37 thoughts on “Saturday’s Papers

  1. Steph Pinker

    The Irish Examiner must have someone to edit and proofread all copy before it goes to print – no?

    Maybe the Examiner should examine that which it fails to examine before it’s in a position to examine others…

    1. SOQ

      Absolutely not- there was no point. People seem to think that it’s just a matter of entering a key and everything magically returns to as was- it doesn’t work like that. As the piece in the IT yesterday mentioned, the hackers supplied software to rebuild the files but would you trust the same people who locked the network down in the first place? I certainly wouldn’t.

      Each file rebuild would take hours and even then, each would have to be checked to ensure full functionality which in itself would take months. I used spreadsheets as an example yesterday- consider how many of them are in an average finance department with all sorts of formulas and most linked to each other. And the HSE is a national organisation so multiply that by thousands.

      They should have been doing nightly incremental data backups and cloning the software shares once a month- especially on legacy systems. Restore onto clean drives is the only way to guarantee data integrity and once all that is done, testing completed and gone live again- the mammoth task of notifying everyone affected begins.

      Its probably the biggest disaster recovery project in the history of the state.

      1. goldenbrown

        “Its probably the biggest disaster recovery project in the history of the state”

        correct. everything has to be rebuilt. everything. but I would go much further than that…

        this was an as successful as it gets attack on a sovereign asset and a demonstration of real power (and weakness). a world class hack that will be probably be namedropped in future academic studies texts

        potentially every man woman and child is affected by it

        this narrative being constructed about bad guy hackers in change of heart hand over crypto keys is a load of feelgood PR stuntery, a bad movie plotline, dumbing it down to us, taking the edge off a bit so we don’t get too upset. I find it personally insulting and I think it’s misjudged because we are quite a computer literate population in reality. there is length, width and depth to this hack

        and more than ever before you will need to watch your personal backs for personal hacks now

        1. SOQ

          I would be far keener on repairing the damage than scapegoating, especially as it is quite clear that the core problem was and is under-funding but- even as part of a GDPR audit, system security is reviewed.

          Was there never any penetration testing done? Was there even any inter-server checks made as to open ports etc? Because its looks like this thing spread like wildfire once it was let loose. It shouldn’t have been able to jump from server to server like that.

          1. goldenbrown

            scapegoating? nah, I hadn’t gotten to that bit yet…but now that you mention it….who is in charge here? you heard anything out of the HSE’s CSO yet? the CSO that just lost all your data? or is that the CIO? do they even have a CSO?

            this soft focus PR being deployed here, who does that serve exactly? (clue: certainly not us)

            this attack should be shaking every organisation (Public and Private) in the country to it’s core and into a full security review, not be lulled into some sort of lets carry on best effort basis business as usual which is the danger in softly softly messaging.

            there’s real danger in failing to properly acknowledge what has actually just occurred here and the consequences!

          2. SOQ

            I agree- it should be spelled out in graphic terms as to what the implications are. Personally I scare the poo out of management in such situations. I ask them to imagine not have ANY IT system for a period of two to three weeks and then to give me a cost to their business.

            The problem is that just like a car accident, if it ends up with an insurance claim, the insurance company will go allocating blame and rarely are the systems up to scratch. In other words, the company’s management are negligent- which is exactly what has happened here.

  2. Janet, dreams of an alternate universe

    We may have campaigned to Repeal the 8th amendment, but this won’t mean anything if our National Maternity Hospital is gifted to a private company under the grip of the Sisters of Charity. They have set up a private company which will be run under their religious ethos.
    This means No IVF, no vasectomies and no treatments that the church considers inappropriate.
    Write or call your TD’s.
    #MakeNMHOurs

    1. Bitnboxy

      The Grifters at Youth Defence Media are claiming this is the “last line of defence” for the “cause”.

      It is profoundly undemocratic to insist that the Roman ethos should take precedence over secular law in this jurisdiction, whatever the means deployed to make this so.

      And despite all the claims from so-called “pro-lifers”, central to the cascade of failures in the care of Savita was the chilling effect of the Romish 8th Amendment (as stated in the report) and the fact that the consultant, knowing the foetus was failing, was still conflicted in whether to perform a life saving termination because of the continued presence of a heart beat, albeit one rapidly weakening. It still both maddens and saddens me.

  3. Donald McCarthy

    I am always pleasantly surprised to see the newspaper people drag their broken and wood-wormed crosses through the skully fields, the altared abbatoirs, the torture camps and the little houses where the trafficked girls don’t live and then to watch them nail their little bodies to the quotidian splinter and bray at the ending world. This biotic world is a ghastly, improbable accident of dumb evolution and only the deeply moral few have the courage and integrity to call for the great unravelling and the return to a world shorn of idiot sentience and an intelligence designed for braying. Otherwise, quite nice morning with sunshine and showers.

