* Posts by Halfmad

881 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2013

Scot.gov wins pals with pledge not to keep hold of innocents' mugshots and biometric data

Halfmad

It certainly makes it easier to commit, however until recently Scotland had several Police forces so even though those were much smaller than most other forces in the UK it still meant different entities.

Also need to look into the political dimension here. The Scottish Government love to highlight things they do better than Westminster, this is yet another one to add to that list. I suspect irrespective of the number of forces, they would have set this out anyway.

Super-mugs: Hackers claim to have snatched 20k customer records from Brit biz Superdrug

Halfmad

They should have bought the maths co-processor for DX power.

Devon County Council techies: WE KNOW IT WASN'T YOU!

Halfmad

Re: 3rd party

Increasingly common these services, many GP letters use it too.

Second-hand connected car data drama could be a GDPR minefield

Halfmad

also ex-rentals

My car is an ex-rental, it came with the previous rental agreement still in it with the guys contact details and a photocopy of his passport.

It's not just the electronic data that's being mishandled. The automotive industry from manufacturers to garages is a **** storm waiting to happen.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

Halfmad

OK then

This looks worse than the £15 Sega handheld I got my daughter for going on holiday (so I didn't care if she lots it). Ended up being rather good and she loved Echo the dolphin etc

No instructions in the box is not a problem, I think kids excel at figuring things out and get a kick out of it. I'm sure many of us on here are OLD at 35+ and remember having to figure out how games worked ourselves. I still remember the eureka moments with games like Deuteros.

Porn parking, livid lockers and botched blenders: The nightmare IoT world come true

Halfmad

Re: Internet of Idiots

IOT has it's place. My father was disabled and we got him a Ring doorbell as it was hard for him to get up and to the door quickly, it was also incredibly tiring and meant additional risk of him falling - he lived alone 40 miles from my brother or myself so we were constantly worried about him.

It meant he could check without letting them know he was doing so - who it was, and talk to them and say he's on his way if he wanted to let them in, otherwise he could ignore them in the knowledge the camera had stored their image with a short video should they harass him.

It's easy to say "christ nobody needs this nonsense device" but there are many use cases for devices like this, but I'd say that personally I have no need and no desire for one. But I'm not the target market arguably as I'm healthy and happy to tell randoms to **** off when try to sell me windows for the 3rd time that month.

UK cyber security boffins dispense Ubuntu 18.04 wisdom

Halfmad

Re: Victim of its own success

Makes sense as it becomes more popular it'll become more of a target but Ubuntu and linux in general represent a fairly tiny proportion of desktops and that's where the money is, either hitting home users or as a gateway into the DB servers irrespective of what those run on.

♫ The Core i9 clock cycles go up. Who cares where they come down?

Halfmad

Laptop coolers won't be enough

No gaming laptop I've seen so far has been able to combine performance, good cooling and relatively low noise from the cooling solution.

Even with an external cooler it's not going to be much better, all this throttling does is expose how unsuitable the laptop chassis is for the CPU it houses. They can fudge a fix if they want, bottom line is that it'll still throttle and you'll still fail to get the full performance out of it for any sustained period because of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.

Will this biz be poutine up the cash? Hackers demand dosh to not leak stolen patient records

Halfmad

Re: Don't bother paying the dosh

NHS England is running down the old sharing data with whoever they want, patient access via internet to their records, booking prescriptions and appointments online.

Shiny you said? It's happening very close to home, let's hope they get it right eh?

Brit watchdog fines child sex abuse inquiry £200k over mass email blunder

Halfmad

Re: The Inquiry said it takes data protection "very seriously"

The fine should automatically double if they use this statement at any point in literature made before the breach or in press releases afterwards..

Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

Halfmad

Let's not forget it'd also mean directly competing with Amazons own tablets which are sold through the largest marketplace on the planet, Amazon. Which I'm *sure* won't have any biased selling tactics to minimise your tablet visibility.

Irish fella accused of being Silk Road admin 'Libertas' hauled to US

Halfmad

Re: Also if anything touches US banks...

It's an estimated salary per year based on what he was getting per week.

Really depends what he was having to do, if it was just tidy up the forum posts and ban users then I'd see that as pretty easy going.. sounds like he was up to his neck in it though.

