Posts by Doctor Syntax

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

Re: Why would anyone leave these turned on?

"If you have teenage children, you may sleep better knowing that they can reach you."

You can turn off your mobile without turning off the land-line. You already turned off your land-line? Your choice.

Pentagon shoots down UFO rumors but says 650 cases are still pending

Re: That's why they changed the name.

Same logic applies.

Of course there are UFOs. If I see a flying object I can't identify it's unidentifiable, at least by me. That's just plain English and common sense.

If you say something's unidentifiable to you and then proceed to hang an evidence-free identification onto it then you're just talking nonsense.

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

You should really add another - wife's birthday.

Re: ... next time

Also the locks had a bit of tolerance so that a number could just be near enough. That meant that in the worst circumstances it wouldn't take as long to open it blind as would if he'd really had to try every single combination.

Re: Hacking an airport

"with a business card to prove it"

None of the Air Canada ladies nor the policemen must have watched the Rockford Files.

Never write the password under the keyboard. It can't be read and typed at the same time so anybody wanting to use it will have to make a copy of it and that's a Very Bad Thing.

Re: Sometimes you do what you have to do.

A Jake Austen ending!

Yes, the magic isn't in the word "root", it's in the UID 0.

With a mighty hand, and an outstretched arm, Musk scraps Pope's blue tick

Re: Seems to me

I see you're making the same mistake as Musk - you think the users are the customers. They're not. His customers are advertisers. They more than most are likely to be aware of a golden rule of sales: never give a customer reason to review the market.

GitHub debuts pedigree check for npm packages via Actions

Long Firm Fraud

What if the original is quite innocuous, possibly useful. Once it's accepted does the author then have the continuing access to convert it into something nasty?

Is there anything in this that prevents anyone who wishes to deliberately plant malware in a repository from adding a --provenance flag? Granted it would be very naughty but anyone deliberately sneaking in malware is already being very naughty so a bit of extra naughtiness isn't going to worry them.

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

"At the top level you get the instruction of what to do."

In many cases if it could even figure out what the instruction was supposed to mean it would would be doing well.

Re: This is totally expected - it doesn't know what you're trying to do

It doesn't even have any idea about what it should be doing even when there's a documented standard such as an RFC.

I asked it to produce Pascal code for generating UUIDs to see if it would reproduce the Free Pascal unit (I've noticed the unit's initialisation for a pseudo-random node for variant 1 value misses out on a minor detail which might have been a give-away).

After some wrangling to persuade it I wanted a variant 1 as well as a variant 4 it eventually produced code for, allegedly, both variants. I didn't try to follow what its supposed difference between the variants was but one thing was quite clear: there was no trace of the supposed variant 1 being in any way time based.

Microsoft not a Teams player as admin center, 365 service suffer partial outage

Re: Completely agree

You own and manage the computers which run el Reg?

Re: "repeated the same disable component, save, re-enabled component, save process"

By the time you've installed the updates it's back down again.

How DARPA wants to rethink the fundamentals of AI to include trust

Re: Operating competently, Interacting appropriately, Behaving ethically and morally

"demonstrably not useful"

For some values of useful. Some people are clearly using it. What value they get is debatable.

I'm not even sure about the bridge metaphor. There are occasional road closures to repair bridges built at a time when I'd expect bridge design to have been allegedly mature.

Microsoft nopes out after Twitter starts charging $$$ for API access

Re: Let me see now...

"In what universe is that a basis for a lawsuit?"

One in which, amongst other things, lawyers now require payment in advance.

"Twitter is 100% his without any minders or babysitters."

Does he not have co-investors? If he loses their money he might be well advised to decline invites to embassy parties.

Musk tells Twitter advertisers: You're welcome back, but don't make demands

This, I think is the problem. He sees the users as his customers, not as his product. The tick-selling seems to confirm that.

Advertisers seem to be treated as someone along for the ride and if they don't like it they can just hitch a lift elsewhere. When even I start feeling sorry for advertisers things have got really bad.

He made money by having people make something customers wanted to buy.

