Posts by Doctor Syntax

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

Re: The idiocy of this runs even deeper.

"exchanging one-time pads via USB sticks carried by racing pigeons"

How do they exchange the racing pigeons?

Re: The idiocy of this runs even deeper.

"I fear the problem is that everyone else is just as uneducated in relation to encryption, so whatever the politicians say, will be believed...Too many people don't care about privacy, yet."

The first explains the second. But what happens if, instead of asking about Windows 10 telemetry, you ask about the banning of encryption making their online banking more easily hacked? If you put it in those terms I think you'd find people did care.

Re: Rudd: liar—or fool?

"it's still a tad surprising that Rudd's handlers continue to let her talk such unadulterated shit"

No, this is the shit they've given her to talk. And because of the shallowness of her understanding she can do so with no trace of cognitive dissonance.

"Can we all please stop pretending that the government is clueless and stupid?"

Actually Fly-in Amber has publicly demonstrated that she couldn't actually remember her briefing properly so it's obvious she never understood it. Hashtags.

Re: Has it escaped her attention?

"I don't know if my MP Lucy Frazer has had an opportunity to discuss things with Rudd. ...However I did write to her (it's very rare I write to anyone) before the election to tell her I wouldn't be voting for her"

I wrote to my former MP to tell him some time ago that, on account of his following the party line on this very issue, I wouldn't be able to vote for him as long as May* remained party leader. Note I said "former MP".

*Forget Rudd, she's just the monkey.

Re: Ask her this

"Would you do your banking over the Internet without "end to end" encryption?"

Actually I was thinking did nobody in that meeting have the wit to challenge her to publish her online banking credentials, her Waitrose login credentials etc? And then explain to her bewildered self that that's effectively what she wants the entire electorate to do.

Re: Ruddy Hastings

To a politician, "The Enemy" is those with the power to vote.

And to a government minister those with the power to vote include those who can vote in Parliament.

"Nurses and teachers can't vote against me till the next election -- backbenchers can vote against me at ten o'clock tonight."

Re: Real people?

"You have to go back s long way to not have Intel management engine built in"

Shock news warning:

There are computers that don't use Intel processors.

Re: The idiocy of this runs even deeper.

"All non-breakable communications will be declared illegal."

That would get a real push-back from business. Take, for instance, VPNs.

And take, for one small example, my daughter's employers. They are a pharmaceutical business. Her role is managing clinical trials in hospitals a hundred miles or more from their offices. She works from home. Her company laptop communicates via HQ with a VPN. By that means she is able to connect to their office system securely. She is able to take part in teleconferences securely.

Given the nature of her work there will be various regulations and requirements governing the data on her laptop (which I assume is encrypted). There will be personal data relating to trial subjects. This will be subject at the very least to existing DPA and forthcoming GDPR laws. I'm not familiar with clinical trials legislation but there may be additional regulations relating to that. There will be issues of commercial secrecy. There will also be financial regulatory issues: clinical trials results can affect share price.

Banning encryption over the net would require some form of point-to-point comms link to be put in place instead, otherwise it would mean that such trials couldn't be organised except from the office. In practical terms it would restrict the trials to fewer hospitals. Restricting trials would slow down the process of obtaining approval and place the company at a competitive disadvantage unless it chose to relocated to a saner business environment.*

These sort of issues would be reflected in businesses up and down the country. Do you really think the business community would stand for it?

*As a side issue it would also put my daughter out of work but with Brexit coming along that would be just another unemployed PhD?

Re: "The only country that is Up Shit Creek *with* a Rudder."

"A piano could drop on her head tomorrow and within a week her replacement would be spouting the same line."

What's even worse is that once they've been brainwashed they stay that way. Look at her predecessor. Fly-in Amber is only the Home Sec in residence. May is the Home Sec in command.

Facebook pulls plug on language-inventing chatbots? THE TRUTH

@A/C

I want never gets.

Re: 'Language' in chimps and bots...

"All Nim (and Washoe and all the rest) seem to do is produce the words with no meaning attached to word order or repetition."

I think it's fairly clear from the example you quoted that Nim wanted to be given an orange to eat. A moment's thought should show that that involves a concept, eating, that's way beyond anything a machine could begin to comprehend but which is fundamental to the existence of any animal.

Just a minute...

Given the amount of repetition in that sample it's hard to believe there was much, if any, information in there, let alone intelligence. Unless, of course, the information was encoded in the number of repeats.

Another day, another British Airways systems screwup causes chaos

"Although informed sources came up with plausible theories about what happened, the actual cause has not been acknowledged by British Airways."

ISTR reading that BA recently said they wouldn't make the full explanation for that public. I think a visit to the relevant HoC Select Committee must be in the offing.

No vulns. No hardwired passwords. Patchable. Congress dreams of IoT: Impossible Online Tech

Re: @Gene Cash

"Then that short-list would actually be an EMPTY list as a field-deployed, embedded system like that CAN'T be patched. Not only would it be deployed too remotely for anyone to see to it after it's installed, but a safety-related system like that REQUIRES that it be untouchable so that it can't be "hacked" to kill people."

