Posts by Dr Who

Rackspace ends discount hosting for open source projects

Re: They're not thinking this through...

Or (false) economy toilet paper.

False because each iteration of the while not clean loop uses 6 sheets instead of 2.

NHS: Remember those patient records we didn't deliver? Well, we found another 162,000

Rise to your level

So .... the incompetent head of NHS transformation and operations is now the incompetent head of, presumably the same, at HMRC. That explains a lot, particularly about if you're having any self assessment troubles.

Swiss banking software has Swiss cheese security, says Rapid7

Re: Two..agencies couldn't contact a bank about security..why..still have a business licence?

Exactly. It's not a bank it's a software house.

Real Mad-quid: Murky cryptojacking menace that smacked Ronaldo site grows

Troy?

Something fishy going on here. First we have Troy Hunt and now Troy Mursch. Can this be coincidence? Troy is where trojans come from. I smell a horse.

Whatever the truth may be, if I ever become a security pundit I'm changing my name to Troy Who.

Frustrated Britons struggle to locate their packages: Royal Mail tracker smacked

The thing about programming is that, just like spelling, it's all about attention to detail.

Rosetta probe's final packets massaged into new snap of Comet 67P

You are very improbably right.

And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

Linode cloud users in Europe hit as Frankfurt DC falls to its knees

I'm not a Linode user but

VMs are available from $5 per month.

Get two in different locations and mirror them. Nothing fancy, rsync and DB replication will do the trick for most web application servers. It's really straight forward and a simple DNS change saves your cured pork belly.

We go one step further and place the mirrored servers not only in a different location, but with a different service provider.

The golden rule : there is no such thing as 100% data centre availability.

We went to Nadella's launch of Hit Refresh so you didn't have to

Re: Lords Cricket Ground?

Bit harsh old chap. Wrong side of bed this morning?

Alibaba beats Google for IaaS market share, with IBM out of sight

The next big thing

Massive Infrastructure as a Service or MIaaS

Sensitive client emails, usernames, passwords exposed in Deloitte hack

On the basis that being compromised is inevitable at some point for every organisation, the measure of effectiveness is whether there was a procedure in place for dealing with and mitigating the consequences, and how good that plan turns out to be. It seems that Deloitte have such a plan and time will tell how good it is.

All of that said, having an email admin account without 2fa seems to be a bit of a schoolboy error by any measure. We had a really good fire drill in place but neglected to fix the leaky gas pipes in the basement.

Equifax fooled again! Blundering credit biz directs hack attack victims to parody site

What I want to know is whether lenders are still consulting Equifax credit checks when extending credit to private individuals. The scale of technical incompetence at the company is clearly so huge that, breach or no breach, their credit scores cannot possibly be trusted. I suspect their credit scoring algorithm is something like :

int value = rnd.Next(10, 100);

or is that a bit too sophisticated?

Scientists produce a map marking water hotspots on the Moon

Hot and wet

... which is great if you're with a woman but ain't no good in the jungle (Robin Williams)

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

Re: Personally

Dilbert had it much more succinctly back in 2000

http://dilbert.com/strip/2000-02-24

Leaky S3 bucket sloshes deets of thousands with US security clearance

Thumb up for Thomas Fischer of Digital Guardian. Tiger Swan cannot blame Talent Pen. If Tiger Swan is using a third party then they need to establish clear security policies and audit the third party to ensure compliance.

Small biz breaks out pen, paper after Brit tax collectors' Digital Form Service goes down

1.3 billion!

At a rate of £50 per hour, 8 hour days and 240 working days a year I make that 13,885 person years. I can just never comprehend this kind of thing. How can anyone spend nearly 14 millennia of people's time delivering a tax system FFS?! Or have I got my maths horribly wrong?

Revealed: 779 cases of data misuse across 34 British police forces

And precisely how many involve a background check on the ex's new shag?

Security robot falls into pond after failing to spot stairs or water

See it's only the K5. The K9 has no such problems.

