Posts by johnB

China outlines plan for National Integrated Government Affairs Big Data System

What could possibly go wrong?

Enormous government project / combine different databases devised for different purposes / very ambitious time scale / unclear objectives.

The Chinese are learning from the West - on how not to do things!

Binance robbed of $600 million in crypto-tokens

Cryptocurrency...Cayman Islands...blockchain......What could possibly go wrong ?

DoJ charges pair over China-linked attempt to build semi-autonomous crypto haven on nuked Pacific atoll

Headline

Best for a some time. In the best El Reg tradition.

WhatsApp boss says no to AI filters policing encrypted chat

Abbreviation

Why is it "EE2E"?

Surely "End to End Encryption" should be "E2EE"?

My Big Coin founder is – you guessed it – a $6m crypto-fraudster

Crypto currency - Eh?

Every time I read about crypto currency I get more baffled.

Why would I (or anyone else) want to part with real money for an IOU, whether paper or "digital", from someone I don't know, can't find, and have no means of trusting? All I can do with the crypto is swap it for other crypto or hope it's still got some value when I want to change it back to usable currency.

The only use I can see is for nefarious purposes - and even then I'm not so sure. I'd hazard a guess that all the cryptos are under quite close inspection by law enforcement authorities & tax agencies. Surely as soon a swap of real money is made some red flags are set? Especially if our friend blockchain is involved.

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

In the UK we have the DVLA

Which makes any Frog bureaucracy look easy-peasy to deal with.

Just try to SORN / tax a car after death & before probate.

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

Re: @Spaceman9Blue Passports

Nope - my new passport is black

IBM looked to reinvigorate its 'dated maternal workforce'

Compare with Accenture?

Accenture - not an outfit I'd choose for any comparative purposes.

(I've worked with them).

Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes

It's' MY printer

If I want to put in cheap cartridges that don't give as good output as the mfr's, well that's my business.

But in fact I put in cheap cartridges that give better output than Epson's at about 10% of the cost.

Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line

Floats into the sky

Great plane for passengers - it just seems to float into the sky from takeoff. Amazing given it’s huge bulk. I seem to recall the wingtips rise by something like 2 (or is it 4 ?) metres by the time it takes off.

I look forwards to reflying it once this pandemic is past. (Emirates to Dubai means I don’t have to use Heathrow - a holiday bonus in itself).

Facebook locks out 1,500 fake accounts used by cyber-spy firms to snoop on people, alerts 50k potential targets

Facebook

Just. Say. No.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Swiss cheese

Seems to me to be a typical swiss cheese error:

* IT didn't delete her access at the right time - unclear why

* Aggrieved (ex-)employee

* Ex-employee decides to abuse IT's error / oversight

What's interesting to me is why she was able to delete stuff. As has been said, the data IS effectively the credit union & should be more or less impossible to delete, if for no other reason than compliance with corporate reporting, taxes, etc. Surely deleting critical data shouldn't be an option for someone apparently fairly low down on the food chain?

Alternatively, $10K is peanuts to most companies, esp in the financial sector, so maybe it was deemed an acceptable risk of doing business?

Android banking malware sharply increased in the first chunk of 2021, reckons ESET

How many Android devices are secure in any case?

As updates for Android only run for a couple pf years I'd guess most Androids are insecure by virtue of running an out-of-date OS.

So running a banking app on Android seems a dubious practice at best. Even if the OS is currently up to date, it'll probably be no longer so by the time the device is disposed of.

Accenture dares to enter site of US Air Force mega ERP-project disaster

Have I worked on a system developed by Accenture? Yes.

Would I ever give them a penny of my money? No.

Rocket Lab deploys Photon, er, in-house built satellite on Flight 14

3.6 million pounds of thrust

I thought NASA were supposedly metric now?

Careful now, UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts

Power of Attorney

I sold a property as executor & the solicitor was content to sign on my behalf. However, she did know the family both professionally & personally, so maybe that made a difference.

