Posts by Doctor Syntax

Oracle faces continued legal battle over alleged NetSuite software misrepresentations

What a precedent this could set. Salesmen being held to their promises. Big vendors to deliver working software. It could be the end of civilisation as we know it.

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

Re: Its gonna be hard to supplant DRAM

"People are often dazzled by the new shiny, but end of the day it takes something truly special for them to write the proverbial Big Check."

It depends. Down at our level, that's mostly true. At board level big shiny and expensive golf days, etc. win out.

Works for USB

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

Somebody let manglement speak get into the training material.

The successor to Research Unix was Plan 9 from Bell Labs

It's all in TMMM

It seems to have been the classic second system effect. Multics, of course, was the one you build to throw away,

Seriously, I think the reason Unix succeeded was that it was built simple so everything could be layered on top. The Unix design was and is flexible. By building stuff in that had previously been layered on top it would have become less flexible. Assumptions become limitations.

"it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft."

It wasn't?

"Eighth Edition Unix didn't have much industry impact, and little if anything drew significantly upon the Ninth and Tenth Editions!

The initial industry interest - and wider interest in general - grew out of the releases, primarily into academia, of the early versions. When AT&T were allowed to sell it as a product they set up a separate division that went its own way with System III (Was there a System I or II? I never encountered anything between &th ed & III myself) and later In FOSS parlance they forked it.

Re: little to no _technical_ resemblance between them

" Likely some BSD + GNU would have replaced the commercial expensive Unixes for servers, routers, eink ereaders etc if Linux had never existed."

Alternatively SCO could have realised that it was competing with free but not, as yet, as good. If they had aimed for a mass market - cut the price for single use, provided a free student edition or whatever it's just possible we might all, and I'm not confining this to Linux, users, have been using Unix on the desktop now. Linux would have got the chance to become as good.

They released a developer's disk that was actually free, but I don't think it was available for long and was only licenced form 6 months' use. In practice that wasn't enforced so it was useful for anyone freelance supporting the paid for deployments. With a bit of prompting they got involved in the long running court case with Linux, took their eye off the ball and lost the SMB server market they'd dominated.

LockBit leaks expose nearly 200 affiliates and bespoke data-stealing malware

Re: Warning

I was thinking the same thing. Why not set up some sort of honey trap to draw them further in. But then I wondered - maybe they've already been doing that for some time.

Microsoft retires Azure IoT Central retirement announcement

You can't simply "present" an announcement in error. You have to write it first and that surely involves a bit of intention.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

" Instead, it dropped into the ocean and sank."

Could have been worse. Could have fallen back on top of them.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

Re: Cloud Multipass proposal

"all the data they need for their advertising business"

There's another thing. If anyone wants me to view their advertising I'm prepared to do this provided I'm paid for my time which I price fairly high. There is, of course, very little likelihood that I'll but what they're advertising and a very considerable likelihood that I'd avoid it.

Although it might appear unrelated I'd like to think that the Post Office scandal would be the trigger for something like a Cyber Harms Act.

The principle would be that any harm a mistake by an online system should be made good by the system operator in full and that would include ongoing harm during any delays, interest and any legal costs incurred by the victim in demanding satisfaction. In the event of bankruptcy the victims would be first in line with the possibility of chasing directors' personal wealth.

Re: Law of unintended consequences

So you're saying the data subjects should bear the cost of the businesses careless losses of hoarded data?

Don't forget the cost of not complying. The more data is held the more there is to lose in the case of a leak.

We should be well past the stage where the cost to the leaker is a year or five years or whatever of "monitoring" by some business which is itself a data hoarder. If the leaked data enables bank fraud the leaker should pay the losses. If every data subject has to spend hours or days rearranging their affairs they should be paid a fairly generous sum for their time doing that. If someone loses their house or their livelihood as a result of the leak that should also be made good. At present these costs are likely to fall on the data subject. They should fall on the leaker, together with any legal costs the data subject incurs in claiming them. In principle companies should be looking at the prospect of being wiped out by a leak. In practice they'd probably insure but the insurers would undoubtedly take a close look at the risks they were insuring and charge accordingly.

TL;DR PII should be regarded as potentially toxic waste. The more you hold the more you have to spend onf containment.

Re: Cloud Multipass proposal

user-chosen *special provider* storages. Typically those would be Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft

I wouldn't trust any of them to be the digital me that this implies, no more than would I trust anyone else who offered themselves to play the same role.

Orgs are having a major identity crisis while crims reap the rewards

It requires a bit of thinking about what's an identity in terms of system access.

