Posts by TRT 9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
When HR starts referring to individuals as "Assets" and company policy dictates a system of non-removable asset labelling, like the old blue goo that swelled and dyed plastic casings with a dot-matrix impression of the company name, then...
Well that old tattooists chair that was rescued during a skip dive and set up in the basement storage room next to the server room...
Hand me that pad of wipe clean "asset disposal forms" will you...
Do you have a keyboard, mouse or screen worth more than £750? OK, some SCREENS might be, but they're generally the ones with the built-in colorimetry...
The sheer volume of work accounting for every item - accounted by sight - was so onerous that they set a threshold of £1000 - a proposal for a more efficient system that could lower that limit and reduce the workload... very tempting piece of bait.
So the bit about CyberEssentials is actually true... and the bit about the audit system being linked to the purchasing system is true. And the bit about using a network scanner to complete around 75% of the annual audit is also true...
The bit about impersonation of an undetected but expected asset isn't true... yet. I think. At least not for our segment of the network. Not so sure about some of the wilier BOFHs in other departments.
That's why one needs a custom methodology for network probing - in a heterogenic network which may include custom and development machines, there's no "off-the-shelf / one-size-fits-all" system.
So we custom design the query server, the PHB approves the design and signs it off based on a rudimentary understanding of the operational block diagram and the validation test results, and then we get the auditors to approve and nominate it as critical infrastructure which means that, by policy, it has to be a HA design.
Simples!
You might have thought it was simpler just to fudge the spreadsheet, but that's far less elegant than, say, developing a robust system for probing network devices that in the event of not finding one resorts to attempting to impersonate the expected network device and looks for the failure resulting from the clash to record a positive identification.
Then making the system high availability by incorporating an active/active pair...
And when you do that it becomes REALLY good at finding all those missing devices. 100% success rate. We have to tweak it down to make it believable.
Oh God... cable counters. Saints preserve us from them. I used to sit them in front of my spare cable cabinet, a genius cupboard recycled from one that used to hold the big magnetic tapes - it had very heavy gauge frames in there perfect for holding cables and keeping the A and B ends separate for ease of identification. Weighed a tonne.
Someone in our department managed to persuade the efficiency in time and motion consultant that they could save over 1000 person-hours of inventory time by using an automated digital asset management and tracking system, linked to the finance & purchasing system, and reduce the threshold for countable asset value from £1000 to £750. Network scanning of assets was all part of the CyberEssentials accreditation, and as there were some areas where the requirements of CyberEssentials were in direct opposition to business requirements, they were happy to firewall these zones off in a way they became invisible to the Cyber Assets scanner and just ignore them - by policy. Anything with a network connection can be scanned, logged and audited.
The auditors seem very happy with the system churning out an excel spreadsheet once a year at the push of a button. It even works out the depreciation and write-off values for them. Everything is perfect, which cheers them up no end, and saves them a packet in boots-on-the-ground costs, and those expensive custom printed asset labels. I don't think they've had eyes on the tin for at least the last 4 years.
Bacon, sausages, beans, mushrooms, fried bread/potato cakes, fried/scrambled/poached eggs, black/white pudding, plum peel/fried/griled tomato, chips, toast, mug of tea. Some places on the coast also put on a kipper or a scoop of kedgeree.
Arteries? Where we're going, we don't NEED arteries.
It was actually in a computer science lesson that I was in back in... must have been about 1981/2... I remember we had one Commodore PET for the previous year and had just received one BBC Micro... anyway, the teacher handed out a mock assessment paper under exam conditions and instructed the class that when they started the clock the students were to turn the test paper over and follow the instructions at the top very precisely.
The instructions said "Read all the questions carefully BEFORE beginning to answer question 1".
Question 1 was "What is your name? Write your answer on line one of the coding sheet provided, putting one character in each square."
Question 2 was something about a BASIC command, then there were some more obvious questions... at the end of the list there was some more advanced but also obvious stuff... and just before the 2/3 of the way mark down the page there was a question that said "Having read this far, answer question 1 only! DO NOT attempt to answer any of the other questions. Raise your hand when you have answered question 1."
The various questions just above the one telling you to stop and answer question 1 only had strange instructions like "Draw a picture of a chicken", "Take one shoe off" and "Make a noise like a duck".
Needless to say there were two people, including myself, who sat there with their hands up for about 30 minutes whilst the rest of the class were making duck noises and taking shoes off and drawing pictures of chickens etc etc.
Learnt a valuable lesson that day. I wonder who else could have been in that class...
I'm waiting for the day someone puts on an alert box triggered by the tick box action that pops up and tells the user they're a total liar and that they never read it and certainly didn't understand it, but fine, at least they agreed to it.
Bonus points if the tick box action can then cause their IoT doorbell to ring and inject video footage of the Monty Python Organ Donor collections team...
Parking a Volkswagen Beetle so the wheel traps a third of a £20 note? Impossible to get out without ripping the note into un-usability that even a bank wouldn't exchange. That was good until one bloke came back with 3 chums the size of brick shit houses who could lift the car up enough to ease the note out.
