Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

Re: What exactly is the Internet-of-Things?

"the very next Alexa / eavesdropping smart-speaker"

Next?

Re: You're Doing Corporate WiFi Wrong

"If this is all it takes to get a device on your corporate WiFi network then you're doing WiFi security wrong."

Probably more a case of the line manager insisting on you doing WiFi security right (from the point of view of his convenience).

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

Re: Need an IT equivalent of mechanical sympathy....

"They've evolved to the point where they can recognise a tech' who actually knows what they are doing, so behave properly in fear of being molested."

This can even happen remotely. Only this week SWMBO's sister rang to say could I come and look at her laptop on Thursday afternoon and described a catalogue of woes leading me to wonder if it was malware (quietly wondering what sites her husband might have visited if he'd borrowed it). Oh, no, it was the cat that had walked across the keys.

On Thursday morning she rung to say it had "fixed itself". Probably fear of being molested by somebody who didn't know what they were doing (it runs Windows) and might have taken the step of installing Linux.

Did you know: Lawyers can certify web domain ownership? Well, not no more they ain't

"email from the same domain name"

I doubt, however, I'd be able to get a certificate for Hotmail or Gmail.

Amazon, ditch us? But they can't do without us – Oracle

Re: Oracle is historic legacy software for Amazon

"you now have to maintain an inhouse solution for non-core software."

The software that runs your day-to-day business is core. Is the greater risk relying on an in-house supplier or an external vendor? The answer to than might change with scale.

Now that's a dodgy Giza: Eggheads claim Great Pyramid can focus electromagnetic waves

Re: An attitude based on unfounded snobbery

"while it has been shown that adding an abrasive material such as sand and lubrication can indeed help to cut using copper, this again, is just a possible theory that is unlikely to ever be proved."

Nowadays if you want to cut stone with a smooth surface you use a diamond saw. My uncles who ran a quarry retired without even installing one. They did a lot of stone cutting, however. Their reciprocating "saw" didn't actually have teeth or anything like that, all it did was move sand back and forward. If you have plenty of man-hours available it's surprising what you can do with simple means. Technology allows you to do things faster and more cheaply but if you don't rate those attributes highly you don't necessarily need the technology.

"Therefore, by definition, they are batteries."

"Are" and "were" are two different things.

Re: Correlation, causation, and all that

"That used to worry me too so for safety's sake we had an earthenware Belfast sink fitted instead"

Our Belfast sink in a Belfast lab leaked badly despite all attempts to tighten up the joints on the drain. I only realised later it was the effect of the hydrofluoric acid on the glaze.

Re: Puh!! Visit Dublin and try out their 121m whip antenna

"drilling just a wee little pilot hole into the side of their 121m tall stainless steel Dublin Spire. All I wanted to do was firmly attach my monopole feed point"

Never heard of crock clips?

Re: Mystery?

"Newgrange (much older!)"

And yet you get at least one nutcase who still pops up from time to time on genealogy newsgroups propounding ex oriente lux crap. At least I think that's what he thinks he's doing.

Re: A wavelength of 200 ... metres

"Which of course has a frequency of 200kHz"

frequency and wavelength are related? It just goes to show it's a conspiracy.

Re: The Woo is strong in this one.

"Still, the nutters who are certain to collect around it have a certain amusing quality about them."

But they get boring so quickly.

Re: Correlation, causation, and all that

" think I'd prefer to investigate the scattering effects of a glass of Martini instead"

A tad early in the day here. Maybe later.

Oooooh! Fashion! Yes, 1m-plus accounts on clothes, trinket websites exposed by lax security

Re: I think...

"It's to send you a voucher on your birthday."

In which case, provided you're actually interested in the product, the more birthdays you have registered the better.

"Is there a free template online somewhere for breach announcements?"

I think it's a standard question in PR job interview scripts. They're not required to know what it means.

Yet again...

... PR-speak is allowed to get away with the "we take it seriously" line without being challenged.

Come on, el Reg, you can do better than this: either they get challenged to prove it and the reply also gets published or that bit of the statement doesn't get published at all.

Irish Supremes make shock decision to hear Facebook's appeal in Schrems II

It could be that taking on Facebook has suddenly become fashionable and the Irish courts don't want to miss out.

UK cyber security boffins dispense Ubuntu 18.04 wisdom

"Do they still have that amazing feature?"

They were fairly quickly disabused of that as a good idea.

Re: Good idea.

"When you have 20+ servers, changing the administrator password because Joe Admin left the company is not so simple."

I think the word you were looking for was "convenient". Do not trade security for convenience.

"Passwords can be cracked or leaked, so a security compromise of one server quickly becomes a site-wide problem (unless you use unique passwords, which complicates the distribution issue further)."

Just so. If an admin's personal password is cracked what stands between the cracker and root? If you have multiple admin users the cracker only has to get lucky with one of them.

"In other words, think about how you implement security instead of just bashing some random tool based on a 7 year old forum post."

