Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
OK, it's fun to make fun of MPs. But we should be able to do better than that. We should be turning this into a teaching opportunity.
For instance Liam Fox, who is a minister, is reported by the Beeb as saying "And it's a warning to everybody, whether they are in Parliament or elsewhere, that they need to do everything possible to maintain their own cyber-security." El Reg should ask him - or reach out to him if they really must - what part he sees end-to-end encryption playing in this. Because I doubt more than the minutest handful of them realise the role that has to play in securing everyday services that we all use.
"Current Linux distros (Ubuntu from at least 15.04 on) have a "3rd party driver" feature to update the CPU microcode. Both, for AMD and Intel."
Such mechanisms have existed since the days of oops-I-can't-divide. So why are Debian saying it can't be fixed except by motherboard firmware?
Does current firmware shut the door on such mechanisms? That might be done for security reasons - block malware that attempts to rewrite microcode - but if so there needs to be a better way to fix it than depending on motherboard manufacturers getting round to distributing upgrades, always assuming they can be bothered.
"They should of course go to those who were called. Automatic credit on their phone bill. NO LAWYERS involved, please!"
My thoughts exactly. Dial some code. The telecoms company charges the caller number - the real one, not the spoof, as if the recipient was a premium number. The company also adds a commission. The call comes in via a different telecoms company? No problem, just bill them and let them charge the caller, adding their own commission. It would need some policing - it would be unacceptable to let recipients flag anyone who called them - but the first claims against a number could be held until there were sufficient to ensure that it was a problem caller. The only way out for the robocaller would be to fail to pay their bill. That's just a matter for the credit control department of the telecoms company to deal with.
Second law. If you find yourself drafted onto one argue strongly for something which is so blatantly impossible that even the members of a committee can see it's blatantly impossible (admittedly not an easy thing to find) so you never get invited to any more meetings. Or any other committees.
SWMBO's ladies group have a committee meeting every month. Given that the only thing the group as a whole does is have monthly meetings and given that the entire year's meeting programme has to be drawn up and printed in advance I've no idea what they find to talk about in 11 of the meetings. But they do.
" Turns out an HW engineer who had not been properly trained would turn up to apply some minor fix to a running server, and simply press the big yellow"
What sort of DBA would allow anyone, H/W engineer or other, anywhere near a running server without escorting them? Some people just don't have the requisite levels of paranoia.
New server delivered and installed on site. This was back in the days of 1/2" tape drives & Torx screws being new and almost unknown. The tape drive had a transit lock secured by Torx. A couple of days later the vendors engineers (plural - where do you get service like that these days?) rolled up to remove the lock and were a bit miffed to discover that I had a screwdriver set with Torx bits in it.
"My previous MP had surname suffixed by initials @parliament.uk."
Mine had $FirstName.$Surname.mp@parliament.uk so the format isn't fixed.
"Apart from confidentiality, I'd have hoped that parliament required MPs to use @parliament.uk both to reassure people they weren't mailing a spoof address"
With you so far.
"and so that all official communications could be recorded"
Nope. Let's say you have a woman suffering from an abusive husband not getting sufficient help from Social Services or the Police who contacts her MP. It's a privileged communication so should not become a matter of official record. That's why the intelligence services are not supposed to tap MPs' communications; a point which is widely misunderstood.
"You must have enjoyed yesterday's Queen's Speech, which St Theresa used to make it clear she was not going to go ahead with everything she'd promised in her election manifesto."
Remember that the Queen's Speech only covers 2 years of a 5 year Parliament (or so May hopes) so on that basis you wouldn't expect all the manifest to be in it. Whether the Parliament will last for 5 years and how long May will remain PM are matters that remain to be seen.
Remember also that without an overall majority what a government actually achieves is going to be a compromise between the parties which form the consequent government and there's always going to eb something that gets dropped; just ask the Lib-Dems.
And last but not least "Events, dear boy, events".
"t's gonna be going very slowly at the end."
IIRC someone was killed in S Belfast by a stray from N Belfast which must be a comparable distance.
However I did for a while, have some sort of handgun round* on my desk with a nice fibre impression on it; it was said to have been stopped by an ordinary nylon jacket.
*Don't ask. I wasn't a ballistics expert. Someone just passed it to me do a fabric comparison.
"If senior management is being compensated in a way that encourages short term thinking - quarterly results"
This is an area where governments could actually make a difference: ban reporting at less than annual intervals. Yup, I know the arguments. But consider the possibility that the benefits might outweigh the disadvantages.
"my contract has always included language preventing me from working, directly or indirectly, for that customer for a couple years or so"
It sounds like you have a badly written an IR35 caught contract, at least in UK terms.
The contract should be between ClientCo or AgencyCo and YourCo not you. As someone said in a previous comment, start YourCo2 which never had such a contract.
"Did anyone claim a statement of fact? All he said is that they are true statements."
That's the point. They were statements but meaningless because they were incomplete. You have to be prepared to examine statements critically in order to understand what they actually mean - which might not be the same as what they appear to say.
