Posts by Doctor Syntax

PCI council gives up, dumbs down PCI DSS for small business

Re: based on experience of SMEs

"Since when has a call centre agent ever used a notebook which they take home with them."

Any time they want to steal customer data!!!

Is the concept of a fraudulent employee too difficult to grasp?

Edited to add:

Assuming both comments to which I replied are from the same A/C who has some responsibility for back office operations I find this rather worrying. We're often told that insiders are a major source of security issues and yet these comments display an absurd degree of complacency and/or lack of imagination. If this reflects supervisory thinking it's not surprising that data goes AWOL.

Re: based on experience of SMEs

"As long as there is no call recording or the recording system they have is PCI compliant"

Is the notebook that the agent takes away at the end of the shift PCI compliant?

UK data watchdog: Massive fines won't keep data safe

Re: In other words...

I think I'd prefer "you spend the half million and here's a quarter of a million fine just to remind you of what'll happen if you have a relapse".

IIRC the original DPA had a sanction to forbid the offender from processing data. That's what I call an effective sanction.

City of birth? Why password questions are a terrible idea

What is it with S/W writers that assume we always live/work/were born in cities? It's an inevitable field in addresses - even genealogical S/W which can reasonably be expected to collect location data from times when relatively few people lived in towns let alone cities.

And then there's the 2FA gadget that my bank gave me. I tried to use it to change my email address and the website simply refused to accept the answer it gave. It's going to be a real benefit of I ever need it to authenticate some financial transaction.

Hacker launches ransomware rescue kit

New OS approach needed

ISTM that it's time to rethink the whole architecture of applications and OS.

What I have in mind is that permissions would be based on a combination of user ID and application ID. For instance only Twitbook would be able to write to Twitbook storage. If Facegram needed to read something from Twitbook's storage it would have had to have been given permission as to what it could read, it would only be able to read from a specific user's storage and it wouldn't be allowed to write back.

A way of implementing this would be to separate applications into front-end and back-end with back-end being something along the lines of a kernel module. The actual kernel itself would have much reduced facilities; it might be able to enforce quotas but it wouldn't be able to duplicate or over-ride the back-end kernel modules' reading and writing privileges. In some respects a micro-kernel architecture would fit but any existing micro-kernel would have to be enhanced with the extended permissions.

Ideally this should prevent any rogue app getting in and over-writing everything. At worst if, for instance, a rogue managed to pass itself off as Instanter it wouldn't be able to encrypt Twitbook & Facegram data.

Did you follow the link in the article? The one that tells you what the kit does including -. No, look it up for yourself.

Google DOG WHISTLING fails to send URLs across the room

Google sending audible URLs

We need a name for that. Gurgle?

NASA plots interplanetary cubesat swarms

Dropping a brick

It's a 10cm cube & they need to test its aerodynamics?

A good effort, if a bit odd: Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2

Ask not why Raspberry Pi needs Windows 10

Ask why Windows 10 needs Raspberry Pi.

I think Voland's right hand may have answered that.

If IT isn’t careful, marketing will soon be telling us what to do

"Marketing ... needs to be social, integrated, responsive, open, honest."

Who writes this stuff?

Robocalling Americans? That'll cost you $1.7m

Re: I think it's easier than that

" but as there is an actual origin available there should be a method by which you can flag a certain call (or time/date) as malicious."

I'll go one better than that. The flagged caller is charged a fee for the callee's time and trouble credited to the callee's telco account. Callee's telco charges the caller if they're on the same network - plus an additional fee for the time & trouble in operating the system*. If the caller is on a different network they charge that network instead. If several networks are involved the charges just keep getting passed up, accumulating additional telco fees each time. If a telco doesn't keep track of where the calls are coming from they are in the barrel for the entire set of fees, an arrangement which should concentrate their minds to do better in future. It would, of course, need some precautions to stop subscribers from gaming the system by flagging every call.

It by-passes the current (at least in the UK) tests for the severity of the distress caused as it simply becomes a commercial transaction - you call me & pay me a fee for taking the call.

*In particular the up-front costs to add the functionality in the first place.

US plans to apply export controls to 0-days put out for comment

Shooting the messenger..

..to become a legal requirement.

BT's taxpayer-funded broadband monopoly may lock out rivals, says independent report

Re: BT spent the money

@AC

I take it you're too young to remember the privatisation. One of the problems with being subsidised by the tax payer was that there was never enough money for investment. The telephone branch of the GPO was otherwise known as the black telephone rationing company.

Russia will fork Sailfish OS to shut out pesky Western spooks

Re: Paranoia over NSA tampering spurs de-Westernisation drive

@ST

Did you hear a whoosh sound?

Blocking mobile adverts just became that little bit easier

Re: Conundrum

"compensation to the businesses whose (paid-for) ads are being blocked"

If a business pesters me with ads then I'm much, MUCH less likely to buy from them. Less as in "if there's an alternative I'll go for it". Less as in "I've taken my business elsewhere from services who thought that my being their customer entitled them to pester me".

