Posts by Mike Pellatt

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Solution for low salaries in gov IT

Haha

Hahahaha

You miss a crucial point in this. The desire will be to outsource management of the system, because reasons.

But the outsource suppliers will say "can't have that open source stuff, because there's no-one to sue if it all goes wrong". Because they don't actually want to take the risk that outsourcing is meant to transfer to them, but shift it somewhere else - and they don't understand that key part of the GPL - "if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces" - with the implied "so you can put it back together yourself"

Since I don't give a sierra-hotel-one-tango any more as I've retired and am now a stroppy parish council chair I can tell you all that I actually heard this from Cable & Wireless in the mid-noughties when a secure email system for local authorities was being looked at, and one of the district councils in Somerset, IIRC, had already developed one. C&W wouldn't consider taking it on and managing it for the sector for that very reason.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: Ouch

You were doing so well with that explanation until you used that awful phrase "reaches out"

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

VoIP phones generally provide dialtone from the ATA. Regardless of whether a SIP registration is active. Certainly the case for my Gigaset.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: I'm curious...

Oh God. You've reminded me of the Olivetti S6000. It was a rebadged version of some American kit. Microdata?

But then, as they did, Ivrea set some NCGs onto it. They produced a hard disk interface that ran over HP-IB/IEEE488. It sort of ran fine-ish. Until paged virtual memory was implemented in the O/S. That did for it.

Olivetti had a habit of setting poorly supervised NCGs on projects. This also produced an OS written in Pascal. That didn't end well either (it was binned in the UK, and the previous gen of OS run on the new hardware. Thus was the Abbey National contract, and quite a few others, gained)

Level-10 vuln lurking in Redis source code for 13 years could allow remote code execution

Garbage collection. Again.

Oh look. Another vuln from a language/system that uses garbage collection.

I've got a novel idea. Keep track of the memory you're allocating, free it when you don't need it any more. Relying on some underlying runtime monitoring isn't the way to do that.

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

Re: Added value

In which case it wasn't F/OSS in the first place.

Re: Added value

Yeah, I've seen that attitude. I bet they don't ensure a bulletproof escrow agreement for the code they're licensing, in which case the value of the support contract/SLA and indemnity they think they're getting is precisely zero.

DDoS is the neglected cybercrime that's getting bigger. Let's kill it off

Re: Effective defense against DDoS ..

> You can't sell a device without an electrical safety cert or a RF compliance cert.

OK. You carry on believing that those regulations are adequately enforced.

Microsoft puts the squeeze on onmicrosoft.com freeloaders

Re: Thank you

I first came across onmicrosoft.com when taking over the admin of an existing 365 account.

My first thought was "why?" It feels like a left-over artefact from the early development phase of 365.

That's probably exactly what it is.

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Come back when there are personal electronic devices available that are usable by people with any disability or cognitive impairment that exists.

Until then, take your your ableism and ageism and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine.

Oh, not forgetting the homeless who'll have a little bit of difficulty finding a power source.

A bit of kindness towards people who struggle wouldn't go amiss.

In wake of Horizon scandal, forensics prof says digital evidence is a minefield

Re: This one of the few use cases for blockchain

I'm completely out of touch with the latest iterations of blockchain technology, but isn't there some issue with exponential increase in computation as you add to the chain? If so, tends to make its use for log/audit immutability proof a tad tricky.

Microsoft blames 'latent code issue' after Windows 11 upgrades sneak past admin blockades

That's the inevitable consequence of bell-curve driven hire-and-fire.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Re: rare occasion

What Openreach call a CBT - Connectorised Block Terminal. I think they're the same thing, just given different names by different manufacturers/operators/geographies.

Re: rare occasion

Oh yes, I'm 100% sure.

I used to work for for said altnet.

Re: Hole reuse

"If Carlsberg did roadworks...", perhaps?

Whereas today with the private sector doing it all, I've been waiting, let me see, 7 years for fibre. And still no sign.

The private sector keeps refusing to do it unless they gets shedloads of taxpayer money, and even then can't be arsed to actually deliver.

And even then, once they've done it, they have to pay back some of it because it turns out more people sign up than they thought (see BDUK phase 1 gainshare - yes I know that was FTTC)

Re: rare occasion

Just got to look up on the poles here. Not just abandoned fibre, but MSTs too, all around the place too.

Yep, it's an altnet that ran away.

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

Re: But why tho?

