Posts by Doctor Syntax

Intel shows budget Android phone powering big-screen Linux

"UIs are important."

Quite. The best approach seems to be that undocked you have a phone interface, docked you have a desktop interface. One of the things about Unix-based systems is that the UI is an additional layer on top of most of the rest of the system and the interface between the layers is clean enough to swap UIs as needed. Of course if you then try to run an application that needs the desktop interface when undocked you're in a hole of your own digging.

Having said that Ubuntu decided that what they really needed was an app-centric interface on the desktop to prepare the way for use on the phone and got it out even ahead of W8. I don't think it's proved as popular as the more traditional desktops.

Re: attack surface

"This looks like it's going to be a security nightmare."

That was my thought. The apps that demand access to all sorts of details they don't need are then going to expect access to all the stuff on the Linux side.

Wi-Fi operators must notify device users of potential data processing

Re: Been happening for a long time

"My 'throw away' email is still getting offers from the place."

You should have thrown it away & got another. That's the principle of a throwaway address.

"technologies that help retailers connect with consumers via their mobile devices as they move around shopping centres and within individual stores"

If anyone tried that with me the only direction I'd move would be out.

Gov must put superfast broadband along HS2 rail line, says Parliament

HS2. The solution to today's transport problems delivered in 2032 (possibly).

Apple fans take iPhone unlock protest to FBI HQ

"the FBI ... its politically expedient, but shortsighted, approach"

I doubt there's anything shortsighted about it at all.

Bill Gates denies iPhone crack demand would set precedent

Re: It doesn't matter...

It's not about the legitimate rights of the criminals. It's about the legitimate rights of everyone else anywhere who owns any sort of device on which they might need to keep personally or professionally private data. Because that's what the FBI is putting at risk. They're out to create a legal precedent which would be employed in any legal system that follows common law principles and a practical precedent anywhere else where a bit of government leaning might be applied.

And please don't trot out the "nothing to hide" tale. Not unless you're prepared to publish all your bank access details, all your other online access details, your credit card details and so forth (and remember also that in most if not all cases you're contractually obliged to keep those confidential. Of course you've got stuff which you quite properly need to hide.

Re: Getting soft in me old age?

"Mr G is allowed to have his opinion?"

Of course he is. And we're allowed our opinions about his, mostly our opinions vary between "he's talking bollocks" and "he's out to damage someone he still sees as a competitor".

Re: Windows 10

@ Semtex451

Don't forget what's not in this week could be in next week and you won't be able to say no. Go & read the T&Cs for yourself. Don't take anyone's word but Microsoft's for what they allow themselves, or rather what you agree to allow them. But read carefully. Note what's not there in terms of restrictions.

@ Lee D

Go and read the M/S T&Cs. Look for anything that limits what they can grab under your agreement with them. It looks reasonable that they'd need your login credentials with themselves. But do they restrict themselves to saving those or do they include the right to capture anything else such as your bank login creds, your Amazon creds, your eBay creds....? Last time I looked there was no limit to what you'd have to agree to. Same thing about transactions: it's reasonable they'd keep their transactions with you but the language doesn't limit them to that. If they capture all you bank transactions, there'd be no problem because you'd agreed to that as well.

Police forces start shifting their data centre tin to Crown Hosting

"Individual forces are not always big enough to see the right people in those organisations,"

Just wait until one of them drives through their patch.

Latest in Apple v FBI public squabble over iPhone crack demand

Re: Let there be one ruler, one king

"Comply with the lawful order of a court within the jurisdiction you do business, or face the consequences."

Which court? This is only at the magistrates level. It can, and probably will, be appealed right up to the US Supreme court. Only if and when Apple lose at that level do they have to comply or face the consequences.

FBI says it helped mess up that iPhone – the one it wants Apple to crack

"reasonable technical assistance"

Is destroying your product's reputation included in "reasonable"?

Re: Right v. Wrong

"This is not a criminal trial regarding the presumption of innocence. This is a case about justice and duty of the citizens."

Quite so. The FBI are not looking for evidence to prosecute the phone's user. They're going on a fishing expedition and they want to set a precedent for having Apple help them so that the presumption of innocence can be breached in the future.

"In this case the court issued an order for assistance in carrying out a search warrant that nobody claims is not lawful. Whether it requires Apple to create something new might be something reasonable people could disagree about."

The place in which to settle those reasonable disagreements isn't going to be the court of first instance.

There's also the little matter of compensation. Not the compensation for doing the work but the much larger compensation for loss of reputation amongst potential customers.

