Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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?

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

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.

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.

"perhaps it would be simpler to implement a this-is-bullshit font."

No. The PR folk would just tell their masters that the text had been accepted with no further comment or request for clarification; job done.

"I think that John is trusting readers of El Reg to draw the logical conclusion from the statement"

Sure we can. But that doesn't stop PR spouting the same self-serving crap every single time. I suspect they're simply saying it to get the statement on record to use in defence in any future court case. If they actually gave such a statement in court they'd be seriously challenged on cross-examination.

They really need to be challenged in the media as well. Tell them they're not being believed. Tell them their statement isn't going to be used at all unless they enlarge on how the events contradict the statement. Tell them that instead there'll be something like "We asked X for a statement but their response was so anodyne and bore so little relationship to events that we won't trouble you with having to read it because you won't believe it any way.".

""Slack takes security very seriously."

Why do you journalists let them (PR people in general) get away with this when the circumstances say otherwise? Follow it up with "Then how do you account for...?". Make the bar stewards work for their money.

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.

CCleaner targeted top tech companies in attempt to lift IP

Re: "Peoples Republic's timezone"

"the IP address which the malware phones home to is located in....the USA. Saratoga Springs? Langley?"

Whois says the registrant is in Seattle.

"With the update to CCleaner, software should be included that totally removes all malware that could have been introduced by the infected versions"

Easier said than done. CCleaner phoned home to a server and that server would have supplied the real payload. It's not possible to determine what that was simply by looking at the rogue CCleaner. It's not even possible to be certain by looking at the server; even if the server is sufficiently accessible to determine what it's hosting now that might not be what it had before Talos investigated.

Re: And yet when I suggested the only way to safely fix a malware infected host...

"the downvoting commentards were out in force."

That might have been because you were suggesting reinstalling Windows.

BlackBerry's QNX to run autonomous car software

The steering wheel will be a small, fiddly keyboard.

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

"an African child is 100 times more likely to die of a preventable disease than an American child"

Meanwhile, in the US, the anti-vaxers are trying to reduce this ratio.

Compsci degrees aren't returning on investment for coders – research

Re: Study if you are interested in learning a subject in depth

"If it is just about maximizing income, get some business degree."

Or a degree in music.

Re: @tiggity re. all those JS coders

"your condescending attitude"

I don't find it condescending at all. In fact I find the attitude that I have to open up my browser to any Tom Dick and Harry's code that the site developer wants, simply in order to view the visual marvels that he (thinks) he's provided. Well, I'm not playing that game. NoScript is part of my security set-up and if anybody thinks they're important enough for me turn that off then I have to disagree.

Re: More!

"If people think of comp sci as a bit like doing a degree in botany, they might be more realistic."

Cough. My degree is in botany.

When I finally moved into IT after a good deal of lab computing and "if you want a program to do that, write it yourself" I ended up on a team consisting or a botanist, a zoologist, a geologist and a recent comp sci grad. The latter actually wanted to be an astronomer.

Black screen of death after Win10 update? Microsoft blames HP

"stupid thing autoinstalled and I haven't removed it"

You haven't removed it but not by choice?

Re: The registry that should never have happened

"Even funnier is that... HP"

Back in Windows 3 days there was a 3rd party package called New Wave which added a lot of the OO-type click to open with the right application stuff, etc. This, as I recall it, had a heap of little files which presumably did much the same thing as the registry did. A lot of that New Wave stuff got incorporated in W95 as could be seen by the copyright declarations.

The company who provided New Wave?..... You've guessed it.

Re: "The Register"

"Blatant Trade Mark Infringement by Microsoft causing damage to the reputation of El Reg."

In Microsoft's case the abbreviation is ill Reg.

"And, in passing, a curse on sans-serifs."

Re: when does the 'joke' : windows IS the malware...

"went fishing in task mgr the other day"

The equivalents (top and ps -ef) will find all manner of stuff running in an Unix or Unix-like system these days. It wasn't always like that. Stuff just gets more complicated with time.

Re: HP maybe the source, but Microsoft is still to blame

"Without a trace of irony or humour."

Or common sense.

EU watchdog: Govt bods are seeking 'legal knockouts' to dodge transparency

"if the government publishes a dataset as a file that runs to 11 million rows a month, it won’t be much use to people who only has the skills to use Excel, where a file can support about 1.5 million rows."

When all you have is a hammer it's no use complaining the nails are too big.

Chap tames Slack by piping it into Emacs

Re: I don't see the point

"the return on effort for this seems pretty low."

I think that was the objective. He doesn't want much returned from the feed.

Re: EMACS. Is there anything it cannot do?

"Unfortunately this is probably impossible for vi"

Why waste time? Straight to /dev/null

Ofcom to crack down on telcos' handling of nuisance callers

"A lot of countries can't/don't/won't supply CLI last I heard. "

If their calls don't get through without it they'll find they can/do/will.

Re: Doesn't go far enough on nuisance calls

"This will only be effective if it is forwarded to the nuclear deterrent targeting system."