NHS systems fell offline for 1,300+ hours over 36 months, cyber-nasties fingered – FoI study

Halfmad

You do know that every department in the NHS is required to have contingency plans for when systems are down and every trust also has SLAs attached to each of it's systems which includes a degree of "acceptable" downtime e.g. 4/8 hours.

Systems going down isn't unusual, it's actually becoming less of a problem as sysadmins are able to point to Wannacry and say "we've got to do maintenance" now where as before this was damn near impossible.

GDPR forgive us, it's been one month since you were enforced…

Halfmad

I don't think many of the opt-in/out menus are legal

They make it too difficult to change options. I had one (on mobile) which required me to de-selected 150 different advertisers individually in a tiny menu as there was no "all" option. That was after going through two other buttons to get there.

It is meant to be clear, transparent and straightforward.

Do UK.gov wonks understand sci-tech skills gap? MPs dish out Parliamentary kicking

Halfmad

Re: Long-term?

This is why the NHS, particularly in England is constantly spending millions on restructuring because MPs are elected and start fiddling with the existing structure to "make efficiency and rid the NHS of middle managers"

Sadly those middle managers normally remove workload from clinicians, so without them clinicians end up managing. Likewise the restructuring costs a blooming fortune due to redundency payments, building moves, changes to clinical systems (which can take ages) etc.

Then those MPs are voted out and the next lot start it all again.

NHSScotland is marginally better but only because they flip/flop between Labour and the SNP so the ideology isn't that enormously different at least on healthcare.

Atari accuses El Reg of professional trolling and making stuff up. Welp, here's the interview tape for you to decide...

Halfmad

Re: Hahashahahahahahaahah!

So incredibly satisfying. Such a nice article, at least from my perspective.

UK! watchdog! slaps! Yahoo! with! £250k! fine! for! 2014! data! breach!

Halfmad

They'll never levy a maximum penalty

They seem to think they need to build up to it, that it needs to be REALLY heinous to justify it. They should be counting down FROM the maximum when deciding penalties. What companies did prior, during and after a breach, what efforts to inform were made, justifications and documentation made etc.

If Yahoo isn't a maximum breach given the number of people involved, then what the hell is ICO?

HostingUK drops offline after losing Farmer vs Fibre competition

Halfmad

Re: DR

Ah the cloud, AKA "using other peoples servers"

Unfortunately this makes you reliant on "other peoples DR plans".

Brit healthcare system inks Windows 10 install pact with Microsoft

Halfmad

Re: All the easier for the USA to grab by health records ...

Many clinical systems are moving to browser and have been for a while but there are big ones which will need a lot of work for that to happen - or potentially the NHS developing it's own if the private sector refuses to. Additionally moving to Libre office etc sound easy but discharge letters etc all have to be automated and Libre etc would have to be able to facilitate this.

Additionally Linux would have to up it's game in terms of managing permissions across thousands of PCs, shares etc. There's is no getting away from there and of course arguably the biggest problem - most ICT staff aren't trained in Linux as their entire careers have been spent learning MS OSes of various flavours.

Power spike leads Chinese police to 600-machine mining rig

Halfmad

Re: Color me astonished!

I setup a mining PC in our kitchen a couple of years ago to mine Bitcoin/litecoin over Christmas as we'd previously had extreme weather which froze our kitchen carpet (not fun in the morning!).

The mining PC prevented that. I removed it when things got warmer though. Got to love AMD (7950s) cards.

Boss sent overpaid IT know-nothings home – until an ON switch proved elusive

Halfmad

try working in schools

I remember fixing an inkjet printer which was full of rice. Turns out the kids had been making little food related collages and put them on the wall above the printer whilst wet, most of the glue and rice fell into the printer over night and nobody realised.

So I went out, took the printer to bits, cleaned it and printed off a couple of sheets to prove it was fine.

The next day we got an angry call from the headteacher about the "printer not working again, clearly your technician didn't fix it properly" So my boss having no backbone sent me out again to take the grief.

Turns out it was pasta this time.

BBC extends Capita Audience Services contract to 25 years

Halfmad

We're the same, I do listen to the radio - that's the only reason I don't begrudge the TV tax too much.

The TV stations though are mostly garbage. BBC News has become increasingly **** as well.

Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte creating app to register 3m EU nationals living in Brexit Britain

Halfmad

Re: Bugs? What bugs?

Well they could just deny it seeing as FOI is a teethless beast with no comeback on organisations which essentially ignore it anyway.

Java-aaaargh! Google faces $9bn copyright bill after Oracle scores 'fair use' court appeal win

Halfmad

Re: Still reeling

The people ruling on this simply don't understand the implications of it and the reasons that it shouldn't be copyrighted.

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Halfmad

Re: It's a feature

Yeah "**** them"

Microsoft: You swore! banned!

User: Cool ,that was the whole point *****.

Skip-wrecked! Boat full o' rubbish scuppered in Brit residential street

Halfmad

Re: Boats are expensive...

You'd have enough old tyres within a year to recreate Waterworld.

Parents blame brats' slipping school grades on crap internet speeds

Halfmad

As a parent (and therefor the go-to expert on this)

I'd blame it on one of these factors:

1. Not reading to kids at bed time, or getting them to read to you - instead letting them play their tablet for 10 minutes whilst chilling out on your phone.

2. Too much Roblox and Minecraft, too little homework and practical skills like painting, writing and mathematics.

3. ...

Actually just lazy parents. I say this as one who's guilty of this on occasion myself. It's got bugger all to do with internet speeds.. as 99.9%* of reasonable people will agree.

*Statistics made up, but so is the reason for the drop in school performance.

Manchester Arena attack: National Mutual Aid Telephony system failed

Halfmad
Facepalm

Holy **** you can't make this stuff up.

OK firstly.

1. Review all Vodafone contracts, find out how many have been subcontracted without notification. Look to end all of those.

2. Find out who was in charge of the Vodafone contract here, sack them for a) not preventing sub contacting as a clause in the contract and b) not making anyone aware of it happening.

3. Tax Vodafone properly on profits made in the UK, seeing as they apparently are cost focused and were saving some pennies by sub contracting work.

4. Start the same investigation into G4S, ATOS etc.

1 in 5 Michigan state staffers fail phishing test but that's OK apparently

Halfmad

20% is about average

Also the organisation now knows what problems it has and is under pressure to fix them. This is better than a company which is blissfully ignorant.

Yes we can point and laugh at some of the details in the report, but that's my point - they are in a report so the senior management can be held accountable for a change so things will happen. Let's turn that around on the UK organisations, how many of us are confident in our local councils, whitehall etc having all this done?

How many think senior management in those places can/will ever be held to account for the failings when there is an incident?

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

Halfmad

Re: Sharp Practice

I still remember one of my friends buying an Amiga from Dixons years ago and paying almost half again for an extended warranty I could here him repeatedly saying to the salesperson he didn't want.

It'd be nice to know if the charge PCWorld etc were abusing included any commission for staff.

NHS Digital heads accused of being 'suppliers', not 'custodians' of UK patient data

Halfmad

the Digital arm of the UK's National Health Service

No it's not, it only covers NHS England.

Ex-staffers slam Microsoft's 'lackluster' response to stacks of internal complaints

Halfmad

Going to be honest.

In all the years I've met and worked with various Microsoft staff in the UK I don't think any of them (outside of receptionists) have been female.

I'm usually the first to sigh and say "oh women's rights/pay gap/equal pay" but come to think of it compared to most other companies it's rather odd.

Brit military boffins buy airtime on HD eye-in-the-sky video satellite

Halfmad

Demonstration purposes, basically doing proof of concept and building business cases for whatever it is they have planned in the future.

Very early days essentially.

Should ISPs pay to block pirate websites? Supreme Court to decide

Halfmad

Who decides if it's copyright-infringing?

Anyone with a Youtube account who uploads videos will likely have had at least one attempt to pull content or screw over monetisation due to "infringing copyright" when it's actually covered under fair use.

ISP are more likely simply to block entire domains than go for a case by case method.

Not a slippery slope, more a great big cliff.

Just can't catch a break, can ya, Capita? Shares tumble 40% amid yet another profit warning

Halfmad

Panic stations!

That's what I read into this and so does the market by the looks of it. There's a smell of "covering our backs" here by execs too, I still expect this ship to sink or shrink dramatically in the coming years as we see senior execs opt to retire early or jump ship before it finally goes down.

