Posts by Oor Nonny-Muss

England's controversial extraction of personal medical histories from GP systems is delayed for a second time

On a personal level...

... Thank $DEITY I left Englandshire 15 years ago.

Now it is F5’s turn to reveal critical security bugs – and the Feds were quick to sound the alarm on these BIG-IP flaws

Re: Holy cluster of &@£$

Sure. Do all that. I work in healthcare - f-ups in our network really can be life/death situations. Any cost is lower than the cost of the IT Director appearing in the dock at the Court of Session in his best suit.

This hurts a ton-80: British darts champ knocked out of home tourney by lousy internet connection

Re: Hold on...

He stays about 6 miles from me... His connection is likely to be crap whomever he's with for *DSL given where his house is.

Broadband providers can now flog Openreach's new IP voice network in bid to ditch UK's copper phone lines by 2025

Re: ISDN

It's going too. Think it's last sale 2023, gone 2025

Deck the halls with ... oh, no. DXC tells staff they may not have a job in the New Year

Re: About to TUPE to this crowd

Yep - VP approval to acquire anything from a biro upwards.

I supported a customer in Ireland from the UK, regularly needed to speak to them face-to-face - total cost per trip was of the order of £200 (which the customer was happy to pay) - still needed VP approval... And by the time it was granted the airfare had gone from £50 Inc taxes to £500... And the hotel from available to unavailable.

Ended up the customer simply paying my airfare & booking the hotel himself (side effect he didn't pay the 40% uplift that (then) HPE added either.

NHS supplier that holds 40 million UK patient records: AWS is our new cloud-based platform

Re: This is the same EMIS...

That £30k is on top of the £42kpa they get to support it (I use the term support because that's what the contract says it is)

This is the same EMIS...

... that want me to pay out £30k so they can provide a system that will run on a 64 bit OS (I regard this as a bugfix, not an enhancement)

NHS needs to tell these charlatans who the customer is here

DXC's Americas CFO splits amid yet more deckchair shifting

DXC - more like the Golgafrinchan B Ark

See $TITLE

Brace yourself, Britain: Health minister shares 'vision' for NHS 'tech revolution'

Except for viewers in Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland....

Thankfully the minister you talk about only has purview over NHS England because health is very much a devolved matter in Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland

TV Licensing admits: We directed 25,000 people to send their bank details in the clear

Re: TVLD

>>There's a way to avoid court appearances, and that is to pay what's owed.

That's not foolproof either. I spent a morning in the magistrates after a summons for non-payment.

Evidence in my defence: the current & previous 15 years of valid fully paid up TV licensed for the address.

Magistrate asked why I hadn't offered the evidence to TVL... "Because the first communication from them was a summons to this place and I felt the bench should be aware of the abuse of process"

Costs & an ex gratia payment awarded and an excoriation of TVL recorded.

America-China tariff tiff could flip the switch on Cisco price hikes

"And lest we forget, UK channel customers of Cisco pay for the kit in US dollars."

I paid for a Zambian beer in Vic Falls, Zimbabwe with US dollars, entirely free of any tariff based interference of US Customs... Presumably Cisco don't ship all of their gear via the US so it shouldn't attract the punitive Orangeman tax.

CIOs in tears? Gartner DELAYS Backup and Recovery Magic Quadrant report

Who knew...

... Arcserve is still a thing.

Bill Gates declined offer to serve as Donald Trump's science advisor

the Microsoft founder and philanthropist

Surely you missed "and sometime Kermit the Frog vocal imitator"

Brit healthcare system inks Windows 10 install pact with Microsoft

Is this one of those things where UK means England

And may $DEITY have mercy upon Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland?

AI can't help without your data, says Gartner, so share, share, share!

Gartner

Nailing jelly to the wall since 1962 - one day some of it will stick, purely by the laws of probability.

See also the Rutherford-Geiger-Marsden Experiment for similar probabilities.

O2 wolfs down entire 4G spectrum as pals fiddle with their shiny 5G band

Re: Empire

BT own less of theirs than you think too - all of those lovely VDSL2 cabinets are owned and operated by Huawei... under contract to BT.

BT to slash landline rentals by 37%... for the broadbandless

Re: Seriously

Indeed - but often a decent ISP will not add a mark up anything like the obscenity that BT Retail do.

BT Openreach wholesale line rental charge is £86.72 pa (ex VAT) - (£7.23/mo ex VAT / £8.67/mo inc VAT)

So even at £11.99/mo they're making £3.32 just for paying themselves...

El Reg deep dive: Everything you need to know about UK.gov's pr0n block

Cybergumble

I've been online since 1990 - in all that time I have never once accidentally stumbled upon porn - sure I've found it *when looking* but never inadvertently.

