Posts by Alan Brown

Hacker takes down CEO wire transfer scammers, sends their Win 10 creds to the cops

"Another defence is making sure that the account being wired to is preregistered in the system, so that the FC can approve it, and the system pays."

Funnily enough this is exactly how $orkplace operates - along with contact details of appropriate people in the organisation.

Lots of grumbling about how slow this is to setup, but we get a steady stream of whaling emails and (so far) haven't been compromised.

Any attempt to change the account details requires (at least) a phone call to the preregistered contacts and more usually an exchange of emails before it would get approved.

Google plots cop detection for auto autos

Re: Oh good grief

"They'll end up being totally encumbered by patents. The holders of the best portfolios will do cross-licensing and kill any new entrants."

Alternatively, Google could (like tesla has already done) make the patents freely usable.

Patenting is as much a defensive measure as an offensive one. By filing/getting a patent you prevent the trolls from doing it.

Lose a satellite? Us? China silent on fate of Gaofen civilian/spy sat

Re: Cities

"It also leads to some confusion with addresses where you have to put down your postal city but not your town "

That happens quite a bit in the UK too. My postal town is 10 miles away from the village where the deliveries actually happen.

EU court: Linking to pirated stuff doesn't breach copyright... except when it does

Re: Eh?

"If you would permit an idea like secondary infringement to take hold you introduce a whole lot of vagueness into the system."

Yes, it's incredibly vague, which is why defamation law is a shark tank and hence my comment about "who has the deepest pockets".

Secondary infringement shows up a _lot_ in civil cases.

"Is a journalist infringing when he/she points at the infringement?"

In defamation cases (civil law): absolutely. It's regarded as republishing the defamation and has been ruled as such on several occasions.

Similarly, when a court order orders a particular website be shut down or not mentioned, mentioning or republishing the site puts you in the firing line of the court - _even if you are unaware of the court order_. National jurisdictions are a bit nebulous in this day and age, etc.

In copyright cases, if someone takes that infringing website and republishes the images from it, that would definitely be secondary infringement (the images weren't stolen from the original copyright holder, but they're still copyright violation). The question is whether publishing links to infringing content in a widely read _for_profit_ publication (or website) is the same as the publication publishing them itself.

Even if the publication _isn't_ found to be violating, the way these kind of laws are written it's entirely possible for the company to face a choice of being bankrupted by going along with the charges and getting penalised out the Wazoo or bankrupting itself defending them - bearing in mind that the moment it can't pay its lawyers it will automatically lose the case anyway, but there's NO guarantee that money spent on the defence will be reimbursed if it wins (Pyrric victory).

Again: This kind of case is more about who has the deepest pockets than actual justice or even who's right in law (if you're in the right and you can't afford the lawyers, you're in the wrong anyway)

The thing is, that if the website is found not to be infringing, then all those torrent indexing sites can be argued to not be infringing too (after all, they just publish links). That means the big guns are going to be rolled out to try and ensure that they get their way on the day.

Re: Eh?

"It would mean that rights holder would have to pursue the site/service hosting the content rather than any other site providing a link to that site/service."

Which is the sensible course of action.

In some types of case there's a principle of secondary infringement (repeating defamatory speech or bringing more people's attention to it is one of these areas) and I suspect this is what the ECJ is trying to make apply here.

Of course it'll probably end as well as prohibiting Google from linking to newspaper articles did. These kinds of cases are primarily based on who has the deeper pockets rather than actual justice.

Officials, lack of kit to blame for 'critical delays' in sex abuse inquiry

Coverups upon coverups, led by a judge with one of the worst track records out there.

Lowell Goddard is ranked by NZ's legal profession in position 63 (out of 63 judges - http://www.kiwisfirst.com/judge-file-index/high-court-justice-lowell-goddard/) and what should be of particular concern is that she's widely regarded within the legal profession to have a poor grasp of human rights and a history of chairing NZ government whitewash exercises.

Her decisions have been excoriated on several occasions by the Privy Council (terms bandied around in privy council rulings include "fundamental breach of human rights", "unfair trial", etc http://www.fairhearing.info/judges/lowell-goddard/) and it's a sucession of similar privy council decisions blasting the conduct of NZ police and courts which led the NZ government to decide to dump them as top court, moving to a local Supreme Court staffed by the very judges the Privy Council was scathing about.

