Posts by Doctor Syntax

El Reg drills into chatbot hype: The AIs that want to be your web butlers

Re: Everything is Advertising

"want one without ads>?"

No. And not with ads either.

Re: On a tangential topic...

Put them in government, it seems. on help desks.

You know how online shops love to keep tabs on you? Now it's coming to the offline world

Re: Already a rudimentary thing

"I wonder what would happen if very large numbers of their customers sent them Data Access requests for all the information being held on them?"

They'd pocket the tenner & ensure they could get the data out to you for less. Probably outsourced to an Indian company who therefore also has the data, no scruples and no inconvenient DPA.

Re: Already a rudimentary thing

"much more time on their hands."

Too much time. Way too much.

I know it seems a way out idea but have they ever thought of offering good customer service, competitive prices, well stocked stores and good quality stock kept in good condition e.g. premix concrete hasn't gone hard in the bags? It might get better results than creeping out customers by spying on them.

Ransomware scum infect cancer non-profit

They don't say what, if any, attempts were made to recover the system without paying the ransom. It's always going to be worthwhile booting a recovery disk such as TRD ( http://trinityhome.org ) and seeing if a tool such as photorec can find unencrypted copies.

Kill it with fire: US-CERT urges admins to firewall off Windows SMB

Re: Samba can disable SMB1 as well

" but the loyalty that XP still seems to have (especially seen as though XP was a pain in the arse) baffles me."

Time to do some hard thinking.

Imagine you have some extremely expensive piece of kit, say a million or so of your favoured currency units. When bought it had a projected life of 20 years. A replacement would cost at least 50% more than the original, isn't in your budget and not likely to be within the next few years.

This very expensive item is working hard. You can't afford not to have it. But it's controlled by software written for XP. It's proprietary code and you don't have source. The company that wrote it is long gone. There's a regulatory requirement that the entire installation have a specific certification which the original installation has.

Do you

(a) kill the PC because it's running XP, scrap the kit which is no longer able to work because you can't run the S/W, close down the service you were providing with it and sit on you backside doing nothing for several years until you can afford to replace it?

(b) reverse engineer the S/W kill the PC, get the program rewritten for a different OS and in the meantime close down the service you were providing and sit on your backside soing nothing whilst the program is rewritten and recertified at considerable expense over the course of a year or so?

(c) protect the PC from the net and carry on?

Are you still baffled?

Why Theresa May’s hard Brexit might be softer than you think

Re: 2 years?

"look to Tory austerity, the foolish deregulation of banking"

Would that be "foolish deregulation of banking" have anything to do with Brown's having the BoE set interest rates based on a metric which ignored house-price inflation and a huge appetite for personal debt in response to the consequent low interest rates. After that bubble burst there was little alternative to austerity - we're still paying for that excess.

Re: 2 years?

"Scotland is not England and was only part of Great Britain from maybe 1707"

Shame to spoil your post with an inaccuracy. It was always part of the island of Great Britain (unless you go a good way back into geological time). It wasn't part of the United Kingdom until the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. In fact the UK was his idea. That's right, the UK was a Scottish invention.

Re: Wait!

"No, that started in 1992 when Major signed us up to Maastricht without a vote, and it became less slow when the single currency was introduced."

I agree that there should have been referenda EU-wide to ratify the treaties - with supermajorities required, unlike this advisory referendum that we suddenly seem to have found wasn't advisory after all.

You may not have noticed but we were never part of the single currency.

But deciding, on the flimsiest of political whims, to take this particular unilateral action is stupidity from the consequences of which I doubt the country will recover in my life-time - and I've no intention of going just yet.

Re: I am dreading it

Actually, having read the previous post again maybe the argument was that leaving the EU was a necessary precursor for resiling from both the ECHRs, Convention and Court. So it would, but that might be a more difficult step for which she might hope as there are other agreements which tie us into that, thankfully.

Re: 2 years?

But I must also be fair and accept that many Leave voters felt they had little to lose

Like the song says, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone".

Re: I am dreading it

Having read the original post I think the argument must have been that leaving the EU is the prerequisite for leaving both ECHRs, Convention and Court. I think that is the basis on which she's acting & I found difficulty believing she was a remainer because of that. However I think she'll find it's not that easy because the Good Friday agreement requires we stick with that and also her Brexit minister doesn't seem to be in tune with her Home Sec ambitions.

"The only positive I've seen is that she's keen not to rip up the Common Travel Area which would have impacted Ireland very badly."

It's likely that that's the reason she's not keen to rip it up - or at least realises she can't.

Re: North isn't as smart as he thinks he is

" If this is to be done it must be bloody, short, irreversible."

