Posts by Doctor Syntax

How's this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini

" It's like a Nokia Communicator, but modern."

The key difference between this and a Communicator is that the latter had phone keys and display on the outside. It's not clear how this will make calls in anything like the same convenient fashion.

Re: Ordered

"The discussions so far relating to the Linux port indicate that those who really need a unix in the pocket will get everything they need."

BSD?

'Twas the night before Y2K and a grinch stole the IT department's overtime payout

Re: Overtime payments

"This will cause a serious syntax error situation to develop between three parties, the people who was promised a raise, the people who made the promise, and manglement."

To which the answer is "see you in court" which, in this case, would be an employment tribunal. The company can sort it out internally.

Re: Overtime payments

"Always get the offer in writing signed by someone outside the immediate project."

This, above all.

"They are then signed back to JPMorgan on a minimum 3 year contract, at contractor rates of around £1,000 per day, i.e. more than 4 times their existing salary."

And I trust their clout is sufficient to enable them to negotiate IR35-resistant contracts.

"Everyone else thinks IT is a cushy job and we are paid a fortune for little. We all know that's not true, we also know we are the first to be screwed over financially or with our jobs as opposed to everyone else in the company."

Having previously been in the scientific side of the Civil Service I can tell you that that's not confined to IT. There seems to be a strange dichotomy in the managerial mind: if they can't understand what's being done it must be very little and yet they realise they couldn't do it themselves.

Beyond code PEBCAK lies KMACYOYO, PENCIL and PAFO

"TFL - Too Flipping Late"

Completely interchangeable with "Transport for London"

Re: PEBKAC is over-reported

"Manglement that puts people in front of a computer who are barely capable of working out what 2+2 equals (yes, those people are stupid, but manglement who give people tasks they are incapable of performing are even more stupid and the root cause of the problem)."

Yes!

Seen a couple of days ago. Must have been the world's slowest checkout operator. An infinite supply of unhurried patience in an overcrowded supermarket. Had to look carefully at each product to find the bar code.

Then someone paid with saving stamps. I can only imaging that the book of stamps totalled more than the purchase and it was beyond the wit of the supervisor (that's two dummies manglement put in place) to detach correct number and give the rest back. So she issued new stamps.

From several feet back I can see that the stamps are in sheets of 10 - 5x2 and all very clearly alike. So she counts the stamps, prodding at each pair with her finger. She counts each identical sheet to make sure they're the same.

Merry Christmas, UK prosecutors: Here's a special gift... a slap from the privacy watchdog

Re: Haa Haa Haa

"Ok what happens if we have a hard brexit?"

The voters who thought taking control was a good idea will find that (a) in the modern world nobody has as much control as they thought they'd have because external factors such as world markets determine so much and (b) such control as they have is over a cratering economy.

When there's nobody about who'll admit to having voted Leave there'll be a clamour to get back in at any terms possible, one of which will be saying goodbye to the pound.

Taking back control, indeed!

Would personal penalties help?

How much will Britain's next F-35s cost? Not telling, says MoD

Re: how many troops the US put into Afghanistan

"Did Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great bother?"

Not sure about Genghis but Alexander certainly did.

Bigmouth ex-coppers who fed media MP pr0nz story face privacy probe

Re: Disappointed

Bob, Cressida Dick has a serious enough back story for elReg not to make puns about her name however unlikely it may seem. In the view of many even her continued presence, let alone the position she holds, is a bad reflection on the Met.

Re: Just an ICO probe?!

"And that's just with my commercial-grade network security in place; I can only imagine what MI6 have set up for parliament."

There is one thing. It's police property.

Re: @ Naselus

"And that's just with my commercial-grade network security in place; I can only imagine what MI6 have set up for parliament."

Very much less, I'd think. For a start MI6's role is foreign intelligence so it wouldn't be their job at all. Also, if Parliament is sovereign who are MI5 or GCHQ to tell them what they can and can't do?

UK teen dodges jail time for role in DDoSes on Natwest, Amazon and more

Re: No prison

"Cost of benefits, because he can't get a job afterwards."

He still has a criminal conviction against his name.

One shortcoming of the the rehabilitation system is that a number of supposed rehabilitees seem to get away with failing to meet their obligations with no substantive escalation of punishment to deter this. There are a surprising number of instances reported in the local press where so-and-so has missed appointments with probation officers/failed to turn up for their unpaid work/whatever and simply get a further term of whatever it is they're ignoring added or maybe a week or two's curfew.

