* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Meta sued for 'aiding and abetting' crypto scammers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Does not go against community standards"

No, because the "community" don't set the standards, Facebook does. Another nail in their coffin when it gets to court, along with the multiple "report this ad" reports so they can't deny they were told about them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They've never taken any down

Every single report, the official response was "Does not go against community standards"

Clearly their standards are sewer-low and allow crimes to be committed while blocking the accounts of people who dare to show how to properly breast-feed a baby.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"No matter how many times one reports to Facescam, the ads keep reappearing."

Yes, always report them. Then if/when it gets to court, as it is (again), Facebook Meta can't say they didn't know. On the other hand, considering the huge number of scam ads on all these "services", it's telling that it only ever seems to be actioned or end up in court when 'slebs are affected.

False advertising to call software open source when it's not, says court

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That was pretty bold

It'd have been interesting if someone took their "open source" claim and forked the software themselves. That court case would've been interesting, especially the prosecutions arguments that their open source isn't open source, shooting themselves in the foot.

ExoMars rover launch axed over Russia tensions

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I guess

Maybe Starship will be ready by then and Exomars can be a small part of the cargo and just roll down the ramp when it lands :-)

Boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in UK compsci classes

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re: Trial and Error

Our school timetable was generated on the mainframe at the local Town Hall.

GIGO was one of the first things I learned on CS.

The above two statements may or may not be linked :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: @Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

"Final thought. Maybe the reason men will accept a poor environment more readily than women is that, until recently, they were the ones expected to go out and bring enough money to keep the family fed and housed. Just a thought for when you're discussing societal pressures."

Yes, that thought crossed my mind too. Is there still a "breadwinner" mentality such that men feel obliged to put up with more shit for the "security" of a steady income while women might still feel they are not the primary breadwinner and so feel less inclined to put up with the shit and take the risk of moving on and possibly being out of work for a while. I'm speaking in generalities, of course. I know a number of couples who got married young, went to work and then a few years later took it in turns to go back into education and improve their lives and careers, the other working to support the family.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Nice assumption on the "his", btw :D"

Considering the subject and the experience of most of us in this industry and the fact I'm nearly 60 and have a lot of past influence on my outlook on life, assuming "his" in this context had pretty high odds of being correct. Just stating that you are "T" doesn't make me wrong either unless you care to elaborate :-p

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"And again there are far more of us than people think, but I guess stereotypes gonna stereotype."

I completely agree with you. My job takes me into IT departments all over the place and I meet many women in various roles. Few, if any, fall into the TV/film stereotype. But those TV/Film stereotype is what the kids see. Like advertising, many people claim not to be affected by it, but the subtle, subconscious worms are still doing their jobs. Especially on those in their formative years. As I said in a post on a similar topic on another thread, my A level Computer Studies teacher was a woman, a seconded Systems Analyst. She was the best teacher I ever had and the ONLY woman teacher in anything other than Humanities-like subjects. (That may have been influence by the school being an all boys Grammar school, only switching to Comprehensive the year I started and only switching to co-ed as I went in 6th form. There were 6 boys and 2 girls in A level CS :-))

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Problem?

You raise a good point, but on the other hand, it should not be a problem on the UCAS form. There may be some "unlearning" to do once reaching university, but it shows the interest in the subject and I suspect anyone doing 2 years of an A level in Law is likely to really want to do Law at degree level. On the gripping hand, of course, there's probably stats to prove I'm wrong and most A level law students fail Law at Uni :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Problem?

"The sad part really is that there's very little room in schools these days for anything that isn't linked to an examination or assessment."

Even sadder is that computers are used for almost all of the traditional subjects, but almost exclusively as a replacement for books, pens and paper. When in reality, if all kids were taught programming along with reading and writing, they could then go on to create and use their own programmes in so many other subjects. But no, all they get is Windows and Office. Rarely any database experience and usually not even any scripting. It's not like we want them to especially come up with original stuff, just be able to understand how the tool works and what it can do for them. I'm pretty sure the conversion tables I printed out under software control for my Physics class wasn't original, but I learned how to do it. And the layout was more useful to me than the ones in the textbooks!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re: Trial and Error

"It all seemed very advanced and technical at the time, but now if feels all dry-as-a-bone. Who wants to know about the various ways to depict many-to-one mappings when you can draw yellow and red boxes on a screen using LOGO and turtles and stuff, or make a beeper play Three Blind Mice?

I'd be interested to know what passes for Computer Studies nowadays. Really I would. My son did a BTec in the subject, but he didn't take to it at all. It seemed a mile away from my experiences - all K'Nex and robots... my experiences feel a bit like the nostalgia associated with my old maths textbooks that had entire chapters on the use of log tables and slide rules."

