Posts by Lysenko 986 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2015
@Anon
>>After 8 password changes the password left the history so you could >>reuse these.
Yep. Had that too (a Bank). They were so keen on changed passwords they had no change limit. So, when the system insisted people just changed the password 8 times in a row and back to the original.
@Phil
>>So now all your users have password set to either "tobeornottobe" or >>"alaspooryorick" ?
I know one of them set it to:
toughoncrimetoughonthecausesofcrime
;)
I found our support overhead from forgotten passwords went way down after we set the rules as:
1) Case Insensitive
2) No Numbers
3) Punctuation Ignored
4) LONG
Therefore:
isthisadaggeriseebeforeme
Is this a dagger I see before me?
...both work.
All the user needs to remember is the Shakespeare connection. The extra length compensates for the loss of complexity vs. a standard 8 char password with enforced l33+ speak. Most "weak password" checks I encounter will bounce "password" but allow "Password1". Pointless.
Ironic example since it was the ECtHR that kept Qatada banged up for a decade[1] by obstructing UK attempts to deport him.
[1] HMG wanted to deport him. ECtHR said no - for 10 years. When HMG finally got their way he was deported, tried, acquitted and released.
@Graham
I don't doubt it for a moment. However that is still just a return to 1997, not a withdrawal from the convention. Turkey manages to hang in there with bullshit offences like "Insulting Turkishness" still on the books after all.
Yes and no, respectively. The UK has been a party to the ECHR since 1951. The HRA was only enacted in 1998. What the HRA does is incorporate the ECHR into domestic law so that British courts can incorporate ECHR principles and ECtHR precedents in their rulings.
Repealing the HRA simply returns to the position from 1951-1998 whereby anyone contesting something on ECHR grounds has to go directly to the ECtHR rather than being able to argue the matter in a British Court.
If the HRA is repealed by the proposed "Bill of Rights" there may be no change at all. It depends on exactly what the BoR says. It might, for example, preserve the principles of the Convention but clarify that the Supreme Court trumps the ECtHR (apparently Dave & Theresa's biggest peeve).
Assuming you're referring to Abu Hamza al-Masri, the ex-Imam of Finsbury Park Mosque with the metal "hands", he has been banged up since 2004. First by us, then extradited to the USA in 2012 where he is currently enjoying "life without parole" in the Federal prison system.
ECtHR interventions slowed down extradition proceedings a bit, mostly because of dodgy US practices like waterboarding and hyping up how tough "SuperMax" prisons are[*]. The outcome didn't change any.
[*] The New York Bar Association says SuperMax facilities constitute "torture" and are unconstitutional under "Cruel and unusual" so it isn't exactly absurd for the court to consider the point.
The United Nations and United Biscuits are not related besides both being tagged "United".
The Council of Europe (and therefore the ECtHR) has Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia and Turkey as members. That's a giant step beyond the reach of the EU. Pulling out or being suspended would put the UK on the same naughty step as Belarus, or Greece in the early '70's under the military dictatorship. Not going to happen; regardless of Ministerial pandering to Daily Mail readers and UKIPpers.
What do you thing you're playing at posting a decent editorial article?
You (briefly) plugged the consultancy you work for. So briefly I almost missed it. This is completely unacceptable behavior. Not only did you fail to mention DevOps and Storage, you included useful facts and reasoned analysis!! This sort of thing undermines the hard won contempt the profession works so hard to maintain.
I repeat: who are you and what have you done with the buzzword spouting PowerPoint ninja who was supposed to write this?
So, you object to LoJack on the basis that you reserve the right to use your car in a bank robbery and regard removing it to prevent vehicle tracking helping to apprehend you as an excessive imposition?
That's bonkers. There are arguments to be made here, but keeping your criminal career as effort free (you can always install Linux) as possible isn't one of them.
You could easily get banged up on remand for a month and the authorities might think there is evidence on your PC. You can elect to refuse to hand over the password, but if it gets automatically sent to your next of kin after a month you place them in the invidious position of either selling you out or else risking jail to defend your principles/privacy.
