Posts by Doctor Syntax

TalkTalk offers customer £30.20 'final settlement' after crims nick £3,500

Re: What does Dido know

'She's a ppe grad. If she says the security wasn't "up-to-scratch" how the F**k would she know?'

I'm sure even she's noticed by now.

"With 4m customers what is the probability that in any one given week someone will be subject to credit card fraud?"

You are correct in this, there's no evidence that TT were responsible. However:

"What is with the witch hunt by The Register?"

The response he got from TT deserves condemnation on its own (de)merits. They have failed abominably in their duty of care to their customers and yet are still trying to hold them to contracts. It's probably not going to do them much good in the long run. At the very least it keeps bad publicity in the media for longer. At the most they'll die the death of a thousand cuts in the small claims court and multiple Trading Standards investigators climbing all over them. The contrast between the way they've handled this and the way VW are handling their problems couldn't be greater.

Re: Tokenised?

"You then keep the token and throw away the card details."

Except they kept partial details because that's what was listed as part of the data that was leaked. And those card details might be enough to persuade the recipient of a call that they're dealing with a genuine trader.

Re: Well....

@ Commswonk

You may well be right about groupthink. This is why the CEO of any company in this position should be expected to walk without compensation (VW got the first bit right). It provides them with a big incentive to keep a close watch on what;s going on in the company and to have that little worry that the person who's "being negative" might actually be the one between you and the one way exit.

The spy in your pocket: Researchers name data-slurping mobe apps

Why should the OS maker be considered primary unless they're the app-maker? If I run, say a mail client under Debian Linux there's no good reason why it should require any interaction with either the Debian project or the Linux kernel team. The OS maker is as much a 3rd party as any other.

Cops' IT too complex for quick and dirty revamp – Police ICT boss

Bedfordshire should be able to finance their share. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-34719997

"The Police ICT company was finally set up this year after years in the planning."

So it'll be able to get on top of the problem quite quickly. Almost certainly by the end of the century.

iPhone, Windows 10, lonely nights – sound like you? Dump Siri and have a date with Cortana

Intelligence, artificial or otherwise?

If Microsoft are so good at this AI stuff why is it that they can't trap "click here or your Hotmail/Live/Outlook/Whatever account will be closed" spam when sent to their Hotmail/Live/Outlook/Whatever customers? The number of these that get through would be good evidence that they're not defending their trademarks if they ever tried to get a passing off case into court.

A bubble? No way, we're in a bust, says rich VC living in alternate reality

Perhaps one of the reasons big companies aren't innovating is that there's only a limited scope for profitable innovation at any particular time.

The legitimate options for making money from innovations seem to be providing a new service that can be charged for at a profitable level or advertising. If a business like Uber can't turn a profit the first of those seems to offer very little. So is this what the internet has come down to - conning advertisers that its worth paying good money to piss off potential customers? Or as a medium for criminal activity?

Microsoft's OneDrive price hike has wrecked its cloud strategy

Re: Trust, indeed

'I like to use my PC to "do stuff"; I don't want to spend hours "playing" with the operating system.....'

Same here. In particular I don't want to spend those long hours each month while Windows Update hogs everything. So I don't use Windows.

Re: (patronising) "choice"

"but what good is it when it's all shit?"

It depends what's all shit. As it happens I spent the greater part of the afternoon trying to work out a problem with a Windows 7 laptop owned by a friend of my wife's. It had been OK until a few days ago, when it was working all morning & not since. Neither IE nor Firefox worked - the former came up blank with "not responding"on the title bar, the latter displayed nothing, just a busy cursor for a few seconds. Internet connection was there - ping to Google worked and my Mint laptop had no problems. Ran virus scan. Ran Windows diagnostics which couldn't identify a problem. Disabled firewall. Re-enabled firewall. Nothing. Eventually I removed the adaptor for a wireless mouse, rebooted and got a major hang - nothing responding but the fan working overtime. Cut the power, replaced the dongle, rebooted & got the screen offering safe mode, went for a normal reboot & the thing started working properly for no obvious reason.

