Posts by Doctor Syntax

Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

Re: Could they pick a better example than Firefox?

I'm not sure how much notice it takes of those settings. I just tried changing the search engine order - including trying commenting out the lot in hope it would stop it - with no effect at all.

Re: Could they pick a better example than Firefox?

Not to any great extent. It appears from the article that they looked at the versions of Firefox from Mint were visiting Yahoo. That means that the options were limited to browsers. It raises the question of whether Yahoo constitutes a representative sample of Mint users.

I avoid the mental strength to tackle Firfox updates by seldom using Firefox because of their interface; I only use it when I start to wonder how Firefox handles some problem site - or the problem site simply refuses to work without some named browser (not a good sign anyway).

I mostly use Seamonkey, which has relatively few updates and did roll back their latest version almost immediately as it had knackered the address groups interface.

SpaceX small print on Starlink insists no Earth government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

What does our resident Martian have to say about this?

Whistleblowers: Inflexible prison software says inmates due for release should be kept locked up behind bars

Re: High speed checks

"Given that sentences are only counted in days, how exactly does recalculating them multiple times per day help?"

It doesn't. All it means is that either (a) they run batch processes a couple of times a day (that counts as multiple) to process any changes that might have come in since the last batch or (b) they they process changes as they come in and there are normally two or more per day. Either way they're recalculating several times a day even if they're not recalculating them all. Presentation is everything.

Either that or they get a different answer every time they run the program.

"Beyond any automated sentence calculations, it is standard practice to review and validate sentence calculations manually to certify release dates."

So why did they buy this software in the first place if they continue to do the job manually?

Apache foundation ousts TinkerPop project co-founder for tweeting 'offensive humor that borders on hate speech'

Re: words fly away, writings remain.

Libel is its own evidence. For slander you need someone prepared to stand up in court to give evidence and can cross-examine them.

Chucking out one of the founders of your project who is also one of the domain experts is just asking to get forked. Assuming he cares enough - and if he no longer cares about it it doesn't show your project in too good a light.

Re: How even dare you to question identity politics and woke culture?

"That's how black and white politics has become"

Are you allowed to say that?

In reality what's at the root of this issue goes back some way beyond Trump. Society is going through one of its puritan phases. It happens.

Reactions happen too. At some point everyone will start pointing and laughing at the PC/Woke mob.

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

Re: "Consultancies" v. independents

"why is HMRC so keen on wiping out the individual independent consultants?"

Because their tax system is modelled on their world, a world of what the Japanese call the salaryman. It's a system devised by salaried employees for salaried employees. The notion that anyone would work - and prefer to work - on their own as a business, accepting the risks of trading as a business other than buying and selling things is beyond their comprehension. They can probably grasp that the solo plumber or sparky etc. who comes to fix things for them at home is doing that, otherwise they'd have to accept all the complications of being employers themselves but that's an exception.

Years ago the IR as they then were, predecessors of HMRC, obviously decided that they weren't going to let that game be played on them and inserted a "key man" clause in a standard contract for provision of services (note the plural - a contract of service, singular, is an employment contract, for services in the plural is a commercial B2B contract). This allowed them to specify that the supplier could not substitute part of the team without agreement from themselves as client. A sample contract was posted on their site. Under IR35, of course, such a clause is deemed to make the contract one of service. Somewhere along the line that standard contract get quietly removed from the site.

"as ever, the deal comes with no admitting of wrongdoing"

Of course not. How on Earth could anyone ever think Standard Industry Practice could be wrong?

Microsoft sides with media groups, together they urge Europe to follow Australia's lead, make Google, Facebook pay for news article links

Re: What a surprise

Or at least a touch of "My enemy's enemy is my friend".

The perils of non-disclosure? China 'cloned and used' NSA zero-day exploit for years before it was made public

Re: TL/dr

Sort of. But understanding what happened in the past should help you build expectations of what might be happening now and go looking for it.

Those who do not learn their history are condemned to repeat it.

Facebook and Australia do a deal: The Social Network™ will restore news down under and even start paying for it

Quite.

"without bringing about the change it was designed to create"

It depends on who designed it. The suspicion is that it may have succeeded depending on how free FB are to choose and what choices they make.

Nominet sets the date for extraordinary meeting where members could fire CEO

I wonder whether the terms of the notice take them into territory where a complaint to Companies House might result in an investigation.

