Posts by Doctor Syntax

Remember WordPress' Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web

Re: "all in one place ..."

"The web in whatever guise is completely ephemeral."

Far from complete - and usually the missing bit is the bit you want - but there's archive.org as a last resort.

"Pingbacks were only ever an ego boosting tool used to make you feel good that somebody referenced you. They never really got used for anything important because they didn't do the very thing you describe Twitter and Facebook as being good at - aggregating things."

Usenet & IRC are the non-corporate way of aggregation. All pingback achieved was disrupting discussion threads on blogs.

Bitcoin burrower biz Butterfly Labs billed $38m for 'bilking' buyers

I think it's time to reintroduce a Victorian institution: the debtors' prison.

How tech firms can drive growth without making inequality worse

Re: So let's see if I can paraphrase

"People quite like working in places where you can walk to work and at least some basic shops without getting a car every five minutes."

And the town planners over the last 6 decades or so have done more than anyone to prevent that. The brownfield site they've allocated to housing previously provided employment to those living in the housing around it. Now those living in both lots of housing are going to have to travel some distance to work because we've got to have houses and employment in different zones, preferably as far apart as possible. They shouldn't publish a report, they should publish an apology.

Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

"hydrogen stations ... near where our customers live"

I hope none of their customers lives near me then. Nasty inflammable stuff, more so than any other fuel and harder to keep where it's supposed to be.

Privacy Shield: Data Protection Commissioners break out a six-pack

From the Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker press statement link

"I want to specifically thank Commissioner Jourová and her team for their incredible, persistent work over the last two and a half years."

Incredible = not believable.

'Nuff said.

"Also, be aware also that some serious contingency planning might be needed if Europe’s Data Protection Commissioners judge that the Privacy Shield does not provide an adequate level of protection."

Not contingency planning, just planning.

Schrems should have been a wakeup call. Until the US totally changes its prying ways and overall approach to personal data no fig leaf arrangement is going to get past the ECJ again. I suppose the US industry could buy itself a better government but it will be a lot cheaper and quicker to shift processing of data to non-US data centres protected from the US govt by an adequate legal firebreak.

This is not an issue that's going to go away.

And the UK govt. should consider the effect of continuing along its merry way in the event of a Brexit. It's going to make doing business with the EU a whole lot more difficult because they'll have put us in the same sin-bin as the US.

Trade union threatens work-to-rule action over HPE Lancashire job cuts

Industrial action is such a good way to make yourself indispensable.

Five Eyes nations must purge terrorists from the web, says Theresa May

It sounds like she's gone off message. Doesn't she know that their online presence helps GCHQ to monitor them?

Re: She,

"like most of the fossils "running" the country"

What fossils? They're all kiddies these days.

Re: Bring back Fidonet.

'Burner phones and poor social graphs (tight contact lists) make you stand out from "normal people."'

It depends what you mean by tight contact lists. I'm retired so I don't make business calls any more. A P&G SIM is sufficient. My mobile just has a few friends & family numbers & I no longer give its number out to businesses as that just invites SMS spam.

And running my own domain I use a number of burner email addresses so spammers can be cut off.

Re: Five Eyes nations must purge terrorists from the web, says Theresa May

"Have I not been paying attention or did they just invent it?"

You've not been paying attention.

Yahoo! axes! websites! you've! never! heard! of! and! lays! off! staff!

Re: Merging Yahoo! and AOL...

I remember that when Unisys was formed by merging Sperry & Burroughs someone said it was on the principle that two rocks tied together would float.

Why Tim Cook is wrong: A privacy advocate's view

"the overall goal here wihch is protect the NATIONAL INTEREST OF THE USA"

And what, exactly is that? Is it the same today as it was yesterday? Will it be the same tomorrow? Or after a change of government?

"Since when has any 'judge' been enpowered to make the law,"

No, they do that regularly. It's the basis of Common Law in England and all other countries which follow that principle. It's statute law they don't make.

"when it's their job to judge 'only',whether or not the case may be,if someone has broken the law."

Again, only partially correct. At the magistrate's court level (or whatever the equivalent may be in other jurisdictions) yes. And, as we're dealing with terrorism, in the "Diplock" courts in N Ireland*. But in jury trials it's the jury's job; the judge's job is to explain the law to the jury.

*In those courts the judge had to do something no jury is called on to do: explain the reasoning by which they arrived at the verdict.

Re: Not even wrong...

"It comes down to phycology"

What does phycology have to do with it?

Re: aye but

"The fbi has gone to a court to get apple help it with one device. There is nothing of the fbi wanting a permanent method for all uphones."

There's a good deal of wanting to use an unusual set of circumstances to set a precedent for lots of other circumstances.

Confused as to WTF is happening with Apple, the FBI and a killer's iPhone? Let's fix that

Re: Simple solution...

