Posts by wyatt

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

I've not seen them next to existing poles but the number that have sprouted in South Birmingham is considerable! Seems Openreach have a target to meet and this is how they'll try to do it in time, looks a right mess though.

DataVita declares sovereignty with 'National Cloud' for UK

That should make for an interesting Data Processing Agreement to review!

Cisco slashes thousands of staff, 7% of entire workforce, pivots into AI

Re: Oh great.

It is the way unfortunately. Business I work for tried a NRR model (none recurring revenue) but that didn't work and now they want ARR (annual). Makes the finances look better.

TeamViewer says Russia broke into its corp IT network

We've used it, not as much as we use to. We made it clear that it is the customer's responsibility to enable and disable as needed- their choice if they want to secure the access.

Many never allowed it, bet they're smug now!

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Ah yes.. I remember a good one. Racked a server in a customer's DC but didn't have the correct colour patch lead.

System got commissioned and went live which was great for a few months.

Customer then decided the colour wasn't acceptable so removed said patch lead, system stopped working funny enough.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Re: WOW

I interviewed for a pre-sales role flogging autonomy, I said no once I found out what the product was!

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Humm. What about workstations that have been upgraded that now don't meet the new rules, will these continue to be supported and receive updates?

We've some staff who have manually upgraded themselves, it's going to be expensive if they've now got unsupported OS's.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

I had to go to Monaco for a 10 minute job. Flew reasonably BA and then helicopter transfer from Nice. It was a few days after the Grand Prix so all the advertising boards were still up. I then spent 8 hours in a comms room chasing the customers IT team whilst waiting for a port to be changed to half duplex (yep was a while ago!). Ruined what could have been an awesome jolly.

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

My brother refused a new EPOS system ad at university he worked at, it just didn't work- calculations were worked out manually and found to be different to the system. In the end it got accepted by someone above him. Hate to think what it's like now.

Irish power crunch could be prompting AWS to ration compute resources

Re: Irony

Problem is, you're probably stuck with ADSL being that far away from civilisation!

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Flipping aircon- 7 hour round trip as the 'has anything changed' question was met with a 'no' from a customer. Open doors and fans were fairly conclusive even without stepping foot into the sauna.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

As a council they're crap. Roads department make stupid decisions that have to be rolled back, IT ones that just don't work, planting trees that are vandalised within hours, unable to sort out equal wages, giving bin collectors an additional paid role that then messed up everyone elses pay.

Hell knows where they'll be in a few years time- bin collections will be the next thing to change, care and social packages none existent, arts are already due to be chopped from the budget.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Bonk user on head, steal unlocked workstation, job done.

Half of polled infosec pros say their degree was less than useful for real-world work

Re: It's pretty much the same for anything..m

Technical debt was my first thought, yes the course won't be 'cutting edge' but there's few that are using this in reality.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

It could have been improved by "microwaving the sandwich and walking away".

No doubt 1000 emails and signs about microwave usage would suddenly appear from Karen!

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Re: Military IT Moves

Before I left the Army I went to a cold place on a comms exercise. The generators were put onto ISO pallets, covered in plastic sheet and shipped over. When the generators were switched on the majority failed to start, having ingested an amount of salt water. This was pointed out before they departed the UK but it wasn't the persons job who was shipping them to make sure they worked on arrival, just to make sure they arrived.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Clearly they need an open window, saves identifying all the credentials that need changing.

Now is a good time to buy memory because prices rise next year, Gartner predicts

Pah. Who buys memory any more? Stick it in the cloud/ someone else's computer and let them buy it.

AWS rakes in half a billion pounds from UK Home Office

My comment is that this shows what the Home Office are directly contracting, there will be a number of their suppliers who are also making use of AWS.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: I thougt all these kinsds of stories were made up until a couple of weeks ago

To be fair, I've done this as well. Not called someone to fix it though..

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Reminds me of the time I was taking an army vehicle for servicing, going round a corner I heard a loud bang. On return to the garage I had a look in the box body- the enclosure with the Nortel Passport, Switch and a number of other bits was suspended by the fibre connectors not where it should be.

I'd forgotten to secure it before moving, apart from a dent it was fine.

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

Ah yes, a slightly more experienced engineer once said 'sguk ASI' to free up some memory. I did this and crashed a rather important system with some fairly stringent SLAs.

Should have I have known better? Maybe.. But it did work and did free up some memory.

Datacenters face double dilemma of supply issues and a need for speed

A shame you have to supply your email to view the report but that's life.

Interesting that I go to a number of private DC's and they're well under their capacity- It'd be interesting to work out what the 'cloud' hosting split is between that and a physical DC. There's clearly a point at which Azure and AWS become second choice, I personally think we'll see more moving back to traditional locations like this and the other report is suggesting. Have all the on-prem engineers reskilled?

Meta spends $181M to get out of lease at vacant London offices

Any lengthy contract will have a break clause in it. You can try to negotiate one before these points with the landlord, generally it'll cost you though.

Buildings generally come with maintenance liabilities, you can realise a saving in the above costs by not having to pay these, I'm sure the bean counters will have been all over it, whilst keeping away from windows.

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

Re: > is just security theatre

Even CE+ is just a dip test, not a 100% check. If you do actually implement it well, it does help out.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Reminds me about the story I once heard about a system that failed.

