Posts by John Smith 19

OVH goes TITSUP again while trying to fix its last TITSUP

"something to which answering questions from customers does not usually contribute."

Except in the sense that ignoring customers when you're company has f**ked up is a good way to ensure they stop wanting to be your customers.

And if enough of them do so with your business then pretty soon you're not going to be needed anymore.

Keeping customers (internal or external) informed should be part of any generic "S**t-hits-the-fan" DR plan. IT should not have to do it but there should be some kind of SITREP process that can be used to inform customers and someone on both ends of it who deals with it.

Let's be real. S**t will hit the fan. Anyone who's thinking "That never happens to us" is deluding themselves. It has simply never happened to you yet. So fail to plan or plan to fail.

The search for the 'next billion' users also targets the first billion

"The Registe..aware of Asian nations..the likes of WhatsApp have become utterly ubiquitous"

OMFG.

Regional variations still exist in software preferences.

No doubt Google will try to stamp that out ASAP moving to their new global monoculture.

And what's this first seen in India?

You'd think a company with a global presence would have tools that auto customize to non-English speaking countries.

Oh, I forgot.

They are from California.

VW's US environment boss gets seven years for Dieselgate scam

PHB's need more stimulus to do the right thing. Jail time seems to be it.

You have to wonder how high these people would score on the PCL-R.

My guess. 30+ easy.

Google prepares 47 Android bug fixes, ten of them rated Critical

" they could have anticipated planned obsolescence for profit by phone manufacturers "

What makes you think they didn't? And if they didn't, why should they care?

As MS taught them Android is "good enough" to get most of the market they want.

Because Androids core goal is not to provide OS services.

It's to slurp your data. And that functionality works just fine in all versions.

All else is merely a side effect.

Did you unwittingly support the destruction of net neutrality rules?

Does this mean the NY DA has evidence of large scale identity theft?

Because it sort of looks that way.

I'd also call that an interfering with a Federal decision making process, which I'm guessing is a Federal crime of some sort as well (at least if it's as blatant as this seems to be).

"Not really. My name was used, but not with my real address."

Sounds like the thin end of an identity theft to me.

Did you report it?

Sprint calls out Charter with chat-patent sueball

Hmm. Most of these seem to refer to Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

That's a network standard of exactly 48 bytes (or "octets" in telecomm standards speak) for low, constant latency transmission of voice.

Who actually uses ATM today?

Don't US patents expire after 20 years? Have they been renewed?

Smells like a patent troll to me.

Dentist-turned bug-biter given a taste of freedom

It's the "naming FBI officicals on FB" bit that gets him the "cyberstalker" tag.

But if you found a route into a system that handles patient information with no security and you told the company about it and they called the FBI maybe you'd be a bit pi**ed off as well?

Top tip.

Don't directly name Law Enforcement Officials.

It's obvious this SW company is clearly very thin skinned and has very poor disclosure handling processes in place. Clearly some PHB can't cope with any level of criticism.

Samsung starts cranking out 512GB eUFS storage

Wow. Stripping the active layer off 64 chips and stacking them together..

And they are all still working together afterward

Impressive.

But an OS that demands an LTE connection to work despite 512GB of local storage?

Not very impressive.

Ofcom just told BT to up its game on fibre investment

A simple question. How do other countries in Europe do it better?

Obviously some do it worse.

But how do those that do it better, y'know, do it?

Are they really just smaller (in population and surface area)?

Or are there incentives that encourage the telcos/ISPs (when they have a choice) to go fibre over Copper?

Because it does not look like Ofcom are cutting it.

"Anybody who think's that is unfair should consider..Virginmedia..not some plucky upstart,"

Quite true.

It's been suggested there should be a central "infrastructure fund" that all providers pay into. You want access to the ducts you pay into it, and all ducts are in the fund. A trickier question would be should the companies pay for access to their own ducts?

But perhaps a better idea might be to study how the Spanish got this funded?

What form of telecomms governance has allowed them to progress so much further and faster?

BTW IIRC Spain is considerably bigger than the UK and has considerably lower average population density.

