Posts by TwistedPsycho

Uber Eats to rid itself of pesky human drivers with food delivery by robo Waymo

Wasn't the business plan of Uber to go entirely driverless anyway?

First stop, driverless food deliveries.

Then, driverless person deliveries.

Want to keep Windows 10 secure? This is how much Microsoft will charge you

Could be worse....

It's only in the last decade that the trains around here upgraded their management systems from Windows 95 to CE

US government sets a 30-day deadline for wiping TikTok from feds' phones

Re: Q: Why are govt. work devices...

My employer, who extensively promotes the use of Yammer internally, won't even let us install the Yammer App*!

So it's not hard!

* Along with banning us from using apps that are specially developed for our specific and almost unique job role.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re:

In the house we bought a decade ago, the previous owners estranged husband was a bodger too.

Run a standard extension cable from the oven hard wire, with an oven plugged in, and then an extension plugged into it around the kitchen to plug in the washing machine.

Still works a decade later from the fuse wire box. Never been brave enough to get an electrician in.

Apple's latest security feature could literally save lives

Hang on, I'm confused....

Is Lockdown Mode something that would be enabled on day one, or effective three years down the line when it appears there is a new threat?

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

Re: The town of a thousand roundabouts ...

"It's Swindon that's got me beat!"

20 miles from Corsham?

Low on passengers, low on memory: A bad day on the London Underground

Re: Shocking Service!

Looks like during a recent weekend. A recent change to overnight RAM-ming up and down the wires has led to a lack of handshakes and leading to more unsigned drivers across the .NETwork

TLDR: strike action.

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

Almost as bad as my last job;

The Operations Management team had to use their computer system to send an eFax to you because you were obliged to only accept an instruction if it was in writing.

At which point, once you read and understood it, if it only applied to you then you could email your acknowledgement and then throw it in the bin.

That was despite the fact that every phone call was (alledgedly) recorded (but easily deleted) unless I highlighted the Operations Management team did something wrong.

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

If all the identifiers were removed, I would swear we were talking about corruption in the House of Commons!

Pulling down a partition or knocking through a door does not necessarily make for a properly connected workspace

Re: Working on that..

Sounds a bit like my gaff.

Was previously an unregistered high occupancy build. Four small adult rooms. Owner cut the immersion heater from the main board and fitted a 13A plug to it to 'stop it being used' and then run a two socket extension from one bedroom to another, having created the gang using a brick splitter (the cube you plugged in to make three sockets.

Then the socket for the washer dryer; run off an extension plug wired into the oven socket....

I have not asked an electrician to installer a new consumer box; don't fancy having the rest of it condemned.l!

Windows terminates here. Please remember to finish setting it up on arrival

Re: It's a sign I tell you...

The trains around here only recently (last 3 or 4 years) upgraded from Windows 95 for their on-board management system.

It's now Windows CE

Catch of the day... for Google, anyway: Transatlantic Cornwall cable hauled ashore

Eeyore ba gum!

T'is all rather convenient, this landing a cable near a secret Government base - in Cornwall.

* Just outside Bude

* with the big sign

* Damn it, just get on the nunber 217 bus in Bude and ask the bus driver to drop you off at the secret base just beyond Coombe.

[Sorry - it sounded better in my head. The voices said it sounded good, and that I need to tell you that there is definitely not a secret base in Bude]

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

I wonder if the other side of the question should be; how have we got to a point where technical errors can be legally binding? If you order something from a retailer when they screw up the decimal point, or book a flight that's overbooked, Errors and Omissions are acceptable and reversible, why SHOULD a council be any different?

More than half of companies rethinking back-to-office plans amid variant uncertainty and vaccine mandates – survey

Re: Office half full or office half empty?

I do wonder how the move of the DfT, in respect for rail service management, will affect the future of this though.

Rail Freight and the traditional morning peak paid for almost all off-peak passenger transport. This is why schemes like Megatrain, Super Off-Peak unregulated fares, and Seatfrog First Class upgrade auctions became a thing.

Now that the use case of rail travel is starting to shift from the daily commute to a weekend leisure hybrid, because workers are not going back to the office, will we see more closures during weekdays?

Also, as all services are now run by the DfT, who assumes all revenue risk, does this mean unregulated bargain basement competitive fares, across common sections of route, will start to fizzle out?

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

What I don't get.....

...is who had the bright idea to rely on a single solution?

I get Data Rentention is a necessity and data needs to be purgable. Surely though, if there are back-ups, the Data Rentention policy would be a separate automation to the data itself?

Then you don't have an automation of destroying the data and the back-up in one foul mash of a keyboard(?)

How do you run a military court over Zoom? With 28 bullet points and a ceremonial laptop flunkey, of course!

Re: Do we have any details...

