Posts by steviebuk 2808 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2017
...why the owners of Star Trek haven't sued yet. As his "Space Force" badge is a clear rip off of Star Fleets badge. It really feels like he got one of his arse kissers to do the logo, who has no clue about design so just trawled the Internet until they found something they liked.
....Darren Jones also ask why the Post Office management that was involved in this have now been promoted to other government contracts, instead of severing jail time or at least being blacklisted from any senior position again. We have Paula Vennells who still has her CBE and now the chair of Imperial College Healthcare Trust.
All mentioned in The Private Eye recently.
Its all fucked up, considering people went to jail and others died. All we're hearing again is "Lessons have been learnt". What? That appears people in senior positions are void of prosecution.
...Google Meet. The amount of information it collects for the admins in GSuite admin and I think sends to Google directly.
I've removed my GSuite details.
Client logs upload
Applied at 'DOMAIN NAME HERE'
Include web-browser and mobile app logs with diagnostic data sent to Google.
Logs include users' email addresses and additional info.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/7304109
Client logs upload Users’ web browser and mobile app log information is sent to Google. This includes users’ email addresses and other information. Google uses it to help troubleshoot support requests from your organization.
When a meeting is going on you can see who is in it, even if they aren't related to your company. See their e-mail address and if the score they give the meeting at the end if they reply.
Meeting code
Organizer
Started
Duration
Size
participants
Network congestion
% of meeting
Packet loss
average (max)
Jitter
ms avg (max)
Score
lowest
I don't use it. I remember going on it and Friends Reunited. Saw a few old school "people" and realised they were the same cocks now as they were in school. Realised people just make up bullshit about their lives so have avoided it since.
I still don't get it because people love to boost about their lives on it and their past friends get jealous, not realising most of the shit on Facebook is bollocks. Why do strangers feel the need to share their kids with the world, I don't get it.
However, I do see and understand why others use it. A ex manager at work only ever used it to see her relatives in Australia, an old woman I used to work with who isn't into IT uses it to keep in touch with people and chat to them and then you have my sister and brother-in-law. I pointed my sister and brother-in-law in the direction of Facebook a few years back, for their small building work business. I suggested its so much easier than me, attempting, poorly, to manage their own domain that they couldn't work out how to upload images to. The local barbers uses Facebook to get his opening and special closes times out there because he's got no time to deal with a proper domain.
So although I hate Facebook, I can see why some people insist on using it.
What I can't understand is people moaning about its privacy issues when they are getting to use it for free. If you don't like it's privacy issues, stop using it, its not a human right to use it. I'm sure most of those moaning would refuse to pay a subscription fee for it with no adverts.
And Crapita will get it. Then, eventually Crapita will go bust. 'Lessons will be learned' they'll out source to Crapita's replacement, which will just be as shit and they'll discover the directors who watched over the failure of Crapita, are now running this new outsourced company.
It was awful. He said "super pumped" which is bad enough as it is, then the even more bullshit "Oh isn't it cute, my daughter accidentally interrupts the filming" yeah, did you pay her for that acting?
Glad I got rid of My Surface Pro 4 last year. Was a bit of an impulse buy, wanted something for digital drawing. But like many of my "ideas" I never really used it. It barely played games. Was able to play Capitalism Lab while on the Euro Star heading to Belgium one year :) because I hardly used it, the screen issue never hit me, but I suspect its new owner will have to get a replacement at some point.
Never purchasing any Surface line again.
Its difficult to resist as we're a curious lot in IT. Nowhere near a bank but in a lodge on IOW, I've snooped round in the loft and found their, quite decent switch that they use for each lodge. Good job I did as one of the bedroom TVs wasn't working. And turned out to be a loose cable in the switch, wasn't clicked into place. They correctly disabled all ports on the switch that weren't in use and the WiFi for each lodge had isolation on. The only shit part was their bullshit advertising of fast internet. It was far from it, it was worse than dialup.
Another site, the whole park was wide open. From the lodge you could get to the main router that control all the other 6 or 7 lodges. The password was left as the default. You could even connect to the printer in their office. Was at Christmas. I was very tempted to send a print but didn't.
Another place with a few lodges spaced a good distance apart also had issues. But the couple that run it are nice so I reported the issues via email. And gave them free IT advice or what to do to fix the issues (I guess thats why I have no money, giving advice for free instead of becoming a bullshitting consultant)
I also remember Turbo Pascal from the 90s and college. Recently found my old Lottery Number Picker from late 90s that I'd written in Pascal. Unfortunately not the source code.
