Posts by Doctor Syntax

Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

Re: From a user's point of view...

"Company I work for gives new hires a form for firstname, lastname and optional nickname."

What about clashes? Always assume they'll happen and be prepared.

Re: 2IC's name

"Don't get me started on Asian names which may have only 3 letters in the first and last name.... or worse yet only 2 letters..."

Interesting read here: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

Worth pointing out to anyone who has ....erm...bright...ideas about naming schemes.

Re: Push back and automate

"There _are_ collisions and people do want to change their username/initials when they get married or divorced"

Throw in name changes following gender reassignment. That will really panic HR if they find themselves forced into taking a non-PC decision.

Re: funny thing about these requests

All clashes of initials should be referred to 2IC for prompt resolution. I take it the work will be done overnight so a few of these clashes will be discovered at 2am, 3am etc.

The clever BOFH makes sure that the consequences of Management actions fallfail where they should.

Re: To the 2IC

"Obviously you'll be looking longer if you've particular requirements for your employer,"

such as, in this case, sanity.

China is building a full scale replica of the Titanic to repeatedly crash into iceberg

Re: Nope

Here's a real and recent trademark dispute over the name: http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/titanic-spa-take-legal-action-12280143

Brits think broadband more important than mobes, cars or savings

"Sounds like an odd target demographic."

Certainly atypical in terms of the country as a whole. I'm pretty sure it's skewed towards the top end of the age range but not particularly rural.

Re: Great Weasel Answer. Top marks for ingenuity.

Think what Which's readership is like. I'd expect them to be more likely than average to be the sort of people who have taken saving and investment seriously. In that context don't you think the rating for pension contributions is surprisingly low?

The explanation which occurs pretty automatically to me is that these are replies from people in the same situation as myself:

I'm retired. I no longer have to pay pension contributions so I'd rate that zero. In fact, I'd make pretty similar responses, including rating broadband highly. The main difference is that given the craptitude of public transport round here I'd rate running a car somewhat higher than in the article.

Of course I don't have any interest in the game of FTTP promotion.

"More also considered broadband an essential than they did savings (70 per cent) and pension contributions (53 per cent)."

I suspect this tells us that a large proportion of the survey are already retired and living off their savings and pensions rather than contributing to them.

90 per cent of the UK's NHS is STILL relying on Windows XP

Re: Extended support?

"Did Citrix think to ask the trusts whether they had their own extended support agreement?"

Or whether they have exposure to the internet?

There could be quite a number hooked up to expensive kit with XP-only applications for which there's no alternative. There's no chance of upgrading in such a situation and the best solution is to protect them.

Shared services centres flop: Only one UK.gov department uses them

Re: Needs saying!

"I hope lessons have been learned!"

Of course they have. It's just that nobody knows what they are. But they've been learned.

Can ISPs step up and solve the DDoS problem?

Re: Actually curious...

Probably a case of "we'll do it when everyone else does".

Playtime's over: Internet-connected kids toys 'fail miserably' at privacy

Re: Not surprised

"At that time the Hospital was the benefactor of royalties from Peter Pan"

Or at least the beneficiary. It should be in perpetuity as far as the UK is concerned. Jim Callaghan campaigned for an amendment to the copyright act to enable this.

Russia's bid for mobile self-sufficiency may be the saviour of Sailfish

Re: Interesting

"Seriously, when was the last time you said; "holy shit, I got to get one of those awesome Russian cars, or computers, or DVD players, or toasters?" Let me guess... never. They have a hill to climb, and nobody cares but them. Good luck with that."

Remind me again, how have NASA been getting to the ISS these last many years?

Microsoft says LinkedIn will make Trump, Brexit, voters feel great again

Re: Slurp, slurp, slurp...

"No option given, they simply logged me in."

You must have had an account set up in order for them to have logged you in. That was your first mistake.

I was a robot and this is what I learned

Re: It can never succeed beyond the novelty stage

I was envisaging taking this to the limit. Apart from exhibitors, or at least the construction crews for their stands, everyone attends as a telepresence. It would mean the venue could be in the cheapest possible shed with no worries about Elf 'n' Safety, fire regs, etc. The lower cost would offset the promoters' ability to screw the attendees for extras.

Re: Event capacity?

'I once stayed at a hotel where the most paletable thing on the menu was "fried ceasar salad".'

A few years ago we stayed at one of the chain hotels near Kings Cross. The end result was an email to them explaining why their Caesar salad wasn't.

Re: Picture paints 1000 words

And far fewer than 1000 words paint a picture.

Re: Event capacity?

"What's wrong with paying to use one?"

I'd guess it could be cheaper than the alternative of flights, taxis & hotels.

"Can it tell the difference between a throng that will part - or someone on a collision course?"

