Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK digital ID may be dead, but its legacy IT problem lives on

There are ~70m people in the UK. Good luck with getting 100% accuracy on that many. Even more good luck to the 700,000 trying to get out from under the errors of a 99% accurate system.

The balkanization of virtualization will de-throne VMware, which doesn't mind a bit

Re: When you lose the bottom end, you lose the top end eventually

The staff running VMware at the customers' end should start learning alternative products.

"Whatever the motivation for quitting VMware, users know they won’t find a better virtualization platform"

Define "better". Does your definition include "value for money" or "affordability"?

The teen Bill Gates has answers to the AI-pocalypse the 70-year-old Gates has forgotten

"All too often, the glib omnipotence of the prompt input freezes the imagination."

There's where the prof. went wrong. The hidden instruction should have said to use "Madagascar" in a way that made sense.

Re: The teen Bill Gates hacker mindset :o

Primary source? No, just early bandwagon leapers as ever*.

* Apart from the time they nearly missed the internet.

Re: "saying she’d read his instructions in dark mode, seen the hidden text"

A link to one of Verity's articles is always welcome.

Re: Ethics and scruples

Avoirdupois of course.

Re: Ethics and scruples

Scruples of what?

Energy biz SSE smacked around in court by a guy and AI

Re: Not necessarily...

If the penalty is severe enough it would be worthwhile ensuring it would have been intercepted one way or another. Reporting it to the court would have been a good idea, given the possibility of a contempt judgement.

A colleague of mine used to get dunning letters from the previous owner of the house. He was one of the QCs we used to deal with regularly in court and a particularly obnoxious one. Colleague never quite succumbed to the temptation, when being cross-examine by him, to hand over some of the letters and say "Byt the way, these came for you.".

Re: About that image:

Surely nothing I wrote could have given that impression...

Re: Bank Awesomeness

"Your bank is awesome."

Taken over or not, it won't be any longer. The idea of having empowered counter staff, let alone managers (managers? think of the salaries) is anathema to them. They don't need to be othered about the crap service because none of the competition is any better. Some day someone will decide to compete on service but in the mean the search for the bottom of the barrel continues.

About that image:

UK judges don't use gavels. They leave that to auctioneers.

Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

Re: Almost but Not Quite

"Yes, but if either endpoint is compromised then security/encryption goes completely out of the Window anyway."

And there's more than one way of being compromised. MPs use things such as Whatsapp. They also have a tendency to blab - like the one who handed over all his messages to a biographer. They'll have learnt to regard it as insecure so if it's backdoored it won't make a difference hence there's no reason why it shoudln't be.

Experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.

Impressed, yes. But 16% is still a big number. OTOH it could improve substantially if a backlash like that to the Flock cameras happened. The publicity of that has probably moved a good chunk of the "don't care" lot along.

"84 percent worried that mechanisms allowing access to encrypted messages could introduce vulnerabilities for hackers and criminals"

This is worrying. It means that 16% can't work this out for themselves. It's a lot of people and as security only needs one weak link to fail it means it's going to be almost impossible to reduce the number of break-ins.

LibreOffice 26.8 is out – local first, and with no AI

Re: Still miserable to use without smooth scrolling

It doesn't have smooth scrolling? I've used it for years and never even noticed whether it has or not.

The more I think about it,the more fascinating a concentration on scrolling mechanism seems. I've been using onscreen editors such as vi for even longer, say >40 years, and I doubt I've even paid any attention to how the text moves at any time. I'm puzzled as to how it can become such a critical factor for some, such as the A/C and Jou, albeit in opposite ways, and something to which others such as myself are completely oblivious. There must be a psychology PhD in there for somebody.

Re: No good for business

The work people usually use any office suite for is transfer from brain to some useful digital representation, be that text, numbers, whatever. That's not readily autometable unless you have a brain/computer interface. But if you want to push oodles of money along with screenshots etc to Microsoft to some still unspecified end instead of automating it by scripting it to run locally for free, I suppose that's just down to the way you were brought up.

Re: No good for business

Perhaps you confused him with "Thinking?"

Re: Not for me

Horses for courses. If you're writing stuff for the web then I can see the attraction of Markdown. If you're preparing stuff to print and you're fussy about getting the pagination just right then you need a proper WP of some sort, be it LO or something else.

One thing I do occasionally find handy is having a second application, being OO or something else (Calligra in my case) that will open the same file format for those occasions when you get in a tangle after multiple changes and think "What did it look like before I started?", try reopening and the application goes "Already open, mate, here it is" and just brings your editing window back to the top. OK, so you could save the edited file under a different name and go back to the original but if you have another application available it's the easier option.

For the record I've used Devuan for years. The only issues currently are the missing secondary search on Synaptic is missing and Informix server isn't starting up due to a missing library. The first is certainly due to the underlying Debian no longer having a maintainer for the relevant library and the second is probably also Debian related and I'll fix it when I need it as the only stuff on Informix is some genealogical material I haven't touched for a long time.

Re: Compatibilty - still!

Different colour spaces?

I've used what appears to be a very rich blue on screen and see it turn out to be almost indistinguishable from black when printed.

Re: Paragraph Composer

It looks good and I wish I'd had it a few months ago when I was preparing the final draft of a book.

