Posts by Doctor Syntax

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: "At present, Windows Recall feels like it was put together with insufficient thought"

I fear they've been entirely cleansed of any trace of ethics.

Re: It begs the obvious question...

Sunk cost fallacy.

Re: It begs the obvious question...

"people who don't grasp that loan-words from Greek, such as "phenomena" are plural"

OTOH There's a book XML Schema written by someone convinced that "schema" is a plural noun.

Re: It begs the obvious question...

"present myself for punishment to the Headmaster."

Here ---->

Re: It begs the obvious question...

For a monent I read that as "Language be a chagrin"

Re: "At present, Windows Recall feels like it was put together with insufficient thought"

You can imagine some techy getting excited with his idea that "We can already take screenshots when the user asks. Why not do it automatically and just save the results?" Or maybe just doing it and showing the higher ups. The question is why there weren't any grown-ups in the room to realise it was a Really Bad Idea?

According to the Beeb the ICO is already taking an interest.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: Just a thought

One local street is apt to have tourists wandering on it as if it was pedestrianised which it certainly isn't. I think the council should put up loudspeakers playing the sound of car horns at intervals interspersed with the sound of screeching breaks and a crash.

Quite so. There'd only be the sound of the screaming to alert him.

EV or hybrid? It depends on the type of hybrid but for some the car will be driven with ICE over about 20mph so even in urban environments they'll be providing engine noise some of the time.

Re: Just a thought

Ernie!!!

Unless the helicopter engine had stalled I can't imagine any level of headphone output that would mask the sound of one approaching form overhead. And if the main rotor doesn't get you the tail rotor will.

Boeing's Calamity Capsule launch date slides into the future

The crew will probably be hoping it's posponed past their retirement dates.

Microsoft Build 2024 looks like it's more about AI fluff than developer stuff

Re: I am so glad ...

I wonder what my friends who are Windows users will make of it all. They want a browser, email, maybe Word and a few of them Excel. How will they react to the rising ide of Copilot trying to force its way in everywhere.

Google offers DoJ cash to eliminate jury in web ad monopoly abuse trial

Re: Legalized Bribery

The nature of the offer seems to be compensation so it appears to be a civil case. A guilty verdict would only apply in a criminal case. Even if a guilty verdict were an option then, as they're wanting it to be tried by a judge as opposed to not tried at all it wouldn't make a difference. Very likely the motivation is that by offering to concede the case before a judge they can avoid having the details of the case aired in public.

Starlink offers 'unusually hostile environment' to TCP

Re: We love it.

AIUI what he's saying is that these are the problems the developers of your protocol stack have to overcome/hide from you for you to get this service.

Re: What's his definition of hostile

"at any point in time, 2/3rds is over the ocean and not earning revenue."

You don't think shipping and aircraft which have no access to terrestrial networks are potential sources of revenue?

NYC Comptroller and hedge funds urge Tesla shareholders to deny Musk $50B windfall

Why not just go for a motion of no confidence in the entire board? Clear out and start again, assuming enough shareholders agree.

Prepare your audits: EU Commission approves first-of-its-kind AI Act

Re: Turing Test

"

The risk here is that first you have to prove something is an AI."

Take the vendor's word for it. Having made a big fuss about their wonderful AI they'll be in no place to claim the legislation doesn't apply. Conversely the need to make the big fuss will ensure they do just that.

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

MS only ever really wanted desktop. And now Cloud money.

FTFY

Re: Nuclear

You think that spending the last six or seven decades shoving fossil fuels up power station chimneys (and distributing mildly radioactive ash) was a good idea?

Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

OTOH I, like many others, maintain a web page which is a programme of planned events, in this case a local Civic Society's talks programme. If we're lucky* we start off each September with a full programme up to May. Every month the list gets a bit shorter and the poster image changes. There's no point in keeping that page unchanged in perpetuity; if you want check up on last month's talk it's too late already.

Some stuff really is ephemeral.

" Since Covid finding suitable speakers has become a bit more fraught than it used to be.

ASML could brick Taiwan's chipmaking machines in case of uninvited guests

"it would be difficult to run it for long without ASML support on site "

If the on-site support requires a permanent presence then the support would fall into the hands of an invader as well as the kit.

Hm! Boeing union just ran whistleblower rights training

This is what happens when what management wants to know isn't what they need to know.

BT delays deadline for digital landline switch off date

It's also up to Virgin to ensure a UPS powering their end of the line. Or do they rely on OpenReach to do that?

Your 2 isn't going to work unless the phone masts also have a UPS/tested backup generator able to outlast a power cut.

So who is to blame for that fact that locally the said telco is putting its finances into rolling out FTTP to the premises well served by FTTC but customers on the further reaches of the same cabinets are struggling with poor quality service?

Even accepting the reliability of limitations of locally powered digital over POTS this should not have been considered in advance of getting an adequate digital service to every location. Not just the easy ones, all of them.

Agreed. But try to convince the "I only use mobile anyway and it works for me" crowd about that.

Of course I have cordless phones. I also have a corded phone. The number of times I've used that in the past few years to call Northen Powergr.... carrier lost.

Our longest power cut in the last few years was 17 hours. Does the UPS in the cabinet last that long? Since 3G shutdown the local phone signal is a bit iffy? So if you're going to have a heart attack, stroke, or whatever you'd be best to have it in, say the forst hour of the power cut.

Having not thought through the consequences they've given themselves a bit more time to not think through the consequences. BY manglement at its finest.

Alleged $100M dark-web drug kingpin, 23, arrested

OK, let's pursue that idea a little.

