* Posts by Just a geek

94 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2011

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Clothes retailer Fatface: Someone's broken in and accessed your personal data, including partial card payment details... Don't tell anyone

Just a geek
Facepalm

Yet another 'sophisticated' hack.

Fatface join the ranks of Easyjey, FireEye, Solarwinds, AWS and sonicwall. All have claimed to have been the victims of "sophisticated" attacks and yet not one single one of them will reveal why the attack was sophisticated instead of the just shitty security. Of course, in the case of solarwinds we know that the breach was anything but sophisticated and yet companies still roll out that trite line along with "we treat your security seriously".

Pisses me off no end.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Just a geek

And every 248 days for this bug -> https://www.slashgear.com/faa-boeing-787s-need-to-be-rebooted-every-248-days-uptime-04381899/

The 787 is mess

Microsoft takes us to 2004 with new Windows 10 so you don't mistake it for Server 2003

Just a geek

Microsoft need to find a number convention and sodding well stick to it.

We've, um, changed our password policy, says CafePress amid reports of 23m pwned accounts

Just a geek

Re: GDRP would have had a field day....

The site is accessible from the EU and therefore GDPR applies. I'm not sure how the EU would force the issue but this could be an interesting test case.

UK.gov's Verify has 'significantly' missed every target, groans spending watchdog

Just a geek
FAIL

"it isn't clear what will happen to DWP's use of the system after April 2020, which is when the government will farm Verify out to the private sector"

I thought that would have been obvious? It'll be hacked, they'll be a mass data leak. The company concerned will talk about "how seriously" they take security and the government will kick off another flagship project and we'll be back here again in 2-5 years time depending on how long they can drag out the procurement process.

Boss regrets pointing finger at chilled out techie who finished upgrade early

Just a geek

Seen this far, far, far too often. However, why was luca the only one able to logon to the portal to see the big alert?

Did no one else bother (Seen that too!).

Perv raided college girls' online accounts for nude snaps – by cracking their security questions

Just a geek

Re: Everytime I see "Mother's maiden name" on the list of security question...

I had a phone call with O2 the other day, I was asked to give an answer to a security question not too dissimilar to "mothers maiden name", for all of these I just use random letters and numbers stored in a password tool.

The women on the phone seemed genuinely impressed that I could remember all of those random numbers and letters..........

Also, all the calls are recorded so these "security questions" and all bollocks.

Michael Dell? More like Michael in-Dell-nial: No public cloud, no future

Just a geek

"What doesn't Dell have? A public cloud"

Except that they now own a chunk of VMWare who is partnering with AWS so maybe as part of the partnership agreement, Dell won't create a cloud rival to AWS?

US military drone goes AWOL, ends up crashing into tree 623 miles away

Just a geek
Thumb Up

Maybe this is drone sentience and it was trying to flee Trump's administration?!

Amazon's AWS S3 cloud storage evaporates: Top websites, Docker stung

Just a geek
Mushroom

Re: But....

Too many people (non IT folk) seem to think that the cloud is this magical place that never has an issue. No matter how many outages Amazon, Azure, etc have, people still seem to think that it's made of magic.

Deploy in the cloud by all means but still backup, replicate, ensure that you don't have a single point of failure.

Dev teaches bot to talk spammers' ears off

Just a geek

Re: perhaps a bit harsh

If it's an unwarranted intrusion into my mailbox then it's spam. That goes for scatter gun emails looking for leads, management reports, company newsletters and the worst of the worst, pushy sales folk asking if I'm ready to buy product X than I only started downloading 30 seconds ago.

Next big thing after containers? Amazon CTO talks up serverless computing

Just a geek

Not exactly serverless computing, more like shared computing/processing/SaaS. We do that today with large, "central" SQL servers that run databases for multiple apps.

AWS blames 'latent bug' for prolonging Sydney EC2 outage

Just a geek

that spinning flywheel...

...which provides power during generator startup is the same system that chernobyl was testing on the night of the accident with similar results it seems!

