Posts by David Harper 1

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Definitely a future case study on how not to do a big IT project

About 20 years ago, the Open University ran an excellent course called "Learning from Information System Failures" as part of its postgraduate computing programme. It examined the different ways in which large IT projects often fail. The course material included several case studies, including the infamous Cambridge University CAPSA project and the Home Office's 1999 Passport Office fiasco. If the OU ever brings back this course, I predict that the Digital ID project will be a prime candidate to become a new case study.

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

It also took Zoom down

There was a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Zoom users cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Dev's last-day-of-contract code helped to crash app used by 350,000 people

Reading between the lines ...

It looks like Ray committed a file containing production database login credentials into the company's source code repository. That is shoddy practice on so many levels. If Ray had worked in my organisation, he'd be getting a very severe bollocking from our cybersecurity team *and* our DBA team.

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

The next Windrush scandal, except that everyone gets to take part

The Home Office is already trying, and failing, to implement a digital ID system for millions of foreign permanent residents living in the UK. It's called the eVisa system, and it is riddled with flaws. The campaign group the3million has recently published a detailed report on the failings of the eVisa system (https://the3million.org.uk/digital-status-crisis) which should be required reading for anyone advocating for a nationwide digital ID system.

On the plus side, given the track record of large, complex government IT projects, this one is never likely to get off the ground.

AMD red-faced over random-number bug that kills cryptographic security

Re: Remember EntropyKey?

Douglas Adams fans will remember that the Infinite Improbability Drive used the Brownian motion in a nice hot cup of tea as its source of randomness.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Why weren't they using a read-only database account?

All major relational database systems allow DBAs to control what each user account can do by granting different levels of privilege, all the way from superuser status down to "you can connect to the database but you can't see or alter any data". So why -- especially after the first incident -- didn't the DBAs severely restrict the reporting account to allow it only to execute SELECT? That's what we do in my organisation. If you have a valid need to view data, but not to alter it, we grant you SELECT privileges only. You can try to execute INSERT or UPDATE or DELETE, but the database will respond with "you don't have the privileges to do that".

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

Re: Is it just me ?

Meanwhile, my trusty Sebo vacuum cleaner works fine, because it doesn't have any of that "Internet of Things" crap built into it. Plug it in, switch it on, and clean the house!

India's tech talent pipeline is sputtering

And going to the U.S. is no longer an option

Now that Mango Mussolini has slapped a $100,000 price tag on the H1-B visas that so many talented young Indian IT professionals rely on to get jobs in the U.S., it's a double blow to have the Indian IT job sector downsize so drastically.

Digital ID, same place, different time: In this timeline, the result might surprise us

Digital ID already exists for non-British residents

It's called an eVisa, and the Home Office has been issuing them to foreign students, workers and non-British partners of British citizens since last year. Existing non-British residents with physical immigration documents, such as stamps in passports or biometric residence permits, are now required to exchange them for an eVisa.

Employers and landlords are legally required to verify the eVisa status of anyone they want to hire or rent to. It is also checked by airline staff before boarding a flight to the U.K.

The Open Rights Group published a report last year (https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/broken-e-visa-scheme-could-lead-to-digital-windrush-scandal/) highlighting serious problems with the Home Office's implementation of the system, and warned that it could lead to another Windrush scandal. Readers of The Register will find the ORG's report both fascinating and alarming, as an example of a major government IT project that has fatal flaws.

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

Re: ID

"the government doesn't exactly have a track record of competence with anything that has a plug attached"

As the eVisa system has already demonstrated. There's a reason why it is being compared to the Windrush scandal.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: Been there, done that

Also, add to your .bashrc:

alias rm='rm -i'

Re: I make a zip

"I like using zip on Unix since its a format that windows users think they understand."

But you lose all of the ownership and permissions metadata. Real UNIX admins use tar.

Never delete the old web site, only rename it

Wilma was extremely lucky that there were backups of the other web sites, but her first mistake was to begin by DELETING the old web site directory, when a more experienced person would have RENAMED the directory e.g. "mv website website.old", before installing the new web site alongside it. That way, if the new version didn't actually work in the production environment, the old web site could be restored in seconds with a couple of directory renames.

