Posts by steviebuk

No extra bank holiday for 75th VE Day, but the pub will be open longer

But...

..."Finally, a government decision we can all get behind"

Not for those that don't drink :) but I don't begrudge, enjoy it.

Would you open an email from one Dr Brian Fisher? GP app staff did – and they got phished

Hmmm

"We have extensive experience in writing large software systems for hospitals – over 60 years between us. We understand how important your data is, we are used to working in very secure environments, and have taken a lot of time to do things right."

But sounds like they didn't implement 2FA in 365 suggesting the reason the Dr's account was compromised. Also urging people to change their password ASAP is all well and good, but if 2FA had been on, wouldn't of been as big an issue. I'm confused why it took hours to block the website. When I find ones in malware, a simple entry in the Sonicwall will then block it instantly. Even if they are large and have 2 external connections, surely blocking on those two main connections shouldn't take hours. Unless the person who wrote the PR just noticed Chrome/Firefox had started to automatically block it, and takes them a long time to decide an address is a phishing site and then block it.

Repairability fiends crack open a Surface Laptop 3: Nice SSD, but shame about the battery

And why...

..solder on the fucking memory. Cocks.

One of Blighty's most-loved charities hands £46m to one of Blighty's least-loved outsourcers

Bollocks

I never knew they were in bed with them. Wouldn't of renewed membership if I'd known, not that we ever win the votes in the AGM or whatever they call it meeting. But this also annoys me

"In its annual report, the trust noted its investment in IT went down £7.1m over the last year. "Our strategy going forwards will be to invest 'little and often' in our technology to keep it up to date and functioning well, rather than a pattern of large cyclical programmes of investment."

So again, someone who doesn't fucking understand IT and thinks its a waste of money so "Invest little" we'll continue with the same old insecure shit then.

Put on your tech specs: Amazon Web Services has joined the Java Community Process

Does this mean....

....they'll make an installer? As having no installer is annoying.

Bezos DDoS'd: Amazon Web Services' DNS systems knackered by hours-long cyber-attack

But..but..but..

...its the Cloud, this can never happen so we're told.

Avast lobs intruders into the 'Abiss': Miscreants tried to tamper with CCleaner after sneaking into network via VPN

Re: CC is the first thing to be removed

Don't understand the downvote as yeah, the old versions are still useful.

Avast fucked it all up

When they bought ccleaner (for some reason I've always called in cc cleaner, glad not only one). Instead of leaving it as is, they've succeeded in fucking it up and filling it with crapware. When will these companies learn, buying something that is popular won't help you if you fuck with it. It was popular cause people liked it how it was. ):o(

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Download now!

"Government advice is for cultural institutions to remove any orphan works from their collection online, consider applying for a UK orphan licence or if they have a UK license find a way to limit access to only UK residents."

Fucking ridiculous.

Re: Bonfire

Blue passports that will be made in France. Ironic.

Row erupts over who to blame after NordVPN says: One of our servers was hacked via remote management tool

Re: I dont get how the box itself was compromised

Having only discovered iDrac early in the year, as far as I'm aware, and as the hosting provider claims, you can either have iDrac available at all times or only when requested. Its a little board inside a blade with its own OS. So you can then do whatever you want to the blade. So I'm assuming someone got in somewhere to get the idrac login. Then from there they can do whatever they want. Although I'm assuming whatever was then installed on the blade also had a compromised account. Or they just used the exploit to get the details for all the accounts. But as Nord rented this, they surely should of turned on logs so they could see all new accounts that got created in idrac. Or have someone connect to them daily to check if any accounts having been created overnight. Clearly they did neither. I blame Nord for not checking and now attempting to blame the provider that they rented a server from because they are too cheap to buy their own.

This is the same NordVPN (who I'm with since Christmas) that claims they work with Amazon Prime. But fuck me if I can get it to work. Netflix is fine, so I can now watch Cheers but Amazon Prime can see I'm on Nord all the time and then won't play anything.

Microsoft Teams: The good, the bad, and the ugly

It's a mess regarding the "free" version

"Teams has plenty of frustrations, but it also plays a key role in pulling together the parts of Microsoft's sprawling Office 365 platform in a manner that users can adopt. Teams also fits well with Microsoft's collaboration hardware, from Surface Hub to the newly announced Surface Neo and Duo."

Read like an advert that bit.

So you want to invite someone who's not in an organisation and not in a business. Use the free version. It states it for people not in a business, free lancers don't always have a business account.

