Posts by Doctor Syntax

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

"While i am sure there are niche markets for such a phone"

Clearly it's aimed at such niche markets. All those comments are really saying "I'm not in that niche". OK, they're not. So what?

Re: It looks very nice

"It would be nice if they provided the source code so that it could be verified, but they won't"

They're obliged to provide source code for all the GPL stuff but not for anything they've added.

Re: Calls and Email

"And before you say to tell your correspondents to just sent plain text, try doing that to someone over your head."

One of the joys of being retired is that there's nobody in that position. I have, in the past had the pleasure of pointing it out to some numpty from the Co-op that his email which consisted entirely of an image of text that it failed some of his employer's core values because it would be useless to a blind person who required a screen reader. I've also stood up in a shareholders' meeting to complain about bad email practice.

Re: Calls and Email

I don't care about your latest corporate branding, I'm already going off the idea of doing business with you.

FTFY

Re: Calls and Email

"MHO that's a careless, probably fatal omission, for business use."

Or a deliberate choice for the paranoid. For avoidance of doubt, paranoia is a base requirement for security.

Remember that lost memory stick from Heathrow Airport? The terrorist's wet dream? So does the ICO

Re: Fines? Pah!

"had it been the PFY then he would have been crucified by now in public."

In which case something even nastier, probably involving insecure windows or faulty lifts, rolls of carpet and quicklime would have happened to the PHB.

Re: The 2% - and not interested

"How any org (that deals with secure information) can think not training staff in Information Security is a good idea these days beggars belief."

Being trained isn't quite the same thing as having been on a training course.

Re: a national newspaper, which recorded the data

but is "recording" it legal?

That was my thought too. What penalty has ICO imposed on them? Or is there to be a prosecution under computer misuse? The stick serves as a proxy for the computer on which the data was kept.

I suppose the get-out is that the only evidence that a copy was made would be the operator's own evidence which would amount to self-incrimination and might not be allowed.

Puppet Insights arrives to shine uncomfortably bright light on DevOps

I'm reminded of a lesson I learned years ago.

There was a Software Tools exhibition at Olympia or the like. Being very new in the industry and enthused with all the AT&T stuff like Programmer's Workbench which was relatively recent I went along expecting to see all sorts of wonderful stuff to aid the developer. Nope. It was all stuff for management to measure developers and the like.

It was my first introduction to the fact that there were a lot of people who wanted to be "in computers" but didn't really want to do hard stuff like cut code. I encountered a lot of them as time went on. Provided I could avoid as many as possible it was still a fun 20 years.

Chinese Super Micro 'spy chip' story gets even more strange as everyone doubles down

Re: How can I put this?

Pictures at the very least. Let's see someone other than the protagonists being able to examine an actual board.

"I am curious if the resistance to the notion of China pulling off this caper is due to academic skepticism "

I don't think it's resistance to the notion, it's just that it's difficult to square a story based on unnamed sources against such unequivocal denials. There's something distinctly odd going on. here.

Google now minus Google Plus: Social mini-network faces axe in data leak bug drama

"the advertising giant didn't want to have to deal with the PR and regulatory fallout from admitting it screwed up."

That's why effective privacy legislation requires an extra layer of penalties for not making notifications in the first place.

Can neural networks, deep learning and GPUs help your business now?

Have you never heard of Betteridge's law of headlines?

"We say yes"

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

Re: Just stick the GUI on debian.

It'll go nicely with the systemd convergence approach.

Mine's the one with Devuan release notes in the pocket.

"You’ll find out all about it on January 14 of 2020 when mainstream support of Windoze 7 goes away"

But is mainstream support of W7 like that of W10?

Re: Microsoft Windows

"I feel like the "Windows" referenced, are the ones patients look out through at the insane asylum."

Or those through which the PC gets thrown.

Re: No thank you

"Hateful piece of GUI redesign."

GUI redesigns are inevitably hateful.

