7 Year Recovery Watch Remains On High Alert

Forward! 21 Comments

Wasthington Examiner;

More than five years after economists announced the end of the recession, fertility levels have still not recovered. As a result, more than 3.4 million fewer babies were born in the United States between 2008 and 2015 than would have been expected if pre-recession fertility rates had been sustained. In each of the last five years, this birth deficit has resulted in roughly 500,000 fewer births,” said the study.

The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire

Great Moments In Socialism 37 Comments

Here’s how it works. If a trooper suspects a person may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan and seize money from prepaid cards. OHP stresses troopers do not do this during all traffic stops, only situations where they believe there is probable cause.
“We’re gonna look for different factors in the way that you’re acting,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent said. “We’re gonna look for if there’s a difference in your story. If there’s someway that we can prove that you’re falsifying information to us about your business.”
Troopers insist this isn’t just about seizing cash.

No, nothing to do with that.

Work Ethic Is Still Proven To Exist & Environment Canada Throws A Spear At The Greens

Uncategorized 25 Comments

77% of Swiss voters just rejected a proposal to introduce a $3000 guaranteed basic income for all. Supporters wanted it because it would allow them to focus on their passions and not go to work.
Meanwhile those who don’t like to work have just taken a hit from Environment Canada. Apparently if the Oil Sands were entirely shut down, carbon emissions would be cut by an infinitesimal 12/100th’s of 1 percent! Seems a good time for a cost/benefit analysis.

Liberals, being Liberals

Uncategorized 19 Comments

This article actually has two news items in it.
The first is that the Liberals were warned by PricewaterhouseCoopers that sole-source contracts are idiotic.
The second is:

The government says there is looming capability gap when it comes to the CF-18s, which has caught observers and the opposition by surprise, since the previous Conservative government decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the jets flying until at least 2025. The Commons defence committee was told last month it would cost about $400 million to overhaul the 77 CF-18s.

Which, to me, reads a lot like helicopters.

University of Calgary

Tech 32 Comments

The single largest vulnerability in any computer system is between the keyboard and the seat.
This is what happened:
Patient Zero gets an email something along the lines like:
Dear Customer,
Courier was unable to deliver the parcel to you.
You can review complete details of your order in the find attached.
Yours faithfully,
Greg Marks,
Sr. Support Agent.
Which naturally has an attached zip file for you to open and examine this package you didn’t get.
Patient Zero tries to open the zip…except they haven’t upgraded WinZip or WinRar recently and it’s a spoofed name. It isn’t a zip file at all, it’s just named that.
The trojan is now on your system and here it gets more complicated based on the attackers, the variants of the virus, etc. Some will provide a point of entry for crackers to investigate the system/s, others will silently monitor the traffic for a while, the earlier variants will immediately start encrypting your system and any other network share attached to the system for which the user has write permissions. The later variants watch for backup processes to execute so that they can learn how to toast your backups too. (Which takes me on a separate rant on how using Windows/NFS shares for push backups without checking authentication is asking for trouble.)
So, PZ has toasted their system, toasted the company backups, toasted the company wide network share, because s/he was the accountant the Financial share is also toast. IT just ran basic backups to a Windows share instead of things like rsync over ssh to a root only mount and so the last three months of backups are also encrypted. Worst case scenario, the MIS system or production systems get done too.
What does the company do? You can’t ‘unencrypt’ it without the key. You get an email or a pop up telling you to send $20k worth of bit-coins to the attackers.
How to stop this
Lesson one: NEVER OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS FROM YOUR EMAIL PROGRAM.
Obviously ignore them from anyone you don’t personally know, but secondly save them on your system and scan them with your anti-virus before you open them. Usually you right click on the file and can select ‘Scan with xyz anti-virus’.
Lesson two: Turn off your darned shares. If you access ‘Calgary Office Share’ once per week, you don’t need a network share on your desktop to it. Learn how to mount it on demand. Hint: type \\machine\share in the URL bar in your file browser.
Lesson three: Companies need to start firing people over this instead of just the IT people who enabled it.
Lesson four: Start using the ‘Junk’ or ‘Spam’ tag on your email program. ‘Mark as Junk’ in Thunderbird. They are fairly advanced Bayesian filters that learn over time. But you have to teach them. If you don’t mark an email as Junk or Spam, it won’t learn and can’t identify subsequent spam. This must be a habit.
Lesson Five: Never trust the company/internet provider anti-virus on the mail server, if it even has one.

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