* Posts by JurassicPark

51 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2014

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Improbable: YOU gave model Lily Cole £200k for her Impossible.com whimsy-site

JurassicPark
FAIL

Charity = No Accountability

So a charity doesn't have to account to the public under FOI? Might as well be a government department then and just change your name periodically so you can say it was the last department and not you that cocked up a-la HSCIC formerly NHSIC selling our hospital patient data.

JurassicPark

Re: In a nutshell

Surely the definition of a charity is a not-for-profit organisation set up to raise money from the public (A) to do something of good (provide a service, react to disasters, do research etc.) for other members of the public (B), where government (local / national / international) hasn't / won't / can't help said members of the public (B).

Why is tax payers money being used to fund any charity? If a millionaire 'supermodel' can get £200k funding for this website and Eton, a rich mans public (private) school can set itself up as a charity in order to avoid paying tax, there is something seriously wrong with the whole charity business.

Blinking good: LG launches smart light bulb for Android/iOS

JurassicPark
Mushroom

Re: Hackers?

I'm sure NORK spooks will be happy, it'll give 'em a chance to turn the lights out in the South without having to resort to thermo-nuclear war :^)

Microsoft issues less-than-helpful tips to XP holdouts

JurassicPark

Re: Backup XP?

Ghost.

ISPs failing 13m Brits on broadband speed, claims consumer group

JurassicPark

GigE over Coax

My network manager implemented GigE over copper in our datacentre (ripping out the fibre). Why can't Telco's implement this for consumers? Is it a distance issue?

Whitehall and Microsoft thrashing out 1-year NHS WinXP lifeline

JurassicPark

Re: A Travesty

"> So - it's lazy good-for-nothing PAS suppliers to blame for this putrid stinking mess - mostly."

All of the PAS systems I've worked on have been Unix based and use green screens for access. You must have got some shiny new software if its working on Windows.

JurassicPark

Re: One more year -- and then what?

Of course there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there who could write and maintain open source code for a clinical system to say, manage a haematology analyser or a cryogenic sperm / egg freezing system and who also know HL7 so it can communicate with other NHS systems. And if the system is dealing with patient data, each one will have to be SC cleared and the development must be done in England if the system is for NHS England as patient data cannot go outside England borders (I do mean England here, not UK of GB & NI, NHS Wales, NHS Scotland and NHS NI are separate entities).

JurassicPark
FAIL

Re: Playing the long game.

"you'd free from vendor lock-in forever"

Unfortunately, whilst a noble goal, its not the OS that is preventing migration, in a lot of cases its clinical applications that have not been updated, tested and certified to run on Win 7 or something else.

It would be the same with any other OS. If a clinical application had been written in 2000 to run on RedHat7, it's unlikely that app could be moved today to Ubuntu 13 and just work. Would you trust your life on the results from whatever device was connected?

Admittedly if the clinical applications were also open-source, there would be less of a problem.

Unfortunately the history of very many of the NHS clinical applications is

1. Highly specialised clinical expert sees a lack of software for their discipline.

2. The clinician learns a bit of programming or works with a programming friend and develops the software.

3. Working in the field, the clinician meets lots of other like-minded clinicians and sells the software directly, bypassing any NHS purchasing requirements for supportability / maintainability etc. Clinical departments not only have their centrally funded budget, they have money given to them in wills etc. that they can spend as they want with no IT involvement.

4. 10 years later, the clinician has made his money and no longer supports the application, having retired at 50 to somewhere sunny. Unfortunately the app only runs on WinXP

JurassicPark

Re: Funding

They should take the N out of NHS, there is nothing National about it, other than the name.

It is a loosely organised amalgamation of semi-competing acute trusts, privately owned companies (GPs included) and other health organisations (mental health, sexual health, ambulance trusts etc), attempting to provide health services within geographical national boundaries of England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland.

"That said, I think you make a good point about how government departments should negotiate contracts at the highest level "

Unfortunately the failure of NPfIT seems to suggest otherwise. It was one aim of NPfIT to provide more purchasing power by amalgamating IT spend within England & Wales, but unfortunately the only real win was a national radiology imaging system. Much of the rest went into the pockets of suppliers, or, like Fujitsu, forced suppliers out of the market by being too punitive.

MtGox finds 200,000 Bitcoin in old wallets

JurassicPark

searching for loose change down the back of the sofa?

That's a lot of loose change. Surprised they could find the sofa.

How wealthy do you have to be not to notice c$180m is missing?

GIANT FLESH-EATING DEVIL CHICKENS roamed North Dakota

JurassicPark

Re: the inoffensive, tiny chickens of today

I once had the misfortune to be staying a night on a farm when one of the chicken barns caught alight. c5000 roasted alive chickens is not a nice sight or a nice smell.

