Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I started with the Royal Mail, but misremembered the year I moved in to my current house"
There could also be a problem with Royal Mail not knowing the correct house. I discovered that PAF had the address wrong all the time my parents lived here. Off-hand I couldn't say whether I corrected it before or after we moved in.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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".
"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.
"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.
"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.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
