Posts by Doctor Syntax

Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific... for Microsoft

There used to be stories about Googlers sleeping in camper vans in the car park and using the office facilities for everything else. I wonder how they cope with having no other homes to go to.

Microsoft runs a data centre on hydrogen for 48 whole hours, reckons it could kick hydrocarbon habit by 2030

Very likely the bollards were put there after the tanks were installed to stop people driving into them. A large quantity of hydrogen, stored under pressure, is something to be wary of.

And, as you say, they look a lot more like tanks than fhe fuel cells TFA implies.

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Re: Were they lost from a catainer in the Pacific?

Oceanographers used them as a means of tracing currents.

Re: As funny as this is...

"Firstly just tell the delivery driver that you hadn't ordered anything from Amazon and simply refuse to accept delivery on the basis that you didn't place the order."

Requesting a return would cause more trouble for them. I must admit I haven't tried requesting a return label and pick-up for something they delivered that I hadn't ordered but twice they've done that themselves for stuff I'd ordered and they hadn't delivered.

It could have been a variation on https://xkcd.com/1807/

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Re: There's more than one way to stop a server room

I have a nasty feeling that from now on that's the version I'm going to remember.

It's the cut-off switch.

And also didn't provide enough sockets in the first place.

Re: We’ve had plenty of these Molly cover stories

"we'd been playing with disks"

You ran out of Frisbees?

"I made a little plastic box to fit over the disk drive buttons and all was well again."

A true BOFH would have solved it differently - a few drawing pins epoxyed to the relevant surface, a connection to the cattle prod, a loose floor tile over an inexplicable void leading down to the basement...

Re: Front panels and security keys...

"Coat icon because you always check your coat for keys first.."

Always check your zip first.

Did you ever identify the guilty - err - member?

"computer bureau (anyone remember those?)"

These days they're called cloud vendors. Nothing's new.

WTF is cloud-tethered compute? We're not sure either, but it just made a hype cycle for the first time

“a process pattern in which the system and application infrastructure, once instantiated, is never updated in place”

AKA "If it ain't broke don't fix it"

UKIP blackmail, data breach sueball allegations were groundless, rules High Court

Re: "you don't deserve pity but we give you're [sic] choice"

What a bunch of chimps.

FTFY

No, on second thoughts, stet. Chimps wouldn't have helped get us into this mess in the first place.

Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?

Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"

Any large transfers of money should have some sort of procedure to check. Although I suppose ego might resist anything even suggestive of being questioned.

It's a Meow-nixed system, I know this: Purr-fect storm of 3,000+ insecure databases – and a data-wiping bot

Subject: Minute of meeting between PHB and A/C on {DATE}

A/C recommended to PHB that {STUFF} be done/purchased. A/C advised PHB that the consequence of not doing so would be a serious risk of {BAD_STUFF} happening to the business. PHB decided not to do/purchase {STUFF} and that the business would accept the risk of {BAD_STUFF} happening.

Typed on an old-fashioned typewriter with a carbon copy sent to PHB so he knows there's a hard copy of the original secured somewhere. Even better:- accompanied by a receipt of the registered letter which was the original posted by A/C to self.

According to the articles the first one discovered was a database of logs of a VPN that assured its customers they didn't keep logs. I'd say the customers would be quite pleased to know this had happened.

Re: Security

"Who'd have thought?"

Not enough did.

Re: Have any sites gone catatonic?

It's the lesser of two alternatives. In fact, if the data was data that shouldn't even have been held by whoever owned the database it's an excellent outcome.

Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

Re: Maybe

Except in a military radar establishment where you can never find a sledgehammer when you need one.

Not only did he take what he wasn't authorised to,he was extremely careless, not to asy inept in handling them. And yet time fraud was the only offence he was convicted of.

Re: Approximately ten

And having documents on his person. Tattoos?

Nowadays it's called working from home. If he wasn't going to work on it and he wasn't selling it on (which seems to have been accepted) then time fraud seems a bit dubious. In fact he might have got more work done than if he'd been in the office.

UK's NCSC reveals Premier League footie clubs to be ripe pickings for cybercrooks: One almost lost £1m to BEC attack

Re: Football

It's not as simple as you think. I'd include bookies in the list of businesses I don't sympathise with but I've done my bit in regard to dealing with at least one crime in regard to them in the distant past, probably more but run of the mill cases tend to merge in the memory or get lost from it.

Being opposed to crime and feeling sorry for the victims aren't necessarily linked.

"He ended up moving the next summer for about £30m, so it's not peanuts on the line"

Football's one of the areas for which I can't really work up any anger about their getting scammed.

It might not take too much guessing around first name/surname combinations.

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

Re: Updates are important!

"yet another tale of developers believing that the latest patches are so unbelievably great"

Or possibly doing what they'd been told to do by some mangler who insisted they needed this level of checking right now.

Re: TomTom Updates

"I still have to keep Chrome around for those dumbass sites that don't work in FF."

I usually take the view that if they can't take the trouble to make sites that work properly the site itself isn' worth me taking the trouble to look at.

Re: SMTP ddos

I think it relates more to business practices and maybe training practices in India.

