Posts by Doctor Syntax

For fax sake: NHS to be banned from buying archaic copy-flingers

The real problem with fax machines is that you can't install Matt Hancock's app on them. They have to be replaced with something compatible.

Re: At least 10 years late

"If they are already on NHS.net, prior instruction should be between 10 and 30 seconds."

That's assuming NHS net isn't down. What do you do when it is?

Re: The first rule...

"Maybe someone should put in a FOI request to find out whether there was a spike in use of faxes while all computer systems were unplugged!"

And during the recent NHSMail outage.

Re: Ban a system that works and is malware free*...

"And works, even when everything else* has fallen over....

(*except for the VoIP PABX)"

Give it it's own exchange line and it doesn't even mind if the PABX falls over.

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Re: Value added installer

"Cue sit down with cup of tea not having to do anything."

If that were coffee I'd claim you to be Dilbert's Wally.

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Re: What will mostly

"so he ran away from the consequences of his actions."

And at the same time demonstrated his foresight by carrying out another consequence bearing action.

Re: The deal being essentially worthless

"World Bank approves $400 million in new financing for Ecuador "

Can we clarify this? Are you saying that the US, via the World Bank, is paying $400 million to have Assange extradited?

I'm sure Assagne would love that interpretation - it must be getting close to his own evaluation of himself.

Re: Assange is a political prisoner, in the United Kingdom, end of

"Echo chambers are a wonderful thing, until someone from outside your echo chamber challenges your world view."

Challenges from people outside appear not to have any effect on your world view.

Linux.org domain hacked, plastered with trolling, filth and anti-transgender vandalism

Re: Using Yahoo! mail for something important?

"Here in Japan the cellphone providers are so nice to block all email from non japanese domains"

So don't use your cellphone for email.

Re: Using Yahoo! mail for something important?

"If you're the owner of a web domain I'd expect you to be using an email account for that domain or paying for your own separate hosted domain with email"

If a free gmail account is good enough for all those professional SEO "companies" that keep spamming me...

Re: Hopefully

"deserve to be hired when in Actuality Linus is the kind of boss Linux needs and people should be hired for skills"

You clearly don't realise that Linus hires nobody. What he does is act as a gatekeeper for code submissions. Some of those submissions may come from people who have been hired, at least in part, to work on Linux. Some may come from people who are paid to work on other things. Search for "who writes Linux" to learn more.

If you're able to get code accepted it means you're good enough whoever or whatever you are.

Cambridge Analytica's administrators misled judge, High Court told

"We say that for reasons that are not easy to understand, disclosure of none of that was made to Mr Justice Hildyard."

I think this is an example of barrister's humour.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

Re: you have global SAN

"once they put it all back and system rebooted it was then found the SAN had never saved configurations so it went back to day one."

This is why you test your restore/recovery procedures.

Re: Incompetance

"that 'once in a career' real DR event such as a data centre fire or flood."

One of the things about having had your place of work burn down is that you realise such things can actually happen and potentially more than once in a career. Those who haven't experienced one tend to put them in the "won't ever happen" category.

Re: Acronyms

"No, these are all TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)."

Two out of three ain't bad.

Three Letter Abbreviations.

"The article explains why this is a bad idea"

I wonder how many times this statement is going to have to be repeated.

"If the beancounters can get something done by a certain date, why can't the IT monkeys?"

One of the things that the beancounters get done by a certain date is to outsource the IT monkeys who had their calendars sorted. And when the IT monkeys get outsourced are they really going to tell the beancounters "by the way, you need to keep an eye on this."? At some point beancounters get to discover that the IT people they outsourced weren't monkeys but there's a distinct possibility the outsourcers were - or maybe they were snake-oil salesman.

Re: V2X

"An autonomous vehicle must be able to work without a network connection!"

If it needs a network connection it isn't autonomous.

UK Supreme Court considers whether spy court should be immune to legal probes

Let's say Privacy International get a verdict in their favour. What happens next? Yet a new piece of legislation just sufficiently different to be claimed as different. It's already probably written, just waiting for the date to be added to be introduced into Parliament.

HCL picks up Notes, spanks total of $1.8bn at Honest John's IBM software sale

Maybe they're planning to make it work.

Galileo's magnifico measurement: 1976 redshift test updated

Re: When life give's you lemons....

There's an inevitability in a greengrocer's apostrophe when lemons are involved.

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

Re: An expired certificate....

"Wow. There was no point building in any other resilience elsewhere then."

Do you mean a back door? Not necessarily a good thing when the whole point of the certificates is to secure the system.

Re: Simple monitoring...

"For a variety of 'things' and a variety of customers, from ESN to businesses to my own personal usage."

Who or what receives the alerts from the monitoring? For your personal stuff, presumably you. But if those from your customers are handled by the customers themselves do you know if there's still anyone looking out for them? If they all come through to you then you become a single point of failure for the customers and what happens then if you retire or fall under a bus?

It's not the setting up of something to raise alerts that's the problem. Monitoring is an on-going process and these days on-going processes are apt to be interrupted by system failures reorganisation by management, especially those processes that deal with rare events on demand.

Re: I don't get it

"Surely,... they could find a way of bypassing the need for certificates that expire."

They could also make things more convenient by not putting locks on doors etc.

Re: NHS

Why the joke alert icon?

Re: Standby?

"If it is REALLY essential, and you have not taken precautions, I find myself very short on sympathy."

