Posts by Doctor Syntax

For pity's sake, groans Mimecast, teach your workforce not to open obviously dodgy emails

Re: you could do that, but...

"The only employees who are likely to need outside email access in most companies are the sales team"

Sales and marketing are the worst offenders in what they send from their businesses. They are the most addicted to sending HTML mail, the worst for embedding links and apt to use outside agencies so that the actual domain from which mail is sent isn't their own and the embedded links are also likely to belong to a different domain. In short their emails look exactly like phishing emails.

They expect other people to open their emails so why wouldn't they open those with exactly the same characteristics?

Re: you could do that, but...

Enough years more experience has the opposite effect.

Sic transit gloria mundi (basis of the best of all Carry On puns.

Re: you could do that, but...

What penguin? The OP mentioned no OS by name and the point is a good one. We need to seriously rethink desktop OS design amongst other things.

From what I've read Qubes OS seems to be a good start but I'd go a lot further. Do we need, for instance, an all-powerful user ID? Perhaps one user ID can handle disk partitioning but not have permissions to read disk contents. Another is responsible for installing applications and another manages user IDs. Another has permissions to structure a disk partition as a database and provide storage and retrieval systems as a service. Ordinary users don't get to access that database, their applications ask the server to store and retrieve files. Preferably some sort of authorisation could be devised so that the server recognises not only the user on whose behalf the request is made but also the application. Less convenient but then security is often a trade-off with convenience.

Re: Just use text/plain

A good start would be filters on MTAs which bounce - with appropriate error messages - HTML mail.

Re: you could do that, but...

Copy the online documentation to a local server.

Boris Johnson's promise of full fibre in the UK by 2025 is pie in the sky

Re: Is the target obsurd?

Note that is said "for somebody". Somebody gets paid to do the job of laying it. They make money.

Providing a service from it is a different matter from laying it.

Who do you think BoJo might be thinking of?

Re: Lies versus incompetance

When I read a comment like this it always leads me to reflect on why the commentard doesn't go into politics. After all if they are so principled and nobody else is wouldn't they make such a better job?

Could it be that they wouldn't want to be slagged off by generalising commentards such as - well, such as themselves?

Re: Lies versus incompetance

"Corbyn hasn't made any fuck ups?"

Not in government but he's training hard in case he gets his chance.

Re: BroBo

how about you accept drugs approved by the US FDA for use in the NHS without requiring us to get them certified by the EU's EMA?" Which isin't actually utterly unreasonable, and probably not actually *that* problematic given that the standards are pretty similar.

How's Hancock getting along with setting up a UK approval body given that we're going to need one of our own?

Re: What is a BloJob promise worth?

I just struggle to understand the concept of how a country tied to operating as part of a large bloc such as the EU is more free than one that's independent bends over any time the US tells it to.

Do these slight amendments help you?

And don't let's forget Boris Island.

Re: Is the target obsurd?

There's money to be made (for somebody) in laying fibre. There's money to be lost in meeting or failing to meet real performance targets.

Re: unusable water cannon for the police, later sold for scrap at a £300,000 loss.

The prime reason though was endangering "policing by consent".

When even May realised that you should have known some was wrong.

Re: Rural rage

Ditches get cleaned out periodically. You need a Russian nuclear sub to do that with transoceanic cables.

You ain't getting around UK data laws on a technicality, top judge tells Google

Re: Dear El'Reg

Fines and payments for compensation are two different things. This case is about the latter.

Re: Excellent news

yes, but a few billion here and a few billion there soon adds up to real money.

Brit consumers still holding off on buying new PCs until that Brexit thing is over and done with

Re: Brexit Unlikely Reason

"So my advice would be to wait unless absolutely necessary. 10th gen will be interesting."

Intel processors have been interesting for some generations - interesting as in the curse about living in interesting times.

OK, it's fair to say UK's botched Emergency Services Network is an emergency now, right?

But not all doom and gloom. Facial recognition is coming along nicely, just a slight problem with false positives.

Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost

Bloody tea leaves. Nick anything. Even asteroids.

It'll probably turn up on eBay.

Let's open the Mystery Data Security Blunder box, and see what's inside today... Ah! Hotel reservations and more

AavGo

Is that pronounced "'ave a go?"

told The Register the exposed database did not contain any personal info beyond names, phone numbers, and email addresses.

What else would be needed for phising? "Could you please confirm your payment details"

The biz also insisted no payment card details were stored,

See above.

and nobody other than Brown is believed to have spotted the server

On what is this "belief" based, other than blind faith?

What Huawei to go: Hundreds of Chinese tech giant's US workers to get pink slips – report

Re: A strategic decision....

"If you read the news... in the US... it appears that the UK Ambassador to the US was leaking classified information."

Either the US news media read it wrong or you did. The ambassador's reports were confidential. What was leaked - by someone else - was his actual words. I doubt many would consider what he was reporting was a secret - we can work that out for ourselves from POTUS' own pronouncements.

I'm sure all the other ambassadors have made similar reports - I'd love to know what the French said, for instance.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

"according to the ugly tit that keeps spouting bollocks"

Error - integer overflow in counter.

Re: "The clocks on the Galileo satellites are British-designed already"

"No mention about it being designed in Britain."

No mention of anything at all unless javascript is enabled. We really need some technologically competent business to devise a language to convey marked-up data from websites to browser without all that extra overhead.

Nigel?

Re: "The clocks on the Galileo satellites are British-designed already"

Who? You?

