* Posts by Lee D

4231 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2013

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Lee D Silver badge

Literally any item that "conjoins" two backups makes them dependent on each other:

- Physical location

- Power source

- Internet connection

- Credit card you signed up to the service with

- The only guy who knows the login

Anything at all.

And though there's no problem with having "dependent" backups, you have to know that and understand what that means when the credit card is blocked or the Internet connection goes off and now both those backups will be inaccessible until you resolve that problem.

But one of above items is most definitely:

- Service provider.

So having two independent data copies in two different continents but BOTH run by Google, say... bam... you just made dependent backups again.

Lee D Silver badge

Yet again:

If you have your files in the cloud, that's fine. No problem.

But where's YOUR backup? Not Google's. Not AWS's. But yours. Where's YOUR other location, entirely independent of that cloud service, where you have a full, complete and up-to-date copy of your data?

If you can't answer that question, you don't have a backup.

You could backup to ANOTHER cloud... that's fine. So long as your recognise that the Internet connection is then a shared access to both your backups.

But ONE cloud from ONE provider is ONE backup, no matter how many drives or datacentres it's stored on.

Same way that ONE SAN from ONE provider is ONE backup, no matter how many drives or network cabinets it's stored on.

Black Friday? More like Blackout Friday for HSBC's online and mobile banking

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Mismash

I moved to Monzo for precisely this reason.

They can't fob you off, they have to deal with it themselves.

And given that I set up my account with them by a photo, an ID and entirely online, they can use similar to identify me without having to make a "branch visit" (which wouldn't be possible).

Worst case, they would just write to you, recorded delivery, I imagine. Same as I've had other banks do when I refuse to drive across town during working hours just to identify myself (but yet they're quite happy to speak to me on the phone or process thousands of pounds of payments in my name without the same...).

Have never had cause to contact Monzo because everything I want to do is just in the app. If I can't get to the app, why would I need anything more than it originally took to get an account via the app? It shouldn't.

Lee D Silver badge

Because being a long term personal and business customer, I wasn't expecting to be literally LAUGHED AT when I applied for a mortgage from a well-established business partner (that's what a bank is) and long-term personal banking provider.

I would happily go to a more expensive provider that I have a relationship with than go with the cheapest.

But established relations were destroyed in one meeting with them, for a totally without-cause refusal (as proven by a mortgage shop being quite prepared to give me one and couldn't understand what the problem was given my credit record, business income, employment, etc.).

My account was closed within a few months of that, especially given the other incident, and as soon as I could move everything away from them.

Lee D Silver badge

"You can get a chequebook on request" is what I see on their accounts, same as several other banks.

But they don't offer it to you automatically any more, and haven't for years.

Lee D Silver badge

I haven't used (or seen) a cheque in at least a decade.

My last three employers (covering 15 years or so of my dealing with their accounting systems) who take in millions of pounds a year started refusing cheques 15-20 years ago.

I don't think there's a high-street bank left who issue cheques to account holders any more.

Lee D Silver badge

"Compensation time methinks," said one. "Train companies compensate when a train is an hour late… what about for thousands of customers who have important bills to pay/ transactions to do/ work and lives to live and need their banking app!"

Just vote with your feet, man.

I have moved away from every major UK high street bank at one time or another.

NatWest - when they pretended that a Java applet in an HTTP page was "secure" just because it showed a padlock, rather than deploy HTTPS.

HSBC - when they laughed in my face when I applied for a mortgage, so I went next-door to a mortgage shop and got... the exact mortgage I was asking for, no hassle. Also when they overcharged me for a cheque that they DELIBERATELY delayed paying in - in ten years of custom, the ONE cheque that could, in theory, be processed for 48 hours for which the last 10 minutes would incur a fee... that one delayed exactly 48 hours and incurred a fee. None of the thousands I'd paid in before over a decade did so, no delay, nor fee, not once.

Barclays - when they insisted on causing me nothing but hassle when it came to paying in my (Barclays Bank!) university grant cheque into the university branch of Barclays Bank that they opened for me for that express purpose.

...

and so on.

I now deal only with online-only banks (not FirstDirect!) because they have to give me the functions I want to use. And because they have no branches to staff, I get functions to do EVERYTHING I need (open a business account, a joint account, dispute a transaction, etc.) in the app itself.

Sorry, but a bank should not be "down" online nowadays. I can understand "Oh, sorry, we're just pausing scheduled payments for a little while" or "Your balance info may be up to date by up to an hour while we process a backlog", etc. but they shouldn't be DOWN. I should still be able to make payments, get to my account, etc. Anything else is a complete failure to deploy enough redundancy.

Which, weirdly, the online-only banks with only one thousandth of the same resources seem to manage no problem at all.

And the train analogy is very apt. When I started to realise that trains were so unreliable I couldn't use them, I just... stopped using trains entirely. That was many years ago and apart from very rare, non-critical, mid-day journeys into London for leisure (with plenty of backup options), I just never use them.

"Oh, the trains/banks are terrible" people say, as they reward them with thousands upon thousands of pounds year after year despite being terrible.

I'd really rather be inconvenienced on my own terms and at my own expense than give such places my money.

A bit like my electricity supplier at the moment. They decided to take the mick, they still are taking the mick, so I'm investing gradually in making them obsolete for my purposes - even if it costs me more in the long run. Each month my grid usage goes down. Each month they vastly over-estimate unless I put in a meter reading on the 31st. So each month I put in a meter reading on the 31st, apply for a refund for ANY overpayment, and use all such overpayments to buy more off-grid electricity equipment, which means my next bill is even lower again....

