Posts by Doctor Syntax

Unemployment is spiking for US IT pros - unless you want to babysit bots

There should be jobs in ransomware recovery.

UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy

With any luck, just in time for the bubble to burst.

Europe's cloud datacenter ambition 'completely crazy' says SAP CEO

The odd thing about it is that the quote in the article shows that he does see it - and then ignores it.

Re: Give them your keys?

He probably has a lot of US relationships - customers and suppliers - he needs to keep in with.

So let's raise the stakes a bit. Introduce legislation to enable European governments to take possession of any critical infrastructure in the event of a foreign government ordering its shutdown an emergency. The government wouldn't have to run the infrastructure itself, it would just become the owner to whom the local management would answer and would also assume ownership of the contracts.

If the sovereign arrangements are what they're cracked up to be it would never be invoked so it shouldn't affect Microsoft and the rest.

Floppy disks and paper strips lurk behind US air traffic control

That raises the question of what it runs on. Anything in use for 25 years would have been designed at a time when floppy disks were seen as a reasonable way to transfer data.

If the issue is maintainability either long term availability of spares needs to be established upfront or it needs to be capable of being re-hosted on new hardware (?and OS) without losing qualification.

"we've got nothing left to fall back on"

Oh yes we have. It's the ground.

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

What I am talking about is that back when GSM was introduced, and with it the IMEI, we were briefed that the network operators could at least block if not disable (it was a long time ago) a stolen phone.

This, it may be difficult to believe for some, is before Android and iPhone OSes existed. Before the phone would connect to the internet. Before there were cloud services to connect to.

The system was designed for the network operators do this.

It's how it was supposed to work.

Talk to the right people.

Re: Nice idea

"they won't because they listen to public opinion"

As a public service, isn't this what they should do.

The IMEI is the ID the phone uses to identify itself to the mobile network.

We have the chain phone > mobile network provider > internet > somebody else's computer.

How and why should somebody else's computer be able to reach through the comms network to grab the IMEI which should be none of its business.

OK, probably Apple can because Apple. If Google can't so much the better. Or to put it another way, if Google can see the IMEI what about Meta, X, random site the user visits? It's a security issue if that's possible.

This is something the mobile networks can and should be dealing with. Talk to the right people.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

It's not just stray metal, jewellery or otherwise. My son says he killed a mother board working on it on a hot day and a drop of sweat fell onto it and shorted out some traces.

Re: Schedule a effing downtime!

"The RETAILER would not let Zeke conduct that investigation with the power off, because it needed various systems to continue operating."

Now do you see why Zeke couldnt' do it?

Of course it didn't work out for them but even so decisions like that aren't necessarily in IT's control, let alone a field tech's.

As Europe eyes move from US hyperscalers, IONOS dismisses scaleability worries

Re: StackIT / Lidl

With all those resources you'd have thought that Stackit could produce a website that doesn't rely on Javascript to show text.

Re: Havin a laugh

He's taking advantage of the fact that the court can only act after the fact. It's possible that a lot of decisions will go against him but fait accompli is pretty effective.

"If a redneck in a Wisconsin wood, casting a vote, can control your IT strategy, you've got the wrong IT strategy."

Thank you for that. A real gem.

The US didn't invent the cloud any more than the EU would produce its own. It's companies that do that. What the US government could do is tell those US companies that they can't offer services in the EU. Microsoft will fight them? That's great. But will they win? And this is the same Microsoft, indeed the same Brad Smith of Microsoft (I doubt there are two of them) who welcomed the CLOUD Act because it gave him clarity when any US agency demanded data from an EU resident's account hosted on an EU resident server supposedly protected by EU legislation. That's why the EU needs to move its arse to start looking after EU residents and businesses.

And if You think EU is incapable of creating cloud services - with the proviso I gave above - look where SAP comes from.

Re: Havin a laugh

"If some political disaster happened and the US hyperscalers were made untenable overnight, European computing would collapse in days."

