Posts by Alan Brown

Millions at risk after attackers steal UK legal aid data dating back 15 years

Re: There are ways of preventing this.

You can design out the risks, only to have upper management backdoor everything because it's inconvenient

Quality British management strikes again

This is going to keep happening until personal accountability falls on management

HMRC's Making Tax Digital scheme also made tax more expensive – by £300M

Re: Small business VAT

"- I have to pay AWS to keep the lights on"

DO you actually NEED AWS for this kind of thing? Have you actually characterised the load profiles?

How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Re: "assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them"

Doing it in writing creates an audit trail that can't be denied like verbal interactions can, so this should be the preferred option in any case

Re: "assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them"

"Do they get bonuses for denying claims?"

Kind of. One of my friends has started working in an office in North London after a long business career (she was bored whilst retired)

There are people in these places who OPENLY BOAST about making things as hard as possible for claimants and finding every possible reason to deny payouts, as though it's their money

It shouldn't be a surprise that these tend to be the ones who openly manifest their religion in the office

In her words: If they'd been working for me in private industry they'd have been shown the door a long time ago. Here, they're unsackable

Re: Universal Basic Income

"We can't give everyone the opportunity to stay out of poverty because some might waste it. Is a poor excuse"

It's the most common one raised against universal healthcare

Re: Universal Basic Income

This is something that people really don't pay enough attention to

The best way of lowering taxes is to lower the cost of collecting them. The government usually ends up receiving MORE net income, which means it can do the stuff that needs doing whilst populations are generally happy to pay lower taxes (which in turn means more disposable income)

Government departments tend to grow unchecked over time. The Colonial office was at its largest and most expensive to run 2 years AFTER Britain ceased to be en empire with colonies. The solution there was to roll everything under the foreign office and start with a clean(ish) sheet

Re: "assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them"

With good reason.

Monopolies break capitalism - which is a precarious state of affairs that can be likened to the trick of balancing a broom vertically on your hand and needs constant government/regulatory oversight to maintain free/fair competitiion in a level playing field

Left to its own devices capitalism quickly turns into the saturnian beasts of monopoly, mercantilism, corporatism (aka fascism, according to Benito Mussolini) or cartels - then starts eatng its children

Monopolies aren't "bad" in themselves, but generally undesireable. Plenty of natural monopolies develop over time(*) - we start having problems when a company leverages its monopoly in one sphere to obtain a monopoly in others, or when the monopoly becomes abusive

Progressive and heavy tax structures also serve a useful purpose by providing tax breaks when investing into things like R&D. Companies and the ultrawealthy get faced with a choice of paying up to the government or putting the cash into projects which _might_ have a long term benefit. Otherwise they sit on it like gamers herding high scores (lack of appetite for "risk", which becomes a self-feeding stagnation cycle)

(*) Eg, infrastructure services such as roading, water/sewage, power, gas, communications and healthcare - as we've seen, breaking these up and privatising them isn't necessarily the right answer (See what's happened to AT&T in the USA as well as the water companies in Britain

There's an old joke that the problem with neoliberalism is that eventually you run out of public assets to sell off to your mates - it'd be funnier if it wasn't true

Going back to UBI, it's about time people took on board that "full employment" was already a myth by the end of the 19th century thanks to the industrial age. We've gone through all kinds of schemes and plans to hide it - keeping married women out of the workforce, restricting what people could do based on skin pigmentation, minimum age laws, etc. The notion that the poor are poor by their own fault or can't get jobs becauser they're lazy feeds into that (particularly the Calvinist mantra of "the devil makes work for idle hands" that Thatcher and Reagan subscribed to)

There are way too many "bullshit jobs" (books on the topic exist). The biggest problem is simply that the ultrawealthy have managed to wind the clock back to 1905 - peak Gilded Era - and convinced the average person that immigrants are at fasult (Hint: Birthrates are falling fast across ALL developed countries, even the ones which were "developing" at the end of the Cold War. Without Immigrants to fill the gaps, western populations would have crashed 20 years ago - and you can see what the effect of that is by looking at Japan's lost decades (deflation, recession, job losses, stagnation, etc))

