Posts by Doctor Syntax

Dishwasher has directory traversal bug

Re: Bewildered. (That's grown-up speak for "wtf")

"With the MobileControl function you can keep an eye on your Miele appliance, even when you're not at home - via smart-phone or tablet PC. Not only can you access the programme status, you can also conveniently select and start programmes regardless of location using your mobile terminal device. Simply download the Miele@mobile app and connect the device to Miele@home. When you return home, your Miele appliance has already finished its work. "

It's a pity I'm not in the market for a new dishwasher. I'd have let a salesdroid give that spiel just so I could have asked "Why would I want to?". And then show them my ancient non-Apple, non-Android phone.

"It's unclear which libraries Miele used to craft the Web server, which means without a fix from the vendor – for a dishwasher – the best option is to make sure the appliance isn't exposed to the Internet."

No. That's the second best option. The best option is not to buy anything that's given a facility to connect to the internet that it doesn't need. A dishwasher doesn't need a facility to connect to the internet.

UK.gov departments accused of blanket approach to IR35

Hypocrasy.

""As the worker (contractor), would you accept as substitute a suitably qualified worker instead of the worker?" "NO" --->> instant IR35 fail."

Once upon a time the IR as it then was had a boiler-plate contract on their site. It was for companies supplying services to them. Let me emphasis that, it was a contract for services, not a contract of service*. It included a term allowing them, the IR, to name specific individuals of the contractor's staff who could not be substituted without their, the IR's agreement. In other words the IR, when they were the client, were quite cool with the idea of a key man clause. I'm sure I still have a copy somewhere.

*Permies might not understand the significance of this but believe me, it is very important.

Re: Ffs...

"My understanding is that companies won't contract a self-employed person because the rules change in the 1990s meant that two consecutive contracts would be equated with permanent employment, leaving the employer open to claims for employee rights."

My understanding is that it was HMRC's predecessor IR to blame. In the event of a self-employed person defaulting the Ltd Co engaging them became liable. The Ltd Co form of engagement protected the engager against this.

It seems to be an attitude to risk on the engager's part as I discovered a client who also had freelance graphic designers taken on as SE. I could probably have contracted with them on that basis. However I already had my Ltd Co set up so continued with that.

Re: Stop taking the p***

"No, the employer pays it once and the worker pays it once, same as everyone else. It ain't your money cos you're not a limited company."

I sort of take your point. The worker isn't the limited company and this really should be emphasised.

But the likes of the first post fail to make the distinction and ISTM that the previous A/C was replying in terms that they might understand. The amount invoiced isn't the amount that's available to be paid as salary and/or dividends. There is a world of difference between the nature of the payments the engager makes out to a permie and a freelancer's Ltd Co.

UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we won't go into the cloud

It would help of the political interviewers had some technical nous.

Rudd should have been asked if she was prepared to lead from the front and publish all her credentials for online banking, eBay, Amazon or whatever. As she'd have been bewildered she (and the audience) could have then had it gently explained that this was, in effect, what she was demanding of the rest of the population.

As it is any politician can walk into any radio or TV studio, spout whatever nonsense their department has fed them and walk out unchallenged about any of it.

Re: Halcyon visions of yesteryear

"Masood wasn't on anyone's watch list. He just a small town thug that came completely out of nowhere."

The reports I saw said that he was known from being on the fringes of some previous case but wasn't considered important. If this is the case we have yet another instance of the intelligence services being able to follow up on someone they did know about whilst trying to keep an eye on everyone in the country. Maybe a more focussed approach would be more practical.

Re: Here we go again. The 'Claire Perry Test'

"Not just tech stuff : one has to wonder what this person is doing as home secretary."

Don't you realise that this is the Home Office's main requirement of a Home Sec? They have to be so devoid of any relevant knowledge that they can parrot whatever they're told without showing any signs of cognitive dissonance and remain totally brainwashed even on being promoted to PM.

'Windows 10 destroyed our data!' Microsoft hauled into US court

Re: W10

"If only you're computer literate, you must know all this."

A lot of people buy computers to do stuff. They're not necessarily computer literate. They paid good money for what they bought. They don't deserve to become victimised.

Re: Uh what?

"...a class action that includes every person in the US who upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and suffered data loss or damage to software or hardware within 30 days of installation"

I can understand if the upgrade procedure somehow caused data loss or 'damage to software' but I haven't heard of Windows 10 either damaging hardware or causing data loss.

It's the sort of thing any lawyer would put in without even having to set the brain in motion for two reasons: firstly it saves having to investigate whether any hardware failures did happen so if someone does turn up with such a corner case they've already got it in there and secondly it cuts Microsoft off at the pass if they try "it was a hardware issue" as a defence.

"Where do we join ?"

Small claims court.

"I'm just so glad I'm retired."

That's the prime requirement for being expected to support friends and family.

Re: Why not include automatic updates in the class action?

"It genuinely made itself too big to sue into the ground."

No excuse. If for no other reason it would discourage others from using the same tactic.

