Posts by Doctor Syntax

NatWest IT cock-up sees 600,000 transactions go 'missing'

Re: Self-inflicted

Neither can she blame them for her being one of their customers.

Furious Flems fling privacy rule book at Facebook

Re: Please Cut Out The Cutesie Headlines

" (they are called Walloons)?

The endless pursuit of punning and double-entre laden headlines grows wearisome"

So it should have been Furious Flems and Wearied Walloons?

For fax's sake: Medic chaos as e-Referrals system goes offline

Re: Hmm... socialized and centralized healthcare

"I have never had my plumber refer me to my glazer"

OTOH I have had my joiner refer me to my painter.

The insidious danger of the lone wolf control freak sysadmin

Tim?

Was he accompanied by a PFY?

'Snowden risked lives' fearfest story prompts sceptical sneers

Re: I don't know...

"I'm leaning towards "This is BS", but absent any evidence either way, I just don't know."

Let me help a little.

Let's assume it's true that the files have been decrypted by the Russians, Chinese or whoever (RCow). Presumably this would mean that they'd discovered an intentional or deliberate back door in a supposedly solid cryptographic system. This raises a question: how would the UK or US know?

Possibly RCow took some action that revealed it. But remember that decrypting German cyphers in WWII was so sensitive that it was kept secret for decades afterwards. It was also so sensitive that not all information could be acted on & a disinformation operation was run to provide plausible alternative sources. Would RCow be so incompetent as to let slip, by incautious word or deed, what they'd accomplished. It strains credibility.

Alternatively perhaps the western cryptographers decrypted a message by RCow saying that they'd achieved this. The same reasoning applies. Would they then release this story and reveal what they'd accomplished?

I call BS.

How much info did hackers steal on US spies? Try all of it

Re: Snowden

"The Chinese, so they say, hacked Snowden's files."

... and we know that because ...erm .. how do we know that?

Re: That's not the point

"most of it is public information"

So it is but for any one person it takes time, effort & expense to locate as anyone interested in genealogy will tell you. You may run into multiple people with the same names and have to devote more time to sorting them out. Having it all neatly laid out by the data subject saves an awful lot.

DON’T add me to your social network, I have NO IDEA who you are

"Friday-afternoon El Reg columnists."

s/Friday-afternoon/Saturday-morning/

4 new twists that push the hacker attack on millions of US govt workers into WTF land

Re: @ Doctor Syntax

"This is entirely different situation as we are not enemies with ourselves."

There is, in fact, a similarity. If my govt. wishes to spy on me it should do so with due process of law. It should go to a judge, or at least a magistrate, with sufficient a priori evidence to get a warrant. This concept of due process was introduced into English law by Magna Carta. In a few days, no doubt, the PM will be saying how great Magna Carta is & how splendid that this has been part of English law for the last 800 years - whilst being quite happy to see this principle violated.

An APT can't be expected to use due process. My govt. should. It is unacceptable if, like the APT, they don't.

$5 each

Look how much we value you.

If it's unacceptable that a foreign government does this why should it be acceptable if one's own does it?

"Now that is hilarious."

Not really. Everyone deserves better than this. That would include Federal employees.

Dossiers on US spies, military snatched in 'SECOND govt data leak'

"The AP's sources would not disclose the extent of the breach because details are classified."

No problem, just ask the Chinese.

You couldn't make it up.

Germany drops probe into NSA's Merkel phone-hacking

Re: Somebody/something got paid

Not necessarily.

NSA to German security services: "You remember that little problem you had about your spying on the rest of Europe? Wouldn't it be a shame if the full details got out?"

Confusion reigns as Bundestag malware clean-up staggers on

"Nobody does spot checks on checksums for data that shouldn't be changing?"

That doesn't help with data that should be changing. Nor does it help with whatever the original vector was - that won't have changed and will still be a potential danger.

I'm not saying you're wrong to say flatten & rebuild as that's my view as well. But transferring the data cleanly to a new build isn't going to be easy as it will all need to be vetted.

And whilst this is happening business needs to continue. A long time ago someone described a particular migration as like transferring passengers from one aircraft to another in mid flight without waking them up. This sounds like another of those.

