Posts by Cpt Blue Bear

Turnbull's 'ideas boom' plan recycles existing ideas

Teachers lacking training - now there's a novelty

"Which is remarkable, because as we've often reported, Australia's teachers recognise that the Digital Technologies curriculum is a good idea, but point out they just haven't been trained to deliver it."

Had a conversation with a mate's missus over the weekend - she's a primary school teacher.

"I'm teaching coding on Monday"

"What will you be using?"

"No idea. Its going to be a debarcle".

Now she's seriously smart and has a general interest but absolutely no training or support.

BOFH: Taking a spin in a decommissioned racer? On your own grill cam be it

Re: Wrecked Lotus

They're still makin' 'em, mate. Besides, if they don't end up wrecked you aren't driving them right.

Australian cops rush to stop 2AM murder of … a spider

"Should have gone for the thong (australian flip flop) instead."

I recently saw a news report that redbacks have colonised Japan - probably arriving on Aussie fruit. That'll teach the buggers for buying up all our prawns and crayfish.

Anway, mild panic has ensued as the Japanese are not accustomed to dealing with aggressive and highly venomous wildlife. A mate suggested we send them a container of left thongs labelled "Redback Spider Control Devices".

Uber Australia is broke: 'We don't pay tax because we don't generate revenue'

Reading comprehension

The other nine occurrences in the story might also be considered a clue.

Lawyers use anti-piracy law to get website blocked over corporate ID brouhaha

The DCMA does not apply as this is in Australia.

I'd have let it slide, this the third story I've read in a row where at least one commentard has been unable to work out what country the story relates to. In this case its only mentioned thirteen times...

NewEgg cracks open Australian shipping scheme

Re: Bit of a worry

Nah, its just ignorance and hurbis. Its pretty common for US companies to try these things on when they open up OS (I'm looking at you, Apple). They'll probably get away with it for a few months until the complaints to the ACCC result in a nasty letter then they'll quietly drop their returns policy.

As for manufacturers' warranties, they only get away with what you let them. Retailers are required by law to replace or refund here, they cannot legally duck their responsibilities so don't let them.

Re: They appear cheaper

"Standard builds"? WTF are you doing at a retailer if you are building in volume? You should be talking to a disty if you're buying volume, Mate.

Volvo eyes kangaroo detection tech

Re: They should check out wombats as well

That's a big wombat mate!

I've always found them pretty easy to spot and avoid 'cause they don't move fast.

True story: I met a bloke who hit a wombat on the Stuart Highway at night. Almighty bang and the car is fishtailing all over because the passenger side front wheel no longer seems to be having any part of steering the car. Or holding it up off the road for that matter. He walks back down the road to see what he hits and finds a mound of bloody fur in the shape of a wombat about 200m back. It moves. He thinks "shit, the poor bastard's still alive" and walks back to the car to get something with which to put it out of its misery. On the way he takes in the skid and scrape marks and thinks to have a look at the damage: front passenger side suspension unit punched vertically through the top of the tower and the bonnet. Now he's angry and heads back to deal retribution with a tyre iron but the wombat is nowhere to be found. A trail leads off into the bush.

That's the point where we found him and gave him a lift to Catherine.

However, they will not flip a car or truck, physics just doesn't work like that outside of Hollywood, bu I'm sure people have rolled cars due a loss of control after hitting the bastards..

Mobile first? Microsoft decides to kneecap its Android users instead

"This is what 'cloud-first' and 'mobile-first' amounts to."

Once all the marketing BS and hype is hosed off, yes. Wasn't it obvious from the start?

NOxious VW emissions scandal: Car maker warned of cheatware YEARS AGO – reports

Re: VW had been cautioned not to rig the tests by its software supplier Bosch

I doubt it.

To stretch your simile, it took a while for the authorities to find the Bosch made weapon used in the robbery and trace it via the serial number to VW. Bosch are saying sure, we sold VW the gun but we told them quite explicitly not to use it to commit any armed robberies.

Top QLD sex shop cops Cryptowall lock; cops flop as state biz popped

"Must be a hell of an exploit to be able to execute code from a preview pane and get out into the wider system."

Nah, all of these things I've seen are just an executable attachment masquerading a document. Ten will get you twenty he opened an attachment named resume.exe or something similar.

"4 words - backup, backup, backup daily!"

And fer Christ's sake don't give users write access to the backup. There are good reasons why all those Unix (and its bastard offspring) systems have a dedicated backup user...

And don't rely on a single copy, keep a historic copy or two. Storage is cheap, a lot cheaper than the ransom.

