Posts by Herring`

Go Pester someone else: TSB ditches CEO over bank's IT meltdown

Re: Dreaming

I remember working on a project where we had the time and resources to create a full regression suite and a variety of setups to replicate customer environments (it was a shrink-wrapped bit of software).

Or did I dream it?

Forget WannaCry, staff themselves pose a risk to healthcare data

It's not just health

I've been in a position where I've come across data about celebrities which could be classified as "fucking hilarious" if it were to reach the media.

No do-overs! Appeals court won’t hear $8.8bn Oracle v Google rehash

Not a good week for Google then

This and that issue where if you google to find out what Trump has said or done, it returns stories that tell you what he's said or done. Bastards.

None too chuffed with your A levels? Hey, why not bludgeon the exam boards with GDPR?

The ICO

That would be the place that uses Google Analytics.

(Yes, I know that theoretically this isn't passing PII to Google. Probably.)

AI image recognition systems can be tricked by copying and pasting random objects

Re: The elephant in the room!

"Present it with something unexpected and watch it fail."

As has been pointed out on The Reg and elsewhere, self-driving cars will (in the near future) inevitably get into situations where they can't cope with the input. The manufacturer has to make a decision as to whether, in this situation, it fails safe and stops (rendering it useless) or fails the other way and goes (rendering it dangerous). The only other option is to completely change the urban environment (e.g. cordoning off pedestrians) which just isn't going to fly.

AI Hype

There seems to be more and more of the hype in the regular media recently - talking about medical, legal etc. applications. The thing that's lacking with AI is, when a human makes a decision, you can ask them "what the hell were you thinking?".

The comforting thought is that we're a long way off Skynet.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Wait, what?

£92m on a feasibility study?

For a start, most people thought the "We're going to build our own satellite navigation system. With blackjack. And hookers" was just dick waving/sour grapes.

But £92m seems like a hell of a lot of money to find out how a positioning system works when you can just look it up on Wikipedia (maybe I should bid for the contract). You need some clocks and some rockets. There. Done.

Android data slurping measured and monitored

Re: Blessed are the poor

It's not how much the data is actually worth, it's how much the advertisers think it's worth. And you're talking about marketing people here.

Look at (for instance) Facebook's market cap. It implies that every FB user (even the fictitious ones) is worth about $250. How does that work? Say an advertiser makes a 5% profit on every thingy they sell, every user would have to buy $5,000 worth of thingies purely as a result of a Facebook ad to make that economic. Or something. It's late and I need beer.

Re: Blessed are the poor

See, that's my cunning plan. Because I'm still walking around with an S4, they won't think to target me with ads for shiny stuff.

Google do seem to be on a collision course with GDPR. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Stuff like browsing history can easily reveal health/religion/sexuality/any of the "sensitive" classes of PII. Hmm.

Everyone screams patch ASAP – but it takes most organizations a month to update their networks

In an ideal world

You would have a pre- prod environment which exactly mirrored prod and a comprehensive set of automated tests that could verify 100% (or as near as you can get) that everything works. Patch that, run the tests and if all shiny then patch prod.

I haven't encountered many (OK, any) outfits that want to put in the investment to do this. Which is daft as it would also benefit your dev process hugely. Meanwhile, IT still gets the kicking when stuff is rolled into production and things break due to inadequate testing in an inadequate test environment.

Microsoft Visual Studio C++ Runtime installers were built to fail

Re: Why the need for complex installers in the first place.

2 words: STATIC LINK

The article mentions system DLLs. It's been a long time, but I think I remember that the order for DLL loading is something like: same directory as EXE; current working directory; windows/system; path

I also remember that LoadLibrary can take a full pathname and you can find the windows/system path easily. So a fix would be to specify the fully qualified pathname of the system DLL.

It's been a while though

Butcher by name, Butcher by nature? Capita finds new CFO

It's quite something having a company that can manage to fleece its customers, lose money doing so and still get more work. It's up there with going bankrupt running a casino.

Network monitoring is hard... If only there was some kind of machine that could learn to do it

No Skynet comment yet? I am disappointed.

"AI and ML have an insatiable demand for data."

So what happens when the cause of the network issues turns out to be the AI that's managing the network? Will it switch itself off?

Heads up: Fujitsu tips its hand to reveal exascale Arm supercomputer processor – the A64FX

Re: Why no ARM servers?

