Posts by Dan 55

Re: Pitch forks unnecessary, Karma is good enough

You have a good 7-14 days before lockdown takes effect, so you shouldn't wait until the curve takes off before doing it. In fact you don't even know when the curve will take off because you're not testing asymptomatic and systematic people (some will have had flu, some will have this, if you don't test you will never know). You're just waiting for the dead bodies to pile up before deciding to do something to bring it back down to the level that you should have started mass testing and monitoring in the first place.

I restate that if there's no testing, no lockdown, and no monitoring of people's contacts and where they've been then it's not science-driven, it's just handwavey political bullshit.

Re: You mean?

If you have to use Teams on your mobile in a crisis then you won't be using it for long. You'd have hard time finding an app which hammers the battery as much as Teams.

Re: Germany

The thing is, the UK is not closing things down by law, just saying things like "it'd be best if you don't go to the pub or restaurants or cinemas".

People don't go to them, insurance companies say there's no law forcing businesses to close down, businesses go to the wall.

Re: Well

For the record, ballcocks.

Britain's bars and restaurants are doomed – unless the government acts now

I am a food and drink journalist, but last night I felt more like a grief counsellor. After Boris Johnson’s announcement that the public should avoid pubs and restaurants, their owners were bewildered, stricken, livid.

“In our industry that’s the worst thing he could have done,” said one “blindsided” bar owner who had expected a total shutdown – an involuntary closure that would have potentially allowed venues to trigger their business interruption insurance.

Instead, restaurateurs were left hanging. No insurance. No rescue package. No customers. With the added PR disaster that, as one put it: “If you stay open you’re seen as someone who doesn’t care about your community or staff.” Hospitality is not alone. Theatres, cinemas, clubs and music venues are in the same bind. As one friend who works across several of those fields messaged: “Fucking hell!"

[...]

The contrast between the French government’s response – €300bn of state-guaranteed bank loans with the promise: “No business will fail’’ – and that of our own government could not be more stark. The piecemeal efforts in last week’s budget to protect hospitality and the arts were pathetic. Business rate holidays for smaller operators and statutory sick-pay refunds for businesses that employ less than 250 was a fraction of the action needed. To survive this, such businesses need immediate permission to waive-not-defer (any deferral is simply accruing debt), rent and business loan repayments, utility bills, all tax and NI obligations. Instead, they are left at the mercy of an imploding market. One operator I spoke to, who had contacted HMRC to spread his corporation tax payments, was simply told this was not possible.

Re: A little Graph Theory can be dangerous ...

Compare the John Hopkins University map with European countries' measures in a table half-way down this article.

The UK is indeed dawdling, other countries have taken harsher measures with fewer infections, but it's nice to see Johnson's finally done an about turn on the cod-science 'herd immunity' bullshit where herd immunity is gained by real-life infection instead of vaccination. Such nonsense is unsustainable even for Johnson.

Teams is a kind of Electron-driven strings-and-yoghurt pots thing holding Active Directory, Sharepoint, and God knows what else together.

Then every so often Electron decides to run garbage collection and as there's a whole lot of garbage to collect the whole computer grinds to a halt.

Downloading it now to put on another computer and I'd say if it went any slower the browser would time out.

Re: Conferences and summits need to get with the program

Or be connected to be a ventilator, if one can be found for you.

Don't worry, Johnson says he's going to find some more for everyone literally at a time of peak worldwide demand.

Re: Forking NVD

You know what it's like as soon as any software can be classified as 'government' or 'enterprise', it suddenly becomes set in stone and never changes for decades.

Re: Upgrading an OS isn't a magical solution

ActiveX was the only solution to have the browser communicate with a software installed on the machine of the user

There was Java too. So, between a rock and a hard place.

U U D D L R L R B A Start?

Re: How to be vigilant...

Do beardy old men count as suspicious?

Bank of Matress.

Re: And none of this is important

Remotely via the ME which nobody particularly wanted in their computers anyway? Which malicious actor put that there?

We seem to have a political class obsessed with re-living the glories of WW2 who were all born after WW2. All you need to be able pontificate on about it is consuming a load of post-war films, comics, and books in your formative years where plucky little England faced the enemy alone and won against all the odds and, for extra points, a private education where the clock is set about 50 years behind.

Re: Pedant

Funny how MS are all for blurring the lines between desktop and Internet except when it suits them not to.

I've used a fibre modem-router which claimed to be able to drive the POTS wiring in the house by plugging it into a phone socket and the rest of the phones are connected as normal to their phone sockets. In practice the current supplied by the router was too feeble to drive more than one phone.

Re: TL;DR

Ask a MAX pilot for the answer to that.

Re: Disappointing

This is what someone very important in Maersk said less than two years ago:

Snabe plans to ensure Maersk learns from the "very significant wake-up call" that was the attack and turn its experience into a security stance that represents competitive advantage.

He also called for all businesses to stop being naïve about security, saying organisations of any size - even the mightiest - will experience disruptions if they don't take security seriously.

So much for that, then.

Re: Government Guidance

Presumably it will be along the lines of 'Protect and Survive' - putting a Paper Bag over your head and then lying down ?

First you have to propose a commission about whether or not bathrooms need to be stocked with soap.

Re: ZX Spectrum != Legacy corporate IT

Imagine a mid-80s DOS machine running something, both DOS and the software came with lifetime licences (as was done then), why would they need any more patches?

Now put this esoteric software on an emulator or a VM on a Windows 10 machine. Now you do have a problem with updates and licences and the possibility that the emulator or VM won't replicate everything 100%.

The last person in the company who understands it has 18 months to write and rewrite a document until the PFY can follow the instructions. That's not an insurmountable problem.