* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Data dealer slapped with £80k fine after flogging info for nuisance calls

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Only?

"How about an extra long necktie"

Long enough to be tied to a ceiling fan whilst the owner is wearing it?

Birds are pecking apart Australia's national broadband network

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not only birds

"bored gunmen have been playing target practice with the insulators on Google's electricity distribution poles"

That's been a problem for telcos since time immemorial. They shoot up the cables too if they're particularly bored.

Over a million Android users fooled by fake WhatsApp app in official Google Play Store

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: store fakes

" (Star ratings seem to be of little value, unless there are hundreds of positive votes)"

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1098/ and https://xkcd.com/937/

Official Secrets Act alert went off after embassy hired local tech support

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Too many stories like that one.

"half an hour later it dies with no warning..."

Yes, but presumably you have enough $clue to check the power and not scream at IT.

Giza geezers' muon-geyser visor reveals Great Pyramid's hidden void surpriser

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Done before?

Something similar was tried in the 1970s but because they got the dimensions wrong, the results were gibberish (which von Danniken and friends ascribed to "aliens"). Once the measurements were corrected there was nothing interesting showing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 'a particle usually found in cosmic rays'

What's not mentioned is that muons were proposed as a tool for examination over 45 years ago and now we finally have the technology to actually try it.

Vlad the blockader: Russia's anti-VPN law comes into effect

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Dobby" will not be mocked.

"Personally I think one day he will be launded as a great gay icon. So butch."

Yes, the Rock Hudson is strong in him.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cutting the cables would be Putin's and Xi's dream

The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.

Chipzilla drops dinkier Optane SSD, but don't expect it in data centres

Alan Brown Silver badge

Small optanes could be useful for...

ZFS SLOG drives - given the cost of 8GB Zeusram drives.

Could be. If the endurance wasn't so awful.

F-35s grounded by spares shortage

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: >This argument that the technology will soon be supplanted

"jet fighters won't be too involved in non-peripheral combat zones unless they're carrier-based"

China's DF-21D and DF-26 are more than enough to ensure that they won't be involved even if carrier-based.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let's make planes that can't fly......

" The Allies have themselves to thank for bringing about the conditions Hitler needed to take power."

It was remarked by at least one official in 1919 after the conditions of the armistice and reparations were laid out that it wasn't a peace document, merely a 20 year pause in the war.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let's make planes that can't fly......

"european powers ignored the military complex hitler was building in the 30s "

That had a lot more to do with memories of how bad WW1 was and not being willing to gear up and do it all over again.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let's make planes that can't fly......

"the "cheaper" F-111"

The F-111 was ok, but the F-111B turned into exactly the kind of clusterfuck that the F22 and F35 have become and got cancelled (The F14 and F15 did come out of the R&D as "smaller, cheaper faster" aircraft though)

The lesson learned from the F-111 experiences appears to be how to structure your program so it _can't_ be cancelled.

Bored 'drivers' pushed Google Waymo into ditching autopilot tech

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: MUCH less of a problem on airplanes

"hence why we have trained meatbags"

Some are trained better than others.

"It's not even clear that the pilots realised that they where descending rather than flying level"

They probably didn't. If you panic and start flying by the seat of your pants without external references, you _will_ go splat. Our balance system is very stable and sensitive but it's programmed at all times on the basis of the monkey enveloping it being generally attached to something solid and unmoving. One pilot told me a tale of how he was flying VFR when clouds got in the way. He pressed on regardless and at one point was looking _up_ at the ground.

The AF pilots fucked up badly, but so did Airbus by assuming "Pilots would never do that" and not making allowances for the times when they might.

One of the parts that's always amazed me when reading incident reports involving pitot icing is that it's not particularly difficult to detect the onset and apply heating automatically (or to simply use a thermostat). Insistence on having pilots do mundane and easily forgotten shit manually in a mostly automated system (or a heavily loaded manual environment) is a recipe for mistakes (there's also the issue of having multiple pitots and only relying on one of them for input instead of using redundancy

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not new

"a cruise control that simply makes progress at a fixed speed"

I achieved the same thing on my motorcycle in the 80s with a clamp on the throttle.

