Posts by Doctor Syntax

Dear hackers: If you try to pwn a website for phishing, make sure it's not the personal domain of a senior Akamai security researcher

Re: Well... I was expecting something more

I was expecting a full-on BOFH retribution.

GitHub builds wall round private repos, makes devs in US-sanctioned countries pay for it

Re: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and

OP had an excellent point, Crimea is a region of another country, not a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right. Where's its international border?

Re: @big_D - Who did not see this coming?

Up to a point. They seemed delighted when the CLOUD Act came in.

Re: Why make things complicated?

"All that issue/work tracking, documentation pages, "

Isn't it a shame the FOSS community never got round to tackling such issues. It would be great if you could just Google something like turnkey linux and get a complete server image prebuilt to handle all this stuff.

Stones, meet glass house: Mind behind Windows 8 GUI disses Windows 10 over leak

Re: stop fucking around with the start menu

"Fiddling with stuff until it breaks is just a normal day at the office for MS."

And continuing to fiddle with it after it's broken is a normal next day at the office and not just for MS UI designers. I think it's a requirement to maintain their street creds with their fellows.

Brit infosec firms urge PM Boris to reform the Computer Misuse Act

Vaguely worded legislation has the advantage that judges can interpret it to suit changing circumstances. The downside is that someone has to be guinea-pig so that it gets in front of the judge.

Re: I doubt that this will get any parliamentary time ...

I think HMG de jour's position is that the backstop isn't needed anyway.

Migrating an Exchange Server to the Cloud? What could possibly go wrong?

Re: In my experience...

"The real technical talent are out on customer sites."

Or long gone.

City-obliterating asteroid screamed past Earth the other night – and boffins only clocked it just 26 hours beforehand

You could also say "don't start WWIII".

Re: "Probably"?

"Those we may need to focus effort on. Not rocks orbiting far away."

A. Doing one thing doesn't mean not doing othes.

B. It's the rocks orbiting too close we need to worry about, not those orbiting far away.

Re: "Probably"?

A big "if"

The word you were looking for is "when". It's happened before and on a geological time-scale it will happen again. Being in a position to look out for them and at least think about techniques for deflecting them is something that's open to us but wasn't to the dinosaurs.

UK PM Johnson spins revolving doors, new digital minister falls through

Re: Just wait for it......

"more splendiferous than any foreign Johnny could manage"

All non-Yorkshire folk are foreigners.

Re: Starting a sweep-

I have investigated a great many. Complaints range from the distressingly genuine to the blatantly false, sometime to excuse the complainant and sometimes downright maliciously. Each complaint that names an alleged attacker potentially creates a victim if that complaint is ill-founded. That means that a conscientious investigator has to keep his or her mind open to this possibility. The knowledge that getting an opinion wrong could do immense harm to someone, the pressure of having to get it right every time was something I found very stressful. It didn't get easier over the years. Far from it, the stress accumulated and was one reason I had to quit. Fortunately in over a dozen years I only ever saw one clearly false complaint get to court*.

But the consequence of this is that things are made worse by this for genuine complainants. Nobody dealing with these cases is happy about this but in my time and no doubt since nobody found a solution. In the mean time keep your ire for those who make false allegations; the rest of us were/are doing the best we can.

* I was greeted at court by the police apologising for my having been dragged right across the country for the hearing but the DPP had insisted on prosecuting. I'm sure the complainant regretted it almost as much as the accused as an eye-witness exposed her lies in front of her family.

Re: Everything!

But he does believe in independence of opinion. Today's opinion can be quite independent of yesterday's and tomorrow's can be independent of either.

Re: Starting a sweep-

Absolutely right.

Until recently I'd have said that any police officer or prosecutor with any significant experience of investigating such cases would be very wary of the risks of simply believing all allegations. The sorts of reports that have turned up in the media over the last few years make me wonder what's going on. The default position seems to have been shifted from "keep an open mind" to "believe the complainant unquestioningly".

