Posts by Doctor Syntax

America edges closer to get-a-proper-warrant-to-read-my-email law

"Not sure that applies as US law is rather big on exercising any leverage they can find."

Whoosh?

Presumably the TLAs will argue that because it's US legislation it won't apply to email held on servers in Ireland.

Dyson hair dryer

Re: Measuring isn't controlling

"Thankfully common sense has triumphed and they've been ripped out and replaced with towels."

I saw a report recently how much more effective those high speed driers were at spreading bacteria - several orders of magnitude higher, in fact. Assuming your towels are disposable as opposed to being bits of cloth hung on the wall*, they're the best solution.

*Lab assignment from student days ($HOW_LONG??-ago). Take towel hanging above lab WHB. Press onto surface of nutrient agar. Close Petri dish lid. Incubate. Observe technicolour growth a few days later.

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware storms live TV weather forecast

Re: Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"My parents and the rest of their 70-year old peer group have a problem with it"

You should help them out, install something better.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"That was embarrassing. But it's a good way to learn for the future"

Yup. Microsoft, read and learn.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"have what looks to be just under 150 members of staff. Deploying and maintaining the professional version of Windows Vista or 7 would be, in my opinion, the wrong choice in terms of administration and cost for an organisation of this size."

What size does an organisation have to be before, in your opinion, it takes on the extra overhead of specialised staff to run its IT system? Not that it matters, their finance department is likely to have the say over this.

"I would imagine that who ever is in charge of their IT function would have (or in this case should have) made use of Microsoft's volume licensing deals in order to get the best value out of the software that they are clearly using"

Whoever is in charge of their IT function might well have been told to keep their hands off studio kit. In fact, it may well have been bought in completely separately from any other IT in the business as a specialised hardware/software bundle for this purpose.

In any event there is no excuse whatsoever, zero, zilch, nil for a vendor overriding what the user is doing to display messages or initiate updates at arbitrary times. None.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"That just doesn't make any sense to man nor beast."

We're talking about Microsoft here - oh, I see what you mean: beast.

Re: @James 51 - Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"I periodically have a walk around Currys and spend a few seconds rebooting the systems from an USB stick with a live Linux distro."

You shouldn't do that. What happens when the customer gets home & finds that all he's bought is another W10 box?

Last week a lecturer at the local Civic Society said that recently he'd been told that there was a PC available in a hall where he was to speak so he turned up with just his Powerpoint (probably on a thumb drive!). The PC spent 55 minutes downloading updates.

To forestall what seem to be usual comments: just a PC in a hall, no WSUS, no IT department to run a single PC. Yes, I know the organisers shouldn't have connected it to the net but they probably weren't Register readers who'd have known that.

Re: @James 51 - Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"I periodically have a walk around Currys"

If you walk round Currys hoping to find Linux in any guise other than Android you must have time to waste.

Re: Poor IT Standards at this outfit

"Any Computer running in a corporate environment that sees this message is an immediate red flag that your IT is not being managed correctly."

For some values of corporate. There are very many medium-sized businesses that can't afford a team of BOFHs to look after their systems.

They have been sold the idea of a small network of computers running Windows Professional as a cheap and simple way of meeting their computing needs. Maybe they should have known better. Maybe they should have known the salesman was lying because they could see his lips moving. Nevertheless they have bought this stuff in good faith and are now finding that faith misplaced. They are businesses in their own fields, not in computing; they should not be required to run the overhead of an IT department to deal with what they've been sold.

"Win7 Professional certainly is home software if you choose to use it at home."

And by the same token it's professional software if you choose to use it professionally. As per my comment above, they've probably been using a set-up that's worked well for them over the years. Why should they be expected to have had the foresight to set it up differently so that their vendor couldn't do this to them years in the future?

Re: GWX Control Panel might help here

"There are reasons not to?"

Yes, if you're just running on a VM for some occasional requirement W2K might do just as well.

Re: Do what I've done

"Windows 7 at SP1 level only. No Internet access allowed (Network adapter disabled in Control Panel)."

They probably needed a connection to get the forecast maps onto the PC in the first place. One doesn't just install a PC nor install an OS on it just for the sake of it. One does it to perform a job and the job will have other requirements beyond the hardware & OS.

