Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK unveils plans to 'transform' the consumer smart meter experience

Re: £2,500 off their bills over 10 years???

"Time to cut the whining"

Well?

Ex-White House cyber, counter-terrorism guru: Microsoft considers security an annoyance, not a necessity

Re: I disagree with this premise.

Not even threats will have an effect unless they start to get carried out.

"I'm not saying we should just get rid of Microsoft, I'm saying Microsoft has got to be better at what it does,"

But what does he think Microsoft does? It makes money, that's what it does. Until it's made clear to Microsoft that it won't be allowed to make any money until it gets better at security nothing will happen because doing nothing doesn't eat into the money-making machine. Starting to get rid of Microsoft on clearly stated security grounds would be the only way to get it to do what he wants it to do as well as what it wants to do. That, of course would have to be allied to a firm stance that the getting rid will only stop wen improvements are demonstrated, not just promised by salesdroids.

Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK

Of course they used to say the same thing about IBM - until things changed. Which only goes to show things can change

Re: Use opensource

Open source front ends to a proprietary service provider is scarcely a way to avoid lock-in. It's having the front end platform allow for a choice* of back end services that's critical, together with the availability of trustable service providers.

* Oh dear, that word. I'll have triggered all the Microsoft and Apple addicts.

Re: The elephant in the room is Brexit

You must be getting deafened by all the whooshes.

Re: Open Source MAKES Big Money

Some of that FOSS comes from Apple.

Re: Alternatives

I suppose one problem with their heads up Microsoft's arse is that if they choose replacement email they get the internationally accepted standard protocol instead of being locked into some proprietary alternative.

"Focussing on the cost of something without examining what you get for that (the value/benefits) is a very odd approach, to anything"

That's why beancounters are odd people.

" It's a truism that moving to open source doesn't save much money, as proprietary licensing spend is replaced by training, support, and local development costs, but reliable data is hard to come by in a field dominated by financial and political interests."

Is it really a truism? What it most likely means is that staff are expected to know Windows and Office without having to be trained and the cost comes afterwards in things like confidential information being CCed, executable files with a .pdf suffix being clicked, Excel being mistaken for a database application and all the rest of it.

When the ensuing disasters are investigated doe "we don't see a need to train staff because we assumed experience of Microsoft products" ever get considered? Perhaps the greatest gain from Mexit wouldn't be the money saved on licences or even the digital sovereignty; it would be proper training.

German security researchers say 'Windows Hell No' to Microsoft biometrics for biz

Re: Duh!

But shite or not I suppose it harvests a lot of biometric data form Microsoft.

Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

Re: While we shouldn't litter space with junk

OTOH there are favoured places in terms of both orbits (e.g. geostationary) and longitudes (over centres of population). It's not an even distribution, hence we read of satellites sometimes having to take avoiding action.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Far Too Complicated!!

For home use most people wouldn't need to use Windows but in practice have to use it through not being provided with alternatives. You and I know what those alternatives are. We will also set them up for users if occasion demands it but, of course, suggesting that usually brings torrents of abuse from a few particular commentards when mentioned here.

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

They wouldn't be allowed to understand the question, let alone know the answer on pain of instant dismissal.

Re: Far Too Complicated!!

You have to use Windows?

Deal with it.

Re: No workaround needed for Windows 11 Pro

"if Microsoft wasn't so disconnected from their user's needs."

In the Microsoftverse only Microsoft has needs.

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

Or keep them on Keepass, copied or synced as required. so you always have them on any device you're using.

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

This sort of thinking has been bouncing round government thinking since at least 2015 (ironically the 8th centenary of Magna Carta). Both the main parties have espoused it which is why I'm unable to vote for either of them.

Governments have been keen to set quotas for various groups. Perhaps setting a quota of 25% of ministerial posts to require a STEM degree would be one of the most useful that could be adopted.

Re: use their I'd.

Any learning experience is useful. This might provide a learning experience for MPs.

Trump calls for Intel CEO's head over alleged China links

I suppose having conflicts of interest as a speciality Trump is particularly expert at spotting them.

