Posts by Doctor Syntax

Time to re-file your patents and trademarks, Britain

"I'm old enough to remember the the time before the UK was a member of the EU."

So am I but I also remember that it was a member of another trading group, EFTA and also that the Commonwealth was a stronger trading group.

Re: Complete Tosh!!

"It does no-one any favours to simply cut off the UK. It would be just as disastrous for EU countries if agreements which allow for the continuation of trade between the UK and the EU on MUTUALLY favourable terms were not reached."

Try telling that to Junker.

Re: "Never was so much lost by so many due to one stupid decision"

'My biggest concern now is that Remainers who won't accept the decision will fuck everything up just to "prove" they were right.'

I doubt it. It's over to Leave now. Let's see what they do, apart from act shocked as, for quite a lot of them, I expect, their sole target was to win the vote and let someone else deal with reality.

Leaving aside the UPC element, consider the headline. Right now there's no basis for saying that patents and trademarks would need to be re-filed. Like everything else that involves EU influence there'll have to be a decision taken about the status of existing registrations. It may well be that the outcome will be that all existing registrations still stand as applying here after exit and that double registration will only be needed after some future, yet to be announced, date. In fact, I'd say that that's likely for the simple reason that sorting things out is going to be complicated enough without making further complications.

"You have to accept the hand you were dealt."

OTOH Boris seems to be back-pedalling a bit, saying there's no hurry.

Re: 'EU' -> 'UK' -> 'K'

"After Scottish Independence: Little Britain and Northern Ireland"

Little Britain = Brittany.

Great Britain = Large island between mainland Europe and Ireland.

'Leave EU means...' WHAT?! Britons ask Google after results declared

Re: A few thoughts...

"You got given one free wall already and look at the state of it."

Two actually. And the Antonine wall is in an even worse state.

Re: google search....

"but it is possible the Brexit will be reversed by a General election."

That possibility occurred to me. At the very least we now ought to have a general election. Admittedly there's current legislation saying we can't but, given the will, that could go through Commons & Lords in a single day.

Re: So how long before ...

"The fuel in the pumps now, that you are buying now, has taken between 4 and 12 weeks from its purchase time to reach those pumps."

But the replacement stock for what you buy now has to be purchased now. As if that made any difference to an oil company's chance of making a profit.

Re: "thats democracy after all"

"with our first past the post electoral system it is quite possible this was the first time he cast a vote which did count."

With our first past the post system votes count, otherwise nobody would get past the post. What do you think all those people are doing in Town Halls on election nights?

Re: Seriously...

"I wrote except not accept"

Got that, but why did he say you should have looked into it?

PM resigns as Britain votes to leave EU

Re: Gutted

"Even if whatever bunch of British public schoolboys (yes, it is our government that is run by more out of touch elitist pricks than any other in Europe)"

Once upon a time we finally had a generation of grammar school politicians in power. They promptly pulled up the ladder behind them so are you surprised about what we have now?

Re: So then

"This means ... that if we want laws our elected government will have to pass them?"

I admire your optimism.

"If they'd had that rule and a referendum BEFORE we signed up to the various intermediate treaties..."

There's the problem. And a rule that if you vote the wrong way, cf Ireland, you can't be told to vote again until you get the right answer..

"that wasn't on the ballet paper"

I think you're dancing around the topic. But have an upvote.

Re: RE: Nigel Farage...

"Gordon Brown hardly ever turned up to westminster but still took his salary, so I don't see why Farage would need to bother."

For one thing we'd have all been a lot better off if Brown hadn't turned up at all and for another he was an MP & Farage isn't.

'It's understandable, as the old people are more likely to remember the "good old times" before the EU.'

Remember, however, that we also voted to stay a few decades ago.

"That will take hard work from both Remain and Leave camps."

True, but are Remain going to be motivated enough to try to make something they don't think can work work?

Re: Anyone remember..

"If a country wanted to get back to manufacturing and increasing exports rather than relying on imports, isin't[sic] a lower valued pound a benefit?"

It makes imports more expensive so it only operates on the value added in production and that benefit then has to outweigh the tariffs it faces.

"They'll rebrand themselves as the people's party and press for an early General Election"

I'm not sure about that. I doubt many of the Leave campaigners had any plans beyond the referendum except "magic happens".

I'm not surprised, BTW, that the leading Leave Conservatives wrote to Cameron just before the event saying that he should stay on whatever happened. They belatedly realised they hadn't a clue what to do if they won & wanted someone to come along and look after them. Who do they have in their own ranks? IDS who has presided over the on-going car crash of Universal Credit? Gove who seems to have got up the nose of everyone working in the areas he's overseen as a minister? Boris, who was the great cheer-leader of the City that may currently be doing nicely (in the short term they can always make money) but are in for bleak times in the longer run? No wonder Boris is going round saying that they don't have to invoke Article 50 any time soon. Well, they and Farage have now got what they asked for and I doubt they're going to enjoy it for long.

