Posts by Doctor Syntax

Yarrrr, the Business Software Alliance reckons piracy be down, me hearties

"t's the GDP to price radio"

Nice Freudian slip in the context of piracy.

Ex-CEO on TalkTalk mega breach: It woz 'old shed' legacy tech wot done it

In other words "do as I say, not as I did". AKA being wise after the event.

UK has data adequacy issues? Oof, that's too bad! says Isle of Man

"partly to ensure the economy didn't become too heavily reliant on e-gaming – the government took a bet on digital cash and exchanges."

And how do these differ from e-gaming?

Missed our Continuous Lifecycle conference? Relive it in video

Thanks for the videos. They give me a chance to miss it a second time.

Nadella tells worried GitHub devs: Judge us by our actions

Opportunities

"Business developers, not devs, talk about opportunities."

There's the insane "nothing bad" management style that insists on thinking of things as opportunities, not problems.* It might not be how MS sees these opportunities but it might be the way devs see them when they encounter them.

* Note that "problem" seems to be almost totally replaced by "issue" in current usage.

"judge us by the actions"

We have.

'Tesco probably knows more about me than GCHQ': Infosec boffins on surveillance capitalism

" I'd suggest that the authorities are not fit for purpose."

We're pretty sure they aren't anyway.

Re: Tesco Does Not Know More About Me

"Then they play muzak, so I go the extra mile to Lidl instead."

Upvoted for the Lidl reference: no music, no ads, no burbling DJs. Peace and quiet.

Re: Tesco Does Not Know More About Me

"Not when it's switched of, they aren't. And mine is switched off"

Similar situation here except that the phone's probably switched on but left at home and possibly with a flat battery. In any case it's a fairly ancient one and although it has GPS I can never get it to work properly - it probably wants a data SIM which the PAYGO isn't in order to get maps or something.

Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work

Re: IBM Software

"They'd obviously decided it was easier/cheaper to just update the manual, than fix the software!"

The converse of the Feynman story. As part of the Challenger investigation he was looking at the process for recycling the booster segments after they'd been knocked out of round. There were a series of holes and the opposite ones at the point of the bulge had to be lined up in a machine to apply a squeeze. There were problems counting off the correct number of holes to locate the correct pair. He suggested painting a series of marks so only a few holes would have to be counted off. He was told it would be too expensive. "To paint a few marks?" "No, to update the manuals."

"everybody was expected to do all roles"

If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job.

Re: Worse still ...

Isn't that the way MS is doing things: "Our customers are our testers."... ?

No the users are the testers. They're also the product. The customers are those who buy the slurped data.

Re: Had a close call

"Did I mention he was REALLY thick?"

No but you did say he was a sales guy. For them words are just squiggles when written or sounds when spoke; they don't have meaning.

Re: Had a close call

"You were working for TSB at the time"

No, he said it was a near miss. TSB was a bullseye.

Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle: Sterile neutrino

Re: This is not making physics any easier

"new physics..., and physicists ... love that."

It keeps them in work.

Microsoft commits: We're buying GitHub for $7.5 beeeeeeellion

Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

"Bottom line was cost."

Did you work out the possible cost of not having control?

Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

@ Geoffrey W

There are all sorts of things you could get someone to do for you better than doing it yourself. Looking after your trade secrets might not be one of them.

Re: How can it possibly be worth that much?

Customers Users are now the product to be sold, rented, hired, wrung out and have their privacy prostituted at every turn

FTFY - the real customers are those to whom the users are sold, or at least rented, but otherwise spot on.

Send printer ink, please. More again please, and fast. Now send it faster

Re: Back in the 80's

"today is my last day of gainful employment in IT and after 40 years I'm being put out to pasture"

Welcome.

Re: Reminds me of French sales

"Well if a tomato is a fruit, who can say that a grape can't be a vegetable?"

They're both fruit but that also makes them vegetable (as opposed to animal or mineral).

Re: Reminds me of French sales

"There are corruption and bribery policies in place for that sort of thing now."

Easily solved. Don't order the one for the customer.

Whois? Whowas. So what's next for ICANN and its vast database of domain-name owners?

