* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

WTF is Net Neutrality, anyway? And how can we make everything better?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @ Irony Deficient

"4G, WiMAX and 5G should be frightening the crap out of the incumbents. Why aren't they?"

Because the only way to distribute them is over services controlled by the incumbents.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @ Andrew Orlowski

"I recently tried WiMAX, and the latency is through the roof, and there is a lot more packet loss than wired."

I used WiMAX in Yangon last year - it had been heavily promoted for both voice and data in the prceeding 18 months - and voice service was so bad people had given up on it. Data was at dialup speed even for local resources.

Wireless services don't scale unless you use microcells and as soon as you do that you need to backhaul - at which point the monopoly incumbents have you over a barrel.

It's the same situation as the one I faced in the 1990s which had 2Mb/s circuits from San Francisco to Auckland costing $900/month - and delivery within New Zealand costing $20,000/month.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Latency.....

Is utterly immaterial for ftp, smtp, http, imap and friends. They are low priority bulk services which aren't overly sensitive to such things.

It's a killer on a telnet(ssh) session when you can type a line and wait 3-10 seconds for it to appear.

On voice/video calls it results in unnaturally long pauses.

if you were playing online games, you'd be fragged and someone could be pissing on the corpse before you were even aware you'd been hit.

Even though I said that low priority bulk services aren't latency sensitive, that's not entirely true: When my upstream switched from satellite to submarine cable feed, throughput doubled overnight on the same bandwidth.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: My Comments List The Article; USA ISPs Versus Their Customers

You missed:

5: Not only have they taken money to do so, they were given legislated monopolies in return for promises to provide those services - and have renegged on pretty much every single promise made in the last decade.

USA incumbents have managed to lockout competitors from DSL and shut down all CLECs in the country. The component parts of the AT&T amoeba have largely reformed (in the guise of "facilitaing competition and efficiency, we will spend XYZ $millions to improve service", and then repeatedly failed to do so after mergers have been approved) and the remaining chunks are joining up in a way eerily reminiscent of a shattered T1000.

What's really amazing is that the Public Utilities Commissions in each state have let the companies (cable and telcos are equally as bad) get away with thse repeated breaches of contract and not held them to account. The USA really does have the best laws and politicians that money can buy.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Excellent article

Large incumbents have been selling retail below wholesale and getting away with it for years. That's simply the easiest way to elimiinate competition. Sure, they'll eventually get investigated and have to pay fines but that doesn't magically bring bankrupt competitors back into existence and the fines are chickenfeed compared to the real costs of shutting down competition (the bankrupted outfits are never recompensed) and the benefits gained by becoming a monopoly, ongoing profiteering.

Such activities have nothing to do with network neutrality. It's anticompetitive behaviour. Don't confuse the two.

What anticompetitive behaviour and breaching net neutrality both have in common is that they're the kind of thing you expect from sociopathic business management who charge you zillions of extra fees for "added value services" (caller id, 3 way calling, etc etc etc) which were built into the exchanges as zero-cost functional extras and intended to be made freely available until some shark realised that millions of dollars of free profits could be made by switching it all off and charging people for access to facilities which are built into the phone switches, cost nothing to enable and don't load down the system processors - the same rentseeking mentality which did that is the driving force behind attempts to breach net neutrality.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Discriminatory access

The author misses the point entirely.

ISP customers pay for connectivity. That's the full price of everything, up to where the ISP plugs into the Internet exchanges.

Other companies pay their providers for the same thing, up to the exchanges.

What is happening is that a few larger telco/ISPs are saying to offsite websites "we notice a lot of our customers are going to you. If you don't pay extra, they will have impaired connectivity to you or will no longer be able to see you" - this is particularly the case where the ISP has their own video offerings and customers are going elsewhere anyway.

In other words, the ISP is attempting to double dip - getting paid for the same data twice.

The economist's term for this is "rent seeking behaviour" - As noted above, the full price of connectivity to peering points is paid by each network's own customers. This is an attempt to extort money out of _other_ networks customers (remember they're already paying their full costs up to the peering points too), so that the ISP's own customers can continue to connect to the other network's site.

