Posts by Doctor Syntax

Fines for crossing roads while TXTing enacted in Honolulu

What if you're crossing the road, looking where you're going but someone in front of you is actually holding their gadget with its screen facing you?

Oracle users meet behind closed doors: Psst – any licensing tips?

Re: "the murky world of licensing and software asset management"

"I prefer per person OR per server (per Core/vCore) "

How about per connection?

The meeting reception desk should be interesting. Checking attendees from lists of pseudonyms and handing out redacted name badges.

Please activate the anti-ransomware protection in your Windows 10 Fall Creators Update PC. Ta

Re: Great feature!

"No. You are the kind of doofus that the feature is designed to obstruct."

Whoosh!

I was wondering how this worked seamlessly without changing the entire file access mechanism. By the time I got this far down the comments the answer is clear. "Seamlessly" doesn't apply. PDQ users will be trained to allow anything that wants to write anywhere to do so.

"No new features, no additional service packs, only security fixes.

This is a new feature."

So it's nothing to do with security?

UK financial regulator confirms it is probing Equifax mega-breach

Re: What Exactly Was The Breach ???

Not everything - there is a "legitimate interest" exception.

Nevertheless it raises a number of issues. If, under legitimate interest a data subject's bank passes data to a CRA who then gets breached what are the responsibilities of the bank? If it were they and not the CRA who had been breached then clearly they could expect to be fined under GDPR. But they decided they had a legitimate interest in passing on the data. Should they not still be liable?

The data subject-facing business should remain liable under both civil and criminal law for any breaches further along the line, irrespective of how far the data gets passed. Apart from anything else it's the only way that the likes of Safe Harbour and Privacy Figleaf can be made to work. They should have to make judgements about the reliability of those to whom they pass data. It's not sufficient for data subjects to have to go to law in some other jurisdiction against a company with whom they have had no dealings although that should not preclude action under GDPR against all businesses in the chain.

"we welcome this opportunity to learn the lessons from this criminal cyber-attack in order for all businesses to better protect consumers in the future."

There seems to be an implicit message that this was a big mystery. How on Earth did such a thing happen?

They know perfectly well. They left themselves unsecured. They shouldn't have needed to learn anything. They should have kept on top of securing things. The only way they'll really learn anything is to be handled penalties by every regulator in sight to the point where they can't pay management salaries let alone bonuses.

What's HPE Next? Now it's unemployment for 'thousands' of staff

"take upper management on holiday for a week?"

Take them on holiday for a week to somewhere where communications and transport are non-existent and leave them there.

As the people being let go find jobs some of them will go to customers or potential customers. And so HPE's* customers and potential customers are staffed with folks with a strong aversion to HPE. It's going to work out really well for future sales.

*Or any of the others doing the same thing.

@Ivan 4

Maybe you need a 1 place circular shift in that list.

Security pros' advice to consumers: 'We dunno, try 152 things'

"Google survey finds pros don't like safety strategies preferred by spooks"

We've seen a few examples lately of spooks getting pwned. Maybe taking their advice on defensive measures wouldn't have been the best idea.

HMRC's switch to AWS killed a small UK cloud business

"What's changed is AWS and Azure now have environments rated to OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE on the G-cloud pricing book."

Does this rely on the Privacy Figleaf? And let's wait & see what SCOTUS have to say that affects that.

"The extra capacity can be (automatically) switched off and forgotten about as soon as they are no longer needed."

And when that's done what happens to the sensitive personal financial data left on the storage devices? Is it left for the next customer to pick up of they do an od over their newly spun up devices or is it completely overwritten with junk? And if it's supposed to be overwritten who verifies this?

Sick burn, yo: Google's latest Pixel 2 XL suffers old-skool screen singe

Sheer nostalgia

VDUs. You got 80x24 shaded rectangular blocks on the screen. The characters kept changing but the places where they were drawn didn't.

Phone crypto shut FBI out of 7,000 devices, complains chief g-man

"the user's password creation patterns."

A random string generator?

Re: Let them have the password

"a truly-determined criminal will be prepared enough to find an alternate way of getting at their incriminating data other than leaving it on their phone."

And meanwhile an innocent person who loses their phone loses everything because it's not encrypted.

It's a choice. You either obtain access to data which might or might not carry forward a number of investigations which might or might not be carried forward anyway without that data. Alternatively you grant access to anyone who comes into possession of a lost or stolen phone to data belonging to the owner of that phone and who might or might not be damaged by that access. Which, in terms of the public interest, is the more harmful choice.

