Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

Be sure to leave a lot of press reports on bleach and UV laid about the place.

Seriously, I suspect if the result of this spying were put in front of researchers much of it would be what they already knew from their own work or what's published. Advance figures from clinical trials might well excite managers. But what would be missing from information acquired by this means would be viable samples of the actual genetically engineered adenovirus or whatever is being used to manufacture antigens.

Re: So short sighted and petty.

"share the vaccine"

Or the Remdesivir

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.

Re: Civilisation demands documents always available

On the whole I agree. However as afar as I can seen MS deprecated Paint but had to back-pedal and the only damage was to drop support for the original .pcx format a long time after support for standards was included. Their real offence in my eyes was to keep releasing S/W which, by default, saved in non-backwards compatible format, effectively forcing expensive upgrades.

Gimp, of course, continues to support .pcx - at least it tells me it would open one if I had one to open.

Re: Disagree with this

"it's usually pretty obvious when you've finished writing a library or a utility application because you can't think of anything else it could do that would be both useful and relevant."

There's another school of thought which says a design's finished when there's nothing left to take away that isn't useful useful and relevant.

"Please tell me that it's configurable and can be turned off?"

No, it's configurable and can be turned on.

So do I - but without the TimeMachine bit.

Re: This...

Downside of that is that, possibly to make way for it, NextCloud removed their Documents app in a point upgrade.

As far as I can make out the actual Collabora doesn't run under NC, NC just connects to it. Likewise, I suppose, the online LibreOffice. If that's the case these solutions aren't going to be available if you're running a personal NC instance on a Pi, as I'm doing, or considering running it on a hosted web service as I was thinking of doing.

The local Pi server isn't a problem - I just keep a desktop folder synced to the Pi. The idea of being able to economically run a hosted NC server to collaborate on a project with my local history group just hit the buffers if users have to download a file just to be able to view it - it doesn't offer enough advantage over an email list.

Re: Payment workaround?

I think the relevant word is "foundation", not "charity". Apparently German legal support for foundations is considered preferable. In any case, I doubt the idea of moving to the UK would even be entertained. It wouldn't be considered stable enough now. We have a government that wanted to take back control so it could tinker with things according to its own whims.

The existing version already includes remote open and save which I think covers your cloud sync. But let's be cynical here. Enterprise users can't get their heads round the idea that an office suite doesn't have to include an email client so get together with Mozilla to add the Thunderbird-based element of Seamonkey plus Lightbird and call that the Enterprise edition.

I'm very seldom pleased with UI changes in anything. The one change I'd like to see in LO would be use of OS file and print dialogs for 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.

Re: Reintroduce Wolves & Bears

"if they happen to munch on the 'other type of herbivore'"

But could they be relied on to tell the difference between herbivores and omnivores?

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 ?

Privacy Shield binned after EU court rules transatlantic data protection arrangements 'inadequate'

Re: Standard contractual clauses

"The Data Protection Act 2018 is still in force. You know, the updated UK legislation that supplemented existing data protections with some additional rules to comply with GDPR."

The DPA 2018 does indeed do this. However we no longer have the ECJ watching our backs in terms of enforcement.

Re: Standard contractual clauses

"I find it strange that the standard contractual clauses were not also struck down."

I think the judgement says that the clauses are fine, just that, as applied to the US, they're not worth the shrivelled fig-leaf they're written on. Applied elsewhere they're fine.

One aspect of this that bothered me was that the EU position was - and still is - that it was sufficient that the injured party had recourse to law in the country to which the data was exported irrespective of whether such a theoretical right was practically (including financially) possible to enforce. Enforcement in the EU seemed to me essential.

Not that that has any effect in the UK now. Thanks to Brexit I'm denied these rights anyway so for those of us living in the UK this has become reduced to an academic curiosity. This must be some new meaning of taking back control of which I wasn't previously aware

Re: Good

Surprised, no.

By "our", who do you mean? The EU's, probably not. UK's maybe. US's - can they get worse?