Posts by Doctor Syntax

ICO fines Morrisons for emailing customers who didn't want to be emailed

Temporary email addresses for firms you don't expect to deal with again is the best answer. Those you do have to deal with more regularly get their own address and if they spam it gets dropped and their spam bounces. Except one business I'm saving for their next AGM....

Re: Sainsbury's did worse

"I set an email filter to forward all Sainbury's emails back to Sainsbury's"

Extra points if you could find the chairman's email address.

A Morrisons spokesperson told The Register: "We sent out an information message to a small percentage of our customers that aimed to provide some helpful information about our service. We did this with the best of intentions and we're disappointed that this was deemed to be 'marketing material'."

The ICO should fine them again for this response; clearly they didn't learn.

A more appropriate response would be "We shouldn't have done this. The employees responsible have decided to seek fresh opportunities elsewhere.".

Note to HR. Don't even look at marketroid candidates with Flybe, Honda and Morrisons on their CV.

You'll soon be buying bulgur wheat salad* from Amazon, after it swallowed Whole Foods

Re: Have you ever or would you eat bulgur wheat?

@Haku

Thanks for the link. Our Simon has a rival.

"You'll soon be buying bulgur wheat salad"

Oh no I won't.

Oops! Facebook outed its antiterror cops whilst they banned admins

"Peak Silicon Valley."

You think it can't get worse?

Fighter pilot shot down laptops with a flick of his copper-plated wrist

Re: I confess...

"Watford ?"

I thought for a moment you were commenting on "middle of nowhere".

Re: Everyone missed the classic one

"synthetic underware"

Sir, the thoroughness of your investigation does you credit.

Re: Survivors

"shorten the jackets and trouser legs of their successful customers. It was often needed."

And cleaning the trousers.

Re: Observe the user

There's a couple at my work who met like that and are now married with kids.

Newish member of staff, thinking he'd discovered a scandal:"Have you noticed how those two always leave together"

"Yes, they're husband and wife."

"You must also try to keep the conversation on track to avoid a potted history of everything thats ever gone wrong with the machine"

Unless the reason for the problem lies in that history.

"Off I trot to the stationary cupboard, select a black ball point pen"

It would have been trickier if the cupboard had been moving.

"At least until he got back to the office, where Dell asked why he hadn't replaced the motherboard.

Len reckons the moral of this story is to listen, really listen, to customers."

And for companies to really listen to their service engineers.

BOFH: Halon is not a rad new vape flavour

"They get abusive if you say no. They ring back if you hang up."

Wasting their time is the one that works. Just ask them to hold the line a moment, put the phone aside and then hang up a few minutes later. I've only had one attempt to call back.

Re: "We're one TWA tick away from an H&S refresher course with a free lunch.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

You're reckoning without the BOFH being the one who gets the lunch. The H&S instructor could end up being lunch metaphorically speaking.

"As brilliant as always!"

I disagree. More brilliant.

Samsung releases 49-inch desktop monitor with 32:9 aspect ratio

Re: Ideal for Management Spreadsheets

Nowhere near wide enough.

Re: Optional

"you lose the ability to snap a windowed application to a single screen, which for me is one of the most useful things about multi-monitor working."

If you can show your applications side-by-side unsnapped doesn't the need to snap go away?

Brit hacker admits he siphoned info from US military satellite network

"why did it need the help of the FBI and DoD to get a conviction?"

Someone has to give evidence that that was the data that was copied and, govt being what it is, every dept. involved would insist on having their own bod there in case the others did it wrong.

Windows Server to get twice-yearly updates, plus stable and fast-moving branches

"venerable unstable which, as the name suggests, might fry your GPU, burn your house down, explode into your face, or hit the fan"

I think Microsoft call these Home and Pro.

Yeah, if you could just stop writing those Y2K compliance reports, that would be great

Re: How many?

Probably at least one a year from each reporting body. Basic rule of civil service procedures the world over: once you start something it just continues until you take positive action to stop it. It obvious thing would have been about June 2000 to do a post-implementation review and stop the reporting apart from any remaining issues.

It's 2017 and someone's probably still using WINS naming. If so, stop

Re: MS love to create "standards."

"There was also UUCP, Xerox XNS, and something from Banyan IIRC. Despite TCP/IP being older and an independent standard (or maybe because of it), in the 1980s it wasn't widely adopted by commercial systems - and MS was just one among many, back then."

AFAICR TCP/IP was introduced after the proliferation of multiple networking technologies. I think that, at least at first it was seen as a means of connecting separate networks - remember it's the internet. So you'd have your Token Ring here and your Banyan Vines (you made me dig that out of my memory!) there and something was needed to interconnect them. Only gradually did Ethernet as the physical medium and TCP/IP as the logical one creep in to replace the others. For a long time it was supposed to be ISO/OSI that would be the long term solution - in the end the term turned out to be so long as to be never.

