Posts by Doctor Syntax

IBM swings shrink ray from workforce to mainframes

"Yet if the machines are as advanced and secure and generally wonderful as IBM insists, surely more buyers would already find them compelling?"

Price? Worry that as the vendor keeps shrinking there may be nobody left to support the kit?

They're back! 'Feds only' encryption backdoors prepped in US by Dems

It's perfectly simple. All they have to do is put it out to tender with the proviso that any proposed solution be critically examined for cryptographic flaws and flaws which would allow the system to be hacked. The project tender should be in two stages. The first would be given to a number of contractors, each to perform a feasibility study and proposal, the second would be awarded to the best proposal.

They can be seen to be doing something which will keep them happy. As the rest of us know the tender will be on a hiding to nothing the rest of us can be happy. The latter includes the contractors because they know they can be paid for doing a lot of work on the feasibility study and still get paid for saying it can't be done. One bright spark, of course, will probably come up with an idea which will eventually fail on critical assessment but they'll still be paid.

This is not, unlike many government IT projects, a waste of public money. It will be an excellent investment on keeping the idiots off everyone's backs, possibly for years with the additional advantage that as it will fail in their own terms they can still eventually be vilified for wasting public money.

Re: As I've said before...

"I'm suggesting every legislator should be forcibly memorialized on their eventual tombstone by reference to their stupidest act of public legislation."

Maybe you've just explained Stonehenge.

Modern life is rubbish – so why not take a trip down memory lane with Windows File Manager?

Re: File Manager supports MDI, Win10 theme doesn't

"Win10 lacks any polishment at all"

The problem is that the designers of all this modern stuff think it's more polished.

Re: Ribbonless

"I dream of days without a ribbon in my interface."

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

https://www.kde.org/applications/system/dolphin/

Re: Bring back DOSEDIT

"I have no idea if vi can be set up to do that. "

Neither have I but seeing as I've been using it since the days before keyboards had such fripperies there's no need for me to even check. The dreadful vim might well have that. My first encounter with that load was with a setup that had been configured to hide the ^Ms from then end of lines and as I wanted to use it to delete those I wasn't impressed. I was left wondering what else it might be set up to hide. So as far as possible vi and its relatives are links to /usr/bin/nvi.

Re: OMG can I say SQUEE?

"What is the impulse to break established UI conventions?"

Tinkering. Somebody wants to "do something" but the functionality is either (a) what's needed or (b)hard work but the interface can always be made more "modern".

Re: OMG can I say SQUEE?

"I must be the only one who hates win 10 flat everything and prefers 3D widgets."

Oh no you're not. And that doesn't only go for W10 flatness. It applies everywhere although in other places there are options for fighting back.

Re: Surprising Comeback on Windows 10

"No one ever sat down at the computer with the express intent of playing with Word or Excel itself."

Well, that pair, never. The LibreOffice equivalents are a different matter. If the program icons are sitting on the panel waiting to be clicked it can be the quicker way to bring up a recent document. On the whole I agree with your sentiment, however; the idiocy of UX designers who seem to think forbidding data icons on the desktop is beyond belief.

Lib Dems, UKIP's websites go TITSUP* on UK local election launch day

Re: What's so special about this NationBuilder thing?

"Didn't Tomcat, IIS or SharePoint suffice?"

You need to explain it in terms your potential market will understand. Good luck trying to sell any of those and many others -PHP, Drupal etc - outside of the IT department. Someone going to political parties and explaining their services in terms that politicians understand ("winning votes" will be a good one but "communicating with voters" will probably be enough) stands a chance of making a sale.

Re: NationBuilder, eh?

a crisis in the charity sector due a severe drop in income as a result of their inability to write to supporters who didn't return the "yes you can contact me" forms.

That'll be the National Trust in my case. Their effort has a very nastily misleading header on the top of the letter. It's a picture of a very large ticked box beside a headline "Stay in" clearly intended to give the impression that you'd lose your membership if you failed to tick the boxes on the form. Of course it only refers to their mailing attempting to flog me cruises, holiday cottages and all sorts of other stuff I've no interest in so they'll actually save money by my not opting in. I'm considering a complaint to the ICO as it clearly gives the impression that membership is tied to accepting their marketing guff which is contrary to the GDPR. Whilst I'd not like the NT to be fined a public caution might be a warning shot to others.

