Posts by Don Bannister

Employees regularly paste company secrets into ChatGPT

Are they insane ?

"... a large number of corporate users paste Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Payment Card Industry (PCI) numbers right into ChatGPT".

FFS why ??

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Unusual error message

Some years ago, was using a bit of software that worked with a hardware emulator. We knew the chap who'd written it - a bit of an eccentric might be a fair description.

So it wasn't a great surprise to be greeted one day with the error "Pointer fucked" :-)

UK justice minister pressed as court system bug raises fears of hidden case files

"HMCTS identified the bug in 2023 and applied fixes in January 2025" - so it was deemed urgent, then ...

To heck with export controls! Nvidia reportedly plotting cut-down B300 for Chinese market

Re: 15% Export Tariff Based On Revenue

These folk may be able to source a golden toilet for a good price !!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3nrrmk04mo

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday baker's dozen: 12 critical bugs plus a SharePoint RCE

Re: A bakers dozen ?

Off by one error - common programming mistake :-)

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: Standards should Triumph

That was a good gag that Irish comedian Frank Carson had in his repertoire !

Japan's latest Moon landing written off as a failure after ispace probe goes dark

Re: Only the one lazer?

"How does the blind parachutist know when he's about to hit the ground? The lead goes slack"

Me bad - that very joke came to me too. You saved me the bother !

Windows Notepad fixed after 33 years: Now it finally handles Unix, Mac OS line endings

Re: relief arrived a long time ago

I've seen use of Win-10-nic before. Is it an acronym for something ? Soz if I should know ...

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

Re: "superseded Edlin"

I bought and used Qedit, and was a big fan !

One feature was that it allowed you to mark up, copy & paste columns. Used that a lot for manipulating machine generated text data, which needed things to be reformatted in unusual ways ...

Thanks for the memory :-)

Millions at risk after attackers steal UK legal aid data dating back 15 years

Probably all of them :-(

Anthropic’s law firm throws Claude under the bus over citation errors in court filing

Being lazy ...

It said they had implemented procedures "to ensure that this does not occur again."

How about forgetting AI and just check citations properly ?

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: No Comment!

Or to express surprise:

Custer "Where the fuck did all those Indians come from" !

China turns on ‘minors mode’ that ensures kids only see wholesome socialist content online

Just wondering

how they make it work ? Presumably a combination of software on the mobile and internet providers ...

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

Webmail access ?

Might this not also have affected users of the "New Outlook" desktop App ? Isn't it just a fancy interface to webmail, or do I have this wrong ?

At least IMAP/SMTP might give an alternative. If Microsoft's email client ever abandons them, it'd be webmail or nothing :-(

Re: This is why forced updates should be made unlawful

If I read the article correctly, this was an issue with Microsoft's own systems which affected webmail access.

A forced update on end users wasn't involved.

Oracle yet to sign a Stargate contract or predict revenue from AI mega-build

Book-keeping & accounts

"performance obligation (RPO) on its books – that’s stuff customers have committed to pay for, but which Oracle hasn’t yet delivered".

I wonder if this includes the sort of Oracle deployment that has spectacularly failed for UK's Birmingham City Council, who have consequently been unable to file audited accounts for a year or more ...

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

Not even a viewer ?

Microsoft say "Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to _open or edit_ Publisher files in Publisher".

You'd think they'd at least be able to manage a viewer. If you are a organisation with a lot of Publisher documents, basically you are f***ed. Definitely the "Extinguish" phase of Microsoft's MO :-(

UK electrical utility seeks partner for £81M SAP overhaul as support deadline closes in

Affected customer

I live in NI, and this doesn't give me a good feeling. Can't help wondering if it'll follow a common path of runs very late, runs massively over-budget, end customer pays for it all.

More complex than expected, lack of clarity about requirements, inadequate project management, lessons will be learnt, etc, etc ...

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

Ambitious !

Given that it has apparently been impossible to get an Oracle finance system working properly for a UK city council, I wouldn't be too optimistic !

Though I suppose it might be more about hoovering up the data than necessarily being able to deliver anything useful from it ...

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Fenny Compton

"crystallographic calculations and was designing one in a barn in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire".

That's rather a coincidence. That was where the former Post Office post-masters & post-mistresses gathered in 2009 to start their actions against the Post Office's now discredited ICL/Fujitsu Horizon IT system.

India's banking on the bank.in domain cleaning up its financial services sector

Banks - absolutely this !

"Instead companies (especially banks) create a proliferation of .com addresses so no-one has any idea which ones are genuine and which are scams".

Case in point in UK: logging in to halifax.co.uk moves to halifax-online.co.uk - just the sort of domain trick a scammer would use.

Why not online.halifax.co.uk or halifax.co.uk/online ?

Maybe marketroids got involved ...

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

"Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the relevant elements of that, and gave a clear, structured letter, defining the problem"

Yes - with a faulty toaster it probably would be the elements ...

Call of Duty studio co-founder pleads guilty to crashing drone into firefighting aircraft

Geofencing not an excuse

Geofencing would only cover "fixed" airspace, so probably not any temporary zones established during firefighting operations.

I understand that DJI have now degraded geofencing to "operator warning" status. It may not be safer, but it'll certainly place any blame clearly on the drone pilot !

T-Mobile US CSO: Spies jumped from one telco to another in a way 'I've not seen in my career'

Is it just me ....

or does this not show the delightful contradiction with government mandated security weaknesses/backdoors/wiretaps ? "Of course the bad people would never be able to access our spying systems".

