Posts by Alan Brown

Ofcom: Rule change to force UK comms providers to tell you when your contract expires

IPv6 disclosures?

Too bad they won't mandate that ISPs be required to disclose if they have IPv6 and hard rollout dates for it.

TalkTalk have been stringing retail customers along with "real soon now" for eleven YEARS - and despite the latest happy shiny press releases bigging it up, have admitted to resellers that they have ZERO plans to roll it out to retail customers(*) anytime soon (where that means at least the next 2-3 years, apparently)

They've also been repeatedly caught telling prospective retail customers that they offer it (they stopped doing that when raked over the coals) or are about to offer it in order to secure sales - for the last 15 years.

(*) TalkTalk business offer IPv6 and TalkTalk(or predecessors) have held a _huge_ allocation since 1998 with another being acquired in 2002

Cache me if you can: HDD PC sales collapse in Europe as shoppers say yes siree to SSD

Re: HDD only, here

"I like the idea of SSD for laptops because they're not shock-sensitive"

That _alone_ is worth the premium for anyone carting their precious around - the problem being that the shock damage tends to be cumulative and final failure generally "without warning" - there are SOME indicators if you interpret SMART returns but very few programs or users actually do.

Re: 'Primary storage'

"I went from old spinning disk to NVMe. ~100MB/s sequential to ~1500MB/s. Never looked back."

On the other hand SK Hynix fobbed off an _enormous number of NVMe drives on HP buyers that maxxed out at 140MB/s write 350MB/s read (yes really, I benchmarked them across a number of systems because I couldn't believe how bad they were - HP's response was to first claim they had 1200MB/s speed, then to claim they never said that and the things were within spec when challenged with benchmarks from us and posted on multiple sites as evidence of the abysmal performance)

Beware particularly of BC501 - they're essentially garbage sold at a premium price

Re: Define primary

"and of course, the maximum SSD capacity is much lower than hard disks."

Really? Lookup MZILT30THMLA-00007 on your favourite search engine.

I already _HAVE_ 16TB SATA ssds in a couple of servers for specialised purposes.

Re: Been a long time coming

"Backwards in that its unable to update a small bit of data without rewriting several megabytes of data needlessly. HDD's (modern ones) only use 4KB sectors."

Until you meet shingled drives - which have exactly the same disadvantage as SSDs in this respect and that's essentially everything over 8TB

Re: Been a long time coming

"4-8TB HDDs are still around the same price they were 5 years ago"

In the meantime, SSDs have come down to the "affordable" horizon - 4-5 times the price of such drives (Samsung 860QVO etc) and with the advantages such SSDs offer (greater reliability, lower power consumption, MUCH faster read speeds) they're starting to make inroads into the larger spinner market just like they did in the sub-1TB arena.

Who cares if they've only got a 1000 write cycle endurance? Most large drives like this are used for semi-archival purposes (porn stash) and are unlikely to be rewritten more than a dozen times in their entire lifespan.

(The 4TB QVOs actually have space on the boards to double the NAND, so Samsung is clearly planning for 8TB units if there's demand)

Re: And..

"Sometimes not. In which case, plan C was to rearrange the chain "

The problem there wasn't scsi, it was makers who built devices with terminators onboard which might (or might not) be able to be disabled. Or makers who simply ignored scsi specs altogether.

Scanners and CDroms were particularly bad offenders, but there were a lot of controller cards which assumed they'd be the physical end of a chain and not in the middle somewhere - and couldn't have the termination disabled.

>> "Hard" means solid

Or "not floppy" - remember those?

Crypto AG backdooring rumours were true, say German and Swiss news orgs after explosive docs leaked

Re: Spies gonna spy

>> "stealing secrets" is not a dirty business

90% of the "secrets" are out in the open anyway, for those who care to look and put the pieces together.

WHich makes it kinda awkward for a spook who accuses someone in open court of blowing open that GCHQ was spying on Turkey to then have it proven that the information being disclosed was actually taken from open sources (including newspapers)..... It's an admission you can't walk back after you've uttered it.

