Posts by Doctor Syntax

Bite my shiny metal Ask: Java for OS X crapware storm brewing

Re: Bah!

"Just associate .pdf with Chrome..."

I prefer Okular. But there are a few times when AR does a better job, such as copying text from an OCRd multicolumn layout.

Re: I believe Java is still necessary for the hapless Libre/OpenOffice suites

"two of the most unresponsive dev teams of all time"

Citation needed. Or do you just mean they haven't changed the interface to a ribbon?

Pentagon 'network intruder', dozens more cuffed in British cops' cyber 'strike week'

Why so many arrests all at once?

Some of these offences go back a few years. I can understand that there might be a delay in handling a joint enterprise in order to identify all the participants; a premature arrest of some might alert the others and make pursuit more difficult. But some are said to be unrelated. Were these arrests being saved up to make a big headline? If so how do they justify the possibility of allowing the perpetrator to continue unchecked on the one hand or make a fair trial more difficult on the other?

Re: Blah Blah Blah.....

"Not heresay."

No, definitely not heresay. Were you trying to write "heresy" or "hearsay"?

US watchdog: Anthem snubbed our security audits before and after enormous hack attack

"Frankly, the sooner that such breaches result in massive financial loss and wholesale bankruptcy of a company or corporation, the better."

Whilst I agree with the sentiment if this were to happen to an insurance company it would leave a lot of innocent customers without the insurance cover they'd paid for. Massive financial loss & wholesale bankruptcy of the senior management team and board of directors would be perfectly acceptable, however.

US Senators hope to crack down on the trade of private information

Re: Sounds interesting, but....

'So in this case, I'm fairly sure that D stands for "Don't think this bill is going anywhere".'

OTOH look at it this way: it's an indication that some politicos are starting to get the message. That's progress.

Australia threatens to pull buckets of astronomy funding

Is there any gummint...

...that doesn't play silly buggers with sci/tech & then go whining about lack of STEM workers?

World’s oldest IT dining society breaks into the House of Lords

Re: Lord Lucas of Crudwell and Dingwall...

How many of us read that as Lord Lucan?

Bad news: Robo-cars will make you work billions more hours. Good news: In 2040

Packet collisions first, real collisions next

If all the cars were driverless and in communication with adjacent cars would there be sufficient bandwidth for all the inter-car communication?

Imagine a road with four lanes per carriageway, maybe crossing over a similar road, with traffic joining from slip roads, say the M1/M25 junction, all lanes and slip roads working to capacity. The number of vehicles within range would be many time the total number of such cars built to date. How fast would they be generating data?

Canadian bloke refuses to hand over phone password, gets cuffed

This could run and run

Providing he can afford it - and I suspect there'll be support from elsewhere if he can't - it seems unlikely that this will be settled at the first court as whoever wins the initial judgement it seems likely to be appealed on a point of law.

Re: Okay, so they ask to see my laptop.

And, of course, it can have as many login IDs as you wish.

Re: Hidden TrueCrypt volumes

For the benefit of the majority of ElReg readers: Tesco is a UK supermarket business.

Upper house of Parliament joins the drone debate

Re: 2050 You Say?

"This coming from the bunch who don't know what is going to happen on 8 May 2015"

And you do?

Re: What's the difference...

"Ban them? Sledge hammer approach...."

You're new here; maybe you don't realise we do irony.

'Hi, I'm from Microsoft and I am GOING TO KILL YOU'

Re: Problem with my windows

"I tried to tell him that my widows were all working fine."

That opens up another possible wind-up line. You misheard him & assure him you don't have any widows. You'd have to be dead for that & if you were dead you wouldn't be talking to him...

Mummy, what's the point of Evgeny Morozov's tedious columns?

Re: Evgeny Who?

"Or I suppose not knowing what both Socialist and Marxist mean."

Or PBCAK

'Security, privacy' main barrier to 'government cloud' rollout in EU

At a government level

For cloud = sombody else's computer say cloud = some other country's computer.

The BBC wants to slap a TAX on EVERYONE in BLIGHTY

Counter blow

I think this speech is really a response to the recent suggestion of making the Beeb PTV. It's intended to make whoever that was realise it might be better to let things stay as they are.

