Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Re: Will this never end?

"Microsoft at least in consistent in the quality of its services."

That's ISO9000 for you. All that's required is consistency.

Re: Oh goody

"However , if you manage to beat the M$ lawyers , all you'll get back is the cost of the win 10 licence"

There was one report of a woman who got a few $k for the disruption caused to her by the enforced upgrade.

Re: Oh goody

"They will just deny all liability and point to their EULA that says you can't sue them for anything. Queue 10 years of costs in court getting nowhere."

Small claims court and stuff their unenforceable EULA.

Re: The joke is on you!

"If MS wants to do you in the rear, they ask"

Ask?

Re: Just go Linux

"I used to prefer KDE years back, what desktop do people go for these days"

KDE but it's not as good as it was. The UX flat GUI infestation gets everywhere.

Re: Just go Linux "Take my Linux ... please!"

"Replacing the OS on a computer they bought as a unit would be like buying a car and replacing the engine with a completely different one."

More like remapping the ECU so the engine works like a better one.

"We're working to restore product activations for the limited number of affected Windows 10 Pro customers,”

Typical PR version. Limited as in limited to what? Everyone with W10Pro? Both users who used their left pinkie to switch on whilst facing north? Meaningless twaddle!

GDPR USA? 'A year ago, hell no ... More people are open to it now' – House Rep says EU-like law may be mulled

I'm not sure the analogy with dropping babies is a good one. I've never been aware of the implied right way to drop one.

Data flows post-Brexit: 'Leave it to government to make sure you've got a smooth run in.' Er, OK

"said he didn't understand the importance of Dover in the UK's trading relationships?"

I gather from the Beeb's report that he's just realised it is important. Better late than never.

Dutch cops hope to cuff 'hundreds' of suspects after snatching server, snooping on 250,000+ encrypted chat texts

Re: Much ado about the supremely irrelevant

"I ate my budgerigar five times a fortnight, ten in one-twelfth of a year"

Getting a good pass-phrase right isn't easy, particularly if your throw some punctuation into it. You have a one in four chance of getting the comma and hyphen in the right combination, always assuming you can remember where they go. I have a similar approach to my Wifi pass-phrase. If I have to use it a few times in a few days I'll eventually remember the twists and turns after I've looked it up a few times. A few days after that and it's gone again. Having your unguessable babble written down defeats the object.

"If proper end-to-end encryption is used, it doesn't really matter who sees the encrypted (cypher text) messages or not."

It does if the key-exchange has been MitMed. Although maybe that can be discounted as not being proper.

Re: That broke rule 1 of creating secure services

"The ab-so-lu-te first thing you must decide on when you create secure services is how you are going to deal with criminals using the service"

In principle this is no different to any other communication system. How are you going to deal with criminals using the telephone? The post? A taxi? A courier?

There's a trade-off between investigating crime and keeping innocent communications confidential. Perhaps the first consideration on deciding that it to ask what proportion of communication is innocent and what isn't. If you decide that the bulk of communication is innocent and deserves to be confidential then you have to accept that you have to forego bulk interception and accept that law enforcement is going to be harder. It's a temptation that everyone, from politicians downwards, has to steel themselves to resist.

Re: Oooh, clever !

"they got a warrant, seized the server"

There's no mention of a warrant in the article. Even if they did get one then all the traffic through the service was compromised. There seems to be a presumption that all the traffic was illegal. If you were using the service to negotiate a confidential but legitimate negotiation - say a merger - you now know the Dutch police had access to it. They were snooping on everyone, at least everyone using the service. Who, apart from the Dutch police, knows what legitimate stuff has been compromised?

Re: "End-to-end encryption" isn't?

"What am I missing here?"

That setting up a private cipher requires thinking. It also requires that the parties meet to agree it or use a go-between who can be compromised.

Re: "End-to-end encryption" isn't?

"Even then, though, you'd hope that 2 clients that had seen each other before would then warn their owners that the other ends key seemed to have changed."

This is a case of hanged if you do and hanged if you don't. If you use the same key all the time any messages which have been intercepted and stored in the past can be decrypted if the key is later compromised - which is more difficult if the server didn't store the key - but you can tell if the key's been changed. If you use a different key each time then past messages are safe but the key exchange is susceptible to MitM attack if the server is compromised.

Re: "End-to-end encryption" isn't?

