Posts by Doctor Syntax

CrowdStrike unhappy about Delta's 'litigation threat,' claims airline refused 'free on-site help'

offering support to the airline "within hours" of the incident unfolding

And what's the cost of the disruption caused "within hours"?

IBM Canada can't duck channel exec's systematic age discrimination claim

"Canadian rules of civil procedure allow courts to disallow pleadings that: (a) may prejudice or delay the fair trial of the action; (b) are scandalous, frivolous or vexatious; or (c) are an abuse of the process of the court."

Doesn't that describe IBM's pleadings to a T?

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Since the late 1960s in Belfast I've often thought that riot control technology should take a hint from ornithologists. One of the techniques for bird ringing is the use of rocket propelled nets - the rockets take the leading edge of the net forward too fast for escapes. The net is then dropped over an area and whatever's immobilised under it can be dealt with at leisure.

UK axes plans for Edinburgh-based exascale computer

I'm old enough to be reminded of Harold Wilson and his "white heat of technology" looking around for a big, advanced tech project to cancel.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: The biggest ballache

"Amstrad ... made the best CP/M machine of them all"

That would depend on what you wanted to do with it but I don't think you could add the sort of interface boards that some of us needed. I suppose the difference is between a machine built around CP/M as opposed to a computing machine which could run CP/M as its OS.

Re: Alternate origin story

"Even at the time that CP/M was a mature OS"

Yes, CP/M was a mature, serious OS, not just a toy. The whole microcomputer revolution was a marvel for those of us who had a use for which, up to then, a mini would have been the answer but no budget for one. People like myself, working in a lab and with previous experience with FORTRAN and punched cards on mainframes. In fact it was likely that not even a mini would have done the job that could be achieved with an S-100 box. There were all sorts of cards available such as ADCs to aid interfacing with instruments. I build a microspectrophotometer and, realising that the 9-bit ADC wasn't enough, added another 4 bits with an op-amp and a 4-bit CMOS switch and a stepping motor controlling the continuous interference filter. Microsoft FORTRAN had I/O equivalents to POKE and PEEK (PUT and GET IIRC). I'm not sure one could have added the necessary interface cards to a mini.

Some of my colleagues went on a computing course which taught Pascal so I changed to UCSD Pascal which ran on the same H/W but subsequently on an IBM PC clone. Maybe another subject for an article Liam?

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

about 60 times more efficient economical

But a good point non-the-less.

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

"Ditto. Wordstar on a Amstrad CPC6128 did my degree dissertation."

Pampered kids!

Typewriter, editing with scissors and stapler.

And back in the day, publishing involved galley proofs and page proofs where edits had to preserve the line length to avoid having to reset entire pages. However it did save the day when I was given somebody's page proofs to read and realised there were errors converting imperial to metric (or possibly the other way about) which really mattered because it dealt with sea-level changes. They had been missed in his thesis by both his supervisor and the external examiner, by the journal editor and reviewer and in the galleys.

Re: @AC - CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

I wonder how many proof runs it took to get an acceptable layout. The original Unix development was effectively financed at Bell Labs as a means of WP of patent applications. A networking textbook is more hardcore than that.

OTOH try a book which has maps and photographs, keeping the text describing them onto the same or a facing page as far as possible. Add the complication of some of these being split across facing pages. That's harder core. And wondering why adding a few words at the op of a page has suddenly left a white gap at the bottom until you realise that there was no longer room for both a footnote an the paragraph that referenced it.

Complex layout is tricky. The advantage of WYSiWYG is that your proofing happens continuously on screen in front of your eyes.

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

And good luck to anyone wanting to do really complex layout such as splitting a map across facing pages using rules based layout. They're either going to have to be very, very good at applying the rules in their head or else use a lot of proofing runs to get good results. For that sort of writing using WYSIWYG is the equivalent of moving from punched cards and batch compiling to programming in an IDE.

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

if I was writing a modern replacement for "War and Peace", surely I'm interested in the words and not the fonts?

If you were writing it for self publishing you might well be more interested in fonts etc. Even more so if you were writing non fiction with a need to provide headings, sub headings, insert images and tables, keep track of references to these in the text etc. Alternatively you could use a plain text editor and then something like Scribus or InDesign to separate text from layout.

A word processor is more than a simple text editor. Both have their uses.

