* Posts by macjules

3426 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2014

El Reg tries – and fails – to get its talons on a Brexit tea towel

macjules

Re: Got Brexit done?

Great idea: we would only need a room in a small hotel somewhere. Should be a smash!

macjules
Unhappy

Re: Tea towel?

lapel pin - Made in China with a warning that you might contract Novel Coronavirus should you accidentally prick your finger.

mug - the handle is inside the mug.

a magnet - designed by James Dyson so fails to attract at all and is as much use as one of his vacuum cleaners.

Canadian insurer paid for ransomware decryptor. Now it's hunting the scum down

macjules

You left out the words 'low orbital bombardment'.

macjules

pissing off a company that has a lot of cash and hiding somewhere without an extradition treaty

I should think that one of the joys of having a lot of cash is being able to have some gentlemen with unsightly bulges under their arms visit said country and 'persuade' the scumbag to return.

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

macjules

Re: WTF?

As a yardstick measure, does anyone know what the SLA is on the Starfleet Command United States Space Force GPS system?

Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

macjules

Re: Peter Holgate is correct

HPE: "What is due diligence?"

KPMG: "It's where we say 'Yes, it ok to buy this company' and you sue Mike Lynch years later"

HPE; "But what if you are wrong?"

KPMG: "Then we get another of the Big 4 to testify in court that we did nothing wrong"

The duke of URL: Zoom meetups' info leaked out through eavesdrop hole

macjules
Devil

How unfortunate

Just as the world's largest advertising agency (WPP) moved everyone from Webex to Zoom.

(Spawn of Satan since we lack a Schadenfreude icon)

Virtual reality is a bonkers fad that no one takes seriously but anyway, here's someone to tell us to worry about hackers

macjules

Re: Her initiative is seeking donations

Exactly.

establish safety and ethics standards

Not sure if any area at all in the computer industry has that.

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

macjules

Re: Good, good.

Not sure I believe you on this. I have responsibility for a number of staff in my London office and almost three quarters of the staff are EU citizens around 200. Not one member of staff has reported any problem with being able to stay in the UK. In fact I have one Bulgarian staffer who started before Christmas and told me how impressed he was that the Home Office went out of their way to show him the steps he needed to follow to stay here permanently if he wished.

You're always a day Huawei: UK to decide whether to ban Chinese firm's kit from 5G networks tomorrow

macjules

Re: Loss of Sovereignty

Exactly. The Daily Mail says so, so it must be true. Nice to see that the US government uses the Daily Mail as its fount of all knowledge: the rest of us just wipe parts of our body with it.

macjules

Re: Who wins here?

Last time I checked Ericsson was a Swedish company, as in Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson.

Windows takes a tumble in the land of the Big Mac and Bacon Double Cheeseburger

macjules

Re: That's nice....

There is a Vodafone shop in Fulham Broadway where the screens are permanently displaying a TeamViewer error message. I asked them about it several months ago and received the usual, "Meh. Not my problem" response.

BOFH: When was the last time someone said these exact words to you: You are the sunshine of my life?

macjules

Hell's boardroom is a place of tranquility and calm in comparison to some of the scrum retrospectives I have been forced to host and review.

If there is a tool for the 8th circle of Hell that they want to use to torture the souls of BitCoin fraudsters then it must be making those souls allocate how much time they require for suffering and torment in Jira.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

macjules
Coat

Re: User replaceable batteries

Yes, that will teach Boeing to use the same battery suppliers as Apple!

(Mine's the coat with the hot pockets.)

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

macjules

Stopped that many years ago. Cash is always welcome if you want to say "Hey, you do computers, don't you?" and the answer is always, "Yes and it is £80 per 30 minutes with a minimum 1 hour charge".

2015-member database floats off through breach in Royal Yachting Association's hull

macjules
Coat

Re: Somebody should walk the plank

The plank only got walked last week. Now he is back in his position as RYA club secretary.

Russian super-crook behind $20m internet fraud den Cardplanet and malware-exchange forum pleads guilty

macjules

Criminal References?

