* Posts by diodesign

3253 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Uncle Sam wants to read your tweets, check out your Instagram, log your email addresses before you enter the Land of the Free on a visa

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Require Social Media?

For ESTA, it is optional FWIW. For the DS-160, not so much.

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Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Methane is odourless"

For the vast vast majority of people, it has an odor due to treatment.

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It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Oppo and Vivo? They're one company.

"Why are figures for Oppo and Vivo cited separately?"

Just the way Gartner breaks them out - see the linked-to announcement. Also, it's Vivo and not Viva - now corrected.

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That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: pun violation

It works either way.

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When two tribes go to war... Intel, AMD tease new chips at Computex: Your spin-free summary

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Unmentioned in the article"

Yeah, they weren't included in the keynote but are in the linked-to announcement. I'll throw them into the article, too.

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It's all in the RISC: Arm legs it to Computex with a head full of Cortex-A77 CPU, Mali-G77 GPUs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Body puns

When Michael Foot was put in charge of a nuclear-disarmament committee, The Times (of London), according to one of its sub-editors, ran the headline:

Foot heads arms body

We're taught it in headline-writing school. I'm dying for headteachers to quit an Arm-sponsored STEM group so we can do the headline

Heads leg Arm's body

It should be no surprise that El Reg editors hoard headline ideas in a black book waiting for the moment to use them.

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Assange rape claims: Complainant welcomes Swedish investigation's reopening

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

It's 22 weeks, not 22 months.

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RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: What about AMD cpu's?

Not affected.

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Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Bandwidth & storage

"So we have all these Teslas sending data/video to where?"

Tesla's backend servers. Funnily enough, bandwidth wasn't discussed, AFAICR.

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We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Please just give it a break

Sadly, politics is everywhere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zruGBWLk9s8

Although we try to keep it to a minimum and just to tech.

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Supreme Court of UK gives Morrisons the go-ahead for mega data leak liability appeal

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "incorrectly e-mailed out the Journo's details on the porn age thing"

FWIW we also got the same mass-CC'd email from the UK government, and I'm told it was sent by someone within White Hall with the initials K. Hunt.

Cue a lot of hacks reply-all'ing with "Thanks, K Hunt"

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Hey, remember that California privacy law? Big Tech is trying to ram a massive hole in it

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"You can easily roll your own analytics"

We could and maybe we will when our tech team is bigger.

> what happens to your page rankings if you don't use Google Analytics

FWIW Google claims GA has no impact on search rank.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1012320567381422081

Not that we care too much about SEO, as you may have noticed from the headlines and writing.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: ratfox

"What is exactly the information that El Reg obtains out of using Google Analytics?"

Less than we could get out of our direct server logs, which we don't look at. With 150,000,000+ pages served last year, we wouldn't have time. We don't see individual readers.

Our internal stats systems and GA therefore aggregate visitors into tallies: number of people reading in the past minute, hour, day, week, month, year, etc; number of people in the UK, US, etc; number of people who are repeat readers, etc. GA happens to present the numbers in an easy-to-read format (graphs, country maps, tables) whereas our internal tools produce text summaries.

All with a pinch of salt and some squinting as a single IP address doesn't represent a single person, people block Google cookies, and so on and so forth.

Specifically, it's documented on our cookie page https://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/cookies/ - and on Google. Here's what is collected: https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsTrackingOverview

Our privacy policy is here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/about/company/privacy/

> Do you know how many of your users have the "specific code for eating disorders (571) and black people (547)"?

No. Our internal tools count page impressions, ad impressions, and unique readers, producing separate tallies per country we're interested in. Google Analytics does this too, and goes one step further by estimating age ranges, gender, and interests, but we don't pay attention to that because... we think we have a better handle on reader's real interests than Google's tracking bots. There is nothing as creepy as racial and disability profiling.

As I said in another comment, we're not cemented to GA.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Ian Michael Gumby

> This is California Senate Judiciary Committee not the US Senate

Correct, which we did know, and we've made it crystal clear in the story now. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything that may be wrong.

> Why does theregister.co.uk still use Google Analytics?

It's free and useful. It produces easy-to-view summaries of daily, weekly, and monthly traffic, and allows us to compare these year on year, or month to month, and see which regions are growing, and which stories people are most interested in, by views. It also produces a real-time dashboard so we can see the live effect of publishing, tweeting, tweaking headlines, etc.

