Posts by Doctor Syntax

Your gran and her cronies are 'embracing online banking' – study

HSBC

You'd think that by now HSBC would have added Linux as a desktop platform that they recognise.

@dogged

I'll see your 20 & raise you 30...

How's this for customer service: Comcast calls bloke an A**HOLE – and even puts it in print

"he court would quite literally tear them to pieces"

I think the word you were looking for was "metaphorically".

Amazon's new WorkMail for enterprise: Another Fire dud – or a Kindle?

Re: Once again - US cloud service. Two words from Europe.

Possibly Amazon have learnt from others' mistakes and set up a legal arrangement with a proper air-gap in it. It's not as if their lawyers are unfamiliar with complex international corporate structures.

Man trousers $15,000 domain name for $10.99 amid registry cockup

Re: So How's Pets.com Doing?

"Back when owning a generic dot com domain was supposed to be the ticket to success, there was the famous crash and burn Pets.com. I've never visited that site before, but I did just now to check on it before making this post. There's no site at pets.com, it's just a re-direct to another domain that I've never heard of that sells pet supplies."

A few minutes with whois shows that pets.com was last modified late last year. The other domain was registered a few years ago. So it's possible that the pets.com domain was acquired fairly recently by the owners of other site who elected to keep their existing site - and existing customer recognition - and do the redirect as a quick fix. Not saying that that's what happened but you can't draw too many conclusions from a redirected name.

US looks at plan to hand over world's DNS – and screams blue murder

Re: The simplest and best solution

With a republic you can vote for the head of state but you always end up with a politician.

BOO! Grave remote-code exec flaw in GNU C Library TERRIFIES Linux

Re: Not Again

"This one is going to be particularly hard to fix"

Really? I paused reading when I got to the sentence that said fixes were available, installed them which took less than a minute, carried on reading and then went to the comments section where, of course, I found exactly the sort of comment I expected.

Switch it off and on again: How peers failed to sneak Snoopers' Charter into terror bill

Re: Organising the Techies

Write to your local MP. Suggest they get together with various members of their friends & family of a reasonably wide range of age groups. Get each one to check his smartphone for apps which use encryption. Ask them what their reaction would be if those apps were made illegal. Point out that the likely results would make the Cameron policy the shortest political suicide note in history (your MP should get the reference).

Also point out that criminals, including terrorists, disregard laws. Although the MP's constituents would be affected by such legislation and considerably angered by it the terrorists wouldn't. They'd have sufficient resources to roll their own apps; the strong encryption genie has been out of the bottle for a couple of decades now and it isn't going back, ever. So all that will have been achieved is a large bunch of unhappy voters and a smaller bunch of uninconvenienced terrorists.

Lord King of Bridgwater

AKA Tom King. It looks like wonkpedia's account may need to be rewritten:

"King's career in the Cabinet may appear odd to some observers due to his many quick moves between departments. The moves were a reflection of his ability to 'master his brief' quickly, and as successive crises hit the government it was King who was moved to fill the gap. King never had a strong public profile compared to other members of the Cabinet, but neither did he draw attention to himself by elementary errors or public gaffes."

Of course there's an alternative explanation of why he got moved round so much...

VDI is heading for a minor DAAS-aster

"Or am I missing something?"

Standby processor to do the job when somebody else's computer, or the connection to it, goes down.

Landlines: The tech that just won't die

Re: Living with Landline

Similar experience except, being a bit more public spirited I asked them to hang on and then put the phone to one side. I reckon that whilst they were hanging on they weren't pestering anyone else. But I'm sure there's a don't-even-bother list that gets sold to spammers.

Re: Call filtering

" I simply don't answer."

Not necessarily a good approach. Our GP doesn't give CLI. It's easier to answer the Withheld calls than find a new GP.

I get very few - almost disappointing few - nuisance calls these days. I think I must have got myself on a do-no-call list....

Oi, Aussie sports fans! Take that selfie stick and stick it

Re: Wouldn't this problem take care of itself?

Alternatively, how about a selfie with that nice croc over there?

FROSTY MISTRESS of the Outer System: Pluto yields to probe snapper

Re: Billion

"Is that a scientific billion or an American short billion."

10^9

It's the traditional British 10^12 that's the odd one out.

YOU. Your women are mine. Give them to me. I want to sell them

Re: This is the end, beautiful friend <RANT>

"businesses demanding your contact details"

Lie.

In the case of UK registered businesses Companies House is your friend - Webcheck will give you their registered office which is an excellent contact address to use. Unfortunately it's had the .gov.uk makeunder & isn't as easy to find as it used to be.

Cunning plan

1. Post bait - er masterpiece.

2. Wait for takedowns

3. Issue counterclaims

4. When someone ignores counterclaims lob ginormeous sueball alleging defamation, fraud, ingrowing toenail & anything else

5. Accept much reduced but still profitable sum in settlement.

'People ACTUALLY CONFUSE Facebook and the internet in some places'

"users (sorry, people)"

Products!

