Posts by Doctor Syntax 42535 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"At what point does a member of staff with valid network credentials become known as a hacker?"
When he accesses something he's not entitled to or,as the story puts it, commits an offence under section 1(1) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
It looks as if Royal Stoke Hospital might have got ahead of the curve with single sign-on.
"companies in the UK want to do business with the EU"
Who cares what companies think? "We" voted to leave. The fact that we (without the quotes) will depend on a functioning UK economy is neither here nor there although it might turn out to be a surprise to "us" when that's discovered.
Just in case - ths GPIB isn't the GPIB sitting on Raspberry Pi boards.
The Commodore interface bus was GPIB or sort of but with a much - umm - simpler connector. I have vague recollections of playing about with a piece of kit which had been built to use the Commodore version and discovering that it wasn't just the connector that had been simplified but also the functionality.
Of course. Provided they provide their own code to reimplement the S/W that goes behind it if that's proprietary. They'd also be selling would be the CPU cycles, storage and connectivity. If it's FOSS then the CPU, storage & connectivity is all they're selling.
"The copyright ship has sailed."
Yup. Right into the Supreme Court. And that can turn it round and sail it right back. That's how appeals to a higher court work.
The fact that huge swathes of Google's competitors in the software industry are presenting amicus briefs in support of Google should tell you something about how dangerous they think the Appeal Court decisions were.
2To clean up that mess, you'd have to amend the copyright law in order to define what an API is made of."
A win for Oracle would certainly leave us with a mess to be cleaned up.
Ideally it could also leave Oracle's doorstep with a queue of lawyers bearing writs: IBM wanting a word about SQL, whoever now owns Bell Labs' rights to C with a number of bits of the API of which bits of the Java API seem rather reminiscent and doubtless more.
The clean room implementation still has to be an implementation of the API and it's the copyrightability of the API that's the issue.
Why is it an issue? Well, look at a C program. At the top you'll see a lot of #include statements. They're copying various files into your program. What are those files? They're parts of the system's API. The same thing is apt to apply in other languages.
Any program being compiled incorporates at least parts of the API(s) it's written against. To raise any form of copyright issue against those is very worrying for the way in which the entire software industry works which is why pretty well the entire set of big players in the software industry apart from the principles have weighted in with amicus briefs. You should at least consider the possibility that they know what they're doing in spending money on lawyers to do that.
"Not a huge problem for China which seems to regard copyright as yet another crazy round-eye concept that they must occasionally pretend to respect."
Not really. They're just taking a lesson from the round-eye US of the C19th.
"due to a totalitarian leftist/emotional/brainless subculture"
Whatever you may otherwise think of RMS introducing a distinct political tone into software development opened a door through which too many have crowded who had more interest in the political rather than the S/W aspects. Ironically, he eventually fell foul of them.
Perhaps they shouldn't have kept Thunderbird onboard. There was some talk a while back of the possibility of it going into the Document Foundation as part of LibreOffice. That would have reduced the costs a bit. With Tbird, or even better, Seamonkey, Lirghtning and Lightbird all incorporated, maybe as optional extras, it would have beefed LibreOffice up into a fuller package.
"But, as with so many other things around Brexit, the truth is that the UK cannot exist in the modern world as its own digital island and so will have to reach some kind of agreement with Europe, or face the risk of being cut off from the continent when it comes to sharing data."
Yes, but who's going to explain all that to the ERG.
"So if there are enough Linux world patches to fill a monthly roundup"
The point is that there aren't. A while back when we had HeartBleed etc there were a good few security patches and a lot of activity following the story you broke on Intel leakage. There are probably a lot of patches come through on bleeding edge distros but for the likes of Debian stable releases not much which suggests security patches are few and far between. Now does that mean that either (a) people have reverted to neglecting such things or (b) development practices have moved on and security has become part of the initial build? Whether or not you think there's scope for a story in there there's certainly scope for comment.
"The UK government seems to change its mind regularly about whether it wants to stay aligned with the GDPR and other EU privacy regulation or not."
What a pity HMG hasn't come up with something like this: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2019/419/introduction/made
Make him an offer. Hand over the suspect phone along with his own private one. Make best efforts to crack both phones. If they succeed the contents of his phone get published for the world to see, this, of course, being the effect that success would ultimately have one everyone else's phone. If he doesn't like the deal he shouldn't inflict it on everyone else and anyway he doesn't have anything to hide, does he? Does he?
Yup. The initial assumption with carbon dating was that the constant cosmic ray flux would lead to a constant level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. Then it was realised that the constant wasn't and that plus other factors resulted in variations so now we have calibrations from dendro samples.
