Posts by Doctor Syntax

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Re: Failing switches?

As BiL puts it "Bulbs grow, lamps glow".

Re: Failing switches?

A switch doesn't prevent yanking it out live. It does, however, facilitate yanking it out not live. And don't assume the appliance has a switch of its own. Some do, some don't.

Re: I have never had a socket switch fail

It took me ages to find a double pole switch over intermediate MK switch, the 1960s toggle, not the flat style. Just so I could match it to the rest of the house. Embrittlement? No sign of it.

The only switch failures I've seen are on the triple sockets to fit double boxes. Can anyone recommend a good make?

If you have two or more way switched circuits you get used to the idea that you can't rely on which way the toggle is to tell whether it's on or off.

After several years my granddaughter's bedroom light switch is still the wrong way up. It was like that when they moved in. I couldn't work out how to get the face plate off without prying, probably hard enough to break it. My BiL who's a sparky was to do some work there so I asked him to take a look. Still nothing. I suspect whoever fitted it originally had an "Oh, shit" moment when he realised what he'd done and he couldn't move it either.

Re: You've got to love a place...

Sole purpose of "On call" and "Who me". It's after 3 now & I still haven't got round to Dabbsy.

"In order to avoid losing an entire shift worth of work, the IT guy had to drive 300 km to the plant"

How much of the shift was left?

Re: Twisty turny narrow roads

Not much different to where I live. At least routing S/W mostly doesn't direct HGVs that way any more. Descending from the cross roads there's one relatively(!) wide stretch with a right-angle bend with a high wall on the right. A hundred yards or so below there's a right-right angle bend to the left and the road narrows. It was just round there that they mostly got wedged against the left hand retaining wall, probably on account of the fact that from an HVG cab they can see the 20 foot drop on the other side of the right hand wall. We used to get a few diversions whilst the local tow truck came to pull them out.

A couple of years ago I saw a tanker parked just past the first corner and still there when I came back an hour or so later. I realised he'd discovered his problem sooner than most but still couldn't back up unaided. A few hours later he'd gone and there were wheel-spin marks on the road.

Re: Yes, double isolate and still check

You're lucky

First failure - Christmas morning, no less. SWMBO had just put dinner in the oven. We always have as guests her sister & husband who live a few hundred yards away so the whole lot was quickly whisked away to their oven while I went online to order two replacements.

A few years later the next element went in a shower of sparks in the run up to Christmas. Just as well I had the spare; fit it and order another.

Another year the fan seized up just before Christmas.

Sigh. This year is going to be quiet....

Re: My favourite

K40 in the glass not enough?

"many devices available from the 60s onward didn't have a switch on the mains side of the supply"

And still don't If anything things have got worse. All those little wall-warts with their penny-pinched components sitting inside...

"If the appliance itself doesn't have a switch, just unplug it..."

I've always assumed that the function of the plug/socket interface was simply to provide a connection with suitable capability to withstand external forces and that the switch was designed to cope with issues such as arcing on breaking the circuit. Two different designs of connector to deal with two different aspects of connecting an appliance to the supply.

Can we stop megacorps from using and abusing our data? That ship has sailed, ex-NSA lawyer argues in new book

Re: And of course...

"It does harvest your data so it can sell you more stuff"

Given the stuff that it suggests, presumably on the basis of that data, there seems to be a gap between intent and achievement.

BTW, folks, give Neil the upvotes he deserves. I'm embarrassed to have got more than him..

Re: GDPR?

In theory it's going to be essential to gain equivalence for EU trade. In practice, by the time the entire UK economy has been sold out in order to gain protection for fishing in UK waters (and at the expense of the fishing industry's EU markets) it won't make much difference,

It could be an act of conscience like Ed Snowden. Unlike Snowden she might make a profit from it but then she's a lawyer.

Re: "... more in the way of solutions ..."

Essentially GDPR is designed to do that. Part of the trouble is that they can only be caught in breach when someone goes after them. I suggested in the Eperian thread that we need to start at the other end: large scale* data brokers and aggregators should require a licence to operate. Conditions of the licence including a requirement to provide regular statements of data held to each data subject and regular audits. The statement would have to include by what right each item was held and there would be an obligation to correct errors and delete - and not re-collect - items for which there was no consent or for which the subject wished to withdraw consent. The statement should also include a statement of categories of data added and deleted since the last statement, and perhaps an ability to demand an interim statement of the exact holdings at some point in time of the subject's choosing**. Failure of an audit, including demonstrable failure to abide by statement rules could result in immediate suspension of the licence with it being a criminal offence to oversee continued processing after a suspension. Suspension remains in effect during any appeal.

