Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK.gov pledges probe into tourists' 'motivations'

Maybe she feels a need to try to over-correct on the hostile environment bit.

OTOH what I've read about the US would persuade me never to go there for any reason whatsoever.

Philips kills dependence on its Hue hub, pointing to a Bluetooth world

Why not do without Zigbee, Bluetooth, Hub and the lot? Just switch it on and off at the wall.

But what we really want to know is whether they've outdone GE in the reset competition.

In Rust we trust: Brave smashes speed limit after rewriting ad-block engine in super-lang

Re: Lost cause

"You can't force people to look at something they don't want to look at."

Maybe, maybe not, but succeeding in at least shoving it in front of them is going to be counter-productive. But, as I keep saying, the advertising industry is only interested in selling advertising, not its clients' products.

BOFH: What's Near Field Implementation? Oh, you'll see. Turn left here

That's a lot of well-informed questions for someone in the coloured pencil department. No wonder he had to go.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

My experience with house moves has been that stuff has disappeared when you get to unpack in the new house but stuff from the house before or even before that reappears for the first time in years. My theory is that they were in the last house in a parallel universe but have now crossed back.

Packing cases are portals between the said parallel universes.

"defective micro-USB connectors"

Is there any other kind? Apart, of course, from the wrong one.

UK's MoD is helping itself to cops' fingerprint database 'unlawfully', rules biometrics chief

Re: Different Rules

That would be a police matter so if the fingerprints are on the police database they would be found by the police who are entitled to have access. It's what the system is there for.

Sorry, you failed your straw man construction test.

Re: You are never going to rein this in, so a different approach is needed.

"Let them do their worst with the data. But ensure that courts only accept legally obtained and processed evidence."

Does that mean that if your neighbour who happens to have access decides to check up you and your friends that's OK because it's just for private consumption and not going to go near the courts?

It's no use just sitting there saying this or that was done illegally. It's also of dubious use saying it was this or that public body. If something was being done illegally there should be prosecutions of the individuals responsible. A charge of misfeasance in public office could be used if there is no specific charge available.

The Eldritch Horror of Date Formatting is visited upon Tesco

"Throw all modern medicine and other benefits away"

Especially when they reach their "Use by" date.

Re: Call me a snob, but...

1988. Wasn't that about the time when Perrier had benzene in it?

Re: Dates? Don't talk to me about dates...

Suite, dammit!

Re: Dates? Don't talk to me about dates...

I had a client about Y2K time in printing. They too used an application that used Progress IIRC. Can't remember the vendor name. Another client, same industry, also had an industry-specific application that did use Informix on SCO. From the perspective of most sales and stock operations they do things a bit peculiarly there. The Informix based one had an interesting quirk. They were, I think, supposed to ship with a run-time only installation but they had ?accidentally left in one of the development applications - sformbuld IIRC. But as all the non-4GL development applications are all the same executable, just link to the relevant names and, ooh, look, a full Informix development suit.

Re: Dates? Don't talk to me about dates...

"Things were already a bit strange as they wanted it pipe-delimited rather than comma delimited"

Did they also want a pipe at the end of each line? It could be they're importing into Informix as that's the standard import/export format.

Re: Well done Tesco's

At least they didn't give a tart reply.

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

There's a good argument to be made for requiring a fitness to govern test for anyone aspiring to public office at any level from local govt. upwards.

There used to be an exam for candidates for the Civil Service but any fool could, and often did, get into Parliament. Perhaps it's time to bring that back, at least for positions of administrative responsibility and require candidates for public office to pass it. Maybe retest periodically at age 70 & above.

PPE graduates should, of course, undergo substantial retraining before being allowed to even take the test.

Re: every new cellular technology has been accompanied by cancer claims,

A suspicious looking skin lesion is just a suspicious looking skin lesion. It lacks the ability to claim anything.

Re: Dihydrogen monoxide

Excellent. I particularly like the advert for Klein bottles on the home page. Just what's needed for keeping the stuff safe.

