Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"An ad a day to keep cybercrime at bay" is what Europol said in its announcement, saying it too will be paying for Google Search and YouTube ads to deter young people from using these sites.
For that to work they're going to have to have a convincing story to tell. A handful of arrests of the operators of the sites isn't going to provide that.
"You know it is never going to improve. It's just going to get worse. Every month, every year, every update, every version."
That means that every month, every year, every update, every version the cost, real or imagined, to migrate away to something more stable gets greater. The longer term rewards also get greater, of course, simply in terms of avoiding the creeping enshittification, but short-termism masquerading as corporate strategy is going to ensure that that won't happen.
However much it's attractive as an idea, what would the grounds be for that? They made a free upgrade from W10 for those who'd bought it reasonably* recently. However much "no more Windows" versions was bandied around in the media it was just something said by "an employee" and not by the company despite the lack of major effort to deny it.
As to the rest of the changes I'm sure Microsoft's EULA agrees that they'll make "improvements" and what constitutes an improvement would be a matter for argument. I doubt you'd find anyone being prepared to gamble the money to try to establish that one in court.
* Reasonable would undoubtedly be the key factor here. I suspect the entire free upgrade was mad with this as a reply to such a challenge.
What this episode has demonstrated is that backdoors are not accessible to only those for whom they were intended, they are accessible to anyone who made the effort - considerable effort, no doubt, but an achievable one - to investigate them. Currently the standard means of communication on the internet are no more secure than messages written on a postcard. You personally might have no dealings that risk exposure in that way. You may never, for instance, buy anything on the internet, transmitting banking details. OTOH your employers might well rely on communicating matters which they expect to be treated as commercial in confidence and leave themselves and their employees - that means you - at a disadvantage if those matters were intercepted by a competitor.
"quite a few cases have been broken by lucky breaks. But this takes the biscuit."
I can think of quite a few:
The getaway car that left one of the gang behind. For good measure their safe house was just round the corner and a witness pointed it out to the police.
The culprit who threw away his cap as he ran away. He'd written his name inside.
The culprit who threw away his jacket as he ran away. His library card with his name and address were in the pocket.
They're not all criminal masterminds.
"nVidia's also in a weird personnel position in that so many of its staff were given company shares in years gone by that the place is full of millionaires now."
If they haven't cashed in those millions are hypothetical until they do so they need to keep the share price up.
"people should go full class action if they've been ruined by fake accounting"
Why? As share holders they own a share of the business. The clue's in the name. The only source of money to pay out is the company which, if you want a fuller description, is the company of shareholders. So what happens in a class action by shareholders? They pay lawyers to sue themselves and pay lawyers to defend themselves against themselves and, whatever the outcome, get what's left after lawyers fees of what was left before the class action.
Are you, by any chance, a lawyer?
What's "basic home use"? Someone with a single address/account/mailbox they use for everything including part of their online credentials (where it's likely to be paired up with the same password on multiple sites)? Home use might extend to multiple email accounts, multiple addresses on the same mailbox, etc. There isn't necessarily a differentiator between the capabilities a home user might and a business user might want. The only difference is that the business user is paid to use it.
Currently I have an email client that has open:
one mailbox with a number of different mail addresses using it,
a second mailbox on the same (my own) domain with mail from a legacy address forwarded to it,
a mailbox on the domain of a committee I'm on and
a second mailbox on that doamin that's the end point of a contact link on our web page
a number of RSS feed
a number of Usenet groups *
It's also my calendar
* Unfortunately not much used since Google stopped supporting them and most members seem unable to make the transition to reading them as they were intended because, I suppose, they're using a mail client intended for basic home use. Thanks, whoever, for dumbed down mail clients.
"Blue Yonder – which reportedly counts ... Morrisons ... among its disrupted customers"
That explains a lot. I'm not sure it explains why it's taken - could still be taking for all I know - naby days to fix a refrigeration unit, nor does it explain why nobody had the wit to either put up a notice to ask staff if you needed butter, nor to shuffle things around so that space could be found on another shelf for butter.
"(or records, for you RDBMS people)"
That'll be rows.
I remember Informix going from file/record/field (when it was called Marathon) to relation/tuple/attribute before getting to table/row/column.
"(Delete removes from RAM, not from database)."
Ouch!
"It’s the console cowboy’s responsibility to know what he’s typing."
I'd have thought that it's the original programmers' responsibility to not let his code expand an ambiguous command. In the examples you give "sho", "shu" and "shi" should be the minimum. nd not just the programmers, thye QA, the overall management chain.
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