Posts by Doctor Syntax

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: 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.

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

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.

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.

"what they would do if their was a kangaroo on the track"

Correct reply - nothing, it's the kangaroo that has the problem.

Re: Experienced tester.

"I did a recent project and the customer was insistent that UAT should be prescriptively scripted."

Obviously somebody who'd never been told that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

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.

Singapore to require smartphone check-ins at all businesses and will log visitors' national identity numbers

"This is a temporary measure."

There's always one who'll fall for it.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

Re: if we a removing racism and sexism...

Don't. Just don't. You know what'll happen next.

Re: Are there no other people of colour that read this rag?

"Why should I listen to people talking about master and slave when primary and secondary is a better description and white list / black list when allow / deny is more descriptive?"

See the comment above about secondary master etc. And why is deny list more descriptive? Why do you want to deny a list?

These are terms which have had specific engineering meanings for years. The only result of changing them is confusion. If you find them problematic you should ask yourself if you're in the right field - assuming of course, that this really is your field and that you're not just a visiting A/C.

They should have gone with something a little less ambiguous. "Allow list" could mean a list is allowed to be used. Something along the lines of "Accepted list" would have been better.

Apart from that, I hate these thieves who keep stealing my language.

Browse mode: We're not goofing off on the Sidebar of Shame and online shopping sites, says UK's Ministry of Defence

Why is this? Have they never heard of the Register?

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

Re: Only A Fool Trusts Tech Absolutely

Convert that to crashes per vehicle mile and then see how well AI can compare.

Re: Autopilot

"The first time I saw people openly carrying Rifles while out shopping freaked me out. That was part of my decision not to want to stay there beyond my 2-year secondment."

I don't think I'd want to go there for two minutes and I lived in N Ireland for 19 years, mostly during the troubles.

Re: why it this civil litigation rather than criminal

You should ask yourself whether a car which leads drivers to behave in this fashion is fit for purpose.

Re: License to Kill

"And did you crash into it, or was your level of engagement in the driving process sufficiently high that you were able to brake manually anyway?"

And if so how much was this delayed by expecting the AEB to have braked?

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Re: Only profit motivated scum

Are you being sarcastic?

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Still operational out of warranty. Take note, Belkin; this is how to do things.

Good luck with the fuel movement, guys, although on past performance you're not really going to need it.

Microsoft! Please, put down the rebrandogun. No one else needs to get hurt... But it's too late for Visual Studio Online

Even safer option

The MBAs must be kept occupied unemployed.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Hauppauge TV card. Face plate tab not aligning with case slot, to say nothing of being too wide. Needed Dremel to remove excess metal and pliers to adjust profile. And that was recent.

Re: DIMM Slots

Should have told him it would work if he could get the smoke back into it.

Academics demand answers from NHS over potential data timebomb ticking inside new UK contact-tracing app

Re: Are you sure you want to criticise the NHS?

It's HMG we're criticising and in that we're only adding to criticism about PPE from NHS staff.

Re: Guys, what’s all the fuss about.

There's a whole lot of stuff they don't hold and ou don't have to load their app on your phone to use them.

Re: RIPA

You're right about excessive access by TPTB but private enterprise will get a look in - they'll be running it.

Re: Great idea (Not)

I think the basis is that proximity has to continue for some threshold period. OTOH it would need to add up the number of sub-threshold encounters. After all, it's some level of probability that should be the trigger.

But I think you're right. It will generate a lot of false positives, too many for those thus identified to be isolated. It needs to be the fornt-end for testing and a more capale testing system than currently exists.

Re: You know it must be bad...

Just one step away from "Don't you love the NHS, citizen?"

By the time the media and opposition have finished looking at PPE provision the current govt. might have its own issues about how much it really loved the NHS.

Re: Presumably this will download and operate on all flavours of smartphone...

"massive server under-provisioning"

Given that it's only useful as a front end to a virus testing service the server under-provision might possibly hide some of the testing under-provision.

Red Hat’s new CEO on surviving inside Big Blue: 'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

Re: "We are good at winning over the tech people; they are good at the C-suite."

"it was a different suite of software altogether that did the actual job"

The UPS supporting the server that ran that suite; wasn't it getting old and fragile?

Facebook defers $3bn of infrastructure spend because it's hard to build bit barns when you're working from home

Not just bit-barns. The Beeb had this interview with the head of Barclays who said that maybe big head offices mightn't be needed either: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52467965

The interesting part was the idea of staff not necessarily working from home but from branches, post pandemic. Suddenly the idea of closing all those high street branches doesn't seem a good idea after all. We may finally get over the idea that so many businesses have to be crammed into a small area.

Cheshire Police celebrates three-year migration to Oracle Fusion by lobbing out tender for system to replace it... one year later

Seems about right. By the time they've gone through tender, hammered out an allegedly detailed spec and spent another 3 years migrating they'll have been using the currently new new but by then old system for about 5 years.

Three things in life are certain: Death, taxes, and cloud-based IoT gear bricked by vendors. Looking at you, Belkin

Re: Returns?

To demand a refund. Why else?

Re: Consumer rights act 2015

The proprietary consumables are an income stream for the manufacturer. The reason to stop supplying them would be that demand has fallen as the product supported has dropped out of use which probably means that it was withdrawn from the market a long time ago. The few remaining consumers have had a fair crack of the whip by then.

If, however, the product is sold requiring a service provided by the someone with no ongoing charge then it wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation on the part of the consumer that they have paid for that service as part of the initial cost, nor would it be unreasonable to expect that they should receive what they paid for. If the product has become faulty for whatever reason in an unduly short space of time and hasn't been damaged by accident or misuse then naturally they should have recourse to whoever sold it.

Re: Never buy IoT kit

"or not knowing they need to know"

That's the core of a lot of our problems. They don't know they need to know a whole lot of stuff. They don't know they need to know how their toys work. They don't know they need to know viruses have nothing to do with telecom base stations. They don't know they need to know who's manipulating them through social networks or to what ends.