Posts by Doctor Syntax

ICANN begs Europe: Please fill in the blanks on this half-assed GDPR-compliant Whois we came up with

Re: Whois lookups used to be useful

This is exactly why I suggested above that corporate registrants should be disclosed in whois. The baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

It might be mandatory but if the domain owner chooses not to do so it's a bit difficult to work out who they are.

If BigCo has their website flogging their rather dubious products they may well register some "review" site which habitually praises them and do so anonymously because they can.

I vaguely remember receiving spam fa few times from somebody flogging print services. They put their limited co name on the email but not their registered number. I think there were also some errors on their website - possibly about address - so I grassed them up to Companies' House who didn't fine them but "helped them" to fix their errors. The spam stopped.

Re: Clarity

Actually, it's only illegal as regards actual people resident in the EU. It isn't as regards corporate registrants but nevertheless they're hidden because of it.

Very simple. The name of any corporate registrant should be publicly available on whois complete with contact information for appropriate roles (not names of holders) such as an overall contact for the registration, administrators such as webmaster and postmaster for any outward facing services, and data protection officer. For any personal registrant the information should only be revealed on production of a court warrant issued in the jurisdiction of the registrar.

Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee

Re: Blue sky thinking?

"And this is supposed to be government by a party known for its financial responsibility."

It got taken over.

Re: Remember...

"I expect the EU will be added to the list come January."

For a substantial part of the current HMG it's been on their list for some time except, of course, when they're looking for somewhere to go on holiday.

Re: National Cyber Security Should Investigate Government Systems

"handing over contracts and Intellectual Property to Huawei."

Would that be the Huawei that has a large number of telecoms patents of its own? Or the Huawei that was about to establish an R&D base in Cambridge? Or was it the Huawei which, alone of the telecoms equipment providers, made arrangements to have its software open for examination to UK security*?

At the very least we should demand any alternative equipment providers be as open as Huawei has been compelled to be. Who knows - if that were the situation we could actually make informed decisions on the basis of technical merit.

* Who seem to have found poor coding standards but nothing malicious.

That would be a political decision. It's not a basis to make a technical one.

In June Cotton described the Chinese company as "a criminal organisation" to the committee during a Parliamentary hearing, belligerently asking Labour's Kevan Jones MP: "Why would you be so eager to use this technology?"

I'm sure Cotton will be well aware that in his legislature it's the committee's job to ask questions and the witness's to answer them. He seems to have some difficulty in grasping that the same thing applies here.

UK ISP TalkTalk confirms it will MullMull go-private takeover offer valuing it at £1.1bn

They probably think they can increase profits by shaving a bit off the running costs.

Chef leaves a bad taste: Staff cut in 'horrid, bleak' week after Progress swallows DevOps darling for $220m

Re: Don't relax

Train them in all the bad habits they can thing of.

"We discovered that validating inputs was a big drag on performance. We were going to remove it in the next version."

"Customers tell us that credential checking is too restrictive at present."

It's in their DNA: Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing tool

Re: Amazing work.

"because she posted a picture of herself in a bikini."

Or with a wardrobe malfunction.

This year's Nobel awards seem particularly outstanding. A bright spot in an otherwise dismal year.

All it took was a global pandemic confining millions to their homes to remind businesses how much they appreciate the IT crowd

Meanwhile John and Susan in marketing are continuing to put the business in jeopardy with a collection of customer details/leads/random contacts gathered against GDPR and held insecurely on AWS.

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

Re: almost certainly prevents me writing down the list of names myself and going from there

"They should have worked out their willingness to license the Java source code before investing."

IIRC Oracle were unwilling to licence the particular flavour of Java that Google needed, hence Google's decision to roll their own.

Re: Good analysis

"In any case, programming will go on."

If Oracle win any vendor that wants to see its libraries used will have to make very specific declarations as to the ability of developers to include the API's declarations in their code. It will be interesting to see how Oracle themselves deal with that. On the whole it'll probably be safer not to develop in Java and probably a good idea to develop outside the jurisdiction of the US.

Re: Nine Laypeople

There seems to be a widespread view, which I find very odd, that judges live in isolation from the rest of the world and know only about the law.

A moment's thought should lead to the realisation that all manner of cases are brought before them. As a defunct Sunday paper used to claim, all human life is there.

Re: Nine Seniles

I take it you've not spent much time in courts listening to legal arguments.

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble, Azure also unwell

Re: Reminds me

Good idea but you need a supply of freshly made and inexpensive ones to replace those that fail.

Re: Make no mistake

OTOH after the first, or at least the first few, outages the ass should be what the manager who made the cloud decision is out on.

A defect which is active is more than "latent". Another weasel word on which they should be called out.

Re: Do you remember?

"which seems to mean exactly the same thing."

That depended on what the thin client was connected to. If it was some external service then, yes, it was the same thing. If it was to your own service, then no.

UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?

According to the article that was a direct quote from the ICO so why do they have had any more legal problem quoting it than you?

UK, French, Belgian blanket spying systems ruled illegal by Europe’s top court

Re: May as well leave security services to do as they wish collecting data

"Oversight devolves to government ministers, parliament, judiciary, and perhaps a committee of the Privy Council."

You think Parliament gets an effective role?

The problem is the government minister bit. They can sign warrants which ought to be limited to the judiciary. At present the judiciary is independent (if you doubt that just remember the judgements against govt. over the last few years) but Cummings isn't happy wit that and wants to get his hands on appointments.

Re: Half way home

"we'll find out the reality that we don't"

Bu, but, but...we've taken back control.

