Posts by Norfolk N Chance

Real datacenter emissions are a dirty secret

And the band struck up

"Believe it if you like".

Is there any legal power robust enough to compel these companies to publish this information? And then prove it?

Because otherwise they'll only tell you what they think you want to hear.

As for the veracity of the current platitudes, they've obviously perfected Nuclear Fusion or harnessed a black hole - everything is up, exponentially in many cases, except the carbon produced.

30 years ago I flew out to Italy to start a new contract. To simplify travel arrangements the company had asked me to meet another couple of contractors at Stansted for the outbound flight. Being young and naive, over a quiet beer in departures I mentioned this was my first proper contract for the company, and had only been in that line of work for 6 weeks. This seemed to throw them off balance - after a brief pause the more talkative one muttered they'd been on the job around 6 months, and the conversation turned to the night shifts they had been on the previous week.

When we landed and met up with another crew (who had been working out there for a couple of months) I discovered my two new colleagues must have been abducted by aliens - for their 6 months experience pre-flight had matured into some 6 years on landing.

I think whoever writes climate PR for Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc must have also been on that flight.

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

Re: Similarly the name _vti keeps cropping up in SharePoint

Luckily it wasn't anything important, or of consequence... !

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: Telling it like it is.

I concur regarding niche (the classic rather than popular meaning here) searches.

I suspect Google has undergone an extensive online storage prune. If it ain't profitable today, it's warehoused.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

The Prequel charts

Trey's rise and fall building a new PoS (both common acronyms valid!) postal stock accounting system for a huge international company at the end of the last millennium - we'll anonymise them as Jufitsu, it's close enough.

I used to regard this as an urban myth, but a straw poll of friends & family revealed that everyone paying monthly for their gas & electricity was "in credit" - some by £100s.

While admittedly a micro survey and at best anecdotal, it certainly has a whiff of an industry wide scam.

And if I see or hear another smart meter advert... I might not be responsible for my actions.

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

There is a hybrid option of using a GitHub project called "scrcpy". This mirrors your android device on a PC screen with keyboard and mouse. It's a bit of a fiddle to set up, requiring developer mode (but crucially not root) and will work over WiFi or usb.

Unfortunately the android timeline app still feels awkward in portrait mode (I can't recall if it was possible to change to landscape) and although the keyboard and mouse improve usability somewhat, it isn't a patch on the old desktop browser app.

Re: World's smallest violin

"This" could be read at least two ways.

Do you mean "this" as in the timeline app, which allowed you to view and annotate your location data? Or "this" as in the storage of location data, allegedly with your consent?

In either case I'm confident that your data (including location) is constantly being accrued by whatever provider you use, regardless of their publicly declared policy. Companies like Google and Apple believe your personal information has value and is definitely worth more than it's storage cost.

If you meant the former as in the timeline app, I personally feel that as they are collecting my data anyway, at least I could have the use of it myself, and I and others found the timeline viewer was very useful indeed.

From this decision by Google I suppose we could infer that they feel the value of such data reduces over time, and 10 year old location data isn't worth the storeage cost at all.

None of this makes any real difference to privacy. Data will continue to be harvested, but they aren't going to provide any windows for us to use it on their dime.

Timeline seems to have been of rather niche appeal to most people.

Occasionally I would read a story where a journalist had stumbled upon it and was horrified to find an accessible window into the location data which is undeniably being collected by anyone who can (Apple Google Microsoft and many others I'm sure).

However for a few, at a guess 2-3% of phone users, it became incredibly useful. I was one, and my specific use was to keep track of vehicle mileage for tax reasons, which seemed to be a common use. Others myself included, used it to just see where they'd been generally.

The argument that a free service provided by someone else may be dropped at any time is true, and to rely on it for any matter of importance would be a mistake. But like the others in small minority who enjoyed the desktop browser and let it into their lives, I will greatly miss it's demise

There are a nother couple of points I'd like to mention.