If the remote site is popular enough, this is a fast way of losing all your customers - but thanks to the perverse and byzantine structure of the US telecoms laws, Telcos have an effective local monopoly on voice and DSL provision, so the customers may be able to go to a cable provider, but that's the limit of competition in most areas.

What it means is that USA telcos/cable companies are attempting to hold remote resources to ransom using their own customers as hostages - customers who have already paid all the costs of running the data service. Its the kind of thing you expect from a bunch of sociopaths.

This is all quite apart from Netflix/Akamai/Google hosting their kit in local ISP datacentres and thereby reducing the ISP's upstream connectvity costs. if that happens then it's a matter for local negotiation, but discriminatory access to offsite resources based on how much those offsite resources are paying the ISP is the crux of arguements about Net Neutrality.

Priority and QoS flags are merely guidelines, aimed at keeping Telnet/SSH sessions workable, VoiP.Video usable, whilst pushing less latency/jitter sensitive material such as smtp/imap/http/ftp to the back of the queue and still giving them enough bandwidth to be useable. (They're guidelines because some dweebs abuse them to try and make their mail or whatever more important than it needs to be. This tends to get stomped on at border routers)

Silicon Valley bod in no-hire pact lawsuit urges court to reject his own lawyers' settlement

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: And then there is the effect it had on pay throughout the industry!

Not just in the USA. They were actively attempting to recruit worldwide at those rates. I got a few of those calls.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Illegal cartel behaviour

Should be approached with a fine starting at 10% of turnover.

Not profits. Those can be made to be negative with creative accounting. It's much harder to make all those squillions of income go away.

It would also hurt the companies involved like hell, which is a GOOD thing.

In some countries the executives who exchanged these emails would be personally, criminally liable too.

Oracle vs Google redux: Appeals court says APIs CAN TOO be copyrighted

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @AC

According to the Berne Convention, no rights need to be reserved. Copyright exists the moment pen is put to paper.

The USA has been a signatory to the convention long enough that C and C++ are covered.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Unintentional humor

I'd like to know too, specifically in order to avoid any financial dealings with the company.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: admin@razorfishsolutions.com.hk

"It also means that no API's can be duplicated unless the copyright owner gives explicit permission, Also that all the software using existing API's of existing products must be totally written."

Yup.

It will kick up a shitstorm that politicians can't ignore.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: W. T. F.

"Apple effectively obtained a patent on a rectangle with rounded corners, something that has been known and used for centuries, if not millenia. Very recently, Amazon has been awarded a patent for photographs taken against a white background. "

It has to be repeatedly pointed out that the USA has 2 different types of patents.

One is for innovative ideas and the other is for "trade dress", which in the rest of the world would be a registered design. Apple might have got it for the phone (but other smart phones have had rounded corners in the past, so they wouldn't prevail except in cases of blatent copying) but there's no way Amazon should get it for doing what marketers have done for years, with millions of pieces of prior art on display everywhere.

That said, the system is broken. The USA's laws have become based on who pays the most to have them written and passed, not on actual "justice". The word for this situation is "plutocracy"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: W. T. F.

Upholding that APIs are copyright enforceable goes against the last 50 years of decisions.

I can't see this one lasting very long

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Probably the death knell of the "industry"

At least the death knell of Java.

What's next? Will Oracle go after IBM and OpenJRE?

'A proper British BOFFIN': Famous Martian prof Pillinger dies aged 70

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Top Bloke

Beagle almost didn't make it onto the mission. As it was, it had a wodge of cash thrown at the last minute, but it was far too late to make much difference.

The same airbags used for testing (patched, strengthened and overweight) were sent to Mars. This is a very bad thing(*). There simply wasn't enough money to make new ones or enough time when the money finally did appear.

(*)Anything tested outdoors absorbs water vapour, which is bloody near impossble to remove afterwards, and in the temperatures of space it's not just ice, but may as well be granite.

