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OVH stuck between a rock and a hard place as investigators demand access

A Canadian court has ordered French cloud provider OVHcloud to hand over customer data stored in Europe, potentially undermining the provider's claims about digital sovereignty protections.…

Audit sympathetic toward Comhairle nan Eilean Siar as staff stretched to capacity trying to recover

Auditors remain concerned about the cyber resilience of a Scottish council as some systems are yet to be fully rebuilt following a ransomware attack in November 2023.…

A number of residential streets across Halstead and Braintree are set to be affected by the new mansion tax following the 2025 budget.

With more than 30 offers now live, shoppers can enjoy incredible discounts, limited-time promotions and festive-season savings right across the outlet.

IT in the firing line as 'legacy' roles under the microscope

AI-pocalypse  New research suggests AI deployment is creating significant workforce redundancies across major organizations.…

The East of England Co-op introduced its new Deli To Go section today, featuring produce from across East Anglia, such as Essex-based Wicks Manor’s award-winning sausages.

The East of England Co-op introduced its new Deli To Go section today, featuring produce from across East Anglia, such as Essex-based Wicks Manor’s award-winning sausages.

A second Chelmsford man has been charged as an investigation into stolen bikes continues.

A new Toys R Us store is set to open in an Essex branch of arts and crafts retailer, Hobbycraft.

A new Toys R Us store is set to open in an Essex branch of arts and crafts retailer, Hobbycraft.

Debian 13.2 freshness, better HiDPI support, and 101 other things to run on your Pi

Raspberry Pi Ltd has shipped two updates for its single-board computers: a very small refresh to Pi OS 6, and a more substantial upgrade to the tool that writes your Pi's operating system to an SD card.…

Arm and RISC-V would like a word

Feature  Remember when high-performance computing always seemed to be about x86? Exactly a decade ago, almost nine in ten supercomputers in the TOP500 (a list of the beefiest machines maintained twice yearly by academics) were Intel-based. Today, it's down to 57 percent.…

Essex Police are investigating an incident where a patient at a hospital in Essex had a necklace stolen.

Essex Police are investigating an incident where a patient at a hospital in Essex had a necklace stolen.

Trains running between London Liverpool Street and Witham are affected this morning due to a signalling fault.

Chipzilla can certainly use foundry smarts, but denies the allegation

Taiwanese foundry TSMC believes a former executive has leaked company secrets to Intel and is testing the matter in court.…

It's a holiday in the US today, one where we give thanks. And today, we give thanks to not have this boss. Original. --Remy

Matt works at an accounting firm, as a data engineer. He makes reports for people who don’t read said reports. Accounting firms specialize in different areas of accountancy, and Matt’s firm is a general firm with mid-size clients.

The CEO of the firm is a legacy from the last century. The most advanced technology on his desk is a business calculator and a pencil sharpener. He still doesn’t use a cellphone. But he does have a son, who is “tech savvy”, which gives the CEO a horrible idea of how things work.

Usually, this is pretty light, in that it’s sorting Excel files or sorting the output of an existing report. Sometimes the requests are bizarre or utter nonsense. And, because the boss doesn’t know what the technical folks are doing, some of the IT staff may be a bit lazy about following best practices.

This means that most of Matt’s morning is spent doing what is essentially Tier 1 support before he gets into doing his real job. Recently, there was a worse crunch, as actual support person Lucinda was out for materinity leave, and Jackie, the one other developer, was off on vacation on a foreign island with no Internet. Matt was in the middle of eating a delicious lunch of take-out lo mein when his phone rang. He sighed when he saw the number.

“Matt!” the CEO exclaimed. “Matt! We need to do a build of the flagship app! And a deploy!”

The app was rather large, and a build could take upwards of 45 minutes, depending on the day and how the IT gods were feeling. But the process was automated, the latest changes all got built and deployed each night. Anything approved was released within 24 hours. With everyone out of the office, there hadn’t been any approved changes for a few weeks.

Matt checked the Github to see if something went wrong with the automated build. Everything was fine.

“Okay, so I’m seeing that everything built on GitHub and everything is available in production,” Matt said.

“I want you to do a manual build, like you used to.”

“If I were to compile right now, it could take quite awhile, and redeploying runs the risk of taking our clients offline, and nothing would be any different.”

“Yes, but I want a build that has the changes which Jackie was working on before she left for vacation.”

Matt checked the commit history, and sure enough, Jackie hadn’t committed any changes since two weeks before leaving on vacation. “It doesn’t looked like she pushed those changes to Github.”

“Githoob? I thought everything was automated. You told me the process was automated,” the CEO said.

“It’s kind of like…” Matt paused to think of an analogy that could explain this to a golden retriever. “Your dishwasher, you could put a timer on it to run it every night, but if you don’t load the dishwasher first, nothing gets cleaned.”

There was a long pause as the CEO failed to understand this. “I want Jackie’s front-page changes to be in the demo I’m about to do. This is for Initech, and there’s millions of dollars riding on their account.”

“Well,” Matt said, “Jackie hasn’t pushed- hasn’t loaded her metaphorical dishes into the dishwasher, so I can’t really build them.”

“I don’t understand, it’s on her computer. I thought these computers were on the cloud. Why am I spending all this money on clouds?”

“If Jackie doesn’t put it on the cloud, it’s not there. It’s uh… like a fax machine, and she hasn’t sent us the fax.”

“Can’t you get it off her laptop?”

“I think she took it home with her,” Matt said.

“So?”

“Have you ever seen Star Trek? Unless Scotty can teleport us to Jackie’s laptop, we can’t get at her files.”

The CEO locked up on that metaphor. “Can’t you just hack into it? I thought the NSA could do that.”

“No-” Matt paused. Maybe Matt could try and recreate the changes quickly? “How long before this meeting?” he asked.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Just to be clear, you want me to do a local build with files I don’t have by hacking them from a computer which may or may not be on and connected to the Internet, and then complete a build process which usually takes 45 minutes- at least- deploy to production, so you can do a demo in twenty minutes?”

“Why is that so difficult?” the CEO demanded.

“I can call Jackie, and if she answers, maybe we can figure something out.”

The CEO sighed. “Fine.”

Matt called Jackie. She didn’t answer. Matt left a voicemail and then went back to eating his now-cold lo mein.

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The village of Coggeshall is one of those delightful corners of the English countryside that seems made for lingering strolls,and afternoon tea.

Analyst Counterpoint says second-hand phones are also helping Cupertino to the smartphone shipment summit

Apple is set to displace Samsung as the world’s top smartphone manufacturer, measured by shipment volume, according to analyst firm Counterpoint.…

60-minute RTO means big outages can still happen

The cause of major internet outages is often the domain name system (DNS) and/or problems at Amazon Web Services’ US East region. The cloud giant has now made a change that will make its own role in such outages less painful.…