Trump teases ‘approximately’ 100 percent tariff for imported semiconductors

Re: If you're a big company like Apple or Nvidia

If you're buying those chips as components for stuff that will be exported again just move the manufacturing out of the US.

"Absolute minimum" may include none at all.

Trump surprises with TSMC $300B investment claim

Re: Chin up, Americans.

True, but likely to be a diminishing one.

Re: More lies

The likes of TSMC should be grateful to him. If he just goes about saying they've promised to spend that it's cheaper than their promising to spend it let alone actually spending it. After all, if he said it he'll believe it really happened

UK's Ministry of Defence pins hopes on AI to stop the next massive email blunder

Being responsible for a leak of classified information should result in being permanently removed from access. If that means the only role open after that is counting the paper clips in some adjutant's office or a far-flung minor consulate so be it. It wouldn't take too many colleagues disappearing into that fate to impress the rest that they needed to be more careful.

What's "explainable AI". I thought the essence of AI was that wasn't explainable. Its popularity is certainly inexplicable.

Amnesty slams Elon Musk's X for 'central role' in fueling 2024 UK riots

"Additionally our crowd-sourced fact checking feature Community Notes plays an important role in supporting the work of our safety teams to address potentially misleading posts across the X platform."

It demonstrably failed on this occasion. Perhaps X's mouthpiece's statement should be fact checked.

Fact checking isn't going to help scotch conjectures that the "engagement" algorithms propagate before facts are even established.

Birmingham City Council's £131M Oracle rebuild in danger as go-live nears

"to replace its aging but functional"

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Perhaps BCC should adopt this as their motto for the future.

Network scans find Linux is growing on business desktops, laptops

"the trend was more along the lines of exponential"

Make that sigmoidal. Unfortunately by the time it gets to anything like mass acceptance the pottering about will have made it as opaque as Windows and the cognoscenti will have moved to BSD.

Mistakenly sold NASA command trailer could be yours – for $199K

"A listing on eBay with a $50,000 minimum bid and $290,000 buy-it-now price ended in May with no takers."

A reminder that something is worth what you can get somebody to pay for it, no more and no less (which principle should really have settled the HP/Autonomy case).

MX Linux 25 loses systemd toggling power as Debian 13 looms

Re: It definitely reduces the appeal ...

"I'll continue with Debian on some systems for now, as long as I can continue to _not_ use most of the systemD creeping features"

More to Devuan instead.

Re: It definitely reduces the appeal ...

Only if they're rounded corners.

Re: A regrettable KDE choice

I'm running KDE with X on Devuan Excalibur (6.12 kernel) and it will open multiple tabs in Konsole, no problem. The one thing to watch out for is that out of the box it wrote complaints to the X error log about not being able to use pipewire - every few seconds. If that's a problem install libpiewire-0.3-modules-x11.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: I'm confused

I would totally believe that Amazon could screw up in the most bizarre way imaginable - or more than that.

Re: Amazon's identity verification is provably broken

My experience of Amazon - admittedly only limited to deliveries - is that if something goes wrong what happens next is totally unpredictable. Unpredictable like a courier being sent out to collect the undelivered item for return. It's as if only the happy path gets coded.

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

"And the dev was probably the closest thing to telecoms expert they had,"

Not a a fact in evidence. If the boss and his mate started a telecoms business it's likely that they fancied themselves as experts or thought "how difficult can it be?".

"and it's not automatically the boss's responsibility to question that."

The boss would have recruited Ivan. It would have been his responsibility to recruit someone able to fill in any gaps in the knowledge that he and his mate had.

It sounds like receiving the complaint was how they detected it.

From TFA:

"After as much testing as was possible at a three-person startup, the team felt it worked well and put it into production.

But when the very first live customer called in, their call didn't terminate properly."

The first point here is that in a 3 person operation the team must necessarily included at least one if not both of the other two. Clearing it for production was not the sole responsibility of the developer.

Secondly, was Ivan the resident telecoms expert (and if there wasn't one whose fault was that) responsible for knowing all the ins and outs of call termination? If the S/W met all tests specified the developer can hardly be responsible for testing for an unspecified condition unless they knew it should have been specified.

