* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Harvard student thrown off 14,000-core super ... for mining Dogecoin

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Exploiting National Resources for Fun and Profit

I've cvaught a few students trying to do it on our systems. They usually get a kick in the pants and told not to do it again.

5 years ago it was seti@home, in 5 years time it will be something else.

Alan Brown Silver badge

What happens

If you task an ASIC miner to go after dogecoins, etc _now_?

Intel, Sun vet births fast, inexpensive 3D chip-stacking breakthrough

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Core temperature

I's say "heat pipes", but someone's probably already done it. (We use them fairly extensively in space kit. Convective cooling isn't an option in a vacuum)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wow. NFC *finally* finds an actual use.

There has to be a protocol of some sort, otherwise a string of 1s or 0s (or an asymetric ratio of 1s/0s) will cause problems.

Red Hat kicks Piston out of Red Hat Summit, then performs $13,000 U-turn

Alan Brown Silver badge

No change there then

> Yeah, no kidding. I saw the v1.1 release of their 'automation' suite (CloudForms) and it was PATHETIC.

A good chunk of the clustering stack is barely fit for purpose too. GFS filesystem corruption doesn't cause confidence.

Reg HPC man relives 0-day rootkit GROUNDHOG DAY

Alan Brown Silver badge

rootkit detection

You can't reliably find a rootkit whilst running the OS which is rooted (they tend to trapdoor themselves form the running OS, that's the whole point of being a rootkit)

In other words you need to scan the infected machine's disks _with something else_, such as a bootable linux distro (or soemthing like kaspersky's rescue disk)

To rule out worst case scenarios (bios infections) the disks have to be removed and checked on another system.

Of course, if you're paranoid you generate checksums for all files and then use a IDS. Decent backup systems do this for you to, so you can see when the checksum for any particular file changed.

10,000 km road trip proves Galileo satnav works, says ESA

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: EU ready to switch off Galileo to aid US security?

"Back in 2002 EU officials stated that the EU would switch off Galileo to aid US security."

It was and is widely believed that the alternative was that the USA would shoot the birds out of orbit.

It'd be interesting to see what would happe if they pulled the same posturing with Glonass or the Chinese systems (Yes, there's a chinese satnav constellation, just not a very big one)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It does not provide a valid service yet

"Of course one cool thing with more satellites up there is that, with the correct receiver technology, you can compile both Galileo and GPS sources in the same fix."

and Glonass too - it's in a lot of devices because the russians apply import duty to any satnav device which doesn't implement it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Would I be cheeky to mention this brand spanking new system would be as good as the current NavStar"

Not at all, but unlike Navstar, it can't be switched off at-will by the US military.

Scotland to test mobe signals slammer jammer

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Rollout?

Theatres and cinemas are enclosed spaces which can be quite effectively blacked out using metallic paint on the walls and possibly a very low power jammer (illegal now, but suspected to be in use some places)

Prisons aren't. The neighbours of Mt Eden prison in Auckland NZ aren't particularly happy that they can't use mobiles within about 200 metres of the prison boundary (suburban housing srruounds the prison on all sides), thanks to jamming systems in use there

Broker accuses FAST of scaring users off secondhand software

Alan Brown Silver badge

FAST is...

primarily a shakedown operation.

As we reduced the amount of applicable software on our systems, they kept trying to jack their fees up. We told 'em where they could get off last year.

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Few CIOs or VP ITs can code

>>"why didn't you deliver?"

>"If they are asking you this, it's likely that you agreed earlier you could deliver it so the fault is not with them."

I've dealt with more than one PHB who's taken a timeframe from coders and halved it when passing it upstream.

CCTV warning notices NOT compliant with data protection laws – ICO

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Signs are for pedestrians"

Surrey CC and the local DCs tend to stick them 15 feet up a pole where they're hard to read.

Apparently this is legal.

Want to remotely control a car? $20 in parts, some oily fingers, and you're in command

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't tell Marvin the Martian

"CAN gets used for communication between systems on Mars rovers too..."

More likely to be SpaceWire - which is CAN-derived, but not CAN as such.

BOFH: Attractive person is attractive. Um, why are your eyes bulging?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bad answers.

the correct answer is of course "Silver". (Black if you're a hipster and Copper if you have an Aga)

All the other colours are just so much faff

CERN outlines plan for new 100km circumference supercollider

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why not space?

Low earth orbit, perhaps. It's getting pretty close out at GEO levels.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Is that really the best place to build these things?