Even as late as the '90s I was running a Unix server with TCP/IP on the same physical network as another group running DecNET. Eventually we had to install DecNET S/W in the Unix box in order to exchange data with the VAXen. They weren't going to sully their VMS with TCP/IP - after all our Unix box was a temporary system only destined to last another 6 months and had been for several years; all things DEC were to be the strategic solution. I wonder how that worked out.

Shouldn't be running it and are running it are two different things.

Is it really difficult to see a repeat of the WinCry situation coming along Real Soon Now? Followed by Microsoft rushing out a fix, even if it's only along the lines of disable by default.

Don't touch that mail! London uni fears '0-day' used to cram network with ransomware

Re: I'm not shocked!

"Client mattered when it came to integrating other services and maintaining support."

Possibly in more ways than you realise.

One of my clients (that's client as in customer) had a system where files were emailed for processing and I had a specific client configured to feed into the remainder of the processing pipeline. You could have had a similar situation where one of your users was receiving files from a remote telescope or particle physics experiment. Universities are apt to use computing to much more varied ends than a commercial business.

It could also, of course, have been the case that your users didn't trust you. I'm sure anyone on KCL who didn't trust their computer services to store data felt vindicated.

Re: I'm not shocked!

"We could not dictate to them which clients they used (we had fellows who refused to upgrade from pine to alpine and this was 4 or 5 years after the final release of pine....) We also had the ridiculous situation where every system had to have a corresponding MX record because academics liked to run to their own mail servers (which we had 0% control over)"

I wonder who develops some of the clients and servers. It could even have been some of your users.

"I tried to report it to [e-mail]"

These days only reports on social meeja work. You can't expect millennials to use something as last century as email.

" if you struggle to explain these kinds of issues to your grandmother, why expect a 70 year old lecturer on Abyssinian pottery to be any different?"

Usual ageism - apart from the fact that a lecturer would be unlikely to have reached 70 before being retired.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40286280 should give you food for thought: the biggest rise in victims was in the under 21s.

Disney mulls Mickey Mouse magic material to thwart pirates' 3D scans

Re: Solid DRM

"The pirate version without the adulterant will end up being superior to the original."

But they'd better incorporate anti-piracy measures or else they might get pirated themselves.

Re: Workaround

"why do you think all detective stories use carbon dust or talcum powder/magnesium carbonate powder for scanning fingerprints?"

Because they don't know real detection uses aluminium powder.

Uber sued after digging up medical records of woman raped by driver

Asked to comment, a Uber spokesperson said: "No one should have to go through a horrific experience like this, and we're truly sorry that she's had to relive it over the last few weeks."

They then said "That's enough about us? Do you want a comment on the rape rictim?".

Look who's joined the anti-encryption posse: Germany, come on down

"We can't allow there to be areas that are practically outside the law."

What about face-to-face conversations? Or are those already all being monitored? Maybe the Stasi never really went away.

Banks could be stung for €5bn under GDPR, screams latest report on industry readiness

Within the last few days I've had a marketing email from my bank containing nothing of value but riddled with links. It doesn't actually come from their domain. The links are to a subdomain of the bank - but the bank doesn't host that subdomain. In other words it looks exactly like a phishing email.

An email like that doesn't get sent out by a single person. At the very least one would have to write it and one to sign it off. More likely there would be a whole team of them. A whole team who, between them, have no concept of the dangers of phishing and are quite happily training their customers to be phished. And if they don't understand those dangers each of them is a danger to the bank because any of them could be phished, leading to a breach.

The best thing any bank could do to prepare for next May is to get rid of their marketing department.

That minutes-long power glitch? It's going to cost British Airways £80m, IAG investors told

"despite major operational problems, by May 29 it was able to fly the vast majority of its planned schedule"

Of course for all those caught up in it it meant that 100% of their flights failed to run on their planned schedule. It's far easier to put a positive spin on things if you ignore the effects on the victims.

Don't all rush out at once, but there are a million devices ripe to be the next big botnet

Probably safe

Why bother writing code when there are enough devices out there with duff passwords?

RSA SecurID admin console can issue emergency access to decent social engineers

Re: Information

"Boris didn't like being called Biggles."

And Biggles certainly doesn't like being called Boris - just imagine a tortoise with a silly haircut.

British Airways poised to shed 1,000 jobs to Capita

Re: End of empire

"I have no idea if Labour can do any better"

Having witnessed their various attempts since the mid-'60s I have very firm ideas about that. IMV it started to go wrong with Wilson.

