Posts by Doctor Syntax

Devs bashing out crappy code is making banks insecure – report

Re: Writing robust code doesn't take much more time

"evaluated each month by SLOC written"

That could work. Just score double for lines of code checking and handling errors. Double again for errors which allegedly can't possibly happen.

I always reckoned banks were computerised ledgers with casinos bolted on the side. It sounds as if the casino management is still dominating.

What a Flake: Congress mulls trashing privacy rules, letting ISPs go to town on your data

Flake

Nominative determinism, a force to be reckoned with.

'Nigerian princes' snatch billions from Western biz via fake email – Interpol

Re: Let's give them a hand

"I quarantine them all"

Have you managed to train your own business not to do the same thing? If so, kudos.

Re: IT outsourcing

"would you trust any of your personal details to a help desk in Nigeria? Could you trust them with an outsource of your bank IT administration or code development?"

No, but then I wouldn't trust them to outsource any of this anywhere else. That doesn't stop them.

BT agrees to legal separation of Openreach

"You could argue it worked"

In the short term.

Look at the long term consequences. BT is now 12% owned by Deutsch Telekom and a complete take-over is a possibility. Ultimately the fixed line thinking dominated BT management's approach and they failed to see staying in mobile as a strategic necessity.

From O2's point of view it may have been welcome; the expression "Big BT" was a term of abuse around the Arlington.

"Excuse me but BT became bigger and more market dominant by swallowing EE."

That was just the current management undoing their predecessor's idiocy of losing their original place in the mobile market.

Re: Cautious optimism

"Now they can easily sell Openreach to the highest bidder and get rid of the headache."

Presumably by headache you mean the pension liability.

Or do you mean the necessity to find the money for those infrastructure investments?

In either case the headache would remain, it would just have been moved elsewhere and all the existing moaners would also just move their moaning elsewhere.

Re: legally separated. means F**K all as ......

"I'm probably going to sound like a communist here, but it would probably be the best for the country as a whole for Openreach to go into 100% public ownership, owned by the government but operated as a separate commercial entity"

Some of us remember the mess that was from the first time round.

User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work

Re: "... the number of incidents dropped dramatically."

@Evil auditor

There's an alternative scenario that could bring about the same outcome. If the out-of-hours incentives were dropped there'd out-of-hours reports might get ignored until normal hours. The users would then learn to wait before reporting the issue.

The correct incentive structure, of course, is one that primarily measures and rewards fire prevention rather than fire fighting.

Re: Back in the mid-1990s. . . .

"In this case, I would want to to bill the misused CD to the training department, for failure to teach the general what the bits of a computer did."

On the whole I agree with you but maybe you missed the fact that the general had signed a waiver.

It's difficult if not impossible to deal with idiocy that's risen to the higher levels of an organisation. After all these are the people who should be exercising wisdom and laying down rules for the rest of the organisation. The first step of this should be understanding why those rules are needed and why they apply to themselves* as much as everyone else.

*It's doubly important that they follow their own rules. They need to set an example.

"Deluxe Paint."

Doesn't it make a mess of the DVD?

"The truly delusional ones might even actually believe it's all the other guy's fault."

The original article involved marketing. Truly delusional fits the bill.

Brit ISP TalkTalk blocks control tool TeamViewer

"I think one can understand TT wanted to be secure"

I think you've put your finger on the problem. They're wanting to do something they've no previous experience with. Maybe we should put up with a few tottering steps from them.

Re: Typical ISP response to a security issue - block it and screw the rest of ya!

"As a result, unless TalkTalk reverses this decision I will suggest to my customers that this is a further example of bad decision making on TalkTalk's part and that they should consider changing ISP's when their current contract expires."

Seriously? You haven't suggested that already?

"And no, you can't just block all Indian netblocks, for reasons I trust are obvious."

It would block TT's own support centres?

Re: Which way?

"paying for Internet access and then found I was getting Internet access minus one particular TCP port"

I discovered this years ago when TT took over Tiscali who'd taken over ...etc. and they decided to traffic shape Usenet to an extent which amounted to a block. I took appropriate action then. I really don't see why so many decide to stick with this serial abuser.

Re: VPN?

Look at everyone else's posts.

Look at your own.

Do you see anything different about them?

No?

Look at Bombastic Bob's posts?

Got a clue yet?

Re: Sledgehammer meet nut

"thumb down...please explain..."

Not me but let me guess. Your inability/refusal to use your shift key?

Once upon a time we had teletypes which were single case. We got rid of that years ago which made it much easier to read stuff. Now we seem to be drifting back to that situation albeit with lower case rather than upper case.

"Teamviewer can be a business-critical application to many people, especially if you work from home."

If people are doing business-critical work from home why are they using TalkTalk?

DeepMind. Blockchain. Medical records. Google. AI – wow, we just won machine learning bingo!

"For example, if results from a blood test were uploaded, it’ll show they were used in an algorithm to check for possible acute kidney injury."

But does it then show whether the results of that algorithm were then passed to your insurance company or Google's ad-slingers?

FBI boss: 'Memories are not absolutely private in America'

Re: Anyone can be compelled

"in the final analysis, the law is just ink on a page"

No. In the final analysis the law is not just ink on a page. In fact it's not always ink on a page at all. It's our collective decision about how society should be run.

Re: Er ...

"Remember the oath you must take before you testify: the truth, the WHOLE truth, and NOTHING BUT the truth. "

I always found this a little odd. In practice one can only respond to counsels' questions. One of the tricks of a cross-examiner is to ask a question which framed to call for a yes/no answer but which, for the whole truth, requires a more discursive answer - which the cross-examiner then tries to suppress. I've also been in the odd situation of being, in effect, cross-examined by the side that called me in an attempt to make me put a stronger construction on my evidence than I considered reasonable.

Re: This is the same Comey

"And who is now having to deal with an unpredictable boss"

They probably deserve each other although I'd have expected his boss to have sacked him as untrustworthy by now. Maybe the only thing stopping him is the thought that finely tuned machines can't lose major components at quite that rate.

Re: argh.

"Most of us don't encounter the worst of nasties that the criminal classes throw at the world, the cops do."

Maybe not most but I can claim to be one of the ones that did, and that in the middle of a terror campaign (and partly funded by US citizens unchallenged, AFAIK, by their government).

My main take-away from that? The importance of the presumption of innocence and due process of law. Why? Because they're some of the main things that distinguish between terrorism and a free, lawful society.

Untrammelled surveillance, especially mass surveillance, is the antithesis of these.

Re: failing at your job

"If you are a chief security officer and don't know your local FBI officer then you're failing at your job"

"No, I don't believe so."

You should look at it as a case of "know thine enemy".

Self-employed bear the brunt of Spring Budget with additional National Insurance contributions

Re: Fairness

And, as an entirely unrelated point, I wonder if the Treasury has worked out why we have this persistent problem of not getting improvements in productivity.

Re: Here's a thought

"Even PSC avoidance is being closed off: first with public-sector contractors prevented from avoiding IR35 (you can be certain they'll get private-sector contractors next); and the new dividend tax clobbers the rest."

Good move. Drive independents out of the UK contract market. Capita's share price could use some help these days. I don't suppose a directorship for a retired MP there will need as much work as doing real IT and probably pays much better.

Re: Here's a thought

On the whole I agree with your comment but:

"in public services this is even more important because every penny they take costs our economy and ability to earn more."

It depends. Money spent in the NHS can result in returning to work someone who, in earlier times, might have died or remained disabled.

Re: something doesn't add up ...

those who are hit by IR35 "rules" ... are now to be hit by NIC changes as well.

I'm not sure what happened to the reply I tried to post about this earlier. If it re-emerges sorry for the dual comment.

AFAICS this isn't relevant to IR35. It affects the self-employed. IR35 victims aren't self-employed, they're employed by their own companies as well as being deemed to be employed by the client. They get to pay employee's class 1 NICs and their company - not the deemed employer - gets to pay employer's class 1 NICs as well, all out of the "salary" which is what the fees are deemed to be.

They're not being screwed by this - they're screwed already.

Re: Here's a thought

"At least the banks are paying back (or have paid back) the bailouts with interest"

We seem a long way away from getting our money back out of RBS.

Re: Here's a thought

"The point is those who earn more have more avenues available to them to pay less tax."

Another way to look at it: if the marginal rate of taxation is high enough it becomes more profitable to spend effort on taking existing income out of tax than on earning more income.

The real unfairness is that HMRC will contrive to arrange the affairs of the lower paid to maximise tax because they know it's unlikely that the victims will be able to afford an accountant to help challenge it. About 3 years after I'd gone freelance they decided to run a tax investigation to make sure I was paying "the right amount of tax". By this time I had an accountant who could look after it for me. He charged a fee of course but it was well spent. An investigation goes back 6 years, i.e. it included the last 3 years of my being an employee. Surprise, surprise! The right amount of tax for those 3 years was a good deal less than the amount they'd taken off me and the rebate was a considerably more than the accountant's fee.

