* Posts by adam payne

1511 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009

BT's Wi-Fi Disc ads banned because there's no evidence the things work

adam payne

“We told British Telecommunications plc not to claim that they guaranteed Wi-Fi in every room unless they held adequate evidence to support the claims,” concluded the ASA

You seem to be telling them this quite a lot.

Seriously though who believes these adverts anyway?!?

IBM veep partly blamed Sopra Steria for collapse of £155m Co-Op Insurance Agile project

adam payne

Further, the IBM VP also said that the Co-Op had introduced a new requirement at a late stage for data within the new platform to be encrypted in transit, something he described as "a significant change in approach that seemed excessive and would have required significant changes to be made."

Why would it not be encrypted in transit?!? it's insurance data that has personal details in it.

Not sure why this would be seen as excessive, it's data security after all.

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

adam payne

Trump, who described COVID-19 as a "foreign virus", said the "EU failed to take the same precautions" as the US. The ban goes into effect tomorrow (Friday, March 13) and will last for 30 days.

What precautions are they then Trump?!? I thought you'd beaten it.

The Reg produces exhibit A1: A UK court IT system running Windows XP

adam payne

We have robust security in place as well as a specialist team constantly checking for threats.

Robust security in XP?!? who are you kidding?!?

Wow it must be great to have a specialist team that constantly checks for threats 24/7

Avast's AntiTrack promised to protect your privacy. Instead, it opened you to miscreant-in-the-middle snooping

adam payne

I remember using Avast back in the day and using a couple of the free skins they had available for it. I also remember recommending it as a decent alternative to the big guys.

I saw it on a couple of PCs late last year and wow was it bloated and naggy. They have added some much additional stuff to it that is of course all pay for.

The thing constantly nags you about upgrading to pro or alerts you to a new report about how many infections they stopped worldwide.

Nowadays wouldn't touch it with someone else's bargepole.

FYI: When Virgin Media said it leaked 'limited contact info', it meant p0rno filter requests, IP addresses, IMEIs as well as names, addresses and more

adam payne

"Based upon our investigation, Virgin Media does believe that the database was accessed on at least one occasion

Is makes me think you really don't know how many times people have accessed it. I quick point though, it only takes one occasion to spill the info.

Turgensec also quibbled with the ISP's attempt to blame the security blunder on IT workers “incorrectly configuring” an internet-facing database. Rather, the database – which was filled with unencrypted plain-text records – was a sign of "systematic assurance process failure," Turgensec said.

Incorrectly configured public facing site = very stupid

Plain text records = FFS

Unencrypted = #Captainpicarddoublefacepalm

adam payne

Re: Internet facing database?

Or maybe they are next door to a scammers call centre.

Like a Virgin, hacked for the very first time... UK broadband ISP spills 900,000 punters' records into wrong hands from insecure database

adam payne

The now-secured marketing database – containing names, home and email addresses, and phone numbers, and some dates of birth, plus other info – had been left open since mid-April 2019

The marketing department strikes again.

MPs to grill Post Office and Fujitsu execs on Horizon IT scandal after workers jailed over accounting errors

adam payne

The Register will be reporting the main Parliamentary evidence session later this month, which is expected to include a Fujitsu exec.

The Chief Executive for Toilet Cleaning no doubt.

So far there has been no suggestion that any individual from the Post Office or Fujitsu will face criminal charges for their part in the scandal.

Why the hell not?!?

They accused innocent people of theft, threatened these people with prosecution and in same cases had people prosecuted and all because there IT system didn't work correctly.

Every prosecution in regards to this complete fiasco needs to be reviewed immediately.

All the money they wrongly took from people with the threat of prosecution should be given back with interest.

If at all possible criminal charges brought against the ex CEO, his management team and anyone involved in covering this up.

Our 'solution is killing us in a number of areas' IBM said about doomed £175m Co-Op Insurance project

adam payne

Innovation Group was brought in by IBM to customise its US-specific white label insurance platform for the Co-Op's use. It rapidly emerged during Project Cobalt that the product needed significant work before it was fit for use in the UK market.

So the software was for the US insurance market and you brought in a subcontractor to customise it for the UK market. Your product, your subcontractor but not your fault....OK good look with that.

Southern Water not such a phisherman's phriend, hauls itself offline to tackle email lure

adam payne

After all the years of anti phishing education and testing that education there are still people clicking on things.

