Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: At a previous orkplace..

"Bill your company for overnight safe custody services."

And for the physiotherapy for back problems due to standing all the time.

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Nudity is not a crime

Back in the days when you took a film to a shop to get developed a& printed (D & P) the company actually did this. As the mother was a well-known BBC newsreader the company and police got enough attention to make them wish they'd engaged their brains before taking it further.

Re: Impossible to have a reasoned discussion

When deterrence fails there's always preventative detention. The reality is that there'll always be criminality. You can't take a blanket approach and say "creating this new criminal offence will deal with it". That's the legislator's approach and at best it doesn't work and at worst it has bad side effects that should have been obvious. The sad fact is that you have to deal with individual cases, detect them, try them and then work out what's the best - rehabilitation, some form of punishment that should be a deterrent or simply removing from society for a long period to protect that society.

As it's not a controlled experiment we have no evidence as to the extent that earlier extreme punishment acted as deterrence or not. The contrary factor influencing behaviour was extreme poverty.

Re: Impossible to have a reasoned discussion

What's wrong here is that you - and Starmer, and many more - are seeking to treat the symptoms. The images are a symptom of the harm done to the victims. Simply attempting to hide them is closing the eyes to the original harm and thus letting it continue. What should be done is to identify those responsible, charge them, try them and, if convicted, give them deterrent sentences.

"Questionable" is understating it. It's simply yet another denial of the presumption of innocence. So was PACE from which we got Horizon.

Re: "We are doing something".....Over And Over Again!

"Something must be done. This is something, therefore it must be done."

The politician’s syllogism.

"How, precisely, do they intend to establish that a child is using the device?"

They don't. That would be impractical*. It will have to be on every device, just in case.

That may or may not be the present intent but the impracticality will be realised in due course.

Re: Doolally

It's not specifically Starmer. The digital ID thing has been a Labour aspiration for the last 3 decades or so. Cameron's government celebrated the 800th anniversary year of the signing of Magna Carta by a new Investigatory Powers Act to further screw down on the presumption of innocence.

Microsoft's worst 'Nightmare' unleashes BitLocker bypass 0-day

Re: Dog bites man?

"I've no sympathy for someone who uses the same justification as a terrorist."

As a bystander in this I can't help thinking that MS should have been more careful about who they pissed off. Sometimes the little people hit back.

Re: Unwarranted use

People can be cautions before becoming demented.

Apple version of Office 2019 becomes useless in a month

Re: WordPerfect?

"will it run on Windows?"

In this case the appropriate question "will it run on MacOS?"

Let's look at T'bird:

Email client

Address book*

Calendar*

RSS reader

Usenet reader

Follows open standards

What's missing?

Obedience to Microsoft lock-in with their closed standards but if you're looking to break out of Microsoft lock-in why would you want it?

* Both these use open standards to sync with servers

Re: Entitled to a full refund in some jurisdictions

The reason I suggested individual claims via the small claims court is that they would have to send someone to court to argue this - and argue it against the fact that it was their deliberate choice to brick it. That's going to cost more than simply making a refund.

I wonder how MS would cope if everyone claimed a refund under the small claims process appropriate to their jurisdiction. The essence of small claims it that the winning side can't claim costs.

LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy

libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook or any kind of email client.

It's debatable as to whether this is the best approach (after all, it enables people like yourself to make comments like that) but AIUI their position is that it enables users to make a choice. There was some discussion about taking Thunderbird under their wing when its position under Mozilla looked shaky. Personally I wish they'd taken over SeaMonkey and wrapped in an entire browser/email/RSS readerUsenet reader/calendar package.

As it is, users can add TBird or something else as they choose.

Uncle Sam considers buying a seat on the Titanic

"does that mean that nobody outside the USA can trust their chips not to spy on them?"

Outside?

Established critical infrastructure - fine. Intel could reasonably be included in that. Speculation with taxpayers' money? Ah, well, I'm not a US taxpayer, thank goodness.

Re: Please give Trump a ticket on the Titanic

A shared cabin should work out fine.

