* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

ICO wades in after GP doxxes woman to her estranged ex-partner

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ouch

"I can imagine more of them not having a good handle on information security."

Given my experience of GP office staff, Dunning-Kruger is probably in full effect (referring specifically to whoever is purported to be the "IT manager" for the practice.)

Idiot flies drone alongside Flybe jet landing at Newquay Airport

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Risk?

"there is at most about three seconds to notice it in the sky (and it is a very small object in a very big sky), carefully examine it and conclude that it is a drone and not a greater spotted grebe"

Or a plastic bag, which is what the last "drone sighting" over heathrow was most likely to be (yes, they can end up wafting about at 1000 feet if caught in an updraft)

As has been pointed out in various places, the decline in reported bird-misses in the UK has been matched by the increase in reported drone near misses.

Microbes that laugh at antibiotics: UK sinks £4.5m into China-Brit kill team

Alan Brown Silver badge

"wouldn't a better choice be to find ways to let us live with the bacteria?"

That would entail a return to the days of having 9 kids so that 2 or 3 would survive to adulthood.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Antibiotics are no longer routinely given ..."

Given that a bladder infection can turn life-threatening in less than 48 hours, it isn't surprising the doc took the cautious approach.

That said, going to the local ED for a test is a better option.

NASA dumps $65m into building deep space hutches for humans

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 'All The Mod Cons'

"Can i have mine lined with six foot thick lead walls please?"

Lead doesn't block neutrons (which is why it was used as a coolant in some nuclear reactor designs)

Water blocks gamma and particles.

Toshiba flashes 100TB QLC flash drive, may go on sale within months. Really

Alan Brown Silver badge

"SLC NAND is the bare minimum to get some reliability for enterprise and professional use."

Oh, do tell which suppliers are still selling SLC.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Some math

"If we use very expensive 20 cent/kwh electricity (maybe it is that high in some EU countries?)"

I pay 14p/kWh, plus a daily supply charge. So: "yes, and then some"

NASA test foiled by rocket shaking power cord loose from camera

Alan Brown Silver badge

What it shows

Is just how lumpy the exhaust from a solid is.

It would interesting to compare that plume with that of a liquid booster.

Elon?

Revealed: How a weather forecast in 1967 stopped nuclear war

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Even if it was 90% mortality (which I doubt) the human race would survive...

> How are the "waves of starving urbanites" going to get to the rural areas? Walk?

Probably - and it's unlikely that there are enough bullets to stop them (bearing in mind that when you run out of bullets, the surviveors are going to rip you limb-from-limb, so you'd better ensure you have enough before you start shotting)

FEMA and the US environment agency have "urban evacuation" high on their list of worst possible environmental disasters.The only reason we can survive in the kinds of numbers we do is because of heavy population concentrations.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Even if it was 90% mortality (which I doubt) the human race would survive...

"I heard some organization in the US (FEMA?) once did a study of the results of an EMP strong enough to knock out all the infrastructure in North America. Their conclusion was apparently 80% mortality after the first year. That's WITHOUT ANY nukes going off."

Yes it was FEMA, in the late 1990s. They documented how fragile the US electrical distribution system was and how long it would take to replace the core transformers at risk (several million dollars apiece, 2-3 year construction time, no spares).

The european grid was much more robust - primarily because of much shorter transmission line runs.

This report was in response to the large solar flare which hit earth in 1989 (it knocked out parts of the Canadian power grid) and made people start wondering seriously what effects a Carrington-level solar flare would have (up to that point people were ridiculed as doomsayers, and that's despite a large 1950s event having quite an impact. The difference was in the intervening 40 years electricity had become utterly critical infrastructure).

The USA (and most other countries) have been taking steps to minimise the effects and damage ever since. The biggest problem is induced large DC offsets in transmission lines causing transformers to saturate and overheat but appropriate rejigging of the way things are connected can avoid that happening.

Because the grids are so heavily interconnected an overload failure in one part of the country can rapidly escalate into cascade failures everywhere. It's possible to design more robustness in, but that costs money and accountants won't approve it until they're personally affected.

Alan Brown Silver badge

> There's a reason why the Japanese surrendered so fast. (They didn't know the US had run out of bombs.)

