Posts by Is it me?

Sony distribution centre engulfed by fire

Also

Supermarket distribution centres tend to be in use 24/7 with large staffs, so 15 hoodies turning up might be in for a surprise when faced by a bunch of naffed off HGV drivers. (Truckers to our North American readers).

India cracks down on the Blackberry

It all depends.

It's always been a function of government and law enforcement to listen in on the private communications of those suspected of anti-social or criminal activities in order that they can gather evidence, or interdict forthcoming events.

Do you really want governments not to have that power? Do you really want criminals and terrorists to have that as an absolute right?

Very, very few countries, have a security apparatus big enough to listen to every single message, all they can do it listen to chatter, and pick-up key words.

In democracies, you need to get a court order, and show just cause to properly listen in to communications, but then who do you focus on, if you can't monitor the chatter.

There has to be a balance between personal privacy and liberty, and the collective good, which is why we have politicians and the law, and the balance shifts. The riots in the UK are likely to make it easier to open BBM in the UK, so BB are doing the right thing by turning over data to prevent a badly and hastily formed blanket law forcing them too in the future.

Oh and lets face it the bulk of BBM messages are probably banal and irrelevant to anything other than the sender and recipient.

Death haunts government petitions site

Don't forget

That for Guido and his fellow Daily Mail readers, there is no such thing as Europe, La La La, no listening.

Microsoft to pay $250,000 for hot new security defenses

ooh, please

It would be so nice to be able to use unix shell without having to use cygwin, but wait, didn't MS have a unix compatibility pack at one time.

UK police warns off hacktivists

The bit Anonymous need to remember is

Once you start attacking the institutions of state you put your self at risk of the state taking an interest in you. Once the state decides you are enough of a nuisance to take an interest in, then it has far more resources to find you, than you do to avoid it, so it just becomes a matter of time, and there is a line that if you cross, then the state will not stop.

That line is usually causing significant economic harm, or putting other people in harms way, like publishing a list of Police officers names and addresses. The law is clear about this, pass on a secret, regardless of how easy it was to get it, and you are culpable, and what's more the state has a duty to pursue you on behalf of its citizens. Get someone hurt, and in effect you become a terrorist.

Successful criminals get away with stuff, either because they don't do it themselves, or they don't do it very often.

MPs slam 'unworkable' one-size-fits-all NHS care records' system

Just like to point out

That there is a national system that consolidates millions of complex data and media records from hundreds of different and disparate bodies with multiple IT systems from many vendors and makes them available to all the other bodies in a common format. it was built by an IT company, and it's well liked by its users, around 200,000, eventually. It didn't cost anything like as much as NHS.

Why didn't it fail, well mainly because the NHS showed them how not to do it, and the project wasn't initiated by an ego who vowed to screw the IT companies into the ground.

Oh, and the users got a say in the contract preparation and requirements.

Hackers dump secret info for thousands of cops

Ye Gods

These people do like kicking bears, and then they complain when they get scratched. Oh and by the way releasing names and address of Police officers is a very dangerous thing to do, you could get them killed, and land yourself with some very serious charges.

The Police are not perfect in any democracy, but exposing their personal details is just wrong, for every bad cop there are dozens of good ones out there that protect you, regardless of your stupidity.

HP to axe sales staff found pilfering dealers

Funny that

Oracle keep pushing us to the channel when we want to go direct for a medium sized long term cloud deal. The channel couldn't do the long term pricing, or the finance, so half the deal has now gone direct with IBM, who can.

Acer turns to trains for imports

Yes Trains

There is a rail route through Kazakhstan, but it still has to run through Russia in the North Caucasus to Ukraine. There is no route through Iran to Turkey.

I wouldn't worry about vibration or shock on modern rolling stock, not much of an issue, but banditry, yup. I'm not sure why they are worried about climate either, insulated containers exist, which could keep the contents at a relatively constant temperature and humidity for a reasonable time period. The Siberian winter is harsh, but no worse than CP or CN have to cope with on the Canadian Praries, or the run to Churchill.

The Eco answer would be sailing ships though.

Police charge Scottish teen over Soca attack

If you poke a bear

You should expect it to react with claws.

MPs slam government's 'obscene' IT spend

For a change

Pretty much all of the comment below is more informed than usual, and certainly the politicians. I would bet that there are some old contracts where a PC is expensive, but when you consider what happens to a basic PC, assuming a one off, it's not that surprising, TCO costs come out to £3500.

