Posts by yoganmahew

'Business folk often don't understand what developers do...' Twilio boss on the chasm that holds companies back

Why respect?

When you can buy in scrum teams and they fit neatly into your spreadsheet?

ServiceNow bakes more ML, low code into Quebec release to push itself as all-encompassing workflow layer

Re: Service now is horrible.

Horrible, terrible, awful, broken, stuck, impenetrable, horrible...

No paste, only attach!

It's like a comments section without formatting.

Oh SITA: Airline IT provider confirms passenger data leaked after major 'cyber-attack'

Re: Legacy tech

Absolutely, but you forgot the "security is at the heart of everything we do" being in sprint 12 of 11 budgeted for...

SITA is almost out of the PSS business, it has wound down its multi-host platform and New Horizons seems not to have built much popularity. Based on the damage, I'd say it is alliance frequent flyer datasets that are routinely shared to provide good service. When you fly on one alliance airline (e.g. in Star or Oneworld), you can use your FF card on other members of the alliance and get points, upgrades, use of facilities and the like. Because the datasets are quite large and the systems are globally dispersed, typically they are copied locally and updated, erm, weekly? (It is, erm, 10 or more years since I was involved!). The lookup is to check validity and tier level.

What interests me more is where the breach happened. The legacy systems poo-poohed in the article are difficult to hack by their nature (they are poorly connected, have obtuse internals, and weird data formats - SITA PSS was Unisys), so my guess is it's a modern offload and probably a copy to an unsecured cloud bucket. For all the sneering at legacy, this modern stuff is shite.

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

Re: Classic ploy

@yetanotheraoc

A sharpened quill and a fireproof safe?

This scumbag stole and traded victims' nude pics and vids after guessing their passwords, security answers

Re: John Kettley is a weatherman

Poor Wincey Willis!

It didn't (sob)... even make it (sniff)... to GA: Microsoft to pull the plug on Azure Service Fabric Mesh

Re: What?

Do you remember when we brought business value to our customers?

Europe considers making it law that your boss can’t bug you outside of office hours

Re: Simple approach - wages

I agree, I'm senior tech in a specialised field and have been on call for the last 8 years, 24x7x365.25; I'm in the middle of an extra-special on-call where I have to be at my desk within 5 minutes of a call for a customer activation. Total remuneration for this? Zero.

So not just an hour minimum per call, but also a minimum payment for on-call hours.

Reg reader's XXXbox oddity: The BBC4 topless thumbnail trauma whodunnit

Re: "Sweaty masses"

Middlesex, Sussex, and Essex.

Naked mole rat.

Nude make-up.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

You may need proof that you weren't resisting arrest when shot while sleeping.

Dell CTO shares his hottest trends for 2021: Four interesting technologies, one of which is still borderline sci-fi for now

Re: Put the "Personal" back

The first link returned is https://itsfoss.com/get-linux-laptops/; the first item on it is a Dell XPS... the other links prominently feature Dell, yes, I looked. I'm not sure if you're trying to disagree with @Craig100 or agree with him...

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Re: The reason I'm only a geek in my private time

I was in the role of A/P, and came to be the only one that understood a critical part of a large system. The large system is being "mainframe offloaded to cloud", so now I'm a cloud architect setting the requirements for a bullshit bingo outsourced vendor to go and rewrite the system in jave framework on cloud vendor for lowest possible cost to a fixed timescale. Oh, and exactly matching function...

What can possibly go wrong? What could possible be a more depressing job vista?

3G ain’t totally dead yet: Verizon pushes back cut-off plans to some unspecified future date

Re: Reality cheque

@Mike

Yep. A sensible progression would be to retain 3G always as the step down value, and kill off intermediate Gs, so as 5G expands, 4G is deprecated, with 4G phones falling back to 3G.

Slack serves up out-of-order messages, shaky comms as world goes back to work

Re: Slack is doing a good job pushing people over to MS Teams

Teams has been slooooooooooooooooow today too. Though still up.

Surface Laptop Go: Premium feel for a mid-range price, but Microsoft's Apple-like range once meant more than this

Re: The price of this is only "cheap"...

While I agree with your definition of monetary value, I'm wondering what you consider will work day in, day out? I have colleagues with Macbooks, they are always broken if you use anything other than an apple stock app. My daughter has a ChromeOS book for school and there was never a more benighted product, neither fish nor fowl. I've used various strands of Linux since forever and it's okay, if clunky, until it no longer works at all and you have to reinstall the whole thing.

I have fond memories of DOS on a 286 where you could magically flick between DW370 and Netmaster, giving you access to VM and MVS, and Keith and Andy only a short walk and a cup of coffee bribe away from any fix. I'm not sure that's what you have in mind though :)

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: The real issue with the death of CentOS

Add in continuous PCI compliance on a bleeding edge system and components, where a security patch may come with dependencies (since who's going to bother isolating security patches for what's essentially a development OS).

