Posts by Doctor Syntax

Dynamic Data do-over denied: Judge upholds $7m patent infringement claim against Microsoft

It would have to have been pending a long, long time given that there was S/W automatically building user interfaces decades before that.

Re: Didn't...

90s? Informix was doing this in the 80s. I wrote an application to generated the 4GL code to use the interface as did a number of other people.

Oh, of course, this is on the web. Naturally that makes all the difference. What's obvious to anybody skilled in the art with character-based interfaces requires a unique inspiration to achieve on the web.

Google, Apple sued for failing to give Telegram chat app the Parler put-down treatment

Re: Shooting the messenger

Don't forget snail mail. Remove all the post boxes.

Re: @tfwwster

Given that FB, to the maximum extent of their ability, seem determined to be a law unto themselves. I don't think I'd want to take anything they do as an indication of how things should be done.

Dear team: Please work hard in 2021. I’d help, but I’m in jail. Yours, the boss of Samsung

Re: Organic?

Diamonds and graphite are not organic. Neither is sodium bicarbonate.

US cyber intelligence officer jailed for kidnapping her kid, trying to hawk top secrets to Russia in Mexico

Re: Budget Snowden

I wonder if what she was trying to achieve was keeping the daughter. The stash of information might just have been accumulated over the years because she was a hoarder and then she realised it might have been the means to get her out of the US with the child.

I was targeted by North Korean 0-day hackers using a Visual Studio project, vuln hunter tells El Reg

WTF

"Opening some Visual Studio projects can cause code to execute"

What's a COVID-19 outbreak? Amazon gets all Trumpy over Alabama warehouse workers' mail-in vote to form a union

Re: Watching the watchers

"Part of the problem is that unions don't have a much better reputation than the employers."

That was certainly my relatively brief experience of unions. The small union representing scientists in the Civil Service seemed to have got together with the larger unions to shaft their members in a situation not dissimilar to this: https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-01-26 I don't know if this is still the case but wouldn't be surprised if it is.

The last straw was calling us out on a one-day strike in support of what turned out to have been somebody else's negotiations. I think it cost them most of their membership in our department. They refused to publish a colleagues resignation letter in their magazine (which I'd never even seen) on the basis that they didn't publish letters from non-members.

It may well be that Amazon employees could benefit from a union but it would be unwise to assume that it'll always be on their side. From Amazon's PoV it would be unwise to ignore a reasonably open vote from their membership irrespective of how it's conducted; the feelings that prompt the vote aren't going to go away.

UK Cabinet Office spokesman tells House of Lords: We're not being complacent about impact of SolarWinds hack

I'm conflicted on this one. SWMBO & myself have both had our vaccinations. That wouldn't have happened yet if HMG hadn't decided to stretch the interval between first & second doses. I can't see any scientific basis for stretching that - the clinical trials didn't look at this so there's no evidence that it won't lead to less effective immunity overall. However they obviously realised that having more people wit limited immunity results in less pressure on the NHS and, at lest in the short term, fewer deaths than would be the case if fewer people had better immunity.

The trade-off personally is that we're going to be in this intermediate state sooner at the expense of being in it for longer. The risks might be off-set if the vaccines protect against being infectious; fewer people in an infectious state reduces our risks but it's not yet known if it has this benefit.

Inevitably there'll be a percentage of people who've had a single dose taking more risks over a longer period and consequently some of them will catch COVID whilst waiting for their second dose and a few will die. That will have a perfectly foreseeable political impact but I doubt BoJo & Hancock will have looked that far ahead. It also risks having a lot of people with an even longer wait if there's any interruption to supply.

I can't imagine that this is anything more than political expediency over scientific advice.

"The only opinion that they’ve shown any interest in is that of the pollsters and the Murdoch press."

And a coterie of their back-benchers. I wonder how the members of that overlap with the back-benchers who brought is Brexit.

Once again it's up to the noble Lords to provide expertise that the Commons always seem to lack.

The scientists' role is to provide the best estimates of numbers on the basis of knowledge available at the current time. Ditto the economists. The decision as to how to react and combine the two is up to the government. And one of the worst attitudes to adopt is "It couldn't be as bad as that, could it?" which is why, after all the vacillating, we're in the hole that we are because it's led to reacting too late every time.

