* Posts by smudge

984 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2008

Don't tell us to go Huawei, Chinese ambassadors tell UK and France

smudge

Re: Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC)

I wonder why. They are obviously not concerned with protecting Chinese state secrets here.

Because, O Brain of Britain, finding a backdoor or, more likely, a vulnerability in a piece of Huawei kit which may also exist in sensitive networks in the UK would be a matter of UK national security. It also facilitates discussions with the spooks about the possible implications of bugs and vulnerabilities in such equipment.

And, oddly, it probably reassures the Chinese that the UK is taking this seriously.

Verity Stob is 'Disgusted of HG Wells': Time, gentlemen, please

smudge
Headmaster

A pedantic grammar Nazi writes...

Time Traveller: Anything you can name. It was very shocking. I heard a doctor – a professional gentleman, mark you – openly split his infinitive while standing in the street. Any guttersnipe could easily audit his ill-chosen words.

Defrocked Lamplighter, baffled: You what?

Time Traveller, warming to his theme: Just so. And what is more, I witnessed a schoolmarm, a steady soul of five-and-thirty summers or more, use an adjective as an adverb. This done with no thought to the innocent ears of her tender charges!

But what about the missing Oxford comma on the new 50p coin? Truly the end of UK civilisation as we know it.

(Hmmm... since it's missing, it can't be "on" the coin, can it? OK then, let's try "But what about the Oxford comma missing from ...?".)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/27/brexit-50p-coin-boycott-philip-pullman-oxford-comma

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

smudge

Re: Nothing new

Not in the slightest!

And I also used to hear bats, too. I see that they produce sounds in a range between 14KHz and 100KHZ.

smudge

Re: Nothing new

When I was in my early 20s - 40 years ago :( - I could hear ultrasonic motion detectors. And bloody painful they were too. On a couple of occasions - once in a pub and once in a big house, neither of which I had been in before - I actually proved to the dubious that I could do this, by pointing out the locations of sensors which none of us could see because they were hidden behind curtains.

A few years later - approaching 30 - I was working in an office in a big country house. Every now and then - and it seemed to be roughly the same times every day - I would be conscious of this very high pitched sound that no one else could hear. At least it was soft, and not painful. Eventually I realised that the estate manager would take his dog out into the grounds at these times, and this was him using a dog whistle to summon the pooch.

A couple of seconds' research suggests that I was hearing sounds at 25Hz or higher. Needless to say, that ability disappeared long ago.

Good folk of Forfar: Alan Hattel would like you all to know he's not dead despite what it says on his tombstone

smudge

Re: Footie result...

Just coming up to the 20th anniversary of that, on 8th February.

We were hoping for a repeat of that match, but have been drawn at home to Livingston :(

smudge

Re: Footie result...

Forfar's... alive???

smudge
Holmes

Why no calls?

"My phone hasn't rung for three or four months. I've been confused by it all but now I know why nobody has been calling."

Aye, right. I always scour the local graveyards before phoning anyone. Don't we all?

Stiff upper lip time, Brits: After bullying France to drop its digital tax on Silicon Valley, Trump's coming for you next

smudge
Holmes

Shurely shome mishtake here?

The UK tax is meant to be a temporary measure until a European tax is agreed

Oh really? So what's all this stuff about leaving the EU, then? Is it a piss-take?

Dixons Carphone to London Stock Exchange: Yay, we grew 2% in the festive quarter. Oh, hang on, no we didn't

smudge

My City expert reckons that all trades between the initial announcement and the correction will be cancelled, that Dixons Carphone will have to pay for all expenses thus incurred, and that there may also be a fine in it for them...

smudge
Joke

The explanation

They have moved some shopfloor staff into Accounts :)

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

smudge

Re: Remember the British computer industry?

Presumably VME was the OS, with S3 as the programming language.

BCPL was developed at Cambridge University.

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

smudge
Paris Hilton

The accessible room

It turns out the most spacious room in a budget hotel is simply the one normally reserved for wheelchair users.