This. However much you try and bend one system to look and behave like another, there will always be stiff bits that won't bend.

Embrace it, run with what you have, changing how you work when swapping systems helps keep the brain active.

And what is this "text editor" for MacOS of which the author speaks? What's wrong with vi in the command window?. Works for me.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: Enslave humanity?

You've made the classic mistake of misunderstanding Democracy there.

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people"

If the outcome of a particular version of government claiming to be a democracy isn't the net benefit of the people (and that doesn't mean "a majority of the people") then it's demonstrably not a democracy.

Not by that definition, anyways. Of course, even the Greeks had ways of redefining democracy, by excluding some people from their definition of "the people"

Re: In any unstable system with a feedback loop.....wild output swings

But, as the parent comment says, the work involved in verification is effectively unbounded, thereby rendering AI useless.

With you on the GIGO bit though - I've been saying for some considerable time now that AI will be a demonstration of GIGO on a global scale. And, boy, does the internet have a s**tload of garbage available for AI training.

What we see here is a demonstration that garbage in can create garbage out elsewhere in the system where non-garbage has been inputted.

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

Re: All Live Operational Virtual Environment Systems are Go.

Have you seen Micah HG on Facebook?

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Wrong - digital businesses will be digital

"What is overlooked in all of this is that when working from home the employee needs to have an appropriate environment to work in.

Offices pretty much guaranteed that"

Oh, don't make me laugh. Every office I've worked in over the last 15 years had air handling that provided hot spots and cold spots. In modern builds and refurbs. So half the people on the floor wanted the temperature up and half wanted it down.

If that fundamental isn't right, you can forget all the rest that you list.

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

It all started that fateful day in 2016. I was on the riverboat on the way to Canary Wharf the morning after. It felt exactly as you describe.

Whilst Crossrail was ridiculously late, and ridiculously over-budget, thanks to being run as a load of projects, rather than a programme, it's exceeded all expectations in terms of usage. Even with the crap infrastructure west of Padders. So that's success on 1 out of 3 of your criteria :-)

Re: Britons: is the detection of potholes the problem, or the fixing of them?

People say the same about driving into Devon from Dorset.

But then Devon CC are quite open that they're only doing safety-critical road repairs. Which means only potholes that have been reported by the public and meet their "safety-critical" criteria - >40mm deep, and "the size of a dinner plate" across.

I've got news for you. It's not being built now. Well, no enough of it to be actually of much use. So freight, stopping and city-city trains will carry on sharing the same track. Except between the midlands and London. Which is not a lot of use

Re: Britons: is the detection of potholes the problem, or the fixing of them?

You mean they come along, throw some blacktop over it, roll it once or twice (maybe) and then run away. Like they do for every other pothole.

This is what happens when politicians and political parties promise increasingly undeliverable stuff to get elected.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Re: This is certainly on brand for Matt

Indeed. I can't remember when it was that the hosted wordpress.com came to life, but I seem to remember thinking at the time that it all seemed a bit shitty. It seemed like an attempt to get do a bait and switch to get people off the free (as in speech) WordPress and into something that was being proprietised. Can't remember what it was about it that made me think that, though.

UK gives Openreach £289M for 4 rural broadband contracts in 'gigabit by 2030' push

Re: wouldn't call him an expert more a blog writer / press release regurgitator

Unlike all those "trade journals" which do exactly what you say, Mark regularly pulls apart press releases, drills down into the detail to find out what's really going on, and calls out, sorry, "seeks clarification" on the bullshit. You do him a disservice.

Yeah, there are a lot of BT shills in the comments. Such is life. He's recently started moderating comments, so I guess the more extreme are getting mod'ed out now. Or maybe just the spam and abuse.

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Time to produce the audit trail

Something else that wouldn't have occurred without Sir Alan Bates standing his ground

Severity of the risk facing the UK is widely underestimated, NCSC annual review warns

Re: Stop calling them 'actors'.

Check your dictionary. The word has two meanings. This one is the one in use here, and entirely correct and appropriate:

"a participant in an action or process" (OED)

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Re: No real statistics

That's the problem with getting "smart" marketing people to sell a technological development.

It was the same with HS2, they banged on about the speed and ludicrous cost savings for execs who'd have their chauffeur driving them anyways, when the real issue it needed (and was designed) to resolve was overall capacity (mixing freight, frequent stoppers and non-stoppers on the same tracks crucifies capacity, even if you put in loops)

It's dynamic pricing and the ability to shift load that's the benefit of smart metering. Trouble is, that needs the user to invest in automation. A solar/battery system that your energy supplier manages, like Octopus Intelligent Flux, and the real benefits of home solar and distributed generation/storage start to be gained. If you don't trust 'em, get your home automation to manage it instead.