Yup. All shit.

Re: So entirely amusing yet completely unexpected!

I think Microsoft forgot that the secret of boiling frogs is that you do it gradually.

Re: Linux to the rescue! Again!

"Not least an OS shouldn't ever 'support cloud storage'"

It depends what you mean by "support" and, indeed, "cloud storage".

In a lot of cases the latter just means some form of remote synchronisation. ownCloud and Kolab are both OSS S/W which provide Linux clients for this and Dropbox is one of several commercial products which do the same. As the OS supports these clients then it's reasonable to describe it as supporting this style of cloud storage as a client in the same way as saying it supports a web browser or an office suite. And don't forget older flavours of syncing such as rsync.

At a more fundamental level of support, and taking "cloud storage" to mean remote storage in general, Linux has both NFS and CIFS available at kernel level which can let a client integrate remote file systems directly into its own tree.

Looking at it from the other side any Linux system can be set up to offer ownCloud, Kolab, NFS and/or CIFS as a service. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dropbox service was also running on top of Linux - in fact I'd be surprised to hear that it wasn't. Linux can also host VMs and containers to provide other cloud services.

The OP's claim was complete nonsense typical of the once common but now almost silent crowd of Microsoft boosters.

Cloud AKA someone else's computer

Someone else's computer to do with as they like. Remember that.

Re: Never had this problem...

'"Yea, got that covered too. External hard drives with encrypted content stored at family members houses "

What do you do about the hideously slow upload rate that your ISP provides? well mine does anyway.'

Whaaa? External drives! Unplug them & take them there, no ISP involved. Bandwidth similar to a van-load of tapes on the motorway. The bandwidth will be fine, it's just the latency he has to worry about.

Re: Linux to the rescue! Again!

"There's no problem with cloud storage as the shareware OS doesn't support that."

Your prejudices are showing again. Apart from the fact that you don't know the huge difference between OSS & shareware take a look at https://owncloud.org/ https://kolab.org/overview https://www.dropbox.com/install?os=lnx for a start.

I wonder what OS Dropbox's servers run on. And AWS...

@ Codysydney

You are, I think, correct in your first point.

However it's more likely that the bitching is coming from the people who put their trust in Microsoft. They've now been kicked in the face twice haven't you noticed all those posts in other threads from people telling us they've been MS stalwarts but are now moving to Mint because of W10? The rest of us are just standing on the sidelines shouting "Told you so!".

Re: Why are people still using Windows?

" Linux desktops still look like they were designed by 7 year olds."

Those must be the ones still trying to look like Windows for Teletubbies. You do realise, don't you, that with Linux you not only have a choice* of desktop systems but you can also theme them to a greater or lesser extent.

*If you're a Windows user - or a marketing shill who's probably actually using a Mac - you may need to look this up in a dictionary.

Re: Never had this problem...

"Of course, if you prefer the vagrant approach of carrying all your belongings with you then that's your choice."

Now there's a thought. Once upon a time we had Windows for Teletubbies. With the cloud first approach maybe they were aiming at Windows for bag ladies.

Ransomware scammers: Won’t pay? We'll put your data on the internet

Re: interesting new twist

Obviously the ability to perpetrate this stuff is moving down the IQ scale

UK's super-cyber-snoop shopping list: Internet data, bulk spying, covert equipment tapping

Re: I personally have no problem with this at all

"She and all the other MP's who vote in favour of it and anyone who can access it have all their data recorded and posted openly on the internet for us all to see."

That would, of course, include any communication you might have with your MP about this or any other topic.

Re: A Request

'since when is many eyeballs critically reading proposed legislation "duplicated effort" ?'

It depends on your skill at reading lawerese. A single pair with good skills is probably worth a good deal more than a few thousand average pairs.

