Posts by Doctor Syntax

British Crackas With Attitude chief gets two years in the cooler for CIA spymaster hack

Re: Another Perspective....

"That part of the story. Up until then, in my eyes he was a stupid teenager being a twat."

Still in keeping with a stupid teenager being a twat.

ZTE to USA: Sure, ban us, but you cannot afford such victories

Re: Protectionism

"moreover, Google has the only viable app store for Android."

And it will continue to have the only viable one right up to the time when someone with backing the size of, say, the Chinese economy decides to build their own.

Re: Protectionism

"Basically, the US has a monopoly of all smartphones and is prepared to use it in trade wars."

The basis of Android is open source, ZTE is able to use that and add its own cruft additional features. Manufacture takes place outside the US. Components are available outside the US. Own brand application repositories AKA Play Stores can be hosted outside the US.

"Trade wars are good and easy to win" vs "Those who do not learn their history are condemned to repeat it".

Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?

Re: My Account Manager

"The account manager had got the price hideously wrong and was told that if I insisted they put the order through, the company would supply at the agreed price but the account manager would get fired on the spot."

I'd be surprised if the account manager didn't get fired anyway if the price was still wrong after three checks.

Re: First of all, I don't accept bribes. Ever. Personal policy.

"A guy offered me his daughter"

Or at least, someone's daughter.

"There's only two more week [sic] to go until IP Expo Manchester 2018, Europe's number ONE Enterprise IT event, do'’t forget to register for your FREE pass," stated the email from Sophos.

"We will also be giving away a pair of free Sophos socks to every 10th person that registers through our registration page."

Oh well, at least the reminder ads nestled in the elReg headline page don't threaten socks. But we do see where you got the idea.

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

"Wagon Wheels being bigger back then"

This especially. The modern variety are Wheelbarrow Wheels.

Re: Education is no longer designed to teach.

students seem to be actively discouraged from taking a wider interest in any aspect of a subject outside the strict focus of the coursework their teachers' knowledge.

FTFY

"Countries like Germany properly recognise titles such as Engineer"

That's Germany. Here there's a tradition of referring to anyone who works with engines as an engineer. Perhaps what's really needed is to coin a new term for the up-market version.

BOFH: We know where the bodies are buried

Re: A Likely Story

"I wonder how (and how often ) that happened?"

As far as the BOFH is concerned it happens automatically and to all emails.

CEO insisted his email was on server that had been offline for years

Re: It's easy to spot the useless management.

"nobody would notice but themselves."

They might not notice. They could just keep showing each other PowerPoints.

They could all drop dead tomorrow and the company would just merrily keep ticking along run much better.

The alternative view.

Re: Deleting emails

"I have 80+ users come and go every year. Why do I keep them?"

Blackmail fodder?

Re: Deleting emails

"I was once told at an Oil & Gas firm that we should delete everything after 3 years of the project ending so that our own email records couldn't be used to sue us in the future."

The alternative view is to keep them so that they can be used in your defence in the future.

The choice made tells you a lot about the company.

Yahoo! webmail! hacker! faces! nearly! eight! years! in! the! cooler!

Re: Yabbut. It wuz forrin 'puters.

"Bloke should get a medal."

All those down-votes. Obviously none of them heard the whoosh.

BT pushes ahead with plans to switch off telephone network

"I can quite easily believe now that there are households and businesses all over the country that are pretty much IP-only, internally and externally, for everything from telephony to CCTV."

And a lot that aren't. But yours is so you're OK and the others don;t matter. Or did I miss something?

Re: Wither the 21CN?

"What happened to that?"

There's still a lot of the C21st still left. Plenty of time. And besides, the marketroids who thought it up have probably moved on.

Re: Mobile as the emergency option?

"There won't be POTS, instead fibre to the premises with a battery backed Optical Termination Unit."

You really think there'll be a 100% FTTP roll-out in that time period? And if there was how do you think it'll be paid for without dumping costs on people who didn't even ask for it and see no benefit?

Re: Mobile as the emergency option?

"There's still a lot of places without a signal."

Or a signal but not on your network.

"Most people have cordless phones. How do they work in a blackout?"

I have cordless. I wouldn't expect them to work in a power cut. That's why I also have an ordinary phone plugged into another socket.

Re: line rental

"with BT FTTP (Infinity), there is no option to ditch the line rental, even if you don't (want to) use their phone service."

You still have the line, it's just made of a different material. It still needs to be provisioned and maintained. If someone else allows you to not pay an explicit rental you can be sure they've built the costs in elsewhere.

Re: Oh well

" Because you can flee AND call, rather than have to stay in the emergency area."

And if you're trapped in the area? Or you don't have a mobile? Or have a mobile with no coverage?

Re: Oh well

"or locally from a lamp post power"

Which would also be out in a power cut so that doesn't help.

Cutting custody snaps too costly for cash-strapped cops – UK.gov

If you can't afford to run the operation properly - and that means in accordance with the law - then don't do it at all.

Maybe in a few weeks time we'll see Privacy International starting private prosecutions against Chief Constables under the appropriate section of the new DPA (191 IIRC).

