Posts by Doctor Syntax

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

Re: She needs to have an active social media presence

"And likely rather more effective."

Likely more effective at what? You need to know the recipient's attitude to having litter poked through their letterbox.

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Re: Old machines

"His complaint also cited it restarting ten times a day with updates."

Actually he didn't say why, just that he restarted it. It might just have been restarting from sleep more. He just said "bloatware". That could have been any version of Windows.

Re: Marked up

You have a point but AIUI this is equipment for people driving nothing more threatening (to the enemy) than desks. Do they really need to buy Mil-spec?

Re: Big Biscuits

"To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if half the DoD only needed to reboot their boxes."

According to the article he restarts his PC several times a day although it doesn't actually say whether this is a reboot.

"personal Linux laptop with uptime of more than 86 days"

True, for a server 86 days is nothing. But I don't see the point of not switching off my Linux laptop when it''s not in use.

Internet Society condemns UK's Online Safety Bill for demonising encryption using 'think of the children' tactic

Re: So, 0.2% eh ?

"I don't think about the children"

I do. I used to think about my children. Now I think about my grandchildren. And I think it's wrong of the government to deny them the legal use of secure forms of communication which criminals will continue to use.

Criminals will continue to use them. One thing my experience has taught me is that if a criminal is setting out to commit some offence, say a robbery, which needs some other law to be broken, say stealing a vehicle to use as a getaway car, in support of the main objective, that secondary offence will not inhibit them in the least.

UK government responds to post-Brexit concerns and of course it's all the fault of those pesky EU negotiators

Re: Bored by Brexit?

"Did you enjoy leaving the European Union"

No. I was in the half of those who voted who voted against it. I voted against it for several reasons one of which was that it blatantly ignored the blatant incompatibility between Brexit, NI being in the UK and the Good Friday agreement.

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

Re: Serial to VGA? All you need is an adapter!

There's probably a whole generation in IT who've never encountered serial other than in USB and SATA and have no idea what RS-232 means.

Re: In the pilot's defense...

Your brother should have reached for the front brake lever. The motion of his hand would have automatically closed the throttle. That's why it works that way. He should also have learned on something more appropriate.

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

"Wear gloves," the PFY says through the lift speaker.

The master touch that raises it from classic to sublime.

"Is there quicksand in England?"

Morecambe bay.

Re: Clever writing

wrapped in about six feet of plausible BOFH deniability carpet.

Court papers indicate text messages from HMRC's 60886 number could snoop on Brit taxpayers' locations

"Mind you, perhaps the page should have checked that the phone number started 07, and rejected or queried the number otherwise"

They're not alone.

Exhibit 1. Local restaurant has (maybe had, for reasons which will become clear, I have no way of finding out) booking software which confirms the booking by text to the phone number. Some children at BT have decided that obviously landlines shouldn't be left out form the SMS fun and implemented S/W to accept an SMS, ring the landline and read out out This is a text message from $GabbledNumber $GabbledMessage

The one thing that stuck from that was "thank you for signing up to our service". It's a scam, right? After finally sorting out what it was all about - nothing more than a booking confirmation - words were said which left the distinct impression that I hadn't signed up for anything and that if they thought I had I'd better be unsigned because SMS spam is even worse when it's read out as gabble. Given that they thought this was customer service I haven't booked there since, not even by mobile.

Exhibit 2. You don't need a computer to make dumb assumptions. Our landline number is on a poster advertising SWMBO's patchwork class. The poster is in the hall where the class is held. Anyone standing there reading it should be well aware that it's a local number. So the phone rang with a text message from $GabbledNumber wanting to know if the caller should bring anything to the class. No chance of ringing back as the only contact was $Gabbled Number which has already receded into the irretrievable past. Whoever rung didn't turn up, presumably thinking that she'd been rudely ignored.