And I made my water supplier fit a water meter. My water bill dropped to 10% of what it was when I did so. Rest assured that if I ever find a practical way to reduce my water usage further, I'm doing it. I'm literally eyeing up a £1000 automatic greywater header-tank system. I'd rather pay £1000 to make them redundant than give them even £100.

Vote with your feet, people.

Attack on direct debit provider London & Zurich leaves customers with 6-figure backlogs

Lee D Silver badge

Okay, let's assume that.

Now tell me... why are you operating your business's primary source of income such that you can't cope with a delay on it, can't fund payroll if it doesn't come in immediately, don't have a backup, and all my other points?

My post basically doesn't care whether it's money in or out... you're not operating a business properly if you can't cope with it.

Lee D Silver badge

1) Don't operate your business so that a couple of week's delay in payment means you can't make payroll. It's the perfect way to tank a business overnight when all your staff just leave (and perfectly justified in doing so no matter what their contracts say by that point).

2) Have a backup provider wherever possible.

3) If you were banking through a bank and you can't pay direct debits because the provider is down, it would be entirely on the bank to sort that out - or arrange funds for you in the meantime.

4) If your financial provider was compromised - change provider at the first opportunity anyway.

Personally, at this point I'd be on the phone to alternative suppliers and looking at how to change those direct debits to come from another account, and I would only be dealing with L&Z to claw back whatever I'd paid them so far.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Lee D Silver badge

Re: My best advice while driving a vehicle

Strange, the law says exactly the same but BOTH hands on the wheel unless there's a driving reason for otherwise (e.g. changing gear or indicating).

It's almost like we don't need fancy tech-barons trying to tell us what they intended when the law is very, very clear, even for Tesla and other automated vehicles.

Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Teens can also get Bard to help them learn skills or complete homework

If you want to follow the advice of a relative of mine who is a multi-PhD in education and specialised in the career of teaching for 40+ years, then the answer is:

Don't bother with homework.

In-class, how are they getting GPT answers? They're not. Devices are not allowed.

At home, they are getting those answers elsewhere because THEY HATE HOMEWORK. Everyone does. It is also of limited value educationally precisely because everyone hates it, it's completely unguided and unassisted, it's often nothing more than "more of the same" of what you were just doing in lesson, the environment is unsuitable, the atmosphere is generally not one focused for learning, the marking sucks up far too much time and achieves little, and the progress in the subject because of homework is zero to minimal.

Even the difference between independent (private) and state schools. State schools give you homework on what you just did. Independent schools often call it prep work. It's what you'll be doing NEXT LESSON and is there to get you up-to-speed so you come into lesson with questions and knowing things without wasting the valuable teaching time.

Even that, however, is of limited utility and in almost any study once you eliminate other factors in the average schoolchild's life, "homework" or "prep work" makes almost no difference to educational outcomes.

How about this: If you want to know if a child knows something, ask them independently at a point where they can't run off to a computer to look it up.

As time goes by, using homework to judge status, progress or ability of a child is getting less and less useful, and things like GPT models are a MASSIVE wake-up call that you can't - and many argue never have been able to - judge those kinds of unguided assessments and usefully use their results in your assessments whatsoever.

So long as you don't let them answer the questions by GPT in-lesson or in-exam, school education doesn't really need to change at all. All you need to do is stop with the pointless unguided homework that has no real evidence to justify it already.

The same guy taught a year in a private school recently. He was threatened with sacking because they accused him of cheating. Because EVERY ONE of his students got an A. Every. Single. One. He was utterly offended, grabbed the nearest teacher (who hated him), had them get a higher-level exam paper from the stores, asked their entire class to resit the exam with only the other teachers as invigilators, and had no part in the resit exam choice, question, invigilation, sitting or marking. They all passed again. All with A's again. Without the guy anywhere near them whatsoever.

When they tried to apologise, he resigned in disgust anyway at the accusation, he just wanted to prove his innocence first.

When someone like that says that homework is a crock, and has in fact filed dissertations on the subject, it's about time educators started to listen.

P.S. the same guy home-schooled my daughter in ALL SUBJECTS throughout COVID, and she now attends school in a foreign country / language. Last week her teacher called her out for not understanding the language, and demanded to see all her notes because she assumed she must be cheating off her peers. She handed in more notes than anyone else, passed all tests, and replied to her teacher in fluent Spanish when confronted. She is so far ahead of her peers it's not even comparable.

Lee D Silver badge

No AI in existence is able to infer or reason. Pretending that it's just a particularly poor example of AI is misunderstanding how these things work.

This thing just averages stuff out, based on superstition ("last time I did this random thing, I was rewarded, so this random thing must be 'better'"). I would say something about pigeons pecking targets or football fans wearing their lucky socks, if you get those analogies.

The result from these things is the original training data, statistically modified based on those superstitions (which are largely random).

There's no way that thing generated that image statistically without that original image being in the training set, and hitting a lot of statistics for keywords like Afghan and girl together.

Lee D Silver badge

Copyright law is long-established and very clear:

If you don't have a licence to use an image, then you don't have a right to use an image.

Same for books, audio, movies, software, paintings, etc.