EU GDPR compliance still a thing for UK firms even after Brexit

Re: Pop!

"Sorry, was that the sound of another Remain bubble bursting?"

Well, it was the sound of something. Please flush and remember to wash your hands.

Holy Crap! Bloke finishes hand-built CPU project!

Re: Bah...

"hand whittling our 2 bit CPUs"

2? You had 2????

We just had an MK SPST found in a junk yard.

Patriotic Brits rush into streets to celebrate… National Cream Tea Day

Re: “tea before milk”.

"the answer is actually Yorkshire Tea"

Grown on the slopes of Ilkley Moor.

Re: “tea before milk”.

"No need for milk in earl/lady grey. It tastes like soap if you put milk in."

s/earl\/lady grey/tea/

Apple quietly launches next-gen encrypted file system

Re: checklist

'It seems to me that "stupid" is allowing there to be two files with names that are identical in all but the capitalisation and that these be considered different files by virtue of nothing more than typographical differences in the name.'

"all but"? "differences"? So they're not the same but you think they should be. Once we start ignoring differences where do we stop? Do we start treating punctuation marks as the same?

Re: Case..

'Regarding the "A.xpm" and "a.xpm"; I'd have called them "0041.xpm" and "0061.xpm"'

Right. 0041==0061. Got it.

Re: Case..

"Why do you think was the 0 (zero) written as Ø on matrix printers 20 years ago ?"

Where I first learned programming the convention for the card punch operators was that letter O was crossed, not zero. But it was in Ireland...

"Alternatively, there is getiplayer which worked the last time I used it."

And last time I used it on Linux - yesterday.

Linux devs open up universal Ubuntu Snap packages to other distros

I must admit that when I first saw the announcements I thought it was just an extension of keeping applications and dependencies together in /opt. I'd missed out the containerisation. On the whole it seems like a step forward. However, as Matthew Garrett has pointed out in relation to X there's a vulnerability where containerised applications still depend on a leaky common service. It's not yet clear to me how much sharing of common libraries will continue. I suppose the answer is to look at the Pi version of Ubuntu Core. Another thing to do when I get a round tuit.

"Great, so a common library gets a security upgrade and we have to update every single package"

Looking through ls -R /lib /lusrlib leads to the thought of "do I really need all that stuff?" (running ls -R /lib /usr/lib|wc -l returns 67257 on my Debian LTS). And I have to conclude that I don't know. What I do know is that a good many of "every single package" are there to provide those libraries just in case I happen to run some application that calls them and that updates to those, whether I ever execute them or not, are part of the overall updating.

Given a system where the core is truly minimal and I only have the application package I want a good deal of those libraries and the packages which provide them might not be there. So I'm by no means convinced that the update frequency and volume would be greater than at present; it might be less.

Re: A new standard for packages?

"I'm wondering if one could set up a very minimal Linux distro and then install all of one's applications as snapped packages?"

Canonical were there ahead of you. It's called Ubuntu core.

Re: What is the advantage of snap over static linking?

The other side of the coin is that dynamic linking introduces dependency hell (Windows users will be familiar with the DLL equivalent) when trying to use something that wasn't in the distro. Compiling WonderPackage requires some library at a later version than the distro. Installing that version promptly breaks the distro.

A current solution to this is to install the package and its dependencies in /opt. I currently have several such examples. Snaps seem to combine the principle of this approach with the isolation of Qubes. Now if we could see this extended to controlled access to files...

Re: Red Hat

Why the joke alert?

Re: Interesting?

"I just can't keep up with events."

It gets worse as you get older.

Re: Interesting?

"Still work in progress, but looking pretty good"

Apart from the Windows 10 part.

" I can't honestly see much advantage for things like Libreoffice. I've no real desire to get the very latest bleeding edge version"

Currently Debian LTS is on LO 3.5. The current stable, not bleeding edge, version is 5.1. I'm not sure of the distro verison of QGIS but it might be around 1.7 and the current stable version is 2.8, bleeding edge 2.10 last time I looked. So there's some merit in ignoring distro versions of packages like that where there are stable versions which the distro maintainers are ignoring.

Russian government hackers spent a year in our servers, admits DNC

Re: Why not just keep running the server and fill it with misinformation?

Shhh.

Re: Careful what you wish, you may regret it! Careful waht you wish, you just might get it!

'I don't think this was what the electorate had in mind when they said they wanted "more openness and transparency" from the government'

And when a government talks about openness and transparency it's the electorate's stuff that's to be open and transparent, not theirs (except to state-sponsored APTs, of course).

Apple nominated for Internet Hero of the Year, Donald Trump for Villain

I'd have thought Ignoramus of the year would have been a better category for Trump.

This is how the EU's supreme court is stripping EU citizens of copyright protections

Re: I don't fully understand...

'Your argument (possibly made more in hope than expectation) is "Not illegal. Because internet."'

