Posts by Doctor Syntax

Brother-and-sister duo arrested over hacking campaign targeting Italy's bigwigs

Re: Excuse me?

"They also understand how the law works."

That comes in handy when they're trying to circumvent it.

Re: Excuse me?

"Don't they understand how computers work?"

I'm sure they understand how to make copies before they pass them over.

Oi, Mint 18.1! KEEP UP! Ubuntu LTS love breeds a laggard

Re: Why the negative title?

"I'd opt for stability over cutting edge, especially for those new to Mint or Linux in general."

I'd opt for it in pretty well any production circumstances.

The top doc, the FBI, the Geek Squad informant – and the child porn pic that technically wasn't

Re: Lock them all up

Arnaud Amalric seems to agree with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_B%C3%A9ziers

Re: Sometimes I dislike law

Actual child pornography was allegedly found in his home

After an alert by someone who appears to have been paid a fee for finding a not actually pornographic image in unallocated space. Don't you get even a little suspicious about the whole business?

Paying techs to perform unsupervised searches which they can't legally perform themselves is getting onto a slippery slope. Once on there how far have they continued to slip? This is the whole trouble with this casual approach to the legal niceties surrounding collecting evidence, whether it be this approach or mass-surveillance; you get to a point where you can't be trusted to uphold the law. The saying about justice not only needs to be done, it needs to be seen to be done cuts both ways.

Re: Re. slack space

"The kind of policeman we need, in fact."

I knew a good many like that.

Re: "To be clear, our agents unintentionally find child pornography"

"I'd have a guess from the details given that in this case the doctor had a problem with his computer and realising that it would have to go in for repairs deleted his kiddy porn stash, probably by dragging it to the trash and emptying the trash bin."

Given that the problem seems to have been that it wouldn't start that seems an unlikely scenario.

Re: Re. slack space

"Personally I think this is exactly why we need random searches in the first place."

And you'd be happy to be randomly searched by someone with no authority to do so but who's being paid $500 per "find"?

Many years ago I met an acquaintance, the local police station sergeant, in the supermarket. He'd become suspicious of the store detective and was keeping her under observation. I heard later that he'd caught her planting goods in a customer's shopping bag.

Re: My 2p worth

"BTW, as per an earlier post, I have found disturbing images on my PC after a virus attack in 2009, 1/2 one of my HDDs was full of what I would call "Nasty" porn, when I managed to regain control."

So if you'd taken your PC in for repair you'd have been in exactly the same position as this doctor is allegedly in. But you're confident that while you were an innocent victim he was guilty so that's OK.

"Caught an animal, good job,"

Did he? You know that for sure? You were standing over his shoulder watching? Or did he "find" something that would score him $500?

Re: Chain of custody

Given that the FBI are paying $500 a time for techs to find evidence I'd be very suspicious of any evidence turned up by this route.

Whatever the outcome of this case it should be a sobering thought for anyone sending this lot a PC for repair. What do you have on there? On a private PC stuff for that would be valuable for identity fraud. If it's a business PC, probably some commercially valuable stuff or client-related data.

One of the first professional principles for a tech to adopt should be that the data on a device is not your business.

IBM: Hm, medical record security... security... Got it – we need blockchains

What improvement would this provide over PGP? Other than selling more IBM boxes, of course.

FBI takes gag out of Cloudflare's mouth after three-year legal battle

Re: Frightening

"Truth, Justice and the American Way"

Shouldn't that be "or"?

Maps and alarm clocks best thing about mobes, say normies

Re: Maps and alarm clocks best thing about mobes, say normies

"Nowadays it's pot-luck if it notifies you at the right time after daylight savings time changes."

Or if the battery lasts that long.

"To the point that there are devices that are sold that are exactly like smartphones, minus the ability to make phone calls."

One of those & an ancient Nokia & you're good to go.

Now for a really cool micro-drum solo: Boffins chill gizmo below quantum limit

So light (laser) isn't as effective as microwaves. Maybe to get to absolute zero they need to get down to 0Hz which brings us the problem of achieving that because of quantum fluctuations in the current.

Can anyone spell asymptotic?

Microsoft sued by staff traumatized by child sex abuse vids stashed on OneDrive accounts

Re: @palpy: Yup. Quite bullshitty.

"Some people who had their kids bath pictures processed at the local drugstore were arrested and prosecuted."

I can remember one instance of this - I'm not sure it went as far as arrest and prosecution. The person concerned was a well-known and respected newsreader and the whole thing backfired. The photo-processor got some bad publicity out of it.

Personally I can't really see the point of taking pictures of your kids in the bath unless you're planning to embarrass them when they get older but some people seem to do it.

New Windows 10 privacy controls: Just a little snooping – or the max

Re: Rule number 0

to get to know the operating system in case I get any "how do I do this in W10?" questions from family and friends.

I think for many of us the standard answer to that is "Sorry, can't help you there".

