* Posts by GrapeBunch

825 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2015

Mozilla's creepy Mr Robot stunt in Firefox flops in touching tribute to TV show's 2nd season

GrapeBunch

It's like letters and packages from somebody you don't know, though in a language you do know. It made me angry. Turned out it was a gift--that was supposed to be an adventure--from the missuz. It must have hurt her worse than it hurt me. That's where the parallel breaks down. Mozilla never hurts, it blithely continues.

Language bugs infest downstream software, fuzzer finds

GrapeBunch

Re: This is a perennial problem

Original provable output:

I am having one wonderful day.

Real world compile:

I am having 0.9999999998 wonderful day.

Real world compile with work-around:

I am having one wonderful day.

Real world compile with work-around, after compiler bug fixed:

I am having 1.0000000002 wonderful day.

UK government bans all Russian anti-virus software from Secret-rated systems

GrapeBunch

Re: I guess NOFORN doesn't apply anymore?

"When IRA-ish Eyes are pwning

Sure they steal your ***** away."

Everything I've read in the past year makes me think that the old model of applying patches and new signatures every morning is hopelessly inadequate. Surely a secure model for an Internet-exposed machine will have VMs, or something like them, at its heart.

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

GrapeBunch
Thumb Up

My first computer in 1979 had a Z80, like an 8080 on sugar (steroids as a meme had not been invented yet). So, STOSB ? But I'm guessing that NASA preferred military-grade cosmic-ray hardened.... if the manufacturer was neither Intel nor Zilog but something like Fairchild, I wouldn't be surprised.

Guilty: NSA bloke who took home exploits at the heart of Kaspersky antivirus slurp row

GrapeBunch
Holmes

I wouldn't say he's being punished for be unlucky... more like stupid. Stupid to take work home and run it on an insecure personal computer. The guy was moron to do that.

Considering the value of the prize, I'd say that any internet-connected personal computer is sufficiently insecure. I can understand him wanting to look at work after hours so he could experience karoshi at home. But why would he put it on an internet-connected computer? The only purpose I can imagine is to deploy the NSA malware in his possession. Say it ain't so, Pho.

I suggest that a fine and retirement is a more suitable treatment than the slammer. But if that's what NSA wanted, why did it become a court case? Surely this isn't good for the image of the NSA. Slightly good for the image of Kaspersky, but not the NSA.

Munich council finds €49.3m for Windows 10 embrace

GrapeBunch

Re: Doomed from the Start??

It has been mooted that Mun could have saved the Lin experiment by switching from OO to LO. My own experience is that while OO did not properly render a heritage Word doc (with, gasp!, images), neither did the most recent LO. By "not properly" I mean "dog's breakfast". Forget even that MS booby traps its office software to make the default save format incompatible with the current best compatibility effort that open software can make. "It don't go out the door, until DR-DOS don't work no more." This was a pretty old document.

So I think the Linux people need to examine what happened, carefully and dispassionately. I wish them well.

Sci-Hub domains inactive following court order

GrapeBunch

Re: re. Martin Eve

Welcome to the scenic Veil of Eve sham.

GrapeBunch
Coat

alt.pub

Please send your paper, along with three box tops and fifty cents, to my academic journal Neture. If you're lucky, they'll think it was a typo.

Mine's the one with the really big prestige in the front pocket.

Healthcare insurance cheat-bot bros Zenefits cough up $1m to make SEC probe go away

GrapeBunch
Devil

... I'd wager (were I ...) that the policy EULA (or whatever it's called in the health insurance biz) specifies that you can't sue 'em for malfeasance. And, for good measure, that any argy-bargy is in a company-friendly jurisdiction / forum.

E pluribus unum sure covers some crazy shit, but I wonder if Caveat emptor might be a more fitting national motto.

'Israel hacked Kaspersky and caught Russian spies using AV tool to harvest NSA exploits'

GrapeBunch
Black Helicopters

Seriously, though. Is it better to run a Russian, a USA-ian, a Chinese, ... a Nork-ian, and why not an Israeli anti-virus, live and simultaneously ... or is there a role for running no Anti-Virus, doing everything in a VM (a virtual machine), and checking what you might want to save from that Virtual session in a stately (meaning calm and collected, not governmental) manner?

Google touts Babel Fish-esque in-ear real-time translators. And the usual computer stuff

GrapeBunch

Re: Dropping phones in toilet?

