Posts by Doctor Syntax

Samsung says sorry as union-busting chairman and VP head off for 18 months in the chokey

Re: Tech Exec Clink.

"harsher sentences to keep your 'customers' returning"

Don't you mean to stop them leaving?

If the OP is comparing Sammy's statement with the industry standard which says essentially "We were right and the court got it wrong." then he's spot on.

Huawei's P40 and P40 Pro handsets will not ship with Google Mobile Services, Richard Yu confirms

Re: Maybe not such a bad thing

"Perhaps a really positive scenario would be for Huawei to sponsor an alternative,"

F-Droid?

Post Office faces potential criminal probe over Fujitsu IT system's accounting failures

Re: Bugs? Sure, we've heard of them.

"That's not a bug, that's a feature" or, "no problems, we'll fix that in a month or two"

That's yesterday's approach. The current version s WONTFIX. How many times is that going to come back to haunt the perpetrators in the coming years?

"Why is the BBC soft-pedalling this?"

The report on the BBC News website mentioned possible perjury charges. It might be a consequence of getting something on air quickly

Re: The real tragedy...

"how it was impossible to convince a court of innocence when that was truly the case, why it's only now recognised that they were malicious prosecutions."

Somebody has posted explanations above. Basically experts - but in effect PO/Fujitsu representatives - giving evidence and the accused not having their hands on sufficient documentation. An expert will be called by one side or the other but should still make an independent investigation. A strong desire to seek out the truth is the best qualification for an expert witness.

I'm mostly with you but I doubt it would be the directors personally who get prosecuted for corporate manslaughter.

OTOH any perjury cases will be personal. I wonder how many will try a defence of "my manager told me to say that.".

"they knew just how bad the damage to their business was going to be."

They thought they did. They're now discovering how much worse it can get.

Re: Malicious Prosecution?

Yup. You step in the witness box and you're personally responsible for what you say. You may think you're representing some big company but you have to be able to justify what you say on their behalf.

Re: Ooooh first post....

"I think this one will run and run"

I hope not. The victims deserve an early resolution to this.

IT consultant who deleted every account on UK company Jet2's domain cops 5 months in jail

Re: A very stupid thing to do.......

Can I suggest

0) You're professional

Amazon slams media for not saying nice things about AWS, denies it strip-mines open-source code for huge profits

Re: "The journalist largely ignores the many positive comments he got from partners"

"AWS, Facebook and Google wouldn't exists - or at least wouldn't be so profitable, without being able to use and run a lot of code for free, and on a lot of systems."

AWS & Facebook, maybe. But I just looked at the 2017 kernel report. Google is 10th in company contributions for 4.8to 4.13, seventh if you strip out "none", "unknown" and "consultants". Only 4 changes less than SUSE and 3x the number by Canonical.

Log us out: Private equity snaffles Lastpass owner LogMeIn

"the PE arm of tech activist investor Elliott Management"

Just as well I never so the point of a password manager on somebody else's computer.

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

"without making an appointment at the Genius Bar."

If it needs its own set of wheels maybe they're worried the Genius might have a hernia lifting onto the Bar.

Put the crypt into cryptocoin: Amid grave concerns, lawyers to literally dig into exchange exec who died owing $190m

DNA wouldn't be required to establish cause of death but state of preservation might impede determination of cause of death. Old-fashioned dental records would help with ID along with any injuries in life such as bones broken and re-set.

FUSE for macOS: Why a popular open source library became closed source and commercially licensed

Re: "GPL / commercial dual licenses have been used for years"

There's also a reason why its originator forked a GPL version.

It's 2019 so, of course, this Wells Fargo employee accused of stealing customer cash posed with wads of dosh on Instagram, Facebook

You might expect someone who's worked in a place for years to become sufficiently familiar with processes that they could spot gaps in the system that mean they could exfiltrate substantial sums. But after a few months?

Creative cloudy types still making it rain cash for Adobe

Nice little design shop you have there. Pity if anything were to happen to it.

HPE to Mike Lynch: You told either El Reg or High Court the right version of why former Autonomy execs won't testify

"I look forward to Hussain being released and restitution made to him."

Different jurisdiction. OTOH it wouldn't look good for the criminal conviction if HPE failed against the supposedly less less stringent standard of balance of probabilities that applies in civil cases.

Re: £4m a month

Reading about the thousands of pages of closing statements I can't help feeling that Rumpole's closing speech might have been as short as 5 minutes and not longer than half an hour unless he was up to something that needed an adjournment.

