Posts by Doctor Syntax

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

Re: The Hidden Benefits of BREXIT

"Laws of unindended consequences and all that."

Only unintended by the voters.

Re: Transition Period?

"I am still at a loss to understand how a trade agreement negotiated up to the 11th hour can then be magically implemented as a new customs system in few minutes ready for the first of January."

That's no problem, HMG has cornered the market in unicorns and pixie-dust. But just think of all the businesses who'll have to cope with magicked-up customers system with no warning. Think especially of those in NI when Boris's reality distortion field finally breaks down.

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

The non-overlap will be useful and oddly enough I was discussing QR codes in posters just the other day. However for now it'll just be a step up from 6.2 to 6.3

Re: Understatement

I don't remember even thinking "let's design a launcher".

It's been one day since Blighty OK'd Huawei for parts of 5G – and US politicians haven't overreacted at all. Wait, what? Surveillance state commies?

I see. That would be the US that totally didn't slip spyware into Cisco boxes being shipped abroad.

Let's be clear about this:

1. The US has form for shipping spyware.

2. Huawei have been obliged to have their code audited by GCHQ with a secure site being set up specifically for this purpose.

3. The audit complained about code quality but didn't find any evidence of what the US is claiming.

4. This is a trade dispute dressed up as security issue by a particularly aggressive POTUS.

5. Our rhetoric towards the US is dependent on its actions towards the rest of the world. If you think this is currently anti-US you should reflect on why and on the extent of making good his successor will be faced with.

Apparently Pompeo is coming over here. Why not take him to the HCSEC and get him to point out these back doors in the code. He obviously understands this stuff so much better than the guys doing the code audit.

Surely if it were that simple the whole thing could be done with your Dell boxes. Surely the whole point of this is that these systems are software defined. So once you've wiped your Huawei box what are you going to load it up with?

Re: Academics

Any big subject has lots of aspects. We need articles on all of them.

"The electorate decide what sort of country we will become, not foreign governments."

ROFLMAO.

The sort of country we become depends on reality. What the electorate decides merely affects what bit of reality we bump into and how hard.

Yes that'll work well.

Re: It isn't like

"and before the Chinese it was the Japanese, or Hong Kong, or wherever."

The wherever included the US. Only when they'd got their industries firmly established did they become interested in protecting IP.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Re: flexibility and agility

"but we can easily move off it"

Or fork it.

Nevertheless management-speak like that does tend to suggest the worst.

Re: "Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

"% share is more important than the absolute number."

The total of those quoted is less than 18%. That leads to the suspicion that the great majority are opened in browsers with lots of links followed up blindly. Hello malware.

Canadian insurer paid for ransomware decryptor. Now it's hunting the scum down

Re: Danegeld

The Domesday survey was essentially a survey for tax purposes. The term used was "geld" but no longer paying off Danes. e.g., from Scafe's translation of Yorkshire Domesday: " In Tatecastre (Tadcaster), Dunstan and Turchil had eight carucates of land for geld, where four ploughs may be."

Yes it was a poetic expression of an idea. But historically collection of geld by government long outlasted the original purpose.

Re: Danegeld

Unfortunately Kipling was wrong. We no longer have the Danes but we still have the geld (taxation). It's the tax collectors you never get rid of.

"unless they want to fall foul of the authorities where they operate."

Depending on where they operate falling foul might require no more than a brown envelope.

El Reg tries – and fails – to get its talons on a Brexit tea towel

Re: this towel

" Seems governments are making people miserable for their own good?"

Please disambiguate "their".

Re: A perfect demonstration of eccentric British understatement

As one of the old crusties with children and grandchildren to think about I hope to live to see that rejoining. However, as an alternative they all have their Irish passports and hence EU citizenship on account of said children having been born in NI.

In the meantime, stuff your ageism where the sun don't shine.

Re: RE: Haven't got time to check the details

It's worth remembering the Daily Wail fuss about our passports being made by the Germans. It was actually a privatised arm of the the old HMSO in the foreign land that is Oldham.

