* Posts by TheVogon

3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013

Builds aplenty, taking calls from the pub with Teams, and Edgy leaks: It's the week at Microsoft

TheVogon

Re: "In what specific way do you think that Windows 10 infringes the GDPR?"

Windows 10 forces you to choose if you want to opt in to anything classed as personal data under GDPR during install / first run. That includes detailed application crash dumps and potentially virus infected files. You have to decide to approve that - it's not the default.

And again for the browser, it depends entirely if retained information is personally identifiable as to if it comes under the GDPR, and to store that information, informed consent is required.

You can see a summary of that here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/privacy/gdpr-it-guidance

Whatever you might not like about Windows 10 privacy, it seems to comply with the GDPR as far as I can see.

TheVogon

Re: "Obviously he hasn't seen any of Windows 10 telemetry logs then!"

"can't wait for the first GDPR full investigation against Windows 10 data slurping..."

In what specific way do you think that Windows 10 infringes the GDPR? I'm not aware of any complaints so far from the usual activists that have already shopped Google and others.

Azure thing at last: Windows Virtual Desktop takes to the cloudy stage

TheVogon

Re: So......

No, you would normally use a Raspberry Pi or Wyse thin client to access your VDI.

WD spins off 300+ jobs in the US

TheVogon

300 jobs gone in a flash these days surely...

Brekkie TV host Lorraine Kelly wins IR35 ruling against HMRC, adds fuel to freelance techies' ire over tax reforms

TheVogon

Because Breitbart says it is. That combined with high local levels of gullibility (have you seen the figures for belief in a sky fairy?!), the Dunning Kruger effect and motivated inference.

Brexit text-it wrecks it: Vote Leave fined £40k for spamming 200k msgs ahead of EU referendum

TheVogon

Re: Dodgy behavior by Vote Leave?

Having another referendum would be a joke. What happens if we get a different result - best of 3?|

Croydon school rolling in toilet roll after Brexit gift deemed unfit for the Queen's Anus Horribilis

TheVogon

I guess the school will have to keep it's government issue loo roll for it's original intended purpose as tracing paper.

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

TheVogon

Google cloud has loads of unused capacity. So much so that they are hiring Oracle staff to run it. After all who has more experience of running an empty cloud no one wants than Oracle.

Burn an offering and backup your system cuz Windows 10 19H1 might actually arrive for spring

TheVogon

Re: Hmmmmm

"Answers on a postcard ......."

You Gmail down too then?

Let's hope the new browser has the performance of Edge and the lack of slurping of erm Edge, and the enterprise GPO support of Edge. Oh. I already have that.

Microsoft changes DHCP to 'Dammit! Hacked! Compromised! Pwned!' Big bunch of security fixes land for Windows

TheVogon

Re: MS DHCP - just say no

"Microsoft's DHCP is fundamentally broken and access to a Microsoft DHCP server requires a suitable CAL for every device."

They just fixed it though. And MS DHCP Server has built in features like cross location active active clustering that are way more painful to implement using anything else.

nb - CALs are also needed if like most companies you use Windows Server for DNS!

Not a great day for Oracle: Top cloud exec jumps ship, analyst recommends cutting shares

TheVogon

Presumably because they have lots of experience in running an empty cloud no one wants.

Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice

TheVogon

Re: Ah...

But the figures above show Seagate with ~ 3 times the failure rate of WD.

TheVogon

Re: Ah...

Me too. I would never buy Seagate again ever. My NAS has WD Gold in.

Is that rain or tears of frustration on your face? Google Cloud bursts, Console and Dataflow washed away for hours

TheVogon

"failing to respond to developers for several hours"

I expect both of them went to the pub instead.

NASA's crap infosec could be 'significant threat' to space ops

TheVogon

Re: apparently too small of a budget

"and spent WAY LESS money on chasing after the POLITICALLY MOTIVATED HOAX called "man made climate change"

Or maybe the US could spend some of the ~ $ 600 billion a year it spends on subsidising fossil fuels instead?

"A 2016 IMF working paper estimated that global fossil fuel subsidies were $5.3 trillion in 2015, which represents 6.5% of global GDP. The study found that "China was the biggest subsidizer in 2013 ($1.8 trillion), followed by the United States ($0.6 trillion)"

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

TheVogon

Re: "A terrorist or foreign agent would have been free to plant explosives ..."

