* Posts by steviebuk

2635 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2017

£3m for 8 weeks of consultancy work: McKinsey given contract to advise UK.gov on tech project business cases

steviebuk Silver badge

One of issues with public sector IT?

Pissing money away time and time again on consultants.

As I've said before, been in one place where the consultant came in, asked us all what we thought the issues were and what could be changed, then took that info and palmed it off as his own work. As always the mangelment listened to the consultant but had been ignoring us for years saying the same old shit.

Black Hat security conference returns to Las Vegas – complete with hacks to quiet the hotel guest from hell

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Re: lbry

You don't have to. Watch a video that yes, gets downloaded as you watch and then shared but you can, as I do, delete them all.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Worth a watch

Its good. You can sync your YouTube account to it so it will automatically upload all your YouTube content to it. The lbry currency you can ignore. And yes, it has the conspiracy nut jobs but you can just ignore them. Client is a bit slow though. Dave Jones from eevblog is on it and likes it a lot. He explains it better than I can in his videos.

steviebuk Silver badge

Worth a watch

Always worth a watch. The best one was the talk the guy did about his kit being stolen from his flat. Then he went on to trace who'd now had it as he had dyndns setup and they never wiped it. Really good talk that one.

Will they be on YouTube? Technically you're no longer allowed to put hacking videos on YouTube (a shit rule) my RDS session hijack example is still up. More reason to move to lbry I think.

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

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So thats what Wang were

Going to school in Boston Manor, and waiting for the E1/E8 to go home at the Great West Road bus stop (guaranteed a seat then as was before the school). The Wang building used to be on the corner. 1000 was the address number if I remember right. Never knew they did computers.

Ex-health secretary said 'vast majority' were 'onside' with GP data grab. Consumer champion Which? reckons 20 million don't even know what it is

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He says that because

He's a lying cunt. Always has been. His app before being in government was a failure and all through the pandemic he's been lying. Not a fan of cummings but he was right that Hancock is a liar.

I feel guilty just making up small white lies to users when I've forgotten to do their ticket. Doing it blantently in front of cameras means you clearly give no fucks.

A bunch of apps will be able to bypass Microsoft's new store and use own update methods

steviebuk Silver badge

Store

Bollocks. Hate the shitting windows store. Several Windows 10 releases ago one release appeared on a few machines at work. But how? All updates are done by WSUS and we don't allow new builds until tested. Turned out despite WSUS being on and windows updates only coming from there. If the windows store was allowed, there was/is a fucking button in there that you can click to bypass everything, even WSUS and do a new release update.

Store has been disabled ever since.

The cockroach of Windows, XP, lives on in London's Victoria Coach Station

steviebuk Silver badge

I loved Windows 98se. Never wanted to move to XP. Tried it, wasn't keen but also turned out my PC wasn't that great. This was back in 2004. I think I may have lasted another year before I was finally confident enough about XP that I moved, then loved it :)

Stayed on it until Windows 7. Loved Windows 7. Still using it and only use Windows 10 on work machines. But I might have to bite the bullet soon as there are some quite useful "quality of life" things on Windows 10 that work well that are missing on Windows 7. Native ISO mounting for example.

NSO Group 'will no longer be responding to inquiries' about misuse of its software

steviebuk Silver badge

The same governments

Moaning are the ones that want to end or a backdoor to end to end encryption, claiming it will only be used by "law enforcement" ignoring the fact, just like this issue, it will be abused.

Amnesty International and French media protection org claim massive misuse of NSO spyware

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Its funny

All these politicians want an end to end to end encryption or at least a "backdoor" that "only law enforcement will have access too". Yet we've been saying for years it won't be only them that has access and this perfectly proves the point.

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: This is confusing

I think it just says "If you thought like that but now don't, just keep quiet about it and say nothing." Although that's not very helpful as people might learn from what he's said and change their ways earlier than they may have. It appears the only time its OK to mention what you used to feel but now doubt is either in counselling, when you've got enough money you never need to work again or if doing a TED Talk.

It had to happen: Microsoft's cloudy Windows 365 desktops are due to land next month

steviebuk Silver badge

Makes me want to cry

Loved computers since going to college to study in 90s. Most change has been nice and good. But this!! Makes me want to cry. I like Windows but don't like the direction cloud is going. Worried for a future job? Sure. But also that control is being taken away. I own all Columbo episodes on DVD. As none of the Streaming services I pay for show it, I've started ripping them all. Try doing that in 365. Will the overlords constantly monitor all instances? If they see any hacking, cracking or ripping software anywhere, will your sub be instantly cancelled?

I see this potentially failing. Maybe useful for some but the price. $31 a month for only a 4GB memory machine with a tiny amount of space. Fuck that.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Umm...

