Posts by Doctor Syntax

Childcare app bods wipe users' data – then discover backups had been borked for a year

"it was discovered the database back up had not been working properly over the past 12 months."

What backups? If they're not regularly tested they're not backups and clearly they hadn't been tested.

We want GCHQ-style spy powers to hack cybercrims, say police

“you cannot control crime through the criminal justice system.”

This is a self-defeating attitude to take. Looking again at that quote "for every 100 crimes committed only 50 are reported to police, even fewer of those reports are recorded and a mere two per cent of crimes are successfully prosecuted."

A serial offender may only be successfully prosecuted for those crimes where he leaves sufficient evidence to support a prosecution. In practical terms the police are justified in concentrating effort on those crimes so a 2% successful prosecution rate may, in effect, be clearing up rather more than 2% of crimes. However to ensure that potentially prosecutable crimes get the attention they deserve there needs to be some form of triage for all reports. The fact that not all reports are recorded is a worry and there probably needs to be a serious review to remove as much administrative burden on reporting as possible so that resources are freed up to triage and then investigate.

For physical crime extending triage would probably require more SOCO resources. For cyber-crime possibly this could be automated which I presume the new national unit is doing but I'd guess there are a lot of police counters who don't know what to do if someone does report such a crime. That needs to be attended to with 100% forwarding of reports.

As to prevention perhaps the biggest step would be re-engineering of email. At one level ransomware is delivered by email and at higher levels social engineering via email seems to be a way in for bigger frauds. Sender authentication needs to be baked into the system so that faked email doesn't get moved through the system. However, given that the PGP underpinnings for digital signing also provide a basis for universal encryption, I can't see TPTB encouraging the uptake of this any time soon.

For crimes where the perpetrators are on UK soil there is a well-established route for getting such powers. Go to a magistrate & ask for a warrant. If there are reasons why this doesn't work for what they need then there's a case for updating. But with all the RIPA stuff I'd have thought that there was over-provision for this.

For international crime there probably are problems. Put simply, a nation's police powers stop at its borders. Any warrant issued in one country doesn't give the police of that country the right to attack a computer in another (the US might have a little difficulty comprehending this). If a police force were to hack a computer in another country without clearance from that country then it would be as much of an offence there as if it were done by anyone else.

OTOH because crime can be so easily committed across national boundaries there needs to be a means of investigating it and bringing cases to trial in an appropriate jurisdiction. To do so within law requires provision in international law. Some such framework needs to be put in place but that need can't be met simply by telling local police to just go ahead as they see fit.

Beautiful, efficient, data-sucking Smart Cities: Why do you give us the creeps?

"the vision only really seems to being put into practice by authoritarian city-state strongmen."

Apart from the vendors I can't think of anyone else who'd want it.

Paint your wagon (with electric circuits) but leave my crotch alone

@MrT

You're right. It was Dalo that made pens. They were loaded with resist so you could draw out your circuit board and etch it.

"emerging products such as AgIC’s circuit marker pen"

Maybe it's age playing tricks on my memory but I'm sure that sort of thing was about decades ago, primarily for repairing boards with damaged traces. Maybe "re-emerging" would be more apt.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise in talks to offload software, asking for '$8bn to $10bn'

How about, once they've finished rewinding all this stuff they get rid of a few top management who obviously never really belonged there and buy Agilent and Keysight. They could put together quite a good business which would be well respected. What could they call it? Hewlett Packard?

OpenBSD 6.0 lands

"Linux emulation ... removed."

So that rules out OpenBSD for systemd refugees who might just happen to need to run binary-only stuff from Linux land.

That Public Health study? No, it didn't say 'don't do chemo'

Re: UK Big Data boffins not up to the task?

Maybe some things are best done from a safe distance.

Surge pricing? How about surge fines: Pennsylvania orders Uber to cough up $11.4m

Re: Commonwealth

"being a Brit, I was only aware of the (British) Commonwealth of Nations."

You should also have been aware that in the middle of the C17th Britain was a Commonwealth under the Cromwells.

Robot cars probably won't happen, sniffs US transport chief

Re: "A.I. is hard."

Not at all. It'll be ready in about 10 years time. Just like it has been for the last several decades.

Re: Why all the edge cases?

"The objections to car autonomy are always weird edge cases."

Accidents, in case you haven't noticed, are not the norm. They are the weird edge cases.

Re: Easy Peasy way to resolve the question

"Google autonomous cars exist, and currently are tootling around with a human ready to take over when the AI gives up."

Which, when you think about it, tells you a good deal about the confidence currently placed in the ability of the AI. When the situation is reversed we can maybe start thinking that autonomous cars might be a good idea.

