Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Re: It's not an ID card

If your ID is on your phone it means that in reality your phone is your ID then whoever has your phone is you - and that's the case with much existing security theatre.

Re: It's not an ID card

First define identity. Have you given it much thought? Have you ever tried, yourself, to prove someone's identity? Do you even know, positively, that you're the person named on your birth certificate? You were told you were but, given the occasional reports of babies being mixed up in hospitals, even those who told you that were not necessarily sure. And in any case that birth certificate will say it's not evidence of identity. Given that being a UK native is one of the entitlements to work in the UK that this is allegedly all about then not having the ability to trace an individual back to birth puts the whole thing on a shaky foundation. It leaves whoever's issuing these IDs having to believe a lot of what people say in which case Rice Davis applies.

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

Re: Protect All Noobs

"But I could never in good conscience recommend anything other than an Atomic OS to a noob."

From what's been described here the only use case I can imagine for that is a bleeding edge distro where you might want to roll back to a known good version because essentially it's planning for failed updates. In good conscience I wouldn't recommend anything that wasn't solid, LTS mainstream-based.

No one talking about a datacenter could be a sign one is coming

Re: "We won't tell the public anything

"In the UK something that kind of size would require an EIA,"

I don't think they're concerned with the UK. The el Reg's USian focus reporting.

£45B savings remain theoretical as UK digital roadmap delayed again

Re: Do you mean this one?

It seems to be a lot of puffery, I don't see an actual document.

Ofcom probes Meta over WhatsApp info it was legally required to provide

Hoe wouldn't send a cheque; he's USian so he wouldn't know how to spell it.

Re: Ofcom

Now here's an interesting conflict. Someone of Lord Grade's age - and wealth - doesn't need to worry about future employees so has no need to worry about doing the right thing. Perhaps you should sort things out between yourself & VoT and his accompanying A/C as to which is the best age range for board members. Or perhaps you could get together and come up with different selection criteria.

Re: Ofcom

"It's about time he collected his pension"

I doubt he needs a pension.

Re: Meta

Do Meta know themselves?

Microsoft shifting to cloud management software brings possibility of it peeking into your estate

Re: re: Software brings possibility WTF?

"those ad slingers need to die a slow and painful death being bombarded by their own adverts 24/7"

They probably run ad blockers themselves because - well, ads are so annoying, aren't they.

ShinyHunters claims Okta customer breaches, leaks data belonging to 3 orgs

Re: Insanity. Talk about all your eggs in one basket.

Although they may do security better they have a bright shining target painted on them so it's a matter of balance. And you need to remember that an attacker only needs to succeed once, defenders have to stay successful all the time.

Re: Insanity. Talk about all your eggs in one basket.

It's outsourcing part of your security, thus enlarging the attack surface, the enlargement being a conspicuously attractive one to attackers as it offers an entry into so many other companies as well as your own.

Agreed the eggs and basket analogy doesn't work as adding more and more bits to the attack surface would be putting one egg into many baskets.

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Re: Cease this nonsense

Pivoting to a different supplier because the current one has a habit of going down isn't ridiculous, however.

Re: Confusion Was Rife...

Endorsed.

Slightly surprised - on both sides, I think - to get a welcome email from someone I new from Usenet.

Re: Confusion Was Rife...

If your email address is a Microsoft domain getting correspondents to adapt to a new address might be tricky. Of course it migh help you lose some you'd rather get rid of.

Re: Confusion Was Rife...

It's a long time since it happened but IIRC very little was involved on my part although t might have been more complicated if the old registrar had been obstructive.

Re: Truly a nightmare

You could try forwarding user complaints on to whoever turned out an external provider. Or just refer the user's boss to the turner-down's boss.

Re: Confusion Was Rife...

No need. They're both portable. It's relying on ISP email that's the real killer, even more than relying of a big US business, but that's because it then makes it really hard to jump ship from the ISP service.

Re: Confusion Was Rife...

"It just needs someone who needs to know what a domain name and MX record is, how SMTP works and how to glue all that together."

If you have a decent registrar/MSP supplier there's little of that except setting up mail boxes and addresses when the service is in place. But otherwise, yes. It just nees someone to know that (a) it's possible, (b) it's a really good idea and (c) if you're in business an email address in your company's name looks so much better.

Re: Confusion Was Rife...

Find a company that can act as registrar, preferably one that can host a mail service for you, get yourself your own domain and have your own mail service, either run by the registrar or, failing that, by another company. If you have problems with your service provider you can simply move to a new provider, keeping your email addresses.

A lot of their clients wouldn't have noticed as they'd have been having the same problem.

UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings

Re: Home Office targets small boat crossings

Taking extra-territorial enforcement action? Is that you, Donald?

China’s Deepin Linux gets a slick desktop - and, yes, built-in AI

Re: Couldn't immediately see much difference from before

>> useful options ... were disabled/removed because "telemetry showed nobody used them"

This is one of those instances where sloppy use of English leads to sloppy thinking (or possibly the other way around). "Telemetry failed to show them being used" would have been a better way of putting it. I suppose if they'd looked at it that way the response would have been to enforce telemetry harder.

Who's going to try shoehorning AI into Western Linux? Gnome? Agent P? I dread to think.