Time to move to North Queensland and set up as a general tech

"It could be possible to restore from backups but the tech says drives have to be fully formatted otherwise files may be re-encrypted."

Clearly, there aren't decent ones in the area.

When the IT department is 'just another supplier'

Re: You are kidding me

From my recent experience I'll add:

The guy who organised it left six months ago taking all knowledge of and, more importantly, access to the hosting service with him.

The hosting company was bought by another who discovered a disturbing laxness of record keeping at their new aquisition. Both shall remain nameless; the latter at least tried to help...

At least I didn't get rudely awakened at 3am. As a consultant, I got to wander in at a leisurely time and ask all the awkward questions. Sadly, the one question I was not allowed to ask was "what the fuck were you thinking?"

Re: It amazes me that we still have to discuss

As an outside consultant who sees quite a lot of these things, I have to disagree. IT depts are pretty well aligned with business needs - just not the fantasies and current wants of, mostly middle, management, which commonly get mistaken for business needs.

Your sentiment is, however, an article of faith in many places.

Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston

All the head scratching comes from misunderstanding the purpose of a meta-data retention scheme. Its not about terrorists or organised crime, its about being able to find and punish whistle blowers and leakers*. The whole farce only makes sense if you bear that in mind.

* You could, I guess, make the case that there are few things that politicians and senior bureaucrats are more terrorised by than having their misdeeds revealed thus those revealing them are terrorists...

Amazon UK conditions 'exhausting', claims union

Re: So where do the Amazon-phobes shop online?

There is plenty of life outside the big chains. As the kids say, "Google is your friend".

"I wouldn't touch ebay either, and "locally" doesn't work because stores on this side of the pond don't stock anything. For example, I've gone to Best Buy for a wired mouse, a hard disk, and a wired ethernet card, and not only have they not had them, I've been laughed at for not wanting wireless."

Everywhere I've been in the last two decades has had a local seller of IT bits and bobs. Generally its a store front with a counter and a photocopied price list (some locked display cabinets if they are feeling a little flash) and staffed by two Chinese, and Indian and a lost looking parkeha. Replace the Chinese with Vietnamese, Koreans or Filipinos depending on continent but the other two seem universal. The trick is to find them 'cause they generally don't don't advertise and they go where the rents are cheap. Find out where the local gamers buy from.

'I don't recognise Amazon as a bullying workplace' says Bezos

Re: This is exactly the Amazon I know - As a customer

Sadly, in the world of Amazon and massive supermarket chains, your mate is actually the problem. The correct response to being squeezed is not let them. The problem for the publishing industry is that its been a sheltered workshop full of genuinely nice people for a long time and they simply don't have the skills to stand up to the hard men from the likes of Amazon.

And so it begins... Cleaning up HMRC's £10.7bn Aspire mess

Meh, that describes one very common career strategy for climbing a business bureaucracy greasy pole. Its a way to progress beyond the seniority limit implied by the Peter Principle.

I was in a meeting yesterday with a middle aged senior manager who got where he is by never being party to a decision made by less than three people. The theory is, I guess, that if it goes pear shaped he can always claim he was against it all along but out voted by the others. The man could equivocate for his country.

Netzpolitik spy journo treason case stalls, chief prosecutor told to quit

Re: Sometimes we have to put bureaucrats in their place

"The English find it necessary to shoot an admiral now and again to encourage the others"

Cheaper broadband will slow NBN adoption, says Turnbull

I really can't see what Turbull's game is these days. I used to think it was to give Abbott and Co the rope to hang themselves with and then step in as leader before the election. The best theory we have now is that he's just wrecking the party in revenge for their stabbing him in the back twice. Maybe he also has an eye out for a directorship or two once he's done.

Pirates also buy content legally, Australian gov study finds

I love getting told that "creatives" (read publishing companies) have the right to get paid for their work. My favourite reply is to look slightly puzzled and say "I didn't realise you were a Marxist".

Australian carriers try to head off government telco security bill

Re: "National Security"

Indeed, every time I see Brandis on TV he looks like a scared rabbit in the headlights. He's clearly been house trained in the Yes, Minister sense by the security services he's supposed to oversee.

Feel like you're being herded onto Windows 10? Well, you should

Re: What CIOs say

"I can't believe there are that many corporates still on XP."

There are.

" Those that are left are probably paying for extended support..."

They aren't.

"...or praying that their security procedures are adequate."

Some probably are. Others just stumble on blindly. Most just apply sensible security procedures and get on with business.

