Posts by alain williams

Scam victims find same fraudulent ads lurking on Facebook and Google even after flagging them up

Ads make money ...

what incentive is there for google/facebook to do anything real to remove them ?

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

Philip Green

still has a knighthood. Maybe smooging up to David Cameron helped.

Re: Now go after...

They should have money extracted from them to just above the point where they become a burden on the state. Houses gone, pension gone, shares & savings gone, ...

Why ?

Execs elsewhere will see this and think "oh, shit, maybe I should not do things like this!"

Although I expect that execs elsewhere will see this and put layers of obfuscation between themselves & their deeds to protect their own bacon: probably by pushing the blame on to others.

Re: And still...

and the penalties should be at least those suffered by the post masters: imprisonment, large fines that will bankrupt some of them, their names published as crooks, ...

MI5 wants to shed its cocktail-guzzling posho image – so it's opened an Instagram account

Well, that shake up ...

is going to stir things up a bit!

Microsoft loves Linux – as in, it loves Linux users running Linux desktop apps on Windows PCs

Linux under MS Windows is not to be trusted

MS Windows can see everything that Linux does so the Windows spyware^W telemetry can still blab back to the USA government (via MS) what you are doing.

So: can you be sure that your passwords, etc, are now completely secure ?

UK.gov wants mobile makers to declare death dates for their new devices from launch

Re: A bit of sympathy for the Devil here.

Most LTS releases for Linux distributions limit to 5 years--from the original release.

But that is not a problem since it is not very hard for the user/owner to upgrade your laptop/... to the next LTS release. The problem is things that cannot be upgraded at all once the vendor has lost interest.

The date to be printed on the box ....

web side touting it (including retailers' & second hand sale web sites) all in a nice big point size.

China has a satellite with an arm – and America worries it could be used to snatch other spacecraft

Low earth orbits will be unusable ...

if the squabbles up there continue, they will just cause zillions of fragments that will bump into other satellites causing more fragments.

Debian devs decide best response to Richard Stallman controversy is … nothing

Re: Not very accurate

We are in an era where some memes receive a lot of vocal support and it can become damaging to speak out against them. If questioned: not supporting the meme can be held against you - this is why the likes of RedHat pulled away from the FSF.

You see related actions all over: no platforming of speakers, prominent groups (not just political ones) claiming that they are more disadvantaged than others (things are not 0% or 100%), blaming others for events that happened centuries ago, denigration of those who bear resemblance to those who are seen as oppressors,...

The evidence supporting the memes does not need to be good, indeed there can be large cracks or evidence against it - this does not matter, they will be ignored as long as the meme aligns with other popular memes.

This is not to say that some things do not need to change, but there is often an all or nothing attitude that is very harmful: you are either for us or against us. More nuance is needed; more listening less shouting.

Note: I said some memes, not all. I have avoided mentioning which memes as unthinking supporters of some of the more egregious memes would just down-vote my comment.

There used to be a time when contentious issues could be discussed, but now ...

Linus Torvalds reluctantly issues one more release candidate for Linux kernel 5.12

I take this as evidence ...

that Linus does not work at Microsoft ... if he did then the kernel would just have been released and let users pick up the mess.

Age discrimination class-action against HP and HPE gets green light to proceed

I wonder what the managers & HR people ...

who are doing this sort of thing think might happen to them when they get a bit older ?

Maybe they are the stupid ones who have risen to their level of incompetence.

Ex IBM sales manager, fired after battling discrimination against subordinates, wins $11m lawsuit

"after IBM fired him in April, 2018"

No really so. One or more unnamed people within IBM fired him. These people should be named by the court and penalised for what they did.

Unless these people (and their managers all the way up to the top) are penalised heavily then this bad behaviour will continue at IBM and elsewhere.

A keyboard? How quaint: Logitech and Baidu link arms to make an AI-enabled, voice-transcribing mouse

So where does the speech recognition happen ?

It can't be in the mouse.

It could be in the user's PC - some chunk of software needed, probably MS Windows only.

I suspect that it sends the voice up to Baidu's servers to use its Baidu Brain. So this means that everything that you want speech recognised goes to China. They might well give you some text back but they will keep a copy to give to Chinese spooks.

Anyone who does not live their life 100% in the open should aoid this like the plague. It is a security disaster. But I can see idiot managers blindly ordering these things :-(

But then some twats do share stuff on facebook - so maybe it will sell well!

Can you switch the chatting to Baidu servers off ?

Beijing steps on Alibaba's Ant Group by forcing it to submit to same regulation as banks

Time to apply the duck test

to Paypal, Apple pay & Google pay. If they act like a bank they should be subject to bank type rules.

Opening up to competition is also good.

I am often critical of the Chinese - but very much approve of this.

Oracle vs Google: No, the Supreme Court did not say APIs aren't copyright – and that's a good thing

Patent fees

The USPTO wants lots of applications and for them to continue as long as possible as this is what earns them a lot of fees. It does not cost them if the rest of us have huge legal fees because they did not do their job properly.

