Posts by IanRS

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Re: Hofstadter's or Parkinson's law?

I agree with your point, but I am not sure 'better value' is the correct term. 'Less bad value' perhaps?

Cost TBD

Of course they cannot say what it will cost, pre-consultation, but that is not the scary part. The scart part is the required consultation over "what range of uses it will have". This is for something that was just meant to make checking validity for employment easier.

Barts Health seeks High Court block after Clop pillages NHS trust data

Your data is perfectly safe.

"To date no information has been published on the general internet, and the risk is limited to those able to access compressed files on the encrypted dark web."

So only accessible to those most likely to abuse it then?

Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown

Re: "but I do any serious modeling in Excel"

Global climate models? UK budget and economy? Take your pick. Excel can handle anything!

Google and Apple ordered to stop fake government TXTs

Re: Guide Rail

No you weren't.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: What is it with managers and training costs?

They did. I used to work there, and knew people it happened to. Some courses had payback periods as long as three years, although the amount did taper off.

UK's Cyber Security and Resilience Bill makes Parliamentary debut

Re: Obsolete IT

More likely it just came out of some press officer's (very old) library of sample illustrations and they just added the text, but surely somebody along the review chain might have had the technological appreciation to think it looked a little out of date, during the process of being signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters

The actual bill?

Does anybody have a link to the Bill contents? Presumably they are still at draft stage as it is now going through its first reading. Press statements, policy statements, and other peoples' thoughts are easy to find, but not the real bill contents.

Obsolete IT

The press release about the bill at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tough-new-laws-to-strengthen-the-uks-defences-against-cyber-attacks-on-nhs-transport-and-energy has an included graphic based on what looks like a Windows dialog box. Windows 95 era. W98 used colour gradients in the title bar, and XP brought in rounded corners. Perhaps the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology should be a bit more innovative about the technology they wish to portray.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

A step up

Microsoft's quality control is no longer merely legendary, it's mythical!

Azure stumbles in Western Europe, Microsoft blames 'thermal event'

Somebody got lucky with a firework rocket.

The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

Re: Political instability nixes it

The optical fibre and aluminium might be worthless to copper nickers, but unfortunately that will not stop them cutting the cable first to find out.

Meta to sell $30B in bonds to build AI datacenters

Repayment duration

I'm not sure whether I would be more worried about Meta not being around in 40 years to pay off their debts, or more worried that they would be.

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: Should have gone and stayed with OS/2 :)

Have you not noticed that modern cash machines display adverts? Having briefly worked, several years ago, on the network security of an enterprise which included running ATMs, that mix of having a nice segregated network for PCI data with having to inject adverts for third parties was a right pain. I'm sure the additional cost of all the security controls was greater than the advert revenue would have been.

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Re: All we need now...

The Greens are very tolerant: they stated that they will end illegal migration by making all migration legal. Everybody is welcome, and you don't get more tolerant than that.

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Re: 75,000 working days a year

There are well over 500,000 people employed by the core civil service, excluding those in more distant quangos and public sectors bodies such as the NHS. They hope to save about 1 hour per year per person, and like most government targets, probably fail to meet it.

Re: Choices of task

Mainly because AI models are trained on the basis of 'monkey see, monkey do'. If you cannot show the monkey how to do the task then it cannot learn.

Re: What a complete load of robots ...

So there are now robots deicing the pavements instead of people, but there will still be people needed to keep an eye on them, pull them back up curbs they have fallen off, etc. Without a 'supervisor' how long until those robots get vandalised or stolen? I'd give it five minutes, even in Milton Keynes, most of which is a fairly civilised place.

Blinded by the light: Tesla fixes glaringly bright Cybertruck headlights

Re: FFS...

Some can. My Skoda Superb 2017 model can, although you lose the steering linked headlight aim adjustment when the lights are set for driving on the 'wrong' side of the road, presumably as there is not enough possible adjustment to go even further right. The menu option is buried quite deep though.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: However...

I was once running data centre cables from network box to patch panel to structured cabling to patch panel to patch panel to structured cabling, etc, to get back to the core switch I needed. Having got there I found that the port I was allocated already had a cable in it. I contacted network management and was told to remove it and connect my cable. They would trace the erring connection and reconnect it properly. I found out later somebody had 'noticed the wiring was untidy, and bunched everything up to the first row of ports.' Presumably at least most connections had stayed within the correct VLAN, or it would have been noticed somewhat faster.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Set the clocks back, swipe the timecard in through the punch-machine which just happens to take its time from the reestablished domain controller, perform the work, stand everything down, then swipe the timecard out again.

BT promises 5G Standalone for 99% of the UK by 2030

We cheated with the name

Last time we did an update we stuck with half-measures, but promised you full service. Now we are rolling out the proper service we can't use the proper name, because we already lied about that one. So we'll use an even better name for an even better service, which is really only the service you thought you were getting last time, but it's better, so we'll charge more.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: What about our fish?

As has been mentioned above, the rollout of the scheme is country specific, and it turned out that the benefit that we got in return for the fish was the right to ask individual countries for the right to bypass the system. Just the right to ask, not the right to get.

Careless engineer stored recovery codes in plaintext, got whole org pwned

I went into a high-street department store a couple of years ago, and at one of the sales desks saw a post-it note on a laptop wrist-rest area with the password written on it. I mentioned to the sales staff that I was a security consultant, and I happened to be working for that store chain at the moment. "Don't worry. This is not one of our passwords. It is for the [brand sold at that kiosk] network."

