Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
After getting their Bitcoin tracing skills up to speed will the FBI work back further to trace the history of the loot before it was deposited in the exchange? It would be a shame to hand it all back if they can't be sure it was legit before it was nicked by these two.
Cynical? Moi?
Or a cloud provider in any other country where a search warrant could be obtained.
It just goes to show that law enforcement can get results by simply using the age-old due process.
And it also goes to show that somebody else's computer you don't control is somebody else's computer you don't control.
The N Ireland situation was always going to be a problem.
It's very simple to state: the Good Friday agreement was predicated in N Ireland being in the EU (or possibly the Republic being out of it) so as to avoid a hard border. The UK is the United Kingdom or Great Britain and Northern Ireland is predicated in N Ireland. Having the UK out of the EU, NI being in it and NI also being in the UK is a logical contradiction.
The Protocol was the Brexiteers' fiction to try to pretend there wasn't a problem It would never stand up to reality. And let's not beat about the bush - it was the direct and unavoidable consequence of Brexit.
It's going to continue to be a problem unless the UK gets broken up and that would be an even bigger problem.
What you describe is probably a people problem. The problem may lie with the wrong people administering the systems. Equally it might lie with the people holding the purse strings and your sysadmins & DBAs may have equivalent but different problems in getting the sign-offs to provide you with your test server. But ultimately you're using somebody else's computer as a sticking plaster to cover the self-inflicted wounds of a dysfunctional company.
Ever since W95 we have had Maximise and Close buttons next to each other. That has carried over to become the default in KDE. It's not such a problem now because it's normal to throw up a dialog if close has been hit with unsaved data. Back then it was unlikely that any legacy application, a.e. just about everything, would make such a check because accidentally hitting close was so unlikely.
For those unfamiliar with GUIs pre-95 close was on the system menu, on the button at the opposite end of the title bar to the minimise & maximise buttons.
It's one thing automating that in-house. When a supplier does that it starts verging on looking creepy and in general the more security concious of us object. Having the user run diagnostics is one way round it. The other is to dump the information and pop up a dialog for the user to email it, showing the user exactly what's in the email so they can check.
When I wor nobbut a lad I spent school holidays working in a worsted mill. In practice anyone in the workflow to produce a piece of cloth was inspecting the previous stage's work because if it wasn't right they couldn't do their own job properly. That was what enabled the mills to produce a high quality produce.
Applying that principle to the situation you describe I'd say it was the programmer's job to question the spec otherwise the product is likely to be industry standard crap.
In practice pretty well any programming work I did was under what I suppose is now an extinct title of "analyst programmer". On a rare occasion where someone had delivered an alleged specification I spent quite a while chasing him to clarify ambiguities.
I wonder if the solution to this would be to check if the problem is fixed, redisplay the dialog if it isn't, check once more, if still not fixed display a dialog with a fixed time of, say 15 seconds, check again and if not close down the machine, which the fixed time dialog will have warned about.
Back in the days of character terminals we used MOTD to broadcast a message at logon reminding users to log off. This ended with This includes you $NameOfMostRecentOffenderWe'dHadToLogOut It was remarkably effective. Eventually we had to remove that bit because the last name had been there so long.
I suppose H/W failure might be due to failed electrolytics rather than semiconductors. There must be a trade-off between depreciation and disruption due to failure of in-use servers.
What's driving the extended lifetimes at Amazon and Google (reported a couple of days ago) may be that shortage of components is demanding it. If thay can't get enough components and have to chopse between not expanding capacity and putting up with more in-use failures it's not hard to work out which way they'll go. They're making a virtue out of a necessity.
"Larger companies often have so many customers that there isn't enough room on the planet for the call centre that would be big enough to deal with them"
The solution to that is to get stuff right first time enough times that the calls per customer are few enough that you can find room for a call centre.
It's a bit annoying that you have to explain to an ISP help desk what Usenet is, that it's not a web site but has its own protocol and that it is actually part of their bundle of services.
