Posts by Roland6

Ex-Harrods IT man cleared of stealing company issued laptop

>AD will let you see where a user is logged in...

After I posted I remembered one company where the laptop had to be periodically connected to the corporate domain (not sure if it was tied to password expiry or not). Obviously if this happened when working offsite, it meant connecting the laptop to a network (LAN or modem), establishing a VPN and allowing AD to do it's stuff. However, for this to happen you had to be in possession of your company issued security access pin generator... I think also I had to visit an office 1~2 times a year and connect the laptop to the wired LAN and reboot, so that various other AD controlled stuff got updated.

I assume therefore that at some time someone in Harrods IT knew a thing or two about security to set this up and to implement HDD encryption (and BIOS password). Obviously, once such an offline system has decided a user password has expired and the user no longer has access to the corporate network and AD, it is effectively a brick - unless the user performs a motherboard jumper reset, HDD reformat etc.

Otherwise, I suspect the guy simply got the password wrong too many times and Windows barred access. Requiring the laptop to be taken to IT who would use their AD/admin access permissions to re-enable the account...

Either way, it would be interesting to know, just what security measures were in place to brick the laptop.

> I've never had a system which was rendered a complete brick by being offline

This was the bit that got me to.

I suppose Harrods could be using advanced security and the laptop has a built in GSM security device, so as part of his departure, IT denies systems access which automatically sends an SMS to all devices on the system registered to him...

Foiled again! Brit military minds splash cash on killing satellites with... food wrapping?

>Aluminium, titanium, copper, zinc, tin, brass, gold, silver, lead... there's a lot of stuff up there.

Shame to have it burn up in the atmosphere, perhaps someone should suggest using black bin bags and setting up a fortnightly bin collection...

European Commission refers Ireland to court over failure to collect €13bn in tax from Apple

Re: @AC - "state aid" for Apple

"So the deal was signed before Apple became the super rich organization it is today"

I don't call a successful business with profits measured in $billions in 2000~2007 'poor'. Remember Apple was a successful company, albeit one selling alot of iPods.

Also Ireland joined the EEC in 1973 and thus has been involved in the EU since the beginning. Hence there is no excuse that Ireland didn't know the rules about state aid...

>The sums involved are not like someone collecting the council tax. You can't just put €13bn in a bank account.

Don't know, depends on how large you are. I'm sure to HMRC who handle circa £740Bn of revenue a year would happily accept a cheque for the full amount (plus interest), but would probably prefer a BACS transfer. But I doubt they would accept cash given the £1M and £100M notes aren't in circulation outside of the Bank of England.

Apple was never found responsible for "tax evasion"

For that to happen Apple would need to be taken to court...

If my understanding is correct, that is something (currently) only the Irish Revenue can do, the EU doesn't have jurisdiction.

However, the EU can use the avenues open to it to discipline members who don't abide by the rules of membership. Hence why the EU is interacting with Ireland over it's non-compliance with EU state aid rules.

Other than demanding that Ireland takes steps to recover the illegal state aid, namely give Apple a revised tax bill and adjusting Ireland's contribution to the EU to include the additional revenues, I'm not sure what else it can do.

What is clear, Apple aren't as innocent as they would wish us to believe. They negotiated the sweetheart deal and those involved would have known that the deal was suspect - because if publicly available taxation documents did support the deal then there would have been no need to negotiate a bespoke deal!

Re: "The Register has asked Apple for a comment. ®"

>Here's the proof...

Only problem, the only source of proof a UK resident totally against the EU will accept is the Daily Mail, The Sun or the Telegraph, but even then they probably would still put more faith in what Nigel, Boris etc said about the EU...

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

Never got Bladerunner either, for which I apologise and will keep rewatcing.

Of the eight versions, I'd recommend Ridley Scott's Final Cut (2007)...