'Nothing to see here', says ECJ as Safe Harbour opinion delayed

The deal created a voluntary framework whereby companies promise to protect European citizens’ data and in involuntary one where they can't.

FTFY

What is the ECJ's deciding?

A death warrant or just a coroner's verdict?

ISP Level 3 goes TITSUP after giganto traffic routing blunder

In other news...

...Freeparking have recovered from their TITSUP. They've resumed spamming me about renewing a domain which was transferred away from them.

It's 2015 and Microsoft has figured out anything can break Windows

Here is a thought experiment. Was Re: Just Use Linux

Where's the experiment? All you say is that there's a lot of Linux about. No experiment, thought or otherwise

And then you trip up by the comment about BSD being like Linux. You've got the resemblances in the wrong order. BSD is a Unix variant. Linux is a Unix-like OS - and one that's rapidly becoming less Unix-like in the estimation of many of us.

How long before we see a generation of malware that actually makes use of this?

Teaching kids to code is self-defence, not a vocational skill

"x ML per square metre"

Mega-litres per square metre? Isn't that laying on a bit thick?

No Silicon Roundabout U-Bend U-Turn: Build that peninsula boys

Re: Is this out the El'Reg window?

"It is still somewhat parochial, especially to those of us who are, thankfully, not within the gravitational field of the blackhole that is LUN DON."

I take it you're not a UK taxpayer. Because for those of us who are our money is definitely within the gravitational field.

Re: What to call it?

"Silicon U-Bend" of course.

As in "The company went round the Silicon U-Bend".

Microsoft to Linux users: Explain yourself

Re: Just use Linux and be done with it!

"The thing is, no user cares, any more, what the underlying O/S is. They do care about the quality, range and ease of use of the applications they want to run.

And this is where Linux still falls down, flat on its face. "

I have a cousin-in-law who could be the archetypal uninformed user. For several years I had to go round to run his annual Sophos licence update before he had confidence to do it himself. I bumped into him in the street the other day & he asked me to call round & install Linux for him. He has an old Dell that's on XP. All he needs is a browser & I can install a choice of those for him. And a whole lot more he's probably never thought of but it's going to confuse him no end not having an A/V package.

Re: Data, not information

"(remember "sar" and "vmstat"?)."

You wrote that as if they no longer existed.

vmstat is on my standard Debian install and sar is provided by installing sysstat.

Using leather in 'leccy cars is 'unTesla', rages vegan shareholder

Re: and the electricity?

You forgot to say that coal has a higher carbon/hydrogen ratio than petrol. Per calorie of heat produced it will emit more CO2.

Top Eurocop: People are OK with us snooping on their phone calls

Re: At what point will the public feel safe?

"So what's a civilization to do when people demand the impossible from its government and will accept no less?"

Tell them they can't have it.

Nobel bro-ffin: 'Girls in the lab fall in love with me ... then start crying'

I have personal experience of the first two on his list nearly 50 years ago. We're still married so the third one works the other way round: she criticises me.

EU: Explain your tax affairs. Google, Amazon, Facebook: Mmm... nah

Re: Get a life

"They're MEP's pretty much the most fairly elected and representative politician we'll ever encounter."

Powerless. You forgot powerless. The European Parliament is a fairly powerless talking shop.

It's the officials who have the power. They're appointed. We're not allowed to vote for them.

The powers given to the officials are given by treaties. We're not often allowed to vote on the treaties. When people have been allowed to vote & voted No they've been told to vote again until they gave the right answer.

So perhaps the disenchantment in Britain stems from the fact that we're not allowed to engage in any democratically meaningful way.

Israeli firm gets legal on Indian techie over ISP ad injection spat

Re: Bharti Airtel and Flash Networks

@A/C

If you count your downvotes maybe you should reflect on your claim about people's acceptance.

Shine a light on the rogue IT that hides in the company shadows

"Make it mandatory for all software licences to be registered centrally, and forbid unauthorised staff members from signing licences or contracts."

If there are no consequences for ignoring such mandates people will do so. Get the bean-counters to agree that any dept. the drops the business in it by breaking licensing rules will have any penalties that the vendors impose charged against them. If nothing else it will protect the IT budget.

