Posts by Doctor Syntax

North of England NHS buyers name IT consultants who got in on £200m framework deal

Open house for the usual suspects.

Business intelligence vendor MicroStrategy reveals it’s bought a billion bucks of bitcoin

If you had a share in the company you might be worried about getting poorer.

If I were a shareholder the news that the company had a billion or so lying around with nothing better to do than be used for speculative investment I'd want to know why it wasn't being returned to me by way of divvies or share buy-back.

Re: "Dependable store of value"?

"As a way to make easy money for a while"

And providing your luck holds.

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

AFAICR it was a sackable offence to discuss salaries. It seemed to me that that would provide an easy way out.

the "visitor flow" was poor

As far as I could make it it was arse about face. You walked past all the things done with the product of the Big Melt before you actually got to see it. And the flow of trying to get back to anywhere recognisable by following the signage when driving away from it was another nightmare.

I couldn't seen the point of the classical elements except to point to the educational background of the designers but the Water bit was fun.

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

Re: A think tank

"Another name for a group of partisan experts"

Experts in hindsight.

Re: Here we go

"Sometimes it is about who you know."

In an emergency turning to someone you know to get a job done can be a good thing - it saves time. It helps, however, if you're at least competent enough to gauge the merits of those you know before making a choice. In this case, however, that seems to have been missing so the "someone you know" turned out to include the likes of Dido Harding.

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

I think I'd have been inclined to tell them that the goo from their smoking had ruined it beyond repair.

Trump administration says Russia behind SolarWinds hack. Trump himself begs to differ

Don't look at Russia. Look over there - China.

You have to ask "Why?".

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

Re: services

Maybe i didn't write that clearly enough. It applies to data subjects in the EU irrespective of citizenship. It does not apply to data subjects not in the EU. It applies irrespective of the location of the processing.

From the EDPB notes:

The wording of Article 3(2) refers to “personal data of data subjects who are in the Union”. The application of the targeting criterion is therefore not limited by the citizenship, residence or other type of legal status of the data subject whose personal data are being processed. Recital 14 confirms this interpretation and states that “[t]he protection afforded by this Regulation should apply to natural persons, whatever their nationality or place of residence, in relation to the processing of their personal data”.

"Residence", I think, means where the data subject normally lives. If I visit en EU country and stay in an hotel there it wouldn't make me resident there - my residence would remain my home. If I did a Dabsy & went to live in France then I would be resident there.

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.

Atlantic City auctions off chance to hit Big Red Button and make grotesque Trump Plaza casino go boom

Re: Point of Order

Yes. It was a repeat you were watching on BBC4.

Bad timing

"The winning bidder during the live auction on 19 January will have the honour of tearing it down 10 days later. "

I really hope that 10 is a typo for 1.

Unsecured Azure blob exposed 500,000+ highly confidential docs from UK firm's CRM customers

Re: What no SAS or AD or even VNET's

I think you lost them at "design".

Re: Who put the Pro in Probase?

They were right about their approach being open.

No more Mr Nice Guy

This sort of thing really needs to be subject to penalties on a scale that jeopardises the company's viability.

We've had DPAs for decades now and the need for compliance just doesn't seem to register with manglements or at least not to the extent that it compels them to supervise the underlings and make sure stuff is secured. We need to start putting some of the worst examples where they can no longer place data subjects at risk. Seeing a few of their contemporaries go down the tubes would encourage even the most obdurate of the others.

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: No cats but...

"I've seen this before with PCs in industrial locations."

Add reprographics shops. A client of mine, based in Oldham, had a branch office providing reprographics services in a govt. office in an historic London building. I can't remember now what the floppy drive was used for in the SCO server but it got through a few of them. The last straw was when I got a call from the operator to say the ceiling has just fallen onto his desk. After that the operation got moved to another branch.

Re: there are strange folk who actually like cats

A normal moggy (random cat of no particular breeding) kitten usually goes for between "please take it away" to a nominal £50.

Where are these traded? It'd be worth rounding up all the bastard cats that keep coming and crapping in our garden and, as per the A/C's post, digging holes elsewhere.

Re: Benefit

I thought it was standard practice for native critters in Oz to be lethal. Are cats immune to this? (I know cane toads are.)

Re: Dead mouse

This is something with which vegetarians have yet to come to terms.

Re: Dead mouse

"the cat had been camped next to it staring for two days."

Unless the cat took time off the mouse must have had a store of food in there. It wouldn't have survived anything like that long without feeding.

Developer beta for Huawei's Google-free HarmonyOS is here – but you may need to Google Translate the docs

I look forward to a review comparing it with Android as to the amount of data sent to the mother-ships.

About $15m in advertising booked to appear on millions of smart TVs was never seen by anyone, says Oracle

I'd call that public service broadcasting.

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.

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?