Re: This is despicable.

"There might be a case somewhere, but it is not here."

The case is setting a precedent to order a manufacturer to breach the security it has built into its own product.

We have a peculiar situation in that a commercial company is more trusted than its government. This is a very unusual and alarming situation. The government needs to rebuild trust. In the longer term backing off here in order to contribute to that might be a wiser choice than the one it's taking.

Re: This is despicable.

'ask yourself where the "evil" lies in this case'

Two wrongs not making a right is a valid option in this case.

"There appears to be no limitations on the particular request as to whether the person is alive or dead"

This isn't an unmixed curse. At least it removes the incentive to ensure the phone user isn't a live suspect.

ADpocalypse NOW: Three raises the stakes

Re: Oh dear

"These are the same guys who would rather spend a day figuring out how to get their precious content for free than pay less than a few minutes' income for that content."

The choice is not usually on offer.

Re: The reason I block ads

"Trouble is, unobtrusive ads don't get noticed and thus get ignored and are, to the ad men, wasted."

That's not really a problem to the actual advertisers. If they're not noticed they don't lose potential customers in the same way that a flashy, jumpy, autoplaying ad sticking it's fingers into the user's ears and eyeballs would.

Re: Ads becoming a self-propogating virus.

"TV ads are time-aligned so you can't escape them by changing the channel."

The solution to that is MythTV & fast forward.

'Hutch explained today that it’s implementing ad blocking because “customers should not pay data charges to receive adverts. These should be costs borne by the advertiser.”'

Maybe if advertisers were to volunteer to pay their way 3 might reconsider.

"Last I checked, it's still a human right to not have to provide services for others for free."

Nailed it! At present the device owners are having to provide a service (bandwidth) for others (advertisers) for free. So as you agree, users have a human right to see that ended.

If the advertisers were paying for the bandwidth they're using to piss off potential customers it might be a little different.

Re: Hahahahahahaha

"Does that taste better?"

If the advertising becomes content (and it frequently is anyway) then the site becomes solely responsible for it. If they start including malware in their content then they're going to have to face the legal consequences - such as paying the ransoms for a few thousand borked computers. So they're going to have to be a good deal more careful about where the content comes from and what it actually contains.

Linux Mint hacked: Malware-infected ISOs linked from official site

@ Codysydney

It sounds like you're doing it wrong. Why are you trying to configure another download server other than the standard Mint repositories? If you're looking for bleeding edge versions you should be on a different distro.

More worrying is distribution by mirror sites. The attack surface is much bigger. If one of those was compromised it could be distributing backdoored ISOs for a good while before anyone noticed - or do they all get regular sanity checks?

Top new IoT foundation (yeah, another one) to develop open standards

Re: IoT - Has it's time passed?

"Care to explain why it is so vitally important that you know what your devices are doing every second of the day?"

Whooosh?

Oh goody. Can't have too many. For good measure, how many DevOps foundations are there?

Yahoo! is! up! for! sale! – so! how! much! will! you! bid!?

"We'll open the bidding with three dollars and a packet of chips"

Don't be silly. Have you seen what they charge for three penn'orth of chips these days?

Re: External advisors

"Destruction of shareholder value on this scale over this period of time should be considered criminal incompetence."

The shareholders employ the board. If they don't rock up to the AGMs & vote the directors off the board then they must be going along with what the board's doing. Ultimately the board & management are doing what the shareholders want, even if they only want it by default as it were.

"I'll pay you to take it away"

Are you sure you can afford that?

The paperless office? Don’t talk sheet

Re: Killing paper may well happen, but not quickly

"annotating, editing and of course, proofreading."

You can't beat 14" wide listing paper with 80 character lines for listing long programs. No the rest of the width isn't wasted. And it's a lot easier to work out what's really happening compared to a piddling little screen (all screens are piddling compared to a 4" thick stack of paper).

"started to type our own letters, which we were then obliged to send to the typing pool so they could retype them on their IBM Golfball typewriters before sending them back to us for signing."

I had the same experience writing witness statements. We called it getting typos inserted. Although given that there were four different types of stationery it would have been difficult to handle in the days of single tray lasers. The "word processor" was the USCD Pascal editor...

Re: The removed the post it notes from our office

"don't even think of looking at my Rotring pens"

On pain of getting one stuck into the back of the hand?

Re: As any fule kno...

That olsa happens to elReg pasts.

"It's almost like he was being sarcastic"

As if the fact that it was Dabsy wasn't a big enough hint.

