Posts by Doctor Syntax

As UK breaks away from Europe, Facebook tells Brits: You'll all be Californians soon

It's the Brexit I voted against. Seems like there were two referenda being run at the same time.

Re: Just Wait

"Since pretty well all ISPs are UK wide"

I'm sure if Scotland seceded they'd requrie all ISPs there to be Scottish companies.

The essence of the problem is that if the US govt can get its claws into a company with access to the data GDPR becomes a no-op. No such company can comply with GDPR. That's why the various attempts at privacy fig-leaves have been overturned by the ECJ.

Re: services

"What about people with dual citizenship (to pick one trivial example of why it won’t work)?"

Location is what matters. GDPR applies to anyone living in the EU regardless of citizenship. It does not apply outside the EU regardless of citizenship.

Re: So what?

"Has the concept of not using Facebook escaped everyone?"

Not quite everyone.

Re: Hmm

"Instagram claimed that because GDPR stops them from unrestricted scanning of everyones private data, their algorithms are less likely to pick up issues."

Rice-Davies applies.

"its illegal, under our laws."

For now, The implication in the article is that Boris or his successor will be pressured into changing those laws to get a trade deal. Having left the EU we'll be fully in control of making any changes needed when negotiating a US trade deal from a position of extreme weakness.

"once Britain tries to get a bilateral trade agreement with America and has to start putting things on the table."

Of course the UK will also want to be able to trade with the EU so it will need data protection here equivalent to the EU's. If Boris can't reassure Biden that the Irish arrangements are a satisfactory implementation of the Good Friday agreement there won't be a US trade agreement so he might as well stick with EU standards and pass it off as part of that implementation.

I wonder how long it will be before Boris declares he's got Brexit's done, his work here is complete, ticks off "been PM" on his private check list and bails out to let somebody else deal with all the inherent contradictions and unsolved problems, rather like Cummings.

UK Home Office chucks US firm Leidos £30m for help snooping on comms data

The main problem with all this is the absence of one thing: a warrant issued by an independent judicial authority, not an investigator, officer in the investigator's organisation or a minister, specifically for the intercept and based on reasonable grounds. It's called due process of law. Without that who is tasked at what cost is irrelevant.

Facebook rolls out full-page ads, website complaining Apple is forcing it to get consent before tracking you

"Their ads provide a dreadful ROI, no idea why people use them."

There are two answers to your musing.

1.. The advertising industry is very good at selling. What they sell is advertising to advertisers.

2. They have willing accomplices in their market place. The marketing departments in their customer base have a direct interest in placing advertising, it's their living and their departmental budget. The advertising industry will feed them with metrics to let them show how well they're doing. Such metrics will never, of course, show how much money has been wasted targeting those who've already made a one-off purchase of the product or who are so pissed off by the adverts that they'll go to some lengths to avoid that advertiser.

Re: I consider myself relatively immune to advertising

Exactly the kind of punter the advertising industry wants the mugs to believe they should love.

For avoidance of doubt "mugs" refers to advertisers. They are the sole market to whom the advertising industry sells and the only products the advertising industry sells are advertising and valueprice-added services such as targeting that goes with the advertising.

"benefits of personalized advertising"

What benefits? Let's see: telling me where I can buy more of something I've just bought? .... Telling me about suppliers I have used?

You need to ask "Benefits to whom?"

It may not benefit the advertiser. It does, however, benefit the advertising industry that sold the ad to the advertisers.

What's mere, the advertising industry most definitely doean't want to know you already bought that or used that supplier. They want to be in a position of being able to prove they don't know it. If anyone should ever turn round and accuse those selling such advertising as being fraudulent they want plausible deniability.

Re: Positive side...

"deceptive ads" - if in the US exist anything like that

Are there any other sort?

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

"Skeptical it would have been that easy to get into such an influential and safeguarded Twitter account ... everyone refused to accept it had happened."

Who's this "everyone"? It was entirely believable.

US aviation regulator issues safety bulletins over flaws in software updates for Boeing 747, 777, 787 airliners

The pilot comments rely on the pilot making the correct and immediate response to an unexpected response of the avionics. All very fine until the pilot doesn't.

The only way to get manglement to get their finger out and actually treat safety as a priority would be to ground the fleet forthwith every time one of these comes to light with criminal prosecutions of anyone trying to prevent them coming to light. The resulting drop in share price would lead to the shareholders ensuring change - and maybe a change in management, not just behaviour.

Re: A Boeing Spokesperson said:

"Safety is and always has been Boeing's top priority."

These are words I've been told to say. Are they supposed to mean something?

UK proposes new powers for comms regulator to legally unleash avenging hordes on security-breached telcos

Good as far as it goes but perhaps a better option would be to require regular security audits by an OfCom appointed auditor. Or alternative might be some kite-mark style accreditation for comms companies, those claiming to offer security services etc (a couple of companies currently in the news here would serve as examples) based on 3rd party auditors. Given the prevalence of things like hard-coded credentials it seems that securing critical infrastructure can't be left to those who run it and users/customers need to have the ability to see for themselves just what state it's in.

Larry Ellison says he's not following Oracle to Texas, prefers his private Hawaii pad

Re: Ellison needs to bone up on Long Run out Landslides off the Coast of Hawaii

Downvoted on account of the general tenor of this looking a bit different when you're also 76.

Google told BGP to forget its Euro-cloud – after first writing bad access control lists

Re: Clouds are great!

There is a choice not to become dependent this complication.

Simple example: A few weeks ago I rung up to order some material from a vendor in much the same line of business as an old client of mine in engineering supplies. My client had his stock control/sales order processing in house. This guy used some external supplier. The necessary complication got in the way of him from entering the order on his system so he had to ring me back when he regained access. That's a couple of decades of "progress".

Stick with Einstein's dictum: everything should be as complicated as necessary but not more.

Re: Clouds are great!

"They* will learn from this"

Past experience says not.

*Corrected the missing capitalisation from the start of one of your sentences for you.

We're not saying this is how SolarWinds was backdoored, but its FTP password 'leaked on GitHub in plaintext'

At leas it wasn't Pasw0rd.

Rocky has competition as more CentOS alternatives step into the ring: Project Lenix, Oracle Linux vie for attention

"It seems the poll did not ask who might opt for a paid RHEL subscription"

It would be unlikely to have got [m]any votes. The whole point of Centos was to provide an RHEL clone where support wasn't needed and/or budget wasn't available. If that condition hasn't changed then a paid sub is unlikely.

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?

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.