* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32754 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Can we stop megacorps from using and abusing our data? That ship has sailed, ex-NSA lawyer argues in new book

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"at least a regime to say there are boundaries on what governments should do."

This from an ex NSA lawyer who noted how good Apple are at presenting themselves as the good guys.

French services outfit Atos told to pay $855m in trade secret pinching case

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"Atos bought Syntel despite knowing it was embroiled in a dispute"

There's their problem.

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

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Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

I wouldn't worry about the Amazon logs. Any attempt to exploit those will simply hide what you were looking for in a mass of irrelevance.

Trump's official campaign website vandalized by hackers who 'had enough of the President's fake news'

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A bit like "hashtags"?

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Re: A sign of the times

"Britain for Britons!"

You mean the Welsh, Cornish & Picts?

Experian vows to drag UK's Information Commissioner's Office to court after being told off for data-slurping practices

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It's time to turn things around.

Require all large scale brokers of PII to be licensed. Retention of the licence would require a regular audit. Fail audit, lose licence, lose business. That would give them every incentive to remain compliant.

Yes, they can appeal against the failure of audit but the licence is suspended until the appeal is allowed. Comply or appeal? Not a tricky choice.

The terms of the licence should include a regular statement to every data subject of each item of information held giving the subject right to challenge as to consent if required (the ICO report mentions some is public domain) and accuracy with the onus on the broker to prove their legitimacy if they refuse to amend or delete. Is it too expensive (as Experian argue)? Then obviously the business isn't financially viable so why are they running it?

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Perhaps the solution is to construct entirely fake data. Any resulting mail shots are handled by the seller of the data. In practice, of course, no mail shots can be sent as the addresses are fake but the profits should be shared with the mail handlers so they don't miss out.

The gullible buy it and are satisfied because they're none the wiser. The public don't get their privacy violated and don't get pissed off with importunate marketers so don't take it out on them by buying elsewhere. Everybody's a winner.

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

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Re: Security by obscurity?

... but refuses to die.

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

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ISTR reading that the application of diplomatic immunity to her was not legally clear as it was her husband who was entitled to it. It needs to be tested in court. Until it is it might be a good idea to suspend pending cases. After all there needs to be, and to be seen to be, some degree of reciprocity.

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Re: Team America: World Police

Which person? Alleged culprit or victim?

Your IT department should behave like a jellyfish, says Gartner

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Analysts did acknowledge that some jellyfish are highly toxic

That's on account of the fact that without any higher facilities it's the only way to defend themselves.

and/or drift around without control over where they are going

So they end up stranded helplessly on the shore.

Linux kernel's Kroah-Hartman: We're not struggling to get new coders, it's code review that's the bottleneck

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Re: "nobody wants to write an operating system"

As opposed to the Windows monoculture being a liability right now?

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Re: Linux and more

Agreed that things such as naming conventions etc should make code as self-documenting as possible. The comment should not need to tell you that this is a check on customer balance but it might need to tell you that this is the company standard code to be used everywhere such a check is needed; online ordering, telephone ordering or whatever.

Other things: copyright terms for open source code, why we initialise to 1 or 0 or index from -2*, why we took this approach rather than some other or the fact that this code deals with stuff covered by regulatory requirements and changes should be discussed with and signed off by the appropriate officer of the company.

* I've used indexing from 400 to 700. They were wavelengths in nm for various data points and Pascal allowed such arbitrary indexes.

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Re: Unfortunately "Torvalds as ringmaster" trope not dead yet.

It just goes to show how indomitable the human will is in the face of facts.

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"The DevOps technologies -- at their heart: easy safe continuous deployment"

What that seems to facilitate is "Oh, there's a problem. We'll fix it in the net a later release."

Personally I preferred getting it right, then releasing it.

Microsoft drives users to the Edge: Internet Explorer to redirect to Chromium-based browser in November

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"Not many corporates have rolled out edge yet"

According to the article this only happens after installing the latest version of edge so if they haven't rolled it out at all it won't apply.

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Re: Let me get this straight

"It's like the problem is your bigotry rather than anything MS have done."

No, the problem is that if you install anything from MS on your computer they think they own it. And quite likely you as well.

UK mapping agency the Ordnance Survey is heading into gaming territory with £6m tender for dev team

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Let's see what I can see on OSM for my local area. Can I find countours? No, no, oh, yes if I select cycle map. What about field boundaries? None here but plenty over there. They seem to be only inside the National Park boundary. Follow that up a bit & suddenly they appear outside the boundary. Head a bit further up and they stop inside the boundary.

