Posts by Yes Me

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Re: Root cause.

"One might be driven to ask WTF it was doing in a bloody browser in the first place!"

Because Tim Berners-Lee put it there, because in 1993 it would have been unthinkable not to support FTP, because that was where all the data was.

Re: Using FTP in a browser

But why haven't you disabled FF updates? It's not hard. (This message brought to you via Firefox 71.0.)

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

Ban it!

"commercial human space travel is likely in the reasonable future"

It should be forbidden by international treaty. It is wrong at so many levels, most so because of its horrible carbon footrpint.

Worse than vanity

It's significantly worse than a vanity project. It's actively worsening climate change, by burning hundreds of kilograms of fuel that didn't need burning. Right up there with BitCoin mining as part of Homo sapiens's collective suicide bid.

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Re: Shakespeare

" Religious converts often write complete books..."

Yes, but you don't have to read them, whereas an all-hands meeting is hard to avoid.

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

Re: Take an accidental knee

I'm sure we don't say kowtow any more.

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Re: Great news....until.

Hmm. I'm not sure about the similarity to the Keyholes. Apart from the fact that the latter point towards Earth instead of away, they were not co-designed with Hubble at all. I heard that somebody from the dark side sat in on the Hubble design team, taking notes but basically saying nothing, occasionally nodding and smiling when they happened to re-invent the same things as the early KHs.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: Your headline reminds me...

Why? She says...

IPv6 still 5–10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

I upvoted that, but take half a downvote because wifi routers are largely there now if the f***ing ISP switches IPv6 on. Seven years since I got my first FritzBox with perfect IPv6 support, and any device that uses OpenWrt is fine.

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

"Deliberately trying to eliminate nat was an own goal"

Firstly, NAT hardly existed when IPv6 was first designed, and it certainly wasn't widespread. Second, NAT doesn't scale, which is why carriers are deserting CGN at warp speed now that IPv4 has run out and IPv6 is mature.

" the other changes where stupid."

Automatic address configuration was so stupid that IPv6 copied the idea from Appletalk.

A distinct interface identifier field was so stupid that IPv6 copied it from Novell Netware and DECnet.

DHCP was so stupid that IPv6 copied it from IPv4.

Yes, extension headers were a bit stupid, which is why they are mainly unused.

I could go on, but IPv4 is a really primitive design compared to (say) Appletalk, Netware and DECnet which objectively speaking dominated the enterprise market when IPv6 was designed. If we hadn't done IPv6, you'd probably have got OSI shoved down your throat.

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

And you probably never heard of compound interest either. IPv4 growth has ended, IPv6 is growing at compound interest.

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

"And this response is a perfect demonstration of my point."

You're not getting it. Of course we need secure solutions to protect resources from unwanted/malicious traffic. Nothing in IPv6 affects that. With an IPv6 router as my interface to the Internet, I have to change firewall settings to allow incoming traffic. There isn't a single respect in which IPv6 reduces my protection. It just avoids the complexity of address translation, which has nothing to do with security.

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

Um, yes, there are tricks you can play but address sharing at that rate is expensive and unreliable, and that's why the serious large-scale service providers support both IPv4 and IPv6. Do you think that Google supports IPv6 as a vanity project? Or Cloudflare? Or any of the large scale cloud providers and CDNs?

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

All the usual misconceptions about IPv6 here, I see. But in the real world, its growth continues (35% of all users now at the weekend, 33% midweek, according to Google). So yes, large telcos are switching more and more users to IPv6 because it's cheaper and more reliable than Carrier Grade NAT. Enterprise deployment is going more slowly but IPv4 growth is over and it's rapidly becoming a legacy technology.

BTW it's no accident that IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist and that IPv6 now absorbs the growth. It was designed to be like that.

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

Re: Thick skin

"pretend that everything's Google's fault"

No, it's just that most things are Google's fault. The rest is FaceBook's and Twitter's fault.

