Posts by Doctor Syntax

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.

"High street banks, able to deal with issues in-branch"

What are these branches of which he speaks? "High street" banks are scarcely worth the name, they're closing branches as fast as they can and their approach to the "customer experience" he refers to is about the same as the "user experience" that you can expect when the UX folk take over your preferred software. The whole shower exist solely on the basis that we need to deal with one of them; I don't know that any of them could get customers based on customer service.

Is! Yahoo! dead?! Why! web! biz! will! rename! to! Altaba! – the! truth!

But..but..but Haven't comments on previous stories assumed that Verizon was buying the whole shooting match, Alibaba holding included and calculated the value of the rest as $4.8 billion - $Alibaba and come up with a negative figure? Now it transpires that it's that negative valued rest that Verizon are paying positive amounts for (assuming it doesn't all fall through).

Re: Does Flickr have a future in this brave new world?

"My advice: save your collection now, because it will probably disappear with barely a warning."

Applies to pretty well anything cloud-based. Even if it doesn't disappear entirely it might suddenly be truncated because you're using it too much.

What do you call a firm that leaves customer financials unencrypted on a hard drive? RSA

"Why was the drive not encrypted before it was deployed?"

Maybe they couldn't rely on a post-it note with the key staying stuck on.

Re: Contradiction

"the ability to know that its data has been stolen"

Hindsight is a very powerful route to knowledge. Presumably they knew it had gone AWOL because they couldn't find it when they wanted to use it. I'm not sure from the report that the disk wasn't simply reformatted & reused but they're not in a position to know that it was and had to take a worst case view.

“The ICO fined us for not foreseeing the risk"

Isn't foreseeing risks what insurance companies do for a living?

You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg

Re: S40 essential part of Levenson

The very notion that someone might be made liable for legal costs of an action that they did not start, and in which they are found blameless, flies so hard in the face of justice that "all right-thinking people" should recognize the iniquity that it embodies.

Indeed. Maybe that's why the Act says "the court must award costs against the defendant unless satisfied that ... it is just and equitable in all the circumstances of the case to make a different award of costs or make no award of costs."

Re: Unprecedented?

"Is this the first law that requires the party being sued to pay up, win or lose?"

No, because it doesn't. There's wriggle room to allow the court to make up its mind, even to the extent of making the plaintiff pay the defendant's costs if the circumstances justify that.

Re: There are two sides to this argument

What should we call it? The Press Council? The Press Complaints Commission?

As Smooth Newt says, it's been tried and we're at the present situation because of the way that turned out.

Re: re. Quadsys

"With the new rules, the journalists will pay the legal fees even if the suit is obviously frivolous."

Except they don't. Go and read what the legislation actually says; the article actually provides a link. If the circumstances are appropriate the court can make different awards or no awards at all. I can see nothing at all in there to stop the court awarding the defendant's costs against the plaintiff.

"If only this was about accuracy."

Indeed. In the interests of accuracy, go back to the article, follow the link to the relevant part of the Act and read 40.3(b).

Anyone thinking the Act allows them to start a frivolous lawsuit for free could end up with a nasty and expensive shock. If the court feels the circumstances are appropriate that provision enables them to dump the defendant's costs on the plaintiff.

"The legislation makes the assumption that fault will only ever be on the part of the publisher, and completely ignores the possibility that someone will try and silence a story they don't like."

Actually it doesn't.

From 40.3

the court must award costs against the defendant unless satisfied that—

...

(b)it is just and equitable in all the circumstances of the case to make a different award of costs or make no award of costs.

In other words, the court can take its own view if the circumstances make that appropriate.

Could the Act have been more open-ended about this? Maybe, but if it were the case of phuzz vs the Mail would you want it written any differently?

Verizon is gonna axe its 'unlimited' data hogs

When does unlimited not mean unlimited?

More to the point, when does it mean unlimited?

Re: To all the wireless carriers...

"It's simply infantile to say you're going to ignore contractual details."

It's infantile - or maybe some other word - to advertise "unlimited" without having first worked out what that might mean and whether you'll be able or prepared to deliver it.

If you don't mean it, don't advertise it.

UKCloud: We ARE cheaper than Microsoft or AWS online storage

"they are not a US company or have a US parent company ... I'm sure that despite Safe Harbour 2.0, they are making that a primary selling point when pitching to customers."

It depends on where and who those customers are. If they're in the EU or UK customers intending to hold data of EU data subjects it's not going to be good enough post May's reneging on ECHR.