My story of Pascal, for me, was interesting. I was never a good programmer. I enjoyed it but struggled to get my head round it, still do.
I wrote a long winded routine for the lottery program, my lecturer looks and managed to shorten the routine massively.
I discovered how to write to a file one week, so I then wrote, while at college in the Windows 3.11 days, a sniffer program. While having my programming lessons and during times using them in study periods, I'd note when students booted the machines, they'd forget to switch to the network drive, say F: drive and would type 'login' in DOS on the C: drive, it not being there would get an error so then they'd switch drives.
So I wrote my version of login and would stick it on the C: drive to see if it would work and if people would fall for it. I didn't know how to hash out what you typed so instead of * you'd see your password, get an bullshit error I'd display, realise you were on the wrong drive, switch to the correct drive and login as normal. Meanwhile my login program had grabbed your user name and password and stored them in a file called assignment.doc, because students also would leave their documents all over the C:
Again, not being a good programmer the details would be written in plain text. If you found the assignment file, you'd be able to read it and realise your machines were compromised. I genuinely only wrote it to see if it would work. I was amazed it did. I still remember one password that it grabbed that worked, 'masterofpuppets" once logged in as the user, we quickly logged out after. I told my college friends, who were also amazed by it to NEVER ABUSE IT. I left it at that. Never used it after that one account I got into, and never did anything bad with that account. I also warned them, if you abuse it and get caught, I had nothing to do with it.
So the day came when the dicks were messing around with it. Lucky for me I was bunking off that day as couldn't be bothered to go in. There was also a stupid cartoon animation tool on the machines that one idiot of the group of friends would use, to make piss take cartoon animations of the lecturers. The rule was, if you got caught pressing the reset button on a machine, you were up to something. They got caught that day. Got caught with the login program on them and the cartoons.
It all kicked off. They were pulled into interviews. It was serious. We had a big meeting in the hall over this login program that was found on the machines. That it was illegal blah blah. That meeting was to say 2 students have been kicked off the course and one given a suspension. I escaped. Lucky for me they kept quiet over where they got it or who wrote it. No one ever found out it was me. I carried on at that college for another 4 years with 2 different IT related courses. I'd learnt my lesson and didn't do anything like that again there.
In their interviews they told me the lecturers asked who created this program? Its very well written blah blah. And this is why I remember it so well. I said they are talking bollocks. They are saying that to see if you confess to writing the code. Why did I know they were talking bollocks? Because the code I'd written was in the Pascal help file :o) I'd just added the text the college display when logging in.
Some years later, while my cousin was at Leeds Uni I told him this story. He said they used a similar system, could I write the program for him. Still being naive I said sure and also because I'd been reading the 2600 magazine. In that they had a piece about Pascal and how to do very basic encryption for writing to files. Ooo, I could add that to my sniffer program. All it did was you'd type A, it would plus 20 to the ASCII value and write that to the assignment.doc file. I'd stick other random crap in the file also. So if you found that file, you'd just think it was a corrupted student assignment file and just delete it and think no more of it. You'd take that file home and decrypt with the decryption program that simply minused 20 from what was in the file. I never found out if he ever used it or not. He became a Doctor, so if he did use it, he never got caught.
There is nothing. No new telemetry. I've installed ESET on a clean VM. Run the latest Process Explorer and nothing. No attempts at connections out.
The only time you'll see it attempt to connect out is when it goes to
status.thawte.com
Which, I believe is the signature check and if you do VirusTotal checks.
From their forums
"We have most definitely not added any telemetry to Process Explorer. The main change in the latest version was to resolve an issue with using the wrong icons. In the last year or so all changes to Process Explorer have been bugfixes only.
Could you tell me what telemetry you think you are seeing?
MarkC(MSFT)"
Would like to see the evidence you have to I can update the post.
..shit. Maybe I'm biased as I love Process Explorer or "Super Task Manager" as David Solomon used to call it. One of the reasons Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell wrote it is because of how poor Task Manager is at showing anything useful.
Take for example The Case Of the Pausing Explorer that we had at work way back in 2011 in XP. Explorer would freeze when trying to access network drives, for about 5-10mins then suddenly all files would appear. Not being given time to troubleshoot I was told to just "Rebuild the laptop". I argued that isn't fixing the issue, we've already seen it comes back. All Task Manager showed was Explorer running at 50%.