If anyone wants to use my kit after I expire they can wipe the drives and reinstall the OS. If that isn't possible with Apple kit then I'll add it to my existing list of reasons why I avoid fruity bling.
Irrelevant. Ministers are representatives of the Executive branch (The Crown) not the Legislative branch (Parliament). A Minister can certify what his department interprets the law to mean. Only the Judicial Branch can issue a ruling regarding what the law actually is.
Governments and Ministers don't make laws[1] or binding interpretations of law. Parliament makes law, Courts interpret law and the Government enforces law. A Ministerial declaration simply means that the department sees no incompatibility and it will instruct its agents (Police) accordingly. Statement of intent, not statement of fact.
Therefore:
>>the intention is not to breach Human Rights
Correct.
>>the Courts should interpret with that in mind
They do. The intent of the Minister is relevant to the degree of culpability, however only the intent of Parliament is relevant to deciding what the law actually is[2]. Ministers are not agents of Parliament.
>>or that the minister is a lying toerag
Or he's just wrong. Losing in court doesn't automatically mean you're criminally culpable of intentionally disregarding the law (which is what lying would amount to).
[1] Secondary legislation always exists under the authority of primary legislation from Parliament.
[2] If it is absolutely clear that Parliament sees an incompatibility and legislates anyway then the conflicting statute can be considered implicitly repealed. That's an anti-pattern however.
The law is contradictory. It isn't a complicated concept.
Your Boss (Parliament) has issued two sets of instructions that cannot both be applied at the same time. You need to go back to your Boss and ask him which one he wants to keep. Both instructions continue to exist until then and you would have a solid justification for obeying either of them.
A breach of the European Convention on Human Rights has no effect on UK law per se - it is an inter-governmental matter.
The provisions of the ECHR were enacted into UK law by the Human Rights Act which derives its authority from Parliament, just like any other law. What the court was ruling on here was two of Parliament's own statutes being in conflict.
Therefore the Crown is potentially in breach of the ECHR because Parliament has enacted incompatible legislation. The incompatibility causes the breach. There is no contradiction.
[*] ECHR is a Council of Europe creation remember. Nothing to do with "European Law" originating from EU Directives.
Essentially, yes. This is the closest a UK Court can get to striking down a law. Given the principle of Parliamentary Supremacy no law can be "illegal" or "unconstitutional". Law is defined as whatever Parliament enacts and the Crown assents to (Liz 2 signs it).
All a Court can do is rule that Parliament has enacted two incompatible things: in this case the Human Rights Act and the cited Terrorism Act. An appeal to the ECHR won't change anything for the plaintiff because ECHR rulings can't change or override UK law either.
An incompatibility ruling notifies Parliament that it has two conflicting statutes on the books. It is up to Parliament to decide which one it wants to amend or repeal to fix that.
Exactly. Many of these devices crop up in embedded systems where everything always runs as "root" because there is no operating system as such. The code running on the chip and anyone with command access can do anything at all. Security is therefore built around doors, air gaps and big men with no necks ... not passwords.
>>existence of a choice of pretty powerful yet lean embeddable engines,
Lua. Designed for precisely this. You can embed it anywhere from a WiFi chip to a mainframe.
>>and the language itself being resource-friendly (after all, it was >>designed to run on a browser at a time when neither browsers nor >>computers had all that much spare grunt).
Running in a browser doesn't limit the scale of the resources you can use, just the type (sandboxing). It is a bit irrelevant to big data analytics though. If you're trying to crunch gigabytes of data then the RAM footprint of the VM isn't a significant concern.
>>That single-thread, asynchronous execution approach may sound like >>bollocks at first, until you realise what a strike of genius it is.
No, it sounds like Win16 co-operative multitasking ... which is exactly what it is. Have a look at all the WSA... calls in the Windows socket API. Writing JS is almost exactly the same as writing for Windows 3.x (in this regard).
>>It is also to be noted that Python is more an application than a >>language--as far as I'm aware
Nope. You can fire up a CLI, but all other "application" aspects (like an IDE) are third party add-ons. The Jython implementation targets the JVM - you wouldn't call Java an "application".