Tidal stresses induced by the moon can already be measured on the LHC track. These are far bigger than anything produced by tectonic movement (the alps are fairly stable), or by the mountains (which are stationary and therefore able to be mapped out of results)

Yes, there are probably better locations but the infrastructure is in place there and most other suitable places have issues with accessability, power, or politics.

Virgin Media's flaky broadband network turns Bolton off

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Trick

"To be honest its not a dig at VM (only for they fact they use them) all the Indian call centres are as bad..."

Believe it or not, there are some decent indian call centres - but they cost too much for the likes of Virgin to consider using them. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

There are also some utterly fucking abysmal UK call centres. Phone monkeys are phone monkeys no matter what accent they might happen to have.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: EE/Orange/T-mob is just as bad

If it's not working for that kind of period, then you should raise an "unfit for purpose" complaint and use it for no-cost contract exit,

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Find the fault or restore the service

"A lot of the fault calls would be from the same customer as the problem would just keep recurring."

Any manager who didn't spot THAT trend is incompetent and should be removed.

UK spooks STILL won't release Bletchley Park secrets 70 years on

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Post war operations

"I presume that we (The Brits) gave our Commonwealth chums an enigma variant after the war and told them it was secure..."

Correct

Snowden leak: GCHQ DDoSed Anonymous & LulzSec's chatrooms

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: DDOS

You clearly have no concept of how IRC works.

For starters they're channels, not chatrooms - think CB - and blocking one means people will simply create another and carry on.

California high school hackers expelled for grade tampering, test thievery

Alan Brown Silver badge

The school was lucky

As I warned one school about their inadequate security setup: "When the students hack into this system, if you're very lucky all they'll do is change their grades" - for which I was sacked as a consultant. Six months later, what I'd predicted happened, with the result that a bunch of confidential data was leaked.

Save Ofcom! Telcos and consumer groups call for end to legal disputes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A stitch in time

" Many of the current challenges are often lost by the telcos but the delays the claim introduces is of benefit to them. Remove the benefit and it may well prove it also gets rid of many of the claims."

Getting the challenges deemed vexatious would help too.

Greenland glacier QUADRUPLES speed, swells seas

Alan Brown Silver badge

The climate science "argument"

Is about the rate of AGW, not whether it exists - and the arguments are over a few percentage points. There's general agreement that if nothing is done then it will be "bad, m'kay?"

It doesn't help that the datasets we have are incomplete. There are whole swathes of the planet we have no accurate data for.

Denialists use this to claim AGW isn't an issue.

Disclosure: I'm involved in a project to quantify _full_ global temperatures over the last 30-40 years using old satellite imaging to quantify changes in the earth's reflectivity (albedo) (GW is a function of heat in (the sun), vs emitted/reflected heat and the "A" part of AGW is to do with all that extra CO2 and other gasses in the atmosphere which enhance the heat trapping effect) If the project suceeds it will be a good few steps towards working out whose calculations are the most accurate, but whilst billions are spent on handwaving and shouting, very little is actually allocated to projects like this (amongst other things it needs a couple of PB of storage, which is very hard to find properly). The amount of money spent on ONE high level meeting would be enough to completely fund this and probably enough to speed up results by a factor of 10.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ReduceGHGs

"Instead they'll claim that the sea swells with heat or some other bullshit."

it does, a little - but where do you think the extra heat comes from?

Boffin dreams up smart battery gizmo for Raspberry Pi fiddlers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If a battery fails when there is no-one to see it ...

A pulsed (flashing) led on the battery board draws so little power that it can run on a single AA for over a year. This is 30-year old technology and techniques - and a pulsing led is more attention getting than a steady state one.

London's King of Clamps shuts down numberplate camera site

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Scary Stuff

(Aside - we find errors are actually more often a factor of OCR than ANPR as such. We get a clearer image to read at night using IR).

Surely the answer is to fit IR filters/lamps and NOT rely on daylight?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"By recognizing plates that have appeared in two places too quickly he would be able to prove the vehicle must have sped between those points."

Unless the plates have been cloned.

Around 10% of cars in greater london are now running with no insurance and a lot of those are on fake plates. There's a known scam involving use of the same plate on multiple vehicles to avoid congestion charges, etc.

As another poster noted, you'd need to match the model and colour too - and even that's not enough because putting the plates from an insurance writeoff onto a stolen car of the same description has been a scam operating for more than 30 years.