Facebook and Apple are toying with us, and it's scarcely believable

What's needed is for governments to take a bit more interest in dealing with monopolies although in the case of mass media monopolies by the time they exist it's already too late. Academic publishing monopolies should certainly come under review, however.

Re: Point

"And if Rupert's girlfriend had been willing to wait for a month for the next container ship to dock at Felixstowe"

The whole promotion of this sort of thing is based on scarcity. If you let slip an indication that they're common as muck nobody wants one. The choice of being willing to wait for the next container to arrive to buy one doesn't exist. Either they're rare and therefore wanted RIGHT NOW!!!! or there are plenty here or on the way in which case nobody cares.

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

Re: Just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are

"It's not really about the links, but about the rich snippet that gets displayed alongside it on FB/Google News."

They have a trade-off. They can simply forbid indexing, then nothing gets seen. Obviously they reckon they have more to lose that way. Cake and eat it comes to mind.

Re: The problem is

This could be a learning opportunity for them. Especially "them" in the Australian govt. and those who tell it what to do.

Re: Just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are

I started reading your post thinking you were describing newspaper owners in general and Murdoch in particular. Although in general I'm not a fan of Facebook or Zuckerberg I think the greater threat comes form monopoly control of newspapers. The more important aspect of this row, however, isn't about monopolies, it's about the attempt to undermine the principle on which the web works: it links material together so if you put something out there expect it to be linked to. If you don't want links to it don't put it there. It's as simple as that. If you don't want it indexed there's a mechanism to prevent that, robots.txt, If people are copying and pasting material that is a different matter but AIUI it's about links and, frankly, if you don't want to have stuff linked to, don't put it there in the first place.

Forget GameStop: Keyboard warriors and electronic trading have never mixed well

"Who, me?"

Well, in this case, not you, "Dave" but whoever said it was OK to reboot.

But not doubt an issue of clean underwear for all concerned.

Malware monsters target Apple’s M1 silicon with ‘Silver Sparrow’

Re: This cannot be true!!!

"30,000 installs out of how many millions?"

I don't know but from the Red Canary article; "According to data provided by Malwarebytes, Silver Sparrow had infected 29,139 macOS endpoints" so the answer is however millions are running Malwarebytes AV on Macs which is presumably just a subset of the overall millions of Macs.

Re: Competitors Sowing the Seeds of FUD for Overcrowded Hostile Market Spaces

"Who are Red Canary?"

Rephrase thar:

whois redcanary.com

Creation Date: 1998-11-19T00:00:00Z

British govt emits fuzzy vision for UK version of American boffin special forces group Darpa

Re: Red tape

One of Sir Humphrey's principles: in order to reduce the size of the Civil Service you need more Civil Servants.

I assume the head of it will be known as "Q".

€121,000 YOGA Book Android is 'priced right' says Lenovo

Re: Out of stock or sold out?

The price was entered by an outsourced employee from Wipro then checked by a manager there and another at Citibank.

Citibank accidentally wired $500m back to lenders in user-interface super-gaffe – and judge says it can't be undone

Re: Isn't it the banks themselves....

"money transfers can't be undone"

The banks don't intend that to apply to their own errors.

Re: Double keying already used in some banking applications

"to detect intended falsification of information."

There's probably a lot more accidental then deliberate errors detected.

Re: Double keying already used in some banking applications

Citi bank do seem to care about their $500m, however.

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

2021 is census year in the UK

Just reflect on the work of a census enumerator. They'll be working from home. They may even do some of the work at home but a large part of it involves door to door work. "From" and "at" are not the same thing.

If you need to be involved later in a project you've not yet been told about then whoever's running the project is doing it wrong.

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

Re: It's important, really

"I cannot second that with enough vigor."

Seconded. We lost my wife's brother last summer and, things being what they are, there was no way we could go over to NI for the funeral.

I'd ignored a couple but after a bit of a scare in the autumn got a check which fortunately was -ve. Won't ignore the next.

Re: Compared to a colonoscopy …

But a possible positive from the one is likely to lead to the other.

Re: Club 50+

"Well they haven't reached Yorkshire yet - at least this bit."

They reached my bit some years ago.

Australia facepalms as Facebook blocks bookstores, sport, health services instead of just news

Re: Typical

"Unexpected by whom?"

By themselves, of course.

It's such a familiar pattern that you'd think politicians would allow for it but they don't.

Re: Look...

AIUI - and I'm no Facebook fan either - the own goal is the govts. in failing to work out how to specify what it means by a news site. It's not an unusual situation - user fails to define requirements clearly.