Why the UK is unlikely to get an adequacy determination post Brexit

Re: Who cares?

"when did she realise her dreams were incompatible with supporting Remain....I'd guess a few days into the campaign someone smacked her with a clue stick."

I doubt it was as late as that nor that anyone had to alert her to it. I think she was a closet leaver all along but expected remain to win so nominally went along with that.

Re: If the UK doesn't, the US won't

4) 3 + repeated attempts to grant US adequacy alternating with trips to the courts to thwart them.

Would it be too much to hope that 3 brings about a final realisation that Brexit really wasn't a good idea with the electorate punishing those politicians who supported it.

NB there's no requirement for an electorate to remain consistent, especially when it finally realises which side of its bread was buttered.

Re: Who cares?

"Unfortunately this isnt a brexit problem but a politics problem."

The two are not independent. Brexit is a necessity for May's escaping international scrutiny on human rights by reneging on the ECHR. She is clearly prepared to chuck substantial swathes of the UK economy under the bus in order to achieve this dubious political end. The most charitable explanation I can think if is extremely blinkered vision.

Re: I'm not sure where the "We" is in the appointment process.

We as a nation. Wasn't that what Brexit is supposed to be about?

Re: Who cares?

You forgot the joke alert icon.

It's one thing to argue that May's policies would make compliance impossible. It's another to assume that she (or someone else) won't have to change them. The economic realities of not being able to comply (not to mention the impact on the Good Friday agreement of abandoning the ECHR) is going to make her stance increasingly impractical.

We would, in future, be well advised to avoid promoting Home Secs to PM; the experience seems to warp their judgement.

Top cop: Strap Wi-Fi jammers to teen web crims as punishment

"top cops’ trade union the Police Superintendents’ Association"

I think you're confusing them with ACPO.

Man jailed for 3 days after Texas cops confuse cat litter for meth

Clearly someone doesn't know what a presumptive test is.

It's a test which is quick and easy and responds positively to what you're looking for plus possibly quite a few other things. e.g. there are several presumptive tests for blood which are actually tests for peroxidase* activity, blood being one of several substances, including fruit juices, which have this property. So although a stain might give a positive result one would have to follow it up with a more specific test for blood. In my day it would have been an immunoelectrophoretic test which would have confirmed whether it was blood but also blood of the species (usually human) that you were testing for.

The key thing is that all it does is tell you to look further. It is not of evidential value.

*We discarded one of these as a component of the kit was known to be carcinogenic. I wasn't happy when years later I discovered from my daughter that it was still being used with enzyme-linked antibodies as a microscopy stain.

Re: Road site test?

"All the cop movies that I've watched have the cops doing on the spot tests by simply sniffing a little of the power or tasting it ..."

It's a reliable test for cyanide.

"Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?"

It's not using them that's the problem, it's relying on them. They would appear to be presumptive tests, an indication that they should be followed up with something more time-consuming, elaborate and, most importantly, reliable.

NASA taps ESA satellite Swarm for salty ocean temperature tales

Re: Hmmm....

Note how the proportion occupied by direct measurement is tiny compared to the rest - and how jittery it is compared to the rest.

"Conductivity, measured in siemens per meter"

Presumably a conductivity meter.

MongoDB ransom attacks soar, body count hits 27,000 in hours

Easy come, easy go?

If large numbers of databases have been pwned and few have paid up what does this tell us about how much the owners valued their Big Data?

Re: Something to note.AWS?

"have a publicly open unfiltered port to any software without the understanding of the implications is just unprofessional."

Were professionals involved or are these cases of Excel and Powerpoint jockeys moving up to the next level?

Google nukes ad-blocker AdNauseam, sweeps remains out of Chrome Web Store

Re: you are the product

"if the ... ad not sent in its entirety"

That could simply be a network problem so it couldn't reliably assume a blocker.

Re: Maybe they should've thought the whole video ad thing over

If I see a big, expensive advert I think "Why should I pay for that?" Same with a big, flashy shop.

Yes, but we're not in the business of selling big, expensive adverts or big, flashy shops. At least I'm not and I don't suppose you are. But being in such a business requires you to take a different attitude - and try to get your clients to share it. I say again, the advertising industry sells adverts to advertisers, that's all. What effect it has on the advertisers' bottom line isn't their problem providing they get paid.

Re: Maybe they should've thought the whole video ad thing over

"What would she have made of Google/DoubleClick?"

