Posts by Howard Sway

Science of Love app turns to hate for machine-learning startup in Korea after careless whispers of data

Re: Scatter Labs

Just be thankful they didn't call themselves Scatter Logical.

Accenture, Capita, IBM jump on £800m framework to make the NHS more agile as UK.gov announces further reforms

Getting 12 different companies to work on the same project

All of whom will be focused on fulfilling their contractual obligations to the letter, rather than the good of the whole project, and who will inevitably start blaming each other for problems, delays and shortcomings when their work has to be integrated, giving the effort that familiar "cats fighting in a bag" feel that any effort that gets outsourced to multiple suppliers has......

Yep, that's gonna be really agile, if you define "unbearably stressful and ineffective" as agile.

New Jersey blames Microsoft for weeks of outages, glitches plaguing coronavirus vaccine sign-up website

the most complex logistical undertaking - other than going to war - in the history of the US

Guess the Apollo moon missions were a piece of cake when compared with this appointment booking application.

And good news for British readers, from the linked Microsoft promo page :

"Most recently, The National Covid Vaccination Registration Platform for the 45 million eligible citizens in the U.K. is built via an Azure web form and hosted on Azure. As part of the overall service, System C, hosted and managed the National Immunisation Management System (NIMS) on Azure, also integrating with Primary Care and National Health Systems (NHS) nationally, using Power BI for reporting."

Microsoft tells Biden administration to adopt Australia’s pay-for-news plan

help improve social cohesion and strengthen democracy

If I wanted to try and do those things, my solution would not be "give more money to Rupert Murdoch".

But then again, it wouldn't be "give more money to Mark Zuckerberg" either.

Microsoft issues emergency fix for Wi-Fi foul-up delivered hot and fresh on Patch Tuesday

Still arrogantly forcing bork on users and calling it a fix

This stems purely from an attitude of overestimating their competence and declaring that if it works in a test in their labs it'll work everywhere.

They just won't admit that they need an easy to use cumulative patch manager built in to the OS, which does more than simply download gigabytes of stuff and spew it into the filesystem. This needs, above all else a rollback function that enables users to look at installed patches, and roll them back with a button click on the regular occasions that updates break vital stuff. Of course this would also require their patches to be limited to actual changes in order not to chew up vast amounts of storage keeping the old stuff available before it gets overwritten.

But even if they did this, it wouldn't take too long before they discovered loads of problems in the patch manager and had to patch that, breaking it too, so really it's just a hopeless situation..............

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

LinkedIn

The clue is in the name folks. It ain't called AnonymousPrivacy.

When Microsoft bought it did you think they paid all that money because they wanted to provide a fun free service? Or because they wanted to leverage the user base to wring every last penny they could out of it?

However, I had no idea that they'd "link in" their Azure customers with it, or their "partners". I thought Azure was supposed to be a private customer-supplier professional grade cloud hosting operation. Obviously not. Just another privacy free marketing operation.

All grown up: Raspberry Pis running Ubuntu added to IoT patching service KernelCare

failure to patch a connected IoT device can range from inconvenient to catastrophic

to hilarious.

I'm on the side of restart after patching myself. The idea that someone could reorder a struct full of pointers somewhere, and have a function resume that uses it without being aware of the fact is too nasty to contemplate.

Facebook and Google’s Australian pay-for-news nightmare finds a European admirer

Re: All has changed

Surely the solution is for the newspapers to set up their own search engines, which just forward the searches to Google, then strip out all the adverts in the results and replace them with THEIR own adverts. Hell, they could do the same with Google News, although that might cause an infinite loop of advert mangling.

Minister tells the House of Lords it'll be another 12 weeks before UK's deleted criminal records can be restored

the process would take 12 more weeks

Is anyone else imagining rooms full of people squinting at faded old dot matrix printouts in order to type them all back in on knackered dumb terminals when they read this?

This Brit biz's seven-screen laptop is something to behold

Imagine the fear you'd experience if you owned one of these.....

I'm not talking about the worry of not having a power outlet available, or of a screen getting broken, or even of it getting nicked.

No, it's the terror of seeing someone breezing into the office and unfolding their new nine screen laptop.

Microsoft suspends donations to politicians who backed attempt to overturn US presidential election

address the issues and policies that are important to the preservation and promotion of democracy

Some of us consider getting corporate donations out of politics rather important to preserving democracy, believing that citizens who vote at the ballot box should influence policy, rather than companies who pile money into the donor trough.

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

violent version of egg-and-spoon race

No, it's a wussy, interminably slow version of the only properly exciting oval ball game, Rugby League.

