* Posts by Doctor Syntax

40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Top Euro court: No, you can't steal images from other websites (too bad a school had to be sued to confirm this little fact)

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: But what if..

@ tony2heads

I don't know why you got downvoted on what's a perfectly sensible question. The answer is yes, you do have such a copyright. A number of agencies trade on that very basis by establishing their own copyright on what might be an out of copyright image.

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Re: Hyperlinking OK though

"Quite possibly the intent, but the early creators of the web were not photographers or others who earn their living by the creation of copyrighted works."

No, but those who do make their living in that way should take the time to understand how it works before they use it.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Instead, he'll always be the person who, to all intents and purposes, sued a kid for using his photo that she cribbed from the net for a school project "

Maybe so - and incorrectly. According to the article he sued the school for publishing it on the net, not the child for using it in a project.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Thanks, Dave. That's very useful. The reviving of copyright raises the further question of what happens after Brexit; can copyright still be revived in the UK after that date?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Hyperlinking OK though

"However, there are a number of websites where when you hyperlink, if it detects an invalid "referrer" field in the URL request, it substitutes the image with a placeholder image telling you where to licence from."

I can't help thinking that this is directly contrary to the whole purpose of the web and HTTP. The whole idea as published was that if you provided a URL it was to enable people to link to it. What's the difference between someone slotting in a URL to your work and you taking someone else's work (TB-L's work in this case) and misusing it?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Try running a local history website. There are often a good few images of the locality, often originating in old post-cards which have been passed around, published in books with titles such as "Old Dunny on the Hill in Pictures" and nobody knows where they originated. Often they're from postcards but a local company publishing postcards in the 1920s has disappeared without trace.

Thinking of saying goodbye to your servers? We'll show you how

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Serverless computing. Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

Mind behind 16.7m nuisance call menace cops six-year boss ban

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Re: Now he can't run a UK biz

"But he can get someone else to front one for him..."

From TFA (my emphasis) banned in July from directly or indirectly being involved. Getting someone to front for him becomes a criminal offence with time as a guest of HMQ as a distinct possibility. I suppose that would also apply to whoever did front for him if they did so knowingly.

I'm not saying he wouldn't do it but he would be heading into progressively deeper shit if he did.

Revealed: El Reg blew lid off Meltdown CPU bug before Intel told US govt – and how bitter tech rivals teamed up

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What a pity that nobody in this outbreak of cooperation thought to tell the BSD devs.

But great story - then and now - by el Reg.

Stress, bad workplace cultures are still driving security folk to drink

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Re: IT is not a healthy profession

@Unicornpiss

While I endorse what you say I have to point out that from my experience IT management is not unique in following that list.

UK.gov to tech industry: Hands up who can help cut teachers' admin

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"The cost isn't huge. About £5000 per classroom, at best? A whole school upgrade would generally be done every 4 years, on average (or 25% a year, etc.)"

As a comparison what would a biology lab get to spend on microscopes and how often would they be upgraded?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: The real solution

"measured educational performance"

See discussion above about what's easy to measure vs what's important to measure.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I reckon the tech industry can solve it

"So the focus becomes almost entirely on things that are easy to measure."

That's by no means confined to teaching.

On the subject of measuring in general. I remember a long time ago an article in a motoring magazine about engine tuning. One approach was "if you can't measure it you don't have it". The other was "if you need to measure it you don't have it".

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I reckon the tech industry can solve it

"When I was at school, we had one headmaster who taught part time."

And with the assistance, if it was anything like mine, of one secretary. There was was also a senior mistress who did teach more or less full time.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

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Re: Unique Content

"They had 625 lines instead of 405. But required purchase of new TV and aerial."

The killer there was that UHF sets were on sale for a long time before VHF was turned off. That meant that there was a long time when the broadcasters were supporting two systems. The switch-over to digital was handled by having digital to analogue adapters available and also dual-standard receivers so that the analogue only sets could die a natural death without being unusable.

The TV analogy is also limited in application because on the whole in a household with multiple sets each one could go irretrievably TITSUP with out affecting the rest. But throw in a mixture of IPv4 printers in a domestic situation and the occasional box that absolutely has to run XP in a commercial situation and the TV analogy doesn't apply.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"It's impossible to do a completely seamless transition, because v4 is just not designed in a way that supports that,"

And given that there are several billion nodes out there on v4 don't be surprised that uptake of v6 isn't happening at all fast. As other comments have said, the time when the change should have been made was a long time ago. There are a huge number of people who have bought, or been sent by their ISP, a box, plugged it in and had everything just work because every single thing they have that connects to that box will use v4. Replace that new box for v6 and something will break - sod's law will ensure that. Nobody is going to want to handle all those support calls.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Privacy implications

"I'm not sure why you mentioned NAT here, unless it was just simply because you misunderstood what NAT was doing for you."

