Posts by Stu J

UK watchdog targets Microsoft licensing in cloud competition probe

Re: Better late than never…

This should be a slam-dunk case that needs no more than a month or two's "investigation". The evidence is clearly visible and has been for years.

Microsoft should be fined through the nose for it, because they're taking ongoing revenue from businesses that migrated to Azure rather than AWS or GCP when Azure wasn't the best technical fit, but was - artificially - the only viable commercial fit. I know of several organisations that would vastly have preferred to move to AWS or GCP but went to Azure in the end because that just couldn't make the numbers work from a licensing point of view in the short to medium term, even if their long term goal was to eliminate Windows and SQL Server from their estate.

The consequential profits Microsoft are making through this effectively illegal lock-in should be confiscated on an ongoing basis, and used to fund grants for affected businesses to migrate off Azure back to on prem or to another cloud vendor should they so wish.

The damage has already been done, and is ongoing, and not easy to reverse. A one-off fine won't remedy their illegally gained market share.

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

Re: Dubai

Dublin isn't really used as a hub for long haul connections though, as opposed to AMS, FRA, CDG, and DXB.

Basically for long haul it's "are you more likely to fly with BA, KLM, Air France, Lufthansa, or Emirates"

Dublin does have US customs and immigration pre-clearance which is great, but who the heck wants to go to the US at the moment...!?

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Re: Downvote - really?

You're welcome

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Woke people are largely intolerant of ignorant twats, Nazis, and other people who _actively choose_ to be assholes to people who are different to them in terms of characteristics they don't get to choose, such as gender, race, nationality, sexuality, class, asylum etc ..

That's how I justify it to myself anyway.

Nobody is born a Nazi, or a racist, or a fascist; they become that way by nurture, environment, and by forming their own beliefs. They can be educated, and they can change, and choose to be more accepting of people not like them.

But if they choose not to pursue change when challenged with reasonable arguments, I personally reserve the right to treat them as subhuman scum that I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.

DVSA drives up online theory test contract value to £700M with no explanation

WTF

Wait, this is JUST for the Theory Test...!?

Just...how? The budget should be considerably less than a tenth of that. It's not rocket surgery. Fuckssake.

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

Five nines is usually overkill

It may be a "gold standard" but for the vast majority of cases, the extra engineering complexity and cost to actually realistically achieve five nines (which is 5.26 minutes downtime per year) is a false economy compared to four nines - which is 53 minutes downtime per year.

I would go so far to say that - on paper - for 3rd party hosted SaaS products that aren't classed as "mission critical" (which arguably 365 and GitHub aren't really) if you get three nines you're probably doing OK - that's a little over 8 hours downtime in a year.

The caveat to that is that nines alone aren't necessarily a useful measure of lost value and disruption. Take three nines; if you randomly lose an hour's service here and there scattered throughout a year, the disruption to you extends beyond the outage window as you're playing catch-up repeatedly. You're probably more disrupted overall than by a single 8 hour outage, when you could just decamp to the pub instead.

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

NASA

If I were in charge of NASA, the odds of xAI dragging down SpaceX would be too big a risk to accept, and I'd very much be lobbying the regulators to not allow such a merger. But with the Tangerine Toddler in charge, the chances of that happening are pretty slim.

Broadcom 'bulldozes' VMware cloud partners as March deadline looms

Why would you jump from a product owned by Broadcom to a product owned by Oracle...? Out of the frying pan and into the fire springs to mind.

There are other true open-source virtualization options available you know...

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Nike

Should probably consider changing their slogan before one of their t-shirts "instructs" an AI to follow the devil on its metaphorical shoulder.

Lawyers will have a field day.

Microsoft Intune changes to start biting unprepared admins

Intune

I've never come across anyone that actually thinks it's any good or remotely fit for purpose, it just gets adopted because Microsoft pull the same anti-competitive shit they always do - they bundle it in with other totally unrelated licenses, making it very difficult to articulate a business case for superior non-Microsoft solutions to the beancounters, because they think that InTune is "free".