  4. Gabby

    So Harry seems to be blaming drugs, booze, sex and rock ‘n roll on dear Diana’s tragic end. And I was thinking all these past years that drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll was the result of the youth culture created by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane and dozens of other adrenalin and hormone pushers.

  5. GiggigyGoo

    Why would the BBC go to such lengths? Unless there was a political / Royal advantage in making Diana’s situation worse. It’s not as if the BBC earns money from advertising.
    Maybe it will all come out eventually – it took years for someone to have the guts to out Savile for instance.

    1. Lilly

      What do you mean, Giggigy? I’d say they took Bashir at face value and didn’t know about the deceptions involved in getting the interview.

      1. GiggigyGoo

        I mean – was Bashir doing a solo run, or were his strings being pulled by higher echelons ?

        1. Lilly

          I’d say he was on a solo run. He has dined out on it since career wise. I wasn’t a fan of Diana’s and the interview was so cringeworthy I couldn’t watch it, but I feel sorry for her in hindsight knowing she was tricked into doing it. Hard to believe there was no one she could trust to ask for advice beforehand. Her brother seems solid enough, could she not have run it by him.

    1. ce

      much nicer than gulls…

      Saw a couple of kingfishers recently, amazing altogether. Each day I hope I get a glimpse of one when I’m out for the auld daily walk

    1. Ben Madigan

      The answer to the housing crisis isn’t to grant permission to every single residential development regardless of its lack of merits.

      1. Rob_G

        – efficient use of land (and then some)
        – close to public transport links
        – close schools, shops, jobs, and other amenities

        What’s the problem, bub?

        1. Bitnboxy

          Far be it from me to defend the Shinners but on this occasion O’Broin is right. This proposal is a vulgar profiteering vanity development of Herculean proportions and devoid of architectural merit. The number of social units is risible and the bulk of the apartments would never have arrived on the market even, for the average well-heeled punter. The aim was another bulk buy for an investment fund/ multinational company to be filled with transient occupants. Rather than was assist the housing crisis, this would exacerbate it even further.

          Having said that, some other Shinner objections are questionable but in relation to the Ronan Phallus, I agree with them here.

          1. Rob_G

            The social housing allocation would be 10%, so 100 units – hardly to be sniffed at.

            Those ‘transient occupants’ will now outbid other renters on 1,000 other apartments – I don’t really see how that benefits anyone.

          2. Bitnboxy

            From my perspective, the scale of this development copperfastens the idea that apartments are for rent only, not homes and aiding the maintenance of ridiculous rents for a city on the periphery of Europe in a country with the lowest population density. It also is a towering symbol of the continued hollowing out of long term living communities in the city centre creating ghost quarters at night as the folks who will rent these places have no intention of putting down roots. Dublin just resembles a bloated low-rise American city with a tumbleweed CBD at night. We need to look at more sustainable European urban models of living like Vienna creating viable city centre communities not “units” for transitory ex-pats.

          3. Rob_G

            So, in essence:

            “Sorry Pavel, sorry Dimitri – I know that you studied really hard and overcame a lot of adversity to get your job in Facebook, but you will have to commute in from Kildare – this city centre land is being reserved for two-story houses for people who have a God-given right to live here for free by virtue of their birth”.

          4. Bitnboxy

            Lol. No, it’s more “Hey Pavel and Dimitri, Sean and Clodagh, we are more than happy to have you paying ridiculous rents on a par with London and Paris but if any of you get funny ideas about buying a place, particularly an apartment within the M50 and near your place of employment, transport links and social amenities, we would really prefer if you could shag off (in your cars) to the outskirts of a regional Leinster town to a beautiful semi-D in a perfectly low density setting where you luxuriate in lower middle class bliss with everyone else at your stage in life. You see owning your own place in Dublin City and County is a privilege for investment funds and the super wealthy”.

            There is a reason Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna, Stockholm don’t follow your model Rob. Sure, they have problems but nowhere near our dysfunctional market.

          5. Rob_G

            Explain to me how building fewer apartments in the city centre is supposed to advance your particular vision.

          6. goldenbrown

            lol

            sorry to butt in on your conversation here but the funniest thing for me is that anyone would believe that Jonny Tosser there wants to build these apartments to sell or rent to local workers of any kind shape or form

            Rob, you need to pay more attention to the likes of London and Manchester to see what your friend Jonny is up to

            (hint: there’s usually Chinese people involved)

          7. Bitnboxy

            Leaving aside the fact that you are attempting each time to distract by misrepresentation Rob and refusing the address quite obvious points, my issue is that we use the foreign investment funds as the virtual solution to urban housing, shoring up laughable rents and banishing young first time buyers to ludicrously unsustainable low-density semi-d estates on the edges of so-called commuter towns where to be honest most of these people would prefer not to live if the focus of one’s work and social life is in Dublin. The government has been captured by these funds to the point of being utterly afraid of scaring them off and allowing them to dominate the narrative.