And, yes, there were one or two very old posts on the forum with a slight hint that it might be DNS - which it was.
"It's rather like owning a domain for email"
And I just got a reminder of why this is a good idea.
A spam on one of my domain mailboxes. Hmmm. Who did I give that one to? Obviously set up in December but I can't find any emails sent to it. Then I had a vague recollection of being asked for an email address in the course of a phone call but neither SWMBO nor I can remember which of us was asked let alone who by. Pity as now I don't know who to hold a grudge against but if whoever it was actually does need to contact us they'll get their email bounced with advice that flogging an email address you need to a spammer isn't good for business.
If they really need to get in touch they'll need to find some other way of doing it. Very apologetically.
And then demanded £40 for the privelege, despite admitting the equipment they supplied was the issue.
You didn't try the phrase "Not of merchantable quality"?
When I was on Be their router stayed in its box, I had an existing ADSL router which I kept using. On moving to FTTC I switched to the PlusNet provided fibre modem and router. However they subsequently tied down the router which stopped me updating my DHCP settings, something I reckoned was none of their business so I've replaced both with my own fibre modem/router.
On the whole I prefer to buy my own H/W provided it's not the ISP's branded home hub type of box. It removes it from the ISPs control and makes it easier to switch ISP should that become necessary. It's rather like owning a domain for email; I might use an MSP to serve the domain but I can switch registrar and/or MSP if things start to go downhill.
If the data subject has dealings with some business or organisation which collects PII then that entity should be solely and directly responsible to the data subject for their own misdeeds or those of any third party for whom they are an agent or to whom they outsource. The data subject should not have to deal with any third party or any foreign jurisdiction to obtain redress. In the event of that entity ceasing to exist the responsibility should devolve personally to its former directors, officers or owners.
To a large extent I think it's a matter of enforcement. GDPR lays down a lot of requirements but it doesn't provide any means of pro-actively enforcing them. It takes an individual complaint to go to court to say whether such and such an arrangement invalidates them. Trade negotiators, of course, have traditionally wanted to do a bit of hand-waving to ignore them and it's taken the likes of Max Schrems to get any movement - hopefully that's changing.
I think if compliance really starts to be taken seriously there'll have to be some sort of arm's length arrangement if the US corporations want to stay in the game. Rather than establish EU data centres and/or subsidiaries they come to a franchise arrangement. An EU owned. managed and staffed company operates a DC using IP and branding licensed from the US parent under a contract under EU law (a difficult concept for US governments to grok) specifically limiting data transfers to those required to perform transactions.
"it would give EU citizens more privacy rights in the US than Americans currently enjoy."
Does that mean twice as good? As in twice as good as nothing?
I doubt the ink will be dry on any agreement before Max Schrems' next lawsuit goes in.
Having taken back control we in the UK, of course, have nothing to worry about.
I think your experience demonstrates clearly that the advertising networks are just selling junk data. The Amazon ads you see on Facebook are the result of Amazon being sold eyeballs characterised as having particular characteristics. Amazon don't know that they actually belong to a customer whose purchasing history is available.
Your experience also demonstrates that, like all current search engines, Amazon's search engine is pretty crap and would rather throw an irrelevant result at you rather than nothing at all. I was using a better search engine - written in FORTRAN, I believe, back in the 1980s. I think the difference was that the old engine was written to a requirement to produce good results. Modern search engines are written to a requirement to produce results.
"Google thinks I'm a retired person with arthritis, at risk from shingles and that I have a newborn baby... I am not retired, I don't have arthritis, shingles isn't a risk factor and I don't have a newborn baby!"
To rephrase that: Google has data to sell to advertisers to indicate that you're these things. Advertisers will buy it because they've no data that says differently. Google, therefore, will be able to keep taking their money.
Google aren't trying to sell you anything. They're not even interested in selling you anything. All they're interested in is selling advertising to advertisers and the more they can charge the happier they are. That data is worth as much to Google as an equivalent amount of accurate data because they can charge for it regardless. Whether it's worth as much to the numpties who buy it is a different matter.