Re: Spies gonna spy

" What are spies supposed to do? Limit themselves to pawing through garbage?"

The vast majority of espionage is done in the public reading rooms of local libraries - looking at local newspapers and correlating stories that don't seem to percolate through to the larger dailies or which seem to abruptly halt, along with checking up on letters to the editor complaining about XYZ activity.

"Pawing through garbage" is usually done to confirm suspicions rather than to find new stuff.

As with Duncan Campbell's investigations - there's an awful lot out there in the open that simply needs piecing together - and if you're using "Someone else's crypto" as your sole line of defence then you've probably already been compromised

Re: Once again ....

"PKI isn't the only solution to the key-distribution problem."

Nonetheless it's a fairly good one - after describing how PGP worked to a few people who happened to be retired spooks, the response I got was "we were doing that in the 1950s. Has it taken this long to catch up?"

Crypto-upstart subpoenas Glassdoor to unmask ex-staff believed to be behind negative reviews. EFF joins the fray

Re: Business Model

"In this case, they're suing because the people who left the reviews are ex-employees who signed a non-disparagement contract."

That would be a contract which can't legally exist under the laws of the state it was signed in

Fake docs rock real docs: Ex-Wall St guy accused of conning medics out of £27m for bogus cryptocurrency fund using faked paperwork

Re: A simply test for this kind of operation.

I have some magic beans....

When you grind them up and add hot water to them, they magically make me less inclined to murder people

Parks and recreation escalate efforts to take back control of field terrorised by thug geese

Did you ever spot that one of the major shareholders was a Mr R.Runner?

Re: Where I live it's ill tempered ducks.

ducking about, shirly?

Starliner snafu could've been worse: Software errors plague Boeing's Calamity Capsule

Re: How things have changed...

" Why are we using 3GHz processors anyway?"

In general for orbital stuff we're not. It's too susceptable to radiation events glitching things out.

There's a reason that space hardware uses rad-hardened kit...

Re: In some ways, that's the problem

> A lot of projects now have many, many lines of overly complex code "because that's how modern code is written"

Case in point: Toyota engine management code. This used to be simple and robust. It's now so complex and fragile that it hid a number of fail-dangerous modes that took months of analysis by 3rd parties to prove

Re: Hmmm...

"What about the stray tools rattling around on the tankers they (try to) sell to the air force?"

That's a management problem - the same kind that killed British Leyland

You don't HAVE that kind of issue with workers (or militant unions) unless management is utterly rotten. Happy workers don't do that kind of thing.

Look into Al Jazeera's 2011 report on the Boeing 737NG whistleblowers - substandard fuselage ribs were being supplied to the factory in the 1990s on falsified paperwork - line management telling the workers to put them in anyway and beat panels into shape to make it fit, covered damage up with filler and paint, then sent it down the line on more falsified paperwork. The FAA shopped the whistleblowers back to Boeing within a week in 2003 and Boeing sacked them

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

Re: Ah, that takes me back..

"When they were destroyed - they abused the master itself."

I'm surprised the masters weren't under lock, key and a hungry doberman.

"The Russians certainly gained access to a lot of Concorde's design details, but they missed some very important ones"

AIUI it was realised the Russians were snooping and were deliberately fed a couple of wrong design details to put them off the scent - particularly related to the downward curve of the leading edge - which is why the TU144 required those ears

Re: Never keep trying without diagnosing.

" the manufacturing team. Because they _will_ power up every damn board."

And then hand them to the designers - with a smirk

"dodgy disk-packs on multiple drive units causing mass-destruction."

Or more recently, zip disks with damaged edges tearing the heads off the drives and causing the click of death

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: Sounds Familiar...

"It worked. "

You fool.

The BEST way to turn "there's no money for that" into "what do we need to do to sort this?" is not to pull that kind of bodge in a company that's too far up themselves to listen to warnings.

And you can add "fire the IT manager" to the list of fixes.

Re: HOWTO Move Your Server

" found in the book a warning that if the fuse blows you must not replace it with a nail."