UK carrier Three in network-wide ad-block shock

Re: Ad pricing

"If it was more expensive and there was less of it, it might improve."

OTOH if it was more expensive malvertising might be the only form to provide sufficient RoI.

"Interesting story on the Reg, given the Reg is the only website I visit semi-regularly that has pop-over ads, auto-playing video ads, noisy ads, etc."

Does it really? I'd never have guessed.

"Basically, Three want to be paid twice for the same thing, which is nice work if you can get it. If they want to make it fair, then lets see them ignore all ads when calculating data usage for mobile customers."

A scheme whereby the customer pays for the 2Kb of content and the advertiser pays for the 2Mb of advertising seems a reasonable scheme. And if the advertiser decides that that's too much they can either stop advertising altogether or devise simpler ads.

Re: Still slurping...

"Advertising in itself is not a bad thing, it's the clunky, abusive, and annoying way it's often done that puts people off."

A distinction without a difference.

Can DevOps be applied to the whole company?

Do I get a hint of desperation here? Maybe the tickets aren't selling.

Feds look left and right for support – and see everyone backing Apple

Re: NOT even cloe

Did you mean "NOT even clue" because that sums up your thinking.

You've fallen hook, line & sinker for a trick. If the FBI win this they'll have a precedent to open anybody's phone on any pretext. Maybe not on any pretext immediately because they'd have to go step by step - they may have to extend the principle to a phone whose user is still living, for instance although I'm sure if that proved difficult there would be ways round the obstacle.

The case was well selected. The user is dead, the phone is actually public property. Although there isn't a criminal trial to prove the user's guilt the coroner's verdict will suffice. And they're arguing "Just this once. Just this little once.". But just once is enough to establish a precedent to allow an extension to anybody's phone on any pretext in a few easy steps.

Re: Conspiracy theory?

"I do recall that shortly after the shooting it was reported that the suspects had a huge store of weapons and ammunition in addition to those that they had on them"

In that case if the FBI don't have knowledge of such a store they should be concentrating on whoever made the reports. Or maybe it's just some reported making stuff up to fill a news slot and hoping to get lucky by being proved right if such a stash is found.

Re: Apple aims to be the Switzerland of data...

"Probably Cooks[sic] believe[sic] iPhone will see a sale boost in a market segment with deep pockets buyers - criminals."

Sigh. Could you try to exercise a little intelligent thought? One would hope that the criminal market is minuscule compared to the mass market and it's the mass market that's likely to suffer due to lack of confidence. If Apple gave in to the FBI I think there are very few people who'd think "Good for them, I'll buy an iThing." and in the meantime the free society you want to defend from terrorists crumbles a little more.

Re: Trust

@DougS

Ever heard the term "fool's paradise"?

Re: Optional

@John Sanders

Firstly we need to consider what the terrorists are attempting to achieve. In as far as they have a coherent purpose - which isn't guaranteed for all of them - they're trying to destroy or overthrow the society in which you live. So at first sight it would seem that Apple's approach is wrong.

But what's the nature of the society in which you live? Is it a free society? If so then a tool to intrude into citizen's live which can be wielded at will by a government agency makes that society a little less free. And by such erosions, step-by-step the society which the terrorists are attacking comes to attack itself; rather like an auto-immune disease, in fact. It might be in the public's short-term interest to dismantle any supporting network but doing so in the wrong way would be contrary to their long-term interest.

Re: Optional

"I can see it now, sales of idevices to terrorists goes through the roof"

I don't think terrorists are a large market in Apple's view. What they're more interested in is the loss of sales to everybody else.

And the terrorists? They'll get their own cryptography apps. There are plenty criminal coders who are getting pretty good at cryptography after a few iterations of ransomware who could be commissioned to put something together. They'll not be unduly bothered in the long run. It's just everybody else who gets their kit compromised.

"But nobody would claim that this establishes a precedent for the FBI walking into everyone's home and opening their file cabinets willy nilly."

"Would" is a big word. Can you really guarantee that neither the FBI nor some other agency of any state where Apple does business wouldn't claim a precedent? Really?

Re: Let's help you out then :) @ukgnome

"scoff law"

Until this goes to the highest possible court we don't know what the law is so it's impossible to know who is scoffing at it. "We" includes the FBI. "Who" could also turn out to be the FBI.

SAP’s Byzantine licensing leaves its customers feeling exposed

Re: Don't forget Oracle!

"Mind you, he was applying lipstick at the time."

To whom? Or what?