Posts by Yes Me

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?

Re: Ah, customers.

"Never underestimate the power of properly applied bureaucracy."

Could you kindly provide more details, so that I can prepare a complete answer to your memorandum of yesterday?

[This never fails to delay things, in a true bureaucracy.]

You're not getting Huawei that easily: Canadian judge rules CFO's extradition proceedings to US can continue

Re: "We expect that Canada's judicial system will ultimately prove Ms Meng's innocence."

"The two Canadian prisoners are nothing more than hostages."

The first hostage taken was Ms Meng.

Re: Justice

"Justice has a different meaning in China."

True, but she's in Canada, which is kowtowing to the US, which is using unfair trade war weaponry against Huawei. I don't know who takes the final decision on extraditions in China, but I certainly hope they don't kowtow.

Great success! Finance app was able to inform user that their action was unsuccessful

What's Success?

Look, when it successfully returns an error code, that's Success!, right? And if you get the Success! message, you won't call the "help" desk, will you?

It all seems very logical to me.

As logical as trying to close a Barclays joint account when you both live abroad. This happened to me today.

1. Because it's a joint account, they require both parties to either come into a branch together (difficult if the nearest branch is thousands of miles away) or make a video banking call together.

2. Barclays video banking only works from a smartphone, not from a desktop computer.

3. You can't register for the app unless your smartphone is registered in the UK (difficult if you live thousands of miles away).

4. So, you can't actually close the account at all.

Doesn't matter since it now has £0 in it, but really?

Not going Huawei just yet: UK ministers reportedly rethinking pledge to kick Chinese firm out of telco networks by 2023

Re: shambles.gov.uk/2020-05-27#huawei

Yes. Like so many of the UK's late lamented IT companies, Marconi had the technology smarts but lacked the business smarts. (Rule 1: Price your crap competitively, or nobody will buy it. Rule 2: Remember that you have no right to win business, you have to work at it.)

Anyway, I'm glad some of the people in charge show some signs of intelligence in the face of the "security" lies from the NSA and other American sources.

IBM cuts deep into workforce – even its Watson and AI teams – as it 'pivots' to cloud

Shareholders really love this...

"Shareholders really love this arrangement though."

Not so much. I sold mine several mass firings ago, when there was a brief upwards tick in the share price. Good move, as it turns out.

Interesting, though, that Arvind is slashing the services arms that his two predecessors were so keen on. That does signal some sort of change. But "pivots to cloud"? Two buzzwords in one phrase, so I have no idea what it really means.

Campaign groups warn GCHQ can re-identify UK's phones from COVID-19 contact-tracing app data

Re: Thank you

So, you rate the probability of significant harm due to GCHQ knowing where you've been as greater than the probability of significant harm due to undetected contact with infectious individuals.

I don't know how to calculate the odds of those two hypothetical outcomes. I do know that COVID-19 is an unpleasant and dangerous disease, and that I have been nowhere that would be of concern to GCHQ. I'll take the tracking, thankyou.

New Zealand releases Bluetooth-free COVID-19 tracing app

Re: You don't have herd immunity for MERS or Ebola

"To get R<1, you can simply get enough people to wear masks"

There is no reliable evidence that this statement is true. NZ has no mask requirement and no more new cases. Social distancing plus test, trace, isolate. But you must test and trace every single case.

Re: Trust?

NZ is a large village where an amazing number of people know each other, and very few of them are paranoid about their own government, which they have a chance to throw out every 3 years. So data privacy, while it's a thing, and occasionally gets breached, is not what people worry about. At the moment they don't need to worry too much about COVID-19 either, and if the cost of that was lost privacy (which I don't think it was) then most people would <shrug/>.

Re: IQ downward spiral...

Rubbish. They closed the border a bit late, but started contact tracing from the very first case, and imposed distancing measures in good time. 100% is due to the excellent, coordinated, well communicated government response. No country has done better. Kudos to the government. Even their right wing opponents know that they did almost everything right.

Of course, having no land borders made it easier. But thousands of people arrive by air every day in normal times.

Re: Police don't get it

Hmm. (a) Be paranoid about my privacy, or (b) be traceable if I or someone close to me gets COVID-19. I pick (b), thankyou.

Imperial College London signs £5m campus sponsorship, 5G deal with Chinese comms bogeyman Huawei

Where the money is

"Uni's have to go where the money is"

Well, duh, that's the neo-liberals' idea of how to run universities. No surprise that they're going to the most successful telecomms & networking company in the most important country in the world.

Why would anyone look to a collapsing economy such as the US for long-term R&D money? And this stupid government has made the EU a much less promising source of funds. You're left with China.

Re: Bonus

Correction: The COVID-19 is delivered by the British Government.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

"Trump explodes"

For a moment, I was filled with hope.

