Posts by Doctor Syntax

Web inventor Sir Tim sizes up handcuffs for his creation – and world has 2 weeks to appeal

Re: @AC "easy to copy"

Maybe it would be worth it for a college student who doesn't want to pay $200 for a textbook, but for a $9.99 paperwork, no way.

If the publisher were to sell their textbooks in paperback form they might sell more. Even without copying the $200 textbook is apt to be sold second-hand and third-hand if $200 is overpriced for its market.

Copying unprotected digital data on the other hand requires no investment of time or money. Well, unless you want to KEEP copies of every book you read and every movie you see!

Errm. What about people who simply want to keep copies of every book and movie they've PAID for?

There is a huge difference here, and it is silly to pretend that difference does not exist.

You've given examples of the supply side trying to manipulate the market. Don't be surprised if the demand side demands the right to respond in like manner. If vendors receive legal protection they should also be regulated to prevent them abusing that protection; at present this isn't the case.

Re: Mixed feelings

"But on the other hand I reluctantly accept that this is the only model that intellectual monopolists will ever use to sell their wares, and if we actually want their "nice things" then we are forced to obtain them on their terms."

Trade is a matter of bargaining. If providers want to well to us then they have to deal with our terms. Success happens when a common set of terms can be agreed on by both sides.

The ongoing problem that Big Content has experienced has come from their trying to manipulate markets - segmentation by country etc. They have been very slow to grasp the idea that that doesn't work in the modern world.

Re: I don't see a problem.

"The only negative consequence of this technology is the scenario of someone wanting access to content without, you know, paying for it."

So none of the ensuing plugins will have security consequences?

Ahem...Flash.

"The W3C, unable to reach agreement on how vulnerability disclosure should be handled, responded with something less than that, offering only voluntary guidelines instead a requirement."

Presumably this means that some DRM vendors will be sensible and some will make life difficult. In due course the latter will get their reward - a reputation for being a cess-pit of malware. Sadly, past experience shows that that won't do them as much harm as one might hope.

Behind the scenes of Slovaks' fight to liberate their .sk domain

Re: So many AC trolls

Any thread here contains a number of AC posts and I'm not sure troll applies to them here. On the whole they seem informed and informative.

Re: You seem to have...

"It also happens at other seemingly random times, probably some sort of spam detection."

It happened to me back on the discussion of brickerbot. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was triggered by my mentioning some of the contents of the script. I could only post a very bowdlerised version of my original.

It wasn't helped by the fact that, having entered the captcha the comment was cleared and trying to repost just brought up a fresh captcha.

Cloudflare captchas are obnoxious.

Was this rewritten from a press release by Centralnic?

BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

"Told you what?" the Boss asks, drawn over by both the conversation and the opportunity to avoid doing anything fruitful for the next 1/2 hour.

This sort of implies that at other times the Boss does do something fruitful. Who knew that?

@Alistair

That's how it ought to be done. Hopefully compulsory up to and including CxO level.

There's still the other side to deal with: how to stop marketing sending out emails which look exactly like phishing emails and thus training customers to be phished.

"Never get out of the boat."

That's easy for an admiral to say.

Zero accidents, all of your data – what The Reg learnt at Bosch's autonomous car bash

"people reading the god damned newspaper spread across their steering wheel"

Bus driver doing his paperwork spread over the steering wheel. driving through central London heading for the M1.

Re: Who pays?

Save on insurance? You don't think the insurance companies are going to let you get away with paying less do you?

Re: Zero accidents?

It's one thing promising perfect performance on "business as usual" activities. The problem with that is, accidents aren't business as usual. They're edge cases and that's just what software has always had trouble in handling. And these are not just simple edge cases such as off-by-one that can be tested for. They're going to be "we never saw that coming" events. They're going to be events that require much more processing than normal to deal with an unexpected set of circumstances.

If a designer reckons there might be enough processing power to cope then maybe the "run down the lone pedestrian" option gets hard-coded as a would-be damage limitation short cut. And then that gets triggered by some freak set of circumstances when an accident wasn't threatened and the car goes out of its way to run one down.

