Posts by Doctor Syntax

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

Re: What does the gender, or a person's skin color have to do with qualifications?

It's probably a requirement to get grants these days.

Growing plants needs a supply of carbon dioxide. Whilst the astronauts' exhalations will supply this it's a closed system. Assuming 100% efficiency the total biomass, astronauts' body mass included, that can be sustained is entirely determined by the total mass of carbon dioxide and water that can be sent or found there.

Re: Arabidopsis thaliana

Only if you can provide suitable inputs.

Re: Are you stupid????

But there's always a first time.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Re: He's very quiet

"I accidentally got hold of the rejected CVs"

Good work!

"Gentle warning"?

Since when did either of those two words have meaning within the BOFH sphere of operation?

This is a website that could cost me a lot of time....

Thanks.

Re: Out of all these...

He should make plenty of dough out of it.

Re: And again

Don't forget the recording from last week. That means he has HR where he wants them. A shame the boss couldn't come to some kind of arrangement with him after that episode. Maybe once you've got the dirt on HR who needs the boss?

Waking up? Surely things are done more efficiently than that.

Re: Brilliant...

I'd never previously realised the BOFH's stairwells had doors. A lot of time must have been wasted by having to open them.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: Email backups

That's where they learn the difference between permission and ability.

It may also have been that they gave the CCTV cameras a glance as they were leaving and realised they didn't cover much beyond the boundaries and would have been of poor quality.

And other email clients. That collection is also understood simply as "Read" by some users.

Re: You just never know...

filed away "in case it might be useful"

"It might come in" (the "useful" is assumed) is my family motto.

With a good RDBMS with proper backup of transaction logs then a restore to as close as possible to the point of failure might initially restore the deleted record if it was on the primary tape but subsequent progress should replay the deletion.

Re: Manager and Cashier

"So, a life-changing sum? Certainly - but life-changing in the sense of Her Majesty paying your board and lodgings for a few years."

Or if you worked for the Post Office, no sum at all.

Startup rattles tin for e-paper monitor with display fast enough to play video

I'd have thought that the use cases for an e-ink and a fast enough for video display were fairly contradictory.

First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

If recruiters are unfamiliar with the concept of contracting there's something wrong with the recruitment of recruiters.

Re: Really?

You think a great deal of thought hasn't been put into BoJo's hair management?

"Basically, liars gradually get overwhelmed by the cognitive load of maintaining their pretense while those telling the truth don't have to."

This points to the basis of the BoJo technique. Don't overdo the cognitive load by maintaining the pretence of being consistent. Just say whatever you think the person you''re addressing wants to hear. Because they want to hear it they'll ignore the complete opposite waffle you're reported saying yesterday - or half an hour ago. If you can't be bothered remembering it why should they?

SpaceX: 5G expansion could kill US Starlink broadband

Re: Well

The FCC does exist to prevent two people trying to use the same frequencies like this sell the same thing twice.

ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

And who wouldn't prefer a matt screen?

Re: Yay, we have finally reinvented the terminal

X-Terminals were fine, whether they were dedicated H/W or S/W on ordinary PCs. But they were on local Ethernet networks.

Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis

"The trick was to rig together a clock program that appeared to multitask but instead was one program pretending to be many."

Did whoever thought of that go on to work for Volkswagen?

If you didn't store valuable data, ransomware would become impotent

Re: The other option....

"Hmm might have overdone it with the meds....."

You might indeed. The value of PII isn't that only the data hoarders hold it, it's that it is unique for a given individual. The value to the data subject is intrinsic and not determined by the number of people holding it.

I can't off-hand think of a closer equivalent but this will do: it's like saying that if everyone were burgled then nobody's any the worse off because everyone else is in the same situation.

Let's settle for something easier. How about a standardised name and address entry form? For those who really can't - or can't be arsed - to type it in themselves they could have a matching text file and copy and paste it.

Yes, I'd put myself in the second category.

