Posts by Doctor Syntax

Virgin Galactic takes another step towards blasting Richard Branson into space

Re: Priorities?

Perhaps, under the present circumstances, his return ticket could be replaced by one way only?

Ex-Imagination Technologies boss tells UK Foreign Affairs Committee: Britain needs to stop overseas asset stripping

Re: Cough, ARM?

The usual description of your idea of balancing the books is "selling off the family silver".

Re: We have to turn the clock back

You overlook the fact that the financial institutions that now hold the shares represent not the government but the savings of their investors. That includes my pension and very likely yours too. It also includes my direct investments and, if you have ISAs etc., yours too.

Re: The Value of a Company

It certainly looks like it. Same lack of understanding. My reply above applies here also.

Re: The Value of the Company

"If you are afraid of your company falling into the wrong hands, do not sell."

If a company is publicly traded the management are not the owners, they just work for them. The most they can do is to try to persuade the existing owners not to sell. Have you read none of the articles here about HP vs Xerox?

In this case the suggestion is that the govt. should prevent businesses that are perceived to be strategic - economically or otherwise - being lost to the country. In this case those who are or, it's argued, should be afraid are neither the owners nor the management.

There would be nothing to stop a company investing from scratch in the UK, for instance Nissan. That can be positive for balance of payments providing they export more value in finished goods than they import in components and raw materials.

When an existing, profitable business such as ARM is bought, however, it simply means that the profits now disappear overseas, even if work remains here.

That leaves businesses which might collapse if they didn't receive additional capital. Were they to collapse any contribution they make to balance of payments would end anyway so there would be nothing to lose.

Re: And who will pay ?

A couple of possibilities, I'm sure a little thought will throw up a few others:

Impose a limit on the percentage of shares that can have a single beneficial owner.

Require that the a minimum percentage of shares should be held by beneficial owners based in the UK.

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

"The firing of two user experience designers"

I'm conflicted about this, being of the view that all user experience designers should be fired or, better still, never employed. But in the circumstances, it was a dick move.

Re: "XML"

"Right up to the point you want to validate the random sequence of characters claiming to be data. Both XML and ASN.1 are unnecessarily cumbersome, but they do solve a problem that the old Unix standby of parsing an ASCII string and hoping for the best does not."

And you don't have to reinvent anything to do that. The libraries are all there waiting to be used.

My first reaction on encountering XML was that I wished it'd been available years ago.

Re: "XML"

"the myriad vulnerabilities that result from folks getting it wrong"

The advantage of XML is that it stands a good chance of telling you that it's wrong. Having been on the receiving end of XML that the sender had got wrong I appreciate the advantage of that. What's more the same mistakes were repeated every 6 months or so as the last lot of developers at the client end had their visas expire and were replaced by a new lot of alleged graduates.

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

Re: In other news....

Yup. That was the case with the Beeb. Wouldn't let the browser enter it. Wouldn't let it be pasted from KeepassX either. How much more desperate could they be for users to use weak passwords?

Let's not forget that half the problem isn't reuse of passwords, it's reuse of user IDs. That's because so many sites want an email address as an ID - and perhaps reinforce that by sending an email to confirm and most people only have one email address. It doesn't matter so much if your password's Pa$$word when you user ID's UsSnkbi32tGdxTFP or '@"p3a@}%3e%Ngud

Re: scott

If it's root/toor remember to change it at first login.

"How are they planning to monetise them?"

Wring question.

How are they planning to monetise the users?

Re: OK, sp which password manager to plump for?

"Many other reasons - but if I continue I start to sound like a sales bod."

There's the thing. So many people won't use something unless it's sold to them by a sales bod - or even worse - they're allowed to use it free and it's they who are being sold.

Yes, KeypassX.

Re: OK, sp which password manager to plump for?

"ideally you want the one that guarantees they will never go out of business, bump up the price, or start pissing you off with ads, and will always fully support any new browser or platform you want to browse the web from. Good luck."

No luck needed. The password manager is kept locally. It's also synced to my home Nextcloud server. So unless I go out of business in a very personal manner or lose my marbles to the extent that I can't remember my master password that's not a problem.

