Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK.gov is ready to talk data safeguards with the EU – but still wants it all

"the current UK administration aren't good at playing the game by any rules than their own."

Current UK administration's rules are like standards: there are so many sets of them to choose from.

"Trump's free trade agreement"

Trump doesn't believe in free trade. He might go along with a trade agreement but it wouldn't be free. If the Brexiteers are really the free-traders they profess to be they'd baulk at it.

Re: Dear club we just stormed out off in a fit of rage

"The four principles?"

Principles. That's the problem. It's a word that confuses a lot of UK politicians.

Microsoft adds subscriptions for SQL and Windows Servers

"But The Register has managed to get its claws"

Shouldn't that be talons?

Salesforce ‘Einstein’ now smart enough for customer service

Re: "Delighting" customers is a counter-productive waste of time

I don't think delighting the customer is a waste of time. It's just that that's done by getting it right first time, not the added insult of an attempt to upsell. If I wanted to buy something I'd have bought it at the time, and certainly not when I'm having a problem with the whatever else it was that I did buy.

That's not something that cheapskate salespestering-oriented management understands. They think that they can do skimp on providing whatever they sell, skimp on support and try to turn support into sales more pestering.

One of the metrics customer experience wonks use to measure their success is “first time resolution ratetime to close call”,

And because every customer interaction is an upsell opportunity to piss off the customer even further, customer service folk want their people to know what to suggest to delight you add insult to injury.

FTFY

Ticketmaster breach 'part of massive bank card slurping campaign'

Re: Why do browsers allows JS from other domains to run

"The real question is, 'is the "trusted" site trustworthy?'"

I tend to regard sites that need to load javascript from a lot of other sites as untrustworthy anyway. Apart from the fact that it's a pain to have to tick go through NoScript's list and work out which minimal set needs to be ticked and then to remember to cancel immediately I've finished with the site.

Re: Why do browsers allows JS from other domains to run

"I've never understood i) why a site would trust other sites to host code for them"

Because they're cheap and lazy and don't care.

"and ii) why browsers allow one site to run scripts from another."

Because if they did they'd get a reputation for breaking all the sites that were cheap, lazy and didn't care and everybody and their Facebook friends would dump them in favour of browsers who didn't care either.

"I wouldn't start a business that put all its money into security. How do I get paid"

The OP didn't say all the money. He said surcharges - the skimming over and above the commission it gets for selling the ticket in the first place.

Tim? Larry? We need to talk about smartphones and privacy

"Tim Cook will have an easier time dealing at least with questions arising from the Quartz story, "

He'll have a good opportunity to explain that they take care not to let data get away, not even to the FBI - did you make a note of the Mr Congressman, I'll spell it: F B I.

Perhaps it was Apple who edited the report to make sure they got an invite to the party.

$100m sueball smacks Huawei over Facebook HQ infiltration claims

a sum of money "less than his accrued bonus which would have been payable the following month"

Big hint: being cheap when buying off employees who have the dirt on you doesn't work.

Timehop admits to more data leakage, details GDPR danger

"The steps that followed suggest swift escalation to the C-suite, but by the time incident response processes kicked in the data was gone."

This implies that incident response had to be invoked by the C-suite and that the time involved was crucial. In that case there needs to be standing permission for sysadmins to respond immediately. It's an area the relevant regulator will need to check on in deciding what action to take.

Like my new wheels? All I did was squash a bug, and they gave me $72k

Re: Good on them!

"it must be coming more remunerative for blackhats to report the exploits they find."

Or just becoming remunerative, easier and with less risk than going for the bigger rewards of exploiting it. It doesn't mean there aren't any taking the latter route.

Governments are leading the way in adopting crowdsourced security testing not bothering with security until one of the people who found an error reports it.

FTFY

UK.gov agrees to narrow 'serious crime' definition for slurping comms data

They need to get it sorted out by next March if they want to retain any sort of services industry that requires data transfers from the EU. And it does seem that there's been a recent rise in the percentage of the cabinet that realises we need businesses that are able to sell to the EU.

UK privacy watchdog to fine Facebook 18 mins of profit (£500,000) for Cambridge Analytica

"there's still no pressure in Parliament to reform our electoral laws to cope with social media and campaigning."

Existing legislation may well cover that anyway. That's going to take a lot more investigation and is beyond the ICO's remit anyway. There could be a good deal more to come.

Re: Pissing in the data pool ?

"the dirty secret of data analytics, which is that - quite simply - about 60-80% of data is crap. And I mean really crap. Not only useless, but potentially dangerously so.

Ask yourself this question: How many times have *you* lied when submitting responses ? "

Lying to questions only explains user-submitted crapness. It doesn't even get near explaining how crap the typical application is even when genuine transaction data has been collected.

Re: Is this joke?

"All fines should be a % of their global revenue."

Do you work for ICANN? Because they spent a couple of years ignoring GDPR as well.

Re: How much did the investigation cost?

"One place to start is to make opting out just as easy as opting in."

If you're going to have a rant at least make it a properly informed* one. Under GDPR the default position is opt-out and if you opt-in opting-out again has to be equally easy.

