* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

UK.gov must sort out its crap data and legacy IT, warns spending watchdog

Loyal Commenter Silver badge

Re: Marpha and Ryslan

So... you can parse simple, well formed, non idiomatic sentences? That's a bit like saying you've written a C parser.

It's easy if you can tightly define and limit the language used. It's also not natural language processing if it can't handle ambiguity, partial sentences, idioms, context, or change of usage over time (e.g. 'wicked' in 1955 vs 'wicked' in 1995), because it's not natural language that you are parsing.

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Re: Marpha and Ryslan

Parse the following sentence correctly (with or without transliterating random words into Cyrillic):

"I saw a man on a hill with a telescope."

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Re: AI database

My patented AI database is organized for this.

Bullshit.

What you are claiming is that you have cracked natural language processing. Since that's a problem that has been seemingly insoluble for the last 50 years or so, I'm calling you out on it.

Unless, of course, 'you' are a large nation state with extremely large amounts of funds which you have been spaffing on the problem for the last ten years or so, in which case... no, you still haven't cracked it.

Jog on.

Buckminsterfullerene sounds like the next UK Prime Minister but trust us, it's in fact the largest molecule yet found in interstellar space

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Are you certain it wasn't grit?

Open-heart nerdery: Boffins suggest identifying and logging in people using ECGs

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Re: Bring on the stupid

Heartbeat could change subtly over time due to, I don't know, ageing, heart attack, medication changes

Add to that, caffeine, stress, illness, tiredness...

The in and outs of Microsoft's new Windows Terminal

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Re: But...

It's a little while since I used Linux for anything, but I still have nightmares about trying to find the right libraries and tools to get MAKE to run so that I could recompile something-or-other to get it to recognise my (common) graphics card so that the window manager server would run.

I'm sure it's better these days, but of course, the question is how much better?

Linux's advantage is its flexibility, but it sacrifices simplicity. Operating systems are tools, to do a job, and most people prefer their tools to be easy to understand and use, with little to no expert knowledge required. To stretch the analogy, Windows is a pre-assembled multi-tool, but with limited customisability. Linux is a box of parts, which can be combined to make any number of different power tools, with instructions for how to put some of the bits together, where someone could be bothered to write them. They might even be in English.

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

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Re: Don't you love the EU?

and [sic] MEP who knows the inner workings has the worst attendance record and misspends EU funds

FTFY

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Re: There's something I don't get

If the Tories collapse, that will leave only Labour, an even worse choice.

[Citation Required]

Don't get me wrong - most politicians are as bad as each other, but I don't think even the previous Labour government with its authoritarianist data fetishism and ID cards was as bad as the current bunch of bottom-feeders in terms of this sort of thing.

In general, socialist policies tend to be more socially liberal than conservative ones. Corbyn is hated by the press, and some of his thinking does appear to be a bit... "interesting"... however, he's nowhere near as hard-left as the UK press would have you think (a lot of his proposed policies are just standard socialist fare, found in a lot of first world countries, you know, crazy shit like havig vital infrastructure in public not private hands, that sort of thing). His biggest problem is that thing where he promised he'd listen to his party members and then totally ignored them when the overwhelming consensus within the party is to take an anti-brexit stance, to the extent of having motions passed at party conference that get completely forgotten about.

Anyway, if Labour get in, Corbyn won't be leader for long. He and his hard-left cronies will get the boot as soon as he tries to do a lexit.

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Re: There's something I don't get

No - you would go around breaking company rules saying "What are you going to do? Fire me?"

I think the response you would probably get to that would be along the lines of, "Garden leave, with immediate effect, with no pay for your notice period because you have breached the terms of your contract of employment. Good luck signing on."

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Re: This was always May's toy

Dr Robotnik, or Dizzy?

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Re: There's something I don't get

In case you hadn't been paying attention, that "leaving the EU" thing isn't going quite as brilliantly as those cheerleading for it had promised. Might have something to do with nobody agreeing in advance exactly what variation of "leaving the EU" we were going to go for, and then not being able to agree after the public had individually voted for 17 million different versions of it.

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Re: This was always May's toy

Assuming it isn't the man-egg Javid*, whose idea it basically was in the first place.

*It won't be, it'll be mini-Trump

Queue baa, Libra: People will buy what Facebook's selling. They shouldn't, but they will

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Devil

Re: The Day the World Went Away

Now I have an image of Miley Cyrus butchering Cliff Richard in my head.