TERROR in ORBIT: Dodgy rocket burp biffs International Space Station off track

Re: True "Big Red Button" story....

I worked in a building that had Big Red Buttons (standard Radiospares product) at intervals along the corridors. They sounded the bomb alert. One day the alarm went off several times with consequent disruption. It was eventually traced to one of the cleaners who decided the the buttons needed polishing.

NSA slapdown prompts Privacy Int'l to file new lawsuit against GCHQ

Re: Talking thru their arses

I spent over a decade dealing with terrorism amongst other crimes. My place of work was car-bombed. I survived handling an item that turned out to have been booby-trapped with explosives. So when I tell you that I think due process of law and presumption of innocence are right and unconstrained trawling wrong I think my arse is reasonably well informed. And yours?

MONSTER GALAXY spotted hiding behind IMMENSE BLACK HOLE

Re: But even so...

Define life.

A pause in global warming? What pause?There was no pause

Re: This again?

"the Register's position on this topic"

It's news to me that the Register has a position. It publishes articles by individual writers.

"I really wish El Reg would just stay away from this topic altogether."

OTOH, if you're not happy with it you could stay away.

"to the embarrassment of everybody else that works there."

Citation needed. Has anyone who works there told you they're embarrassed? AFAICT they must be a fairly unembarrassable lot.

Re: Bah!

I don't have a problem with the idea of climate change. Of course climate changes. It's the sort of thing where change is the only constant.

I do have a problem with the current fad for taking short term noise & trying to imply that a long term trend can be distinguished in it. If there is a long term trend to global warming it'll only become clear in the long term. And at that point it will become possible to make reasoned attempts to explain it.

I also have a problem with treating models as holy writ. A model is a form of hypothesis and needs to be tested against reality. Given the long term nature of climate such testing could take some time.

Re: What we really need

If we don't lack terminology what term do we use to describe variations of temperature, precipitation, atmospheric & oceanic behaviour over the short periods up to a couple of centuries? If you want to call that "climate" what term do you use to describe the longer term variations on the scale of thousands of years?

Actually, I think we do have a good term for the shorter variations: "noise".

Google: Our self-driving cars would be tip-top if you meatheads didn’t crash into them

Re: Assumptions

"If all the cars on the road were automated in the same way"

But would they be? Some would be on v1.0, some on 1.1, some on 2.0, some on SP1, some on SP2, some wouldn't have had the update applied for some reason...

So why the hell didn't quantitative easing produce HUGE inflation?

Re: Tons of inflation

"The size of Mars bars these days is an absolute joke."

And Wagon Wheels ought to have been renamed Castors.

"Why do you expect to be rewarded for piling gold coins into a vault, and having a dragon sit atop it?"

He didn't complain about not being rewarded for piling gold coins into a vault and having a dragon sit atop it. He complained about banks paying poor interest and banks operate in a very different way. Most of the money they are lent by savers they lend out again to people who need it for some purpose. Generally the people who need it are prepared to pay for the benefit they receive from the loan. This makes everyone happy to varying degrees. The original lenders get a return on their savings. The banks make a return because they lend at a higher rate than they borrowed and the eventual borrowers hopefully get whatever benefit they were aiming for (if they didn't then they won't be happy).

And at present it's not working like that. Due to interest rates being kept lower than inflation the lenders are being ripped off.

The gold coins in the vault arrangement works very differently. The gold price fluctuates and you make your money by buying the gold coins when it's low and selling when it's high, a little detail nobody seemed to have explained to our former chancellor when he sold our gold at the bottom of the market.

Re: Tons of inflation

"Housing prices were rising long before QE and have been for years - so you can't blame QE for this."

I think the causality runs the other way round:

1. Elimination of housing costs from inflation measures used to determine interest rates.

2. Off-shoring a lot of production of items in the inflation indexes leading to very low values for those indexes.

3. Maintained low interest rates in view of the low apparent inflation.

4. Low interest mortgages lead to bigger and bigger price rises for housing as all the cheap money goes there.

5. LOTS of financial shenanigans to tap off as much of that home loan business as possible including selling loans to people who can't possibly afford them.