You tell them to download Teams from Play on their mobile. They do, they try to sign in with their hotmail account. It claims "Sign-in error. It looks like you aren't a member of any organisation in Teams. Have someone invite you to use the app, or set up Teams for your org. If you've just created a new organisation, try clicking the link in your e-mail." But it's supposed to be a fucking free version, just give me the fucking option to sign in as a guest!

So you choose "Set up teams". Takes you out of the fucking app to the website to sign in. You do, then that pages tells you to download the app from the Play store. And there we have it. Stuck in a never ending fucking loop. As despite claiming there is now a "free" version. Trying to get someone who's not in Office 365 signed in as just a fucking guest, is impossible.

Choosing "Sign up for free" makes no fucking difference.

If they want it to take over, they need to sort that out. As at the moment we only use it internally and use Webex for conference calls.

Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting

Re: Never Heard of...

Exactly why I have one of those small cylinders on my key ring with an "Emergency £20" in it :)

They are shit...

..but it's only £15.37 a month on my contract with 30GB of data, unlimited text and voice (I assume they have a fare use clause in that). But their signal strength is shockingly shit.

Lucky I was asleep during the outage and only noticed this morning but didn't need the phone.

Masters of Puppet say: There's no magical one-size-fits-all answer to doing DevOpsery

That password

Back in the 90s, as I've mentioned before, I wrote a keylogger program that used in college just to see if it would actually work. It did (I honestly never exploited it) and grabbed a few user names and passwords. The only one I remember to this day was, as it was the only one I used and logged in with and was amazed my program actually worked (I wasn't a good programmer).

masterofpuppets

:)

'Technical error' threatens Vodafone customers with four-figure roaming fees

Very much doubt they'd take the risk otherwise they could end up with their own PPI style payback when found out.

Robocop needs reboot, $200m for AI research, UK govt knowingly deployed racist passport system – plus more

AI bollocks

With all this AI bollocks I just keep seeing Robocop. When they show all the adverts and when they show the desperate attempt to create a competing Robocop that are rushed through testing and, oddly, give the test units live ammunition so they can go rogue and shoot the execs :)

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Same issue in Outlook

I don't see it much anymore but had a few users using the "deleted" folder in outlook as a save location. Had created folders within it. Had to gently explain "Do you understand why its fucking called a deleted folder?"

Oh dear... AI models used to flag hate speech online are, er, racist against black people

Re: crafted in the style of African American English (AAE)

Bit like "Whasup niggers" in Shawn of The Dead. I'm assuming the AI would ignore the context and flag it as offensive. If so, surely its not proper AI. Surely AI should be able to work out the context.

If you thought Windows Insiders was lacking a little in the leadership department, it is now

Re: Dev in 5 minutes ?

Although her statement isn't accurate, I think she's trying to appeal to people who think they could never be a programmer. Some may not realise, try it and find out they are good at it. But some "Devs" like to build walls and not let anyone in.

Ones that got into such areas when they didn't have experience were David Malan from the Harvard CS50 course and he's a great teacher. And Jessa from iPad Rehab (although that was electronics same idea. She was a stay at home mum in a world were people would make out "You can't just pick it up the next day and start repairing stuff")

Yes, being a dev came become complicated and programming can be difficult but shouldn't stop people from trying. And I think that was the point of her 5 min comment. To encourage those that normally wouldn't, to just give it a try.

Re: Dona Sarkar's Twitter Tag Line

Press the Windows key, type the program you want that you know if fucking installed and the shitty search system never fines it. Manually find it, then try and again and now it fucking fines it. Reboot, same shit all over again.

I hate the Windows 10 search.

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

Blizzard

Has turned to shit. Not that I ever played WoW but know people that did. When they said, despite all the knock off servers showing otherwise, that "You don't want WoW Classic" and then being totally wrong as now they've released it, everyone is on it again. Blizzard seemed to have lost the plot and don't give two shits to their customers and gamers anymore, who, after all, are what keep them alive.

Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months

Died years ago

People who now own the name just exploiting it. Its not Atari of old.

Who you gonna call? Avaya grabs $500m investment from RingCentral to cut whopping debts

Avaya

The company that likes to keep your phone/user name logins database on the Avaya servers that any consultant setups up, in plain text (not the consultants fault, its Avaya's shitty software). So all you have to do is steal the database and you have access to everyone's Avaya user name and password logins. The user names and passwords that 99% of people end up using for their AD logins, so you now have compromised their AD account as well.

Oh and go with a full PC/Laptop client only and forbid desk phones and you have "Sorry I know you're dying but I need to login to Windows first before I can call 999. Oh...sorry...hold on...I now can't remember my password. Oh, sorry, you're fucked now as I've locked my account so now can't call 999 for you".

