Posts by Doctor Syntax

This is what it looks like when your website is hit by nasty ransomware

"it takes very little to p0wn an outdated Linux machine as well - without any Windows help"

Running Windows executables requires a bit more - or would they have installed Wine on a server?

Another possibility is that the scrambled material was under a directory exported by Samba and mounted RW on the infected PC. Still, even if they've no other backup it looks like they could recover from Google cache, and maybe archive.org.

Coding is more important than Shakespeare, says VC living in self-contained universe

Advice to Khosla

Pour some water into a bucket.

Dip your hand into it.

Take it out again.

Examine the impression you left behind.

iPhones clock-blocked and crocked by setting date to Jan 1, 1970

Re: Microsoft a decade ahead of Apple

"At least DEC used a standard (that's the Smithsonian's base date) and didn't just pull a random number out of the air"

Julian Day 2400000 no better or worse than any other arbitrarily chosen round number.

Re: taking Jan 1 as the beginning of the year was historically naive.

It's a fairly complicated set of events. "Years" can start at different dates. Academic years (at least in the UK), for instance, start with the Autumn or Michaelmas (YMMV) term. The church's year started on the assumed date of Christ's conception, 9 months back from Christmas, i.e. March 25, Lady Day. That also became the starting date for a lot of commercial arrangements. However there was also a tradition that January 1st was the start of the year so you may well find dates in the first few weeks of the year being given along the lines of 1722/3. I know of one published early C18th diary which starts years in January and some years are labelled in that fashion and some in modern fashion.

England and colonies stuck to the Julian calendar long after many countries had gone over to the Gregorian (but not all at the same time) and by 1752 the two calendars were 11 days out of sync. This was solved by omitting 11 days from September so the calendar for the start of that month reads 1 2 14 15 16 and January 1st was set as the start of the year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar.

This introduced a potential problem with contracts. That was solved by having the contracts which covered that period run for the appropriate number of days. So a contract taken out on March 25 in 1752 would expire on April 4th 1753 and a new contract would start on April 5th. The "loss" of 11 days was problematic in itself so it's not surprising that nobody wanted to tinker with changing contract terms as part of the legislation. On the basis of not fixing what wasn't broken, nobody has tinkered with it since so the UK financial year still runs from April 5th - and try to visualise the complications and expense it would cause to change that now.

Of course businesses are free to arrange their accounting years whenever they like and if a business thinks it's a good idea to go through the accounting year turnover when everyone's feeling a little under the weather, good luck to them.

"So the world according to Unix began on 1970-01-01"

Not at all. The folks who developed Unix knew about negative numbers. The cal command command, for instance, will calculate calendars for dates much earlier than that. Try cal 1752

They were an erudite lot (more erudite than VCs it seems). man cal in V7 Unix listed as a bug that taking Jan 1 as the beginning of the year was historically naive.

Brit spies can legally hack PCs and phones, say Brit spies' overseers

It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone found GCHQ in their system and took out a private prosecution. The first para of the ruling includes this statement: "The now well established procedure for this Tribunal is to make assumptions as to the significant facts in favour of claimants and reach conclusions on that basis, and only once it is concluded whether or not, if the assumed facts were established, the respondent’s conduct would be unlawful". There's a legal saying that facts alter cases. A specific set of facts in a specific case would seem to override the assumed facts (an oxymoron if there ever was one) of this hearing.

And I wonder if this quote from the act "No entry on or interference with property or with wireless telegraphy shall be unlawful if it is authorised by a warrant issued by the Secretary of State under this section." could be the basis for an argument that it attempts to put the Secretary of State above the law.

Send tortuous stand-up ‘nine-thirty’ meetings back to the dark ages

Re: Professional managers

"There is a type of manager who believes that management is a profession in its own right."

I think it is, or at least it's a skill. Unfortunately it's a skill that very few managers have. It's even more unfortunate that so many organisations have a career path that doesn't involve promoting people skilled in their original profession into management. It makes as much sense as, say, promoting a chemist to an accountant (or vice versa). That doesn't stop people doing it. The end result is that the work ends up being done by people who either haven't been doing it long enough to show themselves fit for "promotion" or have been doing it for some time and shown themselves unfit for "promotion" and managed by people who would be excellent at doing the work but are almost all unfit to manage.

"5. Discussion happens between relevant people after the meeting"

IOW you don't need the actual meeting.

Obligatory Dilbert

http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-07-21

Re: RE an unlamented fragment of my past

"I don't wear interview clothes except at interviews, and only when pressed."

It's nice that you keep your interview clothes pressed. ;)

I had one client who needed me to go on site at their client's head office & insisted that I wear a suit (there being a heatwave on at the time). You know something's wrong when you're confined in a distinctly un-pressed suit & tie in a meeting with the (client's) client's manager and he's in disreputable shorts, even more disreputable T-shirt and sandals.

"at least unless BOFH appears to distract me."

Funny you should say that. Where's part 2?

