* Posts by david 12

2344 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Use the local language...

You don't want to have the laity reading and understanding computer science. That would be like writing programs in BASIC instead of c. What happens to the beauty and strength of the liturgy? Next thing you know, ordinary people will be forming their own opinions about computer security!

david 12 Silver badge

One of the reason why the 'Quakers' were unpopular with the English establishment is that they were implicitly and explicitly anti-authoritarian: they used the singular/informal 'thou' instead of the plural/formal 'you' even when talking with or about the aristocracy, refusing to recognize the 'royal we' used by their social superiors.

The Holy Trinity is, of course, 'thou', "How great thou art.." because the holy trinity is of course, just One.

david 12 Silver badge

The universal experience of 50 years of Eastern Block Orwellian mind-control was that it didn't work. "Newspeak", the attempt to prevent unwanted thought by sanitizing the language to exclude politically incorrect concepts, just taught people that politically correct language was lies.

Chinese developers rebel against long working hours with crowdsourced tell-all on employers

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Perhaps we could have a version of this for the west as well

"Not to mention junior doctors..."

Fortunately, critical care is provided by nurses, who are supposed to have regulated hours for just this reason. When you have to worry is when you hear about nurses working double shifts. Because stuff like drugs, meals, and patient checks are supposed to be tightly scheduled, and stuff happens if the nurse is tired.

Doctors are more self-scheduling, and can take 10 filling out paperwork, coming back to the critical decisions when they feel more alert.

(Based on reported research rather than personal experience.)

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

david 12 Silver badge

Re: And again, SNAP

I worked in a very large university building that was positively electrifying for a couple of weeks every five years --- they'd go through the building cleaning the carpets, then make a second pass applying the anti-static coating.

How Windows NTFS finally made it into Linux

david 12 Silver badge

Just because NTFS is in Linux doesn't mean that NTFS in Linux is any good. There are infinite possibilities for how content and meta content is arranged on the disk. I've got NTFS disks in use with existing drivers on the old kernels, and meta information, which under Windows would be placed in blocks, is scattered like stars in the sky, and just as ineffable. Because this meta information, of various types, refers to and is referred to by direct addressing, it is unmovable except by the file system, not under user control

ASUS patches ROG Armoury Crate app after researcher spots all-too-common flaw

david 12 Silver badge

Program Data

c:\ProgramData is the replacement for AllUser AppData. It has become the default installation folder for all kinds of content, exactly because it is unsecured.

Other games put 50GB of content into user \ roaming \ appdata, either because they haven't noticed AllUser, or because they want a different 50GB for every user. Putting 50GB into 'roaming' even I can't explain.

The problem is that for users, stuff that wants admin permission is another irritating popup. Unless they know enough to be scared of admin requests, in which case it's even worse. So developers look for someplace to drop content, and they find places where they /are/ permitted to drop content, and it's OK, because if it wasn't OK, then the OS wouldn't let you do that, right?

Apple tried to patch this security hole in macOS Finder but didn't consider upper and lowercase characters

david 12 Silver badge

File shortcuts are actually a useful feature. That's why the FILE:// protocol was defined.

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Try living in a building...

My house number (in another city) was the number of yards from the reference line through the CBD. We lived 6128: our neighbor was 6147.

Amazon to cover 100%* of college* tuition* for hourly employees* in the US

david 12 Silver badge

Blue badge only

So all the White Badge and Yellow Badge employees still miss out.

Using 'AI-based software like Proctorio and ProctorU' to monitor online exams is a really bad idea, says uni panel

david 12 Silver badge

If the software doesn't work, then dump it. If it costs to much, dump it. If exams don't work, them dump exams. If watching students causes anxiety, then don't watch.

But don't just conflate everything into one big objection to 'surveillance' , ignoring the weaknesses of the individual supporting arguments.

Frankly, the people I worked with who had the biggest objection to exams, and proctoring, and evaluation, were academics who knew that bad exam results demonstrated bad teaching ability, bad pedagogy, and lack of content.

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

david 12 Silver badge

Re: "[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

You would think that, what with COM being specifically designed as a cross-platform inter-processor network protocol, you could arrange to communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit processes. And you can. But only if you create a 64 bit object to do so.

The problem is that (with a few exceptions) MS had no interest in exposing even their own 32 bit objects as 64 bit objects.

