Posts by Kevin Johnston

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

You forget that he original radio play was many many decades ago when the current Board would have been impressionable Uni students recovering from a jolly good evening paid for by their Trust fund. That would make it quite possible they heard it on the wireless in the San and retained the details without realising it. Once in their memory it then becomes 'self evident wisdom' just waiting for that moment when the world around them joins in the game of Snap.

Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote

Scarey flashbacks

I still remember the machine gun rattle of the head mechanism on a system which had no position tracker so would feed 40(?) step commands to the motor to ensure it was on the index track. Hearing the battering the mechanism took every time made me shudder

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Naming co-incidence

I got the blame all the way up to an HR admonishment because I was working on something which had the same name as a process in the automated account creation which suddenly started failing.

I tried pointing out that what I was doing had no link and relied on people logging into a specific system before it even took any notice of them (so well after account creation had happened) but I was not flavour of the month/year with either my manager or his and they needed a scapegoat urgently.

I took it on myself to checked the process which was failing where the cause was easily identifiable and presented all this to everyone involved. Two weeks later they finally agreed that I was correct and my work had been totally innocent but strangely I got no apology from either manager and my HR black mark remained...

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

I went mad and bought a bean to cup unit over 5 years ago. It has been happily producing 10-12 cups a day since first installed and requires just two buttons to be pressed for the first cup of the day (one is the power button as it reverts to standby after 30 minutes)

I use good quality beans from Bob Marley's family (no - really, currently on the Buffalo Soldier blend) and they don't have a chance to get stale

Yes I have to offload the grounds when a 'hopper full' light comes on and load up water when the 'tank empty' light comes on but previous comments discounted that type of activity so I am too :)

HackerOne 'ghosted' me for months over $8,500 bug bounty, says researcher

Re: Hopefully

Had exactly that thought myself

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: Look at the bigger picture

Actually this is very much NOT complicated to setup and just needs you to be logical. You should know which devices you want connecting to the Internet so just block anything which is not them, this is the simplest level of security and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Anything that starts complaining after you do this can be checked for what it is trying to do and then dealt with appropriately.

While we have a 'smart' TV, it has no direct network connection and receives it's video signal from a Roku stick via HDMI so regardless of the data it collects, nothing is getting back home.

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

Re: I use the "I've forgotten it" method

Basically the same technique I use for the google account I need for my Android phone. I set it to something very long and random and then when I need it I use the 'Forgot Password' and once back in I reset it to something long and random

Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown

Inappropriate use

I still remember from back in the days when the office wars were a thing and I had a user call the Helpdesk asking why the spellcheck was not working on the database in their spreadsheet. That got printed, laminated and put on the wall as a warning to all Helpdesk staff that there was no depth users would not stoop to

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

It would also be worth looking at just how many of those lawmakers began their careers as lawyers

OBR drags in cyber bigwig after Budget leak blunder

He sounds serious

You might almost believe he is sorry and intends to find out why this happened and prevent repeats as he never once said 'lessons' or 'learning from this'

How high-end supercomputer filesystem DAOS can break out of its niche

Re: Is it first to guess wins a prize ?

Ah...So nothing to do with Domino Attachment and Object Storage available since 2010-ish?

San Jose's 'warrantless' license plate queries land cops in court

The people have a choice

There has already been reaction against these cameras in a way which killed their use. One citizen in Washington requested footage for some of the cameras and it went to court as the people managing them tried to refuse citing privacy of the subjects. This went up to the courts who pointed out the hypocrisy in this argument and stated that the images were a public record and as such must be provided on request.

The cameras have now been switched off while the powers that be rethink their data/revenue gathering approach

Link to non-firewalled report on this here ---> https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-off-license-plate-reader-cameras-amid-ruling-on-data-access/

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

Here too...

I had an email from my network to say that 3G was being shutdown and my device 'was not 4G Calling compatible'. When I tried to use the link they supplied to check it my phone was not listed but I could see the only phones listed were those they included in their shop. Some searches suggested it was down to the carrier needing to whitelist the phone so I called them to ask but clearly they had not been supplied a script for this.

