Posts by Doctor Syntax

FYI: The FBI is being awfully evasive about its fresh cyber-spy powers

"The amendments would apply in two narrow circumstances:

First, where a suspect has hidden the location of his or her computer using technological means"

I.e. connected it to the internet. I'd like to see his definition of wide.

Twitter bans own CEO Jack Dorsey from Twitter

Re: Captain Obvious To the Rescue!

"We all know that, like so many sites, they rely on algorithms to deal with abuse and harassment. But as we've seen many times -- a concerted effort by threat actors can manipulate the system to nuke accounts"

And this is only an example of using big data and "AI" to run businesses. What could possssssibly go wrong?

MP Kees Verhoeven wants EU to regulate the Internet of S**t

"What I'm saying is that you can't count on regulation in a market that basically lives on working AROUND regulations."

The market is about making money. If there's more money to be made in following regulations than getting around them they'll follow regulations.

There are a shedload of ways to make that happen.

Did you read this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/22/eir_customers_modems_vulnerable/ ? They can enumerate the defective modems in Ireland and the ISP networks they're on. If the regulations oblige the ISPs to ensure that any non-compliant devices are not exposed how easy is it going to be sell them? It becomes more profitable to sell compliant stuff than non-compliant stuff.

Maybe there are individuals who want to trade illegally because it's illegal rather than because it's profitable. OTOH in 14 years in forensic science I encountered one case where it seemed possible that that was the situation but I'm not wholly convinced. Most people just want the money.

" eBay may be in Luxembourg NOW, but they have PLENTY of other locations."

Yes, to trade in the EU they have plenty of other locations in the EU.

Companies wanting to do a lot of business in the EU need to have a legal presence in the EU. So upping sticks from Luxembourg isn't going to help them get round EU legislation.

If they have a choice between the problems of trying to do without that base and ensuring their traders are trading legally it'll be no contest.

Re: I doubt

Can we stop and think sensibly about this?

How many chip sets/software images are involved here? Not many, I'd expect. Vendors are wanting to take advantage of economies of scale. Small manufacturers don't generate their own economies of scale. They achieve it by buying in from large scale manufacturers who are selling components, including software, to all their competitors. Once the software is updated to take into account security requirements it can be sold on the same large scale just as effectively.

Look at things from the manufacturer's point of view. Making a product using version A of the software will result in lots of grief. A shipment could be seized in customs on import. Everything else in the container gets held back for checking. The manufacturer gets grief from the shipping agent who might well refuse any more shipments from him because he's getting grief from the other manufacturers who had stuff in the same container. Market places such as eBay and Alibaba (who, don't forget, are looking to set up a data centre business in the EU) won't allow the product to be sold through them. He might find other routes to a smaller fraction of the EU market but with higher costs or even simply stop selling to the EU. Competitors selling version B would have no such problems.

Does the manufacturer have any particular attachment to version A? Does he have some predilection for selling illegal stuff? Of course not. He just wants to sell as much stuff as possible as profitably as possible and if that's achieved by selling version B like his competitors are doing that's what he'll do too. No point in saddling himself with something that puts him at a disadvantage before he's even shipped the stuff out of the factory.

Now look at things from the software vendor's point of view. Version A has properties which cut him out of customers selling to the EU - and no doubt other markets will follow. A version B wouldn't. The volumes he's selling would spread the additional cost of developing version B very thinly. He could, of course, try to increase his profits and sell version B at a price which would force his customers to raise their prices. If, however, he has competitors competition will keep the price down. If he has no competitors and tries boosting the prices he'll soon find he's acquired some.

Now let's go back to the manufacturer again. He can ship version B of the software for the EU market (and any other market which follows suit) and version A for markets that don't care. Why would he? Having two product lines where one would do is just extra cost. Why bother? Come to that, why should the S/W vendor keep supplying version A?

The object of regulation and enforcement doesn't have to be complete detection of every infringing product. It simply has to be to make it more profitable to sell the non-infringing product.

"4) Stick to the gray markets where nothing's concrete enough for the law to reach."

Did you ever answer my question in another thread about these grey markets you keep going on about?

How do they grey market vendors contact the customer? They're not employing people to wander the streets to sidle up to punters saying "Wanna buy some hookey cameras? Come round the corner and I'll give you an address" are they?

They're advertising. They're selling through the likes of eBay. If you take note you'll find that eBay has a legal presence in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is inside the EU. They can be made amenable under legislation if they start advertising illegal stuff.