Windows Backup adds second-chance restore at sign-in

Incoherent useless nonsense

Honestly it's like an LLM has been hallucinating Microsoft's product strategy for the last 5 years, and this is yet another "feature" no more useful or coherent an offering than what currently exists...

In fact, I'm being rude about LLMs because they'd probably be an improvement compared to Microsoft's Product Management team

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

I've recently been forced to use Word and Excel on a Mac (the web versions wouldn't cut it) and they're still dodgy - there's definitely minor compatibility niggles. Almost certainly deliberate by MS. They're scum, their nefarious tactics over the last 30 years make what VW did with the diesel-defeat scandal look like child's play.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

Re: try something old fashioned

BA ground staff have openly admitted to me it's to avoid EU261 compensation. And I know it's the arrival time that matters, but if the airline can _prove_ they were ready to go then it's much easier to deny claims. We've seen plenty of times where they blame weather or ATC for a problem, but actually they were already delayed before that, which turns into a more complex claim.

Re: try something old fashioned

Semantics. Realistically if they attach the tug, withdraw the jet bridges/stairs, close the doors, and remove the wheel chocks they're probably still officially "off blocks" and they wouldn't need permission from ATC or the airport to do that. Attaching the tug may even cause some slight movement.

Airlines shouldn't be permitted to start allowing passengers to board unless you're expecting to be at the runway say within 1 hour - and if you deliberately breach that then compensation should be payable. Nobody wants to be squashed on a plane longer than they need to be. Things change, we get that.

But if you've been told you're not getting a slot before, say, 1pm, for a 12pm departure, you shouldn't start boarding the passengers at 11.15am...

Re: try something old fashioned

If they lock the doors and push you back even an inch, that counts as "off blocks" which is what the scheduled departure time is actually based on.

If there's an ATC or weather delay, the fuckers want you on the plane so they can prove they "departed" on time and any delays were out of their hands so they don't have to compensate you. Also means premium and frequent fliers are sitting on the plane costing them £0 rather than sitting in the lounge helping themselves to more free booze.

Basically they'd rather increase the chance of you getting a DVT to save them a few quid, than let you wait in the terminal.

Re: Third party booking sites?

...and don't book BA. Ryanair product for Emirates prices, and Customer Service somehow even worse.

70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture

Re: "after his family agreed to let him do so"

...which is a far bigger problem than "boat people coming over here taking our jobs" - at least some of that money would stay in the economy at least and drive other jobs. Offshoring is the worst of all worlds and should be outright banned, unless it's a capability that genuinely doesn't exist in our own country. In which case incentivise onshoring it.

Jaguar Land Rover hack cost India's Tata Motors around $2.4 billion and counting

Jaguar - yes.

Land Rover / Range Rover - no

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: All the same...

1pmobile

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

Just totally ban mid-contract price rises

You literally don't need to add in mid-contract price rises. If you decide you want to effectively put it up by £2/month after a year, just put the entire 2 year contract up by £1/month.

Treat it like you would a currency hedge - you don't get to wait-and-see and then say "oh actually we want a bit more from you". Put your cards on the table on day one and stick to it. If after 12 months you need more cash, raise prices for new contracts.

It's really not hard, if everyone is forced to play by the same rules, and the rules aren't so full of loopholes you could drive a truck through them.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

The fact that you're referring to people's feelings as "fee fees" just backs up your pathetically childish black-and-white view of the world.

It doesn't take much humanity to consider that your fellow humans are fallible, and we put systems in place to cover for that. If the systems don't work for whatever reason - including if there's a culture of bypassing heavyweight SOPs because they're not working for the business on a day-to-day basis - then that's not necessarily the fault of an individual.

You also need to consider that people learn from their mistakes. If you only ever hired extremely competent, very expensive, senior staff, who had made their learning mistakes elsewhere, then that's your prerogative - but it's not a luxury most businesses have.

Should Steve and his boss have been subject to some form of disciplinary process - yes. Should they have been fired on the spot as you claim - no. Should Steve have been fired - probably not, because he was there at his boss's request, and he's just made a mistake which he's undoubtedly learned from and will now never make again. By firing him you're immediately losing some of the little positive value gained from the outage they caused.