Not quite as bad as these Guardians ad litems supposedly acting in kids' best interests but in reality feathering their own nests.

Both cases of power without proper accountability.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre recommends password generation idea suggested by El Reg commenter

Re: Biometric password

Still, it's a shame for her as there were a gazillion photos on there of her late mother.

Do you mean to say that the only copies of these photos were on FB ?

Biometric password

No thank you.

If something goes wrong then restoring access can be incredibly hard especially with the you-cannot-speak-to-a-human attitudes to many services that a lot of people depend upon.

Microsoft drops 64-bit OneDrive into the pool: Windows on ARM fans need not apply. As usual

Port to ARM

How hard can this be ? I have been writing in C on Unix (& now Linux) systems since the mid 1980s, porting between different CPUs is not something that I give much thought to ... it just happens.

How do we stamp out the ransomware business model? Ban insurance payouts for one, says ex-GCHQ director

Re: How hard is it ...

nasties out there that sit quietly and encrypt away

That is why you keep Monday's backup for a month or few and the backup on the 1st of the month for a year.

Restoring last night's backup should be quick. If you have not noticed these files being corrupted then it does not matter if it takes longer to restore them.

backup drives were also live on the network

Not a problem, it makes it easy for users to restore their own files, I do the same myself. But surely these backup drives are read-only to anything other than the backup server to which only savvy IT people have write access ?

It is not really that hard, neither is it expensive compared to the cost of not being able to work for many days. But people do love making plausible excuses.

How hard is it ...

to implement good backups that cannot be corrupted, done at least daily ?

Too hard it seems.

There is a difference between a small business that should know better and a large one where the IT director should be shot for not implementing this.

Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away

What purpose ?

It is about implicit requirements. Were the participants given a functional specification ? Would it have been OK to remove all of the bricks, move the man and put the roof on the floor ?

As any barrister knows you greatly influence the answer that you get by the way that you ask the question.

Belgian police seize 28 tons of cocaine after 'cracking' Sky ECC's chat app encryption

Cut out middle men

I would be very surprised if this did not happen. It is an obvious tactic and the cops are not that stupid.

I was wondering what they do with 28 tons of cocaine ? It is not a small bag that can be tossed into a bin and forgotten about. Burning it would have interesting effects on anyone down wind of the incinerator.

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

Re: Hmm ...

Maybe insist that the info is required on sign up and be made available to the cops; but that it be stored in a way that is unusable to facebook, etc, is so that they cannot use it for advertising, etc.

OK: this would be easy to do technically, however I would expect facebook to say "yes it is in a black box" and the promptly use the data anyway.

Dutch watchdog fines Booking.com €475k after it kept customer data thefts quiet for more than 3 weeks

Re: booking.com sends ALL credit card info as text

I have seen such printouts many times while waiting for the hotel staff to return to their desk.

I saw such a pile when checking in to a hotel in Eastbourne a few years ago, I complained to the manager who said that he would do something about it (no idea if he did).

I complained to Nat West credit card services. They were less than interested. In my experience banks talk much more about security than they actually do.

Android, iOS beam telemetry to Google, Apple even when you tell them not to – study

GDPR ...

Is this not the sort of thing that the GDPR was supposed to stop.

Why are Google, Apple, Facebook, ... just allowed to break privcay laws ? I suppose for much the same reason that they get away with not paying taxes!

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Who is funding Xinuos ?

Going to law is expensive. They are unlikely to win (see what happened last time), but they might unsettle some who will buy other products.

So: where is the money coming from ? Who stands to gain by companies avoiding Linux ?

PS: anyone know where Pamela is these days ?

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

"way to opt-out of SENS-based surveillance"

That should be the default. It should be opt-in.

Question: how do you go about getting the agreement of everyone within range ?

Also: how much more of a drain on the battery will this be ?

Island in the Stream: AlmaLinux project issues first stable release of CentOS replacement

Will it have the Mate desktop ?

Part of the reason that I migrated to Debian was to dodge having to use Gnome 3. No: XFCE, better than Gnome 3, not as nice as Mate.

Satellites, space debris may have already brightened night skies 10% globally – and it's going to get worse

Can't they paint new satellites black ?

This might only help a bit, but surely better than nothing.

Big tech suggests Vietnam rewrite its digital tax plans

Double taxation

Maybe these digital businesses should campaign to get tax relief where they are already, supposedly, taxed.

I suspect the USA government will next threaten 25% tax on imports from Vietnam.

Sadly, the catastrophic impact with Apophis asteroid isn't going to happen in 2068

Re: placing it even closer than some satellites in geosynchronous orbits

some satellites in geosynchronous orbits

To be in a geosynchronous orbit a satellite must be 22,236 miles up, if not it will not stay in the same apparent place above the earth. So how can it be closer than some and not others ?