UK.gov embraces Oracle's cloud: Pragmatism or defeatism?

Exactly, with expensive apps consultants.

And what about completely bespoke third party integrations from legacy systems to banks, third party logistics companies etc... There will be no templates for these so they'll all need to be built from scratch, and because they are likely to be mission critical that will be a lengthy and expensive development and testing cycle.

So people moving to Oracle Cloud have to port all their legacy workloads. At the same time Oracle claim that their cloud eliminates the need for systems integration consultants. Now that is the biggest, slipperiest barrel of snake oil I've ever seen. And I'm a cloud fan.

Azure Stack's debut ends the easy ride for AWS, VMware and hyperconverged boxen

Re: A different battle

I've got this issue with my clients too, but I know for a fact that all of those who have safe harbour / data protection issues still send a lot of sensitive data around the world (think spreadsheets etc...) in unencrypted emails, and make use of sharing services such as Dropbox and GDrive for work related material. I know they shouldn't and you can tell them they shouldn't, but they still will. On premises hardware solves none of that.

€100 'typewriter' turns out to be €45,000 Enigma machine

Re: There is quite a bit of that floating around Eastern Europe

"bugger out" - like it. I think I'll add that to my vocab.

Reminds me of an Eastern European friend of mine, trying to impress upon me that he knew more than I gave him credit for. "You think I know fuck nothing, but I tell you I know fuck *all*". Legend.

Fasthosts' week to forget: 4-day virtual server summer bummer

Fasthosts - always pulling a fast one.

Do a Google News search for Fasthosts, and be amazed that anyone is still using them.

Cloud may be the future, but it ain't all sunshine and rainbows

Re: Cloud is not really about learning lessons though, is it?

When was cloud ever about cost savings?

Outsourcing of any sort is about turning capex into opex i.e. spreading the cost over time.

With cloud in particular it's also about scalability. If you are planning on growing fast you can start small at very low cost, with the costs only scaling as your business scales. When you're building on-prem infrastructure you have to predict the future to a much larger extent. If you think you're going to grow from a 1000 to 1000000 customers in 8 months, you need to build much of the infrastructure for that up front. And what if your predictions are wrong?

Doing cloud properly is never going to be about saving money.

Report estimates cost of disruption to GPS in UK would be £1bn per day

Galileo

Here's Theresa May's plan. It's a much better plan than she's had for pretty much everything else.

Very, very frightening me.

(Galileo) Galileo.

(Galileo) Galileo,

Galileo Figaro

Magnifico-o-o-o-o.

Don't touch that mail! London uni fears '0-day' used to cram network with ransomware

I got one with the same subject line but the link to the javascript is different. I'm not at a university, just a small business so this looks like it's broadcast rather than targeted.

Mind you, I would have thought that "Copy of K9b Form assessed by : James Eley-Gaunt" would pretty much flag this as suspicious in most intelligent people's minds. Eggheads my arse.

PC, Ethernet and tablet computer pioneer 'Chuck' Thacker passes

Re: Rest In Peace

I think I'm probably standing on his little toe, but even from there I can see for miles.

Specsavers embraces Azure and AWS, recoils at Oracle's 'wow' factor

Re: Interesting

Quite. And the poor sod who is going to have to pick up the pieces is probably the one who wanted to keep things in house all along. Bit like Farage securing the out vote and then buggering right off to let everyone else sort out the impending catastrophe.

Don't get me wrong, I don't thing cloud is actually the real risk here. Revolutionary rather than evolutionary change at scale is as we all know an excellent recipe for potential disaster. If I was on the board of Specsavers I wouldn't let anyone draw up the plan if they weren't going to be around when it's executed. Madness!

Boeing preps pilotless passenger flights – once it has solved the Sully problem, of course

Re: The industry is also facing a severe shortage of pilots

@Voland. I'm with you. Pilots are the single biggest cause of aviation disasters, accounting for half of all plane crashes. The fleshpots are the weakest link. They get hung over, tired, are easily confused and get disorientated in very bad weather (think Air France where the pilots flew the plane into the Atlantic without even knowing they were doing it).

