* Posts by Lazlo Woodbine

586 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2014

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Robocallers who phoned the FCC pretending to be from the FCC land telco in trouble

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

If the scammers were more believable, they may be more successful

Recently I've had several text messages from His Majesty's Revenue & Customs, many of them are from overseas phone numbers, and they all want payment in Apple gift cards...

US senator wants to slap prison term, $1M fine on anyone aiding Chinese AI with ... downloads?

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Instead of improving the quality of American goods...

The current administration is just going to ban anything that's better than American products, which are, as Frank Zappa so eloquently said back in the day "All what we got here's American made,

It's a little bit cheesey, But it's nicely displayed"

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Just, how?!?

Very clever, but smirking is also usually accompanied by laughter...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Just, how?!?

Smirking isn't just visible, it's aubible - laughter, you've heard of it, right?

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: "I would like to feel safe in my home."

Maybe the mention of physical fights should be a clue to the safety comments

To the victim, the fart videos were a contnuation of aggression.

Clearly the farter is an unstable person to continue sending the videos after a police warning, would you want someone like that knowing where you live?

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

He has, and we hate him even more...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

The way Florida Man is going, the impact may only be witnessed by insects and a few of the smaller mammals...

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

This is fine when public transport works.

I have a bus stop right outside my house, with buses every 10 minutes, starting at 05:11 am. Unfortunately that stop serves a route that runs to the next town, and I work elsewhere.

I've just discovered there is a bus that goes from near my house to near my work, with a 10 minute walk either side.

Unfortunately, the first bus leaves 14 minutes after I'm supposed to start work, and arrives near work 1 hour and 20 minutes later, not bad for a 17 mile journey.

Maybe I could do flexi-time and work later?

Maybe not, as the last bus leaves 20 minutes before my normal workday ends.

Yeah, public transport is great if it works for you...

Canvassing apps used by UK political parties riddled with privacy, security issues

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

I resigned from Momentum after they emailed all constituency data managers, reminding them of the importance of data security.

The email had all our personal email addresses in the CC field.

Despite repeated requests for them to remove me from their mailing lists, I was still getting emails with other members details for over a year afterwards.

I reported them to the ICO twice, I'm not sure if anything happened, as I eventually blocked their emails

You probably have more CIO experience than the incoming White House CIO

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

I thought the Florida Man had banned DEI because vacancies should be filled on the basis of merit and experience...

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

It came back with the answer "42"

We just need a bigger AI to work out the question...

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: As Murphy's Laws tell us

Murphy's law is "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" which kind of applies here anyway...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

We once had a few plasma displays delivered to the NEC for an exhibition.

At some point someone had driven a forklift through all the displays.

The courier still delivered them to the NEC, complete with a pair of neat holes in each box...

PowerSchool theft latest: Decades of Canadian student records, data from 40-plus US states feared stolen

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Deleting the stolen data

Yeah, I'd definitely trust someone willing to blackmail schools, to be true to their word and not put the entire database on the market...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: But why

In the UK we have to keep student data until the student is 25, and longer for some students.

The student can request we delete it earlier, if they wish.

Prior to GDPR, schools using SIMS had no way sensibly to delete old student data, which did sometimes cause problems when former pupils became staff, and their year 11 photo suddenly became the photo we'd use for their ID badge.

Anyway, now we routinely delete old data, we have a problem whenever we get reference requests from agencies doing deep security checks, so we have to reply "yeah, we remember the person, but we have no exam results on record, because GDPR"

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Lots of angry people here

There seems to be a ridiculous number of down votes on posts that are only trying to explain why a school may feel the need to close.

Let me tell you, schools do not close without very good reasons, because we know exactly how badly this affects parents.

Where I work, outside of Government mandated lockdowns, we've closed 4 times in the last 12 years I've been working here.

Twice because buses couldn't get to school due to flooding

Once because of an area wide powercut, we tried to carry on teaching, but the powercut killed the heating, and classes were uncomffortably cold.

The final time was due to far too many staff being off sick and we couldn't cover lessons safelly.

On all but the powercut, we conducted lessons online for those that could access them.

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

" certainly shouldn't be uploaded to DfE by each teacher individually"

What gave you the impression the teachers upload them?

They're uploaded from the MIS nightly.

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

The school has a legal duty to provide meals during term time to pupils on the Free School Meals regsiter (the school will have a paper copy of this list in the kitchen).

They will simply make up packed lunches for these kids to collect.

This does not negate any of the list of things that are on computer...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

These will be kids on Free School Meals, the school has a legal duty to provide them with lunch during term time, so they'll make up packed lunches

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

Until the DfE has a system where we can upload this data to them without touching the public internet, this is our only option.

Back in the day, schools were linked to systems linked to JANET, but now most schools have switched to commercial fibre, as it's much cheaper than the university's networks.

We moved to B4RN and have two 1 gig fibres for less than 1/3 of what we were paying for 500 meg from LUNS

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

You clearly missed the part about teachers setting work in Google Classroom, so the kids are still in school, but at home, just like during lockdown...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

You're not a teacher, so you have no frigging clue how schools work.

The register is a legal requirement, we have to upload them nightly to the DfE.

Without a usable register, and emergency like a fire alarm could be a disaster, we wouldn't know who is in school and who isn't

Yeah, your teacher couldn't be arsed, and yeah, your teacher wouldn't be working now...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

Read today's Guardian, a shocking number of people can no longer write with a pen.

