Posts by Doctor Syntax

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

Re: It's an old old story...

'once you pay the Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane'

Historical misconception. It's the geld you never get rid of: the only certainties are death and taxes.

Re: Hmmm

Certainly anything written non-portably for Windows is going to have to be rewritten to run anywhere else. That's a fact of life i moving platforms. It's a very long time since I wrote anything for Windows but my experience over a few years was that it was just a perverse system to write for. In reality it might be easier than indicated here* to move stuff based on DotNet over to Linux where is is supported with official Microsoft implementations.

OTOH Pinta, which is based on DotNet, is distinctly crashy here. Admittedly I'm asking it to handle a really large map with multiple layers but Gimp doesn't mind the same material (I use both - some operations are easier on Pinta, others on Gimp, at least for a non-graphics person who's officially been declared by his wife to be "not artistic").

* Note that this isn't really about porting S/W, it's non-Microsoft cloud vendors building a case against Microsoft about pricing differentials so Rice-Davies applies. AIUI Linux is actually a major client OS on Azure.

IBM orders US sales to locate near customers or offices

As I read it, IBM has been investing in expensive flagship offices so it needs some window dressing in them to avoid looking stupid. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire out-of-work actors for the occasions when they have visitors they need to impress? Or maybe all those smiling well-dressed young models who you see posing in any advert for business products?

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

Re: Redundancy is a good thing

A single resource with multiple, mirrored servers works well in other circumstances. It could also have multiple coordinated maintainers so that if one gets funding dropped the work will continue. It would probably end up with the US leeching off other nations' work.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

The story does highlight the gap between acquiring knowledge and gaining experience of applying it in a production environment. It's not isolved by businesses demanding a minimum of 3 years' experience in a product launched 6 months' earlier.

Finn was lucky that the youngster hadn't found out about freelancing as well as the discrepancy in payments.

Word of mouth - best advertising medium of all.

Spending money on good customer services and support staff is likely to do more good than spending it in advertising. It retains existing customers and they will bring in the new ones.

I thought he laid pavements.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

I'm surprised that Frank Karlitschek is surprised about "the espionage factor". Data sovereignty has been a concern for a long time although maybe not as prominent as it should have been (i.e. not prominent enough for governments to take much action). It should still be a factor in a post-Trump world.

Along the same lines I find "Vultr, an American-based company with datacenters worldwide, has seen an uptick in interest in sovereign infrastructure" a remarkable statement. Can a US company provide infrastructure which is sovereign for any country other then the US?

At least people are waking up to the significance of "It's somebody else's computer you don't control".

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Not at all amazing. He can't get his hands on it, that's why.

Re: Trump administration should have...

Define successful. What you mean is that he left creditors and/or the taxpayer in the lurch. He might have counted that a success or an intent. But it's certainly not a good trait for a successful head of government.

Re: Krasnov

Attempts at combining logical, literal and ad hominem argument don't work well.

Re: Krasnov

"Either a system is democratic in intent and outcome, or it's not "

WHo gets to decide that? You?

Re: Krasnov

"Either a system is democratic in intent and outcome, or it's not."

Let's see:

Direct vote by all citizens on every issue.

First past the post voting for representatives

Proportional representation of various arrangements

The same population at any given type might have different outcomes from the various systems. All are democratic in intent but does this mean that only one - or none - are democratic if they don't produce the saem outcome? Who decides if the outcome was democratic? You? The winners? The losers? Winners and losers might disagree so tho then decides whether it was a democratic outcome?

Direct vote doesn't, of course, scale well so we might have to modify it for anything larger than a city state by combining it with some other form.

Different parts of the polity may vote in different ways. If one voted much differently to the rest but are nevertheless bound by the decisions of the rest is the outcome democratic? Should the exceptional area be spun out into a completely separate polity? Would various levels of local or devolved government be a more democratic arrangement - oops, we can't have "more democratic" can we if it either is or isn't democratic.

Seemed simple when you wrote it, but welcome to reality.

Whistleblower describes DOGE IT dept rampage at America's labor watchdog

Re: Russian Agent Trump

"Europe will no longer buy US wepons"

This one. Europe having better control over its own weapons isn't necessarily something either will be keen on.

