* Posts by adam payne

1511 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009

Revealed: British Airways was in talks with IBM on outsourcing security just before hack

adam payne

Asked to clarify, Cruz said it was BA's own systems that alerted it to problems rather than those of an external security researcher, bank or financial service provider. Cruz sidestepped several questions on how the criminals broke in.

Contradict yourself much.

First you say it was a partner that told you then it your own systems that told you. Sorry but i'm not sure I quite believe you.

Top antivirus tool nuked from macOS App Store – after it phoned browser histories to China

adam payne

Adware Doctor:Anti Malware &Ad

Even the name sounds dodgy

PPI pushers now need consent to cold-call you

adam payne

The powers, which came into force on 8 September, will require payment protection insurance (PPI) pushers to check that the person has consented to being contacted.

These businesses ignore the current regulations so i'm quite sure they'll ignore the new ones as well.

Activists rattle tin to take UK's pr0n block to court

adam payne

Re: What could possibly go wrong,..

Doubly so if the ministers then try to claim it back on expenses.

Creaky systems 'cost lives': Health secretary Matt Hancock pledges to solve NHS IT woes

adam payne

Faltering NHS IT systems are "costing lives", health secretary Matt Hancock has said ahead of announcing a further £200m for trusts to create digital testbeds.

OK, so what's your plan? is there a plan? or just another sound bite laden speech?

TSB goes TITSUP: Total Inability To Surprise Users, Probably

adam payne

Re: "some of our customers are experiencing intermittent issues with online and mobile banking"

I have no problem with people leaving the bank just as long as don't get another bail out situation.

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal: Directors quit, new sack effort started

adam payne

CTO Janko Mrsic-Flogel and managing director Suzanne Martin were both recorded by Companies House as having stepped down on 17 August.

Is Levy the only person left working for the business? If so he will be walking away quite soon i'm sure.

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal biz gets £35k legal costs delayed

adam payne

“May I ask the question, if our solicitors are unable or unwilling for any reason to provide the documents, are we entitled to seek those documents from the other side and are they?”

You haven't paid them have you Levy.

We're all sick of Fortnite, but the flaw found in its downloader is the latest way to attack Android

adam payne

Re: 'Bypass the Play Store and this is what can happen'

I'm currently not a Google PR bot. I neither like nor dislike Google.

I'm simply saying when you have to use a custom installer there is always going to be a risk.

adam payne

To download the game, users need to install a helper app first. This, in turn, is supposed to download the game files.

But by using the Man-in-the-Disk attack, a crook can trick the helper into installing a malicious application.

Bypass the Play Store and this is what can happen.

No, eight characters, some capital letters and numbers is not a good password policy

adam payne

what the state’s admins weren’t doing was blacklisting known terrible passwords or requiring them to meet a given level of complexity

One agency was found to have over 2,000 shared accounts with privileged access.

it was found that one agency had left an old offline AD database in a location support users and contractors were able to access

Another had, “inadvertently shared its entire AD database with a third party

#CaptainPicardDoubleFacePalm

Kudos to the auditor for releasing this.

Windows 95 roars once more in the Microsoft round-up

adam payne

Re: 200Mhz

I built PCs using the original Pentium chips up to 233MHz but after that the Pentium II seemed to take over.

Of course AMD K6 came out around about that time so I built a hell of a lot of those as well. As well as the old faithful Cyrix 6x86 series.

HP Inc strips off, rolls around as Windows 10 money pours down

adam payne

"We think that's a positive stimulus in the market."

Being forced on to Windows 10 might be positive for the market but not for everybody who hates it.

Chap asks Facebook for data on his web activity, Facebook says no, now watchdog's on the case

adam payne

However, the firm declined to do so, effectively saying it was too difficult to locate the info within its humongous data warehouse.

Come on FB you knew this was going to happen and you are telling us that you have no easy way of doing this or that you didn't invest in the infrastructure to make this possible.

noting that this kind of architecture was necessary due to the sheer volume of data created

The sheer volume of data slurped.

Facebook simply does not have the infrastructure capacity to store log data in Hive in a form that is indexed by user in the way that it can for production data used for the main Facebook site

You say you can't locate the information but then say you don't have the capacity to do it. Anyone would think that you're making excuses because you want anyone to know the sheer scale of your slurping.

Fire chief says Verizon throttled department's data in the middle of massive Cali wildfires

adam payne

Under this plan, users get an unlimited amount of data but speeds are reduced when they exceed their allotment until the next billing cycle

An unlimited plan with a difference. Unlimited should mean unlimited, none of this throttling crap after you hit whatever limit they decide.

This was a customer support mistake. We are reviewing the situation and will fix any issues going forward So are you going to put them back on the original plan and refund them? thought not.

