Posts by Androgynous Cupboard 2321 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2012
Agree. In a new software system this would be considered a design fault, but because email has worled like this for 50 years we’re just supposed to live with it?
Here’s a starter for ten: if more than five people outside your organisation are CC’d in, display a confirm dialog explaining what will happen and did they mean BCC instead?
My first job was maintaining a program in tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of C which had been auto-converted from BASIC. Loads of "if (b_streq(a, "") == true" to check if the string was zero-length, the vast majority of variables were global and, oh yes: liberal use of "goto"
Frankly keeping the BASIC would have been a better option.
Presumably you only pay cash, file your tax return by post and never use the digital passport gates - not even when the queue is shorter?
I'm no fan of government overreach either, but on some topics the readship here does stry beyond luddite into anti-enlightment territory. This is definitely one.
Downvote away, I can take it. I am confident in the knowledge most of them will be sent by second-class post.
"a JavaScript loader stored in the message body executes" - dear god, a thousand times yes. Surely there must be more to it? (30 seconds later) aha. Someone thought it was a good idea to use a regex to parse and sanitize HTML. Sometimes I just despair.
No mention of outlook in the CVE report by the way.
Too subtle by half, Stewart.
My favourite part of the play: Pozzo commands lucky to "Think", then he delivers "a torrent of academic-sounding phrases mixed with pure nonsense" (Wikipedia's wording), after which Vladimir and Estragon regret asking. The AI analogies, they just write themselves.
The staircases spiral the wrong way. If you're sword-fighting your way into a castle, starting at the ground and attacking defenders on higher levels, spiral staircases were curved to favour a right-handed defender against a right-handed attacker. In Neuschwanstein - built, as noted, long after castles were practical - the staircases spiral the other way which gives an attacker the advantage.
That is the only factoid remained lodged in my brain from a visit 30+ years ago - and while it's true the staircases definitely spiral that way, it's the 2020s and we doubt everything so I wonder whether most castles staircases really do spiral the other way? I've never thought to check.
Yes, if sucks but the current situation is unsustainable. I suspect it’s something like this or their entire internet disappears behind captcha and login-first.
Thats not to say there aren’t a lot of ways this can go wrong, of course, but I am glad someone is trying something new.
Lawks, I have been misled. My omnibus was The Great Dune Trilogy. Now I'm wondering if there's a followup, "The Not Quite As Great Dune Trilogy"
Incidentally while we're on the topic of space opera dross, in my innoncent youth I borrowed the first of L Ron Hubbards "Mission Earth" books from the library. I knew no better, and it had a shiny cover. I'd strongly advise against anyone ever doing the same.
> since he was widely reputed to be an otherwise terrible writer
I read the trilogy a few years back to see what the fuss was about, and my only problem with your previous sentence is the word "otherwise".
The first one was not bad, but it so rapidly disappeared up its own arse in the second that I finished the trilogy wondering what had just happened.
Sweet summer child. Yes, €100m is a lot. The House of Lords also costs about £100m a year. The UK civil service costs £500,000m a year. Governing is expensive, no matter who does it.
Meanwhile UK imports and exports are down 15% due to Brexit. We are, all of us, financially worse off than we were ten years ago. Everything is more expensive (relative to income). Services are worse. People are angrier. I feel it, I’m sure you feel it. The best we can hope for now is managed decline.
And our American friends aren’t interested. You might think the world revolves around the UK but it doesn’t. Everyone has has their own problems.
Based on so many of these recently, the quickest way to fall victim to a remote exploit is to install software that claims to prevent it.
A look through the watchtower labs writeup is informative. They're... unimpressed, and with good reason.
Quite honestly, it feels like there has been no thought given to security whatsoever - I write Java day in, day out and if I ever felt the need to put Runtime.exec on the end of a webservice, or any sort of dynamic call into a random class using reflection, there would be internal alarm bells ringing before I'd sat down to write the first line. This isn't even subtle - it's basic, basic stuff. 0/10 Ivanti, FOAD.
That’s potentially a bit harsh. A gap in the test suite is precisely where you would find new bugs. Fixes in that area are, by definition, in areas that are going to be less well covered, and so can lead to more bugs.
You don’t need AI for any of this. However if it’s AI that found the original problem, it’s going to get some of the blame for the later bugs.
Not defending AI, but this is what test-driven development looks like.
They're missing from my list because I've got actual work to do, I can't spend my day writing comments.
