Posts by Doctor Syntax

Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It just changed its name to Emerdata

Seems to be working

The Beeb haven't noticed yet.

Re: Claim They Did Nothing Wrong...

"It is as if as soon as they become senior managers or above, that they believe their own lies, and everyone else will too."

It's not necessary for them to believe their own lies. They just need to get others to believe them. As that's been what they did for a living it's not surprising that they're continue to do it in their own interest.

Blighty: If EU won't let us play at Galileo, we're going home and taking encryption tech with us

Re: Chokes with laughter

Because of all of the crying about the result of the referendum, the EU has us bent over and all lubed up ready for a forceful screwing over.

FTFY

Brexit has put us in the inevitable position of negotiating from weakness. It's glaringly obvious in every news item and you still don't get it!

Re: Hypocrites

"Also, we happened to ask the opinion of everyone in the country and the majority disagreed with you."

No they didn't, that's the trouble. It was a very close split. It's customary when a referendum is binding to require a substantial majority, something like 2/3, to overturn the status quo.

And it's not customary to hold an advisory referendum and then treat it afterwards as binding.

Re: Hypocrites

"Sadly, there are many who would prefer to see the UK fail rather than accept the outcome of the largest democratic vote in British history."

Actually we would rather see Britain succeed. That's why we think that Brexit is a huge mistake.

We don't want to be proved right but fear we will be and we can also imagine the terms under which we'd have to be let back in. The Euro will be one. Probably the ever closer union crap will be another. It's just a huge strategic mistake which will end up with us back in the EU in 10 years time under conditions that nobody likes and with absolutely nobody willing to admit that they voted for it.

And I suspect this "Remainers want Britain to fail" is a line born of increasing desperation of Brexiteers realising that the EU isn't folding to their every demand, maybe realising that we're negotiating from a position of weakness and seeking somebody - any body - to blame for this other than themselves and their madness that put us there.

Re: Don't worry just yet

"I know some will think this a stupid idea but in my defence; Hammond started it!"

The worrying thing is that up to now he's been one with his head screwed on right.

"using an Arianespace booster would likely cause a sizeable chunk of Parliament to spontaneously combust"

Please! It would solve so many problems, the more so as it would be self-selecting.

Post-Facebook fallout: Americans envy Europeans' privacy – top EU data watchdog

"Hence for instance why the whole planet uses Prince 2 and ITIL from the UK."

Nice one, A/C. A lot of whooshes there. I think el Reg is starting to accumulate a lot of readers with poor comprehension.

Re: "Its about time politicians and lawmakers realized their limitations"

"It's also up to voters to select better ones and not old gits who just seek re-election."

Better old gits with some knowledge of what privacy means than millennials who've never heard of it. That's the irony of the situation.

Re: 'Anyway, the monopolies they are creating are destroying jobs, not creating new ones.'

"We need some real innovation in Legislating Digital. Its about time politicians and lawmakers realized their limitations and re-tooled / re-schooled. Max Schrems has been the only real hero to praise here."

While I totally agree re Max Schrems it still remains the case that without the legislation that had already been made he wouldn't have had a means to do what he had.

Well, that went well: Withings founder buys biz back from Nokia

"Apple's HealthKit"

Does anyone else look at "HealthKit" and see "Heathkit"?

UK Parliament roars: Oi! Zuck! Get in here for a grilling – or you'll get a Tower of London tour

Re: Trouble in Paradise?

"sounds as if they can deal it out to the little people, but they can't take it themselves"

I think they're having some argument with FB as to who are the little people.

Re: Which amendment?

"For some reason the Red Queen comes to mind here."

Because she never really got round to doing anything about it?

"Must be even more difficult than Brexit."

It's governed by international tax treaties on the one hand and a realisation that x% of £y is more than 2x% of £0 on the other.

Re: Why all the sham theatre?

"that they have the power to make that nasty GDPR go away next year"

Only if they want to go extreme Brexit and become the 51st state in the name of taking back control.