Spot on. I too was once a top-level loyalty card holder with an intercontinental hotel chain. So in a hotel that I used to frequent (not the Paris Hilton!) I was once upgraded to the accessible room. As you said, bags of space, two TVs - weird echo effect if you put them both on - and the walls looked as though wheelchair users had been re-enacting the chariot race from "Ben Hur".

The bathroom, as well as being palatial, was done out as a wetroom - i.e. completely tiled, nothing to step into, with the shower spraying directly onto the floor.

Which was fine, except that they hadn't laid the floor right. Some of the water went down the intended drain, but the rest of it migrated across the room and formed a sizeable lake under the wash-basin. So if you wanted to do anything requiring the mirror, or simply clean your teeth, then you had to stand in an inch of rapidly-cooling water.

Naturally, I told the hotel staff about this.

Next time I was upgraded to this room, I mentioned the problem that it had last time.

"Oh, no problem! We have solved that!". Good stuff.

Up to the room, looked in to the bathroom - and there was a shiny new water pusher broom thing! One of these things with a big wide rubber blade which the lifeguards in my local swimming pool used when I was a kid.

That'll teach these disabled people to complain!

Squirrel away a little IT budget for likely Brexit uncertainty, CIOs warned

smudge

Transition will continue after 31 Dec 2020...

... because most IT systems, including Government ones, will not be ready in time.

Especially since any trade agreement that is agreed will probably not be agreed until just before Christmas.

Remembering Y2K call-outs and the joy of the hourly contractor rate

smudge
Trollface

Re: I was working as a care assistant

>> at a nursing home near Camberley.

>

> Ah, yes, I remember Admiral... ;-)

Oh God, yes. I worked there after the Logica/CMG merger.

Lots of ex-service types, all stone deaf from standing too near to the guns. Never mind the year 2000, some of them clearly had problems coping with 1900.

The only women were secretaries.

And the office was empty by 5pm every night.

Such an easy life for them, having money thown at them by their mates in the MoD.

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

smudge
Headmaster

65 million Brits' medical data?

NHS England bosses meet tech, pharma giants to discuss price list of 65 million Brits' medical data

Nope. There are four separate NHSs in the UK, and the population of England is about 56 million.

England /= UK, as the election today will no doubt demonstrate.

Whoooooa, this node is on fire! Forget Ceph, try the forgotten OpenStack storage release 'Crispy'

smudge

Re: Back when OpenStack was launched with NASA, you literally ...

... had to be a rocket scientist to run it

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Sounds about right :)

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

smudge

Re: Interesting

The real neat trick is time transfer from device to device and handling the bookkeeping appropriately as one transfers time from stationary devices to moving devices such as aircraft.

Not just moving devices - altitude too, so your aircraft was a good example. Time passes more slowly the closer you are to a centre of gravity. There was a TV programme a couple of years ago where they synchronised two portable atomic clocks, then took one up to the top of Snowdon and back. That one was then found to be ahead of the other because it had run faster when at altitude.

So if you really need the precision of atomic clocks, then you are going to have to allow for altitude.

We've found it... the last shred of human decency in an IT director – all for a poxy Unix engineer

smudge

Re: Shock tactic

Many years ago, I worked in a security assurance role on a contract managed by IBM. I very quickly learned that I could instantly reduce a roomful of senior IBM managers to complete silence, by the simple question "Who's going to pick this one up?".

smudge
Windows

Re: Champagne

Traditionally, it's a sabre. One of my wife's colleagues, a French lady, learned in secret how to do it, and the scared the shit out of everyone at her wedding reception - especially her new hubby - by whipping out a sabre and opening a few bottles of bubbly.

In actual fact, it's not as spectacular as it sounds. You don't swing the hardware around. You slide the blunt side of the blade up the bottle and hit the weak spot where the seam meets the top part of the bottle. With sufficient force the top of the bottle comes off, with the cork still inside it. You lose a bit of champagne, and everyone should check their drinks for shards of glass.

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

smudge

Re: Star Trek

it doesn't make tea or coffee, which for the price you might expect that it would..

At that price, I'd expect it to communicate with the Enterprise :)

UK Info Commish quietly urged court to swat away 100k Morrisons data breach sueball

smudge

But he was legitimately authorised : he just abused that permission. How was Morrisons supposed to stop that ?

