* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Pastebin: The remote backdoor server for the cheap and lazy

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Holmes

You wascabby wabbit

Please explain exactly why you use Pastebin for this instead of proper tooling.

Hang on a second – Time Lords have added one to 2015

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Holmes

The last time this happened, the Amadeus airline booking system , Hadoop and Linux servers around the world struck trouble, probably because they weren't set up to cope with the extra second.

Rather because nobody can be bothered to check the assumption, read the specs, think things through (true?) then test before shitting code into production.

Top senator blasts US Homeland Security for leaving cyber-drawbridge down

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Big Brother

Bureaucratic ultra-pork lovers in "can't perform" moment. Film at 11.

"Coburn's dossier notes that the DHS bagged $61bn"

Fuck me, those luxury mansion pools must be VAST.

Considering that the Department of Heimland Sicherheit was created by Bush as a super-bureaucracy layer on top of the bureaucracy layers of the TLAs that had utterly failed prior to 9/11 with the sole justificiation of doling out the dollars rolling off the printing presses after the post-Greenspan-Bubble pop, I would say: "Mission Accomplished".

Elite: Dangerous 'billionaire' gamers are being 'antisocial', moan players

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Re: It's for kids!

Well one of you can spot a joke.

"Verily, my retardation was all an act!"

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Re: Aarrr!

But does HMRC pursuit ships able to do the Kessel Run in less than 20 parsecs?

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Paris Hilton

Re: Just like real life then?

single-handedly unbalencing trade routes

What, like imposing sanctions against nominal partners when you feel like it and things like Merry Kerry visiting Saudi Brutalia just before the oil price drops?

ALIEN fossils ON MARS: Curiosity snaps evidence of life

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Re: FOOKING BIG ALIEN LEG AT THE BOTTOM LEFT

It's just a shrimp.

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Thumb Up

Looks like one of the two Turin Shrouds

...luckily without Jesus.

Bacterial mats on my dead planet? Its more likely than you think!

FBI boss: Sony hack was DEFINITELY North Korea, haters gonna hate

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Holmes

"I have very high confidence in that attribution."

Unfortunately the à priori probability of a govt official being right or actually telling the truth is so low right now that its multiplicative factor drags the gentleman's high confidence straight into the shitter.

Especially when the FBI is involved as these are they guys bragging about discovering terrorist plots that they themselves incited.

ALIEN EARTH: Red sun's habitable world spotted 470 light years away

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Re: *!@*!!

SCIENCE! For the good of all of us.

Ford recalls SUVs … to fix the UI

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Facepalm

Web UI design excellence now where the rubber hits the road

Luckily we went to the Moon a bit earlier.

"Yeah Neil, can you switch to camera #2 ... why did you hit Abort? OMG!!"

Buffer overflow reported in UEFI EDK1

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Facepalm

But... Muh QUALITY Programming!!

Please tell me this bullshit would have been spotted by an intern working for free to get company brownie points, pumping the code through Sonar one bored afternoon.

Dev put AWS keys on Github. Then BAD THINGS happened

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Paris Hilton

"S3 keys", huh?

Well, you CAN buy a keyfob for AWS access.

Nvidia flops out teraflop X1 for self-aware cars

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Holmes

Re: Is the DARPA Car Race Grand Challenge still alive?

Woah, 3 thumbs down. I wonder why? Guess the general level of interest in interesting IT has gone down the toilet and has finally arrived in the web circle of hell, populated by zombies emitting noises like "Hurrr AJAX WIDGET Durrrr". Oh well.

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Terminator

Re: I hope it is heat tolerant

MIL-SPEC TEGRA.

Designed by Miles Bennett Dyson.

Now in your Caliphate-cleaning Cyberdyne T101.

The future. It happens while you read.

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Is the DARPA Car Race Grand Challenge still alive?

Would be a good occasion to hack something up.

Saudi Arabia hires 'ethical hackers' to silence smut slingers

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FLOG THEM!

Must be one of Lord Blair's recommendations.

Renault Captur: Nobody who knows about cars will buy this

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Trollface

Re: Roads are not theme parks

I've no idea what this is doing in the Reg.

Not producing orgasm, evidently.

El Reg: A staid webzine for the discerning public.

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Windows

Re: Someday soon all cars will be like this (or worse).

Well, you sure WILL need a special license for it and cops can show up announced to check your garage for "non-licensed items". Also, sin taxes on any unconventional improvements.

