Posts by Doctor Syntax

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Re: No Visible Effect????

This year NatWest "Fraud Department" have twice stopped an online payment to my accountant.......they say It looked like fraud.....

If it happens a third time it's definitely your fault.

Re: Make the management legally liable

That way also lies the retention of corporate knowledge, something that's all too often undervalued until it's too late.

Re: lose-lose

"Now, systems are abstracted into so many layers"

That should be an advantage. Layers can and should be isolated except for the specific channels needed to communicate between one layer and the next. The reality is that if they aren't crammed into a single environment on somebody else's computer controlled by somebody else's staff, then even if the layers each have their own H/W there's very likely a common admin sub-net and once access is gained to that it's game over.

Re: Conferences not needed

Agreed, and that needs directors telling the shareholders that and telling them it's a legal requirement, rightly so because a successful attack will cost even more in dividends.

Re: Make the management legally liable

"Unless the CSuite is made legally liable .... Nothing will change."

I'm not sure CSuite are roles defined in law but directorships are. Vague words such as "responsible person" could be aimed at CxOs but used by them to direct responsibility so a scapegoat down the food chain. So let's stick with directors. Make it a specific item in directors' duties written into company law: get hacked, get prosecuted quite possibly get sued by shareholders and get banned from holding future directorships (executive summary).

Re: What "massive disruption" did Harrods experience?

Immediate impact on the Co-op seemed to be minimal at the store - contactless payment didn't work but chip & PIN did. It took a few days for the lack of replenishment to become obvious.

The BL's report is here: https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf/

LegoGPT is here to make your blocky dreams come true

Re: Dear God in Heaven ... please NO MORE AI ... endless AI crap is too much to bear !!!

Look on it not as a despoiling of Lego but as an improvement of LLMs.

Re: God Mode

Surely one for the Ig Nobels.

Re: Ava Pun

Came with an expectation of what the first comment would be about. Was not disappointed.

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Is this the start of a new era for Microsoft? An era of actually testing stuff so they discover it's bad before they shove out of the door?

Re: LLM Process Scheduling?

They let LLM conduct the tests.

Re: Where is the website suggesting more outlandish uses for AI ?

I'm not sure "flavour" is the right word but I applaud your thinking.

Re: HOW DID IT GET MERGED INTO THE TREE AT ALL?

It got smuggled in via Speedos?

Re: I wonder what it is

Telemetry fails to execute?

s/11//

US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days

"Recognizing the importance of a sustainable, long-term, and mutually beneficial economic and trade relationship,"

So long term = 90 days. I suppose that fits most CxOs' time horizon.

A new Lazarus arises – for the fourth time – for Pascal programming fans

Re: Not fun

Agreed UCSD was non-GUI. I was using it on a Z80 and there was no underlying OS, only the BIOS. But I did use it to control micro-spectrophotometry equipment which required low-level access to the H/W for the ADC board on the S-100 bus, the extra 4-bits of ADC I added on a home-built board, the stepping motor for the diffraction grating and the HP plotter. Don't ask me how I did it because it was a long time ago and seems extremely improbably when I write it but it all worked. AFAICR it included the ability to write and call Z80 assembly so that was probably involved as well.

Re: Not fun

The main issue of "Pascal" was it was not portable across platforms.

UCSD p-System was in that, like Java, it defined a virtual processor and compiled to that processor's "machine" code, the virtual processor being implemented on a number of different platforms. The original Apple Pascal was UCSD with a 6502 implementation of the p-machine.

Kylix was badly received because it didn't work well. The IDE was Delphi on a customised version of WIne with a cross-compiler. I had code that compiled under Delphi but threw a spurious compilation error under Kylix. The real problem was that it got left behind. It was released, IIRC, towards the end of the version 2 kernel era and didn't get updated for version 4 when a lot of the underlying libraries changed. Nothing to do with Linux "purity", Borland let it die.

Re: No OOP in the new book?

"I always think a OO language is just the non OO one where the object reference (self, this) has crawled under the procedure name and advertised (->) itself to the left of the now rechristened method"

In order to do that the language also needs to provide for the definition of methods accompanying data structures. That's the feature that makes it an OO language.

Code can be written in an OO style in any language that provides some form of data structure, much as a Basic style program can be written in an other language; it's just that adding OO features to the language makes it easier. (Writing an OO program that is, not a Basic one!)

Re: Not fun

I've used both but my initial step was Pascal to C. I found them to be the pessimal* distance from each other for learning one from the other in that they do similar things in quite different ways. It's a very long time since I used C. Come to think of it, it's a long time since I've used Pascal either except for a few toy applications for my own use but as they've been GUI applications for Linux they were written with Lazarus.

* I thought I'd made it up but it really is a word.

Re: No OOP in the new book?

"Almost completely and utterly wrong, but interesting."