What am I doing wrong?

KFC: Enemy of waistlines, AI, arteries and logistics software

I may have done that exact modification a few dozen times in my youth... We used to use ¾" black tape to make it look kosher...

See also River Browney(e) near Durham for similar japes.

UK Land Registry opens books on corporate owners

Once again England is conflated with UK

HMLR doesn't act in Scotland (we have The General Register of Sasines, the oldest national land register in the world) - UK registry?

BT agrees to cream off less profit from landline-only customers

Re: That's a YES from me!

Because the underlying service (WLR2) is under a tenner if you're a communications partner (like BT Retail or A&A or Freeola or Sky or VM or...)

A&A & Freeola have taken the laudable decision not to add a markup of 70%+ the others - not so much

You can yacht be serious: Larry might be planning his own version of America’s Cup

Louise Vuitton?

"Mundle added that the final prize would be provided by Louise Vuitton"

Is that owned by Kevin Cline?

UK.gov: Who wants £25m... *cheers*... to trial 5G? *crickets chirping*

And this time...

... start the rollout in the sticks. There are still many places around here that still only have a spotty 2G signal from one network. No 3G, no 4G.

Screw the badgers! Irish High Court dismisses Apple bit barn appeals

Re: Time to brush up on your geography

Nah, it's either "a couple of hours" or "a good couple of hours" in my experience of Ireland... Mind my colleagues in Tipperary thought I was mentally unstable for driving "all the way from Belfast" in a oner, no stopping...

Ofcom creates watchdog specifically to make sure Openreach is behaving

Re: Ofgem and Ofcom are in the line of fire, the only reason for this.

Lucky you. I get 28M now on a "fibre" line with 1.35km of copper & 75m (yep seventy five whole metres) of actual fibre. When it was installed, I got 45 and that was ok. Now more people have gone "fibre" (same 75m of fibre + up up 1.5km of copper) crosstalk has killed it.

Proper fibre to the premises needed 10 years ago, not now.

Oh UK. You won't switch mobile providers. And now look at you! £5.8bn you've lost

USwitch don't have any skin in this game then?

Oh, their entire business model relies on affiliate type fees when you switch phone/broadband/leccy/gas.

I'll stick to my SIM only contract with AYCE everything, I'll arrange my own energy switches and I'll continue with my small friendly ISP who also does my line rental at a sensible fee.

Tesco Bank limits online transactions after fraud hits thousands

I see it is now being reported as a "sophisticated attack"...

Now where have I heard that before? Can someone TalkTalk to me?

Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

I block ads for the same reason I don't visit the Daily Mail - I don't like being lied to.

Pangs? Only when hungry.

'Faceless' Liberty Global has 'sucked the very soul' out of Virgin Media

Was it ever Richard Branson's? I seem to recall he had only around 10% in the enterprise (as usual with Virgin, minority stake but branded his way because apparently people like that sort of thing)

EE looks at its call charges, hikes a bunch, walks off giggling

EE sure are fitting in to the BT group's corporate ethos well. I expect the next thing will be connection charges on top.

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

What are these tea bags of which you speak?

Loose leaf tea allows so much more control & the tea tastes better.

UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

So...

.... we're all busy compiling our 16384-bit encryption clients?

Shocker: Computer science graduate wins a top UK political job

He doesn't seem to grasp that trade with the EU not possible on a bilateral basis with each member...

https://twitter.com/DavidDavisMP/status/735770127564607489

https://twitter.com/DavidDavisMP/status/735770165510430721

https://twitter.com/DavidDavisMP/status/735770216727121920

So a perfect candidate for Brexit Minister.

Ofcom is to get powers to fine mobe providers for crap service

Fine?

So - OFCOM fines $MOBE_OP (stop laughing at the risible idea that OFCOM will actually do anything of the sort, they're a regulator so they don't actually do anything that they're supposed to) for poor performance that is probably more or less impossible to definitively establish.

Subsequently $MOBE_OP's profits are depressed so they put up my contract price to recover the "lost profit" presumably?

Remind me who is being served here.

This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!

When I were a lad...

... working in the stores of a company that was then part of the Ministry of Defence....

The head of stores was told to order 144 boxes of Bic biros (medium, black). He duly ordered 144 *cartons* of Bic biros (medium, black) not knowing that a carton of Bic biros contained 144 boxes...

A couple of weeks later - 4 articulated trucks showed up, direct from Bic in France with his biros...

144 cartons of 144 boxes of 100 biros. All black medium. A lot of biros.

They were still using them 10 years later.