That's the point. If the fleet of HGV stop delivering because some bloke in another country tells them to you might find that a bicycle with a basket looks a whole lot more capable except that you'r now stuck in a queue waiting for one to become free because you didn't have the foresight to book one.

Enterprises are getting stuck in AI pilot hell, say Chatterbox Labs execs

"corporate leaders have to commit to an ongoing security testing regime tuned to the nuances of AI models.

That's the view of Chatterbox Labs CEO Danny Coleman and CTO Stuart Battersby"

Not doubts as to whether it delivers anything useful?

Let me guess. CGatterbox Labs specialise in testing tuned to the nuances of AI models?

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: Even faster

I think it's more a case of you need the sort of people who'll want to go there.

Re: "so that US companies can dominate supersonic flight once again"

"BA, AF, and the manufacturers worked a lot on approach and departure procedures to make sure noise was not an issue."

That applied at the London end as well. When we lived in the SE we would see ordinary Heathrow air traffic overhead but the only time I saw Concorde in flight was from Kew.

Re: "Test flights in January proved out the concept [of Boom Supersonic]"

" security theater, waiting, boarding, taxiing, then taxiing, deboarding, and waiting at baggage claim"

You'd be surprised how all those could be speeded up or eliminated for a premium service.

Re: "so that US companies can dominate supersonic flight once again"

I could never quite avoid the suspicion that the first was responsible for the ban and the ban was responsible for the second.

It was, of course, an essential tool in David Frost's career.

Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress

Are they really rose-coloured AI glasses and not Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses?

Re: Amendment Zero

I suppoe the reasoning is to ensure nobody goes into it for the money...

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: PCM link

I can turn off the alarm if that's what you want but the building's still on fire.

Re: Basement

The positrons will always play hell with the electronics.

how it was Imperative that his email worked and don't I know how important he was and how vital the email worked NOW!

"I understand how important your email is and how frustrating it must be for you. If you want somebody to listen to you vent your frustration I'm quite happy to do that if that makes you feel better. But wouldn't it be more useful in the long run if you just let me get on with fixing it?"

Re: At my last place....

"buy some heaven curtains to hang on the walls "

It must have been hell before they did that.

Re: At my last place....

"the company was wound up"

and the Cat 5 cable with it?

Re: vlans & other segregation config might have hidden the issue

This has also been used to describe not very good wicket keepers.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: New definition

We can hope. It depends on what happens to the Tesla share price.

Re: Tesla stock

What is "Tesla itself" except the company* of shareholders?

* Yes, that's why we call them companies.

Re: "Mercurial Billionaires"

Oh good, Another trophy downvoter. I wonder who this one is.

Re: "Mercurial Billionaires"

Both derive from the Roman god Mercury.

Re: No room for two

"He also needs to be older than 35 years old, which also seems to exclude him currently, behaving as he is like my toddler."

That doesn't seem to have disqualified the current holder of the office.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: 'Compulsory' chips offer unsought external 'supervision' of a device and of its use

A reliable starting point these days is to regard anything Microsoft sets its hands on should be regarded as nefarious until proved otherwise.

Re: Too many distros

A bit of thinking helps here. The OP mentioned that Discover (it's KDE so why not Diskover?) somehow knew when there were new updates. How would that happen?

1. The system tray raises a notification when apt update run manually finds upgrades available so it's just watching there the results are being listed. It also raises notifications without apt apdate being run manually. That's easy to understand because

2. Cron or at are periodically running apt update, either set up by Discover itself or by the apt system - it doesn't matter which. So that

3. When the user runs the upgrade in the Discover UI all it needs to do is run apt upgrade.

In essence Discover isn't really being a package manager to do this, it's a wrapper for the system package manager.

Turning to the other side of the UI where it's supposed to check for uninstalled applications, perhaps it depends on something built in which isn't implemented properly.

