* Posts by JimboSmith

1701 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2012

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Smart DCC, a subsidiary of Capita

There’s a reason Private Eye call it Crapita.

JimboSmith Silver badge

I wrote most of this in 2016 when the smartenergygb website had these faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20160812182044/https://www.smartenergygb.org/en/faqs you remember those cartoon characters that caused mayhem in the adverts? Didn’t have them in my house so never got a smart meter.

The meters are optional thankfully and anyone who wants to double check that they're not compulsory see the following:

http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/do-i-have-to-accept-a-smart-meter

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm111129/text/111129w0004.htm

Now personally I won't be taking one or two as I prefer giving my meter readings over the phone/web but the SmartEnergyGB website (https://www.smartenergygb.org/en/faqs) FAQ page has some wonderful insights/answers. For example

......What is a smart meter?

......Smart meters are the new generation of gas and electricity meters. They are being installed in homes across Great Britain at no extra cost, to replace the traditional meters, including prepay key meters, most of us currently have ticking away under the stairs, or outside our homes.

Now call me cynical if you like but won't the cost of the meter and installation just get added to the bill they send me? It might not be that obvious they probably won't add a Smart Meter charge to my bill. It will probably just be that all the tariffs come with slightly higher prices. I just can't see the energy firms just stumping up for this roll out out of their own pockets. Smart Meters cost £340-£400 each I believe.

So security:

.......How secure are smart meters?

.......The smart meter security system is very secure. Security has been at the heart of the whole smart meter rollout programme from its very inception and right through the design process. Smart meters have their own closed, dedicated communications system that employs technology widely used by, for example, the banking industry. Smart meters have been designed with top cyber security experts, including the government and GCHQ, to ensure that security best practice has been incorporated at every stage.

Well Thank goodness for GCHQ then because according to an article on the inquirer.net (I couldn't find it on El Reg) the original plans for the meters had one single decryption key for all the meters. Now I may not be a top security boffin or even boffing a top security boffin but I do know that's not a really good idea. Apparently neither do GCHQ who thankfully had things changed.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2451793/gchq-intervenes-to-prevent-catastrophically-insecure-uk-smart-meter-plan

......What are the technical standards that smart meters have to meet?

......Smart meters are covered by strict UK and EU product safety laws. These ensure that smart meters all have the same high quality and safety standards, regardless of your energy supplier.

So everyone is hopefully 100% clear now on the technical standards after reading that? So we move on to:

......What health and safety tests have been carried out on smart meters?

......The smart meters used in Britain have undergone one of the most rigorous safety testing regimes in the world and exceed every UK and EU safety standard. Public Health England, the government's agency on public health, has said that exposure to radio waves from smart meters is well within guideline levels, and is many times lower than the exposure from wifi and mobile phones.

So everyone is clear now on the exact health and safety tests after reading that? Oh good.

So we move on to:

......Does a smart meter mean my energy can be cut off more easily?

......No. You’re protected by strict regulations against your energy supplier switching off or disconnecting your gas or electricity supply. This protection remains as strong with smart meters as it is with traditional meters.

So from that can I deduce that there won't be a provision in the meter to cut off the supply remotely? Well no I can't because it doesn't mention anything (technical or otherwise) about the ability of the people I pay for my energy (or some nefarious player) to remotely disconnect my supply. There are supposedly safeguards in place to prevent lots of disconnections at once. That won’t help the elderly couple who are fat finger disconnected on a cold winters Friday afternoon and can’t get reconnected until Monday morning when there’s someone at the suppliers. It might be too late by then. If it’s a dumb meter they have to actually have access to the property to disconnect so how is it not easier for the smart meter which doesn’t require access?

This has cock up written all over it and I won't be having it in my house thank you

FBI: FISA Section 702 'absolutely critical' to spy on, err, protect Americans

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Re: FBI is collecting foreign intel on a hacker in China

Yes the CIA are the equivalent of MI6 (foreign) and the FBI are MI5 (domestic). It’s not the CIA who do most of the interceptions though it’s the NSA who handle most of the SIGINT, ELINT etc. in the USA and in places like RAF Menwith Hill in the UK, Pine Gap in Australia etc.

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

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Yep Paint is a train wreck in Windows 11 thanks to the fecking about with it.

Deepfakes being used in 'sextortion' scams, FBI warns

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This reinforces the reasons I have no photos of myself anywhere that I know of on the net. I will have a job on my hands to convince my younger relatives (nephews & niece) that they should be extremely careful.

Buckle up for meetings on the road as Cisco brings Webex to Audi autos

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A mate of mine when considering a new car went to look at a few manufacturers showroom models. He explained at the start of each visit he didn’t want anything connecting the car to the web, the mobile network or anything like that. When one of the sales blokes (who was just a bit too matey) asked why not, my mate told me he replied

“Because I’m banging this amazingly hot blonde with the most amazing tits and I don’t want my wife finding out.”

