* Posts by hoola

1969 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2013

In the rush to build AI apps, please, please don't leave security behind

hoola Silver badge

Security takes time and costs money. It is better for these outfits to concentrate on selling stuff and worry about security later. That is pretty much the model for any new technology now. They don't care, it is not their money or their data.

The only thing the may care about is if the actual code were stolen. Pretty much all this shite that is touted as AI is derived from data that has been collected using unsolicited means anyway, why shoudl the care if the data that was probably stolen or collected without consent in the first place is compromised again.

Maybe I am just a cynical old fart.....

Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

hoola Silver badge

There will be a hard core group of customers will continue to pay.

That is their choice, we may not agree but wherever you look there is always a group that are locked in to something for whatever reason. It is often not genuine technical reasons but usually management or high-level techies using features comparison charts to protect their favourite product, skills, certifications, job etc (delete as appropriate).

I suggest that for the foreseeable future there will be enough people pay Broadcom for VM subscriptions to make things work. I mean, you can buy it as a service in Azure now. It is not going to disappear quickly.

Claims emerge that Citrix has doubled price of month-to-month partner licenses

hoola Silver badge

Re: "flexible monthly model introduces [..] uncertainty into the business."

Maybe part of the problem is that so much money now is in the hands of these "asset management companies" (Elliot spring to mind.....) and they have bough into so much with just enough to have a seat on the board, the only thing that matters is profit.

To be crystal clear on this, it is their profit, not the viability of the company they are milking. These VC & AM outfits can pretty much walk away whenever they want with impunity. It is unlikely they will make a loss.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

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Re: Maccas closed?

Anyone remember Wimpy in the UK?

Red vinyl bench seat things with a Formica table all bolted down.

No forgetting the giant red tomato with ketchup......

UK council yanks IT systems and phone lines offline following cyber ambush

hoola Silver badge

Re: Keep your key services inaccessible to the internet.

That does not work when everyone demands everything be available online.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Ah, the good old UK public sector!

Yet according to all the Social Media experts people working for councils are and overpaid many time what they should be and sit around doing nothing.

Having working for a local authority we had highly skilled & experienced staff. Just like any organisation there were passengers as well. The biggest issues are:

Tendering - the constraints around public sector tendering essentially means you end up with a solution you don't want, does not work whilst being ripped of by a large private sector outfit.

Money - there is a constant battle with budgets and having to make do. Managed solutions are seen as a way around this because the costs are fixed. The value for money is appalling (as is the quality) but Finance like it because it is predictable.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Managed Service Success Story stabalising the home Office's digital applications

That first link is just part of the insanity of the Public Sector. The amount of information that is available directly or via vexatious FOIA requests is bonkers.

I have been on the receiving end of some of these with requests down to serial numbers of equipment.

No private sector company would ever make that available.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

hoola Silver badge

Re: Taste own medicine

How?

We already have more CCTV in the UK than pretty much any other Western country.

Locks could be put on manholes but they have to be generic and robust.

Any cover can ultimately be damaged sufficiently to pour petrol in.

Cabinets can be wreaked by just parking your stolen vehicle on them (happened to our local cabinet).

In all these situations the perpetrators are long gone and pretty much untraceable.

Just like cable (and fibre thefts) from the rail network, anything like this is very difficult to actually secure to the point it cannot be damaged. Even if it were possible it is not affordable.

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

hoola Silver badge

Re: Cynical? Me?

This is my projection:

£3.5Bn target over 6 years

2 years will wasted on procurement so the contracts are "given" to incumbents and Palantir with no oversight

£10Bn spent over 3 years

Bugger all delivered & what is delivered barely works

Contracts extended because too much has been invested to give up.

Palantir sucks every possible asset it can out of the NHS before say that they cannot deliver.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Ah yes, Mr Hunt...

This will all be wrapped up and completely locked in before the end of this Government with no way of getting out of the disaster.

Belgian ale legend Duvel's brewery borked as ransomware halts production

hoola Silver badge

Re: A new 'zero day'?

It is most likely the latter.