Untrue.

They were already contemplating surrender and the amount of damage the US had already inflicted on Japan(*) meant that news of the scale of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs didn't arrive for several days. As far as the japanese hierarchy was concerned it was just another massive US air attack

(*) Most large cities had already been bombed flat and the death toll from one night raid on Tokyo was higher than either of the nuclear bombs.

The bombs did provide enough impetus to push the remaining hawks in the japanese military to one side and surrender quickly, but they may have surrendered in a few months anyway.

The USA didn't know that at the time. Fog of war and all that...

Alan Brown Silver badge

> Even if it was 90% mortality (which I doubt) the human race would survive.

You're right to doubt. Whilst the multi-megaton bombs scared the shit out of people during the Cold War the reality was that by the mid 1960s targetting accuracy was good enough that only 50-150kt weapons were being used for strategic weapons (only slightly smaller on tactical nukes)

There's almost nothing left now over 100kt (most of the H-bombs can be dialled from 5-150kt, but the standard setting is around 50kt or less and antisubmarine ones can be dialled as low as 0.3kt). In any case nuclear weapons are an expensive boondoggle that noone can actually use. War simulations verified that to the point where it was reported in 1979 that US military commanders who used nuclear weapons in battlefield simulations only ever did so once. In all subsequent simulation runs they'd surrender rather than nuke even if the _other_ guy was tossing nukes.

The best use for nukes now is to expand the swords-to-plowshears program.

London's 'automatic' Tube trains suffered 750 computer failures last year

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wrong conclusion

"The main problem with ATO in wet weather is that the braking rate is too much for the low rail adhesion."

In other words, ATO is fine. The implementation is a failure.

Design for braking distances must cater to "worst case conditions", not "optimal".

Someone needs taking out the back and re-educating with a brick to the side of the head.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Really?

"Getting rid of ticket barriers and stupid, stop-based pricing would also be a great idea."

Indeed. Anything which encourages people out of their cars and onto public transport inside zone 4 would be a good thing.

Then again, whilst a travelcard is nearly 20 squid from my station (I'm outside Zone6), it gets me to Waterloo/Victoria in 45 minutes at worst (vs 2-3 hours by car) and parking alone runs to about £12/day, so it's economic. If they could solve the issue of "no services home past 11:30pm" I'd be much happier though. (Night busses don't go to many places in zone 6, let alone beyond and it's a £40 taxi fare from the last night bus stop to home)

WRT "spending vast sums of money": This is exactly what's needed, along with using eminent domain more often. The UK rail network has suffered decades of underinvestment(*) compared to our european cousins and it shows. The money spent on Trident would go a long way towards a decent rail network (as would starting work on HS2 simultaneously at Birmingham and Manchester, building towards each other and south from B'ham. By the time the line reached the Chilterns they'd have finally decided on final routing and it could be completed quickly, vs taking 20 years from the time routes are decided.)

(*) Under private companies, BR and Railtrack alike.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So what's the message here, then ??

DLR was designed from the outset for automatic trains, with the luxury of not opening lines until all the work was done and thoroughly tested.

All the other lines are conversions from manually-controlled systems with work generally done under enormous time pressure in a few hours window each night in old tunnels full of god-knows-what and testing also has to be crammed into that window.

One of the main reasons given for not putting in extra tunnels is cost, but the cost of only having one line in each direction with no resilience and no ability to take a line out of service for proper heavy maintenance (some tunnels are still running on century old rail which should have been replaced years ago, and as such are subject to low speed limits) far outweighed the cost of boring new ones a long time ago. Doing it this way would allow safe 24 hour services too.

Crossrail _could_ have addressed this, but oh no, the same blinkered mentality applies. 10-20 years after opening when heavy work is required it's going to have the same problems as the current lines do.

A brave politician and TFL head would take the bull by the horns and announce major new programs but this is unlikely to ever happen.

Power cut crashes Delta's worldwide flight update systems

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Aeroflot

Aeroflot has been extremely safe for at least 15 years.

The problem is there are a pletheora of russian airlines, many having splintered off Aeroflot and still using aircraft painted up with Aeroflot's logo - and it's those ones which are still falling out of the sky with monotonous regularity.