Re: OK, sp which password manager to plump for?

KeepassX.

Synced by NextCloud to any device where I might need a copy.

Re: In other news....

"If I could give one piece of advice to web site designers about password policies, it would be this:

Put the password policy on the log-in page."

Let me suggest an even better piece of advice: don't require logins if you don't need them. The fact that marketing want a list to pester people isn't a need - just the opposite because one day that list will be conspicuously toxic when it gets leaked and until then will be quietly toxic when potential customers are put off by it.

Re: In other news....

"Surely no-one is really remembering a completely unique password for every single device, internet shop, social media site and forum they ever used."

One part of this is sites demanding passwords when they don't need them.

Take, for instance, online shops. If I go into a physical shop - it's already getting to the point where it's a stretch to remember doing that - to make a one-off purchase I don't have to set up an account. So why do I have to set up an account for a one-off purchase online? They get some junk that I'll not remember as a password because I'm not going back there again if I can help it. For a logon ID - they'll insist on en email address - they'll get one that will be deleted after a short while.

The there's iPlayer or sound app as it has become (why?). For no clear reason except possibly they think they can't operate a website without one, they need a userID and password. For a while it worked quite well if this was saved in the browser. The the sound side changed it so that it had to be entered manually. I haven't bothered with the whole thing since then (what pissed me off most is that it stopped working with the iPlayer app on OSMC) but if I had it would have been swapped from the secure password-manager generated random string for the least variation on "password" that I could have got away with.

Another example is familysearch.org. This used to be a perfectly straightforward free genealogy site with a compact UI. Then the UX designers got at it so the actual user experience started the usual downhill progression that I doubt has bottomed out, part of which was to add a login requirement it never had before. At least that didn't need an email address; I think Mickey Mouse was taken but it got an equally contemptuous one.

Basically, if the password is important for me I'll keep it secure. If it's just the site being obnoxious about I'll treat it with the contempt it I think it deserves.

Meantime - RESULT. Whilst writing this I finally got an email confirming the removal of my email address the customer list from a firm of whom I've never been a customer but who insisted on spamming me with their coronavirus updates for customers.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Of course, being centrally controlled

It "could" a lot of things but this is paranoia pure and simple.

"The price of freedom is eternal paranoia. Vigilance is not enough." - Deighton.

Re: It asks for your location?

"At least that's what he said"

He's probably realised - eventually - that the original idea of sending contacts into quarantine was going to backfire after everyone had had a couple of false positives so now he'll have to work out how to get round the testing issue. If he doesn't want to admit to de-anonymising the data at the server end he's going to simply instruct the contacts to de-anonymise themselves by asking for an address to send swabs to. Whether those swabs ever get processed is anybody's guess.

Re: It asks for your location?

SW1A

Re: And what about the people ...

"I think it’s safe to say most of the working population have a smartphone"

Apparently it's generally reckoned that fewer of us in the more vulnerable older age group don't. I'm not convinced of this but SWMBO doesn't and if push came to shove with this one I could always revert to my old moderately aware but not really smart phone even if both of its batteries are shot.

Re: And what about the people ...

Currently 26 3, so Hi Ben & Marc as well.

Re: And what about the people ...

"He has no postcode"

He could borrow one in SW1.

Re: Hanlon's razor

But how many times do you have to encounter this sort of behaviour in HMG before you ask yourself if they're really that stupid?

Re: The evidence suggests otherwise

So why did you reply?

Re: 1984 was a blueprint but....

I'm sure BoJo does want to beat COVID. It's just the slight offset from reality that makes it difficult for so many of his educational background to work out how to do that.

Levy also noted that "currently" only “the first part of your postcode” is taken and stored “for NHS resource planning, mainly.”

Spot the weasel words. Both of them.

Of course a lot of us could have the postcode SW1 2AA.

Neither of the NCSC's explanations are readable without disabling NoScript. That's not a good start to seeking trust.

That awful Butterfly has finally fluttered off: Apple touts 13-inch MacBook Pro with proper keyboard, Escape key

It's not only Apple. Tis Assus as a prlem wic te kes in he mdlle clumn and te vwels n the rgt and tp rw tend t miss.

