Posts by Doctor Syntax

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

Re: Wireless Mice

"He should have bought the extended warranty."

He'd probably have been out of that as well.

Re: "Out of Cheese" Error

"the Sergeant was told to swallow his pride"

Preferable to swallowing the furball.

Deluge of of entries to Spamhaus blocklists includes 'various household names'

Re: Lack of feedback

Did you read the bit in the OP which said "If they just included the sender and the subject of the offending email, or the message id, or some bit of info that would help narrow it down it would help enormously."

Re: I do have legit servers on Linode

Of course you know to have emails originating from your legit relay. What t about someone not in the industry who doesn't know better trying to operate something legit from one of these ISPs? Is it right that they should suffer because of the service's other users?

Re: I thought that the problem was obvious....

"it offers an opinion"

I spend a large part of my career offering opinions in the form of witness statements. I had to be prepared to justify any of them if needed. I expect anyone doing the same thing to meet the same standards.

That list affected the reputation of the entire ISP of MSPs customers, innocent as well as guilty. That is wrong.

"their customers if legitimate ones need to choose a better ISP."

This is victim blaming. How do they find out why they're being blocked to know to choose a better MSP and how do they find out who's better.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for spammers but care needs to be taken avoid collateral damage.

Re: No case to answer

LDS's comment hits the nail on the head. They're a reputation service. If they make decisions about reputations which impact on people they should be prepared to stand over them. There seem to be numerous complains that they're not doing that. It may be that their decisions are 100% justified but if so why not explain them?

"Plus if you clearly state the rules for inclusion, I suspect it'd be hard to argue defamation"

And yet people are saying it is hard to argue. Just read the story and comments here where people are claiming they're being listed and not able to find out why when they can't work out what they're doing which is against the rules. In such a circumstance the obvious option for someone in that position is to force them into court to put up or shut up. If, as the article suggests, major corporations are getting blocked, then this is likely to happen.

"Just" a reputation service?

Being a reputation service is the core of the problem if, as some of these stories claim, besmirching reputations without good cause.

It's no use saying no one is forced to use it - the use is at the discretion of the receivers. If someone is being wrongly accused by them of spamming they have no say at all in this.

I'm surprised they haven't been sued for libel if they're not prepared to justify listing.

Attention Microsoft-oriented Linux devs: .NET 6 is on Ubuntu 22.04

Re: Nice one Cyril

"MS seems all cuddly and friendly, open and supportive"

What big teeth you have, Grandma.

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

Re: All conspiracy theorists take a step back from their keyboard

"Entirely through the stupidity of the Trusts' senior management. The money never existed, but was put on the balance sheet as though it did!"

IANAA but I'd expect that there are accounting rules saying that the value of the shares had to go on the balance sheet just like the value of the buildings, the furniture, the contents of the pharmacy and everything else. If they hadn't done that the shit would really have hit the fan when the auditors discovered the fact.

Re: Shoddy reporting

"The company may go bust and be bought up by someone else."

Bought from whom?

Yup, that's right, the shareholders who just happen to include the trusts.

Re: Shoddy reporting

To summarise: the trusts have lost money they never had. I too have lost millions I never had.

Re: Shoddy reporting

"That is ignoring the value of the data that was handed over. "

The hospital trusts still have the data and hence the value if there's value to be extracted. What happens to the copy the company has (and at least some trusts seem not to have handed any over) or what constraints accompanied it we haven't been told.

Re: Consent?

And where's their "interest"?

Re: This raises a lot of questions...

"The data wouldn't have been magically transferred at no cost to the hospital."

That cost is the real loss.

Re: Shoddy reporting

You missed "tricked" from your quote. There is no evidence that the company's management intended to collapse the company. If they had then "tricked" might well apply. As far as can be seen the trusts were participating in a development that could be of use to them in their everyday operations. It's entirely possible that they might have participated in that without the offer of shares.

The complicating factor here seems to have been that the shares were listed and hence received a value that had to be entered into the accounts. If that were not the case then they could have been entered with a nominal value reflecting the cost of the effort needed to prepare the data for sharing. That is the actual cash loss which has been incurred here.

Re: Consent?

Where do "our elected representatives" come into this?

There's no place like GNOME: Project hits 25, going on 43

Re: Backward Compatibility Anyone?

I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Re: JavaScript?

"Strange manipulations of XML files? As a KDE user, I know about these woes."

Interesting. I just check the contents of my /usr/share/plasma directory. There are over 10 times as many QML files as XML. What really surprised me was that there were almost twice as many JSON files as XML.

"My personal opinion is that desktop managers do too much"

I keep hearing this and I'm not sure what's meant by it, especially as my objections to certain DMs has been that they do too little. What is it that desktop managers do that's too much?

Re: Plus ca change - lentement

For some value of "somewhat".

I wonder what the split would be between the various Linux/BSD desktop managers. Perhaps there's scope for a Register survey. FWIW my vote would be KDE.

Apple to compel workers to spend '3 days a week' in the office

It could be that what gets collaborated on most in person is dislike against Apple. Has there been any prior history of unionisation there?

Blackboads were even better if dustier. Permanent chalk isn't a thing.

I think it applies to a larger sub-set of employers than that.

Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

Nothing political in this. As far as BoJo is concerned it's purely personal.

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

Re: Bankrupt the country so you can sell it to Rishi's father in law

"You wanted to leave, you got the votes and Brexit happened. Stop trying to get your snouts back in the trough you claimed you didn't want or need."

