Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK.gov cloud fave Amazon comes under fire for tax bill

These UK-based AWS data centres that HMG are so keen on using - when do they get built? In advance of being used, obviously (I trust MPs can work that out for themselves without expert help).

Does that need money? Yes (same proviso).

If, instead of borrowing money Amazon pay it out of existing sales on other business what does it do to the profits on which tax is paid?

What seems to be suggested in TFA is that rather than expand their business with money taken from their own sales Amazon should build up a big debt mountain in order to pay UK taxes. The distressing thing is that this probably makes sense to Hodge. After all when she was in govt. her party proved pretty adept at encouraging the building of debt mountains. Maybe she forgets that it didn't work out well.

Re: Profit

"Rip up that tax book and start again - Maggie ballooned it and Blair (being a good Socialist) expanded it even further"

I get a bit forgetful in my old age. Could you remind me of the dates when these were Chancellors of the Exchequer?

Re: Legislation, Boycotts and Real Change

"MPs and journalists really should know this stuff."

It's optional. They do know it until it suits them not to.

"Where did I suggest that?"

Maybe he assumed you must have defined it. Given that the scheme made no sense to the rest of us it we couldn't even begin to work out how it could have been fair.

I think you may have mis-remembered what you read. Turnover isn't a company's equivalent to salary. As a taxable figure it means nothing until you know what it cost to produce that turnover.

"Presumably they're hoping that it'll get to some point and stop re-cycling its profits into investment, and suddenly cash ahoy! But that may never happen."

Didn't Microsoft also run like this for a long, long time?

'Adversarial DNA' breeds buffer overflow bugs in PCs

Is that you Bobby?

Re: Bah!

"They created synthetic DNA which, when sequenced, produced dataset"

Which is an unnecessarily long winded way to produce a dataset.

Official: Windows for Workstations returns in Fall Creators Update

Re: What about auto-updates?

"Trying to restart a nuclear rector"

Isn't that a vicarious experience?

Re: What about auto-updates?

"Is that what you see or what you're told happens?"

I was told it happened by the OP who saw it. Does that answer your question?

Alien 'lava lamp' with dying magnetic field orbited Earth a billion years ago – science

"prehistoric lunar rocks"

Just ordinary lunar rocks, then. An historic lunar rock would really get my attention.

Revealed: The naughty tricks used by web ads to bypass blockers

Re: I work in this industry

"At the end of the day people who use ad blockers don't generate us money, and we don't give a shit about your user experience."

I think you've got that back to front. You don't give a shit about our experience so that's why we use ad-blockers. If you want to know why we make it more difficult for you to take your punters' money, go find a mirror.

Re: I ask three things before I allow ads

"maybe an animated GIF"

You're too generous. It was one particular animated GIF that was the final straw for me.

Re: The Solution is Simple

"When they'd businesses clean up their act and take responsibility for the crapware they peddle, then things will improve."

There's a risk that even if they cleaned up people wouldn't notice because the ad-blockers will hide that. The big question is whether we've already reached that tipping point. I'm surprised that Google haven't put their foot down some time ago. If online advertising implodes they have more to lose than anyone else and a greater ability than anyone else to strangle the crap slingers to stop it imploding.

If they could comprehensively and honestly answer that, then they might find a solution mirror.

Re: Gotta be honest here...

"Im open to suggestions on how to earn circa £150-200 a month without anyone having to pay a bean."

TL;DR beyond this point.

Presumably every page on your site has useful content other than, maybe, navigational pages. So there's nothing difficult about working out what those reading the page are interested in: they're interested in whatever that page content is. So what you need is a way to get businesses who are in a relevant line of business pay a small amount per month for a static ad to take an interested viewer to their own web site. You could try approaching such businesses directly. It could save them money - at the cost to you of some effort - because it cuts out all the middlemen making and distributing the often irrelevant, punter pissing off, bandwidth hugging crap.

"I'm not sure how the business is going to continue."

That's easy to understand. The advertising industry keeps selling advertising to the advertisers. The fact that everybody hates it making it counter-productive is kept well hidden. The advertising industry is very effective at selling. But what it sells is its own product, advertising. Nothing else.

"Do all the fancy stuff to select which image at the server end"

It doesn't even need to be fancy. You know what page the user's browsing. You know what's on the page because it's your page. So you know what he's interested in. After that it becomes easy to add the relevant ad to the page. So easy, in fact, that the advertiser and publisher need very little in the way of middlemen to take a profit from. Now why do you think the advertising industry doesn't try to sell that solution instead?

Re: Hey Instart

"If someone has gone to the trouble of blocking ads and they find a way to get round it, then they are likely to be pissing people off and losing all goodwill, so there is not really any benefit to doing it surely?"

You need to distinguish between the advertisers, those with products or services they want to sell and the advertising industry that delivers advertising to potential customers.

The latter want to push the adverts at you regardless of whether or not it injures the reputation of their clients because they're not selling their clients' products, they're selling their own which is advertising. For them it's profitable to get round ad-blockers. For their mugs clients it's money spent on alienating existing and potential customers but don't expect the advertising industry to tell them that.

