Posts by Jacqui

A new wave in data center cooling?

coanda effect

Cray hit this problem many many years ago - when chip densities and hence temps were lower than today - they solved it by using evaporation.

At the time the engineers rather than try and design a customer injector assembly simply went to thier local motor parts suppliers (a lot of dealers in the MSP area) and asked for a range on injectors. Tests showed a certain Porshe injector created the perfect sized coolant droplet for the big cray boards.

To promote this breakthrough, Cray bought a load or "porsche" sunglasses and had Cray etched on them! very cool!

Oh and the other advantage of evap tech - no need to drain etc - you simply pull the boards and replace.

DVLA off-road system seriously off-message

every three months

When we had three spare cars (unscrapped parts vehicles) we kept them sorned. To ensure we did not hit the DVLA's naties we sorned the vehicles eveyr three months (in advance) they would lose at leats one perhaps two of the aqpplications every year. every three months was a MINIMUM safe renewal period for the yearly renewal.

This of course means that when all four renewals are processed, DVLA end up doing four times as much processing and sending out of confirmation letters are needed but as long as I dont get fined (and renewals are uncharged) I dont give a ....

The SORN scheme is a joke as a numebr of pikeys on my estate in camberley have vehicles with either faked documents or use trading as an exemption for tax and mot.

UK regulator wants register of all premium-rate firms

Re: Re: robot dialers

Registered for years - no real effect.

TPS is a joke - I have filled their forms in multiple times and they have done SFA about the robots or any other business calling me at home.

If you answer the debt line by pressing '1' then just ask which company they represent they hang up on you....

TPS and ofcom are both toothless.

Best Buy opens first UK store tomorrow

novatech

15 miles LOS or by road?

Because I think novatech is going to be just out of range - intentionally as I cannt see them beating NT on quality, sevrice or price...

AOL first quarter sales nosedive 23 per cent

AOL

Outsources anit-spam/security teams and suddenly large numbers of customers are getting accounts hacked - indian droids just tell them to reset their passwords - customers very unhappy.

http://www.annaliviaford.com/2010/01/postmaster-team-update.html

DoH puts brakes on Summary Care Record

scare stories

Hmm, let the scare stories currently wamking the rounds die down first?

Doctors in my area are inundated with opt-out letters - and all of the surgery staff have opted out!

Google: botnet takedowns fail to stem spam tide

Gmail too big to block?

"too big to block" has been a big talking point on various anti-spam forums.

However a number of business ISP's block gmail et.al and consider this a USP so blocking gmail is something most businesses think worthwhile.

Also, a number of the big ISP/MSP's have laid off thier talented (read expensive) abuse teams and offshored the work to indian "script droids". And spam volumes have gone through the roof but somehow "botnets" get the all the blame...

Labour shock pledge: 16.8-meg broadband for ALL by 2012!

Lies

Come on these are **election** promises. If .gov.uk promises that terrorist act would nto be misused but now says it is OK to use it to arrest photographers for being too tall and mums because they take a picture of thier kids sports day win, how much quicker will they renege on election promises.

Election promises are a joke.

When someome complains to thier MP that all three main parties candidates have the same campaigns and the candidate says "well tough - you have to vote for one of us", you know the elections are joke.

We really need a viable alternative - even if it is a joke party.

Jacqui

NHS blames computer error for transplant fouls

Opt out

I decided not to donate after a long chat with various members of family at each end of the country working in various hospitals - none of them donate either. Tales of how donation cards can affect treatment (and comments made by consultants) was enough to put me off. The idea that a "Mr" may decide to not give me that extra chance simply because he thinks my organs are more valuable to someone he knows that to me was enough to put me off. And if you dont think this does not happen, think again - doctors are people and if they have a patient desperate for a transplant it is very difficult for them not to think of someone (even if only subconciously) that is unlikely to survive a serious car accident as "spare parts".

CEOP renews attack on Facebook

Porno Jim and his big red button

He wants a direct link to his reporting systems.

Why doesn't Facebook provide one. We all know that *lots* of people world wide start the submission process if only to see what is under the new button then some bright spark will write some code to auto submit the button and millions more will hit the site in a very short time.

I can only assume PJ wants a DDOS attack?

