Posts by Doctor Syntax

HPE's orders to expert accountant in Autonomy trial revealed

Re: Expert witnesses are supposed to be independent

"They are either paid by the defence or persecution - the bias is built in."

I'm not sure that my role was being paid by the persecution as you put it but there have been numerous occasions when I would say either I couldn't find any evidence or the evidence was contrary to what was assumed. I've also been in the position in the witness box where I was fending off the prosecuting counsel's attempts to make me put more weight on the evidence than I considered it would bear and ultimately rescued by an objection from the defence.

One of my former colleagues went into private practice. Last time I called in to see the old firm I found he was back in the fold. His explanation was that he couldn't think of enough reasons why bad boys shouldn't be in gaol.

Re: Fake news

"in UK cases there's normally only one expert witness that both prosecution and defence share"

Having spent about 14 years in a job where it was my role to be an expert witness I don't recognise that situation at all. True we were usually called by the prosecution but there were a number of instances where defence experts came in to examine my or my colleagues' work. Sometimes we had to show them how to operate the microscopes & so forth...

Maybe things are different in the civil world but as I read it it doesn't seem to have been the case here.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: Bless..

"not a smoker, so not sure of the correct terminology"

I suppose his terminology was quite vigorous.

Re: This one obviously needed a chalk pentagram in the computer room...

Micropolis. There's a name from the past. Not that I was ever aware of using any.

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

The underlying problem is a financial industry that assumes that sales of anything will grow forever. They won't. They can't. That's why we're seeing the likes of Microsoft trying to switch customers to some form of subscription, cloud, anything that keeps the money rolling in irrespective of whether it's of benefit to those customers. If they fail to do that their share price, built on the assumption of growth, will tank. Markets need to price shares on the basis of short term growth, medium term peak, long term ticking over.

My problem is a Leica R4 and several superb Leica lenses. The bar stewards have simply abandoned their old customers. So far I haven't seen any sensible option to allow the use of my old lenses on a new digital camera. The new Leica S digital range can take the old lenses with an adapter - about £250!

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

But not down the road at PC Specialist or CCL. And I'm not going to replace my old, used laptop with somebody else's old, used laptop.

"1366x728 panels"

1920x1080 here but only 15.3".

Why is it that laptop makers seem to assume that if you want that resolution in 17.3" you must be wanting to pay stupid money for something they call a gaming laptop. No, I just want to be able to read multiple documents side by side. And I want a DVD drive in it as well.

Re: Keyboards

"Almost every piece of M$-branded peripheral hardware is actually really well made."

They probably have to withstand people trying to smash them up in frustration at the software.

"the cheque he'll want made out to "Computer Assistance Service Helpline"

Definitely one of the best.

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Re: Fine by me

Who needs a browser to download when you can curl up with wget what you need?

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Re: MVP?

“Minimum” is supposed to relate to the richness or paucity of features.

In terms of a trade off between what the user needs and what the developers are able.prepared to provide.

Likely to mean "only just works" as opposed to "just works".

Re: Harrier

"a good deal on the F-35C"

On the basis of the story so far a good deal would be to refuse to sell them.

There's got to be Huawei we can defeat Chinese tech giant, thinks US attorney-general. Aha, let's buy stake in Ericsson and Nokia

Re: What makes Barr think that EU will allow US to buy a controlling stake...

Quite. And he thinks Open RAN is "just a pie in the sky"!

Day 4 of outage: UK's Manchester police deploy exciting new carbon-based method to record crime

Disintegrated Police Operating System

FTFY

Just hold a couple of Capita directors in the cells until it gets sorted. That should speed things up nicely. Or maybe not once the workers realise what all the fuss is about.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Call that a noisy carriage? BR DMU days, first off-peak in the morning, ladies group going up to London from High Wycombe on a day out. That was noisy.

Re: Not a lot of people know this ..

"The ripple moves backwards as 12mph!"

It depends. There used to be a zebra crossing on the Upper Malone Rd in Belfast. It was quite capable of developing a standing ripple. You drove up and had to stop momentarily because the vehicle in front stopped there because the vehicle in front stopped there because....someone had crossed the road. I suppose the ripple was propagating back relative to the traffic at the same speed as the traffic crawled forward but it could build up a very impressive queue.

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Re: What's in the box Doc?

Dead mouse in a police radio transceiver back in the days when some of the last valve-based stuff was in use. Obviously a nice warm place to crawl into...