The timing is cynically fabulous too...

Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again

Re: Broken security model

"Tell me how to protect an environment from a monitoring system that, by design and function, has access to every system in the network?"

Absolutely.

Zero trust only 'works' by giving blanket authority to monitoring agents (like Orion). The proliferation of these agents is quite troubling - every container has the same AppD agent, the same Orion agent, the same Qualys agent on the golden container baseline.

PCI DSS gives you a max of 30 days to install critical updates to any of these agents, your external component libraries, and the OS image.

The volume of updates is already well beyond manual review...

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

Re: Could be scarier than one might expect

Like @sitine, I'm concerned at the blast radius. Solarwinds is inside the VPN, inside the the secure zone. The secure zone where all the deprecated machine instances run, where patching is months behind (because why would you need to patch when you're in the secure zone?).

Jake Williams, Security Analyst, might want to consider the thrill of enterprise security logic before he goes happy clappy.

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

Email addresses are free... there's no cross verification that I can see.

Hmmm, when you sign up for a free trial, G a number of times reassures that it will close down the project and look for confirmation before proceeding past the free $300 credit. I have experienced this to be so, though with a spanner cluster server.

So there's a bit not being spoken, maybe it was a company account, not a free-sign-up?

Cisco challenges the tyranny of Outlook with short, self-terminating Webex meetings

Re: Meetings or chats

Short meetings would entirely be taken by Gary from BizOps introductory remarks about how he and the random vendor he's chosen could do the project and really don't need any IT buy in and anyway IT is insignificant next to the dark side power of being a budget owner. Repeat every 15 minutes for different projects and different Garys...

AWS going AWOL last week is exactly why less is more in cloud server land

Re: Tradeoffs the punters can't control (and don't have the relevant decision making info anyway)

On average, the cloud providers have very good reliability...

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

I'm old enough to remember when Middlesex and Essex were blocked by spam filters. Made a mess of my fantasy cricket. Hmmm, a quick G, sees it's still an issue: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2767791/spam-filters-blocking-ontario-county-with-a-racy-name.html

It seems we have both much and little to fear from AI...

AWS admits to 'severely impaired' services in US-EAST-1, can't even post updates to Service Health Dashboard

Re: I learned SRE at Google

And if anything under 5 minutes is not an interruption, then trebles all round!

Tax working from home, says Deutsche Bank, because the economy needs that lunch money you’re not spending

They say "whataboutery".

Ransomware crims read our bank balance and demanded the lot, reveals Scotland's Dundee and Angus College

Re: Backups

And what Rabbit shows is that every business that uses IT is in the IT business; it's not a cost centre, it's a central part of the business. It's depressing how few businesses realise this.

Trump administration proposes H-1B visas go to highest-paid workers first

Re: So what's the catch

"Proposes"

Probably another bung-fishing exercise.

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

Scalability not in the specification?

"The pandemic also created market volatility that led to record levels of trading, which means the application needs to be re-scoped to work at larger scale."

Er, what?

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble, Azure also unwell

Why kill one SRE error budget, when you can kill budgets all over the world?! Of course, companies don't factor that in to their customer experience when they move to the cloud, nor do they care that they are moving from their own DC, limited complexity so good recoverability times (if they staff it) to a complex cloud (the underlying infrastructure is complex) with poor recoverability times (even if they bother staffing it).

The thrill of it all, is a large corporation moving to Salesforce Cloud, Oracle Cloud (or RE), Office364&Azure for desktop, AWS for workloads, F5& Centurylink for networks, you're beholden to all those actors and more doing their jobs; an endless patch cycle (because everything is at least semi-publilc), an endless cycle of EOL mattering.

You cease to be a company in a business sector for your customers and become an operations company for your own inftastructure.

Federal judge temporarily neutralizes President Trump's blockade against visas for foreign techies, other workers

Hoocudanode

That paid for education wouldn't provide the levels of training required for non-fungible knowledge economy jobs.

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Re: Fundamentally flawed

Ah, we're on to software engineers fixes!

Have they thought about having another set of engines behind the first set of engines to balance? It wouldn't do much for the aerodynamics or the fuel efficiency, but it would make the QA tests pass.

Hmmm, make the QA tests pass... that's what MCAS does...

Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

Re: Here's a snippet

You forgot "where's my ducking document gone?"

CenturyLink L3 outage knocks out web giants and 3.5% of all internet traffic

Re: BGP takes two to untangle

Thank you - that might explain it. A four hour partial outage (flapping at 20-40% of traffic) at my place with the fallback routes not working (customers not able to reach us. Only the timing stopped it being a much bigger incident, so I guess +1 for a weekend change slot versus continuous deployment...

Hidden Windows Terminal goodies to check out: Retro mode that emulates blurry CRT display – and more

Re: I've used a lot of terminals...

