Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK taxman spent six times more with AWS last year than cloud firm paid in corporation tax

Here we go again, having to explain the obvious about the fact that for multinationals there's a competitive market in taxation.

You attract business by having lower tax rates. If you're a country's finance minister you have to work out whether that's a good thing to do because your local businesses pay the same take rates as multinationals. If you have a large economy of local businesses lower tax rates mean you bring in less taxes. You might attract some big multinationals but their taxes won't compensate for the losses.

If you have a small local economy bringing in multinationals is a double win. The multinational taxes more than cover the losses from local businesses so you're in the black and the lower tax rates help local businesses become more profitable. Having a small local economy means either having a small population for that economy to support or having a larger but impoverished population.

Being in the EU there's no legal reason why we couldn't lower our CT rates to compete with Ireland or Luxembourg - after all, those two are also EU members. If we'd tried it in the past HM Treasury would have been greatly out of pocket because of the lower tax take from local businesses and VAT and/or income tax/NI would have had to go up and I'm sure you'd have complained about that.

You could, however, be right about our having greater freedom outside the EU. Remember that the precondition for making money from multi-nationals is to have a much smaller local economy and if the population size doesn't change that means they each get poorer. Are you quite sure that's that you want to do?

Re: And so it goes on...

"The denial and hypocrisy is astounding."

Or sheer ignorance. Once you think you know the answers why go looking for facts?

"Our procurement decisions, including contracts with Amazon Web Services, are based on value for the taxpayer, capability, security and reliability of service."

No mention of data sovereignty there. Why not?

Money laundering and crypto-coin legislation could hurt open-source ecosystem – activists

Re: Is this

"She pretended to be one when she served under Cameron"

Quite. I'm sure that, like most people in Westminster she expected Remain to win & didn't want to end up on the wrong side. Her background in the HO would ensure that she would want to get as far away from the restraining influence of the EU as possible.

These privacy coins the article mentions and the untraceable transactions. They sound very much like the bits of metal in my pocket and paper or plastic in my wallet, all bearing pictures of HMQ. Is the Treasury planning to outlaw them?

DXC Technology exec: What should our brand be known for?

WHy am I reminded of..

Irate customer: "Do you know who I am?"

Waiter: "Sorry, mate, can't help you. Try looking in your wallet, your name should be on your credit cards."

'Cynical and bullying' TalkTalk hackerhacker getsgets 4 yearsyears behindbehind barsbars

Why did it take 2 1/2 years after a guilty plea?

Re: was said to have cost TalkTalk £77m to clean up

It probably included everything they should have spent in the first place to secure their systems.

Re: "Reach out" makes me retch...

Should have been worth 6 months on the sentence.

Re: Skilled cyber-criminal left traces of own IP address

Being a cynical criminal is.

Re: Skilled cyber-criminal left traces of own IP address

"prolific, skilled and cynical cyber-criminal,"

It's more or less part of court ritual. Prosecution will present the offender, however inept, as a criminal mastermind, defence will present them as an innocent abroad and easily lead by the bad crowd they unknowingly fell in with (or Aspergers for shorthand). It's all aimed at determining sentence.

No backdoor, no backdoor... you're a backdoor! Huawei won't spy for China or anyone else, exec tells MPs

"f we did that, we wouldn’t be in the telecommunications business, we would be in the software engineering business."

I'd have thought that if you're in any business, telecommunication included, where software provides a non-negligible part of the product you are in the software engineering business whether you like it or not or whether you realise it or not. Not realising it is a bit of a worry.

TSB appoints new tech transformation chief cuz last tech transformation went really, really well

"Unlike Curran, Crosbie put in over 20 years of service before stepping into the TSB CEO's shoes"

Huh? The figures given in the next para amount to 10 years experience. 10 years isn't inconsiderable and perhaps is appropriate for a job two levels down. In some shops 10 years is enough to be moved to a desk next to the door while the employer looks for "younger, fresher" and, coincidentally, cheaper talent.

You're responsible for getting permission from subjects if you want to use Windows Photos' facial recog feature

Re: GDPR

"'Facial groupings "are not accessible beyond the context of the device file system' and 'AI used on your local device to help tag photos'"

Look carefully at what legalese doesn't say. Note that your quote doesn't say processing is local. It says something quite convoluted which might lead you to think it does but it actually doesn't.

