Posts by Doctor Syntax

Check Point chap: Small firms don't invest in infosec then hope they won't get hacked. Spoiler alert: They get hacked

"Small businesses often don't have the budget for decent infosec."

They always have budget to fix the consequences. Well, maybe they don't always but if they don't it also means they don't have the budget to survive.

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

"but as a smaller company, can you really do better?"

RISC-V itself isn't a company, it's a group of companies cooperating. It might be chancy for a single vendor to make its own extensions but it could be quite feasible for some or all of the group to decide on the need for a given set of extensions and cooperate on those as well.

Australian privacy watchdog sues Facebook for *checks notes* up to £266bn

Re: The court will wimp out

It could still have a serious effect. But in a good way.

Re: What to do with all the money

According to TFA they're suing on behalf of their affected citizens. Logic says it should go to those. Likelihood is that the govt. will have substantial costs to take out of it. Very substantial costs.

Re: That could hurt

"Facebook would rather pay £2 billion to its army of lawyers than admit it's at fault"

It makes no difference whether it admits it or not if the the court decides it was at fault. I'd have thought there facts are fairly well documented by now and this appears to be a civil suit so it would be decided on balance of probabilities (assuming Oz law works like UK). I'd expect the main argument to be about damages.

Disk stuck in the drive? Don't dilly-Dali – get IT on the case!

"running up a bill of £50k when I scanned a cheap costume jewellery necklace"

Better than pricing a valuable antique at a couple of quid. SWMBO also volunteers in a charity shop and is furious when somebody turns up on an antiques programme with something really valuable that they acquired that way.

Re: a melting mystery

Back in forensic days my fire investigation colleagues had a case where fires were started on several occasions in the same house and were looking at possible means of arson. Then they traced it to a large silver bowl. Which years later led to a large gulp when I realised SWMBO's makeup mirror had put a long scorch mark on a the side of a chest of drawers. Luck escape. These concave mirrors are dangerous.

Named "Dave" by the increasingly unimaginative Reg-onymiser

So real name Rodney?

Don't be fooled, experts warn, America's anti-child-abuse EARN IT Act could burn encryption to the ground

Unfortunately the pros and cons of encryption only get debated by proxy via this cat and mouse game of the usual suspects introducing such bills.

As the US is so keen on its written constitution and amendments perhaps its time they debated it explicitly by deciding what rights their citizens should have to privacy and security of communication.

What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING

Usual contents of bag: every possible lead except the one needed right now.

Re: Power Blocks

That's why you have straight power blocks.

"who have no idea what working in them can be like"

What you mean is that they don't give a stuff what working in them is like so why would they be expected to have an idea.

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

Re: "throughput of goods is in excess of the usual Christmas peak"

"running out of toilet paper sucks"

Pass the mind bleach.

AI-predicted protein structures could unlock vaccine for COVID-19 coronavirus... if correct... after clinical trials

Re: Protein structure prediction has been done for ages...

Oddly enough, once the protein's been made it doesn't need AI. It just folds itself.

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

if the business chooses not to act upon the information, I assume there is a good reason.

FTFY

Like a Virgin, hacked for the very first time... UK broadband ISP spills 900,000 punters' records into wrong hands from insecure database

Re: We take our responsibility to protect your personal information seriously.

I'm not sure "hacked" is the right term for "tripping up over stuff somebody left lying around on the pavement".

It seems inevitable. An appropriate fine would be about two years of their complete marketing budget. It seems to be marketing who were responsible - kill their expenses and put them on bread and water for a while.

Re: Easier?

Maybe it would be easier to just list the carriers marketing departments that haven't had personal information hacked left stuff lying about in the open.

Re: "there is a risk you might be targeted for ... nuisance marketing communications"

"If so, please share your secret."

The secret is not sharing secrets.

Now that's what I call a sticky situation: Repairability fiends open up Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, find the remains of Shergar

I think animal glue would be a bit niffy, to say nothing about its effects on the vegans out there.

You'll get your money – when this bank has upgraded Windows 7... or bought extended support

Are there any banks within bargepole reach these days?

Surprise! Plans for a Brexit version of the EU's Galileo have been delayed

Re: Shame we aren’t in Galileo?

"Comrade, you're not allowed to criticise the EU."

There is plenty about which one might criticise the EU. There may also be much one might criticise about one's face but that wouldn't be a good reason for applying a sharp blade to one's nose.

Re: Shame we aren’t in Galileo?

"My experience is that the better educated people are, the more they tend to understand that some problems are very complex and require a lot of consideration."

It depends in what they were educated. An education at Eton and Oxford in classics, PPE or whatever doesn't seem to encourage that understanding.

Re: If only there were a cheap-to-deploy land based positioning system...

You park the base stations on top of them.

Re: Shame we aren’t in Galileo?

"the less educated part of the country."

You need to include the over-educated part not just the intersect between that set and the set of politicians.

Re: Good

"British citizens are excluded"

Unless they were born in NI or have a parent or grandparent who was born there or in the Irish Republic.

"politicos realise space is hard"

So's a lot of other stuff. I wonder how long it's going to take for them to realise that.

