Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

Re: Contracts? Must be nice.

"If there was any real proof of what Sir Bastard actually DID"

I think you'd find it was the BOFH who held the proof and that it was completely in his favour - or favor for you left-pondians.

Re: Hummmm sounds familiar...

The counter to that would be to point out that nobody in their right mind who'd read and understood would sign them. Are they implying that you're not in your right mind in which case here's and incoming write for libel/slander (delete as appropriate).

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Probably the best way of dealing with that would be to have the engineer ask fro Mr **** on arrival and have him show him the ****ing robot. Then remove the poster.

Which continent?

Microsoft 365 tries again at filtering swearing, bad behavior: Classifiers for seven languages offered

The headline & first line of the article makes it clear that this is yet another attempt at this, even for Microsoft. Slow learners.

Shedding the 'bleeding edge' label: If Fedora is only going to be for personal use, that doesn't work for Red Hat

"Although Red Hat sponsors it, Red Hat doesn't own it in a meaningful way. The community makes decisions about what's going to happen."

A few weeks ago the Centos community thought exactly the same thing.

Ruby off the Rails: Code library yanked over license blunder, sparks chaos for half a million projects

Re: This is where GPL is bollocks

If your tens of thousands of lines link to the library and it's GPL vX.0 then. yes. If you keep that little program using the GPL library and just pass stuff to it in some way, then no.

It's not bollocks. It was designed to work that way. You want to work some other way; FSF might equally regard your way as bollocks. They're two different ways of looking at the world, both valid. Trying to use somebody else's code in a way they specifically don't allow you to - that's bollocks.

Re: surely not

"Found it in the unlicense statement."

Here: https://unlicense.org/

Re: surely not

"The law was originally created to allow authors to revoke overbroad copyright assignments to publishers."

I wonder if this has ever been invoked.

Clothes retailer Fatface: Someone's broken in and accessed your personal data, including partial card payment details... Don't tell anyone

At some point? Long overdue.

That they're spending too much on security and customer relations.

Did they do a proper job and send the emails cc to a few hundred customers?

'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries

"domestically built unmanned aircraft"

Much better suited to future UK armed forces staffing levels. There'll be enough Air Commodores to fly the RAF versions and enough Admirals to fly the Naval ones. Finding enough ground staff for servicing might by tricky.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

Re: When is he going to build a bridge

The real joke in all this is even considering Campbeltown peninsular to the north coast option. Avoid the ferry to Larne, take the ferry to Campbeltown and then the bridge.

Seriously, if they want to improve links with NI the first step is to improve the A75 to dual carriageway (I assume a full motorway would be out of the question) and without all those roundabouts on the Dumfries by-pass.

Re: Clueless

"especially the ERG who seem to be posh UKIP."

I assume the coronavirus research group who are now stirring things on the back benches are largely the same lot. At least he's discovering that what goes round comes round.

Is the NAO paying attention?

When the CEO thinks it inappropriate to tell the shareholders about his involvement in a major spending decision it's time to call in the auditors.

Re: Cheaper Skynet?

A rounding error.

Re: When is he going to build a bridge

I'm looking forward to him opening the NI Bridge, preferably from a pier built over the Beaufort Trench. Bridge opening and rocket launch combined.

Re: IT in Spaaaaaaace?

I think the established quote is "Pigs in Spaaaaace", and, given Miss Piggy's hairstyle, strangely appropriate.

Re: IT in Spaaaaaaace?

I suppose HMG doesn't want any closer scrutiny than that.

Defence Industrial Strategy suggests the UK is ready to start taking its homegrown infosec industry seriously

While the IDR was full of "Global Britain" bombast even as it slashed military budgets, headcounts, and equipment programmes

Sir Humphrey lives - "Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title"

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

Does this mean you'll no longer be able to smell Banbury from 10 miles away up the M40?

"Time to become more self-sufficient, people!"

Surely self-sufficiency would mean that you grew your own beans.

So long as tea isn't affected, no problem.

Everything you need to know about the HPE v Mike Lynch High Court case

Re: Not the end

"no class action has been taken by HPE shareholder's against the company and/or all those involved."

Perhaps they realised there'd be nobody to pay any damages except themselves.

Did the carousel arrangements apply anywhere other than in the US - where Brent Hogenson, has been given immunity for any part he may have played in them?

BP Chargemaster's Pulse rebrand let crims send IcedID banking trojan from formerly legit mailboxes

Re: "Please look at the file attached. It must be interesting."

"Their marketing team should be flogged for that."

Only as a preliminary to more severe punishment.

Re: where did they get list of targets from?

I wouldn't assume that the server in question was ever a BP asset. It could have belonged to some service company sending emails on BP's behalf.

Re: Inevitable?

