Posts by Dr Paul Taylor

Ransomware gang runs ads for Microsoft Teams to pwn victims

Indeed, you would be installing code that can remotely wipe your device, at least according to this El Reg story and this M$ documentation.

Europe preps Digital Euro to enter circulation in 2029

the bloc needs a Euro version of Visa and MasterCard

Because they are yet more oligopolies from Trumpistan, so having a European version is another aspect of Sovereignty.

Ubuntu Unity hanging by a thread as wunderkind maintainer gets busy with life

Thanks for sharing your professional view, which is why we read the comments on El Reg, albeit usually about IT things. But I'm guessing that you're not a native English speaker, because "facile" nowadays has a derogatory meaning rather than the original one from Latin. "Proficient" might be a better word.

How did Canonical do this?

Why is a whole distribution --- not just one program --- being promoted by Canonical as an official flavour of Ubuntu when it depends on a single schoolboy (or even a single adult)? This strikes me as a breach of Duty of Care to him, as well as to the community.

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Maybe my comment was ambiguous. I trust El Reg for the facts about IT. The Guardian sometimes writes ok stuff about politics and other things.

Bad IT journalism

try this one about the AWS outage:

on the Guardian

BOFH: Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Which side of the pond are you?

Throwing old computers in the Thames and then burning tires?

50 years in deep space, and Voyager still can't escape budget gravity

Have pity in poor Musk

He has to scrape by on a measly trillion dollars (a year? the story didn't make that clear). We can't afford to spend good money on these scientific fripperies (which the great Robert Kennedy Jr has told us are all nonsense anyway - just read the Good Book!), else Musk and his makes (Zuck, Bezos etc) will starve!

Telecoms wholesaler ICUK restores services after two-day DDoS pelting

Excellent company

I have been a happy residential customer of ICUK/CIX since 2007.

At first they had my broadband while BT Retail had my phone. In 2009 there was a fault on my phone line that BT Retail was clearly structurally incapable of diagnosing. This went on for more than four months. Then the manifestation of the fault changed and it only affected my broadband, so ICUK stepped in. They got it fixed in a couple of hours: apparently a card at the exchange had been knocked out of place. They also helped me prepare my complaint against BT Retail, except that the "Ombudsman" is in the pocket of BT and whitewashed the complaint. Of course I switched my phone to ICUK.

(On Monday I lost my broadband for an hour or so but it came back without any intervention.)

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Please could we have some information about companies (in Britain and elsewhere) that are refurbishing formerly M$ laptops and desktops for re-use with Linux.

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more

Unbelievable level of incompetence across the board

As the article mentions, as well as this software fiasco, BCC declared itself bankrupt two years ago.

It also lost a gender pay dispute because it allowed its dustMEN to knock off after finishing their rounds, whereas WOMEN admin staff had to work 9--5. But now the dustMEN have been on strike since January and intend to stay out until well into next year.

After a few months some company started collecting the non-recyclable rubbish from properties with individual wheelie bins. (Why we have such things in Britain instead of communal ones like Continental cities, I have no idea.)

Meanwhile, outside the flats that have communal bins, there are huge piles of rubbish bags that the stand-in binmen just ignore.

There have been no collections of recyclables, so BCC will have destroyed the environmentally friendly habits of most residents. I decline to send mine to land-fill, so I have my own huge pile.

On top of all this, BCC now wants to steal my house off me (as I reported before). It was built in 1991, as the third generation of housing on the site. BCC wants to give it to a developer to pay for "re-generating" the disaster that was done to my district in the 1960s and BCC's failure to maintain its social housing since then.

Trump admin says tech companies are abusing H-1B visas, slaps $100k a year to allow entry

Academic collaboration

This puts the kibosh on academic collaboration. This is typically done in a much more informal way than in the industries envisaged in this article and comments. One might arrange with a colleague for their research grant to pay for a week in a hotel, maybe following a nearby conference.