No top-ups, please, I'm a millennial: Lightweight yoof shunning booze like never before

Re: re: If you're still doing it when you're 40, you're probably a barrister.

"the local organisation seems brain dead when it comes to communicating with each other"

If asked they'd probably blame data protection.

North will remain North for now, say geo-magnetic boffins

Re: Wow

"raised beaches in Scotland or N Ireland ... intertidal peats"

A nice example of this: Balcary Bay hotel in Scotland. The hotel itself sits on what looks like a low raised beach with a higher one behind it and on the foreshore a shallow peat bed at about high water mark so not quite intertidal but certainly indicative of a relative sea level lower than it is now.

Re: Wow

"overwhelming observed scientific evidence"

Overwhelming observed scientific evidence shows that climate has changed back and forth for a very long time. Whatever is done about carbon emissions it will continue to change. We cannot rely on stable climate, nor on fixed sea levels.

Re: Wow

There seem to be a lot of people who've never seen, or at least recognised, raised beaches in Scotland or N Ireland; never seen intertidal peats and sub-fossil forest remains further south nor glaciation features such as drumlins, eskers, kettle-hole lakes, moraines or outwash fans deposited in former ice-dammed lakes in N.England or N Ireland; never heard of the boreal maximum, the medieval warm period or the frost fairs on the Thames. And yet all these and more are real phenomena.

Climate and sea levels really have changed and will continue to do so despite your downvotes. (Downvoting creationists who attribute glacial features to Noah's flood are excused on grounds of not knowing better.)

Re: Wow

"Apart from 'their' being the the correct word, plenty of evidence exists that climate change is actually happening"

As a geologist you'll be aware that climate is always changing as are relative sea levels. The entire climate change debate seems to be between two sides one of which believes that this isn't happening and the other that it is but shouldn't and either we can prevent it or could have except we're too late. Neither PoV seems quite well founded.

Techies! Britain's defence secretary wants you – for cyber-sniping at Russia

Re: I though he already told Russia where it should go

"That was a bloody good game, really enjoyed playing that one."

You thought you were playing a game.

Let's be Frank: Bloke drags Google to the US Supreme Court over $8.5m privacy payout

Re: Economically Feasible?

"Personally, I would consider the amount paid to track down addresses for the class members and then print and mail all the checks as part of the punishment."

The problem here is seeing this as punishment. If there is punishment it should come from criminal action. This is supposedly compensation and the cost of processing that should be part of the costs paid by Google. If someone has suffered $x damages then $x should be what they're entitled to receive, not $x minus some administration fee.

Re: Been in a few class actions without knowing it...

"Ok maybe the company was punished?"

It's the criminal law's job to see a company is punished if they have broken the law. It's civil law's job to see the victims are compensated. In any given situation one or both might apply. But if there is compensation the calculated amount should go to the victims. The cost of administering the payment should be paid by the perpetrator. If that came to more than 56 cents it shouldn't be anybody's problem but the airline's.

Firefox to feature sponsored content as of next week

The Mozilla Foundation has revealed that links to sponsored posts potential malware vectors have started to appear in its Firefox browser and pledged to deliver them without invading users' privacy.

Anyone shoving something into my browser other than what I requested is an invader.

Escape from the Zuckerborg: WhatsApp founder legs it

"everything you've taught me, including about encryption and its ability to take power from centralised systems and put it back in people's hands."

Translation: You've taught me this encryption stuff lets little people hide stuff from me if I let them use it.

AI boffins rebel against closed-access academic journal that wants to have its cake and eat it

The present commercial academic publishing model is surely one whose time has gone.

It's perfectly possible for an academic society to do all the editorial work needed. I was on the committee of one which did this. As our membership included all the staff of the local University department and the public sector body in the field there was no problem of recruiting well qualified people to do that. We did, however, have to carry the cost of typesetting and printing so although we sold copies to libraries etc. - at nothing like the current subscriptions - it was our major cost of running the society.