After 20 minutes I finally got an acknowledgement that my phone would work but then they were looking to push me into an upgrade to be sure.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Re: Country Music

Through a variety of means (all legal in the country I was in at the time) my music collection is now good for 125 days if I played it without shuffle. This is now on a big USB stick which my car audio system is able to see and play from...who needs 'rinse and repeat' radio stations

Re: More to come

I would point out that what he ate was not the original banana so as the owner of the 'art' he could tape up another banana and sell it on

Re: More to come

That was a steep learning curve as from memory they had all of three songs of any value

OK, to be fair I checked on Discogs and apparently they had 14 albums although only 8 were in their initial active period while with Bell/Arista

Aviation watchdog says organized drone attacks will shut UK airports ‘sooner or later’

Fight fire with fire?

Assuming you do not want the potential PR disaster of using live fire defences against drones at commercial airports, why not go the obvious route? A small team available 24x7 on airport equipped with drones that have a capture/shred system fitted. They should be able to launch and intercept in just a few minutes by using trained spotters to search for the intruding drone.

While there is a cost to this, it would be a lot less than the cost of shutdowns and it would only need a few intercepts to take the fun out of it for the 'black-hats'. Each captured drone will also provide another piece to the puzzle on whether this is organised or just mindless muppets

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

Re: Oh how I wish...

That rings a bell from the early days when Lotus 1-2-3 was still the front runner in spreadsheets. Transferring data between 1-2-3 and Excel was a nightmare as the file produced through the export/import function kept breaking. Every time Lotus would supply a fix, MS would supply another break

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

Not directly me but...

I worked for a while on flight simulators including units for various military and some of the tales I got told about bean counters were legendary.

The best two examples included one from the RAF where the egress shop had to bin multiple million pounds of batteries for emergency radios as someone had noticed they were being purchased at low volume on a regular basis which they decided was not cost effective so they changed it to bulk purchasing. Sadly this meant that when kit was serviced and the batteries changed the new ones had a shorter and shorter life until it fell below the 'service interval plus a bit' level at which point all the remaining batteries had to be dumped.

The other example was from the sim maker where the IC sockets being purchased were changed by someone in Purchasing Dept to save 1p per socket. Unfortunately the new sockets could not cope with the test equipment probes being plugged in as it spread the contacts too far apart so they no longer made contact on the programmed chips when they were fitted. Three complete systems worth of boards had to be scrapped at a cost of rather more than 1p per socket.

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

Re: They're welcome to do so

Plus, every time they lose a case it makes the next one that bit harder as they can no longer rely on the 'everyone else thinks it is OK' defence

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: Good email server

You are correct in that a number of different mail systems do offer that but one of the biggest limitations is coping with the different ways other systems do their Out of Office responses. Then add on to that different languages if you are sending email internationally and you discover the good old 80/20-20/80 rule where 80% is easy to handle and only takes 20% of your time and effort, I'm sure you can guess the rest. This rule also comes in a 90/10-10/90 flavour

Blinded by the light: Tesla fixes glaringly bright Cybertruck headlights

Re: FFS...

I would love to know what these people put in their accident report for their insurance company when it asks what lights you had on at the time. Do they lie and say full lighting all round or do they tell the truth and say 'not a clue, it was set to Auto'?

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

Oh Good Grief

This has all the common sense of that really old error...

Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

When I was an apprentice I had to do the usual 'experience all the different departments' thing and in the Industrial Engineering department they had a frightening example of this that everyone had to learn by heart.

One of the mobile weather radar systems had inspection lamps with 30 foot cables that clipped to the battery for use as general lighting. These are the things that were common back in the 70's/80's in garages and were a bulb in a cage attached to a clip.

Because these were for a military product they had to meet certain specifications which had all been worked out and approved and resulted in lamps costing just over £300 each. Then the bulbs they were using went out of production so they raised a 'minor change request' (MCR) to use a different bulb. Sadly the new bulb needed a new socket so another MCR was raised. The new socket didn't fit in the existing cage, another MCR. The cable needed a larger gland for weatherproofing the new socket, another MCR.....

In total there were at least 8 MCRs raised at a cost of over £1500 per MCR, only 15 lamps were sold at a new cost of over £400 each. Civilian versions in the garage across the road were selling at £5 each

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump 'censorship' case go away

Clearly AC has not done any checking here as Jimmy Kimmel's contract explicitly states that he is free to say whatever he wants in his monologue. This was revealed by a number of people after Disney pulled the plug and is probably part of why they reinstated him so quickly. The loss of subscriptions was bad but a breach of contract lawsuit would have put them in a very sticky, and expensive, position.