Recently developed economies are facing a worse population demographics crunch than older ones. China's impeding storm is going to make Japan's aging population issues look mild and the Asian Tigers are only 10-15 years behind that

Meantime politicians and media keep ignoring the real problems and harping on about what's commonly known as "The bicycle shed problem" - whilst making things far worse by refusing to pay for properly qualified/talented people to _define_ the problems before throwing the IT Crowd and their snake oil salesdweebs at it. We NEED a working and equitable form of UBI that isn't hamstrung by massive workloads for recipients and administrators - AND can serve people in emergencies (It's not just job loss without any meaningful savings, think of what happens when a relationship breaks up acrimoniously, etc). We also need a working electoral system that doesn't go out of its way to dissuade people from participating

As an example of the British Civil Service method of solving problems, look at the VC10 - an elegant solution to the need for jet aircraft to get into hot/high airfields across the empire which had runways too short for Boeing's newfangled 707. It's a great aircraft but by the time it entered service the problem had been solved by the simple expedient of making the runways longer - at a total cost across all airports of less than one VC10, let alone the R&D program - then they left Vickers carrying the financial burden which had been incurred by government edict

There are a bunch more examples like that (Brabazon being one I can think of - an aircraft designed to compete with luxury ocean liners, long after those had left the chat as a way of mass transit) and there are legions of failed government IT projects which all have the common factors of not defining what they were intended to do BEFORE committing (a fundamental project management failing), which in turn resulted in constant (expensive) goalpost shifting

Re: Yes but

"They don't have to worry - it will be backdated"

Thankfully, it IS possible to apply for an emergency grant if you're utterly skint in the withholding period

The problem with UC et al isn't treasury or home office, but the obsession with punishing the poor for being poor that pervades English speaking countries

There _aren't_ enough jobs to keep everyone fully employed on livable wages. Most of them have been automated away and creating bullshit jobs to fill the gap is worse for mental health than being unemployed

Better to encourage creativity and social integration. Why can't "poet" or "street entertainer" be a fulltime reasonably paid job?

Re: "assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them"

"those who receive it tend to spend their money quickly and locally."

Or in other words - there IS a trickle effect. Money trickles UPWARDS

I'll save the rant about monetary theory for somewhere else

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

The USA tested sonic boom population tolerance in the 1960s over Kansas using the XB70. It's one of the reasons they outlawed SST flight over land.

Boomless flight requires flight at a critical speed only just over the speed of sound AND at the exact right altitude AND under the right atmospheric conditions. It's something that you can't do with scheduled services - meaning this is billionaire private jet territory

AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge

Re: FFS always with the nuclear

Yeah.... good luck with geothermal. It's not particularly hot (wet steam), has major environmental effects (usually toxic runoffs), the water is extremely corrosive and because rock is a GREAT insulator they almost always take more energy out of the ground than is being replenished from below

"Yes, but, if you go deep you can get hotter and more sustainable sources" - except you're now talking about needing to frack at depths of 3-5+ miles. with even more problems than oil/gas fracking

Geothermal is one of those "nice ideas, but practicalities intrude" solutions that generally only works reasonably well over an active magma chamber or hotspot - not many of those in Britain

Re: Be it AI, industries or households

There's a big elephant that's being ignored - the phaseout of gas for domestic/industrial heating systems

We'll need to roughly double annual electricity production for this alone

Re: Hmm

Existing nuclear power plants designs produce about an olympic swimming pool volume worth of waste per 1GW reactor, per 60 year lifespan

That waste is safe enough to handle with gloves on in about 150 years and less radioactive than the original fuel in 450-500

Molten salt liquid fuel designs (LFTRs) should reduce this volume by 95% (and be essentially inert in 450 years) if not 99% AND they can be fuelled on thorium - the primary waste product of rare earth mining AND they can be fuelled on depleted uranium(*) AND they can be fuelled on current high level nuclear waste

A coal fired power station produces an ash lake 6-10 metres deep covering 20 hecatres or more in the same period

The thing to remember is that highly radioative stuff becomes inert in a short period of time whilst long lived stuff ("20,000 years!") emits energies so low that they can be stopped with a sheet of paper. The chemical properties of plutonium/uranium are a vastly greater concern than their radioactivity.

