Posts by Doctor Syntax

Welcome to the future: Bluetooth jackets you can only wash 10 times. Gee, thanks, Google

Project Jacquard

Back to punched cards.

Re: you should never wash a pair of jeans

"it is the job of Sir's valet to deal with the washing of Sir's jeans"

Sir's valet is only the middle man. The washing is done by Sir's laundry staff.

Re: "now can someone show me the problem?"

Marketeers don't think they have enough of your money.

FTFY

Small businesses: GDPR affects you, too

Re: Backups

These questions have been posed in the comments of just about every GDPR article.

As regards backup, there is wording about technical feasibility (this is an off the top of the head rely so you'll have to go and check it if you want the exact words). The upshot of this would appear to be, no, if it;s not feasible you don't have to go and edit your backups. OTOH, if you were to restore one of those backups you'd need to have a means of re-doing the deletes that happened between the taking and restoring of the backup.

There's also wording about not having to remove data relevant to performance of transactions. So you'd be able to justify holding onto warranty data until the expiry of the warranty.

But as with any legislation, the ultimate way to decide what to do is to read it to find out how it affects yourself.

Deloitte is a sitting duck: Key systems with RDP open, VPN and proxy 'login details leaked'

"consulting companies are not always practicing what they're preaching."

OTOH in such a field the you should expect to be judged by the way you run your own business. If that isn't very good why should you expect anyone else to buy your services. In fact, you're no better than all those would-be SEO specialists who write from gmail addresses and don't seem to have a domain name that should logically appear on first page in Google if one were to search for "first page in Google".

DataCore tech cranks wheezing SQL Servers to ridiculous speeds

Re: Super fast response times

"agmax works for DataCore"

Thanks, but I'd already worked that out.

Equifax CEO falls on his sword weeks after credit biz admits mega-breach

Re: Not going to receive his bonus

"How would you feel if low income workers who were fired for incompetence or misconduct had to give back several years of historic pay?"

They're not going to be the ones making company policy or overseeing company policy being carried out. The reason CxOs are paid a lot of money is that they carry responsibility. If they fail to discharge that properly that over a long period why shouldn't some of that money be clawed back?

Docs ran a simulation of what would happen if really nasty malware hit a city's hospitals. RIP :(

"Because we could never do elevators/HVAC/refridgeration without computers?"

And nobody ever put the HVAC on the same network as the business and nobody ever let the maintenance company have access to the HVAC and nobody ever got pwned because of such a set-up. Of course not.

Re: I was buying a new vacuum cleaner last week

If it was made by Microsoft, you can be certain it won't will suck.

FTFY

"having monitoring of the conditions would be useful"

Every freezer I've had monitors itself. If the temperature rises above a limit it sounds an alarm. If a fridge or freezer isn't located where the alarm wouldn't be heard it's not beyond the wit of man to run a bit of twin core to sound the alarm somewhere where it would be. It doesn't need to be connected to the internet; that's just needless - and dangerous - shiny for the sake of shiny.

Re: Take results with a pinch of salt

"Things have to be done RIGHT NOW because hospitals are vulnerable"

Let's look at that a little more carefully.

What has to be done right now?

I'd say the first thing that has to be done is to find out what has to be done (yes I did spend time living in Ireland ;).

The medics have a term for this, it was used in the article: triage.

Some things can be done quickly but everything can't be done at once because you always have a finite number of people to do it and things have to be done in order: if you think the network needs to be rearranged so as to isolate the more vulnerable equipment then that has to be planned, otherwise you may accidentally fail to do so by missing out on some bridge or you may separate a piece of equipment from other systems it needs to work with. Then you may need to buy more kit which has a lead time.

You can start doing things right now (Starting telling TPTB you're going to need to budget time and money is one). You will actually be able to finish doing very little right now.

Above all you need to avoid the politician's syllogism: something needs to be done, this is something therefore it must be done.

"The rest makes sense but that's just a bit far fetched."