I think the fact they are using Zoom, rather than an in-house (or even in-Government) developed system speaks volumes.

Are we suggesting there is no secure system for video conferencing anywhere in the military? Surely the National Cyber Security Centre / 77th Brigade should have its development as part of its remit to modernise Military & Security communications?

Whatsapp blamed own users for failure to keep phone number repo off Google searches

Just as soon as the ambulance chasers realise that PPI is no longer a money maker....

Re: It's an unknown

.....and Vodafone, certainly last time it caught me out, converts a three text long message to MMS

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

Re: Heretic

If you don't work fast, you can't take on more underpaid jobs, and then who is going to keep the Vodka flowing!

UK govt probes Brit chip biz Imagination after growing Chinese ownership sparks national security fears

Re: "base" is not a legally defined term, I suspect.

A base, leasing out all it's office space to other companies, is still a base.

'Anything' related to remote working is a winner for Euro disties, but classic enterprise hardware? That's another story

Re: But if there is ever an end to this...

To be fair, I have never understood what the essential mentality is of everyone needing to go to one square mile of London everyday.

All they do is moan about the commute, moan about the tube, and moan about how they miss their kids bedtime!

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Re: acurate

Trust me. After two weeks of furlough, at 20 units a day...

... booze is getting boring

BT CEO tests positive for coronavirus, goes into self-isolation after meeting fellow bosses from Vodafone UK, Three, O2 plus govt officials

When Virgin self-isolates it will be fine as the databases just get left open anyway

Secret-sharing app Whisper shared secrets like last known location and actual password tokens in exposed database

I can only presume that there is a T&C somewhere exonerating Whisper from any stacking that come as a result of the breach.

What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING

Re: unpacking order...

Surely if the duck tape helps stop ducks asking for grapes......

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

Re: "throughput of goods is in excess of the usual Christmas peak"

You can get a slot? We can't because their IT upgrade happening on th 9th prevents any bookings after the 9th and there are also no slots up to the 9th.

This is a recurring theme and will cost them my Delivery Pass come renewal (which because of the upgrade I have to manually approve after the 9th)

Microsoft's latest cloud innovation: Printing

Re: Café au nuage

To be serious for a moment, I am surprised Tassimo or Nespresso have not developed a solution to remote order a coffee from a machine.

It makes it as you walk over, tap your employee password and it is already made and ready.... or once every 30 minutes the designated delivery service agent brings it to your desk....

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: WTF?

Who?

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

Re: How much?

.... and then you wait for him to over steps the mark, in 5, 6, 7, 8...

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

Re: Sorry I'm late, my doctors claimed I'd died...

I would actually walk into the tax office and tell then "You say I am dead"

Security can't remove ghosts.

Re: Naughty list

Don't worry. I had a 'todoo' with them this week.

Had a legitimate £2500 Bill for 2018/19 so I paid it. I also had a 'pre-demand for 2019/20' which I declared not required [what's the actual wording??] Due to a change of circumstances.

Three weeks after paying and getting the confirmation of the change to 19/20 - I get a statement requesting £4500 for 18/19 and prepayment for 19/20.....

Cue a 30 minute wait in the queue to tell them about long walks off short planks....

Remembering Y2K call-outs and the joy of the hourly contractor rate

Re: Money

Ditto. But for a casino and with no additional pay.

UK's Virgin Media celebrates the end of 2019 with a good, old fashioned TITSUP*

We have had our phone line tagged in the local box because we are registered as a priority line (we have our 8 year old and 3 year old taught in how to talk to 999 for a reason) but data line is less of a success.

I tried to explain that our disabled 8 year old can trigger my Alexa command far more reliably and be able to talk directly to me, than pick up a phone and talk to a 999 operator. Thankfully my wife's disability has not required my intervention in a few years.

We still can't get a priority on the Virgin Media data connection though.

Ebuygumm doesn't break t' Nominet rules, eBay and Gumtree told

A chicken shop in Reading has gone though Fernando's, sued by Nando's, then Fernandez, sued by a company 200 miles away and is an independent chicken restaurant, and is now called Manzano's.

If an independent chicken restaurant can she another independent chicken restaurant half way up the country ... anything is possible.

A short note to say I'm off: Vulture taps claws on Reg keyboard for last time

Surely....

..... you can retain a vaguely freelance position to add a notary column every now and then....

ICO scammer Maksim Zaslavskiy to miss 2020 Tokyo Olympics over digital currency fraud

Re: "no investments in any sort of real-world asset to back the coins"

When he gets out?

He probably took a book with him to jail with hidden CellCoin QR codes which are connected to real life (empty) help swag bags on the outside.

A good trading currency if none of the guard have a clue what it is.

What a load of bollards! Object of bloke's street furniture romp run over

Do we have to set up a GoFundMe for the bollards family so they can instruct a solicitor to sue the local highways department for putting the bollards life at extreme risk?

