Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK.gov tips £400m into digital investment pot

"Company goes bump."

Why? Could it be that once the thing's priced up to offer a required ROI the potential punters go "That's nice but not at that price."?

One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail

For at least one PM I ran up against the key to success was to ignore him as far as possible (coming up to a developer concentrating on a complex task and insisting on talking to him is something difficult to ignore). No amount of Gantt charts, schedules to be checked or whatever will get a task done; it's finished when it's finished and not before.

The last straw was spending the day before he went on holiday over between who should be assigned a particular program. After a late meeting it had been assigned to me (good). By the time I got home he'd changed his mind again and assigned it to the inept. The stress was too much. I took the next day off sick and emailed in an announcement of my retirement. Before finally retiring I wrote the program in question myself.

How to pwn phones with shady replacement parts

"If that were true, why isn't it happening already at the point of manufacture?"

It would depend on the brand. An expensive brand has a reputation to protect and could be destroyed when it leaked out if they did this. However, a component manufacturer selling to repair shops is unknown to the public, doesn't have that reputation to protect and could do this without repercussions - just burn their brand and start again in the event of real trouble.

Ubuntu 'weaponised' to cure NHS of its addiction to Microsoft Windows

Re: OMG... really!

A lot of vendors, especially those peddling pathology systems are never going to warrant running their system on a Linux distro.

The phone calls to the vendors' sales and marketing department start thusly: "Hello, I run procurement for $NHSTrust. We're reviewing the market and asking vendors about Linux support. Do you have Linux support?"

Remember the two important things about salesmen:

- They never want to lose a sale let alone an existing customer.

- You can tell when they're lying because their lips move.

Many development teams have been told to make good on something their sales teams have promised they had.

Re: Pipe Dream

"Of itself, there is nothing wrong in out-sourcing some aspects of healthcare to private companies."

There is plenty wrong with it

It has been built into the system from the start: GPs, dentists and pharmacists have been private from the start. The only question is where do you draw the boundary. Do you really want to roll it back so that GPs are nationalised? Dentists? Boots? Should the NHS start making its own hospital beds?

There are two things to realise here.

1. No political party dare get rid of the NHS. Yes, I know it's thrown about as an accusation but do you really, if you give it a moment's thought, think that any party would believe they could do it and survive?

2. No political party has worked out how to deal with the mushrooming costs.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"Any place that can have a week long email outage has incompetent admins who are desperately in need of training."

Training or replacing?

Re: Pipe Dream

"The (English) NHS is a lot of large customers (hospital trusts), and a really big number of medium size customers (GPs etc)."

Fair comment. But some things do get decided centrally. I had one job which covered all England and Wales (integrating the two was a pain) and, separately, Scotland. We only missed out on NI. Trusts, GPs & all ordered separately but there was central control.

Thinking back to my comment about not giving the customer reason to review the market, I wonder if some suppliers who have been coasting on the back of supplying a very few products into the NHS might not have sales staff sufficiently on the ball to realise that.

OTOH I'm sure some of us who've worked with more, shall we say aggressive, salesmen will have had the experience of making good on assurances that, yes, we have such a product.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"You will need managers"

I was with you until this.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"That would last just as long as the first time the government-appointed contractor (Capita) got their hands on it. Then the repo would disappear into the bowels of the Reading monolith, never to be seen again."

You seem to lack familiarity with GPL, BSD and other open source licences.

Re: Seriously?

"I wouldn't trust my life to code written by people who smoke weed 24/7 !"

Thanks for explaining how Windows got to be that way.

Re: Bah!

As for these "smartcards", they sound like the PINs we had in the late 60s and which I've been urging everyone to have another look at for Lo! these many years.

TFA says:

"Its mission was to find a way to deploy... Linux ... on 750,000 smartcards used to verify clinicians accessing 80 per cent of applications – excluding those for clinical use – on millions of health service PCs."

Apart from the rather dodgy phraseology which suggests the smartcards would be running Linux I read this as saying these smartcards are already in use with Windows PCs.

"The rollout was cancelled because they had paid for the wrong licence, then built the image on the incorrect (ie the version they *meant* to buy a licence for) version of Win7, but that's another story!"

This is an argument for Windows?

Re: How uncomfortable exactly?

"This would be the WannaCry attack that El Reg has several times noted didn't actually affect XP systems?"

ISTR that that was because XP had a protection measure: it fell over before any damage could be done. I suppose the closest medical equivalent is "the operation was a success but the patient died".

Re: Swings and roundabouts

"What you save in Windows licences, you'll have to pay in retraining staff."

From the examples you give where did that "re" in "retraining come from?