UK.gov warned that digital transformation hype is no substitute for delivery

From TFA "Avoiding overinflated expectations? Even a politician could do that."

I know it's an ironic and rhetorical question but it's worth looking at the politicians involved.

Again from TFA:

"Peter Kyle, the then Technology Secretary" Geography, International Development, and Environmental, doctorate in Community Development. Succeeded by Liz Kendall, 1st in history.

"the Minister for Digital Government and Data confirmed that internal pilots of in-house productivity tools had been paused after they had been 'superseded by more modern, widely available platforms,' without specifying which ones." That's Ian Murray, Social Policy and Law. "joini[ed] an arts-based internet TV station as the Operations Director." That sounds better. "Following the collapse of the company" Oops.

Re: These numbers always make me

"3. Anyone remember the numbers of Brexit Savings on the sides of the buses?

4. Also, does the government think Joe public believes any of this spin? (see 2)" See 3. It appears that quite a lot did.

Apple courts developers with privacy and context in AI comeback bid

Maybe Apple are missing an opportunity here. Dump it and promote themselves as having the OS without AI.

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Re: Works with hardware, too

Ah, the good old days of SCSI when one of those HP (whatever happened to them?) DAT drives could back up your entire PC to a 2Gb tape.

"I stepped through every line, I checked all values, and I could see everything was right."

If this is, indeed the case, and there were no wildcards in thee filename then it may well have been a bug. Never overlook that possibility.

Re: Not a lot of sympathy for "Evan"

The consultant told them what they could have found out by asking their own staff, true. But the staff are paid far less than the consultant so what they'd have told them would have been seen as less valuable. If you have senior manglement who only evaluate sources of information based on what they pay for them this is the only way they get the information they need. Don't blame the consultant, he's only doing his job. Blame the manglement who aren't doing theirs.

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

It sounds like a case of "Here's a straw, let's grasp it", a variation on the politician's syllogism.

Perhaps it would have been better to have submitted the plan to NICE prior to approval.

Re: National Humiliation Service

a pilot that "found" each user saved 43 minutes a day

We can only hope that this doesn't become the basis for clinical trials.

History of CentOS: How a biochemist's Linux hobby project became the enterprise world's default operating system

If something happens to Alma, Rocky's here; if something happens to Rocky, Alma is there; if something happens to both of us, Oracle is there; you have a problem.

England's exam watchdog frets over smart specs turning GCSEs into Google searches

Re: Real life preparation?

One of the most important real-life skills that the exam system teaches: Read the questions carefully.

"She was also diligent enough to save all that material and have it ready."

Probably the most important of all the skills she'd acquired.

Re: Nothing new

"t could be argued that they are heavily biased in favour of persons with decent powers of recollection and the ability to regurgitate answers without needing to understand the topic."

Also the ability to write quickly but legibly.

Two solutions here, however. 1. Poison the web with incorrect answers and watch out for regurgitation in the answers. 2. hold all exams inside Faraday cages or spaces with jammers operating.

If you don't fall for these extortionists' calls, they'll show up with USB sticks

Re: ... always accompanied by a corporate, in-office supervisor

I suppose lawyers' offices might have had a few clients who were had had bad experiences being mug-shotted and wouldn't want the same from their mouthpieces.

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

Re: "I need a bulletproof vest and a fully automatic rifle..."

"I was taught to shoot, .22 rifle from the age of 12"

I suppose I also might have been taught to shoot early - dad was a notable poacher in his younger years. However, when I was born he got rid o his shotgun so I grew up unused to being around firearms. On the whole I wouldn't swap your early exposure to my lack of it; it might have saved by life some decades later.

One day a rifle which had been dug up was brought into the Lab for examination. I was called down to reception and asked to take a soil sample from it (complete nonsense!). As with the very few other times something like that came up I was very circumspect with it, having no background with such things. In the canteen couple of weeks later one of the firearms examiners casually mentioned that it had been found to be booby trapped. A shotgun booby-trapped in much the same way had exploded in a police station down-town killing two officers a little while back.