Firstly, when following the Google instructions to move the timeline data to your phone, stop. Instead, before going any further, visit Google Takeout and download all your timeline data. Twice if you're paranoid. This is because the data Google sends to your phone has been heavily abbreviated, .and as per article above, some stuff seems to have been deleted. My own experience is that location points have been reduced or decimated by around 75%. If you keep the original Google Takeout files you will be able to import them into other solutions later.

Secondly, I wonder if this might have been an own goal on Google's part. Sure the service was niche, and possibly the data storage requirements (volume, regulatory etc) didn't seem attractive anymore, but they may have just lost the most useful volunteer map correcting team they didn't know they had. I wonder how many other people spend time correcting location physical positions, adding opening hours, answering a few questions about businesses' services and so on - perhaps this may show in time.

Lastly, next time - self host, back up and if it's worth doing, learn how to do it yourself. No one else will care as much as you.

The only thing worse than being fired is scammers fooling you into thinking you're fired

Re: an email that appears to be a legal notice

I wholeheartedly agree.

In view of the sheer volume of mis-addressed email I receive, frequently medical or governmental, there's no way I'd respond to anything unsolicited directly even if suspect it's legitimate. If I recognise the sender and subject I'll attempt to initiate contact by any other means.

I'd like to say most of it is of left-pondian origin, but a large UK bank I shall anonymise as GnatEast insisted on sending a similarily named customer's confidential details regularly for over a year after I first alerted them.

It seems that large organisations care very little for any kind of privacy or responsibility for personal information, so the key is to give them as little as possible to lose and abuse.

Incidentally the bank eventually apologised and offered me £200 (basically "hush money"). I seriously contemplated contacting the other customer to see if the bank had even let them know, but no doubt I'd be hauled up before the Beak for some sort of GDPR contravention, or accused of attempted fraud, impersonation, or any other potential crime I spent a year trying to prevent.

UK authority struggles to RISE with SAP, throws another £9M at project

Re: How bloody much?

Absolutely this.

Too many clients don't realise that they have to provide the business operational logic - the developers can only implement what they're given.

For a company (or local authority) to actually lay out their procedures (the real current happening-now ones, not the dusty file ones) in a rational format takes real effort at all levels - and when everyone else takes a step back because they're too busy. the person left usually has the least useful knowledge.

Blame the horrendously long chain of marketing and management between the developer and the user.

As a basic task is elevated through hierarchy of managers, the real steps the user needs to perform are diluted and discarded, and metrics dashboards and reports are substituted.

Then their bosses have lunch with marketing, and by the time the specification has been written up and passed back to the developer any relevance has long been lost.

During testing (ha!) the client will appoint some twonk who "likes computers" or is related to the boss to liaise with the developer, who, tiring of the flippant and ever-changing brief, loses all interest whatsoever.

In any case after 2 1/2 years overrun, the original requirements and resources available were so hopelessly misunderstood as to make the project undeliverable.

Coupled with the inevitable creep of standards and working practices during the project, it eventually cost more to finish then it would to rip it up and start from scratch.

See Glen Sannox, HS2 et al for further UK examples - though I'm sure we're not alone.

As an aside, I recently chatted with a NHS receptionist who wrote a spreadsheet to track cancer patients appointments in her department. She could then contact them if and when the appointment was changed or delayed so they still had a chance of attending. She assured me this information was not being tracked in any other fashion, and it hinged on her getting a manager who had edit access to excel allowing her to use their credentials to keep the sheet up to date.

Incredible? Unfortunately I believe it.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Important word

Easy call this - when a point of law is in debate, the decision will always favour the party who pays their bills...

(Or Ians in this case)

Chinese boffins build soft robot finger that can take your pulse

Re: It just had to happen ...

Indeed. You could say the meaning has come full circle for this digital probe...

Re: I see a lot of potential here

Oh, I think the "click to enlarge" caption below the photo was sufficient in these enlightened times.

Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code

Re: Irony

The other irony is reading this article here.

Anyone employed in an industry connected to the web (physically or by market) probably relies upon data harvesting revenue to a greater or lesser extent - ask yourself would your job exist without it? I suspect for many readers the answer is uncertain.

Personally I think data harvesting is a disease - is it really the best we can do with interconnected computers?

Then I look at Snaptwit and Instaface and now I'm uncertain...