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

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Re: Workers' rights getting shafted

You're not being cynical enough then. The tories in particular are quite keen on promising to keep worker's rights "equivalent", which sounds like they won't change them, but in reality, means nothing, and in practice means big businesses lobbying them to remove protections via the mechanism of party donations. This is ironic really, since a lot of the EU regulations around employment (such as minimum paid holidays, sick leave, maternity, etc.) have originated at least in part, from the UK.

Smash GandCrab: Free tools released to decrypt files scrambled by notorious ransomware

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If you say to everyone using bitcoin, "hey, there are criminals using bitcoin, you should use something else", the response you will get will be an overwhelming 'meh'. Unless you have some way of forcing people to use something else, you literally have no influence over people's decision to use it.

Bitcoin has a value because the people using it decide that it does, and this is by consensus. You aren't going to be able to influence enough people to switch to something else overnight that they will think, "my investment is better off there instead". It's like trying to catch a freight train from a standing start.

Bitcoin has plenty of things to detract from it; it'll never be useful as an actual currency, and it's pretty crap as an investment, because the value is so unstable. It's only real value is the scarcity that is designed into the system, and the energy cost required to 'mine' it that very loosely ties it to a real value. To me, the only real value is as a curiosity. Others do, however, have significant amoutns of money invested in it, and are going to pay exactly 0 attention to attempts to force a hard fork for law enforcement purposes. The whole point of it is that it is verifiable by the blockchain and operates according to exactly the rules built into it when it was designed, and no others.

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a redesign that addresses the problems you outline

I guess you've not been keeping up with "the bitcoin show".

The amount of consternation involved in making a relatively small change to fix a known issue almost caused a 'hard fork' (where one part of the network becomes incompatible with another, effectively splitting the network in two), for example:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy

What you are proposing would require a major redesign, and then it would require approval and acceptance from more than 50% of the network to implement. You can't just impose a change in a top-down manner, because unless you are >50% of the network, everyone else can, and will, tell you to just fuck off. In practice, it would require much more than 50% to avoid uproar from the remainder (which it wouldn't get). That's the nature of a distributed system with no central control - you can't impose central control on it.

And then, imagine if it did happen, the crims would just move to using another cyrptocurrency instead, you know like Iran deciding to trade in Euros rather than dollars...

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In both cases, people would make damn sure not to accept Bitcoins from tainted wallets.

It's also worth noting that there is no mechanism to accept or reject a transaction from a wallet. It gets entered into the blockchain, cryptographically signed by the owner of he wallet it came from, and it's there. There is no 'accept', so this statement is meaningless.

This cuold be considered a weakness in the design of the whole system, and let's face it, it's not the only one, but there it is.

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The transactions I would ban are the ones where you convert it into real money at exchanges.

I think you're missing the point. Bitcoins are a 'pool', by your rules, any part of that pool that touches another that is tainted becomes tainted. The entire network would likely be 'tainted' within days.

Apart from the simplest case, where the entire balance of a wallet is traceable back to criminal activity, and is then immediately 'cashed out', it is unworkable, because you are effectively saying that there should be a ban on trading all bitcoin for cash. I doubt your rules would have any effect in the countries where these criminals will be 'cashing out' in any case - it would be a clear case of judicial overreach, for example, for US law enforcement to try to stop transactions in Ukraine, or Azerbaijan. Not to mention that there is absolutely nothing whatsoever to stop one person paying another for bitcoin in real money outside of an 'exchange' - the only thing that buys you is the 'trust' that the money is held in escrow until the transaction has cleared the network, which typically is after the processing of several blocks, so takes an hour or more (depending on how many blocks you consider necessary to guarantee a transaction is confirmed).

Lets also not forget that any transaction on the bitcoin network has a 'fee' which goes to whoever 'mines' the next block. That fee would be coming from the ransom money, so would, by your rules, be tainted. You are essentially arguing that the fundamental mechanism for processing transactions on the blockchain should be made illegal, because you can't guarantee the origin of the fees. This might be your intention, but I doubt it, and it isn't realistically going to stop people using bitcoin, so is entirely moot.

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In both cases, people would make damn sure not to accept Bitcoins from tainted wallets.

If you have a bitcoin wallet, and I make a tranfer to it, how do you propose to prevent that? If you are a mamber of a mining pool, because you own some minng hardware, as a large number of people are, how do you prevent a payout from that pool if you don't approve of a payment made into it from someone else? Such an action, by your rules, could "poison" the entire network pretty quickly. Most bitcoins originate from mining pools, rather than individuals.