Violin faces second NYSE delisting threat

Just a geek

If they could get the stock price up above $1 then they'd be worth a buy but the stock price has been steadily on the decline for the last 18 months so I can't see them improving anytime soon.

Zuck: You're still using non-Facebook websites ... I'll put an end to that

Just a geek

"Instead of dividing people we can bring people together"

I applaud the sentiment but how many rows have started because of what someone said on facebook?

I deleted my facebook account a couple of years back and have no plans to ever create one again.

Irked train hackers talk derailment flaws, drop SCADA password list

Just a geek
Trollface

I thought that they already did this as a matter of standard?

Solidfire enters ninth circle of Dell, emerges clutching new blueprints

Just a geek

No real surprise that Soldfire are using Dell kit for a reference architecture. Their own storage system is all rebadged Dell and I think it's Dell engineers who do the hardware swaps for them.

I'm surprised that Dell haven't snapped them up yet as the company wouldn't be that expensive and it'll be another storage offering over the god awful equalogic and not quite so bad but still pretty painful compellent.......

So, GDS saved Brits £1.7bn through 'digital transformation'. Sure about that?

Just a geek
Black Helicopters

The NAO keep on pointing out IT cockup after IT cockup, they need to be careful or they'll find themselves outsourced to a more "MP face saving" organisation......

UK's Lloyds Banking Group scrambles to patch account-snooping security hole

Just a geek
Facepalm

Re: "We take...

I asked halifax if they'd consider adding some sort of two factor and was told "We take security extremely seriously. We've made a note of your suggestion and thank you for contacting us".

In other words "We take security seriously until we don't and that sounds like effort so bugger off".

Oracle, SAP, IBM: They're rubbish and charge you billions for Excel, says man

Just a geek

And MS Project is just a glorified task manager.

Word is notepad (or maybe notepad++) with bold and italics.

There is certainly some truth it what has been said but it's more about the extra features and functionality that these applications bring to the table, sadly though, a lot of people don't know to use them and do indeed just use MS Project as a task manager and use SAP as Excel.....

Patch NOW: VMware vCenter, ESXi can be pwned via your network

Just a geek
Thumb Down

They really are. I understand that flaws will be found but patching the hosts requires a reboot. To move all the VM's and apply the patches requires a bunch of co-ordinated work and change requests.

Sigh.

C For Hell – Day Two: Outage misery continues for furious C4L customers

Just a geek

This is on the NOC page:

"We are aware of additional problems at Slough where we have lost power to network devices. "

UPS issues apparently.

Just a geek
Megaphone

Whenever stuff like this hits companies they always use the same tired line "It's only a small number of people affected".

No, it's a CUSTOMER that's affected. The people who pay your bills. Stop treating them like they don't matter and if the number really is that small why are you not pro-actively contacting them?

Oh Jeez, not now! Activist investor threatens Violin Memory

Just a geek

Violin memory have had their day, their product is a one trick pony that doesn't do anything particularly clever now that other companies like solidfire are around.

BACK OFF, spooks: UK legal hacking code should be 'resisted at all costs' says lawyer

Just a geek
FAIL

Re: Will the spooks be surprised ..

Yup, I made that very point not long ago.

All you need do is spun up a machine at Azure and send people messages through it and thanks to a shared knowledge of code words you can be spied on with no on knowing what you're saying....or forget the computers and have a meet up in the pub.

If this law goes ahead it'll do three things:

1. End a lot of business in the UK as other people do business elsewhere, scared that their data is being leaked.

2. Someone outside the security services will find a way to exploit it

3. Make a lot of extra work for IT people.

This will become the Government's own superfish scandal.

Lenovo: We SWEAR we're done with bloatware, adware and scumware

Just a geek

“The events of last week reinforce the principle that customer experience, security and privacy must be our top priorities"

Shouldn't they be anyway? Is this lenovo admitting that security and privacy were not to priorities? At least not until they were caught anyway.