QUIDOCALYPSE: Blighty braces for £100 MILLION cost of new £1 coin

JurassicPark

Re: Maybe this will incentivise operators

I hope you don't use a car parking app!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/13/parking_firm_pulls_app_amid_privacy_concerns/

Osbo's booze, bingo, biz and big data Budget

JurassicPark

New homes for the south

I understand that house prices in the south are overheating and increasing the housing stock in the south might help dampen this down a little bit.

However, shouldn't we be trying to bring a bit of balance back into blighty's economy by encouraging business to move north? I know for most southerners there is no life north of Watford Gap, but those of us living in the north would like to see some jobs being created here, rather than having to move south.

I know we are encouraged to get on our bike and find work, but Leeds to London is a significant commute on a push-iron (northern term for bicycle in case you were wondering).

Is there any other country that is so capital-city centric in terms of wealth creation?

PAF! MPs go postal over postal location data sell-off by Coalition.gov

JurassicPark

Re: PAF 18 years out-of-date

"Not sure where you get that from, everywhere I search is HU as being Hull"

If you use the commercial licensed (ie. paid for) PAF database within an application then the county is included.

For example, if you go on any comparison website and request a quote for car insurance, you will be asked for house number / postcode and the address will include your county.

JurassicPark
Flame

PAF 18 years out-of-date

PAF is 18 years out of date. I live in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Search for any HU postcode and the county will show as Humberside. Humberside was abolished in 1996. I complained to Royal Mail about this and their response was that they no longer kept the PAF updated.

So who cares if 18 year old data was given away?

MH370 airliner MYSTERY: The El Reg Pub/Dinner-party Guide

JurassicPark

Accident or Malicious?

I was going to ask how do you know that a system has been intentionally switched off by a human as opposed to switching off due to a technical fault? I was wondering whether some form of depressurization (either slow or catastrophic) might have incapacitated the crew and passengers al-la Payne Stewart.

However, if the ping has been detected hundreds of miles off and at right-angles to the intended course, this would seem to be implausible.

With regard to hijack, they would require a runway of c1.5km to land a 777, presumably there can't be many of those around that are not under the control of a government?

Brawling neighbours challenge 'quiet' cul-de-sac myth

JurassicPark
Joke

Re: Tip toe through the cat crap

"But then you have to deal with dog crap, which is a far worse problem."

I find that unless the border collie has really bad squits, a quick flick over the hedge and the shit is gone, it's literally shit off a shovel (or in my case, trowel).

I am of course joking, although this did actually happen once when one was frozen to the ground and using quite a bit of force to free it, it did literally fly over the hedge.

JurassicPark

Re: Perhaps the headline should have been,...

According to Wiki, the definition is

A cul-de-sac (literally "bottom of the bag" in French), dead end (British English..

Dead possibly being the operative word!

Space-junk RAYGUN wins Australian government funding

JurassicPark
Joke

Re: I think someone...

You can watch gravity? Prey tell how? Do you use gravitized sunglasses?

Care Bears... share: NHS England promises to heal careless data-sharing plans

JurassicPark
FAIL

So the HSCIC was preceded by the NHSIC, one letter difference between the two, I wonder how much difference there is in the personnel? Seeing as the majority of the now defunct NHS PCT staff are now doing exactly the same job but for GP consortia, I'd guess a significant number of the staff of the NHSIC are now doing the same job for the HSCIC!

Amazing that they now

a) won't comment (or investigate) why they sold off our NHS hospital admission data.

b) expect us to trust them with our data.

Brit Bitcoin dev: I lost 'over £200k' when MtGox popped its socks

JurassicPark
Pirate

Re: freetards

Maybe he can sell the knees to Mark K who'll presumably be needing new ones sometime soon after his 'investors' catch up with him.

KCOM caught in yet ANOTHER customer privacy snafu

JurassicPark
FAIL

Leaving Karoo

And it's one of the reasons I'm leaving Karoo (KC's internet arm). Sky's broadband/phoneline offering is £20 per month cheaper with unlimited downloads rather than a 30GB cap / 2Mb download, so it's bye-bye KC The only advantage of a KC line is free local calls for 23h59m per day, but who stays on the line that long?

Not sure if that's from the frying-pan...etc etc. , time will tell.

Frenchman eyes ocean domination with floating, mobile Bond villain lair

JurassicPark
FAIL

Re: Not ideal for supervillains

On the open ocean, there's nowhere to hide...

...er, how about IN the open ocean?

Energy firms' security so POOR, insurers REFUSE to take their cash

JurassicPark
FAIL

Re: Have ANY of you naysayers....

