Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK signals legal changes to self-driving vehicle liabilities

Re: £42 billion and 38,000 skilled jobs

I was thinking more about the 2035 target date. Safely in the future - nobody in government today will be there to be held to it, even if anyone remembers.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Re: 8GB? No thanks!

"it’s not unusual to see managerial types with forty to fifty browser tabs open"

There's the problem. Their attention span is well exceeded so they can't work out which to close down.

"And that external drives are a great option for storing data if you don't want to entrust it all to cloudy services."

That sounds reasonable, at least as a backup.

Re: I was gonna say...

What would raise eyebrows would be comparing the spec of the laptop with that of servers one which we used in the past to support the database and the applications served over terminals to multiple users. A Pi will have more memory than those old boxes did. These days it's not the basic task that's the problem, it's the bloat.

Re: *Placed*

Hmm how do you *place* that memory? Hmm blue-tac? tape? superglue?

1. Find a dictionary.

2. Look up the many definitions of "place.

Re: Insult to injury

I don't know what's happening to the el Reg commentariat these days.

All he has to do is put in an appropriately sized expense claim for secure disposal of redundant IT equipment.

It all depends on what OS the laptop is running.

Re: 8GB is plenty if your walled garden is small enough

"My personal server"

I'm not sure what sort of form factor your personal server is running on but most people don't chose a laptop for that purpose. And for a many people's requirements a personal server may well be NextCloud on a Pi.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Re: Sounds vaguely familiar...

Nice one, but how do ceiling panels and trunking go EOL? I can envisage trunking having had its contents stripped out but I'd just regard it as being in wait for its next occupant.

Re: Excellent!

My boss at the time who, despite being an accountant, was quite reasonable, was having a dispute with one of the unreasonable accountants*. His exasperation surfaced as "This business has a surplus of accountants!". Ever since I've regarded that as the correct collective noun.

* I sometimes described this one as going into cannon mode. His first reaction to any problem was to want to fire someone.

China's top bank ICBC hit by ransomware, derailing global trades

Given that Russia needs China to help bypass sanctions I wonder if the price they have to pay might go up. Such as the Lockbit crew finding themselves conscripted into the sharp end of the Russian army.

CEOs of crashed tech upstart Bitwise accused of swindling $100M from investors

Shocked that they didn't realise reality was bound to catch up with them.

Mac daddy Woz hospitalized in Mexico over mystery malady

Let's hope it's just vertigo.

Get well, Woz.

EU lawmakers scolded for concealing identities of privacy-busting content-scanning 'experts'

There's a very simple answer to this. Their experts should provide a proof of concept implementation and then let everyone else pick it apart.

The criteria for success would be:

- It should not present a risk to that vast majority of internet users who are going about their lawful business

- It should not present a risk to those living under a repressive regime

- It should not present a risk to those, including but not limited t, children, living in abusive relationships seeking help

- It should not present a risk to whistleblowers seeking to draw attention to some illegal activity

- It should not present a risk to journalists working in hostile environments, including those working undercover

- It should not be open to abuse by unauthorised use or access by authorised users, including, but not limited to, Cheshire police intelligence (sic) analysts

If these experts can provide a robust practice demonstration of this they will have made their point, otherwise they, like the rest of us, should think of the children public at large.

FTC interrupts Copyright Office probe to flip out over potential AI fraud, abuse

Re: Free pass

If the conditions of buying the book include that it should not be stored in an electronic retrieval system then copying it into such a system is actionable by definition - unless the condition is, for some reasonable, unenforceable.

Re: Must, not, say

"Feeling old yet?"

All too often.

Nexperia sells Newport Wafer Fab to American chipmaker for $177M

A former Inmos site? SiC transit gloria mundi.

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

"Sadly, there is little prospect of Team Vulture getting behind the wheel any time soon."

Why not Richard? Nominative determinism rules!

Re: Dumb Project

Agreed. I can't avoid thinking if it's a car it should be driven by its wheels.

His dad should be able to provide some sponsorship.

Monero Project admits thieves stole 6-figure sum from a wallet in mystery breach

Also keep the password offline.

Wipro: Get back to the office for three days a week or else

Re: Letter

Or "our managerial staff are worried for their jobs as they have little to do when you're not there to micromanage"

Woo-hoo, UK ahead of Europe in this at least – enterprise IT automation

Re: A further 40 percent felt overwhelmed by it all...

the latest and greatest "new thing" is probably broken in a couple of dozen edge cases

I can't think of many latest and greatest new things in the last many years as good as this.

"Enterprises today are asking where they can find the right people, how they can upskill and fire them"

You can buy personal info of US military staff from data brokers for just 12 cents a pop

Re: US privacy law incoming then?

Beating up BIg Tech with an election and all that associated expenditure coming up? Blaming the Chinese seems more likely.

Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5 million bank transactions

Reed called it "odd" that such a core system like the handling of authentication for an online bank would be managed by a third-party provider.