UN didn't patch SharePoint, got mega-hacked, covered it up, kept most staff in the dark, finally forced to admit it

What's 4% of the UN's annual turnover?

Only 6 ransomware attacks on the UK's NHS since WannaCry worm hit in 2017 – report

"That said, Comparitech's statistics are less valuable than they might be because the incidents are not weighted by their severity and scope."

Quite. What's a day's downtime? A day down on a PC with a single user isn't the same as a day down on a server with 100 users.

EU outlines 5G rules: You don't have to keep 'risky' vendors completely Huawei

Re: HCSEC is auditing Huawei code

I assume Europe is prepared to trust its own manufacturers but other stuff, and that most certainly includes that from US vendors, should be audited in the same way. Why should they object if they've nothing to hide?

Re: It is all trade war.

"You decide whether encryption is sufficient if you have something to hide."

Anyone using a phone for on-line shopping, banking or whatever is likely to have stuff that they're contractually obliged to hide.

Brave, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla gather together to talk web privacy... and why we all shouldn't get too much of it

Re: Targeted ads are great and we need them to keep the internet great

"without ads, over half of the internet would die"

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Re: In this, as in most matters, society self-stratifies

"In both instances the rejoinder must be that those complaining ought engage in a spot of introspection"

I think they're incapable of introspection. They wouldn't be in the business if they were.

Re: Alright lads...

I've got a better one. An indicator that in making purchasing decisions you discriminate against those who pester you.

Re: bah

Then why do they persist in trying to fling ads at people who clearly don't want them? The only way it will influence the targets' behaviour is to prejudice them against the product.

Re: Why it's absolutely necessary...targeted to individuals?

"Presumably both parties make/save more money this way or the practice would have died out by now."

No, it only requires the party of the 2nd part, the analytics people, i.e. people in the advertising industry, to persuade the party of the first part, the advertisers, that they're saving money. In fact, of course, they're paying for the analytics instead.

Re: "Microsoft Loves the Web"

"Does this actually work on anyone?"

Of course. It acts on the muggins who's paying for it. Remember the advertising industry is only selling advertising.

Re: Besides

"The people who make money off them all claim that everybody does."

These, of course, are the people in the advertising industry, not their mugs, the advertisers.

Re: "Microsoft Loves the Web"

On the assumption that this is on the level and not ironic, let's look at a situation which is a little more clear cut, in the physical world.

The other day, along with the usual payload of bills the post included unaddressed leaflets for some junk or other I'll never want. Yesterday it included the Radio Times for SWMBO and out of that fell several leaflets for junk we'd never want.

There's only one way to describe this: litter.

And litter is a form of pollution.

What possible justification is there for an economic system that depends, or claims to depend on producing pollution? That's pollution as a deliberate product, not as a by-product of something else.

Re: "Microsoft Loves the Web"

I'm trying to decide if that was a whoosh and I can't. I really can't.

Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

Maybe add the proviso that you have to grab hold of one of the bits of junk and bring that down at the same time.

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

Re: Isn't it amazing

"how poorly (or perhaps with genius artifice) contractual KPIs can be set up by the uninformed"

Nothing uninformed about setting them up. Accepting them, however...

Re: WTF?

More likely you'd take t to wherever you bought it and demand your money back. Loudly enough for any other customers to hear.

Re: WTF?

"The people who wrote the SLAs have certainly set themselves an incredibly low bar."

This isn't a bar, it's a trip hazard.

IoT security? We've heard of it, says UK.gov waving new regs

Re: One big mistake

"Laws only provide a penalty phase, not actual prevention of someone doing something wrong. Putting product security into the realm of product liability for damages would be an incentive to improve."

Liability for damages would still be law, just civil rather than legal.

The legislation is only the means which enables the penalty which is the deterrent (or incentive to improve if you prefer).