This means that any VBA project which used external objects -- one of the prime use cases for VBA -- is automatically broken when run as a 64 bit process.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

david 12 Silver badge

Knew a science/math teacher who had morphed into 'the computer guy' back in the day. Much to his disgust, the main use of PC's in the school was to teach typing.

So the typing teacher walked into the 'business studies' classroom, switched on the first computer and *BANG* it died. OK, that was loud, but she recovered and bravely approached the second computer. *BANG*, it died. That made her even more edgy, but *BANG* and *BANG* This is not a technical person: she's a typing teacher and this was the 1980's. She approached my friend severely shaken and almost in tears.

Unknown student had switched all the computers to 110....

WireGuard VPN gets native port to the Windows kernel

david 12 Silver badge

Easy to set up

IPSEC on Windows used to be /much/ easier to set up, before security concerns led to separation of function and strict walls between kernel and user. Kernel functions have really limited ability to pop up debug information, and user functions have really limited ability to query kernel functions. Which, for a secure channel, was clearly intentional. It will be interesting to see how wireguard survives the translation.

Somebody is destined for somewhere hot, and definitely not Coventry

david 12 Silver badge

Do the right thing

For the rest of is, it was often the case that IT couldn't or wouldn't tell us what was banned. Our salesman was trying to communicate with an acquaintance as a client, and d'd if they could work out why his email had been deleted. By cunning testing of small parts of the message, they worked out that "a large international cigarette company" had decided to block and discard any email containing the magic phrase:

Just do the right thing

In the '80s, satellite comms showed promise – soon it'll be a viable means to punt internet services at anyone anywhere

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Satellite Latency

". I have to wonder if some bright spark decided that San Jose to Corvallis was best relayed via Myanmar."

Least Cost Routing is done automatically -- in the short term, it doesn't require human intervention at all. The only 'bright sparks' involved are those approving the cost of the telecom contract on the buyers side, and those approving the cost of the telecom contracts on the providers side.

You'll want to shut down the Windows Print Spooler service (yes, again): Another privilege escalation bug found

david 12 Silver badge

Re: SYSTEM

The 'print spooler' is the system that manages print jobs for multiple users on multiple computers. It needs to have some kind of super-user permission to do that.

If it was a new service, it would probably have some kind of special default user, but back in the day all the critical parts of server infrastructure were "SYSTEM".

High-end network printers have their own computer, OS, and spooler services: the Windows Print Spooler as was common at the turn of the century, implemented all that stuff on a Windows Server, and a cut-down version was implemented on workstations for printer-sharing.

Post Office awards Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension for the IT system behind wrongful subpostmaster prosecutions

david 12 Silver badge

Re: The Beast of Bolsover

>Hansard does not record Mr Skinner using the work "crooks" at all,

At the option of the house, Hansard does not record things that 'never happened' (were withdrawn with exceptional circumstances). So there is a small open possibility.

More commonly, heckling is not reported unless the the member with the floor responds. So Mr Skinner may have used the word 'crooks' many times, and simply not been reported.

And the Turing Award for best compilation goes to... Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho

david 12 Silver badge

Re: '67 ?

The big step that opened up computers to a vast array of people who began to write software that now powers just about everything we equate with the modern world was Dartmouth BASIC. At the time there was a split between the SF idea of computers as intelligent thinking machines, and the real world idea of computers that they were big calculators, tabulators, or accounting machines. The world of computing laughed at Kemény for wanting to put computers into the hands of humanities and social science undergraduates: they laughed at Kurtz for thinking it was possible.

The BASIC compiler that Dartmouth built was complex, fragile and engineered by a brilliant programmer. In the 80's, any undergraduate with an interest could write a BASIC interpreter. The difference was "Principles of Compiler Design".

EST 7:09PM

Huawei's first desktop PC to be sold outside China is a sleek business machine with optional 'smart' keyboard

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Serial port-Yay!

The standard internal bus is PCI. There will be a PCI - RS232 bridge, not PCI - USB - RS232 bridges.

david 12 Silver badge

Serial Ports are for Point Of Sale retail.

Serial ports are used for legacy cash drawers and legacy bar-code scanners, so they are still common on POS computers. Dell models in this form factor have a serial port too.

GPS jamming around Cyprus gives our air traffic controllers a headache, says Eurocontrol

david 12 Silver badge

GPS was always a civilian system

President Reagan authorized the development of GPS - a civilian navigation system for civilian airliners - in 1983, after the Soviet Union shot down an airliner. The first satellite was launched 6 years later in 1989, and the constellation was complete in 1994

It didn't take 10 years just to notice that civilians were permitted to use an existing military system: it took 10 years to develop a new civilian navigation system suitable for airliners.

