Posts by Doctor Syntax

Pushers of insecure software in Biden's crosshairs

And this could be bad news for Open Source.

From TFA:

(If you're wondering where open source code fits into this planned approach to liability, the strategy has this to say: "Responsibility must be placed on the stakeholders most capable of taking action to prevent bad outcomes, not on the end-users that often bear the consequences of insecure software nor on the open-source developer of a component that is integrated into a commercial product.")

That answers your question "You pick up some package for nowt off NPM, who is the responsible person?". You are, at least in the first instance. If the package is deliberate malware then the author, and any third party who planted it in the repository, would also be responsible. If a particular repository were to become conspicuous for hosting malware then its operators might also become responsible; it would certainly encourage them to be able to demonstrate that they were making serious efforts to curate the contents.

My take on this is that it gives those who use FOSS in commercial products an incentive to take a more active interest in what it is they're using, review it, fix problems and send the fixes upstream.

BT opens 'voluntary job leavers' scheme for merging Enterprise and Global units

In BT voluntary redundancy and early retirement schemes are business as usual.

It's worth noting the union's contribution. The unit is top heavy but it will be middle management being let go.

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Legislation without sufficient enforcement is useless. Back in the C19th when the Factory Acts and the like were introduced an inspectorate was set up to ensure it was obeyed.

The same thing is needed now along with a provision that was in DPA 1.0: the power to forbid further data processing until the situation is remedied. Party inspected tries to hide from the inspector via an NDA? Told to take down the site Right Now.

Amid the gloom of widespread layoffs, Fujitsu is hiring and acquiring

"it is getting harder for young people to get a foot in the door ... things are going to get pretty difficult when people start retiring en masse in a few years"

The two problems should solve each other.

NASA finds crashing spacecraft into asteroids is a viable defence strategy

Re: Worrying.

For a pile of dust & gravel just rely in the ejection impulse. Send up a solar-powered gizmo that parks itself on the asteroid scooping up handfuls & ejecting it. No need to achieve high velocities and wiith enough warning the entire asteroid could be thrown away. My H Robinson could design something suitable in a trice.

Apple's outsourced Lightning cable plant in India goes up in flames

Re: Link?

Or the Up Yours Jack.

Re: Link?

"The world does not end at the borders of the EU"

The ERG is probably thinking of demanding the UK mandate the ¼" jack.

Find pushes back birth of Europe's steel hardware to about 3,000 years ago

If it's known how to produce iron in any form from ore then it's likely that iron-working sites would of the period would have been discovered and the Early Iron Age would have been pushed back to that period. I take it that no such sites were known. That raises the possibility that this was derived from meteoric iron. How close is the carbon content of meteoric iron to that of steel?

Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

It's simply a matter of whose expectations it won't meet.

US cybersecurity chief: Software makers shouldn't lawyer their way out of security responsibilities

Re: As bad as having a monthly fix for security and other issues is...

In the situation I was remembering we'd had the accountants do all the UAT on the new hardware (old H/W wouldn't support the Y2Ked version) so the obvious time to switch over was when the office was shut down over the long break. So rather than go with the signed off, known Y2K compatible version, they insisted on running the first 2 months of 2000 with a known incompatible version. It didn't go entirely as badly as feared (thanks to the vendors going above and beyond by dialling in several times to fix database errors*) but it didn't go well.

*Small S/W houses have a different attitude to customer service.

Re: As bad as having a monthly fix for security and other issues is...

- it is the year end, don't touch anything!

The date is 29th of December, 1999...

Re: OS/360 had plenty of bugs

IIRC it was about whether to place some function in H/W or S/W, the context being discussion on how to make best use of limited system resources.

UK courts' £1.3B case management platform hit with failures

Also independent of the courts. Taken together those are quite significant factors.

In my case it was covered by salary and, like the police witnesses, I doubt the cost was charged to the prosecution, courts or anyone else. If that had happened it might have encouraged more effective use of time but I doubt it.

As to taking written statements a colleague who had come from working in a different lab said that in her area that happened much more frequently than ours - and it was quite rare to encounter a defence expert in ours.