There are quite a few clusters used commercially - particularly finance for stochastic projections and all that. Those companies aren't interested in messing around. They just want to be able to plug in 10,000 cores and run their models. (The poor fools)

Re: Why no ARM servers?

I remember talking to an HPC chap a couple of years back. I asked the question why people weren't interested in the better FLOPS/Watt that you could get from ARM. His response was that the (proprietary) software that he used was licensed per core and that that cost vastly outweighed the savings in power/cooling/hardware.

Bloke hurls sueball over Google's 'is it off yet?' location data slurping

Re: Googles choice is going to be

"India (India!!) is getting in on the act as well. "

I can see reasons why India might want privacy equivalence with the EU. It would help a lot if companies want to shunt processing of personal data out there.

Connected car data handover headache: There's no quick fix... and it's NOT just Land Rovers

Car? That's nothing

I recently sold a house and I can still get to the (Nest) smoke alarm. Granted, it can't give me the current position of the house.

Half surprised that the buyers haven't torched it for the insurance.

How's that encryption coming, buddy? DNS requests routinely spied on, boffins claim

Solution

I just add all of the websites to my hosts file.

What happens to your online accounts when you die?

I keep meaning to hand over my /. troll accounts to my son before I go so as to circumvent inheritance tax.

DXC Technology asks field-based techies if they'd like to leave

The theory seems to be that whenever they shed staff, the share price rises. Eventually, when it's just the execs and HR (HR never gets redundancies), the market cap will be many trillions.

Rejoice! Thousands more kids flock to computing A-level

Re: Fundamentals of IT

I am a contractor now because when I cared more, it was doing my head in. Now I try not to care by reminding myself that these inefficiencies are actually money in the bank for me.

Although I would really rather be creating good stuff.

Re: Fundamentals of IT

I had help putting him off. A couple of years ago, he had to do 2 weeks work experience and a mate - who is an IT manager at a large corp - took him on. Experience of a real IT environment did it.

Re: Fundamentals of IT

Well, I suppose you could argue that cladding isn't structural.

I'm not sure that we'll ever get to the bottom of who should actually carry the can for that one. With all the layers of sub-contracting and who told whom what and when, I have doubts that justice will ever be served.

Re: Fundamentals of IT

Call me a miserable bastard - I am - but back in those days, we'd have meetings with business experts and IT experts and get stuff done. Now the meetings are full of project managers, business analysts and like like so you have to talk really slowly and keep explaining things over and over again.

I bet as a structural engineer, you don't have people in the meeting saying "High tensile steel is pretty expensive. Couldn't we use something cheaper - like cardboard?"

Fundamentals of IT

I put my son off IT. He got his grades this morning and he's off to do an MEng in Civil & Structural.

25 years ago, IT was fun. Users said "Can you make a program that does this?" and we wrote it and they tested it and all was lovely. Now you need 3 weeks of meetings - some of which must be conducted standing up - before you can apply an index to a table.

Google risks mega-fine in EU over location 'stalking'

Re: GDPR is worthless if this gets pushed under the carpet

Quite.

And there are a bunch of other companies who also make "opting out" so fucking onerous that they have to be in breach too.

Three more data-leaking security holes found in Intel chips as designers swap security for speed

Re: Intel only told the favoured few, again

Netcraft confirms it ...

When's a backdoor not a backdoor? When the Oz government says it isn't

Re: Bah!

I would've thought that some in the security services see this sort of action as a problem. Take the pr0n age checking in the UK - before that, hardly anyone knew what a VPN was. In a bid to satisfy the Daily Mail brigade, the UK government have just made the security services' haystack a shedload bigger.

I don't see the problem

As a vendor of encryption technology, you can point out to the government that they absolutely can break public key encryption. You can even tell them how to do it. All they need to do is apply sufficient computing resources.

US voting systems: Full of holes, loaded with pop music, and 'hacked' by an 11-year-old

Obligatory

XKCD comic

Criminal justice software code could send you to jail and there’s nothing you can do about it

Re: Trade secrets, pah

"(recalling OCP for example)"

You have to wonder if they have their own Directive 4 in there somewhere.

Intel hands first Optane DIMM to Google, where it'll collect dust until a supporting CPU arrives

Purley Microarchitecture?

This suggests a horribly congested one-way system to me. Where are they getting the names from?

