* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Don't forget NPfIT

Another back-end database where records mysteriously disappear. It's as if every UK gov IT project reinvents ACID, which has been around since the 70s, but badly at a cost of millions.

eBay to cough up $3M after cyber-stalking couple who dared criticize the souk

Dan 55 Silver badge

The best justice that money can buy.

So, are we going to talk about how GitHub is an absolute boon for malware, or nah?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "often bypassing traditional security defenses"

Well, it seems that traditional security defenses are going to have to consider GitHub a non-secure site and treat it as such.

That's impossible if you're working at a corp where clever MBAs have decided that all that corp's source code should be hosted on github instead of in-house.

What to make of Google backing Right-to-Repair in Oregon? 'It gives me hope'

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Pixel watches

The same Google that says if your watch develops a hardware fault the solution is to throw it away and buy a new one because there are no parts available and not even Google themselves can repair them? That Google?

Elon Musk made 1 in 3 Trust and Safety staff ex-X employees, it emerges

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yet....

So basically what you're confirming is you're unable to make any further rational comment around freedom of speech but you're quite happy to bang the incel drum all day on an IT board. Good to know.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Trust and Safety staff

If only Twitter and X had some way to allow users to choose to follow, unfollow or ignore posters.

Must removed "block", remember?

Or the far left really are just fascists

Are people who can remember 6 months back fascists now?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yet....

One reporter was doxxing Musk in real time

Reporters were banned for writing stories mentioning @elonjet which was already banned in Musk's previous tantrum.

Literally every plane callsign and its flight tracking information is public information, but Musk was not aware of that.

Then in anther tantrum, Musk threatened Sweeny (owner of the Twitter bot) with legal action claiming some nutter attacked his car which, you will notice, is not a jet.

and the other was apparently banned for reporting positively about Matt Walsh's hacker.

The word "apparently" is doing some heavy work there. The reason given by Twitter was thunderously stupid, but "distributing hacked materials" was probably the only thing they had in their ToS with the word "hack" in it.

Musk's reasons are nonsense and don't stack up. Have a bit of dignity and don't be a Musk simp.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yet....

So, a two paragraph reply with nothing substantial in either paragraph and certainly no cited sources.

Can we close the thread now?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yet....

WTF is a 'local public policy' person, and why did Twatter need thousands of them?

Evidently to make Twitter comply with each country's laws around the world.

Why not just a few lawyers who can determine if the speech is legal, or not.

Can a few lawyers in the US check thousands of messages from around the world which are flagged every day?

And if the thousands of previously banned users were banned for political reasons, isn't restoring free speech a good thing?

Elon Musk bans several prominent journalists from Twitter, calling into question his commitment to free speech

Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Still Banning Journalists for Simply Doing Their Job

Funny.

It's a preview party at Microsoft, but do you really want an invite?

Dan 55 Silver badge

".NET MAUI (Multiplatform App UI)"

Win32 is still here and is still not going away. Everything else is ephemeral and will last until the manager moves on to something else.

Michael Dell: Don't worry about AGI, after all we solved that ozone layer thing

Dan 55 Silver badge

Don't Look Up!

Look down at our AI instead.

Careful you don't tread in it...

If you're gonna use AI-made stuff in your game, you better tell us, says Steam

Dan 55 Silver badge

Latest tech layoffs: Twitch, Duolingo, Citrix parent ditch hundreds of workers

Dan 55 Silver badge

Enshittification continues

So at the end of last year Amazon said that adding adverts to Prime Video and making people pay to remove them would allow them to "continue to invest in compelling exclusive content" and now they're firing people at Prime Video and MGM Studios who would make that content.

Just come out and say "we're happy with the mediocre selection of series and films we've got on Prime, making it better looks like too much hard work and after all it's just one of the things so we've thrown into the Prime bundle so we're just going to charge you more and fire people to reduce costs", we'll respect you more for it.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The scary thing about this...

We're the Post Office, we can't be wrong. It's a computer system, whatever it says must be right.

And that view is legally written into UK law. The presumption is that the computer is always right unless the defence can prove otherwise.

The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating correctly – unforeseen and unjust consequences

Posted this yesterday too, a bit spammy, but I'm posting it again as not even IT people know this and as we're writing the damn software we should.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

The Post Office FAQ page is working overtime.

The PO can bring private prosecutions but so can anyone or any company in England and Wales. The problem it appears was there was no oversight or alarm which went off when the PO was bringing so many private prosecutions against their own employees (effectively). Scotland's justice system makes private prosecutions more difficult.

Dan 55 Silver badge

The procurement process for Horizon began in August 1994 (Wikipedia). The Tories started it, Labour ran with it, the Tories picked up the ball again. The only reason why this has blown up now is ITV were looking for dramas to make and the Tory party needs several lifebelts of which this is one. If ITV hadn't made this drama then I have no doubt that nothing would have happened politically either now or after the next election and it would have remained a series of court cases until the very end where the PM would said it's a terrible thing and have commissioned a parliamentary inquiry about it so it could fizzle out and die a natural death like Grenfell, Windrush, etc...

