Posts by Doctor Syntax

SolarWinds: Hey, only as many as 18,000 customers installed backdoored software linked to US govt hacks

You wanted back doors? You've got back doors. Happy now?

"Unfortunately, we are likely to find out over the next year. "

Fortunately we'll find out some of it. Unfortunately there'll be more we don't find out about.

Cruise, Kidman and an unfortunate misunderstanding at the local chemist

Re: Hmm

Yup. It reminded me of all these sorts of tales at the time. In fact there were suspicions about the pickup as engine & chassis numbers were missing. At the time there was a quantity of joinery products lacking known legal owners - window frames etc - in the police store where the pickup had been taken for examination. I wondered about those.

Re: Just a murder

"That prompted them to call me in again and be accused of lying."

I'm not surprised. The call logs told them he'd called you. You said he hadn't. What do expect they should have thought?

Re: Hmm

" the supplier had found his purchase a little suspicious given events in NI at the time"

I'm not surprised. They don't sound like the types of timer used in bombs at the time but I do remember a huge hoo-hah arising from an arrest related to cross-border smuggling (strictly civilian as it turned out).

Apart from the red diesel in the tank that started things off there were some second hand (or maybe nicked) VCRs "concealed" in a pile of bricks in a pickup. The suspects were from Wales and the Welsh police raided their premises and discovered "timing devices". It turned out that they were VCR timers and AFAIK still in the VCRs. It transpired that what was really being smuggled was the bricks which were stolen. We never did identify the pickup with no discoverable chassis number which is what I got called in for.

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Re: The hard part…

One too many.

"Guess who has the most privacy conscious IoT implementation."

Somebody who keeps it all in-house?

"one spokesperson said they were unable to access their email."

How? By email?

Re: Try again *later*

"Either way we'll all keep madly hitting Ctrl+F5 until we get the response we want."

I think you answered your own question. The worst possible alternative would be to say try again at $TIME" where the saem time is given to everybody.

Backdoored SolarWinds software, linked to US govt hacks, in wide use throughout the British public sector

And have they learned anything from this about the advisability of back doors in software?

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: A simple answer

They won't care. It means that the advertisers pay for what they think is targeted advertising. It doesn't matter to the advertising industry that the targeting's crap. They've got the advertisers' money.

"and now even more control is being taken from us"

Not really. I have the control needed to to use Chrome and a non-Google search engine. What more control would I need?

Re: "...the stuff that reaches only the right people is worth far more..."

The problems with ads that "reach only the right people" is that the people would need to share even more of their personal data with the ad companies. Search online for, say, running shoes and you'll be bombarded with ads for running shoes for days or weeks afterwards.

No, just make the ads context sensitive. If you search for running shoes ads presented at that time are likely to be effective - or at least stand a chance of competing with the other ads. They're worth paying for. Ads weeks later are worth zilch to everybody except the snake-oil salesmen who collect the fees for them.

That's why you're tracked on what you searched for, not what you bought - they can sell running shoe ads on the basis that they know somebody who searched for running shoes. What they don't want to know is that you bought a pair because if their practices were ever looked into they'd need plausible deniability to avoid accusations of fraud.

Re: Misses the point

I'm not sure. The millions offer is coming from slick and determined salesmen who have nothing else to sell to make their quotas, the offers from mere punters.

Re: Misses the point

"When marketeers understand how the internet works and where their budgets really go, that's when advertising will improve."

The advertising industry will work tirelessly to prevent this. Advertising is the only thing it sells and it will obfuscate to prevent the mugs buying it from understanding. The only thing that helps is blocking.

The entire online advertising industry has fouled its nest and will have to live with the consequences.

From the Goon Show long ago.

Bluebottle: Eccles, stand on my shoulders and pull me up.

Sounds of miscellaneous scuffling and grunting.

Eccles: I'd like to see them do this on television.

"I don't see that I am taking money from the advertisers"

You're saving them money. Otherwise they're wasting it by paying the ad networks to "target" you.

Re: In a past far far away

Bringing willing buyers and willing sellers together. The trouble with "targeted" and almost all other online ads is that the recipient isn't a willing buyer, most of thetime not even an intending buyer. The advertisers are being conned into parting with good money, the recipients are being pissed off and less likely to buy later but the advertising industry is coining it.