The fault mentioned related to certificates. The only need to handle certificates would be to verify communications. The need to verify communications would only occur if the device could communicate. If it can communicate it isn't too remote to be patched, it isn't untouchable and if hacked can kill people.

The Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act

I thought it was a rule that all US legislation should have an appropriate acronym. The nearest this gets to that is TITCIA and that's only be dropping the preposition.

Re: Move in the right direction

"Bruce Schneier is apparently being listened to on this topic: he knows more about it, and has more realistic, intelligently reasoned views, than both houses of congress put together."

If he's any spare time can we borrow him for the HoP?

Re: @Gene Cash

"Now suppose you're 60% of the way through this project and this certificate handling bug is discovered. What do you do?"

In the situation you describe the processor wouldn't have made the short-list because it wouldn't have been patchable.

Brit voucher biz's signup page blabbed families' details via URL tweak

Kids Pass said that the pair had been blocked “in the early hours of Sunday morning by our 'out of hours' social media monitoring team” and unblocked “within a matter of hours when this error was spotted.”

I think we could hazard a guess that the "'out of hours' social media monitoring team” was outsourced and probably off-shored and that if it had an escalation procedure at all that would have included not ringing anyone important until next morning UK time.

Apple, Google pull options trading apps after Australian regulator shows scams

90% of what?

Grab a fork! Unravelling the Internet of Things' standards spaghetti

Does anyone else find it alarming that Danny could only find two opportunities to mention the word "security" in the entire article - and one of those was part of a company name?

The BrickerBot's author's work isn't over yet: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/brickerbot-dev-claims-cyber-attack-that-affected-over-60-000-indian-modems/

Sorry, psycho bosses, it's not OK to keylog your employees

The EPO's position seems to be that of terrorists everywhere when brought to justice: "I don't recognize this court".

Re: Play the game

"Sorry but I'd take my chances and sack them."

Did you read the article? That's just what they did do and it didn't work out well for them.

Look out Silicon Valley, here comes Brit bruiser Amber Rudd to lay down the (cyber) law

"You can think of examples from history, I'm sure."

The evidence seems to be that he fails at the first three words.

Re: Not for me, thanks all the same...

"let's just get on with the job and make the best of it eh?"

I suppose so but when the outcome becomes clear, let's not forgive and forget at the next election.

Re: Never mind the dawgs!

Brilliant. So we tax terrorists!!! Problem "solved"

If it were feasible don't think it wouldn't at least be given consideration.

Re: Never mind the dawgs!

"Increasing taxes hasn't worked yet ... what make you think it'll ever work?"

Define "work". If taxes stopped everything being taxed "because it's not good for you" governments would run out of money. So "not being good for you" is an excuse to raise taxes which does exactly what it's intended to do: shift money into the government's coffers.

Re: Never mind the dawgs!

"How about the deaths from Sugar? Salt? Fat? Tobacco? Alcohol? Traffic?"

Those are easily dealt with. Just tax them a bit more.

Re: Not Very Bright...

"I am not an internet guru"

Compared to the fly-in Amber you have a brain the size of a planet.

Welcome to the Rise of the Machine-to-Machine. Isn't it time to 'block off' some data ducts?

"I think quite succinctly, one of the big security problems at present is the trend to run absolutely everything over port 80."

And the usual reason, when one is given, is because it's the one port that won't be blocked. Convenience continues to override security.

"Web 2.0 then focused on letting us actually do something with that information."

Web >=2.0 is all about making it impossible to do anything without going online.

Case in point in the last few minutes. SQMBO (but not by large cinema chain!) tried to book tickets over the phone. They will no longer do that, have to to it online. This gets to be like the old Adventure games in that it's a mass of obstructive menus. e.g. go to the specific cinema site, select day and film, click Book and promptly get asked for what cinema. Confirmed purchase at least twice on successive screens.

Do the idiots who run these businesses never try running this maze occasionally and ask their minions hard questions such as "Couldn't you make it simpler?"? Evidently not. And no, I will not set up an account for them to leak. They can have a temporary email address that gets torn down in about a month, or sooner if they decide to spam it. At least I got away with only having to allow 2 Javascript sites, including Visa verification.

Red Hat acquires Permabit to put the squeeze on RHEL

Re: Licensing sense

"The article may not say it, but then the article does not say that the sky is blue"

It does, however say "ready-to-run Linux kernel modules of [Permabit's] wares"

Re: Beer

"couldn't we all just switch to BSD instead?"

But then what would Red Hat have to potter about?

Re: Didn't Stop Canonical

"And that of course opens up a legal question, when shim library is enough to remove the direct use of kernel from OpenZFS on Linux. Not surprisingly, there is some disagreement about this."