"So, not only were the comms not encrypted end-to-end, as is often claimed, but, if I understand correctly, there was no way to securely exchange encryption keys"

They may well have been encrypted end-to-end but the keys were compromised.

Re: So

"I believe it was 11 September 2001 if not before."

No, that was when the US learned that what goes around comes around and that terrorism wasn't just something that happened on an island across the Atlantic and was probably harmless anyway so there was nothing wrong with contributing a few dollars here and there.

Re: So

"Presumed Guilty until proven Innocent once we've gone through all of your private messages ?"

More like presumed guilty to allow us to go through your private messages.

How many Commercial in Confidence and otherwise innocent messages were picked up and gone through?

HSBC now stands for Hapless Security, Became Compromised: Thousands of customer files snatched by crims

Re: Closing my account

"Depending on what you measure my track record with the Midland back goes back more than thirty years and the businesses's twenty something

Good riddance to them."

My business only went back a bout 10 years but my track record went back 40 years to Midland days. And by the time I retired and no longer needed the business account I felt exactly the same way as you and took exactly the same step.

Re: new dongle

"Just walk into a branch"

A branch? What's that?

DXC: Everything is going to plan, too well in fact... we've chopped so many staff, our IT projects are now behind

"the US biz's strategic vision"

Is "biz" short for "bizarre"? It's certainly the way it looks.

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Re: For Shame!

"a shareware OS"

I think I've found the source of your confusion. You don't know the difference between shareware (is it still a thing there in Windows land?) and free/open source.

Re: As a non-apple owner...

"Isn't iOS (or what ever their OS is called) 75% Linux/Unix anyway?"

Linux, no. Substantially Unix, I believe so. There is a difference between Linux and Unix.

Re: Damned if they do

"You simply can't have both the ability to boot any OS that changes from week to week and security against bootloader malware."

OK, I think I've worked out what you're saying: W10 is bootloader malware.

Re: I can see Apple's point...

"secure OSs like Windows"

ROFLMAO

"That means someone like me could read the sauce codes"

Have you considered taking up comedy as a career?

Re: "It avoids having to pay for a bundled copy of Windows."

"But we know even the most greybeard and anarchist Linux aficionado can't resist to Apple bling factor... and show off when he can."

Definitely greybeard but resist Apple bling? Easy. Look at the price.

Re: Why Linux on Apple Hardware?

"One of the reasons I've heard for the justification of the inflated Apple pricing"

The other reason was the reputation of Apple build quality which might have been a reason to buy. As a bystander I can't comment on the validity of the reputation but from comments here & elsewhere it may be that that reason is getting to be a thing of the past so it might be that nothing of value is being lost. OTOH while Apple depend on BSD runtime pissing off the open source community might not be the best move.

Re: Great plan Timmy.

"Oh, and Darwin is not based on Linux in anyway whatsoever AFAIK. It has far more in common with FreeBSD (which presumably won't boot either now)."

I'd assumed that either FreeBSD or maybe the open source community sensu lato was intended.

Re: SecureBoot Bites Again

"but you do realise that"

Probably a Mac extreme fanboy unable to distinguish between Mac & MacOS; realisation optional.

Re: "secure" boot is *EVIL*

"At least if it's Windows where, as the article states, a physically present user must be able to disable it to get Windows certification."

It's Microsoft's certification and they could change it at will. Now they have their own Linux Subsystem for Windows (whimsically known by a reversed acronym, WSL) they might.

European Union divided over tax on digital tech giants as some member states refuse free money

The tax would benefit countries with large populations national economies at the expense of those with innovative small natiional economies but large imported multi-national digital businesses

FTFH

'Blockchain SAVED my Quango'

Re: The one use

"In a basic case, blockchain is ideal for recording those immutable historical facts - you were born on day x1 with name y and gender g, you did graduate on day x2 with name y and degree z, and you got married on day x3 and changed your name to y2, you changed your gender and your name on day x4, etc."

Well,someone did all that. What the potential employer - or whoever depending on the use case - needs to know is is the person claiming to be so really that someone?

Re: "Do you need a blockchain?"

"This is a really good flowchart"

Not keen on 4. It's been written arse about face simply to avoid "Yes" being the answer that doesn't need a blockchain.

UK.gov to roll out voter ID trials in 2019 local elections

Re: So...

