Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft closes off two avenues of attack: Office macros, RDP brute-forcing

Maybe something a bit more creative then simply locking. A tar-pit for instance.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

"a global software engineering salary report this month from CodeSubmit"

Do they also produce a global software engineering quality report or a global software engineering value for money report?

I sometimes point out here that measuring things is hard. That's no excuse for substituting the measurement that's easiest for the measurement that matters.

Rejoice! System Administrator Appreciation Day (SAAD) is nigh

Re: The Internet... turn it off and on again.

OK, we'll turn off decmmission HR systems so 100% of HR become redundant.

Re: Upgrade your hardware

The serrated blade should make it easier in the more favoured woodland - getting through tree roots. And dismemberment...

On second thoughts people like to stick with their old familiar implements so just a new blade or handle for the spade, depending on what's worn out or broken this year.

Obvious: a new roll of carpet, a year's supply of quicklime, a new spade and a screwdriver set for loosening window frames. Sysadmins deserve to be supported in their hobbies.

DiDi in deep doo-doo over 64 billion illegal acts of data collection

Re: Nobody is that bad

I take it the downvote means that someone thinks Western regulators shouldn't be issuing fines much nearer their limits than they are. Perhaps we could be told the reasoning for that view.

Re: Surely...

Nice.

DiDi, don't do dat.

Re: Nobody is that bad

"pretty much every web site not covered by the GDPR"

And plenty that are.

Without going into China's handling of th internet in other ways, this fine is something Western regulators could learn from.

Trees may help power your next electric car

What happens to the waste lignin at present?

Re: And this is going to solve CO2 problems how?

"the company is going to be clear cutting forests which are a principle means of photosynthesizing CO2"

The trees are quite transient on a geological timescale. Even if uncut the forest will reach equilibrium as trees age, die, decay and are replaced. You actually sequester more carbon in the long run if you fell the trees and store the product for a long time, say as the framework of a building.

Re: Isn't it Good, Norwegian^^^^^^^^^Finnish Wood

See my comment above. As elemental carbon it's a lot easier to keep from returning to the atmosphere than it would be as lignin.

Re: And this is going to solve CO2 problems how?

At end of life of the battery the carbon in the anode might be burned but if it isn't, if, say, it's buried, then it's going to be kept out of circulation for a very long time. Apart from oxidation by burning elemental carbon is very stable.

Microsoft sunsets Windows built-in data leak prevention

Do Microsoft have any case studies to demonstrate the value of this in action?

London Stock Exchange CEO still aiming for dual Arm listing

Re: Read it carefully

So you think ARM shouldn't move to the US, then?

Re: Read it carefully

"Listing in the US doesn't mean the HQ has to move."

It was suggested in a comment to a previous article on this topic that it does. Listing in the US does not necessarily have the same rules as listing in the UK.

The recruitment issues are a different matter. Visa issues apart if ARM doesn't want to compete on salaries with Silicon Valley (and its house prices) and the City that's a commercial decision.

Re: Read it carefully

Read it carefully indeed.

Perhaps you didn't read enough of it to get as far as this quote: "We would be concerned for the long term future of the company's global HQ remaining in Cambridge if Arm lists exclusively in the USA and we will always fight to defend our members jobs in Cambridge."

That was from a trade union, not an accountant, a government minister or official or a stock market representative. The union thinks it makes a difference.

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

Re: Old linux person here....do not understand......

And it seems an awful lot of faff to ensure it will.

"We recommend a separate partition for /home, but that's getting fancy."

Fancy? Just a basic requirement. What it means is that if you want to try various distros or need to reinstall your existing distro* you don't lose your home directories. Getting fancy is adding /usr/local and /opt directories although Snap and Flatpak tend to replace those, probably at the expense of a lot of duplication.

One thing to be aware of is that, in Debian derivatives at least, some or your data may live in /var. MariaDb data and, if you use it, Apache web server data live there. You don't really want to lose those on a reinstall so I recommend a separate /srv partition as well and force those onto it.

* Less likely now that upgrades don't usually need a complete reinstall.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Re: Works for me

Thanks. I'll bear that in mind if my 4 is ever delivered.

Were these tracks bought via some route that involved payment to Google? No?

Maybe it's related to this: if my phone is switched off or, as is more likely, the battery has run down because I haven't used it for several days, all the apps downloaded from F-Droid disappear from the main UI pages. They can be copied - or is it linked? - back from the alphabetical list of available apps but not immediately as they're also hidden from that for several minutes. It may be a bug, it may be a gentle hint from Google that they don't like it when I fail opt not to to give them some money. Cock-up or conspiracy, take your choice, the result's the same.

Deploying disaster-proof apps may be easier than you think

Re: Calculating Risk

"These reps though, are on a learning curve, so they are in the dark as much as us consumers."

That'll be their excuse.

"There's still a lack of clarity about who takes ownership of the resiliency issue when it comes to cloud,"

Could this have anything to do with cloud sales weasels' pitches?

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Bank of England going to trade show

Even in the non-currency security printing business things are never taken anything less than seriously. It's the high tech end of the (non-electronic) printing industry. It's not just the designs and engraving, it's also the paper and the inks including, in some cases, print that's raised above the surface of the paper.

Re: Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

Rich was sent there to cover for field service so at least one of them was field service. Quite possibly the other one was sales & he was the one called somebody else out.

