* Posts by Shaha Alam

270 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2009

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Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Shaha Alam

Re: Enterprise computing monocultures

I tend to agree about IT resiliency insurance, but this is only looking at it from the perspective of the business and not its clients and customers.

Lets say Easyjet goes down and all of its customers cant fly on that day. that's customers, their travel insurance (if they have it), hotels, car hires, excursions, and all manner of downstream impacts. In an ideal world money changes hands and people are 'kept happy'. But that resilience insurance does not factor in any of that stuff.

We're already in a world where 'paying off' someone is supposed to be some compensation for failure to deliver a service - to the point that some businesses base their entire proposition on knowing they will not deliver a service and factoring the risk of paying refunds. if the risk calculation is in their favour, they have no issues with that as a viable commercial offering, knowing that they'll be screwing a certain percentage of their customers (parking companies come to mind).

there needs to be a higher standard. one where the company prioritises service delivery rather than risk mitigation. Otherwise, we'll have a world filled with Boengs.

Shaha Alam

how about this for a definition:

cloud: the nebulous place where risk assessments get an automatic green tick, and everyone celebrates until the day the root cert expires and some poor server-ops member gets a 2am call.

Smartphones are becoming like white goods, says analyst, with users only upgrading when their handsets break

Shaha Alam

definitly. not to mention the older phone has a camera, which at the time, probably had rave reviews. so it's not like the new camera made the old camera shit. the old camera is still good.

Shaha Alam

Re: replaceable battery: does indeed exist!

replaceable batteries in good phones. the kind people want to buy and use and that dont frustrate.

Shaha Alam

Re: Not a lot of new features?

but my tv only has an on and off button.

and even that i suspect is just a placebo to switch on or off the led.

Shaha Alam

with phones costing as much as white goods, i should expect so. imagine buying a new dishwasher every 2 years!

NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries

Shaha Alam
Trollface

finally, some useful innovations out of this whole 'lets investigate spaaaaaace' malarky

Computing boffins strip the fun out of satirical headlines

Shaha Alam

what's the need for satire when the reality is often stupid enough?

we can safely hardcode 'satire=false' into the ai's root config and make it easier for the poor thing.

The internet is going to hell and its creators want your help fixing it

Shaha Alam

"She pointed to the impact and growing influence of China and Russia on our lives, highlighting their authoritarian impulses."

I wonder to what extent this happens in reverse - western cultural hegemony projected towards those nations (and others) as 'liberal impulses'.

European fibre lobby calls for end to fake fibre broadband ads

Shaha Alam

its fair to say customers dont care if its fibre, copper or Peruvian cat gut.

the issue is in the use of the "up to..." prefix they attach (in small print) to their connection speeds, and whether it in any way reflects what they can expect at 8pm when all the netflix streams start flowing.

3ve Offline: Countless Windows PCs using 1.7m IP addresses hacked to 'view' up to 12 billion adverts a day

Shaha Alam

"for comparison, this is more than the number of broadband subscriptions in Ireland"

I'm sorry but i cant get my head around this number unless its presented in a more commonly understood metric. please express the number in multiples of average Sheep per sqr mile in Wales, or the distances that can be reached when stacking double decker buses on top of each other.

Just one Corretto, give it to me... AWS brews its own blend of Java with free long-term support

Shaha Alam

Re: Ahhh..... if we Italians...

...and if only those sufi Yemeni arabs had patented their coffee bean brewing process all those hundreds of years ago...

Scam or stunt? It's looking like the latter... Xiaomi so sorry for £1 smartphone 'promo'

Shaha Alam

AMAZING OFFER*

*not really

Budget 2018: Landlords could be forced to grant access for full-fibre connections

Shaha Alam

"The government has committed to rolling out gigabit-capable connections across the nation by 2033"

we'll need a bit more than gigabit by then.

Woman who hooked up with over 15 spectres has found her forever phantom after whirlwind romance and plane sex

Shaha Alam

child1: your mum's so old her fanny's haunted.

child2: she's having a ghost baby.

