Posts by big_D 6778 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
In Germany electricians have to do an apprenticeship and the head an electrical firm has to have his Meister Certificate (Master Craftsman).
The guy who did the wiring was a Meister, but accidents happen... Unfortunately, the company had been out of business for over a decade when I "discovered" the problem - in all that time, nobody had (luckily) ever plugged anything into that socket!
Can you please keep me advised of your itinerary, so that I know what places to avoid!
Many thanks.
Back in the early 90s, I was working for a company that ran elections for countries. We had one project in Angola. I was asked if I wanted to provide local support... But I had "misplaced" my passport.
The people on site were staying in a villa with large grounds, the guards showed them a point 50 feet from the house and said, if they went beyond that point, they were on their own! If they left the compound, they had to radio in every 5 minutes during their journey.
The day of the election came and the incumbent won, which the rebels saw as collusion and the election team had a running gun battle back to the airport!
I was so glad, that I had "misplaced" my passport.
A little different, our desks were moved (I was working on the Helldesk at the time) and BOFH sent the PFY down to move the power and networking tank in the floor.
I don't know what I had done on that day to annoy the BOFH and the PFY, but the PFY rotated the tank 90° before plugging it back in (which should have been impossible, but you know the PFY and prodding things in holes where they don't belong)...
Anyway, long story short, I plugged in my PC and BANG! A 2 foot spark shot out the back of the PC's power supply, accompanied by an ear splitting bang and lots of smoke. I regretted that I had started with the PC, the monitor was on its last legs, but management wouldn't replace it.
Now, I am the local BOFH.
In another office, in Germany, the wall sockets have the earth exposed, so that it is the first thing that gets contact when plugging in equipment - it is also jolly useful when using anti-static equipment, you just clip it onto a spare earth prong... Only the electrician must have been half asleep as he wired up the socket in my office. I was standing against the window, concentrating on my whiteboard, when I lost my balance and reached out for the windows ledge behind me. I missed and stuck my hand in the socket. Not a problem, the earth gives a little jolt if you have a lot of static build-up on your body (nylon clothing, for example), but otherwise totally harmless.
Only, ZAP! I was flung away from the wall and my shoulder hurt badly and my whole arm, come to think of it! I reported it to the technicians, they didn't believe me, until they stuck a tester on the earth prong... The electrician had crossed the earth and phase, so the full 230v were flowing through the earth prong! I had a lucky escape, all things considered.
That is why I like our local pizza parlors, they use fresh dough, knead it out in front of you and put fresh ingredients on the pizza.
I think I have eaten 1 Pizza Hut pizza in the last 20 years. It is a similar story for BK and McDonalds, I think I haven't eaten a McDonald's in over 10 years and I had a disappointing burger at BK when travelling to Magdeburg a couple of years ago, before that, it was probably 2006.
The accounts have been compromised, I'm assuming that the account holder's information, like name are held under the account, so PII would have been leaked. So, yes, it would fall under GDPR.
On the other hand, this wasn't a system breach, it looks like it was user stupidity that let the hacker in, so there would be a mitigating circumstance for PH to avoid a fine.
Third party gaining access to PII = an incident
Reporting an incident != receiving a fine.
He would get a written warning, if that was the case.
IT policy, by us, clearly states all company data has to be stored on company servers. Not locally on the PC and the use of external media has to be through encrypted media supplied by the IT department. Using your own media or cloud services is a disciplinary offence.
The problem is, once you've paid and got your data back, can you actually trust your computers ever again? Are they really clean? Is all the malware gone? Is it syphoning off information? Will it be hit again?
Even if I paid, the first thing I'd do is make a secure copy of all the information (a backup), nuke the PCs and servers from high orbit and install everything from scratch anyway. As I have the backups anyway, why would I bother wasting money to recover the last couple of hours of work, since the last backup, when I'm going to re-install everything anyway? The extra couple of hours work redoing the last few transactions won't make a huge difference at the end of the day, anyway.
A company I know of was informed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution that the IP-address of one of their servers had appeared on a well known hacker board. They provided consultation, but their advice was, even if the drives were removed, new ones plugged in and a restore from a known good backup performed, there was no guarantee that the hackers hadn't put something nasty in the UEFI. The best option was to put the server through a shredder and install a new, factory fresh server from scratch and restore the data.
Mirror servers are never a backup option. They are a redundancy option, in case one server fails. But if the main server gets hit with ransomware, the data on the mirror is lost as well, because, well, it mirrors the encryption! (Or corruption as one CEO found out to his cost, he told the IT they didn't need a backup any more, because he had invested in a new mirrored system... A couple of weeks later, he barfed an update on the database (he was a developer who grounded his own software company and "knew everything") and wanted to simply revert to the the backup on the mirror only... The mirror had the same corruption, naturally. A day later and a backup solution was back in play!)
