Posts by Alan Brown

Cool 'joke', bro, you could have killed someone: Epilepsy Foundation sics cops on sick flashing-light Twitter trolls

"Or put developers of 90s games into prison."

After the events of a certain 1990s Pokemon episode, where a couple of Japanese TV producers almost DID go to prison, games developers and cartoon producers were _extremely_ careful to stay away from certain flash rates and colour combinations.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/18/world/tv-cartoon-s-flashes-send-700-japanese-into-seizures.html

This was kind-of known before 1997 (7Hz strobes were known to trigger some people back in the 80s when I was playing with lighting and many pieces of hit had lockouts or warnings to avoid particular ranges of flash frequencies) but became a major study after that event because it was found that a lot of people were set of who previously showed no sensitivity to flashing would get triggered by flashing colours.

And yes, if you setup flashing lights which injure people - even unintentionally, you CAN go to jail in many countries.

Re: mailing a rabid bat or rattlesnake

Only because nobody ever suggested naming a country "Macedonia"

Post Office faces potential criminal probe over Fujitsu IT system's accounting failures

Re: Court admin

"although the pay is so bad you'd think that was the case"

And this is the problem right across the entire public service spectrum, resulting in skilled people walking out for the sake of their sanity.

If anyone's seen "Brazil", it's worse than that in many areas.

Re: Ooooh first post....

" It's almost as if a Conservative government only cares about Brexit."

They don't even care about that.

Queen Bloris has been telling all and sundry that he has a deal all ready to go after elected - and as predicted promptly dumped "No Deal" back on the table.

1980s Albania here we come.

And now for this evening's space weather report. We've got a hotspot of satellite-wrecking 'killer electrons' in the outer Van Allen belt...

Re: Born Free - Space Radicals ;-)

"our network was being crashed by solar radiation"

Time to break out the water shielding (aka wet blankets)

Re: Explore at your peril

"That's the works of Lord Asriel and his experimental theology, I'd dare say"

Lord Asriel and his Prime Starfish

Buzz kill: Crook, 73, conned investors into shoveling millions into geek-friendly caffeine-loaded chocs that didn't exist. Now he's in jail

Re: I don't get it...

"It would make more sense for Monster or another larger company to buy an established player"

The "trick" is for the startup to run an advertising blitz so it becomes well-known for long enough that Monster buys it for the brand recognition just as the bills come due.

It's been done on several occasions.

Deadly 737 Max jets no longer a Boeing concern – for now: Production suspended after biz runs out of parking space

Re: Is it a good idea ...?

"redesigning a taller undercarriage to accommodate the new, bigger engines in their proper place would be awfully expensive as well as adding weight, which reduces payload capacity."

Not at all. Such an aircraft already existed. It was called the Boeing 757 and works extremely well, as well as having greater payload capacity because it has engines with much BIGGER fans than can possibly fit under a B737's wings and are much more efficient.

The problem was, it isn't a Boeing 737 and pilots need 757 cockpit certification, ground handling crew need 757 certification, service crew need 757 certification, gates need resetting to different heights etc.

"It must be airliner design 101 to have multiple redundancy in all control systems -- but MCAS has no redundancy at all."

It's worse than that.

MCAS uses angle of attack sensors - 2 of them.

Except that it was setup to use a different ONE on each flight - and whilst the flight software could tell that the AOA sensors were giving different readings (even if MCAS was only using one for input), it was an $80,000 option to have this information actually display a warning message (not a dedicated light, just an information message) on the instrumentation LCD - which most airlines didn't bother with as an "option" it's not exactly something that seems essential to a beancounter.

On top of that, if you use 2 sensors on an aircraft, if they disagree all you know is that they disagree, not which one is correct. Critical sensors normally use 3 or another odd number (as with computer clusters, to avoid splitbrains)

Re: "... anti-stall – sorry, plane pedants hate it when we call it that..."

"Indeed, many fighter planes are also unstable."

This is very much the difference. Civil transport aircraft aren't supposed to BE dynamically unstable under any reasonable circumstances(*), let alone need software/hardware to correct it, or special recovery procedures.

