Posts by Dr Paul Taylor 385 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
After Probate has been granted, wills in England & Wales are available for public inspection. (Scotland has its own legal system, which may be different, but probably not.)
Beware that banks will block incoming as well as outgoing payments as soon as you tell them that someone has died, so if you're an Executor, don't tell them until you've finished doing absolutely everything else with probate.
Putting these pieces of advice together, it's a bad idea to include passwords in wills.
How about restricting the lifetime of cookies too?
Oh no, Apple and Google wouldn't like that, because they would be able to collect so much info about us plebs.
Chucking out all but selected cookies after a day would be a simple solution. DOes anyone know of a browser plug-in that does this?
Whereas in the past universities ran on Unix-like machines with RFC-compliant emails, in recent years M$ has invaded.
M$ strips the RFC-compliant Received: lines and adds hundreds of lines of its own garbage and randomly labels messages as spam.
One academic email forum to which I have belonged for ages got shifted to a M$ institution. Now I can't ignore my spam folder because half the messages from that list end up there.
That is, even when their authors' direct messages arrive in the standard mailbox.
M$ breaks everything.
All this sounds like trying to solve the Halting Problem using AI, aka snake oil.
solving the six advanced mathematics problems faced by competitors in this year's IMO
IMO problems are not "advanced" --- they're strictly school level mathematics. They're just fiendishly difficult problems using school-level mathematics.
But if you pull all your hair out and finally discover the highly contorted idea behind the problem, the frustrating thing is, you just think, "Oh, so what was the point of that? --- I haven't improved my understanding of anything."
More frustrating is that there are people with academic jobs who continue through their entire academic careers just doing fiendishly difficult IMO problems and calling it "mathematics". Somebody told me that there's even a word in Russian for such people, but unfortunately I can't remember it.
At least if AI can knock of problems like that then the people who think such things are mathematics will finally be knocked off their pedestals and there might be academic jobs for conceptual mathematics
As a 40-year Unix/.../Linux user, I am enjoying (the rare English sunshine and) the Schadenfreude of the disruption to M$ users.
It has taken a while for me today to extract what actually happened from all the stuff on the news reports.
So someone in this company made a blunder and triggered automatic download to millions of Very Important Computers across the Globe.
The thing that was downloaded was not itself malware, but it caused enormous disruption.
Of course the malware groups in certain significant countries and the autocrats of those countries are taking notes.
All they need to do is to infiltrate their Nasty into this company, which will obligingly install it in Very Important Computers across the Globe.
I am surprised that nobody here has commented on how frightening this is!
No, "the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language."
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, from DATAMATION, July 1983, pp. 263-265 (Readers' Forum).
Well said, Julian.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that Turing would have seen the funny side.
On the other hand, he would be less impressed by the ease with which AI systems can be tricked into talking absolute gibberish or, worse, random far-right rants.
A gay great-grand-student of Turing's.
Today I did a routine "apt update" on my little laptop, but it jammed because it ran out of disk space. When I searched for what was taking the most space, it was all HUGE snap directory trees, in several places in the filesystem.
I'm going to have to switch another distro if I can't re-install (X)Ubuntu WITHOUT snap. Any suggestions?
I have gained even less idea from El Reg's reporting of what happened at the British Library than I did for the Post Office. The link supposedly to the report is actually to another story, that still doesn't summarise or link to the report.
I walked past the BL last week. It still has a banner outside saying that it's "open 24 hours a day online".
The the Great Unwashed would understand the need to prove correctness of software.
As as result of "nothing happened" we have the legal presumption that computer programs (but not humans) are assumed to be innocent until proved guilty. This was apparently one of the factors in the Post Office scandal, AND IS STILL the presumption in English law, I gather.
We also had loony brexiters claiming that "no deal brexit" would be "just like Y2K". Except the analogy would not be a "bug" in the software, but DELETING it altogether at midnight.
I come to El Reg and its often very well informed comments to get an understanding of things without the usual "filtering out" of technical detail that is done by mainstream journalists. But all I have seen here is the (fully justified) outrage that I can read elsewhere.