Except the intelligence risks with Cisco and HPE kit are proven (backdoors being removed by the dozen from Cisco kit and actual cases of NSA intercepting HPE kit and installing their spyware on it) and, at the moment, only theoretical against Huawei.
He added there is little option but to comply, though companies around the world are busy removing American intellectual property from their products to avoid becoming pawns in US trade wars in the future.
That was my first reaction as well. No more Android, no more Windows, no more Apple kit, no more US based cloud services, it is just too risky.
Huawei are also 4 weeks late, and I think Samsung as well.
The problem is in the way that the manufacturers get the updates.
1. Google fixes the code
2. Google pushes updates to their own devices
3. At the same time as they push the updates, they release the source to AOSP
4. The manufacturers have to look at the newly released code.
5. They have to integrate the changes into their base code
6. They have to test the code
7. They have to release the code.
If you are unlucky and have a carrier branded phone, you might have to wait for the carrier to also do their own testing.
That is one of the reasons why I haven't bought a carrier branded device since 2007.
I was thinking more about the customers who had instances running on the Google Cloud, many do understand / don't read the small print and think they are resilient, until a region goes down and they realize that they only had an instance in that one region.
Obviously Google itself knows about this and does add the resilience in for its own products (although this botch put that to the test as well). But this part of the thread was more about average cloud using customers.
The other thing with cloud is, by default it isn't redundant and spread over data centers and regions.
By default you get one instance on one server in one regions. You actually have to pay extra for the resilience. A lot of companies skimp on this, think "cloud" is cloud, until it goes into titsup mode for the first time...
On the other hand, if you have everything running locally on your own servers, you only have yourself to blame if it goes down.
The same with Google Assistant, it would pick up my boss in the next room saying, "ok, ok, I'll look into that," as me wanting to activate the assistant.
After having used GA once in 6 months, I went through the GA log on the website and deleted the 100+ recordings it had made during that time! Most of which consisted of just wind as I was out walking the dog...
I have since turned off GA completely.
They did try, but ODF doesn't provide the flexibility to store current documents created using OOXML - there are a lot of tags and features missing and ODF wasn't interested in adding those features for compatibility, so MS went with OOXML.
That also accounts for why some things go bat shit crazy when imported into LO, because LO is written to handle ODF and those extra tags in OOXML can't be translated into anything useful in LO.
The simplest problems are pagination, which LO generally messes up in Word documents - annoying at best, but embarrassing if you have TOCs and Indexes in your documents that suddenly don't match up any more.
At one employer, they used LO in the conference room and a customer turned up with a PowerPoint slide stack and about halfway through the discussion on process flows, we noticed that LO had moved the flow arrows to random positions on the slides...
Nobody is talking about cloning, but if you have to regularly exchange files with MS Office users, it can be a real pain.
LibreOffice's filters for importing or exporting MS Office formats is as bad as MS attempts at importing/exporting ODF files. Either way, neither party shines and the users suffer, if they have to regularly exchange files.
I used to use OO.o and LibreOffice on Linux, but I always had a Windows machine with MS Office in the corner of the office for checking and reformatting documents, before sending them out to customers. In the end, I gave up and went back to MS Office by default, because all my customers used MS Office and I was spending a third of my time checking and reformatting finished documents before sending them out.
You probably don't. But a video production company could easily make good use of such kit...
Do you drive a car or an HGV? I wouldn't want to drive an HGV to work every day, it would be overkill, but I don't ask why they are still being built, because I see them delivering goods to shops and factories every day.
Exactly, if they are that worried, they should be banning all equipment made in China, like, oh, I don't know, Amazon kit, Apple kit, Google kit, Cisco and HP kit? The sub-contractors finishing the kit are under the same obligations as Huawei.
But, there again, the problem is more that the US can't install their own brand of spyware on the kit, before it is delivered to its enemies allies.
Huawei has insisted that it would resist any efforts to force it to act as an intelligence-gathering arm of the communist Chinese state. These claims stand at odds with Chinese legislation, particularly that country's National Intelligence Law.
Given that most countries, including the USA, Australia and the UK have similar laws - in fact Australia has introduced even more draconian spying laws, on its own citizens - it is a bit rich the US accusing Huawei of something that all of their own companies would also have to adhere to...
Private family discussion servers. I've been thinking of implementing my own for our family.
But inertia is the problem. Most won't want to switch to something that isn't WhatsApp or Telegram, because everybody they know uses them and they are easy to setup and use. Most people don't care or are oblivious to the problems with encryption anyway.
