Posts by hoola

Re: Why are they controlled remotely anyway?

A lot of the control is also down to out-of-hours switching for reducing power consumption.

What is infuriating is that most of the LED streetlights are not saving any power over the LPS or HPS as they are simply using the same KWHr but are far brighter. That most are now insanely bright to the point that it is disrupting sleep patterns and wildlife is an irrelevance.

The light pollution is also beyond belief as they lights are so bright even though it is all pointing down what is reflected back up is causing massive light domes over any built up areas.

Re: OK, let's follow this through then..

I really don't understand how forcing a company to sell part of it's operation really changes things.

Just because the "owner" is based in the host country does not change anything in terms of operation. They can still pretty much do what they want.

Re: This whole industry is a self-licking ice cream cone

Just commenting.....

you also need AppleID, Google Accounts and so on. There is not the same ranting about those.

Many will already have a Microsoft account if they use X Box, or have an Office365 subscription.

As far as the other two go I fail to see what the difference is between then an MS.

Re: “Ministers are said to be considering banning sales....

I would guess that the majority have no controls on.

Older siblings or friends will put Instagram, Facebook etc on but clicking through.

Parent's have no idea what is on the device and sadly most simply don't care.

The crunch comes where grooming takes place or they have viewed utterly inappropriate contents (in many ways inappropriate for adults as well) that cannot be undone.

Then it is all someone else's fault.

Just like the television became the electronic baby sitter, tablets and phones are the default for many. The trouble is that the content is far worse.

Given how much is now installed using a tiny installer that runs then promptly download some mahoosive package from a random site on the Internet I am not sure that visible exe has much relevance now.

Very little is modular now because it is cheap to just replace then entire item. There is simply no value to the supplier or the fitter to replace a plug in module when it is deemed easier to just replace the meter.

Given that older spinning wheel or early digital meters ran for decades quite happily for decades I simply don't buy the concept that a Smart Meter saver anybody anything. All this crap about items on standby and the stupid smart meter is consuming power telling you what is running.

I already know what is running.

Strangely I also know that if I turn on the cooker or kettle the consumption goes up. When they turn off consumption goes down.

My mother (83 at the time) got into a huge flap when she was bamboozled into an ancient spinning wheel meter being replaced as it was better for her and there was this display on the worktop show £££ being spent. Guess what, turn on the kettle, toaster or worse a heater and it shows umpteen pounds per hour or day (cannot remember what). Her bills were not large & were affordable. The stupid Smart Meter cause huge amounts of upset for no reason. I took the display away and life returned to normal.

Re: "avoid using the default credentials"

Even more basic, why is there even a default credential.

It really is no that complicated to generate a unique password or force a change a the point of install. Heck even Windows does that,

Re: End game?

There are some fiction books written by Sean McFate that are interesting in this context.

High Treason, Deep Black & Shadow War and then some more factual ones.

It is an interesting insight....

Re: Fired for Insubordination

I think the critical part here is that the protest took place on company property. As part of the protest they refused to work but it also appears to have degenerated into something more with police being called.

If they had taken time off and protested in the street they would probably have got away with it. In the UK staff can picket and protest outside the gates but not on company property. During the time they are striking they are not paid. Clearly employment law in the US vastly favours the employer and for large corporations like this even more so.

Re: Boring is good.

How many remember the Motorola V3?

It was indestructible, worked, had a great screen and keypad you could use.

Re: If LibreOffice provided anything even approaching an alternative to 365 in functionality ...

All software has bugs, the only reason people rant so much about Microsoft is because it is so widely used.

Just using open source does not fix bugs. The big difference is that with open source most of the people using it are either technically proficient and can work around them or have the time to find a fix.

Regular users who are being provided with software to use in the job are not so able to do it.

Maybe they will be successful, only time will tell.

Re: And deliberately so

Google is also the killer, particularly when combines with Amazon.

You do a search for something and there are endless results for stuff on Amazon with what looks like good prices (often to good to be true).

If you do click on the link you get taken to some page that shows an ancient item that is long out of stock and should never have been returned in the first place. The assumption in many cases is that they never ever existed and it is just a way to get you in.

Now you have a page with all sorts of suggested items on Amazon so most not click on those so it is win-win for Amazon.

What really winds me up is how often those suggested items are more expensive than stuff that is in stock in the Google search or just in a good old shop.

People pick the cheapest that is in stock on Amazon & then say how great Amazon is and how cheap it is.

Everything about Amazon winds me up.

Re: Irony

In terms of conflict both the power generation and the datacentre are targets.

One could argue that it is far easier and significantly less risky to wipe out the bit-barn than the nuclear facility.

Given that there is zone & geo redundancy you have multiple targets anyway.