Private pain: Dell layoff bloodbath to hit over 15,000 staffers – insiders

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Opportunity here

The PC market is commoditised and sales are well down. People might be silly enough to raise 50 million, but what would happen is that they'll burn through that quickly and then find themselves out on a limb.

I doubt anyone wants to "stick it" to Dell - and Lenovo will eat their dogfood shortly anyway.

Unmanned, autonomous ROBOT TRUCK CONVOY 'drives though town'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Optimal solution?

With drones in the air, they can fly escort on convoys and look out for such things as well as providing commlinks to drivers elsewhere. Why be dependent on just one set of inputs in one location?

OTOH the trucks must be capable of autonomous operation if cut off from comms.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: To be fair

" Nobody is (I hope) working hard to find ways to send a convoy of Google cars over a cliff."

Although it has been achieved on at least one occasion

El Reg BuzzFelch: 10 Electrical Connectors You CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT!

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not just an angry American

"The word-of-mouth reasoning for "ground up" is that a wire, metal cover plate, or other conductor, falling across a partially unplugged connector, would contact the ground first, instead of falling across the two line terminals, as it might, if the outlet had been installed "ground down"."

The original reason for being "ground down" is the same as why Australia/NZ require it - it means that should the plug be pulled out by the weight of the cable, the earth pin is the last one to be disconnected. (AU plugs were originally "ground-up" to protect against anything falling on the plug, but a couple of electrocutions in the 1930s due to partially-pulled-out plugs changed everyone's mind.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: BS 546

"No foreign plug comes close."

You've never stood on a AS/NZS 3112 ("Type I") side entry plug. They're much worse than the BS1363s

http://www.fam-oud.nl/~plugsocket/Australian1.html - photo 2

Unlike a BS1363, these can leave you bleeding if you're not careful in the dark.

Altcoins will DESTROY the IT industry and spawn an infosec NIGHTMARE

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: silly question

"the end result of all of the computation is heat?"

Low grade heat - which makes it pretty much useless for most purposes unless you setup some kind of heatpump to bring the hot side up substantially - and at that point it's more efficient to just use a bigger heat pump.

(I've just been scoping trying to repurpose 100kW of waste heat from our datacentre. It's barely economic to use the output for building heating at this level and bumps up implementation cost by at least £100k)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: All your passwords are belong to us!

"Of course, all of these video cards could be scarfed up by science! Yes, you have a research budget, but no supercomputer. What to do? Lay your hands on that cheap post-coin goodness!"

In the meantime those of us who do science are being hamstrung by the inflated price of GPUs, and grant money has a nasty tendency to come with strings requiring it be spent _now_, not when prices crash.

Mail Migration

Alan Brown Silver badge

Here be dragons

"The final decision is made by non-technical staff."

This is a recipe for disaster. Polish up your CV and check what colour your parachute is.

Seriously.

Decisions need to be made by technically competent people and if nontechnical people are involved it must be simply to sign off on those decisions.

$orkplace has so far spent £5+ million pounds and 3 years migrating from a slightly broken(*) locally administered unix/exim setup to Office365 ("But it's Free!") - and ended up with a substantially inferior system (much higher levels of support handholding required) - thanks to a decision effectively made via conversations and handshakes on the golf course ("But it's FREE!")

Justification: The new system is "FREE" - technically yes, but it's also broken(**) and is incurring 20 times more support manpower than the old one did.

(*) Slightly broken = overloaded and manglement wouldn't spend money upgrading the storage/frontend, resulting in increasing amounts of downtime during peak hours.

(**) Limits on the number of connections mean that users are seeing effective downtime in increasing amounts during peak hours - and there's no way of increasing the limits as it's all in the hands of a third party. That's on top of the system often taking 12-20 hours to deliver messages which have arrived during peak hours.

Blocking BitTorrent search sites 'ineffective': Pirate Bay ban lifted for Dutch ISPs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Blocking works

"In the UK dozens of Torrent sites have been blocked and Torrent traffic has fallen significantly."

Citation? Traffic to known torrent sites may have fallen, but actual p2p traffic?

Russian SpyEye author pleads guilty to starting malware onslaught

Alan Brown Silver badge

Hmmm

"The investigation has also led to the arrest of four of Panin's "clients and associates" in the UK and Bulgaria."

Out of 150 clients. Presumably he's not giving them up anytime soon.

New Doctor Who's new costume newly REVEALED by Beeb

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: DMs...Hmmmm

"From my 80's experience, DMs were THE most comfortable shoes (boots) I'd ever worn,"

Same here, until I tried on a pair of Eccos - and walked out of the shop in them. The soles last a lot longer too.