The Scully events of this world are vanishingly rare. To set that event up as the minimum standard for autopilot abilities would be like setting it as the minimum standard for all human pilots, which would clearly be ridiculous. It was a heroic and brave event, but a very rare one.

Hand in your notice – by 2022 there'll be 350,000 cybersecurity vacancies

Re: £87,000+ ???

Ah but do you have the right skill set? Communicating risk to the board is an essential part of the job.

If the phrases "gotta have the right hashtags" and "security depends on removing the scourge of end-to-end encryption" do not sound right to you, and if "pen testing" for you does not involve vigorously scribbling with your BIC biro then you're never going to earn £87K I'm afraid.

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

Anyone who claims they can deliver five nines availability, even for discrete components let alone a complex web of hardware and software, is talking out of their arse. Five nines means you can have a maximum 0.864 second outage in any given 24 hour period. Of course you can start saying that the up time calculation should be done over a week, month or year but where do you stop - a decade? Up time stats only have real meaning over short periods.

So, hands up, who for any amount of money is going to guarantee less than 0.864 seconds of downtime over DC, comms, hardware, and 200 interdependent applications. And how do you even define what counts as "up"?

It's basically all finger in the air stuff.

ViaSat lofts world's most powerful communications satellite into orbit

To all space comms experts

I've set up a satellite dish for fixed domestic satellite Internet. It's a bit of a pig, to say the least, to get the alignment spot on and the signal can easily be disrupted by stupid things like leaves growing on a nearby tree.

My question then is how does a mobile terminal such as an individual sat-phone or an aircraft moving at several hundred miles per hour acquire and maintain a high bandwidth connection to either a geostationary or LEO satellite?

Edinburgh Uni email snafu tells students they won't be graduating

Email is a bit like KFC

Sometimes it's fingerlickin' good. Other times it's just ass wipin' bad.

The shit bit is things like this, spam, people still sending out messages with 500 recipients in the Cc field and then the people who still Reply All to that same message.

The great bit is it's the last bastion of the Internet as it should have been. SMTP for all its faults is a protocol to which all email services comply. I can get my email service from anyone, or run my own email server, or write and run my own mail server and still communicate with everyone else who is on email, irrespective of where they get their email service from. The tragedy of FB, Whatsapp, Snapchat etc... etc... is that they are walled gardens. There is only one Whatsapp service in the world, and it's proprietary. This goes against all the early promise of the Internet, back to the dark dark days of Compuserve and AOL.

'Odour' from AnalTech ramming leads to hazmat team callout

Fnar Fnar

Anyone who says that playground humour has become more prevalent since the 60s should talk to my colleague Buster Gonads who can testicle to the fact that no such trend is observable. In fact any such claims are unfeasibly large porkies. Just today I walked into a restaurant and asked the waitress for an opinion on toilet humour, and she gave me one. What more proof do you need?

Quick, better lock down that CISO role. Salaries have apparently hit €1m

Re: Eye-watering CIxO salaries mean absolutely nothing...

*Roughly* £633,000? That sounds quite specific to me.

Some kind of fookin' tape drive that must have bought! Or was it £500 for the tape drive and tapes plus £632,500 on backup rotation design consultancy and tape changing training.

Ransomware scum have already unleashed kill-switch-free WannaCry‬pt‪ variant

You could look at an event such as that of the last few days as the Internet's version of a wildfire. In the short run some damage is done but in the long run the fire's job is to clear out dead wood and enable the regrowth of a stronger, healthier ecosystem. Short term pain for long term gain.

The Co-Op Bank's online banking has gone TITSUP*

"We are looking to bring it back online as soon as possible"

There's a gaggle of techies sitting around with that slightly vertiginous / nauseous feeling in the pit of their stomachs, sweaty palms, and fingers trembling too much to type accurately at the command prompt ... all of them quietly mumbling "fuck fuck fuck oh fucking fuuuuuck" under their breaths. AKA the patch borked everything and the rollback isn't working.

