Posts by Blotto

Nosey ex-NHS staffer slapped with fine for illegally peeking at medical records

looked up family and friends

I assume she looked up family and friends and one of her family or friends blabbed resulting in a complaint that traced back to her looking up stuff not related to her role.

you can imagine how some private information can be blabbed in a heated argument or just general gossip.

Most officers over 45 will tell you how they looked up daughters / nieces ex wives potential partners etc.

Its human nature to look and these reports of unlawful access just exposes the serious failings of the current controls in place.

we should all get access to near time (updated monthly) report on who is accessing our data for what reason.

Brit folk STILL not getting advertised broadband speeds – survey

I'm surprised so many posters here don't understand why it's advertised as "upto".

The simple explanation is that the signal traversing the connecting cable degrades over distance. The same service is sold nationwide yet everyone's connecting cable is a different length. Longer cables suffer more signal loss and therefore will not achieve the upper end of the upto, shorter cables can achieve the upto limit.

Signals on Fibre also degrade with distance, it's just that the distances required for bb are well within the margins for delivering top speed for the overwhelming majority of end users.

How do you remove the upto part whilst keeping the advertising simple for consumers? The £20 tier will not exceed 40mbs? The £30 tier won't exceed 70mbs? Speeds dependant on survey?

I'm happy with the "upto" marketing and receiving the more accurate estimate when applying.

Upto doesn't tell me anything about the quality of the connection offered by the isp though. An official tier branding from OFCOM would help, tier 1's being bt, Sky etc, tier 2's perhaps plusnet, Zen etc. Consumers won't care though and would just want fastest for cheapest and moan like hell when it doesn't work.

Jocks' USO block shock: BT's 10Mbps proposals risk 'rural monopoly'

@Anonymous Coward

"Get stuffed BT, give the £600M to B4RN so people can have proper 1Gps fibre rather than your crappy FTTC."

they could just give me the £600m & i'll sort them a decent net connection too.

i suspect BT won't be too happy just handing over "loads a money" so some other comms company can profit from them, whilst a stupid idea, there is likely some competition law that forbids them doing so.

Marcus Hutchins free for now as infosec world rallies around suspected banking malware dev

the state plays the same games with those that aren't famous too.

Imagine your on holiday, about to come home and are misidentified as someone they are after, you'd get the same treatment too.

The thing that bothers me the most is that if we heard of this behaviour in Russia, North Korea, China or some other country we have been brought up to expect poor treatment of their citizens, we'd all be moaning about how inhumane they are for treating their citizens in this way. If a foreign country had arrested a US citizen in this way, guilty or not, they'd be sending in the black hawks and parking the Reagan of the coast.

the behaviour of the US towards its citizens and world neighbours over the last 17 years has been getting more and more questionable.

WannaCry-slayer Marcus Hutchins 'built Kronos banking trojan' – FBI

Re: Also Wannacry?

All that vs editing a host file entry and spinning up a vm in a sand boxed environment?

Ok

Re: Also Wannacry?

If he's a security guy and noticed it trying to get to a non existent domain he must have seen it do a dns lookup. The easiest and quickest way to determine what it would do would be to add an entry in his host file and point the domain to a webserver in his own LAN, not go to the lengths of paying for and registering a domain with an odd name then create an internet facing webserver and point the domain at it. Turns a 5 min job into a few hours at minimum and at some cost. If after testing in the home lab he discovered it rendered the attack null then great buy the domain, put your sever on it and tell the world.

There is something a little off with this.

UK IBMers lose crucial battle in pension row

Huge betrayal of trust

That is a huge betrayal of trust and a huge kick in the nads for employees not just of IBM or in tech, but across the whole employment spectrum (except government).

People would have turned down offers of employment from other employers due to the perceived strength of the IBM pension fund. To change the rules after committing to employment really is not fair.

Network and IT investment spanks Three's bottom line

Boasted

"Three also significantly boasted its spectrum holding with the £300m acquisition of loss-making firm UK Broadband earlier this year."

pea-cocking about their purchases, what ever next cheap prices?

Apple celebrates soaring iPad sales: Put it on my tab, says CEO Tim Cook

Re: The new iPads are amazing, but still overally expensive

While I agree the price is bonkers, it's clearly selling well so must be filling some need that is not readily apparent and the other vendors aren't capable of satisfying.

For most people this will not be there first tablet purchase.

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

got nothing to hide etc

if they (government) want to spy on all of us, they need to provide an honest and accurate bi annual report on who they have looked at for what reasons.

i'm sure once mr and mrs average find out how often they have been looked into they may ask the government to change their minds.

