Posts by steviebuk

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Take them off and cover them if

you're gonna have a wank.

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

I fucking hate it

And most at work do. Only found 2 people that oddly like it. We keep the option on so you can try it if you want. But I'll have to look for the policy then, if they are taking the option to roll back away. As I certainly don't want the fucking shitty new version.

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Another 1999 needs to come soon

They clearly never learnt from their past case which they lost due to the way they behaved with IE. Being ordered to break up after, which, for some reason never happened.

All these years later and they are doing it again, because again they know Edge is shit and the only way for them to win is cheat. Are they taking lessons from the Republicans?

'Hundreds' of Iranian hacking attempts have hit surveillance cameras since the missile strikes

Re: Sting in the tail

They will. Nutters will do anything for god and if they can become a martyr

It would also allow the orange tango idiot to cancel the mid-terms claiming "we're at war"

Capita's £370M Whitehall outsourcing deal challenged as 'abnormally low'

Lots of failings

Because it includes the DWP (their failing on Dirty Business when giving a guy disability benefits) and Oracle and IBM, both who are shit beyond belief means this WILL fail.

PayPal app code error leaked personal info and a 'few' unauthorized transactions

Re: On-line bank

Hasn't changed

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/paypal-section75/

Re: On-line bank

But apparently you don't, as Martin Lewis said some years ago. Although maybe its changed.

Re: On-line bank

Because people like me never knew for years until Martin Lewis pointed it out. So canceled all links with them and gone back to credit cards instead. There was rumour that they were going to start charging for the accounts but not heard anything for a while.

Sopra Steria sues UK government over £958M Capita outsourcing award

Re: Parasites

Have said this for years and years in IT, mostly falls on deaf ears despite people practising what I point out.

I point out, when you out source, you loose control of your data, especially if its a database. What to make some changes to the tables? Raise a ticket with the 3rd party. Maybe wait weeks for them to do it, if you want it done quickly "That will incur consultancy costs about £100 an hour".

Keep it all in-house and "We do have SLA's but as you said its for the directors and its really urgent, I'll get it run now, just make sure you raise a ticket after".

And there it is. As long as you don't have jobs worth engineers, you'll always get a better service internally. They know when something is important and will just bend their SLAs to get the fix done. Any time you ask the 3rd party company, they'll direct you to the Account Manager first who introduce you to large consultancy bills.

I once said at work "So the people that got the new contract, were they the lowest bidder?" Yes, was the answer. I said "Well you know the saying, you get what you pay for". It went silent, because they were currently having issues with them being shit :) That contract, not long after was cancelled due to poor performance.

'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing

Re: First off the production line

You mean Tim Apple. You should now be renamed Tim Kiss Arse Apple considering the amount of knee bending he's been doing. I really disliked Steve Jobs, he was a royal cunt, but I think even he wouldn't have bent the knee. However, not so sure. He really wanted jailbreaking made illegal but thankfully a judge tossed it. If tango man offered that, he'd probably be kissing the fat arse as well.

Break free of Ring's servers, earn a five-figure bounty

Re: Why even bother?

Ubiquiti is nice but expensive.

Re: I assume that Ring has been asked ...

Yes they've been asked and America stupid law also makes it illegal to get round their system to use your own server. They shouldn't have that much control, they are your cameras, you've paid for them.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Mark Russinovich himself talked about that in one of his Case of The Unexplained vids where one engineer thought it would be funny to put it on a server. An engineer walked past, panicked thinking everything was down so they best hard reboot to get everything back up before being shouted at. It didn't end well.

Got caught

Was funny when done to me to my home machine by a decent engineer who actually taught me stuff instead of being an unhelpful dick.

I'd left my laptop unlocked and another engineer and I had worked out how to sneak over the network to remote to home without the traffic being spotted. This was 20 years ago now. I'd left it unlocked and connected to my home desktop. I came back to my desk none the wiser. Wasn't until about a day or two later when using my PC at home I noticed icon names have been changed to Cock, knob, wanker etc.