Google wins High Court fight with StreetMap over search results self-pluggery

Re: Hmm

"Personally I mostly use streetmap"

So do I. AFAIK they don't have any APIs which would enable them to be used by other sites. Possibly there are limitations in their licence with the Ordnance* Survey which prevents this. I wish it were possible to have them in the OpenLayers plugin in QGIS.

*NOT Ordinance!

"but I do mourn their passing"

Passing? They're still there.

"I never really bothered with Streetmap - I found it was pretty useless compared to Google Maps"

Really? It's ironic. Google maps are actually no more than road & street maps plus aerial/satellite photography. Streetmap's maps are the real deal OS maps, crammed with detail. But I suppose you actually have to be good at map reading to get the best out of them.

When asked 'What's a .CNT file?' there's a polite way to answer

"In my Mum's case, she's a little more cunning."

She's been managing you like that all your life. Mums are good at it.

Re: What do people do when their computer breaks?

"Take them back to PC world or get the local bloke to have a look."

My advice on what computer to get was "one you can take back to PC World when it breaks" although these days there's more chance of finding a local shop.

Computer Science grads still finding it hard to get a job

"IT35 stops tax avoidance"

What's that? Did you mean IR35? That means applying a tax regime that assumes the cash flow of a salaried position* to a business. However I share your concern at the original statement.

* Tax systems are designed by people on steady incomes who believe that that's how everybody else is employed.

Re: maths... bah!

"The answer was always that in theory there was - but that in practice the real world data was too awkward."

That rings a bell. I and colleagues took a few things to a stats guru. It didn't seem to be the case that the out-of-the-book processes fitted and he produced something tailor made for us.

Re: Degrees these days....

"1) Did you do any internships? What did you learn there? If you just went on vacation for your summers you're useless to me."

OK, I get the vacation bit. But you were only accepting students who were well enough off not to need paid employment wherever they could get it. Or was that a filter to ensure they could afford to live on the pay you were offering?

Re: Unfortunately...

"Due to the skills gap, why would you invest in training when these skills are highly transferable and the big players can always outbid you when you've trained a grad to be usable?"

What you actually mean is that the market rate is what the big players pay and if you're not prepared to pay that then you won't attract or retain staff irrespective of whether you or someone else trains them. That's life.

"However, one of the recommendations ...is to better understand what employers mean when they say they are not fit for the market."

This year, the market is probably looking for 3 years experience in W10.

And whilst grammarians argue that split infinitives aren't really grammatically incorrect they can still be ugly.

Boffins show Ed Vaizey what superfast means: 50,000x faster than UK broadband

"improve the optical network infrastructure to support the explosion of digital content, cloud and e-health services, as well as the ubiquitous connectivity of smart devices referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT)."

So, to a large extent it's another solution looking for a problem.

Joint Committee on UK Snoopers' Charter: Make like a dictionary and give a definition

Re: How do you spell Apoplectic?

"Care to guess just how peeved I am?"

So if you wish to speak to your MP, say to complain about this bill, to raise an issue about ill-treatment of a relative in a nursing home or anything else you don't want that to be a protected communication? Or did you not stop to think?

"As far as Theresa May is concerned this is just another report to be filed in the bin."

Not really. A substantive bill is going to have to go through a committee stage. If she doesn't take these reports into account the committee might do that for her.

Re: "However well-intentioned"

"I think they are giving credit where it is not due."

No, it's OK. "However well" includes zero.

US Congress locks and loads three anti-encryption bullets

Re: Time to write my congressional representatives.

"A) Weakening encryption endangers U.S. government data. The Office of Personnel Management hack and the Sony Pictures hacks being an excellent examples."

Your second example isn't government data. So make that "government and business data" just to remind them that their commercial backers might be watching how they vote.

Met Police wants to keep billions of number plate scans after cutoff date

Re: Show us evidence..

"The driver got an S172"

No, the hirer got the ticket and refused to say who was driving. In the absence of evidence there's no proof that the hirer was also the driver. That's the problem.

SCO's last arguments in 'Who owns Linux?' case vs. IBM knocked out

Back in the day SCO had a Unix version that just worked. At the time any version of Linux only just worked if at all.

Drivers for both were a problem because a lot of H/W vendors were only interested in Windows and Netware. OTOH because this was still dumb terminal time there was SCO specific H/W such as multiple serial interface cards.

They were competing with free-as-in-beer for unsupported Linux and not-free-but-probably-not-as-expensive for Linux with support contracts. They were also, in the long run, competing with Windows for the Intel server market.

If SCO had had any nous they could have cut prices, paid H/W vendors to develop drivers and tried harder to get application developers on their side. At one time they did have a free as in beer offer for developers which included all the development extras supporting only a couple of users or so but the licence was only supposed to be for 6 months IIRC (although it didn't self-destruct) and I don't think the offer ran for very long. Maybe they didn't think Linux was going to get good enough.

I doubt that even if they'd done more they could have strangled Linux at birth or even retained their overwhelming Unix market share but they could have remained viable and maybe kept some server market share away from Windows as well. But they didn't do enough make it worth while for ISVs to continue using the platform and that's what killed them.

Meanwhile Linux improved to the point of just working and attracted ISVs.

