Posts by Alistair

Excuse me your honor

My wife and kids and I need a nice vacation this winter, Please review the following case and get me 800 hours at $150 an hour before January.......

Key phrase.

When law enforcement understands the details of an attack ......

"When Hell Freezes over?"

and the question users will be asking

Why the hell is my battery life so short now?

Good to know that some of my countrymen have already been in to make note that .... well ... it'll be almost a year before thanksgiving comes about in this neck of the woods.

For the lot below the border, I turn off the US on the Wednesday, for about a week, just to avoid the shopocalysms. Horribly, they've been trying to set that disease on us up here over the last bunch of years. I think our only revenge for that export was to send you Bieber.

IBM

HCL

I thought Intel got done over for a bunch of off-by-one bugs........

I'll just leave this here for the AI to work on

But they answered: "Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?"

I keep wondering

Fishing line, open windows and a nicely charged fire pole.

I'll have to add that to the list.

(What? No, the prerequisite list for my next employer)

avalanche of poorly executed cya.

But then we not talking about folks with extensive enterprise IT experience with tons of security skills. Right folks? I mean, these guys don't work for IBM or Equifax right?

Oh. I seeeeeee.

wait --

Appleby's leaked horrendous recipes?

Nope, different Appleby. Whew! would want that crap food getting into the mainstream.

/humour

That said - a Law Firm leaking -- notably a law firm that refers to its customers as "High net worth individuals", effectively hot on the heels of MosFon's leak, tells me that there is somewhere in this cistern of corruption we call the world some few individuals who are serious about chlorinating the cistern. Am I going to laud them for dumping this stuff in the open? Perhaps not, it may run over some folks that don't truly deserve to have their laundry waved about in the open, but I'm *fairly* sure that the intent is to get the dirty laundry of those who use their position to take advantage of the rest of the population in less than fair methods out into the open so that those methods can be removed. Will that happen? who the hell knows, I can hope the changes come, but I doubt it. I'm sure there are still quite a few large pools of financial wealth that will be stolen from the general populace by the 3 card monte global stage acts.

<sorry - my cynicism is showing in force today. Mostly due to having to do things that were outsourced to another entity ages ago myself to close projects.>

Insect populations over ....

Okay - I get that they've seen a change in overall numbers in their collection schemes. However a rather quick skim of this, I won't call it a proper study. Period. There is no consistency in the data collection.

From my backyard, I've seen *far* more dragonflies this year that I've seen in dozens of years, and we've actually had more than a few monarchs fly by (and I haven't seen a monarch in my neck of the woods for 8 years or so) and well, the rest of the bug population is outrageous, although that may have more to do with the rain we've seen than anything else. This is of course anecdotal, not scientific. What I will note is that between myself and one other person on the block, we've managed to talk all but *one* household out of subscribing to those Lawn Care Company schemes that spray crap left right and centre over the last 5 years. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

As for the GMO crops being wind pollinated.... Ummmmmm. There are a couple of grain stock that are wind populated (i.e. don't *require* an external pollinator) -- but that function is native to the stock and has nowt to do with the GMO part of the equation. The issue *I* have with Monsanto is the combination of the patent and their use of 'we detected the gene in your seeds, so pay us anyway' bullshit. I've seen the GM work that the north african farming collective is doing and have to laud them for the practicality of their approach, *and* the fact that they will happily share the seeds with anyone that would like them, given that they've some to spare (and from what I hear they were short stock this year).

Does no one else see

A problem with that organization name?

Cofound.it.

I was going to go all Asimov on this, but the title is Caves of Steel. Although if you read it through from end to end, at some point R. Daneel ends up hiding in a cave on the moon waiting......

Noooooooooooo cigarettes!

It sounds more like the CFO looking to pad annual bonus to me......

While I get the cautious cynicism (and i have a good bit of my own on this), I will point out that the 5 eyes dancing together bit doesn't quite fly. CSE and CCIS have several times in the last dozen or so years called everyone else out. Most notably over an invoice for yellowcake.

Perhaps this can replace MWB since it was co-opted....

Yeah -- us old foks ain't worth it no more.

Until of course the fecal matter hits the high speed rotary device and scares the crap outta the punks. I still get hauled into Sev1s and Sev2s that have nothing to do with me these days, "Cause, well, you know how to fix things......" (Yeaaaah, I've had a SenDir say that in the call).

Like I keep telling my kids, you get what you pay for. Shop at walmart and that shirt will last 3 months. Go somewhere they know how to make shirts and pay a good bit more, that shirt will last years. Experience pays and all that crap. I've been at this now for Th*cough* years. If I'm older than your parents you just might want to listen a bit.

police across the US seized $4.5bn under civil asset forfeiture

--- Given the circumstances of this case, we can expect that number to be slightly low since it clearly does not include NY State's figures.........