Re: Lord True

Lord True can become Lord False quite easily. It's just a matter of flipping a bit.

Or possibly your tax returns, your medical history, your DVLA record, your police record, any bank details you may have given a government dept. Ditto for the rest of your family. Nothing to worry about.

No cards, thanks, we're contactless-less: UK supermarket giants hit by card payment TITSUP*

Morrisons contactless worked today for me.

Biden said to be assembling cyber dream team to sort out US govt computer security

Re: Network security

And how many even need to be accessible from most of those inside? But it's soooo much more convenient if they are.

Re: About time

It goes further than that. Those whose job is snooping seem quite lax about their own security. You'd at least expect them to be careful about that, but, no, all those exploits somehow got leaked as Eternal Blue.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

""We're working on an FAQ which has all of the specifics. It gets into things like cores and other pieces"

Translation: Manglement didn't predict the predictable response so now we're making it up as we go.

AI clocks first-known 'binary sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system'. Another AI will be along shortly to tell us how to pronounce that properly

Re: nice sunset, shame the planet just pulled itself to bits.

But just think of working out when to put the clocks back & forward.

Google AI ethics co-boss locked out of work account while probing controversial ousting of colleague

Rabbit? Shudder.

Boned. That's the step our old Halls of Residence caterers left out. What they put on the plate was a mass of ribs and other bones lightly wrapped in meat. Once a term IIRC. Their other termly disaster was their thermosetting cauliflower cheese.

Re: Ethics

More to the North Eatht, thurely?

Re: That's Not Very Good Is It!

"I anticipate lots of crashes!"

Only on the mornings that it starts.

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

From Google's PoV anything that isn't Chrome is a security hole.

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Elon - is that you?

Re: It's my first day ;)

Firstly, a lot of fraud etc. is from insiders. The assumption isn't that you are hostile but that you could be, albeit with a low probability.

Secondly, what the user does might not be intentional. The user might be hit with malware.

Maybe you haven't worked anywhere where security is taken seriously although that's not surprising as it seems to be a rare thing. My final contract was with a site where the lan was properly segmented so that there was no chance of the secure data we were handling leaking into the office systems. It made sorting out errors in the incoming a bit inconvenient but that's what happens when you refuse to trade security for convenience, maybe something Tesla should have a think about.

Re: Investigator?

Either that or it's something you do with a sharp knife.

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

You can speficy all you like. If somebody at the bottom of the pecking order in the supplier uses the wrong image - by accident or design - your spec won't be met. You need something else - User Acceptance Testing.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Re: The neutral doesn't join up with anything on the switch!

"Tip: If you are in the UK and need a 230 V socket that can't have anything unexpected plugged in, use something like the MK ones with the 'T' shaped earth pin."

What you usually want to ensure is that you don't want whatever you plugged in to get unplugged and by the time the cleaner's discovered your incompatible socket it's too late. The better version would be to ensure the cleaners are equipped with the T plug so that nothing important gets plugged into the sockets they want.

On the topic of cleaner-mediated outages there was a report the other day that in the US a cleaner unplugged one of the ultra-low temperature freezers with sever thousand Pfizer doses in it.

Parsing error.

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

Re: what the fuck is wrong with using the key, anyway?

I had a Subaru with a very warn key. One day I reached down to turn the engine off and the key wasn't there. I had worked out & fallen on the floor. After that I realised that on a cold day I could start the engine, take out the key, get out and lock the door so that the car could warm up without leaving the car vulnerable to theft.

Re: Oh dear!

"I'd have to find the keyhole first"

At Winter Hill in the winter your first problem might be finding the car.

Re: Smart heating system?

Is this a chest freezer thing? Our upright freezer has an alarm that tells if the temperature has gone up too far. Last consulted at the beginning of December lockdown when a power cut in mid morning lasted well into the early hours. Fortunately we still have gas fires and a gas hob so still had one form of heating and cooking. It was a reminder that going all-electric (and that includes trendy heat pumps) creates a single point of failure.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

The DIA has a point: why should they be denied what's commercially available? A better point would be why should what they're denied by commercially available?

