Posts by johnB

Northern Ireland government confirms it did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for project

Fujitsu: Just.Say.No.

That's it.

Canada OKs construction of first licensed teeny atomic reactor

Re: could power up to 1.2 million homes

As soon as I hear the weasel words "...x Million homes...", I ignore the rest as being merely PR flack.

Are they referring to homes heated by gas / coal / oil or electricity or heat pumps?

My gas usage is 6X my electricity (net of solar panel contribution), so what figure are the said PR flacks using? I'd hazard a guess at the most misleading.

And of course, North American houses have an electricity usage - both for heating & aircon - far different from that found elsewhere in the world (maybe Australia should be included here).

IBM boss Arvind Krishna pockets 23% pay rise to $25M

But not much pension?

Pension contributions seem trivial. Maybe in the "C" suite they don't really need to rely on a pension to see them through their golden years?

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

"We are excited"...

Typical corporate drivel.

They will be "loving" their customers next.

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

The delays are deliberate

OK, so it's anecdotal, but I've been told by an HMRC employee that if the phone waiting times get down to the 30 minutes level, they are taken off answering the phones in favour of clearing the backlogs of paper correspondence.

Digital Isle of Man: For all your connected tax haven needs?

Re: And also...

Please do.

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

No matter hw good the security, idiots will always bypass

At a meeting of a large government department in view of the Palace of Westminster (with armed police guards roaming the area), I left the meeting half way through as the remainder wasn't relevant to me.

I couldn't exit the building as the doors required a key card or similar. Cue flustered senior manglement type, "what are you doing?", to which I replied "I'm trying to leave the building"

I was informed I should have been escorted out, to which I said "I didn't know that!".

So he used his keycard to let me out. Didn't ask for any identification.

It rather seemed as if he didn't really understand what the measures were trying to achieve.

Extracting vendor promises won't fix cybersecurity. Extracting teeth might

It's more than safe coding

Safe, secure software should be a given and if vendors can't deliver, then it should be up to the law to convince them of the error of their ways.

But that's not enough. I think too little attention is given to the human <---> computer interface. Too often it's confusing / unclear just what the user has to do and pop-ups / splash screens don't help.

My particular beefs are:

1. The printer. Why on earth does it need updates? It works, it prints what I send to it (mostly) and the updates I'm forced to accept seem to do zilch. Unless of course I'm in the USA, where Epson seem to be hell bent on forcing me to accept an "update" that means I've got to by their moverpriced ink. (I did try to turn updates off, but Windows in it's wisdom ignored me.

2. My bank seem to think I'll enjoy seeing a different opening screen every time I go online. I have to plough through different adverts every time. Surely they could at least keep the opening screen consistent & relegate the ads to a sidebar or similar? Such iconsistency is I reckon a clear security risk

Japanese orgs now paying salaries direct into e-wallets

And?

So what's the advantage to the worker here?

Fujitsu wins spot on £600M framework after vowing to sit out public sector

No No No

They shouldn't be even getting sight of ANY public money until ALL the Post Office's victims have received FULL compensation.

(And even then I'd like to see some jail sentences as well before they get their snouts back into the trough).

UK health services call-handling vendor faces $7.7M fine over 2022 ransomware attack

Re: Justice to come?

Not only here - the travesty of the water companies paying fines from the bloated bill also comes to mind.

The only way to concentrate minds is for fines to be paid out of the directors remuneration before they get what's left over.

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

Re: I dropped Kaspersky when Trump’s buddy crossed into Ukraine

Byzantine certainly describes Kaspersky's unsubscribe process. Fortunately I'd changed credit cards so I managed to escape their clutches that way.

No way would I recommend or go back to using them. They fall squarely into my "scum" category"

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Ask the right question helps

I volunteer at the local library assisting mobile phone / tablet / laptop users with their many & varied issues.

During lockdown, I was asked to do a telephone session with an elderly lady who was having problems with her laptop.