I would think that they would shelve this, at least for a while.
Social media blew-up in the face of the main parties in the run-up to the EU and State elections last weekend. A lot of YouTubers and social media influencers to to the, um, ether (through Wi-Fi) to tell their followers to vote, but not for the CDU/CSU. This got the party incensed and they showed the total (mis-)understanding of social media in their responses.
Now the leaders of both the CDU and the SPD are looking at being ousted by their failures at the weekend.
Interestingly, of all the "major" parties over here, only the CDU and Green bothered to stand for election to the State Parliament - there were only 4 candidates, CDU, Green and 2 independents, AfD, FDP, SPD, Die Linke and all the others didn't even bother to post a candidate. The EU ballot paper on the other hand was about 2.5 pages long!
But the blow-back around trying to silence influencers is still echoing around the press today. It looks like several posts in the leading parties will see fresh faces in the coming weeks.
We use glass bottles for the fridge - we have 4 Sodastream glass bottles, which we use for cold, still water.
On the move, we have the thermos bottles / cups. They hold the water cold (or the coffee hot).
We try to avoid plastic bottles as much as possible, mainly using returnable glass bottles, where they are available. The water tastes better out of glass bottles as well. And you don't get emollient/plasticizer mixed in with the water from cheap plastic or from bottles left in the sun.
I was thinking about the first couple of generations of products, E.g. smartphones between 2007 and 2010, or PCs during the late 80s and early 90s. The performance and capability increases were exponential, we went from 4.77Mhz to 1Ghz in just over a decade. The old kit was old in a year to 18 months. If you were doing a lot of processing, it was often more economical to replace the kit than leave it running - if a process took 4 hours to complete and replacing the PC got it down to 1 hour, that was a lot of saved time and money.
As the markets mature, the lifecycle extends - as you note. I worked for a company in 2010 who thought their 2002 PCs were still state-of-the-art. They still ran and the employees could still work on them, if a little slowly at times. The same with my 2010 Sony Vaio, an SSD gave it a new lease of life (it already had 8GB RAM). The original battery still lasts just over an hour (2.5 when new).
Agreed. We have a wicker shopping basket and some thick cotton bags. They will biodrade eventually, but, more importantly, we have been using the same bags and basket for over a decade... The same for the plastic fold-boxes, the newest is 10 years old, the others date back to the end of the 90s. If you are going to use non-biodegradable materials, then don't make disposable products with them!
We have some chars kicking around from the 19th and early 20th century, but the modern sofas don't even last half a decade! The last one, a nice leather reclining sofa, which cost a fair packet and we thought would last, only held out for about 5 years. This time we bought cheap and durable, so will probably last 5 years as well, but cost about a fifth of what the expensive one did.
My mother got a Sunbeam mixer when she married in the 60s, it lasted until the early 2000s, being used at least once a week. My wife has been through 3 mixers since I met her, and they weren't used nearly so often!
Coffee-to-go? I always use my thermos cup. At work I have a cheap Ikea thermo flask for tea, I've been using it for nearly 2 decades and it cost about a tenner. There are solutions to some of these problems that are easy, but we are generally too lazy to bother. Why carry a thermos cup with you for coffee, when you get a free environmental nightmare cup in the coffee shop? Better still, make an extra cup of coffee in the morning before you leave the house and pour it in the cup and take it with you, no queuing and you save yourself a small fortune! And if you do need a supplemental caffeine injection during the day, you can still use the cup.
For technology products that are quickly superceded, there isn't much you can do - maybe biodegradable casings - but for established markets that don't change fast, we should reward manufacturers who make products for longevity, not short lifespans and gimmicks.
There aren't any Apple Stores in the area. I think the next one is 3 - 5 hour drive away. Which is an improvement, when I got my first iPhone, I would have had to drive 600KM, pass through 5 countries and take a 4 hour ferry journey to get to the nearest Apple Store.
There is the option of paying for Apple Care, which will give you the same swap-out service that all the other manufacturers provide for free.
That always amazes me with Apple, you pay a superior price for inferior support.
With the iPhone, if it goes wrong, I contact the carrier, they collect the phone, ship it off to an Apple repair facility and a week later, I get the phone back. If an Android phone craps out, I contact the carrier, they collect the phone and drop off a replacement at the same time... But Apple won't let them replace defective phones, so our iPhone users go a week without being able to stay in contact, whilst our Android users lose a maximum of 1 day.
The same with laptops, for less than the price of a MacBook Pro, we get next day, onsite support thrown in with our laptops, whereas the Macs have to be sent back to the repair center for a week. If the Windows devices go down, they are repaired or replaced (if the fix can't be done on site) next day.
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