Electronics and Communications weren't at some kind of dead stop during the 1980's: like computers and networking, satellite technology completely changed in the 1980's. The GPS satellite launched in 1983 was not 1970's military technology: it was new technology, developed for civilian airliners in response to the loss of a civilian airliner that went off course and was shot down.

9:30AM AEDT

The military was able to piggyback on the back of the new civilian navigation technology, as they always have: the Allies collected civilian maps and photographs of Europe prior to D-Day landings in Europe, and removed road signs in Britain for the same reason. And the development did happen inside the "Military Industrial Complex": this is the well known method of pork-barreling and industry protection in the USA, but that's much to the disgust of the military, which would like to appropriate all of the 'military' budget for military purposes, rather than having it used for things like developing a civilian navigation system for civilian airliners.

Drag Autonomy founder's 'fraudulent guns' and 'grasping claws' to the US for a criminal trial, thunders barrister

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Typo fixed

Lynch is alleged by the US government to have CLAIMED TO HAVE followed standard American business practices. Which is part of what made his behavior illegal in the USA. The American courts have ACCEPTED THAT Lynch represented that his statements were following American standard business practice, and that HP accepted that representation.

I'm not barracking for either side: I don't know if it was reasonable for HP to expect a British firm to respect American law, or if the American courts got it right, or what British courts will make of the same allegations.

If the Americans were alleging that Lynch had /actually/ followed standard American business practice, he wouldn't be in court.

10:51AM AEDT

david 12 Silver badge

Re: The bounder the cad

>HP a hick from the country first time in the big city <

In amongst all the he-said / she-said, there's a little bit of interesting international finance: the American laws are different than the English laws.

The Americans (claim to have) depended on the representations made by the English. In the USA, those false representations were illegal, which is why they didn't need an audit report and why there has been an American conviction. In London, those representations were only illegal if they contained specific false facts: just making up BS is only business as usual.

Two countries divided by a common finance system.

8:18pm AEDT

Facebook and Google’s Australian pay-for-news nightmare finds a European admirer

david 12 Silver badge

Re: All has changed

> just forward the searches to Google, then strip out all the adverts in the results and replace them with THEIR own adverts. <

This is what HTTPS is designed to prevent.

Oddly enough, HTTPS was backed and promoted by Google, and most of the worlds web browsers are now based on technology developed and funded by Google.

7:14 AM AEDT

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

david 12 Silver badge

Re: So which search engine did you use? an imaginary one?

News flash:

GOOGLE RESULTS ARE PERSONALIZED.

The results you get back depend on your history, location, and the google secret sauce.

9:40AM AEDT

Attack of the cryptidiots: One wants Bitcoin-flush hard drive he threw out in 2013 back, the other lost USB stick password

david 12 Silver badge

A landfill site full of rotting garbage is a low-oxygen environment. Soft Iron doesn't rust in landfill. Neither does Copper/Chrome/Stainless Steel.

And since I've found it impossible to adequately compress garbage or recycling by any means, and, as I've read, you can walk away after getting compressed in a garbage compactor truck that you've been tipped into (while sheltering in a skip), I'm not inclined to think that a disk drive is likely to be damaged by that method either.

#12:25 15 Jan 2021# UTC

Passwords begone: GitHub will ban them next year for authenticating Git operations

david 12 Silver badge

...mission of replacing password authentication...

...an odyssey that began in 1995 with the introduction of "Microsoft Passport.", marked also by the "Internet Tidal Wave" memorandum from B Gates.

Passport got massive pushback at the time, because of reluctance to hand authentication to a company like (now) Google or Facebook ....

#2:27 18-12-20#

China praises Pakistan SatNav collaboration

david 12 Silver badge

"Armed Conflict"

You don't have to be imagining "armed conflict" to have a reason for developing your own technology or to have a reason for pork-barreling your own industry. Sometimes it's useful to pretend that "armed conflict" is your reason for supporting what President Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex", or sometimes, as with maps and GPS, it's just something that everyday civilians find useful. As with the Chinese, Indian, Russian, and European "positioning systems"

The English maps were traditionally provided by "Ordinance Survey" -- a branch of the military. But American maps were traditionally provided by "Geological Survey" -- a branch of the mining industry. Governments support GPS services for all kinds of reasons, and "Armed Conflict" is by no means the main reason for subsidizing your own development in China, Russia, or India.

