* Posts by LeoP

136 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2010

Germany pushes router security rules, OpenWRT and CCC push back

LeoP

Giving the vendors a choice will give the users a choice

Let's assume the average lifetime of a SOHO router is N years (I'd suspect N to be around 5, but I may be quite wrong - it's important to make it a fixed number mandated in the standard).

Now give the vendors a choice:

EITHER: Guarantee FW security updates (within 72 hours after being notified of a vulnerability) for 2*N years after the last sale.

OR: Guarantee the user the ability to run firmware of his choice based on either the Linux or the BSD kernel with all drivers provided as open source.

Vendors, that do not comply are liable for a fine of 200% of their yearly sales plus all damages, that any user suffered because of such an omission.

International politicos line up to get shot down by Facebook

LeoP

The tax man cometh

So, why have those parliaments not yet voted for a special tax on "non-responsive" companies? Something around 99 Pennies/Cents for every Pound/Euro that these peoples pay to Facebook should catch their attention. This ofcourse includes Pounds/Euros spent by others for ads shown to the respective peoples.

British fixed broadband is cheap … and, er, fairly nasty – global survey

LeoP

Re: streams rather than downloads?

If your downloads are corrupted by jitter and lag, you should google for "TCP"

LeoP

Re: streams rather than downloads?

Yup. And these bits have to go down that pipe every single time you listen to that song, not just once.

Apple breathes new life into MacBook Air with overhauled 2018 model

LeoP

1199 - seriously?

So a low-power non-upgradable landfill netbook with a 128G SSD, a keyboard with a MTBF of a few hours and no usable ports will cost twice a reasonably specced Lenovo?

Thanks for the offer, I beg to decline it though.

Techie was bigged up by boss… only to cause mass Microsoft Exchange outage

LeoP

Re: while maybe wiping your machine with rm -rf *

Well, who wants remote clicky-mousy for server administration instead of a text file that can be copied, edited, copied back just in case, etc. might actually be "wiping your machine with rm -rf *".

From the point-of-view of the universe, he or she might also do less harm in a Windows environment.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

LeoP

Less pessimistic here

Quite a lot of the "OMG" moments rests on three assumptions:

- Red Hat is 100% brilliant and speckless

- IBM is beyond hope and unchangeable

- This is a hostile takeover

I beg to differ on all counts. Call me beyond hope myself because of my optimism, but I do think what IBM bought most is a way to run a business. RH is just too big to be borged into a failing giant without leavinf quite a substantial mark.

Cops called after pair enter Canadian home and give it a good clean

LeoP

No problem leaving the door open here in Austria ...

... since miscreants most likely don't know, that my dog's looks and her behaviour differ heavily. She is also very curious, turning her attention immediately to everything that "normally isn't there".

And just in case we would find the burglar and the bitch sleeping arm in paw in the hallway, when her alpha-brainwave emitter did the job and made him fall asleep while giving her the dose of cuddling she insists upon.

Alibaba pulls dust covers off its new London cloud presence

LeoP

I beg to differ

"China" is a strong point - but so are "Trumpistan" and "Amazon"

Whoever uses cloud and whatever for needs to understand, they are putting their data into the hands of other people - the rationale for it being to put the problems and a part of the cost there as well.

Understanding this, I am very hard pressed to think of China as more dangerous than the UST.

Last year, D-Link flubbed a router bug-fix, so it's back with total pwnage

LeoP

Re: Some unpatched models have OpenWrt available

> As ever, OpenWrt might not be appropriate for your needs

I can't imagine a scenario, where it is less appropriate than a D-Link vondor image.

SpaceX touches down in California as Voyager 2 spies interstellar space

LeoP

Isn't it amazing

how much the abilities of NASA, indeed our abilities as mankind to think in long-term projects, build long-lasting stuff, make very much from very basic ingredients have deteriorated, and how much our expectations have kept pace on this downward spiral.

I do hope, that the speed of this change doesn't increase any more - lest I am still alive, when it hits the fan.

