* Posts by 0laf

1960 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Nov 2009

Belgian ale legend Duvel's brewery borked as ransomware halts production

0laf
Mushroom

Too far

These bastards have hit hospitals, governments and airlines

But now they've gone too far, hitting a brewer. Risking an interruption in the flow of that sweet sweet nectar.

I think we need a peoples army of hackers to take them out. If it's beer today tomorrow it could be crisp (chips for the west-pondians) or pizza.

Capita says 2023 cyberattack costs a factor as it reports staggering £100M+ loss

0laf

Re: Magically surviving

No I don't think so, Crapita are right up there (down there?) in the crapola stakes. Northgate might top them tbh.

Capita have a few large monopoly products with no easy escape route. It's often less hassle to keep big shitty suppliers than the replace them with another.

0laf
Big Brother

Re: Take your pick

Then I'm afraid you don't really get 'security'.

If your users are incapable of using passwords then a password is not a suitable security control. You need to find another more suitable form of authentication or you need to implement other controls that provide the same level of risk reduction but are not authentication controls.

You might need to design a security system for users that are vulnerable or lack mental capacity (the very young and the very old) or who have additional needs (visual imparement, physical control issues). It still needs to be secure and their difficulties are your problems to work around.

Your security needs to suit the environment and the users. If you try to force users into using security controls that don't suit that's when you'll get post-its under desks, machines never locked, emails sent to personal addresses.

And if the managment aren't bought in you're screwed before you start.

Security is 90% psychology and 10% technology.

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

0laf

Meh

There is nothing compelling about W11 at all for the home user.

It just seems like a reskin with added data theft (over and above W10).

Like some others here I've a slightly older machine with a decent Ryzen 7 processor (2017) which is working perfecty fine but it won't move to W11 because of some TPM issue on chip or mobo. Really I can't be bothered to fight to make it work.

The copilot thingy, I don't use it, why would I? It's search results are shit and slow and I don't need it to draft a report about things for me.

If I'm making effort I'll make Steam work on Linux on the old kit, at least that's free apart from my time

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

0laf
Go

Fetch the popcorn

Government has a problem, decides to throw new expensive tech at it to see if it sticks. We've never seen this go wrong before have we?

All I can say is get in there quick boys! There will be a shit load of cash swilling around for a while but don't forget to jump ship before you actually have to deliver anything coz you know it'll be a complete clusterfuck with a public enquiry for icing on top. And keep lots of offline notes blaming whatever minister is support be steering this particular wreck.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

0laf

Re: That's not what he said

"AI is the new outsourcing"

I shall use that.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

0laf
Big Brother

Re: Sums up the whole problem really

Google has removed, obsfucated or just ignores most of the basic functions you used to be able to use to get better results.

Clearly it's not to improve search for the end user but to prevent any avoidance of its list of paid for links.

But then the old rule applies, "if the service is free, you are the product". I'm not sure there even is a way to pay for search now to avoid this.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

0laf

Doesn't matter

It doesn't matter now if AI works or not. The board is sold on the idea already, they see the dream of having no staff other than themselves an are being told by the AI sales people that the dream is now possible.

In reality the enshittification of services will continue. AI might get controlled on the customer facing side if mistakes cost money but internal helpdesks, you are all screwed. It doesn't matter if the machine that replaces you is useless and makes mistakes, there are no personal damages to claim.

Got to wonder about the end game though, if everyone outside every boardroom is replaced by a machine so noone is employed then what value does the business have without customers?

It's enough to make you consider conspiracy theories, only my opinion of the majority of the human race is so low that I don't think we're capable of running a conspiracy. Idiocracy here we come

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

0laf

Re: Being polite is great

Never shit on the little people. The PA, the guy on reception, the security guy, the cleaner etc. One, why would you? they're working just as hard as you but in a different way. Two, often these are the people who will get you out of trouble when you fuck up. Grab the notebook you've forgotton, find a spot in the bosses diary etc.

As other have said it's worth being decent to everyone that doesn't deserve to be treated badly, if you are burning a bridge make sure you mean it.

0laf
Headmaster

If you want IT stories of stupid decisions, entitled people and mismanagement schools are the place to fish for them.

I have done the OPs job but without the big dramas. I still have many stories about petty teaching staff etc. i.e. being yelled at in front of a class of kids for a printer not working only to demonstrate it was out of paper.

If you can handle IT in a school you'll spend a few years underpaid and unappreciated but you'll develop a lovely thick hide and everything after will look easy.

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

0laf
Happy

Re: DIRECTIVE 254: Encourage awareness.