One the one hand you've got:

"FBI and CISA officials briefed reporters on the massive cyber-espionage campaign, during which China-affiliated snoops successfully broke into several US telecom companies' networks, compromised wiretapping systems used by law enforcement, and used that access to steal customers' call records and metadata."

And on the other:

"Encryption is your friend – whether it is on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communications," CISA's Greene said. "Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible, if not really hard, for them to detect it. So, our advice is to try to avoid using plain text."

Another 'major cyber incident' at a UK hospital, outpatients asked to stay away

Seems a bit contradictory

Our business continuity processes are in place ....

All outpatient appointments scheduled today are canceled ....

California's last nuclear plant turns to generative AI for filing and finding the fine print

Their example

mentions "what would need to be reviewed to replace a section of concrete in a safety-related structure".

Heaven help us if it hallucinates an answer that is wrong.

But at least an atomic power station can supply the energy to run the training model ....

Ambitious overclocker cools Raspberry Pi 5 with liquid nitrogen

I think the late Lester Haines from hereabouts would rather have approved of this wattless endeavour !

Brit telcos to clash in high-speed mmWave spectrum showdown next year

Just wondering how many phones exist (or will exist) which can work on these frequencies ....

Air National Guardsman gets 15 years after splashing classified docs on Discord

Surely that shouldn't be possible ?

"After settling into his role, he began to look at material above his intelligence classification grade and then shared it via the chat app"

Public sector cyber break-ins: Our money, our lives, our right to know

Contactless still down

For several months I've been trying, without success, to update a credit card on the contactless bit of their website.

If they can't do that, it makes me wonder how the real time card charging part of their system is still working. No information - just the usual "sorry for the inconvenience", "working to get back soon", etc ....

Equinix to pad Thai coffers with $500 million investment

Byeline

Have a couple of points for that !

Why send a message when you can get your Zoom digital video clone to read the script?

Re: And I'd want to why?

And if you need AI to create your agenda, it might be worth asking why you need a meeting, no matter how you convene it !

Microsoft sprinkles AI 'magic' and additional storage tiers on OneDrive

Re: Just No

Thank you AC - that's very interesting.

I wonder is it only when you let OneDrive work with your Photos folder (or other standard MS/Windows folders like Documents etc).

I only let it work with folders I've created - they don't have any particular "type".

Re: Just No

Any details on this ?

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Re: Idiot

Slogan of a window blinds company near me:

"If it wasn't for us, it would be curtains for everyone" !

With billions in UK govt IT contracts about to expire, get the next vendors to act right

Er what ?

"The report – also from bid-writing technology firm AutogenAI – found that"

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

Re: Like any other superhighway

As others have said, it did work like that. Etiquette was that if you heard a conversation, you hung up and tried later.

One aspect was that the exchange equipment had to know which of the two made the call.

The line equipment was configured differently, and you had to press a button which I believe put an earth on one leg, and allocated the call to the relevant subscriber. I think the ring current may have been applied similarly.

If you reversed your line pair, well you can imagine ....

Btw, this was UK in 1960s

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

Meet me, Mr Dell

"I have not met any customers who have said 'We're planning a refresh but we don't want an AI-enabled PC.'

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Re: 2,500 systems?

I thought that too, but wondered if it actually meant 2,500 devices ....

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Re: Why

The logout thing is annoying. Usually only find out when wanting to vote or make a comment ....

Microsoft's results are in, but the E7 subscription remains mythical. For now

But a lot of folk haven't worked that out yet ! FOMO :-(

Microsoft's Azure networking takes a worldwide tumble

Re: Unexpected territory access to Exchange

Blimey - that's some spaghetti mess of domain names ! No wonder they keep forgetting to renew SSL certs ....

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

It's always 5pm somewhere :-)

Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart

What could possibly go wrong ?!

".... changing the application software, infrastructure, and business processes at the same time".

Pakistan punishes tax dodgers with new measures to ensure telcos cut off their mobile phones

Please file your overdue tax return using our App. Oh - you can't - we've cut you off for late filing ....

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

Oh but they are fun :-)

Microsoft sued by ParTec in Texas over AI supercomputer patents

Patents !

I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile filing a patent for "Techniques for building a computing machine out of bits for building a computing machine" !

BT delays deadline for digital landline switch off date

All that old copper

"The urgency for switching customers onto digital services grows by the day because the 40-year-old analogue landline technology is increasingly fragile".

Rather a different view now, contrasting with their earlier wish to "sweat the copper assets" with ADSL, ADSL Max, ADSL 2+, V-Fast, etc.

If they'd gone for the full fibre earlier, methinks today's urgency wouldn't be quite so bad ....

Re: Market farces => predictable effects

So glad you mentioned the Lancaster case. I have read it, and it's quite scary how bad things got quite quickly ....

The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation

About INS

I was wondering about "traditional" INS too. Were you referring to mechanical gyros, or the somewhat fancier laser gyros ? I'd also be a bit worried by the "low temperature" requirement for the quantum version. Hardly trivial or light in weight.

There is a trend towards using GNSS based approaches at airports. Given the vulnerability of such systems, this strikes me as less than ideal.

I know ILS and other ground-based systems are costly to install and run, but surely they will be rather more resilient.

And don't get me going on the reliance of cellular phones, DAB radio, etc on satellite sourced precision timing ....