Re: Plenty of these nuts over there

You think it ever went away?

Re: Bet they all use smartphones though...

"Anon, as I'll probably get roasted by both sides."

No, just the side where you're holding your phone.

"wireless signals are a possible human carcinogen"

In the same way that anything else such as parliamentary hot air is a possible human carcinogen . So maybe she should shut up.

Sneaky fingerprinting script in Microsoft ad slips onto StackOverflow, against site policy

"although it looks like a static banner advertising Microsoft Azure with a link, the fingerprinting code is running in the background."

And what do Microsoft have to say about it?

Let me guess:

Rogue 3rd party advertising agency.

A former member of staff.

We take your/cusotmers'/the Universe's privacy seriously.

Only a few people affected.

Lessons learned.

Steps taken to prevent a repeat.

Next time it'll be better obfuscated - oops, that's what we really meant but it slipped out accidentally.

"The tracking, advertising and monetization story on the internet is convoluted beyond measure, driven by huge global revenue involved, estimated at $298.1bn in 2019"

Does this represent value for money for the advertisers? I seriously doubt it. The few ads I see from search engines fall into two categories. One is irrelevant and the other is the exact ting I was looking for which the search thing should have thrown up anyway without the search target paying for it to be put there.

"Despite this, JavaScript is in ads is everywhere, making it the responsibility of the publisher and the ad server to protect the user."

And do we trust them to meet those responsibilities? No. That's why we block JavaScript and one of the reasons we block ads.

Decoding America's spies: What does the NSA's cryptic memo really mean? Citizens illegally spied on again

Re: Fill in the blanks

Some of these redactions seem to be aimed solely at covering the identity of the provider who the NSA are blaming for the excess. Name and shame. Or would the provider be liable to defend themselves with facts the NSA doesn't want to be released?

Your server remote login isn't root:password, right? Cool. You can keep your data. Oh sh... your IoT gear, though?

Re: This is a controversial opinion, no doubt, but....

In fact I don't recall a regular Linux or other Unix installation process* that attempted to set a default root password. It's a feature of pre-built images which are used on IoT gadgets.

* Pi distros are something of an exception being based on regular distros such as Debian but are pre-built images. Although the default password should be changed - and a non-root ID set up - ASAP but if that isn't done and the OS got banjaxed by something like this the device itself isn't affected, the SD card can be reloaded. Too bad about any user data on it, however.

One-time permanent DWP secretary Robert Devereux set to rock up at 'ethical' tech biz Salesforce

"Devereux, however, does not have appear to have any specific technology experience on his CV."

Yup, I can imagine he'd be keen to avoid any suggestion that he had involvement with DWP's IT projects.

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

Re: think of the children!

"I checked a nearby competitor."

This is where the parking vultures are out to get you. Check and find the first one had the better offer but you incur a fine if you go back to their car park within a couple of days or whatever.

The trouble there is that car parking is really customer service but no doubt all siting negotiations are handled by estates or something with a similar title and they're more interested in their cozy relationships with landlords than avoiding having their customers being screwed over.

Re: Two such patterns missed completely

"Do they want me to assume they bring the same (lack of) competence to everything else they do?"

They may not want you to but it's a good idea to do so.

Item shown arriving at depot and never leaves - do they not raise regular exception reports for items that weren't despatched on time? Or items which, as I'm sure this did, "evaporate"?

And items which leave the despatch point en route for a locker and don't get put into the locker - don't they alert the courier before he moves on?

And when an item goes missing, do they not realise that despatching another PDQ is the proper way of dealing with it?

I assume these are all the result of agile development and one of these days they're going to get round to these user stories or whatever they're called but they didn't make the MVP.

Two such patterns missed completely

1. Throwing completely irrelevant junk into search results. Sometimes it might be a genuinely poor matching algorithm or the junk having irrelevant key-words but not always. Throwing in a bunch of key-words deliberately is included.

2. "You may also like...", "Other customers also bought..." and the like.