Admins sigh as Microsoft pushes Teams changes – let everyone play!

Re: "allows existing AAD users in your organization [..] to initiate a trial of the product."

"Because we can."

Until customer IT departments decide to arrange things so that they can't and using the only possible means to ensure that.

"You are janitors."

Yup. The janitors who'll have to clean up the mess of a ransomware infection or the consequences of the customers' credit card details appearing on Pastebin.

These are the droids you're looking for: Softbank launches Japan cafe staffed by bots

"an emotionally intelligent robot"

I read that as "annoying". I wonder what Marvin would make of them.

Buzz kill: Crook, 73, conned investors into shoveling millions into geek-friendly caffeine-loaded chocs that didn't exist. Now he's in jail

"The trio promised that any investments would be repaid in full if the product failed to sell, with five per cent interest for good measure, with Bershan guaranteeing the funds."

That should have been a warning. If the prospects were that good and they had the money to reimburse with interest why would they need to bring in external investors? If it's too good to be true ....

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

HP Tape & bent paperclips

We had a 1/2" reel HP drive. Periodically its loading mechanism would get into a state where it failed to work - much blowing of tape into the slot and re-winding. The solution was to reset it by shorting two pads on a circuit board. The spacing was just right for a bent paper-clip.

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

That is bwas paid for with pre-tax income of the company from the higher rates that they choose to charge are able to negotiate with the contracting company to cover this.

FTFY

And note that the "higher" income is obviously more advantageous to the client than the costs of engaging a permanent employee. That's because the "lower rate" of the permanent employee doesn't include that until you take into account the employee benefits.

Post Office coughs £57.75m to settle wonky Horizon IT system case

Re: Another criminal fail for people who have to work for a living

False statements? You'll probably find that it was settled without any admission of wrong doing and there were no false statements. No, we wouldn't do anything like that.

Re: Not good enough.

It would be very unwise of a judge in one case to make a straight accusation of what could be another case. It would be up to the CPS to make such a decision. The question is will they decide to try and keep a lid on it and hope it all goes away or will they prosecute some of their witnesses to show their own hands were clean?

Space Force is go, go, go! Because we have a child as President of the United States

The new Space Force will get its own Chief of Space Operations, who will report to the Secretary of the Air Force, and will probably get most of the Air Force’s space assets – from the Vandenberg base in California where satellites are launched to ground control bases like the one at Schriever base in Colorado. It will also get GPS satellites, the X37B spaceplane and, of course, its own force – up to 15,000 personnel apparently. The budget provides funds to train and equip them as well as cover “prompt and sustained space operations.”

This appears to be SOP in politics. Package up or re-announce a whole lot of existing stuff were stuff can just include plans. UK parties of all colours have honed this to a fine art with NHS budgets for a long time.

$13m+ Swiss Army Knife of blenders biz collapses to fury of 20,000 unfulfilled punters

Re: 25% Tariff

Perfect illustration. Mopping up the consequences of the Blair/Brown let the future pay for it approach when it finally hit the buffers is painfully obvious. It would take at least another decade of a flourishing economy to pay it down. What a pity we're not going to get that.

Non-unicorn $700 e-scooter shop Unicorn folds with no refunds – after blowing all its cash on online ads

Re: priorities..

Unless you have product development completed and paid for down to the last detail 20% is going to fall well short. Even then if you want to get income from it it's still well short.

Re: The only winner in this

Like I keep saying, the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising.

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

Re: Good News!

We need lots of data to work out if there are enough beds.

Capita lights One Revenues and Benefits bug bonfire: ALL reports older than 12 months to be ignored

WONTFIX?

Where have I heard that before?

There must be some systemd fans at work there.

Americans should have strong privacy-protecting encryption ...that the Feds and cops can break, say senators

There's a very simple step legislators can take.

They can advertise for expressions of interest from developers. They then allocate a generous amount of money to each competitor to develop a proof of concept system. Each system then gets checked by an expert panel to see if it meets the criterion that it provides good protection for the user with only law enforcement being able to get at the data. If, when the experts have stopped laughing, they deem something suitable to go forward the legislators and official who were pressing for it become the beta-testers using nothing else for at least a year.

Obviously the total amount allocated for proof of concept has to be limited with an agreement before-hand that if the money runs out before they have a system that passes scrutiny they'll accept that it really can't be done or continue to finance development out of their own pockets.