Fusion has a big potential issue inasmuch as the neutrons are likely to produce radioactive iron from the countainment walls, which has a 60 year halflife and is problematic to handle. It may well be that fission ends up cleaner overall

(*) Being able to burn depleted uranium is critically important as this is the primary feedstock for making nuclear weapons and needs to be destroyed to reduce proliferation risks

Re: Hmm

We don't HAVE a "meantime"

It really is that simple. Waiting around for the holy grail of fusion is not an option. We have to roll with what we have NOW and upgrade to fusion later - IF it's ever commercially viable

Re: Hmm

Attitudes of the greenies won't hold much water if rolling blackouts start becoming a winter norm

Right now the general public assumption is that energy planners know what they're doing and handwave the idea away. They don't realise that hands are tied and anyone with authority to issue warnings about critical infrastrcture shortages is being gagged by way of the threat of being sacked

It's the same issue with climate change. Politicians refused to accept science predictions in the 1990s and insisted they be watered down. What's actually happened is that things have been progressing EVEN FASTER than worst case predictions and the political structure has doubled down on the cognitive dissonance of denying what's sitting in plain view

Re: AWS is welcome to start spending on nuclear build

Nuclear suffers from a number of issues

- water cored designs aren't hot enough to be economic on the non-nuclear (power generation) side as they produce wet steam which damages turbines AND they're essentially giant radioactive steam boilers with all the engineering stresses that come with large boilers (This is what drives the long build times and high costs. Boiler explosions are a serious risk) AND high pressure/temperature water is _extremely_ corrosive to the pipework

- solid fuel designs produce high(ish) levels of waste regardless of the coolant/moderator (and can be misused to make weapons grade plutonium or are simply modifications of designs originally intended to produce plutonium)

- enriched fuel designs are a figleaf to cover up for making depleted uranium in a weapons program

- other coolants have various issues (Eg: Santa Suzannah)

Alvin Weinberg built the original Nautilus design as a proof of concept. He was unhappy with it being scaled up to Rube-Goldberg sizes and built a better mousetrap - MSRE - only to get kicked out of the Nuclear industry

None of the western companies pushing molten salt designs have yet to build a working one in the 25 years since the MSRE notes were rediscovered. China has had one working for nearly 2 years with (so far) good results and the indications are that scalability is as straightforward as Weinberg predicted in 1968, as well as having proven that after kickstarting, raw thorium can be used as fuel without needing a Th232-U233 process outside the reactor loop.

Global power and influence has long been closely related to control of access to resources (including energy). In the 2030s China's likely to become the World Hyperpower by way of selling Molten salt designs to power 5+ billion people and weaning them off carbon in the process.

Re: Alternatively..

"if AI can teach us how to deliver a nuclear powerhouse on time and on budget it may just have a future"

Or we could just pay attention to what's happening in the Gobi desert at Wu Wei (SINAP TMSR-LF1)

Our very own hack - the late lamented Lester - was a strong advocate of this technology. It's a pity he didn't live long enough to see the revived prototype being built (let alone going critical)

It's also a pity that the USA continues to operate under laws which make reviving their own MSR program illegal, thanks to Richard Milhaus Nixon in 1972, under pressure from a military which was afraid that divorcing civil nuclear power from its complete dependency on the unwanted waste products(*) of weaponsmaking would expose that weaponsmaking program's costs and also expose uranium separation facilities to nuclear limitation treaties

(*) Enriched uranium was used for the first reactor because it was known it would work and because there were tens of tons of the stuff that uranium separation plants wanted to get rid of. Depleted uranium (9kg for every 1kg of 3% enriched uranium) is the feedstock for making weapons-grade plutonium and nobody's bothered with an enriched uranium bomb since the 1950s because they cost so much that it's cheaper to BUY your enemy

Re: Yes, but then again, No.

