Posts by Doctor Syntax

A Twitter world-improvement plan that doesn't involve deleting Twitter? Unleash the boffins, says microblogging biz

There must be material for a ton of psychology PhD projects in there on mustual self-delusion.

Today's 'sophisticated cyber attack' victim is the Woodland Trust: Pre-Xmas breach under investigation

"If it is ransomware, the attack goes to show that no organisation, no matter how innocuous, is off-limits"

Early victims weren't even organisations. They were individuals such as me cousin-in-law who got hit with an email apparently from a friend. Fortunately that wasn't a sophisticate one - it simply deleted the original files instead of overwriting them.

But it just illustrates that any organisation, however unlikely a target it might think itself, needs a defence in depth.

We regret to inform you the professor teaching your online course is already dead

Producing a distance learning package, e.g. the OU courses, there'll be a lead time to get the course material together. It'll then be expected to run for several years before being scheduled for replacement. There'll be some amount of probability that one of the authors will die or at least retire before the course EOL arrives. A traditional University course is a live event. A distance learning course is a product; it may have to outlive one of its originators.

UK Cabinet Office spokesman tells House of Lords: We're not being complacent about impact of SolarWinds hack

"According to many of the interviews of immunologists I've heard on the BBC, there is evidence that in general a longer gap between the first and second inoculations of vaccines produces a stronger immune response in the end."

I believe the BMA have been arguing the opposite.

"While this is possible, the question is how do you deal with a limited supply of vaccine?"

What's being planned for is a steady ramping up of supply and delivery capabilities. One consequence of this is that at any particular time the number of people vaccinated four weeks ago is a small proportion of the current capability.

"It's the politicians' jobs to look at these outcomes and decide which ones they would prefer to head for."

Their preference is all too often the one that wishful thinking points them towards.

"Historically this would have taken weeks or months but is being done in days or sometimes even hours."

The one thing that's certain about epidemics is that time always counts against you. If the doubling time is 3 to four days and you take a week to decide your problem is already four times as big and it will stay that way until you finally get on top of it - which is, of course, already four times harder to do.

I'm conflicted on this one. SWMBO & myself have both had our vaccinations. That wouldn't have happened yet if HMG hadn't decided to stretch the interval between first & second doses. I can't see any scientific basis for stretching that - the clinical trials didn't look at this so there's no evidence that it won't lead to less effective immunity overall. However they obviously realised that having more people wit limited immunity results in less pressure on the NHS and, at lest in the short term, fewer deaths than would be the case if fewer people had better immunity.

The trade-off personally is that we're going to be in this intermediate state sooner at the expense of being in it for longer. The risks might be off-set if the vaccines protect against being infectious; fewer people in an infectious state reduces our risks but it's not yet known if it has this benefit.

Inevitably there'll be a percentage of people who've had a single dose taking more risks over a longer period and consequently some of them will catch COVID whilst waiting for their second dose and a few will die. That will have a perfectly foreseeable political impact but I doubt BoJo & Hancock will have looked that far ahead. It also risks having a lot of people with an even longer wait if there's any interruption to supply.

I can't imagine that this is anything more than political expediency over scientific advice.

"The only opinion that they’ve shown any interest in is that of the pollsters and the Murdoch press."

And a coterie of their back-benchers. I wonder how the members of that overlap with the back-benchers who brought is Brexit.

Once again it's up to the noble Lords to provide expertise that the Commons always seem to lack.

The scientists' role is to provide the best estimates of numbers on the basis of knowledge available at the current time. Ditto the economists. The decision as to how to react and combine the two is up to the government. And one of the worst attitudes to adopt is "It couldn't be as bad as that, could it?" which is why, after all the vacillating, we're in the hole that we are because it's led to reacting too late every time.

Re: Lord True

Lord True can become Lord False quite easily. It's just a matter of flipping a bit.

Or possibly your tax returns, your medical history, your DVLA record, your police record, any bank details you may have given a government dept. Ditto for the rest of your family. Nothing to worry about.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Re: I don't get it....

Dammit, I'm getting old and slow. I should have checked. This was mlupo's first post.