After that they brought in a rule that all firearms presented for examination had to be X-rayed before being brought into the Lab.

"We flew from Brize Norton to Aldergrove courtesy of the RAF"

It was always Northolt in my experience. If we had to go to/from London and one of the ministers or NIO London-based civil service bigwigs had a RAF plane flight booked we were supposed to use that. It could be inconvenient - car parked at RAF side of Aldergrove, civil side for the return flight.

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

Re: Critics threaten...

In the circumstances, until they've finished fire-fighting, having more code thrown at them is unlikely to be welcome.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

I see the list of commands includes ln. How does that work with MS file systems?

I've had all these things as part of the core system for more than 40 years.

Re: Fantastic!

"There's no worry about licenses or provenance if Microsoft are maintaining this too."

Don't you think it might introduce a whole lot of other stuff to worry about in that case?

Re: Nice, but...

The implication there seems to be that Cygwin isn't written in a compiled language. Really?

Re: Nice, but...

It sounds more like Busybox.

No longer just a Copilot, Microsoft's AI wants to take the wheel

Re: Not happening.

I'd rather keep using Linux.

Re: The introduction of coreutils was nice, if decades late, but this….

Here

See also: using different names for the same thing.

Remote work – not AI – is killing job prospects for the youth

Re: "It's like promoting a chemist to accounts because they're a good chemist (or vice versa)."

AIUI the Peter Principle is slightly different. They get promoted up the same skill ladder until they get to a position that requires more skills than they have. The difference here is that because of not having that ladder at all the promotion is into what is into something requiring a skill set orthogonal to that which they hold.

Re: Time to Sack Managers

Yup. That's the other one.

In regard to training further down the thread - I've come across a trainer who might have been appointed to that role under the same line of thinking.

Re: Too many variables.

"But in general, everyone is battening down the hatches, running light, fewer people, fewer products, core activity only, expecting more economic crap ahead"

Quite apart from geo-politics that's just positive feedback accentuating what happens. It's the way economies work. Geo-politics set the direction, boom or bust. Unfortunately those in geopolitics don't realise that.

Making the move from science to IT I was pushed out from the office to a client site in the middle of the first week because one of the two on-site staff had left to go freelance and they were afraid if they didn't fill the chair PDQ the client might not let them fill it (at least that's the explanation I got). It wasn't the project I'd been recruited for either. After a few weeks the other of the original pair also left and I was for a time the only one on site and even when someone else was added I was still the team leader. We had a visit from the account manager and twice yearly reviews in the office but that was all.

Re: Time to Sack Managers

"Many managers do not get the job because they were good at doing what their subordinates are now doing."

I'm not sure about this one. ISTM that people get promoted to management because there is no technical promotion ladder. It becomes the only way of rewarding them for technical achievement - by transferring them to a job which has different technical requirements that they don't necessarily have. It's like promoting a chemist to accounts because they're a good chemist (or vice versa). It ends up with the work being done by those who are too inexperienced or inept at it to be promoted to management and managed by those who would do the job better but have no competence at management. No wonder we refer to them as "manglement".

Listen up, England. The Health Secretary is going to be data controller for everyone's Single Patient Record

That is why the GPs should remain the data controllers.

It's just standard UK govt. hubris. It's what they do best so whichever party is in power that's what you get.

Poland directs officials to ditch Signal in favor of 'secure' state-developed alternative

Re: I predict this makes things worse for them

Just in case somebody is still reading this thread (been on holiday for a while):

the user id is a mobile phone number

FTFY

If you look at their video of setting things up you can use a burner phone to set up Signal on a computer which is the recommendation if you're security consious. It's only the mobile number if you use it on a phone. Yes, a phone is convenient. It's the old trade-off - why by secure when you can use something convenient?

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: I'm old enough I remember eight inch

"inserting this the wrong way up is a world ending scenario"

Or: There are 8 ways to insert a disk into a drive. Only one of them is interesting.