It's to the advantage of any business that thinks it wants to sell to me to have ads that I might otherwise get being blocked. So maybe "compensation" should be negative and such businesses should pay the ad-blocker a fee to block them.

The truth of the matter is that I'm far from alone in this attitude. The situation is that the advertising industry makes money by charging advertisers to piss off potential customers.

Welsh police force fined £160,000 after losing sensitive video interview

Re: Victim Compensation

@AC

As it was lost, inevitably. If it hadn't been, in theory, yes. But very likely there'd have been an impeccable paper trail for it.

The more things change...

...the more they stay the same.

Back in the days when we were trying to train police officers about preserving evidence from contamination by stray fibres I walked into a CID office & found a jacket which was part of the evidence (in a murder investigation!) hanging on the back of a chair. Forty years later and the nature of the evidence may have changed but it still takes time for proper handling procedures to be taken on board. In answer to Lost all faith's questions - that message has probably got through by now; it's this new-fangled stuff that causes problems.

ALIBABA Vs AMAZON: Let the Global Tat Bazaar war begin

Re: Is it better in Chinese?

"Their English site is so bad"..."I'm scared topic my credit card number in."

Whoops.

Use your Apple gizmos only for good, says Tim Cook

"If you don't have an iPhone, please pass it to the centre aisle"

Pass something you don't have to the centre aisle?

So why the hell do we bail banks out?

Re: But uncle Tim, I want to hear them pigs squeak!

"A way to claw back bonuses, and to structure bonus incentives better, would also be good. But it's notoriously hard to do."

Just thinking out loud but...

Say we have a special share class that is used for share options. The only way to exercise such options is to buy this class of share. When the govt takes new shares for a bailout more shares of this class get issued but the proportion of dividends allocated to such shares doesn't get expanded in proportion so it's only the share option holders who get their shareholdings diluted and devalued. Could this have any traction?

Re: Longer Term Impact

"the zombification of of many companies with the misfortune to have been running final-salary schemes"

Gordon Brown had done a lot of damage to final-salary and private pension schemes way before this. I reckon the pension companies could and should have raised the profile of this: every year when they sent out projections they could have added another projection - what the pension would have been without the tax raid.

Re: Maybe another reason?

"Inflation means cash loses value over time."

Indeed it does. But if people are concerned that they could lose the entire deposit they'd prefer to lose some of the value. In fact at today's interest rates bank deposits are losing value.

Or to look at it another way, if someone you'd never met emailed you from Nigeria to offer you 10x bank interest rates would you lend him money?

Maybe another reason?

If we make the banks small-enough-to-fail we don't have to bail them out for the damage a failure could do to the overall system. But if such a bank does fail then it takes the deposits of its savers with it. From a saver's point of view any bank is too big to fail.

So if I'm a saver then I might consider keeping my cash under the mattress instead of putting it in a bank. I might also draw out my salary or pension as soon as it's paid in - look, no float. Neither response is good for the economy as a whole.

This can be handled in two ways, first a deposit guarantee scheme, which is to some extent a bail-out mechanism, or far more draconian regulation. And while the latter might sound a good idea it does seem liable to an out of control regulator trying to micro-manage everything and everyone.

Ofcom: Oi, BT! Don't be greedy – feed dark fibre to your rivals

the ducting, exchange buildings and other infrastructure which investors bought from HMG when BT became a private company.

FTFY

Feds: Bloke 'HACKED PLANE controls' – from his PASSENGER seat

@ DryBones

Yes shooting the messenger is always such a good idea.

Never trust a developer who says 'I can fix this in a few minutes'

"At least the amount of damage they can inflict is limited to a single project"

Don't be too sure. Ever heard of multi-tasking?

Re: Project manager?

I take it that you've inside knowledge of this particular situation as you seem to know that the codebase is a mess, that it was written in a hurry, that they're following scrum etc.

I can think of several alternative ways in which this could have gone wrong. For instance a salesman having sold the client a product that didn't fit with assurances that it could be adapted (I've quit as a developer over having that dumped on me). Or, for instance, the development team, or a good chunk of it, having been pulled off to work on something else, leaving them insufficient time to complete what was, originally, a well estimated project.

Microsoft: Free Windows 10 for THIEVES and PIRATES? They can GET STUFFED

Re: Worse case scenario...

"will be herded towards a subscription model."

For a moment I read that as "a suspicion model"

Jeb Bush: Repeal Obamacare and replace it with APPLE WATCHES

"On this device in five years will be applications that will allow me to manage my healthcare"

So in 5 years an Apple watch will be able to do brain transplants?

Right Dabbsy my old son, you can cram this job right up your BLEEEARRGH

Re: Post-It note? Miserable amateur!

Upvote for "The ones with messy desks are generally the go-to guys."

Californians get first chance to be run over by a Google robot

Re: No need to worry

@ JamesPond

If the car is making all these other journeys during the day it will be clocking up more miles per day & thus depreciating faster. A hire-car company would include that factor in its sums so your hire charges might be more than you're hoping for.