At last it seems to be that at least some of TPTB are starting to grasp that they're having to choose between two harmful choices and that they actually have to weigh them up.

'Screaming' man fined $149 for singing 'Everybody Dance Now'

This was Canada. In the US it would have been worse. He'd have been done for copyright violation.

Arm isn't saying IoT firmware sucks but it's writing a free secure BIOS for device makers

"Instead they'll order food just-in-time from the nearest freezer-point / auto-kitchen, delivered by solar-drone to their home-pod, using a meal-scheduler app that runs in the cloud and reports how much CO2 they've produced to the global enviro-tracking centre."

Along with flying cars.

Re: Good idea, I think

"You mean, like all those CE-marked devices from China?"

Something more like UL certification.

Boffins trapped antiprotons for days, still can't say why they survived the Big Bang

Re: anti-particles "moving backwards in time" ?

"anti-particles are [or are suspected to be] particles moving backwards in time."

I think this was one of Feynman's notions, possibly in conjunction with Wheeler. It's in one of his books. The suggestion was that there was only a single electron zipping forwards & backwards (as a positron). It explained why all electrons looked alike - they were the same electron. I don't think they took the idea very far.

Plants in SPAAAAAAACE are good for you

Re: There's got to be a lot more of this if humans want to live on other planets.

"whatever they would need to grow"

Growing stuff requires hydrogen in the form of water, oxygen in the form of water and carbon dioxide, carbon in the form of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the form of nitrates or ammonium compounds as the main components of your biomass. Unless these are available on the target planet (I'll assume that minerals such as potassium, phosphorus etc. are) then every gram of biomass that you want to ever have in your colony has to be ferried there. It's not like colonising a new land on Earth where you can expect to tap into the existing stuff that's already in circulation.

Re: There's got to be a lot more of this if humans want to live on other planets.

When it comes to colonising other planets the engineering challenges are going to be a minor part in relation to the rest.

Malware hidden in vid app is so nasty, victims should wipe their Macs

Re: Perhaps developers should work offline

"Requirements change,features added = new product."

Based on the assumption that a full product is bigger than an update - and bigger than the original as it contains new features, then this presents the customer with at least the same risks and possibly more than updates.

"My code has never been exploited and has never needed any updates, this simply because it was bespoke i.e. different for each customer."

Been there, done that. But neither you nor I have had the problems inherent in supplying product to a mass market. I don't think we'd have been in business very long if we insisted on selling new products for every new feature, at least, not without the Stockholm syndrome of Windows users.

Re: A complete wipe?

"Rather than create a bootable USB drive etc, probably easier to boot from the recovery partition, no?"

That assumes the recovery partition hasn't been affected.

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

Re: The most worrying?

"Followed (a few days later) by an unexplainable odd smell.."

You forgot the quicklime.

Re: Cheese

"Its my best eating cheese"

This raises the question of what other uses he had for cheese. Didn't you ask?

Wanna exorcise Intel's secretive hidden CPU from your hardware? Meet Purism's laptops

"Does anyone truly know what is running in that binary blob"

Of course. The team that wrote it.

Re: Everybody's ethical

"I visited the Purism's website and was met with alt+Left sounding language."

I've no idea what alt+Left sounding language is. However, I do know that Purism have been around for a good while. I think of them as the hair-shirt wing of the FSF.

Re: Everybody's ethical

"National-Socialist "

It's called "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

Re: For decades now

"Why anyone thought it a good idea to leave the boot flash in a writeable state by default is beyond comprehension"

Convenience. It overrides security every time.

Ubuntu 17.10: We're coming GNOME! Plenty that's Artful in Aardvark, with a few Wayland wails

Re: The year of Linux everywhere except the desktop

"switched to Windows 10 ... It's safe now, kids."

Have you read the T&Cs about telemetry? Go read them. Look for what statements they make about restricting what they allow themselves to take. Is it safe?

"KDE4 was released about 3 years before it was ready."

Complete with a statement that it wasn't yet intended for production. Which people promptly ignored.

Re: Unity, Unity, Unity......

This post by Piloti is the perfect example of why there is no one ideal desktop for everyone. Clearly what Unity was just what Piloti wanted. Because I want the desktop primarily as a place to put files and directories it's as unsuited to me as KDE would be to him. However, we can both have the style of desktop we want, so no problem.

