Posts by Doctor Syntax

East Londoners nicked under Computer Misuse Act after NHS vaccine passport app sprouted clump of fake entries

Re: The Yellow Advertiser

Multi-tasking would be a good thing.

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: So. many. legs.

It would be well-equipped to give any would-be predator a good kicking.

Great zoological name.

In no time at all, however, some lumper* will come along and insist it's part of some other genus.

*The group taxonimsts is divided into two subgroups, lumpers and splitters who respectively lump multiple genera, families etc. into fewer, larger ones and split general, families etc into multiple smaller ones. This taxonomy of taxonomists is meta-taxonomy.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: Shell energy

"So much faffing about to do a trivial thing."

It was probably a key field for them with all sorts of other data linked to it. It should have been trivial but bad system design made it not so.

Having failed to find any appropriate options on the website you try phoning only to be told by recorded message, after finding no useful options on the ACD, that it might be quicker to go to the website.

I can only assume that every CEO has a nephew who's good at games on a console and therefore knows so much about computers that they can be put in charge of the company's entire IT operation.

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

"usually at least as dysfunctional as the website."

Invariably more dysfunctional, just to disprove your assumption that nothing could be worse than the website.

Cryptocurrency 'rug pulls' cheated investors out of $8bn in 2021 – report

Re: Gosh!

"What happened to sense? It used to be common."

That was just getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

"Scams represent a huge barrier to successful cryptocurrency adoption"

I'm sure there are a few people out there who think the complete opposite.

It never ceases to amaze me that there are people sufficiently astute to amass large wodges of cash who are then insufficiently astute to fail to spot these scams.

US Commerce Dept says China has brain-control weaponry

Re: "Nudge"

Probably true in terms of intention but not very well implementd. A competent psyops job would have completely squashed conspiracy theories by undermining them rather than just trying to contradict them. Just launch counter conspiracies that the original conspiracy theory was the work of deep state/Zionists/Islamists/white supremacists/whatever else triggers the group being aimed at.

Confirmed: James Webb Space Telescope team plans launch for this Xmas Eve after data cable fix

Wait for the reports that the launch was aborted to avoid a collision with several reindeer and a sleigh.

Google joins others in Big Tech: Get vaccinated – or you're fired

Re: I'll bite :)

At a guess - the only one in the office up to that point who had Covid.

Re: Illogical policy

Now look across at the columns for hospital admission and death. D'ya feel lucky, punk?

And also look at the notes referred to above the table and on the next page.

Re: I'll bite :)

"People actually knowledgeable on this subject should now point out where I'm wrong"

I won't 'cause you're not.

Re: I'll bite :)

Because it's a matter of managing probabilities. Vaccination very substantially reduces the probability of catching a serious infection. It does not eliminate it. This is true of all the measures, all the social distancing, all the mask wearing, all the closure of premises. The lot.

My daughter, double vaccinated, still got an infection from her son, at that stage under the vaccination age here. It wasn't as bad as it might have been and will undoubtedly have increased her future immunity. She has still had a booster. Why? Because there's a new, more readily spread variant going about, resisting which needs all the strength the immune system can muster. And because, like me and SWMBO she's a bilogist, in her case a neuroscientist now working in clinical trials AND SHE UNDERSTANDS THIS STUFF.

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

As long as there's a UI to faff about with nothing is ever finished.

National Cyber Strategy will lead to BritChip for mobile devices by 2025, claims UK.gov

"Having a coherent national cyber strategy will be essential if UK wants to be recognised as a science and tech superpower for scientific research, innovation, and leading edge in critical areas such as artificial intelligence."

Having some achievements might do that but the usual tub-thumping strategies never seem to produce those.

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

Re: That there real world...

OK, I get that. What they seem to be doing is cleaning up real world logs to present their system's best guess of what the logs should look like to train another system to spot discrepancies in real world logs.

What could possibly go wrong?

Scenario 1: Say they get 90% of the input doing one thing, 5% doing something else and 5 off 1% doing individual other things. They decide that the 90% is what's right, clean up the remaining 10% to look similar and train the second system on those. The second system gets more examples of the 5% & starts flagging them as errors. In fact that was a legitimate outcome but because the imputation system fudged the data the second system was mistrained. Note that in order to do its thing the imputation system must have noted these variations and could usefully have flagged these as something to be reviewed by an actual real live expert.

Scenario 2: Same sort of results but all the discrepancies are simply failures in the logging system. The second system starts throwing errors looking at real world data because the logging system is making similar errors. The logging system is not fit for purpose and no amount of cleaning of the training data is going to fix it.

The application area seems to be logistics. Any time I've been on the (non-)receiving end of a logistics error it's been fairly clear to me that something hasn't been scanned in or out when expected. What's missing is Real Intelligence when designing and implementing the system to raise and alarm in real time when the expected has failed to happen. No amount of Artificial Intelligence applied after the event is going to fix the problems in anything like an effective manner.

Re: Example?

It's still no clearer exactly what they're doing because it's just a pile of jargon. It's the "recurrent event imputation" that concerns me. The nearest I can make of it is "There's usually an event of type X here but there isn't in this case so let's add one." Possibly it means something different and got lost in translation from the Korean.

It will be added to systemd in the next release.

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

Re: Supreme head of information technology

Some people only learn by experience.