"It's worth noting though that spoofing of the arbitrarily rewritable FROM field is much more common, extremely easy, and seems to be very effective."

Effective not least because so many businesses get marketing firms to send emails "from" them so even those who do check the actual origins of emails are likely to accept them.

Please stop leaking your own personal data online, Indonesia's COVID-19 taskforce tells citizens

Put the QR code on the back of the certificate - it it's really needed at all.

So, where does Silicon Valley stand on S.230? Zuck wants 'industry best practices', Pichai demurs, Dorsey urges more Bluesky thinking

So the key is an adequate means of achieving the impractical - or did I miss something?

Guilty: Sister and brother who over-ordered hundreds of MacBooks for university and sold the kit for millions

"Implausible."

Not in a University.

Somebody never heard of asset registers.

Re: Why is the second part of:

Because there's more where that came from.

Workday bets big on staff coming back to the office by splurging $172.5m on HQ and five more Bay Area buildings

"a great culture and an inspired workforce"

Yes, he's an HR man through and through. It's easier to insult your staff's intelligence if they're in the office.

Whatever 'normal' is, global CEOs don't expect to see it return before 2022 and are ploughing funds into security

Re: The world has gone mad

Yes, twats are indeed spreading this crap. But is it entirely twatishness or are the twats being used by somebody? It has real-world effects in that there are now reports that vaccine uptake is being affected by the nonsense* about the Oxford/A-Z vaccine even whilst a 3rd wave is on the rise in Europe. Who's pulling FF's strings?

* Yes, the statistics say it's nonsense. Even without the statistics allowing a dubious and remote risk to out-weigh a much larger, real risk is still nonsense.

Re: The world has gone mad

Qui bono indeed.

Who benefits from the damaging garbage people like you spew?

Whatever "normal" or "new normal" turns out to be nobody can argue that spending on security isn't due. Well over-due in many cases. Or even too late.

LINE stops data flowing to China after Japanese officials ditch app over privacy concerns

We've seen decades of start-up activity which has increasingly built a tradition of needing nothing more than a basic idea and maybe the ability to put a proof of concept together because everything else can be out-sourced. The out-sourcing has become the norm so that its inherent risks are ignored. If you're only thinking beyond the basic idea the only way to learn about the rest is going to be the hard way.

Eventually there'll be enough business failures to get the lessons taught in business schools and the MBAs in the VCs might start looking more carefully at these aspects of the start-ups they're asked to support. Until then it's the blind leading the blind and even afterwards there'll be some new category of risks the business schools haven't caught up with yet.

"Thankfully, there has been no major change in the number of users,"

Is that because the word's only just getting out?

Bell Labs transfers copyright of influential ‘Plan 9’ OS to new foundation

Re: Alot of that...

"Support for a whole raft of technology and services takes up alot of space...including stacks to cope with unpopular tech."

The difficulty with this line of argument is that nobody wants or needs the whole set of things a modern operating system is asked to support but the subsets people do need and want can be important. Dropping them is why we find crucial and expensive pieces of technology, for instance in medical applications, dependent on out-of-date and vulnerable versions of Windows and out of production generations of computer to run it.

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

If the remnant board remains obdurate I suppose the next logical step is to call a further EGM to vote on a motion of no confidence in the board. No doubt the remnant will have worked that out for themselves. The remaining question is whether they think they could defeat that.

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

Re: Un-named company

"Anyway, his employer is named if you really want to know."

Not enough to set up a LinkedIn account.

Re: No excuse for the criminal... or the company

What about the situation when you take the car to be serviced, hand the keys to the service station and they leave the car unlocked?

When someone leaves your firm, even if they're not leaving under a cloud, don't you close down all their access, iIncluding, in situations like this, any access they may have had to clients' systems?

The kids aren't all right: Fall in GCSE compsci students is bad news for employers and Britain's future growth plans

It's not a matter of engineers looking down the nose at support staff. It's the problem that policy is being made by people who don't know the difference.

One of the interesting points in the article is that post-secondary education, apprenticeships and degree courses, are actually getting more candidates. If they're doing well and the school courses aren't then it shouldn't be too hard to work out where something's going wrong.

Re: Never been a better time or a lower bar for entry.

I don't thing that, despite a few name changes, those offices and the people who work in them have undergone an radical improvement for well over half a century.

Re: Drones

I suppose one solution would be separate schools, one sort to take the "fick and praaad of it" and one to take those who want to learn. Maybe it should be tried.

Re: What?

Creating a new folder and saving to that is left as an exercise for the manager's PA.

FTFY

One of the problems with maths - to some extent with all subjects but more, I think with maths than most - is that teachers (hopefully) have an aptitude for their subject and find it difficult to comprehend that those who don't are actually having trouble with the subject and aren't just being lazy or deliberately obstructive.