Posts by Alan Brown 15053 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
You'll find for the most part that the venues have cluelessly let someone else supply the wifi "at no cost to you" and it's the third party who's charging.
There's also the issue of complying with RIPA, which puts a lot of places off wanting to deal wtih giving away internet access for free.
Let me know when you have a viable alternative to backing up the 900Tb I have to manage.
Let me know when it's proof against fire, or j.random Luser typing in "rm -f /" and wanting all her data back 6 weeks later or (if removable) being dropped on the floor.
Let me know when the costs of this solution are even close to that of a good tape based solution.
Replication and online backups ahve their place. Offline backup is there for a reason and failure to have it has put more than one company out of business following a disaster.
"Webservers are simply easier to find and, therefore, attack than home computers."
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if the zombie controllers specifically targetted mega-hosting outfits like rackspace, given a concentration of clueless users in these kinds of environs, often under multiple layers of reseller.
It's hard to track spikes in this kind of environment unless you want hundreds of false alarms per hour.
Unless audited - and even then it's only as safe as your confidence in the audit.
Unauthorised remote users is the least of the security worries. You stil have to worry about maliciously clueless local users and they're stilll the majority of a security admin's problems.
(Some of the stuff they attempt to do with personally identifiable data would make any DPA admin's hair turn prematurely grey.)
"What about firewalling outgoing connections?"
Exactly.
Webswervers are disposable. Ours has been compromised on a number of occasions - but because it's in its own subnet that's firewalled in BOTH directions, it's never been able to sucessfully participate in any attacks.
The performance and power consumption of even the modest chippery puts any 6-7 year old CPU system to shame.
If AMD really is working on a multicore chimera (ie, gpu+arm+x86) then losing the extra x86 cores might make sense if they can be supplanted by a shedload of ARMs - AS LONG AS THE OS/SOFTWARE MAKES USE OF THEM (emphasis mine).
I'm surprised AMD hasn't started pushing SoC-ish x86 designs for desktop use. The thermal side of things is low enough tthat it's feasible.
"have yet to see the EDL running round with knives and killing people directly"
Nonetheless, a mosque has been firebombed and a 76yo man on his way home from prayer was stabbed from behind so violently that the knife went completely through his chest.
If this was Myanmar I'd suspect that the military was stirring up trouble in order to reimpose martial law, however this is england - and I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone inside the government was stirring up extremists on both sides in order to justify more control laws.
"Wish I had contacted his probation officer now."
You still can. There's no statute of limitations on offences comitted whilst on probation and they'll likely have a bearing on his sentencing.
It'd be nice if the churnalists added some data (like past convictions) to what was pretty clearly cribbed form a press release.
In other countries, if tv companies make programs with public money then manage to sell it overseas or on DVD, they're expected to pay that money back, with interest.
Of course, creative accounting can make any profit look like a staggering loss, and it can also be used to explain the inexplicable such as expensive moves to less suitable/more expensive premises. Following the money trail on those premises is often a circular affair.
Speaking as someone who is often forced by politics and funding to do things on the cheap there are 3 ways to proceed:
1: Don't do it.
2: Do it badly (often a result of mobile goalposts)
3: Do what you can, assume the targets given are bollocks and try to pick your technology so when they finally realise there isn't enough cash for the job and stump up enough readies, you don't have to chuck out everything so far and start over.
#1 gets you fired, #2 gets you vilified in the final reports and #3 atracts a lot of heat to start with but is often the best long-term strategy.
HOWEVER: For the amount of money involvedin this report, there was more than enough to do it right first time, several times over. It looks to me like the usual heads were in the feeding trough again.
"Also, it's not exactly printed in Star Trek is it; it just kind of materialises under a hue of cool blue light with sparkly shimmery bits in it."
That's been explained away a few times as a microtransporter, rather than a printer - however if you think about the way a transporter supposedly works... (You'll never allow yourself to be put through one again)
it's quite possible that if vat was kept at the current rate and everything else was abolished, the net tax take would increase.
The reason for this is that the current byzantine tax structure has enormous compliance and collection costs. Simplfying them could easily result in more than half the HMRC staff being declared surplus to requirements.
Oh hang on, that means poutting civil servants out of a job and we can't have that, can we?
"Do you honestly fear being shot with a 'gun' that is likely to blow itself up, is very inaccurate, is very expensive and single shot (probably damaged too much to fire another)? It really is easier and cheaper to get a real one."
When people are waving short-barrelled weapons around the safest place to be is usually directly in front of them. It's hard to hit the broad side of a barn with even a modern pistol unless you're at near point blank range - in which case a knife is much quieter.