This is the person you go to when you want something to stay under wraps. If _she's_ complaining about being obstructed then it's either incredibly bad inside the inquiry or she's projecting wildly in order to divert blame.

She's an integral part of the New Zealand establishment and heavily involved in its culture of coverup and messenger-shooting.

It should also be noted that taking a Judge from pretty much the ONLY commonwealth country which hasn't dealt with its child abuse problems is kind of interesting:

http://newzealandchildabuse.com/clas-final-report-in-press-self-gratuitous-with-little-substance/

Some pundits were calling it for what it was when she was appointed http://www.laudafinem.com/2015/09/01/australia-v-new-zealand-and-united-kingdom-the-royal-commission-v-the-art-of-cover-up/

What amazes me is that UK media seemed to be (and is still) willfully blind about her history. The victims' support groups should also have been up in arms about this appointment from the outset.

Read the damning dossier on the security stupidity that let China ransack OPM's systems

Re: A million years ago....

"2007 then, I received the following reply"

My response to that turd would have been to forward it to the ICO and Cc a few tech media types on the complaint - and no, I wouldn't have redacted any names.

You're guilty but broke, judge tells Wash.io – the 'Uber of laundry'

Re: Tech washing!

"In the days of the empire, Indian cotton (Bangladesh was part of India then, of course) was sent to England, where it was turned into cloth in the northern mills."

And _this_ was achieved by shutting down mills in India. The idea was by importing raw product and exporting finished goods, Britain wouldn't bleed money out to the colonies as it was doing when buying in indian cloth.

The thing to bear in mind about colonial exploitation is that for the most part the rich didn't see what they were doing as a problem, because they were treating the foreign poor just the same as they treated the poor back home in England.

As another poster said, we spent a good chunk of the 20th century building up workers' rights from the depredations of mercantilism that had occured over the preceeding 200 years - and the mercantilists have responded by getting into government and spending the last 30-40 years systemically stripping them down again.

First Wi-Fi box ever is chosen as Australia's best contribution to global history

Re: RE:Just a short list... (not meant to be comprehensive)

"Until that time, bowling was performed in the same way as in bowls"

The case in question would have made lawn bowls seem energetic.

Death of 747 now 'reasonably possible' says Boeing

Re: Landing Slots! & ETOPS

"Popular routes get a 747 to the 'hub' and smaller planes used to feed in and out"

The A380 was designed for this kind of hub-and-spoke setup.

Boeing decided that there should be more direct flights and sized the 787 accordingly (Airbus having followed suit with the A350)

Airlines do seem to be moving away from hub/spoke, so Boeing might have called it right.

"I wonder what percentage of all Jumbos manufactured are still flying?"

What kills jets is flight cycles. The constant pressurisation/depressurisation means that they have to be retired eventually, or risk the fuselage popping.

The only older ones you'll see are non-commercial units with low use rates.

Re: Last Chance To See

> complete with in-flight entertainment boxes under the seats taking up all of your leg room

That's a problem on A330s too. I Got off a Qatar flight a couple of years back with an incredibly painful knee as a result of having to bend it at an odd angle for 6 hours to fit. (Medics' first suspicion was DVTs as I'd been unable to leave my seat the entire flight thanks to a "rather large" passenger in the aisle seat who downed a few drinks and passed out for the entire flight.)

Boeing's X-Wing 737 makes first flight

Re: infinite improvements

What surprises me is that wing fences haven't made an appearance on large aircraft. I guess the extra weight outweighs the benefit of preventing "sideslip" on the wing surface, but it'd be interesting to see what they'd contribute to lowering the stall speed.

Why the Sun is setting on the Boeing 747

Re: Aircraft as work of art

> I didn't like the newer "stretched" models either, they spoiled its lines

That's debateable. The hump was there as an artifact of the original USAF freighter design and elongating it turned out to make the aircraft more aerodyamically efficient (which to my mind means the lines were improved) to the tune of the fuselage generating 30% of the thing's lift.