That stopped any further discussion about connectivity apparently. He isn’t actually married and just doesn’t like the idea of car companies having a link to his car.

Mozilla so sorry for intrusive Firefox VPN popup ad

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Re: Mozilla that markets Firefox [...] for the availability of ad blocking extensions, or add-ons.

hat may be true on PCs, but under Android, Firefox only supports a very limited set of add-ons, which excludes CookieAoDelete for no valid reason. So much for managing privacy. But I regularly get unwanted UI changes that must cost a lot to implement, given Mozilla's constant need for more money...

Oh you can get round that easily.

Go to the add-ons webpage via the android version and it will indeed only show you limited android options.

However tick the use desktop version box from the menu and it will reload the page.

It will have a message offering the desktop version of the add-ons site which you click.

The page will reload again and you should find the desktop add-ons page appears.

Then you can have everything you get on the desktop version and can mirror all your add-ons if needed.

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Yesterday's technology, yesterday's battle

The intention was to switch over completely at some point, but it's pretty obvious that would have happened long ago if adoption of DAB (and abandonment of FM) had gone as planned. I looked this up and apparently they've changed the criteria for the "digital switchover" from being based solely on DAB adoption to being based on *any* "digital" listening (e.g. smartphones, etc.)

There hasn’t been an intention to kill off FM broadcasts in this country (UK) for quite some time. I worked for a commercial broadcaster and there was for a very short period of time a suggestion that FM would be completely replaced by DAB. Probably some government minister thought that the broadcast bit of the FM spectrum could be sold off. Then someone realised that there isn’t much if any use for these airwaves other than broadcasting and international agreements prevent it. So a new idea was born, see below. (Sounds positively Nadine Dorries like but it wasn’t her) This was well before DAB was ever launched on the public and I don’t recall anything firm policy wise ever being released about it.

This involves the major broadcasters, Bauer, BBC, Nation Broadcasting, OXIS Media Ltd etc. moving from FM onto DAB. The FM frequencies of existing smaller/community stations and newly licensed community stations would be what was left or added to the FM band, plus the pirates. It was made a digital switchover as opposed to DAB when it became apparent that technology was overtaking DAB and that people were listening on-line, through their TV’s etc. (I left before smart speakers became a thing). Problem is DAB sets didn’t sell fast enough and tricks like not counting items that were sold with an fm radio but weren’t an actual radio, (think mobile phones was the big one but there were others) FM sales were still fairly robust. So remove the digital tuning analogue radios and encourage people to get a DAB. For the amount of money spent on DAB we could have redone the FM network of transmitters and achieved better coverage and performance.

JimboSmith Silver badge

Oddly we have tried to get DAB selling faster in this country by killing off sales of analogue only radios with digital tuning on the high street. Yes you can still buy cheap analogue radios that do AM and FM but they don’t have the convenience of digital tuning. Online it’s a bit better and you can get simple radios incorporating digital tuning and expensive advanced ones. Less radios sold without AM supposedly means less listeners to AM and we can then ditch that band in the UK.

Years ago I needed a radio for travelling abroad and went into my local retailer (which rhymes with Murray’s) only because I was passing one. I asked the sales person if she had any radios that did shortwave and had digital tuning. The girl I was talking to was very keen to help me buy a radio but was a little bit lacking in knowledge. Yes she showed me radios but only two of them had any AM component at all and those lacked digital tuning. She had never heard of shortwave and I educated her on the different methods of radio broadcast. She was interested in case anyone came in again asking the same questions as me. I suppose I wasn’t expecting her to know or them to sell what I was after.

Then I tried Peter Jones who used to have a better range and more knowledgable sales staff. They no longer did radios with shortwave or even AM and the bloke there told me that I could just use DAB. When I pointed out that I’d said I was hoping to use it whilst travelling in North America he told me DAB is used in many countries. Yep I said except North America doesn’t use DAB they use IBOC. I explained that I need at least AM as the sports (like baseball) are mostly broadcast on MW.

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

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I watched a quite short video (5 mins) for something recently and it had a combined total of advertising of 2:30 before the video and 0:20 afterwards. I found that a little excessive but I didn’t watch them as I went and put a coffee on then watched the vid. Think there’s supposed to be proportional advertising lengths based on the video length. What I did find annoying was one advert I watched I wanted to rewind and check something but you can’t and they hadn’t uploaded them anywhere else.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

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Re: about 4 years ago...

He probably doesn’t want to fall out of a window which seems to affect people who don’t agree with Putin in Russia.

