Posts by steviebuk

Brit ISP TalkTalk blocks control tool TeamViewer

The dicks...

...are still doing this and it's 20fucking19. Trying to remote to a user and can't because of shitty TalkTalk blocking TeamViewer.

The knobs.

Dropbox Paper: Handy for collaborating... oh and harvesting email addresses, too

Bit like...

...when you share a fake PDF file via dropbox and convince loads of idiots to sign in to legit dropbox to click on the fake PDF. And then they all leave posts saying "Jane did you mean to send me this? Its not working" so I now get to see all the idiots that fell for the "Clearly a fucking phishing email because the owners mailbox was compromised" scam.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Re: That was a serious breath of fresh nerdiness

Just go back to TrueCrypt. The independent said it was still safe despite it being closed down. And at least with it you can create a hidden encrypted partition. I'm sure at the US airports the people asking to look at your laptop aren't gonna have any idea you have a TrueCrypt hidden partition installed.

Calling all the Visual Basic snitches: Keep quiet about it and so will he...

Re: Caught by the auditors

Nice. If in the days of Process Monitor or File Mon and Reg Mon, I think it would of appeared in those traces as well.

Re: Bending the rules to breaking point

And what happened next? Did you e-mail them saying exactly the same? So then you'd have a record of refusing to commit their fraud as people like that normally try to fuck you over later.

Re: Do the right thing?

Tesco?

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

What an idiot

Last week I read that as

"10 seconds of a million automatic number plate recognition images"

:)

What annoys me is in the so call "cloud" age, everything is being run by hipster knobs who what stuff "rushed to market" and stuck "in the cloud". But it needs to be secure "Fuck security, just get it done and too market as soon as we can. I want to then sell it and become a millionaire so I can buy more hipster clothes and just sit in coffee shops all day disguising how we can use AI to put loads of people out of work and call anyone that doesn't agree with me 'Granddad/Grandma'"

Re: Incompetence

From what I can tell from their website, they look like they might also be using a virtual office address based in London. Someone on Amazon was doing the same. His mail would go to the London address and they then forward it on too his real address. He was illegally using the NHS logo so looked him up. He gave it away by leaving a review of their service on their Google Reviews page. Found his real address via Companies House.

Most of the car park management companies end up being as bent as fuck. Most of them have no idea about GDPR and most of them have little to no IT security in place.

Argued with the one in the local Waitrose. I wasn't getting a ticket but requested my number plate be removed from their system under a Right To Be Forgotten. They claimed "I have no need to worry, I'm not getting a ticket and that they keep the plates for 6 months for security and crime prevention". I pointed out that under GDPR they no longer need to keep the plate so it needs to be deleted and that ANPR cameras are not to be used for CCTV purposed as they claimed they were doing.

They removed it. Well so they claimed. I asked for it to be removed from their backups also, they ignored all further e-mails.

Numberplate check on the DVLA website will give you the make, model and colour of the car.

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

Re: Sometimes I miss...

Get a Logitech MX Ergo. Still has a ball, the tiny rollers still, eventually, get dirty. I thought with that new model they'd have replaced the roller balls with lasers but appears not. I only use mine when I have no space for a proper mouse.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Re: polluting the well.

They still do that in Screwfix. Fucking annoys me but I know it's not their fault, its the shitty system they are lumped with. Was before GDPR but because of GDPR they now have a code to skip that section so I just say "I don't want to give my details thanks" and we continue as normal.

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

I remember one summer of the 90s

Where I was putting together the final year project for college. Despite it being the 90s we had still been taught Cobol, I guess they assumed we'd all be supporting legacy systems.

Despite it being so called "plain English" I still struggled with it a bit. Fudge the project to get it to work from what I remember. Also slightly annoyed but do now understand where they were coming from, that I only got a Merit for the project. It was because I didn't stick to the design specs. Roughly remember I think we were asked to take in user entered data and save it to TWO different files. I was struggling to get it all to work but ended up doing so but making it all save in ONE file. Got told by our nice programming lecturer Joan Foxley (I wonder where she is now) that it was a good program and efficient code and worked well, but they could only give me a Merit because I'd only saved to ONE file when the spec required it to be saved to TWO files. I was annoyed at the time as thought well if my code is more efficient and better than what they wanted why the mark down, but was simply because I didn't meant the spec the so called "client" requested.

