Posts by Yes Me

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

Re: @werdsmith

Sad. Seven years since Evi disappeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and still she is a source of enlightenment.

China slams 'dirty' America's 'clean network' plan, reminds world of PRISM snoop-fest exposed by Ed Snowden

party cadres

I take it you are referring to Republican party cadres. If so, that's nothing new, it was standard US operating procedure even before the Marshall Plan.

EY to outsource compute function, sending 800 staff into the loving arms of... IBM

"EY staff only spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, as some are fearful for their job."

Not to worry, IBM's standard operating procedure for this kind of takeover means that you'll lose your job anyway.

Trump bans Feds from contracting H-1B workers and makes telehealth the new normal

Re: Really a ban?

Apparently, then, somebody in the Administration understands that like any country, the US needs imported hi-tech skills because they don't actually have enough home-growns. If H-1B holders are underpaid, that's really a separate matter from whether they're needed, and should be resolved separately.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Re: you never have to print the emai? For rather loose values of 'never'.

Of course you sometimes have to print it. For example when your stupid employer decides it's essential to autoexpire and autodelete all email after 6 months. So anything of importance (e.g. employment related promises from your stupid employer) must be printed.

BT: 'Because of the existing underlying supply of the 4G equipment, most of our 5G (NSA) so far is with Huawei'

Be happy

Don't worry too much. If Trump loses in November, the policy will be reversed within a few months. If Trump wins, we're all screwed anyway, so it won't really matter any more.

VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide

It's snowing outside

You must be some sort of snowflake, except I'm no longer allowed to say "snowflake".

Re: Time to abend some terminology

"I live on the left side of pond"

That's not acceptable. "Left" is an insult to those who live on that side. Not as bad as "down under" of course.

I suggest that in future all words be replaced by "blah". Blah blah blah BLAH!

Networking boffins detect wide abuse of IPv4 addresses bought on secondary market

international what??

What are you on about? The International Postal Union has never had anything to do with IP addresses, or even telephone numbers if that's what you meant. The ITU (previously CCITT) defined international telephone prefixes like +1 and +44, but the rest of telephone numbering is arranged nationally. IP addresses are completely different because they are non-geographical, so are allocated by a handful of Regional Internet Registries. And of course, with IPv6 they are no longer a finite resource, in any realistic way.

Re: Unfortunate but not unexpected

What do you mean by "slackening of governance"? There's never been anything resembling governance of IP address space; there's only been allocation and registration.

And what do the authors of the study mean by "policies regarding the regulation of IPv4 markets"? There is no regulation of IP address space and never has been. So no policy, either. Again, it's just a matter of allocation and registration. They're only numbers, and unlike telephone numbers, they have no historical connection with geography.

Anyone who relies on IP address bits for any kind of intrinsic validation is asking for trouble.

IBM profits cratered 46% last quarter. But its share price is up ~5% because Wall Street expected that to be worse

Re: Shame

All the ex-employees sold their shares, and current employees are frightened of Big (Blue) Brother, so nobody who cares is willing to post...

Oh sure, we'll just make a tiny little change in every source file without letting anyone know. What could go wrong?

Re: Not quite on the same scale but...

Anyone who downloads the ISO 9000 library deserves whatever happens to them, unless they are doing so under orders from a person with a gun.

Chips for Huawei are fried: TSMC stops shipping parts to Middle Kingdom mega-maker this September

Stepping up

"Back home, America is stepping up its domestic chip production efforts to minimize security risks inherent in overseas supply chains."

I think you might find that China is doing the same, only more so. This will just be a minor blip for Huawei in the long run.

US restricts visas for folks working at Huawei and other Chinese tech makers – seemingly over China's human-rights abuses

Re: The chinese govt is a two faced bastard (to put it mildly).

Most governments are two-faced.

I don't believe that Israel ever sanctioned IBM for supplying the equipment that Nazi Germany used to tally the concentration camp victims. Guess what, they had 6 million moral incentives to do so, but one overwhelming economic incentive not to.

Also guess what, the USA mistakenly believes it has an economic motive to sabotage Huawei. How convenient that they could hide this behind a moral incentive.

That doesn't mean that I'm OK with the mistreatment of the Uighurs. It's awful. But let's not pretend that the US is whiter than the driven snow. We're talking about Trump and Pompeo, for heaven's sake.

Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing ... and Victory!

Re: Well done

"mainly due to his post-war preening"

WTF? Even Turing's mother didn't know what he did in the war until 20 years after he died, shortly before her own death. Most of the world didn't know until 30 years after he died, when the Hodges biography was published.

