Posts by Doctor Syntax

Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Wanna walk the plank voluntarily? You got it

The HP fragments must have remarkably able C-suite executives. Because as things are going at present they'll be the only ones left to fill the contracts. At which point they'll probably be hit with IR35.

Is Dublin becoming as unaffordable as San Francisco?

Re: Housing shortage

"Dublin can't get enough skilled people"

Could the housing shortage have anything to do with that?

Apple will be grilled by Irish National Planning Board over €850m data centre plan

As a non-native (?Sitka spruce) plantation it would always have been intended to be harvested by clear felling after a number of years. From what I can see on Google maps a large portion of it has already been felled. If it was previously woodland the real environmental offence would have been the plantation itself. I wonder what the local objections were to the existing adjacent golf course.

China's Dalek-like robots fear only one terrifying nemesis: Stairs

"It's fitted with a stun weapon"

A robot BOFH.

Linux infosec outfit does a Torvalds, rageblocks innocent vuln spotter

Shooting the messanger

Never a good idea.

Docker hired private detectives to pursue woman engineer's rape, death threat trolls

"Yep, I reckon Docker should do the decent thing and release details of the harassment that was aimed at their employee."

You mean, in effect, repeat the harassment in public?

Re: @Meldreth -- Utterly unacceptable

"Am I on a different planet?"

You seem to be.

"Why wouldn't tech journalists call out Docker to share what they found when investigating this?"

Because they're sufficiently well-informed to realise that (a) investigations proceed best when the subject isn't warned of progress and (b) if the investigation results in court action such action might have to be dropped if prior publication were to be ruled prejudicial.

Google can't hold back this malware running riot in its Play store

Re: What chance ordinary users to stay safe?

"Sadly, they don't seem to have been taken further."

Maybe they'd not be backwards-compatible with their existing OS. That clean slate is a problem for everyone who's got an existing product. Just like Unix, MS has a heritage extending back into the '70s.

The 70s/early 80s had a big advantage. There was new hardware without any OS. Although Bell labs were working with hardware that did have an OS that was nullified because they'd been working on an abandoned line of OS research, Multics, so they also had a clean slate. It's going to be hard for anyone to push themselves back to that position and then try to compete against existing platforms with existing app-stores, however flawed.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Branson will lead Sage's 'sexy accounting' shtick

"Why do corporates pay for these celebs to attend their conferences?"

I think it's the execs' idea. It makes them feel important.

But celebs & beancounters - is it really a marriage made in heaven?

Thunderbird is GO: Mozilla prepares to jettison mail client

'Last time I complained on a Thunderbird forum I got told "It's free, how can you complain about something you don't pay for"'

This is a common problem with FOSS forums. There's always a smattering of religious zealots who assume that because it's free in the Stallman sense that it must be beyond criticism - and will be even more beyond criticism in the next release. Alternatively you'll be told that there's the source, fix it up yourself. In reality the actual devs may well be aware of the problems but are too busy chasing something more demanding - such as chasing a changes in the libraries on which they depend.

"This would be a terrible blow."

What would? The article discusses alternatives to enable Thunderbird to be better supported. I don't see that as a terrible blow, more like something to be welcomed.

Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,

"Under the hood, Firefox is racing flat out to keep up with Chrome implementing the standard. If Firefox so much as pulls in for a pit stop, it will fall behind catastrophically and be lost."

And the corollary seems to be that Thunderbird, by using the underpinnings of Firefox has exactly the same problem in relation to Firefox that Firefox has in relation to Chrome. As far as I'm aware Seamonkey also has the same problem and so does Palemoon.

I recall reading that Palemoon were considering writing their own rendering engine. Maybe there's scope for all the Mozilla spin-offs and splinter groups to get together and provide themselves with their own common core, either as a fork or from ground up.

Re: Still around?

"So Thunderbird's a fully-fledged mail server now, is it?"

Read this carefully. Thunderbird allows you to download your mail from the server and keep, i.e. store, it anywhere you want, even with multiple copies in multiple locations. Was that too difficult to understand?