Generally speaking if Steve worked for you, and this happened on your watch, and you enabled it (implicitly or explicitly, culturally or process-based), YOU should be the one carrying the can for it, not one of your underlings. That's what you get paid the megabucks for. If your first reaction is to sack your people, then you're a pretty toxic manager.

Sorry if I've hurt your "fee fees".

Tosser.

If taking out one seemingly minor box took the entire company down, there are bigger issues at stake.

As other people have said, why wasn't it clearly labelled if it was so important? Which moron had "architected" it such that there was a clear SPOF? Or which bean counter had nixed the resilient approach that an architect had come up with?

If anything there should be more chaos monkeys like Steve in organisations, because then things will be architected and built properly, instead of corners being cut all over the place.

Your average enterprise IT deployment is full of bits like a Brazilian favela that's been built with badly mixed concrete and is now held up with sticks and duct tape. Stuff that wouldn't pass building regulations in a million years. Yet even though western society has relatively stringent building regulations for physical buildings, we outsource design and build of critical IT systems to the cheapest, and don't apply any engineering rigour to any of it. Sacking people like Steve who are trying to make do with the sticks and duct tape doesn't fix the underlying problem.

Steve's boss suggested they go. It's not wholly unreasonable for Steve to assume that it's a sanctioned trip. Combined with some COVID lockdown stir-crazy-jumping-at-the-chance-to-see-a-different-four-walls mania I can see how he might have not asked as many questions as he perhaps he should have done.

If anyone should be carrying the can for the escapade, it's Steve's boss, not Steve.

Re: Come on, peoples!

The chances of up-to-date and accessible/discoverable documentation for a piece of kit that's *powered off* in a large organisation is relatively small. Documentation should be kept up to date. But that doesn't happen as diligently as it should.

It's generally a pretty safe assumption that if something that appears to be an active piece of kit doesn't have power then it's not "active".

I've never come across a piece of powered hardware yet that effectively acts as a patch panel passing network connectivity through even when it's disconnected from power. Power cord plugged in and device "off" is a different matter. But no power cord at all - the mind boggles at what this piece of hardware was doing and why it had been designed that way.

So Steve identified a presumably undocumented single point of failure, caused an outage that presumably didn't kill anyone, and learned an important lesson meaning he'd almost certainly do things differently from now on, making him a more valuable employee......

And they fired him. Bravo.

Unless this was genuinely a pattern of reckless behaviour that had already been called out, I just don't get some companies' attitudes to throwing techies under the bus like this, especially where their own line management is complicit.

It's more likely to drive people into covering things up when they make mistakes, rather than being open and honest.

UK agency makes arrest in airport cyberattack investigation

Re: What I would like to know ...

...and that's when planes were being bombed and hijacked on a semi-regular basis, far more people were dying of lung cancer from passive smoking, and flying wasn't generally affordable to the masses beyond a once-a-year package holiday if you were lucky...

In 20 years from the mid-90s to the mid-2010s, UK passenger numbers alone increased from ~140 million a year to ~250 million a year. That simply wouldn't have happened if everything was still paper-based.

So with the greatest respect, kindly take your cancerous (literally) "nostalgia" and shove it up your arse, as it's irrelevant naval gazing bollocks.

Tech troubles create aviation chaos on both sides of the Atlantic

Re: They know where they can stick their apologies.

The "compensation" you are talking about is paid in advance in the form of the lack of another zero on the end of your fare.

There's so much regulatory stuff to jump through, and so many critical calculations, not to mention stuff like routing baggage on connecting flights and so on, that if you wanted a robust and resilient non-automated backup plan that would be so slick that it wouldn't inconvenience qnyone, they'd have to charge so much they'd go out of business.

It's an uncomfortable truth but many businesses are only viable by strategically cutting a few corners here and there. I'd rather airlines and airports cut a few corners on the resilience of their passenger processing systems if it means they don't start trying to shave costs off safety-critical systems.