No, the driving force is pure greed. Its like EA. Made more money from their in game gambling cards (Ultimate Team) that selling the game. Microsoft want some of that pie and hope once someone buys Windows 365, they'll have to continue to pay monthly or yearly so constant cash coming in rather than sell the software once and letting the user use it for several years with no extra money coming in from that user.

Makes me want to cry.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: The way forward?

And then cost a lot more after which they'll not be told about until the bill comes.

Teen turned away from roller rink after AI wrongly identifies her as banned troublemaker

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Re: Using it wrongly

Yes it shouldn't be seen as a racial problem as its just a shit system it would appear and the idiots monitoring it should of then done a manual check.

The problem is, there have been facial recognition software that has been biased towards black people for some fucked up reason and might be same issue here.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

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Re: Green?

Much like Emma Thompson did when she "jetted over from America" to be in the global warming demonstration :) ironic. I think they'd rather she give some funding (maybe she does) than create more pollution with her air travel.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Space Cadets

Star Trek invented the flip phone, the tablet, the voice activated computer. Star Trek IS science

;o)

I do like Star Trek though.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Miserable and small minded

I think the fact Virgin Atlantic was asking the government for a bailout when Branson was pissing his money away on this, is the reason people take the piss.

The fact Bezo's Amazon are fighting its workers to have a right to be in a union and had posters all over one of their warehouses discouraging its workers from joining a union is why people take the piss.

The fact Bezo can more than afford to pay his warehouse workers decent wage but doesn't, is another reason to take the piss.

Robots still suck. It's all they can do to stand up – never mind rise up

steviebuk Silver badge

Robert Miles

Worth a watch on YouTube. He talks about AI safety a lot. And the Specification Gaming episode was quite funny. A list is here

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml

I specifically like

"Road Runner Agent kills itself at the end of level 1 to avoid losing in level 2 Saunders et al, 2017 Trial without Error: Towards Safe RL with Human Intervention"

And

"Block moving A robotic arm trained using hindsight experience replay to slide a block to a target position on a table achieves the goal by moving the table itself. Chopra, 2018 GitHub issue for OpenAI gym environment FetchPush-v0"

So will it get to a point when, like Skynet, the AI decides "To make it appear I've done my daily task correctly, I'll just kill the human instead"

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

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And the lawyers win

Whoever gets the next contract, the other will argue over it and sue.

Why does The Register, keep randomly signing me out!

Another JEDI saga that doesn't need a sequel: Oracle petitions Supreme Court over Microsoft Pentagon contract

steviebuk Silver badge

Like spoilt children

None of the big players will be happy if the other gets it so will just continue to sue in the hope the winner just gives up and pulls out

Watch the moment China's Zhurong rover lands on Mars, hear it truckin' for the first time

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Second view?

Yes. They dropped a wireless camera just for that bit. I assume its not just for show but helps them get a view of the lander as well as the bot.

Serco bags £322m contract extension for Test and Trace, is still struggling to share data with local authorities

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: £22bn?

Probably due to paying overpriced consultants that will tell them want their own local team have been telling them for ages. But appears they only listen to the consultant. We had that at a place I was at. That's all the consultant did, talk to us, then palm our ideas off as their own. And then some other ideas they'd come up with, we'd been saying needed to happened for ages.

And then the rest goes on directors and exec pay I bet.

steviebuk Silver badge

Can't be bothered to find anyone else

"the outsourcing giant said the new contract had been awarded after a competitive process run by the Department for Health and Social Care and the Crown Commercial Service."

Or the Department for Health and Social Care couldn't be bothered to do the work to find someone else, is more likely.

‘What are the odds someone will find and exploit this?’ Nice one — you just released an insecure app

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: WhiteHat Security

Also sounds like he talks business speak bollocks instead of just speaking in plain fucking English so we can all understand.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Windows 10 like Windows 7

Same. Are charity worked for has a training room with old kit in. Doesn't need to be fancy, its good enough. All upgraded to Windows 10 just fine with SSDs slapped in. However, now, none of them will be able to use Windows 11 if a TPM2 chip is required.

It doesn't appear to be about security in my eyes, more like DRM.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: mspaint

The local account issue is fucking stupid. They are essentially saying "All you people out in the sticks or with no Internet, fuck you, you can't have Windows 11".

Dicks.

steviebuk Silver badge

No choice at all

"Personal computing requires choice. We need to nurture and grow our own agency over computing itself. We want to remove the barriers that too often exist today and provide real choice and connection."

Requiring a UEFI bios and TPM 2 (even if not using Bitlocker it sounds like) and forcing people to have a Microsoft account to carry on the install for Windows 11 Home is fucking choice.