Re: Still around?

"you need your own mail server as well"

Yes, but you don't need to run it yourself. In addition to the usual suspect there are paid for service providers. Your ISP may include an email service although using it makes it harder to jump ship if they have problems such as, let's say, three security breaches in less than a year.

My own solution is my own domain with both the registration and email server handled by a single hosting company. Several years advance payment didn't amount to much and I can set up multiple email addresses within the domain.

Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,

"Can someone else look after Firefox too?"

Palemoon?

Re: I use thunderbird, and don't want to see it go

"Seamonkey is still going strong for the truly nostalgic."

When re-homing Thunderbird with the Document Foundation was looked at some months ago one of the issues raised was the need to re-skin it to fit in with LibreOffice. In its Seamonkey guise the mail client wouldn't be a problem. Ironically it seems that LibreOffice (and OpenOffice?) had a good deal of Seamonkey code buried in it until fairly recently in order to have access to the address-book.

As a user of both Seamonkey and LibreOffice my preferred choice would be to see the Document Foundation look after the whole shooting match giving the option of anything between a free-standing email client and a complete package.

Re: Still around?

Given the existence of good email clients why would anyone want to keep their email on someone else's computer?

F-35's dodgy software in the spotlight again

Re: Just trust US. We've been flying by the seat of our pants for a long time

"the most incredible flying machine"

"Incredible" seems to be the operative word here.

Hackers so far ahead of defenders it's not even a game

Re: Don't remind me!

"the CFO complains that his Windows is getting slower and no-one is upgrading his laptop."

Probably the best option would be to collect his laptop first thing every the morning for its daily update. The daily update would be so exhaustive that it would only be ready to return to him last thing at night.

Meet the malware that screwed a Bangladeshi bank out of $81m

" SWIFT said that the attack didn't exploit a vulnerability in its security systems and was entirely dependent on an attacker compromising a local terminal."

Including your terminals within your security system boundaries might be a good idea. After all, they're the obvious points of attack.

FBI ends second iPhone fight after someone, um, 'remembers' the PIN

Re: this whole unlocking thing kills their bluffs

"Making the cost of over $1 million public was probably not Comey's best move"

I hope they kept the receipt.

Re: They'll keep trying

"They will likely pick another case in the same judicial district as the San Bernadino case, where they already had a favorable lower court ruling"

Reportedly when they got the initial ruling they'd told the court that it would be easy for Apple & Apple didn't get to say their piece. If that's the case there's probably a magistrate there now who's a little upset about the whole thing so I doubt another warrant would go through on the nod in that court.

And what was found on the phone now it's unlocked? Will we be told?

What a difference a year makes: ICO tele-spam fines break £2m barrier

"a £5,000 penalty issued to an MP"

I'm disappointed to read that. Telephone spam should have been sufficient to make them an ex-MP. What were the voters thinking of? I wonder if the fine should have been reported as part of their election costs.

Ad-blocker blocking websites face legal peril at hands of privacy bods

Re: @FF22 no one pays attention to them??

'How many times have you said "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label"?'

None.

Re: Bull?

'I am not easily persuaded that something IS illegal just because Mr Hanff SAYS it is, and that such "illegality" will actually be enforced by the national or European courts'

Of course illegality won't be determined except by decision of a court. But courts don't proactively pursue cases. Cases have to be brought to them. This appears to be Mr Hanff's intention and seeking the views of the regulators is a sensible step to take before doing so.

Re: Almost enough to make me want to vote to stay in

"Frequently, I find that to be necessary but obscure device drivers which means I have to take it or abandon the hardware which means money."

Extreme edge cases don't seem like a sound foundation for what might remain of the existing advertising business model.

Re: A blocker to block the anti-blocker

"You can't do that without wasting bandwidth."

Serving ads, particularly big chunks of video, to someone who will only take an instant dislike to the ad and consequently to whatever it's advertising isn't a good way of conserving bandwidth.

"Servers can always tell if something is requested or not, meaning you can't ad-block without them knowing you're ad-blocking."

