Half a million stolen French medical records, drowned in feeble excuses Those files I promised you? Oh, I'm sorry, they accidentally got taken out with the recycling. A gull swooped down and snatched them out of my hands. They were lost in a tsunami. No, a forest fire. An earthquake. Actually, to tell the truth, my mum put them in the washing machine. This is making me feel queasy. My health isn't …
Not only am I currently required by the medicos to drink three litres or more a day (and it's taken a while to find suitable sugar free flavourings in Germany; they don't believe in orange squash here) but I'm also on a diabetes medicine that tips excess blood sugar into the bladder via the kidneys.
It seems the average male bladder capacity is around 400-500ml... dividing input by output means an awful lots of trips to the thinking room, and I haven't had a full night's sleep in weeks...
I blame Dr Watson. -->
500 ml is a medium size tea mug. I need about 5-7 per day. Beside other things I drink (see icon). And that is in winter. In summer the intake goes up and becomes mostly water. Drinking a 1.2 litre jug in one go means I am just momentarily thirsty. I must be a different species…
Prostate problems - Mine was also >600mL, full for much of the time, and waking up for 4-5 trips every night. Green-light laser treatment has apparently fixed it, but the nice surgeon told me to expect further treatment "sometime in your 80s" - So something to look forward too...
The green-light laser special did the trick for me also. Unfortunately, the medication for my neuropathic pain has put me back on the 4-5 trips per night. However, given the alternative is excruciating shooting pain, the bathroom excursions seem like a small price to pay.
400~500mL? LUXURY! I'm probably down to 4~5NanoLitres on a good day. I solved the having to get up to go potty every few seconds issue -- I fall asleep on the toilet.
*Shakes a palsied fist*
Now get out of my loo, I'm surfing cat porn!
*Happily munches on DriedFrogPills like they were candy*
Ha, used to be on that particular tablet, curtesy of diabetes caused by the immobility of Cauda Equina, which has another side effect of a dodgy bladder (retention at that point in time). I had to have a full bladder ultrasound test at the hospital and the instruction was to have breakfast and then 1ltr of water. As it was a hot day I had another 1ltr to be sure and was absolutely bursting when I was scanned. I managed to put just over 2.5 pints (1.4ltr) into the bucket in the next part of the test, before another scan to see if I had fully emptied. The ultrasound nurse told me that she could actually see my bladder refilling in real time.
Neil I'm sure that you have noticed the particular smell that the tablet gives your urine ;-)
Is ripeness a benefit when a sample gets to the lab?
Perhaps it will ensure swift processing.
As far as non production of homework/documents/files are concerned, the best I have heard was by a mate at school in the sixties. "I was kidnapped by a flying saucer, they must have kept my homework!"
The whole class collapsed in laughter including the teacher, my mate Pete got a week of homework detentions.
Attention Please Monsieur Dabbs
"* No, I haven't posted my No.2 to the lab yet."
According to @"Uncle Slacky" in last week's instalment...
"as the test (ahem)material is only "good" for a few days after "production" so any delays (postal or personnel) are to be avoided"
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/02/19/something_for_the_weekend/#c_4208264
You may have to produce a new deposit
A lot of data that is sold on the bad markets as "hacked from a corporation" is fake, hackers might break in and get a copy of 500,000 email addresses and associated information but they get more money when they sell a million or more data records - so they add loads of fake records to the data. It's not anonymizing the data, but it does add so much junk that anyone buying the hacked data will not know what's real and what's not without doing a lot of work.
After a big hack data release I see an uptick on new false names on the mail server getting emails, and more account login attempts by usernames that have never existed.
Not a new idea. We've been using that for years in scripts that activate when there's an attempt to acquire an excess volume of data (the systems this lives in tend to query only a few records at a time).
The result is that the data gets replaced with some pre-cooked fake material (and an alarm is triggered - we follow up because it's always possible that some moron decided to sidestep process and pull data without a formal request for analytics which would ensure protection is in place first).
And yes, that's the sort of action that gets you put on notice or even removed from the company, depending on the gravity of what was stopped.
> the data gets replaced with some pre-cooked fake material and an alarm is triggered
Yes, but that's only possible because you work in some non-vital, unimportant domain...
If your company was handling vital or dangerous data, it would had made sure the database admin password of "admin/1234" was mentioned on the login page, just in case somebody forgets or doesn't know it, and the publicly accessible database would feature an easy way to be downloaded on a USB stick for easier dissemination.
While the propaganda department rehearses the "We take our customers' privacy/security/life and limb very seriously" mantra.
Why not start a boobytrapped honeypot of supposedly real peoples' data, but entirely ficticious so that it floods the market with crap?
Create a few (hundred? thousand? million?) gigabytes of fake PII in a nice juicy database "secured" with crap passwords (12345, password, etc) so that the hackers think they've gotten their grubby hands on something good, except all of it is utter bollocks & simply poisons the well of actual PII to the point where none of the hackers can tell what's good vs bad data?
Someone with a copy of MS Access could slap together a "business class database frontend" for a pseudo-accounting/HR registry, fill it with fake data, & "accidently" leave it in a badly secured AWS bucket...
