Posts by Doctor Syntax

DevOps is no excuse for cowboy devs. Right. Let's talk Composable Infrastructure

The thing to remember about pets and cattle is that the latter get slaughtered. Whilst you're busy herding your cattle your salary is probably being paid by business running on some pet server. Or, looking at it another way, when some service goes TITSUP maybe it was because one of the cattle got slaughtered.

Oh UK.gov. Say you're not for weakened encryption – Google and Facebook

Re: Wrong debate

Apart from using deliberately weak encryption there are at least a couple of ways such a back door could be provided, both of which, of course, are simply disasters waiting to happen as far as legitimate users are concerned and easily bypassed by the intended targets.

One is for the application to lodge the key with the network operator or directly with the govt. The other is for the govt to issue a public key to the application so that all messages would be encrypted twice, once with the user's key & once with the govts key and the two versions combined in the message format so the govt can decrypt intercepts without approaching the network operator. The immediate issue, of course is which govt? Probably the 5 Eyes would get together on that. The big problem, of course, is that the escrow key store would be a major target for hackers and a single private key would sooner or later be leaked, effectively decrypting all messages.

The result of introducing such an arrangement would be a rash of 3rd party applications offering end-to-end encryption, either generally available or through the dark net.

What part of "it won't work" do governments not understand?

Re: One crime one warrant

"The only way this could ever work is THE NORMAL LEGAL WAY"

Agreed but let me extend this. There needs to be a feedback mechanism to ensure the whole procedure isn't being used for fishing expeditions.

The requester is obliged to report all warrants to the regulator along with the results. The regulator compares the percentages of results from different requesters. Anyone who has anomalous results gets investigated and the judges are kept aware of the various requesters' results. And spot checks are made to ensure the requester's returns are correct.

As there's a risk of regulatory capture between requesters & judges the judges could be given feedback to compare their percentages of successful warrants with their brother judges.

Finally the statistics are summarised in the regulator's annual report.

ANN-IE-LATION: Microsoft to axe support for older Internet Explorer next week

Re: for whatever reason are still running Windows Vista...

"If people can't cope with this then they are in the wrong industry."

The reasons why businesses are stuck on old versions have been gone over here many times. However, here's a clue.

Imagine you're supporting a system which is business critical. It depends on a piece of software which won't run on versions of Windows later than XP. It controls a machine which has a life expectancy of about 15 more years. The S/W vendor has gone out of business and there was no code escrow.

If you can't see the problems you face you're in the wrong industry.

HPE's London boozer dubbed the 'Hewlett You Inn?'

If the paper tray on my daughter's 8600 is anything to go by the drinks tray will get stuck in a serving hatch from which it will be impossible to remove without wrecking it so it will become impossible to serve drinks.

"6. For bonus points, print some instructions on a tiny piece of paper in the wrong language and hide it under one of the flaps that hold the box together."

No, print the instructions on a tiny piece of paper as a series of diagrams. This ensures it's equally incomprehensible in all languages.

You want to migrate how much data?

'“The difference between us and everyone else’s backup is that theirs is time-based, whereas we’re based on transactions,” he said. This enables the destination side of a data replication to reconstruct incremental transactions after the bulk of the data has been moved.'

Is there any transactional RDBMS offering replication that doesn't include this?

UK universities unveil £28m hub for Internet of Things

Re: No Standards

"Wake me up when they finally decide on protocols and connector standards."

Wake up!

They've decided: use all of them and anything else that can be dreamt up.

ISPs: UK.gov should pay full costs of Snooper's Charter hardware

Call a spade a spade

One of the mistakes the ISPs have made here is to go along with the govt's anodyne vocabulary. On the first mention of "filters" they should have added "in other words a database" and then used that term in the rest of their submission. It's likely that the general media would pick up on this fairly quickly and given that the term is pretty toxic in this context the gov't would quickly have found itself dragged into defending the term and getting the whole thing more and more toxic publicity.

Re: Depressing.

"Sometimes I wonder if part of the political process should include screening for psychopathy."

Maybe we could start with screening for intelligence and understanding of the fields they're dealing with.

BT and EE, O2 and Three: Are we in for a year of Euro telco mega-mergers?

"Look at the US market, it has far less competition, yet on average broadband providers invest at twice the rate of European, and the gap is growing."

But nevertheless http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/31/us_broadband_speeds_up_but_still_crap/

GCHQ mass spying will 'cost lives in Britain,' warns ex-NSA tech chief

Re: Gosh, a voice of reason speaking to our government!

The feeling of power

FTFY

If you actually read what he's saying the power to actually achieve anything is being lost because the analysts are burying themselves in crap.

'Wipe everything clean ... Join us ...' Creepy poem turns up in logs of 30 million-ish servers

Re: But is it

"prose or a poem, though?"

Vogon poetry.

We're all really excited about new smartphones, laptops, tablets – said no one ever

"The slowdown in the consumer technology market is irrefutable, serious and global,"

It's only serious if you think producing more landfill is a good idea. For people who just want to do stuff "good enough" is what we were after all along.