Nothing that scythe blades on the wheels can't deal with. Boudica should have patented it.

Information on smart meters? Yep. They're great. That works, right? – UK.gov

Re: Do you trust the government and energy firms?

"Can anyone else see where this is all going?"

Yes, lack of ability to come to your own decision on a case-by-case basis.

Re: Umm....

'Well, when you install a qualifying PV array, the "feed in tariff" is paid for twenty five years, with an inflationary uplift every year.'

Unless it becomes politically expedient to cut it. Don't base your own budget on what governments offer. They're not to be trusted, especially beyond a general election.

"The government has insisted it is effectively communicating the benefits"

I'd have thought that not communicating any benefits is being effective.

Fitbit picks up Pebble, throws Pebble as far as it can into the sea

The company said that existing Pebble watches ... will continue to work for now but there will be no support or warranties, and "functionality or service quality may be reduced in the future."

If I were in the market for such a thing I would find this soooo reassuring to buy a product from this company.

Do these people have any wits at all?

Everything at Apple Watch is awesome, insists Tim Cook

Re: Another useful gadget

"Smart watches - almost as useful as smart meters!"

Even better: twice as useful as smart meters.

Hackers actively stealing Wi-Fi keys from vulnerable routers

Meanwhile even the Beeb seems to have noticed: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38223805

"The words "TalkTalk" and "hacked" tend to crop up quite a lot in the same sentence."

And a small number of customers tend to be mentioned a lot in the same articles.

US Supreme Court slashes Samsung's patent payout to Apple

Re: I still can't grasp...

"fined the both of them for wasting the courts time"

Both? Think that one through. There you are, minding your own business when someone takes you to court. The court decides you did nothing wrong but fines you anyway for defending yourself.

Canada asks citizens: How would you like us to spy on you?

Re: AC So let me get this straight...

You forgot that many in Labour and the clueless Left/Greens/Anarchists at the last election waffled on about "mass surveillance" and "privacy rights", and lost the election.

We remember that Labour, when in govt, had similar ideas, including identity cards. We also remember that Labour have a long track record of appalling economic management. There are good reasons why they lost the election. Sadly, this seems to be a party-neutral issue. Home Secs. of any political persuasion seem to go native PDQ.

Re: hidden agenda

"I can only assume that this is really about something else."

Maybe just PR, but maybe something along the lines of plausible deniability.

Re: Straw Man

"if cops want to read my email" then they are welcome, it's boring.

And what if the email is something like a link to reset a password to a site which has access to your bank for instance? Maybe not the best way to reset a password but it happens. Would you want this to be available to 48 different official and semi-official bodies as in the UK? Even if you think you've nothing to hide or that it's boring you probably have a great deal to hide and you're probably contractually obliged to hide it - just check the T&Cs of any online accounts.

The UK's Investigatory Powers Act allows the State to tell lies in court

Re: Welcome to "justice"...

"I doubt that anyone on the Trump team even knows that this law exists."

If they don't I'm sure it'll be explained to them by someone who wants it for themselves.

"Aww poor little flowers."

The poor little flowers are all of us.

What protection would you expect if you were wrongly accused? You'd expect the prosecution to have to prove its case against you. You'd expect that it wouldn't be allowed to take short cuts, to suppress evidence or to present false evidence. In short, you'd expect to be assumed to be innocent unless you were proved guilty in a fair trial.

But you might say "I know I'm innocent, I shouldn't be treated like those bad drug dealers who are guilty."

Well, you may know you're innocent but in advance of a case being heard I don't know whether you are or not nor do I know if those accused of being drug dealers are guilty or not. All I or anyone else including a court can do is make the same assumptions about all of you. It is arrant nonsense to think that there is some means by which you or I, if wrongly accused, are to get some rights and those rightly accused are not.

If from your point of view as an innocent wrongly accused, that assumption of innocence, then that assumption must be extended to all. And in the past that has been reckoned to be a fundamental right of all of us.

Another right, going all the way back to Magna Carta has been our right to due process of law. Due process has come to include the need for TPTB to present an independent judge or magistrate with a prima facie case sufficient to justify a warrant.

This Act sweeps all these rights away and not the least of the issues is that instead of being signed by an independent judge or magistrate warrants are now to be signed by a minister. That raises a whole new spectre of political persecution.

The poor little flowers are all of us.

Re: Section refers 56 refers to interception not to equipment interference

"The position of intercept material is relatively unchanged from RIPA and indeed IoCA, Intercept material is inadmissible and can't be used by the prosecution as evidence; only for intelligence purposes."

If you look at the example quoted about the DEA it becomes clear that a rule on parallel construction could be used to hide all sorts of goings on. The agent in that case had no information as to how the SOP knew that a given vehicle should be searched. If he thought that an intercept was the basis for it legislation such as this would inhibit him from saying that there was any sort of prior information but the truth might be that he was being directed to planted evidence.

