Posts by Doctor Syntax

Investigatory Powers Act: You're not being paranoid. UK.gov really is watching you

Re: Yawn

Maybe if people didn't break the law there wouldn't be a need for law enforcement due process of law and the presumption of innocence?

FTFY

What really pisses me off about this is that the laws are written on the basis that I'm guilty of something. Something that hasn't been defined, but just guilty of it anyway.

It makes me wonder why I spent about a third of my working life as part of law enforcement (got that 'unwarranted triumphalism' - as part of law enforcement?) dealing inter alia with terrorism offences if what's supposed to be my government chooses to impose the same sort of anti-democratic rule that the terrorists would had they won. In fact it's arguable that in this respect they have won.

" the plans do contain baby steps in the right direction."

The author is being very polite. Putting a trace of lipstick on the pig would be a better description.

You're SAP-ing my will to live: Licensing debate lumbers on as ERP giant tries to rebuild trust

Re: Failed with us

" we engaged SAP in a frank verbal discussion on what we could and couldn't do with our license. They were very forthcoming and honest."

Perhaps you should have recorded it "for training purposes".

Once again, UK doesn't rule out buying F-35A fighter jets

"maintenance costs to be cut significantly."

Maintenance costs cut - F35s? Does not compute especially as the maintenance is outsourced non-competitively.

Dentist-turned bug-biter given a taste of freedom

Clearly a good move on Patterson Dental's part. By having the publicity descend on FBI officers it's maybe deflected attention from Patterson Dental's Eaglesoft having security issues. That would help avoid the Streisand effect drawing attention to such security issues with Patterson Dental's Eaglesoft. BTW, doesn't HIPPA have anything to say about such issues?

Dirty COW redux: Linux devs patch botched patch for 2016 mess

Re: Huh?

"And even that is pre-supposing that the requirements can still be regarded as 'bug free' themselves, as Lee D pointed out."

Also pre-supposing that the theorem provers are bug free.

It's bugs all the way down.

Brit MP Dorries: I gave my staff the, um, green light to use my login

Re: Its up to the Data Controller to govern sharing of your data

@Blotto

Some of what you say is quite true but you seem to have overlooked that the net of who's being trusted here seems to have been spread a good deal wider than those corresponding with her might have expected.

Also, right there at the start of your 2nd para you list the police amongst those to be trusted. Well, there's one (ex-)policeman who evidently can't.

Re: Nadine Dorries : Why do people vote for her?

"She loves employing her family to work for her, according to wikipedia, her daughter earns 40-45K working as her office manager, despite living 96 miles away from the office. Her sister is one of her secretaries, on 30-35K."

That's a relief. She's just sharing her password with family so of course they can be trusted.

Re: Yet if any other civil servant did this

"sheer flippancy"

I think you may be doing her too much credit. Flippancy requires some comprehension.

Re: @ macjules

"it'll be 'N4d1n3'"

Too hard. More likely 'nadine'.

Re: Sends a terrible message.

"Essentially she's saying you can't prove someone is at the keyboard just because they've logged in."

Sadly, this is true. If senior managers in business need to have their emails printed out to read them what can you expect of MPs whose only essential skill is chatting up their constituencies' selection committees?

Drone collisions with airliners may not be fatal, US study suggests

Re: Bird Strike

And those were only lapwings!

Re: "may not be fatal"

"I suspect logic is not their forte."

Saying anything cautionary about drones brings out a flock of downvoters.

Escrow you, Apple! Ireland expects Cupertino to cough up to €13bn

Re: "The Register has contacted Apple for a statement"

Things are improving. They didn't reach out.

Re: Clever Irish

but they can always blame count on the mega corps going elsewhere to Ireland on Brexit.

FTFY

From the graaaaaave! WileyFox's Windows 10 phone delayed again

""Wileyfox Pro"

Sounds like a cunning but elderly database system.

Freelance techies moan about DXC billing snafu: No pay for three weeks

Re: If you get your contract through a third party ...

"But an increasing trend for companies that employ contractors"

There's the problem right there: "employ".

As soon as a client is thinking in those terms you have a problem. I stuck to working with relatively small businesses and mostly getting contracts by reputation or repeat business.

Smaller businesses were also less of a pain to work with unlike, say, the time I covered someone's 2-week holiday with an overlap either side and it was largely occupied by doing the paperwork to get agreement to add another chunk to the database and then more paperwork to get the system admins to make the space from LVM.

Re: If you get your contract through a third party ...

"... you are not freelance."

That doesn't follow. What matters is the terms of the contract. The trouble is that having a pimp mediating the contracts introduces an element of uncertainty into those terms. It's certainly preferable to contract direct.

