* Posts by Yes Me

1733 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2008

IBM CEO pay jumps 23% in 2023, average employee gets 7%

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Coffee/keyboard

Re: Interesting because of the legal mess he just landed IBM in.

I would just like to observe that some people believe that hiring quotas are a bad thing, and others believe they are a good thing. This is a political, not a legal, difference of opinion, and being against such quotas is a typical position of extreme libertarians, of whom there seem to be more in the USA than in most of the world (IBM being an international company).

None of which makes Arvind's salary increase any less disgusting.

Texas judge turns out the lights on federal survey of cryptominers' energy consumption

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Unhappy

Unfortunately...

...climate change doesn't recognize the border between Texas and the world. What they do hurts everybody.

Twilio reminds users that Authy Desktop apps die next month – not in August

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FAIL

Narrow escape

Amazing incompetence at user relations. Being just a user, forced some years ago to install Authy Desktop by corporate edict, I have heard not one word about this from the corporate side. I just happened to get a message claiming to be from Twilio that looked like spam, smelt like spam, and was one click away from the trash can, when I thought maybe ... just maybe... it's for real.

No problem installing the Android version or migrating my credentials (except having to create a new password that required me to stand on my head while typing Special Characters). But still no communication from Corporate. I'm looking forward to some very entertaining panic email in mid-March.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

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Headmaster

Re: I propose a marginally less drastic solution

You can safely assume that a whole bunch of solutions like that were proposed, analysed, found impractical, and discarded during the design process that led to IPv6. Anything that extends the address size breaks every single existing IPv4 host immediately, so *all* the coexistence and translation problems that we have with IPv4+IPv6 would still need solving. That's why this is hard; it has very little to do with design details.

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Re: IPv6

Of course it will happen. All consumer units get replaced in the long run.

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Coat

Re: Plusnet

And it's the OPEX of CGNAT that is driving more and more ISPs to switch to IPv4-as-a-service instead. After a while, it'll become IPv4-as-a-service-for-extra-money.

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Thumb Down

Re: Future use??

"can’t find a RFC which defines what action should be taken"

Nobody has invested significant R&D or RFC-writing effort in IPv4 itself since July 1994 when the IPv6 decision was taken. This current effort to mess about with unsupported address space has approximately zero support in the IETF.

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Re: Cover them all

"patch pretty much every device in the world"

All except the IPv6-only devices, in fact.

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

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Coat

Meccano Magazine

I remember reading in the Meccano Magazine how the ZETA project would mean free energy for all within 10 years. That would have been in 1957 (sited at Harwell, right next door to JET). I also spent a week at the JET site once helping them with some computing stuff (they bought Norsk Data minicomputers). Hard to believe it was 40 years ago.

Still waiting for that free energy.

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

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As noted above, whatever they provide for you is not a "6to4" gateway unless they are the only operator in the world that didn't find 6to4 to be a failing solution.

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Sigh

"I also think v6 was the wrong approach and just extending the address field would have been a whole lot easier. "

This again. The design of IPv4 is such that extending the address field by even one bit would break every host and router in the world. ALL the problems of coexistence and interworking stem from that fact. It's true that if the opportunity to redesign the whole packet header had been ignored, the code for IPng would have been much closer to the code for IPv4, but the whole superstructure of a new version number, dual stack routing, dual stack API, new RR types in the DNS, new numeric address format, NAT46 and NAT64, would have been exactly the same.

(Adding digits to telephone numbers was relatively much simpler because of the serial nature of telephone numbers.)

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Real scarcity

The IPv4 scarcity is real, not artificial. That makes it even easier to secure apparent rights.

No, I don't think advertising agencies such as Google will be turning off IPv4 any time soon. But the question is, when will the overhead costs (in money and performance) of maintaining IPv4 service become a significant factor. Imagine that an advertising agency says: ads over IPv6, $0.01 a dozen; ads over IPv4, $0.02 a dozen. Then things might start to change.

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Re: Stuffed Turkey

You're missing what is happening increasingly at the moment - the move to IPv4 as a service, running over IPv6. That's because the large providers who have run out of IPv4 addresses are finding this much the cheapest way to provide access to legacy services that haven't yet added IPv6 support. But (as the AWS case shows) this isn't going to work for ever - eventually more and more services will decide to add native IPv6 support for their customers, to avoid the overhead of IPv4 as a service.

You're correct that this coexistence phase has no particular end date. That was always the plan - indvidual sites can move to IPv6 when they find the need.

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Headmaster

Re: Stuffed Turkey

"consumer-land is moving more and more to IPv4"

No, quite the opposite of course. I hope this was a typo.

"providers are using 6to4 gateways"

No they're not. 6to4 has been deprecated since 2015 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7526.html).

