Posts by Buzzword

Apple tried to warn you, several times

By default, new Macs don't allow you to install unsigned software packages. To fall victim to this malware, you would need to:

(a) download a package from a third party website

(b) disable the unsigned software protection in System Preferences

(c) ignore the warning that "By opening this app, you will be overriding system security which can expose your computer and personal information to malware"

(d) grant it root access.

Perhaps Apple users are lulled into a false sense of security, so they ignore all these warnings.

Coming next: North Korean evil-doers sell car phone chargers which only work if you follow the instructions to disable the car's ABS.

Dangers of moving from outside to inside IR35

"There is a fear that such a move could land them with a retrospective tax bill as HMRC may view that as an admission that they ought to have been paying higher taxes previously."

That's the nub of the problem. In the absence of clear guidance from HMRC, no contractor would want to risk staying with the same client and moving from outside to inside IR35. Consequently, there will be a huge game of musical chairs over the next few months as most contractors try to find new clients. It will be massively disruptive to business.

Plenty of iOS and Android apps already do this

Are GitHub suffering from "not-invented-here" syndrome?

Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

Panel 1: Situation: there are 14 competing GitHub client apps for mobile.

Panel 2: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal app that covers everyone's use cases. Yeah!

Panel 3: Situation: there are 15 competing GitHub client apps for mobile.

Batson is innocent unless found guilty.

As always, right? Or has something changed recently?

Not a Yotaphone

The clever thing about Yotaphone was that the second screen was e-ink, to save battery life. I'm surprised nobody else has copied that idea.

the budget was light on technology announcements

Probably no bad thing. Government technology projects tend to over-promise and under-deliver. Focus on the existing bugs before trying to add new features.

Notepad subjected to Store updates - even on Windows Server?

Spare a thought for us poor Windows Server users, who occasionally want to remote into a server and open a log file or config file in Notepad. There's not a chance in hell that any server will be connected to the Store, for the usual security reasons. What happens when the old Notepad is removed and replaced with a shortcut which automatically tries to launch Store?

What about the good users of TOR? Are there any?

If you're an NSA contractor with a trove of classified documents to leak, should you still use TOR?

Why would you do this?!

In a world drowning in high-definition, high quality, free porn, why would anybody resort to planting a hidden camera in a colleague's desk to get a few grainy and blurry snapshots?

This only helps with the easy stuff

Writing new code is easy. Reading, understanding, and making non-breaking changes to code, is hard.

Parents

So what apps are you allowed to use to track your kids? Asking for a friend...

€20,000 in earnings?

Crime doesn't pay like it used to.

Password ZIP was built-in to Windows XP

Old habits die hard. Windows XP had built-in functionality to add a password to a zip file; and the recipient was automatically prompted to enter the password to unzip. Teams who regularly exchange data built workflows around this functionality, so unsurprisingly it hasn't gone away.

The only workable solution is to demand that Microsoft add native AES zip encryption and decryption in Windows 10. If it's not available out-of-the-box, people simply won't use it.

App Store should go the same way

What about the app store? Instead of downloading an app once, users could pay a subscription to use the app; to get updates; to access the app's servers; etc. App developers will love it; users may be less happy.

Ceremony over results

Alas, Fowler's message often gets corrupted when implemented. For example, we spend a lot of time writing unit tests which raise the Code Coverage metric and make managers happy, but which don't really test anything useful. The least reliable parts of any system are the pieces of string connecting the black boxes, not the black boxes themselves. At scrum planning sessions, we meticulously estimate every task down to the nearest hour; only to find those estimates blown out of the water within minutes of starting the task. Similarly, at scrum review we obsess over why the burndown chart has a long plateau followed by a steep drop on the last day; but since fixing that would require re-structuring the team, it never improves.

I'm a big fan of Fowler's work; I'd just like to see better implementation guidance.

Basic security

Why on earth are there over a million public-facing open RDP ports in the first place?

€1.4bn in a town of 20,000

Presumably the bulk of that cash is spent on procuring kit elsewhere. It would be interesting to know how much is actually spent locally.

She? How do you know?

If the author is pseudonymous, how do you know that they are female?

£6bn of assets, £1.5bn of overheads

£1.5bn over 18 years is £83m/year. That means the annual outsourced IT cost alone is 1.3% of assets. NEST currently levy an Annual Management Charge of just 0.3%, so it's not clear where the rest of the money is coming from. Personally I'd steer clear of a financial services provider whose numbers don't add up.

Why not give users the choice?

Let users choose. The paranoid can disable hyperthreading entirely; while the rest of us can enjoy faster processors at the cost of an exploit which is virtually impossible to reproduce outside of controlled lab conditions.

10-bit smoothing tonal gradation (8 bits in hardware, 2 in software)

So, an ordinary 8-bit display then?

Magellan

Sadly not the antediluvian search engine.

Jaw-droppingly inappropriate, yet perfectly legal

If only Meg Hillier was some kind of law-maker, perhaps even a member of the ruling party, and thus able to propose a new law making this sort of thing illegal.

Mass hysteria, sightings of the Virgin Mary, the Emperor's New Clothes, false positives

How much evidence of a drone do we actually have? The police reported fifty sightings, but that's from people primed to believe that any dot in the sky must be the drone. There's a video on Twitter which the videographer claims shows the drone, but is actually just the police helicopter looking for the drone. The handful of photos and videos show a tiny dot, which could easily be a bird. As for the people who claim to have seen the drone in the hours of darkness (or even dark + rainy) - that's highly improbable. The drone itself has supernatural powers: unheard-of battery life, ability to fly in the rain, larger than anything commercial yet small enough to disappear untraced.

I believe this whole thing is a false positive. We've got the usual fear of new technology, jet-lagged passengers not thinking straight, and everyone primed to believe it's a drone. Nobody in officialdom is brave enough to point out that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes, because the risk of being wrong is too great. There is simply no physical evidence that there was ever a drone.

Capacity, not speed

5G offers higher capacity. With wireless networks reaching saturation point, especially in big cities, higher capacity means actually being able to use your phone when you need it. Next time there's a train delay and you're stuck in the crowds at Clapham Junction, try using your phone to pass the time. Your phone will display five bars of 4G but you'll struggle to download even a text file, let alone modern web apps with their multi-megabyte payloads.

The capacity-not-speed argument also applies to the High Speed 2 railway line. The same arguments are made (people aren't willing to pay more for faster trains); but ultimately it's about increasing capacity, not about going faster.

Ericsson software apparently to blame

According to the FT and the Telegraph.

8GB of RAM seems to be the UK limit

The 16GB variant is hard to find. (There's one on Amazon from a third-party seller, but it's very expensive and appears to have a US keyboard, so probably a grey import.) Alas, 8GB of RAM precludes any serious work.