Posts by Phones Sheridan

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: vegans

Your belief in science does not change the empirical fact that science is wrong, most of the time.

MGM says FTC can't possibly probe its ransomware downfall – watchdog chief Lina Khan was a guest at the time

Re: Oh, wow. If the head of the EPA bought bottled water from Nestle

I wonder if in the US the regulators can increase the fine substantially because of corporate resistance like they can in the EU.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Re: D&D

Now we know this story is fake, there's no way girls play D&D :p

I don't think it was annoyance, I think it was disgust looking at me like I was some cheapskate date making sure the bill got split.

Similar experience in Birmingham. I was asked to provide on-call services over a week in Birmingham and they'd put me up in a hotel so I could respond quickly. The same week as a trade show / exhibition in the NEC. As a result all the hotels were booked up with visitors to that, so they put me up in a serviced apartment for the week, top floor with a balcony overlooking the city centre. Certainly not £5000 a night, but probably £2-300. It was quite nice too, 3 floors, loungers in the lounge etc. With it being an apartment and not a hotel there was no food, but the company did pick they tabs I racked up eating down at the local eateries and bars in the city.

One thing I didn't tell anyone was that I took my girlfriend with me, and when I wasn't working we strolled round the city. I got some strange looks when eating out when I asked that the bills be split into mine and hers (so I could claim back my receipt).

Actual work done was about an hour a day, but overall it was a nice week in Birmingham (and I can't believe I said that).

Space Force boss warns 'the US will lose' without help from Musk and Bezos

“ Russia now challenging our space superiority”

What superiority? How long has the ISS been being serviced by Soyuz because the US decided space was hard and expensive?

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

I thought Americans were allowed to own guns? Are there laws against shooting down drones surveilling your property, especially ones acting like a peeping tom. "I shot it down because was loitering in front of my daughter's bedroom window at the same time as she was coming out of the shower and I noticed it had what looked like a telescopic lens protruding"

Hotel check-in terminal bug spews out access codes for guest rooms

This has happened to me a couple of times, it turns out had I gone to the My Posts section, I would have noticed the post was "awaiting moderation". Something had flagged it up, and none of my posts made between that one, and the most recent were visible. Then they were.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

“Once you've used up your in-hand cash reserves, how do you replenish them? ”

The same way we have for as long as people have been running shops. You start with a float suitable for the days trade.

30 ish years ago when I pumped petrol (gas) as a student the day started with a float of £50 in change. That was enough to get you through a days takings. At the end of the day you would count out another float from your cash pile for the next days trade.

Young ‘uns of today, trying to come up with problems that were solved milenia ago!

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Yeah, in the 10 years we've been here, it's the first time both have gone down at the same time. This weekend was supposedly the weekend they start to roll out the FTTP upgrades at the exchanges in our town. Judging by the 4 BT vans at the top of the street this morning still, and all my neighbours having no internet since Friday midnight, it looks like the upgrades didn't go as smoothly as planned.

I'm able to work comfortably on the wireless, I'm getting a nice 30mb down so it's not laggy.

The biggest problem in the UK is the complete lack of alternative providers. We're at the end of a mile long road going out in the fields, there's 38 units here. Only BT provide service to the estate, so going with BT Business for the main line, and an LLU provider for the second is pretty much as good as we'll ever get, and like I said, one total outage in 10 years has been fine. Having the ability to use the 4g has been invaluable for the last 2 days, and it's not something I was paying extra for or will be billed for. Had I been on holiday, I can imagine it would have been an arse to get the 4g working, and I would have probably just told whoever was in the office, to tether to their phone, and I'd pay the bill when I got back.