Request and send to /dev/null would be effective where bandwidth isn't a consideration. It's the nearest you could get to a win/win. The publisher gets paid and the advertiser, who'd have paid anyway if the ad was seen, doesn't get identified to the user and so doesn't lose out if they were a potential customer. It would be in the advertising industry's best interests not to try to detect this.

Re: They might learn

"When it comes to things like obscure device drivers"

Extreme edge cases are unlikely to be enough for the survival of such a thoroughly unpopular branch of the advertising industry.

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

"Until you find out the calls came internationally from foreign countries who could care less about EU law."

The callers get sent for a long weight. It seems to work, I get very few of them. I really should get round to making a note of who they're representing. There's little point in making a sales call if the business they're selling on behalf of doesn't have some toehold in this jurisdiction and AFAIK the principals are responsible for the actions of their agents.

Sadly the only call from "Microsoft Support" was missed. An opportunity wasted.

"(a) It doesn't get picked up"etc.

It goes into the post box. It gets picked up when the post box gets cleared. Frankly I don't care whether the original sender or the Royal Mail picks up the cost, it isn't me. The Royal Mail now has contracts for delivering bulk unaddressed mail. They really ought to be responsible for the costs of disposal and pass that on as part of the contract charges. The councils for the areas to which they distribute this litter shouldn't be responsible for disposal, the polluter should pay.

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

"Junk calls."

TPS. Offenders either get the long weight treatment or get grassed up to ICO/Ofcom as appropriate to build the case for those nice fines.

"Junk mail."

AKA letter-box litter - let's clearly identify it as what it is: pollution. Gets posted back. I don't give a damn whether it's the offender or Royal Mail who carries the cost. Frankly, if everyone did this I think junk mail would die a quick death as it would put real costs back where they belong on the polluter pays principle. I don't see why council tax payers should be burdened with the cost of other people's litter.

And in general let's be clear about the effects of this - if this crap comes from businesses I deal with it gets counted as negative customer service. My current house insurance will go elsewhere at next renewal due to the current insurer's incontinence with spam. A previous insurer lost the business due to letter-box litter. British Gas stopped trying to sell me electricity when I made it crystal clear that one more call would cost them their existing business with me.

Re: Lots of people hate adverts...

""How are individuals trying to get small web-based businesses started supposed to promote their products?"

This is a question that deserves a fuller answer than I gave last night.

I'll start off by taking out "web-based" and dealing with small businesses in general.

Looking back over the past couple of years or so I've used several local tradesmen such as a joiner, painters, central heating and plumbing, garage door repairer, blacksmith (wrought iron gate), dry-stone waller & tree surgeon. The joiner advertised in print in the parish magazine. The painters were recommended by the joiner. The central heating engineer we'd used before, probably found in the phone book but relocated by his website via search. When we had a non-heating plumbing requirement he recommended his brother. Garage door repairer was found by searching for description and locality which turned up his website. I can't remember how we first came across the blacksmith but he lives across the road now. I found one waller via his website and search but he was too expensive so I hired one recommended by the joiner. The tree surgeon was another search & website discovery. I forgot to include the roofer in my list: ad in local free paper. So, two print ads, the remainder a mixture of word-of-mouth and web search. The joiner and heating engineer were both recommended to my daughter when she needed such services.

One aspect of this should be apparent - a web-based small business can be found by search engine, the only difference is that when looking for a physical small business rather than a web-based one included the locality as a search term. Also, at web-scale social media or specialised forums seem to stand in for word-of-mouth very well.

Re: Blocking ad-blockers is good

"I run a website and successfully block ad-blockers without the need to probe browser cookies."

And when you find there aren't enough ad-swallowing visitors to make your site viable what do you do then?

Re: Ads are bad, mmkay

"Take It Or Leave It."

Fine, I'll leave it. That denies you any alternative means of raising revenue.

"Then you either accept the ad like you do on live TV"

Live TV? MythTV and >>

Re: So people who pay for content should be spared ads ?

"How does that square with Sky and other subscription *TV* services ?"

It doesn't. That's one reason why I don't have Sky.