What Tony Hall really needs to do to justify licensing is to raise programme standards to what they were at in the heyday by assuming that at least a reasonable proportion of viewers and listeners have an attention span that lasts a whole hour. Horizon would be a good litmus test; it was one of their best achievements in terms of quality achieved over a long run and has subsequently fallen furthest.

Re: Actually...

"Lumping a TV License in with general tax probably isn't all that bad an idea in the grand scheme of things, as it will likely balance out across the board."

You want a govt controlled broadcaster? Yes I know what some commentators say about the Beeb but a broadcaster actually funded from general taxation would actually be what they think it is now and something very much different to what it really is today.

Re: Previously on PM

"Local Radio Sorry don't listen to C&W, Irish language or the non existent language of Ulster-Scots"

Using that as geolocation I suppose you'll understand what I mean when I say that having visited Australia some years ago TV there looked like a choice of multiple channels of UTV.

Re: Just wow

From what I can gather about US society & politics from comments on sites like this and /. I consider them very well lost indeed.

Re: Public Broadcast Service

"You mean like catch-up services? Because the only one that works properly is BBC's iPlayer!"

Well, sort of. Heavy dependency on Adobe and its works is a bit of a bummer.

Hillary Clinton draws flak for using personal email at State Dept

Nearly. Death!

Atomic keyring's eerie blue glow lights SPB lab

Re: UV blue

"Most "blue" flowers photgraph as purple or violet (or at least they did on good old film)."

It depended on the film. Kodachrome had quite a lot of sensitivity in the IR and quite a lot of blue flowers reflected IR. As a result light blue flowers turned out pink. Ektachrome was much better for flower photography.

Cisco offers carriers adware-as-a-service for fun and profit

New award proposed

It's time to set up an annual award for the sleaziest vendor.

BP: Oil prices crashed, so must our ICT budget

Re: Greed

"the 'obsene profits actually benefit pensioners' card, is played just a tad too often for my taste."

The insertion of "obscene" before "profits", even when spelled correctly, is a bit too much of a cliché for my taste.

The fact remains that if you have savings in pensions, ISAs or whatever you're likely to have some of that in all the big corporations unless you pick a fund that specifically doesn't make such choices. If so then whenever thinking about the behaviour of such corporations it always helps to replace "them" with "me". It also helps to remember that for any corporation of that size all the numbers are going to be big.

Nevertheless, it's a good while since I bought any petrol at a BP forecourt. They're far too dear.

Re: Greed

"Isn't 12 billion dollars profit enough to be going on with?"

I suppose it depends on how much of your pension is invested in them.

I, ROBOT ~ YOU, MORON. How else will automated news work?

Re: Football…

%s/ball/replica of an inflated pig's bladder/

The robots are amongst us

Long ago my job used to involve taking laboratory results which needed to be interpreted in probabilistic terms and try to express these so than non-experts could appreciate the nuances involved. A colleague and I had a standing joke about writing a program which could be fed the data & generate reports in terms such as "not entirely inconsistent with" or "guilty as charged".

As part of my great escape plan I had a job interview with an agency that used psychological tests in using forms consisting of statements & check boxes for reactions. The interviewer took the results into a back room, fed them into an optical mark reader & returned with the resulting profile written in narrative form just as we'd joked about.

What I'd like to find now is a sort of reverse Turing test, one which will tell the difference between a call centre agent and a badly programmed bot.

"And Those Initial Capitals Are Annoying"

But not as ANNOYING AS THESE

FORK ME! Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers

Re: Logic fail

They may have a list of IP addresses for, say, their employees' homes. But the address used could belong to an employee's parents' home, for example. Until they know who owns the address - and they haven't indicated that they do - they can't know that it doesn't belong to an employee's relative, favourite bar or whatever. And this is starting to read like something Sir Humphrey would have said.

Logic fail

"an IP address not associated with an Uber employee and otherwise unknown to Uber"

Until they identify who it was they can't possibly know whether or not it was a Uber employee.

BOFH: The ONE-NINE uptime solution

Re: Love it!

@chivo243

I wasn't aware of your reference. Having been in my time a forensic biologist your mention of strippers & vacuum cleaners brought to mind distant recollections of some gems of medico-legal literature.

