Posts by Doctor Syntax

Ex-MI5 boss: People ask, why didn't you follow all these people ... on your radar?

"At least with the IRA,... they were not anxious to kill a lot of people,"

That's not what it seemed like at the time. MI5 weren't involved in day-to-day murder investigations so she might not have noticed.

Hyperloop One teases idea of 50-minute London-Edinburgh ride

Re: Whatever the technical merits/flaws

"try looking up the Llyn Celyn reservoir"

And various Pennine reservoirs.

Re: UK Fault lines

"The BGS geology viewer might help you a bit"

Dammit! I've got a fault running more or less under the house!

Re: Um

"If you consider the topography of much of Northern and Western Britain, there's a problem with anything that is ground tracking at c700 mph."

No problem, just start with 1,200 foot towers at each end and keep it level. Surely the unicorns can manage that.

Australia to float 'not backdoors' that behave just like backdoors to Five-Eyes meeting

Re: Who's the real target?

"Governments in general already have all the legislation required to hack phones of nominated terrorist suspects or persons alleged to be committing serious crimes - through processes that form part of the criminal justice system."

Citation needed.

Re: The whole idea of finding terrorists online

“Five Eyes” already have the capability to access your encrypted communications

Yes, but if the encryption's done right then all they get is encrypted.

Dish Network hit with $280 MEEELLION fine for relentless robocalling

"denying that it broke the law."

If they're going to pay the lawyers to dispute a 475 page finding it would almost make it cheaper to pay the fine than pay lawyer rates per page.

NSA leaker bust gets weirder: Senator claims hacking is wider than leak revealed

Re: I like Russians. I could support rapproachment

"As to Qatar, Trump probably doesn't even know that Iraq's invasion of them was our cue to the Gulf War."

Given that it was Kuwait that was invaded I hope he doesn't know it was Qater although it wouldn't surprise me if he does.

Re: It could be worse ...

"she got caught"

She'll be able to call Trump as a witness. He assures us it never happened so she couldn't have leaked it.

Re: curiouser and curiouser

"There shouldn't be anything to defend."

Just use good old pencil & paper.

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

"I don't think imprisonment or punishment without trial - which is what that article​ author is advocating is an appropriate response either."

It certainly isn't. OTW I think internment was counter-productive in NI.

"The intelligence agencies usually prevent such attacks successfully. Recent figures suggest a rate of something over one attack a fortnight."

Where are the prosecutions to prove it?

extremists trying to "knit their own crypto" and making a complete balls of it, some of them have even been reported here.

That seems to have been a typical example of "if all you have is Excel everything looks like a spreadsheet". Real cryptography algorithms are already available as libraries ready to be wrapped up in a UI. It doesn't have to be a pretty UI, just one that works. And if that hasn't already been done it's only because the commercial packages suffice for now.

"Under our current system of law, we tend to require evidence of wrongdoing before we can imprison someone."

...but just in case we'll assume everyone is guilty and put them under surveillance just in case. We'll ignore the fact that the core of strong encryption S/W went public decades ago and that there are enough tech-savvy people* amongst terrorists who will put something together entirely out of our control and even if there aren't there are others who'll do it for cash. We'll also ignore the fact that we will also be attacking British business's ability to compete in a world where security of communications is regarded as essential. We just want all your data.

*We only wish we had a few in our government.

FTFY

Re: The Elephant in the room

They aren't interested in stopping attacks, all they are interested in is tracking down the contacts of the perpetrators

Checking that you really live in the catchment area of the school you've applied for etc etc.

Cuffed: Govt contractor 'used work PC to leak' evidence of Russia's US election hacking

Re: Whaaaaa??

"But, according to the President of the U.S., and Valdimir Putin, the Kremlin Demagogue, this hacking or subversion never took place...?"

Maybe she should sub poena Trump as witness for the defence.

Re: Some excellent headline options missed.

Reality strikes again.

@sisk

And how does the S/W for the machines get written? Almost certainly on machines connected to the internet.

Re: Gotta watch those names, folks

"Like that girl named Chastity in my high school."

Mr & Mrs Belt have a lot to answer for.

Re: Dear "The Intercept"

"They didn't say whether she used her NSA email to correspond"

No, but they do say she used her workstation. And that she had top-secret clearance.

You have to wonder just how little you have to understand security to fail to get a top-class clearance at the NSA.

Hotel guest goes broke after booking software gremlin makes her pay for strangers' rooms

I think I've just realised the answer to some of my questions. DevOps.