Sysadmin shut down the wrong server, and with it all European operations

Re: Fullscreen RDP sessions

"unscheduled data resilience testing - AND YOU FAILED!"

That's for everyone to add to their list of things to say.

Police chief wants citizens to bring 'net oligarchs to heel

Re: Civil laws

"The performance targets are badly flawed."

This is almost always the case with performance targets.

Firstly, they have a great tendency to be inappropriate. Measuring things properly is hard. That means looking for something easy to measure even if it's not a big issue and ignoring the hard to measure relevant target.

Secondly, it sets up a system just asking to be gamed.

Re: Civil laws

"Obviously there's the easy go to of the Robin Hood Airport Case. What everyone wrote off as a joke, South Yorkshire Police thought was worth pursuing"

And yes, every bomb threat can be written off as a joke. Right up to the time when one isn't and then everyone from the Grauniad to the Fail will come down on the police like a ton of bricks for not taking it seriously.

Re: UK Laws are the problem

"Create a limited company, transfer the subject of the lawsuit to the company in lieu of shares and order as a director the company to sue."

Doesn't this then have the disadvantage of losing the protection of consumer legislation which might have applied otherwise?

Re: UK Laws are the problem

"Where, if you lose then you may well find that YOU are having to pay the other sides legal fees as well as your own."

Not if the damages fall within the small claims limits. BigCo then has to decide whether to throw lawyers at the case or pay the claim which is probably going to be the cheaper option. They may, of course, choose the former to avoid opening the floodgates.

Linux Beep bug joke backfires as branded fix falls short

Re: A stand-alone program to ...

"One could ask the same of the vast majority of software packages and features, and never receive a satisfactory answer,"

It depends who you ask. Ask most people who thought, say QGIS (what's that, you've never heard of it?) was for and you'd receive blank looks. But there are enough people who need a GIS (never heard of that either?) to develop it originally and to continue with that.

My PC makes ‘negative energy waves’, said user, then demanded fix

Re: "And bluetooth with Win10 is an iffy affair"

Another good book pass on to the youngster is O'Reilly's "UNIX Power Tools".

Got that one somewhere as well. Coherent brings back memories albeit only of reading about it in Byte. However, there's a limit to what one can present a 10 year old with.

However, mention of Byte reminds me it might be a good idea to find my copy of the issue on RDBMS from which I learned pretty well everything I know about database design* apart, of course, from what I picked up by actually doing it for a few decades.

*I've encountered at least one CS graduate who knew less than that Byte covered.

Re: "The Waves"

"that huge source of waves hanging in the sky during daylight."

If you think that's a problem what about night. The Earth is now between you and all those waves. What's it doing to them as they pass through it to get to you? It doesn't bear thinking about.

"the two mice ... kept interfering with each other."

And that, folks, is how you get baby mice.

the "clutter free desk"

They'll tell you "a clear desk is the sign of a clear mind". What it really means is that an empty desk is the sign of an empty head.

"I know one person who trained themselves to use a mouse with their left hand (it took them a week, they tell me) so they could swap every hour."

What? Have to clear two patches of desktop to use a mouse on?

Re: missed opportunity

"So, there wouldn't be much signal below them anyway."

Now try explaining that to those objecting to near-by mobile phone masts. And also explain that when they connect the mobile transmitter next to their head to a more distant mast it has to transmit at higher power and there's this thing called the inverse square law.

Re: "And bluetooth with Win10 is an iffy affair"

"Do any of them have K&R in the pocket?"

I passed "Unix: The Book" on to my grandson who has a PiTop. It's not all current but a good deal still is.

Re: "And bluetooth with Win10 is an iffy affair"

"My phone quite happily connects with my car every day, makes and receives calls using the car audio system"

Connecting isn't the problem. It's not realising it's disconnected when I take it out of the car that's the problem. It ends up in an offline mode but only infrequently so that I never get to learn the incantation needed to get it working again without a lot of trial and error. Or maybe the trial and error is the incantation.

