Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

The best way to make use of available talent is through the flexibility a healthy freelance community would provide. But Gordon Brown and Red Dawn put an end to that over a quarter of a century ago with IR35.

Infosec community panics as Anthropic rolls out Claude code security checker

"LLMs are fantastic for security and have a great opportunity to actually make a dent in the coming wave of software vulnerabilities,"

Would this coming wave have anything to do with LLMs writing code?

Gemini users say their chat histories have quietly vanished

And nothing of value was lost.

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

"junior developers have some advantages when using AI, as they have fewer preconceptions about how coding should be done"

Preconceptions such as it should be done right? Actually, I'd hope that's a preconception they do have.

O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th

Re: The US Constitution is bullshit

A good way for them to celebrate would be to take a long, hard look at their constitution to see what parts are still fit for purpose, which aren't and fix those that aren't.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Re: That's the new cloud lock-in

"you don't have those folks at the table with you and can't find any help besides the tech vampire"

It's always possible to recruit new help but corporate top manglers have a deep antipathy to hiring in general and people who know more than they do in particular.

Congratulations & welcome.

"no European BigSoft" is an advantage in its own right for two reasons.

First, a big service provider's outage is a big outage. Not having a dominating service provider limits the blast radius. Second, a dominant service provider doesn't have to care about customers or customer service. Being one of many will keep your service provider alert to your needs.

Re: "Sign in with Your ${BIG_TECH_ACCOUNT}"

An email address is an email address. A user ID is a user ID. Keep both. Keep them separate.

Is that really so hard to understand? Maybe it is. Maybe, as in the case of so many other things we see these days, people get so deep into the rut of the way things are done that they can't see over the edge and don't realise there are options outside it.

Re: Puzzled About Email (And Mobile Text Messages)

I've just checked the routing of a few emails. They may bounce around the senders' systems and my MSP's systems but they're all a straight hop from outbound at the sender to inbound at MSP. I think the days of multiple store and forward via random servers between sender and receiver are in the past. The MSP is firmly under UK GDPR. The US jurisdiction only applies to those using US companies to send the email.

Re: Puzzled About Email (And Mobile Text Messages)

"US privacy law"

Sorry for misunderstanding but could you please explain that concept.

Re: Alternative headline for this article ?

"it wasn't done before"

Maybe it's just my long retired memory playing tricks but I'm sure I remember people doing e-commerce before AWS.

Re: "Sign in with Your ${BIG_TECH_ACCOUNT}"

Standard email and password? Why email? Why not a unique user ID that isn't an email address? You could always set up a unique email address for the job but many won't, they'll just use their usual, everyday address so that's half the UID/password protection gone.

Perhaps you could post just a little more practical detail.

Good for him but if he'd tried to do this before AI, LLMs etc. would he have found it impossible to build such a site? If not why is this waste of silicon and energy being rolled into it?

Ex-Amazon UK boss lined up to chair Britain's competition watchdog

Re: Rot

Or gone into politics?

Looking at his CV instead of indulging in knee-jerk slagging he has had quite a portfolio career and he's been out of Amazon longer than he was UK manager so it doesn't, in fact look like an unreasonable appointment. We keep complaining that UK govt doesn't understand business; that isn't going to improve without making such appointments.

Altman: You think AI is wasted energy? Try raising 100 billion humans

Whataboutism at its most egregious.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: OAUTH would like a word

"The OAuth 2.0 authorization framework enables a third-party application to obtain limited access to an HTTP service" - RFC 6749

HTTP services are not the whole of computing. By introducing a 3rd party it increases the attack surface. It is an authorisation service, not an identity verifying service. Needless to say the usual suspects all have a hand in it.

Re: I suppose...

Obligatory how did you get my passord?

Re: And here we go again

And one that can't pos-s-s-s-sibly be accessed by anyone else.

Re: Pass* Options

I decrypt my password file, look it up, use it, and overwrite (BleachBit) the plaintext file. I don't expect this to work for "ordinary" people.

We ordinary people use something from the KeyPass family. Same idea, less messy and no need for bleach.

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

In-place patches to the kernel by, say, 10.0 so the number never changes again. Then it will be the last Linux you'll ever need.

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Re: Training

The "everybody knows" approach is likely to come from someone who thinks they know but only have the very basic - they can find their mouse and the keys on the keyboard. They possibly use the deleted folder to hold all their old emails in case they need to find them.

Are there such things as secretarial colleges any more and if so what do they teach?

Simple explanation: Everyone knows how to use computers and email so there's no point wasting money training them, is there?

ShinyHunters demands $1.5M not to leak Vegas casino and resort chain data

Re: On-the-Fly Encryption/Decryption

And if the key isn't embedded then it has to be supplied, either from a file sitting on the server or transmitted from some other source and in either case it's susceptible to interception.

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

Re: "crack down on the scourge of fly tippers and unauthorized dumpers"

"The laws in place should already be sufficient to solve the problem."

They are.

"Enforce them properly"

There's the problem. You can't enforce the laws if you can't identify who's breaking them.

