Posts by jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid

Students bag extended Christmas break after cyber hit on school IT

Re: So the moral panic du jour is about being dependent on US cloud services.

"Starmer, who has been in office about 18 months needs to do better, when it was 14 YEARS of Tory misrule that drove the country into the ground?"

Don't forget some of it was a conservative/liberal coalition, then there was labour government before them and the conservative one before that, and ...

Maybe a lot of us over estimate the ability of governments of any type to actually make a positive* difference in the face of overwhelming societal or technological trends?

I said "positive", is easier to destroy than to create.

Re: So the moral panic du jour is about being dependent on US cloud services.

You have to have access control in a school. You have to ensure that when the pupils are in your charge, they can't just walk out of even the classroom and disappear to go and fiddle in the plant room, the kitchen, the store cupboards etc. Same goes for preventing unauthorised people getting in.

If you're the teacher and you're distracted by a nosebleed at the back of the class and someone else flicking a ruler at another child, when little Jonny's mum and dad turn up at the end of the day and say "where's my child?", you can't just say "I don't know".

Re: Progress

"The 'Data Manager' blamed the increased number of SENS students, but it sounds like BS to me."

SEN (Special Educational Needs) certainly can be a huge drain on finances and people. Schools are mandated to provide it (and quite rightly too, why should anyone be denied education through no fault of their own) but are left to find the full funding to do so from their own budgets.

Round our way, it was an open secret that one of the local primary schools passively rejected SEN pupils because they didn't want to have to spend their budget on them. Another nearby school with a far more benevolent head therefore always had more than their "fair" share of SEN pupils and hence more than their fair share of financial struggles as well.

Re: Sharing the cause of the issue

"zero IT budget and often rely on knowledgably parents or students to fix problems"

My first thought was that this was instigated by a clever pupil as a way of extending the Christmas holiday. In which case, they go to the top of the IT class (and straight to the head's office!).

"So, what's wrong with pen and paper and teachers actually teaching"

I suspect the teachers are more than capable of teaching without IT. With a big IT failure, they probably aren't capable of:

Controlling child access around the school or preventing unauthorised people coming in (door locks and access control are probably all swipe enabled and defaulted to open)

Taking a register so they actually know how many and which children are on site, so that's another welfare and safeguarding issue right away.

Letting pupils pay for their school meals (even if the school was able to send that day's food order to the supplier that morning) - yes, our school has been electronic for school meal ordering and "purchasing" for years, the pupils get a personal swipe card at the start of the year and place their hot meal order for that day during morning registration, which goes to the external supplier and arrives just in time.

Use the phones (I bet they are IP based) in the classroom in case of emergency like first aid or worse, requiring some fallback instead. That's another safety issue.

There are probably loads of other knock on effects that I can't think of that mean it was just simpler for the head to close the school whilst catching breath and figuring out what else to do.

Venezuela loses president, but gains empty Starlink internet offer

Re: Ground Stations?

"How much visibility to ground stations is there to provide service in Venezuela?"

Assuming you mean the actual link between ground stations and satellites...

The same as any other place on earth at the same latitude. Service is restricted in software by geofencing the ground stations, not by orbital mechanics.

Re: Ground Stations?

I'm not denying that's how it works, but since business is generally happy with financing today's investments by borrowing against the future, wouldn't it be good if a business offered subsidised sales to the poor today, shafts the future unsubsidised sales to the rich? That way, the poor could get access to the technology first for a change.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

Yes it's a tool, but a very different type of tool with lots of autonomy that far exceeds that of a paintbrush or even photoshop.

The paintbrush analogy would work only if it was a self-painting brush that responded to the operator's vague directions. Same for the Photoshop analogy - if Photoshop had a "make this person nude and post the image on the internet" single click function.

Re: Consequences

"Whatever happens, society will have to adapt to the consequences."

