Posts by Doctor Syntax

Banks told: Look, your systems WILL fail. What is your backup plan?

Re: Back up plan? What planet are they on?

"It also shows just how out of touch the regulatory bodies are to suggest modern banking could switch over to manual! There is no plan B - rapid recovery of the service is the only feasible course of action and is where the focus should remain."

It's not necessarily so simple.

What the TSB incident shows - or at least what we're told - is that the core systems were OK but that it was the surrounding access layers were the problem and that that affected online, telephone and the branch systems. If the were various access routes (from the customer perspective) didn't depend on a common access layer the system would have been more resilient in that if the online access failed telephone service would have been possible and if ATMs didn't work cash could be obtained over the counter.

If a bank's customers are left effectively destitute "it's too complicated" isn't an acceptable answer.

Re: I could do with a list of banks that actually consider IT important enough to keep in house

Here it is:

Re: Wrong Question!!

"Murphy syrikes"

Yup ;)

Re: The importance of being earnest!

Hashtags! Is that you, Amber?

Re: Back up plan? What planet are they on?

In the old days it took tens of thousands of well trained clerks occupying endless rows of desks to run a handful of simple account types. Now banks have hundreds of flavours of their "product" the reality is I.T. IS their business - without it they don't have a business - and yet still, management consider I.T. to be a "cost" to be slashed away at

They probably thought the tens of thousands of clerks were a cost to be cut.

Re: That is not what should be regulated

"but in the worst case customers will take their government-guaranteed money elsewhere and that will be that."

That's the problem from the government's point of view. The money comes from government (well, from all of us really but that's rarely a consideration for government, especially the Treasury which considers it really owns all the money anyway). It isn't the bank's worst case, or the customers' worst case they're worried about, it's their worst case. If a bank fails its the government that's at risk and it wants to minimise that risk. That's why they want to regulate.

Re: Wrong Question!!

Asking "What is your back up plan?" is the wrong question!

I think they're using the term in a different sense than you're interpreting it. "What's your fall-back plan?" would have been less ambiguous. There needs to be a means of carrying on business whilst all the restoration, repair etc. is being undertaken.

The embarrassing thing for the banks is that it might involve customers visiting their local branch. Local? What local branch?

Imagine a patent on organizing computer files being used against online shopping sites. Oh, it's still happening

I'm considering a patent for a method of reading a book. It consists of (a) reading the first page (b) reading the second and subsequent pages in the order in which they occur in the book (c) stopping on reading to the end of the last page.

Re: Move on please, there's nothing to see here.

<em.We created this problem when it was decided that patenting software "methods" was a good idea.</em>

Who's this "we" of whom you write?

'Toxic' Whitehall power culture fingered for GDS's fall from grace

"but it's a refreshing change to see someone talking about this stuff with sufficient bluntness to cut through the bullshit."

Were we reading the same article? These are the bullshitters.

Re: Globular clusterfuck

"Do they just string words together and hope there is a message therein?"

Or just string words together and hope people will think there's a message therein?

And do they really believe their own words?

Re: "Hire 50 people under 30 who know what an API is."

"All of the complexities of synchronisation, interface routing, master/slave data stores is a pain....We have tried arguing for MVP deployments of the new system with an ongoing build out of function only for the MVP scope to be insisted to be what the old system does in order to avoid business change."

And how would your less than big bang MVP remove those complexities? Surely it's the cause of them.

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

"It took me less than 10 minutes to build my own exlicense.dll that always returned TRUE"

That's Windows for you. Always making you do things the long way round.

ln true CheckLicense

Re: a sort of oversized Meccano.

Or what real engineers call "Dexian".

OK, oversized Dexion.

There used to be a Dexion shop in N London, long gone, of course. It's right what they say: the variety has gone out of the High Street these days.

Re: Only cracking I have done is

"it turned out that their gates simply lifted off the hinges."

The comms team had a big cabling job to do at the warehouse over a weekend. The warehouse was near a football ground. When they got there they found some local wide boys had lifted the locked gates off the hinges and were selling car parking to match goers.

Re: Only cracking I have done is

"stone castles were reasonably impregnable to direct attack."