There was an internet connected dishwasher mentioned here a few months ago: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/26/miele_joins_internetofst_hall_of_shame/ That turned out to have been intended for use by medical services so it doesn't surprise me that they would have actually found internet connected fridges. This sort of exercise should lead to questioning the wisdom of such devices.

Re: Take results with a pinch of salt

"wonder what the lessons learnt are, that a hospital could be put immediately into practice."

Why would the lessons learned have to be put into practice immediately? Some, maybe. But the fact that some or even all may take longer doesn't invalidate the exercise.

Have you ever carried out a DR practice? If you have I'm pretty sure that at least the first time you would have learned a great deal about how to prepare for a real DR event. Given that you don't see the point of this exercise I'd guess you haven't.

Re: WannaCry and NHS

"Except it forms the basis of the vast majority of the actual servers on the internet"

And all the Android devices. And all Chromebooks.. And what's the score for smart TVs these days?

But still, nobody uses it.

Re: WannaCry and NHS

"No, but if their are any it'll be blamed on 'computers'"

If there are any such deaths they should to be reported to the coroner and an inquest would look into the matter rather more deeply than you seem to think.

Want to keep in contact with friends and family without having to sell your personal data?

"Yes, you can. I can too. But $600 so I don't have to fix it on my mum's computer when it breaks would be the best $600 I have ever spent, BAR NONE."

The point is that the workable solution you knock up on a Pi doesn't cost $600 to produce at scale. You have to ask where the mark-up's going.

The ongoing need for a means of mediating some connections is a real one. We don't need yet another slurping operation.

Perhaps the solution is to accept that such an ongoing service needs to be paid for. There could be a multi-tiered service - say a way of advertising one's current IP address (to provide for ISPs allocating addresses dynamically) for the peer-to-peer. The next tier could be a store and forward facility for passing messages to someone currently off-line and an additional facility for advertising this more permanent address. Add on a means of advertising a public key so that stored and forward data can be encrypted at rest whilst being stored. Another tier could add more encrypted storage, calendar functions etc. Is there anything in this list that seems even faintly novel except for the notion that such services are actually the product in their own right?

Re: Really?

"Granny probably doesn't have internet at all."

How long do we have to put up with this juvenile stupidity?

Of course those of us in the70+ age group have internet. My 90-yo cousin has an iPad (and a robot lawnmower which is an actual thing these days). His wife has a Linux PC (the answer to having been successfully phished with ransomware) which also, via Calibre, acts as a server for her Kindle. Another cousin and her husband have 2 Linux PCs & a laptop on their internet connection; one of those PCs was bought from Time which, for those who know, indicates how long they've been online.

The internet has been available as a commercial proposition since the 1990s, PCs since the 1980s. Many of us have been using computers since the 60s or maybe even earlier. Do you really think the internet, computers & all sprung into existence when you got your first mobile phone (BTW I was working in the mobile industry in the mid '80s)?

The only thing such would-be witty comments show is the depth of the commentards' ignorance.

Re: Sounds tempting...

"for about the same money you can roll your own with a Pi, camera & a touchscreen monitor, but it won't look as nice"

My reaction exactly. And for the price of an HDMI cable you could hook it up to a bigger display. The knob on the side (as opposed to the knob who's selling your data) is presumably presented to the software as a mouse.

Given the number of people selling boxes to house your Pi even the appearance could be a quickly solved problem.

Re: Who handles the video streams and pictures, and how?

" their privacy policy is the first I have seen, ever, that is so one-sided it contains not a single word about protecting YOUR details and data"

OTOH "We take customers' privacy extremely seriously" is so frequently trotted out in the wake of blatant failure to do just that that it has become a de facto admission of guilt so maybe that's why they avoided it.

CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

Yet another reason to avoid sites that don't work when Javascript is blocked.

Driverless cars will make more traffic, say transport boffins

Re: Bah!

"Instead of thinking of them as self-driving cars, try thinking of autonomous vehicles as trains that go where you need them to go."

But not necessarily when you want one for the simple reason that you'll want one at more or less the same time as everyone else and most of the time someone else will have got them before you.