Sixty-five THOUSAND Range Rovers recalled over DOOR software glitch

Re: Car software

"I used to have a Yamaha RD400 which was tuned an inch from being embarrassing"

I miss my RD. Fast, noisy and thoroughly obnoxious when it ran. Infuriating and heart breaking when it didn't, which was about 1 day a week plus Thursdays when there was an R in the month. I chased electrical gremlins around that bike for the whole time I had it. Earthing? Yamaha had heard of it.

In the end it had to go because The Girlfriend hated the pillion seat and having to take a shower after every trip to get rid of the smell of burnt two stroke. I sold it to a mate for whom it performed faultlessly until the engine seized one night on a wet roundabout and dumped his brother in the gutter breaking his forearm. Treacherous bastard things, two strokes...

Meh, the fact that every time we go four wheel driving with someone in a Disco we end up towing the broken Landy is enough for me. Last one did the transfer case climbing out of a creek bed.

At least they don't catch fire like Jeeps.

Evil computers sense you’re in a hurry and mess with your head

Re: @Alistair Dabbs, re Charities.

I got that "we thought you might do it as a donation" BS from our local mainstream conservative party a few years back. I expressed surprise as I thought they were the party for of all business great and small, free enterprise, etc. I added that I was reasonably sure I saw a poster to that effect around the time of the previous state election. I further asked if their receptionist worked for free or if the alleged office manager I was speaking to (turned out she was the daughter of one of the higher ups) donated her time. Finally I asked if the owner of the rather fine and prominent building they occupied donated the rent (this would turn into a bit of a scandal over undeclared party funding when said landlord decided he'd rather have the cash). She had the good grace to look embarrassed, but not sufficient write me a cheque.

It took nine months to get a bill for just over a grand paid and I learnt why the bloke who passed me the job did so...

By contrast, the Freemason's Foundation and the Transport Workers' Union not only paid on time but said thank you.

Wi-Fi Alliance ushers in new era of intrusive apps

Re: > location-based ads remain a disappointment

Live in SA, I presume he's offering 50% off the black market price he was charging yesterday.

Epic Games, Epic Fail: Forumers' info blown into dust by hack

Re: Sigh

Security is straightforward (I'm so glad you didn't say simple or easy, cheers!) if its a consideration from the start and there's no interference from management or marketing types with silly ideas.

Let's take this case: a forum for a game. What do we actually need? A username, an email and a password. The first two need to be stored and used but the last can be hashed so even if it leaks its no use anywhere else. Simple, understood and easy to implement.

Then someone from legal points out that you need to confirm an age to comply with something or other. Note that the age doesn't have to be real, just what the user says they are 'cause this is strictly for compliance and arse covering purposes not actual child protection or anything like that. So we start collecting birth dates, flag user as legal or not and dump the original data.

Then someone from marketing has the genius idea that that data would be useful. I've never seen a compelling case beyond "personalisation" by sending an automated happy birthday message which is about as endearing as any automated greeting. So now we have personal information we have to store and the slippery slope begins. Before you know it you are collecting names, addresses, mother's maiden name and inside leg measurement and all on a system that was never intended to store anything confidential.

Been there, wrote the post mortem after it went tits up.

Apple Watch sales in death dive after mega launch, claims study

No the correct response is to say "Hey! Nice watch, what is it?" and when he swells with pride and tells you respond with a disappointed "oh" as if you thought it might have been something interesting but it turned out to be extremely mundane and not a little tacky. Then ignore him. Three of four such swift kicks in his fragile ego should send him back to his room to beat his wife in frustration.

'The server broke and so did my back on the flight to fix it'

Re: The trouble with backs

I had one of those once.

Right up to the afternoon he slipped on the stairs* and landed on his coccyx on the edge of a tread. The poor bastard never walked quite the same and watching him get up from a meeting room chair after half an hour was traumatic. The following few months were interesting as by mid-afternoon he was usually out of his tree on codeine.

The upside was you only had to start doing lower back stretches to get sent for a break and anything up to three days sick leave (the maximum he could authorise) got waived through as long as it was back related.

* I swear, officer, I was no where near at the time.

Let me PLUG that up there, love. It’s perfectly standaAAARGH!

Many years ago at the Aussie tentacle of an international agricultural equipment company, the company accountant printed a very confidential report relating to the impending merger of local agents into one Ozwide organisation and the parent company's planned but as yet unannounced buy out of same to create a local subsidiary. Highly confidential, one copy for the local MD, potential to affect the stock price, etc. Also not on the output tray of his printer.

Where was it?

Check the printer settings and find its gone to a printer identified only by a string of apparently random digits (in retrospect the "deu" should have given us a clue). We send another print job with the words "if you find this please call this phone number" in 24 point type. With ten minutes his extension rings and a voice says "Halloo, zis iz Gunter from Haamboourg..."