The airbags were placed in a large vacuum chamber and pumped down to remove as much water as possible, but they were still outgassing after 6-8 weeks when they had to be integrated into the payload (there was so much water in them they were clogging the pumps for the first 2 weeks)

It's highly likely that Beagle made it all the way to the surface, but the airbags simply didn't/couldn't inflate properly because they were a frozen mass and the thing went *splat*

A properly funded mission would probably be a sucess and Beagle is actually cheap/small enough that a funded organisation could send a dozen to Mars at once (That would spread the risk. Perhaps one might die, but not all 12).

Beagle, like Prospero stands as testimony to the monumental shortsightedness of british govt beaurecracy. As far as they're concerned all this stuff is simply a "flag waving exercise" with low exposure.

They're more than happy to jump on the bandwagon if someone makes a discovery but getting funding is somewhere between difficult-to-impossble. Of the EU nations who put money into space, the UK spends the least of all - and given ESA investment/contracting rules (contracts are awarded in value proportional to the payments made by each country), it's a self-reinforcing cycle as top up-and-coming british space scientitsts bugger off to other countries where they can be assured they'll keep being able to both put food on the table AND do research.

One of the newspapers made a big fuss about the British space program/industry employing 30,000 people nationwide (Which is a highly optimistic figure and must include the cleaners as well as all the contractors making parts at workshops across trhe country). To put that into perspective, Australia has more people involved in space and there are more people than that working at NASA JPL alone.

Inventors: Feast your eyes on fuel cell tech that'll power up Internet of Thingies

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Methane

"Using methane in a fuel cell is still carbon-positive. At which point, why not just combust the stuff?"

Fuel cells are more efficient, that's why.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Renewable?

"See icon."

Hydride-based storage systems won't do that.

The problem with hydrogen is that at best it's an energy transport mechanism and at worst an expensive boondoggle.

Among other problems yet to be adequately addressed is the issue of long-term hydrogen embrittlement of just about anything the stuff comes into prolonged contact with.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Renewable?

"the only real issue with nuclear power is that it doesn't adjust output very efficiently. "

Actually, it's quite adjustable (even PWRs), but with a fuel cost approximately equal to zero, it's more economic froma business point of view to run at full power 24*7 and sell at whatever price you can get for it.

Tesco to tout its own smartphone – now THAT'S an unexpected item in the bagging area

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: High End?

"And it's bad enough seeing 'Sent from my iPhone'"

That's the 21st century version of a "12 o'clock flasher"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Regretfully

Tesco are neither particularly cheap, nor particularly good quality for most of what they sell and the good stuff is usually significantly cheaper elsewhere

Sitting in that space is deadly to a supermarket chain and is the prime cause of their loss of competitiveness.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I hope they use thicker plastic...

Tesco started using "disintegrating"* plastic bags a while back.

I used to use one of those little sock thingies to hold them for reuse or rubbish bin liners until it started dispensing small fragments of plastic.

* The ones which break down after 30 days or less. Less being the operative word.

Cold War spy aircraft CRASHED Los Angeles' air traffic control

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What kind of idiot programmers did they hire?

Extra points if you can cite what caused it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If you only knew how old that gear is

The system of strips might be glitchproof in its deisgn but the wetware handling it is slow and occasionally misprocesses data.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Vintage planes

Because U2s are fundamentally a very simple airplane evolved from a very well proven design, whilst Vulcans/Harriers are hideously complex things (not that I agree with retiring the Harriers, but Vulcans really had reached their enf of airframe life.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Given its a stealth designed aircraft

Powers being shot down wasn't a shock. They knew it would happen sooner or later.

If a missile didn't hit the thing, simply evading it could rip the wings off (they fly in what's known as "coffin corner" where cruise speed, stall speed and VNE (Velocity to Never Exeed) are all within a couple of knots of each other. (It's basically a starfighter with extremely long wings)

The real shock was that the integrated destruct system didn't work (and that the pilot survived/didn't use his suicide pill). The aircraft was rigged with high explosives along its entire length for just such an event, to ensure the Eviiiil Russkies didn't get their hands on a complete example, but the G forces Powers was subjected to left him unable to hit the switch before he bailed out.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: They have 6 weeks and 1 day.......

or you're gonna be quaking in your boots (or seat).

