Funny that, North Face recently laid off a load of their IT support staff.
Posts by Alister
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
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Cyber-crooks slip into Vans, trample over operations
PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here
Not quite on topic, but we run backend systems for ticket purchases on a number of transport links, where customers can book a ticket and receive an email with a barcode or QR code which allows them to travel. Associated with the barcode is a randomly generated 12 character reference code used to store and refer to the transactions.
We do have some rules in place to sanitise the reference code, but on this occasion the system beat us.
We had a complaint, demanding that we refund the ticket price because of the rude word...
The ticket reference code was UrAWw4nK3rB8
I think the computer was right.
A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal
Locked up: UK's Labour Party data 'rendered inaccessible' on third-party systems after cyber attack
First, stunning whistleblower leaks. Now a shareholder lawsuit lands on Zuckerberg's desk
LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher
Good luck trying to sort out a single coherent stream of data from the bundles of cables shown in the rack in the header photo. If they had to artificially slow down UDP packets and transmit a single letter at a time on a single cable, I think it's going to be a while before we need worry about this in the real world.
Italian researchers' silver nano-spaghetti promises to help solve power-hungry neural net problems
Bistromathics!
Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers, Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers am not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?
Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?
WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job
Re: "Cheap" for a reason
I just don't understand why so many managers insist on going cloud
It's because the beancounter mindset worships OPex, and considers CAPex as the work of the devil.
Going cloud means your IT spend becomes OPex, and they simply don't care if it's 3 x the annual spend if you went with hardware.
Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs
Arms not long enough to reach the plug socket? Room-wide wireless charging is on the way
How to stop a content filter becoming a career-shortening network component
Texan's alleged Amazon bombing effort fizzles: Militia man wanted to take out 'about 70 per cent of the internet'
Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?
Also got lucky
In February 2020 we started a major change to our office connectivity, moving from a 20Mbs copper leased line to a 100Mbs fibre link, and migrating from Cisco routers and firewalls to Juniper routers and Netgate pfSense firewalls, and rolling out OpenVPN clients to all staff. The work was completed on Friday 13th March 2020, a week before the office closed. Had we not completed it in time, there was no way our previous infrastructure would have allowed all our staff to work-from-home, but with the new kit, it all went smoothly.
There's no Huawei on Earth we're a national security threat, Chinese giant tells US appeals court
“Last year the FCC issued a final designation identifying Huawei as a national security threat based on a substantial body of evidence developed by the FCC and numerous US national security agencies,”
Strangely, nobody seems to have actually seen any of the "substantial body of evidence", so at the moment it still looks like a purely commercial decision.
The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software goes offline for good
Legacy IT kit is behind 80% of UK taxman's pandemic costs, says spending watchdog
"HMRC has recognised that, due to the need in the past to forgo operational maintenance and upgrades to its systems to secure cost savings, its IT systems now constitute a significant risk to the department,"
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the root cause of the problem.
Will they learn from this?
Nope.
1. Install big new shiny
2. Do no maintenance or upgrades for the next ten years
3. Moan about risk to business.
4. goto 1
Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm
BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid
With depressing predictability, FCC boss leaves office with a list of his deeds... and a giant middle finger to America
Re: PDNFTT
Jake, your quoted statement relates purely to medical examination and emergency treatment in an emergency department, and then only if the hospital is part of the Medicare program.
Free healthcare means you don't pay for routine operations, doctor's consultations etc, no matter how much it might cost or how long it takes.
Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button
Re: Won't somebody think of the ducklings?
And as a tax-payer (?) I'd rather pay for a drone over a cop-ter.
As was pointed out to you in the previous discussion, there are things that a helicopter can do which a drone can't - as one example, following and recording a high-speed pursuit on a motorway - and as most police services already have a helicopter, why not use it to its best advantage?
Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing
Re: Helicopter danger
Something that could and should have been carried out by officers on foot.
You really don't have a clue, do you. By far the safest and most effective method of searching for someone at night is to use an infra-red camera from above. Officers on the ground have no way of replicating that sort of search.
Watchdog urges Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S, X cars to fix knackered NAND flash that borks safety features
Re: Keep retracting.
Tesla Autopilot actually has fewer (and generally less serious) accidents per million kM than human drivers. This despite AP not being fully autonomous.
Umm, that's because Tesla Autopilot is not autonomous, and therefore when used properly, the human is doing the tricky stuff. The accidents attributed to Tesla Autopilot occur when the human decides to pretend AP is autonomous.
Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere
Sun, sea and sad signage: And lo, they saw a shining light in the sky... oh, it's a BIOS error
Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again
US aviation regulator issues safety bulletins over flaws in software updates for Boeing 747, 777, 787 airliners
Not just Microsoft: Auth turns out to be a point of failure for Google's cloud, too
Re: Redundancy
So you proceed to move to the cloud so that you can save yourself the hassle of backups
That has never been true except in the minds of the cloud salesman.
Moving stuff to the cloud is not an automatic panacea, and needs to be planned just as thoroughly - if not more thoroughly - than setting up a physical environment, and backups and redundancy have to be added, they are not there by default.
FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers
Re: "Not so good at spelling"
There is an unspoken clue in his spelling of paradice (i.e. should be paradise!) which indicates a POSSIBLE English or Canadian heritage where words such as Defence, Offence, etc use CE as the replacement for SE in their spelling of certain words.
Rubbish. Paradise is not, and has never been spelled with a C in British English or Commonwealth English. The use of C in words such as defence and offence is very specifically after a consonant, not a vowel, so no-one educated in British English would extrapolate that to other words ending SE.
Wireless screen in estate agent window just begging for someone to fill it with mischief
China bans encryption exports – including quantum and key management tech
AWS boss calls for racial justice, slams enterprise rivals, unveils a raft of real and promised services
Behold the drive-thru of the California Highway Patrol: Fry me a river, has 'CHIPS' stopped working again?
UK's Space Command to be 'capable of launching our first rocket in 2022'
Dulux feel lucky, punk? Samsung wades into paint world with interior emulsions designed to 'complement' your, er, TV
Good news: Boffins have finally built room-temperature superconductors. Bad news: You'll need a laser, a diamond anvil, and a lot of pressure
We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to
TalkTalk marches OneTel users into a brave new email world
ISS? More like HISS, am I right? Space station air leakage narrowed down to Russia's Zvezda module
Google adopts ‘value-neutral’ language to make selfies less about ‘beauty’
Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing
Re: Doorbell
There's a Bill Bailey clip where he replaces the normal happy ding-dong with a tricord using an augmented 4th interval, which sounds scary...
Talk about working smarter: NASA scientists searching for craters on Mars train AI software to do the job for them
There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable
Was working as a telephone fitter in the early eighties, and went to a client's premises to fit a wall-mounted phone extension.
The client had decided where he wanted it, and helpfully marked the wall with a big cross in marker pen. It was in the middle of a bare external wall, with no electrical sockets or switches anywhere near it, so I was happy to fit it where indicated. (This was in the days before cable finders were a thing).
So I marked out the bracket, drilled the first hole, no problem. Started drilling the second hole, big flash and bang... Oops!
Turns out some electrician, in the dim and distant past, had run an electrical cable diagonally across the wall from top to bottom, and then plastered it in with no steel capping or anything over it.