Posts by Doctor Syntax

Seagate's lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

Re: Old tech solved this decades ago

Isn't that what disk drives handle themselves these days? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_algorithm

Re: I cant be the only one..

Followed rapidly by "Wouldn't it be better to have them both read/write?" heads. And that followed by "That's what they've done". Followed in turn by "But they've only addressed half a cylinder at a time. Why didn't they make two separate arm sets and make them full height?".

Wouldn't an 8 platter drive need 16 heads or are they just using single sides these days?

In effect this splits the drive into two logical drives. There needs to be a prize for someone who has the bright idea of using these as a mirror pair. A wooden spoon?

Your palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy – you forgot about Europe's GDPR already

What nobody's managed to say: you can have all the policies in the world but if one eejit clicks on the wrong thing in a booby-trapped email which leads to a breach it's all for nothing.

So what do I make of a bank that causes an email to be sent out that looks exactly like a phishing email* with 12 clickable links in it and claims to be advice to say safe online? Clearly this was devised by a team** of numpties none of whom would see anything wrong with clicking links in spam let alone recognise a phishing email when it arrives in their in-box. Apart from training their customers to be phished they are imminent dangers to their employers because unless they have been safely firewalled off from the rest of the business they are liable to let any passing scam artist into the building.

* It pretends to come from a bank but actually is from a 3rd party digital communications business spammer and the links also resolve to the same 3rd party.

** Nobody gets to spend the budget on their own, do they?

SCOLD WAR: Kaspersky drags Uncle Sam into court to battle AV ban

Re: Interesting legal theory

"Just what part of the Constitution does Kaspersky's legal team believe this software ban is violating?"

The great US belief in competition in the market place. Free trade and all that.

Re: Interesting legal theory

"So Kaspersky's theory is that the US Government is somehow required to have Kaspersky AV software installed on their computers?"

Where does it say that? The complaint is about not even being allowed to sell in competition with other suppliers.

Competition. The great American principle of free trade. Remember that this is the country that goes after its corporations' foreign competitors on any suspicion of state aid. This one stinks of state aid (OK, anti-aid but it amounts to the same thing).

Re: Sure

"New government in charge"

Making America grate again.

Re: Best of luck with that

"Not sure in this sort of situation they need to conclusively prove you operate at the behest of a foreign spy agency, or potentially provide any proof at all."

What they should have done was depersonalise it - just say US suppliers only. It's calling out a specific supplier that can cause them problems.

Re: Well, that was obvious.

Only one downvote? Somebody's slacking. When I pointed out the obvious a week ago I got 2!

Well, that was obvious.

If they'd just specified USian-only that would probably have been OK but to call out one specific company was just asking to be sued.

PHWOAR, those noughty inks: '0.1%' named Stat of The Year

Re: The UK has much more in the way of peat bogs (9.4 per cent).

"Is it just the raised ones that are scarce?"

Blanket peat probably accounts for most of it from Dartmoor, through Wales & the Pennines into NW Scotland and not forgetting the Antrim Plateau and Sperrins.

No hack needed: Anonymisation beaten with a dash of SQL

Re: 'Make a law'

"outside of the immediate jurisdiction where the law applies"

Except, of course for the US which believes its law applies everywhere.

'I knew the company was doomed after managers brawled in a biker bar'

Re: RE Gearbox

"Makes sense, I don't know anyone who'd willingly admit they owned a Corsa."

Even less to admit to being a Mastercare engineer.

Re: It's all fun and games until someone's toes freeze solid and shatter,

"Hydrogen baloons with lit fuses floating at the ceiling - you name it."

Beginners! We had a means of inflating balloons with town gas (coal gas). Blotting paper impregnated with sodium chlorate as fuses and several match heads as dets. There were launched outdoors from the bottom of a deep, narrow valley after dark. The bang echoed nicely and the burning match heads arced across the sky.

" the AI lady's LN2. (She keeps her semen in it.)"

There's a warning about 2 letter abbreviations!

"Think I'm showing either my age or my university's lax attitude to the welfare of its students, but at the time the only requirement was to make sure the room was ventilated and gloves were forbidden (the risk being, apparently"

I'm with you on this one. In the late '60s - early '70s we had no particular precautions. The supply was a large flask on a tilt stand and was dispensed carefully into the smaller flasks used to chill down some of the cold traps on the carbon dating system. IIRC the University porters brought filled flasks from a larger supply in the Physics Dept. I can't remember about gloves but we probably had them for handling the dry ice which was used for some of the other cold traps.

Engineer named Jason told to re-write the calendar

Re: "Can't we get rid of May?"

"We tried that in June, but we were foiled by the Orange March."

Orange Marches are usually in July.

Re: Can't we get rid of May?

"Literally just before one of the biggest busts in memory."

Not just before. He'd been saying that for years whilst engineering a long boom by having the BoE base interest rates on the principle that a house price bubble wasn't inflation, ignoring runaway borrowing and taxing the future by killing the pension funds' tax relief on dividends. By keeping the cycle going longer and further than normal he just ensured that a bigger boom was followed by a bigger bust.

