Posts by Lee D

C'mon, UK networks! Poor sods have 'paid' for their contract phones a few times over... Tell 'em about good deals

I prefer to use companies that, as a loyal customer, I don't have to threaten to get a better deal which they could offer me at any time.

Re: Just be grateful you aren't in Germany

Yeah. that's what normally happens in the UK.

That's why OFCOM are acting.

Another TITSUP* on this lovely Tuesday: Virgin Mobile takes time out to enjoy the sunshine

Re: There is a solution

Virgin is very much location-dependent.

I have had a leased line out in the sticks for 5 years and nary a blip. As in not even one, in all that time.

But elsewhere they re-use Openreach services to provide (for broadband and/or leased line believe it or not, yes, I have a "Virgin-managed" but Openreach-provided leased line at another site). My previous workplace also had Virgin via a reseller - no problems. Had Virgin at home for years. One spark-out on a VoD movie once, and that was the little cherubs down the road pulling cables out of the cabinet.

VM get horror stories based more on geographic location (i.e. what old duff cable they inherited from NTL) and who else actually *provides* the service than they ever do on their native lines.

Home Office cops an earful for emergency network feck-ups - £3bn overbudget and 3 years late

Of course.

But a 24/7 serious-levels-of-uptime national radio network has been done before, is being done already, and will be done into the foreseeable future.

Why - all of a sudden - do the companies involved not know how to quote proper prices, why do the government departments suddenly not know how to procure, specify, contract and budget, and why are they all unable to do something that every country in the world has done to some extent?

This is complex stuff. But if you gave £1bn to pay for a room of 1000 engineers, £2bn to do it, and the timescales given, they could probably get you way past anything ever being provided here... just on the OVERBUDGET, let alone the original budget. And would be handsomely recompensed for doing so on that basis!

For £3bn I could buy every man, woman and child in England a £40 radio/phone.

For £1.7m a day, I could give them all a SIM and contract too.

And yet it's not enough to provide *just* emergency services with an equivalent that's better than a mobile phone + contract?

Double-sided printing data ballsup leaves insurance giant Chubb with egg on its face

Re: They ought to teach this in schools.

I work on the "apology is not a solution" basis.

Saying "Sorry" doesn't fix it. Tell me why it happened, what you've been doing to stop it happening before, and what you're going to do to stop it happening in the future.

Because if the answer is: "We pressed the wrong button in Word, we've never imagined it could be a problem for a multi-national company to use Word mail-merge and not check the 'double-sided' option on our major print runs, and we'll slap the wrists of the intern involved but the next run will probably be done by a different guy anyway", then I have absolutely no interest in retaining your services.

Rail companies do this all the time. Don't apologise for it being late. Stop it being late. Even if that means it still gets there at 8:08 and waits for 15 minutes before leaving, but at least we *know* that because you just re-time the route accordingly and tell us what to expect.

You wanna convince me... do a full post-mortem, publicise the results (with suitable redaction), highlight the weaknesses you *had* and then post the plan and timeline to fix those weaknesses *and others of the same type* that you can imagine now you've sat and thought about it. Then I might accept the apology attached to that document.

In the claws of a vulture: Nebra AnyBeam Laser Projector

Re: Uhh

Personally... I'd hook it up to my Canon EOS camera body, which is attached to my telescope.

Just because you're "camping" doesn't mean you don't need entertainment, can't benefit from technology, and aren't just "on a cheaper kind of holiday".

I would happily camp with nothing more advanced than a box of matches and a tent. But equally I always take my smartphone, and things get dark much earlier in the middle of nowhere than in your artificially-illuminated home. Snuggle up in a sleeping bag, project a Netflix episode of something on the side of the tent before you go to sleep.

Camping isn't always minimalistic. In fact, it's infinitely more enjoyable to have at least some tech (e.g. artificial lights, camping stoves, smartphone/GPS with pre-loaded OS maps, etc. etc.)

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

1) "We don't need no steenking backups!" - Sacked. Get out.

2) Log in as full privilege user to update a minor database table. Sacked. Get out.

3) Doesn't even bother to do it in a transaction that you could, probably, roll back. Sacked. Get out.

4) If pasting to a remote SSH session, doesn't just edit a file and paste into there (because if that string had anything in it, you could have ended up quitting out of the SQL shell and executing all kinds of stuff! It's easy to paste something with a handful of line returns, but quite hard to paste something that'll Ctrl-X you out of an editor, though). Sacked. Get out.

5) Executing SQL live on a production system underneath the application without prior testing on the staging system he admits he was working on! Sacked. Get out.

The excuse of "Oh this was before the days..." ... so pathetic. What you going to do? Roll back an in-production social network main database server via a Hyper-V checkpoint and "just forget" about all the transactions that occurred on it after the checkpoint but before it was rolled back?

Seriously, this is just people who have a habit of working dangerously around production systems and think it's funny. I use everything I can to make sure I don't mess up - checkpoints to backups to replicas to saving the table contents first to every privilege separation possible to literal-typing (prone to errors but you double/triple-check) to safety-hash (Putting a # before any dangerous command that you're tinkering with so you don't automatically execute it... SQL equivalent is "SELECT" until you're happy and THEN "UPDATE"), to literally never deleting a file in my professional life (rename / move it out of the way, sure, but why delete?). And sometimes there are still gulp moments.

These kinds of people are exactly why I do tight permissioning and delegating on admin functions, filesystems, table and database security, etc. My technicians have always hated it (having to ask to do certain things, and only getting a permanent permission granted once they'd proved themselves and acquired the same habits) right up to the moment that it saves their backside ("Thank God, I only had write permissions to that one table!").

A2 Hosting finds 'restore' the hardest word as Windows outage slips into May

Re: Servers..