Juniper whips out knife, slices off security products

Just a geek

Good riddance. Never have I had so many issues with a piece of networking kit.

Finnish PM: Apple has DESTROYED FINLAND

Just a geek

Re: On the contrary

Indeed. It was a combination of OPK, Elop, that stupid as all hell burning platforms memo and a lack of risk taking.

Sorry, chaps! We didn't mean to steamroller legit No-IP users – Microsoft

Just a geek

A thought just crossed my mind

If Microsoft cannot handle the DNS requests for No-ip can they not scale them out to Azure and if not, is Azure not fit for purpose?

This little cock up should come back and bite them hard.

Just a geek

Still not working for me either.

VMware to offer converged compute and storage hardware

Just a geek
Trollface

Worst logo ever........

Seriously, it looks like VMWare are trying to give birth to something......

Oh maybe they are....

Ignore the pie-in-the-sky storage roadmaps. This is what's REALLY afoot

Just a geek

Fully agree with point 7. I really can't see the point of FCoE. If you want to chuck data down ethernet cables then you can go iSCSI and 10GBE. If you want FC then you can go pure FC. Having a middle ground with FCoE just seems like a solution to a problem that no one has.

Nokia to launch low-cost Android phone this month – report

Just a geek
WTF?

A shade over two years after Elop made huge swathes of ex-Symbian folk redundant following on from the burning platforms memo and decided that the way forward was Microsoft......

WTF as an icon because this is a WTF situation.

Just how solid is cloud storage in 2014

Just a geek

The cloud is a wonderful resource but when you use it please do remember that it's someone elses hardware and the chances of that someone else caring as much about your data is pretty much zero. Even private cloud service providers will operate like that, after all, unused capacity is a loss of money to them so please do your due diligence and make sure that when the cloud platform falls over you have your own backup/DR/Replicas ready to go.

On another note 'The UK's 2e2 cloud service collapsed in February with users asked to pay up to $40,000 extra to get their data back.' - anyone have a link for that?

MPs back call to boycott low-taxed tat from Amazon over Xmas

Just a geek
WTF?

Re: Do what we want, not what we say

I would 'suck it up' if I wasn't paying tax on everything.

Get paid by work - it's taxed.

Put money into my savings account - it's taxed

Buy something at the shop - it's taxed

Order something online - it's taxed

Pay my bills - they are taxed

And my MP? Well, they are in various tax avoidance schemes and have expense funds to handle all that.

Something is very wrong somewhere.

Just a geek
FAIL

So, According to our lords and masters we should boycott amazon because they use the law and tax loopholes to avoid tax?

Well, you know who else use the same loopholes? MP's.

So lets compare the two.

I can order goods from Amazon which arrive, normally on schedule. If something goes wrong I can speak to someone and they'll replace the goods with no fuss or argument. They also provide things like AWS.

My MP - A tax scrounging, expense stealing parasite that I am banned from speaking to.

Which one would I rather see avoid tax? Neither of them but for service Amazon wins out, therefore this bunch of MP's can go screw themselves rather than the electorate.

EMC tries to snuff out SolidFire before tomorrow's XtremIO-gasm

Just a geek

As one of the few people here who has installed a solidfire cluster my comment is that it's "not bad". It's an iSCSI only cluster than is all SSD and provides a max of 15,000 IOPS per volume. It has a few limitations at the moment but it's still quite new.

Wanted: IT world domination. Can Spiceworks succeed?

Just a geek

I hope spiceworks does succeed. It's the only place on the internet that I know of where multiple vendors and users can come together to share information. It's a fairly level playing field like that. It deserves to succeed.

Microsoft CEO shortlist claim: It's just Elop, Bates, Mulally, Nadella and...

Just a geek
Devil

Part of me would like to see Elop get it. It would be fun to see him break up the company and sell it to Apple..... ;)

Nice job, technology. Now we have to work FIVE TIMES HARDER

Just a geek

It's a shame that many companies still insist on daily attendance at the office. Even with high speed internet access and remote working there are many managers who think that 'work from home' means 'take a sneaky day off' and there is no tech to improve that trust.

