* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32762 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Messed Western: Vuln hunters say hotel giant's Autoclerk code exposed US soldiers' info, travel plans, passwords...

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

You'd think by now that hotel chains would have learned that (a) they really need to do a thorough annual audit of their own security and (b) do the same in spades for any business they're thinking of buying.

Obviously they haven't. It's going to take a few more big fines and lawsuits, big enough for the board and investors to notice. Even then it seems doubtful that they'll manage to learn from the misfortunes of others.

Luke, I am your father... which is why I must eject from JEDI decision, says US Defense Sec

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Re: Ethics?

He probably needn't have bothered. After all, he's probably over the half-life of a Trump appointment.

Power to the users? Admins be warned: Microsoft set to introduce 'self-service purchase' in Office 365

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Re: So what happens when the user leaves?

"Seems like a really badly thought out system."

No, I'm sure Microsoft have thought it out very carefully to maximise revenue.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: But

"A few things in win 10 will start complaining, as it downloads crap into the users folder and tries to run them."

Very likely the next update will ensure it doesn't complain about crap downloaded from MS.

Mandatory electronic prescriptions was the easy bit in NHS paperless plans

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Re: £300 million?

"Must be bloody expensive printer paper."

For what I hope are obvious reasons the base stock is a security print. That means not only specialist printing techniques but also rigorous control, secure disposition of waste etc. Pads are, or were (it's a long time since I've seen one), personalised to the prescriber which also introduced a good deal of maintenance of prescriber data etc. It all adds to costs.

Nevertheless my previous GP used to use the tractor-fed paper face-down in their office printer, not only wasting money but making a nonsense of the whole security issue.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I wonder how a totally electronic system would work for consultations outside the GP's surgery or hospital. I assume there will be a well secured means of sending the prescription from a phone (you may detect a slight snark here) but what if the patient also needs the bar-code token? Does this mean the doctor has to carry a portable bar-code printer or will there be pads of pre-printed tokens to be carried?

Reaction Engines' precooler tech demo chills 1,000°C air in less than 1/20th of a second

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In other words the Mach 5 is a bit misleading. It's the speed that the air is moving in relation to the intake (or vice versa) but it's not air travelling at Mach 5 relative to the cooler.

Thanks.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"at Mach 5, they travel 86 meters in 1/20th of a second"

Quite. There's something not making sense here. Is the engine 86 metres long? Is there a convoluted path? Is the air slowed to much less than Mach 5? Or does this mean there's some way to go before it can be cooled quickly enough to work in an engine of practical size?

Big Red tells crypto-coin publication: One does not simply call one's website 'OracleTimes'

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There was a Wellworth's chain in Ireland, in fact, for all i know there still could be. The signage was eerily familiar but I think the name was genuinely that of the owning family.

Japanese hotel chain sorry that hackers may have watched guests through bedside robots

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"the robots have now been updated."

Recommended updating tool: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silverline-245033-Hardwood-Lump-Hammer/dp/B000LFXCU4/ref=sr_1_43?keywords=hammer&qid=1571764194&sr=8-43

UK tech freelancer numbers down for first time in 5 years since IR35 tax reforms hit public sector

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

The fact remains, however, that the package for the direct employee is different. It includes holidays, sick pay etc. as tax-free benefits in kind. In order to maintain "fairness" - which was much trumpeted by the likes of Red Dawn - surely those should be taxable. And while we're looking at such things why not assess the value of a permanent contract of employment. It would be a little more difficult to value because some "permanent" posts are more permanent than others but then HMRC have never been hesitant about valuing things if it brings in taxes. How would they value their own posts?

Don't look too closely at what is seeping out of the big Dutch pipe

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: A serious question

"IANAL, but the people who wrote the policy are."

Which is why they included the bit about the extent permitted by law.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Test bed

"developers had setup linux PCs or MSSQL servers for testing purposes, and within days the network would be crawling and the hard disks would be full of nasty stuff"

How come the IT department made it possible for these servers to be reached from the outside in the first place?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Up for sale

Ah, so you looked for it, did you?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Gazetta dello sport

The thing to do in such circumstances is to ask oneself what BOFH would do.

In this case, gradually limit the bandwidth available over period of a couple of months. When the complaint eventually arrived the usual BOFH/PFY good cop/bad cop/worse cop routine would explain that it must be because our internet connection is getting very congested these days and we really need a much bigger pipe and suggesting a contract with a new comms supplier they've just heard of.

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Sui Generis?

That seems to replace brevity with complexity.

What I think it means is that if you take a number of items which aren't necessarily themselves subject to copyright and arrange them in some sort of order that arrangement is itself a work on which you can claim copyright.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: TL; DR

Do we get to deport southerners from Yorkshire?

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Re: Bonfire

And no red tape of course.

ATTK of the Pwns: Trend Micro's antivirus tools 'will run malware – if its filename is cmd.exe'

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Re: It's nearly 2020 ...

Don't bother, Jake. Check Tilda Rice's short posting history. Even hardware has to be Microsoft. We've seen a stack of them here over the years.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

But can Trend trust known sizes and locations after the next Windows update?

Er, hi. Small Q. Where's our billion-ish dollars gone? We summarize Bitcoin exchange's subpoena requests

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"to recuperate its cash in Blighty"

After Brexit I might need to find somewhere for my cash to recuperate.