I see a personal grudge, or a serious dick *somewhere* in this mess.

Hmm.

I dunno about Scotland so much, however the AirSoft devices my eldest have are like hell made out of plastic, nor do they use springs as firing mechanisms. The name makes it pretty clear what they use to fire those balls with.

And he *has* mucked with it and gotten the pistol muzzle velocity up over 328fps. Mind you after it popped two sandbags and I made him clean that up he choked it back. And despite more than a few months of practice I'm still 45% more accurate than him on a stationary target. (75 ft range)

Still and all, the groups over here are pretty damned harsh on modders that overramp and to get in any playfield they get to test your device before you go out.

This cop and the Sheriff/judge both need a swat, it is after all a (slightly weird) "sport", not a "terrorist" organization.

This application brings to mind a Tom Lehrer song about parks.

I has a little birdie on my desktop.

Now, I've seen some interesting, sometimes rather shady plugins for this little birdie. But what it ships standard with (at least in my experience) covers sufficient ground to keep me communicating with the rest of the world. Annnnnnnnd ... it does E2E where the protocol supports it....

Aaaannnnnnnnnnd I have logs. All grouped neatly together in a bunch of folders. grep suffices. Now, the E2E and logging ... .at least the *message* in flight is encrypted. I've not seen a function that will let me *log* the encrypted message in its encrypted form. And I doubt that file transfer data could be stored on disk in encrypted form...........

/wanders off to talk to someone that knows more about how to handle this ....

emergency stop. Hmmm.

PFY off with the papers, boss in the lift on emergency stop. Auditors in the building hot on the (confetti) paper trail....

Why do I see a power outage and some defective elevator hardware in episode 2?

(And can anyone tell me why Visio is such a hot steaming mess of bugs that I cannot replace? -- Yes, I've done yEd, Dia and others - but .... )

"One individual is responsible"

Per certain large corporate leaky entities.

Hmmmm. Somethings not right......

This one should be on *everyone's* radar.

1) " Should not keep logs...." In any website - DDOS, hacking, etc - you *DO* need the logs. Keeping them for more than 90 days, or at least some variation of your billing cycle is imperative. Pretty much, once some legal entity has clubbed you with a warrant of any sort, you need to keep them until the case is done. (I do recall a case in reasonably recent history where 'the logs were deleted as part of our normal maintenance' resulting in a corporate type spending some time in jail for contempt).

2) DOJ 'chilling affect' 'witch hunts' 'captive populace'

Education has been slaughtered on the altar of the dollar for the last 40 years. "The Media" have always been tilted one way or another politically, but in the last 40 years, the number of and variety of tilts have been reduced and thinned and mergered down to about three. The basic principle of live and let live (forgive your fellow man) has been sacrificed on the altar of ego (ME! ME! ME!) and then buried by the legal profession itself (Think you've been slighted on the train to work? CALL ME NOW! I don't charge you till I WIN!).

The people in the US have no faith in one another any more, only faith in $$ and ${DEITY}, and good grief, if you don't agree with my politics then you must be a terrorist! There are too few that know *why* this is happening or that this polarization and stratification of groups is being enacted. There are too few that are cognizant of the *number* of tools being used to apply this. And far too few of them are resistant to these tools, AND willing to attempt to correct the direction the society is headed .

(when you are surrounded by enemies who are greater in number and power, feed them to one another, with gentle lies.)

3) DOJ hunting down users of website:

I don't know this judge. I've done no research or history ... This judge would have my vote to move up the chain, simply for providing a clear concise interpretation of 'privacy' in this case. And being willing to take on *THIS* much work (and it is a crapton) in this case to *PROTECT* that privacy. That said, there is more to come and we should keep an eye on it. Because, someone, somewhere will apply leverage to get this case out of this judges court, and or to someone with less foresight.

Oh Wow!

Urrrr. Same concepts, different numbers, different interpretations.

One has to look at stuff like this and wonder. These entities are supposed to provide the business types with some guidance on where things are going in the industry. Perhaps at least with "PC/laptop Sales" things are a bit wobbly right now? Maybe someone forgot to copy and paste a spreadsheet tab over?

OMG! they put a PASSWORD on one of the S3 data source pools?????

Like all statistics, lies, and damned lies, I take both these organizations with two shovels full of salt.

Artificial Intelligence in the real world.