You know what spreadsheets need? LLMs, says Microsoft

Re: Paper Predicts ...

While falling, just ask your AI enhanced phone to translate a rescue message into Eagle.

Sequence shortened and steps removed? Oh dear.

In that case you'll almost certainly land at terminal velocity to some YouTube clip of LOTR, or on the back of a flatbed ford, my lord...

Nicely put.

Spreadsheets are great for proto-typing, and one-off, what-if analysis of data. Once you've decided how to organise it, make the method repeatable and lock the format down in a database, for everyone's sake.

"AI" has apparently passed the old Turing Test concept of generating content which is indistinguishable from humans. Maybe this spreadsheet scenario will better illustrate the need for humans to generate better content in the first instance, rather than zettabytes of internet-filler which LLMs dutifully reflect back.

Frankly, even if there was the merest glimmer if intelligence in any process prefixed *AI" (remember the "Smart" buzzword anyone?) the content it has been trained on would kill it.

Re: Paper Predicts ...

Or a Boeing?

HP to discontinue online-only e-series LaserJet amid user gripes

There's always a solution

HP printers?

Brilliant machines, won't hear a word against 'em.

From my first - a Deskjet 500C (which was built like a brick outhouse) to my latest, a LaserJet 5550dn, they've been solid.

Admittedly my latest is now old enough to vote...

Perhaps it's just the younger models?

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: Overpaid

I suppose the big bet is on whether the "AI" sauce they are brewing can imagine plausible answers to new problems.

Slurp, regurgitate, and flush.

It really is a race to the bottom.

Google Search results polluted by buggy AI-written code frustrate coders

Re: Is anyone in any way even slightly surprised?

It's CJD* for computers.

*Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Re: Google Search results polluted

Indeed, that's been my experience also.

I suspect that searches such as these are not particularly monetizable and hence I frequently get that supercilious ice fishing troll, even when Google has returned pages for the search previously.

I close the browser and use any other search engine for the rest of the session or at least until I forget again...

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: Time of Use tariffs

I don't disagree - today at least - but as the thrust of the original article goes, tomorrow is only around the corner and there are a lot of them (we hope).

So while it just works today on the assumption that you are winning if you avoid energy intensive tasks between 4-7pm, unless you are going to check the website regularly you won't know if that window changes.

Obviously it will change over time, as other consumers join the tariff. Also usage habits will vary according to daylight and weather, which will also affect the prices as solar & wind production change too.

So I feel it's fair to say it's not exactly a fire-and-forget no-brainer.

Incidentally I am your original upvoter, simply because it was an interesting point and prompted me to read about an existing surge pricing solution for myself, rather than some potted media version.

Re: Time of Use tariffs

It's great that this is an option for those willing to pursue it, and no doubt this audience are more likely than most to be receptive to this.

But as a country-wide solution? I suspect a very small percentage of domestic consumers are going to be content to check a website every evening to decide what time to cook dinner, shower etc over the following 24 hours.

No doubt there's an app, an IFTTT recipe, Raspberry Pi script et al to automate all this too - to which I would say just re-read above, substituting [maintain another system every month] in place of [ check a website every evening].

One of the UK's greatest mistakes was to uncouple energy supply from distribution and allow "competition" IMO, exceptionally short-sighted. Ditto utilities.

Sigh.

Re: newer != better

Profit = Income - Expenditure

In fairness if it was just about real profit then we'd still have the old, perfectly working meters.

I suspect it's our insatiable curiosity and desire for new shiny things, expertly catered for by ruthless sales departments. Permanent Secretaries and Government ministers seem particularly susceptible to this.

Oh - back to profit then!

Luckily for the power suppliers (UK speaking, but probably similar elsewhere) they can just shove the expenditure back onto the customer, so we can continue to pay for them to blunder on.

And with the way the daily standing charge is progressing, I doubt anyone will have any money left for the tinned goods and personal security.

Re: Simples - Just change the SIM

Absolutely - the new 6.1g eSIM actually contains the new radio as a totally new SMART (TM) software upgradable web-app. Or something. Unfortunately the new format is not compatible with existing "legacy" SIM card slots ...