But seriously, French copyright law applies in France, so what else do you expect the French to do? Australian copyright law applies in Australia, and Google first blustered, then complied. It will go the same way in France.

You wait until the EU goes after them again for privacy breaches. That will be measured in billions, not millions, of €.

Re: If you can't tax 'em fine 'em

Well, browsers seem to have mainly forgotten that there's a difference between the URL bar and the search bar anyway. Unfortunate circumstances forced me to use Edge briefly the other day, and whatever URL I tried seemed to send me into Bing.

I'm off now to devise a way to make googling google recursive.

FCC finalizes $1.9bn compo deal for telcos forced to rip'n'replace Huawei, ZTE gear

Re: My Tax Dollars At Work

Well, there is indeed a small consolation for the Chinese here: the US has thrown $1.9B of tax revenue down the drain. Of course that's not all good news, considering how much $ debt China holds.

It's very dispiriting that the Biden Administration hasn't realised that a trade war with China helps nobody (least of all the Uighurs and the Hong Kongers).

IBM insiders say CEO Arvind Krishna downplayed impact of email troubles, asked for a week to sort things out

Re: A week long email disruption

"If the figure Krishna cited is correct..."

That's the biggest IF I can recall seeing for a long time.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

Re: It's the plot of 'The Producers'.

By Rudy, do you mean some ex-lawyer?

Kaseya’s VSA SaaS restart fails, service restoration delayed by at least ten hours

larger than what it is?

'people make the story and make the impact of this larger than what it is'

Would those people be the ones whose businesses have been ruined?

Kaseya says it's seen no sign of supply chain attack, sets SaaS restoration target of Tuesday afternoon, on-prem fix to follow

Any coder worth the name...

People make mistakes. It isn't the code writing that's to blame. It's the code walkthroughs, the testing harness, using some competent white hats, the regression testing after every fix, and so on.

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Re: Not a chance of salvation

"They can't even migrate their own emails from their old system that they sold off to a new one"

I hope you don't imagine that Notes stored email in mbox format or exchanged messages using SMTP or accessed them with IMAP. This is so much more than an email migration project. Notes and the Domino distributed database were built into every aspect of IBM's business processes. Absolutely ridiculous to design a cut-over style migration; it needed to be done in baby steps, with interworking gateways every step of the way.

Heads will roll, up to C-level I trust.

Re: IBM has one chance of salvation: to migrate back to engineering

Sadly, I think there's no chance. I really hoped that Arvind Krishna would do that, after the awful policies of Sam Palmisano and Ginni Rometty. He used to know better.

IT management biz Kaseya's VSA abused to infect businesses with ransomware

Re: It appears that attackers got onto Kaseya's servers

"Kaseya told all of its nearly 40,000 customers to disconnect their Kaseya software immediately... Huntress Labs said it had tracked 20 IT companies, known as managed-service providers, that had been hit. More than 1,000 of those companies’ clients, mostly small businesses, also had been affected by the hack" [Washington Post]

Another outstanding success for outsourcing your crown jewels to some software company with good advertising.

IBM President and former Red Hat boss Jim Whitehurst quits

Titanic news??

There's nothing to see here. The heads of pretty much every IBM acquisition quit as soon as financially reasonable, because they can't bear to see the IBMization of their creation. Happens every time. Doesn't mean the ship is sinking faster than yesterday.

IBM email fiasco complicates sales deals, is worse than biz is letting on – sources

Re: Bring back PROFS/OfficeVision

I was *very* glad to see the back of PROFS, despite Notes being only half useable at the start. But in those days, there were competent people highly motivated to make stuff work. Nowadays, the "management" believes that you can buy competence wherever it's cheapest by the square metre, and manage it by KPIs. They deserve the result, but it's bad luck on the employees and customers (if they have any of the latter).