Eventually I convinced my boss to let me look. Fired up Process Explorer on a laptop with the issue. Again could see Explorer at 50% but Process Explorer would allow you to view what .dlls that process was actually running. And there it was. Within Explorer was a .dll from PGP running at 50% or more. The encryption software that we ran on the laptops.
Turns out all the .dll was doing was scanning the network for encrypted files so it could change their icon to show they were encrypted. We didn't encrypt files just the whole OS so was pointless. Looked up the .dll, found PGP mentioned the issue we were having and that it was safe to disable the .dll.
Once disabled on an affected machine, problem solved in less than a min, compared to having to rebuild the system that I'd been forced to do for over a month by the PHB.
Reminds me of my story I have mentioned recently about "Netbook gate".
I e-mail the stake holder and people I think should know "Just so you're aware, this Trust is going to put some netbooks on the network because they want to test them. I'm helping so to make sure they are done properly."
Silence.
3 months later "Anyone know why these Netbooks are on the network". Yes, I told you about them 3 months ago.
All hell breaks loose, I get pulled into a potential disciplinary. If I only I'd been sensible back then and knew they can't just bully you like that. I'd have also then printed off the e-mail where I'd informed them all 3 months earlier only to be ignored.
I disagree with the Office Ribbon. Although at first I thought WTF!, when I was shown how to use it, I began to like it.
But his "vision" for Windows UI was just plain shit.
I think gone are the days when they used to do focus groups. I watched a video, years ago, I believe it was about the development of Windows and the testing they went through.
They'd sit a user in front of a machine, sit with them and ask them to speak aloud what they are doing, why they are moving to a part of the screen. What they are having issues with etc. So they could make a better GUI.
Now, you just get some hipster knob who decided they have a "vision" and then convince other people to allow them to try out that vision and NO ONE is allowed to say "But this is shit".
...at the end of this, it proves what I said YEARS ago where I used to work. "Why are you travelling 20 miles each month (various depending on which site is the flavour of the month for the meetups) or ever 2 weeks for your 'meetings' and for the "Request for Change" meetings? You're fucking IT, you can use conference calling".
Windows 3.1.1 and in the study room of college in early 90s. Appears the computers aren't locked down and I had a bit of free software off a cover disc (I'm still looking for it to this day with no joy :( ). It was a screensaver or it might of been a standalone app that was like a screensaver that had tiny spiders on it. When it would kick off, it had taken a screenshot of your desktop and the tiny spiders would start to eat all the screen. All you had to do was move the mouse and it would stop and your work would look normal again.
Being the immature dick I was back then I thought it would be funny to stick this on all the study room PCs (I think there were 6) and set a timer for it to go off. Sat next to a lady one day and she panicked as it kicked off as she was doing her course work and hadn't saved.
Funny at first as caught a few before who moved the mouse and it stopped. But she was getting more panicked and backed away from the mouse. Under my breath I was shouting, just move the fucking mouse. I can't remember what happened. I couldn't own up as would off gotten kicked off the course. But, with hindsight I could of said I'd seen the issue before just move the mouse. But having just come from school, it wasn't the dun thing to be helpful or talk to other people.
I was about a year in to my new roll over 10 years back. Learnt how to remote to my home PC via SSL tunnel created via Putty (another engineer showed me. He said as the traffic will just look like https traffic cause of the port we were using, 3rd line shouldn't notice). They didn't appear to. But, the engineer next to me that day, from another department noticed me on my home machine. He was nice, kept quiet.
Then I made the rookie mistake. Left the PC for a few mins, unlocked. Came back, all still fine.
Got home and took a few days till I noticed some icons on my home desktop that said something onlines of "wanker" "knob" etc I realised who'd been next to me, mentioned it to him. He laughed and said "That's why you don't leave your machine unlocked when you walk away from your PC"
:)
Worst is we did the same on a so called "Senior engineer" and it took him ages to work out what the issue was. Pretty much confirming what we already knew, he didn't deserve the title or pay of a senior engineer as he knew jack shit.
Feel guilty? No. He was an arsehole and would make you feel shitty when you first join. Monitor what you'd be doing when it wasn't part of his job, comment if you used a browser other than IE (back when they still thought IE was secure despite Firefox clearly showing it wasn't) and then eventually would go silent when he'd realise you knew more than him. For fear you'd expose he knew less than he should.
