* Posts by Valeyard

735 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2012

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Capita wins uncontested extension to mega millions Northern Ireland Education contract

Valeyard

So, which MPs/Lords/family have shares in this company?

bold of you to think MPs or Lords even remember northern ireland exists

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

Valeyard

Re: Coming to a govt building near you

Anyone who says "if you've nothing to hide" should be forced to reveal their bank account information on Twitter

didn't jeremy clarkson do exactly that and had direct debits set up for charities by people

'Technical glitch' in payroll software sparks riots in Papua New Guinea

Valeyard

the UK way

it was a payroll error! you'll get your money...

...from next month we'll tax you 5 less per month for the next 20 months! all sorted

New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT

Valeyard

I hope it succeeds

If only so that the LLMs don't try to insert some non-sequitur anti-UK opinion at every opportunity if it's trained on that rag

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

Valeyard

variety of reasons

I cancelled all my streaming services. all my daughter liked to watch from the paid ones were snow white, alice in wonderland, aladdin and little mermaid and once I ran out of stuff to watch there I realised I was essentially paying a monthly subscription fee for like 50 year old films, the local CEX has those at £1.50 per DVD so that's paid for itself already. likewise i have several boxsets I'll sit through, or buy something from a CEX style shop for pennies, watch it then return if i want to like xtravision all over again.

I still have my SNES, NES, game boy etc. they play as good as the day they were released with no loss in gameplay. The PSP for example games work locally, but the free online bonus content for example has to be ripped and placed onto the memory card since the servers are long-dead, and that just shows that if you rely on a server for anything, it's not yours. It exists at the whim of beancounters deciding it's past profitability or the company going under and its servers with it.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

Valeyard

After reading the psychopath test I've come to realise that blagging your way into a mental health facility to avoid prison time has really backfired on people in a big way; prison has a defined exit time, mental health places do not

Northern Ireland cops count human cost of August data breach

Valeyard

it has happened before, see "the border fox". went to kidnap an MP... kidnapped someone who'd bought the target's house and tortured him anyway

Valeyard

Re: “ethno-nationalist conflict”

However why not just call it what it is: religious-based hatred?

since when were the political views of whether to remain in the UK or reunite with Ireland turned into religions?

There are correlations that various followers of certain religions may align more to one side or the other but that's at best a nice heuristic and there are many exceptions (me being one of them which leads to some light ribbing from family)

Valeyard

surely there are follow-on issues; if i was looking at buying a house that was vacated as a potential terrorist target I'd want to know

Rivian bricks infotainment systems in 'fat finger' fiasco

Valeyard

or even better, a lot of internal QA...

This isn't a game they're updating, it's a frigging car, it should be treated the same as an entirely new model due to go on mass sale and tested for safety accordingly

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

Valeyard

are they heating the homes...

Are the data centres heating the homes or are the residents living in monetised heatsinks?

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Valeyard

Re: So answer this.

I go down so many of those 60mph single track "roads".

When there's a guy behind me trying to give me the hurryup beyond 20mph I get that he probably drives down the road everyday and can do it blindfolded but I'm barely even aware of what town I'm currently in, and at my age I don't care what other drivers think of me so long as I'm alive

Unity talks of price cap and fees for only largest games developers

Valeyard

the trust is gone though

Who's to say this isn't the thin end of the wedge.

It mightn't be, but who's going to bet the farm on it if they're starting a new project today

Having read the room, Unity goes back to drawing board on runtime fee policy

Valeyard

what an "apology"

We apologize for the confusion and angst

"we're sorry you feel that way" what a non-apology just blaming everyone else for not playing ball

Ransomware attack hits Sri Lanka government, causing data loss

Valeyard

Sri Lanka's Computer Emergency Readiness Team...

