Posts by Doctor Syntax

Is Windows 10 slurping too much data? No, says Microsoft. Nuh-uh. Nope

Re: You really want to "deliver a delightful and personalized Windows experience" to me?

@ dan1980

A very interesting post.

A significant factor may be that Apple's market is not the same as Windows'. In trying to grab a share of one they risk alienating the enterprise segment of the other (where Apple's consumer-based approach wouldn't have been acceptable). They seem not to have grasped this.

They also seem to not appreciate that their traditional lock-in approach may have back-fired. Where users had custom applications running on XP and dependent on specific aspects of the OS their choices in moving no vary from impossible if the development was by a company that not longer exists to expensive if it has to be extensively modified.

If all they gather is this tiny minuscule little bit of data..... WHY IS THERE A GINORMOUS LIST OF WHAT THEY GIVE THEMSELVES PERMISSION TO COLLECT IN THE PRIVACY POLICY?

And talking about "user experience" is always an indicator of a badly broken user interface.

Re: You really want to "deliver a delightful and personalized Windows experience" to me?

"it's a world-wide corporate thing."

That may or may not explain it. It doesn't excuse it.

Here are the God-mode holes that gave TrueCrypt audit the slip

Re: People still use Truecrypt and friends?

"I'm one of those hipster"

Shouldn't you be using a Mac?

NSA? Illegal spying? EU top lawyer is talking out of his Bot – US gov

Re: The usual

"Sorry, America, your proclamations now carry about as much weight as Israel or Syria's. Except they have the benefit at least of talking a different language when they put out internal and external propaganda."

Now there's a common misconception for you - that American and English are the same language. They're even less alike once you get propagandists deciding that words mean exactly what they want them to mean.

Thousands of 'directly hackable' hospital devices exposed online

Apart from anything else it would appear that if these devices are accessible on IPv4 addresses then the organisation has a stock of those addresses that it doesn't need. Given the shortage I'd have thought that their beancounters would have seen an opportunity here.

Dear do-gooders, you can't get rid of child labour just by banning it

Re: flawless logic

@ST

You seem to have comprehension difficulties. I suggest you go back & read TW's article again. Carefully this time. If you still don't grasp the gist of it - that he's suggesting replacing something that doesn't benefit children with something that does, read it again.

Re: Doctor Symoleton Left and Right and Politics

Matt, your ignorance of British politics - and mine - is showing.

Re: Left and Right and Politics

When we finally had an ex-grammar school pupil, Wilson, as PM one of his govt's policies was to pull up the ladder behind them. So after a third of a century we were back to having public school boys running the country again.

To some extent things depend on the nature of the labour. Unskilled work in a sweatshop is one thing. However, tending the goats on the family farm is a step up as the child acquires the knowledge required to run the farm in later life is a step up although if the farm remains at subsistence level it's not an adequate step. Working whilst learning a skilled job is a definite benefit. It's becoming fashionable again amongst our great political thinkers. It's called apprenticeship but not to be confused with the TV version.

Re: Laws

One law never changes. That of unintended consequences.

Re: Child?

"birth rates are a symptom, not a cause"

The two are not mutually exclusive. They can act together to reinforce the situation making improvement an intractable problem.

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

Re: Who wrote the code?

"Where are they?"

Helping self-driving cars pass their safety tests?

Gold bugs, concrete bog roll holders and frolic-friendly furniture: What IS it with designers?

Re: Have to admit...

"it reads as if they've varnished the oak with yachts..."

You've never heard of yacht varnish? It's a thing.

<tangent> I bought a tin of it years ago to use on the parquet floor but didn't get round to doing the job for a long time. Eventually I came to use it, levered off the spring clips holding the lid down & the lid blew off with quite a bang.</tangent>

Re: Have to admit...

"I predict the varnish on the wooden tub will start peeling within two years"

It probably won't matter. By then it'll be out of fashion, the bathroom will have been made over & someone will have hauled the bath out of a skip & be mixing plaster in it.

"a use for this doubtless ingenious piece of design"

It's a money transfer device. It transfers money to the maker from those who have more of it than sense.

Get ready for a grim future where bees have shorter tongues

Let be add a (c). The bees will bite through the base of long-tubed flowers to reach the nectar that way. It's known bee behaviour. In fact the team should have checked that this isn't happening as it could be the explanation. Not that this helps with the pollination.

Sorry to bring a bit of biology into all your AGW & creationist arguments but I did start out as a botanist <mumble> years ago.

Given that bees and flowers have co-evolved over a very long period I'd expect that either (a) the longer tubed flower species will evolve to match the bees or (b) a new sub-species of bee will emerge to take advantage of a food source for which there is now less competition. Nature doesn't usually much on the table for very long.

@ Spotthelemon

And by replacing "Lewis Page" by "Jews" in your comment we can prove that you're a fascist. What was your point?

