Anyone who things an API is not a creative work (in the broadest sense, although I believe "creative work" is a technical term in coyright law) ... has never designed a complicated API.
Posts by Raedwald Bretwalda
47 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2012
Oracle tells Supremes: Fair use? Pah! There's nothing fair about 'Google's copying'
Capita lights One Revenues and Benefits bug bonfire: ALL reports older than 12 months to be ignored
Oracle and Google will fight in court over Java AGAIN and this time it's going to the Supremes
The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row
Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing
Revealed: The 25 most dangerous software bug types – mem corruption, so hot right now
Several of those top problems can be completely avoided by using a better programming language or third party libraries.
The "Improper Input Validation" problem, however, is tougher. Coding proper input validation for non trivial cases (such as string to integer) is tough. There might be only one correct format for an input, but there are many ways it can be incorrect. When I write (TDD) test cases for input validation code, in almost all cases I need considerably more (an order of magnitude more) test cases for the classes (equivalence partitions) of incorrect inputs. Getting junior, less disciplined or rushed developers to put that effort in is not easy.
Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it
Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision
Nvidia, King's College train robot overlords to spot oddities on radiology scans
Who needs malware? IBM says most hackers just PowerShell through boxes now, leaving little in the way of footprints
There's more going on here than simply "using Power Shell". Unix has had a "powerful" shell since forever, yet has less frequent and harder to perform attacks. Are the attackers using Power Shell to perform operations that are easy because of weaknesses in the system? So the message should be "easy to exploit weaknesses" rather than "OMG Power Shell"?
I'm a crime-fighter, says FamilyTreeDNA boss after being caught giving folks' DNA data to FBI
Oof, are you sure? Facing $9bn damages, Google asks Supreme Court to hear Java spat
Re: Far reaching repercussions...
"If APIs and interfaces can be copyrighted"
They can be, and this has always been the case, as the court ruled. But the doctrine of Fair Use allows use of something even if it is copyrighted. If I interpret the situation correctly (IANAL), Fair Use allows use of APIs and interfaces. And, IIRC, Google was found guilty of copying some implementation, which would not be part of the API.
Google settles Right To Be Forgotten case on eve of appeal hearing
It has, apparently, been the law in Britain since 1974
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/53
...where a question seeking information with respect to a person’s previous convictions, offences, conduct or circumstances is put to him or to any other person otherwise than in proceedings before a judicial authority—
(a)the question shall be treated as not relating to spent convictions or to any circumstances ancillary to spent convictions, and the answer thereto may be framed accordingly; and
(b)the person questioned shall not be subjected to any liability or otherwise prejudiced in law by reason of any failure to acknowledge or disclose a spent conviction or any circumstances ancillary to a spent conviction in his answer to the question.
The eulogising of The Mother Of All Demos at 50 is Silicon Valley going goo-goo for gurus again
Six critical systems, four months to Brexit – and no completed testing
SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...
Not so hasty, fellow atheist.
As TFA and the CoC itself says, those rules are taken from The Rule of St Benedict, which was (and stiil is) the Rule followed by Benedictine Monks (and those who would emulate them), not general rules for Christians. Naturally, Monks held themselves to stricter standards than general members of the population.
DEF CON hackers' dossier on US voting machine security is just as grim as feared
if dev == woman then dont_be(asshole): Stack Overflow tries again to be more friendly to non-male non-pasty coders
Re: equal opportunity offender
It has subsequently been suggested THAT is the problem that causes SO to feel "unwelcoming" to "women and POC": because they have received negative statements in the past (due to explicit or implicict misogyny or racism), they are extra sensitive to negative statements.
ID theft in UK hits record high as crooks shift to more vulnerable targets
Software that predicts whether crims will break the law again is no better than you or me
This is system is probably far worse than the reported accuracy measurement. The measurement compared with software with a layperson. The alternative to using the software is not a layperson deciding whether the criminal will reoffend; the alternative would be the judge, when presumably has training and experience in such things, and so should be more accurate than a layperson.
NHS England told to get a grip on patient records after £6.6m blunder
Watchdog slaps NHS for failure to tackle correspondence backlog
America 'will ban carry-on laptops on flights from UK, Europe to US'
Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals
Two first-gen flaws carried over to HTTP/2, warn security bods
Someone (cough, cough VeriSign) just gave ICANN $135m for the rights to .web
UK patients should have greater data slurp opt-out powers – report
"What's wrong with explicit opt-in consent *every* time they want to use your data, saying exactly what the use is?"
The problem with any system that provides patients with a choice about use of their data (opt-in or opt-out) is the danger that the set of data allowed to be used might not be a representative sample of the population, and so any analysis done using the data would be skewed. So, imagine that well-educated middle aged men with bad eyesight and poor social skills are the most likely to be sceptical of allowing data sharing. Your sample will be skewed against people who are well-educated, or are middle-aged, or are men, or have bad eyesight, or have poor social skills.