But one of my statements concerned a partial identification of one of three women's' bodies from La Mon House burned beyond recognition. Circumstance had preserve a small amount of head hair and my statement was confined to saying that, on the basis of comparison with samples from the hair brushes of the three women known to have died, that it could have been that one and couldn't have been either of the other two. The main consequence was that one of the families had the assurance that they had the right mother's body to bury and yet I spent ages hanging about to make that brief statement in person in the several separate trials that took place. That was an extreme example which sticks in my mind after all these years but there were many others which were less so.

Having spent a lot of the first half of my career hanging around courts waiting to be called as a witness and then told to go away and come back tomorrow - or next week - I'm not surprised. What made it worse was that quite a lot of the time the evidence was quite formal & could have been taken as read from my original witness statements.

The courts are a textbook case of why you shouldn't go straight to computerising the process when it's the process itself that needs sorting out.

One of the core issues is that the lawyers* may be concerned in multiple cases and that if one case overruns it affects their availability for others. Even judges are not immune to this as they may have to preside over an urgent hearing.

Add to that that it might not be predictable how long a witness's examination and cross-examination This obviously affects the overall length of the case but by pushing a hearing over into another day it can lead to conflicts with counsels' or witnesses' commitments to other courts. (I've seen this exploited by a prosecutor stringing out one day's proceedings to hold back another witness's testimony because he knew the leading defence barrister was due in court and that the junior would be too timid to cross-examine that witness.)

*And also various expert witnesses.

Shareholders accuse Tesla of overegging Autopilot, Full Self-Driving capabilities

I can see the logic in suing executives and/or board members. but why sue the company themselves? The only payment the company can make is from shareholders' funds so all they do is get their own money back, less a deduction for lawyers' fees.

Not just you in the night: Tiny bugs use superpropulsion to eject huge volumes of pee

"energy-constrained xylem-sap"

That's their problem right there. Should have stayed with phloem.

...or taking it.

IBM teases AI-infused hybrid cloudy upgrade to z/OS - Bingo!

Re: You're not kidding about the buzzwords!

Quite. If evidence were needed that blockchain's time has gone it's right there in that sentence.

Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

Re: The guy is an asshole. End of

"he's rich"

But for how much longer?

ChatGPT, write a report about database glitches that crashed you today

Re: ChatGPT - help me write

Maybe someone asked that and it's what caused the outage.

OpenAI CEO heralds AGI no one in their right mind wants

Re: It's useful. (Unlike most must-have tech)

"Well, you should be able to ask any search engine for exact search terms and exclusions and actually get a result on that basis."

And back in the 1980s you could so there's no good reason why you shouldn't now.

Part of the reason that you can't may well be to sell you advertising. The other part might be that the providers of such engines don't like the idea of failing to produce a response hence, apart from advertising, your results might be a load of irrelevant nonsense.

Who writes Linux and open source software?

Re: Well well

"And I believe it would be hard to find a person interested in IT who think Linux and open source software is made by people living in their parents' basement."

Not hard at all. There usually seem to be a few here.

Re: Never Forgive, Never Forget

"What an asshole."

And one who didn't even read TFA.

"the software they have produced over the years has never managed to rise above mediocre in terms of quality"

FORTRAN for CP/M was, in fact, OK. Bu that was many years ago.

Re: I knew this would end in tears.

As regards systemd - Poeterring works for Microsoft these days. Possibly EEE is well on the way.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: It's on a par with "hanged" and "hung"

The plaintiff was hanged? That's rough justice.

Petaflops help scientists understand why some COVID-19 variants are more contagious

There seems to be something more than this at work. As the virus has evolved it has become more infective but provoking milder symptoms. This can't be a matter of our immune systems being trained against it - AFAICR this trend had started before vaccination had become widespread. This also needs to be understood. The wider understanding should help in designing the next generation of vaccines. The virus is here to stay so we need to try to push it to a form which is no more serious than any of the other respiratory viruses which we categorise as the common cold.

DNA testing biz vows to improve infosec after criminals break into database it forgot it had

Less than 20c per data subject!.

If you're going to let them off that cheaply the settlement should at least include a requirement that any public statements about their data security be honest and accurate: "We didn't care enough about customer data enough to secure it."