*Cough*
Why waste time with preparing all this when you can get a lot of real data from all the badly secured AWS buckets?
After all, when you sell your users data to marketing companies what better explanations you have than 'sofisticated... cyberattack... state-backed actor... your privacy is out utmost concern..' (damn, I'm out of my bulshit bingo card)
Been doing that for years, I must have created scores of those databases, ranging from a few hundred "people" to 50,000 or more. They're called test or dev systems.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has raided any of them.
I suspect many companies do this routinely. And I also suspect hackers are aware of this, and have ways to tell the difference.
>> "Ah OK, just a glass of wine, then?"
We used to get that a lot when telling the waiter that we're vegetarian. "No problem, you can have the chicken."
Of course we don't have that problem any more. All the restaurants are closed, possibly for ever, thanks to meat-eaters.
That reminded me of being on holiday (or business trips) with fussy eaters.
One time, on a skiing trip in the Swiss Alps, and one of the group would only eat either burger and chips (and the 'chips' were European-style, so not like the ones back home), or pizza (and the pizzas, being stone-cooked in a wood-burning oven, were distinctly nothing like he got from Dominos or Pizza Hut). The second time we tried for pizza with him, he decided to be 'adventurous' and accidentally ordered something which had a raw cracked egg put on it once it came out of the oven.
Another time, with a stand at an Expo in Vienna, the guy I was there with firstly didn't like the hotel breakfasts, because there were no Kellogg's cornflakes, the milk was 'different', and so was the 'jam'. I leapt ravenously at the usual options of dark rye bread, cooked meats, and scrambled eggs.
The first night, with his indecisiveness, I discovered this basement restaurant with bench tables where no one at all spoke English. All the locals ate there, and it was bloody beautiful. But he didn't like it, so we agreed we'd alternate on where to eat. Except all he bloody wanted was to go to a Chinese restaurant!
I said: 'We're in Vienna. I mean, Vienna. It's two weeks to Christmas, and everywhere is overflowing with what makes Vienna Vienna at Christmas. And you want to get a bloody Chinese? You can do that back in England. What's wrong with you?'
That night, we had a mediocre Chinese meal (crispy duck and pancakes) in a place that had somehow distilled the essence of Chinese stereotyping into a pure concentrate, and applied several coats.
When we came out, he said: 'You were right. That place last night was better.'
Which reminds me of another skiing trip in Switzerland.
We're in this restaurant, where we've just discovered that the beer costs twice as much as it does in England for half the quantity. I've ordered a steak dish (can't remember what it was now), and it has just been brought to the table.
On the next table there is a Swiss family, including a baby in a high chair. They're all dipping into a Raclette of some sort.
As soon as my meal arrived, I detected an aroma. I leaned over to one of my companions and said 'I think that baby has sh*t itself'. And it had.
The mother took it to the toilets to fix it up, but the smell remained for the rest of the night until we left.
I didn't enjoy that meal at all.
"No problem, you can have the chicken"
Too true - for me at least. In the 80's & 90's, particularly in France and Belgium I was always having to explain that vegetarian means eating NO meat.
I solved the chicken problem though - by becoming Vegan. Now I just get offered food which simulates the look, feel & taste of dead animal. I'm a hoot at parties.
Frying pan to furnace.
I think it came about because of army (can't remember whose army) experiments on the amount of water needed per day by a soldier. They came to the conclusion of about 4 pints (2.27l) per day. This meant water taken in from all sources - tea, coffee, food, energy drinks etc.
This number was taken by people who like to sell water to you at exorbitant prices to mean "about 2 litres more than you get from other sources", and perpetrated by Woo sellers. Ker Ching
Really? They called it Mega-Bus?
Now I have visions of a rather rotund chap in a yellow suit and hat banging away on a keyboard trying to steal data. And I thought they just provided cheap travel!
I'm sure that "Mock The Week" fans will be pointing the finger of blame at Dara O'Brian......
That's all it is, a myth:
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-nutrition/water-myth (to pick one example)
"If you are thirsty, drink water. If you are not thirsty, then you do not need to go out and purposefully drink 6-8 glasses of water a day since you will probably get all the water in your regular diet. One important caveat to remember though is that on hot summer days, your water losses from sweating go up and if you plan to spend some time out doors, having water with you is important to avoid dehydration and heat stroke. While the thirst reflex is pretty reliable, it does tend to fade with age and older people are more likely to become dehydrated without realizing it. Thus, the take home message is drink water when you are thirsty, but on very hot days it might not be a bad idea to stay ahead of the curve and keep hydrated."
It's not only water, a lot of ex-pats who come to Spain as well as holiday makers keep their fluid intake up but because many Brits and Germans have low sodium/sugar diets find they still suffer from heat stroke because they don't get the isotonics right.
Of course those who overindulge in alcoholic beverages also need to replace rather more than just from sweating.
Yeah, this 8 pints/litres/whatever nonsense was in vogue a few years back. And so one of those educational greasy pole climbers ( who are forever jumping on the newest bandwagon to further their careers at the expense of actual teachers ) wouldn't take a step away from his desk without a bottle of water grasped firmly in his hand for everyone to see.