Another issue is certification. That's going to be a difficult one to test. Will there be a temptation to code to the test? Remind me, who was it who wrote the code for the VW emission control?

"we were assured this wouldn't happen when the cars were owned by regular Joes."

Debugging code never ever gets left in production systems does it?

Re: Cars withe EULA

"The question is, if I buy a car ... do I OWN what I paid for, or do I merely have a non-transferable license to USE my car in accordance with the car's EULA?"

The legal department will sort that out. You won't be allowed to buy a car, just lease it. The car will own you.

@wyatt

You don't really expect marketing to understand all that technical mumbo-jumbo do you? It's just cloud. Why? Because cloud.

Boffins start work on data centre to analyse UK infrastructure

Re: No need to spend £8 mil

" the closer the national infrastructure is to London, the higher the priority it gets."

Cardiff and Edinburgh will also be prioritised.

Re: DAFNI and...

"I wonder if DAFNI will use Virtually Enhanced Logistical Machine Analysis in the project?"

It'll use GIGO.

The water company seem to know more or less where their underground assets are round here. Gas and electricity have been rather puzzled.

Good luck with building a reliable database on that.

Talk about a hit and run: AA finally comes clean on security breakdown

It might have taken a long time to sort out but it's completely inexcusable not to notify those possibly affected immediately.

Virgin Media biz service goes TITSUP* across London

Option The Third - close a few libraries.

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

Re: Welcome to the UK

I'll see your cess-pits and raise you a pig-farm slurry pit.

There were a series of reports to the RUC that a couple had been killed and buried, the theme being that the bodies were dug up and moved. Nobody really believed it but it couldn't be entirely dismissed. (Have I ever mentioned the golf ball episode?)

Anyway, one of the variations was that the bodies had been dumped in a slurry pit in a pig farm. This had to be pumped out so that it could be examined. Even empty it would be done by the underwater team with dry suits and breathing apparatus.

The pit had been used for dumping carcasses of dead pigs and the pump was quite capable of drawing up and discharging bones. Somebody who was considered able to tell the difference between a pig bone and a human bone but cheaper than a regular pathologist had to spend a couple of days of an Irish winter standing at the outlet of the pump checking what came out. That was me. I suppose I should have been concerned about where the effluent was draining to. I wasn't

The subsequent examination was negative and, I heard, very brief. I didn't see that for myself. I'd already left.

Re: injuries....

"Back in the day when PC cases were made by Gillette."

I once had the good fortune to have a couple of PCs made by a firm who clearly hadn't got that message. The lids wrapped round to form the sides, were hinged at the back and had stays to hold them open. They were just held shut be a couple of catches - press to release and lift. All PCs should be made that way - at least those intended for IT folk and lab users.

Re: Frozen winter shit.

Thanks for the reminder, Daedalus. I don't even have to read it or look for it on Youtube. The key word was "effluvium".

Re: Frozen winter shit.

"There's no I in Team"

If anyone had tried that with me they'd simply have got a list of all the manglement buzzwords that do have an I: quality, innovation, profit, competitive, intelligence....

Re: Condensate

"routed it out a window to drip continuously somewhere appropriate."

The beancounters' window sill. Nice one.

"The bean counters wouldn't stump up for a replacement, so for the next year or so we had to make do with the backup unit which dripped continuously into a large refuse bin that had to be dragged out and emptied every few days."

Just have frequent precautionary shutdowns of any systems the beancounters rely on. After all, it's not good for the business to have no backup - which you don't if the intended backup has become the primary.

"Interesting to note that it only started to bombard us with SMSes between 18:00 and 20:00 - other times of the day it was all peachy and happy and quiet."

Systems have a malevolent intelligence of their own. The AI folks are looking in the wrong direction.

Bah Gawd! WWE left wrasslin' fans' privates on display online

Cloud storage is sold as the easy option. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it requires as much skill as keeping it in house.

Well, that escalated quickly: Qualcomm demands iPhone, iPad sales ban in America

Re: These patents are interesting

"That's the thing with patents, they're so easy to get"

Is it too much to hope that the US patent system collapses under its own weight? Perhaps someone could patent something the USPO depends on* and refuse to license it to them.

That would make it prior art, you say? That seems to have very little to do with it.

