Posts by Doctor Syntax

German privacy probe orders Google to stop listening in on voice recordings for 3 months

Re: Fundamental to the product

"How to achieve this legally and ethically is an exercise for the lawyers as much as the engineers"

If they can't do it legally then they shouldn't do it irrespective of whether it's technically possible.

"We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data what was going on."

FTFY

Apple loses FaceTime patent appeal again. And again. And again. And again. And again... yes, it's the fifth time

Re: Hypocritical?

"They're patents"

In the US they're called patents. In the UK they'd be called registered designs. I'm not sure how other countries would treat them. They're not the same as ordinary patents.

Nevertheless this is a case where you'd like all three sides to lose - Apple, the trolls and the lawyers.

This is not the cloud you're looking for.... Oracle's JEDI mind tricks work as Trump forces $10bn IT project to drop out of warp

Re: In-house

In the past the crown has been responsible for providing at least some its own armaments. As in the Royal Arsenal* and the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham.

That's only provisioning arms before a conflict that's now been handed over. When operational matters are outsourced there are additional risks. The refuelling fleet is only one aspect. F35 servicing is another. When day-to-day operational capacity is in the hands of private companies, not necessarily companies controlled by boards within the country, the ability of the militaries to get on with their job, as you put it, of killing people can be brought to a halt without their command structure or governments being able to do a thing about it.

* A late friend of mine was responsible for typesetting a book on that. He said they had a lot of trouble with the hyphenation.

Re: In-house

That raises two questions.

1. Should it have?

2. What in-house talent does it actually have?

Re: a really stupid way to run a country?

"AWS isn't magically secure against people who don't know what they are doing and do things insecurely."

True. But then this stuff gets marketed to non-IT people who don't know what they're doing so as to bypass the inconvenience of those who do.

Who's for another trade war? Japan hits South Korea, Seoul survivor promises to retaliate

Re: An unfortunate turn of phrase

The US could start by setting a good example.

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

Re: Low quality coding

"people usually listen when they are told something they don't know, because they know they cannot know everything."

You obviously never had to deal with people who know they know everything.

UK parliament sends snippy letter to Zuck and his poodle Clegg as it seems Facebook has been lying again

Re: You'll be amazed

"is there a viable alternative to Facebook for these poor souls?"

They could try using this gadget they run FB on to make phone calls. Or text. Or email.

Bored of laptops? Love 200Gb/s interconnects? Then you're going to hate today's Intel news

"foundational to Intel’s journey in enabling uncompromising and workload-optimized PC platforms with performance leadership across all vectors of computing,"

Clearly written by an arts graduate. They know all the words but don't know they're supposed to mean something.

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Re: Why the fuss?

You should listen to those who are older and wiser than yourself.

You say that you want banking, for example, to be secure. Presumably you never use online banking, otherwise you'd realise why there shouldn't be back doors in that. It may not be a question for you (and neither for me) of keeping your banking transactions secure from national governments. But what about keeping them secure from criminal access? A back door for one is a back door for anyone else who discovers it and the most effective way of preventing anyone else from discovering it s for it not to be there.

Yes, email has all the privacy of a post card. Does this mean that it's satisfactory? Of course not. Encryption, the equivalent of using an envelope, should have been rolled into it as standard, not as an add-on, years ago. The fact that is hasn't is why we now have things like WhatsApp. What's worse it might well prove too late to get it rolled in; it would certainly meet strong opposition.

It wasn't actually an Oxford comma to which he objected. He probably rather likes them; Oxford = good after all. It was a comma after "and" and, as it happens, I don't see anything wrong with that.

Re: She seems an ideal host for whatever the Home Office inserts in the brain of their so-called...

It wasn't for want of trying on nulabour's part.

Re: Estonia tells you who in government has been looking at your data

"You can formulate a response"

And much good may that do you. However it persuades the little people that ID cards are Good Things I can see why the Estonian PTP had it built that way. There is, of course, the underlying assumption that it actually does work the way the little people have been told it does.

Re: Yep, Patel continues age-old tradition

"I suspect that this is simply a very extensive dossier"

Something like that. The last Home Sec, shortly after being appointed was interviewed in the Times describing being shown an alleged chat room and a child being groomed. This, he said, persuaded him. In other words he described the brainwashing without even realising that that's what was being done to him. He didn't even stop to wonder whether the entire thing was staged. Nor did he stop to ask whether, if this wasn't encrypted why breaking decryption should be necessary. This is the standard of thought that makes a good Home Sec from the HO's PoV.

