Posts by Doctor Syntax

Multics resurrected: Proto-Unix now runs on Raspberry Pi or x86

Re: Primos

We had access to a Prime run by the Home Office. Its main use was to run a Lockheed bibliography database. It was possible to write well tuned queries for that, a characteristic which Google, Amazon and eBay seem to remorselessly root out of their query engines. The responses were in the form of references to microfilms of the original papers which were supplied to the labs which used it. Elsevier would have a blue fit if that were done today. The database was written in FORTRAN; for some reason a query managed to get it to start regurgitating the source code but I never managed to get it to repeat that trick.

We also had Pascal available. I can't remember what use I made of that but I must have done. We got our Onyx Unix box a little later and I sacrificed one of the TTY ports to connect to the link to the Prime (we must have had some sort of multiplexer on the Prime link). We didn't have tip, cu or the like on the Onyx so I explored the possibilities of fork() (and, indeed C which was new to me at the time) to write a simple equivalent so I could get on to the Prime from my lab instead of having to go down to the library. If I'd just been wanting to use the Prime for a literature search I'd have had to go to the library anyway to use the microfilm.

Again, thanks for a reminder of times gone by.

GSM gateway ban U-turn casts doubt on 7.5-year prosecution in Blighty

Re: @ alien overlord

"if he ran one of these he did break the law"

That might not be a settled matter. If the ban on a COSUG was contrary EU law it could well be that the Appeal court could make the same ruling for a COMUG were the case to be put to them. It certainly would not be in the public interest to continue the case when the ban itself has been rescinded and there's a possibility of the Court of Appeal throwing it out were it to get that far.

Judge used personal email to send out details of sensitive case

Re: Bah!

"Drive with the tax disc out."

Tax disc?

Re: Weird

"Most people who have a domain name use the rubbish mail that is given as a freebie as part of the hosting package."

My previous comment applies. There is nothing at all in the article to say that this is the sort of service being used here.

"I rest my case"

I haven't seen you produce anything that resembles a case worth resting.

The draft judgement is maybe more of a worry than the final judgement unless the latter was sent out with some extra comment. After all, the judgement is a matter of public record.

Re: "Internet e-mail is not a secure medium..."

"So, what sort of e-mail do I need to use?"

Intranet?

Local mail account on a Unix server?

UUCP?

How quickly we forget that email existed before there was an internet protocol for it.

Re: Weird

"Sending an email using his sons crappy mail server"

Gordon, I'm glad you're not a judge as you seem to be unable to limit your conclusions to the evidence.

The article said it was a domain owned by the son. Owning a domain does not mean you run the server. Many of us own out own domains* but that doesn't mean we run the servers; it's possible to buy that as a service. Secondly, even if the son owned his own server there's still no evidence that it was crappy. For all we know the son might be running a mail service provider.

*It's a useful means of controlling spam - we can use it to issue temporary addresses or addresses specific to a particular company with whom we do business. Owning your own domain is also a good idea if you're running a business; $companyname.co.uk looks so much more businesslike than $[e-mail].

'My dream job at Oracle left me homeless!' – A techie's relocation horror tale

Re: Surely Oracle could have found him somewhere to live

"Apparently Oracle have at least one slow, old boat that they're not doing anything with right now."

Yes, but it cost a lot and they'd have to charge a big rent on it to get their money back. Remember, this is Oracle.

Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word

" I can't use LibreOffice on everything as we have some iPads, and LibreOffice is, I think, GPL3 and so ain't ever gonna be in the Apple Store."

Collabora on Nextcloud?

"The drone had no clue about MS 365, but could cough up a phone number. I haven't had time to call it. I will. This should be interesting."

Hope springs eternal.

Re: As if they didn't have enough

"Subscription Katalogue Units"

I read that as "Subscription Kafkesque Units".

The AA's copped to credit data blurt, but what about car-crash incident response?

Prompt disclosure to be mandated by the GDPR isn't just some piece of arbitrary red tape. It's because it's a Good Thing. The fact that it's the best part of a year from becoming mandatory doesn't make it less of a Good Thing right not. It's not yet being mandatory in no way excuses the AA from acting properly.

Re: Pages rule of life ...

"companies that have handled their fuck ups properly."

Do such things really exist?

Former GCHQ boss backs end-to-end encryption

Undoubtedly bodies such as GCHQ know what May & Rudd want, i.e. the govt only back door, is nonsense. They also know that they're not going to be any better off with a bigger haystack. And they probably realise the drastic consequences of the politicians' shopping list of entitled agencies getting their hands on surveillance. But they also know that any words of wisdom from themselves will fall/have frequently fallen on deaf ears and their conditions of service prevent them going public.

