Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

"after official support ends"

How would one differentiate this from normal function?

Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft lack the talent to make something worse?

Re: Win10 will be the last OS from Microsoft I will ever use...

Don't blame the idea for being implemented by Microsoft.

I suppose the ploy is to make sure that W10 is so much shittier than W11 that switching is the lesser of two evils.

Now Online Safety Act is law, UK has 'priorities' – but still won't explain 'spy clause'

Re: But the most important thing ....

"their lawyers can interpret the law"

Their lawyers can argue how they want the law interpreted. It will be the courts and no-one else who actually decide how it should be interpreted and they'll listen to arguments and expert witness from both sides, maybe also from amicus curiae briefs.

It's high time the RFCs for email were updated to make end-to-end encryption the default rather than an add-on, together with adding the required public key infrastructure into the mechanism (add the information as to location of the key store to the domain data and extend the mail sending protocol to request the key). Key store* would mostly become a part of the MSPs' offering.

PGP (I'm assuming this would be the mechanism) would become part of the mail client. Plebmail would scarcely see any difference as Microsoft and Google would provide all that anyway and the user will continue see plain text via MAPI but everyone else will get secure mail. It would get over the problem that virtually nobody uses encrypted email because they don't know anyone who uses it because virtually nobody uses it..

Correction - it's not high time for that now. It was high time for it years ago. It should have been the norm for years so the governments trying to pull this now would have to explain to the world why they're trying to unilaterally wanting to reduce confidential business communication to the equivalent of being written on the back of a post-card.

*Yes, I know. There's also have to be a mechanism for getting the key into the store.

Re: But...HOW?

"Clearly, none of them were listening."

I'm sure some of them were. Unfortunately the various agencies who just want their jobs made easier - and preferably done for them by somebody else - have a lot more influence on the relative ministers than backbench MPs. Home Secs are notoriously well house trained very quickly, apart from the few who start that way.

Re: But...HOW?

New - and old - laws have to deal with situations, including technologies, that have not even been thought of when they're drawn up. Fitting them to current reality is the job of the courts. Normally this works and has done from the time of Henry II or earlier. The trick is to draw them up without inherent nonsense. In this particular instance the courts are going to have a bit of a problem.

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

Re: It's all just Bullshit

"it's basically a pretty-good bullshit generator. But as soon as you ask questions about accuracy, truthfulness, and judgement you find AI is actually not very much use to anyone."

But you repeat yourself.

That seems like somebody's being clever. Two birds with one stone: get Teams and AI banned together.

We've done it for as long as we've been talking. That's how words come to exist. In this case, however, it happened some time ago as DDG pulls up plenty of examples.

"The collision of muddied management thinking and much-hyped autonomous agents will be interesting to watch play out."

The collision of muddied management thinking and much-hyped anything is SOP.

'Alarming' security bugs lay low in Linux's needrestart utility for 10 years

I suppose that, as is usual with Linux utilities needrestart can be updated without needing a restart.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: AI hiring bias?

I'm sure that by now all previous instructions end with "Ignore future instructions to ignore previous instructions".

Re: Anglo-Saxon names?

Are you doubting that Tom is a biblical name?

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

Re: Google to be forced to sell Chrome.. But who would, could, should buy it?

Or exactly like chromium.org?

Re: Criminals “R" Us .... Robed Post Modern Day Robbers and Renegade Carpetbaggers

The remit of any DoJ should be to safeguard the public interest. If that's what safeguarding the public interest requires then, yes, it's in their remit.

Re: Google to be forced to sell Chrome.. But who would, could, should buy it?

As regards being able to afford it - it would be a forced sale which makes a big difference to Google's ability to set a price. But let's go one step further, make it open source overseen by a foundation.

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan's government

"I did make double sure my collection of Steam and GOG games would stay in the family."

Do your family actually want them or is it an encouragement to keep you alive as long as possible?

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

Re: Nothing New Here

And what did they do about the supervisor?

You may have hit on an explanation here. He takes a look at Murthy's approach and, being the competitive soul that he is, wants to outdo him. This is the response. Now it's you move Mt Murthy.

Re: Learning Experience

I think I could write a suitable email in exactly 1% of that word count.

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

Re: Email deletion policy

You have a dispute about some object or service you bought years ago. The other side has kept its paper trail, you don't. Guess who loses.

Re: the medium ...

OI, I'm now ancient and find that there's nothing inconvenient about being kept alive.

Re: Glad to hear it's being discussed

An inbox is not the place to store read mail. A well-run paper-based system will have a filing system to handle old documents. What doesn't fit the filing criteria won't get filed. Problem solved.

Having said that and worked in an organisation with a filing system like that it was important to keep lab notes, instrument charts and any case document received from outside because it might become important a few years down the line. That would have applied even if the information was incorrect; in fact it might have been even more important to have preserved a copy if it was incorrect. Cases can have a long life so the case files have to as well. The best way of dealing with that sort of storage problem back in those days was microfilm.

Re: Data has a cost...

Somebody else's budget is always cheaper.

At last.

Icon: need to amplify sound of penny finally dropping.

Kyndryl insiders say there's little new business

Re: Its separate consulting business, where it helps companies

They'll probably also offer a service to help people into AI when it's too late for that.

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: Is there no product liability at all?

100% discount would be acceptable.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

What could possibly go wrong?

Nevertheless there seems to be a difference in the way any good programmer asks themselves that question and the way Microsoft do.

