Posts by Doctor Syntax

Boris Johnson's promise of full fibre in the UK by 2025 is pie in the sky

Re: Obsessed with fibre

"Cars are like water, they fill all available space." You build more roads and you move the bottlenecks.

The reason new roads clog up so quickly is because they're not built until potential demand has long exceeded capacity.

Demand is increased due to concentration of employment in ever-larger cities that require an hinterland of 1000 sq miles or more to house the employees leading to a commuter problem. Mass transit isn't prepared to make the investment that would provide tolerable journey times* so it's the commuters who have to make their own investments in cars to get to work. The necessary matching infrastructure investments in roads is made only grudgingly and, in a massive victim-blaming exercise, commuters are held responsible.

Old rural industries have been failing for all my lifetime. The so-called brownfield sites they occupied are redeveloped for housing so we have a double whammy of less jobs and more people. No wonder there are more commuters and hence more traffic.

*The number of routes to be serviced increases with the area to be serviced. Just lengthening existing routes doesn't work as the access points would spread out.

Re: Too much Thomas Hardy?

"Maybe Gabriel Oak will become the new Minister for Broadband and Rural Affairs?"

A Gabriel Oak would do better in that role than BoJo in the No 10.

Re: Something Boris will achieve is.

"the only exception being the 1945 election and creation of the NHS, since then its been public schoolboys and girls trying their damndest on both sides of the politcal divide"

From Wilson to Major the PMs were not public school. It was that ersatz man of the people Blair who brought them back into No 10.

Re: Something Boris will achieve is.

The DUP don't have a monopoly.

Re: Something Boris will achieve is.

"She has to be one of, if not THE worst prime minister in living memory."

Soon to be superseded in more ways than one.

Re: Something Boris will achieve is.

"In both instances she could (and should) have given the flat earthers in the Tory party the kicking they deserve."

The reality was that she couldn't muster a majority in her own party let alone Parliament for any form of EU-related policy. The best she could have done was to have done a proper study on the likely outcome of whatever each of the options was and tried to build a consensus for what looked least damaging to the economy before invoking Article 50. By going headlong for an invocation without any clear view of what was going to happen next she was powerless.

Re: Won't Broadband be obsolete by then?

"I don't think he meant Broadband"

Were he to still be in power by 2025 ITYF it meant whatever happened.

Re: Lies versus incompetance

"the Fourth Estate, who resent politicians having all that power and are convinced they could do so much better, if only they could be arsed to get off this bar stool."

There's a certain amount of exchange of bodies between the press and politics so I think we're about to see this put to the test. It could be amusing for those who aren't in danger of beocmng collateral damage.

Re: BroBo

"it could be added onto their existing remit"

As in totally change it. NICE is in effect a purchasing department for the NHS. It doesn't even have any say in what's sold over the counter.

As others have said, we could simply accept other validation bodies without having any say in them but, hay, we'll have taken back control.

Re: Is the target obsurd?

Note that is said "for somebody". Somebody gets paid to do the job of laying it. They make money.

Providing a service from it is a different matter from laying it.

Who do you think BoJo might be thinking of?

Re: Lies versus incompetance

When I read a comment like this it always leads me to reflect on why the commentard doesn't go into politics. After all if they are so principled and nobody else is wouldn't they make such a better job?

Could it be that they wouldn't want to be slagged off by generalising commentards such as - well, such as themselves?

Re: Lies versus incompetance

"Corbyn hasn't made any fuck ups?"

Not in government but he's training hard in case he gets his chance.

Re: BroBo

how about you accept drugs approved by the US FDA for use in the NHS without requiring us to get them certified by the EU's EMA?" Which isin't actually utterly unreasonable, and probably not actually *that* problematic given that the standards are pretty similar.

How's Hancock getting along with setting up a UK approval body given that we're going to need one of our own?

Re: What is a BloJob promise worth?

I just struggle to understand the concept of how a country tied to operating as part of a large bloc such as the EU is more free than one that's independent bends over any time the US tells it to.