@Nick

"An entire sub-industry"

And what they build can only be changed in timescales measured in eons. So much for a new option to do something different hacked up in a day, now it is weeks of lead time and a release cycle away.

Or do we have to live with that worst of both worlds "enter additional parameters in this box" and then the GUI does a flipping CLI command under the hood :|

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Re: make deletion routine

It's a pain in the ass, though, to have chat ephemeral. My company set it to 30 days after having no retention set. By that point, everyone had stopped using email and were chatting preliminary project design decisions, preliminary functional agreements etc. All lost, and chaos and arguments ensued for some months. Even on a personal level, having to reask who someone is (it's a large company) every time they infrequently ping you is painful.

"Only personal chats were lost, it's claimed, not chats conducted as part of a Teams meeting or Teams channel, and not any files uploaded to personal chat threads."

This is what MS say, but the meeting chats disapper too. Only chats in a channel are safe, but the channels are broken once you have more than six. Files you upload are still there, somewhere, but the link to them is removed, so finding them can be challenging...

Re: What the . . . ?

No. Even copy/paste is severely limited.

It's on purpose to limit the legal fallout of Teams.

Single-line software bug causes fledgling YAM cryptocurrency to implode just two days after launch

Re: ???

@Pascal, I think you're missing a step.

Someone stored 100k of tulips in a safe.

Someone else said the tulips were worth 500m

Someone and someone else are rich and looking for suckers to buy some tulips.

Next day...

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

Re: And the corporate world ...

Well, not really. An on-premises data centre is securted by firewalls and gateways, often provided by external professionals. It takes some work (or F5 :|) to leave exploitable holes and even then those holes have to be exploited.

Much cloud storage is individual, each bucket is a separate piece of infrastructure that needs to be individually secured. Failure to secure = no security. It literally takes no effort to see the contents of an unsecured S3 bucket (for example).

You end up effectlively with hundreds or thousands of datacentres to secure.

Teardown nerds delve into Dell's new XPS 15 laptop to find – fancy that – screws and user-serviceable parts

Re: Cans of Compressed Air, how quaint!

Lidl portable compressor. Not powerful, so perfect. Cleaning everything from PS4 to laptops to filters on the vacuum.

F5 emits fixes for critical flaws in BIG-IP gear: Hopefully yours aren't internet-facing while you ready a patch

Re: Public services are probably at higher risk

They're all architected to the same shoddy standard, though, lowest common denominator development, make it secure as an afterthought..

I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer

Re: How did they learn he was Dalit?

Hi name may give it away or he may have gotten an education or first job leg up due to being scheduled caste or OBC (as part of an affirmative action program).

What did it take for stubborn IBM to fix flaws in its Data Risk Manager security software? Someone dropping zero-days

Re: Trust

Accompanied by "we take our customers security seriously" boilerplate.

ServiceNow slammed for 'tone deaf' letter telling customers contracts can't be tweaked as COVID-19 batters businesses

Re: @Chris Hills - Are you telling me

Absolutely that's the way it works, with an additional step - between the highest management signing and the finer details, there's a big announcement about how much better the new is going to be and how much will be saved. Then half the workers on the old proceses are ditched and replaced with SNOW customisation 'experts'...

OOP there it is: You'd think JavaScript's used more by devs than Java... but it's not – JetBrains survey

Re: Journalism, Press Releases, and Surveys

@HildyJ

"Unfortunately, in this case, JetBrains had to explain why second place was really first place."

They've chosen the already accepted answer though, that many have to do a bit of Javascript for the front-end and I think they've chosen a good method to expose it by asking what the main language used in the last year was.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

Still coding to 71 characters, 72nd character the continuation line, and the last 8 the sequence number in IBM assembler, but when I started in 1990, we used 132 column emulators for listings, system dumps etc. Ah, VM (now z/VM), what a wonderful development and test environment!

That string of supercomputer hacks last week? Of course it was a crypto-coin-mining get-rich-quick scheme

The weakest link in the toolchain

If the payloads are compiled on site, does that suggest the CI toolchain and automated CD are the weak link?

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Everybody loves Remond

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Sweet TCAS! We can make airliners go up-diddly-up whenever we want, say infosec researchers

Indeed, but would you prefer a spoofable computer (it will always be spoofable)? Personally, I'll always want a sack of meat at the pointy end with decision rights.

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

Re: "XML"

Article still here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/04/amazon-tim-bray-resigns-working-conditions-coronavirus Is it the same one?

Three years ago, IBM ordered staff to work in central hubs. Now its new CEO ponders mid-pandemic: Is there a better way of doing things?

Downvote because "Ginni Rommety was a good CEO. But she frittered away a of IBM's technological opportunities and advantages."

As you later put it, morale is in the sh1tter too.

And centralised bureaucracy (a result of large sites methinks) is also bloated.

If this is a good CEO, then goodness me, I don't want to see a bad one.