Posts by Robert Helpmann?? 2583 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2011
I don't think anyone deserves that kind of misappropriation of data - mainly because it hurts the customers / chattel as well.
Perhaps "invites" would be a more appropriate term. Leave your car running on a dark street in a high crime area* and you might not "deserve" to have it stolen, but you are asking for it to happen.
* An apt analogy for the internet, I believe.
The issue is that neither in Sony's case, nor here there was a prosecutor brave enough (and interested enough) to file charges.
Seems a class action lawyer could have a good time with this given there is an easily definable class and arguably malicious action which could lead to claims of all sorts of issues for Sony's paying customers.
A lot of ships seem to be going the way of vertical launch missile silos...
Have an upvote, AC. The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) is a guided missile destroyer and this is exactly what was done, with the design providing better safety and storage options on a number of levels. Additionally, it looks like this ship might get, or already have, a railgun as part of her armament. It will not take up a lot of room, either, but packs quite a punch.
Don't over-think it. Place all ingredients in a blender and puree. Roll in a ball, batter and deep fry. Problem solved*. Additional patents need to be filed for other ingredient combinations (e.g pizza & doughnuts, beer & pretzels, broccoli &... perhaps I will have to reconsider this one...).
* All problems may be solved in a similar manner.
The point MS is making in response is that maybe the problem here is more we should stop people from smashing the window in the first place, rather than that the internal doors should all be replaced with iron-reinforced triple-locking front doors in case a window IS smashed.
This is a false dichotomy. Both approaches are valid and important. Perimeter security is obviously important, but beefing up internal security and compartmentalization also yield better results than doing without. The crab method* of security has long been discredited and should not have any supporters at this time.
* Set up a hard, spiky shell on the outside and leave the soft, tasty inside undefended to anything that manages to get through the first and only layer of security.
Except your simple solution assumes the FBI has no in-house expertise on digital storage forensics...
As to this, the FBI has been having a difficult time hiring and retaining people who do this exact sort of work. This has been well covered, both here on El Reg and in other media outlets. They seem to want to get people with the skill set needed to do this kind of work to do so at government worker wages instead of the much high amounts they can get working as contractors or in private industry.
If a business is too short sited to realize it's vulnerable, or too short sighted to realize it needs to protect itself why, exactly, should anyone else do it for them?
While I agree with the sentiment, the practice is not particularly helpful. Allowing one business to become a malware-infested hole does no-one any good - not the hapless victim, not its customers and not anyone else on the same internet. A better approach would be for a competent outside agency to come it, clean up and then present a bill to the business in question. Alternatively, actively blocking said organization from internet access of any sort would also address the issue while going in the direction you seem to be heading. Either way should do the trick.
It has been a while since I was told this, so perhaps things have changed. My understanding is that Microsoft rates the severity of flaws and creates patches for them based on their risk and not the risk to their customers. Such an approach might be used to explain behavior of this sort given that any patch has risk associated with it and this particular flaw wasn't causing that much trouble in the wild, at least not to MS directly.
These folks are bad at crime and at math(s). £88,000 split four ways gives £22K each successfully gained from 6 attempts which in turn gives an average return of less than £4K each go. Low returns for high risk... better to be a day trader and play that game with someone else's money.
...it's a great time to hack Bing maps!
It's always a great time to hack Bing maps. Consider that MS droids are all forced to use only MS products for everything. What would happen if Redmond were to be relocated in Bing maps to, say, the bottom of the Marianas Trench? Hilarity will ensue.
wget is broken and should DIE, dev tells Microsoft
"It's a factor of people having a communication platform to respond to problems which isn't controlled by Microsoft and can't be silenced by their PR people."
Such a shame it wasn't in place prior to Windows 8. Perhaps criticism of PS will convince them to scrap it and start from scratch. I mean, whatever they came up with would have to be better, right? Right?
The Hyatt Regency Atlanta has advertising running on screens in their elevators. There's nothing like seeing a BSoD on the conveyance taking you up in the air 20-ish stories, but that's exactly what I got on the way to my room two years back. Their elevators are Willy Wonka affairs with a vertigo-inducing view of their atrium.
And the answer is in the title of Mr Spencer's book. PS uses objects, Linux and the older Windows command line use regular expressions. The latter is easier to learn, more intuitive. I have heard Monad lovers go on about how much more powerful it is, but except for things designed specifically to be run by it, I can do anything with CMD that you can do with PS and probably get the job done faster.
So to me the choice ought to come down to which you prefer and the issue I have is that MS is working hard to remove that choice for its Windows using customers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on... yet another way to force their customers into having to completely relearn all the skills they have come to depend on in order to get actual work done, costing them literally millions of lost hours of productivity. It is a replay of the ribbon, of the conversion from their CLI to Monad (they switched the name to PowerShell apparently due to the original name sounding too much like what it was), of their ill-fated discarding of the Start menu and so forth.
No, I don't mind that they come up with new things, it's just that they don't give their customers much choice and it really does cause a lot of pain on a number of levels. Before deploying any new user interface, their developers ought to answer the question "How will this increase productivity or otherwise benefit our customers?" at least in as much as the topic is office software. If the answer is not a positive one, the change should be put on hold, reworked or discarded entirely. Damn it.
It lets us know who is incapable of second-grade arithmetic.
Or basic logic. A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.
As it happens, I lived in New Mexico while Johnson was governor of the state. He did decent job from my perspective. Not sure if I will ultimately vote for him, but my experience has been that he would make a better CiC than either of the big party candidates.
When dealing with a group of jihadists bent on inflicting themselves on everyone around, of course the correct response is to wage war against them using weaponized pr0n! It's a good start. I look forward to finding out what the "nuclear option" in this particular effort will be.
