Posts by Peter 26

Re: Something's not right here

I avoid starting numerics for alphanumeric codes when Excel is involved as it sometimes deletes trailing zero's if the column format is set to General. I really hope Excel isn't involved in their process anywhere.

Re: Alternate Reality?

We have chat bots being rolled out globally to every country of our company...

Executives need to roll out something new to get that bonus and lines on their CV claiming to have saved the company money.

Every time someone asks a chatbot something, gets frustrated and gives up, count that as money saved! Multiply that by every country and think of how much money we can claim to have saved and how many customers we can piss off!

I've jumped on the bandwagon and have produced a chatbot using Power Automate and Teams internally. It does nothing that couldn't be done in a simple internal web site much easier and cleaner, but management love it and want me to show other countries how to do the same... what have I done? I played the game and now I'm part of the problem!

Re: IntelliPoint

I have this enabled too. It's really handy when you record tutorials and you want to highlight a mouse click.

Re: Would be really nice

I completely disagree. The aim is to force automation and it works.

I have had warnings that my certificates would fail soon and I then have to go and figure out which my automation isn't working. I hate working dealing with certificates and figuring out why certbot isn't working. I have performed a manual refresh before just to get past the issue. But the second time it happens 90 days later, you do something about it.

I guarantee if it was a year, I wouldn't bother trying to fix it.

Re: Zoho email

Good find. So that just means we lose gmail with custom domain? How would that work in practice though? You'd still need to login to youtube and photos etc. to use the subscription which is using our @domain.com account... This is making me wonder if actually this is the dream scenario, our account just gets moved to a normal google account and we get to keep our standard logins [email protected], but lose the workspace features I don't care about anyway...

I've already got a setup with https://hanami.run/ as the mail server and using a normal gmail account with the pop3 from hanami and send as my own domain name setup in gmail. But I'm starting to wonder if they will let us keep our gmail accounts with the custom domain, as how else can they give us access to all our purchases and subscriptions?

I might just wait and see with this one, it might not be as bad as we thought. Google haven't even contacted me to let me know yet either.

Re: The Diet Myth

Save yourself the time and just read the last chapter, then go back and read the rest if you want to know the story.

Re: Am confused

But isn't this encouraging others to have a go as you can get a $14M payout for nothing?

Re: Won't happen

The purpose of this paper is to prove it's possible and show how to do it without changing hardware.

Making it happen is a job for someone else.

This paper moves the discussion one step forward beyond whether it's possible.

Re: An impossible task

I agree with you, I loved Notes. Outlook annoys me to this day that it can't do the basics.

But the problem was familiarity, everyone knows Outlook, Notes was different, very different. If you had a technical inquisitive mind you'd learn to love it, but that was the very small minority of staff. Notes was a nuisance that got in the way from doing their job, another thing to learn...

I'd forgot about the mass memory stealing around that time! It always made the Computer Weekly headlines.

It seems bizarre looking back that memory was the most expensive part of a PC with the mass production we have now.

Re: Autonomous weapons need to be internationally banned.

Banning it should stop everyone doing it. While we are at it we should really look into an international agreement to ban recreational drugs too, we have enough ways to kill ourselves with bad health without taking chemicals for fun!

Re: Wrong reasoning, right result.

I agree this is akin to planting a bug or a wire tap.

In other articles I've read about this they said they couldn't decode the signal if they had sniffed it in transmission, therefore this proves they didn't get the data in transit. I believe this is sound logic.

Police need to be able to investigate crimes, plant bugs etc. I have an issue with mass surveillance, but at an individual level getting a warrant to bug a specific person because you think they have committed a crime is what I think most people would agree should happen.

The bigger implications of this though is that they planted an updated firmware to EVERYONE who had one of these phones. This was mass surveillance by the backdoor. Maybe in this case it's true that the vast majority of people were using these phones for crime, but I'd like that to go to a judge beforehand to approve the mass surveillance, and I'd expect the bar of evidence to be extremely high before approving this. Plus instructions from the judge on destroying data of any non criminal behaviour captured for innocents caught up the in the mass trawl.

Then you have the issue of which country approves this... Should French courts be authorising hacking of other English citizens phones?

Re: "These vulnerabilities exist because HTTP requests are not properly validated."

I don't think I have seen any tutorials around this area in the last decade which don't cover this. It must be people reusing old code, or a proof of concept which ends up making it to the final product.

I think almost everyone prefers to use an alternative to Office these days.

But there's always that one document you really need that isn't compatible with anything else.

Re: "full rebuild"

You've hit the nail on the head. The scale of this hack cannot be understated and it's going to be practically impossible to confirm you've eliminated all the backdoors into your network they have planted.

