London's Met Police has missed the Windows XP escape deadline London’s Metropolitan Police has missed its deadline to dump Windows XP, with tens of thousands of copper still running the risky OS. The force, on the front line against terrorist threats and criminals in the capital city, is running Windows XP on around 27,000 PCs. At last count, in May 2015, the Met had a total of 35,640 …
Is non-existent.
We had an "open doors" day trip round our local plod station and it is archaic.
CCTV on video tapes of such poor quality you can't even see anything, tiny 4:3 computer monitors you can't even buy on eBay any more and a building literally untouched since it was built in the sixties and falling apart.
Seems this country needs to change it's spending priorities or nothing will change soon.
"CCTV on video tapes of such poor quality you can't even see anything, tiny 4:3 computer monitors you can't even buy on eBay any more and a building literally untouched since it was built in the sixties and falling apart."
Well if there is a terrrorist connection then money is no object. The biggest BMW X5 you can get - oh and really snazzy machine guns and lovely camouflage clothing (bit obvious in the average London street). As for what we spend on security services - it is astronomical - go check out the earth station they built just north of Bude which would have cost more than putting a Beagle on Mars.
But security of all the information they gather - well XP is just the magnet any self-respecting hacker would be ashamed not to penetrate. They have created the most delicious honey pot in the computing universe.
Its unbelievable that they must have been buying perfectly good Win7 kit for years and downgrading it to XP knowing this would happen.
"go check out the earth station they built just north of Bude "
You're mistaken; there's nothing there.
Seriously; according to the authorities, there is nothing there and never has been.
It doesn't matter what you think you see, you are definitely incorrect.
If you give them the location, they will tell you that it is just a patch of open ground above the beach; nothing to see, please move along.
Good luck with that ... look at the state of the NHS, The Police force ... compare with France or, $deity forbid, Germany ... and you will understand ... those £350m per week will be for further tax breaks for our rich friends, you would not want to make the poor poorer, would you, hey ?
No, it is NOT meant to be funny ... call me when you're back from Wonderland, will ya ?
"Haven't we got an extra £350million a week sloshing around somewhere now...?"
No, because that figure was pure bullshit shamelessly used by the leave campaign to trick the voting population. What they didn't tell anyone is that a lot of that money already comes back to the UK in the form of numerous subsidies and grants and other forms of funding.
Therefore once out of the EU, gov.uk will have to use the majority of that 350mil to fill many budget holes opened up by cuts in EU funding. Especially to the scientific community in the UK which currently gets LOTS of funding from the EU.
No that money is going to the NHS, Boris and Gove said so!
Thing is there is money around but it's in different pots. It's a problem to be seen in many government departments, money available for one thing but not another and they can't be transferred across.
But not the biggest waste of money in policing, that has to be the number of forces in the UK (over 40!) all with their own, cars, uniforms, IT, HR, high paid chief constables + deputies, etc Total utter waste. Then they complain about "cuts" to front line policing. Plenty of saving to be had.
"But not the biggest waste of money in policing, that has to be the number of forces in the UK (over 40!) all with their own, cars, uniforms, IT, HR, high paid chief constables + deputies, etc Total utter waste."
Not really. Even if there was a national police force like in france (though to confuse things they have the gendarmerie too), there would still be regional divisions with a regional controller. The only difference would be the names and a few quid saved on bulk buying of uniforms. I quite like the fact than in england and wales we have seperate forces, because if there's corruption in one it generally doesn't taint any of the others.
regional would still be cheaper than what we have now.
Just down here in SW there's, Devon & Cornwall, Avon and Somerset and Dorset forces. So that's according to
https://www.police-information.co.uk/policepay.htm over £750k just in BASIC pay to the chief and deputy constables in those 3 forces. Replace with one regional chief + deputy and pay them a little bit more, ad that's just 3 forces out of 40 odd
"...all with their own, cars, uniforms, IT, HR"
Just to correct this bit, a large number of forces have joint arrangements - Hants and Thames Valley share cars and IT, as do the Midlands forces, for example.