John Wanamaker, one of the pioneers of marketing is reputed to have said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”. Presumably he'd have welcomed ad-blockers because they'd have instantly cut out a lot of his wasted - and very likely counter-productive - spending.

Hell desk to user: 'I know you're wrong. I wrote the software. And the protocol it runs on'

The other side of this is spending an afternoon working through the vendor's source code (they'd supplied most of it) to discover why their invoicing program was causing the RDBMS engine to eat memory until it had crashed two weeks running.

Re: Possible or easy?

"There could well be a full-featured 3D CAD - potentially fully documented - in systemd, and you might just not know."

Hey, how did you find it? It was supposed to be secret.

Re: Possible or easy?

"But it could easily be a failure of the accompanying documentation."

Documentation? Who reads that?

Can GCHQ order techies to work as govt snoops? Experts fear: 'Yes'

OK, to lighten up this debate - assuming a warrant comes with a gag order how do TPTB prosecute someone who refuses to obey the warrant?

Re: What if...

I am not a lawyer, but if I were defending an employee who had been fired...then said employee would be extremely unlucky.

Re: Off the leash

"or rather, the ones that are vague alluded to as being telco-ish which IMHO a lot of horse manure without a formal license, but we'll leave that aside for the moment"

Why would we leave it aside? If the definition doesn't specify a telecoms operator as conforming to your personal definition, i.e. being a licensed operator, then your argument collapses. The Act says what it says, not what you think it should say.

"What do you reckon?"

I reckon over-broadly worded legislation straying well beyond centuries-old legal limits parading ministerial authority as due process of law and under-scrutinised by Parliament is a dangerous thing.

I also reckon that possibly the notion that a warrant could be served on an individual and binding on a telecoms provider may have been intended to allow someone to collar a bloke driving an Openreach van and tell him, as a representative of a telecoms provider to put a tap on a given line without going through too much paperwork. I further reckon that even if that's the case it's open to misuse far beyond that.

Re: What a load of complete cobblers!

"The UK courts do not give out warrants compelling people to provide services for anyone"

Well, they certainly don't in these cases. It's the Sec of State (a certain Amber Rudd of proven keen intellect) or someone wielding her rubber stamp.

That's one of the concerns.

Warning: this post may contain traces of sarcasm.

"And you know that how?"

Have you heard of a Mr Snowden?

Re: Does that mean

"and what about coffee shops / pubs that provide Wi-Fi for customers? are they operators under this?"

If the summary given in the article is correct then it would appear that they are. Whether that's by intent or by carelessness is a matter for conjecture. It's an aspect that should have received scrutiny in Parliament If my ex-MP's attitude was anything to go by I doubt there was much enthusiasm for such scrutiny, at least on the govt. side.

In a way I'm a little sorry he isn't still my MP, if he were I could keep asking him to clarify such issues that he voted for so unthinkingly.

"it's just possible that they come across some expert who is actually willing to help put some scumbag in jail."

Indeed. I have been that very expert. But (a) it was part of my job and (b) it was part of a long-established legal process. It would have been somewhat different if it involved mass surveillance of a sort which has already been struck down in court in a previous guise, which I might fear to be illegal under over-arching European legislation (which, thankfully, still exists to protect us against government overreach) and which, in my view, goes against the long established principle of the presumption of innocence.

OTOH if I found myself in an employment situation where I discovered such scumbag activity I would probably find myself becoming a whistle-blower although oddly enough intelligence agencies don't seem favourably disposed to these.

Re: "threats about what would happen if they revealed its existence"

"Are we in democracy or not ?"

Any answers?

Re: Who cares?

"They have quite enough experts of their own, they're not going to suddenly drag Admin Joe out from his day job to help them bring down some chinese cyber team."

No, but they might call on Admin Joe at home and tell him that when he goes into work he's going to have to set up something to copy all Fred's internal emails to HMRC/DVLA/dog warden. It would be a lot easier than going to GCHQ and asking them to spend however long it takes to gain surreptitious access to the system.

It's not as if we've never seen overreach in the past.

Re: What if...

"I therefore conclude that the law is an ass."

You probably conclude wrong.

- Warrant served against telco.

- Telco directs employee to implement it.

- Employee refuses.

What happens next? Employee has refused a legitimate order (legitimised by the warrant) so can be fired without a basis for comeback although an Employment Tribunal hearing might be awkward with a gagging order in place.

Re: Who cares?

"The chances of Mr Average IT person who hasn't signed the official secrets act ever being called up by GCHQ is so vanishingly small that its virtually non existent."

I'm not sure about that. From TFA:

Section 261 of the Act defines that a "telecommunications operator" is anyone who provides or controls a communications network of any kind. Paragraph 10 of Section 261 talks about how you are also considered to be a telecommunications operator even if you only merely "control" the telecommunications system in question; actual ownership does not appear to be required. That would appear to obligate some third-party maintenance vendors to assist with a Bulk Equipment Interference warrant issued against equipment owned by their customers.