But hang on - Discover isn't yet another .deb package manager, it's a KDE package manager for distros running KDE but which might have .deb, .rpm FlatPak or something else as their packaging format. So either the distro maintainers have to set it up specifically for the distro (in which case we have to look to Debian) or, more likely, it determines at run time which package manager(s) it can find and use the tools provided. As KDE produces the Neon distro (a Ubuntu spin) I'm pretty sure that if I run up a Neon instance Discover will be working - they'd notice if it wasn't which means that it can work properly with Ubuntu's implementation of apt (or it could be dpkg) but not Debian's. The error it reports looks like a network error but the reality is likely to be either:

a. A missing or differently spelled utility

b. A difference in options

c. A difference in formatting of the tool's output

If it's a. it can't be reported at install time as a missing dependency. It's dependent on one or more package management systems but they can't be declared as formal dependencies of the Discover package because otherwise it would fail to install because a distro's repository might not include package managers not appropriate to it. It really is - unavoidably - a "works for me" situation for the original developer because it needs to be tested and debugged on each distro in which it's included. What it should be doing is reporting what actual errors it encounters.

I now have a few ideas as to what to go hunting for.

Your ransomware nightmare just came true – now what?

Unless the ransomware lot are crap negotiators - which in some cases they seem to be - they might well find they have the choice of a quick but lower settlement vs a long drawn out but still lower settlement. It's very likely the crap negotiators who take adversarial approach. The same probably applied to your employers and the Union.

Re: How many people are allowed to die?

"If a ransomware attack shuts down hospitals in a region and a number of patients are expected to die for lack of treatment, how many are allowed to die?"

The whole point of banning payment of ransoms is that it's the only effective way of banning ransomware. You're not going to get the money so why bother? It's not an ethical stance, at least not only an ethical one, it's about the only effective practical preventative step to take but it has to be legally enforced so the toerags realise it's real.

Re: Stop paying. Stop making excuses for piss-poor IT.

"legal penalties for ransomware payment will create a perverse incentive to avoid disclosing the attack "

Failure to disclose should then be a criminal offence leading to at best personal fines, possibly imprisonment and likely subsequent banning from holding directorships or posts in the relevant industry. Disclosure is likely to come out in the company accounts - if it's hidden there then it becomes cooking the books fraud.

It also needs to be part of other measures as I suggested to make businesses more resilient.

Re: Stop paying. Stop making excuses for piss-poor IT.

Set fines equal to the ransom paid. It's unlikely that even insurance will pay a fine.

Company reporting should require annual reports to include statements about testing of business recovery plans and their testing and also a security audit. Yes, poor audit results and inadequate recovery plans will make a business easier targets so those things should affect share price and once expenditure on preparedness improves the share price it ceases to be seen as a cost to be avoided.

"And some of the groups actually have animosity towards professional organizations that assist in these cases."

That seems stupid. Establishing a working relationship should make things easier for them.

European pols wave their hands about digital sovereignty with broad but vague plan

Re: What I don't understand

Not the EU as such, but businesses based within the EU.

Re: Shocktop

"Thats is the EU though isnt it?"

That's the political class everywhere.

Re: An International Digital Strategy costs money

There's usually a straightforward choice: pay now and start to get the value out of it or pay a lot more later to just get out of the emergency in which a lack of preparedness has dumped you.

Re: An International Digital Strategy costs money

"I don't think much will happen until the US becomes a worse problem than these other dangers."

It other words, until it's too late.

Given the overall tone of international partners etc it sounds as if they're wanting to outsource things instead of the very obvious need to get on with things I think that's very likely to be the case.

LinkedIn CEO takes on second gig to lead Microsoft Office and M365 Copilot

"It has shaped how the world works" wastes time.

China accuses Taiwan of running five feeble APT gangs, with US help

"America hacked itself "

But we know about the tariffs - oh this is something different.

Fake IT support calls hit 20 orgs, end in stolen Salesforce data and extortion, Google warns

Re: Installing?

"Allowing" isn't being in a position where users are physically able to load stuff. "Allowing" is having it not being a sacking offence when they do so without specific approval.

Trump tariff turmoil hurting global smartphone market, but hitting US hardest

Re: AI May Be A Factor

So on an admittedly small sample, you and the OP, that's a 50% cut in the market at a first approximation.