Posts by Doctor Syntax

Woman bailed as cops probe doctor's surgery data breach

I'd expected the Copilot issue to appear here yesterday.

Raspberry Pi 5 gets LLM smarts with AI HAT+ 2

I run NextCloud over Devuan on a Pi. Headless - no Wayland, X11 or desktop. No systemd. OS on NVME, data on HDD mirrored with LVM2. Perfectly doable.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

Re: non-Brit perspective

Perhaps "different traditions" is the expression.

Re: non-Brit perspective

This goes to the issue I raised earlier. What's identity?

In a lot of cases it's producing a utility bill in the name and address you're claiming (getting harder in the case of paperless billing). I had a couple of clients. One had a long history of personalised security printing and took secure waste* destruction very seriously. The other got into that line as well. One of their contracts was to produce my water bills. I visited them one day and noticed blank water bill stationery trailing out of a waste container in the yard. No need to mock up a bill in the graphics S/W of yur choice, just nick a bit of that and print a bill on the genuine article.

* That included unused base print stationery which might have been run through as a header or trailer.

Re: Quite surprising...

These days? They tried it last time as well.

Re: We already have National Insurance numbers.

"There are people that can't retrieve their NI number after losing it because they can't prove who they are"

To be pedantic, they can't prove they're the person to whom the NI number was issued.

Visitors who have word visas and citizens of the Republic of Ireland are also allowed to work in the UK. Do they get issued with NI numbers? Checks for eligibility would be the visa or the Irish passport so NI numbers wouldn't be needed for that but would they be needed for taxation?

Re: Sometimes U-Turns are an improvement

"When Labour disconnected the Bank of England from government control they gave up the last actual power the government had."

Independent central banks are all too often the means of saving governments from their own folly. In this case they didn't quite achieve that. BoE was tied to aiming at a fallacious inflation index; fallacious partly because it ignored housing costs and partly because the non-housing element included the effects of off-shoring a lot of consumer good production to cheaper areas such as China.

Governments retain the power to set tax rates.

Re: Sometimes U-Turns are an improvement

"Ironic that by and large they have gone on to do more or less what the Tories would have done in a lot of regards."

Not ironic. Whoever won would have been constrained by the same realities which have been a quarter of a century in the making.

1. Brown* decided that the future could pay for present bribes to the voters and we are that future.

2. John Major's "bastards" then persuaded enough of the public that we'd be better off by cutting the surviving industry's home market to a fraction of what it was.

Between them that left us extremely vulnerable to external factors.

* Aided by low consumer goods price inflation due to shifting manufacture to China. And look where that got us.

Re: What is ID.

In case of the bank:

For card present purchases the ID is possession of the card or possession of the card plus PIN.

For online purchases It's knowledge of a few short character strings from the card plus possession of a mobile phone whose mobile number corresponds with whatever the bank has currently been persuaded to accept as the account holder;s.

For online access to the account it's a user account ID, password and usually some form of PIN, possibly not the same as the card PIN, plus mobile phone as above. If you're lucky it's also knowledge of the answers to some security questions which the wise customer will ensure don't correspond with readily researchable facts.

In the olden days it was a face the customer's branch staff recognised. Tell that to kids these days and they'll not believe you.

What is this identity thing anyway? Does it prove that you were that baby born to those parents on that date in that place on your birth certificate (which, by the way, is not proof of identity)? You only know because you were told that even if you were specifically told that. Does it prove that you are the person who received the qualifications on those certificates? (For some reason SWMBO seems to have included one of her sisters certificates along with her own - or at least a certificate in her sister's name.)

Just what does identity mean? I suspect any real ID scheme is going to founder as soon as it tries to work out an answer to that question.

Re: they are just delaying it

"As of jan 2026 the ruling parties in UK/USA/EUc have all done numerous things they promised they wouldn't do when campaigning for office, not little things but major things."

Parties in government have to deal with reality - at least you hope they will although the US is conducting an experiment to test that. Parties campaigning make promises detached from reality.

Re: National Insurance number

"or you and your employer are crooks"

That's the whole issue. (Although it's worth asking - do you have anyone cleaning your windows, clearing your gutters or any other cash in hand type job? If so, do you deduct NI from their payment and if not how do you know it's paid?)

The idea of a digital check or a digital ID is that it will make enforcement easier. It won't unless enforcement are checking up but as the problem exists it's clear enforcement aren't checking up and if they're not checking up it doesn't make any difference whether ID is by some new system, NI or anything else.