Also not an unusual situation - govt. wants X and passes legislation that they think will result in that. The targets of that legislation who do not want X react in entirely predictable ways to avoid X and all that's left is the downside.

Re: Screw Australia's clumsy attempt....

Both fish and chips I hope. They did taste better when fish & chip shops used newspaper. Or was it that they fried them in fat in those days?

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

"And lacking in outdoor space."

Which is a problem if you're depending on a heat pump extracting heat flux from the area you don't have.

Re: "reach out" *barf*

"Curtailed" also appears to have changed its meaning.

"Other way round, the asked those with generators to switch over and those without to shut down."

To be fair the quote in the article was a bit obscure: "Those of our customers who have backup generation, we curtailed them." Just what does "curtailed" mean? In the context it seems to have meant that they excused them from a cut but without taking context into account it reads as if they were given short shrift.

Hero to Jezero: Perseverance, NASA's most advanced geologist rover, lands on Mars, beams back first pics

"Designed to last about 30 Martian sols,"

And far, far beyond that if previous NASA engineering is any guide.

Looking forward to another successful mission.

Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan

"Google has no choice but to pay."

They have. They can ignore sites where they'd have to pay. I'm surprised they're not taking that tack.

Re: What is the Fuss ?

"The same address box that's sending every keystroke to Google?"

You let it do that, do you? What browser are you using? That can have an effect.

Seamonkey - can choose search engine or turn it off completely.

Waterfox - can choose search engine but don't see a quick way to turn it off completely even when a separate search engine is set. Can be set to forget history

Palemoon - similar to Waterfox

Firefox - As per Waterfox & but all sorts of Pocket stuff as well

Re: The Chinese and Koreans would be proud

"Dangerous when gvmt and it's media buddies control the news"

Also dangerous when the media control their govt. buddies.

Re: Interesting take on this

If you remember, there was a similar argument about Google News in Spain, where Google said "fuck you" and shut down Google News entirely in Spain.

Didn't this also happen in Germany & that didn't go well for the German publishers? Maybe it depends on national characteristics - amount of information in the snippets on the publisher's side and willingness to click through by the users.

Toxic: Intel ordered to pay chip fab worker almost $1m after he was gassed at its facility in 2016

Reactions such as Intel's are for too common. Courts should react by reopening the cases, demand an explanation and, if not satisfied, double the award and add a matching fine for contempt of court. Repeat as needed if they still complain until either they're bankrupt or somebody catches on to the consequences of repeated doubling.

Nurserycam horror show: 'Secure' daycare video monitoring product beamed DVR admin creds to all users

"Yes they do, and it's a _vicarious_ liability (which means they're liable even if they weren't aware of it)

Don't forward it to the nurseries"

The nurseries are the people to forward it to in the first instance, pointing out that they're using a product which opens them up to GDPR complaints from the parents. If they don't react then forward it to the parents. The probably non-technical but responsible nurseries will realise their problem and tackle it at stage one. It's the ones who don't who deserve a GDPR case against them at stage 2.

I wonder what they'd do if someone took "legacy non-functional codes" [sic] that were "there to distract hackers" literally and twiddled a few of these non-functional codes to not change the user IDs and passwords - which they obviously can't change if they're non-functional. At a guess scream that they've been hacked.

FortressIQ just comes out and says it: To really understand business processes, feed your staff's screen activity to an AI

Anything - absolutely anything - to avoid doing the right thing:. going to the staff who actually do the work and talking to them. Why should any MBA expect staff on such lowly pay-grades to know how the business really works?

The usual process is to get a consultant to do that; he will charge a fee large enough to make the whole thing reassuringly expensive. Now, of course, it's got to be the fad de jour, AI.

Nominet claims effort to replace its board with 'safe hands' is invalid, refuses to put it to member vote

Re: 2021's Brassneck Award goes to.. Nominet!

"Hopefully these antics may be raising a few eyebrows in government as well."

What part of government?

Companies House is the regulator as far as company matters goes. It's an agency, i.e. a body enabling HMG to stay at arm's length. I'm not sure they have the right to take an interest until there's a complaint made to them about the board.

But who authorises Nominet to run the registry? Does govt grant them this? If so do they come under Ofcom for regulatory purposes?

Are they authorised by ICANN? If so then it sounds like a case of birds of a feather. Even if that's the case there should still be a case for making them answerable to Ofcom. They're just too significant a part of infrastructure to be left alone.