Posts by Doctor Syntax 40560 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I'm suspicious of the wording "court-appointed estate administrators" who might not be working in the interests of the heirs.
I'd expect it to mean that the deceased died intestate. In the absence of a Will appointing executors there'd need to be a court order to appoint them. They should work in the interests of the heirs, indeed, they may be the heirs themselves, but as this seems to be in the US, who knows?
"Unfortunately, Yahoo cannot provide passwords or allow access to the deceased's account, including account content such as email. At the time of registration, all account holders agree to the Yahoo Terms (TOS). Pursuant to the Terms, neither the Yahoo account nor any of the content therein are transferable, even when the account owner is deceased."
Account holders may agree. Their executors won't have agreed. Are the executors bound by the deceased's agreement? They'd have right of access to other restricted containers (for want of a better word) such as safe deposits; on what basis can Yahoo hold themselves above this right?
"I'm a dinosaur, and therefore I use discrete email clients"
Thee & me alike. But getting access shouldn't be impossible for nearest & dearest providing you didn't encrypt the hard drive. Just take it out & mount it in another box. It doesn't require a trip to court. There's always a downside to "convenience". Security is one. Inconvenience when you need something out of the ordinary is another.
This assumes that the email was left on the mail provider's servers. Why? It's just open to abuse by anyone with access, legal or otherwise to the server. Download, delete from server, delete or save locally as appropriate. Backup as appropriate.
You want it on multiple devices? Copy it to multiple devices.
now you spend your whole life saying "no" to the marketing department.
Definitely a good idea. Every business should appoint someone full time to do just this. Come GDPR time, now only a few months away, they're the ones most likely to bring big fines down on your company.
"Copy the code to your own server and you'll find you've not kept up with updates and you get hacked."
Why are so many updates required (it seems to be a given in a number of comments)? If it's because the code is a bundle of bugs you'd be better off not having it. If it's because of new "features" (did someone say Agile?) then those updates may be adding more vulnerabilities, not removing them.
"If the 'purpose' is e.g. a website to advertise a product that will earn your company £50K p.a. you can't afford code audits of JQuery, Ruby or whatever the current flavour of the month is."
If, for want of a proper audit - or reducing the amount of flavour of the month - the consequence is that you end up damaging your would-be customers the loss of reputation, damages and maybe fines is also something you can't afford.
Security may be expensive. Lack of it can cost more.
@ Flocke Kroes
There's another aspect to lock in. Our S/W only cost £. But the latest version is incompatible with the one you've got. You want to read the file someone just sent you? That's another £ for the latest version. In a couple of years it'll be another £ when someone else sends you a file.
"I'm not really getting this, any explanations would be welcomed."
It depends on what you're doing. If you're busy typing a document, reading mail or commenting on el Reg there'll be a burst of activity every time you hit a key. The waiting time until you hit the next key will be an age in terms of CPU cycles so that you'll not notice that the brief burst of activity was slightly less brief. Even the time spend dragging the next mail or page from the net doesn't disturb the CPU's peace that much. If you look at the processes running on a modern OS you'll see there's other stuff running beside what you think of as your application but they only typically consume a few % or less.
If you're doing something more compute-intensive, especially something that involves a lot of /IO such as streaming lots of data from the network or disk then you might well see a slow-down. The reason for the I/O effect is that it's the OS that handles the I/O and it's the switches between application and OS kernel that are affected by the mitigation. In there's still some slack time on your CPU you might not notice but you're likely to find the fan running faster because more work is being done and more heat generated. If the extra work is sufficient to push you from having some idle CPU time to being 100% all the time then you'll find the system slowing down somewhat. If your CPU was running flat out before the mitigation you'll find it a lot slower because it's now trying to do the original work plus the extra and the only way it can achieve that is by taking longer.
"but in this case I did not find any redeeming features worthy of upvote."
Likewise. He did say he didn't necessarily approve but that's not good enough.
Some of us have been around long enough to look at DevOps and realise that that's what we were doing long ago - one team developing, managing the system and supporting our users. We were also aware that what the users were doing was what brought in the money to pay our salaries so not only did we take care to provide what they needed but were also paranoid about protecting the integrity of the data. As we were running systems which weren't internet connected it was second nature to us to keep control of source ourselves. Had the opportunity been given to us to store source elsewhere that sense of responsibility would have precluded it anyway. That's how you build a business to last decades - assuming the manglement doesn't have other ideas.
