Posts by Doctor Syntax

Brit infosec's greatest threat? Thug malware holding nation's devices to ransom – report

"Point is, they got away with it for a long time, and when they got caught"

The fines are only part of the costs. There will be long-term damage to their reputation. And damage to reputation can have severe effects as Mr Ratner could tell you.

"It's cheaper for manufacturers to game the tests and ignore the risks. Look at Volkswagen."

Do they still think it's cheaper?

US regulator looks at Internet of Things regulation, looks away

Here's a good test for her to consider. Would she offer, now, to compensate out of her own pocket, someone who is harmed in 5 years time by something which could have been regulated now? If not then the time for that regulation has already arrived.

Tech titan pals back up Google after 'foreign server data' FBI warrant ruling

Re: meaningless term

"use of this term contributes nothing useful to a discussion."

I'm not sure. It says a good deal about the mental processes of those who use it.

Today's WWW is built on pillars of sand: Buggy, exploitable JavaScript libs are everywhere

Re: Backwards compatiblity

Normally I'd agree but it's IE that was mentioned so both apply.

Microsoft nicks one more Apple idea: An ad-supported OS

Re: Might be time to try . . .

"lack of native Office install"

Wine.

Can you ethically suggest a woman pursue a career in tech?

"for the next twenty years, men must be on their best behaviour"

And what might that be?

For some the routine politeness with which I was brought up to regard as normal seems to be regarded as an insult. There seems to be a mindset that doesn't so much take offence as actively seek it out.

Re: Meanwhile in the UK...

"Were things different would I recommend a career in tech for her too? In the UK"

Why? You say she doesn't find it interesting in itself. Far better to work in a field you do find interesting.

"Try a glass of your favourite tipple instead of bleach."

Maybe bleach is his favourite tipple.

In hiring decisions there is often an unconscious bias towards "people like us"

It's the only possible explanation for some managements.

Re: passed over for promotion by men half their age

"something like nepotism (... there's probably a suitable word...)"

Cronyism.

Lloyds to outsource 2,000 staff in IBM deal

Re: The beginning of the end for Lloyds

"put it in the hands of people who don't understand"

History says that it hasn't been in the hands of people who understand for quite a long time.

Re: Thanks for the heads up

"I'll start the process of moving my savings account away from Lloyds shortly."

Why did you wait till now?

Vodafone to bring 2,100 customer service jobs in-house

"The move will also help boost Vodafone's image as a company that wants to stay in the UK, following its gaffe after the EU referendum when it hinted it might leave."

Looking back at that report it concerned the location of the HQ currently in London. The location of call centres to support local customers is a separate issue.

Linus Torvalds explains how to Pull without jerking his chain

Re: 5 level page tables

"A 256 terabyte memory limit isn't a concern for most end users."

OTOH Linux does run almost all the world's supercomputers. They might need it.

If you limit what an OS can do to what "most" end users need then you might not get much beyond Firefox OS. You might also conclude that 640K is enough for anybody.

Re: 5 level page tables

"Flash would up to Adobe"

And the server. And all the other links in between. Net neutrality anybody?

"gibberish"

No, gitterish.

Tim Berners-Lee says privacy needs fixing – and calls for 'algorithmic transparency'

Re: "Control of personal data"

"Doesn't help us in the UK much longer though..."

That depends on how much of an economy we want to have post-Brexit. ATM May isn't very much concerned about that but it's likely to become a straight fight between her and people who'd really like jobs in the future.

Re: "Control of personal data"

"Good luck with that!"

If you're based in the EU or wish to do business with the EU maybe it's you who might need good luck in the near future. Either luck or a serious consideration of the GDPR. The alternatives could be expensive.

User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work

Re: Excel abuse?

"Excel is useful for all sorts of things other than its intended purposes."

Sort of. But it the task it's bent to can rapidly grow to a point where it doesn't really work. Your single table database may be fine. Try to add what should be a second table and you have to denormalise it. The point where a real RDBMS would be the better tool is reached quite quickly.

