Posts by Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese

Who needs phishing when your login's already in the wild?

And this is why I have several throwaway email accounts, used specifically on sites that don't need to know valuable accounts.

An advantage of having your own domain and a managed email service is the ability to have <anything>@yourdomain.com

I always use an email address specific to whoever I'm dealing with [e-mail], [e-mail], etc. Very handy for verifying the source of emails, e.g. if I get an email addressed to bt@mydomain and it's for anything other than my phone/broadband service then I can assume it's from some miscreant who has obtained my details. Also a useful stick to beat suppliers with - they're the only ones who know about the existence of a given email address so if it gets into the wild I can point to them as the leaker of data.

Fujitsu promised to sit out UK deals ... then Northern Ireland called with £125M

It has taken more than three years to find a supplier to fit the bill after the department first published a competitive contract notice in December 2021.

How hard can it be to find a supplier for a GIS? Admittedly, it's for a government department so the requirements will be vague at best, contradictory at worst, but still it's just a GIS.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

However the UPS failed at that task and instead shut down.

A sentence which seems to apply in over half the cases where a UPS is required to actually do its job

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Re: How the **** does it cost £1.5bn?

In the case of Sellafield part of the cost will likely be that plant, equipment, tools, etc. will need to be procured specifically for that job.

A friend of mine who does electrical maintenance got a contract at Sellafield (for something fairly dull like servicing catering equipment). It was a good gig so he took the opportunity to spend some money to refresh a load of his tools, new test gear and whatnot. He was really looking forward to using them for all of his jobs. However....he did his first job at Sellafield and was told that because of contamination risk he wasn't allowed to take anything off site. Fortunately he still had his old tools which he could continue to use on the outside.

So for a big job like this it won't be a case of just hiring a cement mixer or whatever for when you need it and sending it back until you need it again.

UK satellite smartphone services could get green light this year

Re: Impressive

The satellites from AST are the size of a basket ball court

Risk of a thumbs-down for use of non-standard units. Please express as Football Pitches or NanoWales

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

My requirements for a mobile service are best summarised as coverage is available, and service is not s**t. Having as big a number as possible next to the G is a fairly distant 3rd on the list.

Sadly, I'm finding that the operators still tend to struggle with the first two

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: Just don't!

It will never, ever be private and will be used against you and your family sooner than later for certain.

I'm aware of one case where DNA from one of these companies (I think it might actually have been this one) has been used secure a conviction in a serious criminal case. There was a serial killer in the USA (might have been the Golden State Killer, or I may be mis-remembering) where the police had DNA from a crime scene and we able to match it to the killer because a close relative of theirs had their DNA on record. Neither the killer nor any relative had been picked up by the police before, so the police had no suitable DNA record, but were able to source it from the private sector.

Microsoft ducks politico questions on Copilot bundling and lack of consent

Apart from the unexpected price rise, the thing that really vexed me about the appearance of Copilot in Office 365 was that it appeared without any action by me.

My system (Windows 10 Pro) is configured to not perform any Windows updates, and although Office will report that updates are available, I never install them. My philosophy is that the software works fine now, so why risk getting something broken by a rogue update.

However, one day I fired up Word, and Copilot had just appeared unbidden.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

Pulling all nighters for three weeks is clearly not going to go well!

That pattern of working is, as the title of the article says, a night shift pattern. Once you've had a couple of days/nights to recalibrate then it's not a million miles away from doing a day job, apart from the darkness (probably a moot point if working in a comms bunker or somesuch, and the lower natural ebb after 3am).

Far better than some of the working patterns I've had in earlier years of my career which involved things like normal workdays punctuated by night working every few days or, in some cases, normal workday followed by working through the same night in a 24-30 hour shift.

UK's biggest mobile operator starts 3G switchoff, hopes it won't catch out April fools

Re: So what about the cars?

Last few cars I've owned have had their own SIM and associated gubbins, which is used for over-the-air updates to the car's own software, real-time traffic info for the satnav, internet radio for the entertainment system, etc. *

My own phone connects to the car for making phone calls (using my phone and its own SIM) but all the in-car stuff is via the car's own SIM

* all quite impressive when I stop and think about the time I thought my car was a technological marvel for having an automatic choke rather than a manual one.

