* Posts by Doctor Syntax

40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Errr, censorship?

"start arresting every FB employee who sets foot inside the country."

So somebody working as a cleaner in some Facebook country visits NZ and you arrest them? On what basis? You can reasonable hold senior management responsible. Every employee? On what basis? How would you hope to prove them guilty of the offence? You're advocating hostage taking.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Errr, censorship?

"Once you start making individuals in the _entire_ company structure susceptable to arrest for criminality"

So a nutter in one country livestreams his atrocity in one country and you arrest a cleaner in another? I don't think that would work. You'd have a bit of a problem proving mens rea. What you could do is look at the fact that the offending company has a legal presence in that other country and prosecute the company there, fining it on the basis of its world wide turnover.

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Re: It can be difficult, but..

"look at El Chapo. Until recently, he made breaking out easy"

You've overlooked the fact that he had money to command that. Most miscreants don't.

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Re: El Reg follows common sense!

"Kialo requires JavaScript to work correctly.

Loading Kialo"

Farewell Kialo.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"sometimes the laws are wrong too"

The laws are what define criminality. If you think the laws are wrong (I take it you're the universally acknowledged arbiter of that) then their definitions will be wrong but they'll still define criminality in that particular jurisdiction.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ambiguity; not in this case.

"Murder is not black and white?"

The OP said "criminality" not "murder". One of the features of different legal systems is that different states get to define what's criminal and what isn't in their own jurisdictions. They don't all agree. You're trying to turn a general statement into a specific one. The downvotes should tell you people saw through that.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I'm not sure about one word in the title. It's not so much the internet they build as the internet they parasitised.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Your "nutter on a rampage" is China's "Tiananmen Square"

"I feel they have the right to rant. It's freedom of speech. I have the right not to listen as well"

You have a right to listen or not as you choose.

Of course TPTB have a right listen as wel if they choosel and to decide whether the ranter needs watching. It's hardly the same as mass surveillance if they choose to watch a rant someone has elected to broadcast to the world.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Errr, censorship?

"So imagine an alternative world where Facebook had a 1 hour delay on uploaded videos. At 13:40 this nutter goes on the rampage, uploading video as he goes. At 14:40 his video goes live. At 16:00 the police figure out who he is. The video has already been live for over an hour."

It depends on what the one hour is used for. A buffer to give time to stop it being distributed at all means t doesn't go live.

Presumably the alarm went up fairly quickly. If FaceBook, YouTube and the rest sere prepared to set up a system to cooperate there might not even be a need to set up a huge operation to take advantage of that hour to check every video from everywhere. They'd have an hour, or the best part of that, to check what's in the buffer from that geographical area (OK VPNs could be a problem) and feed it back to the police instead.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"If the shooter – and the ones that will come after him – couldn't be sure that his video would ever make its way to the public, that there was a very high likelihood that it would be flagged during the upload process and stopped – would he had been sufficiently driven to carry out his actions?"

Who knows? Some would, some wouldn't. There's a long history of atrocities being carried out without live streaming. On the whole the probability is that he would. What's more concerning is the incentive to copy-cats and a general lowering of the mental barriers that prevent people from doing this. It's not so much that preventing the upload would have discouraged him but it might have prevented others.

One thing is clear. Some nutters are apt to advertise their mental state in the ways the article points out. It might be more productive to devote resources to these more than on profiling on the basis of appearance anyone who happens to walk in from of some CCTV camera to "predict" whether they're going to commit a crime or on trying to hoover up everyone's business. It's not as if they're hiding what they're doing.

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: This, so very much this.

Let me add a serious point to this. Whoever designs these switching arrangements probably thinks that this is what the customers want, but have never asked them. Whoever here has designed user interfaces for applications: how do you know you're not in the same boat? How do you avoid getting there?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: CorelDraw

Dammit. never got rid of.

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Re: Fiat Lux

"armoured"

All you need is a nearby store that sells big enough hammers.

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Re: Hotel lighting

"we had to use the light on our cell phones to read the menu"

A missed opportunity to tell the waiter ou couldn't order because you couldn't read the menu. Could he bring half a dozen more of those little tea lights they probably had on the tables.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: CorelDraw

More likely MS got rid of whoever thought up that blasted paper clip. Same mentality.

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Re: Long way around the barn!

"I don’t want them to be publicly embarrassed..."

Go on. Just a little.

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Re: I know you love Kickstarter, so...

"I sleep perfectly fine at about 5 degrees room temp."

Hypothermia?

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Re: Worst thing about hotel room lights

"After you've spent hours figuring out the right switch combination to turn them all off"

...write it down so you'll know next day.

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Re: This, so very much this.

"or even the spark actually wiring the room"

Look at it from the spark's PoV. Wiring a 1000 room hotel is boring so a bit of creativity with switch logic passes the time.

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Helping out friends

"they had to retain him - BY LAW"

Not necessarily. Different countries have different laws.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "While you're here, could you just..."

"ND accompanied by a signed waiver of their 14 day cooling off rights."

I doubt that would have any standing (I'm assuming this is for UK consumer rather then B2B or anything in that lawless place over there) other than to make them thing again before you go ahead. As has been said here when discussion EULAs, statutory legislation overrules contract law and consumer rights are statutory.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"We then have to give them an emphatic 'NO', and ask them to re-write the list, and email to it to our ticket system, and put some details on it. They then invariably say 'Oh, just one more thing' as we are trying to get out of the door."

Tell them that if won't raise the tickets you'll have to and there's an extra charge for every ticket you have to raise. Sorry, company rules. More than my jobsworth etc.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Have you ever ended up being roped into doing more tech support than you’d bargained for?

"always needing to use someone else's printer because her's isn't working"

Always cheaper to use somebody else's ink. And maybe somebody else bought more expensive paper as well. Are you sure she has a printer?