No body armour required, fast moving play without big pauses, skill and guile rather than just brute force, it is magnificent, although its switch to Summer games really spoiled it for us fans of the old 80 minute mudfights in hail-lashed Pennine milltowns.

How do you fix a problem like open-source security? Google has an idea, though constraints may not go down well

factors like verified identity, code review, and trusted builds

You don't need to verify the identity of the person who did the change when you can look at exactly what was changed. Especially when you're a company that knows so much about everyone anyway, and would probably start flagging up contributions if that person failed one of your secret checks linked to your own database for any reason, however minor.

If you don't trust the code, you're free to review it (and if the project has many contributors, you know lots of eyes already have).

If you don't trust the build, build it yourself.

Problem solved. Exactly how it was intended to be.

Ever wanted to own a piece of the internet? Now you can: $1 for a whole gTLD... or $2.8m if you want a decent one

.lol: start bid $450,000

It seems that .lol is the most valuable How many organisations are going to have to purchase this domain to prevent massively inappropriate cybersquatting?

funeraldirectors.lol

victimsupport.lol

yourbusinessdomainhere.lol

This is ridiculous. What'll be next? .omg? .jfc? .fu?

Brit IBM veteran wins unfair dismissal case after 2018's Global Technology Services redundancy bloodbath

Never mind the quality, just look at the cost

The only things that IBM have had going in their favour for the past couple of decades are the quality of their unique technologies and the expertise and professionalism of their staff. For the very high end business stuff, they were still a reliable option, but were always a premium one. This came with superb documentation and access to advice that made it a proper added value proposition.

By ruthlessly booting out decades of experience and knowledge and replacing it with el cheapo newbies, just to save money on the balance sheets, they are announcing to the world that they are now a purely bean counter led company, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. So, in the end the world will ask what the point of them is, and look elsewhere for cheaper alternatives themselves, hastening their decline.

Microsoft's Azure Quantum hits preview: Not so much quantum computing as it is quantum-inspired computing

It unveiled a new language, Q#

Great timing, branding everything quantum with the letter Q.

Will they have t-shirts and baseball caps to promote the new language? I can imagine the fun that might cause as hordes of people wearing them arrive at a conference centre.................

Chrome 89 beta: Google presses on with 'advanced hardware interactions' that Mozilla, Apple see as harmful

RE : Stop it. The web browser is meant to be used to access websites

No, the Chrome web browser is meant to be used by websites to access you.

Missing GOV.UK web link potentially cost taxpayers £50m as civil servants are forced to shuffle paper forms

Re: TPA

If Mr Fone is outraged to discover that the government website links to a document that must be printed out, filled in manually and processed in an office somewhere, he will be delighted to discover this government site that contains lots of them for customs import and export declarations

After all, the TPA is pro-Brexit and I am sure that they therefore must be happy for taxpayers to shoulder the cost of the 200 million extra declarations each year that will have to be processed as a result.

Momentum builds behind campaign to fire Nominet CEO, board – though success still far from certain

would destabilise Nominet and, for instance, the cybersecurity work it is doing for the NHS

The absolute nerve of saying this : implying that he needs to keep having the cash shovelled in his own personal direction otherwise the NHS staff who have worked so hard and with such dedication during the pandemic might suffer.

Cynically trying to hitch a ride on the back of their efforts in order to help his own cause is an utter disgrace.

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

Re: As they said in the 80s...

Come on AC, are you really opining that people with serious illnesses and disabilities are bullies who are stealing money off you?

Injury and illness can happen to anybody, and most people who claim from the national insurance scheme have paid into it for years.

Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future

Re: "we decided to not use any UI frameworks"

Indeed, my bad for getting befuddled there.

But it's still a horrid language to code in in my opinion, and I think the decision to ignore any existing frameworks illustrates either Not Invented Here syndrome, or the fact that nothing exists yet that was considered up to scratch for that language.

Stack Overflow 2019 hack was guided by advice from none other than... Stack Overflow

finding evidence that an intruder in its systems made extensive use of Stack Overflow itself

Was the evidence a post on the site saying "Need to perform hack on insecure website with naively thought out architecture. Please advise complete solution"?

Chaos is good for you, says first 'state of chaos engineering' report

Chaos engineering is becoming more popular,

It's been highly popular since I started work in the industry 25 years ago.

"the practice of deliberately injecting faults into a service to test its resilience" would be nice if any fault free systems existed. But releasing buggy software in order to get to market quicker despite the known bugs is enough deliberately injecting faults for most software development teams to cope with in the first place.

In a trial run, Google Chrome to corral netizens into groups for tailored web ads rather than target individuals

Continuity through obscurity

appears to be the playbook here. Why should anybody, as a user of the web, have to concern themselves whatsoever with befuddling stuff about Federated Learning of Cohorts and First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups just so that they can browse as desired without Google wrapping their slimy tentacles around every single thing they do when online?