...to carry on using Apple though, that are also made in Chinese factories. And lots of other China made kit. That radio you have in your office PM, is it made in China?
Surely if they are all this paranoid its not far fetched to believe the Chinese government could stick bugs in any electronic kit made in factories in their country.
Maybe, but then you'd think he'd expose it if people were in-danger, he fears something is going to go wrong. Because of an issue that has been known about for ages but higher ups are ignoring. Maybe. Probably totally wrong but isn't that how the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. Over O-Rings that were known to be poor but they were forced to go ahead anyway.
But appreciate PowerShell but not his constant banging on about automation and cloud in a bid to be able to get rid of engineers. Saw it in a video but can't remember what one.
Bit like Mark Russinovich. Have a man crush on him and love his systinternal tools. But there is one interview where I didn't like him and it put me off slightly. As he's now made his millions, deserved. He was in an interview banging on about Azure, saying that lots of engineers are against The Cloud because they know it will put them out of work, but that isn't a reason to dislike it, they need to adapt.
I'd rather not. To late in life to adapt and at an age companies won't hire me over the young ones despite the experience. And thats not the only reason I dislike The Cloud.
..you have A GP calling up to complain her PC has been taken away that had patient data on it because her new PC arrived while she was away. For me to have to waste time explaining the engineer I sent out already asked your PA if it was OK to remove your PC, as it was already booked in and agreed with you to take it away that day. To finally remind you that NO patient or any data is to be left on the PCs, this has been best practice for a few years and you know this. So why were you ignoring it? And yes, you're machine is now here in the office and will be securely wiped.
She was only complaining cause she was trying to cover up her fuck up of leaving data on the PC*
Doesn't help when you're doing a temp role and sitting in A&E to install a blood printer (small label printer that prints out labels they stick on your wrist). A fucking printer that just needs a static IP address, that is all. Something you've been doing for years in your last place so know what the fuck you are doing only to be told. "No. 3rd line do that. You have to wait in a&e, call 3rd line, give them the mac address and get them to do it" OK, this is fucking stupid. I've been doing this for years in last place I temped, do you not trust my experience on my CV? Then why did you fucking hire me? I know what I'm fucking doing. Is it because I'm temp scum and showing the fact you are so set in your ways at doing shit because "Its how you've done it for years, and I can't expose how pointless it is as you want to keep your job". So instead you keep me waiting in a&e until your knob 3rd line engineer gets out of his fucking meeting. I argue later for permissions to do this myself next time. "No. 3rd line need to do this". I fucking give up. Clearly NHS IT hasn't fucking changed, all the time I was away from it.
When you get given a job with no ticket because its a pet project of the IT directors daughter. Right at the end of a Friday. And wonder why. Its out of scope of why we're hired to be there. But sure, we'll take a look. To find you have no rights to the building you were asked to go to. Find the daughter also has no rights to the building. Eventually gain access to be told by the nurses about the kit you're there to move "Other engineers were here earlier but they just took the keyboard and mouse". To finally realise, the lazy cunts in 2nd line couldn't be bothered to move the rest of the kit themselves so had said "Get the temp guys to do it. Yes we're aware that's not what they're paid to be here for but we want to leave early, its Friday". What a bunch of cunts. And to top it all off, when you get it to the department its going to. The daughter has now fucked off without the job being completed and the person in the department you took it too who was told was your contact, knew fuck all about it.
NHS IT is as incompetent as ever.
*Was back in XP and proper group policy wasn't in place to lock local saves.
I think it was a Fujitsu project around the time I was in the NHS, along with NPfit. Speaking to one of the people involved in the Trust about it they said Fujitsu are getting increasingly annoyed. Each month they have to speak to a different manager as the turn over it so high, each time they are requesting more and more being added to the system but don't want to pay Fujitsu for it.
Eventually, Fujitsu got pissed off and pulled out. NHS tried to sue Fujitsu. That's a very basic very of what I saw. Who knows how accurate it was, but sounded legit asking for more and more features but not wanting to pay sounded like that Trust.
Doesn't help the people managing the IT were as bent as fuck. We have a director who I still suspect was taking back handers for contracts, giving jobs for his mates, getting "gifts" from HP to use them as the laptop providers over Dell and never declaring the "gifts". HP magically won the contract. His management team order massive TVs for the office for "Presentations" then one or two of the TVs "disappeared".