Fixed speed cruise control is only useful on empty roads. Once you've used an adaptive cruise system you'll never use the old type again (and the one on my car is 15 years old, so not exactly new tech)

Health quango: Booze 'evidence' not Puritan enough, do us another

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hardly a surprise...

"Water kills, that is a fact."

Every single person who drank water in 1881 is now dead. Thus we prove that water kills.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hardly a surprise...

"Cannabis kills, that is a fact."

Citations required.

Car insurers recoil in horror from paying auto autos' speeding fines

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Change is needed in the approach to enforcement

" I am ignoring the clear fact that most authorities end up abusing this system and operate it as a revenue stream. "

Between this and the projected plunge in vehicle ownership numbers, some parking companies which happen to have councils attached (eg: Westminster) are going to find that they're scrambling for income they've become used to. The amusing this is that if it's cheaper to let your automated car circulate in traffic than pay £12/hour parking fees, people will let them do it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: From the department of stupid ideas

"Of course the wiring needs in to the streetlights needs upgrading "

Bringing up the problem of what happens to the national grid when all those EVs are charging simultaneously.

We're going to need batteries at every wind/solar farm to smooth output (Elon will be happy and they should be mandatory to be allowed to grid connect) as well as batteries in every charge point so the substations don't melt (street chargers are unlikely to have cars attached more than 1/3 of the time)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why should the car be 'slow to respond'

"it is simply the maximum speed you may drive at, because at all times you should drive at a speed appropriate to the conditions."

The usual metric in most countries is that the maximum speed allowed is the lower of "the speed at which you can stop in the distance of visible road ahead (half this distance if there is no centreline)" or "the posted speed limit"

Humans are very good at vastly overestimating their abilities and vastly underestimating stopping distances.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why should the car be 'slow to respond'

"Signs (other than temporary ones like road works) will not be necessary for self driving cars to perform"

If you have the technology to do OTA updates to the cars, you have the technology to do OTA updates to the database when roadworks go live.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I thought my opinion of MPs could go no lower

"Sky at Night team are all good"

That's because they're all astronomers or astrophysicists. Being on the program is a lark for them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Daft idea

"spot-checked ... on the way back from an MOT"

One of the more paradoxical things in the UK is that you can pass the MOT with a car that isn't in roadworthy condition. Yes, really.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"there's nothing about CO2 or NOx."

YET.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So I'm liable for my Volkswagon exceeding CO2 emissions?

"A couple of friends are about to find out."

For this kind of case it's trivial. Type Approval is withdrawn for non-"upgraded" cars and the DVSA sends someone around to impound it unless you have proof the fix has been done and is still installed. They'll also tell your insurance company, who will send you a nice letter withdrawing cover.

The rumour mill says that there's about to be a major crackdown on diesels with removed DPFs and ones with the guts of the DPF box hacked out (it's a thing apparently: cut open, dump the contents, weld closed again, modify your engine manglement to disable DPF burns.) as well as "decatted" petrol vehicles and the ever popular engine management hacks to "restore power" (all the above void the Type Approval). With any luck this will extend to the "loud exhaust" brigade (an exhaust louder than factor voids type approval too)

Voiding your Type Approval means you're driving without insurance, so getting caught is a lot more serious than you might think at first.

It'll be "interesting" as the worst offenders tend to be commercial drivers. Imagine half London's mincabs being impounded, etc

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Terrorism

"The current forecast is for 75 million."

In the mid 1960s it was forecast to be 75 million by the end of the century.

Stuff happened. Birthrates in developed countries have been well below "replacement" levels for the last 4 decades and are showing no sign of changing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hacking the Law

"they won't have been programmed with an Awkward Old Fart Playing Policeman mode making them do 69.9mph in the outside lane of a motorway when the inside is clear. "

That's a particular annoyance you won't see with automated cars.