He said "That will remind you to lock your desktop next time".

We always had a rule, no pranks that stopped you from working.

Only

Admitted it was a "great prank" when it was pointed out of his security failings and that he'd be in more shit for that.

Because I had something similar, to a, lets just call him what he was, "a cunt", engineer who liked giving people nick names. However, when I did the same to him and quite expertly stuck him on the front of Time Magazine "Jim in Bung Scandal" and sent it to 3rd line as I knew they'd find it amusing, he went mental. Ranting and raving, explaining it was slander. I pointed out, if anything, it was satire and mainly "No one is going to believe you were ever on the front of fucking Time Magazine". He, with a serious tone said "They might think its real". He still said he was going to put in a complaint until I pointed out the photo he'd done of another engineer and the name he always called him.

He eventually said "It was quite funny". I knew, he didn't believe that, he just knew he'd be fucked if he'd complain.

Thankfully he's now dead and I'd have quite happily pissed on his grave but I couldn't be fucked to go to his funeral because, he was a nasty cunt.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

That's not the point. The point is, you don't put someone in a situation as a "prank" where they may fear for their life or feel they need to act in self-defence. Obviously the knife wouldn't be "smuggled" in, but the point still stands. An example

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55982131

Or worse, as I do, carry a knife where ever you go. I had to take the locking collar off to comply with UKs stupid rule that it can't be locking (meaning I now have the ability to accidentality cut my finger off). Just image being stuck in that situation, having a fear for your life (not knowing what is going on), then stabbing someone to death as self defence. Then ending up in as an inmate because of IT stupid prank.

Yep, which is why they have started to ban them at uni's in the US. They may appear funny in movies but not in real life, not forgetting people have died from them.

Quit

I'd have called them cunts and quit the same day. Some places you don't pull pranks, that's one of them. Fuck whits.

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

doge

Thats all it was created for. Pay back from orange tango man so the cunt know as elon could shut down all areas of business that were investigating him. The FAA were screwed over specifically because they had a case on going due to his shit safty record.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

They reversed their shenanigans but no one will ever trust them again.

Re: I still use HDDs.

I, sadly, purged my floppies in the late 90s when I decide they were dead media. Cut them all up before pinning them. Sad as I lost the sniffer program I'd written in Pascal for college that was on one of them.

Not they're not

"Hard drives have pretty much been displaced from everyday PCs and laptops"

I have several in my old PC which will be moved over to the new PC. 2 are slowly dying but with this shitty news (even more reason to hate AI), I'll have to hold on to them.

Building a NAS and being a datahoarder is going to be even more stupidly expensive.

Arsehole AI company cunts!

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: Needs to go back to the manufacturer I'm afraid.

Its not. Because you have engineers on the ships or at the airfields. What if the plane is on the ship and there is a large fault that still states "We can't supply you with schematics or official parts. You need to send it back to the factory".

Needs to go back to the manufacturer I'm afraid.

This is why we need right to repair. The fact you can have military kit out in the field and have to say "Sorry, can we just stop fighting for the moment, the manufacturer has said we can't repair this ourselves and it must go back to the manufacturer."

Like like the cunts at John Deere.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Breaches

The fun thing with LLMs, is so many companies not only WILL end up being breached because of them by putting in data they shouldn't, leaking data or realising how fucking expensive it is. For example CoPilot, lets use that on company data, it will make things so much better. Yeah but what they don't tell you, for it to work properly on your company data, you need sharepoint setup and all files tagged properly. So you now have to pay for sharepoint and an admin to manage it for you.

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

Missed it all

I was in college in the early 90s learning Pascal and Visual Basic on Windows 3.11, then eventually Windows 95. We saw the birth and growth of the Internet while there and the first between Netscape Navigator and IE. Looking back, it was good to be around then. But, sadly, I oddly missed the birth of Linux and never spotted any of that. I think it was because it was awhile before my parents could afford to buy us a PC for my course. And only having one and no Internet meant never found out about Linux. Even if had, wouldn't of had a spare PC to mess around with it anyway.