Rocky Linux is go: CentOS founder's new project aims to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Re: What's all the fuss?

You can always spot 'em. No past history on other topics to hide behind. Straight in with a commercial point to support.

Re: What's all the fuss?

"Centos-stream 8 is just rh8.x/centos-8.x with slightly anticipated upgrades in between minor *point* *releases* of the very same OS version.

It will just receive the single updates when they're ready and stable, instead of having to wait for the next all-encompassing point release."

You make it sound somewhat like Debian Testing vs Debian Stable. However, the people using Debian Testing are making a deliberate choice to run Testing for one reason or another (I've done that myself on occasion). The people running Centos are doing so because it's exactly the same as the the current stable. Not nearly the same. Exactly the same. Their reasons have been expressed quite clearly in many comments.

Hmm. First post. Is the failure to understand the one famously explained by Upton Sinclair?

Re: IBM won't like that

They don't have to like it. Providing they don't use any RH branding and artwork the licence on their source code allows this. That's why there were several previous clones which were abandoned in favour of Centos. It looks like history wll repeat itself.

They can't, by the way, change the licence because the licence came attached to the components they built RHEL from.

Let's try to explain this without your neoliberal/communist bollocks.

FOSS software is licensed by those who write it under some form of licence (there's more than one, almost certainly more than one will be used by various components of a distro) which enables copying. This is not an accident, it's by design. In case you missed that let me repeat it: this is not an accident, it's by design. If you have comprehension difficulties feel free to read that until you understand it.

That has several consequences.

Firstly the material that Red Hat/IBM construct into RHEL will have come from multiple sources. Although they're a major contributor to Linux and to the many other pieces of software in a distro they're only one. Other people's contributions are used. And remember this is not an accident or mistake on the part of those other contributors, they intended this to happen. Also other distro maintainers also pick from the same smorgasbord of FOSS S/W to construct their offerings.

Secondly, Red Hat/IBM offer the source of RHEL for redistribution. They have to - it was the terms on which they themselves used it which require this.

Now if there's anything which you might possibly regard as cummunistic in this it's the offering of work on those terms. You have to shift "communists" not to those "wanting a free ride" but to those providing the "hard graft".

TL;DR You have at arse about face.

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

Re: Two things

"Larry will try if someone is jamming within earshot of his home."

But is he moving?

"A move now allows Oracle, HPE and others to sell off all that empty office space in California while prices are still relatively high "

If they're trying to sell that much the prices aren't going to stay high for long.

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

Re: LAMP TEST

"I worked in a lab once which had a continuous alarm."

Aldermaston?

UK competition watchdog fast-tracks investigation into mega-merger of O2 and Virgin Media

"BT's at the time market-shaking acquisition of EE (a similar combo of fixed and mobile businesses) was waved through in early 2016"

It would have been difficult for them to have done otherwise. It just restored BT to the position they were in before the idiot BT management (tautology alert) of the time decided they didn't really want a mobile network & floated O2 off.

Subway email weirdness: Suspicion grows over apparent Trickbot trojan delivery campaign

It might or might not have been the marketing firm's breach but its Subway's customer data so its Subway's problem.

Sometimes (presumed) legitimate businesses seem to go out of their way to look suspicious. It certainly makes life easier for the real phishers.

I just ordered a book on eBay. Apart from the normal communications via eBay they've so far sent two completely unnecessary emails from their own domain via a 3rd party mailer with a 4th party non-read reply address. The first is a long email about their T&Cs - bollocks because eBay's T&Cs apply - with a PDF alleged to be a cancellation form. The second contains PDFs alleged to be their invoice and return slip (any returns would be handled by eBay's system). All for a book costing less than 3 quid.

Either this business, which claims to be one of the largest of its kind in Germany, hasn't got the hang of selling via eBay or they too have been got at.

There seems to be a bit missing from the Subway statement. The bit where they say they've informed the ICO.