What I'd really like is someone who's sufficiently lost their rag to retire and go public to the extent of saying "I've told these idiots time after time but they're just too stupid to understand.".

Re: "Oops, we voted for them :("

"If you live in the UK you voted for the party that appointed the current Home Secretary."

That, sir, is a libel.

There seems to be an odd notion about that because a (possibly slender) majority voted for something or someone then everyone must have done.

It's the same mode of thinking that enables Brexiteers to assume that the whole country voted for their madcap idea. They had a slender majority and it's very doubtful that if the referendum were to be repeated they'd actually achieve any majority at whole and yet they and, it seems, almost all the HoC are acting as if they have the entire country behind them.

"I think you'll find that the opposition is also largely in favour of this nonsense."

One didn't have to vote for them either.

"Oops, we voted for them"

Speak for yourself. I told my MP that I wouldn't be prepared to vote for him as long as May remained in charge. She has, I didn't. He isn't.

Trump backs off idea for joint US/Russian 'impenetrable Cyber Security unit'

MPB

"Modern Presidential behaviour"

Maybe behaviour should have had a capital inital as well. MPB could be a useful abbreviation.

Re: What a f@#$ing rube

"I hit "downvote" a bunch of times but it didn't work after the first one."

I'm sure we can provide you with a few spares.

Hard Rock hotels burgered up by Sabre breach

Hypothetical musing

From next May, if an EU citizen's personal data were to be leaked by a PoS in the US would GDPR apply? After all, the US want their laws to apply here so why shouldn't ours apply there?

Is this a hotdog? What it takes for an AI to answer that might surprise you

"Being in tech means you are naturally fascinated by the new. "

And being in tech long enough reminds you that the old is new again.

Largest advertising company in the world still wincing after NotPetya punch

"the board can point the finger at $OUTSOURCER and deny responsibility."

And when it comes to court the court under GDPR will point the finger right back where it belongs. Or if it's something that affects financial performance the market will also hold the company responsible and amend its share price accordingly. You can't outsource responsibility.

Re: How and Why?

"Accounting software gets updated as frequently as the taxation system changes, so at minimum once a year."

At a minimum indeed. Because if it's supplying companies trading in multiple countries there may be a whole raft of taxk changes happening at different times of the year.

But this is best done by keeping the executables as stable as possible and pushing the changes to tax rates as data, preferably human readable text data.

Re: Worlds largest advertising company?!?

"Ad agencies are also known as creative agencies"

To themselves and their clients. To the rest of us they're known as pests.

Re: Local admin rights

"Why on earth does an accounting application require local admin rights other than perhaps for installations?"

Because it's Windows and that sort of thing happens there.

Re: Good practice

"sell shit to the victim at the lowest possible price"

Which, given the victim in this case, explains why the commentariat regards this with more than a touch of schadenfreude.

"but then they themselves always were the only idiots to believe anything they say"

No, their clients believe what they (the advertising industry) say.

Re: It us just you

Obviously not all of the +205k staff are British but a good number are.

Some of us have problems associating "good" with members of the pestering industry. That's part of the reason that Ledswinger's post got so many upvotes and fnusnu's got so many downvotes.

Web inventor Sir Tim sizes up handcuffs for his creation – and world has 2 weeks to appeal

"You say ransom, I say purchase."

Fine, but those who purchase something want something they can keep. Big Content tries to sell the same thing over and over again, rather like prostitution.

Re: Sir Tim is 62

"Yes, I'm proposing Communism"

No, you're not.

Re: @AC "easy to copy"

Maybe it would be worth it for a college student who doesn't want to pay $200 for a textbook, but for a $9.99 paperwork, no way.

If the publisher were to sell their textbooks in paperback form they might sell more. Even without copying the $200 textbook is apt to be sold second-hand and third-hand if $200 is overpriced for its market.

Copying unprotected digital data on the other hand requires no investment of time or money. Well, unless you want to KEEP copies of every book you read and every movie you see!

Errm. What about people who simply want to keep copies of every book and movie they've PAID for?

There is a huge difference here, and it is silly to pretend that difference does not exist.

You've given examples of the supply side trying to manipulate the market. Don't be surprised if the demand side demands the right to respond in like manner. If vendors receive legal protection they should also be regulated to prevent them abusing that protection; at present this isn't the case.

