Posts by Doctor Syntax

NHS COVID-19 app update blocked by Apple, Google over location privacy fears

Re: Not the first and won't be the last

Just in case somebody competent takes charge?

Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away

Or APL?

Re: From the abstract

In the upcoming local election set there's one for a mayor of West Yorks. Apparently there are a substantial list of candidates but i doubt there'll be an option for "No, I don't want one.". An even more stupid idea than "Krklees"; we probably have more in common with rural parts of Derbyshire than we do with Leeds, Bradford etc.

And all too often is.

I rather like the saying that a design isn't complete until there's nothing left that can be taken away. It took me years to realise that that was so often the case.

India's open-source community challenges crypto-busting content-removal and ID-recording Code

What does this code say about telephoning random people all over the world to offer unsolicited services to repair non-existent faults with their PCs?

UK's National Rail backs down from greyscale website tribute to Prince Phil after visually impaired users complain

Was it the result of the Twitter storm or did somebody use ceomail.com to find how to escalate it?

We have never given census data to anyone – not even the spy agencies, says the UK's Office for National Statistics

No spouse. The landlady had previously been cohabiting with the step-daughter's father on a nearby farm. He'd died so she seems to have taken the youngest of his legitimate daughters under her wing along with a few children ho had her own surname and who seem to have kept appearing whilst she was living with him. The census returns were under the premises old (pre-licence) name but it was sometimes styled as an inn although only licensed under the Beer Act.

It's amazing what you can turn up from a few census returns and tithe maps. It didn't initially appear to have been even tangentially related to the query originally being answered although it was and the whole turned into an article of > 12 pages.

"Anyone could request a new code for any address in the UK and then input whatever data they liked."

Familiarity with the historic census returns(from the usual genealogical suspects shows that although most answers are credible there were some who either did give whatever answers they liked or misunderstood questions.

One example I came across recently - the head of household said she was a beershop keeper and her almost* stepdaughter said she was an innkeeper's servant. Were the premises a beershop, a beerhouse or an inn?

* There seems to have been a lack of a marriage.

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

"An enterprising salesman took advantage of the problem to sell them more memory, and the fault reduced to once a day (they worked two shifts a day),"

That should have been a bit of a clue.

I managed to escape from a client's customer site in Italy when the server took a long enough gap between crashes. I was only there to install custom S/W I'd written but the flaky server kept crashing & they didn't want to let me go until "it" worked. I later heard that dodgy memory was replaced bu all I knew was that odd bits of memory kept getting dumped in files in lost+found. Apart from running out of money I had an appointment the next week for a meeting with new client. I needed to get away.

Re: Not a translator

"when someone is trying to give you advice while you're doing it."

You know how to do it better? Here's the headset.

Re: Skodas and Ladas

In my case you also got a lot of text spam.

If within weeks of buying a new car you start getting texts inviting you to some promotion to buy another it doesn't say much about their confidence. It slackened after I found the MD's email address but at the end of the services in warranty period I made it clear that I would do no more business with them on account of the spam. And they never did replace the handbrake lever which was the only fix for a broken button - a crap bit of injection moulded plastic* and the smallest replacement unit is the complete best part of a hundred quid piece of mechanism.

* Clearly internal stresses relieved by shattering as the two halves wouldn't fit back together.

Re: Russians, alcohol, making toasts

It might be wise to bring your own toastmaster's glass, optically designed to look much fuller than it is.

Texan's alleged Amazon bombing effort fizzles: Militia man wanted to take out 'about 70 per cent of the internet'

Re: Christian Militia Terrorist

It seems as if there are a few atheist fundamentalists who dispute this. Been there, seen it, helped deal with it. You're quite right.

Re: Christian Militia Terrorist

"Never heard of the IRA, INLA, etc?"

Tribal rather than religious.

"now it needs to be battled for and is usually rejected on cost."

If you were to dig into how the cloud option was sold to the beancounters in the first place you'd likely find that "The Cloud handles all that" was part of the offer.

How to ensure your tech predictions catch on in a flash? Do the mash

Re: Future Gazing

"within a thousand years: the archaeologists will be competing with the industrialists to dig up the landfill sites"

Very likely mining will win.

"there will be no coal or oil they can reach by muscle power alone"

Back to charcoal. A society relying entirely on renewal resources will be more frugal.

