Posts by Doctor Syntax

Loose tongues and oily seamen: Lost in machine translation yet again

Business expressions that can't even be translated into the speaker's native language are not worth the bother.

Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away: Partner boss explains yanking of free licences

Re: Shows the decline in their thinking

On rereading that I've spotted an error. It should have been "a reputation for quality". Using the definite article implies they have one.

Re: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish?

"Others might start pushing other solutions to their clients and they would be in better position to know which clients could ditch MS either partially or fully."

If they really see their future as running servers for their customers to connect to they maybe don't care what clients the customers are running and if they can ditch Windows altogether then they don't have to support it.

Re: Shows the decline in their thinking

"It's so easy that it's removed much of the incentive to test software."

The incentive should be the reputation for quality.

UK Home Secretary doubles down on cops' deeply flawed facial recognition trials

"we would all forget he was there and ignore him."

Just as well he keeps shouting, then. At least he doesn't try to sneak in under the radar. He must be one of the worst Home Secs of recent times, quite an achievement given the competition.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean Google isn't listening to everything you say

Re: They are still very much a work in progress

"Its 'non trivial', it takes a lot of time and effort to get things to function properly."

It's exactly because we know that that we don't trust them.

"I'm a retiree -- one of those old people that are regarded with amusement because we don't understand computers....or maybe we do, since we've been riding them up from the beginning."

Well so am I. See my comment above.

Re: Why do people put this in their homes?

"At least one of the purveyors is showing this in their adverts these days."

Nice of them to find a job for an older actor.

Re: why do dogs lick their balls?

Wow, I'd never have guessed.

"not linked to any personal or identifiable information"

If the recording contains personal identifiable information it doesn't need to be linked to anything else - it is not "all well".

"We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies"

Translation: somebody blew the whistle on us.

Re: Why do people put this in their homes?

The usual answer to this and many other stupidities is because it's cool - or maybe kool is more appropriate.

'Is this Microsoft trying to be cool? Want to go to the Apple Store?' We checked out London's new retail extravaganza

Re: Pavement Plodder

'Microsoft has never been "cool", nor has it ever tried to be cool.'

Maybe back in 8-bit days....

300,000 edgy folk pledge themselves on Facebook to storming supposedly UFO-tastic Area 51

Let's say they do this and then come out and report not finding aliens. That'll prove there were aliens because how else would their minds have got wiped so they can't remember finding any?

Re: Anyone for a swim?

"Cherenkov radiation is like nothing else on Earth when you see it with your own eyes, by the way."

Well, it's certainly like nothing in a vacuum.

Scots NHS symptom checker pings Facebook, Google and other ad peddlers

Re: Purpose of collection

Or you didn't have to fix what wasn't broken so you wouldn't even need to test.

It's happening, tech contractors: UK.gov is pushing IR35 off-payroll rules to private sector in Finance Bill

What'll probably happen is that someone who's been rated in IR35 will nuke their client (preferably HMRC) for employment rights and then everybody will be rated as out thereafter.

"They [the electorate] can't vote against me till the next election. Backbenchers can do it at 10 o'clock tonight."

"It is intended to ensure that two people working side by side in a similar role for the same employer pay the same employment taxes."

Fair enough - provided security of employment and all other employee benefits are considered a taxable benefit in kind.

If they're not then IR35 ensures they aren't paying the same taxes.

UK watchdog fined firms £3m for data breaches last year – before its GDPR balls dropped

Re: Trebles all round?

"That said the office is right next to an Aston Martin dealers"

Aren't most places in Wilmslow right next to an Aston Martin dealer?

Oh good. This'll go well. Amazon's Alexa will offer NHS advice

"Privacy Shield (under which EU data can be sent to the US for storage and processing) is falling apart"

Shield? It was only ever a fig-leaf.

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

At which point a single bug can crash thousands of vehicles at the same time.

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

will see a few deaths as just the cost of doing business collateral damage.

GDS, what is it good for? According to a UK parliamentary committee: 'Increasingly unclear'

Was its purpose ever actually clear?

Marriott's got 99 million problems and the ICO's one: Starwood hack mega-fine looms over

Re: Collateral damage in the Cyberwar

"it is supposed to fall on its sword for being the victim?"

You have a bank account containing a thousand of your local currency units. The bank is robbed and can no longer return your deposit. But I take it you don't care because it was the bank that was robbed, not you.

Re: A bit of honesty

The routes are there anyway as there seems to be no dispute it happened. A better attitude might actually lessen the potential for punitive damages.

The fines are based on several criteria according to the GDPR and ICO policy. Firstly the GDPR lays out maximum fines. Secondly the ICO makes a decision based not only on the nature of the event but also on the approach of the offender. A non-cooperative business is going to see much bigger fines. It appears that Marriott were cooperative but their self-serving statement and intention to challenge the fine leads me to think that top management have not learned their lesson and the fine should be bigger and if I were a potential customer I'd maybe look elsewhere.

Re: Just the cost of doing business

"I fail to understand how the ICO can properly punish a USA corporation for failing to protect the data of (for example) USA citizens stored in the USA"

It can't. As far as the ICO or any EU regulator is concerned it can lose millions of US citizens' data every day of the week providing none of them are EU residents. That's the criterion: EU residence.

