Posts by Gordon Pryra

Ironic Headline?

"UK.gov demands urgent answers as [insert name here] IT meltdown continues"

Normally it would be the other way around.

An old supplier had it right

Once a month he would take me out and we would get utterly pissed for the afternoon.

And then for every crate for HP toner cartridges we brought from him he would give us a PlayStation 1

We got 3 or 4 pallets of them in the end...

Daily Mail Headline here, meaningless numbers coming from a crappy poll

82% of users includes home users AND business users?

Because i bet that if you took the home users out, the number would drop to 2% or something.

After all its only the American Government and .Govt.uk who leave router passwords as default.

Home users on the other hand run the risk of not getting support, or worse charged for damage, if they play with settings on the hardware they are supplied.

Half the time it turns out that the small print means you are only loaned the equipment that you paid so much for and the rest of the time that equipment may as well be black box for all the changes that a home user can make to it.

"staff are meant to be protected against retaliation for cooperating"

Could say the same is for all organisations, but unless someone is prepared to make as much cash as possible from the media and employment tribunals to last them the rest of the life, staff know that they should NEVER NEVER become a whistle blower.

Sanctions are harsh and generally final to someones career. In the UK look at NHS or local Government whistle blowers for many examples.

People need ask themselves, is it worth the years its taken me to get to this point? Because they will fuck me over and unless I wish to whore myself out to the media, I wont have any protection no matter what the law says.

Yet they give this data to any BBS with a pretty front end?

No offence, but the databases Facebook and Google hold are probably far more up to date and accurate.

After all, the same people complaining about Government use of the data were more than willing to give far more detailed stuff to random companies they knew nothing about

in other news, cigarettes give you cancer

We still see people claiming they didn't know cigarettes give you cancer.

If someone gives you something for free and all you need to do is give them all your personal data you cant claim to not understand what the cost of the free gift was.

Face book was dying anyway, very few new startups and although the papers talk about their huge advertising ability, the stuff pushed via Facebook seems to be the crap that your spam filter keeps out of your email.

This issue is not Facebook being evil, its people being idiots and them pretending to be surprised that a private company that gave them free stuff didn't make money from toothpaste adverts but actually made the cash from selling data about the user to people who want to see that data.

How the hell did they think Zuk got rich when none of them had EVER clicked on an advert on Facebook?

Final news, we don't have Brexit or Trump because of some data mining company, we have these things because people ARE stupid and lazy, stupid enough to tick the relevant box, and lazy enough not to think about what they were doing.

Powerdown Kid?

Slightly better than my moniker of "Server Fucker".....

Blah blah free speech blah blah

Tell me anywhere in the world where you actually have free speech.

Or where you actually have free speech (of a kind) like the UK, where that doesn't just means the right to spew lies and propaganda.

The most vocal proponents of free speech are the ones using it to abuse others and make as much cash as possible into the bargain (look at the daily mail and the like for examples)

In twitters case they may have a point, if it were not for the fact that their system seems to be used mainly by world leaders acting like children and the Kardashions.

Think of the children!!

Compuserve

All these addresses going yet my Compuserve account still seems live....

Good call

Somethings doing nothing is the best answer

Lot of Lies from Microsoft Here

X-Box live has a profanity filter that you need to physically opt out of.

Therefore for anybody to receive abusive language they would first have need to untick the box that says "stop abusive language"

Thereby giving consent.

Microsoft is just using this as an excuse ready for when it becomes public that they are scanning all your private data already.

They have seen the shit storm at Facebook and know what is coming down the line is going to hit them just as hard, so they are trying to justify their use of your data and their scanning of that data.

I could never understand why people saved stuff to the cloud and expected it to stay private.

Load of hogwash

In my experience with Universities and academic data, anything of any real value is held on the desktop hosted on a crappy external USB hard drive.

It would have cost the hackers more on bandwidth charges to get 34 TB out of the average internet connections universities allow their workers than it would to licence anything patent worthy legally.

anyone who has given personal information to the City of Atlanta online

This is a bit rich, considering that most people are being forced by the various Governments of the world to use their online services or face massive hassle.

Anyway, I don't understand how this screw up could be putting the personal information of employees and citizens at risk.

The data has been encrypted, most likely by someone with elevated privileges (because they are important and needs it on their single account) hitting every network share with the virus.... not stolen

The people who have the private key don't have access to the data itself.