The current fad for making learning "fun" does seem to be detracting from actual learning. AT the early stages of learning, making it "fun" to help the pupils find an interest is very worthwhile. But at some point, one has to knuckle down and actual learn the hard stuff. I did great at biology and chemistry when it was all experiments and practicals and funny smells, sparks and flames etc, but soon lost interest when it got all theory and technical. I ended up doing Maths Physics and Computer Studies at A level because I really got into the theory and technical side of those subjects.

And no, it wasn't the teachers fault either. My Biology teacher was especially upset when I dropped the subject in favour of Tech Drawing because I was top of the class that year. I explained at the parents evening that it was the only way I could get to do Comp Studies. If I stayed with Biology, I couldn't later switch to CS, but I could do so if I did a year of tech Drawing first. The vagaries of school time tabling was to blame!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I do wonder how true that geeky stereotype is nowadays but you might be right that it puts children off the subject - maybe especially girls."

Yes, that same stereotype that you still see constantly on TV and in films. You might well see pretty girls doing "tech", but she'll invariably be wearing glasses, have her hair tied tightly back and very probably be single and a bit "weird". The usual stereotype for guys in tech also still apply most of the time too. TV and film casting is almost always "traditional". They are terrified that the audience might be confused. Especially in US productions. Anyway, what else can you expect? They are already struggling to cope with casting female leads and re-writing history to show woman and so-called "minorities" into traditional roles instead of creating new, strong roles. Maybe someone could cast Olivia Coleman as Othello? She's done pretty much everything else al;ready :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"May I ask what this assumption is based on?"

By the sounds of his post, the assumption that all kids are either boys or girls. Being an old crusty here, I find we are being told more and more often that this is not the case and there are a number of children who are not boys or girls but are somewhere on a sliding scale between the two. So, by definition, there can't be a 50:50 split anyway :-) LGB are boys or girls but there are T to take into account. I'm less sure about what the Q & + count as, that part seems to be more up in the air in terms of definition.

How CAPTCHAs can cloak phishing URLs in emails

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

tell people...to supply the intelligence automated systems can't quite manage.

Based on some people I deal with, they are not as intelligent as the automated systems! We're dooooomed!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Ugh

"but if enough of us do it..."

....Carmageddon when Google release their self-driving cars!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: HTML email is in itself a security hazard

"That's the problem right there. Don't open attachments, problem solved."

We're an IT company and trying to convince our own people, especially marketing and HR, of this is like Canute trying to stop the tide. Just the other day I got another missive from security about being careful of "suspicious" email, quite literally followed 5 minutes later by a company announcement in HTML, the text as graphics (FFS!!!) and a link to a sharepoint document with a URL so long I couldn't see it all on my phone so was unable to confirm it went to our own domain. 10 minutes after that came a request for information sent to ALL staff asking for personal information on a form at www.office365.com/something, ie not even our own hosting. Both were confirmed by my boss as genuine company emails.

Sometimes, you just couldn't make it up!!!

Brit data regulator fines five cold-calling fiends £405k

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Still at it

I once told one of these people that my Hoover washing machine had since been replaced by a Zanussi. Strangely and magically, I got a cal a few days later from a supposedly different company about taking out an extended warranty on my Zanussi washing machine. What neither knew is that my washing machine is neither of those brands :-) I like to mess with them when I have the time. Other times I just hang up or tell them to piss off.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I believe the ICO has been able to recover fines directly from the Directors since 2018. No doubt they'll all have tried to move or hide their assets but that doesn't work either these days."

And if it comes to it, Unexplained Wealth Orders on their friends and family if they try to hide it that way.

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Why are microsoft hell bent on pissing off their customers [...]?"

...and home users in particular are already bombarded with ads in their browsers and "social media" apps already. They probably won't even see it as odd or distracting and just accept it as part of "the system".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

A rogue engineer?

(Or should be a rouge engineer in these forums?)

CafePress fined for covering up 2019 customer info leak

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yeah, but you don't have a list of numbers linked to names, email addresses and security questions. It's still not a full credit card number, but an extra bit of data linked to a specific person for whom you have other known data. Your list of all known "last 4-digits" will include my card, but you don't know which one. In this beach, they DO know which one.

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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'rona??

Is that MySha?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Douglas Adams would be proud

Same thing caught my attention too. Oh, the irony of upper management being so out of touch that being shown they are out of touch is mind blowing for them.

Doom comes to the Pi Pico

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

So, although still a great achievement, he's a tad more than the "enthusiast" he's described as in the article. Did El Reg not know this? Or were they just trying to amp up the story a bit?