There's a further legal issue, at least in practical terms, as to who might have a legal standing to challenge the arrangement. Presumably a kernel dev would have the standing to challenge the shim but as the shim is GPL such a challenge would fail. The shim author(s) would have the standing to challenge linking the ZFS module but as this was the purpose it was written for it seems unlikely to happen. Could a kernel dev have the standing to challenge on the basis that "there's something over there I don't like; it's nothing directly to do with me but I don't like it"?

Re: Licensing sense

to get ZFS compatibility into a monolithic (high-performance) kernel compile you cannot use OpenZFS but need to clean-sheet it.Basically, "why sit down and write new code when we can buy someone who has already done that and just re-license it?"

Surely getting the newly acquired code into a monolithic kernel would have exactly the same issues as ZFS unless they were to re-licence it as GPL. I don't see anything in the article to say that they'll do that. If it sits outside the GPL kernel as a module it'll cause RMS just the same pain as does ZFS.

Dirty carbon nanotubes offer telcos chance at secure quantum comms

"After all, what's to stop Eve emitting a new proton to Bob to replace the one she read?"

It seems to be a bit more complicated than that but I'm still not clear why, by intercepting all the channels Alice and Bob use rather than simply eavesdropping, a MITM attack becomes impossible.

"To explain it reasonably well requires more room than the article can give it."

Dammit. The margin wasn't big enough.

Microsoft Surface laptop: Is this your MacBook Air replacement?

Re: Still in two minds about the ports..

"From a new purchase perspective, though, it makes more sense than the old mix, because USB-C ports are universal."

How long before USB-D or, maybe, something else makes USB-C legacy?

Linus Torvalds pens vintage 'f*cking' rant at kernel dev's 'utter BS'

Re: The trick to project management

So, if the trick to project management is as you describe it, how do you account for the success of this project?

Re: Linus knows what he is doing

"Kernael contributors do not get paid."

I think most of them do by their regular employers. However Linus does not have any influence over that and, as you say, he doesn't get to sack them either.

This is surely a unique situation and I doubt that any of those who come here to advise us of how he's doing it wrong would have the first idea of how to manage it, I know I certainly wouldn't but at least I know that.

Possibly the entire secret of Linux's success isn't the original code that attracted a mass of contributors but the fact that Linus himself turned out to have the ability to manage it and that the occasional rant is part of that ability.

" I don't think there are many organizations that would tolerate an employee constantly publicly berating people online."

Just reflect a moment what would happen in an ordinary organisation.

Torvalds would do one or more of the following:

- Write programmers' annual reviews

- Conduct recruitment interviews of programmers

- Recommend programmers for dismissal

- Recommend programmers for promotion

- Recommend programmers for pay rises

He has none of these conventional management aids to maintain quality. All he has is the ability to accept or reject code and to comment on it. By that means he is able to manage a team orders of magnitude greater than by use of such conventional management aids which leads to the further point that in such an organisation:

- He would have no time to do any real work.

Or to put it another way: how would you manage the Linux project (and remember before you reply that a lot of work is already delegated to the likes of Greg Kroah-Hartman).

Re: Linus' biggest mistake

"The 1990s called: they want their "microkernel is better" back."

Yup but you've got to admit that Starace was right. If he'd gone for a microkernel he wouldn't be stuck with arguments with contributors about anything at all.

"Simon speaks for others too"

But does he speak for Linux devs?

Autonomous driving in a city? We're '95% of the way there'

Re: Rate my driving

A lot of trucks (here in the US at least) have a toll free number listed with "how's my driving?"

Also in the UK. Presumably the recorded response is "You're a fine one to complain. You drove close enough to read the number and either you're either phoning or you wrote the number down whilst driving.

Steve Bannon wants Facebook, Google 'regulated like utilities'

"He'll be out of that circus we call the White House pretty soon."

I think I've cottoned on to Trump's plan. He's implementing Andy Warhol's everybody will be famous for 15 minutes idea. He's gradually revving up the revolving door so that the entire US population will have held a USG post for 15 minutes by the end of his term of office.

Re: YOS!

" I don't know what was your point and I don't care."

Actually I thought it was a skit on Bob. That's the trouble with the intertubes - you cen never quite be sure.

Re: "Clash of civilisations"

"The unholy Trinity of Trump, Bannon and Scaramucci"

Scaramucci? Please try to keep up.

"Steve Bannon, President Trump's chief policy strategist"

Is he still there? It must be his turn for the revolving door fairly soon.

Systemd wins top gong for 'lamest vendor' in Pwnie security awards

Re: Systemd...

"it was awarded for a difference on opinion with which the presenters of the award disagreed."

Namely the opinion of whether or not to take security seriously.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg: Crypto ban won't help trap terrorists

Re: open source crypto outside of jurisdiction

"The logical conclusion is that governments will outlaw the use of any encryption that isn't specifically approved by them."

I have no problem with them doing that providing they meet my requirement: a full year before doing so they must publish every detail they use for online access including user names, passwords, etc for all their online services including banking, online ordering etc.