Want a touch-friendly solar-powered laptop? Apple just patented it

Alan Brown Silver badge

US patents

The USA has 2 types of patents.

This is a design one (like rounded corners) whch in the rest of the world is a "Trade Dress" or registered design.

As others have said, almost all of this has been done before. The patent is for Apple's unique version of this layout.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: At last!

"That's what I get for lettering autocorrect do my speeling for me."

Always beewere of spieling chequers

Yes, HP will still sue you if you make cartridges for its inkjet printers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: oh c'mon

"If you want to actually print anything, you need to perform due diligence on the cost of refill and this will most likely direct you to either more expensive models (e.g. some Epsons) or to laser printers."

The same principle applies to laser printers. HP lasers are cheap to buy, expensive to operate.

Foxconn mulls US expansion as States compete for business

Alan Brown Silver badge

Alternatively

Once you get rid of unskilled humans on the production line, you're no longer tied to where the cheap labour is - or in deep doo-doo when labour costs rise (this is happening in China. It's getting harder and harder for Fxconn and friends to recruit and keep assembly line workers, so wages are necessarily going up.)

Energy costs and transportation are far more important - robots turn out consistent work 24*7*365 in the dark, without complaining, picking fights with security guards or jumping off dormitory roofs.

China's Jade Rabbit moon rover might have DIED in the NIGHT after 'abnormality'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Considering...

...that american quality control resulted in a bunch of losses (launch and failure to arrive at target) and the deaths of 3 people on the pad at about the same stage, I think the quality control deficiencies par for the course. Space is remarkably hard on equipment (-200C in the shade, + 200C in the sunlight for starters. Those kinds of thermal gradients cause major mechanical stresses)

Even the russians managed to trash their lunar rovers fairly quickly.

It's only in the last 15 years that western launchers have achieved decent reliability and we've been doing it since the 1950s (I don't see Britain or the EU going to the moon anytime soon. Brazil and India will both be there first - and trading with the chinese moon colony)

Spam drops as legit biz dumps mass email ads: Only the dodgy remain

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Stuart Castle - Mass e-mail != Spam

The most common lie in the world today is "I have read and agree to the terms and conditions"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Mass e-mail != Spam

Unless you actually verify the address belongs to the person who requested it, for all you know someone might be signing up as twelve@monkeys.com (That's a spamtrap) or using a throwaway address such as guerillamail.com (addresses there are only valid for a couple of hours)

Someone asked that you send email to an address, but how do you make sure they OWN the address they've given, without some form of confirmation? (doubly important when someone gives you a piece of paper with an address on it.)

The other point is that if someone's ticking "spammy content", then the content you're sending is probably not what they were expecting or being sent too often (although ESPs report that spam reports for lists run at about 2% anyway).

Marketers repeatedly fail to remember that at least 80% of the cost of any given email is borne by the recipient - it's cheap to send because someone else is paying the lion's share of the costs, but cost-shifted advertising is an easy way to Make Enemies Fast.

OK, Wyse guy: So how do YOU think 'boosting' legacy tech is a winner?

Alan Brown Silver badge

nexenta is vastly overpriced

IxSystems (Formerly BSDi) TrueNAS eat their lunch in the USA, but for the moment ixSystems aren't present in europe.

Nexenta's pricing follows the dope peddler model: Hook 'em on small cheap stuff then hold them over a barrel when they want large systems.

Display tech based on EYEBALLS could reduce teens' mobe-fiddling

Alan Brown Silver badge

brightness

>Brightness doesn't go low enough on most devices. Turning them on in a dark place is still similar to looking into the end of a lightsabre when switching it on...

There are a few apps for oled phones which drop the brighness levels to "superdark" - perfect for pitch black but utterly useless for reading with the light on. Thankfully the brightness can go upwards from there.

And the winner of the most reliable disk drive award is ...

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: dont forget *everything* fails.

Not just "everything fails"

But also "a courier can kill even the most well-packaged device".

Seriously: Just about every drive I've had prematurely fail, arrived with some indication on the box that it'd been handled roughly in transit(*). I reckon distributors would do themselves quite a few favours by applying shock sensors to the outside of the packaging.

http://www.shockwatch.com/monitoring-devices/impact-sensor/

(*) Sometimes it's the supplier's fault. The package which arrived with 20 drives clanking around loose inside the box was returned unopened.