Posts by Doctor Syntax

Queen's Speech: Snoopers' Charter RETURNS amid 'modernisation' push

Re: Tools

And here's another:

"If you think you've nothing to hide what are your internet banking logon credentials?"

Why are all the visual special effects studios going bust?

there's plenty of people willing to see ads

Spot the wrong word.

RAF Eurofighter gets a Battle of Britain makeover

VC

Did fighter command really only get one VC in WWII?

Re: Secret Technology

Shhh It's a typo for gravy tank.

Torvalds: decisions, decisions, top up sun tan or release Linux 4.1?

Re: Typing as a two+ decade Linux user & contributer ...

I'm not sure about that. There's a distinct risk that when he gets back he'll find the systemd crowd have taken over the kernel & pushed him out.

Web tracking puts lead in your saddlebags, finds Mozilla study

The blocker blocked

" the Disconnect blocklist"

I don't know how good Disconnect is but on visiting their home page Ghostery finds one item to block. But that's an improvement on this page which has three.

Windows and OS X are malware, claims Richard Stallman

Re: Online Indy's catching it up…

Maybe back in '61 he played a president in some film?

NEVER MIND the B*LLOCKS Osbo peddles, deficits don't really matter

Re: @Richard 12 - It seems to me...

Second suggestion: Fix the sense of entitlement that leads parties with even fewer votes to claim that they've been robbed.

Re: Final salary pensions

"the number of jobs where that's a realistic expectation is vanishingly small"

To some extent deferred inflation-linked rights will help to some extent although that assumes that you not only stay in the same job but never get promoted. And CPI rather than RPI linking doesn't help either (remind me who do we have to thank for that). Of course moving job could well be a response to never getting promoted so that may cancel out the problem.

However with the move to defined contribution the future tax still applies but now it falls wholly on the employees. I got both my final salary pensions; I'm not too sure how the kids will fare.

Re: Impulsive voting

Nice rant, John, but it does ignore the fact that Brown (& like-minded finance ministers elsewhere) managed to tax the future to a considerable degree & it's going to take more than one parliament to unpick the damage.

Re: Accumulated debt

And not just PFI.

There was the abolition of tax relief for pensions funds. No, dammit, let's call it a tax on pension funds - if the left can get away with calling reduced benefits a bedroom tax then we can certainly refer to a pension tax. That's left a pension deficit that big companies are going to be paying off for years to come and an end to final salary pensions for the foreseeable future.

Then there was all the personal debt encouraged by keeping interest rates artificially low (ignore a housing bubble so as to get a false measure of inflation). That left a whole lot of personal debt to be paid off at some time in the future - or written off if it couldn't be paid off. And when it couldn't be paid we had QE lowering interest rates well below inflation devaluing the savings of those who hadn't fallen for the original scam. Meanwhile the govt had spent the VAT & Stamp Duty collected from the spending that the debt had financed.

Gordon Brown's genius, if I can call it that, was to find hidden ways of making the future pay for his now. Tony Blair's genius, if I can call it that, was to step aside just as the first traces of that future were about to hit the fan.

Nominet new CEO opens giant can of worms, sticks head in

"It's a bold but possibly foolhardy move on Haworth's part to poke at what has been Nominet's biggest sore point within just months of taking over the job."

Maybe it's what he was appointed to do.

Land Rover's return: Last orders and leather seats for Defender nerds

As I understand it the critical factor isn't emissions but crash safety for pedestrians. That's not going to be fixed by an engine swap.

It looks as if they're going to build a replacement in eastern Europe with a monocoque body on a steel chassis. I can't quite see how that's going to lend itself to all the military versions.

Putting your schlong into the reel-to-reel tape machine is a bad idea

Re: Reel-Reel was fun in those days

"People made the same mistake with computer papertape"

Forget paper tape. I had a friend who had a slight misunderstanding with Fortran print control characters. The sort of misunderstanding that leaves you with a single line of print on a page. On the pages that have anything printed on them at all. So he decided to take this huge stack of fanfold home to work his way through it. He put it on the pillion on the back of his motor bike....

HP: you know we said we were done with cost cutting...

Reductio ad absurbum

Will Meg Whitman know how to run a data centre when she's the only one left?

Vietnam-lovin' VoIP man's 50-nation tally couldn't hold him back

Re: Do the math?

Switzerland was nearly half a year so even less for the rest. More a tourist than an expat.

PCI council gives up, dumbs down PCI DSS for small business

Re: Disabling security to allow security tests

Maybe it's a social engineering test question.

Re: based on experience of SMEs

"Since when has a call centre agent ever used a notebook which they take home with them."

Any time they want to steal customer data!!!

Is the concept of a fraudulent employee too difficult to grasp?