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

What is Mr Ross's job again?

"... Huawei and its foreign affiliates have stepped-up efforts to undermine these national security-based restrictions through an indigenization effort,” said US Security of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

Ignoring the wonderful typo, there you have it, right there. If this was actually anything to do with national security, it wouldn't be the Secretary of Commerce, it would be a security-related member of the Administration saying it. So I'd rather say:

The USA has stepped up its trade war and its violations of international trade rules by applying bogus "security-based restrictions" to Huawei and its foreign affiliates.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Wirthless

It wasn't a bug in Algol. It was meant to work that way. If you read up on why Niklaus Wirth designed Algol-W and Pascal the way they were, I'm sure you'll find pithy comments on this.

Even more fun in Algol 60 was passing expressions including functions by name as parameters to other functions. Like A := proc1(proc2(A+B), proc2(A)).That wasn't liable to cause unintended side effects; it was side effects.

Few compilers supported that feature, because it was really interpretative. Burroughs Algol created run-time entities called "thunks" to handle it, which I guess were mini-interpreters built into your compiled code, with hardware assist according to the only Google reference I could find.

There's a new comet in town and you don't need a fancy multi-million-dollar telescope to see it. Just regular eyeballs

Re: I'd like to see it

˙ʇɐɥʇ ǝʇoʌdn oʇ ʞɔıןɔ oʇ ʍoɹɹɐ ɥɔıɥʍ ƃuıpıɔǝp ɯǝןqoɹd ןɐǝɹ ɐ pɐɥ I 'ʍouʞ no⅄

Donald Trump extends ban on Huawei, ZTE telecoms kit in US companies to May 2021

Re: Hopefully

Fortunately it doesn't need that many people in the 99% to change their vote to eject Trump. But indeed some of the rich will be keen to keep a baby in the Oval Office. But I'm not sure it's all the rich by any means. His ineptitude in handling the pandemic has hit many of the rich in their wallets.

IBM to GTS staff: Not volunteering to leave with a redundo cheque? We'll give you a helping hand

Re: The root cause of this issue started for IBM some years ago.. back in 2010-2012

"About 1994 when an outsider CEO came in who did not understand mainframe business model..."

Wrong. Lou Gerstner saved the company when it was about to choke to death on the mainframe-plus-SNA business model that was already obsoleted by commodity servers and the Internet. Although he did a bit of the share option incentive stuff, and share buy-backs to enhance the bull market, it was the next guy (Sam) who started the ruinous accountant-based "shareholder value" "services-driven" crap that ruined the company, and who also picked another one like him (Ginni) who just kept cranking the same handle. It will be great if Arvind Krishna can correct things, but if not, IBM will join DEC and ICL in Computer Company Heaven.

There are signs that Arvind is doing things right, like stopping the share buy-backs:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/04/21/the-next-ibm-platform-revisited/

Paris, because IBM paid for a lot of Hilton nights for me at one point.

Prepare to have your shonky password hygiene shamed by Firefox 76

Re: Firefox has sought to arrest its slide in the rankings

Goodness, I'm glad I suppressed updates after version 71. Why does everything get worse in the name of 'progress'?

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Shame on you, Kieren

This decision is a sad triumph of magical thinking over rationality. In so far as Kieren's biased reporting has helped to influence the decision, it isn't a good day for The Register either.

Just to recap: .org has been operated as a commercial registry since 1998, in a highly competitive market where the price of registering a name in a database has been kept pretty low. There has been essentially no vetting of who registers in .org, and it's been used for commercial or malicious purposes as well as for non-commercial organisations (only some of which are non-profits or NGOs). Who owns the company that runs the registry database has no impact on the perceived value of the name.

So blocking this sale is irrational, and will possibly have negative impacts that people will look back on in 20 years with some considerable regret.

Red Hat’s new CEO on surviving inside Big Blue: 'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

That's what Lotus said. That's what Tivoli said. And a host of others over the years.

It works for about 3 years, before absorption replaces gentle osmosis.

US threatens to turf out four Chinese telcos amid concerns over national security... and COVID-19, doctors, schools, jobs, communists, etc

Re: government involvement in computer intrusions and attacks

"they don't allow foreign carriers to operate outside of HK."

It's (theoretically) a Communist country, remember? What else do you expect?

The USA is (theoretically) a capitalist country with strong anti-trust laws. That means they should be allowing free competition regardless of ownership of a company.

So, it's the United States of Trump which is the hypocrite here. Just part of the trade war (which they've already lost, by the way).

IBM Watson GPU cloud cluster Brexits from London to Frankfurt – because GDPR

Re: Pointless And Political

I thought Brexit was a form of football, with the economy being kicked around pretty much at random.

