Random News Stories

[Harold Hallikainen]

I had the battery replaced in my phone. They also wanted the PIN to access the device. I really did not want to give it to them since that gives access to my banking info, passwords for pretty much everything, etc. It SEEMS that manufacturers should equip devices with a maintenance password that allows testing of the system without access to the customer's data.

[Leo Enticknap]

From Ars Technica:

Thinking about taking your computer to the repair shop? Be very afraid

Not surprisingly, female customers bear the brunt of the privacy violations.

If you’ve ever worried about the privacy of your sensitive data when seeking a computer or phone repair, a new study suggests you have good reason. It found that privacy violations occurred at least 50 percent of the time, not surprisingly with female customers bearing the brunt.

Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied data onto a personal device. Devices belonging to females were more likely to be snooped on, and that snooping tended to seek more sensitive data, including both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, documents, and financial information.
Blown away

“We were blown away by the results,” Hassan Khan, one of the researchers, said in an interview. Especially concerning, he said, was the copying of data, which happened during repairs for one from a male customer and the other from a female. “We thought they would just look at [the data] at most.”

The amount of snooping may actually have been higher than recorded in the study, which was conducted from October to December 2021. In all, the researchers took the laptops to 16 shops in the greater Ontario region. Logs on devices from two of those visits weren’t recoverable. Two of the repairs were performed on the spot and in the customer's presence, so the technician had no opportunity to surreptitiously view personal data.

In three cases, Windows Quick Access or Recently Accessed Files had been deleted in what the researchers suspect was an attempt by the snooping technician to cover their tracks. As noted earlier, two of the visits resulted in the logs the researchers relied on being unrecoverable. In one, the researcher explained they had installed antivirus software and performed a disk cleanup to “remove multiple viruses on the device.” The researchers received no explanation in the other case.

Here’s a breakdown of the six visits that resulted in snooping:

image.png

The laptops were freshly imaged Windows 10 laptops. All were free of malware and other defects and in perfect working condition with one exception: the audio driver was disabled. The researchers chose that glitch because it required only a simple and inexpensive repair, was easy to create, and didn’t require access to users’ personal files.

Half of the laptops were configured to appear as if they belonged to a male and the other half to a female. All of the laptops were set up with email and gaming accounts and populated with browser history across several weeks. The researchers added documents, both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, and a cryptocurrency wallet with credentials.

The researchers also configured the laptops to run a custom logging app that used the Windows Steps Recorder utility in the background. The utility captured the screen on every mouse click and recorded each key pressed by the user. The researchers also enabled Windows Audit Policy to log access to any file on the device.

The researchers then brought the laptops to two national outlets, two regional ones, and four local ones. Half the customers were male, and the other half were female.

Besides finding widespread snooping, the study uncovered other problems. Among them: The vast majority of repair shops provide no privacy policy and those that do have no means of enforcing them. Even worse, repair technicians required a customer to surrender their login password even when it wasn’t necessary for the repair needed.

These findings came from a separate part of the study, in which the researchers brought an Asus UX330U laptop into 11 shops for a battery replacement. This repair doesn’t require a technician to log in to the machine, since the removal of the back of the device and access to the device BIOS (for checking battery health) is all that’s needed. Despite this, all but one of the repair service providers asked for the credentials to the device OS anyway.

When the customer asked if they could get the repair without providing the password, three refused to take the device without it, four agreed to take it but warned they wouldn’t be able to verify their work or be responsible for it, one asked the customer to remove the password, and one said they would reset the device if it was required.

In all, the findings from the study were:

• Privacy policies and the practice of communicating protocols and controls to protect customers’ data do not exist across service providers of all sizes.
• Service providers largely (10/11) require “all access” to the device, even when it is unnecessary.
• Technicians often snoop on customers’ data (6/16) and sometimes copy those to external devices (2/16).
• Technicians who violate privacy often do so carefully to not generate evidence (1/6) or remove such evidence (3/6).
• A significant proportion of broken devices (26/79, 33 percent) are not repaired due to privacy concerns. For the devices that get repaired, device owners are concerned about threats to their privacy but do not use the proper controls to protect their data.

The results likely confirm what many more experienced computer users already know: that their data is vulnerable to snooping or copying any time they surrender their device to an untrusted or unknown individual, particularly when the individual has their login password. But for a much larger percentage of people wanting to recover crucial data on a broken device, the findings are likely a wake-up call with few, if any, good solutions.