"Morgan has already left her role as chair of the influential Treasury Select Committee."

He had to promote her out of there. Just imagine the damage someone who asks pointed questions could do in the age of Borinomics.

Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway

Re: This is not auto-pilot

It seems to have failed in this case. Perhaps a back-up mechanism is needed to raise a sharp object through the car seat in the driver's genital area in response to a crash.

UK digital network Openreach takes 15 electric vans for a spin

Re: Fuel Duty - the invisible elephant in the room

Jim Hacker : It says here, smoking related diseases cost the National Health Service £165 million a year.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Yes but we've been in to that, it has been shown that if those extra 100,000 people had lived to a ripe old age, it would have cost us even more in pensions and social security than it did in medical treatment. So, financially speaking it's unquestionably better that they continue to die at their present rate.

Re: Fuel Duty - the invisible elephant in the room

Maybe a tax on energy production. That would enable different production methods to be taxed differently depending on their perceived ecological impact.

"Anyone still using those awful low-energy flourescent bulbs ?"

No but they fitted the same holders as the incandescents (and those that haven't yet died are still in use) and the LEDs also fit into the same holders. And isn't it a pity some of the LEDs are equally awful as regards colour balance and that their PSUs don't have lifetimes to match the LEDs themselves?

"Supplying the fuel for horses wasn't a problem"

It depends. If you lived in the country and had land, fine. I know some of my ancestors would have had horses and depended on them for their livelihood; one of them was killed falling from his horse coming back from market.

If you lived in an urban area and had sufficient space in your range of outbuildings for not only a horse or two, a carriage and a hayloft a provender merchant would be able to supply you. For everyone else, no chance.

One thing I've never quite understood, not being horsey myself, is this notion of putting horses to grass for the summer which seems to mean not using them.

My point is that if you push to replace ICE by EV (and I doubt the enthusiasts will settle for hybrid) there'll come a stage where the ICE infrastructure becomes uneconomic before there's sufficient infrastructure to support 100% EV. That could well become a transport crisis.

Re: apples for apples

"There are other things that come with this as well, like cars being potentially excellent grid balancing technology"

That's fine until you find that you only have half the range you expected and need in your car because it's just been used balancing the grid.

Re: apples for apples

"And to get updates on how many were in use/available.

Oh - wait, we already have all of that information available."

And oh bugger, all the ones within the range you've got left are already in use and there's a two hour queue. What now? Call the RAC and ask if they can bring a can of electrons?

It's not enough that there are some points you can locate. It's not enough that you can tell which are in use. You need to be able to rely on getting to a vacant charging point. A transport system needs to be reliable

"Historically it has meant walking, or, more recently cycling. It's only very very recently that the car has been an option - and it has completely screwed the country."

What has screwed the country is gathering all the work into areas separate from the housing. As more work gets concentrated in cities those cities are drawing commuters from over athousand square miles. This situation did not arise because of the car. It arose because since the war the entire aim of planners has been to separate work and housing. The motive might have been to get away from the situation of slum dwellings clustered round heavily polluting factories. But not enough thought was given as to how people would get between the two. With such large commuting ranges TPTB aren't prepared to invest sufficient in transport. They'll reluctantly spend on roads but leave th public to invest in vehicles, then complain when they're used. Now they're expecting them to invest in charging points whether it's feasible or not.

It makes not a jot of difference that plenty of other people have lock-up garages if you don't and where I live the old industries were staffed by people who lived in houses built before the motor vehicle, let alone private drives and lock-up garages. Those industrial sites have been closed and reused as housing so we now have more people living here than ever and far, far less work. Those in the houses that replaced mills may have garages (as too many were built on flood plains they have to have garages to lift the living accommodation high enough to avoid flooding!) but the older housing is still there. Some of it is stacked housing so some houses only have a path outside their front door, not even a road on which to park a car. The bus service is a quarter or less of what it was in the '50s and journey times longer. The train service was never closer than 2 miles and anyway that went in the '60s. But never mind, carry on, keep blaming the victims. The planners have been doing that for decades so why should you be different?