As the singularity approaches, neural network pens black metal album

Well it beats being tortured by Justin beiber

With an icon like that we know you love the Bieber.

Wear your gimp mask with pride. :-)

Re: The singularity ...... is not really approaching, is it?

Not today it isn't.

Although IIRC there's a computer generated scene from a (virtual) cowboy movie in Knuth's AOCP

Given this stuff seems good at generating "art" in a certain genre I'm frankly gobsmocked no one has already done the computer generated written pron, for which I'm told there is much online source material available.

UK government bans all Russian anti-virus software from Secret-rated systems

"Yet oddly the CVEs between different versions are suspiciously similar."

Now the interesting question is are there similar bugs between versions that are meant to be on different sides of this "complete-rewrite-from-the-ground-up" claim?

If they are are not then it would suggest that there was indeed a root-and-branch shift in the code base.

OTOH if there are commonalities that would suggest the claim was just so much BS.

"Hopefully, those OS makers never come up with the idea of secure-by-design systems,"

Remind me again...

Which version of Windows was supposed to be a from-the-ground-up redesign after the whole dev team had been training on "secure coding"?

Like so much of Microsoft's products it looks like something that has certain abilities, but actually does not.

"The issue is "Trusting Trust",

Exactly

I have suggested that if you really wanted to do this you'd have to start with a processor IS of your own design (built of parts too simple to hide a processor in), hand assemble an open source assembler, then have built the tool (open source) tool chain from there.

Which just sounds exhausting

Because it is. :-(

Doing a security, anti virus or encryption company properly starts with where it's legally based, since it's clear that many governments no longer seem to accept that strong AV/Security/Encryption benefits the 99.75%* of the population much more than the 0.0025% of potential terrorists.

*MI5 stated a few years ago they had 1500 potential terrorist suspects they were watching, in a country of 60 million people IE 0.0025%. It's unknown how many (if any) did attempt to commit a terrorist act.

"The issue of supply chain risk in cloud-based products,"

Orr to give it a more meaningful description "anonymous server farms in unknown jurisdictions"

So a pretty stupid option for anything where national security tasks are involved. No?

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

"16.999 km/s (in Standard International units)"

That's about Mach 49 (for reference Earth orbital velocity is about M23).

OTOH that's 0.0056% of the speed of light.

However in principal systems can be engineered (no breakthroughs in physics, including fusion, needed) that could get to 5% of the speed of light.

RSA coughs to critical-rated bug in its authentication SDK

" Who could possibly gain from this ?"

Probably the same people who benefited from having a lower security encryption algorithm set up as the default?

RSA are starting to look very TLA friendly.

And that's not a good thing given their core business.

WD to move all its stuff to RISC-V processors, build some kind of super data-wrangling stack

"modern ME (from PCH100 onwards) is a modified 486"

Noted.

I had wondered if the poor security was a result of a less common ISA and limited software pool to cut and paste from.

But in fact the IME software came from the ISA almost every PC on the planet.

BTW isn't the Intel Management ENgine one of these as well?

Let's hope it's a different development team that that bunch of code monkeys.

All that is old is young again.

Didn't ICL do a "Content Addressable Memory" disk drive back in the 70's?

AIUI it worked quite well within the limits of the technology in letting you pull big subsets of records off while ignoring the others on the disk, provided the DBMS could take advantage (which of course only ICL's system could).

So not a bad idea but very tricky to sell without the customers feeling a very strong sense of proprietary lock in, whatever the processor in the drive is.

Guilty: NSA bloke who took home exploits at the heart of Kaspersky antivirus slurp row

Malware developer runs AV on his M/C. AV discovers malware & reports it back to base.

Obviously a goal of malware development would be when your current version runs without the AV reporting back to base.

But that's more an "acceptance test" the malware is ready for use.

And you wouldn't actually let the AV report back to base in the first place.

Because that would be kind of stupid.

US politicos wake up to danger of black-box algorithms shaping all corners of American life

It's the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Isn't "Computer says no" something from the 70's?

