* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32780 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

Page:

Ticketmaster tells customer it's not at fault for site's Magecart malware pwnage

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Java f'in script !

"I would love to see your conversation with your dev team or agency for a significant modern ecommerce website where you stipulated no client side code can be used but the results must be easy to use, have a great user experience and the sort of modern functionality that consumer require."

Have you ever heard the saying that security should be built in from the start? Where was that in your list of requirements?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Their Site

"It could all get a bit messy if they go down the GDPR route."

It's the sort of attempted weaselling that'd likely to get them into top tier fines.

25% of NHS trusts have zilch, zip, zero staff who are versed in security

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: It's okay computer secure themselves

"If company security fails were seen in the same light as H&S fails then you can bet that the insurance companies would push for greater diligence."

You're right, of course, but I'm not sure this applies to the NHS. Back in my Civil Service days the policy was to "self-insure". That meant that when the lab burned down HMG paid for rebuilding. If the NHS works in this way then that pressure is absent. But I'd like to think the insurance companies would push other businesses a bit lot harder.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Security costs

"most of the administrators are desperately trying to make sure money is spent well."

Most but maybe not all. There are occasional reports in the local press of the non-for-profit business (maybe owned by the local trust but I can't remember the details) or the people it employs to do the work, district nurses etc., having pay squeezed. There are also reports of large pay increases for the top management. Not for profit? Oh yes?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I wish this was a unique situation

"Some banks are at least trying."

Most banks are very trying.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

It would be interesting to see how these results divide between those who were hit with WannaCry and those who dodged the bullet.

The internet is going to hell and its creators want your help fixing it

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Saving democracy

"It's not that hard to figure out what's false news, you just have to think about it and ask yourself who's benefiting for this?"

Plenty of people seem to find it too hard.

OSIRIS-REx space probe catches a whiff of water on asteroid Bennu

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: There's no mystery

"Are you saying that life on Earth owes its existence to Manchester?"

No, the Lake District where Manchester gets its water from.

Remember Misco? Staff win protective award at employment tribunal

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"If they did not have their fees protected then no-one would do it"

Sadly, you're right. However, it ought to be possible to provide a more equitable split. A cost of £1.1m to raise £600k out of the assets is probably a less cost-effective management than the one that went bust.

Identity stolen because of the Marriott breach? Come and claim your new passport

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"hey wanted to backdate it to well before GDPR came into effect, otherwise the fines would bankrupt Marriott"

How would that help if it continued after GDPR implementation?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Hotel-chain turned data faucet Marriott

"And the responsibility should be with a C-level security officer."

Even better, every C-level officer should have a statutory security responsibility.

Privacy, security fears about ID cards? UK.gov's digital bod has one simple solution: 'Get over it'

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Could someone sell her the notion that it can all be handled by blockchain?"

There'll be a doazen consultants queuing up to do that right now.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: another iteration

"FFS, please someone introduce a minimal level of understanding prior to appointment to cabinet posts."

It might make it impossible to appoint a full cabinet, maybe not even a single minister. We need to require a minimum level of understanding to stand for any elected office.

For fax sake: NHS to be banned from buying archaic copy-flingers

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

The real problem with fax machines is that you can't install Matt Hancock's app on them. They have to be replaced with something compatible.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: At least 10 years late

"If they are already on NHS.net, prior instruction should be between 10 and 30 seconds."

That's assuming NHS net isn't down. What do you do when it is?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: The first rule...

"Maybe someone should put in a FOI request to find out whether there was a spike in use of faxes while all computer systems were unplugged!"

And during the recent NHSMail outage.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ban a system that works and is malware free*...

"And works, even when everything else* has fallen over....

(*except for the VoIP PABX)"

Give it it's own exchange line and it doesn't even mind if the PABX falls over.

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Value added installer

"Cue sit down with cup of tea not having to do anything."

If that were coffee I'd claim you to be Dilbert's Wally.

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: What will mostly

"so he ran away from the consequences of his actions."

And at the same time demonstrated his foresight by carrying out another consequence bearing action.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: The deal being essentially worthless

"World Bank approves $400 million in new financing for Ecuador "

Can we clarify this? Are you saying that the US, via the World Bank, is paying $400 million to have Assange extradited?

I'm sure Assagne would love that interpretation - it must be getting close to his own evaluation of himself.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Assange is a political prisoner, in the United Kingdom, end of

"Echo chambers are a wonderful thing, until someone from outside your echo chamber challenges your world view."

Challenges from people outside appear not to have any effect on your world view.

Linux.org domain hacked, plastered with trolling, filth and anti-transgender vandalism

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Using Yahoo! mail for something important?

"Here in Japan the cellphone providers are so nice to block all email from non japanese domains"

So don't use your cellphone for email.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Using Yahoo! mail for something important?

"If you're the owner of a web domain I'd expect you to be using an email account for that domain or paying for your own separate hosted domain with email"

If a free gmail account is good enough for all those professional SEO "companies" that keep spamming me...

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Hopefully

"deserve to be hired when in Actuality Linus is the kind of boss Linux needs and people should be hired for skills"

You clearly don't realise that Linus hires nobody. What he does is act as a gatekeeper for code submissions. Some of those submissions may come from people who have been hired, at least in part, to work on Linux. Some may come from people who are paid to work on other things. Search for "who writes Linux" to learn more.

If you're able to get code accepted it means you're good enough whoever or whatever you are.