It's just one source of indications of what works well, and what doesn't, with readers. There are other things we keep an eye on, such as comments, emails, messages, and the effect pieces have on the industry. I'd rather an article forces a company to reverse a bad policy than do mega page views.

However, in an attempt to entice us into paying for Analytics, Google's free version of Analytics becomes somewhat inaccurate after the first 10m page impressions each month, and we regularly smash through that, so we're considering other options, including non-Google paid-for analytics or perhaps rolling our own.

Any stats we quote are from our own internal stats system, which processes logs and isn't set up for real-time analysis. We could make our own form of Google Analytics, but so far we've chosen instead to put our small team of web devs onto other things more directly useful.

> El Reg never has addressed

Well, we do, in a way, in our cookies page - https://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/cookies/ - in which you can opt out of GA and/or view its privacy policy.

Hope this helps,

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No Widevine DRM for you! Developer left with two years of work stymied by Google snub

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

We try to avoid asterisk notes, as it's annoying to scroll to the bottom and back up again. An asterisked note was supposed to be moved but got lost. It's now sorted.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

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Don't know how to do the Kubernetes? MapR says it'll hold your hand

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Nerdmaster

Bod - n, Brit slang: A person, eg: a clever bod, infosec bod.

One thing we do around here is not try to be like all the other outlets, whether that's technical depth, style, sarcasm, exclusives, etc. That means language you won't find elsewhere.

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And here's Intel's Epyc response: Up-to 56-core, 4GHz 14nm second-gen Xeon SP chips, Agilex FPGAs, persistent mem

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"The EPYC Rome processors go up to 64 cores"

Yeah - OTOH Rome isn't out yet. Will add it to the piece anyway.

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With the right training, algorithms can predict Li-ion battery lifetime – with 95% accuracy

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"I don't see how this is valid for battery development"

Imagine you're designing a battery and you want to see how long it will last. You can either sit through 2,000+ recharge cycles, or 100 and use this regression model to predict its lifetime to know if you're onto a winner.

It mean you can mess around with prototypes and get an idea of lifetimes far faster. Imagine compiling an application and then running it through 1,000 hours of testing before you can iterate on it.

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Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

re: sanmigueelbeer

Hi - thanks, that's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if we get anything wrong.

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HPE lawyers claim Autonomy chief Lynch knew all about 'revenue-pumping' carousel

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Wait so HPE overpaid by almost 9 billion because of $20m?

No, HPE claims it's part of it - it's given examples of alleged inflation so far.

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Renegade Android apps can siphon off your web logins, browser history. So make sure Chrome or OS is patched, friends

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Android System WebView

Thanks - will tweak the article.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: More information please?

Firefox on Android is fine - it uses its own engine. Anything that uses Webview and/or Chrome is affected. Just a heads up, TBH.

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Super Cali optimistic right-to-repair's negotious, even though Apple thought it was something quite atrocious

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"my fave IT red-top news website content"

Thanks for the thumbs up, and for reading!

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"PLEASE can these headlines actually scan?"

It does scan - if you say right-to-repair in three syllables, Mock Cockney style. Rigthto-repair. Say it with a D*** van D*** accent.

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Brekkie TV host Lorraine Kelly wins IR35 ruling against HMRC, adds fuel to freelance techies' ire over tax reforms

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Growler

Ah yeeeeah. A wave of the magic wand and oh look, it's gone.

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My Lambda Custom Runtimes bring all the .NET Core to the yard, and they're like... where is this headline going?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Would be, were it correctly spelt"

Bollocks. Fuck. God dammit. I hate it when this happens. My fault. Now fixed. Should be Lambda.

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Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"How many people when they drive past a road accident can't resist rubber necking"

It's true that people like watching bad stuff happen to other people. Getting a good look at something awful. Russian car crash dash cams are all the rage on YouTube. I dunno if that's possible to stop, or even a good thing to tackle.

OTOH while sites like LiveLeak have existed for ages and had loads of visitors, they're not on the scale of Facebook and YouTube, and also if you go to LL, you know you're getting gore and snuff. I suspect if LL had the reach of Facebook or YT, it would have been singled out early on.

I guess it boils down to this: censorship and moderation is harmful. Massive unedited and unpoliced platforms are harmful. There must be an in-between solution that keeps smaller platforms independent, and checks and balances kicking in when audiences start getting huge.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"censoring unpleasant information"

FWIW government-level censorship is a terrible thing, and stripping unpleasant stuff from the internet is not great - OTOH it would be nice if FB took some responsibility for the content they are disseminating.

