Posts by wyatt

HP: That print-free-for-life deal we promised you? Well, now it's pay-per-month to continue using your printer ink

I recently purchased a HP printer which came with the offer of using the cartridges delivered, it sounded like a scam and I didn't even bother looking any further. Glad I did as this won't improve at all.

I'll give you my passwords if you investigate police corruption, accused missile systems leaker told cops

Re: failing to hand over his passwords to police on demand – a crime in the UK

Delete my password safe (and the backups) and I'd be screwed.

British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks

I hope that, if their insurance company is approached to cover the fine they give them the finger. To have user credentials saved in files like that is one of the 'unforgivables'.

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

Re: Classic Errror

Very frequently I find myself also on call with someone who has 'really poor' phone signal in their house. Or, as they work in the City, any calls that come in whilst they're underground travelling home come to me as the next in the line.

Unfortunately for them as I'm not trained in the same products as well they stack up ready for when they do answer the phone.

COVID-19 security tips: Ensure you sack your staff without leaving their IT access enabled, says Secureworks

Re: Macros

You can do this with M365, anything you submit as junk/phishing can go to an additional mailbox.

Sailfish floats v3.4 'Pallas-Yllästunturi', its latest Jolla good reason for itchy-fingered Android and Apple swervers

Likewise, I had a J1 until I lost it in a Taxi in Spain one holiday. It worked well, started to slow down towards the end but was still perfectly usable.

I currently use Android, when my current phone finally gives up on security updates (probably already happened!) I may consider putting Sailfish on it, not sure I'd do it with a primary device though.

UK's Cheshire Police tenders for whole new ERP system after Oracle Fusion went live with 'significant deficiency'

My company were looking to refresh a public sector customer's system, an internal (to them) architect decided that as someone he knew had had a bad experience with what we and another company had proposed he'd have it rejected, after the contracts had been signed!

They've now had to go back out to tender and sort out the existing contracts.

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Re: More than once ...

Everyone makes mistakes, it's being able to recover from them that makes you different.

Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing

Yep, my wife wants a Ring thing light with the camera and speaker after our car was stolen. Said all it's going to do is video the car being stolen, another 200 notes wasted.

I didn't get one.

Think tank warns any further delay to 5G rollout will cost the UK multiple billions – but hey, at least Huawei is out

If this was to be true, was there a massive jump when 3G and 4G arrived?

Funny, that: Handy script for wiping directories is capable of wreaking havoc beyond a miscreant's wildest dreams

Re: My contribution ...

I have memories of Nortel Passports where if you didn't commit a change and it rolled it back, it'd drop all of it's ATM connections. Always interesting to see, it Christmas tree'd whilst doing it.

Re: My contribution ...

Yep, this could have saved me a lot of trouble one night shift!

Unexpected Porthcawl in the borkage area: Riding an indoor Power Truck to nowhere

Re: Have you actually been there?

Yep, we found loads in them! Wife managed to locate a crab, kids caught loads of little fish and shrimps.

Chuckle, I was there last week..! As with any location, it has its good and bad points.

UK Home Office dishes out contracts to 999 control room vendors after wasting cash on network tech it abandoned

999 calls go via the BT emergency service, 101 calls are routed via the standard PSTN.

I know that when a call taker is on a 101 call it'll/can be parked if a 999 call comes in.

If there aren't enough call takers to handle the 999 calls they should overflow to another Police Force.

Tupe them to the new provider?

Whilst I'm happy to bash Crapita most of the time, their evidence/case management software is different to their ICCS offering which is (DS2000/DS3000) known as DSx. This has been working (fairly well) for a number of years.

Overbudget and behind schedule, UK's Emergency Services Network reaches 500th base station milestone

I was in Lincolnshire last week, there was quite a bit of tune I had no 4G signal (I'm on EE). Itd be interesting to know of the areas I was in had a usable Airwave signal.

I think most forces have now accepted they need to buy new handsets, I think the HO had a grant available for this recently.

Manchester, UK seeks IT-slinger: £235m for number-plate-and-fines system to clean up vehicle emissions

Interesting point about decommissioning. Once all the vehicles are compliant (or most..) entering the zone there's no income so the zone will start costing to run. Or they'll just change the standard and charge more people.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: The future is behind you ....