People make mistakes, people get distracted and there are those certain people who just like clicking on things.

Sophos was gearing up for a private life – then someone remembered the bike scheme

adam payne

It is being bought by Surf Buyer Limited – a vehicle owned by VC firm Thoma Bravo, which also owns McAfee, bits of Symantec

So just how bloated is Sophos going to get?

It's Terpin time: Bloke who was SIM jacked twice by Bitcoin thieves gets green light to sue telco for millions

adam payne

Terpin is suing AT&T for not following its own agreed security protocol, and he wants punitive damages. AT&T denies it is responsible for any loss

Well they would.

AT&T are going to drag this out for as long as possible until Mr Terpin finally runs out of money.

London's top cop dismisses 'highly inaccurate or ill informed' facial-recognition critics, possibly ironically

adam payne

Dick says the Met has been “completely open and transparent about it.”

If this open and transparent then i'd hate to see secretive.

She then claimed to be open to serious concerns about the system. “I am not of course arguing against criticism per se.

Of course you aren't, you just ignore it instead.

Dick claimed that “the tech we are deploying is proven not to have an ethnic bias.”

OK the machine may not have but the officer may have.

Just the place you'd want to spot a BSOD: While waiting in line for a roller coaster that lifts you up 124ft

adam payne

...his attention was abruptly drawn to the second thing you really don't want to see before boarding something that does 0 to 100km/h in 2.5 second

Hopefully it didn't control the breaking system.

AMD takes a bite out of Intel's PC market share across Europe amid microprocessor shortages, rising Ryzen

adam payne

I remember my old PC Chips motherboard...

PC Chips.....oh I remember their boards and they were crap on an epic scale.

20 years ago manufacturers making AMD boards made some shockers but nowadays this has changed and the vast majority of boards for AMD are rock solid.

adam payne

Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said CIOs still generally prefer Intel's Core processor family to AMD's Ryzen line

That probably due to a lot of CIOs not knowing what they are looking at.

...and that Chipzilla dominates the B2B portfolios of Lenovo, HP and Dell

I have long suspected Intel is up to it's old tricks again by giving PC builders discounts and back handers to not stock AMD.

"Adding AMD PCs to their PC portfolio would increase PC maintenance costs,"

Most companies are not going to stock spares anyway so I doubt it would increase maintenance costs.

All that Samsung users found on UK website after weird Find my Mobile push notification was... other people's details

adam payne

Mark showed us screenshots he had taken, showing himself logged in and someone else's details being displayed as if they were associated with his account.

Is that the sound of the GDPR train stopping at the Samsung UK HQ station?!?

Among those pardoned by Trump this week: Software maker ex-CEO who admitted hacking into rivals' systems

adam payne

According to Christie: “It was a complete overreaction by the US attorney’s office. He acknowledged that he did something wrong but he didn’t deserve to be a federal felon....

Commit a crime and you have to deal with the consequences of your actions.

One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump

adam payne

Trump went on to say that he didn't want to sacrifice US companies on the basis of "fake national security." People, he said, without naming names, are "getting carried away."

Yourself included oh great and mighty orange one.

Astroboffins agog after spotting the first repeating fast radio burst that pings every 16 days from another galaxy

adam payne
Alien

Astroboffins agog after spotting the first repeating fast radio burst that pings every 16 days from another galaxy

Is it from another galaxy or is it from dark space?

It's a Bing thing: Microsoft drops plans to shove unloved search engine down throats of unsuspecting enterprises

adam payne

While the change of mind will be welcomed, what is surprising is that Microsoft ever thought it could change search defaults in this aggressive manner without strong opposition.

That was my first thought.

US govt accuses four Chinese army soldiers of hacking Equifax and siphoning 145m Americans' personal info

adam payne

“Today, we hold PLA hackers accountable for their criminal actions, and we remind the Chinese government that we have the capability to remove the Internet’s cloak of anonymity and find the hackers that nation repeatedly deploys against us.”

So you've shouted their names from the roof tops but they'll never be held accountable for anything as China won't give them up.

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

adam payne

Incredibly, it seems Windows 10 Search and other services were knocked offline by infrastructure falling over, preventing all search results, even local ones, from showing up on desktops. Yes, it's that stupid.

Yes it is but I can see why Microsoft are doing it. Gotta push the usage stats up for Bing so they can keep pretending that people use it.