Then there are the customers themselves. If they're inside the EU they can also be made amenable for using such kit.

Enforcement of regulation doesn't need to be complete. It just needs to be good enough to give a competitive advantage to legal products. Why make an illegal product when a legal one is more profitable? That's all the difference you have to make.

Donald Trump confirms TPP to be dumped, visa program probed

Re: A mission statement is NOT a plan

"Until one day AI eliminates all humans, there will always be holes in large software systems."

Who's going to write the code for this AI?

Re: YES!

Well, I have a sneaking suspicion Trump chose him as the good old survival strategy of, "you may think you hate my politics, but consider who'll become President if I'm dead!")

The old Spiro Agnew ploy if I'm not mistaken.

"To add insult to injury the Disney employees being terminated were forced to train their replacements under threat of not receiving a specified termination package."

There's training and then there's training. "At the end of the day you can tidy up your work space by typing rm -rf *"

I think you'll find that almost all countries have such visa programs precisely because local talent is hard to find or overly expensive expects to be paid a rate commensurate with knowledge and experience.

FTFY although there may be a few other factors at work.

All too often the only reward mechanism is promotion to management as the technical pay scale doesn't extend that far. Up to a point the "management" post could be a facade to enable the business to retain someone who might otherwise be lost but that can't be worked very often and there's always a risk that higher management insist that the "manager" actually manage.

The consequence is that the work can end up being done by people who are either too inexperienced or too inept to be promoted and managed by people who would be good at the work but whose managerial abilities weren't known at the time of promotion and in many cases don't exist. I think most of us have experience of such managers.

Another factor is management's fondness for gimmicks such as motivational presentations. For a competent technical person the maximum number of such experiences is one. Companies can find themselves motivating experienced local talent right out of the door.

Re: oh yea..

"Spelt wrong" depends on which side of "the pond" you are on.

Kudos has to go to Voland for the ideal Transpondian post which included both.

Re: oh yea..

"However, despite DavCrav's enthusiasm for correct English, he totally failed to detect that labo[u]r was spelt wrong in the original comment"

Two countries divided by a common language.

Veeam kicks Symantec's ass over unpatentable patents

Re: Swish! Nothin' but net!

And USPTO paying Symantec's costs. They granted the patents in the first place.

Hack the Army: US military begs white hats to sweep it for bugs

Re: Vulnerable right down to their cores and completely defenceless against smart virtual exploits

"Do they imagine they are dealing with kindergarten kids?"

If their security is at TalkTalk level they could be.

IETF plants privacy test inside DNS

Re: I'm confused

"When you posted here the domain name forums.theregister.co.uk returned an IP address...If you are using HTTPS"

If.

el Reg isn't a good example.

Allow us to sum this up: UK ISP Plusnet minus net for nine-plus hours

Not noticed any outages here in West Yorks. Dunno about Plusnet email. It's far easier to have a email separate from the ISP just in case the ISP gets taken over by TalkTalk or whoever.

More than half of punters reckon they can't get superfast broadband

"Reservoirs and power generation are both rural industries in many/most cases and yet rural dwellers pay the same urban dwellers who may be many miles from the source at the end pf long and expensive wires/pipes."

What's more some rural communities were broken up to make way for reservoirs.

"instantly help"

Another! I agree with your argument, in fact with all 3 parts of it. But on the existing scale of things "instant" just doesn't happen. Even simply relocating your parents' line would be just one of a myriad of jobs all competing for the same resources.

"it's their choice to live out there and they have to take the rough with the smooth"

Ah diddums. Seriously, have you stopped to think what would happen if everyone from rural areas moved into the towns and cities? Would you be able to afford to live there any more because the house prices would shoot up? And the house you could afford might be several times your existing journey to work.

Seriously, the better solution would be to concentrate on enabling as much employment as possible to move out from the towns and cities by improving rural communications and converting some of the newly vacant office space to residential so that the remaining urban workers could live close to work so that there's be less distance to commute. It would be far more sustainable that the present situation which has been driven by over half a century's worth of planning policy dedicated to separating residential and employment areas.

"This discussion has been going on for years and will continue to go until someone steps up and just gets it done."

People keep throwing in these words like "always" and "just".

