Posts by Doctor Syntax

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

"Think of the LLM as Barbara Woodhouse"

The OP is now entering a query "Who's Barbara Woodhouse?" Or possibly, being a youngling with a modern education, "Whose Barbara Woodhouse?"

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Re: Mir

"and of course lowering the orbit of one module would raise the orbit of the rest"

Despite the name Canadarm is attached to the ISS, not Canada. It also raises the question of how would Canadarm deorbit itself.

Re: Like a circle in a spiral Like a wheel within a wheel

I think it will be buyer collects.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Re: "Why did it never get easy to subscribe to things in RSS"

The strategy worked, then.

An alternative view is that Reader was part of Google's strategy of suckering people in to use its web sites when perfectly useable alternatives exist. Apart from alternatives other commentards have already mentioned there is Thunderbird which, together with its relatives such as Seamonkey, gathers mail, RSS and Usenet into a single application.

Uber and Lyft gig worker win overturned: You're a contractor, Harry

Re: "Lobbying"

"helping freelance journalists and making sure they had proper benefits etc"

In an ideal world either you get to be a freelancer or you get proper benefits. IR35;and, of course isn't ideal: you get neither.

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

Zuck says that... last year was a "humbling experience"

A humble Zuck? It doesn't sound very likely.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

"we WILL do it again"

No need:

apt install gpg

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree... Done

Reading state information... Done

gpg is already the newest version (2.2.27-2+deb11u2).

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

Everyone with a really difficult task is apt to grab onto a "silver bullet" which promises to simplify it. There is no silver bullet, of course. In this case, if the corporate products were backdoored or withdrawn from the UK there's be a few under-the-counter alternatives to take their place. After all, the basic encryption libraries are out there and all it requires is some code - possibly iffy - to wrap it up for use. The nearest it would come to being a silver bullet is that it might be easier to get one or more backdoored under-the-counter products into circulation.

The downsides won't be the concern of those pushing the idea - that'll be another department. SEP. The temptation of the silver bullet is hard to resist.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

I eventually ran out of banks to change to every time I took my account away from one that closed its local branch. What's worse, when I get to the not-really-local branch I find the counter staff have been disempowered, presumably to force customers to a crap online or phone "service". I regard proper back branches in the same light as backups: you might seldom if ever need them but if you do, you really need them.

Any bank that opens a branch convenient to me gets my account PDQ.

Re: Does this mean the browser?

Any CA who is discovered to have granted a root cert to a government (and the ikely abuse of that would lead to discovery sooner or later) is going to find all its certs removed on the next OS/browser/whatever update.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

"you are referring to the Chairman who is a different bloke from Tim Davie the actual Director General"

It's easy to get confused. Are these actually different jobs? Or actually jobs?

Yes, I wonder if Fonant was puzzled by the whooshing sound.

The critical point here is that if they think it's possible they should try to commission a proof of concept implementation that stands up to scrutiny. It's all very well their doing a lot of hand-waving but reality has to be faced.

I've said here many times that if people think the innocent have nothing to hide they should publish their online banking, trading and other dreds and see how that works out.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

"and never trusted with power again"

You'd soon run out of candidates.

The only realistic manifesto would be "We'll sit tight and do our best to cope with events." because coping with events is what a government has to do. The last thing they need is to create even more events for themselves. As trying to do things ends up having unintended consequences which cause events sitting tight is the right thing to do when not occupied coping.

But (a) it's unlikely that the public would vote for that because most of the public each have some personal thing they want a government to do, (b) if the public did catch on that it was the right manifesto to vote for all parties would adopt it and (c) every party, particularly its Dunning-Kruger wing, has something it wants to do.

I started off forming a political law that any sufficiently large political party would acquire a Dunning-Kruger wing. I quickly realised that that did not match reality and eventually decided that any sufficiently large political party might, just possibly, acquire a non-Dunning Kruger wing).

until the 2008 crash (which was nothing to do with labour, rather more to do with bankers cashing in on events which events were a long period of cheap money and rapidly inflating property prices due to governments setting (or having central banks set) interest rates based on measures of inflation which ignored housing costs. Gordon Brown was not just the Chancellor responsible for that policy in the UK, he was an enthusiastic proselytiser, upbraiding countries which didn't join in. The GDP growth was a result of that and the 2008 crash was the eventual bill.

Re: A single thread reveals little of the tapestry it belongs to

He mentioned Enoch Powell? I gave up part way through the first sentence.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Whoosh

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

"One-time pads have been around as an encryption method since 1882."

As has been the problem of securely distributing them.

Signal works by using a mobile number* as the user ID. All they have to do is delete those with +44 as the country code and not accept new ones.

* It can be a burner phone/SIM, see their YouTubes about setting up the desktop apps.

Re: a step too dystopian

When you lack all technical knowledge there's no chance of cognitive dissonance. The important thing is to learn the script properly and stop improvising about hashtags and the like.

Re: a step too dystopian

For the Home Office no step is too dystopian. Home Secs, all of them, are just their house-trained politicians; you don't think they work this stuff out on their own, do you?

I fell into the trap of being a forensic biologist for rather too long. It was only meant to be a stop-gap.

