Posts by Doctor Syntax

FCC fines be damned, ESPN misuses emergency alert tones yet again

Re: you could see people start to pull over thinking it was the law.

"traffic reports"

No EON?

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

OTOH he's telling the world - and that includes potential customers - that AWS won't deploy its software to support remote working. What if those businesses want to support remote working for themselves? Might they take the view that "won't" means "can't"? Might they wonder if, by not using it themselves, AWS might produce a sub-optimal product.

It's a far more convincing sales story for a large IT business to demonstrate that it eats its own dog-food.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Can't recall the mechanism

See https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/enforce-a-judgment

It's not straightforward - note that "Enforce a judgement" is the last stage.

The ultimate detergent is this one https://www.gov.uk/wind-up-a-company-that-owes-you-money

"Nobody has an automatic right for a business venture to be successful."

Nobody said otherwise but if you're in business yourself it pays to keep a lookout to make sure you'r not extending too much credit to those who might not be.

Re: How to go to jail in 1 easy step.

Do you really think AWS, Azure or whatever would be hauled in front of a criminal court for cutting off a customer for non-payment?

Re: Bilaterally Binding Guarantees

"We're trying to pay you but computer says 'No'"

That's OK, we can help you. My big friend here can escort you to the cash machine.

Re: A company I know

I'm sure its correct attribution will be the versatile and prolific Anon.

But he didn't seize them because the customer paid up. There's nothing to stop someone rolling up to claim their own property back even if they have to go to court to enforce it in the face of a refusal. It's just "Can we get our ball beck, mister?" whit large.

Re: Ways to encourage payment

The thought that he was getting 5% probably kept the guy happer, even if he wasn't.

Re: Important word

"Demanding payment and securing it by disabling a computer system until you get paid has previously been ruled to be a crime."

I doubt that any cloud vendor cutting off a customer for non-payment is going to get a criminal conviction. And way back in the 80s/90s it was SOP for the packages to require a key to be entered to enable operation for another year. Circumstances alter cases.

What was annoying about one company was that they'd display a message on every user terminal. As we had a serial link between that and another system in order to look things up it wasn't welcome for an unexpected message to come down the line. In the end we understood how their files were structured and read them directly.

Re: Important word

You'd need to have a court rule on it. I wouldn't bet my freedom on a ruling that it isn't a computer, not when the functions have been explained, including the fact that it could be logged into, wiped, reprogrammed etc. Even more so when you reflect it may well include server functions such as DHCP..

Re: Finance dept. are at the root of this issue

"I managed to inform him of his error before the production ladies started loosening their garments "

Why?

"That business folded about year later."

The serial non-payment might have been an indication they were in trouble already.

Re: A company I know

As one of Tricky Dicky's henchmen said, when you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.

Re: Important word

If you take the router apart you're going to find at least one CPU in it.

"The support outfit needed more Iains"

To be able to afford more Iains they need customers who pay their bills.

Re: Sometimes there's a hidden benefit with irritating clients

"She could have stepped straight out of a 70s spy movie. It kinda made up for some of the angst."

You didn't realise she was the real chief and the other guy was just a front man? And haven't you noticed the same cars following you around ever since?

Post Office CTO had 'nagging doubts' about Horizon system despite reliability assurances

Re: If there's no audit log how can there be prosecutions?

They've put themselves in a position where they can't - or shouldn't be able to - convict even a genuine case without completely independent proof.

Re: Why always 'someone else'

This is the new version "I was going on what I'd been told." It should carry as much weight when you're in a position where you can demand the truth.

Re: I could empathise....

I call it fear.

If he had nagging doubts he was the best placed person to satisfy them yet he didn't. In his position plausible deniability isn't. There were obviously too many who didn't want to start turning over stones for fear of what might lie beneath.

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

If the company doing the repair or refurbishment is big enough to be VAT registered then they're obliged to charge VAT to the customer. They'll also reclaim VAT on their purchases so it makes no difference as to whether VAT's charged on components. The most effective way of dealing with this would be to make repair and refurbishment zero-rated services which would mean the the business can be VAT registered, reclaim VAT on its purchases but not charge VAT* to the customer.

Technically they do, but it's zero.

Re: Stop it!

At least they got 2 letters right.

Datacenter CEO faked top-tier IT reliability cert to snag $10.7M SEC deal, DoJ claims

"Yesterday's charges make clear that the Criminal Division will not tolerate fraud schemes that threaten the security of the government's electronic data."

The contract was signed in 2012 & they're charging him in 2024? That's a lot of not tolerating>

Elon Musk's X isn't important enough to feel the full force of EU regulation

Re: Erm

I'm not sure. It's going to hit him where it hurts - his pride. The thought of him clamouring to be regulated is rather pleasing.

Openreach reveals latest locations facing the copper chop

Re: Power pair laid in with each fibre?

I doubt they'd be able to supply the current needed for everyone's routers. And I'm glad for you you get a decent mobile signal. My SiL who has an emergency alert that relies on a reliable connection would probably also be glad for you.

I see you've never worked at BT.

James Lilley, Openreach's Managed Customer Migrations Manager, defended the company's decision.

