Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Capt May has hit the iceberg but continues to order full steam ahead"
As reality sinks in I think it's slow astern to the only reasonable Brexit; one where we keep just about everything intact in trading terms to minimise damage but, not actually being in the EU, have no say over the rules. It's called taking back control.
I think it was Matthew Parris who said reality will do the heavy lifting.
BoJo was right for once. The compromise was turd polishing but I don't think he'd quite cottoned on to the fact that the turd is Brexit itself.
So you have the option to report to the ICO and look like a good boy or not report and line yourself up for the top tier of fines for not doing so if the ICO disagrees with your risk assessment of the breach. Deciding whether to report or not is also a risk assessment, of course. Does the quality of assessment on whether to report indicate anything about the quality of assessment of the breach?
We have a projector at work which hands out DHCP even though its address is configured manually and the DHCP function shows "off" in all the relevant menus. Panasonic just deny it's possible.
Had the same problem with an extra wireless access point at home. DHCP off but still handing out addresses. No, can't happen according to vendor.
"Is that the collective 'we' of humanity or the ditto scientists who carried out this waste of time."
Complain to HR, manglement or whoever about what almost every office dweller knows and you'll be told you're wrong. They'll tell you that "studies show" you're wrong.
The "studies" are almost certainly going to be unreferreed reports by consultants who'll charge to come out and re-plan your workspace into an open office or office furniture manufacturers who'll sell you the hardware to do that. Having something with the intellectual weight of Proc. Roy. Soc. B behind it should strengthen your arm - unless, of course you're dealing with PHBs who don't know the reputation that journal bears.
"Sometimes I wonder why people - especially scientists - seem surprised by findings like this."
Who said they were surprised? It was scientists who did the work. It's doing the work (and being prepared to be surprised but enlightened if the work had shown the hypothesis to be wrong) that makes it science.
"It also shows just how out of touch the regulatory bodies are to suggest modern banking could switch over to manual! There is no plan B - rapid recovery of the service is the only feasible course of action and is where the focus should remain."
It's not necessarily so simple.
What the TSB incident shows - or at least what we're told - is that the core systems were OK but that it was the surrounding access layers were the problem and that that affected online, telephone and the branch systems. If the were various access routes (from the customer perspective) didn't depend on a common access layer the system would have been more resilient in that if the online access failed telephone service would have been possible and if ATMs didn't work cash could be obtained over the counter.
If a bank's customers are left effectively destitute "it's too complicated" isn't an acceptable answer.
In the old days it took tens of thousands of well trained clerks occupying endless rows of desks to run a handful of simple account types. Now banks have hundreds of flavours of their "product" the reality is I.T. IS their business - without it they don't have a business - and yet still, management consider I.T. to be a "cost" to be slashed away at
They probably thought the tens of thousands of clerks were a cost to be cut.
"but in the worst case customers will take their government-guaranteed money elsewhere and that will be that."
That's the problem from the government's point of view. The money comes from government (well, from all of us really but that's rarely a consideration for government, especially the Treasury which considers it really owns all the money anyway). It isn't the bank's worst case, or the customers' worst case they're worried about, it's their worst case. If a bank fails its the government that's at risk and it wants to minimise that risk. That's why they want to regulate.
Asking "What is your back up plan?" is the wrong question!
I think they're using the term in a different sense than you're interpreting it. "What's your fall-back plan?" would have been less ambiguous. There needs to be a means of carrying on business whilst all the restoration, repair etc. is being undertaken.
The embarrassing thing for the banks is that it might involve customers visiting their local branch. Local? What local branch?
"All of the complexities of synchronisation, interface routing, master/slave data stores is a pain....We have tried arguing for MVP deployments of the new system with an ongoing build out of function only for the MVP scope to be insisted to be what the old system does in order to avoid business change."
And how would your less than big bang MVP remove those complexities? Surely it's the cause of them.
"it turned out that their gates simply lifted off the hinges."
The comms team had a big cabling job to do at the warehouse over a weekend. The warehouse was near a football ground. When they got there they found some local wide boys had lifted the locked gates off the hinges and were selling car parking to match goers.
"stone castles were reasonably impregnable to direct attack."
A bit more laborious but you could also undermine the walls. It needed some sort of shelter unless to approach. You shored up the excavation with wooden props until a enough length of wall was undermined and then light a fire to burn the props out. I think this how "mine" also came to be used for an explosive device.
"I had a friend at college who always carried a screwdriver and would unscrew tables, chairs, anything held together by screws."
A few of us paid a visit to the NUU in Coleraine not long after it opened. The bit we were in was constructed out of a sort of oversized Meccano. I wondered how much of it could be dismantled overnight by a determined squad of students armed with the right size spanners.
New laptop ordered. Despatched one afternoon down to distribution hub halfway to London. Then returned by nextmorning to local distribution hub about the same distance from the point of despatch as myself but in the opposite direction. Whilst watching its final moves on that roundabout trip its despatch location was on the same map. It must have done at least 250 miles to travel about 12.
flightradar24 turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Very few of the planes going over or near our house seem to have the required transponders. The PIA flights on the way to land about 20 miles away are easily identifiable without it; they're the ones coming in low enough to read the pilot's name badge.
"a pet fountain (? shakes head sadly)"
Can we take guesses as to what it really was?
Actually, a pet fountain raises various images. Assorted animals cascading into the air... Dabbsie patting a fountain on the head saying "There, there, who's a good fountain"... It reminds me of a sign outside a farm advertising Pet Hay. Takes all sorts.
"Have a flat square that the head can move across"
Probably even more complicated. The head has to be stopped and then restarted in the opposite direction at the end of each scan. The need for accuracy of positioning doesn't go away. Scanning by adjusting a small element of the optics would only allow a small area to be scanned and is probably better employed in making fine adjustments. Above all, however, spinning disks and radial head movements are a well established technology in storage mechanisms.
"is the EU willing to play the ultimatum card and eventually start the wholesale balkanization of the Internet by usurping all ICANN functions?"
That's why I'd prefer a geographically diverse range of registrars, as many as possible, to act so that sheer weight of numbers would avoid balkanization.
"but at this point I can't really see how it can be worse"
It could very easily. A few governments have wanted this option for the simple reason that they want to get some control over the net and this would be their best option.
My preference would be for the internet community itself, or at least the widest possible geographic range of registrars acting on our behalf, to to more or less what Lee suggests but to do this independently of any government.