Re: Just the cost of doing business

"As an EU based company they're nailed for not looking after EU citizens data"

The fact that they're an EU company doesn't affect the issue although it would make non-payment a bit easier to deal with. Nor does their being multiple entities which don't, in this case, firewall legal

liabilities. The salient fact is that EU residents' data was involved.

Re: A bit of honesty

"I think they have been contrite."

Not when they propose challenging the decision.

A bit of honesty

We take the privacy and security of guest information very seriously and continue to work hard to meet the standard of excellence that our guests expect from Marriott clearly we failed so we think the punishment is appropriate.

Wouldn't that actually be more encouraging to potential customers than the transparently untrue garbage? Contrition is more convincing than bluster.

Internet imbeciles, aka British ISP lobbyists, backtrack on dubbing Mozilla a villain for DNS-over-HTTPS support

"The government *could* pass a law, but would rather not"

The government could pass all sorts of laws. It could pass a law to abolish gravity, for instance. Only the laws rooted in reality will actually work. That was the point of Cnut's demonstration about a millennium ago.

Re: Dear Police

"We as a society just need to have that conversation and decide where we want the balance to be"

We had that conversation several centuries ago and came up with a good answer, the presumption of innocence. The conversation that's needed now is about why it's being ignored so often.

Take the bus... to get some new cables: Raspberry Pi 4s are a bit picky about USB-Cs

Re: Let me get this straight

"wasn't good enough just because you usually had to try twice to plug it in"

Not just that. Having got it plugged in you found it had the wrong micro-connector on the other end. So did all the others within sight. When you found the right cable you then found it didn't work anyway. It was a faulty cable.

Re: USB-C

"did midi teach us nothing?"

MIDI? What about RS232? And no doubt others before that.

Where's my null modem?

Who cares about a Soyuz launch or a Vega delay when there's space gin to be had?

"If wind is your thing"

Does gin have that effect?

I don't know but it's been said, Amphenol plugs are made with lead

Re: "The router went dark"

Whoosh.

Microsoft middlemen rebel against removal of free software licences

Re: Subsidised & free MS Licenses?

Of course there's pain involved. I always found Windows painful the more you looked below the surface.

Re: Breathes a sigh of relief

"Have nearly 3TB in Onedrive. I guess that goes too."

You've got a copy or two elsewhere haven't you? Haven't you?

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

"During the meeting with Polequaptewa, Blue Stone executives asked that Polequaptewa 'turn over' all of the data needed to hand the IT, web design and marketing over to the third party external companies,"

I'd have thought he could have done a fair amount of damage quite legally by just resigning on the spot depending on how well - or not - it was all documented. It'd probably have cost them a packet just to have the outsourcers get up to speed.

"The company says it spent about 10 hours restoring as much data as possible, at a cost of about $50,000."

$5,000 an hour? Was the CEO doing it himself?

Yorkshire bloke's Jolly Roger flag given the heave-ho after council receives one complaint

An ensign:

"a junior rank of a commissioned officer in the armed forces of some countries, normally in the infantry or navy."

Are you sure you're allowed to string them up on a pole?

Not all heroes wear capes: Contractor grills DXC globo veep on pay rises, offshoring, and cuts to healthcare help

Breach of contract?

Entire TUPE-ed development team applied for VR, refused as "protected for 6 months".

At a guess only some of them will get VR as they'll need to leave a skeleton crew in place. If the VR isn't that good anyway the entire development team handing in their notice might have been a better ploy.

There is an alternative if the client's on-side. Have them make it clear their contract is dependent on her. Then she hands in her notice and starts negotiating. Insist on the new pay rise being backdated a couple of years. Collect the back pay. Then quit anyway.

Re: "the workforce doesn't carry the hopes and dreams of shareholders on their back"

"Quarterly reports are THE performance metric."

A clear case of the application of Goodhart's law. Make soemthing a target and it becomes a poor indicator of how well the system performs.

"It is the shareholders that are the focus of this"

More to the point it's the short term share price. Or maybe the medium term because it seems you can circle the drain for a good while before you go down it.

Re: "the workforce doesn't carry the hopes and dreams of shareholders on their back"

Spot on, Pascal. If you hadn't said it I would have. It's a stupid statement that indicates his lack of grasp on reality just as much as the mention of magic.

"We make magic happen"

It isn't magic.

Another mangler who either doesn't know any better about the business he's in or doesn't know any better about insulting his audience's intelligence.

Years late to the SMB1-killing party, Samba finally dumps the unsafe file-sharing protocol version by default

Re: I think the situation can be far worse than that

Automation for industrial production requires a different mind-set from office applications. People in the early days of the personal computer had that mind-set because they were the sort of people who tinkered with stuff and a soldering iron was as much part of their lives as a keyboard.

Then the personal computer became the PC that approach became a minority interest and as MicroSoft became Microsoft they had no time for those who were their customers in the early days - the new market was much bigger. That mind-set has been lost.

Re: And good riddance!

Already happened and it isn't actually a good thing on a home system. I have stuff on an ancient NAS that suddenly disappeared when I upgraded Devuan. I realised it was the new Samba client version. The quick workaround? FTP of all things.

UK privacy watchdog threatens British Airways with 747-sized fine for massive personal data blurt

Re: Great solution

"Blocking scripts, while interesting and useful in some cases, is not a workable solution."

It is for those who use it.