Posts by Doctor Syntax

Electoral Commission had internet-facing server with unpatched vuln

Simple question

Are you siting on data which you would absolutely have to get back if it was leaked?

Well, you can't get it back so the only option is to absolutely not let it leak.

Re: "highly privileged Active Directory accounts by default"

"That'll teach you a thing or two about actual security."

I'm not sure it would and I don't like to contemplate the consequences.

Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy

Re: the larger the satellite ... the more vulnerable it was

"there are numerous international treaties regulating tech"

This argument depends on the assumption that peole who are determined to do something illegal will be put off by providing them with more laws to break. A third of a working lifetime in forensic science tells me they aren't.

The power budget is fixed. If protection takes some of it something else is going to have to be cut. You can't just send up a bigger solar panel.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Re: Completely different problem ...

It sounds like a bit of a pantomime...

""excuse me sir, you aren't supposed to be in here""

"Oh yes, I am."

"Oh no, you're not"

...

Re: I've been locked out ...

The security conscious have been known to lock fire exits.

"Had he seen a bump there, on the ramp near the exit? Asking because jumping on those often triggers the garage door."

The other mechanism, of course, is the induction loop. I often wonder how much is needed to trigger those. I've seen that on an exit-only gate and wondered if something like s few flattened cooking oil drums pop riveted together would do it. Throw it through the gate and, for good measure, reverse in so that if the guard looks up at the CCTV he sees a car apparently leaving.

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

That's rather like BT's idea of delivering text messages over landlines. Straight into reciting the number it came form and than gabbles the message. No idea who it was from, minimal comprehension of the message.

I have lost the ability to walk to people's desk and I find it quite annoying annoy them.

FTFY

"Things that could have been resolved in minutes take hours." And possibly the opposite for your colleagues. If interaction has to be scheduled it means that work also gets its time on the schedule.

I don't usually feel sorry for salesmen but you have to have a little sympathy for Zoom's. If a company bad-mouth's its own product it must be tough hearing all your prospects point that out ot you.

Alibaba says demand for cloud has dipped – which improved its profits

Reduced demand brings bigger profits? Every cloud has a silver lining.

Microsoft OneDrive a willing and eager 'ransomware double agent'

Re: Relatively easy...

There seems to be a long history of "just" getting users to run executables. All you have to do is email them kittenpic.jpg.exe or invoice.pdf.exe. You might might not do so but others will.

Lawsuit: We've got the stats to prove Twitter ax fell unfairly on older, female engineers

OTOH the difference between those in their 50s & those in their 40s might not be that great. A positive correlation coefficient between probability of lay-off and age might be more convincing although I can see the problems in defining a class of claimant.

Re: A tough sell

"The age discrimination one is kinda flimsy."

For a start it relies on a magic limit. 49-year-olds who were fired might feel miffed at being left out of the claim. It would have been interesting to have seen how the percentages compared in each ten-year group.

Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns

Re: Outliers have minimal push.

"we will revert to the 1970s in our technology"

Ah, the good old 1904.

Re: Yeah right...

As per my previous psot: https://www.gov.uk/courts-tribunals/employment-tribunal

Re: "and freed them up to focus on more sophisticated tasks beyond the scope of automation"

And you have to buy the bottle from Amazon.

It depends where you are but in case you're in the UK I'll just leave this here: https://www.gov.uk/courts-tribunals/employment-tribunal

If employers should get employees' consent before monitoring them where does this put HMG in regard to installing monitoring devices on everyone's devices?

GNOME 45 beta: Less buggy, more colorful, and still not your grandma's desktop

Re: ....and what about BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY......

"and, of course, it's a pity that GNOME3 and GNOME4 are both completely unusable"

Given the lack of backward compatibility this is the saving grace,

Larry Ellison a major contributor to Blair Institute vaccine database plan

And people were worried about Bill Gates and vaccines.

X tries to win back advertisers with brand safety promises

Re: What happened next

If they've any sense they'll be demanding cash upfront. That's real cash, not Dogecoin.

Exlets? Exhalations?

Got it: excrement.

Maybe elReg needs a poopemoji icon.

Infosys launches 'sonic identity' – an aural logo to 'reinforce brand purpose'

A good reason to keep speakers muted. If only all marketing cobblers could be dealt with so easily.

Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

Chain of custody applies to potential court exhibits. This is likely to be clerical staff at Castlereagh or wherever HQ is these days. They may nothing about chain of custody but releasing information without sign-off seems incomprehensible. A sign-off of this is even less comprehensible. Someone might be in line for a posting to Rockall.

It seems incredible that there should be no process for responding to FoI requests that doesn't involve a review of the material released sufficiently careful to trap this.

Also the site which published it should also have known better giving that is personal data. In the circumstances I'd expect that at least there would be a DPA offence in there if not criminal charges given the data subjects.

Boeing abandons plans for crewed Starliner flight in 2023

A perk for Boeing board members

Have at least one member as a passenger on each of the early flights.

4 in 5 Chromebooks sold to US students in Q2 as demand rises

If it was EOL when it was sold it would already be due for replacement when you first open the box unless you have a policy of running kit that's not getting updates.

1. Learning depends on teaching.

2. If the kit is being sold at or near EOL It won't make much difference how it's treated, it will be EOL on that date.

Cyber-extortionists pillage Colorado education dept

the US state's officials said they are "reviewing our policies and procedures and are working to implement additional cybersecurity security safeguards to further protect our systems,"

I suppose there wasn't budget to have done this on a regular basis previously. And maybe not to do it more than this one time in the future.