1. Raise order on IT provider

2. IT Provider orders PC from its supplier.

3. PC delivered to central build facility

4a. Build facility discovers Dell have changed the spec and a new build is required so the PC is built by hand and then imaged for the next.

4b. PC is built with standard image.

5. PC is sent from central build to site IT, which could be the other end of the country, but you only charge the same.

6. On site IT install the PC check it works and take away the old PC

7. Old PC cent to central IT where hard disk and memory are removed, Carcass sent for recycling, hard disk and memory are wiped, and either reused or securely disposed of.

Note that a good many PCs in government are now delivered with encrypted hard drives which has to be done after the machine is built and takes several hours. They may also have removable hard drives. The PC cost may also include all the network infrastructure costs on the site, and the WAN. The WAN may well require expensive Crypto units, or even a dedicated network, which again adds to the cost. This happens because some departments like a unitary, per user cost, and if you have offices all over the place supplier have to factor in deliveries from Shetland to the Scillies.

Oh, and most of the government contracts I have worked on have open book accounting with fixed margins which are currently running at 3 - 5% for this kind of stuff, so the PC itself is usually cheaper than you could buy in Tesco, it's the configuration & support that pushes the cost up.

A better comparison would be £500 PC/Monitor + Windows 7 Pro + Office Std + Home Router + 3 Years Broadband + Extended Warranty + Home Service from the techguys (TM).

Cabinet Office government-by-Facebook plans probed

ID Assurance

Hmmm, wasn't that what the National Identity Card was all about, but this time the government wants it done by Faceless American corporations or two faced banks.

Talking to the wrong people, Tesco, Boots or Sainsburys would be a better bet, particularly Tesco who do more about us than we do ourselves. People tend to keep their loyalty cards up to date, far more than banks, because they receive a beneficial service.

Mind you I wonder what new fraud opportunities this would throw up, something I suspect they aren't thinking about.

George Lucas defeated by Stormtrooper helmet man

You know

The winners here were the lawyers. I'll bet if it was up to Mr. Lucas the man he would have said, these are a great niche product that harms our brand not one bit, just ask for $25 an individually made helmet, and we're good to go.

But sadly Lucas the corporation would rather have 25c a helmet on a cheap manufactured product that sells in millions and is thrown in the bin after six months, because one will make maybe $10 thou. at most, and the other $20 Million.

Sad really.

English, Welsh cops get mobile fingerprint-check tech

Actually a few steps behind

Been around for at least 10 years.

Actually a few steps behind

Been in data centres for at least 10 years.

Watch an reality cop show

And you'll see for yourself.

Basically they use it when they don't believe someone is giving them their correct identity. They have the legal power to force you to give one, or to take your picture, to confirm identity.

Some forces can access the DVLA driving licence pictures.

Blighty's top cop quits over phone-hacking scandal

Think You'll find

That actually that offer had nothing to do with News International, and everything to do with being friends with the MD of Champneys who is not being investigated, and is a friend, and yes people do do that sort of thing altruistically, occasionally, hard to believe. I know. In his circles it probably counts as standing a round in the local.

BTW - 24K for PR consultancy is peanuts, around 24 days worth, be interesting to know the advice the Met got for it though.

Why are you surprised by all this

Do you think all those cop and detective shows make up the relationship between the Police, the press and Private Detectives who are Ex Job.

Official: Pastafarian strainer titfer is religious headgear

Nice to see tollerence in action.

Reg. you must be proud of yourselves.

Anonymous spaffs Monsanto employees' details

Power corrupts

They have seen the power of their actions, and like it, so now they want to use it more. What will truly define them as a group will be knowing where to stop before they become more of a cyber terrorist organisation, than a group of direct activists.

Agree with another thread that publishing employee details is not on as this exposes innocents to risk, and this is what they seem to be doing.

If you poke too many Bears one of them will get you.

Interwebs IDE hits the mother Node

Security Model

Problem with this is that as soon as you use a web service, you loose control of the data/code you put in. A hosting company that's not in your legal jurisdiction has to comply with its local laws, not yours, hence all the worries about things like the Patriot act.

What protections do you have that really stop the service provider nicking your code, or passing it on to a third party. Think about the consequences of legal challenges to discover if your code breaks someone else's software patents and so on.

Does the underlying security model allow you to share you code with only those you choose. Is it vaulted to ensure administrators can't see it?

Nice idea if you can host if for your own cooperatives where you do have control.