UK's info commish is having a howler: Site dies amid 'plagiarised' GDPR book scandal

adam payne

In a bid to address the concerns, the ICO said it was now "developing a corporate policy on how requests for support and collaboration from third parties will be dealt with in the future".

With the amount of bureaucracy in the ICO you would have thought someone there would have loved to add another policy to it.

Surely it can't be the first time they've been asked to collaborate on things such as this. Unless of course it's the first time they've gotten caught rubber stamping something.

It liiives! Sorta. Gentle azure glow of Windows XP clocked in Tesco's self-checkouts, no less

adam payne

XP embedded is still everywhere. I've seen it in big high street shops and in small independent shops.

Big or small they won't spend money unless they really have no other choice.

Beam me up, PM: Digital secretary expected to give Tory conference speech as hologram

adam payne

According to The Sunday Times, inside sources said the idea of having the secretary of state appear as a flickering light display was a part of efforts to make the conference "less boring".

Nothing is going to make it less boring.

Who was it that hacked Apple? Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, boy boy boy!

adam payne

downloading around 90GB worth of iStuffs and saving it into a folder hilariously labeled as "hacky hack hack.

I laughed out loud when I read that, now people in the office are looking at me funny.

Bitcoin backer sues AT&T for $240m over stolen cryptocurrency

adam payne

AT&T for its part has promised to fight the lawsuit. "We dispute these allegations and look forward to presenting our case in court," said a representative.

Well you can't dispute that you ported the number. You can dispute that you aren't responsible for the things that happened after the porting but the porting certainly helped the criminals.

Mozilla-endorsed security plug-in accused of tracking users

adam payne

"We’ve received concerns from the community about the Web Security extension, and are currently investigating those concerns," a Mozilla spokesperson told The Register.

"The reference to the extension has been removed from the blog post as part of the investigative process."

Shouldn't you have tested the extension before recommending it.

Google shaves half a gig off Android Poundland Edition

adam payne

2.5GB for a phone OS, that's bigger than some Windows XP installs.

Oh my Tosh, it's only a 100TB small form-factor SSD, SK?

adam payne

Re: The price

El Reg omitted the prices because they didn't want to give anyone a heart attack.

Devon County Council techies: WE KNOW IT WASN'T YOU!

adam payne

A Devon County Council spokesman told the Beeb: “We’ve been trialling a new IT printing system and a number of mistakes were unfortunately not picked up before this letter was dispatched.”

Now that just made my day. I have never seen an excuse quite as pathetic as that.

Space, the final Trump-tier: America to beam up $8bn for Space Force

adam payne

Space Force Fuck yeah

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

adam payne

Well it looks like crap but it least it exists in some form or another. I had serious doubts so i'm shocked some of them have been shipped.

In it's current form I will be sticking to my emulator.

Second-hand connected car data drama could be a GDPR minefield

adam payne

Customer confidentiality and the security and privacy of customer data is paramount to Jaguar Land Rover. We continually review our processes to identify further improvements to meet the security and privacy needs of our customers.

Multiple people have raised an issue and you don't seem to be doing anything about it apart from issue stock statements.

In this case I don't see how confidentiality, security or privacy are paramount to you.

Intel: Yeah, yeah, 10nm. It's on the todo list. Now, let's talk about AI...

adam payne

Re: Intel knows that it is in deep trouble

Unless of course Intel try to give massive discounts to system builders to only use their chips. It's not like it hasn't happened before.

adam payne

They insisted Chipzilla is broadening its portfolio beyond the processor market.

...Our roadmap and the products we're putting forward gives us confidence we'll continue to win."

PR for we don't have anything to go against AMD with so we'll act like it doesn't bother us.

Denial of denial-of-service served: There was NO DDoS on FCC net neutrality comments

adam payne

"With respect to the report’s findings, I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former chief information officer (CIO), who was hired by the prior administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people,"

Yeah blame someone else as it's always their fault.

It's a phone with a peel, but you'll have to wait a bit more for retro Nokia

adam payne
Joke

Well at least the yellow 8110 should match my Bananaman costume.

TSMC chip fab tools hit by virus, payment biz BGP hijacked, CCleaner gets weird – and more

adam payne

Piriform said it will be updating the tool soon to highlight exactly what is gobbled up when Active Monitoring is switched on and off – and has pulled version 5.45 for now.

You should have been honest and told people what was going on instead you pull the version and tell everyone you'll change it. It makes you look guilty.

Alaskan borough dusts off the typewriters after ransomware crims pwn entire network

adam payne

The attackers gained Active Directory admin access, compromising the controller to reconfigure its security settings.

Ouch!

The borough is now reimaging its systems using backups, some of them up to a year old. However, a lot of data such as email has been lost.