Three years ago, IBM ordered staff to work in central hubs. Now its new CEO ponders mid-pandemic: Is there a better way of doing things?

Re: When did IBM lose its way

You're wrong about Gerstner. Actually it was his predecessor (Akers) who started the mass firings and also planned to split up the company the first time it was swirling towards the plug hole. Gerstner came in, actually listened to the top technical people, decided to cancel any idea of splitting the company, and started the pivot towards the Internet. A bit late, since apparently Akers didn't notice the Internet and was fixated with the dying SNA cash cow (by which I do not mean Ellen Hancock personally, but she was quickly ejected by Gerstner). Gerstner's one mistake: picking Palmisano to follow him, who mainly listened to accountants and marketroids. Palmisano's worst mistake: picking Rometty. Rometty's best decision: picking Arvind Krishna. I have a tiny hope that he can save the company again.

ICANN delays .org sell off after California's attorney general intervenes at last minute, tears non-profit a new one over sale

Re: Follow the money.

Of course ISOC is not unbiased, but once they get the cash, Ethos Capital has no say whatever in how ISOC sets up the foundation, who governs it, and what causes it supports.

Re: Sorry!

No, I don't think any of that. However, since .org has been operated as a commercial enterprise since 1998, I am at a loss to understand why a change of beneficial ownership of the registry has led to the current fuss. Yes, the beneficial ownership will move from a non-profit back to a profit-making corporation like it was before Jan 1st, 2003. No, that will not change the perceived value of a .org domain name, and the competition between registries will set the price just as it has done every day since 1998.

"If theregister.co.uk suddenly vanished and moved to theregister.xxx, how would you know and trust that it was the same organisation?" Nice strawman. It would take about 2 minutes with Google or Duck Duck Go to verify or falsify.

Re: Follow the money.

"no one has said who get's the cash from the sale"

Rubbish. That's been clear since the day of the announcement. The current owner of PIR gets the cash and will use it to set up an endowment fund "to ensure that the Internet is there for everyone." That's about as "public interest" as you can get.

https://www.keypointsabout.org/blog/advancing-the-internet-societys-mission-into-the-future

Re: Sorry!

My downvote was intentional.

Why on earth do people appear to believe that a name registry being operated for profit has a serious impact on the organizations that have picked a name because it happens to end in a particular suffix? It's a strange form of magical belief but it doesn't have much to do with reality. Precisely because the name registry business is aggressively competitive, mysilly.org will never become signficantly expensive compared to mysilly. anything else. Get over it.

Attorneys General are supposed to be rational, legal thinkers. Here is a public service announcement: A down vote on this post indicates that you believe in magic.

ICANN's founding CEO and chair accuse biz of abandoning principles in push for billion-dollar .org sale

Re: Real world

"there is a spectrum between Communism and Ayn Randism"

True enough. But ICANN was set up at the libertarian end of the spectrum.

A curious letter

"In a furious letter...". I think you meant "curious". It's curious in that it doesn't actually bring any facts or legal arguments to bear, or even suggest by what mysterious mechanism a couple of AGs might stop a commercial transaction. It's also curious in that it cites two media stories that happen to have been written by the author (one cannot say "journalist") of this one. We move in small circles, apparently.

I'm a bit disappointed by Mike and Esther, too. (I've met them both.) They know, because they were there at the beginning in 1998-2000, that ICANN was created by the US Government precisely to privatize the Top Level Domain business. Once that was done, it was game over for idealistic ideas about the public interest: Ayn Rand had won. Companies get bought and sold. Don't like it? Try communism to see if you like that better.

Sorry but we have to live in the real world.

IBM age discrimination lawsuit suddenly ends, suggests Big Blue was willing to pay to avoid discovery process

Not "risky"

I don't think it would have been risky for IBM. It would have been a guaranteed loss.

ICANN suffers split-personality disorder as deadline for .org sale decision draws close

You bet?

Nice theory. Any facts?

Re: Opportunity Knocks

And once again, that ship sailed in 1998 and it was the Clinton Administration what done it.

Re: "to make sure the technical side of the internet always took precedence over the financial"

Given that the transaction is financially neutral for ICANN (until renewal time comes up, when the whole contract for .org enters an open season) and given that what they are actually discussing are the “public interest commitments”, I'm not sure what the factual basis of your accusation might be.

Not that ICANN is squeaky clean in general, but we are talking about this specific transaction, in which ICANN is not directly involved except as an overseer.

Guess what's heading to trial? IBM and its tactic of yoinking promised commissions after sales reps seal the deal

The good old days

Up to and including the Gerstner regime, IBM played fair with its employees, even when forced by circumstances to send some of them away. Since Gerstner left, not so much. The revenue numbers and the share price graph show the results.

