Posts by Doctor Syntax

To catch a thief, go to Google with a geofence warrant – and it will give you all the details

Re: Wait a minute

Of course this incident was in the US. If they're using the small print in the EU they're committing ongoing offences under GDPR.

Hospital hacker spared prison after plod find almost 9,000 cardiac images at his home

Re: Differences...

"in fact no form of photography is allowed"

<cough>

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51110206

Re: Hacker?

"At what point does a member of staff with valid network credentials become known as a hacker?"

When he accesses something he's not entitled to or,as the story puts it, commits an offence under section 1(1) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

It looks as if Royal Stoke Hospital might have got ahead of the curve with single sign-on.

Over a thousand electronic gizmos went missing from London councils last year

I wonder what the age at time of loss distribution looks like. Does it peak when newer models are launched? So the councils with the highest losses have a new for old policy and those with fewest and even older for old policy? Suspicious? Moi?

Big Falcon explosion as SpaceX successfully demos Crew Dragon abort systems

Re: "given that the rocket is lost during the test anyway?"

"The trick is to have competition but not driving the one that gets behind into cutting corners"

Having a member of the maker's board or their CEO on every flight would be a good way of ensuring that didn't happen.

EU've been naughty: GDPR has netted bloc €114m in fines since 2018

Re: Wouldn't it be nice if the UK had an effective regulator?

"companies in the UK want to do business with the EU"

Who cares what companies think? "We" voted to leave. The fact that we (without the quotes) will depend on a functioning UK economy is neither here nor there although it might turn out to be a surprise to "us" when that's discovered.

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

"My handwriting is all the encryption I need."

Mine is certainly write-only.

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Just in case - ths GPIB isn't the GPIB sitting on Raspberry Pi boards.

The Commodore interface bus was GPIB or sort of but with a much - umm - simpler connector. I have vague recollections of playing about with a piece of kit which had been built to use the Commodore version and discovering that it wasn't just the connector that had been simplified but also the functionality.

IBM, Microsoft, a medley of others sing support for Google against Oracle in Supremes' Java API copyright case

Re: Obviously, all the big cloud providers want to be free to copy anybody's API...

Of course. Provided they provide their own code to reimplement the S/W that goes behind it if that's proprietary. They'd also be selling would be the CPU cycles, storage and connectivity. If it's FOSS then the CPU, storage & connectivity is all they're selling.

Re: You need to go back and reread the judgements in the case

"These stand, unless the Supremes overrule."

Quite. Now it's going to the Supremes it's undecided until they rule. Actually that only applies to the US. The rest of the world has different views.

Re: Allowing copyrights on API's

"The copyright ship has sailed."

Yup. Right into the Supreme Court. And that can turn it round and sail it right back. That's how appeals to a higher court work.

The fact that huge swathes of Google's competitors in the software industry are presenting amicus briefs in support of Google should tell you something about how dangerous they think the Appeal Court decisions were.

Re: An API is not a triviality

2To clean up that mess, you'd have to amend the copyright law in order to define what an API is made of."

A win for Oracle would certainly leave us with a mess to be cleaned up.

Ideally it could also leave Oracle's doorstep with a queue of lawyers bearing writs: IBM wanting a word about SQL, whoever now owns Bell Labs' rights to C with a number of bits of the API of which bits of the Java API seem rather reminiscent and doubtless more.

Re: Why not let idiotic orgs let their APIs slide into obscurity via failing to license freely?

"copyright doesn't subsist in trivialities."

Ah, now you've got it.

Re: The lower courts backed Google; whoops!

The clean room implementation still has to be an implementation of the API and it's the copyrightability of the API that's the issue.

Why is it an issue? Well, look at a C program. At the top you'll see a lot of #include statements. They're copying various files into your program. What are those files? They're parts of the system's API. The same thing is apt to apply in other languages.

Any program being compiled incorporates at least parts of the API(s) it's written against. To raise any form of copyright issue against those is very worrying for the way in which the entire software industry works which is why pretty well the entire set of big players in the software industry apart from the principles have weighted in with amicus briefs. You should at least consider the possibility that they know what they're doing in spending money on lawyers to do that.

Re: Why not let idiotic orgs let their APIs slide into obscurity via failing to license freely?