"They could break a bowling ball."

1. Fill 2.5 cm holes with liquid. 2. Cover holes with water-impermeable USB 3 adapter. 3. Post to Canada in January.

GrapeBunch

Re: Pixie Buds

" man bribing a tax official and Google translated it as he was BITING the tax official"

La mordida de mi tio está afuera del asno de la tarifa.

GrapeBunch

Re: Sounds like a good way to go insane

"some kind of pendant with battery"

Education need never end, in the thrall of a pedant with a battery.

GrapeBunch

Re: Please translate:-

"My food is problematic".

No problema, mango mio. Bromeo.

GrapeBunch

Re: Please translate:-

"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle"

La moda de vida que dispongo, está dentro de la caja de Satanás.

Mozilla extends, and ends, Firefox support for Windows XP and Vista

GrapeBunch
Angel

Dead as a doorhinge

A handful of snarky comments about Windows with 14 upvotes and no downvotes. Whenever I write something snarky about Windows in these parts, I collect a goodly number of downvotes. I wonder if there's something related to time zones at play ...

Since XP Pro is now dead to MS, I wonder if that's a chance for somebody who is not MS to release a security package for it that will close down (or at least make not the default option) every ~ last ~ leaky ~ or ~ vulnerable ~ feature. A kind of Extreme Unction. Every executable file association, every talking paperclip. Or is it a dog? Since XP is no longer a moving target. Make a virtue out of its corpse. Why bother? Because lots of perfectly capable computers lack the processor or RAM capacity to run Win10. It's to keep them out of the landfills a bit longer.

White House plan to nuke social security numbers is backed by Equifax's ex-top boss

GrapeBunch
Devil

Canada

In Canada we have SIN. It's not Original, it's the Social Insurance Number, since the 1960s. For a little bit, it threatened to go the way of the SSN, but the Federal gov't throttled it back. For example, for a while your Provincial medical number (also confidential, right) might have been a version of your SIN. But they stopped that a couple of decades back. AFAIK, SIN is now used only for income tax-related matters and pensions. Somehow fitting that, as, "the wages of SIN is death". Which must mean that the number is no longer useful to you once you've popped yer clogs.

GrapeBunch

Re: Obscure number

That one stumped me, too, for about 8 seconds.

Developers' timezone fail woke half of New Zealand

GrapeBunch
Megaphone

Aukward moment

Let me dissent. The NZ authorities did not say that the timing of the test message was a mistake. The time zones excuse was hearsay. Developers in any country could not be that stupid to wake people in the middle of the night. If you can program in BASIC, you can know what time it is. The multi-million claxon was either intentional, or it was the convergence of bad planning and an accident, such as the classic "cat walked across my keyboard".

Dropbox thinks outside the … we can't go there, not when a box becomes a 'collection of surfaces'

GrapeBunch
Facepalm

Ouch <--- sound of the new drop box.

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

GrapeBunch
Alien

Chess

To play a perfect game of chess also requires a computer larger than the known universe, or more time than already shows on its clock. But hardware to play a typical single-session tournament game against a cyber-unaided fleshly world champion, and win most of the time, is well within the ambit of most first-world households. Even laxer, to beat the head of household of 99.99% of the households could be job done with just a portion of the computing power of an old mobile phone. So you don't need much to make a "good enough" simulation of perfect play at chess. A buzzword could be asymptotic.

The simulation in the story is simpler, as the stumbling block is to simulate quantum, apparently random effects. All they need is a better random simulator than you have. What they need to fool you is next month's random simulator. It's like, some decades ago, when driving to the next chess tournament in a car with other like-minded individuals, one of us in the back seat came up with (paraphrasing): "God is no more than what determines the result when Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle seems to be in play." Or in the present context: "God is a slightly better random number generator."

HPE coughed up source code for Pentagon's IT defenses to ... Russia

GrapeBunch

Zees could never happen in our country.

It's a fun day all around. "The code never left the building" is the 21st century's "The cheque is in the mail". Didn't we have a similar story just a few months ago? If anybody thinks that Russia doesn't have a person, nay several people, capable of memorizing a few tens of thousands of lines of code (or "just the important bits"), that person really should have his or her kindergarten diploma revoked.

Vacated.