The only exceptions are for fair use (hint: feeding the world into an AI isn't fair use), review, satire, etc.

It's very, very clear what's going to happen, because there is no law to the contrary - if you didn't have the explicit up-front authorised rights from the creators (or their licensees) to suck that content into an AI model, then you weren't legally allowed to do so.

Lee D Silver badge

So, tell me:

If you have to control exactly what data you can feed it, double-check its responses with an automated system, and put in safeguards so it doesn't wander off topic, hallucinate, or talk about inappropriate things...

At which point is all of this just fancy heuristics ("human-written rules") and nothing more? Same way that Tesla still has to put in a human-managed blocklist of locations of where the AI goes totally wrong and they just say "Look, override and just drive straight here" (which appears to be a danger in itself!).

And how did it recreate anything Disney unless it was trained on Disney materials? It's not like someone sat and described in intricate detail what Mickey Mouse looked like and it created its own interpretation (which would be valid clean-room reverse engineering for most things anyway). It knew. It had seen it. And that's copyright infringement unless the imagery was licenced to be part of their training database. So who authorised that and what else is in there?

(I mean, I know the answers to all the above, it's pretty much rhetorical).

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

I remember one who insisted that we could use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to write all school reports from now on.

The school paid them a fortune to come out, they obviously made a percentage on sales of the software, they did this little brief (very contrived) demo, and then I had the entire teaching and senior staff breathing down my neck telling me how we had to get the software and that this was the future.

"Have you actually used it?" I asked.

They hadn't. I got them a trial copy.

Never heard another word from them.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

I still enjoy the little factette that Tommy Flowers went to an adult education college in his latter years and got a basic IT course certificate in something that was equally as banal as Works.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

As someone whose entire career is IT in schools, let me just tell you:

It's been like that for far longer than the 25 years that I've had that from every single school I've ever worked for.

"We have to do X because Y are doing X" is the basis of everything.

Every school has a 3D printer. Guess why. It's little to do with actually making practical use of them, for the vast majority of schools.

Every school copies all the policies, initiatives, software, web services, parent portals etc. that they offer, almost universally because "my other school used this".

You can see the fads come and go - digital cameras, IT Suites, pupil devices, music Mac suites, iPads, 3D printers, Raspberry Pi's, and now they're talking AI (but they want to see what other schools are doing first....)

There is vanishingly little uniqueness or initiative in modern schools (and I've worked primary, secondary and further, state and independent, large, small, urban, rural, etc.).

Even down to which of the thousands of app you have to sign up to and deploy.

And generally it means that - unless you're copying the other place's entire business practices, staffing, etc. - you end up with a substandard product that nobody knows how to use properly.

If one more person tells me how certain London schools are making massive use of Apple Macs, iPads, and I have to explain that of course they are - they're sponsored by Apple, precisely to run courses, precisely to draw you in, precisely to make you go back to your school and buy Apple where you don't get ANY of their privileges or benefits that that school get (basically they are an Apple repair centre), I will insert an iPad in them. The largest model I can find.

This filters down to every member of staff. One music teacher *insisted* that "at school X we don't have to sign in to the Macs and deal with keychains". So I contacted school X's IT department, and was roundly told what nonsense that was. When I asked what made them get Macs and their software (because of course I was made to make sure we were doing EVERYTHING like they did it!), I was told that "Oh, the head visited this other school and they had it all so we had to get it."

There's little innovation in education, and very, very little tailoring to their own circumstances. Let teachers and senior management loose and every school would be a carbon-copy of every other even if one's a huge college with hundreds of highly-educated career-long staff, and the other was a tiny primary with no money and only two young teachers hired from the NQT schemes.

For example, if one more person tells me that we "have to" have full AutoCAD and Photoshop, when there isn't a single qualified (even unofficially) member of staff capable of manipulating that software to do anything useful, I may well find a way to design a hidden room with photoshopped camouflage somewhere in the school, and imprison them in it for all eternity.

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

Lee D Silver badge

Maybe if we all just starting ditching weird and 30-minute timezones and things like daylight saving time, we could just have 24 possibilities, named by "+1", "+2", etc. and solve the problem once and for all.

As it is Microsoft don't care about non-US timezones very much (and it's usually the cause of a lot of problems if you try to remove en-US everywhere even if you're not using it), but having to select "London" rather than "GMT + 0" is an annoyance I could really do without.

Capita scores £239M contract to manage mega public sector pension scheme

Lee D Silver badge

Re: WTF

It's not incompetence, it's corruption.

They aren't dumb - they know exactly what they are doing, and getting some lovely backhanders somewhere for it. Or they have shares, or whatever.

Nobody who was merely incompetent would be dumb enough to do this. They are instead incredibly competent, will be making money and chums hand over fist, are doing it explicitly and deliberately, and know PRECISELY that they will get away with it long enough to be profitable because there is no oversight and what oversight there is will be complicit anyway.

Every facet of Capita's, and similar company's, work is predicated on this happening. Bids are made so that someone goes "Oh well, guess we'll have to use Capita *again*, because nobody else is bidding on this incredibly dumb, specific, doomed-to-fail, over-priced project that we change the specs to every week".

I have to say, since passing the age 40, I've totally given up caring because there is nobody in power, or with any chance of power, that will end this. Capita etc. will continue on for centuries like this, and never be brought to account, and successions of multiple governments of all colours will all do exactly the same once they get into power too.