Most countries could be brought to a complete halt now but just zapping 2 or 3 major cloud providers. Locations are know and the missiles accurate enough for there to be minimal collateral damage.

One just hopes that Governments & the military have not put too much various clouds......

Sorry, had trouble typing that without falling off the chair!

Re: Let that be a lesson

As usual it is always easy to be critical from the side lines with no knowledge or understanding of what actually took place.

Not every security event is a result of incompetence or negligence. It is also vey easy to say something could have been avoided with hindsight.

If there is actual negligence then it should be easy enough to take action.

Re: It wont be technical issues which sink this

I don't disagree with ChromeBooks & Ipads and see plenty of both but you are using either Microsoft or Google Apps on top of that with the Office & Email.

You have not actually solved the underlying problem.

You have just replaced one huge vendor with another.

Equally most of the most of the equipment ends up being rendered unusable long before it's actual end of life by physical misuse on the part of kids.

The argument being made is that you can replace everything with Open Source, a ChromeBook & iPad are not open source they it may be possible for them to ran an open source application.

That most users don't highlights the scale of the challenge.

Re: All the above suggestions about standardising council software are good, but

Mostly that is because they have no choice.

They are tied into strict procurement frameworks and rules that make it nearly impossible to select a supplier that may do the job perfectly.

The outcome is that procurement is designed to protect Finance and Procurement teams from being sued by unsuccessful companies that put in tender responses that do not meet the criteria.

Who is to blame for this ridiculous state of affairs?

The same big IT incumbents who see the public sector, education & health as a cash cow they have a right to exploit.

Re: Why not have cloud.gov.uk ?

The first part is just a list of products or services, they all have to run on something,

The second part is correct, if any commercial cloud provider has a glitch people just accept it and post on Facebook/Twitter.

The difference is that when you use Amazon AWS/Microsoft Azure/Oracle you buy a service, have an account manager and when it goes wrong, just ring you account manager and put your feet up. Responsibility ends there.

If a UK Government Cloud service were to be provided the finger pointing and ranting that it did not work would be endless, even if it were better than the alternatives.

Re: Obscene

The insanity of IT and tech where all sense goes out of the window in the constant quest to make stuff better.

Much of the tech we have access to is a staggering waste of resources, it adds absolutely no tangible value to society and in many cases is actually detrimental.

It is not just power used on operation but all the elements & powered needed to make the equipment.

I don't care that people like Amazon and MS claim their datacentres are green. Most of that power could be put to far better use, maybe reducing costs for industries that actually make useful goods or food.

Sadly that is not going to happen as they will be unable to continue to collect data (quite so easily) to improve the useless ability of this shite.

Re: Doesn't TrueNAS Scale work just as well on the HP Microservers?

Or put in a P410/420 raid card then you get proper RAID support across any OS at the hardware level.

You can also use SAS disks then as well.

If you do this you need a converter tray, there is a neat metal one that will do SAS to SATA (It is only middle of the connector that is different). The backplane actually supports SAS 3 1/2" directly if you have a controller.

Maybe even more basic, staff will be assigned to wards or maybe even patients. If someone attempts to look at records that are outside their remit the access is flagged.

Re: color matched with the street cabinet beside it

Also they are repeatedly put in the most obvious locations.

In know it is only a bit of green behind but why the hell can they not put the sodding cabinets again fences. Also while they at it not chose the only narrow bit of pavement to obstruct and so on.,

There is no common sense of anything.

Where I am we have survived without Virgin Media cable however someone finally decided that all the pavements can be dug up to install the cable. Where the little crappy plastic lid on the pavement goes is being put in crazy locations, in the middle of the exit to a drive when there is grass 1m to the left.

I suspect the motivation for this is that we are very close to having the BT Digital Voice roll out and VM are trying to get customers before BT.

Re: Elephant in the room

Whilst it is very sad if people lose their money or the Crypto Currencies/Exchanges lose stuff I an not hugely sympathetic.

It is a completely unregulated market with no protection to anyone other than the criminals who appear to use it for anonymity.

There is a reason that banks exist, surrounded by regulation and in the UK protection for savers. It is also why returns are lower.

You could buy shares and things but the caveat is always there "you may not get back your original investment".

Security takes time and costs money. It is better for these outfits to concentrate on selling stuff and worry about security later. That is pretty much the model for any new technology now. They don't care, it is not their money or their data.

The only thing the may care about is if the actual code were stolen. Pretty much all this shite that is touted as AI is derived from data that has been collected using unsolicited means anyway, why shoudl the care if the data that was probably stolen or collected without consent in the first place is compromised again.

Maybe I am just a cynical old fart.....

There will be a hard core group of customers will continue to pay.