* DavCrav has already pointed you to the concept of maximum fines under the law.

"UK data subjects can take their complaints to other supervisory authorities outside of the UK."

Not for much longer.

"They wont get off so lightly moving forward"

Ahh.... bless... you really really believe that dont you?

If it had been less than the maximum amount (and I'm not sure the maximum amount has ever been applied in the past) you might have had a point. Although the ICO can do no more than what amounts, given FB's scale, to firing a warning shot it is nevertheless a warning shot. If FB has any wit they'll anticipate very big penalties under GDPR. And it'll be no help to them that they've managed to piss off Parliament by the snubbing them so your reflex cynicism might well be misleading you.

Re: Max Fine

"The fine payable, is determined by the ICO, taking many factors in to consideration ... between zero and the upper limit calculated from the company's global turnover."

The fact that the ICO went for the maximum here might be a good indication of how they'll respond to similar factors in the future. It should be a pretty good warning. Whether it'll be heeded remains to be seen but a max fine under GDPR should certainly get board level attention.

Re: Max Fine

"And why aren't there prison sentences as an option for the judge?"

There are but you need to understand the processes at work here.

Although it's commonly referred to as a fine it's a Civil Monetary Penalty (CMP). The key word there is "civil"; the ICO can apply that, it can't apply a fine which would be a criminal matter. Criminal penalties are applied by a court of law and the normal ICO procedure doesn't go to court although it could end up there if the miscreant doesn't pay up.

Like a fine, it's only a court that can hand out prison sentences. Off hand I'm not sure what the process is for the ICO to take a case against the individuals to court in that way but there must be one because the relevant Act has provision for it.

Re: Review of the impact of ICO Civil Monetary Penalties - 20140723

"Give me some clue as to why it's worthwhile to visit an external site and download and read a PDF document of unknown content and length."

To find out what's in it. Or would you prefer to rely on someone you don't know and whose abilities you don't know understanding not only the report but also its significance to your particular situation - which they don't know. The latter doesn't really seem like a good way to keep yourself informed if it's your standard practice.

Re: 'Don't understand ...

"your insurer, your bank, your telco"

As I'm in the UK all these entities will be getting attention under GDPR if they try that.

Re: Conclusions?

"It's worth noting that FB have shouldered the maximum possible fine under the existing legislation (£0.5M). GDPR has provision for far greater fines (4% of annual global turnover)."

Yup. Was going to say the same thing. Unlike many comments and the article FB should read this as a warning of what happens next time. We could also end up with the ICO and at least one EU regulator handing out 4% fines. A billion here, a billion there and it soon adds up to real money.

Infrastructure wonks: Tear up Britain's copper phone networks by 2025

Rural areas should receive full-fibre connections as a priority, said the report, which noted that "long copper lines" cause signal degradation over great distances and "effectively render full fibre as the only viable infrastructure upgrade option for most rural areas".

Let's examine that carefully.

I live in a rural area. There's an FTTC installation in the centre of the village and has been for a few years We're about a couple of miles from the swtich (or exchange if you prefer) and there's and FTTC cabinet at most road junctions where a branch of the POTS network is taken off; say about once every half mile. Once that was installed it was easy to connect any premises that needed faster broadband by simply hooking up their line to that cabinet. We're a few hundred metres from the cabinet and the FTTC speeds are good. Our distance clearly isn't great enough to cause deterioration.

We're one of the last reasonably closely spaced houses, after that it's fields and a few houses every few hundred metres in a network of lanes They probably do have a deteriorating signal. There's underground ducting leading from the village past the house up to a point a few hundred metres further on past the next road junction with a manhole just at the corner of out property and in the last couple of weeks there was a team preparing that ducting to blow fibre in as far as the ducting goes.

I don't know what they propose to do with that but I suppose one option is another FTTC cabinet at that point. Whatever it is they can make provision for the more difficult set of premises out there. It may even be that it's as convenient to connect some of the more remote premises direct by fibre.

But consider what the situation would have been if they'd decided to build out an FTTP network to replace the FTTC. To get to the point where the fibre reaches our house they'd have had to install it in about 80 premises that don't really need it before getting to those that do - they'd probably still be working on it. And if the FTTC had never been used and FTTP had been the approach from the outset I doubt it would have reached our village yet because we'd probably be a few million houses down the list as the network got built out. Not only is full fibre not only not "the only viable infrastructure upgrade" it's a good deal less viable for many purposes than continuing to extend the FTTC and make use of the copper network for individual premises because it will just add to the waiting time to get the benefits of fibre to where they're most needed.

Re: Time to nationalise OverReach

"Ammend the housing act to require Fibre communications (or atleast the ducting for it)"

No need to nationalise it to achieve that, not do you need to amend any Housing Acts. Just add it to building regs. for new build.

Of course if you want to go back to the decades of under-investment that preceded privatisation you could nationalise it to do that.

Re: Germany is the workshop of the world

"Although Bittorrent is very illegal here, so I'm not sure what people will do with all the bandwidth!"

Commonly known as a solution in search of a problem.