Back in the day my then client did a good amount of work with one of the Usual Suspects. Like many at the time and, no doubt, much later the Usual Suspect subbed all development out to one of the Indian Usual Suspects who would - I think for visa reasons - rotate staff from India (or Indian staff if you're prepared to tolerate the adjectival form) through their UK office. These ranged from great* to just out of some training establishment. Needless to say it was the latter who got thrown into the deep end of actual coding. The consequence was periodic bouts of receiving not-quite XML files and having to explain to one of these staff-newly-arrived-from-India (and presumably just out of some training establishment there) how to get names such as O'Neil into well-formed XML.

So the fact that the dude was Indian speaks volumes about the general business environment.

* And a distinct improvement on the initial definitely not Indian "consultant" who initially arrived to brief us about one project.

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

Re: Gates' problem

"UFO's are space aliens"

Half the problem with believers in this one is an inadequate grasp of English or at least ignorance of what the U stands for.

If they're unidentified what are they doing claiming to have identified them?

Re: Gates' problem

Why would anyone who wanted to build a steam powered rocket (as opposed to Rocket) and fly in it be unlikely to also be a flat-earther?

Re: Very good skeptoid podcast recently debunking this stuff

"Unless they've already thought about it (or had someone think about it for them)"

This last. What you need is to get them to realise that that somebody has ulterior motives for having lied to them.

Re: Very good skeptoid podcast recently debunking this stuff

"Sadly, calling them 'fucking nutters' doesn't play a constructive role in pulling them out of their hole."

Expletives are always fighting talk.

Calling them gullible might be better. It puts them into the role of victim and you into someone who wants to help them so if they want to fight then their enemy is whoever sold them this garbage in the first place.

Some first posts are good. Some are by people who blundered into the wrong forum by mistake.

Fitness freaks flummoxed as massive global Garmin outage leaves them high and dry for hours

"worrying perhaps about their personal data stored there"

The time to worry was when they were wondering whether to store the data.

Twitter hack latest: Up to 36 compromised accounts had their private messages read – including a Dutch politician's

Privacy Shield

Is this covered in those standard contract clauses?

UK tech spending in 2020 will be hit harder than in France or Germany with little prospect of growth next year – analysts

So this fall in spending explains https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/everything_must_go_distributor_clear/

I assume the analysts' process for dealing with the unexpected is:

1. Will it increase or decrease spending? Flip coin to decide.

2. Make up appropriate figures.

3. Write up figures as a press release.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

Re: Information cannot be contained

One thing which amuses me is sites which aren't paywalled but retaliate against blocking their Javascript by fuzzing the pictures that punctuate the article. Pictures that contribute nothing to understanding the article but which presumably cost the site good money from a picture library.

Twitter Qracks down on QAnon and its Qooky Qonspiracies

No, the original ant-vax conspiracy theory, MMR, was a particularly ingenious one.

The deep state is worried that welfare legislation is removing natural selection's ability to root out people who aren't bright enough to cope on their own. You can't Darwin out people who've already bred. What you can do is get them to stop their offspring breeding hence MMR. One of the Ms of the MMR vaccine is mumps. If you can persuade the numpties from vaccinating their offspring against mumps you make use of one of the side-effects of mumps, male infertility.

The real genius of the way this conspiracy was planted was to make a fuss about the other M, measles. That distracts from what it's really about.

Re: Such Hypocrisy

Whoosh?

Maybe. Who can tell?

UK intel committee on Russia: Social media firms should remove state disinformation. What was that, MI5? ████████?

Re: If you acknowledge Russian operations supporting UK separatism - what's the consequence?

"IK, that remark was written from the perspective of the current UK PM,"

Use of second person is tricky.

Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here's a way to Fawkes them right up

Re: Artificial Competence

Actual Incompetence

Re: Yabbut...

Attempted Inference

'First ever' snap emerges of something vaguely resembling our solar system 300 ly away. We'll take 10 tickets

Re: Are those numbers right???

My first reaction was that "very similar to our Solar System" relies on your definition of "very similar". But he goes on to say "but at a much earlier stage of its evolution". Does this mean that the early Solar System is considered to have been similarly widely spaced?

Mexican cave relics suggest humans were populating the Americas up to 17,000 years earlier than thought

Re: YDP

Theories and evidence should have a close relationship. Theories are attempts to understand existing evidence and new evidence is used to test them. However I do share some reservations about archaeological theories.

It's amazing to see things going in cycles. Back in the late '60s when I was involved in this sort of thing type-fossil nomenclature such as Older and Younger Dryas was being replaced by type-sites such as Allerød and Bølling.

Re: Spelling

Correct in the case of Macallan. Across the pond - and I mean the local one - there's also whiskey.

Re: "Of course it's all just guesswork"

AIUI it's still faster than counting radioactive disintegrations the way we used to do it.

After banning Chinese comms bogeyman, UK asks: Huawei in this mess? It was a failure of capitalism, MPs told

Exporting manufacturing to cheap labour countries has served medium term government policy well. Exclude one cost you can't export - property - from cost of living calculations and you can hold down headline inflation figures. Tie interest rates to that, ignore the housing bubble and create a fool's paradise. It served well until reality intruded.