Are TMC updates being broadcast via DAB or only FM?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_message_channel

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

I use to have to visit a customer who had a number of servers in an old kitchen with a small extractor and a desk fan for cooling. They kept the door closed as it was so noisy with all the server fans running on full.

Frequently our server would overheat, it'd also log all the internal temperatures. We showed the customer how hot it was running, their response was to find the data sheet for the mother board and show that it was within it's operating parameters. Fortunately my manager agreed with me that we should exclude heat related faults from our maintenance agreement.

Windows 10 Insider wondering where Notepad has gone? Fear not, Microsoft found it down the back of Dev Channel

Re: Better alternative, skip MS

Yep, it wasn’t fun but Vi was always there! Especially if you’ve loads of servers,not having to wait for an editor was essential.

Working from home on Virgin Media's broadband? Too bad. Outage hits English capital

We've lost our customer service team who are working from home in the London area, fortunately we can re-route calls to different users. However, if this had been wider then we'd have lost our office connectivity and PBX access which would make it more interesting. We have some redundancy but if it'd be enough I'm not sure.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Re: I called the cops

Are you sure? The UK country code is 44..

BT and Serco among bidders competing to run Britain's unfortunately named Skynet military satellite system

Interesting you mention the cleaner, he was also at uni doing a fashion degree and then quit his job. He re-appeared a few months later as a network designer, in the office he use to clean..

Chuckle, I worked at Oakhanger when Paradigm Serco started to manage Skynet 4/5. The same people were in charge that were there when the RAF ran it. They just left and went to work for Serco. I imagine the same still happens, they get Tupe'd between companies.

Many who pick up government contracts couldn't tie their own shoelaces but there must be some that do a reasonable job, we just never hear about them.

Zero-click, zero-day flaws in iOS Mail 'exploited to hijack' VIP smartphones. Apple rushes out beta patch

Much as I'm not a fan of Apple, the list of devices they still support is very encouraging.

Something a bit phishy in your inbox? You can now email suspected frauds straight to Blighty's web takedown cops

How long until the NCSC are receiving spam!?

Capita hops on UK's years-late, billions-over-budget Emergency Services Network to keep legacy system alive

They're now more doomed at the HO with Capita on board than they were before, you'd think someone would read El Reg there?

Interesting that you say UKESN is run over 4G, it's a VoLTE system so 'should' be able to go over which ever flavour 'G' is available at the time. With 5 becoming more prevalent, I hope the handsets are compatible but I doubt it at this stage. They're also locked to EE as this is the SIM card that they're using, EE having bid for the specific lot to provide the network. Nothing to stop them sticking in a different SIM and jumping on a different network, however correct routing of the data into the ESN network would be needed.

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

Slightly different to saving cash but I've failed to secure equipment only to have it fall off its mount. We had an enclosure in the back of the vehicle containing a Nortel ATM passport, switches and various other bits of expensive kit. I'd not secured it correctly having been working inside it and drove off, only to hear a loud 'thud' as it moved as I went round a corner.

Fortunately all the armoured fibres that were connected stopped it from falling too far and I managed to put it back with only a small dent in the side. It still worked..

Android owners – you'll want to get these latest security patches, especially for this nasty Bluetooth hijack flaw

Re: "you'll want to get these latest security patches"

The last update I had available to me was December and who knows what that actually contained. Sony Xperia.

BOFH: When was the last time someone said these exact words to you: You are the sunshine of my life?

Ah yes, ISO90001 certification gets you to manage customer feedback to improve the service you're delivering. It's rare we get many responses to our surveys, when we do I'm not sure we can trust the results as everyones comments on the thread have proved!

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Re: I must be lucky then or have better friends.....

That's my experience with Apple as well, always problems with laptops but never with ipads. Fortunately they're enough for both my parents.

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

Re: Awkward

I work with the police, there's loads of XP still.

Whirlybird-driving infosec boss fined after ranty Blackpool Airport air traffic control antics

What a knob.

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

Re: Compliance....

The company I work for use to maintain asystem that worked within the PC-DSS 'area', from what I saw that side of things worked quite well. Old, but contained. Requirements from moving around in there were pretty stringent, I suspect this is separate from this issue (at the moment).

