Posts by Doctor Syntax

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

"recycle the money"

As the saying goes, it's made round to go round.

Mozilla Developer Network adds AI Help that does the opposite

"As of around 0817 UTC on Saturday, an effort was underway to undo the AI Explain function. The AI Explain button has now been paused, for the time being."

So that's one organisation that acts promptly. Now for all the others...

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Re: I still have analog landlines.

"So I'm keeping those old analog lines until they force me to drop 'em"

In the UK that's end of 2025 at the latest. Whether they manage that I have my doubts. BT's latest shareholders' goodies offer still included PSTN stuff....

"imagine what would happen if a major catastrophe did indeed befall us."

Make that "will", "when" and "does".

Re: "if you can see the sky, you're good to go"

Flat battery? Equally tough luck.

Re: How about 112 and Advanced Mobile Location?

"Subscriber addresses are already obtained from landline calls."

Will that remain with VoIP?

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

Re: The issue with V6 is... NAT

"although expect everything to be straight-forward if you use the ISP provided router."

You missed the joke icon.

Still less of a risk than those who put their objections into big blokes with blunt and not at all blunt instruments.

Re: Time for IPv8

And another: devices with baked in IPV4 stacks. Many are likely to be so insecure that getting rid of them would be justification in itself but there'd be uproar if they all suddenly died.

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

Re: UIX

"a consistent experience across mobile phone UIs and a PC desktop"

All too often mobile phones have their UI elements positioned apparently at random. I've seen one where some control you'd expect to use only occasionally - IIRC the button to access configuration - was located bottom bar when other option, if they existed at all, were hard to find. If such little thought is given to the UI how much was given to other aspects - such as security?

Re: LMDE version soon as well

Just use straight Debian or, even better, Devuan.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Desperate

What do you think "Who call" and "On me" stories are for?

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Anywhere where volunteers run things like the local community centre.

Not everyone gets along with doing things electronically and if they don't it's best not to try. I won't say it's an age thing because quite possibly she will be younger than I am. Apart from which it's not so long ago that I as a freelancer, found it perfectly convenient to produce similar paper invoices and pay taxes with the company cheque book..oh, dammit - it was a long time ago.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Probably a COBOL program. Not necessarily written in COBOL....

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Until a few months ago SWMBO paid a local community centre for her weekly patchwork class's room rent with cheques. The community centre used a stationer's duplicate book to produce hand-written invoices. All very old-fashioned.

The centre's book-keeper retired at the end of last year. The lady who took over from him decided to go all modern and has some S/W that produces PDFs she emails out and payment by bank transfer. The first mailing included the full run of PDFs for every group that uses the centre. The next had the correct total but incorrect number of weeks which makes me think her invoicing S/W is a word processor and a clip-art template gussied up with the centre's name. The other day there was an email saying the last payment hadn't been made although our bank statement shows it leaving our account to the account used for the previous few months and presumably the correct one.

Paper invoices and cheques were much more reliable.

Re: Paris...

and the Marriott threw us out, because we were on a reduced corporate rate

"How many rooms per year did you used to sell to our company before today?"

Re: Paris...

One of my late cousins-in-law blotted his copybook with the Beeb (well before they went Arqiva & got sent to Orkney or Shetland as what he thought was intended to be a punishment posting. He quite enjoyed it.

Re: Paris...

If the stuff was good how could the selection be poor?

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

It's not really the same when it's not carved on the edge of a stone.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Only Linear B.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Being English I'd write it out in words as "November the first". Americans, of course, write "the fourth of July" on which topic in N Ireland "the twelfth" doesn't even need a month.

Beware of assumptions.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

It gets a bit harder when you're working with historical material and you mostly day, month, year but the occasional "14th century". ISO is probably best if you allow truncation so the 14th century can simply be "13". (This is only one of the many problems with historical dates - Julian/Gregorian, dating by reference to saints' days and regnal years are others. It pays to give close attention to otherpeople's transalation of Regnal years - off-by-one is a hazard.)

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

"I fail to see why any sane person would force a us keyboard on anyone"

Not even when the anyone is a USian in the US and has only ever used US keyboards previously.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

I couldn't find Etruscan but Noto Sans has Linear A and B fonts if that helps.

Re: Paris...

Only time I was at CDG was a flight from a working trip to Naples (equally grotty if you spend all your time in a big factory) and the flight was grounded due to storms over the UK airport. Eventually diverted to Heathrow, car parked at Gatwick (or maybe t'other way about but client who'd booked flight was in Crawley). Come to think of it, the outbound flight was delayed because of a leaking fuel filler cap. Air travel!!!

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

"All servers shall have only one keyboard layout and it shall be US International"

Is this the physical keyboard or the keyboard layout setting? The real pain comes with an bootable USB drive when they differ, especially when the WiFi passphrase contains at least one of those characters that gets relocated.

Microsoft puts profanity filter on %@!#ing Teams transcripts

Re: Can I opt out of Fucking Teams Transcripts??

When the beancounters went all cloudy and got rid of most if not all IT staff there are no servers on which to host it and nobody to install it if there were.

Re: Can I opt out of Fucking Teams Transcripts??

Remember, folks: it's somebody else's computer and you don't control it.

What about "damn"?

Might cause civil engineers problems.

Microsoft and GitHub are still trying to derail Copilot code copyright legal fight

Does the training material include the source of all Microsoft's proprietary paid-for products? If not, why not? If so would you trust its output?

