Posts by Doctor Syntax

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

Re: Bootnote

Do you know whether any of this entirely random collection of letters is a security clearance? And this? And this? ....

Any one used to dealing with historic census returns learns to treat the answers with a degree of caution. It's not unusual to find a couple in their 50s or 60s with daughters aged about 30 and 2. I also recall one family who lived on the canals who were always, it seems, born wherever it was they were moored at the time of the census. And the 1841 census has a 5 year old Queen Caroline.

Responses on other official documentation can be equally misleading. I recently came across one man who declared himself as "Gentleman" on his marriage register but three years later was a gamekeeper.

Re: UK Law

Maybe but I doubt those organisations' HR/Establishments offices are breaking the law.

If working as a contractor I'd have thought the correct answers of the contracting company's name and the individual's job title within the company ought to be satisfactory for the MoD. BAE/Senior Engineer or Capita/Hell Desk Slave don't give too much away.

Being asked to rate fake news may help stop social media users sharing it, study finds

People get paid to write for the tabloids.

Re: Pointless.

In practical terms it depends on the actual numbers who quit and who stay.

"Although misinformation is nothing new, the topic gained prominence in 2016 after the US Presidential Election and the UK's Brexit referendum, during which entirely fabricated stories (presented as legitimate news) received wide distribution via social media,"

Yes, entirely fabricated stories presented as legitimate news happened well before that in whatever paper BoJo was writing for at the time.

Crims with ties to Tesla and SpaceX 'fess up to computerized conspiracies

SpaceX engineer named James Roland Jones - aka “Millionaire Mike” - has pled guilty to insider trading.

ISTR that his boss had a run-in with TPTB about making financially significant statements.

Swiss security provocateur who leaked Intel secrets indicted by US authorities

authorities have quickly moved to rule out free speech as a defence.

The DoJ’s announcement features a canned quote from Acting U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman, to the effect that: “Stealing credentials and data, and publishing source code and proprietary and sensitive information on the web is not protected speech–it is theft and fraud”.

I'm not sure an AG's view, Acting or not, counts as ruling out a defence. That's the judge's prerogative.

DARPA picks Intel to automate conversion of FPGAs into ASICs for military applications

What's in a name?

"Structured Array Hardware for Automatically Realized Applications program – aka project SAHARA"

That's the tricky bit done. Getting a cool project name is essential for the CV.

Windows 10 Insider build fixes the fix it sent out to fix the fix that broke printing? Afraid not, but here's a new Notepad icon

It's catching

I read the same thing yesterday in a review of the latest KDE Plasma. So long as they haven't broken the alternative cascading menus it'll be OK, otherwise I'm not looking forward to it landing in a distro I use. Why do UI developers insist on fixing what isn't broken and leave the irritants in place? (In KDE's case, restore the ability to specify using just the corner to unhide a panel that was removed in KDE 4.)

PSA: If you're still giving users admin rights, maybe try not doing that. Would've helped dampen 100+ Microsoft vulns last year – report

Re: A critical but overlooked matter

Add mail clients to that, thanks to numpties who want to sent HTML mails or don't know how or why not to.

Keep track of what the policy is costing the business. Make sure those costs are reported up the chain so senior management gets to see them.

"Let's assume a particular market sector of "subject to the GDPR"; because how are you controlling and securing data access if your letting home users store the data on their personal equipment?"

How do you control the salesman who has all his contacts written down in his private notebook "just in case"? Because that is also as much a potential breach of GDPR as having it on a personal laptop or personal phone. Data is data whatever its physical representation.

Re: Why do I need admin rights? Well, because of IT

"The shoemaker's children and all that..."

Alternatively, "Eating your own dog-food". This might be the service they provide to customers. If the manglement can't see what's wrong with the service they provide to themselves they're not going to see what's wrong with the service they sell.

Re: Better idea.

If I wanted. But it's not how email should work by default, is it? It's style over substance marketroids and the like who made HTML email a thing. A better solution would be to bounce it all and let the offenders learn. There is absolutely no reason why email should be sent in HTML. None.