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

Re: Blinkenlights

My area of forensic science involved a lot of colour matching. Oddly enough nobody thought to make a check for this an obligatory part of recruitment until my office-mate & I raised it. One of my colleagues actually was R/G colour-blind but was senior enough to avoid that aspect.

"the cat is the guilty party"

Or at least, the only one who can't deny it.

When first married and living in a 2ndfloor attic flat (3rd floor for transpondians) we bought a bookcase at auction. A huge thing in solid oak. It came up to my shoulder and was 3 doors wide. The staircase was in 3 flights with 2 sharp corners to the first landing and the same again to our landing. It was ridiculous to think we could have got it up the stairs.

Several of us managed to do it, in fact it's been with us ever since & still has some white paint from the staircase embedded in the grain.

It wasn't that that put my back out. It was reaching round the rear wheel to the jack handle after a brake adjustment that did that

Re: Not Me But.......

At 3 am thinking isn't necessarily available, not even as an optional extra.

And a surcharge due to having to start all over again on the garage.

Re: Broke my little toe...

Does anyone win? I thought they just went on and on until everyone lost interest.

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: Things are never quite that simple

It's unlikely they'd fail to pass a budget. Parliament also needs Parliament to pass a budget otherwise even if they didn't get disbanded they'd not get paid.

Re: forthright with outspoken opinions

Whoever you vote for you always get a politician.

How do we stamp out the ransomware business model? Ban insurance payouts for one, says ex-GCHQ director

My immediate situation is that I've got 2 AGM notices. One is on paper and the other is an email stuffed full of links because they think their customers who pretty well have to do business online because branches are an endangered species won't be able to find their website unaided. Unfortunately I'd transferred the account concerned away from the paper-based lot as a result of bad customer service.

It's high time we saw the race to the bottom replaced by a race to the top..

Re: Send the bill to the board

Not near instant. There'd be three categories of director. Those who'd react promptly, those who didn't & got bankrupted and those who'd react once they'd seen a few bankruptcies amongst fellow directors.

Re: How hard is it ...

The IT directer may want to do it but be restricted by beancounters.

Re: sending emails with embedded links

Some of the worst offenders seem to be those who use a 3rd party agency set up as a sub-domain of the alleged sender. Pinging those reveals the truth but not many recipients are able to do that. An automated check and bounce would help. OK, it destroys a business model but it's essentially a parasitic one and if the choice were made between adding the spamming capacity in-house and not spamming it might, in effect, raise the cost of email as you suggest.

It would help if everyone were trained to follow a simple rule: do not click on a link or open an attachment in an unexpected/unsolicited email, even if you think you know who sent it. Trained on penalty of immediate dismissal for failure. Then train customers not to do so either because if you persist in sending emails with embedded links (yes, I'm looking at you, marketing) then, apart from the risk to the customers you've trained, it's very likely that you will indeed do that very thing.

On which topic, can anyone recommend a UK bank or building society that has the faintest clue about email security because mine has finally convinced me that they haven't and don't intend to get one.

What's this about a muon experiment potentially upending Standard Model of physics? We speak to one of the scientists involved

Re: Penny in the air?

"Maybe I can get a promotion to manglement when I return to work ... ?"

No, you need to do more work on your IQ.

‘Can COVID-19 vaccines connect me to the internet?’

Re: Not necessarily conspiracy nuts

This is all very well except people are prepared to believe the most far-fetched ideas rather than the simple ones. Schools have been doing a terrible job of teaching critical thinking for generations.

Re: The logic of the conspiracy nuts baffles me.

"complaining about their slow broadband and lack of connectivity"

And insisting that the next generation of mobile technology interferes with their brain (true but not in the way they mean) or gives you the disease de jour.

The answer's "no" but the good news is that it doesn't lower your IQ any further.

Well done. You dodged the comment about Bill Gates having plenty of bucks.

Or maybe you didn't.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

"It's suggested this won't happen again"

What won't happen again?

This particular problem - maybe not now it's fixed unless, of course, somebody reverts to an older version or looks at the new code and thinks "That's not right for a child"?

Or developing against an insufficiently detailed spec that assumes culturally specific knowledge on behalf of the developer?