The northern region uses long distance radio which seems to have a lot of issues.

My house got smartmeter-fied last year - from talking to the engineer, I understand that a key issue is that the radio distance isn't particularly long.

The mast is only about 200m from my house, but as the meter is on the side of the house facing away from the mast and the house has some fairly thick stone walls for the signal to get through, reception is a bit marginal.

Free95 claims to be a GPL 3 Windows clone, but it's giving vaporware vibes

Remarks file

If that remarks file is anything to go by, they could set up a swear jar and the project would be self-funding in no time.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

I have a first-generation Surface Go (magically, both a laptop and a tablet) that still works perfectly, and which will become so much electronic detritus later this year because Microsoft refuses to let its own hardware run its own operating system.

I don't really understand this statement. If the device is working fine now then, barring any physical component failure, it should continue to run.

I've made this comment before on these forums - lack of support doesn't mean a thing just stops working. Admittedly, you may lose some security updates, but I think there's a balance to be struck between ongoing judicious use versus just adding to more e-waste to landfill.

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

I find it an interesting and worthwhile challenge to resolve such queries without humiliating the person I'm helping.

Me too. My go-to tactic is to rely on the fact that there's so much bad design in software, a spot of light fibbing and pretend that whatever problem the user is having is down to that and, in fact, it caught me out when I first saw it myself. As I see it, they can't call me out for being stupid myself if they got caught out by the thing.

"Yeah, I know what you mean about not seeing the huge button with a picture of a printer on it and the word 'Print' underneath. It caught me out too first time I saw it. I think it's because they put it in the middle of the screen all on its own - that's just bad UI design because your eye is naturally drawn to the side where there's a bunch of other controls. Anyway, you know for next time. No, don't worry about it, I'm sure you won't be last person I have to explain this to"

Years ago we brought in a team of testers as part of a project and set them up in their own little sub-office, with a bunch of machines hastily cobbled together into a network using whatever kit was available.

When they uncovered a weird bug in the software they were testing I went over to do some debugging in their environment. Given the nature of the software and the issue they'd reported, the debugging involved plugging my machine into their network and using Wireshark to monitor packets coming and going - basically to help me identify if the software was behaving weirdly because it was getting bad data.

It turned out that the test network was assembled using a hub rather than a switch, so when I ran Wireshark I could see all of the network traffic from all of the test team. Instead of the data I was expecting to see, my view was swamped with HTTP traffic (this predated the ubiquity of HTTPS) for a number of <ahem> specialist dating websites. Words were had about misuse of time, and the illicit connection of the test network to public Internet.

Satnav systems built for Earth used by Blue Ghost lander as it approached the Moon

Re: What3words?

Got to be OneSmallStep for the Apollo 11 landing site

Re: I wonder if Garmin will release maps for the moon

You have now reached your dusty nation

Re: GNSS uses signal time-in-transit to calculate distance

In cases where signals are reaching around the planet, I wonder what corrections need to me made for refraction, etc. I know from experience that GNSS signals coming straight down to earth can be disrupted/refracted/whatever as they come down through the atmosphere, so don't always travel in a straight line (in a previous life I worked on something which performed calculated the amount of inaccuracy introduced by such things, and did some jiggery pokery to correct for it). In a case where the signal is coming around the planet then that could be a lot more atmosphere to travel through.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

I see no reason why a printer needs to have connection to the internet to get firmware updates.

Likewise. I selected and purchased a printer which does what I want it to do, and see no reason for wanting to modify it, so why would I want to update the firmware?

Microsoft goes native with Copilot. Again

Re: Control more of their PC using a conversational interface

If the response is derived from such training data then, based on my experience in looking for help on forums, the stock answer will be "I have the same problem - if you find a fix then please share it"

Raspberry Pi launches CM4 variant that laughs in the face of frostbite

Re: I wonder if...

I'm sure that's nothing that a bit of epoxy resin couldn't fix

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Re: Asbestos

How has every road not just got a utility section under it that you can easily tap into from every road junction?

Most of the roads around me have got access points every few metres. Oh sorry, my mistake, they're just potholes.