Re: 80000 lb truck

"The only question is who is responsible for deciding. Apparently Secretary Hart believes only meatbags should be granted divine authority to decide"

How does the machine decision get made? Ultimately, by a programmer or someone directing the programmer. So how do you characterise that programmer or other someone? Or maybe the programmer is directed by a committee so that responsibility for any decision, however bad, doesn't actually fall on any particular person. A committee decision - what could possibly go wrong?

Re: Looking forward to it

"The software won't be perfect" Very unlikely, I agree

"accidents will happen" A natural consequence of the above

"but less than what some idiots cause now." Evidence?

"My grandfather had a horse & cart that he used to do that on."

Back in the C18th a several times ggfather was killed falling from his horse. The same diary that records that also records a clergyman killed falling off his horse when drunk. The horse might be an autonomous transportation unit but it isn't safe.

Blackhat wannabes proffer probably bogus Linux scamsomware

Re: Two words

And a third: fail2ban

L0phtCrack's back! Crack hack app whacks Windows 10 trash hashes

Re: Microsoft says...

"would the obligatory reference ... help?"

No.

Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it

Re: @ Doctor Syntax

But it's like beauty which is only skin deep but then the skin's the only thing you see.

It makes these asteroid mining ventures a little more realistic. Just wait for the asteroid to land before you mine it - once it's cooled down, of course.

FBI Director wants 'adult conversation' about backdooring encryption

"US tech firms are, of course, very worried ... any backdoor would kill their sales, both domestically and internationally."

They would of course, have the option of becoming non-US companies. I'm quite sure there are a number of companies that would be happy to accommodate them. Ireland anybody.

They'd have to sell weak encrypted products in the US which is rather ironical. Back in the day the US was very insistent that they should have strong encryption and the rest of the world would have to have weak encryption. If Comey gets his way that might be reversed.

Re: Feels ...?

"How about when law enforcement KNOWS they have probable cause?"

Even better: when law enforcement has sufficiently clear cause to obtain a search warrant.

Life imitates satire: Facebook touts zlib killer just like Silicon Valley's Pied Piper

"a state-of-the-art probability compressor"

Douglas Adams would have been proud.

Astronauts sequence DNA in space for the first time

Re: why microgravity should affect DNA

"some unexpected effect of microgravity on the minION tester"

There are millions of gadgets. Are they going to fly examples of all of them to test in microgravity for unexpected effects?

BTW, what sort of sample prep is needed for this? The nanaopore FAQ said read the list of laboratory equipment but didn't provide one that I can find. The idea of using a centrifuge on the ISS seems interesting....

Re: They took e coli into space????

What MAF said, plus from the article it appears that they only took prepared DNA samples into space. That avoids all the difficult sample prep work. It doesn't have much to say about what the effects of being in space might have on DNA in living organisms but that could be addressed by before and after sampling on the ground. In fact it sounds more like the sort of thing that you'd get out of a space agency/school publicity stunt: how do these seeds germinate in space etc.

"lambda phage, a bacteria"

Apart from the fact that the singular of bacteria is bacterium, a phage isn't a bacterium, it's a virus.

What I'm really left wondering is why microgravity should affect DNA. Radiation, OTOH, should be a consideration.

Lawyers! win! millions! in! bonkers! Yahoo! email! snooping! case!

Is there going to be another class action to stop them scanning data at rest?

I have to admire the comment that it's so complicated not scanning messages that having put a mechanism in place to not scan them it would be too complicated to start scanning again. Nice one.

Newest Royal Navy warship weighs as much as 120 London buses

Re: So, what's it for?

"After the last time they grounded a frigate it was suggested that there was a bit of a training gap - once upon a time we had lots of small coastal vessels"

Wouldn't someone trained on coastal vessels be more likely to ground it when driving something bigger?

Re: 120 London buses

"How many cats would that be ?"

Inappropriate measure for ships. Ships don't have any feet to land on and it's not a good idea to drop them.

Behold: Huawei evokes always-wise God Cloud – with Terminator users

But can they hang on to their password files?

Missing Milky Way mass blown away by bingeing supermassive black hole

Although dark matter doesn't interact via EM forces AIUI it interacts via gravity, its existence being deduced by the need for some gravitational effects needed to explain the behaviour of observed matter.

But if it interacts by gravity with observed matter the two should attract each other so why don't these forms of matter co-locate? As observed matter clusters together under the influence of gravity my expectation would be that dark matter would cluster with it instead of being in some form of galactic halo.

Or to put it another way, why aren't we all 10 times heavier than we are (take all junk food jokes as read)?

Cloudy biz Vesk suffers 2-day outage – then boasts of 100% uptime

Is the Trades Description Act still a thing?

71,000 Minecraft World Map accounts leaked online after 'hack'

Re: A password manager?

"It's open source."

Not a lot of use to the OP if he can't install anything on his work machine. The best would be to run it on a personal device and then type in passwords manually.