Perhaps not "cheap", but I'll settle for "not having rolling blackouts in the 2030-40s"

Re: Yes, but then again, No.

"The truly scary prospect is that the bubble may not burst."

A human brain does vastly more with 75W than AI can do with a couple of gigawatts

Some efficiency drives would help a lot even if the bubble continues

Re: Yes, but then again, No.

"Ireland does take a pretty steady supply from the UK however"

Other way around. Those Irish windfarms are usually exporting energy to the UK and will continue to do so until the Celtic Connector projects provide a link to France

Hmmm

For full decarbonisation, the UK will need to at least quadruple (more likely 6-8 times) its current annual TWh production (gas is being switched off(*)) for starters)

If the AI bubble which pushed builds of new nuclear capacity crashes just as demand starts ramping up, that would save a lot of rolling blackouts

(*) No, hydrogen is not a viable replacement. Why would anyone buy hydrogen at three times the cost per joule of electricity - which is 3-5 times the price per joule of existing natural gas supplies - Faced with a 9-15x higher gas bill most users will simply dump it in favour of heat pumps

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

"Orbital habitats become feasible"

Imagine things like Webb telescope without the orgami, or Hubble scaled up to 9 metre mirror (they're quite different designs and intentions)

Coupled with a fleet of ion tugs (there are 3 in service already), the possibilities are fascinating (tugs allow deorbiting GEO birds and/or removing dead ones from the clarke belt - which is currently causing in-service units to have to manouver out of the way thanks to orbital precession)

Re: Picture of Elmo

"Historically, that's a Roman gesture"

Absolutely not!

The first instance of it appearing is from a painting in the 1600s and it's a classic example of retconning

The salute itself (along with the flag worship, Eugenics, manifest destiny, untermensch, etc) was lifted from the USA (Bellamy Salute)

Don't take my word for it, it's all in Mein Kampf.

The Austrian painter deeply admired the Confederacy (which was the first fascist state, long before Mussolini coined the term) and this is why _millions_ of Americans eagerly adopted naziism in the 1930s

How Amazon red-teamed Alexa+ to keep your kids from ordering 50 pizzas

"NASA termed it a failure of imagination."

Huh? Half the engineering team was PLEADING not to use high pressure oxygen. They already knew velcro burns furiously in such an environment when given a spark but were overridden by manglers

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

Same in the last place I worked - which was ironic because the procurement and financial systems all run on Oracle

PowerSchool paid thieves to delete stolen student, teacher data. Looks like crooks lied

Re: Money Laundering

"the payer cannot be accused of laundering criminal money"

Facilitating Money Laundering is a crime in most jurisdictions. As is paying ransoms in several

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: "HR tries to think appy thoughts"

If that's a long time, then what does remembering red buckets count as?

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: A mouse? How quaint.

The same one of mine who used to sleep on the monitor used to sit on the mouse to get my attention.

That's how he got relocated to the monitor

Re: Cats on computers

One of mine loved doing that. He rolled over in his sleep one evening and ended up falling off the side of the monitor into a magazine holder.

About 5 seconds later, he finally lifted his head up in the classic "I meant to do that!" pose

openSUSE deep sixes Deepin desktop over security stink

Re: Change.... Europe orientated

I don't, due to reasons I've elaborated on other parts of these comments.

Ubuntu have their own issues but Debian has proven remarkably resistant to capture/being turned into a walled garden

Re: Change....