If this makes the business model unprofitable, tough. You have a right to run a business but to to mess with others' individual rights. The ICO pointed this out quite clearly in the Experian case.

* Best defined as a function of number of data subjects, volume of data and sensitivity of data.

** If they want to permanently delete data before the first statement, fine, but unchecked they'd simply delete data before a statement and re-collect it afterwards.

In this benighted year...

I do like miss going into a bookshop and paying cash.

"at least a regime to say there are boundaries on what governments should do."

This from an ex NSA lawyer who noted how good Apple are at presenting themselves as the good guys.

Google Safari Workaround case inspires campaign to sue Facebook in UK's High Court over Cambridge Analytica app

Re: Wait, is this some kind of private equity investing in lawsuits?

Up to a point it's a fair enough idea. If X has a good case against Y but can't afford it on account of Y's deeper pockets then if X can find someone who can afford it to take on the risk for a percentage then why not?

OTOH the article suggests individual claimants might each only have some hundreds of quids' worth of damages owing. In that case the FB deep pockets can be negated by going via the small claims route. Trying to deal with 4.4 million small claims might be the bigger nightmare for FB, the claimants might end up with more in their pockets but the lawyers' children might have to subsist on dry bread and gruel.

If third party data was slurped surreptitiously how do the potential claimants know they have a claim? Will it be incumbent on FB to tell them, assuming FB lose?

Trump's official campaign website vandalized by hackers who 'had enough of the President's fake news'

Re: A sign of the times

And the Scots. They're Dalriada from Ireland.

A bit like "hashtags"?

Re: A sign of the times

"Britain for Britons!"

You mean the Welsh, Cornish & Picts?

SiFive inches closer to offering a true RISC-V PC: Latest five-core dev board includes PCIe, SSD interfaces

"a tradeoff starts to appear between security and ...."

There's always something someone wants to trade for security. Is it any wonder we have security problems?

Another eBay exec pleads guilty after couple stalked, harassed for daring to criticize the internet tat bazaar

Re: Corporate derangement syndrome

"Maybe years of believing to be above the law, or being the law has something to do with it"

Leaving aside the fact that being ex could be significant they might have hoped that their oppos in another force might have been - shall we say - sympathetic. If so that didn't work Being ex-police isn't going to be in their favour if they get sent down.

French services outfit Atos told to pay $855m in trade secret pinching case

"Atos bought Syntel despite knowing it was embroiled in a dispute"

There's their problem.

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

I wouldn't worry about the Amazon logs. Any attempt to exploit those will simply hide what you were looking for in a mass of irrelevance.

Experian vows to drag UK's Information Commissioner's Office to court after being told off for data-slurping practices

It's time to turn things around.

Require all large scale brokers of PII to be licensed. Retention of the licence would require a regular audit. Fail audit, lose licence, lose business. That would give them every incentive to remain compliant.

Yes, they can appeal against the failure of audit but the licence is suspended until the appeal is allowed. Comply or appeal? Not a tricky choice.

The terms of the licence should include a regular statement to every data subject of each item of information held giving the subject right to challenge as to consent if required (the ICO report mentions some is public domain) and accuracy with the onus on the broker to prove their legitimacy if they refuse to amend or delete. Is it too expensive (as Experian argue)? Then obviously the business isn't financially viable so why are they running it?

Perhaps the solution is to construct entirely fake data. Any resulting mail shots are handled by the seller of the data. In practice, of course, no mail shots can be sent as the addresses are fake but the profits should be shared with the mail handlers so they don't miss out.

The gullible buy it and are satisfied because they're none the wiser. The public don't get their privacy violated and don't get pissed off with importunate marketers so don't take it out on them by buying elsewhere. Everybody's a winner.

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

Re: Security by obscurity?

... but refuses to die.

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

ISTR reading that the application of diplomatic immunity to her was not legally clear as it was her husband who was entitled to it. It needs to be tested in court. Until it is it might be a good idea to suspend pending cases. After all there needs to be, and to be seen to be, some degree of reciprocity.

Re: Team America: World Police

Which person? Alleged culprit or victim?

