Posts by Doctor Syntax

From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key

Polycarbonate proving difficult? This https://www.theplasticshop.co.uk/plastic_technical_data_sheets/chemical_resistance_guide_polycarbonate_sheet.pdf has a useful looking table of possible solvents and non-solvents although all the possibles seem even less attractive than the problem.

Somehow the whole story reminds me of a reported episode from student days when a particularly obnoxious denizen of halls was pounced on by several others after a party and treated with contact adhesive (who had that handy, I wonder; was there really glue-sniffing going on in those far-off days?). Subsequently taken to the local hospital and greeted by the doctor with "Christ, is this some new perversion?".

Want to set up a successful bug bounty? Make sure you write it for the flaw finders and not the lawyers

Voting machines

I suppose the explanation is that there's not enough money to be made from providing pencils and sealable boxes with slots in the top.

A 73bn-kg, skyscraper-size chocolate creme egg spinning fast enough to eventually explode – it's asteroid Bennu

A new Register measure of mass - the Bennu?

Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee

"And 1g is a backronym for cellular mobile telephones."

Your 1g is, in fact, the first GSM mobile telephone system. It wasn't the first cellular system; that was TACS. And TACS wasn't the first mobile system. Back in the mid-80s the bit of BT that eventually became part of O2 still had a product called System 4 running alongside the newly introduced TACS.

Re: Blue sky thinking?

"And this is supposed to be government by a party known for its financial responsibility."

It got taken over.

Re: Remember...

"I expect the EU will be added to the list come January."

For a substantial part of the current HMG it's been on their list for some time except, of course, when they're looking for somewhere to go on holiday.

Re: National Cyber Security Should Investigate Government Systems

"handing over contracts and Intellectual Property to Huawei."

Would that be the Huawei that has a large number of telecoms patents of its own? Or the Huawei that was about to establish an R&D base in Cambridge? Or was it the Huawei which, alone of the telecoms equipment providers, made arrangements to have its software open for examination to UK security*?

At the very least we should demand any alternative equipment providers be as open as Huawei has been compelled to be. Who knows - if that were the situation we could actually make informed decisions on the basis of technical merit.

* Who seem to have found poor coding standards but nothing malicious.

That would be a political decision. It's not a basis to make a technical one.

In June Cotton described the Chinese company as "a criminal organisation" to the committee during a Parliamentary hearing, belligerently asking Labour's Kevan Jones MP: "Why would you be so eager to use this technology?"

I'm sure Cotton will be well aware that in his legislature it's the committee's job to ask questions and the witness's to answer them. He seems to have some difficulty in grasping that the same thing applies here.

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble, Azure also unwell

Re: Bizarre

That's what we've been saying for a long time. We're due for the invention of a small, relatively self-contained computer that can sit on your desk of just on your knee and only connects to the wider world occasionally. I can't think what we'll call it.

Re: Reminds me

It's certainly normal weather up here in the North.

Re: Reminds me

Good idea but you need a supply of freshly made and inexpensive ones to replace those that fail.

Re: Make no mistake

OTOH after the first, or at least the first few, outages the ass should be what the manager who made the cloud decision is out on.

A defect which is active is more than "latent". Another weasel word on which they should be called out.

Re: Do you remember?

"which seems to mean exactly the same thing."

That depended on what the thin client was connected to. If it was some external service then, yes, it was the same thing. If it was to your own service, then no.

ICANN begs Europe: Please fill in the blanks on this half-assed GDPR-compliant Whois we came up with

Re: Time to get rid of ICANN?

There needs to be a definitive account of addresses as a source for secondary services. It's easy to see why malware might deviate from that.

However the primary requirement of the ICANN root service is to point to the TLD servers so the TLDs could, if sufficient of them chose (and managed!) to agree amongst themselves to take one of the root server mirrors into the primary. The likely outcome would be a certain amount of conflicts due to holdouts but if those making the initial break were sufficiently dominant the rest would have to follow eventually. The difference between the heretic and the orthodox is who wins.

Re: Why is this differnet from Companies House

You're assuming that domain owners are corporate bodies that make such filings elsewhere. Many of us here have our own domains for our own purposes such as email addresses and are entitled to privacy in this as in any other respect. Individual privacy is regarded as a basic right in Europe. Your use of SCC suggests your expectations are US-centric where you're denied such rights.

Re: Whois lookups used to be useful

This is exactly why I suggested above that corporate registrants should be disclosed in whois. The baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

It might be mandatory but if the domain owner chooses not to do so it's a bit difficult to work out who they are.

If BigCo has their website flogging their rather dubious products they may well register some "review" site which habitually praises them and do so anonymously because they can.

I vaguely remember receiving spam fa few times from somebody flogging print services. They put their limited co name on the email but not their registered number. I think there were also some errors on their website - possibly about address - so I grassed them up to Companies' House who didn't fine them but "helped them" to fix their errors. The spam stopped.

Re: Clarity

Actually, it's only illegal as regards actual people resident in the EU. It isn't as regards corporate registrants but nevertheless they're hidden because of it.

Very simple. The name of any corporate registrant should be publicly available on whois complete with contact information for appropriate roles (not names of holders) such as an overall contact for the registration, administrators such as webmaster and postmaster for any outward facing services, and data protection officer. For any personal registrant the information should only be revealed on production of a court warrant issued in the jurisdiction of the registrar.

UK ISP TalkTalk confirms it will MullMull go-private takeover offer valuing it at £1.1bn

They probably think they can increase profits by shaving a bit off the running costs.

Chef leaves a bad taste: Staff cut in 'horrid, bleak' week after Progress swallows DevOps darling for $220m

Re: Don't relax

Train them in all the bad habits they can thing of.

