Posts by Alan Brown

Docking £500k commission from top SAS salesman was perfectly legal, rules judge

What would Jesus do?"

flipping tables and whipping merchants was definitely part of the bible stories (in the temple)

UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden starts national security probe into proposed Arm-Nvidia merger

Nvidia is the risk

The first thing Nvidia did when they acquired Cumulus was to rip out support for Broadcom chipsets from it.

They have a history of predatory behaviour and it won't stop. They'll make Qualcom look polite

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

If shifting registrars

It would make sense to shift to one which is not already at a vote cap

Just saying....

US Homeland Security sued for 'stonewalling' over use of Clearview facial recognition

Re: Nuke the Planet for Equality

" The worry is that it does work, its very effective and its constantly improving. "

last time I checked, the false negative rate was high and the false positive rate was high. The only thing it CAN do is improve

it's nowhere near close to being useable by anyone and yet Big Brother is trying to do so

FBI deletes web shells from hundreds of compromised Microsoft Exchange servers before alerting admins

Re: They doing this with a cron job?

"Robin Hood and Friar Tuck" date back how far? (Certainly to mainframe days)

Re: Whose bloody computer?

sticking "known compromised" systems in a "quarantine vlan" is standard operating procedure in many networks

Doing it at ISP level can result in helldesks being flooded out though

After years of dragging its feet, FCC finally starts tackling America's robocall scourge

Re: Not so easy in the UK

"robo-calling problem isn't as bad here - at least not for my TPS 'Protected' number."

"They" don't care if your number is TPS protected and "They" don't care whose CLID they're forging (the "BT scammers" have been using valid ones belonging to active customers for a while now)

As the terminating telco gets a cut of the revenue (call termination charges), my argument is that they're jointly and severally liable for the scam. If/when that starts being upheld in court is when telcos will sit up and take the issue seriously. Until then they'll continue to pay lip service to it and only pay attention when they don't get their termination revenue

Re: Not so easy in the UK

"Why can't these public bodies just replace a blocked CLI with the main reception number?"

They can. They're not aware they can do so and their provider doesn't tell them it's possible

in a lot of cases people are working from home and withholding because of that. This is a good case for SIP forwarding (SECURELY!) but of course nobody thinks of doing it until it's suggested to them as a way of providing an acceptable CLID

NHS has been suggesting it for a while

WRT the plod, the CPS would kick their arses quite hard as OFCOM have been mandating public services NOT withhold CLI for more than a decade

make telcos responsible

Terminating telcos get ~1/3 of the call revenue, so they have a vested interest in the problem continuing

Everytime we've seen them take publicised action it#s been because of telco billing fraud depriving them of revenue

Making them jointly and severally liable for the robocalls and fraudulent CLID would cleanup the problem very quickly

Average convicted British computer criminal is young, male, not highly skilled, researcher finds

Re: Technical Report

Having been an El Reg reader since its inception and spent at least as many years chasing various miscreants across networks who never got anywhere near court, I'd say fewer than 0.1% ever get anywhere near police, let alone a court.

For the most part the Plod simply don't want to know, even when it's dropped giftwrapped into their lap, unless "someone influential" puts a flea in their ear

What's really surprised me over the years is how few cases have resulted in victims taking matters into their own hands. Many of the most destructive/malicious skiddies haven't exactly been low profile

Re: It's not the average person we should worry about

"I'm told not to worry - our students are not that clever, etc."

I suggest you keep hard copy of that correspondence. You're likely to need it

Back in the 1990s I was told that by a high school when I said it was only a matter of time before they got hacked by the students - and if they were lucky said students would ONLY change their exam grades

I was an external consultant and as a result was told my services were no longer required. It was less than 2 years later before the inevitable happened and a bunch of private information got out. The fact that they'd been warned meant their liability insurers voided their policy, so it got quite expensive for the administrator concerned (who had overridden everyone else one summer holiday when sleazy salespeople had shown up with a slick sales job, resulting in staff returning to a done deal)

Re: on the job experience

IOW: "revenge hacking" - and pretty easily fingered

"lyshus fripping wimbgunts"

Cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop steal your session cookies, browser history, crypto-coins

Re: Open options

it's rather ironic that Libreoffice is the go to rescue package for broken ms office files.... :)

Who'd have thought the US senator who fist pumped Jan 6 insurrectionists would propose totally unworkable anti-Big Tech law?