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

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Amazon axes Halo gear as job cuts hit cloud segment

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So they're stopping supporting an app that relies on a remote server. It's just as well Amazon doesn't offer such remote services elsewhere, otherwise it might cause customers of such products to worry that they might be next.

This is one of the reasons I try not to use tech that relies solely on the cloud or an internet service and can’t function as a stand alone item. There are too many examples of this which have graced the pages of this venerable website. Like the bloke who despite my requirements being clearly explained, tried to sell me cameras that connected to and/or relied on a cloud service. I had expressed a desire to have the camera on a closed loop system. When I said I wasn’t interested and he asked why not I said to avoid support ending and bricking the camera.

Musicians threaten to make Oasis 'Live Forever' with AI

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Re: Perfect harmony

It’s not AI generated, more the fabulous voice of Steve Nallon doing the late Maggie T singing “My Way”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAkkdnYAYi8

I first heard that without knowing it wasn’t actually her singing. It’s a shame that video doesn’t have the actual show footage because it showed news events from her time in office that went with the lyrics - miners strikes, Falklands war etc.

The return of the classic Flying Toasters screensaver

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I changed the one on a colleague’s machine many years ago when she hadn’t locked it. She came back from a long meeting to find scrolling across her screen text akin to

“Why do you leave me alone for so long, computers have feelings too you know.”

She seemed to ignore that so I followed it up with something like

“That’s right swan off to another meeting and don’t put it in your electronic diary!”

She grabbed me when I got back to my desk and said I think my computer is talking to me. I let on at that point what I’d done.

Tupperware looking less airtight than you'd think

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Re: That's put the lid on things

A friend of mine at university told me one Friday that she was going to a ‘tupperware’ party that night. She was less than thrilled to discover that it actually was a Tupperware party and she was being asked to buy food storage boxes. She was expecting plastic items of an entirely different variety from the ones she was offered. Think of expecting Ann Summers (Adam and Eve for our US readers) and instead getting John Lewis (Crate and Barrel) instead, she was not amused by this in the slightest.

I was though.

Twitter users complain 'private' Circle posts aren't

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Re: Circling the sink

Rumour has it she never stopped bonking Toby de Lisle in case you didn't work out. (c)

Richard Curtis

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

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Re: contract language

I remember an American friend telling me that there was a pizza joint near him in the USA. They had quite high prices but unbelievably fast delivery times and a free pizza guarantee on that to match, He wondered how they did it as this was pre internet ordering and you called to place your order. He went down there one day to collect and saw the operation in action. They had the small selection of pizzas they sold ready to go into the oven, They didn’t do extra toppings or anything like that and when they got the call the correct pizza(s) went into one or more of several commercial conveyor pizza ovens and then to a motorcycle delivery rider waiting outside.

Even more impressive was their use of the English language. If you actually read the ‘guarantee’ especially the small print, it said they guaranteed to get a pizza to you not your pizza to you in the allocated time. They rarely had to give out free pizza apparently.

Cisco Moscow trashed offices as it quit Putin's putrid pariah state

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Re: Nice bit of neutral reporting. Not

Do you have a source for this One Million deaths you claim? If so would you please share it with the rest of us.

April brings tulips, taxes ... and phisherfolk scammers

JimboSmith Silver badge

No, and one of my friends in the USA says they prefer our PAYE system. I was sent a text telling me that HMRC owed me money and I should click the link to claim. As I hadn’t actually submitted my taxes (or more accurately my accountant hadn’t) HMRC owing me money was unlikely. I reported it as SPAM to my mobile phone company and went back to more serious matters…….That money in Nigeria that the Prince needs to get out of the country with my help won’t move itself……or so he tells me anyway.

British govt tech supplier Capita crippled by 'IT issue'

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What about the Pork Markets?

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

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Re: Basic UX problems

My Samsung phone went through a software update a while ago. Prior to this it said Radio at the top Left hand corner of the screen and on the Right corner was Scan and a three dot menu button. That is still there but it has had an addition to the screen architecture.

Now the top two thirds of the screen are a grey space that is filled with large text saying “Turn on the Radio”. This can be seen here:Turn On Samsung Radio Were there really users who said “Gosh the radio isn’t switched on I wonder what I should do? If only there was a handy text message to tell me!”

This text is fairly pointless but it doesn’t end there. Once you turn the damn thing on it displays another ‘handy’ text message. Switched on display

Clearly Samsung think users are incapable of understanding what the frequency display shows below. Or bizarrely there’s a possibility of your radio displaying a frequency below that message that isn’t what you’re actually listening to. These messages also shunt all the other buttons down and obscures your access to favourites etc. You can slide the screen up and remove the message screen from view. However if you rotate the screen it comes back annoyingly. Depressingly Samsung appear to have taken notes from Microsoft.

A leaner Teams would be excellent as my work Surface tablet quickly runs out of memory when running Teams and a few other programs. Kill off Teams and there’s a lot more space.