Re: In other news

driving by grim-faced "agents".

I see a couple of them have proved your point with downvotes.

Re: It's also about automation...

"the NHS has relied on Office macros to function."

Getting rid of those should be a security improvement in itself.

Re: Not a *buntu fan, but more power to 'em!

"We thought about using an rpm base, but NHSdora didn't sound as good as NHSbuntu."

Personally I'd have gone for Debian with an intent to move to Devuan or a BSD and a neutral name. The name ties you to a parent.

BTW, did you consider a Raspberry Pi edition? Just the thing for thin clients.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"And 99% of those will be only work on Internet Explorer...."

Which is a major risk as long as that situation continues, because of the proportion which will only run on specific versions of IE.

It's a situation which needs to change and this is the way to change it.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"Crikey, where do you come from ?"

Don't know what you think, Hans, but I can hazard a guess.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"Have a look at the work being started by https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/, an advocacy group in the Linux Foundation, that is looking for sponsorship from big industry players to pay developers to work on essential FOSS code, because there aren't enough competent volunteers who want to do it."

Remember that Linux has from its earliest days attracted contributions from companies who find it to their commercial advantage to do so. From last year's report at: https://www.linux.com/blog/top-10-developers-and-companies-contributing-linux-kernel-2015-2016

Company Changes Percent of total

Intel 14,384 12.9%

Red Hat 8,987 8.0%

None 8,571 7.7%

Unknown 7,582 6.8%

Linaro 4,515 4.0%

Samsung 4,338 3.9%

SUSE 3,619 3.2%

IBM 2,995 2.7%

Consultants 2,938 2.6%

Renesas Electronics 2,239 2.0%:

"None" is the category which covers volunteers. The biggest contributor continues to be Intel. Are you saying their employees aren't competent?

Re: It will take 1-2 more WannaCries

"And just at the moment it seems that Linux security is in a bit like a mess; it doesn't seem to be a major focus of the kernel community."

While any monoculture isn't a good idea I suspect the comment about the kernel community is a misunderstanding of an attitude that all bugs are bugs so security bugs are no different to any others. But your response to this depends on whether you think some bugs don't need to be fixed.

Re: Good luck.

"many developers don't have a Linux client"

If their sales office received a call from the NHS saying "We're reviewing the market, do you have a Linux client?" that might not be something they'd admit to. It might be followed up by a flurry in development involving Wine so they could put up a plausible demo.

Re: Good luck.

"Especially given that most people have already chosen to learn a new UI, on their smartphone?"

To say nothing of learning a new UI for each Windows version.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

@ Dr_Barnowl

Careful there, you're getting beyond some people's comprehension - markets, competition. Weird stuff.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"someone else's hacked and undocumented spaghetti code?"

Citation needed as to your assumptions.

However let's look at what might be involved. As research is so difficult I've taken the liberty of cutting and pasting this from their website:

Our customisations are as follows:

-NHSbuntu wallpaper!

-A look and feel similar to a well known desktop…

- NHSmail2 compatability

--Email, calendar, address book

--Messager, with file sharing!

- N3 VPN compatability

--RSA token supported

-Remove games packages (sorry folks, no Minesweaper!)

-Added Remmina, a Remote Desktop client for VDI (or whatever it’s called these days)

Yup, maintaining that is going to be far too much of a challenge.

Re: Yet another distro?

"A dedicated NHS distro doesn't see a big deal to me."

Quite. AFAICS enterprise deployments of Windows seem to rely on their own build and routinely overwrite the vendor's install with their own. This doesn't seem to be much different.

Re: Yet another distro?

"I mean, there are several distributions which could be up to this task as they stand even some which could be highly tuned (Gentoo, Arch anyone?) surely the better way forward would be to use an existing distribution and add any required packages/features as an additional repository/ppa?"

s/Gentoo, Arch/Ubuntu/ and you seem to have described what's described here.

Privacy, consent laws under 'unprecedented strain'. We need a data-watcher watcher

I can't really see any value in a body which doesn't have teeth. But a UK body which does have powers already exists, the ICO. Being a creation of HMG it ultimately can't hold HMG to account - they could simply abolish it. It needs a supra-national body to be effective, something like the ECJ. Unfortunately escaping the jurisdiction of the ECJ seems to be the one thing her nibs insists on getting from Brexit.

Oh my Word... Microsoft Office 365 unlatched after morning lockout

Re: Every Cloud has a silver lining?

"When the Cloud is down, it's probable your competitors and/or customers are too. "

Not those competitors who didn't drink the Kool-aid and not those private customers who just use the web and wonder why you're not working and some of your competitors are. Just saying.