"To obtain membership in Burkov’s cybercrime forum, prospective members needed three existing members to 'vouch' for their good reputation among cybercriminals and to provide a sum of money, normally $5,000, as insurance,"

I have never heard of criminals needing references from other criminals. Surely this sort of defies the object of being a crook? Who knows, next we could be seeing Boeing asking their developers to prove that they can write software?

Spanking the pirates of corporate security? Try a Plimsoll

macjules

Re: A decent backup strategy is very expensive.

Ok, a returning space shuttle hitting a 737 Max which then changes its MCAS profile and crashes into your car might well be very unfortunate indeed. But not impossible. And please do not forget that that is more likely than anyone winning the Euromillions jackpot, so be warned.

macjules

At sea ..

At sea as in commerce, the best defence against both icebergs and pirates is a sharp look-out.

And a minigun. With a fsck load of ammo.

macjules
FAIL

And AWS?

Part of the problem is that Travelex's developers or their DevOps team seem to have been scope-locked onto using AWS for hosting, while apparently not ensuring a security group protocol and not having a clear backup policy; something unthinkable in this day and age. A relatively simple audit of their digital estate would have revealed this and (heavens forbid!) someone might have recommended that since Travelex were very much Microsoft orientated that they move to Azure hosting, which would at least have ensured automated backups of sites, databases and the API.

Not only that, but also someone would have been able to quickly work out that Travelex was using a framework that was effectively discontinued in 2012 (.NET 4.0.30319) and that it might be time to upgrade to something a bit more current.

Oh and we have a name to blame for this fiasco.

an AWS security architect worked with us closely, shared industry knowledge, and ultimately helped us

Remind me not to employ AWS security architects in the future. :)

One-time Brexit Secretary David Davis demands Mike Lynch's extradition to US be halted

macjules

Re: Rabid Dog

Personally I am looking forward to a hearing in a magistrates court along the lines of, "Mrs Sacoolas privately agreed with certain gentlemen to be extradited via a jet that we just happened to have waiting on the tarmac'

Keg-xistential issues: Fullers pours away £10m Infor ERP system after selling brewing business

macjules
Coat

The question is ..

Did they use Homebrew?

$ brew cask uninstall ERP

Sorry to be blunt about this... Open AWS S3 storage bucket just made 30,000 potheads' privacy go up in smoke

macjules

Re: Dude...Where's my data?

S3 major breaches list: https://github.com/nagwww/s3-leaks

macjules
Facepalm

It's all gone Up In Smoke ...

Rugby legend Will Carling tells El Reg: Techie stats bods will love this year's Six Nations

macjules
Paris Hilton

AWS-driven tech?

Perhaps one could say that "Arguing with a referee is like reading the Software Licence Agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree."

(Paris, since we lack a 'tongue in cheek' icon)

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

macjules

+1 Allow me to bookmark "Sergei's Emporium of Tat" for future use!

macjules

Dunno, perhaps console.amazon, aws.amazon, s3.theregister.amazon?

Just a thought, mind.

German taxpayers faced with €800k Windows 7 support bill due to Deutschland dithering

macjules

TITSUP?

More Brüste nach oben if you ask me.

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

macjules
Paris Hilton

Always handy for when the FBI need to access your cloud storage. I commend you for your public spirit Sir.

Over a thousand electronic gizmos went missing from London councils last year

macjules
Meh

Over a thousand electronic gizmos went missing from London councils last year

Bet they didn't lose any of those blasted parking attendant computers though.

As miscreants prey on thousands of vulnerable boxes, Citrix finally emits patches to fill in hijacking holes in Gateway and ADC

macjules
Paris Hilton

"We urge customers to immediately install these fixes.

Citrix's Fermin Serna said in a statement: "We urge customers to immediately install these fixes.

Hang on a sec. A hacker would say something exactly like that though. How can we be assured that Citrix's Fermin Serna really said that?

Hospital hacker spared prison after plod find almost 9,000 cardiac images at his home

macjules

Re: Hacker?