“Our investigation shows an absence of policies and controls to safeguard customers’ data across all types of repair service providers,” the researchers concluded. “Our work calls to action device manufacturers, OS developers, repair service providers, and regulatory bodies to take appropriate measures to safeguard customers’ privacy in the repair industry.”

I'm in two minds about this. At first glance, it does seem worrying and gross that this sort of thing goes on. As against which, one of Britain's most notorious pedophiles was caught when PC repair techs fixing his laptop found kiddie porn. If they hadn't looked, he could have gone on molesting children for years, and might never have been caught. And then there's Hunter Biden's laptop, which of course I'm not going to discuss due to forum rules, but it does raise the question of other forms of criminal activity being discovered by this route. Finally, there is the question of liability if computers with this sort of evidence on them pass through a repair shop without being caught.

In any case, these techs were clearly of limited ability. If they'd removed (or even just disconnected the SATA cable) from the drives in these PCs, connected them to another computer and imaged them (e.g. using a Clonezilla live boot drive), they would have gotten all the files and nothing would show up in any logs.

[Harold Hallikainen]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/s...smid=share-url

Time Is Running Out for the Leap Second


To the world’s timekeepers, the leap second is a kludge, a bane, a pain in the little hand. Now they’re proposing to ditch it. Will our days ever be the same?

Article too long to post, but link above should work.

I'm thinking UTC should not have leap second. Instead, local time zone offsets would be adjusted very infrequently to align noon within a half hour. UTC would not necessarily be a local time at a fixed location but would, instead, slightly change location as the earth's rotational speed varies. Perhaps even better would be the use of a 64 bit Unix time stamp that does not necessarily relate to the time at any location. Local time zones would be an offset from the UTC time stamp (by the way, this is the way I did time zones in some products - I took the UTC offset in hours, multiplied by 3600 and stored that value. When a local time was to be displayed, I added the offset to the UTC time stamp and ran it though the standard C functions to display date and time. More recently, products like the IRC-28C and LSS-200 do not care about local time or time zones. Everything is done as a UTC time stamp and javascript in the web UI converts to local time).

Harold
https://w6iwi.org

[Leo Enticknap]

Probably not a good read if you're about to have dinner. From The Daily Telegraph:

The gruesome WWI treatment that’s making a comeback on the NHS

Data show the use of larval therapy to treat hard-to-heal wounds has been rising steadily, despite the ‘yuck factor’

Previous research has shown maggot therapy is effective in treating hard-to-heal skin wounds, while other studies have shown it is a cost-effective method.

Maggot therapy was accepted for use by the NHS in 2004 and one UK firm – BioMonde, based in Bridgend, south Wales – rears thousands of green bottle blowflies every year to sell to the NHS and across Europe.

The firm sells 9,000 tea-bag style “biobags” full of larvae to the NHS every year.

‘Natural aversion to creepy crawlies’

The NHS Digital data show the technique has been gradually increasing since 2007, when records began. The figures dipped in 2019/20 to 1,190 treatments and 776 in 2020/21, likely as a result of the pandemic.

To treat wounds that won’t heal with antibiotics, or as a “last resort” in a patient’s treatment, the “tea bag” full of larvae, which are no bigger than 1mm, is placed on top of the open tissue, covered with a dressing and left for up to four days.

The maggots then feed on the dead tissue and, as some research suggests, secrete antimicrobial molecules which disinfect the wound.

Yamni Nigam, professor of healthcare science at Swansea University, told BBC Radio 4 Today: “Then they drink all that slurry and soup back up, through the bag, and then you remove the bag full of all the process of the wound.”

A survey of nurses’ attitudes towards the treatment, carried out by Prof Nigam, found that specialist wound nurses are highly in favour of the therapy after seeing its benefits and effectiveness.

“Whereas non-specialist wound nurses, and general staff nurses, don’t really want to use maggots,” she said.

“Certainly everybody, I think, has a natural aversion to creepy crawlies and most people tend to have an inherent disgust as far as maggots are concerned,” she added.

A previous survey, cited in her study and published in the Journal of Wound Care, found that health professionals were more likely to be disgusted by the thought of using maggots than their patients.

There was a “lack of confidence” on the part of professionals, which could be alleviated by training and education, she said.

“The yuck factor can be overcome through the enthusiasm of the innovators and early adopters who, as influencers, are championing the use of maggots,” the study concluded.

Maggot therapy on the NHS has surged by almost 50 per cent as the treatment becomes a key tool in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Data from NHS Digital show the number of treatments given in England increased from 886 in 2008/9 to 1,305 a decade later in 2018/19.