"adapt" in these cases seems to mean "put up with". If this is illegal as suggested in the article, why aren't the police knocking on the door of X and arresting them? Let's face it, the evidence is out there and irrefutable.

Seems that these days, corporations are above the law if their computer systems (that they made and operate) do things that are illegal. Accountability is disappearing.

Starlink to lower orbits of thousands of satellites over safety concerns

"The volume of debris and planned satellite constellations is also notably lower below 500 km, he added"

So, they've already trashed one orbital regime to the point of having to move another one? Great work spacex, nice one.

I can imagine the ISS residents being annoyed about this (orbits at about 400km altitude).

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

Fair point. I meant catstrophic as in killing the satellite, highly meaning to kill the satellite and scatter it in many pieces at the same time.

"And how many untrackable objects?"

Depends on your threshold of trackable, but rough rule of thumb is that for every trackable object, there are about 10 (smaller) untrackable ones.

If there are 100s of trackable bits of debris, that means 1000s of bits of total debris. Starlink satellites are only 575 kgs, so for one to turn into 1000s (or even 100s) of bits seems like it would have been a highly catastrophic event.

Images of the satellite in question seen to show it largely intact, so even "hundreds" of bits of trackable debris seems a bit of an exaggeration. https://x.com/michaelnicollsx/status/2002419447521562638?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2002419447521562638%7Ctwgr%5E2197582c8443b96c2fa07bf9cd9fbb8e65f896cf%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.space.com%2Fspace-exploration%2Fsatellites%2Fdoomed-spacex-starlink-satellite-photographed-from-orbit

Re: Incoherence

That doesn't bother me too much, it's probably not the engineers chucking out the banal twisted media speak announcements. And you can design space craft in other languages.

Re: More careful reading

"They are currently looking for the root cause and... "

According to the article, aren't looking for the root cause, but instead "working to root cause and mitigate...". "root cause" is clearly a verb now, that I suspect means go through a set list of actions in some modern fashionable take on systems engineering without understanding what you are doing or why.

Shuffles off muttering to oneself "in my day ... etc. etc."

And good use of the word "relative" in there too, just to make it all sound calm and relaxed.

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

Opposite situation for me recently at a local late night post-drinking kebab parlour. They only take cash (surely some tax dodge?) so I was being that annoying late night drunk, arguing with them at the counter about how I could pay with my card. I asked if they did online ordering, the guy at the till points me to the menu sign that has an ordering telephone number on it. I ask if I dial that number I can pay with a card? he says yes. I notice it's a local number so ask if I dial it does it come through to here, where we are right now? He says yes. I ask if I could just speak to him now and we pretend we are on the phone, he says no.

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

"Social media is automated exploitation"

It's the cigarettes of the 21st century.

Run by big corporations, who promote it as healthy and lobby governments at every opportunity. It's deliberately designed to be addictive. Scientific research starting to come out, showing what everyone really knew all along anyway and governments starting to legislate and age restrict it. The similarities are striking.

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: Motorola 3B BaseStations

I presume the old 2 and 3G bands will be repurposed for other things, so just carrying on using them like that would probably cause some interference issues.

Re: "4G addressed the shortcomings of 3G"

That drop down to 3G for calls was a mess. If you were connected to 4G, the switch to 3G usually took longer than it did for the call to go to voice mail or to just hang up. Either way, the call never got through and the first you noticed on your handset was a "missed call" message.

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

It seems like a simple fix would be to submit a valid driving licence number when booking a test and limit the number of tests you can book against that same licence number to something very low, maybe even just one.

That would kill the bots immediately, until the bot operators find a way to generate unique driving licence numbers on the fly.

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Re: Just Say No

I'm surprised we haven't seen news stories of people having accidents due to navigating touch screen UIs whilst driving.

I did see an accident once where the driver failed to go round a corner and just drifted in a straight line off into the hedge. They said they were try to adjust the aircon at the time. Even if that wasn't a touchscreen it shows that driver distraction is a thing, and touchscreen UIs make it worse.

