Posts by pig

Apple hit with £3 billion claim of ripping off 40 million UK iCloud users

Re: 0.64 pence a month rip off…. Ohhh the scandal

"If Which’s understanding of what Apple’s cloud service is this shallow, I look forward to them being laughed out of court."

You may be overestimating the understanding that our judges have.........

NatWest blocks bevy of apps in clampdown on unmonitorable comms

Re: Good start Natwest

Especially as MPs only started to use it as they thought it was not auditable.....

(Though, maybe fire them as MPs as opposed to full on charge of Treason )

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Reminds me of Alan Sugar being appointed UK Enterprise Czar

And I expect Musk will have much the same effect, bugger all.

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

Well, at least you aren't over reacting.

IBM and Oracle to support 280,000 users after winning mega ERP govt tech contract

Re: Oracle, seems I've heard that name before

I can tell you 100% that if they had oracle consultants in it would have been a lot better.

Oracle consultants won't say 'Hey, we have these features developed, tested and stable. Why don't you ignore them and try to write your own, using Council devs on £40k a year?'

Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year

Re: Did the system do this on its own?

Having seen first hand a different council's ERP cock up...I would bet real money that the default allocations in Oracle would work, but the implementation team wrote their own instead, and that went wrong.

AMD stalls Ryzen 9000 launch over poor chip quality

It is all in the timing.

Last year they may have released anyway, but with Intel facing calls to recall it's 'faulty' hardware it makes sense for them to take the higher ground this time.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Dave Plummer has a different take on this

"bypassing staging" I might fire myself if I did this, or ordered it, in my job.

To do it for this software, at this scale..... someone ether had big balls, or a criminal lack of understanding of the risk.

London council accuses watchdog of 'exaggerating' danger of 2020 raid on residents' data

The saddest thing is the hack was far worse than explained here.

They sat in Hackney for months, widening their access, before they started to encrypt.

Everyone I spoke to at the time who was involved were very clear, that it is was worse than they will ever publicly let on.

They should have the book thrown at them. But of course, public sector fining the public sector is very.... urgh.

Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout

The ERP recently developed for Northampton, Milton Keynes and Cambridge cost £9.7m* to build.

And that is 3 councils (Well, now 4 after Northampton was split up).

A standardised 1, or even 3, would work better.

Give councils the choice of Oracle, SAP, or Agresso - just don't let them build and maintain their own.

*Officially the £9.7m was 'under budget' and it was.

I mean, it was once they tripled the budget to be £9.8m, so they could then declare it 'under budget'

Two cuffed over suspected smishing campaign using 'text message blaster'

Re: a bank or another official authority will ask you to share personal information

Ah yes, landlines.

They would play the 'dial tone' back at you so you thought you had hung up and were initialising a new call.

I remember thinking that was clever.

As is this new scam.

It is a shame scammers can be talented too.

London hospitals left in critical condition after ransomware attack

Re: 3rd attack in a year on Synlab

Everything is feasible at a cost.

You can have any two of price, quality and time.

What, you want it now, and want it to be good?

Hope you have deep pockets.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

I worked at a place where the head of IT Security would do this.

He even took 5 laptops from a meeting room, when the people meeting in the room went on a walk around the office.

While he had a point, to a degree, he was ultimately a twat.

When he left his laptop unlocked, and I send around the usual 'I'll be buying doughnuts tomorrow' email, he threatened me with all sorts of disciplinary action.

His duality did not go unnoticed, and his contract was not renewed.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Re: Monopoly

Probably the same as me.

Although after working on one gov IT project, I never NEVER! will again.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Re: Plus ça change

"The only Annabelle I knew at the time was about six, cute, and perpetually clumsy. Hardly a criminal mastermind."

And that is exactly what she wants you to think.

Unit4 software's budget bungle leaves schools counting the cost

Re: "the new ERP software – which replaced an SAP system"

Because Unit 4 ERP / Agresso / U4BW - however you call it - is cheaper on paper.

And then you start the implementation, and here you should expect 2-3x your estimated costs.

But they don't.

So once they get passed 2x cost the pressure to 'just go live with something' becomes too much for them.

Also, they tend to have bad staff, being a public sector big project that is locally managed.

