Posts by Doctor Syntax

Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people's balances

Re: Cash is king

So what did they take? Barter?

Re: Cash is king

"but people don’t still actually use it, do they?"

A few weeks ago I encountered an area where parking meters wouldn't take cards despite being apparently equipped with card reader hardware. Getting sufficient change to last for a few days wasn't easy.

I'm not sure whether or not they had pay by app because I'm not going to download and grant bank account access an app I see advertised on the side of a parking meter.

Two British-Nigerian men sentenced over multimillion-dollar business email scam

Or Florida...

OpenStack Dalmatian debuts with a new dashboard, better security and GPU-wrangling

I'm sure BorderCollie would be better at keeping things under control but maybe GermanShepherd would be preferable for security.

Re: I haven't seen it in use anywhere I've worked.....

You mean uptake is spotty?

Brits hate how big tech handles their data, but can't be bothered to do much about it

Point proven. I wonder how much the gig pays.

It looks like we've got a Chrome or Edge representative in here downvoting anyone who says a bad word against their master. They're not arguing their case but I don't suppose that's surprising..

"On the desktop, I NEVER use Chrome or Edge"

It's getting difficult to make a preferred browser choice these days. My preference list is SeaMonkey > Falkon > FireFox but too many sites - including my in-house NextCloud FFS!!! - force the last of these.

"The most common reason for taking no action was down to simply not knowing how to take control of one's data online."

And exactly how does one do that, other than rejecting intrusive services, as mentioned in the article?

Maintaining multiple email IDs is one way. It takes work but is possible although email clients could make it easier by providing a preferred ID field in the contacts list.

What's needed is an amendment to the DPA enabling the ICO to pro-actively audit companies, issue fines big enough to cause consternation at board level and, to support and incentivise the work, allow the ICO's office to retain a proportion of the fines.

Another OpenAI founder moves to arch-rival Anthropic

Re: "the Microsoft-backed AI house"

But is it Open Source at all? "Concerns that Altman and his team weren't being as open as the company name suggests."

It's back to Yes Minister, series 1, episode 1: "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title" and the difficult word there was also "open".

MongoDB rebuts claims it's not ready for business critical workloads

"sort of defining the way their data model looks"

If somebody is "sort of" defining "the way" their data model "looks" I can see why they might need flexibility. I think that just defining the data model is the way to go, however.

Microsoft lifts the price of System Center by ten percent

"Maybe that will sink in one day."

If it doesn't it might sink the victims companies.

After 27 years, Tcl/Tk 9 finally arrives with 64-bit power and Zip file magic

Tcl was responsible for the worst abuse of a programming language I ever came across. A script with a few parameters would almost certainly sufficed but, no, Tcl was used to invoke vi and feed it with all the "keyboard" input to write a number of one-off scripts that were then run to do the actual backups or whatever. Just the sort of thing that happens when somebody says "This is cool - what can we get it to do?".

It worked. It was a good thing it worked because if it hadn't there's have been no indication of what a one-time script might have been doing. I should have replaced it with something simpler but, on the basis that I was just passing through as a temporary admin (not that temporary as it turned out) it didn't seem a thing to reverse-engineer and take on.

Extracting vendor promises won't fix cybersecurity. Extracting teeth might

Re: FDixing the problem is pretty easy.

Unless management takes personal responsibility for security and is prepared to abide by all the rules, processes or whatever and also to back up the technical staff then any attempts to improve security will be overrules as soon as management finds them inconvenient.

Re: You gotta pay for it

"Chasing paperwork in the name of mediocrity gives me hives."

Mediocrity: that's the word. I remember [REDACTED] going on about quality management systems and stating, in effect, that quality was quantitative, not qualitative (not their words but that was the upshot) and that what mattered was choosing a point on the scale and hitting it (again, expressed in dressed-up form). My response was that in that case you could just as accurately call it a mediocrity management system.

Re: You gotta pay for it

Not really. They've spent time doing their compliance when they could have spent it on actually improving quality. Think of it this way. You're getting near to end of day. You've a job which will take 30 mins to do and 30 mins to do the paperwork. You have 30 mins left. The paper work is what you need to show you've done the job. Do you just do the job and leave the paperwork undone or do you do the paperwork and leave the job undone?

Re: C

And a BASIC program in any language.

Re: You gotta pay for it

I disagree. Toilet paper is useful.

Re: It's more than safe coding

1. You need a better operating system.

2. You need a better bank.

"Easterly suggests that corporate buying of software and services should be contingent on suppliers making good on such pledges."

Given that corporate buyers keep buying Windows and all who sail in it there's not the slightest chance of this suggestion being acted on.

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

"he'd thought it had been canned years ago. After all, in 2022, HoloLens boss Alex Kipman left Microsoft."

He must have forgotten to turn out the lights when he left.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

Re: AI agents have been the source of much enthusiasm in the technical community

The experiments you describe in your first paragraph would be described as enthusiasm. That you're not enthusiastic about the results won't diminish it when people are trying to tot up enough to reach a total of "much enthusiasm". IYSWIM

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba

"Now only the bathrooms & loos don't have at least two ethernet sockets."

They just have one each?

This thing about shells...

A member of our local history group has beenp hotographing documents and emailing them out in batches. Using my GUI email client I can select a series of emails, each with multiple attachments and selecting save with attachments. What I then get is a directory (folder if you prefer) with a lot of email texts (which are irrelevant) and a series of directories (ditto) named Attachments1, Attachments2 etc containing the images which I do want gathered into the same directory. I have too options.

1. Use the GUI file manager, go into each attachment folder in turn, select its contents, hit CTRL-X , back out of the folder into the parent folder andhit CTRL-V. Repeat for each folder in turn.

2. Open a shell terminal in the directory and issue the command

mv Atta*/* .

and I'm done.

Which option would you take?

The reason some of use use shell commands some of the time is because they're just so much slicker.

After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share

Re: It's the TPM that kills it for me

Will the special S/W run under Windows in a virtual machine or under Wine? If one of those works then you can ditch Windows for everything else.

Re: Support

I'm not sure about the "even". I'm not even sure about the "better". Windows 10 will be Windows 10 is about all that can be said. In fact, it will probably still keep trying the updates it's failed to install the last month, and the month before that, adn the month before that...

Re: Are MS worried?

"Do they care?"They haven't for a long time. It will take an even nastier shock for them to start caring now.

Re: Why Upgrade?

"Also, a hardware refresh of 3-5 years means that IT departments aren't trying to support multiple variations of desktops/laptops."

I think the stats show that IT departments are avoiding supporting multiple versions by the simple expedient of sticking with what's already working.

"I would have thought that most companies would already be running compatible hardware for most of their users by now."

Microsoft obviously thinks the same, as did hardware vendors. The statistics show that you are all mistaken.

Windows 11 user hurt by the KB5043145 update? Microsoft offers a way out

Re: Thank goodness for Linux

FTFY

World Wide Web Foundation closes so Tim Berners-Lee can spend more time with his protocol

That's the theory but Tubz may be right. After all a pod will be a well defined target although I don't really have any idea of what a database of social graph data might look like.

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

Re: Backup Tuesday

You also assume they'll have fixed it in three weeks. Hope springs eternal.

Kamala Harris campaign motorcade halted by confused robotaxis

I remember encountering an army convoy on the Mi. Moving slower than anything else on the road but with outriders in front, not at the back.

Re: Crosswalk I know of

Always carry an umbrella or walking stick. It could accidentally get caught in the spokes.

Re: The beginning of a robot uprising

"Kettles and teapots are unable to speak."

Not yet.

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Re: been there....

Quick thinking should have characterised it as a security test conducted by you, the sysadmin, so you could have given the manager a bollocking for breaching security regulations.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Re: Targeting users with Alzheimer?

It's not just screenshotting. It's OCRing any text on screen and indexing it running it all through its AI.

"Recall is designed with security and privacy in mind,"

In that case how was it that they had created "unique security challenges" and that few if any of these claimed security features were originally present? Does that mean that in a few months they've completely redesigned and reimplemented it or have they just bolted Sellotaped on as an afterthought as much as they could come up with in a brain-storming session?

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

Re: a very realistic product

"FWIW on this side of the Atlantic trains get cancelled, not canceled"

Back when I commuted by trains I was convinced they were concealed.

Re: a very realistic product

"say something with your wonderful accent!"

So do you ask for Marmite?

With our bus service a one line display would be enough.

"a full meter in width."

If it's straight it's a metre, if it's a meter it's round.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

"I tend to threaten devices with a hammer"

That's a DART

"If you do that to a person"

and that's a Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool.

Re: MS Guru

"with poor personal hygiene arrived from Seattle"

Possibly because he'd just been hastily shoved on an overnight flight without even hand-baggage?

Re: been there..

"No, I think I want to be doing that one myself."

But it wouldn't concern you if it was a GUI?

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

Nowadays you'd have been replaced with someone cheaper by the time you got through all that.

Ransomware gang using stolen Microsoft Entra ID creds to bust into the cloud

"managed to extract the plain text credentials of the Microsoft Entra Connect cloud and on-premises sync accounts,"

So what was the encryption?

Fedora 41 beta arrives, neck-and-neck with Ubuntu – but with a different focus

Re: Have another upvote

Agree except:

s/XFCE/KDE

IBM and Oracle to support 280,000 users after winning mega ERP govt tech contract

Re: Oracle, seems I've heard that name before

Are you saying it could have been worse?

""The COM design will continually evolve throughout the five programme delivery phases. As a result, benefits will also continue to evolve over time"

But benefits to whom? Carefully not stated so as not to alarm HMG.