Posts by Doctor Syntax

Why don't people secure their IoT gadgets? 'It's not my problem'

"Sorry, am I too cynical?"

Too cynical? There's no such thing.

It's round and wobbles, but madam, it's a mouse pad, not a floppy disk

Re: Insert a new disk and press Return

"although she's been told we have a remote Exchange server she's probably forgotten"

Or not even understood the significance.

We each have our own mental images of how things work. For some that image is just keyboard and screen.

Re: Poor instructions

"the "music" is inside the grooves, so it would seem that just the record surfaces rubbing probably wouldn't do much."

But the grooves extend all the way up to the surface. So if the surface has scratches on it they do, in fact, interfere with the shape of the groove and the S/N ratio goes down.

'His reaction was "pull the other one"'

Maybe he'd heard about some of the pranks traditionally pulled on engineering apprentices.

Re: ahh, floppy disks

she was also told that we saved electricity if empty sockets were switched off as it stopped electricity "leaking out"

A missed opportunity. You have to put a blanking plug in to do the job properly... And be careful of bits dribbling out of spare network sockets.

Re: Poor instructions

"I have a copy of Tommy by the Who, which was a two LP set, which had sides 1 and 4 on one disk, and 2 and 3 on the other."

That was common with opera recordings which could very easily run to multiple disks. On long pieces it wasn't always possible to get the turnover right. The CBS Bruno Walter LP of Mahler 1 had a turnover in the middle of the long 3rd movement. It was a relief to move on to CD where that wasn't necessary. Then they came out with a multi disk, multi symphony set where they split one symphony between 2 CDs.

Re: Poor instructions

"You never had an autochanger that would let you stack half-a-dozen disks up for playing?"

And let them skid on each other? A great promotional aid for people who wanted to sell more disks.

Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

Re: Where do we find these numpties

"The Republican Party."

I doubt they have a monopoly.

Re: Out of State

"Don't underestimate people with power. Let's assume they know what they're doing."

No, don't let's assume anything. Let's expect them to demonstrate that they know what they're doing.

Ancient water found in Canada is two billion years old – giving hope to Mars colony dreamers

Re: How much did the drilling ...

"Yeah, us stupid scientist who are incapable of thinking about such things, controlling for them or working out ways of sampling which do not contaminate the source."

Nevertheless, one thing does worry me about this dating. There's only one radio-isotope found in water itself, tritium and that has a half-life far too short to be used in dating of this age. They're dating it on the isotopic make-up of the solutes. How do they demonstrate that they've been in solution that long?

I spent half my working life having to be concerned with contamination of samples, including dating samples. They're valid concerns and they're not addressed in the article nor in the linked abstract so you can have your snark back, thank you.

Re: Close

"a pedantic grammar nazi icon"

I've often wondered - is that a photo of Jimmy Edwards? Whacko!

Cyber insurance brokers: If it makes you feel any better, 2016 was not our year either

"So if you're a policy holder and get hacked, you get paid. What about your customers/users who actually suffer?"

You offer them two pennorth of fraud protection or whatever - which you claim on your insurance.

But realistically the insurers have got to start laying down the precautions their clients take. No security, no payout.

View from a Reg reader: My take on the Basic Income

Re: Private market undermines social change

"Where does the capital growth fit into that arithmetic?"

Capital growth comes into it when someone takes out an even larger mortgage to buy it from the previous owner.

Re: Private market undermines social change

"renting should *never* be more expensive than a mortgage and that is the situation we are in these days."

Did you give even a moment's thought as to how anyone could rent out a property at a rate lower than it's costing them to buy it let alone maintain it?

Re: "What if those taxpayers are machines, not humans?"

"You mean money printing machines?"

No, the machines that are now supposed to be putting everyone out of work. That seems to be the notion. Whether it actually works that way is another matter. As per another comment, AFAIK mass unemployment is the result of governments making a pig's ear of the economy by meddling rather than advancing technology. But there's no harm in a bit of "what if" thinking in case things go differently this time.

"And this complexity in turn is passed down to HMRC"

Complexity pushed down to HMRC? Where do you think it comes from?

Re: I would love it

"So you expect the taxpayers who do work to buy you a house, which you will be able to pass down to your children, as well as feed & clothe you?"

What if those taxpayers are machines, not humans?