Re: Security Theatre and/or Snooping

'Unless of course they are using "perfect forward secrecy" schemes such as ECDHE. Oh, except we heard a few weeks back that this had been broken anyway.'

IIRC it was the original DH that had been broken for some values of primes & elliptic curve was the way forward - providing you don't use the NSA's preferred EC, of course.

Re: Security Theatre and/or Snooping

"It's a fact that a lot of criminals are stupid"

The sort who advertised on Craigslist for someone to hack his local court house, certainly. And many who the security services should be targeting are also stupid* but the prime targets aren't. Assuming the entire population is suspect, which is the basis for indiscriminate bulk surveillance, simply defies the presumption of innocence and that's the basis of a free society.

*And it wasn't particularly bright of some US bloke who explained how a drone attack had been made on the basis of some numpty's online activity.

PM wheels out snoop overseer minutes before latest snoops' charter bid lands

Re: who was first called to the Bar 50 years ago...

Ah yes, ageism is not only a politically correctly allowed form of discrimination, it's pretty well politically correctly mandatory. Have you take your A levels yet?

And did you mean "us all"?

"Turns out lots of us have something to hide but oddly enough, we don't like admitting it."

Actually anyone who does business on line, banks on line etc not only has stuff to hide but stuff that they're contractually obliged to hide.

Silicon Valley fights European Court of Justice ruling with small print

Re: Makes no sense

"but presumably can now sue the Commission for any costs in relocating to Bulgaria or Argentina"

What makes you think you can sue anybody for the costs of not breaking the law?

Mandatory car analogy: if the police pull you up & find that there's a fault on your vehicle do you really think you could sue them for the costs of getting it fixed?

Re: Lot of nonsense

"You should bother to simply read the Terms & Conditions"

True but he can save himself some time by not even getting as far as Carter's employer's T&Cs.

Hi, um, hello, US tech giants. Mind, um, mind adding backdoors to that crypto? – UK govt

iMessage

I've now read through the links purporting to show weaknesses in iMessage. They're dated a couple of years ago. In the recent court case Apple said that they could previously intercept messages but not with the current iOS versions. So is the Quarkslab analysis still relevant to current iMessage protocols?

Re: Tech companies not required.

@ Grikath

Who cares about average teens except average teens? HMG can ban all the shiny apps they want with no real effects except pissing off potential voters. If secure non-shiny alternatives exist they'll be used by anyone with the incentive and knowledge to do so. That, of course, includes those who HMG are most keen to eavesdrop on. Great idea, ruin the average punter's privacy to no useful end.

Thought experiment

I'm the organiser of a criminal/terrorist (the former includes the latter in my book) organisation. I want to arrange encrypted communication with my members. How do I go about it?

We'll assume I have access to some developer talent. If I'm running a terrorist organisation I may well have that in my membership, if not there are obviously criminal organisations out there with that talent so I can buy it in.

With that I commission its own S/W for my organisation. The developer talent doesn't need to have a cryptography specialisation as the libraries for this have been available for decades. One approach to take would be an application to create self-decrypting files - executables with the encrypted data built in.

I rent a server out of the jurisdiction of where my organisation is operating and upload the messages there. Or I can upload them to a binary newsgroup. Or pastebin. My members can download their messages, run the software, read the decrypts and then delete. Except for the brief period when they're downloading and reading there's no incriminating decryption software in their possession. Neither random stop and search of my members no seizure at border crossings will reveal nothing untoward.

I still have the problem of key distribution. I can set up a different distribution route for each channel. I identify some forum which members can read without suspicion. I occasionally post comments to that. The comment itself isn't the key. The key is a hash of, say the 2nd paragraph of the comment's grandparent and is a one time pad. The reader simply copies & pastes the paragraph into the self-decrypting file he's downloaded, the hash is regenerated & the message decrypted & displayed.

Such a method has its limitations; it's susceptible to traffic analysis if the authorities suspect an individual. However, if encrypted is banned on WiFi there will be an ocean of available access points; let the authorities try to perform traffic analysis on those.