"almost completely unchallenged"

So not unchallenged then.

And anyway this hut is a decoy. GCHQ and other Echelon members long since intercepted all the fibres off shore and rerouted them through a vast analysis and recording system.

Who needs malware? IBM says most hackers just PowerShell through boxes now, leaving little in the way of footprints

TheVogon

You can set a policy to only run signed PowerShell code.

Need a 1TB microSD for your smartmobe? Come April, you can free up storage space in your wallet and buy one

TheVogon

Most buyers of this are going to be hacked Nintendo Switch owners!

Take your pick: Linux on Windows 10 hardware, or Windows 10 on Linux hardware

TheVogon

Re: Year of the Linux desktop?

"Ansible is way more powerful than group policies and can be applied to any Linux instance. How do you think administrators manage tens of thousands of Linux servers?"

Sure Ansible is powerful. But its also way way more complex to setup, use and administer. Group Policy is built in, and you can do pretty much everything from a single GUI with already there user and group based filtering.

By the way the Windows built in Desired State Configuration and Powershell already give you much of what Ansible does - so much so that Ansible on Windows actually uses those as the underlying toolset.

TheVogon

Re: Year of the Linux desktop?

"Personally, I think that the web version of office 365 may well end up enabling killing windows on the desktop"

Almost no one uses that. It's like Google Craps - pretty lame. Pretty much every company using O365 installs the full fat version. Also seeing as O365 has had a good few hiccups lately would you want to rely on a web only client?

Now, hold on. This may shock you... Oracle allegedly juices its cloud sales with threats and shoddy on-prem support

TheVogon

Re: I wish I could feel sorry for all those companies that bought the Big Red Story

"The Oracle database? As hideously expensive as it is, it's still a good product."

SQL Server is usually a superior and cheaper replacement.

TheVogon

Anyone still out there that doesn't yet have Oracle as disinvest?

US kids apparently talking like Peppa Pig... How about US lawmakers watching Doctor Who?

TheVogon

So learning to speak English without a foreign accent then rather than American English with a drawl?

Wells Fargo? Well fscked at the moment: Data center up in smoke, bank website, app down

TheVogon

Re: The BOFH Strikes Again

A large investment bank I worked at had that happen a number of years ago by a Nigerian security guard That apparently could not read English. Pressed the EPO button next to the door.

TheVogon

Re: This isn't the first time...

Did Wells Fargo by any chance do a TSB and outsourced support to a third world country?

TheVogon

Re: This isn't the first time...

Probably because US datacentres are seemingly run on a shoe string and have sprinkler systems as the cheapest form of fire suppression. So they have to kill to power if a fire is detected. Hence why no one uses sprinklers in DCs on most of the planet.

Google's cash problem: There's just so much of it

TheVogon

Yep, Google Cloud Slurpages is great for performance. Because no one else is using the capacity.

The are hiring lots of increasing desperate sales people that cant find anyone that isn't already going to Azure or AWS.

I have visions of a datacentre with tumbleweed rolling down the deserted aisles!

London's Met police confess: We made just one successful collar in latest facial recog trial

TheVogon

"and in the face of evidence it has a 98 per cent false positive rate."

Casinos have been using this tech for years. It works.

Big Red's big pay gap: $13,000 gulf between male and female Oracle staffers – reports

TheVogon

Re: All else being equal...

"On average there are as many men having children as women"

Well I know there are plenty of single women having children. Not quite sure how you work out as many men are having the same!

TheVogon

Re: What are you brits going on about?

"Paid maternity leave - WTF is that?"

It's standard benefit for civilised industrialised countries - much like universal healthcare.

TheVogon

Re: I would be less likely to employ female employees for those reasons

YOU might expect that but it's not the reality. Women have to take maternity leave. For men it's optional and much shorter in most countries. And in many relationships the father is not around. Also men are far more likely to return to work.

TheVogon

Re: All else being equal...

It's because women are less desirable employees in a free market. Be that wrong and / or illegal, it is also a fact. For instance because of maternity leave, childcare, likelihood of leaving career, etc.

If I ran my own small company I would be less likely to employ female employees for those reasons. They have a cost and a risk. And those realities are reflected in the market.