Re: bluetooth with Win10 is an iffy affair

"Ah yes, proper 5-pin DIN"

5-pin DIN? Somewhere I probably still have the first mouse I bought. It has a 9-pin D connector serial cable.

Re: "And bluetooth with Win10 is an iffy affair"

No, I think what you both mean is: "And bluetooth is an iffy affair."

Let's get this sorted out properly:

Bluetooth and Win(x) are both iffy affairs, either separately or in combination.

"just carrying about 2Kg worth of extraneous hair dryer wherever she goes."

And, of course, you never know when you're going to need a hair-dryer.

T-Mobile Austria stores passwords as plain text, Outlook gets message crypto, and more

Re: as plain text

"The popular salt/hash method demands that the password is transmitted plain"

It demands that the password be made available to be hashed for comparison with the stored has. How it gets from keyboard to hashing algorithm is not addressed. It can be encrypted in transit and decrypted to be hashed.

Re: T-Mobile

Very much like banks that are so "secure" that they insist on certain characters out of the extent of your password. In other words, they have the thing in plain text in order to compare individual characters.

They ask for a combination of several characters. Let's try this one for size:

- You enter a new password.

- The bank extracts combinations of N characters. Perhaps all possible combinations, perhaps a subset of a long password.

- Each combination is hashed and the hashes stored together with a note of the positions of the characters of that combination.

- When you log on the system chooses one particular combination, asks you for the relevant characters, hashes what you enter and compares the result to the stored hash.

Not only can this be achieved without storing plain text, the system doesn't even store your password as a single entity, not even when hashed.

£12k fine slapped on Postman Pat and his 300,000 spam emails

"it goes unread straight into the recycling bin anyway"

If everyone posted letter box litter back marked "return to sender" I wonder how long it would take for the message to get through that we don't like it.

1.5 BEEELLION sensitive files found exposed online dwarf Panama Papers leak

"gotta wonder what their customers would have thought if they found out all the business and personal information they were sending these people was going to a hosed , not secure in any way, computer."

As a customer I'd first want to know what exposure the computer had to the internet. XP off net vs W10 on net: which would you prefer?

Re: Just because you have found a file on the internet doesn't mean it's a security issue.

"A 'business' with a few thousand pounds of turn over is clearly not in line to spend huge amounts on a consultant to verify their system, paying their increasing business rates is probably further up their action list."

A business with a few thousand pounds of turnover probably isn't paying huge amounts for data storage in the first place - possibly an old exercise book. It still doesn't excuse them if they write more in it than they're entitled to.

Re: Just goes to prove

"I'd maintain my position that the new rights and fines will not substantially improve the situation in the real world."

I think the knowledge of this extends well down the scale of business size. The problem is more likely getting a firm grip on sales and marketing pestering departments who have the mentality of 4 year old children including the same response to being told "No".

Re: Just goes to prove

"Note that this is based on turnover not profit."

And not just turnover but global turnover which will make a big difference for some corporations.

Mind the gap: Men paid 18.6% more than women in Blighty tech sector

Re: Sooo...

"If you're, say, a software developer doing the same work/same hours as your colleague in the next cubicle (who happens to have ovaries or any of the other recognised grounds for discrimination) you should both earn the same pay."

You seem to have missed several posts pointing out that as that's the law it is actually the case. Maybe you missed it because it wasn't stated in sufficiently colourful language for you to complain about.

"A who works 60 hours a week gets paid 50% more than person B working 40 hours a week ... if they are only doing half the hours."

Last time I worked it out 40 was two thirds, not half, of 60.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a terrible leak of drone buyers' data

Given that list of purchasers is there a chance of starting extradition procedures with charges under the Official Secrets Act?

My Tibetan digital detox lasted one morning, how about yours?

Re: "surviving pile of stones with potential Scandinavian characteristics"

"Yes, yes, I know they were Angles and not Saxons."

Jutes.

Re: Fifty shades of tea

"And drink it without cow-juice"

Applies to al types of tea. If you have tea that can actually be improved by milk you should get rid of it and buy something better.