Re: Love it!

I think this was a BOFH where you could seriously injure yourself reading it.

Re: Love it!

Good, but not as good as "Look, as I said to Schrodinger - what happens in the cat box stays in the cat box."

Reckon YOU can write better headlines than us? Great – apply within

Re: Easy!

%s/of/have/g

SCC bags universal credit hosting contract

What do you mean: disaster recovery? It is a disaster.

Lenovo: We SWEAR we're done with bloatware, adware and scumware

Weasel words

“The events of last week reinforce the principle that customer experience, security and privacy must be our top priorities,”

Reinforce? What they mean is "brought home to us that we should have always known that". If they'd said that then they might have started to look honest in their statements.

It's the same as "your call/privacy/<whatever they've just failed on> is important to us". No it isn't or they'd have worked harder at it.

The only way to make a promise to do better look credible is to for a company to admit that the reason they failed was that they paid little if any attention to whatever it was they failed on. As soon as the familiar PR line is trotted out as a preliminary to whatever's being said all credibility is lost.

It's the EU and me against the world – Euro digi-chief

"He also echoed Digi-Veep Andrus Ansip’s regular refrain that geo-blocking is bad... primarily because it stops people watching football."

What's wrong with that?

And the buggiest OS provider award goes to ... APPLE?

When it comes down to severe vulnerabilities Linux kernel & Windows are more or less level. It's Apple that has the problems. Also that pariah of applications, Flash, comes out lower than IE, Chrome and Firefox but a larger proportion of vulnerabilities are severe. Another oddity: Seamonkey which combines browser and Thunderbird functionality comes out lower than either Firefox or Thunderbird.

Re: This is not a football match.

" People at my workplace complain about how hard Linux is to use, even describe it as "weird", but that is because many of them started with Windows XP (or maybe Windows 98) and didn't see what Linux was like years ago when getting a graphical desktop meant a long session with XF86configurator and a need for deep knowledge of your hardware."

To a large extent "hard to use" can translate as "different" but the desktop you're providing can also make a difference. Presumably they'd have come up with exactly the same reaction to Win 8.

C’mon Lenovo. Superfish hooked, but Pokki Start Menu still roaming free

Re: I hope this keeps kicking off...

"Let's pray that this issue continues blowing up to the point that the corporates see bundling shiteware as a realistic threat to their market share."

And also strengthens their backbones when it comes it pressure to install spooks' backdoors.

Lenovo CTO: Hey, look around – we're not the only ones with a crapware infection

Security audit

How does a security audit now tell anyone what they'll be pre-loading this time next year?

"Step one is to fess up to customers exactly what you earn per-machine for the crap you are pre-installing."

And say exactly what it does. And I mean exactly. Not "it enables you to make better choices" or such weasel words but "it intercepts your communications to spy on what you're doing in order to serve up ads whether you want them or not".

MP resigns as security committee chair amid 'cash-for-access' claims

It's good that Malcom Rifkind remains on the sub-committee overseeing secret surveillance. After all, he now knows what it's like to be on the receiving end.

Samb-AAAHH! Scary remote execution vuln spotted in Windows-Linux interop code

"I guess it's an artefact of grafting support for the MS protocols onto GNU/Linux rather than having a true remote login."

A remote login would also require a root process in order to be able to fork a process under the eventual user ID. e.g.

ps -ef|grep getty

root 3849 1 0 08:55 tty1 00:00:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

etc. It's a consequence of the Unix security model.

Apple forks out nearly $2bn for two ripe, green data centres

Re: Servicing that demand?

"I wonder where they're going to find the generating capacity for this centre."

Peat burning power stations? If you wait a few thousand years all those bogs that Bord na Mona have been cutting will have regenerated.

ACLU: Here's a secret – cops are using the FBI's fake cell-tower tech to track crims' phones

"the technology was covered under a non-disclosure agreement"

I'd have thought a court summons would have trumped an NDA.

German music moguls slammed for 'wurst ever DMCA takedown spam'

"several technical servers problems"

Translation: "We release stuff without testing"

Tweak comms laws or Facebook 'n' Twitter folk will be treated like CRIMINALS

Re: Trouble is ...

I think the serial failure of common sense started with Chambers himself.