OTOH I still haven't found a better tool than LibreOffice Calc for sorting out genealogical data, even if I keep threatening to write one myself.

Re: Excel can be used to calculate things?

"The dangerous ones are the ones that won't listen, the more so the higher up the chain they are"

The higher up the chain they are the more they're paid than you. And because they're paid more they must know better than you. Life is much simpler when you take this approach.

Re: Hero worship your IT

"Every so often I make sure that [an]individual... gets a copy of their Chrome browsing history sent to to both to their manager and to themselves"

At some point there's a risk that you'll be taken aside and have it pointed out to you that poking around in staff's computers without authorisation is a breach of security. This conversation is likely to take place somewhere between your desk and the pavement.

Re: "... the number of incidents dropped dramatically."

@Evil auditor

There's an alternative scenario that could bring about the same outcome. If the out-of-hours incentives were dropped there'd out-of-hours reports might get ignored until normal hours. The users would then learn to wait before reporting the issue.

The correct incentive structure, of course, is one that primarily measures and rewards fire prevention rather than fire fighting.

Re: Back in the mid-1990s. . . .

"In this case, I would want to to bill the misused CD to the training department, for failure to teach the general what the bits of a computer did."

On the whole I agree with you but maybe you missed the fact that the general had signed a waiver.

It's difficult if not impossible to deal with idiocy that's risen to the higher levels of an organisation. After all these are the people who should be exercising wisdom and laying down rules for the rest of the organisation. The first step of this should be understanding why those rules are needed and why they apply to themselves* as much as everyone else.

*It's doubly important that they follow their own rules. They need to set an example.

"Deluxe Paint."

Doesn't it make a mess of the DVD?

"The truly delusional ones might even actually believe it's all the other guy's fault."

The original article involved marketing. Truly delusional fits the bill.

Official: America auto-scanned visitors' social media profiles. Also: It didn't work properly

Re: the DHS: it's only a state of mind

"That's 'martial' law."

Given that it's the US we're talking about surely both spellings are valid but for different reasons.

'Password rules are bullsh*t!' Stackoverflow Jeff's rage overflows

Re: It only makes it easier to crack...

"My favourate: '; DROP TABLE users /*"

Problem solved. Our GP's online booking service requires reasonable strength passwords including non-alphanumerics but baulks at semicolons. Maybe that's why.

Pennsylvania sues IBM for fraud over $170m IT upgrade shambles

Re: SOP

"Don't ask me how I know."

We don't need to ask. It's Brooks's law.

The irony, of course, is that Brooks worked for IBM before turning to academia.

Devs bashing out crappy code is making banks insecure – report

Re: Writing robust code doesn't take much more time

"evaluated each month by SLOC written"

That could work. Just score double for lines of code checking and handling errors. Double again for errors which allegedly can't possibly happen.

I always reckoned banks were computerised ledgers with casinos bolted on the side. It sounds as if the casino management is still dominating.

What a Flake: Congress mulls trashing privacy rules, letting ISPs go to town on your data

Flake

Nominative determinism, a force to be reckoned with.

'Nigerian princes' snatch billions from Western biz via fake email – Interpol

Re: Let's give them a hand

"I quarantine them all"

Have you managed to train your own business not to do the same thing? If so, kudos.

Re: IT outsourcing

"would you trust any of your personal details to a help desk in Nigeria? Could you trust them with an outsource of your bank IT administration or code development?"

No, but then I wouldn't trust them to outsource any of this anywhere else. That doesn't stop them.

BT agrees to legal separation of Openreach

"You could argue it worked"

In the short term.

Look at the long term consequences. BT is now 12% owned by Deutsch Telekom and a complete take-over is a possibility. Ultimately the fixed line thinking dominated BT management's approach and they failed to see staying in mobile as a strategic necessity.

