Posts by Doctor Syntax

Comcast accused of siccing lawyers on net neutrality foe

How generous of Comcast to call the public's attention to this criticism of themselves.

IT firms guilty of blasting customers with soul-numbing canned music

Re: "Hold" doesn't have to mean Purgatory

"I do my best to make HOLD a pleasant or neutral experience."

Hold is not an experience anyone wants. They want someone to answer the phone. If there aren't enough people to answer the phone quickly the hold queue will grow until it equilibrates; as it grows longer more people will abandon their calls and eventually the rate of drop out plus the rate of answer equals the number of new calls. And every dropped call means a customer or potential customer that your precious company has pissed off.

Your company might want short messages on your hold track, your callers don't, they just want their calls answered.

Re: What we need is a SILENCE option

" along with a queue announcement indicating how many people ahead of you"

A decent call centre will NEVER, do that. It is pointless.

It isn't pointless. The point is that the message should be repeated and you can hear how fast it's going down. Your 1000 calls answered a minute will have a total going down by about 50 as fast as they can announce itt and you'll know you'll get to the front of the queue pretty soon.

Re: Ahhh lovely...

"This is the idea that should be killed with fire, shot, killed with fire again, shot again, stamped on, dipped in quicklime, buried in a lonely forest glade wrapped in an old carpet, and then nuked from orbit."

Sorry, you failed your BOFH. You forgot the electrocution and the fall from the 20th storey window into a skip in the car park.

Re: er - call holding in *2017*

"What kind of business is going to call customers back at their own expense"

One worth being a customer of.

There's a simpler solution. ANSWER THE BLOODY PHONE.

Obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-10-13

Capita and Birmingham City Council 'dissolve' joint venture

Is it so difficult to work out? If providing some part of the job well requires X people being paid £Y to do it then handing it over to someone else who will be expecting to make a profit is going to either cost more to cover a profit or is going to be done less well by employing less than X people. If there are genuinely savings to be made in the operation why not make them yourself and cut your costs rather than let someone else make them and keep the savings?

Bankrupt school ITT pleads 'don't let Microsoft wipe our cloud data!'

"then it's obviously their cost?"

Except they don't want it to be.

Re: Price googing?

"That said, does seem very steep."

What can be paid out to the creditors as a whole will be a fixed amount and paid out as a percentage of the total debt. If MS put in a steep bill they raise their percentage of the total debt and thus their share of the payout.

Reading through the pleading two things emerge.

The administrators don't have a copy of the agreement and are complaining that MS won't let them see their copy. Apart from MS's admitting that there was an agreement it seems difficult for them to prove that there's an account at all!

The administrators are wanting to have their cake and eat it. They want the data to be handed over but they don't know how to use it if it were handed over so they don't want the data to be handed over until it's convenient for them.

Re: Don't forget the fees.

"If so, should cloud agreements not have a 'data escrow' clause?"

From the customer's PoV, yes. But it would be up to them to insist on it when the contract's set up. It's too late to start thinking about that when things go wrong. Despite everything that's said about lawyers this is why you need them - to see such problems in advance.

Re: Other media options are available.

"Because what you're suggesting is probably illegal and akin to a ransomware."

No. Basically it does what a landlord is entitled to do in the circumstances - distrain the debtor's property, in this case the data - but in a way that makes the administrators responsible for the storage avoiding accruing further debts. The payment being sought is what MS claim to be entitled to anyway, clearly different from a ransom for which there is no legal basis. If a court decides that the debt wasn't valid then the key can be handed over.

Dump it onto tape* encrypted. Hand the tapes to the administrators. When the bill is settled the administrators get the key.

*Other media options are available.

Re: Estimations

"It reminds me of the presentation our VP gave regarding the efficiency gains of "lean" introduction."

That in turn reminds me of the estimated savings to be gained by relocating a company. Various subheadings were given along with the overall figure. The overall figure was £1m out from the sum of the subheadings. Rounding errors!

IoT standards? We've got 'em. And if you don't like those, we got more

"We are waiting to see what use cases [evolving current standards] are targeted at. Potentially I think the market will tell us and the market will guide us through that."

That sounds remarkably like a solution looking for a problem.

