Posts by Doctor Syntax

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.

Re: It is capitalism

"For the record, I don't see a fix."

The fix would also be long term - to turn boardroom thinking round so that it looks at the long term. That would require changes in financial and taxation regulations. Ban bonuses that don't reflect long term performance or make them more highly taxed. Likewise, hit short term trading in stocks and shares.

Nominet shakes up system for expiring .uk domains, just happens to choose one that will make it £millions. Again

As I read it you won't be able to order it through your usual supplier,you'll have to bid at the auction. The auction will be advertised and there's more likelihood of somebody noticing it. The Harry Potter first edition that the local charity shop marks at £1-50 on its bookshelf would make much more if they put it into auction.

Does Nominet come under the jurisdiction of OFCOM? If not, why not and isn't it time it did?

We've heard of littering but this is ridiculous: Asteroid dumps up to 50 quadrillion kg of space dirt on Earth, Moon

Re: 50 quadrillion kg...

We can reduce it a bit. 5x10^13 tonnes. Or tons for all the practical difference it makes. How much does a typical social media data centre weigh?

Don't strain yourself, Zuck, only democracy at stake... Facebook makes half-hearted effort to flag election lies by President Trump

Re: For values of "terrified little boy" ...

"maintain a straight face"

I don't think Zuck has any other facial expression so it doesn't really mean anything.

Re: Flagging falsehoods

"your major shareholders aren't calling for the Board to be removed"

Their major shareholder isn't likely to do that.

What might have an effect is the advertising dollars walking away if they don't take action.

Re: why aren't postal votes considered a fraud risk in the US?

" I honestly hope the US manages to get it's shit together, but I doubt it."

A lot of us hope that. We also doubt it based on long observation.

Re: why aren't postal votes considered a fraud risk in the US?

Thank you for your long explanation. For the benefit of us folks in the UK could you please explain what a hanging chad is and why it matters.

Twitter Qracks down on QAnon and its Qooky Qonspiracies

I can't help thinking that the best way to deal with things like this is to take advantage of the fact that those who believe conspiracy theories are both paranoid and gullible. Don't try to explain there is no deep state. Accept they believe it exists and play on that by launching counter conspiracy theories along the generic lines of $CONSPIRACY_THEORY is a lie propagated by the deep state to distract you from $WHATEVER_ELSE_THEY_CAN_BE_PERSUADED_TO_FEAR

Cynical? Moi?

Linux Foundation starts new group to build pandemic-popping software

Re: The right tool for the job?

"I don't have to worry about incompetent/cavalier developers that make stuff that violates my privacy far more than necessary to accomplish the job."

Of course not. HMG and their special advisers are competent at violating your privacy.

Not licensed here syndrome?

Apache 2 license rather than GPL might have something to do with it.

The W3C steers the way the World Wide Web works. Yet it is reluctant to record crucial meetings – and its minutes are incomplete

"It is important both that people be able to participate, and that they feel comfortable expressing their inputs. Since we have heard from some people that they would not be comfortable participating if they expected audio recordings to be made available"

That seems to be a cogent argument for making recordings and making them public.

Twilio: Someone waltzed into our unsecured AWS S3 silo, added dodgy code to our JavaScript SDK for customers

the idea of uncontrolled/3rd party resources being pulled in on client-side without any checks at all is just ludicrous normal in this day and age.

FTFY

Brit telcos deliberately killed Phones 4u, claim admins in £1bn UK High Court sueball

Re: Ah yes P4U

"Within the space of 10 minutes"

I wouldn't have stayed there so long.

I'm always prepared to walk out on poor service and high pressure sales count as -ve service in my view. I've also walked out for the opposite reason; after being left alone for an unreasonable period of time I walked to the dealership across the road and bought a new car there instead.

Re: A few things

If you're aware of it being evidence of something illegal you might have an obligation to preserve it.

I never got the impression that "the dog ate my homework" would have gone down well with a judge.

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

Alternative approach

Dear example.com

It has come to my notice that you are storing data on my computer. Please find attached my invoice for storage costs at 1 [currency unit of choice] per byte. Payment is due in 7 days. If this invoice is not paid all such existing data will be removed as will any further data you may attempt to store.

They can't complain about the consequences they were warned about and which result from their own inaction. They should consider themselves lucky that you didn't get a winding up order on non-payment.

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

Re: What the..

"a retrospective assessment of the EU Referendum is not necessary" [under breath] "because it would call our entire political position into question."

UK.gov admits it has not performed legally required data protection checks for COVID-19 tracing system

The problem would be in educating the policy makers. A DPIA saying what the impact of existing policy is would make far more newspaper headlines than a court saying that haven't had one when they should.

I agree public confidence is critical but an honest impact assessment of the actual situation would ham that. Putting together an honest and acceptable impact assessment would have required changes to policies (such as "we're going to keep this data for decades and not limit processing to what's required by track and trace"). That would have been high level, taken ages of infighting and the reason it hasn't happened is that the required policy changes wouldn't be forthcoming anyway.

Re: But of course

"Obviously the numbers aren't going to be perfect due to reporting issues"

One interesting fact that emerged from HMGs preferred measure is that any death from any cause is counted as a COVID-19 death if the deceased had had a +ve test at some time. Eventually that will reach 100% of confirmed cases.

Re: There is already evidence of data breaches

How astonishing. You'd think they worked for a business that didn't know to send out bulk emails with BCC.

Re: History Repeats Itself...

"He, of all people, ought to have known better"

Only if he had a capacity to learn from his mistakes - or recognise that he made any.

Re: But of course

"the N.I. Assembly"

Or any of its predecessors.

