Posts by Berny Stapleton

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

Nice Article!

Hey Simon!

Long time no talk, awesome article, can't wait for the follow up!

Rackspace rocked by ‘security incident’ that has taken out hosted Exchange services

Re: Love the language

Mirrors.

Pull a mirrored disk, take an image and test with that, leaving everything intact. Boot that on an identical system.

SQL Server license prices rise ten percent as version 2022 debuts

Re: Word soup

HeidiSQL?

Australian exchange pauses project to move stocks to blockchain

Testing done in Australia

If they managed to pull it off, they could have sold the implementation. Win.

With the lower latency of LSE and NYSE, there's no way they could have been a testing ground. I guess if they mothball the project now, they've got enough spare hardware that they won't need a server infrastructure budget for the next couple of years at least...

Australia asks FBI to help find attacker who stole data from millions of users

My personal vote is that it's all re-processed, replaced with a token, and then deleted. You can't lose what you don't have.

Right to be forogtten

Hey Simon,

What do you think of the idea that there should be a one time use against a govt API to do identity verification and then the token is kept and nothing more?

I know that there is systems in place to do online document verification (Drivers license / passport) against govt systems, why not mandate something like this instead?

Berny

iPhone 14 iFixit teardown shows Apple's learning on repairs

Repairability vs component theft

I was wondering what Reg readers thought of the idea that by Apple maintaining tight control and part pairing, they're trying to stop device theft?

If you manage to lock the device to iCloud and then can't part out the device and sell it as spares, then what's the point in stealing an iPhone?

While I don't discount the idea that they're just trying to make money off repairs, if an authorised repairer could re-program stolen parts, then why couldn't they sell stolen parts?

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

With the amount of people who use Waze, there's no need for them to flag it. Just use a marked car and someone else will do it within a few minutes. No need for the plod to have a phone at all!

Re: Brit police not the first to do this

Why not keep them back at the station and GPS spoof? If the gronks know they're there, they're bound to be nicked in no time.

I was in a rest stop just off a motorway, and saw the highway patrol car pull in as I was coming back from the toilets, by the time I got in the car and put Waze back up again, the position was marked and he was out of there. Off to the next stop a few minutes down the motorway. (Where I promptly dropped a pin)

Brit police not the first to do this

Aussie coppers have been doing this for some time. They'll go somewhere and wait till they're reported and then move on knowing that everyone is going to slow down around that point. I thought it was a brilliant use of the technology.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Brilliant...

"I hardly think it was necessary to open the stairwell door," HR notes dryly.

"Really?" the PFY says. "I think he was doing quite well – and he did say he enjoyed a challenge."

5 minutes later and I'm still laughing.... Brilliant!

SpaceX: 5G expansion could kill US Starlink broadband

Regional access

Why not setup a location based license for the frequency? As the difference here is 13 miles from the base, couldn't Dish use 5G is the cities and then leave Starlink to run the rest of regional US?

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

HR was always going to be the one getting played here..

I thought it was going to be that HR started getting shifty when they realised that the BOFH had all this.... on them... and that HR was going to start asking questions about retention times of such data... and how that corresponded to how long ago it was that HR suggested implementing a workforce right sizing for anyone over 40...

Azure Active Directory logs are lagging, alerts may be wrong or missing

I'm just putting it out there hoping some dev will read it and fix it...

The biggest issue I saw with Azure Active Directory logs, when connecting things like Splunk to them was that there was no sequence number.

Azure would aggregate all these messages in the back end. Say you collect everything from 10:00:00 through 10:05:00, all good, right? It turns out a couple of servers were down at that point and now they've sent their logs in. There's extra messages there waiting for you, how do you know? Well, you've got to request that time period again and amend your own logs. How do you know to request that time period again? You don't.

MICROSOFT PLEASE IMPLEMENT SEQUENCE NUMBERS ON LOG MESSAGES.

