Posts by Danny 14

IT technician jailed for wiping school's and pupils' devices

some schools are given laptops as part of a laptop per child scheme run by the government. It belongs to the family but will have MDM software to be set up for the school.

This guy probably logged onto intune and reset them.

Re: Hmm

warrington have a good cyber plod team. They work with school sysadmins and host high level seminars too

Education Software Solutions tells school customers: We are moving to 3-year licensing contracts and so are you

Re: Leaving SIMS is not easy

Isams and bromcom transfer fine. I know, ive done it on both. Because it is sims the smaller compa ies need to have robust transfers else noone will do it.

The main cost is 3rd party integrations, isams and bromcom use different API methods. These days a lot of 3rd party stuff use abominations such as wonde though.

Re: Shorter Montagu/ESS:

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Re: ESS continues where crapita left off? Shocked I tell you; my ghast is flabbered.

I know of two school IT managers that LOVE this news because it does trigger a competitive tender. They hate sims and this is a great way to get rid of it. There are plenty of other MIS providers now and a great many know how to extract data efficiently for a transfer.

Remember SoftRAM 95? Compression app claimed to double memory in Windows but actually did nothing at all

Re: "Windows' registry doesn't need cleaning"

but the registry doesn't NEED cleaning. This machine that I am using right now started life as a windows 7 machine. It has had inplace upgrades from 7 -> 8.1 -> various 10. Not only that but it has been through 3 intel motherboards, each time ive backed up, changed motherboard, restored backup as bare metal.

It simply doesn't fixing or third party utilities. It just works. If windows starts to bog down, create another user or clear the profile. Thats about it really.

Sure, windows 95 was a little flakier but 2k and XP were stalwarts (lets pretend vista didnt exist), but these were on an AMD platform, I wasnt too keep on inplace upgrading and swapping to an intel platform.

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

just dont bother and use a proctor. Search keylogs and page impressions, if developer or view source is used then fail the exam.

Quite simply telling people not to cheat should be enough.

Bad news, AMD fans: This week's Windows 11 update didn't fix your performance woes (they may be worse)

Yeah, in my day cpus didnt even have L2 cache never mind L3.

Ironically that was probably around ME days with the pre P3.

LinkedIn shutting down in China after mounting government pressure to censor social media content

isolated from the rest of the world? China is buying key business and property in the rest of the world.

Disagree with China? Oh, looks like that power plant wont go ahead. Shame if those properties were suddenly unavailable. Want clean watwr? shame the desalination plants are not at full capacity.

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

the difference is, lets say Uzbekistandecide not to play ball. US and EU can make life very hard for Uzbekistan, not so much with Ireland. So they might not get onboard but would you want to move the HQ and wealth of your mega corporation to Uzbekistan?

US nuclear submarine bumps into unidentified underwater object in South China Sea

Re: Hitting a container?

akulas are double hulled. they are modern.

Biggest takeaway from pandemic lockdowns for Microsoft? Teams stopped talking to each other

Re: Worked for us

did you co tinue to examine logon metrics? how much work was being done "in previously considered free time"?

employee burnout could be high if people arent used to working from home.

Re: Logic fail.

offices are typically enclosed with recycled air. footy matches are typically outside. I imagine it is a sliding risk. Both are risky, one is riskier.

Re: Teams vs. Slack

it depends why you use slavk or teams. As a school teams has integrated into our school management system for years, way before the pandemic. Teams have their calendars auto populated with their academic calendar, classes are automatically scheduled, class workbooks are updated automatically, student work arrives with all the metrics used by departments shared automatically, class and year markbooks work well. policies and profiles are set up automatically from office365 groups or "OU" (hybrid domain). from a teaxher point of view they go on teams and everything is there without their interaction, as an admin there is little we need to do outside showing people how to get to archived teams or how to add guests etc.

the system just works. ironically the only portion we didnt use before the pandemic was the video/voice facility as classes were face to face. Come pandemic and students joined the classes via video. It just worked.

So for us (and dozens of schools who also used teams nearby) there was no real issue. Exams were the biggest issue as we couldnt proctor.

Oh yeah, and its free for schools as long as you have a 100% browser usage. We look after a couple of small primary schools who moved offsite and saved an absolute fortune on licensing.

The only technical part are a few maintenance powershell scripts for auto provisioning, adding admins to student onedrive accounts to manage issues and global team management (because we dont pay for premium AD we dont get dynamic groups, so script one instead...)

Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it

Re: @Alpine_Hermit

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jul/22/great-britain-faces-risk-of-winter-blackouts-system-operator-warns

well thats not what the NG were saying last month.

'No peeing towards Russia' sign appears on country's Arctic border with Norway

Re: Covered by cameras....

oh I imagine if russia want to nail you they will have some very good photos as evidence.

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge involving disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

Re: missing the point

now find a lawyer to pull compensation and drag the original evidence out for scrutiny. See how fast they fold then.

not sure why the downvote. I did my electrical engineering masters at UMIST and can corroborate, you could definitely hear the occadional gunshot. Plus an explosion in 1996 when the IRA blew up the arndale. I remember as we had finished uni a few weeks before but still had a lease on the house so we hung around til July.

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

without knowing volume you cant tell if it is value for money or not.

Re: Over a million quid a month?

lets see. So you intended sending a few millions SMS from a handful of domestic sims? There are clauses in domestic contracts against commercial work simply because that is what would happen. Business SMS are still paid per SMS and are sent via API as a batch of 800k SMS take time to send. Good luck send those through a mobile phone SMS.

A 10 year old email server sending government level bulk email would not cope. What sort of connection would you use attached to a 10 year old server? How do you intend updating said server? Governments tend to send 24hr a day not just in office times.

Mailmerge to a hundred customers isnt too bad. Now try sending 10million letters for child tax credit reminders. Again, the software to do this is not consumer office related.

This isnt a small bakery we are talking about.

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

it is fine armchair blaming small companies for poor conditions. Quite often people work for these companies because they arent faceless organisations. The bosses dont earn huge figures, are in work long before and long after the workers. They simply cannot afford the luxury of top up pay. They cant afford to give people more than zero hour contracts. I know a couple of small businesses that employ around 10 people who are utterly shit scared of test and rrace basically closing the company down.

Juat reality of the state of affairs.

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

Re: Ah yes,

He should have built in India. Then he would have found the opposite, having to pay to avoid all the sudden new rules.

Buyer of $28m Blue Origin space ticket has a scheduling conflict – so this teen will go instead

Re: only SOME of the 28 mill is going to charity?

oh the old which is heavier, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers. Still gets the grandkids that one. Mainly because the only pound they know is round and buys things.

Re: Time to change the rules

heady days. I remember being allowed to talk to the captain and look in the aircraft cockpit as a teenager. I was in the ATC at the time and the captain was ex ATC. I was given a small enamel wings too, we chatted about flying as I was half way through my glider pilots at the time. Granted this was 40 years ago, in a different era.

As for the article, if I had this much disposable income i'd jump at the chance to be a real kerbal.

You'll want to shut down the Windows Print Spooler service (yes, again): Another privilege escalation bug found

Re: Wasn't it earlier this week

I disable the print service on servers that dont need it. I disable all sorts of things, MS even advised people to do so

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/windows-services/security-guidelines-for-disabling-system-services-in-windows-server

however, that doesnt excuse MS from leaving glaring security hole in the desktop print spooler.

US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight

while assange is an asshat, the us justuce system is even more so.

Galaxy quest: Yet another sub-£500 phone comes to trouble mobile big dogs in the form of Realme GT 5G

samsung a51 is cheap too, 128gb, sd card slot, few days charge, dual sim and 3.5mm

bootloader can be unlocked and plenty of firmware to flash.

Re: sub-£500

and with the money saved some weedkiller and a strimmer. thise are some nasty looking flags :)

The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows

Re: Maybe its time to consider Linux/BSD boxes as print servers

we dont print to a printer. we print to a queue. then papercut decides rhe department, sends to the queu and awaits pickup from the printer. after 4 hours it cancels jobs not picked up.

the printer talks back to papercut and away ypu go.

theoretically this can be done on a linux box but is run off windows for convenience. the convenience being im an old mcsd and familiar with windows and like being employed.

the other side is, im not daft enough to leave non essential stuff running on DCs and I automatically install security and critical updates on a daily check, my thinking is that id rather deal with the aftermath of a crappy update than the aftermath of a 0 day.

we do have some linux boxes, i have a prototype linux docker in test for digital signs, resilient dns, filtering and a mysql box. it will be some time till I kill off MS though.