I'd have still been impressed and not thought any less of him if El Reg had supplied the full facts :-)

UK Supreme Court snubs Assange anti-extradition bid

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Well, to be fair, most of them probably travel over cables, either copper or fibre, at least some of the way. They still have "wire fraud" in the US too.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yep, switching a Windows user to Linux is easy if all they do is "consume" and/or there are direct Linux equivalents of any software they may use. But to be fair, that is a significant number of home users. I just got my wife to install Gramps on her laptop to see if I can wean her off Family Tree Maker. I showed her how to export her data from FTM and import it into Gramps and so far, she seem to like it. If that goes well, I'll set her up with dual boot and try her with Linux, probably Mint and see how often she switches back to Windows, and if so why. With a bit of luck, I might get her Windows-free in time. Of course, there may be some withdrawal symptoms to deal with too, but slowly, slowly catchee monkey :-)

Russian demand for VPNs skyrockets by 2,692%

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Obviously...

From the right-side of the pond, having watched the likes of CNN, Fox, MSNBC and the like, they don't seem to do "news" as such. It seems to be primarily taking head opinion shows. Now, I could easily be wrong, what we get here may well be "International" versions of what they broadcast directly to the US viewer, but the impression the rest of the world gets is that they simply don't do actual "news" unless there's a big story going on and they put people "on the ground" to report back. Having said that, CNN has gone behind a paywall in the UK. They are included in the Sky satellite packages (I assume Sky are paying them now) but no longer on Cable or FreeSat. I'm not sure what their plan is there. I can't imagine anyone not using Sky choosing to pay to watch CNN. Their ad breaks were almost exclusively trailers for their own shows, so I guess they never managed to sell many ad slots and gave up on the UK market.

UK criminal defense lawyer hadn't patched when ransomware hit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So who was their MSP??

"I mean, it'd be a rare thing if a firm swimming in dosh like a prominent law firm did all their own IT,"

"Predominantly Legal Aid". That means they are NOT swimming in dosh. For non-UK readers, Legal Aid is where the state pay for your legal representation if you meet the standards of not being able to afford it yourself.

NASA in 'serious jeopardy' due to big black hole in security

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Nothing new there...

Makes you wonder how many "foreign agents" with decent budgets were also at those auctions :-)

Much easier than infiltrating or turning employees.

Arm to drop up to 15 percent of staff – about 1,000 people

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

stop work that is no longer critical to our future success

"stop work that is no longer critical to our future success"

I often wonder exactly what these people mean with phrases like that. Is the person who cleans the bog "critical" to the future of the company? What if you get rid of that person? Do people then want to work in a shit-hole (because few people will clean up the mess themselves after shitting in the bog). If you remove anyone and anything not "critical to our future success", then what might be left? There's much work that is useful to "future success" but not actually "critical". I think it's just management-speak to make them sound tough and in control because clearly "critical" doesn't often mean what the speaker thinks it means.

China thrilled it captured already-leaked NSA cyber-weapon

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Great

"If something walks like a war, quacks like a war and explodes like a war, it probably is. Most people would probably agree that Russia v Ukraine is war, even if undeclared."

Sleazy lawyers looking for loops holes so it can be claimed to be "not a war". There are probably earlier examples, but it goes back to at least the Korean "Police Action" in 1950's.

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: GDPR?

Damned auto-correct thinks it knows better than me! Sometimes, apparently, it does LOL

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Can AI make critical military decisions?

At this stage, it's not even AI, never mind sentient. Otherwise, I agree. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: GDPR?

Yes, their defence of "it was on the internet in full public view therefore we can copy it" might not sound so useful to them when others start doing it to them with their websites and software, which is also on the publicly accessible internet.

At the very least, they only have to look at the precedence of Google and their scraping, most notably on the image search page where in the past, clicking the thumbnail brought up the original image only. Nowadays, clicking on it take you to the source site. Not to mention all those books available to the public, in public libraries. Can we make our own copies of them too now? Clearview seem to a have bigger and better Reality Distortion Fiend than Apple ever had. Maybe Apple should sue them for copying that?

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

"Unlike the others nothing else needs to be installed for it to work like video codecs."

What video codecs? Admittedly I've not installed Linux for some years, being a FreeBSD user here, but seriously, what codecs? After installing mplayer/mencoder/VLC/whatever, they pull in what they need at install time. I've never had to manually install codec from a command line or even a GUI based package manager. At worst, I've built mplayer/mencoder and sox to include mp3 when there was that kerfuffle over patents and binaries or whatever the issue was, but still not had top install codecs separately or manually.