As ever, it's not quite so simple. The vote was tight. Those who are the losers in this are likely to have voted "No". In fact some of them would have been too young to vote at the time.

It is grossly offensive to tell people whose careers were ruined by no action of their own that they're wanting to get their snouts back in the trough.

"The idea of Liz Truss being able to negotiate anything is laughable."

WHile I agree with your assessment of her, unfortunately it's not laughable. She's one of two candidates to be the PM. The other is married to someone with a major interest in the Indian outsourcing IT industry. I don't consider either a good outlook.

Re: Reap what you sow

"and will thus quit science"

Or the country.

"Liz Truss says bloc 'in breach of agreement'"

Translation: everybody's out of step except us.

Excel @ mentions approach general availability on the desktop

Phising applications incoming!!!

NASA uses occult means to spot tiny moon orbiting asteroid

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum"

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

Re: Testing boundaries

With a right to be forgotten there's a legal basis, the scope is defined and it's up to the data subject to be pro-active. In the general case the legal basis is dubious, the scope is far from well defined and these, I think, are good arguments for the search engines not to be pro-active.

Look at the OP's criteria: untrue, out of date or irrelevant.

Who decides on those instances where the truth is disputed? Do you wish to have Google usurp what might reasonably be a court's prerogative?

Who decides when something is out of date? What if you have a web page where you rely to a large extent on search engines bring you traffic? Would you be happy if search engines ignored you because your page was a year old but you believed its content was still current? Who would get to decide whether it was still current or, indeed, what the cut-off period should be?

And who gets to decide on what's irrelevant? That, I find an easy one: it's the person making the search. It would be nice if there were some effective means of communicating that to the search engine but IME the trend over the years has been away from such a facility.

Agreed, the newspapers are accountable. That was not at issue.

But if you hold Google accountable do you or do you not also hold the libraries than make newspapers available to the public also accountable? If not, why not? And if you don't hold the libraries accountable why would you hold Google accountable?

"the adtech giant surely knows it has a symbiotic relationship with newspapers"

Aren't these are the symbionts that were the one was being sued by the others? An odd sort of symbiosis.

Modeling software spins up plans for floating wind turbines

Re: Now this is more like it

Hi there, big buoy.

"US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management"

Isn't that a bit self-contradictory?

Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff

You are mixing at least three different things here.

1. These cases proceed under civil law. The claimant only needs to succeed on the basis of balance of probability. Where the case is settled out of court, as these inevitably are, not even that is recorded. A settlement is not the same in terms of public record as the winning and losing of the case.

2. A case under criminal law requires proof beyond reasonable doubt which means a lot of evidence. You also need to think about how a criminal investigation gets launched. Usually it's as a result of somebody alleging a crime to the police. If IBM's ex-employees are looking fo a pay-out they're far better off doing the civil route and getting a settlement rather than the criminal route which gets them nothing except probably a civil counter-claim against them from IBM.

In the absence of one or more complaints it might be possible that a public prosecutor could decide there's something to investigate; that might be more likely in the US than the UK. What would the charges be?

And where does such a prosecutor's search for evidence start?

Warrants to search IBM's records? In that case IBM's lawyers* are going to object and they'd tie the whole thing in knots in court for years amid growing complaints of the cost to public funds.

With the plaintiffs in the civil cases? It would be very difficult to make a criminal case out of a situation where the parties have already settled and those that are still pending are trying to get the evidence they need for the lesser standard of proof - they wouldn't really be of much help to establish the greater. It would involve spending vast amounts of public money with very limited prospects of succeeding.

A criminal case does not, as you seem to think, exist to provide civil redress. A successful prosecution might result in fines for the company, possibly jail time for execs. Aggrieved ex-employees would still need to sue if they hadn't died from old age while their evidence was still being fought over in the criminal case.

3. A public inquiry is different again. It would only be instituted where something is of major public interest. Remember that "public interest" is not the same as "interesting to the public". If IBM were losing case after case in the civil courts that might, just possibly, raise sufficient of a public scandal and IBM isn't going to allow that to happen, not if they can keep settling.

* It might help to think of IBM as a law firm with an IT operation attached.

"There is not now any public interest in access to documents that might form the basis of a judicial decision,"

Is that final? I suppose some of the litigants whose cases are now pending might challenge it.

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

"But that lack of a round ball background won't stop some fans from hoping Musk's tweet expressed a genuine desire to acquire the team"

I'd have thought that it would be reassurance that however bad things are, they're not as bad as they could be.

CIA accused of illegally spying on Americans visiting Assange in embassy

What were they thinking of? Why not leave any devices with someone trustworthy beforehand?

Possibly they were taking in burner devices with this step in mind, otherwise they were ignoring the most elementary precautions.

1,900 Signal users exposed: Twilio attacker 'explicitly' looked for certain numbers

Re: As Wikipedia would say…

I think your downvotes might be for not having researched how it actually works.

Re: How can be…

You do realise, don't you, that a burner phone can be used for registration? Viewing the YT videos on how to do this might be educational.

How do you choose a Cloud Security Provider?

Really?

Sony camera feature hopes to make digital images immune to secret manipulation

"camera makers including Nikon and Leika,"

Nikon and who?

Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

Re: Internet of Farming Things

"he GPL requires that the resulting product be hackable by the recipient"

Could you quote this term in the licence.

When will the UK take another giant leap into space?

Re: Rocket Who

OK providing it's not this one: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.6341077,-1.7486348,3a,37.5y,66.49h,77.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s9H0FG1FliF5jQoK-RBp-sw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en