Obvious, cos El Reg never works a bank holiday :)

123-reg's control panel has been broken in a number of ways for a few months now, notwithstanding the effort maybe a year ago to update it to something that looks modern, bolted onto the top of their old control panel. I've paid for renewals I didn't want to with them because I couldn't get the domains transferred out with bits of the registrar lock and admin details panels being broken at various times.

Of course I cant say if the weakness exploited is part of the new or the old CP. I hope it's actually the new one. The old one was boring plain but entirely functional, and remnants of it are clearly underneath parts of the new one.

Now for example if you're a heavy user of email forwarding, an small old rather long webpage is replaced by (in my case) a 1MB, 40,000 line behemoth of javascript which will show a whole 10 email dresses (while the rest are in the source, but need to you click to see them). It also nicely puts ellipses in email addresses making them impossible to read, usually replacing no letters at all, just for a laugh.

If this security problem affects .co.uk as it would seem (Nominet's involvement) that 123-reg has "terminated our registrar agreement with one registrar" seems BS, as they indeed have, but I understand it's their upstream .com registrar (which in itself has causes nightmares for us that have .coms registered through 123-reg). It also seems from the story to make no difference as it's 123-reg's control panel that's at fault, so why they could say they've "worked with our registrars to help them tighten security" also reads as BS.

Unfortunately 123-reg's marketing/PR have been hundreds of thousands of miles away from what's actually happening on the ground for months (have a ganders at their tweets to and from - complete disconnect). Presumably these statements came from the PR bods sitting there in cloud airy-fairy land.

Stick with Civ 5?

Does Civ 5 work? Civ revolution marked the end of me as a EA customer, as the endgame was bugged to hell to the extent it ruined most games and despite releasing updates that updated *something* they never fixed that.

I also find it amusing that el Reg is plastered with SimCity ads, and the recent articles going through the old Sim Citys. Fair enough it has to make money somehow, but it's amusing nonetheless.

I'm no genius because there will be plenty of other people will be saying I told you so, but this SimCity disaster was completely predictable from the start. Everything EA release these days is full of bugs and has something to extract more money out of the player. There's also no way a small amount of back-of-fag-packet maths would not have calculated the server capacity required, the software will just be bugged to hell.

An enormous shame as I'd love to waste the next 6 months of my life playing SimCity or perhaps Civ something, but perhaps fortunately EA have ensured I actually do something constructive with my time :(

+1 for running the servers on Amigas too. It's true that it would work, if only because the code would have to be debugged fully to avoid continually bringing down the whole OS (no memory protection is a blessing sometimes)

Boots in 10 seconds

EXCELLENT, we're perhaps matching the boot speed of my Amiga circa 1998 (and I *am* talking OS, TCPIP stack and Browser off a mechanical HD) technology's improving so much isn't it?

One of our VPS hosted "servers" fell over at the same time, and while the service status page said there was a network issue their ("we are VERY busy at the moment", yet answered immediately) helpline said a similar thing had befallen it - a disk failure and being restored from backup. What puzzles me is their VPS are supposed to be RAID-5. Don't they keep an eye on the disks?

Additionally said VPS is down again tonight.

I can't STAND the new disks, impossible to get an idea of what's actually happening, for the sake of a spinny gimmick!

and so is shown the problem with "managed services"

"Unfortunately AWE cancelled their contract yesterday. The administrators do not know what replacement arrangements AWE have reached but employees may wish to seek further guidance as to the possibility of their employment transferring to AWE or AWE's new supplier under TUPE,"

WHUT? So effectively 2e2 was just employing the people that worked on AWEs systems, to just work on AWEs systems? When AWE says bye bye, they tell the AWE people there's no AWE to work on anymore and they may be suitable to move across to the next provider? Where's the economy of scale/pooling of skills/etc here? Ah there is none. Just someone else standing in the middle of customer and employees creaming off money for themselves.

@Tezfair. If you are missing something, then I am missing the exact same thing.

This does not sound like what "cloud" is always described as to me. This appears to be a layer of virtualisation over some server resource that you still buy piecemeal, that results in it failing more often than if you just bought some servers.

The requirement for (and lack of in most cases) software/system that can get over things failing by itself is one of the reasons the little guys are invited to put their stuff in the cloud I thought. The cloud handles the outages by shuffling stuff around as needed. Not so it seems, although admitted I speak without much knowledge or experience.

No sense IMHO. Also explains why mysqueezebox.com has been so flaky in recent weeks even though it's "in the cloud"

NHS is one of the organisations that big and ugly enough to roll their own "cloud" (= shared) services in house, rather than outsourcing to companies that - as rightly pointed out in these comments - need the same equipment and staff to provide the service AND make a healthy looking profit on top.