Three-quarters of IoT projects are failing, says Cisco

part of the problem was a lack of interest from the top of companies, with leaders failing to "buy in" to IoT

I don't call that a problem. It's buying into IoT that's the problem.

House GOP takes crack at ISP privacy bill

"It would also establish US trade watchdog the FTC as the governing body for internet privacy rules."

The US should give some thought to having a separate body concentrating solely on privacy rights, internet or otherwise. Given some teeth, say the ability to issue fines at levels comparable to the GDPR, we might even begin to believe the Privacy Shield actually meant something.

Scheming copyright scam lawyer John Steele disbarred in Illinois

Re: Needs to be disbarred in each state individually? WTF?

the problem of some states being more "lenient" in their exams.

Q1. Explain patent law.

Ans It's a licence to print money.

There is no Q2.

Re: federation / republic of USA

"USA is not 'a country' and should be viewed equivalent to Europe, and something i wish was highlited more often, mainly to brexiters."

I think that's their complaint - it is too federal like the US.

EU security think tank ENISA looks for IoT security, can't find any

Re: force the user to update the even the default unique credentials

"many (most?) clearly cannot be bothered with password changing, and mandating stuff will not change that."

It will if the mandate is that the device will not become operational until the user's own credentials are entered. And any variation on "password" will be spat back at the user after a second, 2 seconds at the next attempt etc.

Re: Rule 3, 4, 5

"(although this will instantly kill the IoT market...)"

The most essential rule of the lot.

Re: please...

Rule 2) All devices have different default credentials The device shall not become operational until the user has set up their own credentials.

PayPal peed off about Pandora's 'P' being mistaken for its 'PP'

Sometimes I just wish courts would fine plaintiffs for contempt of court by insulting its intelligence.

Horse named 'Cloud Computing' finds burst of speed to beat 'Classic Empire' in actual race

Re: So many "interesting" horse names...

Something like Privacy Shield - wears see-through blinkers.

Re: Take offense at "nag"

"galloping pet food".

Not just pets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal

Re: Take offense at "nag"

"all thoroughbreds come from a mere 3 stallions"

What about the maternal lines? Everyone seems to concentrate on the paternal ancestry as if the mares are simply vessels in which to incubate a replica of the stallion. But the mare provides the only X chromosome of a stallion foal, one of the X chromosomes of a mare foal, half of the rest of the nuclear genes - and all of the mitochondrial genes. Given that it's the last which provides the critical mechanism of aerobic respiration if there's any variation, however small, in that it could have a significant effect on performance.

I think it was a ringer. It was actually a horse called Somebody Else's Computer.

Quick, better lock down that CISO role. Salaries have apparently hit €1m

Advice given by someone on €1m will obviously be better than the same advice given by someone on £100k. After all you paid more for it.

Japan (lightly) regulates high-frequency algorithmic trading

Re: Tax'um

"held for less then say ten minuets"

A dance to the music of time.

NASA duo plan Tuesday ISS spacewalk to replace the mux that sux

Re: Just another day in the office?

"Have they fixed the second cooling and power umbilical yet?"

Gaffer tape to the rescue.

Re: Unscheduled?

"Why don't we all just have a pint and relax, and toast our colleagues in spaaace?"

I'll drink to that.

Re: Unscheduled?

"I'm struggling to grasp the concept of a scheduled unscheduled spacewalk"

Yup. Bernard Woolley wants a word with Richard.

Google cloud glitch hits at Beer O'Clock Friday, fix coming Monday

"The point of SLAs is to define exactly what they promise to deliver, and what compensation I get if they don't."

This is the MBA version. The reality could be that a failed backup leads to a failed business.

If you're a DBA or sysadmin working for the company that owns the database you know that a failure could lead to the loss of your jobs and those of your colleagues. If a problem happens on a Friday you work over the weekend to fix it, you don't leave it until Monday.

If you work for a 3rd party provider you know the worst is that it cost your employer whatever the SLA says and nothing else. What's more your employer has already taken the decision to carry the risk themselves or to insure against it and if they don't care enough to tell you to work the weekend why should you care any more?