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Ad-tech industry: GDPR complaint is like holding road builders to account for traffic violations

TheVogon

Re: Collective Authority

Likely they will loose all of them. GDPR is quite explicit. The head in the sand defense isn't likely to get them very far.

What's Farsi for 'as subtle as a nuke through a window'? Foreign diplomats in Iran hit by renewed Remexi nasty

TheVogon

Re: renegade Mid-East nation?

"It's 40 years since they moved from very pro-west to militant anti-(anything not them I suppose)"

I guess it's to some extent understandable when you have the USA funding and arming a terrorist state on your borders that has a history of repeated attacks on you.

Iceland starts planning for new undersea internet cable to Europe

TheVogon

"That was during the Medieval Climate Optimum. Too bad we can't get temps that high these days..."

Quite possibly it was, but it would also be possible today - see for instance:

http://footage.framepool.com/en/shot/431658197-sondrestromfjord-cotton-grass-west-greenland-tundra

TheVogon

"Greenland isn't green"

Actually some of it is. There is some grassland and the Vikings used to graze cattle.

NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail

TheVogon

Re: A great job of engineering, but next time....

"we will be able to negotiate a free trade deal in vacuum cleaners with Singapore"

Dyson is already manufactured outside of the EU. It's the head office that's moving.

TheVogon

Re: A great job of engineering, but next time....

"but even my rabidly hard-exit work colleague was fuming at Dyson"

Maybe he should be fuming at the Labour party and the risk of Jeremy Corbyn becoming pm which is what has prompted the Dyson head office relocation to Singapore?

TheVogon

Cant we send people?

For all religious types, i bring a message from your God - Mars is the promised land - The Golgafrinchan "B" Ark awaits you...

Worried about Brexit food shortages? North Korean haute couture has just the thing

TheVogon

Re: Ahh...

"We'll all be drinking our own piss by the end of the week."

No need - I don't think the import of American beers will be impacted.

Trying to log into Office 365 right now? It's a coin flip, says Microsoft: Service goes TITSUP as Azure portal wobbles

TheVogon

Re: The joys of "Computing as a service"

"There was a time when you could run programs on your PC without needing an Internet connection at all."

Office is still available as a non O365 (MSI) version.

TheVogon

Re: Century Link

"It looks like it was a Century Link fat finger that caused the issue"

It guessing that Microsoft have a resilient setup across 2 providers. As one failed that's why 50% of requests did. I would have expected them to spot that immediately and also to automatically redirect to the working provider though.

Open sourcerers drop sick Fedora Remix to get Windows Subsystem for Linux pumping

TheVogon

Re: Linux is moving on the desktop.

"Definitely! And M$ will struggle as a consequence."

Why? Windows runs on Arm too.

Colour us shocked: Google in €50m GDPR fine appeal bombshell

TheVogon

The EU legal process is pretty efficient. What ever Google do it's only going to delay to inevitable by a year or two.

Popcorn out waiting for the other 26 EU countries to follow on...

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

TheVogon

Re: Google are cunts

Computer Users Non Technical? Yes I agree.

They already make advert blockers ineffective on mobile and have banned the one app that works. You can download it directly from block-this.com

Wall St moneymen on IBM Q4 financials: Don't get your hopes up

TheVogon

Htf does IBM sell 20 billion dollars of anything? Its such an archaic company. Just walking in an IBM workplace you feel like you just went 30 years into the past.

French data watchdog dishes out largest GDPR fine yet: Google ordered to hand over €50m

TheVogon

Re: A State Level Protection Racket?

"It's EU wide legislation. As GP said, they could leave a market of 500 million people to their competitors."

And even then they are still required to observe GDPR requirements when EU citizens access US or other international websites.

TheVogon

Re: Wishful thinking

Seeing as Google have substantive assets including datacentres in the EU, and even if they didn't EU law would let them go after revenue and assets abroad, yet it's going to get paid.

TheVogon

Re: Well that took long enough.

I suspect popcorn sales are rising sharply....

TheVogon

Re: Wishful thinking

"In about twenty years"

That's fine - interest will be added. And the options of appeal under GDPR are relatively limited. You would have to prove the local DPR made an error in law.