Microsoft shows off Windows 10 Second Li, er, Mixed Reality

MS really have lost their way

"We just don't believe, right now, the state of the art in VR is such that it is an enjoyable experience,"

So why MS are you putting such immature technology into the next Windows release and showcasing it as the reason why people should use this release?

What is the value of Windows Mixed Reality to your typical Windows Home/Office user, who will using a traditional laptop/desktop with a non-touch screen, keyboard and mouse?

Given the state-of-the-art, VR and Windows Mixed Reality should be an optional feature pack.

Also given its been 5 years since MS introduced the Win8 UI/UX mashup to the world, why hasn't this been fixed? Doing stuff like this ie. support for VR/Mixed taking precendence over sorting out the UI/UX crap, just confirms that MS really have lost their way.

BBC Telly Tax petition given new Parliament debate date

Re: If you have issues with the Telly Tax...

If people spent £250 a week on a weekly shop at Waitrose, would you similarly see nothing wrong with demanding that they also give £100 a week to Sainsbury even though they never enter the place?

Well if Waitrose stocked all of Sainbury's lines as well as their own, for which I only paid a handling charge within my £250 weekly bill in the expectation that I was also giving £100 a week to Sainsbury's then I wouldn't see anything wrong.

Remember Sky doesn't pay the BBC, it is required to carry and distribute (ie. 'handle') the BBC (and the other Freeview?) channels on it's infrastructure to all of it's UK subscribers...

Re: high % women?

I don't find a large proportion of those prosecuted for TV license violation being female at all surprising.

However, for some that doesn't mean TPTB shouldn't be doing something about it...

Caroline Levesque-Bartlett, an anti-Telly Tax campaigner, told The Register at the time of our investigation: “The David Perry Review brought this gender imbalance to light to Parliament in July 2015, and nothing has changed since.”

...

"Sorry madam you can't have a TV licence in your name, we've filled our quota of women holders, is there a man in the house who could hold the licence for you?..."

"Madam you don't have a TV licence, because I've already caught 14 women this week, I can only catch men for the rest of this week; I'll visit you next week"

Taxes are paid, a small amount by all, to pay the large amounts for the few. That's how they work.

This is the real problem with the TV licence, it is perhaps the only form of taxation where currently all monies are collected independently of HMRC and are reinvested in TV services and specifically the BBC.

However, given the TV Licence is fundamentally a tax and government is in need of ways to increase revenue without increasing taxation. The question has to be whether the government really will abolish the TV Licence and allow the BBC to become funded by other means, or whether they will allow the BBC to be funded by other means, but retain the TV Licence revenues and bring the collection process in-house...

Re: If you have issues with the Telly Tax...

Here's the thing though - with something like Sky you can record future episodes and watch them, at your leisure, skipping the adverts.

I can series link so they all download in future.

...

and once I've recorded something to my box, I can actually (should I so desire) keep it ad infinitum.

Wow! You pay Sky £25+ pcm just for that - Humax Freeview PVR's have been able to do that since circa 2003...

Tarmac for America's self-driving car future is being laid right now

Re: Decision matrix sorted?

Easy, hit the other vehicle head on. The chances of a serious injury or death occuring are *lower* than if you hit the child.

Reflecting on the scenario, I see we are all missing the key piece of information: "self-driving car".

The big selling point of self-driving cars is that they will have fewer accidents etc. etc. ie. safety, safety, safety. Thus I expect manufacturers/operators, particularly the new entrants eg. Uber, Google etc. to argue (successfully) that self-driving cars don't need all the safety features of our current cars, such as airbags, seat belts, head restraints, which only add weight and cost...

Thus rerunning the scenario, the self-driving car will, having determined there is no zero fatality course of action, accelerate towards the child to improve odds of a fatality and thus lower insurance payout since that course of action will potentially only result in one fatality...

Re: Decision matrix sorted?

Well if you have enough time to spot the car coming towards you has four people you haven't been paying attention to the road conditions right in front of you...