Re: I don't get it....

If it's RHEL next minor version how is it RHEL current?

Re: @mattdm - I don't get it....

LTS is bug-fixes only, not randomly dropped new features.

Re: I don't get it....

"I think you have a basic misunderstanding here. CentOS Stream 8 will never be significantly different from RHEL 8; CentOS Stream 9 will never be significantly different from RHEL 9. All updates headed for CentOS Stream are already approved to land in that major release of RHEL, with the same general rules about stability that RHEL holds to."

You seem to be misunderstanding what you wrote. If you get updates to 8 which are already approved for 9 then you're half-way between the two but are actually neither. Updates only in 9 are not 8. Stuff not yet updated to 9 is not 9.

It's not all bad. Your headline is correct.

""We're working on an FAQ which has all of the specifics. It gets into things like cores and other pieces"

Translation: Manglement didn't predict the predictable response so now we're making it up as we go.

Europe considers making it law that your boss can’t bug you outside of office hours

Back in forensic science days there was an occasional need for out of hours response to some major crime. My approach was that I'd not guarantee being on the end of a phone at any time (way before mobiles and we didn't have pagers either) but if I was then I'd come in unless it was impossible. It worked well enough.

Re: Soberish

You stop off at the pub on the way?

Re: WTD

Just make sure the time spent accounting for every 15 minutes is accounted for. While you're doing that make sure it includes time spent getting back into the zone after every interruption.

Re: WTD

Not suggesting it keeps within the law. Not suggesting doesn't stop it being career limiting.

Re: Standard interview questions...

"But it wasn't my problem."

It could have been the basis for negotiation.

Europe promises all-out assault on batteries to counter China’s lithium-ion domination

Re: Hmmmm

Cornwall. In Europe, just not in the EU.

Meanwhile, we're going to have to duplicate all this in the UK if we want to export UK-built EVs to the EU. IiRC HMG has already promised we'd be the leading place in the world for this which means that we don't stand a chance.

Dynamic Data do-over denied: Judge upholds $7m patent infringement claim against Microsoft

It would have to have been pending a long, long time given that there was S/W automatically building user interfaces decades before that.

Re: Didn't...

90s? Informix was doing this in the 80s. I wrote an application to generated the 4GL code to use the interface as did a number of other people.

Oh, of course, this is on the web. Naturally that makes all the difference. What's obvious to anybody skilled in the art with character-based interfaces requires a unique inspiration to achieve on the web.

Google, Apple sued for failing to give Telegram chat app the Parler put-down treatment

Re: Shooting the messenger

Don't forget snail mail. Remove all the post boxes.

Re: @tfwwster

Given that FB, to the maximum extent of their ability, seem determined to be a law unto themselves. I don't think I'd want to take anything they do as an indication of how things should be done.

Dear team: Please work hard in 2021. I’d help, but I’m in jail. Yours, the boss of Samsung

Re: Organic?

Diamonds and graphite are not organic. Neither is sodium bicarbonate.

US cyber intelligence officer jailed for kidnapping her kid, trying to hawk top secrets to Russia in Mexico

Re: Budget Snowden

I wonder if what she was trying to achieve was keeping the daughter. The stash of information might just have been accumulated over the years because she was a hoarder and then she realised it might have been the means to get her out of the US with the child.

I was targeted by North Korean 0-day hackers using a Visual Studio project, vuln hunter tells El Reg

WTF

"Opening some Visual Studio projects can cause code to execute"

What's a COVID-19 outbreak? Amazon gets all Trumpy over Alabama warehouse workers' mail-in vote to form a union

Re: Watching the watchers

"Part of the problem is that unions don't have a much better reputation than the employers."

That was certainly my relatively brief experience of unions. The small union representing scientists in the Civil Service seemed to have got together with the larger unions to shaft their members in a situation not dissimilar to this: https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-01-26 I don't know if this is still the case but wouldn't be surprised if it is.