Re: Climate change is real

"who will neither agree nor change their minds in a thousand years."

Now you're being silly. A thousand years is the right sort of timescale to evaluate climate change.

Project Zero bod says antivirus black market is growing

Re: At the risk of being hunted down and called a spammer

". It was very confusingly written"

Takes one to know one.

Controversial: The future is data integrity, not confidentiality

"Ilves spoke knowledgeably about a whole range of tech issues"

But not necessarily about biological ones. IIRC blood type AB is the universal recipient - he has both A & B antigens already so wouldn't react against a transfusion containing either. Unless, of course, he's really O and his records have already been changed in which case he's in trouble but has proved his point.

Google makes admen pay for fake YouTube views, claims research

Re: Contrarian view

Interesting. A downvote. It must be a malvertiser or just possibly someone out of the Ken Wheaton mould.

All the recent evidence is that the web advertising business model is doomed unless it gets cleaned up PDQ.

It seems to be of the view that it's in some kind of war with the makers of adblockers. Wrong. It's in a war with the adblockers' users. A moment's intelligent thought should bring realisation that those users are the people it's trying to influence on the behalf of its clients*. Fighting those who you are seeking to influence is never going to come out well for those on whose behalf you claim to be working. Instead of seeing itself as having a right to thrust itself into everyone's eyeballs and eardrums with that right being denied by the evil adblockers it needs to reconsider. It needs to think what it has to do to be allowed into the potential targets' presence. The most urgent is to reorganise so as to prevent malvertising. It also needs to address other complaints - intrusiveness and consumption of the bandwidth for which those targets have paid.

If the advertising networks themselves can't get over their sense of entitlement to see this the web sites selling the advertising space will have to help them. Perhaps this could start with some of the more tech oriented sites which must surely be best placed to see the problem. Any suggestions?

*There's an alternative view, which I'm not prepared to argue against: that all the industry is interested in is taking money from those clients and that it doesn't give a damn whether the net result is of any value to them.

Contrarian view

If I click on a page with ads on it I'd be quite happy for the ad to be shown to a robot viewer instead of myself. The page author gets paid, I get to see the page and the advertiser, who'd have paid anyway, doesn't risk losing my business by pissing me off. Cui bono? Everybody. Except malvertisers of course.

More email misery and pillory for Hillary as FBI starts quizzery

Re: Conspiracy

Somehow, reading this, I hear it being recited in the voice of Sir Humphrey.

The BBC's Space: A short history of 21st Century indoor relief

Not so much the middle-class as the chattering-class.

Privacy, net neutrality, security, encryption ... Europe tells Obama, US Congress to back off

Re: And suddenly ..

If you're so knowledgeable about this the following comment surprises me: "Thinking that Microsoft will win this is in my opinion wishful thinking. It would establish a precedent that a single company can change the law,"

This and the Enron bit have been trotted out before and it's wrong. Nobody is challenging the DoJ's right to subpoena evidence if they follow due process. The precedent that the DoJ is trying to set here is that if a company looks after the records of someone else then those records become part of the company's records. Enron's company records would have been Enron's company records wherever they were held and a decision in Microsoft's favour wouldn't change that.

There is a mechanism in place for a request to go through due process of law in Ireland. They chose not to use that and invent the theory that other people's email is part of Microsoft's coompany records. Why they did so is a good question. Was it a fishing expedition which couldn't be made to stand up in Ireland because there was no good prima facie case?

If such a precedent were set think of the possible consequences. SomeCo is acting as a safe deposit for documents establishing somebody's right to property; say the deeds of your house. SomeCo goes into receivership or whatever the equivalent is in the US. The receiver can treat the deeds as SomeCo's company records and make whatever use of them that will raise money. When it's put like that does it seem such a good precedent to set?

Re: how many of the MEPs were from the UK

You can check for yourself by reading the linked PDF. And the answer isn't just damn few, it's none! Not unless we have an MEP with a very non-UK sounding name.

Re: And suddenly ..

"Now let's see what finally happens in the DoJ vs Microsoft case because that will pretty much set the scene for the rest of this year."

This year? That's optimistic in terms of court proceedings. And whatever happens the consequences will probably rumble on for a good few years.

Bloodthirsty data parasites hungrily eye up healthcare sector

Re: care.data

"should have a published plan of what they will do *when* it is stolen"

I like it (apart from the fact that "stolen" isn't the legally correct term). It should extend to loss from anyone they've sold it on to and anyone they in turn sold it on to ad inf. - which would place an obligation on purchasers to report back. It would at least concentrate the minds.

"Claim from our insurance" wouldn't be a satisfactory complete answer although it might be a good thing to include. Insurers need to start thinking what they might be on the hook for and start dictating precautions.

And the plans should apply when someone downstream combines anonymised data with a data set capable of de-anonymising it.

care.data

SUCH a good idea!