Many many many moons ago I read "A door into Summer". And quite a few other books that featured barely independent, partially independent, moderately independent, and completely independent mechanical devices. Most of these were "Robots" that made humans lives simpler, easier, more efficient and less work.

When we here and now speak of "Artificial Intelligence" we (especially us TechnoGeeks) have an expectation that AI will be in the class of completely independent devices. I'm thinking that our path to that device will be long and difficult and will start with the lowly roomba. Sadly however, a roomba will still fall down the stairs if you don't fence them off, and can still manage to get itself jammed behind the couch. And *that* is where AI as our society sees it is stuck. It is the roomba stuck behind the couch.

There are tasks that are done that can be taught to purpose built devices and then repeated in perpetuity by that device. What we have great difficulty doing is teaching that device how to cope with something that we have *NOT* taught it directly - and *THIS* is the pivot point. Until the roomba can figure out, solely from observation, and understanding of its own limitations, and comprehension of the environment around it, how to move the couch and get out from behind it, our ability to create an AI will stagnate at feeding in enormous amounts of iterative data and *averaging* that (either literally or using algorithms) to mimic "intelligence". No matter *how* large the pool of input data, there will be future events that *do not* fit either the iterative knowledge or the algorithm.

Andrew: is there a public record anywhere of this committee? Love to see it in full.

Automation and enterprise.

This is one of my major rants having been in enterprise IT as long as I have been.

Sadly the tools I was given to automate and manage the linux environment where I work (and am no longer the platform admin for linux) have been ripped out and ....... disposed of. Now, they're looking for some way to restore the control and management that were in place. No longer do they have a complete list of assets. No longer do they know what versions of what are installed across the environment. Does not help that there has been a change in outsourced IT support. Hell I had a tool that let the security team do the 'walk to the door' bits that needed to be done. (which got invoked at 2 am a few times). And I know too many things that I should not know about that sort of thing....

Puppet/Cfengine/Ansible/Chef/etc are tools that we should be making sure that even folks in S/MB's understand and demand to have in place in order to create sane work spaces for IT admins. I don't think it wise to depend on Hardware vendor dependent tools for these things since they very very very rarely play well with other hardware vendor hardware.

due to work I have MS.

(I Think perhaps that sentence should stand on its own)

L.O., pidgin, evolution work fine for me - Evo can pull my mail -- although getting all the security settings right to talk to O365 is PITA, L.O. can do all I need in the Document/Spreadsheet requirements. PP is a manglemess tool and I don't be a manglemess. Sadly I needs must Visio and the OSS world just has not *quite* gotten there yet. Thus Visio 2010 and 2016 on Win7 in a KVM instance. I've gotten 2010 to run in wine although there are three (nudge) functions that don't quite seem to work the way they should there.

RIbbons vs real menubars? I can get the drift from all the arguments running around. If you want a buggered up, confusing, play with your brains and make you insane interface, I give you Lotus. That. By Itself. will make you accept ribbons from MS. Never mind when some idiot gets a cue and starts writing plugins for your lotus that screw with the dropdowns and menus.

anyhow, about time MS threw out some more old garbage, I can only imagine it has the perfume of last summer's compost about now.

NSA "FISA Court" Liberty Act.

it is all(ways) an act.

If one really wants to review the issue, lets start with weapons. Any weapon. And say, where was it made, where was it sold, and who used it last. I think it would astonish most folks to learn that weapons, parts of weapons, transport of weapons, sales of weapons marketing of weapons has been so utterly integral to the evolution of the US of A for the last ..... ooo ... 120 years or so .... perhaps -- much longer. Weapons, production, transport, sales, training, advise on deployment and use of are very valuable.

And strangely -- there are rather a lot of weapons manufacturers in the USA.

And strangely, if there are foreign rebels that needs supporting against a vile dictatorship there are weapons. To be sold, transported, sold on again, traded for, deployed and used.

Mind you sometime those rebels, well they manage to cook up ugly ugly ugly "democratic" republics, and that regime just might need changing while we're at it. And this requires weapons. And intelligence, and transport, and ammunition.

Yes, yes, yes, LIBERTY!!! we'll enact LIBERTY!!! for the FOX news listeners.

Having grown up through the 70's I recall the "OMG Japanese car makers" shit

Kieren:

Your need right now is an editorial course. Product or Project?

(I'll assume an autocorrect misfire but I'm being generous)

I'll have to see if its available to us Canucks -- I know a couple youngsters that would *love* to get certain things under their belts and would *never* do well in a formal College/University situation ....

............ weeeeeeeeeeeeellll.

That devolved rather quickly ....

Martian eruptions getting smacked and spewing itty bitty bits about and all that....