Posts by TaabuTheCat

Re: I wonder...

See InTune for your answer.

Re: My first though...

"What happens to the one bubble in the center?"

Conception.

Re: Sounds expensive...

"Sounds expensive..."

Silly rabbit, they declared "force majeure", the universal get-out-of-jail-free card baked into every contract. "All beyond our control gov, honest."

Re: Years and money well spent

Thanks for the alignment explanation. I was wondering why $10B didn't get you some sort of auto-focus mode - just press the shutter release button half way and and wait for the image to get sharp!

Re: Good.

"Even if you're going to worry, you need to recognise that the available vaccines have zero public health value: they are not effective at preventing infection nor retransmission. Their only value is to the recipients,"

Tell that to the health care workers dealing directly with the effects of this type of selfish thinking. Overwhelmed hospitals and burned out medical staff have a huge impact on public health value, especially if you need a bed for something other than Covid. If you think health care isn't being rationed right now in the US because of the overhelming influx of unvaccinated Covid patients, you are not paying attention.

Re: Time to lawyer up?

This is exactly what I used to do when setting up a new phone system, for three reasons:

1. We wanted to be sure 911 calls would actually go through.

2. We wanted to be sure the 911 operator saw the correct location the call was coming from.

3. We wanted to be sure our internal alerting that a 911 call was made worked and notified the right people on prem so they could respond.

But then again I worked for a company where life/safety was taken seriously. YMMV.

"Riverbed is great back in the day when most companies can only get 1.5MB T1 connections for site to site VPNs."

This. Lovely products back in the day - used lots of them when they were first released and they felt like magic over T1s, but those days are gone. Convenience blame the pandemic all you want, but the ongoing need for their products is the real story. It's all downhill from here.

Re: Can you opt out of the data collection on smart TVs?

"If it's logging anything about me it's 'Always watches HDMI 1'

Don't be so sure. Vizio sets will fingerprint the video that's being displayed to figure out what you're watching. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if they're all doing this now. No internet connection is about the only option left, and how long before the set won't even boot up without connectivity?

Re: Value Added is negative...

You forgot their most important duty - awarding outrageous salary, bonus and severance packages to the top .01% of the food chain, and expecting nothing in return.

Re: Drunk driving is illegal and dangerous

They are suing the Pappas restaurant chain because they own a LOT of very popular and profitable restaurants. They are no mom and pop organization - I think at one time (and maybe still) they were one of the largest employers in the Houston area. Just going where the money is...

Re: with other common weaknesses...

Because as the article noted, some orgs believe if they just follow this list (or the CIS Top 20, or Bob's Security 100 for Dummies), they've done their part. Truly a curse indeed when used this way. But it's *something*, and maybe at least gets people thinking a bit and addressing the low-hanging fruit. But as noted, it's reactionary, and that's never a good place to be in InfoSec.

It actually could have been worse if they "surfaced" the password. Talk about making me throw up a little in my mouth every time I see that word...

Re: A question about the CRU...

Stairway to Heaven

Re: The

When I worked in Texas we used to do bi-annual real production failovers to our backup DC, run for a couple of days and then fail everything back. It was how we knew we prepared for hurricane season. Interesting how many orgs don't consider failback as part of the exercise. One of my peers (at another org) said management considered the risk too high for "just a test". I'm thinking it's actually quite rare to find companies doing real failover/failback testing in their production environments.

Re: Whoa there

You get the feeling restoring data wasn't the problem - more like the crooks got their hands on data the CEO really didn't want the public to see. Which makes you wonder...

Re: It's too quiet

But that's just it, isn't it? Are you not entertained??

Re: I'm a word wrangler...

Anonymous? You are clearly amanfrommars, unedited. I claim my five pounds.

From one cat to another...

You forgot the most important part - tie it to a subscription.

Re: Can I just say that I love the euphemism there...

I've been in that other aircraft. Waiting at LGA to leave, plane after plane in line waiting their turn. We finally got to the front of the line, perpendicular to the runway but still on the taxiway so I could see the line of incoming planes headed for our runway. And then the captain decides to pull onto the apron, still hadn't made the left to point down the runway so my unobstructed view of an incoming plane about to land on that same runway was quite clear. Gear up, nose up, lots of smoke from the engines as he passed over us on a go-around. Bet he was pissed, and I was about shitting myself watching helplessly. Pilot never said a word, we ended up taking off immediately after that, and I'm not how many of the other passengers even knew what had just happened. You fly enough you get to see a lot of strange things.

