Posts by Doctor Syntax

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?

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

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.

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.

Re: Wait and see.

"To date my invoice to BA for £350 + VAT remains unpaid."

Add interest and then go to the small claims court. If they still don't pay having a bailiff distrain a 747 should be interesting and get their attention.

Re: Wait and see.

"if you're not paying them someone else must be"

In this particular case the someone else was BA. The data was just a bonus.

Re: Great solution

Therein lies a problem. If a sufficient number were knowledgeable enough to use blockers there's be a sort of herd immunity in that the site owners would have to make a choice between tightening up or losing custom.

Re: Scripts are often used to support marketing and data tracking functions

I'd like to think they'll also evaluate their policies re opt-in/opt-out.

E.g. this morning I tried to phone Hotpoint spares. Their pre-recorded rigmarole was that we might spamyou with post or phone unless you opt-out. That's a breach of GDPR right there. I didn't get as far as opting out, however; I gave up on their appalling ACD.

Re: What goes around comes around....

"Is it me or does that note read like the outgoing head of Group IT was an Airline Ops guy, not an IT guy?"

Should it surprise anyone? It's the management attitude that a good manager doesn't need to know anything about what they're managing. That's why we get to call them manglement.

Re: GDPR-exit

Several factors to consider here.

Firstly< offences committed after GDPR applied up until 31st Oct will presumably have to be dealt with under GDPR, just as offences committed pre-GDPR but dealt with after GDPR applied were fined under the old regulations.

Secondly, if HMG wants to avoid problems for businesses which need to process data of EU residents then they'll need to achieve equivalence which means keeping GDPR-equivalent regulation in place. Whether such sanity will prevail is anybody's guess.

Thirdly, the current DPA implements GDPR so if the numpty in residence, whoever he may be, doesn't like that he'll have to replace it or repeal it.

Fourthly, post-Brexit, I presume any fines won't be shared with other EU countries so they may be less to take into account of fines which an EU regulator might apply. Alternatively the maximum sum of EU & UK fines could be 8%. That should make boards think.

"BA and the other regulators now have 28 days to make representations to reduce the fine."

Why would the other regulators want to reduce it?

On the wider issue I can imagine a few penny-pinching manglements and boards having this report thrust in their faces by their underlings this morning.

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

Re: keeping swappable spares in stock might make sense

"Downtime is now absolutely killing and guaranteed to be 4 times as long, but since the beancounters originally calculated you don't need spares, you can't have spares."

You then point out the revised cost/risk situation and that the only way to mitigate this is to replace the equipment now, before it fails and this time why not buy the spares.

Re: "The router went dark"

"Likewise, when I used Murphy in Yorkshire way back when I got odd looks"

Maybe they were just giving you odd looks on principle.

Over here we also use Murphy to trap unwary seekers after umbrage. A comment such as "Murphy have dug up the road again" is apt to flush out those who take umbrage on behalf of Irish labourers. Then we can point out that the Murphy Group are well known public infrastructure contractors.

Re: "The router went dark"

It has.

Re: keeping swappable spares in stock might make sense

"These are the costs that drive my manager batty."

If he wants to he can always economise by not backing up data.

Re: So why did it have a dead power supply?

"Maybe they need three power supplies to handle such a scenario!"

Or four when for when two have been left unswapped. There's no end to the penny-wise scrimping of bean-counters when it comes to postponing essential servicing.

Re: "The router went dark"

"If you're British, substitute Sod or Finagle for Murphy."

Murphy is alive and well and living in Britain. But Finagle? I thought he was one of yours.

BOFH: On a sunny day like this one, the concrete dries so much more quickly

"a shallow grave is just laziness."

Real laziness is burying the body in a rubbish dump. That way people come along with more rubbish and bury it deeper for you.

Re: Ugh, this is all so familiar.

"that powder you strongly suspect to be bits of ground-up teeth"

But probably dental stone, plaster of Paris which sets particularly hard. I used to visit a dental supplier in Belfast to get supplies of it which we issued to Scenes of Crime Officers.*

Eventually it transmogrified into a combined dental supplier and video hire shop, VHS being a new thing. I asked the owner which was the more profitable line. He didn't actually say but it turned out he wasn't happy about the amount of cash he had to tie up in stock for the video side.

*Handy tip for mixing small amounts of plaster: if you store it in plastic bags just add water to the bag and mix it by palpating the bag (oooh-er Missus!). We issued it in one pound bags with the instruction to add a pint of water per bag. You could practically guarantee an empty beer bottle near any crome scene to act as a measure.

I see the building industry caught up a few decades later with bags of ready-mix mortar with hose attachments. What a pity I never patented the idea.

That seems a bit light on gravel.

Re: Informal poll on whether you've ever had to do something like this

Not quite resurrecting an ancient system but having to keep one going beyond its support life as the auditors wanted to use the Xmas/New Year slot that was intended for the migration.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

Re: Cognitive Conflict

From what the report says their problem is wth Mozilla making it more difficult for them to do what HMG is telling them to do. Perhaps they think that having a go at the govt. directly is a bit too risky. Having a go at an EU directive is more likely to win them brownie points with either of the current contenders or with Corbyn should the worst come to the worst.

"But some organizations worry improved privacy will protect lawbreakers."

A good test in these moral quandaries is this: "Is it based on the presumption of innocence?".