Oracle demands dev tear down iOS app that has 'JavaScript' in its name

Re: Conflicted

Not conflicted, Will, just a curse on all their houses.

Facebook's login-to-other-sites service lets scum slurp your stuff

"The road to hell is paved with questionable intentions"

And in FB's case, questionnaire intentions.

"When I do a search on Google for the name of my company, I get a plethora of websites with an info page based on data scraped from Companies House."

Much the same here for a company closed 10 years ago. And for take down in some cases their required information is more than required, e.g. email address and telephone number. Could be fun coming up in a month or so.

Re: Jeez

"Is there anything Facebook does that doesn't take the worst privacy-invading option?"

Good question. Facebook wants to know the answer so they can fix it.

How 'parasitic' Google's 'We're journalists!' court defence was stamped into oblivion

Re: A search engine should be an index

"If it finds unpleasant articles get those taken down rather than the search, then the search cannot find them."

The articles themselves are reports of then current events published from newspaper archives under journalistic protection.

All you have to do to accomplish your objective is get yourself elected to Parliament, put up a private members' bill to remove that protection from the DPA while simultaneously getting into the EU to get it removed from the GDPR as your amended DPA would cause grave problems if it didn't reflect GDPR.

An essential aspect of the court hearing was to establish what the law is in this regard. If you think that's in some way wrong you need to change the law.

NHS given a lashing for lack of action plan one year since WannaCry

Re: We failed our audit....

Quite frankly, it says a good deal more about the competence, or lack thereof, of your auditors than it does about you.

Re: Valuable comments

@ markr555

When the Welfare State was set up NI was added to taxation supposedly to cover the costs of this. Likewise road vehicle taxation was introduced, in the form of the Road Fund Licence, to finance road construction and repair (the clue was in the name). The Road Fund, incidentally, was a solution to a problem that had plagued England and presumably many other places sing the middle ages.

The problem with this is the Treasury. It really doesn't like not being in control of all finances. It simply treats these as part of general taxation and doles out as little money as possible to the originally intended recipients. In the case of vehicle taxation it really did have to change the name - people might have started asking awkward questions such a show much money's in the fund and how's it spent.

In each case I think the solution is to tell the Treasury no. DVLA gets to keep the money and spend it on roads. It might make a payment to the NHS to cover the costs of dealing with RTAs but only when the roads are up to an agreed standard does any left-over money go to Treasury; if they're not up to standard then it goes back to the original tax-payers as compensation. A reconstituted DHSS would collect NI directly. NI could be set according to requirements, not according to what proportion of total taxation Treasury wants to shove under that heading.

This would bring transparency to large areas of taxation. NI could be set to meet requirements with a good deal more acceptance than at presence because it would be clear as to what it was being used for. The incompetence of DWP as it currently is would be an issue that affected taxpayers in general rather than just benefits claimants and get a much higher political profile.

ID theft in UK hits record high as crooks shift to more vulnerable targets

"More than a third of bank account takeover victims were over 60 years old. That was put down to the increasing popularity of online banking, and more fraudsters phoning victims claiming to be from the bank and asking to "verify" online passwords."

It's not necessarily popular. It's just enforced by shutting down more and more branches.

Windows 10 Spring Creators Update team explains the hold-up: You little BSOD!

Re: Bring my optical disk drive back!!

A lot of whooshes there.

Supreme Court punts on Microsoft email seizure decision after Cloud Act passes US Congress

Re: GDPR

"AIUI, it effectively becomes illegal to use non-EU providers come 25th May."

Where does it say that?

It says what your responsibilities are. If you think you can meet those with non-EU providers then fine. If you think you can't then find an EU provider. If your EU provider is breached and spills your customers' PII then you're in violation. If you take a contact email purely to arrange delivery and then, without explicit permission, use it to spam customers then you're in violation no matter where your provider is; in fact your marketing pestering department might be a bigger threat to your business than a non-EU provider.

Re: GDPR

"I, and my colleague have our main business email accounts on a US hosted server provided by a US company, are we obliged to migrate it all to an EU based server / provider by the 25 May to comply with GDPR, or do we just need to inform clients via our privacy policy that client data is stored or processed in the USA ?"

You are required to process data in such a way as to keep it safe, not collect data you don't need,* don't keep it for longer than you need** and don't subsequently process it in some other way (e.g. being daft enough to spam your customers) for which you don't have the data subject's explicit informed consent.

It's up to you to work out how best to achieve that. Presumably you're primarily concerned with the safe-keeping aspect. You need to assure yourself that your email provider has adequate safeguards in that respect. Can you do that, to your own satisfaction with your existing provider? Does you contract with your existing provider indemnify you for any fines you might experience under GDPR for any shortcomings on their side? (It's not the only way to reassure you but if they're prepared to sign up to that it indicates that they believe their systems are good enough or at least they have good insurance). Note that you'd have to assure yourself in the same way in respect of an EU provider but you might feel that the different legal frameworks make that assurance easier.