But these breaches will continue until fines are big enough to bring a few companies down. Only then will manglement think security and IT expertise are worth spending money on.

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

"The only way to install software, including updates, is during a reboot, using a new command,"

This sounds strangely familiar.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when we...abandon KISS

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: Unix was always diverse

"what really did it for the commercial Unices was the huge and extortionate licence and royalty fees that came with them"

Yes. If SCO had realised the possibilities of the mass market and set their prices accordingly its likely that neither Windows nor Linux would have got any hold on servers. There were a lot of businesses running on PC-architecture with SCO and some industry-specific application. They didn't need an in-house admin. I had a few of those under my wing and even taken together then they weren't my main customers.

SCO's window of opportunity lay before Linux was sufficiently polished to use in production and package vendors realised it was worth porting to. They missed it and then doubled down on that with their litigation.

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

Cool is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned but keeping opened mail in the inbox is only marginally less sensible than keeping it all in the deleted bin. The reason people expect all their mail to be in the inbox (or in deleted) is because they're not provided with a system that makes any better provision.

Imagine physical mail trys on your desk. Somebody brings mail and puts it in there. You read it and put it back. Next day somebody brings more and puts it on top. You read that and put it back. In a few days you only get to read the items of new mail that you dug out from amongst the growing pile but you're unsure whether or not you missed any. In a few years or sooner the intray contents are piled up to the ceiling. There's another growing pile, the copies of the mail you sent out, and you can't match the replies to the originals when you need to.

It would be a stupid way of handling physical mail so why do we do the equivalent with email? Especially why do we do that with email when it should be possible to use the system to help handle it? The answer is that although better is possible it doesn't seem to be implemented. What is implemented is a thin wrapper around functionality to exchange messages with a server.

You and I make use of folders but my experience is that the implementation is clunky which is why few people do so.

On the subject of digging out emails here's an old email dug out at random from my archive:

"Like Peter, I have been through your e-mails back to 2015, but ca’t find anything on Marsden brothers. Any idea what you may have put as the title for the e-mail? David"

(Serendipity rules - the random choice was about digging through emails!)

Without the thread to give context it's not particularly useful; what was being asked about the Marsden brothers?

Personally I still use SeaMonkey - same underpinnings but 1. the underlying browser is available as a browser and 2. my reaction to the T'bird interface isn't that it's old, it's that it's too ugly modern*. But would I be prepared to change to an updated T'bird?

Yes, provided it really did involve a ground-up change.

Let's start be recognising that for the user the principle object of communication is the thread**, not the individual messages that comprise it; a singleton message is just a member of a thread which has, currently, no additional members.

In the SM/TB interface the thread is a run-time construct of any linked messages in the mbox file whose contents are currently being listed. By default a sent email goes into a separate, sent mbox. Unless the user discovers how to change this default the thread as shown doesn't even include their own contributions.

So the first step would be to add any incoming or sent message to an existing thread to which it belongs or create a new thread if none exists. The next would be to preview the thread contents better; show the first two or three non-quoted lines with the option to extent and reply. Something like el Reg's comment presentation, in fact.

Next, let's remember the numerous comments on here from support folk who discover users with thousands of read messages in their inbox or deleted folders. A good UI would confine inbox use to unread message Opening a message would remove it from the inbox. There should be another folder for current mail threads. After a period of inactivity; no further messages on the thread during the period would result in its being archived although there might be some sort of staging folder for recent but non-current threads. And the deleted folder is nothing more than a guard against those oops! moments, it will be cleared according to some sort of schedule.

That would be a start but there's scope - and, I think, need - for a much more radical approach. It's a typical email client and AFAICS no email client has got beyond being a thin wrapper around a basic utility to exchange messages with a server.

* i.e. UI components without clear boundaries and scratchy monochrome icons that look like a cuneiform writer's first attempt at heiroglyphs

** Thread, conversation, discussion or whatever you prefer.

Microsoft tells people to prepare for AI search engine that goes Bing!

That went well

I'm looking of an image, if one exists, of a specific mid C18th presbyterian clergyman ("Captain" Eden in Yorks Arch Soc Record Series CXVII on archive.org).

