Posts by alain williams

Brit MPs brand Facebook a 'great vampire squid' out for cash

OK: Facebook is a bad boy ...

MPs (appear) to finally understand that. What about the rest of them ? How about starting with Google.

Most of the public, unfortunately, will have tut-tutted a couple of times and continued as before.

Astroboffins discover the stink of eggy farts wafting from Uranus

Optional, related reading

If you enjoyed this El Reg article then you will enjoy this book.

Ah, to be a school boy again!

Time to ditch the front door key? Nest's new wireless smart lock is surprisingly convenient

How long before forced upgrade ...

when google decides that it will no longer support that model and wants you to buy a new one ?

The lock in my front door is 30+ years old ... will this Nest product still be working in 30 years ?

Apple unleashes FoundationDB as an open source project

So, as I understand it ...

Apple has outsourced development of FoundationDB and expects the outsourcers to work for free.

SpaceX finally Falcon flings NASA's TESS into orbit

second stage ?

What should they do with the second stage other than throw it away ?

One idea: park it in orbit and put it up for sale. The cost of taking it up X hundred miles has been paid, so sometime it might be of interest to someone who is building something large upstairs and who needs a lot of metal. I'm assuming that it could be melted/reformed into something else.

Cutting custody snaps too costly for cash-strapped cops – UK.gov

I wonder what would happen ...

if I told a government department that I would not obey the law because ''my IT systems made it technically impossible" to do what I was supposed to do ?

UK spy agency warns Brit telcos to flee from ZTE gear

Could we have a 'Cell' for 'phones

a unit near GCHQ that would check/validate mobile operating systems and apps to ensure that they did not have back-doors/spy-ware in them. I would want their results (& checksums published & end-user verifiable) by equivalent Cells in China & Russia - I doubt that the 3 would collude enough to agree common spy-ware.

Hmm: thinking about my last sentence -- I'm not sure.

Exposed: Lazy Android mobe makers couldn't care less about security

No money in it

the user has paid for the 'phone ... the ROI on security updates is zero. Far better to encourage the user to buy a new model that has got lots of shiny new (useless) features.

No manufacturer brags long term patch availability, so punters do not think about it as a purchasing criterion.

The only way to get them to do it would be to make the manufacturer liable in some way - as with motor cars. That will be a long time coming.

The same applies to all IoT stuff.

Facebook scandal: EU politicians should aim for straight answers, not star witnesses

Have someone with nouse ask the questions

Eg get someone from EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) or similar to ask the questions.

Second best is to get EFF to write them so that the politicians can still look clever by asking them; the trouble with this is that they won't be able to ask the right follow up questions - to the obfuscating answers.

Samsung Galaxy S9: Still the Lord of All Droids

"the after-market support"

Oh yeh ... in my experience Samsung abandon 'old' handsets pretty soon after a new one is released, no operating system patches - leaving users vulnerable to exploits.

They should provide lifetime support - where lifetime means as long as they continue to work - which should be 6-10 years.

That is what I care about - not the number of pixels in the camera.

British government to ink deal for yet another immigration database

Usual suspects again

What were those fine words a few years ago about giving more contracts to SMEs ? I doubt that they would do worse than Accenture & gang.

Nervous Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg passes Turing Test in Congress

Irony alert: politicians attack facebook ...

over intrusive monitoring that invade privacy ... the same bunch that approve of even deeper data sweeps by the likes of NSA/FBI/GCHQ and this data is then available (often without oversight) to the police, local councils, government departments, ... In the UK DRIPA (RIPA predecessor) has been ruled by the High Court & ECJ - RIPA is worse but T May is doing little to roll this back.

It is a shame that Zuck did not have the balls to point this out -I would have given him a big thumbs up for that.

Are you SAP-py now?! ERP giant overhauls pricing model following indirect access drama

Is SAP trying to become Oracle ?

It is moving in the same direction.

Company insiders behind 1 in 4 data breaches – study

Another mitigation strategy

is to not overwork people. When rushing to get something done quickly it is so easy to make mistakes, not take the time to check, ... The hapless employee is then held up to blame, not the manager who put them under too much pressure.