CSI: Let's get out of the lab, interview the suspect, then do a warrantless search

To summarise

CSI is fixing what isn't broken. Or have I missed something?

This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs

A long time ago I had Microsoft FORTRAN for CP/M. It came with some assembler source for a library or something. In it was a comment from one programmer to another to the effect of "I can't get this to work, can you?"

Bank fail: Ready or not, here's our new software

"the bank as a whole rather than just the software."

The distinction is getting less clear. The bank is, to a large extent, its software.

Open APIs for UK banking: It's happening, people

Re: wat?

Quite. Someone should send the Treasury a copy of the DPA.

Gmail growls with more bad message flags to phoil phishers

Re: clueless banks

"the lengths banks go to to make their emails look like phishing."

And thus train their customers to fall for phishing. With a bit of luck this will encourage banks and other businesses which should know better to tighten up their internal procedures. If this means a few marketroids get fired for breaching them it's a double gain.

Ballmer schools SatNad on Microsoft's mobile strategy: You need one

If Nadella thinks he's hearing voices he should be reassured - they're not inside his head, they're coming from the back seat.

Re: Luxuries

'Ballmer lists his luxuries as his private plane'

I don't think Desert Island Disks would have allowed him that.

Silent Nork satellite tumbling in orbit

Re: " Soviet SS-1 "Scud" powerplants"

"Either a bad joke or you don't know your history."

The coat icon suggests the former.

Private clouds kinda suck, you know?

Re: Is this not relabelling?

"idiots/politicians (pretty much synonymous)"

The word you're looking for is "marketing".

Microsoft hits the gas in drive to recruit autistic techies

Re: What about management?

no empathy with customers or staff

FTFY

Virgin Media spoof email mystery: Customers take to Facebook

Obvious questions

When they migrated between services did they outsource the work? Seems likely - I can't see their beancounters letting them have enough in-house staff to do it.

To who was it outsourced?

And in which country?

Re: ISP Email

"what do the rest of you do - run your own 24/7 redundant and monitored mail infrastructure? Or use gmail/Hotmail?"

Neither. Use a 3rd party service to host my own domain. Along with Hotmail where it's likely spammers will get hold of it. Set up a mail alias for each bank, insurer or whatever - and kill it if they decide to send valuable marketing communications spam.

Intelligence Committee marks Gov's Snoopers' Charter: See me after class

Simple rule:

No bulk anything.

Canonical reckons Android phone-makers will switch to Ubuntu

"The goal in 2011 was for 200 million Ubuntu users by the end of that year – but today that figure, according to Canonical, is just 30 million desktops."

What's the total if you include derivatives such as Mint?

It's 2016 and a font file can own your computer

Re: re. Libgraphite 2-1.2.4 is known vulnerable,

It's a bit of a half-arsed report. I have a choice of 2-2 and 3. No mention of them. Did they really look at just one version?

In any case, removing it (2-2) seems to have no effect. LibreOffice continued to render Gentium which seem to be the only font family I had installed that uses it.

Bye-bye, BT: Finance director jumps ship

Re: Popcorn time perhaps?

As far as I can make out he's over the BT retirement age anyway. I doubt that's forced on execs but once you realise you don't have to drag into work every day why bother?

Security? We haven't heard of it, says hacker magnet VTech

"Mocking customers killed Ratner's too."

He did it a bit more openly than small print.

IANAL but I don't think this would protect them under UK consumer protection legislation. Less familiar with the rest of Europe but I doubt it would protect them there. US? Maybe someone there knows; is there consumer protection legislation to over-rule contract terms?

Inside Adwind: A DIY malware toolkit used by 1,800 crooks to spy on 443k victims

Re: Worryingly

"I just assume, Linux is crafted to mitigate such privilege escalations."

That would depend on whether anything involved in this runs with root setuid permissions. On a quick rootle round my jvm and browser files I can't see anything but (a) it was a quick look and (b) YMMV.

Re: Worryingly

A quick look at my .mozilla/plugins (in Debian 7) revealed a number of links placed to a Java plugin by Crossover Office. Despite Crossover Office supposedly being removed long ago there was a .cxoffice directory containing the library. In addition there was a .netscape/plugins directory containing similar links; the dates suggest that Crossover Office created that entire path. Wine doesn't seem to have set such links.

There was also a dead link to Java in a long removed LibreOffice 4.2 installation. Subsequent LibreOffice versions don't seem to have set a link.

With those links removed the relevant Java plugin disappeared from the browser. There's still an Iced Tea plugin but that's set as ask to activate. Iced Tea Java in installed from the Debian repository.

Of these I only expected Iced Tea. Clearly applications can casually install Java in the browser even if you don't expect it. Vigilance is needed.

AdBlock Plus, websites draft peace deal so ads can bypass blockade

Suggested change of headline

One-time market leading ad-blocker commits hara-kari.

Health Secretary promises NHS £4.2bn to go 'digital'

Re: NHS money wasted on wifi for customers

"BOFH makes you feel better!"

Reading BOFH could damage your stitches.