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: The opposite problem

A small business I was advising had one provider of telecoms which was Tiscali. They had switched from BT to Tiscali about three years earlier because the deal was far better and supposedly faster speeds. I spotted they were paying BT each month for lines that had been moved to Tiscali (now TalkTalk Business) and for what therefore appeared to be no service from BT. I queried this with BT and mentioned the numbers they supposedly were billing us for. Someone eventually got back to me to say that the lines had only been switched about 8 months ago, so yes a small refund was due. I said that was bollocks and they should check again please. I’m transferred to our “account manager” who is keen to resolve this for us. He’s having trouble because he’s got the same information supplied to him by the another team (Open Reach?) as the previous person.

Suddenly I realised what the issue was, eight months ago Tiscali had been taken over by TalkTalk. That was what the other team were using as the date point which was then being used to calculate the refund. He agreed but requested any evidence we had to back this up. Once evidence was provided BT agreed to cough up a full refund. The person who had done the transfer from one provider to the other had left shortly afterwards to go to another job. It was suggested that was why it had been missed, the accounts woman had no idea you could do telephone lines without BT. She therefore hadn’t raised any queries when Tiscali was added to the bills needing to be paid each month.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Amazon 3rd Party Seller

Ordered a solar outdoor light from Amazon and what arrived was a wedding veil. They told me to keep the veil which can’t have been worth more than £1 and they’d send the light as well. Another one had a box of caged nuts and associated bolts on order what arrived was a round acrylic mirror. Again I was told to keep the mirror and they’d send on the correct item. I ordered a 1U 19inch rack shelf for home and this duly arrived. However it didn’t have a square 90 degree base at the mounting bracket it extended below the 1U size blocking the hole below. Obviously that was useless if you only had 1U of space, it wasn’t fair for the purpose for which it was sold, so I tried to return it. I initiated the returns process and found they were offering up to £15 postage to return it. Sadly the return address was an Amazon depot in Eastern Europe and £15 didn’t come any close to covering the postage. I’d actually lose money and it would be cheaper not to return it

Spoke to a nice lady at the customer service desk who reviewed my order. She said she could see other customers had spotted it wasn’t actually 1U as well (I subsequently found those reviews that I’d somehow inexplicably missed). As I had now ordered one from a different brand through Amazon directly they wouldn’t ask me to return the existing one. I said I would donate that one to a charity and call it quits.

Ex-Meta security staffer accuses Greece of spying on her phone

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Re: PMSL

I must be paranoid then because I have a different feature phone for SMS that doesn’t connect to the Internet. If you send me a link on an SMS to that number clicking on it has no effect at all. I have to laboriously copy the address over to another device and check the address then for anomalies or malicious content on the landing page.

Winnie the Pooh slasher flick mysteriously cancelled in Hong Kong

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I think the film makers got Vlad the inhaler already https://twitter.com/puffzaddi/status/517983062169489408

Average Adobe staffer makes $170k a year, and 185 of them = 1 CEO

JimboSmith Silver badge

I quite like the Bloomberg approach to CEO pay. This was something like he (Mike Bloomberg) got paid the same base salary as that of the lowest paid employee in the firm. The rest was based on how the company did, so dividends, bonus etc.

I would add a twist to that which is if you’re making people redundant just to sustain C suite bonuses etc. then the number of employees affected is the percentage that your salary is docked.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

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One day she had another issue - she had forgotten her password although was adamant it was correct and it's the c0mPUteR's fault - and her manager fully believed it was a problem with the laptop. I was rather pissed off with her shenanigans so I said to her in ear shot "the only problem with that laptop is that it has a PICNIC error".

I worked somewhere which merged with another company. This bunch were very keen on Active Directory and rules set using it. So one rule introduced was that computers lock after 10 minutes of being idle. Not so stupid as it sounds for most desktops but this was applied to everything across the board. So meeting rooms with dedicated computers for display via the projector had the same as ordinary desktops. People wouldn’t log out of meeting room PCs when they finished their meeting and it would then lock. IT support had to reset the computer (locked in a ventilated rack cupboard) every time which was annoying both for those of us who could reset it and the next user of the room.

I suggested that we just enter the wrong password three times lock the user out. They would then have to contact us to get it reset and have a little chat about logging out. That was working well but we pleaded with a manager to change things for meeting rooms. IT director is having none of it (one size fits all policy) and we’re stuck/stuffed.

Then the CEO is going to be doing an important presentation one day. The meeting room/boardroom is booked for him a full hour ahead of the presentation and it is set up ready for him to use. The PowerPoint and video have been placed onto his desktop and he has practiced in his office. He just has to log in, in the meeting room his desktop will appear and he can start. We’d checked that the computer wasn’t locked and even checked the batteries were fully charged on the mouse/keyboard. However when he and his invited guests get in there he finds the computer is locked to another user. They had borrowed the empty room for 5 minutes and hadn’t logged out.