And now seems there's going to be a law passed which allows the executive to interfere in the judicial process, so the UK's downfall continues apace.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Flame

An accountant somewhere must have known that those sums of money were appearing out of thin air, as there would have been no balancing ledger entries to account for them

As far back as 2013 it was publicly known that their own accounts were also a mess so they could not compare entries in their own accounts with entries created by the software on Horizon PCs installed in post offices. They maintained whatever shortfall the Horizon PC software made up was the amount which had to be paid, put the money in a general account, congratulated themselves, and went on to bully the next subpostmaster.

Podcast: Where Did All The Money Go?

It is important to remember the Post Office had no real control over its internal accounting systems for the duration of its Horizon-related prosecution spree (cf the 2013 Detica report) and so it didn’t know where money was going, nor could it properly account for where it came from. Suggesting that double-entry accounting would have revealed an obvious positive entry corresponding to an obvious negative entry assumes the Post Office systems worked and the people operating them knew what they were doing. They didn’t, and even if they did, they were not going to give any visibility of them to Subpostmasters or their legal representatives.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Dan 55 Silver badge

And now their money + compensation will not come from the PO's accounts but from the taxpayer.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Balls of steel - 'IT System assumed to be correct'

The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating correctly – unforeseen and unjust consequences

The fact that a computer has failed may well not be obvious. Even when a failure has been identified, it may be infeasible (that is, not possible) to discover whether it was caused by a software bug or improper operation. As a result, a person challenging evidence derived from a computer is unlikely to know what documents or records might show whether a relevant error has occurred, and so cannot request they be disclosed. They will typically not have been privy to the circumstances in which the system in question is known to fail or may have failed.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How is Fujitsu not in the dock?

ICL was bought by Fujitsu while the project was being developed so the chances of there being corrective action being taken at that early stage after a visit from Fujitsu were minimal.

I'm sure we're all pretty familiar with the idea of foreign outposts belonging to multinationals where nobody at the parent company has any clue what's going on apart from a look at the balance sheet every quarter and an office tour and slap-up meal every year or so.

Fujitsu management are probably annoyed that no UK management committed Seppuku around 2013 though, after the Post Office first admitted there had been problems for a decade.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Hot air

They have delayed until it was impossible to continue to ignore it. Similar is happening with other scandals eg the Windrush people who were wrongly detained, deported

And then they delayed a bit more until it was possible to ignore it once again:

Home Office Windrush ‘transformation team’ formally disbanded

Jacqueline McKenzie, a solicitor with Leigh Day, who has handled more than 100 Windrush compensation cases, said she saw little evidence in daily casework-related calls with Home Office staff to suggest the department had introduced significant cultural change.

“In terms of its attitudes towards asylum cases, deportation and refugees the department is as hostile as ever. Things have gone backwards in terms of poor decision-making and lack of humanity,” she said.

In a further sign of a departmental desire to move on, the cross-government working group on Windrush, which was set up to monitor progress on the reform agenda, is due to hold its final meeting on Wednesday.

Establishment's gonna Establish.

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Maybe IBM or MS could host a mirror.

Both IBM and MS spent time and money removing documentation for software from two major versions and above ago from their websites. We're in the future where documentation seems to be a crowdsourced moving target hosted on official forums but employees never actually reply to problems. Isn't it exciting?

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Dan 55 Silver badge

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: From what I can recall ....

Obviously what happens in California where you can fit four cars in the driveway can be extrapolated worldwide.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: "comes from renewable energy, we're told"

Do they also still believe in an afterlife where you can take your money with you?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: From what I can recall ....

If they're sleeping for eight hours why do they need their car charged in one?

Fujitsu wins flood contract extension despite starring in TV drama about its failures

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Historical effects.

Two UK unions for programmers are UTAW and Prospect. IWGB if you're a game dev.

Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot

Dan 55 Silver badge

Message to marketing depts if they are reading (doubt it)

This is not a feature which attracts, it is a feature which repels. There are only two kinds of customers, those which couldn't care less about this feature and those which will be more willing to look at other makes of car because of this feature. That's it. Just make it use Android Auto or Car Play and let the phone do the assistant part (or not, if the customer doesn't want it).

Just like TVs with nice hardware and terrible software and the customer ends up plugging something better into the HDMI port.

Avoiding AI-capable PCs will be impossible by 2027

Dan 55 Silver badge

Something like this, but worse.

Dan 55 Silver badge

2028: Year of the Linux desktop

Confirmed.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Coolest XP install

That might be the Bliss screensaver by Microsoft, you can still download it from archive.org.

Dan 55 Silver badge

It was consistent up until OS 9, then fairly consistent from 10.1 to 10.6, then who knows what the next version is going to bring...

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Decades ago?

