Posts by stungebag

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Re: It's an easy go to

This is a great post of you're playing nut-job bingo. Soros, grooming gangs, Assange, it has the lot.

A Kansas pig butchering: CEO who defrauded bank, church, friends gets 24 years

He was targetted as an individual. Either the scammers got lucky or they'd done some research because he gave away his church's and bank's money once his own had all gone. Pig butchering scams are common and happen to ordinary people in the USA and outside it.

WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk

Drupal has got harder and harder to manage over the years, with the need for Composer etc, whereas Wordpress is always pretty easy. But you'd write off Wordpress because they've fallen out with one hosting company? I don't know WP Engine but the name suggests they have built their entire business around Wordpress. It looks as if they give nothing back. Just choose a general-purpose host or use generic cloud resources.

31.5M invoices, contracts, patient consent forms, and more exposed to the internet

We don't know where this stuff was stored, do we? How do you know it's the cloud?

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

So what's new?

This article, and the MS document it quotes, just confirms that the Control Panerl is deprecated and that settings are being migrated to the Settings app. That's been the case for years.

What does this article say that we don't already know?

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Re: From bitter experience, MS hates admins.

Don't think I've ever seen an ad where a backgrounf could be in Teams.

You break it, you ... run away and hope somebody else fixes it

True. Line printers neither buzzed nor made any sort of noise that could ever be described as comforting.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Yes, they were easier times. I used to work for a major US-based company that sold an early 4GL that required you to describe screen layouts in text. A colleague wrote a screen painter that would generate the right text for you. It worked so well that the UK saleforce routinely used it when demonstrating the system. On startup it displayed a nice ASCII-art logo that was an acronym: Direct Input of L*** Definitions Online, or DILDO.

No prospective customer ever found it anything other than funny.

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

Re: The very point at issue?

It's all very well saying that the doctor/relationship record should be confidential, but the problem is there are a great number of doctors in the NHS and you may be being treated by several at any one time. As a recent and unwilling heavy user of two NHS trusts and several hospitals I know very well that trusts don't talk to each other and trusts and GPs don't effectively comunicate. Even different departments within a trust fail to pass on important information about patients to each other.

Example 1. I was declared ready to go home by my medical team, but they referred me to the respiratory team due to my low oxygen level. I occupied my NHS bed for two days longer than I should because the respiratory team never told anyone they were happy for me to be discharged.

Example 2: I was told I needed an urgent assessment by the respiratory team and was sent an appointment. When I turned up I was sent away: they couldn't perform the tests on me because of my recent operation.

Bettter comms, including better record keeping, could have prevcented both, each of which cost the NHS quite a bit of money. There must be a better way and that has to include a single place where all of my data from across the NHS sits. It need not be sitting in the same place as your data, but it should sit somewhere where any clinician that needs it can get at it.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

Don't know about where you live but I grew up in a place and time where every house had a supply of coal gas, which contains plenty of hydrogen. There were explosions from time to time, but safety systems such as closing the valve when the flame was out were almost non-existent. The biggest problem with col gas was the non-hydrogen part, carbon monoxide, which was used for suicide.

So the problems of a grid delivering hydrogen should be far from insuperable.

Not that I'm in favour. Why use electricity to create hydrogen when it's more efficient to just use the electricity directly?

Menacing marketeers fined by ICO for 1.9M cold calls

Re: Spam calls

One of the callers in the article called my TPS-listed landline just this morning to discuss the warranties on my appliances. They don't know what appliances I own and I very much doubt that they'd be of any use if an appliance broke down and I tried to book a service call with them. So they may appear to be offering a real service I'm not sure that they are.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: Silly Mistakes

I never got a sensible reading when I (accidentally) tried to measure the resistance between live and neutral of my mains supply. The end result was similar to that of a University colleague who had the bright idea of getting a ~500v supply by putting two adjacent 240v sockets in series.

BOFH: Zen and the art of battery replacement

"You shouldn't be storing those in the building," our claims guy points out.

"THAT'S THE SPIRIT!

Brilliant.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Re: Hypocritical

I'm astonished at the constant claims on here that Windows (only children say Micro$oft, Window$ and so on) keeps feeding ads. I've never seen one - where do they appear?

If I looked at the Bing homepage I'm sure I'd see plenty of ads, and most sites I visit show ads that ultimately lead back to Google, Facebook and I dare say Microsoft, but where does Windows ever display an ad outside of a browser?

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Not just in the office

I had ISDN at home and a new laptop configured by my employer. I worked from home a couple of days a week, and often left the device switched on at evenings/weekends. After about a month the postman knocked and handed me an A4-sized parcel about two inches thick. It was my itemised phone bill. The laptop had been sent out with IPX/SPX installed which was firing up a data circuit and trying to make a connection every minute. Or perhaps it was every second. In any case it led to many thousands of very short calls, each of them billed at a far higher rate than their length would suggest due to a minimum connection charge.

