Posts by Doctor Syntax

Dead serious: How to haunt people after you've gone... using your smartphone

" SwonSong ceased posting to its own blog ten months ago."

They don't seem to have had any faith in their own product if they couldn't set up a few decades' worth of posts in advance.

Great for delivering a most scathingly ad hominem attack on some deserving public figure (which'll get you into jail normally)?

Why wait?

The immediate thought that occurs is "how will they know you're dead?". Obvious: someone has to tell them. Next thought: "how do they know who you are?". Obvious: you have to tell them.

So set up the app with an entirely fictitious person and then report their death. All the company can do is point to an apparently dead customer. (Point of order - should this be an ex-customer?)

Rackspace goes TITSUP in global outage outrage

"Yesterday dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of local storage guys had their storage go down on them."

And they'd have had control over fixing it. Don't undervalue control.

Shadow Brokers hike prices for stolen NSA exploits, threaten to out ex-Uncle Sam hacker

Re: Just $130,000?

"They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. "

More to the point, why wouldn't the NSA release them to Microsoft? It's time for the rest of the world's governments to start giving US ambassadors serious grief each time their infrastructure or businesses are hit. For a start May could make it clear to Trump that his invite is cancelled and a new one will only be made once that's done.

Talk about cutting-edge technology! Boffins fire world's sharpest laser

So you'd be able to spin a CD on the moon and read it with a pickup on Earth providing the spot size was also constrained.

Ubuntu 'weaponised' to cure NHS of its addiction to Microsoft Windows

Re: Yet another distro?

"A dedicated NHS distro doesn't see a big deal to me."

Quite. AFAICS enterprise deployments of Windows seem to rely on their own build and routinely overwrite the vendor's install with their own. This doesn't seem to be much different.

Re: Yet another distro?

"I mean, there are several distributions which could be up to this task as they stand even some which could be highly tuned (Gentoo, Arch anyone?) surely the better way forward would be to use an existing distribution and add any required packages/features as an additional repository/ppa?"

s/Gentoo, Arch/Ubuntu/ and you seem to have described what's described here.

Re: The city of Munich tried this

"But found it cost too much. They recently announched a move back to Windows."

Nope. Politics. It helps not to have your local politician too chummy with vendors.

Re: Unpatched=Unsafe

That's a big win for Linux given the relative speed and simplicity of applying patches.

Re: Pipe Dream

"Clinical systems developers will simply charge more for developing systems on linux, since all they typically develop for just now is browser or Windows."

For a start those who develop for either are going to have to move on from XP only. That's unsustainable and they shouldn't have been allowed to get away with it.

Secondly, the NHS is a big customer. For many their only customer. Giving the customer a reason to review the market is a really, really bad sales strategy.

Re: Well, might be better than windows. But not much cheaper

"A good paper system"

Ahem...https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/27/watchdog_slaps_nhs_for_failure_to_tackle_correspondence_backlog/

Re: Well, might be better than windows. But not much cheaper

"Not much point pulling Windows out and replacing open SMB shares with open NFS shares, is there?"

No, but then a migration is a good time to change to a better approach.

"In fact there are very few of the computers in an NHS trust that dont use software unavailable on linux , if you can unpack that string of negatives."

I think I've unpacked it correctly.

But let's make a slight change:

there are very few of the computers in an NHS trust that don't use functionality unavailable on Linux

As an example, if we discount Wine IE isn't available under Linux but other browsers are. It may well be that there are web-based applications that are tied to ancient versions of IE. That's something that has to be faced anyway, otherwise the NHS would be stuck on XP forever. When these are replaced there should be an insistence on cross-platform support so any browser can be used. The same insistence could be applied to any new web-based applications: if they're not sufficiently generic to run across multiple browsers the bid goes in the bin.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"For the NHS cost is the biggest concern and will become increasingly so."

The two are linked. Having overall control prevents lock-in to expensive proprietary solutions.

Re: Cost is the smaller concern

"it will become difficult to hire a different company to maintain it."

Why on earth should that happen? The source is available. The upstream, Debian>Ubuntu is already maintained. If NHSbuntu makes any more widely applicable code contributions - such as smartcard ID - they can also be passed back upstream and integrated with it. So what you'd be looking at would be a collection of userland add-ons which could be maintained separately. You (a) wouldn't need a single company to do that and (b) iit could be competitively tendered. This is a different world to what you're used to in Microsoft.

UK.gov leaves data dashboard users' details on publicly accessible site

"The Cabinet Office did not respond immediately to a request for comment."

Probably still trying to find someone who understands the question.

'Janus' resurfaces: I was behind the original Petya. I want to help with NotPetya

"Regular ransomware authors must be terribly frustrated that NotPetya did damage to their reputation of 'pay and you'll get your files back'," joked Martijn Grooten

I'm not sure that was a joke. For ransomware to work victims have got to trust they'll get their files back. So, odd though it might seem, victims need to rely on crooks being honest. A few episodes like this and the entire ransomware business model is destroyed. "Frustrated" probably understates it by an order of magnitude.

However, the assumption that it wasn't intended to be ransomware without further evidence violates the principle of never attributing to maliciousness that which can be attributed to stupidity and underestimates criminals' aptitude for screwing up.