When the idea of a car to replace your horse was first put forward, I bet people were aghast at the thought of having to make a specific journey to fill the car up with petrol, rather than tying the horse at a post next to a trough or in a stable at night where it would "charge" itself.

Probably not. Horses were always high maintenance transport. The worry would have been having an adequate fuel distribution system. That's long since solved for petrol vehicles. It's nowhere near solved for electric vehicles and going round claiming it it's near enough solved isn't going to make it any better.

"And if you really need to do something which requires absurd range/longevity away from civilisation then you can always hire a liquid propelled vehicle."

How do you do that when manufacturers are being compelled to only build EVs? Or the demand for liquid fuel has run down to the point where the distribution system has become uneconomical?

Re: apples for apples

"you're a fraction of one percent of the minority and EVs aren't designed for you. Get a hybrid, fill it with petrol, no worries."

If the intention is to get rid of all petrol vehicles then a better solution is needed. What's more, once a tipping point is reached the petrol distribution networks will start to get run down and at that point there really would need to be a system in place to make EVs an effective full replacement for all ICE applications.

And by the way that long mileage driver is probably quite a lot of drivers at least once or twice a year.

Re: apples for apples

"I do more than a couple of hundred miles a day probably four times a year, and even that I could manage on one stop at a charger while I get a bite to eat"

That has a couple of requirements.

One is that where you stop has sufficient chargers that you can be sure of getting to park adjacent to one (and having to queue as might happen for petrol pumps isn't going to work; a queue for a facility that takes a half an hour or whatever to use isn't going to clear as fast as a queue for petrol). A limitation to the number of chargers that can be installed is the total available power at the site. For a motorway service area this is going to be considerable. Throttling the charge rate to match supply and demand isn't going to cut it, coming back to your car and finding you've only got another 20 miles of charge wouldn't leave you feeling very happy.

The other is that when you get to your destination you'll be able to rely on there being a charging point there for whatever you're going to do next day.

"but there is no reason that parking has to be within 6 feet of your front door"

It does if the charger is running off your own leccy connection. I doubt very much you'd be happy to let someone call at your door asking to plug their car into your house overnight because they can't find a space to park outside their own house.

So that takes us into the territory of needing public chargers for each overnight parking space.

It's one aspect of an issue that goes to the heart of public vs private provision in transport. If a country's economy depends on people travelling to work then either it needs to make adequate provision for everyone to travel to their work on public transport or it has to accept that those for whom provision isn't made to use such means as works for them. Historically this has meant private vehicles. It will also need to mean carbon-fuelled private vehicles until such time as there's an adequate public charging facility for those who can't make private provision.

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave

Re: Quality evaluation of pen is not hard.

I like your style. You may find this useful:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Madeira-Magic-Vanishing-Fabric-Marker/dp/B003KBB6X6

Re: Not here...

With average luck you eventually get to a time of life when most of the branded pens you pick up are those handed out by undertakers at funerals.

At least, that's been my recent experience.

Re: Disposable income

Back in the dim, distant and happy days when SWMBO & I were both palaeoecologists fieldwork involved taking multiple samples from peat faces. (Just checking I typed that OK). To avoid cross-contamination the spatula had to be wiped clean between samples. So the field kit included a bog roll.

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

He needs to be asked...

Are you

(a) so stupid as to believe it can be done or

(b) so stupid as to know it can't be done but it doesn't matter or

(c) so stupid as to know it can't be done, it does matter but we wouldn't really notice you're spouting dangerous bollocks or

(d) so stupid as to not understand the questions?

One of the above must apply.

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Re: Health and safety gone senile

You probably confused them by pointing out that words should mean something.