Cambridge Analytica's administrators misled judge, High Court told

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"We say that for reasons that are not easy to understand, disclosure of none of that was made to Mr Justice Hildyard."

I think this is an example of barrister's humour.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: you have global SAN

"once they put it all back and system rebooted it was then found the SAN had never saved configurations so it went back to day one."

This is why you test your restore/recovery procedures.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Incompetance

"that 'once in a career' real DR event such as a data centre fire or flood."

One of the things about having had your place of work burn down is that you realise such things can actually happen and potentially more than once in a career. Those who haven't experienced one tend to put them in the "won't ever happen" category.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Acronyms

"No, these are all TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)."

Two out of three ain't bad.

Three Letter Abbreviations.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"The article explains why this is a bad idea"

I wonder how many times this statement is going to have to be repeated.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"If the beancounters can get something done by a certain date, why can't the IT monkeys?"

One of the things that the beancounters get done by a certain date is to outsource the IT monkeys who had their calendars sorted. And when the IT monkeys get outsourced are they really going to tell the beancounters "by the way, you need to keep an eye on this."? At some point beancounters get to discover that the IT people they outsourced weren't monkeys but there's a distinct possibility the outsourcers were - or maybe they were snake-oil salesman.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: V2X

"An autonomous vehicle must be able to work without a network connection!"

If it needs a network connection it isn't autonomous.

UK Supreme Court considers whether spy court should be immune to legal probes

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Let's say Privacy International get a verdict in their favour. What happens next? Yet a new piece of legislation just sufficiently different to be claimed as different. It's already probably written, just waiting for the date to be added to be introduced into Parliament.

HCL picks up Notes, spanks total of $1.8bn at Honest John's IBM software sale

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Maybe they're planning to make it work.

Galileo's magnifico measurement: 1976 redshift test updated

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: When life give's you lemons....

There's an inevitability in a greengrocer's apostrophe when lemons are involved.

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: An expired certificate....

"Wow. There was no point building in any other resilience elsewhere then."

Do you mean a back door? Not necessarily a good thing when the whole point of the certificates is to secure the system.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Simple monitoring...

"For a variety of 'things' and a variety of customers, from ESN to businesses to my own personal usage."

Who or what receives the alerts from the monitoring? For your personal stuff, presumably you. But if those from your customers are handled by the customers themselves do you know if there's still anyone looking out for them? If they all come through to you then you become a single point of failure for the customers and what happens then if you retire or fall under a bus?

It's not the setting up of something to raise alerts that's the problem. Monitoring is an on-going process and these days on-going processes are apt to be interrupted by system failures reorganisation by management, especially those processes that deal with rare events on demand.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I don't get it

"Surely,... they could find a way of bypassing the need for certificates that expire."

They could also make things more convenient by not putting locks on doors etc.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: NHS

Why the joke alert icon?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Standby?

"If it is REALLY essential, and you have not taken precautions, I find myself very short on sympathy."

Remember the people at the sharp end are not usually those taking the decisions. The OP of this particular thread was someone whose employers had done so. There will be others whose employers hadn't and even a few where an original dual provision had been cut to save money.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: More detail

"thats if someone has actually configured it to send out emails...."

And if the recipient of the emails is still there.

It's easy enough to set up a warning system. Protecting that warning system against the ravages of management changes is a different matter and almost certainly outside the powers of whoever set it up. If you were the one who was the designated recipient of the email and you've just been booted out of the job are you going to be in a mood to warn whoever did the booting that that particular mail box needs to be monitored? Is the booter even going to listen if you did? And will the booter get booted out in the next bout of changes?

There needs to be personal responsibility on those making such changes to ensure that everything like this gets covered under the new organisation. HMG has woken up to the fact that national infrastructure needs to be protected even when it's in private hands. Maybe that protection should extend to personal sanctions on those involved, even up to CEOs and board members. Make them sweat a little. After a few big personal fines or gaol sentences businesses would become a little less cavalier about reorganisations and outsourcing.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: These things don't have internet access

but are you telling us that the "core nodes in a telecom network" which provides Internet access to millions ... don't have internet access?

No longer having internet access was the problem.

Tech support discovers users who buy the 'sh*ttest PCs known to Man' struggle with basics

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"So, Bill worked for RM then?"

You never had Time to look at other makes?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"until we found where the manufacturer had hidden the power switch on the case."

Style over function. The sign of a company run by marketing.

Keen for much-hyped quantum computing to finally land? Don't expect it for a decade

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I have a little box which simultaneously does and doesn't contain a quantum computer. Unfortunately every time I've opened it it came down on the side of not containing one.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"The google search engine for example"

So that's why the head of MicroSoft AI has gone off to work for an estate agentcy: so they can display even more estate agency hits when I'm looking for something else entirely.

Capita: We are seeking staff to join our board. Just two please

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

To make it easier to create a short list we're making all employees except two redundant.

Brits' DNA data sent to military base after 'foreign' hack attacks – report

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"This has to be a first ?"

No. The ones you hear about being breached are the ones who didn't build in security from the first.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "100,000 Genomes Project is secure, insists chair"...

"Which regular commentard am I?"

I don't think you're Bob. One down....

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Take your browser and fuck off

"This goes for all manufacturers."

And while we're at it, can we include non-manufacturers? No I will never sign up to Prime so stop pushing the crap at me. No I will not let PayPal remember my password to add a "Not even later" option. And on and on....

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "Microsoft doesn't comment on rumours or speculation"

They're not sure which of them will turn out to be true.

Page: