Posts by Doctor Syntax

You call it 'hacking.' I call it 'investigation'

Re: Please keep your biometric nettles away from my arse

"Barclays give you a little keypad like a small calc that you can plug your card into."

So does my bank. I tried to use it once. It didn't work.

"you pick a phrase, and picture that they show to you each time you login"

The issue here isn't logging in online (and, BTW what you describe online wouldn't prevent a man in the middle attack) it's about banks being able to prove their ID when they call you.

Re: Counter productive

'"... ask for the first, fifth and eighth character from that ..."

It's easier to remember the entire password than it is the nth character.'

No need to write it down. The first character is 1, the fifth is 5 and the eighth is 8....

"When it comes to authentication with banks... they seem resolute not to let us as consumers have the same confidence in them."

I have had several phone conversations initiated, supposedly by HSBC, the then bankers for my then business which never got beyond my telling the caller I didn't believe they were from HSBC because they [cw]ouldn't prove it.

Swedish appeals court upholds arrest warrant for Julian Assange

Re: Ah, yes, the famous "afraid of the US" bogeyman.

"that could change pretty quickly once he's held in a country which could well honour such a request."

He was held in a country which could well honour such a request. The UK. Where was the arrest warrant?

Re: Ah, yes, the famous "afraid of the US" bogeyman.

"USGov is perfectly happy to let someone accused of leaking so many secrets wander around scot-free"

Where is he doing this wandering around of which you write?

Re: Ah, yes, the famous "afraid of the US" bogeyman.

"He's embarrassed the USA so many times they need to get their revenge in one way or another."

Which they're doing very successfully. He's imprisoned himself, at the expense of the Ecuadorians and ourselves. And his ego is being injured by not being taken seriously by them.

Re: Ah, yes, the famous "afraid of the US" bogeyman.

" the lack of any concrete steps by the US to show even the slightest bit or interest in Assange"

That's what's really bugging him: being treated as unimportant.

BOFH: The case of the suspicious red icon

Re: So, that's the secret!

"Defenestration seems to figure heavily in these BOFHs. But my building is a single floor."

Get a four story deep hole dug outside your window. Get the pile of upcast left there. You can shovel it back in, a little at a time, as required.

Re: Ahh the horrible days of desktop support

"persistent non-sense callers would be sent to IT training"

Given sufficient training budget they can be sent on end-to-end courses so they never come back to work.

Brexit will happen. The EU GDPR will happen. You can't avoid either

Re: GDRP despite Brexit

Oh yes? Who's going to make them? It'll be the EU courts that enforce it and they can only do so on entities within their jurisdiction.

If the non-EU company is going to process such data for an EU customer then it will be incumbent on that customer to require compliance as part of the contract. If the company fails to comply it will be a breach of contract and a civil matter for the customer to take up in whatever court has jurisdiction over the contract.

It's not the same thing.

Re: GDPR will apply if you have EU customers

"The article is good but a little misleading. No matter when (if?) Brexit happens, any UK company that holds data on an EU citizen anywhere will have to comply with GDPR."

Hmmm. Not quite. If the company already holds that data that alone won't make them have to comply because post-Brexit they'll be outside the jurisdiction of the EU. There may be contractual issues with an EU customer if they have one but in that case it would be the customer at risk of non-compliance.

OTOH any UK company that wants to acquire such data from an EU customer will have to comply.

Re: Compliance

" I am sure that any UK company found to be non-compliant would be have their cases rushed through the EU courts"

"Rush" and "courts" in the same sentence. Does not compute.

Re: Compliance

"Additionally, it would be crazy not to be GDPR compliant after Brexit."

I agree with you but there are a lot of crazy people out there. And some of them will be looking at the issue and thinking "that's a lot of work" and then "if we don't do it there's only a few months when someone could catch us out and even if they catch us out they won't have time to do anything about it".

There's the additional complication that whatever businesses do about compliance the effect of investigative powers legislation might be to undermine any chance to be seen as compliant from the EU perspective.

"Those firms that fail to meet GDPR standards may simply find they their ability to work with EU clients profoundly challenged."

s/firms/countries/

Fanbois iVaporate: Smallest Apple iPhone queues ever

Re: To paraphrase Futurama 603

Come, friendly Samsungs, and fall on Slough

That's better. Gotta make it scan.

You really are related to JJ Carter aren't you?

Re: Vacation days..?

"Downside to retirement: no sickies!"

Even bigger downside. Sickies are real!

@cali

Are you related to JJ Carter?

'Google tax' already being avoided, says Australian Tax Office

Re: But, But they are lawyers...

"If I had any say in the matter, I'd limit the number of people with a law degree who could sit in Parliament."

The sad reality of this is that you'd still end up with loopholes and laws that did damage you didn't intend to innocent people.

New ISO standard kind-of explains how to ignore standards

Translation: sometimes you have to think about what you're doing.

Remote hacker nabs Win10 logins in 'won't-fix' Safe Mode* attack

Re: Security 101:

"If they get physical control of your machine it's no longer YOUR machine."

If they get physical access they think it's their machine. Of course it's still running W10...

Alleged buggy software wrongly flunks wannabe lawyers from bar exam. What happened next won't shock you

Re: @MrDamage

"So it seems more logical to me to put the blame on the institution."

Maybe they thought the software company had more money. Or the institute had strong T&Cs.

Encryption backdoors? It's an ongoing dialogue, say anti-terror bods

"[Groups like ISIL] throw out a wide net, and start pulling people in. And when people are pulled in, then they start using secure communications."

And they will get secure communications to use. If they can't get it from legitimate sources they'll just get it from illegitimate sources. Sorry for the caps but:

YOU DO NOT STOP PEOPLE WHO ARE INTENT ON BREAKING THE LAW BY FURNISHING THEM WITH MORE LAWS TO BREAK.

In the meantime, if you cripple legitimate encryption you not only have the baddies still using strong encryption but you have your law-abiding citizens at continual risk.

You can choose to win one or lose both.

Dear sysadmin: This is how you stay relevant

Re: A good sysadmin...

"Your job security comes from a good reputation and the ability to jump ship when this happens and land somewhere else, possibly doing something totally different."

If you've got the good reputation go freelance. That way you work for a company which is totally focussed on your career.

Sysadmin or developer, the advice is the same. Talk to people. Sysadmin to developer & vice versa but also talk to users, the people actually sat in front of screens, not just their managers. Get to know how the business uses IT in reality and get to know each others' concerns. That way you might be able to anticipate what the business needs, not just react to it.

Google GPS grab felt like a feature, was actually a bug

I wonder if Ubuntu Touch is ready for practical use.

"Why is this bit worded in the same style as a lawyer answering a claim?"

I suppose they were both statements that Google made to the Register but el Reg couldn't, of course, verify them for themselves. Alternative wording might have been "Google told us..." but it's a reasonable way to say that.

Accidental gathering of data? Sounds familiar. Ah, yes, I remember. Streetview, email and passwords.

There was a time when iPhones Google didn't know where whole towns cities in Australia were.

Google's become an obsessive stalker and you can't get a restraining order

Re: Opinion: Your choice

'OR I could go to my government representative and say "citizens need better inalienable privacy protection that's fit for the 21st century".'

And much good that will do!

"it was the Gallery app"

Possibly the coordinates were recorded in metadata in the image file and it was the gallery app that reconciled them with the premises.

Re: Had I known

"That is all."

No it is not all.

Are you still signed up? If so, now you know what Google has become, why?

Re: The thing is...

"I don't get ads. I don't get emails from Google or anyone that I don't want them from."

Neither do I but I have to work at it. An ad blocker is one factor. Another is maintaining my own domain and a multitude of email aliases on there, including short term ones for those who confuse needing and wanting an address for me.

"Even Amazon never emails me about potential purchases."

I'm not sure why you wrote "even". Amazon are far too smart. They realise that it would lose business. Even so I'm thoroughly pissed off with their repeated attempts to inveigle me into Amazon Prime.

Re: It will continue for a while longer

"Google employs very intelligent people and they are measured against the ultimate benchmark : ad revenue."

I'm not convinced on this. They ought to be able to get on top of all the bad practices which have driven people to use ad blockers yet haven't seen fit to do that.

Non-doms pay 10 times more in income tax than average taxpayer group

Re: On a related note

"When someone earning X times more than me is paying Y times as much tax and X is many times greater than Y then I'm going to complain because I'm having to make up the shortfall and subdidise their lifestyle."

You're looking at it wrong. If that person were earning X times as much as you somewhere else they wouldn't be paying Y times as much tax here. They'd be paying none at all. And who do you think has to make up that shortfall? You and me of course.

"The real question is how much tax would they have paid and how many austerity cuts could have been avoided?"

?

What do you mean "how much tax would they have paid?"? In what circumstances? If you mean in circumstances that wouldn't have attracted them here in the first place the answer is simple: none. I'll leave you to work out the effect of that on austerity.

I wonder how many of the critics here, at least those living convenient to cross-channel services, have made trips to France to buy booze and/or fags. It's the same thing. If it becomes possible to make international choices then tax rates become a competitive market.