I don't have to base my dislike of sudo on any thing as recent as a 7 year old forum post. I can make up my own mind.

Re: Good idea.

"Firstly, sudo logs all its invocations. Secondly, sudo can be configured to only allow a user to run a certain subset of commands."

Those, in my view are because sudo is a kludge to overcome:

"su is an all or nothing command."

Which it has become as a kudge because root is now used for a great many purposes which could and should have separate administrators: e.g lpadmin to manage printers, bin to install and upgrade S/W. But that was too inconvenient so root got handed all the powers.

"Finally, su requires the destination user's password (e.g. root) whereas sudo requires the current user's password (or not at all). "

You say that as if it's an advantage. If the user has adopted a weak password that's all that stands between anybody who cracks it and root permissions. Requiring a second password provides an extra layer of protection.

"One benefit of this, is that when an employee leaves, you don't have to change all the root passwords, you just delete their account."

Again, it's the convenience thing.

I harbour suspicions about that (convenient)option to enter further sudo commands within a given period. It opens the door to an exploit.

"in an unusual step for a Government agency, does a pretty good job of dispensing sensible security advice."

I don't know how you can say that. HMRC did a pretty good job of finding an email address I'd never given them and, only yesterday, wrote to tell me I'd got a tax rebate.

Microsoft devises new way of making you feel old: Windows NT is 25

"we had a weird January thunderstorm and lightning strike which nailed my apartment building, resulting in a massive hardware failure the same damned day Vista came out."

So that's where it happened. The heavens had to protest somehow and thunderbolts are the standard way.

"Just out of interest, does ReactOS run the software?"

Not tried but probably not. It actually fails to install properly as far as I can tell and the bastard vendors had no interest whatsoever in fixing it. It needs to contact their servers to register although IIRC there was a means to register it by contacting them off-net. But it's a long time since I bought it and I don't know if I could even register a re-install so the easiest thing is simply to keep it on a VM where it's registered and working.

Re: NT

"21 3.5" disks, and the installer insisted on *every single one*."

I don't remember what Xenix used but I don't think it was quite that many.

I had a SCO install which came on a CD but needed a sloppy to boot. It wouldn't install on Virtual box even if you could get a copy of the floppy onto it - it didn't like the emulation. I had a few clients with Informix on SCO (the staple of a lot of small businesses at one time) so having that on a laptop was quite useful. About the time laptops no longer had floppies Linux became mature enough to use without spending more time fiddling with it than doing actual work (KDE 5 is making me start thinking that things are going backwards).

Re: Obviously...

I can tell you when my hatred started. Late '90s some complete and utter eejit in their advertising pestering department decided on a gimmick. They would get a magazine pubilisher to put a gob of the sticky stuff used to attach floppies between two pages with the slogan "Don't get stuck with Microsoft".

I suppose said eejit in his idiocy thought it would simply peel off with no harm done. It didn't always do that on magazine covers and stood no chance of being got off the flimsy pages without tearing. The eejit also hadn't realised the slogan was ambiguous. As a reward for such an arrogant tampering with what I'd paid good money for (and to the other advertisers who'd paid good money to buy space on the same pages) I decided to take the meaning they didn't intend and avoid getting stuck with them as far as possible in the future.

Back in the early days I had their FORTRAN for CP/M which seemed a bit of a miracle although I suppose even a Z80 box had more memory and storage than I was allotted on the University mainframe a few years earlier. And Windows itself was quite welcome when it first arrived: I could run an X-server on it to connect to the HP-UX boxes I was responsible for or, later, just multiple terminal sessions.

But Microsoft, over the years, have brought the hate on themselves through the sheer arrogance of their behaviour.

Re: 25 years and still a PITA

"Everything after Windows 7 is a step backwards if you ask me."

I'd go back to W2K. Missed XP. W7 just filled up its VM space doing almost nothing but updates and I couldn't be bothered to give it more.

Re: 16MB?

"which is conveniently 3 bytes when using the usual 8-bits/byte"

And even more conveniently 4 bytes if you have 6-bit bytes. ICL 1900 anyone?

"NT 4, in 1996, is peak Windows as far as this grizzled hack is concerned, before NT was retooled for consumers with the launch of Windows XP in 2001."

You missed W2K?

I migrated my W2K VM from my old to new laptop this morning. It runs the one application I can't get running under Wine and couldn't find a decent replacement for under Linux. I'm trying to decide whether to migrate the W7 VM. Probably not.

Beam me up, UK.gov: 'Extra-terrestrial markup language' booted off G-Cloud

"A51 Technologies stopped offering this service on Tuesday 31 July 2018,"

When did they start offering it? The first Sunday in April?

Dixons Carphone: Yeah, so, about that hack we said hit 1.2m records? Multiply that by 8.3

"I want to assure them that we remain fully committed to making their personal data safe with us."

Look here, el Reg. I'm fed up with you just rolling this sort of statement out like that.

Will you please ask their PR people why, if they meant that, they allowed it to happen and tell them you won't publish their boilerplate at all unless they provide an answer to that question to publish alongside it.