IT error at Great Western Railway charging £10k for 63-mile journey ticket

Re: small city

Is it small? Or is it far away?

30,000 London gun owners hit by Met Police 'data breach'

Shit meet fan. Do your thing.

OpenStack: Pleeeeease stop panicking, Intel and Rackspace still love us

Re: The Cloud...

In this case, not necessarily.

OpenStack is designed to run public, private or hybrid virtualised server environments (aka clouds) so the computers may well be yours and may well be on your network.

A second point is that is that if I wanted to base some or even all of my infrastructure in the public cloud, I would much rather it was running in an open sourced virtualisation environment than a proprietary one, so the demise of OpenStack would be a significant loss to those who are serious about secure and reliable computing, and a significant gain to the proprietary vendors.

Gordon Ramsay's in-laws admit plot to hack sweary celeb chef's biz

Hell's bells! Ramsay's raunchy relative's robbing rollocking.

It's enough to put effin flames in your kitchen.

Crafty Fokker: Norfolk surgeon builds Red Baron triplane replica

Your coat is indeed required. Orthopaedics is muscles and bones. Orthodontics is teeth. Lucky he wasn't one of those Paedophilic surgeons they have in Portsmouth (https://goo.gl/8zunyy)

All of that said, we are all actually Xenophobes now it seems so he's finished his plane just in time to fly it back to Germany where he belongs! He is after all a prime example of yet another low skilled immigrant nicking our jobs and sucking our welfare system dry.

Goodbye, cruel world! NASA's Cassini preps for kamikaze Saturn dive

NASA engineers are currently conducting a final check on the list of commands that will maximize scientific returns during the kamikaze dive, before uploading the instructions to Cassini on April 11.

April 11th 2017 : "Cassini to NASA Engineers. Well you can fuck right off if you think I'm doing that. Cassini out"

Web-app devs note: Google wants to banish JavaScript dialogues

What about applications

In a browser based application there's often a genuine case to use a beforeunload confirm if for example the user has not saved some changed data.

Ex-broadband biz 186k hit by major outage

The obvious comment here is, why on earth is anyone still using any services delivered by 186K.

However email migrations in particular, which used to be a trivial task, are now a nightmare. First, email is used by most users as a storage system, resulting in multi-gigabyte mailboxes. Secondly, people now expect to sync their mail, contacts and calendars across multiple devices (phone, tablet, laptop) using ActiveSync, IMAP, CalDAV etc...

Moving even a single mailbox is a significant job, and the time and effort involved increases proportionately with the number of mailboxes. OK there are some automation tools you can deploy such as imapsync, but none of them are perfect and all need a lot of manual intervention.

In the light of this, maybe people don't move away from poor providers because they don't know where to start, and they can't afford to get someone in who does.

Microsoft beefs up Skype for Business as Amazon Chimes in

Heard in IT Support. "Office 365 is down again Bob. Odd that our phones aren't ringing off the hook with irate users. Well if they're not bothered I'll just finish my lunch and then call Microsoft. Oh ... wait ...."

Profitless Twitter starts rumour of paid-for Tweetdeck option

Re: Enough already!

I thought it was quite a good comment myself. Trump is famous for his outrageous tweets. Maybe top politicians (and Stephen Fry) should pay for a "licence to Tweet". Not such a bad idea when you think about it. Possibly anyone with over 100 followers should pay a fee. Or anyone who wants to send more the one tweet a month. Any of these would work for me.

Google Spanner in the NewSQL works?

Is it just me

or was most of this article complete gobbledegook? I kept having to reread sections which looked on the surface like they should have meaning, but even with rereading may just have well been a load of blahs.

Spammy Google Home spouts audio ads without warning – now throw yours in the trash

Re: Good way to lose customers

Probably a bit steep to say that all these lonely business executives are lesbians.