It always amazes me that people "lose money" over a system that - for way less than even a day's outage money - could be doubled in resiliency by putting some inactive server in a disparate cloud, or on their own site, or whatever.

Even a VM replica, syncing every 15 minutes or so but otherwise idle, could have been spun up quickly even if it wasn't the fastest server / connection that it was sitting on.

I did a calculation once - my employer's entire systems could be stored and booted up on a single laptop. Not claiming it would be "fast", but it would be up and you could carry on business in a reasonable manner.

Literally, for the cost of a laptop with a copy of Windows Server, VMWare or whatever, I could have an entire on-site warm spare of everything we run. Built-in UPS too! When you then get into "we need a real system", then it's a cinch to spin up instances in a handful of separate cloud servers and have the same.

But, these people are complaining about "losing money" when they could most likely have just turned on a cheap laptop and got access to all their data, a recent backup of everything they had (e.g. web transactions) and maybe even got a chance to operate their services from anywhere in the world (sure, it'd take a little tweaking of settings, but at least you'd have the option).

Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks over Ecuador embassy bail-jumping

Re: £16m of taxpayers' money

£25,000 per copper.

£5000 an hour for lawyer's fees to consider the question of what the police / Home Office are legally able to do about the situation without causing an international incident or getting accused of over-stepping the law and thus (potentially) letting a criminal go free because of a legal ballsup.

To be honest, I've always thought that once found guilty you should be charged for the police and court time in dealing with you. When you get kids smashing through streets in a stolen car, with half-a-dozen cops spending a day chasing you, arresting you, charging you and doing all the paperwork and legal side, I don't see that a £200 fine and a "driving ban" (though they aren't allowed to drive anyway) is sufficient or sensible.

Like "victim surcharge", we should have an "enforcement surcharge". You co-operated, handed yourself in, came to the station quietly, etc.? No charge. You were found not guilty? No charge.

You resisted, and were later found guilty? 10% of everything it cost to apprehend and charge you, reparation for damage caused (whether insured or not), etc. Maybe then our police would actually have a lot less hassle, proper funding, and criminals would give themselves up rather than run away.

And if you go to prison? Cool, you don't get out until you have worked off the fines and charges, even if you served your sentence. Paid at minimum wage for each hour of work you complete in the prison without causing hassle for the prison officers.

Assange, Snowden and Manning have shown you only one thing:

If you discover your country doing something illegal, never reveal it unless you want to spend large portions of your life on the run, in prison, or at the behest of the Russian authorities.

They are *TERRIBLE* whistleblowers. Incompetent, amateur, unable to even cover their own tracks, and resulting in literally *nothing* happening. But they all now have spent a significant amount of their lives in fear of authorities, one way or another.

And, I'm sorry, but the man in the street is hardly in uproar about everything they "revealed". They'd literally be more shocked at Trump's tax return.

I think Wikileaks hasn't changed the world - if anything, they've merely revealed the dangers of trying to do just that. Which consists of US prison, 7 years in an embassy and 1 year in prison plus extras, or having to flee your entire life to Russia where you then get told *exactly* what you can and can't do because you're now their political prisoner and they can screw you to the wall any time they like.

Sky customers moan: Our broadband hubs are bricking it

Re: It's been years since . . . .

"So modem mode on the router for Virgin. I have an older Vigor but it's not a cable one. Can I still use that on the Virgin setup? As I assume the Vigor just connects via cable to the Virgin?"

Yes. If it has Ethernet, you plug it in the WAN Ethernet port. Done.

That's the exact config I had for a number of years.

Re: It's been years since . . . .

Worked in IT for 20 years, installing all kinds of lines. Not once have I ever been asked for the original equipment. And, for ADSL, it's a £20 box... they're not going to lose thousands of pounds of custom over a £20 box that they produce en-masse and change every year. Not if they have half a brain.

P.S. So long as your router is certified compatible (e.g. BT SIN 498 MCT), they have no just reason to insist on a particular box.

Re: It's been years since . . . .

+1 for Draytek. The Vigor range of routers are amazing.

If you have a "BT fibre" line, then you just plug it into the VDSL port, plug in the broadband login info, off you go.

Using the stock supplied router is very old hat, I haven't done it since about 1999, whether home or at work. I just bin their junk day one, put a "real" ADSL/VDSL/Ethernet router on the connection and off you go.

Not quite as easy on Virgin DOCSIS networks, etc. but then you put the Superhub into Modem mode and just pipe that through to the Draytek (or whatever).

Most importantly, Drayteks will check that your upstream routers are using DNSSEC if you let them... and then offer it out over your local network as just normal DNS. So you know that no amount of tinkering at your ISP end is fecking with your DNS requests/responses, but you don't have to reconfigure your entire network. You still need to encrypt or use another protocol for proper privacy of your lookups, however (VPN to a proper DNS server under your control, use DNS over HTTPS, or trust places like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8?).

But using a stock router on an ISP DNS? That's very 1990's.

Sorry, but I don't let my own bank snoop my information, why on Earth should I be letting my ISP do the same?

Customers furious over days-long outage as A2 Hosting scores a D- in Windows uptime

Re: Uptime is not easy

Not just that.... your systems need to be 100% isolated from those you're managing AND those from each other AND from each other.

If you can't manage that, then for all I know, Joe Bloggs who rents a £2.99 VPS next door to my server is actually living in my server scot-free and wreaking whatever havoc with my data. Or your call-center agent is one-click away from knocking my server offline and losing my credit card details in the process.

Security is about isolation - VLANs, filtering, port-settings, firewalls, VPNs, administrative back-end networks, privilege separation, etc. etc.

