Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"My session lasts for days, weeks sometimes. It only gets interrupted by browser updates and OS updates demanding a reboot."
Yup. For some people convenience beats security any time. Some of us close down sessions we're not using. We even log off when we're not using the computer. We go further still - we switch the computer off.
What you won't see from that is that A, B, C & D all pissed of some prospects and maybe current customers. You only see the relevant upsides. The downsides are invisible to that sort of comparison. Yes you can see that some customers didn't return but you've no idea that that was because of whatever crap you shoved in their face with your "campaigns" and not for some other reason. As Richard says nobody is going to do that particular bit of research, not if it costs them their jobs.
"It's carefully tracked and if it didn't give value for money the advertisers would go out of business."
What is very unlikely to be tracked - and it's actually quite difficult to see how unless you actually listen to people like me telling you how they behave - is the people who walk because of it.
For example, yesterday I had to ring up my car insurer to give them an updated card number. The agent then promptly tried to upsell on other insurance products. That annoys me. When renewal time comes around I'll go elsewhere. It won't be the first time I've done that and I don't suppose it will be the last. Their marketing won't have the faintest idea that that's why they've lost this customer. They'll be able to show the positive results of their upselling but they won't know how many customers like me that they've lost. Their figures will be slanted to the optimistic side.
What really amazes me is that the actual advertisers - those people who buy from the advertising industry - don't realise that they're not just wasting money spending on advertising to people who don't want to be advertised at; they're actually spending that money to drive away potential customers.
If I get their unwanted advertising shoved in my face any time I want the sort of thing I'm selling I'll research the market and, if at all possible, buy from their competition.
"He's been in only place for 7 years, they knew exactly where he was."
Yes. Out of reach in a foreign embassy.
"So they've had years and years to get every possible piece of information and evidence prepared for the day hecame out but have totally failed.."
Except rape cases depend critically on witness statements. It becomes very difficult to put on a fair trial at that lapse of time. It's not that they didn't have the evidence needed at the time, it's more that the passage of time erodes the value of it.
An essential aspect of a rape case is consent. It becomes a matter of claim and counter claim unless there's contemporary evidence of violence. The scientific* evidence will stand the lapse of time. Witness evidence, including complainants' and accuseds' becomes less reliable over time and, critically, it becomes difficult to give the accused a fair chance of putting on his own case. That's why courts don't like allegations made long after the alleged events and very probably why the prosecutors are dropping this case. The long delay has helped him there but not exactly to his advantage.
* Scientific evidence. The ford "forensic" simply means to do with the courts. All evidence in court is forensic. Some if it is scientific. <Sigh>
"Assange's assertion that removal to the USA was the main aim, is now coming to fruition"
Whether or not it was originally the main aim in anybody else's head than his own, it's now coming to fruition entirely as a result of his successive missteps: fleeing to a country with a stronger extradition arrangement than where he started, fleeing again into an embassy he couldn't get out of without being arrested on a charge of bail-skipping and staying there long enough for a more vindictive US govt to get into office.
Not really. I'd have thought most people would want to provide controlled access. They might, for instance, want people to see their YT videos but not be able to edit them or just upload something else in their place. Or if the material is commercial in confidence they might not want anyone to see it.
A couple of things. One, ensure it can only be done by a confusing user interface where anything wrong in the process leaves it secure. The other, which I've suggested above, is to ignore what the user sets and periodically just going back to default. Perhaps send out an email "We've noticed that you must have accidentally left your AWS system insecure so we've repaired that for you."
After a few cycles update the email to explain why it's really bad. Or maybe do that first and then switch to the "We've fixed it" non-explanatory version.
But why do we see so many examples of this? Is AWS insecure by default so users are failing to secure it or is it secure but inconveniently so that users are deliberately turning security off?
Amazon need to make it more difficult to use insecurely than securely so that nobody would jumpt through the hoops to do that.
"Management decide Plan B doesn't work so lets go back to Plan A. More throat choking."
It won't be Plan A, it'll be Plan C. After all Plan A was the bad idea of someone no longer with the company. Plan B was the idea of someone just departing. Plan C is that of the new management so it must be right. The fact that it may appear to the uninformed eye like Plan A is just an error on your part; if you were better informed you wouldn't be looking at it so critically.
"If orchards don't pay well enough then perhaps there should be fewer orchards? Or they should be more efficient. Or they should concentrate on premium products."
At some point you have to start thinking about just what we produce in the EU or the UK or wherever you're thinking about. You could very easily end up creating an employment desert. Pretty well everything we make or grow can be done by someone else somewhere in the world cheaper, especially if a little dumping allows them to destroy the UK capacity to produce it.
"Code quality was poor."
Another factor was thet there shouldn't even have been that much new code according to what the board were told. They thought they were being moved to an existing platform with a few tweaks to meet local requirements. Instead they were getting a largely rewritten system.
According to the report they were presented with "packs" of hundreds of pages. Much easier to hide stuff in that. If you hide something by omitting it from a bullet list summary you're apt to find that when the shit hits the fan it then sticks to you because you can't deny hiding it. Put in on pages 834 to 842 out of 967 and nobody can accuse you. Of course you can do even better by putting on a single loose sheet that then gets accidentally trapped in the 967 page file. The Sir Humphrey tactic.