Search string to "Ask me anything" :get an image william eden 18th century presbyterian minister of holmfirth and elland not anthoney edan and not baron auckland

The first two entries are Dictionary of National Biography and ancestry for William Eden 1st baron Auckland, then People also ask about entries for Anthony Eden and his father, then Wikipedia entry for baron Auckland, then numerous entries for Anthony Eden.

An answer of "Can't find one" might have been a correct response. Scads of responses to what follows the word "not" isn't.

Back in the 1980s I was using a search engine that understood "not". I wonder how much more refinement is needed of AI before we get back to the functionality of those heady days.

A match made in heaven: systemd comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: Better idea.

I'm not sure just when it was but I think the rot set in when stuff other than home directories started being stuffed into /usr.

Re: "extinguishing systemd"

"the current patched up spaghetti ball crud that is Windows 10/11"

So slotting in a systemd-based Linux would be replacing like with like?

Re: Better idea.

Much the same applies to being a stable-hand.

Re: Better idea.

"see how far you get"

You get to my favourite, Devuan, and Jake's favourite, Slackware, for a start, plus one or two others. They all work perfectly well. (From what I read it may well be that they have a problem running current versions of Gnome but that doesn't disturb my idea of "perfectly well" and there are quite a few others of the same view.)

Re: Can someone explain.....

"... what the issue is with systemd ??"

It is not minimalist in the way that Unix was designed to be. As such it doesn't really belong there.

Re: Better idea.

As far as I can tell VoT sees only BSD is the true heir of V7 although I might have misinterpreted.

Re: Better idea.

A lot of us Linux on the desktop people are old Unix hands and have been so since a time when "windows" simply meant something to keep the draught out.

This hero probe will smash into an asteroid to see if we can deflect future killer rocks

"The DART impact will temporarily slow Dimorphos down, changing its orbital track."

Temporarily? How would it get back up to speed?

Boeing to pay SEC $200m to settle charges it misled investors over 737 MAX safety

"little more than an administrative expense"

Just as well. This is punishment for misleading investors shareholders. Unless it's a personal charge on Boeing management or directors* it's shareholders' money. Shareholders are being fined for having been mislead.

* Or cab be recovered from them by shareholders.

Billionaire CEO tells Googlers 'we shouldn’t always equate fun with money'

When money gets a bit tight it's not surprising if businesses start to cut back on discretionary expenditure and advertising is going to fall into that category. That sort of cutback will be restored when business picks up.

What's very likely worrying Google senior management is that their customers' senior management might start asking harder questions about advertising policy. Questions like "Does tacking really pay off? How much money are we spending showing adverts to somebody who once enquired about $PRODUCT, who's then bought it, isn't going to buy another and is more and more unhappy about having pointless ads shoved in his face?"

When those sorts of questions start to get asked Google's allegedly value-added services start to get questioned and that might be a hit from which it will be far harder to bounce back.

Re: Google, the little startup that could!

"the size of the paycheck"

Adequacy of that might or might not be a significant part of job satisfaction. Inadequacy is a major part of job dissatisfaction.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Sh1t Planning

You forgot ->

Re: I've seen worse

When my daughter was at grammar shool her class saw the no longer flat roof of the adjacent wing blow past their window.

Re: Architect Smartitect

I remember the Beeb having a real fireman examine Zaha Hadid's famous award winning fire station. It didn't emerge well from that, there were comments such as the ends of handrails being dangerous to any one running through the building - which tends to happen in fire stations. In fact I think the building was repurposed not that long after it was opened but her reputation was unblemished.

Re: Architect Smartitect

I will certainly blame the architect who insisted a corner office's windows should meet right in the corner so that it would appear that the wall above was magically floating without support (I think they award each other bunny points for this). It would have been OK if the walls were magically supported but in fact they were supported by a concrete pillar set a foot or so back from the corner. This blocked a good deal of the light from the windows but probably did little for the heat loss.

Just as well that was my boss's office. Mine next door was on a plain wall and had a reasonably sized, unobstructed window but it made his a miserable dark hole to visit.