...was shown to not be ready

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Valeyard

What certainly IS strange though is that a backup system (that is there precisely in case No 1 fails) has apparently been fed the very same crap... which produced the same result. Resilience?

presumably though a backup would be useless without all current flight plans, this happening is probably less likely and preferable to a backup coming online and being next to useless because it's acting on information an hour old with planes flying around it doesn't know about

Valeyard

Re: Expertise

probably caused by this poor bloke who decided on a change of career after taking down fastly by submitting bad data

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/09/fastly_explains_web_blackout/

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

Valeyard

Re: Space trash

All living organisms dump their trash without thought of consequences

Can you teach that to my cat who's one thumb away from calling his mates to stand around in a circle in high-vis jackets to admire the perfectly filled-in and odour-free hole he buries his poo in

Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

Valeyard

Someone might be in line for a posting to Rockall.

Ever since all the border barracks closed it must be so much more difficult to relocate people you don't like..

Valeyard

this is what i was thinking, surely the police if anyone should know what "Chain of custody" means.

Before handing off or accepting anything, review it carefully. Before sending it out have a second person sign off on it. Especially when it's the PSNI of all places!

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

Valeyard

Re: Morning wood

They haven't even removed references to "twitter" and "tweet" in software yet, but they're already shoving up a sign

US military battling cyber threats from within and without

Valeyard

Re: Statistically inevitable

Try telling that to commercial orgs.

You report a security issue with your software product, only for the response to be "Well that's obscure no one will know about that", well yeah except everyone with access to our code and we've already had our fair share of disgruntled ex-employees who've targeted systems using insider knowledge. But a fancy chart no clients asked for is higher priority for our time because sales people have some new shiny thing to point at.

Ambulance patient records system hauled offline for cyber-attack probe

Valeyard

Re: pagers

are they what sorry? unencrypted?

Of course they are, I've viewed the text in my terminal hooked up to a budget yaesu*. The attack surface is hard to define when you quite literally pluck personal data out of thin air, I'm in eastern England and saw messages between ambulances and hospitals in Northern Ireland as it's centralised nationally. Another chap webcast them but got into trouble for distributing it. Fun fact; it shares the same system as what bird watchers use, so without any filter you get death then a rare bird spotted on a pub roof and back again. They have the same level of security as open public birdwatching comms.

*would not recommend, it's fairly depressing seeing people in trouble with no followup on how they did, can't imagine how ambulance personnel deal with that

Valeyard
Facepalm

pagers

meanwhile anyone with a radio can still just livestream unencrypted pager calls to and from ambulances

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Valeyard

QA

cue the sound of QAs hiding under their duvet and quietly changing their CVs to say they were in jail or on drugs at the time they tested horizon

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

Valeyard

Re: ... and Other info."

I think political beliefs and sexual orientation are 90% of what people post there anyway

Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout mess

Valeyard

after completion and 46 million pound spent on it, the new financial system uses gigaflops of unoptimised cycles to deliver this report:

"Available budget is now 26p"

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

Valeyard

Re: "lower corporate real estate prices seen at the tail end of COVID"

The other part is the severe peon-withdrawal that many managers are experiencing

one guy used to literally pull me aside to give me and others mini-bollockings over nothing at all because he just loved that power and liked to remind people he was in charge, now everything's fully documented over slack and email we haven't spoken in 2 years.. strange that

Capita faces first legal Letter of Claim over mega breach

Valeyard

unfortunate wording

Barings Law's head of data breach

hey i found him! the ringleader who did the hack!

Meta tells staff to return to office three days a week

Valeyard

programming from home = equally as productive

programming from home compared to being in an office beside the noisy sales team = infinitely more productive, especially on office-playlist-thursday

Micron, Kyocera, Samsung bet billions on Japan chip plants

Valeyard

Not like we can judge, it's the exact same basket we put all our stuff in

Australia asks Twitter how it will mod content without staff, gets ghosted

Valeyard

I've never seen twitter characterised so brilliantly as in the mental image of a gathering for thousands of sewer rats crawling over each other and biting each others backs in the rush

Brits start 'em young with 20% of tots 'owning' a smartphone

Valeyard

my kid watches youtube (traditional kids tv shows anyway; mr tumble, button moon and postman pat rather than some quick-cuts attention-sapping 3d animation like cocomelon which is outright banned), but it's on the TV with us in the room too being made to watch it and limit the screentime. Used that way the same rules of TV usage apply