I was hired to a public sector implementation of Unit 4 (not this one) but you will know which one (if you worked on it) when I say the sentence:

"The Programme Manager hired ALL of her friends as Project Managers, despite none of them having experience or qualifications".

It went as well as you would expect.

And no, I did not stay long!

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

Re: Throw me in that briar patch!

Same here, autistic - diagnosed mid forties.

I actually aspired to run a department once, and being great at what I did I soon was given the job.

A big pay rise, and more important for me at the time, 37 people under me and a £1million pound annual budget.

It soon became apparent to me that my skill set was not people!

After a couple of months I switched my 'internal targets' to training up the best of my deputies and having her succeed me when I resigned.

She did great. Honestly, they should have given her the job in the first place to be honest.

Thing is, since that day I have done much better.

I now earn more, work from home, and given my setup cuts out the things I deal with less well (People, Commuting) I thrive.

I used to commute for 90 minutes to an office in central London.

When I got there I would, often in vain, try to find a desk where I could spend the day .... in Teams meetings.

Why was I spending 3 hours and £8k a year travelling again?

Re: The inalienable human right of WFH.

"Stop ploughing that field, get thee to the office at once!"

Re: Being remote is career limiting

Absolutely this.

My old employer decided we needed to come in 3 days a week.

This gave me the oomph to accept a job from one of our suppliers.

A job that is fully remote and paid the same.

I now live by the seaside and don't commute to London anymore, except for 1 day a year - the company piss up. I mean, important annual meeting.

I work better remote. Many of us do.

New companies accept this. Indeed, the older bigger companies who insist on silliness like this will definitely not benefit from it.

Northern Ireland cops count human cost of August data breach

That is a bloody good point.

Three quarters of software engineers face retaliation for whistleblowing

Sorry, I don't believe this

In my experience there is no way the figure is as low as 75%.

I don't think I have ever seen a whistleblower treated fairly.

Outage-ous: Twitter OKs cannabis ads, then goes up in smoke

Re: decriminalisation

It was class B, then Class C, then Class B again.

But in 2018 they made it so you can get it legally prescribed.

I have a prescription for 20-25% THC medicine.

It is amazing.

It is also odd that most coppers don't seem to have been told it can be legally prescribed now.

World of Warcraft Classic lead dev resigns to protest 'stack ranking'

I had to reread this before my mouse moved over from downvote to upvote.

(And I assume those 3 downvotes just didn't read it twice).

A very true point.

It is strange, As I have got older in IT and implemented 'if you do X, I don't work for you' rules my work life has got far smoother, and the companies I work for are better.

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Re: Real life example

There is a great deal of difference between what auditors should know and do and what they do know and do.

The .amazon argy-bargy is STILL going on – and Uncle Sam has had enough with ICANN

This reminds me of the long fight between WWF (Animals) and WWF (Wrasslin') over WWF.com.

Obviously someone high up at WWF (Animals) had decided they should have it, come what may.

The arguments made by WWF (Animals) were long and, at times, convincing. It was all politics though.

The WWF.com domain has never been used to point to the animals site.

The same here. I don't think Brazil or any of the countries actually have any plans to use the domain.

it is just silly politics.

Another sign of the End Times: Free software guru Richard Stallman speaks at Microsoft HQ

Now now, let's not get silly.

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

Re: Measuring standards pedant alert!

So you would be allowed a square one? 100x100yards?

That would be interesting.

It's 2019 – and you can completely pwn millions of Qualcomm-powered Androids over the air

Re: The bad news

"What's unclear? Many, maybe most, of the vulnerable devices won't be fixed -- ever."

Yeah, but it is also clear most handsets wont also be pwned, and most users wont care or know either way.

I know us lot like to think that everyone should be super security savvy and fully alert about their data, but most people just don't care - unless it has an explicit and noticeable effect upon them.

Certainly, I don't think your solution is the right one. Shutting yourself off from the world is not the answer, and neither is overplaying the threat.

Are the risks of someone getting some/all of your data proportional to your actions?

I don't think so personally. But hey, each to their own.

Braking bad? Van with £112m worth of crystal meth in back hits cop car at police station

The Pro wouldn't crash the van in the first place.

Hey China, while you're in all our servers, can you fix these support tickets? IBM, HPE, Tata CS, Fujitsu, NTT and their customers pwned

Re: Huawei

They specialise in the cloud though.