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Re: Capital One

If the post is addressed to your address then I am sure that under the Postal Sevices Act you would not be liable if you opened it in order not to detriment the intended recipient.

So if you opened a handwritten addressed envelope with no return address to contact the company on the letterhead you are not acting in detriment of the two parties.

Saying that, when Barclays started sending demands for cash from the person who sold us our house, when we read them the account number over the phone we were accused of illegal tampering of mail.

Except I was reading it through the Window of the envelope in clear view for all to see.

237 UK police force staff punished for misusing IT systems in last 2 years

I think we also have to expect different interpretations in the responses.

Surrey mention mis-use of email which might include minor infractions that other forces did not.

For example in one of my previous clients, they had a number of staff warned for setting up a forwarder from their company email to their personal email when they went on annual leave. The company deemed that misuse of email despite having no alternative staffing arrangements to cover the work.

Dough! Jobs microsite for UK's data watchdog set hundreds of cookies without visitors' consent

Re: That is something the ICO is well aware of

Certainly from where I sit in a completely different industry; it appears that many corners of the bigger players work to an ethic of promoting people to the Peter Principle and then promote them one more time for luck.

The problem is that with so many promotions, it is inevitable that there are also department moves, so a Head of Department has never done the job of either their management team or indeed of the rank and file troops.

So it does not take long for their young Graduate who (albeit not all grads can be tarred with the same magnum of Champagne) to be edicting absolute crap in the name of "I run the department."

Source: recently left one such department.

Surveillance kit slinger accused of slapping 'Made in America' on Chinese gear, selling it to the US government

So what they are saying is that they would have preferred the company to import the components from China, with the same vulnerabilities, and hired a few US workers to assemble them.

Then of course you can stick 'Making America Great.... Maybe' all over them.

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

We could of course go whole hog and remove all our cards from Amazon, go to the local supermarket and buy Amazon gift cards £100 at a time to register.

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

Re: Charities are a fraud

From my personal experience though, many UK charities also have zero paid staff.

I volunteered for free at a small local charity, after a number of years I became it's Chairman and still was a volunteer.

I moved on from the charity to work within the national support mechanism for both the charity I chaired and 200 like it. I was a volunteer like every single person in that national umbrella organisation.

Not a single charity at the national or local level had a paid member of staff. So not all charities are a fraud, and it those that then end up being the ones who struggle to get donations from those offended by the big internationals.

Spin doctors: UPS gets permission to expand drone delivery fleet in the US

Re: "move items [..] faster than a human runner could manage"

Well no, Health & Safety bans running, which flies straight into the hands of drones that can probably go faster than a runner as well as a walker.

Margin mugs: A bank paid how much for a 2m Ethernet cable? WTF!

Re: Not just business

I can think of a number of people that would spend that sort of money, they are not very off at with tech and would take everything at face value.

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

I remember having to phone Northen Rock to change an address for a mortgage balance we were paying off. It was one of those 120% mortgages that the wife and I learnt was a bad idea.... anyway.

So they took me through security and asked to speak to my wife for her to go through security either. I said she will find it difficult and is it really necessary just to change address.... yes it if.

They could hear me reading out some of the details of our balance and payments which is as good as a security question. The agent said "We can hear Mr X reading you the answers." to which she replied honestly "I know, I am virtually blind and you refused to send me things in large print."

She did not need to pass security after that.

Do you want fr-AI-s with that appy-meal? McDonald's gobbles machine-learning biz for human-free Drive Thrus

It's Automachef coming to life!

Stalking cheap Chinese GPS child trackers is as easy as 123... 456 – because that's the default password on 600k+ of these gizmos

Re: When I were a lad ...

Like the cycling across the country of @defiler I used to wander all over the south coast by bus by about 13 or 14.

I would not let my kids do it now though, because not only are there lots of stories of kids oping missing, but it also acts as fuel to the fire of people that have always thought of nefarious acts but never felt confident to act on it.

I always liken this to the problem with paedophilia. A few decades ago, people who had illicit thoughts about children would hide away in their local community as being outed was inevitably going to become a big thing. Now the Internet allows lots of like minded people around the world to talk in real time and feel included in a community.

People become more brazen when they feel included. People then fail to realise that if they are more open online, they are more likely to be caught.... hence more people being found.

A day in the life of London seen through spam and weak Wi-Fi

But, but.

The railway refers to the rail way as the Permanent Way.

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

Re: Use Case?

Why stop at a high spec laptop?

Have a mid spec i5 laptop or 2-in-1 that is light-weight for working on the road and an Intel Serial Bus 4 connected beast unit with a second processor that can co-operate.

From a business use case, you then could have a ratio of beast units to standard units that staff can simply dock into place and it automatically uprates the work that you are trying to do.