Posts by collinsl

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy

Re: It's still not hard to do.

Depends on the site - in the DC where I work they differentiate staff at a glance by their lanyard colour (amongst other means) and are strict on you wearing one of their lanyards.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Re: In other news

Better than King Donald I.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Thanks to the rising cost of disk pricing and multi-year support contracts etc, the other week I was walking up the stairs in our office with a small box of disks worth almost double the average UK house price.

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Re: HOORAY!!!

I agree with everything you've said and I hope they can keep going however the cynical side of me is now fully expecting this org to be lawsuited into bankruptcy by the US government for some sort of "stealing government data" or "promoting anti-US ideology" made-up nonsense to prove the point that they are in control.

BOFH: Amnesty means never having to say you're sorry

Re: Priceless

A similar thing happened with the SS Atlantic Conveyer during the Falklands war - it was hit by an Exocet missile and sunk (along with all but one of the Chinook helicopters sent for the mission which caused massive problems later) however the stores reports for it suggested it would have sunk before leaving the UK under the weight of kit which was supposed to be on board!

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: CYA

I remember Penny Mordaunt on some TV programme or other stating that for her maiden speech (IIRC), which is supposed to be humorous in some regard, she talked about her Royal Navy reserve officer's training, including a section on caring for your penis and testicles in the field and how the women on the course had been "issued the incorrect equipment". She had to get the parliamentary staff to check if a) she was allowed to say "penis and testicles" on the floor of the house (the decision was that "as they were things, they could be mentioned") and 2. whether or not they had been said before (they had not).

Re: CYA

When I did a year's placement in Air Traffic Control engineering some years ago their intranet had a glossary of acronyms to which you could propose additions or corrections - I'd assume they still have to have such a thing and that the list has only grown massively!

Re: CYA

Too many time's I've seen apo's'trophe's simply sprinkled through text a's' salt sprinkle'd upon mashe'd potatoe's.

FTFY

Re: A clock system would never work

In the DC where I work they use the fence turnstiles to check people in/out (since you can't tailgate) and the fire alarm triggers a printer which spews out a building occupancy report that they can do a check from (based on who was in the fence line at the time the alarm was triggered I presume)

Re: Not quite the same but...

So if required you can beat down fire long enough to run/crawl past, or put out someone who is on fire I suppose.

Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled

Rest assured even 13 years ago when I worked in ATC engineering for a bit they had the capacity to train controllers (both new ones being taught how to do the work and existing controllers doing refresher training) using simulators which could generate massive traffic loads if needed for the scenario.

So it's easily possible these days to get controllers to practice emergency scenarios without getting anywhere near a live flight, and they do it all the time.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

I only found this out today!

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

If you think them pronouncing "yes" as "yis" is odd, look up how they pronounce "deck". There's even a whole video on how they build their decks as they take them so seriously.

DARPA seeks swappable satellites to help with future star wars

I'm sure the US plan would just be to blow up the fragments until sufficient space has been created...

EU sovereignty push gives tech buyers a new alphabet soup to swallow

Re: Possible fly sighted in ointment.

And secondly, if such an attack was detected, the kernel could immediately be forked to an EU-specific variant which did NOT contain the back door, and from then on we could develop our own parallel kernel, taking upstream content from the original one as long as it met the required security standards etc.

Fired IT worker jailed for 21 months after sabotaging old school district

Re: So many things wrong about this story...

Teachers were 'locked out' for a whole two hours preventing them from teaching?!? Whiskey, tango, foxtrot! All those years of education to earn a teaching certificate and they cannot produce an ad-hoc lesson plan without a computer? Totally lame and speaks volumes about our modern education system. Any teacher worth their degree should have a half-dozen lessons ready to go for those odd days where something goes wrong.

Half the time these days teachers aren't allowed to teach without working computer systems, both from a perspective of tracking the student's progress, plus from basic attendance and health and safety requirements - if you can't prove where the kids are, then they can't operate. Yes they should have a backup system on pen and paper for this but with all the security stuff these days (esp. in the US around unauthorised entry given the staggering numbers of attacks on schools) the kids may not be even able to get into certain areas of the school safely without working systems.

Re: The elephant in the room

Work should have provided you with a secure on-system way of electronically sending the case/details over to said supervisor instead of employees having to manually process them.

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: Hungarian

The phrase should be "lupDujHomwIj lubuy'moH gharghmey" IIRC

I'm the same, no hope of telling the difference on a server between a yellow and a green LED, and almost none of red.