No, just credit the recipient's account with an answering fee and charge it back to the originating caller/telco. The delivering telco (and any other in the chain) can add a fee of their own for handling it. It does away with the folding call centre company; their telcos just apply the necessary credit control or take the hit and learn by experience.

Re: Follow the money

(4) Credit the recipient with a fee for answering the phone.

Equifax's disastrous Struts patching blunder: THOUSANDS of other orgs did it too

"Some developers / maintainers do care about backwards-compat, see the lengths Debian"

I've used Debian for many years. I also, however, remember libc6 undergoing radical changes (about the time of Linux kernel 2.6, I think) that broke previous application binaries. And if the application was commercial and no replacement was available -well, just too bad.

"Imagine a senior dev has left and he was partial to using Go for servers, node.js for UI, python for some algo, ZeroMQ plus numerous 3rd party github projects, the NoSQL flavor of the day."

A few days ago there was an article being somewhat snotty about enterprise architects. One role for the EA should be to make an informed choice of the technologies in use, minimising the uncontrolled dependencies and keeping up to date with them when they change.

"Over the years Struts versions have unsupported/broke features, plugins,"

Backward compatibility. Nobody cares about it. Except the users, of course.

I'm not familiar with Struts but a good policy, whether for free or commercial products, would be:

If the major version number is the same we'll ensure it's backwards compatible. If we have to break compatibility we'll update the major version number but maintain the last major number for X months/years or as long as practical.

From the users' point of view they can then choose who has the longest maintenance period, changes least often and best lives up to the policy They can also minimise the number of external dependencies.

Programming in the Middle Ages: Docker makes a lovely pair of trousers

Re: QUBAL : teletypes?

"The only QUB teletype I ever used was at an Expo thing in the Botanic Gardens (or near it) and running a poker dice program."

I remember that. I think it was to mark 50 years of Stormont or something similar. IIRC it was in the new Stranmillis sports centre.

I used to use the old computer centre in University Square Mews. There was a punch room upstairs. Although during the day most of the machines were used by data entry staff keying in from coding sheets which was the most practical way of getting your first draft onto cards a lot of changes ended up being done in the evenings.

Even on the Teletype system FORTRAN had to be compiled from cards and the executable stored online - you just ran it from the Teletypes.

Kids today 0 they'd never believe it.

"Why did it get written as Apple ][ ?"

Marketing/Steve Jobs?

"I should have bought an S100 machine."

Another memory.

Re: QUBAL

"Precursor to pascal (so I'm told). Queens University Belfast Algorithmic Language (maybe)."

That's what I thought. Did they run it on the home-grown multi-access system with the teletypes? I managed to bring down the whole 1907 from one of those.

More data lost or stolen in first half of 2017 than the whole of last year

It's not surprising. Big Data means more data to be snaffled.

Re: A poor reflection on the industry

legally liable for any and all losses that are incurred by users as a result, plus damages

s/damages/fines/

The users' losses are the damages. Otherwise, you're quite right.

What do you call an all-in-one PC that isn't? 'Upgradeable', says HP

"All-in-one PCs look pretty and make for tidy desks"

If an AiO makes any measurable difference to the tidiness of your desk than you're a raw amateur.

Forget "a clear desk is the sign of a clear mind"; an empty desk is the sign of an empty head.

Google, Bing, Yahoo! data hoarding is like homeopathy. It doesn't work – new study claims

If this applies to all the other Big Data stuff then eventually there's going to be an awful lot of storage capacity sold off cheap. I suppose it'll be bought up to store all the data being leaked by all and sundry.

Re: Homeopathy doesn't work??

"don't do it using links to hour long TV shows."

Or even 20 minute TV shows padded out to an hour in typical modern day BBC style.

Re: Don't see their successes

"I don't define success as convictions for gun murders."

It would be a lesser type of success. But wouldn't you agree that a conviction for possession that prevented the murder would be a success?

Re: Clowns at GCHQ and your pals, please take note!

"You don't see the people they manage to proactively stop 'doing something'"

Up to a point this is true. But if they are proactively stopping people how are they doing it? Where are the prosecutions?

Re: The purpose of targeted advertising ...

"It is to increase the price of advertising by claiming the adverts only go to people who might buy."

I'm not saying you're wrong but if everyone else sees adverts for stuff they've bought why don't the people who place the ads; and if they do, why don't they realise that this is happening to their ads and that they're paying for junk? Or do the people who place the ads not see them because use ad-blockers like the rest of us because ads are so annoying.

It's not only AI that fails to be self-aware.

What's that, Equifax? Most people expect to be notified of a breach within hours?

"I hope you have more luck with this than I did trying to get Anthem to reimburse me"

But did you take the approach Eddie proposes: the small claims court?

Re: Not Qualified

"Most people that age in IT don't have a degree at all, especially in the UK - only 20% of people even went to university - and it hasn't stopped them being effective at their jobs."

But was she effective at her job?