Redhat had turned into a company with a half dozen very large customers (regarding the science community as a nuisance) long before the IBM aquisition

Their persistance in academic use is very much a "You can't go wrong buying IBM" moment and we've repeatedly see what happens when groups adopt that mindset for prolonged periods

pot and kettles

"SUSE's engineers have raised these issues with the upstream developers"

That kind of comment is kind of rich given my experience with deep problems in Suse where they essentially "ran away" and wouldn't even respond to Novell senior management (USA or European) trying to find out WTF was going on

The appalling taste of such "support" on 6-figure contracts turned them into a "Never do business with this outfit again"

What's worse is that this kind of thing isn't unusual when dealing with German/Swiss software companies. If it becomes "too hard" they simply put up brick walls

The only worse companies I've had to deal with were Taiwanese (Acer and Asus in particular, who responded to increasing levels of customer complaints by deleting their support websites and forums). Mainland Chinese outfits can be difficult to deal with but they don't adopt the "we know better than YOU!" attitude you see all the time with German outfits.

ESA feeling weightless and unwanted amid proposed NASA cuts

Re: Lets restart Hermes...

"But do we (Europe) actually have the money?"

In short: Yes

More importantly, the benefits (contracts) for each country involved are directly tied to how much they put into the project in the first place - pay-for-play and not as subject to "congressional pork" hijackings as happens in the USA

Anti-intellectualism isn't a large problem in Europe (apart from Britain) as the results of letting that kind of thing prevail are well documented in recent/not-so-recent history and as a result we know better than letting religous zealots, or next-quarter-focussed "biznezzmen" dictate the narrative

Most importantly, budget for science/space programs is NOT subject to populist pressures - This is why the LHC managed to be built whilst Texas efforts are now an underground documnet storage facility

30 years of MySQL, the database that changed the world

Re: Avoid If Possible

Not just e-commerce sites

Extremely useful stuff like GLPI is written using MySQL and there's a LOT of kludge in the code to try and work around issues that simple don't occur with other DBs

Nagging devs who've been working on a single database for 15 years tends to fall on deaf ears. Nothing's going to happen until they're FORCED to change horses

Re: OTT

"Actually, MySQL's main advantage over Postgres is better write performance in most situations."

That used to be the case but Postgres usually outstrips MySQL by a couple of orders of magnitude when you're handling large datasets and for smaller ones the write differences are too small to matter. This isn't the 1990s anymore and 2GB is a SMALL amount of memory in most cases (Remember, MySQL's big claim to fame was running on small non-dedicated systems with 4-16MB total ram)

Besides, PgSQL has native handling of a lot of data types that you need to run through external sanity checking before feeding into MySQL (eg: timestamps and IP addresses) AND it's fully posix compliant vs MySQL

When converting datasets from MySQL to PgSQL queries usually only need tweaking if you've used keywoards specific to MySQL - and if any of your queries contain joins you'll see substantial savings in both time/memory consumption

I've dragged a number of people kicking and screaming off mySQL onto PgSQL. After a few months none of them have ever wanted to revert. Fear of the unknown is the most prevalent reason for not even trying

Re: OTT

MySQL was good enough and fast enough back in the days of 128MB systems

It simply doesn't scale well, innodb or MyISAM backends regardless

Once you're up to several million records it's struggling and the extra base memory/cpu requirements of PostgreSQL really don't matter post-2008 or so

At 50+ million records, you'll find that Postgres uses 1/4 the memory of MySQL with queries running in seconds when MySQL takes minutes

MySQL is good as a starting point, but people fixate on it, thinking other databases are "too hard" - resulting in massive kludgefests being written to handle cases that PostgreSQL frequently handles natively

FWIW the primary reasons that MySQL was 3x faster than PgSQL for thousands of queries/inserts back in the 1990s was due to PgSQL fsyncing after every tranaction whilst MySQL relied on disk buffers. The risks to data and database integrity should be obvious - and PgSQL solved that issue with WAL in the early 2000s - making it MUCH faster than mySQL if you need to add 10 million entries and add indexing

Calling MySQL a "toy" database isn't fair, but on the other hand with the ease of using PgSQL from the outset it makes little sense to use MySQL unless you KNOW with absolute certainty that it won't be asked to scale

Having spent decades tuning MySQL for best performance/memory consumption, the fact that most of this is done automagically in PgSQL is a godsend that lets you concentrate on the actual task rather than trying to deal with the system growing increasingly unstable as the load piles up

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computer SpiNNaker overheated when coolers lost their chill

Kind of.

