* Posts by macjules

3426 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2014

Uncle Sam prepping order to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch from the UK

macjules

Re: Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

So, trussed and exported in January? Perhaps they can put Julian Assange on the same cargo flight and save on the gas?

macjules

Re: Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

"Perhaps the US would be wise"

Now there's a tautology.

Ex-Capita accountant who claimed £10k bung to leave was blackmail has appeal thrown out

macjules
Coat

Re: Who to believe

I have yet to hear of someone "sweating like a Capita accountant".

TalkTalk says it's yet to close deal on FibreNation as UK telecoms industry reels over Labour's nationalisation plans

macjules

Re: Overly Excited

"Labour's policy would decimate the business plans of TalkTalk"

Be hard to see how any political party could do more than TalkTalk have already done to themselves.

Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

macjules
Coat

Re: Fake Meat Meet

Take away the cows and you would sort of be grazing at the bottom ... rump of vegan.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

macjules

Re: The big red button

Well I certainly had the clearance. I just used to wonder why there was such a high turnover of "ICL-qualified" staff moving onto the commercial sector, often without saying goodbye. Now I know.

macjules

Re: The big red button

Great story.

In the mid-eighties at a "secret government installation", or "Whitehall" as the rest of us called it, I was once asked to audit some of our security protocols for emergency shutdowns. The server room shutdown control was a suitably impressive big red button, on a bright yellow base with a sign saying "Do Not Touch Except in Emergency" plus various threats as to what would happen if you did. Back then there was a tendency to colour halon controls in green, so one might expect a separate green button on a yellow base with a similar sign above it.

But no, this is government contractors at the lowest price we are talking about. Thankfully nobody had ever had to hit the red server room power button, as the halon door lock and gas release had also been wired into it. Checking the evacuation protocol for around 5 admins it would appear appear that the Halon lockdown would have killed all of them since it gave less than 3 seconds to evacuate the room before engaging the door lock and releasing the flame suppressant.

What most distressed the department was not the fact that it could have killed 5 admins, but that it was in clear breach of HSE guidelines, and most of all in breach of a new piece of legislation, Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1985, or RIDDOR. Typical civil service.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

macjules
Happy

"Admittedly, he wrote those stories"

Suitably hoisted by your own petard I should think.

Thanks, Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk reveals Berlin as location for Euro Gigafactory

macjules

Re: No, the UK was never in the running

Or you simply go back to designing wheelbarrows.

macjules

Re: No, the UK was never in the running

Funny that you mention Dyson as, in a similar vein, Dyson has an R&D centre in Hullavington for battery technology. Mind you, I would probably trust a Dyson EV less than I might trust an Über killing machine autonomous vehicle - the only product that James Dyson makes that doesn't suck is his vacuum cleaner.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

macjules

Re: Everything will be FREE!!

I stopped complaining to BT about their speeds a year ago. I simply switched to Virgin which has not got very good customer services but does provide a 350Mbps line in an area of London where BT could/would only provide a maximum 3Mbps. They continue to maintain that it is not worth it to them to fibre-enable that particular exchange (W14 Blythe) as the 4 adjoining/overlapping enabled exchanges cover most of the area ... except, Kensington Olympia and much of its surrounding area, including several large hotels.

I really doubt they would even notice that they had been re-nationalised back into the "GPO", or whatever Labour want to call it. I would suggest that Labour also nationalises Vodafone, so that the GPO can learn how to build a particularly unpleasant customer "support" team.

What a boar! Wild pigs snort and snuffle €20k worth of marching powder stashed in Tuscan forest

macjules

Re: This is just the street dealers trying to get out of their debt to their supplier....

Except that you do not get a ‘D-‘. Instead you get “Where are my drugs you thieving bastard? And don’t tell me your pig ate them.”

DXC's new boss has quite the cleanup ahead after frankenfirm exits Q2 nursing $2bn loss

macjules
Coat

Re: I wish him luck, for the employees' sake

So, I take it that nobody is now whistling DXC then?

20% of UK businesses would rather axe their contractors than deal with IR35 – survey

macjules

Re: Dangers of moving from outside to inside IR35

In the absence of guidelines from HMRC then the ‘presumption’ is that you should immediately go onto PAYE and how dare you not do that.

Personally speaking as a contractor, I know that you are only employed on a permanent basis in IT until they can get someone cheaper to do your job or you can automate yourself into redundancy, so not a chance.

They terrrk err jerrrbs! Vodafone replaces 2,600 roles with '600 bots' in bid to shrink €48bn debt

macjules

Well, at least now when you talk to them they don’t swear at you like the UK ‘customer sewervices’ used to do,

+1 for the South Park headline Kat.

This may shock you but Adobe is shipping insecure software. No, it's not Flash this time. Nope, not Acrobat, either

macjules

I am horrified ..

.. that the owner of Flash could make something insecure. I shall stop using Photoshop immediately.