In any case, if it did get sued into the ground there'd be good money to be made supporting the victims so someone would be ready to buy up the assets at fire sale prices.

Re: Place your bets

"Seriously, when did you last hear of a software company being successfully sued on the grounds that its product failed to perform as advertised?"

The article quoted some examples relating to W10.

Re: About time

"Nice ignoring of context by the spokesdroid"

The standard journalistic response to these sorts of statement should be "how did you manage to say that and keep a straight face?".

Bloke whose drone was blasted out of sky by angry dad loses another court battle for compo

Re: Guns...

@ bombastic bob

Upvoted for Bathsheba reference and absence of superfluous upper case. But pointing lasers into the sky? There are too many idiots doing that already as has been pointed out in these pages

Re: What a colostomy bag...

"chainsaw to cut down the pole, a cricket bat to beat the shit out of the camera, & then offer to smash in your skull if you do it again?"

I say, old chap, do the colonials actually have cricket bats to hand?

I've Been Moved: IBMers in same division slapped with 2nd redundo scheme in 2 months

Re: Infrastructure

"Cloud based services are so clearly the future"

And as the outages become more frequent their vendors will be able to say they were the future once upon a time. Anybody who can't see that coming needs to read the news and to have been around long enough to realise that IT is a fashion industry.

Astroboffins stunned by biggest brown dwarf ever seen – just a hop and a skip away (750 ly)

Re: It's quite a small object

"Dark matter is the luminiferous aether of our age."

Or even Phlogiston.

"I assume you mean more than 99.9% hydrogen and helium "

The paper doesn't mention helium.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Some other gems

Way back in the days of plain old character terminals (the ones which were efficient for data entry - just use the keyboard and don't fumble with pointing devices) the function and arrow keys sent control strings. These were usually initiated by an ESC and the OS used the delay between that and the next character to work out whether it was just an ESC or a control string initiator. Cue a bit of delay on the network and the OS got it wrong so that the rest of the control string got sent into the program as data. That was rapidly followed by the accountant demanding to know why his staff were mis-entering data. ISTR there was some tuning available to lengthen the allowed interval so that got sorted.

Ubuntu favouring what looks for a moment like a progress bar but actually just whisks a short bar backwards and forwards until it's done.

KDE. The task bar can be set to autohide and restored by taking the mouse pointer to a user-chosen location. Make it the bottom edge and any attempt to take the mouse to the bottom of a window at the bottom of the screen brings up the task bar. Similarly going for the scroll bar on a window at the right hand edge. The bottom left corner seemed the most convenient but least likely place that you'd take the cursor by accident, the likeliest target there would be the menu button on the task bar itself. KDE 3 included corners as well as edges in its choices so that worked out well. KDE 4 restricted the choice to edges. WHY????

Re: You hit it Dabbsy

"Even better would be if they made the damn things easier to open after tearing them off the roll."

That was my point. The idiots who inflict these things on others will continue to be idiots until they're made to experience the consequences long enough for the problem to penetrate whatever they're using for brains.

I wonder if some of these misfeatures on web pages can be attributed to using bits of Javascript from so many different sites. Every time the user does something the browser has to go off to some other server(s) to get the instructions to tell it how to respond.

Another variation is the menu that jumps as soon as you click on an item leaving you wondering whether you've clicked on the wrong one. Maplin, I'm looking at you - for that and numerous other UI shortcomings.

Re: All auto Pop-ups and window-to-front from non-focus software should be banned!

"Android and Windows 10 can collect notifications without this retarded pop-up UI behaviour; all other OS's GUIs should do this already too!"

Are there some that don't? KDE user here.

Re: Favourite things

"All the windows shrink and align themselves neatly, so that one can see at a glance what is open. It is invaluable for spotting errant dialogue boxes and and pesky 'pop-under' browser windows."

That sounds useful - but can it also get back to where it was?

Re: You hit it Dabbsy

1a Access their application via a 14000baud serial link for a day.

On a similar note the numpties who select the bags for packing vegetables in supermarkets should be obliged to spend an entire day packing them whilst wearing gloves and glasses which restrict their ability to focus closer than a metre.

Re: Strangely enough ...

"in some sectors the best applications are created by teams of people paid to do so."

And let's not forget the utter crud produced by people paid to do so.

Re: Strangely enough ...

@Dan 55

You'd be more convincing if you showed some sign of actually having used Linux. For a start you could tell us which particular GUI it is you're complaining about. Then you could show some indication that you know there are others. Bonus points for telling us which commercial UI you prefer and why.

Re: Yep...

"WORSE!!!! If you click the X to get rid of it the page you're wanting to be on jumps back to the top so that you have to scroll down and find where you had got to."

Worse still if you're reading it on MythTV where there's no way to click the sodding X. You're left squinting through a letter box shaped slot at the top of the screen. An the next breaking broken news thing comes up on the next page. And the next. And the next. A user friendly designer would say "If we show it a couple of times let's assume they've read it and really don't want to see it again". A really good designer would realise that after being displayed for a few seconds it can bee removed without even needing to click. Anybody from the Beeb reading this?

