Episode 10 It is a great morning! The phone has not rung once (and not because the PFY has rebooted the phone server with a DBAN USB stick in it again), the aircon and security system are behaving, and outside the sun is shini-

"What's he doing here?" I ask the PFY.

"Who?" the PFY asks, getting up off his chair as he senses a hint of urgency in my tone. "What's who doing... SH*T!"

"Quick, which printer is offline?"

"None of them," he says after a quick scan.

"F*CK! We're probably too late. How many do we have left?"

"Uh..... just two, one in security and one in HR!"

I'm gone before he's finished the exclamation mark.

But it's too late, the damage is done. The HR printer has been repaired and the service engineer – whose heavily emblazoned wagon I'd seen out our window – has gone.

"WHO called the service guy?" I ask.

"I did," the new HR office manager says.

"Yes, I KNOW it was broken, and it has been powered down for two years AND there's a label stuck on top of the service label saying that you are to call us if there are printer issues."

"I don't know about that, I just saw the number when I opened the paper jam panel."

I open the panel and sure enough there's a second service sticker in there – a sticker so hard to remove that we had to put our own label over the one on the top of the machine. I also note that the engineer has slapped a new label over the top of the label we put over his previous label.

"Oh he said he had to replace some stuff."

"I dunno. It's on this job sheet."

Part of my mental processing is a background stroke-warning subprocess that casually monitors that vein in my forehead. The further I get down the job sheet the more mental processing power the monitor is using. I have to stop before I get CPU bound.

"These printers," I seethe to the new HR guy, "are the biggest white elephant the company ever bought – and they're up against some stiff opposition. They're unreliable, have hideously expensive consumables and are so old the page count is in Roman numerals. We do NOT use them. They are switched off and will remain off until the end of the maintenance agreement – in about 18 months."

"YOU, However, authorised him to service the machine," I say, pointing at his signature on the job sheet, "and he has replaced all four toner cartridges, the fuser unit and the waste toner box! You can buy a BRAND NEW colour laser for the price of one of those toner cartridges alone!"

"A toner cartridge which didn't need changing in the first place because WE DON'T USE THOSE PRINTERS! HE SWAPPED AN OLD FULL TONER CARTRIDGE FOR A NEW FULL TONER CARTRIDGE! AN OLD FULL TONER CARTRIDGE THAT HE WILL SELL BACK TO US AGAIN THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE TURNS THIS MACHINE ON!"

"Ah. Well, I guess we just switch it off then?" he asks.

"Yes," I reply, trying to lever the new service label off the label we put on the printer.

He put them in the paper trays too," he points out

Sure enough, at the bottom of every paper tray is a shiny new service sticker that the sneaky bastar...

"What did he say he was doing in the paper trays?"

"Oh he, uh, upgraded the paper for us."

I look at the bottom of the job sheet and my stroke warning process kicks up to 100 percent.

"HE CHANGED THE BLOODY PAPER TO US LEGAL AND SOLD YOU 20 BOXES OF THE STUFF!"

"He said it was a steal."

"THERE WAS DEFINITELY STEALING GOING ON!"

20 minutes of calm thoughts and contract reading later, the stroke subprocess is down to 2%

"Right, so here's what we're going to do. In 20 minutes or so you're going to call him back and say there's a very thin black line running down every page. He will tell you the drum probably needs replacing – something he probably didn't have with him earlier because his vehicle was full of paper no one uses."

"You're probably looking for your printer," I say to the engineer who's scanning the room fruitlessly.

"Uh yes," he says, preparing to bullshit his way out of any accusation.

"I was just reading the contract. Apparently we still have 18 months still left to run on it."

"It is no longer economical to service."

"..." I say, holding up my index finger

"Oh dear," I say. "I think I just saw a printer falling past the window after accidentally falling from a third floor window. I expect that it's now uneconomical to service. And perhaps your car has suffered the same fate?"

The engineer dashes to the window.

"No, it's just the printer," he says, with a tinge of triumph.

"And yet.." I say, holding up my finger once more.

>CRUNCH< >CRASH< >Crash<

"Oh dear. I think I just saw security's printer after falling out a fifth floor window, hit the window mounted air conditioning on the fourth floor. It sounds like both units then fell onto your vehicle – making pretty much everything uneconomical to service."

"You think you..." he sneers.

I hold up my finger once more.

"But wait!" I say "Is that the sound of 20 boxes of paper being opened and 100 reams of paper being handed out to staff to bash the engineer who has stolen so much from us in the past?"

"And just so you know – I think the lift is locked out," I say. "And I suspect the stairwells are full of people carrying reams of paper."

"WHAT DO I DO??!?!!" he gasps.

Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.

That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.

The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.

America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance. 

A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. 

Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.

Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.

A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."

The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.

A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.

The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.

Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.

Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.

"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.

HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.

Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.

Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.

HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.

The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.

However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.

This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.

The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.

Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.

According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.

During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."

Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.

This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.

"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.

GitHub has revealed it stored a "number of plaintext user credentials for the npm registry" in internal logs following the integration of the JavaScript package registry into GitHub's logging systems.

The information came to light when the company today published the results of its investigation into April's unrelated OAuth token theft attack, where it described how an attacker grabbed data including the details of approximately 100,000 npm users.

The code shack went on to assure users that the relevant log files had not been leaked in any data breach; that it had improved the log cleanup; and that it removed the logs in question "prior to the attack on npm."

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022