From O2's point of view it may have been welcome; the expression "Big BT" was a term of abuse around the Arlington.

"Excuse me but BT became bigger and more market dominant by swallowing EE."

That was just the current management undoing their predecessor's idiocy of losing their original place in the mobile market.

Re: Cautious optimism

"Now they can easily sell Openreach to the highest bidder and get rid of the headache."

Presumably by headache you mean the pension liability.

Or do you mean the necessity to find the money for those infrastructure investments?

In either case the headache would remain, it would just have been moved elsewhere and all the existing moaners would also just move their moaning elsewhere.

Re: legally separated. means F**K all as ......

"I'm probably going to sound like a communist here, but it would probably be the best for the country as a whole for Openreach to go into 100% public ownership, owned by the government but operated as a separate commercial entity"

Some of us remember the mess that was from the first time round.

Brit ISP TalkTalk blocks control tool TeamViewer

"I think one can understand TT wanted to be secure"

I think you've put your finger on the problem. They're wanting to do something they've no previous experience with. Maybe we should put up with a few tottering steps from them.

Re: Typical ISP response to a security issue - block it and screw the rest of ya!

"As a result, unless TalkTalk reverses this decision I will suggest to my customers that this is a further example of bad decision making on TalkTalk's part and that they should consider changing ISP's when their current contract expires."

Seriously? You haven't suggested that already?

"And no, you can't just block all Indian netblocks, for reasons I trust are obvious."

It would block TT's own support centres?

Re: Which way?

"paying for Internet access and then found I was getting Internet access minus one particular TCP port"

I discovered this years ago when TT took over Tiscali who'd taken over ...etc. and they decided to traffic shape Usenet to an extent which amounted to a block. I took appropriate action then. I really don't see why so many decide to stick with this serial abuser.

Re: VPN?

Look at everyone else's posts.

Look at your own.

Do you see anything different about them?

No?

Look at Bombastic Bob's posts?

Got a clue yet?

Re: Sledgehammer meet nut

"thumb down...please explain..."

Not me but let me guess. Your inability/refusal to use your shift key?

Once upon a time we had teletypes which were single case. We got rid of that years ago which made it much easier to read stuff. Now we seem to be drifting back to that situation albeit with lower case rather than upper case.

"Teamviewer can be a business-critical application to many people, especially if you work from home."

If people are doing business-critical work from home why are they using TalkTalk?

DeepMind. Blockchain. Medical records. Google. AI – wow, we just won machine learning bingo!

"For example, if results from a blood test were uploaded, it’ll show they were used in an algorithm to check for possible acute kidney injury."

But does it then show whether the results of that algorithm were then passed to your insurance company or Google's ad-slingers?

FBI boss: 'Memories are not absolutely private in America'

Re: Anyone can be compelled

"in the final analysis, the law is just ink on a page"

No. In the final analysis the law is not just ink on a page. In fact it's not always ink on a page at all. It's our collective decision about how society should be run.

Re: Er ...

"Remember the oath you must take before you testify: the truth, the WHOLE truth, and NOTHING BUT the truth. "

I always found this a little odd. In practice one can only respond to counsels' questions. One of the tricks of a cross-examiner is to ask a question which framed to call for a yes/no answer but which, for the whole truth, requires a more discursive answer - which the cross-examiner then tries to suppress. I've also been in the odd situation of being, in effect, cross-examined by the side that called me in an attempt to make me put a stronger construction on my evidence than I considered reasonable.

Re: This is the same Comey

"And who is now having to deal with an unpredictable boss"

They probably deserve each other although I'd have expected his boss to have sacked him as untrustworthy by now. Maybe the only thing stopping him is the thought that finely tuned machines can't lose major components at quite that rate.

Self-employed bear the brunt of Spring Budget with additional National Insurance contributions

Re: Fairness

And, as an entirely unrelated point, I wonder if the Treasury has worked out why we have this persistent problem of not getting improvements in productivity.