Something similar can be said for both Boeing and AT&T's breakups too

There's definitely a place for antitrust laws and the USA isn't using them nearly enough but the legislative abuse is so deeply entrenched that I don't think one nutjob senator railing about them (ironically, from the side of the plutocracy) will make any difference

It's important to realise that what we're seeing now in the USA is the culmination of an effort to destroy the New Deal which began in 1940 (and recruited evangelists to the cause). That group gained the upper hand in 1980 with the election of Reagan and have been running rampant ever since, but history has a tendency to repeat and the New Deal short-circuited a depression which "should" have lasted 30 years if normal economic cycles had been left to play out. When the crash comes, the USA is going to hurt and unlike the last few times it's no longer the only 900 pound gorilla in the room - meaning that "if America sneezes the world catches flu" no longer applies

Northrop Grumman's MEV-2 gives Intelsat satellite a new lease on life until the next rescue in another five years

Hubble?

MEV-3 ?

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

|Deja Vu

DOMAINZ, ISOCNZ - 20 years later

the more things change the more they stay the same

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

there were a lot of things wrong with the british shipbuilding industry at the time but that was merely a symptom of what was going wrong

When 3 shifts of welders could be outperformed by a single japanese worker operating semiautotomated rigs on the other side of the world, changes had to be made. Choices were between shedding staff and modernisig practices or shutting down entirely and it ended up being the latter

This scenario has repeatedly played out in industrial areas around the world where manglement have tried to maximise profits when they saw that heavy reinvestments in plant + automation was needed and chose to run the business into the ground instead. It's never ended well for the poor buggers at the blunt end of things

Re: Skodas and Ladas

by the late 1960s BL were still selling heaters as "optional extras" except you couldn't actually buy one without a heater

It was their way of being able to undercut the "funny" japanese cars which had them as standard in their print adverts

Re: Skodas and Ladas

not just larger, but substantially reinforced at critical points to handle rougher roads (a bit like Holden Commodores were vastly strengthened over the Opel Senators they're based on)

This makes 'em heavier and necessarily thirstier. Life's always about tradeoffs

Re: take care when abroad

the usual thing for hotel safes is that there's a manual release behind the nameplate on the front and a hardcoded longer release code on the electronic lock (123456 or 000000 are the most common ones)

They won't slow down a professional by much

Re: Such value for money

"At some point here in Europa old Toyota cars were bought and sent to Africa."

This is still happening in Japan and Korea. It's a major export business in both countries

Stuxnet sibling theory surges after Iran says nuke facility shut down by electrical fault

Re: Yes, poor Iran needs nuclear power.

"They don't have any other fuel source to produce electrical power."

Sooner or later the oil will run out. Long before that the world will be paying middle eastern countries NOT to pump oil.

Contrary to what many americans believe, climate change is a very scary reality and what's happening in the Leptav Sea risks turning into extinction level event material if the methane clathrate beds that are threatening to blow out turn into a chain reaction (it was end-game of the Permian era and played out in less than a decade - one blowout is bad. 2 is a disaster. 3+ is likely to be "game over, planetary reset button hit, global oxygen levels reduced to 11% for around 100k years" - That's what happened last time)

Re: What ?

"There are other theoretical reactor designs which might use thorium, but so far as I am aware none have actually been built and demonstrated."

8MWt wasn't that small - 1965-1969

OK, that one didn't use thorium, but it DID use various fuel loads including U233 and it was designed to use/transmute both thorium and U238. Nixon killed it before the next step could be taken

Satellite collision anticipated by EU space agency fails to materialize... for now at least

Re: Looking forward to full reusability & refueling

SpaceX's constellations are at _very low_ altitudes which have a maximum endurance of 5 years without constant reboosting from their onboard ion thrusters (ditto any debris from collisions - note that they have onboard collision avoidance software so this is fairly unlikely anyway)

They launch them into initial orbits which come down even faster than that (18 months or less)

The irritating thing about bringing down a lot of the smaller shit is that "we" already have the technology to do so (laser brooms) but actually deploying it risks causing a war because being able to bring your stuff down also means you can use it to bring down the other guy's stuff and nobody will agree to a closely supervised cooperative effort

(it's not even particularly difficult to bring things down - just sufficiently destabilise the orbit to make it mildly elliptical and the atmosphere will do the rest for you)

Biden administration effectively slaps bans on seven Chinese supercomputer companies for military links

Re: Design software ?

If China wanted a biological war all they actually needed to do at any time in the last 3-4 years would be to lob a few infected pigs(*) into Wisconson or other pork farming centres. Plausible deniability and all that...