Why people in charge of NHS stuff - particularly Informatics Merseyside if they look after 9 trusts - don't understand and get the balls required to roll their own, free of any profits required to be made.

After all it sounds like SCC are offering the extremely complicated service of 15tb worth of disk space.

These voice recgonition things are shit

I recently had the displeasure of using Virgin Credit Card's one, that to my surprise could understand perfectly all the complicated stuff I said, aside from the word "yes" when it asked for confirmation that it had understood.. No options to back out of the system either, or even - blindingly obvious I would have thought - provide the option to type numbers instead, or "press 1 to confirm".

BT's genius implementation on 152 is great as well. "I'd like to report a fault on an ISDN line" is not within it's vocabulary, and it repeatedly insists that you must say something it understands. I always end up with it completely misunderstanding me, then apologising to whoever I do get through to, who usually punts me in the right direction.

I had a training course recently where some crazy fool said these things are the future of callcentres. Only if clueless implementation managers fall for the emperors new clothes big sell from Massive Telephone Services Company Limited. People have been doing voice recognition for years and it will just never ever work at anything like an acceptable rate, until we start reaching technology that gets near emulating however the brain does it.

How about actually training and looking after some people that can speak and understand English, and can comprehend and deal quickly with multiple types of user problem, so they can get the customer off the (freefone?) telephone lines ASAP, with them satisfied and hopefully therefore a returning customer who will go out to the world and extol the virtues of the great service they just received?

They'd additionally save the cost of all the voice recognition snake oil system that no doubt piss off a slice of their customer base so badly that they go elsewhere and usually require a new and better one be bought every 2 years or so because they failed to meet expectation.

Or am I missing something?

O RLY?

Windows? Pre-emptive multitasking? Do me a favour! Maybe for the process that draws the mouse pointer but that is all.

Cloud == resilient, no? If someone's made a "cloud" that is (perhaps optionally) not - resilient, that's not what people are thinking of when someone says "cloud" right?

Gotta totally agree on the Vertex 2 point. Perhaps they guy jumped before the class action? Personally going nowhere near OCZ ever again.

want

cracking idea, i'll take 30 of em immediately - if you put a sim slot in it, and it does have a battery.... hmmm.

Haha, anyone who genuinely is thinking they'll use or develop for IE because the new versions are "better", have been fooled at least twice.

IE, MSs "extensions" - and by association those developers that were sucked in by them - are the reason there are corporates and public organisations up and down the country are absolutely stuck with IE 6 or 7 because they are needed to run their ageing expensive to replace web based systems, while also getting bleated at by their users because the new stuff they're buying (and/or youtube etc) are demanding that something new is installed instead.

An undoubtedly huge number of developers and users got locked in and then abandoned by MS. Why would you risk unblinkingly walking into that again!?

3G doesn't work reliably. Coverage is patchy on all networks, and data rates when you supposedly do have a signal are far too often zero. Handover between the technologies fails frequently. The kicker is, use a 2G phone and mobile phones are suddenly a reliable technology again (aside from on Three of course). Why are we at all hopeful that 4G is going to be any better?

re: Smart move

It's a smart move if 3G works. In my experience it doesn't on an extremely regular basis. Let's hope it works better in AT&T land than any of the UK networks (I've now tried them all!).

That said, we'll get to know because if it's as bad as I think it will be, then pretty much everyone will cancel their service. I'm pretty certain 2G is seriously propping up sales of 3G in this country.

@Lee Dowling - totally spot on!

I have no idea why it hasn't clicked with any of these companies that having someone on the end of the phone fully trained, bothered what people are phoning for, and having all the possible systems at their disposal for getting a result is much cheaper than filling call centres full of clueless, powerless morons, and pissing the customers off both waiting for them and dealing with the buffoonery once they get through.

I've had experiences much the same as yours with BT, Sky, O2, Orange (who unbelievably told me they "didn't have the time" to deal with an overcharge!), Talkmobile, Fujifilm (who's callcentre closed while I was holding) and loads more that I probably should be glad I forgot about.

To go on another slant, I have worked closely with callcentre "system admins" on a number of occasions (but never as one). The lack of thought into the design never ceases to amaze. It seems the simplicity of administration of such systems - or should I say the perceived simplicity - fosters the idea that anyone can write a callhandling script. They actually get really complicated really fast - particularly in a multiskill environment. Try telling a caller to one line what caller number they are when there could be a call to a higher priority line any second. That's probably the main reason why most callcentres don't do it. People get told they're called number 2, then suddenly they're caller number 5.