It really is a pity that "Failure to Keep Left" (aka lane hogging) and "Disrupting Traffic Flow" (aka holding up traffic by travelling below the limit with more than 4 cars behind you(*)) are both offences which require the police to observe personally. Make it easy to report and there would be so many dashcam reports that the egrarious offenders would be off the road in 2 weeks.

(*) In the UK (and many other countries) you're legally _required_ to pull over and let the traffic pass if you've become a mobile roadblock. Some countries take it seriously enough that a phoned in report will result in police being sent to wait ahead of the old fart (it's always an old fart) and pull them over. One memorable report counted 600 vehicles behind the dawdler.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Some small towns depend on that income"

In the UK, police are county-based rather than towns.

Because of past abuse, speeding fines from cameras and roadside ticketing are paid into central government coffers. Unfortunately those who run the very lucrative speed camera scam(*) realised that by diverting motorists to "speed awareness courses", they could get kickbacks^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H referral fees paid by course providers to the camera partnership charities and thus maintain their 6-figure salaries.

(*) The scam is that speed limits are being set on the statistical mean of all traffic speeds, rather than the "statistical mean of free running traffic speeds(**), plus 1 standard deviation" (aka the 85th percentile) - traffic engineering textbooks and various standards define this as the maximum speed a reasonable driver will travel at when the road is clear(***). If this is higher than the defined speed limit then it's an engineering failure, not a motorist one, requiring design rework, not traffic enforcement. By including congested traffic and platoons behind slower drivers, the reported "average" is forced down and in some cases can end up more than 10mph below the 85th percentile - and this in turn is used to justify lower speed limits than the design speed on roads - which sets up the speed trap.

(**) Free running is usually taken as vehicles with at least 4 seconds headway, so that they're not influenced by the vehicle in front. A number of countries have legal standards for this, but the UK doesn't. The only mention of measuring speeds is a reference to using free running speed in the apendicies of a DFT management document. (Because of "speed trap towns", there have been moves in the USA to make it illegal to set the speed limit below the 85th percentile but this hasn't happened yet)

(***) 60 years of traffic management, measurement and statistical analysis in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and various EU countries has shown that motorists tend to travel at the design speed of a road and will _ignore_ speed limit signs which deviate more than about 10mph from this. Even worse, once they do start ignoring it peak speeds and "speed spreads"(****) increase - especially if the speed limit is set too low. If you want to slow traffic you have to increase the perceived road hazards - things like chicanes and speed humps don't work, whilst adding parking restrictions and pedestrian fencing actually speed traffic up considerably.

(****) This is the difference between the fastest and slowest traffic. Slow drivers frustrate followers, frequently resulting in dangerous overtaking manouveres and drivers "flooring it" to make up for perceived lost time.

The worst part is that _most_ things that councils attempt to do to "slow down traffic" or "make things safer" usually have the opposite effect, resulting in more changes, and more positive feedback because they can't be seen to admit they made a mistake. It's a bit like the old lady who swallowed a fly. In a lot of cases the best thing to do when congestion starts being a problem is "nothing at all", as that way it becomes self-solving. Attempting to make the traffic flow more smoothly frequently just moves the congestion a few blocks or results in a marked increase in off-peak traffic speeds.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Once certain people learn how autonomous vehicles operate there will be ways to game them"

Setting up a speed trap should become a criminal offence with liability on whoever signed off on it. At the moment it's merely unlawful and there's effectively no penalty.

Google Drive ate our homework! Doc block blamed on code blunder

Alan Brown Silver badge

Not just happening on Docs

I've had a couple of dashcam videos removed on "offensiveness" grounds recently.

The cause appears to be the "Scunthorpe" problem - literally (video title based on location were recorded)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Vapourous clouds

"It keeps it out of US jurisdiction."