Re: Car's web browser?

Someone I know got a new car a few months ago, they still have the traffic announcements cut in, because the UI to change it is so bad.

Re: Seriously...

"The correct way for cars to handle this IS to support Apple Carplay and Android Auto, so the systems don't rely on software that never gets updated"

Yes it would be. But my other half's car has Android auto that doesn't work because phone updates have left it incompatible. The car is 8 years old and has never had any software updates available.

Another one: a friend has a car that is only 3 years old and he's facing our having no more software updates, even though that model is still being sold.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: Why a TV licence?

"There is no moral argument around the BBC TV Licence."

Technically, it's not a BBC licence, it's simply a "TV Licence".

But yes, it does part fund the BBC (other funding comes from selling content and license deals around the world) and for me, the moral argument is that it's chipping in to fund a high quality broadcaster that is independent from commercial pressures or political loyalty.

Also, it's not mandatory, it's easy to not pay it.

Re: Why a TV licence?

Again, if you only watch on demand stuff away from the BBC, you don't need a license.

Re: Why a TV licence?

"but what of those who watch TV but do not consume BBC content? What are they subscribing to?"

I think that is becoming less of probing question as time goes by and pretty much all video services are paid for subscriptions, even some of those supported by adverts. And if you only watch on demand programmes away from the BBC (e.g. Netflix, Amazon etc.) then you don't need a licence.

I'm glad the BBC exists as it is, the license fee is good value and it still somehow retains independence from government. The fact that every UK government at some point claims that the BBC is biased against them is in my opinion, a good sign of media freedom.

New Jolla phone and Sailfish 5 offer a break from iOS-Android monotony

Re: Needs wireless charging, too expensive

"I have never _ever_ had a single charging port failure."

I've had one, a USB C socket would only work if the plug was inserted and wedged with something to apply just the right amount of pressure at just the right angle. Admittedly, this is my only example.

I've had a few start to fail but remedied with a good clean out. Otherwise, I agree, charging ports do seem very reliable considering the exposure to muck and fluff they experience.

Ford shifts gears to build batteries for datacenters

Re: “underutilized electric vehicle battery capacity”

Not necessarily. This has been covered here before, but in the US Ford bet big (bigger than most) on EV growth. They (and plenty of other manufacturers) are building more EVs than ever before, but Ford over estimated EV growth so aren't making quite as many more as they banked on.

So in summary, the EV market is growing, just not as much as Ford planned for, hence Ford have spare capacity.

https://theicct.org/record-electric-vehicle-sales-show-american-demand-will-us-automakers-deliver-or-retreat-nov25/ has some graphs that show steadily increasing sales of EVs in the US.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

Re: Haggle

... which is exactly how I have presumed all flight, hotel etc. aggregator websites have always worked. If they haven't been doing so, why not? I should have patented that idea.

China’s first reusable rocket explodes, but its onboard Ethernet network flew

Re: Ethernet on rockets

It first made me think of power over Ethernet, then I started wondering if they were using the exhaust plume plasma as a data transmission medium for at least the first few seconds of launch. That would be utterly ridiculous, and also really cool.

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

"why is the moon important again?"

It's the staging post to Mars, literally and metaphorically.

Literally because it's where the space fuel depots could be. Metaphorically because to get a human presence on and around the moon means solving a lot of the problems you have to in order to do the same at mars. But doing it at the moon means you are developing your technology and processes in your own back yard, instead of the other side of the solar system.

The analogy is like attempting the first round the world flight, but first testing if you can at least make it across the country.

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Vast improvement

Sounds like an improvement on the old system. Now you get nonsensical or wrong responses instantly, rather than waiting for the mandatory 2 weeks.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Re: Fuck microsoft and the horse they rode in on.

Wish I could upvote this many times, I'm in exactly the same position as you.