Re: Incredible

Agreed, and it's only a matter of time until all of their devices are M1 and the ecosystem really sings.

Frankly, it's refreshing to see Apple, with more money stockpiled than God, finally using some of it in a really thoughtful and strategic way. This project had to be a huge undertaking, and if I'm honest I didn't think Tim Cook had it in him to strategically position Apple for the next 10-20 years. With the investment in M1 (and M2 and M3...) I take it all back. What he and his team did here is a massive long-term win for the company, and I hope it's just the first of many innovations. Goodbye Jone Ive. Welcome to the new Apple.

And two men enter, no man leaves please.

Re: It depends...

Can it print?

It could until the last patch Tuesday.

Re: It's a different world

In '74 as a youth, I had a part-time job repairing Canon calculators for a dealer. I still remember some of the machines having mechanical delay lines - a rather large tin box soldered onto the PCB, I assume filled with wire based on the schematics - acting as "memory". Didn't hold the data for very long and it was serial in bits, run around the wire for a while, and then serial out bits, but it took long enough to be useful.

Damn, did I really work on that stuff? I haven't thought about that in a really long time.

Re: "the majority of those insurgents are in the process of losing their shirts"

It is a rebellion - beating these assholes at their own game. Patrick Byrne must be beside himself with joy watching these shorts get taken down, wishing WSB had been around when he was being put through the ringer. But don't worry - all the rules will change overnight to make sure the plebs can never do this again. Got to protect the neighborhood you know, or pretty soon undesirables will be moving in.

Re: There's a simple solution

Exactly. When I lived on Long Island I was just a few miles away from the Westbury Music Fair. Being able to go to the box office over lunch and buy tickets in person for an upcoming show at face value with no "service fees", "convenience fees", "delivery fees", etc. was awesome. You paid what it said on the ticket and not a dime more.

The exclusives that Ticketmaster signed with venues in the 80's ended any pretense that a ticket was just a ticket. Instead it became a vehicle for anyone who could get their fingers into the pie to extract their vig, with kickbacks for the venues and unlimited power by Ticketmaster to charge whatever the hell they wanted to for some supposed "convenience". As mentioned above by others, I too simply won't go to any event where Ticketmaster fees are involved. Fucking parasites.

Re: Offered to sell the company for 1/10 current market value

Exactly, but as an Apple shareholder I'm disappointed that Tim didn't at least take the meeting to see if there might be a pony somewhere in that mountain of poop. The thing is, no one ever comes looking for a sugar daddy when things are going well. Savvy business people can spot a temporary problem (solved with cash) and recognize an opportunity, and a potential bargain, when others only see risk. But you can't make that assessment if you don't engage. A meeting would have cost Tim nothing but a little bit of his time, so yeah, disappointed he wasn't thinking harder about what to do with that mountain of cash he's sitting on. He pretty much has a fiduciary responsibility to take meetings like that.

Re: What about SIEM / Threat-detection / Traffic-profiling tools?

Exactly. This incident highlights the spectacular failure of "advanced" threat analytics, heuristics, ML, and every other buzzword claim for catching bad guys by monitoring and profiling good behavior so you know when something is amiss. Think about it: Even after six months in operation, NO ONE detected this backdoor via traffic analysis. It seems FireEye only discovered it tangentially, as a result of their tools being stolen. That means Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Cylance, Carbon Black, Palo Alto, Cisco, CheckPoint, every single AV vendor and dozens of other security monitoring products and services failed in their use of behavior-based analytics to see this change in behavior that started in March. The very thing these services were designed to detect got through without a whisper from any of these products. Who says there aren't three more SolarWinds happening right now that haven't yet been discovered? As I said, this is a spectacular failure for behavior-based systems monitoring and I sure hope there's a lot of soul searching going on at these companies, because if this is the best our industry can do, we're sunk.

Re: Limiting the damage

Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but no, the SolarWinds server does not need any form of internet access to remain functional. Source? We run one our instances in a dark network.

Re: Who installs USB drivers on a VM?

Uh, those of us unfortunate enough to have software that uses USB licensing dongles?

Best I ever did was in the 90s dot-com bust. Picked up a storage array that turned out to be from a defunct streaming service that had about 200,000 MP3 files on it, from all different genres and time periods. Sure expanded my collection of music quickly!