Posts by Doctor Syntax

Bombastic boss gave insane instructions to sensible sysadmin, with client on speakerphone

"Sounds like Craig is unprofessional and was trying to score points."

Sounds to me as if Craig had a good idea of what was likely to happen and was covering himself.

"Sorry, you couldn't have. He works here."

No contradiction; you work where the A/C worked.

Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!

Re: Gilgamesh sued Apple

(In that sense a bit like King Arthur, though evidence for him is more tenuous and most of what you read/see is stuff made up 100s of years after original Welsh legends.)

And not actually a king either, assuming he existed.

Re: Special cases

"The Egyptians beat Pythagoras to it; they used 3:4:5 for land surveying. Heck, I used it a lot when building my home 14 years ago."

When we moved into our home some years ago after my parents had dies I wondered what became of the 3:4:5 wooden triangle my dad made to set out the walls when he built the house. A year or so ago I found it propped up against a boundary wall when I was cutting back a holly. The joints attaching the hypotenuse had rotted but I still have the right angle.

Re: So much for digital

"Thought that was why there was 60 seconds / minutes in a hour."

I think that's also derived from the Babylonians as do the divisions of a circle. But, of course, it was they who had the wit to use a number base that was convenient for integer division rather than an inconvenient one based simply on counting their fingers.

Re: So much for digital

"why has the modern world moved so far towards pure binary (and powers of 2 in specific contexts)?"

Imperial measurement made considerable use of binary. Weights from pounds down to drachms were binary as were volumes from gallons down to gills. In general they seem to have been based on measures which were a convenient size for some purpose with a strong inclination to subdivide on a binary basis. It's a natural thing to do. If you have a standard of weight, for instance, you can weigh out that amount of sand, flour or whatever on scales and then, using the same scales, divide that into two equal portions and subdivide further.

The problem arises when two different scales of measurement overlap and we end up with a stone of 14 pounds. Other stones were available - I've seen reference to a stone of 15lbs in the C18th - but I suppose a atone of 16lbs would have required too much adjustment to reconcile with the larger scales in use for other purposes.

Re: So much for digital

"1024 if you undo your fly"

No, that would be 2047.

El Reg gets schooled on why SSDs will NOT kill off the trusty hard drive

Re: M-disc

"For me, it was Zip drives."

I had to buy a drive which got used just once. My daughter had data on a disc and needed to get it off onto something more tractable.

Re: Tepid storage for home users

"What I'd like is some reliable, long-term (archival) storage for home users. Something with a vast amount of capacity that I can write, lose in the back of a desk drawer for 20-30 years and reliably read afterwards, without (like a tape drive) needing a rather expensive bit of kit to read and write it."

The problem with this is that not only do you have to provide the equipment for 20-30 years but you also have to be able to understand it. So even if you resort to writing QR codes to microfilm you then have to hope that whatever OS you're using in 20-30 years has a library for decoding QR codes, even if the data is just plain old ASCII text that you could have streamed off a tape providing you had a tape drive.

There are no easy solutions for long term data storage except active curation: copying from the old medium and format to the latest one whilst the old is still physically and logically accessible.

Re: What is needed is better data destruction policies

"Lots of storage will be freed up as people die."

There's a very long term storage format available: ink on parchment. A lot of that must have been freed up when people died. If you're an historian that's one of the central problems of your professional life.

OTOH I think present day rates of data accumulation will also be a problem for future historians.

Re: Flash replacing Tape too

"tape technology... evolved to produce additional advantages: such as high data transfer rates that can surpass most rust drives"

Isn't tape also based on rust?

Re: I just replaced the HDD in my laptop with...

"Put the SSD in as the boot drive and put your old HDD into the USB casing for extra data space."

I get it: it's a use case that works for you so of course it must work for everyone else.

Fancy talking to SAP about your indirect licensing concerns? Straw poll says no

Re: Overlicensing?

"too many licences"

Does this concept actually exist?

Node.js forks again – this time it's a war of words over anti-sex-pest codes of conduct

I'm trying to work out who's harassing who here. I think it's everybody and everybody else.

It certainly wouldn't happen in the Linux kernel community.

Reality strikes Dixons Carphone's profits after laughing off Brexit threat

Re: Extended life expectancy for mobes

"what makes them die so young?"

The smaller you make the components the less able they are to tolerate minor defects.