I can't remember how large that bill was but it was sufficient to get the company to reconfigure networking on that PC very quickly indeed.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Bulldog

I was quite an early broadband adopter, proudly sitting at home marvelling at my 512kb ADSL connection via USB dongle. Streets ahead of my previous 128kb ISDN. But one evening it started getting flakey. No problem, I'll sort it tomorrow.

I pitch up at work the next day and durng a quiet time decide to look at my ISP's website. They were called Bulldog Broadband. I typed an address, possible www. bulldog.co.uk, into my browser. Imagine my surprise when my screen was filled with thumbnails of gyrating naked women! It seems that Bulldog had not checked, or secured, the url. Or perhaps the company was more diversified than I'd realised.

No harm done but by the time I was made redundant several years later Bulldog Broadband had gone. My ex-company put me on a course of handling redundancy and two of my classmates were ex-Bulldog customer service staff. I wished I'd had the ability to talk to them before choosing my ISP. It was, apparently, a porrly managed shitshow.

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

Re: Rate your skill level

Oh dear, the memories. I know exactly what you mean. We had to take an annual skills inventory. This was reviewed by my line manager and normally came back with an instruction to raise my reported skill level for most of the categories. It was exactly what you're referring to. I knew quite a lot but was aware that there were others who knew much more than I did.

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Great start to a Friday! We've all met them. Both of them.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

"The trick is to phase it in slowly, one direction at a time."

They've already started at Liverpool St. Underground station. One of the corridors has a Keep Right sign at one end and Keep Left at the other.

Ex-Twitter Brits launch legal challenge against dismissal

Re: Union

The reason that drivers' wages are quite high is all down to the traiin operating companies. They ask drivers to work on rest days and Sundays (when some of the companies have ZERO rostered drivers) because it's cheaper than training new drivers and increasing the headcount. A further reason is the habit of poaching staff from other operators, which again tends to increased wages.

Royal Mail, cops probe 'cyber incident' that's knackered international mail

Re: Hmm, 'Incident'?

Horizon was Post Office which has long divorced from Royal Mail. Quite possible that RM use Fujitsu, thought.

RIP Fred 'Mythical Man-Month' Brooks: IBM guru of software project management

Re: 6 to 8

The Burroughs Large Systems, dating back to about 1970 but still in use today as the Unisys Clearpath range, were interesting in this respect. Originally character data was 6-bit. 7-bit ASCII support was added and 8-bit EBCDIC which became the normal way of handling character data. Eventually 6-bit was retired in the hardware. The word on these machines was 48 bits so the character size indicated the packing: a word could hold 8 6-bit characters, 6 ASCII or EBCDIC characters (ASCII being padded) or 12 Hexadecimal characters. A word could also contain a real, integer, boolean, complex (over two words) and so on.

Things used in string manipulation, such as Algol SCAN and REPLACE, used character pointers with a length expressed in the appropriate unit for the character size of that string. E.g. you could declare EBCDIC POINTER P then perform operations on it that knew that it was 8-bit units encoded in EBCDIC. Other data structures such as arrays could be SIMILARLY typed.

EBCDIC ARRAY EA[0:79;

HEX ARRAY HA[0:11];

ASCII ARRAY AA[0:131];

An efficient TRANSLATE was supplied.

REPLACE EA[0] BY AA[0] WITH ASCIITOEBCDIC.

Fascinating machines.

Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you

Re: changeme

When I worked in schools' IT about ten years ago most people had systems provided by RM. Most still had the default admin pasword of changeme.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Cop Out

There is, but the word is too long to write in the margin.

OpenPrinting keeps old printers working – even on Windows

Better at supporting old stuff?

My old Canon printer lacks drivers for every Linux distro I've tried. It won't work on my old iMac, either. There are no Windows 11 drivers. But the Windows 8 driver installs and runs just fine under Windows 11. Never solved it for Linux.

Royal Mail customer data leak shutters online Click and Drop

Re: Facts?

You don't need a printer to use the service. There's the option to have Royal Mail print the labels for you upon collection or drop-off.

Cops swoop after crooks use wireless keyfob hack to steal cars

Re: Progress of car security

I had a company Sierra a while back. It needed a thin physical key with a round cross-section to unlock the central locking. Some oiks tried to steal it one day but the police were on hand and stopped them, leaving me with a dangling ignition switch and nice full-beam-only headlights for my commute home on the M25, the scrotes having broken the stalk.

The policeman told me that to unlock the doors all you need is half a tennis ball. You place it over the keyhole and strike it sharply. The air pressure then unlocks the car.

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Re: FTFY

I don't think cookies are the consents being referred to here.

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Re: 17 yrs FFS

Maybe Blair and Brown did think about it but assumed that when the situation changed the Government of the day would be competent enough to change the rules?

Re: Dame Sue Ion, former chair of the UK Nuclear Innovation Research Advisory Board

She must be neutral as she's neither Ann Ion or Cat Ion.