In other words, be very careful who you fly with.

In other news, one of the single largest contributors to civil air transport safety was the decision most airlines made in the 1990s to stop recruiting ex-military pilots. Originally this was due to a shortage of them that forced more reliance on flight schools, but it soon became clear that civil-trained pilots were much safer because unlike military pilots they'd assess the situation and take into account the number of people behind them, rather than taking a gung-ho approach and try to land no matter what.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Single point of failure

It's actually possible to RAID your UPS systems and run everything via the UPS rather than introduce a switchbreak (large systems use a flywheel and this has the effect of supplying conditioned power to the site).

It's also possible to RAID the generators that back the UPSes.

As someone else has mentioned, the problem is managers looking to get a bonus for cutting costs who end up ripping resiliance out of the systems. I wonder if they'd be so keen if they were made liable for the costs of system failures if it traces back to their cost-cutting.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Leap Seconds

"namely that GPS hadn't allowed for continental drift"

GPS doesn't NEED to adjust fro continental drift. It's a set of global coordinates.

The problem is that mapmakers hadn't made allowances.

then again, 7cm/year is absolutely sprinting in geological terms.

Ofcom is keeping schtum over BT Openreach plans until end of year

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: OFCOM are pathetic

"they chickened-out of forcing BT to get its grubby paws off of OpenReach."

People should be lobbying the Competition and Markets authority, not Ofcom.

Ofcom is composed of people who come from the telco industry and who will go back to the telco industry. They have a vested interest in not rocking the boat too much.

The comparable case to BT/Openreach in New Zealand was forced by their ministry of commerce, not by their version of Ofcom. Once you start quantifying the damage to the economy caused by market abuse you have a strong case that Ofcom can't ignore.

UK telco market worth £37.5bn, Ofcom reports

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ofcom - they love their stats, but completely miss the point.

"Yes it is an incomplete picture but is not without its uses"

There are 3 factors at play.

1: Your xDSL speed/line quality. This can be obtained by interrogating your router.

2: Backhaul from the local exchange to the ISP

3: ISP connectivity to the rest of the world.

There have been more than a few instances in the UK of 1 and 3 being fine, but 2 being oversubscribed - and usually because Openreach have been footdragging on providing link upgrades.

Ofcom's ruling on Openreach doesn't go far enough. It needs to be separate shareholding/board of directors/CEO from BT and the easiest way to achieve it is to make doing that split a condition of any more broadband funding.

I really am surprised the Competition and Markets Authority hasn't stepped in and forced this issue. BT's ongoing market abuse has quantifiable damage to the UK economy - which is why when New Zealand looked at the proposal for BT/Openreach model there, they said "NO" and forced a complete split.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ofcom - they love their stats, but completely miss the point.

"Entanet's excuse"

You get what you pay for.

For £50/month I get unlimited data AND full speed at all times on 80/20, plus a UK helpdesk which more often than not is a techie, rather than a semi-literate half-trained simian (accents and locations vary, a chimp is a chimp whether in Yorkshire or Bangalore), along with the usual phone service and unlimited local calling, etc.

Sure I could shave it down a bit by tweaking my packages but I like not having to worry about nastygrams for going over 2TB/month because something I host got popular (Yes, I'm allowed to host services too)

New York jerks face $25K fines for hassling ex with fake caller IDs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Begs the question...

"Seems to me that the best solution would be to require "legitimate" users of caller ID spoofing, such as the above, to post a large £££ bond with the telco"

The problem is that a VOIP or ISDN origin call can set any callerID they want.

BT started countering the problem some years back (for ISDN origin) by only allowing CID of the numbers allocated to the ISDN connection. Anything else (such as 0800/0300/0845) has to be specifically authorised.

Unfortunately BT is not the only telco providing ISDN in the UK and most of the rest are not diligent. In any case it still doesn't stop spoofing from VOIP origin (calls from my personal VOIP show the userID as the origin number - which doesn't even look like a valid number - without the domain name on the end.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: CallerIDFaker.com

"You might wish to hide behind a fake number in this instance."

There's a section covering this in the TCPA.