Porno Jims servers would collapse and he would be running to the press for more money for new servers and bandwidth. Then make a request for more staff to process the millions of spam reports. Then in a few years time he would retire and take a job with the pork barrel IT company used to supply said (now unused, probably non existent except on paper) servers.

Moral: Pigs and pork barrels go together!

Electronic Bodyguards bureau sets up shop in Switzerland

UK's Government Secure Intranet

And the above .gov.uk disaster^Wproject is supposed to give employers confidence?

BBC, big business leer creepily at orphan works

BBC steals photohra[hs

The BBC has a rep for filtching images from the net and not bothering to contact the owner.

The most recent visible case was when they used a brum skyline as a studio backdrop.

When the owner contacted aunty they eventually offered 100UKP. Luckily he knew pro rates start at 3K/image *USAGE* and asked for the image to be removed and for compensation for the two times they had used his image without permission. Only when he started legal letters/proceedings did they give him (part of?) what he was asking for. FWICR the BBC NEVER AGREED THEY WOULD STOP USING HIS IMAGE.

So watermark all decent images other wise the BBC and other thieves will nick them.

Jacqui

The IT management impact of home working

Support

I run not only home desktops but a work desktop as well as a server hosting virtualised instances replicated from work. This allows me to do high bandwitdh work without a VPN tunnel to work.

I just need to get the vz image sycn down so that I no lonegr need to replicate the entre image.

We already distribute DNS and change control...

Jacqui

N00b spooks to be pensioned off

peanuts monkeys

Need I say more?

Perhaps if they offered to hire experienced staff and train/certify them they would get some skilled "script kiddies" but professional security folks can do better than 20K/pa and severe restrictions working for .gov.uk places on you. I know cleaners who earn more than what they are offering!

Desktop Colour Laser Printers

Samsung

Also the samsung unlike most of the overpriced tat under review costs less to run and will talk to linux boxen without the owner having to jump thorugh hoops.

Russia to crack down on abuse of .ru addresses

nominet

Anyone bothered to review spam rDNS for nominet registered domains - almost all of them have obviously invalid addresses that are easy to check automatically.

Reporting these to nominet gets you nowhere - unless you are the police and want to look good oncracking down on "e-crime".

IMHO Nominet takes money from these thieves and does not bother to check addresses because if they did so they would lose a LOT of money. Anyone who knowingly takes money off crims and supported thier activities is (in my mind) a crim themselves.

And lets not paint russia and china with the police state brush - in some ways we are WAY ahead of both countries - we are *proud* of the fact that we have more CCTV cameras per head than any other country and already log and track everyones movement by car, plane and train.

Sophos sorry for blog comment spam campaign

marketing companies

only do what is requested in the brief.

Steve Jobs and governator tout transplant reform

UK organ donor

Some drunk tales from "interns" a good few years ago in a northern teaching hospital put me off ever being a donor.

It seems if you are a known donor and your chance of survival is slim they may decide to "call time" and get your organs than go that last mile and try and save you. Note that because organs have to be removed before they can remove life support and there is always the possiblity that you could still be alive (not technically brain dead) when the remove your organs.

OK junior docs and nurses are known for thier sick humor and pranks but this is beyond sick.

Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers

winding up order

AFAICR Wrong! - when they ignore the SCC judgement you move on to a winding up order.

You can ask the court to infer by thier failure to pay the judgement that they cannot pay and as such should be wound up. A winding up order is issued and they have so many days to pay you and prove they have done so before their bank accounts are frozen and receivers are called in.

In the case of the gent who took a certain mobile phone company to court to get his 50UKP back, he decided that just after the winding up order was instigated was a good time to go on holiday (stopped answering the door and phone). Note that simply posting a cheque does not satify the court they have paid thier debt - they have to get your signature to that effect.

He said it is so much fun to have a nast corp running aroud like a headless chickens trying to track you down for your signature...

Jacqui

Police National Database will have audit trail

Audit trail

Newsflash - plod forced to add an audit trail! Excuse me - WTF.

How many systems do the plod have without a audit trail(s) plural. I thought all supposedly secure systems had multiple levels of audit trail. Also I would hope someone is reconciling these as part of a rolling security review.

Are you teling me the plod have yet to get their brains out of the 80's? Mind you given the salaries for plod IT jobs, "pay peanuts get monkeys" springs to mind. I am amazed they have not outsourced thier IT dev and support to one of the APNIC lands to save that bit more.