Robots will enable a sustainable grey economy

Re: How can a car-based future be long term sustainable?

"That's a problem decent public transport can solve cheaper and better."

In this context decent public transport borders on being an oxymoron. Stop crowding all the work into cities which need 1,000 square miles or more to house their workers. Don't take people to work, return work to where people live. It means reversing a life-time's planning policy but that's because it's taking more than a lifetime for planners to work out their policies were wrong.

Re: Hurrah we can work forever

"Don't blame those of my generation if said government has frittered away that money."

It wasn't so much frittering away the money as spending as intended. You were paying into a Ponzi scheme just as the rest of us have done. None of the money we paid in is left over because it was spent on pensions, healthcare and other benefits as we paid it in. It's been that way for a long time.

It's not a good scheme and not easy to break out of. Grey vote aside, a generation that decides to break with it will simply grow old to find itself unsupported.

What should have happened was to start off, back when Lloyd George set up old age pensions, with a fraction of the money paid in being invested. With time that investment could have grown so that gradually the income from it could have replaced contributions. Of course that would have meant public money favouring some investment targets at the expense of others, opportunities for corruption, putting undue power in Civil Servant's hands etc. So it didn't happen and here we are.

Re: Dumb yanks

"Increasingly, as autonomous(ish) vehicles can take public transport passengers the last mile or so, it will be private transport that fades away."

How does that work? Is public transport going to invest in fleets of autonomous vehicles that will be used for an hour or so at each end of the working day? Private owners do so because they have to. Public owners won't because it's SEP.

Re: Dumb yanks

"Many oldies retire to the country, or to the seaside - only to discover they're nowhere near the health/care support systems they increasingly need."

You can stay in the same place and discover the health care systems become nowhere near all of their own accord.

Re: Dumb yanks

But X is a complete pain, if you want to get anywhere other thanY. You have to go to Y and back out again to get to Z"

Generic statement of public transport at its best. Worse is possible.

Re: Dumb yanks

"Public transport is conceptually flawed, based on the weird assumption that everybody has the same requirements."

Which usually comes to the conclusion that everyone wants to commute into the centre of $city in the morning and back out at night.

This starts to fail when you have clusters of towns & cities such as Manchester, Oldham, Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds/, Wakefield and Sheffield (plus a few others on t'wrong side of t'Pennines) or the equivalent in the Midlands & the North East. You then find that the only public transport offered is $home to $(centre you don't want to go to) to $(centre nearer where you want to go to) to $(where you want to go to) and it takes 2 hours each way with one connection involving a 40 minute wait and another just 40 seconds. It doesn't help to move house because different members of the household commute in different directions.

"By the mid 2020s you’ll be able to buy autonomous vehicles from nearly every major manufacturer at a variety of price points."

But will we bale able to avoid them? I'm assuming we won't be able to completely rely on them avoiding us.

Re: Dumb yanks

"That said, public transport is tricky anywhere the street plan is basically still based on the medieval roads that Farmer Giles used to get his cows to the river a thousand years ago."

I think you've misstated the medieval history of Bristol.

Re: Hurrah we can work forever

"Let 'em all retire at 60, and then expect the rest of us to pay for them and their health care for the next quarter century?"

OTOH we keep getting told that AI and robotics are going to take everyone's jobs and it's difficult to see how anyone will be able to work at any age.

Somewhere between the extremes there should be a compromise.

Re: Hurrah we can work forever

"Hey I know, maybe we could have some residential work facilities for those people who didn't come from a fancy management job, I'm sure everyone would feel so fulfilled with that."

Careful now. More sarcasm that might be misunderstood.

"Seriously, the autonomous car could reverse the decline of the country pub."

You think you couldn't still be done for DIC even if the car was driving itself? You underestimate your political masters.

Re: Dumb yanks

"For those not in a big city, how often do they drive?"

Let's see.

Mondays SWMBO to gym. We each pick up one of the grandkids from school.

Tuesdays SWMBO to her patchwork class (used to be me who drove her before some equipment changes were made & a smaller car was enough). Then SWMBO to art class.

Wednesdays SWMBO to gym then one of other of us take grandkids to tennis.

Thursdays Me take SWMBO to charity shop, collect her later then go for meal, one week in 3 go to local auction viewing.

Fridays SWMBO to gym, then often both of us out to where-ever (it's often the only weekday with nothing fixed for the afternoon).

Shopping? Oh, mostly me, two or three times a week.

The thing is, we both grew up in a time when private vehicles were rare. When they became generally accessible it was a change which had probably only been equalled once in human history and that was the introduction of the bicycle. It represented a huge expansion of individual freedom to travel at will. The introduction of railways probably came somewhere close but even then there was a constraints of distance from station, routes and timetables.

I suspect the entrenched hostility of TPTB to the private car is an expression of their instinctive opposition to any form of personal freedom - much the same as their current opposition to privacy of communication.

UK regulator probes PwC over BT's Italian accountancy scandal

Auditors supposed to catch frauds? Who knew that?

