Posts by unbender

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

Re: Why the sympathy for the criminals?

MOT records are online, they can check against those if they want to. ANPR flags so many cars passing the typical patrol that they tend to turn it down or off using it when a more obvious offence seems to have taken place.

I suspect that whoever dreamt up this offender cam system hasn't thought it all the way through:

1. The system gets a "match" on a person of interest and pings every officer in the vicinity.

2. How does it convey this message? SMS? Email? Automated radio broadcast?

3. How does it know which officers are in the area?

4. Assuming officers have been alerted that Scruff McScrote has just walked past a camera somewhere in the vicinity they know where he was, but where is he now?

5. Having a location without a vector is kinda meaningless.

6. What if the officers don't know what Scruff McScrote looks like - how will the image be shared with them?

7. I suspect this is impractical unless the person of interest is on the local top ten villains list.

Re: Why the sympathy for the criminals?

I wonder if the author of that line would change his point of view if he is one of those unlucky 1 in 2000 innocents being flagged.

I pull out my ID and establish that whilst I may look like a wrong 'un I am indeed not the wrong 'un that they are looking for.

Alternatively I could pull out my phone and monitise an auditor/victim video for TikTok before wasting the rest of my day in a custody suite.

Why the sympathy for the criminals?

What's the difference between this and a police officer with photographic memory?

Traffic cops have to dial down ANPR as so many cars trigger alarms, but when they do get an alert for "in connection with" they usually find someone that their detectives would like to talk to. Personally I'm all for automating it and dishing out fines for no insurance/tax/MOT automagically - you know the sort of systems that most readers here claim to be experts at delivering.

I fail to see how flagging that someone wanted for assault/DV/murder/rape is walking down the street to a nearby police officer is a bad thing.

On the subject of carrying ID - most of Europe have an ID system and they seem to get by quite happily.

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Re: What's a reasonable lifespan?

My router is at over ten years old and doing everything I need it to do and TBH spending £250 to replace something that has never clocked any errors is questionable from and environmental PoV.

Question here is how long should vendors continue to provide security patches for their hardware? No problems with not getting feature updates, but security patches are the sort of thing that I would expect the EU to get interested in.

Cruise robotaxis parked forever, as GM decides it can't compete and wants to cut costs

Re: May stop quickly...

Burying the HSR either in culverts or tunnels is fabulously expensive. Doing so in the wet is ruinously so. Stopping for a full CSI analysis of any bones that you find when you dig is murderously so.

HS2 was doomed from the off whereas in France they pretty much do as the Romans did - drive the bulldozers in as straight a line as possible with Gromit throwing down track as they go.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Bluffing

I was sat down in front of something that vaguely resembled an Osborne luggable computer and told that as I knew about computers I could make this "thing" work.

The "thing" was a programmable logic controller that drove hundreds of hydraulic rams and solenoids with an equal number of limit switches, buttons, and levers. My very rapid introduction to ladder programming.

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

Re: I cannot imagin the UK having a 10 year limit on roofs.

In the USA they typically use what they refer to as bitumen felt shingles which is essentially strips of shed felt cut into strips and glued and/or nailed to the roof, a form of construction that we'd reject for a garden shed. From a building PoV it has a number of issues:

1. It doesn't breath, trapping moisture and encouraging rot.

2. It gets ripped off by strong winds.

3. It can ignite when cinders from forest fires land on it and thanks to the bitumen is pretty much guaranteed to take the whole house with it.

In the UK we typically have a layer of waterproof OSB sheeting covered by a membrane that is a mix of gortex and aluminum foil, with either concrete or natural slate tiles on top. Here in Scotland you have a choice of aluminium or copper nails as galvanised just don't last long enough. Each slate get two nails and concrete tiles get at least one. Gullies are pretty much always done in lead.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: New outlook doesn't keep replies in the same folder

Microsoft just don't understand the concept of search as part of the whole information management process. It's just as bad with SharePoint - it will search the content of documents when you just want to search titles and vice versa.