That is their choice, we may not agree but wherever you look there is always a group that are locked in to something for whatever reason. It is often not genuine technical reasons but usually management or high-level techies using features comparison charts to protect their favourite product, skills, certifications, job etc (delete as appropriate).

I suggest that for the foreseeable future there will be enough people pay Broadcom for VM subscriptions to make things work. I mean, you can buy it as a service in Azure now. It is not going to disappear quickly.

Re: "flexible monthly model introduces [..] uncertainty into the business."

Maybe part of the problem is that so much money now is in the hands of these "asset management companies" (Elliot spring to mind.....) and they have bough into so much with just enough to have a seat on the board, the only thing that matters is profit.

To be crystal clear on this, it is their profit, not the viability of the company they are milking. These VC & AM outfits can pretty much walk away whenever they want with impunity. It is unlikely they will make a loss.

Re: Maccas closed?

Anyone remember Wimpy in the UK?

Red vinyl bench seat things with a Formica table all bolted down.

No forgetting the giant red tomato with ketchup......

Re: Keep your key services inaccessible to the internet.

That does not work when everyone demands everything be available online.

Re: Taste own medicine

How?

We already have more CCTV in the UK than pretty much any other Western country.

Locks could be put on manholes but they have to be generic and robust.

Any cover can ultimately be damaged sufficiently to pour petrol in.

Cabinets can be wreaked by just parking your stolen vehicle on them (happened to our local cabinet).

In all these situations the perpetrators are long gone and pretty much untraceable.

Just like cable (and fibre thefts) from the rail network, anything like this is very difficult to actually secure to the point it cannot be damaged. Even if it were possible it is not affordable.

Re: Cynical? Me?

This is my projection:

£3.5Bn target over 6 years

2 years will wasted on procurement so the contracts are "given" to incumbents and Palantir with no oversight

£10Bn spent over 3 years

Bugger all delivered & what is delivered barely works

Contracts extended because too much has been invested to give up.

Palantir sucks every possible asset it can out of the NHS before say that they cannot deliver.

Re: A new 'zero day'?

It is most likely the latter.

If you do detect ransomware you just have to start switching things off.

Re: Who are their lawyers?

The Remain campaign also was catastrophically bad. The outcome of the 2016 referendum was not just because of the Leave campaign.

Remain arrogantly assumed a win was assured, they could not conceive of the possibility that anyone would not see the EU as anything but perfect. People voted Leave for a plethora of different reasons and the questions was very simple, in or out. There was no agreement on what leaving would be. For many who voted leave remaining in the Customs Union and Single Market was fine. What actually happened is that as the vote loomed it became clear that the Remain victory was far from assured.

At that point Remain made a mindbogglingly stupid error. Instead of pushing the advantages they attacked Leave. The media was full of statements about how shelves would be empty, house prices would crash, millions would be jobless. All fear-mongering, just as bad as those from the other side.

Then to put the cream topping on the unfolding disaster we had big businesses writing to their employees telling them how to vote. In true British form people will most likely have done the exact opposite simply because they were told to vote remain.

Then we have the 28% of mostly younger voters who allegedly all supported Remain who could not even be bothered to get off their arses and vote.

Once the result was in we had politicians on all sides of the EU and political divide doing their best to ensure the worst possible outcome. Any possible compromise to give a better outcome was systematically blocked by anyone. Hard core Remain MPs voted against everything on a matter of principal. The likes of the ERG voted against anything that was not "pull the shutters down and walk.. Combined they ensured that nothing progressed. That directly led to the 2019 GE with Johnson and "Get Brexit Done".

If politicians had not been so pig-headed and incompetent from the very start at best Brexit could have been avoided and at worst, the UK would still be in the CU & SM. That fixes 99% of the issues we are lumbered with.

There are calls to "Rejoin", we cannot do that, the UK can apply to join. All the benefits the had negotiated have been thrown away and are very unlikely to be clawed back. Equally those claiming that 56% of the population think Brexit was a mistake is conjecture. It is based on a poll, polls that have been notorious for being wrong. Then comparing those numbers with the 32% of the population that voted leave is also wrong. If you take the poll sample and compare that to the population it is a tiny percentage.

I don't like Brexit but it is not correct to lay the blame on those who voted leave. That is with those who did not vote and the politicians. The outcome we are stuck with is fair and square with politicians.

Re: Buy existing vs build new

That is debatable, buying most of the output of the new UK offshore windfarms does not help anyone other than Amazon.

Amazon (or anyone else) making their data centres "green" at the expense of reducing existing carbon emissions is a complete farce. If Amazon are that keen on renewables then put solar panels on their distribution centres, add turbines if they can or guess what, use some of the billions the accumulate wot build their own wind farms.