Posts by Doctor Syntax

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.

Re: Sunset?

"let's assume they're just not too bright, rather than maliciously planning something."

The two are not mutually exclusive given that there's more than one body involved here, the NHS and those who get the job of implementing it.

"we need data, vast amounts of it."

Who's this "we" of whom you write? NHS? The Home Office? Sheffield Council? Local dog warden? The parking vultures who operate my local B & Q car park?

That letter was written by people who know you don't get to put toothpaste back n the tube.

HMG reply.

We only like experts who we agree with. We don't agree with them.

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.

"Adding insult to injury, the ubiquitous consumer network gear maker only plans to refund customers with active warranties"

At least in jurisdictions with decent consumer protection legislation, it doesn't matter what Belkin thinks about warranties, the issue would ultimately be decided on whether a court depends compensation is due. No amount of EULA or disclaimer can override statutory rights.

The customer's sale agreement is with the retailer and the customer should look to the retailer to sort it out.

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

The Beeb's report (it name-checks el Reg BTW) includes a reminder of past email problems at Sheffield.

Perhaps there's a need for the ICO to be able to put a public body into special measures and appoint an official of their own choosing at the body's expense and with executive authority in the body to oversee all aspects of their handling of PII.

Re: No shock

"Don't tell me that this didn't benefit someone, somewhere in the process."

That'll be the Robin Hood Airport?

Re: Great news!

"do everything we can to ensure it will not happen again."

Given that this was the result of their duty to ensure it couldn't happen in the first place this isn't reassuring.

I find it deeply annoying that those making such anodyne statements never get directly challenged on them.

Just got to love these modern "experts" not a clue most of them.

Unless your idea of an expert is the cheapest pair of hands that can be recruited by the cheapest off-shored outsourcer there are no experts involved.

Re: Never ascribe to mailce ...

"These programmes are devised by people with one track minds focused narrowly on a single objective, the contracts are assigned to corporations to which only the financials are of interest,"

And this is why we should demand more than anodyne statements when things go wrong.

The possibility of personal punishment might lead minds to focus on more than one thing and a single contract worth less than a few percent of global turnover might make the financial return on implementing things properly worth while.

Re: Always abused

This raises an interesting point. For ANPR the data subject is the registered keeper. The proof of the right of the registered keeper is the current registration held by the DVLA.

Re: GDPR

"The actual perpetrators don't have to pay it out themselves."

No reason why not. GDPR makes provision for those with responsibilities to be prosecuted.

Re: Colour me surprised

The issue is a little more than subtle than thinking of guilt by association. It's the underlying assumption that the individual doesn't matter.

Government - at all levels - then starts thinking in abstractions: hard-working families, the vulnerable, minorities, elites and the like. All manner of things can then be done in the name of supporting or opposing such abstractions because it becomes permissible to trample on the rights of individuals regardless of whether the action is supposed to be supporting those abstractions of which the individual might reasonably supposed to be a member.

why are we being mass-surveilled in this way? What possible justification can there be? Oh yeah, terrmotorists.

FTFY

Re: No login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system

"Fining doesn't work as they don't pay the fine."

If the fine is a personal one if would be wrong for the council to pay it. If it did then the councillors responsible could be surcharged.

Re: Massive invasion of privacy

"a huge GDPR fine for the council will ultimately make things worse for those residents as yet more cuts are required to pay for it"

GDPR and the current DPA based on it allow for the officers of a corporate body to be held personally responsible for its failings. Where the body is a public one ITSM that this would be the appropriate route for prosecution.

Re: So who is to blame?

AMAFM1 posting A/C?

Re: Massive invasion of privacy

Councils are very obviously part of the government in all but name

That name is local government.

Re: Massive invasion of privacy

I doubt anyone changed places there.

Memory, all alone doing all right. Samsung dreams of the old days, life was beautiful then. Hopes punters remember happiness is a new telly

Happiness would be a new telly that was just a telly, not a T from the IoT with a tuner thrown in for good measure.

Family meeting! Chocolate Factory makes its business-like video-chat service free to anyone with a Google account

you'll need a Google account t... That account is "so it remains secure", according to a representative.

That always works.

I'm doing this to stop humans ripping off brilliant ideas by computers and aliens, says guy unsuccessfully filing patents 'invented' by his AI

I thought patents were already issued for things invented by computer. Do you mean it was actual people adding "on a computer", "on the internet" and "by mobile phone"?

Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

Re: time marches on

Actually there was no US extradition warrant out for him when he skipped bail. I rather think that the previous US administration had realised that ignoring him would be a sufficient punishment.

Re: time marches on

The greatest threat to Assange seems to be Assange. If he hadn't skipped from Sweden he could have served whatever time he was due there and then moved on to wherever would be prepared to take him.

Instead, although there wasn't even a US extradition warrant against him, under the pretext of avoiding extradition to the US he fled to the UK where it would have been much easier for him to have been extradited to the US if they'd asked - which they hadn't. So he then took the extraordinary step of skipping bail, to the detriment of those who'd supported him with bail and hiding in an embassy from which there was no chance of escape without being rearrested. He stated there until (a) there was a US extradition warrant and (b) the Swedish process (which still had first dibbs on him) was pretty well exhausted.

Re: As long as UK.gov keeps the money this time

"This time anyone putting up money must know what they're getting into"

Given that he was already doing a runner last time they should have had a reasonable idea. It's difficult to see why they didn't get charged the full amount. There's no point setting bail if it's not to be forfeit in full.

It's so unfair when a bad reputation follows ou around like that.

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

Re: HP printers

"I'm expecting 5G to explode the number of common household objects that we have to pay monthly service fees for"

I'm not, for the simple reason I wouldn't buy one.

Resistance is futile: Some Cisco security appliances are ticking time bombs of fail thanks to faulty resistors

Re: The manufacturing process issue

Or simply a process failure during manufacture of one batch of resistors. Which leads to the possibility that other manufacturers might have used components from the same batch.

UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy

Re: Watching from the bunker

"while these are unusual times, we are acutely aware of our obligations to you."

If they're aware of their obligations these are indeed unusual times.

No, silly me. They always were aware, they just didn't feel inclined to follow them.