Proof-of-concept open-source app can cut'n'paste from reality straight into Photoshop using a neural network

Re: Unintended consequences

Upvote - but I think the start was a good while ago.

Re: Impressive

Or literally incredible? Or even literally actually incredible?

It has been 20 years since cybercrims woke up to social engineering with an intriguing little email titled 'ILOVEYOU'

The world of fake news shows that far too many are still gullible.

Apple-Google COVID-19 virus contact-tracing API to bar location-tracking access

It's not hard to work out why HMG decided not to go with that.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Fast Fourier Transform.

Autocorrect's a hitch.

Re: Experienced tester.

Users, however, do it all the time.

Comms giant Telefonica confirms O2 in talks to merge with Virgin Media

It's a times like this that I remember that the unfailingly stupid manglement of big BT* let O2 go. And that the price of BT's getting back into mobile when it became painfully obvious they should never have got out was to sell a chunk of itself to Deutsch Telekom.

* Big BT was the usual term used for the rest of the business in BT Mobile which became part of O2. It was never a term of endearment

"and then COVID19 coming along I suspect its going to set back widespread 5G take up"

With so much more business use shifting onto the net with working at home the 5G capacity might not be able to cope with a widespread take up.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Let's say Joe Public has installed the app. It goes off telling him that he's been in contact with someone who has tested positive. What is he supposed to do? AIUI rather than go and get a test to check he's supposed to hole up for 14 stressful days waiting to see if he develops symptoms. A good proportion of those alerts are going to be false positives. How many of those will Joe tolerate before he gets thoroughly pissed off and deletes the app - assuming he's allowed to?

Unless it's backed up by a quick and easy to access testing system with the capacity to handle the alerts* the whole system is going to be dead in the water in a few months' time.

*And for positive results, access to prophylactic treatment if the drug trials come out with something that works.

Re: Next step

Probably not. They have their own solution to push that positions themselves as the good guys. I can't see them wanting to condone what they've already condemned.

Re: The app may be well done...

I think your expectations are more generous than most here.

UK IT contractors slipping back into old ways of working now IR35 tax reforms delayed

'Twas ever thus. It's called body-shopping. Back in the day the IR even had a standard contract as a PDF on their site which included a "key man" clause which is what you're referring to. Oddly enough this specimen contract disappeared from the site some time after IR35 was introduced but not before I'd taken a copy in case I ever needed to use it a evidence.

As civil cases, which includes tax cases, are decided on the balance of probabilities it seems quite wrong to me that the probability that the relevant clause in a freelancer's contract isn't such a commercial "key man" clause isn't considered.

"You can also employ your spouse"

I've removed your superfluous quotes. Although, AFAIK, it's not necessary for small companyies to have a Company Secretary these days it's still an option. SWMBO was my CoSec and it was she who signed contracts on behalf of the company. The CoSec has legal responsibility for the company and should be entitled to be paid for that responsibility. If accepting that legal responsibility isn't genuine employment I don't know what is.

"consultancies that happen to be party donors"

I always reckoned that when IR35 was introduced we should have had a whip-round and see if we could raise half a Bernie to contribute to Labour to get it rescinded. Then it could have been found out (with a few hints to the media) and they'd have had to give it back.

"Brit contractors are opting out of the rules in droves – and many employers no longer care."

Employers of whom? The employers of the contractors are the contractors' own companies and they care very much.

It looks like you want a storage appliance for your data centre. Maybe you'd prefer a smart card reader?

Re: Bit like Amazon at the moment

eBay is as almost as bad. Maybe three hits and then an almost unnoticeably small caption introducing items with fewer words followed by a list from the wild blue yonder. Or an equally overlookable intro to ads from international vendors when you've specifically clicked UK only because you don't want to wait for whatever it was to arrive on a slow boat from China.

"The same principle is used to direct a customer to in-stock items when something is unavailable"

There's a word missing there.:"Irrelevant". Or possibly several: "mindblowingly and utterly bonkers irrelevant".

Google Australia says government pulled pin on content-for-cash talks, hands in its homework anyway

They do that anyway. It's called robots.txt.