It has been 15 years, and we're still reporting homograph attacks – web domains that stealthily use non-Latin characters to appear legit

What a glyph looks like is entirely up to the font in use. There's nothing to stop email clients and browsers defaulting to fonts which make a clear distinction.

Re: A þorny problem, to be sure

"They must be taking the þiss."

What's thiss?

UK data watchdog slaps a £500,000 fine on Cathay Pacific for 2018 9.4m customer data leak

"no evidence"

Cathay Pacific, go and write out 100 lines: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Re: sigh...

Indeed. I was going to say thanks to the author for making that point in the article because there'd otherwise be somebody coming along with just that comment. But someone has to come along to say it anyway and demonstrate their lack of reading skills.

MPs to grill Post Office and Fujitsu execs on Horizon IT scandal after workers jailed over accounting errors

This will turn into a spectacular display of mutual finger pointing.

What could power an early-warning system for harmful radiation storms in Earth's Van Allen belts? AI? Let's see, say Los Alamos boffins

"it was a simple logistic regression algorithm that prevailed"

Does that actually count as AI?

You. Drop and give me 20... per cent IPv6 by 2023, 80% by 2025, Uncle Sam tells its IT admins after years of slacking

> Who, aside from some enthusiasts, actually wants ipv6?

ISPs do.

Mine doesn't seem to want it.

Re: It's the hardware

"IPv6 is trivial. I've been using in my home network and personal server for years."

The rest of your post seems to contradict that, at least for anything less trivial than a home network.

Scottish biz raided, fined £500k for making 193 million automated calls

Re: I'm not sure I understand all of this

"Having checked with companies house there seems to be no exception to UK Law as one of the articles."

The Companies Act has a section of on directors' duties. I can't remember the exact wording on fiduciary duties but it makes reference to Common Law. Presumably a director causing or allowing the company to do something contrary to Common Law would be failing in this duty. There is also a concept in law of "piercing the corporate vei"l which seems intended specifically to prevent the hiding of criminal acts behind a limited company; otherwise you'd have every thief in the land incorporating and trying to pass off their thefts as those of the company.

See points 6* and 3 respectively.

* No matter whether it's spoofed or not the originator's telco knows the originator and if a telco is passing on a call that originated elsewhere it still knows the telco it got it from. They need that for billing. They'd have a problem if they were obfuscating the origins of the calls in which case they'd be - deservedly - on the hook themselves.

OK, here's this once again:

1. Allocate a number such as 1476 (nicely away from miskeying 1471.

2. Dial that after the nuisance call.

3. Until a threshold of reports has been reached your telco holds a record of your report.

4. Once the threshold has been reached your telco credits your account with a few, say £1 for each call or £2 if you're registered with TPS.

5. The telco charges whoever originated the call to them and adds a handling charge. If it's the actual caller it goes straight on their bill, if not it's up to the telco who forwarded to yours to keep records and charge their source, along with their handling charge.

6. If some telco along the line didn't keep track they're on the hook and won't be doing it again.

7. The telcos are given notice to prepare for all this.

8. The telcos realise there'll be upfront costs plus even if they don't kill the practice stone dead with credit control to protect themselves the costs will kill the rogue-calling industry and their upfront costs won't e recouped in handling charges.

9. The telcos suddenly discover previously unknown ways to stop the problem at source so there's no need to incur those costs.

Requires only will on the part of government to empower the regulator.

"The company's most recent accounts show it was a dormant company at the time of the offences, so it was trading improperly anyway"

In which case the directors will be on the hook anyway under the Companies Act.

"I thought if the purpose of a business was illegal, there was no shielding of liability?"

There isn't. But the first step will be to hold the company responsible. The next step has to go after the director(s).

Honeywell, I blew up the qubits: Thermostat maker to offer cloud access to 'world's most powerful quantum computer' within months

Thank you for introducing us to the word "turducken" which I'm sure can acquire an entirely different meaning.

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

Re: obligatory link to Dilbert 'token ring'

No, we all knew. Nothing sad about knowing the classics.

"We had 10base2"

Yup. '95 sounds a bit late for a recently installed Token Ring. By then we were on our third Ethernet set-up although luckily enough the stiff hose-pipe variant was somebody else's problem. Maybe the installer wanted to unload some old stock.

Re: obligatory link to Dilbert

https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-05-02

Windows 7 goes dual screen to shriek at passersby: Please, just upgrade me or let me die

I was in a local library the other week to use their Ancestry subscription. Yup - still running W7.

It's only a game: Lara Croft won't save enterprise tech – but Jet Set Willy could

"the real lines drawn on the dry-wipe whiteboards over endless cups of indifferent coffee as last night's hangover dissolves under the strip lights of endless meetings"

You are jack Dee and I claim my £5.

Re: I wants one

But only if I could find a copy of the Z80 UCSD Pascal.

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Re: Strangest job interview technique

The appropriate response to that has to be "Mornington Crescent".

Re: Coding Tests

"My brother went for a job, in the late 90s I think. At a listed company. And was told his CV had to be hand written. Turned out they employed a graphologist to spout bollocks about what your handwriting said about your suitability for the job."

The interview is also your chance to evaluate the company.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: Devils advocate.....

The fact they got the domain back tells me the devil doesn't have all the best tunes.