It would need some thought: no assumption that everyone lives in a "city", not assumption that all street addresses have a number and no assumption that postal codes are numeric.

Re: A pattern emerges...

Do you not already hold your name and address in your own head? Can you not enter them into an online order form as required?

Don't over-think this.

Re: So instead of...

There's a lot of data a business needs to survive. It's their data and possibly they may be a little more motivated to look after it. Maybe they won't but if they suffer a breach it's just their problem.

If it's customer data it's a lot of other peoples' problem. The significant difference there is trust: the customer's trust the business and the business fails to live up to that trust despite all the protestations about that after the event.

As to decentralising data, the general thrust of the article seems to be that it's the customer who looks after their own data. Let's say I want to order something online on this basis. What needs to happen in data handling:

1. I select what I want to buy, I go to the checkout page. I enter my name and delivery address. That's in my own memory where it's not open to a ransomware attack.

2. I enter my bank account details which I copy from my hard copy bank card. This may well be verified by the bank's own pop-up app. The bank already holds my details, that's inevitable. I hope that my bank is a lot more secure than the average retailer. It's not 100% but ultimately it's the bank's problem if they're not, they're regulated more effectively than the retailer. That last statement is worth reflecting on.

3. The bank confirms the purchase to the retailer.

4. The transaction is confirmed back to me on screen, possibly offering a PDF to download and I can take a note of that. No email is needed. I am, however, holding my copy of that, possibly on my computer although I could make a written note or print the PDF.

5. The retailer prints a picking/despatch note and a shipping label.

6. At this point the company doesn't really need to keep personal information online any longer and can delete it. A summary of the transaction without these details can stay on their system.

7. When I receive the goods I can retain the packing note and delete any reference to it on my computer or retain it at my own risk - I'm not placing anyone else at risk.

Before anyone gets het up about needing to keep this in case of delivery problems, warranty claims etc. they have this on the picking note with the personal data on it; once delivery is confirmed they can dispose of that. If I have a complaint down the line it's up to me to produce my copy of the despatch note or the electronic copy of the order acknowledgement if I chose to keep that.

The retailer's holding of my PII is limited to the time needed to print out the paperwork. My holding is at my choice. The long term holding of information by the retailer is more or less what they'd have held if I'd walked into a shop and paid cash for the item, a business model which has worked for a few thousand years.

If data is to be sold valuing it shouldn't present any problem at all. It's based on what customers* are prepared to pay for it. Ironically the data that's hard to value is that held by businesses who are more ethical and don't sell it on.

* That's the data customers, not the customers who are mere data subjects

DMCA can't be used to sidestep First Amendment, court rules

I'm sure Musk is pleased that the ID of someone who tweeted about him is protected by the 1st Amendment.

Halfords suffers a puncture in the customer details department

Re: Halfords IT Always a bit odd

It may have passed through several hands but if management teams aren't replaced from time to time you'll get the nth generation of managers who kept promoting underlings in their own image.

Europol arrests nine suspected of stealing 'several million' euros via phishing

Your mate's bank wasn't unique in this. I've had a similar missive, not pointing to a login but to a page for further information.

"These messages included a phishing link that led to fake banking websites, which were used to harvest credentials."

Let's not forget the banks' culpability in this. They train their customers to be phished by sending emails, mostly marketing emails, with links in them. Two things should be made compulsory for banks:

1. No email sent to a customer should contain a link except for a few well-defined circumstances such as a password reset and certainly not without some previous interaction that ensures the customer is expecting it.*

2. Hammer home to the customers that any email purporting to be from the bank is fake, should be reported and the link should on no account be followed.

It probably wouldn't even be necessary for legislation to compel this. A regulatory requirement might be sufficient although legislation to make it a criminal offence to sign off sending such emails would be a good way to ensure the first requirement was obeyed.

* Ideally this should be eliminated by doing it off-net in a branch. Yes, real bank branches.