"The passcode is needed to unlock the key with which the data is encrypted.

That key is a 256 Bit AES key. You can't brute force that"

Yes, but the whole point of this is that the FBI wants to brute force the passcode. Not the key, the passcode.

They seem to think it can be done if Apple would remove the limitation that 10 wrong guesses will wipe the whole thing. It's not immediately obvious to me why, if the flash memory were to be cloned, this couldn't be done in a VM as the whole memory image could be restored every 10 guesses.

I'd have thought that extracting and cloning such an image is something the NSA would have looked at already and had a method worked out. That makes me suspicious.

Consider the situation. The owner is dead and is unable to object. There's general acceptance that the owner committed several murders - and in due course we can expect a coroner's court to make that official. There's a strong argument that good intelligence relating to terrorism could be obtained. It's about as good a situation as TPTB could have to set a precedent which could be used later in weaker circumstances - a phone seized from a live suspect who's not been charged with a particularly serious offence let alone convicted - in other words a fishing expedition.

All-American Apple challenges US gov call for iOS 'backdoor'

'the FBI* doesn't want to use the toxic phrase "back door"'

Of course they don't. That makes it important to insist on calling a spade a spade - and a back door a back door.

*Other agencies and nationalities are available.

A third of Brits would cough up £300 to ransomware peddlers

Useful market research for the baddies!

Bulk sensitive data slurp? You can't stand under our umbrella-ella-ella – EDPS

"Falque-Pierrotin said, though, that she does not think the Judicial Redress Bill will address those concerns because the Bill would not apply to cases concerning access to data for national security purposes."

It fails to address concerns at a much more fundamental level than that. Redress should not be in the US against whoever abused the data there; data subjects should not be subject to the trouble of taking action in a country in which they do not reside especially where it might well be the government of that country responsible for the abuse. Redress should be in the data subject's home jurisdiction against whoever transferred it to the US.

Cybersecurity is slowing down my business, say majority of chief execs

"I don't think the issue here is actually managers seeing that security is a barrier, it's security people creating barriers to business instead of realizing the security needs to follow the company line and enable."

One way of looking at security is that it's the ratio between the difficulty between someone trying to do something nasty and the difficulty of someone trying to do their job. There's no point in making the first impossible if you also make the second impossible.

Streetmap's lawyer: Google High Court win will have 'chilling effect’ on UK digital biz

Re: Innovate, update layout, compete!

"the reason I stopped using Streetmaps was because Google Maps was easy to move around and Streetmaps required me to press an arrow in the direction I want to go"

I find this statement surprising as I can drag Streetmap maps round in much the same way as Google maps. The big advantage of Streetmap is that they're actually full-featured OS maps. Ironically Google maps (as opposed to the overlaid aerial photos are just streemaps.

Failed school intranet project spent AU$1.4m on launch party before crashing and burning

Learning Management obviously didn't manage to learn.

Ofcom must tackle 'monopolistic' provider BT, says shadow digital minister Chi Onwurah

"So £2000 is nothing."

OK, so it's nothing. For one house. Now roll it out to a million houses. Pretty soon all those nothings start to add up to real money. The there's the logistics. Let's say you have 100 teams and each team can connect a house a day*. If you want to connect a million homes then that's going to take 10k days, 27 years working 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. How do you scale up the number of teams? Who's going to train them? Where? Are you going to pull workers out of the active times to provide the training and slow the rate of installation down in the mean time? And when they've finished connecting up every home what will the redundancies cost?

*If you have real figures as opposed to illustrative ones please feel free to substitute them.

"On the other hand, if FTTH were introduced from the start, you would have a ready-made replacement to LLU "

Wrong tense.

s/were/had been/

How short-sighted of the telecoms industry way back in the last century to lay copper (which they had technology to make and use) instead of fibre (which they could neither make nor use).

Re: All hail!

"Now where's my Trimphone?"

You can't have one. Get back into the queue and one day you can have a black telephone. Do you mind sharing a party line?

Re: Priorities

"If the Openreach arm of the business was taken back into public ownership (i.e. a public service) then no, it won't have shareholders."

And if the GPO days are anything to go by it wouldn't have much in the way of investment either. Why do you think BT was privatised? Big clue - HMGs of all hues had fought shy of putting money into it at anything like the required rate. Nationalised GPO was the black telephone rationing company.

Re: Competition is great...

"or to provide free, unfettered access to the ducts and poles"

And the RoI for this will be exactly the same for the competitor as for BT. Or would they have some other advantage which would enable them to do better? Do they have a huge army of fibre layers chomping at the bit that are somehow unavailable to Openreach?

It's partly material costs and partly man*-hours. Both cost money and the rate of supply of man-hours is governed by the number of available men. You could, of course, increase the supply of men but to do that you'd probably have to pull some of the workforce out of the field to act as trainers, then the trainees have to get up to speed.