British gambling giant Betfred told to pay stiffed winner £1.7m jackpot after claiming 'software problem'

Re: If BetFred have a valid legal case ...

Maybe the S/W came with an industry-standard deny-all 50 page EULA but in this case the end-user was BetFred.

Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'

Re: Exit Strategy

Ditto but in my case it was looking at what the pages are like with NoScript in operation: a big list of links.

Ex-Geeks staff lose legal bid to claw back withheld training costs from final paycheques

OK, let me rephrase that. Does it have many employees who wouldn't be/haven't been in this position on leaving early?

Apple extends Find My support to third-party vendors including Belkin, Dutch bike maker VanMoof, and Chipolo

When they can track SWMBO's specs I might buy.

Belgian police seize 28 tons of cocaine after 'cracking' Sky ECC's chat app encryption

Re: Encyrption back door?

"So presumably either the messages were not encrypted, or the platform got hacked and someone installed a keylogger."

Or the service mediated the key exchange and kept copies or was being monitored.. End to end encryption is fine so long as nobody else knows the keys.

UK reseller sues Microsoft for £270m in damages claiming prohibitive contracts choke off surplus Office license supplies

Re: "Earlier this year it slashed the length of support perpetual licence holders could expect."

"Perpetual for the life of the machine was their usual claim in the olden days."

IOW they didn't mean perpetual.

Somehow I can't work up much sympathy about someone not being able to make enough money out of selling Office licences.

Privacy activist Max Schrems claims Google Advertising ID on Android is unlawful, files complaint in France

Re: This is so Googlish...

"Clearly welding extra money on phones for development of Android isn’t going to be favourable with users"

Go back to your 2nd paragraph. Android was and OS project before Google took it over - and they still have to make the kernel OS because of GPL. If the smartphone manufacturers had chosen to collaborate in developing it - as, for instance, Intel has with the kernel - they could have provided themselves with a GPL core. It would still have raised the problem of non-collaborating manufacturers trying to use it so they'd need to have added a non-GPL collaborative userland. Of course the costs would have been added to the purchase cost but spread out over many of millions of units and wouldn't favour one make over another.

TL:DR It didn't have to have turned out as it did.

Personally, I don't trust banks trusting a mobile OS.

Re: Worth noting

There's an entirely different way of looking at this.

An OS is simply a part of a computing device. Without one the device is incomplete. A vendor can develop their own, buy it in or, as a middle way, develop one in collaboration with other vendors. Developing their own was, of course, the original way of doing things.

The OS can be supplied to the purchaser by various means. It could be licences as a one-off payment as part of the original package. It could be leased. It could be a mixture of initial payment with an optional support contract. It could be ad-supported. And, of course, the collaborative development approach* has enabled the free download of Linux and the BSDs inter alia.

It would have been feasible for smartphone manufacturers to have got together to develop a Linux distro which could have been provided to their customers as part of the one-off payment for the device. However Google has managed to divide and conquer them with its own Linux distro at the ongoing expense to their customers of eternal slurping.

*If you look carefully you'll find that H/W makers such as Intel contribute a lot of Linux development so in fact one-off payment as part of the the H/W applies even if you run some other OS. We Linux users thank you Windows users for your contributions.

Re: "We may see a market for paid mobile OSes start to develop."

How about we make that paying for a specific service such as email? In that case, yes. I pay for a domain and for someone to provide an email service for that domain. It gives me the freedom to choose not to use an ISP email address and hence to change ISP if I wish and also freedom from having my activity tracked by "free" email providers.

I need to have a gmail address as the system ID for my Android phone. It's actually a garbage address with no meaningful personal ID attached - and now Google seem to want me to provide its profile with a date of birth on "legal" grounds. The legality of that demand seems to be negative under GDPR.

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

"an old spare tower PC I had at the time, I ended up with a very expensive doorstop"

Almost by definition something that's old and spare is no longer expensive as you'd already written off its value. And if you'd kept the Windows distribution disk (or did you transfer the licence to another machine) you'd have been able to reinstall it.

Greenland's elections just bolstered China's tech world domination plan

Re: Nothing rare about rare earths

Wine. Mmm.

"But keeping the chinese out of the loop would probably be a good idea."

I don't doubt they'd want to keep the US out as well.