>>there is only one implementation of it?
One reference implementation (Cython) sure. But also Jython, PyPy, micro-Python, IronPython etc.
Depends where the project emphasis is. Server side JS (node etc.) isn't driven by JS or its ecosystem being particularly well suited to server side processing. It is driven by "full stack" concepts that promote the idea that it is a good idea to use the same language on both client and server with the implicit assumption that there actually IS a C/S division and that the client is a web browser.
That doesn't hold for a lot of analytics. Frequently the app crunches data to a PDF, XLS or RDBMS. No web browser so no incentive to use JS besides it possibly being the only skill you've got and in that case R isn't an option either.
For a lot of IoT "full stack" means Embedded C in microcontrollers to C/C++ wireless comms server to Python/Java/Go/Scala/Whatever database storage. JS/node can maybe handle the last part, but then so can C/C++ and that is the non-negotiable layer here. Programming an MSP430 in JS isn't going to happen. Ever.
Python/NumPy fits best (IMO) because you can leverage it to do both the analytics and the "glue" between the comms feed and storage. Use JS/node for glue and you need to bolt in yet another language for analytics ... it causes more "tower of babelism", not less. Angular, React, JQuery etc. aren't in the game, so JS main drivers simply don't apply.
Python has certainly taken a hit in the web application back end arena with the rise of JS centric "Onesies" (SPAs - Single Page Applications) and that will inevitably depress its market share in terms of overall job postings, but in the context under discussion here that is irrelevant.
As someone else posted in respect of R, it is as much about the libraries as the language. In the case of Python that means NumPy. There is nothing in the JS ecosystem that comes remotely close - ECMAScript V6 and node.js aren't going to change that.
If anything is likely (IMO) to make inroads in this area it would be Go, if Google open source some serious math libraries, but even then it would probably be for distributed production quality analytics, not ad hoc short lifetime hackery which Python and R excel (sic) at.
...and Python can do a hell of a lot more than just wrangle numbers. You can, for example, write your IoT wireless comms handling largely in Python. I wouldn't fancy trying that in R.
R isn't really a programmers product, it is meant for people whose tool set would otherwise be SPSS, MATLAB and Excel.
Churches are granted automatic tax exemption whereas all other 501(c)(3) charities have to actively apply for it via Form 990.
What qualifies as a "Church" (etc) is decided by IRS inspectors, based on the appended criteria lifted from the IRS web site. If they decide you don't qualify you end up arguing your case in court - lawyers - not sociologists.
These criteria are not unconstitutional until SCOTUS says they are - and they haven't - yet.
"Churches" Defined
-------------------
Certain characteristics are generally attributed to churches. These attributes of a church have been developed by the IRS and by court decisions. They include:
Distinct legal existence
Recognized creed and form of worship
Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
Formal code of doctrine and discipline
Distinct religious history
Membership not associated with any other church or denomination
Organization of ordained ministers
Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study
Literature of its own
Established places of worship
Regular congregations
Regular religious services
Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young
Schools for the preparation of its members
...and a few years ago a guy who believes stories about digging up golden tablets in New York around 1830 nearly became President of the USA.
The only thing separating preposterous rubbish from established religion is tenacity.
Ummm ...no.
Or at least you won't get very far defending your tax position with the IRS with just a sociologist on your side. A court will rule based on arguments from lawyers who might cite the opinions of sociologists.
Legislatures and Courts decide what is a religion and what is a cult/tax evasion scam when interaction with Government structures is involved (like driving licenses).
They're illustrating their subject matter. Continuous Delivery of articles with trivially small changes per iteration. This ensures they consistently match the quality metrics of that well known journalistic icon: "Phil Space".
This one wasn't actually that bad:
Buzzword quotient: Low
Sales pitch: Low
Cynicism: Refreshingly present
Rock Star Consultant Name Dropping: Virtually non-existent
Zero Credibility Industry Analyst Endorsements: Low
Fitness for Purpose: High. Page successfully filled.
I'm sure usual services of Clouds, Hyperconvergence and Storage will be restored shortly. Personally I'm dying to know what the CEO of EMC had for breakfast last Tuesday.