An admirable illustration of the "all you have is a hammer" principle in taking an inappropriate use of OO as a counter example of the whole in favour of sequential data processing and pipelines.

As a counter example I'd offer my little Object Pascal file card program with different card types for text, tabular and image data, an absolute natural for OO in presentation. For storage, however, I had two options, a database (underlain by a set approach) such as SQLite or text which involved sequential processing.

Or my crossword assistant. It would be unreasonable to expect SWMBO to construct a grep command so it gets encapsulated in OP with the output displayed in a TMemo object.

Successful application development requires thinking in whatever mode is appropriate - OO, sets (OO fundamentalists freak out at the idea of an RDMBS), sequential or anything else that springs to mind.

Pragmatism is the true approach.

"I wonder it it will make it into the new Debian/Devuan"

It has. It was RC3 when I looked but no doubt the final version will follow PDQ.

I wonder it it will make it into the new Debian/Devuan - the hard freeze date is supposed to be next week. I'll be interested to try it out but I found a number of issues with complex programs developed with the current implementation but the FPC version is the same.

Britain's cyber agents and industry clash over how to tackle shoddy software

Re: Hmm.

That's the power of lock-in.

The usual chant is "fine them more, imprison the directors", but there's little evidence that works

How many directors have been personally brought to book for security breaches? don't recall seeing that reported here and I suspect it's none. If it isn't specifically in the list of directors' responsibilities it would be hard to make the charge stick.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

He hasn't noticed he's being ripped off by farm machinery repairs?

"English" is a language as well as a nationality. Even the US speaks something resembling it.

(Who was it who valued the origins Cooks Tours as whe would always be welcomed in broken English by a broken Englishman?)

"the Trump shills, Putinistas and Faragists all seem very silent on these topics"

Not entirely. There was one right before your comment. Shameless.

DOGE worker's old creds found exposed in infostealer malware dumps

Re: There is more than one of everything.

"Reorganise and simplify your tech, because if your internal systems are connected to the net, you are vulnerable."

We need it to be mandatory that for major failures like the British Library, M&S, the Co-op etc there are reviews as to how the damage spread so widely and how the system might have been designed to avoid that. As with air accidents, the findings need to be then applied more widely. To back it up, responding to such findings needs to be made a part of directors' fiduciary responsibilities - neglect them and if your company gets hacked you can be fined, sued personally by shareholders and banned from holding directorships in the future.

Re: There is more than one of everything.

If it's not practical the day may come when you have to make the cold restart and wade through legacy as well.

"excusable because while Schutt’s info was found in records associated with a 2013 Adobe breach, the 2016 LinkedIn breach, and Gravatar’s 2020 breach"

Did these reveal reuse of passwords? That would not have been excusable.

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: who tests the testers?

We had a senior but human accountant whose retirement do invitations were "to debate the motion that £NAME be referred to as a former officer of the company".

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

Of course, the extra memory needed for the code to do it that way will mean out of memory is reached sooner.

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

It's time to bring it back. It would need to cover updates to microcode as well.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: Power cables

Oddly, not that I can recall.

I can't remember whether the incident was before or after we found him recovering used benzene by distilling it in a 2 lire flask heated by a couple of bunsens.

Re: rotating cat

When it's accelerating it's in free fall and would feel weightless.

Re: Cats just sit on the keyboard

Or the other way around.

Re: We had an issue with a rabbit

Maybe that's what happened in Spain but with two storks.

Feds disrupt proxy-for-hire botnet, indict four alleged net miscreants

It's all a bit Wild West so why bother with indictments of persons not in custody? Just offer dead or alive rewards.

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

Which just illustrates the futility of setting concrete timelines for such a project.

Re: Three years?

"Just wondering what years not to fly."

Just keep both feet on the ground from now onwards.

Re: Amazing ..

TMMM should be required reading. But then, I suppose reading isn't understanding.

US govt's science foundation purges 37 divisions, equity unit among casualties

Re: Science in the <s>public</s> interest of the for-profit Caliphate

"Nurse, he's out of bed again."

Re: Well, ...

And exactly what does this have to do with gutting the research that's been feeding the US's pharmaceutical industry etc. for the last decades?

Re: Well, ...

It's news to me that 100% of people voted for Trump but I suppose it says so on his Trump Social thing so you'll believe it.

You may be right. The US science/industrial complex has reached the end of the line. No more transfers from academic research to products.That's going to be the prerogative of wiser countries in the future.

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Re: I'm sure...

"The idea is stupid and probably not as feasible as the article, let alone the politician, thinks it is"

Such politician's dabbling should be required to come with a proof of concept implementation.

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

Re: Added value from Oracle Java?

They gain reassurance from the superstition that if you pay for it it must be good and if you don't it isn't.

It's called knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

To clarify that comment - his credentials suggest he's entitled to be a law unto himself.