Alleged Scattered Spider teen cuffed after extortion Bitcoin used to buy games, meals

Re: Extradition?

If he's committed offences here, he can be tried here for the offences.

Only after we're done with him should we even entertain an extradition request, and part of the condition of agreeing to a request should be - if found guilty in the US - that any US sentence gets tacked on the end of whatever we sentence him to, and he should serve the whole lot in a US jail to save us the prison space.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Re: Pension schemes and salary computers

Not necessarily - wouldn't be the first time the "obvious" and "important" problems have been fixed in terms of future cashflows, but turns out there's some code on the periphery that uses today's date that will blow up the application or cause invalid queries to be generated...

Microsoft puts the squeeze on onmicrosoft.com freeloaders

It's a start

Now we just need Google to limit the ability for spammers to add non-Google addresses to Google Groups on hacked GSuite domains.

Every few days it's another avalanche of auto-reply shite coming from legitimate businesses in response to messages that the spammers have sent "from" a group e-mail that they've subscribed god knows how many people to - and because it's coming from legit businesses via Google's infrastructure, it's much harder to elevate the spam score without capturing too many false-positives. Pain in the arse.

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

Re: Being sensible for a moment

..."that they sold you 10 years ago"

No... Windows 11 didn't come out until October 2021, so I suspect there were still computers being sold "new" with Windows 10 on as little as 3 years ago.

Microsoft offers EU cloud providers fresh commercial terms, staves off risk of litigation

I feel deep unease that this is being negotiated behind closed doors between one set of companies with vested interests, and the abusive monopolist, Microsoft. Any outcomes will benefit CISPE only, not Microsoft license-holders.

The best outcome for everyone else is if CISPE tell MS to feck off, support the antitrust/monopoly complaints to reach their inevitable conclusions, and get both the playing field levelled, and a massive settlement for literally every MS customer/hostage who's been adversely affected by their shitty practices over the past 10 years.

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

Air quality

If they can get this working with electric motors (or at least hybrid) then another plus is the definite potential to improve safety and air quality on the ramp - although I love the smell of burning jet fuel - engines often burn oil and other crap when starting up, and if you're working on the ramp every day it's probably going to take a toll on your health.

If each aircraft just has to start a relatively small APU with an exhaust that's high up, rather than starting two or more jet engines down at person-height, I'd expect that would make a difference. Don't start the engines until you're on the taxiway out in the open and the startup smoke dissipates where there's nobody to directly breathe it in.

Could also reduce the likelihood of foreign object damage, as well as reducing the likelihood of workers being ingested into running engines.

All low probability, but high cost/impact issues which probably add to the overall business case.

14-hour+ global blackout at Ingram Micro halts customer orders

Re: Resilience

If they have expired / died well sucks for for you for a lack of planning.

If they are expiring / required in the next week, we'll it sucks for a lack of planning

Take it you've never worked for an organisation where the Finance bods sit on everything until the very last minute...

The techies can plan perfectly well, give management/procurement all the right paperwork, weeks ahead of time...and they'll still sit on it until 11.59 for "cashflow purposes", seemingly regardless of operational risk.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Heathrow not blameless

Should the CEO be directly involved with people fixing underlying faults - hell no. And a good management structure that acts as an umbrella to shield the workers from senior management is invaluable and always appreciated in a crisis.

Should the CEO be directly involved in making a judgement-call decision, i.e. "shut the airport until 11pm" - that will cost the business - and it's customers - tens of millions in disruption - abso-fucking-lutely.

You're conflating different types and scales of decision-making here. They should have sent someone to get him out of bed to make the decision, and held off making knee-jerk decisions for the hour or so it would have taken. Even if you've got nobody local to him, you send a taxi local to him to go and hammer on his door.

Re: Heathrow not blameless

I'd put money on it that the CEO - had he been awake - wouldn't have decided to close the entire airport for 20 hours when the fire had only been burning for an hour or so.

I also can't imagine that that level of detail of decision is codified in the big red "oh shit" book.