If it can be outsourced it will be outsourced. Nothing odd about that these days.

Ireland to develop datacenter powered by fuel cells

"SOFCs are more efficient than gas turbine generators, and the transmisson loss from on-site generators will be minimal compared to power coming from the grid."

Where does the hydrogen come from? If it's from electrolysis you have to consider the transmission losses to the electrolysis plant and the electrolysis itself. Where is the electrolysis plant? if it isn't on-site you have to factor in the energy needed to pump it and, hydrogen being hydrogen, the losses from the joints in the pipework, the replacement of the pipework due to embrittlement etc. If the plant is on-site the transmission losses are the same as you'd have had powering the data centre direct plus an addition to the second order effect of transmission losses incurred in transmitting the energy that's lost in the course of hydrolysis.

If a fuel cell facility helps stabilize the grid then surely this is a matter for the grid operator rather than a grid customer.

"powered initially by gas, moving to hydrogen in future."

Leaving aside the fact that hydrogen is also a gas, powering the fuel cell by natural gas, i.e. methane, is hardly decarbonising the operation compared to using the same gas to fuel a gas turbine-driven generator. The significant question is how is the long-term hydrogen to be obtained? If that involves simply transferring electrical energy from some other source into chemical energy in the form of H2 why not use that electrical energy directly?

Fuel cells and hydrogen make sense (give or take the difficulties of handling hydrogen) where the energy is to be deployed in situations which are intrinsically disconnected from the grid such as vehicles. The only point I can see for a static installation such as a data centre is green-washing.

Hardware hacker: Walling off China from RISC-V ain't such a great idea, Mr President

There's this thing called gravity. The Chinese use it to keep their buildings firmly anchored to the ground. Maybe, for security's sake, the US should ban the Chinese from using that.

Vanishing power feeds, UPS batteries, failover fails... Cloudflare explains that two-day outage

How many data centres is he authorised to call at any one time?

"Repeat after me: An untested backup is a worthless backup."

Also repeat after me: Cloud is just somebody else's computer data centre and they control it.

"We had never tested fully taking the entire PDX-04 facility offline."

That sort of thing is scary; scary enough to duck.

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

Even from jail?

ICE faces heat after agents install thousands of personal apps, VPNs on official phones

We've seen this in a number of instances now. Organisations whose role is security are rubbish at securing their own systems.

Okta October breach affected 134 orgs, biz admits

Re: The usual....

Only 134 looks OK until you realise that these customers are businesses relying on Okta for secure ID management. What number of real people are at risk from those 134?

"Okta Security identified that an employee had signed-in to their personal Google profile on the Chrome browser of their Okta-managed laptop,"

How was this possible, given the nature of the company?

Samsung family sells $2B worth of shares to pay inheritance tax bill

It's good to know the business is in safe hands.

Ex-GCHQ software dev jailed for stabbing NSA staffer

Re: Stabby stab

What is "a good guy" doing with a gun in the first place?

That's a question which would be beyond the comprehension of a lot of the US population.

Home of the world's longest pleasure pier joins public sector leak club

A good thing in a way. It didn't include information about the wider public and, given the personal involvement, will encourage them to be more careful in the future when it might be the wider public at risk.

Experience is a dear teacher but there are those that will learn by no other.

Re: So :

Putting it altogether in one place is still a bad thing. And although NI number shouldn't be used for anything other than NI purposes it is, widely, especially by financial institutions.

It's not necessarily lack of staff training that's the problem. The staff training might have included extracting data into a spreadsheet. The underlying problem is more likely to be lack of a proper procedure as in Mike 137's post and insistence on a format that precludes any hidden content that might escape initial inspection.

Re: Excel and FoI basics

Plain text. That could cover CSV.

No PDF. No SQLite or other database. I have nothing against either in their place but this is not their place.

The standard you are looking for is plain text where everything is visible for inspection.

Re: Excel and FoI basics

"that, should be extracted into a new document..."

And that new document should be a plain text file.

"...that gets verified"

Verified by someone who knows the difference between a plain text file and a WP document or spreadsheet.

I might stretch a point to allow CSV.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

"(I know this from RTFM'ing not because I've witnessed anything in particular - honest!)"

See EvilAudotor's comment below!

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

Good for your company that he had an insurance policy that covered it.

Re: When checking voltages...

Ohmy!

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: Crashed a super-computer with Lode Runner clone

"Still it's my one claim to fame, I crashed a supercomputer with Java."

The alternative view is that Java crashed the supercomputer, you just helped it along.

Re: Statistics

Our statistics class was more or less similar. We handled it be turning up a bit later each week so he also turned up a bit later. Then we turned up on time and he wasn't there so we left for good.

Doing research the best way to use statistics was to call on a statistician for advice. Rather like encryption, if you're not a specialist don't try to roll your own.

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

Re: Edited out

After last week's evidence at the Covid inquiry I think we can safely rely on BoJo staying as lon longer Prime Minister.