Had there been a fan the shit would have buried it quite deeply, not just hit it. CEO phones IT director to come and fix it and the policy for meeting rooms was changed shortly afterwards.

.

Biden wants to claw back, flog off 1.5GHz of spectrum

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Paws off FM radio.

I am a big fan of LW/MW/SW/FM and almost every radio in my house has all of them. The one that doesn’t is my comparatively expensive DAB which is gathering dust on a shelf. This is because the one commercial station I used to listen to on it, Guildford’s Eagle Radio, is now no longer broadcasting. It used to come in perfectly in Central London on DAB which was great. When that was replaced with some rubbish generic national radio station (Greatest Hits Radio?) I went back listening to the BBC on one of my analogue “world band” radios. Once went travelling in Europe and had a Sony SW100 (which is fabulous) for company, and at night I picked up Capital Gold and 5Live on Medium Wave in Eastern Europe.

Talking of spectrum there is sadly no chance of Absolute Radio in France anymore as they’ve ditched their MW frequencies. The license to broadcast nationally on MW was renewed only last year. If they knew they weren’t going to use it they could have handed it in then and the frequencies readvertised. As a result of this Absolute had their license revoked by Ofcom and are facing a fine. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/manage-your-licence/radio-broadcast-licensing/cessation-of-absolute-radio-national-am-service

No point in taking a DAB to the USA as they use a different system. Also what other uses are there for the broadcast FM spectrum other than FM radio?

Rebel without a clause: ISP promises broadband with no contract

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Re: Plume SuperPods

I looked up the HomePass by Plume as I’d never heard of it before.

They have a nice website which you can find here https://www.plume.com/homepass

I wondered if all this clever wifi stuff:

HomePass adapts to your usage through network improvements. It runs more than 10 different types of improvements that work in the background 24/7, so you get fast and consistent WiFi to every corner of your home. For example, if a change occurs that would impact your WiFi performance, like an increase in connected devices or interference from a neighbor’s WiFi, HomePass will make the appropriate adjustments to maintain your WiFi experience.

Would work on a closed loop system or would it use some cloudy back end system which I’m not fond of.

Depending on your configuration, Plume HomePass services will continue to work in the event of an Internet or Plume Cloud outage allowing you to continue accessing the local network.

Although, since the configuration is through the cloud, during the outage you will not be able to make any changes to the network during an outage.

https://support.plume.com/hc/en-us/articles/222244107-Will-Plume-continue-to-function-when-the-Internet-or-Plume-Cloud-is-down-

Now I realise it’s being offered by a broadband company in this case so not expected to work on a closed loop. I just don’t want any details about my network going into the cloud, nor my network traffic monitored by the Superpod or Gateway pod.

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Well - I'm not impressed

I asked him if they supported IPv6, if they gave static IP addresses and how many GB/month the $35 gave.

He knew none of the answers to any of that but kept on wanting to know who I was.

That’s not worrying at all!

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

I had to explain to my Mum that end to end encryption underpins a lot of the modern world. So why don’t they include these back doors all the politicos talk about then. Well because if you do that and someone discovers this back door and works out how to open it, you’re screwed. So online shopping and banking would be totally impossible without E2E. WhatsApp (and Signal) both use it too etc. She sort of now accepts that we can’t ditch it nor backdoor it.

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Yet the government-appointed Director General (whom is himself subject to criticism for facilitating an £800k loan to Boris Johnson before his appointment...)

One for the libel lawyers there! I think you’ll find that you are referring to the Chairman who is a different bloke from Tim Davie the actual Director General.

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

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I wish I could upvote you more than once for that reference.

Four charged with swiping $1m+ of gear from Microsoft cargo trucks

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Then, they allegedly registered some of the stolen devices using IP addresses located at Soto's home in Northridge, Los Angeles. Additionally, the cops traced the alleged crooks' mobile devices to several of the hijacked cargo trucks' locations.

If the above is true then I do hope none of them are wondering why they were caught. I know cellphone networks will provide which cellphones were in an area switched on to law enforcement agencies. The criminals might be regretting the fact they didn’t know this. If it’s a rural location then they’ll stick out like a sore thumb, owing to the probably limited numbers of cellphones nearby.

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

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Re: Wrong Visa

This is a long story, so I shall try to truncate it.

Basically, I was asked by my employer on Thursday if I could get to the States on Monday. After a bit of toing and froing, I agreed and applied for the US Visa I was told to apply for. The trip was uneventful - literally as the person I was meant to meet there didn't turn up, so I spent the few days there doing what I could. I had flown out on the Sunday and was coming back late on Thursday due to family commitments back in the UK. This had been agreed beforehand with the proviso that I would go out again, just let me know when you need me etc.