Re: Asbestos

Mileage may vary.

I worked with a major utility company when they were first adopting GIS, and they actually had a team of people going out and surveying every single one of their assets ready for digitising into the GIS. The quality of their data was - and, I believe, remains - very good

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Oh well, it looks like I'll have to go to my local branch and sort out my business at the counter....oh....b****r!

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

So Tom was called when there was something major wrong at Ground Control?

The issue was related to compatibility between CP/M and Windows, and not between two different versions of Unix, so it wasn't a case of bashes to bashes

FBI officially fingers North Korea for $1.5B Bybit crypto-burglary

Re: We used to swap marbles at school

That comment seems to imply that those who trade cryptocurrencies have lost their marbles.

FDA clears Google watch feature to call 911 if you flatline

Knowing Google, I expect that if it detects a loss of vital signs it will scour your address book for details of next of kin and serve them some adverts for funeral services and discounted coffins/caskets.

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Re: Colour me surprised. Not.

A candidate that exceeds requirements can be seen as a risk. If they're over-qualified for a position then there's the worry that they're just looking for something as a stop-gap before moving on to something that's closer to their skillset, and not a long-term proposition.

London is bottom in Europe for 5G, while Europe lags the rest of the world

Re: Roll on 6G, I say

Count yourself lucky you can fall back to 3G. Here there's no 3G so when 4G drops out, it's down to GPRS and basically no modern websites or apps are operable over such a relatively narrow bandwidth connection.

Southern Water takes the fifth over alleged $750K Black Basta ransom offer

Re: So they did then

That would be a drain on resources

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

Except for Outlook, Teams, OneDrive. I use and need all three to be able to work with my clients.

I took out a 365 subscription because I needed access to the Word, Excel and Powerpoint as something of a business necessitity. I recently realised that the subscription also includes Teams, so I was able to bin my monthly Zoom subscription. As a video conferencing tool I prefer Zoom, but when it's effectively free then I prefer Teams more.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: More than light fingered

That reminds me of a story my father told me from his days in the army. One of the REME guys at his camp had been routinely posting Land Rover parts back home to England...he'd got more than half-way to a complete vehicle before he got rumbled and sent to the glasshouse.

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

The world's so ****ed-up right now, if I got a completely accurate summary of events (and assuming I wasn't actually witness to the s**tness firsthand) I'd be inclined to dismiss the summary as nonsense from the AI.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Is the needle even in the haystack?

The whole scheme is predicated on the drive actually being there.

If it was brought in by hand rather than in a dustcart as part of kerbside bin collection then there's the possibility that it would have been spotted and scavenged by staff working at the tip. They aren't supposed to, but it does happen* that they spot something that they think could have value and for them to keep it for themselves.

It's not beyond imagination that a worker at the tip decided to help themselves to a free computer, not knowing what was on there.

* Only just this weekend I took some old electronics and enquired which skip a particular thing should go in - the member of staff said to just give it to him and he'd make sure it went in the right place....and wandered off in the direction of his hut and away from any of the skips

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: 100V

Many years ago the power was off to my village for an extended period and National Grid set up a generator to provide us with power for a few weeks. For some reason it was running at 60Hz instead of 50Hz. The only problem I encountered was the clock on the VHS machine (for this was, as I say, many years ago) started to run fast as it must have been driven by mains frequency.

If I wanted to program the timer to record something while I was out I had to do some maths to work out what time the clock would be showing at the start and end of the show so I could set the timer accordingly.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Heil Wankpanzer...?

Swasticar

Very good. Have an upvote and one of these ----->

Re: Not really a time to be owning a Tesla

being driven by a total wanker.

Do you mean individual cars, the company as a whole?

Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon

I think it's great that network providers are building in that kind of capacity as a means of future-proofing, but what I really object to is sales-folk from ISPs telling us that we need that kind of capacity "now*.

At home I have FTTC which gives me around 80 Mbps download / 20Mbps upload, which is plenty fast enough. I keep getting calls from other ISPs and also the upgrades team at my current ISP, inviting me to move to a package that offers better speeds than that...obviously for more money than I'm paying right now.