In the case here, the email shown doesn't seem to carry any of the regular caveats, e.g. "E&OE", "this is an offer","final terms to be agreed",etc, etc, so possibly that influenced the judges thinking.

Whatever, I think this needs to be considered on appeal by a higher court so some clarity based on precedence can be established.

You know what the NHS really needs? Influencers, right guys? #blessed

£6,400,000 !

They were robbed.

This is one of the worst public IT sites I've ever come across.

Heathrow Airport drops £50m on CT scanners to help smooth passage through security checks

Lipstick on a pig

It's still Heathrow. It's a dump. I've vowed never to use it again.

UK libraries dumped 11% of computers since 2010-11... everybody has one anyway, right?

What support?

"While 98 per cent of Universal Credit claimants make their claim online there is support for people who need extra help. Staff are on hand to help people to claim and we can give support over the phone or through a home visit where needed." ®

Not up here in the NE of England it isn't. Every week we get new UC claimants without IT skills referred to us by the JobCentre. The dialog seems to be:

"Fill in this 28 screen UC application & we'll consider your claim";

"But I don't have a computer & have never used one";

"Go to the library, they'll sort you out. In the meantime until the claim is completed & approved there's a food bank you might want to visit".

UK Ministry of Justice: Surprise! We tested out biometric tech in prisons and 'visitors' with drugs up their bums ran away

Re: Wales

Make that 11 !

Facebook names former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg head of global affairs

Snout, meet trough...

Google can't innovate anymore, exiting programmer laments

My problem with Google

Is that I just can't rely on them to support their offerings.

For example, I used to find both My Tracks & Picasa simple, easy to use & useful. Google's dropped both. Finding suitable replacements has been a bit of a pain (and so far unsuccessful as far as Picasa's concerned).

They have the appearance of being a company long past it's innovative / growth stage & one now simply concentrating on protecting their market & profits. The story about their massive lobbying endeavours supports this. As is the way with most big US corporations, profits (i.e. bonuses) first, the long-term to be looked after by the next wonderkid brought in to save the sinking ship - Kodak anyone?

White House plan to nuke social security numbers is backed by Equifax's ex-top boss

NINO checksummed ?

Not to my knowledge.

Staff at NI HQ always denied to me when I worked there that there was any such checksum. Not surprising for a system devised in the 1940's, long before computers. The first two (alpha) characters can give some indication of age, but that's more or less it, as far as I'm aware.

(VAT numbers are, however).

Yahoo! says! hackers! stole! ONE! BEELLION! user! accounts!

Could be worse

Could have a Yahoo account & Talk Talk as your ISP.

Microsoft joins battery-saving browser bandwagon with Edge claims

It would take more than a marginal claimed increase in battery life to get me to use Edge.

A UK digital driving licence: What could possibly go wrong?

Trust DVLA?

When my step mother died, I had the choice of re-taxing the car or "SORN-ing" it. Neither of which I could do as I wasn't the owner.

After long calls with DVLA I was told to just forge a signature.

And then of course there's the scam where they make you pay an extra month's tax when you trade in your car.

DVLA - wouldn't trust them to get the time of day right.

'Legacy' Wordpress blog site of The Independent serving malware

Flash ? Security problem ?

Move along, nothing to see here...

Brazil reverting to paper votes amid budget crisis

Yes,

Electronic may be easier to count, but for me doesn't meet the bill of being easily understandable, nor do I trust it.

Paper - a big pile of easily-examined votes for candidate "A" can be compared against the pile of votes for candidate "B", by any ordinary person.

Electronic needs intermediaries to examine the data & compile the results, with the non-expert being unlikely to be able to detect. And, given the pass of a few years, both the hardware & software are likely to be obsolete (think punched cards), effectively meaning analysis by later generations is difficult if not impossible.

Engaged to be worried – Verify borks married tax allowance applications

HMRC Telephone

I can only hope the poor sods that have to use the telephone won't have to wait the 50 mins it took HMRC to answer my call last week.