            This government and the immediate previous ones have compounded a crisis by simply tinkering at the edges of a broken housing market and adopting strategies to maintain Irish house prices at risibly high rates by effectively throwing money at people to buy the wrong types of homes in the wrong locations, if one can find a home to buy and for the rental market, off-loading it wholesale to corporate private interests with bare-minimum tenant protections.

            Investment funds are a feature of most mature housing markets but a small feature and they operate in markets which also have security of tenure and in Germany and the Netherlands, a whole system exists that allows people to rent for life with special saving funds and state schemes set up for this purpose so renting is totally viable in later life without affecting quality of life or destroying pensions.
            Here we have no such thing or any such intention.

            In France the state still builds social housing also and similar to Vienna, in Paris proper such housing is often cheek by jowl with private housing – you should see the quality of some recent social housing in the 20th. There is choice in the private market and while it is expensive to buy in these cities, there is choice in terms of secure rental so that those on modest salaries but providing essential services can live there.

            We have no ambition here, content to be outsiders, pandering to vested interests, destroying a city of its social variety and mixing, no attempt to look at building costs or radical solutions to infuse choice in the market and sustainable renting, burdening young people with constant precarity and delayed adulthood and the only answer you have is that without these investment funds, no apartment building can take place.

            To me, this government is signing its own death warrant with a paltry response and an effective two fingers to the under 40s. I just don’t understand them.

          8. Rob_G

            Your ‘obvious points’ are just conjecture, you are not really offering an good reasons why a developer building a large number of city centre apartment is, in and of itself, some sort of a bad idea.

            I am perhaps not as au fait as your are with the French housing market, but I was under the impression that poor people were shunted off to live in HLM with zero facilities, and that buying a brand new city centre apartment in Paris was very, very expensive.

            I do know that the social housing provision in Ireland amounts to 10% of new units – so, if Johnny Ronan (or anyone else for that matter) decided to build 1,000 new apartments they would have to build 100 social housing units as part of this.

            Developers don’t set rents, the market does, so I’m not sure how building 1,000 new units would have anything other than a (slight) downward pressure on rents – these 1,000+ people who would have rented these apartments will not have to live elsewhere, displacing 1,000+ renters.

            “Netherlands” – the rate of homeownership in the Netherlands is 69%, a whopping 1% lower than Ireland, so I expect that the rest of your woolly assertions are similarly well-founded.

          9. Bitnboxy

            “Wooly conjecture – assertions”. Lol. I call BS. You need only look across the Liffey from where Ronan planned his concrete and steel phallus to the recently completed apartment high rise – a build to let – and what so you see? A virtually empty block- why? There is little point in offering them a cheaper rent because of the price set by the rent pressure zone rules. Ronan’s 1000 apartments, rather than expert pressure downwards, are destined to keep the rents at such an inflated value.

            You correctly assert the Netherlands has more or less the same rate of ownership now as Ireland while utterly ignoring the fact that the rest are quite happy to rent long term given the strong security of tenure I mention.

            Paris and indeed Vienna, the latter the gold-standard in terms of public urban housing, are not a panacea. Paris indeed has problems in the banlieue but also is a world leader in terms of some schemes. We are light years behind both tethered to an Anglo-saxon model with a dollop of Ronanesque sleveen profiteering. Neither country has the depth of our housing problems.

            My point stands that Irish housing policy is comically dysfunctional addicted to inflated house prices and rents in the least densely populated country in the EU – crazy!

          10. Rob_G

            I think that your assertion that the RPZ is contributing to empty apartments is quite likely true, I’m not familiar with the building you are talking about.

            Security of tenure – sure sounds good.

            But we need additional housing units, and we need them yesterday – none of what you have written will result in any new housing units. New apartment blocks are expensive to build. Developers prefer to build houses – you can sell the first 10 houses while you are still building the other 90, keep the cashflow going.

            We need to build up. This developer wants to build 1,000 units. Your objections seem to be ranging from the shape of the building, to Johnny Ronan as a person, to asking them to single-handedly solve every problem with the Irish market, to ‘profiteering’.

          11. Ben Madigan

            Rob, Ronan would not necessarily have to build 100 social housing units out of his 1000 apartment scheme – he could alternatively offer land elsewhere, or offer a lease of existing units elsewhere.

  6. Dr.Fart

    lawyers horrified at Donnelly saying they’re licking their lips over cases to do with the hack. I think this is one instance he could just say “here, fupp off” and literally no one would mind. “Minister says leaches are leaches” shocker

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