Cellphone kill switches kill cellphone snatchers

Re: No longer a deciding factor..

i was wondering how much it would be worth.

Is that £50 the thief would get or is that £50 the repairer would charge the customer for the bits? If the latter then parts from China/ebay/Amazon may well be cheaper

Wallet-snatch hack: ApplePay 'vulnerable to attack', claim researchers

MiM attack

dismissing the first attack because it requires a user to circumvent the built-in security of the device, like others have mentioned, blaming the front door lock when the back door is wide open.

The second attack requires the phone to connect to an unscrupulous wifi network who's owners can then perform a man in the middle attack while the phone user is makeing an internet transaction paying via apple pay.

you'd hope the iphone would complain about the MiM cert not matching Apples but as that is the point of MiM attacks (masquerading as a CA authorised to validate certs) then that's why that gets through.

is the onus then on Apple to ensure token replay is not tolerated?

the token is meant to be meaningless once used so i'm really surprised a replay is tolerated when the token can just easily be regenerated from the legitimate source.

Uneasy rest the buttocks on the iron throne. Profits plunge 14% at Sky UK and Ireland

Re: THe Real Reason

i still get F1 free with my HD subscription, i've not heard so far if thats changing.

Sensor-rich traffic info shows how far Silly Valley has to drive

Publicise details of what's recorded

It's about time the public learnt just what details our cars are recording about us and our journeys.

Most (if not all) cars from ~2000 onwards are data logging details of our journeys, like an automotive black box. Accident investigators can replay details from moments before an accident occurs and ascertain what you've been up to.

It's about time it was more publicised.

I can see Waze now integrating with obd apps to gain this same brake data and enhance their own service, maybe offer extra points or graphics for enhanced output. Putting even more data in googles hands.

Take that, gender pay gap! Atos to offshore hundreds of BBC roles

its about time other non it or manufacturing jobs where outsourced abroad.

Its totally possible for broadcasts to be made from anywhere so why not ship the other functions offshore and just keep the data and associated tech jobs here?

Google goes home to Cali to overturn Canada's worldwide search result ban

Do no hm?

UK ministers' Broadband '2.0' report confuses superfast with 10Mbps

Re: Available but not realistic

@Lotaresco

any links to those 100mbs fibre products that can only be used upto 80 mbops?

never seen anything advertised like that other than Virgin Media advertising 100mbos and beyond.

Also while they state you have to use their rubbish router, its often not impossible (other than on Virgin) to use your own.

Repairable-by-design Fairphone runs out of spare parts

Re: Why on earth didn't they just use standard components?

"I buy my organic veg from Waitrose and my electrickery from Ecotricity, but my beer comes from Lidl. :)"

the funny thing is that I get the same eco or un eco electricity as you but I have a contract with the cheapest supplier.

My phone runs over the same airwaves and same providers as yours and was purchased in 2014 yet is still supported by the manufacturer,

in fact the manufacturer have already announced their 2013 model (still supported too) will be compatible with their forthcoming next release.

To me it seems that Global manufacturers producing phones on mass already have a better longevity model than FairPhone, who appear to be just another Android shop with a supposed ethical twist.

Sorry.

UK mobile number porting creaks: Arcane system shows its age

Re: Makes me wonder..

Use whatsapp.

I barely send any SMS's now, mainly iMessage and whatsapp.

I had a similar issue a longtime ago with c&w not able to phone to orange. A chat with their senior techs revealed they didn't have the prefix in their call routing system, while it took minutes to fix, it took a lot longer to get someone knowledgeable to look into it.

No one still thinks iOS is invulnerable to malware, right? Well, knock it off

Advatorial

This whole article was like one long advert for some upstart vendor.

So IOS is secure, but just invade use our crapware too.

'Millions of IoT gizmos' wide open to hijackers after devs drop gSOAP

Re: Of course it won't happen anytime soon

the answer is to secure the network the cameras reside on, ensuring the devices never receive the crafted messages that will pawn them.

if your not doing that already then simply sniffing the traffic over port 80 will get you the login and other details anyway.

This would be much more of an issue with IPv6 with all those internal hosts directly addressable on the net without default NAT provided by the current limitations of IPv4.

Deutsche Telekom G.fast demo pushes G.Fast faster, further

How does it push g.fast further? Faster perhaps, but no mention of further.

Stop all news – it's time for us plebs to be told about BBC paycheques!

More high earning radio stars than tv.

It appears to me that radio celebs are being paid more than their tv counterparts, unless of course the tv stars are earning off the direct BBC pay scheme, I.e through production companies commissioned by BBC.

Re: OK Not to defend the BBC and all...

I think you got that backwards.