They shouldn't be allowed to get away with that crap. The only reason they do is that the media allow them to get away with it. Being allowed to get away with it just encourages them more to the point where Pester thought he could whitewash a major meltdown with some anodyne guff.

Think tank calls for post-Brexit national ID cards: The kids have phones so what's the difference?

Even with a thing like Brexit there's nothing so bad that a determined politician can't make it worse.

"Isn't it illegal (or should be) to require one group of people that are citizens of the UK to have ID cards without requiring all citizens of the UK to have ID cards?"

The ID card phase 1 proposal is that those who are not UK citizens have them. Those who are don't. No discrimination between citizens.

Re: It's quite funny

"I would argue that by this point, people are in so many database systems"

Why do you think they want the ID scheme? To tie all those records together. It would make it so much easier...

Re: Tax

"It's certainly the main reason that Blunkett wanted them."

Not his department. The reason he wanted them is that he was Home Sec, i.e. under the control of the Home Office who want them because they're control freaks.

Yes Minister never properly tackled the Home Office but essentially Home Office policy very much like Foreign Office policy was explained there: ministers come and go and they each want their own policy so it's much simpler to just have on policy, the department's. HO is very, very skilled at brainwashing new Home Secs very quickly.

Re: ...citing the Windrush scandal as justification.

Given that it was the result of policy (hostile environment) as much as cock-up that's a hard one to believe. And even the cock-up included ignoring the staff who used the records telling them they were still needed.

The Solar System's oldest minerals reveal the Sun's violent past

Re: but 1/10th mm isn't really that small to a microscopist

You can view some bacteria with a "toy" microscope.

With the toy microscope that started me off that's more likely to be a bunch of fringes and other optical artefacts round a bacterium. It sounds as if Intel are having similar problems but at smaller scales.

100microns is small? It all depends on what you're used to working with but 1/10th mm isn't really that small to a microscopist. By standard definitions it's within the range for sand grains.

The internet's very own Muslim ban continues: DNS overlord insists it can freeze dot-words

Re: DNS Terror

"Countries should just start their own DNS servers and fracture the root server system."

Not the solution. Let countries (by which I wake it you mean national governments) get involved and you'll end up handing it to the ITU. What needs to happen is for the registrars (who, I believe are supposed to be ICANN "stakeholders" but not, apparently, treated as such) to do it in a coordinated fashion. The root server has a number of mirrors around the world; all they have to do is agree to treat one of those - and has to be just one - as the new definitive server and ICANN is on a downward slide as fast as you can say "fait accompli".

"and nation.of. "

Point of information. That would just be a subdomain of of.islam

India mulls ban on probes into anonymized data use – with GDPR-style privacy laws

"exemptions granted to government in the bill."

Sounds familiar. Not so much like the GDPR, more like the UK's new DPA.

UK 'fake news' inquiry calls for end to tech middleman excuses, election law overhaul

Chickens coming home to roost.

I've commented here a couple of times that Zuk could come to regret it if he needs to lobby HMG and his lobbyists get treated with the same disdain as he treated Parliament. This could well be such an occasion. The CA affair has given MPs motivation enough. Zuk's behaviour will have compounded that.

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Re: Four into one

"shifted from a proprietary software package to SAP"

SAP is open source? Who knew?

Re: Employee to consultant...

"the company came to their wits and asked if they would like to simply come back on-staff."

And he didn't come to his wits & say no? If this was the UK going back on contract to an ex-employer would be IR35 bait. Going back permie with the same client even more so.

Re: Karma can be tough

"I politely decline the offer."

Without even quoting a figure?

Re: "How to use a barometer to measure the height of a building."

"3) (with stopwatch) swing barometer from top on a rope - time periodicity"

Not so easy. With a tall building the mass of the rope might exceed that of the barometer.

Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway

To err is human..

.. and sometimes you don't need a computer. Well, not make the actual error.

End to end testing of a snail mail system.

The client sent us a life-sized test file of correspondence which would have been sent had the system been live. I'm not sure how they generated it, maybe from their own training exercises but it used real postal addresses. The arrangement was that it would be run right through the system, including the enveloping line, a sample of the results checked and the rest shredded.

That was the computer part and it worked perfectly. The human bit came when the trolley was wheeled over to the outbound post area instead of the shredder.

It was publicly explained as "someone pressed the wrong button".

Re: Net send

Just checking...

man write

man wall

Yup, still there after all these years.

Let me try: is it the "c" being some sort of a "sh" instead of a "c"?

No, it's pronouncing the "ces" as a distinct syllable.

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Re: Nine out of ten idiots deliver free advertising.

"The logo-laden shirt of your favourite football club is tolerable."

Only if you really believe that, if you turn up at a match wearing it and they're in need of a a last minute substitute, they're going to pick you because you came prepared.

"My plastic carrier bag from Waitrose is a walking advert."

It wouldn't be much use having Waitrose advertise to me. I don't even know where there's a Waitrose near enough to where I live to avoid it.