Re: The devils foam

Never mind the laptop, what about the site staff who'd been working in the same environment?

Team China: Nation's biggest mobe makers link arms to battle Google's Play Store

"However, with the novel coronavirus disrupting the Chinese tech sector, forcing some employees to miss work, it’s not clear if it’ll hit this deadline."

OTOH some of those employees might be using their enforced downtime to do a bit of work on their own account.

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

I doubt it's the cheapness of the devs responsible for making desktop search depend on Bing. That sort of decision takes expensive management.

I used it for a while. I worry that with very few resources to maintain it parts might be getting more antiquated than they should - I read somewhere about the network stack for example. I'd welcome your view on that.

KDE 4 isn't too bad and is the best fit on my little MSI. 5 OTOH has real problems of borking its desktop-appletsrc and scrambling the desktop layout so I have a script to back it up periodically & just restore it. It also has wierdnesses round autohide which would be intolerable on the small screen. 5.16 as exemplified in Neon looks a lot saner and the sooner it finds its way into De[bv][iu]an the better.

Combined with some judicious mixing and matching of bits of different themes and a decoration Theme called Reactionary makes the whole thing look and behave largely as things did about 20 years ago with a few genuine improvements picked up on the way. But fielding off those crayon-wavers requires some effort from time to time.

Re: George W Bush lives

"There's a syllable too many"

So that's where the missing bit from aluminium went.

Re: Microsoft has inertia batting for it

"People and organisations are trapped."

Only because they're not prepared to take the one-off hit of moving.

Re: This is Mircosoft after all

"After what, 30 years of development"

You've got to admire their consistency.

Re: You can also fix with Group Policy

"A reboot is required."

Of course it is. It's Windows.

"Time to learn new things rather than trying to go back to the way things were."

Why?

The principle of interfaces in IT is that they can change minimally if at all even if the implementation behind them changes. This is so that entities which use the interface can be unaffected. The alternative is that anyone writing programs that use whatever the interface provides (and if that whatever is popular there will be a lot more of them than those who wrote it) can get on with their own thing without having to keep running round in circles trying to keep up with others' whims. It's this simple idea that has made possible the huge success of the S/W industry.

The visual shell on Windows or any other desktop manager fills the same role between provider and user. Why is it that crayon chewers and marketing get to piss about with it at whim to the enormous cost in time and effort of relearning it, not to say suffering from the results when it turns out that more effort has gone into the interface changes than making sure that what implements it is on a sound basis?

BTW don't think this applies to Microsoft alone. They're all at it. Stability has gone downlhill since KDE 3 and I gave up on Gnome years ago.

"Prize for the first person to come up with a DNS hijacking thing which pwns Windows 10 machines via the search box."

The winners are already quietly enjoying their prize.

Don't mistake quantity for quality. What I want is a search engine that finds the gems in the reams of ads and other dross in Google results.

That said, Google is usually better at finding stuff on Amazon than Amazon's own search. I suppose the only reason Amazon keeps the "don't know when it'll be available again" stuff on line is to poison Google results.

"being a US company, they need to open up their data vaults if the Big Orange One™ develops an haemorrhoid."

If, as they say they don't retain search info, then it doesn't matter. The vault will be empty.

Good: IT admins scrambled to patch 80 per cent of public-facing Citrix boxes to close nightmare hijack hole

It's quite possible that a lot of these are being used by companies who don't have what you and I would recognise as a sysadmin. Small businesses often run with no IT staff at all; somebody, if they're lucky, changes the backup media and for anything else they call in a specialist as and when they need it. On occasion I have been that specialist. Such firms won't even know that this is an occasion when they need to call someone in.

This raises a question. Given that vulnerable, exposed systems can be located from the net should vendors undertake such searches and patch them remotely?

LCD pwn System: How to modulate screen brightness to covertly transmit data from an air-gapped computer... slowly

"It also requires a device capable of picking up the emanations from the infiltrated target machine – a nearby video camera in this instance."

The nearby video camera could be exfiltrating data by other means.

He’s a pain in the ASCII to everybody. Now please acquit my sysadmin client over these CIA Vault 7 leaking charges

This back door which only authorised users could access that's been accessed without authority: is this the one you want to put in everybody's communications?

"Also, if he restored the system to the original state, surely that'd reintroduce whatever backdoor he'd used to gain access so that it could be found?"

