Posts by Doctor Syntax

Facing sale or ban, TikTok tossed under national security bus by appeals court

Why don't all other countries take the same approach to US-cintrolled companies gathering data on their citizens?

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: A bit of an overreaction to wrong number.

But be subtle. They need him to authorise it first.

"whats the combo to the key cabinet" ?

Make very sure you know who's calling and that they are entitled to know before answering that one.

Re: Warren's big mistake

"Kindly" is the word. I might have been tempted to do it unkindly - i.e. immediately without telling them.

Re: The other side....

"I've never heard of attempted manslaughter before: Nearly but not quite managing to killing someone without intention or with diminished responsibility?"

Quite a frequent charge. Usually a serious assault where there was not clear indication that actual murder was intended but could be a reckless act although I think normally with a sufficiently serious injury to show that death was a likely outcome. I doubt there'd be intent to kill, which would be the requirement for attempted murder.

Re: Evil Midnight

We have the same number as a local business except for one digit, a 6/8 swap which could be confused depending on the font. We used to get calls for them. I eventually rung them to ask if the typography on their sales material was unclear. They said it wasn't but I wonder if they changed it as the calls stopped.

Re: The other side....

Mere shouting still seems inappropriate in those situations.

"Wow - you are generous!"

There's a difference. You have a boss. Pascal tells us that he has customers.

Family IT support is only available for Linux.

Re: Warren's big mistake

"Was giving his employer his own personal cell phone number."

Suddenly I feel very old. I remember the days when there were no cell phones. There were pagers but not every organisation had those. There were land-lines and, due to the black telephone rationing office, getting a personal line was problem enough without getting a work line as well. When I got a job which might require a call-out, with it being a job with most call-out callss originating from a police liaison officer, we got our first land-line.

Windows 11 24H2 rolls out to more devices – with a growing list of known issues

Re: Break/fix/break

"incapable of discovering one of my older D-Link NAS units"

Deprecated SMB version issue? I've seen that after a Linux upgrade There wasn't an option to upgrade the NAS (Buffalo rather than D-Link) but I could also access it over FTP (it runs entirely locally). Northern Powergrid have helped fix that problem permanently. After a power cut in the middle of running disk repair after an earlier power cut it's now unrecoverable.

Re: A new stage of availability

You think the Windows business hasn't been given sales targets?

Re: Break/fix/break

That's because just turning it off and on again is no longer strong enough medicine.

Re: gamers face black screens

You are locked into a very dark cave...

Re: A new stage of availability

"Redmond still hasn't understood that the days where it could push everyone to upgrade are gone."

It's you who doesn't understand.

If they let you upgrade they don't get any money from you so they're not going to give you a freebie.

You don't like that? You can buy extended support.

You don't like that either? You can buy new hardware with a new W11 licence.

You don't like that either? You're worth nothing to them and they don't care what you think. They really, really don't.

They can't force you to upgrade, true. But you can't force them to give you a freebie.

It's about the money. It's as simple as that.

Re: A new stage of availability

"MS would rather eat shit than admit that they have screwed up."

No, it's their users who are doing that rather than switch to something better.

Re: Negligence

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Microsoft.

Veteran Microsoft engineer shares some enterprise support tips

Re: When I used to fix the machines of friends...

If it's not running Linux I don't now how to fix it.

Re: Been the problem myself before

Regrettably some help-desks are badly named. Increasingly it seems that what I, as a customer, am encountering, is a decision further up the food-chain that mounts to "it's not a bug, it's policy". The trick from a customer's PoV is to figure out that all they're doing is covering up that situation and take your business elsewhere.

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

Re: Reimplementation costs

That won't come cheap either. Only marginally less than commissioning a time machine to go back and correcting the original decision.

Re: Pretty much every large software implementation

There may be legal, regulatory or practical* reasons for the way things are currently done. Deciding to change before evaluating those is stupid.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware

Re: "Always keep a second passport"

My wife, children, grandchildren and brother- and sister-in-law are all entitled to both UK & Irish passports. I'm only entitled to a UK one.

Solana blockchain's popular web3.js npm package backdoored to steal keys, funds

Blockchain. The gift that keeps on taking.

Wish there was a benchmark for ML safety? Allow us to AILuminate you...

It's all very hand-wavy as to what "safe" means let alone how to measure it. Who's to say that if the model doesn't advise eating stones or glueing topping on pizza it won't, with a different prompt, advise substituting crushed glass for salt? It's not feasible to test every prompt and vet every answer.

British hospitals hit by cyberattacks still battling to get systems back online

Apparently this scum favours the CitrixBleed exploit which bypasses 2FA. Patches were available in October last year. If that's the case here the hospitals' suppliers have some tough questions to answer.

Because it would cost money?

"A shared digital gateway"

Yet another supply chain attack. Digital supply chains need to be treated as critical infrastructure and held to appropriate standards.