They're back! 'Feds only' encryption backdoors prepped in US by Dems

Mrs May: I have an idea that should work ...

please just employ me at the very reasonable salary of £200,000/year and I promise that I will try my hardest to code something that has a GCHQ only back door.

It is not a lot of money for the government to save us from evil terrorists & drug dealers (do think of the children), but will bolster my pension fund nicely - I only have a few years before retirement.

If we get a good designer who can make the app look pretty then all these nasty people will be seduced into using it rather than some free open source stuff.

Please, pretty please!

Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte creating app to register 3m EU nationals living in Brexit Britain

A focus on security I hope

This is going to want a copy of all the information that is needed to open a bank account & similar. If someone can compromise it there are going to be many unhappy people.

Making this run on a mobile phone might be trendy, but is it secure ?

Hmmm

2018's Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop is a lovely lappie

"who uses a laptop’s speakers these days"

I do.

Not very often, but sometimes I come across a video clip that I want to watch, eg off BBC news. For something short I don't want to fish around to find some earphones to plug in.

Amazon and eBay agree to expose potential VAT evaders for UK tax man

It is not just lost VAT ...

but since they can charge 20% less than a native vendor (ie UK based who does pay VAT) they can undercut them and so UK jobs, etc, are lost. Thus the true loss to the UK is much more than the £1.5 billion VAT.

Mind the gap: Men paid 18.6% more than women in Blighty tech sector

Equality for men & women ?

how about we then get down with real equality and have full paid paternity for men to be even with women

What happens if a mum wants time off due to a sick/... child: it is usually granted without a fuss. If a dad does the same thing: often there is resistance from managers.

Following divorce: the kids go to mum 90% of the time & dad struggles to see them; mother then complains that her career/pay has suffered as a result. Share the childcare and everyone benefits.

Facebook dynamites its own APIs amid data slurp scandals, wrecks data slurp applications

NHS & Google

So has this brouhaha finally woken the NHS to the fact that giving patient data to Google is not a clever idea ?

Has Google deleted the data or just said that they have ?

Don't want to alarm you, but defence bods think North Korea could nuke UK 'within a few years'

Could but won't

The Norks are rational enough to know that if they nuked the UK or anywhere else then they would be reduced to glowing embers -- look at their recent actions. The summary of this report says as much. They will huff & puff and carry out more missile tests just enough to worry people in other countries.

Facebook can’t count, says Cambridge Analytica

Does the number matter even approximately ?

What they are trying to do is to distract the focus from ''they abused personal information'' to ''how many ?''

This is not too far from how political messages work these days -- sod the facts, produce vague, emotional messages that most listeners will interpret differently as being good for them.

OK: politicians have always done that, it used to be called 'spin'; but these days it seems more deliberate - we are in a 'post truth' era where people believe things despite clear evidence to the contrary.

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

X-T&C header

It might be worth making your browser add a X-T&C header that said something like ''If you misuse my data then you pay me £1,000,000''. It might be hard to make it stick in the courts, but part of the problem is one way T&Cs, you either get to accept it down to the last comma or nothing at all**.

This is part of the Internet 'wild west' that is well overdue regulation; there should be standard T&Cs++ that have been prepared by even handed (consumer/business) lawyers - that people could thus trust.

IETF might even make an official T&C header.

** I admit to being one of the few who I know who does read T&Cs and frequently refuse to accept and thus not use some web site.

++ With schedules to specify things like delivery dates, etc.

It would totally help, EU told, if data we held on migrants was accurate

Log files ...

Log files should be kept to monitor access, specifying who accessed a system and why, and these should be available to national data protection agencies and the European Data Protection Supervisor on request.

They should also be made available to the individual who's records are being looked at. It is s/he who is really going to take an interest and ask why the ex's brother is looking at their record.

BT to slash landline rentals by 37%... for the broadbandless

What to tell BT ...

You do not have fixed line Internet; Virgin provides you with a TV connection and chucks in some Internet.

I can see why BT might offer cheaper to non Internet people - the line can be cheaper & the card in the telephone exchange is POTS only (so cheaper), no load on its ATM network, etc. Well if you get Internet via Virgin/who-ever-cable then BT do not need to provide any of the expensive kit either.