Re: Not for much longer

Cummings doesn't need to explain anything to BoJo. He just tells him.

Re: Not for much longer

"The UK will be at theoretical liberty to go its own way, but the practical consequence...."

And you think the current HMG gives a damn about consequences?

Like the next US govt, the next UK govt. is going to have a massive foreign relations and trade repair job on its hands.

Re: Nothing rhymed

" the illegality of these mass surveillance systems was known long before"

In legal terms it's not "known" until a court rules on it.

As such, the intelligence services will immediately start work on their own interpretations of what phrases like “strictly necessary” and “persistent threat” mean and see if they can fit them within existing laws. If that effort doesn’t hold water, we can probably expect to see new legislation proposed by the government.

Assuming HMG deigns to take notice of it (and they'll have to if they want* any hope of getting a pass on businesses doing any trade with the EU that involves sharing data) they'll probably just go to the filing cabinet and get out Investigative Powers Act 4.0 or whatever number we're up to now.

I'm sure they've anticipated this and couched the same old slurping in different terms. It's one thing where we're really world beating.

* I have serious doubts they even care.

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

Re: Excel as an intermediate step

And if you really know what you're doing you'll use something different.

Re: RDBMS vs Excel

the last one said “This page intentionally left blank.”

Surely that should be the zeroth one.

It's the "and dirty" bit that catches people out.

Re: Is my memory failing..

"CSV is so useful that I'm more than a little surprised that a decently flexible and configurable CSV module has never surfaced in either the C or Java standard libraries."

TStringlist, the Swiss Army Knife text handling class in Object Pascal (Delphi and Lazarus) has options for treating data as CSV.

President Trump to slap fresh restrictions on H-1B work visas, refuses to hear public comment on changes

"with the added benefit that US companies pay them less. Last month ... plug the skills gap ... if that works it will still take years for the results to take effect."

Same problem in US and UK. Over the long term, neither country has wanted to take on the cost of training a sufficiently large skilled labour force. Neither country's employers want to pay the going rate for such a labour force. Both countries have, in consequence, an unemployment problem with people with few or no skills and their only solution is to periodically make noises about training people up to fill the skills gap as if that could be done with some short course. The fact is that the effort needed to repair the damage would take much longer than the life of a government in either country; it isn't going to happen.

Was he sent on a spool's errand or something? Library staffer accused of stealing, reselling $1.3m of printer toner

What were they working on round the clock? Hiding it from the next level up?

Nvidia promises once again to let Arm keep its Switzerland-of-chips biz model – and even license some Nv GPU tech

"We have every intention of protecting it, nurturing it, and growing the business model."

Even if present management has every such intention there's no guarantee that a future management will.

"We value a network of partners that can take difficult designs and turn them into soft IP products. It’s something that I wish [Nvidia] could always do.”

And what was stopping you?

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Re: VBA implicated yet?

But they didn't. They didn't even realise it was broken.

Re: Use Excel or use Oracle?

False dichotomy.

Re: I once had to..

It would help to know the reasons for denying the request. Security - B not entitled to know? Reliability - data not clean and B want to make decisions based on it?

Re: It's not the software

and take duck the blame at the subsequent enquiry

Fixed to bring into accord with political reality.

Re: Excel by print only

"the problem seems to be bespoke software that expected ..xls files"

You may be assuming something here. It's more likely that the writers of the bespoke S/W were told to expect .xls files and don't complicate things with things manglement don't understand.

"they are quite clearly and human stupidity error by the system architects. developers, Project Managers (who at least have teh excuse that they are just IT users and don't know better but really should) and Developer management who really should not this kind of thing happen."

More likely a human stupidity error then ensured professionals never got near it. Remember this is a government that declared its disdain for experts except on the rare occasion when it realised that it was in over its head.

Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK

I think we just have to file it alongside all the plans for the EU granting his every little wish for a post-Brexit trade deal.

Re: Or

"The real way to decarbonise the transport sector" is to need less of it. Until recent events we've seen London workers commuting in from sillier and sillier distances. Now London's complaining about all the money lost from lack of footfall but they've been part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Re: The big problem however...

"his leadership"

For want of a better word.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Re: VBA Security Security Security Security... I can't hear you!!!

"And yes, an excel spreadsheet is likely more secure than a database set up by someone who has no idea what they are doing."

And when the spreadsheet is set up by someone with no idea what they're doing you get the mess we're encountering now.

"for some reason that is where things stopped."

The reason is that manglement is incapable of understanding that a PoC isn't production-ready. Or even beta. See also that in HMG beta is believed to be production-ready.

Re: Ye Olde English Proverb

The bad workman might have chosen the tools.

Step back here and ask a few simple questions (the answers might not be simple).

1. What data and in what format is received from the testing centre to accompany the samples?

2. What format do the lab instruments export?

3. What needs to be done to interpret the results from 2 and marry it up with 1.

4. How many systems need to be fed from this?

5. What format(s) are needed from that?

6. What needs to be done to prepare the output from 3 into 5.

7. What sort of scale is needed?

8. What's needed to accomplish 6 at 7 reliably and at appropriate speed?

9. What's needed to oversee the process and ensure its all running properly?

At that point you have a set of requirements for the processing needed. "A spreadsheet jockey" isn't likely to be the answer to 8 although it might e the answer to 9.

Re: What should I use instead

"Ok we should not use Excel. What should a non programmer use instead?"

Email or the telephone. To ask a programmer to put together a real application.

For a lot of purposes the spreadsheet is good enough but at the very least you need a sanity check on the results and sometimes "good enough" isn't really good enough and you have to require better. Dealing with people's health and lives is one of those times.