It's known as a swamp cooler...

Re: That must have been toasty

Every server room I've worked in has been fitted (either originally or at my insistence) with a high temp room crowbar, usually set around 40C

It's simply a thermostat linked to the emergency stop button

Hard shutting down the power is preferable to cooking the hardware and 40C room temp is usually 70-80 at the actual semiconductor junctions. AC is one of the least reliable things in a computer centre and making sure you can prevent destruction of potentially millions of pounds worth of hardware (and more importantly, data) is fairly important. Back in the old days an overheating room would regularly result in disk drive head crashes

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

"this sort of thing is becoming startlingly common"

Yes and there are good reasons for it - old age and poor maintenance. It doesn't help that this stuff ISN'T National Grid, but UKPN or other local network responsibility and those have been firmly under beancounter control for decades

"Brazil" was set in a distopian future where this kind of thing was happening regularly and the authorities would blame it on terrorists as a way of maintaining ever-tighter control of the population

BTW: It's worth noting that the 5000 gallons of oil in each one of these ancient transformers is usually heavily laden with polycarbonated biphenols (PCBs) and you DO NOT want to be downwind of them if they're burning

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

The former is inextricably linked to the latter. As soon as personal liability crops up they begind learning proactively

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

Personal liability has consistently proven to be the ONLY way to achieve widespread compliance.

I still recall a company-wide communique which begane "As I have no desire whatsoever to find myself spending time at Her Majesty's pleasure for actions of my employees, the following actions are expressly prohibited and will result in summary dismissal if discovered" - proceeding to list 2 dozen things which were common practice amongst sales & marketing departments

Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare

Re: Reason #854637

"And when the brown stuff splatters, it'll all be your fault."

ALWAYS keep audit trails, including all email safely archived where it can't be mysteriously deleted

When personal information is involved you're REQUIRED to notify the ICO. It wouldn't take much extra verbiage to extend the requirements to all data exfiltration/damaging/encryption breaches

> One was handled by the organisation's cyber insures who said "Don't speak to a soul about this or we wash our hands of you"

This in particular needs to made a criminal offence with heavy penalties on the companies trying it (the original company, the insurer and personal liability on the staff member uttering it)

Re: You have a few minutes between boarding and take-off.

Attacks on civil infrastructure should be treated as terrorism and dealt with accordingly

After all, the perpetrators of most of this shit are state backed, or at least state-tolerated

Sometimes they do.

Comet springs to mind

Data watchdog will leave British Library alone – further probes 'not worth our time'

I've had several scoff and point out the ICO is underfunded to the point of being toothless

They're correct of course.

As with many other quangos The ICO was setup to create an APPEARANCE of complying with EU directives but deliberately operated and funded to do the absolute minimum possible whilst not bringing down sanctions. Discussions I've had with ICO staff (off the clock) indicate they're as frustrated as anyone else but those who pay the piper call the tune (and Tory governments in particular DO NOT WANT the ICO to exist)

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: sometimes a zero or a one was read wrong at the other end

I can think of one very popular backup package which relies on TCP acks to provide the totality of flow control between the backed up device and the tape spooler - including when the spool is full - meaning that data is sent until the network buffers are choked and that in turn can trigger a Linux memory leak (which nobody seems interested in fixing) if you've set the buffers LARGE to get maximum throughput (Tape drives are FAST, faster than disks)

Suggesting that they use actual end to end flow control handshaking was dismissed as "unnecessary" because "It works well enough"

Swiss-German managers can be extremely pig-headed

Re: No Surprise

There are good reasons that positive pressure and decent dust extraction are mandatory in such environments

Re: I was called in ...

That sprang to my mind too. Ground your shield at only ONE end

The ground strap may have worked but it could have made things worse