The session went badly - nothing I suggested worked, the screens seemed all to pot, etc, etc. Eventually in desperation I asked her for the model name & number so I could look it up online. She was unable to do that as it was a hand-me-down machine from "the daughter". So I said when next the daughter sees her would she ask the daughter for the details & I'll see what I can do on the next scheduled call in a weeks time.

Next week arrived & I asked if she had the details of her laptop. Oh yes, daughter says its an iPad laptop...

UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation

Not all bad

But at least they were "carbon neutral", so an _important_ target was met

Academics probe Apple's privacy settings and get lost and confused

iTunes

Shudder

Capita says 2023 cyberattack costs a factor as it reports staggering £100M+ loss

Any content in there?

"...yet to deliver operational excellence...", "...create the right platform...", "...achieve out full potential...", "...Looking forwards...", "...leveraging our technology...".

I wonder how he talks to his wife? Or maybe he's run out of cliches by the time he gets home.

Microsoft's Notepad goes from simple text editor to Copilot conspirator

No No No

The whole point of Notepad as far as I'm concerned is that it's very, very simple.

No hidden formatting. Or anything else. What you see is what you get.

And it's great for stripping out unwanted formatting.

Keep it that way.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

It's payroll, for god's sake!

Payroll is just about the most basic business IT system you can get. It's been done "on the computer" since the 1960's.

How on earth did these jokers get something that simple wrong?

And would you now trust them to be able to do anything???

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Automatic "upgrades"?

Why does a printer need to upgrade it's software? It's not as if the alphabet's been reinvented.

Capita scores £239M contract to manage mega public sector pension scheme

AI????

What possible purpose - other than making their bid for the work sound "sexy" - is there in using AI for pension payments, for deities sake?

Pensions are about as simple as it gets: "Pay X the sum of £Y until he / she / it dies".

It's worked for many years without AI.

And it's Crapita. What possibly could go wrong?

Down and out: Barclays Bank takes unplanned digital detox, customers not invited

They don't want to listen

In Newcastle, Barclays closed three city centre branches & opened a new branch in the middle of the main (Nothumberland Street) shopping street.

The Market St branch, now a restaurant, had a couple of sandstone plaques about 60 X 60 cm that must have been there for many years, engraved with "Barclays & Co, Bankers" & the like.

I suggested to them that they might fit in well if they were installed in the lobby of the new branch - would show continuity, etc, etc.

They referred my comments to their complaints section, who never made the promised response.

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

Trolley Buses

Seeing the overhead cables reminded me of when, many years ago, Newcastle upon Tyne scrapped their trolley bus fleet for diesels.

The downside was smelly diesel.

The upside was that there was noticeably more light at ground level.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

Usual misleading PR

It's not the amount (at least here in the UK) of energy a house uses in a day, it's the amount of electricity it uses. The quote ignores space heating, which is more than that by a factor of about 4.

It's bad enough when media types, bless their innumerate selves, get confused, but in a technical setting this simply shouldn't happen.

Fujitsu admits it fluffed the fix for Japan’s flaky ID card scheme

Hmmm...Fujitsu

Haven’t I heard that name recently IRO a certain UK calamity (Yes, Post Office, I’m thinking of you).

This upstart is selling tickets for a SpaceX trip to the world's first private space station

Nothing to worry about

"Crypto currency billionaire"

NASA tweaks Voyager 2's power supply to avoid another sensor shutdown

Great Stuff

Just brilliant.

Hats off to the guys at NASA.

UK govt Matrix has unenviable task of consolidating several different ERP systems

Shared services - not an encouraging track record

Shared services have an appalling track record - does anyone remember the financial bloodbath in SW England ?

This seems to be a whole order (or two)

more complex.

I predict delays, cost overruns, only partial at best implementation.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

It's not all bad

I've spent years ranting about non-metric measurements.

But I've got to admit the American usage of cups in certain recipes is by far easier than using spoons, weigh scales & measurers.

Some recipes are actually more dependent on ratios, not volumes / weights.

e.g. my morning porridge (for two) is one cup of porridge (oatmeal) & two cups of semi-skimmed milk. No scales, etc & washing up simpler.

Otherwise, yup, systems other than metric are simply bonkers. (And far too error-prone).

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?