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

LeoP

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

While QLC is not for me either, I can't let your argument stand: Every level adds one bit of information per cell, thus doubling the capacity. So SLC->MLC is x2, MLC->TLC is x2, TLC->QLC is x2, etc.

This does however not excuse its other shortcomings.

Oracle Database 18: Now in downloadable Linux flavour

LeoP

Re: Long live Windows production servers

It is 2018 and if you still roll out Oracle RAC you deserve Windows.

Quantum, Linux and Dynamics: That's the week at Microsoft, not a '70s prog rock band

LeoP

Re: Powershell on Linux

I beg to differ.

Your argument is completely valid, but ir relies on an assumption: That knowledge of BASH scripts in the Windows sysadmin population is either constant or decreasing. I am seing the exact opposite in the real world. It might easily be, that legacy PowerShell scripts will be just another account in the technical debt department, when POSIX-type shell scripts are still the de facto standard.

Oracle wants to improve Linux load balancing and failover

LeoP

Fair and square

It is exceptional, that Oracle does (or tries to do) something good. Let's take a minute to appreciate this - god knows, when this will happen again.

Science! Luminescent nanocrystals could lead to multi-PB optical discs

LeoP

Or just forget the Multi-PB stuff ...

... and create a cheap 40TB medium. Could actually be quite usefull.

Europe's scheme to build exascale capability on homegrown hardware is ludicrous fantasy

LeoP

I beg to differ

First of all: I agree 100% with this being a laughable idea in the proposed timeframe.

But: I do think it is time for Europe (including Britain!) to change from a pure consumer perspective of IT technology to a more active and innovative approach.

Am I the only one to hear the crackling in the structure of our beloved and well-understood workhorse architectures? Wouldn't right now be a good point in time to explore alternative ideas while Intel cleans up its mess and the overwhelming part of the big name's budgets go to IP lawyers rather than R&D boffins?

Not all exploration leads to immediate success - but why let that stop us from trying? Let's not pass on a chance to become a more confident player in IT research, maybe make the tech a bit better all over the place and get a speck of "independent of others" (which I tend to think of as a big illusion) to show as well.

The butterfly defect: MacBook keys wrecked by single grain of sand

LeoP

Re: But...

The german saying for that is: "Shit ordered, shit delivered".

LeoP

"Der Reg" actually

Yours humbly has german as his first language and during his long ago first years learned the hard way, that inanimate things tend to carry a rather random gramatical gender in this weird language. The Register would most definitly be a male specimen, just as "the Standard".

Oracle's new Java SE subs: Code and support for $25/processor/month

LeoP
Pint

Java was larryated - resistance was futile years ago

At the time, I pushed through a complete stop on any new Java investment when Oracle got their hands on it ... against HUGE resistance and with quite some bad blood. 2 years later we were de facto Java-Free (If I don't count Android).

I guess this bad blood will now be easily resolved over a (see icon) and a hearty laugh.

OnePlus 6 smartphone flash override demoed

LeoP

So what

You need physical access .... hm, wasn't there something like "physical access = complete compromise modulo time interval" rule around? It seems to have fallen out of favour, though.

As for encrypted contents: If you store your key where it is accessible by a random boot image, you might just not bother at all.

Australia wants tech companies to let cops 'n' snoops see messages without backdoors

LeoP

Re: Key escrow

That's SO 20th century!

Nowadays you're just shot - the Cop saw you reach for a something and had to proactively defend himself.

Close, but no Tigar! Appeals court slaps judge, drags Apple back into touchscreen spat

LeoP

Ah ja.

Am I the only one to remember Apple wanting (and of course getting) big money from their competitors for "slide to unlock"?

Let's just make it clear: Which patent office in the world, that issues such a patent (to whomever!) if the capacitive touch screen, the mouse pointer and the way humans work is already known, would actually need a "method and apparatus to make medical diagnosis easier". And of course: "On a computer" or "On a smartphone"

Up the stack with you: Microsoft's Denali project flashes skinny SSD controllers

LeoP
Paris Hilton

Next attempt at lock-in

What's a WinModem? A WinPrinter? They are

- cheaper than the true thing (aka. the beancounter "wins")

- can easily be made useless by just not creating a driver for the next version of WIndows (the OEM "wins")

- (mostly) don't work on anything else than windows (Microsoft "wins")

Can anyone remind me, who were the losers in that game?

