Posts by wyatt

GitHub Actions outage told devs 'your account is suspended'

Re: GitHub is disappearing up its own AI fundament

Maybe an olive branch will come from somewhere?

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

If it can't be used for the most attractive benefits, what's the point? I was considering applying, not sure it's worth the few minutes of my time.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: Fired

I did some work at a "secure facility", I asked if they ever forgot to close doors- yeah they said, happens all the time! Generally they just get closed and locked without saying anything unless they're camered up.

They'd had no escapes fortunately.

Memory shortage could push PC shipments to pre-pandemic lows

Guess that pile of laptops I'm trying to dispose of may get taken apart for their RAM and added to others to make something serviceable. I've quite a nice Dell I saved from the scrap pile as a 'test' workstation, a lot nicer than the HP's we're buying.

NHS disability equipment provider on brink of collapse a year after cyberattack

Re: Perhaps not the cyberattack.

They're now in liquidation. It does sound as though they were struggling before the attack, it'll be interesting to see what their "PE" investors are owed. Lots of management fees will be registered knowing how they work.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Ones Aurora

There was a TV program about the Forestry Commission in Scotland, one of the guys said you can guarantee you'll get the quad (bike) stuck on a Friday afternoon when there's no one else around to help.

Simple jobs on paper are sometimes the most challenging in reality.

Alan Turing Institute: UK can't handle a fight against AI-enabled crims

Is this the same Turing institute that has been criticised for not being fit for purpose recently?

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Yep, outsourcing to reset the pay and get rid of the union seems the only fix atm.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

I use to work on a lot of Linux servers, may with only 1 letter that would change between them. I restarted a UK Police Forces finger print processing system think it was a client (it was the server). Fortunately (maybe?!) it coincided with a major outage and they didn't notice.

Motorola appeal over £200M price cap for Airwave service rejected

I use to be really interested in the deployment of UKESN. It's dragged on so long now that I've given up.

Infoseccer: Private security biz let guard down, exposed 120K+ files

Ah yes, "if no serious harm" has occurred then it's not reportable. Almost like as long as you get away with it, it's ok?

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

Re: Perpetual?

I think there is an acceptance that 'perpetual' will generally end after a period of time, life moves on and people accept that technology and software will as well. As long as it doesn't end prematurely then paying for a new version after a period of time is acceptable to me.

Likewise, think it was ~£30 for Office and Visio for 3 installations. I've also a Hotmail account which gives me limited OneDrive access- yeah it's putting my eggs in the Microsoft basket but there are limited suppliers that do it as well as Microsoft does (not always great, but better than others).

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

I had my last car engage collision avoidance on a round about, a car cut in front of me and I braked, not enough for it though. It slowed me to a dangerous speed causing a hazard for other drives before disengaging.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Reminds me of when I was being shown round my first contracting job. Went into the 'comms/server' room and saw that 2 of the 3 ISDN BRi boxes had no lights on them. Guess the backup isn't working then!

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

First one I've really laughed at for a long time.

AI-driven e-commerce fraud is surging, but you can fight back with more AI

AI wars, who'd have thought.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

I've learnt to walk around places with my hands in my pockets. Stops me touching things that I'd then be responsible for fixing. It also helps for when installations are CCTV'd- you with your hands in your pockets is less suspicious that the person who doesn't have them in!

Get ready: US port strike may snarl tech supply chains

Well, I can see this going one way and that's the workers getting a pay rise without the automation clause their union wants. The owners sound like they're rich enough to sit out any union action, after all, containers will still need shipping after it's finished.

Automation is coming, trying to stop it at all ain't going to work.

AI’s energy appetite too big for Texas grid, regulators warn

Re: Good

The availability of resources seems to be a key limitation to a number of sites currently, maybe this will be negated by locating them where resources are plentiful, if the network latency and resilience is sufficient.

Or maybe people will just stop going on about AI being the next big thing and just do what they need to well.

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.

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.