Having so much money has detached him from reality. He's forgotten that he still needs to provide something that customers want to but. Either that or he hasn't grasped that his customers are the advertisers. In fact, given that he's trying to flog multi-coloured ticks to users, the latter is probably the case.

Europe wants more cities to use datacenter waste heating. How's that going?

I'd argue that self-styled greens have been responsible for a lot of the CO2 emissions over the last half century and more by opposing nuclear energy.

Europe doesn't just pass laws on Big Tech algorithms, it sets up cop shops to police them

If it's a condition of doing business in the EU then they have a simple choice. Comply or don't do business in the EU.

Meta virtual reality interrupted by financial reality as thousands lose their jobs

Re: "Meta expected to disemploy"

In my day it was redeployed © Harold Wilson.

Spyware slinger QuaDream’s reported demise may be the canary in the coal mine

If the Online Safety [sic] Bill gets approved there may be a UK market for such S/W as it may become mandatory.

Chromebook expiration date, repair issues 'bad for people and planet'

Re: Bit one sided

Or how long it takes for the computer assisted census to get finalised. Of course that might be needed to be able to generate several well spread-out press releases.

Re: Bit one sided

"become E-Waste overnight"

No, they just stop receiving updates. They can continue to run Windows without updates or they can be upgraded to run a better OS. They don't become E-Waste.

Re: Bit one sided

If only it had been built 4 years earlier it could have helped with William I's great survey. OTOH given how quickly Domesday was put together without computers "help" might not have been the right word.

Re: Bit one sided

"When Windows cut off devices in the past, they didn't really cut them off; the device just wouldn't run well."

AFAIK when they ended support the device simply continued to run as before. But if the cap fits...

Re: computers, what computers?

My first biology teacher was a good shot with a blackboard eraser.* We eventually hid it on top of a wall cupboard for the rest of the term.

* Reputedly so was my late cousin, a woodwork teacher.

Re: Perceptions

You mentioned "algorithm". According to some HMG ministers that makes you a Bad Person. That's how dire our situation is. Sunak worries about the general public's innumeracy but he should really look at those he gives jobs to.

Re: Perceptions

"This is all stuff people are expected to understand."

There are a lot of other people who depend on people not being able to understand.

Re: Bit one sided

"it's better than most. of the vast swathes of power hungry tech required to trun your on premise or even cloud windows environments"

You do realise, don't you, that the sole purpose of a Chromebook is to connect to Google's cloud?

Re: Please Stop

"I'm pretty old, but even I'm not old enough to remember how much a pound weighs."

It weighs a pound, of course. Kids today....

Re: computers, what computers?

"it worked for me and I received an excellent education"

An "excellent" education now involves learning how to use Microsoft Office so as to fit pupils for the modern workplace because that's what's expected of educators. Those funny old books? It wouldn't be excellent by today's standards.

Re: Perceptions

"The only part of all this I dread is the prep work for the painting."

Nothing as bad as looking back at the half-dry paint and seeing the dribble, paint brush bristle or dead fly that definitely wasn't there when you'd just painted it.

Re: Perceptions

"So then ask when they last did a long multiplication sum. Or added some fractions."

They may well use calculators to do that today but they'll have had to learn to do it manually in school, long ago. It's that manual calculation that gives some insight into what's happening. Without that the symbols on the keyboard and in the display are just peculiar squiggles. Learning to distrust electronically produced numbers is an essential part of learning to understand them.

Microsoft goes meteorological in defining cybercrook groups

Latin binomials?

It's all very well repeating the old joke about standards but where naming is concerned it seems likely that an agreed standard is needed, it's jut no likely to come from a unilateral attempt,even if Microsoft has form in trying to concoct standards to suit itself.

Botany had the same problem until Linnaeus came along with a systematic convention. Even so his binomials needed to fit into a larger hierarchy. (And zoologists seem to have been keen on throwing in the occasional trinomial.)

More ads in Windows 11 Start Menu could be last straw for some

Re: 2023

"They made compilers before they made operating systems!"

True, I used their FORTRAN compiler for CP/M. But does anyone from those days still work there?