New outlook doesn't keep replies in the same folder

The new version of outlook will only save replies in the Sent folder, so if you have any sort of folder based filing system when you reply to a message you have to then go to the Sent folder and move the reply you have just sent to the folder that the original message was in.

This is a feature of the web based outlook and AIUI the mobile app which folks have been complaining about for eons, so far Microsoft have no plans to change this behaviour.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Re: "where guests can reasonably expect privacy expectations"

I spent many years managing the networks in a medium sized hotel.

The only place not covered by at least two cameras was the interior of guest bedrooms and the toilets, the police had made comprehensive CCTV a condition of their license.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid! - running costs are a thing.

My Golf diesel cost £8K at 6yo with 80K miles on the clock and I expect it to carry on returning 60mpg until it retires after I put another 100K or 6 years on the clock.

Running costs excluding fuel and insurance are circa £700pa (all mtce, tyres, and MOTs).

Perhaps the 10mm feed to my house and my four neighbours' houses will have been upgraded by the time I'm in the market for a replacement car and I can consider an EV.

Wipro: Get back to the office for three days a week or else

Re: Office work may become a necessity for security.

The norm is for company laptops routing most traffic through always on VPNs, so it really doesn't matter where you are hooked into the Internet your cyber colleagues can inspect your traffic.

WFH is good for the bottom line and reduces staff churn

DXC seem very happy that virtually everyone is working from home, the other advantage is that the days of people working on client sites have all but gone. Getting kit for home office is devolved to line manager and the budget is surprisingly generous.

That said they don't have so many offices as they had pre-covid and middle managers have experienced a bit of a housekeeping.

US prosecutors slam Autonomy tycoon's attempt to get charges tossed

Buyer remorse

The CEO took a punt on a shiny acquisition that he though would burnish the share price, the board went along with him, and the due diligence was dispensed with.

Turns out that they bought a pig in a poke - apart from Jack and his beanstalk that has never ended well for anyone.

Caveat emptor - why has this even got this far as a legal journey?

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

Re: more BS university studies

As they also seem to be protesting against new rail capacity in the UK, I'm not sure that they've really thought everything through.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

fanless minis

The paperback sized things are low power, silent, and better suited to many of the things that people use Pis for.

Elitebook mini 800s

Ebay is awash with them for £70 or less and as you say they are fully loaded. At that price most ship with windows 11 pre-installed, but they are great for things like Asterisk and Nagios that create logs that you want to keep.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

internal travel time and ad-hoc meetings

Client wants everyone including suppliers in their offices.

People regularly disappear early from meetings and arrive late for the next as they travel between meeting rooms. Managers arriving at your desk and "pulling you in" to a meeting totally disrupts workflow and wastes so much time. The noise of open plan offices combined with the lack of desk space are not performance enhancing.

Net zero and daily commuting are not compatible concepts.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Why customise anything?

Never understood why people buy standard packages like Workday and then decide to write blank cheques to have it bent out of shape to cope with their spechul way of doing things. Top tip, if you are doing something that no one else does, you might just be the baddie.

Local governments love dishing out freebies in order to win re-election, but eventually those generous handouts become a cash consuming monster that no one can control. The social welfare budget is typically half of the budget and seemingly immune to any attempt to inspect it - paying £200 per day per pupil for taxis to take children to school due to their anxieties about travelling on busses etc soo adds up.

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

Not to mention the impact of commuting on the environment

Re: Keep in mind

I was recently given a figure of $20K as the cost of replacing a staffer taking into account the loss of invoiceable work as well as the recruiting and on-boarding costs.

BBC to staff: Uninstall TikTok from our corporate kit unless you can 'justify' having it

Not good new for TikTok's sponsorships

The Women's six nations kicks off on Saturday with TikTok as the major sponsor. If anything like last year they generated mountains of media which the BBC re-broadcast.