The largest 737NG was _ALREADY_ dynamically unstable (ever increasing stall characteristics) and as such should have been the absolute end of the line.

(*) Deep stalling of a T-tail is an extreme condition well beyond any kind of normal flying - on civil transports usually only ever encountered in extreme handling tests.

Re: Rebranding exercise

if you fly Ryanair, you can never be sure, air to be sure.

Re: Rebranding exercise

"Ryanair's undelivered aircraft have been photographed carrying the model name 737-8200 "

Which is the aircraft's technical designation anyway. MAX8 is/was the marketing name.

Re: Rebranding exercise

"I'm sure a responsible regulator like the FAA would be amenable to calling it something completely different to 737, but grandfathering in 737 type approval."

Wouldn't matter. What happened merely allowed the other agencies around the world to say out loud what everyone already knew.

EASA, CAA and CASA are not going to let the FAA mark their own homework anymore (although the Japanese might).

Boeing's scored itself a fine tooth comb inspection of the 737MAX testing procedure and microscopic oversight of the 777X tests which have caused _its_ costs to start ballooning virtually uncontrollably - and that's well before the reinspection of everything related to the 787 gets underway.

"when they got caught with their pants down by the Airbus A320neo?"

Not that they needed to: The Boeing 7J7 was developed and then shelved in 1989 for one very simple reason: It wasn't a 737

Boeing already had it and the 757 able to step into where the 737MAX operates. It was AIRLINES who demanded this aircraft. MCAS was an attempt to ensure it flew like older 737s - avoiding needing a supplemental type certificate. However Boeing utterly screwed the pooch on the software and implementation of the system hardware.

MAXes will fly again - quite possibly with MCAS disabled by regulation in EU airspace - and it's quite likely that pilots will have to have supplementary type certification to fly it - which wipes out every single piece of commercial advantage that Boeing (and airlines) expected to gain from rat rodding the airframe one last time.

NGs already have undesireable handling characteristics near stall meaning pilots have to put the stick forward and and _wait_ until the nose is actually down before throttling up (this goes against every bit of stall training given in other aircraft up to this point). MAXes had it in spades plus excessive throttle-related pitch changes in normal flight - and MCAS was supposed to prevent the latter.

(This is quite apart from the other scandals involving Boeing parts suppliers falsifying documentation for substandard (handmade, well out of spec, not CNC milled) NG parts and Boeing assembly lines beating the shit out of them and the skins to make the things fit, then falsifying _their_ paperwork and painting over the damage before sending them down the line for final assembly. This happened in the late1990s-early00's and the FAA helped Boeing cover it up, including shitting all over the whistleblowers - 3rd generation Boeing employees)

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

"who the hell needs 700GB of RAM?"

Anyone editing large 4k video files for starters - which is one of the target markets for these machines

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Re: Pardon?

"I started mentally composing a strong warning against inserting paperclip wire in your ear..."

If you insert it too far, you WILL reset youself to factory presets

Re: And this is why...

"For the average Eurolock"

Except the ones which have specfic protection against this - and cost a whole pound extra.

Re: And this is why...

"Those rack locks are trivial to pick"

Almost all of them only use 3 key patterns. Why use a pick?

Re: Not his fault really

"Each one of those datacenters was the source of one of those stories"

EVERY SINGLE DATACENTRE I have had to deal with has been installed with unprotected BRBs

and it usually takes stand up screaming arguments with the beancounters to get that sorted.

(locking them in the server room and pushing the gas discharge button is a last resort but oh so tempting)

Re: Not his fault really

"You are supposed look around and be careful with your protruding body parts while wheeling a trolley"

Lesson one: If it can be whacked by a passing body part or trolley part, it WILL be whacked by a passing body part or trolley part. Plan accordingly.

Lesson two: If whacking said item will cause a claimable injury, then you will get a claim and your insurers will gripe at you. Again - plan accordingly.

Lesson three: Someone will ALWAYS go "what does this button do?" whilst pressing it, unless it is under a protective cover of some sort that can't be broken by simply walking into it (see #1) very clearly labelled what it does, how much pressing it will cost and that there's a camera monitoring it.