OK, let's look at the IT issues here:

they had had some problems with their online reservation services and had "written a bypass" – a bypass that had, it turns out, "created some anomalies."

1. They're storing card numbers which they simply shouldn't do.

2. They had problems. Why? Presumably their service had been working OK before. Did they do something to cause the problems or was it their service provider?

3. If it was their service provider why didn't they dump it on them telling them to fix it PDQ or stand for any lost business if they couldn't.

4. If it was themselves why didn't they roll back to the previous state?

5. Having written a bypass why did they release it without effective checks to make sure it worked properly and then watched over it when they rolled it out to make sure it was working properly?

6. Why, having discovered there was a problem, did they not pull the plug on it immediately?

Re: Oh, he knew.

"I have a feeling the head of PR chose exactly the right day to take off"

And may have taken off permanently.

Re: She has to sue

"The hotel company showed so much bad will that the compensation needs to be much bigger than allowed by the suit imagination."

She'll undoubtedly get more as an out of court settlement plus NDA than in court. They can't afford to let it go to court. I'm sure that's all in place already which is why she's no longer answering reporters about it.

Re: One of my pet peeves

"Almost worse than that there is the deliberate delay in accepting responsibility when something goes wrong."

In this case it's even worse. According to TFA in the first place they called her and even then she had problems getting back to them. And knowing something was wrong they still kept debiting her card. OK, if they stopped taking bookings it would have cost them some business but keeping doing this knowing they were debiting the wrong account they must surely have been committing fraud. At the very least they could have started issuing credits to her account to counter each debit their system made. In fact it's difficult to find anything in this account that they did right.

It sounds as if there was nobody on watch empowered to make decisions nor any means of quickly reaching anyone who could.

Re: "Sounds like a lawsuit"

"It really depends how the hotel handles such a fuckup."

As she's now not talking to the media it sounds as if an offer has been made conditional on her shutting up. However I'm sure they're discovering it's much too late. What was the hotel again - oh yes, "1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge".

Re: "Sounds like a lawsuit"

"2) Get used for all bookings?"

And

3) Not be shout down immediately they realised the problem?

It sounds as if they just let it run.

Re: Perhaps?

'The Customer is always right'

Modern management: did you type some words?

State of DevOps: Everyone's slinging code out faster

Re: The real question. How far away is what you have running from what you want running?

"OTOH if your current system is only SoA for the last century then you'll want to move things on sooner rather than later."

And if it's still doing what it needs to do and isn't broken you should go ahead and fix it?

Lloyds finally inks mega 10-year cloudy outsourcing deal with IBM

"if i were a customer, i'd run... now.. very quickly ..."

I was, I did...ages ago.

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

Re: Workers defending their territory; managers afraid to challenge them.

"eventually come back to code you previously worked on."

And fail to understand a word of it.

"As the earlier poster mentioned - look at telecoms."

Which can be brought down in a moment by a man with a back-hoe down the street. Or a flood. Or a fire. Or a gale.

"Of course you can start saying that the up time calculation should be done over a week, month or year but where do you stop - a decade?"

BA are going to have to calculate over an awfully long time.

Re: Larger systems need to continuously evolve to survive

"This is about mapping where the problems are, finding out what the critical chunks are that *must* be improved and then building a simpler more maintainable system to perform the task in hand. In short, building a live, functioning system that is under continuous evolution."

This. It's also easier to do as you go along. A good maxim would be to aim for a situation in which the result of each added development is that the system looks as if it were designed that way from the start.

Re: Do any really large companies rip it all out and start again?

"Not without a massive amount of planning anyway."

You should have the massive amount of planning in place anyway. If you don't test it yourself on your own terms Murphy will do it for you and not at a time of your own choosing.

Re: Do any really large companies rip it all out and start again?

I had a client - small business, maybe a dozen employees - who did this in the run-up to Y2K.

His servers were Xenix with a fairly old version of Informix and custom applications. He did a rip and replace with SCO and a packaged system allegedly Informix compatible; he wanted various custom tweaks adding and there were more of these over the years. Also over the years I gradually discovered various "interesting" aspects to the alleged Informix compatibility that ended up with me directly amending the data in sysindexes so they reflected the actual indexes.

When he retired he sold the business to a group who presumable ripped and replaced with whatever they ran on as a group; certainly I never heard from them.

Re: Workers defending their territory; managers afraid to challenge them.