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: EVs = bad for planet, bad for poor people, bad for practicality

"a non-trivial chunk of the remainder are low-density terraces with potential for parking"

A short distance away is a stretch of 2-300 metres of Victorian housing. No garages at all nor space to build them. There are cars parked on both sides leaving a one-way at a time slot down the middle. If you're lucky there might be a space partway down where two cars can pass. On the whole people cooperate but I'm not sure what autonomous vehicles would do if thrown into the mix. Of course if road works are in place the council insists on TTLs to manage what the rest of us can cope with the rest of the time; they just do it with extra delays.

It's not an urban side-street, it's an A road, albeit a 4-digit one.

Re: Summon the lawyers!

Does the footway count as part of the highway?

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Your first statement is probably true but maybe not in the way you meant. It's very likely to be a shift to one of the forks.

Re: Erm ...

"If you were self-supporting then there would be constant, hourly demands as to why it wasn't fixed yet."

In a well-managed business the constant, hourly demands go to somebody who sees it as their job to absorb those calls and keep them away from whoever's doing the work.

In a less-well managed business the reply to "why" is "because I keep answering bloody stupid calls wanting to know why it's not sorted instead of sorting it."

In in ideal world there's be one call - "Let me know when you're finished. If you need anything or anyone gets in your way, call me.".

Re: Who cares about Linux?

You'll notice from the comments that a lot of people care very much. Largely they're people who use it run servers. You might not have seen a server but they're the big racks of stuff that do the actual work that companies rely on to do business.

Re: Someone already has - Rocky Linux

Rock on!

Re: Erm ...

Start Rescue are much cheaper. Not had to use them yet myself but turned out in an awful rainstorm on the M6 to sort out my daughter's car. I know how bad it was because we were a few miles in front and had to double back to pick up the grandchildren and take them on to Tebay to get dried out.

Re: Erm ...

"the middle manager"

Naïve by definition.

Re: Looks like Debian ...

Synaptic if you want a GUI version.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

And a good thing too. It would solve a lot of problems at source even if it dried up "on Call" fodder. I've even be called out by a niece to fix her "internet" - all it needed was power-cycling the router.

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

"there's no need for any business to use cloud services."

Quite true. We ran for years without such a thing existing but I don't suppose that's what you meant.

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

Re: He should have checked the docs and settings before releasing the code

"Anyone else could just go crying to the bank for a loan."

Or declare insolvency.

Re: VISA gift cards

"And, also, what were they thinking not to check for recursion / duplicates in the first place?"

Even more fundamentally, what were they thinking of to just let it run unattended without being sure they knew what it was doing?

Isn't being able to manage costs one of the benefits of Cloud?

South Korea kills ActiveX-based government digital certificate service

"in 1999, when it wasn’t the worst imaginable choice for the job"

It might not have been the worst imaginable choice but any choice locking them in to proprietary software should have been seen as bad enough and Microsoft had already nailed its colours to the mast. How many non-backward compatible variations of .doc were in existence by then?

When it comes to privacy, everyone says America needs a new federal law ASAP. As for mass spying, well, um… huh what’s that over there?

"argued – or tried to – that actually the European Court of Justice had decided wrongly and that everything was fine"

Why can't these people get it into their heads that it doesn't matter whether they like it? It doesn't matter if they think the court didn't get it right. It doesn't even matter if the court didn't get it right if there isn't a higher court to which they can appeal, which in this case there isn't. The court has ruled on what the law says and that's that.

EU Medicines Agency hacked, BioNTech-Pfizer coronavirus vaccine paperwork stolen, probe launched

Re: Other suspects?

"we need to simply disconnect all critical storage systems and access system from the Internet."

In fact, disconnect them from other parts of the organisation that don't need access.

In due course we'll be told lessons have been learned.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Re: Naked coding? Sounds Agile...

6. Snow on the roads, the council still haven't got the gritters out.

Re: Naked coding? Sounds Agile...

"what is this "heating" of which you speak?"

Isn't it the reek bit of Aluld Reekie?

Delay upgrading the UK's legacy border systems has added £336m to taxpayers' bill

I'm sure it'll be dwarfed by the extras once the new system gets rolled out.

John Reid (remember him?) said the HO was not fit for purpose. That was a long time ago. Nothing seems to have changed.