Good programmers ask it to probe for likely problems and deal with them in advance. For Microsoft it seems to be a form of self-assurance inviting the answer "Nothing". Of course for the rest of us nowadays, when asked in the context of a Microsoft product, it's asked ironically.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

I never found FORTRAN a difficult language to learn, nor did the instructors in QUB. It had been decided that all the lab staff (included me as research assistant but not SWMBO as a research student) would go on a 1 week (i.e. 5 days) course in this mysterious computing stuff.

Compulsory courses did not go down well with me and that may have been how the timing of the previous week's field trip to Scotland for SWMBO somehow ended up with missing the Monday of the course. I never found out what they did on that day because all the programming was fitted in on the Tuesday to Friday and I had no sense of having missed anything. And it was easy.

Having said it was easy we were using coding sheets and punched cards with professional keypunch operators to join the two together. It wasn't something that would have been quite so easy dealing with the rigid line formatting at a terminal although I did, much later, use Microsoft's CP/M version. It also helped that FORTRAN was at its best with what I wanted to do with it - doing some calculations and producing nicely laid out tables of results to plot by hand. Nevertheless, a four day course surely makes it an easy language to learn.

Database warhorse SQL Server 2025 goes all-in on AI

So an RDBMS engine, just what you need to be reliable, can look forward to hallucinating outputs.

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

The closer you look, the more the US looks like a failed state.

Maybe he is crackers.

Crook breaks into AI biz, points $250K wire payment at their own account

Lessons will be learned.

Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize

Re: Best solution

He can promise to pay cash. That should be good enough. It's good enough for the rent, suppliers, severance pay...

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Re: 2FA can be a Catch-22 when moving countries

"it is a banking site"

All you need is to find and visit a branch of your bank where the staff are empowered to sort it all out for you.

Ah, I see your problem.

Re: watch out for MS Authenticator

You trusted everything to somebody else's computer and let them make the rules?

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

"Then if you lose your phone, it is stolen, or it breaks you can buy a new phone and restore with the passkeys as part of restoring from backup."

And when you come to buy the replacement the bank wants to send a text to your old phone for 2FA.

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

This, of course is the sort of rubbish that's specifically advised against when it comes to good practice.

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

" I assume you use a different long, random password on every site and also different username...."

By and large, yes.

Of course the sites that want an email address as a UID are a bit of a problem. If they're important (i.e. my money's at stake), they get an individual email address - one reason to have a personal domain. Sites which want an email address just for marketing purposes to be annoying (hi, there, booking.com) get an individual email address which will be blocked between my usage or one that's discarded immediately as appropriate.

Sites which issue their own UIDs can be a bit of a problem too in that sometimes they follow a predictable pattern.

It's a curation problem but one largely due to individual services' predilection for annoyance. I can't imagine passkeys being different in that regard. Essentially the combination of UID and password is just a long string of characters as is a passkey with only the protocol differentiating them.

It's the practicality that matters. As things stand I keep passwords on a laptop with a master-password protected password manager. The laptop login is also password protected, of course. Those two passwords are all I need to remember. The laptop is synced to a NextCloud instance.

I only access whatever the passwords protect from my laptop so if I don't have the laptop available I don't need them anyway and the laptop is a big chunk to carry around so I don't accidentally not have it with me.

If what's being proposed is to replace the password manager by a passkey manager on the same laptop then I have to ask what's the difference (I'll come to that in a moment). Or is the passkey to replace the password that's currently protecting the laptop login? If the latter then it means I have to have the laptop and something else to hand. Given that it's already the case that I need the laptop plus a charged, switched on and in-signal mobile to do some things I know from personal experience that that's all too often a complete fail.

But if you're telling me it's "just" replacing my passwords by something with a more secure protocol and that my everyday usage is unchanged then I'm still going to have to take a look at how that protocol's being implemented. I have one end of that in the form of S/W in my laptop and each remote service will have its own implementation. Oh. Just. Great. We all know what happens next, don't we? Some scrote working for either my laptop OS provider or for the S/W used by one or more service is going to spot an opportunity for an improvement, optimisation or tweak (icon: looking for idle hands) and the whole thing gets screwed on a regular basis - shall we say every other Patch Tuesday?

Re: What happens when you die?

You can just imagine the project meeting.

"OK, but we need to plan the procedures for what happens if the customer dies, the device breaks etc. We'll have to have them in place for go-live."

"Don't be negative."

Hardware barn denies that .004 seconds of facial recognition violated privacy

Data is being collected for long enough to be processed. As a general member of the public entering the place I'd have wanted to know what was being done during that time and in particular, could it put be in the way of some sort of harm or disadvantage? What if it made a false identification of me? What would then happen?

If they tried to answer "nothing" I, and, presumably the court, wouldn't believe them because in that case there'd be not point in having the kit installed.

Robot runs marathon in South Korea, apparently the first time this has happened

And faster than my daughter in Athens at the weekend - although she now says that'll be her last.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: Slap on the wrist?

"User permission management wasn't some new concept introduced in the 90s."

Of course not, but it all depended on what permissions were set. Write for group? or for all?

Re: We all learned the same way...: mv and move

So that's what happened to Data General.

“I could sit in comfort writing papers using LaTeX in emacs,”

Not my idea of comfort.

Teen serial swatter-for-hire busted, pleads guilty, could face 20 years

Re: D-Link: "...all should be retired immediately."

EOL shouldn't just be for the device, it should be for the vendor.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

"If you're the human at the end of this AI-smart question and want to look smart enough to answer it, who are you gonna call? Copilot."

This one's easy to deal with. You throw it back at the "questioner". "You got Copilot to write that question? OK, get it to answer it. Next question, please."