"Pushing an emergency fix on a Friday evening sounds like a good recipe for disaster."

Pushing an emergency fix on a Friday evening and waiting until Monday morning aren't the only alternatives.

Code-thief pleads guilty to pinching file system to sell to China

"If he'd wanted to put China's IT efforts back 20 years, he could've stolen WebSphere."

Why stop there? Lotus Notes.

IBM CEO Ginni flouts £75 travel crackdown, rides Big Blue chopper

Re: There is nothing wrong against proper old guard

"Then all those extra millions that they are used to making are deferred 3-5 years."

Make that 10 years minimum.

Wondering why the office is so productive? Yep, Twitter's knackered

Is the bug attacking Vine a vine weevil?

Man sues date for cinema texting fiasco, demands $17.31

Re: One mistake with the lawsuit

"Should have filed it as class-action to get everyone in the theater reimbursed."

Maybe half the rest of the audience was doing the same thing.

Re: Why bother dating?

Maybe they were also a married couple.

Bye bye MP3: You sucked the life out of music. But vinyl is just as warped

Some of the best recorded music was cut direct to the masters at 78rpm (maybe rather approximately in some cases).

Julian Assange wins at hide-and-seek game against Sweden

"doesn't appear to reward loyalty for very long and is totally self-obsessed"

You could say that about both of them.

Re: @Jason Boomberg

"Now he's going to get the boot from the UK back to Australia."

Unless the US issue an extradition warrant. There was no sign of that happening under the previous administration but the current one seems to be thinking about it. It's possible that his delaying tactics may well have brought about the very situation he was trying to avoid. Of course actually being wanted by the US is good for his ego and he can continue to stay where he is.

I wonder how long the Embassy's lease has to run...

LastPass now supports 2FA auth, completely undermines 2FA auth

Re: Once again: WE NEED A STANDARD !!!!

"can we not have an RFC or W3C devised standard on password generation, usage and storage ?"

Which everyone will implement with their own little amendments. Like IE implemented HTML.

Re: Banking

" I need to generate a unique token using my debit card and card reader, plus the payee account number and the amount. This generates a unique code, which is used to verify the transaction."

Or, in the case of the card reader my bank sent me, is used to fail to verify the transaction. However the use cases needing this are very few; the only one I encountered was changing the email address. So the security device is a piece of crap but the good news is I don't have to use it!

America's drone owner database grounded: FAA rules blown out of sky

It'll all change when an airliner engine ingests a drone. At that point there'll be all sorts of legislation introduced in a big hurry.

WannaCrypt: Roots, reasons and why scramble patching won't save you now

Re: The real solution is always ignored...

"What do you do when the one doesn't get it is on the board?"

What you need is something that starts up when clicked and displays an animation, flashing text whatever saying something like "Deleting all the files on your Network", "Kiss your business goodbye" and the like for a few minutes. And then ends up with a message "Don't panic, that was just a warning. Go and offer your IT whatever they need to secure your system."

Then get someone to email it to them from outside the business.

Re: Lack of any finger pointing at the right people.

"here am I running XP in a VM because I refuse to throw away a perfectly good scanner just because Canon don't want to release Win 8.1 drivers in the hopes that I'll throw it away and buy a new one."

Yes it's a familiar refrain but do take a look at Linux or BSD. They may well have a driver for it and you'll be able to run updates on the OS and the scanner will still work.

Wannacry: Everything you still need to know because there were so many unanswered Qs

Way back one of the client's network guys had discovered that someone was persistently trying to probe the firewall. He then looked at the IP address and found the eejit was sharing his C: drive. If it had been me I'd have tried to mount the drive and see how much could be deleted from it before it all fell apart.

Re: Oh, the irony!

Updates to W7 also got switched off because it was taking until the heat death of the Universe or the arrival of WannaCry before the updates ran. There are still posts here from people complaining about that and even I, a non-Windows bod, know that there's a specific update to be downloaded and applied individually that fixes it.

Re: Wasn't "But we had to have SMB for our internal shares on the network" the NHS problem?

"our VPN has security checks in place that won't let you connect fully until you've:

a - got the recent antivirus definitions"

Which still won't protect against something new enough not to have got into the definitions.