I have learned that everyone encounters a donkey-hole of an American immigration officer sooner or later.

Mine was after a conference in Vancouver, when I was trying to get on a plane to San Francisco to "visit" and "work with" a colleague at Stanford. I didn't allow for the fact that academics use these words differently from other people. The only "work" I would do was to give a seminar and talk with my colleague and his grad students. My only "payment" would be for my hotel. Fortunately I managed to contact my colleague and get him to send a fax saying this and I could get on the plane. This was long before The Orange One.

Now people are afraid to go to Trumpistan and I have seen postings on academic mailing lists urging relocation of conferences from there. This $100k H1B thing represents yet another risk. People whose total research grants are only this much will just not be able to take the risk of short visits to their American collaborators, maybe even of going to conferences.

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

What if the SSD or Motherboard has failed?

How computers work has always been smoke and mirrors, but it has got far more so. SSDs do all sorts of "clever" things to balance load and so stop re-writing particular cells. If you tell it to "delete everything" then, so far as I know, it just sets a bit somewhere to say that. Somebody with more knowledge of how SSDs work could easiy get round that.

So what can the "ordinary user" -- ie anyone short of an SSD specialist -- do to be sure that the data have really gone?

Especially in the case where (from the ordinary user's point of view) the unit has failed?

A few years ago I bought a laptop from "PC Specialist" but the SSD failed after a few months, ie within warranty. The company refused to replace it unless I returned the faulty one. I refused to do this because it contained my digitial life.

Like everyone else, I have this and other defunct kit lying around. I would like to get rid of it, but have no idea how to do so securely.

DDoS is the neglected cybercrime that's getting bigger. Let's kill it off

Re: Guilt by tenuous unwarranted association

Wrong, As I explained, my email does not go out from Linode.

The problem is sysadmins who make decision prejudicial to strangers' interests with **no transparency**.

There are numerous blacklists that one can search for one's own address and get it removed. Primexeon and ICUK/CIX aren't on any of them.

M$ and Google use their own blacklists that cannot be searched and don't respond to enquiries. Besides that, M$ has always undermined Internet standards.

Added to this is the problem is manglement of universities and other organisations who know no better than to use M$. Universities are particularly culpable because they employ people to be "professors of computer security" but don't consult them about such decisions.

Guilt by tenuous unwarranted association

Practically all the traffic we received from Digital Ocean and Linode was garbage, so we blocked all their networks.

It is likely because some moron at M$ thinks like this that my email to places that have been overrun by M$ (significantly including many universities) doesn't get through.

I regard it as my Civil Right in as a citizen of Cyberspace to have my emails handled independently of the tech giants.

It is sufficient for my level of usage to use shared hosting for my email and website. That is done by Primexeon in Cambridge, whose delighted customer I have been for 18 years.

They in turn use the cloud services of Linode.

However, M$ scrambles the standard email headers and replaces them with hundreds of lines of their own garbage. In some inscrutable way they they judge a large fraction of the legitimate email that passes through them as spam.

I had the same problem with Google/gmail, which I apparently solved by routing my outgoing email though my phone/broadband provider, ICUK/CIX, of whom I am also a longstanding happy customer.

Neither Primexeon nor ICUK/CIX have any idea how to fix this. If I say "debugging" and "M$" in the same breath, I can't keep a straight face.

On what basis M$ judges my email to be spam I have no idea. If it's not the IP address then it's presumably the domain name of the From: address.

But the most likely explanation is that some j*rk at M$ thinks it's a good idea to block everything that has a Linode MX record, even though it hasn't come from there and they're not sending anything there.

AWS catches Russia's Cozy Bear clawing at Microsoft credentials

what difference does it make nowadays

"Amazon today said it disrupted an intel-gathering attempt to trick Microsoft users into knowingly granting the Whitehouse-backed cyberspies access to their accounts and data."

whether your data ends up in Putinistan, Xistan or Trumpistan?