(*) China's been battling an outbreak of haemmoragic african swine fever ("Pig ebola" zoonotic) that's been raging across Asia for the last 5-6 years, culling hundreds of millions of pigs and putting millions of farmers out of business in the process. That's WHY soybean purchases plummeted in the first place - you don't buy animal feed for animals which no longer exist. Meantime pork smuggling across internal chinese biological protection borders is rampant and continuing to spread the disease (which might give a hint about how much control the government REALLY has over the people when the people don't want to cooperate)

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

"The weird part is always how it doesn't hurt anywhere near as much just after you do it as it does the next day and thereafter."

I found that out after falling off a motorcycle(*) and bouncing down the road. The day after was agonising

(*) You might think it was carelessness but it was a choice between road and the back of a car which pulled out in front of me. The road was softer

Re: Blinkenlights

at least you can SEE them.

A good chunk of sufferers can't SEE red at all.

Mty father works on the principle of "if there's nothing visible, the traffic lights are probably red" and keeping WELL back from the car in font - although in that case there's enough chroma bleed he can usually see something from brake lights (not red leds though)

Some people can't see green

Possibly the two worst possible colours in existence for indicators or traffic safety unless other pigments are mixed in

Re: Not Me But.......

let's not forget that in the USA, a floor sweeper is a "sanitary engineer" and extrapolate from there

Re: Broke my little toe...

if you're playing it until everyone dies of boredom then you haven't read the rules

hint: when anyone lands on an unowned spot they MUST buy it or it's immediately up for auction. The result is a much faster game and the bank always wins - just like real life

Amazon claims victory after warehouse workers in Alabama vote to reject union

Re: In other news

"If the warehouses & delivery are all automated that is an awful lot of people who now have no income. "

Lest people reading this think they're safe

WHITE COLLAR jobs are far easier to automate than blue collar ones

Anything which involves physically moving "stuff" has a higher barrier to automation than moving ideas around

Automation of whte collar jobs has been going on for decades - when was the last time you saw a room full of acounts clerks?

It's far more agile than automation of manual labour and it usually pays off faster as white collar workers tend to be paid more than blue collar ones

SpaceX's Starlink: Overhyped and underpowered to meet broadband needs of Rural America, say analysts

Re: It doesn't add up

It's not.

5 years is the fall time of a failed LEO bird. They have ION drives and on-orbit lifespans considerably longer than that

Rural broadband is not the only market in any case.

Laser linking provides low-latency interconnection of trading hubs (1/2 the link latency of undersea fibre) which would pay for starlink many times over, making rural broadband essentially "pin money"

High speed connectivity of ships at sea and aircraft in flight at slightly less than current rates would also pay for Starlink several times over

5 years

worst case scenario, if not boosted once on-orbit

They are of course boosted by ion engines

it's interesting how selectively the numbers are being used

Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away

There's a song about this

It's called "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly"

One of the biggest issues when faced with a problem and a solution which doesn't work is the tendency to layer on more+more "fixes" rather than stepping back and seeing if there's a better way of approaching the original problem. People get tunnel vision about things

Re: people tend to add elements to solve a problem

Lotus cortinas had a tendency for the suspension to exit the bodywork. There's such a thing as too light, but the principle holds

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

Re: Not necessarily.

Some do, some don't

Belgian police seize 28 tons of cocaine after 'cracking' Sky ECC's chat app encryption

Re: Cocaine

no, but it's a drop in the ocean of what's actually coming in and is essentially letting the authorities have some cheap publicity for something with a very cheap actual wholesale value (essentially thousands, and trivially replacable. the gangs are far more concerned about losing cash, not products)

this is why the war on drugs was won long ago by the people with the drugs

Greenland's elections just bolstered China's tech world domination plan

The issue isn't the rare earths

The real issue is the thorium

and that SHOULDN'T be an issue - but an opportunity, as Tim Worstal kept pointing out.

The "highly polluting extraction methods" really aren't. They just produce lots of thorium as an inevitable byproduct. Rare earth mines are really thorium mines which should be producing rare earths as a side gig (about 5000 tonnes per mine per year)

How do you deal with acidic wastewater? Evaporate and recover/reuse the materials. It's being done already

DoorDash delivery drivers try to manipulate the food biz's payment algorithm to earn a living wage in gig economy

The local pizza place is even mopre explicit and offers a couple of pounds off if you phone them direct rather than ordering using UberEats

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Re: Sampling French customs...

the trick to detect this was to diagonally stripe the top of the deck with a pen (preferably two pens) and explain the deck as a "book"

the story is likely to be apocryphal though

Myanmar junta suspends all wireless broadband networks until further notice

Exactly this. I warned my (now ex) wife that a coup was coming back in 2018 if attitudes didn't change and got screamed at about being "treacherous" (along with tirades about "muslims are not burmese" and rohingya being subhuman)

