It is no longer safe to organize a protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas.

Source: The Supreme Court abolishes the right to mass protest in three US states – Vox

Zeus feels a more beffitting name for an all-electric Atlas, surely?

Source: Boston Dynamics’ new electric Atlas robot is swiveling nightmare fuel – The Verge

Waymo can operate on San Francisco freeways without a human driver, but the company is still only testing on freeways with a human driver in the front seat.

Source: 7 Waymo robotaxis block traffic to San Francisco freeway on-ramp | TechCrunch

The FCC stipulates as part of the rules around being a licensed amateur, I am unable to encrypt or obscure the the content of any message. I may encode (not encrypt) as long as the ability to decode is part of the public record. The only exception to this is remote control of things like space stations (AMSAT) where the control point needs to be authorized.

This got me to thinking about how such regulations would apply to trusted computing. And now I want to take that to the next level. As an academic exercise, just how far can I take an “air gapped” (as in unplugged from the internet) computer network and still ensure that there is trust. What does trust look like in this scenario? What needs to be trusted?

I intend to find out!

TTFN!

Don’t get me started on VCARB…. I’m not even going to link that one.

Microsoft’s Dangerous Addiction To Security Revenue – SentinelOne

I want to point out this one paragraph and say, bravo!

They need to throw away this poisonous idea of security as a separate profit center and rededicate themselves to shipping products that are secure-by-default while providing all security features to all customers. I understand the need to charge for log storage or human services, but we should no longer accept the idea that Microsoft’s basic enterprise offerings (including those paid for by the US taxpayer) should lack the basic features necessary to protect against likely attacks.

Alex Stamos

If you use Microsoft products on a regular basis in a professional capacity, you see this tendency of Microsoft to upsell what could be basic security features that any organization should employ to protect themselves. Microsoft’s sales people have a tendency to get excited about, and spend a great deal of time praising, a new Microsoft365 or Azure feature and then when pressed on license requirements, will state after the entire presentation, that it requires either an E5 license or is a separate SKU entirely. “Just upgrade to an E5 license and you’re all set! What’s wrong with you!?” I think they know that if they start by saying “new E5 level feature” people will lose interest.

Many organizations choose E3 because it’s “good enough” but I think the real reason is that its cheaper. I don’t blame them. When you start doing the math the E5 license costs can become intolerable real fast. But what do you lose?

In the good old days of on-prem you had all the logging you could want and the only real cost was disk space, or speed if you chose verbose logging options. You could easily clear that up by rotating the logs. And you want to keep logs. Logs are bread and butter in the security world. Threat hunting and incident response would be a shot in the dark without logs.

Enter Microsoft365 and the Azure cloud, and Microsoft’s premium price tag for logging access. Microsoft Azure logging facilities are terrible and you are subject to changes in the “user experience” that can and will break your workflows. If you want better access to those logs, be prepared to pay a premium. The same goes for simply accessing certain logs for security purposes that you would otherwise easily retrieve on-prem at no additional monthly cost.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, the EDR incarnation of their Defender antivirus product, has a threat hunting/incident response feature. If you get the EDR license for Defender you don’t get the log query functionality unless you have an even more pricey license per user.

This is not to mention all the other premium security protections that you have to subscribe to in order to fully secure your cloud tenant. This is the “nickel meet dime meet existential danger” problem of the cloud, where it’s not merely costly and inconvenient, it can have real world consequences as we all wait for Microsoft to admit the next breach that “hit a small percentage of our customers” when said customers could have had faster warning had they only subscribed to Microsoft’s coveted E5 license and paid a small fortune for all the other logging access, a dozen or so SKUs that require a monthly fortune.

Cloud security takes a team of security people, and not just Microsoft’s Security Resource Center.

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley – ZNetwork

I was struck by two things in this Article. The first is how much we’ve been mislead on what’s really going down in San Francisco. The second is just how much San Francisco’s fate is tied to the whims and machinations of the tech-bro elite.

Fast Radio Bursts – XKCD

Finally, a great XKCD strip about noise in the data. We’ve all been there, even the blue team.

Moscow says SpaceX’s internet service ‘cannot be officially used here in any way’.

Source: Elon Musk denies selling Starlink to Russia after Ukraine claims use in war

I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised Starlink made its way over to Russia. I’m hoping to be surprised if Elon does something about it. I’m not holding my breath. Effective altruists don’t really care about the present day and it doesn’t take the chosen one any closer to mars, so….

On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees found out they had been laid off in the company’s third round of job cuts last year. Not long after, music fans around the world realized that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working. These two […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Source: Spotify’s layoffs put an end to a musical encyclopedia, and fans are pissed

We should all be watching carefully what is happening to genuine huma produced content. The tech-bro corporate dystopia we find ourselves in hit the creatives hard, and it continues to destroy truly human work in favor of hard algorithms and the “promise of AI” wether we like it or not.

Enlarge / The Rings of Power… now in HDR10+ for ad-tier users. (credit: Prime Video ) On January 29, Amazon started showing ads to Prime Video subscribers in the US unless they pay an additional $2.99 per month. But this wasn’t the only change to the service. Those who don’t pay up also lose features; their accounts no longer support Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos. As noticed by German tech outlet

Source: Prime Video cuts Dolby Vision, Atmos support from ad tier—and didn’t tell subs

I don’t know about you, but Amzon just keeps getting better and better.

So-called ‘smart home’ appliances and gadgets have become an ever-more present thing the past years, with nary a coffeemaker, AC unit or light bulb for sale today that doesn’t have an associated smartphone app, cloud service and/or subscription to enable you to control it from the beach during your vacation, or just set up automation routines to take tedium out of your busy schedule. Yet as much

Source: How To Build A Fully Offline Smart Home, Or Why You Should Not

Microsoft has launched flighting for Windows Server systems enrolled in its Windows Insider open software testing program. […]

Source: Microsoft introduces flighting for Windows Server insiders

I have yet to meet anyone using insider builds, let alone an expensive Windows Server license for an insider build. Free licensing for insiders would be a boon for Microsoft, provided the licensee can pass some basic requirements (testing, not in prod, etc). But it’s been some years since Microsoft ditched the whole Technet license thing and I don’t think we’ll ever see holistic QA from Microsoft, not when their testers all probably write malware after discovering flaws in early releases.