Microsoft Office 365 and Azure Active Directory go TITSUP*

"Possibly because I'd told Microsoft to locate our stuff on UK servers due to impending GDPR requirements."

Not that that's going to do you much good. As far as the US govt and the CLOUD act are concerned there's no such thing as UK servers, just servers.

NUC, NUC! Who's there? Intel, warning you to kill a buggy keyboard app

Re: VNC on Linux

"Just is it the right tool for the job question ?"

Reading the stories about that some weeks ago ISTR that binary size was significant. Maybe Minix could be got down to size & the others couldn't.

An easy-breezy attitude to sharing personal data is the only thing keeping the app economy alive

Re: kill the money chain

the subsidy the net gets from the advertising industry will have to come from somewhere else

The net existed without it and many feel that those were better times.

Too many people expect everything on the net to be "free" for alternative payment to work

I'm quite happy for them to be disappointed.

Re: Better alternative

"Third, today if a Democrat proposes the fix than the Republicans will blindly oppose it no matter what and vice-versa."

Other countries with other parties are available.

Re: Better alternative

" if you use Facebook to keep in contact with family, friends, clients and customers, just switching it off is not an option that stacks up"

I'm sure there were people who said much the same about MySpace.

Re: Better alternative

Even if faced with a stark "Agree to let us slurp your data or you don't get access" warning, most Facebook users will happily tick the box and go on their merry way.

I think Facebook is too smart (i.e. employ enough lawyers) to realise that that just lines them up for maximum fines rather than being told not to be naughty. The authors of GDPR saw the possibilities of that one and dealt with it

Re: And that's exactly why...

"But you have just told world + dog that you do eat breakfast, and that you go out to eat it."

You believed all that did you? That's the trouble with the data fetishists who pay for that stuff., they can't distinguish between data and fact, let alone information. Intelligence and wisdom are entirely beyond their reach.

Re: And that's exactly why...

"all of which ... is monetisable."

The most valuable thing for advertisers to know about me is that advertising at me is counter-productive. It's not a thing they want to hear, of course, wants and needs being two different things. Would they pay good money to discover that?

Re: And that's exactly why...

"So they probabbly HAVE data about me, but that data is likely to be of very poor quality."

Never mind the quality, feel the width. As nobody has any alternative data about you to judge the quality of what's collected the customers will believe what they've got and pay for it so the phone companies or whoever collects the data in the first place get paid. At some point, however, the customers might finally realise that what they're getting is worth less than they're paying for it. It's a bubble that's due to burst some time.

'Every little helps'... unless you want email: Tesco to kill free service

Re: Damn

"A vanity domain you pay for, then you can redirect as you want and noone will be any the wiser."

Nothing vain about it. It's just a more practical solution. If you have your own domain you can move ISP without disrupting your email contacts.

Some years ago my formerly very good ISP fell into the clutches of TalkTalk. At that time I'd used the ISP email. I moved to a new ISP but to prevent a recurrence of the inconvenience of that happening again I registered a domain with a registrar who provided an email service. After my new ISP fell into the clutches of Sky I switched to another ISP.

I also found that eventually my original choice of registrar started getting outages which they never troubled to explain - and seldom troubled to acknowledge to I transferred the domain and email service to another registrar/email provider, again without disrupting my email address.

The other side of having your own domain is that you can set up and tear down addresses as necessary. Anyone I expect to deal with on a regular basis is given an alias I've set up specifically for them. If they start spamming I simply drop that alias; in fact I've the option of setting it to bounce email with a message telling the sender why they're being bounced. I also set up aliases which will only last a few weeks and anyone who doesn't, in my view, need a long term alias gets given the current one of those which will be pulled immediately if it gets spammed.

For a few quid a year you can have a flexible email service that's not, on the one hand, tied to a service provider you can't dump, nor, on the other to a big corporation who treats you as their product.

I have a Hotmail address for situations which demand an email address but where I don't expect any interaction whatsoever and that's treated as /dev/null and a gmail address if I need a Google login which carries no traffic at all.