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* Posts by MartyOhr

7 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Mar 2018

ISP TalkTalk's Wi-Fi passwords Walk Walk thanks to Awks Awks router security hole

MartyOhr
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Talk Talk were so bad at delivering my 'Super'-router that I bought a £20 one from amazon prime, had it delivered the same day and configured it myself. It means that TalkTalk can send me 'updates' like some other ISPs do which would reset all the fine tuning to make it run to perfection.

I setup a segregated guest wifi network with no password but the bandwidth capped at 300K; enough for a visitor to check facetwitter or email or whatnot; but slow enough to stop someone parking up outside and watching netflix for free.

Talk Talk's router eventually arrived on the same day that a replacement arrived. They sit unopened in a box somewhere - if anyone wants one let me know.

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Windows 10 April 2018 Update lands today... ish

MartyOhr
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Isn't 'timeline' just Office Journal from days of old

About a hundred years ago (well 2006) Microsoft snuck a feature into the Office suite to ruin your pc called Office Journal. It kept a timeline of activity; kind of. It was largely useless and almost no one used it. On our pcs at work it used up loads of memory and cpu and made somethings really slow. Most enterprises disabled it in group policy to stop constant helpdesk calls.

I never understood who would use it, it's pretty easy to search your email or folder structure to find stuff. Although I'm always amazed when on a screen share at how long it takes people to find the file or email they want to share. The people with the overly organised folder structures being by far the worst. I use my mac all day long, I just accept the default path for anything I'm saving; nothing ever goes missing, I can lay my hands on a document or a photo just as quickly as I need to.

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UK.gov demands urgent answers as TSB IT meltdown continues

MartyOhr
FAIL

The bank that likes to say si

How hard can it be?

Big bang IT changes are always fraught, but an online banking website and app is not really that hard surely? In my simple head it's just a long database of transactions against account numbers with a relatively simple front end.

Of course if I'd been doing it I would have moved customers in batches. Or I'd have offered reduced functionality over the weekend rather than shutting up shop. At least then there would be a small element of goodwill from customers rather than pent up demand desperate to get on the new platform.

The official reason for the move is to stop paying Lloyds for use of its IT systems by the Spanish parent company of TSB. It seems ludicrous in this day and age of 'anything/everything as a service' to expose yourself to so much risk by taking stuff back in house. But I've spoken to other retail finance companies who are in the process of 'de-clouding'. Is this a new trend?

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Great Western Railway warns of great Western password reuse: Brits told to reset logins

MartyOhr

Current advice from GCHQ is not to reset passwords

The NCSC who are part of GCHQ have updated their password advice. They advice NOT changing passwords unless the account has actually been compromised.

It seems like GWR were trying to do the right thing, but now they have 1000 users scrabbling around to try to figure out new passwords.

Password managers are great - but have limited use. If I need to login into an account from somewhere different then I'm screwed if the password manager on my laptop is not in the same location. That 15 character random password will be useless to me. A standard reusable password with 2FA is likely to be much stronger.

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Watchdog growls at Tesla for spilling death crash details: 'Autopilot on, hands off wheel'

MartyOhr

where's the big data/machine learning?

I thought the Teslas were very clever. Wrong it seems. I assumed that data from all the vehicle sensors and the drivers actions was from all their cars was federated back to update the algorithms and add specific instructions for bits of the road. Like a clever version of Waze.

If I was writing an 'autopilot' I'd take all the times a driver has had to correct the driving lines and use that to update in realtime any temporary hazards and feedback to me any locations where multiple vehicles have had issues with following the road.

I'm not suggesting that is easy, but surely such a feedback loop is the minimum a responsible developer would want?

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Hate to add to the wanky jargon – but your digital transformation is actually a bolt-on

MartyOhr
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Re: Usually a cover for more deep seated problems

'how can we make it happen?", but of "you can't do that because...". No UK readers will be surprised to learn that this was a large energy supplier.'

I was surprised, because it was more or less the same story where I worked. Different sector, exactly the same story. The CEO used to personally approve all expenses - he didn't even have a PA, but the company was super agile, fast moving and highly profitable. It was also always in the sights of the parent company .

Weird things would happen; like our generous shift and on-call allowances would suddenly be changed to align with the parent's HR policies. Even though we were legally separate. Prompting oodles of bad will. Eventually closed down for offering too much competition to the parent.

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MartyOhr
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Re: Usually a cover for more deep seated problems

Exactly so. Most companies who need a transformation will never be able to achieve it. My model for a digital transformation would be to start a new company built from the ground up with the desired end state, prove the model works and then shift customers into it.

Most large corporations can never do this because they are full of leaders whose main goal is not having their empire reduced in any way. This seems to be all the worse for the HR, legal, finance departments who spend their lives telling people what they can't do. They'd have kittens at the though of starting a new company unshackled from the current job/reward structure, accounting methods etc.

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