"Not a huge problem for China which seems to regard copyright as yet another crazy round-eye concept that they must occasionally pretend to respect."

Not really. They're just taking a lesson from the round-eye US of the C19th.

Re: They have a court ruling ...

"The lower courts ruled/juries dismissed Google's fair use claim"

The lower courts backed Google. It was the federal appeals courts that overturned those decisions.

WebAssembly: Key to a high-performance web, or ideal for malware? Reg speaks to co-designer Andreas Rossberg

Re: WaSm to you too

'The "populos" have already accepted Wasm, since it is included as standard in the major browsers.'

This member of the populus hasn't.

A quick check shows it defaults to off in Palemoon & Seamonkey and on in Firefox and Waterfox.

You're not Boeing to believe this: Yet another show-stopping software bug found in ill-fated 737 Max airplanes

But will the actual customers - those for tickets, not planes - buy them?

Re: Those moneychangers...

"And they were smart enough to use Boeing's money for that as well."

Rinse and repeat, this time with Xerox and HP.

Re: Those moneychangers...

One the problems with test driven development...is that if you're not careful it becomes test determined design.

Did somebody mention the British education system?

Re: Those moneychangers...

"Whatever happens beyond that [curerent financial year] is unknowable"

The accountants can, if they're in control, hold some sway over whether it's knowable or not. At best that's a cop-out, at worst it's a guilty plea.

The time that Sales braved the white hot heat of the data centre to save the day

Re: Gratitude!

In the circumstances I'd have wanted a few hot whiskeys rather than anything cold.

Re: Totally different industry...

Probably safest to park it well out of the way and get somebody to blow the bloody doors off.

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Re: everything you do is wrong

Code which is legacy today is usually the application that is being used by those earning the company income to pay to produce tomorrow's legacy.

No Mo'zilla for about 100 techies today: Firefox maker lays off staff as boss talks of 'difficult choices' and funding

Re: How Sad

"due to a totalitarian leftist/emotional/brainless subculture"

Whatever you may otherwise think of RMS introducing a distinct political tone into software development opened a door through which too many have crowded who had more interest in the political rather than the S/W aspects. Ironically, he eventually fell foul of them.

Re: Thunderbird

AFAIK it was a volunteer project before those discussions with support from the foundation. I'm not sure the existing arrangement has altered much.

Perhaps they shouldn't have kept Thunderbird onboard. There was some talk a while back of the possibility of it going into the Document Foundation as part of LibreOffice. That would have reduced the costs a bit. With Tbird, or even better, Seamonkey, Lirghtning and Lightbird all incorporated, maybe as optional extras, it would have beefed LibreOffice up into a fuller package.

This is also a system for GPs, right? UK doctors seek clarity over Health dept's £40m single sign-on funding

Presumably not everyone needs access to all these different systems. Is there a risk that a single sign-on gets access to all the systems irrespective of whether the user needs or is even entitled to such access?

The $4.3bn trial of the century is over! Now we wait for judgment

I'm still trying to get my head round the idea that the closing statements have been made but expert evidence can and will be taken later.

The dream of a single European patent may die next month – and everyone is in denial about it

Anything to do with patents seems to result in a tangled mess. And the first law of tangled messes is that once a critical complexity is achieved all attempts to untangle them make them worse. Where's Alexander the Great when you need him?

Spanking the pirates of corporate security? Try a Plimsoll

Re: A decent backup strategy is very expensive.

Remembering always that unless it includes regular testing it isn't a decent strategy.

Of course if banks and building societies got into that sort of thinking they might realise that for us customers their branches were our backup.

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

Re: Hold on!

"I am actually pleasantly surprised."

Why? The EU and the ECJ have been fairly consistent about this. Only fairly consistent because they've been a bit weak-kneed about the Safe Harbour/Privacy Figleaf stuff.

"But, as with so many other things around Brexit, the truth is that the UK cannot exist in the modern world as its own digital island and so will have to reach some kind of agreement with Europe, or face the risk of being cut off from the continent when it comes to sharing data."

Yes, but who's going to explain all that to the ERG.

A fine host for a Raspberry Pi: The Register rakes a talon over the NexDock 2

Re: Why some people keep on reinventing the ill-fated Palm Foleo?