King's College London breached GDPR by sharing list of activist students with cops

Re: Access Control Systems

Sadly they have longer form than that. The mention of a south London site prompted me to do a bit of checking. The buildings that held my old department have gone which I knew about. So, it appears, has the building that replaced them and so has the department, in fact a whole bunch of science departments. Even my old hall of residence. All the property seems to have been sold out to developers.

Bastards!

Re: Norman?

His father had a few novel ideas too. One was to stiff customary tenants of manors in royal hands for many years' worth of rent to confirm their tenancies. The manorial records were seized and gone through with a fine tooth comb and if there were any departures from what the auditors considered to be customary rents the tenants were accused of fraud.

My area was one that suffered. It's not surprising that it came out solidly for Parliament when his son had a bit of trouble.

Re: "It's the sort of role you have to be prepared for from birth"

"Wrong century. Richard III died in battle at the end of the 15th century."

And later still George II was the last king to lead an army in battle (Dettingen, 1743).

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

Re: Bit of a long story from a land far away, but...

"The IT manager got the old 'choose the sword or get the bullet'"

Did he have an audit trail of the "no, you can't have it" correspondence? If so it should have been a silver bullet - or even golden.

Whilst it was pretty dumb - but for many SOP - not to maintain their own backup a lawsuit seems an effective way of getting the attention of support. It doesn't necessarily mean they'll get their data back but it'll be interesting to see if they do.

Re: If only...

"Choosing not live up to that responsibility doesn't make it go away."

In this case it did.

UK competition bods to stick probe into worrying lack of said competition in online advertising

Enlarge the market?

Just what we need. More advertising.

Brexit? HP Inc laughs in the face of Brexit! Hard or soft, PC maker claims it's 'no significant risk'

Re: trying to tell the British public

"The winner will be desperately hoping that the Irish border issue can sorted because they can't run a third national election campaign on the promise that they'll 'implement the peoples wishes'."

I'd guess that whatever happens they'll run an election campaign* on the claim that they did implement the peoples' wishes. We're talking about politicians here.

*Probably ASAP and hope that they get to the winning post before it all unravels.

What he may have meant that after the introduction of W10 customers had held off replacing kit for as long as they could and that that's now.

Re: Impact will vary

2So you have an 8% price advantage post-brexit in the UK market.

It sounds like a win-win to me."

It does until you realise that post-Brexit the UK market is your entire home market. Pre-Brexit your home market was the whole of the EU.

MapR misses deadline for sale, biz prospects looking thinner than a Hadoop sales pitch

"the list of the dearly departed."

Dearly sounds right - as opposed to the cheaply departed.

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

Re: Error Messages

There were also booleans called things like "FatLadyHasSung" and "CowsComeHome".

HellFreezesOver was one of mine.

Cloudflare gave everyone a 30-minute break from a chunk of the internet yesterday: Here's how they did it

I can appreciate that for a business such as Cloudflare "we may be under attack" is the normal first-out-of-the-box reaction to a sudden problem. However when a change has just been rolled out the possibility that the change may have been responsible should take precedence. Rolling back the change, assuming that can be done quickly, should be a fairly obvious - and prompt - response. At the very least it triages the most likely cause over which you have control and in the worst case leaves you no worse of than before you rolled out the change.

Re: This is an important lesson in the testability of regular expressions

"reading regexes (like SQL execution plans, it's more an art than a science)"

I wonder if it's possible to have a regex parser compile in test mode to give an execution plan. But I suspect the result would be a lot harder to understand than an SQL execution plan.

Get rekt: Two years in clink for game-busting DDoS brat DerpTrolling

Arrested in '14. Pleaded guilty late '18, sentenced mid '19.

Why so long? It's taken longer than his sentence.

YouTube mystery ban on hacking videos has content creators puzzled

Re: YouTorrent?

"that useful list down the side"

Useful as in one in ten relevant if you're lucky?

Re: Strange

"It's one by a antique furniture restorer. Not the sort of thing that I think that anyone would find objectionable."

Vegans complaining about glue made from boiled down animal parts?

Metropolitan Police's facial recognition tech not only crap, but also of dubious legality – report

Re: It's in its infancy, but it will improve

* You have a personal tracing device in your pocket RIGHT NOW (your phone).

Only when I remember to take it with me. And I minimise what's on it.

* You have listening devices in your home RIGHT NOW (Smart TV, digital assistant, games console...)

You might have them. I don't and won't. I can't imagine anything they'd be useful for. TV smarts are provided my MythTV and Kodi. I control them, not the other way around.

* You have behaviour monitoring devices RIGHT NOW (activity tracker, internet connect fridge, home automation...)

Nope. Again, can't imagine having a use for them. As to internet connected fridge - ROFLMAO.

* You are using facial recognition RIGHT NOW (Facebook, Windows, Apple...)

Facebook? Absolutely not. Windows, Apple? No, Linux..

* You are happy to be tracked RIGHT NOW (advertising)

Poor little A/C. Never heard of ad blockers, NoScript and all the rest of the armour the security minded use.

Apart from any other consideration has it not occurred to you that one of the requirements to live freely under the law is that the police should follow the law themselves? When it's considered likely that a challenge to their legality would likely be successful then we really should be concerned.

Yuge U-turn: Prez Trump walks back on Huawei ban... at least the tech sector seems to think so

Re: @AC

"They seem to be going through a learning curve which is knocking them about a bit but they are persevering so far. "

It's like Japan a few decades on.

"They're just making cheap copies of all the stuff we make."

...

"Oh, they're ahead of us."

The US, of course, doesn't like to admit it but it was also their getting on for a century or so before Japan.