Still, the wise learn by their mistakes.

NASA finds best evidence of life on Mars so far

Re: as we don't know it

"We may live in a galaxy teeming with life, but very little multicellular or intelligent life."

As the Monty Python team once memorably expressed it:

So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure,

How amazingly unlikely is your birth,

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,

'Cause there's bugger all down here on earth.

Traffic to government domains often crosses national borders, or flows through risky bottlenecks

Re: It's called the internet

According to the NSA, anyway.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

On the plus side

When the databases of the age-verification services used by popular pr0n sites get hacked -- as we all know they will -- and the identities of prominent U.K. politicians listed in those databases are leaked to the media, the schadenfreude will be SO satisfying.

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

Bu those legacy systems also contain undocumented workflows and business logic due to (in the words of the article) 'encode[d] arcane policy'. You could be a COBOL grandmaster, and still not be able to figure out what the f**k the program is doing. Anyone who has ever been told to debug someone else's 10,000-line program will know what I'm talking about.

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

My irony meter went SPROING!

Considering the billions of pounds that have been wasted trying to integrate NHS medical records over the years so that Hospital A can view your records from Hospital B or GP Surgery C, it's ironic that at least one hospital in the U.S. appears to have managed it quite by accident.

Birmingham City Council's £131M Oracle rebuild in danger as go-live nears

A future case study in why big IT projects fail

Twenty years ago, the Open University offered an excellent six-month graduate-level course called "Learning from Information System Failures". The course materials included several case studies of large IT projects that had failed. One was the disastrous Cambridge University Capsa project of the late 1990s, which attempted to implement a single accounting system across all the colleges and departments of the university. If the OU ever revives the course, Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP project will surely be a prime case study.

Capacity planning a rising concern for datacenter operators as AI grows

Re: Bit Ironic

"Look, but don't touch" seems like a sensible approach to take, given the immaturity of AI.

Flock storage: Audio boffin encodes data in a starling

For high-end bird storage, you want the Superb Lyrebird

Who can forget this jaw-dropping excerpt from David Attenborough's Life on Earth?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

It's not only junior developers that commit this type of SNAFU

There's nothing more dangerous than an over-confident senior developer who has write access to the production daatabase.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Fond memories of networking in the days of X.25

As a Ph.D. student at Liverpool University in the mid 1980s, I tried to use the X.25 JANET FTP protocol to transfer a set of data files from a VAX at the Royal Greenwich Observstory (of blessed and glorious memory) at Herstmonceux to the IBM mainframe at Liverpool. It turned out to be a non-trivial task, and even when the head of operations at Liverpool got involved, he was unable to get it to work, and advised me to ask my collaborators at the RGO to put the files on tape and send it by Royal Mail.

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

Not so much a canary, more a dead parrot

"Not all industries have the tightly integrated function and quality testing regimes of production code generation."

And some titans of the IT sector don't even have that ... https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/16/google_cloud_outage_incident_report/

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

The ancient Babylonians had the right idea

There are Babylonian clay tablets containing cuneiform text that are almost 4,000 years old and still readable. Some of them contain records of solar eclipses and other astronomical events that are still being used by modern astronomers to investigate how the Earth's rotation rate has changed over the millennia. Now THAT is durable data storage!

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

Mountains of AI-generated corporate BS!

If I were cynical, I might wonder whether this is simply a case of AI being used to generate greater volumes of the kind of corporate BS that blights the lives of the people who do the real work. I think readers of El Reg will know what I mean: emails, reports and presentations from HR, senior management and consultants, full of buzzwords but oddly devoid of any actual meaning. On the plus side, if I can toss these into Copilot and ask it for a one-line summary in language that a 7-year-old can understand, I'll save myself actually having to read all of the tedious crap and save myself a lot more than 26 minutes each day.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Re: This is what I keep saying

I really hope that none of your LLM-generated projects run on anything connected to nuclear power plants, civilian aviation or medical devices.