Like decapitation. I despair of what passes for thinking amongst leavers.

Re: The fly in the ointment?

"we're either going to have to have a United Ireland (at last!) or a war"

The two are not mutually exclusive. Unless the mood has changed since I lived in NI a United Ireland would simply be the prerequisite for a war of secession.

Re: 2 years?

"if the UK is so desperately to leave, why doesn't it hurry up and leave?"

I suspect that the reason for this - and Farage's attitude to Art 50 - is that nobody really expected the vote to go as it did so nobody had given it any real thought (as opposed to an impressive sounding manifesto) and thus didn't have a clue what to do next or how to get out of what they'd brought down on themselves. Even after the vote I got the impression that they wanted - and expected - Cameron to pick up the pieces & do the hard work for them.

Now they have to work out what to do and are, I suspect, still clueless about how it can possibly be made to work. Not all of the, of course. Some are still expecting magic to happen and complaining bitterly when someone who should know what they're talking about, say an experienced diplomat, tries to tell them it isn't going to happen. Personally, I think each of that crowd should be given a minor govt job, assigned a small area of economic activity, preferably one close to their constituency's interests, and told to develop Brexit policy for it.

Re: Article 50 puts a two year limit after the notification

"My betting is that it will all be done and dusted in 6 months."

And it's just that sort of wishful thinking that got us here.

Re: Defaulting to WTO?

"So we have to work out how to split them. And those quotas were set in 2004 when the EU only had 15 member states so nobody knows what those quotas actually are."

If the WTO is managing to continue working with with quotas when they don't know what they are continuing to work with different but equally undefined quotas might not be a problem in practical terms.

Re: I am dreading it

"And what does it have to do with the European Court of Human Rights?"

Nothing. Maybe you're thinking of the ECJ.

So now any foreign corporations who have set up their EU base in the UK known to start their relocation planning.

AI and robots? Will someone think of the jobs, says HPE CEO Whitman

"So what DOES HP make these days?"

Press statements.

"The company is now almost unrecognisable to the one she inherited, with the PC and print businesses spun out, Enterprise Services spun out in a deal with another caring corp CSC, and the Software division spun out to Micro Focus."

Given that she now has much less to manage, surely she should be taking much less pay.

Microsoft Germany says Windows 7 already unfit for business users

" I am thinking specifically of the way Access can move fields from large records into separate tables. This means, for example, that city and county names can be defined just once and used consistently."

I'd have thought that any self-respecting data analyst would have done that before creating the tables. It's called normalisation, been around for about 45 years.

"I guess you did not use MS Access. Probably only serious data analysts really need it, but there is nothing like it in Linux."

There are quite a few relational databases available for Linux. Are you saying Access is nothing like a relational database?

Re: Win7 not fit for business?

"More to the point what sort of crazy-ass IT director do you have?"

One that matches IT's provision to business requirements.

Re: Enough Whining.

"I'm not happy at using it at home because of it's nosiness but that clearly hasn't bothered my employers."

Maybe they're not big enough to have in-house legals.

"encourage businesses to keep using PCs, a challenge given five years of sinking sales."

Keeping using and keeping buying are two different things.

Ransomware brutes smacked 1 in 3 NHS trusts last year

Re: HR Issue

"The majority of NHS staff are not IT literate."

Unfortunately this is no longer a sustainable approach.

The previous comment mentioned that all staff will be be aware that they shouldn't leave leaking clinical wast lying about. That doesn't require them to have microbiological knowledge, it just requires them to know what are the appropriate procedures for handling it. The same applies to IT procedures.

"Imperial College Healthcare in London – suffering 19 attacks in just 12 months."

I always liked the saying that experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other. If "suffering" means successful attacks it looks as if there are some who won't even learn by experience.

CBI: Brexit Britain needs a 'sensible and flexible' immigration programme

Re: It will be horrific

"you're going to have to dig your own potatoes."

There'll be enough unemployed natives looking for seasonal work.

Dodgy Dutch developer built backdoors into thousands of sites

"Id usually charge in the region of £1000-£2000 for this which for a proper business is peanuts."

Nice rant but how would a customer know you're trustworthy and not a cowboy?

Devs reverse-engineer 16,000 Android apps, find secrets and keys to AWS accounts

Re: over 304???

"So that'll be 305 then?"

Or even 306. Who knows?

Nadella calls for AI sector to move beyond 'worshipping' a handful of companies

"how can we democratise this access, versus worshipping the four, five, six companies that have a lot of AI"

Translation: "How can we get a monopoly on it"

Sysadmin chatbots: We have the technology

Re: Looks to me just like playing Zork...

"It will be an AI when I could ask "why MySQL is slow?" and it will give a meaningful answer..."