Once we are our own seperate little Kingdom

Can we bring back hanging and hang the people who conned the great unwashed into voting Brexit?

Or just hang the 52% who were stupid enough to?

I'm not saying eugenics, but it may just clean up our gene pool by removing the bad breeding partners...

What about a swap

Zuk for Love?

Same old crap

NHS have been selling our data for years.

Their last big cash grab failed when everyone told their Doctors to keep their medical records away from the central database. Watching some Tory MP spout technobabble about anonymised data being "linked to a private key which is then linked to the user so its all safe and not identifiable" was both funny and scary at the same time.

The NHS are not fit to hold our private data.

Their systems are not patched and are all out of service date. Having a sizeable Windows XP estate is proof enough of this. Their blatant bollocks regarding being hacked by North Korea as an excuse for Wannacry is proof positive that they are not capable of either controlling their IT infrastructure nor do they feel they need to tell us when they screw up.

That last point, where they feel they can lie through their teeth as if it were 1980 and technical knowledge was low therefore we believe what they are saying is the biggest sign that tells me they should never ever get our data.

If they are selling car-parking spaces outside A+E for 4 quid an hour, then they are either selling our data to life insurance companies or swapping it for shiny toys with Google. Eye-scans from Morfields given to the one company who can unanonymise this data is no joke....

HMRC need to sort their ***in act out.

The VAST majority of "contractors" have always been within ir35

I am a contractor because I hate working for the same company for years.

I am generally project resource on IT projects, migrations and roll outs occasional BAU and backfill stuff. It would be soul destroying to sit in the same chair doing the same shit for the rest of my life?

it makes me suicidal

vSphere is vSphere no matter what chair I sit in, but changing that chair makes it bearable.

My working like is long and hard; why the fuck SHOULD I make it worse by sitting in the same office for the rest of my life.

If the entire tax system was not set up to allow the rich to stay rich then we would have the ability to have a far more simple system, set up for people like me.

In fact, the average IT contractor is the same as the average Deliveroo cycle rider dropping off McDonald's, but politicians are also limited companies?

We should NOT be limited companies, but have some other classification which has 5% of the required paperwork.

But by putting this in place, I assume that many senior figures would have their financial systems effectively ripped apart and make it obvious how they are hiding their money.

HMRC not putting simpler systems in place is just proof that the system is a protection for a certain strata rather than a usable system.

Nowadays I am generally paid the same as the full time staff except I won’t get any of the advantages they have (sick pay etc.) I am forced to "opt out" of all of these legal advantages before any agency will give me a job anyway.

Even when I work for .Govt and they come to me directly I am forced to go through their agency of choice where I am told I need to opt out with my own volition!.

Whats the point to this experiment?

Lies are always more interesting than the truth.

Generally that is why they were written, to cause some affect, so are going to be written more sensational style.

Rather than looking at the reach of truth and lies, they should have looked at the STYLE of the various posts.

I bet the vast majority of "lies" are more interesting to read than the boring truth.....

The wages of sin are high, and the uniforms are better

Seems a bit cheap

$6 million doesn't sound that much considering the prices some of the more common Spitfires and Hurricanes go for (well, "common" is relative when compared to unique anyway)

its all ones and zeros

Computers don't make mistakes, and if they do, then a system that is used by literally millions of people would be flooding the world with pictures from peoples cloud storage.

You would have more chance of winning the lottery for 3 consecutive weeks than a "bug" selecting a naked photo of a women out of a number of files and sending that image to a random person who just happens to know her.

Then again I have had to sit and waste my time talking to a couple (friends of the wife) about how you would go about "hacking someones hot mail" when the husband found out his wife's email open and in her sent items were messages to other men." She claimed it wasn't her, he WANTED to believe her, I had to explain how hard it would be to do this, and that the big question "why" came up. What I wanted to do was scream in his face "DON'T BE SO ****** STUPID!!"

new measures in place to avoid further crippling cyber attacks.

Would this be actually spending the money on upgrading from XP on ...... upgrading from XP?

or blaming North Korea for them not spending the money they said they have (multiple times) on upgrading from XP?

I cry foul, there have been measures in place to avoid crippling cyber attacks for donkeys years. And the NHS has already (on paper anyway) implemented these measures.

This is just more lies to cover incompetence and outright embezzlement (contracts to your mates for 5 times the market value type of thing)

nice words

Until you hear them coming from an American. Probably the most prolific country involved in state sponsored cyber-crime.