It simply doesn't matter how bad these providers, or politicians, are any more. Nothing changes. Nothing ever stops. Things just move from one hive of corruption to the next.

We've got a layer of people in charge, behind a glass ceiling, who couldn't care less and are in it only for personal profit.

Capita was founded in 1984 with the express purpose of being this company that they are. Nothing's changed, they've just got bigger and with more fingers in more pies. In 2006 the chairman resigned because of links to donations to Labour, etc. Nothing changes. It's a personal profit machine and nobody with the power to do so will shut it down. Same for countless dozens of other quangos.

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

Lee D Silver badge

Re: DR Strategy

Quite. How else are you going to yell at people to fix your network if your network is down?

To be honest, it's dumb that they would have to drive across the nation to reset switches and routers, too.

Those points should have an entirely independent access to them, to allow that to happen remotely and electronically.

Canonical intros Microcloud: Simple, free, on-prem Linux clustering

Lee D Silver badge

Until it's as simple and standardised as HyperV Failover Cluster then, I'm afraid, it's still just a tool for Linux CLI junkies.

And I say that as someone who ran a Slackware desktop as my only personal machine while managing Windows networks for a living, who happily had a 4DOS/DOS 5.5 AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS that had a dozen hand-crafted menu options to optimise the system towards certain demands of programs (literally juggling 1Kb around to try to make things fit), and who has a rack of Pis in my house doing everything from SDR to PVR to VPN to home automation.

Failover Cluster: install OS. Add Hyper-V role. Add Failover Cluster role. Run wizard to check all the nodes are compatible with each other and set up the cluster. Move virtual machines into it. Done.

Even complications like using S2D for the storage backing for it only resort to a few very simple Powershell commands.

Much as I hate so-many-things about Windows, and especially long-standing user interface annoyances with admin tools, it's really so simple for something so complex.

I'm not scared of the CLI at all, but it shouldn't be a necessary element of getting any of the above working, on either OS. And what we're seeing here is already a web-based interface on a pre-configured cluster and still it's so reliant on so much being done on the CLI - I can't imagine how many commands are involved to get to that stage, and the fact that a typo in a script brings things to a halt isn't encouraging.

Windows Server sucks, in so many ways. It wins because any idiot can just run a wizard from a clean install and create a HA cluster with storage and VM and other role capabilities. There are parts of all Windows GUIs that suck (hell, try moving VM storage on a failover cluster, whoever designed that menu should be shot!)... but the biggest, most complex ones work wonders for the user.

There's a reason I spin up entire Linux VMs for small, singular purposes, even on Windows clusters, and it's because the Linux tools to manage this stuff are awful. Hell, I remember how long it took to get a vaguely useable equivalent of "Active Directory Users & Computers"... and we're still not really there.

Linux has a long way to go on making this "admin friendly", rather than "vaguely usable by a dedicated expert tech who's read every single HOWTO in existence".

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

Lee D Silver badge

Re: The design is already stale

I'm sorry, but at what point did this Delorean designed by a toddler EVER look "cool" in any magnitude?

It's looks like a student team of engineers who'd been let loose with a welder trying to cobble together a vehicle on a desert island with no other resources.

In fact, it doesn't. Because even they'd have done a better job.

Lee D Silver badge

They wanted to ensure there could only be one bad review and disappointed customer per vehicle.

Airbus to test sat-stabilizing 'Detumbler' to simplify astro-garbage disposal

Lee D Silver badge

Space Junk is a problem, but it's a problem because we don't take some very simple steps. Like:

- Before you're allowed to launch into space, you must deposit the full current cost of decommissioning your equipment. The money accumulates interest, is used to deorbit yours and other satellites. You don't get it back (unless your satellite literally never made it into space, I suppose).

- You sign a waiver that says that ANYONE can de-orbit your gear once it's declared defunct (because touching a Chinese satellite that you think is space debris only to start a war when it turns out to be a stealthy military satellite is a serious concern).

- Standardised equipment, orbits and permissions for everyone.

And none of that is going to happen, purely because of petty human politics and geographic boundaries.

Cruise parks entire US fleet over safety fears

Lee D Silver badge

Re: If you can fix train ridership, you can fix bus ridership

This is not an exaggeration but I live in rural Oxfordshire. I moved there last year.

There is precisely one bus that stops in my village.

It goes to a small town, drops off near the "market".

It runs only on market days. Which is a Tuesday or something. I don't know because I've never witnessed the actual market, even though I've driven through that town on countless hundreds of instances for each day. If there is a market, it's not what you and I know as a market. Also, that town only has about 10 roads and 5 shops, so it's not in some side-street or other.

Anyway, this bus runs once every Tuesday. It goes from another big town MANY miles away, into my village, and then onto another town 3 miles away.

That's it. It doesn't COME BACK. It just goes there.

I asked all the neighbours about it - in a village of barely a few dozen people, nobody has even seen it, knew it ran or ever used it. Why would you?

Apparently it was there for the elderly and disabled to get to the village on market days. It just abandons them there. It doesn't even go back to the far larger town further away. So nobody ever uses it. It's only because we're a village that it has to go past to get to the bigger town, it "stops" but we're absolutely not who it's designed for. It's designed for one big town to transport people to a smaller town.

I have seen this mythical bus (I believe) twice. It's a little minibus. I saw it stopped, or got stuck behind it, once or twice in my village. I've never seen anyone get on it. There were about 3 people on it whenever it was heading towards the drop-off in the town.