FTFY. HTH. HAND

Watch a bank-raiding ZeuS bot command post get owned in 60 seconds

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fantastic, now shut them down!

The bad guys calling the cops would be like Boy George complaining that someone stole his cocaine.

The issue is that some of the bad guys are very very bad indeed, don't like having their toys taken away and don't play by the same sets of rules that 99.999% of the population use. The cops at the door would be preferable.

Hacktivists hijack BNP Twitter account, crayon over leader Griffin's too

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I see the lefties are out in force on El' Reg today.

"Tories may be evil, but they're competent and evil. At least economically."

There's very little evidence that _any_ UK party has been economically competent in the last couple of hundred years. The economy mainly staggers on despite them, rather than because of them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Poor guy.

This and a bunch of other policies are quite disturbing, but I suspect a large number of Kipper votes will be "strategic" ones in marginal seats or protest votes in safe ones.

If I was Labour, I'd be doing all I can to get UKIP support up, as it splits support for their opposition.

Reg man builds smart home rig, gains SUPREME CONTROL of DOMAIN – Pics

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Whatever.

Is X10 sill limited to 256 devices or whatever it was last time I looked?

(16 channels, 16 devices per channel, intended to be used one channel per home. Every single X10 installation I saw in the USA was using at least 40 devices thanks to individually controlled lights and wall outlets.

The downside at the time was that 230V kit was 5-10 times the price of 110V stuff and all the contemporary rivals required running a separate data wire to every control point.

Mozilla asks FCC to unleash the nuclear option on net neutrality

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Agreed

"The problem in the USA is that, generally, there is no choice. You have one Cable provider and one telephone provider, if you are lucky."

This is a direct result of collusion between Telcos and the local PUCs. The incumbents have managed to get local loop unbundling banned and sucessfully shut down virtually all of the LECs which used to operate in the late 20th century by simply denying them access to the network, whilst claiming to foster greater competition.

The american telecommunications setupis one of the most corrupt in the world and has been for a long time. It won't be much longer before all phone companies are the same one again at the current rate.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"and also the cost/price of delivery of the information (ISP) "

Consumers are paying the ISP for that already. ISPs want to doubledip and that's the big issue.

"If the ISP is charged more, for say delivering Reuter's information and less for, say Fox News information, which one is the ISP going to pay for?"

Why would the ISP pay at all unless they're putting it on their webpage. The contract for data delivery is between Reuters/Fox and the customer. ISPs are attemtping to insert themselves in the middle as a toll collector, forgetting that they are already charging for access.

It's rather telling that the largest proponents of this activity are the monopoly telcos which are part of the reforming amoeba which used to be the largest privately owned monopoly telco in the world.

HALF of London has outdated Wi-Fi security, says roving World of War, er, BIKER

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: only allows specified MACs to connect

Blocked SSIDs still leak and MACs are easily tweaked.

At least some of the kit I've used happily shows the SSID of "cloaked" APs.

WPA2 is only secure when used in conjunction with a decent password, as otherwise a snoop session can deduce the password over a few hours without issuing any packets (or it can bother the AP for more data, faster)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"brand new Internet enabled TV...only supports WEP!"

Name and shame please.

Sony nanotechnicians invent magnetic tape that stores 148 Gb per square inch

Alan Brown Silver badge

Extending the LTO roadmap

I'm guessing that will be LTO12 or something equally silly.

We were supposed to have 8-12Tb tapes by now (after the last breakthrough) and it hasn't happened yet, although T10000D is pretty large.

10 PRINT "Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC" : GOTO 10

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "create a BASIC interpreter "

It's probably worth mentioning that Gates and Allen developed their port using stolen time on a PDP11.

Thus showing that nothing is new under the sun.