"Promise that it is, and will remain voluntary and free"

And who would believe such a promise. The entire basis of TFA is a govt. U-turn.

Re: pressganging

"you weren't permitted to be drunk"

Of course not. It was the tot that was drunk.

Re: I am shocked, shocked I tell you

I don't think I know you so addressing me as "thee" is inappropriate.

"once the IT systems are in place"

So probably not this Parliament.

Re: Sometimes U-Turns are an improvement

"The ideal would be for them to come up with good policies in the first place"

Pre-election policies are designed to win elections. Post election policies have to deal with reality. Sometimes those objectives are mutually exclusive.

"cash-strapped departments might struggle to justify their contribution."

Including undoubted contributions to mission creep.

AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

Re: "jobs eaten by bots don't come back"

" who was the idiot who decided that investors had the right to sue the company they invested in ?"

That wasn't the idiot in the case. It would be the lawyers involved and will do quite nicely out of it. The idiots are those who believed them.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Re: Bad analogy

But always check what a court has said about the legality of that smallprint definition and, if a court hasn't pronounced on something you're prepared to accept as similar circumstances, check what a court will say. That's why things are as TFA describes them.

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

As per my comments above, it would be possible to have a European company subject solely to European law but TFA doesn't seem very reassuring about that.

As to the Airbus aspect, if you follow the link back to the earlier article you wil find that Catherine Jestin, is not only "executive vice president of digital at Airbus" she is also "chairwoman at GAIA-X" and GAIA-X is a "European Commission-backed initiative was conceived in 2019". There's no mention anywhere as to whether Airbus use public cloud or not.

Re: The problem with the EU version of AWS...

Not necessarily. A name can be licenced to a franchisee along with other aspects. It's the least of the problems. The real criteria are the legal and technical ones that permit independence for the duration of the contract - a contract thatcan't be arbitrarily cut short.

Re: Sovereign political‑legal concept in “The Cloud”

Not by technical architecture alone but both aspects are needed.

The devil is in the detail.

"Subsidiaries" may be a loose translation from German or possibly German law puts subsidiaries further at arm's length that we might understand in the UK and, I suppose, the US. What I've said a number of times is that a franchise arrangement could fit the bill. The franchisee would have to be a locally constituted, owned and staffed company with the sort of arm's length arrangements described in TFA with no US citizens or AWS employees with hands on access, no strings on the use of the rented IP except at the termination date of the the franchise and no dependence on Amazon's infrastructure. It would be doable but a very thorough examination of all the legal and technical aspects would be needed before it could be trusted.

Re: Performative hyperscaling

Storing is one thing, processing is another. Are companies using somebody else's computer solely for storage or are they doing processing there? If they are it has to be decrypted and, even if that's done on the fly, the key needs to be available. If the key is passed to the AWS site it can, if AWS are compelled to do so, be tapped off to enable them to decrypt the data.

CrowdStrike shareholders lose battle to recoup losses from 2024 outage

A corporation's money belongs to the members of the corporation. The members are AKA "shareholders".. So shareholders attempt to claim compensation from themselves. They pay lawyers to do this on their behalf. They also pay lawyers to defend themselves against the claim.

If they win they pay themselves. If they lose they keep the money they'd have claimed. The lawyers get paid anyway.

I wonder who instigated this.

New Linux malware targets the cloud, steals creds, and then vanishes

Not seen in the wild. How did they discover it?

Ignore rosy datacenter expansion projections – there isn't enough power

Maybe another HMG U-turn is called for. The one about easing planning regulations. Make the public good part of the plannng criteria. Ai training centres would have a very tough hurdle to overcome. General cloud services? Maybe demonstrate that they couldn't be ransacked by extra-territorial legislation from another country or ordered to cease providing services to anyone except by order of a UK court.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

"For the low, low deposit cost of either $250,000 or $1 million"

Surely that should be $1 at compound interest.

Eurail passengers taken for a ride as data breach spills passports, bank details

"Customers whose data may have been accessed will be informed directly. We take the security of our customers' information seriously and regret any concern this incident may cause."

Statements like this should receive a double penalty and be liable for exemplary damages to those affected.

Media should onlyo publish them as part of an interview where they are questioned about the statement.