If you do detect ransomware you just have to start switching things off.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

hoola Silver badge

Re: Who are their lawyers?

The Remain campaign also was catastrophically bad. The outcome of the 2016 referendum was not just because of the Leave campaign.

Remain arrogantly assumed a win was assured, they could not conceive of the possibility that anyone would not see the EU as anything but perfect. People voted Leave for a plethora of different reasons and the questions was very simple, in or out. There was no agreement on what leaving would be. For many who voted leave remaining in the Customs Union and Single Market was fine. What actually happened is that as the vote loomed it became clear that the Remain victory was far from assured.

At that point Remain made a mindbogglingly stupid error. Instead of pushing the advantages they attacked Leave. The media was full of statements about how shelves would be empty, house prices would crash, millions would be jobless. All fear-mongering, just as bad as those from the other side.

Then to put the cream topping on the unfolding disaster we had big businesses writing to their employees telling them how to vote. In true British form people will most likely have done the exact opposite simply because they were told to vote remain.

Then we have the 28% of mostly younger voters who allegedly all supported Remain who could not even be bothered to get off their arses and vote.

Once the result was in we had politicians on all sides of the EU and political divide doing their best to ensure the worst possible outcome. Any possible compromise to give a better outcome was systematically blocked by anyone. Hard core Remain MPs voted against everything on a matter of principal. The likes of the ERG voted against anything that was not "pull the shutters down and walk.. Combined they ensured that nothing progressed. That directly led to the 2019 GE with Johnson and "Get Brexit Done".

If politicians had not been so pig-headed and incompetent from the very start at best Brexit could have been avoided and at worst, the UK would still be in the CU & SM. That fixes 99% of the issues we are lumbered with.

There are calls to "Rejoin", we cannot do that, the UK can apply to join. All the benefits the had negotiated have been thrown away and are very unlikely to be clawed back. Equally those claiming that 56% of the population think Brexit was a mistake is conjecture. It is based on a poll, polls that have been notorious for being wrong. Then comparing those numbers with the 32% of the population that voted leave is also wrong. If you take the poll sample and compare that to the population it is a tiny percentage.

I don't like Brexit but it is not correct to lay the blame on those who voted leave. That is with those who did not vote and the politicians. The outcome we are stuck with is fair and square with politicians.

Amazon goes nuclear, acquires Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters for $650M

hoola Silver badge

Re: Buy existing vs build new

That is debatable, buying most of the output of the new UK offshore windfarms does not help anyone other than Amazon.

Amazon (or anyone else) making their data centres "green" at the expense of reducing existing carbon emissions is a complete farce. If Amazon are that keen on renewables then put solar panels on their distribution centres, add turbines if they can or guess what, use some of the billions the accumulate wot build their own wind farms.

US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

hoola Silver badge

Re: "[The FTC] has decided that browsing and location data should be considered sensitive"

And crucially it is on by default and on most sites when you to "Reject All" for the cookies, it does not clear them.

hoola Silver badge

Re: How many times?

Yet there are millions or people who are addicted to all the "Smart" tech with tracking and all sorts of shite clamouring for more.

Everything has to be smart, connected and controlled by an App.

I just don't get it.....

Maybe I a too old but the entire stuff about collecting data really pisses me off. The "Legitimate Interest" stuff is just insane when you go through and reject them because it is on by default. Hundreds of companies, no clues as to what any of them do other than collect data to sell.

GitHub struggles to keep up with automated malicious forks

hoola Silver badge

Re: Forks have always annoyed me

And that is the entire problem of the Internet now.

It is filled with ever-increasing volumes of gibberish because people have to post stuff or do "something" regardless of whether it adds any value, is relevant or answers the question that was asked.

All this AI search shite is not improving things, you just get a different variation on a load of bollocks.

As a very simply example I tried to find out how to force Teams to open directly in the Application not via the browser. All the results came back telling me how to change the default applications that Teams uses to open shite.

The same question was asked many times including on MS community pages. all answered wrong and then posted as a solution. That people upvoted it is the solution is even worse.

Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

hoola Silver badge

Re: I've said many times that...

Sadly in all these cases the money always wins. Reservoirs can be empty, the water table catastrophically low so boreholes are compromised but the only thing that matters is that big business can continue to strip resources.

The same applies to any other natural resource.

It is why the Amazon (and many other tropical forests) continue to be destroyed at the rate it is.

Millions of hectares are strip-mined for metals to turn into stuff that is used for a bit then junked.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

hoola Silver badge

It is not the reliance on "The Grid" that is the issue. One the connectors terminate everything is dependent on the National Grid. The underlying issue is that we do not generate enough power preferring to import it.

On the other hand all those offshore windfarms also need cables.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

hoola Silver badge

Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

Agile has an awful lot to answer for:

Deliver lots of stuff really fast.

Test a bit of and hope other stuff works

Actual product is a bug riddled mess

Next sprint fixes some of the bugs, adds new features (nobody wants), breaks more stuff that was not broken and adds more weird behaviour.

Rinse and repeat......

Developers and PMs are happy because they are delivering (loads) stuff. Nobody cares that what is delivered is a load of shite, fingers in ears ignoring all the feedback from users.

hoola Silver badge

Re: What would it cost ...

Modern and forward looking does not automatically mean better.

At the school my wife works at one almost working system has been replaced with a smaller "modern" system that is far worse and less usable than the monstrosity it replaced. The simple task of tte register requires 5 mouse clicks and two page loads per pupil.

Heck, even Excel would be better. They still have to had a printed sheet anyway for evacuations.

hoola Silver badge

Re: What would it cost ...

And it is going to get worse if the trend of sacking civil servants whom the current set if incompetent politicians don't like increases.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Why?

Based on my experience on both sides of the fence having to work with (and select/engage) consultants and then in the private sector in consultancy I find the entire thing stinks.

Companies providing consultant just use the customer as a cash cow to generate money. Very occasionally you will have someone who understands more than recalling a playbook from memory and copy scripts of a stick but it is rare.

What is worse is when you engage a consultant and then get sent someone from a telephone book whose only interest is the fee they are being paid. As a consultant or part of a professional services team you can earn significant sums, it is very nice but I struggled with the ethics and went to earning slightly less but actually enjoying what I was doing and being good at it, solving genuine problems for customers.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Why?

Probably but only at huge cost to the customer. You can be absolutely sure Oracle is not going to do anything unless money is changing hands.

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

hoola Silver badge

Re: Please blow it up

Where I used to work at a university in the Midlands there are similar issues.

One building is a horrendous grubby concrete box that was never finished because it started to move before the remaining floors were added. Another was designed by some funky architect and recently had millions spent replacing the funky roof. Both (along with some other buildings) would all benefit from being demolished and replaced with something that is fit for purpose.

I agree that we do need to preserve some buildings but some of the stuff that acquires listed status really does beggar belief.

hoola Silver badge

Is there anyone that is any better?

From the comments on here on other articles there are plenty that are worse. There can only be so many companies providing the infrastructure due to the costs and overlap.

Unlike the other utilities the service is provided over unique lines, not a shared pipe or wire.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Secret places and maps

I remember when Capital Radio (194) was the commercial station for London area, none of this stuff with bits regionally. They were on the corner of Euston Road. No idea if they are still there.

Peter Young

Alan (Fluff) Freeman

Kerry Juby

Nicky Horn

Kenny Everett

These are the ones I remember.

Back to the Zimmer frame and reclining chair with a laptop balanced on the rug over my knees....... The wonders of WFH!

Top five reasons to move from CentOS to RHEL (according to Red Hat)

hoola Silver badge

Re: After almost 30 years ...

Corporately we are moving from Centos/RHEL (it was a mix) to Rocky Linux as much as possible.

Smaller footprint, lower costs and less risk.

VMware takes a swing at Nutanix, Red Hat with KVM conversion tool

hoola Silver badge

Re: Meeeh....

Exactly, when is read this I thought, "whoopie-doo" that will be useful to a few aliens.