A bit more laborious but you could also undermine the walls. It needed some sort of shelter unless to approach. You shored up the excavation with wooden props until a enough length of wall was undermined and then light a fire to burn the props out. I think this how "mine" also came to be used for an explosive device.

Re: Only cracking I have done is

"But above and below the padlock are two conventional shackles, easily removed with a pair of pliers, or maybe a bit of wire."

Hmm. If you were to undo the shackles and reconnect them to each other you could leave the boat still tied up and steal the padlock.

“opened the skin of the PC system and replaced a ROM chip.” And with that, Guy’s exploit became impossible.

I'm sure copies of the original chip would have been available as spares from Zenith. Not impossible, just inconvenient.

Re: About 10 minutes later I was "cracking" some of the locks and interchanging them around.

"I had a friend at college who always carried a screwdriver and would unscrew tables, chairs, anything held together by screws."

A few of us paid a visit to the NUU in Coleraine not long after it opened. The bit we were in was constructed out of a sort of oversized Meccano. I wondered how much of it could be dismantled overnight by a determined squad of students armed with the right size spanners.

Every step you take: We track you for your own safety, you know?

New laptop ordered. Despatched one afternoon down to distribution hub halfway to London. Then returned by nextmorning to local distribution hub about the same distance from the point of despatch as myself but in the opposite direction. Whilst watching its final moves on that roundabout trip its despatch location was on the same map. It must have done at least 250 miles to travel about 12.

Re: flightradar24.com

flightradar24 turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Very few of the planes going over or near our house seem to have the required transponders. The PIA flights on the way to land about 20 miles away are easily identifiable without it; they're the ones coming in low enough to read the pilot's name badge.

Re: Being on Stage is stressful

"a pet fountain (? shakes head sadly)"

Can we take guesses as to what it really was?

Actually, a pet fountain raises various images. Assorted animals cascading into the air... Dabbsie patting a fountain on the head saying "There, there, who's a good fountain"... It reminds me of a sign outside a farm advertising Pet Hay. Takes all sorts.

Re: Battery life ?

"checks for danger via several vectors"

Does it turn your glasses opaque?

Re: Smartphone pouches

"just turn off location"

Going through the procedure to turn it off and actually turning it off aren't necessarily the same thing.

Like an everflowing stream: New tech promises remote S3 nearline disk performance

tl;dr

Backhoe.

Science! Luminescent nanocrystals could lead to multi-PB optical discs

"Have a flat square that the head can move across"

Probably even more complicated. The head has to be stopped and then restarted in the opposite direction at the end of each scan. The need for accuracy of positioning doesn't go away. Scanning by adjusting a small element of the optics would only allow a small area to be scanned and is probably better employed in making fine adjustments. Above all, however, spinning disks and radial head movements are a well established technology in storage mechanisms.

ICANN't get no respect: Europe throws Whois privacy plan in the trash

"is the EU willing to play the ultimatum card and eventually start the wholesale balkanization of the Internet by usurping all ICANN functions?"

That's why I'd prefer a geographically diverse range of registrars, as many as possible, to act so that sheer weight of numbers would avoid balkanization.

Re: " It wouldn't take a year to set up a "ECANN" and make all EU ISPs use it "

"but at this point I can't really see how it can be worse"

It could very easily. A few governments have wanted this option for the simple reason that they want to get some control over the net and this would be their best option.

My preference would be for the internet community itself, or at least the widest possible geographic range of registrars acting on our behalf, to to more or less what Lee suggests but to do this independently of any government.

London's top cop isn't expecting facial recog tech to result in 'lots of arrests'

"That is truly a gift to us commentards."

Her back story is too atrocious to make jokes about her name. If you don't know it there are enough clues up thread to guide your research.

TalkTalk, UK2 sitting in a tree, not T-A-L-K-I-N-G: Hosting biz cut off after ISP broadband upgrade

Upvote for reference to Stan Kelly-Bootle.

European Parliament balks at copyright law reform vote

Re: McCartney

"Google have made a lot of theirs off of other people's creativity."

As I recall Google gave German newspapers what they wanted - they stopped linking to them. It turned out it wasn't what they wanted after all.