So, you write your code, run your TDD suite on it, notice the time (release day!), upload the code ... to the plane ... then you get in the pilot seat (DevOps remember) and fly the thing. Good luck with that.
You'll avoid prosecution by the CAA only because you're likely dead because you assumed a suite of highly specific test cases is a substitute for proper field testing.
Hyperbole aside, how does the DevOps/Agile mantra (scarily close to: "Release early, release often") cope with mission critical systems? TDD is not a panacea. Neither is rewriting everything in Haskell and hand waving away the fact that a physical world full of sensors, actuators and wetware has side effects that push your TDD cases into a geometrically expanding number of combinations.
How do you "DevOp" a process that is already test driven and still finds most bugs via three month plus field beta tests? Something like the "fast lane" of the Win10 update system? Or just our old friend: "Beta test in production"?
HAHAHAHAHA !!
You jest of course. The only way someone wouldn't have heard of DevOps around here would be if it were temporarily obscured by a landslide of storage articles.
How about a more useful analysis than this formulaic rehash. Examples:
OCD is equally as common as ADHD. Some people want/need an app to behave *exactly* the same today as it did six months ago. Just faster. How does CD help in such cases?
Many industries have statutory or regulatory requirements. Where does CD fit in when bugs mean deaths and gaol sentences? Closely related: how does CD fit in when user viewpoints are secondary to what HMRC (IRS) and the CAA (FAA) think?
"Continuous Delivery" is a concept very familiar to sewage engineers. Discuss relevant parallels.
"Enter microservices that are designed to replace large monolithic systems with much smaller systems that are very fine-grained (sometimes so small they do one job and one job really well)."
This is ground breaking stuff!
A grab bag of individual utilities that do one thing and do it well, working together to achieve a larger task? You could even design an operating system using this ethos. Why didn't anyone think of this before!?
It is such a pleasure to be in this industry at a time when thinkers like these are innovating so dramatically. Such a change from those crusty old farts in the '70s. They could never imagine such a sublime vision. Not their fault I suppose. They didn't even have JavaScript!
There really isn't. Apple leverages BSD, Red Hat - Linux, Oracle - OpenJDK etc. etc. ad infinitum. Or maybe those aren't $BigCorps because Bill Gates never ran them?
The only ways to work on FOSS code and not automatically provide corvee labour to some evil capitalist corp. are GPLv3 (dubious) or work on something of such obscurity that there is no money to be made on the back of it.
If you contribute to PostgreSQL your work is underpinning EnterpriseDB profits. Anyone contributing to Linux is already working "for" MSFT via Azure. I could go on (endlessly). The difference here is the $BigCorp is the one kicking off the sharing ...unlike any of the above bar Java.
[*] No skin in this game. I write for embedded Linux and there is no way in hell I would embed a JavaScript interpreter in anything. That's what Lua is for.
One of the (very few) areas a bit of ISO9000 can help.
Punt the "File not Found" bug back to dev as a defect report. Demand a written report detailing the nature of the defect, how the defect arose, what procedural changes have been made to avoid a recurrence (written copies of said amended procedures, naturally) and what monitoring strategy will be applied over the next <appropriate timeframe> to verify that the amended procedures worked.
This has much the same effect on trigger happy devs as a cattle prod in the nether regions. Wash, rinse, repeat as required ... in my experience it never is.
I am a Dev incidentally. I never experienced the above because I started with MoD work where a "crash" meant your bug just brought down a plane and Ops carried firearms.
As with most things, it starts with a mindset.
In the case of the "Magic Quadrant" the relevant mindset is, self evidently, "Magical Thinking" facilitating adoption of "Magical Realism" as a C-Suite world view.
The opportunities and efficiencies possible once you realise that both Hogwarts and Star Trek technology can be applied simultaneously are astounding! It is no wonder that the PHBs/MBAs get frustrated with the small minded drones below who cannot grasp this new paradigm.
... or the sub-editors have at least.
The buzzword filter has been largely successful and obfuscating the byline is a sensible (if predicable) touch, but it is still a transparent HPE advertorial.