Perhaps I'm not so cross at Microsoft, after all, it's their decision to do everything they have done. I'm more cross at my employer for adopting pretty much everything Microsoft fling out, but without clear corporate guidance on what we should all be using, when and what for. Multiple SharePoints, one drives and Teamses litter our corporate IT and of course, all us workers have our own opinions on which to use and when. I spend more of my time searching for messages than I do reading them.

TryHackMe races to add women to Christmas cyber challenge roster after backlash

Re: Hmm

"as the available line-up was males because females were not available it seems someone went looking for the females which would be discrimination"

Ask yourself why are there no females available? If you don't make the effort to be more inclusive and actively promote the under represented groups, then you reinforce the bias and prejudice of the past that has resulted in that imbalance today.

Re: What?

"So they did try to invite female security experts but either didn't hear back or they couldn't fit it in their schedule"

The example in the article of a woman (Katie Paxton-Fear) being unable to make it isn't entirely accurate. Follow the link in the article to Katie's response on LinkedIn and it's clear that rather than being unavailable, they consciously chose not to engage with the organisers.

"Just to be totally clear: I was offered a spot this year I intentionally ghosted them because I didn’t want to be involved after some winners did not get prizes, some creators were unpaid and some were paid very low compared to others, and some key folks no longer work at the company and I just didn’t want to work with them"

UK Covid-19 Inquiry finds early pandemic surveillance was weeks out of date

Re: Scamdemic

"Never, ever, believe anything posted by an "Anonymous Coward'."

That's unfair. Some of us participate here just for the fun, and don't want to put our real names on the internet.

(by "anonymous coward" I presume you mean any pseudonym, rather than that particular default handle)

Re: Scamdemic

"That's why you have an established pandemic plan for influenza (which also applies to similar illnesses). The UK did have one of these, and completely ignored it in 2020."

I remember watching Chris Whitty giving evidence to the inquiry on this. He said that as soon as they looked at the flu pandemic plan, they realised it was not suitable for COVID. He also said that any COVID preparedness plan was unlikely to have been the right one for whatever the situation was at the time, given all the possible variations and complications. Better he said, to have a well resourced capability in place, able to be agile and responsive - something we also didn't have and given the cost of maintaining such a thing, probably unlikely to ever have.

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Re: Air breathing electric-powered devices that go around the world

"when do we stop calling them satellites and start calling them aeroplanes"

An aeroplane is one that stays up due to aerodynamic lift. That's the definition of space (ie the Karman line): the altitude at which the speed required to maintain aerodynamic lift reaches orbital speed.

Vodafone, EE, O2, Three hit with £3B overcharging lawsuit

It's been a long long time since I had a phone contact like these ones, but when I did, I remember them never being described as a lease, hire purchase or any other way of implying that you were actually buying a phone. The contracts were always a service contract with a "free" phone included (and a minimum term of course).

Yes, you could (and I did) do the sums and work out that typically, you've paid the cost of the handset by the end of the minimum term, but it was never stated upfront by the provider that this was the case. I presume this has always been their tactic, to get customers to just keep paying the high monthly rates by obscuring the fact that you are simply buying a handset on credit and that when that's done, you are free to leave.

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

Re: I'm glad that sites like The Register have checks in place for this sort of thing

Your password is ***********? So's mine! What are the chances?!?

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Re: My 70+ year old aunt...

She has prior art then. Could be worth a chat with Apple's lawyers.

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Re: Well... yeah, but nah?

"Seems reasonable to me if the buses will indeed operate without a SIM card."

The buses will certainly be designed to operate without connectivity, for a while at least, in tunnels or areas with patchy phone signal. I'm wondering what will happen if the telemetry buffer fills up after a day, week, year, whatever, of having no connection back home. At which point, it might not happen maliciously but it might simply trigger a poorly handled error that at best does something unexpected, at worst panics and shuts the bus down.

And running without a SIM assumes that is a physical SIM that is accessible in the first place (might be protected by tamper proof switches for "safety"). What if it's an e-sim that is not replaceable?

