Posts by Notas Badoff 1061 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009
"Once Ransom32 arrives on a system and is executed, it will first unpack all its files into the temporary files folder. ..."
But how does it first get executed? Did someone mention that? Is it still possible to convince people to do a multi-step footgun?
(BTW: oh the pain of finding out your company name can get misread as 'emesis'. Heck, they may pronounce it that way without realizing...)
If someone asks me about the doom bringing asteroid, I'll ask them "which one?" The one last month, the one a month before that, the closer one two months before that, or one of the other three earlier this year? And how about the closer ones last year? Strangely though, I don't get asked about such much anymore...
The most revealing (to me) part of this election cycle was a poll of Iowa Republican voters, where one half of those said that Islam should be illegal in the US. That these 'citizens' have forgotten what the first amendment mentions as basic freedoms somehow didn't surprise but does appall. The US has a native-born fifth column. And they ain't *any* of those people the GOP candidates are warning about.
Okay, so now the social media companies will have to be hiring scads of people knowing myriads of languages to scan for naughty phrases. Even dumping phrases into automatic scanning requires lots of upfront work and continual (socially aware) maintenance.
Now what other potential employers have gone begging for people with expertise in weird combinations of languages? You know, like say Javanese or Indonesian used by the Bali bombers? Oh yes, the intelligence services.
So this law is actually sabotage. Fine work all around from our political classes!
"... as it was widely viewed as a sop to the feelings of the French minority in Quebec."
And look how well that sop soaked up the vinaigre! Not at all. The problem with acceding to the somewhat random current demands of "change is needed!" groups, where the only constant is they want to stay on the podium forever, and so there are always new 'changes' needed following thereafter.
I rather like the idea of presidents/etc. having only one term of office, perhaps at 1.5 the length of the old shorter terms. Can we also wish that the 'change' people were also limited to one movement per decade say?
Perhaps it was a description of the exact flaws, or link to such?
Having read the article only once, am I to understand that at least three or more AV companies - in their separate amazing and patentable software development - all came up with code so similar the same exploit techniques would work for each?
Can we please use this phantasmagoric occurrence as yet another example that s/w 'genius' ain't necessarily unique, or code patentable? Instead of these companies playing patent gotcha against each other with their code, the exploit showed the illusion behind the claims of uniqueness.
"For everyone who is affected, we apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing.”
I *hate* this! Given there are people affected then the true acknowledgement would be
"For everyone who is affected, we apologize for every inconvenience you are experiencing.”
Customer pain turns to bile and hatred when you won't acknowledge their pain. Is that so hard to understand? This statement makes nobody feel good except management.
I wonder if Github factored the biggest companies being dragged into open source, into their business plan. I would think they had originally counted on s/w companies wanting to use Github for private repositories (cuz collaboration), and on the revenue from that. But now that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and et al. are near forced to make substantial nods towards open source, those are public repositories being paid for at company rates. Bonus for Github!
.
BTW: I gotta wonder about the 'starred' count of 6726 for the apple / swift project. I far as I can see, this repo was made public either only 18 days ago or just *today*. *How* do you get 6726 stars so quickly? Any ideas? I suppose I'm just too suspicious of corporate antics....
Next year, *five* digit numbers! We've been at the flatter part of the exponential curve.
... CVE-2015-8252, CVE-2015-8253, CVE-2015-8254, ... CVE-2015-15283, ...
BTW: Can someone come up with a CVE medal/ribbon we can start sending these companies? Should then be easy to have a site where a potential customer can quickly check when thinking about a product. "AeroGello brand security products have received 17 CVE ribbons!"
I've been mentioning this to people for years. Cheap hamburgers bought with future deaths. Tens of thousand of tons of antibiotics pumped into livestocks each year.
Med father would opine on whether supurating bone infections or gangrenous guts smelled worse. You betcha he thought antibiotics a blessing, having lost too many patients after too long struggles.
Now we've lost again to short-sighted economic interests - farmers and pharmers.
(BTW: if you are killing millions and millions, but without regard to race/class/nationality/etc, if that can't be called genocide, then what is it called?)
I think you are confused. They tied with two other teams for last place two years ago. MIT/NEU were not those other teams.
This year, MIT was 6th out of 23 entries, and Northeastern is acquiring talent (sounds like sports!) from WPI/CMU, who were 7th out of 23 entries this year. Considering that NASA may have a bias towards domestic non-commercial entities, it would seem they've picked the two top choices.
