Posts by Doctor Syntax

Civil-rights probe: Facebook has completely failed to… Zuck: Look over here! We’ve banned four groups! Go me!

And you haven't taken the hint?

Re: Is anybody surprised?

"Maybe ads don't actually need eyeballs to make money these days"

Remember the advertising industry only sells advertising. If the advert gets blocked before reaching eyeballs but still gets charged to the advertiser it still makes money. At least as much as it ever made and quite possibly, by not having a negative effect on the viewer, being slightly better for the advertiser's bottom line that it would had it got through.

So, no, they don't need eyeballs to make money.

Heir-to-Concorde demo model to debut in October

Boom Supersonic

Not quite what Sir Humphrey meant with "Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

Road trip on Mars: Thrill as Curiosity rover races up to 0.06 miles per hour. Marvel as it takes a mile-long detour

"The US space agency's boffins hope the experience will help them figure out ways to improve the bot's modest self-driving capabilities."

An opportunity, maybe, to improve self-driving vehicles without risk to other road users of collateral damage.

"It stops if it doesn't have enough information to complete a drive on its own."

On second thoughts, no. Modest it may be but it's already way ahead.

Criminals auction off stolen domain admin credentials for up to £95k. Your bank account details? Barely get £50

"Such is the popularity of these services that users on forums are desperate to acquire invite codes to this market,"

I suppose that's the next market. Stolen invite codes.

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software'

Upvote for the handle.

Re: Let's see how it really comes....

It can't become slimmer than the existing version simply because the existing version is open source and once it's available there's no way to make it unavailable.

Re: There is a third way

Agreed. By far the simplest, cleanest solution. Click here for a free download and here for a support contract.

Re: "Software can be open source, but you have to pay to use it"

"Just, when it's open source, it's very difficult to make people pay for it"

I had a client using a commercial ERP system for which some - but not all source was provided. How else do you think I could tell them how to fix their bugs?

Re: Such short memories

"they got rid of it to the Apache Foundation."

Only after the damage had been done.

Re: This has been handled badly, but it's not beyond hope.

did you miss the entire "Would you like to switch to Edge? Yes or Yes?" fiasco?

Yes.

Re: "RedHat has done it for years"

Doing a reverse takeover of IBM.

Re: What's the need?

"that's always a recipe for disaster, complaint and resentment."

Or another fork?

Re: "Personal Edition"

Open Edition? No, too much like OpenOffice. Libre Edition.

Cereal Killer Cafe enters hipster heaven, heads online: Coronavirus blamed for shutters being pulled down

So not even cutting VAT to 5% helps?

GCHQ's cyber arm report on Huawei said to be burning hole through UK.gov desks

Cisco, Nokia and the rest should be subject to the same inspection by NCSC as Huawei. After all, if they've nothing to hide...

Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

Re: Sometimes you just have to be there

"The open university understood this"

And, of course, had time to spend setting everything up in the first place. I don't envy the universities trying to do this, or anything like it, on the fly.

Re: Does the Big D.T. talk to mayors at all?

"do what the likes of New Zealand and Isle of Man did."

For anywhere else it now needs a time machine.

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart

Re: I won't shop at a small site

"Unless they take paypal."

Or order by phone.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

Re: So what happened?

"in the aircraft industry it seems you need certification for every cable, nut and rivet you use."

In the case of the CMAX Boeing seem to have been allowed to write their own certification.

Re: So what happened?

"Perhaps a few C-class firings without their pretty golden parachutes is what the company needs now."

Just require them to be passengers on every test flight whether it be of Starliner, 737 MAX or anything else. That would concentrate their minds.

"The full report detailing these changes will not be publicly released, however, as it contains Boeing's proprietary information that could allegedly provide its competitors an unfair advantage"

Does being able to point and laugh count as an unfair advantage?

High-flying Microsoft exec jumps to Magic Leap as CEO. No, we haven't got that the wrong way round

Re: Show me the money

And why not? There must be some of the $375m left on the table even if the original $3b's gone.

Manchester, UK seeks IT-slinger: £235m for number-plate-and-fines system to clean up vehicle emissions

Re: ANPR

"I avoid driving in Manchester."

I was thinking the same and them remembered I have to go through bits of Greater Manchester to get to the M6.

Re: Greater Manchester in northeast England

In that case nicking Saddleworth & Greenfield and adding them to Greater Manchester should have sent someone to seek absolution.

"The Reg is sure Transport for Greater Manchester will keep itself clear of such weaknesses."

If Sheffield gets hammered on this it might help concentrate their minds.

Mind the airgap: Why nothing focuses the mind like a bit of tech antiquing

Re: I was suspected of Dyspraxia...

"As for the down votes, would the commentard care to explain?"

I think it works like this. You commented on something which someone wrote which was utter bollocks; so much so that whoever wrote it can't argue back. Most of us in that position would be able to say "OK" and move on. Occasionally someone can't so all they can do is follow you round downvoting you.

Wear your downvotes with pride. They mean that whatever you wrote was write and somebody's acknowledging it.

Re: Distractions...

"I was hoping the work from home thing might lead to LESS disruptively common team meetings."

You need two computers. One for work & the other for teams. The latter, with its slightly dodgy network connection, could have its camera pointing to you working solidly on the other.