Securing clouds is HARD and there are groups that take advantage of that. Some of those groups are state backed, some are - essentially - private enterprise.

In the early days of 'the cloud' I remember seeing a great example of lateral thinking for a 'hack'

The provider was pretty good with the security on the live servers.

If you hired a box in the same data centre as your target though, and then purchased backup services you could, given the right skills, follow that route to a backup box shared with your target...

The security on that box was not as good as live.

Vulture gets claws on Lego's latest Apollo nostalgia-fest

Re: Why is Christmas so far away?

LEGO sets will usually have a few extra bits, almost always the smallest parts.

It is due to the way they pack the sets and that they decide a while ago it was better (and cheaper) to have extra bits in then have people upset they are missing a bit. (As happened during the dark days of LEGO when the company was struggling)

Over time they add up to a lot of pieces.

I know I have a bag full of 'extra bits' that is scarily large!

How do I get this job?

Lego reviewer for El Reg.

Tis a dream!

Mayday, mayday. Cray, you cray cray: Investor attempts to halt HPE's $1.3bn biz gobble

Given their history with buying companies and running them in to the ground HP should have to pay a premium if buying a business.

If I were a shareholder I would want 4x what it is worth from HP to compensate me for future losses.

So if a company is worth around $3billion I would demand HP offered $12billion.

Hang on, have we discovered how the Autonomy valuation was arrived at?

Judge slaps down Meg Whitman for accusing Autonomy boss of being a 'fraudster who committed fraud'

"Whitman fell back on saying she trusted her team at HP, particularly including then-CFO Cathie Lesjak"

Maybe HP should have trusted her before the acquisition, when she was recommending against it?

For the judge though, surely this just reinforces that HP decided a value for Autonomy without proper care and attention.

They then decided Lynch and Hussain were fraudulent, again without proper care and attention.

In both cases they leapt before they had full finished looking.

I see no one to blame here except for HP.

Controversial American bigwig in London... no, not Trump: HPE ex-CEO Meg Whitman to give Autonomy trial evidence

"Just for good measure, HPE also claims that as time went on, Lynch became “less and less focused and grounded in reality,"

Sounds like he was nearly perfect material for a HP Chief Exec, except he must have remained a bit too grounded in reality for their liking.

Is it just me though or does most of the evidence HP have brought work against them?

This is a most odd case.

Don't be Russian to judgement but... Bloke accused of $1.5m+ tax filing biz hack, fraud

Re: a refund to be paid into a prepaid debit card

I'm sure there are people without bank accounts, but doubt they would be filing a tax return at all, let alone online.

Allowing the refunds to be paid on to pre-paid debit cards is bonkers.

Part of my brain screams 'inside help' but then the other, larger, part just says 'stupidity'.

Here's what Lynch, Hussain and HPE are saying about Autonomy pre-buyout due diligence

Re: Auditors?

This.

What I heard at the time was this:

Autonomy: We are for sale for $6billion

HP: We'll give you $11billion

Autonomy: Errrrrrr. OK! :D

If you put your car up for sale for £600 and someone tries to buy it, but for £1100 and forces the cash in to your hand, are you really liable for overcharging them?

Autonomy didn't think they were worth that.

HP finance people didn't think they were.

But Leo and his adviser decided $11bill was a snip as they could make it worth $17bill!

In reality they made it worth about $3.5 bill.

Autonomy should point out prior behaviour to the court too.

They are far, far, far, from the only company HP have bought and messed up.

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

Re: waste

I once supported a 4 person departmental HR team that had 3 colour laser printers.

When colour laser printers cost around £20k.

They did like to keep their budget.

UK's ICO slaps £120k fines on Arron Banks' insurance biz and Leave.EU campaign

"When questioned about the consent, Leave.EU tried to argue they weren't unsolicited emails because subscribers had agreed to receive newsletters, and a privacy policy referred to information from third parties.

However, this policy ... did not say who the third parties were, or what type of marketing they might receive."

I can't think of ANY policy I have read that lists the 3rd party companies or the type of marketing. They all just refer to 'partners, 3rd party companies may send you stuff we think is good' (paraphrasing obviously)

If they used that criteria 99.9% of firms would be guilty.

Combined with receiving no customer complaints this does indeed look rather unfair.

