Posts by Doctor Syntax

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

"America couldn't bare the thought "

Are you claiming to have the naked truth?

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

And don't let's forget Boris Island.

Re: Is the target obsurd?

There's money to be made (for somebody) in laying fibre. There's money to be lost in meeting or failing to meet real performance targets.

Re: unusable water cannon for the police, later sold for scrap at a £300,000 loss.

The prime reason though was endangering "policing by consent".

When even May realised that you should have known some was wrong.

Re: Rural rage

Ditches get cleaned out periodically. You need a Russian nuclear sub to do that with transoceanic cables.

You ain't getting around UK data laws on a technicality, top judge tells Google

Re: Dear El'Reg

Fines and payments for compensation are two different things. This case is about the latter.

Re: Excellent news

yes, but a few billion here and a few billion there soon adds up to real money.

Brit consumers still holding off on buying new PCs until that Brexit thing is over and done with

Re: Brexit Unlikely Reason

"So my advice would be to wait unless absolutely necessary. 10th gen will be interesting."

Intel processors have been interesting for some generations - interesting as in the curse about living in interesting times.

OK, it's fair to say UK's botched Emergency Services Network is an emergency now, right?

But not all doom and gloom. Facial recognition is coming along nicely, just a slight problem with false positives.

Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost

Bloody tea leaves. Nick anything. Even asteroids.

It'll probably turn up on eBay.

Let's open the Mystery Data Security Blunder box, and see what's inside today... Ah! Hotel reservations and more

AavGo

Is that pronounced "'ave a go?"

told The Register the exposed database did not contain any personal info beyond names, phone numbers, and email addresses.

What else would be needed for phising? "Could you please confirm your payment details"

The biz also insisted no payment card details were stored,

See above.

and nobody other than Brown is believed to have spotted the server

On what is this "belief" based, other than blind faith?

What Huawei to go: Hundreds of Chinese tech giant's US workers to get pink slips – report

Re: A strategic decision....

"If you read the news... in the US... it appears that the UK Ambassador to the US was leaking classified information."

Either the US news media read it wrong or you did. The ambassador's reports were confidential. What was leaked - by someone else - was his actual words. I doubt many would consider what he was reporting was a secret - we can work that out for ourselves from POTUS' own pronouncements.

I'm sure all the other ambassadors have made similar reports - I'd love to know what the French said, for instance.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

"according to the ugly tit that keeps spouting bollocks"

Error - integer overflow in counter.

Re: "The clocks on the Galileo satellites are British-designed already"

"No mention about it being designed in Britain."

No mention of anything at all unless javascript is enabled. We really need some technologically competent business to devise a language to convey marked-up data from websites to browser without all that extra overhead.

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

Re: Smart Phoey

"and the surfeit of people too stupid to understand its limitations"

Especially managers.

"Bulb already limits smart meter installations to areas where it has enough engineers "

Welsh speaking engineers?

Yes, I've been swotting up on court evidence in advance, says Autonomy founder Mike Lynch

"Enough documents to sink an aircraft carrier in this case."

Given the present generation of our aircraft carriers that doesn't need to be a very big bundle.

"Only in a murder trial do you have a last-minute proof that the prosecution keeps hidden until just the right time - twenty seconds before the commercial break."

And that's only fictional murder trials.

In the US? Using Medicaid? There's a good chance DXC is about to boot your data into the AWS cloud

Re: The countdown to disaster has started

"That decision is going to cost a lot more than DXC is ready to budget for, I am sure."

It should, but probably won't.

Amazon's bugging of homes has German boffins worried that Alexa may be an outlaw

Re: Didn't El Reg follow a project to nobble Alexa ?

Nothing so sophisticated needed. A hammer will do just as well.

Re: Convenience v Surveillance

"my credit card"

If your credit card does this you can avoid it. What about someone else's credit card when you happen to be talking to them? How do you, or more to the point, Julz, deal with that?

Re: "the country takes the issue very seriously"

"hence why the data is being uploaded"

And yet it's possible for the mobile phone in my car to have its voice commands processed locally. How old is this advanced tech? Well, I remember a mobile phone with voice control being launched in 1986 (Topaz in the old BT Mobile catalogue).

Re: "the country takes the issue very seriously"

"Actually, there is one solution"

There's another which was John Brown's solution above. Give an audible warning when it starts live. And let's not stint, a nice flashing red light as well. It should be possible to do this locally but even if it isn't, all input when it's not live is sampled for wake-up detection and then goes straight to /dev/null.