Back to basics

Let me return you to what it's all about. The advertisers, 1 in my previous post, want to entice members of the public, 4 to buy their products. The advertising industry, 2, are offering their services to do that.

Imagine, for the moment that I have a product I want to sell - garden furniture, ice cream, readymix concrete, whatever. Would FF22 or any other apologist for the advertising industry please explain how you'd sell me your services; you're offering a medium which has proved so unpopular to the public that you're reduced to pleading or haranguing them to stop blocking it. Now take it from there and explain how you're going to use this unpopular medium to improve my sales.

Re: One way online advertising might change?

"You're treating all publishers and all ads the same, as if they'd be all reckless, bad and dangerous. Which they aren't."

To paraphrase Gresham's law, the bad ads drive out the good.

'Of course they would be "new". They would be extra cost on top of the costs that are already there and have to be covered. That's what I'm saying.'

Really? These ads that are being thrust at users - you're telling me that they don't come from servers? They just come out of the ether?

Of course they come from servers. It's a question of whose servers. Instead of paying the ad networks to run the servers the advertisers pay the publishers. When all's said and done they may even be in the same server farm, even the same servers re-purposed.

"But we can also take the problem of malvertising. This is caused by malicious entities hacking the ad servers or submitting covertly malicious ads to the ad network."

And your contention is that we should allow such servers and networks access to our computers? ROFLMAO

Re: Lots of people hate adverts...

"How are individuals trying to get small web-based businesses started supposed to promote their products?

It's all very well to say that advertising isn't nice, but just blocking it is cutting off your nose to spite your face."

Do you really think products are going to be successfully promoted by advertising that isn't nice?

Re: Ok, just RTFC

"And, unlike you, I can also provide you with a verifiable and official document proving what I'm saying, and disproving what you keep repeating. Feel free to read it: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2014/wp224_en.pdf"

Thanks for the link. I've just read it. It appears to support Mr Hanff.

" they will now have to have ad sales people (or more of them than they did previously) that directly sell to advertisers. They will also have to invest into additional equipment (ad servers, which was done previously by a 3rd party), sysadmins who run those new servers, etc. These will all drive up their operating cost, which in turn will force them to display more and more obtrusive ads to cover those raised expenses."

All these costs. Would they be new as opposed to existing at present? Of course not. There are ad sales people currently selling advertising space to advertisers. There is currently server capacity delivering the ads (make the ads less obnoxious and there'd be less capacity needed). The cost is there. Maybe not identical but it's there. Who pays? Not the advertising industry. The advertisers pay. They'd still pay but the costs would be distributed differently.

But there's one thing you haven't addressed in any reply. That's what the presence of ad-blocking is telling you: users are repelled by the ads.

There's no getting around that. The more ads intrude the more they're disliked. And it's not the advertising networks and agencies that receive the opprobrium; they're faceless. It's the advertisers' names that are on the ads. They get the dislike. And once they finally wake up to that and start to walk away the industry has had it. It's not the ad-blockers that are the disease. It's the ads themselves and the reputation they've gained. The blockers are just the immunological reaction.

I've said elsewhere, the best service you can do for your industry is to report back the reaction and tell them that they need to get to work to make themselves publicly acceptable although I suppose there may be a tendency to shoot the messenger in which case you have my sympathy.

Re: @FF22 no one pays attention to them??

"you take notice of a good advert, and that helps the product tuck itself away into a little nook or cranny in your mind."

A long time ago i took note of a series of good ads. Brits of a certain age will remember the Hamlet ads - witty and even a fragment of JS Bach. As far as I was concerned it never did them a bit of good because I've never smoked.

"Ever thought the ad revenues will be greater than ANY subscription fee will ever bring in?"

In the past, maybe. The old model worked by an arrogant industry doing exactly whatever pleased them, using the consumer's paid-for bandwidth to insult the consumer's intelligence with inanities and offend their senses with offensively attention-grabbing gimmicks. To that has now been added the delivery of malware.