Nationwide UK web bank and app take unscheduled nap

Re: An amateurish organisation

In the banking world it seems to count as business as usual.

"Customer service is the highest priority for Nationwide"

What's the lowest?

Terrible Interference To Santa's Universal Providing

Damian Green: Not only my workstation – mystery pr0n all over Parliamentary PCs

"Well the ICO has waded in"

Given that an MP could be dealing with personal affairs of constituents it's not surprising. What is surprising is that the Sergeant at Arms would allow the seizure on an MP's computer even with a warrant let alone without one.

If you were of an - errm - nefarious turn of mind wouldn't it be a good idea to send each MP an email claiming to be from a constituent with a dodgy payload that would download a few dodgy thumbnails? It would have the added bonus that the timestamps of the files would coincide with times that the computer was in use. Just so that should the case arise you want to blacken or blackmail an MP you could make such allegations against them.

Who might want to do that? Probably lots of people, not all from unfriendly countries. MPs are high value targets.

"No filter on the gov network?"

This is a Parliamentary network and what applies here doesn't necessarily apply to other gov.uk sites. I'm not sure about then but nowadays they even have their own domain, parliament.uk. And introducing a filter onto that raises all sorts of issues: would you be monitoring MPs' confidential communications with their constituents? or Party officials? Would you be censoring what they see? What authority could impose such sanctions on MPs given that collectively they are sovereign?

"particularly damning to ...the coaching MPs get on security"

The coaching might be OK but the ability of MPs to understand complicated technical explanations such as "don't share your password" might be a bit restricted. Ask Amber about hashing.

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

Re: Well done NASA!

" by planets"

Almost as good as a Soviet-era Russian woman shot-putter.

Re: how is assembler outdated and by what?

"this particular Assembler language IS outdated."

Not if there's a functioning CPU to run it on.

Guilty: NSA bloke who took home exploits at the heart of Kaspersky antivirus slurp row

Re: Pho no!

"What's a good replacement for Kaspersky?"

Do you mean apart from not using Windows in the first place?

A lot of people here would reckon that they have more to fear snooping from their own governments than from a foreign government so, unless their government is Russian, Kaspersky would be their AV of choice.

Re: Stealing, really?

"The opinion of the editor is quite visible here and it's even wrong."

Really? Just let's go back to the article and get the fuller version of what you quoted:

Pho is understood to be the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) programmer whose home computer was running Kaspersky Lab software that was allegedly used, one way or another, by Russian authorities to steal top-secret NSA documents and tools in 2015.

Do you notice that word there: "allegedly"? Maybe you also missed the reports of the USG making such allegations for some weeks now. This entire paragraph is just straight reportage.

Re: 67?

"I bet he is WAY smarter than you are"

Who's "he" and who's "you"?

Re: 67?

"they are employing the Gentrified Squad."

Gentrified? I didn't know the US had gentlemen.

Re: The mind boggles.

"didn't Kapersky give a false positive and proceed to upload his secret stuff?"

His secret stuff was malware, recognised as such and uploaded for analysis. Subject to the user's configuration, that's what AV packages do. It's how they stay up-to-date on the malware they're supposed to be detecting. It just happened to be NSA-written malware.

As it was included in a zip file the whole zip was uploaded and found to contain the source. Oops.

Re: The mind boggles.

"You'd think that a professional would be on top of such things."

It seems that offensive hacking and securing computers are very different skill sets. Govts drawing up policy really shouldn't take recommendations from the former; it puts us all at risk.

Ex-cop who 'kept private copies of data' fingers Cabinet Office minister in pr0nz at work claims

Re: Confused

"Misuse of a computer the taxpayers paid for is a crime, pure and simple."

Such misuse would include making unauthorised copies of improperly obtained data. This was an MP's computer. It would be quite likely to contain all manner of confidential constituents' business and shadow cabinet documents, all covered by Parliamentary privilege. If there were documents shared between government and shadow cabinet an unauthorised copy might constitute a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

Re: Constituents confidential details

I'd make a most unsuitable expert witness for either side: I'd be full of "ifs" and "buts". I couldn't in all conscience, sit there on the stand and say categorically (in terms a jury would understand) that fact X is true/false.

I think you'd make an excellent expert witness. A forensic scientist can only report on the basis of what they found. They can comment on how that might or might not be consistent with various accounts of what might have happened. You shouldn't put in a report something you're not prepared to stand over in court and that includes the limitations which you're aware of. Standing over those limitations is a reality; I've certainly experienced a persistent attempt by the counsel who'd called me to get me to go beyond what I'd written.

That doesn't mean that there aren't witnesses who take a different view or who stand as examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Re: What Proof It Was Him ???