Re: On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me:

"Was in a hotel in Brum a couple of weeks back and there was already a small Xmas tree by the lifts"

Mince pies sighted in the local Co-op about the same time.

Re: Not a good look here.

"These netowrk locations are on a stretch cluster for resiliency and backup up."

Like KCL did?

Re: Not a good look here.

"but many users just choose the default which hangs everything off /"

An installer should default to not doing this. Unfortunately some distros do default to this but a distro aimed at newbies really shouldn't. It might be OK for a quick and dirty test system that's going to be torn down again or to get some idea of how big the various main subtrees are for sizing the real install but otherwise the distro should at the very least work out how big the root partition should be, default to that and make the rest a /home.

Re: Not a good look here.

"I don't really have a problem storing data on the same volume as the OS, which simplifies things if I'm using a single-disk machine, like most laptops."

Disk != Volume. You can have multiple volumes on one disk, even in a laptop which is why this laptop is able to have / /boot /usr /usr/local /opt /var /tmp and /home as separate volumes. That means that even a reinstall that completely overwirites anything which houses OS stuff leaves both user files and anything locally installed alone.

Re: This is affecting the enthusiasts ...

I have a "System" partition and a "Work" partition.

Change "partition" to "physical drive" and physically disconnect the Work drive before attempting upgrades.

"While some enterprising souls have used the situation as an opportunity to sell file recovery software"

Just download http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?content=TRINITY_RESCUE_KIT_DOWNLOAD (but not onto a drive where the missing files were) and take it from there.

Super Micro China super spy chip super scandal: US Homeland Security, UK spies back Amazon, Apple denials

And right now someone is probably saying "You remember the stuff we concocted the other April when we were waiting for the server to be fixed? Guess what."

"Just curious as to why the NCSC in the UK spoke up so rapidly in support of US corporates rather than simply denying knowledge about what had, until that point, been a Chinese/US issue?"

Splitting that into two -

Why they spoke up so rapidly? Maybe someone in the media asked them for a response.

Why they gave the answer whey did? Because it smelled as wrong to them as it seems to have done to most others with a clue.

Re: Who gains by this ?

"What would a country gain by hurting Bloomberg ? Maybe one that wants to make it harder for us to distinguish between fact and fiction, one that generates fake news that it does not like reputable journalism from showing that the news is fake. "

The usual suspects.

It'd take a lot of work to narrow down that list.

Oracle? On my server? I must have been hacked! *Penny drops* Oh sh-

Re: 1200 baud down, 75 baud up

"It could get very turing after a long day."

Re: 1200 baud down, 75 baud up

"they managed to parcel the costs out over a dozen or so projects, on the promise that it never happened again!"

And did it?

Re: 128K of ISDN

"300 baud, the size of a shoebox"

The size of a shoebox? I had to lug an acoustically coupled modem in some sort of huge sound insulation box and a teletype half way across N Ireland for OU tutorials.

Re: Ah, the old days

"You'd be surprised how unwilling some of the instrument vendors are to moving this DB onto a proper server in the datacentre!"

And I can see why.

The instrument sits on the bench here. As the instrument user I control it. What datacentre? Where? What extra cabling is needed to connect it? Who runs the data centre? Who has access?

Unless there's a specific need for an instrument to be connected to a network it should be capable of being used locally; the alternative is to introduce it into the IoT where, as we all know, the S stands for Security.

Apple macOS Mojave: There's goth mode but developers will have to wait for the juicy stuff

"a journey for developers that merges the desktop and mobile operating systems."

Wouldn't it be a great idea if every now and then the software world learned from others' mistakes.

Where can I hide this mic? I know, shove it down my urethra

Re: re. micro sd, etc.

"Toilet roll inners, free and plentiful."

it depends on the rate at which you accumulate cables (assuming no compensating medical condition).

"an amusing role-play"

No such thing, at least not if you have sufficient IQ to make you employable in any capacity other than marketing and management.

