Posts by alain williams 2650 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
A lack of regulation was one of the factors behind the Grenfell Tower disaster.
The watering down of financial regulation led to the 2008 bank crash.
So the government is ignoring history to make a quick buck in its term in office but storing up potential liabilities in the longer term future.
Why do we end up with monkeys like this ? Not that the Tories would be any better.
Good advice but readers of el-reg are at an advantage:
• They are aware that their TV is spying on them
• They are technically capable of blocking it at their firewall
Manufacturers do not worry about losing the small numbers of technically aware users - they will make plenty of $£ from the rest of them.
but then realised that it was different from Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed.
Do remember that there is a big push to having software run in someone's cloud (to generate perpetual income). So what software running locally would need AI hardware ?
The marketing people need to work that one out.
Also: what is the extra energy requirement of this extra hardware -- even if it is not used ?
Under the GDPR scripts from either of these should only be run with the end user's opt-in consent.
If the UK ICO (Information commissioner) was doing its job it would have a field day as almost no web sites do ask consent before running Google scripts. But the fact that everyone does it does not make it legal.
Because there is an access door on the side that was "never" used but could foment fast ingress of water.
Interesting theory but it would need a crew member to "accidentally" leave the door open. Please follow all crew members and see if one of them suddenly retires with unexplained riches.
I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next man. However I think that it is improbable that HPE has the ability to conjure up a storm that sinks one particular boat outside Porticello.
Yes: Mike Lynch & Stephen Chamberlain died a day apart but coincidences do happen.
A system is only as reliable as the weakest component. The more parts there are the more likely that one will break and bring down the whole house of cards.
There is a cost equation to evaluate, which is greater: outsourcing IT to someone's cloud; the cost of not being able to do business when the cloud is not available.
A big unknown is how often said cloud goes down.
You have said what I came here to write.
The trouble with backups is that they are a complete waste of time ... until you need them. Thus the C-suit can not do them (or not do them properly) and no one will notice - until that fateful day.
I fear that the only way of ensuring that they are done (& tested) is by use of a big stick: insurance companies demand proof that they are being done; or government legislation (which will lead to cries of "nanny state"). Anyone any better ideas ?
This is where a bit of enlightened cooperation can pay big dividends. If you are a large VMware user then club together with other large users and fund developers to add whatever you think is missing to open source VMware replacements. It might take a few months and some ££ but you then get what you want and save lots more ££ over years to come.
However it is psychologically hard for the large corporate C-suits to do this - they just see it as making payments when others, not in the paying club, get the results for free -- why should they do that ?
But that is how FLOSS works: some pay, some do not, all benefit.
Why does Meta silence voices in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook ? This has been going on for years and is still happening.
This is what many will think, including those at the electoral commission. But it is clear that China thought that putting the effort into getting the data was worth while.
The consequences for some individuals could be great, I read stories on how China issues threats to people in England who have relatives in China.
The consequences for those at the electoral commission will be receiving a memo on security that most will not bother to read.
There is also the notion that as they have now fixed their Microsoft Exchange that all the harm is undone and there is no need to worry. Not true: China still has a list of all voters in the UK and much of the information will not change for years (when did you last move house ?).
They list 30-odd user agents. This is more than a web master should have to worry about. It also does not distinguish when one bot is scraping content for more than one purpose.
A new directive is needed, "Purpose" that could have values like: search-index, human, archive, llm, ... These could then be allowed or disallowed.
At lease ClownStrike has the tissue thin excuse that it needs to get patches out quickly to prevent day-0 exploits. I do not think that this Google update was urgent and thus has no excuse to not go through proper QA.
But for both of them: QA costs money that neither wants to pay for, especially when the cost of damage is paid for by someone else.
What would it cost HMRC to produce its own bespoke system - written from scratch ? How much will it cost to make bespoke changes to S/4HANA (or Oracle or ...) ?
Once done it will not need to do this again; except of course when government changes tax legislation which would trigger changes in whatever it uses.