So, not only was I accused of "walking off site without permission" by management, but after a couple of weeks back in the UK, I was threatened by HR of gross misconduct as I had applied for the wrong Visa. All my explanations of timescales and protestations fell on deaf ears and eventually (that is after about 30 minutes of him arguing my case on my behalf) my team leader finally managed to get HR off my back.

On the plus side, I managed to get my wife a lovely Christmas present in the airport waiting for my flight home. Needless to say, I never volunteered for anything like that ever again and I am most fortunate now to have left that outsourcer. (No, not Crapita, but Shitpro.)

I can sympathise with that, we used software products from a company that we were Guinea pigs for. Once had a nice chap of German descent at our offices trying to install a new version of their software for me to Beta test. He’d arrived that morning, they’d booked him in to stay with us for the day supposedly flying back that afternoon. He’d flown overnight from the USA with his laptop, a few CD Roms and assorted cables. He also brought with him a bad case of Jetlag and an attitude to match when things started to go wrong.

Things went wrong rather quickly because the freshly burned CD Roms were not allowing him to install his software in my test PC. He blamed my computer and then to demonstrate got his laptop out and tried it on that. That didn’t work either which he was seriously unhappy about and lead to more grumbling. He said he’d have to contact the office in the USA to see what was going wrong but no one would be there till after lunch in the UK.

I suggested having lunch and then worrying about contacting those across the pond afterwards. He reluctantly agreed and asked about where he could buy it. I mentioned there were a few sandwich bars nearby, a few restaurants and we also had a staff canteen where I was going. He didn’t seem keen on leaving the building but had questions about the canteen.

“Do they sell Sandwiches?” - Yes

“Do they have non carbonated beverages?” - Yes

“Can lunch be bought for under £5” - Yes

“Do they supply receipts?” - Yes I believe so

“Are there places to sit down?” - Yes

Those answered we ventured to the staff eatery for lunch. He explained that his company has a $10 meal allowance for lunch when “on the road”. He needed the receipt to be able to reclaim this from the firm. Furthermore because nothing was installing and he hadn’t identified the issue, he was likely to be here overnight. This was an issue because he was booked on a flight back later that afternoon to the USA. He had to get authorisation to change that and find + book a cheap hotel room for the night. Buy some underwear and a toothbrush as he hadn’t brought any clothes/wash kit with him. On top of all of that he had to explain to his wife that he wouldn’t be back that night - hardest one to do.

He talked to head office after lunch and eventually (I got the feeling blood from a stone would’ve been easier) got his authorisation. His wife was really quite unhappy given the shouting coming out of his cellphone. Sadly staff at headquarters didn’t have a clue as to why it wasn’t working. I said I had to go to a meeting and left him with the IT department phone number and another member of staff as a chaperone. When I got back he had installed everything and was just customising the system for us. I asked what had been wrong and he muttered something about truncated file names. It turned out that one file name was missing a digit at the end which had been truncated on the CD Roms. This stopped the installer as it checked all the files early on in the process and stopped when it couldn’t find one.

On the plus side as this was now a two day trip he had a further full $20 in expenses, to spend on dinner. He said that he needed to buy his wife a nice souvenir to placate, her so was off to Harrods. The new software was described beautifully by a colleague of mine as “Not even a Beta version at the moment, who wrote this buggy piece of crap”.

Bringing the IBM Thinkpad 'Butterfly' back to life

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Re: Low bar

Sounds like a fun project to m, giving a new lease of life to an old machine.

Vodafone tests waters with 5G Raspberry Pi base station

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Have you considered a cel-fi? Not cheap but might be a potential solution.

NASA: Yup, thousand-pound meteorite exploded over Texas

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Re: Meteor Defence - Texas Style

I wish I didn’t but every time I see kilo tons mentioned I think of Dr Strangelove and the binder General Turgidson has in front of him labelled “World Targets in Megadeaths.”

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

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Somebody offered me a lift in their brand new Mercedes S Class a few years ago and showed off by attempting to call someone else using the voice recognition system. Needless to say he was having so much trouble with it I ended up finding and calling the number on his mobile and him taking the call on speakerphone.

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: TVC

I’ve posted this before but……

Worked once for a UK media business that was based in Central London. We had during the dotcom boom a plan to update and revamp our online offering quite substantially. To do this we hired some talented people and had our own kit separate from the main server rooms (by one floor) for work before it was installed elsewhere both in the building and elsewhere. A small room with very good aircon was chosen for storing the now powered up equipment because it was one of the few places where the floor was reinforced enough to take the weight.

