Posts by Doctor Syntax

Congress strips out privacy protections from CISA 'security' bill

This idea of Trumps about pulling the plugs. From this side of the pond it sounds like a good idea.

Let's shut down the internet: Republicans vacate their mind bowels

These smartest people he wants to use. How does he define smartest? If he means smarter than himself he's setting the bar fairly low.

Former Sugar babe of Viglen fame set for Chrimbo exit

“I’ve been running Alan Sugar’s companies for the last 25 years, and that’s why I know a little bit about technology,”

What a wonderful sentence. One could spend hours thinking about the possible interpretations.

"Seems a lot of turnover for a company with no apparent market presence."

I didn't even realise they were among those still present.

Be afraid, Apple and Samsung: Huawei's IoT home looks cheaper and better

cheaper and better

Better fits into the scale good>better>best.

I have yet to be persuaded that "good" applies to the IoT let alone "better".

At least 10 major loyalty card schemes compromised in industry-wide scam

"Some of your information (e.g. your email address) is only as safe as the weakest link."

Which email address would than be? People who are likely to be long term suppliers get their own address, these days the rest get one which is used for a few weeks & then torn down (they used to get a hotmail address). An email address doesn't need to be "your information" for any greater value of "your" than you choose to make it.

IT infrastructure on demand? Yeah right, say devs

If your business thinks that 8 hours or even a week is reasonable notice you're doing things wrong. If you have some project that requires resources then the time to bring operation into the planning is at the start along with everyone else.

Having said that I have been in the situation of arriving at work one morning and being grabbed by the data input team because they had several temps just arrived to enter data for which no software existed because it hadn't even been mentioned to anybody in IT. And another instance when my first meeting with the project team was a day or so before go-live - fortunately I'd heard about that one on the grape-vine & although I hadn't done any coding I'd thought it through & realised it wasn't difficult. Those were exceptions because usually I and my team had good working relations with the rest of the business and because, in those far off days, we did S/W, DBA & Unix admin as a single team we didn't get into the sort of face-offs implied by this report.

Cyber security buck stops with me, says Dido Harding

In view of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35110909 maybe the board should consider leaving security in the hands of someone who actually knows about it.

Re: Really?

"Rather less if, as is usual, the scrotes are happily ensconced in Russia"

Fortunately the "dumbest, pigshit-thick woodentop" appears to have been brighter than you as several suspects have been apprehended and the nearest to any of them being ensconced in a foreign country is one in Co Antrim, N Ireland.

Lettuce-nibbling veggies menace Mother Earth

Re: But what about the one true root vegetable....?

"So we call them spuds, or tubers if we went to agricultural college."

A tuber is a storage organ formed from a stem.

Re: Yawn

"Actually, it's not closed."

You missed the fact that I completely ignored the hydraulic cycle.

Re: But what about the one true root vegetable....?

"POTATOES!"

Sorry, but they're not roots, they're stems. Those eyes? They're buds which you find on stems, not roots.

Re: Yawn

"Turning camel manure into CO2 and NOx doesn't seem to be an entirely rational approach to reducing GHGs. How about composting the manure and feeding the grass with that. More grass, more camels, less pollution."

The grass will fix the CO2 and the NOx will be rained out of the atmosphere into the ground & taken up by the grass. It's not strictly a closed system unless you put a big glass box over your house, lawn and camel but it's balanced.

"But where will the raw materials for our food grade 3D printers come from?"

HP. But you'll be able to donate the "empty" cartridges to the poor.

"Are there any long term studies regarding growing, harvesting, and consumption of tomatoes, given they are related to nightshade ?"

As are spuds. The fruit of spuds look rather like tomatoes but are poisonous as they contain alkaloids similar to those of nightshade. Spuds also develop alkaloids if they're exposed to sunlight & turn green. The vegetative parts of tomatoes also contain alkaloids. OTOH many commercially produced tomatoes seem to contain little but water.