Did ROPEMAKER just unravel email security? Nah, it's likely a feature

Re: Old school

"Which then sits on my hard drive, wasting space for nothing."

Why? Given your icon you should be familiar with /dev/null.

Re: "E-Mail is a TEXT medium"

"Then what happens when you're told you just lost a big deal because of your paranoia"

And what happens to you when your lack of paranoia has let in malware that's closed down your IT network for a few days or allowed access that's enabled a few million of your favoured currency units to be looted?

Re: "E-Mail is a TEXT medium"

"Email was a text medium. Since then it has grown richer."

Richer for marketing spammers and criminals. I have no wish to indulge such low-lives.

Re: Err,

the flow.

breaks up

Top-posting

Re: remote CSS?

"Outlook and Thunderbird? Both will load remote content if you let them."

Simple solution: don't. And don't use webmail either.

Paris nightclub red-faced after booze-for-boobs offer exposed

"Simply identify a gentleman"

But how many of the men are gentlemen?

Needless to say, Feynman had a story about this.

Identity fraud in the UK at 'epidemic' levels as cases rise 5% – report

Re: How hard can it be to steal someones identity?

"You can't steal an identity. They are permanently attached to people and impossible to remove."

That's a debatable point.

For the purposes of identifying oneself for an increasing proportion of transactions "identity" consists of a few pieces of data. Given those - or maybe a subset and a bit of social engineering of the service provider - then a criminal could start to get control of of other aspects. An instance would be getting a bank to send out a replacement credit card to a different address. Another would be getting a password reset to something the criminal controls.

We're used to having to remind people writing of "copyright theft" that it doesn't meet the ingredients of theft. But this is different. If the criminal takes control of various aspects of the individual's identity, at least within this meaning of identity, then the individual has indeed lost something and the criminal has gained it. It wasn't permanently attached and it's certainly arguable that it's been stolen.

Re: Hmmmm

"Crime recording standards generally only allow crimes to be reported by the victim or an officer."

Clearly things have changed. Back in my day I took part in quite a few murder investigations and I don't think all the victims lived long enough to dial 999 or was stumbled over by an officer who nobody else could call because they weren't the victim.

Microsoft, Red Hat in cross-platform container and .Net cuddle

Not surprising as Red Hat have been trying to make Linux more Windows-like for some time.

Sonos will deny updates to those who snub rewritten privacy terms

"I don't expect them to agree"

If they fulfil your expectation you could try the small claims court.

Re: Meet Mr Three Point Five Millimetre

Completely with you except for the "stream of conciousness" bit. "Purest" wouldn't have been an adjective I'd ever have applied.

Re: Nobody actually read what they said in the blog post...

@Timmy B

It depends on whether your use of the product depends on an ongoing arrangement with the vendor. If it doesn't then you don't need to worry. If it does then you should realise that pretty well anything could go wrong. Even the most stringent T&Cs aren't proof against the vendor going out of business. If it's simply some item you can live without - a sound system for instance - you could just be prepared to write off your investment in hardware. If it's something that's looking after your personal media collection then you need backups or, again be prepared to write it off. But if it's something your livelihood or business depends on then you do need to think seriously about what could happen if things go wrong.

Risk involves both the probabilities and what you stand to lose.

Re: "Couldn't see the point of getting a Sonos. "

Having (in theory) a "plug n play" device to do this is meant to be sooo much simple

"Meant to be" is the critical bit here. Until the vendor's updates render it increasingly tricky.

And people wonder why some of us prefer open source software wherever possible.

Re: Nobody actually read what they said in the blog post...

I don't know how much we can trust that but the "never will" part gives me hope.

It makes you hope that the management and ownership will never change?

Re: Choose whether hackers get your data or the vendors

"The majority of hardware and software has security flaws that need patching from time to time."

Mark one piece of wire seems to connect speakers without needing software updates.

Uh oh, scientists know how those diamonds got in Uranus, and they're telling everyone!

"Why do they need a factory to make more?"

They need industrial diamonds. If they were to simply release gem-grade diamonds for industrial use they'd PDQ get recycled into the gem trade & depress the price there.

Re: Holocene Extinction coated with nano-diamonds !

"Care to describe the physics involved when nature produces a bowling ball sized hail stone?"

A lot of turbulence.

a "rain" of diamonds.