Nominet to release super-short domain names

rules

long time ago we got a two letter .co.uk - and perl.co.uk but some scumbag squatted it when it lapsed (our own fault as we no longer ran perl support and should have transferred it to london-pm or similar.

Jacqui

Virgin signals start of telegraph pole broadband test

voltages

Its been a long time since I did any of this - X0+ years but...

The local distribs in the UK are ~11KV and have a three disc hanger.

The main distribution lines are 250K, 500K and 750K depending upon isolator size and oddly number of cables per run 1, 2 and 4.

A high tension tower (danger of death) carries two three phase circuits, contra rotating to reduce EMF with a single earth line along the top as a lightning trap.

It is this cable that the leccy boards used to attach their fibre to when they started offering net services - mainly because they could run a little unmanned trolley to do the job while power was still on.

At the substation level they dropped to powerline technology over the 11KV lines and bridged the 11K to 450V 3ph drop. As we all know 450 3ph == 240 single with each house getting one of the three phases.

Of course things have probably changed since the 80's :-)

UK pol touts canine chip implants

more MP graft

I wonder how much of a backhander the MP's proposing this got from thier insurance company sponsors? Everyone ni the rescue business knows how much the insurance companies are gouging small businesses such as rescues - mandatory will mean double costs.

Look what happened to business PL costs after the last mandatory Pl came in - building sites are now plastered with signs etc and building costs have gione up by a factor of 10!

Man of God backs Beverley porncoder

competion

HDM's sister company is competing with the HU17 web site and this article is an attempt to close down the site so they can take over with thier commercial offering.

Of course a backhander (beer) to your local mayor for a nice juicy quote helps grab headlines.

I bet Mr Mayor now feels like a complete tronk!

Jacqui

Brain scanners to be used to 'design' political candidates

Roll on

blipverts

3D TVs to drop below £1000 in 2012

3D = HD fup handled three times as badly

First HDready (and HD-xxxxxxx for any number of quasi-legal descriptive terms) was used to sell defective incapable tat before they started offering programmes at seriously degraded broadcast resolutions - 3D will be tthe same fiasco again!

FYI When the TV died a year or two ago we decided to wait and see what happened. Broadcast wise before investing in a new goggle box. Originally we planned a year perhaps six months without TV to see how much more we could get done without the distraction of live "must watch" TV.

The abuse and threats from TVL ended up ensuring we never replaced the TV and went further. We gave the TV ariel, cable and booster away to family so we now need a new TV, ariel and wiring to watch anything! Going by the TV listings it is certaily not worth the cost and effort.

Also getting a TV would feel like giving in to the TVL threats. I would rather do without than give in to such legalised extortion.

BT blamed for Davina McCall spamcalls

BT spam

My home number still has a business DSL attached (work pays for it) and I get calls from BT roughly every three days asking if I would be interested in moving from Virgin to a BT DSL service.

The BT business DSL has not worked for over a year and I keep asking the boss to cancel it.

I plan to move the DSL service from BT to a non business service such as BE or a business

sevrice such as zen but BT will not give out a MAC because the DSL is not in my name :-(

Virgin to offer 100Mb/s broadband by year's end

traffic shaping

NThell have a habot of dropping connections that have any form of heavy traffic.

I telework periodically and if I transfer a lot of data batweeb work and home via the openvpn tunnel I find that NThell has dropped the link the next morning - the modem does not reconnect for up to 24 hours. One call to "support" (via the cancellations number0 finally admitted that flagged lines will be "off hooked" for a period if heavy buirst traffic is detected.

Nthell is still 2Mb/s ro over 20UKP/mo

NThell is still only a 2Mb/s package for 20UKP/mo and has recently underwent a 50p price increase. Time to jump ship methinks.

Banking industry worker faces cosh over anonymous rant

PR gone bad

Some PR or tech monkey was given the task to post a rebuttal and failed miserably.

Also his comments about APACS believing that being able to hack CnP cards is something a first year engineering student could do flies in the face of thier "chip and pin is secure" mantra.

I think anyone who has had to fight to recoup money stolen via CnP should find this plonker and call him as a witness :-)

Chuck Norris botnet doesn't infect routers...

chuckie ducks

"noted for playing Russian Roulette with a full-loaded pistol and winning"

Playmobile or it did not happen!

