Posts by Allan George Dyer 2547 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
"All external mass mailings should be authorised, approved and need at least 2 people to authenticate to a system in order for it to proceed."
And they must use two keys, turned simultaneously in keyholes too far apart for one person to reach, and the recall code is a permutation of the letters O,P,E.
"How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Mass Mailing"
"And I'd love to know what happens if everyone in the same apartment block tries to exercise their gigabit speeds at the same time."
i) No-one gets gigabit speeds because everyone uses WiFi within their flats, sharing the available bandwidth with their neighbour's wifi.
ii) You blame the website for being slow
iii) The ISP persuades you to upgrade to an even faster connection.
I understand now. Which would you rather tell your boss:
1. "There was a disc failure in the RAID array and a second drive failed during the rebuild, so we're restoring from backup, it'll take 9 hours..."
2. "It's Google's fault. Look, it's affecting all their other customers too."
As a bonus, if the boss is still angry, tell him you can do it in-house, but you need a big budget (remember to move on to a new job just after spending the budget).
There are only two three certainties: Death, Taxes and System Failure.
I love that song,
"You make a grown man cry"
I tried to avoid 95, and kept to OS/2 or NT whenever possible. 95 was just another GUI over DOS. When the filesystem is still FAT, long filenames are just a kludge, the real filename is still 8.3 characters. Plus, whoever thought that allowing long filenames AND keeping special meanings for extensions AND hiding known extensions by default was a good idea should be forced to clean up every virus infection this enabled, worldwide, while crawling on broken glass</rant>. Sorry, breath deeply, clam down...
On the plus side, 95 did kill off boot sector viruses... they didn't support 32-bit drivers, so when it booted, Windows was forced into compatibility mode. Everything worked, apparently normally, except the CD driver disappeared (most CD drives depended on 32-bit drivers). Users complained about that, so the virus was discovered and eliminated. Easy to diagnose, once you knew.
"My own personal computers, being highly secured and reliable, coupled with my knowledge of how to use them, would make me personally the equivillent of a nuclear power in a nuclear war."
So the first sign that the "cyber cold war" is turning hot will be conventional military strikes against 1980s_coder and other IT experts?
@LucreLout - "No reg plates requires a physical stop, which requires actual traffic police, of which we have very few."
But every driverless car around you is checking the registration of other cars (for purely safety reasons - "that's an early Ford controller, known for sudden braking on left-hand turns...") and reporting back tp the System. Then, like a dreadful, mechanised ballet, every car around your manual, unregistered car bunches up and gently forces you to stop outside the nearest police station, speeding away about their business once you're cuffed. No need for traffic police to stray from their donuts.
Chinese official in press conference on BBC news explaining they had detected cyanide at two locations but won't say where they are because cyanide is poisonous.
Yep, that is going to reassure everyone that the authorities are keeping people out of harm's way, and not cause mass panic at all.
You forgot the troll icon.
How about, Firemen, Doctors, street sweepers?
We had enough new malware in the 1980's - one new item a month is enough to make a subscription necessary, why would anyone make more work when there are tens of thousands of new samples a day? Knowing about it before your competitors only gives an advantage of hours - you don't get credit for detection until a testing organisation has a sample, and testing organisations are part of the sample distribution structure. On top of that, there's the chance of getting caught.
Full disclosure: I sell anti-malware software and Eugene has given me vodka.
Interesting article, after the attention-grabbing soundbite, "They are charlatans and scammers", Chris DiBona says, "No major cell phone has a 'virus' problem in the traditional sense" and "Yes, a virus of the traditional kind is possible, but not probable". I'd take 'traditional virus' to mean 'program that alters other programs to include a (possibly modified) copy of itself', and a defence against that is limited transitivity, which a walled garden can provide. However, 'anti-virus' suites nowadays are more general, acting against all types of malware, such as trojans. A trojan can be distributed in a walled garden, if the gardener is not doing his job. Can anyone name an app store where a malicious app was passed through vetting?
Google feels it is necessary to bad-mouth anti-malware vendors because admitting they are necessary is an admission that Google is unable to make its app store perfectly safe.
Full disclosure: I sell anti-malware software and Eugene has given me vodka.
And James Holmes was convicted today... how many gun nuts have attacked unarmed innocents? Perhaps no free AV software is the price one pays for being an NRA member?
Personally, I prefer controls that i) are easy to apply, ii) address the actual problem iii) are effective and avoid unintended consequences.
@Fonant - Interesting lists.
At least the UK version has some activity details, so they could use a follow-up question that doesn't require sensitive personal information... like,
"In approximately 2005, did you run a 'basic training' camp for Al-Qaida in Pakistan?"
"Um... No?"