6. BIG liquidity crisis as soon as the people who couldn't afford the loans start to default.

7. QE to fix the liquidity crisis.

8. Low interest rates due to QE fixing the liquidity crisis ultimately caused by too long a period of low interest rates in the first place.

If long continued overly low interest rates were the original problem it's difficult to see how continuing unduly low interest rates for a long time is going to solve it.

"Late this year, early next is the conventional wisdom here."

Yes it's been the conventional wisdom for several values of "this" & "next" now. It hasn't happened. Does this suggest that there might be a problem with the theory?

There's certainly a problem with the effect which is that although inflation might be low, when interest rates are lower savings lose their value. It's the unspoken intent, of course. For one thing it encourages people to spend instead of save and for another it's the loss of value of savings that makes the debt less burdensome in the future.

But people have savings for a reason: it's money they think they'll need in the future. So at some point in the future we discover that we haven't got the savings we need & there's damn all we can do about it. I think economists, instead of reading more & more papers & books about economics, should go and read TMMM, especially that bit about the tar pit. Because that description about pulling one paw out only to get another stuck more firmly seems to describe exactly what economic manipulation is doing: solving immediate problems at the expense of more problems which aren't immediately obvious.

Oh, shoppin’ HELL: I’m in the supermarket of the DAMNED

This week both the machines & the checkout operators at B&Q were causing problems

Four items - I should have known that was one too many for the automated checkout. It refused to accept the last item was the right weight although it had accepted one previously.

Grab the items & go to one of only two manual tills in operation (since last time I was there they've replaced all the manual tills with new ones but still never seem to have more than one or two operators).

Despite the lengthening queues the operator, instead of checking stuff through & collecting money PDQ, is trying to get everyone to get one of the new loyalty (sic) cards. I complained. As I got to pay someone who was collecting cash from the tills (including the ones without operators!) got to mine. The operator put them off saying snarkily "this man's in a hurry". So I told her yes, I had to get away to go elsewhere to get the stuff they were out of stock of.

Two things that really annoyed me about this: way back my wife was in the initial staff of this store and at that time it was well staffed and well managed; and nearly as far back, I had a gig setting up the S/W for their allegedly super-duper distribution set-up - so how come they can't use it to keep stuff in stock?

Re: I just go to the tills

'Do you need help bagging?'

No, just with opening the bags which have been made out of material so thin that the van der Waals force is holding them firmly closed.

BOFH: Step into my office. Now take a deep breath

Scary?

In my first venture from the world of science into IT the shop was mostly VAX/VMS. The machine room was occupied by two operators sitting side by side watching two terminals. The terminals were displaying apparently identical streams of VMS messages. Both operators were called Simon. Looking back, that seems scary.

Re: Looking back isn't that bad...

"Oh, the platters were 14 inches across as well."

Those were only the exchangeable disks. When the University's 1907 got a fixed disk it had a building all of its own. I always envisaged it as something Brunel might have built.

Ed Snowden should be pardoned, thunders Amnesty Int'l

Re: What he did.

"stole information"

Sigh.

When will they ever learn? Stealing is permanently depriving someone of something. The NSA still have the information. If he deprived them of anything it was their veil of secrecy.

Re: He's a traitor

"Lock the traitor up and throw away the key. Two wrongs don't make a right."

I take it that you're also arguing for all those responsible for the wrongs he exposed to be locked up as well. But maybe you accidentally clicked "submit" before your typed that bit.

"And who gets to decide which laws are unjust?"

AIUI it was a matter of him seeing just laws being broken.

If you saw a few guys drive some earth moving machinery up to a hole-in-the-wall ATM and use it to separate the ATM from the hole, dump the ATM in a truck which they then drove off at high speed would you a) report a possible theft of the ATM or b) decide you were some low-level guy who probably didn't have the big picture & do nothing?

UK NHS IT supplier CSC coughs up $190m fine, three execs in the dock

Being banned from practising accountancy shouldn't be a problem. It doesn't look as if they need any more practice, they're pretty good at it already.