Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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!

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?

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.

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.

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?

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!