I really cannot see a use case migrating from those hypervisors to VMware, certainly at the moment and possible never.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

hoola Silver badge

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

This actually is the critical issue that is completely ignored.

So much is accessed from a mobile device now and that same device is also the 2FA device. This is nothing to do with texts, but all the Authentication apps that are used as well.

Essentially, the entire point of 2FA has been lost.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

hoola Silver badge

Re: Ignore the SMB/homelabber at your peril...

I think the issues around this depend on what you are trying to achieve.

If you are using the hypervisor to run a home lab then the actual platform is largely irrelevant, we will all use what is most convenient & free. As an aside, the one with the lowest overhead. If you need half you resources to do nothing but run the hypervisor and management interfaces then it starts to become an struggle. If you are lucky to have a cheap DL380 or equivalent then fine but they take space, power & make a noise!

The Microserver Gen8 is still an incredibly piece of equipment when you add the 1265L cpu & a Smart Array,

hoola Silver badge

Re: Sliding doors...

Having setup a lab on Nutanix CE all I can say is that compared to ESXi it is utter rubbish.

It is just a badly skinned version of KVM.

To put context on this for training purposes I have:

ESXi

ESXi cluster with vCenter

HyperV (standalone & cluster)

Nutanix

The one that constantly gives me issues is Nutanix, even HyperV is better.

hoola Silver badge

Re: ESXi Free Version was too restricted

Your comment suggests you have no understanding of the product what so ever.

You do not need vCenter to use ESXi effectively.

Standalone ESXi has a huge amount of functionality with the GUI and using PowerCLI.

Cloudflare joins the 'we found ways to run our kit for longer' club

hoola Silver badge

Re: More green as well as more greenbacks?

Does hardware from cloud providers get resold?

I don't know but given the lunacy I have seen around some of this stuff where perfectly usable equipment is shredded for "security and compliance" reasons I would not be sure.

hoola Silver badge

Re: More green as well as more greenbacks?

More capable normally just means less boxes consuming more power.

The embedded resources and emissions in the production of IT equipment will favour longer life. Server hardware will just get shredded and recycled (responsibly is you are lucky) so extending it's life is probably beneficial to everyone expect chip & server manufacturers.

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

hoola Silver badge

Re: Well

I believe there was more use of dormant and quickly setup companies to claim furlough fraudulently and it is also likely a larger amount of money.

hoola Silver badge

Those suppliers were out of stock because they could not cope with the sudden surge in demand.

That was a large part of the problem, everyone was competing to get the same resources and the only thing that made something happen was money.

Look at the reports of US teams taking PPE destined for other countries.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Oops, we stole it

There are several levels at play.

We have the direct fraud that you experienced, that has occurred because criminals found an opportunity and exploited it. Politician, the media & public were screaming for things to happen quickly. That leads to mistake, lack of oversight or compliance and errors.

Then we have the more difficult scenarios like PPE. Much of this was because the global supply system was broken and again companies (and people) could see opportunities. The Government then facilitated inappropriate contracts, many with people that had links to the Tories to buy stuff quickly. Again a lack of oversight combined with global shortages allowed things to happen that in normal times would not be possible. Should contracts have been given to people with direct links to MPs or the Government? Probably not and there needs to be restrictions in place to prevent this in the future.

It is only after the event that the scale of some of the abuse of power and size of contracts has surfaced. Where there has been deliberate fraud (Mone) then one hopes they will be brought to account.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Oops, we stole it

Whilst that was true I think part of the issue is that some very large sums of money would be spent on finding people (criminals) where both the money and the people are long gone.

There was almost no hope of any convictions and zero possibility of recovering the money.

I don't like the outcome and it tends to send the wrong message but in terms of value for money, it is the best of a bad job.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

hoola Silver badge

Re: So easy

There is also the basic misunderstanding that many universities (and plenty of other organisations) also do time and time again.

IT departments forget that they are there to facilitate the business to do their primary function. The reality is clearly identified in the report is IT and higher management have done just that, taking what they see as a solution and trying to force it onto users, often without even asking what their requirements are.