If someone should "just" get it done why not you? All you have to do is buy a lot of fibre, a lot of gear, recruit and train a few thousand staff and arrange planning for all the street works you'll have to do. It'll cost you billions but, hay, you can borrow that. Of course you'll need to be able to sell the product at a price that at least covers the interest and repayment of the loans. If you hire the staff direct you'll have to pay redundancy when you lay them off after the project's finished. How long will it take? If by "just" you mean a couple of weeks it's going to be a hell of a big ask for everybody. Or is just going to stretch for a couple of years? Or a couple of decades?

Are you going to do that? How long will your "just" amount to?

Why do you think it's been talked about for years? Could it be because nobody wants to take the risks and make the investment for something that you think can "just" be done?

Re: Disruption

"As many as 79 per cent said they would accept disruption to their home in order to get faster broadband – an obstacle often cited by the biggest providers as an obstacle to fibre."

And how many said "how much?" when told what it might cost? Or wasn't that bit mentioned?

Re: exchange only lines...

"Someone said, a few years ago, that the value of BT's copper was greater than the market valuation of the company itself."

Value as scrap or value as plant? There's a difference.

Re: Copper cabling, crap service

"Fibre has always been the way to go."

"Always" is a big word. Some of us can remember times when it not only wasn't the way to go but didn't even exist except when you melted the middle of a glass rod in a Bunsen flame and pulled the ends apart.

Of course telephones existed in those days and it would have been silly to have waited for fibre to be developed so they were connected by copper.

Some of us can also remember the times when cable was introduced and BT wasn't even allowed in so various other companies cherry picked the areas where they thought the best ROI was to be found.

It was only when the cherries had been picked that it was demanded that not only should BT cable up the rest of the country PDQ but that the erstwhile cherry-pickers should be able to piggy-back on BT's investments when they couldn't be arsed to make their own.

Four IBM data centres planned for Big Blue UK cloud

"Residency in the UK enables customers to brush past data retention and privacy regulations that would have stopped UK citizens data and financial information going to US-based firms in otherwise unsavoury overseas locations."

How savoury is the UK as a location these days?

Google DeepMind inks 5-year agreement with NHS for 'Streams' app

Re: Comparative context

US vs UK sensitivities?

"It is in nobody's interests that there be a breach of privacy."

Did you leave out the sarcasm tag? Data is valuable these days. A breach of privacy would undoubtedly be in someone's interest. Maybe not those closely associated with the project but that doesn't justify such an open-ended statement.

Fallout from Euro Patent Office meltdown reaches Dutch parliament

Re: use a different photo!

What photo?

Mines the one without regmedia.co.uk in the pocket.

Re: Just another example of a harmonious and efficient European organisation

Shit just doesn't get done when you're constantly having to appease the fragile sensibilities interests of France.

A further small but important correction.

Merkel calls for balanced approach to data protection

"In Germany we have the principle of 'data minimisation', but we may have to give a little on that. Such a principle doesn't seem as appropriate when you are looking at big data,"

Wrong way round. Big data doesn't seem so appropriate when you are looking at the principle of data minimisation. It's big data that needs to give.

UK.gov flings £400m at gold standard, ‘full-fibre' b*&%*%£$%. Yep. Broadband

Re: Get the basics right first.

"His point was that they are set targets for delivery by the bean-counters who manage the funding"

But who made the original promises? If it was the bean-counters then they should keep them. If they were made by someone who didn't have the authority to implement them they shouldn't have made them.

If a schedule is made and published it should be with the sign-off of everyone involved, including the finance. And that everyone should then consider themselves bound by it. Yes, there could be external reasons why it can't be kept - fire at the exchange, for example. Accountants should not be external reasons.

Irish eyes are crying: Tens of thousands of broadband modems wide open to hijacking

Re: "except for IP addresses"

"They *are* the ISP so presumably could have their routers configured to block incoming IP addresses to any customer that should not exist"

They could also block any specific ports - such as 7547.

New state of matter discovered by superconductivity gurus

"Some element of logic would indicate that there should be some state between structurally different states, for example, solid and liquid"

But the same element of logic would indicate other states between solid, the interim state and liquid. And iteratively...It's states all the way down.

It sounds more like processes of changing states. In the water/ice case there are already names for them: freezing and melting. That raises the question of whether this pseudo-gap is actually a state or simply a process of becoming or ceasing to be a superconductor.

Why I just bought a MacBook Air instead of the new Pro

Re: Surface is nice and all

"Don't get irritated when nobody wants to handhold you as to why you can't find the SysV init scripts."

Been using Unix & Unix-like OSs for almost as long as Poettering has been drawing breath and well before SysV. I don't seen any reason to change to something that no longer fits that description. If systemd-free Linux becomes unsustainable - and I accept that it might - I'll make the move to a BSD.