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

Re: US owns US corps. China owns Chineese corps

"The gov of the day OWNS you and the tech bros are totally OK with that"

So don't use the corporate products.

Re: An extension of the state

"enough companies still offer encryption which cannot be hacked - which includes MS and Apple."

If they have the keys the encryption doesn't have to be hacked, it doesn't exist.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

Re: Rare earth buffet party pack

"https://www.iceland.co.uk/"

And Mum's gone there already so he'll just have to stand in the queue.

I wouldn't mind mining a few prawn vol-au-vents right now.

Re: @Thomas Steven 1

"Biden escalated the war in Russia."

Freudian slip? The fighting's in Ukraine.

Re: The fine art of diplomacy

And so here we are until the next time when we have to go through it all on something else.

Re: Rare earth buffet party pack

Or the lava vents.

Re: Trump spews an endless stream of utter rubbish

Because he's in a positon to start chucking tariffs around until he chickens out causing problems for everyone trying to do serious business.

I guess it's even possible he believes what he's saying. In an infinite universe, his mind anything is possible.

FTFY

Re: Who encouraged Trump?

The Grauniad has gone back to crashing Seamonkey browser.

Marching orders delayed: Veterans' Digital ID off to a slow start

Re: easier and faster?

"Yer 'avin' a larf, aintcha?"

No, they're justifying their existence.

Re: Oh Dear !

"I don't remember the current plate number"

It takes a year or so for it to become second nature and even though it's coming up to 2 years the other day I had to register the number on a parking meter (the pattern here is LLYYLLL) I put in the first 2 letters of the previous car (actually only second letter changed).

"Can you remember, in what month, of a year several decades ago you opened a bank account ?"

The present account, no. The first account I opened, yes - the month and year I started at University.

I think for most people it's the same with cars - they can remember their first reg and, out of necessity, their current one but very few in between.

Re: Single point of failure anyone?

"ohh my phone died since it's not charged"

Quite often my situation because I don't use it much.

A couple of days ago SWMBO asked me to make a payment for her. It took a few hours to charge up far enough to handle the bank's MFA and, even connected to power, the charge level started sinking while it was in use. It took until this morning to get it holding charge properly.

In the interim I wondered if it was time to get a new one and as I use very little in the way of apps I looked at the possibility of KaiOS as their store has a calendar that will sync with NextCloud. That got me exposed to lists of phones describes as "for elders" which might be the target for some of the potential users of a veteran's ID.

It seems that the main selling point for these is having WhatsAp loaded and that doesn't work on KaiOS any more so that many of them now have proprietary S/W - good luck with finding a wallet on there if that's what's how it's to be stored. I also found that quite a few of the KaiOS phones don't access the app store any way so there's no chance of getting it on those. There are also Android based phones in that category which don't access PlayStore so it's unlikely they would be any more use.

It means that a digital ID by mobile phone is going to mean the holder buying a smartphone whether they can afford it or not.

Not that I'm ex-service but I suppose I am in the age-group you mention. We've been around long enough to apply critical thinking but I can see how you might misunderstand that as "unaccustomed and often unwilling to engage with the up-to-date technology, less likely to have a computer or smartphone, and ... may be suffering brain deterioration which makes it difficult to learn and understand the necessary tech in any case."

Re: Single point of failure anyone?

"then I can buy a new one"

ROM - Requires Only Money

"more places don't take cash any more"

My Civic Soc dispensed with the card reader for taking admission at talks. It simply wasn't worth the faff.

Re: What do they expect?

Be careful what you ask for.

Re: What do they expect?

"one step up from Fushitsu"

That sounds a tough call to make.

London boroughs limping back online months after cyberattack

Re: birth certificates

"It's proof of ID."

It isn't. It specifically says it isn't - at least last copy I saw said it wasn't.

The fact that it's necessary for a passport is just silly. It goes back to the fact that proof of ID is a really slippery concept. There's no way that the Passport Agency can determine that you're the same living entity as the child named on the birth certificate, that parents were those named (especially the father!) or even that there was such a child (it would be possible to fraudulently register a home birth, I doubt anyone has been required to take the baby to the registry office as proof).

Oracle, Michael Dell, named as investors in JV that will run TikTok's US operations

"Big Red gets to store data, advise on security, and store the 'I'll watch just one more video' algo" and how to screw more money out of it.

British government caves on datacenter approval after legal challenge

$[YourFavouriteOnlineService] not being available is more likely to be due to the operators at the DC fixing what wasn't broken rather than there being no DC, especially as there was a DC there yeserday.

Ah, but that was entirely different. Her party wasn't in government then. And in was in one of her backyards.

UK trade department put civil servants' feelings first during Windows 11 migration

Re: This is all news to me

Maybe you're classified as one of the advocates.

The real tragedy in this is that the effort was pu into a change that will have to be repeated when the next version of Windows is rolled out.

Re: When going through change, …

And after the 3 years, what then?

Qualcomm CEO pockets 15% pay rise as profits fall 45%

"and just over $1 million in other compensation."

What harm has he suffered for which he idesrves compensation?

AI conference's papers contaminated by AI hallucinations

It's an AI conference The organisers would have been worried if there wasn't any.