Now the typesetting and printing costs have gone the equivalent would be hosting costs and it would certainly be cheaper for libraries to get together and share those than continue to pour huge sums into the coffers of Elsevier.

Re: Research

"While Nature is an esteemed publication, one has to wonder how it got that way. Was it because they had well-known and peer-evaluated reviewers looking at articles, or was it because they slowly clamped down and monetized what the publishers thought were best."

It got that way by being very early into scientific publishing. If you couldn't get into Proc. Roy. Soc. you wanted to get into Nature although in my field New Phytol. or Proc. Roy. Ir. Acad. were pretty good.

However I do recall being told that just before I started out as a researcher that a journalist on Nature rung up my boss and my predecessor to check a report he'd written about someone else's paper and it was so bad that they more or less rewrote it for him over the phone.

It wasn't just refereeing that got farmed out, it was also proof-reading. Hot metal printing meant both galley and page proofs. For an author it was a chance to change your mind providing it wasn't a big change and fitted into exactly the same space as the text you'd changed. It was intended, however as means of picking up typos which really required a new set of eyes so the authors needed to rope in another academic colleague to assist in that.

Brit healthcare system inks Windows 10 install pact with Microsoft

Re: M$ should be paying us!

"Since I'm not seeing the symptoms that Isces wrote about, I am inclined to believe that the update problems he faces are down to laptop models (drivers) or some esoteric configuration."

It's quite likely that in the NHS there are plenty of machines running what would be esoteric configurations to you and, indeed, to Microsoft but that esoterica is the core application for them. It explains, for instance, why some of them are still on XP.

Re: Is this one of those things where UK means England

"may $DEITY have mercy upon Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland"

From experience, mercy is needed for anyone having to arm-wrestle data from several of those. I managed to avoid NI and Scotland was different enough not to be a problem but the distance between English and Welsh data sources was pessimal.

Re: Speaking as an insider ...

"CERNER requires IE, it was designed that way."

It's things like that that are part of the problem, not part of the solution. It makes for a monoculture in which everything goes down together.

Re: Speaking as an insider ...

"avoiding the monumental scream-fest if people have to cope with a particular screen no longer looking like it did before"

That describes the evolution of Windows and Office fairly well. And yet there seems to be a perceived problem with making a one-off move to something that would offer the prospect of a stable user interface. One of the aspects of open source is that a change in UI is apt to prompt work by refuseniks to maintain the original.

Re: M$ should be paying us!

"An upgrade breaking some slightly esoteric piece of software Im running I can accept"

Why? Surely the whole purpose of the system is to enable you to run your choice of software, whether it be common, slightly esoteric or full-on left field. That's what you bought the kit for. Surely you didn't buy it because you wanted a Windows paperweight.

Re: M$ should be paying us!

"nor should any customer with common sense conclude that such an expectation was reasonable."

If a customer has a version of a system running and a vendor does their utmost, sneaky utmost in this case, to push a new version on it it's very reasonable to expect that the new version (a) continues to work on the hardware onto which it was pushed and (b) continues to support the application that the system was purchased to run.

Perhaps it's time to step back and remember that an operating system is not an end in itself, it's a platform to support the application on owner's hardware.

Re: upgrade' the PC's to run ChromeOS

"So.... where are all the myriad of VB6/VB-Net applications going to run then?"

I see you've spotted the advantage.

Re: Half solved, you mean

"Don't forget the several billion you'd have to spend retraining everyone"

What do you mean retraining?

Re: The Trust I work for didn't fail...

"The assessor didn't actually understand what InfoSec were telling them."

Been there! The assessor had been drafted in from perimeter security.

Re: How Long?

"Would it not be simpler (and cheaper) to standardise all IT equipment across all NHS trusts directly from Whitehall? Think how Maersk dealt with NotPetya, by replacing all servers and desktops/laptops."

Either (a) Maersk had a very small variety of tasks for their IT estate or (b) they didn't update anything with a very specialised control function.

