Posts by James Turner

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

Re: If the only purpose is work checks...

It should have changed in England and Wales a decade ago, except the SNP decided it merited an exception from their usual policy of not voting on legislation that doesn’t cover Scotland.

Taliban impose tele-ban and take Afghanistan offline

Re: Lammy

Probably because he isn't Foreign Secretary now.

Warnings about Cisco vulns under active exploit are falling on deaf ears

It will say on the advisory that Cisco will provide security updates for out of contract devices, but the route to getting them is to phone up TAC rather than being able to download from the website normally.

Re: Serves them right for buying Cisco

Too short? You get 5 years from when they announce end of sale to end of support.

Re: Smelly?

They actually do get obsolete hardware wise. Take the ASA 5555-X, it has a first generation Intel Core processor from 2006. As firewalls tend to need to be flexible in what they’re doing, quite a bit ends up on there rather than on a dedicated accelerator. So overall firewall throughput is 4Gbit, but turn on any of the advanced inspection features and that drops to 1.2Gbit. If you want to do VPN with it, throughput is only 700Mbit. I used to run a small cluster of these to provide enough capacity. Whereas a modern 3100 series can do 10s of Gbit from one box.

Bandwidth is ever increasing and malware writers come up with more sophisticated ways to evade detection which in turn requires more smarts on the inspection devices. So eventually that old firewall won’t keep up.

Re: Smelly?

If you think Cisco are bad, try Fortigate. My colleagues finish evaluating an update and by the next week there’s a new one fixing another bug.

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Re: Just another Trump lie

People always seem to leave off the rest of Gove's comment about experts.

"I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong."

How often do you hear that economic forecasts have been revised? Many of them make astrologers look good and accurate, which was his point.

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Re: Firewalls? Who needs them?

HTTP challenge is not the only method of authenticating to Lets Encrypt. If you control DNS you can put a token in there that does the same job. You’ll want to be able to automate your DNS as the token changes each time.

But webservers are generally easy, you can install things like certbot to do this for you. The pain is with ‘appliances’ where the only access is through a GUI.

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: DAAMIT and chipsilla

Intel changed to a RISC-like core with the Pentium Pro.

The first company to go down that route was NexGen, whose Nx586 came out a year before the Pentium Pro. They were bought out by AMD and their designs influenced the AMD K6.

Top-secret X-37B space plane ready for daring new orbital maneuver

Re: Timeline question

The X-37 programme goes back to 1999 when it started off with NASA. It then moved over to the military under the Air Force. Trump set up Space Force to consolidate the various space operations the different services have.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: A very measured "this wouldn't have happened on Linux"...

Which has existed for the last two years, as you'll see from the link you provided.

Getting people to use it may be another thing.

The Crowdstrike Linux kernel panic was from a version that _didn't_ use eBPF...

Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

Re: But why?

The sockets API that everyone decided to use came from Berkeley and is known as BSD sockets.

But the implementations are not derived from BSD code. Infamously around 2000 Windows was using a BSD-derived TCP/IP stack, but that was rewritten for Vista. There’s probably the odd utility they haven’t bothered to rewrite, but the core of Windows or Linux networking is not BSD.

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

Re: does anyone

If your iPhone 14 is only doing WiFi 5 then something is broken. Apple are reasonably quick to jump on new wireless standards and have supported WiFi 6 since the iPhone 11. Only the 15 Pros have 6E, but that’s had relatively little deployment.

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Amiga had the famous boing ball demo at CES in January 1984. Their financial issues that resulted in being bought by Commodore might have delayed the launch until the next year, but they had a working GUI then so it wasn’t something written in the time since the Mac came out.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

Or next to a pool?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64939558

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Re: Windows 12 ?

They didn’t.

One of their evangelists, Jerry Nixon, said it at a conference, but it was never an official position of MS.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

Re: Shocked, of Hamel Hampsted

Vodafone are also an exception. The device is a separate loan repayment unaffected by increases to the airtime contract.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

Yes, Dinorwig can output 1.8GW at full power which would cover something like Hinkley Point C going offline suddenly. But its capacity is ‘only’ 9GWh, so after 5 hours it’s empty and you need to wait for it to be refilled.

Nicking from withouthotair.com, the situation you need to prepare for is a major lull in wind across the UK for several days. The number he uses is 10GW of wind power being unavailable for 5 days = 1200GWh. (And as the amount of wind capacity we build goes up that number only gets bigger).

So you’re looking at 100s of Dinorwigs, are there that many suitable sites in the country? Are people going to get upset when you start flooding valleys for reservoirs?

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

Re: always do the secondary

Depends what you’re doing.

If you’re updating a pair that does failover and there’s a bug in the new version, if you’ve updated the primary first then you’ll see the bug and you can failover to the secondary that’s still running the old code.

Whereas if you updated the secondary first you now have two broken boxes.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

Re: Might want to check....

