Posts by Doctor Syntax

Research into deflecting potentially world-destroying asteroids is apparently not a 'national priority' for the UK

I suppose a small one could be deflected a little way to the NW of the EU.

We want weaponised urban drones flying through your house, says UK defence ministry as it waves a fistful of banknotes

Why do these military procurement stories remind me of Feynman's story of going to some reception or other and talking to an armny bod who waid they just wanted the scientists to come up with a way of using sand as tank fuel?

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Despite the .gov.uk source it's GB-only. NI uses I. I once had EOI as the letters.

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

I (the letter) is used in UK plates in N Ireland. When GIL numbers were issued they became very popular in the rest of the UK as personalised plates.

The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations

Remove "of WW2"

Net neutrality lives... in Europe, anyway: Top court supports open internet rules, snubs telcos and ISPs

“measures blocking or slowing down traffic are based not on objectively different technical quality of service requirements for specific categories of traffic, but on commercial considerations, those measures must in themselves be regarded as incompatible with Article 3(3).”

That's traffic shaping dealt with then. Good. Oh, we in the UK don't benefit, of course. We've TBC so the ISPs can do as they like.

Brit MPs to Apple CEO: Please stop ignoring our questions about repairability and the environment

Re: Easy way to get a response.

"For the record, I think that it absolutely should be an obligation that all products are long lived, easily repairable (by third parties) and recyclable (by third parties)."

If those criteria could be made objective then there could be penalties such as substantially higher VAT or environmental surcharges for badly performing products.

Wow, you guys have so much in common: Oracle hotly tipped to power TikTok’s operations as Microsoft deal rejected

Re: Updates

"just be a customer list"

That's what Trump wants.

I think ByteDance should be allowed to licence their S/W to Oracle. They could take Oracle's licensing terms as a template.

Re: Credible evidence

"Credible evidence" means that they wouldn't tell him who pissed on his party in Tulsa.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: Our licence software is slightly broken

It's ages since I looked at an RS catalogue but they insisted on giving dimensions for components based on converting a 1/10th inch grid to metric. Spaces between pin positions on ICs being specified down to the diameter of a pollen grain? Really?

Re: Not just dates get confused

But probably best to explain it in court as GMT otherwise you'll just have another layer of incomprehension to deal with: "UTC - whever heard of that?".

Re: FFS

Nevertheless I doubt anyone thinks that 12345 is a larger number than 54321. Least significant number on the right is fairly normal.

Re: 11Oct16

11Oct 20 could be this year, 1920, 1820...

Re: 11Oct16

Add to those complaints the assumption that every address belongs to a city and customer address formats are structured that way. There's even less excuse when genealogical S/W is written that way to the exclusion of fields that would be more relevant such as townships in England and townlands in Ireland.

And while we're on the subject of addresses I'll add the online ordering S/W of a German car parts site that couldn't cope with the notion that some addresses don't have a street number. I don't know if it's coincidence but ever since that mess hit them one particular courier had been unable to deliver anything here.

Re: Bring back VMS Standard Date/Time...

If the ISO standard is being followed anyone who mis-interprets it has only themselves to blame. The significance of ISO dates is that (a) they collate properly and (b) they are natural language independent.

If I'm writing up genealogical or historical stuff I do, in fact, use something like 15 Sep 2020. It doesn't have to be collated and the whole text is in English so language dependency of the data is a minor issue.

Dates as data are an entirely different kettle of snakes.

My database engine of choice is Informix which, internally, stores dates numerically where 1 is the first day of the last year of the 19th century (nobody explained it to them) and you can have that converted in a large number of ways depending on language settings and an environment variable. Spreadsheets should work in similar ways and switch representation on demand.

But get into historical dates and if you're lucky all you have to worry about are Julian/Gregorian changeovers and hope that the first part of the year it was written out unambiguously, e.g. 1731/2*.

If you're unlucky you end up with something like: "Friday before the Feast of the Apostles Philip and James in the fifth year of the reign of King Edward" or even worse "the Friday in Pentecost, in the year abovesaid" and hope that some kind editor has done the hard work of translating it all. And if you're really unlucky you find that the kind editor hadn't noticed that a whole year's records were missing so all the dates were mistranslated**.

* I came across the work of an antiquarian who avoided that - I suspect as a deliberate choice - so he recorded a will dated and proved (i.e. testator died between the dates) apparently several months before he was being sent instructions for his part in the latest episode of the Hundred Years War.

** Several hours with an Easter calculator, Googling of saints' days and cal to sort it out.

Re: FFS

"[e-mail]"

Shouldn't that have been jsmith123@uk!ac!salford ?

Re: 11Oct16

"a large US firm I used to work for insisted on this format everywhere"

That's because they didn't know any better.