Logitech's MX Mechanical keyboard, Master 3S mouse

I'd really like one of these with separate media keys and a fingerprint reader like the Microsoft keyboard. I've got the Microsoft keyboard now, and it's quite good.. Maybe Microsoft need to make a slightly larger Microsoft keyboard with media buttons, MX keys and I'd be a happy camper.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

Re: But it will happen

> Does any high-level sysop actually know that many Windows printer drivers that connect to a network printer actually expects a static address and cannot reconfigure themselves on the fly?

You're talking about the SOHO market? Nothing recent that I've seen.

My printer will use IPv4 or IPv6 and is automatically discovered by Windows, I've changed providers (And subsequently changed IPv6 blocks) and I haven't touched a thing and my printer continues to work.

Re: far bigger

How many home users even touch their router that they're given by their provider?

If the provider enables IPv6 it's completely transparent to the end user.

Now that I understand IPv6, it's as easy for me to deal with as IPv4. Was there some things that I had to get used to? Sure. Is it an impossible mountain to climb, absolutely not.

> that is the 4 octets currently in IPv4's length, could be used for intranetting exclusively.

They basically did.

When you understand standard subnetting like having a /64 as a minimum assignment, and having a /56 or /60 assigned to a home, and a /48 is assigned to a building, then everything starts falling into place pretty quickly.

The problem with people adopting IPv6 is that people think of it like IPv4. I've got my personal environments IPv6 enabled now, and it's made my life simpler.

I've just got to train the other network admins at my work and we'll start IPv6 enabling our core. There's no reason why we shouldn't do this that I can see.

Munich mk2? Germany's Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Re: MS has everything to lose

Who honestly runs two VMs on every server though? Realistically, you're running either a single server (SQL) or you're running a heap of VMs on a hypervisor, which means that you need data centre licenses.

Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine (JET Blue) source code arrives on GitHub – sadly comments not included

Re: Gimme a reason!!

Third party tools to look at Active Directory / WINS / Certificate Authority databases?

If you can understand the data structure, you can load the data directly from the DB without having to use the Microsoft libraries. This would be required if you wanted an implementation to load the Active Directory database under SAMBA for example?

Maybe a backup product no longer needs to use other APIs to get into these databases and do item level restores? This would absolutely be required if you're running a cross platform backup product like commvault...

Samsung Galaxy S21: Lots of little downgrades, but this phone is more than the sum of its parts

Re: New chargers required

Sorry to explain here, I went looking for QC3.0 compliance, as I thought the S10 (Current device) was QC3.0 compliant (Turns out, it's not) so, not seeing QC3.0 compliance for the S21, I assumed that Samsung had walked away from QC and joined everyone else with USB-PD due to QC being a Qualcomm proprietary product, and Samsung probably not wanting to pay Qualcomm if they don't have to (Move to PD).

Turns out they do USB PD 2.0 as well as QC 2.0, and not QC 3.0:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/05/07/qualcomm-quick-charge-2-and-3-devices/

https://www.samsung.com/au/support/mobile-devices/how-to-use-and-charge-galaxy-s21-series/

USB-PD, will do 25W and QC2.0 / 3.0 will do 18W, but you don't have to swap everything immediately as you can still use QC 2.0.

New chargers required

For those of us who've been using Samsung devices for a while, we've gone out and bought all the QuickCharge 2.0 / 3.0 chargers and cables etc.

The S21 is a departure from the proprietary charging standard, and a move to USB PD (Power Delivery), which requires a whole new set of cables, wall warts and portable charging bricks. Something to note if you thought that Samsung might have stayed the course on this one.

IBM ordered to pay £22k to whistleblower and told by judges: Teach your managers what discrimination means

Re: £22K? Is that all?

Having used old work colleagues as references before (It was accepted) because of changes in environment; a simple "My manager left the organisation shortly after I left, and I've no idea where he is now" works quote well.

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

Re: I understand

You could of course renew it at less than 30 days which would mean your existing authentication token would still be valid and you could renew without having to open port 80....

BOFH: It's not just an awesome app, it'll look great on my Insta. . a. a. AAAARRRRRGGH

That should have been Simon's line, let's be honest. That was as good as the BOFH himself.