Astroboffins capture video of Mercury passing across the Sun's surface

macjules

Re: 22nd century kiddies terrified by theregister cobweb

Well, if you are reading this in 2117 then I hope you eventually managed to get OSX Catalina to work properly.

Uber CEO compares pedestrian death to murder of Saudi journalist, saying all should be forgiven

macjules

He then argued that everyone should be forgiven.

He then argued that everyone should be forgiven, and defended the Saudi government’s investment in Uber.

Luckily in Tempe, AZ the Über self-driving cars do not appear to have instant body-disposal devices as Saudi Arabian embassies seem to possess. I am sure that this must be an oversight to be shortly corrected.

Is this paragraph from Trump or an AI bot? You decide, plus buy your own AI for $399

macjules

Re: I thought that Donald 'I cheat at Golf' Trump

I think that no self-respecting developer would create software that outputted such garbage as Trump emits. Although possibly Trump is a reject from Microsoft's Tay research.

237 UK police force staff punished for misusing IT systems in last 2 years

macjules

Nowadays anyone can quite legally ask UKDBS for a check on whether someone else has a criminal record, for around £23 per check. It seems a bit odd that staffers need to access this information illegally .. unless someone does not want the subject to know that they are running a check on them.

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

macjules

Re: Your list

+1 for Cafe Nero. I am lucky in that nearby I have Monmouth Coffee's HQ plus a really good Cafe Nero for when I don't quite feel like paying £3.60 for a miniscule latte.

macjules

Re: Your list

No, because you are using the words "Costa" and "Coffee" in the same sentence. If you compare a cup of the watery substance that Costa produces with something from just about any other coffee outlet you find that the Costa output actually has no real discernible taste. The presumption is that since it has come through a coffee machine, has made lots of noises associated with the coffee process, you have been served by a (usually) surly individual of unknown origin and you have been chronically overcharged then it must coffee.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

macjules
Pint

Re: Hope the hack is up to date with his TB jab

I am looking forwards to the regular updates on this sorry tale of blood, snot, tears and Hyattus.

Beer, because I feel your angst.

Senior GitLab exec resigns over plan to stop hiring engineers in China and Russia

macjules

Re: Security

TBH I can not see any self-respecting criminal using GitLab for anything. Given their disastrous handling of customer data back in 2017 ("What exactly is a backup?") plus the famous "team-member-1" incident ("sorry I deleted the db1.cluster.gitlab.com directory, not db2.cluster.gitlab.com").

I wouldn't go near GitLab, except possibly a self-hosted instance sitting behind a very well protected firewall.

All bets are Hoff: DXC exec is standing for Brexit Party in UK General Election

macjules

Re: he's american

It costs 5 years returns and something akin to a $2,500 fee for the IRS. A friend of mine tried to renounce his "American"* nationality, gave up and simply sent a letter to the US embassy in London with a rather nice flag attached to it.

* He had never actually had a US passport but was required to pay their disgusting taxes by dint of having been born there, like Boris.

macjules
Mushroom

Re: Obligatory

Good, now I have a reason to "accidentally" swerve* into any red vespas I might pass on the A27.

* - in a totally "no yer honner, I never said nuffin on El Reg".

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

macjules

Re: Sounds like a job for...

Emails? Access? Excel? Floppies?

No, simply print the list out and hand it over the security service for safekeeping. You can guarantee that it will be left on a train and end up in the Daily Mail's offices: that way it eventually becomes safe,

Controversies aren't Boeing away for aircraft maker amid claims of faulty oxygen systems and wobbling wings

macjules
FAIL

You are Dennis Muilenburg and I claim my free 500 Ethiopian Airlines airmails.

macjules
WTF?

Would that not be like saying that fire extinguishers should not be tested since the one-use compressed air bulb can not be tested once installed? Just saying, like.

IBM stands for I Block Money, says sales rep: Big Blue sued yet again by its own staff over 'missing' commissions

macjules

Re: IBM ....

When the Sculley deal with IBM was made in 1991 IBM was known as “I Buggered Macintosh”.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

macjules

Re: Mains gangs or wall sockets

Having heard of this before I suspect that the Twitter poster got it spot on: cannabis farm.

Open wide, very wide: Xerox considers buying HP. Yes, the HP that is more than three times its market cap

macjules

Trebles all round?

Deloitte was Autonomy's auditor; Ernst & Young is HP's (not HPE). KPMG provided approval advice on the deal to HPE. PwC has been hired by HPE to sort through the mess. If HPE's claims are true, Deloitte, Autonomy's auditor, should be the one in the firing line.

PWC are Xerox's auditor. Xerox, not surprisingly, would not appreciate KPMG being involved at any level.

Oh chute. Two out of three ain't bad, right? asks Boeing after soft-ish crew module landing

macjules
Facepalm

“We don’t ‘sell’ safety, that’s not our business model”

As Dennis Muilenberg said to Congress recently.