Re: £13bn that could have been spent on something useful.

You couldn't have built all those powerlines without the good residents of Norfolk coming out with the torches & pitchforks.

Re: Turn it off

You can easily work around the last disbenefit with, ahem. judicious use of Home Assistant.

Plenty of opportunity for alibi creation. Even automatically.

Crapita are, unsurprisingly, unfit to run the DCC.

I have 2 meters installed, about 100m apart, neither LoS to a Telefonica cell site (this is the Soith area obvs). Both have T2 antennae.

One commissioned on the second attempt (once I'd seen the WAN light reliably indicating connectivity).

There have been 3 attempts at the other one, I thought I'd got a commitment to put a T3 antenna on it, but DCC decided nope because "my address doesn't have coverage". All attempts to plead that their coverage modelling is clearly wrong as I have a functional meter fall on deaf ears.

I have not route for redress as I don't have a direct relationship with the DCC and the Ombudsman can only seek a remedy from the energy retailer, who cannot influence the DCC either.

Clearly not only Crapita but also the contractual arrangements aren't fit for purpose.

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: ARM train wreck is much worse

It's not a worse train wreck, it's a different one.

As the guy said, for him as an application dev, ARM is heaven compared with x86.

He explicitly said that for the OS guys (at least for system init/boot), x86 is heaven compared with ARM.

Re: x86 Train Wreck

You've skipped the #ifdef hell that has also doubtless resulted.

Re: x86 Train Wreck

Unimplemented instruction traps going off to software implementations can have interesting side-effects.

First, an aside. The actual O/S calls on Dec10 (if not earlier) were implemented via UUOs. Bu I digress.

In the late 70's/early 80's, the research group I worked for started their Dec10 replacement plan. Put in a VAX 11/780 with the Floating Point hardware. Soon after it was installed, I left.

Then it was time for another system. Was it to be a VAX or an IBM? Now, Rutherford Lab having an IBM was quite the draw in that direction as it made data exchange easier, FP formats not being quite standardised as yet. So, benchmarks were run (you know where this is going now, don't you?)

The IBM 370/whatever that was being contemplated won, so it was ordered. Some time (months??) later during maintenance, it was discovered that the VAX FP unit wasn't functioning, and the FP instruction set was being transparently emulated. Fixed it, the VAX now out-performed the IBM. Red faces all round.......

Re: 16/32 bit

As long as its time_t has been fixed.

Re: "We also have a 128-bits wide operating system READY TO GO"

No need to, apparently.

You just 3D print it at home and clock the thing at 10THz.

Nurse, nurse. Over there!! Quickly!

Post Office seeks more Horizon support as it continues hunt for replacement

If recent evidence to the inquiry is to be believed (!!!), POL thinks it can get the assets (including the IPR) running Horizon off Fujitsu and contract someone else to do it

This further demonstrates the top-class management I place there.

That's because his sole goal was to crawl out from under the bus Vennells threw him under and throw some others under it.

Well, that and it seems like it's the only speaking orifice he posseses.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: Follow the money

Whilst describing a task as a "Simple Matter Of Programming" is generally, correctly, taken to be ironic, in the case of certificate generation and installation it is.

Generally.

I'll make an exception for the Java certificate store.

Re: Follow the money

OCSP is being deprecated, thanks to well-documented privacy issues.

CRL lists are hard to trust and potentially a major performance hit.

Reducing cert lifespan is, probably, the only mitigation possible for what is, at its core, a broken infrastructure.

Re: Follow the money

If you're paying money for each certificate regeneration, you're using the wrong certificate supplier.

Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal

At that point,, he might actually understand the difference between a civil case and a criminal one.

Just like Crapita, that's impossible to achieve in anything less than 5-10 years. Minimum. Their tentacles are far too deep into the UK's critical infrastructure.

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Re: A solution to a problem that didn't exist

The tinfoil hat brigade is strong here given the downvote on that.

The speed with which load shedding is required, once it is, means that doing it via the smart meter network rather than at the substations would not, you know, actually stop the grid crashing.

Re: £5 a month saving

was about to downvote until you got to the last sentence.

Can't disagree with that.