Posts by Alan Brown 15090 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
This wasn't a mistake. (Get paid for sending stuff but don't bother sending it)
The only 'mistake' was storing the undelivered mail instead of destroying it (or being caught)
This is no different to cases where posties are discovered to have been hoarding undelivered mail for years. Half a million letters doesn't take up as much space as you might think (I'm aware of cases where 50,000 letters were found stuffed under a bed)
Unless the storage environment was provably secure then personal data for everyone affectdd should be considered as "at risk"
IANA only own addresses dating to when they were created and Jon Postel handed administration of IP space over to them
Virtually all class A allocations were assigned by Jon Postel before IANA was created and as such are regarded as personal property.
Jon's the only person who could rescind the allocations and he died nearly 20 years ago.
I know it's several years since the article was written but IPv6 is still a clusterfuck in the UK and the easiest way to make IPv4 valueless is to use IPv6. There are vested interests at work here.
"The ASA are a worse joke though."
Like the premium rate "regulator" they're a trade association which until about a decade ago only existed to give the illusion of industry self-regulation and avoid government intervention. They are not regulators in any legal sense.
The Internet changed that and scams abound. both groups started getting their feet held to the fire and didn't like it - threatening to refuse complaints from people who stated they were tracking performance resulted in real regulators starting to look over their shoulders and not being impressed.
The changes in responsiveness from both since 2004 have been a direct result of being told "if you don't do a satisfactory job self regulating, WE WILL" - and of course represent the absolute minimum effort to keep government regulators out.
The fun part is that FOI law states that organisations delegated responsiblity from government bodes or performing a role which would otherwise be performed by government agencies are subject to FOI coverage - Both the ASA and PPP (or whatever it's calling itself this week) have been resisting FOI requests and that could still result in independent government regulators stepping in.
"The thing to remember is that, relatively speaking, we mostly get very cheap internet."
Compared to the USA yes - but the USA has legislated local monopolies and zero competition across most of the country. Most people have a choice of _one_ supplier for Internet (DSL or cable, few areas where they overlap and virtually nothing else)
Compared to other countries which supposedly have competition in the market our prices are high and speeds are low.
"I would assume that "no one home" etc. provide reasonable grounds for refusing compensation"
You'd assume that, but when there's CCTV recorded evidence showing they didn't bother showing up, you'd assume wrong.
Not to mention the BTOR linesman who turned up and sat outside for 20 minutes (under the CCTV camera) before driving off without setting foot outside the van, or the one who came in to "fix your broadband fault" and then went and sat in his van for an hour before driving off when he realised it was supposed to be an installation. Or the one who showed up to discover that none of the preparatory work had been done, so went off to do it and never came back.
Conversations with various people indicate that Openreach don't pay people for travelling between jobs or allocate enough time for travel, resulting in contractors dumping jobs they can't get to - pulling the "noone was home" stunt means they get paid - they're "independent contractors" paid per job (even though prohibited from working for anyone except Openreach)
This is all familiar stuff - and it's worth noting that the same thing was happening in New Zealand when the telco there ran a BT/Openreach pseudo-separation model in the hope of staving off government intervention - it stopped cold when their version of Openreach was fully separated into a separate company and the newly independent lines company had a significant commercial interest in not pissing off their customers (the other telcos). It transformed into a rapidly responding company overnight and the effect of real "level playing field" access has had a galvanising effect on the NZ market. (For starters there's no more incumbent telco double dipping by insisting that their equipment is used on data tail circuits, etc and that alone is hundreds per month, per connection in operating cost reductions for ISPs)
As for TalkTalk - as there was an existing ADSL connection they were being paid and LLU means they make more from ADSL2 services than VDSL2, so there's no incentive for them to sort the issue out. By making customers wait, this strings out the higher income and the wait period is just long enough to dissuade switching to another provider thanks to the mandatory 14 day delay involved in changeovers.
In any case they did try to bill for non-existent VDSL services.
> I can see none of those companies going to Sofia or Budapest - or they would be already there.
Actually they are. The largest ramp up of technical jobs in the EU is happening in both countries along with Romania.
Buda and Pest are separate cities now btw.
"and we will still endure cuts/austerity and the continuing collapse of social care despite it."
In some councils *ahem*Surrey*ahem* the amount of _documented_ fraud by contractors and staff is far higher than the proposed cuts, but manglement are busy trying to sweep that under the carpet instead of callling in the SFO.
Oh dear mr council.