Your IT department should behave like a jellyfish, says Gartner

Analysts did acknowledge that some jellyfish are highly toxic

That's on account of the fact that without any higher facilities it's the only way to defend themselves.

and/or drift around without control over where they are going

So they end up stranded helplessly on the shore.

Linux kernel's Kroah-Hartman: We're not struggling to get new coders, it's code review that's the bottleneck

Re: "nobody wants to write an operating system"

As opposed to the Windows monoculture being a liability right now?

Re: Linux and more

Agreed that things such as naming conventions etc should make code as self-documenting as possible. The comment should not need to tell you that this is a check on customer balance but it might need to tell you that this is the company standard code to be used everywhere such a check is needed; online ordering, telephone ordering or whatever.

Other things: copyright terms for open source code, why we initialise to 1 or 0 or index from -2*, why we took this approach rather than some other or the fact that this code deals with stuff covered by regulatory requirements and changes should be discussed with and signed off by the appropriate officer of the company.

* I've used indexing from 400 to 700. They were wavelengths in nm for various data points and Pascal allowed such arbitrary indexes.

Re: Unfortunately "Torvalds as ringmaster" trope not dead yet.

It just goes to show how indomitable the human will is in the face of facts.

"The DevOps technologies -- at their heart: easy safe continuous deployment"

What that seems to facilitate is "Oh, there's a problem. We'll fix it in the net a later release."

Personally I preferred getting it right, then releasing it.

Microsoft drives users to the Edge: Internet Explorer to redirect to Chromium-based browser in November

"Not many corporates have rolled out edge yet"

According to the article this only happens after installing the latest version of edge so if they haven't rolled it out at all it won't apply.

Re: Let me get this straight

"It's like the problem is your bigotry rather than anything MS have done."

No, the problem is that if you install anything from MS on your computer they think they own it. And quite likely you as well.

UK mapping agency the Ordnance Survey is heading into gaming territory with £6m tender for dev team

Let's see what I can see on OSM for my local area. Can I find countours? No, no, oh, yes if I select cycle map. What about field boundaries? None here but plenty over there. They seem to be only inside the National Park boundary. Follow that up a bit & suddenly they appear outside the boundary. Head a bit further up and they stop inside the boundary.

One thing the OS has that OSM doesn't: consistency. Sorry, but that's the way it is. If I want good mapping of the UK I'll stick with OS.

NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app is leaving some unable to access government self-isolation grants

"very grudgingly agreed"

Hopefully the grudge was because they got a flea in their ear for not knowing the rules in the first place.

There's nothing like a well thought-out scheme and this is nothing like ....

IBM: Our AI correctly predicts onset of Alzheimer’s 71% of the time, better than standard clinical tests

There seems to be an assumption that speech is in regular sentences whether long or short. What would it make of continuous rambling with no such structure? Just diagnose politician"? And no, I'm not necessarily thinking of BoJo.

IBM has yet to solve the conundrum of IBM.

Palo Alto Networks threatens to sue security startup for comparison review, says it breaks software EULA

Re: Bad marketing, Palo Alto Networks!!

It also raises the question of how much stuff hostile to the more typical end user might be hidden in there.

Huawei's financials take a beating as President Trump's sanctions come home to roost

The writ is just waiting for January. It still depends on which January.

Re: All Important?

"The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows."

True, but the reason is that this is what customers have been trained to expect by the efforts of large, dominant corporations imposing their will on the H/W suppliers. The customers are so well trained thet you hear squeals of horror from some of them any time you suggest the alternatives.

If you suddenly can't print to your HP Printer from your Mac, you're not alone: Code security cert snafu blamed

I can't help visualising HP's management over the past many years as being like a group of children who've wandered into a control romm full of switches and buttons which they don't understand going "I wonder what happens if we press this".

Alternatively it may be a consequence of the fact that, as most of us know, the reliability of an HP product is proportional to its age so they're trying everything they can to make it difficult to drive the older stuff because that's the only way they'll force us to replace it.

In this case it's HP at fault.

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

Re: Streisand Effect

Streisand effect keeps giving! I'd never heard of this and would have taken the list of "music" that could be downloaded as a warning. However as it's in Python the normal installation method applies. Yup, does what it says on the tin. Thanks RIAA.

Re: Fail!

They were good on specifying physical recording characteristics, pre-emphasis/de-emphasis and the like. It seems to have been all downhill since then.