SanDisk man tipped off his family to Fusion-io fusion, bagged $220k in share snatch – says SEC

GrapeBunch

Perp was insider at San. Perp's family bought and sold shares of Fusion-io, of which perp was not an insider. Maybe he can argue that a possible deal was public knowledge, open to anybody watching the parking lots of the two companies. Or maybe he has a better defence than these admittedly flimsy attempts. I'd like to see this again when it is over. "Innocent until proven ... " and all that.

Cost of Africa's internet shutdowns? $1m a day – quarter of a billion total

GrapeBunch
Go

Re: "suddenly removing people's ability to communicate"

A seven-mile radius of reception manquée is a difficult technical feat, worthy of the highly advanced civilisation which brought it into being.

Nobel Prize for boffins who figured out why you feel like crap after long-haul flights

GrapeBunch

Life is fun, and then bzzt.

Linode cloud users in Europe hit as Frankfurt DC falls to its knees

GrapeBunch

Zees coult not hhappen in Tschermany.

Oops.

Man with 74 convictions refused permission to fling sueball at Google

GrapeBunch

Next name lottery

How about Peat Townshend ?

Should be disallowed, not for confusion with the rocker, but as false advertising for a sense of humour.

Guntree v Gumtree: Nominet orders gun ads site must lose domain

GrapeBunch

Re: Pick a fight with eBay??

I still think it's a bad decision, even after all the hate. Here's a chance to downvote some more, lawyer-lovers.

Yes, it would be ironic if GUM (which translates to State General Store), using this case as precedent, got gumtree to vacate its domain. GUMtree could actually mean something in Russian (GUM three), which would strengthen the Russians' putative (see what I did there?) case. IANAL, but it strikes me that the Russians' case, had it been launched in a timely manner, is stronger than the one that is the subject of this article.

GrapeBunch
Mushroom

Eucalyptus it ain't

From the armchair peanut gallery, I don't always disagree with powers that be, but this time, yes, it is a bad decision which will have bad consequences if seen as a precedent. Internet space is not the same as trademark space.

For chuckles, I googlooked up gun and tree in Afrikaans. It's geweer and boom. Probably too obscure for most English speakers to remember. The multi-lingual boomboom dot com gives this landing message:

"BoomBoom.com ....

Arriving 2016"

I hope that didn't gun up my browser.

Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders

GrapeBunch
Pint

Bletchworthy

"I'm glad we're telling them about the flaws in their cryptography. It reminds me of that press conference we had in 1943 when we told the Germans we'd broken Enigma."

The above lingered for three days without vote or reply.

Congratulations, @David_Gillies, your post prompted me to click on your name to see how much you were capable of irony, sarcasm, or other archness. For the first time under the sign of the vulture. The breaking of Enigma was a secret so secret that, at least in urban legend, many Coventry souls were sacrificed to preserve it, and Britain's hard-won lead in electronic computers was immolated even after the War. How we didn't quite win the war, department.

Examination showed you are capable of all manner of intelligent comment.

So, either it's true, and those six decades of shtumness were the most hubristic ever sacrifices to the god of Twittery (using that work in its archaic sense, equi-impotent to fuckupery) Bureaucracy, and the acts that caused it the most enduring monument of any Twittery Bureaucracy.

Or it's ironic, like the phrase "It's spelled Joomla, but it's pronounced Yomla, remember who won the War."

In either case, I'd send you an Ale except I don't know which button to press.

Attention adults working in the real world: Do not upgrade to iOS 11 if you use Outlook, Exchange

GrapeBunch
Holmes

Marriage of true minds admits impediment

Mrs. Bunch uses Yahoo mail on her iPad. One of my e-mail accounts is the backup for that Yahoo account. A week or two ago, I started receiving messages from Yahoo, warning that as of September 20th, Yahoo mail messages could not be read on an iPad running iOS 8.0. I decided to take no action, because:

1. it wasn't clear to which Yahoo account they referred;

2. Mrs. Bunch's iPad had long been running iOS 9, not iOS 8;

3. they had not bothered to inform her; and

4. sufficient unto the day...

Came the day, and what I expected did not happen. Instead, all of Mrs. Bunch's Yahoo mail, excluding the Sent folder, disappeared, in front of her eyes. I confirmed this was real and not an iPad-artifact by logging into the account on a laptop. It turns out that if you have a Yahoo account, and your e-mail disappears, they have a standard interaction that no human need ever interfere with, to request the recovery of your e-mail. Whether this is reassuring (as in, good customer service) or scary (as in, your e-mail disappears from their software so often that they have to have a robocall to fix it), is up to the reader.