It does surpeise me that domestic PVRs aren't sold with a removable drive bay - but then again some twat would try and shove an unsuitable drive in place.
BTW, 180Mb/s in linear reads is NOT 16 streams - as soon as you try to read multiple real streams the head will start seeking like a bastard and throughput will drop down to 40-50MB/s at most.
The UK has RIPA. Failing to hand over the keys is a 2 year sentence all by itself.
In other countries, refusal to hand over the keys on response to a court order is contempt of court and you'll get to sit in a cell for a week at a time until the judge gets bored, or you change your mind.
If it saves having multiple devices kicking around then I'm happy. After all, that's why I updated a Moto A1000 to a S2 and dumped various other pieces of kit I carried around to cover the parts the Moto missed
To cover all the bases, it'd be great if the phone had a DECT module onboard, 433MHZ RF remote (power/light controls) and a rollup 10-inch screen (as seen on TekWar).
Some of that is still SF, but others are perfectly doable. My home router/PBX (FritzBox 7390) has a SIP module which works fairly well to the S2 over WiFi, but that comes with WiFi's inherent limitations when it comes to penetrating walls, etc.
"but so far I insist on showing them my birth certificate instead (since that is sufficient)."
Birth certificates are not identity documents. Given enough information about you anyone can obtain a copy - and that is the first step for anyone who is in the business of identity fraud.
The fact that birth certificates are used as the basis for a lot of identity documentation shows how much of what you trust is really a house of cards.
"Because most of the time, the cost to the bank is nothing; either the customer pays or the retailer pays."
FWIW, by the time penalty charges are levied, banks make more money from fraud than they do from legitimate transactions.
THAT is why they don't do all that much to curb card fraud,
"Actually, for an on-line transaction where the customer is not present, the bank reserves the right to charge back to Apple in case of fraud,"
You need to rewrite that. Even for offline transactions where the customer IS present and has provided a PIN (and CCTV security footage shows that it is indeed the customer, not someone using a purloined cards), the banks can and will chargeback in case of a dispute - and hit with penalty charges which are not removed should the dispute prove groundless.
I know, because as a retailer it happened to me on multiple ocasions. It's one of the reasons for encouraging people to move to direct debits or bank transfers
Then there's the massively high cheque fees banks charge in an all-out attempt to encourage retailers to stop accepting them, or the high standing fees and surcharges attached if your card processing is below threshold numbers or average transaction values. Bank commissions can easily hit 30% on debit card payments if there are a lot of sub £10 transactions.
Basically the banks rape and pillage. Retailers were forced to swallow that until recently. I suspect Apple have gone too far, but I'm not surprised they're making these kinds of demands, given recent stories such as the guy who got mugged of his cards+ipad and documented the assailant making multiple purchases from Apple on stolen cards, then flogging 'em on Ebay - however in that particular case the mugger had enough stuff to fulfill most of the demands from Apple. I'd be going for a request to provide a photo showing face + holding up a handwritten copy of the order number, along with some other form of phptographic ID.
"Saying the number is premium rate is NOT the proper answer to hijacking. The PROPER answer is to ban premium rate numbers from being used for hijack purposes."
There's already a tort on the books for this in civil courts - "Passing off". Among other things, victims using this line to go after the impersonators could fairly easily (IMO) get an order forcing the scammers to hand over their entire gross income for the number in question.
More importantly, given the tort exists, why is PPP having to do all this when the OFT should be going after the scammers with criminal charges?
"and worse 070's can be (worst idea ever)"
Perhaps but I've taken advantage of the situation to get one and give it to any company wanting my phone number without a good reason. If they want to pay £1.50 to call me, so be it.
(no, I don't get any termination revenue. It's mainly a way to discourage unwanted marketing calls and 09 numbers are costly to maintain)
"I also thought this only happened in the old corrupt banana republic counties which are still dotted here and there."
NZ is just as bad. It's just hidden far better, or legalised.
Bear in mind that the only definition of corruption which exists under NZ law is bribery. "If it isn't illegal, it must be ok" etc. Cronyism is a major problem in the country, and anyone pointing it out becomes a target for the establishment.
Sitting in Yangon, the fastest you can get is 2Mb/s FTTP (this will cost you 20 times what UK VDSL will cost and has per Mb charges over 500Mb traffic)
Out-of-country connectivity is so bad that dialup to Thailand would probably be faster, even with that 2Mb/s connection.
Being 22nd is a lot better than being near the bottom of the list.