In the past the consumers had to put up with it because there was no defence; now there is so that old model is no longer viable. Those revenues are no longer going to be available. The publishers are going to have to rethink their business model.

Let's remember there are four groups involved here:

1. The actual advertisers - those who have products or services to sell.

2. The advertising industry.

3. The web-site publishers.

4. The public.

1 wants to favourably influence 4. 4 wants to use the product of 3. 3 wants to be paid. Currently 2 sells its services to 1 and pays 3 to impose its product on 4.

The rise of ad-blockers quite unequivocally tells us one thing: 4 doesn't like 2's product. It shouldn't take too much reasoning to conclude that this dislike will wash over onto 1. When 1 actually cotton onto that fact it really is game over for 2. In fact 2 really ought to be keeping quiet about the whole thing and the only reason I can come up with as to why they aren't is that they're so full of themselves that they really think they can overcome ad-blockers.

So far the only solutions 2 have are to persuade 3 to block 4 (which ends up having 4's dislike spill over onto 3) and to have folk like FF22 stand on the sidelines yelling at 4 to the effect that 4 really do like the advertising or some such nonsense. That isn't going to work if only because malvertising is making ad-blocking a required part of users' security alongside anti-virus. There are a few possible outcomes:

2 get their house in order. They reign back on the offensive adverts and they get a firm hold on malvertising. They then persuade 4 that it's OK to stop blocking on the basis that they really have cleaned up. The longer they keep up with their present ideas the more difficult that becomes.

3 adopt a different business model, either by subscription or by hosting vetted ads themselves. This to a greater or lesser extent cuts out 2, especially the "creative" element of 2 that's responsible for creating the obnoxiousness.

3 go out of business taking 2 with them.

1 get the message and walk away from the whole mess taking out 2 & 3.

What's the best option for 2?

Re: @FF22

"I don't think you understand how your own industry works."

Of course he does. That's why he's here - because of the panic.

Re: @FF22

"The reason ads are more obnoxious is because, as you note, it's the only way to get their attention."

The only reason the advertisers want attention is to positively influence the viewer. Obnoxious may get attention but it isn't going to be positive.

Re: @FF22

"So, by blocking ads you're creating that downward spiral for every site that provides services free of charge to you."

No. There are a couple of alternatives.

One is that they serve the ads from their own servers. They'd have to vet them for malvertising. They'd have to consider whether they'd be sufficiently annoying to drive traffic away.

The other is to offer paid for content.

As far as I can see we have a situation where internet users are thoroughly pissed off with ads. Advertisers are getting ripped off because they're paying to piss off potential customers but they don't get any feedback about the extent of negative reactions.

The advertising industry and publishers have, up to now, been coining it because there's been no way to the public to avoid what they don't like. Now there is.

The model which has victimised the public and ripped off the advertisers is failing.

It's not surprising that they (advertising industry and publishers) are trying to force the issue; they're so full of themselves that they haven't realised the game's up

The biggest service FF22 could do for their masters is to report back the reality out here - that their modus operandi is really, really hated by those who they are trying to influence and that that is counter-productive to what they're trying to achieve for the advertisers*. That the good days are over and they aren't coming back. Only when that sinks in will they finally get round to doing what they need to do - come up with a model that is acceptable to the public.

*If anything. The cynic in me says that maybe they're not trying to achieve anything except get paid and the one product that the advertising industry successfully advertises is itself to the clients.

"Don't feed the troll."

But he's so entertaining when he loses it.

Re: snooping my machine

'What I said - and what you didn't get - was that by not visiting sites with "bad" ads, but switching to sites with "good" ad instead, you're creating a feedback loop, which doesn't need you to actually fill out a form about ads.'

Nice one. The only way to distinguish these sites would be to turn off the ad-blockers!

What a pity we can all see through it.

Re: snooping my machine

'"But at the end of the chain the only way we have of expressing a preference for good quality advertising versus random malware is to install ad blockers. "

Wrong. Actually, the contrary is true: ad blocking is what eliminates any expression of preference'

Please enlighten us. If he's wrong to say it's the only way then there must be another. What is it?