I've got all manner of management skills and training and certificates in management. Then I had to take another job because I was too highly paid to shift down into the purely technical roles left over when the organisation downsized and merged.
New post had no other staff to manage. Purely technical support but the pay matched my old technical management post because it was highly specialised. A decade and a half later and I'm still doing the same job. Over the top of the pay grade. No chance to move up and I wouldn't want to as this organisation keeps management and technical skills far too far apart for my liking.
Great idea, actually. I've had so many requests from colleagues who've done stuff at home and e.g. discovered that their new extension conservatory would be a great place to work except that the foil backed insulation panels in the dry wall that are pierced by grounded copper pipes seem to block all the WiFi making it useless as a SOHO workspace for them.
Whereas at home I've got a cloud managed network with Cat 6 to every room, 200Mbps cable with failover to 4G and 3 PoE WAPs so there's coverage even at the far end of the garden. Perfect when I need to go and prick out some seedlings whilst attending the yet another round of compulsory implicit bias training or a mandatory slideshow/quiz on GDPR ("Which of these can hold personal data? Tick all that apply. A USB stick, a hard drive, a paper note pad, a tablet device, a print out of a completed job application form"). Well... why waste an afternoon?
Indeed. It was only this morning that I was reflecting on how comes, as an old grey soak, I can recall the giants of software / computing past - Jeff Minter, Peter Molyneaux, David Braben, Ian Bell, Jim Gregory, David Jones, Jez San etc. (met most of them in my time too!)
Don't really get that now - it's just names of Megacorps with coding teams rather than standout individuals.
Did you see that forensics thing on BB2 I think it was last night? The Digital Forensics team was a woman guessing PINs to get into a phone. Yeah - I think not.
EDIT
Since reading on I note that the perp had set their PIN to 0000 / 000000
There's no accounting for idiot.
I guess 0000s is a starting place instead of powering up the old NSA/FBI iPhone cracking sledgehammer software / device thing that we all know they have secretly hidden away somewhere.
I saw the Style Gallery. My mother had unfortunately used a different style in each document and when they were viewed next to each other it didn't look good, so I tried to show her how to apply a style that could be adjusted and applied automatically to multiple documents and parts of a document.
The pain was excruciating. Nothing worked as it used to - The option to remove all styles appears to have gone - that was the ultimate reset button... now every time you try to create a style it mashes everything up together.
I wanted to access my fuel records that I update every few years or so when I clean out the glovebox. I couldn't remember where I'd put it, but I could remember the file name. Typed that into the search tool and after 10 minutes of a spinning wheel I got bored and decided to try and find it myself. It took me 5 minutes to do that, and when I'd finished updating the document 2 hours later the search tool was STILL spinning away trying to find it.
Oh Jesus. I tried to show my mother how to integrate the individual Word documents (poems) she had been working on into a single Word document (en route to a pdf for submission to a publisher), a task I had done a dozen times or more around 15-20 years ago when I was a publication assistant to a group of professors.
"This'll be a snip", I thought, "After all, it's so long since this was an obscure but easily done job... link a series of live documents into a Master document that can create a chapter list, index and bibliography but retain live updating from individual documents".
No Fucking Way on EARTH is this possible nowadays. I spent about 18 hours glued to the keyboard, resorting to looking it up in on numerous "help" websites. Every time I thought I'd found the secret sauce to make this work, it turns out it's NOT applicable to the latest version (a Christmas Present I wish I'd never bought my mother). I ended up just glueing it together by copying and pasting. All the elegance of Word 6's Master document handling had vanished.
Fuck you, Microsoft.
There's a real lack of quality in NHS digital. Take the home Rapid Flow Test system, for example. They want to collect data for analysis of effectiveness, right? So they create a website where you can report the result. It's clear that most test results are going to be negative, so do they make it easy to report a Flow Test result? Do they build a reporting tool into either of the two NHS apps that sit on my phone? The dedicated COVID app? No. The NHS app that's actually quite handy for accessing GP test results and booking appointments? No. They have a website - OK, so that's not terrible, is it? Well it is when they want you 10 digit NHS number but the input field for it truncates at 10 characters and rejects non-numeric characters... Where did I get my NHS number from? The aforementioned NHS app which presents the number as grouped digits separated by spaces. Can one copy and paste the NHS number? No. It includes spaces, and if you copy and paste that, it truncates and fails form validation. So if I'm REALLY determined to let them know that I have a negative test, I have to paste the number into something like a notes app, remove the spaces, and then recopy it back into their website. Or use a pencil and paper. And can I be bothered to do that? No. As I suspect many millions of people who have used the home testing kits also can't be bothered.
Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy.
The armed forces have a health and care records system that spans the three services - essential really as they work together so often. There seems to be very few problems with interoperability - so it's not impossible to lift the formats into a National standard. The problems ex service personnel have when they transition to civvy street has to be seen to be believed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
