Posts by Headley_Grange

UK.gov launches cyber 'lockdown' campaign as 80% of orgs still leave door open

Re: 82 percent of businesses and 77 percent of charities

You could make your house a lot more secure if you bricked up all the doors and windows.

Re: Platitudes

Someone is doing their IT. Someone's getting paid to do it. If they haven't got an IT pro then it's probably being done by a combination of everyone plus a couple of self-taught employees - who have 'proper' jobs to do - tinkering with stuff they don't really understand and relying on Google to keep their kit going. If they got an IT pro then those people could spend more time doing the jobs they understand and are qualified and paid for instead of trying to sort out IT stuff they don't understand. The company could become more productive, increase sales and profits, job and customer satisfaction. An IT pro could optimize the IT to support the business, make sure backups ran, licences were paid for, patches done and security addressed, etc. Your negative attitude towards everything seems to include regarding employees as burdens as opposed to contributors.

Re: Platitudes

You're so right. Since the driving test was introduced in the UK there is no bad driving and not a single driving offence has been committed by a licenced driver.

Re: Platitudes

I bet all those small businesses use qualifed accountants - either internal or external - to run their accounts, payroll, RTI, VAT, corp tax, etc. They do this because getting it wrong means anything from a fine to the company going bust to prision. If they can afford an accountant they can afford an IT professional.

Edinburgh councillors pull the plug on 'green' AI datacenter

"promises of public green space and sports facilities."

Yeah, right.

AI.com goes for $70M as crypto boss bets big on buzzword bubble

Aren't domain names a bit phone like phone numbers? In the old days memorable phone numbers were a bonus but the only ones I remember today are from my youth and those of long-gone girlfriends because no one taps them in them any more. Who types in a full domain name these days? People just search by service or company name or hit a bookmark and the top hits from a search are probably paid for.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Re: You need to get pout more

Sure, with heat, water, polytunnels and fertilizer you can grow anything anywhere anytime but if we had to grow all our own food then farmers wouldn't be allowed to waste space and resources growing luxury soft fruits out of season. They'd be growing potatoes, wheat, barley and sugar beet with a few luxuries, like turnips and parsnips, chucked in to keep the population sweet.

Apt, considering that the Chinese dumping of cheap steel has all but destroyed the UK's steel production capacity.

The article is about Microsoft but the UK - and probably many other European countries - would struggle to be self-sufficient in anything. The basics - energy, food, clothes, transport - all depend on the rest of the world. The last 25 years of globaliztion has seen commodities, production and services move to the cheapest areas of production. It might not take the UK long to be self sufficient in food but there'd be no more strawberries at Christmas and our diet would revert to the more austere and seasonal one I remember from my youth.

Hope Springs Eternal

Sure they could turn it off but Microsoft's markets, together with those of many other US S/W companies, would disappear within a couple of years as countries all over the world developed their own or turned to non-US alternatives. Microsoft might not even survive the share-price drop that would result from it. That would be something to remember Trump for.

Google to foist Gemini pane on Chrome users in automated browsing push

Re: Why are you still using this shite?

What AI shite? Apart from Google Search AI answers - which I've fixed - I've never seen any AI in Firefox.

Re: Why are you still using this shite?

Many people have use-cases that are different from yours. I use Firefox because it has an RSS add-on that works for me and I've never found one that comes close. If it ever disappears I might even use AI to try to write one for myself ;-)

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

This isn't a CoPilot, AI or LMM issue. The problem is that someone simply believed (or confirmed what they wanted to believe) what the internet told them without checking sources or, even better, getting a quallified expert view.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

I'm hoping that they knew damn well that calling it Visio would piss Microsoft.

Marching orders delayed: Veterans' Digital ID off to a slow start

Re: What do they expect?

The one I have been forced to used is called Dice. They don't make it clear at all that you can't print tickets - it takes a delve into the help section of the website but even there they seem to have put a lot of effort into not specifically saying it. Having said that, the last couple of gigs I used it for they didn't have any sort of reader on the door, just a list of names. The upsides of it are that the price on the first page is the price you pay and you can transfer tickets to other people who have the app very easily. They also don't explicitly charge for delivering your e-ticket and then add another charge for letting you print it at home. The main advantage they have for me is that they are not Ticketmaster, who top the premier league of cuntage.