HMRC rapped as Brexit looms and customs IT release slips again

Re: no surprise

"If that's the intellectual depth of the Remain argument, you're not really going to change anybody's mind, are you?"

In due course reality will do that.

Re: EU red tape bonfire

"HMRC planning for eventuality that an additional 100,000 small businesses will need to submit four to five times as many customs documents as are currently processed."

It's called taking back control.

Decoding the Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip super-scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth?

So many birds with one off the record briefing stone. Draw attention from whatever exploits you're making with Intel ME. Prepare the way for "Nice little motherboard business you've got there. Pity if something happened to due to manufacturing off-shore/not co-operating with us. Remember the Super Micro incident".

Re: Should we be worried ?

"and fit itself into even the smallest box you have left lying around."

But you won't know if it's still alive until you open the box.

Former General Electric boss explains how he got the internet wrong

"To be a smart buyer of technology, he said, you have good practitioners. And that requires talent."

Tell that to all those buying outsourcing, especially HMG.

It's good to know somebody gets it at last.

Sendgrid blurts out OWN customers' email addresses with no help from hackers

"The Reg asked Sendgrid yesterday why it hadn't focused on making sure nobody could access the pages without proper credentials, instead of just asking crawlers to please not show the information in their search results. We'll update when it responds."

Don't hold your breath. They probably don't understand the question. They're in marketing.

Re: 3rd-Party Cloud Email Solutions

"It really helps too when you write to a firm to opt-out, but get this as a reply 'Rejected high-probability of spam'."

If you're in the EU just grass them up to your local data protection regulator.

UK space comes to an 'understanding' with Australia as Brexit looms

Re: Inconvenient Truths

"The UK on its own is no longer a world super power, and the sooner we come to terms with this, the better the future will be"

Joining the EU was the result of coming to terms with this.

Re: RE: Mooseman

"The EU is in multiple self inflicted crises, the chaos is already there. Everything is going to be the end of the EU and Eurozone according to its presidents and leaders of member countries."

Project Fear.

Re: RE: Mooseman

"I always wince when I hear we have a poor hand to play."

So do I for the simple reason we have no hand. On the most minuscule of majorities on an advisory referendum HMG has decided unconditionally that we leave. No feasibility study. No planning (you may remember that a citizen had to go to court* to even get them to realise that they needed Parliamentary consent). That, as far as I can see, amounts not no hand.

*Sadly mistimed. If she'd held her hand until now it could have thrown a real spanner in the works to discover that the invocation of Article 50 didn't meet the constitutional requirement.

California cracks down on Internet of Crap passwords with new law to stop the botnets

Re: What a stupid bill

"All they need to say is that you need to be forced to reset the password from the default in order to use the device."

Great idea. That's why the bill makes exactly that provision.

Re: Not in anyone's interest

"security = PITA, so unless you can come up with something worse than a PITA"

Make insecurity a bigger PITA.

Re: Not in anyone's interest

"the owner doesn't care as the bulbs continue to work"

The owner will care if the law obliges the ISP to cut them off from the net. Next time they'll buy better light bulbs. Even if, by that time, the original vendor is making better light bulbs they'll find they have lost reputation.

Re: No need for a unique password

"companies get complaints and lose customers"

If the playing field is level the only place for a customer to go is someone selling something that behaves the same way. See my comment about some not learning except by experience.

Re: No need for a unique password

"Then curse and snarl six months later when he forgot it and needs to to force a reset on his IoT thingy."

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

Re: But will they give out the "unique" password?

"You have a brick."

Next time buy something that handles such stuff better.

Re: The problem...

"They will need someone to program a password into each device"

There is an option to force the user to secure the device with its own password before it will become operational.

"I don't need Big Brother telling me what I need to do to improve the security of my devices."

Frankly I don't give a toss whether you take any steps to secure your devices at all. What I do care about is you exposing an insecure device on the network where it can be weaponised to attack me or anyone else. If it takes legislation to force you to do that, then so be it.