Posts by Doctor Syntax

Whois? More like WHOWAS: Domain database on verge of collapse over EU privacy

It should be simple enough. Natural persons resident in the EU (or UK when the new DPA is in place) have an option from the registrar to hide personal details just like any other data subject. Where appropriate these details can be obtained from the registrar by going to court, obtaining a warrant and presenting it to the registrar. If the court disagrees about what's appropriate they don't get the warrant. It's pretty well how any other online business will have to operate. Why do they think they need to be different?

"I get over 100 emails a week offering me SEO services"

I'm not sure whether it's an improvement in Hotmail/Live/Outlook filtering but I now get very few.

Alternatively it might be a consequence of the fact that I've got into the habit of writing back if I've nothing better to do and saying that oddly enough they seem to have omitted their own domain name from their pitch so I can't check whether they're any good at getting their own site on first page in Google if I search for first page in Google. This is usually accompanied by a critique of their written English; I'd expect them to take especial care of this when presenting themselves. I usually finish up by pointing out that the address they've spammed is my spam bin and if it's typical of the list they bought they've been overcharged. The trick is to sucker them into reading through what's initially a helpful-looking the whole reply before telling them just how crap they are.

Of course they're all lead generators. I only ever had one who passed the lead on to someone who claimed to have a UK branch (situated above a language school operating out of a shop front in Longsight): probably a cousin. I wrote back pointing out the crapness of the reference sites he gave. With any luck the ?cousin got shafted for incompetence.

Re: An open registry of who owns domains is important

"The EU has passed a law that (either intentionally or unintentionally) undermines the Internet, and that when enforced in the fashion they like would actually terminate any contract that violates it. In essence, if you owned your own domain the EU is saying that the contract you signed is no longer valid – meaning it is quite possible that you no longer own your domain."

Could you cite the clause or clauses which say that?

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

"One punter was ordered to pay an extra £40 or she'd be sold a blank laptop, Which? said."

Fine. Let's see, advertised price includes the OS so that'll be £40 less than advertised. Yes, I do have Trading Standards on speed dial.

Brexit in spaaaace! At T-1 year and counting: UK politicos ponder impact

" Such a pity we have the wrong people in the wrong room with the wrong drivers and the wrong mindset."

And he seems to be one of them. Never heard of him before. There might be a reason for that.

FYI: There's a cop tool called GrayKey that force unlocks iPhones. Let's hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands!

Re: Woah! Some much tin foil, so many hats.....

"Whilst I appreciate privacy is important, security is also, and if this can help stop bad things happening, great."

You're reading it wrong. Security is indeed important and this makes bad things happen from a security point of view.

Office junior had one job: Tearing perforated bits off tractor-feed dot matrix printer paper

Re: out of paper!

"Doesn't matter how many times I say to fill it to the top, never gets done unless I do it."

An old saying: If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

"Can't remember the last time I saw anyone else use carbon paper."

As recently as yesterday evening. Should have been a month ago but my local Civic Society couldn't take subscriptions because the carbon in their receipt book had worn out! They've now got a new sheet.

Take that, com-raid: US Treasury slaps financial sanctions on Russians for cyber-shenanigans, 2016 election meddling

Wot? Not even expelling a few diplomats?

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

"Just look at how we monkey around with extinction level warfare, are xenophobic, live in the world controlled by the sociopathic likes of Putin, Trump and their buddies, and a race that is bent on subverting all scientific benefits towards destructive means"

Hove you considered the possibility that relative to the rest that might make us the good guys?

Re: Too little info

"If humans disappeared today, how long would it take for another technologically advanced species to arise?"

Good question. Technology is boot-strapped starting with easily accessible stuff and we've used the easily accessible stuff. Of course our rubbish dumps now contain a good stock of material for anyone who finds them but the remaining fossil energy sources are going to be harder to exploit.

Re: We're gonna need a bigger board

Upvoted for socks teleported out of washing. But what do they want with all those socks?

Re: Irrelevant

"Yes there are still many high power broadcasts but fewer and fewer as time passes."

And not as high power as it says on the tin. Nominally a VHF radio transmitter might be transmitting a total of a MW across its channels. In fact, that's ERP; as they don't want to waste energy radiating into space the only directions from which the tower looks like a MW job are those just above the aerial's horizon.

