* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

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Re: I must be missing something...

Files get passed around. If you rely on setting the program that opens them to something non-default you come up against the problem of relying on everyone to do that correctly every time otherwise munged files start getting circulated. It's a bit like you rely on everyone to use mv or rm -r correctly in root. Of course nobody ever got the latter wrong did they?

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Re: How?

And are also liable to prostate cancer.

Trump administration labels WeChat, TikTok ‘threats’ to national security, bans transactions with both

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Two can play the sanctions game

Does China wait until January or will it move in November?

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Re: Trump plans to use his Death Star in a democratic election

We laugh that we may not weep.

Q: What’s big, red and pulses UV light into the cosmos three times a night? A: Mars

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The Universe is a strange place. Even our little corner of it.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

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Quite right. It's what users do* that rakes in the money that pays IT salaries.

*Well, some of the users. We all know the ones who are counter-productive.

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Re: It sometimes works the other way

A frequent variant of this is trying to communicate with a company whose online "Contact us" is a very limited number of FAQs with no message link, an online chat service which is currently or invariably offline and phone. On phoning before even dropping the customers into an ACD system as limited as the FAQs, they're played a long recording to the effect that they could get in touch via the website.

Mozilla warns more Firefox website breakage to come because devs just aren't checking for SameSite snafus

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Re: Its the old

Sign at Aldergrove: "Please set your watch to 1690".

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Re: Why the problem?

In fact, a good starting point is to regard such sites as broken anyway.

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"The Register asked the UK's Cabinet Office about this but given the time difference with our San Francisco office"

About a decade.

Canon not firing on all cylinders: Fledgling cloud loses people's pics'n'vids, then 'Maze ransomware' hits

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Re: "...offers 10GB of long-term storage space for people's personal photos and videos"

"Because you'd expect their back ups to be more robust than yours."

Expect != know

TikTok to splurge €420m on Ireland data centre to get Euro-data into Europe by 2022

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Keeping out of the hands of any US corporation would be advantageous. In regard to doing business with that tiny remnant known as the Rest of the World being banned in the US must surely be worth while.

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On that basis Facegramter should go first with TT replacing them.

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

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Re: Modern

I'm beginning to think that you must have stopped reading the article before you got to this paragraph:

McBride also stated that Hermes had a better availability record than either Gmail or Exchange Online, with a "single two-hour outage" in recent years. He also said that the cost of Hermes, estimated at around £10 per user per year including staff costs, compared favourably to the cost of the EES licence, which he said was £35.00 per year excluding staff costs (but including additional services).

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Re: Modern

"Microsoft's standard terms for Universities ... mandate data storage in UK datacentres."

With the CLOUD Act that doesn't really make much difference.

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Re: change for sake of change

"the uni's decision sounds reasonable from a long-term fiduciary point of view."

Fiduciary in what respect? It pushes students' email into the arms of various branches of the US govt. via the CLOUD Act.

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Re: "Discarded"

"And in Tech change is expected"

The standards involved in email haven't changed. The technical changes seem to involve not implementing them properly according to the former Cambridge admin. This is not the sort of change to be encouraged.

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"the knowledge and expertise needed to keep it running are in very short supply."

What an admission for a university to make.

Clue's in the name: Samsung's next Galaxy Note line captures scrawls with responsive stylus then punts them over to a PC

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"the noise-cancelling can tell the difference between ambient noise and chat directed at wearers."

Isn't the latter part of the former?

NSA warns that mobile device location services constantly compromise snoops and soldiers

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The way it was done doesn't specifically alert politicians.

China slams President Trump's TikTok banned-or-be-bought plan in the US

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I can't help thinking that the moment he steps down from office there'll be a ton of writs descending on him.

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Re: So you've missed out the big detail.

That's for little people.

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Re: So you've missed out the big detail.

He'll expect that from the US Treasury.

Microsoft forked out $13.7m in bug bounties. The reward program's architect thinks the money could be better spent

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Leaving the detection to external researchers carries the additional risk of being outbid or not getting an exclusive. Once the bug has been shipped knowledge of it becomes valuable.

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Re: It shouldn't affect internal security programs

Splitting the million with AN Other gets round such a restriction and also avoids the risk of handing in their notice but being forestalled by someone who discovered it independently.

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Re: About bug bounties...

ISTR reading that Scott Adams was told about this happening in real life. I doubt that's what was being suggested in the article, rather that testing teams are adequately staffed to test S/W more thoroughly before release.

They say the tooth will set you free... so Brit dentist trade union tells members: 'Bad news – we've been hacked'

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"could cause more pain with potential fines."

This may tingle for a while but it should go numb.