Man drives 6,000 miles to prove Uncle Sam's cellphone coverage maps are wrong – and, boy, did he manage it

One thing I love about the Australian system, if you manage to get a formal complaint through the industry ombudsman to the telco, then the carrier has to pay for that complaint on receipt, not the customer. Also, any decision by the ombudsman is binding. Saying your going to make a complaint to the industry ombudsman when talking to the carrier and starting formal proceedings with the carrier really brings them to the table to try to fix your issues instead of ignoring you and hope you go away.

Amazon can't or won't collect sales tax in Australia

Corporate Structure

Any chance that the US entity can't charge GST and pay it back through the Irish entity (No, sorry, Dutch, no sorry Cayman Islands, no sorry Bermuda) to the Australian entity / Australian Govt without breaking a tax law somewhere?

Don't know myself, just seems funny that I don't think this is a technical challenge and I can't see Amazon throwing their toys from the pram over something as easy to fix as this.

Suspected drug dealer who refused to poo for 46 DAYS released... on bail

Re: Lamarr, Lucky to be alive

> If there were no drugs, why wouldn't he just poop and prove it?

Just to stick it to the man, he might not be clean, but if he's been suspected of a couple of minor things and the police keep following him around trying to catch him up, maybe he's sick of the harrassment and wants to take them on? If they've held him, locked him up, under protest... this whole time ....and there's nothing... can you imagine what he's going to get out of this in settlement?

He might just be that f***ed off

UK.gov: Psst. Belgium. Buy these Typhoon fighter jets from us, will you?

Re: but can it drop the ..

If they fly over the south of belgium, do they speak dutch or french?

Transport for London to toughen up on taxi firms in the Uber age

Re: It's all about control

> Of course if it had been now and Uber there would have been a nice electronic trail leading back to the driver

But it seems that Uber is doing nothing except for contacting the victim and making sure they don't speak to the press, so while Uber might have had a digital trail of breadcrumbs they certainly don't appear to want to tell anyone.

Europe slaps €997m antitrust fine on Qualcomm

Re: Great.

> Please tell me just ONE use case for having a gigabit at the disposal of a mobile phone.

Downloading updates when tethered?

Syncing your spotify playlist at the gate before you board because you realised it's not sync'ed and you want to listen in offline mode after you take off?

File syncronisation as a generalisation with Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox etc etc

OS updates now are delivered over the air, and Gigabit LTE chips aren't just going into mobile phones, they're going into M2M devices, laptops etc etc.

BOFH: We're only here because they said there would be biscuits

Cost saving

I never really would taking the BOFH to be cost saving, why wasn't the bloke implementing it rehired under a BOFH umbrella company, run till the last day till marketing decides that the project does suit the company ethos and it's disbanded with the BOFH getting a 4x penalty rate for the project because of cancellation before delivery written into the contract?

Vodafone customers moan about sluggish data abroad

Re: Blame placement

I told them that I was able to download updates from the Google play store at multiple MB/sec but downloading a song on spotify took and hour, they fessed up.

I also still have a pre "free roaming" plan with Vodafone that says I get 4GB of roaming data that I'm not letting go of till they sort this mess out.

Nokia's retro revival 3310 goes on sale and disappears immediately

Re: Prisons

I doubt that'll beat the BOSS.

HTC seeks salvation with squeezy design

Re: My M7 is still going strong

Root it and install the Venom ROM?

nbn™ gets its wish: Australian ISPs' performance to be rated

SamKnows?

How about they get a bunch of SamKnows boxes and just pay them to do some testing for them?

Inside OpenSSL's battle to change its license: Coders' rights, tech giants, patents and more

Re: Key Learning Point for the OSS Community: IP Ownership Governance

> Just, like an employer

Actually, this couldn't be further from the truth, in that instance, you're being paid for your work. You're giving up your copyright, in exchange for a pay check. In open source projects, the copyright is still yours, it will always be your code. The purpose of the license (And in this instance, I'm referring to open source licenses) is to provide a legal framework for someone else to benefit, or not, from it, but in every instance I can think of providing someone permission to use (And potentially distribute) your copyrighted work.