Alexa hits snooze on basic functions as alarms and timers KO'd in UK outage

Fritz

Kick out Alexa the spy, but be nice to Fritz!

I have had a Fritz!Box router & phone answering machine for 10 years and remain delighted with it.

Fritz could give you an alarm call, without telling any Trumpistan tech giants about it!

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Re: A fundamental problem...

results are always presented authoritatively, confidently and often convincingly.

Same happens with every advance in technology.

Student essays that are word-processed probably get better marks than those produced on a typewriter, which probably got better marks than handwritten ones.

We have the word "scripture" meaning religious stuff. It somehow acquired authority, even though the word only means "written".

Socrates famously hated books, because you can't argue with them face-to-face.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Re: Fond memories of networking in the days of X.25

That the Great Unwashed don't know what the Internet is (like presumably in the past they didn't know what "air" was) just shows you what a brilliant invention it is. Anyone who attempted to use Janet X.25 certainly appreciates how the Internet "just works" (of course, except when it doesn't).

PS to my previous post, it was c1978 when I was doing CS A-level.

Phone bill must have been astronomical

I did Computer Science A-level at the local technical college, partly to get out of Games lessons at my proper school. We connected to the Open University's computers using dial-up modems where the telephone handset was put in a cradle. I suppose it might have been nominally 300baud, but I don't know for sure. Each student, or at least each terminal, had to have their own connection. Then there was the clacketty printer, which of course had to be connected in the same way, not to mention the punched tape readers and punches. (In those days, "telephone handsets" were real "telephone handsets", not fondleslabs. Kids don't know they're born... well, they weren't.)

Psylo browser tries to obscure digital fingerprints by giving every tab its own IP address

Psylo?

Well, ψύλλος (psyllos) means "flea" in Greek, more generally any parasitic insect.

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

petrol pumps

My recollection (as a non-driver, btw) was that it was when the price of petrol went above one pound per gallon that it started being quoted by the litre instead. NB the British gallon is 4.546 litres, whereas the yankie one is a mere 3.785 litres, whilst petrol(eum) is a liquid, not a gas.

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

the problem pre-dates AI

There were plenty of webpages generated by programs that contain no actual information, long before the present AI craze.

For example if I see a personal name or a phone number that I've never seen before, I put them into a web search to try to find out where they come from, But most of the sites that purport to offer this information actually just give garbage about astrology or "similar number that people have searched". I as a human can see that these pages are garbage and I wish I could never see them, but AI picking them up could well believe that they contain actual knowledge.

On the other hand, if you arbitrarily say that only stuff before 2022 is valid, you are effectively ending further genuine research.

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

digital vs physical

The problem with the Library of Alexandria and similar collections was that they collected what was in many cases the only copy of a document, so this was lost when there was a fire or an invasion. (The advantage of clay tablets was that they were improved by fire!)

With digital documents there are many versions, so they should be more durable. Unless (1) the original website owner set permissions that were unfriendly to web crawlers (I've made that mistake) or (2) the entire Web gets commandeered by some Billionnaire, who reduces it to a single copy.

European pols wave their hands about digital sovereignty with broad but vague plan

Far worse than this.

I don't understand why you post as AC and haven't already got far more up-votes.

Britain has been handing over its computing achievements ever since there were any computing machines, particularly in the time of Turing and then in the 1980s when Cambridge (I was there then) was the Wild West of personal computers.

(Even though my EU citizenship has been stolen from me, I cannot think of the UK as being separate from the EU.)

Now we are in the situation where (1) the NHS is handing over my personal health data to Thiel's Palantir --- a mate of the Orange one, (2) many universities and other organisation are handing over my email to M$, which frequently marks it as spam so doesn't delliver it and (3) we are all under relentless pressure to get "smart" phones owned by Google and Apple that spy on their users relentlessly.

So, to pick up your analogies with Covid and Ukraine, (1) instead of lockdown we have "eat out to help out" to ensure that the virus has maximum opportunity to spread as widely as possible and (2) we have asked Путин хуйло to take care of all of our tanks and drones.

AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0

Never mind the CLOUD ACT

Once his Orangeness gets Bezos by the goolies, all this "legal protection" will go to the wall.

Remembering John Young, co-founder of web archive Cryptome

website that looks straight out of the 1990s

You mean one with information that's easily accessed and indexed from the front page, without Javascript that's there to spy on you and show invasive ads?

With Asmi 24.04, Ubuntu's never looked so snappy (without the Snaps)

what's wrong with snaps?

(1) VAST bloat in disk usage. I'm typing this on a laptop with a mere 64GB of disk space. (What? when I was a graduate student, I had use of ONE MEGABYTE of disk on the university computer.) It is divided in three: two system partitions and one for my own stuff, because I like to do clean installs when a new LTS version comes along. Because of Snap, Xubuntu now no longer fits in to 20GB.

(2) Weird restrictions on file access. pdftk is a simple utility for combining PDFs and re-arranging their pages. It only works in my "home" directory, so I have to move stuff into it and then back out, typically leaving a lot of crud around.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

La Repubblica

I love the fact that this was reported via the Italian press. When I was studying Italian and had to write altogether four pieces of work, one of them was "Il Giorno del Blackout" (yes, that was the word that La Repubblica used). Every line of my essay had a citation to an Italian newspaper article (mainly La Repubblica, because it uses fairly straightforward language). But the teacher didn't like it. She wanted me to write about some seriously self-indulgent Italian film director. Strange though she could be, she was actually the best language teacher I've had (apart from my partner).

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Re: God help the academic sector

My experience of various universities is that their Computer Science departments (used to) have brilliant sysadmins running secure top-notch Unix-like systems, whilst the central university IT services have M$ systems run by monkeys. But increasingly university manglement has sacked the CS IT people and imposed their incompetent M$ systems on everybody. Worst bit is that this is purportedly done in the name of "data security".

I have just found out about Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

Washington is a far worse adversary than Beijing or Moscow, because people in the rest of the world have voluntarily allowed their computers to be pwned by the American Tech Giants, especially M$ and Google.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

The best way to learn something is to teach it

That seemed to be the understanding amongst the lecturers and grad students when I was a grad student in Cambridge.

I seem to recall my Ancient Greek teacher at school admitting that he was only one step ahead of the class.

So three cheers for Alfred the Great!

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

Legacy tech? if only!

Anyone who has ever dealt with lawyers will know that, not only are they ignorant of IT, but they stubbornly enforce their ignorance on other people. The ways in which the (civil) justice system insists on handling documents is frankly Dickensian. They care far more about ritual than evidence. You have to add a "statement of truth" to everything, as if that made it "true", and if you get the wording wrong it's "false". Then there are "certificates of service", which prove nothing at all, given that one of the options is "last known address". If the opposing counsel claims that a document was not "served", there is no way of proving that the letter or email arrived and the judge dismisses the associated evidence.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

Common operating system

Yeah, why not get all of the world's governments to adopt a "common operating system" for all the data about everyone in the world.

That would make it so much easier for the Orange King! (apologies to the Dutch)

Hang on, we already have it, M$

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: I remember when HP was a good company

I remember that time too.

I have an HP LaserJet 1320 duplex that's still working fine after 21 years, now with a third party toner cartridge in it.

I dread the day when it fails. What manufacturers are recommended nowadays?

The NHS security culture problem is a crisis years in the making

The "initiative to gather patient data into some sort of arrangement to be shared with researchers" was to hand over all of our very personal data to Palantir, owned by Peter Thiel, a mate of The Orange One.

So far as I am aware, this deal was signed off by the Tory "Government" and allowed to go ahead by the new one.

Besides giving all our private stuff to Palantir, the (basically useful) Patient Access website is inaccessible without Google "Capchas" and is now trying to force people to use authentication through Apple or Google.

They might as well have webcams in my GP's surgery connected directly to Trump and Putin!