Re: Relevant ads?

No such thing.

Re: What about automatic updates, automatic drivers updates ?

"So more and more PCs with Windows 10 Home will go BSOD thanks to Microsoft"

In future they'll go GSOD. Green is good. Or did I mishear?

"And 'clearing' the data probably means hiding and definitely not deleting the data."

It makes no difference either way. Even if they are deleting it only the most brainwashed will think they are. In the future this has to be Microsoft's biggest problem: once you lose people's trust it's very, very difficult to get back.

Re: bah

"I'm sure Microsoft does indeed work hard to protect their users from malware and hackers, but who protect us against Microsoft?"

Or

"With friends like these, who needs enemies"

Re: Terry Myerson is the Endpoint Antichrist

"He does seem exceptionally full of it."

But is he exceptional inside Microsoft or just normal?

Re: Rule number 0

"Hows that work in the real world though? Does this not mean you have to reboot into Linux everytime you want to check email"

No. It means you boot into Linux or BSD in the first place.

If you need something that's Windows only and doesn't run under Wine you either reboot into a Windows partition or, preferably, Windows on a VM. And you'd be surprised to find out for how many people that evaluates to never.

Re: It's getting a bit warm in this water

"I'm sure it's buried somewhere in the 45 page privacy policy."

The trick of the privacy policy is that there's nothing buried in it. It goes to all that length to avoid saying how they'll limit themselves. They say they'll keep details of accounts, transactions etc. That sounds sensible - of course they need details of any accounts and transactions they have with you. But if you understand what you're reading you'll realise that they don't limit themselves to that, they don't limit themselves at all.

Re: Or... no snooping at all

"it may be worth blocking Win10 from talking to its masters but ... in both VM and "naked" version: you still need it to patch"

Why?

You don't need to protect against the big bad internet it doesn't see.

If it's working as you need it to work you don't need to change it (especially if, as in some cases, the patch makes it stop working as you want).

If it's not working as you want you should have installed something else that did in the first place.

"Trust must be earned, not dispensed from a mealymouthed blog post."

Or

"If you want to get there I wouldn't start from here."

GCHQ feeds first crop of infosec startups to Cyber Accelerator

Crypto accelerator

I imagine them being whirled round faster and faster and then flung into something to see if anything useful breaks off.

EU wants power to fine behavioural data bad boys and the ad men aren't happy

Re: But...

"they have the cosy feeling the whole internet is tailored for them, the search results and ads skewed in the favour of their hobbies and interests."

But do they? Or do they think it's a bit weird having ads for whatever one-off purchase they just made repeatedly stuck in front of them?

Black horse blacks out: Lloyds Bank website goes down

Re: TSB and Halfix too

"Although TSB was spun out as a separate entity, it still shares a lot of the same systems."

And probably still keeps some of the same attitudes to customers.

US Navy runs into snags with aircraft carrier's electric plane-slingshot

Re: We all need less stress...

"Once these are all available EMALS should generate lower stresses than current steam catapults."

But best to make sure they get the plane up to take-off speed.

EMALS could not "readily" be electrically isolated for maintenance

Have you tried tur...Oh, you can't?

How to secure MongoDB – because it isn't by default and thousands of DBs are being hacked

Re: Commitstrip

"Obligatory commitstrip."

I'd upvote if it was comedy rather than tragedy.

Crumbs. Exceedingly good cakes, meat dressing price hike in wake of the Brexit

Re: stir and stoke

"England may or may not do alright"

Do you have similar predictions for Wales, Scotland & N. Ireland? - although we might be able to leave Scotland out of it after Indyref 2.

"Same applies to Walkers Crisps. ... Surely they don't import spuds!"

No, but they and the farmers producing the spuds buy the energy to fertilise, harvest and transport the spuds, fry them, make the packaging and distribute them at dollar denominated prices. They're realistic costs although there might be an excuse to increase margins there, which will probably be taken up in the longer run with wage rises when the employees get hit with all the other price rises consequent on more expensive imports.

Re: Clickbait

"The chances that the UK Government will roll back 30 years worth of policies promoting London and the South East as the be all and end all of world are rather remote I feel."

I think you're confusing two issues. Increasing concentration of employment in large cities is unsustainable - far too much time and energy is wasted on commuting ever-increasing distances.

On the other hand "the city", be it in one place or many, accounts for a large proportion of the national income and we'll be very much worse off without it. Especially if May wants to use some of that income as state aid to keep motor manufacturing from migrating to a bigger home market.

Re: Oh dear

"I live in a country who got fed up with the ten-yearly devaluation and joined the Euro hoping for a less easy and more intelligent solution to dealing with the reality."

I suspect one reason we kept out of the Euro was the realisation that it seemed impossible to set an economic policy that worked out right for all parts of the UK let alone a whole continent.