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Enigma code broken in the 1930s, not 1942

Yes, an Enigma code was broken in the 30's. It wasn't the machine, process, or code used in the 40's, but it was the starting point for the later work.

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Sorry but ...

20 odd years ago, you would have known that, if you really wanted it, you already had this functionality. It was very effectively hidden in office 95 and 97, but the ability to write functions using the native function language of Excel, as it existed in 4 and earlier, was still there.

Python swallows Java to become second-most popular programming language... according to this index

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Sin tax

The only language I've used without syntactic white space was FORTRAN, in which GOTO100 and GO TO 100 were the same statement, X=SUM SX was the same as X=SUMSX, and accidentally hitting the . key instead of the comma key gave you a legal statement meaning DO50I = 10.1 instead of DO 50 I = 10, 100

I'm not aware of any person who's actually /used/ a language without syntactic white space who wants to go back.

The evolution of C#: Lead designer describes modernization journey, breaks it down about getting func-y

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Breaking a lot: we can't do that

""People… have code they've committed and if you take anything out or change what it means, you're breaking a lot: we can't do that," "

Which it's been right from the start, when they wanted people to move seamlessly from c and c++ to c#.

And which is why VB.Net was such a fail. Because it was designed to be like c/c++/java, which largely changed what it meant.

Your web browser running remotely in Cloudflare's cloud. That's it. That's the story

david 12 Silver badge

'Sends HTML5...

Wait, somebody's developed a HTTPS proxy server that converts Web 2.0 to HTML?

Now lets just match that with a small light-weight application that displays HTML .... we'll call it a 'web browser'.

Brit webcam criminal snared in FBI LuminosityLink creepware sting spared prison

david 12 Silver badge

Re: How on earth wasnt this toe rag jailed?

Stopped in 2016, caught in 2018 (on a purchase from 2015), sentenced in 2020.

Might have been different if he hadn't demonstrated changed behavior 2 years before he was caught and 4 years before he was sentenced.

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Using a computer where pen and paper would have sufficed!

a shared user database that doesn't go through a server.

It does go through a server -- that's the problem. There is a network database service provided by matching "workstation" and "server" services which auto-start on most Windows machines, and a database protocol called "SMB" which provides record locking and retrieval. Problems are that (1) SMB on IP is notoriously high latency, buggy, and made worse by authentication and encryption, (2) the native Windows database API dates back to DOS 3.x and was never upgraded to provide record-level security or authentication (WinFS was canceled) and (3) If it worked properly, why would people pay for SQL Server?

The DOS 3.x database API is so limited that not even Access can use it without another layer on top, and even then is fragile due to the lack of record-level ACLs. While the 'server' service and SMB/IP protocol is so heavy weight that the number of recommended users has declined from 32.. to 16 ... to 8 ... to 4 ... to 1.

Meanwhile, the free version of unix that was provided to universities did not include a native OS database system (just one of the reasons why mainframe programmers thought it was 'not a real operating system'), and the whole idea of a native OS database system ('computer says "no") was lost to a new generation, who are convinced that Access is a 'flat file' database because they have no idea what that means.

Former antivirus baron John McAfee collared, faces extradition to America on tax evasion, securities allegations

david 12 Silver badge

Re: $750

This is old tax forms, so the line numbers don't match the current forms.

But 'total credits' includes form 3800, which includes business tax paid.

So the magic of $750 was not that it was total tax. The magic was that every year, after deducting expenses and tax paid, it came to /exactly/ $750. Which suggests that the tax returns were a form of fiction, written to get a particular result.

But that's true of all complex tax returns in the USA. The tax system is such a mess that even the IRS doesn't understand it, and their tax revues are a form of fiction, written to get a particular result.

I'm sorry. I give this one to Trump.

Future airliners will run on hydrogen, vows Airbus as it teases world-plus-dog with concept designs

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Looks good to me

>It’s more likely to go bang than a pool of fuel.<

It doesn't though.

Propane is known to be dangerous, and sometimes goes 'bang', but hydrogen doesn't. Even the Hindenberg didn't go 'bang'.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

david 12 Silver badge

Council Policy

This was the same council that took me to court for parking legally in front of my house.

I didn't blame the parking inspector -- it was not a clear situation, and it's not the parking inspectors job to decide who to let off.

