Posts by Doctor Syntax

Tick, tock motherf... erm, we mean, don't panic over GDPR

Re: Up to €20m includes the figure zero

"Would you start an action against (eg) Talk Talk, who probably have a legal budget of the order of a couple of million quid?"

Depending on the scale of the claim the small claims court might be the appropriate venue in some cases. That effectively wipes out the advantage of a large legal budget.

But what happens if

- the ICO finds there was a breach

- a victim loses their house as a consequence

- the ICO issues a flat rate £1,000 compensation?

Should the victim simply write it off to bad luck?

Should the ICO's finding assist in the victim establishing their case? Should there be a compulsory use of an independent arbitrator to assess compensation on a level playing field?

Where does it all end?

Dave's comparison of big and small businesses set me thinking. It's not necessarily the big organisation that doesn't realise what it's doing with PII. If anything they may have better resources to carry out a formal analysis and pick up on such things whilst a more informally managed SMB might not.

But this line of thinking extends down to the purely personal holding of PII. What about personal friends and family phone and address books? Your Christmas card list? SWMBO's ladies group (definitely NOT part of the WI!)? Does sending Christmas cards escape by being counted as a transacton?

Is a line drawn anywhere and if so where? What about the email list of a group of friends who meet in each others' houses to play bridge? Or a larger group that hires the village hall? Or the village hall management committee?

Re: Up to €20m includes the figure zero

it is worth stopping to ask whether the actual fines will differ by very much from the current regime

Maybe "dissuasive" as mentioned in the article will change this. I hope those issuing the fines will interpret this as "big enough to affect management's bonuses and too big for the board to hide from the shareholders".

The bottom-feeders can be smacked with proportionately high fines, but they simply aren't going to pay them.

Power to freeze bank accounts would be a useful addition.

Government actually stand to make money from data breaches. That's wrong - the money should either be handed out to the victims

The possible income should be an incentive to pursue cases more vigorously and more often. The fines shouldn't stand in the way of civil proceedings for compensation. The imposition of a fine should, if anything, make the burden of proof easier. The ICO could be given the power to compel a compensation payment but then it might block the injured from producing evidence of more substantial actual losses.

"Why are fines always an up amount? It's like a flat tax."

Do you mean "up to"?

Think about what "up to" means. Note that it's not the same as "at least".

Then you'll realise that your "flat tax" comparison is the exact reason for "up to"..

"I don't see why I got a downvote?"

Maybe someone thought you should have included Alice. But I suspect it was really Eve.

Given that it's been talked about in general terms for ages it's not really that new. Anyone who will have responsibilities under it and has been paying attention should have started planning for it a good while ago even if the final details have only recently been confirmed.

On the downside it'll only be Royal Assent that finally persuades some boards that it's a thing. And some will hold out until they're fined.

UK Data Protection Bill lands: Oh dear, security researchers – where's your exemption?

"GDPR is not compatible with high chancellor rees-mogg. It won't be passed into their law."

I wouldn't worry about that. Once reality starts to bite and people discover what they actually voted for Rees-Mogg will either turn out to have been an enthusiastic Remainer or be a forgotten man.

Re: [an offense of] altering personal data in a way to prevent it being disclosed.

"Hmm, is it about (e.g.) tampering with access logs to prevent disclosure of disclosures?"

I think that's it. Of course if you don't keep logs....

"That's not Kafka-esque, that's just English."

Yup. It's an assurance that the terms don't mean one thing in one place and something else in the other. Just the opposite of Kafkaesque.

DARPA lays out cash-splash to defibrillate Moore's Law

Re: Where is this going?

And why do I seem to hear Dick Feynman saying "Nature cannot be fooled"?

Chirpy, chirpy, cheap, cheap: Printable IoT radios for 10 cents each

Re: Official reg units please

"a ballpark figure"

Over paid, over sexed and over here with their ballparks.

Re: Oh sh*t

"You missed the hint in the article that they are looking at agricultural applications."

I'm sure there will be plenty of scope for abusing the technology beyond farming.

Shoddily-set-up Elastisearch hosting point-of-sale malware

If they used the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy to decide not to include authentication, their definition of "one thing" is not big enough.

And their definition of "well" certainly isn't good enough.

Re: This doesn't make sense

"The worst a dumb customer should be able to do is leave all their data exposed for the stealing and/or deleting."

A customer shouldn't even be able to do that. You need to think again about the "their" in "their data". The data may be about customers, employees etc. You and I may be included in the "they". "Their data" may mean "our data" and nobody should be able to leave that exposed.