Re: Try a Lathe

"Bizarrely we had to wear boiler suits (sensible) and shirt + ties"

If the boiler suit is properly buttoned up the tie isn't a problem.

Re: DIY

Or offered to take the printer off its stand so she could carry about with her.

Re: Chain Printer

"terrifyingly noisy"

The noise probably kept onlookers to a safe distance.

Cyberlaw wonks squint at NotPetya insurance smackdown: Should 'war exclusion' clauses apply to network hacks?

"If Zurich's approach is successful, it could also lead to a loss of confidence in cyber insurance as an investment – ironically devaluing Zurich's product."

Even more ironically it might mean ransomware doing less damage as businesses realise they have to protect themselves instead of just relying on insurance.

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

All this small mammal stuff...

A ewe and one or two lambs in the garden happens a few times a year. Cow visits are rarer since the farmer stopped dairying and walking the herd past the gate every day but we've also had a significant fraction of the cattle herd complete with bull when they escaped. We've even had a half-grown calf leap the back wall - which I didn't think possible - and smash a few plant pots where it landed.

But sheep: I'm quite sure that, like children and what you see on Sean the Sheep, they know when they're up to mischief and keep quiet - until one of them can't control themselves any longer. So one Sunday afternoon some years ago we heard one solitary bleat and looked out of the window to find the garden packed with what looked like the entire year's crop of lambs. Being a Sunday I've no doubt some townie walker had left a gate open and our drive is the first they meet coming down the road towards the farm.

Re: A fox for his valour

And your neighbours will be really pleased to find that they've exchanged the fox crap for cat shit.

Re: @gazthejourno

I'd be up for that one. For the bloody cats. Out here in the country we don't have a fox problem, they've probably all gone into the towns.

Re: Trap & relocate them

I've considered doing this with the cats.

Azure consultant to sue Google for linking his cached pics to cloned site, breach of copyright

Have you considered the possiibilty that the judge understands the legal aspects better than you, both because he understands the law and because he heard the whole case, not just a summary.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Re: Could be worse.....

Could be worse. Windows 10 updating cuts out to show an in flight movie.

Re: "CPIOM is effectively a mini computer"

"Does this mean I'm officially old?"

Welcome to the club.

Re: Why is there a choice?

I've been stuck waiting for a plane where they found the fuel connection wouldn't cut off so they couldn't remove the hose. Very difficult to take off with the tanker still attached.

Hey, Windows Insiders! Sorry about that whole 20H1 build thing. Won't happen again – honest

It's like running on Sid - although possibly Sid might be more stable.

IT outages in the financial sector: Legacy banks playing tech catch-up risk more outages, UK MPs told

I suspect the changes aren't to the back ends but to the web front end and the mobile apps and whatever the latter talk to.

Of course to really screw up, just migrate whole lot to a shiny new platform which is, of course, launched on a course to become "legacy" in a year or two.

Privacy? Watchdogs? Fines? Whatever, nerds, more people than ever are using Facebook and filling its deep coffers

Re: "we need politicians to lay down some rules"

"Net income was $2.6bn, a 49 per cent decrease on the quarter. This is largely due to a $2bn wedge Facebook coughed up, in addition to the $3bn already set aside, to foot the $5bn settlement fee"

On this basis the expected net income was $4.6bn per quarter. That means a $5bn fine wiped out more than a quarter's profits albeit spread over more than the single quarter.

Of course fines on any scale are a cost of doing business. What else could they be? They're not income, a loan or a capital investment. I'm not sure, however that fines wiping out a quarter's profits are just a cost of doing business. In any business with a sensible share structure the board would be being held to account by the shareholders. What you really need to look at is why this doesn't happen to FB.

Having written that it strikes me that the main difference between FB and most other corporations is that most other corporations are in thrall to a stock market that concentrates on quarterly results. Clearly Zuck is prepared to look long term. Perhaps there's a lesson there of sorts for other businesses.