From experience, you stamp on the brakes and use the ABS to avoid the child and either aim for a straight head-on with the oncoming car (and hope the other driver is also stamping on their brakes and doesn't try to avoid you) or go through the hedge - the crumple zones, air bags etc. give you and the other occupants the greatest chance of survival - which you stand better than 50/50 chance of doing if the combined impact speed is less than 40mph; hit the child at any speed greater than 20mph - they are dead.

The other scenario is to have a muntjac deer run out from undergrowth in front of you: thinking/reaction time at 40mph means the deer is sub 5 metres in front of you by the time you hit the brakes ie. odds are you are going to hit it - what do you do?

NB. Whilst an elk or other large animal will go over the bonnet, the muntjac, being the size of a large dog will tend to go under the vehicle...

Re: saving lives, expanding mobility and reducing congestion

Congestion - a factor in congestion is often poor driver behaviour, so there really is some potential there.

Did you see the live traffic and congestion in Florida in the days before hurricane Irma?

Do you watch the UK live traffic reports for the morning and evening rush hours?

Whilst some drivers could move their journey to another time, I suspect the numbers - particularly during school term time, would be insufficient to make a noticeable effect.

Also any benefits arising will be lost on additional vehicles/journeys arising from your second point "expanding mobility". In fact if the pixie land dreams of the self-driving advocates are to be realised, there will be significantly more vehicles on the roads and hence the congestion we experience today will be nothing like the congestion arising from self-driving cars.

Ofcom head Sharon White slams 5G hold-up in spectrum auction

Re: Sharon White...where is the fibre backhaul for 5G?

... are you suggesting the Openreach should flood - wire the UK with fibre on the basis that what might be a small percentage of it gets rented by 5G providers?

That might be the best technical solution, but it is not one that recognises financial realities.

No, however, unless BT do get on with it and flood wire there will be no dormant "dark fibre" fibre to satisfy Sharon's other dream:

"And we see opportunities for “dark fibre”, BT’s dormant cabling that can be used by competitors."

Internet-wide security update put on hold over fears 60 million people would be kicked offline

Re: The problem?

>And note some of those blacked out could be entire regions or countries.

Like the USA? Go for it?

Nested virtualization comes to Google's cloud

Development?

Surely one of the reasons for supporting nested virtualization is to permit replication of a developer's desktop?

This approach should help solve a problem of maintaining dev/test/trial versions of multi-server enterprise systems: I build an image containing all the various servers and now I only need to start a single cloud VM to bring up that prebuilt configuration.

My name is Bill Gates and I am an Android user

Re: Ballmer managed one thing..

I miss the Ballmer era, under which we got Windows 7 with its original individually-avoidable updates that were actually tested by professionals prior to release.

Win7 was largely Bill Gates legacy, if Ballmer contributed anything, it was with the consent of Bill.

Win8 etc was Ballmer's. Ballmer was the one who decided it was more important to ape Apple and become consumer-oriented rather than to merely follow Apple but deliver products, enterprise customers could use...

Suspect Win10 is Satya's initial attempt to rein the mistakes of Ballmer's era in, however Satya was too timid - personally I would have burnt Win8 etc. and reverted to the archived Win7 source code (re-implementing the functional updates but not the UI/UX and privacy invading cruft). This wouldn't have caused a problem, except for those who are dedicated to being on the bleeding edge - the vast majority of MS's business customers back then were still on XP or Win7 and had little intention of migrating beyond 7 before 2020...

Re: Thriller

>Then Sadnad ... has absolutely no idea what to do with Windows on mobiles.

But MS had lost their way on mobile years previously; specifically when they took the decision to subsume Mobile development into Desktop development.

Given products like the XDA Pocket PC launched in 2003, it makes you wonder if the Windows Mobile developers had been given greater freedom (eg. not constrained to adhering to the Windows Desktop paradigm), whether the iPhone and iOS launch in 2007 would have been so revolutionary.

Re: He should be made to use Windows versions of all the crap they make.