People don't believe me, and then I show them the schedules.

One bus. One day. One trip. One way. One destination.

Strangely, when planning permission was being sought to add ten new houses to the village, this was raised - because the village has no resources of its own, no public transport, no schools, no doctors, etc. The council refused planning permission and all appeals because there just aren't the facilities to serve the village, including transport.

The other day my car was unusable and I haven't tried to get to my current employer by public transport. The journey is 25 minutes in a car. I used all the tools and found the "best route". This involves a 20 minute DRIVE to the nearest railway station. Catching a train into Central London. Changing onto another train out of Central London. And then a 30 minute walk to my workplace. The total estimated time - including waiting for trains - was 3.5 hours.

The other story I have is when I was challenged why I don't use public transport. At the time I lived in a pretty major London town that you've definitely heard of. I worked just across the same town. My commute was about a 5-10 minute drive.

I researched the public transport. The one, sole, viable option I could find was thus: a 20 minute walk to a particular bus stop. Catch a single bus that only ran at one time that would get me to work on time (earlier, that bus doesn't run, later the other required links don't run or have huge gaps to make me late). Get off bus, walk to another bus stop. Wait 15 minutes. Get on that bus (assume it's perfectly on-time), get off that bus, get on another bus almost immediately (again, I hope everything's running on time!), get off bus, walk for 15 minutes to destination (because no other bus goes that way).

When people ask me why I don't use public transport in the UK, I tell them - it absolutely, categorically sucks unless you've deliberately bought a house and got a job near the right type of public transport. Anything else, and you're absolutely stuffed. And those houses/jobs are costed to factor that kind of access in - the houses are more expensive, and the jobs don't provide any other way to get to them, nowhere to park, you have to buy a season ticket, etc. etc. etc.

Even when it comes to travel for a break or holiday... I can take some ridiculous time and money to get to Cornwall from London (and only certain places in Cornwall), or I can do it in half the time, half the cost just driving myself, whenever I like, however I like, to wherever I like.

I'm not a car fanatic, I have no interest in Jeremy Clarkson's diatribes or fast cars or making loud noises or leaving tyre tracks. I never have. I don't like that the only way I can reasonably get to most places is by car. But that's been a fact of life for almost my entire life, except when I lived in London near a tube station and went to university in London near a tube station on the same line.

My retirement plans include an electric car, because there is no other reasonable alternative whatsoever. And when I start becoming too infirm for that, I'm stuck. Sure, I'll have "the time" to spend 3.5 hours trying to go shopping, but I will not have the inclination at all. And I imagine I'll just live in the same village and order goods in. Goods that will arrive by road.

Public transport is abysmal almost everywhere I've ever lived. In one place it was actually better for me to get on a train for half the journey and then cycle for 15 miles to get to work than it was to get the equivalent buses and trains.

That's before you even get into timings, reliability, frequency, night services, rail replacements, and all the other things that "go wrong" so often that they are more correctly called "the norm".

As far as I'm concerned, outside the centre of major cities, mostly London, we just don't have public transport.

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

Lee D Silver badge

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

I once fitted an entire 12 foot shed into a standard hatchback Mondeo, I moved house entirely with a Mondeo (lots of trips, and a roof rack, and a car full of stuff, but took double-beds, sofas, bookcases, etc. no problem at all), and I put a 9ft live Christmas tree in one every year (saves me buying pine-scented air freshener...).

Lee D Silver badge

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

One of the reasons I'm invested in an amateur solar setup is that it's not dependent on a utility.

Every month, I'm "required" to overpay a company for electricity that I know I haven't used. Then I can claim it back later. What I do, every time I point out that their estimates are pants and have no basis in mathematics or reality, is refund that overpaid money and spend it on solar (panels, batteries, etc.). So the next month, I use even less electricity, and have even less reliance on the power company. I rode out a 4-hour power outage the other day and that's just the beginning.

In an apocalyptic example, fuel is going to be gone quick. And solar panels will die about 10 years later and we probably won't have the tech to make any more. Even batteries will be dead 10-15 years later. But generating *electricity* in any form will still be viable - stick a waterwheel on an old washing machine motor and drop it half in a river... hey presto, electricity! And generating some form of battery will be viable.

And there, an electric vehicle (suitably modified) may well be the most sensible way of getting around because maintaining and fuelling an ICE will be next to impossible after a few years.

It's one of the reasons I bought a particular house recently (not a zombie apocalypse, I'm not a nutter!)... it was small, all-electric, nice roofspace, etc. It's my retirement house, 20 years from now. By which time I hope to be relatively independent of utilities. And the basis of it all was electricity:

- Make your own electricity

- Store your own electricity

- Convert your own electricity

- Have a house, appliances and vehicle that only really need electricity.

I don't expect to have to Heath-Robinson a river water wheel, but it means I can use anything to make electricity that will power everything.

I can fall back to the grid. I can use my solar. I can even just hook up a small generator and power the lot (and I have my eye on an LPG / petrol dual-fuel generator, and already have a solar inverter that can accept an outside power input and let it override the solar).

Hell, I was looking at a £1000 box that store / pump / filter / treat rainwater to work as greywater in the house, and even an incinerator toilet that can burn your waste leaving nothing but sterile ash that you can put on the garden. And that's powered by... electricity (it's basically an automated electric kiln).

