Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

"The submarines, maybe; the Tridents, maybe not..."

Well, I've always held that you could just fill the missiles with concrete and get the same effect. The point of nuclear weapons isn't possessing working weapons, but rather getting the enemy to think that you have working weapons. A country could easily become quite powerful by just making it appear that they are building massive numbers of nuclear missiles while only building one a decade, testing it, and then keep claiming that you have many more.

Of course, I've also held that you really only need one nuclear weapon so long as you produce evidence to each potential adversary that its pointed right at their leaders' home.

Re: Valuations

I'd go with a different example than Apple/Samsung, seeing as how those companies' values are based off of actual product sold and income unlike companies like Facebook, Twitter, and all the other companies that have yet to make a single penny in profit.

But then your example isn't about the valuation of the companies themselves, but rather the perceived value of a specific assets. The case was that Apple lost a billion dollars in sales because consumers instead purchased a Samsung device for the sole reason it too had corners similar to those covered by their design patent.

Of course, though, you argument doesn't really track in that it is very unlikely people are suing the companies for such large amounts solely because of what they have been valued. I have personally been sued for a $2 million despite living in a modest home without any reason for them to believe I have that kind of money (I really don't). They lost the case (They were suing because their kid jumped over my fence and landed on a slippery concrete pad causing them to slip and receive massive amounts of brain damage). There are many other lawsuits like that where the defendant is being sued for an insane amount of money despite no evidence being present of the defendant possess anything close to that level of assets.

Re: Somebody else's problem?

"Of course that would make it impossible for us to trade with the EU, but who wants that anyway?"

Don't you see, that's their plan: If the US / UK are made to be crappy enough, no one would want to go there and would thus no more immigrants / refugees. You know, like how a little kid would drop their candy into the mud so they wouldn't have to share it.

Re: Fine idea - apply to all other research that doesn't meet the politicians' favor

To be fair, there is some data that the public should be aware of. Like if a town next to a military base suffers from a higher rate of certain respiratory issues, or if the demographics of people voting in an election doesn't match up with the actual demographics (EG, an entire segment of the population's votes weren't counted).

Anonymization is hard, which is why need more researches finding potential holes in the process.

Re: @Doc Ock

That has got to be the ugliest URL I have ever seen...

Re: Putin?

That would be Muammar Gaddafi, he had at least $200 Billion squirreled away in banks accounts until he got his comeuppance.

Putin being worth that much is quite likely just some lie he perpetuates to try and seem rich, just like Donald "I used to have $10 Billion dollars but managed to lose most of it" Trump.

Of course that doesn't compare to Augustus Caesar who was worth the eye-watering sum of $4.6 Trillion dollars (In 2015 money)...

Re: missing something

There are only two types of people that give out parental advice:

Those who have never had children and those who've lost touch with reality years ago. Either way, the advice is, at best, useless.

Re: Is it just me

"Ultimately that is my main reason for choosing Linux - it is MY computer"

Well, unless you use Ubuntu in which its now Amazon's computer. Since the whole 'Unity' search bullshit, I've pitched Canonical into the same bin as Red Hat. Specifically, the bin marked 'bastardized versions of Linux that I will never install on my equipment'.

You should see the aviation industry, fuel is measured in so many different units depending on the situation. Tank capacity is measured in cubic meters, consumption rate is measured in kilograms, remaining fuel is measured in hours, with it all being billed in litres...

"The bluetooth chrome features do not work on mobile devices."

Well, this API doesn't, but I'm pretty damn sure the mobile version of Chrome already has these capabilities, what with it being integrated so deeply into the OS it knows what the Kernel dev had for breakfast...

Re: Does this mean

"would soon know something was amiss if that resulted in opening the encrypted file"

That is why I intentionally type in the wrong password on any password prompt. If the system accepts it, then something has gone wrong and I shouldn't be entering my password anyway.

@cd

"I wish there was a way to reach out to them and present alternatives"

Its not a lack of alternatives, its a complete lack of funds to buy anything else. They know damn well that the food they are eating is terrible for them, but there are no alternatives. The US and Canada have fucked over the native populations' economies by forcing them to live on barren land long distances away from any population centers so that they no longer have either the option of growing their own food or making enough money to acquire food. Although even for those that are near population centers, their school funding and medical funding are so terrible that there is no way to compete with European-Americans (Funny how America is now screaming "Them immigrants are ruining the country, let's deport them all!" when the Natives have been saying that for 500 years now...)

Re: Take your pick

"So that should be secure for about a week until the local crims re-learn the art of old-style lock picking."

Or the lost art of stealing or buying a master key from one of the staff. Even if there is no master key, they could still just use a simple bump key to get in... And if that fails, there is also the possibility of just renting a room, copying the key, then using it to break into room a few days later.