Re: 11Oct16

And that's assuming the century.

Re: Bring back VMS Standard Date/Time...

Three letters: I S O

Re: Another reason an IP

"If you have lame security you may not be able to use it as an excuse for illegal uses of your connection."

It depends on who "you" refers to. If it's a business then there should be an expectation of reasonable care being taken to defend the network and factors such as size of business, number of data subjects and amount and sensitivity of data should determine what's reasonable. In the case of a private household it's more reasonable to look on the householder as victims in the case of an intruder.

None of that, of course, excuses sloppy investigation.

Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay, and a nuked payroll system

Re: These old stories are fascinating

"I'm no spring chicken myself but was still at school in the early eighties."

Inconsistency detected in statement.

Re: Beware of caching

A good database backup backs up the actual database, not what's on disk. If the database is running there's always stuff in memory that hasn't been flushed to disk yet, at least there is if it's anyway busy. The database S/W should have its own backup process to take care of that.

Re: you could flip in a hex editor from 1 to 0

"You see, when you lock a Lotus Notes database, you compile the code and get rid of the source."

Designed by someone with no experience of the real world.

Re: "the discovery that a backup was not all you hoped it might be"

"I finally did find a valid copy of the template on a server which, ironically, it never should have been put."

The best place to look. If it shouldn't be on there it's the place where it's least likely to come to any harm.

Re: whoops - wrong disk

"the wording could have been read two ways"

And nobody took the hint?

Re: Shadowing - What could go wrong

I'm not even a VAX person and I could see how it was going as soon as I got to the 2nd paragraph. But customers? Never until it actually happens.

Re: Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay

"basic maintenance, install/configure stuff, can do departments' and events' web pages as long as they are in PHP."

I hope "basic maintenance" covers backups, testing restores and doing actual restores when the need arises. Otherwise, you know where you are and you'd better start looking for the paddle.

Court hearing on election security is zoombombed on 9/11 anniversary with porn, swastikas, pics of WTC attacks

I think it's what they call a learning opportunity for the court.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

Re: Sounds familiar

It sounds as if you're thinking of something more than Bluetooth.

Infor pays UK construction retailer Travis Perkins £4.2m settlement following cancelled upgrade of 'Sellotape and elastic bands' ERP system

Re: Barely any input from the IT department

I discovered something in forensic science that carries over perfectly into IT and no doubt many other specialities as well:

The world is divided into two types of people, those who don't bother to speak with their specialists because they don't want to waste their time as they don't expect to get anything useful from them and those who consult their specialists from the beginning because that way they get better results. Oddly enough, both find that experience justifies their position.

Re: It's there, on the shelf. There, right in front of you, you idiot!

With Travis Perkins it should end up shifting bricks. No, not a typo.

Re: "did not include functional specifications"

"Because that means likely that the old business processes were designed to work around the old system limitations and thus are very inefficient and cumbersome."

Alternatively it could mean that years have been spent fitting the system round the quirks of the way the business is run but in which case why change the systems? Because shiny? Because persuasive salesman? Because big manager wanting to prove how important they are?

Brit mobile network EE follows O2 by ending trading relations with retailer Dixons Carphone

Re: Didn't know carphone warehouse were still a thing

"I think it was time for his lunch"

You probably looked like someone who wasn't going to buy extended warranty.

DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers

"the foul abominations which are Flatpak and Snap"

And AppImage. The choices for installing the latest InkScape are AppImage and Flatpak.

Yes, I get the idea of providing your own versions of libraries to be independent of the distro* but .... I don't know how the other two are implemented (although snap needs its own daemon!) AppImage AIUI runs in its own compressed filesystem. Just why? A whole extra layer of overhead for what?

If you want or need to do that just stick the thing in its own directory in /opt along with the libraries and put them first in the path.

* But will you be as prompt as the distro in updating them for bug-fixes?

It might not pay salaries but it ought to be able to pay for contracts to do specific jobs.

Re: Window of Opportunity?

I use KDE. It may have its own problems from time to time but it always comes as a surprise to be reminded of just how awful the Windows interface has become.

Re: Window of Opportunity?

I've put Zorin onto a couple of relatives' PCs with no problems. I don't know what you call "fairly old" but they're older than me and I'm - horror to say it - closer to 80 than 70.

QR-code based contact-tracing app brings 'defining moment' for UK’s 'world beating' test and trace system

Re: Basket Cases

"An ideal antibody test I guess would show close to 100% 'cases', ie everyone's been infected and developed antibodies, and the herd is now immune."

It ill-becomes you to accuse the BBC of scientific illiteracy. I'm not entirely sure how to read your statement.