Phone numbers and email addresses are simply hopeful but uncertain means of communicating with a person. There's no guarantee that the person in control of either is the person you think it is. Phones can be lost or stolen, numbers swapped to other SIMs and the phone might also be the endpoint for email. Using either for TFA is less of a security feature than your bank or mine assumes.

Personal emails are re-used for all sorts of site that demand email as an identifier as well as means of communication. People being people they'll also reuse the password. The only place an email address makes sense as a login ID is the email account; even then it's best to have a number of addresses each feeding the mailbox which is the actual login ID.

Australian supercomputer 'Taingiwilta' comes online this year with [REDACTED] inside

Re: So, publishing is more attractive, but you can't

It sounds as if she took the job and at the end of the first week they broke it to her that if she leaves she-ll be charged under the equivalent of the Official Secrets Act. Retirement might be a problem.

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

Re: Coming to a govt building near you

And people will still shout 'if you've nothing to hide...'

They should, of course, read the small print they clicked through when signing up for their online bank account, online retail accounts, social media accounts or whatever. They'll find that those accounts all require them to keep their access details confidential - in other words, hidden. Yes, they have stuff they're contractually obliged to hide.

Cops turn LockBit ransomware gang's countdown timers against them

I was thinking more along the lines of "They don't like it up 'em, Mr Mainwaring, they don't like it up 'em".

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

I think in your place I might have contact RM first. They're clearly the one's ultimately responsible for letting an employee walk off with the data. Assuming it was post GDPR they should also have reported themselves to the ICO.

Then I'd have told the new company that they had to report themselves to the ICO within the statutory72 hours.

And made clear that I'd report them both myself before the 72 hours were up so if they wanted to get in first to look good they'd better move.

Apparently they "apologized sincerely" and the police confirmed that all data had been deleted.

To whom? Not, I'll be bound, to the 79,000 whose email addresses were nicked and, presumably, spammed.

So the only penalty was that they lost their job but as they had started a new business it may well have been that they had quit anyway. The best that can be hoped for is that, having proved themselves untrustworthy to do business with and probably pissed off 79,000 potential customer with spam the business fails.

Superapp Gojek fine-tunes each new error message for a week. What? Why?

I wonder how often the same amount of effort devoted to extra coding or maybe a redesign could avoid having to display an erro message at all.

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

"80 percent of applications arriving in an unfit state to be assessed"

Maybe that's part of the assessment.

Re: Seems perfectly elementary to me :|

The window with the skip under it.

City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment

Re: Stitch up

I wonder if putting "Must actually work" in the requirements might be considered illegal.

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

Those one in 100 billion chances happen all the time.

British businesses told: Compliance with EU AI law will satisfy UK guidance

Re: Hold your horses!

"There are already American websites that block people in the EU or the UK."

If it's not from the US it must be from some tinpot little commie place.

Re: Hold your horses!

"We do need better options to vote for."

We most certainly do.

Re: Hold your horses!

"Should the EU decide its a good idea to limit the power of a kettle"

Spot the straw man.

Re: Hold your horses!

"Hardly post-Brexit UK being the master of its own destiny, rather just waiting and hoping that EU countries fumble the ball."

As carried out by the world leading ball fumblers.

Having written that it's just occurred to me that that might have been behind the whole thing. They're always going on about Britain being world leaders in whatever they realised that this was something in which they could really remonstrate they were world leaders.

Re: Hold your horses!

"trumpet about how light touch the UK is (as if that were a good thing)"

Yes, that was the point of Brexit. More trumpeting than a brass band (apart from the fact the brass bands use cornets rather than trumpets).

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

"Now, can you repeat what I told you about this last week?" If they can have them make the effort to repeat it as exactly as possible. If they can't, you have the excuse to give them the explanation and make them repeat it back to you and to make it clear that you'll ask them to repeat it next time. The effort they have to make will help them to retain it.

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

I receive contact messages from a website emailed to me by the admin of the site's server. As the reply-to address is that given by the enquirer I can just reply. At the weekend I had a reply bounded with a message which said, translated into English, you'll have to play guessing games to try to work out what went wrong. The guesses are either that outlook.com is not a domain they recognise, they'll only accept emails that reply to an address previously used for an outgoing email or that the different from/reply-to addresses confuse it in which case it's either going to be even more puzzled by an email from my own domain or there's nothing much I can do about it.. Either way my view is that if the enquirer wants to use an Ionos hosted email system it's her problem.

Dell staff not alone in being squeezed to reduce remote work

That's an ex[expectation that needs to go. Huge cities as centres of employment dependent on long commutes are unsustainable dinosaurs. They need to be dealt with by converting some of the property to housing so those who want to live and work in a city can do so and, instead of building more homes on former business premises (AKA brownfield sites) in the surrounding areas, refurbish or rebuild those sites as business premises reachable without long commutes. It's not likely to happen without costs but, because of the unsustainably, given that it's a case of when, not if, those costs are going to have to be incurred sometime. It's arguable that it's the role of government to take the lead in that.