Re: A password manager?

"So how exactly am I supposed to use a password manager when I don't control the machine I'm working on?"

A good point. It's something that sysadmins need to consider. Add a password manager to standard builds. Encourage its use.

Re: So we're debating password creation methods ?

"by guessing the year"

There isn't even a need to guess as far as el Reg is concerned. Just click on the handle at the top of the comment.

Re: Correct Horse...

"The first seven characters are from a previously owned vehicles reg plate"

I can only even remember 3 of my car number plates: the first because, well, it was first, second because it was my MG and it was an easy one to remember and my current one because I have to. As soon as one becomes no longer current, it's gone.

USBee stings air-gapped PCs: Wirelessly leak secrets with a file write

"That's a radio jammer, which is illegal"

No, it's a hair dryer. Also blocks attempts to get information out via sound waves.

Re: There's another way...

""Excuse me while I watch you type in your password, no? well could I just borrow your laptop for a sec while I extract your crypto keys.""

"Could I borrow your laptop to install this code which will enable me to extract data when you have a USB storage device plugged in."

Labour's Jeremy Corbyn wants high speed broadband for all. Wow, original idea there

Re: Socialism?

" I made the original post this morning when Europe was awake. Lots of downvotes."

Probably from people who can't get 4G in London upset at the idea that people in Wales might.

Re: "democratise the internet"

"It all depends on how it is used, but look at Estonia. They have a distributed set of services, all linked by a middleware layer with a unique identity product."

That would require trusting your politicians - at least twice as far as you could throw them.

EU verdict: Apple received €13bn in illegal tax benefits from Ireland

Re: Apple have strong bladders..

"The very existence of the EU is at threat and the single market is right up there as the biggest cause of the problems."

The single market was what it was all about originally. It's all the "ever closer integration" nonsense that's the cause of the problems. None of which is relevant to this case. The issue here is that Ireland decided to let Apple play silly buggers with paper companies. Apple would still have got a good deal at Ireland's standard tax rate although they'd probably have found a different tax haven for all the rest-of-the-world business that's been put through Ireland. In general I don't think the rest of the EU are terribly happy with the standard Irish rate but short of the EU imposing yet another EU-wide diktat they have to lump it.

Re: What I don't get...

"The sale of products of services within a country should be taxed in that country."

OK, assuming you're in the UK*. You buy something off an eBay seller in Ireland. In which country is the deal done?

This, of course, oversimplifies the matter given that eBay is Luxembourg so that's another country thrown into the mix.

*It doesn't matter if you're not. It applies to any pair of buyers and sellers in different countries.

Re: Of course, Ireland has already protested

"Governments everywhere have to start recognizing that in a global economy they all have to co-operate and agree to a uniform tax structure"

Some governments - e,g, Ireland - realise that at the level of multinationals there's a free market in tax rates. Individual governments can decide whether they're better off being poor competitors in that market in order to clean up taxing purely domestic businesses so it's not going to be a race to the bottom, more a matter of strategic choices.

If the US wants to continue the high tax route it can scarcely complain about the obvious consequences with multinationals. Nobody's stopping them from lowering their tax rate if they wand to.

Countries such as Ireland, however, are better off with a low tax strategy. Would it be right for the US or anyone else to force them into a tax regime they don't want to apply?

Re: Of course, Ireland has already protested

"So this'll be a case for the courts."

Right now it's more likely to be a case for the Irish tax commissioners.

Re: Particularly interesting...

"that when you have an issue with the TaxMan"

In this case the tax man is still the Irish tax authority. They're not going to upset the Apple cart.

Re: Particularly interesting...

"I wonder if they will now leave Ireland, since the benefit maybe isn't there, and if other high tech firms will follow?"

It depends on what the EU decides about the other arrangements with Luxembourg etc. but for US companies 12% plus English as a 1st language is probably going to be a competitive deal.

$329 for a MacBook? Well, really a 'HacBook' built on an old HP

The cached Google page says that it "comes with the latest OS X El Capitan installed". The current version of the page says that it "ships with everything needed to start running the latest version of OS X" but "Once installed, OS X cold boots...". Maybe they've already had a call from Apple's lawyers.

Pump-priming the new ampere: NIST works to count electrons in silicon

Re: Down for the count

"Why exactly is it so embarrassing not to have a physical standard for the Amp?"

First find your infinitely long wire. Then find another.

Microsoft redfaced after Bing translation cockup enrages Saudis

Re: Think on

Note that there are people more critical of Microsoft than el Reg & co.

Ireland looks like it's outpacing Britain in the superfast broadband rollout stakes

Re: Livin' in the USA

It sounds like a good line for Apple vs the EU: "We're not here for the lower taxes, we're here for the faster internet."