But when I wound up in court, I found that not only had they not read my protest, they hadn't even briefed the barrister. I had to explain to the magistrate, and to their barrister, where I had been parked.

Northrop Grumman wins $13.3bn contract with US Air Force to kick off Minuteman III ICBM replacement

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Opposite wealth

This is just the engineering development budget. Actually building missiles is a separate allocation.

also... Boeing could bid for a control program sub-contract :) Recently demonstrated incompetence may damage their chances in that area too.

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

david 12 Silver badge

Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You

It was the 2110 that made the Nokia ringtone ubiquitous; although the number sold was much smaller, the total market at the time was tiny, and the sound of the Nokia ringtone was the sound of a mobile phone.

In the frame with the Great MS Bakeoff: Microsoft sets out plans for Windows windows

david 12 Silver badge

Re: The revenge of OS/2?

MS killed OS/2 because it was owned by IBM and written in Assembler.

QUIC, dig in: Microsoft open-sources MsQuic, its implementation of Google-spawned TCP-killer QUIC

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Ok, I have to ask...

SMB was always a dog when running on TCP. That's the internal dog food environment.

If you can't understand how Instagram 'influencers' make millions, good luck with these virtual ones doing even better

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Every time I think people can't get any crazier,

>What, people in the 19th century pushed newspapers into your face every 10 seconds?<

Well they certainly did in the 20th Century. 3 kids on every corner, 4 corners on every intersection, leading down to the main railway station, where more waited. And, as I think about it, I can still hear the voices, crying the name of the evening paper.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

david 12 Silver badge

Re: User Error

Nobody wants this feature of Excel.

Lots of people like Excel, and lots of people use Excel, but nobody likes this feature of Excel. There are a large number of people who haven't been bitten by this feature of Excel recently, who don't care today, and there are people who have been bitten, who do care, and there are people who don't use Excel, but there are no Excel users who want this feature of Excel.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: User Error

BSP -- British Standard Pipe -- is a metric thread. The metric thread for pipes.

I can only imagine the negotiations and horse trading which led to that result (standards creation is notoriously corrupt), but out of all the thought that went into creating the metric standards, BSP was chosen without modification.

For nuts/bolts, a modern thread profile was wanted, which was why all the existing British bolt threads were abandoned, and Britain had the choice of going with Europe, or continuing with the new standard it had just developed in co-operation with the USA. Britain abandoned the new trans-Atlantic standard, and adopted the European standard instead. And Europe chose BSP for pipe threads. Was that the best choice for Europe? I have no idea what their pipe threads looked like before metric threads. But after metric threads, I know what their pipe thread standard is: BSP.

Privacy Shield binned after EU court rules transatlantic data protection arrangements 'inadequate'

david 12 Silver badge

How is this different to EU/UK practice?

As I understand it, "the processing of personal data by competent authorities for law enforcement purposes is outside the GDPR’s scope (e.g. the Police investigating a crime)", and National Security is exempt. In the UK and in Ireland and in the EU. How does FBI and NSA access differ from this?

51 years after humans first set foot on the Moon, a deepfaked Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Alternative fakery

>We know they never went to the moon anyway<

As shown in the 2002 French documentary "Dark Side of the Moon" (William Karel)

It is very good if you are the kind of person who likes watching history documentaries or are interested in the space program.

And it demonstrates that you don't need Deep Fakes to do deep fakes. Watch the film before reading the Wikipedia article :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_(2002_film)

If you can read this, your Windows 10 2004 PC really is connected to the internet no matter what the OS claims

david 12 Silver badge

Re: I see this BS because of minimal trust for Microsoft domains

>The correct way to detect no connections, should be continuous failure to connect to any internet address, during a set time period, a good one can be the time server, if set to an internet address. <

This is the way Win10 detects internet connection failure, and up until now has been the reason for this bug. You get a routing failure, and Windows labels that as an Internet connection failure, and that affects routing....

It's been a problem with Win10 for some time, -- IPV4 standards/RFCs never really caught up with multi-homed systems and multi-homed systems are subject to corner-case routing failures. It should be fixed by total system conversion to IPV6 protocols (but of course will probably be broken by the transition).

And no, "IPV6" doesn't just mean IPV4 with more bits.

No Wiggle room: Two weeks after angry bike shop customers report mystery orders on their accounts, firm confirms payment cards delinked

david 12 Silver badge

Re: There is no breach

The fee isn't outrageous for a credit account, (although they look to be making money on their business accounts) and Revolut has an Australian presence. I'll look further.