No, it doesn't. $orkplace didn't use them for corporate mail because they explicitly WOULD NOT provide a guarantee that data could be held out of US jurisdiction. It goes everywhere.

By contrast, MS's Outlook system keeps EU mail housed in the EU.

UK industry bods: Re-train one million manufacturing workers to deal with new tech

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Same old same old

"And to a lesser degree skilled service, legal and financial industry jobs by AI systems...."

I think you'll find that it will be a greater extent.

Robots cost serious money compared to increased computing power for brainiac work.

The low hanging fruit is in white collar stuff - and that's been happening for decades. Robots may have replaced dirty/dangerous jobs in factories but that's about it - and automation is still mostly targetting the jobs that are heavy/hot/dull as hell or where repeatability is paramount. One example I've been peripherally involved in used cameras to assess temperature variation in steel blocks coming out of a refectory furnace for a specialised application. The skilled guys take 20 years to train and even they're not as accurate as a thermal imaging setup with appropriate (simple) logic.

Far more people have been put out of office jobs by computers/automation than any kind of factory work. When was the last time you saw a room full of accounts ledger clerks?

Alan Brown Silver badge

" and then finding themselves falling prey to the likes of RBS"

Or megacorps going "Thanks for creating this market. We'll have that" - which is what happened to all the ISPs

Algorithms, Henry VIII powers, dodgy 1-man-firms: Reg strokes claw over Data Protection Bill

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A problem for democracy

"Any candidate who tried to "engage" me that way would be granted a swift lesson in rules of engagement."

The easiest lesson to give being this: Recipients pay for their email. Therefore you are engaging in cost-shifted advertising - and that is why people object to unsolicted email advertising.

If they bluster, then you can add these arguements:

1: The full value of such advertising is not being accounted for in spending declarations.

2: _all_ UK ISP acceptable use policies prohibit the activity and THEIR suppliers prohibit it too.

If you decide to sidestep by sending from an foreign ISP with an AUP prohibiting the sending of UCE (almost all of them) then you may be committing an extraditable criminal offence depending ont he country.

3: Getting someone else to send on your behalf does not make you any less liable.

4: The ability to send email is based on the receivers deciding to accept it. Unless you have a contract with the company operating the receiving mailserver, you have no rights to expect delivery and no comeback if they refuse messages from you. Email systems are entirely discretionary in their operation.

5: If you spam, you are likely to find yourself blacklisted for a whlie by thousands of mailserver operators. Making threats or demands to be removed them is likely to make such blocks permanent and even more widespread.

6: See https://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/737/french-government-provides-spam-lists

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Forget using electronic marketing to attract new customers

"My main focus in on unwanted direct marketing "

Don't be at all surprised if amendments are slipped in to prevent you continuing this.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

" the governments determination that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights doesn't make it to domestic law "

Which is "rather odd", considering it was WRITTEN by the UK government.

Chinese whispers: China shows off magnetic propulsion engine for ultra-silent subs, ships

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Swedes

The new Australian subs are rumoured to be even quieter than the swedes and have underwater endurance ratings that rival nuke boats (which kick out a shitload of heat thanks to the nuke and may be possible to detect because of that, if someone doesn't develop a mobile neutrino detector in the meantime)

Boss put chocolate cake on aircon controller, to stop people using it

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Air con wars

"I tried to sellotape the thermostat at 21 several times. "

I solved the problem at home with a time-zoned thermostat. If SWMBO adjusts it, it will reset a few hours later (and it's never switched off in summer, it just never gets cold enough for the heating to kick in)

Many office thermostats have the same facility. If you can't install a fake one just use the timer facility to reset temperatures periodically. Most people won't work out how to disable it.

The problem with analog units is that people equate them with a volume control. Digital 'stats are somewhat more resistant to being dialled up to 11.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Reminds me

"It showed me the power of the mind. If you see a thermostat say "74 degrees" then you think it is 74 degrees even if it is 78 degrees."

that works wonderfully until someone acquires a digital thermometer.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The sort that sprinkle hard little bits of grit all over the place when you cut and drill them. They'd cut and drilled them."

how many tape drives do you have? How much did you bill them for replacements? (at $12k to $20k for robot drives)

That kind of bill is the sort to make facilities managers sit up and take notice.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's not just cake which can annoy the real folk.

