Posts by Robert Helpmann?? 2583 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2011
Don't you just love English? It's the crème de la crème of all languages, and the lingua franca of The Internet.
To steal a phrase from Mr Nicoll, "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
...the eighth, and farthest, planet in the Solar System.
Not when the Voyager craft were launched, no. Then there were 9 and we were looking for number 10. This retrospective on a wonderful program should unite the masses. Don't sneak any reminders of the planetary discrimination we have more recently been forced to endure into the story. It's too soon.
I'm a cat, but I pretend to be a dog on the internet.
You usually have to surrender any illegal item, or the profits from your illegal operations, whatever form they have.
Actually, you have to surrender any purportedly illegal item or gains. While I get the reason for this, it opens the door to abuse as having one's bank accounts frozen makes it difficult to mount a legal defense which makes it much more likely you will be found guilty thus making it a lot easier for the state to hold on to the seized assets.
See how it works now?
Yes! All is clear now! You are signalling your virtue by virtuously pointing out the person pointing out the person virtue signalling is signalling their virtue. Got it! And by extension, you are a virtuous virtue signalling signaler and I am pointing out the virtue signalling of the person pointing out the virtue signalling of the person pointing out the virtue signalling of the original person signalling virtue, thus making me the most superlative virtue signaler of all, QED.
U.S. servicemen and women would balk at firing on American citizens...
I don't have a clue where you pulled this from, you AC troll, but history would disagree with you there. Both our military and police forces have plenty of instances under their belts of doing just this (e.g. Kent State).
The US is the only place on the planet whose Constitution specifically says that the people SHOULD overthrow their own government if it abuses the will of the people enough. Look it up.
You look it up! The only thing in the US Constitution remotely having to do with making changes to the government has to do with the way it can be amended and/or replaced (Article 5). There is mention in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, yes, but not the Constitution. You have managed to conflate... I lose track... many different issues and facts. Take some time and figure it out.
...the director of national intelligence has asked Congress to reauthorize a spying program that the NSA itself decided to shut down after it repeatedly – and illegally – gathered the call records of millions of innocent Americans.
Agency not only violated laws, they violated constitutional rights...
This is something I see all over the place on reporting of this and similar issues: the insistence on "innocent citizens" are having their rights violated. In almost all cases, it isn't about innocence or guilt until after the trial. It should all come down to people having their rights violated and that the agencies that are doing so ought to be held accountable for it. The way it is stated above plays into the rhetoric that Judge Roy Bean's approach (fair trial followed by hanging) is how a justice system ought to work - no presumption of innocence, no oversight, just that we should only care if the innocent are in some way harmed. If those who are charged with implementing our justice system do not play by the rules, we have already been harmed.
VirusTotal was acquired by Google. They're not running it as a money-making exercise.
You meant the company that tries to acquire and sell all the information they can would purchase something like VirusTotal and then not try to milk it for all the information (aka money) they can get out of it? I'm not sure I follow your logic.
Reality is not easy, has an unlimited number of facets.
And as the number of facets approaches infinity, the surface of reality approaches a perfectly smooth curve, therefor reality is a perfect sphere. The WSJ is part of reality, but only part, which makes it a less than perfect sphere. I think we can posit at this point that it is pear shaped.
I am going to have a lie down now I've managed to confuse myself.
They also implemented this attack on Chrome and Chromium-based Brave using QUIC as an Alt-Svc endpoint. ...QUIC is currently hidden from Chrome users behind an experimental flag and must be activated by the user.
Google's business model notwithstanding, this is one of the few instances in an article concerning security where the fix was out ahead of the problem being inflicted upon the masses. Bravo for that!
And a real key to start instead of that start-stop nonsense.
You were doing all right up to this point. Push button starting predates key starting by over 45 years. The use of a key fob for authentication took almost another 50 years to come around, but everything old is new again so we are back to push button starting being the norm.