Re: Got rid of mine...

"Bike for short journeys, train for longer ones."

That works for you so it must work for everyone else. Everywhere is reasonably flat. Everywhere has good local train services ("good" because I've had experience with not good) and everyone has a good enough sense of balance and fitness to ride a bike. And, as per Charles 9's comment, everywhere has an agreeable climate.

Re: Am I stupid (be kind)?

"I don't get how car sharing reduces congestion"

The predictions we're usually given are not so much private individuals' cars being shared but commercial autonomous fleets, something Uber-like but without the drivers. According the Beeb's report (but not included in el Reg's coverage) one of TfL's reasons for pulling Uber's licence was that the Uber cars increased congestion.

Brit military wants a small-drone-killer system for £20m

"shotgun and cartridges"

There's already been a proof of concept experiment.

Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders

Re: C'mon, ElReg.

"world's ignorant press has been doing it's level best to devalue the word "hacker" for a couple decades now"

Have an upvote for the sentiment but I think we just have to accept that battle as lost.

"Little wonder four of the groups' IT leaders have been killed in the last two years by drone strikes."

Clearly too many creationists in the US decision making chain. They haven't heard of the consequences of natural selection.

NBD: Adobe just dumped its private PGP key on the internet

Re: User friendly encryption ?

(3)and if the key leaks you're dependent on the provider for a new one.

"Adobe has not returned a request for comment on the matter"

Possible reason.

Call from Adobe PR to tech suppert: "We've all been viewing this cat video someone emailed us and now our computers aren't working."

Spanish govt slammed over bizarre Catalan .cat internet registry cop raid

Re: the English want to keep Cymru and Scotland.

"As UK government is run from London and dominated by English politicians, from the Scottish perspective it's not so much the United Kingdom as 'England et al.'"

From an English perspective Scotland is seen as making a lot of decisions in its own Assembly with its own govt. but decisions involving England are made in the UK Parliament.

I'm not convinced that, had the Scottish independence referendum been held on a UK-wide franchise,* it wouldn't have had the same outcome; the English might have voted to have rid themselves of the Scots. However being effectively thrown out wouldn't have sat well with the SNP.

Not setting up an English Assembly along with the Welsh and Scottish ones was a mistake. Arguably we might have had the Brexit nonsense although I suppose we might have had the numpty wing of the Conservative party dominating the English Assembly.

Home rule for Yorkshire, I say - and within its pre-1974 boundaries.

*Quite justifiable on the basis that it affected the UK as a unit.

For Facebook, ignorance is the business model: Social net is shocked – SHOCKED – that people behave badly

Re: How many people believe Sheryl?

"Just ask Bell Pottinger."

Who?

You forgot that you hired me and now you're saying it's my fault?

Re: Oreo break? Means they hate you!

Biscuits - huh! My team, scavengers all, used to be located next to a meeting room which was fairly often used for lunch-time meetings and heavily oversupplied when it was. The high point was the meeting that had Cointreau crèmes brûlée...

Re: Ah, memories.

"Yes, the Epidiascope. They had one at my school in the early 1970s."

The epidiascope also had a slide projection option (the dia bit).

Although most speakers had 35mm slides someone turned up with over-sized slides. No problem, we have the biiig slide projector fitting on the epidiascope. Except his slides were too small for that one. They ended up being suspended in the gate of the epidiascope with sticky tape.

He was a local speaker. The lecture room was the one his own department shared.

Re: You were doing so well...

"That leaves them with no wriggle room to blame you."

When it comes to blaming no wriggle room is necessary.

Microsoft reveals details of flagship London store within spitting distance from Apple's

Within spitting distance? This could get messy.

At least it's handy for a nice afternoon tea in Liberty's café.

Cloudflare coughs up a few grand for prior-art torpedoes to sink troll

"I am not sure that would be fair on the prior art front. It would be impossible for the USPO to have perfect knowledge of everything ever invented."