The essential point is that making encryption illegal only bans legal applications. If people are already breaking the law you don't stop them doing that by furnishing them with more laws to break.

PC sales will rise again, predicts Intel, but tablets are toast

"The new form factors – including mini-computers – are also inspiring companies that haven't been big in laptops to get in the game he said, citing Microsoft's Surface Book and InFocus' $99 Kangaroo PC as examples."

Somehow these don't look like minis as I remember them.

Apple’s TV platform just became a little more secure (well, the apps at least)

Good

So 64% will still be plain old TVs.

Microsoft Windows 7 Pro: Halloween Horror for PC makers next year

Old news

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03/food_water_batteries_medical_supplies_ammo_and_windows_7_pcs/

Web server secured? Good, now let's talk about e-mail

Re: People attempting proper SMTP TLS is terrifying

"If Blackadder had continued on to do a series in which he worked in IT"

Forget all the other stuff, will someone please pitch this to the Beeb.

"Unsurprisingly, any UK government email delivered via MessageLabs comes over cleartext SMTP - they don't even try."

Why try if it's going via a US-owned service provider?

Windows 10 is an antique (and you might be too) says Google man

Re: @Richard 12: Note on Windows 8

It is very hard to distil the behaviour of real people into bullet-points. This is why it shouldn't be done.

FTFY

Re: Matias sounds like a real prick.

He's a user experience specialist. They go round breaking things by taking something that was working flexibly and insisting on that it only do one thing and do it in one way.

Re: @Shadow Systems: Duarte, the Android UI guy (laugh)

"Or am i being unfair?"

I doubt it. ASAICS they shackled themselves by insisting on a one-size-fits-all user interface as an article of faith. That's stopped them offering a switchable UI, assuming the architecture would make that possible.

Re: Revisionist

"the PlaySkool tag"

Windows for Teletubbies was another.

Food, water, batteries, medical supplies, ammo … and Windows 7 PCs

Re: Windows 7

"Could someone rationally explain what's this thing is with windowz users, why all the clinging on to an old dying or unsupported version."

This has been explained before but clearly we need to explain it all again. Let me preface this by saying that not only am I not a Windows fan I'll be abandoning Linux in favour of BSD when my current version falls out of support on the grounds that the next version will be insufficiently Unix-like. But I have a fair degree of experience in the commercial world with both Windows and Unix.

Firstly you need to understand that system administrators don't like change. Change breaks things. Change brings them problems they don't need, often in return for fixing problems they don't have. This applies as much to Unix as Windows. Old, rusty and working is better than new, shiny and useless. Sysadmins are paid to run things that make money by working.

Secondly you need to realise that there are often very good* reasons why stuff is running on Windows & maybe specific versions of Windows. At the bottom, however, these reasons come down to money.

One reason is that the computer is tied to a very expensive piece of machinery. When I retired at the end of 2006 my last client was running a digital print centre on a number of industrial printers. These are not the sort of thing you go down to PC World to replace. They're massive beasts, bigger than some printing presses. The economic lifetime of such beasts would probably demand that they're still working. AFAIK the embedded version of WIndows was 95. That sort of kit doesn't get replaced because MS has decided to EoL W95. Or NT. Or W2K. Or XP.

Another reason is that the business is running, and depends on running, S/W that is tied to some quirk of Windows. If it was bought-in from an external vendor the vendor might have gone bust or simply stopped developing it and may not have ported it to another version of Windows. Even if it runs on later versions the vendor might not have certified it for those versions which, in highly regulated industries, might be a show-stopper. If the S/W doesn't run on the new version a replacement will have to be bought in - assuming a replacement is available. If there's no replacement on the market commissioning one will be expensive. If the S/W was specially commissioned in the first place it might need work to port it over to the new platform which assumes the source hasn't been lost, that there's anyone available who understands the language it was written in, that there's good enough documentation to rewrite from scratch if the source has gone - you name the problem, someone will be going through it.