"We discovered that validating inputs was a big drag on performance. We were going to remove it in the next version."

"Customers tell us that credential checking is too restrictive at present."

It's in their DNA: Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing tool

Re: Amazing work.

"because she posted a picture of herself in a bikini."

Or with a wardrobe malfunction.

This year's Nobel awards seem particularly outstanding. A bright spot in an otherwise dismal year.

All it took was a global pandemic confining millions to their homes to remind businesses how much they appreciate the IT crowd

Meanwhile John and Susan in marketing are continuing to put the business in jeopardy with a collection of customer details/leads/random contacts gathered against GDPR and held insecurely on AWS.

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

Re: almost certainly prevents me writing down the list of names myself and going from there

"They should have worked out their willingness to license the Java source code before investing."

IIRC Oracle were unwilling to licence the particular flavour of Java that Google needed, hence Google's decision to roll their own.

Re: Good analysis

"In any case, programming will go on."

If Oracle win any vendor that wants to see its libraries used will have to make very specific declarations as to the ability of developers to include the API's declarations in their code. It will be interesting to see how Oracle themselves deal with that. On the whole it'll probably be safer not to develop in Java and probably a good idea to develop outside the jurisdiction of the US.

Re: Nine Laypeople

There seems to be a widespread view, which I find very odd, that judges live in isolation from the rest of the world and know only about the law.

A moment's thought should lead to the realisation that all manner of cases are brought before them. As a defunct Sunday paper used to claim, all human life is there.

Re: Nine Seniles

I take it you've not spent much time in courts listening to legal arguments.

UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?

According to the article that was a direct quote from the ICO so why do they have had any more legal problem quoting it than you?

UK, French, Belgian blanket spying systems ruled illegal by Europe’s top court

Re: May as well leave security services to do as they wish collecting data

"Oversight devolves to government ministers, parliament, judiciary, and perhaps a committee of the Privy Council."

You think Parliament gets an effective role?

The problem is the government minister bit. They can sign warrants which ought to be limited to the judiciary. At present the judiciary is independent (if you doubt that just remember the judgements against govt. over the last few years) but Cummings isn't happy wit that and wants to get his hands on appointments.

Re: Half way home

"we'll find out the reality that we don't"

Bu, but, but...we've taken back control.

Re: Not for much longer

Cummings doesn't need to explain anything to BoJo. He just tells him.

Re: Not for much longer

"The UK will be at theoretical liberty to go its own way, but the practical consequence...."

And you think the current HMG gives a damn about consequences?

Like the next US govt, the next UK govt. is going to have a massive foreign relations and trade repair job on its hands.

Re: Nothing rhymed

" the illegality of these mass surveillance systems was known long before"

In legal terms it's not "known" until a court rules on it.

As such, the intelligence services will immediately start work on their own interpretations of what phrases like “strictly necessary” and “persistent threat” mean and see if they can fit them within existing laws. If that effort doesn’t hold water, we can probably expect to see new legislation proposed by the government.

Assuming HMG deigns to take notice of it (and they'll have to if they want* any hope of getting a pass on businesses doing any trade with the EU that involves sharing data) they'll probably just go to the filing cabinet and get out Investigative Powers Act 4.0 or whatever number we're up to now.

I'm sure they've anticipated this and couched the same old slurping in different terms. It's one thing where we're really world beating.

* I have serious doubts they even care.

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

Re: Excel as an intermediate step

And if you really know what you're doing you'll use something different.

Re: RDBMS vs Excel

the last one said “This page intentionally left blank.”

Surely that should be the zeroth one.

It's the "and dirty" bit that catches people out.

Re: Is my memory failing..

"CSV is so useful that I'm more than a little surprised that a decently flexible and configurable CSV module has never surfaced in either the C or Java standard libraries."

TStringlist, the Swiss Army Knife text handling class in Object Pascal (Delphi and Lazarus) has options for treating data as CSV.

President Trump to slap fresh restrictions on H-1B work visas, refuses to hear public comment on changes

"with the added benefit that US companies pay them less. Last month ... plug the skills gap ... if that works it will still take years for the results to take effect."

Same problem in US and UK. Over the long term, neither country has wanted to take on the cost of training a sufficiently large skilled labour force. Neither country's employers want to pay the going rate for such a labour force. Both countries have, in consequence, an unemployment problem with people with few or no skills and their only solution is to periodically make noises about training people up to fill the skills gap as if that could be done with some short course. The fact is that the effort needed to repair the damage would take much longer than the life of a government in either country; it isn't going to happen.

Was he sent on a spool's errand or something? Library staffer accused of stealing, reselling $1.3m of printer toner

What were they working on round the clock? Hiding it from the next level up?

Nvidia promises once again to let Arm keep its Switzerland-of-chips biz model – and even license some Nv GPU tech

"We have every intention of protecting it, nurturing it, and growing the business model."

Even if present management has every such intention there's no guarantee that a future management will.

"We value a network of partners that can take difficult designs and turn them into soft IP products. It’s something that I wish [Nvidia] could always do.”

And what was stopping you?

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Re: VBA implicated yet?

But they didn't. They didn't even realise it was broken.

Re: Use Excel or use Oracle?

False dichotomy.

Re: I once had to..

It would help to know the reasons for denying the request. Security - B not entitled to know? Reliability - data not clean and B want to make decisions based on it?

Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK

I think we just have to file it alongside all the plans for the EU granting his every little wish for a post-Brexit trade deal.

Re: Or

"The real way to decarbonise the transport sector" is to need less of it. Until recent events we've seen London workers commuting in from sillier and sillier distances. Now London's complaining about all the money lost from lack of footfall but they've been part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Re: The big problem however...

"his leadership"

For want of a better word.