Blinking cursor devours CPU cycles in Visual Studio Code editor

Re: bring back vi and assembler on command lines

"FORTRAN 77 on a Control Data Cyber-whatsisname. Using punchcards. In the early 1980ies."

Johnny-come-lately.

FORTRAN IV on ICL 1900 series, punch cards, 1970.

Re: The solution -

"Real programmers use switches to manipulate the memory directly"

I once read that some IBM system program was written in FORTRAN but after compilation some manual editing of the binary took place. The program as shipped had no corresponding source code.

The solution -

vi

Squirrel sinks teeth into SAN cabling, drives Netadmin nuts

Re: Rats!

"wire wool ... is a fire hazard"

My late cousin-in-law used to work at Holme Moss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holme_Moss_transmitting_station

They had a rule that all wire wool was to be stored in closed tins. I suppose stray RF was a bigger pest than rats.

Re: @VRH, Best traps

"I prefer to buy Kimodo Dragons & let them run wild through the place. If a boss gets uppity, a salesdroid shows up, or someone starts talking in buzzwords, feeding the remains to the Dragons is a great way of getting rid of the evidence."

You are the BOFH and I claim my £5.

Re: Best traps

"So your choices are glue or patience and a pellet gun."

One of my first jobs was with biological supplier mostly dealing with schools*. One of the products was dead rats for dissection. Over the years a few had escaped and they bred. The head of the microscope slide section decided to stay in one evening with a gun and potted one. Then he remembered rat blood often has trypanosomes and went to fetch a syringe intending to make up some slides. He should have taken the dead rat with him; by the time he got back the others had dragged it away, presumably to eat.

After a little while they went bust. They'd invested in making microscopes just at the time the Japanese were moving into the school microscope market. It must have been one of the receivers' odder jobs. There would have been some strange assets. One of the set items for A-levels that year was a bull's eye. For weeks I'd been visiting the slaughter house and come back with bags of bulls' eyes. The schools had got wind of the impending doom so hardly any ordered them. There was a big vat of them steeping in formalin.

*at the same time SWMBO was a teacher. She reckons we still owe her some dissecting scissors.

Our Sun's been using facial scrub: No spots for two weeks

"The sun is going out?"

Dunno. Has he got his hat on?

Re: Solar Constant....is NOT constant....

"Faux has ANECDOTES and TESTIMONIALS on his side!"

I'd like to know if Faux things the Dunning–Kruger effect is faux science.

Re: Solar Constant....is NOT constant....

"Total Solar Insulation"

I don't think the sun needs insulating. It stays nice and warm as it is.

Gov may need to splash £245m per year on IT contractors – NAO

"Amyas Morse"

Younger brother of Endeavour?

Mines the one with a crossword dictionary in the pocket.

Re: GDS Academy?

Rule 1b Passwords again. Require a certain number of different types of character but don't tell the user what they are. Also disallow certain characters and don't tell the user about those.

"This meant that my revenue was taking a big hit even before things like accountancy fees and my role in the company meant I had strange exclusions on expenses I could claim such as accommodation whilst on training courses and these exclusions changed year on year."

I never experienced that as a freelancer. When I was a Civil Servant years previously the exclusions seemed to change from expenses claim to expenses claim. It was part of the mean-spiritedness that prompted me to leave. No, folks, Civil Service jobs are not gold-plated, at least not in the scientific branch. Neither are the pensions.

"However, the issue of skills will only be exacerbated as thousands of tech contractors are set to leave the public sector amid a major crackdown on the tax freelancers pay via IR35."

I haven't been following HMRC's latest wheeze on this but AIUI it will be up to departments in the Civil Service to determine the status of contracts. If so then departments have the solution in their own hands. They can insist on contracts which they can certify as being non-caught. If HMRC insist on doing things differently their loss will be other department's gain.

Pure Silicon Valley: Medium asks $5 a month for absolutely nothing

Re: Medium?

"Which provider will suffer the greatest number of outages over the next 36 months?"

Whichever you choose.

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

Re: Even Amazon Fire is overpriced.

"'There was a silly article on a UK paper website this morning'

To be fair it was in the Guardian"

I'm glad you told us. A silly article in a UK paper isn't very specific.

Re: I've said it before...

"You can't make a shovel with another shovel"

Not on its own but you can use it to shovel coke onto the forge.

Re: I've said it before...

"Have you tried reading The Reg on a laptop while taking a dump, balancing a laptop on closed knees doesn't help things pass. A tablet is much better in those situations."

And worth a guinea a box.

Re: Chrome in US

"You could replace 'chromebook' with anything that could get a web interface to Google Docs and the schools would be happy."

And competitive in price.

Amazing new WikiLeaks CIA bombshell: Agents can install software on Apple Macs, iPhones right in front of them

So if you get a present or a bribe from your friendly local CIA agent - eBay.

Lloyds Banking Group to hang up on call centre staffers

"That's Marketing. They are liars."

You can't blame them. It's a job requirement.