I'd guess that what the OP was alluding to was that the NATed device can't be routed to so that anybody running round knocking on random IP addresses to see if they can find an open port won't be able to see such a device. If all addresses are routeable then that level of protection doesn't exist and you're left depending on the firewall; let's hope that that's properly configured at source and stays that way.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Obvious need for..

"The solution was to take IPV4 and make the packet size and address field larger"

The tricky bit of this is doing it in a way that lives with a lot of kit that doesn't know what to do with such a packet. There needs to be a way for your extended protocol to allow a node using it to be able to recognise that the node it's trying to talk to is plain old IPv4 only

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Second class netizen

"I remain amazed that the folks on here can't see the potential problems of these second class connections."

Nevertheless if you talk to those who are using such connections and tell them about their potential problems they'll look at you blankly and say "but it works".

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

"We're just saying that NAT is an unnecessary headache, that it breaks too much stuff and requires too many compromises, and that you should be avoiding it."

Millions of people are, however, running NAT and haven't even noticed that their stuff is broken.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

"related to what it is you want to learn about."

And that's only if you're lucky, otherwise they're totally unrelated.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ipv4 origins

"A lot of the first few bytes of IPv6 is intended to provide exactly that routing detail."

How does that work with portable devices?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"When IPv4 was under development during the 1970s, it must have seemed reasonable to specify 32-bit source and destination fields that dictate approximately 4.3 billion possible addresses."

And now that those 4.3 billion addresses are moe or less all allocated and, via NAT and CGNAT, over-allocated that's many billions of nodes, some with IPv4-only baked in via firmware which need to be migrated if you want an IPv6-only world. That's a seriously non-trivial task. And it's no good saying, as one commentard more or less did some time ago, if you don't understand hex you shouldn't be using it because most of the owners of those billions of nodes don't, never will and shouldn't need to.

Unless a scheme had been devised to seamlessly - let me go full Bob here: SEAMLESSLY - migrate those it was always going to end up like this.

Would it have been feasible to devise a protocol which accepted IPv4 as a fully accepted subset? I don't know, but if it would then anything else would have been a serious mistake.

FreeBSD has its own TCP-queue-of-death bug, easier to hose than Linux's SegmentSmack

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"The Register expects a rush of vendor announcements as they finish their security assessments."

What do you mean "expects"? Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u1 kernel which incorporates the fix ( https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4266 ) , dated 4th Aug arrived here on the 6th.

Battle lines drawn over US mass surveillance as senators probe NSA's bonfire of phone records

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Re: soooo

"Where is this Snowden guy now ? Still hiding out in the embassy or have they kicked him out ?"

Are you confusing him with St Julian of the Broom Cupboard?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Shame

@ Rich 11

It's called "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title". If they suggest they're in favour of liberty they get instant approval from those who don't look more closely at who it is who gets that liberty and who doesn't.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: What is the mandate here ?

" your Agency is in violation of the Consitution and I will have you all rounded up and put in prison."

I'd expect Congress would have the power to cut off Agency funding. If they exercised that, even once, they'd get a good deal better response.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"In essence, the senators want to know what happened, and why, and what changes have been made to ensure it doesn't happen again."

More likely they suspect what happened, why and what changes have been made* and are looking for confirmation.

* We're going to hide it better.

Greybeard greebos do runner from care home to attend world's largest heavy metal fest Wacken

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Not my kind of music but aren't those listed in the article the younger generation of bands?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"On what grounds did the police force them to leave?"

They were enjoying themselves?

UK govt's top tech heavyweight Maxwell quits for Amazon job

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Re: Best of luck

"https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector"

They did simple web forms? I thought all they did were just information white space pages.

Almost 1 in 3 Brits think they lack computer skills to do their jobs well

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Just wait until all the old people die off

"possibly because a decade ago these people were 10 years younger."

I can beat that. 3 decades ago I was 30 years younger. By that time the PC was already several years old.

Batten down the ports: Linux networking bug SegmentSmack could remotely crash systems

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Most enterprise-grade Linux distributions do not yet use kernel 4.9 or above so aren't immediately affected."

Suse enterprise server is on 4.12. Debian Stretch and derivatives are 4.9.