Finally there is an investment in training and accumulated experience of users. To some extent this might be an overrated issue but a big change in interface will require expenditure on training and inevitably set back productivity whilst the users adapt to it. Linked to that is the amount of testing that has to go on to ensure that everything the business needs works on the new system (assuming that it does - see the previous paragraph). There may be other costs associated with migration such as converting data from old versions of S/W to new.

The bottom line with all this is that users have made investments in good faith only to find that those investments are now dependant on what's become abandonware.

*For given values of good. What may have appeared a cost-effective decision in the past is no longer such a good decision when seen in the longer term.

Skype founders planning non-drone robodelivery fleet. Repeat, not drones

We need more firms doing this. Then we can have some turf wars.

'T-shaped' developers are the new normal

Re: Definitely, maybe...

He may not be a web hack but it's clear we've formed our opinions about what he is.

The $53bn 'startup': Hewlett Packard Enterprise begins life

Re: Diddums

"Poor Andy, had to cope with knowing everything. That must be a first for a senior executive, most seem to get away with knowing bog all about the businesses they run."

Some of them seem to insist on knowing nothing. It's called plausible deniability.

Anti-adblocker firm PageFair's users hit by fake Flash update

Re: Hah!

"advertising finances a large chunk of the internet"

Or, to put it another way, surely we can do better than this?

Tl;Dr: Always use an adblocker.

Windows 10 growth stalls during October

Re: XP

@A/C

'Navigating a KDE or whatever "start menu" is a PITA.'

Now you've got me really puzzled. The classic KDE start menu follows the original Win95 design principles quite closely; although I can't say I like the more recent alternative it's not that different to what Windows is throwing out at present.

Let me run through some of what I do to set up KDE to my liking which may well match what you like about W2K.

First, right click on what KDE calls the panel but we'll call the task bar for convenience, and click unlock widgets in the popup menu. Click on the classic menu option.

Then go into the menu and find KDE settings. In Common appearances etc>Application and System Notifications>Launch Feedback click any option you want for Busy Cursor other than that blasted bouncing cursor that's the default.

These two steps make for a more comfortable environment.

Whilst you're in settings you might like to go into Workspace Appearance etc>Workspace Appearance>Window Decorations & see if there's something you prefer to the default - Redmond will diminish the difference in appearance between W2K and KDE as will Common appearances etc>Application Appearance >Style.

Close settings, go to the so-called golden cashew (AKA the golden turd) at the right hand end of the task bar. Click on that & click Add widgets and add a Task manager plus anything else that seems useful. Then lock widgets.

Click on the golden turd on the top right and select Desktop settings. Change the view to Folder view and Apply. Go back into the golden turd menu noting that settings are now Folde view settings, into settings and choose Location, select Desktop folder and apply again. You can set up the Icons however you please - ordering, snap to grid or whatever.

You can now save things to the desktop as you wish. If you unlock the widgets again from the task bar right click you can select applications from the main menu with a right click and add them to the desk top and/or task bar.

This should take you a long way to getting your working environment as you wish.

I'm not sure about the keyboard - I wonder if that was set up correctly on installation.

In-a-spin Home Sec: 'We won't be rifling through people's web history'

Re: Read the story in the Telegraph today

"Town halls were granted permission to access private communications data 2,110 times last year, more than GCHQ and MI6 combined. "

This, of course, takes no account of the number of accesses without permission.

Whitman's split: The end of Fiorina's HP grand expansion era

The real HP - oscilloscopes, IR spectrophotometers, etc, is long gone. So sad, it was a really successful business.

Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant

"Having a go at your staff is rarely, if ever, the way to get the best out of them."

What staff?

"I personally wouldn't contribute to a project with someone like that at the wheel and I can't believe I'm the only one that feels that way."

The number of kernel contributors suggests that there are plenty who feel differently.