If you fail at that in the design stage, it really doesn't matter what happens in the implementation stage, I wouldn't want to touch you.

And then you get to the backup scenario - why are you not able to rebuild every hypervisor machine back from an clean image with deployment tools, and then suck individual backups of the machines back, and restoration of the machines themselves is on a huge grandfather-father-son basis or - worst case - you restore an image and tell you clients to restore from their own backups.

Windows malware able to run riot through a datacenter unchecked enough to affect every customer is an indication of an amateur-hour setup.

I can't even fathom a reason how it would be able to spread from one machine to another, or why the backend control and administration systems would be using Windows at all.

There's NordVPN odd about this, right? Infosec types concerned over strange app traffic

You want to VPN because you don't trust the third-parties who are transiting your connection.

So you VPN with a random third-party who is subject to those other third-party's whims.

Great idea! Thumbs up! Well done! Top security!

A VPN is for you to place OVER an untrusted connection to form a trusted connection between two computers / network. As soon as you insert a random third-party app, or indeed VPN provider, into that connection it's even-more-untrusted than it was before, and there's another party who you have to trust entirely with all your data which - as this and many other incidents show - is a really, really, really poor idea.

And, let's be honest, to do what? Watch YouTube or BBC past geographical restrictions? It's just not worth the effort, just stop consuming their media.

Anything more nefarious, you're really an idiot to trust that intermediary with that information, you're basically flagging yourself up and THEN handing them your data on a plate.

If you want to do something "private", insert as few third-parties as possible into the trust chain. Hell, the reason I run my TV from a RPi is so that I can dial into it from abroad and do that same kind of thing, rather than have to trust anyone not-to-dob-me-in (I used to use TVPlayer.com, but half the stuff is content-restricted still EVEN THOUGH I'm paying for it... and often with Irish local programmes and adverts... I can literally do a better job with an aerial and a Raspberry Pi).

And I'll tell you something else... rent a server and pretty much nobody cares what traffic you do on it, so long as you don't flag up. You can rent a VPS or dedi for next to nothing nowadays, in any country you like, and they'll often pre-load VPN access for you.

And if you value absolute anonymity, for anything more cheeky than a bit of British TV, you can't use any connection registered to your name, or your normal desktop browser, it's as simple as that. Paying NordVPN to offer you a VPN is literally just handing your name to the authorities if you're doing anything remotely naughty anyway. If you're gonna do that, Bitcoin a dedi (plenty of people doing that), Tor the connection, access it as a "desktop" from nearby public wifi (not your home connection) and use it that way.

You can't trust even the people you pay to give you a privacy-secure VPN.

You can't use any paying service to give you a "criminally"-secure VPN.

So stop trying. Either do it yourself (a VPN device at home and a VPN in a VPS somewhere), or actually do it properly with no association to yourself whatsoever.

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

Re: walked to school by myself

Been a standard practice in most (primary/prep) schools across the UK that parents have to collect or explicitly notify of an authorised person coming to collect (e.g. in some prep schools, they will organise a driver or PA to come collect, I kid you not!). Not secondary, where you're pretty much left to your own devices.

Worked in state and private schools for 20 years. It's the exception to be allowed to walk to school in primary/prep (the school would certainly raise concerns about it).

Worked at a school in the UK that did exactly the same.

Parents who aren't dressed appropriately weren't allowed on-site (and the pickup/dropoff was inside the school grounds and the kids were little so weren't allowed to leave until someone appropriate came and picked them up / dropped them off).

Nobody really complained, and it stopped the onesie / dressing gown mums.

Seriously, people, your kid's expected to be washed, dressed, in a smart uniform, with their kit, on-time, and ready to go. And you can't even throw a pair of jogging bottoms and a t-shirt on?

But then, I've also worked in schools where it's not at all uncommon for kids to arrive un-fed, not having slept all night ("because mummy doesn't tell me to go to bed"), in filthy clothes that are weeks unwashed, etc. etc.

Sophos antivirus tools. Working Windows box. Latest Patch Tuesday fixes. Pick two: 'Puters knackered by bad combo

Sophos Enterprise Console is in every LGfL (and many other similar networks across the UK) school, as it's given away free, who often (stupidly) have automatic updates just set to roll out without any control.

The people who work in that industry and have for years been saying to me "Yes, but why don't you just push out all the updates immediately" have had their answer several times over, and just got it again.

That's a massive, stupid boo-boo, that's very difficult to revert in any automated fashion whatsoever, across thousands of organisations running thousands of machines each.

I refuse to be a Microsoft beta tester, so WSUS is the first thing I install when setting up a new network.

Cheapskate Brits appear to love their Poundland MVNOs as UK's big four snubbed in survey again

Unlimited data only applies to phones, not to tethered devices.

Read their gumph and "unlimited" really means "9Gb" in those circumstances, or thereabouts. I have a mobile data SIM designed for tethering, I burned through 40Gb (which is unusual for me).

Giffgaff et al are all the same in that regard - once they detect you tethering, they charge you, stop your data, or terminate your contract.

Though quite why is beyond me - a tethering client using 100Gb is no more a burden on your network than a phone using 100Gb, surely?

I don't see that.

I have a giffgaff SIM in my 4G phone... I get more than good enough download speeds to do anything I like.

My Three-based Huawei hotspot device is only slightly faster, in fact.

Given that I have *no* fixed broadband, only the above two, I think I'd notice.

Giffgaff are cheap and flexible, which is why I use them. I could get a ton more data if I cared, but I can't really fault their service and speed, even if they have had the occasional hiccup like everyone else (they're only re-selling O2 after all). At least they don't even *pretend* that it's worth their while manning huge call centers for the idiots that can't activate a SIM online.