Can we have a twiddling thumbs icon?

"Well, there is this thing called "the web" now; you can actually get to your data from other computers than your main machine!"

Oddly enough I've never found this a problem, at least not since 8" floppies replaced punched cards (but with punched cards I only ever had access to one machine). Ever since then portable media have got smaller physically, larger in capacity and, on the whole, faster.

"Erm you download the software to your computer. Then it's all available even if you are unable to log-in to MS for any reason."

What did people do before there were online services? Oh, just what you said (substitute "stick a disk in the drive" for "download"). So just what has been gained by going online/to cloud?

What would journalists do if they didn't have Twitter to quote?

Reach out to ring people up for quotes.

The ability of Twitter to kick businesses into action almost makes it worth having an account. Almost.

Dead serious: How to haunt people after you've gone... using your smartphone

Re: Please add BT to your list

"I was IT manager"

You were an IT manager and didn't know to prod keys at random until someone answers?

"See you soon!"

Oh, you didn't know that, did you?

Re: Like those Chryogenic companies

"If they can't revive you in 100 years time you can't sue 'em. Yer dead."

It seems like a sort of reverse version of Pascal's wager.

" SwonSong ceased posting to its own blog ten months ago."

They don't seem to have had any faith in their own product if they couldn't set up a few decades' worth of posts in advance.

Great for delivering a most scathingly ad hominem attack on some deserving public figure (which'll get you into jail normally)?

Why wait?

The immediate thought that occurs is "how will they know you're dead?". Obvious: someone has to tell them. Next thought: "how do they know who you are?". Obvious: you have to tell them.

So set up the app with an entirely fictitious person and then report their death. All the company can do is point to an apparently dead customer. (Point of order - should this be an ex-customer?)

Civil rights warriors get green light to challenge UK mass surveillance

"They had to rule themselves out of any coalition because they got punished so heavily for being in the last one."

Yes, too many of their voters were protest voters who wanted to be able to complain whatever party was in government. The thought that their party might actually have to make real decisions that counted was too much to cope with. And then they discovered that in a coalition you can't get everything you want and that didn't go down well either. But it would have been sensible to say nothing at all and keep options open rather than declare themselves to be an irrelevance even though that's what their core vote want to be.

the Lib Dems... promised to roll back the law if they gained power in the last election.

However they ruled themselves out from joining a coalition which made all such promises a no-op.

Talk about cutting-edge technology! Boffins fire world's sharpest laser

Re: @ Doctor Syntax

"I would imagine that constraining the the frequencies would increase coherence"

I interpret "Stable for up to 10x the distance from Earth to Moon" as referring to the coherence length so that appears to be the case.

The irony is, of course, that a laser should be unnecessary for reading CDs & DVDs. Interference contrast ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_interference_contrast_microscopy ) microscopy resolves similar phase differences with white light.

So you'd be able to spin a CD on the moon and read it with a pickup on Earth providing the spot size was also constrained.

UK.gov leaves data dashboard users' details on publicly accessible site

Re: Well, that didn't take long...

"Next time some authoritarian crackpot insists we must have ID cards for our own safety, we can point to yet another example of our data not being safe in their hands."

No problem. Lessons will have been learned. No, no problem at all.

Re: Example of exceeding open data requirements

"It works in Estonia, where if anyone in government looks at your data, you get notified of who did and why."

How do you know? Just because they told you that?

Fresh cotton underpants fix series of mysterious mainframe crashes

Here's one I made earlier

"I've never seen a lady slip *into* a bikini... the process inevitably involves her briefly balancing on one leg at least one point, and some bending."

Sir, the thoroughness of your investigation does you credit.

Re: Don't give me no static ...

"Note also that opening envelopes with self-adhesive flap generates static -- try opening one in the dark"

Not necessarily static. Other forms of luminescence are available.

Re: I've personally measured 61,750ish volts on an empty, unused Styrofoam coffee cup

"Do we need a Reg unit of charge?"

That's a DUP.

Oh, that sort of charge.

Re: "it might be you appearing in this august space next week!"

Dammit. Two hours too late.

Rackspace goes TITSUP in global outage outrage

"Yesterday dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of local storage guys had their storage go down on them."

And they'd have had control over fixing it. Don't undervalue control.

Shadow Brokers hike prices for stolen NSA exploits, threaten to out ex-Uncle Sam hacker

Re: Just $130,000?

"They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. "

More to the point, why wouldn't the NSA release them to Microsoft? It's time for the rest of the world's governments to start giving US ambassadors serious grief each time their infrastructure or businesses are hit. For a start May could make it clear to Trump that his invite is cancelled and a new one will only be made once that's done.