Posts by Chris King 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009
We've seen plenty of stories where criminals and terrorists have tried (and failed) to use cryptography properly, but you can bet that HMG breaking "normal" protocols will result in someone developing viable alternatives.
All it will take is a few evil (or disgruntled) crypto experts, and the spooks are back to square one.
But "EXTERMINIEREN !" is not even a real German word - they should have been screaming "VERNICHTEN !"
Of course, they didn't quite get the voices right in the 80's
"Sounds more like The Borg...
"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
"Hang on lads, it's a Windows Phone !"
"Bugger. Nothing worth pinching from these Humans then".
I just assumed it was Hipsterese for "Somebody PLEASE give me a job".
Sounds more like an "employee association" rather than a union - you know the sort of thing, run by management shills to give a pretence of "representation" but neatly steps out of the way to push you under the bus when things go wrong.
Been there, done that, almost ended up with a set of tyre marks on my back.
"The term Engineer has been used to represent technicians and general workers for such a long time that the title has no real status in the UK. As others have stated, on the continent an Engineer is held in high regard to the same status as a doctor or lawyer".
In Europe, "Engineer" is a protected title, but it isn't in the UK. I've been a Chartered Engineer for 18 years but I'll have to sign up with FEANI for that fact to be recognised in mainland Europe.
I've absolutely no idea if Brexit would affect the 30-odd UK engineering bodies who are members, though.
Unless you're dealing with a place that's never had to fire a sysadmin before.
I've had to write "exit procedures" for such situations, if only to protect myself when it was time to go - I like to make sure that, even if no-one else thinks about it, that I've been removed from EVERY system before I depart the building the final time.
I also build systems to what I call the "V'ger Rule" - if you've seen "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", you'll understand. Put simply, the "V'Ger Rule" states:
"A System must continue to operate in a correct and safe manner in the absence of its Creator".
Remove my accounts. and it carries on running as though I was never there.
Or, to put it another way:
My last job was a bit like that... The previous sysadmin/netgod disappeared eighteen months earlier and the whole place had gone to crap IT-wise.
I turned up on my first day, and they said "Sorry, we haven't had time to fit your office out yet..."
Bare walls (by which I mean "Bare Brick"), threadbare, stained carpet, third-hand office furniture, and a PC that burst into flames within a week of me starting. Running out of the computer centre with a burning tower unit after the building was closed DID rather attract the attention of Mr Plod, who just happened to be driving through campus at the time !
A few days later, I also ended up with an insect infestation as a bonus... Flying ants in the office, bats in the roof cavity above me, and Lord of the Flies waiting out for me on the network.
(Bonus points: Piggy was already dead and the Conch had been smashed)
Or how about using it for some... ahem... "gift wrapping" ?
I particularly like the advice in the last frame.
I've done ITIL. Whatever we call it, users call it "Help Desk" and are irritated by other names.
Call it Service Desk, call it Advisory, slap a fancy title on it, it's still the Help Desk to the end user, because they want "Help", not "Service".
I once got my wrists slapped for asking if that was "service" in the way that bulls "service" cows.
Maybe they took exception because someone posted a picture of bovine-on-bovine action into the e-mail thread, I don't know...
"So you have a copy of your license on your smartphone, wow, except someone has nicked your phone and their mate who looks a bit like you is now flashing your ID when stopped by Police. That's going to come out well isn't it?"
The same smartphone that's probably full of malware, so not only is it sending off your 2FA codes for on-line banking to its new Russian masters, they've got a copy of one of your ID documents...
"Yes, Comerade Barclays, I am wanting £20,000 loan, £250,000 mortgage and £2,000 overdraft all at once".
One problem I see with bundling patches like this (apart from forcing us to chow down on the obvious GWX and telemetry "shit sandwich") is that it will be FAR more difficult - if not impossible - to remove individual patches.
Sometimes, somebody has something installed on their machine that chokes on an update (usually something obscure, or Crystal Reports), and being able to pull that update for those individuals can get them working again reasonably quickly - at least until the update (or the offending app) is fixed. Rolling back an entire patch cluster could be a whole different matter.
It's also not uncommon for companies to outsource e-mail marketing to third parties,who may turn out to be spammers, or who outsource to spammers themselves.
Kelloggs made that mistake, but when I pointed out that I hadn't signed up for "My Special K" e-mails, they cleaned up their lists and I haven't had a single spam from them since.
Saga, on the other hand, did not. They actually admitted to using the services of a well-known spammer-for-hire, and that they had "listwashed" me with said spammer-for-hire - which has since resulted in even more spam for pensions, equity release and funeral plans. Not to mention even more spam from Saga !
An organisation that can't treat me with respect right now is NOT going to benefit from me in old age or death, that's for sure.
"I had that quite a lot with some Convergent MiniFrames with Micropolis disks. Ended up having a rubber mallet in the toolkit. Obviously frustrated kick could work too, but had the risk of being too hard, or causing other damage".