Supplier got ripped a new one as the customer had purchased a fully redundant with failover/bells/whistles the lot and nothing should ever go down. Turns out the primary had failed a while back and no one noticed until the secondary failed.

Capita staffers told attackers stole data from its own pension fund

Re: But the data hasn't been sold...

hahaha, I can just imagine someone using 'dark' google and not finding much- you're safe then!

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Ah yes, the joy of software that runs as an application on a server. Frequently we'd have to support customers who had installed updates (go them!) but failed to complete the process by logging the server back on to the required account. As regulated customers the lack of records could prove expensive..

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

Meh, this bill is bollocks as anyone who wants to do business with the EU will still have to meet the requirements of the EU GDPR.

So, do you have a 2 tiered system within your business or just crack on as before?

Then you have all the scumbags flogging your data- cheers gov for screwing us again.

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

I loved my 6310, it did calls and was enough for me.

Uber fined $14m for lying to get customers to ditch cabs

Never personally ordered a Uber but have travelled in one, when it finally arrived. I order direct with takeaways and generally collect, I can't see the benefit of the increased cost of someone delivering it. I see the drivers sitting waiting for multiple orders at MacDonald's to make it worthwhile- who wants cold food.

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Re: Static wouldn't have been the only problem

When the Gulf 2 kicked off the military requested a quote for quality fans and filters to stop sand getting into the boxes which contained servers- typically the box would run with the lid off.

Quote was of course refused as it was a lot of money. Not as much however as the cost of cleaning all the kit when it returned full of sand.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

The company I work for had a customer in the City of London. Every time something didn't go their way they'd involve their lawyers. As you'd expect, we dropped them as a customer, along with everyone else in the market.

They've recently asked us why we didn't respond to RFP they put out, same people are still in charge- do they think that people don't remember how they behave?

Ritz cracker giant settles bust-up with insurer over $100m+ NotPetya cleanup

Oh? Insurance companies haven't done their due diligence in evaluating the risk and cost of potential claims?

Guess they'll start doing this and prices will rise along with audits or attestations which if found to be lies, invalidate your claim. Nothing new here.

UK government in talks with datacenter operators over blackouts

Great having a DC working but there may not be anyone who can connect to it! It'd be interesting to know what the maximum outages are that individual components such as networking nodes/switching kit/ engineers kettles can run for in a scenario such as this.

Without having a crystal weather ball it's impossible to know if this will be an issue, whatever happens my priority will be my family.

Private equity suits at Thoma Bravo pull out of Darktrace acquisition

Re: "Mistiming" of revenue recognition

Oh look, an accountant found your dodgy reporting. Don’t pass go.

Watch a RAID rebuild or go to a Christmas party? Tough choice

Re: IBM Engineer...

I take it there were no risks identified in the change control they were working under along with mitigating steps then!?

UK police to spend tens of millions on legacy comms network kit

Oh how I wish I'd have brought shares in Motorola, they're lapping it up!

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Whilst this will undoubtedly benefit all, improvement needs to be made of the Firearms Licensing Teams as well. They're frequently poor or the issue with incorrect records.

EU cuts off key Russian banks from SWIFT system

Yep, I read this as well it was quite interesting.

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

I hate that setting, first thing I change when working on a system.

French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi ups Altice UK's stake in BT to 18%, says he is not planning a takeover... at least not yet

It amazes me that BT make any money, aren't they meant to be paying into a massive deficit of a pension pot? How can anyone make money when they owe so much.

I'd have also thought that BT would be considered CNI, allowing foreign control of this (and other) assets is madness.

FoI response points to network updates for ambulance outage on England's south coast

Re: So, who's update?

Frequentis do generally appear to do things better than some other suppliers I'm aware of!

Re: So, who's update?

It's interesting with the 'new' ESN network that some Blue Light services have their control rooms receiving radio traffic in hosted environments, it then gets pushed to a terminal where the user is logged on, where ever that may be. Networking has never been so important. One customer has had WAN problems ever since they started doing this to the extent they had to restrict WAN usage until they could upgrade their connectivity, something that has been ongoing for years now.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

I agree, this only works if there is a job available in a company that is WFH that you get.

I am of the opinion that as Covid becomes accepted as here to stay, businesses will slowly return to on site activities, probably not at the same scale due to cost but some will be back in the office.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Excellent.

I'm sure many have been on the receiving end of crap support.

Judge in UK rules Amazon Ring doorbell audio recordings breach data protection laws

Re: Surely they have to go shopping?

First thing I'd do if I was a criminal is send someone else with a spray can of paint to cover everyones ring/accessible CCTV cameras. There goes most the evidence they may have captured.

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

Re: executive assistance can sometimes be a good thing.

I had a fault on a bit of software that we supplied that I needed to escalate to our Development Team. Support was refused until it could be fitted into their 'sprints'.

Once I managed to get them to look at it (by escalating internally), it took them <5mins to see the issue and about 1hr to fix it. To get to that point was months.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: Rather moronic

Yep, I had to remind my people that even though the person leaving has given a date, you take away their elevated privileges now.

Leaving someone's account available after they've left the building appears to be more common than it should be!

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Ah yes, I've disabled a NIC before without thinking things through. Fortunately it wasn't that far of a drive, it took longer to get into the server room once I was there.

I rarely work with customers who connect the management NIC.