Raise the bar on originality. Recognise that everyday programming is simply applying logical thought to everyday problems. The applicant should provide evidence that the problem has been around for a good while and acknowledged to have no existing solution - as documented in peer-reviewed journals, for instance.

Or simply ban software patents in their entirety.

IT plonker stuffed 'destructive' logic bomb into US Army servers in contract revenge attack

Re: How would you folk hide a logic bomb?

Introduce a dependency on some 3rd party package which needs periodic renewal and not tell anyone the account numbers. Or just use Oracle & Microsoft products and then grass them up for a licence audit.

Sysadmin tells user CSI-style password guessing never w– wait WTF?! It's 'PASSWORD1'!

A client for whom I used to do occasional work got so pissed off with the support from a package vendor* that he cracked the licensing file in order to not have to keep paying their "maintenance" charges. On the basis that I really wanted to keep my distance from that I didn't pay too much attention to how he did it - I think it was simply a matter of resetting some text every few months or updating some date related number.

*He had my sympathy. One gem was that I ended up having to edit the Informix sysindexes table to bring it into line with the actual indexes their C-ISAM S/W had created.

Re: I'm unintentionally awesome at work regularly

"I bumped into an old boss who'd bumped me."

Sometimes it works the other way round. In this case the boss was actually a client of the company I'd been working up to about 9 months previously. The conversation more or less went "Would you like to come and work for us?". The subsequent interview was more or less "Do you still want the job?". They knew how many plates I'd been spinning.

Re: "They looked for the password on the CD . . ."

"I once found a comprehensive list of login/password pairs written in sharpie on the underside of the leaves of a faux ficus"

Why were you looking there?

First big Privacy Shield review has ended – and yep, it's great! Just don't ask about mass spying

Roll on the real review when a case hits the ECJ.

I take it the results of this one were printed on bog paper.

Chatbots: A load of hype or fancy lifehack for the lazy IT person?

Turing convergence

It's not that computers will become indistinguishable from humans. In too many support centres the scripted humans are already indistinguishable from computers. Turning the job over to the computer is just the next logical step and will be undetectable to the hapless customer.

Slain: Unions' US OPM mega-hack lawsuit against Uncle Sam

I hope the reviewers ( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/18/first_annual_privacy_shield_review/ ) of the Privacy Figleaf are taking note of this decision. It indicates that the US legal system does not regard disclosure of PII as being a harm in itself but only as a possible facilitator of harm.

Chief digital officer and sales director leave O2 amid ongoing shake-up

I wonder how much of the BT pensions hole it inherited and how that will affect the IPO. Or maybe there are no ex-BTers left.

How's that 'turnaround' year going, Capita? ...Sheesh, sorry I asked

I'm sure there must be good opportunities for a new customs system. Get in a low bid now and then coin it on requirements changes, i.e. when the govt makes up its mind.

Re: Capita issued its first ever profit warning...

"Come on, someone surely had to pay for IR35."

A decade ago isn't long enough to account for IR35. That must have been something else.

Equifax fooled again! Blundering credit biz directs hack attack victims to parody site

"Given that Equifax is trying desperately to avoid a full-scale investigation into its business practices"

Equifax's whole business depends on persuading other businesses that they really know what they're doing when it comes to handling data. It's all going terribly well.

You lost your ballpoint pen, Slack? Why's your Linux version unsigned?

"Isn't that their job?"

As long as they're allowed to get away with it, yes. But they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

Re: It isn't that hard to do

Slack by name, slack by nature.

Something good about Brexit? Errr, more teeth for Ofcom! – report

Re: More regulation?

I thought the tenor of the Brexit debate was to "reduce regulations imposed by unelected [European*]bureaucrats"

Because taking back control means HMG can do as it wants. The little people don't get control.

*Muttered soto voce

Orland-whoa! Chap cops to masterminding $100m Microsoft piracy racket

Wasted opportunity

Remove the "telemetry", cut new disks and flog them instead. They'd be worth far more than the original. Just don't sell them with the licence codes. Only legitimate Microsoft customers would then be able to use them. It would put the prosecution into a real quandary.