Posts by Doctor Syntax

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

"There was one national network operator and two threats: nuclear war and terrorism."

There was and is more than that: floods, fires, landslips, JCBs, power outages and, not least, field engineering doing stuff without telling customer service.

By phasing out POTS we're ending the immunity of the domestic telephone to power outages. I'm not expecting everyone to realise they need a UPS, nor of a cheap UPS's chances of surviving a real power outage. What's more the last power outage here seems to have tripped something in the local cabinet as the network went off at about the same time as the power but didn't come back until much later. In the dash to Go Digital the telcos have been handed a free pass to end the old requirement that the phones should just work.

Infosec teams must be allowed to fail, argues Gartner

"infosec teams responding to incidents by attacking them without a rehearsed plan."

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

I've successfully rehearsed DR plans for the systems I was responsible for. I doubt very much they'd have worked in an emergency, not least because I had no idea how the DR centre was to be linked in to the recovery plan of the rest of the businesses. In fact didn't know what the rest of the businesses' plans were or even if they existed. As tot he latter I had suspicions.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

"Lesson learned."

Not really. The lesson that should have been learned was to set up a helldesk email address.

The server was pining for the fjords.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Re: The owner has two Ferraris. They have that kind of money

"When I see somebody in a Ferrari I always feel kinda sorry for them."

When I saw somebody in a Ferrari I used to feel pleased for my cousin-in-law. He used to service them.

He was also racing mechanic for a local farmer (related to a a cousin-in-law on the other side of the family, as it happens) who raced a vintage car. For a road car he had Lancias. When the V6 Dino came out he bought one of those instead. Callied in to visit one of his mates and got "Yer do, Cec. I hear tha's bought half a Ferrari."

Re: Aaron?

You win the internet.

Re: Well...

Didn't the head office invite him to the embassy in order to explain to them why it was set up like that?

"

The issue here is putting the primary and backup copies on an external drive which is more likely to get damaged or stolen, and the same drive meaning no backup."

The issue here is putting the backup on a medium that can't be taken off-line if not off-site for secure storage.

"bean counters baulk at the cost of enterprise grade disks"

The best way to get money from bean counters is to install the cheap option they want and encourage it to fail ASAP. There's always money to fix it.

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

Re: Fingers crossed

Hoping for a full-scale monopoly investigation that ends with Microsoft being broken up instead of being allowed to get away with making promises whilst keeping their fingers crossed.

I suppose the downside to that would be Oracle coming along to buy up the pieces.

These are all obstacles and speed bumps in our lives that aren’t designed to help us at all, they’re designed to block us, frustrate us, annoy us and generally use us. tell us to take out custom elsewhere.

FTFY

Re: Chrome used to do the same thing

I don't know about google.com, I've never seen that on google.co.uk. I suppose it could be the ad-blocker handling that, of course.

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Re: Coincidence...

"NirSoft which hosts small useful Unix-like utilities (do one thing and do it well) for Windows"

Perhaps they'll even have to run them from the command line.

Re: Coincidence...

I wonder what Windows users do when they hear of something that's not in the Windows store.

Re: Coincidence...

You still haven't said what you were doing to get told to get this and get that at the command line. Were you writing from your own experience or just repeating what somebody wrote on the internet which was repeating what somebody else had written on the internet who'd seen an actual developer working away at the CLI because,as somebody said above, that's what developers do quite a lot of the time?

Or possibly seen somebody like me hacking away to reformat some big text file because Unix, with its CLI toolkit does that better than just about anything else on the planet and has been doing it for decades. You could do that on Windows, of course but you'd either have to install WSL or Cygwin because unaided Windows isn't going to cut it (or paste it or tail or sed it either).

Re: Coincidence...

"I don't want to have to clutter up with Snap and Flatpak or whatever."

Neither does this Linux user. What he likes about Linux is that it Just Works unlike Windows which all too often only just works axcept when it's just not working.

"If you have a geriatric PC that, when it was new, ran Windows 7 reasonably well, then today it will run Zorin OS just fine."

From TFA: "If you have a geriatric PC that, when it was new, ran Windows 7 reasonably well, then today it will run Zorin OS just fine."

I have a cousin-in-law that's been running it on the same PC ever since she got ransomware under W7. It's a couple of miles away so I can't check the spec but it must be a decade or more.

FWIW SWMBO is running full-fat Devuan/KDE on an old HP laptop which I think started life with W2K on it.

"Linux users don't get why I'd use a Mac."

I do. It means you're earning money from it and are prepared to pay accordingly. Before I retired I used to run SCO on a laptop as a stable Unix platform and it was on client's servers as well. If they'd not played silly buggers instead of realising they needed to cut prices so that they could compete with free but, at the time, very immature, I might be doing so still.

From my PoV Mac laptops all seem to have screens too tiny for my ageing eyes.

Re: Coincidence...

"You may have to download and run the installer on it from the command line."

Exactly the point I was trying to make.

And the point I was trying to make, if you'd quoted the next sentence: "Alternatively you may have your installer set as the browser's handler for that sort of file." is that you may have the option of doing it from your browser by setting gdebi as the handler for .deb* files.