As others said last time this was discussed, they were supposed to do that by making it bloody difficult for him to do so, or at least to do so without being detected. By making it physically impossible to attach storage devices, for example. By making him pass through a metal detector, maybe - I have seen that in non-spooky environments. By logging what he was doing. And so on.

Do stores still have kitchen knives on open, non-secure display? I haven't looked recently, but I'd be surprised.

150 infosec bods now know who they're up against thanks to BT Security cc/bcc snafu

smudge

Interesting dilemmas

If you were a candidate, wouldn't you now withdraw your interest?

And if you were BT, wouldn't you go after those who withdrew, rather than those who stayed?

And as for the bod who replied-all, citing GDPR - clearly top management potential there.

smudge
Windows

Reply-all email chains are no laughing matter.

Damn right. I once worked on a contract for Shell, and had a Shell email address. Every now and then some eejit would send an email to a relatively small proportion of Shell's workforce, but that would still amount to thousands of people. It was quite informative to see the resulting email war spreading around the planet, and seeing how long it took. But that in no way compensated for having frequently to delete hundreds of emails...

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

smudge
Trollface

A gift for the Brexiteers

But far too complicated for them to understand :)

Wasn't the UK going to build and launch its own system as soon as we left? I suppose it's all Parliament's fault that that hasn't happened yet. Still arguing about whether the clocks should be set to 1953, 1940, or 1887.

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

smudge
FAIL

How not to hold up autonomous cars

Who remembers the predictions that there would be permanent traffic jams of autonomous cars - because pedestrians would learn that they could walk right out in front of the cars and the cars would stop?

"You've got to ask yourself one question. "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?"

The UK's Civil Aviation Authority asked drone orgs to email fliers' data in an Excel spreadsheet

smudge
Headmaster

To email or not to email?

You would need to populate the CAA Excel template of member details in a CAA specified digital format (email field will be required)."

...

It seems quite strange that the regulator for such a technologically advanced industrial sector couldn't sort out a secure online upload portal instead of relying on emailing Excel spreadsheets full of names, addresses and all the rest of it.

To me that doesn't say that you'll have to email the spreadsheet to them. Maybe there will be a secure portal for uploading the spreadsheet.

"email field will be required" means that they want an email address for each member in the spreadsheet - not that the spreadsheet has to be emailed.

Remember the big IBM 360 mainframe rescue job? For now, Brexit has ballsed it up – big iron restorers

smudge

Re: Not the Crysis joke

But can it run Space Invaders?

When I was at university in the mid-70s, the main machine was a 360/44. Batch processing most of the time, but in the afternoons it ran a timesharing system called RAX.

This predated Space Invaders - and the terminals were all green-screen alphanumeric "VDUs". However there was a moon landing game, where you controlled (I think) vertical and horizontal velocity by manipulating thrust, and the system would give you frequent (textual) updates on altitude, rate and angle of descent, etc.

I don't think I ever landed successfully.

Will someone think of the taxpayer? UK.gov needs to stop burning billions on shoddy procurement, says Reform

smudge

Where do the procurement staff come from?

One interesting question would be whether the costs of procurement are reduced by having so many private sector contractors working for the procurement agencies, or are they increased?

I retired a few years ago, but worked as a prospective supplier on bids managed by, amongst others, MoD Abbey Wood, the MoJ, the Cabinet Office, and indeed I worked on a bid for e-Borders, though not with Raytheon.

In all these cases, many, if not most, of the procurement staff that we dealt with were contractors, from our competitors. Indeed one question was always "Do we want to put people into that procurement organisation, getting steady money but disqualifying us from bidding for the programmes, or do we take the riskier but potentially much more rewarding approach of bidding for the programmes?".

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

smudge
Unhappy

Another compiler bug

My first ever job in the real world was to find why code for processing sonar data, running on a PDP-11, kept crashing with a stack overflow. Always a stack overflow, but not always after the same amount of time or processing. The code was written in CORAL-66, the UK MoD standard block-structured language (like Algol, Pascal or Ada, if that helps).