Aircraft that were inbound on long haul, and still 6+ hours away from needing to make a decision about landing ended up turning back to their origin. For BA and Virgin in particular, they've now got lots of passengers and tens of planes on the wrong side of the world, and a massive logistical headache that will take days to unwind.

Heathrow's Ops Director likely doesn't give as much as a damn about the knock on effects as the CEO would. The Ops Director will have been in tactical mode; the CEO would likely have taken a bigger picture strategic approach to decision making.

Terminal 5 could have been accepting flights from mid-morning onwards, so the long hauls still airborne could have continued and arrived more or less on time, those that had diverted to other UK airports could have shuttled down to Heathrow, and a large percentage of the knock-on disruption of having people and planes in the wrong places would have been avoided.

Choosing to close the airport for the entire day was demonstrably the wrong decision, and wholly unnecessary. The only thing that will have saved the Ops Director's bacon is the fact his boss screwed up by being uncontactable and sleeping blissfully ignorant until 6am.

And I still imagine boss's first words to the Ops Director will have been along the lines of "you've fucking done what!?"

Heathrow not blameless

The CEO was fast asleep with his phone on silent and they couldn't raise him. Why someone wasn't dispatched to wake him up, who knows...

Which meant it fell to the Operations Director to handle the incident, and he made the call to shut the airport for the entire day, the best part of 24 hours.

Which doesn't appear to have been remotely necessary as several areas - including Terminal 5 - had power sufficient to handle passengers safely before the morning was out.

So aside from not testing their power resilience, their chain of command fell through, and the person left in charge by default made a poor decision that actually caused much of the financial harm.

Now they're pointing the finger of blame at others to try to deflect from their own failings.

Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols

Re: "Secure by Default"

Wordpress is absolutely fuck all to do with Linux, it's a PHP-based omnishambles that you can run on anything that can run PHP. Including Windows.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: “Starships might land on Mars in 2026”

So long as Musk is on the inaugural flight, I don't give a shit if it can get back again.

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

Exactly - Oracle's lawyers will go after relatively low-hanging fruit that are likely to be a slam dunk. Not the kind of case that will be difficult to win and will play out badly in the court of public opinion.

They're good lawyers, not idiots, and the last thing they want is case law that potentially damages the rest of their shakedown scam.

Re: Students don't have to be paid for

It may well be, but safer to get them to sign it as well so that if they become staff there's no grey area.

The minute Oracle even threaten you with court, you get an injunction against them, backed up by your evidence, and get a judge to throw it out.

American megacorp trying it on vs UK educational establishment, who do you think a British judge is going to side with?

Make all students and staff (barring a specific procurement team) sign up to something that says they are individually liable for any Oracle licensing costs that may be incurred if they install Oracle products on any of their devices.

Explicitly declare that said students and staff do not have the right to enter into any contracts or license agreements with Oracle on behalf of the organisation or any of its related institutions, and do not have permission to use Oracle products in the course of their work or studies.

Explicitly inform Oracle that this is contractually enforced and that unless licenses are agreed to in writing by specific named individuals, there is and will be no agreement between Oracle and the organisation or any of its related institutions, and no liability for any licensing.

Then, tell Oracle to fuck off whenever they send a bill. Simples.

Single passenger reportedly survives Air India Boeing 787 crash

Re: And Boeing gets blamed

It did look like a mid-field takeoff based on ADS-B data from FlightRadar24, but that appears to have been a data issue rather than reality.

There's video footage showing it already at a reasonable speed going past that intersection, so a mid-field takeoff can be ruled out, though there is a turning circle that's about 2/3rds of the way down the runway, so that's still a possibility that it wasn't a full length takeoff - but that would be a very strange decision for any pilot to have made in a heavily laden 787 in nearly 40 degree heat.

Re: Survivor

...and actually walk away from the smoking wreckage, with what appears to be his phone still working!

Got to feel for the guy, his brother was apparently sat next to him and didn't get out. Fella's going to need some serious time with a shrink over the coming years.

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

Here's a thought...

Maybe a human being at Meta should be involved in approving ads when they're submitted, if their automation isn't good enough to catch these scumbags out.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

What the fuck are they smoking?

See title