Posts by Frank Bitterlich 517 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2007
When a dishonest company like Roku has "no plans right now" to implement something as bad as this, they're reminding me of the Berlin Wall and Walter Ulbricht's famous "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!".
That's what happens when you destroy your brand by f%$§ing over your users repeatedly and being dishonest.
"... the desire from people in the business to drill down on things in circumstances where they don't appear that they are correct."
What a nice way to describe a business where asking too many questions will get you nowhere (if some stories are to be believed, said "nowhere" is somewhere out in the desert...)
As usual, Facebook wants to gaslight not only its users, but also regulators, into thinking that "advertising" equals "tracking". Newsflash: It does not.
The model of "subscribe or see ads" is nothing new, and a valid way to earn money.
But "subscribe or we'll track you all over the internet and across all your devices" is, obviously, not. That is asking the user for a ransom to comply with the law. But according to Meta, that is somehow different from the local branch of the Legitimate Businessmen ClubTM showing up at you door asking for a donation so they don't do anything illegal...
"It should be said, however, there's no evidence to suggest this was actually exploited in the real world."
Sure, maybe "no evidence", but still "highly likely", because such things are being found out invariably – either by accident or by trying – and once found out, these tricks will be making the rounds. To pranksters, creeps, criminals, and sleuths.
The usual playing down of these flaws. I'm surprised by the missing "Ibis Hotels takes the safety and security of our guests very seriously."
$sql = sprintf("select * from BOOKINGS where BOOKINGCODE like '%s'", str_replace("-", "%", $entered_code));
I came here to post pretty much the same.
What is wrong with the brains of those people who try to sell the concept that "advertising" and "tracking" are the same thing? "Sorry, dear reader of my blog, I need to track your behaviour and interests and clicks and everything, because without advertising I have no income"... I am fine with advertising. I do not tolerate tracking and surveillance. And if you try to conflate these two concepts, you're (a) dishonest and (b) insulting your users by assuming they're stupid.
And just to make this clear: I don't care who is doing the surveillance – your site, your ad network, my browser, the company that made my browser – the answer is No. Please write that down. "No". Not "No, but if..."; just plain "No."
Thanks for listening to my rant.
"We believe this is the orientation of the lander on the Moon..."
I wonder why it's so difficult to actually know the exact orientation of the lander? Didn't they put accelerometers in to measure the exact orientation? Or ist that not possible due to the reduced gravity?
It sounds like they are guesstimating the orientation from the light received by the different solar panels...?
"[...] only 1,504 users actually looked at the feeds of others, willfully or not. This represented around 0.25 percent of all users."
"Also, we left our complete customer database in a publicly-accessible AWS storage. But it was only like 15 persons downloading it, which is only 0.00047% of all users."
... an alien race captures Voyager 1 and in their quest to find out what it is and why it doesn't appear to work right any more, they connect a serial terminal to a connector that sits next to something that looks like an UART interface to them. After a few experiments with baud rates and stop bit settings, their screen flickers, and character by character, the following message appears:
No keyboard detected.... press F1 to continue.
As a (very) small-time sysadmin, I have trouble understanding why so many very large organisations are so hard-hit by ransomware attacks. Sure, the exfiltrated data is gone, nothing you can do about that. But what about service restoration? Is it really that hard to rebuild a server infrastructure and recover/restore data at least to a certain point?
I know, there's always the odd backup that didn't actually back up anything since the last twelve months, but that should be the exception. Am I the only one who believes in "If you haven't tested restoring, then you do not have a backup"? What's with multi-level, offline or write-once backups? Do they not have incident response and disaster recovery plans?
I would really love to learn more about the detailed problems they're battling. I can't just put all of this down to incompetence or negligence. Are modern infrastructures simply built in a way that makes recovery so hard? Are they all saving so hard that someone has to get the ten-year-old DR plans from the proverbial filing cabinet in a locked bathroom stall in the basement?
Amazing, I always thought that I was some kind of freak because I have a similar kind of memory. I tend to describe it as anti-photographic memory. It's almost like my brain does the opposite of what the main point of that study found: storing (visual) memories in a descriptive form. Kind of like SVG vs JPEG. Withe side effect of sometimes not being able to remember an obvious detail from a scene I witnessed just a minute earlier, just because it wasn't on the list of things to remember.
Needless to say, this leads to interesting situations when I'm refereeing in football... sometimes I have to literally "replay" or "render" a scene in my mind in real-time just to find out what color jersey a certain player had when a foul occurred. So far I've not found anybody who understood this kind of problem...
These days, all the advertising that I get is for dubious crypto currencies, a few Chinese drop-shipping "retailers", and fake advertising for inferior mobile games. Oh, and of course a lot of likes and follows from Kayla8462453, joined two months ago, zero posts, and a link to their OnlyFans page in the bio.
Makes me totally look forward to the privilege of paying for supplying my content to that dumpster fire of a social platform in the future. Maybe that will get them enough money to hire back a few developers to fix this year-old stupid UI bug in their iOS app.
You can abuse the BCC field - by simply using it. This report, and many more cases in the past (probably in the thousands), shows that trying to send bulk email using the BCC method is not safe, because it practically invites the user to mess up. By either not understanding the difference, of by clicking in the wrong field, or because they can't remember which is which.