But the bottom line is that GDPR determines your responsibilities in processing personal data of EU residents. How you fulfil those responsibilities is up to you and your skill and judgement. In that respect it's no different to any other aspect of your business, say taking customers' money in advance of providing goods and services, if that's what you do, are taking delivery from your suppliers before paying them. In each of those cases you, like any other business, have a responsibility not to defraud your customers but how you manage your financial affairs is up to you. Processing customer data within GDPR is going to be just another aspect of being in business.

* The need is in terms of providing the goods or service which the data was collected, not what your customer pestering department thinks they need.

** Ditto.

"I guess that depends on how many local (to other countries i.e. not USA based corps), have cloud hosting services in the USA."

Not really. Just frame the laws so that it's sufficient that a company does business in the country.

Re: Hmmm...

"This means the Tax-evasion pass-the-buck cookie crumbles as Amazapple USA can now, de rigeur, be considered the same company as Amazapple UK and thus cannot charge itself in order to avoid paying taxes."

An alternative take on this is that Amazapple UK* is a ready-made structure for a reverse takeover so that Amazapple US is left as a local sales operation, maybe, for arm's length sake, an independent franchise, and the real business has left the US to do business with the rest of the world.

* Other non-US countries are available

Re: As has been noted...

"Imagining that unencrypted on-premises data is secure indicates too much faith in your OS, your router/firewall software, your operational security an the trustworthiness of your staff"

That's a much shorter list than it would be for off-premises where you have to repeat that for your vendor's - or vendors' - premises and all the communications in between.

"Anyone who truly cares about secure communication should not trust Microsoft or any government to protect it."

Make that "Microsoft or any other corporation".

Re: How can Microsoft be happy?

"US politics being the minefield that it is at the moment, MS would *far* prefer the politically expedient solution than getting ready for another round on the barricades against the DoJ and everything else trying to wade in."

It could be a very short term solution. MS are selling Azure to European govts - certainly to the UK govt. Are they serious about wanting that business to continue? The US govt can come along demanding Top Secret information from the UK Azure cloud if a US citizen is involved somewhere along the line, however peripherally. Surely somebody's going to realise that isn't a good idea.

"Any nation that might try to hold-out against the new USA law might find itself getting the same treatment as Tax Havens give the strength of opinion on the topic in the USA."

Just think that statement out again. We're talking about hosting of EU residents' personal data. Why should any EU country give a damn about what the US thinks? Either they play by EU law or someone else takes their business. It's not the US treating the EU countries the same way as the US treats tax havens. It's the EU treating the US the same way as the US treats tax havens. If the US hasn't the wit to realise that it's their loss, not Europe's and on present evidence it doesn't. Either the US corporations set up their own arm's length operations or there'll be EU businesses eating their lunch in a few years' time. Possibly some of those EU businesses will be ex-US.

Unfortunately, here in the UK, thanks to the numpties, we'll be stuck in the middle.

Cambridge Analytica's ex-CEO decides not to front UK Parliamentary Committee again

Re: Politicians should go after NIX's 'Personal' Lawyer

"Its also why politicians don't want to mess with Facebook / CA, as they're useful tools - for hire."

Governments might not want to. Select Committees give power to MPs who don't have the funds for that sort of hiring. ITYF they're rather keen on using that power if they see it as having popular appeal. Given that FB/CA etc. have rather dirtied their nappies now Committee members can probably see it as having public appeal.

Re: This:

"Unless you're an MP, the government takes a rather dim view of anybody lying to parliament."

That needs rearranging. Parliament takes a dim view of being lied to. Especially by governments.

Re: "There is no legal reason for him to appear."

"It used to be, back when the MPs had a smidgen of honour and sense of duty"

Back in those days a minister would accept that he carried the responsibility for his department's failings and resign. It even happened that a minister, might resign if the actual failing took place took place under a previous minister's period in office. Say something as serious as the Windrush business.

Re: "There is no legal reason for him to appear."

"Of which he clearly has neither."

I suppose if I were in his position my reasoning would be "Does attending give me a chance of dropping my former colleagues in it instead of me? If so, go, if not, try and stay out of it.". In that case my not going would be indicative of my thinking I had something to hide. I wonder what his reasoning is.

Facebook faces foe formation in facial fingering fight

Re: 'Activate face recognition in Europe'

"What criteria is going to be used by Facebook to decide whether EU / non-EU data-rape rules apply:"

Their problem. They want to use that business model? Right, they have to work out how to use it and stay within the law. If they can't figure that out they either don't do it or don't complain when they get whacked..

Re: There are news Facebook would like to activate face recognition in Europe...

"On flickr user A's ability to tag user B in a photo is controlled by user B."

What about the ability to tag non-user C?

Re: OH dear....

"Well, maybe you should of thought about that before you rolled it out."

It's what you get for using artificial intelligence instead of the real thing.

Scissors cut paper. Paper wraps rock. Lab-made enzyme eats plastic

Re: shipping it around

"The only way to dispose of stuff created in the first world is to dispose of it in the first world."

OTOH most of it seems to be created in China these days.

Huawei CEO sings 'Bye, bye, mister American Pai', trims US C-suite

Are the US monitoring the manufacturing of iPhones in China just in case of any "additional features"?

Maybe it's such an additional feature that's allowing unlocking of iPhones nowadays.