Architect of tech contractor tax fraud scheme jailed for at least five years

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I did contract in the UK prior to retirement. I knew of umbrella companies. I avoided them. I let an accountant do most of the stuff for a fee, CoSec or I did the rest. Increasingly after IR35 came in I managed without agencies as well.

One of the major attractions of freelancing was the degree of control I had. You see the work and costs of running the company as the price of that, I see them as the means.

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Re: Lesson to learn : beware of free

"why go pay somewhere else when here it's free ?"

Because if it seems too good to be true it probably is.

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"The service concerned, Plutus Payroll, was technically the contractors’ employer,"

That should have been a warning. If you're freelance* work through your own company, not someone else's. Engage an accountant to do the sums ifyou wish but ensure the money comes into, and taxes go out of, the company's account where you or the CoSec can control it.

* and not a sole trader

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Re: So much for 'umbrella' services

HMRC don't seem to give 2 shits

FTFY

Doctor, doctor, got some sad news, there's been a bad case of hacking you: UK govt investigates email fail

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Re: Delusional Officialdom

It could be worse. They could have used the phrase "world beating" which is the usual form of hubris.

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Re: If the Tories General Election pledge was to NOT sell of the NHS

"with binding pledges"

The only thing worse that manifesto pledges when coping with reality would be binding manifesto pledges.

Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people

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Re: Short and sweet.

Read what I wrote. "more specifically their vectors". That's people.

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Re: Short and sweet.

"Ok explain the Spanish Flu of 1918"

WWI

Lots of soldiers from all over the world brought together and then dispersed. I thought that was common knowledge.

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Re: Short and sweet.

Except to move novel viruses or, more specifically, their vectors around the planet. It was mass aviation that got us into this mess.

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

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Once enough businesses have been done over badly enough to show up as case studies in business schools it'll get sorted.

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Re: Outsourcing

"This is a problem over and above the abilities (or lack thereof) of the staff."

If the manglement sees moving its data centre to the cloud or the like as a means of saving money on staff who have the ability to secure their infrastructure, wherever taht may be, and can demand commensurate salaries, then the two are intertwined.

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Or someone elsewhere in the business with a company credit card and an app they got somewhere.

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Re: And the corporate world ...

"I was discussing increasing the size of the attack surface, not the abilities (or lack thereof) of the staff."

Actually, you framed it in terms of businesses understanding that. But it's not the business as some legal entity that understands things, it'sthe people who work there. It matters if that ability remains in the company after the PHBs have done their thing,

Co-inventor of the computer mouse, William English, dies

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"So why houses?"

The Wikipedia entry on plurals gives "housen" as a rare/dialectal plural. I think modern "standard" English was cobbled together from multiple dialects which handled plurals (and other things) in different ways so maybe some of these exceptions come about by most words of a class coming from one dialect and the odd word from another.

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"We might all have a drawer or box of old computer mouses, but they can be counted accurately."

Experience says otherwise.

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Re: Revolutionary

The tricky bit's the subtraction.

UK Defence Committee chair muses treating TikTok like Huawei: So eyeball its code then ban it from the country?

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A government MP who's heard of HCSEC! Maybe he should tell his colleagues because he seems to be in a minority of one.

'We stopped ransomware' boasts Blackbaud CEO. And by 'stopped' he means 'got insurance to pay off crooks'

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Re: Capitalism at its best

"there is literally no more possibility of stopping this type of crime"

Actually there is. Make it an offence to pay the ransom with the board liable to imprisonment for up to 10 years each for breach.

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Re: National Trust

I've no doubt they are farfrom happy but where was this? The NT volunteer URL simply redirects to a dashboard run by Blackbaud and volunteers seem to be covered by a privacy policy which ATM seems to be more aspirational than real.

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Re: "don't anticipate any material financial impact" and "do have insurance coverage"

Just pissed off? I'd have thought they should be a little more reactive than that.

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Re: No consent for data sharing in the first place

"The problem here is that that data wasn't secured properly, not that they stored it."

The problem was that they didn't store it. They gave it to somebody else to store, presumably to save money.

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Re: No consent for data sharing in the first place

The GDPR also has something to say about looking after the data and the responsibilities of data processors. The big failure here has been the Privacy Figleaf saying it's OK to ship the data to some overseas processor providing they abide by certain terms some of which cannot be honoured US-based corporations as court has finally ruled on.* And it was OK if you could only proceed against the overseas processor for breaches in their jurisdiction.

What we haven't heard about yet is what Blackbaud's customers are going to do about taking action. Presumably Blackbaud were in breach of contract. I'd have thought their earnings call would have said "We expect to lose contracts and be sued into oblivion."

* But we knew that anyway,didn't we.

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

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Re: As Built

One of Brookes' less quoted dicta was that the documentation should be the first thing started and the last thing finished.

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