Windows 10 Creators Update will add app-level privacy controls

the additional setting, Microsoft says, will limit telemetry to “the minimum required for Windows Analytics”

Why didn't they start like that? And make even that optional?

Facebook posts put Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli in prison as a danger to society

Re: Misleading headline.

"Shame on the Reg for such misleading clickbait over a non-story."

Come off it, Nick. You're not new here. You know what goes on.

Intelligence director pulls national security BS on spying question

" How can Congress reauthorize this surveillance when the administration is playing games with basic questions about this program?"

s/reauthorize/continue to fund/

That'll get his attention, if only in retrospect if the implied threat gets carried through.

Act fast to get post-Brexit data deal, Brit biz urges UK.gov

Re: Fiddlesticks

"I don't see them blocking transfers of PII over the Atlantic any time soon"

They have a cunning plan for that one. Every time the current fig leaf gets torn down by the courts they invent a similar one (rather like the Home Office's handling of investigative powers law). That's because keeping in with the US is important to the rest of the EU. Keeping in with the UK after Brexit won't rank so highly.

Re: Not just GDPR

"There's no way around it, this is going to be a cliff-edge Brexit."

However the Brexiteers will read that as a White Cliffe-edge Brexit and cheer - because Vera Lynn.

Regulate, says Musk – OK, but who writes the New Robot Rules?

"Then the passengers ON the trolley die."

No, they can jump off. Didn't anybody tell you they were wearing crash helmets & protective clothing?

Re: Working out what AI is thinking and why

Writing procedural code for "if this horizontal line at the top of the image is n pixels long AND ... AND ... AND " then Peckham high st - is going to be a bit limited

And if you don't know how it claims to be able to recognise Peckham High St - and that that "how" makes sense - then you've no assurance that it will recognise it correctly nor that it won't categorise other streets as being Peckham High St. Indeed you don't even know whether the system that recognises it correctly today will do so tomorrow after being provided with additional training data.

Re: Maybot to the rescue

"our Prime Minister elect(hah!)"

I take your ironic point that we don't directly elect Prime Ministers. However to style someone as '$OFFICE elect' indicates that although they have been elected to that office they haven't yet taken it up. It would have been correct to refer to Trump as POTUS elect between his election and inauguration, subsequently he became simply POTUS. By contrast, as May is PM your use of "elect", even ironically, is inappropriate.

"Simply POTUS" is left on the table for those of you who want to play with it.

Re: Working out what AI is thinking and why

"I'm not sure that this is possible with some aspects of AI/ML, since the algorithm is honed by the AI/ML itself and may not be transparent/apparent to its developers at all even if logged in a black box log."

If liability falls on the manufacturer - and I think it should - it's then up to that manufacturer to decide whether they want to ship something whose workings they don't and, more importantly, can't understand. It seems to me that they really shouldn't want to. Should they even be allowed to?

Cops' use of biometric images 'gone far beyond custody purposes'

"Being annoyingly pedantic the person responsible for most, but not all, policing is the Home Sec."

And being even more annoyingly pedantic the Home Sec of that time is now the boss of all the others. So there!

The person ultimately responsible for policing is the Home Sec. This would have been the Home Sec at the time of the original commissioner's report. She and her successor should be held responsible for her continued failure to take suitable action.

El Reg is hiring an intern. Apply now before it closes

Re: I'd love

"a season ticket from here to the smoke costs 5K a year"

So you're just inside the M25, then?

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

"We deserve all we get for putting up with this treatment."

Who's this "we" of whom you speak?

Re: These "new" iPhones

"The question Apple has to answer (and the tech press would ask it if they were journalists)"

If they asked questions like that they wouldn't be allowed into the press conferences.

Re: The interesting bit...

"My Tesla would like to say Hi."

Tell it to just keep watching the road. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/13/ntsb_recommends_self_driving_cars_autopilots_upgrade/

"a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'"

Oh no it isn't. Not mine, anyway.

Bish, bosh, Bashware: Microsoft downplays research on WSL Win 10 'hack' threat

Re: WSL?

AIUI it's a facility to translate Linux system calls to Windows kernel calls in order to run the Linux userland - the converse of Wine.

But I like Gnu/Windows. As soon as the marketroids mis-hear it it will become New Windows.

WSL?

Windows System for Linux. Why did they call it that? It's obviously a Linux system for Windows. Their name sort of describes Wine.

Government lab that gives a crap pushes open source

"Whether you believe them or not, there are departments in the US Gov that do, and that's why they've gone to the bother of encouraging farmers to build digesters."