Many on the list and a lot more not on the list are paid by production or management companies. Their total salaries including from companies the BBC has paid is not shown.

The excuse is that other BBC companies like BBC America may have paid or part paid. Ultimately it's the BBC that paid so should be included.

Australia releases MH370 sea floor data but search is still off

Huge areas depicted, but tiny in the grand scheme of things as shown when zoomed out.

Sad for the family's not knowing after all this time.

Have Malaysian Air had their third bit of bad luck yet?

Global Switch suffers uptime blips at London Docklands DC

Re: At least 10 floors for a DC?

single floor, multi floor, pentagon military complex, i really don't think it makes much difference if some nut jobs decide to fly a jet into it.

best to be in an area where a plane is not likely to strike (avoiding airport approaches is an obvious).

Openreach asks UK what it thinks about 10 million 'full fibre' connections

At what cost to those that don't want fibre or are happy with adsl or just a phone line?

Tape lives! The tape archive bit bucket is becoming bottomless

@Charles 9

For the cost of tape, writer and off site storage, you might as well just pay a big cloud provider for space.

How much is a big capacity spiny disc and how much for the same storage online for a year?

MH370 researchers refine their prediction of the place nobody looked

Re: What can be learned of the crash at this late stage?

the fact we've not seen much debris indicates that the plane likely landed mostly intact and then likely sunk intact.

there are lots of the external pieces of the aircraft that are designed to float in the event of a landing at sea (not float enough for the plane not to sink, but float enough for a debris field).

How to pwn phones with shady replacement parts

Re: Fantastic way to make phones unrepairable

@Paratrooping Parot

Ffs, Do you want your portable device to be vulnerable to attack or not?

It's not the phone manufacturers coming up with compromised replacable parts.

Get the genuine oem stuff from the manufacturer or its approved resellers, not the shady cheaper , no recognisable brand thing off eBay arriving from some unknown Chinese seller at a fraction of the price.

It's like when a company outsources their IT to a developing nation, on paper it's the same tasks being performed but we all know the quality will be vastly different, and who knows what back doors are being left wide open exposing company data to all.

I'm reminded of that golf advert, the dealer closing a car door and saying "see it sounds just like a golf", the girl looking back as if to say no chance.

Lordy! Trump admits there are no tapes of his chats with Comey

Re: It only gets worse

We only just dodged a likewise duff candidate this side of the pond, making promises he had no intention of paying for just to give the incumbent a bloody nose.

When you have 2 poor choices then there really is no choice at all.

I do wonder what kind of scary hell we'd be in if Hilary / Jeremy had won their respectives.

Honda plant in Japan briefly stops making cars after fresh WannaCrypt outbreak

The virus was not proxy aware so the registered domain didn't work for those who went through a proxy

BT problems impact Department for Work and Pensions services

Not just the DWP looking to break large contracts into smaller ones, large parts of Government see it as a way to save cash, also sticking as much of their crap in the cloud as possible is seen as a positive move.

They no longer have the in house skills to manage their IT, having long ago decided they are not IT shops and IT is better managed by IT companies with SLA's that upper management can hold to account.

Its a bit like the NHS and its key targets and stats that just skew the delivery of care to try and satisfy the numbers rather than deliver real patient care.

Government PM's and managers are no match for the sales bods in the giant outsources who promise the earth and deliver little, charging more in consultancy and products to deliver on the promise the agencies thought they where gaining, often at the expense of working solutions.

Companies often earn more out of failures to deliver than they do when they deliver on time and on budget.

Tesla death smash probe: Neither driver nor autopilot saw the truck

Re: Still driving?

@ John,

yes i agree, i assume the camera is mounted at the top of the windscreen in front of the rear view mirror (next to the light sensor for turning the lights on etc) to not obstruct the drivers view and also for a better view of the road. Surly the camera, light sensor and controls for the sunroof or other roof mounted controls going off-line at the same time would trigger an auto pilot off or emergency car stop.

modern cars can tell you when and which bulb is out, electric windows stop closing when obstructions are in their way, aircon changes mode when sunroof or windows are open, modern car alarms listen for the noise of braking glass their mics are often in the ceiling, driver attention monitors monitor driver input, curtain airbags again ceiling mounted firing down checked and primed on car switch on plus lots more sensors who's sudden going offline would indicate a good reason to stop a car.

the above is mainly what i know about my 2011 car (not a Tesla). I'd imagine a more modern car would be similar or have more sensors.

BMC and CA in agreeable acquisition talks – report

Re: By having a monopoloy of all options for certain tasks on a MF or legacy platform.