We had a system for out of hours call outs, someone had written a small prog that alerted reception something had failed and they then called the out of hours mobile number. There was I think one call out in the middle of the first week when a cleaner switched off something by accident. These things happen but are annoying and so a High Voltage Danger of Death sign was placed on the door. The cleaning staff were also told not to go in and this was fine with them as they found it too cold in there. So we get to that weekend, I'm on call the phone rang and they said they're showing multiple failures. I got in (I was nearby) and found someone left the door open and things overheated and thermally cut out. This was during the summer so the building air conditioning was working overtime and that had cut out too at one point. I reset everything and went back shopping.

Next weekend I was on call again (lucky me) and the same thing happened, had a call from reception "multiple failures". I was a bit further away but I was able to get in quite quickly. This time the door's closed but the aircon is off and it's a far cooler day. Again I reset everything and went home and heard nothing all the rest of the weekend. This pattern continued for two more weeks when whoever is on call is phoned with multiple failures. This seems malicious now so I suggested locking the door, with the key being held on reception in the key safe for access if needed. Doesn't seem to stop it though and the key has never left reception so it's a bit of a puzzle. We viewed the security camera footage and no one was seen near the door so all very mysterious.

The next weekend I'm the unlucky sod who will get the call and I realised from reviewing the call log on the phone that they're all coming in at roughly the same time ±5mins. It happens at around 6pm on the Saturday and I decided I'm going to catch whoever is doing it. I got in at 5pm got the key and unlocked the door the plan being to wait for the miscreant to come in and I'll surprise them. I take a book and a chair and settle down all Columbo/Poirot/Jessica Fletcher style to wait for the handle to turn. At 17:30 there was no handle turning but mysteriously the aircon died and the room started to warm up. I started digging into the aircon options and discovered that whilst there isn't an auto on time set, there is an auto off. No one (and certainly not the person who was given the responsibility) had bothered to check if the auto off was set because the auto on wasn't.

The person concerned who was supposed to check was made the "voluntary" on call person for the rest of the time we had the kit on our floor. Then the week after it had gone to the main server room etc, this person was still in possession of the phone when they should have handed it back. As it was a weekend the boss called reception and asked them to call him and say there were "multiple failures" showing again. He made it halfway in before realising that he'd been right royally had.

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: air CON

One office I worked in had perfect air conditioning and each area in this open plan office was served by a unit in the ceiling. The company moved in in the Autumn and the system worked absolutely fine throughout the winter. There was fresh air added in through vents as well and everyone was happy. Then when summer came around one floor of the office building and only one floor was inundated with flies, nasty large black ones. We couldn’t understand why but it was a problem that needed a solution and so all the vent screens and filters were checked. We also installed a butchers fly zapper on one Friday night putting all the blinds down in an attempt to get as many of them as possible. Came in on the Monday and it was amazingly fly free on that floor, we had killed the lot with the zapper. It didn’t last long though and the flies were back by the end of the day. That was a real puzzle and made us wonder where they were coming from and getting in.

Eventually we found a woman on that floor who had her desk next to a window. During the day she opened this window she confessed and this was obviously how they were getting in. We asked if the temperature was different, was there any issue with her particular space? No she had just opened it to “Let some fresh air in as it gets very stuffy.” which caused some amusement. We explained that the air wasn’t just static in the office it wasn’t a closed loop system. The air brought in was better quality than an open window because the dust, other particles from the busy road below and flies had been filtered out. We showed her the black particles that surrounded her window ledge that were absent everywhere else. She didn’t seem convinced but we told her it was dangerous to have it open, despite the fact it was double glazed, didn’t even open a foot wide and there was a plexiglass baffle to prevent things falling out. Someone then looked outside her window and on a ledge below there was an ex pigeon. This has expired some time ago and the thing was crawling with maggots and flies. Source found the problem was eventually dealt with. The windows were then locked shut with a key in a break glass holder in case of emergencies at each end of the wall.

More victims of fake crypto investor scam speak to The Register

JimboSmith Silver badge

A mate was almost a victim of the false invoice scam. Someone called him up and said they supplied the telecoms to the firm (multiple offices). Apparently the bills for the last 18 months weren’t paid and they were going to cut the firm off unless money was transferred immediately. He said he had no idea that this firm was owed money. He suspected it was a con though so wasn’t about to give them a thing. However he wanted to see how far they were willing to go to get the firm’s cash. So he said he was sorry and that the cheques must have got lost in the post He said that they’d write out a cheque for the full amount (£2k) immediately and it would be waiting at reception in an envelope. Scammer is a bit flustered by this and says they’re normally paid by bank transfer by the firm. My mate says check your records we always pay by cheque and have done so since we moved in.

He said he put an envelope at reception with a comp slip in with the words we weren’t born yesterday written on it. They were next door to a police station so could easily get help but no one ever came to collect it. He emailed everyone in the firm to alert them.to this too.