One thing the OS has that OSM doesn't: consistency. Sorry, but that's the way it is. If I want good mapping of the UK I'll stick with OS.

NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app is leaving some unable to access government self-isolation grants

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"very grudgingly agreed"

Hopefully the grudge was because they got a flea in their ear for not knowing the rules in the first place.

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There's nothing like a well thought-out scheme and this is nothing like ....

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Re: meh

The traditional phrase is "terminological inexactitude".

Nowadays "world beating" amounts to much the same thing.

IBM: Our AI correctly predicts onset of Alzheimer’s 71% of the time, better than standard clinical tests

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There seems to be an assumption that speech is in regular sentences whether long or short. What would it make of continuous rambling with no such structure? Just diagnose politician"? And no, I'm not necessarily thinking of BoJo.

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IBM has yet to solve the conundrum of IBM.

Palo Alto Networks threatens to sue security startup for comparison review, says it breaks software EULA

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Re: Bad marketing, Palo Alto Networks!!

It also raises the question of how much stuff hostile to the more typical end user might be hidden in there.

Huawei's financials take a beating as President Trump's sanctions come home to roost

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The writ is just waiting for January. It still depends on which January.

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Re: All Important?

"The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows."

True, but the reason is that this is what customers have been trained to expect by the efforts of large, dominant corporations imposing their will on the H/W suppliers. The customers are so well trained thet you hear squeals of horror from some of them any time you suggest the alternatives.

If you suddenly can't print to your HP Printer from your Mac, you're not alone: Code security cert snafu blamed

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I can't help visualising HP's management over the past many years as being like a group of children who've wandered into a control romm full of switches and buttons which they don't understand going "I wonder what happens if we press this".

Alternatively it may be a consequence of the fact that, as most of us know, the reliability of an HP product is proportional to its age so they're trying everything they can to make it difficult to drive the older stuff because that's the only way they'll force us to replace it.

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In this case it's HP at fault.

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

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Re: Streisand Effect

Streisand effect keeps giving! I'd never heard of this and would have taken the list of "music" that could be downloaded as a warning. However as it's in Python the normal installation method applies. Yup, does what it says on the tin. Thanks RIAA.

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Re: Fail!

They were good on specifying physical recording characteristics, pre-emphasis/de-emphasis and the like. It seems to have been all downhill since then.

'This was bigger than GNOME and bigger than just this case.' GNOME Foundation exec director talks patent trolls and much, much more

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A very quick fix would be to make the legal costs for an invalidated patent recoverable from the USPTO. With a good case the defendant would know their costs would be covered, the plaintiffs would be aware that the cases would be fully defended, there would be far fewer patents granted and the USPTO would have a great incentive to go through the back catalogues, checking each one even if it meant handing back fees. In the meantime the USPTO would probably keep popping up with amicus curiae briefs to stop the expense getting out of hand.

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Re: Irrational fear of upgrades?

It's not the effort or even lack thereof. It's the niggling worry of what will be broken when it comes up again.

In my case it was the upgraded release refusing to recognise the camera when I plugged it in. It might have been fine with a thousand other camera models but I only had one and it didn't work. Subsequently I read something that suggested it was just a type in a config file. By that time I was long gone, put off, ultimately, not just by the minor typo that should never have been there (the file was working, don't fix it) but also by the process that allowed it to happen undetected.

For all I know Fedora may be have a far more rigorous release process now but I've no great reason to go there (do they even have a systemd-free version?) so I'm never going to find out.

Ho hum: If you're so artificially intelligent, name this song while my videos go viral

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Whiteleys Garden Centre?

If that's the one I know I wouldn't have expected them to be at the forefront of modern technology. Maybe there are others. Or maybe it's a long time since I've been there.

Today's tech giants won't be as naive as I was in DoJ dealings, says former Microsoft chief Bill Gates

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I thought the rule was "don't buy anything before version 3 and don't even think of touching version 4".

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Re: Still the same liar, then

I think he meant he didn't realise should have been making political contributions.

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

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Re: Stupid Idea

"just hope Mike Lynch wasn't involved in this startup as he has enough on his plate right now."

I'm sure his lawyers will be interested in this. Evidence as to her propensity to mismanage a business into the groung.