And others who served at Bletchley Park with him have made it quite clear that he was one of the leading lights; the other one who could be compared to him in mathematical importance was W.T. Tutte, but he didn't co-invent computability theory, artificial intelligence or mathematical models of morphogenesis; he is, however, well known in graph theory.

No question that Alonzo Church's work was important too, but it was Turing who built the bridge between theory and real-world machinery.

Zuse

The assertion that the Z3 was Turing-complete is very dubious. Being programmable doesn't make a machine equivalent to Turing's U. "Program code was stored on punched film" according to Wikipedia. Even its successor the Z4 had no memory for the program; all it had was "a mechanical memory with 64 words." [1] That makes it programmable like a Jacquard loom was programmable in 1805, or like ENIAC was programmable in 1945. None of these was Turing-complete, because to emulate U, the machine must have a rewritable memory where its own program is stored. (Somebody editing Wikipedia seems to be very confused about this).

Actually nobody has ever built or will ever build a Turing-complete machine, because it needs an infinitely long rewritable memory tape. But the first approximation to one was only built in 1948, in Manchester, England. I'm typing this, and you're reading it, on a slightly updated version of the 1948 device.

Zuse was indeed a great inventor, but he knew nothing about Turing's work until well after the end of WW II.

[1] See Konrad Zuse's Z4: Architecture, Programming, and Modifications at the ETH Zurich, by Ambros P. Speiser, in The First Computers - History and Architectures, edited by Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen, MIT Press, 2000.

UK smacks Huawei with banhammer: Buying firm's 5G gear illegal from year's end, mobile networks ordered to rip out all next-gen kit by 2027

What a silly question

Dear gwp3,

You ask who is going to pay for this. What a silly question. You, the user, are going to pay for this. Did you think it would be young Boris and his best friend Donald?

Yours,

A. Cynic

Re: Orangeade

And assuming America does the right thing in November and ejects The Orange One from the White House, we might at least re-enter a phase of logical and reasonable discussion. So if I was running a UK telco, I'd not be hurrying to change my plans just yet.

Re: Logic?

Of course it's about trade, but sadly the logic is utterly flawed. What's happening is that the US (Dems as well as Trumpettes) has given China a strong message: develop your own semiconductor supply chain, right back to the rare ores mined in developing countries. So 10 or 15 years from now, China (including Huawei) will simply laugh at US sanctions and they will be making cheaper, better stuff just as they are today, with no dependency on Western industry. The current trade war is just a minor glitch for them.

Huawei growth weakens as COVID-19, politics bite to make carriers its slowest-growing segment

Check back in ten years

They'll be fine. They have an enormous domestic market, many eager customers in the developing world where the Writ of Trump does not run, and just a temporary problem in some Western countries. Come back in ten years and you'll see that they will have the benefit of a major new semiconductor supply chain in China itself. The companies like Ericsson who may benefit from the US/China trade war today will be wiped out tomorrow.

British telcos will be running mainly Huawei kit ten years from now.

Rip and replace is such a long Huawei to go, UK telcos plead, citing 'blackouts' and 'billion pound' costs: Are Vodafone and BT playing 'Project Fear'?

Trumpery

"ditching Huawei is about much more than following trump."

No, really, it isn't. You don't cite any evidence, but the fact is that all this started with Western vendors paying lobbyists in Washington DC to whip up Congressional hysteria against Huawei, because Huawei kit is better & cheaper & threatens their profits. This plays well in Washington, with appeal to both Democrats & Republicans, but it plays best of all with Trump and his infantile misunderstanding of international trade. And for whatever reason, the Tory right wing has dug itself into a deep hole that makes them slaves of Trumpery.

Assuming Trump is duly kicked out in November, all this will start to unravel by next February or March, so I don't expect that any UK telco will actually need to remove a single item of Chinese kit.

GCHQ's cyber arm report on Huawei said to be burning hole through UK.gov desks

Nothing to hide?

They've nothing to hide. They all include back doors in their kit because most governments require them.

Huawei kit works well and it's cheaper. That makes any kind of dirty tricks permissible for their competitors.

July? British government could decide to boot Chinese giant Huawei from the UK's networks by this month

Re: Huawei should not be the last ...

So it's OK to discriminate against China to the benefit of the US?

Are you sure that no citizens of the US feel themselves to be trampled on by the authorities?

It's OK to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, but not to buy telephone equipment from China?

Are you sure that citizens of Yemen would agree to that?

The world is a dirty place. It's very, very hard to have clean hands.

The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com

Re: Once again

And they seem to have totally ignored the fact that .com is a worldwide domain, and something that's a trademark in the USA is not necessarily a trademark in, say, China.