I'm not sure that targeting a distant manufacturer is the best way to go about it. Make it an offence to offer the stuff for sale, that's more likely to make at least some vendors amenable. OTOH the only effect would be to make stuff available in the UK only through Trotters Independent Trading. There's no chance of manufacturers producing a new, improved line for the UK market. This is the sort of thing that could be done effectively via the EU where the market size would be more worth-while. How good of the MoF to underline why leaving is a mistake before we've even done it.

The statement on the MoF website also says "We want to make the UK the safest place to be online with pro-innovation regulation that breeds confidence in modern technology."

That's the kiss of death. They always say something like that when they've no idea how to do it.

"This could significantly increase the number of passwords the average household has to manage – and there are also questions about what happens when such passwords are forgotten or misplaced."

He says that like it's a bad thing. Hasn't he heard that re-use of passwords is a big problem?

There's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation here. An alternative, which would deal with the lost password, is to be able to reset the device to a state where the user has to set a password before it becomes operational. This would ensure that an operational device doesn't have a well-known password but it does facilitate setting a weak password or the re-use of passwords. Alternatively have the device generate and display a new, random password on a factory reset. Any reset-and-cahnge system, however, needs to be protected against a remote reset.

The UK market is so huge in world terms that this is going to have a huge effect on IoT design. Or maybe not.

Calling all, um, 'general AI' practitioners: Blighty needs you for public sector glory

Re: Shudder

It lacks only the boilerplate "making the UK the bast place to use AI in government".

In deepest darkest Surrey, an on-prem SAP system running 17-year-old software is about to die....

Re: You wish

The existing staff will be long gone before the need for any support staff is realised. BTW this is local government so they're not civil servants, they're local government officers.

Verity Stob is 'Disgusted of HG Wells': Time, gentlemen, please

Why should this be the end of times from the Open University? And kindly leave the Godless of Gower Street out of this.

All these solecisms pale into insignificance compared to the absence of an Oxford comma from the Brexit 50p piece: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51269012

Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt. Time to give something back

If I were to acquire a commercial licence I have to get the source; that's the GPL.

If I then sell an application built with that code I have to provide my customers with the source and a copy of the GPL. That's also part of the GPL.

Those customers can then distribute the source because the copy of the GPL they receive says that.

In that case I fail to see how anyone who wants a copy of the supposedly commercial-only LTS version can't get a copy,legally, from a customer of a commercial licensee.

Re: Annoying

And why, in consequence, Qt ended up under GPL.

There seems to be a conflict here. First of all, does Qt as it stands consist entirely of code written by employees and former employees? If not are there external contributions under GPL or LGPL? If so how do they propose to make LTS commercial only? They can't apply a non-GPL licence to those contributions which means that any end user has to be able to receive the source.

Even if the previous code is employee only asking to give back in the form of code contributions is going to present a problem: if those are made under GPL type licences it introduces that problem and if not then I don't think there'll be many of them.

UK: From 5G in Tiree to the Isles of Ebony, carry me on the waves… Sail Huawei, sail Huawei, sail Huawei

Re: The horse has bolted...years ago

"I asked her if she thought BT’s total dependence on a Chinese vendor represented a security threat."

No longer being able to make what might be terms strategic products is a security risk and we've abandoned that capability a long time ago.

If we really want security for UK telecoms we should be able to audit the S/W in all the suppliers' kit. We do that for Huawei (the broad conclusion seems to be more cockup than conspiracy) so what about the rest?

Remember the Clipper chip? NSA's botched backdoor-for-Feds from 1993 still influences today's encryption debates

Govts. seem to want the tech industry to develop this magical system for free.

They have the option of putting their our money where their mouth is and offering the tech industrymoney to develop a workable scheme. Perhaps an initial competition for a contract to develop it. The bulk of the money would only be paid when the result had passed scrutiny by industry experts - who would also scrutinize the competition offerings.

If they can't get a workable system out of it they might finally reflect on what it was they were wanting and why nobody in the industry has attempted to do it on their own initiative.