Some folks going to be struggling with working out how to square that circle.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Re: Check your privilege

Helps build the narrative that sticking in at school is a really good idea.

Space dust reveals Earth-killer asteroids tough to destroy

You can compress things with electromagnetic radiation. Lasers compressing hydrogen filled balls to initiate fusion is a recent example, XRays to compress dense metal is one that has been demonstrated a few times to produce rather illuminating effects.

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

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Close, it's normally 45x95mm or 47x97mm and comes in 2.4, 3.2, 3.6, 4.8, or 5.4M lengths.

Plasterboard and most sheet materials come in 1200x2400mm, but plywood is 1220x2440 as most plywood is made to American 8x4ft dimensions. This is changing, but means yards may sell imperial, metric, or both sizes and can cause some issues.

Ransomware severs 1,000 ships from on-shore servers

Re: "if it planned to pay them"

The only reason these things continue is that there are gateways between real banks and Crypto-currencies. Without an untraceable way of collecting the loot Ransomware would not be a thing.

HPE to face lawsuit for allegedly misleading DXC investors

"Defendant Lawrie" - an excellent start to the weekend

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Re: University blues

Aston?

Some interesting rooms down in the basement levels of that building, and almost everything surrounding the main hall - especially the voids above it.

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Re: It would be wonderful if some of this now-obsolete enterprise software were made open source

PostScript is a rather convenient way of creating documents when coding applications. Run it through PS2PDF and you have something you can email.

If you want to create PDFs directly an understanding of PostScript makes like a little easier.

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

Re: iNnovation™

Seems that Apple have forgotten the success of the Apple IIe which became the must have computer on the back of the expansion slots which allowed anyone to develop their own interfaces and hook up peripherals. It featured in almost every Tomorrows World report with a stream of ribbon cable hooking it up to the wizzo gizmo. It dominated the market for twenty odd years.

It is no accident that the IBM PC had an open bus and a case with nice cutouts for your expansion cards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series#Legacy

Calls for bans on Chinese CCTV makers Hikvision, Dahua expand

Gateway that allows access to the DVR or a jumpstation that can talk to the cameras. No reason to allow the cameras to be directly connected to the Internet.

UK police to spend tens of millions on legacy comms network kit

Without travelling anywhere in the highlands, there are massive areas of the country where there isn't even 3G.

I'd love to see the effect of push-to-talk on a 4G network when a major incident was going on.

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

extensions and version numbers

An ICI power station many years ago with a snazzy new VAX 11/780 optimising the combustion process. VAX/VMS introduced version numbers, so the filenames were all in the format filenames.ext;version (IIRC 9.3;3 characters), every time you edited a file it was saved in a new file with an auto incremented version number which saved many people's bacon over the year.

Space was always an issue as the HDDs were only 128MB, so the OS provided a handy utility to purge the old versions down to a sensible level.

The designers of the system came from PDP land and decided that these newfangled version number things could be utililised for something more useful. So cue a directory filled with files named thus:

tempinput.dat;1

tempinput.dat;2

tempinput.dat;3

.

.

.

tempinput.dat;150

Each one contained all of readings taken every 15 minutes for an individual sensor.

I (being a newbie muppet at this point) typed PURGE/KEEP=5 across the entire disk and left the scene of disaster chuffed at the amount of space that I had recovered.

Scottish enviro bods shrug off ransomware gang's extortion attempt as 4,000 files dumped online, saying it's nothing big

No backups it would seem

The report would suggest that they were relying on simple cloud replication instead of an actual backup system. Attack on the 24 Dec, backup corrupted the following day.

100% data loss.

https://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/uploads/docs/report/2022/s22_220201_scottish_environment_protection.pdf

Seems to have been rotting from the top https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-60087226

What happens when back-flipping futuristic robot technology meets capitalism? Yeah, it’s warehouse work

Dr Who might have an opinion on that idea

So sort of Cybermen?

Third time's a harm? Microsoft tries to get twice-rejected encoding patent past skeptical examiners

Re: Further news

These triangles of yours - do they have rounded corners?

