Posts by Doctor Syntax

Is that a bulge in your pocket or... do you have an iPhone 8+? Apple's batteries look swell

Re: Must be a component issue.

"It's an extremely difficult and complicated subject and Tim Cook can no longer give all his attention to it, as he has other jobs."

One of those ought to have been succession planning for his previous job.

Re: Must be a component issue.

"you normally no longer look inside the component."

But as you then go on to say it might be a good idea to check. It's the job of QA to keep a tight reign on the quality of components being used. It can't be an easy job if your company doesn't assemble the final product nor, I suppose do Apple route all supplies to the assemblers via themselves. The umpteen things that can go wrong in such a situation mean that they really need to put the effort into managing their supply chain.

Re: Must be a component issue.

"I suspect the batteries may come from an outfit that delivered good batteries when they were asked to supply a small number for development and QA, but immediately started cutting corners once they had the big order in."

You may well be right but wasn't Tim Cook supposed to have been a supply chain specialist before he was elevated? This is the sort of thing such a specialist should be in control of.

"Samsung owners in the Sammy ads. Particularly this one: [Redacted]"

Life's too short to spend it watching ads.

Re: Obligatory

" I have a passionate dislike of imbalance and unfairness - towards anybody, and anything."

So does el Reg. Everything gets slagged off. That's balanced and fair.

Re: Jesus phones

"Their marketing department on the other hand"

I think I can work out what they turn wine into after they drink it.

Re: Wrong Swelling

"They may or may not be running. You do not need to shut down apps."

Not being able to is not the same as not needing to.

People keep saying Apple copies others. Is this what they mean?

Microsoft silently fixes security holes in Windows 10 – dumps Win 7, 8 out in the cold

Re: Gnome for Windows

"The Windows architecture is fully modular with a hybrid microkernel. Much more modular and amenable to that type of change that most other OS options"

So why didn't they take advantage of it at W8 time, TIFKAM for mobiles and keep the W7 interface for desktops?

Re: Blast from the past

" there's those who apparently still need to browse the internet with Windows because they have some industrial machine attached to their computer."

And those who have to have Windows because they play games.

You're right, nothing changes.

Re: People in glass houses.....

"Microsoft made it free and simple to upgrade"

The difficult bit seems to have been preventing it from "upgrading". Many users considered it a downgrade.

Re: Upgrades are not always improvements.

"I sometimes wonder if a really secure system will appear, written from the ground up"

From the ground up would be essential. Then there's the question of putting convenience secondary to security. It would be a hard sell without a few major disasters to existing OSs to help it on its way. It would also be a good idea to think in terms of a pair of complementary systems for client and server functions so that neither carries unwanted baggage from the other.

Re: Not an Apple fan at all but...

"Make the jump and give MacOS a fair chance"

Apple's pricing doesn't give make provision for fair chances.

Re: re: I still can't figure out why THIS person *FELT* that 2D FLATSO TIFKAM...

From Wikipedia:"Julie Larson-Green (born 1962) is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of the Office Experience Organization at Microsoft,[1] where she has worked since 1993."

"Experience" is one of those warning words. Finding it twice in the same, introductory sentence simply underwrites just how bad things she can make things.

Having said that I've recently been looking at KDE 5. It's almost as bad with endless widget styles with the same flat button look and themes with squiggles for icons. With any look the nadir may be reached if someone introduces a Big Jules theme leaving all the buttons and icons blank* and then things can start improving.

*PCLinuxOS has almost achieved this, the default window buttons are simply coloured spots which only display an icon on mouse-over.

Re: If they cared about security at all

"And if they cared about security AND gaming at the same time?"

Life's a bitch.

Re: Windows 7, 8, 10? I'll take 9, please.

"Upgrades are not always improvements."

Quite so. That's a good reason to stick with LTS systems as far as possible. It reduces the number of occasions you have to spend time chasing after someone's failure to maintain backwards compatibility. Bleeding edge distros are fine if you want to play with them. If you want to get stuff done use an LTS for as long as possible.

Read what I wrote again.

We did. You said "trust me". In this post you in effect said "trust someone else saying the same thing": See page 7 in https://jon.oberheide.org/files/source10-linuxkernel-jonoberheide.pdf for one of many mentions of this phenomenon

Still no examples.