I'm very sorry, but owing to extra charges, we're having to increase the service provision costs for your premises by XYZ amount - which coincidentally is the same as you've just billed us.
We don't care.
We don't have to.
We're the phone company.
NASA's early 60s projects were Rogollo wings (which evolved into hang gliders and delta kites) and were for the Dyna-soar project, not Mercury/Gemini.
Dyna-soar was part of the manned space plans which included the Sea Dragon launcher (600 feet long, built from 8mm submarine steel in a shipyard, 100% reusable, no turbopumps (engine pressurisation via liquid nitrogen boiloff). The engine bell of the launcher would have been large enough to completely cover a Saturn V first stage)
Stunt kites (actually power kites, only the smaller ones are stunt models. Anything bigger than 1.8 metres simply can't manouevre quickly) are a derivation of parafoils, not the other way around.
I built a few Rogollo wings as a teenager when interested in kites. The advantage over Deltas was that having no rigid spars meant they were easily compactable (useful in a returning capsule) - but that also meant they were susceptable to crosswind gusts collapsing them at inopportune moments when close to the ground - not the greatest thing to happen when carrying a manned capsule, and that's why normal parachutes + water landings were used throughout the US manned programs. I did build one with inflatable spar pockets and it worked very well, but having something like that would be far too risky for spaceflight (if the pockets didn't inflate you're back to the same problem as before).
> Google dropped that back in 2015, and changed it to "Do the right thing".
Google _NOW_ is just a larger version of DoubleClick.
Seriously. Look at who the directors of Doubleclick were when google inadvisedly hoovered it up, and who the directors of Google/Alphabet are now. The cast your mind back to the evilness of Doubleclick.
It wasn't so much of a poison pill acquisition as taking on a zombie and trusting that it wouldn't bite people.
"Bing also swap between different scaled OS maps but they also zoom to different magnifications of these so you have a choice of too small to be legible, legible and jaggies."
If you're using GIS as the underlaying engine then this should all be stored as points plus vectors and scaling is no longer an issue. It's not difficult to draw maps with the level of details required for navigation on the fly.
You only have jaggies if you're scaling a fixed image.
"Monopoly laws might apply"
In particular the ones relating to a company leveraging its dominance in ONE area of the market to obtain a dominant position in OTHER parts of the market.
That one is so painfully obvious that I'm sure Streetmap's lawyers pulled it up, but I've never seen judges rule that doing so is ok because of the "consumer benefit" before.
I've spent many years dealing with spammers and their victims - both the advertisers and the spammees.
Most advertisers are blissfully unaware that sending bulk email is mostly illegal unless "done right" and are happy to sign up for a glossy brochure and a smooth talker - it's worth noting that the vast majority of signups of otherwise reputable businesses happen via spammers treading the boards at tradeshows, introducing themselves as marketing experts and usiing the usual snake oil high pressure selling techniques we all know and hate.
Responsible businesses generally learn pretty fast thanks to the tsunami of complaints they get and general business losses resulting from the spam campaign - which can be substantial and most spammers demand payment in advance. (Then there are Joe Jobs... spam sent by someone purporting to be from a 3rd party in order to deliberately damage the 3rd party)
Unfortunately there are some who decide the pain is worth it, the ones who do it twice are of the same ilk as the spammers - entitled sociopaths who usually cry "free speech" when confronted and "victim" when the tables get turned (see: Alan Ralksy, or Donald Trump)
The long-term way of eliminating spam is to punish the companies which hire spammers - even for a first offence, but with increasing fines if they continue. That way only criminals will hire spammers and spammers knowingly involved in a criminal enterprise are usually part of organised crime groups that the smaller players will steer clear of. (The mafia hates competition, etc)
4 years isn't long enough. But it's a start. I just hope that his activities are tagged when released so that if there is any other source of money found, it can be confiscated too.
"$1.5M for five years = $300k per year"
If he's splashing out on that kind of toy and has 1.3mill sitting in his bank account, then the actual figure taken in is likely to be significantly higher.
It really depends how deep down the rabbit hole the investigators want to go, but most crooks tend to sequester money in multiple locations.
Spamming won't be eliminated but you can put one hell of a dent in it by making the companies paying them responsible for the spam too.
This was the part of the USA's TCPA that put a huge brake on junk faxes. Advertisers started caring when illigal advertising practices cost them directly.
At that point the remaining spam is mostly for illegal shit like web pharmacies selling narcotics - which you can use to ensure the spammer gets a lot more than 4 years.