UK pensions dept hands Softcat £250M for Microsoft subscriptions

At a guess - they have to invite competitive tenders. A monopoly supplier doesn't have a competitor so that wouldn't be a competitive tender.

A former colleague did some work with DWP. His simple comment? "Not the sharpest knives in the box."

Smallsats + solar sails = Photos of exoplanets at 1970s digital camera resolution

Re: How do you stop?

Motion blur?

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

Re: It's all somebody else's fault

" It's the harm, abuse and criminal behaviour that happens behind closed smartphone apps that is, with the tech firms carefully and mathematically provably looking the other way whilst it happens."

The smartphone apps are simply a way of criminals communicating, not of being criminals in the first place. They're criminals. They're already intent on breaking laws. It's sheer folly to believe that you'll inhibit them from breaking laws by either giving them more laws to break by installing illicit apps or do more than inconvenience them by making then communicate by other means.

With that, the lack of upside out of the way, let's look at the downside.

The criminals are in the minority. It's maybe difficult for those whose job it is to investigate crime to get their heads round* but it is so. The majority of app users are not only innocent but have a right and a need to communicate securely. People not only have things to hide, they have things which they are obliged to hide. If you don't believe me look at the T&Cs that you happily clicked through when setting up some perfectly legitimate online service - such as your bank. If you don't find a requirement to keep your password secure somebody has been negligent; but that, of course, is just a trivial example.

If you use a smartphone for work any such traffic is likely to be commercial in confidence at the very least. For someone like my daughter, working in clinical trials that's also a trivial aspect; her communications will very likely have information which concerns patients' personal and medical information covered by a slew of regulatory and statutory restrictions. The data may also affect the sales prospects of her company's clients' products and therefore their stock prices and so is also subject to financial regulatory concerns. Oh, and jI forgot to mention, not only does she have to communicate with the actual medics looking after the trial subjects, her employers are multi-national and almost 100% remote working so online communication is the very foundation on which their biusiness operates. Of course her company's communications need security - it would be stupid to think otherwise. And yet it's proposed to make it impossible to give them the legal protection that legal requirements demand.

And similar concerns apply more widely. Now go back and re-evaluate your communications security needs. They might not be exactly the same as my daughter's but they're likely to be there, might be equivalent and you'll certainly not need to look very far to find others to whom secure communication is essential for their legitimate employment.

That's why tech firms are "carefully and mathematically provably looking the other way". They have to.

* Very many years ago that was my job and even today I will sometimes look at something and realise how it might be a scam, or could be used for one.

Re: Whose Encryption Might Be "Weakened"?

Equal or identical.

It's the same in pretty well all such cases. It's easy to see that MI5, SB etc are up to their necks in data they can't process and yet the solution seems to be to want enough to drwon them completely.

The answer to that is to forcibly install a scanner on your device (see the hoo-ha about doing this on iPhones a year or so ago). Not all devices are phones so that will have to apply to PCs as well. Of course the scanner will only be looking for Bad Stuff so that's OK. And it really won't be gobbling CPU cycles like 3 anti-virus scanners all running at once so that's OK. And there'll be no possibility of a supply chain attach that might let it steel banking creds so that's OK. No, nothing to worry about at all.

Payments firm accused of aiding 'contact Microsoft about a virus' scammers must cough $650k

Re: They've tried calling me before

" I still don't get any tech-themed scam calls. It is weird to be disappointed by not having criminals calling."

The only one I got was one I found on the missed calls list. As you say, disappointed.

Was refunding victims also required?

US citizens charged with pushing pro-Kremlin disinfo, election interference

Maybe they got confused & thought it was the other St Petersburg. That might be their defence.

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

Re: It's how they fix potholes that makes them bigger.

Variation:

1. Council tar & chips entire road, potholes and all, sealing bottoms of all potholes

2. Eventually council fills potholes with asphalt.

3. Water gets underneath asphalt but can't get through the tar seal

4. Water freezes, loosens asphalt which is then worn away

5. Council does it's usual thing: nothong