Posts by Doctor Syntax

If you want into Anthropic's Claude club, you may have to show ID

Re: I am curious

So you think that's a valid citation to describe someone as "functionally illiterate". Very informative.

Irrespective of whether or not you're the previous A/C I can see why you post that way.

Re: There's something basic...

Do any of us know who we are?

Are we the person named on our birth certificate? The child whose birth is recorded there was present but in no fit state to take notes. We rely entirely on what we've been told by those who told us they were our parents.

And that's before we consider those who are fraudulently using a birth certificate or other documents.

Re: I am curious

"for some, functionally illiterate"

Citation needed. But I can see why you posted A/C.

Re: Hard no

"Europe basically forced the entire world to have stupid cookie dialogs after all."

Because Europe tends to be on the side of the consumer and user tracking is very much consumer exploitative.

Thanks for letting us know you're on the other side.

Re: Hard no

"Thus, if $BIG_COMPANY can outsource compliance to a third-party solution"

At a first glance it has doubled the attack surface. In reality the 3rd party might be outsourcing to more companies so it may have done more than double its attack surface. In practice such outsourcers, by performing the same role for more end-user facing companies, are a juicier target than any single end-user facing company and will attract more determined attempts to crack them. When the least well defended of those goes down the blame, lawsuits and general opprobrium will inevitably fall on the end-user facing company with added blame for not being capable of looking after its own affairs itself.

"When new information is gathered, it often goes through a whole chain of providers"

And, as I keep pointing out with supply chains, a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

Re: The real news here…

The real news here is that European countries join forces when needed. They don't start things on their own and then expect others to join in.

If it's an escort vessel it can help to give away the position of the capital ship, alsways assuming that's not been done already with Strava.

Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams

Re: Unsure of What I Just Read

AMFM1's alter ego?

I'm beginning to wonder if Po's law is at work here.

Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems

Re: Never mind azure. Exchange is dying.

So now you have two problems?

Re: Yorkshire!

Stourton! I hope that's not the Park & Ride site I use when I go to the University Library.

You think they're into details like that these days?

Re: Users forget

And bucket.

Re: Users forget

That's Palantir at work.

Re: Users forget

What Brexiters ignored, despite being told many times, was that Brexit would cut British business's home market from 28 countries to less than one (allowing for the frontier they created in the Irish Sea) and that for many of them that would mean their future job prospects would be on the line. And they're still ignoring it.

And before you point out that many of them would be retired many of them would also, like me, have working age children and grandchildren who would become working age if they weren't there already.

"Civo, noted that sending workloads abroad could easily turn into a sovereignty nightmare."

I note that Civo have regions and an office in the US. Could that be a sovereignty nightmare?

Re: Users forget

"Admittedly, they tried that with Brexit, but I guess they decided to pull out of that economic nose dive before everything went North Korean."

Far too many of the Brexiters haven't. I doubt there's any depths to which the post-Brexit economy will plunge before they accept it was their fault. When your heads stuck in the sand you can't see what's happening around you.

"Microsoft is not short of tools for creating tables of figures and forecasts."

Perhaps Excel ran out of rows.

Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug

Re: Apple...Or Someone Else?

FBI is a 3LA

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Re: It's not just hardware!

Tell them it's magic and they've got to get the spells just right.

"last week we got LEDs"

Just wait till they start to fail. The <= 1Hx flashing gets annoying, especially if it shines in through a bedroom window.

Re: We call her Ruth

st'Ruth!

Re: Had similar

"A BoFH that can actually see the future is a window far too open for most people."

With a BoFH in the vicinity any window is far too open, even when it's closed.

Just for extra effect, the interference was strongest just before the phone rang.

Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned

Re: OurJukebox still working nicely

Perhaps your play lists show a superior musical taste and are limited to the music of Edard Kennedy Ellington.

Mozilla throws Thunderbolt at enterprise AI providers

Bludgeoned its way in,in fact.

"into German company deepset's Haystack platform"

Does it have any needles in it?

Sorry - too tempting.

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Re: Brown Envelopes

"What was also ignored is that Civil Servants are still one of the only groups to have gold plated final salary pensions"

I get fed up with pointing out that IME the Civil Service scheme was not gold-plated. I had a far better deal moving into the private sector. The Civil Service pension scheme had less value per year served in terms of final salary and the non-contributory aspect was a salary sacrifice scheme and a bit of a con trick because it lowered the final salary on which the pension was calculated. More pinchbeck than gold-plate,

It's worth bearing in mind that it's the bollocks being made of that very CS pension scheme that's the focus of this thread.

And apart from that, a pox on your casual ageism.

Re: Brown Envelopes

"This leaves governments filled with the same Etonian based connected mates in Politics and civil service"

We had a generation of politicians, starting from Wilson, through Heath & Thatcher who came up through the grammar school system. It was Wilson & his cronies who pulled up that ladder behind them. The next generation were largely headed by public schoolboys again.