Google, you're not unleashing 'unproven' AI medical bots on hospital patients, yeah?

"All rather good points that ought to be raised or highlighted."

And answered.

Norway to hit Meta with fines over Facebook user privacy from next week

Re: Tell the ISPs to block access to Facebook

The external company could be hit with a similar instruction, applying to all its processing, even for other customers. That wouldn't propagate very far, nor be repeated.

Re: Tell the ISPs to block access to Facebook

UK DPA 1.0 gave the Information Commissioner the power to forbid processing data. This would be the equivalent for online businesses. I don't know if the IC ever used it but it's the nuclear option.

Re: Less than 1%

Fines need to be based on percentages of global annual turnover. It's the only way to ensure that nobody's big enough to ignore them providing, of course, that regulators apply them at appropriate levels.

S/4HANA was once the future for SAP – but now it's in the clouds

"I was only half-paying attention and I only caught a few seconds worth"

You should pay more attention to these conversations. They're really useful advance warning of what might be dropped on your desk at the last minute.

Re: "SAP said [..] customers need to be in the cloud"

"Especially since there is no such thing as a completed SAP migration . . ."

Maybe they were worried that might actually happen.

If a business expects customers to rely on it as a base for their long term strategy they need to have a reputation for having a reputation for a consistent very long term strategy themselves.

NASA's ice-hunting cubesat lunar mission is over, thanks to a stuck valve

Reminders that space really is difficult emphasise just how good the engineering of the Voyagers etc. really is.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: They'll try

"They can't even get locale customisation right for a country like South Africa that has a case for mass adoption."

I find it difficult to believe that there are no Linux developers in South Africa who can't generate a suitable locale and push it upstream - apart from the 8 which KDE lists for me under "Formats".

Re: Windows 2025

"Something has messed with the file associations. Normal Windows 10 will open that PDF in Edge by default."

Of course something has. Probably the H/W vendor who wants their commission selling the extra application. W10 is a great selling platform.

In fact it subsequently did open in Edge. I wonder how many modes Edge offers for presentation and copying compared to a real PDF viewer.

Re: Windows 2025

And therein lies the difference between a typical Linux distro and the OS Windows. The Linux distro will provide you out of the box with a lot of stuff the bare OS will try to sell you. You don't need to buy this Windows compatible application if there's already something there with the functionality you need. Note I said I'd have to remove some stuff - it would need to look like a credibly bare cupboard.

Re: re: ""This computer is broken"

"I don't like Windows 11 but have installed it to use knowing at some point family, friends or even strangers in the village who neighbours have told them will come and ask me about it and as a free source of help."

My response would be simply "Sorry, I don't know anything about Windows 11." Firstly I know that if it's any variety of Windows there'll be too much going wrong and secondly why on Earth would I want to learn something I don't know about to help those who know even less?" As with Jake, I know that if people who are having problems with Windows move over to any suitable Linux distro they will make far fewer demands on my time asking for help.

Re: functionality

Linux is never going to be the primary OS of choice because people are told, by people who haven't used it but have themselves been told, that for the average user it is too complicated.

And yet, those of us here who have switched very non-technical people from Windows to Linux for various reasons know that those people do not find it too complicated at all, nor do they find it that different from Windows.

Re: functionality

Translation: "We don't have time to deal with any compatibility issues, so just don't go there, okay?"

I think the real translation is "We work for a cheap employer who will only employ people who 'know a bit about IT'. Windows and Office are all we know."

Re: functionality

I'm afraid she is. However having had somebody from Microsoft phone her up a good while ago (followed by her calling me) she is pretty careful.

Ideally I'd like to get her running Linux. I have a cousin in law who years back got an email apparently from someone she new (I never explored the ins and outs of that) with a rather primitive ransomware on it. All the ransomware did was to write out the encrypted versions and delete the old ones. Photorec recovered everything. In fact it recovered far too much including all the little gifs etc from the browser cache. I just repartitioned the disk, installed Zorin with the old C drive available as another partition. She's perfectly happy with that.

The only real issues since are that Thunderbird updated its address book format to sqlite without automatically migrating the data and she sometimes gets the Epson printer offline.

Re: functionality

"it's what the users know"

It's probably all the IT departments know as well.

Re: functionality

I suspect a Microsoft Reputation Manager at work

FTFY

Re: functionality

"If you don't have a recovery partition (as you wouldn't when installing from scratch), all of the various drivers and what not you need to operate things will be missing."

Even reinstalling W10 from a restore image isn't a bundle of fun either.

Zoom updates its legalese explicitly promising not to feed vidchats to AIs

"Zoom has insisted it never intended to give the impression"

Translation: "You weren't supposed to notice"

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Re: "Facial Recognition" is no worse than any other kind.

"It's a blue-collar job: they aren't lawyers or social workers: they arrest people."

Police officers will generally tell you that in reality a lot of their job is social work. I don't know if it's still the case but senior station officers would be responsible for prosecuting some offences in the magistrates' courts. They'll certainly have received some training in the law. I think you may be underestimating blue collar workers.

Having said that you have to remember that they're human like everyone else and that means that for some being offered a supposedly wonderful technique that will revolutionise their job they'll believe the hype and believe the results.