IPv4/IPv6 coexistence is much more complex than a simple gateway.

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OPEX

You've been soundly downvoted for a reason. There actually aren't any "Internet powers that be" that could have resisted people pricing IPv4 addresses. Laissez-faire capitalism is rampant. This won't happen with IPv6 because addresses will never be scarce; and IPv6 deployment by the recalcitrant user sites and ISPs will occur when the OPEX cost of supporting IPv4 grows enough, which it will. The biggest operators are already finding the costs of service based on CGNAT painful, which is why they're moving to IPv4-as-a-service solutions.

Google flushes cached search results forever

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Re: It figures

More seriously, remember that G is an advertising agency above all, and cached results might show who knows what sort of ad, thereby reducing G's revenue. Better to keep the user's screen under tighter control than ever.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

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Coat

Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

I need to correct myself. The IETF WG consensus on the 2017 proposal to reserve .internal was to kick it over the fence to ICANN. It seems like the kick has landed 6+ years later.

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Headmaster

Re: what about .home.arpa

Well, read https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8375 to understand .home.arpa

Neither .home nor .home.arpa would be acceptable for enterprise use.

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Meh

Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

Exactly. That's the reason for putting it on the reserved list. There are mentions of using .internal in this way in IETF documents going back many years (2017 at least).

But if it was actually important, the IETF would have added it to the registry some while ago, I think:

https://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain-names/special-use-domain-names.xhtml

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Headmaster

.local is the official standard

.local is part of the standard for mDNS and has been for more than 10 years: https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6762

Yes, the authors of that RFC worked for Apple, but it is not proprietary at all.

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Headmaster

Confused maybe

I think you're confusing link-local (where .local works perfectly as part of mDNS) and site-local (where people want to define stuff in the site-local part of split-horizon DNS). .local will not work in split-horizon DNS. server.internal.example.com already works well in split-horizon DNS. server.internal will save typing, that's all. It's pretty pointless.

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

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Unhappy

Months???

"We're told that IBM's invention review process could take months,"

You have been misled. It can take years. And (as happened to me) if a patent is issued after you leave the company, your name is on it all right (imagine the glory!!) but you don't get a penny.

Anyway, this is all part of the decline of a once great company that has been hijacked by glorified accountants.

Thousands of Juniper Networks devices vulnerable to critical RCE bug

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WTF?

Politics

Remind me again why Huawei kit is so much more dangerous than Western equipment.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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FAIL

Re: Impossible you say? Maybe unsinkable, huh?

DING DING DING DING DING

"due to it's design"

INVALID APOSTROPHE DETECTED, PROGRAM ABORTED

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Coat

Re: -ize

It's worse than you think. The Oxford English Dictionary specifically prefers -ize (modulo some rules about the Latin origin of the word in question). Only, most British writers greatly prefer -ise.

I have a theory about that. It's crosswords that make -ise better. When that "s" is part of a crossing word, it is vastly easier to set the crossword than if it was a "z", because there are far more s's than z's in English. Since all UK newspapers print proper cryptic crosswords, they tend to prefer "ise" generally.

Yes, it's a crazy theory, but I like it.

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Headmaster

Pednantic grammar nazi alert

Isn't "its" a contraction of "it's" (possessive apostrophe) to distinguish it from "it's" (contraction of "it is")? Yes, I think it is.

Road to Removal: A blueprint for yanking billions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere

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Re: Done that.

You don't understand how money works, apparently. What we need is a worldwide reduction in pointless consumption and human reproduction. Exactly the opposite of where neoliberal economics takes us.

People by themselves tend to be selfish, greedy and have too many children.

Huawei finally gives up on US schmoozing efforts

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Re: Huawei tracking China population - Huawei Slide decks leaked

Yes, I'd like to hear about American equipment used by, for example, the FBI, or the NSA, for spying on US residents and non-residents, or capturing international communications traffic crossing the USA.

The idea that a Chinese company provides equipment and services to the Chinese government doesn't astonish me. (Any more than IBM supplying equipment to the Nazis during WW II was surprising.)

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Re: "it may have given up"

You're describing Cisco, I expect.

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Coffee/keyboard

Re: Different in non United States Of Murica

And of course no Western company would ever do anything like that.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

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Headmaster

Re: Customers are the security liability

"education for staff on how to not be an idiot"

I'm sorry, I'm too stupid to understand that phrase. I've done a fair amount of teaching in my life, and both my parents were schoolteachers, and I can safely say that none of us ever successfully taught somebody how to not be an idiot.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

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Re: "Wright"

And did you notice how the whole UK government was in a tizzy because something called a "book" was about to be "published" in Australia? I believe that referred to some kind of hard copy system they used to have before Wikileaks.