Temporary printable tattoos could be the future of EEGs

I suppose soldering the wides onto the electrodes is the next thing to solve.

Re: Definitely proof of concept gear.

Note that the video is speeded up x4. You're looking at the patient's breathing.

Re: Interesting tech

"For example, there are heart exams that involve taking your pulse and pressure continuously for a day, even though those are trivial to measure at any given time."

Also "24 hour" ECGs although given the timing between fitting and handing back our local rust is more like and 18-20 hour ECG. Again, trying to catch transients is a matter of luck.

As to washing the hair, given the shaved near bald, bit, a mini-vacuum cleaner should be good enough.

Vodafone and Three permitted to tie the knot – if they promise to behave

If the promise to behave for 3 years.

PlusNet stopped doing mobile a while ago & shunted customers onto EE.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

If you're sitting at your desktop with what looks to be W11 on it nobody's going to look closely enough to check that you haven't quietly upgraded your OS. That's the under the radar use case.

OTOH it only takes a few minutes to apply cosmetics from kde.org to make any KDE distro look like any version of Windows you choose. That's why it will be a flop.

Re: Some use cases

As Flatpak is installed I'd expect it to be installable with the dependencies via that. But, as you say, the Windows experience would be Edge and Chrome. I wonder how they manage to emulate the Windows experience of Mail.

Kudos to them if they've got Discover working reliably. That's been a KDE paper-cut for years. I think there must be a few undeclared dependencies.

A couple of reasons. One would be to introduce Linux where it's not been seen before without frightening the horses. Another would be to fly it in under the radar in corporate environments where Windows is de rigueur.

OTOH the cosmetics can be downloaded from store.kde.org and would you really want to replace some Linux utilities by Windows lookalikes.

Re: Some use cases

It would be odder still if Firefox isn't installable. But is Firefox on a standard Windows install? If not I suppose its omission is only to be expected.

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

How much money would MS make out of letting you upgrade?

And how much would it make if you bought a new PC with W11 installed on it?

Now do you think they'll let you upgrade? (Irrespective of Jim Hacker's dictum.)

I doubt Microsoft's concern with the cronies extends beyond their buying W11 licences for the H/W they sell.

Re: Can anyone clarify

"helping ... sell new laptops"

And with them shiny new W11 licences. Follow the money.

But if that's all it's running why bother with Windows on a PC? You could run that combination on a Pi on a smaller box in a smaller corner of your spare bedroom with a smaller power requirement.

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

Re: re: sarcasm without contribution

You've been locked in and still don't realise where the real problem is?

Windows, meanwhile, continues to smell increasingly strongly of 3-day old sewage.

Re: Utter Shambles

So they have inflicted a "lunchtime hack" in their unsuspecting customers.

As their customer will lap up all this crud and scarcely ever do anything more than whine about it, why shouldn't they? They're running a large scale experiment in how far they can abuse customers and get away with it. They still haven't found the limits.

One of the arguments often deployed for not switching to Linux is that it doesn't have an application comparable to .... and one of those things it doesn't have an application comparable to is Outlook. Remarkably this is seen as a disadvantage on Linux' part.

Microsoft says premature patch could make Windows Recall forget how to work

"However, it appears that those users stand every chance of falling victim to Microsoft's legendary quality control."

What do you mean? They're not victims, they become Microsoft's quality control.

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

Re: Speculation

The weakest point is this is that it wasn't P2P, it was mediated by servers where there was scope for inserting an MITM.

Re: In other news.....

End to end encryption works be having an application that has an encrypted channel between the endpoints but relies on the endpoints being what the messaging parties think they are. If communications pass through a server it might be arranged that instead of a message being passed direct from endpoint A to endpoint B the endpoint that A actually communicates with is a spurious one in the server which pretends to be B when key exchange takes place and is matched with another which pretends to B that it is A. The two spurious endpoints in the server pass the message between them, taking a copy. This is a man-in-the-middle attack.

For a MITM attack to work the communication must go through the server. The alternative is called peer-to-peer whereby the devices communicate directly without an interposed server. The likes of Encrochat are server based which is, presumably, the basis for its being a paid-for service and which allows for a MITM to be inserted, whether by the operators for their own benefit or TPTB.

Now here's what Wikipedia say about Signal:

"By default, Signal's voice and video calls are peer-to-peer."

All Signal does is set up the routing. However it goes on to say:

"If the caller is not in the receiver's address book, the call is routed through a server in order to hide the users' IP addresses."

That does seem to be a weakness if Signal could be leaned on to treat all calls in that way.

Obviously there have to be concerns about whether the encryption processes are as good as they're cracked up to be. OTOH it seems that a lot of people who know more about this than most of us seem to be satisfied.

FTC scolds two data brokers for allegedly selling your location to the meter

There is only one satisfactory way of dealing with these people: fines at a level that constitute an existential threat to the business. OK, two: prolonged incarceration of the directors and/or managers.