How to avoid getting hoodwinked by a DevOps hustler

Re: If they’re a 'DevOps Expert', they probably aren’t

"a whole bunch of cobblers"

A group of superannuated shoe repairers.

“A strong background in not only the technical and tooling side of DevOps, but also in driving enterprise-wide people and process changes.”

Translation: "At least twice as long in $LatestFad ad $LatestFad has existed"

"Any organization that’s successfully changed is tripping over itself to tell others how awesome it went."

Translation: "Any organisation that's persistently chased rainbows to no good effect is ever going to admit to itself let alone anyone else that it's gone nowhere and will take any chance to boast how great it is".

French general accused of nicking fast jet for weekend trips to the Sun

"History does not record just exactly how pissed off the lion was about this..."

Maybe someone should have looked in the bottom of the sidecar to find out.

The better trick would have been to have the lion ride pillion...

London suffers from 'sub-standard' connectivity - report

Cram more and more people into an urban area and find the infrastructure isn't catching up. It hasn't for centuries. It never does.

Murdoch's £11.7bn Sky takeover referred to competition regulator

I can't tell you how disappointed I am to hear this. Because I'm not.

"You won't see that on the front page of The S*n though."

Which - the bosom or the consolation.

Not the one with a copy of the Sun in the pocket.

Re: NowTV

@ djstardust

Next chat simply ask "What's the address of your registered office? I need it in order to address my Small Claims Court summons."

Culture secretary Karen Bradley

Shouldn't her title be Secretary of Fun in elReg speak?

Don't panic, but Linux's Systemd can be pwned via an evil DNS query

Re: "pid 1 does DNS"

"its totally optional."

Probably seen as a bug which will be fixed in due course.

"time for you to do some much needed research into systemd"

Maybe it's time for you to realise that many of us have been using Unix and Unix-like systems for decades without systemd. Those systems have done sterling work for us and for those who've paid us over those years. We have not experienced any problems that systemd would have been needed to solve. We therefore see no more need to install systemd to our systems than, say, a mechanical apple-picker (unless, of course we were to work in the cider* industry in which case the apple-picker might well be of use).

In short systemd is irrelevant to us. If the word irrelevant is unfamiliar to you look it up in a dictionary. Systemd does nothing useful for us that its predecessor didn't do. And, by long experience, we know better than to install something more complex than it needs to be.

We do not argue from ignorance. We argue from experience.

*Mmmm- cider ->

Re: Only 14 responses (at time of writing)

"It may seem to come from a colleague with their email address"

Be thankful they're starting to think about things and provide some gentle guidance.

Re: Hang on, all y'all ...

"he'll wipe you across the floor technically"

Who's this "he" and who are the "you"?

Re: Hang on, all y'all ...

"nice one, you just proved you no nothing about systemd"

By failing to quote what you replied to you've just shown you know very little about responding on forums.

Re: At some point in the article

"https://devuan.org/"

Debian LTS.

Re: If THIS isn't a reason to hate systemd...

@ Missing Semicolon

Whilst I agree with the sentiment the article makes it clear that use of the systemd resolver isn't compulsory. Yet. At least not if you use Debian.

O Rly? O'Reilly exits direct book sales

Re: As long as they're still publishing dead tree books ...

"I think your living in the wrong century... beside, I was not pointing to historical material, but rather modern publications that already exist in or were created in digital formats."

Date of publication 2015.

Don't get me wrong here, if the translated and edited publication had been in digital format it would actually have been better. It's easier to cut and paste or otherwise process stuff when it's in digital format. Some of the earlier published volumes were scanned and I have them in that format.

The point is that if you require a specific item that's only in printed format then that's what you use. There's no value at all in taking the approach of phablet (or, come to that, print) only.

NHS WannaCrypt postmortem: Outbreak blamed on lack of accountability

Re: Outbreak blamed on ....Windows.

"One of our Linux servers went flat on it's arse the other day.....because Marketing didn't bother to patch Wordpress (they insist on using it, so they deal with it)"

Marketing insist on a particular application. It's had a reputation of having security holes for some time. So IT didn't insist on ensuring it was patched. What's the IT department's role there if it isn't to maintain the IT facilities that users need for their work*?

*Given that it's marketing "work" is used in its loosed possible sense. OTOH, because it's Marketing they probably need a closer eye kept on them than most.

"Just needs a little planning and agreement"

The latter is the more problematic It's just IT getting in the way again right up until it's IT failing to protect us against this.

Re: Best thing that's happened in years

"it's very hard to convince someone they need to expend funds preventing something they haven't seen happen"

Unless it were established as a general principle in law that those withholding the funds would be held personally responsible when it happens.

Hint for PowerPointers making a pitch for such funds. Put a picture of a hook in the corner of the template. During the pitch make the occasional reference along the lines of "..and there's the hook". Inevitably someone will ask "What's the hook". "That's the hook your balls will be hanging from if $(predicted disaster} happens".

Re: Chartered Institute For IT?

"And registered professionals means ones who are our members."

Quite. The whole tenor of it - e.g. "assure hospital Boards that computer systems were fit for purpose" - suggests a dedication to the paperwork than the reality. Wouldn't "ensure that computer systems were fit for purpose" have been a better statement?