Scriptreading phone simians are scriptreading phone simians, no matter what accent they might have,
Granted, these phonemonkeysy are a bit more understandable/less frustrating than the ones from Bangalore/Makati, but they can't get things fixed any faster than those phonemonkeys.
Wot she said.
In some countries, text messages were charged at less than 1p each ten years ago, vs 10p/min for calls. It's fairly clear that the real cost of SMS messages is "too cheap to meter" (less than 0.001p apiece) and the telcos regard it as a major cash cow. I clearly recall when vodafoe started pushing SMS services as a business tool - and doubled the price overnight.
By way of comparison, a standard GSM voice stream is several kB/second, vs 200 bytes for a text message.
Me too. I've just upgraded mine to JB (samsung version) and after rooting/removing the samsung tat I'm a happy bunny. I've tried the S3 and couldn't see a good reason to upgrade, nor do I for the S4, despite the exra whizzy bits.
I'm the kind of user who keeps a phone for years&years (ie, till it breaks), then upgrades to whatever's top of the line at the time, after trying everyone else's phone to see what I do/don't like. This allows reverting to sim-only pricing for the interim period.
BTW: the best "upgrade" I would like to see is a battery capacity whihch will let the phone run for 2 days or more.
AIUI it's got a IR trasmitter on it.
Next step would be a 433MHz transmitter for various RF remotes and DECT for when the phone is at home.
(My DSL router-cum-PBX - a Fritzbox - is a Dect base station with an app to treat wifi-based smartphones as internal extensions when they're in the house, but wifi range is a bit "lacking")
But it's harder than having a single coherent/point source to start with.
For standard lighting, more leds over a larger surface area isn't generally a problem (look up "corn cob" lamps to get an idea how some makers get around the issue - the same primciple is used in flourescent batten replacements and 600*600mm ceiling tiles.). Point sources in domestic environments are more of a nuisance than anything else.
"My personal annoyance has always been with HP: "
There's a pretty effective solution to this problem: Don't buy HP.
IPMI is bloody handy but there are still a surprising number of crappy implementations around (including what Supermicro used to flog)
It's a little worrying to me that Supermicro is rapidly becoming our "go to" manufacturer for most servers, not least among reasons being that they refuse to certify hardware ex-factory for Linux distros (Their blade shelves have a few points of major suckage too) Intel/IBM/HP/Dell seem to be sleepwalking into irrelevance.
"(A) There is simply not enough usable[1] spectrum in a typical built-up area to give everyone gigabit links like wired/fibre can."
That is entirely dependent on how far the Gb link needs to be transported.
Before cellular technology was developed that same argument was raised against the possibility of widespread personal phones.
"MAC addresses aren't usually passed beyond the first router"
This used to be true in IPv4.
IN IPv4 the MAC is usually part of the IP address
MACs can (of course) be altered to something else via software, so fingerprinting isn't that useful. All that matters is that 2 identical MACs aren't on the same LAN.
"I have just spent over three years in court arguing the merits of "prior art" that conclusively demonstrated that my technology (Stacker) pre-dated Microsoft's specious patent claim - it IS possible to beat the bastards."
Yes, but it's taken 20 years for you to get that decision. In most other long-running cases MS has won via attrition.
I hope you get the $15/copy PLUS triple damages for wilful infringement.
(I had a stac hardware card back in the day. They were a great piece of technology)
A lot of stuff does get transferred for a consideration, but usually the liabilities go with it. Unencumberred transfer is rare.
Having said that, the city has just reduced its ongoing liabilities by 8 mill/year (the losses), plus had an undertaking for network completion, PLUS has dodged having to pay to upgrade infrastructure (easily another 40 mill)
Yes, there's a 3million/year odd bond repayment to deal with, but if they shut down the network tomorrow they'd still have to pay that anyway - and the way things are worded, if google walks out everything reverts back to the city - including any work Google adds to the network.
I have every confidence Google will do what it says. Had the city sold to one of the USA cablecos it's quite likely they'd have demanded a legislated local monpoly, plus money up front AND halted any further work for 20 years, as well as driving up costs substantially for endusers.
This is not a case of leveraging monopolies. The alteratives for the city were much, much worse.
I know Ofcom don't care. What do you expect from a bunch of public servants whose next step on the career path is telco management? They don't plan on shitting on that path.
Ofcom also said "unlimited" which wasn't was ok, etc etc
The ASA's investigators don't have vested interests in toeing the telco line and it shows. Even if Tmobile havrn't signed into the ISP agreement I have every suspicion that the fact it exists means the ASA will hold them to it.
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