I had to activate some very cold storage to get that but it happened eventually

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

0laf

Not American. But have done US based training and indeed legal non-compliance and fines were simply to be considered a business risk and or expense. The ethics of actions leading to that situation were not even a consideration.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

0laf

Re: It proves climate change is a hoax

I think it proves that governments are lying gobshites that will say anything and climb on any bandwagon that suits them at any moment.

The fact that WFO/WFH and climate targets could possible be linked in a positive or negative way is of absolutely bugger all interest to them.

Ensureing their own, their donors and their friends commercial property portfolios continue to hold value is of far more importance.

I don't think's it's got anything to do with the truth about climate change at all.

British businesses told: Compliance with EU AI law will satisfy UK guidance

0laf
Meh

The money will make the decision.

If you need to sell to EU or have data that has originated in EU then you'll end up complying with the EU regs anyway.

UK gov might want to flap around and make noises about being seperate from Europe and able to make our own rules (Brexit means Brexit and other such sweaty faced drivel) but business will make up its own mind and probably plump for the EU rules since it's likely to give them pretty much global scope through one compliance policy.

None of this will stop Big Tech from stealing data and doing what they like as usual.

OpenAI shuts down China, Russia, Iran, N Korea accounts caught doing naughty things

0laf
Alert

Re: "We disrupted five state-affiliated malicious actors"

Anything except admit that you've not done any updates for 5yr and the chief exec's password is "bigboy123".

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

0laf

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

If you can authenticate using only one of two available factors then it's a single factor login in.

For access to personal information this should be considered abreach of the GDPR under article 32. And MFA is certainly not state of the art by any means

0laf

Worse than that SMS is less worthy as a 2FA factor since the SMS is not tied to a physical device tightly enough. SIM Swap fraud is relatively easy to do since you only need to social engineer the person in a retail phone shop which brings the entire retail arm of the supplier into your personal attack surface. And that is much easier to do than intercept the SMS or steal a phone.

SMS is a better than nothing additional factor. 10yr ago we were referring to it as a half factor because of this.

Banks etc use SMS as MFA because it's cheaper than signing up to use an app based system, your security is not the primary concern.

Europe's largest caravan club admits wide array of personal data potentially accessed

0laf

Well they've hit a good few squares on "cyber incident bingo" so far and see to be aiming for the full house.

I await for "victim of a sophisticated attack" to be announced before I'll shoute "house".

Rise of deepfake threats means biometric security measures won't be enough

0laf
Terminator

MFA

A biometric on it's own is still only one factor. A fancy factor maybe, a sci-fi factor possibly but still only one.

Possibly in the future facial recognition might be considered a bit like SMS tokens. That being better than nothing but not a proper factor since it's too easy to circumvent or has too broad an attack surface.

We'll be fitting actual physical key locks to doors again soon

Scientists don thinking caps in wearable tech breakthrough

0laf
Big Brother

Just think of the ads

"We've noticed you've scratched your crotch 15 times in the last hour, why not try this new ball cooling lotion from [insert Chinese chemical factory] and we've assumed your consent to share this data when you remvoed the price tag and have passed it to 127000 trusted partners and signed you up to 7 TikTok streams on crotch related fungal infections and you've been auto enroled with your local GUI support group"

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

0laf
Flame

Dark?

I'm not sure these are dark patterns. MS trying to get you to use Edge and give up your privacy in other areas is overt obvious, persistant and bloody annoying.

They are only a couple of steps away from that 90s 'funny' exe that used to make you chase the close window "X" around the screen.

I should be able to invoice MS for my time since I need to undo their privacy 'suggestions' after every fucking update.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

0laf
Black Helicopters

Very sorry honestly

We're saying we're very sorry honest and it's not just to get this all behind us so we can get back to sucking that public sector money teat just as hard as we can.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

0laf
Mushroom

Re: Back in the day

I remember those days and was of the understanding that a British MI# deptarment had altered that particular book subtly so that the nastier recipes didn't work but left it in circulation since people are generally lazy and less likely to investigate doing things properly by learning chemistry etc.

0laf
Trollface

Re: But ... I thought computers didn't do Scottish

That depends where he was at Uni. If it was Aberdeen then "Down South" is everything south of Stonehaven.

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

0laf
FAIL

Search sucks, AI isn't supposed to improve it

Search doesn't need improving because search technology is/was bad. Search is bad because the results are bastardised to promote adverts and paid for listings ahead of the actual information you are looking for. Introducing AI into the mix isn't going to (and isn't intended to) improve search for anyone except the ad slingers and the data slurpers.