Re: Dont have your machine room at the top of a building

Not being under the main water tank for the building is also good advice.

And CHECK the build if you can, because even if the original spec is NO WATER PIPES IN THIS AREA WHATSOEVER, you may find the architect has ignored this requirement and every single piece of plumbing passes through the ceiling space of your data store (This happened. The people concerned "no longer work for the company", but that didn't get rid of the unwanted plumbing)

Re: Dont have your machine room at the top of a building

80% peroxide..... that reminds me.

There was an incident on the M25 some years back involving a shipment of 85-90% peroxide on a lorry full of other stuff. Some might remember it for the reports of blue buckets strewn across the motorway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4197500.stm

The peroxide in question was jetpack fuel...

Re: Dont have your machine room at the top of a building

"There was a 4 month outage all because some insulation on a screen was starting to smoke."

Yup. there's got to be some level of "sense" about when you want the gas system to fire.

Inergen systems are reputed to be about $5k a bottle, and that's apart from the other costs(*) - I tend to get quite paranoid about loose crap under the floor - especially drilling debris and insist that all areas worked on are thoroughly vacuumed afterwards. I've had contractors regularly gripe about me being anally retentive and how noone will ever see it, why does it matter, etc

(*) I think we've all seen the "don't shout at your drives" video

Canada's .ca supremo in hot water after cyber-smut stash allegedly found on his work Mac ‒ and three IT bods fired

Re: Wrongful Termination

"At the point of firing and NDA, I'd pause and go get a lawyer."

Even in the USA (and especially in Canada) you can't NDA something illegal or contract out of a legal requirement.

In most places, attempting to (or suceeding in) force an employee to sign a NDA to cover up unlawful activity or to contract out of legal requirements becomes a criminal matter and the employee is held utterly blameless in the matter as the company is deemed to hold all the cards.

Re: Do you think

"This North American fear of nudity is bizarre."

You mean Bibble Belt USAian. Canucks are a _lot_ more tolerant.

if it was bad enough to raise eyebrows in a Canadian company it would be bad enough to raise eyebrows in a French or German one

HOWEVER: This comes under misuse of company resources and abuse of staff.

As a non-profit there are strict rules about use of company equipment for personal purposes and as a company there are even stricter ones about exposing staffers to unsavoury images.

CEOs are not immune to such charges. He's not an "Owner", he's an "Employee" - more importantly he's an officer of the company, with a high level of trust implied that he won't misbehave with company time or hardware.

On the kind of salary being paid to afford to go to places like Hedonism Inc you can afford your own fucking equipment to store your home-made porn, and yet it's virtually ALWAYS this kind of C-level twit who seems to think they can treat company equipment as personal property - it's not.

Re: Do you think

"And assuming the employees got paid off, they are also out of a company that willingly sacrifices employees to protect senior people."

Which - now it's come out - is now known to do this.

There are now a lot of ethical companies which won't touch anyone above PFY level from CIRA with someone else's ten-foot bargepole. Many of them might well have a legal claim of employment taint against CIRA.

FUSE for macOS: Why a popular open source library became closed source and commercially licensed

Re: A bit of a "metoo" here ...

"mostly because of the people who would just wrap my code into their big project without offering their end-users support, but telling them to go to me for support."

There's always the Eudora model (free software, support via contract)

The problem with this is that if you're doing this, you _really_ need to pay attention to what the endusers want and deal with the bug reports. Writing things off as "not a problem" or "works for me" doesn't sit well with paying customers.

Not overly surprising.

I was informed one of my projects saved one company alone in excess of $90million - so I asked if they'd mind tossing a few bucks at the development hardware so I didn't have to keep scrounging around on scrapheap junk and being heavily in debt.

Answer (of course) being "nope".

There were a number of such stories.

Not to mention regularly finding my work (and other GPLed stuff) stuffed inside proprietary blobs with Big Scary Copyright Claims on them.