Top tip? Sprinkle bugs into your code to throw off robo-vuln scanners

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Because the stack layout of a function is determined at compile time, we can control what data will be overwritten when the overflow occurs, which gives us an opportunity to ensure the overflow will not be exploitable."

That assumes that what the compiler does with the source is predictable. Optimisation might affect that. Even if the result is what was intended it might not be after a new release of the compiler.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Also

"Good documentation?"

What's that?

Can you hear that? It's the world's smallest violin playing for DXC, IBM and Capgemini

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Via various sources we hear of strong uptake in the Public Sector and believe that it could be worth 20 per cent of its business in the UK."

So this puts UK citizens' data at the mercy of the US CLOUD Act. No wonder HMG wanted to leave itself wriggle room in the new DPA.

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

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"The new paradigm will be (if not already) SSD for boot / apps / working data and HD for storage / archive."

Which could be on a single hybrid drive.

Internet overseer ICANN loses a THIRD time in Whois GDPR legal war

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"The truth however is that ICANN continues to be baffled by the fact that the European court system has no interest in its corporate interests and refuses to be told that the Whois service is as important as ICANN considers it to be."

I think it's more of a case that ICANN isn't as important as it thinks itself to be.

ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"But they've just been stripped of the IP by Sky, so there's nothing to realise."

They've been stripped of the Sinclair name and games. The H/W & firmware are still theirs. Whether that's of value or not is a different matter.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"On the other, such moves would also hammer a stake into the corpse of the Vega+."

It depends. The IP would be one of the assets the administrators would want to realise cash on. If there's perceived to be a market for the device someone might be interested in buying it and goinf into production. Not that that would help those who've already paid.

Salesforce cloud glitch blurted customer data at unauthorised users

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"Customers who may have been impacted by this issue were notified."

Which customers are these? Salesforce's customers or the customers who had their misfortune to have their data spaffed to someone not entitled to have it? Are any of them in the EU and if so have the appropriate regulators been informed? What was that about 72 hours?

'Can you just pop in to the office and hit the power button?' 'Not really... the G8 is on'

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"some impatient woman ramming my car because we weren't moving, neither was the car in front, or the police offering stood in front of them!"

Years ago, in the queue for security checks leaving the ferry port at Larne the driver in the car behind was flashing lights and gesturing impatiently. I was strongly tempted to flash my official pass at the police checkpoint and suggest the driver behind was acting suspiciously.

I later wished I had as a means of getting retaliation in early. Many years later my wife worked in QC for an Anglo-Italian firm which had a plant in Larne and in retrospect the driver looked very like her then Italian boss. He didn't like some of the figures she produced about a batch of product and "adjusted" them. When it turned out the batch was indeed substandard it was she who got fired for producing an erroneous analysis.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: That sinking feeling

"Ahhh yes, the all familiar dread that creeps up your spine and tickles the brain stem after you've pressed a button."

And the spitting of a spilling era jest after clocking submit.

Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Travesty...

"I would like to have it on record that Disney's representation of Pooh is an utter travesty of the character as written by AA Milne and as drawn by EH Shepherd."

I wouldn't have expected otherwise.

Alaskan borough dusts off the typewriters after ransomware crims pwn entire network

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"We immediately started to isolate servers, took workstations off the network"

The implication is that this happened after they tried to clean machines. If so it looks as if they were doing things in the wrong order.

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Sometimes violence is the only answer

"When he had trudged downstairs and retrieved it from the flowerbed it was occupying, he emptied out the soil and plugged it in, and it worked first time."

Did he also intone the magic words "Next time you're staying there."?

Amazon meets the incredible SHRINKING UK taxman

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Re: Turkeys stage a referendum on Christmas.

"who all enjoy a decent, index linked final-salary pension"

People keep saying this. It's actually a smaller proportion of final salary than I encountered in the private sector. Every time HMG decided there should be a freeze on pay rises it was to their own staff they could apply that. Until I got out I had every expectation of retiring in penury.

Porn parking, livid lockers and botched blenders: The nightmare IoT world come true

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Parking kiosk

"so you go to out of town superstore to shop instead as it has free parking"

The "free" parking is funded by letting it out to parking vultures who hand out fines to people who might only have driven through to drop off a passenger. And yet the chains who rent premises there don't seem to mind being treated as bait.

And yet both town centre and out-of-town venues wonder why they lose business to the net.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Parking kiosk

"Presumably the hack gave free parking by knocking out the payment system?"

Or it was working some scam clicking through adverts?

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Re: Internet of Idiots

"IOT has it's place"

The exact place depends on whether it's recyclable or not.

And, in your particular use case, door phones have been a thing for a very long time now.

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