Happy birthday to you, the ruling was true, no charge for this headline, 'coz the copyright's screwed

Re: Copyright theft

"they should be ordered to pay all that back."

With interest. Compound interest.

"so should the tune not be out of copyright anyway??"

Sometimes reading is so difficult. From TFA "expired in 1949".

Revealed: Why Amazon, Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb and co plunged offline

Re: @ Voland's right hand If only there was a way

"the sparky didn't like working on live kit"

Clearly you need a BOFH. Choice of working on live kit or the cattle prod.

Ex-BT boffin Cochrane blasts telco's 'wholly inadequate' broadband vision

What would be the cost of laying FTTP for the whole country? Not just densely populated cities but the whole country - isolated farms included. And the true cost, not the sort of estimates that are used to get the contract so that the difference to the true cost, along with the profits, can be added in as extras.

You call THAT safe? Top EU legal bod says data sent to US is anything but

The EU needs to give a deadline by which the existing SH will be dead unless there is a major change in US legislation - one which will be binding on the NSA with a treaty binding the US govt.

No more NSLs.

No more rubber stamping courts.

No more DoJ fishing expeditions.

The whole lot repealed from US law.

The deadline should be just sufficient for companies to bring their data home with a modicum of panic if they get their backsides into action PDQ; sufficient panic to give them serious worries about ever getting into that situation again.

Then let's see how fast US officialdom can reform to try to meet the deadline from their side. It would help if there were increased political pressures in the US. Isn't there an election coming up soon?

If you absolutely must do a ‘private cloud’ thing, here's how

Re: Business Critical Data out there in the cloud

" if it happened to Shoreditch no one would notice anyway apart from the slight increase in hot air rising from the area."

Don't you mean decrease?

Citrix wants a buyer, fast

If these activist investors are so good at managing other people's companies how come they haven't set up their own businesses to actually do stuff?

Malvertisers slam Forbes, Realtor with world's worst exploit kits

Re: In a related story, Advertising Age editor Ken Wheaton once said...

Is Basingstoke really that bad?

Re: responsibilities

@Don Dumb

I take your point about the sites' contractual arrangements being with the advertisers not the public who visit them. However, to continue with the restaurant...No, let's just say that the sites also have a duty of care to the public, as we all have. If, by negligence, they cause public harm then they must surely be liable.

Apart from that they must surely have concerns for their reputation. Are they really content that their sites are bait to be used by criminals?

11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?

Re: European testing

In the UK at least the test results determine the taxation class. If the upshot of this is that taxation classes get revised upwards there are going to be a lot of unhappy customers - and presumably a big prosecution under the Trades Description Act.

BTW so far the reports apply to diesel. Does anyone know if petrol-fuelled cars are also affected?

India's daft draft anti-encryption law torn up after world+dog points out its stupidity

Danger

Encryption policies can seriously damage your wealth. Other governments please copy.

Cambridge University Hospitals rated 'inadequate' due to £200m IT fail

Re: Bah!

" describe a rich and immutable API"

Can't do that because Agile.

Things you should know about the hard work of home working

Re: Terminology

"Working from home is, I believe, generally understood as working from one's own home."

Agreed. From. Not at. If you don't see the confusion it may be because you're confusing the two words.

There are a number of scenarios where the worker's normal base is home but little or no work is done there. The field service tech is one example, the travelling salesman is another. There may be a certain amount of paperwork done at home but it's certainly not the same as working there more or less full time which is what the article described. It's also not the same as working daily on a single customer site which you mentioned in another post; been there & done that myself, visiting my employer's office maybe 3 or 4 times in a couple of years.

The circumstances are different. Working from home isn't likely to cut down travel but increase it. It doesn't mean isolation except, maybe, for a tech servicing unmanned installations but at the same time one isn't dealing with the same people on a daily basis and communication with one's fellow employees is restricted.

Terminology

There's confusion here. Working FROM home isn't the same as working AT home. eg A maintenance tech going from home to one customer site to another and seldom visiting base might be said to be working from home but not at home.

Cisco shocker: Some network switches may ELECTROCUTE you

IT kit with built in cattleprod. Marvellous!

My parents don't know I'm in SEO. They think I play piano in a brothel

Re: Spam filter

My response is to ask them which site they're referring to. They never seem to be able to quote a URL. Odd that as I have a number of sites. Well, zero's a number isn't it?

India to cripple its tech sector with proposed encryption crackdown

Re: Bureaucrats not speaking to techies

" They won't stand for it since they get hit if there's any attack and data grab."

Sadly, data grabs are getting to be business as usual these days.

This could be interesting

If they go ahead and the Indian service sector's overseas customers start to drop them maybe a few other governments might get the message.

Microsoft starts to fix Start Menu in new Windows 10 preview

Re: Documents on desktop

'sensitive documents shouldn't appear on desktops in case a minion notices the file "Everybody to be sacked.xlsx".'

Sensitive documents shouldn't leak information in their filenames.