"Of course you'd have to implement the taxes on a global level"

Not really. Place an export tax on money. Money leaving the country bound for tax havens or off-shoring gets taxed. No need to tax the rest of the globe if you can simply tax the money headed in that direction.

"Inevitably that cannot work for everyone, since then there would be no money coming in to pay us"

The recent article on this was predicated on the assumption that automation would give rise to mass unemployment.* The proposal there was to tax the work of the robots. This in itself might not be sufficient as the work could be off-shored to somewhere with lower tax rates. It would take more than simply taxing robotics but there could still be means to levy the necessary taxes. In those specific circumstances one could see how it might work.

*AFAIK mass unemployment in the past has been a result of economic meddling rather then mechanisation but I suppose there's always a first time.

Re: Private market undermines social change

"If you did an FOI of your local authority to ask them how much money is spent on emergency accommodation, I think you'd be in for a shock."

OTOH some of the locals have a shock when I point out how much the local authority, which is perpetually crying poverty, spent on financing a leg of the Tour de France in England.

"A similar idea is negative income tax. If you earn less than the tax threshold they pay you to bring it up to that. Probably easier to administer than UBI."

Maybe you're thinking of PAYE and a low-paid job. In the case of Edward making and selling stuff there wouldn't be an employer running PAYE.

But the killer in this idea is that it would involve HMRC. HMRC would ensure administration could never be simple.

IT ops doesn't matter. Really?

Re: Heretic!

And Cloud! Don't forget Cloud.

Christmas cheer for KCL staffers with gift of extra holiday after IT disaster

Re: Need new glasses

I don't think there'd be much difference for those whose data was lost.

Re: Repeatable?

"If it's not repeatable, it's not science."

But you never get back the several years you spent doing it.

'Upset' Linus Torvalds gets sweary and gets results

Re: Wouldn't YOU be fucking pissed off ...

you then "test" against the "bugs your changes are supposed to fix"

Not just that. Also test against the bugs previous changes are supposed to have fixed. Just in case you reverted some of the previous fixes.

Re: Torvald's Tongue Back To Normal - XMas May Proceed

"At least Santa's list compiles"

or Santa compiles his list?

Banks 'not doing enough' to protect against bank-transfer scams

More hindrance than help

A few days ago my bank send out an email about this. Or, strictly speaking, they didn't. They had a marketing company spammer send it out with a From: line purporting to be the bank, naturally a noreply address.

So I have an email purporting to be from the bank but originating from an IP address not owned by the bank. Look like a phishing email much?

And it gets worse. There are several links in the email which appear to point to the bank's domain. However when I look up the address of the sub-domain server for these links (the same subdomain used for the From: address) it's not in the bank's block. It belongs to the same spamming business that sent the email. Look like a phishing email supported by a bit of DNS poisoning much?

The only indication that it's probably from the bank is the address to which it was sent. It's one that's provided only for the bank.

Instead of training customers to be aware of scams, the overt purpose of the email, it's actually training them to be phished.

And I wonder if their IT security manager, assuming they have such a thing, is happy to have a subdomain resolve to a server not controlled by the bank. If I were in that position I'd be livid.

'So sorry' Evernote rips up privacy changes

Re: Evernote?

"I guess napkins are so 20th century."

It's all email's fault. No envelopes so no backs of envelopes.

Re: Translation

and

"we are reviewing our entire privacy policy being more careful what we say in public in future because of this."

Crim charges slapped on copyright trolls who filmed porn, torrented it then sued downloaders

Re: Not News!

"we're going to go after a bunch of law students"

Law students? Go read Ken White's account at Pope Hat to find out in detail what this bunch were up to.

Kids, look at the Deep Learnings! (We’re just going to slurp your data)

Re: can someone please disrupt Evernote

"if that was a tenner a year"

Not in Switzerland.

Re: All your thoughts are belong to us.

"https://owncloud.org " forked to https://github.com/nextcloud

Re: No privacy at any price

"For example, its hard to argue that Gmail is one of the better email server implementations, but I can not get a private account"

You can get a private account by going to a provider who specialises in running paid-for mail services as their business and it will cost you a lot less than $1,000,000 pa. Don't forget, with Google you're the product and it you're the product it's hard to argue that it's even a good implementation let alone one of the better.

Re: Inevitable

"Why did this ever need to be a cloud based service anyway?"