If you look at the NHS you'll find a lot of machines that could be updated to a current version of W10 and a lot running lab and other diagnostic kit that depend on specific drivers that either aren't going to be available for W10 or possibly not for the H/W on which W10 will run. Identifying those that couldn't be handled like that will not be a trivial project.

But take it a step further. If a lot of PCs are simply running office suites, email and browser why not introduce extra resilience? A monoculture of Windows PCs of any single version could be taken out by an exploit of some zero-day*. So for such tasks add a mixture of Mac, Linux and xBSD, say 25% of each, to minimise that risk. And Linux and BSD for servers.

* This also applies to Maersk of course. They may be protected against the last variant of NotPetya. But what about the next?

DRAM makers sued (yet again) for 'fixing prices' (yet again) of chips

The complaint, put forward by named plaintiffs Michele Jones, David Laietta, Kimberly York, Benjamin Murray, and Wanta Dureya on behalf of anyyone in the US who purchased something containing DRAM from one of the three companies from July 1, 2016 through the February 1, 2018 lawyers and their friends

FTFY

Windows USB-stick-of-death, router bugs resurrected, and more

"So unless you're willing to kill people"

I thought we were talking about the Pentagon. Where's their problem in that?

Tick tock data-muncher: UK to let info commish demand faster access

Re: 24 hours

"24 hours isn't enough time to do it properly. To do that you'd need a team, all properly trained and kept up to date on every database change across an entire organisation, with an on-call rota."

As far as I can make out this isn't about routine subject access requests. This is about ICO investigations and the week-long stand off at CA. Even 24 hours is long compared to being able to roll up at 5am with a sledgehammer.

In fact, I'd go for the ICO being able to turn up at 5am with a sledgehammer.

"Making what is clearly covered by existing statutes for fraud, perverting the course of justice or other serious criminal offences into something you can get away with using a good lawyer."

I don't see any rush to bring CA to book for deleting data, nor is it clear what basis there may have been under existing law for doing so if the only thing affected is an ICO investigation.

Nor do I see the ICO's remit overlapping much if at all with what's covered by existing law (statue and common) so why should adding provision for prosecuting destruction of evidence for investigations within that remit affect existing criminal provisions.

It looks like a batch of good amendments and recent events should have made it easier to get them in.

"Events, dear boy, events."

‘I broke The Pentagon’s secure messaging system – and won an award for it!’

I like the regular feature but maybe it should be retitled Testing In Time: Scheduled & Unscheduled Proving

Re: Work ethic

Then we have to craft an ever-fscking "vision" statement in yet another demented "all-hands" group grope.

Insist on working some - no, make that all - your gripes into the "vision". Even if they're off-topic. Eventually I found manglement got a good idea about what it was best to leave me out of.

Supreme Court to dig into Google's very cosy $8.5m deal with lawyers over web search leak

"You never pay every class member. On small dollar settlements there is 0.25 per cent claim rate, so even if you quadruple that rate, you can still pay people $5 or so."

Simple solution. Make the damages per claimant realistic and publicise them.

Facebook furiously pumps brakes on Euro probe into transatlantic personal data slurping

Just wait a few more weeks and then just start another case under GDPR about SCCs tying consent for data slurping to provision of a service.

Windrush immigration papers scandal: What it didn't teach UK.gov about data compliance

Re: Not just immigrants

"If we accept this, at the very least we should get id cards and have less hassle."

"If". Big word for only two letters.

Javid's in, Rudd's out: UK Home Sec quits over immigration targets scandal

Re: Aside from the usual noise

"You know of whom I speak."

No. I can think of several who'd want the job. When the opportunity comes up they'll end up stabbing each other in the back again with any luck.

Re: Fuckety bye...

"the poor schmuck in charge of the Home Office?"

"Poor schmuck" seems a reasonable description of the fate of anyone appointed Home Sec but Home Secs are in the charge of the Home Office, not in charge of it.

Re: Diversity in action ...

"At the core is the previous Home Secretary policy, so this will change nothing."

It's not previous Home Secretary policy. It's standard Home Office policy. Home Secs come and go, the Home Office just goes on.