Edited to add:

Assuming both comments to which I replied are from the same A/C who has some responsibility for back office operations I find this rather worrying. We're often told that insiders are a major source of security issues and yet these comments display an absurd degree of complacency and/or lack of imagination. If this reflects supervisory thinking it's not surprising that data goes AWOL.

Re: based on experience of SMEs

"As long as there is no call recording or the recording system they have is PCI compliant"

Is the notebook that the agent takes away at the end of the shift PCI compliant?

UK data watchdog: Massive fines won't keep data safe

Re: In other words...

I think I'd prefer "you spend the half million and here's a quarter of a million fine just to remind you of what'll happen if you have a relapse".

IIRC the original DPA had a sanction to forbid the offender from processing data. That's what I call an effective sanction.

City of birth? Why password questions are a terrible idea

What is it with S/W writers that assume we always live/work/were born in cities? It's an inevitable field in addresses - even genealogical S/W which can reasonably be expected to collect location data from times when relatively few people lived in towns let alone cities.

And then there's the 2FA gadget that my bank gave me. I tried to use it to change my email address and the website simply refused to accept the answer it gave. It's going to be a real benefit of I ever need it to authenticate some financial transaction.

Hacker launches ransomware rescue kit

New OS approach needed

ISTM that it's time to rethink the whole architecture of applications and OS.

What I have in mind is that permissions would be based on a combination of user ID and application ID. For instance only Twitbook would be able to write to Twitbook storage. If Facegram needed to read something from Twitbook's storage it would have had to have been given permission as to what it could read, it would only be able to read from a specific user's storage and it wouldn't be allowed to write back.

A way of implementing this would be to separate applications into front-end and back-end with back-end being something along the lines of a kernel module. The actual kernel itself would have much reduced facilities; it might be able to enforce quotas but it wouldn't be able to duplicate or over-ride the back-end kernel modules' reading and writing privileges. In some respects a micro-kernel architecture would fit but any existing micro-kernel would have to be enhanced with the extended permissions.

Ideally this should prevent any rogue app getting in and over-writing everything. At worst if, for instance, a rogue managed to pass itself off as Instanter it wouldn't be able to encrypt Twitbook & Facegram data.

Did you follow the link in the article? The one that tells you what the kit does including -. No, look it up for yourself.

Google DOG WHISTLING fails to send URLs across the room

Google sending audible URLs

We need a name for that. Gurgle?

NASA plots interplanetary cubesat swarms

Dropping a brick

It's a 10cm cube & they need to test its aerodynamics?

A good effort, if a bit odd: Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2

Ask not why Raspberry Pi needs Windows 10

Ask why Windows 10 needs Raspberry Pi.

I think Voland's right hand may have answered that.

If IT isn’t careful, marketing will soon be telling us what to do

"Marketing ... needs to be social, integrated, responsive, open, honest."

Who writes this stuff?

Robocalling Americans? That'll cost you $1.7m

Re: I think it's easier than that

" but as there is an actual origin available there should be a method by which you can flag a certain call (or time/date) as malicious."

I'll go one better than that. The flagged caller is charged a fee for the callee's time and trouble credited to the callee's telco account. Callee's telco charges the caller if they're on the same network - plus an additional fee for the time & trouble in operating the system*. If the caller is on a different network they charge that network instead. If several networks are involved the charges just keep getting passed up, accumulating additional telco fees each time. If a telco doesn't keep track of where the calls are coming from they are in the barrel for the entire set of fees, an arrangement which should concentrate their minds to do better in future. It would, of course, need some precautions to stop subscribers from gaming the system by flagging every call.

It by-passes the current (at least in the UK) tests for the severity of the distress caused as it simply becomes a commercial transaction - you call me & pay me a fee for taking the call.

*In particular the up-front costs to add the functionality in the first place.

US plans to apply export controls to 0-days put out for comment

Shooting the messenger..

..to become a legal requirement.

BT's taxpayer-funded broadband monopoly may lock out rivals, says independent report

Re: BT spent the money

@AC

I take it you're too young to remember the privatisation. One of the problems with being subsidised by the tax payer was that there was never enough money for investment. The telephone branch of the GPO was otherwise known as the black telephone rationing company.

Russia will fork Sailfish OS to shut out pesky Western spooks

Re: Paranoia over NSA tampering spurs de-Westernisation drive

@ST

Did you hear a whoosh sound?

Blocking mobile adverts just became that little bit easier

Re: Conundrum

"compensation to the businesses whose (paid-for) ads are being blocked"

If a business pesters me with ads then I'm much, MUCH less likely to buy from them. Less as in "if there's an alternative I'll go for it". Less as in "I've taken my business elsewhere from services who thought that my being their customer entitled them to pester me".

It's to the advantage of any business that thinks it wants to sell to me to have ads that I might otherwise get being blocked. So maybe "compensation" should be negative and such businesses should pay the ad-blocker a fee to block them.