UK lays world's longest autonomous drone superhighway

There are indeed. And this trial doesn't cover any of them.

"Here in the UK we don't have the remote locations, at least very few"

And fewer still in a T shape between Reading,Oxford, Coventry and Cambridge.

"With such a load capacity, a human body could even be put in a protective cocoon and flown to another hospital if some emergency treatment was needed."

And when the medically unattended passenger is DoA it'll be a bit of a problem determining place of death.

CityFibre loses appeal against Openreach discounts for ISPs

So CityFibre don't want to compete by offering their own discounts. Noted.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

No paper of this nature should be given credence unless its authors are prepared to expose themselves in the way they'd expose others: they should include all their online credentials for banking, shopping, email and everything else.

If they do include such details then the paper shouldn't be given credence as the authors are either outright liars or stupid.

Re: Quite apart from online...

"I'm a fan of the jury system. Pick people at random."

I vaguely remember on jury trial. Accused was a hospital worker. Petty thefts of patients' ' property started when he was put on the ward. Some property was marked with a powder. He wasn't caught with the property on him but he did have the marker. Thefts stopped when he was removed from the ward.

Not guilty.

Outlook email users alerted to suspicious activity from Microsoft-owned IP address

Touch wood it seems to have stopped.

At least it wasn't just me. I started getting these alerts on a couple of accounts coincident with going on holiday and logging in from a different location. When they continued when I got back I thought MS were getting just a tad too suspicious. I should have realised that incompetence was more likely than an excess of competence.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Re: Steptoe and Son is the future!

No way. Think of the methane. And that's the least of the problems. he ICE enabled a massive clean up of city streets.

Re: "the increasing urgency to decarbonize transportation"

Has anyone worked out how they get to all those places they glue themselves onto?

Re: "the increasing urgency to decarbonize transportation"

Quite. And you're never going to get the Greens to admit that they're the reason we didn't do it years ago.

"then crack the water to hydrogen as it's quite energy intensive"

You're right about the sea water. But the energy going into splitting the hydrogen out of water is the energy you're looking to get back (allowing for losses) by recombining hydrogen with oxygen. The hydrogen is a storage and distribution medium for that energy.

Having said that I don't actually like hydrogen on safety grounds.

One winner would be nice. As things are at present they all have problems scaling up.

Re: Quick charging

"Practical, ubiquitous battery-EV HGVs are within touching distance."

Practical, maybe. Ubiquitous? Do we have the raw materials to make them ubiquitous? In this context "materials" includes copper and that's going to be a problem for hydrogen/fuel cell/electric motor systems as well.

"But to create hydrogen without releasing CO2 at all, you need renewable electricity and electrolysis"

You also need a water supply. The state of the reservoirs round here today is a reminder that that can be easily overlooked.

Judge approves Twitter's request to hurry along Musk trial to October

Re: An elongated fine?

"Why would Musk settle for any more than $1bn"

He doesn't have to "settle". He just has to do what the court tells him to and if that's the full $44bn that's what it will cost him.

Microsoft floats Cloud for Sovereignty

Beware of the weasel

Drilling down through the links in the Microsoft waffle I find the statement: "we defend our customers’ data from improper access by any government in the world."

I take it that a demand under the CLOUD Act would not be considered "improper" because it's sanctioned by law. In fact I recall Microsoft were pleased at the Act's passing, not, as far as I can make out, because it strengthened their hand when some US functionary didn't want to go through the proper channels in Ireland, but because it clarified things for them. US functionary now says "jump" and Microsoft can jump without any comeback from the affected customer.

Drilling further I find out how they're going to do this: "a contractual commitment to challenge government requests for data". "Challenge" not "defy". I read this as saying that they'll make sure that a demand under the CLOUD Act meets its requirements and is, therefore, proper.

What seems to be needed is an arm's length agreement whereby the EU data centres would be run by a self-contained EU-owned business over which neither Microsoft nor any other business within legislative reach of any non-EU government had any power to demand access. Does it provide for this?

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

Re: 3 steps to dystopia

And did you check on his wife's family?

General knowledge tells me we may have a major problem keeping private data private.

Your "wedge" might be a Freudian typo.

Re: Remoaners

A bad decision is a bad decision. It doesn't get better because it's been implemented. Far from it. Making and implementing it are only the start of the problem.

If we don't lay the consequences at its door we're not going to learn from the mistake. We also need to be vigilant that those consequences don't lead us into a constitutional crisis. BoJo's antics have nearly got us into one already in the last few weeks.

Re: Last

Your recall is faulty. It was a very narrow majority of a population which was extensively and systematically lied to by those who wanted to escape adult supervision.

Re: Trust is non-existent

This is what happens when you have a government without adult supervision. Why do you think they wanted Brexit?

WHat makes everyone think Palantir will get it and not Infosys?

Security flaws in GPS trackers can be abused to cut off fuel to vehicles, CISA warns

Make type approval a requirement for any such attachment that can affect the safety of the vehicle.

After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite

Re: Tie me down

What really annoyed me was having to sort out somebody's BASIC written in FORTRAN - just after we'd both come off a 5 day FORTRAN course. I say fize - I don't know what they did on the first day because I'd only joined it on the Tuesday & didn't seem to have missed anything.