Huawei wins approval to plonk £1bn optical comms R&D facility in UK's leafy Cambridgeshire

Re: Given the reality shone on China recently...

By about a million % it benefits the UK more than China. And it's in the Cambridgesphere because that is the UK's high tech corridor, of course. It's where the skilled staff are. (It's also one of the strongest Remain voting areas, which shows that it's a much better location for an international company than any brownfield site in the Brexit heartlands. Don't imagine that Brexit is over...)

Internet Society, remember your embarrassing .org flub? The actual internet society would like to talk about it

Re: ISOC and PIR...

How about ISOC's work in developing countries (https://www.internetsociety.org/issues/access/) or their work in favour of encryption (https://www.internetsociety.org/issues/encryption/) or supporting Internet exchange points (https://www.internetsociety.org/issues/ixps/), etc. etc.

All funded by income from PIR, in the public interest.

Please look at the facts.

Re: Hmm

The California AG stuck their nose in for no good reason, but since they succeeded in scaring ICANN off, nothing else will happen. It's over. In fact it never began.

As for PIR's existing contract with ICANN, as far as I know they didn't violate it and it will run its course. I forget when it comes up for renewal, but that's public information.

Re: Burn everything!!!

They did nothing wrong or unethical and have nothing to shred.

No conflict that I can see

The person making the comment about conflict should post the names of the people who were on both sides. There has always been some overlap between the ISOC Board and the PIR Board, because ISOC owns PIR. No conflict there. So who are you accusing of conflict? I'm not aware of anybody from the ISOC/PIR side who had anything to do with Ethos Capital.

Secondly, I think that any laws about this would only apply in the case of companies with publicly traded stock, which is not the case. In any case, both ISOC and PIR have conflict of interest policies and as far as I can tell are not afraid of review.

Re: ORGasmic

"there’s nothing in [the] recent announcement that addresses the unilateral decision-making that led to the Internet Society (ISOC) board of directors deciding in secrecy over a matter of weeks to sell the .org domain,”

Um, no, why should there be? The Internet Scociety (which anybody can join -- anybody) has a Board (selected by a well documented community process) and the Board gets to decide on things. And from the first announcement, they made it clear that the confidentiality was not their choice; the company offering to buy insisted on confidentiality, which is pretty normal in any $B deal that doesn't involve stock trading.

Where you detect hypocrisy is beyond me. ISOC was transparent from day 1 about why they wanted the deal and what they would do with the proceeds.

Apparently the piffle about the sacredness of the .org registry continues. It's a list of names, for heaven's sake. It's nothing other than a list of names. To have control of a name on that list, you have to pay a modest annual fee. That's all there is to it. There's no vetting, and never has been since 1998, whether the "organisation" using a name is good, bad, or indifferent, or even whether it is an organisation at all rather than an individual person or just a robot. The only qualification is the ability to pay the fee. If the EFF forgets to pay its fee one year, eff.org might pop up the next month as a porn site. There's no magic in .org. (www.magic.org shows this quite neatly.)

Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

Don't believe what you read in some random blog

"The Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT) points out that 'master-slave is an oppressive metaphor that will and should never become fully detached from history' as well as 'In addition to being inappropriate and arcane, the master-slave metaphor is both technically and historically inaccurate,'" he wrote... This comes from an IETF draft document published in 2018

Factually speaking, the IETF did not point out anything of the kind. That quote is from a draft that expired in September 2019 and in no way is a statement by the IETF.

It is also a fact the one of the authors of that draft has made a point of keeping an eye on other drafts in order to sus out terms like master/slave, blacklist/whitelist and even balkanization, which some people from the Balkans don't much like. And some people think it isn't OK to call other people snowflakes, even if they're snowflakes.

Turns out this is a research topic: see the Human Rights Protocol Considerations research group.

Huawei launches UK charm offensive: We've provided 2G, 3G and 4G for 20 years, and you're worried about 5G?

Re: The bigger issue is rising Chinese power

Exactly! If the British had installed a democratic system in HK, say during the 1960s at the height of decolonisation but before the opening of China, the one-country-two-systems deal negotiated in 1997 would have been very different, and mouthpieces like Carrie Lam would never have been installed.

Code quality

They might just be working on fixing their code quality, don't you think? And like all vendors, they have to make sure they meet normal police and GCHQ requirements for wiretapping.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Re: If Only...

IPv6 is running later than expected, yes, but it's needed as much as ever and is growing faster than ever. And as has been said many times here, backwards compatibility with IPv4 is a logical impossibility because IPv4 has no provision for forwards compatibility.

Sign of mass adoption

"shows little sign of mass adoption."