What good is VPN & password protection if the contractor's infected laptop/usb drive is connected directly to the controller? Added to this, antivirus software houses didn't pick up on Stuxnet for 3 years, so AV software is clearly not the answer.

I suggest read this: http://www.langner.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/To-kill-a-centrifuge.pdf

JurassicPark
Mushroom

No internet connection required.

auburnman wrote

"have a strong level of inherent security unless they have been specifically modified to take remote instruction?"

Other than those directly involved, no one knows how the Stuxnet infection was introduced into the core system. The prevailing theories are either introduction via an infected USB stick (involuntary or voluntarily) or by infecting an engineers laptop that was then connected to the 'secure' local network and it propagated from there.

Once infected, the central control system sent 'valid' messages to the equipment being controlled. These 'valid' messages forced the physical equipment i.e. centrifuges, to work outside their design parameters, either creating over-pressure or speeding up past their design limitation.

So it seems that air-gapped systems still need to be physically secure, and the local networks they inevitably rely upon also need to be secured. It's not as easy as just saying the control systems shouldn't be accessible from the internet.

JurassicPark
Joke

Re: "Self-insured"

I'm unique and cannot be replaced, but I can still get insurance.

.....wait, the better half says I'm not the only idiot around and I can be replaced, ah well.

JurassicPark
Pirate

It's not a sticking plaster

"However, insurance is only a plaster over these underlying weaknesses"

...surely insurance isn't a plaster at all, it's just a way of moving the risk onto someone else?

A plaster would be to put in some decent firewalls or air-gap the networks from the internet in the first place. Then replace with secure systems.

I would guess though that a lot of these systems are many years old and the coders that knew what they were doing have had their jobs off-shored to improve the bean-counters profit margin.

iOS 7: Even if you don't jailbreak your iPhone, bugs STILL CREEP IN

JurassicPark
FAIL

"that's something Apple would spot."

Like they spotted the problem with SSL?

JurassicPark
WTF?

Running in the background

Not sure 'running in the background' and 'closing' are the same. I've turned off 'running in the background' for Safari, but it is still available after swapping to another app. Maybe it means the app is no longer monitoring the UI or other input such as GPS?

Reading the linked article, it appears music apps can be set to "not run in the background", but continue to play music when they are no longer the foreground app.

Amazon fuses LoveFilm, subs service, calls it Prime Instant Video

JurassicPark

Re: 60% rise for delivering stuff I don't think so

Totally agree, I don't have a fast internet connection so no point in streaming films. I'm not paying another £20pa for a service I won't use, plus I'm totally against the automatic opt-in, as per NHS care.data.

Stuff the delays! PM chuffed to have BT's superfast broadband in his constituency

JurassicPark
Unhappy

Re: Are you commercially viable?

At least you have BT and the semblance of competition. Here in the peoples republic of Hull we have to put up with Karoo and not a sniff of BT, Virgin etc. , unless you want to go 4G (but not available in my part of Hull), Karoo Lightstream (again, not in my part of Hull) or satellite.

Curiosity now going BACKWARDS

JurassicPark
Alien

Re: beep, beep, beep

If Curiosity reverses on Mars and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Volvo tries to KILL SHOPPING with to-your-car Roam Delivery

JurassicPark
Go

Re: Didn't get what they solved

Maybe more use to Amazon/Ebay etc. , rather than leaving goods next door with the neighbour (allegedly), they have an electronic key that opens the boot of your car, whether your car is parked in your driveway or at the office, you decide. You can always set your car to 'valet parking' mode to prevent drive-off. With more accurate 'GPS' becoming available, presumably you'll be able to send exact geo-coordinates of your vehicle location from your phone (although I'm not sure how geo-coordinates work with height i.e. when in a multi-storey car-park).

Facebook pays $19bn for WhatsApp. Yep. $45 for YOUR phone book

JurassicPark
Mushroom

A beelion users can't be wrong (can they?)

Facebook / WhatsApp. I don't use either, I can't see the point, and gathering from comments on here, most IT literate punters don't either.

But you can't argue at the numbers, 450m have given their telephone number to WhatsApp. Assuming these have to be checked at sign-up, that's 450m valid numbers. Plus 680m mobile Facebook users (I guess there will be some overlap), that's possibly a billion users. Add voice functionality to WhatsApp / Facebook mobile app and that's 1/7th of the world population talking/texting that you can tap into, literally or figuratively.

el capitano Zuck has some serious political clout if he wishes to wield it.