It would have to be set up to require a password to d o that. Whether you think being able to click and open as root random files from the internet is a good idea is another matter...

Convenience is not everything.

* Or whatever is appropriate for the package manager.

Re: Coincidence...

But would ChromeOS work for me? To take an example, for graphics (largely tweaking images of patchwork for SWMBO and annotating maps) I use a mixture of Gimp, Pinta, Gwenview (yes, even that has its uses to do more than just display) and sometimes QGIS. They all tend to have aspects for which they're more convenient than any of the others. I suppose if I had to use just one it would be Gimp but really any single one would be a pain. Maybe I should try Krita but the UI looks as if it's intended for the coloured pencil department and I most certainly wouldn't fit in there. What would ChromeOS offer for that?

AFAICS ChromeOS has its biggest audience in schools where it's possible to tell users that that's what they're getting and they're not likely to be given tasks that exceed its capabilities.

But I agree with you that there's scope for a Linux distro tweaked to online use. Say something like NextCloud as a back end hosting the user's home directory through davfs with server URL as part of the sign-on screen for security (if forced to divulge a "password" the URL might not be the usual working server).

Re: I bet in spite of the usability angle, there is little to no fingerprint support

Repeat after me:

A FINGERPRINT IS AN IDENTIFIER, NOT A PASSWORD

If you're not sure about that, try changing your fingerprint as you might change a password.

"Windows users still think it's funny to joke that running Linux means learning to build your own OS from sticky tape, glue, toothpicks and cardboard tubes. It's not like that anymore and hasn't been for most of this century"

Not only has it not been the case for most of this century but, as a Linux user, it seems to me that this is exactly what running Windows has become. I have one old laptop with a W10 partition on it which isn't used much but I do tend to force myself to go through the pain of regular updates.

To get from the menu to where Windows update starts to throw dots across the top of its window probably takes about as many clicks but more time than getting from a Linux menu to Synaptic starting to run the actual upgrades. Note that to get there for Synaptic includes having completed the equivalent of that throwing dots stage. Note also that Linux, even using sudo, takes a stronger line on security then Windows and will have required a password to run Synaptic so the time to do that will have been included. (If the inconvenience of a password is what puts you off using Linux, there is something seriously adrift with your priorities.)

If I choose to do so I can review exactly what packages Synaptic is going to upgrade and I can watch the commands streaming smoothly past (Windows is still throwing dots). With Windows I will eventually see a rather opaque short list of updates it proposes to install including the one that it failed to install last month and the month before plus that same Intel display update that seems to get installed every month and comes back next month.

If I'm lucky Windows will install these with only a single reboot needed. The reboot will, of course, take ages to complete because although it also took ages to get to the reboot a lot of the updates are done at the reboot stage. With Linux reboot is almost always confined to kernel updates which, running LTS kernels, aren't that frequent and is simply a matter of restarting as and when is convenient so that the new kernel, which is ready and waiting, can be used. For everything else the executables are simply put in place so that next time a program is executed the new binaries are used. Services are written to be restarted so if a new version of a service is installed that's what happens. In many years I've seen exactly one service that was so low level it needed a reboot but, again, not urgently but just in the normal course of shutting down and starting up again

In practice I find it's even quicker to fire up the terminal emulator, su and run three apt commands than click around menus but if GUI is your preference then that's fine but this elephant in the Windows room has to be addressed:

There's that hanging update on W10 that won't go away. The oh-so-slick, oh-so-clever Windows initial set up created a partition which it has now decided is too small. What's the solution to that? AFAICS you're supposed to shrink your C: drive - assuming it's not too full for that - drop into the command line, look up some info on that too-small partition, take a note of it, delete the partition (no, not your C: drive's partition - did you screw up there?), recreate it to a larger size and run some stuff manually based on the note you took, all at the command line. How's that for string and sealing wax?

Re: Coincidence...

"but Linux for consumers needs to be a single desktop environment so users get that constant familar interface with the minimum of bundled apps"

I'm struggling with this. Are you saying Linux uptake would be better if distros just had a minimum of apps so it would be able to do less? Where's the sense in that?

Re: Coincidence...

Packages where I can click and install are great, but I grew increasingly frustrated by the regular prompts to use the console with half a dozen "get this/get that" commands.

Can we clarify what you're doing to be prompted with "get this/get that"?

The only time I will see that is in some online article entitled something like "How to install $App on $distro". The first thing to do is to pop open Synaptic or whatever your distro's software manage might be and see if it's there. If it is just select it for installation and click Apply or whatever it might be. If it's not in the distro the next step is to look to see if it has an install option - a .deb file or whatever - for you OS, FlatPak or Snap. If it has, use that. You may have to download and run the installer on it from the command line. Alternatively you may have your installer set as the browser's handler for that sort of file.

Only if neither option is available would you need to resort to hand-knitting and you're probably getting into the realms of somebody's pet project which might be interesting, might get into the mainstream distro repository or might disappear without trace.

