Posts by Bogle

Inadequate IT partly to blame for NHS doctors losing 13.5 million working hours

NPfIT

What we need is some kind of National Programme for IT, surely?

UK government responds to post-Brexit concerns and of course it's all the fault of those pesky EU negotiators

Re: .....but in the "sunny uplands" this sort of c**k up never happens, does it?

You're wrong about Sweden, @codejunky. 154.1 per 100k. So they are massively better off than the UK. Obs, innit?

Of course, it's a bit redundant saying codejunky is wrong. Can anyone supply a word that describes just how wilfully wrong codejunky is all the time?

Re: .....but in the "sunny uplands" this sort of c**k up never happens, does it?

EU [https://vaccinetracker.ecdc.europa.eu/public/extensions/COVID-19/vaccine-tracker.html#uptake-tab] 81.5%

UK [https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/] 84%

Oooh, so different! Now, deaths per 100k ...

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

Re: Sorites problem

"Don't try to destroy the painting, bishop, we have the original etchings." - Edmund Blackadder

UK government has 'no clear plan' for replacing ageing legacy IT estate, MPs report

None at all

'UK government has "no clear plan".'

There, FIFY.

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Bampots

Only 20 o' these bampots? Where were the rest? We all know there are moar and moar of these emboldened eejits about.

Probably a case of "The People's Front of Judea" hating other lunatic fringe groups' conspiracy theories. Romans Go Home, indeed.

Missile systems software dev leaker has sentence almost doubled after UK.gov says 4½ years was too soft

Re: "The sentence for refusing to hand over his password was increased to 2½ years"

I think the punishment is much harsher in 2000AD, no? It's the cubes, Devil's Island or perhaps even Titan.

Remember the Titans: Yubico jangles new NFC and USB-C touting security key

Re: Standardise 2FA

Really handy because you can keep your PGP keys on them, and all of my passwords are in 'Pass: The Standard Unix Password Manager'; I can use it as 2FA for GitHub and Google; and the Yubico Authenticator app handles all my OAUTH 2FA needs. There's really no competition.

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

Re: Its stupid

Heh. There you go again.

ProtonMail filters this into its junk folder: New claim it goes out of its way to help cops spy

Re: Snoops

Are you _sure_? Strange how the last word of your post is ... strangled.

Apple reckons mystery new material will debug butterfly keyboard woes in latest MacBook Pros

Re: Week repairs

And price is an issue. Maxed out spec on the new 15" MacBook Pro is 6,074 UKP. You have to be kidding, what's the middling spec comes in at 3,599 UKP.

This. Is. Ridiculous.

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

Re: Has anyone...

> Spoken to the Norks about these treaties? Iran too (to a lesser extent)?

Given their haxor teams' experience I think they may just try turning these AIs on their makers.

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Re: 3 football fields?

Clearly, we need a new ER (El Reg) unit. Commentards, to arms! Swimming pools are too ... swimmy. London buses are lengths, etc.

The current list of units doesn't seem complete: https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

In honour of our illustrious forebears, and those who were previously our Overlords, cruelly cut down by the very thing we are trying to measure, may I humbly suggest a Dippy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dippy_(London)

Daddy, are we there yet? How Mrs Gates got Bill to drive the kids to school

The school crawl more like

A 40 minute drive to school?! That's absurd. Perhaps he's a very slow dirver or had a rubbish car. Seriously though, is that normal in Seattle or was the local school not considered good enough for the little precious ones so that they had to spend over an hour a day couped up in the back of the jalopy?

Perhaps the Bill-mobile was a test-bed for Windows for Automobiles and had to be rebooted for 20 minutes every morning.

Facebook is not going to Like this: Brit watchdog proposes crackdown on hoovering up kids' info

Or educate them?

Or we could let the kids know exactly what creepy things these online mobsters are going to do, to them and their friends, and then see if they still want to go on Facebook?

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Re: Don't travel to the US.

I would read the Time article but fuck me, what's all this nonsense when I don't want ad cookies?

Slack slings crypto-keys at big biz, union gets worked over, VPN owners probed, trolls trouble vets, and more

Fairly sure the IPSA loggin is still optional. I'm with Andrews & Arnold (aa.net.uk) who state "We don't monitor or intercept or block Internet traffic". They've resisted all of the excessive logging that the government has tried to foist on them.

Which country do you host your VPN in? I personally like Germany but Switzerland seems very popular.