You do realise that Gates stepped down in 2006 and effectively left Microsoft in 2008 after completing the handover the Ballmer?

The last major product releases he had any veto over were: Windows Vista and Office 2007, although he would have strongly influenced Windows 7. From interviews Bill decided to not veto Office 2007, hence why it shipped with only the ribbon and no 'classic' menu-based UI option.

Re: Damn them to Hell

Allow me to revise that for you (Imagine alterations are handwritten amendment to memo)...

Microsoft Strategy:

Version 8: Copy Apple.

Version 10: Copy Google Facebook (from Build 2016).

Firemen fund sues Uber for dousing shares with gas, tossing in a match

Re: And who is the brilliant investment manager ...

>So in whose fevered mind does this merit a $70bn valuation

There are a series of readable articles here: http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Uber

that discuss the valuation of Uber.

>why would a pension fund invest in a company that has never made a profit

Depends on the size of the fund and the size of the investment...

I can see a fund having a relatively small - say 1~2% of the fund in very high-risk investments, which may include seed funding in startups, however I would not expect all of that high-risk investment to be in a single company. Hence why I'm interested to know just how much they did invest.

Re: And who is the brilliant investment manager ...

>They're saying the total value has fallen up to $18bn and their investment has fallen pro rata to that.

Interestingly, having scanned the PDF complaint, there is one reference to an 'interest' but no mention whatsoever of the amount paidout to secure that 'interest'.

It seems they are trying to go for a violation of the California Corporations Code, but the complaint isn't clear on this.

Perhaps someone could enlighten us as to what might happen if Uber were found to be in breech of the Code.

UK third worst in Europe for fibre-to-the-premises – report

Re: Help

>I am not convinced FTTP is a useful metric

It's not!

However, it is about the only metric in the report that castes the UK situation in a bad light!

Looking around on the web, it would seem that some such as uSwitch, ISPreview & El reg have chosen to run with this spin on the EU report because it supports a bash BT/Openreach agenda.

The report, notes that the UK is still deploying FTTC, but fails to connect this with the fact that that is what the BDUK project was largely intended to deliver and that project will continue for a few more years yet. Hence why the main Openreach effort is in deploying FTTC and not FTTP...

>The UK needs fast fibre to copy over the corporate data centre over to the new premises in France.

Don't need to involve Openreach - I'm sure Eurotunnel will happily provide duct space...

Re: Help

Links:

IHS Markit press release:

https://technology.ihs.com/595739/growth-in-european-high-speed-broadband-availability-and-4g-lte-coverage-progress-confirmed-by-ihs-markit-and-european-commission-study

EU Report:

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/study-broadband-coverage-europe-2016

Whilst I've not read the report yet, although it isn't a peer reviewed scientific paper, as it is an official EU report, I would hope its data gathering and conclusions are reasonably rigorous.

Google Cloud says it's first-to per-second cloud server billing, twice

Billing CPU Clock cycles?

I was wondering, how many cpu clock cycles in total (as multiple cpu's are likely to be involved) it takes to record the bill for 1 sec of CPU time. I presume it's significantly less than 1 sec, only don't run it on anything slower than 1Ghz...

Docs ran a simulation of what would happen if really nasty malware hit a city's hospitals. RIP :(

Re: Take results with a pinch of salt

wonder what the lessons learnt are, that a hospital could be put immediately into practice.

By this I meant, okay we've done the simulation what do we do next, ie. what can I action/task people with - this is both things that can immediately change things on the shop floor and investigations etc. that will result in change.

My reading of the article is the main finding seemed to be that the hospital effectively ceased to be a hospital on day 3. Which is the sort of finding I seem to remember some consultancies liking, as it provided the opportunity for a rather large, loosely scoped consulting assignment - just sign here...

Re: Take results with a pinch of salt

Have you ever carried out a DR practice? If you have I'm pretty sure that at least the first time you would have learned a great deal about how to prepare for a real DR event.