I followed the alternative applications link. Looked down the list and saw Blue Mail. Wondered what that was and clicked that. The first thing that the Blue Mail web site offered was "Generative email". Is there no escape.

Forget TikTok – Chinese spies want to steal IP by backdooring digital locks

Re: Ah, Physical Security

"They've always had that ability anyway"

The critical thing is whether you can reuse the door afterwards.

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

Re: atlnets running amok

You can have both and probably will.

Re: atlnets running amok

"It seems as if the planning departments are powerless to control the madness"

They are. I wonder,was that free pass granted when Nadine "Gizza' peerage!" Dorries was the Dept of Digital, Culture Media and Sport?

Re: They do.

Perhaps you should check up on how they might do that: https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/bills/private-members/

TL:DR? It's mostly government that gets legislation before Parliament. Members' best form of action is to tackle the relevant minister.

"a small number of areas in England,"

That may, of course, be the same "small number" affected by any mass outage, data breach or whatever.

Cop shop rapped for 'completely avoidable' web form blunder

"However, there is no evidence that the data was ever accessed,"

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Is their any evidence that it wasn't accessed?

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Can you spell "SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE"?

FTC goes undercover to probe suspected antivirus scam, scores $26M settlement

Re: Hold On One Second

Yup. That was the one that stuck out for me. The scam could have been nipped in the bud well before they had $26m in hand to make a settlement.

Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinking about buying TikTok

Re: nothing's shocking

"The US can of course ask US companies exactly the same thing under national security letters."

And the CLOUD Act.

Oracle adds GenAI to Fusion with a whopping 50 use cases

"But is there one that can sort out failing ERP projects?"

If it makes money for Oracle it's not failing.

US House goes bang, bang on TikTok sale-or-ban plan

Are you saying that isn't the traditional US business way?

Re: Clone

"All you need is an app with >1m users"

You could call them "gatekeepers". Where I have heard that before? And why does the statement "Trade wars are good and easy to win" keep running through mu head?

Re: Clone

Don't assume work hasn't been done in that direction and that more won't be done now. The network effect would make it hard launching a clone while the original is still in operation. If it's successfully banned in the US it will be easier to launch a clone there but such a clone would still be in competition with the original in the rest of the world.

It also remains to be seen how successfully it is banned in the US. Prohibition didn't work too well there a century or so ago. What was that about those who haven't studied their history being condemned to repeat it?

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

Re: My, what drama

"As I've said elsewhere on this thread, I have been thinking about this stuff for an awfully long time"

And I spent an awfully long time doing job which involved giving evidence and being cross-examined on it or, as you put it, being pushed to give an answer.

Probabilities were something I could quote in some circumstances. They were not the probabilities of things happening in my neural networks, they were statistics based on actual work done to determine frequencies of particular blood groups and blood enzyme phenotypes in the local population (this was in the days before DNA came into forensic biology).

I could advise a court what conclusions could and couldn't be drawn from them. One side or the other would try to push for conclusions more favourable to their side. This is something any competent expert witness resists. One doesn't get pushed to hallucinate an answer.

"You know that the audience of this journal is in Tech right?"

And you know that they, like el Reg, take the piss out the likes of the Wail. A good part of the house style is devoted to that. You fell foul of Poe's law.

Re: My, what drama

"If I pushed you for an answer, you would probably make up an answer based upon probabilities."

I think I've enough experience in having been pushed for answers to silly questions in cross-examination* to not make up an answer. I'd tell you that it was a silly question. Out of the constraints of court, I might even comment about what it told me about the questioner.

"I don't know" and "I can't say" are valid answers if that is the situation. Given search engines reluctance to give such answers I fully expect LLMs owned by search engine providers to hallucinate. It will not somehow make them more useful. Quite the contrary.

* and one time in direct examination by a barrister who wanted me to exceed what the evidence would bear in terms of interpretation. Same result.

Re: Isn't it ironic

It's called "Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

SAP accused of age discrimination, retaliation by US whistleblower

Re: Demeaning?

"have an exit strategy planned well in advance"

Suing the employer for discrimination is the usual one.

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

"That means a GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM (and not one from Intel – at least at the moment, for lack of driver support). That's not too pricey – which is good, because it's table stakes. For RAM, you'd be happier with 32GB than 16GB, while 8GB simply won't cut it. And that's about it. That's all you're going to need."

I can't imagine anything I'd have bought something like that for and I certainly wouldn't be buying one to run a Chatbot on. Back in pre-bloat days I've seen entire SMBs run on kit with far less than that.

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Re: Quick survey...

"Can anyone think of anything useful that AI can do for them?"

Sell hardware. Sole purpose.

Digestion? I haven't even taken a bite out of mine, yet.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

Re: Looks like Curiosity did it again

"This was just a cat being a cat and doing cat things."

I just wish cat owners (or is it the other way round?) would confine their cats to doing cat things in their own homes, not my garden.

Re: Is PPE Optional now?

It's very hard to find any atypical examples.

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

1 Billion? 1 in 8 of the world's population including infants? Is that credible? If not either there are a lot of people with more than one account or a lot of bots.