What it takes to keep an enterprise 'Frankenkernel' alive

Re: Just because it's hard doesn't mean you're in the right

Thanks. Will take a look at that tomorrow.

Re: Just because it's hard doesn't mean you're in the right

The linked stream is over 8 hours. Where does the talk come in that?

Ripoff Vuitton handbag smaller than a grain of salt fetches $63,750 at auction

This would be ideal for SWMBO. She's always complaining her bag is too heavy. Something like this would stop her putting so much stuff in it. Problem solved!

Crook who stole $23m+ in YouTube song royalties gets five years behind bars

Re: Ill-Gotten Payoffs vs Prison Time

There's no mention in the story of any of it being clawed back or of how much was left to claw back after the obligatory "lavish lifestyle".

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

Re: Now forgotten

"modern Unix emulating teletypes"

Not very well. I can't get Konsole to punch paper tape.

Re: Now forgotten

"No muss and no fuss"

Not once you've sorted things out with the breakout box & determined what flow control and parity are being used.

IME there's no sort of computer interconnection where muss and fuss can't be introduced given enough determination and lateral thinking.

Experts scoff at UK Lords' suggestion that AI could one day make battlefield decisions

Wikipedia mentions avoiding collateral damage. Perhaps the experts have a point.

Re: Mmmmm let me think...

Perception is all. I momentarily misread Eton.

Chinese balloon that US shot down was 'crammed' with American hardware

"Initial criticisms centered on the administration's decision not to shoot the balloon down while it was over land for fear of the harm it could cause"

Perhaps it would be a good idea to take whatever of the gondola that survived the shooting down a few thousand feet above some suitable idiot's house and release it. It might help them get the message.

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

The would-be advertisers should look on the bright side. They didn't piss off potential customers by shoving unwanted ads in their faces.

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: Protecting us from terrorists eh

"As for 'having a backdoor' in strong encryption ... will someone send these idiots on a basic university mathematics course"

No. Just ask them to commission a proof of concept. It would, of course, have to pass scrutiny by independent experts to verify that the monitoring facility couldn't possibly provide any form of point of weakness.

Oddly enough they do tend to use the services they're attacking. They maybe don't realise they are encrypted because it's apt to leak out anyway - they leak it themselves whenever it becomes worth it to do so. E.g. handing it all over to a journalist to help them write their account of dealing with Covid.

Re: "Strong" encryption?

"Strong encryption is any encryption where the cost in money/time/effort to crack exceeds the value of the information retrieved...."

... within the time-frame in which it will have that value.

Re: Ofcom....and partial solutions to personal privacy.....

The (partial) solution: use peer-to-peer messaging where the ONLY messaging software is resident on user end-points.....and the encryption protocols exist ONLY on the end-points. (So no dependencies on any third-party "service".)

1. Protocols are fine but you need software to implement them. I suppose this was what you meant to say.

2. How do you get that S/W onto the endpoints?

3. How do the peers get in touch with each other?

4. Have you actually looked at Signal?

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

Boris would and will say anything that he thinks will further his own interests with whoever he's talking to. H may well believe it until he has to say the opposite to someone else in a hours - or minutes time and will be entirely unaware of having contradicted himself. One of the things which slipped out when some of his staff started describing their time working for him was that they kept trying to stop him talking to anyone, at least when they weren't there.

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

"For example, at the time of Brexit, the claim that any problems created due to the border issue in Northern Ireland could be quickly and easily fixed by the application of modern technology."

Anyone with any intelligence would have realised that three mutually incompatible requirements created a problem beyond fixing other than by entirely removing one of them which was a political impossibility given that the third requirement was the one HMG had introduced.

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

"why didn't you say anything before ?"

To which the only possible answer is "We've been saying i for years. Why didn't you listen?"

"and rumour has it Microsoft was actively involved in the Cloud Act (although I have as yet not seen any evidence of that"

You must have missed the reporting at the time it was passed. Microsoft pushed them into it by insisting on warrant in a case where the data* was held in an Irish data centre. Logic would suggest that it would have made an even deeper cleft stick for them as it would still mean ignoring the need for an Irish warrant. Did they protest about that? No, they welcomed it.

* Existing international agreements would have enabled this if the USian PTB had been prepared to seek one in ireland.

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

Re: Fingers crossed

It's the unrented, unoccupied ones that are the problem.

I have some personal interest in this in that I have a pension fund which includes a commercial property element. That certainly doesn't stop me believing that the established state of affairs - big cities, long commutes - is unsustainable in the long run, needs to be rethought and rebalanced, and the quicker the better.

The target as I see it should be a mixture of:

- less urban office space

- more urban residential space for those whose lifestyle it would suit

- more working at home (I distinguish that from working from home. There are many jobs, field engineer, for example, where at least some of the work is performed in locations which is neither home nor the employers' premises but this is less likely to be affected in any rebalancing.)

- more suburban offices so work in the office does not need long commutes for cases where W@H does not fit

- more use of serviced offices for those who do not have suitable working space at home

There's an urgent need for governments to catch on and change the planning rules PDQ. For instance use of "brown-field" sites is encouraged for residential use but those sites, at least those in my area, are old mill buildings which would provide for the last two of my points and there are very few of them left.

Add to it the current trend of these agencies not releasing direct e-mail addresses and phone numbers (" just write to info@....."), and it becomes very difficult to get anything done.

Incompetent management is incompetent management will always find a way to screw up.