Re: Apple's hypocritical

"You realize Google "taxes" software developers the exact same 30%, right? Where's your outrage over that?"

Given that this is a row between Apple & Qualcom what's the relevance of Google?

Google ships WannaCrypt for Android, disguised as Samba app

“I'll disable SMBv1 on my home server and try to connect to it again. Edit: Nope, it doesn't connect. Ugh.”

The pre-requisite for this statement is that his home server was still running SMBv1. Why?

Someone's phishing US nuke power stations. So far, no kaboom

"There is no indication that hackers were able to jump from their victims’ computers into the control systems of the facilities, nor is it clear how many facilities were breached."

Translation: We don't know what's going on.

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

Re: All you complainers...

"There are distros that did not jump on the systemd bandwagon"

AFAIK the only established enterprise distros in this category are RHEL6 and its derivatives.

"I would shed a tear, but the sooner that bollocks Poettering stops being such a clown and takes his abomination systemd with him the better."

I wouldn't and if he actually did split from the Linux community I wouldn't care whether he continued to be a clown or not. But an upvote for the general sentiment.

Re: Burn it

"bring back upstart."

Not upstart.

Re: Maybe they are not fixing it because...

"Red Hat. Red Hat controls enough of the commercial enterprise Linux market that nearly everyone's applications have to be compatible with them."

They also still support just about the only enterprise Linux without systemd, RHEL6. So if you want to escape the stranglehold of one of Red Hat's least favoured contributions to Linux you can do so by becoming a Red Hat customer. That's irony or something.

Re: the problem with clueless amateurs...

"Still not sure why people think Linux is a hobby when plenty of companies contribute to its development, but there you go."

For some people their job depends on their ignorance.

Re: "A lot of good things started in the medieval period."

"Universal human rights are a product of Enlightenment"

Magna carta (1215) made such a good start at this that it took about 800 years before May managed to remove the concept of due process. The presumption of innocence didn't actually come from there but was introduced, I think from France, also in medieval times (maybe this is a further reason why May is in favour of Brexit - all these foreigners with inconvenient principles of law).

Re: A lot of good things started in the medieval period. ..not some many comp-sci inventions.

"Brewing."

That started much earlier.

Re: the problem with clueless amateurs...

" People creating things as a hobby who just don't quite 'get' all those older principles us grey hairs used to live by and enterprises"

Poettering isn't doing this as a hobby. AFAIK he's employed by Red Hat and Red Hat is certainly big enough to be classed as an enterprise.

Payroll glitch at DXC leaves former staff in employment limbo

The company declined didn't have anyone left to comment.

Dark web souk AlphaBay outage: Users fear they've been scammed

Total Inability To Supply Unusual Products?

Feelin' safe and snug on Linux while the Windows world burns? Stop that

Re: OS Upgrades and Other Patches

@Aitor 1

Yes, you've read some article on how it's done but I can see you've never actually done it yourself because you don't know what the result is.

"We talk about, say, RHEL 5 or CentOS 7, but each of these versions has sub-versions and they do fall out of support over time.... Now, there's a difference between applying patches for, say, version 6.2 and updating from 6.2 to 6.3: in-version patches will generally not affect applications, but minor version upgrades have a higher risk. "

I don't know about RHEL and derivatives but for Debian regular patching brings it up to the current version number. e.g:

cat /etc/debian_version

7.11

and yet it started out at 7.0.

TfL, WTH is my bus? London, UK, looks up from its mobile

TITSUP

Total Inability To Satisfy Unhappy Pedestrians

"Aren't printouts of the timetable displayed at bus stops?"

Yes. That gives you the theory. Actual bus users are more interested in the practice.

Re: There, there children. Sorry your pacifier is b0rken.

These were a miracle of modern technology work of fiction.

European MPs push for right to repair rules

Re: "... software should be easier to repair and update"

"Does this mean Windows 10 GPL?"

I think the implication of repairable means that it started out in a working state to which it can be returned after damage.

Re: Related topic

"lots of the kids toys fail to work when NiMH are used as the voltage is slightly lower"

And it's not just kids' toys. A lot of other stuff also fails to work with NiMH.