Posts by Yes Me

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Thinnet to Earth... Thinnet to Earth...

We once had a colleague, let him be known as Anon, who knew much more than we did about electricity, so when he found that none of the Thinnet cables that arrived in his lab had properly earthed shields, he carefully soldered them all to earth (or ground, as it's known in Umrika). And then he told us that our Ethernet had an unacceptably high error rate despite his improvements.

We then explained the concept of earth loops to Anon and removed all his helpful solder. With all the 50 Hz electricity gone, things worked much better.

Scientists find gasses from Earth in rocks from early Moon

No

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

Re: emoji

Wrong question. If a criminal buys a set of picklocks and uses them to break into a house, you might reasonably ask whether the seller is at fault.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

When??

" I'd say that TCP/IP had won by the year 2000. "

1989 in my book, and others would say sooner. Everything else became legacy long before Y2K. Of course, not all corporate IT departments realised it immediately.

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

It says here that only 13 KDF8s were manufactured. The delivery list is a bit incomplete (https://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/Maincomp/Eel/ccs-n3x1.pdf) but maybe we can tie down the location anyway.

Re: Always remember

Was that downvote your daughter or your wife?

IBM board probes claims of fudged sales figures that led to big bonuses for execs

All to be expected.

Long overdue, I fear. First, IBM was a technology company run by engineers, salespeople and lawyers. It was well on the way to irrelevance when they put a businessman in charge (Gerstner). He pulled it back from the brink but then handed over to accountants, and finally to a techie who has clearly been snowed by the accountants. The accountants didn't know how to manage but did know how to make bad numbers magically look good. Until they didn't, which is where they are now.

Apple network traffic takes mysterious detour through Russia

Re: This is why all traffic should be encrypted

If they were trying to receive traffic in bogus servers, they could provide bogus certificates. But there's nothing in the report to suggest that. It's equally likely they just wanted a look at the traffic for a while or just to blackhole it for fun and annoyance.

Re: Yet IPv6 networks were built to rely on and assume both BGP and DNS work perfectly.

If only if it was that simple. It isn't.

Apple v Chicago streaming service tax battle ends in hushed settlement

Re: Am I reading this right?

ISPs carry bits, and pay for the right of way. Streamers sell entertainment, and that's taxed in Chicago. All makes complete sense, and there's no reason a streaming service should be exempt from paying taxes like any other business.

Huawei under investigation for having tech installed near US missile silos

Mass paranoia

It's just like mass hysteria except that it's infected only US politicians, and nobody who actually understands technology.

Just because you failed doesn't mean you weren't right

Re: Failure analysis: Step One

Excuse me, but I think that would apply in the upper layers of UK society too. Arizona is not a social desert, in any case.

Paris because, well, I'm sure she'd never say that.

SCOTUS judges 'doxxed' after overturning Roe v Wade

Right-turn-on-red is not a Federal rule. It's a state or local decision.

Meta's AI-based Wikipedia successor 'may be the next big break in NLP'

Metacrap

universal, uncurated and unstructured knowledge source

i.e. less accurate and more full of crap than Wikipedia

COO of failed bio-biz Theranos found guilty on all twelve fraud counts

Re: Methinks it's lawyers all the way down on this one...

From what I've read she was very self-deluding and he was just bad. The two juries seem to have reached a similar conclusion.

Europe passes sweeping antitrust laws targeting America's Big Tech

Re: They are not equal...

All your data belong Cloud

Re: Not good

people who are ethically "challenged."

But some of those get elected to jobs in, say, the Kremlin or 10 Downing St.

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

DID end

I think this is DID on arrival.

did:whatever_you_like:random_identifier is a recipe for an unholy mess. The only ones that will work out of the box are did:dns:<valid DNS domain name> or did:email:<valid email address>.

Tim has blown this one big time IMNSHO.

DARPA study challenges assumptions about distributed ledger (and Bitcoin) security

Impossible

Using IPv6 addresses as identities is impossible. They are topological addresses (exactly like IPv4). The IPv6 addresses of my laptop change whenever I move to a new network, and the IPv6 addresses of my smartphone change when I move from WiFi to cellular or back.

Because of the way Internet routing works, it cannot be otherwise.

("Addresses" in the plural, because any up-to-date IPv6 host uses temporary addresses to protect privacy: it isn't an oversight that IPv6 addresses are not tied to identity, it's a design goal.)