It got a mixture of sighs and laughs at the next client discussion, as they knew that they could not really stop that kind of behaviour.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: Important? Information

I've just finished off a portion. (Came from Waitrose.) Isn't it convenient that biscuits come in individually wrapped single portions?

Hack to school: Parents told to keep their little script kiddies in line

No cameras

In the dim and distant past, when work was more interesting, I got to build and deploy systems. The handover of these to the operations team would only be accepted if the documentation was completed to the necessary standards, which included photos of the front and back of each racked box, showing its position and all attached cables. The datacentres had a no cameras policy.

UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age

Re: Skull-measuring

There is no separation in the middle of my eyebrow. Am I guilty? (Of what probably doesn't matter.)

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

The lawyers will get the biggest pizza the action.

Who are you again? Infosec experiencing 'Identity crisis' amid rising login attacks

Re: For real?

But I've hidden the post-it note under the keyboard. Nobody would think to look there.

IBM, NASA cook up AI model to predict solar tantrums

Re: Trained?

The full cycle is 22 years, but akin to a sine wave, there are two peaks per cycle, in this case with opposite magnetic polarities. Taking (at least) 11 years of data would still seem to be the obvious route to take though.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

Re: What a bunch of clowns

All right, I'll bite.

Their head of security needs to be grilled over why things were so bad.

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: The AI bandwagon

You are missing one key point. LLMs just spout whatever nonsense they have heard in the past and have no idea when they are talking complete rubbish, whereas politicians ... are a perfect match.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Long term data

Speak for yourself, but I have no plans on working for another 40 years. I'm hoping for no more than 15, but who knows what Labour will do to pension levels and retirement ages.

14-hour+ global blackout at Ingram Micro halts customer orders

The laptops need to be disconnected so that the clean-up operations do not touch them. Once the internal systems have been sanitised then the laptops can be reconnected and everything re-infected.

Re: Seems like razor thin margins

Sounds more like they have a good accountant. Taxes are paid on profits, not turnover, so companies try to make sure the money ends up were it needs to be (including various pockets) while appearing to make only a minimal profit, or even a loss which can then be used to justify tax rebates.

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

I think therefore I am

I doubt, therefore I'm not.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: Honestly

There are occasional (and now quite old) motorway signs that give the distance to the next junction as 2/3 then 1/3 of a mile rather than the usual 1 mile and 1/2 mile. Apparently these were put in place shortly before the 'imminent' change to metric for British road signs, when they could just be patched to show 1km and 1/2km.

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

What is the issue with keyboard these days?

Keyboards used to be basic and cheap peripherals. My current keyboard is still functional, but starting to look scruffy, with the symbols wearing off the keys. As a touch typist this is not particularly important, but I would like it to look neat.

All I want is a standard full-size UK layout, 105 full travel keys, USB wired, decent build quality that will last a few years. No programmable function keys, no RGB lighting, no 'ultra-fast response'. Not long ago this would have been a £25 device, but these days, not even close, even if you can find one of that specification.

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Re: Snap test!

Can you keep going for another 55 seconds without deviation, repetition or hesitation?

Obviously not, as you have repeated 'parrot'.

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

Re: But think of the cost!

We seem to have an accountant with us today. See Navarac's comment below. Some people never find any joy in life.

But think of the cost!

Just because you can does not mean you should, but sometimes, just because it is pointless does mean you still should.

This is the kind of (pretty much pointless) effort that has everybody wanting to join in, from the musicians to the inter-site comms team to the radio dish engineers. Except for the accountants.

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

Got off lightly

Only trapped rather than crushed, and just £50 for the BOFH beer fund. The PFY must be feeling a bit off.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: Noise? What noise?

Did they stop complaining only after you battered them to death with it? They are generally up to the job.

Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

Mutual proof of identity

Many years ago one of the telecomms companies (Vodafone I think) had a process whereby you agreed a 4 digit PIN when you became a customer. When they called you, they gave you 2 of the digits and you had to give back the other two. Which two went in which direction could vary. It is a really good, easy to implement, basic method of proving that the vendor calling is who they say they are (or that they have had a major data breech and all the details in the CRM have been nicked). I don't know why more companies do not have something comparable.

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

Zero Knowledge SNARK

Sounds like the attitude of a teenage school pupil.

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

Re: Picture of Elmo

A two finger salute, before just a raised middle finger became the more common gesture, was a raised middle and fore-finger. It (apparently) dates back to when wars were common between England and France. The English archers were greatly feared by the French, who cut those two fingers off any captured bowman to render them harmless. Hence the meaning of the gesture was that the gesturer could still shoot you, and would be quite happy to do so.

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

Another bandwagon

AI is going to be a major transformation factor in the way everything works, just like blockchain was going to be too.

AI works well for pattern matching/recognition, so has potential there. For generative work you may as well employ a parrot - you get recognisable noises copied from elsewhere but no understanding.

Google Cloud’s so-called uninterruptible power supplies caused a six-hour interruption

Procurement error

They bought the Unavailable Power Supply instead.

Don't delete that mystery empty folder. Windows put it there as a security fix

Re: But

Should it not be C:\cellar\disusedtoilet\bewareofthe leopard? With optional deeper directories fillingcabinet\lockeddrawer\planningnotices

PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished

Google hardware support

Google keeps coming out with interesting looking hardware, at a hobbyist level: audio / vision AIY kits, Coral TPU, etc. Then, not much later, they completely abandon them. Yes they still work, but you have to use their old libraries, which are only compatible with language versions that were current at the time.

So, despite my love of fiddling with interesting new 'toys', I will never be buying any more hardware widgets from Google.