Assange™ in court to fight extradition order

Yup

That and the fact that if he were in any danger of being tortured in Gitmo, the UK & Sweden wouldn't extradite him as that would break all sorts of National and European law on extraditions.

BTW - I doubt there's much else Assange(TM) can do to make himself look anymore stupid than he already have, but hey you never know.

News International grabs SunOnSunday.co.uk domain

Well da

No way News Corp would give up the market share of NoW without a plan B. Even listening to their spokes persons they talk about this being an ongoing move, to consolidate brands and reduce costs.

And would they lie to use?

Cisco drives epic Chinese surveillance network, says report

No not really

ANPR only flags watched VRNs, some, but not all hold VRNs for a while, for later analysis as a part of a criminal investigation. Some also might hold the vehicle image, but again not for long as there's a storage issue, not to mention Data Protection and so on.

This kind of system is way beyond the kind of money the government will spend.

Efficiency and Reform Group 'has saved over £3bn'

And the suppliers

Reduced their quality of service

Microsoft patent points to Skype snooping

How to attract attention.

You're right, and wrong, if you want the security services to take an interest in your activities, using encrypted telephony is a good way, just as is repeating a number of key phrases too many time in a single open phone conversation. Government does us encrypted voice, but not as much as you might think, because it's expensive and inconvenient. To do it you need to have control of both end points, and share keys.

Encrypted streams shine out like anything on a network, and state, I'm hiding something, so al sorts of people will want to have a look, not just governments and their agencies. Talking in the clear is a much better bet, as the government is only likely to be listening in, if it has a warrant, and has cause that you are doing something wrong.

Ok, encrypting data streams is now a must for pretty much everybody, but voice no, and are you really saying you don't want governments to have the ability to listen in to the bad guys, just in case they might hear you discussing your acne problem with a chum.

It is impossible for the government to listen to everybody, it is just, way too expensive, and of no benefit. You'll only get listened too if give cause, and even then it has to be pretty major. Do you really think governments tap the phones of all the criminals in the UK, why do you think they would bother with you or me,

Police body defends controversial procurement deal

Wow

7 front line police officers for £150,000, now that is a deal. If this guy thinks that's how much a police officer costs, then that might explain his idea of a good deal. I reckon at that price my Village might want it's own Police force, £200 a household, bargin.

His statement indicates that this is a margin deal, probably based on a catalogue. I'll bet though it has no scope for large deal discounts, and probably undermines turnkey solution deals as well.

I can't see how SCC has any incentive to seek the best deal from the suppliers, open book just means they can see how much you buy for, and how much you sell for, and the overall costs of sale and margin.

Bloke ordered to remove offensive numberplate

The thing I object to is...

That the DVLA thinks I will be offended by a number plate, don't care what it is, this one made me laugh, hardly offensive, perhaps the DVLA should take the approach that if a substantial number of people complain they will withdraw a plate, but otherwise, so what. Those few combinations that result in a really offensive word are not that hard to spot, and if anyone was daft enough to put it on their car, it would say more about them than anything else.

I suspect there are very few numbers that would really cause offence, and words that cause offence permanently are few and well known, most vary over time, has Bollocks ever been offensive, don't think so. I'd love to see the DVLA stand up in court and prove it is an offensive word.

And....

Just because you hold a licence from another country does not automatically mean it transfers to the UK. This is not unique to the UK. The validity of an overseas licence is accepted for short term visitors, but not for long term residents, you have to pass a test and gain a full licence, so naturally you will get a provisional licence, and if you are driving unaccompanied on it, you are committing an offence. If you had wanted to move to a full licence, then you should have applied before your overseas licence period expired.

Why should you be an exception. Pretty much every country in the world operates the same system, your national licence is fine for visiting, but move here and you need one of ours, and you need to prove you can drive to our standard.

Liam Maxwell appointed to advise on gov ICT

WTF

The head of IT for a school to advise the government. And lets not go down the old school tie bit...

Oracle to overhaul reseller rebates

No just slow delivery either

Oracle take days to price orders and decide on volume discounts, something IBM seem to be able to do in hours.

Not only that, change a single item, and the whole process has to be redone. They seem to have lost the plot when it comes to selling kit, and are entirely focussed on their appliance strategy.

Anonymous claims LulzSec merger

They'll be too young...

To understand this reference....

Romani ite domum or should that be "Haud nomen ite domum", but hey probably don't get out much anyway.

