* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32780 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Outgoing UK Information Commissioner issues warning about the independence of her office

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Logic failure

"a Brexit dividend for individuals and businesses across the UK"

In this particular respect I think that's OR rather then AND.

In general neither is the more likely outcome.

Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry awarded to boffins studying complex systems, organic catalysts

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It's also a nice endpoint when you're preparing a carbon dating sample for the scintillation counter. Char sample to carbon. Heat with lithium to form lithium carbide. Add water (oh, look, South Belfast water supply from Silent Valley has radon in it) to form acetylene. Clean up the acetylene at low pressure given acetylene's tendency to explode. Convert to benzene.

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"Scientists earlier thought there were only two types of catalysts: metals and enzymes."

I remember we used to use vanadium pentoxide to catalyse 3C2H2 -> C6H6

Nothing says 'We believe in you' like NASA switching two 'nauts off Boeing's Starliner onto SpaceX's Crew Dragon

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Now there are a couple of spare seats I'm sure a couple of the Boeing board or C-suite will want to muscle in. After Branson et al put themselves in the fornt of their queues. RHIP - Rand Has Its Privileges. Surely they're not worried about the H.

.NET Foundation boss apologizes for pull request that sparked community row

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Re: What a shame

"act as if they apologised when they in fact had not"

All too often the apology is for any "inconvenience" or, in particularly egregious instances, "distress" caused.

No! That's really hidden victim blaming. It's just polite wrapping for "sorry you're such a wimp".

What the apology should be for - and explicitly for - is getting it wrong.

Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication

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Re: Telephone numbers are not credentials

I think he said "If you use 2FA whoever's got hold of your phone is efectively you".

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Re: Mandated? No thanks.

One hoop too many is demanding the set up of an account for a one-off purchase or maybe not even a purchase (yes, BBC with iPlayer, this includes you) but demanding a user ID for no good reason at all.

Facebook rendered spineless by buggy audit code that missed catastrophic network config error

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Quis audit auditors - or something like that.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

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Re: why some (but not all) of our Windows 10 machines won’t mount a particular network share

"An ancient network share at Deficiency House only supports the SMB1 protocol."

But does it support non-SMB protocols? I ran into that a few Debian/Devuan generations ago. Then I realised it also supported FTP. KDE's network share mechanism supports that. Maybe Window's does too.

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"Available on the Widest Array of Choice in Devices,"

The apologists' play-book for that is not only already written, it's looking quite dog-eared: "only a small proportion of users....".

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

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That bit was true. For six hours it wasn't.

No return of the JEDI: Supreme Court declines to hear Oracle's challenge to now-dead cloud deal

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Now pick up your toys and put them back in the pram.

UK's £5bn National Cyber Force HQ to be sited in Lancashire beside Defence Secretary's constituency

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Re: Lancashire Tech Step-by-Step

I'm not sure what it was but it was neither of those.

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

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No. Always be prepared to go back for suitable money.

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I take your point but there's an old adage "Don't get mad, get even". And one way of getting even is to get the money.

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Re: I could post my history of 'temporary' bodges .....

Or ruins his hobby.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

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It all seems very vague. Perusing through the linked articles I find it talking about data taken from media. What data? What media? Then it would be processed in the user's device. How? Finally this quote seemed to be their answer to Why?

"The results of this processing might, for example be a profile of the sort of TV programmes someone might like or the sort of theatre they would enjoy."

So it's yet another attempt to double-guess me, rather like $RetailSite trying to sell me a fridge because I just bought a fridge or the garage that started texting me with their new car advertising when I just bought a car from them. It might answer their Why? but it certainly doesn't answer mine.

UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?

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Re: There's a reason why large rockets are launched from out of the way places

Think polar orbits. Of course if Scotland goes Indyref then that's ruled out.

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Re: "Space is worth billions to us"

"but call on him to go further"

... and stay there.

Danish artist pockets museum's cash and calls it art... and other stories

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Re: Great (blank) future

Correction:

not some non-dabbling dilettante

2FA? More like 2F-in-the-way: It seems no one wants me to pay for their services after all

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Re: "Something I know" isn't ....

"sent by means of non-arriving SMS messages"

Just this.

Tried to make a payment this morning. After jumping through the hoops of enter password again and enter two digits from security code again they send a text. Phone which was supposed to be charging wasn't.. Hastily plug it in properly. Request resend. Request it again. Nothing. Eventually 3 texts arrive by which time the payment page has timed out. If I try to go through the whole thing again will it send duplicate payments? Who knows with this wunch of bankers? Thank goodness I still have a cheque book.

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"Authentication proves that you are consenting to this security check."

By the time you've entered the password a second time and entered two digits of the pre-arranged security code a second time the SMS, should it arrive before time out seems a bit superfluous in terms of authenticating that you are consenting to the check.

And let's remember that the bank, should they ring you up, will be totally unable to distinguish themselves from any random phone phisher.

They will also fail to reply to any emails requesting that they confirm whether of not the marketing spam, laden with links, sent in their (noreply) name from some 3rd party professional spammer digital marketing company professional spammer is really theirs or not.

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"Adding 2FA into the mix means the attacker also needs to physically have the 2FA device, or be able to spoof it, as well."

And nobody ever lost a phone or had one stolen. Or had their SIM swapped by a bit of social engineering of their mobile service provider.

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"As in authenticating that you are the person who you identified yourself as."

And some potentially lost, stolen or cloned package of electronics does that?

It's all security theatre.

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"This sort of thing makes me wonder just how maintainable the name-space for usernames is."

Obligatory https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-19

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Re: Smartphone apps

"why do I need to pollute my phone for a one-night stay in a hotel I never intend to use again"

In fact it could be the cause of reversing the order of "never" and "intend".