The slow strangulation of telework in Australia

Re: AMEN!

Ring your ISP and get them to put you on symmetric. Grown up providers will ask a few questions about your usage, but since you are using a business class service it shouldn't be any problem.

You are using a business class service, aren't you?

Re: Fact Check

He's a "creative". He can't be expected to get these complex technical terms right.

Google harms consumers and strangles the open web, says study

Seconded. I get up to four marked paid results at the top then useful stuff. I think the OP has a browser hijack...

Two foreigners, a desert and a jeep full of bank statements

Road trip

Many years ago when this internet thingo was all new fangled, I was involved in a company move from Melbourne to Brisbane. You can get the map out if you really want to know but its a bloody long way.

The plan: new servers are installed in Brisbane office, techs (us) in Melbourne dump a backup on Friday night and upload it to new servers and we'll all be golden for Monday morning. Now, I had some doubts about our pokey little ISDNs being able to handle that data in the allotted time, but they became moot when Telstra shut off the phones at lunch time on Friday.

Fuck.

By the time we found out it was too late to dump to tape and get it on a flight.

Double fuck.

No option then: down the old servers, pack them in the back of a car and drive to Brisbane. Two of us, two IBM AS400s and a drive pack in the back of a 1972 Chrysler station wagon thundering up the Hume in the dead of night in a desperate race to Brisvegas...

The $60,000 logo: What it costs to change a website

Re: $60,000 for this?!

No, the important task was giving a chunk of public money to someone's mates in the advertising industry. They were having real trouble getting their snouts into this public trough.

Vic cops want 'potential radicals' off the Internet

If they weren't radicalised now...

...they will be after this treatment. I wonder if anyone at VicPol has thought of this?

Not that I'm suggesting that police policy makers would foment a menace in order to further their empire building. Not at all, Officer, never crossed my mind, no need for a re-education, sorry deradicalisation camp for me.

AFP officer abused data access to stalk ex

I've just been reading a collected version of Yes, Minister (long flight, other entertainment curtailed, only paperback I was willing to steal from my host) and its quite scary. I opened it at random to a story about Jim Hacker being gamed into supporting a massive database without safe guards. Further random and then systematic reading shows that the plots of this show are still current today. When was this written? Forty years ago? The omnibus edition is dated 1984.

Plus ca change, as le Frenchies say (or at least they would if they couldn't do little finigally things on their letters)

Oz government to put dark fibre net on the auction block

ADSL1? I have two clients in metro Adelaide who can't even get that. The local DSLAMs are all fully occupied so nothing for them until someone moves or dies.

'Arkansas cops tried to hack me with malware-ridden hard drive'

"Is this the first time this has happened, or just the first time it's been noticed?"

Close to my first thought, which was: is this sort of thing getting reported more or has law enforcement in general become more actively hostile?

You’ll be the coolest guy in IT if you ain't got your ID

Re: That's why you get to know the security people

Hell, yeah! I've worked security as a semi employable student but large lad. Like the receptionist, they ultimately control your access so be nice to them. Say hello, smile, know them by name, ask how they are, etc.

In the days when everyone smoked, a great deal of useful intelligence could be gained by walking the extra distance and sharing a durry with the security blokes. This tactic once allowed me to bail out of a sinking ship three weeks ahead of the brown stuff impacting the rotating device (quitting before receivership means they have to pay out entitlements or admit to trading while insolvent).

In line with the original story, one place I worked had a swipe card system on the rear main door to the car park. Now those doors opened outward, the swipe unit was mounted on a pole three feet from the actual door so that no one got whacked when the doors opened. That put it right under the overflow for the third floor gutter. Cue lots of rain and a dead swipe card reader. In those days these things were neither cheap nor common, so for two weeks while the unit was replaced, the rear door to a supposedly secure building was held open with a potted palm...

The same building had outside fire doors keyed to the alarm: unless the alarm was triggered they remained locked. Nice idea but about once a week someone had to be rescued from the fire escape. After I left, I heard that someone had actually set off the alarm by holding a lighter under the smoke detector after getting trapped late one night.

Welcome to the FUTURE: Maine cops pay Bitcoin ransom to end office hostage drama

Re: Oh, Neal Stephenson

What do you mean "without Russian gangsters"? Where do you think these things originated from?

That aside, yup, looks line Mr Stevenson strikes again.

Videogame publishers to fans: Oi, stop resurrecting our dead titles online

Re: Expand this to all technology

"Probably because its rarely all their own work"

Cyan's community release of Myst Online fell foul of this a while back over the Bink video codec.