Side-lined suppliers beat on Police procurement deal

Depends on the Service

If all that SCC do is provide a Police IT version of Amazon and fulfilment, then you would expect the corporate discount pricing they provide normally, however as soon as you wrap other services around it, such as a PC with Installation and three years support, then you are in a whole other game. If SCC are running a brokerage service, then they will charge a standard transaction charge for the additional effort, on top of their normal charges.

Remember, if you buy a £15 dongle from Amazon, for your organisation, the Organisation pays £15 for the dongle, plus your time spent finding it and expensing it, plus the processing time for your expenses. If you fill in a purchase requisition, then you have the internal costs for that. Whichever way you look at it, your £15 dongle will not cost the company £15.

The aim of such contracts is to reduce the total purchase costs, not just the item buy price. To do this, there might be an agreed margin on all items, or a transaction price. Procurement gets to lower its headcount, and the additional purchase costs go on to user departments. The real winner being the procurement department manager who has slashed his budget and headcount.

Plods roll out new Police National Database

Absolutely

Are you saying that the Police should not hold intelligence information about criminals on computer systems for analysis, or that criminals should have the right to know what is known about them, and who said it.

Are you saying that only true information should be held on the database.

Or course intelligence and investigative information is confidential, and not for disclosure outside of controlled user groups. Any investigation will turn-up thousands of items, some true, some false, some indeterminate. All of this is subject to human and computer analysis, some will be marked as true and later found to be false, and vice versa, that is the nature of the beast.

Oh, criminals tend to lie when they give information to the Police, those lies are as important to record as the truth. It is not unknown for a criminal to give someone else's details when challenged.

Do you ant the PND to hold information only about known and convicted criminals, well that won't work either, the guilty get off, and some really serious criminal are never caught because they never actually commit a direct offence, they fund, they manage, they sit in the shadows and are only identified indirectly through data mining across boundaries and borders.

It's a sobering thought that many of the behind-the-scenes criminals tend to be Accountants, Solicitors, Estate Agents and small business men of good standing. Remember Layer Cake.

Because it didn't work.

There was, and still is an indexing system, but it doesn't work that well. It's used as a part of the vetting process.

LPF systems only cover information relevant to their inquiries, and only hold other force data if a cross force connection is known. Chief's tend to get very nervous when you suggest things like distributed queries over their data from other forces, and would never allow it, as it would be a nightmare to administer that level of user access, and cost each force a fortune in additional equipment and licence costs, holding their own copies of data would also be prohibitive.

The NPIA however can do this, and having a central warehouse means you can do a whole load of neat stuff with the data. Though, I doubt it is as sophisticated as yet, as the fraud detection software used by Banks and Insurance companies.

Don't forget that the Police have relied for years on the PNC, and that's a pretty limited system in modern IT terms, basically a lookup database.

Elite UK police agency website downed by Lulzsec

Little Nuisance

If Lulzsec or Anonymous actually managed to hack a significant government system I might be impressed, but public web sites is just pointless.

A better analogy than access to your house might be access to the bathroom, not that inconvenient, until you really need to go. These websites hardly have a high volume of traffic, but when they are needed, well, it's the public who suffer, not the organisations involved.

Would these guys still be your heroes if they took the 999/911 service down.

Facebooking juror gets 8 months

It's made crystal clear

When you start your term as a juror it is made crystal clear that you should not discuss a case with anyone, as I remember both in your papers, and verbally by the court staff. There is no way a juror could be ignorant of the law.

You should also remember that most criminals are morons as well, so it's also useful to have some on the jury. Juries in my experience are a wide representation of society, and are pretty good at spotting bullshit from either side, and the Judge.

There is also a limit to the number of times you can get out of jury service when called, but hopefully all our civic minded non-moron commentators would want to fulfil their civic duty and sit on juries to keep the morons at bay.

Iranian pimp plates arse up Afghan car sales

You missed ...

The £80 to move it to your new car.

EU ministers back centralisation of population databases

Ha - I learned two

Estoppel, thanks to Oracle and HP

It's not the government bit I worry about

It's who has access to this kind of data within Europol, and how honest they are.

Steer clear of the desktop virtualisation bootstorm

Well

We are about to deploy a large VDI implementation, and we have been told from day 1 by our vendor that you always maintain a configurable pool of pre-booted instances on each server, and that you need to be very careful with bandwidth between your storage and servers. They also suggested that holding the VM image on a flash disk in the server might not go amiss.