As Microsoft touts Windows Insider for biz, let's take a look at W10's broken 2FA logins

Thanks for the tip

I was due a rebuild and this would have led to no end of frustration!

Wearable eats wearable: Fitbit 'to buy Pebble' with a steal of a deal

I hope they keep it going

I'm getting the Time 2 when it comes out, but it might be my last smart watch... I've never wanted any of the other ones due to battery constraints. The time steel has been a fantastic bit of kit, but it's not hold up as well as I'd hoped.

Australia's Telstra and Optus outed as two of the world's six most expensive ISPs

Re: How does it actuallly work?

Bingo. Got it in one. Get this man (woman? Person?) a beer. You need to pay for the access to the network and a per Mb/s charge for the bandwidth you use to send them data for them to deliver to a customer.

Re: >Transit is an important source of revenue for isps.

That doesn't make any sense, whether Telstra is providing access to that data via a cross connect in a DC or whether they provide it over bandwidth they're buying from Asia or the US, they're *still* going to charge their customer for it, as Telstra are still transiting the data themselves. Getting the data over a 10Gb in a DC in Australia somewhere is eminently cheaper than bringing it over subsea cable. If they wanted to charge a nominal fee for a port charge to the CDN provider, I'm sure they'd pay it, but they don't. Larger ISPs usually give the likes of Google whole racks, ports and power for free or used to give space / ports / power for Google Containers when they were around because it meant that they didn't have to pay exorbitant rates to Telstra / Optus / other for transit.

It's simply a case that Telstra don't peer, period. They only peer with Optus as far as I'm aware. You can't get a connection to them for the purposes of reaching their customers and them reaching yours. They don't peer with TPG / PIPE. You can't even use them for a redundant circuit and use BGP to prefer the traffic go down another path, they route your block down your link, end of. This does mean as an ISP that you end up buying transit off them, and commercially it makes sense, but from someone who is shovelling data in their direction for them to sell, it doesn't make much sense.

Ankers away! USB-C cables recalled over freakin' fried phone fears

My concern really is, if Anker, who are one of the better manufacturers out there, can't get this right, how many others have got this wrong?

BOFH: Free as in free beer or... Oh. 'Free Upgrade'

Re: Sounds all to familiar

> @PJL DEFAULT CPLOCK = ON

Oh that's cruel... I so would have liked to have known that one in my younger years....

Is Dublin becoming as unaffordable as San Francisco?

Re: Housing shortage

"Could the housing shortage have anything to do with that?"

IMHO, no. As much as I hate to make this comment, it's simply because of it's size and Dublin is a small city by comparison. A lot of people will move to London, but you can't get them to move to Dublin. I really wish there was a better answer than that, but the size of the workforce in London is hard to ignore, changing jobs is easier and there is generally more going on in London. Socially, someone who is likely to move, probably knows at least one person in London where, they wouldn't know anyone in Dublin, again size...

Re: Housing shortage

Without a local airport to get the staff around, ain't going to happen.... Galway airport is closed, Cork airport does European destinations somewhat, but you not only can't get everywhere, flights are infrequent, at least with Limerick, you can fly from Shannon to the US, but again, frequency is an issue.

There's recruitment issues, Dublin can't get enough skilled people, let alone if someone started up in the smaller cities, the ability to entice people there would be lower.

I'm not saying it's not possible, but Dublin already has it's own issues because Ireland is a small country, those problems would be exacerbated by being outside the capital city.

Thousands fled TalkTalk after gigantic hack, confirm researchers

Expiring contracts

Let's see what happens over the next year if they lose 7% of their customer base every quarter. People couldn't leave without penalty before; I wonder how many have put marks on their calendar for an exit date.....

Actually, are Paddy Power running a book on this?

Microsoft wants to be your phone company, at least for voice

QoS

I really don't want to have to get direct connectivity into MS to ensure QoS....