Mixed messages for UK small biz

end of year tax

The tax man is hunting down funds and is targetingsmall businesses with spurious charges.

Many small companies are having to go (repeatedly) through the ohmbudsman to recoup as much as 25K which is then immediately recharged and the process starts again.

The tax man is far worse than the banks in trying to destroy UK small businesses and this being so close to end of year I can understand why some businesses would rather declare bankruptcy than have the tax men pull thier business down from under them.

Jacqui

Chips make you chipper: Official

UK science === fake science

Funding must be bad when they end up doing fake science like this.

I mean show someone something horrible then give them some comfort food and what do you expect. They could have replaced with with chocolate, mince pies, ice cream or a ping pong table. Hell a quick game you enjoy would probably be more healthy and far better at actually making you feel good. They could have even replaced the chips with kittens, bunny wabbits or walking the dog!

How any "health science" department can come out with this tosh (funded by the ministry of chips) and expect us to believe them is beyond me.

UK Science died some years ago - its all part of the minitry of truth now.

Anyone scientists that disagree end up with a smear campaign and out of a job or dead in a field.

Jacqui

Google doppelgänger casts riddle over interwebs

Yes but

only because (you missed a step) DNS A for this name is configured - the above does not mean you can expect this name to point to the same IP...

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: iw-in-f147.1e100.net

Address: 74.125.95.147

Pupil database claimed to be breach-free

national archives

Next obvious question - when was the last NA breach?

Note that I did not ask if there had been a breach - given the UK record on leaks^Wbreaches I assume it must happen at least annually unless told otherwise...

Jacqui

Windows 7 RC 'buy a copy' shut downs start next month

ICL again

ICL removed a mainframe with council data when the council did not pay for the machine.

the council sued ICL because under UK law while the machine belonged to ICL the data

belonged to the council and ICL had no right to deny the council access to their data.

ICL lost big time.

MS may be much bigger than ICL (now) but this case means MS are taking a risk

in denying access to data or possibly corrupting data with this new behaviour.

Virgin hails 'free' landline-to-mobe calls

BEthere

Went to BE web site to purchase a new DSL connection (migrate from a dead BT DSL.

Filled in loads of forms (had to hack the phone number cos BE do not accept short

<11 digit phone numbers). After 20 minutes of trying various extra digit combos' finally

got the to DD screen - odd that they will check valid short numbers but will nto accept

valid short numbers in thier sign up form.

Yup as well as a DD form, they want a credit card as well. F* that.

So I called the sales number to see if they really want my non existent credit card...

Crackle, Crackle splutter splutter - WTF my phone line has iced up!

Called family in NE of england and neighbours - clear line - no problems.

Tried BE again - could *just* hear over the third world crackle the "select one for..."

Pressed one four times to get redirected to "ravindra" who kept repeating the

same script no matter what I said. I hung up.

A+A/Zen may be more expensive but at least I can call sales and get a human been.

UK.gov unmoved by Internet Explorer 6 security concerns

tfl.gov.uk site

Crapita sounds right. I tried to find out our vans status via thier site and it rejected requests from firefox but was OK with MSIE7. I then tweaked FF to submit with MSIE headers and hey presto it worked. Looks like Crapita have coded the servers to detect MSIE User-Agent: and bounce FF et.al.

Airport scanner staff object to vetting

Lady GAGA

My Scum reading hubs suggests that images of this celebutard will probably be the first to be leaked. Evidently the scum has a reward outstanding for definitive proof of her (lack of) "meat and veg".

The Equality Bill: Hidden agenda?

Equality Disclaimers

You can always tell the employers and agencies that have had (and probably still still have) discriminating staff and/or policies because ofthe big prominent "we dont discriminate" footers on emails and adverts. Dont they *know* the only reason companies display them is *after* they lose a discrimination battle?

BT reveals faster broadband pricing

Lying Sales driods

Busy working from home today when call arrived - no CLI - suspicions raised but some clients withhold CLI (phone companies..) Before I get to spount my "Jacqui .... How can I help you bit" I get an indian on a sputtery VOIP line.

Droid: "Is this Miss Caren?"

Me: Who is this?

Droid: "Is this Miss Jacqui Caren of <<addresss>>?"

Me: Sorry but would you please Identify yourself otherwise I am hanging up!