Probably bumped all the management off before getting Lord Peter on the case.

TV anchor says live on-air 'Alexa, order me a dollhouse' – guess what happens next

"Order me an escort"

Followed shortly afterwards by a "vroom vroom" sound from the street.

Re: "CONFIRM"

"Isn't a chimp some kind of monkey?"

No.

Re: @ Lee D

Why am I now imagining Compo from "Last of the Summer Wine" walking up to one of these things and saying "ey'oop Google !" ?

There were few characters played with anything like the right accent. Compo wasn't one of them.

I entered my home number into my car phone. The first time I used voice command to call home it told me it didn't have an entry. I got it to read out the entries and it pronounced it "hume", i.e. the pronunciation used by the former Prime Minister. Presumably the makers think more of their customers know someone called Home than have homes to go to.

They need to sort this out before self-driving cars come onto the market. Come out of the pub, get into the car and get driven to a suburb of Manchester.

Google gives up YOUR private data to US govt – but won't hand over its OWN staff personal info

Re: @AC Egg-zactly!

"It's actually voluntary for employees to provide it."

Presumably the employer (a) asks the employees to volunteer it and (b) makes provision to record it.

This must pose a problem in relation to people employed by US companies in Europe. In the UK, for instance, the information would fall foul of the data protection principles (see https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/data-protection-principles/ ), especially 3 and hence of the DPA and the equivalent legislation in other EU countries.

I can see how they'd probably twist the principle's wording to try to get away with it assuming the exemptions in Schedules 2 & 3 extend to obligations in the US. As stricter EU regulations come into force and Max Schrems or others get more judgements at the ECJ that might get more difficult.

But I repeat a comment I made earlier: it's different attitudes about such things that make Europeans distrust the US with personal data.

And I trust that the man who fell to earth, amongst others, has never been in charge of anything where European data protection law applies.

Former car rental biz staff gave customers' details to phone pests

Re: The calls aren't stopping

"direct access into the DVLA's live database"

No surprise there: https://www.gov.uk/data-requests-dvla

Re: Did they really steal it for hundreds of thousands?

Once they've got their foot in as "solicitors" (I'm sure they're called that legally, if not ethically)

If they were solicitors I'd have thought the Law Society would have been taking an interest.

Ransomware sleazeballs target UK schools

Re: Called me twice this week

"If you're really from the Department for Education then the should already have our proper contact email details,"

She put the phone down.

For occasions like this, keep a list of addresses of the more recent SEO etc spammers from your junk folder. They're all in the same line of work, no reason why they shouldn't occasionally be introduced to each other.

Re: standard response

"I've said it before: the point at which this great idea fails is the point at which a management higher-up decides the security rules don't apply to him"

It's up to senior management to set the policy. If they don't set it and follow it they've nobody else to blame.

Cache flush: AI poker bot to compete against top players in tourney

Does it get to shuffle and deal?

Microsoft goes retro with Vista, Zune-style Windows Neon makeover

Re: Rearranging the deck chairs.

"Not all of us are happy with shit like the ribbon, we want to slap the stupid out of you for that, so the ability to choose our own themes would be a big boone."

From MS's point of view ribbon was far from stupid. Between that and supporting education (getting schools to train MS Office users) they've now got a cohort of users who don't grok what you and I would call a sane interface, and hence any S/W that uses it. It's lock-in 21st century style.

Not to worry, LibreOffice is fighting back with multiple interface options.

Re: Blur disbanded

"Talent...Post proof or retract."

I think it's just a word they have to use. Telling it like it is would only bring in the lawyers.

FBI let alleged pedo walk free rather than explain how they snared him

Re: 'We...

"So reality is... they don't need to put them away or try them to ruin the alleged crim."

"Alleged" is a key word here. No conviction so in the eyes of the law he's innocent. I think we can expect the lawsuit to follow PDQ.

Investigation of crimes should be properly conducted so that the prosecution are able and willing to stand over their evidence.

Bank robber reveals identity – by using his debit card during crime

The problem with crime is that sometimes you just can't get good staff.

http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/hapless-burglar-chased-hit-shovel-12409920

Re: Curious

"How is the guy being 'a registered sex offender' relevant?

Why was it mentioned?"

It's just possible that the register also had his address, just in case they needed to check that the bank's records weren't out of date. It also indicates prior convictions which might affect sentence. Just a couple of obvious answers, I'll leave you to work out if there are more.