Paris, because she definitly is a winner.

IBM's homomorphic encryption accelerated to run 75 times faster

LeoP

Re: It's the future given the eagerness of TLA's to spy on people.

I suspect you might have missed the point of HE! Assume you want to query a HE database for a string, then what you need to do is encrypt your search string then query the (encrypted) DB with the (encrypted) search string - this takes the same time as the unencrypted version. You the need to decrypt the resulting records.

The H in HE means, exactly that works as expected, so the performance penalty comes down to the pre-query and post-query operations. The same thing of course makes it susceptible to the good old tools of frequency analysis etc., which is why the key needs to be huge to be not easily defeated.

Google reveals Edge bug that Microsoft has had trouble fixing

LeoP

Most alarming though ...

... is the fact, that 90+14 days are not enough to fix a bloody memeory management bug. Is there really noone left at MS, who is an at least partly competent developer?

How many Routemaster bus seats would it take to fill Wembley Stadium?

LeoP
Paris Hilton

Disappointed!

TRSS (The Register Standards Soviet) has gone lazy!

The only correct way to solve this, is to

1. define a Standard Routemaster Bus having e.g. 64.2 seats (or whatever the average turns out to be)

2. define a Standard Routemaster fleeet size somewhere in the 2800s

3. Multiply these to get the Standard Routemaster Fleeet Seat Count (SRFSC)

We then can compare 1 SRFSC to Wembley Stadium.

Paris, because she is such a well-defined standard

Worcestershire's airborne electronics warfare wonderland

LeoP

Appreciated

It's time to say that once: As a non-british reader (Austria tbp), very much into 20th century history, I very much appreciate this series - quite a couple of the recommendations here are on my to-do-list on my next tour of Britain.

If they allow me in of course.

Liberty Global's sale of Austrian biz paves way for Voda merger plans – reports

LeoP

This might actually be a good thing locally

Full Disclosure: Yours humbly is a customer of both LG (they are called UPC here for historic reasons) and DT (T-Mobile / T-Systems / T-Whatever here) in Austria.

Having been in business with both of them, there is absolutely nothing right now that could make me think, that LG being taken over by whomever in the world will be a substantial improvment for Austrian customers. Hell: Having Ali Mustafa from the local Kebab outfit run it would be a substantial improvment.

The level of moronity achieved by the current management is a league on its own, it is simply a law of nature that DT can't do worse. Actually, my dealings with them were not too bad until now.

And don't get me started on the Helldesk. Just don't - its the day before Christmas. A tiny hint may be in order: Ringing support for a routing problem brought me to the phase of asking the answering clown from hell if he had an idea how IP routing worked within a few minutes. His bloody answer was of course: "Not at all. Have you tried restarting your modem?"

Just to make that clear: For Austrians this means replacement of the plague with a light Cholera. Which is a good thing. Sort of. The global implications are something I hope my much younger collegues will deal with in due course - this might be more Ebola-ish.

No hack needed: Anonymisation beaten with a dash of SQL

LeoP

Re: How about the use of Cascading Temporal Surrogate Keys?

Ken, while I very much like the technical idea behind your proposal (and upvoted accordingly), it does run afoul of Leo's 1st theorem:

The realms of stupidity, lazyness and incompetence do not overlap with realms that house technical solutions. They do however overlap with realms containing educational solutions.

(Please forgive me for a possibly bad translation, non-native speaker of English)

New battery boffinry could 'triple range' of electric vehicles

LeoP

Re: You'll have an iPhone 16 by the time this technology is out.

I will most definitly not.

Spy-on-your-home Y-Cam cameras removes free cloud storage bit

LeoP

No sympathy - sorry

So you bought a gadget, that is by design locked into a cloud service you have no control over whatsoever.

So you seeingly made yourself dependent on a vendor's goodwill.