SAP now insists that everything runs in the SAP cloud. I would feel much happier if my tax records were kept in an HMRC cloud rather than a SAP one.
It requires that Web Site Owners (WSOs) list the different crawlers and specify rules.
Most WSOs do not care what the crawlers care called they just want to control what the content is used for; so indexing might be fine as might humans use as learning material but feeding to an AI might not be. Also should there be some attribution made whenever derived content is displayed somewhere ?
The Consent in Crisis paper kind of talks about this but, as all to often in such papers, does not provide an easy to read summary.
Maybe Automated Content Access Protocol needs to be revived. But this will be objected to by AIs and others who want to continue their free lunch.
We should be asking why something like ClownStrike was considered necessary in the first place. It does not seem to be to just address the weaknesses in MS Windows as there are versions available for Linux and macOS. I have been hearing things about it being required by insurance and compliance.
It would be interesting to see a cost benefit analysis: what does it cost to install vs what does it prevent - especially since it does have a history of causing outages.
I suppose from the PHB point of view this ticks a box as otherwise getting security done right takes time and expertise that a business often does not want to pay for.
This is a third party issue, not Microsoft!
If Microsoft produced secure systems in the first place then add-ons like CrowdStrike would not be needed.
Security is hard, needs work to get right. Even on Linux systems many do not bother to get it right, for instance SE-Linux can stop things working and there is a big temptation to just switch it off. SE-Linux is not a panacea but does make it harder for malware to get in.
How about the UK parliament not writing all laws on vellum. OK: they need an open specification file format, simple PDF or simple HTML would be OK. Files in these formats can be simply copied to what ever is the data storage medium du jour.
Vietnam has 19% of known reserves vs China's 38%. You might notice that Vietnam is next to China which might decide to put pressure on Vietnam to maintain control of these rare earths.
China mines much more than do other countries, so a few others could start digging it out if/when China starts throwing its weight around -- although it would take several years to ramp up production.
Until then it is a case of too many eggs in one basket.
Jenkins said the EPOS code, which had been developed in 1998, became his responsibility around 2004 and 2005, but he had assumed it had stabilized by then."I accepted that there were these problems in the early days, which I hadn't been involved with specifically, but there had been plenty of time then for things to be sorted out for it to be working stably," he said.
He said he did not recall if anyone had told him about problems with the EPOS code.
If it was his responsibility then should he have not made it his business to find out if there were problems so that they could be fixed ?
Apparently not. So what was he doing with his time ?
This long predates Microsoft. Unix has had a fork(2) system call since the 1970s.
Wikipedia says "The word "fork" has been used to mean "to divide in branches, go separate ways" as early as the 14th century.".
There is an assumption that if something is available on the web then it can be downloaded for free and used for whatever purpose.
OK: we know that that is not true, there is plenty of stuff that cannot be used for some purposes: eg not to be sold on.
AI people like to pretend that they have no way of knowing that content cannot be used by them. This is what robots.txt would be perfect for. A tweak that lists allowed/disallowed purposes would mean that operators of web crawlers would no longer be able to claim ignorance of a web site owners wishes; this could make it easier to sue them in court.
The well funded AI crowd would fight tooth & nail to be allowed to break copyright with impunity but some large web sites might be able to win, set precedence, ... that would prolly get ignored unless you had enough money.
It is probably cheaper for organisations to keep more data than to work out what 20% they are going to need again. Even without understanding that requirements may change in the future.
It is like backups: I would love to only have to do a backup just before I have some sort of failure.
The Middle East - always been that way, never changed. It's news only when the Middle East isn't at war with itself.
In other words: just ignore the current Israel/Palestine spat, it will end at some point and we can go back to pretending that it is not happening.
That, from what I read, was part of what led Hamas to its horrible attack on 7 October -- it knew that Israel would retaliate big time but that the world would see it happen. Previously the world had been able to overlook the 70 years war of attrition against the Palestinians.
I feel for the largely innocent civilians on both sides who are caught in a conflict between two terrorist organisations: Hamas & the government of Israel.
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