Treating contract IT staff like shit, so shit and disorganised (and I'm not suggesting at all it was right) that said contracting staff decided to "make some of those roll out PCs disappear because no one records the roll out of them properly". It was just targets, targets, targets. We must reach our targets. When you treat staff with respect, you tend to get engineers that do work properly. When you treat them like shit, you get rogue thieves. And when you get pulled under the bus for reporting an issue with some netbooks, only to be ignored for 3 months, then have an attempt at a disciplinary 3 months later for them ignoring you, you can't blame that engineer for sitting back and not report the thieves.
When you have an argument with a PHB because they want you to "No longer cherry pick calls. But pick the low hanging fruit calls and do those first". That is FUCKING CHERRY PICKING. He insisted it wasn't. I insisted it was. He was a dick.
When senior management decide to create a desktop background for XP that is eye bleeding and makes it near impossible to fucking read any text that is on the desktop. To be constructively have this pointed out, only to be told "Its not changing, get on with rolling out the PCs". Until user after user told me how shit it was and I had to go to a director in the Trust to tell them, they aren't listening to me so you'll need to tell them. To it then suddenly changing.
To suggest "Its cheaper if we get in a HDD crushing machine and do it ourselves. Then we know for sure they are all crushed and not just assuming this certificate from this company is legit". Yeah, whatever contractor scum, have you not realised we don't listen to you. To hear, several years after I left, with great joy, that a Trust requested some drives be crushed but IT couldn't so suggests a company. Granted that trust ignored that, gave them to a company that wasn't vetted who then sold them on. Someone picked them up off ebay and found medical records still on them. That trust got the biggest fine anyone's seen. Shortly after they got their own HDD crushing machine :) knobs.
When you decide to randomly move one engineer who's been helping the 2nd line for a few years & was good on a not great pay (I was clueless at the time) to another role and say "Well if you want to stay you have to now do this role. But as you're a contractor, we're gonna pay you less." (I'd have got the same money per hour working in a fucking supermarket.) and really wanting a career in IT so stupidly stayed. You can see why I'm bitter.
Glad I'm out of it. Walking away from the PC before I get more angry.
We only had one in primary school. And I can't remember his name now but was a kid in the class who was the whiz. No one, not even the teachers knew how to use it so he'd do it all for them including printing out. The BBCs in high school I think lasted a year or two. Was later 80s so were on there way out. Don't think we had the luxury of a turtle. I do remember them showing us a 12" laser disc. From my bad memory I think computing classes disappeared after the BBCs were gone. I just remember that room then only being for CDT and technical design drawing.
Is good. Still not visited but their YouTube channel is really good. Really needs to be saved, sad to see the Just Giving is struggling. I donated a few weeks ago. I like their room full of BBC computers. The way they are laid out reminds me of our computer room in school in the 80s. They even have the same monitors. It was two boys to one BBC back then.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnw4p95EOWghQNP4vOv8VHw/videos
...if you can do what some attempt to do with ANPR cameras. Hoping the database doesn't validate data, they stick the dump the database command on their numberplate just before entering. Hoping, that the camera reads it with no check and the database does just that :)
Don't know if its ever worked.
They'll be rushing it out so the directors, CEO of the body making the app can stick it on their CV and spin how great it was. In the hope they then get head hunted by the likes of Google, Amazon etc.
They'll give no shits about the actual developers and force them to cut corners where needed to meet their agenda.
Unfortunately it appears to be like this in most places. A previous place I contracted at for years after (it would of been cheaper to hire me full time) eventually let me go and didn't give me the perm job I'd been doing for years, despite cries from actually users who said I was good (was surprised with the gift I got on leaving and how many signed my card considering how quiet I am). Claimed I'd answer a question poorly in the interview despite my answer being a real world example of good customer service. When I pointed this out to their bent HR department, they fumbled and said their were other reasons. I asked "if those reasons included having to put me at the top of the band when starting where as the new person you've picked who isn't even in the country yet and will only be allowed to stay for 2 years. They will be at the bottom of the pay?".... "Well yes it was a bit about money". At least you admit to my face. Shame I never released the voice recording of that.
The problem is the NHS is massive and each area and Trust have their own IT. Some Trusts try to use the same IT department but, as my experience, that hasn't lasted long as new governments come in an tear it apart of a Trust that is being forced to use them as in contract, hates them and wants to go their own way. The Trust that had the netbook issue ended up making the mistake of going with Crapita a year or so later.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