The Yahoo auto-responder said to check back in 8 hours. In the meantime, I tried to install the iOS 10.2.1 package which my dear wife had in Settings. iOS returned the message that it was unable to continue: verification was impossible as I was not connected to the internet. "What really happened", I think, was that Apple had withdrawn the plagued 10.2.1 update and was unable to verify the files for that reason. I erased the 10.2.1 update. It strikes me that proper procedure would have been for Apple itself to tag or erase an update which could never be used. Then I requested an update, which turned out to be iOS 11. There was never a choice to install any level other than 11. Installation went OK, and when it came time to verify the update package, of course the iPad was connected to the internet.

Back to Yahoo. After close to a day, the e-mail in the folders seemed to have returned. But not yet the Inbox. All it holds is the e-mails that came in after the disappearance. In the midst of my wife's trauma, I was entertained to see an article that told of iOS 11 and e-mail problems. This is our version. iOS version: impedimental.

Downloaded CCleaner lately? Oo, awks... it was stuffed with malware

GrapeBunch

VM ?

I wonder if in the "future" we're going to be using VMs instead of most of our anti-malware. At the end of the session, the software might offer to preserve any files you've asked to be downloaded. These files will have been malware-checked by anti-malware software running in the background (so reduced real-time bottlenecks). It's a bit like the way public computers boot to ROM (not literally, I'm just calling it that) with each new user. New software? Runs in a VM, too. It would not be computing as we know it. There might be hurdles in regard to EULAs and copy protection. But it might be safer than what we have. Just a suggestion. Let the experts weigh in!

GrapeBunch
Angel

Re: NEW PRODUCT

Try CCleanerCCleaner today!

Ubik.

US government sued by 11 pissed-off travellers over computer searches

GrapeBunch

Re: Hang on a moment

Sarchasm, n. That's a cancer we can cure. No, really. The gap isn't in the credibility.

GrapeBunch

Re: That humming noise

Dick is dead, but a combo world of Ubik and Remoronity Import might see gov't agents visit the dead to convict them of post-crime. Philip K. is the first they'd approach. Wherever he is, he must be humming. If you thought: "Meh, this is bad, but when I die it will all be over", perhaps you didn't hear that hymn. Listen. It's faint, but if you cup your hand to your ear, you can hear Dick hum. Listen to Dick hum. It's faint, but it goes like this: "Bwahahahahahahahah"

The next great OS should be named Govern, so that hipsters can get into Govern Mint. See Dick McGovern. See Dick eat McGovern, except for the catholic comix.

I thought you could only sue McGovernment if they invited you. "Après vous, monsieur le Cœur de Lion en tête." "Non, merci, pas du tout." Did I think faux news?

Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two

GrapeBunch

Entrianglement

It's intelligent life calling to tell us they want more Dangerman:

ABC logo.

I don't know how to break this to them. Maybe by sending the first minute of The Prisoner.

Best Korea fingered for hacks against Bitcoin exchanges in South

GrapeBunch

Yoga retreat

What's so great about Bitcoin if there are so many reports that others are getting to steal or destroy it? Is this the Universe where all software is beta software? Are the reports of Bitcoin's weakness just fake news originating with gov'ts, that don't like vibrant and secret money exchanges? If you're quiet, you can hear the wheels-within-wheels spinning.

China claims to have turbine-powered drone carrying 200kg payload

GrapeBunch

The open skies of enterprise

The possibilities for ransomlair are humongous. Please pay us $5 a month not to be on the noisy flight path. Please pay us $1000 so that our non-exploding but pointy 200 kg cargo may not fall on your roof or through your window. This is almost as good as smart meters!

Uncle Sam outlines evidence against British security whiz Hutchins

GrapeBunch

Re: Does he sound like a baddie?

Evil villain no, Austin Powers or Monty Python, yeah...

CANADA would like to apologize to any British person who believes that Austin Powers's accent is intended to be a British accent. Our agent was instructed to make it sound like a Canadian in the television rec room annoying his friends and family with a bit of OTT.

If any American person thinks that Austin Powers's accent is intended to be a British accent, well, that's the point, innit?

Phisherfolk dangle bait at dot-fish domain

GrapeBunch
Coat

All of my reactions were unprintable - except the sardinic one.