Staff and students at Victoria University of Wellington learn the most important lesson of all: Keep your files backed up

Re: Bad move for an IT department

Nah - someone wants a job at Microsoft and is just showing that they follow Redmond's practice of not properly testing stuff before inflicting it on users.

Tata says hello to £14.5m 1-year contract extension for UK child support system, while DWP figures out how to procure a new one

They sent me a refund once ...

to an address in Dewsbury - I have never lived there, I live some 200 miles away. I only found out when I asked for a subject access request (data protection act). They refused to refund me as it was more than 6 years ago and claimed that, somehow, I should have known about it.

If you deal with them only do so in writing; what they record on their computer is not always what is said on the 'phone.

Australian police suggests app to record consent to sexual activity

When the consent database gets stolen ...

and it becomes known that X has had sex with Y ... embarasment on a huge scale!

Microsoft fixes the thing it broke via another dose of out-of-band patching to deal with BSOD printing problems

Re: testing

Given how much intelligence we can pack into a printer why does any OS need to do anything other than say 'here's the data, get on with it'?

It means that the printer manufacturer can save $1 in making it and offload the hard work to a computer that has to have vast resources just to be able to run Microsoft Windows.

They need to build them cheaply in case they do not make their money back if the user does not buy their over priced ink.

Apple's app transparency rules: Google's privacy labels for Chrome and Search on iOS highlighted by DuckDuckGo

The privacy labels are for the updated Chrome

who knows what they slurped before ? Have Google spent between 8 Dec & now removing some of the more egregious stuff that they were taking ?

Does Apple/anyone verify what Google says that it takes ?

Asahi's plan for Linux on Apple's new silicon shows Cupertino has gone back to basics with iOS booting

Re: "Breaks most of the standards"

There is PC and Mac.

Apple stopped selling servers some years ago, thus all Macs are PCs (Personal Computers).

The "PC vs Mac" meme was something dreamed up by marketing droids who saw things is terms of Microsoft vs Apple operating systems.

ISP industry blasts UK Telecoms Security Bill for vague requirements, high costs of compliance

Vague requirements ?

This is collecting personal data. I thought that the data-protection-act/GDPR said that what data is being collected, and why, had to be clear and easy to understand -- so why vagueness ?

I do understand that I cannot opt out of this government data scrape, but I should know what is happening.

First Australia, maybe Europe, now America mulls effort to potentially make Google, Facebook pay for news

Re: Copying snippets of news articles ...

it is about ensuring that what gets printed is not significantly biased in any direction

I do not mind bias in op-ed pieces as long as it is clearly marked as opinion of the author. This can lead to interesting debate, we need to be wary of no platforming unpopular views.

There is no place for bias in, supposedly, straight reporting of facts in news. But it is really hard to police as the choice of words can completely colour descriptions: one man's "freedom fighter" is another's "terrorist".

Copying snippets of news articles ...

If they were copying snippets of music they would have had to pay a long time ago.

Both music & news articles take time to make and both are protected by copyright - except that, in practice, journalism is not.

UK draft legislation enshrines the right to repair in law – but don't expect your mobile to suddenly be any easier to fix

3 years is "up to a decade"

I hope that it is better worded than that. Should be "minimum" of a decade.

EFF urges Google to ground its FLoC: 'Pro-privacy' third-party cookie replacement not actually great for privacy

A cookie by any other name will break privacy as much

(Apologies to W Shakespeare)

I think that part of the purpose is to evade the cookie laws in the EU, California & other places.

So: back to normal for a few years while Google tracks everyone. It will take legislators many years to catch up ... I suspect that Google has draft a FLoC replacement for then.

Re: FLoC

More to the point: it would be usable by Google and others would not find it useful.

Re: Why anyone would install a "browser" on their machine ...

because most of them would not know about it. Chrome will come with it enabled by default, you might be able to switch it off, but most would not know how to and probably not understand why they might be at disadvantage by being tracked.

Biden administration labels China top tech threat, promises proportionate responses to cyberattacks

China is becoming a dictatorship

Installing "yes" men that make a mockery of an electoral system.

Self-supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server virty users see stealth inflation

After 25 years use ...

of RedHat/CentOS (me & my customers) I am now moving to Debian.

The wrong guy: Backup outfit Spanning deleted my personal data, claims Cohesity field CTO

If you cannot touch it do not complain when it evaporates

This time is was Kaseya being arse holes, next time it could be some malfunction, either way Kayeya are unlikely to worry much. How much work would you do for $48/year ?

The only way of being safe is to take your own backup, preferably two that you keep in different locations.

Yes: it is harder, more work, needs thought - but how much is your data worth to you ?

Apple faces app store payments fight in Arizona, Throttlegate suit in Portugal

1 million is too large a number

The number of annual downloads to trigger them allowing an alternative should be much lower.

Perl.com theft blamed on social engineering attack: Registrar 'convinced' to alter DNS records by miscreants

Re: Focus

No doubt that some manager at Network Solutions has said that "lessons will be learned" and then immediately gone back to sleep.