Flash cheaper than disk? 'Customers aren't buying that', says NetApp CEO

Just a geek

We had a presentation of flashray and I was kinda left with a 'meh' impression and I think that Georgens is wrong with his 'you can't have idle data on flash' because with flash you may pay more per gb but you pay less in power, cooling and rack space.

Skyera unveils rival-crushing 21PB-a-rack flash monster

Just a geek
Happy

Re: Apart from the NSA...

640kb was referring to RAM, not storage.

Anyway, provide the storage and the users will eat it :)

UK gov's smart meter dream unplugged: A 'colossal waste of cash'

Just a geek

The Americans certainly haven't welcomed them and I was told by a meter reader that they have a habit of picking up every spike, especially those from older appliances which generate a voltage spike when turned on which leads to much higher bills.

I was 'surveyed' for one of these meters the other day and I'll be doing what I can to resist having it installed.

Ofcom fines TalkTalk AGAIN - a whopping £750k over 'abandoned calls' gaffe

Just a geek
Thumb Up

good on Ofcom. Next time make the fine higher.

Oh I'm so surprised. TalkTalk deserve this. I had one dealing with them a few years back where they took on my phone line without consent. The sales drone had forged my signature!

A few months back one of the TalkTalk sales drones knocked on my door and promised me that 'it is all different now'. It seems that OFCOM has proven that TalkTalk are as disgusting and shady as ever.

Tech is the biggest problem facing archiving

Just a geek
Flame

There are actually places that have older style drives to be able to recover data from those tapes sitting out at places like iron mountain at the moment. Of course, one issue here is that to recover data from 10 years ago - or more but it goes a lot further than just the tape drives.

so, once we've found the tape drive that we need we'd then need to find the tape(s) and hope they work.. hang on, how do we restore it? Ok, we need to build a server so we need the correct software - maybe even the patch version. Where do we get that? The supplier doesn't exist any more (or has been bought out). We've got the server backed up on tape but are now in a chicken and egg situation and even if we get the server back we may well need the domain as some backup products (netbackup for example) will use the domain SID to generate an encryption key.

You did keep the passwords for the domain somewhere safe didn't you and not just on the tape????

Long term archive presents a whole series of problems. Tape format and machines to read it are just one of those problems.

BAN SMUT, rage MEPs: Purpose of internet must be EXTERMINATED

Just a geek
Stop

It is... extremely badly drafted and almost certainly too absurd to be taken seriously.

Sounds like a lot of legislation that then becomes law.

this is a crazy thing to focus on though, if they haven't defined what pornography is it'll hit girlie mags and the chippendales.

I'll also add that there are other places where sex is banned - certain religious establishments for example and it's worked oh so well for them hasn't it?

Amazon yanks SimCity download from store

Just a geek
FAIL

Re: Vote with the old wallet, theyll learn (probably)

One reason I'll never buy this game is the requirement to use someone else's server. What happens when EA decide to close the servers down? In five years time you'll own a game you can't play.

Commvault disgorges ginormous flood of biz data-furtling software

Just a geek
Alert

So when are netapp moving away from their snapmanager products and using simpanas? We all know it's coming and it was supposed to be announced in Feb but so far nothing.

Microsoft's own code should prevent an Azure SSL fail: So what went wrong?

Just a geek
Windows

Re: SysAdmins versus Ops versus Sec

Why mess around with a spreadsheet? Surely networking monitoring/syslog/SNMP must have the ability to say <8 weeks remaining on this cert and send out an alert/change an icon to yellow/something to draw attention to the issue?

Apple: iOS 6.1 network overload caused by our Exchange SYNC OF DOOM

Just a geek
Alert

"That flooded networks with packet traffic and burned through 3G mobile data allowances"

So does that make Apple liable for the expense? Could be an interesting court case.

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