"then you can dream about increasing surveillance."

The surveillance is to make that identification although I don't think drones are the best method.

I thought I'd seen that one on the Beeb site.

<Checks>

Ah, yes. Here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy8qkl7ypqo

Re: Self-inflicted

"In large part because they cannot afford to provide free disposal like they used to."

Clearing up the fly-tipping is probably costing them more than making legal disposal easier.

Yesterday's Times has a report about a farmer whose previous attempt at prosecution failed leading to problems with the criminal gangs responsible.

When I lived at High Wycombe there was a different solution. make the recycling centre really the recycling centre. There were a number of traders operating there who would go through anything that looked promising on the basis that people will dump stuff rather then give it to a charity shop or try to sell it second hand. I guess the traders were paying for their pitches there. The only problem was to make sure you only had junk in your boot because the moment you opened up there's be somebody diving in. Is that still the case? BTW the name of the dump was High Heavens.

Lisburn where we lived previously hadn't been quite as well organised but stuff could have been picked up from there. I once saw a whole pile of marble but table tops there - I doubt they were there long before they were collected.

Moving from there to Kirklees and there were notices up forbidding bin diving, at least at the main Huddersfield site.

They had enough people all saying the same thing and it was obviously stuff that would have gone into the recycling bin. No dodging the issue.

The scale of some of the dumping we've seen isn't just a one off. Once activity is spotted that's the time and place to install cameras. You don't need 100million+, you need one or two where you're likely to catch a return visit.

Like I said. By the local council.

There was a case reported recently where paperwork was dumped. Addresses were traced and it turned out householders some distance away had put it in their recycling bins so it was the council, via their contractors, who contrived to enter it into the fly-tipping chain.

Meanwhile Kirklees, in their infinite wisdom, are shutting the skip sites several days a week.

There's a sortage of free trucks. Stealing somebody else's wouldn't be a good solution to being stopped either. It would just lead to jail time.

Trail cameras would be my solution but by the council. The council or police would find it hard to initiate a prosecution from the landowner's cameras and the only alternative would be for the landowner to go to the expense of suing, hoping to recover the cost of clean up but risking getting no return.

Informing them separately gives them the chance to do this. Assuming you've got a paper trail forward it all to thel ocal papers.

Email the CEOs (or equivalent of both in the same email showing both addresses suggesting they sort it out between themselves. If you still get finger pointing emails forward the whole thread to the local papers.

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

Accenture no longer administer my pension scheme, thank goodness.

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

My original thoughts, actually, were on Eliza. There are a few open source clones of that and something along those lines tweaked to respond to Eon's Smart Meter calls would do nicely. An uncanny valley is the exact effect required.

It will all have to wait until the analogue phone gets replaced with digital and assumes the kit will be flexible enough to direct the calls from certain numbers to it.

Could it be combined with voice to text and text to voice and trained to lead spam callers seriously astray and could it run on an old Pi 2? If so it sounds useful.

AI coding assistant Cline compromised to create more OpenClaw chaos

"A different actor found my PoC on my test repository"

How did they do that. After all, a security specialist would surely have made his test repository secure, wouldn't he? Wouldn't he?

Quebec vehicles agency spent C$245M over budget on SAP ERP it wasn't sure it needed

When you don't know what you need you should start with at least one of two people: a competent consultant who will not be a vendor in the subsequent project whose job is to recommend the sort of thing you need, not a vendor and/or a member of your own staff competent to review the report or to make in themselves. Otherwise you end up in a situation of deciding the answer is a nail and looking for whoever sells hammers.

AI agents abound, unbound by rules or safety disclosures

You might not be able to win them all but don't reject the wins you can make. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Safety disclosures. Perhaps this is the answer.

Require all public facing responses - searches, web-site customer disservice bots, emails, images, etc to carry the equivalence of a public health warning

"This material has been created by AI and may be partially or entirely untrue and cannot be safely relied on.".

That should be possible under consumer protection law for anything addressed to the general public and maybe also the likes of Copilot on Windows Home editions. If it were encountered often enough in those circumstances the general idea might seep through to users within business.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Cheer up, kids.

In fact it's just well written to pull that punch line.

Re: School church group trip to prison

knife was passed around the jury for inspection with a label saying "murder weapon" and not "alleged murder weapon"

Even "alleged" would be a bit much. A label should ust state where it was found. Even if the pathologist removes it from the body the officer receiving it should just label it as "Received from doctor $NAME". Whoever was responsible should have known better.

DEF CON bans three Epstein-linked men from future events

Re: What the Epstein Files Show

T that level it's a small world. Worrying but not surprising.

From Agile to AI: Anniversary workshop says test-driven development ideal for AI coding

TTD & AI. Expect something like https://xkcd.com/221/

How many of you guessed correctly?

Snyk CEO bails, wants someone with more AI experience to replace him

Re: "an era of hyper-intensive AI innovation"

Why the coat icon? It was pretty much my own translation of what he said.