Brown thought he had a winner to end boom and bust: set interest rates at a level depending on inflation excluding housing inflation and at a time when a lot of manufacturing was being outsourced to cheap labour countries. It was going really well until the consequent humongous credit boom collided with reality.

Re: it's easy to resolve...

"When will this spate of Brexit hoodoo economics ever end?"

When reality catches up with it. By then it will be far too late.

Re: it's easy to resolve...

You pay something out of your wages called 'National Insurance' which are supposed to fund those...

"Supposed" is the operative word there. NI has been part of general taxation for many years.

The Treasury really, immensely, tremendously hates with a vengeance the very idea specific taxes going to specific expenditure as it wouldn't be able to get its claws on them. It invented an ugly word to describe them: "hypothecated". Would you want to pay something as nasty-sounding as a hypothecated tax? Of course if you knew that NI went to the NHS, pensions etc. or Vehicle Excise Duty under its old name of Road Fund was spent on roads you'd think it was a good idea.

Ideally NI would go direct to the relevant spending departments and VED would go direct to the DoT & Highways Agency and even a contribution to the NHS to cover the costs of treating RTA injuries. That would force governments to be a bit more upfront about general taxation levels.

And a final point about NI. I take it you pay NI as part of PAYE. Do you realise that you only pay employee's NI? Freelancers pay both employee's and employer's contributions. Maybe you didn't know that.

Re: it's easy to resolve...

It's only because the gov wants needs to clear it's debts that we are all suffering.

FTFY or nearly. Damn difficult to strike through an apostrophe.

Re: My toothpaste

"We really need to consign that completely illogical system to history."

Along with metric. Do things right. Binary would be a bit cumbersome but octal or hex would be fine. The evolutionary chance that gave us 5 digits on each hand is a pretty dumb basis for a numbering system.

"The biggest cost to most businesses is their employees, not the cost of raw materials."

So either the employees absorb the effect of rising cost of imports on their purchases or they get paid more. Either that biggest cost increases or employees subsidise their employer. Never mind, they're getting back control.

"Exports are up for the moment"

And yet...https://www.ft.com/content/2ffab0dc-d7dd-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e

Binary star bash-up should add new light to Northern Cross in 2022

“If we’re right it would mean the science is already done,”

Whether he's right or not the science is only done when observation confirms the theory - or otherwise.

This'll be the next thing Trump crows about: Apple assembling servers on American soil

Re: What's old is new again

"Actually, looking at the logic board"

I take it we're back to the Mac Classic. Is there any indication of where the board was assembled?

Back in the day the UK govt - I think it started with them but seems to have become an EU thing - had the Great Idea: we must have a chip industry. So they came up with the wheeze of imposing a duty on imported components - that's components imported as such, not as parts of assemblies. This would make it cheaper to buy components from this great British chip industry that would come into being.

If you actually looked at any board you'd see something like the Mac Classic - components from all over the globe. And even the marking on the packaging didn't necessarily reflect where the die inside it was made. It would have been hopeless to avoid duty on all the components to assemble a board by sourcing them locally because it would have required the UK or the EEC as it then was to be unique in being able to provide everything. However you could avoid the tax very easily by assembling the entire board overseas.

Any effect that had was to reduce local assembly of boards so there was no home market for the wonderful new industry which consequently never sprung into existence. I never realised this nonsense was still in operation - and at an EU level - until I heard that Raspberry Pi had run into it when they decided to assemble boards here.

If, as a government, you want to encourage manufacturing of any particular type of product, or manufacturing in general, it's a good idea to set about maximising the home market first. I'm not sure if it's an idea that's entered the minds of many politicians or would-be politicians.

How Apple exploded Europe's crony capitalism

"Today you can walk into a mall in Shenzhen, and half an hour later you are a phone OEM."

Or a front for a Chinese S/W company that wants to own your customers?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/15/android_phoning_home_to_china/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/20/more_androids_carry_phonehome_firmware/

Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

"Nokia's handset division failed because Nokia didn't have the technical ability to develop a useable OS and touch screen environment."

I thought it was more of a lack of ability to develop several successfully at the same time and a managerial ability to settle on just one.

UK Parliament suddenly remembers it wants to bone up cyber security *cough* Russia *cough*

Breeched

You keep using that word....

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/breech

Snapchat chooses London for international headquarters

So an business promoting itself on communication security bases part of its operation in GCHQ-land? Presumably its servers are elsewhere, or isn't it going to tell its customers about their communications being logged?

Rethink on bank cybersecurity rules might only follow major bank breach, says expert

Re: Smile/Cooperative Bank Poor account reset Security.

"I won't be the only one looking to leave the bank over this bullshittery."

You're not but with branches closing all over where do you go?

I'd been waiting for YBS to roll out their Norfolk & Peterborough (or whatever) current accounts to the rest of their franchises but it looks as if they're trying to phase it out; I was told they're not accepting new customers.