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Sophos Anti-Virus Update Identifies Sophos Code As Malware 245

Posted by timothy
from the auto-immune-disease dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday afternoon anti-virus company Sophos Inc. released a normal anti-virus definition update that managed to detect parts of their own software as malicious code and disabled / deleted sections of their Endpoint security suite, including its ability to auto-update and thus repair itself. For many hours on the 19th, Sophos technical call centers were so busy customers were unable to even get through to wait on hold for assistance. Today thousands of enterprise customers remain crippled and unable to update their security software." Sophos points out that not everyone will be affected: "Please note this issue only affects Windows computers."

Patent Troll Sues X-Plane 214

Posted by Soulskill

Comment: Re:How about just an iPhone and save even more? (Score 1) 372

Which is great until you discover a time related software bug that puts all 3 iPads into an endless reboot cycle, or you find that the documentation loaded onto the iPads is corrupt and the engine-out landing checklist is not available when you need it.

Even a complete failure of all iPads in the cockpit (however unlikely that is) will probably not be a big deal. You're forgetting that the crew still has radio contact with air traffic control and their company. They can still get vectored where they need to be and have whatever information they need read to them. There multiple thing that are far more likely that an obscure bug affecting multiple iPads simultaneously.

Comment: Re:Time equals money (Score 1) 158

by million_monkeys (#41275801) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Hackable Portable Music Player For Helicopters?

Seriously, this post is the very definition of "penny-wise, pound foolish".

$1000 is, what, like one flight's worth of fuel? It's like... maybe half of one month of one employee's health benefits? It's nothing.

Your time is worth far, far more.

$1000 per helicopter is more than nothing. But it's not just a money thing. You're also overlooking the time and paperwork to install it, plus any FAA paperwork (and time required for it) for certification in their operation. Once they have it, fixing/replacing it in the future requires all the hoops of a certified system. For that trouble they get a crappy, out of date product.

He's looking for an alternative. There may not be a simple one out there. But if he happens to find one that meets his criteria, odds are it will not only be cheaper, but much better. It's also quite possible that it will ultimately require less time and hassle than the certified system. Depending on what's out there, he could come away with substantial savings of money AND time, while equipping his fleet with a superior product. It's at least worth looking into.

Comment: Re:Here be no surprises (Score 1) 608

by million_monkeys (#41230205) Attached to: Obama and Romney Respond To ScienceDebate.org Questionnaire

The idea is to disconnect the money from the influence - you can promise a politician that you are giving a million dollars, but you can't prove it. There is no restriction on speech at all - you can "say" all you want with words or money. You just can't tie the two together in a provable fashion.

Apparently something like this system was tried in an election for judges in south florida - the result was that none of the candidates got a single dime.

Do you happen to have any links handy to document that? I've heard this claim before and if true it's quite telling and i'd like to know more. But I haven't seen anything more than a claim that it happened with judges somewhere in Florida.

Comment: Re:Oh, the delicious irony! (Score 1) 923

by million_monkeys (#41016993) Attached to: Ecuador Grants Asylum To Julian Assange

Try and look at this from the other point of view, leaving emotions aside for a minute.

You have a man accused of committing sexual crimes in Sweden. Sweden wants that one man to return to the country for questioning, in the country where he's accused.

That man says screw you, instead you have to figure out the logistics and spend a lot of taxpayer money to send over a whole team of interviewers to an entirely different country, so they can then enter a third country's embassy to suit his desires. This will invoke a whole host of legal, territorial, and logistical questions, based on who has sovereignty at what point, as well as cost a lot of money.

So... to avoid a situation that "will invoke a whole host of legal, territorial, and logistical questions, based on who has sovereignty at what point, as well as cost a lot of money", we now have him holed up in an embassy of a country that's granting him asylum, with the host country threatening to revoke diplomatic privileges in what may or may not be a treaty violation with far reaching implications on the sovereignty of embassies worldwide. While their lawyers figure out whether that's legal, the police are surrounding the building to make sure he doesn't get out and to keep the protesters at bay. Until they figure out an answer, diplomats on all sides are rattling their sabers vying for the upper hand. Meanwhile there's talk of whether it's legal to smuggle him out in a diplomatic bag as a way of crossing the British sidewalk that stands between the foreign soil of the embassy and its sovereign embassy car. All this coming after months of legal proceedings and requests between countries.

If Sweden's goal in not questioning him abroad was to avoid complication and expense, it seems like they failed miserably.

If you let go of your emotions for a moment, there are plenty of valid reasons for Sweden to want him to return to Sweden to be interviewed about a crime he's alleged to have committed in Sweden against Swedish women.

I'm all for having him interviewed and charged if there were crimes committed, but surely provoking an international incident isn't the most effective way to do that.

Comment: Re:yay! (Score 1) 184

But in this case, it's horribly wrong.

This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.

Perhaps. But that reveals the underlying flaw in the do no track (DNT) idea (even if companies want to honor it): It doesn't work if everyone opts not to be tracked. There's just too much perceived value from tracking users. When it's less than 1% of the total users asking not to be tracked, marketers don't really lose anything by honoring the system. But setting IE 10 to use DNT by default means 95+% of IE 10 users will be using DNT. That's a huge market share gone,

And maybe more importantly, DNT becomes no longer opt-in. It's now an opt out system for nearly half of the users. That adds a pretty powerful argument to ignore the opt out request: nearly all of the users didn't really choose to opt-out of tracking, they just selected the default setting. So tracking them doesn't really violate their wishes. Out of 20 people who say "don't track me", maybe one actually means it. If you're a web company, even with the best of intentions, it's hard to give up tracking 20 people just to honor the wishes of one.

(This post brought to you by a six pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.)

Comment: Re:Good on them (Score 3, Insightful) 141



Comment: Re:a 'fun' way sounds like a bad idea (Score 1) 1127

by million_monkeys (#40783639) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Preempting Sexual Harassment In the Workplace?


This does not sound like a good idea to me. It makes it seem like some kind of American college comedy film, where you wink and tsk tsk the naughty fratboys for their inevitable innuendos and they smirk and promise to behave better.

That's exactly what I thought when i read it. It's like he's making this into a joke. If they use these sorts of policies and ever end up defending against a harassment suit, it's not going to end well. The accuser is going to be on the stand testifying about all the harassment she suffered "...and then i complained to my manager, and all he did was make the offender wear a pink polka tie. Everybody got a big laugh out of that, like this was all a big joke to them." Any halfway decent lawyer is going to make that look like he was encouraging it, He's gonna get crucified.

I get that the guy asking is trying not to make a huge thing out of this so he can avoid destroying what i guess he thinks is a good work environment among the team, but he's clearly in over his head on this one.


Submitted by NormalVisual
Link to Original Source

+ - Tweet Lands Sexual Assault Victim In Trouble With Court->

Submitted by Empresz
Empresz writes "Savannah Dietrich, a 17-year-old Kentucky girl who was the victim of a sexual assault last August, could face contempt-of-court charges for outing her two juvenile attackers on Twitter. "I'm at the point, that if I have to go to jail for my rights, I will do it," Dietrich said. "If they really feel it's necessary to throw me in jail for talking about what happened to me as opposed to throwing these boys in jail for what they did to me, then I don't understand justice.""
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