I wonder what the biggest searches are? cmd, Windows up, word etc etc

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

adam payne

IBM credits Rometty with overseeing the acquisition of 65 companies and developing its $21bn hybrid cloud businesses....blah blah blah

She is also uncredited for one of the biggest PR disasters ever.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

adam payne

Thunderbirds are go or rather Thunderbird is going again.

UN didn't patch SharePoint, got mega-hacked, covered it up, kept most staff in the dark, finally forced to admit it

adam payne

I don't know which is worse the security audits telling you to get your house in order or the cover up.

Indie VPN WireGuard gets the Torvalds seal of approval with inclusion in Linux kernel 5.6

adam payne

Indie VPN WireGuard gets the Torvalds seal of approval with inclusion in Linux kernel 5.6

Lasers!

Brave, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla gather together to talk web privacy... and why we all shouldn't get too much of it

adam payne

Justin Schuh, engineering director on Google Chrome for trust and safety, reprised an argument he's made previously that too much privacy would be harmful to ad-supported businesses.

Such as the very one you work for?!?

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

adam payne

....HPE's expert, said he hadn't seen, writing that "my opinions are given on the basis of the facts I have been instructed to assume"

I think it's quite obvious what he was instructed to assume.

The judge continued, addressing HPE's legal team: "Your expert recognised that whilst it's not what he thinks he would have done, that it wasn't improper in the sense of being beyond what a reasonable auditor could have imagined, in which case, that's that, isn't it?"

Yet again the judge schools the legal team of HPE.

It's good to see a judge who can see through the smoke and mirrors.

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

adam payne

According to the burger-flipping chain, "the screen was going through a reboot and was working normally once that had finished".

Oh OK so every PC with Windows blue screens when going through a reboot. My PC must be broken then as I don't get that.

This episode of Black Mirror sucks: London cops boast that facial-recog creepycams will be on the streets this year

adam payne

"An important thing to remember, I think, anyway from my perspective, is live facial recognition makes no decisions.

Yes you are correct it doesn't make decisions but decisions are made based on the information given, information that has been showed to be incorrect an alarming number of times.

If your mug is not matched by the system, according to Ephgrave, the images taken and the processing done will be deleted immediately.

Are you sure this is the case? sure you don't want to double check that first? We wouldn't want it to could back and bite you.

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

adam payne

we welcome his constant attention to our liberties, something to which we must always pay due care."

You can't pay due care when you consistently walk all over them and try to pretend it's for our own good.

Davis told the House of Commons this afternoon that if HPE "fail to win their civil trial against Dr Lynch here in the UK… it is inconceivable that the US authorities would win a near-identical criminal case if it was fairly tried. Accordingly, the case for extradition would evaporate.

You mean when HPE fail to win, their entire case is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

What is inconceivable is that any case in the US would be tried fairly. He is one of their scapegoats and they want him badly.

If you never thought you'd hear a Microsoftie tell you to stop using Internet Explorer, lap it up: 'I beg you, let it retire to great bitbucket in the sky'

adam payne

He put it more bluntly on Twitter: "I don't know who needs to hear this, but...don't use Internet Explorer to browse the web."

Well i'm so sorry Mr Lawrence but IE is the only way to do certain things and workaround some bugs in Sharepoint so i'm stuck with it. So Mr Lawrence please feel free to turn your attention to Sharepoint.

Chrome suddenly using Bing after installing Office 365 Pro Plus... Yeah, that might have been us, mumbles Microsoft

adam payne

That is the pitch: but is it reasonable to change browser search defaults without specific user consent?

It wasn't OK in the past, it's not OK now and it's still not going to be OK in the future.

You're not Boeing to believe this: Yet another show-stopping software bug found in ill-fated 737 Max airplanes

adam payne

"Our highest priority is ensuring the 737 Max is safe and meets all regulatory requirements before it returns to service."

Sadly after 346 people had already died.

After all the problems and bad publicity is any airline going to order these things? Could the Max become the new DC10?

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

adam payne

Ellen Lord, the US Department of Defense's chief arms buyer, told Reuters that ODIN (also an LM product) would be produced "with the voice of the maintainer and the pilots at the forefront of the requirements list."

Will ODIN be any better though? or will get share the same fate as it's predecessor.

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

adam payne

Perhaps the most ambitious element of the review is the proposal to retire the copper network – though there was no set end date in the review for this.

I'm sure BT isn't going to be happy about this they like their copper slush fund.