(Rah rah rhee, kick'em in the knee! Rah rah rhass, kick'em in the other servo!)
Watched a friend help a county government consolidate from many buildings down to one new one, and part of that was sizing the data room and most importantly the AC/power required. Quite enough people/groups returned the questionaires/queries about what they had and needed, that the coordinators really felt they had gotten everybody, even better as some things trickled in after a few weeks so even the laggards were accounted for, right?
After all the power/AC/server contracts had been let and announcements about projected scheduling/timing for early moves were distributed, the third half of the requirements showed up from groups that just hadn't bothered, and with no recognition that now they'd created an impossibility. It wasn't just "can we stuff that many servers into the space", it was that "we don't know how to reinforce the roof to hold that much AC", or even "will that much AC fit in the available roof area!?!"
I don't know what resulted - I did the "hear no evil" thing. If "the cloud" was available back then I think the panic would have driven them to it. It was only tax records, budgets, payroll, criminal records, court proceedings, and the like after all...
noun.
1. an armed ship that is privately owned and manned, commissioned by a government to fight or harass enemy ships.
Often used when the 'state' was otherwise incapable of responding to a situation. Unfortunately that state would often also then be incapable of dealing with privateers when they went "off message".
"Danish? We thought you were one'a them Swiss ships! All your flags look alike to us. Ah, who cares, hand over your goods or we'll put more holes in your bilges!"
(note: read "IP addresses" for 'flags' above. They all look alike to some...)
"An immediate review is under way."
Yeah, well, it's a problem of timing, y'no? An immediate review... by the coroner... is not the best kind of health checkup. "We'll have a cure for the disease that killed you real soon now. Thought you'd like to know. Amen."
Choir, let us practice the Te Deum laudamus... ♪@#*&♫@%♪
"I'm sure all Yanks would have expected this shameful behavior to stop with their new messiah cum Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ironic just how much things stay the same despite changing so frequently."
How many seconds do you think would elapse between the President declaring he would squash these illegal activities and Congress drafting articles of impeachment?
Each individual congressional district is happily electing their individual idiot, without thinking about the power of idiocy multiplied to the point of being in the majority. Case in point is Texas District 6 whose favorite son was Phil Gramm, author of the fabulous collapsible banking system. Who did they replace him with when he retired? Joe Barton, of fame defending bumbling BP over the interests of mere domestic citizens, among other stinking missteps. No revulsion from Republicans or Democrats or voters elsewhere matters to a district wanting to screw the nation with *their* own little screwball.
The only way Obama would be able to break the "snooping is patriotic" logjam is with a bomb, and he already has too many saying he's Muslim.
How many people reading the above then had to say/think '256', to complete the byte. Hmm, how many of those then had to say/think "well, 255" because actual range of values possible in a byte.
Ehhh, relax into what you're good at. That will bother everyone else to differing degrees. The least bothered are going to be better friends!
Slack, slack? Oh, yeah, Slack... "Slack offers persistent chat rooms organized by topic, as well as private groups and direct messaging." Valued at $2.7 beeelion pre-IPO and all based on chat and ad-libbing. Yeesh!
I only know of Slack because a technical discussion/chat group I've participated in is having to transition away from Slack because of some limitation they are having. I didn't know this was 2.7G$ 'worth' product - all I could see was a toy project. *What* are they snorting out west?
ElReg must be turning a new leaf!
As to the accidental side-topic, if you read more than a few articles on WP you will soon see 'taint always one English but all of them. After freaking out at the mental image of a proud Indian neighborhood 'metaling' their main road, I finally tracked that down to a retained imperial usage for paving a road. Even the English don't English like they used to. They englished the ole sphere and we all are enjoying the billiards. Well, except the French.
My benchmark for how bad things can be in the military is the Battle of Savo Island. The only thing that "saved the day" was that the other side was nearly as confused as the US navy, and so withdrew without destroying every Navy ship, cargo ship, and the ongoing landing.
Every military and government official ought to ask themselves at least once a week "Are we rocking in the waves off Savo Island?"
Don't mock 'iUsers' when, as the article pointed out, it is the EULA that every company uses that is the point of attack. It is not 'Apple', it is every company. It is not 'iUsers', it is everyone using proprietary software.
Damn, the only three-letter agency that is going to win at the end of all this is RMS.
