A great read - your bursar sounds like a top geezer!
Posts by Red Sceptic
65 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2011
Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks
Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US
Dinsdale
Luigi Vercotti. : So I decided to set up a high-class night club for the gentry at Biggleswade. With international cuisine and cooking and top line acts. And not a cheap clip-joint for picking up tarts, that was right out, I deny that completely. And one evening, Dinsdale walks in with a couple of big lads. One of whom was carrying a tactical nuclear missile. They said I'd bought one of their fruit machines and would I pay for it?
Second Interviewer : How much did they want?
Luigi Vercotti. : Three quarters of a million pounds. And they went out.
Second Interviewer : Why didn't you call for the police?
Luigi Vercotti. : Well I noticed that the fellow with the thermonuclear device was the chief constable for the area. Anyway, a week later, they came back, said that the cheque had bounced and that I had to see... Doug.
BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment
Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top
CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'
Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up
When is a privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit
The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111
Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file
Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun
Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins
Stereotype at best
When I worked at a provincial RG university in the UK, the work of university staff was universally headlined in the local rag as “University boffins [create/discover/{other verb}] …”.
And at school, those who - whether by dint of natural aptitude, hard work or both - excelled at STEM subjects were universally dubbed as “boffs”.
Neither usage seemed to be particularly gendered.
PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis
Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry
No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron
Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic
Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine
Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked
Heineken says there’s no free beer, warns of phishing scam
Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems
Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth
The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?
We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?
Infosec chap: I found a way to hijack your web accounts, turn on your webcam from Safari – and Apple gave me $100k
Elvis may have left the building, but Windows remains very much on show
A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes
Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege
UK chancellor: Getting back to the altar of corporate dreams (the office) will boost young folks' careers
Russia's ISS Multipurpose Laboratory Module launches after years sitting on a shelf, immediately runs into issues
'Lots of failed startups came out of Campus': Google axes London hub because startup scene 'doesn't need' another 7 floors of workspace
To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA? Gartner analyst says OK — but don’t be robotic about it
Boffins show sleight-of-hand tricks to Corvids, find they are smarter than people
Crown Prosecution Service solicitor accused of targeting judge ex-wife's lover through work computer systems
Brit unis hit in Blackbaud hack inform students that their data was nicked, which has gone as well as you might expect
TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader
The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end
Jeff Bezos tells shareholders to buckle up: Amazon to blow this quarter's profits and more on coronavirus costs
'That's here. That's home. That's us': It's 30 years since Voyager 1 looked back and squinted at a 'Pale Blue Dot'
Supreme Court says secret UK spy court's judgments can be overruled after all
The D in SystemD stands for Danger, Will Robinson! Defanged exploit code for security holes now out in the wild
123-Reg goes TITSUP – again
Kremlin wants to shoot the Messenger, and WhatsApp to boot
So, just let me get this straight ...
Our Western governments impose sanctions and use all sorts of bad words about the government of this pariah state, yet when it comes to protecting the rights of their citizens they wish to enact exactly the same kind of laws which deny these citizens the right to privacy and secure communications for banking, commerce etc.
So just who are the bad guys here, eh?Western nations are now governed by a class which views the law as being a protection for them and their cronies against the people - not at all like the Kremlin, then.
Chinese loan sharks seek salacious selfies as collateral
Norman Conquest, King Edward, cyber pathogen and illegal gambling all emerge in Apple v FBI
No - it's binary
There are no shades of grey here. Either you have secure data or you don't. Once you create a backdoor into a system, unlock just *one* phone, make just *one* exception for law enforcement or whoever, THAT IS IT. There will be no going back:
a) once the vulnerability is made, do you really think it will stay in the hands of "the good guys", even if they were the ones (whomsoever they may be) for whom it was specifically created?
b) once the precedent is set so that "the good guys" (whomsoever they may be) can get the information that they want, do you think that others will not seek to use whatever means necessary to avail themselves of this, whether by rule of law or commercial pressure or some other means?
It's binary, people - being referred to as "West Coast law" in some articles I've been reading.
German mayor's browser tabs catch him with trousers down
Hackers mirror 250GB of NASA files on the web
Oh the conspiracies ...
"One of the main purposes of the Operation was to bring awareness to the reality of Chemtrails/CloudSeeding/Geoengineering/Weather Modification, whatever you want to call it, they all represent the same thing."
So they also got access to the giant network controlled by the blood-drinking baby-eating lizards (David Icke, we know you're in there!) too, did they?
"NASA is looking at the effect of cloud seeding in the upper atmosphere, but sadly – for the hackers – there was no smoking gun suggesting the agency is engaged in an active conspiracy."
Oh what a surprise ... gee, I know the standards of education here in the UK are dire these days, but ffs, how do these people even manage to go to the bathroom (sic), let alone reproduce?