Posts by Franklin

Re: Not as Unreasonable as It May Seem

Eh, there's plenty of out-and-out criminal content that Cloudflare is more than happy to serve and protect as well. They're notorious for shielding carder sites (they protected rescator.cc, the site where the information from the Home Depot hack some while back was sold) and malware sites, and they're quite content to do so.

Much as they like to say they're champions of "free speech" and they're interested in protecting odious but legal content and whatever whatever, they do seem to throw their chips behind content that is in no way legal under any circumstances, and the way I see it, that speaks volumes about their character.

Re: MS & security in the same breath?

"MS still manage fewer vulnerabilities than any enterprise alternatives though"

It's 2017, are there still people who think you can simply count the total of vulnerabilities and learn anything meaningful?

There are vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities. I'll take a dozen local DoS vulnerabilities over one remote code execution any day, kthx.

Re: Don't Just Blame Users

One of my banks has the same idiotic policy. Passwords are required to be exactly seven--no more and no fewer--numbers.

And it gets worse. Your username is always the last 8 digits of your debit card number. So if someone lifts your debit card, they know your username and exactly what format your password is.

This is a large Canadian bank.

I weep for humanity.

Re: No thanks

Doesn't matter if you need it, I reckon. What matters is it wants you.

Google will add your biological and ocular distinctiveness to its own. You will adapt to be served ads. Resistance is futile.

Re: On a related note . . .

I'm thinking Abominator-class offensive unit, because it works both ways: it describes what happens when the ship splits apart into a fleet and what happens to any hostile vessels encountered whilst doing so.

Re: law enforcement?

"If there was an open police case, then why were these guys still going about their business?"

One of them was a cop.

They had a pattern: The cop would drug women and film his friend raping them. Eventually, word would get back to the police force he worked for. He'd be quietly fired, and go to work somewhere else.

At one point in 2009, he was finally charged with rape. He was arrested, booked, and released on bail...during which time he committed additional rapes.

Re: The thing is…

I get about a dozen of those spam emails a day. And on those occasions where I've Googled the spammy SEO companies, I tend to notice that their companies don't appear on the first page of Google results.

It's a bit like those psychics who claim to tell the future but can't seem to tell what tomorrow's lottery numbers will be; if an SEO company can't get their own business on the first page of Google, why on earth would any rational person think they could do it for someone else?

Re: Bullet proof

Yep, CloudFlare is definitely the bulletproof service provider of choice for large-scale ROKSO spammers, malware distributors, and Eastern European organized crime.

I track all the spam I get. Right now, I'm receiving an average of 37 spam messages a day that evade my spam filters, 31 (about 84%) of which Spamvertised domains protected by Cloudflare. Cloudflare does nothing at all about spam or malware domains--their "security head" has told me on Twitter point-blank they don't care, so piss off--and phish and malware sites served by Cloudflare tend to remain active on Cloudflare's network forever.

I'm not sure how folks who started out as spam fighters ended up in the pockets of spammers, but it's a sad thing.

Re: Why are they suing AT&T?

Immersion has a patent on "sending control information for a haptic system over a network," IIRC.

Re: So now flying a kite...

There are situations in which flying a kite can indeed get you in hot water with the FAA; I went to school with a fellow who landed in trouble when he flew a kite about a quarter mile from the runway of a local airport.

The specific situation of being that close to an airport aside, yes, the FAA thinks it can, and occasionally does, get testy about kite-flying.

A design patent isn't the same animal as a utility patent. A design patent is only a patent on the exact look of something, and it has to be on a look with no practical utility to the underlying thing.

Which makes me believe that had Corel put the + and - widgets at the end of the slider inside squares rather than circles, or made the design of the slider bit look different, they wouldn't have this mess.

Not that the patent is anything but bonkers, but still.

Re: Masturbation

Dunno about masturbation, but I did get one of these and an Arduino with a Bluetooth and a motor control shield, wrote some software for my laptop, connected the Arduino to a vibrator, and made a gesture controlled sex toy. It's kind of fun, winding up a girlfriend just by gesture, though in fairness I doubt it will ever be a killer app.

Re: Looks like the Thieves Support Assocation is going to get some competition.

I will confess, my first thought was "Oh, look! Now when TSA steals my stuff, they'll have an excuse. 'It wasn't us! It must have been an evil 3D printer owner who made a copy of our key.'"