Modern use of medical maggots dates back to the First World War, when a surgeon discovered soldiers’ wounds healed faster when they were “colonised” by maggots.

But use of the treatment dwindled in the 1940s with the rise of antibiotics.

However, because the rise of antibiotic resistance has made wounds harder to treat, medics are being forced to return to the out-of-fashion approach.

[Leo Enticknap]

I don't know if optimizing the line for fax/modem use was ever done in the UK or not. For a few years before I got ADSL in the late '90s and early '00s, I had a fax/modem card in my PC, which used the same POTS line in my apartment as the voice phone did. I used the fax function in it very rarely - maybe two or three times a year - but recall that the speed seemed reasonable to me. I certainly got 56K out of the modem with no issues. So if that optimization was happening, it was being done dynamically on detection of the carrier tone, as Jim describes.

I guess that must also be the way that combined fax/phone devices distinguished between an incoming voice call and an incoming fax call: it picked up, and then if it detected a modem carrier tone, activated the fax function, and if not, caused the voice phone to ring and continued to play a ringing tone to the caller until a human lifted the handset.

My father was a freelance journalist working out of a home office throughout the '80s and '90s. I remember him buying a fax machine in the mid '80s, when a postal workers' strike left him pretty much unable to do his job. This was at a time when almost no-one had one in their home, and it cost what would be thousands in today's money. He also had a separate line installed for it. I remember him telling me that he estimated that it paid for itself within a few months, through a combination of lower postal costs, time saved not having to mail stuff, and work he picked up that he would not have been able to without it.

If VOIP completely supersedes POTS (and in my household, it pretty much has - we ditched our international calling plan when my mother in the UK got an iPhone last year, and now do all our international voice communication with my relatives in the UK, and my wife's in Canada and Trinidad, using FaceTime), the traditional phone number will become nothing more than an addressing method, primarily for cellular.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I think that more than having to support echo suppression, the telephone companies are moving to IP-based transport with audio compression. The audio compression is optimized for voice but creates havoc for modems such as those used in fax machines.

[Jim Cassedy]

My understanding is that a fax machine plugs into the same POTS landline as a regular landline phone;.

For a while in the late 80's & early 90's, I worked as a network engineer for the the phone company when FAX & modems were very common. I don't know how the British phone system was provisioned, but here in the US, the electronic switching systems at the time 'listened" in to the first few seconds of a connection and one of the things that it did if it heard that "hand-shake' tone was to disable certain echo-cancelling devices in the transmission chain, and do a quick sort of 'line-eq" to optimize the line for data transmission. Of course, if you wanted to spend the extra money, you could buy a 2nd 'dedicated fax line' which was permanently provisioned & optimized within the network for modem transmission, at least from your originating end.
- - and as the article mentioned, there are still some business that require use of FAX rather than e-mail for certain types of communications. I ran into that a lot when having to send or receive legal and medical documents when I was dealing with my elderly mom when she was alive and later dealing with her estate trust . The funny part is, I still keep a dedicated "fax number" through an online fax service- - so while it does actually 'dial out' over the POTS network to the receiver, on my end, I'm sending & receiving all my documents via an e-mail interface to the FAX network provider . .

[Leo Enticknap]

I'm a but confused by this story. It appears that fax machines are to disappear in the UK, yet from the detail, I don't see how this rule change makes that happen.

Telegraph[/URL]]Fax machines to finally disappear after proposed Ofcom rule change

BT will no longer be legally required to provide connections

Fax machines are finally set to disappear after the telecoms regulator agreed to drop a legal requirement for BT to provide connections.

Ofcom has proposed rule changes that mean BT and Hull telecoms operator KCOM will no longer be required to provide fax services under its universal service obligation (USO) rulebook.

The move comes amid diminishing use of fax machines, which were a common sight in offices in the 1980s and 90s, but are now rarely used after being replaced by email.

Fax machines now only tend to be used by some NHS Trusts for medical records and by law firms and football agents for sharing legal documents.

In August, it was reported that more than 800 fax machines were still being used by the NHS, nearly four years after the Government vowed to phase them out.

Ofcom said: “Currently, our telephone universal service obligation, which ensures that a minimum set of phone services are available at an affordable price to people across the UK, includes fax.

“However, the technology has become increasingly outdated and the phone network that is used to deliver messages is also being upgraded. Once this is completed, fax services can no longer be guaranteed to work in the same way.