I can't believe I have something positive to say about BT :p

I had to reply on the failover 4G service built into my BT Business SmartHub 2 today. I have 2 ADSLs from 2 providers, and following this weekends upgrade to national infrastructure both were dead this morning. The failover wasn't seamless, because the SmartHub was configured in Bridge mode, and the 4g failover only works in NAT mode. Took me about 10 minutes to plug into the SmartHub with my laptop, manually configure the IP, re-set up NAT, unplug my main VPN concentrator firewall and plug the Smarthub back into it's place and let it pretend nothing had changed. Apart from I wasn't bothering to open up ports to allow incoming services, it worked great all day.

Now if only they had made the failover work seamlessly in Bridge mode.

I have BT coming in hopefully tomorrow to fix the "DIS in Infrastructure" problem, then it's another 10 mins to re configure it in Bridge mode, and plug everything back in where it's supposed to be.

Apple to settle class action for $490 million after Tim overcooked China outlook

So was the phrase "We grew 16 percent" factually incorrect?

It's not often I side with Apple but this does seem to be nit picking over words. Expensive words.

NASA's FY2025 budget request means tough times ahead for Chandra and Hubble

Maybe convert it to a space hotel then!

If... Nasa was to get no budget for Hubble, and they decided to let it just drift into orbital decay with the intention of it burning up in the atmosphere, could a private organization or a mad man with a volcano lair, and the means to launch into space, do so, and claim salvage, repair it, stick a logo on it, fit a newer camera in it and send it back up into a long term orbit and change it's name?

Ideas like this keep me up at night!

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

Re: "Don't try to find the documentation"

And if you are in the EU, have you given your cookie consent first?

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

Re: Microsoft's "vision for OneDrive….”

My problem with OneDrive is that it doesn't handle the same characters that the windows file structure does, so it refuses to back up files containing certain characters. At the very least include an option in windows to disable these characters, because no amount of user training will get Doris in admin to save her filenames differently.

Re: Microsoft OneDrive URL upload feature

"Why not leave the large files where they are?"

Probably because they might not be there the next time you look? You can't rely on other people to keep their wares available for you to download.

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

Re: To sum up ...

"How big is the Apple gift card scam market now"

Weekly I get an email from "Dad" asking me to go buy him 5 x £50 apple gift cards and reply back with the codes when I have. For me the first request was not out of the ordinary, I'm his tech son and he often relies on me for his tech purchases. The dead giveaway was that he'd changed his name to [e-mail] without telling me (NFSW site, don't visit it).

What a surprise! Apple found a way to deliver browser engine and app store choice

Re: re: it appears we have the less intelligent people

"do some research for yourself"

I.e. go watch someone elses YouTube video!

Turns out cops are super interested in subpoenaing suspects' push notifications

Re: That would be easy to eliminate

“ Cellular companies don't keep your SMS messages “

Sooner rather than later, a story will emerge that will tell that they were keeping your SMS messages all along.

72 flights later and a rotor blade short, Mars chopper loses its fight with physics

Re: Wait, hang on a mo...

My thoughts are that a blade fatigued causing rotor imbalance and the fatigued blade damaged all the other blades before being hurled off at high speed. YouTube has videos of blade fatigue on wind turbines, one second it’s there, the next it isn’t and the turbine usually shakes itself to bits in another second or so.

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

Re: Same old

I remember it as:-

We are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will all be approximated!

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Being polite is great

First time on a computer after using typewriter

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

Re: I am sympathetic to "Tim"

It’s probably tied up to a google Workspace account, and helps itself to the credit card details registered to pay for that.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

"The changes Apple is planning, he said, mean that in the EU, Apple will delete user data associated with PWAs without notice,"

This would fall foul of the Computer Misuse Act in the UK. However private individuals would need to take Apple to court, if they care. It's unlikely that the Government would.

Not sure what the legal status is in the EU, but I can see the EU taking retaliatory actions, they don't like to be given the finger, and by breaking working existing functionality within the EU Apple are sticking up a pretty big finger.