Inside our three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party

Re: If one compared companies to countries

"Brasero routinely trashing DVD-Rs because it ignores me telling it to burn at 4x and instead hammers the drive to something stupid like 48x which, of course, fails."

For some inexplicable reason Ubuntu install a fake cdrecord package (wodim) which is a fetid pile of dingo kidneys.

Get the cdrecord PPA onboard and things will work properly - and k3b is much more usable than brasero

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

Re: Aeroflot Flight 593

"Because having one of several autopilot channels silently turn off is the poster child of good UI design; not."

Airbus don't have the monopoly on this. There have been a number of crashes caused over the years by pilots not hearing the "disengage" bong as they accidentally knocked the controls (on all makes)

Re: So long old friend

What's grounding the older birds is noise regulations for the most part. There aren't many places left a Classic can fly in or out of anymore - even the cargo hubs are getting pinched on noise grounds.

QANTAS' air safety spiel warns not to try finding lost phones

Re: Why

> Diesel is pretty tricky to set on fire.

So is kerosene. You can use it as fuel in a diesel engine (although it tends to lack the lubricating properties of diesel, so may trash the injection pump), but both burn relatively well if you provide a wicking surface (like seat cushion fabric or carpet) and a decent ignition source (zippo?)

If you had a diesel powered phone, then getting it crushed in the maw of some electric seat would just create a different set of hazards.

"Or better, to drop it in a bucket of water."

I think you misspelled "sand".

A fully charged lithium battery has significant quanties of pure lithium inside it and mixing with water is going to result in a bad day if you do it whilst airborne.

On average an aircraft fire which can't be put out by cabin crew will down the plane if it is further than 11 minutes from being able to land.

Re: The ultimate iPhone destruction video waiting to be made?

"I no longer fly Ryanair when I heard how they treated their staff."

It's not just the in-air experience.

A few years back a friend of mine arrived at Stansted airport after being delayed at Edinburgh for 4 hours.

The flight arrived after the last train into london departed, so a lot of passengers wanted to claim for a taxi (passenger rights, etc etc) RyanAir's aitrport staff _hid_ from the passengers and wouldn't even come out when the airport manager called security to fetch them.

Hollywood offers Daniel Craig $150m to (slash wrists) play James Bond

"negotiated a larger than normal share of the profits"

Hollywood accounting means there's _never_ a profit. Most actors only fall for that scam once.

These are not just job cuts, these are M&S job cuts

Re: Horrible company

"Then one day they decided to scare off their long termers"

And more recently they've tightened the screws on those who remain, using the living wage legislation as a convenient excuse.

They're just another retail chain. Any pretense of glory is just wrapping a faded past around a brand which has long been as bad as all the rest.

Nul points: PM May's post-Brexit EU immigration options

Re: Controlling immigration was never that easy...

"EU migration made up less than half of the immigration to this country, and we couldn't touch it in terms of controls (freedom of movement)."

Indeed, and even when you factor in in non-EU immigration, both sets are dwarfed by internal migration of britons from north to south, chasing jobs.

That said, the real driver of the "housing crisis" which many have pinned their Brexit hopes on is simple population demographics. Even if the population stayed static there would have been a problem simply because of the change in household sizes from 4-6 people down to 1-2.

There's been a lot of dog-whistle politicing and kneejerk legislation over the years but virtually all the jobs and housing issues we're seeing now (including the pensions trainwreck which is slowly unfolding and will result in stupidly high income tax levels within 15 years simply to pay Boomers who didn't bother saving enough) were clearly obvious in the 1980s, yet planners and politicians usually choose to ignore such elephants until they start rampaging.

Re: IT skills shortage

"not offering much more than living wage"

The reality in most cities is that earning under 35k means that you can't support yourself (living alone) let alone a spouse.

There's a substantial dead zone between "earning enough to not qualify for benefits" and "earning enough to pay rent and all bills without needing benefits" which makes it problematic for those in the lower earning brackets to shoot higher.

One of the more perverse things in this country is that if you get a council house your rent is fixed at a low rate. It really should be income related up to market values. Right now there are definite perks to being unemployed that the never-such of us can't get access to.