"If Green was allowing somebody to use his PC for an extended period, (sending emails, and viewing documents) while logged in under his account then I think most people would see that as a considerable more serious issue than the porn thing. I really don’t think he (or anybody seeking to defend him) wants to go there."

And yet we're told of senior corporate types who have their PAs open and print out their emails so that they can read them. If it were the case here that an MP's assistant were using the MP's login to work on the MP's behalf it wouldn't be a unique situation.

Re: What Proof It Was Him ???

"I am deeply concerned if plods, ex or otherwise, take their work home and use it to manipulate national politics."

The original seizure of the computer was manipulation of national politics.

Re: The issue I have with this

"If anyone tried this in their workplace they'd be fired."

Think about this a little more carefully. What's the workplace and who was the user?

Now imagine that for whatever reason you had some sensitive personal issue that you needed to take up with your MP. Would you then be happy to learn that the Met had barged into your MP's office, seized his PC and taken it away to be examined?

Now do you see that an MP's office isn't like the average workplace?

Re: The issue I have with this

"An MP is a member of parliament, not parliament"

An MP nevertheless has Parliamentary privilege and that's quite right; if it were possible for an MP to be hounded by government and/or police we'd be well on the way to being a police state. Bearing that in mind, the real issue here is that his computer was seized by the police when he was a shadow minister with the complicity of the Sergeant at Arms.

Ofcom proposes ways to stop BT undercutting broadband rivals

Re: If BT can lower their prices........

"nationalise the UK's internet backbone infrastructure lower the prices for all and invest"

Historically these tend to be mutually exclusive options.

Badass alert: 1 in 5 Brits don't give a damn about webpage crypto-miners

"Plus Google, Facebook et al likely have a TOS document you signed which allowes them to do that."

But which would be unenforceable if contrary to law.

Oracle rival chides UK councils for pricey database indulgence

Re: poor data management

"The bill came to £80K."

I hope you deducted the cost of conducting the audit.

Re: Just say no ...

"As with any organisation linked to electoral cycles"

Oh that that were true. My local council hasn't changed political ownership for years and in any case the officials seem to be entirely out of the elected representatives' control.

Russia threatens to set up its 'own internet' with China, India and pals – let's take a closer look

Re: ITU

"They should be under the ITU"

Or the wider internet community as a whole. They could take the steps outlined in the article as a possible response to a Trump meltdown. The time to have done that was when, as the article recounts, they failed to get adequate controls over ICANN.

User dialled his PC into a permanent state of 'Brown Alert'

Re: So let's thanks technology...

"knobs in front of the monitors"

KIFOM. Another one to join PEBKAC, ID10T and PICNIC.

Will you be on Cloud9? AWS emits cloudy code editor it nabbed last year

And on an unrelated note, AWS launched Amazon Time Sync Service, which provides a way to synchronize clocks over Network Time Protocol using "a fleet of redundant satellite-connected and atomic clocks" at no extra charge.

You make that sound like something new? Does it mean that previously they didn't have their servers set to the correct time?

Ands finally, really finally, there's now Alexa for Business so you can bung one of Amazon's voice-controlled assistants in an office and make it do biz-related tasks.

(Shouts) Alexa format the C drive.

That 70s Show: Windows sprouts Sets and Timeline features

Re: Sets == Activities?

"Hopefully, as with Activities, it will be possible to ignore it."

And, at least with KDE you can just link whatever you want into a directory (or a folder in KDE speak).

I was intrigued to see on the video something called a research feature or words to that effect. I take it it's Bing embedded into whatever application was being used. Good luck with that if you want to research a geographical location - all you'll get is bloody estate agents.

Re: Whitelist vs Blacklist

"metal/woodwork - the largely useless working class subject(s) that my generation was pushed through for no other reason than that we were working class."

Maybe your school was different to mine but nobody asked what class we were when drawing up the curriculum. So, yes, woodwork and metal work were not optional in earlier years, neither were Latin nor PE to my chagrin. And guess what - we working class kids were allowed to study real subjects such as physics, chemistry and biology. Is that chip on your shoulder a wooden one left over from woodwork?

Lauri Love's US extradition appeal judges reserve decision

Re: Just send him over there and good riddance.

"He committed a crime (Let's be honest here and not use any 'allegedly'), and broke into a hornets nest in terms of targets, the US Government."

Where? Did he ever visit the US? If the actions he took were taken on UK soil irrespective of where their effects took place then surely the obvious thing would be to charge him under the UK legislation. If the US authorities find it too embarrassing hard to provide evidence to a UK court then he'll be found not guilty and can claim double jeopardy against any subsequent attempts at extradition.