No. Snoop has a well accepted meaning. Rape has another and different one. By trying to conflate the two you diminish the one without effectively replacing the other.

Re: Communication tools are only as good as the people willing to use them.

Thank you for ringing High Street Bank. We have been experiencing unusual levels of calls for the last ten years. You are 258th in the queue. Please enter your bank account number followed by hash. This will not remove the need for our agent to ask you for it when you get through.

The Home Office has proved itself to be very adept at house training its new Home Secs. So much so that one of them gave an account of it in the Times without realising that that's what they'd been doing.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

They'd have to legislate to ensure we got decent provision for High Street Banks in the High Streets. Of course that would just redirect criminals back to good, old-fashioned bank robbing.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

"I suspect people have had to take them aside and explain things slowly and clearly."

The problem is that the people who are taking them aside and explaining things slowly and clearly are the ones who want back-doored encryption. They want to take short cuts in dealing with criminals. My experience - a third of my working life - is that there are no short cuts without risking the innocent in one way or another.

If this is implemented it will undoubtedly go wrong with a big scandal. Those pressing for it will be well hidden behind official secrecy. Those fronting it will be out of government if not out of Parliament; they'll get some opprobrium but neither will be very unlikely to suffer the penalties they'd deserve.

Re: Does this mean the browser?

Sir, I admire your courage in using Whatsapp as an example of end-to-end encryption not allowing data to and up.

Re: I'm more than happy for my encryption to rendered useless...

There's also the all-purpose verb: to Boris.

Re: I'm more than happy for my encryption to rendered useless...

Their comms are only safe until someone Hancocks it up and gives a copy to a journalist.

All "they" have to do is prove that it works. Come up with a proof of concept implementation. Use it themselves for a long enough period, say a couple of years, without getting hacked. Then introduce it into legislation. It's called "showing leadership" and if it's that simple and safe there should be no problem.

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

Re: Sacking

There's a skill in writing documents to be misread but which are actually correct.

Re: Would have done otherwise

Get even better.

Re: Would have done otherwise

"If you want to punish them, telling them to shove it is the way."

That's unprofessional. Professionals get paid.

Re: Would have done otherwise

Don't get mad, get even.

Re: Would have done otherwise

"Whereas, paying them out the nose 6 months later to do something just costs somebody else's money."

Make sure the amount is above their signing level so that it's visible further up the food-chain.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

Wouldn't it be nice to havee cars that Just Work.

SAP's in-and-out burger Qualtrics sold to Silver Lake and Canadian pension funds

An experience management company? Are the on the B ark?

LockBit brags: We'll leak thousands of SpaceX blueprints stolen from supplier

Re: RIP LockBit

Or an average of 3 revisions each for 1000 different flanges and brackets.

UK refreshes national security plan to stop more of China's secret-stealing cyber-tricks

Encouraging strong end-to-end encryption online would be helpful.

Rebel without a clause: ISP promises broadband with no contract

"Frankly, the only reason for contracts is to try to trap people in to a bad product,"

The T&Cs linked to above only say there's no long contract without defining "long". The T&Cs and the custoner's acceptance of them are the contract. Acceptance would appear to be implicit in using the service and paying for it.

CISA joins forces with Women in CyberSecurity to break up the boy's club

Re: Too late!

"since then she now handles all our extended family IT support matters!"

A smart move on your part.

"To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information" etc

Need to know becomes need not to know?

Silicon Valley Bank's UK arm bought by HSBC for 1 British pound in rescue deal

I don't think it's being saved for for shareholders. In fact the shareholders have got exactly £1 from it. That's between them.

If it went had gone various UK firms banking with it might not have been able to pay their staff or their suppliers. Some of the unpaid suppliers may then have not been able to pay their staff or suppliers. The number of people potentially affected could be quite considerable. Who knows, you might have been one of them. Are you one of those rich people?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls./It tolls for thee. How does the next line go?

I take it your employer doesn't, at least with your knowledge, bank with them so your job wasn't, at least to your knowledge, in danger.

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

Re: Live by the ESG, die by the ESG?

Be careful what you ask for.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

The PFY could have complained about having his intelligence insulted by the reflective listening traing. But I suppose that's best saved for one of manglements' alleged motivational courses.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Re: Been There

"the supplier allowed me to speak to them directly "

What was the drill for this?

The Great DB debate: SQL extensions won't solve the graph problem

Re: data access

"you need direct control of the storage device"

My database engine was Informix which, at least on Unix boxes, allowed access to the character devices in /dev which is about the closest you can get without having the database engine include a H/W driver. Linux doesn't offer that although it does provide something close in terms of tweaking the block device (it's so long since I looked at this that I can't remember the details).

Although it's possible to use the OS's file system (reads and writes to files in /srv have the same semantics as devices in /dev) this was usually avoided for production systems except for earlier versions and what they called the Standard Engine.

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

"The people that are saying send the shoes to Turkey or somewhere where people don't have shoes or there has been a tragedy happening"

There is nothing in there that precludes donating them to a first world charity to raise money. In fact, the Beeb's report says "Adidas said it was considering selling the footwear and donating the profits to charity and had ruled out other options, such as burning them."

Of course they'll all end up in land fill one way or another.