As everywhere, the rot set in when Personnel was renamed Human Resources.

I hope Arvind Krishna understands this; otherwise the company is doomed.

New IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says hybrid cloud will be bigger than mainframes, services, middleware

Re: What a pile of old bollocks!!!

"total disconnect from that customers want and the coal-face staff"

I'm not sure he's that bad. He's not a robot, unlike Ginny. What is positive is that he actually understands the technology, which the past several CEOs haven't. He might just save the company.

Still, I'm glad I sold my shares a while back.

Not only is Zoom's strong end-to-end encryption not actually end-to-end, its encryption isn't even that strong

Not the end of the world

"we discourage the use of Zoom at this time for use cases that require strong privacy and confidentiality"

But for the vast majority of their recent influx of users - students & teachers, grandmas and grandkids, that really isn't a big deal and their traffic is worth anybody decrypting. So yes, they should fix, but actually this is not the end of the world.

Australian digital-radio-for-railways Huawei project derailed by US trade sanctions against Chinese tech giant

Re: Convenient

> You left out the word "alleged"...

And you left out "absurd right-wing conspiracy theory"

Huawei rotating Chairman: Chinese government will not 'just stand by and watch Huawei be slaughtered'

Re: Well I used to be fact driven...

Are you suggesting that "the Chinese" subverted the truth about coronavirus, or about Huawei, or what? It's quite unclear from your post. In objective fact "the Americans" (or at least, their so-called President) have been subverting the truth about both Huawei and coronavirus, and much more so than the Chinese authorities in both cases.

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

Re: Civilian note

I don't think that improving (IPv6) connectivity in the Asia-Pacific region is a hobby-horse. It's more like, say, being able to sell most of the (US) 847 area code numbers and use the proceeds to improve 5G coverage in rural Illinois.

Anyway, I've known Jun for 20+ years and whatever he does always works out brilliantly well. My only comment is Kampai!

Freed from the office, home workers roam sunlit uplands of IPv6... 2 metres apart

Re: Colour me disappointed...

"It's disabled because of the forums and logging / posting IP etc."

4 months ago they said "(which is part of what we have yet to finish updating for full IPv6 support)." I realise that bringing a software fix into production takes time and won't happen during lockdown, but this is a fairly poor excuse when IPv6 has been production-ready for so many years.

Firefox to burn FTP out of its browser, starting slowly in version 77 due in April

Re: Use a real FTP client

"I can see why pulling an afterthought FTP function from a browser is a good idea."

It was not an afterthought. I don't recall for MOSAIC, too long ago, but the code was already in Netscape and I expect that's the origin of the code in Firefox. The ftp: schema is as old as http:. The full set of schemas defined in RFC1630 in June 1994 was:

http Hypertext Transfer Protocol (examples)

ftp File Transfer protocol

gopher Gopher protocol

mailto Electronic mail address

news Usenet news

telnet, rlogin and tn3270 Reference to interactive sessions

wais Wide Area Information Servers

file Local file access

IBM's outgoing boss Rometty awarded $20m+ in 2019 for growing revenue 0.1%

Re: Sauce for the goose?

And Arvind might actually develop a real technical strategy, unlike the overpromoted salesperson he is replacing. I rate him higher than either Rometty or Palmisano.

Four months, $1bn... and ICANN still hasn’t decided whether to approve .org sale with just 11 days left to go

... should be operated by not-for-profit organisations

The problem with your "should" is that this approach was explicitly refused by the Clinton Administration in 1998, so we are stuck with a privatised top level domain registration business and all its consequences.

DoH

DoH is certainly sinister, but you can switch it off in FireFox.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https#w_manually-enabling-and-disabling-dns-over-https

Re: Sick

What are you talking about? There is no new money for ICANN in this proposal. There is no new money for ISOC either; just an endowment to replace an existing revenue stream. There is, presumably, new money in prospect for Ethos Capital, or they wouldn't have put $1.35B on the table. But if so, that's no different from all the other investors in the DNS registry business. Their capital, their risk.

As I've said before, I don't like the fact that DNS registration became a business. But that was in 1998 and there's nothing to be done about it.

UK Defence Committee probe into national security threat of Huawei sure to uncover lots of new and original insights

It all depends on the real remit

I'm sure that the published remit of any investigation will be nice and unbiased. But the real remit will be mumbled into someone's ear (one would like to think this would happen in the smoking room of an exclusive London club, but those days are probably gone, and surely no club would let Dominant Cunnings in). And the real remit could be an instruction to declare Huawei to be as clean as the Immaculate Conception, or as dirty as COVID-19, depending on where the government's lords and masters have their money invested...