Re: No need to worry

Downvoted for making unwarranted assumptions about pensioners. Why would pensioners not expect cars limited to 25mph to be overtaken?

The Internet of Things: a jumbled mess or a jumbled mess?

"The big advantage of Thread is that it is an IP protocol and so can work with the vast internet infrastructure that already exists"

Is it just me that sees this as a DISadvantage?

BUZZKILL. Honeybees are dying in DROVES - and here's a reason why

Re: The sharp increase in the fall of bee numbers

The sharp increase in the rate of decline in bee numbers...

RFTFY

Home routers co-opted into self-sustaining DDoS botnet

Re: BT with the stickers

The plastic thingies, at least the PlusNet ones, appear to be individually printed so I assume that the passwords are individually set so it wouldn't be a problem. However I reset mine anyway. But if you do that don't throw the card away; if you reset the router it goes back to the factory settings & you'll need the card again.

RAF radar station crew begs public for cash to buy gaming LAN kit

Look before you leap

"keep the skies safe 24-hours a day 365-days a year"

Next February - be afraid; be very afraid.

Forced sale of Openreach division would put BT broadband investment at risk, says CEO

@Bunbury

I think you've missed the point here. The BT Chairman is speaking for the BT Board. In the event of a spin-off it would fall to the spin-off to roll out broadband. It's no business of his (literally!) as to what that board may do unless, of course, he expects to be its chairman as well. If the latter he's making a damn poor job application.

'"would be difficult to convince the board of BT to invest" in broadband infrastructure improvements if the regulator took such action'

This is meaningless. It would be a decision for the spin-off's board, not BT's.

Microsoft's run Azure on Nano server since late 2013

Well, well

"Cloud-first, it seems, only gets you so far on-premises."

So you really need to use Azure?

Colour me surprised.

Chill, luvvies. The ‘unsustainable’ BBC Telly Tax stays – for now

"Moving to a subscription service would in theory force the BBC to produce high quality output"

I suspect it would lead to even more dumbing down.

Google cloud: rubbish at updates, world-class at rapid rollbacks

" totally greenfield, except for the fact there were a bunch of mainframes, minis, and hundreds of desktops, thousands of peripherals, and I never even got a handle on the number of laptops wandering in and out the gate."

Your idea of "totally" or "greenfield" seems somewhat different to mine.

Like a Dell factory but what comes out is a LOT more fun: We visit Aston Martin

It's possible that if you were paying that much for a car you might expect the bodywork to be hand-crafted using delicate taps of a skilled hammer.

So tablets, if you want to get anything done travelling get a ... yes, a laptop

Re: : Wrong Memory Card

"By eckers, lad, you have a good memory."

It's all done with punched cards.

Re: The last thing I want to see

"I'm also in my 40s and can read..."

I'm in my 70s & can still read if I've got the right glasses.

Ding-dong, the cloud calling: The Ring Video Doorbell

Re: Whazzat?

'Like all PIR, it uses infra red heat and the sudden appearance of to register "movement".'

Yup. It's probably PIR. So why didn't the review just say that instead of something which is self contradictory?

Longevity

The other day my doorbell gave a single ding which indicates the back door bell push had been pushed (back door ?"NSA calling"). There was nobody at either door. I then realised the bell mechanism was making a buzzing noise. A little investigation showed that the front door bell push had finally succumbed to a mixture of spider introduced grot, moisture & old age.

A little though showed that the bell, transformer and front door wiring had probably been fitted about 50 years ago. The bell push might not have been original - there's a cut-out in the door frame which suggests a larger one was intended - but must have been installed at least 30 years ago. A few minutes searching indicates that identically sized & styled bell pushes are still available.

I wonder if a Ring bought now still be in operation in 30 years time.

So what would the economic effect of leaving the EU be?

Re: Blah blah free trade blah

That's the whole problem. The entire democratic basis of membership, at least as far as the UK is concerned, is a referendum about 40 years ago on membership of an organisation which is very different from the present set-up, especially the ever closer union bit.

Each time the organisation has changed the issue of popular approval has been ducked so a huge democratic deficit has been built up. Even worse, when the Republic of Ireland voted against the Lisbon Treaty they were told to go back & vote again until they came up with the right answer. And I think that in a lot of people's minds that is so objectionable that they'd be prepared to vote for an exit as a matter of principle even if the economic consequences meant going back to living in Iron Age round houses.

This situation could have been avoided. It would have meant getting popular approval for each stage of change across all the member countries. That would have been hard work. At each stage the negotiators would have had to come up with something which could have gained that approval. The end result might have been something rather different to what we have now. The membership might have been smaller. The role of MEPs might have been greater. But if an in/out vote were now being proposed against such a background the Europhiles would be quite laid back about it because there'd be a history of repeated approval over several decades.

The task for the EU is to get rid of that democratic deficit and retain the membership intact - give or take Greece.

Re: The UK can leave

'Also - sorry - because I cannot help the grammar correction: "more easier" should be just "easier".'

In that case let me correct yours. "everyone who's anybody".