"Supporters of the amendments... claimed the process had been impacted by intimidation and lobbying from outside the EU, including from the US"

Including some heavyweight lobbying in favour. But I don't suppose they count that.

Hurry up and make a deal on post-Brexit data flows, would you? Think of UK business – MPs

Re: Ha

"prepare to boost the economy with economically sane policies."

How? UK businesses get cut off from a large part of their home market. What's this economically sane policy you propose to replace that? Print large amounts of money?

"They have the GDPR, if the UK doesn't implement it then there will be no UK-EU data deal."

In theory this should be straightforward as we have a new DPA which implements GDPR more or less. It's the more or less bit that's the problem, namely the wriggle-room HMG left itself to do as it pleases. If anything stands in the way of an adequacy agreement that's it.

"the first one was thrown out for being illegal?"

And the same looks likely to happen to the second.

"the EU has no jurisdiction over America yet they have a data deal"

Not necessarily. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/05/privacy_shield_under_pressure_meps_vote/

"I'm unsure why I'm getting down voted for speaking the truth"

In politics the truth can change PDQ. Harold Wilson knew that.

Security guard cost bank millions by hitting emergency Off button

Re: Kim or Ken?

"Actually, you should take time to assess the situation - otherwise you risk putting yourself and others in even more danger."

And one factor in that, if you plan to use a fire extinguisher, is what sort to use.

The Big Red Button story we're all waiting for is the BA one from last year.

Re: Slightly off-topic, but a memory stirred by tales of being shown around places.

The only possible response--->

Re: Kim or Ken?

"When you smell and see fire, you don't hesitate, you use the emergency button to shut down kit"

Not if everybody who knows what's what (a) hasn't hit it already and (b) is shouting at you to tell you not to. You can at least allow a few seconds to check.

United States, you have 2 months to sort Privacy Shield ... or data deal is for the bin – Eurocrats

We know what comes next...

"Can we have a moratorium?"

Thunderbird gets its EFAIL patch

Re: Good to see it's still in development

"If Thunderbird pooled resources with Pale Moon, Waterfox, Basilisk, and SeaMonkey"

Even better, if they, and preferably Seamonkey, had gone over to the Document Foundation when that was proposed a few years ago...

US Declaration of Independence labeled hate speech by Facebook bots

Re: Fortunately for us here in the UK

"Not abolished as much as subsumed in the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Human Rights Act 1998."

Abolished seems about right. We now have the presumption of guilt to allow mass surveillance. Anything in the BoR or HRA is now subject to ministerial whim. Why do you think the Home Sec in No 10 wants to get out of the jurisdiction of the European Courts who represent the only real way of overseeing a UK govt's respect for human rights?

"We Americans may be muzzled on social media for hatin' on you Brits, for example"

AIUI you also regard Magna Carta as a foundational document.

Unfortunately we celebrated its 8th centenary by conveniently (for HMG) disregarding one of the few important remaining clauses, the presumption of innocence, in favour of the presumption of guilt to allow mass surveillance.

"What happened to the first two parts?"

They died. After George IV it was considered wise to wait nearly a century before the next instalment.

Re: This could be solved by...

"El Reg's world famous comment forums (which, amusingly, are social media)"

We are determinedly, and sometimes amusingly, anti-social here.

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

Re: shutdown silliness

"HP-UX?"

That was the one.

Re: shutdown silliness

"That's the sort of thing the previously mentioned molly-guard is for"

If I were still working I'd look at that.

UK.gov IT projects that are failing: Verify. Border control. 4G for blue-light services. We can go on

It's a pity that all this agency can do is issue warnings. If it had power to fire the incompetent and claw back payments for poor work and missed deadlines it might actually do something useful rather than tell us what we already know.

"If Brexit is a mega-programme, where’s it happening and why haven’t we heard about it?"

Like all other consequences of Brexit it will only become visible on Brexit day. Or, in this case, some time after because it takes some time to work out the requirements. IoW, don't put off any long contracts for something else; you'll have time to do those and come back to get on the gravy train although by that time the gravy will be little more than boiled water.