The courts presumably think they're sending the message that the offender can't get away without extra punishment. The offender receives the message that he can continue without being punished. The first law of communication: the message communicated is what's received, not what's transmitted.

Ubuntu 17.10 pulled: Linux OS knackers laptop BIOSes, Intel kernel driver fingered

Re: Accidental Aardvark

"Ideally Lenovo should provide BIOS reflashing tool which works under Linux"

Better still, one that can self-boot and doesn't need any installed OS.

'Please store the internet on this floppy disk'

Re: iPads

"after my lawyers had finished with them, I got compensation for unfair dismissal."

I take it you're one of those smart enough to keep a paper trail. Well done.

Re: Brings back bad memories

"Beyond that you implore your boss to tell their boss his users are not competent and need training / redeploying and its not his or your problem."

It depends. If it was your department's decision to replace the familiar with the unfamiliar then perhaps it is your problem.

But in general, use of the software is just part of the user's job so training the user to do their job including the software should be part of the user department and, although you might help with it, any written document should be the user department's work and cover the whole job instead of the IT aspect being taken out and documented separately.

Re: Brings back bad memories

"the new system is broken and what was wrong with the old way"

And do you have a good answer for that? Fixing what wasn't broken is all too often the tech industry's substitute for productivity.

Re: Brings back bad memories

"and shrink the pic to achieve that"

Or crop it to isolate the relevant dialog.

Hancock's hour: Minister of fun makes quips as GDPR questions cover old ground

I wonder if it would be possible for HoL committees to contract Paxo as a freelance interrogator for such occasions. ISTR he was pretty persistent with this sort of answering. Or possibly Lord Howard, he's already a member and has had the chance to observe how Paxo did it.

UK.gov pushes ahead with legal right to 10Mbps

Re: So Openreach get to pick up the bill?

"What fibre?"

The fibre that was used to roll out FTTC after BT were finally allowed to do that once the others had finished cherry picking the areas where they were prepared to lay cable.

Re: Silly Idea...

"The wireless telcos are already doing this"

But not as Shadmeister expressed it - one network forced to build the lot.

Re: So Openreach get to pick up the bill?

"That is what they inherited or were gifted."

I think you're trying to say it's what the shareholders bought at privatisation from a government that didn't want to invest more in building up the infrastructure. And, of course, you're ignoring all the investment BT put into it in the intervening decades. Or do you think all that fibre was in the ground back in the '80s?

One more beancounter given a spanking over Tech Data chicanery

How can you not notice that you're a bit short of change until it gets to £27m?

Windows 10 Hello face recognition can be fooled with photos

"backed up by another device that only they should have access to"

How does the user authenticate themselves on that other device?

Oh good, half of Defra's Brexit projects involve IT

Remember the howls of anger when it took a few weeks to go to court to establish the correct legal process to pull the trigger and how this was delaying "the will of the people"? It's becoming increasingly clear that the lead time to accomplish this is stupidity should have been years just to work out what's needed.

Re: with a small exception

"just to patch the date handling on stuff already there."

In some cases it was also a good time to refresh systems. Some commercial products didn't provide updates for older kit. But yes, basically straightforward, required only time and money.

Re: Who cares

"It will be like the millennium bug all over again, nice pay, good bonuses, resulting in tax revenue."

Except that the Millennium bug was fixed. Apart, that is, from the odd numpty business who insisted on running their old system into January because "year end"; that was - interesting. I reckon this is going to be a lot more interesting.

Our Defra strategy for brexit will be taking the cow to the EU market and getting magic beans. It worked for Jack.

FTFY

Re: Standard systems...

"going by the Price2 method they worship"

The official name is Prince 2 but Price squared sounds closer to reality.

US senators rail against effort to sneak through creepy mass spying bill

"I simple don't understand why the rules should allow tacking one (or more) distinct, unrelated items onto a bill."

It's got a long and not entirely shining reputation. In Westminster, back in the days when divorce required an Act of Parliament one way to do that was to tack on a clause to some other Act.

Paul noted that "the information on foreigners is gathered in a less-than-Constitutional manner – and most of us are okay with that

And still it's claimed the Privacy Figleaf is "satisfactory".