Re: Mixed feelings

"But on the other hand I reluctantly accept that this is the only model that intellectual monopolists will ever use to sell their wares, and if we actually want their "nice things" then we are forced to obtain them on their terms."

Trade is a matter of bargaining. If providers want to well to us then they have to deal with our terms. Success happens when a common set of terms can be agreed on by both sides.

The ongoing problem that Big Content has experienced has come from their trying to manipulate markets - segmentation by country etc. They have been very slow to grasp the idea that that doesn't work in the modern world.

Re: I don't see a problem.

"The only negative consequence of this technology is the scenario of someone wanting access to content without, you know, paying for it."

So none of the ensuing plugins will have security consequences?

Ahem...Flash.

"The W3C, unable to reach agreement on how vulnerability disclosure should be handled, responded with something less than that, offering only voluntary guidelines instead a requirement."

Presumably this means that some DRM vendors will be sensible and some will make life difficult. In due course the latter will get their reward - a reputation for being a cess-pit of malware. Sadly, past experience shows that that won't do them as much harm as one might hope.

Behind the scenes of Slovaks' fight to liberate their .sk domain

Re: So many AC trolls

Any thread here contains a number of AC posts and I'm not sure troll applies to them here. On the whole they seem informed and informative.

Re: You seem to have...

"It also happens at other seemingly random times, probably some sort of spam detection."

It happened to me back on the discussion of brickerbot. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was triggered by my mentioning some of the contents of the script. I could only post a very bowdlerised version of my original.

It wasn't helped by the fact that, having entered the captcha the comment was cleared and trying to repost just brought up a fresh captcha.

Cloudflare captchas are obnoxious.

Was this rewritten from a press release by Centralnic?

BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

"Told you what?" the Boss asks, drawn over by both the conversation and the opportunity to avoid doing anything fruitful for the next 1/2 hour.

This sort of implies that at other times the Boss does do something fruitful. Who knew that?

@Alistair

That's how it ought to be done. Hopefully compulsory up to and including CxO level.

There's still the other side to deal with: how to stop marketing sending out emails which look exactly like phishing emails and thus training customers to be phished.

"Never get out of the boat."

That's easy for an admiral to say.

Zero accidents, all of your data – what The Reg learnt at Bosch's autonomous car bash

"people reading the god damned newspaper spread across their steering wheel"

Bus driver doing his paperwork spread over the steering wheel. driving through central London heading for the M1.

Re: Who pays?

Save on insurance? You don't think the insurance companies are going to let you get away with paying less do you?

Boffins start work on data centre to analyse UK infrastructure

Re: No need to spend £8 mil

" the closer the national infrastructure is to London, the higher the priority it gets."

Cardiff and Edinburgh will also be prioritised.

Talk about a hit and run: AA finally comes clean on security breakdown

It might have taken a long time to sort out but it's completely inexcusable not to notify those possibly affected immediately.

Virgin Media biz service goes TITSUP* across London

Option The Third - close a few libraries.

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

Re: Welcome to the UK

I'll see your cess-pits and raise you a pig-farm slurry pit.

There were a series of reports to the RUC that a couple had been killed and buried, the theme being that the bodies were dug up and moved. Nobody really believed it but it couldn't be entirely dismissed. (Have I ever mentioned the golf ball episode?)

Anyway, one of the variations was that the bodies had been dumped in a slurry pit in a pig farm. This had to be pumped out so that it could be examined. Even empty it would be done by the underwater team with dry suits and breathing apparatus.

The pit had been used for dumping carcasses of dead pigs and the pump was quite capable of drawing up and discharging bones. Somebody who was considered able to tell the difference between a pig bone and a human bone but cheaper than a regular pathologist had to spend a couple of days of an Irish winter standing at the outlet of the pump checking what came out. That was me. I suppose I should have been concerned about where the effluent was draining to. I wasn't

The subsequent examination was negative and, I heard, very brief. I didn't see that for myself. I'd already left.

Re: injuries....

"Back in the day when PC cases were made by Gillette."

I once had the good fortune to have a couple of PCs made by a firm who clearly hadn't got that message. The lids wrapped round to form the sides, were hinged at the back and had stays to hold them open. They were just held shut be a couple of catches - press to release and lift. All PCs should be made that way - at least those intended for IT folk and lab users.

Re: Frozen winter shit.

Thanks for the reminder, Daedalus. I don't even have to read it or look for it on Youtube. The key word was "effluvium".

Re: Frozen winter shit.

"There's no I in Team"

If anyone had tried that with me they'd simply have got a list of all the manglement buzzwords that do have an I: quality, innovation, profit, competitive, intelligence....