"We're all good, carry on with your download"
"part of a massive, incomprehensible universal web of energy" -
Yep, that's right. Biologists call it the Food Web. Next time you get bitten by a mosquito - celebrate, it's immortality on an instalment plan! Bird just shat on you? That might be Grandma trying to get back in contact, via the bird that ate the worm that... you get the idea.
Any sane person makes a distinction between energy and consciousness. Shesh!
From: Chief of Police, Chechnya
To: Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS
Subject: Restoration of Proceeds of Fraud
Your Excellency, following the regrettable incident of criminal elements in Chechnya defrauding members of your esteemed organisation of "travel fees", I am pleased to report that we have arrested the perpetrators and will be arranging restoration of the funds as soon as possible.
However, to proceed with the case, we do need to take statements in person from the victims and verify their standing in your organisation. Please can you assist in contacting the victims and providing documentation of their atrocities and beheadings glorious work in your organisation, and ask them to report, in person, to any Chechen Police Station to make their statements.
We will, of course afford them every hospitality they deserve, and, in addition to the restoration of the fraudulent funds, refund their incidental and travel expenses if they are ever released when they leave.
Yours sincerely,
Chief of Police
P.S. - Please note, we have a relaxed dress policy at our Police Stations, weapons should be checked with the desk sergeant and suicide vests must not be worn.
@AC - "programmers who don't understand that opening windows lets in more hot air and stops the air-con working"
Ah, must be Microsoft loyalists. They don't understand, air conditioners are like computers, they don't work properly when Windows is opened.
@Cipher - The One Time Pad is not the answer to almost all real-world security problems. The article gave practical (but not mathematically perfect) solutions for two scenarios:
1) Data at Rest - The OTP is as large as the encrypted data, so you've replaced the problem of securely storing the data to securely storing the OTP, no gain. The OTP was never intended for this scenario.
2) Data in Transit - The OTP gives perfect protection to a message, provided you have previously securely shared a OTP at least as big. In other words, it allows you to time-shift the secure data transfer.
The OTP works for pre-defined communicators with previous opportunity for secure transfer - say a Government and its embassies. It is useless for whistleblowers or ad-hoc collaborative groups.
Windows 10 still hides double extensions by default.
worst_idea_ever.txt.exe
We've seen video of a quadcopter-mounted handgun recently and facial recognition software is freely available. How difficult would it be to release a van-load of quadcopters programmed to "proceed to beach, shoot faces" and drive quietly away before the carnage starts? A bomb would be much simpler, but the terror effect of murderous drones on shaky cameraphone video would be much greater.
The limiting factor is the availability of guns. A drone can't be the "Kalashnikov of tomorrow" until you mount a Kalashnikov on it.
It occurs to me that a high-pressure hose is more aim-able than dropping water, and can be used without manoeuvring above the drone. Also safer than firearms, and I imagine the effective range is at least as good as a shotgun. Not to mention that it is normal equipment for firefighters, the ammunition does not explode when heated and there is plausible deniability in use.
He achieved a 300% mortality rate in one operation: the patient, an assistant and a bystander all died!
"All being different models - and not the exact same O/S and update level."
But then you get caught by the "it only prints correctly from THIS version" bug. If it's a long document, the problem will occur on a page in the middle (you know, the one with the complicated diagram) subtly changing it so that it is complete nonsense, but you don't notice until after the document is delivered...
And the page numbering on the table of contents is messed up.
They've got us. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
@ Trevor_Pott - Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? The advertisement houses want to buy the ad space. If a major news site stopped supporting flash, the ad houses would fall into line.
Also, I don't think the BBC are using flash because they want the ad revenue.
Perhaps we could use a limited number of pictograms, say 26, and give them short, standardised names. Hmm, but there are more than 26 things we need buttons for, so perhaps we could use combinations of pictograms to symbolise things, and derive rules for combining the short names for the pictograms so they become pronounceable groups of syllables. But someone is bound to mess it up, breaking the rules and adding extra bits above or below the pictograms to change their names a bit...
It could be worse. Does she interrupt halfway through any question intended to clarify the situation, either blaming you for not having already solved it, complaining you are being too finicky, or shouting, "Stop shouting at me, I just want to get my work done!"?
I don't see the use-case for bring-your-own-supercomputer-appliances. If I drop my smartphone in the cradle on the washing machine, I have to wait until my shirts are clean before I can cook my dinner and listen to some music?
The option of upgrading my stereo by giving it last-year's smartphone is attractive, but I can't imagine manufacturers giving up build-in obsolescence easily (yes, the cradle is an industry-standard, but you can't use new feature X without upgrading this bit).
"Before the attack, Hacking Team could claim to control who had access to the technology, now we have been exposed as liars and have been forced to rely on misleading PR to maintain our business model."
FTFY.
They knew their job included defending against "terrorists and criminals", and they failed.
Who's for making knowingly concealing a vulnerability from the developer concerned a crime?
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