Comment Inevitably someone will ask (Score 1) 122
Can we have a homomorphic pride parade in Silicon Valley? There are just so many homophobic programmers out there. /s
Comment Re:Wait... (Score 0) 198
Wasn't the apple store supposed to be safe?
Isn't this one if the main lies Apple uses to convince their users to give up the freedom to install whatever app they want because only apps that are thoroughly checked by Apple are approved?
Agreed. Apple needs to pay this guy and whomever else is scammed like this back. After they do that, they can drop the lofty claims about how their walled garden is so safe and their software is checked because it isn't and it can't be. Nevertheless, Apple is making the claim, so they can take the consequences.
Comment Inevitable (Score 1) 48
I was waiting to see when the next Facebook scandal was going to drop. Seriously, why does anyone even have accounts at these kinds of places anyway? Oh, and fuck the Zuck.
Comment Re:Shame on them (Score 1) 208
Hello. My disability is alcoholism and I barf continuously and will shit in your car like it's a major street in San Francisco. I'm also addicted to PCP and might rage out on you. My dire wolf keeps me centered. He's my comfort animal. Sometimes he'll make a mess too because of the steady diet of Ex-Lax I give him in his four pounds of raw meat per day. You will drive me across town through rush hour on the 610 or I will sue you! Dial 444-4444! Thomas J Henry!
Comment Don't stop here. (Score 3, Insightful) 53
Okay. Now prosecute the administrators for putting a critical system needlessly and insecurely on the Internet.
Comment Obligatory... (Score 1) 20
Fuck Zuck. He sucks.
Comment Re:Tax capital? (Score 1) 170
I'm pretty sure property tax is already a thing. Yes if your home appreciates in value to where you can no longer afford it, you sell it and get something smaller. And anyway, who should be paying taxes, the people without any assets? How does that make any sense?
Yes, and its bullshit. I think that was the point.
Comment It learned from GTA V! (Score 1) 232
What Elon Musk isn't telling you is that they trained the neural network on Grand Theft Auto V and the feedback criteria was how many wanted stars it could accumulate.
Comment Re:Afraid to speak (Score 1) 459
That's what "cancel culture" has brought us. I wouldn't even write a science fiction novel much less anything espousing a political opinion with my real name attached to it.
Comment Re:The Great British Army (Score 1) 73
I think the DPRK could take them already.
Maybe. What I do know is that Chuck Norris could single handedly defeat France even if he were drunk and out of ammo.
Comment Soon thereafter... (Score 1) 95
The wildlife lurking in Dorsey's beard realized that if they go to Memphis they can be free of him forever. Zuckerberg's resident rectal gerbil was quoted as immediately hoping that Facebook would implement something similar for the good of all the wildlife.
Comment Re:Ok so this sounds like the best place on earth. (Score 1) 347
They should invent "silencers" for the blowers which don't silence but really just act as noise reducers. But Oakland should require a $200 tax stamp to be able to use or possess them and special licensing if you want to modify them in any way. PROFIT!
Submission + - SPAM: Windows.com Bitsquatting Hack Can Wreak 'Unknown Havoc' On PCs
An anonymous reader writes: Bitflips are events that cause individual bits stored in an electronic device to flip, turning a 0 to a 1 or vice versa. Cosmic radiation and fluctuations in power or temperature are the most common naturally occurring causes. Research from 2010 estimated that a computer with 4GB of commodity RAM has a 96 percent chance of experiencing a bitflip within three days. An independent researcher recently demonstrated how bitflips can come back to bite Windows users when their PCs reach out to Microsoft’s windows.com domain. Windows devices do this regularly to perform actions like making sure the time shown in the computer clock is accurate, connecting to Microsoft’s cloud-based services, and recovering from crashes.
Remy, as the researcher asked to be referred to, mapped the 32 valid domain names that were one bitflip away from windows.com. Of the 32 bit-flipped values that were valid domain names, Remy found that 14 of them were still available for purchase. This was surprising because Microsoft and other companies normally buy these types of one-off domains to protect customers against phishing attacks. He bought them for $126 and set out to see what would happen.
Over the course of two weeks, Remy’s server received 199,180 connections from 626 unique IP addresses that were trying to contact ntp.windows.com. By default, Windows machines will connect to this domain once per week to check that the time shown on the device clock is correct. What the researcher found next was even more surprising. “The NTP client for windows OS has no inherent verification of authenticity, so there is nothing stopping a malicious person from telling all these computers that it’s after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 and wreaking unknown havoc as the memory storing the signed 32-bit integer for time overflows,” he wrote in a post summarizing his findings. “As it turns out though, for ~30% of these computers doing that would make little to no difference at all to those users because their clock is already broken.”
Link to Original Source
Remy, as the researcher asked to be referred to, mapped the 32 valid domain names that were one bitflip away from windows.com. Of the 32 bit-flipped values that were valid domain names, Remy found that 14 of them were still available for purchase. This was surprising because Microsoft and other companies normally buy these types of one-off domains to protect customers against phishing attacks. He bought them for $126 and set out to see what would happen.
Over the course of two weeks, Remy’s server received 199,180 connections from 626 unique IP addresses that were trying to contact ntp.windows.com. By default, Windows machines will connect to this domain once per week to check that the time shown on the device clock is correct. What the researcher found next was even more surprising. “The NTP client for windows OS has no inherent verification of authenticity, so there is nothing stopping a malicious person from telling all these computers that it’s after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 and wreaking unknown havoc as the memory storing the signed 32-bit integer for time overflows,” he wrote in a post summarizing his findings. “As it turns out though, for ~30% of these computers doing that would make little to no difference at all to those users because their clock is already broken.”
Link to Original Source
Comment Re:A stupid trick (Score 1) 72
I'm waiting for some intrepid upstart to get the idea that they can charge by the processor tick their software runs or something nuts like that. The entire history of DRM borders on ludicrous and in the end often becomes so frustrating that a person or company just pirates the cracked software and never buys it at all. I have legally purchased software that limits the number of activations, so my only legal choices are to buy another copy for my virtual machines, laptop, etc. Of course I'm going to pirate that. Many companies try to get around this by running everything on one Citrix server and having a bunch of different users log in on that, which is just as obnoxious, but when they actually have reasonable enterprise pricing I mostly side with the publishers there.
Comment Ick. (Score 0) 109
If someone served me one of these without my asking for it I'd set it on fire and throw the smoking plant material through their window. /s
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Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.