I do believe it. That's why I'm a bit worried by the article. They're encouraging farmers to build anaerobic digesters. These are the ones which produce methane. But then it goes on to say that it might not be possible to sell the energy from the methane to make the process economical. If that's the case the methane might be released instead. Old fashioned muck spreading may be a bit smelly but it does result in aerobic breakdown and adds humus to the soil.

"This bovine bounty accounts for about 2.5 per cent of annual greenhouse gas emissions in the US."

If the waste is digested aerobically all it will do is put back into the atmosphere the carbon dioxide that was recently removed by the grass on which the animal was fed. It's called the carbon cycle and we've known about it for years.

Digesting it anaerobically is a different matter unless you're able to effectively trap the methane and burn it.

Or do US farmers feed their stock on oil?

Your boss asks you to run the 'cloud project': Ever-changing wish lists, packs of 'ideas'... and 1 deadline

Re: Enterprise Architecture

"Presumably in crayon"

Powerpoint. Crayon for management.

Whiny systems people management who have no clue about how the business makes money and why things need to be done.

Re: Opposite problem can be as bad

"we all lived in fear of the Council invoking the BC plan which they threatened to do on one occasion!"

Why? Invoking it would be the one thing that would force them to confront reality.

Re: plus ça change ...

"I'm sure that there is a medically definable mental condition that kicks in when normally rational people commission anything to do with IT projects."

Careful. You're in danger of equating manglement with normal rational people.

They aren't. They believe that because they're paid more than you that their understanding of everything must be better than yours and that because they want something it must be possible.

This underlies the magic of consultants. If the consultant is paid more than management he can take your advice and pass it on, adding price. Manglement equates this with adding value because they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Because it costs them so much money the advice instantly becomes believable.

Re: Management advice

"When you need it, it will not be for sale."

Deserves far more upvotes than I can give. Absolutely spot on. Why is this simple fact so unfamiliar to management? Or is it that they really believe they won't ever need it?

Not exclusive to cloud

In some respects, not even exclusive to IT.

And Bob's solution was the correct one. When it's time to go, go. Punish management by making them crawl with better offers if you can but go anyway.

Auto-makers told their autopilots need better safeguards

“conditions for which they were designed”

Test tracks?

Bosch wants crowdsourced data for future connected cars

Re: Bosch, best known in the UK for domestic power tools...

"Whether you encrypt the payload or authenticate slave nodes isn't within the CANBus bailiwick, it's the responsibility of whatever protocol you run on top of CANBus."

IOW add it later, so standard operating practice.

And then when things go wrong everybody asks why security wasn't built in from scratch. In this case by including the necessary protocols in the spec instead of of waving hands and saying it's SEP.

Re: Bosch, best known in the UK for domestic power tools...

This isn't a case of a drill and coffee maker manufacturer muscling in with no track record.

Given the frequent reports of "security, what security?", a track record of inventing CANBus seems something to be wary of.

ICO slaps cab app chaps for 10-day spam crap

Re: re: What about the taxi companies?

"I suppose this will be covered by the GDPR?"

Isn't it already covered by the DPA?

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

Re: Semiconductors are getting hard to fill

"No really new ideas."

I thought multiple cores per die were the new idea once there was little "faster" to be found.

Maybe the next new idea is to accept that semiconductors are a mature technology and that there are no further gains worth investing in in that direction.

Monkey selfie case settles for a quarter of future royalties

Re: Don't get it why

" Don't they have any other stuff to do?"

Too much.

Re: Interesting principles behind this

"What is it that makes creatures have rights and the law apply to them?"

Back this up a little.

What is it that makes humans have rights?

Simple: it's a convention we adopt amongst ourselves to make human society work better. Rights are a description of human behaviour

Can this apply to other species?

Some species are social, some aren't. Those that are have their own behaviours some of which are vastly different to humans. Start going down PETA's route and you end up trying to apply modern slavery legislation to worker bees.

Re: I fscking loathe PETA

"get Peta to call the monkey to court as a witness just to shut them up and stop them bringing future cases."

Seconded. Without this they would appear to have no standing. Why did the court even deign to take the case? Publicity for the court?

The new, new Psion is getting near production. Here's what it looks like

Re: TRACKPOINT??

Alternative view: No GUI and a set of applications optimised for keyboard instead of mouse or touch.

And before the mouth-foaming starts, that doesn't have to be synonymous with a CLI. Back in the day we had menu-driven systems which worked perfectly well for ordinary users.

Re: Disappointing looks

"Looks a bit too generic, basically a random Huawei slab"

Looks aren't everything. Can you point is to a random Huawei slab running Debian? Or are you a Mac user?