On some of our devices I'm clued in because the red LED looks "brighter" than the others, but this is subjective and requires a reference point.

Is it not possible to activate the button with some kind of pointèd stick? Or failing that, a loganberry?

Apple's Orwellian device controls for tots also mean more work for parents

Which is true from a technical standpoint, but from a usability standpoint if parents can't easily understand how to enforce the restrictions, then they might as well not exist as they will be badly used or misused.

I've never looked at how to do parental controls on an Apple device before but UI improvements or better workflows and easier to understand instructions may be required if so many parents (and I don't know what the % is here either, some people are always going to be bad with technology) can't get the thing working right.

Trump pumps federal funds into coal plants in the name of energy security

Re: I wonder if he's ever seen a windmill,

I think comment OP means a traditional corn-grinding like Windy Miller inhabits rather than a turbine

UK's top crime agency hamstrung by legacy IT, watchdog warns

Can't print, printer's broke

Ohio hits pause on datacenter tax breaks draining its coffers

Re: There was very litte lost revenue.

Datacentres unfortunately produce a lot of heat and a constant "hum", so unless you were in a cooler climate and re-used that heat for residential heating, and had good soundproofing, you wouldn't want to use the floors above for anything much. It may be OK for an office but not for housing.

ICE to keep an eye on your eyes under $25M biometric scanner deal

I'm surprised they're only buying 1770 of them, I would have expected Trump to add another 6 and proclaim it as part of the 250th anniversary

Troops’ phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

Re: If i didn't know better...

Same sort of thing for people running laps on the decks of aircraft carriers, so you'd get a slowly moving square in the middle of the ocean showing where the ship was and what direction it was moving in, and at what speed...

Disgruntled 0-day hunter 'humiliated' by Microsoft pledges 'bone shattering drop' as Redmond calls cops

Re: Typical large corporation throwing its toys out the pram

Exactly - they can put in all the crap they like including "we get to enslave you up to your 10x great grandchildren" as long as they have one line which says "Nothing in this agreement supersedes any local law or statute in your jurisdiction".

London cops post £300M tech shopping list after Palantir contract blocked

Re: Framework?

But you'd expect there to be more than one supplier bidding for a CCS framework contract wouldn't you? Unless the Met doctored the requirements in such a way that only Palantir could meet them, in which case you'd use some kind of expedited single-supplier process rather than using CCS.

It all seems very odd to me too

Re: Not Just Corrupt, Foot-Gun Corrupt

There's clearly some gamesmanship going on here between the Met and MOPAC. So MOPAC pull the rug out from under a £50M Palantir contract, and the response - in a ridiculously short time frame, no less - is to retort with, "Well, if you won't let us spend £50 Million with Palantir, we want *six times as much* to buy from all these other companies.

Or might it be that these are the other tenders which come up around this time for renewal in one big lump at the "start" of the financial year?

Things like horse's fodder and radio services aren't likely to have been in the Palantir contract.

These are likely the contracts which were approved by MOPAC, but they blocked one more which would otherwise have come out in the rush.

Re: "the MoD, the NHS, and other police forces"

If those orgs followed their purchasing frameworks correctly and Palantir won then they would get the contract (whatever we think of them as a horrible nasty organisation).

In this case it appears MOPAC is alleging that the Met didn't follow the rules, so the request for tender got pulled.

Re: Who got the bung?

If done correctly, the purchasing framework works. You're supposed to be able to choose the best value for money contract which meets the requirements laid out in the application pack, whether that be mandatory ones like number of units, requirements around how they work, certain features they must have etc, or optional ones like quality of life improvements or inclusions above the must-have requirements. Cost should only form a part of the score, you could also score elements around how good the support has been from that company previously, what kind of environmental plan they have, how well they align with the goals of the organisation etc.

EU moderation watchdog says social media giants hate taking down hate speech

Re: It entirely depends...

Whilst I think we can all agree that politicians will overdramatise things when it's in their interests, we also shouldn't ignore the fact that countries like Russia are actively conducting sub-threshold and grey warfare campaigns against the rest of Europe and the US and misinformation and disinformation is a large part of this, even if it's just amplifying what's already there.

Re: By design

Is the Appeals Centre a court though, and do it's rulings have legal weight?

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

Re: If I don't understand, it can't be important

Problem is if they chuck that out as a press release to their customers they'll look totally clueless since it's been there all along and some of their customers use that to pay already, and something like that is ripe for being released as marketing twaddle.

Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

Re: Surprised they responded at all.

I'd like a salary of one google-cent per anum, please!

Microsoft remembers that taskbars used to move

Re: the upgrade to Win12 can't come soon enough

I think 12 will be more cloud-centric and will be attempting to transition people that way, and 13+ (or whatever they call it) will probably be fully cloud.

Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess

Re: Can you hear the jack boots!?

Nice projecting you have going on there, but the fact that you can't see that Trump is a fascist and European governments are not is worrying to a high degree.

Re: Number twelve. The naughty bits of a lady

I expect it is due to insufficient reference as children to No. 1, the Larch. Or is that Birch?

But the corollary there is that "accountable" bodies run by politicians will bend and sway to the political whim of the moment, good or ill.

Sometimes we need things to be independent of politics - like the police, the courts, the watchdogs etc, otherwise you end up with a situation like they have in the USA currently where a suitably empowered politician can break entire agencies by ordering them to go after their political enemies, or even by just scrapping everything, firing most people, and telling the remainder to do no work.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Re: The usual snide jab

People are free to choose whether or not to be employed by the state healthcare system. Somewhere like France or Germany it's all insurance-run anyway but the government puts a cap on what the insurers can charge, and subsidises the cost of treatment, so that everyone wins - capitalists make their (reasonable) profits, citizens get good, prompt healthcare, and those who can't afford it don't have to pay.

Even in the UK we still have private medical companies like BUPA you can go and work for if you don't like the idea of working for the NHS - in fact a lot of our senior doctors work for both, doing private practice and NHS shifts.

Only America has this insane system of the healthcare companies competing with each other to charge as much as possible whilst the insurers compete with each other to cover as little as possible of the bill - the only person who loses out in such a system is the citizen, but as they only exist in the USA to be a money source then no one with the ability to do anything about it will do that because they want the system the way it is so they can make their profits.

KDE bags €1.3M as Europe realizes it might need an OS of its own

Re: Wouldn't it be nice..

Why do they have to agree? Why not have options? After all, you can get spins of lots of OS builds, so why not have spins of OS builds for government?

In fact, why not have a lot of desktop options in the install and let the user pick?

Dude… where’s my password? Claude reunites forgetful stoner with $400k Bitcoin stash

I'm surprised it didn't crack it, lie about it, and steal the money for itself to be honest.

Americans would rather have a nuclear plant in their backyard than a datacenter

Re: NJNIMBY

Use the tools of the capitalist pigdoggoatpig west against them to bring about their own downfall!

London cops hail fixed facial recognition cams after suspects collared every 35 mins

Re: Stranger things

Legal reasons.

For legal reasons this post is also a joke.

Britain pays Starlink millions despite Musk's calls to overthrow UK government

Re: All Roads Lead to Tony

I'd argue at least 40% of those started with Thatcher, especially selling off bits of the UK...

Re: Just stop using anything from Musk

If the ships were going anywhere dangerous they would turn the terminals off. It's not like they don't have control over them physically, and they often do in the RN confiscate people's phones and ensure they're turned off if they're doing some specialist or sensitive work or the ship is going into a sensitive area. Same with Starlink, it would just be physically powered down and unplugged, at which point it's an antenna-shaped brick.

Re: El reg's EDS so bad.

You are free to express your opinions. You are also free to accept the consequences of those opinions, which may extend to people or organisations with different opinions choosing not to do business with you.

The UK Government would be well within their rights to refuse to do business with SpaceX if they chose to over these views. They're not attempting to suppress them, they're exercising their right to choose who they pay taxpayer money to.

After all, if we extend your argument, shouldn't the UK government use Chinese child labour for all of it's projects as it's a lot more cost-efficient than employing people in the UK? But we don't, because we take the (right) moral position that exploiting children is wrong and our government shouldn't be doing that.

Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch

Re: reheating water in a microwave

If you want to boil liquids in a microwave it's best to give them some sort of nucleation source to form around - drop a toothpick or plastic spatula with a rough(ish) surface so that the gases in the water can form bubbles (nucleate) and they can then exit the liquid.

If you're boiling soup or something it's fine as the ingredients in the soup will form that surface, but plain water can just superheat and won't show any signs until you disturb it, at which point all of the energy is released at once, throwing superheated water everywhere and burning anything it comes into contact with which is fleshy and/or alive.

Memory godboxes could offer relief from the RAMpocalypse

That sounds amazing! Where do you work and are you hiring? ;-)