"It was producing 2 to 3 300 mm long cukes per day for many weeks"

SWMBO here only grows the dwarf variety & gets to eat the lot. Horrible fruit although the cuco-melons she tried one year were worse.

I'd have thought the T of the BLT would have been as bad as cucumbers. Both are predominantly greenhouse crops, at least in the UK.

Beleaguered Microsoft customers: Streamline your licensing

Re: how about the SME's then?

"Not everyone is like you."

Be fair. He's got a job to protect.

Mine's the one with a copy of the GPL in the pocket.

New data porting rules mustn't overburden businesses with costs, says UK minister

Re: Is it just me

No it's not just you. Having read the article I still don't know what problem they're supposed to be solving.

Red Hat launches dedicated enterprise cloud platform

"For $48,000 a year, the Linux distro provides a high-availability cluster with five nodes, four application nodes, 48TB of bandwidth, premium support, and 100GB of data."

Alternatively, for $48,000 a year you could buy a lot of PCs.

EU mobile roaming rules to save customers billions in bills

"They'll make up the loss by jacking up non-EU roaming."

More likely they'll jack up all rates. Why stop at non-EU roaming?

3 continents, 8 countries and one cyber attack on a fake petrol company

I don't know whether the scenario has much effect on the exercise but if it does then this seems to follow a traditional military strategy planning pattern: fighting the last war or the war before that. Even a scenario modelled on Sony would have been more recent than that chosen but the current attack-de-jour seems to be DDOS.

New gear needed to capture net connection records, say ISPs

Cheap solution

3rd hand old tape drive.

Access? "See that pile of unlabelled QICs there? You're welcome to look through them. No you can't borrow our drive, it's in use."

Expert welcomes UK’s digital health recommendations

"Among the advice she gave was a recommendation that the UK government ensure that there is access to free Wi-Fi within all NHS buildings in England."

Why? Does she also recommend that ISPs give free health treatments?

Re: They're not serious about this

"Repeat prescriptions actually work!"

Lucky old you. After several reissued passwords SWMBO still hasn't been able to log on to get repeat prescriptions.

HMRC aims for fully digital tax system by 2020. Yeah, whatever

Re: No end to tax returns

"And you have to check that they've calculated it right. If they get it wrong... who's fault is it?"

That's easy. If the tax came out too small it was your fault but if it came out too much then it's your fault for misunderstanding because obviously it was correct all along.

Microsoft to OneDrive users: We're sorry, click the magic link to keep your free storage

Re: The Problem Seems To Be Both Simple And Predictable.

"the complete failure of the IT industry to make a simple and secure server product suitable for home use"

Failure to make? No, there've been such products about for years. Failure to sell, apparently so. But I suspect that the demand for storage as a service comes mostly from people wanting to access storage from mobile devices. Providing that from a home device would mean punching holes in the home router's firewall (apart from those pre-punched by too many vendors!) which would be beyond most of the potential market.

Maybe what's needed is a home device that can combine storage with router/firewall pre-configured to provide external access AND good security.

Re: it is practically impossible to not use it.

" but the default when setting up a new windows machine is to create a cloudy account and use that"

On 7? That's what the original claim was about.

Re: Bah

"This is an irrefutable, documented fact."

Citation or it's neither.

Assange inquisition closer after Sweden, Ecuador sign pact

Re: Once

"deliver him to the authorities in the UK"

Who might well deport him back to Australia after he's served his sentence.

No root for you! Google slams door on Symantec certs

Re: this...

"Seriously, I am surprised this jail concept is not rolled into a distro yet..."

From the linked site: "June 2015 – Firejail included in Debian."

Mozilla backs away from mobile OS as Android looks invincible

Whilst digging though the possibility of such integration I discovered that until comparatively recently LibreOffice incorporated an old, hacked version of SeaMonkey just so they could have access to the address book code. What a missed opportunity. They could have exposed the mail client and kept with an up to date version. They could even have exposed the web interface for good measure. Assuming "hacked" doesn't mean large chunks chopped out it wouldn't have even increased the footprint.