I highly suspect a lot of Register headlines would be deemed unpleasant by a large number of people and I'd hate for us to be thrown off the internet as a result. OTOH if The Reg had the same reach as Facebook, I don't think our headlines would be quite the same.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"to put blame on the technology"

No one's putting the blame on technology. As the article says, 'this murderous racist knew exactly what he was doing when he pulled the trigger'.

The problem is, how to contain viral murderous exploitative propaganda without stamping out other forms of expression. I'm all for individual outlets catering for all sorts of cultures and interests and people, all making their own free decisions on what to publish. What I'm, personally, not happy with, is a huge Mad Max platform that doesn't care a jot what is shared as long as it makes billions of dollars.

There are no easy answers. Tiered moderation, based on audience reach, might be one way forward.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"cut the stream straight to an ISIS video"

That is a problem that is difficult to solve without fundamentally changing Facebook - though funnily enough not a problem major, professional broadcasters have. Wonder why that is.

Facebook needs to grow up and realize what its platform is being used for. And it's not just livestream murders. It's anti-vaxx, flat earth, conspiracy theory nonsense that is suddenly given an immense platform.

I don't like any form of government censorship, heavy handed moderation, and similar - which is part of the reason why we try to push boundaries with headlines and writing.

On the other hand, it's not a black and white issue of freedom or no freedom. It's one thing to share stuff with friends or small groups privately that others may or may not like. It's quite another to have access to a huge potential audience.

Do I have the answers? No, no one has. Though, thinking about it, maybe one approach would be tiered moderation. After the first 10,000 views, it's flagged up for increasing levels of moderation as the views increase in stages (10k, 50k, 100k).

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"regulation on the Internet isn't going to stop nutters like this"

It never will, but we can at least curb the encouragement of it. There are knock-on effects.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"the video would have been shared differently"

Without the same reach as a vid streamed on Facebook, though.

Look, you can't stop small / niche / dark web platforms hosting this stuff, and I dunno if full-blown suppression of anything deemed nasty is the answer. I'm uncomfortable with heavy handed moderation. I don't want all bad stuff stamped out because it's v hard and there's the potential for certain views to be swept away.

OTOH I can think of a few things FB could spend some of that $22bn profit it made in 2018 on. The FB platform is too big and unmoderated. Would you live in a city with no police?

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Your "nutter on a rampage" is China's "Tiananmen Square"

I am dead against the government dictating what we can and can't see. If Fox News, NBC, BBC, etc decide it's too graphic to show real people being gunned down live, though, why is it beyond Facebook? Because of scale? Which is code for 'because we love making $$$$$$$$s from adverts with no consequences'.

If you make a TV show or documentary, and people refuse to broadcast it, or write a paper and a journal refuses to publish it, is it censorship or the application of standards? Don't get me wrong: this can be abused, and stuff can get suppressed for being uncool, unfashionable, or counter-cultural. That's why smaller platforms sprout up.

But if you have the reach of Facebook or YouTube, can't someone apply some kind of standards before a snuff livestream is disseminated? It's not black and white, freedom or zero freedom, it's not letting a platform with 1bn+ people just descend into Mad Max territory.

If there are riots in London, for instance, I expect and hope to see videos appear on the web. We don't need to see someone stave another person's head in with a mallet in real-time, though.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "the item the author of the article fails to address"

Thanks for the post. What I'd like to add is that the thrust of the piece is that this stuff shouldn't be out there for sharing, for the exact scenario you described.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Errr, censorship?

"the nutter would have used a different service"

One with far fewer viewers and virtually no impact, hopefully, yes. There's no denying there are other platforms - in fact, why not create you're own. It's still a free country in that respect.

The trouble, IMHO and what Kieren was getting at, is that if you're going to have as vast a reach as Facebook, YouTube, etc, cripes, take some actual effective steps to prevent your systems being wielded as a deadly propaganda weapon.

Apologies for the cliche, but: with great power, comes great responsibility. And Silicon Valley has shrugged off all but the bare minimum of responsibility.

Again, IMHO.

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Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

FWIW WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger do voice and video calls. The only people who phone me via the traditional phone system are PR people, restaurants confirming bookings, and robo-callers. Everyone else uses WhatsApp (or Signal) voice and messages.