He's expecting a deal. But probably recognises a master land more experienced kleptocrat when he sees one and is prepared to keep in with nim to learn.

Daddy of a mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for about 90 minutes

So it isn't always Microsoft. But it's always DNS.

First Nvidia, now AMD: Trump trade turmoil threatens $800M in China chip sales

Reports of shipments into the US peaked in Q1 suggesting non-US vendors and their importers had anticipated tariffs? How come the likes of AMD & Nvidia didn't, even even park them in warehouses in Canada if not further afield?

Whatever, it's a peculiar way to encouraging manufacturing in the US.

Re: How long will the appeasement of Trump and his supporters continue?

What the world needs is an "America Last" program

AFAICS it's already getting it, organised (pauses --- possibly not best word) by Trump himself.

Russians lure European diplomats into malware trap with wine-tasting invite

Re: Just wine?

It's edam nuisance and leaves them feeling blue.

Re: Examine the goddamm headers!

The Foreign Affairs also have a limited circulation.

On a more serious note, the people who are going to click on such links aren't going to check the headers.

Re: Just wine?

The victims are cheesed off.

Re: Ported

A full-bodied red but the bitter after-taste makes it unacceptable.

Signalgate chats vanish from CIA chief phone

Not to worry. Just ask The Atlantic. I'm sure they still have their copy.

CVE program gets last-minute funding from CISA – and maybe a new home

I think I see a bit of mart manoeuvring on the part of MITRE here. Careful application of pressure and all that. Well done.

Guess what happens when ransomware fiends find 'insurance' 'policy' in your files

Re: delivery of the miscreants for trial or the bodies thereof

Fake?

I think it's the good chaps rule in operation. If, for instance, some good chaps running a bank have a bit of a misfortune and have to pay out a few million $CURRENCY to get it sorted out that's no reason why a good chap in government would want to see them having to go to prison, not when it's been sorted so easily.

What's more a good chap in government has to look at the bigger picture. For instance in 5 years' time he might be in banking himself and it would be a rum do if he had a bit of misfortune and couldn't get it sorted without his old legislation sending him to prison. A good chap wouldn't want to see that sort of thing happening, would he?

Re: What people are willing to pay to avoid ...

We're dealing here at a level of INSERTs, DELETEs, UPDATEs and COMMITs or ROLLBACKs on the actual data of the commercial transaction as it's being processed. If the order for 3 pairs of socks get s encrypted to 287 in the course of the transaction the user might notice and if key fields get encrypted to different values in the tables that they joins there's liable to be an error thrown PDQ as the indexes become corrupted. OTOH there might be an argument that some product names at Ikea and vendors names on Amazon have already been.

The objective, really would be to keep the database sufficiently isolated from anywhere where a marketroid might click on a phishing email, a dodgy but of javascript downloaded onto a server on the fly or whatever. I get the impression that we have businesses set up with networks of machines with storage shared at file system level so that malware introduced through one is readily written to another if there's an escalation of privilege. That becomes a lot harder if the only traffic to some node is through a single protocol that doesn't deal with file systems. On reflection I suppose it would be possible, given an escalation of privilege to introduce a malware stored procedure but even then change control would help - something like the DBA granting and then dropping the required privilege required to upload SPs. Basically you connect the server to the outside world through a very narrow (in functionality) terms.

I suppose as a sometime DBA I take a paranoid approach but the data which represents the real business needs to be separated from all the wielders of spreadsheets and powerpoint presenters.

Right now I'm chasing a UK financial institution as to why I've been sent a click to confirm email to an address that should be part of my customer ID when the email wasn't intended for me and, of course, only a small number of customers were affected. Clearly that information hasn't been kept where it should as it should.

Re: What people are willing to pay to avoid ...

"However, they aren't going to work so well for online businesses because all the transactions between the last backup and its time of reload will have vanished into cyberspace."

What sort of online business runs on an RDBMS that doesn't use transaction backups?

Unfortunately I suppose the answer is an ordinary one.

Let's think of what seems an overly old-fashioned concept. A physical server that runs nothing but a basic OS and the RDBMS service. it has a network connection on which only the RDBMS service port is open. It is controlled solely by the console - either a directly connected monitor and keyboard or a serial terminal plugged into tty0 and located next to it. It has its own directly attached media drives for backup and for installing upgrades over trusted media. It's not somebody else's computer.