The truth of the matter is that I'm far from alone in this attitude. The situation is that the advertising industry makes money by charging advertisers to piss off potential customers.

Welsh police force fined £160,000 after losing sensitive video interview

Re: Victim Compensation

@AC

As it was lost, inevitably. If it hadn't been, in theory, yes. But very likely there'd have been an impeccable paper trail for it.

The more things change...

...the more they stay the same.

Back in the days when we were trying to train police officers about preserving evidence from contamination by stray fibres I walked into a CID office & found a jacket which was part of the evidence (in a murder investigation!) hanging on the back of a chair. Forty years later and the nature of the evidence may have changed but it still takes time for proper handling procedures to be taken on board. In answer to Lost all faith's questions - that message has probably got through by now; it's this new-fangled stuff that causes problems.

ALIBABA Vs AMAZON: Let the Global Tat Bazaar war begin

Re: Is it better in Chinese?

"Their English site is so bad"..."I'm scared topic my credit card number in."

Whoops.

Use your Apple gizmos only for good, says Tim Cook

"If you don't have an iPhone, please pass it to the centre aisle"

Pass something you don't have to the centre aisle?

So why the hell do we bail banks out?

Re: But uncle Tim, I want to hear them pigs squeak!

"A way to claw back bonuses, and to structure bonus incentives better, would also be good. But it's notoriously hard to do."

Just thinking out loud but...

Say we have a special share class that is used for share options. The only way to exercise such options is to buy this class of share. When the govt takes new shares for a bailout more shares of this class get issued but the proportion of dividends allocated to such shares doesn't get expanded in proportion so it's only the share option holders who get their shareholdings diluted and devalued. Could this have any traction?

Re: Longer Term Impact

"the zombification of of many companies with the misfortune to have been running final-salary schemes"

Gordon Brown had done a lot of damage to final-salary and private pension schemes way before this. I reckon the pension companies could and should have raised the profile of this: every year when they sent out projections they could have added another projection - what the pension would have been without the tax raid.

Re: Maybe another reason?

"Inflation means cash loses value over time."

Indeed it does. But if people are concerned that they could lose the entire deposit they'd prefer to lose some of the value. In fact at today's interest rates bank deposits are losing value.

Or to look at it another way, if someone you'd never met emailed you from Nigeria to offer you 10x bank interest rates would you lend him money?

Maybe another reason?

If we make the banks small-enough-to-fail we don't have to bail them out for the damage a failure could do to the overall system. But if such a bank does fail then it takes the deposits of its savers with it. From a saver's point of view any bank is too big to fail.

So if I'm a saver then I might consider keeping my cash under the mattress instead of putting it in a bank. I might also draw out my salary or pension as soon as it's paid in - look, no float. Neither response is good for the economy as a whole.

This can be handled in two ways, first a deposit guarantee scheme, which is to some extent a bail-out mechanism, or far more draconian regulation. And while the latter might sound a good idea it does seem liable to an out of control regulator trying to micro-manage everything and everyone.

Ofcom: Oi, BT! Don't be greedy – feed dark fibre to your rivals

the ducting, exchange buildings and other infrastructure which investors bought from HMG when BT became a private company.

FTFY

Feds: Bloke 'HACKED PLANE controls' – from his PASSENGER seat

@ DryBones

Yes shooting the messenger is always such a good idea.

Never trust a developer who says 'I can fix this in a few minutes'

"At least the amount of damage they can inflict is limited to a single project"

Don't be too sure. Ever heard of multi-tasking?

Re: Project manager?

I take it that you've inside knowledge of this particular situation as you seem to know that the codebase is a mess, that it was written in a hurry, that they're following scrum etc.

I can think of several alternative ways in which this could have gone wrong. For instance a salesman having sold the client a product that didn't fit with assurances that it could be adapted (I've quit as a developer over having that dumped on me). Or, for instance, the development team, or a good chunk of it, having been pulled off to work on something else, leaving them insufficient time to complete what was, originally, a well estimated project.

Microsoft: Free Windows 10 for THIEVES and PIRATES? They can GET STUFFED

Re: Worse case scenario...

"will be herded towards a subscription model."

For a moment I read that as "a suspicion model"

Jeb Bush: Repeal Obamacare and replace it with APPLE WATCHES

"On this device in five years will be applications that will allow me to manage my healthcare"

So in 5 years an Apple watch will be able to do brain transplants?

Right Dabbsy my old son, you can cram this job right up your BLEEEARRGH

Re: Post-It note? Miserable amateur!

Upvote for "The ones with messy desks are generally the go-to guys."

Californians get first chance to be run over by a Google robot

Re: No need to worry

@ JamesPond

If the car is making all these other journeys during the day it will be clocking up more miles per day & thus depreciating faster. A hire-car company would include that factor in its sums so your hire charges might be more than you're hoping for.