If a country decides to go the high tax route to gather as much tax as possible from those who aren't mobile there's absolutely no justification sitting and howling* about injustice if tax-payers, individual or corporate go to Hong Kong, Ireland or anywhere else. The decision should have considered these factors.

By adopting more generous rules to high net worth individuals the government has, over the years, gained more tax than it would have done if those individuals hadn't chosen to be here. There are only two questions here:

Does the presence of those individuals with their spending power distort the local economy to the detriment of the rest of us, e.g. in the housing market?

Will these changes lose more from those who move away than it gains by increasing taxes on those who stay?

*Except, of course, the justification of political theatre; shift the blame from the politicians who made the decision in the first place.

Yelp wins fight to remain morally bankrupt

Re: My two cents worth

'You're talking as if "reputation" and "reliability" were still actual bankable commodities.'

You might find them appearing on company balance sheets as goodwill. If they weren't bankable why do you think people would pay for page rank?

Great British Block-Off: GCHQ floats plan to share its DNS filters

The intent might be genuine. The technical plan might be good. But even if both are true the scheme depends on trust and that is long gone.

Bad news: MySQL can dish out root access to cunning miscreants

Re: As always...

"It's the Unix outdated permission systems with scripts run as root and software that must drop privileges itself because of lack of a more granular permission system on processes and files."

No, it's developers* wanting to run their database engines with root permission when they shouldn't need to. There should be a $DatabaseEngine user and group. They can own the scripts, data and everything else to do with the engine. You're obviously unaware that such setups are not only practical but that they've been in use for decades.

"Of course all the downvoters have no clue about a proper permission systems."

No. We're the ones who actually do have a clue. And practical experience.

*Oracle have been around long enough to know better.

End all the 'up to' broadband speed bull. Release proper data – LGA

Re: Why not publish what exists?

"oven better aggregate it and publish it."

Do you mean cook the figures?

Re: Still not enough to filter out incompetent ISPs...

Now we're getting to the stuff that matters. Bandwidth to the ISP is one thing. What the ISP does with that is another. Traffic-shaping, for instance. When my old ISP fell into the clutches of TT they traffic-shaped Usenet out of existence for part of the day. And the first rate customer service had been wiped out by a previous owner - I still don't know whether it was run by a chatbot or humans that had failed the Turing test.

These are things which are under the control of ISPs and going to be experienced uniformly by all of the ISP's customers.

Re: "local data for local people"

"Given that the LGA represent the bureaucrats that decided my festering rubbish only needed to be collected every two weeks"

Until you got to the music festival I thought you must be a neighbour.

"As has been mentioned previously, the BT Openreach estimator that's available to wholesale suppliers is pretty accurate."

The speed I'm able to get in the middle of the afternoon here might be a good deal more than what I'd get in the evening if a lot of people down the road start streaming stuff when they get home from work and my bits have to share the infrastructure with whole lot of others. It might also be better or worse than my neighbours; all our connections come from the same point on the buried cable. Mine comes underground, theirs are overhead from a cable running up a pole, some of them distributed direct from that pole and others from a second pole linked to the first. Clearly there are various options for water penetration, different wiring choices (Al vs Cu) etc.

Can the LGA suggest a test method by which this can be determined other by having the user run a speed test from within the premises?

Microsoft thinks time crystals may be viable after all

Re: Its not complicated

There's a difference. The quartz crystal in your watch doesn't spontaneously settle into oscillation. It requires forcing with some additional electronics which consumes energy.

UK oversight body tipped to examine phone snooping tech in prisons

"By the time of publication a spokesperson for Number 10 had not confirmed when IOCCO would be formally asked to audit IMSI catcher usage by the Prime Minister."

Given who the current PM is the answer should be obvious: "Never".

HP doorsteps Apple shoppers at the altar of dreams

Re: The problem with the HP kit no matter how good it is, is...

"Now, if HP wanted to license HP-UX, and resume the port to x86, and then hire some quality software developers to upgrade the CDE interface and the available tools ... but that will never happen."

In part because HP-UX is owned by HPE and laptops etc are made by HP Inc. But what a thought.

Re: The problem is the HP label...

"cheap components that won't last 2 years"

The trouble with getting this sort of reputation is that even if you turn things round it takes years to get back to where you were. I'm currently on my 2nd HP laptop in the best part of 15 years with no troubles. I also have an all-in-one laser printer which is pretty substantial, has lasted with domestic use for many years and is still going strong. But having seen the HP printer my daughter's firm supplied her with (and looked at what's on the shelf in Staples) when I decided to get a colour laser there's no way I'd have bought it from HP.

I'd really like to see them regain their reputation but in order to do that they really need to face up to how they lost it in the first place. A puff-piece based on what seems to be a shininess comparison isn't convincing evidence that they've done this.