I'd still rather have a piece of paper and sooner or later a huge event will have a major outage on the night and have to be cancelled which might make the venues reconsider ticketing options.

Was about to post exactly the same thing. I can still remember the number of my first bank account ,first Barclaycard and first car and bike reg.

Re: Single point of failure anyone?

I sort of agree, but if my I lose my travel wallet when on holiday then my cards, passport and driving licence, etc are gone for good and I'm spending time trying to cancel them and visiting the consulate to sort out a passport. If they were stored on my iphone and it got broken or stolen then then I can buy a new one, log in to my Apple ID, synch the wallet and they're all back.

I still prefer to carry paper tickets, I still buy beer with cash and I use plastic more than contactless but people like me are in a minority. Many people don't carry cash or use credit cards and more and more places don't take cash any more.

Re: What do they expect?

I assume that if they ever get it sorted properly it will be stored in the devices' wallet the same as credit cards and gig tickets are. I've recently attended a couple of shows where the ticket used a contactless device as opposed to scanning a QR code, so it's not just a pdf file of the paper ticket. That would mean, of course, that organizations which wanted to accept the IDs would have to invest in card readers.

Personally I prefer to carry a paper ticket just cos I'm old and a bit paranoid about my phone running out of battery but more venues are using ticket agencies that don't allow printing and it's getting hard to avoid having to use the phone.

Future jobs in AI will come with a hardhat and boots, tech bigshots argue

Re: Gold rush

But a few, a very few, a tiny proportion of the prospectors got rich and it's that lottery that the AI companies are playing.

"Plumbers and electricians" is playing to the crowd. We all know that trades earn a decent whack but that's partly because there's a shortage of them. When they are the only jobs left and everyone is training to be one then watch the salaries pluimmet.

Turing Institute Chief Scientist takes acting CEO role amid defense push

Why have we got a Chief Scientist and not a Chief Engineer? Theory's OK but someone's got to make it work. Rocket science is pretty simple but rocket engineering is bloody hard.

British Army's drone degree program set to take flight

Re: ARIA?

Thanks, I'd forgotten about that but it's not really the equivalent of DERA (as was). A quick web search shows "..it awarded £57 million in funding for a range of projects centred on controversial approaches for cooling the climate..." I'm not saying climate change isn't important but we need something focused on the military and if it has beneficial civilian use then all the better. The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (which eventually got rolled up into DERA) did some of the first research on TCP/IP - intended for military comms.

SAP scores £275M award from UK tax collector – sans competition

Future tenders for government ERP projects should include a requirement that the supplier covers the costs of transition to the system that replaces is. This would prevent the "it's cheaper than tendering" argument and might make the suppliers cooperate on database structures etc. I might be living in a dreamworld regarding the cooperation thing, but including the costs in the contracts would at least prevent the effective vendor lock-in that we see here.

We come in peace, OpenAI tells locals near gargantuan Stargate facilities

Is this Open AI's version of "Don't be evil."

Kids learn computer theory with wood, cardboard, and hot glue

Re: Valves (Tubes) impracticable?

Keep one hand in a pocket at all times.

Re: Inevitable

A housemate at uni in the 80s used to run write-in war games based on the Napoleonic wars. Let's call him Clive - he was a post-doc in the subject. You paid to enter and paid for each move and could play Napeoleon or Wellington and fight him or fight another player. Players would write to him with a postal order enclosed to, say, send a scouting party over to a certain point on the map and Clive would write back telling you what was there, or that your scouting party was wiped out by skirmishers or whatever. The games moved in almost real time because the information lag by post wasn't far off what it would have been at the time. His bedroom walls were covered in maps of northern Europe with the positions of various players and armies. I think he made quite a bit of money out of it.

Re: Blue Peter

Yes - like that, but I seem to remember that you could do simple arithemetic as well. My memories might be muddled. It was such a long time ago in the age when you had to race your sister to get the milk in so you could have the cream off the top on your cornflakes if the birds hadn't got to it first.

Mandatory Elite link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I

Re: Blue Peter

In the 60s or 70s I made a rudimentary computing machine using a cornflake box and home-made punch cards which was almost certainly from Blue Peter or Magpie. After a quick search I can't find it on the web or remember exactly how it worked but the cards had 4 holes at the top some of which were cut open at the top to form slots and the holes/slots representing 1/0 (or 0/1) for numbers 1-15. Corresponding slots were cut a the top of the cornflake box and the cards held in place by pushing pencils through the holes in the cards and suspending them in the box. I think there was a sliding flap under the cards to hold them in place and a "results" slot at the bottom. You could do somehow do multi-step computation by the selecting numbers with the arrangement of pencils then removing the flap and the cards that fell out were part of the solution to be fed to the next stage.