Your proposal signifies a fundamental misunderstanding of what the bitcoin network is, and how it works. The merits or otherwise of bitcoin aside, you are effectively saying that you would not allow transactions between 99.99+% of the network, which is clearly not workable.

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it should be illegal to trade in bitcoins that have ever passed through the relevant wallet

Whilst the bitcoin ledger is distributed, and therefore a matter of public record, 'bitcoins' as such don't exist as discrete entities, and are theoretically infinitely divisible (although technically the 'atomic' size is currently 0.00000001 BTC). It's not a case of bitcoins moving around, but of balances in wallets going up and down. All 'bitcoins' are perfectly fungible - if a wallet holds a balance, and part of it is paid out to another wallet, you cannot identify which part of it that is - i.e. what origin that part of the balance had previously.

What you suggest is impractical for two important reasons:

1) There is no global regulation, so someone in a country not respecting your rules can cash out their bitcoins.

2) If a wallet has a balance of, say, 1.45874354 BTC, and 0.0004323 BTC of that has come at some point from an "illegal" source, do you then say that any transaction in the future from that wallet is suspect, and, by extension, any transaction from a wallet that has had a transaction from it, etc.? What happens if someone transfers 0.00000001 BTC from a suspect wallet into a mining pool? Are you going to say that suddenly a large fraction of the network is suspect because those wallets receive payments from the pool's wallet?

Your suggestion is a bit like saying that all bank-notes that have ever been involved in the drugs trade should be removed from their current owners and burned. We can start by burning everything you have in your wallet. Let's include the bank cards as well for good measure.

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Re: Why is this still a thing?

Lincs County Council was one, and I'm sure they'll have had AV and security policies in place.

With the swingeing budget cuts inflicted on councils in the last decade, what makes you think they have the budget for anyone to manage AV and security policies?

Cyber-IOU notes. Voucher hell on wheels. However you want to define Facebook's Libra, the most ridiculous part is its privacy promise

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Except Gary Glitter has oversight from law enforcement agencies...

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Re: Just because I noticed it ...

Well, I'd use it, but only in the sense of suckering others into handing it over (perhaps as microtransactions?) and then cashing it out for actual money as soon as possible.

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Re: When has that happened ?

Isn't this a part of what happened in 2007 when a number of financial organisations went down like dominos, or am I misremembering it?

Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g

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If they ever finish building it, and it becomes operational, and the planned deuterium-tritium experiments take place around the planned time (2035), then I'd estimate that maybe someone will start building a production reactor some time in the 2040s, to be operational maybe some time around 2060.

There are a lot of ifs there, and something else might come along to knock it out of the water (such as laser-based fusion). However, it's all research that increases human knowledge, and like any other big scientific endeavour, there will be spin-offs. If it pays off, it will pay off big. It likely won't be in my lifetime either. In 2060, I'll be in my mid eighties if I'm still alive.

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Re: Fusion

ITER isn't even due to start operating for another 6.5 years. It'll be interesting to see how much of the technology used to build it is outdated by the time it fires up. This does, however, bode well for the subsequent demonstrator phase for a commercial fusion power station, if that ever happens.

Atari finally launches its VCS console. Again.

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I remember journalists lining up in their hundreds to say just that about the Switch prior to launch.

Nintendo, unlike the reanimated corpse of Atari, is a large company with plenty of viable business streams outside of the console market. They have recent history in the hardware market, so no doubt have the factories and expertise that goes with it. They have a large advertising budget. They can afford a loss-leader. They have a software division, and alternative income streams from licensing things like Pokémon. They have the Japanese work ethic, not the "vulture capitalist" approach (with apologies to vultures). They know how to innovate, rather than copy. Literally everything about them as a company is the polar opposite of what Atari is today

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Re: How to choose a gadget...

They're not that expensive that many families couldn't afford to enjoy a selection. Then one can shop around for the best value video games

So... Spend hundreds to save a few quid on things that cost in the order of £40 each? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

In the unlikley event that there does turn out to be that one killer game that you have to have and is only available on this platform, how many people have the spare cash to splash on the console and the game together? Games publishers, on the other hand, will be trying to push their products onto as many platforms as possible to maximise the profits. Nobody in their right mind is going to publish that game on only a minority console with next-to-zero market penetration. Your logic just doesn't add up...