*awkward silence*

UKIP doubled price of condoms for sale at party conference

Shaha Alam

here's me thinking UKIP would be more in favour of the *pull-out* form of contraception.

haw haw narf narf.

British Airways hack: Infosec experts finger third-party scripts on payment pages

Shaha Alam

so much for the green padlock icon telling us the page is secure.

Lo and behold, Earth's special chemical cocktail for life seems to be pretty common

Shaha Alam

Re: Alternative life forms

Venturing elsewhere is how you go about cleaning up where you are now. It's a lot easier to clean a house when it's not being lived in, think about it.

Moving off world and expanding usable space, reduces our demands on the earth's natural resources, giving its ecosystems time and space to recover.

Let's face it, it's not going to get any better while we're squabbling over the tiny scraps of what's left after we've destroyed most of it. Expanding outward is our best, and frankly, only, hope.

What's in a name? For Cambridge Analytica, about a quid apparently

Shaha Alam

Re: Responsibility Laundering?

"Is there such as a thing as Responsibility Laundering?"

yes, but it's more commonly known as business as usual.

Leatherbound analogue password manager: For the hipster who doesn't mind losing everything

Shaha Alam

if people are resorting to writing their passwords down, we need to rethink security to accommodate those people who can't remember a minimum of 8 characters and maximum of 16 with at least one capital, one number and one special character, but not that special character or that one, and cant contain an obvious word and must not be a repeat of any of your last 10 passwords, nor can it be a previous password with an obvious sequence number attached to it, or fuck it i dont need a bank account anyway i'll just store my life savings under my mattress instead of having to deal with this existential hell every time.

GitHub given Windows 9x's awesome and so very modern look

Shaha Alam

i'm sorry but i dont know how i feel about this till i see some dancing skeletons or flashing icons.

SpaceX Bangabandhu-1 launch held up while Dragon splashes down on time

Shaha Alam
Thumb Up

always nice to see a small, poverty-stricken country like Bangladesh making a name for itself. something other than the usual depressing stuff.

I got 99 secure devices but a Nintendo Switch ain't one: If you're using Nvidia's Tegra boot ROM I feel bad for you, son

Shaha Alam

now we'll be able to run 20 year old console roms on yet another device.

Facebook suspends account of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower

Shaha Alam

Re: Please pathetic libtards stop the whining you lost big time

"Everything seems good enough to debase the choice of American voters against liberal destruction of the society and tyranny."

i thought the american voters voted for hillary? wasn't that the curiosity with the american elections, that more people voted for hillary than trump yet trump still gets elected because of ${reasons}?

Maplin shutdown sale prices still HIGHER than rivals

Shaha Alam

woah woah, slow down, it's not like online distributors dont have any costs. they still have staffing, warehouse, distribution, utilities, packing, support, management, marketing. its not the same cost base, for sure, and is likely cheaper (hence the competitive advantage, you've stated), but it still comes with it's own set of costs.

Apple agrees to pay £136m in back idiot taxes to UK taxman

Shaha Alam

can't we just sell the country to Apple? they can afford it cant they?

and people are already paying an apple tax, so why not?

I for one welcome our... etc.

FBI says it can't unlock 8,000 encrypted devices, demands backdoors for America's 'public safety'

Shaha Alam

I'm pretty sure China and Russia already have backdoors (as do phones manufactured in the US).

they just have a different set of backdoors.

Time's up: Grace period for Germany's internet hate speech law ends

Shaha Alam

Re: C'mon Reg...

and the official name for north korea is Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

funny thing about political party names, they're mostly about propaganda. its in their policies where you decide which way they lean on various political issues.

long story short, nazis were facists. which is about as extreme right wing as is possible to get.

Shaha Alam

Re: Bah!

i'm not going to dispute your claim. but in general, the [over]use of CAPS is inversely proportional to the quality and intellectual consistency of someone's response, imo.

Astroboffins say our Solar System could have – wait, stop, what... the US govt found UFOs?

Shaha Alam

first contact

normal human sensory range is pretty piss poor when even compared to other species on earth. imagine what differences there're likely to be with alien creatures. they could be communicating with us right now but we just wouldnt know it because our senses aren't tuned in to it. what if they could only 'see' in the extreme ultra-violet? what if they could only hear dog whistles?