OpenAI will try to guess your age before ChatGPT gets spicy

It's interesting to see in recent AI stories the move in business model from improving productivity to ad-slinging and, as this article calls it "erotica", buy which I assume they mean "porn". A cynic might think that Grok's recent headlines about removing garments was more marketing than misstep.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

"Broadcom says it tried to renege on it's contract and offer Tesco a new worse deal, but that the mega-retailer “failed to meaningfully address” its proposals."

FTFY

China's Z.ai claims it trained a model using only Huawei hardware

Re: Well gosh

Article in yesterday's Graun about China's trade surplus last year a record trillion dollars. Tariff's have made bugger all difference partly because it's making China find other markets outside the US.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/14/china-reports-record-trillion-dollar-trade-surplus-despite-trump-tariffs

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/14/global-survey-suggests-trump-is-making-china-not-america-great-again

AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

You only have to look at the PC revolution's impact on productivity to have a go at forceasting AI's impact. There's no doubt that that PCs have made some things massively more affordable and improved productivity (e.g. circuit simulation, analysis, requirements management, etc), but they also made life shitter for working engineers. A few examples off the top of my head.

Engineers have taken on the workload that secrataries used to do. In the good old days I could dump my log book on Evie and she'd have a first bash at typing up a test report, give it to me to mark up and then finish it. It would have been a couple of pages of technical content whereas today it will be much thicker and the engineer has to do it all cos there are no more secretaries. Paperwork has become more onerous just because it can; outlining, headers, contents, etc. and all done by engineers who should be working. Ditto meeting minutes, metrics for managers, .....etc.

Powerpoint - nuff said.

Endless Zoom-enabled meetings.

AI will be the same. There will be some focused stuff for which AI will be transformational - lke the protein folding stuff, but for the rest of us it will just shift work from creating and designing things to checking and testing an AI's output then having to argue with the boss about fixing it cos his bonus depends on AI being brilliant and engineers being fired.

I'm allright, Jack, cos I'm old and on my way out, but I feel sorry for today's grads.

Britain goes shopping for a rapid-fire missile to help Ukraine hit back

The Cynic's View

Having been shat on in the past by MoD when working on quick-turn round contracts - called "urgent operational requirements" - I'm a bit cynical and my prediction is that it will pan out like this.

A contract will be awarded on the basis of re-use of existing parts, limited performance and the waiving of some of the more onerous MoD commercial and quality requirements, all in the spirit of quickly getting something useable and effective into the field.

The product will be just about on track to deliver something useful when the MoD unleashes their commercial and quality teams. They will deny the fast-and-fit-for-purpose intent and turn the original customized off-the-shelf concept into a full-blown bespoke, designed-from-the-ground-up missile system. Items in the build which are already in MoD inventory will be declared not fit for purpose, unobtanium mines will have to be dug and laws of physics will be challenged and refuted in their quest for absolute perfection based on a spec they've made up in their heads.

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Multiple FQDN

When I first set up in business for myself about 20 years ago I knew virtually nothing about the web. I looked for a web domain for my company and the .com and .co.uk were all taken but there was a .uk.com one and was happy with this. I didn't know that this was a sub-domain of .uk.com until a few years later when it was blocked by one of the spam filter services, presumably because one of the other .uk.com sites was spamming. I was offline for a few days while the host sorted it out. When the .uk domain came up I jumped onto that, which brought its own problems, but that's another story.

Meta admits to Instagram password reset mess, denies data leak

Re: A bit off topic but...

I'm in the UK. Last Thu, Fri and Sat I had to reset passwords on my BT mail addresses because they were suspended after, according to BT, someone had tried to access my eamail without my permission. A couple of friends have also had similar problems so maybe related to your problems. I haven't woken to a BT SMS warning for a couple of days so maybe BT have fixed it or the miscreants have given up. I've got another email host which has got a support desk with real people so I spent a bit of time transferring the few remaining accounts, websites, etc. that use BT because getting any useful help from BT is a waste of time.