'Buyer's remorse' drove HP's legal crusade to go after Lynch, High Court told

adam payne

.. Mike Lynch's barrister has branded HPE's $5bn fraud trial against his client "a case study in buyer's remorse"....

It certainly does sound like buyer's remorse for a massive company that pushed ahead with the purchase regardless.

I'm the queen of Gibraltar and will never get a traffic ticket... just two of the things anyone could have written into country's laws thanks to unsanitised SQL input vuln

adam payne

The spokesman continued: "It should also be noted that the Government of Gibraltar website is hosted outside our corporate network and therefore the earlier vulnerabilities posed no risk to the security of the government's communication systems.

Good to know but that's not really the point is it.

Long-term Linux Mint: 19.3 release unchains the Gimp, adds HiDPI, is kind to your older, less-beefy kit

adam payne

I'm still using 18.3 on my old HP 6730s but will be upgrading to 19 at some point. Still loving the minty freshness with a hint of cinnamon.

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

adam payne

Travelex could not say when it expected the services to be back online. The biz said it has "teams of IT specialists and external cyber security experts," working on the issue, but there's no reported progress so far.

Sounds like Ransomware to me.

Let me guess no patching?!?

Lynch lied about Autonomy's accounts, rages HPE to the High Court

adam payne

HPE's legal team also claimed then-Autonomy COO Andy Kanter was "struggling with questions of materiality" put to him by HP's due-dil battalion.

Surely some alarms would have be going off if this was the case?!?

HPE alleges that "far from showing that HP simply charged ahead with the acquisition instead of waiting for access to Deloitte's work papers [for more detailed auditing], the evidence shows that HP made repeated requests for such access and that Autonomy management consistently refused."

It shows exactly that, you charged ahead with the acquisition.

Senior health tech pros warn NHS England: Be transparent with mass database trawl or face public backlash

adam payne

"The information, including medical and genetic records that are said to be anonymised as necessary, will be accessed by NHS practitioners, along with researchers and possibly private companies. "

Where's the opt out?

"We hope the lessons of Care.Data have been learned. I'm not sure what patient representation goes into current policy thinking. I suspect not enough," he added.

I would suspect none.

UK cops lost nearly twice as much of their own tech kit this year, says thinktank

adam payne

Hapless UK plod have lost 2,600 mobile phones, laptops, police radios, and other assorted gadgetry over the past three years

Who's paying for the replacements? Oh yeah...right that would be us the tax payer.

Post Office coughs £57.75m to settle wonky Horizon IT system case

adam payne

"The Post Office would like to express its gratitude to claimants, and particularly those who attended the mediation in person to share their experiences with us, for holding us to account in circumstances where, in the past, we have fallen short and we apologise to those affected."

You accused innocent people of theft, threatened these people with prosecution and in same cases had people prosecuted and all because your IT system didn't work correctly. Fallen short is an understatement and down right disgusting. I mean seriously you destroyed people lives over this.

It said the new chief executive was committed to learning lessons and that the company would be "undertaking an ambitious and sustained programme of changes to the Post Office's relationship with postmasters".

You've burnt those bridges and I don't think you are going to be able to repair quite a lot of them.

Every prosecution in regards to this complete fiasco needs to be reviewed immediately.

All the money they wrongly took from people with the threat of prosecution etc should been given back with interest.

If at all possible criminal charges brought against the ex CEO and his management team.

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

adam payne

NHS Improvement chairwoman Baroness Dido Harding

It's not like Dido can't be trusted or anything.

An investment of up to £3bn will be required at the data-curation stage, the OLS document added, though an initial investment of hundreds of millions if pounds would be “powerful and signal that the UK is committed to its vision of becoming the best place in the world for research and life sciences.”

There will be a more powerful signal when the project is years late and billions in the red.

Beware of bad Santas this Xmas: Piles of insecure smart toys fill retailers' shelves

adam payne

parents should still beware of toys that do not meet minimum standards.

Which standards are they then? I assume the toy industry doesn't have a minimum standard, it just has to be quick and cheap to produce.

Oi, Queenslander who downloaded 26.8TB in June alone – we see you

adam payne

singled out one user in Queensland who guzzled an astonishing 26.8TB in June alone.

This person didn't get a fair usage slap down from the ISP?!?, colour me shocked.

Xerox woos HP stock owners with talk of layoffs, selloffs and cash payouts post merger

adam payne

"synergy savings"

Management speech for lay off all the staff