The main problems I keep coming across are (1 - mentioned several times above) what happens when a call centre closes while you're in the queue. The easy answer is that the lines close but the agents don't go home until all the calls are answered. Of course all the agents are on strict fixed hours and are treated like disposable shit, so go home immediately. and (2) Monitoring. Nobody usually has a clue what's going on in the callcentre, wallboards if they're present are usually based on the known, rather than the exception - e.g. some caller being punted off to some unmanned queue somewhere for 16 hours, and reporting tools are pretty much universally a work of fiction, even in the rare cases they are configured correctly. Tiger billing, Cisco webview for examples just punt out a load of stats that really do mean sod all. Management love them though...

Will do wonders for Seagate's reputation for reliability!

Incompetent Dabs?

Indeed. In their great customer database migration of April 2011-ish my account disappeared. I've emailed and rung (0870, 30 min+ wait) several times, because not only can I not order anything, I can't retrieve old invoices. After my emails in April, and their apologies for not sorting it quicker, we emailed back and forth until August with them ignoring most of the requests, at which point I gave up. Seems they don't even need customers like me. BT have cocked up what was a pretty decent place to buy from.

There's no way...

...that the disputes only, or mainly, enrich the lawyers, or the companies with the patents wouldn't bother using the services of the lawyers to defend them. Companies aren't stupid, in the main they know a lose-lose situation when they see one.

99.99%

SLAs are pretty much always like this. We'll give you a tiny amount of money back, and cap it at a slightly less tiny amount of money, should it go completely pear shaped and the 5 nines run off into the distance screaming. In this case, if you notified Fasthosts that your service was down, you'll get a whole month service credit. Wow. I've seen much bigger services that offer pretty much the same - here, massive company, we'll give you a day's service credit in return for your day of lost trading.

Although I do agree in this instance that expecting events of this nature never happening on such a cheap service is foolish. If your service was business critical you implemented a standby on another provider didn't you?

That said, like "unlimited" broadband, the practice should be stopped. 99.99% guarantees should only be made by those that guarantee it, not with a big asterisk next to it linking to a passage offering something quite different. In this case 99.99% uptime will have been added to Fasthosts webpage because, like unlimited broadband, that's what everyone else was offering, and they were losing customers by not doing so.

No resilience, no service status updates. Denial of at least the extent of the problem. On probably one of the biggest "cloud" services out there. And people still falling over themselves to not have their stuff on their own tin in their own rooms?

EPG Ads

Good on ya for knocking the points off, but could you make it more like 100 points next time? -15 is surely a score to make people sit up and take notice.

Thanks for your patience?!?!?

The words you are looking for, BOA, are "we apologise for the inconvenience". Your customer's patience is not on offer, nor should you be presuming you can take it, and certainly not thanking them for it when you do!!

I use PayPal all the time, several times a week pretty much. Always in the solid knowledge that at some point I will get ripped off. PayPal will facilitate that ripping off, and not assist me in getting the matter sorted.

I am sure that as people can already buy stuff in the high street knowing that they are pretty well protected from getting ripped off. PayPal will not be able to compete.

"private cloud computing"

That'll be a bunch of privately owned servers connected by a network then?

Typical Nokia

I really like the look of the phone - kind of an iPhone cross iPod nano 2g mashup. For some reason my interest is piqued. I hit up the link in the article. Presumably it has been checked, or even cut-n-pasted from the URL bar of someone actually visiting the page at the time.

"OOPS It looks like the page you're trying to find isn't available"

so I stuck N9 in the search box, and got a nice bold this-is-definitely-what-youre-looking-for type search result at the top of the list. Hit that link and "OOPS It looks like the page you're trying to find isn't available" WHAT? from your OWN search engine?!

VERY VERY typical of Nokia. I saw many of these pages when I was trying to sort out my CWM subscription, which also aptly demonstrated that Nokia employ a bunch of morons in their support function. CWM/Ovi music (pretty much the only bit of Nokia I have interacted with in recent years) displays popup windows full of jibberish and locks up until I pay attention to it, and has old-school fat client software that actually gets buggier and slower with each new release. Their support site is full of these kind of 404s or links for detailed information that plonk you back to the most generic of FAQ index pages.

Bumbling idiots can mash a working website together these days, it's a pretty well established art. If Nokia can't manage it, my confidence they can manage much else is severely dinted.

and that was be O2's testing team?

the same people that passed the C905 to give to customers? In that case the PS phone must be really really really bad!

Although if it's also being sold for 1058 clubcard points....

.... then you get one free with every £50-ish quids worth of shopping! Bargain. (I know BTW)