I'm an IT engineer by day, but more and more I'm getting dishearted with the way Windows is going. Soon it will be software as a service "No Internet? Tough tits. Move out of the stick or use something else. We don't care, it will be software as a service and you will pay the yearly sub for it".

Its why I'll be keeping hold of my current PC and my spare for years. So if I want to go back to old games and the glory days, I can.

John McAfee dead: Antivirus tycoon killed himself in prison after court OK'd extradition, says lawyer

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Re: Laws for thee - NOT me...

Ironic considering Trump was REALLY bad and far from "Draining the swamp" he added to it massively and became the Don of the swamp (as in the most corrupt person in it)

steviebuk Silver badge

Sad end

Wasn't much of a fan but growing up in the 80s and getting into computers in the 90s his name was well known along with his software.

Although he did the part of life I've always thought about with people who make a few million. Why not just quit and enjoy the money. He did, a little on the crazy side though, but still got out of the computing game to just enjoy the money. Unless you truly enjoy it, more fun just sitting back and enjoying the money instead of having to deal with office politics.

Only other one I know did that was Bryce Cogswell from Wininternals. They sold to Microsoft in 2006 but I believe part of the buyout was both Mark and Bryce had to continue to work for Microsoft for 4 years I think it was, until they could cash out (sounded like that was the deal anyway from what Mark has said in his "unexplained" talks about Bryce). Mark carried on with Microsoft and now head of Azure but Mark said Bryce retired, I assume, to enjoy the freedom the money bought him.

The great fire sale continues as Capita sells government joint venture Axelos for £380m

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: PRINCE2

Unfortunately I've seen a few companies who still expect managers to have it, some of those were/are in the NHS.

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

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Re: LSW

Also some of the independent developers I like where they are one man shows, at least one of them has said it was a ball ache coding for Linux and there wasn't enough market for it so he's newer games aren't on it. I like Linux but will always have to keep Windows for gaming.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: LSW

So many games don't work on Linux so we're stuck with it for a while. Unless you're not a gamer then its fine or enjoy a console instead. I prefer gaming on PC to console.

steviebuk Silver badge

Not completely

"Get angry if you must at the rolling back of reality. Utilise weary disdain by all means, it helps. And if you must look on the bright side, at least we're rid of Skype."

There is a user at work, and I've still not worked out why, where Skype keeps fucking reinstalling itselfs. Pretty sure its one of those apps that gets installed where you can use the powershell command to uninstall, but sure enough a few days later, the fucker reinstalls itself ):o(

UK financial watchdog dithers over £680k refund from Google (in ad credits, mind you) for running anti-fraud ads

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Is Google blamed for the existence of online scams?

Not the same. YouTube for example has quite a lot of clearly fraud ads and other "questionable" ads the "Free seminar" ones. Yet YouTube blame this on AdSense yet they own AdSense. And the starscope monocular is clearly a fucking scam yet has continued to stay on their platform for months and months. I assume while the scammers give them a cut, they appear to not give a shit.

New York congressman puts forward federal right-to-repair bill

steviebuk Silver badge

It's like the

John Deere tractors. They're against it so expect a remote farmer to leave his/her tractor, broken in a field, while they come to towe it for repair. Instead of letting that farmer fix it on the go so they can carrying on with the harvest.

Tim Cook: Sideloading is a disaster and proposed App Store reforms would harm user privacy and security

steviebuk Silver badge

So you're saying

"Android has 47 times more malware than iOS does."

So you're ssying the App store does have malware despite you apparently checking it? Which means you don't check properly. So let me fucking decide what I put on the phone I bought then. Unless of course you're suggesting "You don't own the phone, you're just renting it"

Roger Waters tells Facebook CEO to Zuck off after 'huge' song rights request

steviebuk Silver badge

Bob Dylan is a funny one as Steve Jobs loved his music yet Bob declined to have any of it on Apple iTunes from what i remember

Up to £80m on the table in University of Nottingham's search for service provider to lace together IT support

steviebuk Silver badge

Annoys me

"reliable and robust technology services" hire a department internally then!!!

An external company will say "Sorry can't do that, its out of SLA" internally they'll say "We should have a ticket but as you're desperate we'll do it now and sort the ticket out after".

Why don't these people ever get this.

A company will now tell them bullshit and maybe do it cheap for a year then put the price up massively the next year.

I wonder what Dr Mike Pound and the like think of this (computerphile)

EE and Three mobe mast surveyors might 'upload some virus' to London Tube control centre, TfL told judge

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Open door policy?

But you have to make sure you don't touch the roof floor, not even a bead of sweat or the alarms will go off.