Pascal was the language I enjoyed learning back then. Never did get that good at programming. Then grew bored of it for years and moved into hardware support. Now interested in it again but just as before, struggle to understand it :)

Service call centres to become wasteland and tumbleweed by 2024

Re: Tumbling Tumbleweed

Yep and I'd rather speak to a person than a bot. Amazon chat have now done away with a real person from the start, so I have to feed that lots of bollocks until it gets to the point of saying "Do you wish to chat to a real person" fucking yes!

Eco-activists arrested by Brit cops after threatening to close Heathrow with drones

Re: Good work MET Police

That's a flawed argument. You're suggesting all cyclists don't also own cars. Again, everyone pays tax even if you don't own a car and that tax is added to funding roads. Car owners pay more because the cars are massive pollutants (why cars before 1979 aren't included I don't understand) that's why you have no tax for electric vehicles.

My point stands. Cyclists are allowed as much use of the road as anyone else.

Re: Good work MET Police

Time and time again. There is NO ROAD TAX. They, we, all pay tax that is then added to funding the roads. So unfortunately for you, they have exactly the same rights to use the road as you.

Hasn't been road tax since world war 2

Handcranked HTML and JPEG japes. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Keyboard japes

Not to justify it but some kids were rights shits back then. In our school, roughly the same time just a year or two earlier, a mild mannered teacher was hounded in science every lesson. The shits in our class knew he couldn't control them so they'd act up. At one point he snapped and punched the blackboard while shouting. Then clutched his chest. The shits panicked as we all thought he was having a heart attack. They were so worried they even asked him if he was alright but he was so pissed off with them he told them to shut-up and get on with work. It felt if at that moment he'd rather die than have to carry on dealing with the shits.

The rest of the lesson everyone was silent.

I don't recall what happened the next week. I know he never died and assume he wasn't having a heart attack (at least I don't recall hearing anything about it later) but it didn't stop the arseholes continuing to be an arsehole too him in other science lessons.

Problem when you get a teacher like that in school, is you never learn anything. He was too busy trying to control, unsuccessfully, the shits, that we'd never get anything done. And I'm sure the shits had a death with as they'd randomly set fire to the gas taps without the bunsen burner attached in some lessons.

Re: Keyboard japes

You're fine, he's either an old git now or dead.

Hmmm..

You can't really say that when you were the soul person to create the image so you can't really blame anyone else "It was also your fault for not stopping me"

"Fiona also didn't hand in the names of the rest of the gang "as much as I wanted to turn in the numbskull webmaster who'd been asleep at the wheel with that assets list." Instead, she was rewarded with a lecture from a HR contractor on how she should have known she'd never get away with "something like that.""

That's like me blaming everyone else when I decided to paste a member of staffs image onto a front copy of Time Magazine. He saw the funny side for about a minute then got really pissed off. Especially when I said I'd e-mailed it to the 3rd line team :) I blamed no one but myself. Got away with it though as he was a cock and had been doing similar stuff to others so had no argument. If he'd got HR involved he'd have fucked himself over. It all went quiet and he oddly started to be nicer to me after that incident.

#MeToo chatbot, built by AI academics, could lend a non-judgmental ear to sex harassment and assault victims

Will it also...

...detect the liars? Obvious harassment is a awful issue to happen to a person but there are also cases of people "crying wolf" and later found to be lying, such as Carl Beech.

UK ISPs must block access to Nintendo Switch piracy sites, High Court rules

Pointless

"ISPs can be forced via a court order to block websites found to heavily facilitate internet copyright infringement."

When DNS over https become the main, the ISP can put the block in but will be ignored by the masses.

What a bunch of DoSers: Wikipedia says it was walloped by 'bad faith' actors over weekend

No.........

....just no, it's the only game you can get away with at work "Wikiraces" then claim you're "Doing research".

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

I've just had a look

It appears you don't have to use Cloudflare as "use provider" there is the option to choose CUSTOM.