As to why they can't limit access by IP/country - I can't give you an informed answer but it could pose problems for people who travel a lot; even if it were an option then the likelihood of forgetting to switch it off before travelling would be high with me. The most likely answer is that much of this stuff was developed many years ago before attacks were common and untangling years of production code to add in IP filtering for log in attempts might just be too expensive to contemplate.

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

Profitable?

It's possible that I don't understand open-source so apologies in advance if this is dumb.

There seems to be an assumption here that open source means "free". The EU would have no worries about "grant support" and "surviving in the marketplace" if they just paid the going rate for the OS development of whatever they want. Making a profit is surely a long way secondary to developing (and maintaining, supporting, etc.) European capability so why worry about it? If they were paying then they'd also have some control over the evolution of the product and, ultimately, it's ongoing existence. I assume they're alread paying a shedload for whatever cloud, enterprise, etc. they're using today so why not invest in something they have control over?

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: Just so you know.

For me Apple still finds most (but not all) CDs I rip but its success in finding Album art has been on the wane for many years now and I have to manually add it for about half the CDs I rip.

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

Re: They still don't get it

They worked it out years ago and hanging an AI on the end of the phone is aimed at fixing it for them, not the poor bloody users.

Lenovo shows off new laptops that twist and roll

Re: AI to manage heat exhaust

That would also make cleaning it easier by blowing the crumbs out of it and hence make it last longer! Great idea.

One criminal, 50 hacked organizations, and all because MFA wasn't turned on

Re: Most companies give away 50% of login credentials from the start

I've got 3 bank accounts and 3 credit card accounts in the UK and none of them uses an email address as the account login.

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Re: Follow the money

True, and if the AI companies can wait long enough before charging full price then some of their customers will have hollowed themselves out so much that recovery will be virtually impossible and they'll be locked into ever increasing AI costs.

We will be cruising at 35,000 feet and failing to update our Apache HTTP Server

No excuses but I'm guessing that the paperwork associated with updating anything in a commercial aircraft fleet makes updates expensive so they don't bother.

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Lottery Ticket

They look back at the dot-com boom and instead of remembering the ruined companies and disappeared pension funds they see Google, Facebook, etc. and the billions they could have made if they'd invested with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. So they're hopping on this bandwagon and figuring that that a tiny probability of making billions is worth a punt today.

Japan loses another H3 launcher, plus the satnav bird it carried

Re: Losing

It's not a euphemism. OED's first entry for "lose" is " be deprived of or cease to have or retain (something)".

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Plus ca change

I had my first driving lesson in Feb 1986 and my driving instructor told me to book the test immediately (or he might have done it) because the waiting time was about 6 months. The test was in August 86.

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

Re: The new guy is apparently as big a bozo as Mitch Daniels was

Not really - it's just a measure of how fucked up things are getting There are already reports of tech companies telling engineers that their use of the (expensively acquired, FOMO) AI agents will be part of the appraisal process. The directors will have AI in every paragraph of every company report, presentation and press release. I shouldn't be surprised if we start seeing companies change their names to include AI or to create AI divisions, even their main products are toilet brushes.

Like it or not, until the bubble bursts, engineers are going to need to have "AI" scattered throughout their CVs to compete in what's left of their job market. Poor fucking fuckers. I'm glad I'm old.

China's Ink Dragon hides out in European government networks

Tools

I know bugger all about servers other than my NAS is noisy and the menus are annoying, so apologies for a potentially daft question.

I know that nothing beats proper training, experience and standard ops/configs, but given that this seems to be attacking misconfigured commercial servers aren't there any tools that can be used as a final or regular check to highlight these misconfigurations? I'm assuming (don't know why) that it's more than users with "password123".

Oracle isn't done with Ampere yet as A4 instances arrive on OCI boasting 96 cores

Or you're being groomed.

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

Doesn't make sense to me. When I fly my priorities are, in descending order of importance: flying to an airport near to where I want to go, flying from the nearest airport to where I am, arriving at a time convenient to me and, finally, a personal view of airline/price combination. If I ever were to let someone or something else book for me then the first time they or it broke that hierarchy would be the last time I used them.

If I have a choice after the first three have been met then in all likelihood price will not be the top discriminator. Probablilty of cancelling flights at the drop of a hat, difficult of changing tickets and pretending to provide a better class of service whilst acting like every other budget airline tend to put BA at the bottom of my list every time.