Ready for DevOps? Time to brush up on The Office and practise 'culture'

Re: Sigh

"Another week, another DevOps article."

s/week/day/

or maybe

s/week/article/

Re: ISO9000/9001

"Even if quality gurus affirm otherwise (they wouldn't be gurus if they actually spent the time doing the stuff they are talking about though...)"

Quality is like sex. Those who are always talking about it probably aren't doing it.

Half of UK financial institutions vulnerable to well-known crypto flaws

Re: And The Banks Don't Care

"My bank"

Shouldn't that have been "My ex-bank"?

Dutch govt says no to backdoors, slides $540k into OpenSSL without breaking eye contact

"the Dutch situation cannot be seen in isolation from the international context."

It'd be interesting from the international point of view if a few large companies decided to move their HQs to the Netherlands on account of the govt's favourable attitude to encryption.

The Register's entirely serious New Year's resolutions for 2016

Re: What did I just read?

Sorry, only one upvote to give. Very well said.

Serious suggestion

Voting on articles, not just on comments.

It would guide you as to what we want & don't want. To some extent the number of comments is indicative but these can be distorted by a good OT diversion.

Re: So the new formula is:

You missed out:

Articles re-published from The Conversation

"We'll revisit the site's design"

Does that mean space-wasting irrelevant pictures will be dropped?

It sounds as if someone needs to fork the original elReg. Yes I DID mean fork.

Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement

"117, Oak Ridge, so Weinburgium after it's first boss maybe ? Well, Weinburgine seeing as it's a halogen"

Quercine?

Microsoft in 2016: Is there any point asking SatNad what's coming?

Re: The one really useful thing MS could do for all of us

"if the CIA/FBI records of IRA gun running - and the links to Irish politicians - were released."

I doubt that would make much difference to Irish politicians. Most if not all from those days who are still alive are retired. And it would only confirm what most believe anyway. What it would reveal is the extent to which the US - and especially the CIA/FBI - let it happen. Are they really going to tarnish their own reputations, such as they are?

Re: Windows XP and Office 2003, the pinnacle of MS

"users know it"

No, PHBs know it.

Re: No point to it

"you can see why Microsoft needs it, more than you can imagine why you'd want it."

I think the reason is that the verbs should be swapped round. Microsoft (or IBM in the old days) want it more than the user needs it.

Re: mad, really mad

"My immediate reaction was that if Ballmer thinks they're wrong, they're almost certainly right."

The trouble with that line of thinking is that there are more ways of being wrong than there are of being right. And over the years MS seem to have ventured into a good few of them.

Re: "he has a higher degree of tolerance for unfinished software than his customers"

"The culture there (being general) is that is just not done to ask questions of your peers. If you do, you lose face and that would never do your chances of promotion any good."

I think this has much to do with more than software development. It could explain a lot of the way Indian customer service centres work - or don't work.

Re: The reality...

"My company is accelerating adoption of Azure and 365 and working on a Windows 10 plan."

I can never be sure whether your posts represent an alternative reality or are simply good satire.

Forget anonymity, we can remember you wholesale with machine intel, hackers warned

"After all, the comments were likely written by the person who wrote the code"

True, but they may not say the same thing.

Microsoft to begin alerting users about suspected government snooping

Assuming such warnings are by email I can't see how such warnings wouldn't get lost amongst all the phishing spam claiming to be from Microsoft. The first thing they need to do is to tighten up on their spam filters so that 100% of that spam is marked. Only then would users take note of the warnings.

MPs slam mandarins over failed GP IT system

Could have been worse...

...it could have succeeded.

It's amazing the UK Parliament agreed to track 22bn Brits' car trips. Oh right – it didn't

Re: AC Morality

"Second case - terror! - where every budding jihadi knows (thanks to people like Snowden) that he should take the battery and SIM out of his phone before driving off to meet his fellow jihadis. ANPR not only allows the authorities to do live tracking of suspects, but also allows them to go back and look for at where he was during those times when the suspect has tried to go off-grid."

And since well before Snowden any villain of any stripe knows that if he's up to something (AKA go off-grid) false plates are a good idea.

Re: Legality

"In criminal proceedings, all relevant evidence presented by the parties is prima facie admissible as the UK courts have adopted an inclusionary approach towards evidence in order to favour the victim and ensure a fair trial."

Nevertheless the admissibility or even relevance of any piece of evidence is unchallengeable if it could prejudice the ability of the trial to estalish guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Does the database contain actual images? If not then the ANPR output is the sole evidence that a numberplate with that text has been read. But if there's no statutory basis for the database then there's no statutory provision for maintaining the apparatus or even for approving it in the first place so its output must surely be regarded with suspicion.

Even allowing the accuracy of the number recognition system there is then the small matter of whether the number was genuine. Anyone using a motor to commit crime must surely have at least considered the possibility of false places. Unless it can be shown (how?) that the plates were genuine then the evidence must surely be considered irrelevant.*

And that's before we even start questioning the chain of evidence of a database which lacks statutory authorisation.