You're going to require a jury for the trial. These days potential jury members are going to be drawn from a wider spread of the population and attitudes than when death sentences were normal, at least in societies like the UK. The prosecution then has the problem of risking one member of the jury who, whether from principle, awareness of the possibility of miscarriage of justice* or squeamishness, is not prepared to vote for killing someone and getting a not-guilty verdict against even the strongest possible evidence.

So how are you going to deal with that? Allow for majority verdicts? Given the risk of miscarriage of justice for a capital offence public opinion might not allow for that. But if majority verdicts are to be banned for one category of offence perhaps they should be banned altogether? You'll open up a can of worms going down that route.

* On a personal note I found it stressful enough doing my job investigating crime whilst being aware of the possible consequences of an error. Doing it under the shadow of a possible capital offence would have been impossible.

Big Tech is not much help when fighting a junta, and FOSS doesn't ride to the rescue

Re: Don't use the Internet

"The hidden messages have to be communicated using another means"

If you have "another means" then you don't need the videos.

Really? A sarcasm detector? Wow. You shouldn't have

And o course it will deal with Poe's law.

First LockBit, now BreachForums: Are cops winning the war or just a few battles?

"The fact that online fraud in the UK doubled year on year in 2023 to a value of £2.3bn shows that there's more cyber crims and they're mostly getting away with it."

This is not surprising.

Take, for instance dodgy phone calls. There is no single reporting mechanism. The subscriber is supposed to triage the call themselves and then decide which of the reporting sites is appropriate. Receive and attempted fraudulent call? AFAICS there is no site for reporting this. If you have actually been defrauded there's a site to report it. Not collecting details of attempted frauds tells me there is no attempt to collect intelligence that might enable fraud operations to be detected and closed down sooner.

Take, as another instance, clickable links in spam. Are the public being discouraged from clicking them? No some financial institutions are routinely sending unsolicited emails with valuable marketing information spam to customers, training them to believe that a link in an unsolicited and unexpected email that appears to be from that institution can be safely clicked.

Are TPTB discouraging this? No, they're at it as well. IME a visit to any NHS service will be followed up by a text* with a link for feedback. And let's not forget sending texts to a landline where the text can be picked up by whoever's nearest the phone but their interpretation of GDPR prevents them, when queried, from saying who it was intended for.

* There's a great deal else wrong with this. The text doesn't say who it's intended for and just says "your recent visit" so anyone wanting to fake it can just spam them out blindly. Even for its intended purpose this fails if there have been a few appointments in quick succession before the first text arrives. Also any hospital appointment will ask for next of kin contact details and my local trust would (I think I have now dissuaded them) treat this as the contact information for the patient.

"Would you give up some hacker you knew to Xi Ping ?"

You're thinking as a law-abiding person, not as a criminal to whom the $10m is very likely aimed.

Several possibilities.

First, just considering Russian criminals: Criminals don't really stick together and some would easily be tempted by $10m if he could be kidnapped and transported across the border. There might even be the possibility of eliminating a rival or getting their own back if they've been cheated.

Secondly the $10m might be enough for a non-Russian gang to attempt the same.

Thirdly, there's the possibility of a sting operation, say somebody in a neighbouring country looking for help to st up a new operation and offering to cut him in. There are one or two countries where he might feel safe to visit.

Arrest, trial and lengthy sentences would be what I'd term a "more aggressive" method of takedown.

20 years of supervised release doesn't seem as much of a deterrent as 20 years imprisonment although I suspect there might have been quite a bit of trading to get there.

And with a $10m reward I wouldn't rule out someone ordinarily resident in Russian suddenly turning up somewhere more accessible to arrest.

Gentoo and NetBSD ban 'AI' code, but Debian doesn't – yet

Do you have legal precedents for this, preferably in multiple jurisdictions? Otherwise it's an unknown area.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

What is your "this"?

If it's the EU's rules they're legal by difinition. If it's Apple's work-around we won't know until there's a ruling on it.

"All it requires is common sense - as is expected of you if you have a bank account, drive a car, or generally live as an adult."

I see you're an optimist.

"Apple doesn't sell my data"

How do you know? Or how would you know if they did?

Aussie cops probe MediSecure's 'large-scale ransomware data breach'

The technical term for this is "getting rid of the tricky bit in the title". Yes Minister Series 1, Episode 1.

Three cuffed for 'helping North Koreans' secure remote IT jobs in America

Re: Laptop Farms?

Very little IT skills needed to buy a bunch of laptops and set them up for remote access. Setting up VMs needs a bit more knowledge.

Microsoft's carbon emissions up nearly 30% thanks to AI

Re: Cunning plans.

I'd insert REPURPOSE as no 3. Not the same as REUSE, requires less energy then RECYCLE.

Microsoft PC Manager app bizarrely suggests Bing as a Windows fix-all

Re: Why are apps like this needed?

"8 years uptime on one of my servers"

A server unpatched in 8 years? I take it it's not exposed to the internet. If it isn't I suppose it's a good way to stop it getting broken.

"protection of your default settings from unauthorized change."

Change by Microsoft unauthorised by user or change by user unauthorised by Microsoft?

AWS to pump billions into sovereign cloud for Germany

Without a complete firebreak to put the entire operation out of Amazon's control having a EU location and employees is just a whitewash.

Toshiba to shed 4,000 jobs as part of revitalization plan

"According to Shimada, the early retirement plan targets those aged 50"

That's Tario Shimada, currently aged 57 according to a Toshiba press release. Is he fixing himself an early retirement plan or doesn't it apply to him?

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

"Yes, I'd like to talk to you but it'll have to be in a couple of month's time. I'm a bit tied up with this Postgress migration project at the moment."

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

We need a new word: mieddling - middling and meddling.