Posts by Alan Brown

Gadget world's metals irreplaceable, say boffins

Re: I can hear the piano now.

Try singing it as you skip along the road into Regent's Park.

UK Police have no sense of humour.

Re: Shortage scaremongering

They may not be rare, but they're hard to extract and hellaciously polluting during the process.

Unite: HP 'addicted to culture of job cuts' as axe raised again

"I think a numberb of "sisters" might have been concerned? Anyway hp as a shadow of the company it used to be, technically and socially and as a business is finished."

Yup. After looking at their financials and other bits'n'bobs, plus bearing in mind how badly they fucked us over on a £200k purchase a few years back when it turned out unfit for purpose, I took great pleasure in telling 'em they didn't have as much chance as Comet ISON did, when it comes to selling me about 100k worth of networking kit.

Partly because they've shown themselves willing to fuck customers over but mostly because I don't have any confidence that they'll be around to support their kit in 24 months time.

Earth to Unite

The market's shrinking. The company is pants, the company is selling hardware that's pants.

The only surprising thing is that HP hasn't sacked everyone and shut down.

Evan Powell exits Nexenta as Wyse guy strides in

As a term it sucks.

ZFS itself is mindbogglingly brilliant.

It's a pity that Nexenta operates the "dope peddler" pricing structure for its licensing - small deployments are cheap, larger ones become exponentially more expensive. (at 200Tb the annual support fees cost several times the purchase cost of the hardware)

That's put them on the naughtystep for the forseeable future at $orkplace.

The only way is Office: UK Parliament to migrate to Microsoft cloud

Re: longevity of Parliamentary records protects us all

"It is unlikely we are going to be so lucky with digital recordings of democracy in action (cf the BBC's Domesday project and the subsequent efforts required to preserve it)"

One of the positive outcomes of that project being so bloody hard to recover is that we use it as an object lesson for anyone who tries to pooh-pooh the importance of keeping data in readable formats AND on readable media.

This has saved us (mostly) from having data lost when various proprietary database companies which XYZ reserch group insissted on using went titsup with no hope of ever getting the code to run on hardware and OSes less than 10 years old.

(UK space science has lost a LOT of data over the years because of this. Many academics explicitly only think about data retention to the end of their paycheck and "don't give a flying fuck" about future researchers trying to use past data - those exact words when the subject is brought up - given it's kinda hard to refly a spac probe, that's a mindbogglingly selfish attitude and I only wish I was allowed to name'n'shame the dickheads concerned.)

Re: Oddly enough...

Same here.

My only consolation is that when users rant at me about the mail system I can smile and tell them it has nothing whatsoever to do with our group anymore and if they don't like it thay can take it up with the boss.

Re: Have we learned nothing....

"Unless there is a WWIII there is little value in knowing ANY enemy military info"

It's worth knowing that Vlad at the missile base will not under any circumstances push the button to kill millions of civilians and has secretly cut the wires to make sure nothing happens if he does.

(You think this hasn't happened?)

Re: To sum up

$orkplace checked (nice to have a bunch of lawyers on retainer)

The Irish and NL cloud servers ARE subject to the PATRIOT Act.

$orkplace moved to office365 anyway.

DOH!

Accused Glasshole driver says specs weren't even turned on for traffic stop

Re: "nothing illegal to be wearing Google Glass"... yet.

Yup. STOP means STOP - worldwide

As a cyclist that means "put your foot on the ground" - if you play that stupid game of wobbling and not quite stopping you can be ticketed (This was explained tto me by the friendly cop ticking off the friend I was riding with for doing that, whilst I copped a bollocking for riding no-hands.)

As an aside I often wonder if the USA's addiction to 4-way stops goes some way to explainng their ridiculously high urban fuel consumption levels.

Amazon's non-existent drone delivery army ALREADY P0WNED

reroute quadcoptores over the local skeet range

and

"Pull"

Eagle steals crocodile-cam, records video selfie

Re: Bloody eagles

Keas - bad enough that they were the subject of an insurance advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLrrNFb_6-M

Romance is dead: Part-time model slings $1.5bn SUEBALL at Match.com

Re: Fake accounts set up by scammer?

A friend of mine investigated setting up a dating site in the early 2000s - and paid money into the software.

A _large_ chunk of said software was built around harvesting pics from other sites and generating lots of fake profiles in order to entice real signups. It also claimed to be the most widely used package in the industry and just happened to be supported out of the UK if message headers and IP stamps were any indication.