No warnings about making especially sure not to hold onto said nail?

We jest about this, but I've seen the results of what happened when someone tried to use a nail in a ceramic fuse holder - it stuck out the ends and the inevitable happened when he whacked it back into the panel without bothering to turn the supply main off first

Luckily for him he was a poor conductor and survived but one of the side effects of being well and truly zapped is temporary loss of control of bodily functions - including sphincters.

Re: This one obviously needed a chalk pentagram in the computer room...

"Not one, not two, but THREE SCSI controllers - one for disks, one for a CD-ROM and one for a tape drive."

GIven the utter shittiness of a lot of pc-grade scsi tape and cdrom drives, that may have been a wise choice - your experience seems to bear that out - they really didn't play nice with others

And a hell of a lot of scanners assumed they were the only device on the bus

Re: Bless..

"Always pick up the soldering iron from the end with the cord, never from the other end."

When I was _MUCH_ younger, I was working in my "shed" (a space at the end of the garage) and the soldering iron slipped off the bench for some reason - not really thinking and only seeing the movement out of the corner of my eye, I reached out - and caught it by the hot end.

An Antex X25 leaves a lovely linear burn across the palm that takes weeks to heal properly and can take a lot of explaining when you're 14

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

1. GEO latency sucks for FP shooters

There, FTFY

Actually GEO latency sucks, fullstop

Re: Good thing LEO is becoming more profitable than GEO

Microsats and cubesats are set in orbits so low they come down very quickly - usually in less than 5 years and often in less time than that.

Re: This is where we are now

"How would LEO beat microwave links at ground level? "

Microwave links need repeaters every 40-60 miles.

Satellite is ~200 miles up and then repeater spacing 500-2000 miles (variable) using precision laser pointing - this is covered in a bunch of patents and FCC filings

Speed of light in atmosphere: ~0.99C

Speed of light in LEO: ~1.0C

Speed of light in water/glass: ~0.7-0.6C

Speed of light in coax/transmission line: ~0.75C

Speed of light in waveguide/fibre: ~0.6-0.55C (it gets a bit complex but propagation front speed is slowed down a LOT due to the longer overall paths taken by bouncing off the sides - at the same time the phase front can appear to be travelling faster than light but it's an illusion)

Depending on how the signal is regenerated, each hop is going to add a few microseconds delay in the optical/radio -> electrical -> optical/radio transitions (and a few more if actual retiming is done).

Optical boost pumping in fibre isn't done this way and effectively doesn't have any time delays (the less electronics at the bottom of the sea the better) but the speed penalty of the medium is already a big penalty.

Re: Jamming

"In theory true. In practice not without the whole world knowing that you're doing it."

Jamming SW stations was easy because they were far away and normally on the third ionospheric skip whilst the jammers were local - and they weren't frequency-agile. In practice VoA and friends would change frequencies 4-5 times during the day and the jammers would take time to catch up.

Jamming a bunch of _moving_, frequency-agile comms satellites only 150 miles up is a different kettle of fish

Apart from "the world would know" - you'd need a LOT of jammers, and those "pizzabox size antennas" are likely to get both a lot smaller and a lot more hideable in a short period of time if this kind of game gets played.

You can make it illegal to possess a ground station, but enforcing that will be both difficult-to-impossible and likely to draw even more attention that you don't want (Myanmar, China, Venezula, etc)

Re: Nuts

There are vast swathes of the USA where there are legislated monopoly players - they got that way by bribing the regulators.

In a number of other of parts of the world the monopolies are there for "Other reasons" - but they're all feeling the pinch of Skylink being competition they can't shut down - and the service is actually a sideline for El MuskOx anyway.