Does anyone with experience of how distributed accounting systems actually work have any plausible theory about what went wrong?
At first the Post Office made repeated denials that remote access to local terminals was possible. As people have said here, "of course" central PO and Fujitsu sysadmins had remote access.
But would El Reg Commentards really accuse their co-professionals of this degree of fraud? Surely the PO would have spotted that?
Then it was suggested that data synchronisation was the problem. Maybe there were "race conditions", either on individual transactions or the daily reporting. I still find it difficult to believe that these would account for the magnitude of the discrepancy.
But Alex Hern on the Guardian has written a more technically plausible story:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown
Does anyone here have anything to add to that?
"will be replaced by brute-force, extremely wasteful"
Grammatical error - I think you need the past tense, not the future, cf the discussion of Wirth's Law that we have had recently.
Actually, my thought was that this is yet another scheme to stop me from installing Linux on my own computer hardware.
Wikipedia calls it Wirth's Law but also gives several alternative expressions, such as "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away".
(Incidentally, Reiser was Martin Reiser, not Hans Reiser of the filesystem and murdered mail-order bride.)
We had an article and discussion recently, maybe this one, about how dramatically computers improved between 1983 and 1993, but how little they had done since then. That is, in terms of utility, not hardware.
I remember thinking, sometime during the 1990s, that we were probably then at the peak of usability of computers.
I almost missed seeing my Dad for the last time before he died because of this policy.
I got a mobile call with number withheld when I was on a bus that would have taken me to the hospital (where he stayed three months).
I didn't answer the call because at the time somebody else was harassing me and withholding their number.
If the phone had simply shown the hospital switchboard number, to distinguish the call from the other person, I would have answered.
It turns out that Dad had had a severe relapse, but he survived another two months. After he died, they took his brain out and sliced it up; he was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia (whilst Mum had Alzheimers, at the same time).
This is yet another case where Manglement makes decisions for "security" reasons, without thinking it through.
Please can someone here who works for the NHS tell us whether this is still the policy.
We are expected to talk with doctors (giving highly personal information and taking advice) without even the most basic confirmation that they are who they say they are. In line with this article, they could be scammers.
But they do!
Increasingly nowadays I send URLs with /private/ and /drafts/, which are "Disallow:"ed in my robots.txt, but then find them in my logs accessed by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc, or obfuscated into "safe" links.
These things have been explicitly enabled in the recipients' handling of incoming email. Or more likely by their pointy-haired Boss.
Anybody know of a way of blocking such accesses on a website?
Birmingham City Council's answer to overwhelming debt is like that of an adict to drugs or gambling --- take other people's property.
Ladywood is to the SW of the city centre, within the ring road. In the 1860s it was densely built up with Back-to-Back (slum) housing. My grandfather was born one in 1902.
The City Council inflicted its first "re-generation" on Ladywood in the 1960s. The back-to-backs and the whole community of business, pubs, schools, etc were demolished, leaving a wasteland. Ugly concrete tower blocks and 4-storey maisonettes were built to replace them. But only a fraction of the 15,000 residents were rehoused there.
The second re-generation was done in the 1990s. Miraculously, that time, the City Council were persuaded to involve the local people in the planning process. Joe Holyoak was the architectural advisor. My house was built in 1992, as part of a development advertised to "professionals".
Now there is a third "re-generation". The cabal who have planned this, in secret, in bed with a huge developer have led the people of the rest of Birmingham t believe that the 1960s tower blocks are typical of Ladywood. (In fact, the plan is to keep them, because people in houses with gardens are criminals.)
"Phase One" of the "re-generation" is compulsory purchase and demolition of exactly the area that actually benefitted in the 1960s and is as good as anywhere else in Birmingham (or anywhere).
Why? Because it is mainly privately owned. It is a sweetener to the developer, in the hope they will then build new tower blocks to replace the ugly Council maisonettes. But no developer in their right mind would demolish these houses. Thy will just give them a lick of paint, cram in some extra ones and re-sell them at twice the price for which they were stolen from the original owners.