Anyway, it's more about maintaining accurate attendance registers, which need to be uploaded to the DfE nightly.

If you can't have an accurate register, there's also dangers with Fire Registers, you try taking a headcount of 1,000 kids in an emergency situation if you don't know who is in or out of school that day.

I know what you're muttering under your breath 'we had to in my day', well it's no your day anymore, kids today have real problems following instructions, which is partly down to them having to fend for themselves during lockdown, something schools are still struggling to fix.

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: and Trump can't sidestep the law.

He's just pardoned a frigging drug dealer...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7e0jve875o

Asda tech divorce from Walmart delays cut-over for 55 stores

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Without the necessary insider knowledge

They made over £1bn profit in 2023/4, that doesn't sound like a company in imminent danger of going under...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: ASDA

Not as bad as Morrisons, which seem to make a habit of killing their IT systems on Saturdays...

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Not "Fixing", Exactly

Ethan Hunt style IT support...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

A customer of mine used to specialise in network audits, which were usually carried out prior to upgrades or introduction of new tech,

He got a call from a large UK university who wanted to install a new networked IP camera system across the main campus building.

When my customer carried out his survey he found out the university already had a full IP camera system, running to hundreds of cameras and multiple recording servers, that the site management had installed a couple of years earlier, failing to tell the network department.

Because the network department hadn't been informed this system was running on their network and their switches, it wasn't even on a VLAN, and many of the students had already discovered the recording server and were merrily deleting any footage of after hours shenanigans.

Anyway, my customer utilised the existing kit and reconfigured it all so it was on a secure VLAN, this meant I didn't get a sale, but we had a new case study to show to other Universities and large colleges to ensure they installed kit properly in future.

In farewell speech, Biden rails against the tech industrial complex, disinfo dismantling democracy

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Leaders all mysteriously wish they'd taken on the vested interests

The problem with the US, is that Government is set up in such a way that it's alomost impossible to get any real work done.

Raspberry Pi hands out prizes to all in the RP2350 Hacking Challenge

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Transparency

Schoolboy errors don't generally involve frickin laser and ion beams.

These hacks took the best in the business, months to work out.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: The end of pr0n in UK

Back in the day you used to go through a grubby curtain at the back of a book store for the more niche products.

I fully expect Amazon to introduce a grubby curtain Easter Egg to their site, one they can monetise, obviously...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Surely it's already in place at the comms provider

Mine does that, but it was already off when I checked, so I suppose it's an opt-in filter, which it should be

Oh, Deere! FTC sues tractor maker, alleging decades of monopolized repairs

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: It won't

Trump loves companies that give him money, he hates companies that don't give him money

In the 2024 election campaign season, people affiliated to Deere & Co gave 3x more money to Kamala Harris than Trump, but on the whole, they gave more money to GOP candidates than Democrats.

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: It won't

It's definitely woke...

Tim cooking up the dough as his Apple pay rises 18% to $74.6M

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

That would be covered by saying "total package".

My question about why executive pay is called "compensation" relates to the meaning of the word "compensation"

"something, typically money, awarded to someone in recognition of loss, suffering, or injury"

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Why is executive pay refered to as "compensation"?

HPE may have bagged $1B order from Elon Musk's X for AI servers

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Stealing from the rich...

From the article "X and xAI are quite tangled"

Your reading comprehension appears somewhat lacking...

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: How much ink?

We had a large Agfa printer, it was fine for the first few hours each day, then someone would send it a job it didn't like, usually an A5 stapled booklet or something similar, and it would become a shredder for a while...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: How much ink?

Duh, maths failure!

It'll happily print a page at 200dpi every 250ms, so maybe I need to use 4 printers to print alternate frames

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: How much ink?

That's 12.5 pages per minute, I think our WF-M21000 can slow down to that speed :)

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

£699, and bizarrely, they appear to be sold out. So clearly far too many people with more money than sense...

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-wheels-kit

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

A jump from 8gig to 16gig from another fruit based manufacturer will set you back £200, so I'm saying $40 is something of a bargain...

US watchdog sticks probe into 2.6M Teslas over so-called Smart Summon crash reports

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: It is an ASS...

Model 3 was supposed to be Model E to make it even less subtle, but fortunately, Mercedes intervened...

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Voting is for losers

Let him destroy the USA, hopefully USA v2 will be an improvement when it rises from the ashes...

Backup failed, but the boss didn't slam IT – because his son was to blame

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: Oh yes, the famous "additional router from the boss's son"

That doesn't appear to be the case here.

It looks like the Boss just used the same ISP at home, and the ISP was knocked out by a DDoS attack preciptated by his son's beef with other gamers online...

Good news! You'll soon be able to send faxes again with Windows 11 24H2

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Our exchange is FTTP only for new connections, so we have no landline, and I've not bothered with VOIP, no point when my mobile uses WiFi for calls at home.

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Bizarrely, the Epson printer I bought at the weekend can send and recieve faxes, or it could if I had a landlie at home...

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

Re: touch screen is incredibly useful for many applications.

Form factor is relevant here.

I have a touch screen on my laptop, never, ever used it, because there's no point, the mouse & keyboard do everything a touch screen interface can, without getting grease marks all over the screen...

Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

I asked if this existed last week, and this week it appears.

I shall order one after Christmas, because it looks like it will provide the perfect distraction free writing environment for me...

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