Russian crook made $90M exploiting stolen info on Tesla, Roku, Avnet, Snap, more

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: evidence free

Obviously they may well have been guilty, but I'm generally unhappy about evidence free convictions (as, there was no mention of any proof they "hacked" financial data) - a bit like the appropriate US classic quote "it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.".

Although big companies usually ban employees from discussing financially / commercially sensitive data its quite easy to get a general vibe about a company from social media if you have the info to connect a decent number of accounts to a particular company (which would tally with only trading in a small number of companies as a lot of hard "legwork" involved).

e.g. if you see post(s) about reduced work related travel then could be a hint of cost cutting & potentially sign of a "dip".

whereas if you see some sales folk bragging about smashing their targets / expecting a big juicy bonus, then you might gamble the company is on the up.

.. and that's without inferences from other press coverage (e.g. you don't have to be a financial wizard to guess Twitter might not be the best choice of stock to invest in).

Then there's more nebulous stuff like looking at peoples LinkedIn profiles and trying to gauge their level of enthusiasm for their current role (obviously this can be affected by factors other than how well company is doing, if someone's PHB is a total **** then you may spot a lack of enthusiasm despite that company doing really well) .. back in the day when I used LinkedIn to communicate with some ex colleagues, it was certainly possible to gauge how content they were in their role just on a quick read of their public LinkedIn content.

So, their defence is reasonable, IMHO.

Could you please explain that stuff about scouring social media to my wealth manager who then might do a bit better than he has of late.

CNN reports that

Klyushin wrote to Ermakov, whom the Justice Department describes as a now-former GRU officer, in May 2019 describing the nearly $1 million in profits the scheme had netted for one account over the previous seven months, according to a federal indictment.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/14/politics/russia-us-jury-klyushin-convicted-insider-trading/index.html

And the Massachusetts District Attorney says:

Evidence presented at trial demonstrated that the times in which the filing agents were hacked corresponded with the times in which Klyushin and his co-conspirators made profitable trades. Additionally, of the more than 2,000 earnings events around which Klyushin and his co-conspirators traded between January 2018 and September 2020, more than 97 percent were filed with the SEC by the victim filing agents. Testimony at trial indicated that the odds of this trading pattern occurring in the absence of a relationship between the trading and the identity of the filing agent was less than one in a trillion.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/russian-businessman-found-guilty-90-million-hack-trade-conspiracy

So the prosecution do appear to have other evidence and it’s not just that the bloke and his mates was good at guessing

Warren Buffet cashes out of TSMC, which splashes cash on fabs

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Re: Warren Buffet

I believed that (although not so sure now) that the SEC doesn’t require Berkshire Hathaway to disclose immediately any large trades. Normally companies and individuals who buy or dispose of stock where they go above or below 10% of the company have to disclose this. The reason they don’t is because of the extraordinary effect Berkshire Hathaway trades have on companies and the market.

Google lets a few Android devices into its Privacy Sandbox

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Re: Torn on this.

If you’re worried about Google (or other companies) spying on you on your Android phone/tablet there is a way to stop them. It’s to use a no root firewall and block outgoing and incoming connections for individual apps and services. You can see which addresses apps are trying to communicate with and how frequently. I restricted a weather app I downloaded to just the source for the data, it had a fit and complained that it couldn’t connect which it bloody well could, but just not to the random dodgy website it wanted to. I deleted that one and found another that didn’t complain.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Rhythm is a Dancer

That article was worrying, NT is years old, which makes me feel ancient.

US defense forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

JimboSmith Silver badge

I had an odd one where I was incorrectly added to a distribution list at work. As I really didn’t need to know what the was going on in branch offices elsewhere I tried to leave the list. Easier said than done. The real owner of the list was hidden because the originating email address was something ike branchofficeupdate@thiscompany234.com. All the recipients were in the BCC field so I couldn’t ask anyone else getting the email if they knew. I called IT support who were sympathetic but it obviously was not their priority. I was asked if I’d tried emailing the address and asking them to remove me? I politely said I had and got an automated reply saying this mailbox is not read and your message has been deleted.

Then over lunch in the canteen I saw someone I knew and owed me a favour from support. They said they’d look into it for me and duly came back a couple of hours later with good news. I was not on the list any more and they’d added the bloke with the same first name as me who was the intended recipient.

No more rockstars, say Billy Idol, Joan Jett in Workday Super Bowl ad

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Why?

I’ve discovered It’s an awful UI and not a great product now that I have to use it. Even my manager has said it’s not great but what we have to work with. I quite like the advert but then I wouldn’t rate Workday as a rockstar product (nor most if not all of the software I’ve used) and I’ve never called anyone at work a rockstar………Is this a US thing?