Re: Huzzah!

And go round in ever-smaller circles.

Alternatively just how do you manage to set up a geostationary satellite that hovers directly over Birmingham?

"A suspicious mind would notice lots of very odd happenings in the world of tech at the moment."

SNAFU

"notified within a matter of seconds"

But which seconds? That seems to be the problem.

Looking forward to the On Call.

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

Re: Smart Phoey

"and the surfeit of people too stupid to understand its limitations"

Especially managers.

"Bulb already limits smart meter installations to areas where it has enough engineers "

Welsh speaking engineers?

Yes, I've been swotting up on court evidence in advance, says Autonomy founder Mike Lynch

"Enough documents to sink an aircraft carrier in this case."

Given the present generation of our aircraft carriers that doesn't need to be a very big bundle.

"Only in a murder trial do you have a last-minute proof that the prosecution keeps hidden until just the right time - twenty seconds before the commercial break."

And that's only fictional murder trials.

And why not? Any time I went into the witness box I had my case file and would at least have read enough to remind myself what it was all about.

In the US? Using Medicaid? There's a good chance DXC is about to boot your data into the AWS cloud

Re: The countdown to disaster has started

"That decision is going to cost a lot more than DXC is ready to budget for, I am sure."

It should, but probably won't.

Amazon's bugging of homes has German boffins worried that Alexa may be an outlaw

Re: Didn't El Reg follow a project to nobble Alexa ?

Nothing so sophisticated needed. A hammer will do just as well.

Re: Convenience v Surveillance

"my credit card"

If your credit card does this you can avoid it. What about someone else's credit card when you happen to be talking to them? How do you, or more to the point, Julz, deal with that?

Re: "the country takes the issue very seriously"

"hence why the data is being uploaded"

And yet it's possible for the mobile phone in my car to have its voice commands processed locally. How old is this advanced tech? Well, I remember a mobile phone with voice control being launched in 1986 (Topaz in the old BT Mobile catalogue).

Re: "the country takes the issue very seriously"

"Actually, there is one solution"

There's another which was John Brown's solution above. Give an audible warning when it starts live. And let's not stint, a nice flashing red light as well. It should be possible to do this locally but even if it isn't, all input when it's not live is sampled for wake-up detection and then goes straight to /dev/null.

Re: users can delete recordings themselves by accessing recordings through an app or browser.

Yup. I decides it was a joke but only by a majority verdict. Next week it might not be.

Virgin Media blocks Imgur, literally tens of people rage at UK ISP

I wonder if that constituted a libel against legitimate users.

Good luck deleting someone's private info from a trained neural network – it's likely to bork the whole thing

"In order to leave out specific data, models will often have to be retrained with the newer, smaller dataset."

That strikes me as an indication of just how fragile the whole system is."

"That’s a pain as it costs money and time."

Oh, what a shame.

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

It's very likely that a few people will take the advice and go to employment tribunals. When that happens there'll cease to be grey area (or worse) contracts.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

100k on the new shiny fixed (as opposed to exchangeable disk packs) disk. They were 24 bit words so worth 300 to 400k bytes.

Microsoft tells resellers: 'We listened to you, and we have acted' (PS: Plz keep making us money)

Re: Seriously

You know what it means, I know what it means. The advertising people may even know what it means but they make their living selling bushes and there's the other saying about what happens when a man's living depends on his not understanding.

Cloudflare comes clean on crashing a chunk of the web: How small errors and one tiny bit of code led to a huge mess

A good rule of thumb is that authorisation to roll out a change includes authorisation to roll it back in an emergency. It shouldn't need someone else to be consulted.

A second is that if things go pear-shaped promptly on rolling out a change it should be rolled back PDQ. Even if the problem was actually something else you're no worse off than you were before and at least you now know it wasn't the change.

However this is the way to handle the PR side - not the self-serving, transparently untrue boilerplate response we usually get. It actually raises Cloudflare's reputation.

Re: It never gets any less true.

One of the things to remember when writing regular expressions is that just because it's possible to do some particular thing it isn't necessarily a good idea.

We have the best trade wars: US investigating French tech tax plan over fears it unfairly targets American biz

"Isn't Jeremy Hunts solution to leaving the EU ... the UK drops its corporation tax to the same level as Ireland to attract ... multi-nationals"

The prerequisite to this is that the national economy* is relatively small compared to the size of the revenue that the multinationals put through that facility, otherwise the fall in revenue from native businesses exceeds the gains. Up to now that's ot been met. Leaving the EU might achieve that, however but I'm not sure it's a good achievement to make.

* Normally the consequence of being a smallish country with a smallish population.

"As a revenue tax targeted on a narrowly defined set of companies, the Digital Services Tax is not one of those smart measures. It risks making investing in the UK less attractive"

Investing? I think he means "selling in". The tax gets charged irrespective of whether they invest or not. In fact the whole thing could be structured so that real investments are offset against income.

US border cops' secret racist Facebook group a total disgrace, says patrol chief. She should know, she was a member

Re: Patrol?

"and for Iceland were 73.6% of men and 60.9% of women"

Store or country?

Cough up, like, 1% of your valuation and keep up the good work, says FTC: In draft privacy deal, Facebook won't have to change a thing

Re: Probably about as good as the government can do.

"Third, you don't want X thousands of FB shareholders screaming to their congresscritters"

The people at whom they should scream are FB manglement for getting into this position. And FB manglement are pretty well insulated from this because one of them has a controlling vote.