Similar happened years ago when Apple lost a court case in the UK, and they went on the offensive on their website sticking up a finger to the court and attacking it. The court started fining them daily for contempt until they retracted the offending pages on the website, and replaced it with a court approved webpage admitting wrong-doing all along.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

The word you're looking for is hubris.

The sound you're listening to is "WOOOOOOOSH!"

Re: "... when you replace a skilled worker with an unskilled worker ..."

I think that pretty much backs up what I am saying. If the work procedure states.

1) fit frame

2) ...

3) ...

4) ...

.......

25) fit bolts

.......

51) take picture of the finished job and file with work sheet XYZ-123.

The unskilled worker doesn't realized he hasn't fitted the bolts. The picture is there for reference at a later date if something requires it, this report required it so it was dragged out of filing, then a skilled worker looked at it and spotted the error. I bet nowhere is there a procedure that says "All pictures must be inspected by a skilled worker before filing". The picture is a replacement for a sheet full of tick boxes, to save yet more money.

This is what happens when you replace a skilled worker with an unskilled worker holding a photocopy of a work-procedure. To a bean counter they both look he same, but the results are always that the unskilled worker misses or doesn’t understand his mistakes.

You could have heard a pin drop: Virgin Galactic reports itself to the FAA

Wooooosh!

I had my tongue firmly in my cheek when I posted the above, but it turns out Nasa already have form!

https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/duct-tape-auto-repair-moon

Should it move? Yes ---> WD 40

Should it move? No. ---> Duct Tape.

Adobe has 'no plans' to invest in XD despite failed Figma buy

I'm having major issues with Illustrator at the moment. It's just so damn slow that our artwork dept is going nuts. Saving files can take literally hours, flattening files, you may as well go for lunch, followed by an afternoons shopping while you wait. You look at the task manager, full memory?, nope, thrashing hard disk?, nope, maxed out CPU?, 5% max, nope. Tried running the same task through Ghostscript, 15 seconds. Look on the forums, lots of people having the same issue going back to 2016. It just sits there doing nothing for so many people. It really is a dogs dinner.

Rant over, feel better now.

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

Re: GDPR breach here we come

It's not really a GDPR issue, as someone has said unless your tabs contain peoples names, DOB, social security numbers etc.

The UK Act that covers this is the Computer Misuse Act 1990, specifically the section starting "Unauthorised, or malicious, access to material stored on a computer.".

Getting the authorities to act on this though is another thing. I believe the last event that prompted the government to act, was Prince Phillip's Prestel account being hacked by journalists. "Prestel" I hear you say. "What's that?". Exactly!

Guess the company: Takes your DNA, blames you when criminals steal it, can’t spot a cyberattack for 5 months

Re: I got a good idea!

Have a search around this site and you’ll find articles going back almost 2 decades that quote database owners as saying they have enough data stored to identify your fathers surname from any DNA sample uploaded. Think about it, surnames tend not to be changed in the west, father to son. If you have the same surname as your long dead grandparent, you’re identifiable and probably already have been linked.

If your based in the uk, you can use services such as the 192.com website to trawl electoral register records going back decades. Tracking people in that is incredibly easy. If you are registered to vote or you pay council tax, you’re identifiable.

Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will fly no more, but is still standing upright

Re: Impressive... very very impressive!

Still waiting for the Finglonger!

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85

I'm never able to read this, without it being in John Hannah's voice in my head.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Or hiding them in plain sight, say on the disc.

“ that allowed attackers to bypass BitLocker encryption by…”

This would indicate to me that the drive isn’t actually encrypted if you can bypass it using a boot disc. Is the patch just hiding the issue elsewhere?

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

They made a rocket out of a hot glue gun???

America's first private lunar lander suffers 'critical' fuel leak en route to Moon

I'm guessing one of the "games" they are playing right now, would be "what would we now do if we had people on board", and they are probably using this as an opportunity to practice things that rarely get the opportunity to be practiced outside of a lab.