Equifax is going to make you work for that 125 bucks it owes each of you: Biz sneaks out Friday night rule change

Re: So basically

The FTC is in a human centipede with Equifax. Equifax is at the front, the FTC is in the middle and all of the unfortunate users of Equifax at the end.

It's free...

...free monitoring from the very company that had a data breach. Fuck that.

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

Well then...

...that's cause you get managers who say "I want to be infrastructure free. It will save us loads of money" and despite being told it won't and there is no such thing as infrastructure free, they want stuff done on the cheap. So think moving to the Cloud means their service will do everything for you backup wise, not understanding you have to set that up yourself and pay for it.

You know what the NHS really needs? Influencers, right guys? #blessed

Shakes head...

"NHS 111 online"

Is it as bad as the phone line. Tell them you are short od breath and every time, even if you tell them you don't need one, they'll send an ambulance. The 111 service is fucking shit. Making an app for it ain't gonna help.

Oops, wait, yeah, we did hand over photos for King's Cross facial-recog CCTV, cops admit

I see the ICO only gets involved when it's news and a big breach, other than that they appear to not give a fuck. Reported a car ticketing company that weren't using HTTPS on their site yet requesting quite a lot of ID over their shitting web form (not my ticket).

And while we're at it. Like has been mentioned, does the private company have permission to hold said details? They can't spout the bullshit it's for security so we have a right under GDPR to hold images. People in the area all now need to just throw loads of SAR requests at them until they give in and delete the lot.

Have done that in a Waitrose car park. Parked, shopped, got no ticket but didn't want my plate on their database forever, the parking company. Requested under Right to be Forgotten for it to be removed. They claimed they can keep it for as long as 6 months as they use the ANPR system for CCTV security and nothing to worry about as not getting a ticket. I then pointed out GDPR states ANPR can't be used for CCTV purposes so delete the number plate now please. They did. I requested they also remove it from their backups. They've stopped replying to me now.

:)

I like being an annoying dick at times. Guess its why I have no friends.

Big...

...GDPR breach that one is then.

Massachusetts city tells ransomware scumbags to RYUK off, our IT staff will handle this easily

Finds local admin on one machines. Attempts to jump from that machine to another and discovers all local admin passwords are the same. Eventually finds a machine where a domain admin was once logged on. Uses mimicats to get the hash of the domain admin. Domain admin has an easy password. Cracks it. They now own the network with that domain admin account.

From there they can create dummy accounts and then delete logs. Then edit the odd service or two on some servers that give them readwrite persons on the service for write dac and write owner. This then gives them a hidden backdoor unless you're looking for that you wouldn't see it. They can then use that service, even as a non admin, to restart the service to run their own code. Then change the settings back leaving the write dac and write owner as their secret backdoor.

Thats massive overkill. Mark Russinovich bought this idea up on one of his talks. That the first port of call people do is wipe a system, but he said its not always required. Showed his tools in use hunting malware. He was the guy that found Sony's rootkit all those years ago.

Yes wiping is best practice. But destroying a mobo and drives after an attack is massive overkill and a waste.

Loss-making $15bn hipster chat biz Slack suddenly less appetising to investors as it predicts deeper losses

Re: I just don't get these massive losses

Lego is quite expensive. I could spend £200m

Re: My new business venture

Can I invest?

Re: Slack

A pointy-haired-boss introduced it to our old company. It didn't last long. It was shit, a time waste, nothing but poncy shit was done on it and then when it turned out he had to pay for the old archive messages it was scrapped for some other digital, hipster bollocks.

Having said that, I can't lie that I'd like to create something that is classed as "Hipster bollocks" just because I'd like to retire. I love IT but can't stand this push to "the cloud". And can't stand lying fucking consultants.

Re: Investor darling Slack .... has never made a profit.

Poncy offices. Apple Mac Pros, Starbuck coffee lunches/meetings. Having to travel for "meetings" instead of using a digital solution so they can say they are a "traveller" and "Busy all over for meetings". Hipster clothes and accessories. Endless meetings with fuck all to show for it. Stuck with an issue instead of using current staff that are good if not better, they probably hire overpriced consultants that just ask the engineers "What would you suggest" then they palm that answer off as their own.

That's what I bet.

Red flag: Home Office inks £45m border tech extension with IBM

The HRMC.....