Huawei with your rural subsidies ban: Chinese comms bogeyman fires sueball at US regulator

Re: Forcing EU to choose sides

" It seems the US primary interest is selling overpriced, outdated Telco gear and military hardware."

Not quite. It's mercantilist/monopolist dominance of the marketplace, where the government and private industry become hard to tell apart - think of the way the UK government and the East India Company became so heavily tied together that when the EIC was hitting its third bankruptcy, it was able to get laws passed allowing it to bypass England and directly export untaxed tea from India to Massachusetts (with import taxes exempted too - which made a bunch of Bostonian tea smugglers who had large stores kept in canadian warehouses cross enough to put on fancy dress and have a party in the harbour...)

American colonial ambitions are likely to run into a similar fate sooner or later.

Re: Get your head on!

"Huawei are not in league with anyone, their kit is just so insecure world+dog could get in wothout too much effort."

Huawei are _far_ from the only company with this issue.

One of the less amusing aspects of all this: If folks recall the big "hacking Huawei kit" presentations about 6 years ago - looking more closely at the switched and routers in question showed the unmistakable syntax of Comware - remembering that Huawei and 3com had a licensing agreement for a while.

Sure enough, checking showed the exact same sets of vulnerabilities that were in the presentation were present in 3Com kit. HOWEVER, they _weren't_ in Huawei's Wind River Linux VRP-cored kit (essentially everything since 2011) but those SAME vulnerabilities started showing up in comware-based HP equipment.

Very much a case of "Huawei's kit is full of holes, and we should know, because we sold the holes to them"

Onestream slammed for 'slamming' vulnerable and elderly folk: That's £35k to Ofcom, please

Re: pathetic

The fine is levied by Ofcom - and is additional to (and in no way precludes) any private legal action by victims.

The fact that the fines have been levied by Ofcom is more than sufficient level of proof for civil courts.

Re: Only 30k?

10% of _turnover_ is 30k?

That means we're talking about a "telco" with around 5000 "customers" (if that)

Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese

Re: *Standing, thunderous, rowdy ovation*

"they let people weave their own nooses one antisocial fiber at a time until the state decides to hoist their self-made noose."

AKA: If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him (Cardinal Richilieu)

It's an ancient and honourable tradition.

China fires up 'Great Cannon' denial-of-service blaster, points it toward Hong Kong

Re: Fuck China

WRT "sneaky folks" - the thing they're _most_ afraid of is publicity.

It's going to be "interesting" to see what China (and other control-freak countries) do when it's a simple matter of pointing a - nearly impossible to detect - skylink antenna at passing LEO birds. Threatening to shoot them down wouldn't go down well with a large number of other countries thanks to Mr Kessler.

Re: Fuck China

"Not they're anything to do with Hong Kong and won't bring much manufacturing back to the US. But they might move some of it to Vietnam or Indonesia."

The stuff that CAN move out already moved out years ago. Chinese workers are as expensive as American ones. This is one of the reasons they're hurting.

Trump's tariffs and belligerence are providing the Chinese leadership with an _excuse_ to keep acting out and means they can point a finger at him. The soybean issue was beyond the chinese leadership control anyway (it's hard to convince pig farmers to keep buying soybeans when their pigs are dying off en-masse - you don't buy food for non-existent animals - and if China _chose_ to "let" its raging swine flu (more like swine ebola) epidemic get into the USA the game would be over in less than a week)

Re: No Internet for You

"China holds sovereign authority within its own borders."

Be that as it may, "other countries" hosting DDoS networks have found themselves entirely depeered until they started behaving - which is usually a matter of hours if not less.

Re: How charming....

Only if you allow all javascript

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Re: Wrong Buttons...

"There is something in the GUI that adds gravity to icons that shouldn't be clicked"

One of the trendy new jobs is "UI designer"

Which - when you think about it - means that someone DELIBERATELY chose to put those clicky buttons next to each other....

May the fleas of 1000 camels infest their crotches.

Re: Wrong Buttons...

"I once had a 350mile round trip because someone in our support department clicked "shutdown" instead of "reboot" on a windows server on a customer site. "

All these tales of servers without IPMIs or IP-connected KVMs......