"Because it's free?"

As in speech. Those who are running RHEL as a server OS certainly aren't using it because it's free as in beer.

"Speaking personally and using Debian, by the time I read about it on el reg it has already been updated."

And that's also my experience.

"This gets really, really bad when you consider that a lot of distros keep the kernel version stable and just backport security fixes."

If I use version N of the kernel because it supports my hardware and has the features I need why would I want more than security update providing those come at regular intervals? I'm old enough to remember that upgrades all to often means breakage and have no intention of having to keep fixing things because someone somewhere couldn't be arsed to pay attention to backward compatibility. That's why I like Long Term Support versions.

So here's Debian 7, not at LTS (staying pre-systemd) and the current version is Debian 9 (equivalent to 10 in Microsoft numbering ;). What's the kernel number and what's the date the last version arrived? 3.2 and just over 2 weeks ago on 20th of September.

Re: Perhaps money will talk louder:

"Microsoft is one of the US government's pet corporations."

Other governments are available.

Re: Perhaps money will talk louder:

"They have over 2 decades worth of experiences of dodging that one. That's why they have these exabyte-sized conditions you have to agree to."

Whether these EULAs are worth the paper they're not written on depends on your jurisdiction and status (consumer vs professional).

In current affairs news: Teen boffin with lots of potential crafts electric honeycombs out of oil

Re: Mpemba

I'd always assumed it was simply due to the unheated water containing more dissolved air and hence having its freezing point slightly lower due to the solute effect.

How bad can the new spying legislation be? Exhibit 1: it's called the USA Liberty Act

Re: Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title

"Except that the real ones are neither sympathetic nor funny."

Of course not. But in the midst of the humour of YM there is solid guidance to help understand what you're up against. It should be part of the National Curriculum.

Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title

Remember, folks, Yes Minister is your guide to administrations everywhere.

It's 4PM on Friday, almost time to log off and, oh look, Disqus says it's been hacked

Re: they disclosed but ?

"have not informed users and have provided no information beyond acknowledgment"

From TFA: after spending the day notifying users of the hack

Re: No loss

Generally speaking, when I see the little Disqus logo on a site's comment section, I think I will have fewer issues than if I try to use the site's own comment system to enable Javascript.

FTFY

And no, I won't.

Leicestershire teen admits attempting to hack director of the CIA

Re: causing risk of serious damage to human welfare/national security

Rest assured, the government is undoubtedly mad as a box of frogs so maybe the spell worked.

Online criminal records checks to take a punt on troubled Verify system

"One problem is that the identity providers, mainly Experian at this point, fail to recognise anyone without a digital footprint "

Experian was involved in this role in the original CRB checking system about 15 years ago.

Russia, America dig into tug-of-war over Bitcoin laundering suspect

Re: I bet he’s FSB

"Why else would the Russians be so desperate to get him back?"

For the $4b?

Beach, please... Billionaire VC finally opens way to waves

Re: B E A C H P A R T Y ! ! ! !

Try to remember, this Khosla dude will be just as upset at a lone jogger on "his" beach at sunset as he would a major twelve-dozen keg barn burner with The Who's sound system cranking multi-genre, multi-decade rock&roll for three days

Not saying you're wrong but it sounds like a statement that could be tested.

Support team discovers 'official' vendor paper doesn't rob you blind

Re: As the old, old saying goes...

"then what do you use for a PHB that is rapidly killing the company ?"

Duct tape would be fine. It just takes more work than carpet.

Re: Common English words with very different meanings.....

"It is correctly pronounced "rowter"."

How do you pronounce "route". If you pronounce it "rowt" I can see how you got to your rowter pronunciation but we've had routes in the UK way before the router was invented to allocate them.

Re: Million to one chances occur nine times out of ten*

"OnCall really is just an interesting repository of anecdotes, not a manual of best practice"

It's a pretty good manual of worst practice.

Re: The story is ...

"The assistant knows there is a bar code - so persists by presenting it repeatedly. "

And is utterly convinced that a barcode has to be in motion in order to be read, just like a mag stripe.

surely it would of become very obvious once the robot went to retrieve the tape from the drive, and failed because 'I can't find the tape!'

The article describes exactly this except that the tapes were missed on the shelves and didn't get as far as the drives.