We have strayed away from a universal, easily transported, easily stored, versatile form of energy - even the first cars were mostly electric - and now we have the battery technology to get back where we should have been.

Gas boilers are now being banned in the UK. ICE cars will be banned. Soon it'll be gas cookers, etc. Heating is moving to heat pumps (electrical), etc.

Electrics are a much better option, but not because solar will keep working forever. Because you can generate it in a dozen different ways and use it in a dozen different ways and supply almost all your needs with it.

Lee D Silver badge

And it'll never sell in Europe because it can't pass EuroNCAP tests.

Despite the fact that Musk was praising European sales of his vehicles the other day, he's cut the entire market out of this product purely because he wants his toddler-sketch pedestrian slicer.

Lee D Silver badge

Could they do more to make people not want to buy one?

Fujitsu-backed FDK claims nickel zinc batteries ready for use in UPSes

Lee D Silver badge

Most start-stop car batteries are AGM too.

My Ford one was, from the factory, and the replacements all are.

Lee D Silver badge

You can charge them below that but you have to do it at a reduced rate.

Almost all decent LiFePO4 batteries have a BMS which will refuse charging at too high a current at too low a temperature.

Some even include warmers to warm the batteries in low temperatures when on charge.

And all the solar-controller-chargers, etc. are aware and compensate for charging in such temperatures.

It's not that they can't be charged, it's that there's a limit to how fast you can charge them below zero. Which wouldn't be an issue after a few minutes of driving.

However, they store power far better than lead-acids and their voltage is linear to their charge, so you know exactly how much battery you have left.

They're used in marine applications all the time.

Bug hunters on your marks: TETRA radio encryption algorithms to enter public domain

Lee D Silver badge

It's not the black-box or even the software that would be the problem.

The hardware has to be able to do what you need it to do and cope with any new encryptions required, or patch any flaws in the radio end of the protocol.

They are not, presumably, software-defined radios, and they are based on a given base encryption requirement which may well be about to change if this one is obsoleted.

In the same way as Wifi / 3G means changes to previous generations and the next generation requires hardware changes or far more oomph to manage (and thus not every hardware is upgradeable), or other assumptions built into the hardware design mean that it can't actually do what you want no matter what software you throw at it.

To pick an analogy in a field we should all be familiar with - it's relatively easy to change the software on an Wifi router to talk WPA3 if it's just using software supplicants. It's a different thing entirely if it uses any kind of hardware supplicant or acceleration for such, and may not be possible at all. Hence obsoleting rafts of hardware that were working fine.

And if you factor in that you just listed 3 different mobile OS, and hardware systems are likely to vary depending on manufacturer and purchase date, that could mean a lot of radios obsoleted, or a lot of radios running insecure portions of the software for backwards compatibility.

This looks to me to be a far bigger potential problem - if those protocols are actually insecure and need to be changed for something that requires even a little more oomph.

Lee D Silver badge

Well, let's see what kind of rubbish is in that, I'm guessing at this point it'll be obsoleted within a year (because presumably most TETRA radios are pretty much unpatchable, despite it being 2023) and replaced with something else because of what's found when this happens.

Passive SSH server private key compromise is real ... for some vulnerable gear

Lee D Silver badge

That's okay, nobody in their right mind would be foolish enough to expose the SSH management port of a switch or router to the Internet or even their local network, right?

VLANs have been a thing for decades, so obviously you're all isolating those kinds of things to management networks only, right?

Datacenter would spoil beautiful view ... of former industrial waste dump

Lee D Silver badge

Do you know what happens when you allow things because they're "only a stone's throw" from something horrible, but at the same time tear up the green-belt plans?

There's only one inevitable conclusion, and that's precisely what made the green belt necessary in the first place - everything turns into concrete which grows, unchecked.

10 years ago, you were next to a field. Now you're next to a house that's next to a house that's next to a house that's next to a motorway... and before you know it there is no field, and the next field over is the same, and so on and so on.

Nobody wants a motorway in their back yard, but equally nobody wants zero development at all, either (especially with a growing population).

It's about choosing the best place for it... and in a long-established and legally-sound green belt is not the place when you could go a few miles in a couple of directions and do just the same but without infringing on the green belt.

Do you know, I lived in and around London for 40 years and I'd never seen anything like the wildlife, flora, night-sky and silence that I got when I moved into a part of Oxfordshire just 20 minutes from London? We can't just obliterate all that without thinking, when there are plenty of other urban and semi-urban places to build a datacentre.

Lee D Silver badge

Exactly what I suspected in my post below!

Lee D Silver badge

If it was last used as a landfill in 1987, chances are its nothing like a landfill now. There are lots of former landfills that are now parks, green hills, and actually quite pretty.

I mean, it could look like Beckton Ski Slope (anyone?) but it could also just look like a hill now.

That aside, I live in rural Oxfordshire now, and it's actually very picturesque but you could easily ruin it with just one new huge building like that. Whether it was near me or not, I wouldn't want it spoiling that view when there are plenty of more suitable locations - a datacentre doesn't need to be out in the sticks, it could be on any brownfield site. Hey, what does Ford Dagenham look like nowadays? And I think they had 2 wind turbines there at one point, plus a large river for cooling...