We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news

I'd have thought the simplest solution would just be to stop indexing news sites. If News Corp discovers that without Google they lose traffic the law will be repealed PDQ. If they don't and the situation becomes permanent then Google minimise their losses.

There may be not one but two new air leaks in International Space Station: Russian boss tells us not to panic

Send up chewing gum on the next supply mission.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: My personal rant about all Linux variants

Coming from Unix my position was the converse - not prepared to commit many months learning the details of Windows.

Re: IPv6 only networking only ...

My experience with the Debian installer and the Devuan equivalent is that it tries both although I haven't installed Buster. But I see from the Debian site that they include the Calamares installer on the live images. Could it be a Calamares thing?

Re: "Drivers" me mad...

There must be a "Who me" in there somewhere.

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

How did users of his code get your contact details? Perhaps you should just forward all the requests to him.

Re: @Doctor Syntax - Free means somebody is not getting paid

Have you ever used Debian or even read the story so far?

Debian does maintain both* the free and unofficial non-free versions so the work is done. They're both on the Debian mirrors. Sorry if I have to shout to get through your ear-wax but THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE MOST GENERALLY USEFUL** VERSION IS PUSHED INTO A CORNER.

*There are a lot more than two versions and I don't mean old-stable, stable & testing etc. There are versions for architectures from ARM up to S390. There are several live images with different desktops. There are netinst images. There are non-live images for instillation from disk that run to a 3 DVD set if DVD-1 isn't sufficient for your needs.

** More useful in that it has the drivers for a wider range of hardware.

Re: rg287 - Not for noobs

This is all true but it's not the complaint. The complaint is that the non-free version, which a whole part of the user population - and potential users - who are not sys-admins is hidden away. As GP said, it's largely a site design issue.

Re: Not for noobs

If the drivers are there they'll generally be found and used. The problem is the packagers who leave them out, possibly because they reject proprietary S/W, possibly because the vendors don't release a proprietary one nor make the information available for anyone else to do so or because the distro was packaged before the H/W became available. As regards the last you may well find that Linux provides the opposite side of that coin; it continues to support H/W long after Windows abandons it.

Re: Not for noobs

Given the number of times I've installed Debian or Devuan I agree with that. The "here, let me put that into a configuration you can't replace without wiping user data" distros that I've seen tend to be the "user friendlier" end of the spectrum. Somewhere in between are the slightly more flexible ones that still don't make it clear just how they're going to partition or what other stuff they're going to install (such as Apache on a laptop) before you set the process in motion.

Re: Not for noobs

The installers I find particularly unfriendly are those which offer to do everything and then set up a partitioning arrangement that's not suitable for long term use, not even a separate partition for /home.

"You can get the source package and view/patch/compile it yourself"

Have you tried that?

Don't forget that many of us who adopted Linux was because it was Unixy. Why do you think we should appreciate having something non-Unixy foisted on us in such a crucial role?

Edit wars coat-trailing ignored.

Re: I wonder how old this complainant is...

A compact netinst image still isn't much use if the netinst doesn't because it won't talk to the net. I have to admit that I'm used to that so if I'm using a netinst image I take the precaution of plugging in cable.

And let there be a special curse on distros which provide an install-from-live image where the live image is all singing-dancing but only includes OSS drivers in the installation.

Re: "Drivers" me mad...

"What you should provide though is an easy link to drivers."

Of course if it's a networking device and you need the network to follow the link...

The most ridiculous thing I've found so far is a motherboard that just hangs if a DVD drive is plugged into its SATA connectors, less so if the drive is in an external USB connected housing or connected via a SATA daughter board but even then it won't work. Try installing a DVD image if the MB won't handle a DVD drive.

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

It depends on who you mean by complainant but I take it to be the one who just wanted to install and go. His complaint wasn't that the driver didn't exist. It did. His complaint was that the DVD with the proprietary drivers was well hidden.

If by complainant you mean someone who thought the driver should be OS you have a point but I find it difficult to see such a person as being the complainant.

BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid

Keyboard as a Subscription needed.

Google's Alphabet sticks a pin in its Loon internet broadband service

Re: Why am I not surprised?

RFC 2549 for vultures.