Re: My first thought (could be an overreaction)

2002? That's almost last century.

"Facebook (of course) uses facial recognition ... but allows you to opt out."

And just how do you opt out if you don't have a FB account and cive FB you picture? The sooner GDPR catches up with them the better.

Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings

Re: Oops.bat.

The Unix equivalent is

cat a >> a

where a is a non-empty file. Or at least it used to be - maybe the cat's been neutered but for some reason I haven't checked for a good while. Handy for overwriting disks before returning a rented box.

Judge slaps down Meg Whitman for accusing Autonomy boss of being a 'fraudster who committed fraud'

Missed opportunity

“one of the biggest [revenue] misses I’ve seen in my career,”

You've had a lot of revenue misses in your career, have you?

Re: Wow, that certified software has really had to prove itself.

Oh, no. That's what applies to the little people. It's even more straightforward for CEOs.

Re: Etiquette when in Court

One of the regular defence barristers would, reputedly, tell his clients to plead guilty if they were well caught but if they didn't he'd still take them on. That might or might not have been the case but I've certainly seen him simply sit there, raise an occasional objection if something was out of line but not much else.

Re: Etiquette when in Court

"not the defendants, plaintiffs or their legal teams"

The defendants' legal teams seem to be doing OK.

Who left a database of emails, credit cards, plain-text passwords, and more open to the web this week? Tech Data, come on down!

That might be information they really don't want to know.

3) Marketing didn't like IT's attitude and rolled their own with a cloud vendor and a company credit card.

"Experienced suppliers already have the get out of jail clauses included in the contracts."

They may mitigate civil damages by passing them on to the customer but they can't override statutory requirements which will include criminal liability. In more enlightened jurisdictions consumer rights are also likely covered by statute, B2B less so.

Worried ransomware will screw your network? You could consider swallowing your pride, opening your wallet

Re: Have done just this.

"They didn't have regular backups in place so this was their only option."

Ransomware was only one of the problems that could have cost them their data in that situation. What if it had been one of the others? What would they have done then?

Re: Dane geld

Actually history says that you might get rid of the Dane but you don't get rid of the geld.

Death and taxes.

All used but with the numbers recorded? Or all marked with fluorescent marker on the edges (yes, I've had that job) or probably something trickier these days?

Re: "Where's "here"?"

"I think we all know what that would lead to"

Making crime more difficult?

I suspect that any public servant paying public money to a criminal enterprise (or, given the all too often nature of public administrations, an undisguised criminal enterprise) could well result in their being prosecuted.

"Good for you, but the point of the article is addressed exactly to those who don't have good security and backups. They ALREADY screwed up and are already in the shit. So then what?"

Drifting through life thinking "if the worst comes to the worst I can always pay the ransom" is exactly the attitude that can land them in the situation where the worst comes to the worst and it isn't ransomware.

Re: Just no

"People who do make decisions like that, know that there's a balance."

People who make decisions like that should have made them years ago. In that case the thread of ransomware will just be an additional one to the many threats for which they have already covered themselves. They then won't have to make the call of making a payment with a little better than evens chance of rescuing their business.

Re: Just no

"So basically you're saying you'd take the hit, liquidate your company and make your staff redundant and start all over again, rather than pay a relatively small ransom, all to protect potentially hypothetical other unknowns who have been as stupid as you were and got themselves infected?"

Are you saying that there's no need for a backup arrangement because data can only be lost through ransomware and not through the possibility of a physical problem such as a drive failure? Are you saying that all those of us who maintained backups years before ransomware was a thing were wasting our time?

Re: Just no

"This means paying the ransom will cost us on the order of one thousand per year, while backing up will cost a lot more."

The calculation should, of course, take into account the nearly events probability of not getting anything back at all and of losing the data to any of the possible hardware problems that could take the data out with no possibility of paying a ransom to get it back. Saving on ransoms is simply a side benefit of the backup system which should have been there for other purposes.

Re: Just no

"There's no way in hell I'm going to advise someone to do something I regard as unethical."

It may well be illegal as well.

Re: Have done just this.

The right thing was not to have had good backups.