Unlike the Windows/Menu/multimedia/internet keys of yore, the Emoji key does send not a unique scancode so it's not a real key, it just sends a bunch of left keys + Space and the OS interprets it.

change emoji key to ctrl in Microsoft designer keyboard with autohotkey

Hopefully the AI key will do something similar instead of getting its own scancode, making it easier to ignore in the future... it might even just send Left Windows + c.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Great idea, but,,,

Someone already tried that but it didn't get off the ground.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I Can Remember Back When Spacebars Were Wider

If you want to see how much the space bar could shrink have a look at a Japanese 109-key layout. If MS plugs a few more apps we'll be the same way.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Another idiotic key to avoid

Perhaps a missing right alt/ctrl key to fit this new key in will screw you more while gaming. Or speaking a language where right alt/ctrl have different key selection functions to left alt/ctrl.

Dan 55 Silver badge

It was innovation in the late 90s (left windows, right windows, menu key, multimedia buttons, Internet buttons), so the same magic must work now!

Driverless cars swerve traffic tickets in California even if they break the law

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Doctor Syntax

it would make sense to me too that the person behind the wheel would be to blame.

The person behind the wheel cannot morally be responsible if the Tesla they are in is self-driving and decides to crash or break the speed limit. If the law says the driver is responsible then it needs to be updated. Likewise if the law protects Tesla the corporation when its cars crash or break the speed limit then it also needs to be updated.

California just chose to update the law to protect car manufacturers from the consequences of their bad software which was the wrong decision.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Doctor Syntax

If the reality is nobody's responsible for self-driving cars breaking the highway code or causing accidents which kill people, or the person responsible is sat behind the steering wheel but wasn't actually driving, then the law needs to be updated. Pretty obvious I would have thought.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Doctor Syntax

"Which party pays the fine if a self-driving car breaks the highway code" is probably the next question everyone would think of after thinking of "Which party pays damages if a self-driving car is involved in an accident" first. Neither seem to be questions which require galaxy brains to think of and neither appear to be authoritarian or interfere with the glorious free market since we already ask these questions over the past 100-odd years of automotive history.

In this case I'm quite happy for the rest of the world to move on without asking those questions if it wants to. Their beta testing should be quite instructive for everyone else.

Dan 55 Silver badge

How to improve AI training in one easy step

When the letter drops on your doormat and you as the registered owner have to identify either yourself or someone else as the driver, include the manufacturer as a third option and they get fined instead. That'll be an incentive to improve mapping data.

Just before posting I did a quick check and it seems that the registered owner is always fined no matter who the driver is in California and probably the whole of the US. Madness.

Valve celebrates New Year by blowing off Steam support for Windows 7 and 8

Dan 55 Silver badge

Why not check protondb.com and if your games run then install SteamOS in a VM?

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

Dan 55 Silver badge

So they've lost knowledge about how localisation works in their own OS but who cares since everything at Redmond is set to US English...

Mozilla CEO pockets a packet, asks biz to pick up pace the 'Mozilla way'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Retire

Mitchell has been at Mozilla for a long, long time.

7 million for managed decline? I'll do it for half that.

Google password resets not enough to stop these info-stealing malware strains

Dan 55 Silver badge

Session cookie stealing is not an unknown thing

We've known for a while that there's malware which copies your entire browser profile and uses it to access accounts belonging to open sessions. Google really should be checking if a session is suddenly accessed from an IP in a different country, asking for the password before allowing certain settings to be changed, and any password change should immediately invalidate all sessions.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...eh?... "Sound Chip"?

Who said it shipped with a "sound chip"?

You said the PC shipped with a sound chip in your original post. I'm afraid you're getting befuddled by your own anecdotes.

Also even supposing you did rig up another kind of sound output with an 8255 and strings and yoghurt pots slightly better than the standard PC speaker, it had no mainstream software support so such an expansion was pretty limited in application.

The previous poster is 100% right, you had to bit bang the PC speaker if you wanted anything other than a simple beep, something which you can't do now on a modern CPU and Windows as userland software is not allowed to do that.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Reducing capex to as little as possible has become a dogma, even if it makes absolutely no sense and the business would end up spending more money.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...really?

Hiercoles when it first came out was hi-res two colour, fine for business software displaying something on the screen which looks similar to what it's going to print on paper but not great for a multicolour GUI or games.

Until VGA came out the de facto standard which actually gave you a decent palette comparable to Mac, ST and Amiga was Tandy and until Soundblaster came out the de facto standard was once again Tandy.

I suppose that was a strength of a PC, third parties could step in where IBM failed until IBM could pull its finger out and catch up. Sucked for you if you were a PC user and didn't choose Tandy though.

Irony alert: Lawsuit alleging Chrome’s Incognito Mode isn’t will settle on unknown terms

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: a new computer and trashing it

Play Services is continuously logged in with your Google account so they have a pretty good idea of who you are, at least down a few candidate accounts connecting from the same IP address.

Kaspersky reveals previously unknown hardware 'feature' exploited in iPhone attacks

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Must have been a rogue engineer...