There, their, they're, never mined, eh?

Blighty's online pr0n gatekeepers are begging for a regulatory beating, says digital rights org

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Re: "We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online"

Yes as a parent you can teach them the rights and wrongs but most teens with rampaging hormones are going to find porn at some point

And this is entirely the point. Stopping teenagers from seeing something is like a big neon flashing sign saying, "something interesting here." Sensible parenting involves educating your children about porn and explaining to them that it isn't a realistic depiction of sex. That way you don't end up with 15 year-old girls who think there is something wrong with them because they aren't into A2M.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

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Devil

Re: That's why when importing data...

The added advantage of having admin accounts, is that if you screw something up, it's not necessarily traceable back to you...

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Re: Estimating Software Projects

My general rule of thumb was to multiply my estimate by 4 to get a believable number and then multiply by 4 again.

Don't forget to double that number before giving it to the sales droids, so that it ends up the same when they halve it to make themselves look good in front of the client.

Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam

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There's a further subtlety here - they may have known the IP addresses of the people downloading the films, but the only way they could get the names and addresses associated with those IP addresses was to obtain them through law enforcement channels - there is no legitimate way of doing this if the people downloading the videos weren't actually infinging the copyright, so they did so fraudulently, by claiming that their copyright was being infringed when they knew full well that they were the ones distributing the videos for free via a torrent site in the first place.

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Re: Is there a lawyer in the house?

rule 34

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Headmaster

Re: A bridge under which to harvest scum, with a special fishing rod.

The word you are looking for is federal (of, or pertaining to a federation). Feral means something quite different (i.e. "he was maimed by the feral donkey"); unless you were trying to make some sort of point by deliberately misusing the word, in which case, I'm not quite sure what your point is?

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

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Re: In other news...

...especially that bit where you bring the Moon into a geostationary orbit, and the resulting tides destroy every coastal city.

IT pro screwed out of unused vacation pay, bonus by HPE after judge rules: The law is a mess but it's still the law

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Re: Highest incareration rate depends on how you measure

Adding an additional 650,000 inmates to China’s total would place it ahead of the U.S. in terms of total incarcerated population.

This may well be true, it takes China's prison population to around the 2.3M mark, a little above the US at 2.1M

It still leaves China a long way behind the US in per capita prison population, as China's population is more than 4 times that of the US.

These are measured per 100,000 people, and taking China's population as 1.38 billion, this adds 47 to that number (bringing it to 165 per 100,000, still well short of the US at a staggering 655). Note that these figures are the adult prison population per total population. My original figures were a bit off - I think the 2.5% is the adult black incarceration rate. The adult incarceration rate for the population as a whole, (22.6% are under the age of 18) is 846 per 100,000, or 0.846%

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"The land of the free" where worker's rights are practically non-existent, and 2.5% of the adult population are in prison (the highest per capita incarceration rate, and highest prison population of any country where it is measured).

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

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It's a subtle distinction, but one I think that does exist, between re-enactment, and cosplay, and dressing up like (albeit fictional) characters that are based clearly on real people who have had horrible things done to them, and glorifying it. You may, or may not, agree with others about whether this sort of thing is generally acceptable behaviour (it is a morality / ethics issue after all, which are notoriously fuzzy).

However, my point isn't that everyone should be offended by this, it's that name-calling others that don't agree with you to shut them down is just shitty. By using terms like 'SJW' in a perjorative sense, it is shutting down discourse. It is saying, "if you don't agree with me, I won't even listen to your viewpoint, you are wrong," which is about as boorish as you can get.

And just one final point: I can't say I'm particularly outraged by the actions of the sleb in question. To be honest, I'm more saddened by the fact that Margaret Atwood's subtle, thought-provoking and ground-breaking novel has been reduced to the status of "look at me, I'm dressed like someone on that there TV program" by some vacuous self-aggrandising arse-biscuit, who probably isn't even capable of understanding that she is missing the point of the character she is emulating so widely, she may as well be one of those Star-Wars stormtroopers trying to shoot a fleeing Leia Organa in a 20-foot corridor...

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...downvote me all you like, it doesn't change the fact that terms like "delusional", "SJW", "snowflake", "political correctness gone mad", et al are increasingly used in place of an actual argument in order to close down criticism of one's own viewpoint. If that criticism isn't valid, or is an overreaction, your argument should relfect that and be able to stand on its own merits.