Gimme three different giff-gaff-like places and I'll switch between them when there's slowness/a problem if it really came to that.

P.S. just this week I used up all my Three data, and then spent the last two weeks on my giffgaff SIM as a hotspot - for EVERYTHING from watching Netflix to doing work, to every bit of browsing, to roaming around 100miles with it in my phone. Speedtest says 18Mbps at the mo, but I'm literally sitting in the middle of a 28 acre-site in the middle of nowhere, far from anything that could be a mobile tower and right next to some HUGE power lines. At home, I generally get 30-50Mbps.

IT sales star wins $660k lawsuit against Oracle in Qatar – but can't collect because the Oracle he sued suddenly vanished

Re: Wow just wow.

That's fine.

Who paid the lawyers? The entity that vanished? Oh well, recoup it from them. Or another entity that spontaneously started up and is now funding the lawyers? Whoops.

Legal entities like companies may vanish, but the lawyers, (former) directors and others can still be held to account if there are matters outstanding. In some cases, such "winding-up" can be forcibly reversed, in fact, until such matters are dealt with.

And the prime case of doing such things is exactly when people do it to evade justice.

And these are the people who you want to do business with?

People who screw over their own sales people on a regular basis, and up-sticks-and-move without telling courts that they are being sued within?

Sorry, but if that's how they treat their OWN people and the legal establishment, why the hell would I want to subject myself to their behaviour as a *customer*?

Micron's new 9300 SSDs are bigger, faster and simpler... which is nice

Re: 16 TB. And if it fails?

In that instance, neither is tape - if the tape catches fire.

But if you put that RAID *in another building*, like you would a tape, then it's a perfectly adequate backup.

Re: 16 TB. And if it fails?

RAID is a perfectly adequate backup. As a SINGLE unit. Two drives in a RAID is *NOT* a backup of one of those drive. But one RAID set backing up to another RAID set that you then take offline is a not-unreasonable (and pretty damn fast) backup solution as a single, solitary backup.

It makes for a very timely restore, quick access to single files, and doesn't require huge expense with tape libraries and the like. Most especially, the equipment required to recover it is positively minimal even in the worst case scenario (whereas a new tape library on short notice of a very particular model / compatibility is going to cost you big).

If you have half a brain, you have a "live" RAID set, a "secondary" RAID set to provide redundancy elsewhere, maybe a handful of little offline RAID sets, and if you want then you can have your tapes and other stuff for more "emergency" type restores.

But two drives in a RAID is not a backup. Because each drive only contains (for example) 1 sixth of the full RAID6 set. And in restoration / resyncing, you can easily (in fact it's likely that you'll) lose drives and that means nothing might restore at all.

But having a "copy" RAID set as a quick-restore, poke-around-the-backups, staging and non-critical (No single backup type, unit, media or technology should be "critical" and the only way to restore something! That's the point of a backup!) backup... another RAID set is fine.

Technically, one of my many backups is literally a RAID set on a portable device, which offers the RAID over iSCSI, such that I could - in theory - run every VM and data backup I have off a single portable device without having to do anything more than turn it on and add the iSCSI address to a server. No "18-hour restores". Not saying I rely solely on that for business continuity, but it's saved having to do a full or even partial restore from other technologies and provided direct access to the file from a backup at basically network-speed, many a time.

And why do the links go via Google? Cached?

How much?

Until I know that, I have absolutely no way to judge whether they are suitable.

Given that I can find a 1.6Tb 9200 for about £800, I'm guessing that new / bigger ones are also stupendously expensive too.

It was that gosh-darn anomaly again, says SpaceX as smoke billows from Crew Dragon test site

54% success, overall, to date.

So as I clearly stated "for years, more often than not" it failed.

Or 84% success. IN THE BEST INSTANCE. If we let them just say "Oh, we never intended to land that time". Or even if we go back a year or so (hey, sorry for not watching EVERY launch ever), that percentage tends back towards the 50% and maybe even below that for quite a while.

Which is fecking appalling for space-faring. NASA's record since the 1960's was way better and they were literally doing it for the very first time ever with nothing but a handful of silicon chips and an awful lot of engineering.

And yet still, just last year, these things are still crashing, or in this year so far - exploding.

Either recognise that it's a stupid thing they are TRYING to do, they are doing it sloppily, or they're just not as good as you want to believe even when you KNOW the numbers.

SpaceX have been sweeping bad news under the carpet since the start.

Their amazing "auto-landing-on-drone-ship" for years, more often than not, was more likely to have taken out the drone or the rocket. They just never said when it did, and made an awful fuss about how brilliant it was whenever it happened to work properly.

Nothing different to any other Musk property... don't listen to what they *are* saying, because it's mostly nonsense. Listen to what they aren't saying, and check for yourself.

Not another pro-Brexit demo... though easy to confuse: Each Union Jack marks a pile of poo

"#1 is bin collections; but that's 90% lying bastards that have forgotten to put theirs out."

Allow me to describe a complaint I filed against my council:

- They didn't collect bins from 12 houses for a period of 3 months.

- Collections were sporadic, random, and never at their assigned times.

- I complained, they ignored.

- Neighbours complained, they ignored.

- So I did my usual - full, no-holds-barred, complaint-flurry with follow-up.

Literally, the bin lorries were taking it upon themselves to not bother with the last part of the street, because that would mean doubling-back down other roads they've already done (it wasn't a dead-end, just the end of a street that met another two streets). They never came back and didn't bother to collect unless an enormous fuss was made, when they'd collect once at random and then claim "the bins weren't out" (of course not, we get fined if we put them out on a non-bin day!).

Full-complaint mode revealed that they'd rather target me explicitly, trying to fine me for putting the bins out wrong, throwing the wrong stuff in the bin, letting bins overflow (YOU DON'T BLOODY COLLECT THEM!), etc. etc.