And I'm no NIMBY. The only planning permission near me lately was for 10 very nice houses that would have kept my cul-de-sac a cul-de-sac permanently. At the moment, it just ends facing a field, and I can quite see someone trying to turn that into a road to new houses on the field at some point. But the plans were to shut it off and I would live in an isolated rural cul-de-sac forever more. I was quite sad to see the planning denied (mainly because it would almost double the "traffic" and the population of the town overnight, and Oxfordshire's argument against it basically said that there were TONS of other, more suitable sites, and that you could make far more houses elsewhere (than building just ten £1m mansions for rich people), and that expansion on that land would require humungous upgrades to everything in the local area because there are no shops, schools, doctors, etc. I was actually in agreement but also secretly wanting them to build it so I only have millionaires a long way away as neighbours, and nobody can ever use my road as a cut-through, and pretty much all further planning would be denied because of the way it was laid out making anything else impractical.

But for sure I could find you a better site for a datacentre, in a much better place for people to actually get to in order to work there.

UK signals legal changes to self-driving vehicle liabilities

Lee D Silver badge

Re: only the driver – be it the vehicle or person – is accountable

Why not? That's what humans get. And this self-driver is all the same entity, so yep.

Now imagine the insurance that the manufacturers will build into it once they realise that one car accident could cripple all their cars until the courts rule it's safe to drive again. Ouch.

The onus is entirely on whatever is in control of the vehicle. If that's me, it's on me. If that's not me, it's going to be the car.

Like I explain to bad bosses on a regular basis in my career - I can have both the power and the responsibility, or neither, but you can't mix and match.

Lee D Silver badge

It's the old hybrid-dilemma.

If you hedge your bets and try to make a device do two different things, chances are it will do both badly and cause you more problems than either.

As far as I see it, you would need to be buying a "self-driving car" (with a subscription because the software/insurance would be on the manufacturer of the car) or a "human-driving car".

At that point you can abandon all controls, steering, instruments, much of the dashboard, etc. and make the car's job so much easier.

But trying to do both in one is just a temporary solution that's never going to work well in terms of liability, insurance, etc. We're already seeing that with Tesla "Autopilot". All parties point fingers at the other and it becomes an expensive mess to sort out.

Whereas a dedicated self or human driving car - you know exactly who's liable immediately and can just deal with the collision (never "accident") straight away.

Self-driving cars will be a thing eventually, but they'll be a totally different thing. They'll be a personal transport unit that you hire or rent. The seats don't even need to face forward or even be seats - they could be beds! But the obsession with trying to make the car do the human's job but tolerating interference from the human, not to mention all the other humans around it, on a road built for humans and signs and signals readable by humans, plus handing back to a dead/inattentive human if it panics, and putting the onus on the human at all times... that's just a ridiculous mess of liability.

I would be happy to see a little automated pod zooming down an isolated lane of a motorway overtaking me, with kids lying on a bed reading a book on the back seat, and mum and dad making sandwiches in the front seat (which is turned to face the kids). I'd be in sci-fi heaven.

But what we have at the moment is idiot-hell where some twat thinks that their self-driving car is infallible, falls asleep at 70mph and kills a family, then tries to blame the manufacturer when it's not even clear if he ever turned on the self-driving at all.

Lee D Silver badge

This has always been necessary.

At which point you're putting the liability on the software - which if they are the "driver" by their definition - also means: INSURANCE.

So now although you might choose to insure your car as an asset, the "3rd-party" (main) component of the insurance should be on the system driving it.

Then you will discover that a) nobody wants to take that on as a car manufacturer and/or b) the cost of self-driving cars / subscriptions (yep, ongoing costs of insurance will require ongoing subscriptions) skyrockets to compensate.

And it's only at that point that, drunk as a skunk, you can get into a self-driving car and let it take you home. Until then, you are always the driver/responsible.

So, look forward to expensive subscriptions for self-driving, paying insurance for the vehicle AND 3rd-party insurance via the subscription, and companies being sued to oblivion and your car "decertified" if, for instance, something like the Dieselgate scandal comes out, or some AI is found to be terribly faulty as a knock-on effect of even one lawsuit involving the cars around the world. A recall will mean "no driver" until you update your software to a recertified version. Not to mention obsoletion when your car software is not up-to-date, or is too old to support, and now it's no longer legal to use on the road except if you're driving it yourself.

This stuff is all "just another 20 years away" again, because the above isn't going to happen overnight no matter how much business you throw at it. And when it does, Ford etc. are then basically a software / insurance company that happens to make cars.

Microsoft hits Alt+F4 on internal ChatGPT access over security jitters, irony ensues

Lee D Silver badge

Was literally talking about so-called "AI" the other day to a teacher.

They want to use Bing Copilot on their 365 account, because they "use it on their personal account".

Dug into it, it requires complete access to your 365 account. Not gonna happen.

Triggered a discussion, but the old-fogies in the room including myself were quite adamant about this:

- If it is given access to data, we have to account for how, when and why we are processing that data with AI, and tell people whose data it is.

We can't just let it run around a 365 account which has access to all sorts of privileged data and then hand-wave about how we're processing it or what it can or can't do with that data. We have to assume it is actually accessing it all... because it can. We have to assume it's using all the data when processing... because it can. And without access to the source code or knowing how it works and what it does with that data, we can't take responsibility for it.

Now imagine when things pop up like "How did you make that hiring decision? What data on my client did you have and how was that processed and by whom?" and now you a potential timebomb on your hands.

Sorry, but it's very simple - don't give AI any access, data or capability that you don't want it to have. The same as any human user on such a system.

