http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7209276.stm

McDonald’s has won approval to offer courses which could form part of a qualification at the standard of A-levels or advanced Diplomas.

…

Universities secretary John Denham said it was an important step towards ending the old divisions between company training schemes and national qualifications.

Yeah, obviously if you want to up the status of work based qualifications you choose McDonalds to be a flagship. You think they’d start with a respected name like… OK we don’t respect any businesses much these days but at least someone like Microsoft, HSBC, The BBC isn’t actually a byword for a lack of intellectual ability.

Who do you think might be able to give the scheme a better image?

Another laptop stolen with unencrypted data on.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7197045.stm

Hopefully it’s been formatted and is running some naff games but maybe it has passed a whole load of personal info on to criminals or worse to terrorist who are very interested in soldiers home addresses, parents, spouses, …

There really is no excuse, yes stuff can get nicked however careful you intend to be but windows has it’s own directory encryption options - right click in explorer, properties, encrypt. Not that I’d recommend it. I did that but various exe’s wouldn’t run from it and then I couldn’t unencrypt it. I managed by copying the data out into another directory, deleting the original and renaming the copy back to the original.

These days I use true crypt which has all sorts of sneakies. Not only does it do serious encryption it can hide the data your encrypting so no one knows it’s there and so can’t force you to reveal the password.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

My main complaint with it is it is another of those invisible apps. Maybe the version I have is for windows 3.11 but it doesn’t appear on the task bar & I forget I haven’t entered the password and get all confused when the encrypted drives aren’t there.

And… both options are free, so where is the excuse?

Is your data encrypted? Is your personal data at home encrypted? Is your personal data at work encrypted? You could hide your cv & mp3’s!

I’ve just had an ad pop up on a website that says use original XXX cartridges because “1 in 5 non XXX cartridges fail”. This is a great piece of advertising waffle because it doesn’t actually say anything useful - it just appears to.

The problem is it doesn’t say how many XXX cartridges fail - it might be 1 in 10 million but it might be 5 out of 5 for all the advert says!

One thing I almost appreciated with my new big company is the need to use a hard password. They require you to use a 12 digit mixed case with numerics and you must change it every 12 months. A bit of a pain but I can appreciate the need for it.

However (you knew that was coming!) I’ve just discovered that each machine has an admin level account set with no password! Der, how secure is that? This is (I assume) to let support get access but to leave it blank? Maybe the logic is that even if it was set to a serious value then it would soon become well known and so pointless - but it would still be an improvement. A proper password hashed against the m/c serial number would be better.

Given the general efficiency round here it could just be the original account setup to allow config (these m/c’s arrive with user name accounts and passwords hashed against personal details so someone has set them up individually and we don’t use the Administrator account) and no one thought to remove it or give it a password.

As ever, it’s talk the talk, make the employees jump the hoops but at company level don’t even attempt to do it right.

So, have you checked your m/c - just nip into control panel, user accounts and see what accounts are there and if you don’t like them delete them or reset their passwords to something sensible.

A bit of a fuss about the selling on of tickets…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7179834.stm

Promoter Harvey Goldsmith said at the time: “eBay are an absolute disgrace. They have no right to be doing what they are doing.

What a load of twaddle. We all have the right to sell what we are lucky enough to get don’t we? Whether it’s my skill as a s/w engineer or my winning lottery ticket. Even my kidneys are mine to sell - though sensibly enough it is illegal to buy them.

I’m sure I heard some clot on the radio saying they should stop tickets given to charities being sold on ebay - maybe I miss heard it and he said shouldn’t. Why give tickets to charities? Did some endangered panda really want to see Led Zep in concert? A ticket given to WWF is there to be sold at outrageous profit for the benefit of the charity.

I can’t really see the problem with touting in general. Market forces and all that. When I was young I queued all night to get tickets for my favourite band. Not something I would do now - being old and soft but relatively well off (relative to my student days that is, which isn’t hard) I would rather pay someone else to queue for me. As I remember it snowed about 3am - yes most of us over forty would rather pay up than sleep out.

If venues / artists are so concerned about making tickets available to fans and not just the rich they could do something about it themselves. Sell 80% of the tickets at half the current excessive price and ebay the other 20% to make up the difference. If flooding the market would drop the price & touts wouldn’t make such a profit.

Again, as with music sharing this has always gone on it is just that the internet gives us all access to it so suddenly “it’s a problem”.

The latest insanities of my new big company employer may amuse you - they would make me laugh if I wasn’t crying…

Problem one, because we don’t have a support contract on it they are removing our phone system and giving us mobile phones. When I say “giving” I mean allowing us to order them on the super duper intranet. The “super duper intranet” won’t let us order them until “sometime in January” - the phones are being taken out “sometime in January”. It will be interesting to see which “sometime” comes first.

Problem two, and this is very catch 22, we can’t travel without a form signed by our manager. My manager is in the US, I’ll just pop over and get his signature so I can travel to see him to get his signature to allow me to travel…
Stack Crash…

It has long been a Dilbert type theory that half of the IT department is there to make work for the other half thus keeping both halves in lucrative employment. Given my experience yesterday I might have to agree.

You may remember I spent an hour on the phone to report a problem so that I had access the support system to report a failed link to a training site which might just help with a failed order.

What I didn’t mention yesterday was that to underline the full circularity of the system my time on the phone was primarily caused by my attempt to order - can you guess? Oh yes, a phone.

I needed to order something off the intranet however I got an error off the submit order. Being keen and eager I went back and found a link to training on how to use the ordering system - a quick click gave me “page not found”. Somewhat deterred but still pushing on I went to the IT Support page and clicked on the FAQ - “You are incorrectly registered”, try any page off the support page “You are incorrectly registered”.

So I can’t order stuff, the training pages don’t work, and now the support pages don’t work - just an hour on the phone queuing whilst a nice lady tells me “all the agents are busy helping other users” (or popping out for a smoke - and given their job who can blame them - but the nice lady doesn’t mention that).

All that I can cope with, what is really getting me down is every two minutes she also tells me to go to the IT Support page and check on the FAQ to see is my problem is listed. How would I know if it’s listed? My problem is I can’t get to the FAQ and I’m being reminded of it by an automated voice!

However, given the efficiency of the rest of the system it almost certainly is listed and it is probably the only thing there.