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Re: Not to whine about it ...

Sadly, they are far from the only ones. In an industrial context, cleaning out a tank that normally contains pure nitrogen is how exactly the same thing can happen.

On a lighter note, a true story: machine operator staples her hand (badly but not fatally) by bypassing a security shield. Next day, safety inspector asks the foreman how it happened. "Like this" says the foreman, bypasses the security flap, and staples his hand.

No doubt that has happened many times in many places. This one was in about 1964 at the Metalastik factory in Leicester.

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

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Happy

Re: Genossen, wir müssen alles wissen!

No need to go to China, your Cisco supplier can help you.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

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Re: Please speak to George

This is why certain theoreticians of computer science blather on about why strong typing is essential. It is a bit funny that -1 tests as True, but there you go. If you want to make it False, +=1.

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Happy

Irregular

IMNSHO that applies to all regular expressions, without exception.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

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Angel

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

As far as I can tell, it would also allow me to sell the Brooklyn Bridge a few more times, too. (It's guaranteed to stop your Tesla from falling in the river, even on Autopilot.)

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

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Headmaster

Re: Yearly tasks....

NTP dates back to RFC958 in Sept. 1985. Of course, it may have taken Novell and Microsoft a wee while to notice.

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Facepalm

Re: Yearly tasks....

Sigh. Replace it with NTP for heaven's sake. That is rather what NTP was designed for. Needs no batteries. Not even a clock.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

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Headmaster

Re: Every single time

And you can plug an RJ11 into an RJ45. I've used domestic telephone setups where all the sockets were RJ45 and all the plugs were RJ11. (Not in the UK.) It works fine. What doesn't work, of course, is plugging an RJ11 uttering telephony signals into an RJ45 wired for Ethernet. But the exec in question did not actually force a round peg into a square hole.

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

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Count on GPT

I tried this:

Me: Please count from 1 to 1000

ChatGPT:

Certainly! Here's the count from 1 to 1000:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,

[...and so on to]

998, 999, 1000.

But I lacked the cojones to ask for a million, since I don't want to be blacklisted.

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

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Re: "could hear the telescope motors start humming"

Sounds like a case where you should press the Any key.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

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Facepalm

Re: Qualified Electrician

Moved into a house (in Switzerland, many years ago) which had a nice built-in wooden unit for stereo and TV. Installed stereo, looked for power socket. Unswitched live socket at the bottom of the unit, too far to reach. Fortunately, extension cord already plugged in, left by previous owner. How kind, I thought. Extension cord had a (Swiss) 3-pin plug at each end. Lived to tell the tale.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

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Angel

Re: Wait a minute...

In any case, all Australians are called Bruce, as far as I recall the ultimate source of truth.

Apple slams Android as a 'massive tracking device' in internal slides revealed in Google antitrust battle

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Unhappy

Re: Pot... Kettle...

But always remember that "improve the user experience" means "force ads down the user's throat that they are most likely to click on". I think that's Google's life blood, not Apple's.

China requires any new domestic Wi-Fi kit to support IPv6 and run it by default

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Boffin

Re: Big Brother is watching

"Wireless LAN equipment with public network IP address allocation function". It all depends how you interpret "public network IP address". I suspect it is intended to mean what we call "global IP address" (as opposed to private addresses like 192.168.178.1 or fd63:45eb:ab41:0:6a25:e384:2468:54b9). Maybe someone with better knowledge of Chinese than Google Translate can help us out. If I'm right, every home gateway is affected.

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Big Brother

Re: Big Brother is watching

"When IPv6 was first introduced, we were assured that the address space was so big that no-one would ever find us. "

No, privacy was hardly an issue on the horizon when IPv6 was first introduced. It's really quite recently that temporary addresses were added to the mix, and that interface identifiers were recommended to be pseudo-random. (Not that address-based privacy is very important - most privacy issues arise at higher layers of the stack.)

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

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FAIL

Re: Tech support call

"Water is kind, unless it shorts something fragile it will get better."

Then (are you listening, James Dyson?) why does a teeny drop of water completely bugger an expensive cordless vacuum cleaner? So they have to replace the electronics module and blame the user for daring to have a drop of water on the kitchen floor?

Ah, fragile, I see.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

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Boffin

Re: my friend's software might be older than your friend's and still in use...

FORTRAN or C? And no update to the graphics API?

Since LEP was physically dismantled to make way for LHC, the hardware side has definitely been replaced. (Unless of course it was actually monitoring the Booster, the PS or the SPS.)

Anyway that was but yesterday, LEP started up as recently as 1989.

LEP was an interesting machine, because it proved that answer was 3 (not 42).