Facebook gobbles WhatsApp for SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS

JurassicPark
Thumb Up

Re: Maybe 15.55bln too much

"My ex used to WhatsApp her friends in the US, Norway and other places, from the UK, often in 2, 3 and 4-way chats. I wouldn't want to try working out how much that would cost in international text messages."

Fair point, well made.

JurassicPark

Re: Maybe 15.55bln too much

Well WhatsApp is 99p per year so compared to £144 a year, its cheap..... sorry I don't get your point here???

Well unless you have a PAYG account and never top it up, you have to pay a monthly fee, whether this is contract or PAYG. On T-Mobile, £12 per month gets you unlimited texts, £10 gets you more data but only 400 texts. So why pay for another app? Admittedly its only $1 pa but I still don't see the point. Personally I use O2 that has TuGo for free!

JurassicPark

Re: What is that?

What app?

JurassicPark

Re: Maybe 15.55bln too much

450m users @ $1 pa less 30% appstore topslice is $315 revenue pa. At that rate it will be 50 years before Zuck sees a ROI. So it must be about more than the revenue stream?

Is text messaging so expensive in the rest of the world? A quick look on T-Mobile (first to load on my browser), £12 per month gets you unlimited texts. So what is the point of WhatsApp?

Whitehall and Microsoft negotiate NHS Windows XP hacker survival plan

JurassicPark

Re: Obviously a lot of people posting who have never worked in the NHS

"staff had been promoted well above their levels "

....Promoting incompetent staff is the only way, in may civil-service departments, of getting rid of the useless idiots at the coal face.

Steelie Neelie 'shocked' that EU tourists turn mobes off when abroad

JurassicPark

Re: Two words

I disable roaming data, never make calls, never take calls

...err, why bother taking your phone with you at all then?

Google warns Glass wearers: Quit being 'CREEPY GLASSHOLES'

JurassicPark

Re: A small window

"Something more justifiable might be Haynes manuals highlighting engine parts as you look at them"

Most vehicle manufacturers are developing augmented reality, but currently this is for mobile phone use, see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26134338

Samsung flings sueball at Dyson for 'intolerable' IP copycat claim

JurassicPark
Facepalm

Re: RE Hoover / Hoovers

Or extreeeemly hungry labs if they are well behaved and you forget to give the command.

Who OWNS data generated by 'connected cars' sensor slurpers?

JurassicPark

Re: My car...

But how will you stop them? They'll sell it as a 'service' , you give us your data, we can give you all these nice goodies...traffic info tailored to your exact location, we'll know exactly how the engine is performing so can tweak it to give you the best fuel efficiency / performance etc.,..oh and trust us, we'll keep your data safe (just like the banks and the NHS)!!!

Either that, or in the small print on the new car purchase will be 'you agree we can read any data collected by your car' .

Once one manufacturer starts, they'll all follow, just like the petrol companies will with E10 fuel.

THOUSANDS of Tesco.com logins and passwords leaked online

JurassicPark
Coat

Is this Tesco's fault?

Not the first, won't be the last.

If users have the same username / password on multiple sites, is this really Tesco's fault?

However it wouldn't be difficult to implement two factor authentication, requiring, for example, a pin, birth date, last random digits of the Tesco club-card number etc. to prevent this occurring in the first place.

I personally don't use Tesco's , but I do use LastPass to create a unique password for every site where I have a logon. However I have had the greatest difficulty getting er-in-doors to use LastPass, she used to have the same username/password combo for fakebook/paypal/ebay/next etc.

WD My Cloud EX4 four-bay NAS

JurassicPark
Holmes

Re: I keep looking at these NAS devices

I've been running my own business doing IT consulting for the last 6 years. All my financials / receipts / invoices fit on an 8gb LaCie encrypted USB stick that has 7gb free! It is backed up to another LaCie encrypted USB stick. I work on the basis that as long as both are kept in separate locations 99% of the time, I should be fine.

Customer and non-financial data takes up more space, about 100gb (pst files, iso images, electronic books etc.) but all this is recoverable from CD/DVD if a laptop disk fails.

So from a SOHO perspective, I can't see the point of a NAS.

However, I'm looking into the Synology DS412+ for streaming DVDs and music.

Indian press focuses on Satya Nadella's love of cricket

JurassicPark
Alien

Career Over

So who is the Kevin Pietersen of Microsoft?

Apple marks '1984' anniversary with iPhone-produced un-commercial

JurassicPark

Re: Successful?

If a commercial is meant to be seen, then an 'uncommercial' presumably is mean to be unseen? So in that respect it's achieved what it set out to achieve so it's a success.

NHS website hit by MASSIVE malware security COCKUP

JurassicPark
Unhappy

Trust me, I'm a doctor, your data (life?) is safe in my hands.

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