* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32776 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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

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They're going to be puzzled by a lot of the existing industry literature. We'll just have to hope they eventually catch on to the idea behind it.

Missouri governor demands prosecution of reporter for 'decoding HTML source code' and reporting a data breach

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It's tempting to say that in a democracy people get the elected governments they deserve. But it would be a good idea if they could get the governments they need.

German Pirate Party member claims EU plans for a GDPR-compliant Whois v2 will lead to 'doxxing and death lists'

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Re: So which way is it, then?

There's certainly a lot of surrounding verbiage in the PDF linked in the article bringing scope for confusion. However para 62, pp 26 to 27 seems clear enough: "TLD registries and the entities providing domain name registration services for them should make publically available domain name registration data that fall outside the scope of Union data protection rules, such as data that concern legal persons" (My added italics.)

If it's protected by GDPR that protection is honoured. AFAICS it means that if scammylookingsite.de is registered to a company you can look it up and if mypersonalemail.de is registered to an individual you can't. Substitute uk for de and all bets are off, of course.

White House ransomware summit calls for virtual asset crackdown, without mentioning cryptocurrency

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Re: cant hold it

A very good reason not to mention it is that it would have to be defined. Apart from the wrangling over a definition someone would then come up with a tweak to get round the definition.

Keep the terminology as open ended as possible. "Monetary or non-monetary payment systems" might be a good start until someone argues it's not a payment system. "Monetary or non-monetary means of transferring value"? Sometimes manglement-speak has its place.

FTC carpet bombs industry with letters warning that fake reviews will be punished

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Re: does anyone reads them ?

I've recently been reflecting on the methodology of bank reviews. Which and the CMA have a similar approach: ask a number of actual customers. Sounds fine. But if then have questions such as phone support or branches this is very dependant on the respondent having used that in the last 12 months or whatever the interval has. The ones who have used the bank's service and found it lacking end up on Trustpilot (I do wonder about the Trustpilot reviews along the line of "All the branches screwed me up until Carol of the Much Piddling in the Marsh branch sorted it out, She's a star." Does Carol have friends?).

It seems to me both approaches have selection bias problems of one sort or another. What a pity the CMA don't use their clout to demand audited reports on wait times, time for issues to be closed off to the customers' satisfaction, etc. and things the branch staff are empowered to do.

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Re: does anyone reads them ?

All too often the nagging comes complete with links to the review site. These automatically fall foul of my policy never to click on links in unsolicited emails. Instead the offender is apt to receive an email telling them why they've just lost any future business from me.

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"$43,792 per violation"

We're used to seeing money quoted to 5 significant figures when there's been a currency conversion but - in the original denomination? It looks odd, OK, it's even but still odd.

Client-side content scanning is an unworkable, insecure disaster for democracy

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"Moreover, the issue is not just illegal content. In the UK, for example, the Draft Online Safety Bill contemplates a requirement to block legal speech that some authority finds objectionable."

Well, why did anyone wonder why they wanted to take back control?

All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

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Re: A lawn 2.7 Km away

"return a packet to it's country of origin"

Luxury. Amazon packet origination (AFAIK) in the UK scheduled for delivery to an Amazon locker (so absolutely no excuse for not finding it) in the UK. Next heard of in France. Meanwhile it was marked on their system as to be returned so I was sent an address label to return an item I didn't have and a courier arrived, unbidden by me, to collect the parcel I didn't have and wouldn't have wanted to return if I had it.

It should be obvious to their S/W designers that the driver shouldn't be allowed to sign off the delivery at a locker location until all expected packages have a locker number assigned. It also should be obvious that the system shouldn't collapse into a heap on a failure and send an undelivered package to $RANDOM-LOCATION or generate returns. But then I've seen Amazon search results...

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"I must have my own address and directions wrong"

I once had someone in a call centre tell me I must have had the day and month of my wife's DoB wrong. I can only assume he wasn't married.

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Re: Can they find my phone?

This is why you need a land line as well. Just ring the mobile. Now where's the DECT handset...."

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"We know where you live" conceys no information on a note through the door. "We know who you are" is the one to worry about.

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House name, in letters 6" high by the side of the road. It doesn't help when the delivery company insists on the drivers using the company supplied GPS coordinates which are wrong, despite of several attempts to supply the correct ones. The better drivers ring for directions, some just text or dump the package at some other door. We've even had a package left on the bin of the neighbour across the road in clear sight of our own sign.