Reading through the comments to this article in entirety returns neatly to the first -

newer != better

Network Rail steps back from geofencing over safety fears

Beeching's revenge

GPS is just simply the wrong solution.

It's amazing the accuracy which can be achieved under ideal conditions, within a few millimetres (it's revolutionised surveying). This does however require secondary static base stations (easy) and the primary device (wearable?) to have a decent low horizon view. Build it in a hat? Not much good when you have to bend over to work.

Physical barriers to prevent access to dangerous areas ie live lines are the only reliable way.

Sadly I don't suppose the humble (physical) fence has the wow factor these days.

On that note I'm surprised someone hasn't suggested train-mounted LiDAR - a fantastic idea if it could alert the driver of an obstacle 2.5 miles away around a bend...

Maybe they could use AI to defend them from the manslaughter charges or Bitcoin to pay the fines and compensation?

GPT-4 won't run Doom but will play the game poorly

Re: LLMs can never explain themselves

I've recently wondered if you put a LLM in one room, an adjudicator in a second, and finally a politician in a third... Could the adjudicator tell the difference?

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Meet the new boss...

Same as the old boss.

Yeeeeeeeaaahhhh!

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

I suspect you'd be quite surprised at the official response these days!

Re: Plus ça change

Good advice which has served me well over the years.

Such common sense and basic courtesy is now grossly unfashionable today of course, and lacks the basic elements of drama and entitlement needed to prove to an overcrowded world how unique and special we are!

Mandiant's brute-forced X account exposes perils of skimping on 2FA

Re: Deary me

"These phishing pages lure users into connecting their wallets to receive what they believe is free crypto, only to have it drained after signing a transaction.”

I've read that 3 times now, but it still sounds like "Hey stranger, pass me your wallet and I'll put some free money in it".

Have I just woken up in some alternative universe?

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Re: The possibilities are infinite

Thanks dinsdale54.

A splendid dive into the chaos of software development driven by conflicted interests and mismatched abilities against an implausible schedule.

Well worth a read IMO.

Re: No Justice

No kidding.

It would certainly make a pretty good "Who, me?"

Re: No Justice

I couldn't agree more.

The victims are the epitome of decent normal people who eschew "vertical roles" - almost all were self-employed, quietly serving their community and minding their own business.

As such it's indeed ironic that the Sub Postmasters/mistresses we have seen are now being paraded for self-effacing gains by all.

However, I'm more surprised that the Reg readership isn't all over the obvious flaws in the Horizon software - there's evidence a-plenty at the enquiry site: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/

A quick trawl through the evidence revealed this nugget from 2009 (https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/fuj00080526-fujitsu-report-horizon-data-integrity-v10).

I wonder if the author (with 10+ years involvement in the project at that point) would have liked to say more - it would have been interesting to have seen the first draft!

The earlier emails discussing the development of the live system are damning.

Something nasty injected login-stealing JavaScript into 50K online banking sessions

Re: When will they learn

UK bank customer here.

I don't believe there is any mainstream personal bank login which doesn't insist on JavaScript for "security features" - most of which involve asking for a few random letters from a pre agreed string.

I've heard it referred to as security theatre, which certainly sounds more apt.

Around 10 years ago most small/micro book keeping services offered bank statement imports. One such service I used didn't support my bank, but did support a siblings's interface which looked almost identical.

Though my JavaScript skills are almost nil it didn't take long to substitute a few strings and get a working version, which the bookeeping company gratefully used for a number of years, long after I'd moved onto a different service.

This page scraping died out when open banking APIs became available, probably because they are more reliable than page scraping, but the banks don"t appear to have changed the basic log in methods much.

The only improvement I've seen is occasional multifactorial challenges, eg requiring a code sent by SMS in addition to the regular user & password sections, or from a card reader.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Really?

75°C? Whilst I don't refute your numbers, one specification conspicuous by its absence is the *quantity* of water heated over time - e.g. gallons per second or litres per minute. Egg-cups per hour perhaps?