From now on you will just have to assume they have access and be constantly trying to find it. Probably not a bad approach to security anyway and a lot like our COVID safety protocols, just assume you have the virus and take precautions.

Yes, you'd expect a more detailed response from a company like this. Clearly they have decided to hide that information, why? Is it embarrassing?

I am highly suspicious of claims of state sponsored actors being the culprits. It's the ideal excuse. Only the best of the best could beat us we are so great...

Where's your evidence that it was a state sponsored actor? Hmm you've decided not to provide that information, why?

My spidey sense is tingling.

Re: insider trading

I doubt these were system admins, just 1st line support. They probably pretended to be their IT and got them to let them remotely login to their computers to fix something, including inputting any 2FA required.

There's no easy solution, more training on phishing calls, including internal phishing attempts to catch those who fall for them. Maybe a change in process so it requires more than one person to fall victim to make changes.

Re: I've said it before here on el Reg

FYI, I've been tested twice and got results 26 hours after first test and 18 hours the second time. I drove to the testing station rather than using the postal version. I was impressed with the speed of results.

Re: Simple question

Every old person I have spoke to said it is an overreaction and they don't see themselves as high risk.

I think you summed it up though. Old people, ask yourself, would I call an ambulance and take up a bed if I was dieing from it? If yes, then self isolate and take it seriously.

Re: "That doesn't make sense" ...

Maybe it was. Suspiciously we never heard back from them regarding that issue after my suggestion...

Re: Who needs Tea Towels when you can have Jack Boots?

Thanks for that link. I'm now a subscriber. It's good to read something honest and unbiased for a change.

Re: So what....

This is a really valid point. We don't think it's the case, but who's to say for sure?

Also, what if they have been issued a secret subpoena requiring them access to all the DNS logs?

Alternatively just targeting their network data which I've read can be fingerprinted to identify lookups. A massive project, but certain people have big pockets and by putting all your eggs in one basket it means they have less networks to target. Cloudflare/Google DNS being the main ones.

Anyway, 99.9999% of people don't know what DNS Sec is, so I think Fierfox have done the right thing for today. In a years time there might be a better option. If you're a techie you can change it in the options, if you aren't you would have no idea and noprotection anyway, so something is better than nothing.

Re: I blame Rupert for this...

It's the reason the Republican party is what it is, and people are willing to vote for this criminal idiot.

It's clear Brexit happened because of tabloids blaming Europe for everything. We have started down this path, if we let them destroy the BBC we will be much further down the the same route as the US.

Re: "Visual Studio is a paid-for product"

"If Microsoft want more developers using C#, they need to drop their enterprise-style pricing and make Visual Studio much more attractive. I know that there's a Community Edition, but the cost of the jump from free to non-free is incredibly high, it's no wonder everyone just goes off and uses something else..."

It's the same as travelling in business class. Way too expensive, but you don't care as you're not the one paying it.

Re: Checks and balances essential

I definitely think Trump Tower is fishy, but just to play devils advocate this does happen with bigger constructions.

Here's an example. WWF UK Headquarters (The panda one, not wrestling!) WWF knew they needed a new site for their head quarters in the UK, they asked around the different councils to see who would subsidise their new building the most. Woking won by offering to pay for the building for them, in return they got the prestige of having WWF UK Headquarters in Woking putting them on the map, and presumably more jobs... You can argue whether that was a good deal, but it shows that it makes sense to get the subsidies in place first before deciding on location. Even on a smaller scale when doing a house extension, you first sort out with the bank how much money you've got before you start the plans and construction.

I don't think this classifies as a vulnerability, this is a feature which allows you to run a command on the server from the client. I don't see any way this could be accidental, it's bizarre. It's either a deliberate backdoor or some development code that got into release by accident? The development code part doesn't make any sense either though, why would anyone add remote code execution into a development build?

I find it interesting how people can be clearly smart, but also equally stupid at the same time.

Re: We need a new approach

Absolutely agree. I think a big issue with IPv6 is that it may be better on paper, but the human element hasn't been given enough weight. We have all grown up with IPv4 and on the surface it's pretty simple, people are lazy and don't like something that different and looks complicated.

Re: Google too

Can anyone recommend a cheap burner SIM? They all seem to start at £10 minimum topup. A bit much to create anonymous accounts.

Re: you could simply not put the creepy things in your home

The remote server is required for the quality voice recognition.

Re: Keepass

I can't get over the fact you have to manually copy the password file to your device. I get that it's more secure, but it sounds really annoying. What if you sign up on your PC to a service then want to login with the accompanying app on your phone? You have to copy the file first.

Just seems like a lot of hassle, last pass sounds like a good compromise on security/ease of use unless I am missing something.