Re: Who said they are using EM in the first place?

"There will be a point where we simply cannot jam the required information into a spectrum band any more."

And the closer you get to that the more it looks like noise.

Re: Not useful

"We know there can't be no intelligent life."

The lower bound, however, is extremely low in astronomical terms. It's one planet. Here.

Airbus CIO: We dumped Microsoft Office not over cost but because Google G Suite looks sweet

“We want to force the organisation to make the change and drive a true transformation, and not just do a tool upgrade.”

Forget about the choice of tool. This is the sort of verbiage to worry about.

“let people go to the information that they need for their jobs… almost the opposite from an environment that is based on email where you receive whatever it is that others decide you can receive.”

Nice. Plausible deniability. No email with your name on the distribution list telling you not to do something you just did or vice versa.

Re: Well, let's just hope...

"When the internet's off, there's no work done anyway"

Only if you do your work on someone else's computer. If you don't it's quite likely that more work gets done. Unless you count browsing el Reg and watching cat videos as work.

Google to 'forget me' man: Have you forgotten what you said earlier?

Re: What DOES the EU Want Google to Be?

Then, the EU says "Google, you MUST police the Internet for us, only YOU have that power!".

This seems to be something of a misrepresentation. The EU mandates a right to be forgotten as a general right. It's not specifically about Google. In this particular case a plaintiff has raised the right against Google. It could equally be against any other search engine.

"The delisting would be a specific url / news article when the search term was NT2's name."

How would the URL/news article be specified? If it's just existing material listed in the court case it wouldn't protect against someone rehashing the material and publishing a new article. The only way to deal with the latter case would be for Google to review any new material featuring the name or variants of it as they're encountered.

"it appears to be suggested that it only impacts on a search where the search term is the claimant's name. That’s not quite accurate... It results in the delisting wherever the search terms include the claimant's name.”

This raises all sorts of issues.

First of all there are numerous people sharing the same name. The effect would be to delist results for anyone who happened to share the name. What rights would such a person have if they wanted their name to feature in the result?

It also raises the question of what happens if the search includes words which go to make up the name. For instance, if the name was John Smith and I happen to search for a John Brown who was a smith does it mean that all the results I was looking for are to be delisted?

And what happens if I search for something completely unrelated but someone whose name coincides with the named person appears in the results? Would the result including that name be delisted even if it referred to the person involved? How would Google even be expected to know whether it was the same person or not?

Intel: Our next chips won't have data leak flaws we told you totally not to worry about

Re: So

"go down to your local retailer in 6 months or so and buy them"

...as part of a whole new computer.

Re: Actually...

I'm surprised there aren't more publicly known errors in it.

FTFY

Poop to save planet as boffins devise bullsh*t way of extracting gas

Re: Crap News?

"Is any part of this story actually new or novel?"

Using the CO2 which is also included in the biog as by addition of hydrogen (produced using some energy source), a catalyst and some more energy to get methane that can be burned to produce energy and CO2.

"Not quite - it's not a closed system, so it's not perpetual motion. The sun adds energy to the system, so it's not impossible."

The sun adds the initial energy. But on this scheme, having burnt the methane (including the methane produced as such by the digester) they have CO2. And as this is essentially a system for using CO2 and hydrogen (from ???) and more energy (from ???) the only limit to repeating this indefinitely is ??? As I said, the Underpant Gnomes version of perpetual motion, powered by ???

Taking a look at what they're doing, I see that the "anaerobic" digester produces carbon dioxide as well as methane. So, using energy from ??? they convert it to methane which can then be burnt to produce energy (and, incidentally, get the carbon dioxide back). It's the Underpant Gnomes' version of the perpetual motion machine.

Re: Crap Digesters

"Most of the Methane generated by our Bovine friends actually comes out of their front ends and not the rear."

This digesters like this aren't dealing with the bovine gaseous products. They deal with the solids. Well, semi-solids.

I thought those digesters produced methane directly? What's this one producing? Ethylene?

Transport for NSW scrambles to patch servers missing fixes released in 2007

Surely IBM has multiple layers of management.

And surely all those managers are their because of their technical competence - aren't they?

