Posts by johnB

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Not quite the same but...

We had the same nonsense at a largish govenrnent office - record arrival & departure by completing a register.

Of course Fred never did that when popping out for 10 minutes to get his morning bacon sandwich. So as long as the fire took place outside the 10 minutes the system would work. Otherwise we'd be sending firefighters into a burning building to look for a member of staff who standing outside eating said sandwich watching the activity.

Fortunately the system quickly got forgotten.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Been there, done that

Or in simpler terms: no good deed goes unpunished.

Go straight to sell! Windows second-chance setup hawks Microsoft services at IT's expense

Many thanks to the author

I was not only puzzled by this, but was also a little concerned in case I'd upset the precocious beast that is W11.

Watch out UK taxpayers: 28,000 HMRC staffers just got an AI copilot

Saves time?

Usually staff are asked to:

A: tick how much time the latest "innovation" has saved them (takes a couple of seconds, then they can get on with their work);

OR

B: Write a report explaining in detail why it doesn't do what it says on the tin.

Unsurprisingly, most choose A.

Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it

Re: Expiry dates

Agree 100% - just about all webpages would benefit from a date of issue and also a "best before"

Using the password 'admin123' wasn't as bad as sharing it on Slack

Convieence or death ?

Outfit I used to work for (large UK government department, handling sensitive personal information) had a very locked down system: access to individual "customer" records only from nominated terminal in specified location & only to staff authorised to use said terminal. Repayments had additional layers added.

Then "efficiency" & "flexibility" took over. Now any staff, anywhere, can see anybodys record. And staff are now being sacked by the score for unauthorised accesses.

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

The direct approach

At my old office, we were "upgraded" to a "modern" system that left every floor cold.

Except one, which was toasty.

After much investigation /arm twisting I ascertained the early starter, as a first job of the day, put a bag of ice cubes from the freezer onto the thermostat. Job sorted!

Minnesota State payroll problems grew after Workday launch, auditors say

Wrong pay

Payroll - about the most basic & long-running computer application.

If they can't get that right, why would anybody trust them with anything else?

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

Accenture + AI

Sobs uncontrollably....

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Ummm...

Wouldn't it be cheaper & more effective to train actual humans in COBOL?

You know, an actual training programme for staff rather than buying the latest vendor shiny shiny?

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

Accenture + AI = <shudder>

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

Re: Wrong

Upvote for coidiot!

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Re: Ah yes, 6-Sigma.

(Return of horrible memories) - the time wasted ploughing through all the ISO9000 junk that it was obvious would just get filed & never see the light of day again.

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

An interesting side effect

An interesting side effect of the 1957 Windscale / Sellafield leak was that an amateur inventor in Southern England was having difficulty calibrating his latest device. Unknown to him, he'd detected the leak.

The inventor was, of course, James Lovelock, who subsequently went on to develop the GAIA hypothesis.

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

It's the same database

Decades ago, tax info was loaded onto the NI database. So the data forms part of the SAME record.

Government efficiency - tautology.

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

powering homes

As commonly used in press releases, presumably for it's lack of meaning.

A house with gas heating?

A house with electric heating?

A house with a heat pump?

A house with an electric car or two?

Typical flack.

UK tax collector falls short on digital efficiency, watchdog says

HMRC - efficiency

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Accenture / NIRS2 / shudder

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

jujitsu...again

I see from the above link that Fujitsu are listed as using OS/2.

Hmm....

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Re: Mosquito laser zapper

Simon Reeve did a programme recently where a Norwegian salmon farmer had underwater lasers targetting lice on the fish in the farm.

It seemed to work & I'd have thought water would be more difficult than air to operate a laser effectively.

It'll be interesting to see the results for the mosquito laser zapper.

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

Beaurocracy, beaurocracy

As any organisation grows, it slowly gets suffocated by beaurocracy. And as followers of the documentary "Yes, Minister" are all too aware, a beaurocrats sucess is measured not by results, but by budget (or headcount if in the public services).

Whether there's any actual productive work to be done is largely irrelevant. Finding something to do to fill in the long empty hours pretending to work is as close as many get to "creativity" in their day to day activities.

AI has come to the rescue of many!

JetBrains previews Kineto for vibe no-coding

No coding experience needed

Quote: "JetBrains claims that no existing platform "allows people with no coding experience to build a ready-to-use app and actually enjoy the process of building it."

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa

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!