After this festive season, a little bit of Sci-Fi reading, 1979 style: Lipidleggin'

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Paris Hilton

Re: An ideal car for the French market

There are things still made in France?

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Windows

Re: 'drive like a christian'???

That's the people who have a "JESUS SAVES" sticker on the bumper. Seen those.

But even in the world of Higher Sanity (tm), go to Portugal, drive like a mofo playing chicken with trucks, but at least the rosary hanging off the rear-view mirror gives you assurance.

Apart from that, what was so bad about the PS/1 except its eye-popping price (which was expected since you bought the IBM sticker actually, not the machine underneath). Ok, nobody would have wanted an 80286 if he had known what that was...

Norks SCOLD Prez Obama over Sony mega hack payback sanctions

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Windows

"Would send a message to the Norks"

Always that schoolyard bully canned marketo-quote. Right up there with "all options on the table" (except the genital ones I suppose) and "at the time of our choosing".

One could simply pick up the phone instead.

Microsoft has made excellent software, you pack of fibbers

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Rather it went Silent Hill.

Google unveils Windows 8.1 zero-day vuln – complete with exploit code

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Thumb Down

aiding and abetting

Yeppers, it's argumentation from 2001 again. Should we, shouldn't we etc. etc. etc.

I would find myself in the dock for aiding and abetting theft.

[Citation needed]

It's out, and there was time to fix it. Deal with it.

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Re: 0 Day Exploit

Of which there is none at the company's end.

"BEST EFFORT" is the best you can get.

As Dan Geer says in "Inviting More Heartbleed" -- "The only two products not covered by product liability today are religion and software, and we don’t think software is going to or should escape for much longer."

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Windows

Re: 90 days?

remember 4-5 years back, when they said they would put security at the core of Windows and all dev processes ?

I have the same problem: Time flies.

It was in January 2002 after a string a "access all areas" events IIRC.

The trustworthy computing group was disbanded this September.

As to the rejects claiming "OH NO 90 DAYS IS NOT ENOUGH FOR ANYBODY."

... what you gonna do when a 0-day hits the street and it's not 90 DAYS but 90 MINUTES. Huh? What you gonna do, PUNKS?

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FAIL

Have you applied leeches and vented the phlegm?

"We encourage customers to keep their anti-virus software up to date, install all available Security Updates and enable the firewall on their computer."

Recommendation to do the obnoxious, perform the borderline dangerous and enable the frankly useless.

Ugly Microsoft code NUKED Bing and Yahoo! – report

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Windows

Ach so!

Yep, I noticed Office 365 was not exactly responsive on Friday, presenting you with a white page, although it was labeled as being "up" by isitdownrightnow, though with ~150ms response time.

Luckily the office looked like someone had fired a neutron bomb a kilometer above the city.

Sony grovels, offers freebies after PlayStation network spent Xmas TITSUP

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Paris Hilton

Sony: Not so tough after having had its Playstation Network diddled

> needlessly taking database space

You know that "database space" is about a 1/1000 of a standard harddisk these days, right?

Islamic script kiddies aim killer blow - at Bristol bus timetable website

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Trollface

Re: The wrong website defaced with dunerunes

This explains finnish coding.

Humanity living on Snowball Earth would reach the Singularity in no time.

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Holmes

The wrong website defaced with dunerunes

Sad to say, the code quality of tasks outsourced to the sunny southern lands is often at the same level of awkwardness.

Step it up, guys.

Prez Obama slaps sanctions on Norks in payback for Sony hack

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Trollface

Woah

That dog sure is being wagged by both of its tails.

Pat Buchanan asked whether "war was in the cards for 2015". By the farty sounds, one in Europe, a continuing one in Afghanistan (wait, we won that one yesterday, right?), a renewed one in the Caliphate, an couple of "interventions" in the Lybia/Mali region, one in Korea, .....

SpaceX six days from historic rocket landing attempt

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Trollface

Re: What a team!

Apparently no-one likes the Japanese.

Much ship industry loss, innit?

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Windows

Re: Its the wrong technology

Warp drives ain't gonna come out of garages dude. They most probably won't come from anywhere, ever. (Yeah, Alcubierre Blah Blah Blah. Bullshit. Guess what, if I had the power to warp space at will, negatively not at my current location to boot, I could do ten impossible things before breakfast.)