If you live in Birmingham, please write to your Ward Councillor to tell them to stop this and concentrate on the debt caused by failing to pay women equally.
I had to get halfway down the article to learn what an immutable distribution is
But it still doesn't explain how this works, besides a few casual references to COW.
For the principal notion in the article, this is disappointing, considering that less important things do get explanation.
What I have wanted for a long time is a clear separation of system and userland, so that the system can be reinstalled but my personal configurations are preserved. I guess M$ is the root of this evil. Often nowadays "applications", or at leasy huge config files, get installed in userland.
My ad hoc solution is a load of symbolic links from /home/pt, which is nowadays full of this crud, into /paul, which is my own filespace. Of course this doesn't work if you're sysadmin even for a small group, let alone a company.
No. Gopher was barely more than a way of indexing documents served by FTP.
HTML turned the paradigm around: the document itself became primary, along with a way of indexing other documents.
Also, being able to "click" on things opened it up to The Great Unwashed.
At first I was skeptical of "hyper-text". Around the time of Noah (1970s, maybe), in the London Science Museum, I played with a demo of hyper-text intended for teaching. It was a history of the calendar. It was full of exercises - which you were forced to do in order to proceed. So I only had time to see the first chapter.
Nowadays, if some company wants you to do an "online survey", it's just like that. Typically it starts with the personal data, in case you get bored later. So I refuse to do them.
A colleague first told me about "xmosaic" on 24 May 1993.
When I first saw the WWW I thought it would be a democratic revolution. People could post their materials in a way that cut across Manglement.
What a dystopia we have now!
I hated HTML - it's so verbose! I thought that, since Berners-Lee was surrounded by people writing Physics in LaTeX, he should have based the language on that.
What a horrendous mess we have now!
I put my name on their mailing list, so they tell me about other campaigns and ask for money.
But they have no campaign info website and I got no answer when I asked for a form letter to send to my GP.
I did write to my GP in November and a month later demanded an acknowledgement, but I have still had no substantive reply.
Does anyone know of a coordinated campaign website?
"When I were a lad", say up to 1980, tools had an identifiable function. A reasonably intelligent and practical person could take them out of their case and see how they worked, how robust they were, how to use them and maybe how to repair them. Maybe they worked in some shoddy Heath-Robinson way, but at least that was visible, and maybe there was a more robust and expensive alternative.
Now everything is magic, Heath-Robinson, smoke-and-mirrors."Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", said Arthur C. Clarke. Well yes, but I'm not so sure that it really is more advanced than reading tea leaves.
I had to have a face-to-face row with my bank manager to get them to record that I was going on holiday to Argentina. They claim to have ways of detecting fraud. How, when I had never been to South America before? By no better method than reading tea leaves.
What the hell does this Artificial alleged Intelligence do? How does it work? Or is it glorified tea leaves?
I can imagine a useful tool using this technology. When one does a web search, often there are numerous pages with essentially the same text. It would be good to have a tool to merge them, identify the original version, corrections or errors that have been introduced, etc. Maybe there are conflicting versions, or opposite sides of a story: these could be distinguished. For centuries,historians have spent their lives in libraries doing this by hand. In the future, digital historians will have to sort out multiple versions of documents in a vastly larger dataset than classicists or medievalists ever had to play with.
But of course such a tool is not as sexy or profitable.
the spoofed domain state.gov includes the spoofed domain state.gov includes Outlook’s SPF record (spf.protection.outlook.com) into its own SPF record (spf.protection.outlook.com) into its own SPF record
If (large) organisations sent out their own email from their own IP address space, instead of from Outlook, Messagelabs, etc., then this hole would be fixed. Human recipients could also see for themselves, without doing a recursive SPF lookup, whether the email comes from who it says it does.
If they include the SPF record of some mail handler that's also used by The Great Unwashed, their authentication goes down the drain.
Whatever the problems with SPF, I (can in principle) be more confident of where email has come from than a phone call, especially (purportedly) from a bank that starts by askingme "security questions". So far as I can gather, there is no way of tracing a phone call, even a "landline" one.
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