or a wireless user to connect to a new AP."

Yes, that was the problem I was referring to. Given that the vulnerable OSes also have a tendency to connect to whatever AP is "best" -without warning- by default, you'd catch a lot of people at Starbucks.

Depending on how the corporate WiFi is set, you'll probably be able to also catch data from visitors and/or personal laptops from management at your competitor's. Probably enough to really harm them (you don't need much info to mount a devastating social engineering attack).

@Ragarath

>Why should a user setting override a group setting?

Because that's the sensible thing to do. Fine-grained control should have precedence over large-scale. Deny access to everyone but to the known authorized persons. That's just common sense.

>If the user your talking about needs access why are you putting the user in a group that denies access?

Because when you have hundreds of users, accessing tens of ressources, but with specific rights, you just can't create a group for every one of them. You create a few tens of groups, maybe, for the general population, but sometimes you need exceptions. What do you do, remove the "exceptional" users from all their groups and create a special group for each of them? And do the same thing, the opposite way, each time one of your "special" users lose or gain credentials?

>Try thinking of a group as a user that can change ownership without having to change the permissions

Well that's exactly what a NTFS group is, a rigid multifaced anonymous meta-user closed to finer-grain control, and that's why it sucks.

>rather than thinking that it is a looser set of permissions.

??? tightness has nothing to do with it. It's just plain clumsy.

>This also raises the question why your adding specific user permissions to objects rather than groups [...].

Maybe because when john-doe-067845 (previously in group "users") genuinely needs -temporary- access to /secret/ressource/files/john-doe-067845/, but nothing else, I'm not necessarily willing to open the directory to all and sundry?

R is not like Perl

Perl was designed to be flexible, versatile, and fast to write in (with an emphasis on code compacity). R is neither. In R it's damn nigh impossible to work on any dataset not in 2-d table format, the syntax is a messy, ambiguous jungle (plus it requires many, many times the "optimal" keystroke number), and R really does only one thing: statistics (and associated graphic representation). But that it does quite well.

Actually R might ("structurally", so to speak) be a programming language, philosophically it is a statistics framework that HAS a language. A bit like TeX, LaTeX, lout etc are languages (Turing-complete, even), but good luck if you want to use them for anything else than document layout.

Understand you don't, little padawan

The target of this is NOT banks, big oil,... its the REAL big guys, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook etc.

You'll notice the COMPLETE -and deliberate- lack of user-friendlyness, basically the configuration has to be done with a hammer and a tiny chisel to carve the 0s ans 1s manually on the disks. It is a lego brick to be incorporated in big datacenters in lieu of the comparatively bloated MySQL, not a complete, luser-ready system.

Also I'm sick of people complaining about open source names just because it's open source. Apple OS is a stupid name, and Windows? Seriously? Skype? come on. .NET? How could you get more horrid than .NET? Oh right, that would be iPad. Or Java. Seriously, Java? Puh-leeze. etc...

Names are just tags, and that's especially true for backend software. For all you know your "conservative" bank software might include a module named WhoeverUsesThatCrapIsaMoron, but only the seller's devs would know. Same as for Drizzle. You're not likely to notice if Facebook starts using that, are you?

Also, I did not know that banks had a need for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, although if they had, they would be complete morons not to use it based on the name alone, and I, personnally, think you're pulling that crap out of your arse; no high-level manager will dismiss a saving of million dollars based on a seemingly silly soft name. There would have to be REAL reason. Only deadwood middle management types and the coloured-crayons department give a rat's ass about software names. The rest of us use the right tool for the job.

Which reminds me that I need to rename my latest project Hammer. Because Hammer is always the right tool for the job, Or something. The next one will be Ductape (possibly with a logo featuring a large simian creature just to add some confusion). Cubicle drones might not get it and find the names silly, but if it's aimed at techies it will make a killing.