...will take all that money back fucking over the contractors with IR35.

Cortana makes your PC's heart beat faster: Windows 10 update leaves some processors hot under the cooler

Disable it

I've put in a group policy to disable it on all machines and avoiding 1903 anyway so hopefully won't see it.

Can also disable it via cmd

REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search" /v AllowCortana /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000

Trade union club calls on UK.gov to extend flexible working to all staff from day one

Re: Less of the rather dismissive "Trade union club", please

At the NHS someone had a beef with another member of staff regarding bullying I think. Took it up with the Union rep but it went quiet for a while. The member of staff spoke to another union member and said "Speak to the regional union rep as the person you're complaining about is mates with the Union rep you went too. Hence why nothing is being done"

Ah, this should totally reassure Euro workers: They'll get Brexit EU settled status app on iPhones from October

Re: Priceless ...

Not really when government and government departments are so hell bent on making everything digital without having the digital infrastructure in place. And ignoring the fact some of their demographic in an area are mainly old people with no access to computers.

No it's not Russell Brand's new cult, it's Microsoft's Office crew rolling out their Save Experience

Dicks!

"If your organization does not use OneDrive, we recommend starting to plan an adoption campaign to take advantage of the cloud, allowing users to securely access their files anywhere and seamlessly work with others, including in real-time."

Don't fucking tell us what we need or should do. We don't save to OneDrive cause of fucking GDPR. Its easier saving on perm so we can easily say on a SOR request "No we don't have that file with your name in and its not in the cloud as we don't use OneDrive"

Stop fucking trying to force the cloud on people ffs!

I just love your accent – please, have a new password

I like the joke but also sounds like the service desk manager couldn't be bothered to do their job properly the "We'll recognise the voice" excuse, what if someone new starts?

Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it

Jesus....

....what a way to kill your company. I'll never now knowingly buy anything from Crown Sterling and will never recommend them to anyone. What the fuck did you think would happen at black hat. Instead of suing, prove them wrong. Suing has now just killed your business as most people will now avoid you. They'll assume if they use your tech, they'll never be able to point out issues with it for fear of being sued.

Can't bear to part with that well-worn copy of Windows 7? Microsoft might let you keep it updated an extra year

Re: Windows 10

I still don't know how MS got away with the deal with Intel to lockout Windows 7 on newer chips. Clearly big money has been paid which then forces people to Windows 10. If that isn't a massive anti-trust case then fuck knows what is.

Re: The cost of Win10 is far too high.

You also forgot advertising despite paying for a licence you still can get hit with advertising within windows 10

Cybercrook hands cops £923k in Bitcoin made from selling phished deets on the dark web

10 years

People involved in knife crime don't get that long.

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Re: 2023!

We have MOTs in England, so wouldn't be allowed as it wouldn't past the MOT.

2023!

That's a stupid target.

I own my car because it only cost £1500 back in 2009 and it was built in 2000. I can't afford a new car, that's why I have to drive that shit box. Electric cars are nice and all but I just can't afford one.

Also the infrastructure is the biggest issue. Low on battery lets charge up at home, oh, look I can't because I live in an old Victorian house that barely has a front garden (so no driveway) and oh look, no parking outside my house. Even when I can park outside my house there is the pavement in the way. I can't ask people "Please make sure you step over my charging cable. Thanks".

Not against electric cars but they need to be affordable. I hear the batteries are super expensive when they also need replacing.

Latest sneak peek at PowerShell 7 ups the telemetry but... hey... is that an off switch?

Re: Surely...

Ah yes, thanks :)

Surely...

....to comply with GDPR they need to make the slurping "Opt-In" and not "Opt-Out" as opt-out is essentially having a box automatically ticketed, like on websites marketing section when you fill in your address, which now, under GDPR, is a breach of GDPR.

Hmm.

I like Powershell, still need to learn it and stop being lazy but I like the fact in CMD I can still do the likes of

gpresults /h a.html & a.html

Which will run the gpresults command AND then open the html after.

Not found a similar command in Powershell yet that does what the & does. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Ironic....

...considering their annoying "Chromebooks come with anti-virus builtin" bullshit and misleading adverts recently.