So you're 'agile', huh? I do not think it means what you think it means

Shaha Alam

agile does not mean doing stuff quickly.

if you're finding its quicker its probably because you previously had an obstacle that was slowing things down.

or worse, someone on your team is no longer doing their job properly.

Report: Women make up just 17% of IT workforce, paid 15% less than men

Shaha Alam

What is it about this topic that gets so many men on the defensive?

Boffins pack more info onto photon for faster quantum key distro

Shaha Alam

oh its fine, they're not against the concept of unbreakable encryption. they're against you* having unbreakable encryption.

*you means anyone outside the power elite^

^outside the power elite means you

Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020

Shaha Alam

something, something, something, dark side.

something, something, something, complete.

Better filters won't cure this: YouTube's kids nightmare

Shaha Alam

i dont get how any of this makes money.

who's clicking the ads? are they buying something? which companies are paying for ads where no customer clicks through? who would bother producing shit content when no advertiser is willing to advertise because no customers click through?

which advertising platform would survive if advertisers decided their adverts were being pointlessly shown to minors who have no potential to click through and 'convert' into a customer?

am i missing something here?

Bad news! Astroboffins find the stuff of life in space for the first time

Shaha Alam

i'm not saying it's aliens...

...but turns out it's not aliens.

<Giorgio Tsoukalos sad face.>

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

Shaha Alam

if we're going to assume a computational simulator...

why not assume it's a very big computational simulator? it might even be a hypervisor simulator with more than one simulation running at the same time.

seems like the problem here is lack of imagination.

Australia commits to establish space agency with no budget, plan, name, deadline …

Shaha Alam

the RFP's went out for a super-catapult.

Don't panic, but.. ALIEN galaxies are slamming Earth with ultra-high-energy cosmic rays

Shaha Alam

bloody foreign cosmic particles. comin' over to this galaxy, messing around with our isotopes.

UK PC prices have risen 30% in a year since the EU referendum

Shaha Alam
Trollface

Re: @UncleNick

remember the mantra: Reduce, reuse, recycle? brexit leads to loss in the value of the pound, which leads to less consumerism, which leads to reduction in consumption, which leads to reduction in greenhouse gasses which leads to reduction in global warming.

who knew noble brexiteers would turn out to be superheros saving the world?

flying capes and amazon vouchers all round folks,

What's your flava? Ooo, tell me what's your flava... of Ubuntu

Shaha Alam

no, but you might be a kdefiddler

Chrome web dev plugin with 1m+ users hijacked, crams ads into browsers

Shaha Alam

"I stupidly fell for a phishing attack on my Google account"

it happens, lad, it happens.

IT systems should never expect users to be infallible. quite the opposite. user's lose keys, forget birth dates, run out of phone battery, get pick pocketed. any security process needs to compensate for the every day personal misfortunes and mistakes. that means key revocation processes, priority lines for reporting losses, alternative ways of accessing services, 'lite' services that can be offered where the full-fat version would require a higher level of clearance. etc.

people arent computers. we should stop building processes that behave as if they are.

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

Shaha Alam

Re: "The only country that is Up Shit Creek *with* a Rudder."

but anvils sound terrible. even after tuning.

Two-factor FAIL: Chap gets pwned after 'AT&T falls for hacker tricks'

Shaha Alam

Re: Any other luddites about?

what you use your phone for is irrelevant.

as long as your service providers allow the use of a phone number to secure your account, you're vulnerable - even if you dont even have a phone.

what's a self professed luddite doing on a tech website anyway?

NHS WannaCrypt postmortem: Outbreak blamed on lack of accountability

Shaha Alam

what, the gajillions spent on internal rebranding exercises didnt help?

Facebook fake news: Sort it out yourself, readers

Shaha Alam

its just easier to accept we're all heading for an idiocracy, a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid. if we're not there already.

with any luck, the smart people will just take their ball and fuck off elsewhere, leaving the rest of us to stew in our own stupidity.

that's if any of them actually played ball games. which we know they dont.

so in conclusion, have another sip of your victory gin.

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