Posts by Doctor Syntax 42421 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Banks and other financial services are among the stampede of businesses betting the farm on the cloud computing in the hope it can offer "modernisation", flexibility, and reduced cost.
It's always a concern to see modernisation as an end in itself rather than a means to some other, more practical ends.
While they're looking at this perhaps BofE could also consider data sovereignty.
Could you explain in a little more detail how any app promising anonymity, privacy etc. is going to do so without attracting the ire of the Pritti Patels of this world? It's the confidential communication that really gets their attention.
If the code is used without modifications neither permissive nor copyleft licences are going to make much difference. If it is modified then if it's copyleft the distributor has to make the changes available to the recipient but it still doesn't bring payment.
If someone has developed a package and posts it on Github or anywhere else there's nothing that requires them to make any further changes to it. If a corporate user wants something added then either they do it themselves - forking it if necessary - or offer to pay someone such as the original developer to make the changes. Either way the developer shouldn't feel pressured to simply keep on maintaining it let alone make changes without payment.
These situations seem to arise from someone feeling obligated to continue to maintain something without payment and consequently an expectation by others that they will. That doesn't have to happen.
I once, as part of a contract, did some work on an NHS project. It was clear that the data they held was properly structured. It was all to be passed to my client as flat records with several of the fields out of order concatenated into a single field which we then had to rearrange back into order. I pointed out to them that because some of their fields sometimes contained spaces we couldn't take spaces as implied record separators. After a bit of humming and harring they conceded the point. Getting the data in a sensible format seemed out of the question but they would add a flag to hint how it should be rearranged. The flag ended up with 4 values one of which, used in exceptional cases, indicated we didn't need to rearrange it because they hadn't deranged it.
The project covered England and Wales. Part of the fun depended on deciding which national body contained the definitive version at any one time.
It's a very long time since I was in any branch of the Civil Service but at the time I was introducing some IT to the lab. Slightly more recently (it's all a long time ago now) I was working for something with a strong resemblance to the Civil Service in many ways. In either role I'd have been very reluctant to let the sticky fingers of the central organisation near what I was doing - I preferred to keep things working and not have my time wasted by ill-conceived efforts to "help".
Define "they".
"They" as an office (i.e. your local JobCentre) might have an inventory but "they" as a department (ministry) might not have an inventory of what the offices have, nor might it be easy to get one as some offices might not have an inventory.
Alternatively "they" as a department might have an inventory but "they" as the Cabinet Office or whoever it is who's doing this might not - in fact obviously doesn't.
Then we come to define "inventory" and its relationship to reality...
"this is yet another failure that is in part due IT pushing their preferred solution to IT's specification"
I don't see anything in the article to suggest that the council even has an IT department let alone one pushing their preferred solution to their specification. A lack of such could well be a reason for failure.
Very likely also (D) the "business users" aren't actually the business users, they're manglement at some higher level who think have no experience of what the current system does day to day, how it's actually used and how the new system needs to work and be used day to day.
Your number 3 is similar to my extra one - except that it was along the lines of a government agency could be forcing the operators to force logs (if the weren't keeping them already) and to hand them over. The rest is pretty well what I said.
Not a good idea. But then neither is depending on something easily stolen or lost - a phone - as the key to your life. Paranoia it the minimum standard for personal security.
"I'm still looking for a generic IoT product that isn't solving a problem that is already solved in older and arguably better ways"
And not just IoT products. This and the Moxie Marlinspike article listed above reminded me of an article which came to my attention a few days ago: https://trendoceans.com/a-simple-solution-to-the-private-key-loss-conundrum/
Basically it saves you having to remember your private key by going to an online random password generator which you seed from a piece of arbitrary text of your own choosing and a date. This gives, according to the article, 10 15 character passwords (I tried it and got 20 20 character passwords) from which you select 32 characters and from that generate a 256 bit key. The article provides a shell script for this. Repeat the process to regenerate the key as needed. It struck me that:
1. You now have to use a server whose operators may well be of the utmost probity - I'm sure they are - but who you have to take on trust as you don't know them.
2. You not only have to trust the current operators but any successors whom even the current operators may not know.
3. You have to trust the security of the server and everything linking you to it.
4. You have to hope that the server is still running for as long as you need the key.
5. You have to trust the reliability of the server, namely that it will give the same result each time. Note that the results it gave me a few minutes ago don't match the description in the article although it may be that the article accesses it via curl and I used a browser.
6. In place of not losing the key you've got to not lose the script the article describes or at least you've got to remember the URL and which characters the script picks out from the returned block of text.
7. You've got to remember your seed text and date.
I suppose you could keep all the bits you need to remember in your local Keepass database but then I suppose you could do the same for the private key you're in danger of forgetting.
And have I missed anything out from that list? (I've already thought of one extra.)
My local history group has published a few books. We can sell a hundred or more fairly quickly and usually have a few to offer on open days etc over the next few years but eventually run out (although we have an over-ordered book on the Poor Law from many years ago of which I could sell quite a few copies). I looked at Amazon's print on demand arrangements to see if we could make the out of print copies available. To break even we'd have to sell at about 50-60% above our old list price. Instead we've now put them online as free downloadable PDFs.
Distrowatch rankings are hit counters for its distro pages. They aren't claimed to be anything more. Apart from anything else the site's likely to be biased in favour of visitors with at least some fluency in reading English.
Like everyone else I've read these accounts of non-Western OSs being mandated; I'm curious as to how this works out in practice. We have commentards with geographically diverse experience. Surely someone has at least anecdotal information of what the reality is.
"It also shows those who engaged with music, television, films, and video games tended to have lower happiness and higher anxiety levels than those who did not."
It might depend on the subject matter. As far as I'm concerned even the opening tymp beats of the Beethoven violin concerto lower stress instantly; by the time the soloist enters all is serene. OTOH There's a lot of crap out there masquerading as music (of all genres) which would drive me up the wall.
Trying to read their paper does seem to lower happiness. Maybe I'm reading it on the wrong medium.