Secret UN report finds WIPO chief 'broke procurement rules'

Re: Dirty work

"The Swiss police should not have tested the DNA of people with diplomatic immunity, and nor got involved in the cover up afterwards"

My experience and observation is that conspiracies almost never occur in in the leadup to an event of spectacular stupidity but frequently manifest afterwards as people close ranks and try to protect their jobs.

It's likely the Swiss police took the complaints at face value and only discovered staff had diplomatic immunity later on, at which point they had a serious "oh shit" moment on their hands.

Japan's Brexit warning casts shadow over Softbank ARM promises

Re: Meanwhile

"I would not be surprised if they quietly moved HQ functions back to the continent at some stage."

I would also be surprised if HRE start any new build projects in the UK.

Likewise it's quite likely that announcements of new models from Nissan/Toyota/Honda/BMW/etc will come with the news that they're to be built in eastern europe.

JCB is already making a large proportion of its product outside the UK. They'll just slowly ramp down what they're doing here.

Manufacturing businesses can't stand uncertainty. It drives their costs sky high. It doesn't matter that there's been a bounceback reported in the last month. Every week of foot dragging on announcing Brexit or No Brexit increases the liklihood that manufacturers (even wholly "british" ones) will up sticks and move to the mainland in order to guarantee long-term stability.

Re: Meanwhile

"Its workers largely wrecked it in the '70s. "

Ahem. No.

Workers might have started kicking the cat later on in the piece, but successive governments and management had already screwed the industry with poorly thought out attempts to create employment by directing makers to build factories in unsuitable areas (on the govt's part, trying to be a command economy and create employment in depressed areas) and a succession of abysmal decisions, poor designs, poor equipment and piss-poor industrial relations from a disconnected management.

By the mid 1960s "British made" was a warning label and the _only_ reason anyone outside the UK bought british cars (or electronics) was because there was no other choice (other countries' cars or electronics were heavily taxed) or government directives (government departments) - and in virtually every case paid an extremely heavy price due to unreliablity

To give an idea of how well regarded british cars really were: When New Zealand relaxed tariffs against japanese cars in 1973, british cars went from 40% of the market to 3% in less than 12 months - and when GM tried to reintroduce the Vauxhall brand in the late 1990s they managed to sell 3 out of a batch of 10,000 Vectras before giving up and sticking Opel badges on the things (at which point they sold quickly).

My maths teacher was a transplanted brit who'd worked as a designer for Gradall (the people who make graders). He quit in disgust and emigrated after senior management systematically went through and weakened every part of a gearbox he'd designed to ensure that parts would fail, in order to have an ongoing maintenance business. Other engineers I met whilst growing up told similar stories. Management treated everyone (customers and workers alike) with contempt and viewed them as a source of easy profit or cost reductions. In that toxic atmosphere it's no wonder the trade unions got militant and faced with management who made it "us and them", no real surprise that staff got collectively angry enough to walk out at the slightest provokation.

The real tragedy is that many UK companies seem to have been inspired by the UK management spirit that made British Leyland such a world dominating power and seem determined to emulate that success instead of using the lessons from those years to make things better all round.

After Monday's landing, SpaceX wants to do it in triplicate

Re: Titusville is a s***hole

> The municipalities like to juggle highway speed limits between 55 and 35mph on 301 and ambush you at speed changes

Whatever will they do when Elon's OTHER project gets traction and automated vehicles hit the changes at exactly the right speed?

Related, I thought there were federal investigations over this kind of activity that had managed to shut most of these scams down.

SETI searchers: We still haven't found what we're looking for

Re: "Soviet" military satellite?

"Most satellities only operate for around 10-15 years at most"

They tend to go a lot longer than that. One which was mislaunched in 1964 and ended up sitting at (IIRC) L2 only died in the early 2000s.

Comsats tend to end their life due to running out of manouvering fuel, not electrical failure. Now that ion engines are common that could mean a 30+ year lifespan

A plumber with a blowtorch is the enemy of the data centre

Re: Cable woes...

"Their solution to the protection was a bigger saw."

I've frequently wondered what happens when the liability insurer sees this on a claim.

Re: Cable woes...

