Posts by a_yank_lurker 4138 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
An interesting comparison is Fruit has both revenue and profit growth about every quarter. Also, they seem to be building a service business without too much fanfare. This makes you wonder what else they have under wraps to announce in the future that might be a big hit. While Itsy Bitsy Morons seem to losing sales every quarter even if their profits wobble. The Morons are talking about how they plan to make a major splash in the whatever but never seem to get around to it. There is a sneaky feeling that all is not well with the Morons and some speculation when they will go bankrupt as they sink into total irrelevance.
Horrors!!! A court decision that is common sense. Uber drivers and the like are really part-time employees not contractors. The problem that many like Uber having trying to do is skirt employment law worldwide by trying define the drivers as contractors.
There is a situation where someone can be a contractor and not an employee. That is when the contractor is an employee rented from another company. There is a company taking care of the legal issues.
Itsy Bitsy Morons do not have a proactive strategy but reactive strategy. What you are outlining is proactive strategy to deal with the market place. Do they have a workable plan and more importantly do they know where they are going. I doubt they have the latter so any plan is fundamentally pointless. Being reactive, they are always behind the trend and are playing catch up with others.
@Martin - I doubt this will be the end for Kaspersky as actions like this risk a winnable civil suit by them. The only reason they are in 'trouble' is because they are Russian and thus most be in Putin's hip pocket. The same could be said about any AV vendor, they must be in X's back pocket because they are in Y. No proof has been offered on these assertions.
However, Twitter is being more and more censored because they are afraid of anything smelling of a controversy. As they become more risk adverse look for more this type of action in the future.
Also, this might be a blessing for Kapersky as the use of ad blockers rises making online advertising less effective. Some browsers are shipped with ad-blockers (Brave definitely - built in).
@Lost all faith - It is the over reliance on external alpha and beta testers that is the problem. A proper internal test program would catch a lot of the problems before the alpha and beta testers ever see it. Also, a well designed program would deliberately try to break the code and find the errors.Your typical external testers are not likely to try to break the code. Also, the equipment available to the external testers is rather limited; maybe a couple of printers, a scanner, a couple of laptops, etc.
What is often forgotten in this whole argument is often the communication decrypts are incomplete or missing key details. The decrypts supplement a through understanding of the strategies and tactics being used, traffic analysis, good old fashion intuition. Sir Rodger Winn called his daily analysis of the German U-boot efforts 'working fiction' because he realized he was always partially in the dark about the true German intentions, even when Enigma decrypts were available.
In the movie 'Tora, Tora, Tora' there is a scene were Col. Rufus Bratton was puzzling over the Japanese diplomatic messages and other information. He concluded the Japanese were going to attack on Sunday 30-November-1941; only 1 week off. The US at the time was decrypting Japanese diplomatic messages as fast or faster than the Japanese Embassy in Washington at the time.
The issue is not have the decrypts but having the full context of the messages. Also, depending on how much planning took place 'off the grid', the decrypts may not make much sense to someone not part of the plot. Given San Bernardino was a husband and wife team, I suspect most of the planning was face to face. Also, activities that should have raised an alarm were not reported because many feared being labelled a racist if they made a report. However traffic analysis would show who they were communicating with and that would warrant a visit and game of 20 questions. Most would be absolutely innocent.
@bombastic bob - In this case the phone was the county's phone issued to him. The problem was incompetence causing the password to be reset in such away the county could not access it. His personal phone, the one likely to have the info desired, was destroyed with hammer. Apparently, he slightly smarter than the average feral or local flatfoot, use effectively a burner device and then destroy it.
Semi non-story, for many businesses an active social media presence is not very critical or as noted above be a net loss. This is a form of advertising that should evaluated on its own merits for one's specific situation.And the results will range from a presence being at best pointless to absolutely critical.
Targeted advertising makes a critical, often erroneous assumption: one's current online activities reflect one's needs or desires. What is lacking is the context of the activity which may be due to nothing more the pure curiosity or just seeing what is out there. Another missing bit is whether the search has already led to a purchase in which case a targeted ad for the product is pointless. The idea that you can target to nearly an individual level is false. This is because the information is always somewhat out of date (another problem).
To me, the primary goal of advertising is brand awareness. People do not buy stuff from unfamiliar brands that often especially from a brand they have never heard of. This can be done any of a number of ways including 'word of mouth' but always means that some of the advertising will always fall on the uninterested as John Wanamaker observed.
@tom dial - If you operate a transmitter in any country you have to apply to the locals for the correct operating license. Part of this is frequency allocation as well as other technical details such as power output, etc. While the ferals are catching flack about this, it is actually true no matter where the transmitter is located, just the name of the agency is different.
If I understand correctly their primary activities are illegal in most countries and where they are legal may not be the best business environment. Moving money around only complicates things and risks tax fraud charges. Given the charges are state level the really nasty feral charges are yet to kick in. It appears they thought Section 230 gave them an absolute impunity to aid and abet prostitution and child trafficking when that was likely never the intent. But the problem is the post may be protected but the underlying acts are illegal (aiding and abetting child trafficking is illegal in the US). Section 230 is intend to primarily to prevent sites from being liable for third party content. (El Reg can not be sued because I posted a libelous comment - I can be still be sued.).