" simply hacking Openreach away from its parent would probably have a catastrophic effect."
Perhaps for BT. But riddle me this: If Openreach is _so_ expensive and has _so_ many liabilities and is losing _so_ much money, why is BT trying desperately to hang onto it?
The effect of splitting in New Zealand was electrifying. Their version of Openreach went into high gear when the split happened and hasn't slowed down since. Almost all(*) customers are happy at paying 1/2 to 1/3 the rates they were previously forced to.
The incumbent telco isn't looking so rosy though. It advanced the exact same arguments and costs against splitting that BT has been using - including the claim that an independent openreach would have trouble raising financing.
Not long after the split, NZ Openreach (chorus) got lots of financing, whilst the former incumbent had its credit rating slide substantially. It seems that plant in the ground and hundreds of telcos as your customer is a better credit risk than being one of those hundreds of telcos (especially when customers are leaving like a plague of rats deserting a sinking ship. Most people stay with BT because they're the lines company. Once that goes away they're more inclined to move)
(*) The exception to the happy clients list being the former incumbent - which despite the line charge figures being set based on information it passed to the regulator about costs, etc. claimed that the charges were far too high, they couldn't possibly make money and they demanded a special deal.
Everyone laughed at them and the damands weregiven short shrift. That little tantrum demonstrated what everyone else already knew - that the outrageous costs they claimed were involved in running the lineside operation were made up figures to cross-subsidise the other divisions.
"and that's me sweating, how to explain to a very attractive woman, in her mid 40 that her porn browsing habits got her machine riddled with viruses, adware and PUPs?"
If she's browsing porn sites then you don't need to be sweating it.
Been there, done that, had a chat about how lots of them are trojan horses and if you're going to spend time trawling these sites you need to use scriptblockers etc etc.
People are people. As long as you don't play "prude" it's relatively easy.
I get more flak for my lectures to people who've been told not to open XYZ attachments and do it anyway or disable the antivirus that's wraning the file is infected "because it might contain something important" (in one case, twice). Such people go to the end of the queue. Once it's clear that they don't listen, the lesson usually only sinks in if they get a large bill or maximum inconvenience.
Some people really don't like being told they're the reason that 30 other staff can't do any work at an effective cost of £1000 per person per day.
As for C-level staff or other manglement: Form a good relationship with the company accountant and/or finances dept. When this kind of thing happens, have a chat and explain the costs/inconvenience/losses. You'd be amazed how fast they can school the most stubborn lusers.
"and he had a foot of Phantom wingtip to prove it, sliced off on a guy wire..."
Not in the UK, but one transmitting station I worked at had a semi-regular problem with local flyboys knocking the nav lights off the top of the 110 foot towers on the way to their bombing ground.
" In fact let's just make this sinister thing called "NDAs" illegal. "
NDAs hold no water in a court, If a judge orders someone to talk and there's a NDA they don't mention holding them back, then they'd better talk because if that NDA comes up later, it's perjury charges time.
If they do mention it and the judge tells them to talk anyway, any penalty clauses in the NDA are null and void. vs not talking and facing contempt of court.
> So I would guess Intel has EoS this?
The Cisco story said anything shipped after Nov 2016 was OK.
That's probably your cutoff on bad silicon, but as a long term supported SoC for embedded systems and low end servers, the failures seen to date are probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Regarding other comments: These are not your grandfather's anaemic Atoms that used to hobble consumer systems. The Avoton/Rangely parts were a new generation Atom System-on-chip with performance spec that outruns Xeons prior to the E55xx/56xx parts (ie, anything more than 7-8 years old) whilst using 1/10 of the power and in a lot of cases became the chip of choice even when replacing 3-5 year old systems that would have traditionally been DP
They've been Intel's bread and butter server chip for non-compute-intensive operations and embedded work, which means the company is going to take a hammering unless it steps up and 'fesses up. The longer they leave it, the deeper the shitpile's going to be.
> It does sound like they're not going to replace anything until the unit has actually died
My worry is that even if makers have this policy, they won't have enough stock to handle increasing failure rates.
Having a critical system go tits-up - then finding that even though there's a support contract, not being able to replace it for a week - is one of the nightmare scenarios.
Encrypt your mail - even on the server.