A system that provides all the data and which is trustworthy is the best system. The tragedy of the care.data farce is that government have behaved badly and so lost trust by trying to run it as a money making opportunity, rather than a public health care improvement or research opportunity.
Heartless hackers break into Florida cancer clinic network – 2.2 million records exposed
no evidence that the leaked data has been misused
"there’s no evidence that the leaked data has been misused"
What reason would anyone have to break in to access such data other than to misuse it? Given that knowing much of that data would constitute misuse . Or are there guerilla free oncologists out there trying treat patients locked into 21st Century Healthcare's methods?
European Patent Office still in nosedive as union denies reaching deal
UK says wider National Insurance number use no longer a no-no
PRIMARY KEY (nino)
Although the Government tries to ensure that National Insurance Numbers are unique, their uniqueness can not be guaranteed. And you can not guarantee that an input National Insurance Number is free from typos when adding a record for a customer/client. So any database that tries to use a National Insurance Number as a primary key is doomed to fail, eventually.
If a database can not use a National Insurance Number as a primary key, the justification for recording the National Insurance Number at all disappears, unless the database must be used for tax or benefits payments.
Enraged Brits demand Donald Trump UK ban
"there is no indication the billionaire überpatriot intends to visit our shores."
Yes there is. He wants to become President of the USA. And the President of the USA visits the UK quite often:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_visits_to_the_United_Kingdom
Obama has visited 4 times, Bush Jnr 5 times, Clinton 7 times, Bush Snr. 3 times.
Sysadmin's former boss claims five years FREE support or off to court
Re: Earth to world:
"Don't sign a contract..."
IANAL, and I guess it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but a contract requires an exchange: if you do some work, they have to pay you. And if the contract itself does not specify that you will be paid, it is an unfair contract term. You can just ignore it. Let them waste time and money on consulting a lawyer who will set them straight.
Well, what d'you know: Raising e-book prices doesn't raise sales
"Demand curves slope downwards"
Interestingly, and *not* contradicting your broader point, there are some social psychology experiments that demonstrate that the curve slopes upwards in some cases. IIRC, it is when the buyers have poor information about the quality of the available products, and so assume that a higher price means higher quality and thus a more desirable product. I recall reading somewhere that the cheapest bottle of wine sold restaurants is not the best seller, but the *second* cheapest sells best.
Major web template flaw lets miscreants break out of sandboxes
Critical BIND bug scores PATCH YESTERDAY grading
Timeout, Time Lords: ICANN says there is only one kind of doctor
Re: Sadly the wrong answer.
"Chiropractors don't have an M.D, they are "D.C."
Maybe where you live (the US?), but perhaps not true everywhere. If they apply the rule has "having an MD awarded anywhere in the world", it will be just a matter of time (if not the case already) that you can buy a "MD certificate" on-line from a dodgy jurisdiction.
The quacks might even justify this to themselves as a noble work around of rules set up by the evil Big Pharma establishment to keep them out.
I ain't afraid of no GHOST – securo-bods
Software gurus: Only developers can defeat mass surveillance
Re: Well meant but still narrow minded thinking...
"they are simply wage slaves and out of a job if they don't bend personal principles to fit their employer's desires"
In the short term, true. But you do have some choice about your employer. You can take your labour-power elsewhere, unless you have been made redundant and/or there is a recession on.
QUIDOCALYPSE: Blighty braces for £100 MILLION cost of new £1 coin
'Copyrighted' Java APIs deserve same protection as HARRY POTTER, Oracle tells court
Re: This is a tough one...
You are confusing patents with copyrights. Understandable, because people and organizations that want to extract unearned rent (such as Oracle, here) often try to confuse them by using the term Interllectual Property as an umbrealla term to imply they are the same thing.
10 Types of IT managers from hell
Re: And for your next trick ...
"Nothing like three different decisions/opinions/strategies to work around to help a project along."
Can be handled, I'm told, by taking the line that only your immediate boss can give you orders, regardless of how senior they are, and that everyone else must go through them.
Rise of the Machines: How computers took over the stock market
Fashionably slate
Smart TVs will die
I guess that smart TVs will die out soon after the manufacturers "end of life" their early smart TV products.
We are used to a TV being something that, once bought and installed, contionues to give years of service. When the TV manufacturers decide to pull the plug on the servers providing the smart TV service, customers will be up in arms that the manufacturer has in effect stolen their TV from them. The fallout will be either plummeting demand for smart TVs, or the manufacturers deciding that providing the ongoing support for them is not worthwhile.
Stob on Quatermass: Was this British TV's finest sci-fi hour?
So available, but poor video quality
As a lad I read battered Penguin editions of the shows. They had some monochrome plates in them. I've always wondered whether watchable recordings existed. Sad that they don't, except for the last.
IT trivia: IIRC, one script refers to an electronic digital calculating device as a "computor" rather than "computer", because the conventional spelling had yet not been settled.