So surely those managers could lend a hand to do essential work.

After all, no business would be so foolish as to cut the staff who know how to do the work the company depends on and leave it overstaffed by those who don't. Would it?

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

Re: All Pi's need USB3!

"I'm using one Pi in a rather unorthodox location and have 17 USB devices connected externally (including the hubs). No-one should have to go through what I did to get that working."

Hove you considered that you might need more than one computer (that's more than one at the same time) to do all that properly?

Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

"You're comparing apples to oranges."

No, he's comparing Apples to Raspberries.

@James Hughes 1

Can I just float this idea & see what the rest of the commentards make of it.

The existing Pi layout sprouts connectors in all sorts of directions which is fine for a bench-top gadget.

Trying to incorporate this in some sort of integrated device, say the PiTop or the NextCloud box the arrangement is really sub-optimal. In the PiTop, for instance, the need to get an internal connection for the keyboard plugged into the Pi means that the board is set far back into the case making the connectors awkward to access from the outside and the keyboard lead blocks the headphone socket.

Can I suggest an alternative layout for system builders?

HDMI, headphones, network and at least two USB sockets all line up on one edge which could then be made accessible to the outside of the box.

At least one USB would be on another edge for internal user - keyboard and/or storage.

The power connector would also be internal on the assumption that such a device would have its own internal powere (e.g. Pi batteries) or some sort of internal power distribution so that storage doesn't have to draw from the board.

Re: I hope the Bluetooth works better on this one

I wanted remote keyboards to go with Kodi (better than faffing with on-screen keyboards) and ended up buying a couple of compacts which paired with their own USB devices rather than BT. At first it seemed a bit pointless to tie up a USB connector. Having read these comments it seems they were were the better option than pure bluetooth.

Re: Dates

" Four and twenty blackbirds"

To be fair, "twenty four blackbirds" would ruin the scansion.

Trump’s immigration policies costing US tech jobs says LogMeIn CEO

"He now believes that won’t be possible, that the company will instead need to establish bigger offices offshore and that the net outcome will be fewer employees in the USA....He added his hope that the cost of running extra offshore offices is offset by lower labour costs, so that shareholders don’t see extra cost."

Translation: Great. We now have the perfect excuse for off-shoring as much as possible to the cheapest possible country and blame the govt. for any public backlash.

Openreach hiring thousands more engineers

Re: Engineers...?

"Be great of the Register could use the correct terminology."

And equally great of the PR numpties who write press releases.

MailChimp 'working' to stop hackers flinging malware-laced spam from accounts

“It is unclear how spammers managed to gain access to MailChimp's systems"

Really? I thought it was perfectly clear. I regard MailChimp and those like them as spammers.

Come May I'll be making it clear to anyone I do business and who shows signs of thinking otherwise with that they do not have my permission to send any of my personal information, namely by email address, to MailChimp or any of the rest of the spamming industry.

NHS Digital heads accused of being 'suppliers', not 'custodians' of UK patient data

Gordon said the body was only providing information “of an administrative kind” to those who were seeking to pursue criminal offences. He said the body saw the MoU with home office as “lawful and proportionate”.

I wonder if Mr Gordon will be taking legal advice before May because I'd have thought that this:

191

(1)Liability of directors etc

Subsection (2) applies where—

(a) an offence under this Act has been committed by a body corporate, and

(b) it is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of or to be attributable to neglect on the part of—

(i) a director, manager, secretary or similar officer of the body corporate, or

(ii) a person who was purporting to act in such a capacity.

(2)The director, manager, secretary, officer or person, as well as the body corporate, is guilty of the offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.

puts him right in the firing line.

Patch LOSE-day: Microsoft secures servers of the world. By disconnecting them

Re: I just don't get it.

"Calm down and see what happens first. Perhaps even consider some testing too."

Unless someone takes up your second piece of advice everyone will sit calmly for a few days, then, because there've been no reports of problems, everyone applies the patches on Friday - just in time for a week-end's panic.

Ex-Equifax exec charged with insider trading after bagging 1 MEEELLION dollars in stock sale

"they were cleared of insider dealing by a panel of three directors from other firms."

Assuming they have their own days in court I can't see a judge and jury being impressed by that.