I think you give them more credit than they deserve

They are either a basking shark, feeding on the bits non of the other sharks want, or they're a dog fish acting like a big shark but in reality small and harmless.

They make there money from legacy. They should concentrate on that market, maybe consulting for upgrades or virtualising old tin on new, maybe cloud hosting of legacy kit or something focussed on their core market that their loyal (have little choice) customers may want to spend money on.

South Korean hosting co. pays $1m ransom to end eight-day outage

i doubt they have an sla, warranty or provide onsite support. If they do maybe they'd be better off hiring the scammers and binning their owns staff.

Scottish govt mulled scrapping £178m car-crash IT system

Dow we not hear about this every year?

DDN burst buffer to bimble along more briskly after boost

Re: Not quite blurry enough...

admit it, who else has checked the dvla for that reg too?

https://vehicleenquiry.service.gov.uk

French firm notches up 50km unmanned drone inspection flight

Re: 3G

That's why they are doing this before August.

Intel to Qualcomm and Microsoft: Nice x86 emulation you've got there, shame if it got sued into oblivion

I wonder what intel would do if both M$ and Apple went ARM first on their primary os's.

Where is Intel's ARM competitor?

Where is Intel in the mobile phone or tablet space?

Where is intel in discreet gpu?

Uh-Koh! Apple-Samsung judge to oversee buggy Intel modem chip fight

And Virgin in uk?

Will we see similar action against Virgin in the uk?

Teen texted boyfriend to kill himself. It worked. Will the law change to deal with digital reality?

She deserves the the most severe sentence the judge can hand out.

As his girlfriend, at the time he needed support the most, she was encouraging him to kill himself even when he didn't want to.

She is pure evil.......

Europe to upgrade its continental GPS

I'm fed up with Strava smartphone users, especially off road, posting great times, kom's etc due to the inaccuracy of the phone GPS that's in their back pack or pocket vs that of say a garmin edge that's mounted on the handlebars with a much better view of the sky.

I've ridden with both a garmin edge 1000 (with wheel speed sensor) and Strava on my iPhone 6 and the 6 constaly shows quicker times, did a ride with someone with Strava on android (in a pocket) and despite him being behind me all the way and me pulling away from him, he managed to beat my kom by a few seconds on his first try.

Smartphone gps is good for approximate positioning, but not as good as a dedicated gps unit which is designed for gps and he designers have spent the bom on gps stuff not smartphone stuff like phone specific antennas, speakers , microphones etc.

'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem

@wolfetone

Did they have macs at school or something?

I vaguely recall a geometry issue where you needed the original machine to read a disc but don't remember a disc compression that only worked with the original hardware. A bit useless as an offsite backup or file transfer as you mention.

HPE sales slide, profits evaporate... but think of the future, CEO urges

It's lie IBM and HP in a race to the bottom.

One of the 2 need to do a Corbyn and do a last minute change and hope it wrong foots the other.

Much-hyped Ara Blackphone LeEco Essential handset introduced

huge spec and innovative features like 60ghz 6gbps wireless accessory connection and magnetic attachment do'nt come cheap.

its all good if everyone adopts the same standards, terrible if they are the only ones.

Millimetre wave.. omigerd it's going nowherrr.. Apple, you say?

big comms innovators spending billions, el reg commentards adding their 2p

lots saying this wont work, yet the huge comms innovators are betting big on this tech.

If Verizon are saying it solves their last mile problem and are taking it seriously, i can only agree with them. they are putting their future into this tech, it must be working for them to be confident in it.

NTT, ATT, Verizon, Samsung, Apple, Nokia, Ericsson, very successful names, big pockets, they and others see a future in this.............

BA CEO blames messaging and networks for grounding

Sounds like they had some type of encryption system running, perhaps encrypting their WAN traffic that relies on a central key server that went awol.

Something like a Group Encrypted Transport VPN

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/sec_conn_getvpn/configuration/xe-3s/sec-get-vpn-xe-3s-book/sec-get-vpn.html

Very secure but

Loose your key server / config or timings and things go bad quickly,

Loss or delay of replication leading to out of sync data leading to corruption leading to a mess.

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

What else has BA poorly maintained?

Their IT should be redundant and resilient, a bit like the critical systems on an aircraft.

If BA have got their IT wrong this basd, whats to say they've got their aircraft maintenance correct?

Re: Operational Failover is incredibly complex

Ive worked in numerous places, (public and private sector) where the DC's have had to be powered down for 5 yearly electrical testing. Its a complete power down, all systems off, ac off, ups off, geny's isolated etc. Its a pain to manage, eerie walking through silent data halls slowly getting to ambient temp, with the constant worry if what wont come back up.

Full DC power downs are not a rare event.