Posts by Doctor Syntax 42496 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"And why wasn't the T-Mobile DB cleaned up after the credit checks were run? That would ensure minimal customer exposure to attack?"
Exactly this. Or are they trying to tell us that they handled nearly a million applications a day (the breach is said to have run for about 16 days and there were 15 million records stolen).
"You can prove that you are the bank by getting them to phone you back on your bank number. It's pretty certain that if you phone a bank, the person you end up speaking to works for the bank."
There's actually a well-known scam based on this. The scammer puts a recording of a dial tone on the line to fake having hung up and then an accomplice takes over the call after the mark has gone through the motions of calling back. Ring-back verification only works if you call back on a different line.
"There really is no answer to this one, as eventually one side has to trust the other, but the banks are aware of this"
They show no indication of such awareness. The proof that they expect you to offer is the sort of information a scammer would need to impersonate you. It's no different to a faux website at www.somebnk.com collecting passwords from a mistyped URL. The onus has to be on the originator of the call.
As to your challenge there are three responses to this
(a) it's the banks' problem - they should have solved it before they started making the calls;
(b) you have an agreed set of information which they will use to identify themselves and which is different to that which you use to identify yourself, a solution so blindingly obvious that even the USPO should be able to reject a patent application;
(c) absent any such arrangement a few moment's thought should reveal to you an obvious technique which you can apply unilaterally, which works equally well with passwords if you're not sure the site is genuine and which will actually impede the fraudster so long as everybody doesn't start using it.
"My wife works in a high street bank"
Stop!
You have the answer right there.
High street banks should be training their customers to resist frauds.
But do they? No they train them to fall for frauds.
They have digital marketing companies <spit/> send out emails which bear all the signs of phishing emails by purporting to be from the bank but are clearly not from the bank's domain and which include links which are also not to the bank's domain.
They phone customers and expect the customer they phoned to prove their identity without making the slightest provision to authenticate that they really are the bank.
And yet they, of all people, have most to lose. The marketing people are in charge which is another way of saying the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
"complaining to Microsoft won't help"
You know that, I know that. We also know not to fall for the scam. But we're talking about people who did fall for it so it's not surprising that they complain to Microsoft. They're probably the people who call 999 or 911 when their interwebs go down & they can't twat or facebitch.
You know the noise the TV used to make just before the mobile rang? A couple of weeks ago we were in the pub & that noise kept coming over the speakers. The landlord said it was because he was using his phone to play the music. He normally used his iPad but it turned out he'd been one of the early adopters of the borked update. I reminded him of the saying: the early bird catches the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
@Symon
I know they're emitted by trees and shrubs in nature; I'm a botanist by training. The point of this paper is that they've discovered abiotic isoprenes being generated at the ocean surface. Short of an hitherto unknown abiotic photosynthetic process they must be derived from some organic material. What might that be?
"The Northern hemisphere jet stream is being disrupted by something"
Disrupted from what? How long has the existence of the jet stream been known? What records exist to show what its "normal" pattern might be?
Most of the things which we can measure now are so recently discovered that our total knowledge of them in relation to the length of the current interglacial amounts to buggerall and yet people keep making this sort of statement.
"The interesting thing is that climate isn't chaotic. Weather, of course, is, but climate isn't."
Hmmm. On the right scale weather isn't chaotic in that a weather system will follow a predicted track, more or less, at a predicted speed, more or less but such predictions fail if you try to extend them out more than a few days on the one hand and you can't tell who will get hit by a shower at one time on the other.
When we look at palaeoclimates we have very few variables we can measure and measurements tend to represent quite long periods of time so the long term changes look fairly steady yet do bounce around quite a bit on time scales of millennia. Do we really have sufficient data to say that they aren't to some extent chaotic apart from some forcing due to orbital factors?
The thing about paleoclimatology is that because the measurements cover extended periods of time they smooth out variations on the scale that warmists/non-warmists are arguing about. Even taking the longest data sets directly observed measurements only cover a tiny fraction of the current interglacial.
The process science is intended to follow is to form a hypothesis, test its predictions against reality and, if it fails to match up, recognise that and then either discard it for a new one or modify it.
A model is a complex hypothesis, nothing more, nothing less.
With "climatic" models we have three problems. One is that the timescales that get discussed are really too short to be called climate but we don't have anything in our vocabulary to deal with the gap between weather and climate. The second is that over those short timescales meaningful measurement is difficult at best and arguably impossible. The third is that both sides are so dug into there positions that they would be reluctant to recognise any detectable* failure of prediction.
*Personally I'm not convinced we're seeing anything but noise.
"how about a code you can dial on your phone which causes the phone company to log the source of the last incoming call and simply blocks calls from that underlying source number (so it includes withheld and non-geographical numbers, possibly also international numbers?) to the customer in question"
You're not taking it far enough. The callee gets their account credited with a fee for taking the call and that gets transferred back. Accepting calls from another telecoms business without making arrangements to do the transfer charge? Then you get to pay it. It needs some means of checking that a given source is making enough logged calls to a variety of numbers to ensure that someone doesn't get the idea of just logging every call irrespective of who calls.
Of course this might have the entirely unexpected side-effect of killing the outbound calling industry stone dead. Wouldn't that be a shame?
"we haven't actually *got* the very best at top level"
Of course we have. It's just that they're the best at climbing corporate ladders. That's the sole requirement for getting to the top of any organisation other than one that one founds oneself. Anything other talent is an optional extra.
Cynical? Moi?
The advertising industry have just realised they've got a problem. They think it's ad blocking.
They're wrong, they have two problems and neither of them is ad blocking.