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: While ya'll

All true, but it doesn't change the fact that the US is trying to prosecute someone for doing the job of a journalist. At least they haven't simply assassinated him, which is the procedure adopted by Israel and Saudi Arabia, among others.

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

Foresight

I'd just love to see Ginny Gone-Lately's actual emails with the HR woman. But I don't expect I ever will. There's a reason why IBM years ago had the foresight to enforce 6-month expiry on all internal emails.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

Too easy to confuse with the ANY key

IBM ordered to pay $1.6b to BMC

Re: IBM rejected the decision and said it intends to appeal the ruling.

Even the IBM of 20 years ago wouldn't do it, but with today's IBM that seems devoid of principles, anything is possible. I'm with the judge.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: This is the way... the Scotty way...

My way of estimating manpower (sorry, this was many years ago) for software projects was: ask 3 programmers and add their estimates together (do not divide by 3). It worked pretty well.

UK opens national security probe into 2021 sale of local wafer fab to Chinese company

Re: We welcome overseas investment, but it must not threaten Britain's national security

The best way to threaten national security is to keep on pretending that China isn't the most important country in the world and that we shouldn't cooperate with them.

For the sake of protecting the USA from the consequences of its own decline, we'll have a tiff with China that we're sure to lose.

Canada bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks, citing national security risks

Re: An apology

So we must have a small clique of NSA apologists here, who systematically downvote any post telling the truth (that there is no evidence whatever that Huawei and ZTE kit is more backdoored than anyone else's, and that this whole business is a political beat-up).

I'll come back tomorrow to count up my downvotes...

Re: More Misdirection.......More Window Dresssing......

Why the downvotes? What VoiceOfTruth says is simple fact.

Re: Bit late to the party, aren't they?

Exactly. It's a beat-up, orchestrated by tRump and inexplicably continued by Biden.

There has never been a shred of evidence that Huawei or ZTE equipment is more prone to hidden backdooring than any other vendor's kit.

The whole nonsense is purely the result of lobbying by Western companies that hate fair competition from cheaper competitors. And probably due to some tRumpist bias in some of the 3-letter agencies.

Re: Bit late to the party, aren't they?

if HuaweiCisco hadn’t done anything illicit with its back doors yet that proves definitively that they never will.

Fixed it for you.

Elon Musk says Twitter buy 'cannot move forward' until spam stats spat settled

Bring it on

It's lovely to see rich people have a spat.

It's time to kick China off social media, says tech governance expert

Fixed it for ya

It's time to kick China off social media

It's time to kick social media off the Internet.

Email out, Slack and Teams in for business communications

Re: The end of email's dominance

"Has there been a shift in brain function as a result of social media that means people are better at multitasking or has impatience trumped considered thought?"

(b), definitely. There's a place for deferred communication (memos, letters, telegrams, telexes, email) and there's a place for instant communication (talking, telephone, IRC, Slack,...) and both will survive for ever.

I know people who believe that the only decent communication tool is GitHub. Go figure.

Re: Old School.

There's a reason for that. Email works best for time-decoupled work flows, i.e. teams operating across multiple time zones, different working hours, intermittent connectivity, and also across different platforms. Voice/video/IRC/Slack/Teams work best for synchronised work flows, i.e. teams working the same hours on a single shared problem set.

Both will be around for a long time.

Re: Cool & Shiny

In fairness, email security and privacy both stink. (Don't bother reminding me about S/MIME and PGP. Not unless you have solved the riddle of Sphinx and also invented a distributed key management system that actually works.)

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

Re: Not lost in translation

Well, hang on there jake, the ARPANET existed from 1969 but by my reckoning the Internet really started on 1/1/1983 (the cutover to TCP/IP).

Re: Not lost in translation

Where I worked we just said "le floppy". Marginally easier to say than "la disquette" which is the correct French.

Limited language skills.

I was with a French colleague in a pub in Belgium where they all spoke Flemish. He simply said "Deux!" and the server brought us two excellent beers. Simples.

Re: Typing is not a good idea.

At this moment, you have exactly I upvotes and O downvotes.

US appeals court ruling could 'eliminate internet privacy'

Very interesting...

"the data was copied and the defendant was not deprived of it – there was no seizure."