Glass raised because they will probably learn some stuff from this.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

"So why is it that networks are so Swiss cheese that these guys can actually take advantage of this swiss cheese?"

In my experience, it's users convincing the higher-up-than-mes that they absolutely cannot do their job without admin rights. I'm fighting 2 battles right now, one with a marketing team, and another with the design team, both of which get the CEOs direct attention, cos, ooh, shiny and buzzwords. I've written a report to my superiors why I am refusing to let anyone including myself work with realtime admin rights ( they don't want to have to go through the bother of elevating privs during a task ), and have given them the option to follow my Expert Advice™*, or sack me. I'm getting too old for this same old same old, and I've already retired twice, and changed professions completely.

*I was headhunted out of retirement, so someone thought I knew what I was doing.

Not working with admin privs out of the box stops 99.999% of malware intrusion.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

Re: Gifting

Good point, maybe I should have said I don't really think that you could get that kind of response from forwarding someone an MP3.

Gifting

Can you really gift digital media? I was recently chatting to a 60 something work friend who fronts an Iggy Pop / Status Quo tribute band. I was telling him how I played rock organ in my youth, and my favourite thing to perform back then was Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. What followed was an incredulous 15 minute "What's War of the Worlds - You've never heard of War of the Worlds - You know the film, with the tripods, NO??, The HG wells broadcast?, the book?, the Jeff Wayne Musical version?". Long story short, I gave him a CD copy. He was over the moon. A couple of days later he sent me a picture, he'd mounted the CD case on the wall in his recording studio. It was now his favourite thing in the world, and was the top of his play list. I don't really think that you could get that kind of response from digital media.

Europe classifies three adult sites as worthy of its toughest internet regulations

So what happens if those site cut their subscription numbers back to 44.9 million and refuse further signups? Do they stop being a VLOP? Or is it a case of once a VLOP always a VLOP?

Google coughs up $700M in Play Store antitrust suit

I thought in the US that lawyers fees for the winning are rarely awarded?

The government is probably the only organisation with pockets deep enough to keep funding the court cases indefinitely. Bill Gates once said that fighting the government is a battle you will always lose. Even if you win, the government makes a change in the law, and starts again.

UK government woefully unprepared for 'catastrophic' ransomware attack

Re: Nothing remarkable here

"It's just another easily identified risk for which HMG is woefully unprepared."

Sounds an awful lot like Brexit, We voted for that in 2016 I believe it was, but in 2021 I had a phone call from HMRC telling me that they would not be enforcing their penalising me for my inability to conform to the new rules, because they still couldn't figure out themselves what the new rules were, they then followed that up with a letter offering me £100 compensation for their previous aggressive enforcement of the UK rules because the UK rules were perhaps-maybe-almost-certainly-were in error.

2023 and I'm still having almost monthly back and fro's about this with HMRC. As a business it's a shitshow. Ordinary consumers (i.e. voters) have no idea that my workload has increased 10-fold because of their vote. I may as well just sack my staff, and go tend to my allotment and live a much simpler life.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

Re: "and I am all out of bubblegum"

In game, it was ass and gum in that order. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0GZ4Y9w6o0

Lsl

Ne2000

Ipxodi /a

I remember religiously keying that in every Doom lan party

30 years later, retired sysadmin. Yup article was right!

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Re: Just the tip of the iceberg.

Because prior to brexit, records were not kept about trade with Europe. I didn’t fill in one piece of paper declaring anything I sold or bought from Europe. Jan 1st 2021, everything is declared in triplicate followed by a non-sensical declaration of estimate of taxes owed if we didn’t have a brexit deal, then we have to pay it and claim it back in the same transaction, and to top it off, once every month the government sends us a PVA certificate of what they believe the tax figure should have been, and we have to change the declared figures to the new approved government figures and re-declare. Funnily enough it’s always a higher value we’re told to declare.

Trade isn’t up, it’s just documented since 2021. Anything before that date is an estimate.