*sigh*

Re: From Experience (and In Hindsight)...

I called mine "percyguards" - percy was a cat who had a knack of knocking reset buttons.

Homeland Security backs off on scanning US citizens, Amazon ups AI ante, and more

Re: "extending the process to include American citizens was too risky"

"But treating every tourist like a potential terrorist isn't ?"

Exactly this - and exactly what's been costing the USA a large (and increasing) chunk of travel/tourism revenue as more and more people who can route around the USA choose to do so.

Remember the hidebound cronyism and bureaucracy built into US govt institutions

"Director" or "Executive" is a political position. "Deputy" are the career people - the ones with the _actual_ power.

Feds slap $5m bounty on 'Evil Corp' Russian duo accused of running ZeuS, Dridex banking trojans

They must have decided these guys are untouchable

As we've seen in the past, if there was a hope in hell of actually catching them, the feds would have sealed the indictments and kept names under wraps until they had their mitts on the crooks.

Of course with a $5million bounty there's always a possibility they may be delivered - trussed up like turkeys - to a US border checkpoint by someone wanting to collect. The fact that they've had to _offer_ that kind of bounty even after "Russian authorities have cooperated" pretty much underscores their untouchability.

Doogee Wowser: The S40's a terrible smartphone, but a passable projectile

Re: And with any luck ...

"Sadly, however, in today's world the kid teaching the lesson will be vilified by the adults, and the bully will be coddled & cured and thus will instead learn that bullying is OK."

Unfortunately yes. This is usually what happens when the victim finally snaps, fights back and hurts the bully for a change.

These days the bully's mates(*) are usually filming the events and share the footage though - which means that they usually end up being caught and dealt with properly

(*) One of the defining characteristics of bullies is that they almost ALWAYS run in packs

Re: There was a time....

"They missed with unerring accuracy."

That, and the eraser embedded in the rear wall of the classroom were cause for "respect" for certain teachers (one of whom I had great respect for, for other reasons - he was a fantastic engineer)

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

Blaming the wrong company

Leaving bad reviews for Yodel, etc is of no use whatsoever.

YOU ARE NOT THE CUSTOMER.

YOU HAVE NO CONTRACT WITH YODEL/WHOEVER

YODEL/WHOEVER DO NOT CARE

Your contract is with the supplier.

If they choose to use a shitty delivery company, that's between them and the shitty delivery company.

The poor review MUST go to the company YOU have the contract with - the supplier.

A few rotten reviews based on shitty couriers will have far more effect on who they choose as courier than any amount of wastes air complaining at Yodel - and any attempt to deflect your complaint _to_ Yodel can be short circuited very quickly by pointing out that distance selling laws put the onus on the SELLER to sort this out, not the receiver (or the courier) - and quickly too.

Pointing out that a recording of the call will accompany the credit card chargeback complaint usually has an electrifying effect.

Let THEM sort out the delivery issues. It's their contract, not yours.

(and letting them know that a GDPR complaint will accompany the use of Yodel will have a similar effect)

" they kept trying to deliver on different days than I had arranged to be home to wait for it."

You are legally allowed to bill them for this kind of thing. It usually wakes them up.

"PF are under Royal Mail rules"

That would be the PF who regularly lose packages, can bend even the best packed servers and are well documented as having managed to have had "lost" parcels show up 400 miles from where they're supposed to be?

"A lot of PF's reputation is because people expect them to act like Yodel, Hermes and such. "

According to my CCTV recordings, they're even worse than Yodel/Hermes/etc - at least those couriers usually wait a minimum 15-20 seconds at the door before buggering off.

"I heard the van pull up outside, got a card saying sorry you were'nt in and the van drove off within 15 secs before I'd even managed to get to the front door......"

I have CCTV over my front door.

On several occasions it's recorded deliverers walking up with a card in hand and shoving it through the mailbox without bothering to knock (or shoving the card through _before_ knocking and walking away)

Royal Mail are just as bad as the couriers.

Re: he was told there was "no security problem"

"Lets hope there is a big GDPR fine"

That implies competence and political will at the ICO