"A communications network of any kind" would include a company's internal network* so a warrant could be served on a company's own BOFH to compromise his employer and be gagged from saying anything about that. It might not be intended but once the facility is there abuse tends to follow; we've certainly seen reports of this in the past.

*It could even include a domestic WiFi link to the router!

TalkTalk fined £100k for exposing personal sensitive info

Re: No surprise

"Within the week, they'll have marketing saps* camped outside many major Shopping Centres"

And if they appear at mine I'll explain loudly and at length why I changed a previous ISP after they took it over and why they're a laughing stock in the entire IT industry for their ineptitude.

News from next month, "TalkTalk anounces unavoidable price increase of £1 per month per customer due operational cost increases"

Given that their ?only selling point is price there's a limit to the fines they can pass on.

Re: Role based access control

"They were fined £100,000 of a possible £500,000. 1/5th the maximum fine. The 4% fine would not be applied under the GDPR. "

Let's look at it another way. From their 2016 annual report let's take the headline income before various deductions as the turnover. That's £1,838m. 4% is £73.52m. Now apply a 1/5 maximum and that comes out to £14.7m. So taking the same % of the new maximum fine should be enough to get the board's attention.

"No organisation will be hit with anywhere near the maximum fines. We will see fines around the same levels we are seeing at the moment."

Citation needed

Manchester firm shut down for pretending to be Google

Re: Fake invoice scam (been around forever)

"Some gullible accounts payable droid dutifully pays the invoice"

An accounts droid who pays out without a PO is more than gullible but downright incompetent. Hence the first response to a phone demand should be for the PO number.

Re: The lads from Lagos..

"They will just start again under a new name"

TFA states plainly that they are disbarred from acting as directors and breaking that will be a criminal offence Not a company criminal offence but a personal one.

Why this sanction isn't more often used I don't know.

Me (reading from counter-script script): "Fuck off and get a proper job." *slam*

There you are, then. No public spirit. No effort to waste time they could spend looking for someone more vulnerable.

Re: SEO/Domain Registration scams.

"I had a similar one the other day, turned out to be from a search engine optimisation company."

They're easily identified by the fact that they never have their own website that can be easily found by searching for "first page on google" - purely so you can check their abilities of course.

If I've nothing to do I sometimes reply politely pointing out that they seem to have omitted that and, by further, oversight, have used gmail rather than their own domain. I then run through the rest of their mail pointing out the bad grammar and asking why anyone would want to put their own reputation in the hands of someone so sloppy when making a pitch. I assume they're pleased with their English prowess although it's possible they bought the email text along with their cheap spam list.

Re: SEO/Domain Registration scams.

"It's time that WhoIs info is only available by warrant and not to random members of the public."

????

Whois is one of the first lines of defence of the public against these scammers.

General rule of thumb, don't just give money to people who ask for it over the phone.

"I'll need a purchase order number."

"No, sorry, it's company policy. I just work here."

"Sorry, I can't give out that information. Data protection."

You just need a counter-script script.

Berners-Lee and the open-data bunch: £60k for your best collab dataset register ideas

"having so many stakeholders can end up causing management headaches and confusion for users."

And no amount of money is going to make that problem going away.

Even talking about stakeholders is part of the problem unless you acknowledge that each and every data subject is a stakeholder.

So you're thinking about becoming an illegal hacker – what's your business plan?

"Obviously, using pseudonyms is a must. Changing them frequently is also an excellent idea, even though it may entail additional work on your part."

Using a pseudonym associated with a security researcher could be a good wheeze (see framing someone else).

Salesforce sacks two top security engineers for their DEF CON talk

"What can one conclude about a company that behaves like that about employees who care?"

The conclusion is the message. Of course it's a message the execs who sign the POs won't get.

Corporate criminal tax offences likely to further increase HMRC's use of dawn raids, says expert

"Obviously HMRC have read BOFH and a dawn raid ensures there's no unexpected cattle prod/Hector interface issues."

A competent BOFH will have removed the tile just inside the server-room door. Once Hector has made it past the portcullis, booby-trapped guillotine blade etc, it'll be straight down into the oubilette.

Stops a company from saying "Well, they're not an employee of ours, so it's not our responsibility."

Yup. Maybe I should have queried "facilitating". In the instances I gave the stationer, printer and cartridge vendor and Royal Mail could all be argued as facilitating. At the very least there's an opening for a reductio ad absurdum argument in defence.

Marcus Hutchins free for now as infosec world rallies around suspected banking malware dev

Re: Blind support

"blame the ambiguities of the English language for that one"

The original would have been stated in medieval French so anything else is a translation or restatement.

Windows Subsystem for Linux is coming to Windows Server

Re: Oh joy, more embracing...

"where will it all lead?"

Maybe the Linux runtime will include stuff that requires systemd. Systemd included in Windows? Maybe Poettering will end up going to work for Microsoft (was that a voice at the back saying he already does?).

Oh joy!