And should be left there.

what you reall mean is

"Is our profit optimizing algorithm has chewed through shedloads of data and found a bunch of parameters which maximized our profit (with that data set). We don't care what the parameters are and we don't care if they seem unfair."

Say hello to "Social Darwinism" in the 21st century. *

*Where privileged White males were declared as the "natural leaders" of society on the grounds that they were the leaders of society, with "evidence" from IQ tests written by other privileged White males

Oracle rival chides UK councils for pricey database indulgence

"We refused to pay the bill and Oracle could not even provide a list of what we'd bought"

"In the end we gave them a list of what we used after performing an internal audit."

That's more like how such negotiations (and it is a negotiation, your money versus their hassle) should be conducted.

If it wasn't a multi $Bn company you'd actually bought software off of it sounds a lot like a version of the "pro forma invoice" scam, not unlike the old "Readers Digest" nonsense.

S/W companies have astonishing data management practices. I've seen very high end development environments where the "contact" listed was the CFO who'd signed the contract.

They had no f**king clue who within IT used it, or who was in charge of IT. All they had kept was the CFO name, which was often years out of date.

"falls to the License Management Services team –.. and the optimization team. "

That is in the sense of "optimize" as in "Optimize the amount of money you're going to pay us."

I am also surprised "only" 70 get their license fees jacked up.

TBH a fair chunk of this s**t should be foreseen up front but they may have bought the DB decades ago.

Oracle sounds like a big ticket item that underlies a shedload of stuff at most of these councils. IOW finding ways to minimize what they can sting you for and uninstall unnecessary parts of it could pay off big time. It is therefor a strategic issue worthy of CTO level scrutiny.

High-freq trade biz sues transatlantic ISP for alleged spiteful cable cut

" and the electronics at either end can increase the "speed of light"."

When you know that HFT companies have spent (literally) $Bn to ensure their servers are in the same room as the stock exchange servers they are linked to cut the nanoseconds of delay between their offices and the stock exchange offices several thousand kilometres means they are not even in the game.

Unfortunately the NYSE board is controlled by big banks who have their own HFT

There are other exchanges.

For anyone who wants a crash course in flash crashes..

start here

Frankly I'm astonished you can "HFT" from across the atlantic due to signal delay.

Or has the speed of light gotten faster in FO cables?

"It doesn't "rob" other participants in the market - "

Bulls**t.

Most HFT is basically an automated man-in-the-middle attack against actual buyers and sellers.

There is little or no "risk." In fact there is so little risk (and so little reserve in their accounts) that if HFT do have to honor any proportion of the trades they run (and cancel) in order to probe the market they usually go bankrupt.

Will you be on Cloud9? AWS emits cloudy code editor it nabbed last year

"there's now Alexa for Business"

Yeay for that.

The perfect end for a bad week.

TBH I've been underwhelmed by (allegedly) language aware editors for years.

Javascript based and "Cloud" (or to give it a more meaningful description "anonymous server farms in unknown jurisdictions") based as well. My f**king my, be still my beating heart.

Counting the hours to "Beer O'Clock"

That 70s Show: Windows sprouts Sets and Timeline features

" Oh so THAT'S what Hypercard was for "

It also let artists program.

Programming "for the rest of us" to steal a phrase.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Russian hacker thrown in US slammer for $59m bank fraud

Should have spent more on a good lawyer.

First offense

No guns.

No drugs (directly) involved.

White offender.

And since when does the "CEO" of anything ever go to jail in America?

UK.gov admits Investigatory Powers Act illegal under EU law

SOP for the Home Office. Choice of Courts or new rubber stamping body. No choice at all.

Obvious really.

There is a serious issue centered on (but not confined to) the British Home Office.

Data fetishism. It's not a sane policy. It's a personality disorder

Today in non-depressing news: Boffins build biggest quantum sims

and can only simulate specific situations..So no, they can't play Crysis.

Which I think is a "Quantum leap" in reporting this sort of stuff.

In effect it can (potentially) generate a single 2^50 digit representing the states of all atoms in the cluster that represent, er something.