Java-aaaargh! Google faces $9bn copyright bill after Oracle scores 'fair use' court appeal win

Re: Still reeling

The EU has some sanity by explicitly saying it cannot be copyrighted:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/eus-top-court-apis-cant-be-copyrighted-would-monopolise-ideas/

Ooooh - another area of EU/USA courts disagreeing, time to order more popcorn!

I hope that the EU view prevails.

Adobe: New Unified Customer Profile will personalise ads as never before

This is what GDPR was designed to kill

and I hope that it just does that - stone dead, wooden stake through its heart.

Fleeing Facebook app users realise what they agreed to in apps years ago – total slurpage

Re: Facebook forcing people to use Messenger on mobile

in the past few months they disabled the messaging part from mobile website forcing people to use their Messaging app

Does this not fall under the computer misuse act ? You have not given FB permission to make such a change ... but it does it.

Airbus ditches Microsoft, flies off to Google

Re: "and switching to plain text"

and an UTF document will never be in "plain text" and an UTF document will never be in "plain text"

In a modern environment plain text is UTF-8.

Anyway the distinction being drawn is between a structured binary file (eg .ofd or .docx) and a text file containing some kind of markup (eg: markdown, LaTeX or even troff!) Both have their advantages.

Maplin shutdown sale prices still HIGHER than rivals

Support from Maplin ?

so how much support do you think that Maplin will give you on kit that you buy from them today ?

Dead companies do not give support -- which is part of the reason why the price as to be low enough to make the risk worth while.

Privacy folk raise alarm over schools snooping on kids' online habits

web web proxies for schools: Squid + DansGuardian

I remember doing that .... looking at the web logs the most enthusiastic 'pink pixel' site visitors were the teachers.

Much easier to get a robot ...

to monitor children than for adults (teachers in this case) to know what the kids in their charge are up to.

What kids need is to trust adults and be confident enough that they will seek guidance Adults should spend time with them, adults should get to know and care for them -- and the kids be aware that they are being cared for. A computer is not a substitute for that.

Also: kids will get up to a little mischief, and have done so for millennia, it is good for them to push boundaries, to explore as they get older. Feel the consequences of going too far. What about the perve from the Internet I hear people say -- that is what you need to build adult/child trust for -- so that the adult will get to know and so react/guide in what is really a relatively rare situation.

Sexting: education as to why it is a bad idea, then support/admonishment when it does happen. Making criminals out of kids for this is over the top.

Bullying: this is not new, on-line bullying is just a development, just as when kids stopped using slates and started using paper in the classroom.

Naughty pictures on the Internet ? A natural curiosity. 'No' is not the answer (& impossible to achieve), but educate the differences between sex & relationships, romance & love. Not new anyway -- in my day it was smuggled copies of Playboy.

All of the above need adults (teachers & parents) to spend time with kids, get to know them.

The trouble with a solicitor driven risk averse society is that kids are not allowed to be kids.

Man who gave interviews about his crimes asks court to delete Google results

Re: Easy one

Do I get moderated for speculating that NT1 is not Lord Lucan ?

So if I fall prey to NT2 ...

in a few years time, in spite of having done a search to try to determine if he is an honourable character - which draws a blank because he has been 'forgotten'. Can I seek compensation from google/etc or the courts or ... ?

Right to be forgotten should be about personal things (affairs, etc) and for those under 25; not those who have indulged in criminal activity.

.

Anyway: why go after search engines, surely the newspapers, etc, are the right targets ?

UK.gov's shift to AWS: It's squeaky-bum time for small cloud pushers

No joined up thinking at all

Individual government departments each seeking to save a few bob off their own budget; whereas, maybe for a little more, they could 'buy British' - which creates jobs, etc, in the UK that DO pay tax, that DO build up UK expertise, that DOES make them better able to complete internationally, that DOES keep British data within our borders, ...

Overall a few different choices ends up benefiting Britain overall.

But politicians won't do that: each trying to bring their departmental budgets down and, anyway, the benefits of beefing up British business probably won't be noticeable until after the next election -- so they don't give a toss!