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Re: Money For Nothing And Your Flicks For Free

"Or do you mean streaming Cat antics and crazy dancing as in TikTok and other drivel?"

That seems to be what the market wants.

Run Windows on a Chromebook: All the details. Not so fast, home user...

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legacy means "boring and difficult to monetize".

Legacy usually means the stuff that runs the real business and makes the money.

ISS air leakage fixed in time for crew handover, thanks to floating teabag

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Good to hear you stand a chance of getting a decent cuppa on the ISS. It would have been a long way to go if you couldn't. But is it Yorkshire Tea? Earl Grey? Lapsang Souchong?

UK test-and-trace coronavirus data may be handed to police to nab those who aren't self-isolating as required

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Re: Tragedy of the commons

"I was in a supermarket earlier and was stuck six feet away from a dozy old unmasked couple picking up and putting down dozens of ready meals in front of the product I was after. Then an other old dozy unmasked mare shoved her trolley between us and did the same thing. I just left. Most supermarkets have a special hour for NHS workers and old folk when I am barred. I'd like an hour when NHS workers and old folk when are barred."

Rather than the casual ageism (& what do you have against NHS staff) perhaps your ire should go the supermarket for not requiring better behaviour.

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Re: Tragedy of the commons

"This one time my sympathy is with the police."

From what I read the police are far from happy with it although that might vary depending on the CHief Constable force.

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Re: BBC take the opposing position . . .

Actually the original article didn't do that at all: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54586897

I don't know when the official announcement was mad but by the time the Beeb had their article written (they'd have to spend time getting reactions) it went live about half-past 10 on Saturday evening, well in time to get buried under later stuff by Sunday morning.

Note also that the later article is about the App. The original article deals with sharing data from the test and trace system. The difference being that the App doesn't collect personal data so Dido hasn't got anything to share.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

It's a difficult position for T&T given that there is widespread avoidance. However making it a police matter, at least in the first instance, is not the way to go about it, neither is sharing data.

Part of the problem is that T&T for Covid-19 is a centralised operation whilst in the past such operations have been done locally. A local operation could have its own staff going round to check in the first place and only calling on the police if they didn't have the powers to enforce. As it is, the best they can do is to try ringing the contact to see if there's no response in the case of a landline or trying to make some judgement from background sound if it's a mobile.

Another part is that all this depends on a system which determines whether the subject might be infected; I haven;t seen any figures for it but wouldn't be surprised it it were quite low. It's not to be wondered at if members of the public are reluctant to self-isolate on a possibility and even less so if some of them are getting the message several times. Nor is it to be wondered at if the police themselves are unhappy as the Beeb article suggests. A test, trace and test approach would be better.

I suspect there might not be a problem sharing data from border records. It was reported that Burnley had a substantial spike resulting from someone returning from holiday and, instead of self-isolating, going on a pub crawl.

GSM gateways: Parliament obviously cocked up, so let minister issue 'ignore the law' decree, UK.gov barrister urges court

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Welcome to the new post-law world.

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

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Re: A Place for Everything, and Everything in it's Place

That's why your /home partition is on LVM.

Atlassian pulls the plug on server licences, drags customers to the cloud

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"If you've got to migrate anyway, why not migrate to something better?"

Never give the customer a reason to review the market.

If you're feeling down, know that we've just buried a heat sensor in an alien planet. If NASA can get through Mars soil, we can get through 2020

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Seems that Mars is like the Earth. Both follow Sods Law of Ground Investigation. That's the one that ensures e.g. the only lump of wood in your peat core will be in the middle of the period you're interested in.

Come on, Amazon: If you're going to copy open-source code for a new product, at least credit the creator

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Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

Copyright exists automatically. You don't have to do anything.

That's something that's caught out the unwary by posting something on github or wherever without a licence. They think they're making it public domain by doing that. In fact they're making it unusable because there's no legal way to copy it.

A very quick search reveals that Ace Books used a loophole in US copyright law.

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Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

My own correction. There's the option of the licensor including a NOTICE which must be copied if it exists.

Will there be no end to govt attempts to break encryption? Hand over your data or the kiddies get it, threaten Five Eyes spies

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Put your money where your mouth is.

Instead of complaining nobody will do it for you commission someone to provide software to do this. It must, of course, stand up to expert infosec inspection to ensure it actually does keep out miscreants, including ensuring that collected data can't get leaked or misused.

When you've cracked that you can go ahead and get it used.

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