To me that was "No Sh** Sherlock", but then I've been doing this a long time, and remember all about session start-up on our VAX servers at 9am on a Monday morning. Mind you we did only have to worry about RS232 connectors to VT220s and the odd terminal concentrator. Nor did I have to cope with managers who thought that VPNs increased the available bandwidth on a link.

Already invented

Sorry!

Actually the compelling case for VDI is security and support for large enterprises with multiple sites. Thin clients require little skill to maintain and support, and upgrades can all be managed from the data centre. A corrupted VM can be blatted and a fresh one started in moments, an upgrade requires a few images to be modified off line, not an estate of thousands of machines.

MoD plans 'name and shame' crackdown on crap projects

You can bet

That at no point will ministers be to blame, the Treasury or the NAO, and a significant reason for cost escalation is by Political interference, budgetary replanning or spend governance.

Not though I hasten to add, that contractors and MoD project staff are blame free. What's really needed is a radical new approach to government procurement, not more governance and oversight.

And if you ask a supplier to deliver a Cow then don't change your mind and ask for a Pig halfway through the project. It's probably cheaper to cancel and start again, well Mr.Supplier, if you want to be in with a chance to partake in the new programme, you won't want to be too stringent on the cancellation costs.

Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

Hang on

Fossil Fuels are running out, yes Ok there's lots of coal, but it's not very good for your health, ask anyone who lived in London in the 40s & 50s, or bits of China today.

We still need to drastically reduce our reliance on Carbon, global warming or not.

So yep bad timing to get rid of Nuclear. Still the Med. will be OK, they don't need it, lucky for our Italian chums then.

Anonymous vows to attack Federal Reserve

The harder you kick a bear

The more likely it is to wake up, and if you are stupid enough to wake the bear, don't be surprised if it eats you alive.

Doubly stupid if the bear knows you are coming.

Royston's ANPR surveillo-plan goes to ICO

However,

It is where some major national and regional routes cross, A10 & A505 for a start.

Not adding up.

If you can get a camera Pole bought and installed for £200, then I think Herts police will happily award you a contract to do it.

£7500 seems about right to me, as you have to pay for the pole to be transported, stuck into the ground, connected to the mains and connected to a data network. You then have to test that it all works properly. I suspect that the cost of the Pole also might be more that £200 as well.

And remember that will involve three different organisations to put the Pole up, and another three to commission it.

I can't see BT, National Grid, and Herts Highways being happy about a contractor rocking up tapping their networks and then disappearing without some level of quality control and governance.

Porridge for Ofcom IT boss in £500k software fraud

And not the Civil Servents either

It'll be independent consultants and business people brought in by the world class management hired externally, over whom there is very little control. Lots of senior positions are held by consultants on paid through their personal companies.

In fact most normal company employees are not permitted to be directors or to work for multiple companies by their contracts without permission. No sane organisation would allow an employee to work for a supplier or competitor.

These restrictions however don't apply to contract staff.

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

I won't be flocking anywhere

Thanks Steve, but I want to know, and control where my data goes, certainly not to US servers subject to the Patriot act with access dictated by Apple. I like my data in my personal NAS and loaded to my iPhone & iPod (I have an Air as well) as I see fit.

Spinning rust will not disappear until flash is cheap enough and reliable enough to provide large data stores, until then, even iCloud will require it as a storage medium.

Sadly, as is often the case in IT the proponents of this model actually believe they speak the truth, because they can't cope with more than one technical solution at a time.

'Backward' resellers impede cloud progress. Yeah, right

Economics

Cloud offerings are not about any technical benefit, there really aren't that many, they are about economic benefit to the vendor through reductions in hosting costs and protection of long term revenue streams.

For consumers, it's about flexibility of demand, paying for what you use, rather than your peak, and transfer of capital expenditure to revenue.

If you have a consistent demand for computing a cloud is always going to be more expensive, because you are in effect renting by the minute, and placing more risk on the vendor, who will charge for that risk. The kit they provide has to host more than a single vendor, then they need to size for multiple clients peak demands, and when that resource is not in use, they still have to pay for the kit, the racking, the management tools, the networks, the power, cooling and floorspace. You can bet their cost models ensure full recovery of those costs over a relatively short time period. I can only really see cloud computing being of any value where you have a low base load with very high peaks, or can get a good deal on any base load commitment over a number of years. This doesn't tend to be how its sold though.

Oh and then there is security, client separation, and separations of duty in the ops centre do not come cheap, neither are they that easy to implement.

Ultimately Cloud computing is a financial gimmick, not a technical need, and anyway isn't it just a variation on time sharing mainframe bureaus?