EDIT: I see from later posts that some stuff like mp3 codecs may not be installed by default and the user has to choose to install them or, in same cases, install after the fact. I assume that may also apply to some other stuff like NVidia binary blobs, especially with Linux and the special conditions of GPL that don't apply to FreeBSD. As a FreeBSD user, I'm not used to vagaries of Linux "distros" and their full-on, OOTB desktops :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Support for Ukraine

In the UK, you don't get any tax benefits. However, you can fill out a form and then the charity can claim back the tax you already paid on your donation when you earned the money, in effect increasing your donation by 20%.

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

or "face further action."????

The FCA warned them to shut down their machines or "face further action."

Shirley, by definition, all crypto ATM operators should be facing further action, whether they already shut up shop or are still operating. They are illegal under current legislation, therefore the operators were, and in some case still are, breaking the law. Ignorance is no excuse, we are constantly told.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Nee Petri

Ooh, well played. I bet you've been waiting years for the right moment to use that one :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: First time I heard of her -- thanks!

I heard of her. My A Level Computer Studies teacher, back in 1978/79 was a woman, a Systems Analyst on secondment, She had some great stories, including about women in computing, so it never feels odd to me to meet women in tech fields as it does for some others of my generation. I guess what you learn and the examples you see in your formative years really does have an effect on your outlook throughout your life.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Blissful ignorance

"but they had no monitoring to tell them, eventually, the other TRU failed but they had no monitoring to tell them."

On a much smaller scale, I was sent off to a data centre to be "a pair of hands" to replace a failed HDD in a RAID for a world wide online payments processor. While chatting with their desk-based support op who was triggering the HDD LED to make sure I pulled the correct drive, I mentioned that only one LED was lit of the two for the redundant PSUs. He was a bit surprised as it was was supposed to be monitored, but clearly was not. I went back a day later to meet the overnighted PSU and swap that out too. Apparently they were quite impressed that I spotted the issue and reported it. I guess they had used companies with less experienced people to be "a pair of hands" previously.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Only one generator?

"The client was understandably unhappy with the electrical contractor responsible for the initial build."

Yes, but probably after balling out the electrician who turned it off in the first place. After all, he pulled the switch, and surely he should have know, that's his job, innit? </sarc> Hopefully they didn't fire him before the investigation found the root cause.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Black start

"It took over a day to get the power up and Hawaiian Electric refused a navy offer to kick start the grid with power from a nuclear submarine."

Is that a viable solution without special considerations? I've heard it suggested before and I'm fairly sure I remember someone posting that it's "not the right type of electric" or something.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Must've been a long time ago. Dunno about current US prices, but with the current exchange rate, $1.50 might get you a few miles in a car these days in the UK, it'd get you a pint or two at most.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Stealing more than fuel

Has it been stolen already?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Stealing more than fuel

A local haulage company was in the news just yesterday. £24,000 worth of fuel stolen overnight through what the security guard said "looked like a garden hose". Mind you, if they'd stolen it last week, it would only have been worth about £20 grand! Fuel is like bitcoin at the moment. Vast fluctuation in value and hard to trace :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Dipstick

Yep. The number of times we see this same story, either as a Who, Me? or an On Call, followed by the numerous Me Too comments, it's clear than anyone installing a backup generator MUST include checking the fuel levels as part of the checking/testing procedure. It's obviously a relatively common issue, enough such that the suppliers and/or installers should be passing on this information to the customers as a "just in case you didn't think of this as a potential problem" sort of note. Maybe a big sign on the generator on/off test switch too. Likewise, another problem mentioned here is the diesel fuel going off. 6-12 months is the expected shelf life IIRC. If that cost seems like too much to bear as "waste" (note, beancounters will question the "waste"), then use the genny and save on the leccy bill on the day the tanker is due to refill it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: One step too few

Only really an issue if you are doing an image copy of the drive. If you are re-installing the OS and restoring files, it's not an issue unless the failed bigger HDD was completely full.

Backups are not usually 1:1 images of the source data because backing up all that empty space takes time, even if it does compress (which it likely won't since much of the "empty" space is almost certainly no zeros, ie never users sectors.) That might be less of an issue on modern hardware with on-the-fly compression, but back in the days of 40MB HDDs, that could significantly add to the time. I'd still not like to dd an 8TB HDD, even with compression, when it's 50, 60, 70% "empty". That's still a lot of wasted reads.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: One step too few

Similar here, but in my case, a custom designed year planner! None of the ones the company supplied, or the freebies from suppliers, had on what I wanted, or space for the info I needed to put on it. And no, doing all that on a computer back in the days wasn't a convenient option. A "hard copy" year planner you can take in at a glance was (and might still be, but I don't need one in $current_job) far, far superior than what could be seen on an 80x25 text screen :-)

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

ISTR an anti-virus package back in the DOS days called Silver Bullet. (Dr Solomans Silver Bullet seems to ring a bell)

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