It turned out to be a compiler optimization bug. There was a statement which started "if A and B then...", where A and B were logical expressions of some complexity. Obviously, if A turns out to be false, "A and B" is false, and you don't have to evaluate B.

This was inside a double for-loop, which was executed for each sonar "ping" in the input data. The number of iterations of each loop depended on the input data. Exit from the loop took place when "A and B" was false.

We eventually found that the compiler had created code to evaluate A, and leave the result on the stack. However, thinking that it was smart, it had also planted code to exit directly from the loop if A was false - without popping A off the stack.

Hence the stack would grow, not always at the same rate, because it depended on the input data and on the interactions between simultaneous real-time processes. But eventually you would get a stack overflow.

A couple of years later I actually wrote an optimization pass for a Pascal compiler. Made damn sure not to make mistakes like that!

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

smudge
Devil

Re: Tobacco smoke

BAT HQ?

I once had the misfortune of visiting BAT HQ by Temple Tube, in London, back in the day.

Been there, done that, had to have my suit cleaned after every visit.

Would love to have seen how their staff sickness figures - especially serious and long-term illnesses - compared to the average.

Wondering where the strontium in your old CRT monitor came from? Two colliding neutron stars show us

smudge
Pint

Unique naming

Strontium is the only element named after a place in the UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontian

A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse

smudge

Re: Pain and Fear

Was he called Ian Faith?

'Technical error' threatens Vodafone customers with four-figure roaming fees

smudge
Coat

Who, me?

Is that bloke Alban still writing spreadsheets?

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

smudge

I think Alban is being a bit churlish, since the manager could easily have thrown him to the wolves...

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

smudge
Holmes

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

This is the primary difference between the British legal system and a lot of the Continental ones (mostly derived from the Napoleonic Code).

In the British code, anything not specifically made illegal is legal.

There is no such thing as "the British legal system" or "the British code".

Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England & Wales (together) each have their own legal system - three in all.

I don't know about NI, but I do know that Scots Law was historically based, in common with many of the legal systems in contentental Europe, on Roman law. England, of course, had to be different, and evolved its own "common law".

IANAL, but my Mum - who wasn't either, but did work in a legal office in Scotland - once explained to me that court cases in the English system tend to be very adverserial - ie very much one side versus the other - whereas the approach in Scottish courts, although of course having two sides, is more to try to establish the truth, or what happened, and so arrive at a verdict that way.

Scottish courts also see no one as being above the law, see everything as within their remit, and really do try to see fair play, as evidenced by the two recent cases against the government, one saying "of course they misled the Queen into suspending Parliament", and the other, ongoing, in which they are ready to jump on Johnson if he doesn't write the letter requesting a Brexit extension (if it is required).

English law and English Courts, in contrast, are a f***ing mess :)

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

smudge
Paris Hilton

So where are the solutions to this problem?

Answer there has come none. I wonder why?

Yup, I've been saying that too.

If anyone had anything like a workable solution, they'd be making as much noise as they could about it, and inviting the PM to their flat in Shoreditch.... sorry, beating a path to Downing Street.

(Paris cos she looks like Johnson's type. Actually... she looks like Johnson's sister!)

smudge
FAIL

Invalid assumptions

The panel's proposals are contingent on the EU agreeing to a Brexit transition period of three years, and on a scenario where the UK leaves with a deal.

Well, the first - three year transition period - has never been on the table as far as I am aware. And the second - leaving with a deal - has more or less been ruled out by the latest shenanigans.

So, as usual, all a load of hot air...

Egyptian government caught tracking opponents and activists through phone apps

smudge
Holmes

Important to note ...

... that Check Point is an Israeli company, one of many set up by former members of the Unit 8200 sigint and crypto unit.

Given that the report is dishing dirt on the Egyptian government, the background of the company is relevant and should have been mentioned, simply as a point of information.

'Six' in the city: Kiwi sportswear shop telly beamed X-rated flicks for hours over weekend

smudge
Paris Hilton

Moving pictures, please ...

... or it didn't happen!!

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly

smudge

If you mean the Zimmerman telegraph, which helped to bring the USA into WW1, it seems that that was intercepted at the Porthcurno relay in Cornwall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram

Although it's not clear from your post what espionage, or indeed which war, you are referring to.