Droid: "Hello Miss Caren I represent British Telecom and would like to offer you .... great broadband package ...."

Me: <<hangup>>

I assume BT share thier consumer details with broadband division?

Also I am on the TPS and have stated that I *NEVER EVER* buy over the phone

both to TPS and BT.

BT have in the past called me to offer stuff and I tell them if they do this once more I will

move to a provider that honours my "do not try and sell me shit" request.

Time to move to a decent phone service provider!

UK BitTorrent admin acquitted on fraud charge

police force reputation

Sorry but it is not that difficult to find the real crooks just look for the blue flashing lights...

Anyone remember the gagging order on the newspapers about the "repairs" done to a certain chief constables house some 10 to 20 years ago using police force funds? The gagging order was taken out by the force itself (again public funds) IIRC. I think the matter was dropped because he had taken early retirement?

Swedish Weight Watchers bring down the house

Event horizon

Forget CERN it's the lardy congregations we should be worried about.

West Country pagans tie horses in knots

terrorists

**this* is the only terrorist "giveuscash" FUD the devon plod can come up with?

I thought police were supposed to investigate - not publicise theories blaming events on a specific religions. I suppose it is budget time again and they need a scapegoat to ensure they get more moolah from the limited budget. I wonder who had the bright idea to demonise a (to the plod) "unpopular" religion.

Lets try this another way. If the police has said they belived that a bunch of muslims were responsible because of some ancient long forgotten dooberry the newspapers would be up in arms and the plod would be apologising to the national police force rep and any local or national honco that came out of the woodwork.

The fact that most pagans are quiet unassuming folks means the police can get away with this utter crap.

Before anyone asks, I am an athiest IMHO all religions are populated with nutters who need time off on in straighjacket and strong drugs. Saying this of all the religious folks I have met only the pagans (and church of the FSM!) come over as having any common sense whatsoever.

Brown offers free laptops to deprived UK schoolkids

Pork varrel

Like every other government scam^W^W^Wcheme its just a way to distribute the pork barrel.

Recession forces software escrow releases to jump by 150%

Escrow and the application of force

Some of the escrow agreements proposed by the big multinationals are designed not only to cover them if a supplier goes under but to make it easy/cheap to make a supplier fail in hard times giving thme the product for free,

Escrow is a good idea but unless you are really really carefull, a large customer *will* try and force you out of business to get thier hands on your code.

Also, If the police can get away with stealing peoples software why can''t others?

Monty's 'Save MySQL' mudsling gets 15,000 backers

Spam

Same here - The only contribution I made with the email acount was in the documentation. As it took the support team four **years** to respond (an automated response!) I can say that MySQL is a lot safer out of this backsliding, money grubbers hands.

And yes I did report the mail as spam.

ISPs slam Digital Economy Bill's multi-million pound price tag

Virgin sinking/rats leaving

I telework via virgin and mainly because of cost called up to cancel. They are *desperate* to retain customers and are already asking if the filesharing legislation is a factor in my reason to cancel! The retentions bod I spoke to admitted that this is now a major problem for them.

My worry is the rumor that BT wholesale are installing DPI on the backbone so providers such as Zen are going to have clients data viewed by third parties irrespective of contract terms. A lot fo my work is under strict NDA terms and the idea that someone could be trying to crack my encrypted VPN connecting is a possibility.

Surveying anonymity and the public good

NHS "patient audit"

We recently received the NHS "patient audit". A couple of little old biddies I know assumed they *had" to fill it in, others asked the local doctor or nurse and were told to fill it in - they likewise assumed it was mandatory. Only when I told them (when asked) that it said it was on behalf of the NHS but went to the address of a private company, was not mandatory and there is no guarantee this information would be kept private (conditions on the form allowed the processor to pass details to "relevant third parties") did they finally realise they had been conned - they all promised to shred them next year...

Not sure if ti was actually on behalf of the NHS or not - they would not talk about it to me and hung up when I got through to someone in the know.

Jacqui

EDS mainframe goes titsup, crashes RBS cheque system

Anyone remember the Ingres takeover?

Similar thing happened - all "consultants" were fired at once. Then someone read the contracts realised that all the major contracts have a fixed amount of consultancy included and they had to *beg* the now embittered consultants to please come back and work for us - people had been frogmarched(some beaten!) out of thier offices by hired thugs.