AI might be the shiny-shit du jour but it's just the fashionable glitter on the turd that is search at the moment.

0laf

It might be AI but it's crap

Having had the pleasure of MS AI foisted on me at home and at work I do occasionally try it to see if it works. Without fail it's a shit way to get information and much slower and less reliable than doing it myself.

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

0laf

Re: GDPR breach here we come

Tab may imply personal or senstive personal informaiton. e.g. if a significant number of tabs feature cancer, or specific types of cancer then coupled with an IP address (which is personal information currently) then this may be seen to be correlating a health condition with an individual which equals special category data. MS will not have lawfully obtained consent to take this data in this way.

It doesn't matter if it would be impossible for you or I to correlate this information, MS has extensive records on users and the processing power to carry out that matching exercise.

Similary it can be enougn to have the tab for any employment union open, union membership being considered special category data.

A letter to any EU regulator should at least be enough to make MS consider if this might affect its share price in the short term at least.

UK lawmakers say live facial recognition lacks a legal basis

0laf
Big Brother

Old hat

Facial recognition is bad enough but it's biomechanical tracking that worries me more.

Facial recognician can be foiled by a hat or a scarf you can't do that if you are being tracked on how you walk.

It's already in use in lots of places.

The paranoid cynic in me wonders if facial recognition drama is bieng talked up to slip biomechanical tracking in through the side door.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

0laf
Big Brother

Why now?

Just wondering why the trigger now?

There has been celebrity pr0n fakery going on since before the internet including other AI stuff more recently.

What's so different about the current ones to cause outrage where there was none (or little) before?

Is it just because Taylor Swift is a near diety in the US?

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

0laf
Black Helicopters

It's everywhere

You can see enshittification everywhere, not just tech. I just never had a word for it until now. In politics, in basic utility services (water/sewage in the England being a prime example), in cars, clothing everything. You can see the same trend, shittier service delivered by fewer more overworked underpaid staff for ever increasing prices. AI for many companies is just another way to push this further, a way to ditch underpaid staff completely, deliver even shittier levels of service and extract ever more money.

And it's all backed up by a government and right wring press that gaslights citizens to belive that they should only ever be paid less (real terms), should work harder and if they don't like it they are lazy bastards deserving of destitution.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

0laf
Alert

I still use it

I've used FF for a very long time and still use it as my primary browser and that is predominatly because of a few security plugins that block traking and ads better than I've been able to do on other browsers. To me the internet is unusable without these ad ons. Ok It might be possible to do on other browsers but I know how to do it on FF and it works for me, I'd have to relearn tools on a new browser. I rarely see any compatibility issues and if I do get any it is normally down to my use of script blockers and tracking blocks.

I've never seen the performance issues others complain of but I rarely have more than a couple of tabs open.

I distrust Google more than FF and Edge is appalling marketing nagware from MS endlessly reminding me to try 365 despite me having a family license for it.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

0laf
Childcatcher

From what I've read we may have worked physically harder in the past but we didn't work as long. you could only work when there was sufficient daylight and there was more time off at home, not extended holidays like not but longer evenings sitting round the village campfire.

UK government woefully unprepared for 'catastrophic' ransomware attack

0laf
Alert

Government Awareness Programme

I'm sure they've set up an extensive and targetted anti-phishing awareness programme.

Meaning they got the graduate trainee to print off some free phishing posters they found on line and blu-tak them above the gents urinals and back of the bog doors.

Job done, box ticked, get it off the risk register, 10p spent.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

0laf
WTF?

Re: Anointed proprietary monopoly

They didn't just not got to jail many of the senior executives went on to lead major public sector organisations and Paula Vennells was rewarded with a CBE for "services to the Post Office". So they actually benefitted from their time in charge. She's just in the last few days voluntarily handed this back with the current outcry casued by the tv show.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

0laf
Flame

Paula Vennells may not have been directly running investigations and personally pushing the button on ruining sub-postmasters but she was the CEO and is ultimately responsible for the running of her organisations. Executives are supposed to be legally responsible, maybe if we started holding them to that responsiblity we'd have fewer scandals. Also ending the eternal failing up of those in power would be a good thing too. We have former CEOs coming off disasterous tenures often moving straight into prime jobs often in the public sector only to fail repeatedly then move on again to yet another gold plated post (cough Dido Harding cough).

What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines

0laf
Meh

Amazon already has AI generated self published books. Unless they are keen to screen these there will be a flood of LLM generated grabage books. Many of which will be cribbing from copyrighted works ingested by the LLM

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

0laf
Megaphone

I think MS Windows peaked with W2000 tbh.