Please tell us why you're not securing yourselves, UK.gov asks businesses

macjules

Re: Post-card

It's called "humour" (sorry, if you are American), as in "sense of ...".

macjules

Re: Post-card

4. We actually do not have a clue about internet security. Sorry about that.

5. We are appointing a Digital Security Czar to oversee our lack of security and to advise us on why. This may be a high court judge appointment of someone in their late 70's with no experience of the "Internet".

6. Apropos 5 above, we are intending to set up an MoD Cyber Security division. The cost to the taxpayer will be minimal, or so Capita assure us.

(speaking as one with 25 years experience of UK government IT)

Google forks out $2.1bn for Fitbit – and promises not to exploit all that delicious health data to sling ads (honest)

macjules

Re: company making WiFi connected pacemakers

Because the love of my life is Type 1 I tend to get spammed by all of the shysters on Instagram, Twiiter etc. peddling their disgusting snakeoil cures for diabetes. Nowadays they seem to know when we have to do glucose checks and tend to hit my email right on cue.

macjules

Re: company making WiFi connected pacemakers

Hope to God they don’t buy DexCom. Their Dexcom G6 glucose tester can now link direct into an Apple Watch 4 - imagine if Google got hold of that.

Watch Waymo's totally driverless self-driving car cruise around, how the US military wants to use AI ethically, etc

macjules

US Department of Defense has drafted its own AI principles

Does that include defence of the Kurds, or is the AI to blame for the "run away and abandon our bases to Russia" principle?

Are you as handy with privacy certs as you are with a screwdriver? Ikea has the perfect vacancy

macjules

Re: Instruction sheet

Step 1: Create CSR A into Folder A

Step 2: Use CSR A to obtain CRT B

Step 3: Insert CRT B into Folder B

Step 4: Oh sorry, it looks like you still have a PEM missing. Would you like to go back and try again?

Almost like revenge for IKEA 1990's build instructions.

UK taxman goes chief digi officer shopping at the bank: Appoints ex-Barclays CIO

macjules

Re: Making Tax Digital

Hemp old chap, hemp and lamp posts. We are civilised in the UK - we only reserve firing squads for unmitigated shits like Nigel Farage. The rest get to decorate the lamp posts of Whitehall.

Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins

macjules

Re: Read this a while back

Pesticides in this case presumably being “Rum and Havana cigars”?

WTF? Apple iPhones shrank by more than $22bn in fiscal '19

macjules

Re: The Thrill Is Gone

News International (Times/Sun/Sky/Fox etc) still issue their staff with a white iPhone 5c. WPP (most of the planet’s ad agencies) issue their staff with the iPhone SE. Yet to come across a fanboi working at either who starts screaming how he cannot use such dated technology.

Not just adhesive, but alcohol-resistant adhesive: Well done, Apple. Airpods Pro repairability is a zero

macjules

Re: So much for "design"

Can do the same with 2 used electric toothbrushes.

macjules
Pint

Re: Removable stem seems like a reasonable suggestion...

Very wary of new Apple kit post-Catalinastrophe but a fellow freelancer just bought a set of the AirPods and claims that they are the first decent set of earphone he has ever found, and they fit perfectly.

Beer for the brilliant "Huntingdon Life Sciences of the tech world"

Move along, nothing to see here: Auditors say £100k grant to Hacker House was 'appropriate'

macjules

GIAA?

Which used to be known as “Giving It All Away”. Nice to see they are living up to their name.

US Air Force inks deal with Raytheon on Windows 10 (and other) support for ARSE

macjules

Well, I guess someone must be very good at explaining all of this. Or could it be said that they are good at talking out of their ARSE?

Profits dip at BT while troubled biz steams ahead with restructuring

macjules
Unhappy

Yes, but ..

significantly accelerating its pace of FTTP build and is now passing a home or business every 26 seconds.

Ok , so an OpenRetch van passes a customers house every 28 seconds and fails to stop. This is promptly followed up by someone in India who telephones your home number for a second and thus fails to get in contact with you. They then promptly "reschedule" your OpenRetch connection visit to another 3 months in the future.

I am sorry about the 100,000 staff, but BT deserves to die the death.

Google goes full Anti-Flash-ist, boots Adobe's insecure monstrosity out of web search index

macjules

Re: Cross platform embedded/streaming video

Something far worse than Flash killed Java. Larry Ellison. A bit like saying that, "Good news old chap, we've killed off your case of 'flu. The bad news is that we had to give you Ebola to do it."

Cyber-security super-brain Rudy Giuliani forgets password, bricks iPhone, begs Apple Store staff for help

macjules
Trollface

Give him a break. He's in his late 80s and probably has trouble remembering if he has put his trousers on over his underwear. Just be thankful that the Apple GeniusBar assistant wasn't a decorated Democrat Ukrainian veteran with a history of loyal service to the USA .. he wasn't was he?