@spectacularly refined chap

I understand your argument and enjoyed your example but where ICANN & ITU are concerned Chronos is probably nearer the mark. Not everyone is as refined as yourself.

Re: Rejected one year moratorium oddly similar to 12 months they say they need to devise a new model

"So why do they need 12 months to decide how to do what European registrars do now already?"

It's not that they need time to decide. They need time to realise that they need to decide.

"The CEO and board have been able to see first hand how they were given terrible advice time and again from their own staff."

Is it the staff giving bad advice of their own or simply telling the CEO and board what they wanted to hear?

"because that contract is illegal, not matter what American lawyers parsing every word of the text argue otherwise."

They may be right in that it's not illegal. They're just using the wrong word to distract attention from the finding that it's not enforceable.

Kill the blockchain! It'll make you fitter in the long run, honest

Re: Wut?

"Provenance, of course."

Or maybe Provence would make Mme D feel more a t home?

Re: If it's not currency, where's the incentive to mine blocks?

"Why do you need to keep a running book of authenticated transactions?"

And especially one that's so compute intensive.

Re: ...the cat farts...

"Don't forget the forsaken moaning of the arid wind, broken only by the piercing cry of a distant hawk in the parched, burning sky. Bonus points for a cow skull in the foreground!"

I never knew SE London could be so interesting.

Facebook stockholders tell Zuck to reform voting rules as data scandal branded 'human rights violation'

Re: Meh

"all we need to do is walk away."

I would if I could but I can't - for a very good reason.

Visa Europe fscks up Friday night with other GDPR: 'God Dammit, Payment Refused'

Re: Wake up call

"what about all the Internet Of Things going dark"

That comes under the heading of every Cloud having a silver lining.

The glorious uncertainty: Backup world is having a GDPR moment

Re: Ideology over mathematics

"The data in company A's backups is not indexed in any meaningful way in the current schema"

You've merged the data into B's schema. Why are you keeping backups you can't use?

"Again, the de-dupe and merge processes make automatic deletion of restored data effectively impossible."

Why is it impossible? Haven't you indexed it? On de-dupe you already deleted an entry so why should deletion of another be a problem?

Both your examples are, in fact the same: merged data sets. If the merged data set is usable it would need proper indexing and should, therefore, be possible to delete as required.

Re: Backups aren't the problem

"Erm, yeah, but I've deleted everything about Joe Bloggs of Wankstain, Essex, including his request to be deleted."

Two points. If you have some central record ID and that gets used as a foreign key in every other table affected then retain that foreign key. Otherwise retain the request. It will be needed to re-delete on restore. Without it you can't do as he asked so if you deleted it it you were doing it wrong.

Re: Is this GDPR or Right to Be Forgotten?

"As for the right to be forgotten, well, IANAL but wasn't all this discussed at length some weeks or months ago?"

Weeks and months ago. And still we have numpties crawling out of the woodwork asking about which law trumps which when storage is legally mandated.

Re: Ivory tower IT

"Maybe come down from the tower occasionally and meet the real world of personal data scattered in Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, pdfs and for all I know coded into C# objects."

If this is the primary data storage then they have other problems already. If this is secondary storage - look for it particularly in Sales and Marketing or possibly HR - it needs to be dealt with. Audit the business and delete any of it you find. Permanently. Even if it means going through old file system backups (not the same problem as RDBMS as regards data integrity). In the real world it's this sort of secondary storage in the hands of users that's most likely to cause damage.

"So who wins that one?"

Every time GDPR comes up we have to explain this all over again.

E V E R Y bloody time!

If anybody concerned with implementing GDPR compliance is still asking this sort of thing they're clearly out of their depth.

Re: Not a problem

"Why has it taken until a week after the law started for someone to say 'what about backups'?"

It hasn't.

Re: Not a problem

"If it's for a legal requirement with very infrequent and non urgent access then yes."

If this means that the PII has to be retained for legal purposes then you're in the clear.

Re: Not a problem

"You have Fred's data on a tape backup that you know you cannot dump in the bin but at the same time you can no longer read."

This raises questions about the sanity of the audit or about your failure to migrate the old data to new media once the old one becomes obsolete. It also raises the question of whether you have effectively forgotten everything on the old media already.