If the children at BT who'd come up with this scheme had properly tested it, including sending SMS messages to test subjects who weren't expecting the call, they might have correctly decided that it wasn't fit for purpose and should be abandoned. If they had gone ahead they should at least have supplied the originating number as CLI for the call so the recipient would have a chance of calling back to ask what the gabble was about.

Be careful firing someone who knows where the bodies are buried. (Also explains why Cummings didn't get fired when his Barnard Castle excursion came to light.)

Carked it, Diem? Zuckerberg's grand cryptocurrency thing may sell off assets for $200m

Is it too much to hope that we're seeing the whole sorry mess on its way out?

Windows boss Panos Panay talks up 'new era of the PC' – translation: An era of new PCs

Re: Julie Larson-Green, Steve Sinofsky....and now Panos Panay.....

Nad, of course, you can get a good idea of people by the company they keep. (For both senses of company, even if that wasn't what I was thinking of when I started to write it.)

Re: A market ready for disruption ...

Perhaps it's something a few regulators could take a look at.

"beginning to enter its final phase of availability."

They're replacing it with Windows 12 already?

In a first, FTC extracts millions of dollars from online store accused of blocking bad reviews on its website

"As part of its settlement with the FTC, Fashion Nova will cough up millions of dollars, and must allow all customer reviews to be posted online unless they contain obscene or unlawful content"

It seems that the FTC should have insisted in one more thing in the settlement: an admission that they were, in fact, wrong.

Hardware boffin starts work on simulation of an entire IBM S/360 Model 50 mainframe

1. It looked a bit unlikely until I saw just who the guru was.

2. About the link to https://ibms360.co.uk/ It's a bit worrying the website hasn't moved for nearly 2 years.

3. The original development of the software for the 360 was the inspiration for TMMM.

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

It doesn't need a computer for the beancounters to play those tricks. Back in my Civil Service days they always seemed to come up with some new IR* to say my claim was invalid. I considered claiming witness expenses from the court instead. That might have caused a ruckus.

* Waaay before HMRC was invented.

Linux distros haunted by Polkit-geist for 12+ years: Bug grants root access to any user

Re: Why do you broadcast this for ?

How about "Let's reveal there's an important upgrade to apply"?

Re: Polkit

As far as I can remember so long ago the basic design, or at least V7 which was my earliest version, was a bit more nuanced.

Yes you could use root to do things such as administer printers but you could also use a different UID to do that such as lpadmin for the printers. "Do one thing and do it well" in operation.

It meant that in the case of an installation with multiple operators the privileges could be shared out appropriately by giving an operator the specific passwords they needed.

That seemed to be Too Complicated so everyone tended to get the root password whether they needed it or not.

That was Too Insecure so then we got sudo and pkexec.

Re: Polkit

Right idea, bad choice.

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Re: Think of the children?

"But the kids are more tech-savvy than the grown-ups. They can make it look like a voice-only phone when it really isn't after a magic knock or the like."

If you think you can make SWMBO's ancient non-smart Nokia that totally lacks a camera into a camera phone you're welcome to try.

Head of Big Tech Expertise? Believe it or not, it's a UK.gov vacancy for a Whitehall job

Re: Which side of the fence.... ?

Bending over it?

"fulfil partnership opportunities" with the megacorps and "deliver against their needs and demands."

Really? This is the customer delivering to the supplier.

It's more than 20 years since Steps topped the charts. It could be less than that for STEP's first fusion energy

Re: Mixed feelings

Recent experience with Covid vaccination and treatments has shown that if the pressure is there it's possible to restructure the processes and shorten the overall time. Parallel processing can be fast; who knew!

Do you know what TikTok is? Then you might make a good magistrate, says Ministry of Justice

Re: Who else?

There were such posts - stipendiary magistrates or the Irish equivalent, the RM - resident magistrate. Somerville & Ross's accounts of the (mis)adventures of one of latter are a good read.

I'm not sure if they still exist - it would involve paying real money.

Observing a few cases would soon dispel any notion that any magistrate or judge would be out of touch. As the slogan used to go, "all human life is there".