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Re: Maybe more for On Call but here goes....

That's easily dealt with. Ensure that scanning the sample results in a message telling them that it's only a sample and scan the one on the authentication scheme.

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Two factors: User Id and password.

Count them. Two.

Why don't we call these two factor ID/

Because some numpty at some point decided that the user's email address was a piece of secure, unguessable information that could be safely used as a user ID and would save on the effort of keeping a separate email address. And the lemmings followed. Because most people only have a single email address they use the same user ID everywhere, reducing its authentication value to zero.

So now we have to have an additional, how many hoops can you jump through, "factor" and call it 2 factor authentication.

One-character bug gives away $90m in COMP tokens – recipients can keep 10% or consider themselves doxxed

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"In the Compound forum, developers discussing the incident believe it would be a good idea to commit to rigorous testing and auditing prior to major code changes."

Rigorous testing and auditing! What is the world coming to?

If it's going to rain within the next 90 mins, this very British AI system can warn you

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Re: Don't need AI for this!

I think the Lake District equivalent would be "Summer is the best time of day".

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"weather forecasts can be good or bad in lots of different ways; perhaps one forecast gets precipitation in the right location but at the wrong intensity, or another gets the right mix of intensities but in the wrong places, and so on. "

It sounds like a job for quantum computing.

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Re: Don't need AI for this!

The more general form is "If you can see the $LocalHill then its going to rain, if you can't see the $LocalHill then its raining already"

There's a reason why East Anglia is drier than the rest of the UK.

Beijing explains what China's new data protection law really means – a month after it took effect

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There's a lot in there that other countries could usefully learn from. Even the national security stuff - MoD promotion lists & BCC for example.

'Quantum computer algorithms are linear algebra, probabilities. This is not something that we do a good job of teaching our kids'

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Teach linear algebra and probabilities? Why not include critical thinking as well?

As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

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Re: Toy extensions won't mess with their revenue stream.

In my case it means I won't switch to Chrome.

The browser market has swung one way and another ever since the web was invented. There's no reason why that won't continue.

Samsung is planning to reverse-engineer the human brain on to a chip

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We already have brains. We may not understand how they do it but we have a good understanding of the results it can produce. A much better effort would be to look at what the human brain finds difficult and make products that help with those tasks. But that sounds remarkably like what we've been doing all these years with so much existing software.

Metro Bank techies placed at risk of redundancy, severance terms criticised

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If I had an account there I'd be quite agile about moving it.

If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place

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Re: The complexity and scale of a proper corporate infrastructure

Back in the distant past - 1980s, 1990s - I worked in an environment where we had a small team working on Unix/RDBMS (mine), another on VAX/VMS and another on IBM type stuff all handling different aspects of the business. I'm not sure about the last two but in my area we didn't really differentiate between development and operations; our technical knowledge applied to both operations (which wasn't all that onerous) and development, and user support informed our knowledge of our part of the business which was essential for development. Back then it was just what we did - it didn't need a special name.

Only in the last few years before retirement was I in a mostly Windows shop where operations and development were separate. It made life harder, at least from a development point of view, not least because of the amount of ceremony involved in handing stuff over. Oddly enough the ceremony was suddenly set aside any time we had to look at the operational system to sort out the crap data my client's client (one of the Usual Suspects) had sent because their favoured Indian outsourcer had rotated in another lot of XML-deficient staff on short term visas.

I wonder if combining the two has somehow become special because of the notion that you have to crank out new stuff on a daily or even hourly basis.

Don't touch that dial – the new guy just closed the application that no one is meant to close

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Re: the words "DO NOT CLOSE DOWN THIS APPLICATION"

"bigger and better idiot-proof"

I think there's probably another iron triangle involved here. Certainly "bigger" and "idiot-proof" don't fit together very well.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou admits lying about Iran deal, gets to go home

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The whole affair seems to have been a mix of political dogma and personality issues, global security, national trade issues and US overreach, particularly getting Canada to do its dirty work. No wonder it's eventually fallen apart.

With just over two weeks to go, Microsoft punts Windows 11 to Release Preview

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Re: Joke

"And the eco-crowd is nowhere to be seen."

Migrating from one single issue to another takes time.

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"A problem is not FIXED until the customer has tested it and verified it is fixed"

I don't think Microsoft look on you as a customer. Customers are OEMs who ship Windows installed on computers. They don't have your problem.

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The devil you know

Why fret about updating? By the time your W10-running H/W dies W11 will have reached what used to be known as SP3. Folklore ways that was the marker for considering a new OS to be safe to install. No need to hurry.

Scientists took cues from helicopter seeds to invent tiny microchips that float on wind

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Scattering e-waste over the countryside.

Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts

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A late cousin-in-law was reputed to occasionally go over a roundabout to save time. And, no, that's nothing to do with him being late - he lived into his 90s. At one stage he owned a car I'd have loved to have had a drive in - a Bristol 406. The family were also keen on caravanning (takes all sorts) and wrote to Bristol for advice about fitting a tow bar. The body was aluminium on a chassis that stopped somewhere about the back axle. They wrote back to say if he worked it out could he let them know. As he co-owned an engineering works he did work it out.

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Re: Not a Cossie, but...

Did they even wonder where you might be parking it?

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Re: HP LaserJet 4

LaserJet II? I wouldn't be surprised to find a numberless LaserJet working somewhere. Probably in the ruins of the building that collapsed under its weight.

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Re: I don’t think printers will ever work…

You should look for an old HP laser printer.

CutefishOS: Unix-y development model? Check. macOS aesthetic? Check (if you like that sort of thing)

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Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin

I forgot the progress dialog that jumps randomly between 99%, 2%, 110% and 84%. This isn't and ordinary progress bar, it's an MS progress bar.

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Of course it is . Has been for years.

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