"The boss is right ."

The boss is paid to take responsibility.

Windows 11 leads as October looms, but millions still cling to Windows 10

Re: "an uphill struggle remains to get Windows 11 on desktops"

"I was the one who wrote that."

Of course you were.

"As for orphaned or gauging ISVs... Are there "any" ISVs doing the kind of application you need in *nix?"

If it's orphaned there aren't going to be any ISV doing it for any platform. You now have a free choice of where to rebuild. Are you going to choose the option that's already left you stranded once.

It might surprise you to know that Unix and Unix compatibles are a very good platform on which to build. Before I retired I spent a couple of decades or so developing snd running systems built on RDBMSs on Unix platforms which ran operations for organisations large and small. They were reliable systems with long uptimes that did the job or, as you put it, ticked all boxes

I also spent a while developing on Windows. The client's approach was ad hoc. They spent more time on putting together new systems for individual contracts than they would have spent on something adaptable and even longer than they'd have spent on putting something together adaptable to run on SCO which would have been the platform of choice at the time. What an over-complicated mess Windows was as a platform back then and from what I hear it's got a lot worse since.

The basic Unix platform would always be the one to choose for an application with a projected lifetime of decades. Windows would be the choice for a platform you can go into a shop and buy today to treat as disposable because you're treating the application as disposable.

Re: Debian 13 (Trixe) is out on Friday

apt distupgrade

Re: Abomination

I don't regard mac usrs as peasants. Peasants don't usually flash money around. We actual peasants were brought up on frugality and a strongly independent outlook.

Re: "an uphill struggle remains to get Windows 11 on desktops"

Somebody above wrote "Migrating bespoke internal applications is a bitch." and that was in the context of one version of Windows to another. Tencontinued in the same vein for ISV supplied applications especially if the ISV has lost interest or gone broke. Might this notme an opportunity for a clean sweep with more control over the underlying OS?

Antivirus vendors fail to spot persistent, nasty, stealthy Linux backdoor

Re: This is the very design of PAM

"What is actually more concerning is how this is being deployed. It requires a privilege mode session or process to integrate it into a system, and how that was done is more of interest,"

I'd have thought that the likeliest way would have been to get it integrates into a distro repository.

When hyperscalers can’t safeguard one nation’s data from another, dark clouds are ahead

Re: It’s back to basics: business models

Obviously not your company because of the way they went. But if the EU insisted - unlikely but possible - that the only way MS could continue to run their stuff in the EU would be at arm's length through some sort of franchise arrangement it would be made possible in short order. Necessity is the mother of invention, etc.

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safety Act gets rolling

Re: This will be extended to all web sites eventually

A couple of wooshes, I see,

Re: Does it really matter?

"More that we need to look at it cohesively as a data leakage problem, rather than focusing on this one element."

You usually fix leaks one at a time. This is another, and it's a big one.

Re: Madness

Totally unexpected - surely they'd have hired somebody with a STEM background (I don't think a degree in geography counts).

Microsoft briefly turned off Indian company’s cloud, perhaps due to EU sanctions on Russia

Re: Gaslighting

From a customer PoV ti would be safer to have the service provided by a locally owned franchisee set up under local law that allowed them to use the US company's IP under strictly hands-off terms. IOW if the USG tels MS (for isntance) that it can't provide Teams to LittleOldRightPondCo but LittleOldRightPondCo is actually dealing with RightPondFranchiseeCo then RightPondFranchiseeCo's use of MS's IP for Teams is subject to a contract that allows them to continue providing it to LittleOldRightPondCo unless the Right Pond giov also tells them not to.

Re: Gaslighting

"A company which is headquartered in the USA CANNOT put their EU operations out of reach of American laws"

The interesting situation in TFA seems to be illustrating that trying to follow this in respect of an Indian operation it isn't as simple as that as it can be challenged in the Indian court. I suppose the upshot of this is that MS will be spinning this along the lines of "see, your local law does protect you.".

Re: Not the first and probably not the last

Having not listened, when it's too late they will claim they weren't told.