Re: Sustainability

kyocera had something similar and paired with papercut is a reasonable solution.

Re: As much as I like to dump on microsoft a pile...

we have never had print spooler enabled on our DCs. we shut off services that aren't needed. We havent had any issues with no spooler on our DCs in the decade ive managed it.

Small companies would be better with VM anyway, even on one physical single point of failure server. You get 2VM per box license so the DC can be separate drom file server even with local storage.

opens the door for a small cluster should they want resiliency.

veeam is free for 10vms and an excellent backup option.

IT manager who swindled Essex hospital trust out of £800k gets 5 years in prison

Re: Barry Stannard

what do you have against working at McDs? Son in law is a manager at McDs, he went through the graduate program and works hard. Money is decent and honest.

do be such a snob.

Wish you could play tabletop Dungeons & Dragons but have no friends? Solasta: Crown of the Magister offers a solution

Re: Friends ≥ null program

those shops have long gone. even the warhammer shop has gone. along with debenhams and even the travel agents and charity shops.

we did try a zoom dnd (before lockdown) but it wasnt the same.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Re: So, SatNad...

i know what i will be doing, creating fuckloads of gpos to get rid of all the cruft.

Google: About that whole getting rid of third-party cookies thing – we're gonna need another year or so

it is simply learning the mystical art of tracking without tracking.

Do you want to become a vulture? Now's your chance to join The Register's news desk

I would want free dental and healthcare. must cover chainsmoking and heavy drinking.

Does el reg have a petty cash fund for working lunches? Im more than happy to work from home.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

it would be interesting to see how many other CDNs had ties to fastly and thus were also affected.

we ran our own web site, email, storage via sharepoint all onsite for many years, at least the 14 ive worked here. The management decided that we needed to shrink budgets so my dual internet, dual site, dual storage, dual stretch cluster was too expensive. Whilst dual redundant we only had power outages on both sites to consider - this happened once that I can remember - for loss of connectivity. Cloud DNS updated the records should we have an ISP failure and a lowish TTL meant this wasnt too much of an issue.

Management wanted me to move to the cloud and we decided that 365 was the best option (since migrating onsite sharepoint to 365 was supposed to be painless. Covid hit, backs were patted as we were already cloudy (which meant nothing as we could already access all the resources externally anyway), however 365 started to have a few hiccups and outages over the year. Throttling reared its head a few times, other dropouts were noticed. Basically we have had more loss of access in the last 6 months at least than we did over the entire preceeding period of onsite.

Cloud is definitely not more reliable.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: You have my sympathies...

harmony owner here too. works very well.

Give me a (tax) break: UK broadband plumber Openreach to almost double the number of rural premises to receive FTTP

Re: Fuck that!

eol is a pig, when I lived in penrith I had an EOL. luckily penrith became a test ground for new technology so I eneded up with adsl max before other people.

now im in the sticks it is fttc at least.

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

Re: I would expect them NOT to

fred, apart from the fact that the accused will have the cctb evidence in court to prove it wasnt them. sort of makes the cops look stupid then.

AWS Free Tier, where's your spending limit? 'I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200'

most free sponsored events i go to are just pute sales pitches for the last 10 mins or so. im guessing the event didnt say "stick around so you can learn how not to get fucked over"

Re: Free tears

that wont stop amazon chasing you for an unpaid bill.

Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations

Borat school for business

scrape freenode with an adbot that posts along he lines "i heard you were moving to libara, good luck!"

let the battle of the bots commence.

Mobile network sleuths rank UK carriers in 5G performance study, including new 'Everyday 5G' category

who downloads whole movies on data? even uaing netflix caching on my modest 64gb+128gb phone i wouldn't get far. plus i do that on wifi.

if pushed my 62mb 4g+ is better than the majority of FttC houses near me.

exactly. i can see a use for a portable 5g wifi brick but not a phone.

USB-C levels up and powers up to deliver 240W in upgraded power delivery spec

Re: hope it's enough

funnily enough, a rep was at our work last week, he had a BMW i8. Those are quite interesting beasts, fully electric on the front with a small petrol engine on the rear. I had never seen one up close before and they look pretty good.

Re: I wish they fixed the hub issue

USB-C docking stations come close. they come with other cruft though and mess with the host device (adding VGA, network and sound etc)

Re: I predict excitement

most plug in brick PSUs are double insulated so wont be fused though. The earth pin will be plastic.