G7 nations aim for global 15 per cent tax on big tech and bin digital services taxes

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: As mentioned in the Private Eye (but not about this story)

For some reason I forgot to add that it is Rishi Sunak. Annoyingly too late to edit.

steviebuk Silver badge

As mentioned in the Private Eye (but not about this story)

His wife's family IT business Infosys is now worth £500million. He has a blind trust and they apparently have an eight figure property holdings. They could be close to £600 million.

But he refuses to move on a wealth tax system and said the UK already has a "very progressive tax system". Yeah because it helps him and his family keep their fotune.

And he stands on the stage trying to make out he's done something good here and made a change for the world.

Fuck off.

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Punishment?

Its shit. But if others choose to use it who are we to judge. That maybe how they want to live their life, not up to us to say "get a life". I play games a lot, as I enjoy them, people still say "get a life".

My point, people use it for all kinds of things. One person I know just uses it for past time stuff in the area where everyone uploads very old photos of where we live. Others use it to keep in contact in a way they find useful for family in Australia.

I don't use it, had an account in the early days but then deleted it but I also don't judge others that do or tell them to "get a life". Sick of hearing that when I play games, I'm sure they are sick of it because they happen to like Facebook.

The policy of truth: As ransomware claims rise, what's a cyber insurer to do?

steviebuk Silver badge

Might want to make the PSA ad not male aimed.

Tech scammer who fooled Cisco, Microsoft and Lenovo out of millions jailed for more than seven years

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Just sayin' ...

Also, far from condoning his actions, some murderers get less time than what he has. Or people that commit GPH.

Funny how money can buy you long sentences.

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: You also have to start not giving a shit if you don't get the role

Also forgot to say, the job where both managers in the interview ended up being really nice was the job where I just started to not give a fuck if I got it or not. I knew I was good, if they didn't see it, their loss. Thankfully I got it.

steviebuk Silver badge

You also have to start not giving a shit if you don't get the role

Why do I say that? Because I suffer from anxiety and hate interviews. I'm shit in interviews. One I went for I was just desperate to get out of the NHS. Turned out both managers that interviewed me were really nice.

Long story short. Once I'd been in a year was talking to one of them when they were looking for IT manager replacement. One of the applicants walked out after being told there was a short test. She said "What they don't realise is we don't solely take into account the test, we look to see if they'll fit the team as well". I did suggest some people just panic so maybe that's why he walked.

Also over the years I've seen people get roles they shouldn't have. I've seen an engineer get a role at the NHS only for HR to state "That's not policy or potentially legal. You have to put it out for interviews" so they did. Wasted everyone's time that applied because they were going to fudge the results so they could just choose the engineer they'd already given the role to. Interviews were only done to shut HR up. So sometimes, its not because you were bad in the interview, its because they either already have someone in mind and just going through the ropes or they are scamming the system to get rid of you so they can replace you with someone cheaper.

I had the unfortunate job of checking over CVs at one job. I was only an engineer but the place was desperate, they'd fired the shit IT manager with no replacement so I had to help out in some areas, one was just checking over CVs. Because they were bringing in a temp engineer and the head of IT was mainly an accountant and not IT (although still a really nice person). When I was looking them all over I felt really guilty while reading them thinking "You're a chef, not choosing you. You have no experience, not choosing you". I asked her after how she copes. Told her about my anxiety and how I hate applying for jobs because always feel no one is going to give me a chance. She just said "You get used to it and learn to ignore the emotions, its not personal".

Nobody expects the borkish bank-wisition: When I said I wanted some notes from the ATM, I never thought I'd see...

steviebuk Silver badge

You'd hope if the app isn't running then it disables all keys from the front panel. But as we've seen over the years ATMs aren't exactly great with security.

An interesting one I had was when a few notes came out and one note was folded in the corner, this caused the machine to count it as two notes. Had to put in a request for a £10 refund as it counted it as giving me £40 when it really had only given me £30. I religiously count the money after I withdraw any now.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: What does it take...

You'll get companies or local councils that will "Go Google" and then force you to use Chrome and nothing else. So its issues like that.

But also, I love Firefox but due to the above ended up using Chrome more and more and came to love "Save selection to Keep". Yes, something Google made that is very useful, Google Keep. Being able to highlight text from a site, right click Save selection to keep and have it save the text and a link to the site. Unfortunately, and I haven't checked in a while, there was no official addon for that for Firefox.

Google to end free unlimited online photo, vid storage, will eventually delete files if accounts go over their cap

steviebuk Silver badge

How did I miss this

Just seen news today and came here to find was reported ages ago.

These big companies are doing this more and more. Tie people into the free offer then once enough people are so buried in it, take the free offer away and make them pay.

Arseholes.

More reason I hate the cloud and try to storage as much as I can locally.