Posts by Korev

Royal Mail wins worst April Fools' joke 2023

Royal Mail said in a statement: "The poster was removed and the local manager has apologised.

I bet the staff are so pissed off that s/he needs chain mail armour

Criminal records office yanks web portal offline amid 'cyber security incident'

We're not sure ACRO should be handing out security advice right now but in any case, it urged users to make sure they use "strong and unique passwords"

Even with a 1000 character-long random password, this wouldn't have helped if the miscreants had compromised the system and have access to some very sensitive data.

Having a unique password is always sensible though.

Benchmark a cloud PC? No way. Just trust us, they work, says Microsoft

If the cloud VDI VMs were significantly faster than a "traditional" setup then I'm pretty sure there'd be Apple-esque hubris all over the place

Re: Benchmarks are important sometimes..

I mostly agree, but not so much with The only use cases for Cloud are small firms with no in house IT Talent

Running stuff in the Cloud still requires skills, albeit it different ones. You obviously don't need the hardware people, but you still need people who know how to spin up VMs etc. The risks of getting things wrong are debatably higher too, as the number of "hacks" on S3 buckets shows.

Re: Benchmarks are important sometimes..

A friend had a business who self-built some consumer-level PCs for running their tests. They got taken over by a company who'd standardised on Azure, apparently to match the speed of the PCs they built for a three figure sum, their new corporate overlords had to spend a five sum in Azure!

IBM, Kyndryl cut jobs even after cutting ties

Re: 100 Kyndryl employees in Austin TX?

Good luck finding a new role in a better company

IBM shrinks z16 and LinuxONE systems into standard rack configs

Re: LinuxONE Emperor 4

Superb David 132 -->

Phwoaar see the AS400 on that

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

Autistic People too

I was at a talk about Autism yesterday and the "All the skills we can possibly think might be useful" style of job advert was mentioned as a barrier because Autistic people see the list as minimum requirements and then think they're not suitable.

Capita: Cyber-attack broke some of our IT systems

It's often said on here that the companies' previous performance isn't taken into account when things go out to tender

AI software helps astronomers deblur galaxies snapped by Earth telescopes

Will they use Samsung phones?

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

Re: Money for nothing, it's the best

He's a Fire Engine for growth

Re: Money for nothing, it's the best

It'd be interesting to see if he climbed the career ladder

Re: Money for nothing, it's the best

I'm pleased they didn't fire him for just doing his job...

Ex-politico turned Meta hype man brands Metaverse 'new heart of computing'

> Why would I want to wear a bucket on my head?

I thought you looked a bit pail

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

> But what the discerning reader really wants to know is, where were Jane and Freddy?

They could help with the Bungled storage shutdown

Re: So you could say...

He should file for damages...

Sounds like a SCSI way to treat your employees to me.

You mean terminating them?

He needed to fibre channel his anger somewhere...

Rod stuck in the job long enough for the wheel to turn: a re-org or two later he was again asked to take on storage support, trained another group of colleagues, and watched them leave with the skills he had imparted on their CVs.

Looks like he had to leave to keep his SANity...

Virgin Orbit lays off 85% of staff as funding deal falters

Cornwall Council "invested" £10 million into the Spaceport at the same time as cutting the Duchy's museum grants meaning it almost had to close and still faces an uncertain future. Hopefully the Cornish taxpayers will start asking some hard questions!

Looks Cornwall will have to go back to Wrecking at this rate -->

Psst! Infosec bigwigs: Wanna be head of security at HM Treasury for £50k?

Re: Only reason to take the job

Like Crapita? That being the Crapita who only this morning had what could well be a cyberattack

One of the sad things about The Americanised Register these days is that you now have to read about stories like this in the mainstream press...

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Hmmm

I'm related to a psychiatric nurse who does cross fit and is rather big and strong. The cops dropped off one of their patients who'd "gone for a walk", took the handcuffs off, left as soon as they could and the patient saw the nurse as another figure of authority and floored him! I believe Vitamin H was served shortly afterwards...

> Wonder if "snow-flake" is a gendered term?