Choices are good. Perhaps your female peers might have offered one between a "young, perky grin" and a "classic smile."
The next thing you know, some researcher will claim that customers and staff being able to understand each other at the drive in line will lead to a better experience for both. Blasphemy!
Caveat: I avoid McDonald's under the assumption that what is provided there is neither fast nor food.
Very confusing to those of us who have not studied Heraldry...
Well, it sure beats the one that goes "Gules, a fess or and three toads." Perhaps the College of Arms ought to request the various heraldic components be incorporated into Unicode and added as emojis. There are arguably plenty of worse things included already.
Alternatively, create a "privacy mask" that includes a VR headset for augmented reality and you should have a winner. It would function both in the practical capacity of allowing users to be completely connected all of the time without having to make actual eye contact when talking with their respective assistants and as a fashion statement (we could make day-to-day living one big costume/fancy dress party).
Icon as example of possible choice of mask.
Submerged turbines in tidal races are only just getting towards production.
Something I have wondered about is why I have not heard much about any efforts to submerge turbines in deep water where there are strong currents, tidal or otherwise. Besides maintenance issues, I would guess they would have fewer problems to overcome than other renewables. It would seem that they wouldn't pose more environmental issues than windmills, shouldn't get in the way of shipping, and would be a lot more reliable in terms of hours of production than wind or solar.
And who exactly is Uncle Sam trying to pick a fight with ? They invaded Iraq instead of North Korea because everyone knows that the Norks have WMDs.
You should add "first" immediately after "Iraq" and change the reason to "because Saddam put a hit out on Bush I and Bush II couldn't let someone go after his daddy like that."
Are you suggesting the US is trying to pick on Russia now ?
They started it!
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine on which points I am being facetious.
As for the BBC establishing guidelines for the rest of us to follow, well, the idea of guidelines seems to be rather loose with them.
To say the least! I just popped open my BBC Bbc ap and was faced with the horror of "Nato." That's no way to treat an acronym! At least I didn't have to work out the difference between NATO, "the Nato" and a theoretical group of natos, so it wasn't all bad.
For the last two places I have worked, it was more like "SLAs? We've heard of those." I move on to the next big thing in a couple of weeks. ITIL certification was on the list of job requirements which probably means... Who am I kidding? It means an HR droid had a box to check and I will never have to worry about an SLA at the new place either.
I agree with Jane that her next important eamil will be headed 'It is raining in Borneo'.
See, this secret squirrel stuff is why actual education is so important. If you think getting people to follow password security requirements is a chore, try implementing this "proposal."
Ongoing education and personal consequences for failing to follow policies are a much more reasonable and effective approach. This applies to both IT and accounting. Simply having a policy in place that no-one at any level may make expenditures above a certain amount without a defined set of individuals required for approval of the deal go a long way toward killing the effectiveness of phishing scams.
...pirate... sites [should be] avoided.
- Hear no evil.
The ZCrypt scumware is distributed through old but effective methods of phishing emails, Word document macros, and fake Adobe Flash installers.
- See no evil.
Macros should also be banished
- Say no evil
...and porn sites [should also be] avoided.
- Have no fun.
It seems unlikely that more than one bank would be hit by insider attacks so close together. There even sems to be some evidence that the Norks are to blame, for whatever that's worth.
The only point in going off-Earth is to enable additional goods, services, energy, materials, and profit.
While I disagree that it is the only reason to get off the planet (colonization, tourism and basic scientific research all come to mind as good reasons to escape the chains of our planet's surface), having a business reason to get into space will certainly help drive and inform efforts to do so.
I don't mind people trying to sell me something as long as they take my "no thanks" as intended. - I don't mind if someone takes the time to come round and talk. Its sales calls and spam that I hate.
But those bastards who won't take "fuck off" for what it is... Last time, ... I let them waffle on for about half an hour... Apparently it was my fault for wasting their time. - Simply saying goodbye and closing the door, hanging up or marking the address as spam tends to work for the decent sorts. Stringing them along should be reserved for those that don't behave properly. You are wasting their time, which in turn means you cost them some money if they are on commission. That is, after all, the point. It lets them know they have done the wrong thing, prevents them from inflicting themselves onto someone else, all while providing you with some entertainment.
Pro Tip: Alert cold callers that their call may be monitored for quality control purposes at the start of any sales pitch.
Security implementation in Windows systems was an afterthought but is a big deal today. The fact that these certs are being developed would seem to point the way for security professionals who wish to get ahead a bit. For people in information security, problem areas such as exist in the field of IoT present opportunities for continued gainful employment. Don't knock it!
Says Richard Lack (I would hold this up as a case of nominative determinism and upon careful consideration of his comments, I will), “The future lies in methods of authentication without passwords, which consumers clearly favour, both in terms of convenience and enhanced security...” which really means they want technology that is sophisticated enough to be magic. consumers want to be able to have their phones, financials and abodes only open to themselves and those they allow without having to do anything or know anything. That last might make a good metric of customer acceptance. If you would trust access to your house to a given technology after being made to understand the risks, benefits and operation, then it is probably OK to use to protect access to your phone which in turn allows access to your bank, credit cards, et cetera.
Mr Lack goes on to say, “Biometric authentication is a powerful enabler, allowing businesses smart enough to deploy it to significantly increase rates of registration, gaining data and insight about their customers, while also increasing customer security. This is a win/win scenario...” No, these are arguably mutually exclusive as the idea here is to allow the businesses in question to gather consumers' biometrics rather than to have a third party provider authenticate your identity based on your biometrics. A big win for big business, but not so much for individuals.
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