HP is turning off 'Always On' data deals but won't say why

Bait & switch

Trading standards should get involved ... except that they have little money do to what they should these days.

Trouble is that most will soon forget that HP are liars by the time that they next buy something.

Auto manufacturers are asleep at the wheel when it comes to security

What motivation car manufacturers ?

A car stolen leads to a replacement being bought.

Like IoT the cost of a security failure is borne by the consumer; the cost of making secure is borne by the manufacturer.

Surprise: Norks not actually behind Olympic Destroyer malware outbreak – Kaspersky

No one will read this new report ...

other than a few nerds. However at the time the politicos made great hay of it being the Norks - which suits their political ends of portraying Kim Jong-il as being the current root of all evil and a great nuclear threat - not ½ as many words spoken when Putin did the same last week.

I'm not saying that Kim is a nice bloke, but lets start to compare him to Bashar al-Assad, Robert Mugabe, ...

Your entire ID is worth £820 to crooks on dark web black market

New business ...

generate made up IDs by the dozen and flog them off. Getting a good reputation in the first place on the dark web might be hard.

Do it too many times and someone might order me some cement overshoes, but I would have thought low risk.

Buffer overflow in Unix mailer Exim imperils 400,000 email servers

Re: There are alternatives...

Exim is still good for that.

UK.gov cooks up code of conduct to enforce a smidge of security on Internet of S**t kit

The vendor to the consumer should be liable ...

otherwise they will simply refer customers to the manufacturer; which is probably somewhere in China that ignore complaints. This will ensure that resellers will sell stuff that causes them least problems, ie kit that it well designed, tested and is well supported, etc. If a manufacturer cannot provide assurance, etc, they won't get sales - simples.

Also product (support) lifetimes should be reasonable. This does not mean 'until the next model is released', but the real lifetime that one expects. So: for a fridge - maybe 20 years, light switch - 50 years.

Women of Infosec call bullsh*t on RSA's claim it could only find one female speaker

Can we take gender out of computing

Let's be completely blind about speakers' irrelevant human attributes: weight, height, skin colour, gender; .... What matters is: do they know their stuff; is it relevant; can they speak in an engaging way ?

123 Reg suffers deja vu: Websites restored from August 2017 backups amid storage meltdown

Why do people still use 123reg ?

I suppose that their customers must be those who are new enough to this to have not realised that, as far as 123reg in concerned, cheap means expensive in terms of time lost.

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Typed 'Reboot' where ... ?

Telnetted into various Unix machines, wanted to restart the one in the server room. Whoops - I forgot which machine I was logged into and typed 'reboot' to a machine on the other side of the planet. It did not come up, had to wait until teatime for the guys there to come in and push a button :-(

Euro Commission gives tech firms an hour to take down terror content

This stuff terrifies me ...

can we please have it removed from the EU web site.

Equifax peeks under couch, finds 2.4 million more folk hit by breach

Re: They can no longer be trusted

follow the money

Google: Class search results as journalism so we can dodge Right To Be Forgotten

Re: Fahrenheit 451

We all did silly things when we were young and naive...

Agreed

I think there also needs to be a Statute of limitations of articles.

But only in some circumstances; perhaps some combination of:

* Petty crime, eg stealing a car, getting into fights, using (not dealing) drugs, ...

* Under a certain age. I would put this at acts done under 25, 5 years after the act was done. 25 might seem high but a magistrate friend of mine tell me that she saw the same youths time & again, then at 25 they asked for other things 'to be taken into account' - then she would not see them again. It appears to be an age at which many of us finally grow up.

* Maybe acts done under 20 should drop out of sight after 2 years.

Billionaire's Babylon beach ban battle barrels toward Supreme Court

Access via the sea in a boat ?

OK: not for everyone, but has anyone done that ?

Vatican sets up dedicated exorcism training course

Exorcism

is the catholic church's equivalent to the E-meter

A bit of intel on AMD's embedded Epyc and Ryzen processors

Re: Spectre & Meltdown

Who pays your bills ? Intel ?

If you were a half awake typical technical reader of El Reg you would well know that Meltdown is almost entirely an Intel problem - and that Intel is trying to blur the distinction.

Spectre does affect most chip vendors.