Campaigners urge UK PM Starmer to dump digital ID wheeze before it's announced

Re: Paying

A small point but the Asylum process requires migrants to apply in the first 'safe' country they reach. For those coming to the UK that would have been one of the EU countries.

This is made clear in the EU Agency for Asylum information handouts.

UK Cabinet Office hands stalled Microsoft migration to another department

Re: Ikea Cabinet Office

It has ever been thus from the days of steam, the adage used to be designed in Britain, bought out by US and made in China. The list of examples would fill many a book and every time it looks like we are growing a pair there comes another capitulation 'to maintain the special relationship with the US'

Privacy activists warn digital ID won’t stop small boats – but will enable mass surveillance

MPs should lead by example

All legislation of this type should have a mandatory lead-in phase of at least two years where all MPs and their staff are fully enrolled into the system and only if there are no problems or leaks identified in that period are they permitted to propose an extension to real people.

Perhaps once they have had every detail of their private lives exposed and cloned a few times they may begin to understand why people who have a clue are saying these are bad ideas...then again

Why Windows 95 left a handy power saving feature on the cutting-room floor

I'm stunned

Gosh how things have changed. So in the days of Win95 MS were risk averse when offering new features in the OS whereas now they have opened the sewers and it all just floods out regardless of what it might do to the investment people have made in their PC hardware.

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Re: What needs for 40,000 virtual servers ?

When you have 3,000 stores plus a similar number of separate offices and distribution facilities that is actually a fairly small number. You will have clustered server instances in each store to handle the tills and possibly separate ones for the handheld scanners then there is the security systems and you are into double digits for one store. This is a very different scenario to a financial institution which would have a small(ish) number of offices and 2/3 datacentres hosting the hardware/instances

Reg hack attends job interview hosted by AI avatar, struggles to exit uncanny valley

HR 'in the loop'?

HR should NOT be directly in the loop as they will almost certainly have no in depth knowledge to assist in making valid decisions about candidate suitability. The best they can do is stack up the CV and pull 10 at random to move to the next phase.

In my past I have gone to interviews for a specific role where we have agreed in the interview I am not the perfect fit (they had already spoken to someone who was better for the role) but there were other similar roles in other teams so I spent the day talking to different managers which led to a job with them. Had HR been involved I am not sure I would have even got in the door.

I have also been involved in the reviewing of CVs passed through by HR and either nobody with the right background applied or HR failed to follow simple instructions (pass ALL the CVs through)

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

In terms of descending complexity that would equate to 1, 3 and 53749

EU court's dismissal of US data transfer challenge raises privacy advocates' ire

Re: Dubious and pointless.

Yes and No. The crux here is that any agreement is predicated on the US President being a nice chap who will allow the rules to apply equally on both sides of the pond. Since he is not and does not then you start with the fight which is easiest to win and then leverage for the next battle etc etc.

If you start with the toughest fight then you are minimising your chances of winning and could also use up all your funding before it even reaches the courts.

Microsoft tweaks Windows Out of Box Experience for enterprises to adjust control freakery

I miss the days when I just used Ghost and SID with an external drive to build new machines while keeping them isolated from the network/internet. Plug in the drive, insert the floppy and start the PC; repeat for the other 5-6 on the bench and then go grab a coffee. Come back and all now ready to test and deploy

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Army Air Corps Detmold

I was part of a team installing a helicopter simulator on the base and we worked silly hours to get access to the required areas when they were not being used by the Instructors. Finished one night at about 1am and was driving out to go back to my hotel when the nice chap at the gate pointed his Stirling at me which I took as a sign to stop. Apparently I had to sign out to show I was not drunk but as I tried to get out of the car he suggested in gentle tones that I move the car back behind the barrier.

I was very tired/flustered/deafened at this point and almost managed the feat but remodeled the front wing on the very substantial barrier support post

Re: Lower ranking officers

Closely followed by a freshly minted Lieutenant saying "I've had an idea"

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

Re: Look at this the other way for a moment.

But we do still have 'with intent' and 'to obtain pecuniary advantage' ie to profit in some manner

Re: AI-Generated Content

Much what I was coming to say. The website designer/IP owner has not selected a specific ad to play in each slot so they cannot say that blocking anything from displaying in each slot is any different from a particular slot not getting picked up by an advertiser and while that is not a likely scenario it is theoretically possible.