Adi Shamir visa snub: US govt slammed after the S in RSA blocked from his own RSA conf

Re: @Bogle Though it's only fair...

I would urge some caution here. The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism makes it clear that a legitimate critism of Israel is not antisemitic: "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic". I don't of course know which particular instance of speech in the House you are refering to but let's not conflate Israeli politics and Israel the nation state.

Re: Politicize all teh thingz!

> a majority of US citizens

FactCheck: No, they didn't. The Electoral College does that and overall Trump had 2.87 million fewer votes nationwide.

Re: Though it's only fair...

Methinks Hanlon's razor applies.

Lenovo kicks down door of MWC, dumps a stack of sexy new ThinkPads

XPS 13

So another manufacturer sees the Linux mob as a tiny minority not work supporting - are there really that few of us? What about all those Mac users looking to move away from the very dodgy Apple butterfly keyboards? Dell think otherwise and they seem to be cleaning up.

U wot, m8? OMG SMS is back from dead

Re: No encryption

I use Signal on my smartphone, I won't use What'sApp as it requires pawning my tech soul to Farcebook, and day to day my old dumbphone, which is my *real* phone, can *only* do SMS (so there).

What has an 'open-door policy' with industry and puts the X into NHS? Brits, let app-happy Matt Hancock tell you

OSS ignored

Open Source by default? Yeah, right. I'd love to see a break down of those numbers after a couple of years. Of course, no one will be recording this because no one on the NHSX board will be able to use a computer.

Romford Station, smile! You're in London cops' final facial recog 'trial'

Orwell ain't seen nothing yet

Given the plod's continuing abuse of the DNA data they've collected and refused to delete, is anyone expecting anything other than Stazi levels of boots stomping on faces forever.

Hold on, if the boots are stomping on the faces, doesn't that ruin the facial recognition?

Campaigners get go-ahead to challenge exemption UK gave itself over immigrants' data

A State of Affairs

It seems now I do less marching on the streets, as that's no bloody use whatsoever, and more funding lawyers to fight for basic rights through the courts. So we have such a broken parliamentary system that we must constantly challenge the government in the courts?

Isn't it three times they've had their air pollution plans defeated in the courts, they've still to produce anything workable, but now they are banging on about wood burning stoves!?

I'm ranting, aren't I. I'll take my dried frog pills.

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Re: Gatwick is a big place

Your linked article on moral panic posits various tests and this situation fails on all of them.

Firstly, we haven't identified a group to demonise here, unless it is "all drone pilots" which would be ridiculous.

Secondly, there's no gap between the threat and the objective threat as this isn't an objective threat, it really has stopped over 100,000 people from travelling. The hazard is small, a downing of a flight, but the risk is very large, the consequent loss of life.

Thirdly, there's no fluctuation of attention over time. It's just happened and it's been ongoing.

Mostly importantly there's no public hysteria.

Conspiracy theories are invariably posited by nutters and believed by the pathologically credulous. Trying to back up your insanity with totally inappropriate material simply demonstrates your foolishness.

Sounds like a massive, risky UK.gov scheme, but let's not keep too many tabs on it, OK?

"Bring out the GMPP"

"But the GMPP's sleeping."

Who fancies a six-core, 128GB RAM, 8TB NVMe … laptop?

Re: Should be a great CAD machine...

Go on, what's the config for SolidWorks? (Only the important bits, if the whole config is a bit of a mouthful and you're short on time). 3 grand sounds okay but could you have done it for 2.5?

Dob in naughty data slurps to top EU court, privacy groups urge

Bums

So the UK government is acting illegally but appears to be free to carry on with its bulk data collection. What exactly is the sanction that the High Court can apply? Because a slap on the bum is only going to encourage most of them.

No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project

Re: Well

@codejunky

Bend over, reality has it's kicking boots on, and your arse is hanging out.

This ain't a negotiation. It was never going to be a negotiation, and it certainly isn't going to be one however much you cry foul.

Re: Ja, Christoph...

@Prst. V.Jeltz

"What the UK government will be most upset about is that the fact it will be no longer be allowed access to the highly secure military-grade signal Public Regulated Service (PRS)"

As I pointed out before, RTFM (Read the Frickin' Material) before you selectively quote, fool.

Home time

You'll need the whippet to get you home from the pub, shurely?

Re: Well

That is a very 'zero sum' view of negotiating.

As others have already commented (a few times) this is less of a negotiation than an implementaion of the existing rules. Many of which, including the ones now excluding the UK from Galileo, were written by the UK.