Mine's the one with the net lining to hold important documents.

UK.gov is hiring IT bods with skills in ... Windows Vista?!

GrapeBunch

I hear they're about to say "TOODLE PIP" to CP/M 2.2.

GrapeBunch
Alien

Milton Keynes. That's code for Bletchley.

There was a time you could tell the weft of a chap's tweed from the bold ollocks he wrote for Hell Reg. And when you gask oogle to do the interviewing for you, it says "Sorry, Dave, old chap, I could have done that for you last week." Will have to go bad to filtering out the ones with no Reginads in the ancestor list. Pity poor Charles.

US cops point at cell towers and say: Give us every phone number that's touched that mast

GrapeBunch

Re: Data for Sale

It's my way or the Nor Way. Looks like it's Nor Way. Speaking, of course, only for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Don't panic, Chicago, but an AWS S3 config blunder exposed 1.8 million voter records

GrapeBunch

Inquayling Minds ...

... so, when somebody steals the identity of your dead grandfather, can it still affect your credit rating?

Forget what happens when your identity is stolen, that won't change the result of any election.

Comp sci world shock: Bonn boffin proposes P≠NP proof, preps for prestige, plump prize

GrapeBunch

Am I the only one bothered ...

... by the statement of the problem? A correct solution is a list of 100 distinct numbers between 1 and 400. Or between 0 and 399 if you're a zero-based thinker. There are no "pairs" in the solution. The dean need not provide pairs, but more efficiently a list of up to 400 lists, each containing the student-numbers incompatible with a student. References to "pairs" make me want to divide the 100 places into 50, 2-person dorm rooms, and the pairs to indicate dorm pairings that are not allowed. That is a different (set of) problem(s).

Aside from which, the Ramans do everything in threes.

NotPetya ransomware attack cost us $300m – shipping giant Maersk

GrapeBunch

Perhaps what they actually said was "there was nothing that could be done to stop an attack by a determined and skillful cracker targeting only our systems".

Which was not what happened, eh. Even then, I'd doubt it.

Brit firms warned over hidden costs of wiping data squeaky clean before privacy rules hit

GrapeBunch

Offshoring

Nobody's mentioned offshoring yet. For example, offshore your live data requirements to a non-GDPR jurisdiction such as USA. All the way down to shipping old tapes and DVD-R disks to the Third World as a "just in case" alternative to destroying them which might otherwise be required to become compliant. With suitable corporate arm's-lengthedness as secreted by appropriate lawyer-arachnid-molluscs.

GrapeBunch

Re: Shame!

"The Wayback Machine will have to be erased using Mil-Spec algorithms on the media"

Wayback Machine has more fundamental problems. I had my website hosted at an ISP. For many years, I could find old versions of the site at the Wayback Machine. Then the ISP decided not to host websites any more. It's Canada, it's a race to the bottom, I understand. I made sure to Wayback Machine - snapshot my site. But when I came back after the date when the ISP had erased all the sites, I found that in the Wayback Machine, all versions of my site were : "Page cannot be displayed due to robots.txt."

Upon erasing all the webpages, the ISP added a robots.txt that would discourage web spiders looking for info that was not there:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The Internet Archive interprets it to mean "don't show this", even though the ISP never had ownership over any of the material.

If even the Internet Archive, with a clear purpose, fairly independent, run by smart people and "lives in" The Land of the Free and Amendment(s) Thereof, can so easily become confused (and it's the same decision now as it was two months ago when first the problem was brought to their attention), is it any surprise that some are foreseeing a world of hurt from the GDPR?

US military spies: We'll capture enemy malware, tweak it, lob it right back at our adversaries

GrapeBunch

Misdirection

So when they are found to have attacked someone, it still will be all "No comment", but with the implication that it's a retaliation, rather than the default assumption: aggression. It's not about retooling malware at all.

Hey America! Your internet is going to be so much better this January

GrapeBunch
Coat

There is no big business, son. That's redefined to be enterprises with 100,000 or more employees, not counting robots and outsourcing. Nope. Everything is now a Mom and Pop shop.

In unrelated news, inflation continued at less than 2% year-on-year for the 467th straight month, except in Venezuela, Argentina, Iran, Belarus, and the Sudan, where it may be approaching 3%.

Mine's the one that belonged to the previous poster.