"Unfortunately this was connect to the He supplies (we have a closed system to re-liquify the stuff for cooling purposes). Damage in copper was low. We lost a lot of He"

Too bad you can't have a continuously circulating (or just capped) set of pipes containing hydrazine running alongside.

(Who me? Evil death dealing b'stard?)

Re: Been there

"Seriously, who the hell DOESN'T run spanning-tree nowadays? Hands up? You're idiots."

Spanning tree was (and is) great for what it's intended to do, but the stories of spanning tree storms are legion as networks grow well beyond their original designs.

TRILL is cheap enough that if you need mission-critical networking or exceeding 6 spans it should be included automatically in your core - and it has the nice side effect that you no longer need to mess with LACP between the switches.

Re: In the US it varies by city

> I encounter a lot of aluminium "Cat 6"

The scam these days is "copper clad aluminium" - which is as it says. All the disadvantages of aluminium with no easy well to tell just by looking at the wires. (Frequently sold as copper with the only giveaway being "CCA" on the boxes if you're lucky and they haven't managed to get rid of that marking too.)

Re: DC Deluge

" Along the way he had also managed to take the head off a water point"

This has been frequently cited to me by fire brigades and various civil engineers as an outstanding reason why water points should always be under a pavement access plate.

Of course if one was to do this in the USA, dog bladders would explode.

Still got a floppy drive? Here's a solution for when 1.44MB isn't enough

Re: @ D@v3

"However for this to be a solution to that problem, they'd have to be willing to modify all of the machines with one of these drives, as well as putting one in the PC"

1: They don't have to do them all at once

2: Why do you need one in the PC when you can update the things across the network? At that point the CF drive is just a local store.

3: If you float it you might be surprised at how enthusiastic they are. Old floppy drives seem to go on forever but media quality has been manky for a long time (mankier than that of the old SSSD 5inch floppies which never seemed to last long back around 1980) and that slows the drives down even more.

4: If you don't float it, someone else will.

Re: Only real use for this one....

"the controller generated the required signals in software, driving the stepper motors directly from the controller through 4 transistors."

And that allowed various copy protection schemes to work. (Who remembers Aztec?). These would fail spectacularly when they encountered a Shugart drive.

Re: Can't add USB?

"There was a company making PDP11 on a card to run traffic lights until recently"

PDP11s don't just control traffic lights. Every DLR train has a couple on board to do the legwork.

Re: Only real use for this one....

Half the boards I deal with still have serial port headers internally (all you need is the backplate connector), especially the 24*7 industrial PC ones (fujitsu, etc)

This is a specialist device and I can see huge advantage in having a network port if you can upload floppy images to it (Cover and dustproofing makes it more robust and USB ports on machining devices get crap in them). Serial cables are problematic over long distances.

Other odd stuff you can buy are things like 2.5" PATA to M2 or MSATA adaptors. These work far better (and are much cheaper overall) than attempting to buy a PATA SSD (been there done that). Again it's for specialist work. It's economic to use them in an old laptop but the greater utility is in old (expensive) industrial control stuff like CNC systems where the drive has gone titsup (been there, done that too. Trying to control via the serial port was doable but SLOOOOW)

Is it time to unplug frail OpenOffice's life support? Apache Project asked to mull it over

Re: Self fulfilling prophecy my ass

> * This also applied to Libre Office too the last time I could be bothered looking.

And mysql, but there are other reasons not to use this for non-trivial applications.

Re: VinceH : People still use this!?

"You are a bit out of date. .docx and .xlsx are the de facto standards now."

There were several formats under the name of ".doc" and ".xls" (as well as their gzipped *x derivatives)

That's the part about moving targets that annoys.

By the way, Libre copes quite happily with 2 and 3 decade old WordStar 3.3 or Wordperfect docs I still have. MS office...... not so well.

Childcare app bods wipe users' data – then discover backups had been borked for a year

urrrm.....

Why did they even need to LOOK at their backups?

When migrating like this you do an ascii DB dump and reimport. You should only need to resort to the backups if that's failed.

Multiple levels of FAIL.

It's OK to fine someone for repeating a historical fact, says Russian Supreme Court

Re: Fact-checking, we've heard about it

" North Korea is one of their client states."

No, emphatically not. NK is tolerated by China but that's about it.