I did - very briefly - consider it when I retired, largely as a matter of curiosity as to what it looked like from the other side of the witness box. Very briefly because I looked at the bumf about training and decided it seemed to be all in managerial-sounding jargon.

22-year-old Brit avoids US extradition over SIM-swapping conspiracy after judge deems him to be high suicide risk

Re: Bad OpSec

The ones who are easily caught aren't.

From TFA: "Nothing about the case prevents De Rose from being charged and tried in the UK, added Judge Griffiths."

"This was not a case where the [requested person's] mental condition had only arisen after his arrest on the extradition request, as is often the case," observed District Judge Sarah-Jane Griffiths

There speaks experience!

Pakistan considers ten-year tax holiday for freelance techies

Re: What's to stop folks ...

A freelance business is a real business like any other..

Re: I hope I'm wrong, but...

I suppose the thinking is that if it works, then in ten years time they'll have built up their industry to the point where they don't need to offer the incentive. What happens to the freelancers after that isn't their concern. They're not doing it for the freelancers' benefit.

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Re: Locked in at night

You were too kind. Just having the name and following through with the plan without explanation would have been a better learning experience for him.

Warehouse containing Valuable Stuff close to a football ground. It wasn't usually staffed at the weekend.

One weekend the network team went along to do some upgrades. They discovered some local ne'erdowells had lifted the gates off and were charging punters for parking.

Re: Under the floor

"a locked filing cabinet"

Things may be different now but back in the day there seemed to be a lot of filing cabinets with the same key.

Rolls-Royce consortium shopping for factory sites to build mini-nuclear reactors

Re: Money for old rope

Or wallpaper while they're sill in office.

Re: Money for old rope

As for nuclear, I don't think that many people are thinking "mushroom cloud imminent"

I'm not sure everyone is capable of making that distinction. If they were we probably wouldn't also have anti-vaxxers, Ng phone mast arsonists etc. Never under-estimate the technical ignorance of a Grauniad reader Sun reader substantial chunk of the UK population.

Re: SMRs are expected to produce 300MWe per unit.

"nuclear free zone!"

I've never worked out how they keep all the electrons in place.

Re: lets build more fukishimas, but in all the cities...

"who cannot plan for longer than to the next by-election"

Sir, experience suggests you are over-generous.

Re: Money for old rope

House of Parliament? They can't even tell the cabinet that.

Re: Money for old rope

"Because we don't design and build we just ask foreigners to do it."

It's actually a bit worse. It's because we gave up doing that. OK, a lot worse.

By definition $My back garden won't be where it is. That might be their problem.

LG promises to make home appliance software upgradeable to take on new tasks

Our (not Samsung) washer does indeed just ping when it finishes the wash cycle. Responding to the ping leads to disappointment. The door remains locked for a further period to no good purpose that I can see.

After a while it unlocks the door. Silently.

I can never fathom what happens in the heads of UI designers.

Re: to take on new tasks

"unblockable speaker"

Glue.

Employers in denial over success of digital skills training, say exasperated staffers

"on behalf of online learning provider"

Rice-Davies applies.

Twitter's top security staff out after incoming CEO shakes things up

Security? Who needs security?

Running Windows 10? Microsoft is preparing to fire up the update engines

"But OS fragmentation is not unique to Windows"

OS fragmentation imposed by a single vendor is, however, a Windows speciality.

I'm not sure about Macs but with Linux and BSDs you can choose your preferred version, your preferred UI and run those on multiple machines if that's what you want*. You don't have to put up with a mishmash and you don't get forcibly updated by the vendor.

* In practice you might want to run different setups. For instance SWMBO suffers from macular degeneration and has had lens replacement. Her laptop also runs Devuan and KDE but some settings are changed to adapt to that.

Australian Prime Minister's WeChat Shanghaied by Chinese patriots

"the account in question was originally registered by a PRC individual and was subsequently transferred to its current operator, a technology services company"

IOW it was never his account but that of some media company working for him.