Re: Why do I need admin rights? Well, because of IT

It sounds as if your IT is either outsourced or lining itself up to be outsourced whether it intends that or not. In-house IT staff, and especially manglement, need to realise that it's what the rest of the company does that pays their wages and that it's in their own interests to make sure that they support that fully.

An IT department that's so disconnected that it might as well be in India is likely to find itself out on the street and replaced by one that is in India. Getting out of the the office/cubes and going to talk to some of the users is a Good Idea.

Re: Better idea.

Macs and mail! I occasionally receive emails which appear to be blank or allegedly include images which I can't see. Then I realise they're from Mac or iGadget users and have defaulted to sending HTML mail that's partly or entirely invisible to a mail client that's set up to be secure, i.e. expect plain text.

Re: Surely there must be a better way to do this

There is. It's an IT dept that's in-house, not out-sourced, and properly managed so that staff realise that they're actually an integral part of the company and keeping the company secure and productive is essential to paying their wages.

Northern Ireland hands deal worth up to £87m to Fujitsu: Now keep our 15-year-old Oracle HR system up and running

I wonder just how far back the origins of the system go. It might well descend from something running on ICL kit and ICL had enough NI manufacturing to be looked on as a local company to be supported. In that case Fujitsu could have inherited it along with any other worthwhile bits of ICL.

Re: "a transfer of intellectual property rights"

The clue's in the article: "The current contractor has acquired the intellectual property and know-how to maintain and develop the system over the last 15 years to reflect the varying requirements of the NICS departments and their associated bodies."

Big problem: Nominet members won't know how many votes they're casting in decision to oust CEO, chair

Perhaps Companies House should be requested to send along an observer.

Ofcom says no price controls on full-fibre broadband until 2031, giving BT's Openreach the kick to 'build like fury'

Not just lose the internet, lose your phone as well.

Re: £1.70 more ... justified due to the speed and reliability fibre offers over copper

I take it you're expecting the fibre to be provided for free by the manufacturer along with the equipment and to be installed for free by people working just for the sheer joy of it.

Re: Meanwhile in the real world...

And meeting the vocal calls by those who already have an urban service of FTTC to get that choice means that the rural roll-out will falter.

Missile systems software dev leaker has sentence almost doubled after UK.gov says 4½ years was too soft

Re: "The sentence for refusing to hand over his password was increased to 2½ years"

"The guy sounds like a bit of a dick"

The guy sounds as if he might have mental health problems.

California bans website 'dark patterns', confusing language when opting out of having your personal info sold

Unfortunately this seems to be set up so that DPAs only act on complaints and even then they're probably limited by resources. They need to be pro-active and to be able to finance additional operations out of the fines.

Re: adding unnecessary steps purely for the sake of legal compliance

"And companies still want to flog their wares"

So why do they persist in pissing off potential customers by shoving unwanted ads in those potential customers' faces?

Actually I know some of the answers to that. 1. The advertising industry is very good at selling adverts to punters, especially those who think they're such special snowflakes that the populace will actually want those ads shoved in their faces. 2. The advertising industry has willing collaborators in marketing departments whose status is determined by their advertising budget (or vice versa).

'Business folk often don't understand what developers do...' Twilio boss on the chasm that holds companies back

Ah, yes, low-code and no-code. But will they be the Last One?

OVH says burned data centre’s UPS, batteries, fuses in the hands of insurers and police

Re: UPS in the data centre?

Just as well nobody dug a trench across the car park.

Microsoft fixes the thing it broke via another dose of out-of-band patching to deal with BSOD printing problems

"It is unclear how Microsoft has managed to break printing in Windows 10 once again, less than a year since the last time it did so."

As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. With a little more practice they'll be able to manage it every month.

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

I suppose there's a grin of truth in what he says. If the company isn't being run in accordance with company law then the relevant govt. body, Companies House might take an interest. Of course the exact nature of that interest could depend on whose actions are responsible for it not being run in accordance with company law.