The UK is not perfect, but it is not unredeemable. Things could be better, they could be an awful lot worse. We agree that Reform are going to make it worse, and we agree (I think) that focusing on £4K of council tax and ignoring larger issues is a distraction; We differ on who the baddie is; you think it's the civil service, I think it's that group of elderly men that enjoy influence and power and didn't like sharing it with Brussels - Farage, Rothermere, Bamford from JCB etc ad infinitum. Fine. Yo do you.
Note the "eg". Other charts are available.
Zach Polanski was hauled over the coals for £4,000 of council tax, Angela Rayner lost her job for £40,000 of stamp duty and the ex Mr Nicola Sturgeon is looking at jail for £400,000 of fraud. Nigel Farage took a £5,000,000 gift and didn't declare it. Donald Trump is alleged to have made $1,4000,000,000 off the presidency in his first year. Like I said, small beer.
You know, if you reined in your hyperbolic tendencies you might come across as a bit more useful - some of your points are good, but you add way too much salt.
There are literally charts of corruption - see eg https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025/index/gbr where the UK is 20 out of 182. So not only is it on the charts, it's not doing too badly.
> There's a very easy explanation for that. Corruption in this country is off the charts
No, it’s just not. It’s non-zero that’s for sure, and higher than we want. But on a global scale, corruption in the UK is small beer. Although you can bet that’s the first thing that would change under a Reform government. .
Pick your poison.
Either you've got an ID card that can identify you with a single number, which is open to abuse.
Or you've got an NI number, drivers license number, NHS number etc, all of which can also identify you and all of which are equally open to abuse - and that's if you're lucky. If you're not lucky you've got none of these, and the Home Office will deport you without a second thought despite the fact you've been living in the UK since Windrush.
There's plenty to worry about with an ID card scheme, but the current situation isn't exactly roses.
I sincerely hope that in ten years time we will be able to point to Trump's misrule and the ICC shenanigans and say that was the point when it all started to go wrong for Google, Amazon and Microsoft - and that Palantir will be an historical footnote.
> But the plain text is still on all end points!!
Well, duh. If it wasn't you wouldn't be able to read the message.
If you're implying the message is also stored decrypted on the device, well that's different. I don't have any inside knowledge on how Messages works internally, although it seems unlikely as Apple (for all their flaws) are not stupid. Although obviously once a device is compromised with a rootkit, all bets are off.
I have beeen through quite a few site redesigns, and the only constant is people immediately whinging about how everyone involved was an idiot and they want everything back the way it was. At the very least the font size is too big or small and there is always, always too much white space - the poor little lambs. Sudden onset headaches or seizures are also not uncommon.
Withholding judgement but I thoroughly approve of the new font. Clean and modern and readable. Surprised no dark mode as part of the rework. but easy enough to add later. Otherwise TBD but echoing the “it’s fairly mild as redesigns go” view above.
Works here on Safari and Firefox, not Chrome. And it's 100% a server-side issue - a request is sent, no response received.
The captcha is only a bit odd (Cloudflare's hCaptcha), but I suspect the culprint is literally staring us in the face: "the website you are visiting is protected and accelerated by Imperva". I'm taking issue with "accelerated".
That's an unusually dumb thing to say, even for you.
Pick up a newspaper, 2/3 of them will have something in there about immigrants, benefit cheats, scroungers, shirkers not workers, take your pick. The government responds to this and directs its civil service accordingly.
Now, if you'd made the point that those newspapers and the fleet of grotesques they promote (ie. Farage and his ilk) are trying to distract you from the millions they're taking out of the system in tax avoidance, jobs-for-mates and sundry corruption, then you might have had a point.
https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-wants-your-cookie-aba1c536b0d8
My "flawed methodology" antennae are a-quivering, because that's a very big number. Fortunately UK Gov is good at some things, and one is reporting the process. Numbers are based on a phone survey of 2,112 businesses, but only those with an online presence and with IT capacity. Which excludes your local pub, corner shop, butchers etc.
So it's 43% of businesses that have any sort of IT presence, and the actual question was "any kind of cyber security breach or attack" - so unsuccessful attacks count too. I've probably got a dozen 419 messages or "log in here to send your Wyse transfer" emails in my folder right now, I would think those qualifiy - not to mention the constant hammering of port 22 on our server.
A finding from the survey that's not in the article: "the median perceived cost of the most disruptive breach or attack was £0 for businesses and £0 for charities, increasing to £30 for medium and large businesses." - i.e. most of the time, nothing happens.