Don't mind Facebook, just putting its own browser in its Android app

Re: Our Ethical default? !Ethical

It's also the place where most villages, clubs etc. communicate. The only thing comparable is nextdoor.com which many trust less than FB.

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

Re: Beauty or beast

With a software update a window safety system can be broken. As can the brakes on a Model 3.

The complexity of all this software makes a constant stream of problems inevitable, not all of them trivial.

Yes, a big IT angle, but not as pretty as you paint it.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Re: I'd pay

You do realise that Office has never lost the ability to keep your stuff local?

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

I got one, too. I hope BOFH isn't next.

Deluge of of entries to Spamhaus blocklists includes 'various household names'

I got on the list because I was using Demon Internet. An early and clued-up ISP. The idea that it's your fault for using a dodgy ISP is plain stupid.

Re: No case to answer

That's good. So please explain how a mail sender opts out of Spamhaus' service. For the absence of doubt I'm not talking about deliberate spammers, just somebody who, for instance, finds themselves sending from a listed IP block because somebody using their ISP so smarthost has managed to screw up (or got compromised).

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

Re: I assume a continuation of their efforts to anex NI

That's the first dab on my cliche bingo card!

Hi, I'll be your ransomware negotiator today – but don't tell the crooks that

Re: That $2000 job

Appointed by the insurers?

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

Re: Phone bills

You mostly got used to the phone bills, especially if your POP was local rate. I was able to access Chelmsford, about 30 miles away, as local. But Chelmsford went down for a few weeks so I had to use a London POP, also about 30 miles away but A rate. My monthly bills shot up well into three figures.

Another notable feature of Demon was its quirky customer support. Knowledgable, yes, but sometimes very rude. The name Richard springs to mind.

Microsoft to block downloaded VBA macros in Office – you may be able to run 'em anyway

Re: Macros are the only real differentiator left between MSOffice and LibreOffice, bar one.

Cash cow? Does anybody, apart from criminals and a few heavy-duty Excel warriors, use macros?

Would anyone even notice if they were quietly removed from Word?

Court papers indicate text messages from HMRC's 60886 number could snoop on Brit taxpayers' locations

This is how SMS works

Most bulk SMS senders wouldn't use SS#7 as that's the internal phone network protocol suite (or was, last time I looked some years ago). But this company did. That suggests that either they're being treated as a telco by their peers, or perhaps they aren't doing anything, a real telephone company is doing the work for them.

In the GSM network any call or text causes a location lookup from the HLR. This is perfectly normal and not in any way sinister.

How else can the call/text be routed to wherever the phone happens to be today?

IBM bosses wrongly sacked channel salesman after Tech Data joint venture failed, tribunal rules

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

Eh? Amost all US states can bin you for any or no reason, within (sometimes) very loose limits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Wifinity hands customers bills for Wi-Fi services they didn't want but used by accident after software 'glitch' let 'fixed term' subs continue

I don't understand why the area being large should affect the wifi. Universities have campus-wide networks as do many towns and cities. Not providing comprehensive, free, wifi is just the usual mean attitude we've come to expect from the state.

I bet the officers' mess has decent wifi.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Yes. tell me about it. I was network manager in a school that owned 600 HP laptops and the most common problem brought to us could be easilly diagnosed by observing whether the little blue light by the little sliding switch was illuminated or not.

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

It's odd how the server editions of Windows manage so well without a UI, isnt it?

Crypto for cryptographers! Infosec types revolt against use of ancient abbreviation by Bitcoin and NFT devotees

Re: how about "Cryptography means Cryptography"?

By his own logic he isn't NickHolland but, perhaps, Mr. Nicholas Holland.

But I think we're in danger of turning into a community of cryptofascists.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Re: VISA will be just the first

Yes, you're correct. I've seen a suggestion that this is due to the UK no longer being subject to EU regulations. While I'd like to believe it I really don't know.

What I do know is that two of my cards, from seperate banks, have recently been replaced before their expiry date. Both were Visa and have been replaced by MasterCard.

Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?

Er, no. Large cloud providers rely on statistics. They hope that your sudden need for 100 times your usual computing resource does not happen at the same time that everybody else needs 100 times their usual resource.

Re: But it's up to us

Zoom runs fine in the browser, so I don't believe it would struggle under Vista.

I would, though, it was horrible.

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

No, they didn't put the answers in the page source code. They used Google Forms. The people setting the exam almost certainly had not the slightest idea, or interest, of how Forms works. It seemed to offer what they needed and even if they'd been told that the answers were hidden in the source they'd have been reassured by their admin telling them that they'd disabled the view source feature (but we now know that the disabling didn't work). They wouldn't have the slightest notion of what Javascript is so suggesting that they hand-craft some js is just silly.

And these are managed machines so almost certainly are in a school. Invigilators are walking around the room looking at screens. Possibly someone's monitoring thumbnails of the whole room using a tool such as Impero. Supervised students doing an exam under time pressure are not in a position to do much in the way of tech-based cheating, even with vulnerabilities such as this.