Monday 26 October 2015

Headline Of The Day

From City AM:

Dido - I will not raise white flag

Problem is, they have used this hilarious reference to the song "White Flag" by Dido at least once before, four years ago.

The internet never forgets.

8 comments:

Lola said...

IMHO none of these people like Dido could ever 'make a living' on 'the street'. Their whole lives have been all about equipping themselves for corporate cronyism, at which they excel.

James Higham said...

P45 time.

Tim Almond said...

The problem with these sorts of people is that they get cushy jobs that are frankly just about keeping the ship (that someone else built) going. They have their crappy degree, an MBA, can wear a suit well and sound good.

It's like putting me in charge of a Jumbo Jet. I could probably do the job with very little training. And 99% of the time, you wouldn't know I was a total amateur. We don't pay airline pilots to get us from London to New York under normal conditions. We pay for airline pilots for situations like the Hudson River one. When you need someone with Chelsey Sullenberger's skill and experience to know what to do in that situation.

She was horribly defensive and out-of-touch on Newsnight, talking about how many hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks that there were, and she's harping on about it being a criminal matter. But everyone knows that these attacks happen, and if you're talking about traffic coming from Russia or China or Vietnam, there's really nothing you can expect the police to do. Even in this country, the odds of finding someone who does an attack from a cybercafe are about nil. If I analyse my website logs, I bet that 90% of the traffic is coming from bots in those places and trying to hit a known, common attack vector in order to plaster my website with ads for little blue pills, and it's my problem. And if you mix in software architecture circles, people will look at you like you're a total amateur if you talk about computer security as if the police will take care of it.

"Cyber crime is the crime of our era, of our generation, every single company
in the world probably isn’t spending enough money on it – we are not the only ones". Just look at the whataboutery in that. As it happens, they got hit with a common attack:

https://xkcd.com/327/

In software circles that's a "doh". We even have automated ways to stop it happening, so every data request goes through a layer that sanitises it. It suggests to me that they're running on a pretty old system and not doing any sort of external website testing (which costs a lot less than what this lost TalkTalk's share price).

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, TS, agreed of course.

JH, P45 for whom and why?

Lola said...

Ts. That's expertly forensic. Send it to talk talk

Tim Almond said...

Lola,

This stuff is pretty much my bread and butter. My field of expertise is writing software, but more specifically, the thing I do above all else is the bit of it where it talks to databases.

Bayard said...

"The problem with these sorts of people is that they get cushy jobs that are frankly just about keeping the ship (that someone else built) going."

They're what I call gravy train passengers. They move seamlessly from CEO of this to Chairman of that, from company board to quango to charity to Royal Commission. Some of them leave a trial of disaster in their wake, but it never seems to slow them down.

"My field of expertise is writing software,"

Anyone with specialist knowledge is doomed to be continually frustrated by the depth of ignorance about the subject from the pontificating classes.

Random said...

D.Cameron
"Britain has come so far, but the long march to an equal society isn't over. My article in today's Guardian:"
Cameron combines the worst of Left and Right. What a twit.