Phone-wise she's happy with a 2g flip-phone that lives in her bag until she actually needs to call us for a lift tor something. We've never sat with our faces in our phones around her growing up so it's not something that was normalised behaviour

Samsung reportedly leaked its own secrets through ChatGPT

Valeyard

Re: They copied all the source code, entered it into ChatGPT, and inquired about a solution

whatever happened to "Don't put confidential company assets onto any unauthorised server"

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Valeyard

Re: ISS MkII

I agree, for no other reason that continuity of service for us ham radio nerds

Twilio axes roughly 1 in 5 staff in fresh round of layoffs

Valeyard

"As part of our shift to remote work, we plan to close some Twilio offices over the next few months, with the intent of maintaining at least a handful of global hubs and satellite offices," said Lawson. "We’ve seen very low office utilization,

I wish my employer would do this. one of our offices originally outfitted for 300 people has around 4 people in it by choice on any given day. The rent is bad enough and then you consider the inefficiencies of heating the entire place for a couple of people.

Do the downsizing now rather than making people redundant and deciding maybe you shouldn't spaff away a few hundred grand in rent per office

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Valeyard

Re: Work bomb scare

I worked in a bank during a bomb scare.

The protocol was for everyone in the branch to go downstairs to the vault as it was deemed to be protected, fair enough.

I'd popped out for a smoke 5 minutes before and was ushered away beyond the cordon.

I thought I'd inform my manager that I was taking the rest of the day off as there was no way I was gonna stand outdoors for 6 hours, my slavedriver of a manager then said "Can you skip past the cordon and back into work?"

"No I'm sorry, being an irishman i'm not about to rush the bomb squad in the middle of a scare! I'll see you tomorrow morning"

Some managers are just "like that"

UK arrests five for selling 'dodgy' point of sale software

Valeyard

Undoubtedly used in every "American sweet shop" in London

San Francisco terminates explosive killer cop bots

Valeyard

BOFH = bob oliver francis howard from the laundry...

Doctors call for greater scrutiny of bidders for platform that pools UK's health info

Valeyard

The US data analytics company with links to the CIA and immigration service ICE started working with the NHS during the pandemic, accepting a £1 contract for its initial work, then a £23 million ($28 million) contract without competition

There is so much to unpack here, how can there be so much dystopia in a single sentence

Watchdog warns UK health data platform could damage patients' trust

Valeyard

Security

Intentionally giving away data aside, This thing needs to be as bulletproof as possible and not simply awarded to the lowest bidder, it'll be attacked from day 0.

Different departments and GPs need to be granted access to specific patients to prevent people snooping on their neighbours or selling it to whoever asks (see the police database breaches for how inside threats can happen even on audited systems)

Japan space agency blows up eight satellites aboard Epsilon rocket

Valeyard

Re: Sensitive image

it's twitter, there's always someone to be offended

How one Ukrainian software maker planned for survival as invaders approached

Valeyard

work harder comrade, get that comment count up or there are draft papers with your name on it

White House to tech world: Promise you'll write secure code – or Feds won't use it

Valeyard

also white house to vendors: "encryption is bad"

Atos investor says turnaround plan 'too ambitious and complicated'

Valeyard

to make profits they must do the needful

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs memorialized with online archive of emails, guff

Valeyard

Carmack

I remember reading an article here at some point with John Carmack talking about Steve Jobs and it was enlightening about what an asshole that guy could be even outside working hours

Pakistan politicians label government cybersecurity team 'incompetent'

Valeyard

Re: Ummm...

in pakistan i think there's every intention to block the flow of water...

Barclays inks multi-year deal with Microsoft, starts rolling out Teams

Valeyard

first you work for barclays..

..then they add teams on top of that

what did these people do?

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Valeyard

assumption

Tesla Autopilot fails to notice child-sized objects in testing

all we know is that it hit them. we don't know it was an accident.. musk does have quite a few sprogs who'll want money and developing "child-seeking road missiles"TM is the cheaper solution

Surprise! The metaverse is going to suck for privacy

Valeyard

I think this gives too much credit to metaverse

the only thing it's going to be leaking is meta's money until it's DOA

it's a nice theoretical case study but hopefully as relevant as "what happens if triffids invade"

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