FWIW I put a Cheribot on my BBS in the 1990s for a laugh and was gobsmacked by how many people would spend HOURS talking to it. We ended up making a dozen variants simply by changing the response phrases and triggers - a lot of pepople thought they were talking to a real person, not a pretty simple Eliza with 500 stock responses.

Re: Shirley...

"The problem then is with nicked pix off facebook et al, so I presume the majority of people save the pic and do a Google image search to see if it's a knock off or a real person's profile "

No need to even do that anymore. Install the "who stole my pictures" firefox plugin and all you have to do is rightclick.

Re: Doubt she'll win

"Unless she has evidence MATCH.COM were complicit in the scammers' actions"

They have the ability to automatically detect and remove copyright violations as they're uploaded. They don't because it cuts into revenue generated by knuckle draggers seeing the images and coughing up some dough to talk to a pretty girl who's actually some hairy Nigerian trucker named Phil.

Re: Hmmm. Extract from the lawsuit.

"Gosh. I really could do with some of these systems that Match.com must have. Near infinite disk bandwidth, and very sophisticated image hashing and analysis tools."

Tineye is cheap and Google image matching is pretty good at finding pirated pictures.

Outfits like Match happily tolerate the scamers because it makes them money. Businesses have no conscience, so the object of the exercise is to make it uneocnomic for them to tolerate scammers.

1.5 mill isn't much

It's about the size of the payout that AFP has been ordered to fork over for knowingly pirating a haitian photographer's work.

That case has still to go through appeal but it's already set the precedent.

Confessions of a porn site boss: How the net porn industry flopped

Re: usually finished off with a full on facial!

Such stuff used to regularly feature in material rented at the New Zealand local video stores in the early 1980s - along with backdoor action that invariably ended with a jizz unload on the woman's back.

All such rentals were for research purposes - we were searching for the one with a plot.

I thought I was being DDOSed. Turns out I'm not that important...

Re: Use postfix...

Another way of locking out the 'tards is to note several "nosuchuser" delivery attempts and simply blackhole the sending IP for 6 days. Suitable tweaking of "fail2ban" or related packages can do the trick and this will drop the double bounces back into the postmaster box of the malformed mailserver (said box is likely to be malconfigured and spin itself into the ground or die of a full disk as a result)

If these really are malformed bounces then the odds of getting only 1 or 2 from any given srver are slim to negligable

China's Jade Rabbit takes great hop for mankind

You can see the rabbit

It's a well known legend and the rabbit shape is one of the first I made out as a child looking at our satellite.

"rabbit in the moon" images for the uninitiated. :)

Some other legends are pretty weird. Maori tell about the woman on the moon - kidnapped by the moon after cursing him for hiding behind clouds as she walked in the dark.

How your data loss prevention plan is killing your business

Re: It is not just about numbers here

"Old backups can be vital."

AMEN

Here's an example: In 1999 a NEAX61M switch was rebooted to allow y2k updates to take effect.

It failed at reboot, and the failure cascaded to 3 other switches, putting 200,000 phone lines out of action as well as a major international switch, resulting in subscribers throughout the country being unable to make long distance and international calls.

BACKUPS WERE CORRUPT. It turned out that something had scribbled over memory more than a year previously and what was backed up was copletely corrupt information.

Techs had to go back more than 2 years before they found a working backup - that was ok, the switch booted up - BUT 2 years means a LOT of changes around (people move houeses, etc etc etc), so the next step was to replay all database changes - which thankfully had been backed up separately.

It took more than a DAY before anyone could make any phone calls at all in Palmerston North - but there were still thousands of people who found they couldn't make calls.

It took 6 _WEEKS_ to replay those database updates. In that period various people had no dial tone, the wrong number, etc etc etc. A small ISP had more than half its lines out of action for most of that period.

Lesson1: Older backups can be vital

Lesson2: A backup is no fucking good if it hasn't been tested.

240 copies of small pieces of data such as mail folders is immaterial. 240 copies of a 1Tb filesystem is another matter.

I admin backups for about 1Pb of data. It's all about mintaining a balance between COSTS (and frankly tapes are the cheapest part of the whole shebang, so I don't really care if I use a bunch of extra LTO5s at 14 quid a pop), resiliance,complying with data retention laws, keeping archival copes and being able to run the backups in a reasonable time window. (Some areas are backed up 7-10 times per day, others are only touched once a week.)

A good backup system has a backing database so an admin can zero in on a given file at a given point in time in 2-3 minutes. That database is also a BRILLIANT intrusion/modification detection system - if any aspect of a file changes, its SHA512 signature changes and that means it gets backed up again.

It can tell you how many copies of any given file are backed up.