We had an S-100 box using cards from SD Systems. The OS was S-DOS. I'm not sure whether it was a CP/M clone, a ripped-off version or a licenced version re-branded but whatever ti was it did everything CP/M did, ran everything CP/M ran and was functionally indistinguishable. We also had a Microsoft FORTRAN compiler for it.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Some of us remember what happened when somebody sanitised the memory access of the SSL random number generaor.

Re: Poppycock!

"Concensus is irrelevant in matters of fact."

Indeed. Anyone who thinks otherwise should go and read Feynman's review of the decision to launch Challenger.

Microsoft's results are in, but the E7 subscription remains mythical. For now

Costs of real human, skilled IT staff are something enterprises want to minimise.

Subscriptions to Microsoft apparently accepted without demur.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: I tend to use a UV marker

This has the advantage that you become the only one who can sort it out.

Re: Sense of humour?

OTOH stripping something down and reassembling it because you need a couple of screws for another job is a bit excessive.

Re: The correct way

It can also e done before the maintenance window so doesn't take any time (except billed time, of course).

Re: Alarm bells

Inform the sales droid that it's his job to go and pay for the pizza* at two hour intervals until its fixed.

Alternative unhealthy meals may be substitured.

Re: Every office has one.

"but not 'I want a milk' or a rice or a water."

How does that apply to beer?

Re: Well I don't think

You should certainly drink fewer alcohols. Strictly no methanol.

Breaking the economy of trust: How busts affect malware gangs

We need to see a few affiliates getting busted soon, otherwise this will become the new normal and they'll start getting active again.

Fortune 50 biz coughed up record-breaking $75M ransom to halt leak of stolen data

It isn't going to improve until C-suite and board face jail as accessories for paying ransoms.

FBI, CISA remind US voters that DDoS attacks can't touch election systems

OTOH Distributed Denials Of Sense are affecting the electors.

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

"Put simply, because John's dev machine was a MIPS RISC box, and the firmware on that machine was white on blue.

"And in fact, his favorite editor at the time was SlickEdit, and the default text colors for SlickEdit were also white on blue.

And it's a nice bright colour to make the user feel happier.

Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

Re: "We believe this case lacks merit"

"Company" is a collective word for people. Who are the people who comprise the company?

The directors shouldn't deceive the shareholders. The manglement shouldn't deceive the shareholders. It makes no sense to say the shareholders shouldn't deceive themselves at least not collectively and in the legal sense.

Re: Not the kind of lawsuit I was expecting

Not expecting shareholders to sue themselves? This is the US. It happens all the time.

And a canary icon.

Re: Unfortunatly your canary is really a (dead) parrot

"what they appear to be vending is a bright idea that was sloppily implemented backed by a first class marketing and sales effort"

Sadly yu could say this about too much of the industry..

Re: I hate to defend Microsoft...

Ditto but in this case it wasn't Microsoft's update, it was Crowdstrike's, delivered by Crowdstrike's channel, not Microsoft's. It was Crowdstrike's responsibility to test before release and theirs alone and doubly so because it was applied automatically so it would be difficult for customers to test for themselves.

Re: WTF did I just read?

I don't think checking the hash would necessarily work. Create a crap file, calculate its hash and all the hash will subsequently confirm is that it's still the same crap file. It needs actual validation of the contents of the file, for instance, look to see if the memory it's about to access is legal and reject it if log an error message instead of going ahead.

Re: Hurting investors

The original investors in your sense would have done soe in hope of a return, either by dividends or by being able to sell their share of the company to others. The existence of those willing to by shares in the after-market are ultimately responsible for the willingness of the original investors to invest at all. And they themselves are now investors because they now own a slice of the original investment and because they were prepared to invest in it. It's unfortunate that they haven't grasped the fact that, together with the other shareholders they are members of the company they're suing. They're suing themselves.

I suppose it's just possible that this is a vehicle to get some of their investment back before it's swallowed up by customers' suits.

Re: Hurting investors

And for that you got a downvote?

It's beyond belief that there are commentards who can't grasp that simple fact of company law. The word company refers to the company of people who have come together to own it by buying shares in it. Unfortunately some shareholders also seem to overlook this simple fact. Sue the manglement - that's reasonable - but otherwise congratulations to the lawyers who got the shareholders to pay them (the lawyers) to sue themselves (the shareholders) to maybe get some of their (the shareholders) own money less the cost of two sets of their own lawyers. Two sets? Of course, as plaintiffs they're paying to sue and as members of the company they're paying to defend themselves against themselves.