TalkTalk banbans TeamTeamviewerviewer againagain

Being generous - it's Christmas - let's suppose for a moment that the TT management realise that they need to provide customers with a safe, reliable service, allowing for the fact that the bulk of their customers aren't going to be anywhere near the upper quartile of IT-savvy.

Given their starting point of having had their customer data breached multiple times, how do they do that?

Re: Hmmmm

"As much use as a chocolate Dido."

Much less useful. Chocolate can be eaten.

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

Re: I may have missed something...

Won't this mean that even more businesses will put customer data directly onto the Internet so that requests for what is held can be automated and sent to the applicant?

Only if they're stupid. For the reason's you mentioned, of course. There's a primary requirement to take care of the data. Putting it "directly onto the internet" would be the opposite of that. That doesn't, of course, mean that stupidity in business management doesn't exist. Some people only learn the hard way. The increased fines just raise the cost of being stupid.

Isn't it just a tax without any benefits to the end user?

Tax? Complying - which is what they should always have been doing, is just a cost of doing business. And "end user" of what? What you should be thinking about is "data subject". And the data subject could be a customer, a supplier, a patient, an employee ... Everyone about whom you want to hold data. If doing things right is too expensive don't do it at all. Don't hold data that you don't need. That is and always has been one of the principles of data protection.

Data Protection was the same, seemed like a good idea

What do you mean "was"? It still is Data Protection. That's what the DP in GDPR stand for.

world plus dog used it as an excuse for "I can't tell you that because of data protection laws" and it became a barrier for getting hold of useful information.

I'm not sure if it's specifically dealt with but wrongful invocation ought to be an occasion for judicial remedies. A good reply to anyone trying would be "I've got the entire text of the Regulation on the computer in front of me. Could you please refer me to the passage to which you refer? If it helps I'll read the entire thing out and you can tell me when I get to the relevant passage".

"If it's possible to access private date of multiples in clear text from an employees email system, you're already doing it wrong and nothing will save you. That's not designed for safety, that's designed for disaster."

For high value targets the object of spear phishing isn't to grab the employee's email. It's to subvert that employee's machine as a beach-head to work their way into the system. If you don't allow for that you're doing it wrong.

Re: Red herrings

"but am I acting legally by leaving the data that I now know (or have good reason to believe) relates to mrs smith available to mr bloggs?"

Like the man said, get proper legal advice. Like you should have done before setting up your business.

Re: I have already registered a company

" Instead or working to fix the problem"

Whoooosshhh!

How Google's black box Knowledge Graph can kill you

Google is a mere beginner at confusing people. Genealogists have been at it for centuries resulting in people allegedly becoming parents after they'd died - and probably before they were born as well. It's not easy matching names to construct profiles of people. Perhaps they should have tried it out on historical data first and then rolled it out slowly - and stopped when they discovered what a pig's ear they were making.

UK.gov needs help getting folk to splurge on full fibre and 5G

Raising taxes is PROVEN to increase local investment in tax avoidance.

Re: End Openreach, BT, Monopoly

"AND THEN I MAY FINALLY BE ABLE TO MOVE OFF ADSL!"

Let's say OpenReach drops roll-out of FTTC and concentrates instead of extending FTTP to those areas where it already has fibre in place, namely those which already have FTTC. Does this shorten or extend the time needed for you to get off ADSL?

Hot chips crashed servers, but were still delicious

"if a user requests something , hardware , software , or merely how to do something"

The first response is almost always "What are you actually trying to do?".

"Nah, eroding workers rights should be easier, so they're going to do that first."

Or all those tight banking regulations.

Re: The first question you ALWAYS ask...

"I can't dispense"

With thinking like that it might have been for the best.

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

Meanwhile, over on the Beeb I see the US is blaming the Norks for Wannacry. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42407488

Here's a quote from them: "The tool kits of totalitarian regimes are too threatening to ignore." Just how much brass neck does the US have?

Ace reporting from the Beeb: as far as I can see there's no mention of the basic toolkit having come from the NSA.

Re: Well, that was obvious.

Well done that second person. You've caught up with the teo downvotes. So presumably that's two people who still believe that it wouldn't be obvious for Kaspersky to sue even in the face of reports that they've just done that very thing.

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?