Well done, UK.gov. You hit superfast broadband target (by handing almost the entire project to BT)

Halfmad

Re: 95%? dubious..

I get "up to" 34Mbps.

In reality I get 11. Which ironically is under my ISPs cap for their non-super-fast broadband.

UK infrastructure firms to face £17m fine if their cybersecurity sucks

Halfmad
Trollface

Re: Poorly named

Ministers already have a firm grip on this legislation. In fact you could say most of them spend all day toying with it.

Maybe you should've stuck with NetWare: Hijackers can bypass Active Directory controls

Halfmad

Re: OS vs. Directory Service

As a mechanic would say, **** cars keep me in a job.

Ever wondered why tech products fail so frequently? No, me neither

Halfmad

Isn't that what users are for?

Absolutely going by every game I've seen released on PC in the past couple of years. Ironically the indy games seem to have better support and fewer game breaking bugs than the big studio guff.

Long live Rimworld (Google it, I'm not being rude, much.)

Acronis: Ransomware protection! Get yer free ransomware protection!

Halfmad
Windows

Link for download may have changed since publication, it's now: https://www.acronis.com/en-gb/personal/free-data-protection/

I'd be interested to see if anyone fancies deploying this to their estate.. so I don't have to be the guinea pig obviously

My only concern is that free tools, well they are usually not that brilliant especially when they are part of a promotion for cloud storage. I hope this is one of the few exceptions.

Here we go again... UK Prime Minister urges nerds to come up with magic crypto backdoors

Halfmad

Like a shell company?

Government starts shell company with funds from taxpayer, shell company buys out trusted encryption system and changes the encryption in the background to suit themselves. Job done.

NHS deploys Microsoft threat detection service on just 30,000 devices

Halfmad

Re: Windows XP Patches - Norwegian Blue

Sounds like they are essentially saying "we give up with XP, we're blaming you if anything happens"..

Halfmad

We have looked at WER in the past, but abandoned it due to lack of usefull info, and quite frankly we have more important things to do, like keeping the medical systems running, and deploying the endless stream of MS patches, and sending responses to useless NHS Digital Alerts ....

Don't forget answering freedom of information requests from companies asking about critical infrastructure, social media etc too! Because they are such a good use of IT resources.

Bell Canada Canucks it up again: Second hack in just eight months

Halfmad

p@$$w0rd. ???

Surely the logical thing is to opt for the next best one "password1" or to think outside of the box and go for "letmein"??

Neither requires holding down the shift button either, bonus.

Halfmad

Pop quiz!

Choose as many as you fancy:

a) Lessons will be learned

b) We are busy blaming a subcontractor because that totally gets us off the hook

c) We will do everything we can do prevent this from ever happening again

IT 'heroes' saved Maersk from NotPetya with ten-day reinstallation blitz

Halfmad

Re: I hope

That all the staff that pulled this off were well rewarded.

Because frankly that's a phenomenal effort that deserves it.

Annoys me that companies don't shout about how well their IT departments recover in situations like this. If they'd had a fire etc they'd be thanking those staff who helped PUBLICLY but IT is seen as a shadow department, we can't possibly talk about those people..

Fresh botnet recruiting routers with weak credentials

Halfmad

Re: D-Link

Best De-Link it from the t'internet anyway.

Scumbag who tweeted vulnerable adults' details is hauled into court

Halfmad
Mushroom

Weak punishment but I expected nothing else.

I mean it's not like he's stolen lots of money or slagged off the judiciary on twitter!

VTech fondleslabs for kids 'still vulnerable' despite sanctions

Halfmad

Are you ****ing me?

.As well as paying the fine, VTech agreed to apply privacy and security requirements so that it complied with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC Act

How nice of them, so here again we have an example of a fine being required to get people to AGREE to comply with something they are meant to legally comply with. Clearly our sanctions regime isn't enough, time to consider holding executive directors personally responsible for the actions of the company they manage.

Money isn't always the solution, assigning responsibility to senior management and making them lawfully responsible might be.

Drone crashes after operator failed to spot extra building site crane

Halfmad
Trollface

Re: Not sure going straight up is safer.

PPE should always be warn.

Hardhat, safety glasses, hi-vis vest at a minimum, I would think.

I doubt it'd be able to take off with all that on it to be honest.