The outcome is wholly predictable and is something that I have seen with monotonous regularity at the institution I worked at.

There are something where it comes to data protection and security where universal adoption is needed however something like this is not one of them.

Microsoft's Notepad goes from simple text editor to Copilot conspirator

hoola Silver badge

Gobbledegook

Does this mean that when you type it is going to do the same whacky auto correction and suggests that we get in Word and everything else?

As long as the don't inject it between the keyboard and everything you type in then fine, it they do that then we are utterly stuffed.

SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

hoola Silver badge

Re: Billions off share price

This fashion for calling anything that is not "on-trend" (funky cloudy shite) as legacy is just marketing.

For the companies and people that do this it is for one reason only, to try and scare people into thinking that the perfectly good systems and equipment they have are somehow clapped and and a liability.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

hoola Silver badge

I think that is is even worse than that.

Microsoft (along with Google and other big tech outfits) are heavily investing and pushing "AI". This is all being developed with data that has been harvested over the last 10 years at the very least (maybe more). That data has mostly been collected without consent and stored for future use. We now have the compute resources available to turn that data into money.

The entire AI thing is totally depending on training the model on data that has been scraped from any source, with or without consent. The horse bolted long ago when they data first started being collected.

Almost all main-stream applications now have some kind of reporting and even if they do not, the OS (Windows & Apple - yes I don't trust then either) will be collecting stuff, even if it is just keystrokes.

AI is the bandwagon where all the money is going because it is a arms race between the big tech companies. That it adds almost no value to most people is irrelevant, it is about control.

Whoever holds the data, controls access to the data or the decision making software that uses it is in a position of power.

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

hoola Silver badge

Re: 5-10 years is short term for people, too

Whilst we don't know that much about the sea, what is happening is that anywhere these is a useful resource then it is being harvested with no thought given to the consequences. Look at nodule mining for rare-earth elements. This is a complete and utter disaster but nobody cares because the money is the only thing that matters.

The beneficiaries of this are the rich countries that are already responsible for most of the consumption and waste occurs.

hoola Silver badge

For pure science then it is always worth doing.

The issue we have now is that everything, absolutely everything has to be commercialised with a view to extracting resources continuing to feed teh insatiable demand of humans to convert stuff into waste.

No other being has done this more efficiently or destructively.

The entire Amazon rainforest can be cut down, all the Artic ice gone with cities flooded and people will continue to stick their heads in the sand and claim "not my problem".

Based on current consumption,. destruction and conflict the 150 years suggested earlier looks decidedly optimistic. Mankind still has not understood that you cannot fix everything with technology. By it's very nature technology is a huge part of the problem,

Microsoft sheds some light on Russian email heist – and how to learn from Redmond's mistakes

hoola Silver badge

Re: weak password

Maybe I have missed something here but are we not being told about how all this AI shite can detect stuff like this?

It will have all been logged as they know what happened. Could it be that all this funky monitoring is actually just a large bucket of characters that is only investigated when it is too late?

Akira ransomware gang says it stole passport scans from Lush in 110 GB data heist

hoola Silver badge

Re: Id/Passport verification service

There already is one, Easy-ID (Yoti).

hoola Silver badge

Re: Translating Spokespeak

But yet again someone is reacting to a loss. It is already too late.

That is the issue. This will have been another " sophisticated" attack that somehow justifies the loss and makes it acceptable.

No data loss is acceptable and the penalties for the losses take too long and are insignificant.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Stop data storage by business

Hmm, and have everything in one place ripe for picking.

Nothing that is connected to any form of data cable is 100% secure .

20,000-plus tech workers got the boot this month

hoola Silver badge

Re: And how many were hired?

What is sadly predictable is Elliott Asset Management appearing as a reason.

They are utterly despicable, like all these investment and wealth management organisations.

The only thing that matters is profit, as much as possible is as short a time as possible. Completely ignoring any long term outcomes.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

hoola Silver badge

Marketing and brand.

A surprising number of people buy (lease) the stuff because of what it is not whether it actually fulfils the functions they need or is reliable.