You're all too skeptical of super-duper self-driving cars, apparently

Re: Lesser of two evils?

"If the worst automated car is better than the average teen with 2 months' experience, that's a step up. If it learns from mistakes, that's already better than the average human."

Let's think that one through. You choose an "average teen with 2 months' experience" as you yardstick. Why not a 40 year old with over 20 years of driving experience? Presumably because the latter is a much better driver and wouldn't be such an easy target for the automated car to beat (and don't think I didn't spot that weasel "if" at the start of the sentence).

So it rather looks as if you think humans can learn from something, whether it be from mistakes or from simple practice. And yet you say they can't.

Five Eyes nations stare menacingly at tech biz and its encryption

"Present enough power and you can simply ignore it."

History says that in the long run you lose.

Re: That makes perfect sense

"What drugs are these people on that allow them to be so disconnected from reality? I want some."

I.G.N.O.R.A.N.C.E.

Re: "that normally meek geeks will stand up is one that politicians must find terrifying."

And if a politician ACTUALLY ADHERES to that and say, "Fine by me."?

They get challenged to do a Clarkson (no, that's not punching a production assistant).

Re: Making a deal with the Devil

"Breaking the new laws will result in huge fines, and possibly prison for individual company officers. That's the choice that people like Zuckerberg, Schmidt, Cook, etc will personally face."

And eventually US govts will wish for the old days when they had tech businesses resident there.

"They’ve forgotten what it is that motivates voters, and hence politicians."

I think they know very well what motivates their users and also that their users are voters. They also have very good communications with their users. It could turn out to be the politicians who've forgotten something. When it comes to being warned about terrorism, that's a relatively remote threat*. Being warned about your finances being at risk, that's personal.

*I lived in N Ireland for many years in the '60s to the '80s so, yes, I do know a little about that.

Re: This is bad for business.

"Simple. No one's above THE LAW. If the law compels you to break the contract and takes precedence over contract law, guess who wins."

And what if THE LAW (to adopt your caps) says you've got to keep things confidential.

Take, for instance, my daughter's job. She works from home managing clinical trials for a pharma company based some distance away. By using a VPN she can log onto the office system, video-conference etc. as if she was in their office. Now consider what's likely to and what will certainly be exchanged over the link. Patient data is likely and is going to have various regulatory protocols governing it, from basic DPA stuff upwards. And certainly trials results will be involved; those are share price sensitive so they're governed by financial regulation.

TL;DR The law may or not be an ass; legislators are and whenever they stick their noses into whatever they don't understand they'll contradict themselves.

Re: I need educating

"Which has meant nothing since the US compelled Switzerland ... to break their vaunted bank account anonymity."

I thought someone would come up with that. AFAICS that's left the Swiss hopping mad and consequently I'd expect them to be even less willing to countenance anything else that goes against their take on privacy.

Re: This is bad for business.

"How many companies do you suppose are under contract to keep their data encrypted to protect their customers?"

It goes the other way as well. If you have log-in access to any online service take a good look at the T&Cs. You're obliged to keep those confidential. How do you do that if you don't have secure encryption while you use it?

There's a simple rule to apply here. If you want to advocate breaking online security you should be obliged to put all your online credentials - bank, Amazon, Tesco, whatever in the public domain for a year before implementing everything. If, at the end of the year, it still seems like a good idea then go ahead.

Re: I need educating

"if a government with appropriate legal authority shows up and demands access, ProtonMail will have to make a choice"

What's all this about "a" government. ProtonMail are based in Switzerland. I don't think Switzerland are going to take kindly to any old government rolling up. The only legal authority that stands there is Swiss.

Labour says it will vote against DUP's proposed TV Licence reforms

Re: Amazon and Netflix?

"What people keep forgetting is that Horizon (and other science progs) aren't aimed at people who already know the science - but at people who might be interested, if they are suitably engaged."

They used to be aimed at people who knew science but not the bit that was the subject of the programme. They're now aimed at people who would like to know about the current subject but don't mind having their intelligence insulted by the presentation.

Voyager 1 passes another milestone: It's now 138AU from home

"Voyager 1 has just ticked off another milestone"

Which milestone were you thinking of? At the rate it's moving it ticks them off pretty quickly.

Re: Not sure what they used...

"We probably could perform all functions with one of today's boards and still have room for solid state data storage and much more fault detection software."

Or maybe not. You'd have to fit it round all the bloat of modern software & firmware.

I still haven't found what I'm malloc()ing for: U2 tops poll of music today's devs code to

Working in a general office it was worth listening in to the surrounding conversation. That way you could get advance warning of some of the crap ideas heading your way.