Posts by Yes Me

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Long ago I was in charge of IT for part of a university

There are many possible explanations (for a textbook on the subject, read "Moo" by Jane Smiley) but the generic answer to anomalies like CS and Maths being in Social Sciences (which I experienced many years ago) is simply academic politics and which senior professors and Deans hate each other (or the opposite). But generally speaking, everybody hates the university IT department for reasons amply explained above, so they are bypassed whenever possible.

The Bunter books were truly awful, in retrospect. There was some very dodgy celebration of flagellation too. It all made me very glad that I went to state schools.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Any system...

You can comment out an if with if True: #day=="Tuesday":

I also find the statement 0/0 very useful for checking that the code works up to a certain point.

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

Re: Bork Bork Bork

Windows 10 ? More like 7 or 8 from what I see at the top of bus stop poles and the like.

FCC net neutrality rules dead again as appeals court sides with Big Telco

Re: Interseting argument

How about reviving the radon-infused water business while we're at it? That used to sell very well back in the day.

Or in solid form

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Here is where G****e is heading

ChatGPT's Astonishing Fabrications About Percy Ludgate

https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.2023.3272989

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Re: One of my favotire tools

The big false assumption is that it assumes everything is IPv4

Re: One of my favotire tools

I think the downvotes were for the American spelling; it should have been "favoutire".

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

"On many routers I've played around with, the routing of private traffic on the WAN ports had to be explicitly enabled."

Absolutely true, but (see my other comment) that is exactly the same for IPv4 and IPv6. NAT is irrelevant to opening and closing external ports, except of course that a NAT box can only support one instance of port 80 whereas an IPv6 router can support one port 80 for each host on your LAN.

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

"I expect ISP IPv6 routers will implement something akin to this rule"

What do you mean by "will"? Of course they do; I haven't looked at the code, but I can't see any reason why the same code path can't be used for both IPv4 and IPv6 firewall rules.

If I want an IPv6 app to be able to accept incoming traffic on port N for IPv6, I have to tell my home gateway. It's called "Port sharing" and it's configured on the same page for IPv4 or IPv6. There is simply no difference. The idea that network address translation adds any actual security is just bogus.

(It is true that NAT prevents an external attacker learning a little bit about the internal addressing of your network, and possibly guessing a few things about its topology if you have multiple LAN segments and routers. Some enterprise networks claim to care about that and want to hide their IPv6 topology.)

See for yourself

"IANA let's the rir play in 2000::/3"

More accurately: the IETF lets IANA let the RIRs play in 2000::/3

The large majority of IPv6 address space is still completely reserved. The authoritative information is at https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xhtml

Re: Good for Huawei

They can only tunnel if the relevant gateways let them tunnel. And that's always been true and always will be true, so love your firewall and keep it warm and happy.

Re: Good for Huawei

Not so. Actually the top 48 bits aren't structured; they're allocated non-geographically just like IPv4 prefixes. And most ISPs don't allocate a /48 per subscriber anyway; /56 is more common unless you want to pay extra.

So we do have a ridiculous amount of address space for everybody. I can only assume that Huawei wants to pursue the idea of semantic addressing, i.e. using address bits for more than just network topology. Otherwise they could not conceivably need that much space. I think that's a REALLY BAD IDEA but some people don't agree, including some Huawei people.

Re: Good for Huawei

Emphasis on was available.

IPX? Please!

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Thusly

A useful word is "thusly"

It's dual syllablically

Therefore it scans handily

When writing silly poetry

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: smart decision

It has been said that if you make your software fool-proof, they will send a better fool.

I have rarely seen such blunt commentards on El Reg.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: 8.5 seconds...

WHAT'S CAPS-LOCK???

Top 10 billionaires make nearly $64B in post-Trump election stock surge

The only good news we'll get this week

"apparently Mark Zuckerberg failed to cash in"

Re: ...collective net worth increase by $346.3 billion

Don't worry, tRump will look after that little problem for them.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Re: Seems a bit specious

"long on opinions and quite short on facts"

Exactly. As a kid I always loved the longer evenings after each change to BST, plus the fact that sunrise woke me up at the right time instead of far too early. Agreed, it's hard on the dairy cows in Scotland, but they don't get a vote...