However, there was one teensy, tiny downside to their assertion:

I had CCTV footage, 24/7/365.25. Covering the entirety of my front garden, the road beyond and anyone collecting (or not) my rubbish. Going back six months. When this was revealed, they hastily retracted all such claims. They also claimed that "I'd put non-recyclable rubbish in the recycling bin hence why it wasn't collected". Either they have long-distance X-ray vision, or they never even actually turned up to look at the bin, much less make a decision on its contents. And, as I pointed out, even if true, just "not taking" the rubbish is no good unless you put a flag or leaflet or something explaining one (because otherwise people could make up any old cobblers not to take it and how the hell would I know?).

Then I got them into the papers with my complaint letter, and handily revealed the fact that the councillor in charge of waste management just-so-happened to own the waste management firm (and hadn't properly registered that interest *cough*). I received a very hasty apology and not once was our rubbish left uncollected again.

The best part, though. "Oh, you live in XXXXX Lane? Well, our manager lives in that same road, so obviously he's collecting your rubbish!". Really, mate? You give me the time, date, vehicle registration, and I'll provide you the footage of him doing just that. Because I *do* have footage of every time, date in the last six months. And he's not on any of them. Do you want that footage?

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

"The armed robbery went wrong when the domain owner, Ethan Deyo, thought that the gunman, 43-year-old Sherman Hopkins, was going to kill him and fought back."

Yup, sorry but you have to 100% assume that someone pointing a gun at you is not faking either the gun or their intent, and that they have very real intent to harm you, whether or not you comply.

If they weren't going to fire on you, they likely won't fire on you when you try to overwhelm them.

If they were, or they are panicky enough to fire on you anyway, then they could have done that at any time - better to be a time of your choosing.

If you comply, you have no guarantee whatsoever that the madman with a gun talking about domain names in your house is going to do anything other than kill you once he has what he wants - or maybe even before then.

The exception is the police who *SHOULD* know better than to fire on a compliant person, but even that's not necessarily true in the US.

You have to operate on the basis that you're dead anyway / whatever threat they make to your family will be carried out anyway. May as well take them down with you as, as this article says, even with several shots to the chest, the guy still survived long enough to stand trial and go to jail.

UK comms watchdog mulls 5G tweaks: Operators want moooooar power

Re: I keep my mobile

Which is why my glovebox-phone is:

- Tiny (about an inch long, but fully functional, multi-SIM, bluetooth, etc.)

- Literally just a keypad, it doesn't need anything more but it can store contacts etc. if you wish (but it's next to the bit of card with the breakdown etc. numbers on it).

- Charges from a standard USB cable but also has an internal battery you can change.

- Even without a SIM, you can call 999 from it.

- On a SIM card that doesn't expire (so long as you pay the £4.99 a year explicit renewal that they email you specifically about, it's yours - you just pay slightly more for calls on a PAYG basis).

Should be a standard piece of kit for most people, even if just to call 999 (e.g. you're in an accident). As it stands, my car automatically picks up programmed Bluetooth phones and uses them if the airbag ever deploys to report my GPS location automatically to 999 / 112 / 911.

A phone like that should be part of any emergency kit. Hell, if you're hillwalking you should have that at minimum, let alone if you're driving along dark country roads at night and hit a flock of stray sheep (nearly happened to me).

Hey criminals, need a getaway vehicle? There's an app for that... Car share tool halts ops amid crime wave, arrests

Pigeons home to one roost... it would be positively idiotic because they could only lead people in a straight line right back to where you're intending to pick up their stuff. And you'd have to train them to do that, which would be quite telling and require a lot of preparation and meant you wouldn't be able to move around much from the training location.

Plus... weight, bulk - how are you going to pack more than a little bag of diamonds on them? Even half a kilo would be pushing it for a pigeon to get any distance with. There's a reason we curled up little slips of paper and put them in tiny holders on their leg, rather than used them to just carry a book.

A drone can literally fly at random, only honing into your location when you explicitly instruct it to and the big ones can almost carry a man.

Yet another "Told you so" moment.

I was expecting this for Zip cars and the like, but most especially applies to anything "autonomous" which people keep harping on about. So I can summon a car to a field in the middle nowhere, put a dummy on the seat that "weighs" the right amount, and then instruct the car to drive to, say, the Houses of Parliament or just outside the Ecuadorian embassy, or whatever. All on the basis of a pinched or pre-pay credit card. Yeah, that doesn't at all like it could ever be misused. Hell, I could see genuine delivery companies misusing them to deliver their goods.

Wait for the same with drones... if they can be used to commit crime, they will. And not just "Oh, we flew it about the airport a bit" but actual, real, physical crime. What better way to ditch the proceeds of your heist while you're in the getaway car than to load it on a drone which is instructed to fly over the most awkward terrain possible to a secret location? Hell, kit it up with sensors so when people try to get near it, it flies off elsewhere and sits on top of inaccessible skyscraper roofs and the like to recharge. Jewellery heists. Drug-dealing. Prison-breaking. Getaway cars. If it can be abused, it will be abused.

Hell, even 10-year-old episodes of Police Interceptors talk about "pool cars" which are just nicked or cheap cars that are shared around the local estates for people to joy-ride, commit crime, etc. in and because so many people use them "who actually nicked it" is a question even they genuinely can't answer.

If a hire car can be used as a getaway car, drug-dealing car, a distraction, or just stolen-to-order, plates-changed and shipped abroad at profit, then for damn sure an automated service of the same is even worse, GPS tracking or not. Your GPS tracking means nothing once it's loaded into the back of a truck or shipping container, and then "looked at" by a guy who can just rip out any kill-switches or trackers he finds, en-route to South Africa or somewhere.