Anthropic Claude wants to be your helpful colleague, always looking over your shoulder

And don't we just love having a helpful colleague always looking over our shoulder?

Britain goes shopping for a rapid-fire missile to help Ukraine hit back

Re: Of course the real truth

Who said anything about technical and financial and, indeed, procurement? You've got to consider the political aspect and HM Treasury.

Re: Starmer sabotages peace process

"I don't think anyone is playing Donny for a sucker"

This is the Donny who was going to end the Ukraine war in a day? And Putin keeps dangling that day as a carrot in front of him, ever a little way away.

Re: Of course the real truth

The real risk is that the contractors each get £9m, each deliver a prototype missile and somebody in government looks at them and says "We paid £9m each for those? Too dear. Cancel." without realising that the £9m went into much more than the bill of materials and fabrication of the actual missile. That sort of thing has been done before.

Re: Starmer sabotages peace process

By "peace process" do you mean "Putin playing Trump for a sucker"?

Re: Of course the real truth

With the advantage that they can actually be tested against Russia by live firing without the UK doing the actual firing. If, when the whole thing gets washed up, Ukraine gets compensated with frozen Russian funds we bill Ukraine so the whole thing is paid for by Russia.

Cloud to be an American: Congress votes to kick China off remote GPU services

Export controls worked so well with encryption, PGP etc.

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Re: And

No, we just wonder what he'll sat tomorrow, next week or the week after. Or maybe he's assuming that all the oil that Venezuela as going to give him (or is it he's going to take) will provide the power, once the reluctant oil companies have ramped up production and refinement capacity.

No government has policies which are both coherent and linked to reality. His less so than most.

Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data

Re: Most accurate picture of Boris so far

Don't forget Brownomics: tying interest rates to an inflation index that excluded cost of housing and ?wilfully ignoring the soaring house prices driven by the resulting cheap loans. And then going round upbraiding countries that didn't follow suit for being dumb. Nobody has tackled that since as the number of households who would have been in negative equity would have been catastrophic.

Lenovo has a hunch you’re about to try quitting VMware

Re: Back to the Future

If long term thinking really was last year, then last year they'd have looked ahead to today's memory prices and put this on the market then.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Re: An alternative method?

They'd be slop.

Birmingham pauses Oracle relaunch to get staff on board

"staff need more time to adapt to the vendor's standard processes"

And how do they do that, apart from using it?

Training would be a possibility but none of the quotes mention that.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

My experience was not being allowed to leave. I'd installed some reporting stuff I'd written on site in Italy and the system ?started crashing with bits of memory content being left in a lost&found directory. The software worked fine on my client's system back at base and I'd no information as to whether there were crashes before. They didn't want me to leave until it was working and (a) I was booked to leave that evening (b) I was running out of Lira and (c) I had a meeting lined up with a potential new client in England on the following Monday. OTOH it looked like a H/W problem. Fortunately they had a good run & I escaped. I later heard it was indeed a faulty memory module. Quite possibly the extra job just pushed the memory usage up to reach the area with the fault in it which hadn't been reached previously.

Re: Workig for a Dialup ISP in the 90's...

He may not have many posts but his handle goes back way beyond the start of all this nonsense.

Re: Typical council

1. There are companies who specialise in supporting FOSS.

2. Do you get to raise a ticket with a huge S/W vendor unless you have a support contract with them?

PC shipments set to hit the buffers as AI guzzles memory

"However, analysts think this is this unlikely to happen this time."

Wait until AI trips up over its own feet.

'Violence-as-a-service' suspect arrested in Iraq, extradition underway

Good. Although the idea of someone being arrested in absentia is a strange concept but maybe it's Sweden's way of issuing an arrest warrant.

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Re: seems straightforward to me

That would be the rational decision - if he'd chosen to express it rationally.

Re: Confused (again)

This raises an ineresting question. Say address w.x.y.z hosts a lot of legitimate customers' domains and one pirate site. An Italian media company instructs Cloudflare to stop resolving anything to w.x.y.z causing a drop in traffic to the legitimate sites. Who, then, is liable for the losses of those sites? A few lawsuits against the Italian media company might result in a search for a tchnically sensible solution.

Re: Fair point, badly made

If it's that easy under Italian law to get a site blocked with no checks then the remedy is simple. Start issuing blocking instructions against any sites that are legitimately streaming the matches. Perhaps some tweaks to the law would be purchased PDQ.