And I'd just carry the data on a thumb drive.

One company on the planet, US-based Afilias, meets the criteria to run Colombia's trendy .co registry – and the DNS world fears a stitch-up

"In fact, the technical requirements listed by the Colombian government mean that just a single company on the planet is eligible to run the .co registry"

Golly! How lucky that there was even one who could manage it.

Behold the Internet of Turf: IoT sucks waste energy from living plants to speak to satellites

AFAICS the application is monitoring. I suppose that for agricultural cycles that involve regular ploughing you might well want things to be biodegradable but there must be other situations where longevity is important.

Welcome to the 2020s: Booby-trapped Office files, NSA tipping off Windows cert-spoofing bugs, RDP flaws...

Re: "The patches are sent out as and when necessary"

"So if there are enough Linux world patches to fill a monthly roundup"

The point is that there aren't. A while back when we had HeartBleed etc there were a good few security patches and a lot of activity following the story you broke on Intel leakage. There are probably a lot of patches come through on bleeding edge distros but for the likes of Debian stable releases not much which suggests security patches are few and far between. Now does that mean that either (a) people have reverted to neglecting such things or (b) development practices have moved on and security has become part of the initial build? Whether or not you think there's scope for a story in there there's certainly scope for comment.

Re: Linux?

The patches are sent out as and when necessary. No hoarding them for a few weeks. I haven't seen many recently, though.

AppSheet. Gesundheit! Oh, we see – it's Google pulling no-code development into a cloudy embrace

"With the rise of low- and no-code platforms, citizen development has emerged as the strategic way for modern organizations to invest, innovate, and compete,"

Like thins? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/06/19/excel_snafu_costs_firm_24m/

Squirrel away a little IT budget for likely Brexit uncertainty, CIOs warned

Re: Things to look out for: the GDPR

"The UK government seems to change its mind regularly about whether it wants to stay aligned with the GDPR and other EU privacy regulation or not."

What a pity HMG hasn't come up with something like this: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2019/419/introduction/made

Re: 2019?

I never have found why that the EU had such a problem with bananas.

FTFY

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain's part in the accounting badness was 'wildly overblown'

"as well as a readable summary of the trial."

It's been very readable so far, for which many thanks.

UC Berkeley told to cough up $5m in compensation to comp-sci, engineering students recruited to teach classes

Re: Standard business logic

And, of course, the sudden need for extra teaching capacity came as a complete shock in the wake of the rapid rise of enrolment and couldn't possibly have been planned for by taking on more full-time staff.

Apple calls BS on FBI, AG: We're totally not dragging our feet in murder probe iPhone decryption. PS: No backdoors

Make him an offer. Hand over the suspect phone along with his own private one. Make best efforts to crack both phones. If they succeed the contents of his phone get published for the world to see, this, of course, being the effect that success would ultimately have one everyone else's phone. If he doesn't like the deal he shouldn't inflict it on everyone else and anyway he doesn't have anything to hide, does he? Does he?

Re: A wise man once told me..

Alternative version:

Never argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and then beat you with their greater experience.

Geoboffins find the oldest matter on Earth: Ancient stardust created before the Solar System formed

Re: asumptions, assumptions

Yup. The initial assumption with carbon dating was that the constant cosmic ray flux would lead to a constant level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. Then it was realised that the constant wasn't and that plus other factors resulted in variations so now we have calibrations from dendro samples.

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

I believe the US govt has issued similar advice. Odd, then, that they both seem to think that phones can have their security deliberately weakened broken and still be usable in this way.

Re: Awkward

Won't they be on the embedded version which still has life left in it?

Re: Upgrade from Windows 7

In my case there's a W7 Starter edition on a little dual boot net-top. As of yesterday it had 4 updates that failed to install (5 really but one seems to be the one that warns of doom and EoL so I hid that). I'm not really persuaded that, even with best efforts to keep it updated, a current Windows box can be kept secure. Fortunately neither that nor the W2K VM are going to be used on the net.

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Re: Innovation and 'rights' cannot co-exist

"Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international license."

Oh, the irony. It's only because you have copyrights in what you wrote that you have any right to attach that statement.