Lucy?

Biz sends apps to public cloud, waves 'bye to on-premises server folk. NO! WAIT!

Re: Where do Server Support people come from?

"Cloud providers (as vendors) can be threatened by large customers to either fix their s[censored]t or customers will go elsewhere."

Threaten, yes; but to make good on that threat they need staff able to move the services and data elsewhere.

And they no longer have any.

"The 45'ers say 69.7 per cent of respondents said current candidates lack skills and experience."

That's always the case when you demand x years of experience and offer a salary appropriate to x/4 years, especially when the product version in question has only been available for x/10 years.

10% of UK's top firms would be screwed in a cyber attack – survey

Keep the FORTRAN IV and get rid of the rest.

German court reveals reason for Europe-wide patent system freeze

Re: "a specific date for the decision is presently not foreseeable"

"When is Batistelli's term up?"

When will Batistelli concede his term is up?

FTFY

Re: So, in other words..

"I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you by such an astonishing amount of sanity, in politics no less."

Is it too much to hope that this will bring the whole saga to an end? Probably.

Disbanding your security team may not be an entirely dumb idea

I don't like the term "appetite for risk", it's just an encouragement for cowboys. "Tolerance of risk" seems a better starting point.

Re: Sounds like another management idea - "They are all just IT guys, right?"

"IT Security has three balanced priorities: Confidentiality, Integrity of data, and Availability.

IT and developers and CIO's also have three priorities: Availability, Availability and Availability."

Presumably you've never been a DBA. If you had you should have been aware that integrity of data was your first priority.

You're spot-on about bonus level managers, however.

Re: deregulation

"Would this be just as effective?"

Let's see.

Marketing department decides it's perfectly OK to spam customers irrespective of whether they wanted to be spammed or not. Hands over customer list to "digital marketing company" AKA professional spammer. Together they concoct email which is infested with links except web site managers refuse to host them so the spammer does that as well. Ends up training customers to be phished with customer list in hands of spammer to be re-used for other clients, sold on or both. Do we expect marketing departments to have security functions to make sure this is done properly?

"not my job that one guv'nor!"

Also expressed as "when it's everybody's job it's nobody's job".

British snoops at GCHQ knew FBI was going to arrest Marcus Hutchins

@kain preacher

C) FBI need to keep their numbers up and a foreign kid is a soft target if some sort of case can be cobbled up.

"this is the adult world where if someone has potentially committed a crime they need to be investigated."

There's still the question of why, if there was a case to be investigated, it wasn't investigated in the UK where it would appear that the alleged act would have been committed.

"the fact that the crime was committed in the US (allegedly)."

Only in the sense of the US's extraterritorial extension of its criminal justice system. If he lived and worked in the UK it's likely that if he wrote Kronos (& see my response to Gumby) then he would have done so in the UK. However, the CPS would have required something like a proper prima facie case that they could present to a committal hearing. So far we've heard of nothing like that in this instance other than that he wrote an explanation of a technique which wasn't original, posted the code on Github and then, maybe naively, suggested that it had been the source of similar code in Kronos.

TL;DR In the UK it'd have been laughed out of court had it got there.

Re: @The idiot... you really don't get it...

"The real question is why does the FBI think this is their guy?"

They need a guy so anyone will do?

Oh, look, here's a bit of code he posted publicly that he then says was incorporated in Kronos. That'll do.

Incidentally the author of this analysis https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2017/08/inside-kronos-malware/ suggests that the actual code has a longer pedigree than Hutchins publication and that the implementation is more sophisticated concluding "The level of precision lead us to the hypothesis, that Kronos is the work of a mature developer, rather than an experimenting youngster."

The sky is blue, water is wet and UK PC shipments are down

Re: Now then, Harber, old son, here's what you need to do ...

"In your laptops, get rid of the rubbery chiclet keyboard and use proper keyboards instead"

I have a little MSI I use when I don;t want to take my regular laptop with me. It has a chiclet keyboard and I don't give the difference a moment's thought. Press key and character appears on screen. That's what matters.

"waiting for the fab new iPhone expected in September! I can't wait!"

So you're buying something else instead?

Re: re: the sky is blue etc

"Who will these people blame for their woes after 2019?"

a) The negotiators because they didn't do a good enough job

b) The EU because old habits die hard