Re: Can't we get rid of May?

"Imagine the media coverage if that was being spent on any other industry."

Imagine the media coverage if they hadn't bailed out the banks. Although there might have been rather less media to provide the coverage - a collapsing bank is likely to take most of its customers down with it.

"ah the good old days. Cant do that anymore"

You still can if you own the company. Calling themselves Mythic Beasts gave the company the ability to name their servers after mythical beasts.

Re: Can't we get rid of May?

"When Blair left office in 2007, the National Debt was ~36% of GDP. Its now well over double that."

He sidestepped the crash. Things were well on the route to getting a lot worse.

Re: Can't we get rid of May?

"Blair might have dragged us into an illegal war, but at least he didn't completely stuff the country"

Not on his own. He had his side-kick Brown to help with that. Then neatly stepped aside just in time to avoid the inevitable result.

Oi, force Microsoft to cough up emails on Irish servers to the Feds, US states urge Supremes

Re: UK not much better (in the quality of its arguments)

"The article clearly states that MS can access the data from within the US"

Where do you see this in the article?

Do you mean this: The prosectors argued Microsoft is an American corporation and therefore should obey an order from an American judge; where the data sought existed was immaterial – it could be accessed from Redmond's US offices.?

Or this: “The court reached this conclusion even though Microsoft could easily access the stored data from its United States offices,” the group said, echoing a key argument in the DoJ’s case against Microsoft.?

In the first case note that this is an argument by the prosecution and in the other the group referred to is the not entirely disinterested group of state attorneys general in it's a claim in an amicus brief.

Neither of these constitutes evidence. Neither is clearly stating fact.

"I have no interest pro or anti any of the parties in this case, but surely where the information is accessible from, and by whom, is just as important as where it's physically stored? Otherwise, all reasonable law enforcement in the digital realm could quickly become impossible"

How many times does it have to be pointed out that if the authorities have a case to justify a warrant there is an existing process whereby they present it to a court in Ireland in whose jurisdiction the data resides? So reasonable law enforcement is not impossible. The fact that they have not done so gives rise to grave suspicions that something else lies behind it - anything from initial ignorance of the due process backed up by pig-headedness or a severe case of willy-waving to embarking of a fishing trip with no case at all. It doesn't need any interest in the outcome of the underlying case to be deeply concerned about due process in accessing it. Due process of law should be of interest to us all.

The next step?

The EU should test the US's attitude on the reciprocal of this. Start a tax investigation into Trump's EU property and apply for a warrant in an EU court to get his tax returns.

"What numpty wasted taxpayers money coming up with this one?"

On reflection this could be much more than a waste of money. It could cost British business dear. When, post-Brexit, the UK is looking for adequacy under GDPR this cavalier attitude could be held against us.

Re: Yeah, but common sense, too...

"Well in the case of the EU it would be because personal data stored in the EU is protected under the GDPR regulations"

Not quite yet. GDPR doesn't apply until May 2018. But GDPR only tightens up on an existing directive.

Re: Change "email" with "money"...

"Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the courts being in Microsoft's favour. It's just, rationally, I find it hard to support"

Rationally it's not at all hard to support. There's an established procedure for this, one which involves going to the Irish courts. They should have used it. There's no indication that they tried. Supporting due process of law vs taking short cuts isn't at all irrational.

"Because of such storage policies, and due to technological change and the global nature of the communications environment, the U.K. does not believe that the geographic storage location of data should be the determining factor for whether or not a nation may gain access to such communications."

Does HMG really believe that if the Feds won this one that the US would reciprocate and grant access to US servers on the basis of a warrant in a UK court? What numpty wasted taxpayers money coming up with this one?

Re: Yeah, but common sense, too...

" why in the hell should the police have to involve the government of another country just because the emails are located on some server there?"

They don't have to so why are they doing it?

There's no need to involve the government of another country. All they have to do is involve the courts of that country by following existing agreed procedures. So why do they try to go barging in heavy handed in a way that gets governments involved in defending their sovereignty?

"This whole situation highlights the serious need for more and better international agreements regulating this sort of thing."

ROFLMAO. The international agreements of which you write already exist. This entire episode is the result of the authorities in this case choosing not to use them.

All they have to do, assuming they have a case, is to present that case to the relevant court and get a warrant. Microsoft Ireland would be bound to abide by that warrant. The Irish government would not be involved. (Technically, I suppose, it would have already been involved in negotiating with the US the relevant treaty which the US authorities are now ignoring.)

So why are they getting themselves in this position. Is it that they don't have a case? Do they have a case but can't be bothered to get off their arses and present it to the relevant court? Are they trying to establish a precedent whereby they can go to a complaisant US court for fishing expeditions when they really don't have a case and know they'd be laughed out of an Irish court? Did the read the word 'foreign' and think they'd have to present the case in a non-English language? If it's that I can assure them that they speak excellent English in Ireland. Do they just fancy throwing their weight about internationally to bully smaller countries, given they're not doing very well with Russia or the Norks?