Setting aside the fact that a lumbering behmoth like HPE is about as credible on matters like these as CAPITA is on customer service, an actual article would have at least made passing reference to the fact that "Agile" frequently results in "continual release" because of frantic fire fighting against bugs that should never have gotten into the wild in the first place.
It would also point out that "DevOps" is a term meaningful only to PHBs because most developers work in small teams and have never had a developer, operations, QA segmentation. The Linux sysadmin being the same guy as the PostgreSQL ER modeler and SQL coder is the normal state of affairs (statistically). Astonishingly they also often manage to do this without buying any specialist tools or management consultancy services!
Siloing these functions is an obscure, outlier practice that has only ever existed in giant bureaucracies, commonly called "enterprises". Most dev and ops people work in companies with less than 1000 employees, just like most people in general.
Deciding to do what the majority have been doing all along by dismantling the last round of PHB/MBA/Gartner inspired nonsense does not mean you have invented something new or even, frankly, interesting. Anyone out there still doing "Extreme Programming"?
Not to mention that most mass market drones use the 2.4GHz band which means they can be "shot down" by a £25 microwave oven after 10 minutes worth of modification (same as WiFi).
You can get a whole world of "line of sight" from the upper floor of a decent sized building and transmit a webcam image back to the controller (MCLOS). SACLOS or inertial guidance is also well within the capability of anyone who knows who AdaFruit are and where Raspberry Pi forums can be found. TERCOM? OpenCV can do facial recognition, let alone pattern match a landmark!
GPS jamming is worthless except against clowns. There are far too many alternate options. The reason MCLOS still exists is precisely because it is "unjammable". As with "strong encryption", there is no way to keep sophisticated technology out of the hands of anyone who wants it. There is probably enough tech in a Shenzhen generic phone to build guidance for a credible cruise missile.
...terrifying!! But radio controlled model aircraft, which have been around since before WW2? Nooooo ... nothing to worry about here:
http://www.tonynijhuisdesigns.co.uk/Lancaster134.htm
...for example. It's only got a 3.4 METER wingspan, weighs in at 12.5 kilos, can carry at least 5kg of payload and (with IC engines) achieve over 60 minutes flight time. Ban it? Sure!! Problem is you'll have to ban WOOD to do that ... and radios ... ANY radio. Welcome to North Korea.
Most of these "drones" are just mass produced, radio controlled model aircraft with hilariously bad performance (ELECTRIC motors?? Seriously?!?). Quadcopters struggle to keep a 500g camera package aloft for 20 minutes, let alone any kind of warhead.
This.
Sometimes it is like being back in 1992 (in another field) listening to: TQM, IIP, ISO9000, ZDP, 6Sigma etc. all over again.
Whenever a buzzword deluge like this surfaces you can guarantee that lurking under a nearby rock will be a member of the Maldives Basketball Association whose technical competence dates to the Middle Bronze Age.
They make NAS (Network Attached Storage) arrays. Essentially the same thing as the Synology or D-Link boxes you might have at home, just "enterprise costclass" and based on proprietary hardware and a tweaked version of BSD Unix (called OnTAP) rather than Linux.
A NAS serves files (yes, it's a fancy name for a "file server") whereas a SAN (Storage Area Network) works at a lower level and serves blocks from it's array of disk drives (yes, it's a fancy name for a networked "RAID Array" ... though often omitting the "inexpensive" dimension).
Storage
Storage
Hyperconvergence (sic)
Clouds
Buzzword infested Guest Advertorial
Safe space for wimmin humour
Storage
Industry Mergers
Docker
Storage
...with an extra side order of, yes ...you guessed it: Storage
...all important stuff (bar the advertorials), but a pretty dull place if you're more interested in chip families, operating systems, compilers, DC operations etc.
Outsourcing is *always* done badly because it is never done to improve quality (as in your example). Outsourcing might work if the contracting team had a mandate to improve performance and remain cost neutral (yes, a directive to NOT SAVE ANY MONEY) but that is slightly less likely to happen than the return of the Galilean carpenter on Friday.
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