“As a result, we’re proposing changes to the rules that will mean telecom providers will no longer be required to provide fax services under the universal service obligation. There is more information about the changes on our news centre.”

Ofcom’s USO rulebook requires two designated telecom providers – BT and KCOM – to provide universal service in the UK and was introduced to ensure phone services are available to people across Britain at an affordable price.

However, the current set of USO rules, which require BT and KCOM to provide fax services, were established in 2003 when fax machines were far more prevalent and the use of email and instant messaging was not widespread.

Ofcom added: “Almost 20 years later, and the telecoms landscape has changed. Not only are alternatives to fax machines now more widely available, migration of telephone networks to internet protocol (IP) technology means fax services can no longer be guaranteed to work in the same way.”

Ofcom has launched a consultation on implementing changes to its rules, which it expects to publish early next year.

My understanding is that a fax machine plugs into the same POTS landline as a regular landline phone; therefore, if British Telecom still has a universal obligation to provide landline service, then by extension it still has the obligation to provide the connection for a fax machine. And, as has been noted on the printers are crap thread, combined voice phone and fax devices are still widely available.

I suspect that this could be a precursor to a proposal to abandon the universal service obligation for POTS in its entirety, leaving VOIP as the only voice communication offering. I can see that this would make sense if BT intends to replace copper with fiber. Telegrams and Telex have gone the same way into the history books: it wouldn't surprise me if POTS is next.

[Harold Hallikainen]

It's interesting that they are not dropping DST in the northern border regions, though a significant portion of that northern border is Arizona, which does not use DST. A while back the US Senate passed the "Daylight Preservation Act" (I think that was the name) unanimously, as I recall. It would put everyone on DST year round. But, luckily, the House has not taken it up. If people want to get up earlier in the summer, that's their prerogative. No need to mess with the clock and "God's time."

[Leo Enticknap]

I bought this book as an impulse buy at Amsterdam airport, before beginning a 12-hour flight. This was in 2007 or '08, a few years before everyone had electronic entertainment devices, and I'd forgotten to pack my customary couple of paperbacks. It was an eye-opener: I had no idea that DST had been such a political hot potato.

The justification for it when it was first introduced (during World War I) was energy saving. At that time, a much higher proportion of electricity usage was for lighting than is the case now. What struck me about the Mexican change reported above was "While there appear to be energy-saving benefits by switching to daylight saving, the Mexican government says they are minimal and can be countered." In other words, we use LEDs for lighting now and most electricity consumption is to do other stuff, and it doesn't matter whether it's dark or light outside when that other stuff is done. So the selling point of DST when it was first invented, no longer exists.

I can't quote you the actual chapter and verse, but my understanding is that per US federal law, all that individual states can do is to opt in or out of DST. If they opt in, they have to change the clocks back and forth on the same day as all the other states, and as of now, only Arizona and Hawaii opt out and have standard time year round. Hawaii is so near the Equator that DST would be complete insanity - they have around 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark pretty much all the year round. The same applies to the southern end of Mexico, which I suspect could be behind their new law, and why the northern states of Mexico have been given an opt out from it.

I completely agree that the changing of the clocks ritual is stressful, unpleasant, and knocks you out for a week or two afterwards, and would like to see the end of it. Maybe there is a case for DST in longitudes that have a big variation in daylight hours between summer and winter, but that is no reason to impose it on those parts of the planet that don't.

[Frank Cox]

When I was a kid every town decided on its own timezone. The town I lived in was an hour either ahead or behind the next town over (I can't remember which) and both were different than the nearest city. I remember it always played hell with the television program listings in the paper since they printed it in the "city time" and we always had to translate it into "our time". I vaguely remember something about there being a half-hour offset somewhere in there too.

Eventually the province passed the Time Act and put everyone onto the same time. There was some opposition to that too even though it ultimately simplified everyone's life.

People didn't travel or communicate over long distances then like they do now so it wasn't as big of a problem then as it would be these days, of course. It was inconvenient, but it's what people were used to. Until they passed that Time Act, anyway.

[Leo Enticknap]

And 38 officially recognized time zones.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Which "Gods Clock" are they going to use. There are over 8000 known gods.

[Leo Enticknap]

Daily Telegraph:

Mexico is poised to scrap daylight saving time and return to “God’s clock” after government officials argued there were health, personal safety and energy-saving benefits.

The country’s senate approved the measure with a 59-25 vote, after it already passed the lower house of congress. It will now go to President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to be signed into law before Sunday - when the clocks would go back for the last time.

