Or now.
Posts by Jim Whitaker
163 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2013
Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery
Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout
World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads
NASA's satellite pit stop project runs out of gas
Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit
Re: They'll reap what they sow
"Didn't watch "Good Omens" until it came out on (discounted) dvd - I really liked the casting but still preferred the book."
I normally have a belief that the film version of a book is worse than the book. Worse, often much, much worse. Good Omens is, for me, an exception to that rule. Indeed I just started last night on about the third watching on Prime.
When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster
Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts
'Exemplar' digital hospitals trust hit by multiple tech-related traumas
"NHS administrators tend to regard electronic records as supporting the NHS internal market and a source of lucrative data that can be commercially exploited. Concern about patient wellbeing is well down the list"
Speaking as an ex-NHS (interim) manager, I think you do us a disservice by assuming that approach. What I saw in colleagues would not support in any way your assessment.
FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet
Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway
Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing
Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users
You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused
IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups
Rhysida ransomware gang: We attacked the British Library
They get kept for as long as is necessary. The method of having a "trusted" person in your organisation have sight of the relevant documents and for them then to record "conditions met" is attractive. Attractive, that is, until the relevant law enforcement bodies rock up on your doorstep and start asking difficult questions.
Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits
It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs
Vanishing power feeds, UPS batteries, failover fails... Cloudflare explains that two-day outage
Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off
Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
Data Protection breach?
I would have thought that anyone of the trainees who felt that they had been disadvantaged by this shambles might have a case to bring under the Data Protection legislation. Mind you given how NHS management (especially clinicians in management roles) treat those who point out errors, perhaps trainees eventually with a job will judge it better to keep schtum.
UK procurement is too glacial to bring AI into defense, MPs told
Old story
Where have these people been for the last 50+ years? (I can only speak for my experience; I suspect the problem goes back much further.) I worked (as a Naval officer) in a part of the MoD Procurement outfit in 1973-ish. The headline message of this article was crystal clear even then. I suspect that part of this is inherent in the nature of the activity. On the other hand, think of those activities which have been created or driven as a result of military needs (and funding). Also bear in mind how quickly some things can move when and "Urgent Operational Requirement" arises.
95% of NFTs now totally worthless, say researchers
BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year
If anyone finds an $80M F-35 stealth fighter, please call the Pentagon
Google Chrome pushes ahead with targeted ads based on your browser history
Southern Water to drink up tech deals worth up to £358M
Silicon Valley billionaires secretly buy up land for new California city
Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds
Pretty tough comments but what about the companies?
Most of the comments so far are pretty tough on the perpetrators and I get that. I too am not comfortable with a mental condition leaving someone free to re-offend. However, I think the elephant in the room is the lack of condemnation of the various companies for the incompetence shown by their IT teams. If they had not made it possible for these two to roam through their systems, then there would have been no (serious) crime committed. Pretty unimpressive.
ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance
"The technical community is not part of civil society and it has never been,"
Of course technicians should have an input to the governance and discussions but do we really want anyone who will say that they are not part of "civil society" to have any conclusive hold over something as important as the Internet?
So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans
Boffins say they can turn typing sounds into text with 95% accuracy
UK's dream of fusion power by 2040s will need GPUs
Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them
Batteries
I'm surprised that so little of the comments are about battery replacement. I have two redundant phones, one of which would still be in use if it was possible to simply replace the battery. Android OS still new enough to not be a security concern, works OK on 4G. The phone I had about 12 years ago had an easily replaceable battery and would still be in use if the technology had not moved on. Hence I support the EU drive to force all similar small electronic devices to have easily replaceable batteries. (Ditto common USB connections.)
Comms watchdog to probe errors that left Brits unable to make emergency calls
Re: Dry Run
Rather similar to what happened round here. The Parish had been told to collect pledges of funding (~£1k for each household) to co-fund fibre rollout. Then one day I saw a guy climbing the poles at the foot of the garden and was told that we would all be FTTP in a few weeks. No explanation, no further information, just BT planning at its best. Still it works just fine so I'm grateful for that.