The later lawsuit by Symantec (who bought Veritas) was over their Volume Manager. That would tend to sit underneath the file systems rather than being a part of it.

I suspect a more likely source of encumbrance would be IBM depending on how the OS/2 and NT divorce was sorted out.

It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?

Re: Intel Itanium

The first properly released 64bit Windows XP. But that doesn’t mean MS didn’t have a version of 2000 internally which they decided not to release. You can find things like https://web.archive.org/web/20000301193850/http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/guide/platform/strategic/64bit.asp which talk about what MS had.

In the same vein there are beta versions of Windows 2000 for DEC Alpha floating around. But it never got to the full release as Compaq killed that processor.

VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro

Re: Why were they even thinking about ESXi on Mac Pro?

I work in academia which is very much a mixed Mac/PC environment.

The common use case for a Mac VM is support/development. New bit of software comes out, or even just an updated version, you want to install it on a test machine first. With a PC it’s easy enough to have VMs running the standard image for testing, you can roll back and all the other good stuff.

But Apple insists on Mac hardware to run their OS, even in a VM. So do you have to give all your support people Macs so they can test things as well as a PC? Having a nice big host let’s you consolidate into one box which is one of the advantages of virtualisation.

Cisco’s 'intuitive security' tool can’t handle MAC address randomization out-of-the-box

Not just a Cisco issue, this is going to cause havoc for any vendor of Network Access Control that's keying the device off the MAC address

At least Apple backed away from their original proposal to periodically change the MAC address within an SSID. That would make managing wireless utterly horrific.

The virus curing the mobile industry's chronic addiction... and sparking an impressive algorithmic price experiment

Pah, AWS are newbies at this conference lark. Cisco have been doing Cisco Live for 30 years now.

Though they just had to cancel the one scheduled for Melbourne next month due to Covid-19.

Strewth! Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6 addresses

Re: Another IPV6 article which exposes issues with IPV6

You don't need a specific allocation for the IPv6 network. The IPv6-only host doesn't need to know about IPv4 at all.

NAT64 is usually combined with DNS64. An IPv6-only host will do a DNS request, the DNS resolver will see if the response only includes IPv4 addresses. If so, it rewrites the response to an IPv6 address that points at the gateway and encodes the IPv4 address. The gateway then has the smarts to spot this IPv6 packet is actually for an IPv4 host and translates it.

NAT works in both directions, you publish your service on a public IPv4 address and translate it to the IPv6 server sitting behind the gateway.

Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today

Re: I remember

That second CPU was completely wasted under Win98. Only the NT-based Windows did anything with more than one CPU.

Have to use SMB 1.0? Windows 10 April 2018 Update says NO

Re: Yeah, but...

That's not entirely true. https://twitter.com/NerdPyle/status/876880390866190336 states there is an option you can set in recent builds of Windows 10/Server 2016 to have SMB2/3 without OpLocks.

Essex drone snapper dealt with by police for steamy train photos

Re: Fair cop?

Article 95 lists the 50 metres rule if you don't have a licence that exempts you.

Global IPv4 address drought: Seriously, we're done now. We're done

Re: The bad decision that keeps on biting back

NAT64 or 464XLAT allows you to have IPv6-only clients. Do translation at the gateway and you can keep your internal network IPv4-free.

You can also invert it and have IPv6-only datacentres.

UK Home Secretary signs off on Lauri Love's extradition to US

Re: Extradition

Wrong, the US-UK extradition treaty was ratified by the US a decade ago. US citizens have been extradited to the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK–US_extradition_treaty_of_2003

Alleged hacker Lauri Love loses extradition case. Judge: Suicide safeguards in place

Your recollection is about a decade out of date - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK–US_extradition_treaty_of_2003

Google: There are three certainties in life – death, taxes and IPv6

Re: Bridging the gap

It exists in theory, called NAT46.

There are two bits you need, first is your gateway to generate IPv4->IPv6 mappings on the fly so that your IPv4-only hosts have an address they can communicate with.

Next is you need your DNS server to rewrite queries from IPv6 addresses into these dynamic IPv4 addresses.

VMware flings vCenter Server away from Windows, if you want

Update Manager

The elephant in the room, you still need a Windows server for updating your hosts.

Double-negative tweet could be Microsoft Surface Phone hint

Re: Um...

No, those processors are too chunky for a phone. Intel previously did Atom in phones and you're looking at more like 1-2W max power consumption.

Sony wins case over pre-installed Windows software

Re: "without pre-installed software"

If that's an Enterprise licence of Windows you're installing, it's generally only an Upgrade version. So you still need a Windows licence attached to the machine to upgrade from.

Why are there so many Windows Server 2003 stragglers?

Re: Lack of 32-bit Server platform

32bit applications work fine on current 64bit Windows, using WoW64.

If they're using browser components, MS are still shipping both 32bit and 64bit versions of IE on their 64bit OSes.