Hey, Samsung: Why so shy about your 960GB flash drive's endurance?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Any auto backup solutions?

Linux raid with write-behind.

FreeNAS (bsd distro with ZFS filesystem)

The latter solution simply uses the SSDs as cache so it's no big deal if it dies.

Alan Brown Silver badge

for my use

500 full write cycles is plenty. A drawer full of these (ie, 200TB+) would end its support life before the drives wore out.

Boffins build billion-synapse, three-watt 'brain'

Alan Brown Silver badge

If it's put into robots

When will the robots start dancing?

6TB - big? Pah! Seagate plans to put out 8TB and 10TB MONSTERS

Alan Brown Silver badge

If you crunch the numbers, you start seering that raid6 is enough for the moment.

However I'm paranoid and use raidz3 already.

It's spade sellers who REALLY make a killing in a gold rush: It's OVER for graphics card mining

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Doesn't add up

"What to do with all these GPUs?"

I have some $orkplace projects which are waiting for the GPU pricing bubble to pop. Quite mundane stuff really - mostly chewing on planetary albedo data.

Oracle accused of breaking US competition law over Solaris support

Alan Brown Silver badge

Oh look

*nix fanboy wars. Haven't seen one of those for a while....

Spy back doors? That would be suicide, says Huawei

Alan Brown Silver badge

The ironic thing...

Is that the "vulnerable Huawei devices" demonstrated publically last August were ALL rebadged 3com devices.

None of the devices Huawei developed were vulnerable.

It appears they dodged a bullet by being forbidden to buy 3com.

Silk Road dealer 'SuperTrips' faces 40 years for DVD drug imports

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Blowhard Boring Green RegMidnight 40 years in prison @Plump & Bleaty

"For the record, an unashamedly Stalinist totalitarian state is not sufficient to stop, or even very well stem, the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In particular, North Korea has a major meth problem"

Given that NK is the world's single largest producer of the stuff (some estimates are as high as 80% of the world's supply), that's not particularly surprising, especially when being off your face takes your mind off being starving.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: RegMidnight 40 years in prison

Most of the reason people are selling illegal drugs is because it's immensely profitable to do so, despite the obvious risks. In order to make more profit, they seek out new customers. This is what eventually leads to schoolkiddies being sold Crack.

What makes illegal drugs dangerous is lack of oversight, in the same way that illegal horsemeat in the food chain is dangerous - you don't know what that shit's been cut with (anything from talc, to rat poison, to sodium hydroixide)

Crystal meth labs and crack wouldn't exist if other drugs were more easily available and the long-term effect in areas where drug possession and use has been decriminalised is a marked _decrease_ in both addiction problems and crimes committed to support them.

The war on drugs has been won - by the people selling the drugs. Everytrhing else is just rearguard action in the afghan and iraqi hills so you can pretend you didn't lose.

Samsung Galaxy S5 owners hit by fatal camera error problem

Alan Brown Silver badge

For all we know (distinct lack of information), the problem is as simple as the ribbon coming adrift.

You'd be surprised what kind of simple assembly screwups you find in first batches - which is a good reason not to buy them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: first 10 days is when most fail

A hard fail is a warranty job - simples.

Soft fails are a lot harder to get fixed.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 'Camera Failure' pop-up error message

Even the name wasn't origiinal.

"iPhones" existed (as a horrible internet email toy) while Apple were still selling PowerPCs (long before iMacs hit the market). I remember evaluating and rejecting it in 1994 as a limited, expensive device with an even more limited and expensive mail server which was only available as a solaris binary.

Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer – advice from US, UK, EU

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cleverness

"it seems to me that any badhat capable of discovering and exploiting this is sufficiently clever to have a proper job."

Or is being paid very well by other blackhats.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This sort of thing doesn't happen

I wish.

IE is so embedded into windows that even if you don't think you're running it, _something_ ends up making use of its dlls.

Let's not even go into the fact that I can't get my 75yo father to stop using WinXP or IE - because he doesn't see why anyone would attack his connection, all available documentation to the contrary.