Posts by Doctor Syntax

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Re: Too late

Yup. That battle is well lost.

My current annoyance is "gift" as a verb. No, the verb is "give". "Gift" refers to that which is given. I think it must be something to do with lack of confidence in using an irregular verb.

Pressure builds on Nominet as members demand to know leadership's contingency plans for when they’re fired

"Does anybody know if there is a government regular who has oversight of Nominet?"

As a they're a company, Companies House would have oversight in relation to company law.

Re: How did we get here?

I think it's called "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine".

Have the board got round to organising a mob on Parler to invade the meeting if the vote goes against them?

Homo sapiens: Hey you, Neanderthals! Neanderthals: We heard that

The region of 3–5kHz is associated with the production of high-frequency consonants such as the voiceless plosives (in the English "p", "t" and "k") and the fricatives (eg, the English letters "f", "s" and "th").

Sima de los Huesos with a median of 2.8kHz - better adapted to Estuary English, then.

Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon – and future version may insist on some updates

Currently running Mint 20.1 whilst waiting for the next Devuan. Not, however, running Cinnamon. It does very nicely with KDE. I wonder if Mint have whought about batching up updates with a bit less granularity. Two lots in the day is a bit much and I can visualise users deciding to hold off for a few days in case there are a few more in the pipeline.

Re: -Update Manager

"I've had to remove Pulseaudio in Kubuntu in order to get sound - perhaps I should rant at the devs? No, a bug has been reported"

Knowing Pulseaudio's provenance it'll probably get marked WONTFIX.

Re: "In a few of them it might even insist."

I didn't think you used Mint, Jake. Aren't you on Slackware?

Linus Torvalds went six days without electricity, swears smaller 5.12 kernel is co-incidental

Re: Wonder which part of Portland he's in...

It'll get progressively more difficult to find fuel for any internal combustion engine as the last generation of ICE vehicles dies out. The govt really wants to phase out any from of gas-fired heating as well. If you have the ground level footprint for a heat pump you can have that but it won't work in a power cut.

The usual rules will apply: govts will plough ahead with whatever the ruling pressure groups demand until some disaster requires a change. Even then the pressure groups will insist it wasn't their fault, How many greens can you find who'll admit that opposition to nuclear has resulted in several decades during which far more CO2 has been shoved up power station chimneys than would have otherwise have happened?

Re: Wonder which part of Portland he's in...

"Managed to get by with an open log fire and my generator."

Lucky you. If HMG gets its way both of those will become illegal in the UK. Sitting and freezing to death in the event of a power cut will be allowed.

Palantir and UK policy: Public health, public IT, and – say it with me – open public contracts

Re: Trust but verify?

"unless you have significantly more financial clout than they have"

The financial clout lies in offering the contract. If the contractor wants the job then they accept the conditions.

You might rely that a contractor who's big enough might turn down the contract. But contractors don't get big by repeatedly turning down contracts.

Re: Nope, COVID-19 is not a catch-all excuse for backdoor deals

"make them legally accountable for the promises they make"

Or to quote a previous PM: "Events, dear boy, events". Exactly what promises do you think the present government or opposition would have made in relation to dealing with a novel coronovirus before the last election? Or should the first reaction of a government to any unexpected event be to resign and call an election so that each party can make its promises as to how they'd deal with it?

Re: Nope, COVID-19 is not a catch-all excuse for backdoor deals

"And to eliminate the problem of MPs not bothering because they're in a Safe Seat."

Take a look at the N Ireland situation. Most seats held on the basis of the constituency religious demographic.

"Require all government ministers to be elected MPs"

And who is then to be govt. spokesman in the HoL? They need to be represented in both places. Personally I'd give the HoL more powers but insist that a substantial proportion of them are ex officio as presidents or the like of various chartered bodies such as the various Royal Colleges of $MedicalSpeciality, Royal Society, Institute of $ScientificOr EngineeringSpeciality.

Please can we have a means of upvoting articles. In lieu of that, please assume you have 10 of mine, Rupert.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

Re: Well you won't find me...

"being a North East Coast native"

How dare you!

"Just because some people have corrupted the English language, doesn't mean we should all fall to their level!"

Absolutely. There's more than a suggestion of Doctor Johnson's "So you looked for them." about all this.

"How is grandfather racist? Sexist/gender biased I can accept, but racist?"

It's also ageist which I thought was not only allowed but compulsory amongst these types.

"placeholder data" instead of "dummy data" - Again, no issue with this, though "test data" is shorter

Not a good substitute. A placeholder could simply be an empty field. It doesn't even have to look like data which dummy data has to. Test data may be a substitute but again it depends what you're testing for. If you're testing for data validation or sanitisation* the test data will include out of spec data. Dummy data probably wouldn't.

* Are we allowed to say sanitisation? We probably can't say sanity checks. Can we even say validation or is that being too judgemental?

Copper broadband phaseout will leave UK customers with higher bills and less choice, says comparison site

And however tech aware they are they'll have to hope they have a mobile signal and, contrary to sod's law, a charged up phone to ring in to report a power failure.

"After all you don't get a new line every time you switch electricity provider so why should you depend on a particular mobile provider having THEIR mast near you so you can use the damn thing."

The physical electricity network is run by a single provider in each area. Ditto for gas.

If the same vendor independence were to apply to provision of mobile service then it's likely that the same thing would have to be done with the masts. I suppose it's possible that the threat of that would lead then to offer a roaming arrangement instead but without at least moves to force a combination the present situation will remain.