Personally, I couldn't care less whether some "slebrity" dresses up as a rape victim and posts it on social media, because there's zero possibility of me seeing it and / or caring about the sleb in question. However, if you don't see how doing so could be considered to be tasteless to, for instance, rape survivors, survivors of modern slavery, or indeed those who managed to escape the Iranian revolution, whose plight Atwood's novel analogues, then you are both stupid and insensitive.

So in short, when someone uses terms like "delusional SJW", I see someone who is lacking empathy for the plight of others, and is responsible, in their own small way, for making this planet a slightly more unpleasant place. And lets face it, it's already got its quota of arseholes, so try not to be one another one.

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Atwood based the events in her novel on things that have all happened at some point somewhere, they aren't all based on things happening in a single place, ar at a single time. Everyone thinks, "it couldn't happen here," right up to the point at which it does. The novel (and the series loosely based on it) are an exploration of those things happening in the context of right-wing Christian fundamentalism, as that was, at the time (and it seems moreso now) the way in which it could happen in the US.

You don't really have to look too hard to find analogues of the Revolutionary Guard in US politics today (or British or European politics for that matter).

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." - John Curran, 1790

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And nothing says "shutting down other people's opinions" when you start labelling people with derogatory terms because they find something tasteless. You say, "delusional SJW", I say "common decency"; something that too many people seem to lack these days.

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Re: Throw a party for influencers at Chernobyl.

You might be surprised at how safe swimming in a spent fuel pond would be, if it weren't for the bullets:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Google: We're not killing ad blockers. Translation: We made them too powerful, we'll cram this genie back in its bottle

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we’ve increased the size of the engineering teams that work on extension abuse by over 300 per cent and the number of reviewers by over 400 per cent.

In other words, the work experience boy on 3 hours a week now does 2 days a week on "extension abuse", and the gibbon that used to work only on Wednesdays now 'reviews' things all week (by flinging its shit at them).

Those are some nice context-free weasel words right there...

US border cops confirm: Maker of America's license-plate, driver recognition tech hacked, camera images swiped

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Re: Subcontractor’s network compromised?

What class of a computer did this subcontractor’s network run on?

I'm going to go with digital.

Russian Jesus gives up food to meditate on how he can improve crypto messenger Telegram

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Re: Sherlock Holmes

...and to top it off, he didn't exist either!

Let's also not forget that Arthur Conan Doyle, his creator, believed the Cottingley Fairies to be real, and was pretty much obsessed with spiritualism, so his judgment may not be as sound as all that, even if couched in the words of a famous fictional detective.

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Flame

vi or emacs

"discuss"

The e-mpire strikes back: Google appeals that $1.7bn EU fine for choking web ad rivals

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Re: I appeal to your better judgement

I could say, "Straw Man, your argument is," and also expect to be understood, especially if saying it in a Yoda voice.

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Headmaster

Re: I appeal to your better judgement

It's an idiom. I know what is meant by it, as do you. The more fully correct version would be something along the lines of "Google is taking the judgment of a fine against them to the court of appeal," but pretty much every English speaker would parse that down to the same meaning.

Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings

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Re: Friend did something similar

At one place where I used to work, I can remember someone being hauled over the coals for receiving a dodgy email of some description. In true Kafka-esque style, TPTB would neither tell the individual involved who had sent it, nor what it contained, but were determined to punish him for it anyway.

Needless to say, that particular company no longer trades.

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Re: Friend did something similar

So I'm assuming here that he sent a sample of the recursive zip file to his email address and the virus scanner picked it up and...

What happens next is the interesting bit. Any competent virus scanner would (hopefully) be able to detect a malformed zip file and not try and parse it for eternity, and then remove it from the email. I'm guessing this is not what happened, which strongly implies that the bit of software designed to explicitly look for malicious code is pretty poor at finding it.

The severity of the result is going to depend on whether this is a single instance 'scanning' all email, or a separate thread for each email, and whether it has been designed with any sensible timeout. On balance, I think I'd probably design such a thing to use a thread pool, and scan each email on an idle thread, queueing them up if the thread limit is exceeded, and putting a sensible timeout on the processing (maybe 60 seconds which should be more than ample for most cases), with the timeout configurable. There may still be some other attack vectors to cause a denial of service, for instance flooding with multiple malformed messages, so perhaps limit the processing to one message per sender simultaneously. That's not going to deal with multiple malicious emails fro multiple senders, but that's the sort of thing that's getting into DoS prevention/mitigation territory and it has its own solutions.