Part of my Y2K preparations included "Retire any old clunker still running with Micropolis disks", the savings on power and aircon alone made that one viable.
Dealing with "stiction" problems on the bigger DEC RA-series and Fujitsu Eagles needed something more substantial than a rubber mallet, and I once "cold-booted" a MicroVAX II quite literally by giving it a swift kick !
20x ? That was probably danger money !
I didn't get paid any extra, as nobody thought I needed to be on-call - but I checked all of my systems and everything rolled over as expected. There was nothing I could have done anyway, as the Estates boys decided to lock up and chain the doors of any buildings that were unoccupied over the Christmas break.
A neighbouring institution decided to shut everything down, and fared worse. The Y2K bug didn't wave antennae in their direction either, but lots of kit was taken out by a lightning strike.
Moral of the story: Mother Nature can mess up your DR plans in ways you can't possibly imagine.
I also fit the JOAT description - or as someone else described me, "Designated Grown-Up for Projects that Need One".
Someone else said "You're like that five-year-old kid that every Evil Overlord should employ, to make sure that their plans don't have inherent flaws".
I may not have the depth of knowledge that "Mission Specialists" bring to a team, but a broad overview means that I tend to spot flaws they don't. It also means that if a project is missing vital knowledge or experience, I know who to approach to fix that.
Bloody hell, does that mean I've also been doing DevOps most of my career ? Ewww.
"The idea is that you never want to go through it twice (even, that if you have to go through it twice you endanger the project) so you make sure you know exactly what you're doing before you do it rather than trying to wing it".
If making a change twice endangers a project, then your CAB processes are probably the least of your worries.
Some companies do go over the top with their CAB processes, in others I've seen "rockstar coders" overdose on alphabet soup and crap out code that should never have gone near production environments. Striking the right balance isn't easy, and not many folks get it right.
Oh, and I don't care what you call it - "DevOps" or "Agile" doesn't mean you've got a note from your mum that excuses you from PE^H^Hactually testing stuff.
An old story, from early on in my career...
An academic buys a cheap dot-matrix printer from Morgan Computer, and complains it won't print.
The Boss-man says "Sorry, we didn't supply it so you'll have to have to talk to Morgan or the manufacturer".
After much blustering by the academic, the manufacturer sends out someone to take a look at it.
The service engineer rummages through the packaging, pulls out the ribbon, and says "It does help if you fit this" before doing a test print.
The call-out fee was more than the price of the printer - and the engineer had to make a 100-mile round trip, just to fit a ribbon.
I see Vermin Supreme is running again - "Screw World Peace. I Want A Pony !"
Yes, his website has a pink background and looks like something that escaped the GeoCities shutdown, but he's probably still more sane than Trump !
And YES, that IS a boot he's wearing on his head.
(Speaking of potty headgear, whatever happened to that other guy who always used to campaign wearing a WWII Wermacht helmet ?)
"I'm still hopeful he picks Sarah Palin as his running mate. That would be really funny.
He won't of course. Everyone saw the look of disgust on his face as he watched her endorse him".
It was like watching the AntiChrist trying to endorse the Devil.
WOO !!! SATAN !!! WOO !!! HOTTER SULPHUR PITS FOR ALL !!! WOO !!! GO SATAN !!!
Sadly, we'll have to file this under "Shit You Can't Make Up".
It's for real (and it's not the only one he's had published), but if nothing else, it proves that dinosaurs still walk the Earth.
* If he's not too busy with Paddy Power ads
Not to mention "Thunderbirds Are Go" series 2.
Of course, the original Brains never bottled it on a rescue or puked up in the back of Thunderbird 1.
There's your problem - Taggify allowed someone to upload malware-ridden payloads and didn't bother checking them before release.
Advertisers - When you clean up your act and stop wringing your hands every time you let stuff like this hit end-user systems, maybe people will take you seriously.
In my book, that makes them "Account Administrators", not anything Technical or Engineering.
The word "Engineer" gets bandied around a lot in the UK, because it's not a protected title. CEng, IEng and EngTech are protected in civil law, but that's about it - and even with a CEng you can't even call yourself an "engineer" in mainland Europe unless you're on the FEANI register.
As a result of all this, you can be L1 telephone support and still have a job title like "Customer Service Engineer".
This person is probably first-level support, and Monster is a reseller so probably a "Customer Service Engineer". Having said that, his response from the get-go was combative and totally uncalled-for.
I've done L1 support in the past and yes, I got it in the neck from angry customers. It's like a telephone/e-mail version of the Kobayashi Maru test from Star Trek, but you're still expected to launch a rescue, take the resulting arse-kicking from the Klingons AND keep your cool.
Losing it like that has just cost them a potential customer - a friend just asked me (in a personal capacity) if they were any good, so I've just sent them this article. "Right, they're off the short-list then !"
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