It's become an arms race, where attempts to legislate against their gluttonous hunger for every morsel of user-connectable information are being met with ever more deliberately complicated and confusing counterproposals in the hope that if no-one understands the whole thing anymore, it will create lots of scope to sneak loopholes into the regulatory net that will let them carry on regardless.

Instead of all this complicated jargony obfuscation, force them to understand the concept of You're Not Allowed To Intrude On My Privacy In Order To Sell Advertising And Fling It At Me.

Chrome = Continue heaping rubbish over my eyeballs. I just hate how so many people have fallen for its' supposed superiority, when it's a complete user surveillance tool.

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

The wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

Watching the idiots in charge make terrible decisions that lead to huge security disasters? And only learning the huge real costs of attempting to cut costs by doing things on the cheap after the disaster?

This is a real life, industry standard lesson that will have taught the kids more about what not to do when it comes to cybersecurity in their futures than any multimedia app plaything. It's just that they're being taught what not to do by what they've just had happen to them. And that's the only way most of the grownups ever learn anyway.

Reg reader's XXXbox oddity: The BBC4 topless thumbnail trauma whodunnit

What a rotten swizz!

I tuned in expecting something exciting to warm the old winter cockles, and all I got was some bloke riding round on a steam engine and another painting crappy pictures of trees.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

"We are aware of an issue with a small number of devices"

Sounds like Baroness Dido Harding has given them a copy of her book of corporate IT fuckup excuses.

"Chapter 5 : A limited number of users may have been affected by this problem"

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

baby products from Fortnum & Mason, wine from the Hungarian government, and caviar

Or, as Johnson calls them, lunch.

So what can we expect from a Joe Biden White House when it comes to tech? We'll try to answer that right now

In return, Amazon will assist in the logistics of distributing the vaccine

That's funny - I was under the impression that their logistics had hardly been affected by the pandemic, and that they've been absolutely raking it in as people stay at home and spend more of their money at Amazon because the shops are closed and they want to buy stuff. This has a massive feel of "please prioritise us so we can make even more money and here's a thin excuse why we should get it first" about it. And also possibly a bit of "if you don't give it to us first, we won't help".

It hasn't occurred to them to magnanimously offer this help until the moment a new president is sworn in, presumably because of a beef between the boss and the last guy who occupied the White House. Hopefully the incoming changes don't include a newfound urge to start doing favours for, and shovelling even more money at Jeff "I really haven't got enough yet because I haven't got it all yet" Bezos.

Microsoft claims to have 200 million education users as it pushes new hardware and updated Classroom Pen

the imaginatively named Classroom Pen 2

An entire generation of schoolboys must be looking forward to version 15 being released.

Labour Party urges UK data watchdog to update its Code of Employment Practices to tackle workplace snooping

Code of Employment Practices

I'm fine with this, as long as the code also stipulates that all allowable monitoring tech must become mandatory for all MPs and ministers from the governing party, so that we the public, their employers, can monitor their performance at all times.

US gov sets up the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office at the last minute before Trump's presidency ends

trained on 750GB of text scraped from the internet

And the answer to the question, the ultimate question, of life, the universe and everything is.....

For Amazing 30% Discounts on the Answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything Click Here Now! Hurry! Limited Offer!

Dratted 'housekeeping', eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database

They have controlled and 24-hour access from remote terminals

This sounds like a job for Dixon of Dock Greenscreen

UK's AI fairy tale sets out on its yellow-brick roadmap

a path to a 10 per cent GDP boost from AI by 2030?

So some ill-defined idea of AI is going to be adding 200 billion pounds a year to GDP in 9 years time in Britain?

That is the same as the second largest sector right now (supermarkets) and double the contribution from banking (fourth).

This is just an inane claim conjured out of nothing by fools who still believe in the rubbish that Dominic "I've just learnt to program in Python so I'm now the country's foremost IT expert" Cummings was spouting.

Trump silenced online: Facebook, Twitter etc balk at insurrection, shut the door after horse bolts and nearly burns down the stable

temporarily restricting channels that post misinformation

Yes, let's keep our heads down for a bit until the storm has passed, then we can quietly get back to making tons of money from the looney tunes goons.

I suspect that this won't be enough to stem the consequences resulting from what just happened once the new administration takes office, but you can be pretty certain that the lobbying effort will already be underway to fight back against any changes that will be proposed in the way these giant companies currently operate.

Still, the realisation may finally be dawning that if you let people play with fire in your house, you might end up getting burnt.