Perhaps this amazing piece of equipment might be able to shovel vast quantities of cold air around (whilst making a fabulous racket), but I'll bet most of the heat output comes from the equally vast quantities of electricity it consumes during this process.

Those who have enjoyed the experience of an electrically heated shower know just how much electricity is needed for a surprisingly moderate flow of water during the winter months.

Another unreported factor is the quantity of air required on the cold side - let's hope the next house doesn't have one, because soon all we'll be effectively doing is running air conditioning, outside - in winter. Which might help cool the planet down, except for all that inconvenient electricity. Oops.

Icon to remind us what heat used to look like >>>>>>>>

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

Or perhaps, "Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see" (Event Horizon 1997)

For those at the back, she's gone much, much farther than that etc.

My parents just happen to be a couple of those edge cases who don't have broadband but do have a landline. It's copper from the exchange of course, around 2 miles away line distance.

This was nstalled in '80 if I recall correctly and a Great Step - previously when I was younger we used to drive to the phone box across the valley to phone Grandparents on Christmas day.

Neither has had more than a fleeting interest in computers, and the life they have led for the past 80 odd years has coped just fine. As Dad put it recently, "when I hear about a computer hacking or identity theft I can be confident it's nothing I need to worry about."

Whilst not entirely accurate I certainly empathise.

After the rambling, the point I suppose is I'm trying to get to is when telephones were born, they provided an incredible service.

It was relatively instant (human exchange connections not withstanding) and resilient to local power interruptions.

It feels we've taken a step back in the name of progress, and I can't help feeling the "we won't force anyone until 2030' schtick is to wait for the old codgers to pop off.

It all makes me think that even if we could live forever we'd probably not want to.

Inside FTX: Jokes about misplaced funds, diabolical IT, poor oversight, and worse

Priorities, priorities...

'FTX Group also lacked any enterprise resource planning software, instead relying on QuickBooks and "a hodgepodge of Google documents, Slack communications, shared drives, and Excel spreadsheets and other non-enterprise solutions to manage their assets and liabilities."'

"Lacked"? Pretty sure in fact that the aforementioned *is* the gold standard stack of today's ERP for Startups.

Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked - only this time we're talking about leveraged IT rather than money.

Perhaps it's the same thing!

China debuts bonkers hybrid electric trolley-truck

Re: ...yeah, but we've got electric trucks!

Don't forget all the rare earth mining needed to save the earth... I'm sure we're missing something here.

+ 1 for railways, generally a pretty efficient transport system. It's not a huge stretch to consider a conveyer belt as basically an infinite train.

Re: Does that thing really have the supply and the return both delivered by cables

I suspect ground requires a dedicated conductor due to the power required.

Traditionally these systems use around 600v DC which absolutely requires a return conductor.

Even using AC the voltage required to overcome the road surface over the area any vehicle could occupy would be in the order millions - not practical in the scale of road vehicles.

AC does open up the possibility of contactless charging using inductors buried in the road surface, though I'm not aware of any operational system beyond the R&D phase.

Going back to pantograph wear, an alternative system used a grooved metal wheel on the end of a sprung "fishing rod" to make the connection - which was was unsurprisingly prone to slipping off.

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

Phone numbers

are the thin end of the wedge - just about every online service seems to encourage an email address as a username.

It generally works if the online service is an email provider, it might do no harm if the username is only used as a primary unique identifier, but fails painfully when it's also used as an (unverified) primary contact.

The second and third scenarios above are not helped by individual services interpretation of unique addresses. Gmail may decide that certain variations resolve to the same account (it ignores underscores for example) yet a third party service may happily open 2 separate accounts one with underscores, one without.

Guilty parties range from social media to government orgs, and the latter seem to be the most ardent in broadcasting personal information to patently unverified addresses.

Coupled with many services insistence on sending from noreply email addresses, the erroneous recipient can do little to help. How many emails do you receive from such originators which have the "If you received this message by mistake, please reply to this message.. " boilerplate?

Obligatory tenuous xkcd https://xkcd.com/970 - while it may be irritating, the sheer volume of highly personal medical email I receive (my initials are D R) would suggest that we should check our email address more rigorously rather than less.