Of course the best way of running the competition would be that they put their money where their mouths are and just finance the whole thing themselves.

Re: Really?

"Does the government think I'm a criminal? I'll let you know."

No, they'll let you know. But they probably do, they just haven't got round to deciding which crime but they're sure you should be placed under surveillance.

Alleged Nigerian social engineer wins free flight to the US for business email fraud and love scams

Re: So it's a rare thumbs up for the wheels of justice

"since when has justice... been about making a profit?"

Since the middle ages at least. The amercements of a manorial court were amongst the recognises profits of a manor.

OTOH for society as a whole the costs of crime, and large-scale fraud especially, justify the costs of the policing and criminal justice systems.

"sentences of 78 and 31 months"

Months not years? In the US?

Things are getting awfully slack over there.

Re: Next on the demonization list...

We spoof email addresses every day, for sending email on behalf of various companies... I wouldn't call either of them a "sophisticated anonymization technique".

OTOH a spoofed email on behalf of a company makes it more difficult to distinguish between what you and the company would regard as a genuine email and the sort of fake these guys are sending out.

How would you explain to recipients how to distinguish between your "genuine" emails and the fraudsters' fakes? It's this spoofing that trains the public to be taken in by fraudsters.

What's worse financial institutions such as banks and building societies and their customers have the most to lose from this sort of fraud and yet, IME, they're amongst the keenest to do this.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: Engineers

Whoever it is they demand complete transparency about qualifications.

Re: So... is he an engineer?

"I got my engineering degree from Bradford University, and the Institution of Chemical Engineers awarded my chartership. I *am* an engineer."

Back when I was working in a lab there was a suggestion that legislation or regulation was afoot that in science in order to call oneself a *ologist one would need to be a Chartered *ologist by being a member of the relevant Institute. As a biologist my relevant institute was the Institute of Biology so, as a pre-emptive strike, I joined. It turned out that the majority of the membership seemed to be biology teachers, so much so that a feature of its journal was exam howlers.

One thing I never quite gathered was whether MIBiol as a qualification outlasted membership which lapsed when I changed career. Am I still entitled to call myself MIBiol?

With a warehouse of unsold AR goggles, Magic Leap has a brainwave… let’s rebadge ‘em and sell to business!

Re: Good article

And a good title for the blog. Requiem.

Good thinking. Magic Leap 1 is a much snappier name than Magic Leap One.

Ad network ransomware crook to flog £5k Rolex after court confiscates £270k in ill-gotten gains

Re: Absurd sentence

For a start, if the original judge describes the convict as a menace to society/children/etc require the case to go back before a judge before the release can be confirmed with the judge going through the original summing up and judgement as well as the case being put forward for release.

Internet jerk with million-plus fans starts 14-year stretch for bizarre dot-com armed robbery

Re: May have been something more serious

Prolonged contact with social media can loosen people's grip on reality as can mind-warping substances which could well have played a part in the decision making (for want of a better term).

And you'd be surprised at how inept criminals can be in real life. A colleague of mine ended his description of one incident with "...and these were professional bank robbers. It's hard to get good help these days.".

Oh noes! Half the NHS runs on Windows 7! Thankfully, here's Citrix with a virty vaccine

Like the article says, contact Brad's team I'm sure they'll be able to help you.

Actually, I wonder what they'd do if everyone in that particular boat contacted them.

"If you think you have an application that has a compatibility with Windows 10, you can call Brad's team, we'll look at it. If it's a Windows issue, we're gonna go fix Windows to unblock you. If it's an issue with your app, we'll help you fix your app so you can get unblocked."

Which of those alternative covers being connected to an expensive piece of kit which can't simply be written off and which is only certified for use with 7 or maybe even XP?

Behuld – zee-a internet ouff tuilet tissuoe at Meecrusufft Sveden. Bork bork bork!

Re: Demarcation, Comrades!

Dabsy shouldn't have announced himself as being on holiday although maybe he wouldn't have counted a trip to see a Microsoft office as a seasonal jolly.

And on the subject of demarcation your handle seems quite apt.

Brewing in spaaaaace: SpaceX sends a malting kit to the International Space Station

In zero gravity how do you get a head on your beer?

Tesla has a smashing weekend: Model 3 on Autopilot whacks cop cars, Elon's Cybertruck demolishes part of LA

Re: Is it actually becoming a thing

"False positives can be worse than false negatives"

Both are bad. If stationary obstacles have to be ignored to avoid false positives the system is not fit for deployment on public roads.