Re: There we go again

"I would hope that it would be seen taking away money away from the PHE budget."

It would be seen as that. And political suicide for the ICO.

Perhaps a compromise would be for the ICO to appoint a consultant of their own choice to do the impact statement for them and fine them the cost of that. It wouldn't be effectively taking away the budget if it was used to do what should have been done out of the budget in the first place.

In an ideal world failure to fulfil such an obligation by a public servant would be dealt with as a disciplinary matter. It doesn't seem likely that somebody low down would have been told to produce an impact statement and failed to do so; more likely that somebody higher up failed - inadvertently or otherwise - to instruct anybody to do so. It's a very long time since anyone in that position was disciplined.

On the whole, however, I'd prefer them to take a punish the official approach. It would send a message to both public and private sectors, especially to the latter that if you fold the company we'll just come after you.

Re: There we go again

The ICO is in a difficult position here. It can exact a monetary penalty but how do you do that when the offender is a public body?

For a private offender a fine results in a loss of profits. A public body only has money in the form of a budget given to it to do its job. What would be the consequences for the ICO being seen to be taking away from PHE the budget given to them to deal with a national public health crisis?

About the only option it has would be to use its powers against an officer of the body responsible. Perhaps it ought to do that. AFAIK it's not been done against an individual in the private sector so it would be by way of being a test case and probably lead to the ICO still being pilloried for distracting management attention at such a critical time etc etc.

But - but - but .... We used all the bast practices we'd adopted at Talk-Talk.

"In no way has [there] been a breach of any of the data that has been stored."

At least, none that we know about.

An axe age, a sword age, Privacy Shield is riven, but what might that mean for European businesses?

Re: No Shit Sherlock

"technically free to stop being your franchisee and go do something else"

Only if the franchise contract allows it to do so.

"What happens if the franchisee has a huge IT security failure? Does the mothership have any liability?"

ROFLMAO

The the current situation has an ongoing, built-in security failure: the CLOUD Act.

"will the franchisee's cut of mothership revenues generated be enough to keep the franchisee operating in the marketplace?"

Back to the contract.

Re: SCCs

As I read it SCCs per se are legal but when applied to the US they're worthless because US legislation prevents them being honoured. If you have SCCs with a company in a country that doesn't enable its govt to override them they're OK. I've no idea if such countries exist but I suppose the countries that do override them will have to be excluded one at a time. UK next up?

Re: No Shit Sherlock

I've suggested previously that the way round this for a US service is to offer a franchise to a an EU business, set up under EU law with EU citizens as owners, officers and staff. The franchise pays for IP - branding and copies of S/W - from the US business. EU data is handled purely within the EU. If data, mail in the example in the article, is to be sent to a non EU, no US destination then it's not routed through the US.

There's another option for EU businesses to use email of course - use an EU owned and based MSP. That's assuming the MSP doesn't simply resell a US-based service (Is BT still reselling Yahoo! ? Not that that matters now anyway.).

"When an organisation's only customer interface is via Facebook or Twitter (to name the main ones), it forces customers to agree to terms that harm their privacy in order to communicate."

In that situation no consequences will be undeserved, regardless of how costly they are.

If you can read this, your Windows 10 2004 PC really is connected to the internet no matter what the OS claims

Re: Cortana can't be activated

"Every cloud has a silver lining"

That's what the cloud vendors are counting on.

Cisco restores evidence of its funniest FAIL – ethernet cable presses switch's reset button

Re: Who buys those cables?

Probably nobody.

Given the way that cables mysteriously breed (there's no other possible explanation) new and completely incompatible cables or knot themselves into configurations which are topologically impossible from the original, tidy configurations, they're perfectly capable of growing their own hoods after being fitted.

Cables are an alien life-form.

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Re: The Russians?

Just four beats to the bar, OK?

Companies toiling away the most on LibreOffice code complain ecosystem is 'beyond utterly broken'

Re: Grow Up or Give Up

"What they *should* do is wrest Thunderbird away from Mozilla, make some adjustments to the GUI, and give M$ a seriously good run for their money."

Or SeaMonkey. The SeaMonkey GUI is compatible in appearance with the default LO GUI - although I suppose they'd need both for the ribbon fans. The ironic thing here is that OO and, I think, LO, were said to have originally included a lot of the email client so it could access the address database. Instead of writing their own code for that they could simply have exposed the UI and made it an all-in-one. Add in Lightbird for completeness.

Re: This is grim

"there seems to be a distinct absence of decent Qt based web browsers"

Firefox and derivatives (Waterfox & Palemoon) and Seamonkey all work under KDE.

Teardown nerds delve into Dell's new XPS 15 laptop to find – fancy that – screws and user-serviceable parts

"The battery is affixed with screws and a bit of tape"

I'll stay with laptops where you can just clip the battery in and out without dismantling.

Re: Why so few size options?

"Who really LIKES resting their palms on the touchpad and causing all kinds of spurious changes of focus in the middle of typing?"

I can't say I've ever had that problem. Getting a big enough screen to be readable with a useful amount of information displayed is another matter.

Re: Cans of Compressed Air, how quaint!

A solid blast with compressed air. Solid? That takes compression to new levels.

Oh deer! Scotland needs some tech smarts to help monitor its rampant herbivore populations

Maybe a whole new midge-powered technology is needed.

This used to be the sort of problem they'd set up a grant for a PhD student to work on.

UK's Co-operative Group to centralise IT teams across various divisions, warns redundancies 'inevitable'

When Tata take over will they still continue to respect all this: https://www.co-operative.coop/ethics/ethical-policies ?