Devuan debuts version 4.0 – as usual without a hint of the hated systemd

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I've been using it as the Devuan testing version since the underlying Debian version became their stable version. There were a few updates a day or so ago but not very many and none today. These "testing" versions can be everyday usable well before they become officially stable.

Electric car makers ready to jump into battery recycling amid stuttering supply chains

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Re: Shoudl have from the start

But combine this with the autonomous cars that are going to have much higher usage (and miraculously manage to convey all the commuters at the same time) then a two year battery life or shorter might be expected. But I'll expect them when I see them.

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Re: "Less than 5 per cent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled today"

It's time to start mandating standard sizes. Power tool batteries are a good case in point. I now have a battery operated hedge trimmer and paving cleaner which can share batteries and charger because they're from the same manufacturer. We also have a battery operated vacuum cleaner whose battery packs look similar from a distance except for colour. Closer up they're not alike and not interchangeable. I can't help thinking that the EU's standardisation efforts should extend to these packs as well as to phone chargers. It wouldn't help with my existing stuff but it would be good to think that in future I could swap the batteries around and also have a 3rd party supplier.

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Re: Shoudl have from the start

They should have been designing the battery packs for easy recycling from the start.

AlmaLinux Foundation chair says he stepped down to highlight value of community status

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Cough. This is a server distro, not, primarily, a desktop distro. The sort of distro that runs a huge proportion on fhe internet these days. What's more it's a replacement for one that's ceased to be, at least ceased for the purposes its users required.

I grant you that Rocky Linux is also a replacement for Centos. Nevertheless, having one too many is better than having one too few, like, for instance, a Windows print server that's both working and secure.

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"Secure Boot, which requires an EV (Extended Validation) certificate and a shim bootloader signed by Microsoft."

That's something that needs to be in the hands of an independent organisation. Clearly something the competition regulators haven't noticed.

Acer expands its antimicrobial PC offerings – with caveat they may not offer any protection

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Re: But...

What do bacteria do to viruses? Apart from bacteriophages, of course, which are viruses parasitic on bacteria. I'd have thought that a coronavirus would have made a nice snack for a bacterium, a package of amino-acids, nucleotides and a dressing of lipids.

Indian government promises One Portal To Rule Them all in support of colossal infrastructure build

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Somebody looked at gov.ulk and thought "Yup, that looks good.", let's do that?

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

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There are a number of factors, one of which is simply the dramatic reduction in footfall now people are using the web or mobile apps. the branches are no longer capable of fixing allowed to fix the situations created by the mobile/apps and the non-answering telephones (see recent BOFH).

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Re: Lowest Common Denominator

I suppose you have to train users that when it Just Works it's actually doing what it's supposed to.

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"Just use it like you would a public toilet."

You sometimes see notices along the lines of "Please leave this toilet as you would wish to find it."

Does this mean users should debug Microsoft software?

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A genuine IT profession would make zero assumptions about what Microsoft.

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Re: How Did He Get a Human on the Phone?

Something went wrong at the Microsoft end?

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I suggest you replace TQM by ISO9000.

Back in the distant past my then employer took to TQM. It had a mantra of "Get it right first time, every time". All the quality stuff led me to deciding quality is like sex, those who spend all their time talking about it aren't doing it. Anyway after spectacularly failing to get a relocation project off the ground, and without any admission that they hadn't got it right first time any time, the top team decided that ISO9000 and continuous improvement was the way to go. Nobody managed to answer my question of how, if we were getting it right first time every time with TQM, could we have scope to continuously improve.

What ISO 9000 wants is consistency. I quickly discovered that quality was a sliding scale and maintaining your position on it was more important than where that position was. I referred to it as the mediocrity management system.

To see the effect of consistency in practice take a look at Trustpilot reviews for banks. This is, of course, subject to selection bias as they're more likely to be the home for disgruntled reviews rather than praise. What you'll see is a lot of what the reviewer considers to be service failures plus a few where an employee actually owned the problem and dealt with it.

I have an awful suspicion that the banks don't really like these employees - they're providing inconsistent customer service. Being generous, this might be because providing dreadfully bad service is the only way they can be consistent.

(Not being generous I have an even more awful suspicion that by dis-empowering the branch staff they can make branches so bad that there's little push-back from customers when they close a few more.)

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Re: Lowest Common Denominator

Oddly enough when we swap family to Linux they find it Just Works. It's those still using Windows that keep coming for help.

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Staff who have the knowledge to use their brains to sort things out would need higher salaries.

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Re: Lowest Common Denominator

The moral should be if you can't support it properly don't force your customers to use it. This seems to apply to just about every large business, IT, banks, whatever.

