Posts by monty75

Health secretary Matt Hancock assembles brains trust: OK, guys. Let's cure NHS IT

Re: Oh, great

We've got open standards coming out of our ears already (HL7, FHIR, openEHR to name but a few) - a few less standards would be a good start.

Obligatory XKCD

So, nobody with any actual IT experience then?

IBM struggles to sign up shipping carriers to blockchain supply chain platform – reports

Shocked

You mean you can't just slap "blockchain" on something and watch the money roll in? I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

Sounds like a massive, risky UK.gov scheme, but let's not keep too many tabs on it, OK?

In some cases this was because it was simply to early to tell, but in others it wasn't clear what the intended benefits were – seven projects didn't have a business case, for instance.

How do you even start a project without a business case? This is, like, day one session one of any project management course.

You like HTTPS. We like HTTPS. Except when a quirk of TLS can smash someone's web privacy

Re: OMG

IIRC, that was how they managed to get it past the BBC censors. They said that anyone who knew what it meant would also be the kind of person who'd laugh at it and anyone who was likely to be offended wouldn't understand it in the first place.

Fed up with cloud giants ripping off its database, MongoDB forks new 'open-source license'

Re: "viral GPL"

FYI, this is what I was referring to https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/

Re: The new license makes it much easier for them to litigate and win

I could have been clearer in my question. The full quote from Mongo's blog is : "The SSPL clarifies the conditions for making MongoDB publicly available as a service, to ensure we can continue to invest in building MongoDB for our users rather than in costly litigation over enforcing the AGPL."

Surely it'll be just as costly whether they're enforcing the AGPL or their own slightly modified AGPL? I don't read their new section as being any clearer only more expansive.

Also: the blog posting at MongoDB suggests that they've chosen this path rather than try to enforce the AGPL through litigation. That being the case, how do they propose to enforce this new license?

This sounds almost exactly like the "viral GPL" FUD that MS used to spout in the early 2000s: use open source software in your stack and your application becomes open source too.

Yale Weds: Just some system maintenance, nothing to worry about. Yale Thurs: Nobody's smart alarm app works

Re: Not Surprised

Having a dog is a good start :)

There are few problems in life which can't be solved, or at least ameliorated, by having a dog.

This is IoT we're talking about. It probably lets in everyone *except* the owner.

National Museum of Computing to hold live Enigma code-breaking demo with a Bombe

Cool. I wasn't planning on doing too much work on Friday anyway.

Equifax IT staff had to rerun hackers' database queries to work out what was nicked – audit

Sounds like a future article for Who?Me?

UK networks have 'no plans' to bring roaming fees back after Brexit

Re: re: No Plans?

In Germany. Spending his stash of EU pension.

Whisky business: Uni of Edinburgh servers Irn-Scru'd by cyber-attack

Website seems to be up again now.

Article 13 pits Big Tech and bots against European creatives

Re: bad law

So, does that make it right? Maybe most laws need looking at and rewriting to remove all the exceptions for special groups.

You'll end up back at the Ten Commandments. There's always exceptions. Thou shalt not kill - unless it's in self defence, for example.

Re: bad law

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the argument, a law that has to have specific get-outs to preserve some behaviour is not a good law.

That's pretty much every law though

The eyes don't have it! AI's 'deep-fake' vids surge ahead in realism

Re: Merging Faeces , oh the posabilities...

Vintage Dr Who remastered without Bonny Langford

Shut up and take my money!

I'll pay double if you can replace her with Jenna Coleman. Triple if you can replace everyone with Jenna Coleman

Home Office seeks Brexit tech boss – but doesn't splash the cash

Re: Over in Brussels this morning

Spend seven months looking for someone else to scapegoat?

Ad watchdog: Amazon 'misleading' over Prime next-day delivery ads

"One day delivery" - as in one day it'll be delivered

Criminal justice software code could send you to jail and there’s nothing you can do about it

A handful of pre-cog psychics in a pool of water would work too

Encryption doesn't stop him or her or you... from working out what Thing 1 is up to

Re: Privacy=Security

Also, posting your holiday photos on Instagram is a dead giveaway that your house is unoccupied.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

Has anyone looked inside to see if it is actually a Pi Zero?