How can a database be gendered?

Re: Usage

> I have heard, on occasion, the temporary sexual union of a male and female referred to as a "boff".

Not usually a "problem" for your boffin

UK seeks light-touch AI legislation as industry leaders call for LLM pause

Re: How quaint it is .....

They know about creative expense claims and noses in the trough. But IT?

Oh come on, those duck houses won't clean themselves you know...

Exasol: Taking a bet on the affordability of in-memory analytics

Thinking of machines with ~1000 CPUs in the 90s is incredibly far-thinking.

The only single machine I can think of with that kind of scale were the Cray XMTs. I think CSCS' machine had 2TB of RAM and 8192 threads. I guess we'll see "normal" servers with that scale towards the end of the decade.

A pint of Britain's finest for the German boffins -->

Re: Name....

Where can I send the invoice? -->

Microsoft Defender shoots down legit URLs as malicious

Well to be fair to MS, Zoom installing a web browser without asking is a security risk

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

Re: Make it fast?

I remember my uni ran Win3.11 on some 450(?)MHz Pentiums IIs for a bit, the loading screen popped up for than a second. They got a lot slower once they'd got NT4 on them...

Re: "On average, a typical user switches ten thousand times per month"

Many of us were/are stuck with Teams, because the Central Corporate IT Bureaucracy was entirely populated by Microsoft types who were completely devoted only to Microsoft products and would tolerate no other.

Don't forget that Teams comes bundled with Office365; to run Zoom, Slack etc on top costs more money.

I have no idea how this has been allowed to get past the competition regulators!

Amtrak back on track after server breakdown forces dozens of cancellations

They need to alter some buffer settings on the server...

They couldn't see the points of working...

Sounds like some IT teams are due for some training

Looks like there was a sleeper on the job...

France bans all recreational apps – including TikTok – from government devices

Next one: stop that nonsense that is BYOD.

FTFY

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

The old office where no one worked. Ethan's company was paying for a service that had exactly zero users.

A true BOFH would have taken full advantage

And was the accounts deparment billed for the lost revenue ?

Because I would have taken that from its budget.

There's no way they'd let themselves be accountable...

Matthew Brown Companies confirms it's in funding talks with Virgin Orbit

This Cornishman hopes that the company can be saved as good quality non-seasonal jobs in that area of Cornwall are very hard to come by

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Take aways

In my favourite curry house, since Covid, the couriers now outnumber the customers actually sitting down for a meal :(

I know the owner quite well and he doesn't like it, but he wants to stay in business. Things have started to pick up again, so hopefully people will continue to come back.

Re: Higgins

I used to be a tester, in general I found it very boring; however, it was fun thinking of really nasty ways to break the software...

Re: Ahh...yes, metrics

Some interesting Fax there for the management

Re: Installed Remedy

We went from Remedy to Service Now for the Company-wide stuff. Internally we used Jira which is much nicer!!!

Stockholm Syndrome -->

Well... This EXPLAINS Bombastic Bob

Re: I see this a lot

I was on a major cross-organisation project. The company doing the AWS side of things assured us that the tests for their stuff all passed.

One day I thought I'd look and see what they did... terraform validate

BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days

Re: Compassion

Nah, then they'd be board stupid...

"How about an alternative option," I say. "Tell the board there's a free gin tasting on the sixth floor then turn the lifts off. Anyone who makes it up the stairs gets a GPS watch and anyone who doesn't gets a free trip in a hearse. It's win-win."

Sounds like there'd be a lot of coffin...

SAP user group: We want the same features on-prem that you put in the cloud

I suspect they'll have to start to reduce costs now, I can't imagine they'll lower egress charges though!

IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs

Re: LinkedIn

Out of interest, where are you based?

I had a phased return after an injury a few years ago, I really liked being a 50% - enough to do to keep your brain ticking over, but enough time to do what you want. I did the maths; I could afford to do it now, but I'd never be able to retire.

Journalist hurt by exploding USB bomb drive

Re: Other explanation…….

Or a fork bomb?