Precisely! You learn "how to prepare" and deal with a real DR event. However, looking at the thumbnail sequence of events in the simulation and the "destructive malware" (what were the parameters used to define destructive - the malware knows all the known and unknown exploits in all hospital systems?), I get the impression this simulation was more about sensationalism than real learning, particularly as no reference is made to any previous simulations, ie. this simulation was staged to make a point.

Personally, I start from the basics and build up, this allows me to take an organisation step-by-step through the change process, with reduced risk of shocking the client into paralysis.

Take results with a pinch of salt

The group ran a simulation exercise with the authorities ... The three-day simulated cyber-disaster involved one hospital in the city being infected by destructive malware that crippled essential services, followed by other digital assaults on hospitals across the city on the second day, and then a physical attack similar to the 2013 Boston marathon bombing on day three.

From the article, no systems were actually infected and the sequence of events was obviously chosen to create a worse case scenario. I see a security expert spreading FUD and trying to drum up custom.

Not to say that hospitals and medical equipment don't need better security etc., only not sure what the real benefit of running the simulation - wonder what the lessons learnt are, that a hospital could be put immediately into practice.

Shock: Brit capital strips Uber of its taxi licence

Re: Uber - the real world view

Maybe you shouldn't be riding a bike on roads paid for by taxpayers. Just sayin'

Do keep up, someone has to pay for the location tracking/surveillance whether it be by Facebook, Uber or the state.

Once TPTB perfect road pricing for cars, it is only a small step to road pricing for all; step outside of your front door and get charged for using the pavement. Stay at home get charged (council tax). There will be no escape...

Re: Meanwhile on change.org...

"More than 450K people email addresses have signed been added to a petition to reverse the decision."

Change.org only check for a response to a confirmation email, no postcode etc. needed, so even easier to falsify than the UK gov e-petitions website before the record-breaking referendum petition...

Also just for balance there are the petitions: Ban uber completely and Stop Uber being re Licensed

both of which were started today...

I wonder if he'd have been caught sooner had each patient rated him with that rating aggregated and publically published for all to see?

That would require the services of Mediums...

Itching to stuff iOS 11 on your iPhone? You may want to hold off for a bit

Control Center...

Updated an iPad - without problem.

The most noticeable change has been to the Control Center, where to get the volume/brightness etc controls to display now required a double up swipe rather than the single one previously. Also the volume and brightness controls themselves aren't obviously slide controls, even though that is what they are.

Beyond that, the changes don't seem so pronounced.

Attention adults working in the real world: Do not upgrade to iOS 11 if you use Outlook, Exchange

Re: Works fine here

are you using the Outlook app? That app is crippled: check out the reviews for it. The UI is mashed beyond repair.

I looked and found:

iStore - rated 4.6 out of 5

http://thetechnologygeek.org/outlook-mail-app-review/ - positive review (mar 2017)

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-releases-new-outlook-for-ios-and-android-redesigned-conversations-and-account-switcher/ - positive review (August 2017)

Also according to the MS KB article (https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3296291 ):

"This issue occurs because the Mail app on iOS 11 is not compatible with Outlook.com, Office 365, or Exchange Server 2016 running on Windows Server 2016." and Not with the MS Outlook app communicating with MS mail services.

Whilst the Outlook app does have it's limitations, my (non-IT) partner and her (non-IT) colleagues seem to be able to use it without additional assistance.

Cloudflare coughs up a few grand for prior-art torpedoes to sink troll

No go nuclear, sue them for attempted fraud and extortion and get them to prove to a court that the patent application was for an invention and not an idea. This approach also opens the possibility of your team doing a discovery search ...

Behold iOS 11, an entirely new computer platform from Apple

>Went to Tesco and bought a hudl for no money instead.

I assume this was a year or so back; Tesco announced in October 2015 that there would not be a successor to the Hudl2 - released in October 2014.