Edit: I don't mind downvotes, people are free to vote how they want, but I get the feeling it was something I said. Anyone want to help me out and explain? Cheers.

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That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Numberwang

Ah, no - Numberwang is a reoccurring British comedy skit created by Mitchell and Webb

https://thatmitchellandwebb.fandom.com/wiki/Numberwang

It mocks math-based TV game-shows.

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Open-source 64-ish-bit serial number gen snafu sparks TLS security cert revoke runaround

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Unfortunately your comment is still not quite right"

Well, I'm trying to keep it simple here in the comments. Thanks for the extra info.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Why is this a big deal?

As we said a few times in the article, it's not a big deal for normal folk. There is still 63 bits of certificate serial number space.

It's just a bit - get it? - embarrassing for the usually by-the-book world of cryptography. And an interesting or amusing bug that we thought Reg readers would appreciate.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Confusion due to lax use of terminology in RFC?

'1' is a perfectly valid cert serial number, yes. There is no problem with it. The problem is that no serial number would be generated with the top bit set, halving the number of available serial numbers and increasing the chance of collision.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Confusion due to lax use of terminology in RFC?

To be clear, the problem is all about certificate serial numbers, and nothing to do with keys. I've cleared out any mention of keys to avoid any confusion.

The issue is that serial number length must be at least 64-bits and a positive integer. To ensure this, the generation software was keeping the top bit clear, effectively reducing the default 64-bit integer to 63 bits.

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Windows XP point-of-sale machine gets nasty sniffle. Luckily there's a pharmacy nearby

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: Yawn?

Ignore the anonymous haters - everyone else does, here and in real life.

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Hey, DevOps fans. We've got another TLA for you to write down: CDF

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I expect better of The Reg

Yeah yeah yeah - it's fixed. Sorry, sometimes, either due to interest or time, we focus on technology rather than pedantry.

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It sounds like a new train line, but no: Compute Express Link is PCIe 5.0 server CPU-accelerator glue from Intel and pals

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I was told ...

Well, GPUs run software, and today's FPGAs are programmed like software. It's code all the way down.

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Liz Warren: I'll smash up Amazon, Google, and Facebook – if you elect me to the White House

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"I will be forced to vote for Trump again"

You couldn't vote for Bernie so you voted the polar opposite of Bernie.

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While this CEO may be stiff, his customers are rather stuffed: Quadriga wallets finally cracked open – nothing inside

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

"Why is there no mention of what date in December the sixth wallet was emptied?"

Just an oversight on our part, it's in the linked-to report - it was December 3. Added that in now.

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God DRAM, that's a big price drop: Memory down 30 per cent, claim industry watchers

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: The article's reasoning doesn't make sense

It makes perfect sense: fewer desktop Intel CPUs, fewer desktop PCs, fewer orders for RAM, more RAM building up in warehouses, prices drop as supply outstrips demand.

We're talking about the price of RAM, not the supply of RAM. Supply is outstripping demand. No shit you found RAM in your computers - it's cheap as, er, chips at the moment ;)

Hope this helps

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How to make people sit up and use 2-factor auth: Show 'em a vid reusing a toothbrush to scrub a toilet – then compare it to password reuse

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: VIDEO Link

I'm not aware of the video being public - Iain, who wrote the piece, got the article's info from going to the researcher's presentation at RSA in SF this afternoon.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Not even El Reg.

FWIW our publishing system uses multi-factor authentication. It is mandatory: you cannot login to write, edit, publish, and manage articles without it.

So there's hope yet it'll be rolled out to comments.

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PS: We get our little red Reg badge when we post or reply to comments via the publishing backend.

When the bits hit the FAN: US military accused of knackering Russian trolls, news org's IT gear amid midterm elections

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Not sure if I get this...

FAN is being vague about the means - but it sounds as though the updates were intercepted or meddled with to allow the news org to be infected.

Here's verbatim from the news article - take with a pinch of salt.

"After connecting the Apple iPhone 7 Plus mobile device to the personal computer, not only the automatic launch of iTunes and the synchronization of user data were performed, but also Internet access was obtained from the Windows operating system and some system update files were downloaded that were installed automatically.

After that, the computer was actually managed remotely and all the necessary procedures were carried out to fully invade the local area network. It is worth noting that the intrusion into the local network was carried out from IP addresses controlled by American companies, including Amazon servers, which are usually used by hackers to sweep their tracks and hide the real source of attack."

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