30 years of MySQL, the database that changed the world

Re: No

Ah, you're talking about MyISAM, the bane of every MySQL DBA's life. Yes, legacy applications that rely on MyISAM are a world-class PITA. I used to work with a team that refused to switch to InnoDB because they liked to move entire schemas between instances using filesystem-level copying of the data files. You could (with care!) do that with MyISAM. The manual says that you can now do it with InnoDB using the "Transportable Tablespace" feature, but any user who comes to me and asks about that will get the Paddington Bear Hard Stare.

Re: Currently exhibiting 'surprised pikachu face'

"MySQL broke this by supporting, but ignoring the syntax, and using table scans whenever tables were joined, causing many developers to think, not unreasonably, that JOINs were the problem."

I've read and re-read this several times, but I still don't understand what you're saying. MySQL has always used indexes to perform joins, if there are suitable indexes. Its query analyser may not always pick the best index for the job, but it does have the EXPLAIN command, and an experienced developer or DBA will always run a new JOIN query through EXPLAIN to find out what indexes the query analyser is planning to use. MySQL also has a handy extension called index hints, which allow you to say to MySQL "no, don't use that index, use this index instead", when EXPLAIN shows you that it's picking the wrong index itself.

Occasionally, the query analyser will determine that none of the available indexes will give better performance than a full table scan. That can happen if you have an index on a column that has only a couple of values, and the data are split 50:50 between them. That index is pretty useless, and a full table scan will in fact be faster. That's not MySQL's fault, of course, but trying to explain that to some developers is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to my cat. Pointless and annoying for both of us.

Re: No

"It is a long time ago but I remember having to fix a website where a single user had two different ids… and the root cause was the lack of data integrity across tables that a FOREIGN KEY would have ensured."

I've seen this myself, back when Ruby-on-Rails was (briefly) the must-have framework that all the cool kids were using. I was told, by someone whose job title was "senior developer", that they had no need for foreign key constraints, because ActiveRecord (RoR's ORM layer) took care of data integrity. A couple of months later, the team leader asked me to look at the possibility of adding foreign keys. If you know MySQL, then you'll know that it won't allow you to add a foreign key if it would be violated by existing data. That was the case with several of the critical tables, so I had to tell the team leader that the data were already inconsistent and would need to be cleaned up first. Thankfully, that wasn't my problem.

And that's why, whenever I hear a developer say "MySQL has changed my data!", I roll my eyes.

Re: No

Well, the developers *would* say that, wouldn't they. After all, every developer will tell you that their code is perfect, and if weird sh*t happens, it must be the database, right? :-)

Seriously, if there were a problem like the one you describe -- MySQL randomly changing data -- then support forums like Stack Overflow would be full of threads on this subject, and it would be front-page news here at The Register. Googling for reports of MySQL changing users' data unexpectedly, I found just one Stack Overflow thread (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49594025/mysql-loss-of-data) where a user claimed that MySQL was changing their data, and the leading reply was as skeptical of the claim as I am.

Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation is the most likely: the bug is in the application, not the database.

Re: Currently exhibiting 'surprised pikachu face'

"PostgreSQL's backup facilities are to say the least primitive"

That may have been true ten years ago, but the pg_basebackup tool has been part of the standard PostgreSQL distribution for more than a decade now. It allows you to make hot backups of both local and remote PostgreSQL clusters, and re-building a working database cluster from the resulting backup fileset is so easy that even an intern could be trusted not to screw it up. The capability to backup a remote database cluster also makes pg_basebackup the perfect tool for setting up standby clusters quickly and easily. I'd hardly characterise those kinds of capabilities as "primitive".

Re: Avoid If Possible

"I am speaking of experience with a database holding 3 million entities (a song metadata database). It would always lose records and never knew the exact number of songs."

Is it possible, do you suppose, that your software developers weren't very good at their jobs, and the reason why the records went missing is because the application was defective?

I ask because I've worked with MySQL for 25 years, as an application developer and as a DBA, supporting databases with tables holding hundreds of millions of rows, and I've never seen the kind of behaviour that you describe.

