Posts by Ynox 25 publicly visible posts • joined 22 May 2015
What do people think this is? Ransomware? Whatever it is, it's been causing a headache for a number of days - It's pretty nuclear to shut down your e-commerce site!
For what it's worth, I used contactless in my local M&S yesterday to pay.
Probably a rough weekend ahead for the team involved in this. Good luck.
I started swearing at a caller once in Hindi. They said they'd report me to the police.
Both my wife and I enjoy wasting the time of scammers. I tell the insurance ones that I had a load of beer and crashed into a tree (cue most of my colleagues laughing their asses off in the background back when I was in an office).
Interestingly, the last one I had which was an IT one I told I didn't have a computer but just my phone. They were pretty keen to get me to install AnyDesk on it. I guess they're changing with the times to find more victims.
And definitely watch Jim Browning's content. It's great. I've made my 73 year old Dad watch it with me and explained how these scams work.
I had a Tiny _and_ a Time machine back in the day.
The Tiny was bought in '96 in the early days of them being on the high street. Was a Pentium 133 with 16mb RAM and a 2gb HDD. It required an RMA for a dodgy motherboard which resulted in it going back off to Asia from what I remember. Think from memory it was a broken LPT port. Also required software support after an installation of Flight Sim '96 resulted in Direct X 3 screwing up the ATi Mach 64 graphics drivers. No real complaints on that.
The Time I bought as a result of a review in a PC mag. It was a weird spec machine only available from their business side of the business. P3 500MHz, 128mb RAM, 17.2gb Seagate disk (Medallion I think), DVD ROM drive, Riva TNT2 Ultra graphics card, Soundblaster Live sound card, Supermicro P6SBA motherboard, crap quality software MODEM (replaced it with a hardware MODEM in the end) but also with a Microsoft Sidewinder force feedback joystick, a half decent quality LG monitor and a good set of Labtec 2.1 speakers. I couldn't build this machine for what it cost then and it had pretty good quality parts.
Overall I was happy with the machines. Also heard about some iffy work conditions there though!
My old university computing society did the same. Nice email with 1000 emails in 'To'.
A fairly friendly (but a bit arsey) email later and I got a data breach email from them the next day announcing what they'd done.
And yeah. I also work in a place where 'Reply All' is pretty much the default option. Cue hundreds of email a day.
I wonder if Sky will only supply this over Sky Broadband? It's entirely possible I guess. Especially if they're hauling multicast over the network too. No Sky broadband, no IPTV.
As for the other way to geoblock - just use a satellite with a tight footprint on the UK, e.g. Astra 2E.
WTF. Hopefully 'legitimate' VPN use is OK otherwise it's not great if you need to VPN to an office for network access.
The UAE has had an interesting run with comms. Remember back in 2009 or so I think Etisalat got a company to create an application to intercept emails on Blackberry devices. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/14/blackberry_snooping/ . Turns out it wasn't too efficient (a thread just polled) which killed battery life and rapidly let people know they had this malware installed!
A few years back I ended up in a meeting on a Thursday night where the PM said 'If this isn't fixed by tomorrow, you're flying to the customer (out in the sticks in rural Iowa - I was based in Wales at the time). Got off the call, booked a last minute ticket (full fare Economy - £1.6k or so) out there and flew out on the Sunday (so I was at the customer for Monday).
Got to the customer on Monday morning only to hear that miraculously, the problem they had no longer existed. No one thought to tell me. Rolled back to previous version of code (this was set top box images) and replicated the issue before fixing the actual root cause - a 5 minute job.
Trip wasn't all in vain though. Ended up going out drinking with Avril Lavigne one night in Des Moines when I was out there (I was 24 at the time - this happened in 2010) and I had a load of other stuff to get on with, so the customer kept me on site for a month.
I still miss those days. They were a good customer - as long as we made progress they didn't tend to get too argumentative!
Spent a while in a similar industry.
General approach I used to always take used to be to spend 5 minutes or so doing some analysis, then if I didn't know what the hell was going on, revert to a previous version. Allows you time to do a proper fix and apply regression tests etc to ensure you're not even more in the shit than you were at the outage.
That said, I've also had enough angry PMs yelling at me at 11pm. Easier said than done when the shit's hitting the fan!
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