My iPad2 (16GB, iOS 9.3.5) is still going okay, although given the huge performance difference between it and the Air2, it's shortening battery life and limited memory, it has been relegated to 'leisure' usage.

I learnt that the best way to avoid failed apps after iOS update was to ensure all apps were updated before installing the new edition of iOS. Also iOS like other OS's doesn't perform well with constrained memory (less than a couple of GB unused). Perhaps you should do a factory reset and only reinstall selected applications rather than fill the memory.

If sections of the organisation really still want to pretend they're touting a serious OS for doing actual productive work on, Apple should concentrate on forcing people to spend well over the odds for the MacBook UltraThin SuperShiny (or whatever the laptops are called these days) rather than trying to make the iPad an all-singing all-dancing device.

Or produce a 'business' version.

Surely one of the key advantages of the iPad (and iOS 4) was it's simplicity of operation and portability and so made IT accessible to a much wider audience.

You could (and I know people who did) give an iPad to a child with learning difficulties and they could use it: play their favourite music, videos, games etc. Something you can't do with a Windows tablet - unless you want the kid to use it as a frisbee...

Hence perhaps what is needed is iOS for everyday users and iOS for business - given what Doro and Samsung have done to make Andriod more accessible, I suspect these could be the same version, just with different UI skins.

Ah, good ol' Windows update cycles... Wait, before anything else, check your hardware

Re: Hardware Refresh

It sounds like no one will have any idea when a new release of Bloat 10 will make some or all your hardware obsolete.

Agree, given the article heading, I was expecting something along the lines that Win10/Intel management would include a hardware monitoring/assessment function so that they could generate warnings that a system's hardware was reaching its end of life with respect to Win10 support.

Because the real problem with Win10 (aka "the last version of Windows") is going to be identifying hardware obsolescence, a problem that didn't exist with previous discrete versions, as people expected each new version to have differing base hardware requirements and thus it made sense to link hardware refresh to major software upgrade/refresh.

Alternatively, perhaps we'll get GWX style of advertising: you need to upgrade your system to get the full win10 experience, click here to order your new PC...

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

>Their connection to Nazi Germany makes me sick.

Don't know why you single out IBM, until Churchill forced the US off the fence, they were quite happy trading with both Germany and the UK - it was just business. Hence why when they did enter the war, the UK picked up a rather large tab, which was finally paid off in 2006...

There's nothing worse than a single key having a major function.

Like the on/off rocker switch on the front of the Sun 3. at knee height...

Re: O la la!

> 20 years ago?

Can't find a reference to CTRL+Shift+Esc that predates XP... :)

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

Re: Solution

send all newly published content to Theresas secret squirrel top terrosist content detection departmentMinistry of Truth.

I see, T.May obviously took inspiration from 1984.

Re: Poor Requirements Specification

...at the time it was uploaded...

That one statement told me, T.May hasn't a clue about the Internet.

I connect a webserver to an IP address and grant access, I haven't uploaded anything, yet all the content on that server is now on the Internet.

I suspect (tempted to do an experiment) that as most public hotspots have static IP addresses, that I can advertise the availability of my website as being 'open' between 10 and 11 am when I take an extended break in my local Library, McDonalds, Starbucks etc.

But then if lived outside of the UK - France post-March 2019? ...

Chief digital officer and sales director leave O2 amid ongoing shake-up

"A replacement for the positions has yet to be found"

Hasn't anyone at O2/Telefonica talked to Three UK; I'm sure they could supply suitable candidates or even provide them as an outsourced service ...

Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines

Noble sentiments, but have you given any thought to how much that would cost?

But, but, Boris says post-March 2019, we will have £350m a week to play with...

>Perhaps they should consult the French police

Suspect because of licencing issues, the UK police will have to build their own distro, as if the French police supplied a version to the UK police, it would count as 'distribution' under the Linux licence.

Also post-Mar 2019, it could become subject to export controls (depending on just how much the French police have modified it to contain security and policing specific functionality)...