And, as it's so often convenient for some people to forget, BT were confined to copper only for a long time when the newcomers were free to use other technologies. Oddly enough, out here in the Pennines there were no newcomers. They didn't, and still don't, like the idea of digging up roads which are solid rock under a few cm of blacktop.

First post, I see

Presumably it's your comms problems that prevented you posting on el Reg earlier.

Re: Copper won't get switched off for a long time, only WLR

The predictable consequence of diverting resources to FTTP where FTTC service already exists.

Re: Emergeny calls

"And why does SCADA, DCS, etc need gigabits/second to poll its RTUs in pumping stations or whatever?"

From a security point of view I'd have thought point to point connections were a distinct benefit for infrastructure installations. What's even the point of using IP if not to route it though a general network and open it up to possible breaches?

I'd have thought Flockton had enough problems being on an HVG rat-run between the M1 & Huddersfield without being robbed blind on telephone charges.

Re: Mobile to save the day?

"but a single person just wanting to do a bit of browsing is paying way over the odds if they need to pay for a fibre connection."

And even worse for a single person who just wants a phone. That's a phone that even works if you don't have mains available.

Apple, forced to rate product repair potential in France, gives itself modest marks

It's not unusual to find laptop service manuals downloadable so they have a point.

Not that that would help us in the UK except indirectly by pushing manufacturers in the right direction.

Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

This.

There's no point in self-assessment unless there's an objective standard for the assessment. The article doesn't mention if this is the case.

BOFH: 7 jars of Marmite, a laptop and a good time

Re: Bloody briliant episode again

Ir usually is.

UK minister tries to intervene after Government Digital Service migration mangles Ministry of Justice webpages

Re: Crossed swords with GDS

If there's a usable page without Javascript then why add any at all? As soon as someone decides to add it, even if they host it themselves, the temptation to just add this little dependency on some external snippet quickly follows. And then another. And one of those snippets drags in a whole lot from more 3rd party domains.

There's a reason we block Javascript. We don't trust it.

There must be a good chance of someone raising this as an issue in court as to why something hasn't been done properly. At that point I'd hope to see someone senior in GDS summoned before the court to explain themselves - with the possibility of a contempt charge hanging over them.

Re: Crossed swords with GDS

I think it's a law of averages thing - sometime they have to get something right.

Re: Why GDS has turned webpages into PDFs is a mystery

More like large whiteboard and very fine marker department.

Re: Why GDS has turned webpages into PDFs is a mystery

The real mystery is that anyone in gov.uk ever decided that their web pages were an aesthetic or functional improvement on anything.

Where gov.uk is concerned, assume incompetence. I doubt they're competent enough to be so malicious.

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

They're still not going to get the brokerage charges back. There'll likely be a VAT element to that but nothing more.

I wonder whether and how Tom voted. And all the other small business owners who are finding out the hard way about freeing the UK from EU red tape.

Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff

Re: Too late, trust has gone.

And damn-near impossible to restore.

Re: Stem the exodus?

"What did they think would happen?"

There's an implied assumption in that question.

Think?

Half a million stolen French medical records, drowned in feeble excuses

Re: Hacked and whacked

Now there's an idea. Inflate the data by an order of magnitude or so of junk. It would need a means of the system using it working out how to tell real from fake, of course but if it became standard practice it would devalue the hackers' product.

"Could it have been at that crucial, most vulnerable moment when unencrypted data was moved from the old system to a new one?"

Or when that old server was flogged off on eBay?

Re: Alistair, you have my sympathies

"I haven't had a full night's sleep in weeks"

Get used to it now. You'll have to as you get older and discover 400-500ml has become wildly optimistic.

Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

"The web was never designed to be secure."

It certainly wasn't designed to require all this insecure garbage.

Re: web developers

"But: the ICO is asleep on the job."

I don't think the ICO has the authority to check this on its own initiative, it probably needs a complaint. The next DPA needs to empower the ICO and feed enough fines money into their resources to allow them to do that.

Much the same thing with custom fonts. Why have them? They've been proven to be a feasible vector for malware. It's the crayon department mandating them but even the OP seems to accept they're OK if you host them yourself. That might be an even more dangerous option than letting Google police them.

Qualcomm under fire for 'anticompetitive' patent shenanigans causing pricey UK smartphones

"The Which? action does therefore carry a slight whiff of piggybacking about it"

Given that we can no longer benefit directly from any EU action and probably HMG isn't going to have the resources to take actions that the US or EU has then it's difficult to see how there could be an alternative.

Revealed: The military radar system swiped from aerospace biz, leaked online by Clop ransomware gang

At some point somebody is going to make a carefully worded offer for the "arrest" of one of these outfits which doesn't quite say "dead or alive" but which would be sufficiently carelessly worded to oblige them to pay up under the first alternative.

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

Re: Strongly discouraged

"So many questions, so many possible stupid answers, but no good ones."

I'm sure MS find the answer to be perfectly good: You want more storage? Buy a new machine.

IT contractor caught charging Uncle Sam expert rates for newbies, agrees to pay back $6m in settlement

Re: Working with outsourcers

Select the size of the provider carefully. Big enough to do the job but small enough to ensure they need you as a customer.

The key man clause is nothing to do with the supplier retaining or developing staff. It's all to do with the client protecting themselves against a supplier who might want to pull a bait and switch.