Posts by IanRS

Microsoft tells crusty old kernel drivers to get with the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program

Re: Detection tools?

The powershell command "Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver | select devicename, signer" looks like a good start. "driverquery /si" also shows which drivers are signed, but not by whom.

On a normal desktop system with no weird devices attached I just have two signers, "Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher" and "Microsoft Windows". If anything signed by the former gets disabled, then I only stand to lose my graphics card, printer, webcam and a selection of motherboard on-board elements such as network and sound. It is not an old system.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: given that there is not yet an Amazon standing military force.

Not quite a standing force, but military use by US companies is not unprecedented: https://www.rossperot.com/life-story/iran-hostage-rescue

I used to work for EDS, but not that long ago.

Bigger problems

In my work as a security architect I occasionally get asked by an assurer or auditor why I think running AWS infrastructure in just two availability zones without a second region is enough. The latest was just earlier this week. It shows that they do not understand risk/impact balance outside their own little box. I have to point out that if something can take out two geographically separated data centres simultaneously then the impact is not restricted just to their website, and they probably have bigger problems to worry about. Some of them accept this. Some still think another region would help.

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Cart before horse?

The CDTO is meant to push AI usage?

Should not the CDTO being assessing what goals need to be reached and what technology can be used to get there? AI may or may not be the right tool for the job, but that should be for the CDTO to decide on.

UK police force presses pause on live facial recognition after study finds racial bias

Re: May not be a racial bias at all

That is not a racial bias, it is a lighting level bias. Read the 2nd half of my post.

May not be a racial bias at all

If you consider the brightness range of an image of say a causasian face under good lighting you will get a significant difference in brightness levels (e.g. in the HSB colour model) over different parts of the face. If you do the same with e.g. an African/Carribean face there will also be a range, but the range low and high levels will obvious be lower brightness, and the range may well be narrower too. e.g. If the darkest pixel is half the brightness of the brightest pixel in each case, the darker image has a lower range, hence lower contrast. This gives the pattern matching algorithm a lower signal strength and worse signal-to-noise ratio in the latter case.

If a trial was run with the same group of purely 'white' people, once in good lighting and again in dim lighting with no exposure compensation, leading to a similar brightness drop, would you not expect the false positive rate to be higher in the second case?

It is no more than "Who is that?", "I'm not sure as I cannot see them clearly enough."

UK blinks on AI copyright carve-out after star-studded revolt

Your loss

Because once the UK is known as en environment which permits AI theft of copyright works, no author, artist, or other creative designer whose work can be represented on a computer will want to allow their work to be published here. I would consider the loss of much 'modern art' as no great problem, but peoples' taste varies and somebody would regret any part of what we lost.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: Shhhh!

Back in the late 1980s I was at a big printing expo at the Birmingham NEC. There were some amazing quality colour printers, which were quite rare back then as dot matrix with a four colour ribbon was the best most people got to see, and also some newspaper production line printers. These were only run in full speed demonstration mode for very short periods and not very often. The output was such high volume that it had to be cleared off the stand within a couple of minutes, which is why the normal output collector had been replaced with a large wheely bin.

Re: North Star.

'Polar' must be used because "equality!" North implies a bias again southerners, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

Please wait, your call is important to us

That sort of human contact?

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

Re: Nostalgia meets modern hardware

It would have been about then that my father worked for Newbury Labs. I remember going in with him one weekend when he had to get something done, going to the engineering test lab and being shown the inside of one of the terminals with its covers off. "Don't touch that bit, it is at 40,000V". That was one of the then new colour terminals. The monochrome ones ran at a mere 25kV or so.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

MY precious!

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Just a single instruction needed: HCF

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Verschlimmbessern

A lovely German word meaning to try to make things better but to really end up making them worse.

Great language - has a single word for everything, although it might be 17 syllables long

Google to foist Gemini pane on Chrome users in automated browsing push

It is spelled "AI Pain"

But if you are an AI Pro/Ultra subscriber I suppose you enjoy the masochism, in tango form or otherwise.

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

Re: GOOD

Lucky you.

I recently had to sit through an hour long collection of video-based presentations on various DEI topics. The training system would not let you skip any of the video - you had to watch it start to end - otherwise it refused to present the end of section questions and you had to replay the video, from the start.

ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

Redundant or irrelevent?

If you have "agentic ERP [with] autonomous, AI-driven decision-making", then how many CxOs become unnecessary?

Warwickshire school to reopen after cyberattack crippled IT

Fire Alarm as a Service?

Who on earth has a fire alarm system which relies on other bits of IT?

Trigger alarm, bell rings, everybody goes outside is all it really needs. A large environment, such as a school, will benefit from having a zoned system, but other than being able to tell the fire engine driver which end of the school to aim for, it is not really necessary, and even then should be self-contained.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Maybe not all bad

"We cannot guarantee the security of your personal information."

Full marks for honesty at least. How many other companies provide the same level of 'service' but do not include it as a described feature?

Researchers poison stolen data to make AI systems return wrong results

Re: Dates and elapsed times

No, the 90s were 20 years ago, the 70s were 30 years ago. How old am I now? No, I can't be!

Meta's SAM bot keeps 'em separated as it isolates voices and instruments from audio clips

Re: Tune in or tune out, that is the question?

Hearing aids, at least good ones, already have frequency dependent amplification, and can be tuned to your particular hearing loss frequency profile. Some claim to be able (using AI of course!) to amplify particular targets such as picking out nearby conversation within a crowded environment, or music over background noise. I got some recently, at ridiculous cost, so I have much less excuse to ignore my wife and surrounding conversations in the office are more intrusive. Oh well, such is progress.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

What did you do? Nothing!

I had a junior developer in my team once who claimed that his development environment application was no longer working, but insisted he had done nothing to it since it last worked. After a fair bit of investigation and step-by-step crawling through the application flow I found out that it was trying to access a database table which no longer existed. How had that single table come to vanish? "I didn't think I needed that table, so I deleted it."

The contents of that table were highly dependent on everything else and non-trivial to recreate, so I pointed him to the environment complete wipe and rebuild instructions and left him to fix his own mess.

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.