Uber isn't limited by the taxi market: It's limited by the Electronic Thumb market

"Wasn't it Robert Maxwell who said there is no such thing as money?"

I think his actual view was that there was no such thing as other people's money.

Re: Uber limits

"Well no, then again, the absolutely last thing you want to do is bring professional extortionists into a business model."

Let's examine that a little.

Maybe you haven't had the experience I've had of being in a taxi that's crashed*. If you had & had been injured then you'd need some compensation for loss of earnings or any out-of-pocket costs arising from that. As the taxi driver himself might not be able to afford this you'd rely on the driver's insurance.

The driver's insurance costs will in turn be based on certain assumptions. If the driver is assumed to be involved in the sort of mileage and passenger carrying levels of a private motorist then the insurance company will be rating the risk as much less than that to which they were really carrying**. And in that case they may refuse to pay and you'd be seriously out of pocket. That may be a risk you wish to take but most taxi passengers probably won't agree with you.

*No injuries to me or the other passengers. I'm not sure about the car he T-boned; it was amazing how quickly another taxi arrived to remove all possible witnesses.

**The alternative, of course, is that the insurance companies spread the taxi drivers' risks across all motorists so that the many of us who aren't taxi drivers subsidise those who are.

Re: Economy

"It's not something that many people think about when they're chucking something out."

This observation isn't necessarily true in Yorkshire. And maybe not in Scotland but we Tykes tend to look on Scots as amateurs.

SUPERHANDS! Fossils of early human ancestors reveal a GRIPPING development

The comment on the New Scientist report at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26844-human-ancestors-got-a-grip-on-tools-3-million-years-ago.html#.VMIwqv6sXTo give this a different slant. The squeeze grip is related to climbing (my first reaction to reading the report here was much the same) and the precision grip has a possible alternative origin in peeling fruit.

Bloke claims someone paid him 85,000 for a web glitter bomb factory

What's new?

"So pay us money, provide an address anywhere in the world & we'll send them so much glitter in an envelope that they'll be finding that shit everywhere for weeks,"

The grandchildren do something similar with angel hair every Christmas.

Developers, developers, developers! But WILL they support Windows 10?

Re: we're already developing for Windows 10

"So you're already committing to a platform that isn't released, stabilised, proven or even gained a mentionable user base?"

It makes sense. His company's customers are looking at kit with an EoL in, say 2030.* W2K has EoL in 2020. 8.* has EoL when? Of course they're going to want something that has a long life in front of it.

* Industrial kit has to run for a long time, that's why folk are finding it difficult to get away from XP and when I retired in 2006 my client had industrial printers still going strong which, as far as I could make out, had W95 embedded.

Re: “WPF is not quite to the done state yet,”

"Paid to communicate, and produces a sentence with more misses than hits."

It's a valuable skill. It can obfuscate bad news & make no news sound impressive.

What was Tim Cook worth to Apple in 2014? $9 MILLION, apparently

Re: how does this compare to the heads of ... say,

"Not a penny of my Tax money has gone to apple"

How do you know? Are you sure none of the various levels of govt. where you live buy Apple products with your taxes?

Why so tax-shy, big tech firms? – Bank of England governor

Re: "the challenge will be for people to develop skills that cannot be displaced by machines"

"Why bother using labour-saving technology in the first place if we don't want to save people from labour?"

The problem then is how to distribute the products of the technology. The employment route achieves this by paying employees who use the payments to buy the products and services which they and other employees produced.

Hola HoloLens: Reg man gets face time with Microsoft's holographic headset

Re: The most screamingly obvious use for augmented reality...

That was the thought that struck me as well.

Admen - a greater plague than lawyers.

FIVE Things (NOT 10: these are REAL) from the WINDOWS 10 event

Re: Nobody talks to Cortana

"Cortana is a virtual assistant"

So was that paper-clip.

Free Windows 10 could mean the END for Microsoft and the PC biz

Re: Oh no!!!

'"""Windows 7 doesn’t work with Microsoft app-store apps."""

They say it like it's a bad thing.'

Or as if they couldn't provide an app-store for W7 apps.

What is this app-store thing anyway? Is it something like Synaptic which I can run to install most of the stuff I need on Debian?

Re: Exact wording @ AceRimmer

True. But the sentence before the one you quoted reads "Windows 10 will be delivered as a service to offer a safer, innovative and updated experience for the supported lifetime of the device." This is the one that introduces two doubts.

1. What does "as a service" mean? As long as you keep paying us?

2. What does "supported lifetime" mean?

Until these are clarified people are not going to drop their long-held habit of distrusting Microsoft and all the suits who sail in her.

Re: Stop and think a bit, please...

'The problem is that tricky phrase, "for the supported lifetime of the device".'

I have a VM running W7. It started off as what seemed a reasonable size for a VM which only runs one application for which I don't have as good a substitute on Linux. However every time it got patched it grew and grew. Now, despite applying the "clean system files" option (or whatever it's called) firing up the VM brings up error messages about not having enough room for swap files.