Re: Brown Envelopes

"Don't have the size of in house teams to handle larger projects hence it getting outsourced."

This is a factor entirely within government's control.

From the letter linked in TFA: "Capita was the winning bidder in line with the evaluation methodology."

Perhaps the evaluation methodology needs to be evaluated.

NodeWeaver says its perpetual licensing beats VMware’s perpetual price hikes

Re: Potato

"Will it run on a turnip?"

You have a cunning plan?

DuckDB uses RDBMS to attack classic 'small changes' problem in lakehouses

Or any other good RDBMS. (Licence audits not good)

"cheating with a better design,"

Given the description of how it works otherwise it wouldn't be hard to find a better design. When somebody calls it cheating you have to wonder why they've ever been allowed near a keyboard.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: I have a lockpick set in my laptop bag

Who needs paper-clips when an office is fitted out with filing cabinets, all with the same key?

Microsoft announces product it doesn't want anyone to buy

What's a software giant to do? Point out it was quite emphatic about not extending the ESU period past April and stick to its guns – or make a change take the money?

FTFY

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Re: Passwordless sudo ?

A regular user in the sudoers list needs only their regular password. In effect they're using the admin password all the time.

Re: The obviously correct decision

Doctor Syntax has been administering various Unix systems from Edition 7 days until he retired. In particular he may know more than DaDragon because he remembers how privileges could be split up before sudo in a way that didn't fail a basic principle.

In view of discussion further down thread he also knows that su did not mean for "superuser". It was an abbreviation of "substitute user". su lpadmin meant that the user could run a shell as lpadmin and needed lpadmin's password - an additional key to gain additional privilege which is the better way to do it.

Re: The obviously correct decision

"Isn't it a bit more complex than that. The real issue is a god like 'root' user that can do anything."

It is more complex than that. Once upon a time in Unix there were specific user IDs with specific powers. You wan somebody to administer print queues? Give them the lpadmin login. They can use it to administer print queues and nothing more. When I started using Unix there was a user ID bin who owned any system executables that didn't have to be suid to a specific user. The user with the bin password could update software.

It was never as well implemented as it might be, probably because in practice there might only be one administrator to do everything or else all the administrative group needed to do everything. It was a right pain, for instance, if the DBA needed to go cap - or paperwork - in hand to somebody else to get more disk allocated. And I don't recall there being a specific user for password resets or user creation although that might be aged memory.

We got, therefore, to the situation where admins got the root password and the alternative ways of doing things were forgotten so that when anybody got agitated about this sudo got invented. And sudo has one big disadvantage. It fails Saltzer and Shroeder's separation of privileges principle:

"Where feasible, a protection mechanism that requires two keys to unlock it is more robust and flexible than one that allows access to the presenter of only a single key."

It means that instead of requiring two separate passwords to get from a login prompt to executing something that requires elevated privilege it just needs the one password applied twice. If the sudo user's password gets leaked then whoever acquired needs nothing more and as the usual case is, as before, there's just ordinary user and root privileges, it's root that's leaked.

Add to that the fact that you've enlarged the attack surface - and ISTR reports of a bug in sudo - you've introduced a security hole by trying to plug one.

My view is that in most cases sudo makes a system less secure by its presence.

Scooby dooby do

Shoe company says it's getting into AI infrastructure and yes this is the top

The sold their sole to the ->

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

Re: Captcha

Exactly. That's why I'd like to see the scheme applied to the Ainley roundabout. The idea occurs to me every time I'm queued up at the top of the hill out of Elland or coming down from the M62 which used to be my daily commute years ago. It's a roundabout that covers a lot of ground so there would be plenty of room to implement it.

But I suspect it would confuse the hell out of Waymo.

Re: Captcha

If they ventured out to High Wycombe I wonder what they'd make of the roundabout at the bottom of Marlow Hill. (I'd like to see that arrangement applied to the roundabout where the M62 crosses the A629 between Huddersfield and Elland.)

You won't get the rest of the rural hazards, however. BTW, as a group, the horse riders are the best behaved of the lot.

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Re: Constant change is here to stay

True. So shall we say "feature-complete"?

Re: Microsoft should hire her.

Is there anywhere like that left?

French cops free mother and son after 20-hour crypto kidnap ordeal

Four arrests is a good start. Were there any arrests in the previous French cases? If not, let's hope they can link these four back to the others.

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

Keep it in your phone instead?

UK told its Big Tech habit is now a national security risk

Re: Lock-in, pay-out

There's a further point of comparison.

Back then there was an assumption that an economy could exist which was able to ignore the inflationary effects of rising house prices to maintain low interest rates.

Nor there's an assumption that an economy can exist which is able to ignore the amount of money already burnt on AI data centres to provide a return on investment.