Asking for a litigious fruity friend.

Back to the office with you: 'Perhaps 5 days is too much family time' – Workday CEO

The elegant elephant in the room

One subject that no one seems to have passed comment on: How many of us met our partner in the office?

There are somethings in life that are definitely better in the flesh so to speak.

That's it. It's over. It's really over. From today, Adobe Flash Player no longer works. We're free. We can just leave

Rumours of its demise may be premature

Here in the frozen North the SQA are keeping the monster alive with the aid of the Surpass Viewer. As if things were not bad enough for students trying to self school from home, the SQA seems to have built everything on Flash and is pedaling a windows only workaround which most famously will not run on the Chromebooks that the Scottish Government have been doling out to students from deprived backgrounds.

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

Re: New builds

The developer only installs ducting if they get paid to do it, they charge Transco and the local water board to run in the utilities. Yes it would make sense to have ducts and a DP for the estate, but in practice the developer is too busy squeezing in another bedroom or parking space.

Paging technology providers: £3m is on the table to replace archaic NHS comms network

The 160MHz carrier and it's ability to penetrate walls and go round corners is the magic that is going to be very hard to replace.

IMHO the NHS is big enough that it should be able to use bespoke products as their end user population for almost anything is large enough to generate economies of scale. If they were to take the opportunity to add some marginal improvements to the existing pager system then they would have a device that others with similar coverage issues would adopt.

Lords: New IR35 off-payroll tax rules 'riddled with problems, unfairnesses, unintended consequences'

I've rejected approaches from four different recruiters in the last fortnight trying to resource public sector roles in strange locations that would mean travelling for almost anyone that takes the gig. All inside IR35 (one with option of 18 month FTC), so the cost of travel and subsistence can't be set against tax.

It would seem that they are really struggling to find candidates. Doh!

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Re: Wear face protection?

"...slightly longer than one dead relative laid out on the ground"

African or European relative?

Check Point chap: Small firms don't invest in infosec then hope they won't get hacked. Spoiler alert: They get hacked

How about SMBs implement the basics

In no particular order:

1 Enable Windows Defender (it's a freebie), or whatever end point protection you prefer

2. Disable local admin rights

3. Remove write access to archived (old) files

4. Setup and maintain proper backups - even (especially) if you are in the cloud

5. Restrict full admin rights.

HMRC claims victory in another IR35 dispute to sting Nationwide contractor for nearly £75k in back taxes

Travel and lodging?

What is going to happen to those that work on 12-18 month contract travelling from home every Sunday night and staying in a hotel? HMRC seem to be saying that those costs cannot be deducted pre-tax by the contractor, so are they to be added onto the day rate?

It's going to hurt companies in remote places like Dounreay bigly.

You're always a day Huawei: UK to decide whether to ban Chinese firm's kit from 5G networks tomorrow

Are there any computing companies left in the USA that do actual R&D, you know develop new products?

This is nothing to do with security and everything to do with propping up failing American companies like Cisco who've taken their eye off the ball.

DXC Technology warns techies that all travel MUST now be authorised

Re: Paperclip counting jobs

Problem is that DXC is too big to swallow, even for someone like HCL. Splitting it up for a sale would require a whole lot of thinking and effort by people in a very short time.

MPs tell BT: Lay more fibre or face split with Openreach

Re: Nationalization not needed.

Except for the fact that there is no obligation to provide mains electricity, gas, or water, nor unless it is residential, a telephone you got all that right.

I built a house in 8KM west of Dumfries - no water, electricity at cost (£4000 in 1985), no sewage, no gas, and the telephone I only got because I dug a trench for 500M. The rule of thumb used to be that universal obligation only included one telegraph pole.

Stop resetting your passwords, says UK govt's spy network

Ironic (given the subject) that no one has recalled this nugget yet

Passwords have been done to death, but as always xkcd has summarised it raterh well: https://xkcd.com/936/