It also doesn't miss things if a file tree is moved - the number of backup systems which will detect and handle this correctly can be counted on one hand - 2 are free and the other 2 cost in excess of £30k.

The vast majority of "backup" systems out there are crap - and the ones being most heavily promoted commercially certainly fall into that camp.

How much should an ethical phone cost? An extra penny? Or $4bn

Re: Companies should simply ignore the law

Companies do all the the time - and when called to account, simply dissolve themselves.

Hence Superfund sites such as Love Canal.

'This BLACK HOLE just isn't BLACK AT ALL' snarl boffins

Re: I'm confused!

"HOWEVER, here is where a theory of mine comes in. The larger the black holes event horrizon, the OLDER the black hole is."

Except that assuming no material falls in, Hawking Radiation means the black hole is constantly losing matter and as such its event horizon shrinkis with age. (Assuming Hawking Radiation is a a valid construct and I've seen no reason to disprove it)

Re: I'm confused!

> No "small?" No "Big?""

This is one of those very odd things that various people have been trying to find out an answer for, over a very long period.

Either they don't exist (unlikely) or we're not looking in the right places ("Space is big, very big. You might think it's a long way down to the shops..."), or quite simply because we don't know WHAT we're looking for.

Finding black holes is difficult because they can't be directly observed. Think of it as predicting the location of a needle in the middle of a haystack - in the dark, from 500 feet away - using the methed of observing how the needle's gravitational effects on the pieces of straw immediately surrounding the thing change the way they reflect photons from the streetlamp at the side of the field.

Black Holes are black

But they're spectacularly messy eaters - worse than a cookie monster going "On Nom Nom"

It's estimated that only 2-3% of the matter in the accretion disk ends up going into the black hole, the rest is shot out as jets - and it's the accretion disk where the light is coming from thanks to matter orbiting at high velocity and banging into other chunks of matter.

The findings mean that things in the neighbouhood are moving a lot more energetically than previously thought and that the amount of matter crossing the event horizon may be significantly lower than previously thought - both mean the math needs reworking yet again.

(I'm not particularly susprised. Many researchers just add a "fudge factor" when results aren't quite as expected instead of going back to see why things aren't quite right. Space scientists would never be great accountants, let alone actuaries.)

Elon Musk scrubs lucrative MONEY RING debut again on Thanksgiving

Re: Mr. Musk's attitude

"By "his own money," you mean, "The US government's money," correct?"

No.

If these fail, he goes out of business. He gets paid on results - not on failure.

Re: Measure twice...

Actually more like measure 1000 times and make 100 test cuts on prototypes.

And yet people still manage to swap cameras between mars rovers or install gravity sensors upside down.

Aussie boffins can detect orbiting SPACE JUNK using rock gods' radiation

whoopdie-do

As others have said - detecting large objecs is easy.

Its' the myriad tiny items which are problematic. A single fleck of paint gouged a large chunk out of a shuttle windscreem in the 1980s and a 1cm object - whilst currently not trackable - would simply pass straight through the hull of the ISS and leave a trail of smaller debris behind it.

El Reg Contraption Confessional No.1: The Dragon 32 micro

"Volume adjustments, messing with the cable - nothing could prevent the inevitable ?IO Errors. I suspect the tape lead is not what it once was."

90% of the problem is that the audio input on the ocmputer is line-in levels and the cassette output is expecting a speaker.

Electronics catalogues always used to have a few circuits to terminate earphone circuits properly and attenuate them for line-in levels. It only takes 4 resistors to do it properly.

UK.gov's web filtering mission creep: Now it plans to block 'extremist' websites

Re: Well

"The DM has been campaigning for the fascists since Oswald Mosley's day."

Less openly these days, but that may change in future too.

DON'T PANIC: No FM Death Date next month, minister confirms

Re: Well now

hmmm

88-108Mhz DAB+?

Re: Radio Silence in Cars ?

"Except that I don't fucking want to. DAB offers me nothing that FM can't do, in fact the quality of FM is usually better than DAB, and I've already got FM receivers."

The only FM receiver I have in the house is a bedside clock radio. Everything else streams across the 'net.

I doubt my setup is unusual.

REVEALED: How YOU PAY extra for iPHONES - even if you DON'T HAVE ONE

"Some manufacturers won't even let you pay invoices at time of order and force you to take the float so they can maintain control of pricing."

If that's provable in the EU then criminal charges would be forthcoming. Ditto a number of other countries.

Re: Much as I love to kick an aggressive anti-competitive multinational in the nuts...

But the results of this industrywide cockup/collusion/cartel is that customers pay higher prices no matter which carrier they choose.