The REAL money is in providing low latency links between stock exchanges. These LEO birds could provide time-of-flight almost half that of submarine cables between London/NY and even better percentages on longer paths. (light in glass is slowed down by over 2/3) - and the FCC filings for the laser comms systems on Skylink make it clear that's what is being chased (ultrarapid dynamically reconfigurable laser pathing between birds across oceans - a laser tag version of OSPF)

If Skylink can be the first player into the ultra low-latency market, Musk stands to make _trillions_ out of it, and could pretty much GIVE away the comms service whilst still paying for his mars ambitions - or sell it at a price so low it would force the monopoly players to be honest and drive some revolutions in the marketplace

Some examples of gouging: New Zealand, 1990s - 2Mb across town: $2000/month - 1.5Mb from San Francisco to Auckland - $9000/month. From Auckland to 160 miles down the road: $27,000/month

The DSL pricing across middle America today is similar and will stay that way until there's competition. YES, fibre/cable is cheaper, but telcos don't charge what it costs, they charge WHAT THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH and if they can shut down all the competition, they can get away with a lot.

In other parts of the world, the barriers are firewalls for information, etc etc. 6 layers of IPv4 NAT and no IPv6 is a strong dissuader to look outside your borders, etc.

Whirlybird-driving infosec boss fined after ranty Blackpool Airport air traffic control antics

Re: Contrary view

>> IF it was true that the controller was having semi-social chats with other pilots she knew while telling this pilot to "stand by"

Having sat both in ATC halls and in towers observing - if a controller is doing that, then they're shuffling stuff or waiting for a computer and can't actually DO anything - and if he was being pushy or a prick, then I can understand her not saying that the computers are being sluggish.

Of course pilots like this guy _DON'T_ spend time in controller spaces, so they don't know what goes on at the other end of the radio. It's a worthwhile experience for anyone training so they have a feeling for what's going on when things get busy.

Re: What a ...

>> I'm running on fumes" call

Handled very differently - including an investigation into WHY it was allowed to get to that point: IE: WHY the PIC didn't make a technical stop a long time before it got anywhere near that stage instead of pressing on regardless

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Re: Grrrr

"they only patch the first one. Then have to come back another time to do the second."

Councils only pay once per area of road. By doing it that way the contractors get paid multiple times.

It's a good old fashioned rort - they're SUPPOSED to do them all at once.

Getting holes repaired quickly

It seems the fastest way to get potholes fixed is to take a leaf from the books of Wanksy and the Cock Lane Crusader

http://wanksy.mycindr.com/

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/phantom-phallus-graffiti-crusader-strikes-7613001

They can't collect your bins or fix your roads. They let Google stalk visitors to their websites. Yes, it's UK local government

ICO.....

"The ICO's response was hardly inspiring. "

It's following government policy, based on who's paying the politicians. Shut up and eat your spam.

Trivial backdoor found in firmware for Chinese-built net-connected video recorders

Not Huawei

Not Huawei directly anyway.

The DVRs run on HiSilicon SoCs. HiSilicon is a Huawei company. The HiSilicon parts of this are full of GPL violations - I've complained to Huawei Europe about this several times but never managed to get any traction (more people need to be complaining)

The DVR part of the system is a monolithic binary called "Sofia" written by a company called XiongMai (XM EYE) - which is "interesting" to scroll through for the stuff that's been pulled into it - GPL violations galore and even some RSA private keys in there.

XiongMai have been screaming loudly about "Software Piracy" for some time - which is..... ironic.

And yes, this is typical shit pulled by companies when someone finds an open telnet - hide it instead of fixing it. It's not a "chinese" thing - I saw it lots of times in American ones too.

As for WHY XiongMai's DVR software is there - Huawei contracted them to create it on top of a Linux distro on the SoC - and it's the same stuff underlaying a huge number of brands (various stuff turned on or off for differing feature sets)

The Sofia binary needs a concerted reverse assembly project thrown at it, or even better some GPL project setup to replace it with a better OpenDVR on these HiSilicon SoCs (there's a Linux SDK available for them) - it's got definite Internet of Crap tendencies including building tunnels out to bypass NAT that will backdoor your security and expose your internal lan to the world if you are not careful, etc, as well as being only viewable with Internet Exploder(ActiveX) instead of using HTML5, etc.

The SOCs themselves are _VERY_ nice and cheap as chips, so putting secure auditable GPL software on them would be a winner all around.