...and some of those forces are privately funded, so we don't really care about those (CNC, the various Ports police and Universities)
"Seems this country needs to change it's spending priorities or nothing will change soon"
To right, stop spending so much on the Police and spend a hell of a lot more on crime prevention.
Youth clubs are closing all over the place,
Drug rehab is massively underfunded.
Adult education services are being slashed,
Social care is at breaking point.
Still better to give them a X6 rather than keep 50 kids of the street for a year.
"To right, stop spending so much on the Police and spend a hell of a lot more on crime prevention.
Youth clubs are closing all over the place,"
I didn't have any youth clubs near me when I was a kid, but I didn't compensate by going around nicking cars or robbing people. I'm tired of this someone-else-is-to-blame mentality when dealing with youth crime. Some kids are just little shits. End of. Most grow out of it , other don't, but they'll be shits no matter what toys or activities you throw at them.
"Drug rehab is massively underfunded."
Good. Better the money is spent on people with non self inflicted problems instead. You want to take drugs? Well suffer the consequences whether that be prison or dead in an alley.
"Adult education services are being slashed,"
If people didn't piss about at school they wouldn't need education as adults. They've had one lot of free education paid for by the state, I see no reason why the state (read: taxpayers) should pay for a 2nd lot free for the bone idle. There are always books, assuming they can read.
" You want to take drugs? Well suffer the consequences whether that be prison or dead in an alley."
People don't go in prison for taking drugs, most the time they go for things they've done because of taking drugs, you forgot those consequences in your phrase. Maybe those are the consequences you'd prefer not to see.
Former plod here - to record interviews we used cassette tapes... yep... cassette tapes.. that was back in 2008... I'm sure they still use them. You want to type up your arrest reports on computer? Nope, you hand write them. Their single sign on was the best... you could tell it was a cobbled together copy/paste function since as you were logging into CRIS or CRIMINT or whatever application you had to use, you could see the pop up screens for authentication being populated with username/password... I imagine NTLM wasn't available at the time. Maybe in a few years....
There is actually a sound reason for using cassette tapes. They're robust, they're simple and they're reliable. Digital recording can still just magically disappear (the more general magical disappearing properties of evidence contrary to a case notwithstanding), whereas a tape is bloody difficult to wipe effectively.
It's the same reason solicitors still tend to use fax machines for important legal documents, and why hansard is printed on vellum.
It's the same reason solicitors still tend to use fax machines.
dont get me started . Tradition , stubbornness amd an unwillingness to change is why people still use them. Particulalary in finance depts
I still see people printing stuff out , then faxing it - when eFAX IS AVAILABLE!!
If you want timely and reliable patches, 10's the only version getting any attention and only the bleeding edge anniversary edition at that. MS never were terribly good at supporting anything except the very latest version of any given product. They are now officially not even doing that, since everything is now "rolling release" (or "beta as a service").
"MS never were terribly good at supporting anything except the very latest version of any given product."
Sadly though, that also applies to hardware - hence some of the problems with legacy kit and win 10 Anniversary Edition (or A&E)... Not to mention drivers for associated peripherals such as printers & scanners. Before long the hardware bill can spiral more out of control than an ecstasy-fueled joy-rider :-(
(Obligatory Linux icon ahead of massed cries to ditch MS )
"Windows 7 only has 3.5 years of extended support left."
better 'go Linux' instead, then. it will save money, allow local companies to support regional police departments, and NOT send a bunch of money to Micro-shaft.
I'm sure cops are smart/savvy enough to switch over. The pain is limited by certain distros, like Mint with Cinnamon. And you probably won't need to buy 'all new hardware' either.
(more money left over to keep cops on the street catching bad guys)
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1. XP works... and keeps on working. That's evil?
2. MS has defeated Win7 security patch updates by destroying trust in the content.
3. Untrusted security patching: 7 = XP. Welcome to the wilderness!
4. Windows 8.1? What's that?
5. Windows = HIV. Practice safe sex.
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