"Hopefully LibreOffice could pick this up, work on it and bundle it to give a better MS office competitor."

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Ideas_for_the_integration_of_Thunderbird_with_LibreOffice

Re: "This depressing picture"? Aye right...

"After all, the customer is always right. Right?"

But who's the customer & who's the product? Right?

Electrician cuts wrong wire and downs 25,000 square foot data centre

"The likelihood of the failure is low, provided you have a competent electrician. "

Yes, well, JF's company now know theirs wasn't.

Re: opps - Nope, Risk = Impact X Likelihood

"the flood defenses were improved, and they did not fail - they were overwhelmed"

If your living room is knee deep in water (again) it's probably a distinction without a difference.

HPE's private London drinking club: Name that boozer

The Engineer's Lament

The Last Chance

The Lost Chance

The Former Glory

The Withered Husk

The Silent Women - This has a dual version of the traditional inn sign for The Silent Woman featuring portraits of the two guilty parties

Social media snitching bill introduced into US Congress by intel bosses

"Senate Intelligence Committee"

Oxymoron?

US government pushing again on encryption bypass

Nurse...

...they're out of bed again.

Re: for goodness sake

"If they passed a law that prevented this sort of thing it would be offered via apps from somewhere outside the US."

That boat's sailed already. Telegram is from Germany and the owners are Russian, I think, so even if Germany joined in the idiocy they'd just move on somewhere else.

Revealed: Mystery 7-year cyberspy campaign in Latin America

Isn't ALBA the likes of Venezuela (give or take the result of the recent election)? If so I'd have thought the US would have been likely to be supporting opposition groups there, not spying on them.

'Personalised BBC' can algorithmically pander to your prejudices

Sounds like a good thing...

...if it can control the ratio of content to padding in Horizon etc.

Enraged Brits demand Donald Trump UK ban

Re: Great value

"Carter blocked Iranians coming to the US until some things got sorted out"

I think there's a difference between the nationals of a specific country in specific circumstances (with the connivance of the Iranian govt a rabble had taken over the US embassy) and members of a religion from a wide range of countries.

"there is no indication the billionaire überpatriot intends to visit our shores."

Doesn't he have some business in Scotland to do with balls (appropriately enough)? He might want to visit that.

Re: There are two points of view

"When you use juvenile and derogatory tactics l...you negate any chance of being taken seriously by intelligent people."

Good point. Would references to the traitor in the White House be an example?

MPs slam gov heads over 'childishness' on failed farmer IT project

Re: What was the "dysfunctional and childish behaviour"

It would have helped if the article had a link to the report - https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Early-review-of-the-Common-Agricultural-Policy-Delivery-Programme.pdf

The relevant paras are at pp 28 - 29. Of course "childish" isn't actually mentioned in the report. I suspect the members of the committee have access to a good deal more information than is in the report itself.

I like the raising of the question as to why people are still in post. It's time to end the culture of people remaining in positions of responsibility for such failures.

Libertarian hero: 'Satoshi Nakamoto', government funds, the NSA and the DHS

Re: NSA

"the bitcoin creator was working hand in hand with NSA, and they are able de-anonomize the blockchain"

I thought everybody know that.

In-a-spin! Yahoo! clutches! Alibaba! baby! to! breast!

Re: Makes sense

"admin assistant (or whatever the PC types call them these days)"

Intern. Added advantage is that they don't have to be paid.

Microsoft pitches lobotomized Cortana for iOS, Android handsets

"restrictions third-party apps have on access to system components in both OSs"

I thought the usual complaint is that these restrictions are negligible.

Mandatory data breach reporting rules finally agreed by EUrocrats

Critical national infrastructure

"operators in energy, transport, health, and banking"

Surely water, including drainage, and communications,including internet services, should be included as part of that infrastructure.