And if he restored the system back to its original state why would he need to edit the logs? Surely he'd have the wit to restore the original logs.

It also doesn't mean that it wasn't planted. When this is the IT dirty tricks dept. of the CIA it's going to be very difficult to get any jury to decide between what's real and what's a dirty trick.

From the viewpoint of a forensic lab I started with the assumption that "somebody probably knows what actually happened but that's not me". I'd find it difficult to decide how "accurate" a judge's opinion or a jury's might be. An interesting experiment would be to pick a shadow jury and see if they agreed with the real jury. That still has limitations - they don't carry the responsibility of the real jury. I suppose you'd really need two shadow juries and see how often they agree.

"He left the CIA following an internal dispute in which he accused a co-worker of plotting to kill him, and made a formal complaint. The complaint was investigated and management sided with the other employee."

They told him to form an orderly queue?

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Or go back to the days before HM Treasury got its hands on what used to be called the Road Fund Licence.

Maintaining highways has been a problem for centuries. Collecting an annual fee from users and devoting to that end was probably the best solution.

Re: I have a simpler and lower cost solution

"The bin lorries"

One of the worst roads in our neck of the woods is the one that leads to the local dump recycling centre.

AI? I think our roads would crash the system.

They can't collect your bins or fix your roads. They let Google stalk visitors to their websites. Yes, it's UK local government

Re: An alternative example

Nice one.

"Critics responded that the IAB are not road builders, but the traffic authority."

More like a road builders' trade association.

Outlook more like 'look out!' as Microsoft email decides everything is spam today

Re: Yay for single points of failure !

You're telling me they're not?

Re: Outgoing or Incoming?

"marking EVERY SODDING EMAIL I RECEIVE as spam"

It usually is.

Oh ****... Sudo has a 'make anyone root' bug that needs to be patched – if you're unlucky enough to enable pwfeedback

Re: SUDepressing

" Anyone up for safesudo?"

Or sudont?

Re: It's okay - Lennart Poettering is on to it

Just don't make jokes like that.

Re: SUDO and +s is a design weakness

No, you let only those entitled to log in as root do so. Part of the problem is that although early Unix had multiple user IDs for different tasks these all got handed back to root eventually. Why, for instance, couldn't a specific non-root user have rights over installing S/W in /usr/local?

Trivial backdoor found in firmware for Chinese-built net-connected video recorders

Given that the communication is over Telnet it doesn't sound as if they were at pains to hide whatever might be communicated. More likely to be an ill-thought out diagnostic/IoT business as usual.

Microsoft Teams starts February with a good, old-fashioned TITSUP*

Re: Executive Hubris

"They gave up an on-premise solution with a 10GB network fiber backbone, 1GB to the desktop with full blown QoS and an exceptional up-time rating."

Perhaps this is the time to turn up with a purchase order to reinstate that. Even better if you can come up with an innocent sounding project title which is a backronym for something along the lines of I TOLD YOU SO or YOU WERE TOLD.

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

Re: No point

"I suppose it comes from the earliest days of Unix?"

Not quite, at least not in its present form.

You need to remember that Linux, like Unix, is fundamentally a multi-user system. If an application can be used by all users then its binaries, logs and configs can't be in user home directories. If the data - say a database - is shared then the data can't be either but your office files should then be in your home directory. If you have personal configs that override the defaults then they do go in your home directory.

One area which has changed a good bit is the overall file system layout. Unix had /lib for libraries and /bin for binaries. There might well have been something like /sbin for binaries needed at start-up/single user mode because devices were small and these would be programs needed before the system was ready to mount the others.

Home directories went in /usr - the name was a bit of a clue. Then for some reason we had some stuff going into /usr/bin and /usr/lib so eventually home directories ended up being shunted out of /usr into /u or /u2 and eventually /home. There does seem to be some inconsistency between distros as to whether some or all stuff goes into /bin, /lib or the /usr equivalents and, indeed, as to whether the /bin and /lib exist at all or as symlinks.

Mostly there are reasons why things are as they are, some, admittedly, based on distro maintainer's choices and some into 3rd party packager's choices (does this go into /usr/local or /usr?).

Re: On a brighter note, there *are* alternatives

From that link: "using much less resources than the traditional syslogd."

Traditional?

Anyone who thinks systemd is traditional is to be avoided.