Maplin Electronics demands cash with menaces

Sad excuse for the company it once was...

... when I was a budding hobbyist electronics enthusiast in the late 1970s when it was run from MD Doug Simmons' kitchen table... I had my 4 digit customer number and was proud of it - sadly the shops have become like Tandy at the end of days and the prices have gone the same way (there was a time when they'd be the first place I'd look for $emergency_widget - now they're amongst the last - even when I'm ready to pay a premium to get it now)

When Capita job ads go BAD

Did they mean Herefordshite? :D

Google Research opens machine intelligence base in Zurich

Why is there a picture of Lake Geneva...

when Zürich is at the northern end of Zürichsee (aka Lake Zürich)?

A bit like saying the river running through Cardiff is the Thames.

Virgin Media goes TITSUP* in South London due to painful piles

Re: loved the sample tweets

Ooooh! Someone is going to contact OFCOM. What is it that OFCOM *actually* *do*? I've not seen anything useful attributed to them - I know what the law says they're supposed to do (but scant evidence of it happening)...

Marauding monkey blacks out Kenya

Re: Huh?

The sudden loss of a large supply means the rest of the grid gets a "shock wave" which means that other lines can become overloaded and protection kicks in. Cascading failure...

Common when there's little supply overcapacity compared to demand... and why the UK imports electricity from France on such a regular basis.

UK Home Sec makes concessions to please Snoopers' Charter opposition

Just what is an internet connection record?

Nobody seems to have defined it yet... they like to tell you it's like an itemised phone bill, but it is so much more than that.

I just did a bit of light Wiresharking on my DSL line and there's an awful lot going on there, even if they "just" harvest DNS lookups and HTTP requests they're going to be snowed under and there's a lot of stuff on there as various devices, OS and apps phone home looking for updates etc...

Got a Fitbit? Thought you were achieving your goals? Better read this

Quote from the report PDF (page 4, section D.2) linked to:

The mean age, body weight, and height of the subject pool was 23.23 ± 3.46 years, 168.43 ± 9.76 kg, and 70.05 ± 14.33 cm, respectively

So the average participant is 168kg (that's 26½ stone!) and is 70cm tall (that's about 2'4") and thus has a BMI of 343...

I fear more for their longevity than the accuracy of their FitBit

Hacked in a public space? Thanks, HTTPS

So, avoiding public wifi and using your own 3G/4G connection is the order of the day - i.e. a connection that you know as much as possible about - preferably with a VPN back to a known endpoint (like back to your house)

Hacker finds flaw in teleconference tool used by US Army, NASA and CERN

Once you know how the URL is constructed you can use Google (or another search engine) to search for the part of the URL that is unchanging between hosts - so if they were all at /etc/VidYo/VidYo.html - then you search for that and Google obediently tells you all of them that it can find... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_hacking

Queen's Speech: Ministers, release the spaceplanes!*

Re: Who's Brenda?

In 1971 the UK satirical magazine Private Eye ran a pseudo-item that Queen Elizabeth II "is known as Brenda to her immediate staff" resulting in the name Brenda being used in the media as an irreverent nickname for the Queen

BT to splash £550m integrating EE. Firm shrugs: Cheap!

These premises passed by fibre - does that include me where I am 250m from the cabinet (straight line along a straight road, with houses on it and ducting under it) yet my line is 1375m long (as measured by BTOpenreach's reflectometer) to the exchange... 1300m to the cabinet.... It would be almost excusable if the circuitous route it took to the cabinet was the direct circuitous route - but it takes a circuitous diversion even from that.

The joy of "Superfast" "fibre" broadband at 22-24M (yes, that's the line speed range) - with 75m of fibre in 1.375km of actual line length - chances of actual fibre before hell freezes over, near enough nil as to make no difference... chances of G.Fast making a blind bit of difference, similar. Wish I'd had a tenner on Leicester...

FRITZ!Box home broadband routers' security FRITZed

Used it once - not for actual support...

... rather to add to their FAQ. Had a reply in 15 minutes - followed by a phone call at an agreed time and my answer is in the FAQ.

I can't fault the devices or the support.

Dropbox tells Mailbox and Carousel users to get their affairs in order

I only installed Carousel & Mailbox to get the free extra gigs in my Dropbox :)

TalkTalk attack: UK digi minister recommends security badges for websites

The answer isn't to levy fines...

The answer is to jail the board members responsible and sue them personally for the entire costs associated with their trial and incarceration.

This may have a short term net positive effect on the Exchequer whilst minds are concentrated.

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

EXCLUSIVE: ITV camera catches the moment before Simon Cowell's trousers were sent forward in time.