It will be AI when it can work out whether you meant "MySQL" or "my SQL".

Re: BOFH

"I can't wait to see Simon's take on this"

Whatever it might be I doubt the AI would survive until pub o'clock.

Father of Android II: A Hardware Comeback

Re: The USP...

"How about a phone ecosystem that doesn't involve Google or Apple?"

Or Microsoft. In short, any phone ecosystem that doesn't take the piss.

Re: connector

"but any photo I take on my phone is already on my Mac by the time I get home. In my DropBox"

No, it's on somebody else's computer (DropBox's). It isn't on your Mac until you transfer it there - which you could do from your phone when you got home.

Tech moguls dominate Oxfam's rich people Hateful 8

Re: Intentions over words

"If they did reduce their salaries to that of the common man/woman, there would be no one at work in their swanky offices in Oxford."

Then move out of Oxford.

BT installs phone 'spam filter', says it'll strain out mass cold-callers

Re: Numbers that put out a lot of calls?

"I don't see how stopping spam in phone calls is all that much easier than stopping it in email, and we all see evidence in our inboxes that email spam is still very much a thing."

The solution in both cases would be to revise the protocols so that the alleged source (From: line in email headers) can be verified by the system before the connection is accepted.

Re: But...

"Can OFCOM make this mandatiory for all providers at no charge?"

Maybe they will. After all, it's not their money providing it.

Re: It must be becoming a problem for genuine companies.

"So it would be nearly impossible for a genuine company with an Indian call centre to contact me by phone."

What? Not even the agents with a heavy Indian accent and called Kevin?

Re: The same thing happens with IP address allocations

Any attempts to ask to talk to the technical support over the phone proved futile as the call centre operators will direct us to the e-mail address.

"Please provide your company's registered address so our lawyers can write to you."

Re: Interesting development

"the gas had been disconnected long ago, but the meter was still there"

Did I ever post the one about the time my Dad helped a friend with some renovations? In the course of that they moved the meter but reconnected it the wrong way round. Gas meters will run backwards. After they discovered it there was a slight panic. The friend's family used as much gas as possible to try to get the meter at least back to the previous reading and a little beyond. They succeeded but the meter reader commented on how little gas they'd used.

Re: Interesting development

"the water board replaced the main outside and the lads doing the job spotted that there was one more connection to it than their plans admitted to."

We had problems on our electricity a few years ago. When the crew turned up to investigate the dodgy connection they found it wasn't connected to the supply at the bottom of a different pole than was shown on the plans. Both problems solved by replacing the corroded joint with a new one where it was shown on the plans.

Then the gas dug a hole just down the road to disconnect a pipe which they'd discovered (I'm not sure how) ran under someone's conservatory. They then discovered that (a) there were two lots of gas pipes just under the road surface where they only expected one, (b) one of them was flooded with water, (c) the pipes were steel & the working pipe had to be replaced and (d) the pipe running under the conservatory which they were about to disconnect wasn't a branch, it was actually the feed into the mains under our road.

A year or so later whilst I was working in the garden someone came wandering up the road asking questions about the gas supply. His company had taken over the maintenance but didn't have current drawings. Fortunately he probably know more about the system as he used to work on the system years ago.

Re: A Typical Scam Call I Get

"Amongst my canned Spam call answers."

Almost anything: "Sorry, it's company policy to not discuss that over the phone."

Re: 1572

"Say, £1 per spam call, collected by BT/phoneco as in normal billing and going to Good Causes (in the manner of a Lottery)."

Or credited to the callee's account as a fee for handling the call. But not a flat rate but, say, a pound per minute so there's more to be gained by keeping them on the line.

Re: How much to review your spam call messages?

"Well that's not going to work when an overseas call centre uses a fake number."

Requiring Indian TelCo calls to be whitelisted would be an excellent start. Or even announcing that they'll be doing that in a few months might prompt some of them to get their houses in order.

"Of course if the caller withholds their number you can use BT's Anonymous Call Rejection service that won't let numberless call through."

It would also block any calls from organisations without DDI - our GP for starters.

Re: 100% success record

"It's worth a shot - honestly, try it."

OTOH £10 on a PAYG SIM lasts a long time if you have a fixed line.

Re: Free as part of Line Rental? Thought not.

"This sounds like complaining about BT doing nothing about the problem, and now complaining that it is doing something about it."

It does indeed. However a little voice in my head keeps saying "It's free now but for how long?".

Calls for UK.gov's tax digitisation plans to be put on the back burner

Re: KANBAN?

"Tax-payers do not fit that mould at all well IMO."

I think HMRC's view is that your opinion doesn't count, only theirs. It explains a lot, of course.