Hell, just as a mule-car... "Book a car from field X to street corner Y", load it with your drugs, send it off. Less traceable if you do it right than you turning up on some street corner. If you did it right, your buyers would literally never know who you were, especially "new" buyers given your details by your other customers. Burner phones? Pfft. Now we're given them burner cars.

Strong-willed field support op holds it together during painful customer call

A good example of when customer services (which is an *expense*, remember) really pays off.

It probably didn't hurt that much for them to do, and if they got a couple of meals out of it, likely it paid dividends for them.

On several occasions I've done the "Look, honestly, it's nothing to do with me/my employer, but I'll help you out..." and given equipment, advice, phone numbers, referrals, my time. Not to everyone (you have to be polite still) but it got a few people out of really hairy situations not of their own creation when I could have just shrugged and walked off. It usually resulted in a much bigger payback, whether that be a box of chocolates biscuits at Christmas or them singing their praises to my boss.

Server at web host 1&1 Ionos decides to take unscheduled day off, sinks a bunch of sites

I use them, but literally only for DNS services, and as a secondary mail server.

I used to rent a dedicated server from them many years ago, but they literally supplied it to me with a Linux image that was so out of date and insecure it was laughable, but for which their update servers refused to provide updates. Additionally, the only official update available from the distro (I forget which, probably wasn't Ubuntu back then) to get over the hurdle required you to do something in the bootloader and came with all kinds of dire warnings.

Of course, you didn't have access to the bootloader, and when asked they refused to do anything about it, or even assist - they would charge if the machine became unbootable as a result, for instance! Literally, they supplied a booby-trapped insecure server from the very first second you clicked the button and there was no recourse that didn't involve a potential charge. I talked to support multiple times about it, who were singularly unhelpful and I think just avoided doing anything but remote-power-cycling on a server from their offices, I emailed, I wrote letters, and in the end I just cut the credit card payment. They moaned a bit but didn't even bother to chase.

The server literally never went into production, because it was just too dangerous - the OS was so drastically out of date that most of the usual services were remotely-compromisable, and you couldn't upgrade the services (things like Apache, etc.) without a kernel upgrade, which you couldn't do because they didn't supply it, support it, and would charge you if it didn't work. Oh, and of course they reserved the right to take your machine offline if it was found to be vulnerable, and still charge you for hosting it.

After that experience, I never touched them again, with one exception. My current employer holds a domain with 20+ subdomains with them. All of the A and MX records point to something non-1&1. Basically if their nameserver does ever fall over, I'm moving the domain, and I already don't trust them with anything else at all.

They keep trying to sell me SSL certificates, though. Which is hilarious since the advent of LetsEncrypt, but even worse when their prices are like 10 times their competitors even for a non-wildcard certificate.

Google Fiber experiment ends with Choc Factory paying Louisville $3.8m to clean up its mess

Infrastructure is expensive and nobody wants to pay for it.

That's why anything like installing fibre / copper / pipes / roads should be done by a nationalised entity, and the costs meted out over all customers.

That's the reason why we still don't have Virgin fibre anywhere except where NTL went bust putting the cable in, or Virgin were paid up-front to lay fibre (e.g. brand new housing estates in technology districts).

That's why the out-in-the-sticks people still don't have broadband at all, but I can get 300Mbps just by paying for it. That's why there's no mobile phone coverage at all in 5% of the country and it will stay that way.

Infrastructure needs to be put in place by a central company that everyone has to use (e.g. the GPO). Then it charges everyone on a cost-only-basis to use that infrastructure. Oh, you want your special customer in London to get two-gigbits? Then you need to pay the infrastructure company to do that for you and then they have a legal obligation to also cable up some people out in sod-all-nowhere and charge you the price to do both.

Re: Scorched Earth

Free email provision at least as bad/good as Hotmail or any of the others, free unlimited cloud for every school in the world (yes, you can get unlimited numbers of users on unlimited storage on all the main Google Cloud apps - docs, sheets, slides, drive, classroom, etc. - for free, just for being a school), YouTube...

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

If you can *blow* a electrical circuit just by plugging a hoover in, it's far, far, far too close to the wire for a server to run on.

If she'd *unplugged* something, yes, sure, but... again... if you need people not to unplug stuff, lock the plugs away inside a cabinet and/or put a great big sign on them.

We might all validly blame the cleaners etc. at one point but I can't expect a (probably) minimum wage employee who gets into trouble if things are dusty for not plugging into a perfectly valid outlet that doesn't have any warnings on it (even "NOT EVEN CURRENT TO RUN A HOOVER!") and trying to do her job.

This is as much on IT as it is on the people responsible for physical access, and the cleaner is pretty blameless. They took reasonable steps to do their job and weren't ignoring any signs, warnings, etc. presumably.

Honestly - you've got a big-arse server and you let people have open access to plug sockets (e.g. if you had a UPS you would *NOT* expose the UPS-backed plugs!), and those plugs aren't capable of running... what? Another 1600W? What the hell kind of electrical wiring do you have.

I'd also like to point out that in the last four years I have complained and got a direct feed to IT for exactly such issues... except we weren't within 1600W of killing the circuit, but within 10KW of killing the site (forcing us to upgrade the main transformers out in the road, not just the internals). But I had phase-crossing devices (shouldn't even be possible!), people flipping circuits further up the chain, people kicking out cables under their desks, etc.

If that thing is important enough that you have to lock the door, it's important enough that you have to stop every Tom, Dick and Harry who does get access (fire alarm engineers, access control engineers, etc.) from plugging their test equipment in. Which means big-ass signs, covering sockets, or simply not having them were people can get in.