Not Sorry at all for you, this is like using Oracle software.

Might be a good time to grow up, though.

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

LeoP

Significance

Am I really the only one to consider this significant?

Every project needs what I tend to call a kick-start-moment: When the current state of the project is good enough, that other bits and pieces are comfortable relying on it even for a mission-critical role one a timescale of years or decades.

Not being knowledgable enough I might have missed that moment already happening to RISC-V or read too much in it, but it certainly does feel like this could be something like that.

Tesla reveals a less-long-legged truck, but a bigger reservation price

LeoP

The value of Tesla and Musk

IMHO it would be rather short-sighted to value Tesla (the company) or Musk (the man) only by their actual products - even if this seams counterintuitive.

Driving a Nissan Leaf? A Renault ZEO? A Chevy Volt? An Opel Ampera? A BMW i3? Please give it a good thinkover, if these models would exist, if there was no Musk or Tesla.

Looking forward to drive one of the Gazillions of E-cars announced by (at least) the European manufacturers?

For yours humbly the value of his Muskness is much more in being the bold posterboy, who was instrumental in actually starting a process, that I think is necessary: Moving from the talk-about-it phase to the make-it-available phase.

And in all fairness: The 100kW battery for Australia he so boldly promised for "done in 100 days or for free" completed in 55 days.

I also can't let that subsidy argument stand without a comment: If you consider not the price of the kWh as payed by the consumer, but the cost of a kWh as payed by the last few and next many generations to be payed, we might actually conclude fossil fuels to be very highly subsidized. Not as much as nuclear, but close.

No taking the complete cycle into your calculation is the same folly as those telling me I should have replace my 14 year old car (Diesel!) long ago: There is much more pollution inherent in the sheer existance of that car than my low mileage per year can ever produce in a realistic timespan of using it.

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

LeoP

Impressing

Just got it on Ubuntu, and it certainly FEELS more than 30% faster. Bookmarks, Extensions and everything else converted perfectly fine. Ugly as hell of course, but that's no show-stopper.

US trade cops agree to investigate Apple's 'embrace and extend'

LeoP

Nah, can't be true!

Apple owns ALL the IP in the world, including the rectangle and the button. So how can they ever infringe?

Funnily enough, when Qualcomm's licensees stop sending in their royalty checks, profits start going south

LeoP

Ah, the precious IP

So, just that I get that straight: The company, that wanted and got billions for the "IP" in the "invention" of a square with rounded corners now doesn't want to pay a third of this for tech that actually has R&D behind it, does something usefull and is incorporated into a tangible chip.

It's definitly Apple, that gets ripped off here. Sure.

Curiosity rover gives Mars the middle finger, prepares to get drilling

LeoP

Brilliant

Now they only need to figure out how to build a dishwasher that works for 13 years on earth and humanity is saved.

Supreme Court to rule on whether US has right to data stored overseas

LeoP

GMX, really?

FYI, they give fulltime, direct read access to everything you give them to the BND. It's even in their TOS, somwhere between pages 4000 and 5000 (in 3pt comic sans)

BlackBerry's new Motion will move you neither to tears of joy nor sadness

LeoP

Re: Battery life a concern?

Must be the same hardware as my "Ulefone Power".

And it's actually perfectly usable as a smartphone - for work, not for benchmarks.

Microsoft silently fixes security holes in Windows 10 – dumps Win 7, 8 out in the cold

LeoP

Wine to the rescue

A customer (and friend) of mine was stuck on Windows because of some ERP software he is forced to use - automotive industry will force software down to the individual repair shops.

When they tried to force him to Win10 we did migrate ... turns out the ERP package runs fine under Wine on the client, the Server is just firewalled off into oblivion.

32 less Windows installations, this made my life much easier: Before there was no month, when not at least one of them would refuse to install WIndows Updates (after burning many CPU hours over a day or two), but I yet have to see apt-get update && apt-get -y dist upgrade to fail.

Legacy clearout? Not all at once, surely. Keeping tech up to snuff in an SMB

LeoP

This article was Supported by Dell

'nuff said.