Do these slight amendments help you?

When Harry met celly: NSA hoarder thrown in the clink for 9 years – after taking classified work home for decades

Re: 22 years...

Does it mean the same as it would in a UK context? Could mean an employee of a bodyshop?

Two countries separated by a common language.

There must be a good chance that somewhere in that lot there's the only copy of a file or two that the NSA accidentally deleted. He should have claimed he was just keeping a security backup.

UK.gov drives ever further into Nocluesville, crowdsources how to solve digital identity

"generating a public-private key pair with long enough keys to resist being cracked takes a big computer"

You can trade size computational power of the computer against time so this aspect of the scheme isn't a problem. But how do you generate the required entropy to generate a secure key pair?

What happens when you lose the card? Or it fails?

Re: Do nothing.

If one is of "No Fixed Abode" then any Post Restante that is used should have some responsibility for confirming identity.

And this introduces a bootstrapping prolem.

Re: Not that difficult...

For a passport, your somebody's birth certificate plus one or both of your somebody's and preferably same person's parents' birth certificates and maybe their marriage certificates plus someone who knows claims to know you.

The requisite certificates can be ordered here: https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/Login.asp quite legitimately. https://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl will help you in your research and there's a worked example in The day of the Jackal.

Identity is a slippery concept. The administrative mind assumes everyone follows the rules. The people whom ID systems most want to defend against are those who often don't.

Re: Not that difficult...

"Not that it necessarily works perfectly, nothing does witnessing all the fraud out there, but a start."

IOW, fails where it's most needed.

Re: Le sigh

My son has never been in the military, doesn't drive and, being of mixed ancestry, his Yorkshire half realised that the passport his Irish half was entitled to was cheaper (and potentially more useful in the near future).

Re: Not that difficult...

"This is often / usually linked to (and issued) by a bank."

And how does the bank "identify" the person to whom it's issuing an ID?

Re: Not that difficult...

"Let the DWP verify people's ID"

DWP? ROFL

Seriously, how do you bootstrap these "IDs"? What does identity mean?

AFAICS it's all relative - this passport holder might be the same as this driving licence holder. But what TPTB might want to know is whether they're the same as the owner of this business which they suspect of being a front for organised crime or the same as this person on a facial recognition system. If, somewhere along the line, those IDs get lined up wrongly (and good luck to that not happening with the reported "success" of the latter) then it might take years for some poor schmuck to get out from under.

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

Re: don't wait 20 mins !

"Yeah, testing beforehand may be a slightly better approach."

Testing before hand is often regarded as optional and seldom has a budget. Recovering from the problem usually has one allocated immediately, just hope there's enough in the kitty to provide it.

Re: I'm so glad we kept one!

Not necessary. The Poor Bloody Expert gets pissed off and leaves.

"I now how really insecure those cheap safes are."

Expensive safes are also insecure if you can afford the time to get into them. As with securing anything you have to balance the value of what they'll hold against the cost of breaking them. The cost, of course, involves the chances and consequences of getting nicked if you're not entitled to break in.

Re: Temperature Units

All temperatures should be quoted on the Gas Mark scale.

"Only if you nail the doors shut and turn off the phones in the room."

No problem about the latter. It was the phone building on fire.

"He was reprimanded for being negative."

BT management at its most typical.

However, being in a meeting kept them safely out of the way.

Re: don't wait 20 mins !

The batteries might have been connected in a series/parallel arrangement to deliver more than 12v. In that case you also have to arrange the right number of vehicles in series as well.

Re: Recovering after loss of power - paper bootstrap.

Great first post.

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

"All the Australians are paid actors, apparently."

A lot of them seem to be.

Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

"You could even repeat Eratosthenes's calculation of the earth's circumference in c. 100 BCE"

That depended on two locations separated north to south, not east to west.

Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

"it is easily possible to do a degree in CompSci or mechanical engineering while remaining a Flat Earther"

A bit more difficult if you visit the seaside or the shore of a large lake and start to wonder why ships disappear hull down. Or if you visit some place well to the north or south of where you normally live and wonder about why the sun follows a different path to what you're used to. Being a Flat Earther is only possible with very limited geographical experience.

Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

"America couldn't bare the thought "

Are you claiming to have the naked truth?

Estate agent dodges GDPR-sized bullet after exposing 18,610 folks' data for two years

What about the "partner company"? If they were handed information did they not have equal responsibility to look after it irrespective of the permissions or whatever they received at hand-over?

And about that handing over: were there appropriate consents from the data subjects for it?

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Re: Maglev first stage

"If there is a carrier, you need a way to decelerate it."

No more than you'd need it for conventional first stages.

Re: Man has definitely been to the moon.

OK, who was responsible for those downvotes? Own up. You know who you are.

Re: Yet Another Cockup On Flights & Marketing

"Thanks to the disconnect with Marketing, Advertising & Production departments"

Probably a disconnect with their legal department as well.

It's never good when 'Magecart' and 'bulletproof' appear in the same sentence, but here we are

Re: "the storage bucket [..] was left facing the public internet with no security protections"

"You can hardly complain about being robbed when you leave the front door wide open."

It's not those leaving the front door who are being robbed, it's their customers.

"The use of bulletproof hosting is particularly bad in the case of Magecart, as it eliminates one of the more effective means of stopping the infection - disabling command and control servers."

It doesn't stop the re-assignment of the IP addresses of the DCs concerned. OK, it takes out anything co-hosted there but of the DC operators want to get back into business then they have to clean up, assuming they can given that they're in bandit territory.

The pro-privacy Browser Act has re-appeared in US Congress. But why does everyone except right-wing trolls hate it?

Re: BROWSER Act

Verbosity.

Give an Act a short name such as Data Protection Act and everyone can remember it.

Ex-Microsoft dev used test account to swipe $10m in tech giant's own store credits, live life of luxury, Feds allege

Re: Typically they require

"If his OPSEC was good, his Bitcoin are fine."

If his OPSEC was good he wouldn't have been found out.

The Empire Strikes Back: Trump discovers $10bn JEDI cloud deal may go to nemesis Jeff Bezos, demands probe

"But will be surprised most certainly if IBM do."

At one time it would have been almost certain they would have won it. Senior management needs to look carefully at themselves to work out why they're not even in the running.

For pity's sake, groans Mimecast, teach your workforce not to open obviously dodgy emails

Re: you could do that, but...

"The only employees who are likely to need outside email access in most companies are the sales team"

Sales and marketing are the worst offenders in what they send from their businesses. They are the most addicted to sending HTML mail, the worst for embedding links and apt to use outside agencies so that the actual domain from which mail is sent isn't their own and the embedded links are also likely to belong to a different domain. In short their emails look exactly like phishing emails.

They expect other people to open their emails so why wouldn't they open those with exactly the same characteristics?

Re: you could do that, but...

Enough years more experience has the opposite effect.

Sic transit gloria mundi (basis of the best of all Carry On puns.

Re: you could do that, but...

What penguin? The OP mentioned no OS by name and the point is a good one. We need to seriously rethink desktop OS design amongst other things.

From what I've read Qubes OS seems to be a good start but I'd go a lot further. Do we need, for instance, an all-powerful user ID? Perhaps one user ID can handle disk partitioning but not have permissions to read disk contents. Another is responsible for installing applications and another manages user IDs. Another has permissions to structure a disk partition as a database and provide storage and retrieval systems as a service. Ordinary users don't get to access that database, their applications ask the server to store and retrieve files. Preferably some sort of authorisation could be devised so that the server recognises not only the user on whose behalf the request is made but also the application. Less convenient but then security is often a trade-off with convenience.

Re: Just use text/plain

A good start would be filters on MTAs which bounce - with appropriate error messages - HTML mail.

Re: you could do that, but...

Copy the online documentation to a local server.