Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK test-and-trace coronavirus data may be handed to police to nab those who aren't self-isolating as required

Re: Tragedy of the commons

"This one time my sympathy is with the police."

From what I read the police are far from happy with it although that might vary depending on the CHief Constable force.

Re: BBC take the opposing position . . .

Actually the original article didn't do that at all: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54586897

I don't know when the official announcement was mad but by the time the Beeb had their article written (they'd have to spend time getting reactions) it went live about half-past 10 on Saturday evening, well in time to get buried under later stuff by Sunday morning.

Note also that the later article is about the App. The original article deals with sharing data from the test and trace system. The difference being that the App doesn't collect personal data so Dido hasn't got anything to share.

It's a difficult position for T&T given that there is widespread avoidance. However making it a police matter, at least in the first instance, is not the way to go about it, neither is sharing data.

Part of the problem is that T&T for Covid-19 is a centralised operation whilst in the past such operations have been done locally. A local operation could have its own staff going round to check in the first place and only calling on the police if they didn't have the powers to enforce. As it is, the best they can do is to try ringing the contact to see if there's no response in the case of a landline or trying to make some judgement from background sound if it's a mobile.

Another part is that all this depends on a system which determines whether the subject might be infected; I haven;t seen any figures for it but wouldn't be surprised it it were quite low. It's not to be wondered at if members of the public are reluctant to self-isolate on a possibility and even less so if some of them are getting the message several times. Nor is it to be wondered at if the police themselves are unhappy as the Beeb article suggests. A test, trace and test approach would be better.

I suspect there might not be a problem sharing data from border records. It was reported that Burnley had a substantial spike resulting from someone returning from holiday and, instead of self-isolating, going on a pub crawl.

GSM gateways: Parliament obviously cocked up, so let minister issue 'ignore the law' decree, UK.gov barrister urges court

Welcome to the new post-law world.

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

Re: A Place for Everything, and Everything in it's Place

That's why your /home partition is on LVM.

Atlassian pulls the plug on server licences, drags customers to the cloud

"If you've got to migrate anyway, why not migrate to something better?"

Never give the customer a reason to review the market.

If you're feeling down, know that we've just buried a heat sensor in an alien planet. If NASA can get through Mars soil, we can get through 2020

Seems that Mars is like the Earth. Both follow Sods Law of Ground Investigation. That's the one that ensures e.g. the only lump of wood in your peat core will be in the middle of the period you're interested in.

Come on, Amazon: If you're going to copy open-source code for a new product, at least credit the creator

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

Copyright exists automatically. You don't have to do anything.

That's something that's caught out the unwary by posting something on github or wherever without a licence. They think they're making it public domain by doing that. In fact they're making it unusable because there's no legal way to copy it.

A very quick search reveals that Ace Books used a loophole in US copyright law.

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

My own correction. There's the option of the licensor including a NOTICE which must be copied if it exists.

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

I wonder how many commentards have read the Apache licence. As far as I can make out from it, unlike the early BSD permissive licences, there's no requirement to to credit the author(s) but there is a term against applying their trademarks. That might be seen as an inhibiting crediting authors.

I might have misread it, of course, so I'm open to correction.

Will there be no end to govt attempts to break encryption? Hand over your data or the kiddies get it, threaten Five Eyes spies

Put your money where your mouth is.

Instead of complaining nobody will do it for you commission someone to provide software to do this. It must, of course, stand up to expert infosec inspection to ensure it actually does keep out miscreants, including ensuring that collected data can't get leaked or misused.

When you've cracked that you can go ahead and get it used.

Software billionaire accused of hiding $2bn in income from IRS – potentially the largest tax scam in US history

Re: Idiot

That's the trouble. All those who didn't know when to stop keep outbidding each other because they can.

Re: Idiot

Or decided that 1 billion was enough for anyone and retired long ago.

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

Re: The bane of auto formatting....

"auto formatting is useful. It is, as ever, the user's fault when it goes wrong."

I thought the entire purpose was to make it go right when the user went wrong. The cost of that is that it goes wrong when the user's right.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Re: Possible solution to different licencing...

If that was the idea it's taken a long time for them to get round to it. It was a good while ago so I might have retained the wrong impression but AFAICR there was a lot of who-ha about Oracle not doing much with it, alienated devs and the like so the release under the Apache licence was made so that it could be forked which enabled the dissatisfied devs to do that. If that's a reasonable summary then I think it ill-behoves them to complain about the continuing existence of something that was set up for their benefit.

"Money – we know the TDF is trying to find ways to finance the project"

Quite. And even more ironically, it's the nature of their licence that makes it difficult to do that. No wonder they're looking at OO and shouting "sour grapes".

Re: Possible solution to different licencing...