Ill communication delays NHS England's GP data grab for six months

Re: Why does anything identifiable need to leave the GP?

Because they're matching it against the hospital records they already have. So you can do things like spot everyone prescribed a certain treatment later turned up in hospital suffering a particular illness.

The identifiers are then kept separately and the data released only has the things you mention.

Wi-Fi Alliance takes grid place, revs engine in race to 802.11ac

Re: Can someone explain...

Because we got to z and have wrapped round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Standard_and_amendments

There is more than just your main wireless types, standardising QoS (which can apply to any of the types) is 11e, 11i is more commonly known as WPA2...

Are the PCs all getting a bit old at your office? You're not alone

Reason to upgrade...

Power consumption anyone?

I upgraded from a Athlon64 X2 4200 last year to a Core i5 3550. The old system used to idle at 100W (measured at the wall). The new one is less than 50W.

Newer machines won't be quite that dramatic a difference, but there are still some savings that can be made by replacing older desktops.

BT copper-cable choppers cop 16 months in the cooler

Re: Simple solution

Except the thieves are too stupid to tell fibre and copper apart. I've seen several cases of BT fibre infrastructure being ripped out by thieves who thought it was copper.

Intel debuts 'Haswell' chippery: from tablets to servers

Re: Not to throw a damper on this lovefest...

Do you have a source you can cite for that? All the articles I've seen state Haswell supports OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.2.

AMD puts network, chip guru in charge of Opterons

Re: take a leaf from ARM

Isn't the process migration something the OS should be doing? AMD and Intel already shut down many bits of their CPUs (including whole cores) when they're not in use.

AMD are already doing that with their latest generation graphics cards, they're calling it 'ZeroCore'.

The problem with lots of small servers is the overhead. Even your dinky little ARM servers are going to be using some power all the time. Whereas in a virtual environment you'll have fewer servers so the base load of them sitting idle will be less. You can even shut down servers completely if the load isn't sufficient for them all to be running.

OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD

Really the end of sata?

I'd say these PCIe flash cards merely reaffirm sata/sas, as they all seem to be made up of sata drives and a raid controller, it's just instead of a sata cable, it's a trace on the pcb.

HP frogmarches new Xeon, Opteron chips into ProLiants

Re: New?

That was presumably the E5-2600 version of the DL360 Gen8 (which appear to have gained a p suffix), whereas these are DL360e Gen8 (note the different suffix).

Nice way to confuse people HP. At least Dell are giving their systems different numbers (their equivalents are R420 (E5-2400) and R620 (E5-2600).

Intel goes wide and deep with Xeon E5 assault

Re: Intel thoroughly missing the point here

I don't think Intel are missing the point, they just see gaps in their line-up that need filling. (i.e. between single socket and a full-on dual socket, and between dual socket and their big E7 quad setup).

Intel cores are currently faster, clock for clock. For example, lets take anandtech's review of the E5-2600 ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/ ). In that they take a simulated E5-2630 (6 cores, 2.3GHz) and they reckon it beats an Opteron 6276. Thats a $616 CPU beating a $788 CPU (list prices for both).

But still, the Opteron reaches futher down than the 2600 series does, so Intel knocked off a few of the extras to produce the 2400 series to compete with those. Likewise, the E7 is overkill for many where you just want 4 sockets-worth of ram and cpu, so bump up the E5 to fit there.

Browsium rescues HMRC from IE6 – and multimillion-pound bill

Really a fix?

I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that these things are essentially still using IE6, but hiding it round the back. What happens when XP support goes? You're still stuck using components that MS aren't supporting, so you'll be stuffed in just the same way as soon as a bug comes up.

Cisco Nexus ports stretched to take 40GE and 100GE loads

Indeed. They've typoed the name (It's a 6904 card, not a 6094). And the 44 ports is for a full 6913 chassis. It's 4 ports per card.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps708/data_sheet_c78-696623.html if you're into your hardware porn.

Chrome browser 'is becoming Number Two'

Why would you assume that?

People have to go out and actively get Opera mini for their smartphones. Whereas the huge number of people waving iPhones about will all be using Safari by default.

Adobe rushes out emergency fix for critical bug in Flash

They're only following in Apple's steps. You had noticed that as soon as Lion released, Apple stopped bothering with any more updates for Leopard? The last PPC-compatible version...

Apple finally purges Mac OS of disgraced DigiNotar certs

There's a paper http://www.thoughtcrime.org/papers/ocsp-attack.pdf on how the protocol can be MITM attacked.

Rather than bandwidth usage, resource usage of the server running the OCSP service might be an issue if you get millions of requests. If it takes a while to respond, people will complain their browsing is slow (you're waiting for OCSP to respond before trusting the site). If it fails to respond at all, do you block access to the site? (That'll be disabled if people want to get to their stuff). Or allow access, risking people going to a site that shouldn't be trusted?