The old fogies and the techs realised that, within seconds of receiving the request, but the other people were still on the "Yes, but it's Microsoft" and "Other places are doing it" etc. bandwagons.

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

Lee D Silver badge

I was thinking more that a CAA record can be definitive, so if the presented root CA is as pre CAA, it gets accepted for THAT SITE ONLY.

And therefore sites are automatically filling in their CA and root CA and browsers ship with nothing trusted by default.

Why should I be accepting a root CA to browse My Bank and then automatically accept everything that it claims to secure including Random 3rd Party Website forever more?

And if the governments want to get into CAA and DNSSEC tampering, there are alternates and measures in those already.

Lee D Silver badge

There was me wondering why my browser comes with any CAs by default anyway.

Just give me the option to wipe them clean when I start and then I approve/deny root CAs as and when I need to (in a similar style to approving SSH keys).

Major telco outage leaves millions of Australians disconnected

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Not quite to same scale

As an IT manager for schools - that's a nonsense.

There's no way that an Internet failure should take out fire alarms - they can't be compliant.

Also - no MIS access is feasible, but emergency contact details should be printed out and/or otherwise held offline and on-site. You could phone the MIS provider and ask them to send the output of a single emergency report (which all MIS have) to an email address, and then access it on a phone, in extremis.

Stopping a school running for either of the above is a failure of their basic processes, whether they use third-parties or not.

What are they going to do in a real fire that occurs in the middle of the school day and burns through the networking cabinets? Are they going to shrug and say "Oh, well, we can't possibly know how to contact parents or see if we're missing any children now". They'd be shut down by the DoE and the fire service if nobody else.

And no - repeat NO - fire alarm should have any network dependency, let alone Internet dependency. You keep that stuff entirely separate for a reason.

Something tells me a fire inspector is going to be paying them a visit "real soon now".

Lee D Silver badge

Re: I Feel for the small shops...

Almost like if you're running a business-critical system like payment processing that you need an independent backup that's not reliant on a single telco.

No matter the practicalities of that, small business is no different - if it's going to cost you, say, thousands of dollars to go a day without payment processing, then you should at least be spending a thousand dollars to try to mitigate that in most circumstances.

They could buy Starlink (or other satellite broadband), they could use another cellular provider, they could link with other local shops and get another / better line, etc.

I cannot imagine - as a self-employed person - running any kind of physical retail shop without at least a Square or iZettle reader under the counter for backup, and some other way of getting online.

I kind of get it in the middle of nowhere out in the sticks, but that's not where the vast, vast majority of Australians live or Australian shops are.

Honestly, if I had my entire income stream reliant on a little box that swipes cards, I'd have several backups of all the parts necessary if that were to fail.

Monero Project admits thieves stole 6-figure sum from a wallet in mystery breach

Lee D Silver badge

Sorry, but why aren't you moving that into an offline wallet on a regular basis?

I mean, at least every $100,000, even if there's a transaction charge. I'd be doing it every $10,000 or similar. Activate machine with offline wallet, send money to offline wallet, confirm transaction, turn off machine with offline wallet.

Same way that supermarket cashiers would put notes into a tub and send off to a safe rather than having it all on the shop floor for anyone to rob.

For rich people, and large companies dealing in money, they appear to be completely naive in how they handle other people's.

Microsoft likens MFA to 1960s seatbelts, buckles admins in yet keeps eject button

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Please think of the techies

This doesn't affect any corporate user, because you're not actually storing data on those systems anyway (so the user can be given any other machine in the meantime) and you have full access to the machine.

Remoting into a broken computer where you can't log into it as yourself is definitely a "return to base" issue nowadays.

The whole point of MFA is that you can't pretend to be the user without their cooperation. The whole point of a corporate managed system is that IT don't need to.

'Corrupt' cop jailed for tipping off pal to EncroChat dragnet

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Sneaky badges got caught

As Terry Pratchett went to great lengths to point out in his character Samuel Vimes:

Sometimes you need secret policemen because there are sometimes secret crimes.

Home of the world's longest pleasure pier joins public sector leak club

Lee D Silver badge

Re: So :

Not really.

Your NI number isn't privileged and nothing should hang off it (unless people are being absolutely incompetent).

Your name and address are a matter of public record, easily discovered for any given individual - you give that to Amazon or everyone that you ever receive a letter from, for example.

Pension scheme - yeah, maybe some slight phishing possibility there but nothing really major.

Salary? Nope. Horrible personal data to have leaked but not a security issue of accessing anything (nobody genuine is going to ask you to enter your salary to gain access to a website, for example).

Same for equal opportunities data.

Any place that lets the above information take over an account without checking is utterly incompetent, and probably failing their own GDPR to be honest.

What I don't see in that list are passwords, account numbers, security questions, etc. that would actually be required to directly do any harm.

It's actually quite a low-level compromise, with the exception of the salaries.

P.S. your employer knows all the above, anyone who works in the accounts or payroll department, anyone who works in the HR department, as do all of your previous employers up to a given point in time.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Excel and FoI basics

It's the one sole reason for which I tolerate CSV.

No fancy hidden data, just a text-readable file that you can inspect and search for any private data if necessary.

We need a kind of "PDF" standard for data export (but, again, without the possibility of revealing data hidden behind poor censorship attempts, etc.).

Something like a single SQLite database table with no fancy features, or similar. Or Firebird. Same kind of program.