Unbelievable

They scheduled a major email transition to coincide with closing the quarter? That should be a firing offence for both the CIO and the CFO. Incredible. Thank goodness I sold my shares a couple of years ago.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

Re: IBM and Technology

Hi Arvind, I'm surprised you have time to post here, but I guess that with email down there's nothing else to do.

America world’s sole cyber superpower, ten years ahead of China, says Brit think tank

What a mess

Not heard anywhere else in the world that's happened but yes they are 10 years ahead of everyone else.

Actually, wasn't Australia the world pioneer in having a sewage system hacked? El Reg told me so it must be true.

I was fired for telling ICO of Serco track and trace data breach, claims sacked worker

Re: Avoidance of responsibility

Isn't it more accurate to say that the umbrella is designed to protect SERCO, not the poor non-employee?

Court kills FTC, US states' antitrust complaints against trillion-dollar Facebook

Bit of extra text needed in the next version, then. The FCC's litigators clearly didn't think this through from the judge's point of view, but I'm sure they'll be back.

Huawei must learn from US tech success stories, says founder Ren Zhengfei

Re: Old tricks

This is just Huawei continuing Ren's policy of copying IBM. (IBM as it used to be, not the hollow shell that it has now become.) But if you want an illustration of how the tRump/Biden trade war against China is much more dangerous to the US than it will ever be to China, just consider Ren's reaction: we'll continue copying American success factors, and we'll build our own supply chain. The end of the American Empire is nigh, and it's increasingly self-inflicted.

Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU

Re: If it's not on the side of a bus...

Actually it's quite a lot of money for me too, but we got good value for it, namely the 40% or whatever of European export earnings that we seem to have, er, mislaid somewhere this year. What a great bonus for the Brexit liars that this can be conveniently blamed on COVID-19.

Nominet is back to 'the same old sh*t' says Public Benefit campaign chief as EGM actions grind to halt

Re: In all seriousness

True, but it's also time for the government to rescind Nominet's authority over .uk since they are clearly abusing it (the authority, that is).

But wait, we have a government that does what rich people tell it to do.

.uk is going the way of the UK as a whole, then.

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

Not Five Eyes

This is nothing to do with Five Eyes. For a start, FVEY is not about intercepting criminal communications subject to a warrant, but about sharing military/diplomatic signals intelligence (as it has been since 1946). Also, it only involve five countries.

G7 nations aim for global 15 per cent tax on big tech and bin digital services taxes

Re: Too soft too weak

Yes, that's how the tax system works: it moves money from the consumer to the government, to pay for essential services and to support redistribution of wealth to make society fairer. What tax havens do is distort the tax system in a way that favours the rich, deprives many governments of necessary revenue, and obstructs fair redistribution.

So, the G7's goal here is noble. Of course, it's also bound to fail, since the G7 is only seven countries and most tax havens aren't included. Only a very strong set of WTO rules can do the job.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

Stop fiddling with my browser!

"The redesign, on the other hand, includes a new icon set, new typography, and simplified menus. There are now just two menu buttons, the hamburger menu top right, and a right-click menu; the three-dots menu in the address bar has gone."

Thank heavens I froze Firefox updates at version 71. Now things don't keep being "improved" against my will.

TCP alternative QUIC reaches IETF's Standards Track after eight years of evolution

Re: Ready salted packets

Right. As best it can, TCP creates reliability over an unreliable path, although there is always a residual probability of failure. But if you want transactional integrity, you have to add a 2-phase commit on top of TCP (or whatever other transport protocol you use).

Security is an architectural issue: Why the principles of zero trust and least privilege matter so much right now

Buzzword-based networking

Oops, I meant to refer to "intent-based networking" but it seems to have been auto-corrected. Please point us to the standard for "intent".

That said, yes, starting out by trusting everybody to be well-behaved isn't a good idea, but requiring everybody to jump through security hoops every 5 minutes is such a bad idea that no money-making service provider will ever do it.