"I've been saying for a while that GitHub (and Bitbucket, and GitLab, etc.) are doing open source a disservice, by making the primary route to accessing a project's source code be tied to a particular identity - either that of a single person, or a single organisation."
What do you suggest? A project site has the same issue: somebody has to own the registration of the domain, arrange for hosting, etc. A distributed model without its own domain has the problem of keeping all the copies in sync in the absence of an agreed master.
"I am hoping they were ALL posted with humour intended behind them because why else would one suggest a couple of $$ (or ££) of plastic and a manual water control system to protect tens of thousands of $$ (or tens of thousands ££) of delicate and mission critical electronic systems"
At the pay-grade of those who do things like that it's not delicate, mission critical electronic systems, it's just stuff. The water just needs catching and emptying it's the next shift's problem.
I've seen a delivery driver want to drop a heavy, delicate and expensive piece of electromechanical kit off the back of his van because there wasn't a tail lift and they'd not arranged for a fork-lift. To him it was just another crate. There were enough of us to insist he didn't and to slide it down a plank.
"I'm glad someone gets it."
It helps to have worked in a carbon dating lab. Carbon 14 is also a weak beta emitter, a bit different in energy but it meant the same counting technology would see both if the material going into the counter was a hydrocarbon.
Tritium in the hydrogen supply was a concern. On the methane counting system there was a supply of "old" hydrogen as the source of the hydrogen in the methane. The later benzene counting system was a different matter. The hydrogen came from water (carbon and lithium heated to produce lithium carbide, add large excess of water to produce acetylene which is then catalytically converted to benzene). The best that could be done was distil the water to reduce the tritium content. That just left the radon problem. When your water supply comes from a granite catchment you have radon in your tap water.
Then there was the Great Melton Street Flood. A high pressure main in Melton St next to Euston Station ruptured, washing out a huge crater in the road and flooding the underground car park.
It didn't affect our computer rooms. It found something much bigger and electrical: the Tube system. We had an operator on his way in to start a shift. He told us the train stopped. The lights went out. And then the water started coming through the floor....
"Is there an exemption for the functioning of government ?"
Yes, providing, as you say, it's a statutory function. HMG seem to be trying to slip in some extra exemption in the current bill. If they get it through the Commons I can see a quick trip to the ECJ while there's still time. It would be pretty daft of them to do this if it ends up by costing equivalence post-Brexit.
"There is a complete absence of thorough worked examples for many scenarios."
What makes you think that there should be? The ICO don't know your business or your systems. The legislation is there. You need to look at how your business is affected by it, just like any other piece of legislation. Would you, for instance, expect a thorough worked example of how to fit fire doors to your premises so you could comply with legislation on fire protection?
"However that does not stop states creating legislation that goes further than an EU regulation"
There was an article here a week or so ago about the EU getting at upset that countries hadn't adopted it yet: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/eu_gdpr_infringement_procedure/
"if after brexit we are no longer under the ECJ then who is going to issue fines in the UK under the GDPR and if it's an EU related issue how will they collect from a UK company without any legal options?"
The GDPR has to be implemented in local legislation in each country. That's why there's a new Data Protection Bill going through Parliament now. When it received Royal Assent it will become the new Data Protection Act. Like the others, the ICO will be the body in day-to-day charge. The ECJ doesn't come into it. This will be the situation from this May and unless a subsequent govt. tinkers with it it'll remain. Any govt would be mad to tinker with it except in one specific circumstance because it would greatly harm all manner of trade with the EU, or at least such as survives Brexit.
The one circumstance is that the EU changes or replaces GDPR in which case we'll have to make parallel changes without having had any input into the EU process. It's called "taking back control".
"Them spineless bastards wouldnt dare build one themselves and it is better for the Irish not to have a border."
So how is this issue going to be handled? Any hint that the border moves to the Irish Sea and the Home Sec of Downing St will be visiting HM to ask for a dissolution of Parliament.
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