Can we please distinguish between the internet as a whole and the WWW? That's an important distinction to make because hyperlinks are how the web works; no hyperlinks, no web. Every page on The Register has loads of them. So can we get rid of the notion that hyperlinks in themselves are illegal or a breach of copyright?

We then have to consider some of the areas of complaint. One is the row about deep linking. One site publishes content. Another has a link to that content. First site complains that its content is being "stolen". As above, hyperlinks are how the web works. If you don't want people to link to it, don't publish it on the web. Possibly the context in which the deep-linked material is presented is intended to deceive the viewer into thinking that it was the second site's work. In that situation there may be a case to answer but it's a case about the deceptive presentation, not the link itself.

The other is material uploaded and made in breach of copyright. That's the offence. A link to it is, in itself, no more than a statement of fact. To go beyond that you have to look at the circumstances in which the statement is made.

Take an example: You tell me that you're looking for a good picture of a sunset. I find a really cracking example on the web and email you a link. It turns out that the picture was actually a third party's picture, uploaded in breach of copyright but with no indication that that was the case. All I've done is make, in all innocence, a factual statement as to where you can find what you were looking for.

If someone is publishing a list of links to such material in a context where there's a clear implication, if not an outright statement that the material is hooky then secondary liability comes into play but it's not the links themselves that are the problem, it's the context which forms an incitement to commit further breaches of copyright that should give rise to secondary liability. What's more it's not the communication's being in the form of a list of hyperlinks that gives rise to the liability, the same liability arises from telling someone that there are stolen phones for sale in a particular pub.

Re: I don't fully understand...

"While at the pub, I hear someone saying they are looking for that film, and I tell him about the guy in the market. Am I violating copyright?"

No, but you might well be aiding and abetting fraud, depending, of course, on whether the stuff actually is hooky.

Re: Hyperlink

"What I can't decide is if this distinction makes it copyright violation."

I doubt it. In one case you're providing a URL which has to be copied into the browser, in the other you're providing a small bit of extra wrapping which allows the browser to automate the process. The information is the same, the presentation is different.

"A decision to put hyperlinks beyond the reach of copyright would place the European Union in breach of its Berne Convention obligations."

Really?

Let's take a real world example.

I copy a document that's somebody else's copyright. Unless I'm covered by fair use that's a breach of copyright. I post that copy somewhere public, maybe by displaying it on my front gate, maybe stick it on an advertising hoarding, wherever. That's definitely a breach of copyright.

Someone then spreads the word that there's a document there. Just that. It doesn't say what the document contains*. It doesn't say whether it's a copy of something that's somebody else's copyright. It just says that there's a document there. How is that, in itself, a breach of copyright? It's a simple statement of fact. Or is it even that? If I remove the document but the word is still being spread and is now erroneous.

*The name of the document in the link might be arbitrary, something like image_$1.jpeg or it migh hint what the document contains, something like elReg_vulture_icon.jpeg, but even that doesn't guarantee that the document actually matches the description.

12 years of US Air Force complaints lost in database crash

Re: A backup isn't a backup

Interesting. a downvote. Presumably from someone who doesn't mind their backup going up in the conflagration or being stolen.

Chubb used to tell a story about their fire-safes. The Co-op in Belfast stored their backups in one of Chubb's safes in their HQ, same building as the computers. When the building burnt down the safe fell several floors and jammed shut. Rather than wait for the locksmith to arrive and sort it out someone decided to use a torch to burn their way into the safe (fire safes are designed to resist fires, not oxyacetylene torches). The backups next to the opening were destroyed by the torch.

Re: A backup isn't a backup

"restoring to fresh hardware in an off-site location"

And making sure the test system is wiped afterwards.

The first time you try this you'll probably learn a good deal about making backups. In my case it was discovering that /etc was stored a long way into the tape. We rearranged the file system backup sequence so that restoration gave us what we needed to start the database restoration quite early in the proceedings.

Re: A backup isn't a backup

Also, a backup isn't a backup until it's removed from the system and securely stored at another location.

Re: They probably lost all the records from the

"system admins saying better backup procedures were necessary."

That assumes there were backup procedures. There's no mention of those in any of the reports and presumably none in the original statement. That raises the question as to whether there were any backup procedures at all. What will be really interesting is if someone manages to restore data up to a particular point in time some years ago. Then the hunt starts for the memo that said they should stop wasting money on taking backups that never get used.

Forget Game of Thrones as Android ransomware infects TVs

Re: Killing TVs, a step too far

"What could the manufacturer possibly do to protect you from yourself in that scenario?"

Not make provision for apps to be given admin rights.

Microsoft splashes Virtual Reality-slinging 'Scorpio' Xbox

Re: Bravo

I thought Elop had been let go? Maybe someone he'd mentored.

Imagination: Come back to MIPS, Wi-Fi router makers, we have an FCC ban workaround

Re: Not just "American geeks"

"It doesn't matter what the manufacturers want, what matters is what the regulators want."

And what do the customers want? An access point that reports back its location to some central surveillance system?