More power to UK, say 'leccy vehicle makers. Seriously, they need it

Re: A pragmatic view?

"Too many electric charging points are being installed in poor locations, shopping centres open 9 - 8 is useless. I want to plug in on arrival at my hotel......why are councils not providing road side charging? Lack of demand!"

So everyone should run round and provide charging points suitable for your convenience at their expense? Or do I misread you?

Re: Batteries are a stupid solution for EV's anyway...

"Longer term, increasingly autonomous vehicles are going to lead to a massive reduction in vehicle ownership anyway"

The chief characteristics of autonomous vehicles for hire on demand (which is what I think you have in mind) have been achieved for years in taxis. They supply a limited market, great for getting to the airport, not great for getting everyone to work in the morning and back at night. Great for walking or tube/bus replacement within cities, not great for going on long trips.

It's difficult to see why taking the human driver out will change this substantially. Indeed, the reported experience of driving down the cost of the human by Uber is that it increases the walking/tube/bus replacement and adds to congestion.

Re: Batteries are a stupid solution for EV's anyway...

"Cars spend 90% of their time parked, time that is more than long enough to keep them topped up with charge."

Only if there's somewhere to plug it in. How many of the places where cars are parked have a charging point available? How do you propose to set up the infrastructure to provide the extras you'd need? No, it's not just a matter of dig a hole and stick in a little post for every few metres of pavement. Have you thought how hefty a 3-phase cable you have to provide down each side of each street where those posts go? And the extra sub-station capacity to supply those cables? And the extra infrastructure to get power to such sub-stations in a city? And the extra generating capacity to drive all that?

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

"Costs me about £12 a month to charge it overnight, £0 a month in tax, and about £40 a month in petrol"

The £0 a month in tax won't last. The numbers on the road right now are small enough for HMG to afford this as a political gesture. As the numbers mount they'll need the income. They'll also need more income to replace fuel duty. Perhaps a flat rate tax equivalent to existing VED and a mileage charge to replace fuel duty.

Like all the other things that make EVs practical now the taxation advantage doesn't scale.

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

" the latest fast chargers are 120kW. A 1/2 hour stop for food and bladder relief should be able to add 180+ miles range, or about another 3 hours of motorway driving (by which time you'll probably be in need of another stop anyway)."

That assumes than pulling into a service station car park you'll be able to park at one of these chargers. If we went all-EV that means that most if not all parking places in the car park would have one.

Now tell us how you're going to get the required number of megawatts into a motorway service station car park.

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

"Actually Mr Commswonk, the UK has plenty of power, it's the ability to delivery it that is a little wonky."

That's pretty much what he wrote except for one qualification: "little".

A row of lamp-posts charging cars are going to need a much heftier supply than one just lighting the road. That's the sort of infrastructure problem he referred to. Than, of course, unless you put the lamp-posts a lot closer together most drivers won't be able to park next to one to charge up. Cue nightly fights between drivers trying to get charged.

A decade? Nowhere near long enough. You're talking about replacing multiple decades of investment in both the grid and vehicle refuelling.

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

"There is no denying that for that journey its going to be a faff but its not generally that hard and console yourself that for the 98% of the rest of the time you wont be visiting any petrol stations and will charge at home."

It probably becomes harder than you think if he has to queue for an hour or so at each service station waiting for his quarter of an hour or however long it takes for the "quick" charge.

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

"They are fitting fast charging points at service stations, and supermarket car parks are getting charging points also."

1. How fast is fast in relation to fuelling and equivalent mileage into a petrol-powered car?

2. How many charging points are there in a supermarket car park in relation to the number of cars that might need charging there if the country went all-EV?

3. How would you provide sufficient power to such places if the country went all-EV and the majority of vehicle owners depended on them?

Re: This has not been properly thought out.

"You shouldn't write off the whole electric car idea just because it is of little use to you (or me)."

Similarly you shouldn't specify electric cars for all because they can do all you happen to need.

Maplin shutdown sale prices still HIGHER than rivals

"But the repeated leveraged buy-outs of Maplin by private equity players was arguably where the rot first set in, leaving it with high debts and owners that wanted to milk the firm for all they could."

el Reg needs to give up the vulture logo. These guys are the real vultures.