Re: Oh, yeah...

"So, if this news station had been running an enterprise version of what looks like either Vista or 7, the popup would never have ruined their lovely weather report."

Disregarding for a moment the post which says your assumption isn't true, let's examine the implications a little further. At some point in the past, probably several years ago, they set up this system. They used what would at that time have been a perfectly appropriate version of Windows, Vista or 7, probably Professional. Now you're saying that they should have spent extra on Enterprise, even if they had no other reason to do so, because they should have predicted that Microsoft would do this and they should have protected themselves. They may be doing weather forecasting but that doesn't extend so far into the future.

Apple will be grilled by Irish National Planning Board over €850m data centre plan

Re: Sounds like the site is/was a tree farm

'since it is now a "forest" in name only if the trees aren't native and have probably been planted in rows.'

Calling non-native plantations forests is a prime example of getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

As a non-native (?Sitka spruce) plantation it would always have been intended to be harvested by clear felling after a number of years. From what I can see on Google maps a large portion of it has already been felled. If it was previously woodland the real environmental offence would have been the plantation itself. I wonder what the local objections were to the existing adjacent golf course.

Another failed merger, Carly? Ted Cruz to bring in ex-HP boss Fiorina as running mate

"Cruz ... has no experience in business."

By comparison he should regard that as an advantage.

Apple man found dead at Cupertino HQ, gun discovered nearby

'Sgt Andrea Urena of Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office described the death as "isolated incident,"'

No. A death is hardly ever an isolated incident. It affects a wider circle than the deceased.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Wanna walk the plank voluntarily? You got it

The HP fragments must have remarkably able C-suite executives. Because as things are going at present they'll be the only ones left to fill the contracts. At which point they'll probably be hit with IR35.

Is Dublin becoming as unaffordable as San Francisco?

Re: Housing shortage

"Dublin can't get enough skilled people"

Could the housing shortage have anything to do with that?

China's Dalek-like robots fear only one terrifying nemesis: Stairs

"It's fitted with a stun weapon"

A robot BOFH.

Linux infosec outfit does a Torvalds, rageblocks innocent vuln spotter

Shooting the messanger

Never a good idea.

Docker hired private detectives to pursue woman engineer's rape, death threat trolls

"Yep, I reckon Docker should do the decent thing and release details of the harassment that was aimed at their employee."

You mean, in effect, repeat the harassment in public?

Re: @Meldreth -- Utterly unacceptable

"Am I on a different planet?"

You seem to be.

"Why wouldn't tech journalists call out Docker to share what they found when investigating this?"

Because they're sufficiently well-informed to realise that (a) investigations proceed best when the subject isn't warned of progress and (b) if the investigation results in court action such action might have to be dropped if prior publication were to be ruled prejudicial.

Google can't hold back this malware running riot in its Play store

Re: What chance ordinary users to stay safe?

"Sadly, they don't seem to have been taken further."

Maybe they'd not be backwards-compatible with their existing OS. That clean slate is a problem for everyone who's got an existing product. Just like Unix, MS has a heritage extending back into the '70s.

The 70s/early 80s had a big advantage. There was new hardware without any OS. Although Bell labs were working with hardware that did have an OS that was nullified because they'd been working on an abandoned line of OS research, Multics, so they also had a clean slate. It's going to be hard for anyone to push themselves back to that position and then try to compete against existing platforms with existing app-stores, however flawed.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Branson will lead Sage's 'sexy accounting' shtick

"Why do corporates pay for these celebs to attend their conferences?"

I think it's the execs' idea. It makes them feel important.

But celebs & beancounters - is it really a marriage made in heaven?

Thunderbird is GO: Mozilla prepares to jettison mail client

'Last time I complained on a Thunderbird forum I got told "It's free, how can you complain about something you don't pay for"'

This is a common problem with FOSS forums. There's always a smattering of religious zealots who assume that because it's free in the Stallman sense that it must be beyond criticism - and will be even more beyond criticism in the next release. Alternatively you'll be told that there's the source, fix it up yourself. In reality the actual devs may well be aware of the problems but are too busy chasing something more demanding - such as chasing a changes in the libraries on which they depend.

"This would be a terrible blow."