The chronic problem is that nobody outside the industry likes them because a significant number of their members are just so damn annoying. That's the pop-up, pop-under, animated, video, sound-playing membership. If they insist on poking their fingers into the public's eyeballs and ear drums the public are going to be annoyed. Ad blocking is the public's response. If the industry had dealt with this rogue element there would be no ad blockers. Up to now although it's been a chronic problem for the industry probably not been too serious as ad blocking had been a minority sport.
The acute problem is malvertising. This is moving ad blocking from nuisance prevention to being a normal part of any PC security setup alongside AV. The likelihood is that it will become a standard part of browser and/or OS builds. At that point the industry will be moribund.
If the industry wishes to survive it needs to deal with the problem at source and do so quickly. They need to look at their entire chain of brokering and serving ads so that only clean ads are served up on the net. And now that the wider web-public realises that blocking is not only a security resource but actually makes web use more pleasant cleanliness will need to include not only absence of malware but also all those other features that make advertisers unpopular. I'd guess that Google not only has the wit to see the need for this but also the resources to do it on their own. Of course this would just squeeze out a lot of other players but the security aspect would help justify this to regulators and indeed would go a long way to helping them to defend against general accusations of monopoly abuse.
In other words, I suspect that if the rest of the industry doesn't get off its high horse with accusations of stealing and the like they're going to find Google walking away with pretty well all their business. Either that or there won't be a business at all because ad blocking will be universal. What's more, because it's an acute problem, they don't have much time to do it.
Right now they need to stop thinking that they have some God-given right to our attention which the evil ad blockers are interfering with and start asking themselves what they need to do earn our willingness to grant them admittance. They need to learn humility. And respect.
"Anything else is mostly a justification that Government has too much money to play with, and should pare down the taxes to leave research institutes and corporations to care for technological advances."
Largely I agree, but where do those research institutes go to get funded if not to the government?
It's reasonable that the government should do those things which we can do better together than separately e.g. a public fire service rather than separate ones funded by insurance companies. But that's much less than big government enthusiasts think but more than small-staters want.
"All it's saying is that companies and other people don't operate optimally, so government should actively encourage more optimal operation."
That assumes they can work out what would be optimal so as to encourage it. There's always a snag somewhere, usually between theory and practice.
"And on the civil front, Britain had the edge with the jet. You might think a quick trip to Malaga in a Ryanair bus is "a bit noisy and why can't they make it quieter", but pre-jet all planes (to put it simply) vibrated to add to the propwash battering the hull."
And those rear engined jets such as the BAC 1-11 seemed a good deal quieter, at least for passengers, then the engine on the wings variety.
Followed shortly by "What's one of the most technologically advanced jobs we've got on the stocks? TSR2? Cancel it."
Along with the pound in your pocket speech it made Wilson one of the masters of Yes Minister's principle of getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.
"Weird, I've never really had problems with turbo diesels, and I have been driving them from the time VAG brought out the first turbo diesel."
Mine wasn't VAG.
The power band must have been all of 500rpm wide and on acceleration away from the lights the traffic behind vanished. Behind a black cloud.
Being a company car I handed it in when I retired & bought a 2nd hand petrol-driven Sierra with a suspiciously exact 60,000 on the clock. It was a major improvement.
"All that is needed is for the Volkswagen Group cars to have their test running parameters set back to a mode which reflects normal driving."
T'other way round.
If they did what you suggest then they would fail the emissions test. The issue is that normal running does not reflect the test results which entitled them to be on the road. It's the normal running parameters which need to be changed to bring them into line with the tests and when that's done the vehicles are likely to be down on power, have higher CO2 emissions or both. Owners will then be complaining that they haven't got the performance they paid for & maybe that their vehicles have been reclassified into higher tax bands. Either that or remediation is going to include the fitting of additional hardware to inject urea.
As I have a VAG petrol driven car I'm hoping that this doesn't extend beyond diesels. OTOH, assuming it doesn't, I'm glad that after my experience with a crap (as in crap from brand new) company car years ago I've refused to even consider another diesel.
Once upon a time MS had this great idea about proprietary lock-in. Encourage customers to use those non-proprietary bits & pieces to build mission-critical applications and they were committed to using MS platforms for life. Except that now MS want to EoL those proprietary bits it means either abandoning those locked-in customers or charging them for extended support whilst they incur further costs in rebuilding the applications. In practice a good many of those customers are going to just keep using the old platforms as long as they can; if they isolate them from the net then there's probably no great harm in that as long as the hardware lasts. But for those current customers who rebuild are they going to think more carefully about having control over their own destinies in the future? And will that mean reducing their dependence on MS?
@ dan1980
A very interesting post.
A significant factor may be that Apple's market is not the same as Windows'. In trying to grab a share of one they risk alienating the enterprise segment of the other (where Apple's consumer-based approach wouldn't have been acceptable). They seem not to have grasped this.
They also seem to not appreciate that their traditional lock-in approach may have back-fired. Where users had custom applications running on XP and dependent on specific aspects of the OS their choices in moving no vary from impossible if the development was by a company that not longer exists to expensive if it has to be extensively modified.
"Sorry, America, your proclamations now carry about as much weight as Israel or Syria's. Except they have the benefit at least of talking a different language when they put out internal and external propaganda."
Now there's a common misconception for you - that American and English are the same language. They're even less alike once you get propagandists deciding that words mean exactly what they want them to mean.
To some extent things depend on the nature of the labour. Unskilled work in a sweatshop is one thing. However, tending the goats on the family farm is a step up as the child acquires the knowledge required to run the farm in later life is a step up although if the farm remains at subsistence level it's not an adequate step. Working whilst learning a skilled job is a definite benefit. It's becoming fashionable again amongst our great political thinkers. It's called apprenticeship but not to be confused with the TV version.
