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User: bill_mcgonigle

bill_mcgonigle's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re: Any professional tools available? on Bug Exposes OpenSSH Servers To Brute-Force Password Guessing Attacks · · Score: 2

    The ssh.com people are still selling theirs as I recall. Go ahead and ask them for indemnification against breaches, though - I'm sure they could use a good laugh on a Wednesday.

  2. Re: OpenSSH is for cows. on Bug Exposes OpenSSH Servers To Brute-Force Password Guessing Attacks · · Score: 1

    From his denial there it sounds like serious mental illness may be at play - schizophrenia perhaps. Somebody is probably going to doxnswat him now, thinking it's for his own good, but really it isn't. The cries for help were good, but fellas - guns are never the answer to medical problems.

  3. Re: All you have to do is walk around Google... on Woman Recruited By Google Four Times and Rejected Now Joins Age Discrimination Suit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    kids are easier to boss around and they don't tell the product manager that his new Maps is a piece of shit.

  4. Re:Surprise? on FBI's Hacks Don't Comply With Legal Safeguards · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And why shouldn't they? Do you think a single person will see a minute in prison for this?

    Knowledge is advantage is power - of course they will abuse their position - they have no incentive not to.

  5. Re:Serial RS-232 port on What's the Oldest Technology You've Used In a Production Environment? · · Score: 1

    I was going to say the same thing (1962) until I realize they're all plugged into 120V 60Hz AC power.

  6. Re:I hate it already! on A Month With a Ubuntu Phone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Gestures can be incredibly useful but mostly they're wildly abused by programmers who are not UI designers.

    Here's an example: in Chrome, if I pinch to zoom in on a screen, a minor variant of that gesture (I haven't discerned what it is yet) will destroy the current browser window. So about 20% of the time I zoom I lose my session. No 'undo' close either.

    Developers, *please*: give me an option to disable all data-destructive gestures. I'll turn them on if I feel like juggling chainsaws on a given day.

  7. DSN's and NDR's too on Gmail Spam Filter Changes Bite Linus Torvalds · · Score: 1

    Was helping a guy having trouble posting to our LUG list the other day.

    He had DSN's being delivered to his GMail spam folder. I thought, "golly, how does Gmail figure those could be spam?" Nobody is going to sneak a Viagra ad through underneath a 550 report.

    Of course his other problem was he was using Comcast as an outbound relay. Their new relay retries a message once every second five times and then gives up forever. Totally breaks greylisting, or even temporary outages. Didn't even try my backup MX.

    But I'm running RFC-complaint secure servers, so those two big bozos can go pound sand. Eventually they'll fix their game. If a LUG member, of all people, can't be bothered to spend $2 a month for quality email hosting (assuming they just don't want to do their own), I'm not going to cry about it.

    Free services are only guaranteed to be worth just as much as you pay for them. This falls squarely into the "not my circus, not my monkeys" category.

  8. Re:Is this really something new? on California Legislation May Allow First Responders To Take Out Drones · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yep. I'm a big proponent of aerobots for all kinds of social good, and the FAA is doing a terrible job (hampering the march of progress) but absolutely the FD should be able to clear them, even with dedicated anti-aerobot drones (birdshot from a helicopter is going to be all kinds of fun but probably not too effective). The broken car windows are a perfect analogy - if it were my car that I stupidly parked in front of a hydrant (I wouldn't but I'm not perfect and could miss one) I would absolutely want my car windows broken if they prevented a firefighting operation.

    Curiosity is not sociopathy and the two are not interrelated, but stupidity is stupidity and needs to be handled.

  9. Re:Taxi company on Europe's Top Court To Decide If Uber Is Tech Firm Or Taxi Company · · Score: 1

    I can order a taxi online already

    Yet Uber and Lyft are much more popular, so you've proved their point. But why? Because they're tech companies and people like their tech (reputation systems, scheduling systems, payment systems, etc.) If you got rid of their tech, they'd be nothing. If you got rid of their cabs ... wait! They don't have any cabs!

    They specifically enable private drivers to _not_ need a taxi company. "So they're a taxi company?" Yeah, like eBay is a department store.

  10. Re:They're worthless. on Why Certifications Are Necessary (Even If Aggravating To Earn) · · Score: 1

    EVERY cert test I've ever taken tests not knowledge of the subject

    Because that's not their main value.

    Hiring managers don't know enough to qualify candidates. So they hire people with certifications. That way, if the employee sucks they just say, "hey, he was properly certified - blame the certifier, not me."

    It's CYA, blame-shifting, etc. The ability to deflect blame is quite valuable to people who are not qualified to be in their jobs, so they're willing to pay more to such employees, because such employees are valuable to them.

    If the tests get too tough, the candidate pool will dry up, so that's never going to happen. For qualified interviewers, asking the questions isn't hard, so they don't have a use for the certifications.

    Another factor is that such middle managers tend to be in the corporate world, as startups cannot afford either the inept middle managers or bad employees. Corporate jobs tend to pay more, so 16% does not seem unlikely at all, in aggregate of the two factors.

    For that 16% you probably have to work at a dreary soul-crushing job, but if your interview doesn't consist of smart people asking you tough questions, you probably knew that already. Get busy with the 401(k) allocations so you can live out the end of your boring life in a median retirement community!

  11. Re: No Foul play... on Grooveshark Co-founder Josh Greenberg Dead At 28 · · Score: 2

    No, it means he wants shit for free and doesn't care if artists or their heirs get paid.

    Your fallacy is strong with this one. Creator-endorsed is a much more civil system - copyright isn't the only way to get paid. It may be one way to get paid more, but that gets paid for with lives of innocents (and no, profit reduced from a hypothetical does not make one a victim).