If you liked Myst, its well worth giving Myst Online, or whatever they are calling it at the moment, a run. It runs very well on modern hardware and manages to still look beautiful today, with the bonus that you can play through the puzzle worlds cooperatively.

Try Myst Masterpiece Edition. It runs on Win 7 and has higher resolution, true colour graphics. I played it through a while back.

If you really want to play the original version, there's a development engine for ScummVM. I've no idea how well it works because I couldn't get it to work a year or two back.

Are you sure there are servers in this cold, dark basement?

Re: The funniest I've seen...

"...is two occasions of failed RAIDs within days at two unrelated small orgs."

i've seen three in the space of 5 hours but they weren't unrelated. Two sites had a shared boundary and mainns feed with a football oval where they had recently installed light towers. The third was in the club offices. Cue Thunderstorm...

"First one was a call in to say the server wasn't working. On arrival I find two failed HDDs in a 3 disk array. Pointed out the flashing red LEDs to the client who said "Ah,I thought that might be important. There only used to be one flashing light". How long has the other LED been flashing? "Oh, I don't know. It was doing that when I started here last year"."

Many years ago I did support for an art school. Something to do with sins in past life, I assume*. I used to do a monthly sweep fixing the minor problems that never got reported, generally because they didn't realise they were problems. As soon as I walk into the front office I can hear a piercing BEEEEP every coule of seconds. I could hear it two rooms away but the staff in the office seemed oblivious. 'when questioned they said it had been going on for days, at least one had wondered what it was, but none had thought to follow the noise and find out.

I tracked it two the server's UPS complaining about batteries that would no longer hold a charge.

* Actually it was kind of cool 'cause there there were lot's of hot "arty" girls.

Streak life: Oz woman flashes boobs at Google Street View car

Re: "The Advertiser" can suck my 8-inch non-dairy creamer.

If you'd ever read The Advertiser you'd be glad of your lucky escape from reading their shitty website...

Streaming tears of laughter as Jay-Z (Tidal) waves goodbye to $56m

Re: not alone at last

"Given that in Oz ads now take up 30% of airtime"

They have ads on radio? I've never been able to put up with the "announcers" on commercial radio here long enough to get to an ad break...

Boring fixed 'net users still dominate Oz market

Re: Ausmerica

Australia isn't really a First World Country in the way Europeans (and I'm lumping you Poms in with them) or even 'Mericans think of it. We are more like Spain or Canada - a lot of space with relatively few people lounging around the edges and a lot of space in between. Good weather (Canadian winters aside), good food and some decent surfing if you know where to look. But nobody really understands how it works and very few really give a fuck.

Costs for just about everything are high here for reasons far to complicated to go into. In the case of telecommunications, a major factor is that its a bloody long way between Australians and what connects us* is pretty much all owned by one company who have systematically failed to keep the string both dry and taut.

What they have done is build out a lot of expensive wireless infrastructure in the hope we'd pay through our collective proverbial to make video calls to one another from taxis in downtown Sydney. The other infrastructure builders have pretty much followed this model.

On the plus side, I can cross three time zones without roaming charges or wondering whether I'll even be able to make a call because the local carrier doesn't talk to mine.

Swing, meet roundabout.

Last time I looked, mining employs under 8% of working Aussies, a lot less now, which is less than manufacturing and even I'm hard pressed to think of something actually made here. The majority of those work in the back office rather than at the coalface, so to speak, so your mates who work "on the mines" are a very small sample set. The immediate limit on the resource sector is not availability of raw materials, its demand and a failure of management to understand how their customers run their economies. Don't worry about us running out of stuff to dig up, that's the least of problems right now.

* For the benefit of non-Aussies that's a joke on the tag line of a Telstra ad campaign

Smart meters are a ‘costly mistake’ that'll add BILLIONS to bills

Re: And just this morning, something else that's fishy

"Farming Today this morning - this scheme http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/cfp/control/technologies/ers/index_en.htm - laptop data entry on fishing vessels then uploading it. What could possibly go wrong?"

I built something like this a decade ago for the local(ish) prawn fisheries. It consisted of an Excel spreadsheet to fill out and a button to FTP the resulting file server where it was collated with a script and imported into an Oracle database. No need for laptops 'cause every boat already had at least three PCs on the bridge and a GSM data connection (invariably with an illegal signal amp inline - the chaos that resulted whenever a skipper forgot to turn if off when entering port was a joy to behold).

The real trick is to structure the scheme so its in the fishermen's best interest to report honestly. It turns out that if you make them feel they are part of the management process, rather than the thing being managed, you get much better data. Who'd have guessed?