Jorge Alcocer, the health secretary, said Mexico should return to “God’s clock”, or standard time, arguing that setting the hours back or forward damages people’s health.

Changing the time twice a year disrupts people’s circadian rhythm, which is closely linked to sunlight, resulting in more people feeling tired.

Mexico City is currently five hours behind the UK. It would be six hours behind in the summer.

The measure would mean an earlier sunrise and darkness falling an hour earlier on summer evenings.

Advocates argue that people would be safer on their way to work in the morning.

While there appear to be energy-saving benefits by switching to daylight saving, the Mexican government says they are minimal and can be countered.

In 2021, the savings were only 537GWh, which is equivalent to 0.16 per cent of national consumption and savings of £49 million, the government said.

“This new law seeks to guarantee the human right to health and increase safety in the mornings, procure the well-being and productivity of the population, and contribute to saving electric energy,” the Senate said on Twitter.

The change will not apply to northern border states, however, so as not to disrupt trade and the flow of people.

However, some economists have argued that going back to standard time might cause trouble for financial markets in Mexico by putting US East Coast markets so far ahead.

Businesses such as restaurants that have become accustomed to staying open later may have to close earlier as many crime-wary Mexicans often try to be off the streets after dark.

Finally, some sanity! There has been campaigning to end the clock change ritual here in California for years, but the proposal has always been for year round DST, not year round standard time. If you don't get up until well after breakfast time I can see how this might be attractive, but for those of us who need to commute it would be a very depressing prospect. Two weeks before the clocks go back, I'm writing that at nearly 7am, and it's still pitch black outside, and very depressing. In the middle of the summer it isn't fully dark until 9.30pm, which makes it very difficult to get children to bed at a reasonable time, and it is actually difficult for me, too, as on service call days I typically have to get up at 3-4am. Year round standard time would mitigate both these problems.

As for the safety aspect, I'd much rather drive in the dark in the afternoon, when I've been awake for several hours and am fully alert, than first thing in the morning when I've only just got up, and am likely having to share the road with hung over drivers. With any luck, Mexico's move will form a powerful argument against California adopting year round DST.

[Leo Enticknap]

Two crazies to start the day:

Fox News:

North Carolina woman cited by police for shooting Mountain Dew cans in backyard: 'Don't DEW this'

A North Carolina woman was issued a criminal citation this week for shooting at cans of Diet Mountain Dew in her backyard.

Gastonia Police Department officers responded to reports of shots fired in the neighborhood and found a 64-year-old woman who said she was firing a revolver at the soda cans because she didn’t approve of her father drinking them, the department said on Facebook.

"We totally understand that not everybody is a fan of the Dew but we can’t stress enough how dangerous this is!" the department said.

It continued, "There are much safer alternatives to disposing of beverages that you don’t like instead of using the full bottles as target practice…in your backyard… in your neighborhood… surrounded by other homes and people."

The department added, "guns and Diet Mountain Dew don’t mix!"

The woman was cited with discharging a firearm within the city limits.

"From the just when you think you’ve heard it all file," one commenter wrote on the post.

"Come on people, this is Gastonia. SUN DROP ONLY," another added.

"I would fully understand if it had been dr. Pepper," a third quipped.

And closer to home, from the LA Daily News:

A 65-year-old woman who police say was videotaped swinging a pickaxe to smash windows at a Pasadena home was charged Wednesday, Oct. 26, with felony vandalism.

Beverly Ann Baker caused an estimated $20,000 in damage to the eight windows Monday at a home in the 1700 block of Asbury Drive, Pasadena police Lt. Rudy Lemos said.

Baker is due to enter a plea on Friday in Superior Court in Pasadena, said Matthew Krasnowski, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

Police had no motive for the attack on the home, which was reported at about 4:50 p.m. The video showed the vandal, wearing a flowing green dress, taking a few swings, leaving and then returning to inflict more damage.

The vandal was gone when police arrived, but a resident helped police track the woman to the 1600 block of Casa Grande Street. That’s when Baker was arrested. She was being held at Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood in lieu of $20,000 bail.

At least the Mountain Dew shooter had an actual motive, albeit a somewhat bizarre one. The Pasadena psycho looks like Carrie Nation smashing up bars in the nineteenth century, but unlike Carrie Nation, no-one has any idea as to why, and she isn't willing to tell us. The (Armenian) victim is claiming racism, but no evidence for that has entered the public domain as yet - it looks completely random.