There is no indication in experimental and theoretical physics that any of this is possible. None. Otherwise LHC would rip unicorns out of the vacuum.

> Farady cages

> Could Bermuda Triangle pilot’s ‘fog’ have been a space warp?

Perpetuum Mobile tier QUALITY SCIENCE!!!11!

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Paris Hilton

Re: Fingers crossed!

> namely aerodynamics.

Don't you mean pork projection?

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Re: Tony Stark

No champaign until a Tessier-Ashpool corporate orbital refuge is up there.

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Angel

Re: What a team!

It's almost as of they were Japanese!

NASA preps lobotomy for Opportunity rover to cure amnesia

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Windows

Re: "But anything could fail at any moment. It's like you have an aging parent, "

Sounds like someone needs to work on separating life and work...

You seem to be either at school or otherwise rather young?

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Headmaster

Re: "Was wear levelling and trim support around 10 years ago?"

wrapped in gold-foil (for radiation resistance).

That's not how "radiation resistance" works, ops guy.

I hear in the east, they try to wrap things in vodka. Doesn't work either.

No wind-up: Second New Year's honour for Baylis music box

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Windows

Re: How odd...

That would be the "King Gong" for services to your customer base that exhibit disdain and arrogance should not (or cannot, in case the customer base flees) be reproduced.

Want to have your server pwned? Easy: Run PHP

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Windows

Re: Seriously, he actually believed the advertised PHP version on the server?

it's long been standard practice to report completely different Apache, PHP, OpenSSL etc variants in the server banner

.... Seriously? Home hacker scene, ahoi!

Next up: hanging hare's paw on the server room door.

Stale pizza, backup BlackBerrys, payroll panic: Sony Pictures mega-hack

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Big Brother

Re: Cheques

...but if you carry it around in physical form, you are a suspect and police can actually seize it with no particular justification to finance their year's end partygear.

This is not a joke.

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Devil

...including "IT MUST BE THE NORKS" FBI investigators...

The timeless movie quote

"You asked for a miracle. I give you the EFF BEE EYE"

comes to mind.

Office MACROS PERIL! Age-old VBScript tactic is BACK in biz attack

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Stop

Excel and VBA - a great combination - should be more widely used.

No.

Excel: A bad idea, implemented badly. A dataflow program presented in a way that resembles a 2-D sheets for beancounters. Unmaintainable. Can't even compute correctly in the best of cases (uses floats instead of the appropriate fixed-point arithmetic). Stats show that most of the Excel sheets out there have errors that go unnoticed. Cancer.

VBA: Acceptable, but people with no training use this, resulting in overcooked macaroni and more cancer.

NORKS? Pffft. Infosec bods BLAME disgruntled insiders for savage Sony hack

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Wag the Nork

Norse has identified a group of six individuals – from the US, Canada, Singapore and Thailand – as potential suspects. One of the alleged perps is a 10-year veteran of Sony Pictures’ backroom technical staff who lost his job in May.

How.jpg

Did the query the NSA database? Did Sony give them full access to extended activity logs??

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Facepalm

Re: Let me be the first one to say

Coming from AC, this is a bit rich.

Proxima and Ultima: AI, hard sci-fi and multiverse – All good. Romans – not so much

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Analysis of the comment section makes me suspect BAXTER is nearby.

Tor de farce: NSA fails to decrypt anonymised network

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I sure hope the CA does NOT HAVE the private key, otherwise there is a bad case of PEBKAC at the end of the CA's customer.

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Windows

If you've transferred your private keys to a server via SSH or VPN, they've possibly been compromised. Time to revoke everydamnthing.

100% of non-sneakernet-connected nodes (pretty much the whole cloud for starters) fucked??

"UK TOP SECRET STRAP1 COMINT"

WTF does STRAPONE mean?

When algorithms ATTACK: Facebook sez soz for tacky 'Year in Review' FAIL

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Facepalm

Re: Actually

> Humans overwriting their memories and making shit up from whole cloth

ITT: Humans memory is volatile and has no error checking.

Well, we do it all the time. You know that most of these "repressed childhood memories" about being violated by parents were actually implanted by the therapists? Good job.

Young adults, aged between 18 and 24, say they frequently lie about their relationships, promotions at work and holidays.

At that age I had even difficulty keeping track of actual reality. Sometimes I really feared I was getting psychotic due to overwork and general stress. And that was before the Interwebs came out of the "text only" phase.