Moaning about having to adapt your body clock is sad. Your body clock adapts to the longer and shorter days anyway; the change to and from BST is a minor hassle by comparison.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: Since they brought up DNS

"... getting the big vendors to implement..."

What on earth are you talking about? Firstly the engineers who work on IPv6 standards mainly come from, and are paid by, big vendors. Secondly, product managers at big vendors don't do what the engineers tell them, they do what the accountants tell them. Those "useful, secure, and use friendly tools" would come from the big vendors or from startups trying to get bought out by a big vendor. Or they'd be open source (i.e. no paychecks at all).

I agree, more tools are needed, but it isn't IPv6 standards writers you need to convince, it's the accountants. Welcome to capitalism.

Re: phone numbers are easy

It's irrelevant. Phone numbers used to be for people, who used to have to dial them with their fingers in a dially thing. IP addresses are for computers.

Incidentally, your example above should be written fe80:cd00:0:cde:1257:0:211e:729c according to RFC5952, and looking at it anybody can tell that it's a link-local address. No human is expected to parse beyond fe80.

Re: Hence, IPv6

"...with an address scheme that no human being can personally translate."

Translate to what? Am I supposed to be able to translate "142.250.76.110" to "google.com" in my head?

What the designers recognised at a very early stage is that no human can readily memorise 128-bit addresses whatever format they're written in, so it was better to write them in hexadecimal to make them shorter to cut and paste.

"a far simpler, far more humanly-parsable address paradigm could have been (easily!) adoptable; the 'country code prefix' being just one easily-readable idea."

I'm not sure you understand how Internet routing works. It's non-geographical, so the notion of a country-code prefix is simply meaningless. In any case, human-parsability is not a requirement, so TBH your whole comment resolves to null.

Re: Opinions do differ

I don't know which world you live in. In the one I inhabit, half the traffic is IPv6 and all operating systems support IPv6. There's no realistic prospect of an IPv7 in the next few decades. QUIC may well paper over some of today's glitches, and if it does you won't even notice when IPv4 fades away.

Re: He should keep quiet and be thought a fool rather than open his mouth and prove it

"Does he even know what an A or AAAA record is?"

<sarcasm>I doubt it, he's only been involved in Internet technology for 30 years or so, how would he know anything about DNS? After all, he wrote his first RFC as recently as 1994, and the first one concerning the DNS only in 2008. Clearly, he's an ignoramus.</sarcasm>

That said, I don't really agree with his conclusions, and with the Google IPv6 usage peaking at 47% recently I think we can say that IPv6 has made it.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Important word

If you take the router apart you're going to invalidate your guarantee.

Internet Archive wobbles back online, with limited functionality

Re: My question is... Why?

I cannot upvote that more than once, but +1000. That is the whole point: an irrefutable archive makes people who lie for a living very, very nervous. There's very possibly big money behind this assault.

This isn't the first time: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/ddos_internet_archive/

Pure coincidence that the Archive is in a legal fight with the copyright industry, as the Vulture has previously reported: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/20/internet_archive_lawsuit_latest/

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Time for another R-word?

I think we should hold a Referendum on this, and Keir Starmer should resign if the wrong answer wins.

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Excellent news

> But for the rest, just 365 days remain until Microsoft halts updates.

Good news indeed.

> While Windows 10 won't suddenly stop working for users still on the operating system, stopping security updates will inevitably leave customers increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

Alarmism, for people who take a little care.

My laptop will break one day - that's when I'll stop with Win 10.

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

Re: Tape is unbounded, not "infinite"

Yes, it makes a difference if you want to fit the machine into a finite universe. If the universe you are in happens to be infinite itself, I think the difference vanishes.

BTW people have been building TMs for many years. This isn't the first Lego attempt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYw2ewoO6c4 is 15 years old.