Physical keys are also highly susceptible to the birthday attack in that there is a very limit number of combinations that can be used and its quite likely that two or more rooms in even a modest sized hotel would share the same key pattern.

Magnetic key cards were created specifically to prevent such basic attacks. That and not having to pay a locksmith to re-key a room if someone leaves with the key.

"'if he lasts that long'"

I suppose its really dependent on what will get him first. I think we should start a betting pool on what will happen to Lord Baby-hands in the next 4 years:

-- Resigns in the midst of one his tantrums

-- Impeached after one too many Constitutional violations.

-- Dies in attack by another nation

-- Assassinated

-- Dies in an accident (like choking on a pretzel or falling down a flight of stairs...)

-- Medical condition (He is 71, always angry, and eats a lot of red meat; not exactly the healthiest person)

From what I've heard no one actually looks at the cameras anyway, so maybe they've already been infected and no one has noticed.

Re: Just need better certificate management

Work on the crap software, but Lenovo signs both their software and their device drivers with the same certificate...

Re: @Gerhard

"For 90% of systems it is a total overkill. SystemV would do just fine but where you have multiple dependencies then I've found SystemD a better bet."

I've had the opposite experience. On a proper SysV system, it will start daemons in the order they are listed in rc.conf.local. Clustering was never a problem for me since I've always used properly coded applications where their start-up script would check for a file lock and would start it up in a passive/stand-by mode if the file was locked.

Of course, it helped that I made the afternoon-worth of effort to learn basic Perl / shell scripting that the tiny startup scripts were easy for me to follow, unlike the spaghetti that is systemd.exe

That is what botnet operators already do. They secure their victim so that they are the only that can use it. For a while, I saw some infected systems come into my shop with anti-virus running and configured, but with the malware added to the whitelist. There was one case where I saw someone had re-packaged ClamAV so that it would ignore their malware and actually had a their own virus definitions included that would kill off detection tools, other AVs, and a host of other pieces of malware that were unknown by AV companies at the time. The Malware's payload was embedded into ClamAV's executable as to provide a reason why the program needed internet access, kernel-level permissions, and would regularly thrash the filesystem.

It had nothing to do with ClamAV itself, it was just an ideal thing to target since it cross-platform, Open Source and was fairly lightweight (all of which are reasons why I use it on my own network)

My city's airport has been experimenting with birds-of-prey to keep drones out of the way of aircraft. They already use such birds to keep other birds off the airport grounds, so its just a matter of training them to hunt drones as well. A Phantom Drone is no match for a bird that can pick up and eat a grey wolf...

Re: An Adobe Wannbe?

Probably the very same coders.

The facts:

Adobe's been laying off programmers, mostly the terrible ones.

Cisco has been desperate to hire programmers with experience in coding multi-media applications.

Cisco and Adobe's offices are within shouting distance.

So, I would assume that the programmers that got laid off from Adobe would be going to Cisco. Fairly easy transition, what with staying in the same niche and the commute is not altered that much. So the same morons that botched Flash probably now have their greasy mitts all over Cisco's code.

Interesting fact: Office has had the Ribbon for 10 years now. The menu system has only existed for 16 years before that (Office 1.0 was released November 1990, the Ribbon was implemented January 2007). So to get '25 years' of experience with the Menu system, you would've had to been using Office 2003 up until 2012, assuming you were using Office 1.0 the day of release.

Also of note: The Ribbon hasn't changed since 2007 when it was introduced. A final note: the keyboard shortcuts for functions haven't changed from their initial bindings, so shortcut from Office 95 still work in Office 2016.

"Time for a central unit I think"

Seconded.

I've always thought that the various military 'cyber commands' should be spun off into their own division. While they are at it, scrap the NSA, send their offensive teams to the newly created military branch, the intelligence units to the CIA, and then spin off a new governmental agency responsible for defensive-only type stuff.

That way any offensive activities fall under the rules of combat, the intelligence stuff is where the rest of the foreign intelligence stuff is (I'm not a big fan of the CIA, but I'd rather one organization being shady rather than several).

I figure that a proper defensive organization would also take a few pieces from other organizations and would act as the InfoSec department for the entire government, and even would do work for state/county/city level governments as well. Essentially NIST, but with consultants. Maybe even, with proper oversight, tap into the NSA's network taps at the US borders and implement multi-layer firewalls to block malware, spam, botnet, and attack traffic from coming into the US. Maybe also set up a certification process, similar to UL, for evaluating the security of internet-connected devices before going to market.

Re: @Crazy... But that's the thing...

"You would have to show that you got that information without any reference to his computer."

Yeah, that's kinda my point. The implication I was trying to make was that the site's access logs would have been retrieved during a raid on that site and his IP address was among thousands of others and the defendant's address could have been on there, but the police hadn't got to it yet.