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.

He's worked out how to make a cushy billet out of Nominet.

Re: I'm pondering how bad "government control" would really be

Now that really would be a threat - if he gets pushed out Harding might be put in to replace him.

US govt indicted me because I make privacy tools, says crypto-chat app CEO accused of helping drug smugglers

What may well give rise to suspicion is running an expensive service and providing modified equipment. But to go further than that needs evidence of conspiracy. Offering over-priced goods and services is not in itself a criminal conspiracy. Were it otherwise I'm sure we could all think of many businesses both inside and outside the IT industry who'd be in line for prosecution.

The question here is whether they have evidence of a conspiracy or does the US system allow indictment on suspicion alone as well as allowing indictment of someone who's not even within their jurisdiction?

Re: So tomorrow Signal, Telegram?

I misread that as Telcos which is even more pertinent. Should all the telcos be shut down because we might mutter something criminal or subversive into our phones?

Re: So tomorrow Signal, Telegram?

"Do you understand the difference between assumption and fact?"

Do you? Let's start with some of the basics. Everyone is assumed to be innocent until proved guilty by due process of law.

Do you think that rule exists to protect the guilty? If so, you're wrong. It exists to protect the innocent. If you set it aside then we're all at risk.

You may argue that it makes it hard work to proceed against criminals. I know, I was one of those working hard at it. Nevertheless, that's the way it should be.

Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke

Re: Change control is good - when it is properly controlled

I remember installing DecNet S/W on an HP-UX box to communicate with a VAX. DecNet packet addressing was based on the assumption that all the NICs were Dec and so had the same MSBs. in the MAC. In order to work the S/W changed the HP MAC to look like a Dec with no warning. This rendered all the users' caches invalid and broke their connections. Fortunately this was in the days of character-based applications with client and RDBMS running on the same box so there were no database connections broken and the user PCs caught up with the change of address pretty quickly.

Re: The good old days when management believed everything

Hi might not have been S.H.I.T. but did you get S.H.O.T. of him?

Re: Documentation

"a comment in the config file"

In the world of point and click what's a config file?

Re: Experience is the best teacher

OTOH - trying to get through to management that the system was designed to set up new products through a proper user interface that stitched everything together properly and not via a list of instructions for the DBAs to execute individual SQL statements that required CC clearance.

Documentation

Was there documentation of the set up? Documentation of why things were done this way? Even more important, why things were not done that way? Or did ne not bother to read it?

OVH says some customer data and configs can’t be recovered after fire, some seems to be OK, plenty is safe

Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

"No real problem when you're ... simply replicating transactions to a standby system"

The real problem is getting it past the bean-counters. "We're paying how much for this? And you want to pay the same again for another one just in case?"

Remember that this was all too often sold on the basis that it makes problems like this go away. Of course all it does is make them just go out of sight.

Third time's a harm? Microsoft tries to get twice-rejected encoding patent past skeptical examiners

A simple solution. Challenge to granted patents is taken out of patent offices' hands but any patent successfully challenged by negligence of a patent office results in the office being responsible for all the challengers' costs and damages resulting from any lost income.

Just watch the number of successful patent applications fall.

'No' does not mean 'yes'... unless you are a scriptwriter for software user interfaces

Re: Pedantry

It depends on whether you're making your selection on political grounds.

Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Re: Football Fields

When something I recognise is quoted in football fields my reaction, should I be interested enough to have one, is along the lines of "so that's the size of a football field".

Stability of standards is essential. Thank goodness nobody has tried to eat Wales.

We can't avoid it any longer. Here's a story about the NFT mania... aka someone bought a JPEG for $69m in Ether

Re: Blockchain 0, Mona Lisa 1?

"a thing is worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it."

HP wish to dispute that.

Talk about a Blue Monday: OVH outlines recovery plan as French data centres smoulder

"Clue: it's not the hosting company."

No, just all those who made reassuring noises about "the cloud".