What would? The article discusses alternatives to enable Thunderbird to be better supported. I don't see that as a terrible blow, more like something to be welcomed.

Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,

"Under the hood, Firefox is racing flat out to keep up with Chrome implementing the standard. If Firefox so much as pulls in for a pit stop, it will fall behind catastrophically and be lost."

And the corollary seems to be that Thunderbird, by using the underpinnings of Firefox has exactly the same problem in relation to Firefox that Firefox has in relation to Chrome. As far as I'm aware Seamonkey also has the same problem and so does Palemoon.

I recall reading that Palemoon were considering writing their own rendering engine. Maybe there's scope for all the Mozilla spin-offs and splinter groups to get together and provide themselves with their own common core, either as a fork or from ground up.

Re: Still around?

"So Thunderbird's a fully-fledged mail server now, is it?"

Read this carefully. Thunderbird allows you to download your mail from the server and keep, i.e. store, it anywhere you want, even with multiple copies in multiple locations. Was that too difficult to understand?

Re: Still around?

"you need your own mail server as well"

Yes, but you don't need to run it yourself. In addition to the usual suspect there are paid for service providers. Your ISP may include an email service although using it makes it harder to jump ship if they have problems such as, let's say, three security breaches in less than a year.

My own solution is my own domain with both the registration and email server handled by a single hosting company. Several years advance payment didn't amount to much and I can set up multiple email addresses within the domain.

Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,

"Can someone else look after Firefox too?"

Palemoon?

Re: I use thunderbird, and don't want to see it go

"Seamonkey is still going strong for the truly nostalgic."

When re-homing Thunderbird with the Document Foundation was looked at some months ago one of the issues raised was the need to re-skin it to fit in with LibreOffice. In its Seamonkey guise the mail client wouldn't be a problem. Ironically it seems that LibreOffice (and OpenOffice?) had a good deal of Seamonkey code buried in it until fairly recently in order to have access to the address-book.

As a user of both Seamonkey and LibreOffice my preferred choice would be to see the Document Foundation look after the whole shooting match giving the option of anything between a free-standing email client and a complete package.

Re: Still around?

Given the existence of good email clients why would anyone want to keep their email on someone else's computer?

F-35's dodgy software in the spotlight again

Re: Just trust US. We've been flying by the seat of our pants for a long time

"the most incredible flying machine"

"Incredible" seems to be the operative word here.

Hackers so far ahead of defenders it's not even a game

Re: Don't remind me!

"the CFO complains that his Windows is getting slower and no-one is upgrading his laptop."

Probably the best option would be to collect his laptop first thing every the morning for its daily update. The daily update would be so exhaustive that it would only be ready to return to him last thing at night.

Meet the malware that screwed a Bangladeshi bank out of $81m

" SWIFT said that the attack didn't exploit a vulnerability in its security systems and was entirely dependent on an attacker compromising a local terminal."

Including your terminals within your security system boundaries might be a good idea. After all, they're the obvious points of attack.

FBI ends second iPhone fight after someone, um, 'remembers' the PIN

Re: this whole unlocking thing kills their bluffs

"Making the cost of over $1 million public was probably not Comey's best move"

I hope they kept the receipt.

Re: They'll keep trying

"They will likely pick another case in the same judicial district as the San Bernadino case, where they already had a favorable lower court ruling"

Reportedly when they got the initial ruling they'd told the court that it would be easy for Apple & Apple didn't get to say their piece. If that's the case there's probably a magistrate there now who's a little upset about the whole thing so I doubt another warrant would go through on the nod in that court.

And what was found on the phone now it's unlocked? Will we be told?

What a difference a year makes: ICO tele-spam fines break £2m barrier

"a £5,000 penalty issued to an MP"

I'm disappointed to read that. Telephone spam should have been sufficient to make them an ex-MP. What were the voters thinking of? I wonder if the fine should have been reported as part of their election costs.

Ad-blocker blocking websites face legal peril at hands of privacy bods

Re: @FF22 no one pays attention to them??

'How many times have you said "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label"?'

None.

Re: Bull?

'I am not easily persuaded that something IS illegal just because Mr Hanff SAYS it is, and that such "illegality" will actually be enforced by the national or European courts'

Of course illegality won't be determined except by decision of a court. But courts don't proactively pursue cases. Cases have to be brought to them. This appears to be Mr Hanff's intention and seeking the views of the regulators is a sensible step to take before doing so.