Even tapes that the team put on shelves by hand weren't being detected.

“The robot sometimes even tried to place other tapes in those 'empty' slots,”

Avast urges devs to secure toolchains after hacked build box led to CCleaner disaster

Re: XcodeGhost again, cmon people!

"Requiring a 'pristine' build environment is software engineering 101."

Putting 'pristine' in quotes says it all, really. You may think your build environment is pristine but if it's been got at you end up in exactly the situation Piriform found themselves in.

Re: CC Cleaner is an enterprise tool?

"Handy little tool, not 'optimisation'."

Surely cleaning vendors' bloatware is optimisation.

Hipster disruptor? Never trust a well-groomed caveman with your clams

Re: Something I've always wondered ...

"The really great invention was actually the axle."

The really great invention was the roller (not Roller). Everything else was refinement.

Russian spies used Kaspersky AV to hack NSA staffer, swipe exploit code – new claim

I complained to "bitdefender" because with their new enforced fucking "cloud" system, not only can they "snag" files. (never used to happen with the standalone version, which they discontinued)

I believe Bitdefender are a UK company. Assuming you're also in the UK invoke your rights under the DPA or, better still, wait till next June & hit them with the new, GPDR-enabled Act. And in the meantime, don't use them. "Cloud" should have been a warning to stop right there.

Re: "no self respecting spook would be caught using Microsoft Windows to do their spying"

"For the thousandth time, counting CVEs does not indicate relative security levels."

Doug, there's no point in trying to explain things to A/Cs spouting the MS party line. They're only doing what they're told. You don't expect them to actually understand any of it do you?

Re: "no self respecting spook would be caught using Microsoft Windows to do their spying"

"the very probable fact that, spook or no, management will be using Windows and management wants their time sheets, planning, expense reports etc done on time. I haven't heard of a lot of Linux versions of the products that handle that, so you'll be most likely using Windows for all that stuff."

Management should be using what the organisation's security bods specify which, you'd hope, would be something more like Open BSD. LibreOffice will run quite nicely on BSDs so I can't see any problems with the sorts of management stuff you mention.

"The Washington Post says the contractor ... worked for the NSA's ace hacking team"

As I posted in another thread, it just shows that the attackers aren't good at defending. If you want good advice about defence don't take it from your attack team. What do the attack team advise? Back doors.

Hey, IoT vendors. When a paediatric nurse tells you to fix security, you definitely screwed up

"From the article it looks like she's been a security professional for the past three years"

Given that IoT vendors seem to place children in charge of security maybe a paediatric nurse has exactly the qualifications for dealing with them.

Re: But then comes the big problem: the bill.

"t'll probably cost less to deal with the fallout than to actually do things right."

Pay and cost, at least monetary cost, are two different things. It may cost the vendor money to do things right but if they don't you may pay - with your life.

Of course, there's always the other aspect of it: if the market is properly regulated you, as a vendor, don't get to sell your product if you're not doing things right so you don't get any money at all. And as it's the same for your competitors you're not at a disadvantage by doing things right. The only way to disadvantage yourself would be not to spend the money in the first place.

Spy vs spy vs hacker vs... who is THAT? Everyone's hacking each other

The moral of the story seems to be that attackers aren't very good at defending. So, if you want to defend your infrastructure, don't take your attack team's advice. What was it attackers advised? Oh, yes; backdoors.

Ex-Harrods IT man cleared of stealing company issued laptop

Re: This is one of those stories

"I got this feeling there is a wee bit more to this story than has been told."

It's a given of court cases that (a) there's more then you're being told and (b) you're being told more than there is, at least by one side.

"Which means Herrod's has a procedure when an employee separates, and they follow it."

Herrod? Think of the children.

"It would be possible for someone to have their personal credit card details accessible on a company PC for booking hotels etc on company business."

That's one category of information I don't have to keep on a PC. It lives in my wallet.

If, however, there's stuff that I think should be kept private it can go into something like Keepass. Even if the disk is encrypted on a company laptop having a separate encrypted file to which the company has no access would have solved the problem. It would also solve the problem of the company backing up the laptop onto their own servers.

Re: Eh?

"In normal conditions, he could have talked to a friendly Harrods IT guy"

He'd been fired. That opportunity might not have been open to him short of threatening to take it up with the ICO.