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Comment Re:WordPress: the Flash of web servers (Score 1) 21

Let's be real, even if wordpress code quality isn't the highest of its CMS peers at least the core product is probably not worse than the vast majority of server software out there.

The real issue here is AI. The time it takes and the range of capable people who can now reverse engineer a patch, and generate exploit code from has been greatly reduced and greatly expanded respectively.

Patch management that once got exposed systems patched the same day is no longer adequate, if you can't be patched within hours even if you're tiny potatoes, shodan.io knows about you - so you're in for a bad time. Every hour is a roll of the dice.

Which brings us back the zero trust model, and why it really isn't a very good idea, or not a very good idea implemented independently from the tradition moat/perimeter model. Between true 0-days and now near zero time to patch, nothing not even the immediate peer if it is directly on the Internet can enjoy much of any trust no matter how often you re-authenticate.

Comment Re:Not much of a "transformation" (Score 4, Interesting) 32

I was going to say the same thing. We have some amazing weapons systems. I mean when you think about it, it is down right stunning what a systems like Patriot Interceptors, AIM-9 air to air missile, or even a Phalanx CIWS, actually do and with such efficacy.

Yet these are 40-60 year old systems, at least their fundamental designs are.

All of it is undone though by swarms of cheap drones, which are marvels of technology themselves in terms of position identification and the digital logic to deliver simple stable flight be it fixed wing or multiple rotor aircraft.

Its funny in some ways it seems we are back to castle walls and archers. You can bead a horse to be strong and fast, put a bunch of fancy Armour on the riders, but if the enemy your are approaching can throw a lot of cheap shafts at you (which just as now were actually not all that cheap to manufacture) all the expensive super weapons become as much liabilities as assets.

Comment Re:Just park it (Score 2) 101

I don't know. All the same arguments could be applied to not acting upon a non-responsive passenger while the taxis is traveling as well. It isn't as if cardiac events or respiratory failures are just going to wait until the vehicle is parked!

Yet traditional cab drivers don't monitor their passengers to make sure they are awake and alert and not reporting any distress the entire trip, as matter of fact neither do bus lines, railroads, airlines, passenger ships, and so on. Neither do these business require everyone to wear a pulse-ox for the duration. Would we hold a motel accountable if you expire from natural causes in your rented room overnight?

Liability usually follows from either expectation of concern/care or causation and I am not sure there is either here. I am not a fan of Waymo but if I am on the jury and they are the defendant in your case against them because they did not do enough to prevent your whomevers death by self inflicted alcohol poisoning where we have video that simply shows them appearing to be sleeping peacefully in the back seat most of the ride; I am going to need to hear a lot of compelling argument. I can't currently imagine what that would be to get me to go along with the idea you have any claim against them.

Comment Re: Digital Escorts (Score 1) 34

This is what everyone needs to understand when they say "we should have a public..." or "why did we privatize this".

If you have actual experience doing any work from the government you know that huge portion of it is compliance costs, realistically it absolutely is something like 40% probably.

First there is the upfront bits of doing an RFP that looks like nobody else's

then there is proving you have the required mix of ethic and gender representation (if you actually want to win)

after that comes the recording and reporting on different metrics than anyone else in industry uses because someone has to follow a rule from 1943 or some public employee who does not understand anything about the process decided they needed to CYA and wrote up some report templates, because they all believe (possibly rightly) that if they make the haystack big enough none of them can ever be identified and faulted for ordering the wrong thing or given the wrong instruction.

Next unlike the business world where the incentive is usually to accept the deliverable, if it meets the spec and functions well under test, because the customer wants to put that asset into operation and either start making or saving money money with it, the public folks are incentivized to nit pick and play lawyer about every word because again CYA, in case anything ever goes wrong in the future. So you got 15% in rework or dispute resolution right there whichever path you chose; again all the fix things any reasonable persons would find no fault with.

So the private sector responds to this in a couple ways.

First - dramatically over charge because it is government. In competitive markets there is a wink a nod and nobody offers the tax payer a far price

Second - in smaller less understood tenders they dramatically under bid to win, then insert some time and materials language somewhere that lets the go 30X over budget. The people evaluating the responses know this and don't care because it is not their money after all and the vendor will let them play victim in the court of public opinion. Oracle, SAP, Blackwater, Core-Civics types don't care what "people" think about them because they don't have "consumers", the Amazon's and Microsoft's of the world have figured out consumers are not informed enough or don't seem mind them abusing Uncle Sam or the local yokels on their county board..

Comment Well duh (Score 1) 54

they won't bring back your account if you're a nobody.

Well yeah. I mean come on we know about IT stuff around here. If you are trying to back up vary large transnational systems two axis on the chart or granularity, and cost on the operational side, and granularity and time to restore on the recovery side. Sometimes you can mix them, ie a not vary granular operational backup, but if you are willing to put enough time an engery you can restore individual records or groups there of by say restoring a whole partition (as in database) querying the data you need and injecting it back into the transaction environment.

It does not surprise me that Microsoft can't wont do individualized account operations for just anybody from a technical perspective or from a customer service perspective in terms of customer rep time and engineering time to deal with one persons issues.

What they are charging for these services does not allow for that. The other reality of these SaaS service is cheap does not therefore translate to good individual value. As we have seen with the Sony article yesterday, IP in your account like a movie or video game title reality is its a rental for as long as they feel like it no matter how the terms sounded, and if it is data pictures, videos, personal files, you better damn well have copies elsewhere because while the causes might be different your data is just as likely to vanish one morning as it was back in 1988 when the ST506 MFM disk in your PC AT suddenly refused to read, but curiously was fine after a new low level format..

Comment Re:This really shows that possession is 9/10ths (Score 0) 137

Never mind all those DVDs from the mid 2000s that rotted on the shelf. Good luck getting anyone to replace those..

Physical media does not provide any sort of certainty you'll be able to enjoy it a decade from now and don't say "but make backups" the value proposition of making a backup as in a real redundant copy to sit on self somewhere (or hardisk ... whatever) vs for piracy just isn't there. The time plus the cost of the media does not let that make sense for something you paid less than $20 for in the first place.

Comment Re:Slippery Slope of Modernity's Rights Retraction (Score 2) 137

There are already provisions for 'hair cuts' and similar theft.

Dodd-Frank gave the FDIC the ability to treat similar seniority creditors differently in resolutions, for 'systemic stability' which is not well defined. So if you have a bond in a failing bank and the current administration does not like you... to bad....

Temporary though it might be the pandemic legislation (cares act? I think it was) also created force majeure where if you'd owner financed a residence and the buy decided to just not pay, dear old Uncle Sam say to bad, you can't foreclose and get your property back.

I for one don't think if the shit really hits the fan and gold buried in the yard or bitcoin wallets on USB keys will do anyone holding it much good but rest assured, 'they' will absolutely steal your money. They already demoed this now twice in as many decades, and things did not even have to get that all that real.

Comment Can't we at least standardize on standard time? (Score 1) 263

It makes zero f'ing sense to not have noon be when the sun is directly overhead. I realize that timezones are geographically to large and if you live at the edges noon is never really noon. Still FFS the middle of the day should be the middle of the day at least near the center of our given timezones.

The other thing DST means is the earths rotational day does not align to the calendar day, that just means more goofiness around local observations, and recording.

Given this is entirely a political thing if people WANT DST from a life style perspective, why don't we collectively agree start the morning news at 5a instead of 6a and open the office at 7 rather than 8 on the same day we set the clocks for the last time?

Comment Re:An AMAZING number of flaws (Score 1) 76

We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

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