Re: Ja, Christoph...

Personally if they want to do all the work and put all the money in , and are still going to let us use it , GREAT!

Umm, you might want to re-read the article ...

... Aaaand that's a fifth Brit Army Watchkeeper drone to crash in Wales

Savings

So, does it save money on the project if we keep on crashing them? If that's the case we could have a special show, say around Guy Fawkes, and finally sew up the hole our trouser's pocket.

UK Home Office's £885m crim records digi effort: A 'masterclass in incompetence'

Shout out

Well done, Meg Hillier, on a giving us such a superb quote. I'm looking forward to more.

Max Schrems: The privacy bubble needs to start 'getting sh*t done'

Through the company

If it makes it any easier for others, I thought to put this on my company debit card (contractor, here). That way I can mark it as Charitable Donation and my accountant deals with it. Also means as long as there's money coming in some small part of it will be going to NOYB.

Activists launch legal challenge against NHS patient data-sharing deal

crowdjustice

The general direction of the comments make it fairly clear that most everyone in here understand what a bad idea this is. Now I intend to put my money where my mouth is and I'd encourage others to be generous, too: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stopnhsdatasharing/

Alexa, please cause the cops to raid my home

Re: IT happens - @JeffyPoooh

Apply thin leaves of After Eight Mints?

Police watchdog investigates illegal outsourced Indian hackers scandal

Just here for the icons

Nothing to add, the icon says it all.

The Co-Op Bank's online banking has gone TITSUP*

Re: Co-op have always been great

Recently moved on from the Co-op, both a credit card I'd used for perhaps 20 years and a joint account for more than 5 years.

Online banking offerings are now the main showcase for customers (unfortunately just *after* you've joined) and they are *all* horrible to some degree. The web interface invariable creaks and groans mightily. They are *all* making some kind of basic security error. For example, I opened a TSB account last night and it only allows alpha-numerics in the password.

I moved on from the Co-op when their online offering was upgraded to unusable.

UK drops in World Press Freedom Index following surveillance and anti-espionage threats

ORG

I'll just leave this here: www.openrightsgroup.org

Get your chequebook out. We don't have time to do much about this, busy people that we are, but we can fund someone who can.

Not auf wiedersehen – yet! The Berlin scene tempting Brexit tech

Re: Anecdotal data point

> The biggest problem is when the employee's spouse has a country-specific job/career/profession like law, civil service, teaching

Medicine, just to add to the list. That's my Significant Other's profession and not only would she need fluency in the new language she'd need (some) re-qualification.

It's easy to forget when you're in something like software where you (a) don't need to talk much and (b) don't need any professional qualifications!

Re: There are more levels than that

> I am one of the co-founders of a very small analytics business in Edinburgh

So, not waiting for the (increasingly likely) IndeyRef 2 or Scotland becoming Canada's 11th province?

If Scotland *had* gone for independence already just imagine how many firms would be thinking about a quick jump north of the border. Culture's pretty similar and you'll pick up the language in no time.

Privacy

There're difficulties in relocating and you're brave to set up in another language and culture but a distinct advantage of Germany is their strong privacy legislation. This could be a significant plus point for some (especially when compared to the UK).

Go, while the getting is good?

Oh snap! UK Prime Minister Theresa May calls June election

Re: This goes to show one thing

>> Who will be returned in NI, Wales and Scotland?

> I'm hoping we can reduce the number of Tory MPs in Scotland by 1.

A downvote? People, David Mundell himself is in the house!

Re: This goes to show one thing

> Who will be returned in NI, Wales and Scotland?

I'm hoping we can reduce the number of Tory MPs in Scotland by 1.

IT contractors behind IR35 calculator to leave HMRC... because of IR35

Support? We've heard of it.

HMRC: "Customers who use our online services should not be affected by these reforms."

Umm, who's going to be writing the software for those, then? You do know it's software, don't you? Tell me you know what software is ... oh, help.

Gov may need to splash £245m per year on IT contractors – NAO

Failure isn't an option - it's mandatory

Which is more efficient? Failing because you can't afford to start or failing because you can't afford to finish? Either way, we know the outcome will be a fail. I'm hearing the Gershwins' "Let's call the whole thing off"!

Google's Deepmind NHS deal 'inexcusable', says academic paper

NHS selling data on your kidneys.

At least, I 'think' that joke alert icon is appropriate ...