Literally, guys... a pack of baby-proof plug protectors and a label printer... how hard is that? You can even get covers for rocker switches to stop you turning them off. Not to mention, anything of value should be on a UPS, which means that it goes bananas when you turn its feed off, but gives you time to turn it back on, and the UPS-protected sockets should be in a big-ass locked rack away from cleaners and casual "I'll just plug my 220V->110V convertor for the drill in here" workmen.

Pregnancy and parenting club Bounty fined £400,000 for shady data sharing practices

Re: How many?

There's no way that's true.

https://www.tommys.org/our-organisation/charity-research/pregnancy-statistics

If you multiply that out, that's about 750,000 babies a year.

Even taking into account that ~23% of pregnancies are unsuccessful, according to those same stats, they're at least one order of magnitude out (3.4m), and nearly two (340,000).

Patch blues-day: Microsoft yanks code after some PCs are rendered super secure (and unbootable) following update

If you have Windows server, you have WSUS. No need for third-party (though third-party often does it more nicely).

There's no excuse, one you have more than a handful of computers, for not using WSUS for exactly what it's intended for - scheduling updates, revoking them, and centralising all Windows Update downloads in your organisation.

Stop installing patches on the day of release automatically.

Set up a small set of machines, in a separate WSUS group, apply them there, test them there, then roll out to larger and larger groups as you get more confidence in them.

Seriously, "auto-update as soon as something is released" is the stupidest thing I ever heard.

Home users, sure, I understand that they don't have the nous, but even so a "I know what I'm doing" button should always be present.

You cannot forcibly inflict updates on any group of people, though, unless they've CONFIRMED that they have a backup ready and in place. That MS think they can just force it anyway, without even telling the user, and just assume they've been backing up is RIDICULOUS. Hell, even System Restore is pretty much a waste of time that I don't know of anyone ever successfully using to any decent extent.

Woman calls cops on shadowy baddie barricaded in bathroom... to discover: Roomba gone rogue

I have one.

I named him Bob.

Now, admittedly, he's not a fancy Roomba but he's a robot vacuum and he gets the job done.

But, I'll tell you one thing. He's as noisy as all hell. Not because he's cheap, but just because being a vacuum, having spinning brushes and navigating around the floors is far from a quiet thing to do. Also, he worked by bumping into things (gently) and then trolling off in a new direction. If I left him in the bathroom in the middle of the night, the only impression you would be under would be that you've got very noisy clumsy burglars who have decided to hoover up after themselves. You'd be hard-pushed to ignore it.

So unless it's a top-of-the-line Roomba and they are drastically quieter than every other robot vacuum I've ever seen, I say either the woman is deaf, or stupid, or both.

Bob's good though. He saves times even if he's far from perfect. He lives on a kitchen stool which is his little charging station. Plant him on the carpet before you leave work, press the button, and he just skitters around randomly for an hour or so while you're out. Do the same when you come back home, in another room, and after a couple of days the whole house is hoovered and you need only do "deep into the corner" bits if someone's coming round. Carpet, tile, vinyl, laminate, he just gets it done. I tend to shut him in a room if one room is particularly bad, so he gets everything in that room rather than wanders off on safari, but otherwise he's good.

He avoids the stairs. He doesn't break anything. I just make sure there are no cables on the floor (because he can make a mess of those) or put something over the top of them. He's got jammed once under the radiator but just stopped himself and beeped for help. I stuck goggley eyes on him to give him a bit of personality. He does keep trying to eat the penguin-shaped bathroom mat, though. He's definitely got something for that penguin.

But so much easier than hoovering myself. Clear the decks, point Bob at the floor, go out to work/the shops/whatever, spend five minutes looking for him when you get back (little sod likes to hide).

Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly

Because it's a tiny, focused, hot flame.

What you want is a large, wide flame - nowhere near as hot but hot enough.

There are weed-burners that would do the trick for ice, even little hand-held ones that you can just stick a butane canister on. They work quite well for weeds (they tend to die before they can spread seed, it kills the seed too, and they tend to stay-dead for a while after), and can be handy for a quick de-ice.

Saying that, some pillock will use them underneath their car fuel tank or something, won't they?

But if the field is wet... the field is wet. Leave it alone. Anything you do to it will just damage it more and make it worse to play on.

Go get muddy instead, it won't hurt you.

BT Tower broadcasts error message to the nation as Windows displays admin's shame

Would have been fixed by not just having whatever the Windows machine chose to display on its primary monitor just splatted on a massive banner in the center of London, actually.

Sure, make the control software run on whatever OS, but at minimum have it output whatever was on the secondary monitor and configure it never to show anything else on that secondary monitor or - even better - literally only have the software output to the screen interface directly. So Windows doesn't see it as a monitor, try to use it as a monitor, or accidentally display whatever error messages or whatever the technician is doing to the world.

Then when the Windows thing *doesn't* work, at worst you get a blank display because it's not being instructed to display anything. And it won't display anything until the OS is up and working, the software is loaded, the software communicates with the screen, and explicitly tells it what to display.

The suggestion that there's some HDMI/VGA connection somewhere and that HUGE display just blindly stretches/scales it and splats it straight on the billboard? I'd be asking for my money back if that was the case.

Hell, even an RPi can output a specific chosen display separately over an electronic interface that has *nothing* to do with what OS it's using, what display manager is running, what console messages are showing, or anything else.

Hands up who can tell me which pupil details transfer system has glitched. Yes, Capita's

SIMS is always a nightmare, for everything. It's only redeeming feature is that everyone in state education standardised on it, so it gets vendor support from a lot of other products/services.