Video intercom firm Doorbird wants $80 for device password resets

Re: Idiots Of The...

"when it dies, I'll repeat the cycle"

Tip. When it dies just check it isn't the bell push that's corroded. You could save yourself most of that £12.

Re: Because this process is attended to us with considerable effort,

"I've not seen the device and may be making an unwarranted assumption, but sure a $350 device will be on the inside of the house with the just the bell push/camera on the outside?"

That's what I thought. But a little investigation shows that it is entirely external. All it does is replace the bell-push with a combined internet-connected bell-push/camera/entry-phone box.

I like the instructions: remove the bell-push. You will see at least two wires. Connect it to these two wires. [My emphasis]

Re: Lesson teaching perhaps

"it isn't as unreasonable as it sounds"

My first reaction to the headline was that this adds a new meaning to lock-in. But overall I think you're right: they're doing as much as they can to ensure the user's security and that must incur costs. It will also encourage the user to take better care in the future.

OTOH would I wish to qualify for their customer service? No. A hardware lock and the doorbell that's been there for most of the last 50 years does the job fine. The only extra expenditure was a new bell-push.

Fancy that – the sharing economy lobby doesn't speak for the sharers

Re: "Labour arbitrage"

Other terms are available. Pimping?

A previous boss of mine once told me quite honestly (when I asked for a raise) that the company "pays the employees one pound over the threshold where people would just resign".

My threshold's just gone up by a pound.

And again.

And again.

....

Smut-scamming copyright chaser 'fesses up, will do hard time

Re: No sympathy for this guy

"What kind of conviction includes stripping people of their rights of due process?"

What part of "waive" didn't you understand?

Re: God I love America:

"You've just made my point for me."

And you've missed the point. If he feels entitled to call duly appointed judges "so-called" then he's equally entitled to get the same appellation applied to himself. What goes around comes around.

I'm almost sorry to see this drawing to a close. Ken White's writing on the subject has been massively entertaining although, of course, the victims won't agree.

Next Generation Security: No, Dorothy, there is no magic wand

IDaaS

Do you really want a single ID around the internet? Should your bank ID be the same as your Amazon ID or your Register handle?

Do you trust a provider to never leak your credentials?

An online provider may well analyse your behaviour for security purposes. Fair enough, it might be able to detect attempts at impersonation that way, but would you trust it to not also use the analysis for its own commercial ends such as ad-slinging?

Re: SIEM vs UBA

"You dare contradict the talking heads of Gartner?"

Are you sure you've got the right part of the anatomy?

Fraud detection system with 93% failure rate gets IT companies sued

Justice by computer is a very long way away. Unfortunately attempts at at aren't.

That CIA exploit list in full: The good, the bad, and the very ugly

Re: Hmm, wikileaks

"Even if the Trump angle is wrong, (why would Wikileaks support him?)"

Pardon?

US Senator snaps on glove, probes insecure IoT toymaker CloudPets

Re: Risk vs. Reward

"they have little or no liability for the digital bits"

Are there any precedents either way on this?

Salford and Liverpool City Councils plan IT trading venture

Given that so many councils don't seem to do a particularly good job of running their existing services I suspect their taxpayers could be in for a few losses.

Iconic Land Rover Defender may make a comeback by 2019

Re: Why did people like the defender?

"They weren't bullet proof"

Now you tell me. I had the occasional ride through Belfast in Army LRs. They did have some internal cladding AFAICR. It was held on by nut & bolt and the bolts hadn't been cut to length. The sticky-out ends were lethal.

Scammers hired hundreds of 'staff' to defraud TalkTalk customers

A TalkTalk spokeswoman said... “We take our responsibility to protect our customers very seriously."

And did she keep a straight face whilst saying it?

A mooving tail of cows, calves and the Internet of Things

Re: Coverage - and not in the nice way

"Has anyone done any analysis about birth rate defects due to the calf growing up on a microwave transmitter"

According to this the monitor is only fitted when calving's due in a few days.

http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/huddersfield-farmer-delivers-calf-after-12700086

Re: Now that is a useful IoT application

"In this case it wouldn't be Bullsh*t it would be CowSh*t..."

You're milking it for all it's worth.