If they get their way with this things will not go very well with a large swathe of the US tech industry in the future. The Privacy Figleaf can be expected to shrivel up and die and it will be very difficult to persuade anyone in the EU to have another shot at replacing it. Any US business that depends on the Figleaf this will find EU business drying up. Other markets might follow. You might find yourself reminiscing about the halcyon days when the US had an international tech industry.

Russia could chop vital undersea web cables, warns Brit military chief

Re: "Can you imagine a scenario where those cables are cut or disrupted?"

"The threat of Russia doing this does not exist."

Not deliberately, of course. But there could be the occasional careless anchoring -oops, so sorry.

We need to talk about mathematical backdoors in encryption algorithms

Re: turning it up to 11

"based on what we know of chaining hashing algorithms, you may end up with a counterintuitive result of making it easier to crack your ciphertext"

Nevertheless it's something the theoreticians should be looking at.

The critical point could be key exchange algorithms. It's not going to help if you have a very strong message encryption based on chaining algorithms from multiple sources if the key exchange is vulnerable.

UK needs a 'digital twin' to keep track of its data assets – report

@ Ledswinger

Enough of this reticence. Tell us what you really think.

It's a pity they didn't get some boundaries into the title. "Data" is just too vague. They clearly mean data about how some sort of infrastructure is working. But if someone from, say, the NHS picks this up...

UKIP appeals against ICO request for info on Brexit data dealings

Re: The problem for UKIP

"The government in power does not need to break laws, it just changes them to make what it wants to do legal."

Could you point to any changes in law in a time frame relevant to the referendum?

Not being the type of party to shy away from being accused of petulance

FTFY

EE Business Broadband digital transformation: Portal offline until July

Re: Code review?

"I agree, biut since when did something like a ton of gaping security holes stop a company from making a service live over the public Internet?"

So damned if they do and damned if they don't?

Re: Code review?

Either that or the likes of SAP, 'Orrible etc. came along and did an audit that showed they needed 2 licences for every member of the UK population in case any of them blundered into the portal by accident.

FBI tells Jo(e) Sixpack to become an expert in IoT security

Re: Almost no education

"I've been trying to teach 13 to 15 yr olds computers on a one on one basis (to earn some cash) and not one has known anything technical learnt from school."

Selection bias could be at work here - if they learn it at school they're not your target market. But, depressingly, you're probably right.

The root problem - what's the intersect between teachers and elReg readers and what's the probability of finding a member of it in any given school?

Re: Continuous product and service improvement

"Those votes are for comments, not the article to which they relate though."

Nevertheless, comments such as GrumpyKiwi's serve as a proxy for voting for the article.

Re: Who is this aimed at?

"Let's assume, as a starting point, that the FBI is not completely stupid."

It could be an arse-covering move. At some point they might need to turn round and point at this and say "well, we did tell you, it's your fault for not taking the advice".

Another possibility is that it's a starting point for mandating features and default configuratons for stuff to be sold to the public.

IETF protects privacy and helps net neutrality with DNS over HTTPS

Re: Now this would be a great idea...

"Meaning, all the surveillance that your ISP or government did on you is moved to Google and Facebook."

This is the real problem. The bottom line might be that you'd have to take a paid service from a provider in a country that takes privacy very seriously. DNS, email, storage hosting; eventually a small country is going to realise that this could be a nice little earner - just like running a tax haven and maybe a prerequisite.

Re: Chickens and eggs?

"made me think a bit, though."

Not too long, I hope. The reminder was in A Non e-mouse's reply.

Re: This proves it...

"and that impasse can come with ISPs blocking encryption wholesale at most levels"

The points about ossification and greasing made in the linked article ( https://blog.apnic.net/2017/12/12/internet-protocols-changing/ ) are worth a read. But in this case encryption of HTTP is now so prevalent that an ISP who tried blocking that would be out of business PDQ. That's why initiatives such as DOH use HTTP.

Re: Now this would be a great idea...

"The only way to break in is to get a copy of the pad"

That's also your weakness. The recipient of a message also needs a copy of the pad. That means that you have to have a secure method of distributing the pads.

Disk drives spin, are you listening? In the lane, servers glistening...

Dunno about the article but full marks to the title.

Former ZX Spectrum reboot project man departs

"I'm surprised to see how popular the ZX Spectrum"

It's part of the phenomenon that sees grown men buying second hand toy cars etc. because they once owned new ones.

Put down the eggnog, it's Patch Tuesday: Fix Windows boxes ASAP

Re: Damn you ms - damn you to hell!

"Executed it, went to save it"

Lesson learned. Write it, save it, try it. Then edit, save and try as necessary until it works.

And if it updates stuff, start with BEGIN WORK but leave the COMMIT or ROLLBACK to be entered by hand.

Re: "Put down the eggnog"

"Whatever was she thinking?"

Something along the lines of "Stop the boat, I want to get off" as far as I could make out.

Google lies about click-fraud refunds and tried to destroy us – ad biz

@FozzyBear

No. Definitely not.

Re: Conflicted Here

"The fact that the putative victim of the act is bottom-feeding scum doesn't change the fact that the act itself is wrong."

It does, however, severely limit the amount of sympathy I can feel for them. Down to zero, in fact.