Posts by John H Woods

"depends on us agreeing something with the EU"

That sounds like hard coding business logic into a system if ever I saw it.

Re: Living in a buble

first Xmas Freudian typo?

Re: It's not a problem, it's an opportunity

You could even outsouce some tasks to the commentards

Re: Sale of Goods Act

"Arguably it's limited to it's warranty"

The length of the warranty is largely irrelevant. My 10 quid splashproof Bluetooth speaker also had a warranty for a year. I doubt a SoGA case for a 13th month fao lure would be a success. But if you're shelling out serious wedge for audio equipment, and you treat it nicely you have a reasonable expectation of longevity. I think 5 year is reasonable and 2 probably a minimum (he says, looking at a pair of massive Acoustic Energy speakers he bought a quarter century ago, e.g. which have survived half a dozen house moves, four cats, three dogs and three kids. And also survived collision with a pony ... don't ask)

complete waste of time

I'll be surprised if thats fewer than 99% of us.

Re: Nixon

If only his dad had pulled out early

Re: Symptom of bullshit job

"Are most IT jobs actually bullshit jobs where the performance in the role actually has little impact on the org?"

Yes.

I hope she didn't take all 81 pages in one go...

on a decent laser printer, 4-up is readable: Print in duplex and ditch the title page and you've got exactly 10 sheets of A4 - max 1mm thickness of 80gsm paper.

Re: Quick and dirty interim solution

"It's a terrible idea because you're naively copying around clinical data containing the most sensitive personal information ..."

With respect, data that is already on a simple network share of the type that is most vulnerable to a ransomware infected client encrypting the lot is already stored "... with no heed paid to audit, retention or access control."

Nothing to stop you using an encrypted FS for the private storage. But even if you don't you're hardly increasing your exposure any more than having a secondary backup system.

/boot too small

Just live boot from a distro that understands your FS and re-partition.

USB-C -> iSCSI

USB C -> SATA -> iSCSI

Re: Defeating Draconian laws

"It's been proven that hidden volumes are detectable..."

There are indeed bugs and operational errors that can reveal them. In the absence of these, it's very hard to prove the existence of such a volume unless you have an opportunity to repeatedly image the disk.

Re: Aren't there already enough laws?

I rarely agree with Orlowski, but his articles are usually well worth reading... Journalism should challenge one's own preconceptions. And it's hard to find fault in AO's journalism, even if you think his analysis is wrong and some of his opinions are bonkers.

And whilst I would tend to agree that more laws are usually just a noisy distraction, in this instance the article mentions a specific case that was not covered by an existing law... so I did learn something.

Re: Is this a problem ?

Always use a USB condom

Re: Re. storms

It would be the mutant crocodiles that would worry me!

Re: Skepticism

"The greens have no realistic replacement for it, no matter what they may claim."

We most certainly do have a replacement, a clean power source that will probably see us through to the establishment of space based solar. That replacement is nuclear power and I can assure you that I am not only "Green" who thinks this.

Re: Personally

Sample size requirements are hard to "intuit"

For instance, if 14 people out of a randomly selected sample of 70 are X, and the remaining 80% non-X, you've already got a 95% confidence that the true population frequency of X people is between 12% and 28%, however big the population.

This is why you can get reliable polls even if you ask fewer than 1 in 100,000 people. The randomness of the sample is vastly more important than its size.

The main requirement for being a silk...

...is being able to persuade a group of laymen of the truth or falsehood of some proposition, determined respectively entirely by who is paying you ... whilst remaining utterly regardless of the truth of the matter.

fortunately...

... My wife has very good eyesight.

"Isn't it a fundamental principle of encryption..."

Indeed: Kerckhoffs' principle

Re: So yeat another case of "Don't re-check system generated data that's been read back in."

The content of a URL is data! Are you a PHB?

Re: Straddling bus

A shoddy prototype was constructed, but the TEB was a scam.

Re: Dear Lord!

The only reason they need to ask a court is because it's the only body whose answer is authoritative. Obviousness is an irrelevance.

"He's lucky it didn't go off in his pocket then..."

IS2R some old British Army joke about a serviceman keeping a souvenir weapon he had acquired on manoeuvres which, due to his lack of familiarity with the model, went off in his pocket neatly severing the top of his manhood.

He was drummed out of the army, of course, not for keeping the weapon or any subsequent negligence but because "everyone knows you have to be a complete knob to be in the British Army"

Re: Anyone else just use ext4?

Ext4 locally, ZFS on my fileserver.

My fileserver snapshots my few TB or RaidZ3 every minute. If I've set it up right, there's no remote admin login, so you need physical access to delete snapshots.

I cryptolockered the lot from a throwaway VM attached via NFS and it was possible to rapidly recover every single file from snapshots... I didn't even need to restore anything from backup.

ZFS is marvellous... Let's just get the licence issue resolved...

995 vs 1005

Very reasonable argument but I would suggest there are two significant complications.

1st, I don't think even a quite narrow set of skills can be measured on a one dimensional index.

2nd, I don't think even Google has got hiring practices that ensure they never hire people below the 99 percentile.

But the principle problem with his manifesto is context rather than intrinsic quality. The guy is not an anthropologist publishing a paper for a research department.

I could produce some pretty good science to support the Peter Principle and the Denning Kruger Effect but I don't think I'd submit a paper on these if my company asked for my thoughts on how people were selected for promotion!

Re: Detecting Wireshark

A classic way of detecting wireshark or other network snooping is to reserve some IP addresses for that purpose; send a packet to the client from one of them and see if that is followed by a reverse DNS lookup for that IP address. Of course, you can turn off revDNS in Wireshark (anybody else wish they'd kept the old name, Ethereal?) and I should imagine most other network snooping tools but a lot of folk leave it on for convenience.