REF: https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/articles/2018/01/09/push-button-start
I was looking for something more than "Cashdollar was also able to extract the criminal's email address and their preferred language". That may lead authorities to the people committing the attacks, but probably not. As far as the perps are concerned, his was just another of a list of sites that couldn't be pwned using this method. They only care about those they can get into, so they just moved on after trying and failing.
Who better to protect you from targeted, government-backed malware than a company that develops it on the side?
1) A company that doesn't
2) The tooth fairy
3) A mummified gibbon trained to code when manuals were written in cuneiform
4) Virtually anyone else
5) All of the above
For me, he's always been Yertle the Turtle. The story has a distinctly political feel to it, so it works on that level, too.
But, as Yertle, the Turtle King, lifted his hand And started to order and give the command, That plain little turtle below in the stack, That plain little turtle whose name was just Mack, Decided he'd taken enough. ... For Yertle, the King of all Sala-ma-Sond, Fell off his high throne and fell Plunk! in the pond!
- T. Geisel
The new one will come with the default provider spyware. ... from Verizon (My provider...
Buy your next phone from a source other than Verizon and replace your old with it or have it added to your contract.The convenience of purchasing your phone from your service provider makes it too easy to give in to pre-installed spyware being the norm.
A well-known...security solutions firm does not implement USB access controls
You beat me to it. They have a product - McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) - that is supposed to address this very issue. Of course, the ex-employees might have known how to disable or otherwise circumvent the protections in place. it's harder to get around logging, though, which is what I think is playing out in the court case. Too bad there wasn't a SIEM solution in place that would have caught the tools being disabled, if that is actually what happened. Monitoring is only as good as the response it generates.
It is neither. The company stated clearly that paying the blackmailer is one option that they may have to take so there is no fraud.
That simply is not the way that works. I had to look this up because IANAL, but conspiracy to defraud is defined as "....an agreement by two or more [persons] by dishonesty to deprive a person of something which is his or to which he is or would be or might be entitled [or] an agreement by two or more by dishonesty to injure some proprietary right of his suffices to constitute the offence...." This company has made a business model of simply paying off the ransom. They present it as one possibility of many, but do they ever pursue any other route? Do they offer any sort of warranty of their actions? What would happen if these professional negotiators pay the ransom and the hackers fail to restore the data? There are certainly more ways to mislead and thus commit fraud than a simple falsehood. There are more ways to conspire than to sit down with someone and go through all the details of a plan. Where do those lines fall in this instance?
When will people learn that biometrics are a username not a password?
About the time security folks manage to reconcile "ECG is sufficiently unique to each individual and could be used for user authentication" with "an error rate of about 2.4 per cent over short durations of time... [and] ...over longer periods between readings, the error rate goes up to around 9 per cent." What this does not mention is how the statistics break out. Is that each person can expect a 2.4% error rate or 2.4% of individuals can expect a 100% error rate while the tech works every time for everyone else?
My main concerns are the aforementioned confusion about identity as authentication and a rush to introduce lots of new metrics which will provide lots of new opportunities for poor implementation and thus new security gaps where there were none before.
Hot desking is fundamentally flawed.
My experience is that it works, but only in very, very limited situations. If you have the same people coming into the same office on a regular basis, it is a complete waste of time. On the other hand, if there is a group of individuals that are in the office on an occasional or irregular basis, it makes a lot more sense. The only other situation that I have been in that applies has been in a production environment that had to operate multiple shifts. Having said that, people tended to end up in the same spots without assignments being made due to which machines were open was down to the same folks working the same hours every day.
**I'm presenting a rather unintelligent finance and operations staff. Plenty of companies wouldn't get into this type of situation. However, not every company is run competently, and you don't need a lot of incompetent companies of this nature to fund even more ambitious and sophisticated ransomware that will in fact destroy someone else's company, government, or infrastructure system.
There is a question very similar to this on one of the harder information security certification tests. The question is stated in terms of being a purely business perspective, but that is often how decisions are made - a simple cost-benefit analysis with $$$ as the deciding metric.
Huawei are also 4 weeks late...