Bank of England says JLR's cyberattack contributed to UK's unexpectedly slower GDP growth

Re: Dodgy figures.

Pedant alert!

"So we should expect a dip in GDP for Slovakia then as well?"

Yes. I mean, any negative impact on any part of a nation's economic activity is going to have some impact. Even if it's just my greetings card company selling 1 card a day that can't trade for a day because I've got a cold. Assuming that the BoE uses enough precision in its numbers, any impact, however small, can contribute.

The point is, how much of an impact did the JLR attack really have? The MPC's own 79 page report doesn't quantify it, just saying that the growth figures "reflect ... disruption linked to the [JLR] cyberattack".

Pedantic rant over.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

"Which Linux distro?"

For a first time user, any one, it won't matter that much.

Black Hawk chown: DARPA takes helicopter pilots out of the air for $6M

Re: As far as I know

"Autonomous means Independent?

So how was this thing autonomous when it is being controlled by someone using a tablet?"

Not necessarily. There are multiple levels of autonomy according to the degree of decision making by the platform. It can go from no autonomy (a human fully in control) to fully autonomous where a human night give a high level instruction but the platform makes all the decisions about how to carry it out.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/defence-artificial-intelligence-strategy/defence-artificial-intelligence-strategy#:~:text=A%20diagram%20showing%20the%20Autonomy,Defence%20organisation%20for%20our%20size:

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

"This idea of spending £5 this year rather than £50 and it being a better option even if that means it costs you £5000 extra over the next 3yr I cannot rationalise"

If you had a stable, known future income and you had control over your own saving and future purchasing ability, then yes I agree, that sort of decision making is irrational*. But that's not how MOD or government budgeting operates.

For MOD budgeting, spending £5 instead of £50 purely means that you've saved £45 today - and that's the good news headline that your budget holder has been ordering you to come up with because that £45 is needed right now for some immediate other thing. An analogy is if in your own household, you spend £5 instead of £50, that means you now have £45 to spend on food for the week so you can stay alive. (a better analogy might be that you £45 to pay for the £40 worth of food you got on credit last week to live on. This week's food is a different crisis).

The idea that by doing so (ie staying alive) you've committed to additional spending in future years is a problem kicked down the road, kicked out of sight and out of mind. The thing that you might have to spend £5000 on now might be scrapped, or made cheaper by some magic creative accounting or it's just one of many things you want but can't afford anyway. And all the while you are living hand to mouth anyway, as you go cap in hand every few months to the keeper of the magic money tree (which is neither a tree, magic, nor actually containing any money).

That's how MOD "budgeting" seems to operate.

*Imagine if you said to your boss that you were putting aside £100/month to save up for a new car in three years, and their reaction was to dock your pay by £100/month because you are clearly don't need that £100. Or, you told your boss you were putting aside £100/month for a rainy day, and your boss instead fired you for financial rule breaking and sued you for all your rainy savings to be returned. That's government budgeting!

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

" I cannot fathom why anybody would take out a mortgage in order to get a top of the line phone that they cannot afford."

People are free to spend their money on whatever trinkets they want.

I don't understand why a contract where the bulk of it is spreading the cost of some hardware, should rise with inflation anyway. A house mortgage or washing machine credit deal wouldn't, so why can phone contacts? Maybe the service provision part of it, but just that, nothing else.

Get ready to squint! World's smallest pixel is just 300 nm

I'm sure some telly manufacturer is cranking up the upscaling marketing guff as we speak.

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Re: The Muppet Test

If it can explain why it's funny, does that suggest it's a person or a bot?

My first thought was that if it can explain the joke, then it's a person, but on second thoughts, it's a very human thing to laugh without being able to explain why.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: HMRC taken down

I get your point about sovereignty, but if UK gov stuff was all hosted on UK based servers, that wouldn't protect against this sort of failure.