So maybe "the supported lifetime of the device" means "the time it takes to bloat over all the drive it was installed on".

Re: Stop and think a bit, please...

"EULA != the law, consumer rights trump EULAs"

This may be so for consumer rights depending on your jurisdiction. But consumer rights don't necessarily apply to business purchases. So read the EULA just in case.

Tat bazaar eBay confirms: THOUSANDS of workers will be AXED

Should have done it years ago

Specifically they should have got rid of the developers who kept making tweaks to what started out as a reasonable interface and introduced lots of minor annoyances.

SECRETS of the LOST SCROLLS unlocked by key to HEALTHY BOOBS

The way things are going with libraries hereabouts it might turn out to be easier to read books from the Herculaneum library than from the local one.

Will fondleslab's fickle finger of fate help Windows 10?

Re: I think I'm getting old :(

"A Microsoft account will be and currently is, optional."

"Currently is" seems to be the case. But "will be"? Do you have some cast-iron assurance on this?

Facebook worth more than Portugal? Hell, it's worth a LOT more than THAT

Congrats to Tim...

...for crafting a cunningly disguised version of the broken windows fallacy.

Pull up the Windows 10 duvet and pretend Win8 and Vista were BAD DREAMS

Re: Post Windows World

"Read and digest: http://philstephens.com.au/security-for-google-drive-businesses/"

I had a quick look. I came across this "Instead of documents being emailed around the company, they can be shared via email. This means that all that is sent is a link."

What's to stop emailing links being done if the storage is in-house? Alternatively, what's to stop complete docs being emailed if storage is on someone else's computer?

Whilst not wishing to cast aspersions on Google's security measures (other, of course, than the fact that they're open to hidden NSA demands in a way that an in-house system isn't, a major consideration if you're in the EU) the generic issue still exists. You're now dealing with three attack surfaces, the in-house one which may now be smaller; someone else's which, as another commentator has pointed out, you can't visit or audit its physical security; and the connections between the two.

It's not Luddism to point out the smoke and mirrors. Nevertheless, maybe I'll adopt "and Enoch shall break them" as a sig.

Re: Post Windows World

"Most businesses could move their entire organisation to the cloud storage and web apps, and get themselves some proper security. (with cloud storage, users don't email docs, all the security is handled serverside with 2 factor auth)."

s/cloud storage/someone else's computer/g

What's this "security" of which you write?

Re: Linux.

@Kaltern

You'd be much more convincing if you wrote as if you knew what you were writing about.

Re: Hellooooo UBUNTU...

'What *most people" want is ... a PC that ... smells like the one they're used to.'

Burning?

Re: "..stopped retailers and PC makers from selling .."

"A good marketing person makes you think YOU came up with the idea of NEEDING it"

Meanwhile, back in the real world, real marketing people make me realise that they're trying to make me think that I came up with the idea of needing whatever it is. And succeed in pissing me off to the extent that even if, by some remote chance, I actually need whatever it is I'll buy it from someone else.

Re: It's not difficult you know

"Ethel who works in HR"

HR?

Works?

Oxymoron detected.

Whisper keeping schtum over abuse of user data

Surely a typo?

'an internal review... had "found no wrongdoing".'

The usual wording is "found no evidence of wrongdoing" as Sir Humphrey explained.

Facebook is MORE IMPORTANT to humanity than PORTUGAL

Re: Self Importance?

I was with you as far as Port. But I'd need considerably more than one bottle to reconcile me to watching a bunch of kids kick a bag of wind up and down a field.

'If you see a stylus, they BLEW it' – Steve Jobs. REMEMBER, Apple?

Re: Who wants Handwriting Recognition anyway?

So you've never had a delivery which you were asked to "sign" for on some sort of electronic pad which converted your signature to a series of straight lines joined at odd angles?

Buggy? Angry? LET IT ALL OUT says Linus Torvalds

Re: Middle finger

"it doesn't mean that El Reg has to plaster the picture of him"

But it doesn't mean you have to see it. Just block all images from regmedia.co.uk until they get over this redesign nonsense. You'll lose one or two meaningful things from time to time but on the whole the signal to noise ratio will be greatly enhanced.

" look at the tie die"

Really! Professional shills ought at least to be literate. The correct spelling is "dye".

Dongle bingle makes two MEELLION cars open to exploit

Wouldn't connecting something like this invalidate the car's warranty and the construction & use approval (or equivalent in the jurisdiction concerned)?

'Our AI systems must do what we want them to do'

@Sebastian

"Do NOT re-elect him. We need to send a signal to western leaders that we're not willing to trade privacy for some illusion of security."

Elect someone else who'll do the exact same thing? That's the problem.

The Year of Living Danishly, The Internet is Not the Answer and Classical Literature

Re: Fact checking - a pedant speaks

"I could truly care less"

So you do care?