Re: Looks tempting

"Any code out there at all Bombastic Bob? Sounds interesting."

It's probably full of random capitalisation.

Re: I wonder why it's *still* not the year of Linux on the desktop

"no-one can agree of the best distro/desktop combination!"

Because the best combination for you might not be the best for me. One of the good things wbout Unix-like systems is their modularity. You can either tailor an existing distro such as Debian or Fedora to what you want or roll out your own spec from Gentoo. Or you can start from a BSD base. What you don't have to do is put up with the one size fits all vendor approach.

For instance, one of the comments usually made here is that Linux is unsuitable for older users. Well, I've just been setting up a new laptop for SWMBO. Amongst other things I've been able to take advantage of the configurability of the typical Linux desktop to choose features such as the best system font to improve the readability for her, a necessity after macula problems a little while ago.

Re: Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun.

"I'm currently liking Pop!_OS."

Your link is a 404

Re: Nice

"None of that RSI inducing command line nonsense."

Nice to see there are still people who can follow scripts. Even if they can't write them.

National Audit Office: We'll be in a world of pain with '90s border tech post-Brexit

Re: If you were born before yesterday ...

"you might remember that Meg Hillier was one of the many Home Office ministers"

So was John Reid who described it has "Not fit for purpose". Has anyone seen signs of improvement since then?

Re: How hard can it be?

"To my simple IT sales mind, that in itself is a relatively simple system and process to create"

That's the IT sales approach. Sell a simple system and then make the money out of the bits that weren't initially defined.

As things stand the bits that aren't defined include what happens to non-UK EU citizens already in the country.

Re: no deal over visa free travel

"I hate to say I agree with you about the extremists, except the only ones I hear demanding this are those who argue for remain."

Which "this" do you mean?

"It is concerning that some people seem to want the country to burn if they cant have their own way."

Our worry is that we will see the country burn because of those who have got their own way although it's not very clear just what that way is.

Re: Sure you have to do it faster but what's the problem with that?

"Running to the NAO"

The A in NAO stands for "Audit". You don't run to auditors, they come after you.

Re: Brexit?

"One which records movement in and out of the country while checking the validity of entry."

You're trying to hide the problem in that little word "validity" aren't you. How do you determine it?

There's another problem hidden under "entry". What about non-UK national EU citizens already here?

Re: Brexit?

"The rules will be whatever we as a sovereign country say they are."

Have you not been following any of this?

Go and read the papers or the accounts on the Been news website covering the last few months' worth of negotiations and then come back and tell us what those rules will be. Because none of the rest of us know. And by the time you've done that you might have started to wonder just ho "sovereign" a country we will be post-Brexit.

Or failing that, go and round up a few of the Unicorns that are going to bring the magic to make it all work. We're going to need them.

Re: Brexit?

"Brexit has had one positive outcome, because of the hard deadline we will know quite soon just how big a fuck up the new system is."

We don't know already?

Re: Brexit?

"We are leaving the European Union, what difference does that make to our borders?"

It makes a difference of who's allowed to come and who, of those present before the event, are allowed to stay. None of which is settled and doesn't seem likely to be, on present showing, until at least the beginning of March 2019.

Re: Brexit?

"The brexit in the title would appear to have next to nothing to do with the UK border problem."

OK, if you know what the post-Brexit requirement is going to be maybe you'd let Davis, Barnier & everyone else involved because as far as I can see none of them have a clue.

Re: Brexit?

"So, just more FUD that really has nothing to do with Brexit, then? It's just another plain old Government last-minute spending screwup."

No it's the plain old Govt screwup plus Brexit which itself introduces a last minute element because until the terms are known there can't be a specification. Remember that EU negotiations have traditionally involved stopped clocks in that they end up being completed in the early hours of the morning after the deadline. This one's going to be a doozy.

Re: "It's going to be a total failure."

"the big joker in this pack will be the fabled border-without-checkpoints that will be the Republic/NI EU/UK border."

As an added delight this is straddled by farms and even, I believe, buildings.

I remember being on holiday in Sligo in the Republic, going out for a drive and finding ourselves arriving, via back roads in Belleek in NI after a navigational error without any indication of when or where we crossed the border.

Later, at the height of the height of the troubles with massively fortified army posts, the border was still somewhat notional. However much "technology" gets thrown at it things won't change unless we get Trump in to build a wall.