"What if you have gone paperless billing/statements and don't own a printer to print them off?"

OTOH if you have a printer you can "print off" any bill or statement you care to invent.

"I've never worked out, if you don't turn up and identify yourself, how do the police know who they want to arrest?"

And even if you do, what does it mean? Who am I? Who are you? The answers to those questions are relative.

I can turn up with a copy of my birth certificate. I can equally turn up with a copy of someone else's birth certificate providing it gives a DoB roughly the same as mine.

I can turn up with a piece of photo ID. What does it mean? Just that I persuaded someone to attach a name to a photo of me or someone who looks reasonably like me.

Utility bill (what's that in the days of online billing?)? I got what I claim to be my address printed on a letter heading that looks as if it might have come from a utility company. Utility company billing base stock is scarcely a secure base stock; the base stock for the birth certificate is - and it clearly states it's not a form of identification.

"If we're going to have mandatory ID, we should also have a proper, written constitution"

We do. It's not just written in a single place. It starts with Magna Carta (which, admittedly, successive govts, especially recent ones, try to ignore) and including "and a Bill of Rights."

You want a Bill of Rights? OK, here you are:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/introduction

"I get asked for ID every time I visit Scotland and stay in a hotel"

I stayed in an hotel in Scotland earlier this year and also last year with no such demand.

Woke Linus Torvalds rolls his first 4.20, mulls Linux 5.0 effort for 2019

Re: Bring back the old Linus

"All the previous times he said it he cussed."

No. The cussing was the exception. BAU doesn't get reported on. Learn to discriminate between the two.

"find it more impressive if someone gets bullocked without a single swear word being used."

The example given is definitely entering the realm of talking down to the culprit as if they were a small child. Nice one. Demeaning but without anything the snowflakes can actually put a finger on as being wrong.

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

Re: Quite.

" when the child comes to a conclusion you can ask them to explain why they think that is so."

It depends on the age of the child. Before they acquire language infants are learning how to interpret the various sensory inputs. One of the things they can do is reach out to touch what they see so they can correlate the tactile qualities of what's in the visual field. They can't explain how they learn that. In fact, can you, as an adult, explain how you recognise an everyday object such as a cup?

US draft bill moots locking up execs who lie about privacy violations

I'm not sure about a central opt-out register. It's an all eggs in one basket affair. At present one of the options we have in our defence is to set up variations on details such as email addresses, physical addresses, dates of birth and all the rest of the stuff to make it more difficult to combine data. A central register means that the user would have to give details of their account on that register to each site with which they connect. It becomes a single point of failure tracking.

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Re: First Algorithm?!

@ Nigel Sedgwick

Your namesake Adam would also be a good choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Sedgwick

Re: two more to the list

"Beatrix Potter (Yes really)"

Indeed. Thanks for the reminder.

Re: Honestly can't decide

"He even accompanied Einstein on the piano to Einstein's violin."

So did Rubinstein. They were practising a piece and Einstein kept fluffing his entries. Eventually Rubinstein was heard to complain "Albert, can't you count?".

Re: Michael Faraday got my vote...

Already been on a £20 note.

DBA drifts into legend after inventive server convo leaves colleagues fearing for their lives

Re: But can I get F1 on my BT account

"quite serious operators who had undergone a humour bypass"

I suppose it's what comes from being exposed to generations of students.

Re: My boss was demonstrating the instrusion sensors on our building

"I hope you know the reset code because we certainly don't"

So who signed off on the installation without making sure they had the reset code? And why did the installers not make sure they left the reset code with someone?

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

Re: Anti-intellectual?

"Religious nutters destroyed the School of Euclid and the Library of Alexandria. Here's hoping the books of Euclid will still be in use when all the religious books are forgotten."

Can someone remind me of how the surviving books from antiquity were preserved?

"Here in God's Country where we have our own banknotes (a cunning ruse designed to spike the blood pressure of London cabbies"

When I lived in NI the local banknotes were useful for spiking the blood pressure of any Scottish businesses I had to deal with when in transit along the dreaded A75. In NI local, NoE, Scottish and (while the Punt was at parity) Irish notes were all accepted without comment.

"Only after more sentences and a picture did the anthropomorphic features slant become apparent."

It's by Dabbsy. Isn't that enough to tell you how to read it?