Bipolar transistors made from organic materials for the first time

Re: Gatekeeping @My-Handle

A few hundred quid would buy you a reasonable quality used microscope that could be used to project your mask image onto a die. But at best it would only get you down to micron resolution and at that resolution it would only cover a small area so for any reasonable sized die you'd need to do it in sections. With all that glass, of course, you'd have to forego UV sensitive materials and just stick to what can be activated in the visible spectrum.

The first step to a really wearable computer.

Leading Arch Linux derivative Manjaro puts out version 21.3

"The user guide compares the relationship between Manjaro and Arch as being similar to that between Ubuntu and Debian."

Apart from the fact that Debian is far from being a rolling release distro and, from this account, far better put together than Manjaro.

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

The Master may have been a souped up Beeb. The one I had briefly on my desk wasn't; as per my post above it wasn't Acorn, it was by Torch - a 68k box running a Unix.

A little prodding has revived memories. Associated with Acorn was Torsh. I think it must have been this: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/11268/Torch-Computers-300-Series-Workstation/

Dick Pountain's review describes the Master as a soaped up Beeb and it certainly wasn't that. Maybe it was something else - it was along time ago so my recollection is a bit shaky. It cersinly wouldn't have been something very expensive because buying expensive things for what was a speculative diversion didn't happen.

"In June 1987, Acorn launched the Archimedes A305 and A310"

What was the one that came out before that? Sort of pizza-box type machine. It must have been about 85 because I left the lab that had it in mid-86.

Re: Some features i would like today

As I recall they already had / as the escape character for end of line. It seemed to me that when those vast hard drives were added to PCs they tried to do a pivot from the rather DEC-like command-line syntax of CP/M and early MS-DOS to something more Unix-like to accommodate subdirectories and ended up being neither.

This startup says it can glue all your networks together in the cloud

Stitch all your networks together? ISTR someone had the same idea a good long while ago. It was called Arpanet. I wonder what happened to it.

Investors start betting against Bitcoin with short-trade products

Re: Investors or gamblers?

You are gambling.

If you buy a share of Dobby then you are investing because if Dobby wins you not only have your share of the prize money but Dobby has gained in value, not just as a more likely prospective winner of more prize money but also as a prospective parent of more race horses. And if Dobby loses Dobby is till Dobby.

It's a speculative investment with a greater than average value of failure but it's an investment because your money's going into something that might generate extra money in income (the prize money) or value (the stud fees).

Cash is accepted - by fiat if you like - as a medium of exchange in the economy. Its intrinsic value is that of the economy of the country that issues it (or countries in the case of the Euro). It may vary with the fortunes of the economy. If the economy tanks its value tanks. Its value in terms of pints of beer vs loaves of bread vs days' work might vary with the relative values of those items within the economy. There's no evading the effects of the real world but at least it is based on the real world. That's why Bitcoin and the rest are valued in dollars and not the other way around.

AWS buys before it tries with quantum networking center

Re: Not entanglement

Then the man in the middle intercepts both photons and replaces them with his own entangled pair. Undetectable.

Re: "photons can't be amplified, so their range is limited"

Quite. They can't be amplified but they can't be attenuated either. They can be lost but, if you're dealing with specific photons, they can't be replaced.

Toyota wants 'closed loop' EV batteries in its future cars

"a move that researchers involved said could cut the cost of solar installations by half."

I was wondering why adding something to a solar installation could cut the cost by half - unless it came with free money. The quoted article says it cuts the cost of solar storage installations by half. As it's using second-hand components that's not surprising.

Info on 1.5m people stolen from US bank in cyberattack

Re: Identity theft protection services

The examples which have been mentioned in the past are the usual data slurpers such as credit reference agencies. Did they ask for your inside leg measurement?

"We keep hearing this canned response too. Maybe their staff are just not up to it."

And somehow we never hear them explain why they didn't live up to it. Personally I'd like the media to get together and refuse to report such statements unless they're prepared to answer questions on those lines.