Q. What do you call an IT admin for 20-plus young children? A. A teacher

Re: "Young students, for example, cannot be expected to remember and enter a password. "

My 3 year old Nephew knows the passcodes of all the iPads in his house.

Why my sister has pass codes when all her kids know them I don't know. If I am there and I want to use one I just ask my nephew for the code.

The problem with school IT is usually more with the teachers than the students, especially in infant and primary school.

My wife is an early years teacher. She has a passion for it. She does not have a passion for IT security, and neither has she been taught how to deal with it. And neither have her bosses.

As such they bumble along finding practical ways to get things done. If, and it always does, this involves unencrypted pen drives rather then secure storage they will use it.

Can we really blame them when they haven't been taught why this might be wrong?

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal firm's original directors rejoin

Re: Massive-

True Story.

The only way Chequered Flag ever loaded for me was if I stopped the tape half way through the loading, rewound it a bit, then hit play again.

I don't know how I discovered this, but I do find it amusing to this day that I didn't find it odd at all.

That's just how it was having a Speccy. You learned to be creative to get things working.

(Like my level skip cheat for Operation Wolf. It involved rubbing my socked feet across the keyboard until it gave the message it was skipping to the next level).

Townsfolk left deeply unsatisfied by Bury St Edmunds' 'twig' of a Christmas tree

Meh.

Imagine the comments if they had a 50ft tree covered with loads of decorations.

It would be all "Why are you spending on a tree instead of children's / adult / other council services"

Council's can't win. Damned it they do, damned if they don't in this world where everyone is a critic and we seem to compete with each other over who can spot any semblance of fault first.

Who needs custom malware? 'Govt-backed' Gallmaker spy crew uses off-the-shelf wares

It is an interesting idea.

By only using existing tools and outputs it makes identifying the state (if there is one) behind the group a lot harder, whilst at the same time giving them greater plausible deniability if they are correctly fingered for it.

Smart move I think, whoever it is.

Oh no, Xi didn't! Chinese spymaster cuffed in Belgium, yoinked to US on aerospace snoop rap

That's what I was wondering.

The Interpol boss didn't make sense until I saw this.

Tit for tat.

It's like the 80s again.

Reanimated Violin returns to scene with flashy XVS 8 array, and, er, AR app

Re: Really?

Errrrr.... Think about it folks.

I'm pretty sure scanning the QR code isn't the *only* way to get the performance info.

You could bring it up in a browser instead of making such an onerous trip.

If it doesn't need to be connected, don't: Nurse prescribes meds for sickly hospital infosec

Re: More than NICE to have

"But I couldn't find guidance for infosec (looking under several relevant terms) on the NICE website. If it's there, it's not obvious. Does it need a disaster first?"

Yes.

The NHS is, sadly, anything but proactive.

It requires a Wannacry that doesn't suddenly stop, but instead spreads more and destroys/costs more.

Sense wont get change, only public outcry after a disaster.

it's bloody sad it like that, but that's how it is.

Holy ship! UK shipping biz Clarksons blames megahack on single point of pwnage

I wonder if their HR database was accessed via Active Directory automated login?

A lot of places authenticate internal systems like this now.

Yes, it saves you typing more passwords but it also means once an attacker is in they are in.

Of course, since most users would just use the same password for both previously anyway.......

UK 'fake news' inquiry calls for end to tech middleman excuses, election law overhaul

Clinton Win = Good democracy.

Trump Win = Must have been fraud - from RUSSIA!

Remain Win = Good Democracy

Leave Win = Must have been fraud - from RUSSIA!

And so on.

It runs the risk of people judging that 'fake news' is simply anything the cognoscenti of the current zeitgeist dislike or disagree with.

Also, I've never voted a certain way due to fake news. And neither has anyone I have discussed it with.

Ask a room full of people and they will tell you the same.

Ask a stadium full and again they will all say they haven't.

Yet look at the news and you'd be forgiven for thinking the winner of the election was merely at Russia's whim. I think the power of 'fake news' is massively overstated and being used for political purposes be people we should be very afraid of this.

Any censorship that comes from this is a massive step back, not forward.

Rights group launches legal challenge over London cops' use of facial recognition tech

lol, story synergy.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/amazon_face_recogition_sucks/

I like the Amercian way of warning their politicians better!