* Posts by SiFly

27 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jan 2018

A Reg-reading techie, a high street bank, some iffy production code – and a financial crash

SiFly

Re: This smells funny

They used to ...

SiFly

Traders

What I want to know is how much the traders paid the software engineer to make that mistake ?

A couple of mars bars *?

* other confectionery is available

Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design

SiFly

Re: Six seconds at 43mph (18m/s) ...

It occurs to me maybe the UBER software was asking the driver what was in front of it on the road ?

SiFly

Re: Six seconds at 43mph (18m/s) ...

Also, you know, the horn could have been used to signal to the cyclist ... why didn't the system activate the horn ....

Red Hat admin? Get off Twitter and patch this DHCP client bug

SiFly

chroot

Why doesn't it at least chroot into a safe(r) environment ...

Engineer crashed mega-corp's electricity billing portal, was promoted

SiFly

Deserve what they got

That's really poor :-

1. Testing installation on live network without validating on test network.

2. No deployment plan

3. No approval for required changes to the network.

4. For something attached to the network no approval by network security.

US Congress finally emits all 3,000 Russian 'troll' Facebook ads. Let's take a look at some

SiFly

Re: I fail to understand

Don't worry he is actively working on that one

Hands off! Arm pitches tamper-resistant Cortex-M35-P CPU cores

SiFly

Re: Smart streetlight? FFS, why?

Lots of things :

1. Potential failure of the light, current consumption too much

2. Actual failure of the light (no light coming when there should be a light)

3. With a small battery failure of power.

4. meshing together @night to only come on when there is a car /person near the road

5. Placing a pollution monitor on the light, and use this for active traffic management.

'Computer algo' blamed for 450k UK women failing to receive breast screening invite

SiFly

For the love of god where is the testing ..

This should be simple

1. create a set of birthdays since 1938

2. run date selection routine

3. check output matches known result.

Of course they say its an "Algo" issue because that makes it sound clever and all modern like, when it is a simple coding error which has been known about since dot.

I hope the contractor who coded this pays NHS compensation

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

SiFly

Don't understand

Why NASA don't have an archival department whose job is to make all data from all spacecraft available on the latest media, this data must be more or less priceless (spent an awful lot of $$$$ getting there) and to have it sat on old media is a crying shame.

Openreach and BT better watch out for... CityFibre after surprise £537m takeover deal

SiFly

Sigh .....

No sign of any movement of actual FTTP from anyone anywhere, just marketing BS. If BT^H^HOpenReach have plans to reach 20% of UK housholds by 2020 they only have 19 months to do it

Scotland: Get tae f**k on 10Mbps Broadband USO

SiFly

Re: Bit selfish...

ahem ... billion quid for ten mp votes

Data exfiltrators send info over PCs' power supply cables

SiFly

Meh

Again any sort of physical access to the computer provides a means of getting information out of it though you still need malware running on the computer in the first place ...

Manchester Arena attack: National Mutual Aid Telephony system failed

SiFly

Not tested

Clearly this was not tested, they should refund the money between contract being awarded and the issue fixed. Literally anyone can offer an emergency service, the proof of the contract is when you actually have to use it

British Level 4 driverless pods are whizzing along ... er, a London path

SiFly

White line followers

notice those two apparently well maintained white lines on either side of the vehicle, wonder what would happen if someone had a bit of fun with some black and then white paint

BOOM! Cambridge Analytica explodes following extraordinary TV expose

SiFly

Re: Team from Facebook are in their offices tonight?

Probably on a private G5 on the way to the USA right now

Facebook confirms Cambridge Analytica harvested profile data

SiFly

sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

Boeing ships its 10,000th 737

SiFly

Re: Amazing numbers

ahem Rudder Reversal on the 737 nearly got the type grounded

Tutanota blames Comcast block for March 1 outage

SiFly

Secondary ISP

best plan is to have a secondary ISP such that you know if they *both* go down at the same time something fishy is going on

Air gapping PCs won't stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers

SiFly

Physical Access to Computer

Is Game Over

UK's air accident cops are slurping data from pilots' fondleslabs

SiFly

Its a pity

That the IPAD apps didn't flag that he was flying into marginal conditions given his licence.

BlackBerry unveils bold new strategy: Suing the c**p out of Facebook

SiFly

The patent system is just there to make lawyers rich, if you look at how the patent office it pretty much rubber stamps anything bar the most outrageous patents and then approves them.

If you want to fight/defend a patent then you need a lawyer.

Quad Erat Demonstrandum

'A sledgehammer to crack a nut': Charities slam UK voter ID trials

SiFly

Utility Bills : who gets printed utility bills these days ? and i am sure they can be faked

Hypersonic nukes! Nuclear-powered drone subs! Putin unwraps his new (propaganda) toys

SiFly

Nuclear Rocket Engine

Quite trackable (if it exists) i'd say, just look for that spot in the sky emitting a rather lot of high energy neutrons

National Museum of Computing rattles the bucket: Help shift war-winning proto-puter

SiFly

Tourist Trap

When I visited Bletchley Park I was really really disappointed with very little explanation of how they actually did the decryption and the processes involved and how their processes evolved as the war progressed.

I suppose a good summary of this place is in that they put a speaker next to the pond where the boat was attached to make sounds of a boat gently rubbing against the platform as well the sound of aircraft flying close.

At the end of my stay i felt distinctly ripped off, the only good point being a raspberry pi showing videos of the pigeon war

STOP! It's dangerous to upgrade to VMware 6.5 alone. Read this

SiFly

Validation

Whatever happened to software having doing a validation check prior to running an upgrade, i.e. are all my upgrade requirements in place, does everything look right prior to the upgrade and can the rollback data in place.

For heavens sake isn't modern software capable of preventing such FAILS, rather than giving some poor sap a 300 page document to follow, or are the writers of the software just being cheap ?