Stealing is taking with intent to deprive the owner of it and without the owner's permission. Basing a commercial product on a permissive licensed one in no way deprives the world of the original version. I don't know about current windows but earlier versions used, and, in keeping with the licence, acknowledged they used, the BSD networking stack. That in no way prevented the same stack being used in other OSs.

If someone contributes to a permissive project they presumably do that in full knowledge of the possibility of someone basing a commercial product with it so the commercial product has the contributors' consent. The commercial product might be feeding back changes to the product. It might even fund the entire product.

On neither basis can the accusation of stealing stick. The only difference is that the permissive project can be shared in binary without any obligation to provide source code. Even then there's only a real difference if the commercial version has made changes that aren't fed back. And what's at issue here is one project forking a permissive project and making changes that can't be fed back due to the difference in licensing terms. If you want to consider a commercial closed version as stealing from the original project then you must surely apply the same label to the fork under the more restrictive licence.

From the PoV of the original project it's just sharing, as the licence facilitates but don't you think it just a little ill-mannered, to put it no stronger, to take the freely shared code from an original project, ensure that your changes can't be shared back and then claim some sort of moral high ground over the project from which you've taken it?

Re: "We were caught quite off guard"

"They should get over themselves, switch licences so that a merge is possible."

Easier said than done. They'd have to get agreement from all contributors.

Re: Possible solution to different licencing...

This can't be done for the same reason that OO can't take the MPL contributions. The MPL contains copyleft clauses similar to GPL, i.e. projects using such source, including any forks, must also be copyleft. The Apache licence is permissive and doesn't put any such constraints on code taken from it. It may seem unfair that LO could take the OO code freely and not give back but that's the difference between the two licences. Yes, it's ironic - or something - that the copyleft principle is intended to force code sharing whilst permissive licences simply facilitate it.

"LibreOffice (presumably purposely) doesn't have a mail client."

There was an article some time ago on the LO's blog site arguing for this but the decision seems to have been to stay neutral. A problem with TBird is that the later have gone in for a tabbed interface although the SeaMonkey derivative remains classic although the underpinnings are different AFAIK. Personally I wish the two projects would get together and produce an integrated offering.

Although I have LO as the main office suite I keep a copy of OO, if only for old times sake. I see no harm in OO continuing to exist if only to remind LO that an alternative exists should they lurch off in some odd direction which makes me wonder why LO are so concerned.

UK tech supply chain in dark over Brexit preparations months ahead of final heave-ho

On his own, he's welcome to leap. It's taking the rest of us with him I object to.

Re: It's just me who doesn't qualify.

Seriously I'm a bit too old to be affected but equally seriously it could be significant for the younger generation.

Re: you are still a Brit as far as the eu is concerned?

Not sure of the date but it must be after mid '70s as our children qualified.

Re: It's almost as if

As I remember it the plan for Leave was to let Cameron deal with it because he'd foolishly said he would. Having discovered that the result actually was Leave he did the sensible thing and bailed. That left Leave scouring the woods for unicorns. Come January we'll discover whether they found any.

Re: Awww, kids today...

"The passport control actually checked that I looked like my photograph."

But you got out eventually?

Re: Bye lads....

"if the Brexit talks to pear shaped"

Were they ever going to be any other shape? HMG deliberately put themselves in the position of supplicants and then want to dictate terms.

Re: Bye lads....

"until you have Irish citizenship you are still a Brit as far as the eu is concerned."

No problem for my children (born NI), my grandchildren (mother born in Ireland) and any great grandchildren (grandmother born in NI), my sister-in-law (as per my wife) and her husband (Irish mother) and at least some have their passports to prove it. It's just me who doesn't qualify.

I think one comment was that they were more likely to hear something sensible from the sand than from the government.

Re: Latest from the PM

"This is cargo culting at its worst."

But without cargo.

According to Lord Agnew it's all the industry's fault. They've had their heads in the sand. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54525211

Lift us up where we belong: UK's Network Rail puts elevators online

Re: What could posssssibly go right?

"Actually, there's quite a good record of third-party applications picking up data provided by Network Rail"

It will necessarily need some sort of hole in the systems perimeter to get access to the API and there's a good - or bad - record of miscreants taking advantage of any possible weakness. Those holes had better be well defended.

"real-time updates which can be plugged into the creations of any enterprising app or web developer by means of an application programming interface."

What could posssssibly go wrong?

To stop web giants abusing privacy, they must be prevented from respawning. Ever

"Force them to incorperate in each nation, then force them to declare how much money they trade and how much profit they make and tax them accordingly (with the stick in the background of a tax per trade system if they try any shifty IP purchasing stuff to try and reduce local profit)"

The present system makes it possible for a country with what might be called a natural economy to attract in a few big multinationals with low tax rates which also give local companies the same advantage. As long as the IP stuff is possible that can be used to shift the profit to such countries whether they incorporate in each country or not.