"The way to avoid it is for management to rotate employees around different systems"

Ouch! This is how the Civil Service produces senior officials who can avoid responsibility for anything. Something goes wrong on A's watch and he immediately blames predecessor B who in turn blames predecessor C who immediately blames A and/or B.

Re: Sunny when it is working

"it is easily seen that it isn't safe to let any of your staff go until you have reached the point where the system can be rebuilt by script."

And even then, when the staff are let go you may find nobody knows what the script actually does and you will even more likely find that nobody knows why it does it.

Not only do you need to retain knowledgeable staff, you need to have succession planning in place.

The internet may well be the root cause of today's problems… but not in the way you think

Re: You had better tell me some valid reasons to vote leave

Let's take a few:

"1. Not waving goodbye to a net of £13 billion of our tax money per year"

I remember the morning after the result was declared one MP who'd campaigned for Leave demanding that the government make up for the special EU funding that his constituency receives. I wonder where those special EU funds come from.

"2. Having boarders that the UK are allowed to control"

What boarders are those?

"3. The possiblity of returning to the superior British Common Law"

Are you thinking of English (and Welsh) Common Law. Scotland has its own legal system? No matter, Common Law still applies - just about. May wants to dispose of bits of it; that presumption of innocence is so inconvenient, so let's ignore it, treat everyone as guilty and spy on them.

"4. along the same lines, No EU courts overruling our own."

I'd rather like to have had the EU courts continue to overrule May's diktats.

Re: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

"Thanks Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan."

Are you the same A/C that touted the same garbage on an earlier thread? You were out by decades then; you're out by decades now.

Re: Christian Berger: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

"Government finances are not the same as Personal Finances"

No, governments can print money in order to delay the inevitable and make it worse when it happens.

Re: How does breaking encryption monitor people in parks?

"At the moment the numbers are the same as what we had at the beginning of the 2000's. I don't remember us having to resort to vigilante policing due to lack of numbers then."

The threat levels were different then.

Re: How does breaking encryption monitor people in parks?

"As I understand it one of the London attackers was reported to the anti terror hotline for his activities in his local park."

And it now turns out that he'd been investigated and the investigation dropped and also featured on a TV documentary about radicalisation.

Re: Christian Berger: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

"Just a quick question, if companies don't pay tax, what is corporation tax?"

A tax corporations pass on to whoever they can - employees, customers or shareholders.

Re: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

"The same for money, it is not an unlimited resource we only have so much in circulation"

You're confusing money with the stuff it represents. Take flats and houses. There are indeed only so many at a given time. But money can be printed by governments or, in effect, by banks giving credit and the result is inflation. Apply that to the limited number of houses and you have the house price bubble that got us into this mess.

There's absolutely no way you can solve the legacy of that era by sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "La la la". That's what Brown & co did while the problem was developing.

Re: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

"They were stuffed up by mistakes (to be polite - it could be called criminal fraud) the banks made, not their own."

The banks were operating within the environment created by government policy. Part of that policy was to exclude house prices from the rates of inflation used to determine interest rate policy.* The result was a long period of artificially low interest rates and a house price bubble that drove the rest of it. Surely any responsible economic manager should have looked at the situation and realised it was a threat. But the electoral advantage of cheap goods and cheap loans was too much to resist. When the inevitable happened the banks had to be baled out to fend off an even worse disaster.

*Another part was globalisation leading production to migrate to low wage areas, particularly China which reduced or held down prices of many items which were used to measure inflation.

Europe's looming data protection rules look swell – for IT security peddlers. Ker-ching!

Apart from fixing all those SQL injection flaws a good deal of this is going to hinge on a business's attitude to how it manages personal data. I can't see that as a thing that can be bought in. Except, of course, for buying in the services of those specialists in being kind to those laid off; those will be needed for the muppets from marketing who'll happily spaff all the customer data to digital marketing consultants spammers.

Microsoft totters from time machine clutching Windows 10 Workstation

Re: Yet another version?

"And I guess people who use this kind of software wouldn't like their files be sent to Microsoft if an application crashes."

And what do their likes count for compared with those of Microsoft?

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

"All you can do is cover your ass."

Which is just what the CTO seems to have been doing.

Re: ehm, one thing

"Is there a legal requirement for keeping the document current?"

Very unlikely in most legislations. Would there even be a legal requirement for the document to exist? There may be a requirement if the business were ISO9000 accredited or something similar. If the latter I'd say this was a clear fail of that.