One area of TD that is overlooked is when the requirements change significantly but some of the old code is still needed. You might really need to rewrite the code completely.
Another area of TD is when the system does not allow the easy solution and any working solution is nasty kludge at best.
Not all TD is due to poor programming or shaky specs.
While I am not enthused seeing any outdated OS running expensive kit, just how risky is it in reality? Often these are devices that do not require network connection to work so they could be airgapped by default. If one does connect them to a network, they can be buried underneath layers of security. Plus if a hacker did get in would they know what to do, we are not talking office macros here.
Ship the plod over here and if we make him a Congresscritter he will personally double the total IQ of Congress. His idea may be dim but he is pointing out that may Silly Valley giants have not grasped the world is actually shades of grey not stark black and white. Abusing users, overtime, is not a good business practice as it leads to customer reaction eventually.
@Voyna i Mor - The issue is not adult prostitution but child sex trafficking. With adult prostitution, Mussolini's solution makes a great deal of sense. But with child sex trafficking you are talking about pedophiles taking advantage of children. A very different problem. However, my reservations is with the mental capacity of Congresscritters and their tendency towards idiotic solutions to difficult problems.
On a legal note, does anyone know what the US case law is on dead tree ads for child sex trafficking? I would be surprised if there was nothing given this is not new.
Like most people, my habits, vacation plans, etc. tend to follow a pattern there is a limit to the pattern's value. Major life changing events will likely cause changes in how I must do things because the assumptions behind the original patterns are invalid. Also, one might decide to change something at any time, such as a new hobby.
Another consideration is many do not keep a detailed personal electronic calendar as it is unnecessary. I can tell you what I will plan to do for the rest of the year but I do not need a detailed electronic calendar to keep me straight, the ordinary pen and paper variety is more than adequate for the level of detail I need.
So they want me to share plans electronically when I do not need to keep track of them electronically. The basic question then is what is the real benefit to me; I see none.
Leisure Larry's Minions are pushing mostly one relational database. Relational databases are a well understood technology know with numerous databases available. In principle, it is possible to switch databases though there are serious issues with differences in the SQL dialects. And this does not preclude that another database model is a better fit for the data and the end user's needs (a much nastier migration to be sure). The net effect is the core product is vulnerable to market share erosion either to direct competitors or other alternatives if a customer is willing to pull the trigger.
Thus, the minions' antics in suing everyone for any slight is an attempt to staunch the bleeding. Short term it will help as they will win some cases. Long term is it a dubious strategy as they will need a basis to file a suit and those will slowly dry up and suing does fix the underlying causes.
The cloud is not always suitable for small businesses either. One has to consider data privacy laws such as the US HIPPA that have strict requirements about data access, etc. The cloud is also nothing more than moving an internal server farm to an external server farm with supposed cost savings (or more accurately more obvious costs) and possibly some operational efficiencies.
One major difference with external vs internal is how many are affected when the service goes down. Internal only affects one company while external affects numerous.
While I am an absolutist on Free Speech in that anyone has the right to say anything, anywhere I also realize there may very serious consequences based on the content. The mistake often made about Free Speech is there are no consequences; there are. Deliberately cause a panic leading to innocent deaths and you will see what kind of vacation facilities the locals provide for long term vacations. Make threats against someone and see what happens.
Given the psychopathic antics of FraudBook and other slimes self-regulation is highly unlikely to work. But government regulation is not a panacea either given that many politicians and bureaucrats are greedy for personal power and not the good of the society. So, unless a competent third is available, we are faced with choosing which set of liars we distrust less.
The specific file may be innocuous but the underlying problem is not. The fact a massive amount of data is exposed to whomever may want to gobble it is troubling. In this pile, most of it will be chaff but enough of it will be rather valuable to the miscreant gets their hands on it.
It is the degree that is import. If you have a commercial relationship with a business, it is in the best interest of the business to track your purchases, etc. so they can find products or services you might be interested in to sell you. And as a customer, the freebies and recommendations are nice. But where this should stop is at the business door. And it does not matter if the business is a mom-and-pop pet food store or Apple. Fraudbook offers targeted advertising and 'anonymous' user data to third parties. As along as Apple keeps the data internal, Cook is correct, Apple is only doing what any competently run business does: know your customers.
Companies that do not value grey hairs are run by idiots. Whether the grey hair has been a 'lifer' with the company or a recent hire, they do bring to the table experience and knowledge as well as technical skills. Depending on the needs, the requisite skills can be learned by a new employee but experience and knowledge can not be learned very fast. Hiring only PFY sounds good but their lack of experience and knowledge means they will make the same mistakes the grey hairs made before. Having to grey hairs around to mentor (even informally) them means they will make these mistakes again and again.
From what I have read Meltdown and Spectre are not being exploited in the wild and some of the 'fixes' (looking at you Slurp) are worse than do nothing at all. So the real question for older chips, what is the real risk of an exploit? Partly how difficult are they to exploit with a normal user configuration and how would the exploit be installed. I have seen opinions that say if hit it is real bad but it is very difficult to actually exploit.
So should the average user (or their informal IT department) maintain a watch and wait posture towards patching?
An accurate risk assessment will also impact any law suit as it currently stands as there has been no known attacks using the flaws.
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