Re: Ryan Air pricing..

"Mobile phone contract pricing is even more scandalously difficult to "read" and compare than 'cheap' flights. More so now when instead of just call minutes / sms, with multiple options each for 'own network' / other mobile / fixed line / overseas fixed line / overseas mobile / roaming, there's also the same cornucopia of options for data."

Including a number of "unlimited" data options that aren't. The fine print on some of those makes me wonder why the OFT hasn't stepped in.

Re: Message to mobile operators

If you lose money on the deal then lockin doesn't matter.

If you rely on lock in to keep your clients, then you're in the wrong business.

If mobile phone companies realised that, their churn levels would fall _dramatically_

Why a plain packaging U-turn from UK.gov could cost £3bn a year

"But by standing around outside you have gone back to the bike sheds / cool approach. It is almost impossible to walk down a street in any commercial district here without incurring second hand cigarette smoke."

This is one of the reasons California made it illegal to smoke within X yards of a doorway.

Technically it's illegal in the UK to smoke outside where the smoke can reenter a building, but I've yet to see it enforced. People who live near pubs and restaurants would be pretty happy if they were.

"If all the packs look the same do you think the corner shop is going to sell the taxed cigarettes and make10%-20% of the revenue or do you think they will stock the cheap imports and make 70% of the revenue."

Some years ago in New Zealand a corner shop owner ("dairy" in NZ parlance) was caught selling individual cigarettes to schoolkids. The resulting fines shut the shop down. I'd heard of similar cases in Australia in the sae period.

I'd imagine those caught selling untaxed cigarettes would face similar penalties. A containerload of smuggled cigarettes can result in seriously _long_ jail terms in both countries (and has!). They do have borders which are easier to police than the UK's though.

Re: Hmmm

The price hikes are aimed at stopping people starting too. Addicts will keep paying no matter how much it hurts.

ENISA wants mobes to wander freely between carriers in emergencies

Re: Let's flip this into the real world...

You missed:

Mobile company A bills Moible company B "shiloads" for the unauthorised roaming, puts them out of business and acquires their hardware/sites/customers for a song - then proceeds to build up a hedgemony.

It's not that different a scenario from that practiced by AT&T in the 1930s.

Boffins release 44-MEEELLION-star Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

You'll need it. The globes in question are a long journey away.

Krakoom! OCZ flies into the ground. Time to salvage the engines and look around

"I don't think I have even seen a hard disk with a "backplate" hiding the pcb, retail or otherwise."

I have, but not since the 1990s.

BT performs INSOURCERY on outsourced staffers to secure cash savings

Re: brain dead boss

Not brain dead.

Outsourcing allows you to get rid of deadwood and expensive staff

Insourcing reduces costs and allows staff contracts to be renegotiated - downwards.

It's a nasty, vicious way of making a profit - and it's a shot across the bows of the outsourcers to force them to lower their prices (and enduser service) or face losing business.

Weird PHP-poking Linux worm slithers into home routers, Internet of Things

"What does that mean "may" be availabe"

It's a PHP exploit - that part is portable. It would need to be crafted to target other CPUs.

PHP and wikis are the stuff of nightmares from a security standpoint. I'm sure a 3year using duplo could producce better code than a lot of the "authors" out there.

Google to CyanogenMod: YOU! GIT yore warranty-BUSTING ASS outa Play

Re: So

"Don't know about the status in the UK, but you are right. The EU ruled that replacing firmware/OS does not void warranties (for consumers)."

The Eu may have ruled that, but Samsung are still refusing to their legal obligations (They're not alone, Apple and Microsoft both try to pull this one routinely too, as do nice German outfits like AVM.de - makers of the highly whizzy Fritz! range of DSL/Cable routers)

Re: Support when things go wrong.

My old Nexus7 tablet has had its wireless FUCKED OVER by Jellybean 4.3, yet Google is staying utterly schtum about complaints on the issue (Im far form th eonly one affected)

It strikes me that support is about the same no matter whose firmware is on the device.

City of London cops arrest 6 suspected to be Microsoft counterfeit ring

Re: 100k

"One is infringing copyright and has deprived Microsoft of maybe $100K,"

Try $15k and you'd be much closer to the mark.

HP’s ENORMO-SLAB: The Slate 21 MONSTER tablet

Re: great idea

FAT isn't mandatory. F2FS is better

Re: More is not enough!

Only if they use thoriated tungsten heaters for improved electron emission

Is that you, HAL? No, it's NEIL: Google, US Navy pour money into 'associative' AI brain

I thought

Zebras were found at the zoo.