"Yup - when you wanted to turn down the volume/turn off an irritating television it turned out to be very useful "

Some android phones have IR emitters and in the App store there are a few apps that can utilise this for switching off TVs.

Guess how I know this? :)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Obvious design fail

"Designing it "roomy" was asking for trouble."

No, allowing anyone other than the IT staff was.

Noone outside IT goes in our server room unaccompanied. The extingushant system is potentially lethal.

That's our excuse and we're sticking to it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Within 3 months of moving in, the room had changed from a roomy, pleasant work space, to being jammed full of crap..... to the point that it is no longer possible to open the rack doors unless you first empty the room into the corridor."

Which is what you do, and then make an anonymous call to the local fire service that a unannounced random inspection would be a good idea.

Or just tell the maintenance staff that all the crap in the hallway needs to go into a skip - NOW.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Heating / Aircon

MOST folks I do not want to see nude

There, FTFY

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Heating / Aircon

"It's true the hands really start to suffer even if you wear a jumper."

That's what these are for: http://www.kiwikate.co.uk/shop/Shop+by+Product/Gloves/Gloves+-+Possum+Merino+with+Silk-2%3Fsku=01239.html

US voting server in election security probe is mysteriously wiped

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: You can get it back

"Unless they used military grade data removal, the FBI can get it back."

Ah yes, someone's bringing up the the voodoo thoughts about hard drive erasure based on Peter Gutmann's tests back in the 1990s - which were performed on 10MB stepper motor MFM drives with relatively coarse track spacing and the imprecision that steppers have, vs multihundred GB drives fitted with voice coil actuators utilising servo tracking systems and _much_ more advanced error correction techniques.

Perhaps you need to read this (his paper and an epilogue): https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

To save you the effort, here's the important bit:

" Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the drives in use at the time that this paper was originally written are long since extinct, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 200GB of other erased traces are close to zero.

Another point that a number of readers seem to have missed is that this paper doesn't present a data-recovery solution but a data-deletion solution. In other words it points out in its problem statement that there is a potential risk, and then the body of the paper explores the means of mitigating that risk."

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Quick look over there...

"the conspiracy theories"

The thing about conspiracies is that they almost always get started AFTER the event that supposedly there was a conspiracy to cause.

The reason for that is simply that a lot of people screwed up to allow that event to happen and covering things up is in their interests because it avoids them losing their jobs.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @big?_john

"Somehow we were able to think that was a good thing back then."

Ronnie's path to power was based on tearing up FDR's social contract and convincing people it was a good thing. As an actor he understood the secret to success is sincerity - as in if you can fake it, the world is your oyster.

At least (so far), Trump hasn't been using the CIA to fly in hundreds of tons of cocaine, to flood USA cities and create the Crack Epidemic, whilst simultaneously espousing a "war on drugs" (yes, this really happened, it all came out in the criminal trials associated with the Iran-Contra deals) - and one of the good things about him being in power is that all the nazis and racists are coming out of the closet, which makes them easily identifiable for later.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Low level format"

"It is not something done on modern drives"

Let me introduce you to the concept of "ATA secure erase"

it goes like this:

# hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass Eins /dev/sdg

security_password: "Eins"

/dev/sdg:

Issuing SECURITY_SET_PASS command, password="Eins", user=user, mode=high

# time hdparm --user-master u --security-erase Eins /dev/sdg

security_password: "Eins"

/dev/sdg:

Issuing SECURITY_ERASE command, password="Eins", user=user

(some time later.....)

Done

This even scrubs the spare sectors

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I'm positive Europe and the rest of the actually developed world will spring for a roof."

No, we'll just caulk any holes and fill it up with water.