In this case, Huawei is being affected by the US government ban. This is interfering with Google's ability to get security updates to them to pass along to consumers.
REF:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/7/18656163/google-huawei-android-security-ban-claims
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730536125/as-google-advances-its-interests-it-serves-as-huawei-emissary-to-u-s
In my experience, whenever someone makes a technical request or provides a technical solution that starts with the word "just", that person is talking BS and should be regarded as an idiot concerning the subject. For example, "Just open the firewall so I can download this app that isn't allowed here at work" was a real request I got. It seems MS is playing to this and it makes it even more obvious what we are dealing with.
...my dad climbed a ladder on the outside with a vacuum cleaner and put it to the hole the bees used as their vestibule.
Glad the pro was able to help out and that your dad wasn't too horribly harmed. I have never been able to fathom why people think it's a good idea to take a do-it-yourself approach to creature removal. Police blotters and ER records are full of stories like this that have gone sideways. In this part of the States, they often start with the phrase "Here, hold my beer". What's the warning of choice elsewhere?
GANs offer hope of being nearly as accurate compared to full physics simulations.
Similar in quality to "shows promise", "may lead to", "have the potential to" and "within the next decade". Add explanation of dark matter to list headed by commercial fusion and flying cars. A much different reaction would have been elicited on Friday, but it's Monday...
- the saboteur has a whole set of stickers that can be applied to glass surfaces that require really hot water to remove. And the hot water activates acid microcapsules in the glue that, once activated, combine to acid-etch an image into the glass.
There is a group in Russia that basically does this, except without the acid etching stickers. They deal with people who drive on sidewalks and similar brilliant activities by slapping enormous stickers over their windshields/windscreens, typically while the owner is in the vehicle. This seems effective. Alternatively, public naming and shaming has a certain appeal.
Exxon continued to break the law and just pay the fine for doing so, but apparently 1 month they forgot to pay the fine so they had to stop dumping, but just until they paid the fine so they could continue breaking the law.
If only regulators were empowered to add a 0 to the fine for each subsequent offense.
"You bad company! You did something wrong and must now pay a fine! Pay $1,000.00 and be warned not to do it again."
"You bad company! You did something wrong and must now pay a fine! Pay $10,000.00 and be warned not to do it again."
"You bad company! You did something wrong and must now pay a fine! Pay $100,000.00 and be warned not to do it again."
... and so on. How many iterations of this would it take to shut repeat offenders down? Facebook is in the $100 billion bracket, so 10 rounds ought to do it. If we had this in place before, the problem would already have been solved. Oh well, it's never too late...
Assuming those blood-sucking, tentacle-waving Martians don't show up and form some PC red planet indigenous-rights group
Sir/Ma'am/Other,
The autochthon population will be cared for through mandatory transfer to habitat domes currently in the process of being established in various climatic districts across the face of the planet. There is no need to disparage or impugn their character in any manner or in fact believe in the existence of, past or present, members of the Polytentacular Martian race until such time as they present themselves for registration and relocation has commenced. Their de facto representative in this forum, AMFM, may wish to weigh in on this subject, but we remain confident the scheduled terraforming regime will proceed to plan.
Sincerely.
...shops like Woolworths contributed to crime and injury.... each additional chain outlet is associated with a 35.3 per cent increase in intentional injuries, including assaults, stabbing, or shooting, and a 22 per cent increase in unintentional injuries, including falls, crushes, or being struck by an object.
Seems like we have identified the problem. Just shut down all the Woolworths. Problem solved!
Apple doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. And they do e-mail, chat, photo sharing, etc.
So my choices devolve to 1) cheap & crappy or 2) expensive & crappy? I jest! I have no real beef with Apple products in general even if I do feel they are a bit overpriced. Google's products, however, are full of hidden costs and are indeed crappy. I worked at an agency that adopted their office suite, opting to replace the then-used MS products. They decided to return to MS after having dealt with Google for a couple of years. Once they had a handle on what the actual costs were versus what they got from the product, they could justify ditching the cheaper (in both senses of the word) alternative.
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