In every office these days, every person under 40 walks around with a special plastic bottle of water from which they glug every five minutes. Many of the bottles have elaborate filtration mechanisms. One bloke I worked with had a bottle containing something that looked like a piece of charred wood. I never dared ask what it was.
The origin of all this was apparently a (WHO?) paper that said you need x litres of water per day. Nobody seems to have read to the end of the sentence, where it said "most of this will come from your food".
> bottle containing something that looked like a piece of charred wood
Piece of the femur of St. Sebastian of Dublum, martyrized 216 by the Saracens by being burnt alive. The relic in the drink water protects the drinker from jinxes and kidney stones.
In the USA there was a competition to see who could drink the most water before needing a pee. A woman died of water intoxication.
The same in schools, everyone goes round clutching the bottles. In orchestral rehearsals us oldies just get on with it, have a tea or coffee in the break and make up any shortfall with a nice cocoa made with condensed milk or in the pub.
The young folk also go to the pub but then drink al sorts of weird concoctions that look like squash but are actually highly alcoholic and calorific. Good old beer may be calorific but at least you (mostly) know what is in it.
Some side issues not covered by that useful article, to add to it.
There was a published bit of research ( sorry can't find the reference) from the US military about the water needs of soldiers on active duty - much of the claims about water need were lifted from that, omitting the bit about its applying to soldiers as well as the bit mentioned in the article above of it being from all sources ( food etc).
But then some clever marketing added to it (keeping "hydrated"). And some health nuts started claiming- in so many words- that once you felt thirsty it was too late you were already dehydrated with a strong implication that you would practically be ready for a shroud if you felt a bit ready for a cuppa.
All just bollocks of course.
I upvoted you, but it's not 100% bollocks, more like 99% bollocks. Example, if you run a marathon in hot weather, since your body can only take in fluid at a certain rate, you should start drinking before you start running. If you don't do that, you won't keel over, you will just run a percent or two slower at the finish. So there are scenarios where it is in a sense "too late", but the office is not one of them. There's also a story going around that thirst is not a reliable indicator of dehydration, which might be true at the margin, e.g. the last one or two percent in a performance situation, but overall is simply not true. Thirst is very reliable, survival of the fittest and all that.
"Changing my mobile number would be a total pain for me"
Have an upvote, AC. I've had the same mobile number for 21 years and there have been five house moves and a marriage (where I opted not to change my name, not that this deters my MIL in the slightest from addressing cards to the non-existant Mrs WegieHusband'sSurname) in the interim.
MIL? She's 82 and from a generation where almost every woman took hubby's name.
Well, that's my charitable explanation.
The fact that it's our 17th wedding anniversary tomorrow and she's still addressing stuff to Mrs WegieHusband'sSurname, despite being told that I haven't changed my name, occasionally leads me to think rather less charitable thoughts...
"it's all there, detailed across 491,840 lines of plain text."
It's a pity they didn't use .xls, this would have limited the damage to under 17 thousand.
(Also, does anyone else have the feeling Mr Dabbs has somehow arranged this as a follow-up to last week's article? A bit too neat if you ask me.)
Alastair the 8 whatevers of water is scientific bunkum. It comes from a misunderstanding of the concept of total daily water. That includes water in food, water in tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer, cider and lower strength wines. Your digestion is well able to winnow out the water. It also includes metabolic water, we burn carboHYDRATEs and HYDROcarbons (fats) for energy producing CO2 and H2O. The H2O is then available to cells and tissues for hydration requirements.
When you tot all that up you get a figure of about 6 pints. But you don’t need to drink all that (food, metabolic water) or as water (all the other drinks mentioned). Drink when you’re thirsty, your body will let you know when it needs topup. If you have a dry mouth there are mouthwashes and sprays available to deal with that.
Drinking too much water depletes you of urea, made from proteins, and electrolytes lost in urine. If you are a slight or teenage woman you can deplete your bones drinking too much water. Making the new urea causes metabolic acidosis which leaches calcium. Men with bigger bodies are more resistant to the effect but it will still be real in us.
Metabolic acidosis makes you breathless. The body monitors CO2 levels through pH so anything which changes pH changes your breathing. Since you are trying to exercise making yourself unwontedly breathless is counter productive. Ignore the water blandishments.
It has been many, many years since I assumed that any data about me was truly secure unless it was on paper in my own file cabinet. Digital is by nature easily copied and shared with anyone and everyone, and sooner or later every company will find that their systems have been accessed by someone who shouldn't.
Besides, Google and Facebook have it all already.
As an aside: why is it impossible for Google to identify the owner of a specific phone number? God knows they must excel at that sort of thing.
A bitter pill best swallowed with eight gallons of swimming pool water
It would appear that a suppository has some advantages over a biter pill taken with copious amounts of water.
"Isn't Dabbsy in France? Medicine there tends to be a bit more anal - sore throat Monsieur, have a suppository."
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/02/19/something_for_the_weekend/#c_4208309
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