UK.gov to tech industry: Hands up who can help cut teachers' admin

Re: I reckon the tech industry can solve it

Like most of the evils in the world, I blame management consultants. The obsession with measuring, metrics, spreadsheets and all that bollocks. It's very easy to measure how a child does on a standardised multiple choice test. It's very hard to measure anything like creativity or engagement. So the focus becomes almost entirely on things that are easy to measure.

When I was at school, there was a lot of music going on. Two orchestras, a couple of productions a year, concerts, stuff. You don't see much of that sort of thing in schools anymore - because you can't turn it into a number in Excel and draw a chart.

Has anyone also noticed how, 20 odd years ago, an appraisal was a half hour chat with your manager. Now appraisal systems are massively bloated and complex (and pointless as, in IT, half the projects that were your "objectives" will have been canned by the next appraisal). Makes me glad I turned to contracting.

I reckon the tech industry can solve it

If we all lob in a tenner, we can get the "senior leadership teams" of most schools bumped off.

When I was at school, we had one headmaster who taught part time. Now even the smallest school has 3 or 4 "senior" people who don't teach at all but just demand reports and paperwork from the actual teachers.

Mrs. H. is moving from full time into supply so she doesn't have to put up with this crap.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

Re: Unique Content

Well content filtering would be a lot harder with 2^128 addresses.

We could be onto something here.

Re: Unique Content

Well, the thing that struck me: what really drove demand for things like the Internet and VCRs was filth. When there is a pr0n application that required IPv6, then you will see things change.

Mind you, I believe that there is far more grot on the internet than one person can ever get through. I'll update you with my progress on this as it happens.

UK govt's top tech heavyweight Maxwell quits for Amazon job

"Absolute tosh. Liam Maxwell was literally a high school IT teacher, not some sort of enterprise technology heavyweight."

I hope you're not suggesting that Amazon haven't hired him for his technological prowess but for other reasons

Anyone who reads Private Eye will have an idea how effective ACOBA is

Rights groups challenge UK cops over refusal to hand over info on IMSI catchers

Where I live (just inside the M25) if I started getting good reception and a 4G signal, I'd immediately become suspicious.

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

Except that the scanning is done with Javascript running locally. If they did it from the server, then they'd hit your router and the whacky port forwarding rules that you've got set up there (it isn't just me, is it?)

It is sort of a fair point. If a web server is going to scan my ports to make sure I'm all safe, then I should be able to do the same before I connect. What's the point in having nmap if I can't use it whenever I please?

Top tip? Sprinkle bugs into your code to throw off robo-vuln scanners

I see now

So that's what Microsoft have been doing.

Internet overseer ICANN loses a THIRD time in Whois GDPR legal war

Re: So, the WhoIs record should have contact info

I'm not sure the "abuse" contact means the people you call to abuse them.

So, the WhoIs record should have contact info

This one doesn't seem to.

ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

Re: What we need

Wow. That went better than I expected.

Next up Shimano is better than Campag, vi is better than Emacs ....

What we need

is someone to do a BBC Micro reboot. Then we can revive those old Z80 vs 6502 arguments that took up so many lunch breaks at school. Silly really - the 6502 was always faster.

Dixons Carphone: Yeah, so, about that hack we said hit 1.2m records? Multiply that by 8.3

Re: Cost

Somewhere up the chain of command between the people who understand the tech and the board, some person will have been keen to "control costs" and be seen to be taking an interest in the bottom line.

You're right about fines not being a deterrent. Hence my musings about whether ultimately the authorities should be able to shut an organisation down if it's repeated shown to be crap with people's data.

Cost

Given that this is pre-GDPR, the max fine would be £500K. And the cost of doing security properly? My guess is that they count this as a win.

Even Equifax is still trading - a key indicator that there is no justice (yeah, I know that's mostly US). There's no way the authorities are able to say "Sorry, but you're just too crap to be trusted with PII".

From the "probably a stupid idea" file, what if the ICO were able to employ a bunch of suitably gifted people (I nearly said "1337 h4x0rz" there) to actually test whether a company has actually sorted itself out rather than having to take their word for it.

UK 'fake news' inquiry calls for end to tech middleman excuses, election law overhaul

Re: 'Fake news'

"If it's fake, believable and intended to slur or defame a person then it's probably libel."

Ah, but libeling who? I recall a headline in a certain popular newspaper on "4,000 foreign murderers and rapists in the UK". (Reading down to paragraph 94, it was 4,000 foreign nationals who had committed an offence, which might include rape or murderer). Who sues in this instance? Press standards organisation no good as the "affected party" can't submit a complaint.