"Ransomware is a multi-billion dollar business"

It's three things. For some it's a multi-billion dollar business; they're in organised crime. To work that sort of operation requires some degree of business organisation. It means that records have to be kept so that the payment can be related to the correct key. It means maintaining servers to run a large scale operation. Those servers also present a risk of being traced and traced back to the operators. That sort of thing needs effort and frankly some wannabes will find that boring which leads us onto...

...opportunistic criminals. If they can get hold of some software that just overwrites files with randomish garbage so that they look encrypted they don't have any of the overheads or boring stuff. If your data falls to these guys you're not going to get it back and, according to the article that's currently a 40% chance and, I suspect, rising.

Then there's the randomisation as a weapon operators. You're not going to get anything back from them. The main intent is the damage.

If you count on getting data back because it's a multi-billion dollar business operators you're going to rely on the organised crime operators carrying out a search and destroy operation on the opportunistics who are poisoning the well.

The FCC has finally, finally approved a half-decent plan to destroy the robocall scourge... but there's a catch

There's always the possibility that one network would offer the service free of charge and start a race to the top for a change. It would need someone intelligent in marketing which makes it unlikely and the rest would probably counter it with charges of monopolistic practices.

Re: This is not how telephone service works

"It is legal to place unsolicited calls for political campaigns, so that politicians can get themselves elected"

This is something I don't understand. How is robocalling not electoral suicide? Or are they electoral assassins - placing calls in their rivals names to piss off voters?

Re: This is not how telephone service works

"Also, a lot of robocallers pretend to place calls from the same local calling area as terminating number, so that they can place them as local calls and pay nothing."

The number displayed to you might look local but that's just to make you think it is. The Telco knows where it came from if it came from one of their own customers and if not then they know at least the telco they got it from. The telcos aren't doing this for free. What's needed is a system which allows the recipient to claim credit and have that passed back to the robocaller along with handling charges imposed by any telco it passes through.

Alexa Conversations: Amazon's AI assistant is about to get a whole lot more like Clippy

"Anything more sophisticated is hard to code and arduous for the user, which is why those customer service bots that attempt to triage your support call are so frustrating"

And there I was thinking they were deliberately coded like that so it was only possible to deal with the few things the "service" provider was prepared to do anything about and/or avoid challenging their marketroids rose-tinted perception of how well we all thought of their attempts.

Wholesome: Waste heat from coal power station turned data centre to help grow veggies

What happened about that company that was going to install servers in people's homes to power the central heating systems? Maybe it failed when the people found they couldn't turn off the heating in summer. Not that that would have been an issue so far this year.

Re: Cooling towers

"Battersea power station's waste heat used to provide district heating to a bunch of nearby buildings."

Dolphin Square across the Thames.

Re: dumping heat into the lake is not so great

Maybe the former power station did that and they plan to re-use the plumbing.

Re: I thought....

"Unfortunately.the waste heat is usually wrapped in an enormous amount of air.Unless you can find ways of raising plants in a perpetual gale, you have to concentrate it in order to use it in a quiet environment"

More conventional glass house heating systems used hot water but they didn't put the plants in a shower bath.

Re: wonderful concept

It would depend on the investment you have to write off to make the change, the investment needed for the change, the investment you'd need to make to replace it when the service became unavailable and the amount of notice you'd get if it were to become unavailable. With a free phone service that might not amount to much. With a district heating system it might amount to a good deal more than the value of the heat

You. Quest and LabCorp. Explain these medical database super-hacks, say US senators as 425,000 more people hit

Re: Solution?

It's the consequence of a casual attitude to passing data around. The EU has been trying to get this under control for years but it's difficult when US corporations get involved in the chain and we get the likes of Safe Harbor and the Security Figleaf.

"two years of credit and identity theft monitoring service free of charge."

Two years? How about for life - always assuming the monitoring service can be trusted to be secure?

Someone slipped a vuln into crypto-wallets via an NPM package. Then someone else siphoned off $13m in coins to protect it from thieves

Re: Taking from somebodies house as the window locks didn't look perfect. Not great.

How about having noticed the window locks had been changed in circumstances which looked a bit suspicious?

Re: "the assets await reclamation by their owners"

"And how exactly will the owners know who to reclaim it from?"

The first few paragraphs of the story should give you a bit of a hint.

Re: Surely...

"Most criminal offences also require mens rea, a guilty mind, criminal intent."

And in this case publicising what they'd done and why makes that an unlikely circumstance.