*Unless, of course, it were established that the defendant was using a vehicle with those false plates at the relevant time.

What did we learn today? Microsoft has patented the slider bar

Re: Microsoft is the new SCO

"Since they can't make decent product"

I have to disagree. SCO had a very decent product but they couldn't/wouldn't compete with "free as in beer". If they'd cut the prices I suspect Linux would never have got off the ground.

Watch out, er, 'oven cleaners': ICO plans nuisance call crackdown in 2016

Re: Individual fines please

I have a slightly better scheme in mind.

Assign a number in the 147x range.

Instead of dialling 1471, dial that number.

Your telco refunds you £1 on your account and debits the account of the caller (assuming it's one of their customers) with the charge plus their surcharge for operating the scheme. If the call came from a different telco they charge that telco instead as an additional call terminating charge.

This chain carries on, accreting additional service charges, until it finally hits either the caller or a telco sufficiently stupid to accept calls without knowing where they came from.

The end effect is that the caller pays the callee for the annoyance caused.

It would require the telcos to put up investment for setting it up but if it were a requirement than it just becomes part of the cost of doing business which they'd recover from their charges.

It would also require some monitoring to prevent some bright spark from just doing that to legitimate calls.

"if your address is Flat D, 250 Streatham High Street"

It isn't but it could be.

"I use the T.P.S. (Telephone Piss off Scheme) to get my number removed."

Simpler version. Send them for a long weight. For those not acquainted with the ancient industrial practical joke, ask them to hold the line for a moment and prolong the moment for several minutes before hanging up.

Re: the TPS is not worth the paper it is written on

" How can I report them to the ICO if I have no number to use as a reference?"

Ask them who they're representing. You can then make a complaint to the ICO about their principal.

"Until they can crack down on overseas call centres being used by British companies then they will continue."

I don't see that this ought to be a problem. The overseas centre is acting as an agent of the British company. The British company is within the ICO's jurisdiction and you could complain appropriately.

"It's if the company has a 'relationship' with you that they are allowed to cold call you."

You then make it transparently clear to them that presuming on this relationship was not a good idea on their part as it has just terminated it. If enough people do that - and mean it - then the message might get through.

China wants encryption cracked on demand because ... er, terrorism

Re: ban mathematics...

"But quite possible with a very smart mole who hides the exploits in bits and pieces scattered throughout the code, each piece inextricably tied to a legitimate function so it's not only tough to spot but hard to remove without breaking something else."

That's a good reason to use an operating system with clean, well defined interfaces between components so that any individual component can be replaced by an alternative that offers the same, defined service through the same interface. Sadly, that eliminates an increasing number of OSs these days.

Re: I'm looking forward to the part where....

"where do you think 99% of tech gear gets made for pennies?"

I'm sure there are one or two other countries that would be prepared to step up to the mark. Kit gets made wherever the companies perceive as being the best location. If some other country offers sufficiently lowish cost options and a better business environment then manufacture can go there fairly quickly. If all the kit vendors make the move then there's no competitive disadvantage even if the costs are a shade higher. In fact, is China even the lowest cost option these days?

Governments conspiring?

'I find it interesting that the Chinese are copying the "free world" in their quest for access... I would have thought ... that it would have been the other way around'

It is. Basically they're like a jar of worms, squirming over each other to get to the top by using each other's actions as precedents to legislate something worse.

Jez Humble to deliver keynote at Continuous Lifecycle London

"WTF is DevOps then? What was it called a few years ago before some buzzword was dreamed up?"

Not sure but it sounds like what we used to do 20-30 years ago. We had a nice Unix box with a nice RDBMS engine running on it. We talked to users. We wrote programs based on what the users needed, installed them on the box and were out own DBAs & Unix sysadmins. We didn't call it anything beyond doing IT.

I suspect DevOps is much the same except with a lot more ceremony and "Agile" stamped all over it. And lots of consultants.

If you want to introduce cycles into it repeat after me:"Development is the process of introducing software into the maintenance cycle".

Cisco, HPE and Dell: Let's just say 'it's complicated' for now

Re: Forecast

Once upon a time it might have been possible to believe all that but the HP of those days is a distant memory. Who's left in those labs after years of cutting staff?

"HPE's game plan will be to take someone else's software, put it on hardware made by a different someone else, test it to make sure it doesn't do anything strange, and then sell it at a premium."

If the first someone else does their own testing right then where's the added value? And if they didn't then either HPE doesn't sell it or it feeds back the problems so they get fixed for all customers so again, where's the added value? They could, of course, take multiple other pieces of S/W & test them together but unless they need to add some proprietary stuff to make the combo work where, again, is the added value?

Microsoft in 2015: Mobile disasters, Windows 10 and heads in the clouds

Re: The game is up Microsoft - your code is crap!

"copying what worked well in windows while dutifully avoiding (most of) what didn't."

Binary logs?

The many-tentacled monster that is systemd?