DXC Technology warns techies that all travel MUST now be authorised

Re: This won't change much in day-to-day DXC life

Without it a lot of layers of management would be redundant. It's called job preservation. You might argue, of course, that it would be a much better way of cutting costs to take out those layers of management and allocate the front-line staff travel budgets.

I suspect that at every such move the senior manglement at their clients would probably think "Good idea".

How else can you explain non-cancellation of contracts?

FCC adviser and fiber telco CEO thrown in the clink for five years after conning investors out of $270m with fake deals

"seems it wasn't about regular greed"

Nevertheless the sentence seems to imply she made about $900k out of it for herself.

RIP Dyn Dynamic DNS :'( Oracle to end Dyn-asty by axing freshly gobbled services, shoving customers into its cloud

Re: Expiry Date Never

"they promised for life"

But whose life?

ultimately give sell customers a better more expensive set of network and cloud services

I think that's what they might have meant.

What the cell...? Telcos around the world were so severely pwned, they didn't notice the hackers setting up VPN points

Re: Tired of these claims

"No telcos named" says an A/C

It's a subtle, long-term game to set up a pretended hack via Windows to cover up the fact that they were extracting data via compromised Huawei. At least I'd expect that's how the US administration will spin it.

Please stop regulating the dumb tubes, says Internet Society boss

Re: "A very strange thing for Parliament to do [..]"

"It's a reflex for any government, let alone one that likes control."

The trouble is that it puts the rest of us between govts wanting control and the likes of Google wanting control.

Remember that crypto-exchange boss who mysteriously died after his customers' coins disappeared? Of course he totally stole them

"Sooner or later, he would have wanted to drive a Ferrari"

Maybe he is, but where and under what name?

"It's exactly why financial workers are required to take a two week continuous vacation every year."

Nothing suspicious about booking that holiday to somewhere that coincidentally doesn't have an extradition arrangement. Or somewhere where you can conveniently be declared dead and buried (or for preference cremated) before you're due back.

How convenient to have "died" when he did

Or to put it in terms of the headline, did he totally die?

Curioser and curioser: Little Mars rover sniffs out highest ever levels of methane

Re: If, and it's a big if, the methane in this case is biological --

"I've also read a couple of papers suggesting the Earth has too much water"

I keep seeing this sort of thing reported.

It doesn't have too much water. It has the water it has. If the theory says it shouldn't have as much water the theory is wrong and the theorist needs a new theory, not the Earth less water. It's called science.

"There are plentiful sources of oxygen on Mars"

You still need a set of reactions which are exothermic overall.

"an important potential fuel source for vehicles"

They'd still need oxygen to burn it.

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc

https://xkcd.com/908/

OK, you all know which it is.

Having bank problems? I feel bad for you son: I've got 25 million problems, but a bulk upload ain't one

Re: I call bullshit

"Well, I do, and haven't."

Find a dictionary.

Look up "hubris".

Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row?

Re: Microsoft did not used to need to see the future

"For some reason Microsoft did not follow their winning strategy with phones."

I doubt the phone industry, manufacturers and networks alike would have allowed them. They saw the way the PC makers had been shafted and wouldn't have let that happen again.

EE-k, a hundred grand! BT's mobile arm slapped for sending 2.5m+ unwanted texts

“We accept the ICO’s findings"

That actually makes a nice change from recent reports of regulator cases. The usual response seems to be "we don't accept the findings" and even "the regulator was too stupid to understand the technology" or words to that effect.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Re: Pi-top

James,

On the subject of PiTop, I got one years ago for my grandson. My reaction was that for that purpose the location of connectors didn't work out very well. In particular the power and headphone connector were on the same side and as the power connector needed to be internal there was no easy way to connect plain old phones or speakers. Perhaps it would be worth thinking about how best to lay out the connectors for this sort of purpose - and then about something along the lines of chromebook except running NextCloud as the server (on a Pi, of course).

Re: Sata

"If only they had added the much requested sata port."

A while ago I looked at similar boards with onboard SATA. The SATA was an onboard adapter from USB so you could do the same thing with a USB/SATA cable.