And "Why did I take ages to answer your call? Because I couldn't answer the fucking thing until I logged in. And by the time I put my long password/passphase in, you rang off".

Windows 10 update panic: Older VMware Workstation Pro app broken

And I was going to upgrade one of my home machines

To Windows 10 finally. But no longer interested again.

Astronaut Tim Peake reminds everyone about the time Excel mangled his contact list on stage at Microsoft AI event

Re: AI bollocks

Yeah they know it as ALPR

AI bollocks

" "to fully capitalise on its standing as a leader in AI"."

What so your company can spout out bullshit marketing AI and Machine Learning bollocks?

FFS. Getting really annoying now. We were on a webinar call today for a CCTV system based in the US of A. Looks nice but the amount of times AI and Machine Learning was mentioning was a little annoying. But they didn't mention it too much. Ironically at the end with the Q&A someone asked if the cameras could do ANPR reading. Skip the part where we had to explain to the American's what ANPR was (they have a different name for it) but the answer was funny. "Yeah we still are looking into this. As its not a huge market..." What? Its a massive market, we didn't say anything though. He continued "..this would mainly be a software thing and we're not quite there yet" what? But you've just spouted AI and machine learning. Surely if you've implemented such then ANPR recognition would be a piece of piss. Or our you just using those words as marketing bullshit. And why, when doing presentations do US salemen talks to fucking fast. Stop and take a fucking breath. Its not a fucking race. Is it to hide your bullshit in noise? In the hope we didn't hear because you said it so quickly?

If you really can't let go of Windows 7, Microsoft will keep things secure for another three years

Marks & Spencer

I wonder if they will be paying. Their customer service desks in the local store still uses Windows 7.

Zendesk clocks 10,000 accounts accessed by miscreants before November 2016

-Snigger-

A certain NHS trust was using this last time I knew. Despite us saying years ago it was a bit shit. Anything to stop us visiting actual users in person was the real reason they wanted it used.

YouTuber charged loads of fans $199 for shoddy machine-learning course that copy-pasted other people's GitHub code

Re: Sounds a lot like...

Yeah although i can understand why they want to be. They then feel like they are working for themselves and not some faceless corp. I find it hard to explain as you'll get some that want to do it for that reason and will shit on anyone that gets in the way or misunderstand the approach. Such as the guy that started up a video podcast for Star Wars Republic as it was being released. Was doing it from his house. Which was all fine. But then he thought to be bigger he needs to go and rent an office space with big TVs in the background. Long story short, didn't last long after the move and "hiring staff". That's where a lot of them go wrong.

We all want to work for ourselves and YouTube used to be a way to do it. But I think getting lucky with it so you get the numbers that you can now do it as your day job but ignore the bullshit "YouTube celebrity" side of it is just fine. Its why I like the likes of LGR. He's done it as a hobby for years and now finally made it a success & was able to quit his job a while ago. But he doesn't get involved in the "celebrity" side of it. He's even admitted in an old video he wouldn't do meet ups with viewers he doesn't know. As its really uncomfortable meeting strangers as it is. Strangers that think they know you just cause they watch you all the time must be even weirder.

Sounds a lot like...

..Eli The Computer Guy. Originally thought he seemed OK with his free courses on YouTube. Then noticed that most of his "Courses" consisted of one or two videos on the subject, then he'd move on to something else. Got the impression he was just taking the first two chapters of a book and blurting them out in the hope to get viewers and subs (unfortunately has worked). I gave up on him when I watched his backups video. The amount of disinformation in that was clear he has never implemented a proper backup solution before.

Holy smokes! Ex-IT admin gets two years prison for trashing Army chaplains' servers

Re: Where is god when you need him?

I wish I was a Q

How to lose a UK contractor in 10 days: Make them commit after upcoming IR35 tax upheaval, apparently

Re: Some are considering moving to another employer

But they never will. They will always go after the easy target.

Pupil mental health monitor promises app rewrite after hardcoded login creds discovered

And becomes the managers just "Want stuff done now" for "Market and/or release" "we have to hit this madeup target" despite being told time and time again it won't look good if there is then a security issue. "Fuck security. Just get it done. I want my bonus for hitting bullshit targets". And because those bonuses aren't then taken back when a massive security issue is revealed, it will continue.

HMRC chief digital wonk Jacky Wright takes flight back to Microsoft's light

I'm so proud

""I am so proud of all that we have achieved in my two years with HMRC. The digital transformation we have introduced and the new ways of working we have championed have built a solid foundation on which to continue, for both our colleagues and the customers we serve.""

I'm so proud I've managed to escape before the shit hits the fan.

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