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Re: I won't believe none of it ...

Darn it, we were keeping the corpus of comments by amanfroMars1 as our secret weapon to destroy ChatGPT and its brethren if they became too strong!

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

You can easily spot the mathematicians in the audience

We're the ones grinding our teeth in collective fury over yet another incorrect use of "exponential". There are few things that can move mathematicians to kill, but this is one of them.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: "My mouse is going the wrong way"

- Picks up mouse.

- Holds mouse close to mouth.

- Speaks clearly and loudly: "Computer! Oh, computer!"

[If you know, you know.]

Isar’s first orbital rocket crashes into sea – CEO calls it a 'great success'

Have you watched "The Right Stuff" recently?

NASA had plenty of rapid unplanned disassemblies in the early days. In the movie "The Right Stuff", those clips of rockets exploding just seconds after lift-off are real NASA archive footage. The courage of the Mercury astronauts, especially Alan Shepard, cannot be overstated. Those guys watched rockets explode, then went ahead and sat atop one anyway.

Saturn runs rings around Jupiter

Re: Should we Pluto some of them.

Well, the next General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union is in August 2027. That should be plenty of time to come up with a definition of "moon" that will satisfy half the planet and annoy the other half.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

"25-year-old Marko Elez, who's now in charge of the US Treasury payment system"

You mean the guy who was forced resign from DOGE after journalists uncovered tweets by him that were so racist that even Elon Musk wasn't willing to defend them? That Marko Elez?

Privacy Commissioner warns the ‘John Smiths’ of the world can acquire ‘digital doppelgangers’

Since we're sharing amusing stories ...

Around 30 years ago, I worked for a while at a large UK university. The HR department had a reputation for leaving people on the payroll after they had moved elsewhere, so in my last month, several memos were sent to HR to remind them to remove David Harper from the payroll. A few months later, I started getting mail forwarded to me from the university, but for a David Harper in a completely different department. I emailed him to let him know that I had his mail and would send it back at once. He wrote back to tell me that after I left, HR had stopped paying *him* too. The poor guy missed two months' salary before it was sorted out. Not funny for him at the time, obviously!

The UK Home Office's e-visa system has the same problem

As reported back in September by the Open Rights Group and the3million (https://the3million.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Loss%20and%20Liability%20-%20Glitching%20immigration%20status%20as%20a%20feature%20of%20the%20British%20border%20after%20Brexit%20-%20Sep2024.pdf) and more recently in the Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/evisa-uk-immigration-status-help-b2678643.html).

The Home Office's euphemism for this is entanglement. It sounds almost quaint until you remember that it means that your personal data is being shown to a complete stranger, or a complete stranger's personal data is being used to deny you the right to return to your home in the UK.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

Re: 886 cans of spam

That's only the width. Now imagine a stack of tinned Spam that's 886 cans wide, 886 cans deep, and 886 cans high. That's 695 million cans of Spam. Moving at 38,700 mph. Does anyone have Bruce Willis's telephone number?

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Crashed an IBM 360 mainframe

You, sir, are a Real Programmer.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Today IS a good day to fix the printer config

And to find the petaQ who screwed it up!

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: PEOT? What's that?

I did that too, when I was a Ph.D. student using a VAX 11-750 as a visitor at a famous but now sadly defunct government research institute. I got a royal bollocking from the system administrator who had to fish the end of the tape out of the reservoir of the tape drive and painstakingly thread it back onto the reel. I only made that mistake once. Happy memories.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: I had one user...

And, alas, the Machine Spirit can only be placated by the sacrifice of a beancounter.

'Best job at JPL': What it's like to be an engineer on the Voyager project

Now there's a real rocket scientist

I'm sure every one of us reading this article wishes they were Kareem Badaruddin. I know I do.

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

The room/desk-booking system at my company now features an AI "assistant". I asked it to tell me the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, but it did not understand the question. It was also unable to tell me the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Clearly, its training data did not include any of the classics.

NHS to launch 'real-time surveillance system' to prevent future pandemics

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

Knowing that there is a problem is the first and essential step to finding a solution.