That is a very interesting statement. Apply it to an escrowed cryptographic key and you get an even more interesting statement. The judge is saying that copying bits is not seizure. Does that also mean that secretly photocopying paper documents is not seizure?

I'm sure it will end up in the Supreme Court and of course on the face of it the judge is objectively correct.

Rocket Lab to attempt mid-air recovery of descending booster

Re: Fingers and toes

Judging by the Black Caps recent Test Match performances, there's some chance this will end with a loud shout of "butterfingers".

China again signals desire to shape IPv6 standards

Not hovering

It's not hovering, it's steadily climbing. This will continue as more and more ISPs (especially mobile carriers) switch to preferring IPv6.

It isn't ten years, actually IPv6 Day was a bit of a sell, it's more like 20 years which is 5 years longer than I expected. But as more and more operators identify the costs of running massive scale "carrier grade" NAT, the trend towards IPv4 becoming an overlay service will continue. Already I suspect that that 37% figure (from Google, I assume) is deceptive - how much of that 63% of IPv4 originates as IPv4-over-IPv6??

Re: Sounds like a fantastic idea

Actually the observed fact is that most IPv6 extension headers don't work across the Internet, because enterprise firewalls drop them, so while this may have been a concern in the early days of IPv6 deployment, it's become impossible to deploy unusual extension headers outside a limited domain.

Re: Sounds like a fantastic idea

"is that the default behaviour for the average person"

Yes. Because any off-the-shelf customer edge router will have the IPv6 firewall switched on by default, exactly like the IPv4 firewall. The difference is that the IPv6 firewall is simpler, because it doesn't have to do the nonsense of port mapping required by the IPv4 NAT.

Re: Sounds like a fantastic idea

IPv6 makes every device directly accessible from the internet

Nonsense. It makes every device that needs to be accessible, and no others, accessible. (You may have heard of the technology, because it's been around longer than IPv6: it's called a firewall.)

The difference from IPv4+NAT is only that a device's individual address is known outside the firewall. Some people believe that matters; I don't, because firewalls work just as well now as they did 25 years ago. Devices that are not accessible via the firewall are not accessible, with or without NAT.

To say that another way, Net 10 hosts are safe because of the firewall, not because of the NAT. People get confused because the NAT and the firewall are in the same box, but the safety comes from the firewall - just as it does for IPv6.

Re: Time for the Internet to become less US-centric..

Fundamentally, the Internet Society/IETF has done the typically 'techie' thing and not thought sufficiently about the politics

Sorry, you cannot mix the two like that. ISOC's role is policy and they have thought about it a lot, and lobbied (with the ITU in particular) when appropriate. But ISOC is an NGO, is not politically aligned, and could never, ever become a tool of the UN.

The IETF is explicitly not concerned with policy. But it does have active liaisons with many Standards Development Organisations, naturally including the ITU, for technical coordination.

Re: Time for the Internet to become less US-centric..

Wikipedia tells a lie: although ISOC is incorporated in the USA, its scope and membership is worldwide.

You are correct that China feels comfortable with the ITU. Wanna know why? Look here!

Re: Time for the Internet to become less US-centric..

"If the IETF and Internet Society aren't prepared to take the lead then they can't object when others do."

That is an absurd statement. The Internet Society was founded in 1992 and has been international since day 1. (I know because I was a pioneer member and I'm very definitely not American). The IETF started in 1986, has always been open to any adult human, and held its first international meeting in 1993 (Amsterdam).** Nowadays, it has an explicit policy of rotating the meetings round the world - the first post-COVID meeting was last month in Austria.

The Internet stopped being US-centric a long time ago; it's hard to define a specific date, but it was clearly before the Web took off in 1995. The first web site was in Switzerland, after all - except that it was in France, too, since the CERN site straddles the border and all the comms links ended in a building on French soil.

** Actually, it held a meeting in Vancouver in 1990, because the planned venue in the US fell through at the last minute.

Re: IPV6 adoption.

Because it isn't bad practice? It sure makes traceroutes more useful, for example. Assigning a /127 to a p2p link is somewhat standard practice and has been for many years.

Re: "adds security and management features"

IPSec has its role but actually it's TLS that saved the universe. A more accurate statement is that everyone shifted to TLS for encryption.

Re: IPv8 anyone?

Which is why there has been research work for quite a long time on how to handle those very long delays. The problem has little to do with addressing; IPv6 really does have enough addresses...

See all these documents for example.