In other news ..
A power-crazed non-entity who refuses to yield power and insists that has full and total control. But enough about Mark Zuckerberg, let’s concentrate on Trump.
Posts by macjules
3426 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2014
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Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired
Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly
Friday 6th November 2020 11:58 GMT
My introduction to IT was as a Grade 9 intake into Whitehall. First ever job was to solve an "I.T." issue with a truly gigantic government green telex that had stopped working for some unknown reason. This was a machine that must have seen serious usage in WW2 and ever since: the power cabling was vulcanised rubber-coated wire with cloth wrapping and slowly disintegrating - so much so that you could see the live copper cabling. Replaced the mains cabling and everything started up ok, at which news my boss grumbled that he could have got a month of doing nothing out of fixing that machine.
Shopping online for Xmas? AI chatbots know whether you want to be naughty or nice
Friday 6th November 2020 11:35 GMT 
Based upon your order history ..
Our amazing BezosBot AI™ has analysed that since for the past 6 months you have been buying useless tat from Amazon during lockdown then you will want to buy these amazing products for your family for Christmas. Do not worry: in the true tradition of an Amazon purchase they will either be unusable, break quickly or have a completely intelligible manual that only a pygmy tribe from just north of the Gobi desert can translate for you.
Happy Religious Festival of your choice from everyone at Jeff's Grotto of Tat
Suspended sentence for bank IT worker who broke into his boss's webcam because he didn't get a payrise
I'll give you my passwords if you investigate police corruption, accused missile systems leaker told cops
Wednesday 4th November 2020 08:44 GMT
If he even got as far as being considered for a position that involved signing the Official Secrets Act then he should have undergone either an enhanced security check or enhanced developed vetting. This is not a simple background check on PNC plus recent employment but covers:
successful completion of the Baseline Personnel Security Standard
completion, by the individual, of a DV security questionnaire
a check of both spent and unspent criminal records
a check of credit and financial history with a credit reference agency
a check of Security Service (MI5) records
a full review of personal finances
a detailed interview conducted by a trained Investigating Officer
the full review of personal finances will include an assessment of an individual’s assets, liabilities, income and expenditure both on an individual basis and taking into account the joint position with a spouse or partner.
further enquiries, including interviews with referees conducted by a trained Investigating Officer
checks may extend to third parties included on the security questionnaire - parents, friends and so on.
Unfortunately it takes a really long time to complete both ESC and EDV and for the report to be sent to the relevant parties (MI5, Police, BAe etc) so it is likely that he started employment with only partial clearance (clean bill by MI5 and no PNC history) and they would still be awaiting the third party interviews, which might have shown that he was not fit for employment in that role.
Protecting the NHS: NCSC fended off lots of meddling aimed at UK health orgs while ransomware ramped up
GitHub warns devs face ban if they fork DMCA'd YouTube download tool... while hinting how to beat the RIAA
Cops aren't normally the most 'agile' of folk, but that's exactly what London's Metropolitan Police Service would like to be
South Park creators have a new political satire series with some of the best AI-generated deepfakes on the internet yet
Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400
Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape
Friday 30th October 2020 14:20 GMT
Re: We piggyback the 4G from our mobile phones
Just got back from Cannes, and suffering 14 days isolation with SWMBO claiming that the Quarantine Stasi are watching me or tracking my mobile every time I take the dogs out for a walk. Tried "working from home" there and it was a complete shambles with the WiFi du Ville broadband fluctuating from 0.2 through to 3Mbps. 4G wouldn't be so bad if the blasted connection did not keep changing from Orange FR to Free to SFR and to Bouygues every few minutes. Gave up after 10 days and drove back to UK, enduring National Border police checking to see if I had any Afghani refugees in the 3 cubit ft boot of my car.
I want that flying car so badly.
Machine learning gets semi conscious... Waymo, Daimler vow to bring self-driving trucks to American highways
Trump's official campaign website vandalized by hackers who 'had enough of the President's fake news'
Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US
Wednesday 28th October 2020 11:15 GMT
Re: Team America: World Police
Would just hate to think of what would happen if a US pervert was caught looking at underage girls undressing in the UK. Of course, we would never, ever ask for them to be extradited to face trial in the UK.
Oh, by the way Mr Pervert threatening to kill yourself does not really work as a defence. Claiming you were testing allegations that the software could activate someone's laptop camera remotely might, but unlikely.
