Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft snubs Hololens loyalists by already ending feature updates – even though version 2 isn't out yet

Re: Confused

"Long Term Servicing (LTS) state....In plain English that means it will no longer update the system to add new features i.e. it is effectively abandoning the kit."

LTS to my way of thinking is that it's the version which receives security updates over a log period of time as opposed to a a bleeding edge version that doesn't. Linux kernels and Linux distros are examples, some kernels and some Ubuntu releases get updates longer than others. It means they're the versions you use for production.

Meet ELIoT – the EU project that wants to commercialize Internet-over-lightbulb

Re: First radio, now light...

The thing about your IR remote is that the actual signal on the IR carrier is quite low frequency. What happens when you ask it to transmit a GHz signal?

You'd be sending out a pulse of light about a foot long (Grace Hopper used to hand out nanoseconds - pieces of wire about a foot long). It would be OK with a direct line-of-sight signal dominating the reflections. Block that and the various reflections of your nanosecond pulses will arrive over a period of tens of nanoseconds.

Or on the same WiFi access point.

People of Britain: You know that you're not locked into using the same ISP forever, right?

" Long gone are the halcyon days when you can just send British Rail a stiff letter from Mrs A Cantankerous-Biddy expressing ones displeasure at the poor service the previous day."

And be ignored.

Re: "Cost" of switching

"the domain of their provider as opposed to web email"

They may well be using the web mail of their ISP but I know what you mean.

One reason for moving ISP not listed was the ISP being taken over, perhaps repeatedly with downward steps in customer service and service provision until, as happened to me, it ended up in the hands of an ISP whose name has a couple of Ts in it. At that point I realised it was a good idea to shift the email domain first and, rather than get to depend on a branded email provider*, get my own domain with a registrar who would also provide an email server. That made it easier to move ISP again.It also made it easier to move the domain registrar when they kept having a lot of outages.

So I now have ISP, email domain and MSP independent of each other. In addition it's possible to give different companies their own email address so you can see who leaks (hi there, eBay, hi there PayPal) and temporary addresses for one-offs.

It would have been easier to start off this way but otherwise you only have to bite the bullet of changing email addresses once.

* Actually it's just as well to have a free branded provider as well, even if it's only to provide cover whilst the MSP is being swapped or to give out to people you don't even want to go near your domain addresses.

Fix LibreOffice now to thwart silent macro viruses – and here's how to pwn those who haven't

Is there any OS other than Windows that can make the extension invisible?

Hacker swipes personal deets of 20,000 peeps from under Los Angeles Police Dept's nose

"Data security is paramount at..."

Prefacing any statement with something of this pattern this is tantamount to declaring "This statement is bollox". The media should just make it clear that it won't even be published and ask for meaningful comments. At the very least it would cause the PR industry to write some new boilerplate for the drones.

US sanctions fail to get in Huawei as embattled Chinese vendor reports 23% revenue growth

Trump has made sure a lot of people who'd never heard of Huawei before have heard of it now and maybe there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

It's official: Deploying Facebook's 'Like' button on your website makes you a joint data slurper

Re: But what does it MEAN ?????

"I'm hazarding a guess it's close to - if not actually - zero."

That's because it needs to be followed up with fines that make whatever news media manglements read. And an awareness that this means YOU. Manglements catch on slowly. Once they do, just watch the panic set in.

Re: I was harvested like that.

"FaceSpam spent the next 6 months advertising mattresses to me."

You know why, don't you? Because you let it.

Re: How about the "Web Analyst" business now?

NoScript blocks them. I won't be opening it up so it will continue blocking them.

Re: Truly excellent news

"In nearly every case they will carry on, claiming they are in the right, and will ignore requests from visitors and the ICO until the last minute."

This is behaviour which will result in the biggest fines. It will probably take quite a few big fines, well publicised before boards start to realise the risks presented by the self-narcisists in their marketing departments. Then there'll be the businesses owned by self-narcisists but those will always be with us.

Re: The big problem remains

"Legislation is toothless unless those constrained by it actually care."

Legislation with sufficiently large penalties is far from toothless if those enforcing it care to use them The whole principle of penalties is to make those constrained care whether they want to or not.

"when a customer likes and shares on social media its free marketing for the business."

The implication of this ruling is that it's no longer free. It's potentially very expensive. It will take a while for this to filter through to marketroids given that their standard MO seems designed to put the business at risk post GDPR.

Re: simple solution!

"You shouldn't have to run No Script to protect your privacy."

Agreed but there are good reasons to run it for security purposes. There are folk out there who couldn't care one way or another about your privacy, just your money or the use of your PC for mining.

Re: No f in button?

"Most websites are usable to an extent without Javascript enabled, although the pretty bits might break."

And those that aren't I generally consider useless.

For heaven's sake: Japan boffins fail to release paper planes in space after rice wine added to rocket fuel

"an apogee of just 13.3km before the rocket rendezvoused with the sea 9km downrange from the launch site in Taiki-cho, Hokkaido.

We, of course, successfully undertook our own Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) project from a lofty 89,591ft."

There's their problem, right there. They're using newfangled metric measurements while el Reg went full Mogg with Imperial units.

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

I'd have thought this is the sort of operation that must happen fairly often, certainly one that Microsoft want to happen fairly often. OTOH it's probably one that individual admins only do rarely and in any case there's always a first time. And it's one that seems high risk.

Taking those three together why haven't Microsoft automated it?

The third problem is not knowing what not to restore if there are some good up-to-date files undamaged.

Re: In my experience...

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

Or long gone.

Facebook, Microsoft, Google among tender, caring tech giants on UK internet safety board

UKCIS will "contribute to the Government's commitment to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, and will help to inform the development of the forthcoming Online Harms White Paper".

That dooms it for a start. Has anyone ever seen this sort of hubris-laden statement ever come good?

UK taxpayers funded Grand Theft Auto V maker to tune of £42m – while biz paid no corp tax and made billions

"The Register has asked Rockstar to comment."

Why not ask whoever is responsible for conducting the British values test? BTW the link to the test in the 2014 article now produces the most way-out 404 I've ever come across.

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: Informative blog link

Seems to be working for me from the UK.

But while we're on the subject does anyone else have problems with Linux Today. Almost inevitably I get a message such as:

An error occurred while processing your request.

Reference #97.d481655f.1564419041.399b3e2a

with changing references. That's been going on for weeks.

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.

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.

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.

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.