DAMMIT!!! It's 40 years - FORTY WHOLE YEARS - since Brookes published TMMM and we still have people who don't get it.

*Where "man" signifies a human of any gender.

Re: Is the issue Openreach

"the "others" e.g. Virgin media, no bothering to invest?"

All the cherries have been picked.

'But we should have looked more at the investment path for super fast broadband and fibre to the home.'

True. But then she'd have no excuse for magical thinking where all you need is a plan and not money: 'Digital connectivity must be a priority, with a proper plan to roll out networks, according to Onwurah. "I think we should be looking at fibre to the home, although that doesn’t seem to be BT’s view.”'

Virgin Atlantic co-pilot dazzled by laser

Re: One way mirrors

"The kind of glass that you have in a police line up - not that I've ever been in one ha!"

It works by splitting the light, some reflected, some transmitted. If the witness is watching from a darkened room there's little light coming through and it's easily swamped by the reflected light from the room where the line-up is taking place. Inside the viewing room there's little light being reflected back so it doesn't interfere with the light from the viewing room.

There's nothing "one way" about it, it's just a coating that reflects some but not all light. If both sides of the mirror are well lit each side will see a dim reflection and a dim transmitted image.

"Sounds like a good way to ensure their drinks licence isn't renewed next time."

And very frequent visits to check licensing conditions are being complied with before the renewal.

Re: Wouldn't filters

"Block out the useful parts of the light spectrum as well?"

Interference filters can have very sharp responses. As they're thin films deposited on a glass substrate it would be practical to have several filters laid down on a visor blocking just a few nanometres of the visible spectrum in total.

Re: How about adding the penalty of......

"They need to be certified as safe for aviation use, not interfere with daylight operation and have a lifespan in place of at least 10 years."

So they should be certified. In fact there's a good argument that NOT being so protected is unsafe. And if they're worn rather than fitted to windows why would they need to not interfere with daylight operation and last 10 years?

Re: How about adding the penalty of......

"Given that commercially available lasers use only a few restricted light wavelengths, isn't it possible to add filters for these to the cockpit windows??"

I was thinking along similar lines. Glasses to be worn when near the ground. It's not particularly new technology. I remember using the converse case - a narrow filter mimicking the sodium doublet at 589.29nm for calibration purposes decades ago.

Blighty cops nab Brit teen for 'hacking' CIA Brennan's AOL email

CIA's motto

Do as I say, not as I do.

Shopping for PCs? This is what you'll be offered in 2016

"It's expected that plenty of organisations will look therefore decide 2016's as good a time as any to take the plunge on a new PC fleet, powered by Windows 10."

Let's hope their procurement processes include due diligence on the T&Cs.

Metel malware pops bank, triggers 15 percent swing in Russian Ruble

Re: Seems like banks are going to have to beef up at last

"it's the numptys that badly configure both OS's that are to blame for 99% of attack vectors."

Numpties clicking on unsolicited files attached to unsolicited emails is another vector. Tell me again, why Windows is configured out of the box to hide suffixes?

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

"Are you sure it was encrypted by a Windows executable?"

Not of my own knowledge but that's what the article says.

"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.

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

Re: Adam Swallows Eve's Apples and Worlds Appear in Heavenly Splendour to Render*

"Would it kill you to write in something at least resembling English, AMFM1?"

The trouble is, it does resemble English. But only a resemblance.

"The facts in your suggested case aren't likely to be materially different to those in the assumed one....In reality a private prosecution would fail miserably, the courts would never rule against the government not even in a civil case."

OK, let's think what the facts might be. Say TPTB suspect a particular employee or customer & hack into the business. First of all the business will say "we're a legitimate business. We'd have been happy to cooperate if they'd approached us directly (employee) or with a warrant to cover out backs (customer)." Then they point out that the hack was damaging. A specified back door was left which competitors, criminals, foreign states etc. might have used. They also point out that they're concerned that even if the back door wasn't used by someone else they can't be sure of what data might have been changed by the "authorised" intruders so they've had to pay for an independent audit of their entire data assets in addition to a thorough review and repair of the system software. All costed out to a huge amount. Those would be specific facts which are couldn't be covered by a set of assumed facts in a general hearing.

Cue accusation of misfeasance in public office by the SofS on the basis that it wasn't necessary accompanied by huge bill for all the costs. Then there's reputational loss. Wouldn't a jury find against them on the basis of clear evidence?

The likely situation would be a big out-of-court settlement on the basis of keep quiet and take the money. Which makes one wonder how often that's already happened.

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

Re: Stupid customers

"the technical support of the company in question is *extremely* well regarded in the industry"

How's it regarded by their customers?

Re: What do people do when their computer breaks?

"they must be right, they have a shop"

They were keeping their shop going so they must have been doing something right.

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.