At that point you have to encrypt everything including laundry lists, because otherwise the fact that something's encrypted screams "oooh, I'm secret, look at meeee"
(For added shits and giggles, ONLY encrypt your laundry lists)
"I've demonstrated a few weeks ago that that is at least partially a fabrication. Their so-called "EU only" services also use US based infrastructure, and I demonstrated this using a government level service, well beyond any anti-terror excuse they could use at consumer level."
If you can provide proof of this, I know some people who would be _very_ interested in seeing it.
Exactly.
300 merlins launched so far(*) and not a single engine RUD (although one did shut down early on one launch, but that didn't affect the delivery). If there's cracking in the turbopumps then it's fairly minor - but rest assured that having been raised it will be remedied.
(*) Every single one of them had at least 2 ground tests before launch too.
"This is worrying on a couple of levels."
1: You assume China and Russia are friendly. They've been to war twice in the last century.
2: You're also assuming the chinese want to copy the aircraft rather than simply work out what's needed to take or keep them out of the air
3: Russia and the USA have "domestic" and "export" tech. Russia might have sold china a few Mig-35s but they won't be equipped with the same technology that the domestic versions get. In the same way USA export version F35s are inferior to domestic ones (and this extends downrange to things like F15/16s, the export versions are significantly less capable than the domestic units)
It's been predicted since the 1960s (or earlier) that there would eventually be an oil war in the South China Sea centred on the Spratley Islands (there's not much under the Spratleys but there's a lot in surrounding continental shelves)
The only real questions are "who will show up?" and "Can it be avoided by making oil irrelevant?"
The thing about wars is that they're usually about trade (most of them in the last 400 years up to WW1 and it's arguable that WW1 went on so long because UK/Germany had been gearing up for a trade war for 30 years beforehand), pillage and plunder (most of them before that - war was only done if profitable) or resources (oil and water primarily). There was an odd period around 1000 years ago when religion was supposedly a primary motivator, but plunder played a large part in the attraction.
Just about every conflict since WW2 has been about oil or independence from colonialism - even the proxy wars that the superpowers engaged in.
Looking closer at oil wars, they're really about cheap energy and access to it. If a better energy source source can be developed (preferably soon, carbon dioxide is looking to be a much worse problem than simplistic warming issues) and is replicable enough, many wars would simply go away.
Poland and eastern europe in general is a bit of a stretch as far as provoking the Russians is concerned.
The years 1956 and 1968 should be borne in mind. NATO stayed well back from the eastern borders since 1990 to avoid any issues until the Russians started making the Poles and others nervous that history might repeat.
not only 2 aircraft carriers (one russion, one being built), but it has working antiship ballistic missiles (DF21-D and DF24) which are believed to be more capable than anything the US or Russia have.
ASBMs make aircraft carriers as obsolete as aircraft carriers made battleships - you don't need to have a nuke onboard, or even to destroy the target. If you can put a big enough hole in the flight deck then the entire fleet will keep its distance lest they have to return home unexpectedly(*) and stay there for several months.
(*) Wounding the enemy is more effective at tying up resources than killing them. If you wound a man or damage a ship, resources have to be expended to save him or it (6 people to recover one wounded solider is the rule of thumb, factor on tying up a dockyard for a long time repairing a ship). If you sink or kill your opponent then they leave it where it is and keep going. On top of that the psychological effects of having one of your own screaming his nuts off in pain can't be underestimated.
It's worth noting that the F14 and F15 were both "cheaper faster" aircraft using lessons from the F-111B program.
The importance of that is that the F-111B was almost as large a clusterfuck as the F35 project, but eventually common sense prevailed and it was scrapped. It appears that amongst the lessons learned by aircraft makers was "how to ensure your program doesn't get killed off"
"The appeal of stealing details of the F-35 is that it will make it possible to screw not only its flight & fighting systems but also its logistics & maintenance systems"
That and knowing what it's weaknesses are. It's pretty clear that noone would want to copy a tubby underpowered thing that handles badly and blows its radar stealthiness by having to fly with the bomb bay doors open most of the time in order to avoid overheating.
The americans didn't want the MiG-31 to build their own one, they wanted to find out what made it tick and how to work around it. The factor of using vacuum tubes was mindblowing to them and made them think about emp resistance in their own aircraft.
That's _why_ everybody spies on everybody else (and if you think 'allies' aren't as busy pilfering data about each others' systems or industrial processes, you're pretty slow)
"What will QLC expected life usage be then? 10TeraBytes read/write operations or less?"
In a lot of applications at this scale data is written to the storage and rarely altered. This applies as much for SANs as for home systems.
The more important question becomes "what's the write speed?"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