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

And the other concern is that someone checks the results, with it being craptia they probably won't.

We were testing out copilot (we now use it) for meetings, to transcribe what was said. My manager asked us to check after as we were still testing it.

And here in the issue, where people will potentially go to prison on "CoPilot evidence". I had to point out there was a sentence it said I'd said about a subject we'd never talked about. So not only did it make up what I'd said, it made up the subject we talked about.

If those issues don't get spotted, that will go down in records and then fuck whits will use it as evidence, bit like the Horizon scandal. For my example it was nothing, for others it could be "Dan was told that if Mrs Smith isn't checked on next week, she may die". Then Dan goes to prison for corporate man slaughter or neglecting duty. Just look at the Lucy Letby case, no real evidence, no CCTV, no forensics, mis-information in court and non-disclosure of evidence in court, all just "Theories".

ʎɹǝʌoɔǝᴚ sʍopuᴉM ʇɐ sǝʇɐuᴉɯɹǝʇ snq sᴉɥ┴

Upside down Internet

Sadly, can't be done anymore due to pretty much all traffic being HTTPS. But it was a simpler time when the neighbour was stealing someone's WIFI and surfing the net for free. So the guy served them the upside down Internet.

https://pete.ex-parrot.com/upside-down-ternet.html

Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security

Re: intended to deal with suspect behavior behind the scenes...

And Recall

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Its not a paywall. They keep asking you to sign in but you can just so no.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Re: Its why

Also possible legality as its user content that is why their model exists.

What really pisses me off is people like MrBeast. Exposed several times for his shady vids yet he now has a massive Amazon contract.

Re: Its why

I don't know the specifics but there is code there, unless they've now removed it, is if ublock origin is detected, load the pages slower. Louis Rossman did a vid on that.

Its why

I moved back to Firefox.

Also take a look at YouTube. Some folks did testing a while back and discovered if you use ublock origin to block all ads on YouTube, youtube then purposely make it load pages slower.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: Many moons ago now

Can't stand issues like that. No longer at the place but I hear they keep hiring apprentices but then never teach them anything. I did a full guide for a departments software as the department was important. I had a senior engineer who was staying test it and I made adjustments where I'd assumed things. All worked fine.

I still keep in contact with people in that department who said "The engineer came the other day to fix that odd thing with our software and the printers. He's taking ages to fix it. Then got the other new engineer and still neither could fix it. We told him have you looked at John's guide he left before he left? They said Oh that was the last engineer, we don't look at his guides".

Fucking idiots. The fix to the fucking issue is right there in my document. Its a 5min fix when you know how.

Many moons ago now

We had an issue that was only affecting laptops, back in the XP days. You'd sign in then go to explorer and it would freeze for 10mins. No one knew what the issue was and we were told "Don't waste time on it just re-image the machine". I argued "That's not fixing the issue though is it?"...."I don't care just re-image the machines" was the reply.

Fucking annoying. Re-imaging took an hour, and we couldn't have some set by because they'd be out of date. Users also wouldn't give me enough time to work out what the issue was.

Eventually, thankfully, our manager got "infected" just as she was to go on leave for 2 weeks. I said "Now will you let me just fix it. Just let me spend time looking at the issue so I can find a proper fix. Re-imaging machines isn't fixing the issue". She agreed.

So I sat there watching. Task Manager showed explorer at 50% but nothing more, was only affecting laptops. So I grabbed Process Monitor and Process Explorer from Sysinternals. Watching with Process Monitor showed nothing obvious so as they say "Try Process Monitor AND Process Explorer".

So saw Explorer running at 50% in Process Explorer, but you could then go deeper into that and see what it is loading as it does. It loaded a few .dlls, only one of them was running at 50%. A PGP dll that was a filesharing shell extension for PGP that we used to encrypt the hard drives only on laptops.