For a lot of use cases I don't see the point. The common point of contact is the user. User has portable device and base computer, records data on portable device whilst away from base, has no access to base computer at that time & hence doesn't need it synced at that time. user returns to base with portable device and only now can use base computer but portable and base are now within BT/LAN/USB cable distance and can be synced.

The use cases I can see this making sense are non-portable work and home computers (but even then a portable device can intermediate) or needing a backup for the portable device whilst still away from base. This last sounds like something a journalist could need but wouldn't it require encryption whilst in transit at the very least?

Re: Yeah but how long

Good question.

Firstly AFAIK Evernote is Freemium which always raises the possibility of "you're the product" whereas the sites I'm thinking of are essentially paid for hosting sites which is a very different business model. Secondly there's a choice of several EU countries plus Switzerland which provide very different legislative environments to the US - and data protection in the EU is due to get stronger still in 2018. Thirdly https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/9.0/user_manual/files/encrypting_files.html

"There are open source alternatives you can host for yourself, but setting this up is beyond the skillset of the average user."

Presumably you're thinking in terms of Owncloud/Nextcloud. There are a number of businesses which will host a service for you so you don't need to set one up yourself. You can take your pick of whatever you think is the country with the best attitude to privacy.

But it’s only a “a very small number” of staff. So that’s all right.

Only a small number. Where have I read that before?

National Lottery whacked with £3m fine for suspect ticket win

Re: What about the fraudster?

"Has the claimant been prosecuted?"

And if not why not? Probable answer, not sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. But if that's the case why do the Gambling Commission think they've sufficient evidence to issue a fine?

NASA – get this – just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft

Re: Only perfect storms ?

"I am going to launch a competing system which helps sailors avoid all storms"

Called a basement.

Wouldn't be a bit damp?

Don't panic, friends, but the Chinese navy just nicked one of America's underwater drones

You'll soon be able to buy them on eBay.

US Supreme Court to hear case that may ruin Lone Star patent trolls

"It might be bad news for the lawyers who work at those courts"

Aren't US judges also lawyers?

Re: So if this goes through, everyone has to be sued in their state of incorporation

"That's due to the USPTO's biggest problem: shoestring budgets."

And also their biggest advantage - they don't get to pick up the bills for fixing their mistakes.

Around 1.4 million people have sub-10Mbps speeds - Ofcom

Re: This is an ideal opportunity

And BT's response is that without Openreach being part of BT they can't offer a USO and Openreach as a separate company won't be able to afford it (unless, of course, someone else takes them over). So where do you go then?

Ransomware scum face unified white hat army

"a conservative US$84,000 a month for an investment of US$6000, a whopping 1425 per cent profit margin"

There are many things appropriate to call the perpetrators but "cretin" isn't one of them.

Sysadmin 'fixed' PC by hiding it on a bookshelf for a few weeks

"went outside office for 30 secs brought back in SAME bulbs"

Big fail there. Missed an opportunity to leave him in the dark for a few hours.

Re: IT Slight of Hand

"Sleight of hand."

In the context, "slight" seems appropriate; it describes the effort involved.

Re: Slightly off topic

"The second is that the decision maker has to believe that they had the original idea. You learn to let them take the credit as a way to get something done."

There's also the issue of how much the advice costs. Suggestion by line-worker, volunteer or whatever, much less than manager receiving it is paid so it can't be worth very much. Same advice relayed from same source via consultant or from an expensive conference, clearly very valuable. Yes, the manager clearly knows the price of everything and the value of nothing but in such cases adding to the price effectively adds to the value.

What’s next after hyperconvergence?

Re: Back in the last century

"compute, storage and network resources together..[in]... a single, pooled storage resource that can be distributed between your different workloads as necessary" is actually a pretty good description of a mainframe.

'Public Wi-Fi' gang fail in cunning plan to hide £10m cigarette tax fraud

Re: “nothing can be traced”

"otherwise forensic accounting alone is enough to nail you on tax evasion."

I suspect that this is where HMRC started. All the other stuff was just to get the details of how and how much.

Dixons warns of looming Brexit storm cloud amid bumper results

Re: Not the best customer service

"the salesman couldn't have been more disinterested"

Uninterested more likely. A disinterested salesman is more rare than a hen's tooth embedded in a unicorn.