Re: Estonia tells you who in government has been looking at your data

"If someone in government looks up your data, you can find out who did and for what purpose."

And exactly what can you then do about it?

Re: the golden age for electronic surveillance

And even less to process it into wisdom.

Re: RE: encryption from my PC to its destination PC/server

"At least with a decent Linux kernel you can check your keystrokes aren't watched and build up from there."

You need a decent userland around it. You can start with that kernel but then wrap it in layers of opaque binaries and it doesn't matter what the kernel is.

It's only a change of organ grindermonkey. The tune organ grinder is always the same.

Home Secs are quickly brainwashed by the Home Office into doing what they're told.

As many as 100,000 IBM staff axed in recent years as Big Blue battles to reinvent itself from IT's 'old fuddy duddy'

"The company hires 50,000 employees each year, and spends nearly a half-billion dollars on training our team."

That'll be nearly half a billion spent on replacing the expertise that was shoved out of the door. Brilliant idea.

Networking giant in hot water for selling US govt buggy spy kit? Huawei again? No, it's Cisco

That'll be $1m for selling stuff with a bug, $7.6m for not telling the spooks so they could take advantage of it.

Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

Filenames are not used by Linux Unix and Unix-like systems to determine filetype.

FTFY

Microsoft snubs Hololens loyalists by already ending feature updates – even though version 2 isn't out yet

Re: Confused

"Long Term Servicing (LTS) state....In plain English that means it will no longer update the system to add new features i.e. it is effectively abandoning the kit."

LTS to my way of thinking is that it's the version which receives security updates over a log period of time as opposed to a a bleeding edge version that doesn't. Linux kernels and Linux distros are examples, some kernels and some Ubuntu releases get updates longer than others. It means they're the versions you use for production.

Meet ELIoT – the EU project that wants to commercialize Internet-over-lightbulb

Re: First radio, now light...

The thing about your IR remote is that the actual signal on the IR carrier is quite low frequency. What happens when you ask it to transmit a GHz signal?

You'd be sending out a pulse of light about a foot long (Grace Hopper used to hand out nanoseconds - pieces of wire about a foot long). It would be OK with a direct line-of-sight signal dominating the reflections. Block that and the various reflections of your nanosecond pulses will arrive over a period of tens of nanoseconds.

Or on the same WiFi access point.

People of Britain: You know that you're not locked into using the same ISP forever, right?

" Long gone are the halcyon days when you can just send British Rail a stiff letter from Mrs A Cantankerous-Biddy expressing ones displeasure at the poor service the previous day."

And be ignored.

Re: "Cost" of switching

"the domain of their provider as opposed to web email"

They may well be using the web mail of their ISP but I know what you mean.

One reason for moving ISP not listed was the ISP being taken over, perhaps repeatedly with downward steps in customer service and service provision until, as happened to me, it ended up in the hands of an ISP whose name has a couple of Ts in it. At that point I realised it was a good idea to shift the email domain first and, rather than get to depend on a branded email provider*, get my own domain with a registrar who would also provide an email server. That made it easier to move ISP again.It also made it easier to move the domain registrar when they kept having a lot of outages.

So I now have ISP, email domain and MSP independent of each other. In addition it's possible to give different companies their own email address so you can see who leaks (hi there, eBay, hi there PayPal) and temporary addresses for one-offs.

It would have been easier to start off this way but otherwise you only have to bite the bullet of changing email addresses once.

* Actually it's just as well to have a free branded provider as well, even if it's only to provide cover whilst the MSP is being swapped or to give out to people you don't even want to go near your domain addresses.

Fix LibreOffice now to thwart silent macro viruses – and here's how to pwn those who haven't

Is there any OS other than Windows that can make the extension invisible?

Hacker swipes personal deets of 20,000 peeps from under Los Angeles Police Dept's nose

"Data security is paramount at..."

Prefacing any statement with something of this pattern this is tantamount to declaring "This statement is bollox". The media should just make it clear that it won't even be published and ask for meaningful comments. At the very least it would cause the PR industry to write some new boilerplate for the drones.

US sanctions fail to get in Huawei as embattled Chinese vendor reports 23% revenue growth

Trump has made sure a lot of people who'd never heard of Huawei before have heard of it now and maybe there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

It's official: Deploying Facebook's 'Like' button on your website makes you a joint data slurper

Re: But what does it MEAN ?????

"I'm hazarding a guess it's close to - if not actually - zero."

