Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Microsoft claims it's doing this...

"After a long weekend, come to work to find Win 10 has installed itself on most of a company's PCs"

Well, at least it would tell you which users ignored your instructions to turn them off when they're not in use. You did tell them that,didn't you?

"if you are not in the deb camp and want rpms then fedora is UEFI compatible as well."

It's a very long time since I used Fedora but AFAICR I found it to be release often, break often. Maybe a derivative of RH, say Centos or Scientific Linux, would be better; I'm sure they're UEFI compatible.

But as a stepping stone it might also be worth looking at one of the Ubuntu derivatives such as Zorin that set out to provide a user interface as close to W7 as possible.

Re: That Went right over my head...

"Sometimes I think if you want to learn something, the last thing your should do is read a book."

If all else fails, read the manual. Or maybe that's not quite what you meant.

"democratic and judicial oversight"

I think you're confusing political with democratic.

What this bill does is attempt to legitimise the abolition of the presumption of innocence and to redefine "due" in the concept of "due process of law". Last year we celebrated the presence of that latter concept in the last 8 centuries of English law. We celebrated it by abolishing it.

Re: Well, if it wants to jump species...

"I have just bought a GPS that REQUIRES Windows (or a Mac) to upgrade the maps. Imagine my disappointment"

Always read the small print.

But check if Wine will do the trick. Or Vista in a VM.

Re: GWX isn't the problem.

"Before 10 came out I could update a clean 7 build in around a hour or two. Hit update, a minute later the list of 200 updates would appear, click install and go get on with something else for an hour or two."

The fact that this was considered acceptable, or at least normal, is a sad comment on the extent to which MS had brainwashed admins.

Re: Telegraph not unique

"too many managers who are more internally directed rather than looking externally and selling or delivering stuff that adds value to the bottom line"

too many managers

FTFY

Re: Data =/= Information

My aunt and mother were both great hoarders of photographs. But not great labellers. So I have problems of who were these Edwardian ladies staring at the camera and who were the children with them? And what was the building all these people were standing beside? A few labelled pictures are a useful archive; a few Tb of unlabelled jpegs are so many random bits.

Re: Media works … DVD a bit tight for all you snaps.

"I don't have time to be picky about what is stored"

Maybe best to delete it all. If you don't have time to review it now you're never going to have time to look at it all or to find the one picture which you seem to remember you have somewhere if only you can find it...

Re: Media works … DVD a bit tight for all you snaps.

"More to the point perhaps is the use for family histories; family trees including pictures,, scans of certificates and other historic addenda."

Print out on good quality paper. Your descendants might not be bothered to work out how to use your digital version but hard copy won't be a problem. Unless they burn it, of course; maybe you should print a large threat to come back & haunt them on the cover.

Re: Solves only the easy problem

"DVD drives are so common today that finding one in 50 years time (if only to reverse-engineer a non-functioning one) is likely to be easy."

It's not so long ago that 5 1/4" floppies were common. And 8" before that. There aren't too many about now. And good luck reverse engineering a non-functioning DVD drive.

You just have to keep migrating to new media.

"Add another thing - a judge can only grant a maximum of X warrants in any 24 month period. This is to stop a judge that is overly sympathetic to bullshit or probe to rubber stamping."

What concerns you here is what's sometimes called regulatory capture, the judges being the first layer of regulation. If you look at point 5 you'll see that this is also checked for. The approach I've suggested is to check for outcomes.

One could easily envisage a situation where a case has a large number of suspects The judge is presented with a request for warrants against all of them. I'm assuming that individual warrants would be issued for each suspect. This could eat up an undue proportion of your X without the judge being overly sympathetic to bullshit or rubber stamping. In fact, by having to read the background to the case once he could concentrate on wanting to know why there are so many suspects and requiring warrants to be vacated as soon as it became clear that a suspect was eliminated.

Rationing the inputs wouldn't be as effective as reviewing the outcomes.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

"You missed one key thing."

No.

From point 5: "this would be to check for attempts to slip unjustified, overbroad requests through the system"

One of the purposes of the checking layer would be to prevent what you're concerned about.

A well-informed commentard on a thread some time ago pointed out than in some cases multiple warrants had to be sought to follow up on an initial warrant - IIRC an example was discovering that a suspect had a second mobile & another warrant had to be issued to cover that. It's likely that a warrant system that required undue follow-ups would be counter-productive - the judges would be overwhelmed with requests & not able to give due scrutiny. An effective system would need a sufficient degree of flexibility which is why I didn't suggest a specific granularity but a system of checks to countermand abuse.

"as there's already a severe shortage of good embedded systems bods."

Do you really think this has been worked out in sufficient detail to appreciate the need for good engineers?

Re: Definition of success - going OT

"energy-engaged"

Engaged! More marketwanker-speak.

After I'd renewed my house insurance recently, my insurers decided to start spamming me except it's not called "spam", its "part of our customer engagement". (We'd had words about spam a couple of years ago after I found the email address of someone senior in their marketing.)

Using your own domain for email has benefits. Last summer I sorted out my email to give individual addresses to people I'm a regular customer of. So they've quickly found themselves disengaged when I deleted their address. They'll find themselves even more disengaged next time renewal's due.

Re: I think it *will* be a ghastly mess

"Then again, could things be any worse than the current performance of people like npower, coop energy, and first utility?"

You're an optimist aren't you?

There's always room for worse.

Re: @dcluley

"Also different leccy suppliers use different meters, different software... so if you dance to that other favourite gubmint tune and SWITCH - then your spiffy new smart meter immediately becomes a good old-fashioned dumb meter."

Sounds interesting should they ever try to insist on installing one here.

Re: Trust

"The intelligence community is coming to the tech companies and saying sorry (not publicly, that would be too much) "

If you're right it's a good start but publicly is not too much, it's what's needed. However I don't see the tech companies being able to help the community out of their hole. If they were to try they'd simply find their customers turning against them and looking elsewhere for secure apps.

Missed the edit window.

The security community also need to accept that there is no magic bullet to solve their encryption problems. Code for strong encryption has been generally available for a couple of decades. It's not going to become suddenly unavailable.

Mandating weak encryption or key escrow systems are not going to satisfy public needs. If such restriction on strong encryption were imposed on suppliers in their jurisdiction the public would simply turn to suppliers from outside. If such external software were made illegal then the general public would suffer but anyone wanting to use strong encryption for illegal purposes would not be affected. As I've written here previously, you do not dissuade people who are or are planning to break laws by furnishing them with more laws to break.

The security community has a real problem with widespread use of strong encryption. It's a problem entirely of their own making. They can't blame anyone else. And frankly I don't see what they can do about it now except live with it.

"Admit what exactly?"

Exactly what I said: that they have lost the trust of the people.

The people who object to being spied on. The people who are the customers demanding end-to-end encryption of Apple etc's services. The people who are the demos in democracy. The people whose taxes pay their salaries. The people for whom they are supposed to work.

Clear enough?