Said daughter of mine now works from home for a firm based about 150 miles away. They provided her with computers and printer. My HP all-in-one printer is of considerable vintage. Superficially "her" (ie. firm's) new, shiny, printer looks quite like it but all black. The HP badge on mine looks more solid than any component of hers. One day she asked me to look at the printer. There was some problem with the paper tray. It looked like no amount of fiddling with it was going to fix it and would most likely break it. In the end the whole printer got taken back to head office on her next visit and swapped. How are the mighty fallen.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

OK, so it was invoiced. But at what rate - field tech or project coordinator?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "This will only take a second..."

"And you can't refuse to do support for said person because it's your Mum"

If it's a family PC it gets Linux if they want me to support it. If it isn't I don't.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Have you ever ended up being roped into doing more tech support than you’d bargained for?

"Student computers are a pain, they usually crash just as the critical disertation is finished and needs printing and no backup exists."

Even more so when the student's one of your own kids.

Again a long time ago, daughter arrived home after finishing her PhD. Backup was no problem. In fact all she had was the disk with her data on it as she'd used a departmental PC. Trouble is it was one of those proprietary disks so I had to buy a drive to get her data transferred onto something more portable.

Blighty's most trusted brand? Yeah, you wish, judge tells Post Office in Horizon IT system ruling

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Pro tip: Don't get on the wrong side of the judge.

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

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Re: Optional

"It comes from advertisers."

And where do the advertisers get their money from?

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Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

"trying to rouse my son who is a student"

I admire your willingness to tackle the impossible.

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Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

"critical infrastructure as an identity provider"

That only shows how bad things have got.

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Re: Can't see why merging the services would hinder a determined regulator...

Exactly. If it becomes hard to pick them apart it's their problem. If it becomes impossible to pick them apart (unlikely) triumph.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: As an advertiser ...

"Facebook and Google claim to tell you which half."

Adblockers are even better. They stop you spending the wrong half.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

"Yes, I do use it, and it's necessary for various community activities I'm involved in, mostly due to critical mass."

In such a situation the community activity would have to do without me.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

"going down is very much like your bank having its telephone service cut off."

I'm not sure about that. Banks seem to have no compunction at all about cutting off their most direct link with customers: branches.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

Clearly 14 hours wasn't a long enough outage for the lesson to sink in.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Facebook was down?

If they don't want to say anything what could the PR do better than keeping schtum? Churning out some longer meaningless garbage just gives us more to point and laugh at.

Public spending watchdog snipes at UK.gov's £1.3bn infosec plan – but broadly nods it through

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Wannawhat?

Have an upvote, Nick, you got there before me.

I'm sure there was a lot of heavy lifting after the event but I there's obviously no point in sharing credit when they can avoid it. And they're hardly going to admit they let him go to the US without tipping him off that they knew he was going to be arrested.

Can't do it the US way? Then we'll do it Huawei – and roll our own mobile operating system

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I'm just imagining a dev looking puzzled having been told not to put data harvesting in.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Just pick one of the open source phones

"The Open Source community would have a harder time writing apps for proprietary services such as banking, Uber, etc that many consumers would expect."

A Huawei or a combined Huawei/Sumsung OS would represent so much of the new phone market that the proprietary services would provide their own apps.

Capita: B is for Brexit, C is for cutting costs. Stock exchange: Yay! You guys are awesome

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "Firmly on track"

To follow Interserve and Carillion? It looks like its profitable activities are selling bits of itself and persuading (how) people to fork out for a rights issue.

Never thought we'd ever utter these words, but... can anyone recommend a spin doctor for NASA?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

It's just a big Crookes radiometer.

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

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Re: Photorec

Upvote for both. I've used them to recover files from ransomware. The encrypted files hadn't overwritten the original data which had just been deleted.

Holy sh*tsnacks! Danger zone! Edinburgh Uni's Archer 2 super 'puter will cost a cool £79m

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

The rest of the Spring Statement could do with scrutiny. He seems to have made a statement that MPs should compromise of Brexit that lead the Beeb at least to get so excited they more or less ignored anything else he said. It sounds as if he might have been trying to distract attention from whatever bad news he might have hidden in there.

UK digital competition review: Forget money, we should consider 'balance of harms' during tech mergers

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Balance of harms? What's wrong with absence of harm?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: ACTive Attractive Applied Imagination as Fabless AI Driver. ..... Applied Imagination

"King Canute didn't Fare so well the Time he failed to stop the Tides of Progress."

Go and read some history to find what he really did.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"And for now, the tech giants need only promise to be good and honest."

Could we specify the dictionary they use to understand these words.

Tech sector risks GM-crops-like crackdown if it doesn't win back trust, warns privacy watchdog

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Crack down on lopsided EULAs

Is there actually a contract in some cases? AIUI a contract is an agreement to provide goods and/or services in return for a consideration. A consideration is usually payment. If the user pays nothing what then is the consideration? If it's the provision of the user's data then exactly what would be the breach of contract if the vendor uses that data? Certainly until precedent could be established it could prove very expensive to sue as it might be hard to establish exactly what implied contract might be in place.

Another aspect is that as far as consumers are concerned EULAs may already be void right-pond as consumer protection is stronger here.

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

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Re: "A terrorist or foreign agent would have been free to plant explosives ..."

"if anyone abused the situation, it would be local yobs"

Well, you couldn't expect the Mail to tell its readers their teenage kids could go in there, shoot up drugs, nick anything not welded down and set the place on fire.

Carphone Warehouse fined £29m for mis-selling mobile insurance to punters who didn't need it

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Re: Persistent buggers

"they take more money in premiums than they pay out in claims"

And commissions. Don't forget the commissions. Dixons don't.

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