An obvious question is at what point do you get enough atoms together that it stops looking like a cluster of atoms (with various exotic quantum stuff going on) and look more like a lump of metal IE the "continuum approximation"

Closest thing to an actual QC seems to be something more like a FPGA where you program the connections between "cells" of quantum somethings, doing some kind of logic.

Well done for the rise in the quality of reporting this sort of thing.

Mozilla releases voice dataset and transcription engine

If it can do transcription of more than 1 sec in 1 sec of processing it'd goind alright.

But can it do 1 sec of 1 second of 2 people from opposite sides of the NI/IR border talking English at > 200 WPM?*

*Very lightly inflected and the words seem to run together.

SpaceX 'raises' an extra 100 million bucks to get His Muskiness to Mars

"Currently stands at 95.92%. "

<1 in 80 (for Ariane 5) is better than 98.75% success.

< 1 in 60 (Atlas V) is 98.333% success.

Obviously it should get better if the launch rate keeps up.

"I think it's a bit over 95% now - 2 losses in 49 flights "

Not really. Ariane 5 has managed 80 launches in a row (which is what counts) without going bang and that's fully expendable.

Atlas V (also expendable) > 60 launches.

F9 so far has managed 15 since its last bang.

Reusable should make for better reliability.

The trouble is that so far it has not.

Watchkeeper drones cost taxpayers £1bn

Is anyone else thinking "What an utter PoS" ?

If the 450 $2m a pop 64 of them would be $128m. Call that $64m over 2 years to buy them all.

What exactly does such a thing need in the way of specialized ground support equipment?

It's a subsonic propeller driven light aircraft, not an SR71.

Say $10m a year for all support costs. That's $120m over 12 years since 2005.

Russian rocket snafu may have just violently dismantled 19 satellites

It's not looking good for Soyuz and the Freigat US in particular.

Apparently their insurance premiums are quoted at 3x those of Ariane or the Falcon 9.

Judge stalls Uber trade-secret theft trial after learning upstart 'ran a trade-secret stealing op'

Uber really does not seem to grok this "disclosure" thing very well

It's not optional.

You have to do it

Nor do they seem to understand the concept of "case law" or "Judges opinions" and that the US is a "common law" country.

Uber are about to discover exactly what the phrase "I am the law" really means.

Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Siemens tease electric flight engine project

Bottom line. It's a big ass hybrid.

With all their strengths and weaknesses.

It also demonstrates (like it was needed) that the most efficient store of electricity is in fact a room temperature liquid hydrocarbon connected to a turbogenerator, probably with a battery for load leveling.

Which really should not come as a surprise.

Now let's see how close this can get to M1.

Surprise: Android apps are riddled with trackers

The best kind of surveilance. They kind you pay for yourself.

You pay. We spy.

And BTW since when do you take a cookie called "CrashLytics" at face value?

Surveillance Capitalism thinks it won, but there's still time to unplug it

Until (or unless) you can *show* people that whole creepy picture of *themselves*

That won't change.

Seek 'passion' and tech skills will follow, say recruiting security chiefs

" Which outsourcing operation has passionate and dedicated staff?"

Many I'd guess.

" passionate and dedicated" about getting the f**k out of there.

Outsourcers.

The place where hope goes to die.

Forget Sesame Street, scientists pretty much watched Big Bird evolve on Galápagos island

"I suggest a trip to Stevenage town centre on any Saturday night.""

I sense a new reality TV show in the making.

I need to lie down until my level of self disgust at having thought that up has dropped.

Boffins pack more info onto photon for faster quantum key distro

multi bits were a thing even in the days of dial up modems.

How did you think they got 56kbs over a voice grade phone line with an analog bandwidth of about 3KHz.?

TBH I had not realized that "time in slot" was a parameter that could be safely manipulated.

However making this work in a quantum context is still a major achievement.

Well done to the team involved, especially for using more or less OTS hardware to do so.

Logicalis lands mega air traffic computer deal. Yes, that Logicalis

http://www...../brexit-fallout-for-$subjectarea-remains-unclear/

That should cover all the relevant sectors of the UK economy.