I just love your accent – please, have a new password

smudge

I once had the fun of helping somebody hook their mobile phone up to the hands-free system in an Aston Martin DB9. ...

The two of us tried all sorts of pronunciations in our native Scots accents.

Shurely a Sean Connery impershonishation would have done the trick?

Last one out, hit the lights: UK energy supplier SSE to axe 115 bodies from tech department

smudge

Last one out, hit the lights

No need - they will have gone out anyway.

Home Office told to stop telling EU visa porkies

smudge

Re: home office buffoons

I also pointed out that I had spent the last 6 years interpreting German legal documents! But that isn't a certificate either!

I have a friend who has lived in Germany for about 30 years, and for a lot of that time was MD of a chemicals firm. But he, too, had to sit the language test. Inconvenience only - he was quite confident about passing :)

He is now a German citizen, and very happy about it. Though there must also be some sadness at feeling that you have to give up your birth nationality.

Electric cars can't cut UK carbon emissions while only the wealthy can afford to own one

smudge

Re: I actually own one

Model s. From £80,700

Mazda RX8 is now <£7,000

Not a fair comparison. That is presumably the price for a new Tesla, whereas any RX-8 you can buy nowadays will be years old, and will probably have expensive things going wrong with it. It was taken off the European market in 2010, and production ceased in 2011 or 2012.

Plus, as I know because I had an RX-8 for 5 years, petrol consumption of just over 20mpg adds to the costs somewhat :(

You monsters: Screen time murders your kid's imaginary friend – until they reach school age

smudge

Re: Which is the imaginary friend of the other?

My mother used to work in a legal firm (in the UK) named after its long-dead founders - let's call them Able and Baker.

One afternoon, the telephonist took an incoming call, which went like this:

Caller (strong American accent): "Hi! Can I speak to Mr Able, please?"

Telephonist: "I am sorry, but Mr Able passed away quite some time ago."

Caller: "OK. How about Baker then?"

Telephonist: "I am afraid that he, too, is no longer with us."

Caller, angrily: "Well Goddarn it! Is there anyone alive there?"

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

smudge
Mushroom

From university days - broadcast message: "System about to self-destruct. Please evacuate the building!!".

'Deeply concerned' UK privacy watchdog thrusts probe into King's Cross face-recognizing snoop cam brouhaha

smudge

Re: Private/Public land

if there are public roads/footpaths included then it is much easier to show the legal status and throw the landlords in the Tower

I thought it was the other way round. In law you have no expectation of or right to privacy if you are in a public place. So councils have had CCTV on the public streets for years, and presumably others could too.

But for private space I think that there have to be notices at the boundaries informing you of the use of CCTV, and, I suppose, giving you the option of not entering those spaces.

I'd be interested to know if there are any. It's 4 years since I was round that area - I used to walk through it between the station and my work - and there weren't any then. But things may very well have changed.

Crunch time: It's all fun and video games until you're being pressured into working for free

smudge
Holmes

see icon

The majority of video games devs do long stretches of unpaid overtime, and bullying and harassment is rife within the sector...

Games workers from across the UK described the sector's notorious "crunch working" – clocking up to 80 hours per week for six-week periods, with regular demands to work 12-16 hour days and through weekends prior to the release of games.

So it's just like any other development project, then.

Y'know how everyone hated it when tuition fees went up? Cutting them now could harm science, say UK Lords

smudge
Headmaster

Re: Not a UK issue

There are still no university fees in Scotland.

There are. It's just that they are paid for by the Government (i.e. the taxpayers in general) rather than by the student themselves. Same as it used to be in England.

There are university fees, and there always have been. It's just that the ludicrous (IMHO) aim of 50% of kids going through university was felt to be too much of a drain on the general taxpayers in England (and Wales and NI). Whereas Scotland recognises university education as an investment in its future.

Judge rules Oracle didn't have to listen to its Euro Works Council over support biz layoffs

smudge
Holmes

Re: So much for EU workers protections then...

Another remainiac totem falls flat on its arse.

Bring it on. What joy it will be to be able to sack you, just because I don't like what you say.