Re: What looks like gobbledegook

I think you missed the OP's point, that's why you're getting downvotes.

Baroness Dido Harding lifts the lid on the NHS's manual contact tracing performance: 'We contact them up to 10 times over a 36-hour period'

Re: Contact tracing is about far more than just tracing contacts.

A further problem is that having an app simply spamming low risk people with "get tested" messages threatens to effectively DDOS the testing system at times when it is more under load anyway.

Clearly things are different in Canada. The approach here seems to be don't bother with testing, just tell people to self-isolate. After they've had a few false alarms people will just ignore it on an individual level and on the public level its reputation will plummet and the whole thing will end up being dropped.

It doesn't even have to be that good. Cheap, quick, unlikely to generate false negatives but some false positives acceptable. All positive results go for a more expensive, slower but more definitive test.

Re: Two out of three ain't bad

"That suggests on average every person infected generates 7.65 contacts."

Which is an order of magnitude greater than current estimate of R which in turn implies about 90% false positives which means about 120,000 or 240,000 utterly wasted weeks of self-isolation.

"the system presently doesn’t track whether an individual who has been warned to self-isolate ultimately contracts COVID-19."

An absolutely basic metric not being collected.

Just go and self-isolate for 2 weeks. We don't even want to know if we're wasting your time. We certainly don't want to know if we should be telling you to get tested instead. And did the Committee not challenge her on this? Surely even though they're MPs a Science & Technology Committee should have some inkling about this.

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Fujitsu tells 80,000 of its Japan employees: From now on, you work remotely

The hub idea would be a good way to get round that one.

Re: Smart Management

"preparing for the next big pandemic"

Yep, hot-desking is a really good preparation for that.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

gzip /dev/*

Re: Seems like a proper who, me

I discovered a client's system was set up to do a backup from the live system to the hot standby overnight. I also discovered that he rcp, ftp or whatever it was would be terminated if not complete by start of business next day. I also discovered that although it probably worked when first set up but by the time I came on the scene there was no way it could be completed overnight and probably hadn't been for months years.

Fortunately there were also tape backups.

Oxymoron alert

"overconfident DBA"

The first requirement of a DBA is paranoia.

UK government shakes magic money tree, finds $500m to buy a stake in struggling satellite firm OneWeb

Re: Not the solution

Having an Indian telco on board suggests that at least one other bit of the coverage will be used and I'd guess they plan to rent out other parts as well.

But "increase the satellite count to 48,000"? Coming soon - HMG statement "We will be the world leader in Dyson spheres".

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: I'm sure we've all done this too

It's just the air of menace and the big hammer you carry. Equipment needs to know who's boss.

"The photo received showed the router with a large table lamp sitting on it and blocking the air vents on it's top surface"

That's why so many of them were made with rounded tops or, as seems to be the preferred design now, to stand upright.

Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

Switching it off when the the software shutdown of W95 didn't.

Euro police forces infiltrated encrypted phone biz – and now 'criminal' EncroChat users are being rounded up

I suppose you think you have nothing to hide. If so go back and look at the T&Cs of the online services you use. Start with banking. Then come back and tell us all the login credentials you're contractually allowed to share with us.

Legitimate online commerce depends on being able to maintain security. Anything that compromises that for the sake of attacking criminal operations also attacks legitimate commerce is problematic.

While one part of me thinks this was a great operation the other side worries. To do this legitimately, with due protection to the innocent, it should have been conducted under appropriate* warrants. Was it?

*I also have concerns that the framework under which interception is carried out in the UK really is appropriate. There is a history of the Acts which provide this framework being struck down in court and replaced by a new one to provide the same shaky cover. I suspect that somewhere in a Home Office filing cabinet there's a draft of the next Act ready to put before Parliament as soon as the existing one gets successfully challenged.

Re: Matters arising

"I may be wrong but my understanding is of encryption when using this device depending upon a dedicated chip."

The Motherboard article says they didn't, they just added a little something in software to intercept the plain text from the keyboard. Which raises the question of how did that get smuggled out to their own servers without anyone noticing?

Re: So...

"they did physically disable the GPS, camera, and microphone"

The reports also mention pictures in the seized data. I don't doubt there will have been a certain amount of disinformation in the account that's been released.

Details of Beijing's new Hong Kong security law signal end to more than two decades of autonomy

Re: Terrorism Act 2006

"the Diplock courts were introduced primarily as a solution to the problem of getting an independent jury"

Of course. But their use needed to be pointed out.

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

Re: I GOT 1 wordz 4 all u traytowers!!!

"We won"

And now you're starting to discover just what it was you "won". Some of us, of course, realised all along what we'd lose.

Happy privacy action day in California: If you don't have 'Do not sell my information' in your website footer, you need to read this story right now

Re: ...ought to be delayed given the Covid-19 crisis...

"they've had a full year and a half to plan, design and implement the change"

But it's so hard to do all that when your head's buried in the sand.

Re: It only stops them from SELLING my information?

These are the companies whose lobbying got the current legislation watered down. The CPRA is their comeuppance for that.

Re: he criticized the slow enforcement of Europe’s GDPR

"Funny, given that it's his country's (frequently his state's) megacorps that are the problem"

You might be looking at cause and effect here. Plenty of his voters work for those megacorps and aren't happy with the thought that they're some of the subjects whose data their employers are abusing.