And people wonder why some of us prefer OSs that don't impose all this theatre.

Android OS vendor variants transmit data with no opt-out

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Warranty would also be a good idea - providing the manufacturer stands over it. But that really shouldn't need data leeching.

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"phones are supposed to phone home with telemetry data, like modern cars do"

One problem is supposed to excuse another?

EU Commission may extend antitrust probe into Nvidia's $54bn merger with Arm

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Parsing problem

"Developing and licensing electronics technology and owning shares are two different disciplines."

Where do you put the brackets?

Microsoft Patch Tuesday bug harvest festival comes to town

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"reported to Microsoft by the US National Security Agency"

Does that mean they've finished using it and moved onto something else?

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

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Re: I see a lot of

"The best way to charactorise it is as a pub with several billion people in it."

Some of whom are apt to spill out onto the street fighting. The sort of pu bbest avoided.

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Re: Without Facebook...

None of those things need Facebook. And as to businesses that assume I have to have a Facebook account to deal with them...well, I'll forget them as well.

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Re: Without Facebook...

"email is clunky and awkward"

With email I have a local archive of all manner of things - business transactions, private and my long-closed freelancing business, family stuff, family history stuff, local history stuff, everything I've been interested in and felt the need to keep going back for years.

To some extent it is clunky and awkward because even with some rules-based stuff, because no email client I've seen has been designed to do half what an efficient office filing system would do but it's a different league to depending on somebody else's computer to do it for me.

Messages are not always ephemeral.

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Re: Without Facebook...

"Isn't FaceBook?"

I suppose if you have two addicts typing online together it doesn't look like i's async.

OTOH I mentioned a genealogical one-name study in another comment. I remember an occasion where we were both online at the same time after one of us - can't remember which - had just got a break on a line. The conversation went on by email as each of us kept working on it. I said "at the same time" - here it was lunch time, I've no idea what time it was in California where he lives. By the end of my lunch (and probably Bargain Hunt as well!) we'd sorted out the entire line between us.

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Re: Login with FaceBook

A useful learning experience for them.

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Re: Can't?

"You can. All it takes is the willpower."

You're right. I don't have the willpower to set up an account so I can cancel it.

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Re: Rant!

You want access to that information? Get a Facebook account!"...

You want me to get a Facebook account? Get another customer.

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Re: Life goes on...

And there are other MSPs who offer paid for services without the data leaching. They're not expensive - even for a Yorkshireman.

In fact the only gmail address I use is the one that takes incoming mail from a website contacts page and, because it's a group's page, not mine, it needs to be separate from my private MSP account. And good luck to Google monetising whatever they search from that.

Bottom line, there are many options for communicating with others. Selecting one that rewards toxicity, even if your own use isn't toxic, is a matter of choice, maybe even a matter for your conscience.

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Re: Without Facebook...

Our daughter went off for 3 years post-doc in Australia. We regularly spoke on the phone. It's a service that long pre-dates Facebook, WhatsApp and the rest and I fully expect to post-date them as well.

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Re: Without Facebook...

"The first two options don't work because most of my friends don't know each other."

Do they need to?

I have a couple of mailing lists, one is a local history group and the other is a genealogical one name study group. Although to an outsider their interests might appear to overlap, in practice there's little in common other than my own involvement.

Brit MPs blast Baroness Dido Harding's performance as head of NHS Test and Trace

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Re: Share the blame

"more complex than"

Surely that should have been "as complex as"

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Re: Share the blame

The public sector in the form of local government already had a remit for test and trace. Either it's not central government therefore had to be replaced because controlling things is what central government likes to do or, possibly, its very existence was overlooked.

As to app development, Google and Apple had got together (and how often can that be said) to provide the necessary underpinnings but HMG wants a Homegrown Unbeatable BRItish System because that's the nature of the current HMG.

Just more blundering in both cases.

Zero-day hunters seek laws to prevent vendors suing them for helping out and doing their jobs

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Publish the cease and desist letter. Then let the company's customers wonder just what's wrong, how bad it is, and why they're doing this rather than fixing it.

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6. All of the above.

Australian PM and Deputy threaten Facebook and Twitter with defamation liability for users' posts

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Re: You keep using that word...

Free from what?

This is a variation on the "Me freedom to extend my fist stops short of the end of your nose" classic.

If a country has freedom to defame than it lacks freedom from defamation. What you have in reality is not limitless freedom but a choice of incompatible freedoms.

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If the service needs moderation and moderating it at scale is not feasible than the service itself should be considered infeasible.

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