Barnet Council: Outsourcing deal with Capita has 'performance issues'

Re: "Savings"

"Here in nottinghamshire they instigated a new 'savings' scheme by preventing out-of-area people using their recycling scheme (local tip to you and me). All 'customers' wanting to use their 'facilities' had to register and they were going to check to see if you were registered using a hand held device scanning your numberplate."

Have they combined it with tweaking specs for trailers, vehicles etc? Restricted what you're allowed to take (e.g. no rubble)? And have they then found the 'savings' impact of the fly-tipping everyone outside the council predicted?

Re: Pity the poor ratepayer

"Worse services, libraries closing, parking management a nightmare. potholes galore."

I was with you till you got to Barnet. I thought you were describing Kirklees.

Re: It's Barnet council that has "performnace issues"

"As a responsible consultant, you should be looking at the RFQ and highlighting areas where you think they may be deficient, and clarifying anything you think is ambiguous so that both sides agree what it means, all before providing the price and timescale quote."

If you ask questions that can't be answered (it'd require someone to do work) you'll be regarded as an awkward bastard and the contract will go elsewhere.

Re: It's Barnet council that has "performnace issues"

"Have Crapita ever successfully completed a project on time and to budget?"

As a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor to Crapita I was on two projects that completed on time. I couldn't comment on budget - outside my scope. I've retired since then so things might have gone downhill a bit.

Re: It's Barnet council that has "performnace issues"

"For any large organisation that rarely applies because big organisations have scale by definition"

For too many councils this simply extends Murphy's Law so mean that anything that can go wrong will do so on a larger scale and that there will be more things to go wrong.

UK PM Theresa May's £2bn in R&D still a drop in the ocean

'She said: “We need to make the UK outside the EU the most attractive place to invest.”'

Which might need more than financial incentives if the EU decide that businesses subject to May-style spyware can't be allowed to handle citizen's personal data.

'£2b is rather less than the annual cost of employing the extra 30,000 civil servants who are needed to find out what "Brexit" means.'

I'd hope not. A lot of those 30,000 would be clerical grades which ought to pull down the average somewhat.

Surveillance camera compromised in 98 seconds

Re: Why is this still a problem?

"...because the business risk to the vendors is currently near zero and margins are paper thin."

And because TPTB haven't the wit to introduce regulation with just enough enough enforcement to tip the risk and margins in favour of selling compliant stuff.

Kids' Hour of Code turns into a giant corporate infomercial for kids

Re: Minecraft as a way to force Win 10 in education

Who didn't expect things to turn nasty once they'd bought it?

Microsoft's cmd.exe deposed by PowerShell in Windows 10 preview

Re: Yet another Windows 10 annoyance

"I do with Gnome. When they decided to go all single pane crap and dropped split pane in Nautilus (they could have left it as an option but didn't). Despite lots of complaints their answer was 'our way or the highway'. It was the final straw for me and I put on my walking shoes. I'm sure I wasn't alone."

Or as I said, broken. But it wasn't a no option situation. There were existing choices, that was the point.

Re: ksh or nothing, thank heavens for cygwin

"Say you're writing a script that will output the IP of the current machine, in bash you'd pipe the output from ifconfig through a grep and a cut or two (after thinking carefully about all the possible outputs and how they might break your regex), in Powershell you'd just reference (Get-NetIPAddress).IPAddress ."

Or

hostname -I

D-Link joins hands with Microsoft to give 'Super Wi-Fi' a push

Re: 54MHz?

So you're saying it should be 540MHz? Just a missing zero - a mere nothing.

Forget 'shadow IT' – it's 'self-starting IT' now

Re: You broke it, you bought it IT

"You bought it, Your problem."

Or the slight variation, you bought it; you fix it.

Put down the org chart, snowflake: Why largile's for management crybabies

Re: In 5 years?

"In another 5 years, we'll all be tired of incomplete, faulty software and switch back to Waterfall."

And then remember that it was invented as a straw man.

Can I be fist to say...

...BINGO

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

"The mainstream media is dead because it lies, it no longer has the narrative"

You seem to imply that having "the narrative" means accurate reportage. I'd have thought it was just the opposite.

Re: Just say No.

"facebook is actually useful. It's how I and almost all my friends coordinate our real life social lives"

That's just the network effect. If you'd settled on something else, say email and a mail-list, you could do exactly the same thing.