I've never been particularly worried about some Random Evildoer(tm) stealing my stuff at an airport, to be honest. I've always been far more concerned about TSA staff doing that. And now, TSA staff have greater plausible deniability.

Re: I'd like to see an option

Chrome's Red Screen pages have an Advanced -> Continue to this page anyway link at the bottom.

Re: Year 7 = 11 years old

11 years old was when I got my first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I (that ought to date me!). It didn't take long before I was tearing it apart and soldering new ICs to it--back in those days, if oyu got a computer, as often as not the schematics and PCB layout came with it.

I reckon at least some 11-year-olds will have an absolute blast with this. I know I would have. Hell, I probably still could! Where can I get one?

Re: Based on an El Reg comment post earlier this week...

Maximum Overdrive! There's a stinker of a film and no mistake. I saw it in the theaters with some friends of mine, and we were absolutely rolling with laughter, until about midway through when we realized that (a) nobody else was laughing and (b) the actors all seemed deadly earnest. I recall looking at my friend Henry and saying "this movie isn't a parody, is it?" and he shook his head and said "no, I don't think it's supposed to be funny."

Re: The hacker spirit...

I definitely get the appeal of the hacker spirit, but I don't think it's dead, I just think it's gone in another direction.

Adding RAM to your computer hardly qualifies you as a "hacker" any more. I mean, hell, my mother added more RAM to her computer last year and she's 74 years old and the farthest thing from a hacker it's possible to be, fer Chrissakes! The days when computers were so ultramodern and new that a person who could put in another battery or swap a hard drive was qualified to call himself a "hacker" are long gone.

I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro. Is my hacker spirit dead? Naah, it just has another outlet--I don't hack this laptop, I do my hacking on the Arduino Uno and the DF Robotics Beetle board it's connected to.

Cycbot and Zbot are both executables, not malware that hide inside doc files. It seems likely that if there's an .exe sitting in a specific subdirectory on an external drive, it's because someone put it there, not because it copied itself there from an infected computer or hitched along with a Word file.

Firm to users: You're tightening it wrong!

Well, no, we don't believe we know everything. That's kind of the point. If we believed we knew everything, we wouldn't be launching satellites to make observations and see how well those observations line up with what we think we know.

The universe is a vast and tricksy place, and our intuition evolved to make sense of only a small sliver of it. The universe is in no hurry to reveal its secrets and in any event is under no observation to conform to our expectations. Hence, science, which is always observing, making predictions, and asking questions.

Re: There is plenty of both.... we just have to get over the..

"Instead of sending it through the sewer system into the lakes and rivers, it needs to get sprayed on the fields along with the animal manure. Rain runoff can be minimized by proper tilling of the land with an eye to the direction of the furrows.

Voila, ALL the NATURAL ORGANIC fertilizer one could ever want and Dupont and Monsanto (or other chemical companies) aren't involved. No anhydrous ammonia, no phosphate mining."

Mammals do not fix nitrogen. We just don't. Not pigs, not cows, not humans.

All the nitrogen in our poo comes from nitrogen in our diet. We do not fix nitrogen. We just pass it along through our digestive tracts. Animal manure, human or otherwise, is not a SOURCE of nitrogen, it's a CARRIER of nitrogen.

We, like cows and pigs and any other mammals, have nitrogen in our waste from the nitrogen we ingest in our food that has been fixed somewhere else. That "somewhere else" is either chemical fertilizer or from rhizomes, filamentous bacteria, or to a lesser extent some other bacteria.

I've read at least one report that states the total amount of crop-available biological nitrogen fixation on earth does not meet the total amount of nitrogen we need to grow food for the entire population. That leaves chemical fertilizers.

If we apply chemical fertilizers to plants that are grown for animal consumption, then feed those plants to the animals and use the animal's poo to grow other crops, we've done what one bloke I know calls "nitrogen laundering"--but I trust you can understand why getting your nitrogen to grow animal feed from animal poo doesn't actually work, given that animals do not actually fix nitrogen.

Re: They're suing the wrong company

Yours is the first cogent description of the problem I've actually seen. I keep hearing about how "Apple wiped out non-iTunes music!!!111!1!" but I've had an iPod for quite some time and have never experienced this issue. I've never downloaded music from RealNetworks, either.