Gisbert Hasenjaeger was building Turing machines before 1960 (look him up in Wikipedia). The amusing thing is that Hasenjaeger's job in Germany during WW II was attempting to break Enigma, and his failure reassured Germany that it was safe. Meanwhile, the inventor of the Turing machine was breaking Enigma...

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Re: Oof

Nothing wrong with Electricity Supply & Demand (ES&D), according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

No banter please, we're British

I cringe at the word "banter". The dictionary says "to speak to or address in a witty and teasing manner" but it's usually much darker than that when used in a phrase like "It was only harmless banter."

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

In control again

I recently installed InControl and have never been happier.

Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?

What the flock?

I thought "flock" was an autocorrect of a somewhat similar word.

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

Re: "they were required to sign an NDA"

I think the poster meant that the firing manager was forcibly under NDA about the firing. As in "Sign this or you get fired too!"

Nothing seems too despicable for IBM these days.

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Re: Ouch!!!

I hope the admin got at least "Meets expectations" on their next annual review. (Their gender seems irrelevant.)

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

No ginger hair involved

Once worked in a newish building, and at a certain time of year the fire alarm started going off just at the end of the morning tea break. "Some joker" we thought. Very inconvenient since we then had to stop lazing around in the common room and evacuate until the fire brigade came and cancelled the alarm.

Turned out that for a few days, the sun was accidentally focussed on some heat detector or other at exactly that time.

Windows 11 users still living in the past face forced update, like it or not

Re: run that past me again

Have you never used Microsoft stuff before, then?

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

F*** WYLBUR

So, getting back to insulting OPERATOR, if you were at SLAC, you must have been aware of what WYLBUR did if you typed FUCK WYLBUR. Of course that was long after the 1401 era.

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

Once they have proved their ability, they get promoted to Corporate Travel. There's always a cheaper flight or hotel, and who cares if you end up 100 miles from the customer site?

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Prison

Also in Malta, during very heavy rain they drive the wrong way round a certain roundabout, because they know (and tourists don't) that the water gets very deep on the normal side.

Speaking from experience (as a wet-footed tourist).

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Re: EFF

So you think that providing end-to-end encryption for users is a crime? If so, there are an awful lot of criminals around...

New Zealand minister OKs Kim Dotcom extradition to US

Re: The Meng exit

No. That was pure politics from start to end.

Re: Paying Trump for a release

Banking on tRump would at the least require delaying matters until November. And apart from tRump being completely nuts, it isn't clear why he'd be inclined to suborn the justice system to drop charges. And surely President Harris won't do that, as a former prosecutor herself.

Maybe he plans to change his name to Kim Bebimbop and try for North Korean asylum?

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

Re: Own up to it

"a change like that should require a detailed process document..."

Um, that's not how the Internet worked in the early days. Not at all. People would live patch configs. Ubergeeks would even live patch code. It was more fun like that, until it wasn't.

(Icon for Old Farts needed.)

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Re: You're young, I take it

Another thing in the electromechanical era was that (at least in some parts of the UK), the *real* emergency number was 99. The idea was that if there was a glitch, or the user was in a panic, the call would go through; the third 9 was redundant.

Brilliant idea? Maybe not so much. While I was a teenager, one of my mates had a home phone number that *ended* in 99. I rang him up one day and there must have been an electrical glitch at the crucial moment, because the reply I got very quickly indeed was "Emergency, which service do you require?" My answer, naturally enough, was "Jesus Christ!"

[The number was on a nearby local exchange so there were two electromechanical exchanges involved, Leicester and Oadby to be precise. Most likely the glitch was that the call between the two exchanges dropped just before I dialled the last two digits.]

Asia's regional internet registry APNIC names new director general

Outstanding

Paul Wilson has done an outstanding job and APNIC is an outstanding organisation, providing outstanding services for a very large chunk of the global Internet.

I don't know Jia Rong Low but I wish him great success in continuing what APNIC does so well.

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

DAT's right, man

Open source AI helped China catch up to the world, researchers reckon

Re: China Taking The Lead?? Again??

Any 40-year plan we have will be wiped out by climate change, unless it's a plan to stop burning all fossil fuels immediately.