As a user of Kaspersky's products, I've been wondering for awhile regarding their situation re: location in the land of Putin. How the heck can they keep the company going? Either they've long ago started on the slippery slope of 'cooperation' in order to keep running or they can get closed down at any point. I don't see any other options. Either it's shit or soon to be shut.
All those points mentioned in the article about personal vulnerabilities, especially where people reside in the aggrieved country, well, where are the key contributors to Kaspersky located? How would you organize the simultaneous exit of all those people and families? And to where?
How do you start a company when the terminal trust issue will be "but they are located where <Godwin> does <analogies>!"? And you're not Godwin and don't even know they exist (yet).
"only spotted 10 days ago"
"a third of a kilometer across, but it's traveling at 35 kilometers per second"
I keep being struck (pardon) by the idea that I haven't heard anything in years that wasn't described by SciFi decades ago. Heck, even wildly popular brainless candidates for president was long predicted by those wacko SciFi nuts.
One story was about an asteroid that never even really hit - clipped a peak in the Andes a tad - but the grazing passage through the atmosphere was described in wonderful detail from entrance to exit. If the overpressures didn't get you, the heat radiation would. Discoverer named it after his wife... but you've seen that in the movies haven't you. Hollywood steals from everybody.
I'd love to go back and re-read all that SciFi, and pretend it'll never happen.... (sigh)
"And so, $99 later, ..."
"You charge it with a Lightning connector same as your iPhone." (you need another cable on your desk)
"So far it feels worse, but then that may be a matter of getting used to it."
"But that happens whenever you get a new keyboard, your hands have to get used to it."
"Taken together, the new keyboard requires a small adjustment in how you lay out your desk."
"The first part of that has worked; the second, not so much."
"... so it's not possible to change any of the settings."
"... but the auto-sync hadn't worked and required manual connection and syncing (by pressing specific identified buttons)."
"The function keys have gone haywire."
"Of course it's hard to troubleshoot because the keyboard doesn't appear in System Preferences."
"... you need to be running the latest version of Mac OS X – El Capitan."
"Four out of five stars."
?
Was this supposed to be satire? Or an accurate representation of cultism (that I keep hearing brought up)?
Or was this quote the most accurate commentary: "What the hell is going on?"
"As soon as I connected to the network, the Apple News App would refuse to refresh or open any of the articles already displayed on the screen, showing the message “News isn’t supported in your current region”."
"At this point, it was pretty obvious that Apple isn’t using location tracking and geofencing to shut down the News App, but is doing so based on the mobile network the phone connected."
Ah, how nice for you to be using one of those satellite-based cell phones. The rest of us use cell tower-based connections. Which are planted in the ground of very specific locations, connected to specific networks, some of those clearly labeled "do-not-fuck" (with us).
Actually you're quite close likening this to jAr! jAr!, to wit:
1. (slang) of poor quality, odd
2. (jargon, computing, rare) Unresponsive (of a software application’s user interface), sluggish.
Me, I'm waiting for El Reg to define what a "Web Vomponent" is. Maybe that's from another StarWars movie?
"I used to bullseye vomponent rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters."
I had to triple check y'all hadn't written "Maoist conspiracy theorists".
Then I read further... it's worse...
If Rush makes me cry from my left eye, is that part of NASA's salty water conspiracy?
If Rush makes me cry from my right eye, his conspiracy?
If I cry from both eyes at the same time, will his brain explode, please...
Somebody find an old recording of "GOP Love Call" crooned by Slim Reagan!
I realized during one of these snafus a few years ago that I had no reason to fear - anything I'd contributed to United's or Continental's portfolios of whoa woes had to have aged out of their systems by at least a decade or two since. I didn't need to duck anymore - that code was long gone.
Now I can just sit back and know, smiling, that what the fools replaced it with was much worse than anything I'd perpetrated!
I'd love to read NYT and WaPo at will, even if it costs $. But an obvious problem is that you have to read more than one outlet to find the 'truth' that lies somewhere between them. And each outlet says it's only ¢ to read. But when I look at the prices it's $$$$$$$ per month! And then times two or three outlets to find the truth twixt the 'tainment.
So it's the old lament: price it low so everybody wants and can get it, or maintain the high paywall so you can say only the elite read it.
You want answers? You can't handle the truthcosts!
a government-backed security backdoor is an open door sooner or later, but you won't necessarily know when it opens. When your friends ask about security and 'reasonable' government demands, you now have a simple cautionary story to tell them.
Thank you TSA! (cough, gag, ftbbht, isaidwhat?)
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