Remember the people at the sharp end are not usually those taking the decisions. The OP of this particular thread was someone whose employers had done so. There will be others whose employers hadn't and even a few where an original dual provision had been cut to save money.

Re: More detail

"thats if someone has actually configured it to send out emails...."

And if the recipient of the emails is still there.

It's easy enough to set up a warning system. Protecting that warning system against the ravages of management changes is a different matter and almost certainly outside the powers of whoever set it up. If you were the one who was the designated recipient of the email and you've just been booted out of the job are you going to be in a mood to warn whoever did the booting that that particular mail box needs to be monitored? Is the booter even going to listen if you did? And will the booter get booted out in the next bout of changes?

There needs to be personal responsibility on those making such changes to ensure that everything like this gets covered under the new organisation. HMG has woken up to the fact that national infrastructure needs to be protected even when it's in private hands. Maybe that protection should extend to personal sanctions on those involved, even up to CEOs and board members. Make them sweat a little. After a few big personal fines or gaol sentences businesses would become a little less cavalier about reorganisations and outsourcing.

Re: These things don't have internet access

but are you telling us that the "core nodes in a telecom network" which provides Internet access to millions ... don't have internet access?

No longer having internet access was the problem.

Tech support discovers users who buy the 'sh*ttest PCs known to Man' struggle with basics

"So, Bill worked for RM then?"

You never had Time to look at other makes?

"until we found where the manufacturer had hidden the power switch on the case."

Style over function. The sign of a company run by marketing.

Keen for much-hyped quantum computing to finally land? Don't expect it for a decade

I have a little box which simultaneously does and doesn't contain a quantum computer. Unfortunately every time I've opened it it came down on the side of not containing one.

"The google search engine for example"

So that's why the head of MicroSoft AI has gone off to work for an estate agentcy: so they can display even more estate agency hits when I'm looking for something else entirely.

Capita: We are seeking staff to join our board. Just two please

To make it easier to create a short list we're making all employees except two redundant.

Brits' DNA data sent to military base after 'foreign' hack attacks – report

"This has to be a first ?"

No. The ones you hear about being breached are the ones who didn't build in security from the first.

Re: "100,000 Genomes Project is secure, insists chair"...

"Which regular commentard am I?"

I don't think you're Bob. One down....

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

Re: Take your browser and fuck off

"This goes for all manufacturers."

And while we're at it, can we include non-manufacturers? No I will never sign up to Prime so stop pushing the crap at me. No I will not let PayPal remember my password to add a "Not even later" option. And on and on....

Re: "Microsoft doesn't comment on rumours or speculation"

They're not sure which of them will turn out to be true.

"Gartner said something like that about the Windows phone not long back either.."

So did Charles3 if you check his previous posts.

Re: So wither those "MS Only" outfits ?

"Unless you were urging MS only outfits to decay and atrophy and shrink. Which I suppose works, too."

It's a very good interpretation, especially as they were his former former employer. It would be a good reason to move them from current to former status and get out ahead of the crowd.

"users do matter and will either not stay, complain or hate a design if they can't get what they want easily and fast."

The thing that most effectively causes me to not stay is a page that displays nothing at all or a list of URLs it wants Javascript from. If it doesn't work reasonably with NoScript in action then as far as I'm concerned it's a dead loss.

"How about a BSD distro?"

Somebody could go and rummage in the attic for the Xenix source code.

The British Home Office was warned about its crappy data management – then Windrush happened

At some point, assuming the whole Brexit process doesn't choke itself to death, we'll be looking for an adequacy rating from the EU for data sharing. I don't think the HO going rogue in this way is going to help get that.

Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning

"very misleading without additional context"

Any ideas why that context might be missing?

GOPwned: Republicans fall victim to email hack

Will someone point out to them that insisting on back doors in communications will make this more likely if you get them. Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.

BT pension scheme will stay on RPI interest rates for now

Re: I came here...

"how BT manage their pension scheme on a Raspberry Pi."

It's managed by Accenture. Is that better or worse?

Accenture in doghouse after NHSmail mass outage cuts off 1m+ UK health staff

Re: Accenture wont care

"They also need to satisfy a lot of due diligence, usually involving delivery on similar sorts of contracts to similar sized public sector bodies."

And they still win the contracts?

Oz opposition folds, agrees to give Australians coal in their stockings this Christmas

Step 1. Start rumours that the govt is spying on the public's $stuff, e.g. turning on everyone's Echoes etc.

Step 2. Govt starts taking serious public heat and discovered it's been courageous (as in Yes Minister).

Step 3. Govt appeals to telecoms companies to deny the existence of such TCNs

Step 4. Telecoms companies point out they have to keep shtum about TCNs and can't possibly confirm or deny they exist.

Step 5. What was that about an election?

UK taxman told to chill out 'cos loan charge is whacking tax dodgers and whoopsies alike

Standard tax gatherers' approach since the (Red) Dawn of Time: go for those least able to afford professional defence and demand an arm and leg.

YouTube fight gets dirty: Kids urged to pester parents over Article 13

ISTM that this is dogfight (or would catfight be more appropriate) between two unlovely branches of the media industry. I'm not sure which I want to come off worst.

Space policy boffin: Blighty can't just ctrl-C, ctrl-V plans for Galileo into its Brexit satellite

Re: Strangely in the last week or so....

"I dont think May or the gov has the stones to deliver"

Kidney stones? I believe they're appropriately painful.