The world was hoping for another Nelson Mandela, ended up with another Robert Mugabe and is now facing another Yugoslavia (there are at least 4 long-running separate secessionist operations within Myanmar. Surpringly the Rakhine state area isn't one of them and harsh religious intolerance/oppression is at the core of a lot of the problems. Buddhism (as practised by burmese) is not a peaceful religion and the Burmese don't seem to have gotten over being invaded/subjgated by Ghengis Khan 1000 years ago)

Internet connectivity has always (quite deliberately) been rotten in Myanmar and anyone who can afford it pays for direct satallite links from Thai providers. These bans only affect the middle classes and poor

'Imagine' if Virgin Galactic actually did sub-orbital tourism: Firm unveils new chrome job on SpaceShip III

Re: Pigs in Space

even fewer than that have set foot on the bottom of the oceans.....

Satellites, space debris may have already brightened night skies 10% globally – and it's going to get worse

Re: It doesn't actually get dark here.

" I have often wondered if there is a practical way to add sensors to the types of lighting systems used by cities? "

Yes and it's being done.

More importantly, lighting that DOESN'T fire upwards is needed, as is legislation about light trespass

The UK is particularly bad for this. Streetlighting "falls through the cracks" on nuisance lighting laws to the point that scotland had to add an extra sentence to their laws to ensure that councils could be forced to comply ("any stationary installation" - something missing in England/Wales/NI) with the environment act 1990

Another successful flight for SpaceX's Starship apart from the landing-in-one-piece thing

Re: SpaceX have turned rocket science into Spaghetti Engineering

"Look at SABRE and Skylon for the radical, new and innovative. Not SpaceX."

Sabre/Skylon - and hotol.....

both of which were being pushed back in the 1980s by Alan Bond

Have THEY flown yet?

Sitting comfortably? Then it's probably time to patch, as critical flaw uncovered in npm's netmask package

ancient history

I got shouted down by Bind groupies in comp.risks for poiinting this stuff out in 1996

I really can't believe it's still there 25 years later

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return

Re: What were they thinking?

You're free to think that

and others are free to criticise FSF

Stallman's presence in anything other than an adjunct role at FSF is likely to be counterproductive

That said, Redhat are throwing stones in glass houses here, given who now owns them and their recent behaviour (centos)

OVH reveals it's scrubbing servers – to get smoke residue off before rebooting

Re: To be fair

even ten years ago nobody in their right mind put UPS systems adjacent to working server farms (or even in the same building if avoidable) due to smoke damage risk

It's not as if there haven't been a number of spectaular UPS fires to draw examples from

Re: MTBF

" the only way to refurbish smoke exposed electronics would be a bath in some inert cleaning agent. "

Soapy water, ultrasonic cleaners, IPA baths, etc

It takes time and rapidly costs more than just replacing the kit once cascade failures are factored in

Once of the BIG problems with insurers is when "loss adjusters" who aren't competent at their jobs end up in the position

A classic example is a motor scooter I had 35 years ago that got knocked off its side stand and panels cracked. Ex factory they're dipped and treated so they stay the same colour for years.

Bozo loss adjuster decided the damaged panels could be painted.

They came back not macthing the rest of the bike.

ALL the panels were then repainted - and because of pearl coating's different behaviour in different light angles, adjacent panels didn't match because they'd all been painted differebt ways up

The all went back again - and 3 panels came back damaged - the whole lot had to go back again to be repainted when the replacement panels showed up and they still didnt match

this went around several times - at one point I ghot the machine back and rejected it after 3 weeks when the panels all started going different colours under sunlight exposure

It ended up taking 7 months and costing 4 times as much as a new BIKE ($6000 in 1986) because the adjuster decided to save $400 and "his mate was a painting expert" - who had to repaint the same machine 6 times before he did an acceptable job

The final result? EVERY SINGLE PANEL was replaced with factory new ones - the bike shop then managed to shatter several smaller ones whilst installing them only to find out they were out of production

I really would've liked to be a fly on the wall of that insurer, but the loss adjuster was gone shortly afterwards

Re: This is very low-rent

The only thing twhich needs recovering is the content of the hard drives.

The fact that they're cleaning these smoke-damaged systems means they intend to use them in production again

Re: Worth saying again......

not to mention the twunts who think everything can be done on a windows desktop pc - and imagine places like OVH to be full of such things