We've found it... the last shred of human decency in an IT director – all for a poxy Unix engineer

Re: Beer...

We've a few PMs who will come to site to allow us to work whilst managing the customer, especially if stuff is going wrong. Not many though, most manage from afar.

'Big three' 5G kit maker Nokia downgrades profits as returns from next-gen networks fail to show up

"Damm, Huawei hasn't been banned by everyone so we won't sell so much kit."

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

My wife asked me to call a 70 yo with their Surface laptop. They'd passworded the bios and needed to reinstall but couldn't due to said password.

It'd already been sent away to a IT company to try to resolve and they'd been told it wasn't possible but I of course, was to try. I didn't, I wasn't going to try to unglue it to get the battery out.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

I failed to ask a pertinent question once. As a helldesk op on a weekend a call came in for a common issue. Process was to power off the PC, power off the UPS and then power it all back on again. Talking through the user to power off the PC I then said to open the locked box so they could access the UPS, and base unit, they of course didn't have a key. Fortunately for me there were units dotted all around the county and they were able to send someone to get a key from another site.

Cortana makes your PC's heart beat faster: Windows 10 update leaves some processors hot under the cooler

I tried installing 1903 on my work laptop yesterday, it failed. Think I'll avoid it for a bit longer and ignore the almost out of support messages.

Yes, TfL asked people to write down their Oyster passwords – but don't worry, they didn't inhale

Definitely! I don't know most my passwords and certainly couldn't access them on demand like this. Plus you'd be wondering what sort of scam the TFL people were running to be asking for this info straight away..

WeWork filed its IPO homework. So we had a look at its small print and... yowser. What has El Reg got itself into?

Wow, not sure what else to say.

All roads in US cable biz GTT's Brit network seem to lead to Menwith Hill

That might be this:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/11/southport_cable_landing_station_wide_open/

OK, it's fair to say UK's botched Emergency Services Network is an emergency now, right?

Re: Wrong in so many ways....

Yes. The project is based on achieving MCVOICE (mission critical voice) via VoLTE. The 3/4/5/etc G part of it isn't that important, just that there is a network available that can support it. Because the standards for MCVOICE hadn't been agreed on, there was no standard to work to and therefore the functionallity hasn't/hadn't been implemented.

The UK is now in the position that it has committed to a system which does not yet fully exist outside of a lab (compared with Airwave). Other countries have invested in their Tetra systems for MCVOICE leaving data running over the mobile phone networks as they are, something we probably wish we had done. Vodaphone have changed the Airwave backhaul from TDM to cater for the extension but this won't remain up for ever/come without a cost.

It is all quite interesting, but then you consider that lives depend on ESN working correctly and it's a bit scary how bad a job is being done.

The Home Office promise that users can continue using Airwave until UKESN is as good as it is but have only negotiated the extension of Airwave until 2022. I hope that they've started discussing this further and arranged a cost as so far this hasn't gone well for them and negotiating when under pressure tends to on favour the supplier.

As also mentioned in the comments, so many locations don't have a 4G signal still, I wonder if they have an Airwave signal as there are still dead spots in it's coverage.

Internet imbeciles, aka British ISP lobbyists, backtrack on dubbing Mozilla a villain for DNS-over-HTTPS support

Interesting piece from Cisco about DoH:

https :// support.umbrella.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001371526-Firefox-and-DNS-over-HTTPS-default

UK's Openreach admits 50k premises on 'gigabit-capable' FTTP network can't get gigabit speeds

I've recently had Fibre run to my house by Openreach via Zen. I didn't got for the 330Mb package due to cost, I wonder what the maximum speed is that I could get out of my circuit? Uptake looks to be low looking at the poles near me, not many connections but then there is VM in the area to chose from.

UK police want to Airwave hello to some more mobile devices – survey

Re: "shifts where officers could choose when, and when not, to switch on the cameras"

Here's the Met Polices BWV page:

http://www.met.police.uk/bwv/

Other forces may have different policies.

Re: "shifts where officers could choose when, and when not, to switch on the cameras"

The cameras only have a finite amount of storage, cameras are only activated (should be..) as per the force policy. Once they're full then they need to be docked and the footage downloaded, if it is to be kept.