Fast, functional and did what it was bloody told for the most part.

Even driver managment wasn't that bad.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

0laf
Flame

The Market

Ah our wonderous politicians strike again.

Half baked plan, no idea how to actually makes soemthing work? Never mind just chuck it out there and "The Market" will sort it out.

Because of course what ever voter wants is minimum service delivery for maximum cost, coz that's all we seem to get from "the Market". If you ban every other option those citizens will be delighted to comply. And if all else fails just get the tax hammer out and club people into ticking those boxes you promised they would then throw in your resignation and pick up that golden goodbye before you step into your 3 day a month boardroom seat at the energy firm you've been taking brown envelopes from all along.

Plus problems with the grid, not enough electricity generation or storage capacity, who cares! It's in the enxt parliamentary cycle anyway so not your fucking problem.

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

0laf
Thumb Down

Right now

So it's appeared on my W11 laptop. We have it at work.

TBH it's as good as Bing search. Which is shit.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

0laf
Meh

Nothing new

I've been telling people for years that they are only buying a license when it's a streaming service or a digital copy.

TBH for many things I don't really care. Steam, yeah I use it and I've had no issues in 8yr, it's unlikely I'll have any issues that will make me change what i do. Also I only buy older stuff so no big bucks involved.

Music is a bit different, I still like to own my music, I still have physical media players and they are good quality so I'm going to keep buying physical music. Film I'm less concerned about but I may go back to buying bluerays etc for films I really want to keep watching. Most things I wouldn't really miss.

No more staff budget for UK civil service, but worry not – here's an incubator for AI

0laf
Terminator

Money

There is always money available for shiny shit.

Capita scores £239M contract to manage mega public sector pension scheme

0laf
Facepalm

Just as Capita announce 900 job cuts many in the UK. I'm sure they're provide wonderful service none-the-less.

However they didn't earn the nickname "Crapita" for nothing.

Meta, YouTube face criminal spying complaints in Ireland

0laf

Alex Hanff is rather tenacious. Not only will he give those corporations a hard time he'll likely clobber the courts as well.

Inside Denmark’s hell week as critical infrastructure orgs faced cyberattacks

0laf
FAIL

Re: Firewall updates

There is nothing shocking in that. Many organisation refuse any downtime to apply fixes and updates to critical systems. At the same time they reduce IT budgets and refuse to pay for out of hours support when the downtime would be less impactful. This looks like a problem with a beancounter at the root of it. Again.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

0laf
Big Brother

Adblockers are necessary

I've used adblockers since the advent of the technology 20yr ago. And IMHO the reality is that the internet is unusable without them. Even mainstream sites are so bedecked with adverts, left right top and bottom, plus popups and pop unders that if I can't use an adblocker then I won't use the site at all.

And lets be honest YouTube is a cesspit filled with 99% utter garbage. Would you actually miss it?

Psst! Infosec bigwigs: Wanna be head of security at HM Treasury for £50k?

0laf

Parliament is little better

Head of Infosec Risk HMG Pariliamentary Digital services - £75k.

That's still joke money to deal with teh risk associated with the loonies that are using WhatsApp and TikTok to move government secrets around

0laf
FAIL

Re: Can't pay more

As a counterpoint Renfrewshire Council in Scotland have a Security and Governance Manager job up right now - £56-59k.

But tbh I don't really know any qualified security guy who would even look at a salary like that for a job that is likely going to be one to drive you into an early grave whilst ministers use you as a blamehound for their failings.

NHS Digital exposes hundreds of email addresses after BCC blunder copies in entire invite list to 'Let's talk cyber' event

0laf
FAIL

But why?

Ok they cocked up like pretty much every business does every other day. But why is it so hard to set BCC as a default option?

Yeah it's possible but it's not simple.

why no easy end user option to "send as BCC unless"?

NASA's InSight lander expected to survive most of summer before choking to death on Martian dust

0laf

Re: Learning point.

I guess the landers will get through their primary mission without dust causing a problem just fine, so why bother with an expensive solution to what isn't really a problem.

Price of Microsoft's Surface Duo plummets to better represent middling hardware ... but only if you're in the US

0laf

Re: Fool me once

I had one, I'm not a big app user so it's main functionality as a phone was good and price was good. Then it got dropped, or first MS attempted to ruin it with a W10 update which luckily I never applied.

At work we bought thousands of them as they could be centrally managed. Then MS dropped support and that probably cost us a couple of 100k to replace with android devices earlier than we would otherwise have.

So yeah, I'm not buying into anything that MS could easily dump.