Posts by Doctor Syntax 42408 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"otherwise functioning companies going to the wall. Some of them very large companies."
That shouldn't be a necessary cost to get the message through but maybe it is. Some will take notice if it's made illegal. Some will take notice when the first one goes to the wall. Some will catch on later. And for some there will be no hope anyway.
On the subject of Microsoft, their mail software and online services, how is it that the one category of scam spam they regularly fail to stop is that which claims to be from themselves warning that some mail service will stop working if I don't click on some link? Two this morning, apparently almost identical apart from the headlines, following closely on a couple of others in the past few days. Announcements that I've won this or that, and other unbelievable offers regularly get trapped but any cams claiming to come from Microsoft sail straight through.
On reflection I think this comment I made the other day applies here:
It raises the usual questions about top management:
Do they believe what they say?
Do they believe we'll believe what they say?
Do they think we won't care even when we don't believe what they say?
Do they care whether we care when we don't believe what they say?
None of the alternatives show them up in a good light but I've never been able to determine which is the case given that the only external evidence is that they keep spouting bollocks that only an idiot would believe.
On further reflection I've realised that quotes like this aren't directed at anyone who knows the difference between a shift key, a shift lock key and a control. They're aimed at the execs of the councils involved and any stray councillors who take an interest, the sorts of people who'd be equally likely to spout such bollocks. To adapt the BBC's motto "Management shall spout bollocks unto management".
It gets worse.
report@phishing.gov.uk replies to reports with a number of links, mostly to various NCSC sites but also including Action Fraud and usually buried well down the bottom of the reply - too far down to even see without scrolling on my browser. But earlier this month they started including a prominently placed link to a 3rd party survey. Really?
I'd like to think it was really to some site designed to discourage clicking on stray links but more likely they actually thought a 3rd party to a survey didn't look at all suspicious.
"We take security and all matters of data protection extremely seriously. After identifying a potential vulnerability with one of our systems,"
Identifying such a noob vulnerability after the event once it's been pointed out and then describing it as "potential" says a great deal about what they mean by "extremely".
Given that the members are registrars, very much part of that critical infrastructure, they know at least as much as Mr Wood about operating it. Directors approved of by those members should be relied on to run it properly unless events prove otherwise. The fact that the members, given their background, did not approve of the existing directors should tell any government watching the situation closely all they need to know.
A slightly different option - they can make one free release of S/W to be run locally reproducing the existing feature set. They can then operate a subscription model for releases to add extra features or provide any extra services. That should please customers who cease to be dependent on Cricut for anything further. Assuming they can make a sufficiently attractive offer for subscriptions they may make more money that way but in any case they'll have freed themselves from the ongoing cloud costs.
In the meantime their customers may have learned a useful lesson: if what you paid for upfront depends on a "free" cloud service to keep running then either its a badly thought out business model or a scam and, from the customers' point of view the outcome will be the same.
Let's not forget JStor. Back in the day a friend produced a very cheap (I'm not sure how it was produced but certainly not letter-press) archaeological magazine/journal. I wrote a few articles for it. I find that JStor have picked up copies, scanned then and now have them pay-walled. They weren't even the publishers. They certainly don't have my permission and my friend died tragically young, before the web let alone JStor was even thought of so they couldn't have had his either.
Years ago I was in a society that published an archaeological journal. In its area it was the main journal in its area. It was where the local professionals would expect to publish. This was back in the days when the author's manuscript had to be type-set, no getting the author to provide a formatted publication-ready MS.
We produced an annual volume with several excavation reports and other significant articles. We did this without the aid of any large publisher and all for an affordable annual subscription out of which we also ran monthly meetings for most of the year. Nowadays the production costs are even less. It's become a racket.
This morning it was working well. It clearly wasn't put together by the usual crowd. The only annoying thing was that with the longer pages trying to navigate down a list of radio buttons to the Save and Continue button by down arrows flipped the selection down to the next box.
I've got one like that. A childless couple took in the husband's nephew. In a society of small farms and no welfare society except the parish poor relief or, later, the workhouse, a family depended on the next generation to take over the load. Sometimes it was a middle or younger son. The deal seems to have been that that son would be the one who inherited the farm; older son(s) would marry and be set up with their own farm. I've even seen a will which mentioned an indenture which seemed likely to have been a formal agreement on those lines. It can show up as a late marriage. That happened with my 5x great-grandfather's family where one son remained unmarried until the father died (and then married very soon after) although even younger sons had married. Sometimes it went wrong. Same 5x ggfather's only younger brother was clearly the intended as the successor but died a few months before 6x ggfather. The vicar's Latin inscription in the burial register showed that even he was upset by the turn of events.