On the one hand it might be interpreted that you believe everyone has already been infected - and if you really do mean that then where's your evidence?

On the other, perhaps you mean an ideal situation would be one in which everyone had had the virus. This ideal requires closer examination. Firstly that would mean that a very large number would have suffered a very bad experience at the worst end of the symptom spectrum. Secondly very many would have died; a greater proportion than actually died because the health service would have been overwhelmed. Thirdly in some cases there seems to be long term damage to at least some survivors so in your ideal situation a large number of people would be experiencing that. Fourthly we don't yet know how effective the immunity is.

My ideal would be a vaccine that's at least good enough to need no more than an annual top-up until such time as the virus can be eliminated like smallpox was, an absence of ant-vaxers to make elimination possible and real grown-ups in charge in Whitehall and Westminster. I have hopes that the first part might be possible but am exceedingly dubious about the other two.

Re: Hm.

"If we were still living in an era when smallpox was a hazard I would obey"

We are living in an era where a coronavirus is a hazard. Of the two it seems likely that it's the virus which is the greater hazard.

"or are out of data on their phone"

AFAIK the mode of operation being claimed is that it simply stores the scanned codes on the phone so being out of data wouldn't make a difference. Where things go from there is a bit less clear.

Re: Pity

"I'm beginning to think that the practical test during the interview for a senior government position"

I think you're over-estimating the rigour of the appointment process. Not in supposing the existence of a practical test but in supposing the existence of an interview.

The appointment procedure was probably no more than:

"She's married to one of us."

"We gave her a seat in the HoL"*

"She ran an internet business so she must know about these things."

The fact that the internet business was persistently at or near the bottom of the heap on measures other than cheapness and not safeguarding its customers' PII obviously wasn't taken into consideration.

It's showing up in aspects such as the allocation of testing appointments seems to be based on a very old, cheapest and misleading satnav.

* NB I don't think being in the HoL per se should be a contra-indication. On the contrary, I think the HoL should be strengthened by an ex officio process for appointing people from the top of appropriate professions - science, engineering & medicine - to it so that Parliament gains rather more people who know what they're talking about and would be available for positions of public responsibility.

Re: Basket Cases

OTOH the genuine statisticians are agreed that R is now greater than 1 and that infections (is that sufficiently unambiguous for you?) are doubling about once a week.

Re: Absolutely NO lies necessary!!!!

My local Chinese takeaway only takes cash over the counter.

And exactly what does the app do with the QR code once it's read it?

Most reports are a bit light in detail/ According to the only privacy statement (for the trial, not the launch) I could find it's supposed to store the locations on the phone so I have a list to tell me where I've been. Somehow I think I might have worked out where I've been for myself. What use am I going to make of that? Does the app phone home to find a list of premises to which an outbreak has been traced? If so, at what point is the privacy statement quietly changed so the app can upload the list so the list can be checked centrally - so much more efficient?

Wouldn't it be nice to have someone in charge who had an impeccable a track-record of trustworthiness in sageguarding PII?

Something to look forward to: Being told your child or parent was radicalized by an AI bot into believing a bonkers antisemitic conspiracy theory

Perhaps we need a reverse Turing test. Anyone indistinguishable from an AI bot should be disbarred from public office. And from social media.

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump's Twitter account days before 2016 US election

"once they realised their digital trail was not particularly well covered"

Should have tried emailing the breach report from Trump's email account.

Adtech's bogeymen are tracking everything - even your web visits to mental health charities, claim campaigners

Re: British charities are sharing information about people visiting their websites

I assume from the .com in their domain name Pro Privacy aren't actually a charity so I'm sure those strictures couldn't possibly be aimed at them. But I do wonder why they want to add Javascript from, for instance, tableau.com.

Ireland unfriends Facebook: Oh Zucky Boy, the pipes, the pipes are closing…from glen to US, and through the EU-side

Re: NSLs

"Nope. Nothing to do with NSLs, because they are an individualised legal warrant."

Can EU data subjects challenge NSLs in US courts (a low enough bar IMV; they ought to be able to challenge in the data subject's jurisdiction)? That's the test.

Re: SCCs

It's a valid warrant in the US. That makes it impossible for US-based FB to be able to perform the SCCs. That makes the SCCs worthless in the EU. If they want to comply with GDPR they need to ensure any PII is held securely outside the grasp or the USl. If they don't want to do that then it's time to start fining them. Actions speak louder than words; no amount of waffle about how much they want to makes any difference at al

What an IDORable Giggle: AI-powered 'female only' app gets in Twitter kerfuffle over breach notification

"had I known then what I know now, I would have handled the situation differently."

That speaks volumes. If you want to collect PII there are things you need to know before you start, not discover as you go along.