El Reg tries – and fails – to get its talons on a Brexit tea towel

Re: Lesson learned?

"Shops can refuse to take the coins"

Shops can refuse to take cash, fullstop - and some do (card only)

Legal tender is only required to be accepted to settle a debt, not as payment for a transaction.

Re: Lesson learned?

Coins are only legal tender up to limits set in the coinage act 1971 (20p for 1&2p coins) and there are limits in law on the maximum "debt" any given denomination can be used to pay (for a payment, cash can be refused entirely)

Above those limits a creditor can refuse it - this has been upheld in court on several occasions and the debtor ordered to pay using more suitable currency

https://www.royalmint.com/help/trm-faqs/legal-tender-amounts/

"Coins" in this context are also banknotes.

Re: Sadly, you cannot do the drying up with delight on the big day itself.

" Johnson's big project fails to deliver and all I got was this lousy tea towel."

He's an unhip non-frood who doesn't know where my towel is.

Re: A perfect demonstration of eccentric British understatement

"which could easily sour relationships with important trading partners such as China, New Zealand, Australia and the US."

China TOLD the UK it was better off being in the EU.

New Zealand and Australia (plus Canada) cacked themselves laughing at the suggestion of CANZUK, stopped laughing when they realised it was a serious suggestion and then doubled down on the howls.

The UK might have been an important trading partner once - but there's a solid reason that landrover went from 90% of the 4WD market to less than 2% in 18 months when Australians could get their hands on Landcruisers, or why British cars went from ~40% of the NZ market to under 3% in the same period when Japanese cars were able to be imported with the same tariff as British ones (and they were still significantly more expensive than the British ones) - or why when GM tried to relaunch "Vauxhall" in New Zealand, not even company reps would be seen dead in the cars until the entire shipment was rebadged as Opels (2 out of a shipment of 1000 Vectras were sold as Vauxhalls....)

The UK is a tiny country, with very little of interest (that it makes itself) to sell Australia or New Zealand and it's STILL using its position in the global Copyright Cartels to make certain items imported to those countries cost 3-20 times as much as they do in the USA or EU, whilst US magazines can take 8 months to arrive (or not arrive at all) due to being forced to travel via London. It's not seen in the best light as it is and that's not going to change in a hurry without some major refoms that are unlikely to happen whilst the British hold onto the whole "Brittania" and exceptionalism myth.

The UK pays out ~72% of its net tax income in state pensions and pension top ups with another 8-10% going out in other welfare payments. Business is sufficiently spooked that a good chunk of the ones who contribute to the taxation bottom line are moving out (the car industry is pretty much gone, and financials are looking about 60% moved out). Johnson has already (quietly) announced what amounts to a 25% cutback in state pensions for couples and I expect it will get a lot worse. I'm pretty sure that virtually all EAMA HQs will move out of the UK too.

Welcome to North Elbonia. Please try our delicious Mud and pay no attention to the McElbonians.

Re: A perfect demonstration of eccentric British understatement

"I think you're looking at the wrong demographic"

I grew up on the other side of the world in one of the colonies.

Britain has a long history of breaking deals, demanding special concessions and screwing its trading partners over - one of the things that virtually all members of the commonwealth have in common is that they got shafted by Britain at least once - and the ones that stuck with up to 1973 ended up facing 20-30 years of serious social and financial upheavals when they were unceremoniously dumped into the Big Bad World as the UK tore up its last vestiges of empire to join the Common Market.

The Empire itself really ceased to exist in 1940 - Churchill handed everything over to the USA - the gold reserves, control of the high seas, the international trading currency, etc etc as part of the terms of the Lend-lease agreement (one of the biggest peaceful power transfers in history) and it was locked in with Bretton Woods after WW2. Brittania got the reminder rather forcefully chiselled into her forehead that nothing happened without USA permission with Suez and TSR2 (even the Falklands wouldn't have gone off if the USA had said no)

As a colonial, what we saw was a very long stream of underqualified, overentitled brits showing up on our shores expecting to be paid more than qualified locals, for doing less than locals - and usually to a far lower quality and with a piss-poor attitude attitude to customer service whilst expecting us to be grateful that they'd come over to gift us with their mighty British Presence - which you can imagine gets short shrift most places. (There are a lot of decent people too)

British Exceptionalism and "Superiority" has been drilled into the national psyche - It's why Britain is tolerated but not _liked_ (and why "Made in the UK" became a warning label synonymous with "utter shit inside") - the USA is simply doing it bigger and better these days.