If you have to send an email to many people, use a bulk email that was build for that purpose. BCC is a crutch that should have been deprecated a long time ago.
Typically, in "BCC blunders", it is the failure of using BCC, and using the CC field instead, to copy-and-paste a bunch of email addresses into.
Using BCC is unsafe because it is very easy to click into the wrong field to paste the addresses into, and thereby facilitates human error.
A bulk email system typically does not even give you the chance to make such a mistake. That's why using BCC for mass emails is considered bad practice – for a long time actually.
Hm, by definition RJ11 is 6P2C, so only the two central contacts should be used. But many "RJ11" cables are actually RJ14, which is 6P4C, so 4 wires are connected. But still not the outer ones. Not sure what the UK did there, but that's not part of the RJ11 standard, AFAIK.
As other have stated, at that time USB wasn't a thing yet. And still, many years later, USB ports on Windows were not completely interchangeable. I remember relocating a PC (probably Win 98) completely with all its peripherals, including a label printer. When setting it up at the new place, I made big mistake: I plugged the printer into a different USB port (there were 4, all on the main board). After powering up, the PC congratulated me on the new printer and happily offered to install the drivers for it, with the caveat that it didn't actually have any software for it.
I powered it down, tried another USB port, same issue, repeat from 1. I bet you can guess how many tries it took me until I got the right port... of course, it was the last one I tried.
I briefly hesitated before putting a sticker on the back explaining which port to use for the Zebra, because I thought it too absurd. But I did it anyway.
... and so does everybody who has ever read (or watched) The Shining.
All work and no play makes Jack adull boy.
All work and no play makes Jackkk a dull boy.
All work and no play MUST KILL ALL HUMANS I'M SORRY DAVE I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT all your base are belong to us...
I have to say I'm impressed with the response from the regulating authority. Instead of slapping a meaningless financial penalty on the bank (which in the end is paid by the customers and low-level employees anyway), they basically ordered them to stop playing around until they have fixed the mess.
Typically it's the other way around; they get a massive fine, and in response, close some branches and fire part of their workforce.
"Google has maintained it simply makes the best search product." Yes. Tell that to somebody who hasn't used Google in a while.
Maybe they would, if it were still a search engine. But it has become a marketing engine and surveillance tool which gets a small part if its input from the actual search engine, then then puts it though their enshittification engine. They may actually be the "best" in that discipline, come to think of it.
At first I thought that was a mis-transcription or something, meaning he bought login creds on the darknet; but it's actually there in the plea agreement, a direct statement. Looks like some morons really log passwords. (A few days ago I read about someone logging *failed* login attempts, here on The Reg; don't remember the actual article. [No, it was not BOFH.])
And yet I still have to give five-minute explainers to people on why they should not reuse passwords. Sigh.
Just because they were right this time doesn't mean that a reasonable person, at the time, would have viewed the warnings by that person as realistic or appropriate.
I agree somewhat, but in hindsight, there clearly was a security problem, which they didn't recognize, understand, or detect; so the warnings of that individual were accurate. If the C-suite declares the company and products "secure", and they are not, they will take the heat for it. If you don't trust your employees (justifyably or not) when they're warning about risks, it's your responsibilty as CISO to make sure there is no wolf - regardless how many times anybody has cried wolf.
... the dumbest law proposal that I have heard of this year. "We're not able to regulate guns, so we're regulating tools. After all, you need tools to make gun parts."
Next step is obviously requiring registration with a gov-issued ID for anybody downloading or buying slicer software, and outlawing Blender altogether. Oh, and maybe the sale of PLA filament should be regulated, too.
Sometimes I think US politicians are intentionally acting stupid when trying to solve the rampant gun problem in their country, just like someone constantly intentionally dropping plates so they don't have to do the dishes any more.
OK, let's do some translation work here.
"Within this test, existing users are not affected." -> "You're next."
"... to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam..." -> "We successfully drove most advertisers from the platform, resulting in way less spam."
"... manipulation of our platform and bot activity..." -> "people making fun of me"
" while balancing platform accessibility" -> "it works for some, not for everyone. Who cares."
"It is not a profit driver." -> "It's a pretext to collect more information from our users."
"And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale." -> "We have no clue what to do instead."
Clear the cache... and reset cookies.
Try a different browser. (Works best on Netscape Navigator at 1024 x 768).
Are you using the correct URL?
Switch it off and then on again.
Reinstall your browser.
Or, better yet, your whole OS.
We're sorry, looks like we have a technical problem.
Can you helps us try to identify the problem. Just clear your cache, and reset the...
Continue on line 1.
I say: ready the Arks! Ark B should go first, so that when the survivors of humanity arrive on our new home world, they will find shiny-clean telephones and a thriving advertising economy. Oh, and someone needs to build electric cars on that planet, so how about sending a certain CEO, too?
"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution"...
User have been known to use even worse places to store documents. I once got yelled at because in the course of regular maintenance, I've been emptying the trash can ("recycle bin" for Windows users) on a Mac. The lady using that desktop had actually put documents there that she wantetd to sort out later. Well, tough luck...
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