Countries trying to do impose trading taxes will simply get bullied by the US with sanctions, at least as long at the current incumbent's there. Getting multiple countries to work together would be a problem as the smaller ones trading on this would raise objections as might HMG as a means of trying curry favours from the US.

In addition trying to devise a system to hit the FAANGS wouldn't be easy - at the very least it would probably generate more hoops for Real Businesses to jump through to escape it whilst trying to handle their imports and exports. From the UK's PoV we're just about to discover how much of that sort of red tape will affect our businesses once our existing EU arrangements end; the last thing they need will be more of the same.

UK's National Audit Office warns full-fibre rollout strategy is leaving rural Britain behind. Again

From item 6 of the summary in the report: "Since we last reported, the Superfast Programme has moved increasingly to gigabit-capable full-fibre solutions in

place of copper telephone wires from premises to a local cabinet."

So they've switching from an approach where the individual premises connections are handled by existing infrastructure to one where the existing infrastructure has to be replaced. Is it surprising that things have slowed?

For the more widely scattered farms it may well be that a direct fibre connection is the only effective one and if the sites suitable for FTTC have all been supplied this is reasonable and inevitable but I do wonder if this is a matter of selecting those who already have a good service and replacing it with better whilst those without hang on for longer and longer.

British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks

"the airline had been saving credit card details in plain text since 2015."

Presumably this is going to be subject to a whole lot of other actions from financial regulators and credit card companies.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Re: CUPS sucks

"If you compare a modern printer driver from Windows"

I'd have to buy and install Windows for that. I think I'll leave it, thanks all the same.

Re: CUPS sucks

"You can run practically every Windows software"

That's everything that Windows supports which might not be some older hardware. Windows has form for this.

I see you found a couple of people with no experience of serious proofreading.

Until the current unpleasantness (and hopefully again once the good times roll) I produce weekly hand-outs form my wife's patchwork class. Following online notes on a laptop, even assuming there was a connection in the hall the class was held in, whilst sewing wasn't going to work too well. These days we email out a PDF which the class members will need to print, especially as they'll need to cut out the templates from it.

The vid-confs drinking game: Down a shot of brandy every time someone titters 'Sorry, I was on mute'

I'd forgotten M. Dabbs now resides in France where villages have mayors. In the Anglophone world villages are bereft of idiots. They've all gone into national politics.

BTW fish leather has been a thing in this dimension for a long time in the form of shagreen.

Re: Alternate reality

That's the thing about peacocks. You see them strutting about and never image they were aerodynamically capable of flight until your eardrums get assaulted by one perched in a tree above your head.

Re: Alternate reality

"if the cows break into my garden"

IME that's because a townie has followed attempted to follow a footpath into the wrong field and left a gate open because there wasn't a stile.

Actually, that's sheep. The cow problem was when the farmer used to walk a milking herd back home along the road. Fortunately dairying isn't profitable at his scale so it doesn't happen now. We did have as much of the herd as would fit, including the bull that always accompanied them, in the drive, milling round the cars. The farmer even got worried that time.

If you can see this headline, you're certainly not reading it on Twitter: All tweets, notifications vanish

Re: Is it too much to ask?

And take all its brethren with it.

COVID-19 security tips: Ensure you sack your staff without leaving their IT access enabled, says Secureworks

Re: Macros

But is there an anti-malware team to check it. That's when you know the company is taking it seriously.

Re: Tip for those sacked

Two conflicting points of view, both excellent in their own way.

Some data is definitely hybrid. Any email from company to worker relevant to employment and copies of similar emails going the other way are both company and personal data. Depending on your relationship with your employer you may need your own copy. I'm sure it's a grey area of law. OTOH if the communication had been on paper there'd probably have been no question of the employee being forbidden to retain it.

Then there's general knowledge - all those accumulated little code snippets or scripts that an employer expects an experienced techie to have at his finger tips. Does it all have to be in the head or can some of it be preserved in some other form? And I'm sure every old-school salesman had his little black book or card index which went with him from employer to employer. In either case the employer can't expect the leaver to be brainwashed.

Re: Seems reasonable

"but are we paranoid enough?"

If you're not your manglement will discover that the hard way. They won't blame themselves. Oh, no.

Tip for those sacked

Hope for better times for everyone including your ex-employer and remain on good terms to be at the front of the queue when they get back on their feet.

Intel celebrates security of Ice Lake Xeon processors, so far impervious to any threat due to their unavailability

Re: Special Instructions?

A hardware flaw may also affect your software solution.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

"Lifetime Support Policy"

Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title. Sir Humphrey would applaud.