I can imagine desktop / laptop images being out of date by a year but losing data on servers how did that happen? What is the backup process? surely they weren't just doing disk to disk backup.

Apple takes an axe to its App Affiliate Program

adam payne

Obviously axing the affiliate program will help Apple hit the 1 trillion dollar mark

Facebook deletes 17 accounts, dusts off hands, beams: We've saved the 2018 elections

adam payne

Today's announcement is intended to send the message that Facebook is on top of the problem.

The announcement was intended to send that message but to me it sounds like back slapping.

Oooooh! Fashion! Yes, 1m-plus accounts on clothes, trinket websites exposed by lax security

adam payne

Fashion Nexus take our clients and their customer's data security extremely seriously and we apologise that we have come up short in this instance.

Is there a free template online somewhere for breach announcements?

Dixons Carphone: Yeah, so, about that hack we said hit 1.2m records? Multiply that by 8.3

adam payne

In today's statement CEO Alex Baldock, who only started in April, said: "We're disappointed in having fallen short here, and very sorry for any distress we've caused our customers. I want to assure them that we remain fully committed to making their personal data safe with us."

Blah blah blah, same kind of statement different day.

"We continue to make improvements and investments at pace to our security environment through enhanced controls, monitoring and testing."

At pace? Makes me think of people running around patching systems that were forgotten.

I hope you are fully testing things before deploying them at pace.

Think tank calls for post-Brexit national ID cards: The kids have phones so what's the difference?

adam payne

It is true that there is low confidence in government to manage large scale IT projects well

Well that's an understatement.

There's low confidence in any UK government to deliver on any IT projects.

Hot US deal! IBM wins $83m from Groupon in e-commerce patent spat

adam payne

They include two patents developed in the 1980s for IBM's pre-internet Prodigy online communication service, which offered news, weather and sports reports.

IBM announces their plans to expand their new patent trolling department.

Politicians fume after Amazon's face-recog AI fingers dozens of them as suspected crooks

adam payne

The results from the ACLU's latest probing showed that Rekognition mistook images of 28 innocent members of Congress for mugshots of cuffed people suspected of crimes.

Define innocent?

Well, well, well. Crime does pay: Ransomware creeps let off with community service

adam payne

Two men who masterminded various Coinvault ransomware infections will carry out 240 hours of community service as punishment for screwing over 1,200 computers and banking around €10,000 (£9k, $12k) in profit.

Not sure I agree with the sentence. Sends out a message of soft time if you get caught.

They are criminals and their actions effected thousands of people.

Official: AMD now stands for All the Money, Dudes!

adam payne

#GoAMD

Good to see AMD back in the black. Now I want to see them stick it to Intel.

Brit spending watchdog brands GP Primary Support Care a 'complete mess'

adam payne

"The dismal fallout here, with NHS England and Capita squabbling over details that should have been agreed in 2015, tells its own sorry tale," said Hillier.

Sounds like important things that should have been discussed and ironed out in the initial specing up stage never happen.

Why does this keep happening time and time again?!?

No big deal... Kremlin hackers 'jumped air-gapped networks' to pwn US power utilities

adam payne

We're told, and can well believe, that the equipment makers and suppliers have special access into the utilities' networks in order to provide remote around-the-clock support and patch deployment – access that, it seems, turned into a handy conduit for Kremlin spies.

Not the first time that vendors have been used to access the real target.

Trusted connections between customer and vendor, sorry not happening on my network.

Seems like security measures need to be improved in both camps.

You're burning £1.2bn for what? UK spending watchdog gives digital court plans a kicking

adam payne

Ten years in the cubes

Brits whinging less? About ISPs, networks and TV? It's gotta be a glitch in the Matrix

adam payne

That was business support.

adam payne

TalkTalk and BT are the most moaned-about home broadband operators

Well you do surprise me :P

Classic BT approach. Spend an hour on the phone, get transferred through nine people and departments to end up back with the first person you spoke to and for them to then say your package doesn't support DNS. Awesome!

Techie sues ex-bosses, claims their AI avatar tech was faked – and he was allegedly beaten up after crying foul

adam payne

Sadeghi said he would return the laptop after he had retrieved some personal data from it, and later tried to leave Pinscreen’s offices.

Personal data on a company laptop, no just no.

Will this biz be poutine up the cash? Hackers demand dosh to not leak stolen patient records

adam payne

Data privacy watchdogs at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario said they were “assessing whether the breach could have been prevented

If the breach wasn't preventable then they had no business using the system in the first place.

PayPal's pal Venmo spaffs your pals' payments – and yours

adam payne

Why is this stuff even public? Why would there even be an option to make the stuff public?

Surely GDPR should have slapped this one down by now.