Ah yes - and put your mail into the cloud, that's so cheap and reasonable.

The new, new Psion is getting near production. Here's what it looks like

LeoP

Count me in

Understanding, that this is NOT a Psion PDA, but a general purpose computer I'll most likely still have one rather sooner than later. The thing is: Not only has the gadget changed from doing only what a PDA does and doing that brilliantly, but what I expect from a PDA has changed as well: I loved my Psions, but ...

... Reading my mail while keeping the cellphone's IR eye in line with the Psion's was nothing for the bus or the subway

... I would not have thought of them as a tool to do routinely replace the laptop for server maintenance via SSH

... etc.

The original Psions were "barely connected" devices, and as such they were brilliant - but we are used to "truely connected" devices now and won't go back. New role, new software, new appearance.

And being able to type "grep '11:0[123]' /var/log/syslog | grep -v 'audit: ' into a Temrinal running an SSH connection on a real keyboard after pulling something out of my pocket, that is not much larger than my current Chinadroid is bound to make my life easier.

Dolphins inspire ultrasonic attacks that pwn smartphones, cars and digital assistants

LeoP

I knew why ...

... I don't want a Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Blubba-Blubba or Listeny-Spyme even before that.

Who the ***************** thought this would be a good idea anyway? Hint: Starship Enterprise assumes the benevolence of all with an authorized voice. An authorized voice that ist.

Oracle finally decides to stop prolonging the inevitable, begins hardware layoffs

LeoP

Good hardware, bad name

One of the reasons, that the hardware didn't fly under the Oracle banner might have been the Oracle brand itself: We used SunFires for Linux workloads quite often, but the moment they became larryated we stopped immediately. Sure enough, for the next NTP on ILO debacle they wanted us to pay for a firmware upgrade. Not even HP dared so.

Microsoft's fix for web graphics going AWOL? Disable your antivirus

LeoP

Re: Is IE still a thing?

It is, if you want to use the bloody remote management Java Applets for the hardware gadget of your choice. It ofcourse comes unsigned for better entertainment value.

I have responsibility for an Intel-branded server, where the ILO functionality is completely inaccessible without IE and outdated Java. Same goes for a lot of Cisco FC switches (Yes, I know: My own fault to use Cisco, but they were cheap on eBay).

Literally carrying around a WinXP VM with IE and old Java, just to access that sort of equipment, running from a snapshot and reverting after each use.

Fancy talking to SAP about your indirect licensing concerns? Straw poll says no

LeoP

Anyone actually still using SAP?

That's what takes me wonder - what exactly is the value using SAP gives you, that couldn't be had at half the price with a trivial amount of brains?

A client of mine once was asked to actually pay for the privilege of exporting his data from his legacy SAP system - we ended up "printing" it to a "text-only line printer" which of course was a linux box set up to receive this CSV-like data and put it into a database. Printing was "allowed".

El Reg gets schooled on why SSDs will NOT kill off the trusty hard drive

LeoP

There is more to storage than performance

I am very sceptic of flash replacing disk altogteher as well. One of the points is, that flash performance is simply not needed for many applications. The video industry as an example has a highly sequential access pattern, enormous dataset sizes and a well-defined performance profile, that simply needs not be made faster. That's why they use disk for most of their data.

Biz sends apps to public cloud, waves 'bye to on-premises server folk. NO! WAIT!

LeoP

Who would have thought?

"However the cost of using the public cloud rises as more of it gets used"

So, outsorcing everything doesn't solve your problems? Maybe someone could pass a note to the MBA-breeding facilities and let them know? They seem to not yet have heard.

Oh no, EE! More UK mobile customers face sluggish roaming abroad

LeoP

Just came back to my home country of Austria after visiting Italy, Slovenia and Croatia - with a cheap as chips PTG "packetized" to something resembling a contract. No 4G apart from Italy (no surprise here, none deployed) but speeds better than when falling back to 3G at home.

I may have missed a few holes though - a total of something like 30mins over 2 weeks must be enough for a vacation. If you don't insist on posting every piece of gorgous local food instead of enjoying it, that is.