Re: Reasonable Doubt

"At which point he is arrested under this act"

Actually the prosecution would object, the jury would be ushered out of court and there'd be a legal argument culminating in the question not being allowed. Then the jury would be brought back in. A persistent defence barrister might well be able to try to put the question a number of times until such time as the jury worked out that there was something fishy going on.

A repeated blocking of defence questions might well be the basis for appeal, maybe as far as the ECHR (no, this is not affected by Brexit).

Another tack might be to get a copy of the relevant bit of the Act introduced as evidence.

Sony kills off secret backdoor in 80 internet-connected CCTV models

Re: Hardcoded passwords...

"That's just stupidity, and the manufacturers should be sued into oblivion for it."

This is Sony. They have form with rootkits and didn't get sued into oblivion then.

Sony has killed off ... a debug backdoor

Killed off in what sense? Killed off as in taken it out of current production, killed off as in made an upgrade available to punters who actually know an upgrade's available and will install it or killed off as in pro-actively upgraded all vulnerable devices exposed to the net?

Bloke sold cash register code to restaurants that deliberately hid sales from taxmen

"to give businesses a leg up" does seem a curious turn of phrase coming from a US Attorney. It implies that payment of taxes presents a barrier to businesses that they need to surmount if they're to succeed. It's almost an official admission that tax rates are too high.

Printer security is so bad HP Inc will sell you services to fix it

Re: Good to know they don't update firmwares...

No, but it'll probably be added any way because, well, you know, security.

If your smart home gear hasn't updated recently, throw it in the trash

Re: Preaching to deaf numpties

"The originating ISP won't be able to detect it, and the target will have to send as many reports as it receives attacks, which isn't much help."

Change the emphasis a little. Tools such as Shodan enable the net to be searched for vulnerable devices. So instead of treating harbouring of attacks as the reason to blackhole ISPs, transfer attention to exposing vulnerable devices.

Take that, creationists: Boffins witness birth of new species in the lab

There is a clear historical instance of a new species being created by natural processes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartina_anglica

Species with extended geographical ranges can have infertility between the populations at the ends of the distribution most clearly demonstrated by ring species where the population extends round some obstructive feature and where the two "ends" have met up and do not interbreed. Such populations could be split into two species by exterminating it in the middle part of the range. The obvious ethical considerations prevent this as a deliberate experiment but it could happen as a consequence of human interference with the environment for economic purposes.

King's College London staggers from outage, replaces infrastructure services head

Re: there but for the grace of God...

"And have a DR that actually works.."

..and you know it works because you test it from time to time.

Icelandic Pirate Party asked to form government

Enquiring minds want to know..

.. what's the impact on the dispute with Iceland the shop?

Sysadmin figures out dating agency worker lied in his profile

Re: Setting passwords for international users

"except for USAians where it as read as C-Pound"

or C-octothorpe if you follow the Bell Labs version.

"Be honest, do you know how to type?"

I bought my typewriter over half a century ago. I think I've got the hang of it by now although the onset of arthritis in my fingers isn't helping.

"People who know how to type don't need to see what they are typing, helps proof check, but it's not required."

The whole point if this is that when you're entering a password you can't see what you're typing

It matters not whether you can type or not. The only feedback you might get is that you entered a character by having an asterisk or a blob appear. If you're logging in at a standard Unix command line you don't get anything back at all (and if, as in a previous comment, a key isn't working, you're SOL).

Because you can't rely on visual feedback to tell if you're entering upper or lower case the only sure way to be sure is to hold down the shift key or not. The only way.

As someone has pointed out, if someone enters a different password than they thought they were entering when encrypting a disk in the first place there's no way back. It's not like getting an ordinary password wrong when setting it up; you can't go to the help desk for a password reset. Your options are limited to reformatting the disk.

"Isn't that what the Caps Lock LED is for?"

The moral of the original story was watch the screen, not the keyboard.

Re: Password?

"The number of times someone is looking over my shoulder is tiny. The number of times I make a typing mistake is comparably huge. Please write for the common scenario, rather than assuming the worst case."

So do you just open any enclosure in a spam email rather than assuming the worst case?

Google turns on free public NTP servers that SMEAR TIME

Re: Sub-second accuracy

"If they don't do the time smearing, then events can get out of order and applications end up having incorrect data."

AFAICS they could still order events by using a 61 sec minute.

Re: We have also a Google time now?

"Google could well have added its servers to the NTP time pool

No, no, and thrice no! Because Googles NTP servers will be telling the wrong time for about a day after every leap second."

I think the assumption in this is that Google could have done that and then implemented the leap second along with everyone else instead of having the Google Second.