They only got involved in the Korean war when MacArthur directly disobeyed orders and chased NK troops right up to the chinese border instead of standing to at the 50 mile mark. Faced with the NK army crossing into china and the americans on the other side of the river, China felt it had no choice.

Until fairly recently they allowed it to exist as a useful buffer zone between them and the richness of the south , but china is now rich enough that doesn't matter and the leadership is clearly growing more and more uncomfortable with what's happening there. They're also fully aware that the only reason the USA is present in significant numbers in SK is because of the existence of NK and the fact that the war never actually ended.

China's cut off oil and electricity supplies to NK for months at a time in the last few years but stopped because it was clear that the elite were simply taking what they wanted and the peasants were getting an even shittier end of the stick than usual.

NK is a creation of Stalin and the vast majority of their foreign trade and energy supplies go through the 50 mile wide border with Russia. This is still a restricted area on the russian side and you can't get closer than 30 miles without explicit authorisation, but you can rest assured it's one of the most heavily spysat-observed areas on the planet.

Yes NK is a client state - of Russia. I'm fairly sure that even if China embargoed border trade entirely along with China/USA blockading the ports, Russia would continue to prop them up.

I'm also fairly sure that one of the main fears China has about NK is millions of NK refugees streaming north if the NK leadership were to implode. That said, should NK actually use their nukes against anyone it's a fair bet that retaliatory strikes would come from them as well as the USA.

Watch SpaceX's rocket dramatically detonate, destroying a $200m Facebook satellite

Re: cant see much

"I would speculate a leak in the fuel stage mixed with venting oxygen"

Or a leaky coupling (not secured properly)

Which would gel with the "cockup" comment.

Re: Bugger...

"God knows what we're going to do with it now!"

Wait for the replacement. It won't be long.

Re: Hydrazine

Parts covered in Hydrazine stay covered in hydrazine no matter how much cleanup you do.

A few metres away from me, there are a couple of bits which fell off the 1st Ariane 5 launch (recovered from under about 6 feet of Guianan swamp mud by members of the French Foreign Legion)

They're in a glass case and unlike all the other glass cases there's a safety seal on it to prevent anyone opening it.

Hey, uh ICANN. US govt here. You know we said we'd give you the keys to the 'net? Yeaahhh...

Re: Who do you trust??

The US govt (department of commerce) has done a pretty good job over the decades.

ICANN has been a clusterfuck from the outset and when a IP lawyer with a documented history of duplicity and dirty dealings got to be chair it managed to get even worse.

It's not a coincidence that the former chairman now works for a registrar and ICANN policy is setup the way it is.

SpaceX blast kills Zuck's sat

Re: Oops

"This seems to have been a mighty impressive kaboom"

All the moreso when you consider how hard kerosene is to light, and keep lit.

Re: "anomaly"

Diamonds are intrinsically almost worthless. No villain would bother with them (If you have enough to matter, you also have enough to upset de Beers' carefully controlled cartel)

As with London housing prices(*) they're expensive because of an artificial shortage of supply (de Beers buy a lot of gem-quality stuff and destroy it for sale as grinding paste simply to keep the prices up)

(*) Or long distance prices in the 70s-90s when the growth in capacity was dictated by telcos instead of by customers.

Iridium or Rhodium on the other hand. Those are expensive for good reason, highly saleable and extremely portable.

Re: [SpaceX] called the explosion an 'anomaly'.

"It's just that it's supposed to burn slowly rather than all at once."

It's also supposed to burn at the blunt end, not near the pointy one.

" A large geosat will cost something near $1billion."

Each sat is almost handbuilt and designed from the ground up, even if there are now standard chassis.

That cost is the _total_ development figure from go, through all the prototypes (usually dozens of such even with contemporary CAD systems and computer aided engineering), to the flight model

" You don't build a spare one of those just in case"

Of course you do. The incremental cost of doing so is a few million at most and after launch these flight spares become your test articles for procedures if/when anything goes wrong during the mission.

The only time you don't have individual flight spares is when you're production-lining a number of birds for a constellation and even then they're catered to by making a few extra just in case.

(Disclosure: I currently work in a space lab.)