When we hear about Russians or North Koreans its generally crap information given out to obfuscate our screw ups.

Some good examples include the NHS blaming North Korea for "CYBER ATTACKS!!" instead of owning up to having spent the budget for upgrading from XP to a proper OS or the Americans claiming that Russia hacked their elections rather than just owning up to having been bank rolled by them.

The US have become so blaze in their utter disregard to the rest of the worlds IT infrastructure that they have even allowed their hacking tool-kits to escape too the wild, allowing criminals access to tools more powerful than ever before. (though I believe a eastern European criminal hacker would still be the more trustworthy user of these tools than the Americans...)

Possibly one of the worst oversights to date on any flavor of any OS

Considering the cost of a machine that you need to pay in order to have one that runs High Sierra (MACs are stupidly expensive for the specification) You would think that the manufacturer could engage in some basic testing of security.

With the numbers of people who own these items, there is no way that this wasn't found on the day of release by someone, and WILL have been used in a malicious manner.

There is a (good) argument that this OS is not fit for purpose and refunds should be given.

Luckely most organisations with MACs will also be using active directory or novell for their network infrastructure, and so a user having local admin privileges isn't that big an issue. That said, MAC users tend not to be that technical, claiming artistry over technology, and store all sorts of important stuff locally......

Talking up products o make them seem more attractive

Is not a crime.

Its also called advertising.

Buying and selling to massage markets is being done on a daily basis by the banks, yet none ever gets accused of being a criminal (even when destroying the worlds economy or being court transferring money for Dictators and drug cartels)

Why therefore describe smaller practitioners of this "pump and dump" system as "aspiring criminals" when they are just doing the same as the other shit sucking leeches in our economy....

Still not sure how Google is at fault.

People go to google.com or whatever and receive a list of results from a search.

The website is owned by Google and they provide the indexing services that return the results.

Foundem or whatever are complaining that they are not appearing in the list? Then maybe they should make foundem.com and run their own search engine in order to level the playing field?

Every time i see a company complaining about Google dominance I take a look at that company's website/service and its generally crap.

I CHOOSE to go to Google because their service is good, I don't go to bing etc

Should Google therefore be penalised in order to force me to go to bing? (or whatever shitty search engine is trying to take some of the advertising revenue out there?)

Hmmm Galadriel's Breasts

Because you know it will be commissioned by a group of executives who will take what has made loads of cash before and transpose the LoTR storytelling over the top of it.

Living in a buble

"in the history of humanity"

This makes it sound like its actually important. What the guy ACTUALLY meant is

"will take a few days work to sort things out if we move"

terabytes?

So a physical download then, unless their network boys have been asleep for a few days....

Anonymisation of data?

That is the same as talking the names of a list of finger print records and then giving them to the company that holds the database for fingerprints

UK ISP are uniformly terrible.

The service they offer their customers is appealing and their MO is "Don't like it, then you know what to do, but you will find the opposition just as shit"

Generally the moment you need to call the service desk, then you may as well look at cancelling your direct debits before they take any more cash.

The best answer when dealing with their customer support on them calling you about lack of payment is "you can answer in Court why you feel this payment is due, because I certainly didn't receive the service"

From Talk Talk selling a 1Mb line to my parents for £60 a month

to BT Charging me for my old house for 6 months (as well as my new house) then cutting off the new connection and trying to charge me to reconnect it

to Virgin selling their "Gamer Package" for £150-200 a month complete with hardware that actually means a gamer would have received a better experience using their phone as a mobile hot spot...

EVERY one of the top ISPs has had their customer service lie to me on the phone regarding the service at some point, from straight out technobabble when they don't want to tell me they have oversubscribed the services in my area to downright lies regarding anything from packet shaping to shit modems

Pathetic

Both the subject of this story and the fact that a company that effectively sold peoples credit card details to 3rd party's did not actually get anything more than a telling off. (8 million $ to Google?)

Directors are responsible and should get the same jail terms as anyone else caught selling credit card details.

Scholtz

Head of the The National Outsourcing Association........

actually hes not but I thought it sounded like he may well be : )

"There are a number of possible defenses"

its a tad late, and if people are now talking about it, it means that the NSA will have a fully working system already running.

Sooooo on past performance, give it a week and they will have given the tools to the enemy and will be blaming North Korea for mapping your movements some time soon

we've become a larger target for meritless patent litigation

For a moment I thought this was a quote from Apple, must be boiler plate fluff on the templates given out to multinationals.