The website is displaying AS DESIGNED BY THE OWNER, it is the extra cruft from 3rd parties which is not happening.

Minority Report: Now with more spreadsheets and guesswork

Re: Prenatal screening

Could I remind people that Juvenile Delinquent is actually an oxymoron. If you are a juvenile then you have not reach a level of maturity to be considered a responsible adult while being delinquent requires you to have responsibilities you are neglecting.

This is one of those buzzword phrases invented back in the past to have a label to put on people the local do-gooders felt were not showing them the correct level of respect and obedience. People who think phrases like this are appropriate to use to label people should be banned from any position of responsibility higher than 'do you want fires with that?'

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

Prior art

Douglas Adams already covered this in HHGTTG with the Genuine People Personalities. I can see in the near future that every PC will become a Marvin explaining at length why your request is not only incorrect but is also not worth spending even a few cycles considering. At which point a chirpy Eddie comes along to jolly along the situation

Law and water: Russia blamed for US court system break-in and Norwegian dam drama

Head meet wall

On what planet was it deemed a good idea to be able to manage the dam controls from outside the facility? I could understand Read-only data to display status at a remote site or similar but the ability to change a valve state?????

Marc Andreessen wades into the UK's Online Safety Act furor

Which is a question that should be directed at the current Government who just pass this Swiss Cheese piece of legislation

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: What do we think of those who buy our cars ?

I think it was the Mk3 Cortina that only had 16 unique keys for the whole production run and someone even got in with a baby's teething ring 'key'

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Re: Being sensible for a moment

The Car Company analogy does not fit here as other companies are able to make pattern parts which (if you pick the right company) will be as good or even better than the original and which you are free to fit if you are out of or do not care about the warranty. For Windows 10 there is nobody able to produce patches or updates as they would need the keys and magic account needed to implement the update. In addition, Microsoft have the weight of the law preventing people from even attempting this because of IP/Copyright etc etc

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

Re: Ignorant politicians

I understand your thinking but it is even worse than that. They put together a shortlist of people we are permitted to vote for so the game is rigged even before we get to see the players.

There is the option to have people stand who are not in one of the mainstreams but they rarely get beyond a nominal protest vote and even if we had 20-30 get in, that is not enough to make a change as the Liberals discovered once they had fallen out of favour back in 1915

Re: Ignorant politicians

Surely not, next thing you know someone will claim you need to be a qualified accountant to run the treasury...

UK unveils plans to 'transform' the consumer smart meter experience

The whole circus around Smart Meters is a close match for the Tesla hype.

They suggest all manner of amazing things will be possible once you have one fitted including a level of granularity on seeing how your power is used which will never be possible. In reality while it will show you what you have used in the various units and some history to see how it compares it is attempting to replace common sense. If you turn on more things you use more energy....WOW

As we are seeing with these backend problems they offer minimal gains to the consumer compared to the much larger probability of failures from the technology chosen.

Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK

Simple options

As someone who worked in email administration, the problem is always how convincing the MS Salesteam are when talking to the C-Suite (I always thought that meant the Crayola people).

Exchange is an OK product but has a number of features which provide increasing lockins to the MS world. It does not quite run to International standards so sometimes mail from platforms that do are not displayed as intended and some outbound mail misbehaves for non-MS recipients. In addition, it must be installed on Windows and uses a very very large number of servers for Enterprise level installations. Also, MS have still not worked out how to so in-place upgrades but since you are running on Windows that becomes expensively irrelevant as you need to replace the OS for the each new version of Exchange.

UK's Ministry of Defence pins hopes on AI to stop the next massive email blunder

Re: Using AI to catch an xlsx

I presume this got a downvote because of the wordage as the concept itself is bang on the money.

If you want to prevent data getting out you put meaningful locks on the data and the transfer method, you do not put some wishy-washy IT magic eye in the loop instead even if it is simpler. The fact it is simpler should be the clue of how effective it should be as proper security is hard and needs serious planning/knowledge/implementation.

For an organisation such as the MOD I would expect data transfer processes to start at maximum security and then need to be be actively relaxed to the level applied to the data with a note of the active account. If the transfer is to an outside entity then the same loop starts again so this cannot happen by accident and there is a clear record of who did it.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

Re: Very interesting.

Ah, sequential passwords. Every company I have been at tried to prevent those but none of them thought people might put the number at the start of the password