Adobe lifts sheet on Dropbox-style doc sharing cloud

Why would anyone

After vowing never to let anything from Adobe onto any machine I was going to use ever again I switched from Adobe to Foxit some years ago. Life just got better.

Then my local public library forced me to use an Adobe product to read their on-line offerings. They haven't got any better.

No way I'd voluntarily sign up for anything from this outfit.

The voters hate Google. Heeeeyyyy... how about a 'Google Tax'?

Who benefits?

One point which tends to get overlooked in these discussions is just what is the overall effect of a Corporation Tax (at least as it works in the UK).

If megacorp makes a profit of (say) £/$/€1M, then it pays tax on those profits (not it's turnover, as some politicians would seek to imply. We use VAT to tax turnover.) at whatever rate it's home country charges.

If Corporation Tax didn't exist, then the same profits would still be taxed, only as dividend income in the hands of shareholders

So the net effect of a Corporation Tax is to bring more tax into the coffers of the "home" country, at the expense of shareholders - both domestic & foreign - who have less profits distributed to them. Nothing to do with "fairness", just a pre-emptive tax grab by the local government.

Orion: To Mars, the Moon and beyond... but first, a test flight through Van Allen belt

Re: Why a heat shield?

Thanks folks - all a bit clearer now.

Why a heat shield?

As one who watched Neil Armstrong make his "one small step...", what I've never figured out or had explained to me is just why we need the heat shield at all. Surely the craft could just spend longer gliding to earth?

Any commentards able to indicate just why or where I can find the answer appreciated.

USB coding anarchy: Consider all sticks licked

Hidden partitions

I used a thumb drive for years and then when I plugged it into a Linux box I found a hidden partition with executables (and couldn't access the Windows partition).

So even after formatting a new drive, I reckon it's not possible to be secure knowing a drive is "clean". And this was from a known brand name, supplying UK gov't.

All a bit scary.

UK.gov set to burn £500m on one-dole-to-rule-em-all IT, claims PAC chair

Mission creep - big government

The middle / senior realms of the civil service are not where I'd look to find people with the skills to oversee such a project (I speak as one who was given a performance bonus for being the only member of the team able to apply a filter to an Excel spreadsheet).

In my experience of a (different) large civil service project, the aims & objectives were under constant review / adjustment, and consultants were able to utilise this lack of precision to pad the project out, giving every input from senior management an answer in the form of "yes, we can do that". Without, of course spelling out the costs & delays inherent. Needless to say, the deadline dates were wildly overshot.

Systems guru John Seddon of the Vanguard Method predicted this likely outcome when the project got underway in 2010, and, sadly but apparently inevitably, he seems to have been proven correct. (In brief, Seddon suggested the system be decentralised to local government and added to the Housing Benefit scheme they run, as they already held all the relevant data. It would have been up & running within a year, but not under the direct control of Whitehall).

Just don't blame Bono! Apple iTunes music sales PLUMMET

ITunes?

Maybe the sheer unpleasantness of iTunes on the PC might be a contributory factor ?

Are there sounds on Mars? NASA launches audio athenaeum

Re: grrr...

A truly horrible website

Facebook pays INFINITELY MORE UK corp tax than in 2012

Don't lump them all in the same basket

One point that tends to get overlooked is that AFAIK Starbucks and other outfits are predominately franchise operations.

So mostly they are local businesses who can't escape paying the panoply of PAYE, NIC, VAT, Business rates, and Corporation Tax. They also pay royalties to the multinational for the use of the name and to receive marketing support, and it's those royalties we're talking about when we excoriate the megacorp for not paying taxes here. The local guy is just a businessman trying to earn a crust, so don't boycott him / her (and no, I've no connection to any franchise operators).

Smart meters in UK homes will only save folks a lousy £26 a year

Irrelevant

Don't want one, don't need one, won't use one.

World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs

Not only on planes

According to my Dad, he served in WW2 on a Motor Torpedo Boat which was Merlin-powered.

So the Merlin was more than "just" an aeroplane engine.