If I'm not mistaken, zero trust and least privilege really originated in MULTICS, although described differently in those days. You have to ask why they didn't catch on 50 years ago. I think the answer is the same as why most people don't use 2FA most of the time. It's just too much hassle. I'm not optimistic.

Boffins improve on tech that extracts DC power from ambient Wi-Fi

Re: Neighbor WiFi

If my neighbours recuperate energy from my WiFi signal, I certainly expect them to pay me for it. There should be no free lunch here. Also, since they abstract energy, they must also make the S/N ratio worse. I think that's a tort, on top of the stolen energy.

Lawyers should pay attention...

New IETF draft reveals Egyptians invented pyramids to sharpen razor blades

Re: Some get government support

RFC3514 has of course been updated for IPv6; see RFC8136.

Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register

Mission: Impossible

Backwards compatibility of features that we might not even know we have

Python's an interpreted language and includes the eval() and exec() constructs. As a result you can never know what you have in the code base. I've written Python that dynamically constructs statements and sends them over TCP to another Python program that executes them. You can't do that in a compiled language, so it's pretty certain that there will always have to be a complete interpreter and a byte code version of all variables. Good luck in making that run several times faster on the same hardware.

New Zealand hospitals infected by ransomware, cancel some surgeries

why so many people need external email

external = patients

I prescribe a scan

Banks have switched to in-house "secure messaging". That's hard to do for a health board (in any country, not just NZ) because getting every citizen set up with a trustworthy access mechanism would be a logistical nightmare.

But you'd think they could virus-scan all incoming attachments.

Oops, says Manchester City Council after thousands of number plates exposed in parking ticket spreadsheet

Information wants to be free

Rubbish. The Information Commissioner's Office has its head up its bum IMNSHO. The reason we have number plates on cars is precisely so that misbehaving drivers can be identified. That's been the case since 1904, for good reason, and only the reigning monarch on official business is exempt. (So if you see a car with no plates, it must be Liz.)

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

Re: What about just plain Gmail?

https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha is your friend, unless they bugger that up with the 2FA nonsense.

Bitcoin is ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ says famed investor Charlie Munger

Re: Insert meme here

Yes, he has a point. Bitcoin mines consume mind-blowing amounts of electrical energy, to the extent that Bitcoin is a significant contributor to climate change. It is very far from free money.

Don't blame rural carriers for buying Huawei, says FCC Commissioner. They couldn't afford the top-shelf stuff

Insidious and misleading

It's insidious and misleading how she makes it sound as though the "security concerns" about Huawei and ZTE kit are real, instead of being completely imaginary concerns invented by their competitors' lobbyists in Washington DC. This is a bit of tRump's misguided trade war that Biden needs to nip in the bud quite urgently.

Cloudflare offers $100,000 for prior art to nuke networking patents a troll has accused it of ripping off

No free money for me here...

The challenge is that to invalidate a whole patent, you have to beat back every single claim, which usually means at least 20 claims per patent (and does in this case too). Having my name on three or four patents in the same general area, I looked to see if there was a quick $100k for me here, and sadly there isn't. It would take days of work just to translate the claims into plain English, and then you have to stretch Google pretty hard to look for around 100 hypothetical pieces of prior art. If the patent attorneys did their job, two or three of the claims in each patent would survive this process (because the art of writing a patent is making the successive claims narrower and narrower, so that even if the main claims are thrown out, something survives).

If I was seriously looking for the prior art, I'd read Larry Roberts' own publications for the few years from about 1996 on. All the ideas seem pretty obvious with my excellent 20/20 hindsight.

Also, unless Cloudflare has gone into the router and switch hardware design business, it stretches credulity to suggest that they have implemented even a single one of all the claims in those patents. These are not things you do in software.

OK so what's going with these millions of Pentagon-owned IPv4 addresses lighting up all of a sudden?

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Apparently the routing for these addresses ends up in Virginia, close by Dulles Airport. The Florida address is kind of irrelevant.