With that kind of Jingoism and constant running down of Johnny Furriner it's no wonder the poorly educated believe they're better off out of the EU. Having lived through "Small country has to try and establish itself in the Big Bad World", I KNOW how bad it's going to get - and am making plans to hit the eject button, or put a few Brexiters in the freezer.

Re: Deliveries [..] won't start until the week commencing 10 February

"And the FT is still running articles on things...."

The FT was one of the first "respectable" outfits to start spamming in the 1990s and they refused to take the many clues they were handed that cost-shifting their advertising was a spectacularly bad idea.

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Re: What he said

"He over-rode me and ordered me to produce a copy for the PFY.

....Once I saw what the PFY was doing...

....I was told I had a personal grudge...

....it was beginning to look like a systematic swindle to the auditors...

....The PFY left a few days later."

Except it wasn't JUST the PFY who should have left - and with a correspondance trail handed to the auditors, it wouldn't have been.

That 'CFO' was (and is) a liability to the company.

Re: Perhaps....

>> (Management resists allotting hours for fixings things that "already work").

A couple of "anonymous" hints to the auditors can be handy in such instances

"I left the company after my entire team were made redundant. I had a redundancy date 'pencilled in' and pushed back several months in a row, yet my software was still in active use in several teams. I have no idea what happened to my software after that."

You warned them - meaning you discharged your responsibility. What happened after that point isn't your problem or your liability, but I'd make DAMNED sure I kept copies of the correspondence.

WannaCry ransomware attack on NHS could have triggered NATO reaction, says German cybergeneral

Re: It's all in history

"China, for all the punch lines they have become, aren't stupid."

That whooshing sound was the point flying above your head.

China is so RIDDLED with attackable systems that it's used as the jumping off point for attacks on the world _BY_ the world and its dog (especially the Unicom network)

Very few of the attacks coming FROM Chinese network space have actual honest to goodness Chinese origins and this is compounded by the same mentality that sees train crash carriages hastily buried in trenches complete with victims inside, or doctors reporting the beginnings of a Coronavirus outbreak arrested and charged with public order offences - public officials not only utterly refuse to acknowledge they have problems, they actively shoot the messengers, so things don't get fixed until there's a massive clusterfuck already in progress.

Militaries tend to cooperate with each other on international basis' a lot more effectively than civil police groups do - even notional "enemies" do, mainly because they can't afford for mistakes to get out of control - which means that tracking down organised crime gangs would be a lot easier - and those gangs are a lot closer to home than you realise. Follow the money.

Police investigation of "cyber" anything is getting better but they're hampered by the noxious habit of putting their hands up in the air and dropping it in the too-hard basket as soon as it crosses a border instead of seeing where the rabbit hole leads. (Bury St Edmonds in one case, and that only got enthusiasm because the twit in question targetted the police themselves)

Re: NATO response

"If we retaliated against each individual server, we'd cause mayhem in those 70-odd countries, while missing the fact that the C&C's are all in Turkey."

That's the big issue - but of course someone always gloa

ts.

That said - there are relatively strong supporting arguments for knocking out systems being used in a DDoS - amongst which being that it's a virtually guaranteed way of getting the attention of those who own the box and maybe getting it actually fixed.

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

Re: How easy it is to fool

" This guy did it as a prank and probably caused little harm. What if he had been malicious ?"

It strikes me as a hell of a way to game Waze and other apps that cause Rat Running down suburban streets.

Re: Ingenious

"walk his 50 phones *faster* than the traffic on the 405"

No, get William Shatner to do it.