US sends cybercriminals back to Russia in prisoner swap that freed WSJ journo, others

Re: Cybercrime

Yes, it's more a feat of kleptocracy than democracy.

Ransomware infection cuts off blood supply to 250+ hospitals

Re: Private networks will be far more expensive?

If you follow the actual threading you will realise that I was using the "Reply" button to answer the question of why such a system would be put on the internet and the word "available" was used in that context.. Are you not familiar with manglements putting budget before everything else?

And before you start going on about the budgetary effects of being hit by ransomware, let me remind you that there may not be budget to do things right but there's always budget to fix things when they go wrong.

A central service needs to be available across all the places where it needs to be available. Private networks will be far more expensive - maybe prohibitively so - than using the internet.

Re: Data Stewardship License

A monoculture - of any sort - is extremely vulnerable. At present we have something approaching that. Leaving aside any questions as to whether any other given OS might or might not be more secure that Windows the fact that it is so ubiquitous makes it a profitable target for those seeking vulnerabilities. Even if all the clients are on Windows it would be far safer for the underlying database to be run on a dedicated server running on any other OS, be it commercial Unix. Linux or a BSD and offering not other connections other than the SQL service itself. No, not even an SSH for remote admin - trading convenience for security is where the problems start.

Boeing's Q2 nosedive buoyed by appointment of new CEO

Re: Great Man Musk

Perhaps Boeing etc management were more successful that Musk at getting in the way. After all there's only one of him (thankfully) and he can't be everywhere at once.

Re: Stargazing

The numbers of telescopes below Starlink and much greater than those above. They're also easier to service (although that didn't always happen. Availability of instrument time matters.

Re: Top Notch U.S. Aerospace

All those Starlink satellites have certainly been a gamechanger for astronomers.

Re: Boeing missed the mark on pretty much every analyst expectation in Q2

If the analysts expected better than what happened they need to start looking around them at what's actually happening out there.

UK court rules in Intel's favor in R2 Semi power patent case

Re: don't know if that's quite true

The UK judge provided clarity, the German didn't. Isn't that the former the better way of doing it?

Beetle mania: How bugs are inspiring the next gen of robot aviators

From TFA it appears that the deployment and folding of the hindwings is linked to that of the elytra so it's a bit of a stretch to say that no power is required. It's just that it's applied to the elytra with some form of mechanical linkage to the hindwings.

The elytra are curved in profile. I wonder if they contribute lift when the hindwings are driving the beetle forwards.

DigiCert gives unlucky folks 24 hours to replace doomed certificates after code blunder

So essentially somebody decided to fix what wasn't broken (or was there a scaling problem?) and do so in the most complex way they could think of. And then fail to review something which was extremely critical.

Let me guess. The developer of the original code was someone with a thorough grounding in the intricacies of certificate generation but was no longer with the company because they wanted younger, digital native, developers to work on this exciting new project.

More than 83K certs from nearly 7K DigiCert customers must be swapped out now

Given that the error has existed for 5 years, 24 hours seems a bit draconian. Surely this is an exceptional circumstance in its own right that should apply the the entire affected customer base.

Five months after takedown, LockBit is a shadow of its former self

"LockBit appeared to have 194 affiliates on its books, according to Operation Cronos, which found every single one"

What does "found" amount to here? An alias, a name and address or something in between that could be worked up into a name and address? If it's possible to identifiy them we should expect to see arrests unless they're all in Russia.

'LockBit of phishing' EvilProxy used in more than a million attacks every month

Banks are such a special case they really need to be dealt with by legislation. Send this sort of crap and receive a big fine. Send it again and senior management lose the right to work in financial services. Sent it a third time and lose their banking licence.

UK Electoral Commission slapped for basic cybersecurity fails

Re: Methinks the political spin is strong in this one.

Much of the electoral roll is public anyway.

Delta Air Lines dials up Microsoft's legal nemesis over CrowdStrike losses

Are the T&Cs sufficient to defeat gross negligence? Do they cover pushed updates? Alternatively how would a defence that they disclaim the product's being of any use whatsoever help subsequent sales?

Meta to cough up $1.4B to end fight over 'unlawful' facial recognition of friends

Re: Meta does not admit wrongdoing.

Just prosecute. A conviction means admissions would be immaterial. Settlements like this come pretty close to buying and selling justice.