Amazon turns Victorian industrialist with $2bn building project to house workers near new headquarters

These are houses for staff who work at the headquarters

Think about that : these are mostly the more senior management type employees, plus the minions that serve them. If more senior staff can't afford housing then the problem has really got out of hand. No doubt the housing will come complete with Amazon autonomous vehicle delivery services and "free" Amazon Prime services, Amazon supermarkets and street corner Alexas.

In the warehouses, it will be easier to build "sleep pods" for the unfortunates that end up having to "live" there. And if you spend more than seven minutes in the toilet in an hour, you won't just lose your job. You'll lose your home.

React team observes that running everything on the client can be costly, aims to fix it with Server Components

Client / server architectures

are like types of customers. Thin clients, thick clients, fat clients, those who think the server should do everything for them and those who think the client should control everything................ you'll meet them all eventually if you stay in the industry long enough.

Brit infrastructure stuck in neverending restart cycle... and that's just the Microsoft 365 admin center

Brit infrastructure stuck in neverending restart cycle

Have they tried turning it off and on again?

Singapore changes the rules and will now use COVID-19 contact-tracing app data in criminal cases

the operators of app stores should remove the Trace Together application as malware

I suspect the operator of at least one of the app stores has already looked at all these contact tracing apps, and seen them as an important part of their future business model. Or thought that they were a bit amateurish compared to their own tracking and snooping capabilities, but best not mention that too loudly, eh?

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

I won’t be able to use what I’ve paid for

Yeah.... you, me and everybody else. For a great many things.

If you rage quit your local tiddlywinks club because you want the right to make your own rules up, you don't get to still play with the tiddlywinks they bought when you were a member.

Welcome to the splinternet – where freedom of expression is suppressed and repressed, and Big Brother is watching

Re: what if the net stopped being one big, connected thing?

It wasn't a "choose one side or another" proposal.

It was meant to suggest that a more attractive third alternative was "no spying".

what if the net stopped being one big, connected thing?

In the authoritarian states you'll be restricted to the governet, where the big government dictate arbitrary rules and spy on everything you do.

In the world of freedom, you'll be free to use the internet, where the big corporations dictate arbitrary rules and spy on everything you do. And the big corporations finance the politicians in government that keep it that way.

As Uncle Sam continues to clamp down on Big Tech, Apple pelted with more and more complaints from third-party App Store devs

Re: Has Big Tech gotten too big?

Thanks for the upvotes folks.

Stay tuned for the Apple turnover joke, which I'll reveal on the day they release their next quarterly figures.

Has Big Tech gotten too big?

Will Apple crumble?

Will they get their just desserts?

Have I been eating too much during Xmas lockdown?

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

Reads like a guide of how to achieve maximum possible efficiency rather than sabotage

At least in a company of more than 2 employees, following this will get you to a level of market-competitive efficiency as nowhere else will be much better.

However if you want to actually sabotage things, there's one guaranteed way to do it. Introduce new systems and procedures as part of an "efficiency drive". Nothing succeeds better in reducing efficiency in a big company than a conscious top-down attempt to improve it.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

"Fast Breeder" battery technology

According to a short documentary film on the subject I saw several times in the 1980s, the best way to produce extended life batteries is to charge them up by getting lots of little rabbits to play drums and extract the energy generated. If there could be some way to minituarise the rabbits, and provide them with sufficient carrots and lettuce to give them the energy they need to drum a little more quickly, then future power requirements might well be met this way. You do have to be careful though, as the rabbits can get a bit tired and fall over.

No amount of Glasgow handshaking will revive this borked kiosk

At least this Glaswegian kiosk is bang up to date on the operating system

As long as you accept that a parking meter requires an unstable consumer PC operating system that needs 20 GB of disk space. Which I don't.

Yes, Microsoft Access was a recalcitrant beast, but the first step is to turn the computer on

"You mean her PC needs to be on in order to read the hard drive?"

Let's face it, what has actually fundamentally changed between the problem described in this story and every story of cloud bork reported every day this past year? Still the same issue : computer unavailable via network. Whether that computer is an ancient 386 in Ken's office or on a rack in an Azure datacentre is irrelevant when you find that remote access to your files has ceased. Although those of us who actually had to endure the horrors of Windows for Workgroups and Netware back in the mists of time probably appreciate it better than the modern folk who take it as read that everything automatically connects to networks and starts working instantly. Most of the time.

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Offered to sell the company for 1/10 current market value

I'm not surprised Cook refused to meet after this offer. He may as well have phoned up and said "Hi Tim, the company's in seriously deep shit, and I'm looking for some mug to get some money out of before it collapses". OK, the company got through this and subsequently succeeded, but nobody knew that was going to happen at the time.