I daren't change anything that might impact layout right now. I'm in the middle of introducing proof-reader's corrections and the ability of a slight change to cascade into pagination changes is mind blowing. e.g. changing a comma to a colon pushed the last word off the end of a line. That ran through the paragraph to push a couple of words off the end of the original last line so that added a line. Moving the rest of the page down a line fit the widow/orphan rules and move two lines onto the next page ...

Re: "Professional Typography"?

I've found a few horrors. Mostly text arranged round images by spaces instead of setting wraps with a mixture of font sizes. Spaces instead of tabs, etc. I wonder how it rendered on the original, or in a different version of Word.

I suppose if Collabora see their customers demanding AI they have to go along with it. Kudos to TDF for insisting on keeping it out and let's hope they're able to keep it that way. Likewise keeping it a native application.

Re: "Professional Typography"?

Agreed - it's a poor basis for comparison.

BOFH: Schrödinger's petty cash puts us in a very awkward superposition

Re: and, of course

I'm not sure what High Street you go to to buy methylumbelliferyl phosphate but back in the day this civil servant managed to get a good deal by shopping around. Same with a few other consumables - even early PC work-alikes (the local Tandy franchise for those).

If lay witnesses didn't get paid expenses you'd soon hear about it.

One of the annoyances of life in the Civil Service was somehow never getting paid expenses for court attendance because we claimed through the office and not through the court like most witnesses. There was always some IR regulation that they found to make whatever they said was correct last time invalid this time. I suppose I could have brought matters to a head, or at least resolved it, by claiming through the court system instead but in the end quitting was more effective.

Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

Re: Just got an MFP

If you were looking for a used printer your best bet would have been an HP built when the old HP business model was still operative.

Quite. The power cut only affects the fax machine. Loss of POTS is a retrograde step. It's just the digital shiny issue - in reality POTS has an analogue advantage.

Re: "email signatures don't count"

The physical document being signed might well be the work of someone else. Historically it would have been written by a scribe, more recently typed by a typist. The content might be the work of some specialist (are you going to write your own house conveyance?). It was and is the act of signing that's important. It means that the signatory has committed to what the document says. That applies where the "signature" is anything from a wax seal several inches across to an X.

Re: The reason fax persisted in MFPs for so long

"I was using the fax in my MFP"

Another reason why it wasn't such a horrible mistake - many MFPs actually did have fax. OTOH if she keyed a fax number into a copier keypad didn't sh notice it emptying the paper tray?

One thing about fax - it required nothing more than a working POTS line and power giving it a survival power approaching that of the cockroach. Obviously it wouldn't work in a power cut but it wouldn't be prone to some random BGP error on the other side of the planet or finger trouble in a data centre in Virginia.

Re: Highlighting marker

"This continued for months despite the sending office staff being repeatedly told.."

Should just have faxed them back and told them to correct. After a few iterations point out what they were doing wrong.

Re: Fax machines bring back some horrible memories

I also know of an incident where a company had two fax machines and for some reason forwarded calls for one to the other office hours. Our system sent a lot of faxes overnight to the first number. One evening they miskeyed the redirect number ...

CISA: Most exploited vulnerabilities should have been eradicated decades ago

"Secure by Design" is one thin - being secure by implementation is a whole extra can of worms.

Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

Re: At work ...

That means your password is invalid, try again.

At least it has a non-alphameric character in it.

Keepass. Generates the line-noise like passwords on demand. Copy and paste. Save encrypted.

Re: Sorry, wrong number

You weren't alone.

Have I been pwned the book.

Re: Simple is nice :)

Nowadays it's PoI - POTS over Internet.

Re: Beware of unproven assumptions

Not easy to feed a book round the rollers. I wonder where my old typewriter is. It's probably around somewhere unless it got lost in a house move. The first thing I bought with my first grand check ----How many???!!!! - years ago. £10 was a fair bit of cash in those days.

Microsoft warns that transitioning Excel workbooks to new Exchange connectors might not be smooth sailing

Re: Stop using Excel

"Many companies already have Office so Excel does not cost anything extra. Many people know how to use it already."

Consider https://xkcd.com/2347/ and replace "Some random person in Nebraska" with "Excel".

Nigel Farage wants to scrap 'suffocating' UK GDPR

I suppose this is to look after his real constituents and there won't be many of those in CLacton.

Re: Where "light touch" means

Make that any bidder, not just the highest.

YouTuber's backyard fab ambitions expand from RAM to homebrew LEDs

Re: Love it

Our used HF and other chemicals used to go straight down the drain. The lab drains were plastic but further out the sewers were probably glazed earthenware. As somebody had put sufficient undiluted HF down the glazed earthenware sink to make it porous who knows what happened downstream,.

Re: A Blue LED?!

The wafers with everything to produce the light of the selected colours are bought in. As the linked website explains, that's 95% of what's needed to produce LEDs.

Ancient ‘Who owns Linux?’ case now has one foot very deep in the grave

One foot in the grave? The whole problem is that it keeps climbing out.

Re: to be blunt

I think it was even more successful in distracting SCO management. Openserver was a very good platform for small business systems and a step up to bigger servers - Sequent, AIX, HP-UX etc. if the business got bigger. If SCO had had the wit to cut prices and go for a mass market Windows might never have got into the server market and Linux might never have got to be more than the hobby system it started as.

Re: "attorney fees are huge and dwarf what you could have settled for"

An approach which fails if you ever find yourself in court charged with something serious that you didn't do (all the more likely these days with facial misrecognition systems being deployed).