Re: Ummm

Well but then only one phone would work, and only if you unplugged it, plugged it directly into the NTBA (which depending on the type of your line your phone may not support) and configured it to work with the "emergency power" mode which not all phones support.

I think we're at cross purposes here. The UPS at the switch (or exchange if that's what you prefer to call it) powers the entire local POTS network. True if you only have cordless the base station will die without a local UPS. But it's simple and easy to have a POTS phone plugged directly into the line as well as the cordless set-up. Provided you don't exceed the REN you can have multiple phones plugged in.

Re: Every Telephone Pole Resembled The Mess Associated With Wire Frames

On my road almost every house except mine is cabled overhead although the main distribution is underground and ducted.

But on estates built since, say the '60s like my daughter's the entire telecoms network is buried. Unless the houses have individual ducts into which the cables can be blown there's going to be a choice: dig up every drive and garden, dig a trench into the street at every house at least on one side of the street and reinstate it all properly or tkae the cheap and nasty option of installing a mess of overhead cables.

I wonder which it will be.

Re: Rolling in cash

"Money-tree policy?"

That's right, the money trees are fertilised by the unicorns cocking their legs against them.

Re: Ummm

"They cant even fit a smart meter"

Not all bad, then?

Re: Ummm

"Well just like you do with copper lines, have an UPS on your PBX."

One humongous one at the switch, regularly checked and maintained rather than a lot of little ones, probably costing n times as much to get the same capacity, fitted and forgotten and half of them dead when needed.

"labour cost are not needed to be calculated into the initial build if you go the Co-op route (pay them back with the profits)"

ITYF that if you try to do that on a national scale you'll need a labour force that needs to be paid as they go.

dispense Gin Black Bush instead of water

"The money's there - its just it is being wasted on other poorly conceived infrastructure programmes."

So switch it from one poorly conceived infrastructure programme to another. Right. It'll make us all better off or something.

Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something

There's something to be said for this decentralisation stuff. If I rely on credit cards to finance transactions from a centralised bank they only work if everything in the entire payment chain doesn't have a TITSUP - card network, bank, everything. The possibility of that ideal state of affairs these days seems to be getting more remote. So, my lords, ladies and gentlemen I present my own, novel solution: Compensation Asymmetrically Serverless Hosted.

"All in all, Chen and HTC have set a very high bar for Strategy Boutique entries – it is hard to imagine this combination being surpassed."

Shouldn't that be Boutique Strategy? BS for short?

BINGO!!!!

We shall call him Mini-U – Ubuntu reveals tiny cloudy server

"Ubuntu’s a little late to the game with this release, as the two versions of Windows mentioned above have been around for many months"

And Turnkey Linux has been around for years.

BGP hijacker booted off the Internet's backbone

" It is however, the least broken worldwide communication system we have managed to come up with."

But there are plenty of people working on that.

Up in arms! Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V smear site after own staff revolt

They wanted a debate. They got a debate, it didn't go quite the way they anticipated. Be careful what you ask for - you might get it.

Google offers to leave robocallers hanging on the telephone

Most of the cold calls I get are a CLI of "International".

The other week I got an "International" call. It turned out not to be Indian. It was my gas fitter who was on holiday returning my call to his mobile. I suppose Ibiza was respite from the temperature here.

Former wig-wearing Twitterphobe replaces Hancock as UK.gov's Secretary of Fun

Re: Lawyer?

"I thought all lawyers were, by definition, criminals?"

IME most of the criminal lawyers I met were quite civil. Civil lawyers Ambulance chasers, however, could be reckoned to be criminal.

Re: Brexiteers jump ship

"Not Clarkson?"

With two Jeremies in the hunt already, so to speak, we don't need another and one May is surely enough. Many would argue more than enough.

Re: Brexiteers jump ship

"My money is on a new PM before Parliament returns after the summer recess."

You could be right and my money would be on it being Hammond.

Re: Brexiteers jump ship

"Capt May has hit the iceberg but continues to order full steam ahead"

As reality sinks in I think it's slow astern to the only reasonable Brexit; one where we keep just about everything intact in trading terms to minimise damage but, not actually being in the EU, have no say over the rules. It's called taking back control.

I think it was Matthew Parris who said reality will do the heavy lifting.

BoJo was right for once. The compromise was turd polishing but I don't think he'd quite cottoned on to the fact that the turd is Brexit itself.

"Hancock's departure from DCMS will be a loss of consistency for a department that has now had four secretaries of state in two years."

That seems pretty consistent to me. Staff are probably already setting up the sweepstake for who's next and when.

Insurers hurl sueball at Trustwave over 2008 Heartland megabreach

Who provides Trustwave's insurance? Presumably these two have done due diligence to make sure it's not themselves.

Thomas Cook website spills personal info – and it's fine with that

So you have the option to report to the ICO and look like a good boy or not report and line yourself up for the top tier of fines for not doing so if the ICO disagrees with your risk assessment of the breach. Deciding whether to report or not is also a risk assessment, of course. Does the quality of assessment on whether to report indicate anything about the quality of assessment of the breach?