Um.
I’ll gladly take any evidence that undermines the absurd war on crypto, but I can’t help but notice that the attackers did not in fact hit Britain, or Civitas, or La Défense. Nowhere in the source article does it say that the folder contained any details on any of the actual targets that have been hit.
As far as I can see it’s entirely possible that this is a deliberate attempt at disinformation. I don’t see then that it proves much of anything about their opsec.
My wife’s desktop looks like that. She organises her files into rectangular blocks which she calls “Folders”. When she runs out of space she zooms out.
See, now if only we had let the gov’t snoop around in our devices all the time… 
So, like the dozens of BB articles about how to use crypto and TOR nodes?
If these guys were reading Techdirt they would already know how to use crypto.
Also, this same excuse: “They need to keep secrets to keep us safe from terrorists!” is used to protect law-breaking intelligence agents and government officials from accountability. Thing is, their definition of “terrorist” is broad enough to encompass legitimate, legal political groups in the US. The kind of secrecy you are advocating for is in tension with free speech rights, and I personally favor free speech rights over someone else whose agenda I don’t agree with deciding what I need protection from.
And yet - their plan worked out fine. What does that tell you about ‘intelligence’ services?
Whats the point of having a background wallpaper if you shit looks like that?
Also, I love the “screen capped wallpaper” prank for people like this.
Has it occurred to you that their operation security worked perfectly, and will continue to do so in future, because it is not physically possible for the police to visit everybody and inspect all the files on their computers? They could have kept the entire plan on an A5 notepad under a floorboard and the chance of its being discovered before the event is equally remote.
One problem for the security agencies is that WW2 was the time of the great successes of SIGINT, and they have been, in the way of generals always wanting to fight the last war, trying to follow the same SOP ever since. HUMINT seems to have been badly neglected, especially as far as the Arabic-speaking world goes, and has been complicated by having “allies” like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Yet as Philby and Snowden show (bookending the period) HUMINT can give enormous success very quickly.
In the Middle East the Russians have the advantage that they can use the very effective intelligence networks of the Assad government, while NATO doesn’t even know whether someone is a “moderate rebel” or a member of Al-Queda.
So what’s in the PORN folder sitting to the left of the TARGET folder?
Expense reports.
Once did that at work. My boss simply tested out the left mouse button, found that it couldn’t manipulate one of the “icons” and immediately threw away the mouse. He then got me a new mouse, I plugged it in and found that the right button worked perfectly. Could have easily gotten myself a free mouse…
Contrary to the old joke, “Military intelligence” is not an oxymoron. However, it may well be true that the brightest officers are flying planes, commanding ships and generally making stuff work, and the “intelligence” services, who think they are the cleverest, may have a lot of keyboard-pounding dead wood.
Dude… should have said the monitor interface went bad. That it allows you to see things, but not click on them.
Get a new monitor, fix your prank, new monitor seems to fix issue - offer to dispose of old monitor.
They were actually trying to remove the internal hard drive. Old-school Mac users have fucking weird muscle memory.
True story: For a while my work laptop’s desktop looked a lot like this. I had the computer open while my mom was visiting and she said, “Is that all the files on your computer???” Like, she was seriously impressed that my computer had this many files on it. I was like, um, it’s all the files on my desktop.
But who knows when you might need to open Acrobat Reader directly instead of double-clicking a PDF! Or what if you can’t find your shortcut to GameMaker? Better have another one a few icons away!
I would bet all my money that this person’s computer is still covered with the same manufacturers’ advertising stickers it came out of the box with. And maybe even the screen protector film, although with some bubbles in it where it peeled off naturally and got stuck back on.
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