As per my suggestion above. Put pressure on as senior manger as possible that the oly way to get work done is if you borrow their office for a little while - like the rest of the day and the day after.

"so there isn't room for the entire department to be back on site"

Arrange for everyone to go in on the same time and hound senior manglement for more space: "I can't find a desk. Can I use your office for an hour or two?" "Bill say's he's having problems as well. Can he come and join us?". Then the killer, "I know it's hard for you with all of us in here. Why don't you work from home? we'll be OK here if you do."

Re: Hybrid

None of that worries you when you can't hear it because the dot-matrix printer somebody installed on the desk behind opens up for a long print.

How to weaponize LLMs to auto-hijack websites

Maybe it tells us something about how the LLMs get their training material.

Nginx web server forked as Freenginx to escape corporate overlords

Re: Deal

Almost. They bought the name and rights to maintain something someone else could download for free and then fork. But the forkers have to vary the name.

Re: West Good, Russia Bad

How do you go about registering a FOSS product in a country? His complaints about Nginx and Angle was that they were owned by companies which did have a geographical location. Some products are overseen by foundations and there might be an issue with where the foundation is registered but otherwise FOSS is a citizen of the world. I grant you that may irk some people and governments.

Oxide reimagines private cloud as... a 2,500-pound blade server?

Nine foot high? I've seen computer rooms where there isn't that much height between raised floor and dropped ceiling.

Cybercriminals are stealing iOS users' face scans to break into mobile banking accounts

Re: This is not a biometrics flaw at all

The young are never over-credulous? Nor the middle-aged?

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: We need a new Unix

Draw up and implement your set of new ideas. What happens when a new new idea emerges? The test of the quality of your design is how well it gets accommodated.

The original Unix ideas were few and flexible so that networking and GUIs could be built on top. They didn't have to be built in as first-class clients (whatever that means).

If you start out be saying "this needs to be built in and that needs to be built in as special cases" then you're making assumptions about what belongs in there. Assumptions have a habit of becoming limitations.

If the new new idea violates the assumptions, you have to take the back off the system and build in another extra case. That way lies bloat.

The original ideas of extensible simplicity have lasted for decades and been scaled from some controller based on a Pi to supercomputers. That seems a good indication that they got things right.

If there's a case for a new Unix it has to be for removing cruft and getting back to the minimalism.

Re: What is unix anyway?

"The sticking point would be libraries and support programs that came with Windows, and couldn't- at least legitimately- be run on top of some other foundation OS."

Wine can run Windows applications without Windows being present so it must be (not!) emulating them already. What I'm pondering is whether it would pick up applications already installed in Windows as if it had installed them itself. If so then, at least at first sight, there should be no difference between Windows being there and not being there except for the paths where it finds them.

On the other hand the original installation might be directing the executables to use the installed Windows libraries. S do the "libraries and support programs" come with Windows or are they part of it? There would still be a registered* copy of Windows installed. If the libraries are part of that then while they're executing Windows would be executing. And how would that differ from running the original installation in a VM, which would be an alternative way of going about it?

Much the same applies to any support programs from the original installation although there would be a greatly reduced dependency on them as the Linux installation would largely take over their roles.

* Assuming it was legit in the first place unless Microsoft were to actually cancel licences when a version goes out of support.

Re: Not *everything* is a file

Try ls -lR /dev

Re: What is unix anyway?

It's like saying that OS/2 or Windows "is A Unix" by virtue of their compatibility layer.

I was wondering about the reverse of that prompted by the end of W10.

It would be possible, if there were sufficiently free space available, for a Linux installer to compact and shrink an NTFS partition and create a new partition into which to install a bootable Linux. The user's data files could be linked in to the new home directory.

But would it be possible to retain in place any Windows applications that couldn't be substituted, run them via Wine and reassure them that they were still on the same Windows machine on which they'd been registered?

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

Alternatively, just wait for the VCs and C-suites to move onto The Next Big Thng.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

"giving 3rd party devs something to play with"

If they see potential customers returning them they'll probably return their own and more on to something else.

Re: re: Overall, once you've had the Watch, it becomes very difficult to live without it.

My point is that I put the watch on when I get up and it stays there, weighting the square root of damn-all on my wrist, until I go to bed - and even then it's on the bedside table. And I don't think it's had a battery changed since I got it several years ago.

But the phone is, comparatively, a big lump to carry about, quite often with a flat battery when I need it. And I locate it, assuming it still has a charge and is within earshot, not from the watch but by ringing it from one of the DECT landline extensions.