"As copper's ability to support modern communications declines, the immediate focus is getting people onto newer, future-proofed technologies."

Copper's ability to maintain basic communications, OTOH, is underpassed. In the event of a power failure the newer technologies aren't even present-proofed. There's no way of holding this smug git typical BT manager to account.

Re: Amazing

"the next big wind knocks down a few pylons, or a goodly thunderstorm trips out the inverters on a big wind farm"

If it took an event like that to produce a power cut round here we'd be quite pleased with the service.

Link

The latest exchanges due to have their customers' service fail in the event of power cuts are listed here:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/10/openreach-name-next-79-uk-areas-for-copper-to-fttp-switch-tranche-18.html

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

"I say was a home brew kit"

But whose home?

Re: the most sophisticated agencies on earth could not track them once they left

"Who knows what the truth is?"

We can reasonably suspect that whatever it is, it's not what we're being told.

Re: the most sophisticated agencies on earth could not track them once they left

"the most sophisticated military & associated agencies on earth could not track them to their landing places."

It's possible that some of what we're being told is a terminological inexactitude.

IBM: Insurance industry bosses keen on AI. Customers, not so much

I think "customer" is being used in 2 ways here. IBM's customers are the C-suite manglers for whom something shiny that they think can save them employing people with real intelligence is a a wet dream. The customers who distrust it will be IBM's customers' customers.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

So a cheater wants to escape punishment for cheating. That sounds like cheating to me.

Not to worry, he sounds like top manglement material so he'll probably go far in any case.

Windows 7 finally checks out as POSReady 7 closes the till on an era

How many businesses will take kindly to replacing a till because Microsoft tells them to? Assuming any of the tills are still functioning. This is just a special case of taking some piece of specialised equipment and then tying its life to that of a piece of S/W. In this case it might have met its H/W EoL first.

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive

Re: How about a compromise...

It's not just the cost of excavation. It's also the cost of going through so many cubic metres of waste looking for a hard-drive. Either that would have to be done by hand, expensive even with cheap labour* or there'd be the cost of designing and building a custom machine for the job.

* Add in the security guards to make sure that if one of the cheap labour found it they didn't pocket it. And then more guards to watch the guards.

Perhaps there's more in this than he's telling us. Perhaps he's really Satoshi.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

If so much 3rd party code was in the repository did they even have full rights to distribute the binary?

Re: Simplest solution

Those who can't won't and very likely won't need to, those who can will.

Microsoft teases latest Windows 10 build despite looming end

"back to the halcyon days of Windows 1, a typo that was swiftly corrected"

So what were the intended halcyon days? W2K? It's been a downward slope since they discovered with XP that they could get away with requiring the user to let it check in with the mother-ship.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

"sysadmin complaints"

Is it complaints or a matter of feasibility?

Personally I'm pissed off by the multiplicity of sites that want to tell me that I can't use my preferred browsers, mostly, I suspect, because it's the authors of frameworks such as PHP that can't be arsed to remember that the web was supposed to be a universal platform. Clearly the businesses that run such sites don't care provided the user switches to some other browser. If Apple and Google, as browser vendors, get the rough end of this they'll get no sympathy from me.

Re: Automation don't work this way

"45 days won't break the internet, but it _will_ break services we depend on, daily"

Alternatively it might break Safari as a browser for internet banking and all those other services.

""may not pass the CABF ballot, but then Google or Apple will just make it policy anyway…"

So if that happens how about the web sites telling Safari and Chrome users to try a different browser? That's a power that's in the sysadmins' hands if they choose to use it.

NHS England warned about plans to extend Covid-era rules for patient data access

"NHS England Secure Analytics Service Pilot Directions 2024 "

It's "Secure" that's the weasel word here. Whose interests are to be secured and from whom?

AT&T and Broadcom may settle VMware support case

argued that the telco giant should have known that VMware – like the rest of the enterprise software industry – is moving to subscriptions.

Should have known when? The relevant time would have been before they entered into the contracts. How would they have known that?

a price that is well below market

The "market" is Broadom's own so it's not exactly a market price set by competition is it?

Keir Starmer tells regulators to chill as Microsoft exec takes wheel of advisory council

The CPS's reputation at the time he was in charge there was an indication of how it might go. OTOH his predecessor in the party would undoubtedly have been worse.

Re: Hystery

I've long been of the view that when a process is devised and written down the rationale should be written down with it. It not only keeps that corporate knowledge from being lost, it also underlines the need for revising the process when the circumstances on which the rationale is predicated change.

The high level decisions are made by the politicians and we've had a long run of advanced Dunning-Kruger syndrome there. HS2 was, I realised when it was proposed, a solution to today's problem in a few decades time. Detailed regulation, OTOH, quite often comes from someone in the Civil Service or an agency who actually does know about the domain. There are obviously exceptions: I formed the view in about 1967 that the Ministry of Labour as I think it then was ran the forerunners of Job Centres staffed all too often by people who were on the wrong side of the counter and subsequent contact with their DWP successors at a higher level did not inspired a revision.

Windows 11 24H2 disk space hoarding a 'reporting error'

Re: Almost sounds like Apple...

The report is prepared by AI. The 8Gb is simply an hallucination.