TL;DR: It's illegal to spoof a number on a sales call.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: CallerIDFaker.com

"But a service which allows anyone to spoof any number? That just doesn't sound like there could be a legitimate reason for using it."

There isn't - and there are a few such services in the UK.

Meantime I'm getting spam telesales calls using spoofed London numbers (unallocated), trying to sell me on fake injury insurance claims.

Simply not credible: The extraordinary verdict against the body that hopes to run the internet

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Think i've found the problem...

"non-profit organization.."

That doesn't mean what you think it means.

Non-profits are free to pay out obscene amounts of money to employees and others. They're not free to return profits to their stakeholders.

The game they're playing is an ancient scam pulled by thousands of non-profits worldwide.

The best thing you can do is sic the IRS onto them and try to get the non-profit status revoked, but with that amount of money in their legal war chest iy might be hard to achieve.

'ICANN's general counsel should lose his job over this'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ICANN is an example

"Start looking at personal bank accounts & life styles of ICANN personnel & family members."

And ex-ICANN heads. Particularly the ones who moved on to DNS registry companies and have a long, documented history of the kind of shenanigans detailed in the article well before they came to ICANN.

California to put all your power-hungry PCs on a low carb(on) diet

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Somewhere along the line the will have to give up the green dream as a dream and get back to reality and build real power stations."

Nuclear plants would qualify as green. LFTRs really would be.

US Air Force declares F-35 'combat-ready'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IOC not FOC

"as an air superiority interceptor"

It's nothing of the sort. The F22 is the air superiority bird.

F35s were designed to only go in AFTER the F22 had cleared the way for them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IOC not FOC

"by limited combat I'd imagine happy dropping JDAM on ISIS"

I wouldn't even put money on it being sucessfuly able to do that.

Apple gets judge to hit ctrl-alt-delete on $625m FaceTime patent troll

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Theft and Infringement

"Apple was founded on theft and Infringement with it's original GUI being stolen from Xerox Parc."

And trolling, suing (unsucessfully) to try and prevent Windows being sold, based on "Look and Feel" - http://lowendmac.com/2006/the-apple-vs-microsoft-gui-lawsuit/

GEM was also wiped off PCs about the same time by Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager

Seagate scoops a revenue boost off back of its 8TB drives

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Maybe add in some kind of RAID-like redundancy into a backup set"

Never heard of RAIT?

$67M in bitcoin stolen as hacking typhoon lashes Hong Kong's Bitfinex

Alan Brown Silver badge

"That is why you'll never hear of a bank hacker getting away with millions."

So the attacks in Bangaldesh and other locations didn't happen then?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"What % of US$, Euro €, Yen, Pounds etc are potentially forged bills/notes"

For the UK, actual printed/minted cash accounts for 3% of the money in circulation.

Which means that forged currency isn't a particularly large threat.

"There's ultimately no gold in a vault somewhere backing up every bill. They're only worth what the market believes they're worth."

Which means that forged currency IS a particularly large threat. If people stop accepting payments using XYZ currency then it's valueless - and it's worth bearing in mind that this was the final straw for the Roman Empire(*). Once people stopped accepting roman currency the empire collapsed within 18 months.

(*) In the roman case, after centuries of debasement, a revaluation of the currency intended to bolster confidence had the unintended effect that people refused to accept older coins. It didn't matter that the new coins were OK, what counts in currency is the confidence you can spend it. You can't eat a gold coin.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Virtuality

"As much as I don't trust the banks with real money"

Gold is not real money. Seriously.

Norks hacks 90 Southern officials, journalists

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nice idea

"you'd have to persuade North Korea's greatest protectors and fans to cut it off."

That would be Russia, not China. The chinese put up with the Norks as a buffer between them and the decadent west but they don't particularly approve of what they do (oil and electricity supplies have been cut off on several occasions, but the Norks keep getting most of their stuff over the russian border)

Of course if the Koreas were unified, then the USA/UN would have no mandate to stay on the peninsula and the US military bases at Okinawa would probably close or be drastically scaled down too.