That's because it needs to be followed up with fines that make whatever news media manglements read. And an awareness that this means YOU. Manglements catch on slowly. Once they do, just watch the panic set in.

Re: I was harvested like that.

"FaceSpam spent the next 6 months advertising mattresses to me."

You know why, don't you? Because you let it.

Re: How about the "Web Analyst" business now?

NoScript blocks them. I won't be opening it up so it will continue blocking them.

Re: Truly excellent news

"In nearly every case they will carry on, claiming they are in the right, and will ignore requests from visitors and the ICO until the last minute."

This is behaviour which will result in the biggest fines. It will probably take quite a few big fines, well publicised before boards start to realise the risks presented by the self-narcisists in their marketing departments. Then there'll be the businesses owned by self-narcisists but those will always be with us.

Re: The big problem remains

"Legislation is toothless unless those constrained by it actually care."

Legislation with sufficiently large penalties is far from toothless if those enforcing it care to use them The whole principle of penalties is to make those constrained care whether they want to or not.

"when a customer likes and shares on social media its free marketing for the business."

The implication of this ruling is that it's no longer free. It's potentially very expensive. It will take a while for this to filter through to marketroids given that their standard MO seems designed to put the business at risk post GDPR.

Re: simple solution!

"You shouldn't have to run No Script to protect your privacy."

Agreed but there are good reasons to run it for security purposes. There are folk out there who couldn't care one way or another about your privacy, just your money or the use of your PC for mining.

Re: No f in button?

"Most websites are usable to an extent without Javascript enabled, although the pretty bits might break."

And those that aren't I generally consider useless.

For heaven's sake: Japan boffins fail to release paper planes in space after rice wine added to rocket fuel

"an apogee of just 13.3km before the rocket rendezvoused with the sea 9km downrange from the launch site in Taiki-cho, Hokkaido.

We, of course, successfully undertook our own Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) project from a lofty 89,591ft."

There's their problem, right there. They're using newfangled metric measurements while el Reg went full Mogg with Imperial units.

Migrating an Exchange Server to the Cloud? What could possibly go wrong?

I'd have thought this is the sort of operation that must happen fairly often, certainly one that Microsoft want to happen fairly often. OTOH it's probably one that individual admins only do rarely and in any case there's always a first time. And it's one that seems high risk.

Taking those three together why haven't Microsoft automated it?

The third problem is not knowing what not to restore if there are some good up-to-date files undamaged.

Facebook, Microsoft, Google among tender, caring tech giants on UK internet safety board

UKCIS will "contribute to the Government's commitment to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, and will help to inform the development of the forthcoming Online Harms White Paper".

That dooms it for a start. Has anyone ever seen this sort of hubris-laden statement ever come good?

UK taxpayers funded Grand Theft Auto V maker to tune of £42m – while biz paid no corp tax and made billions

"The Register has asked Rockstar to comment."

Why not ask whoever is responsible for conducting the British values test? BTW the link to the test in the 2014 article now produces the most way-out 404 I've ever come across.

Dear hackers: If you try to pwn a website for phishing, make sure it's not the personal domain of a senior Akamai security researcher

Re: Informative blog link

Seems to be working for me from the UK.

But while we're on the subject does anyone else have problems with Linux Today. Almost inevitably I get a message such as:

An error occurred while processing your request.

Reference #97.d481655f.1564419041.399b3e2a

with changing references. That's been going on for weeks.

Re: Well... I was expecting something more

I was expecting a full-on BOFH retribution.

GitHub builds wall round private repos, makes devs in US-sanctioned countries pay for it

Re: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and

OP had an excellent point, Crimea is a region of another country, not a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right. Where's its international border?

Re: @big_D - Who did not see this coming?

Up to a point. They seemed delighted when the CLOUD Act came in.

Re: Why make things complicated?

"All that issue/work tracking, documentation pages, "

Isn't it a shame the FOSS community never got round to tackling such issues. It would be great if you could just Google something like turnkey linux and get a complete server image prebuilt to handle all this stuff.

Stones, meet glass house: Mind behind Windows 8 GUI disses Windows 10 over leak

Re: stop fucking around with the start menu

"Fiddling with stuff until it breaks is just a normal day at the office for MS."

And continuing to fiddle with it after it's broken is a normal next day at the office and not just for MS UI designers. I think it's a requirement to maintain their street creds with their fellows.

Brit infosec firms urge PM Boris to reform the Computer Misuse Act

Vaguely worded legislation has the advantage that judges can interpret it to suit changing circumstances. The downside is that someone has to be guinea-pig so that it gets in front of the judge.