UK mapping agency the Ordnance Survey is heading into gaming territory with £6m tender for dev team
Oculus owners told not only to get Facebook accounts, purchases will be wiped if they ever leave social network
Is it Iran or Russia's hackers we need to worry about? The Russians, definitely the Russians, says US intelligence
Transport for London data pilot: We want to keep tabs on dockless bikes and e-bikes
The exodus continues: Less than half of contractors expect to stick with their employment set-up after IR35
Microsoft builds image-to-caption AI so that your visually impaired coworkers can truly comprehend your boss's PowerPoint abominations
Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's US extradition hearing will be in February 2021
Can't quite remember the name of the song stuck in your head? Hum it and our AI will take a guess, says Google
Monday 19th October 2020 08:19 GMT 
the chaotic, gritty streets of San Francisco.
You wait until you try that on the the chaotic, gritty streets of Central London complete with manic, unlicensed JustEat delivery drivers, London Black Cab drivers who decide to do a 180 turn without signalling or buses that just pull out beside you without indicating etc. etc.
British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks
It's that time of the year when Apple convinces you last year's iPhones weren't quite magical enough, so buy this new 5G iPhone 12 instead
It's 2020 and a rogue ICMPv6 network packet can pwn your Microsoft Windows machine
UK taxman waves through £168.8m Fujitsu contract because no one else can hold up 30-year-old infrastructure
Tuesday 13th October 2020 11:55 GMT 
What could possibly go wrong?
So you have legacy code and infrastructure from Fujitsu with Capgemini, IBM (attempting) to manage AWS and Azure deployments to the cloud, while of course not trying to pressure HMRC to use IBM cloud?
Why not bring in Capita with Sopra in joint venture for CNI oversight and appoint Dido Harding at CEO to run the whole thing?
Microsoft tells staff work-from-home is now ‘standard’ – with caveats galore
Boeing Starliner commander Christopher Ferguson bows out of first crewed mission due to family commitments
Crown Prosecution Service solicitor accused of targeting judge ex-wife's lover through work computer systems
From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key
Friday 9th October 2020 14:06 GMT
Surgeon Simulator 2 is on a par with the classic board game Operation
I was going to say that Dido Harding is probably playing CEO Simulator, then I discovered that there really is a game called that:
"Please enter the name of your new company":
"TalkTalk"
"Sorry, you lost all your customer's data, your customers all left and you no longer have any operating income. Congratulations on receiving a massive pay rise and payoff"
Disgraced cop, 55, spared prison term after admitting he abused police systems to snoop on his girlfriend's ex
Former antivirus baron John McAfee collared, faces extradition to America on tax evasion, securities allegations
Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets
Wednesday 7th October 2020 09:41 GMT
Re: Alternative?
It all depends upon the job you need to do. For something like your wife's casework analysis then I should think Excel is ideal. If you want to run a check on 65m detailed rows of CSV data then I suspect that you might prefer to use a tool such a CSV Linter, which strangely enough HMG actually built for nationalarchives.gov.uk to check large CSV files. I wonder why they didn't use that for PHE?
If you are a financial institution and trying to run calculations on fractional percentage trades within microseconds then something written in Python is probably going to be far more effective than Excel, or any other spreadsheet software come to think.
What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases
Tuesday 6th October 2020 11:48 GMT
Re: 'spreadsheet software as "human middleware" in the sector'
Apparently all data is sent to PHE as a .csv dump file. PHE then open those files into Excel (so far so good - xlsx can handle that ok) but they then have to save the file as an Office 2003 .xls format for uploading into the Track and Trace database.
So is it the developers of the Track and Trace app and database (Zühlke Engineering?) who are actually to blame. NHSX did raise the issue when they realised that the stumbling block was not being allowed to directly upload the csv files into the database. Therefore not a Matt Hancock problem but definitely a Dido Harding one, or the poor bastard she has handed the job over to as she runs for the door.
Monday 5th October 2020 18:10 GMT
From my understanding it was reported right up to the top so that there would be absolutely no misunderstanding that Excel should not be used. The heads of development at NHSX told PHE exactly what would happen if they used a spreadsheet system and sure enough it happened.
From a civil service point of view every single person involved has done CYA. The sword is now passed to Baroness Dido to fall upon.
If the Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition doesn't make you a fan, we don't know what will
Sunday 4th October 2020 12:05 GMT
Re: A 600£ or 700£ price is now considered not hard to swallow? For a phone?
+1. It seems to be along the lines of, "Oh thank God I am not being forced to pay £1,500 for a phone. Look, this one is less than half the price of a 'normal' handset!"
One day we might be able to look from iPhone to Samsung, from Samsung to Honor, from Honor to Sony Xperia and not be able to tell the difference, á la Animal Farm.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