US lawmakers want to put NSO Group, 3 other spyware makers out of business with fresh severe sanctions

One letter wrong If it had been NSA there'd have been no problem.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

Having said all that Signal delivers a good deal of what Tom suggested although in different ways. Being free with no promotion budget, however, it doesn't get the same publicity as the big tech services.

I think a phone is more likely to be lost and picked up or stolen than the phone company being socially engineered unless the victim is being specifically targeted.

I really don't like the idea of a phone being used as personal ID irrespective of whether it's via mobile number or IP address - there seems to be too much opportunity for stuff to go wrong. Even something simple such as a flat battery at an inopportune moment could stuff up your urgent 2FA driven transaction.

Whenever your device's IP address changes, it sends a message to each of your friends saying, "Hey, my IP address has changed.

Depending on the rate at which IP addresses change the whole thing falls apart as such messages cross each other in the net.

You cease to become you if you lose your devicephone and somebody else becomes you if the phone gets stolen.

Re: Forget technology

"I don't think Web 1.0 provided decentralisation to the extent that we're now talking about. It still relied on servers run by third parties."

The third parties came along later. It started with places like CERN running their own servers; or does that count as Web 0.1?

Re: "Mildly amusing"?

Stealing them seems to be part of their circulatory mechanism.

French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi ups Altice UK's stake in BT to 18%, says he is not planning a takeover... at least not yet

Re: TV

Alternatively, realise it's not even telecoms and doesn't belong in the business. However this is a telecoms corporation that at one time decided it didn't need to be in the mobile phone business.

Re: Copper

If they rely on DECT phones then the phone will fail. That's why it pays to have a POTS phone in the circuit. If they have, then all they have to do is pick up the handset & they'll hear the dial-tone. Using a mobile in an extended power cut - assuming the base stations are working - is likely to mean starting the car to recharge it.

Re: Copper

"The copper free network ... will be much more reliable"

Right up to the time when the customer suffers from a power cut. So much for the emergency call provision.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

We've heard of regulatory capture before. This sounds more like regulatory ownership.

Re: Actions have consequences

Does that Act move the task of actually doing the work from the manufacturers' employees to the FAA? Does it fund the FAA sufficiently to enable it to have the appropriately qualified staff to do that work? Protecting whistle-blowers is solving the wrong problem. The right problem would be ensuring that they're not needed.

Re: Procedural changes

IOW the FAA is not fit for purpose and FAA certification means nothing.

Re: Procedural changes

"It would probably be good to make sure the non-managers responsible for anything safety-related have a good handle of statistics."

It would also be good to make them personally legally responsible. The American way seems to be that the company can buy its way out with the addition of paying someone rather handsomly to be one scapegoat and throwing the other under a bus.

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

I've said it here before & I suppose I'll have to say it to my MP. If someone is intending to break the law then providing them with more laws to break will not stop them. The people who will count the cost will be the law abiding.

Re: I must be reading this differently to everyone else

The phrase "identifying end-to-end encryption as a risk factor" does not, to me, meant eh same as "ban end-to-end encryption".

So the weasels fooled you.

ExoMars parachutes just about good enough to land rover safely on the Red Planet

"the unexpected detachment of the pilot chute"

Translation: Failed.

Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?

"Corporations have a budget and are willing to spend, but it takes too much time,...Finding projects that need help and maintainers willing to help in exchange for money is hard."

No harder than finding the projects they want to use. Check which projects you use. Find the maintainers from GitHub or wherever the project lives. Offer them money.

Re: Frameworks...

"But sure, businesses don't put enough back into the open source that they rely on."

In this case, a feature added for big business according to TFA, perhaps one of those businesses should have written and tested it themselves and then submitted it to the maintainers for incorporation.

West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle

Re: Another important ERP project going off the rails before even going live

Or a mapping gap between what they need (whatever that might be, which could be the nub of the matter) and what either product provides.

Re: Another important ERP project going off the rails before even going live

The common factor seems to be the County Council, not the vendors. One problem might be that they don't have enough people in their IT department for the existing product.

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

Re: You Do Not Own Your Computer.

"It's written into the contract for using the OS."

The only contracts written into my preferred OSs are GPL and BSD.

Re: if your business model cannot withstand reality, it is not reality at fault

Or the foreheads of the board members.

I certainly hope so.

"After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance"

Are you saying they Haven't A Clue?

UK government has 'no clear plan' for replacing ageing legacy IT estate, MPs report

They never manage to serve enough helpings of the well-deserved humble pie.

There's a distinct advantage for govt departments having an ancient system. It provides a scapegoat.

Is it decadent that I use four different computers each day, at different times?

Re: Only four?

I don't think the average modern car would even start if it only had four.

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

Re: Windows NT 4 SP2

"This shows how old I am.."

Remembering CP/M gets closer to showing how old you are. Remembering GEORGE shows how old you are.

Clearview's selfie-scraping AI facial recognition technology set to be patented

What's reasoning? If working out that doing something a bit more than see food, eat food is reasoning then some crows have exhibiting reasoning without using language at all. It's very dubious whether any language is needed let alone written language.

Google advises Android users to be careful of Microsoft Teams if they want to call 911

Re: Does this issue impact all emergency phone numbers?

It's a long time since I heard the Arlington described as ex-Systime.