But I don't need more. The household has a finite number of eyeballs and can only consume a finite amount of HD streamed content. Any extra capacity would be wasted. Fortunately I understand my needs and know to say no, but I do worry about less savvy people being suckered into packages where they're paying for way more bandwidth than they need.

Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10

Re: Still peanuts.

And how do those costs stack up against simply not doing anything, keep running Win10 sans any further updates and just squirreling that cash away to cover the cost of impact of a future incident caused by lack of updates? Individual use cases and risk profile would of course influence how much of an "if" versus a "when" such an incident could be.

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

I thought that weaponised flatulence was a French idea. This Welsh thing seems to be more of a refinement of the idea from farting in someone's general direction, to something more precisely targeted.

Hyperoptic customers left in dark as power outage takes down systems

Re: UPSes are a common feature of...

They might be the Russians, the Chinese or the French in disguise.

I believe they weed them out by only picking up the phone after the caller has been on hold for at least an hour - Johnnie Foreigner doesn't do this queueing lark.

Linus Torvalds offers to build guitar effects pedal for kernel developer

Re: Aion FX are they really tracing ?

if they are really tracing the circuit boards of competitors sorry but thats theft

Tell me you're unfamiliar with the world of guitar fx without telling me you're unfamiliar with the world of guitar fx.

The space is awash with clones and copies. Pretty much every builder starts with at least a Tubescreamer clone and a Klon clone before making their own original pedals. Some copies do add a little bit extra, like an extra band in the tone stack, but often the aim is to produce something which replicates the original circuit as closely as possible. The latter is especially prevalent in the case of Klon klones

Japan's wooden satellite exits International Space Station

Guidance?

Can the craft navigate its way through the cosmos autonomously, or does it need someone to man the elm?

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

Re: Funeral benefit?

For some reason I was under the impression "silencers" were in fact flash suppressors.

The silencers portrayed by Hollywood are quite far removed from how they work in reality. As well as suppressing flash, they do offer *some* noise reduction but nothing like what the movies would have you believe...it's more a case of going from "F*** me! That was f***ing loud!!" to a slightly less strong expletive

Re: I wonder

They're not all criminal masterminds.

Indeed. My favourite is the burglar who went out on a winter night and left a trail of footprints in the snow from the victim's house back to his own house.

Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware

Re: "Always keep a second passport"

I would venture that, in every country that delivers passports, having a second one is against the law.

Not at all. It's quite valid to have an extra passport, and I know some people who do. Visa applications can require you to send in your passport as part of your application, so people who travel on visas a lot will have spare passport(s) so that they can always have one to travel with when other passports are away with visa applications.

A friend of mine has used this to his advantage by carrying both his passports on a trip to the other side of the pond - he used one for getting in and out of Cuba and the other one for subsequent entry to the USA...much easier than showing up at USA immigration with a Cuban stamp in the passport. Similar use cases exists for travelling between some middle-eastern countries.

'Best job at JPL': What it's like to be an engineer on the Voyager project

The engineers went further down the fault tree, and eventually managed to get a minimum program to the spacecraft to give a memory readout. That readout could be compared to one retrieved when the spacecraft was healthy. 256 words were corrupted, indicating a specific integrated circuit. Code was then written to relocate instructions around that failed area.

Something that would make me feel a bit wobbly if doing it in a nice safe earthbound environment...fixing the problem on something all that way away is just something else.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

Re: But but but

If it's not a full featured computer, and it's not saving you money on licenses or power over a standard SFF PC or laptop....WTF is it for?

I can imagine a use case for someone who wants a very high spec PC which will only be used for a limited time each month - buy one of these boxes and spin up a VM in Azure as an when needed. The TCO would be less than buying an equivalent physical high-spec machine.

However....if that's your use case then your almost certainly the sort of person with some other sort of laptop/desktop kicking around that you can use for the same thing, so no compelling argument to buy one of these new boxes.

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

Re: Why would they bother?

And it acts as a bit of a warning too. Without going nuclear yet

FTFY

A phrase I heard on a podcast the other day, which has kind of stuck in my mind..."we are currently in the foothills of World War 3"

Re: Why would they bother?

A dry run for a bigger quantity of cable cutting (inc maybe power and gas pipes).

That was what I was thinking of