Before the mutterings of Stuxnet let's remember that we're wanting to proof the system against ransomware, not a nation-state attacker.

Re: What people are willing to pay to avoid ...

"Although they can be hard to test without a spare machine to test them on."

If you have a DR contract this should include provision for testing. You can test a full recovery that way. I found this to be ... instructional. The first test led to changes in the order on which the files were put onto tape. Moving some closer to the start of the tape meant that it was quicker to get some functionality in place so that database restoration could proceed from another tape drive before the file system had been fully backed up.

Testing tells you much more than the simple fact of whether you can restore your system.

Add some text to the effect that the insurance policies are cover rewards for the delivery of the miscreants for trial or the bodies thereof.

Law firm 'didn't think' data theft was a breach, says ICO. Now it's nursing a £60K fine

Re: "Commitment" is not enough

Yet another descendent of ISO9000?

"Sue Christopher"

Nominative determinism?

20 years on, DART still a masterclass in how not to rendezvous in orbit

It sounds not so much a cautionary tale as a valuable one. As they say, "That's odd".

In wake of Horizon scandal, forensics prof says digital evidence is a minefield

Horizon seems to have been a case of someone too close to the day-to-day operation becoming blind to its limitations, especially if there was incentive to be so. It takes a fresh pair of eyes to see the problems. That was how I conceived my role back in the day - a fresh pair of eyes. The police investigate, they bring in bags of potential exhibits, the statements, their hypothesis. Can I, without having been enrolled in any group-think that might have happened, find evidence that contradicts the hypothesis? If I can it avoids a miscarriage of justice, if I look hard and fail it strengthens the hypothesis but again it's up to the court to become the final arbiter of fact.

There were two sides, the gathering of evidence - in my day in conventional forensic science often delegated to police SOCOs - and the testing. I'm not sure this is brought out strongly enough; presentation and testing are not the same thing.

It's painful to read DNA being traditional as it came into use after I left although the Jefferies paper was out. I think of blood grouping and enzyme polymorphisms as traditional.

Re: Not over yet

"many of the innocent Post office staff have yet to agree, let alone receive, compensation"

It's difficult to not believe that TPTB are hoping that more of them die before a payout happens.

I'd have changed the order of the bullet points in his last list. The expert witness should come first as it's his or her job to prove the others.

Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter

Re: Time for creative accounting

The big guy can have 10%, he'll have the rest.

Re: Time for creative accounting

"he's encouraging corruption around the world."

He'll expect his cut.

Microsoft hits Ctrl-Z after Teams trips over file sharing

A modest proposal

Software development and maintenance is difficult. It involves such requirements as thinking. Automation would make it simpler. It is proposed therefore to set up an automatic process which makes random changes to the software at random times. Those that cause problems can then be reverted, those that don't can be left in even if their effects are meaningless.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: Reasoning

"seems like a shot to the foot"

There can't be much foot left to aim at.

As opposed to worthless like the OP's comment.

Hope isn't going to get you very far.

Remember where all that debt came from: you buying stuff you couldn't make. You still won't be able to make it and now people are already to buy less of the stuff you do make. They'll also be less willing to invest in your country to enable you to make more because investors want to see stability first.

No, hope isn't going to get you very far at all.

Re: Debt? No Sweat!

that debt is was happily bought by foreign investors who consider considered America both safe and a good place to invest.

FTFY

If the US wants to continue selling their debt they're going to have to jack up interest rates a lot.

When a UK PM has that effect on bonds their party can remove them in less time than it takes a lettuce to wilt.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

Art imitating life again. Many internet users have been training themselves on made up data for years.

From the BBC's PoV does it mean that it will be bolloxing up summaries of its own invented news reports instead of the Beebs?

TalkTalk Business pulls disappearing act on customer emails

Re: "Rock-solid resilience"

So is clay.

Japan serves Google a cease and desist order over its Android bundling deals

"this is the first time the Commission has acted against a big American tech company."

Why now, we wonder.

Team Trump readies national security card to justify taxing Americans for foreign chips

Re: i want my own chips

I think this is one where Poe's law applies if you check his posting history.

"And that’s going to take a decade!"

But ill achieve more. At least more of what he claims to want.