30% of Google traffic seems like mass adoption to me.

Re: Doomed to eternal limbo

"You'd have to be both arrogant and crazy to try to grab hold of it. "

That's funny, since in my experience it just works.

Re: Doomed to eternal limbo

"At best you end up with dual-stack"

At best. Exactly. That was the plan since 1994. What's the problem?

"there is no discernible difference at all to the web-browsing end-user."

Firstly, that was a design goal, of course.

Secondly, IPv6 is not stagnating, it's gaining traffic share every day. Please use data, not beliefs.

Re: Maybe ...

"But how do they keep from breaking ICMP(and thus Path MTU Discovery), traceroute, et. al.? I don't know."

They don't break, because if your IPv4 flows through an IPv6 tunnel, your ICMPv4 flows through the same tunnel. The IPv6 tunnel will show up as a single IPv4 hop in your traceroute and you won't even know.

Fragmentation isn't affected because the IPv6 minimum MTU is higher than for IPv4. (Duh, people *thought* about these problems.)

Re: Maybe ...

"the whole "transport of IPv4 at IPv6 protocol level" should have been in there from day 1"

It was, at least from RFC1933 (April 1996). I used exactly that method until my ISP supported native IPv6.

It is happening

If it ain't going to happen, why is proportional IPv6 usage increasing every month? The plan was for a long period of coexistence, although nobody expected as much as 25 years.

Re: What has it got in its pocketses?

"It will not disappear until a protocol compatible with both v4 and v6 supercedes them both. "

Sorry, ain't gonna happen because IPv4 has no provision for forward compatibility. Simple logic tells you that a dual stack solution, or IPv4-IPv6 translation, are the only possible options. We have both.

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

"If the only problem is lack of address space, why not simply add another dot and three more digits?"

You forgot the :-) icon.

Even adding one binary digit to the address length breaks all IPv4 protocol stacks. Adding 96 bits is a pragmatic choice, but in either case every single app, computer and router in the world needs an upgrade. That's why it's taking a while. We're above 30% now.

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

"why I would want my garbage disposal to be able to talk to a garage door opener in Bangkok"

You don't. That has nothing to do with IPv6. End of message.

We have Huawei to make the internet more secure: Dump TCP/IP to make folks safer says Chinese mobe slinger

Let's stick to facts...

The New IP proposal has been characterized as an attempt to impose authoritarian, top-down control on the unruly internet with features like a "shut-off" mechanism to stop denial of service attacks.

No, it's been mischaracterised that why. And it in no sense "dumps" TCP/IP. And most operators would welcome that off switch anyway.

Huawei's presence on the US Commerce Department's Entity List has called into question whether American companies can participate in standards organizations alongside Huawei.

Well, US based companies like Futurewei seem to manage. And IETF and ITU-T meetings don't take place in US jurisdiction. And we're all waiting eagerly for President Biden.

But given that many of these discussions are happening behind closed doors...

The smart money says that actual technical discussion will end up in the IETF, because it has change control of Internet standards, and it's open to all.

Re: IPv6

It's finished and works very well. Also, New IP builds on IPv6.

IBM to power down Power-powered virtual private cloud, GPU-accelerated options

Re: Couldn't they have waited until the streamlined POWER offerings supported Linux?

If only IBM hadn't handed over decision making to pointy-haired accountants some years ago, they might have been able to notice that dumping Linux-based clients before supporting Linux was not the brightest idea they've had this century.

Come on Arvind Krishna, you know better than this!

'5G for Five Eyes!' US senator tells Parliamentarians the world would be better without Huawei

Re: Admission of Guilt?

"I'm guessing that's because they can't hack Huawei."

No. It's because Cisco hates Huawei, and Cisco has better lobbyists; they lead the world in telecom lobbyism.

It's true that the NSA must have a direct line to the backdoors in Cisco kit, but Huawei has to provide backdoors like any other supplier, wherever governments require it, which is basically everywhere.

As we have known for several years, this whole campaign is only a protectionist beat-up.

Watchdog slams Pentagon for failing – for a third time – to migrate US military to IPv6

Re: Security concerns

Some upper layer software has sucky or non-existent support for IPv6. That isn't IPv6's fault; IPv6 support in network stacks and ISPs is getting better and better. Actually to a large extent it's DoD's fault for not doing what they are very good at: requiring specific support in their RFPs and checking that it's delivered.

Meanwhile in the real world, IPv6 usage is up to 30% according to Google, with a measurable jump caused by COVID-19 (i.e. work-from-home generates IPv6 traffic).

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: "the concept of saving face"

How could you write that and not mention that man who drove to Barnard Castle to see if he needed glasses?