Re: Not a problem

"If it's that difficult for you to restore a backup, do you really have a backup?"

And why are you even keeping it that long?

Re: Not a problem

" If it's ever necessary to restore from a backup taken prior to the deletion then later transactions, including the deletion, will be reapplied."

You'd hope so but Murphy's Law can apply here.

Re: Not my field of expertise

"Erase-on-restore is probably a nonstarter because it is technically trivial to *not* erase-on-restore"

It's equally technically trivial to not act on the request in the first place. No difference.

"If you delete the tokenisation key or the master record, the record in the backup becomes (to some extent) anonymous."

How do you handle the restoration of the backup of the key?

Re: Not my field of expertise

My only question is, once you've "forgotten" about somebody, how do you remember to forget them on a restore?

GDPR allows you to keep PII which is being held for a good reason. You couldn't, for instance, forget the delivery details of an order which is yet to be despatched. On this basis one should be able to hold the forget request until all the backups that the real data may be on have been superseded and wiped.

Don't read this, Oracle... It's the rise of the open-source data strategies

Re: Not puff piece. Not employer

"As it says at the bottom of the article, Matt is head of ecosystem at Adobe. He left Mongo DB in 2014."

But still pushing cloud, e.g. "a developer's first decision is what cloud platform they'll use". My first decision would be "Does it matter if my data ends up on haveibeenpwned?" and take choice of storage place from there.

German court snubs ICANN's bid to compel registrar to slurp up data

Despite these comments, ICANN’s general counsel John Jeffrey said that the ruling “did not provide the clarity that ICANN was seeking when it initiated the injunction proceedings”.

I'd say it provides excellent clarity. It shows that European registrars know what they're doing, know that some of the ICANN contract terms, being unenforceable in the EU, should be ignored and the business should proceed along legal lines. The sensible thing for Jeffrey to do would be to go back to his clients and tell them to let those registrars continue doing what the law says they should do.

But wow. That must have been one of the shortest times on record for a European court to give a US corporation a flea in its ear.

Cold call bosses could be forced to cough up under new rules

"I wonder if I can take Laithwaites Wine to task for sending me wine offers after I've told them several times I am no longer interested?"

After a long while Everest seem to have started sending letterbox litter to me - or at least having the Royal Mail deliver them to all local addresses. I'm considering ringing them to send a representative along - who will then be presented with the unwanted mail I wish to return. This, if organised nationwide, would be an effective deterrent as they wouldn't be able to distinguish real leads from complaints.

"They are happy to be disqualified as a director"

Citation required. Remember that simply putting up someone else as a front is an offence that can carry a gaol sentence.

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

Re: Mapping plan

Anything that poses a problem for the IoT is to be encouraged.

The ITU, of course, has been in a permanent state of being miffed ever since the world preferred Internet technologies to its own on account of the former being here and working and the latter being in committees.

GCHQ bod tells privacy advocates: Most of our work is making sure we operate within the law

Re: "If you whack governments on privacy it will only drive the vulnerability market."

"Some admirers of technology have no idea how the ordinary selfish human world works."

Well, this one does because he spent about 14 years helping investigate crime, much of it terrorist related because we had a little local problem largely funded by the US. And emerged from that with a strong belief in the presumption of innocence and due process of law, fundamental concepts for a free society which surveillance tends to trample on rather severely.

Who had ICANN suing a German registrar over GDPR and Whois? Congrats, it's happening

Re: Merica f*ck yeah

"At this point, trying to argue that collecting the data is necessary falls flat on its face over the kerbstone of historic indifference to its accuracy and I'm fairly sure that german courts will point that out."

Sort of. The defendants might well point it out to the courts and the court would then note it in the judgement. Most likely the defence will point out that contract terms can't override legislation and here's a sling in which the court can hand ICANN its arse.

USA needs law 'a lot like GDPR' – says Salesforce supremo Marc Benioff

Re: Privacy policy law

"Plus, I don't actually believe that companies are all that fussed about sticking to what the privacy policy says anyway."

Probably not. The EU regulators didn't think so either so that's why they came up with a law. What's more it's a law based on a few decades of past experience in trying to regulate this area.