Looking this up on their website to see what it did I discovered all it did was scan the network for encrypted PGP files. If it found them it would change the icon to show it was encrypted. We didn't use any of that so wasn't needed. It has been just scanning the network drives for 10 mins until it either finished or timed out. PGP said the dll could just be disabled because it had this issue. So I did and all unfroze. Something that was taking us over an hour to resolve was now fixed in less than 5mins.

I got a small thanks and that was it. Just lucky I like fixing stuff in IT. Its annoying when you sit back and watch grifters get all the praise all these years but was still a personal good feeling when you fix something like this.

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Or

"Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: "If we are going to get AI to work for Britain, we need Britons and British public services that can work with AI. That is why Barnsley's ambitions are crucial, because if we can show that AI helps young people learn, supports local businesses to be more productive, and improves public services, then we can show what's possible for the whole country.""

Talk to us in IT and we'll tell you its a mass of shit, will fail, will increase your carbon footprint and is a bubble waiting to burst that you're going to piss tax payers money on.

Fuck whits.

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

Well then your systems are doing their job if you're not seeing real phishing e-mails. And I guarantee are seeing some. You'll most likely work with other companies, like we do. Its their mailboxes that get compromised so then the phishing e-mails get through because its from a trusted mailbox.

Oo won of the god complex IT admins, I also refer to as cunts.

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

Burst, please, do it now

We all want to see Oracle go bankrupt over it.

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Re: Always bad decision...

And the bean counters, I think, were responsible weren't they? Wasn't it about costs?

Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir

Fools

Just like constantly giving Fujitsu new contracts.

And on an unrelated note. Can someone explain why the reg is regularly logging my account out on all devices. Its fing annoying.

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

They will

give the contract to Fujitsu and we'll end up with another Horizon scandal with several people going to prison wrongly because of the system.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

And there's the knob IT engineer part

"and Louis made sure to equip it with a warning label which explained that if anyone outside the IT team did anything other than load fresh paper, it was a firing offence."

Be nice and not passive aggressive. No one likes IT engineers with god complexes. Just put a note to say "Only to be repaired by IT".

Someone ripped off the paper sensor arm in our large MFD the other day, trying to clear a jam. Lucky it wasn't snapped or the business would of been charged for the repair. The helpful engineer (we're not experts so only do the basics) said "Someone was being heavy handed trying to clear a jam. They need to clear it along the path of travel". I never knew that but luckily always have done anyway as its easier.

So instead of putting an accusing message out, I made it neutral, calm and informative.

Again, no one likes a god complex IT engineer. Those that I've worked with get called "A cunt".

PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

Microsoft must be shit

As he left in 2022 and another great one Aaron Margosis left in 2020. Sadly stopped doing his talks, which he told me was because Mark Russinovich stop doing his.

Crims compromised energy firms' Microsoft accounts, sent 600 phishing emails

Their MFA system would have worked here to stop this, even if they had people's passwords. Because you need the device to type in or tap the number on screen.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

money talks

Instead of actually sanctioning the social media companies, they just let them get away with it cause they lobby and/or you have the cunt known as Elon who has more money than sense and just threatens everyone now with his money.

FortiGate firewalls hit by silent SSO intrusions and config theft

You'd think

These big firewall companies would be paying for decent pentests to test their own kick with words to the effect of "Fill your boots. Take one away and try whatever tools you have". Instead of the bullshit controlled ones as we had some years ago when the pentester said "I need an admin account". What? What's the point of that then if I'm just giving you admin, the point is to see if you can make yourself admin by finding the faults! (not the fault of the pentesters. The fault of the companies that restrict their tests).

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: Pity the poor journalists who have to listen to this demented ranting

Everyone time he eats one I can picture Melania crossing her fingers whispering "Please crush his heart, please crush his heart".