HP, Microsoft prove it again: Big Business doesn't create jobs

Re: Jobs?

A few years ago I was involved in analysing employment figures & concluded that the average company in the UK has about 12 employees. (The actual average was 15, but that included leavers, so 12 seemed about right).

Banning handheld phone use by drivers had NO effect on accident rate - study

Re: Only Lab-based tests?

But it's the safe 90 mph which will get you a speeding ticket in Blighty.

Tell us we're all doomed, MPs beg climate scientists

Re: Just wait

Apologies to both Clarke and Plank - I was so convinced it was a Clarke-ism I didn't check. Maybe the version I quoted was Clarke's succinct paraphrasing?

Just wait

Scientists whose living depends on the government dole agree with the line the politicos want, which of course keeps them in a job.

According to the sage Arthur C Clarke, when asked what causes changes in science, "Old men die". We'll just have to wait & hope they don't do anything too daft before a more rational set take over.

Me, I want them on the "B" Ark.

MPs: Ancient UK Border Force systems let gangsters into country

Overstaffed

I've just had the "pleasure" this morning of experiencing the Border Force in (in)action.

Four checkouts, only two staffed, for 600 ferry passengers. But they did have a chappie pointing out to us which of the two checkouts to use. Obviously I'm missing something when I go to the supermarket & have to choose a checkout all by myself. A complete waste of taxpayers money.

The guy isn't even there as a security backup - the five plods at the back of the hall doing nothing but chat amongst themselves were more than enough for that.

First the Yanks, now us: In-flight mobe use WON'T kill us all, say Eurocrats

On more than expected

Usually the instruction to turn off the device is after bags have been stowed, seat belts fastened, the safety drill being demonstrated, & the plane toddling it's way to take off. Virtually no-one at that stage will disrupt everything to unstow hand baggage to turn off their phone if it's in the hand baggage.

I reckon most flights take off with many devices in full working mode.

Microsoft needs to keep visible under waves of Blue

Blue ?

When I hear "blue" in an IT context the association I have is with "Big Blue", i.e. IBM. MS isn't "blue", it's "Azure", surely ?

It'll be interesting to see how MS holds on to it's revenue stream. My view is that they'll hold onto the business customers for Windows / Office in a single word: Excel. Every business outfit I know has lots of stuff on Excel that's been around donkeys. No one really knows how it does what it does & no one in their right mind would risk their job by suggesting an alternative. It's easier, cheaper & less livelihood threatening simply to pay MS's rental fees. The overwhelming majority of users neither know nor care what OS / software they're using, they just want it to work the way it did last week & no changes, thank you very much. That's a heavy inertial load in favour of MS in business for the foreseeable future.

Outside of business, there doesn't seem to be much reason to pay MS's increasingly hiked-up charges. XP still works just fine, & MS are asking £190 for W8, way more than Apple ask for OSX. Old versions of Office also work just fine & the latest versions (home & student) have had their price hacked up from £80 for 3 licences to £109 for a single licence. Unless you need or are required to use Office then Google's "Drive", at a purchase cost of zero, and a maintenance cost also of zero, seem very attractive. And, being cloud-based, it's got automatic backup built in, which means you don't need to wrestle with Windows Backup. Or as is often suggested Libre / Open Office might be worth looking at (can't say I was too enamoured of it myself when last I tried it, but that was some time ago).

I reckon that for the first time for years MS have a real fight on their hands. It'll be interesting to see how, or if, they can effectively respond.

YouTube's hilarious cat videos could soon cost you $5 a month

Who Pays?

Surely it should be the originators of most of the dross on You Tube who should pay for foisting the stuff on us???

Google files patent for eyewear that SHOOTS LASERS

Re: Sod that, wake me up when........

Can't see many sales for a device that shone lasers into the eye. Bit of a tricky thing to sell?

LOHAN slips BRA over BOOBIES in ballocket backronym buffoonery

HARRIS TWEED

High

Altitude

Rocket

Release

Ignition

System

To

Watch over

Electronic

Events in

Deep space