  12. Re:Dead at 28, no apparent signs of foul play... on Grooveshark Co-founder Josh Greenberg Dead At 28 · · Score: 1

    The recent heroin overdose uptick seems to be caused by massive cutting with fentanyl and other adulterants, so people can't determine a safe dose.

    Short of having generic heroin available at WalMart for five bucks, people are gonna keep dying. But, hey, why else is the US Army guarding the opium fields?

  13. Re:Transparency on Elon Musk: Faulty Strut May Have Led To Falcon 9 Launch Failure · · Score: 1

    That is why you use Statistical Process Control.

    I'm familiar with the system, but am still glad they do ultrasonic inspections of stress-critical airplane parts, not just a statistical sampling.

    This has to do with costs vs. expenses. Settling all those wrongful death suits is expensive. Buying new rockets and payloads is expensive. Replacing dead cell phones is cheap.

    If I were Musk, I'd hire some techs to do ultrasonic inspections of every strut on the way in. Or, even better, set a contract so that the failed vendor has to absorb the cost of the failed launch if the parts are not to spec.

  14. Re: Speed v.s. reliability on AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Performs Wildly Different Based On Program's Name · · Score: 1

    Right, and what if hl2 uses small, low quality textures but you can force the renderer to do that badly with another app through some driver tunables? Crap rendering but OMG FPS! Be careful what you measure.

    It would be nice if all the tunables were at least available as environment variables or in /sys so tuners could be happy regardless.

  15. Re: Translation on Apple Watch Still Waiting On App Developers · · Score: 1

    iOS doesn't allow Android-style widgets on the phone - only on the watch, so there is an [artificial] niche to fill.

    The big problem is risk management, though. Apple was quite permissive when only 5 million iPhones were on the market. Over time they tightened their grip. Now developers need to ask if they can afford to put their money into an iWatch app only to have Apple capriciously ban it and wipe out their investment - all for a tiny niche market.

  16. Re:Target practice? on Spurious Drones Buzzing Around Spanish Royal Palace · · Score: 1

    shooting practice

    At night? The only option real option here is to ignore them.

    If the Royals are doing things that piss people off and thus live in fear of them, then perhaps they should stop doing those things.

  17. Re:Insanity on UK Government Proposes 10-Year Copyright Infringement Jail Term · · Score: 1

    10 years? You can rape and/or kill someone and not get that much time. Pure insanity.

    But that's only one disposable serf - we're talking *corporate profits* here. Perhaps millions of dollars.

    Privatize the gains, socialize the risks - that's the true nature of governmental systems.

  18. it's the State, stupid on Ask Slashdot: Opinions on the State Breaking Its Own Law Against Employee Misclassification? · · Score: 1, Insightful

    the whole point of having a State is that there is one set of rules for State actors and another set of rules for everybody else. Qualified immunity, massive pollution, wasting resources, welching on promises, breaking every damn law on the books when it furthers wealth and power; how about you go work for a business that's not so wildly corrupt? - heck, even on Wall Street you'd do better.

  19. Re: Boring. on Intel's Tick-Tock Cycle Skips a Beat · · Score: 5, Funny

    I know - the transistor count should have enabled us to build neural nets to filter out inane AC comments by now.

  20. Re: Secret 3G Intel Chip Gives Snoops Backdoor Acc on Facebook Finally Ends XMPP Support For 3rd Party Chat · · Score: 1

    Never go full-InfoWars. Christ, I can barely get a 3G connection *with* an actual antenna connected to a radio.

  21. Re:I can tell you what will happen ... on What Will Happen When Cascadia Subduction Zone Slips · · Score: 1

    How exactly do you prepare for a mag 9 earthquake?

    I've prepared for a mag 9 earthquake - I know they happen so live in a geologically stable location. I'm inland enough to survive an oceanic comet strike as well as La Palma collapsing into the Atlantic and hurricanes are weak by time they get here. The worst weather here is heavy rains from tropical storms and the odd tornado. Ice and snow are just an inconvenience.

    But go ahead and live the high life on the coasts and then come begging for bailouts from everybody who had the sense to not live there. The under-capitalized insurance companies aren't going to save you from economic ruin because they will be completely wiped out.

  22. Re: Wow on Does Elon Musk's Hyperloop Make More Sense On Mars? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A train in a vacuum is called a 'train', not a hyperloop. Nobody outside of journalism students thinks Musk was the first to have the idea, but perhaps he has the methodology to get it built.

  23. Re:Good on Iran Has Signed a Nuclear Accord · · Score: 1, Funny

    Why do we have to fight ISIS at all?

    Haven't you seen the pictures of the hooded ISIS "warriors" where they forgot to cover up their US Army tattoos?

    Everybody else in the world has.

  24. Re:Associate of Science in Networking... on Ask Slashdot: VPN Solution To Connect Mixed-Environment Households? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No amount of college coursework will fix someone being too lazy to use Google. Or Amazon.

    Both of those sources will mislead you into thinking IPSec is a good solution that's not a giant pain in the ass in the real world and appropriate for this kind of install.

    pfSense and OpenVPN, as everybody has been saying, is appropriate, solid, and on the easier end of the scale.

    His requirements are 99% like mine, and that solution works great. My parents' pfSense box is in their basement, nailed up next to the FiOS demarc, and it works great.

  25. Re:Not really true (anymore)Let's stop using misle on New Default: Mozilla Temporarily Disables Flash In Firefox · · Score: 1

    Let's stop using misleading phrasing that will make people think they blocked any past, current, or hypothetical future version of the plugin.

    Hey, there are a lot of linux users here - we're used to it. Mozilla has been blocking the current version of Flash on Linux for three years now. The people who know that codebase can't seem to figure out how to put in an if statement (I jest - they just don't give a fuck about it working).