On the other hand, all of this "multi factor authentication" is totally inappropriate. They're supposed to be looking after my health, not my money! In an emergency, my friends might need fast access to my health records!

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

card-carrying communists

What would Senator Joseph McCarthy have made of the bromance between Путін хуйло and The Orange One?

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Nothing to hide

If you've got nothing to hide, go around naked!

Privacy is a human right, not an admission of guilt.

GDPR

This was precisely what GDPR and its hefty penalties were for. Why haven't they been sued into oblivion?

Microsoft unveils finalized EU Data Boundary as European doubt over US grows

Re: (UK readers) Forget boycotting M&S

More fundamentally, is the UK inside or outside the "EU data boundary", after our catastrophic foolish self-indulgence on 23 June 2016?

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Wake up call!

Europe (and the island that flatters itself as a "bridge") are slowly realising that, in the wake of The Orange One, they need to look to their own (and Ukraine's) defence.

Maybe even more slowly they will come to see the need for European "clouds", "social media" and the like.

Zuck, Musk and Bezos are already the Triumvirate of Trumpistan.

It's not as if superior FOSS bug-compatible substitutes for M$ didn't already exist.

verbatim transcripts of interviews

Please don't do this. Edit them for clarity, as well as to get rid of the "ums".

(Actually, Scientific American is particularly bad with this.)

The meaning of parts of this article is actually ambiguous.

Beta of Unix version 2 restored to life

tech museum

I went to the Stasi Museum in Leipzig. It has one or two "specialist" machines, such as one that opens and re-seals letters, but nothing sophisticated. Most of it was stuff that we had in the 1970s. At least ordinary people in the "West" had it, although they probably didn't in the DDR. But none of the stuff would be recognisable to anyone born after Mauerfall.

India's banking on the bank.in domain cleaning up its financial services sector

Re: Why has it taken so long to think of this?

Ignoring most of your offensive post, I just point out that I said "national regulators".

For example, one for Indian banks (bank.in), another for British ones (bank.uk), another for British solicitors and barristers (law.uk) and so on. The proliferation of non-national TLDs is irrelevant.

Keeping the second level domain short (eg not "solicitors-and-barristers.uk") would help to avoid impersonation.

Whu has it taken so long to think of this?

We have had .ac.uk and .edu and similar things for universities in many other countries since the beginning of the Internet.

Why hasn't this been extended to other sectors that have national regulators, banks for a start?

Instead companies (especially banks) create a proliferation of .com addresses so no-one has any idea which ones are genuine and which are scams.

If the hierarchical domain name system had been propertly designed from the start and people were educated in how the name hierarchy relates to legal management, a lot of the scams could have been eliminated.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Little thing called the Constitution

As we have already seen, the US Constitution says no more nor less than what the US Supreme Court says it does. IE that Orange One can do exactly as he pleases. God Help Us.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Re: We are stronger together

Columbia (and Brasil, sort of) have also shown two fingers to the Orange One.

Re: We are stronger together

Mexico (where I happen to be on holiday at the moment) Is taking advantage of the Orange hostility by creating 35,000 new jobs. I am sure that Canada and Europe will also benefit from the voluntary refugees.

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

Got one

I have had a Fritz!Box 7360 for ten years and I think it's great.

When the phone and broadband come in on the same wire, the same device should handle them both (router and cordless phone and answering machine combined), which Fritz!Box does. It sends me an email whenever there's an incoming call, so I can pick up messages when I'm out. It has more diagnostics than I understand.

It could be even better if its operating system were fully open-sourced, so that people could improve it.

But I hope this legal action doesn't harm the company or their product

NASA's lunar Roomba set to suck up Moon dirt for study

Re: If it works as designed...

Perplexity.AI says: "Hubert Cecil Booth may have coined the term "vacuum cleaner". Booth was a British engineer who invented one of the first powered vacuum cleaners in 1901, creating a large horse-drawn machine that used suction to clean carpets and floors."