300 million pelicans? Pah. What 6 billion plastic bags really weigh

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Niche scenario - but annoying regardless

"Strange that the paper that includes paper store bags that I put into the trench for my runner beans degrades very nicely thank you very much"

Put a couple of newspapers under 2-3 feet of soil and dig them up 6 months later, then rebury them and dig them up 5 years later. They won't have degraded much, if at all

That's the kind of conditions in landfill. Even food waste doesn't break down much (the breakdown tends to be anaerobic, which is why landfill emits so much methane)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Niche scenario - but annoying regardless

Adding to the comment about paper bags:

They are quite expensive to recycle (in terms of energy use) and as recycling shortens the fibres which make it up (chopping...), paper can only be recycled a few times.

In most cases (paper and plastic) it's less expensive and uses fewer raw materials/energy to simply burn the bags (paper or plastic) for fuel and make new ones. In the specific case of plastic bags the energy used to recycle the things uses enough oil to make several new ones. It's even worse for plastic bottles as they need washing and the energy requirements for any with a paper label are insane (you can't allow paper fibres into the plastic recycling process. It results in films with holes in them (bad bags) or plastic extrusions/molds with major weaknesses)

From the retailer point of view, plastic bags are 1/10 the price of paper ones, even if you use "bags for life"

The big mistake (of course) is attempting to recycle glass bottles into glass bottles or plastic bags/bottles into more of the same. Turning the glass into insulation wool is an example of intelligent recycling - you don't have to worry about the myriad mixed grades/colours that would otherwise need separating. The same thing can be done for plastics but the energy costs mentioned above come into play. Metals are much easier to recycle and the only reason they "need" to be cleaned is to prevent attracting vermin whilst they're waiting to be melted down.

Captain Piccard's planet-orbiting solar aircraft in warped drive drama

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can someone calculate

" If they can get weight-for-weight equivalent solar cells to aircraft skin, why not make use of them?"

Complexity, fragility, extra wiring mass and charge control complexity, certification for about as much extra energy as is consumed by the inflight entertainment gear of a half-dozen seats.

It's much more profitable to reduce seat mass, the weight and power consumption of the IFE kit (which is what's being done) as well as the mass and complexity of aircraft wiring (which is why some busbars and wiring are being run in Aluminium or F/O instead of copper, despite the increased fragility of the former and the extra transceivers for the latter and why switched networks/control busses are proliferating instead of hundreds of miles of individual control/power wires.)

Seriously. Just the extra wiring for solar panel skins means they'd need to weigh 1/10 of existing skins to be worth replacing on a like-for-like bases.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can someone calculate

"very few pure hybrids achieve better fuel efficiency than an equivalent-sized diesel powered vehicle."

In open road cruising that's true and unarguable.

For urban warrior work, it's a completely different story.

The issue with car engines (diesel or petrol) is that they only work efficiently at full load and even than that's only ~35% maximum and only when at operating temperature.

The average petrol engine runs around 2-4% efficiency most of the time and 0% when idling in traffic.

Stop/start engine technology has made quite a difference for dense urban traffic fuel consumption but in the suburbs where most runs are less than 2 miles in light traffic you can expect your 50mpg diesel to be making more like 25-28mpg (real world figures) - and BOTH these areas are where hybrids win.

Using a smaller, lighter engine with more tightly defined operational parameters means you can cut the emissions control weight and complexity too, so there are engine/battery tradeoffs you can exploit for a win-win situation, but don't expect to see many hybrid longhaul trucking rigs. (On the other hand hybrid trucks are ideal for drayage work)

The further advantage in dense urban environment is that you can switch the engine off entirely and roll on electric power during pollution blackouts, but it's worth noting that London's NOX levels are now only 40-45% caused by vehicle emissions and have been like this for a while (predating Euro5 cars), so you get a law of diminishing returns unless you go after the largest pollution sources.

offtopic: The largest source of NOX in London is old-school gas and oil-fired boilers and for the most part they're also the largest source of HC and particulate emissions. Modern condensing ones are almost zero emission, which is one of the unstated reasons councils trend to mandate the things but their complexity is the very thing which causes owners of older massively polluting installations to refuse to update (until they get CO poisoning and the system is condemned, as happened to some friends of mine).