At what point does a member of staff with valid network credentials become known as a hacker?

The moment his Implied Right of Access has been revoked.

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

macjules
Meh

Re: Enquiries

Hah! My brood know that the the only way they can contact me is via Signal or, if it is important, by simply telephoning my better half or myself. They have been taught that Facebook, Twitter etc are obviously the evil spawn of Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckenberg and other global Illuminati.

Of course they pay as much attention to that as any child would and go back to direct messaging each other on Twitter.

Autonomous Logistics Information System gets shoved off the F-35 gravy train in favour of ODIN

macjules
Facepalm

TITSUP?

Why not just replace the entire system with the newer Boeing product TITSUP?

The $4.3bn trial of the century is over! Now we wait for judgment

macjules
Paris Hilton

Due Diligence Report

HP** did not wait for audit firm KPMG to deliver a final due diligence report before going ahead with the buyout.

I rather suspect that that will be the lynchpin ('scuse the pun) of the entire case.

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

macjules
Black Helicopters

Yeah, like we have had nearly 3 years to prepare for Brexit.

Yet nothing has been done about that either.

Totally Subcontracted Business: TSB to outsource entire IT estate to IBM for a cool $1bn after 2019 meltdown

macjules

Re: New TSB slogan

IBM has its own offices in India, so it does not need to "outsource".

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain's part in the accounting badness was 'wildly overblown'

macjules

"We take a rather different view over here"

Pointedly, the judge observed later on: "We take a rather different view over here… we rather regard any resort to the privilege against self-incrimination as a black mark."

Dear God, that a UK judge actually has to say that in a UK court of law. I am so looking forwards to, "We find against HPE and furthermore refer this case to the Crown Prosecution Service for further action". What a truly despicable company (not that Autonomy were much better mind).

Apple calls BS on FBI, AG: We're totally not dragging our feet in murder probe iPhone decryption. PS: No backdoors

macjules

Err, I think that the only reason they are anti the FBI having a backdoor is because there are so many that they have already put in there for themselves.

Welcome to the 2020s: Booby-trapped Office files, NSA tipping off Windows cert-spoofing bugs, RDP flaws...

macjules

Re: So...

Travelex will be happy to hear that the RDP flaws have been fixed. Or not.

AI of the needle: Here's how neural networks could detect nighttime low blood-sugar levels using your heart beat

macjules

Re: I know when my blood sugars are low at night..

My better half says that the test strips are like buying HP printer ink - you get the printer dead cheap and then get ripped off for the inks.

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

macjules

Re: Inconsistent with Boeing values

No, that's the software developers for MCAS. There's one short of a billion of them.

macjules
Coat

Re: Fuck you Boeing

You are certainly not going to catch a 737-MAX for the foreseeable future.

Mine's the one with the secret FAA report in one pocket and a P45 in the other.

macjules

Re: Inconsistent with Boeing values

His severance package includes a seat on the first 737-MAX to take to the skies, along with the rest of the board, on a worldwide reassurance tour.

Oh, and the pilots are clowns wearing monkey suits.

UK Home Office opens AWS cash firehose even wider with £100m public cloud services deal

macjules

Re: Should be hosted in the UK by a UK organisation

Well the simple answer is that UKHO retain the £100m spend and pass it on to HMRC saying to AWS that "we paid some of your outstanding taxes for you".

BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret

macjules

Re: 'You brought nothing to the party but a six pack of regret?'

That's just the City of London. But only if the courts do her bidding, such as finding Lynch guilty and ordering him bound and gagged and ready for extraordinary rendition.

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

macjules

Re: "Lightsaber"

Nope, its a pyromaniac with an affection for igniting anyone called 'Abe'.

Dixons fined £500,000 by ICO for crap security that exposed 5.6 million customers' payment cards

macjules

I still use SW1A 1AA, house # 1

Google and IBM square off in Schrodinger’s catfight over quantum supremacy

macjules

Re: Seems my post still hasn't made it yet

Nah, 'isopope' is a new international standard for Popes.