But, to be honest, as an IT guy in education, I have yet to see an MIS that isn't at least 20% shite. They all are. State, independent, offline, web, cloud, they all have shiny interfaces on some parts and absolute trash on another part.

It's taken me 4 years to get a nice listing of staff CRBs out of our provider (who shall remain nameless). Literally to the point that I coded up an Excel with ODBC to pull in the data from the database, sanitise to something approaching order by automatic formulae, then print it so it comes out on a single sheet in a nice compact tabular format (as requested by ISI inspectors - the equivalent of Ofsted for private schools - when we had an inspection who said the default report was basically useless). They still can't manage it, despite being in control of all the reporting output via Crystal Reports and all kinds, and don't make headway because "Well, one of our guys used to work for ISI years ago and he says it's fine").

Four years to get a report, and I'm still no closer, despite pulling in every ranking person in the school to chase it, multiple meetings with them, literally supplying them a format and showing the database fields I manipulated to make it work, etc.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Do you honestly think that the kind of people who are going to nail knees to the floor - of anyone - are a) at all interested in whether you don't have what they want in the first place, b) going to be letting you walk away to talk about it even if you capitulate, c) not going to those tactics against absolutely anyone else if they thought for a second it would help them?

Sorry, but in legal, moral and self-defence terms, you have to treat any credible threat as coming from someone perfectly capable of that action. As such, you have to assume - and it's not a bad assumption - they're going to do it anyway, no matter what you do. The second you give up the info, they're not going to think it's enough and do more. And then they'll do you, because you're not co-operating. And then kill all the witnesses because they're just that type of person.

Like you say - if they're already at the "inflicting a fate worse than death" stage, then... what do you think it going to improve about that situation if you co-operate? They'll merely kill you and everyone else anyway.

You respond to credible threats as if they are going to be carried out. Whether that's a threat of a fight on a street, a shot through your head, exposure of your naughty photos, a fire in your building, someone trying to gain entrance to your property or anything else. If the threat is credible, you have to assume it's going to happen.

The kind of guys who torture your friends/family because you wouldn't co-operate are the exact kind of person who no amount of co-operation will appease and, in fact, even if you get on their good side somehow would just make your life worse as they'd come calling for every little favour under threat of more violence. That's how you end up being the drugs mule... do it or your brother dies... Once you're at that point, literally the only thing you're gaining is a quicker death, which might well be a blessing.

You are literally in a no-win situation at that point, you're being threatened with - effectively - murder by your murderer.

For that situation, you cannot with any certainty ever improve the situation by capitulating. However, when it comes to muggings, burglaries, dodgy photos, etc. with much less severe outcomes even possible, then you *certainly* can't improve the situation by capitulating, and actually improve your odds by not capitulating.

That's nice for you.

However, I've been through the US a few times and security are always a problem.

I cannot in good faith say that I would want to take even my personal laptop or other devices to the US. For a holiday, it's just not worth the effort/risk of being detained for no good reason. I'd leave the devices at home but, more likely, I'll find a cheaper destination (it is just a holiday after all) that doesn't have such issues.

The US isn't alone in such things - there are countries where you can't disparage the king, women can't show their hair, can't access the Internet unfiltered, etc. etc. I include all of them in my holiday blacklist. Not because I think anything will happen, but because it's just uncivilised to have such things happening. Some things like that wouldn't affect a holiday, say, but might affect business. Australia's "no outside food" rule - perfectly sensible, enforced quite strictly, but wouldn't affect a holiday.

But the US believe they can demand things like social media accounts and so on, too. Even if you don't have them.

Sorry, I work in IT. I'm bound by EU data protection laws. When my employer or lawyer tells you that you can have that information, I'll provide it. But if we have to get that far, for what is someone carrying a laptop through an airport which happens a million times a day, I can't see why I'd risk it. Especially not for a holiday.

It's not anti-American sentiment. It's anti-stupidity. That the two overlap... draw your own conclusions.

I have to say that's the only sensible response to blackmail.

X knows you did Y and can tell anyone at any time.

X threatens to tell everyone.

Unless you do something for X that's costly to you.

There's no way you can trust X, so effectively that information is already in the public domain for all you know, therefore you're better off just saying "OK, go for it... by the way, my lawyer is interested in your threat of blackmail and how you legally obtained that information".

I think the same about muggings, car jackings etc. "your money or your life?". What kind of deal is that? You're already threatening to kill me, therefore I have to assume you're going to do that to remove any witness anyway, therefore why should I assist you in finding valuables which may well contribute to you repeating this incident, valuables which you are otherwise suggesting you wouldn't be able to get any other way if I *don't* co-operate (which in itself suggests you're not actually willing to kill me, but whatever) --Throws wallet/car key down sewer---

Now neither of us have it. And if you were going to kill me anyway, you still will. And if you weren't, then you still won't.

Same with hostage negotiation (they've already kidnapped your daughter and threatened to kill her, how much trust can you put in them to release her even if you give all your money to them?) and a lot of other things.

Sure, it works by intimidation, but even if there was a public-outing on the horizon that you don't necessarily want, why do things their way when there's literally no advantage and they *already* proved they can't be trusted.

Razer – perfectly happy to sell you a laptop for over $2,000, but when it comes to fixing security holes... tough sh*t

Wait... gamers buy Razer?

I thought it was like Alienware and Apple... only sold to "geeks" and "media" people, and used by their stereotype on TV programs (e.g. Big Bang Theory was all Alienware... but they covered up the Apple logos on quite-obviously-Macs)... i.e. you buy them to look like that class of person, not because you actually are one.

Surely the proper gamers aren't actually touching anything from Razer at all?

It's the go-faster stripes of the computer industry. You put them on because you think it makes you look cool, but actually anyone who does the real thing is looking at you like you're an idiot for touching them.