That said - London NOX (and other pollution levels) are only problematic inside the inner london ring road and virtually non-existant outside the North/South circular roads. A lot of automotive pollution control technology is being produced and sold with efficiency and cost penalties everywhere, to nail issues that only occur in small areas when there are probably better ways of tackling the issues, such as adaptive technology which restricts emissions when actually needed or simply mandating zero emission vehicles in zone 1.

Giant Musk-stick test-firing proves a rocket can rise twice

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Splitting hairs

"the shuttle's solid fuel boosters flee sub-orbital and were re-used..."

For some versions of reused. It would have been cheaper to dump them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Splitting hairs

NS2 is a sounding rocket. It goes straight up and comes straight down.

You're comparing Granny's car that gets driven slowly once around the block on Sundays with a F1 racer that gets thrashed within millimetres of its design limits over a hard race. They only thing they really have in common is that they get taken out for a drive on Sunday.

Windows 10 still free, even the Anniversary Update, if you're crass

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Missing option in survey @alain williams

"How does the screen narration work in your superior OS?"

Very well and has done for a couple of decades.

UK's 'Sir King Cash' card fraudster ordered to cough up £560,000

Alan Brown Silver badge

"A crim can just say "I blew it all on hookers and gambling", and then what? Issue him with a charge debt on his person for the money? Then it will just be written off as part of their rehabilitation (or the crim will just declare bankruptcy after the sentence anyway)."

Bankruptcy can't be used (in the UK) to evade criminal court financial orders.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"So, if he squirrels the money away somewhere and goes to jail for 5 years, he will earn £110,800 for each year in prison."

The way it works in the UK is that if there's a hint of where the money is after he's released, he'll be hauled back before the beak to hand it over and face another sentence for refusing to do so.

Forensic accountants make most of their money from tracking this kind of thing.

As for his passport - if he's suspected of squirreling the money somewhere he can be ordered to surrender it/be prohibited form obtaining another and in any case he'll be unable to enter most countries due to the criminal conviction (Even other EU ones have restrictions on the entry of convicted criminals)

For the entire duration of the sentence he's under the supervision of the court whether in jail or not. He can be recalled at any time for any reason. It's much like USA probation without calling it that.

What's ordered in Vegas, doesn't stay in Vegas? $6.7m of printer ink 'stolen by office worker'

Alan Brown Silver badge

management involvement.

"Sounds like others are involved in this not just a few people in the purchasing department."

That's usually the case.

One I got mixed up in revolved around employees in the tax and welfare departments of the New Zealand government selling data to private investigators. It was happening at _every single_ office in the country, had been going on for over 15 years and was only discovered because a net-connected computer in another government department was spotting acting oddly - it was being used as dropbox for the activity. The contractors called in to fix it were put under extreme pressure to not notify the police when they found what was going on (including physical threats).

Mysteriously according to the official investigations, noone above office junior grade was involved, despite a number of convictions for illegally selling personal information and hundreds of people being sacked. To this day the NZ government describes it as "a few isolated cases of employee fraud".

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not a crime if the company does it!

"Such utility bought all of its expensed office supplies from a wholly-owned non-regulated supply shadow company "

It's a common strategy and 100% markup is low.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: accounting 101 anyone

" woudn't ten of thousands of bills at a time more efficiently be printed on non-ink printers"

Have you ever seen a chain printer doing a billing run? the paper tends to finally arc over into the out basket about 3 feet above where it exits the top of the printer.

Lasers/inkjets are slow.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: accounting 101 anyone

"Once upon a time I was instructed by my HoD to order 50 (Fifty) of a certain form, which I duly did in total accordance with his written note.

What turned up was 50 pads of said form."

Someone in a place I worked with did this with power cables about 10 years before I arrived (tech site, installing a lot of kit all the time).

Around my 12th year in the organisation we finally used the last one. 1500 2 metre IEC320s take a long time to use up.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: accounting 101 anyone

At least one of the systems I'm working with (GLPI) has the facility to do this via automated printer interrogation.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: accounting 101 anyone

"Have we got the invoices, yes. Have we got the delivery notes, yes. Are the payments on the bank statement, yes. What more is an auditor going to do?"

Not much unless you actually know how much the printers are consuming.

Many scams like this are frequently only uncovered once the miscreant has left the organisation and someone notices that expenditure on XYZ is significantly lower than it used to be.