Re: Almost enough to make me want to vote to stay in

"Frequently, I find that to be necessary but obscure device drivers which means I have to take it or abandon the hardware which means money."

Extreme edge cases don't seem like a sound foundation for what might remain of the existing advertising business model.

Re: A blocker to block the anti-blocker

"You can't do that without wasting bandwidth."

Serving ads, particularly big chunks of video, to someone who will only take an instant dislike to the ad and consequently to whatever it's advertising isn't a good way of conserving bandwidth.

"Servers can always tell if something is requested or not, meaning you can't ad-block without them knowing you're ad-blocking."

Request and send to /dev/null would be effective where bandwidth isn't a consideration. It's the nearest you could get to a win/win. The publisher gets paid and the advertiser, who'd have paid anyway if the ad was seen, doesn't get identified to the user and so doesn't lose out if they were a potential customer. It would be in the advertising industry's best interests not to try to detect this.

Re: They might learn

"When it comes to things like obscure device drivers"

Extreme edge cases are unlikely to be enough for the survival of such a thoroughly unpopular branch of the advertising industry.

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

"Until you find out the calls came internationally from foreign countries who could care less about EU law."

The callers get sent for a long weight. It seems to work, I get very few of them. I really should get round to making a note of who they're representing. There's little point in making a sales call if the business they're selling on behalf of doesn't have some toehold in this jurisdiction and AFAIK the principals are responsible for the actions of their agents.

Sadly the only call from "Microsoft Support" was missed. An opportunity wasted.

"(a) It doesn't get picked up"etc.

It goes into the post box. It gets picked up when the post box gets cleared. Frankly I don't care whether the original sender or the Royal Mail picks up the cost, it isn't me. The Royal Mail now has contracts for delivering bulk unaddressed mail. They really ought to be responsible for the costs of disposal and pass that on as part of the contract charges. The councils for the areas to which they distribute this litter shouldn't be responsible for disposal, the polluter should pay.

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

"Junk calls."

TPS. Offenders either get the long weight treatment or get grassed up to ICO/Ofcom as appropriate to build the case for those nice fines.

"Junk mail."

AKA letter-box litter - let's clearly identify it as what it is: pollution. Gets posted back. I don't give a damn whether it's the offender or Royal Mail who carries the cost. Frankly, if everyone did this I think junk mail would die a quick death as it would put real costs back where they belong on the polluter pays principle. I don't see why council tax payers should be burdened with the cost of other people's litter.

And in general let's be clear about the effects of this - if this crap comes from businesses I deal with it gets counted as negative customer service. My current house insurance will go elsewhere at next renewal due to the current insurer's incontinence with spam. A previous insurer lost the business due to letter-box litter. British Gas stopped trying to sell me electricity when I made it crystal clear that one more call would cost them their existing business with me.

Re: Lots of people hate adverts...

""How are individuals trying to get small web-based businesses started supposed to promote their products?"

This is a question that deserves a fuller answer than I gave last night.

I'll start off by taking out "web-based" and dealing with small businesses in general.

Looking back over the past couple of years or so I've used several local tradesmen such as a joiner, painters, central heating and plumbing, garage door repairer, blacksmith (wrought iron gate), dry-stone waller & tree surgeon. The joiner advertised in print in the parish magazine. The painters were recommended by the joiner. The central heating engineer we'd used before, probably found in the phone book but relocated by his website via search. When we had a non-heating plumbing requirement he recommended his brother. Garage door repairer was found by searching for description and locality which turned up his website. I can't remember how we first came across the blacksmith but he lives across the road now. I found one waller via his website and search but he was too expensive so I hired one recommended by the joiner. The tree surgeon was another search & website discovery. I forgot to include the roofer in my list: ad in local free paper. So, two print ads, the remainder a mixture of word-of-mouth and web search. The joiner and heating engineer were both recommended to my daughter when she needed such services.

One aspect of this should be apparent - a web-based small business can be found by search engine, the only difference is that when looking for a physical small business rather than a web-based one included the locality as a search term. Also, at web-scale social media or specialised forums seem to stand in for word-of-mouth very well.