The last straw was calling us out on a one-day strike in support of what turned out to have been somebody else's negotiations. I think it cost them most of their membership in our department. They refused to publish a colleagues resignation letter in their magazine (which I'd never even seen) on the basis that they didn't publish letters from non-members.

It may well be that Amazon employees could benefit from a union but it would be unwise to assume that it'll always be on their side. From Amazon's PoV it would be unwise to ignore a reasonably open vote from their membership irrespective of how it's conducted; the feelings that prompt the vote aren't going to go away.

No cards, thanks, we're contactless-less: UK supermarket giants hit by card payment TITSUP*

Morrisons contactless worked today for me.

Biden said to be assembling cyber dream team to sort out US govt computer security

Re: Network security

And how many even need to be accessible from most of those inside? But it's soooo much more convenient if they are.

Re: About time

It goes further than that. Those whose job is snooping seem quite lax about their own security. You'd at least expect them to be careful about that, but, no, all those exploits somehow got leaked as Eternal Blue.

AI clocks first-known 'binary sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system'. Another AI will be along shortly to tell us how to pronounce that properly

Re: nice sunset, shame the planet just pulled itself to bits.

But just think of working out when to put the clocks back & forward.

Google AI ethics co-boss locked out of work account while probing controversial ousting of colleague

Rabbit? Shudder.

Boned. That's the step our old Halls of Residence caterers left out. What they put on the plate was a mass of ribs and other bones lightly wrapped in meat. Once a term IIRC. Their other termly disaster was their thermosetting cauliflower cheese.

Re: Ethics

More to the North Eatht, thurely?

Re: That's Not Very Good Is It!

"I anticipate lots of crashes!"

Only on the mornings that it starts.

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

From Google's PoV anything that isn't Chrome is a security hole.

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Elon - is that you?

Re: It's my first day ;)

Firstly, a lot of fraud etc. is from insiders. The assumption isn't that you are hostile but that you could be, albeit with a low probability.

Secondly, what the user does might not be intentional. The user might be hit with malware.

Maybe you haven't worked anywhere where security is taken seriously although that's not surprising as it seems to be a rare thing. My final contract was with a site where the lan was properly segmented so that there was no chance of the secure data we were handling leaking into the office systems. It made sorting out errors in the incoming a bit inconvenient but that's what happens when you refuse to trade security for convenience, maybe something Tesla should have a think about.

Re: Investigator?

Either that or it's something you do with a sharp knife.

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

You can speficy all you like. If somebody at the bottom of the pecking order in the supplier uses the wrong image - by accident or design - your spec won't be met. You need something else - User Acceptance Testing.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Re: The neutral doesn't join up with anything on the switch!

"Tip: If you are in the UK and need a 230 V socket that can't have anything unexpected plugged in, use something like the MK ones with the 'T' shaped earth pin."

What you usually want to ensure is that you don't want whatever you plugged in to get unplugged and by the time the cleaner's discovered your incompatible socket it's too late. The better version would be to ensure the cleaners are equipped with the T plug so that nothing important gets plugged into the sockets they want.

On the topic of cleaner-mediated outages there was a report the other day that in the US a cleaner unplugged one of the ultra-low temperature freezers with sever thousand Pfizer doses in it.

Parsing error.

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

Re: what the fuck is wrong with using the key, anyway?

I had a Subaru with a very warn key. One day I reached down to turn the engine off and the key wasn't there. I had worked out & fallen on the floor. After that I realised that on a cold day I could start the engine, take out the key, get out and lock the door so that the car could warm up without leaving the car vulnerable to theft.

Re: Oh dear!

"I'd have to find the keyhole first"

At Winter Hill in the winter your first problem might be finding the car.

Re: Smart heating system?

Is this a chest freezer thing? Our upright freezer has an alarm that tells if the temperature has gone up too far. Last consulted at the beginning of December lockdown when a power cut in mid morning lasted well into the early hours. Fortunately we still have gas fires and a gas hob so still had one form of heating and cooking. It was a reminder that going all-electric (and that includes trendy heat pumps) creates a single point of failure.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

The DIA has a point: why should they be denied what's commercially available? A better point would be why should what they're denied by commercially available?