Euro data watchdog has 'serious concerns' as to whether EU deals with Microsoft obey GDPR

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The issue is do you mitigate the worst risks, which seems to be the solution they're looking at, or do you eliminate them?

OK, here come the no-Linux-here naysayers but all they can claim is one sort of risk vs another. The GDPR-related risks are ultimately legal and on-going whilst the FOSS-related risks are practical ones involving training and the like and relate to change-over.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

if the Timeline is disabled and telemetry set to the lowest level, there are "no high data protection risks resulting from the diagnostic data collection in Windows 10". My emphasis.

Hmmm. Does this mean "We know there are still some risks" or "There could still be risks but we haven't found them if there are"?

Assange fails to delay extradition hearing as date set for February

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Could we offer a straight swap for, say, someone claiming diplomatic immunity?

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

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"If they start being completely honest and open about what they pay staff, how much they raise and what they spend that money on then I will be happy to believe what they are doing is genuine."

You mean they should do something like publish accounts? With some oversight body like the Charity Commission?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Charities are a fraud

Sometimes figure need a little interpretation. A while ago it was reported that the Charities Commission was concerned with Samaritans because almost the whole income was eaten up by office expenses. What do Samaritans do? They seat counsellors in offices to answer phones. Offices and phones were classed as office expenses.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: How many engineers does it take to change a light?

In this case 1 had to change the whole institute. I bet they're ruing the day they took him on.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Would someone explain

"when turning right."

Remember the US drives on the wrong side so the UK equivalent would be making a left turn at the junction.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

One junction in Huddersfield used to have a turn right filter operated by a detection loop in the road. The detection loop was forward from the stop line. Out-of-town drivers would stop at the stop line on red. The main lights changed to green and they'd just stay there waiting for the filter not knowing that they needed to roll forward a car length or so to trigger the filter.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Countdown

Taxi drivers are perpetually annoying.

FTFY

Google ads from the po-po can prevent vengeful gamer nerds going full script kiddie – research

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Not even FreeDOS?

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Shocked to discover that budding skiddies don't already know about them. The state of education today...

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

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"Previously she was chair of the Treasury Select Committee"

Gamekeeper turned poacher.

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Re: Hacker House

And while we're on the subject:

"But the whole point of having a government internal audit service looking at this is to make sure that we take it seriously."

Surely she knows that the point is to find a lot of non-evidence.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: TV ownership fine

I think you collected downvotes because HMG has too much say in setting licence fees. As for your second point I did just that some years ago. My view of your TV back then was that it was like having multiple channels of UTV and it would be hard for me to get ruder than that.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: TV ownership fine

As a non-Brit, it boggles my mind that an entire country feverishly defends its government fining people for owning TVs.

And before you explain to me the difference between a "fee" and a "fine", I would like you to first explain it to yourself.

First you have a false premise.

Your second paragraph seems to indicate that realise that there is a difference so why didn't you use the correct term in the first place?

And I don't need to explain the difference to myself, it's something I've known for as long as I can remember. I think I also have a reasonable handle on what the two words meant in medieval English but that's something I've only understood for the last couple of decades or so.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: More clueless rambling from people who don't know what socialism is

As that frenetic little tick, V.I. Lenin, was fond of implementing: "None Shall Eat Who Do Not Work."

Although it's not clear what work he did in return for eating.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: TV ownership fine

"A fine is a penalty levied as a punishment for breaking some rule or law to discourage you from doing it again. There is no way you can legitimately consider the licence fee to be a fine."

IYHO

Not a matter of opinion. Go and look the words up in a dictionary. You'll find that in modern English they're two different things. Intriguingly they also meant too different things in medieval English although a fine then was more akin to a fee in modern English.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "I do think it is right that we should understand what pages are most popular"

To know the pages that were accessed they only need the URLs from the server logs, they don't need client IP addresses.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Yes please...

OP will be getting letters addressed to "The Occupier". That requires no PII, just a list of addresses. As no PII is being held Crapita have no information as to whether it's the same occupier as last year.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Yes please...

"Which didn't stop the BBC re-awarding contracts to most of them."

Nothing ever seems to stop any public sector body from awarding contracts to the usual suspects.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Hmm

"My attitude is really that if I have to listen to government propaganda then the government should pay for it."

Governments pay for nothing. It's taxpayers who pay.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Hmm

"Hence we get one spiv after another trying to sell off our national assets, like the BBC."

Although they're now more ambitious and going for as much of government as they can get.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"No Samsung TV web browser still works well enough to use."

So smart TVs improve with age?

Pack your pyjamas, Zuck: US bill threatens execs with prison for data failures

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One of the things about being a witness is that you speak for yourself. In the US, of course, he could take the fifth.

BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...

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Re: Directors and DR

No, it's OK if they're not covering the senior managers for that risk.

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Re: Preparing for planned surprise outages

It'll be interesting when there's a really surprise test - well not really a test. As I keep saying, once you've had a real disaster you take things seriously.

Sod 3G, that can go, but don't rush to turn off 2G, UK still needs it – report

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I doubt that as far as money goes they were always going to make it but not, of course, for customers.

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Re: Set a date, and stick to it.

A lot of them will start taking a serious look at possible alternatives

AKA "never give a customer reason to review the market".

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