First low-frequency fast radio burst to grace our skies detected at last

I'm not saying it's aliens ... but it's aliens.

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

Take the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on, whose Network control panel tells me that my IP address is 192.168.1.150

Aha! Now I can hack The Reg and extort you with my l33t ransomware!

Think tank calls for post-Brexit national ID cards: The kids have phones so what's the difference?

Not this crap again

And without those pesky EU data protection laws getting in the way too

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Those magazine inserts always make me think of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgyjTnimZfg

BBC websites down tools and head outside into the sun for a while

In the BBC-context Dev is just restored from a previous backup.

No, hang on, not Dev. Dave.

Re: Scary

"It's a sign, that little white dot. It means something really heavy. It means there's no more telly, it's time to go to bed."

Brit tech forges alliance to improve cyber security as MPs moan over 'acute scarcity' of experts

Money?

Who’s going to pay for this? I’ve looked at moving into cyber security but all the jobs expect me to have qualifications that cost five grand a pop (usually multiple qualifications). Plus the usual IT recruiting crap of having ten years experience for an entry level job.

CEST la vie, IR35 workers: HMRC sets out stall for ignoring Mutuality of Obligation

Re: @Herring: Just a question

If you're an employee you're legally entitled to four weeks paid leave.

Like an everflowing stream: New tech promises remote S3 nearline disk performance

Re: "they appear to have come up with [..] a faster way of streaming files "

There’s also latency which has the annoying tendency to obey the laws of physics.

'Toxic' Whitehall power culture fingered for GDS's fall from grace

And removed large chunks of usefulness with it.

Re: Utter bollocks, GDS was useless because the people running it were idiots!

Have an upvote - just for the word "wanktocracy"

Hurry up and make a deal on post-Brexit data flows, would you? Think of UK business – MPs

Even if they had a plan 94% of MPs wouldn't read it

'Coding' cockup blamed for NHS cough-up of confidential info against patients' wishes

Re: GDPR?

And probably a few who didn’t, too.

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

Re: Halted machine on other side of the planet

Not when the "server" is a Raspberry Pi hanging off the end of a consumer broadband connection.

Re: Label, Label Label

@I Am Spartacus

If it involved canals then it was the same place :)

Re: Label, Label Label

My first job in IT was with a major fibre network provider. They'd grown too fast and hadn't kept proper records of where their fibres actually went and how they were connected up. I was employed to map the network from a pile of surveyor's notes. There were parts of the network where fibre would go down a duct only to have disappeared by the time it got to the next inspection chamber. This was live fibre carrying live traffic so it must have gone somewhere but buggered if we knew where.

Unfortunately, I didn't stay there long enough to find out if they ever tracked it down.

Re: Halted machine on other side of the planet

I've done the same with my home server. Accidentally did a shutdown -h instead of shutdown -r whilst remoting in from India. Not a lot you can do about that when you're five thousand miles away.

DNS ad-hocracy in peril as ICANN advisors mull root server shakeup

Re: If it ain't broke

But equally, don't wait until it breaks.

Amazon’s Snowball snowballs as Google's clone gets real and IBM's comes to Europe

Re: Does it go both ways?

Yes. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/#Using_Snowball_to_Export_Data

Re: Plus shipping = outrage

In a previous job we moved servers across London in the back of a taxi.

Relive your misspent, 8-bit youth on the BBC's reopened Micro archive

I had similar fun with this (PDF)

Google kills AdWords!

Re: The important question is:

Amusingly, my adblocker blocked the image of the new logo in El Reg's story.

MSDN unleashes a fresh round of unintentional innuendo bingo

Re: Does knob really have two meanings any more?

How about...nob?

At least buy me a drink first

Micro soft knobs are very disappointing

Re: Does knob really have two meanings any more?

I have seen plenty of door knockers

Ah, so that's why police break down doors with a cry of "This is a bust"

Re: Does knob really have two meanings any more?

I've never seen a door penis.

You've never lived, then.