Posts by Paul

Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code

Re: Blimey, pt II

I once wrote assembler for a 4 bit NEC microcontroller on a pager. Every individual bit of memory was needed. It was a nightmare.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

It's not just apathy, it's deliberate

Here in the UK, the big providers have all hoarded IPv4 addresses, and if you start a business and want a good sized block, you need to buy them.

This gives the old guard a competitive advantage, so it's not in their interest to promote IPv6 adoption.

Where it suits them, you'll see IPv6 usage. BT and Sky now have it enabled by default on consumer services. Some mobile phone operators use it, they have so many attached devices that rfc1918 addresses were exhausted on a national scale.

Why your external monitor looks awful on Arm-based Macs, the open source fix – and the guy who wrote it

Re: Amazing....

Some butt hurt Apple fans didn't like the parent comment, and probably won't like this one.

Openreach out and hike prices on legacy fixed-line products: Broadband plumber pulls trigger after Ofcom gives the nod

Last year, BT wanted £600/house to lay fibre in our village to be funded by government subsidy. They missed the deadline to get funding.

With a new fibre subsidy scheme offering £1500/house, BT told me that they will lay fibre for £1500/house.

Funny how the cost BT has calculated has risen to the maximum available subsidy!

Trump H-1B visa crackdown hit with legal double whammy: Tech giants, Chamber of Commerce challenge rules

movie recommendation about indentured servitude in corporate america

you might enjoy this movie, about indentured servitude in corporate america

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5688932/

good for the UK/EU

I think actually that jacking up the price of immigrant workers in the US is a good thing, it'll mean jobs moving to the UK and elsewhere to get cheaper labour.

In fact, one SanFran company tried to recruit me only a month ago, to work for them.. only snag was they wanted me to work in the US timezone, started at 1600 and finishing 0000. I live in the UK, and I wouldn't have liked that.

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Re: Programming interminable comments

and the joy of Golang, looks like C without the semis!

sorry I broke your DNS

if anyone was a customer of PSINet at the time this happened in the late 1990's, I'm sorry I broke your DNS.

... "hugo"

Re: @AC Back in th eday? Still!

try writing zone files for dual stack!

reverse zone files for ipv6 will make your eyes bleed

Sophos puts 100 at risk of redundancy as future of Naked Security blog hangs in balance

Did anyone have a bet on how long it would be...

Did anyone have a bet on how long it would be... before Sophos had a data leak after this?

If you guessed less than six months later, you win a prize!

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Re: Send them to Scotland for a few years...

I edited the page about my own village, and some guy on another continent decided to revert a bunch of changes, as if he knew more about it than a 20 year resident

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Re: Simple solution?

mandate that all gov't subsidised internet solutions (broadband/gigabit fibre) have to support IPv6

When you first encounter IPv6 it does look hard, but it doesn't take long before your brain starts to see the patterns. And on your local network you can learn to ignore the /64 prefix very quickly.

And there's this thing called DNS anyway.

UKNOF failings

If consumers were told "don't buy any new kit that doesn't support IPv6" and it was sold as a feature of the internet connection as a means of solving the horrid mess of nat and port forwarding, maybe we could make progress.

back in May, it was proposed to the UK Network Operators Forum that they announce the end of IPv4 for a future date but it was met with a range of responses, from apathy to "too hard" to enthusiasm.

The interesting thing is that the big players like Sky and BT have deployed it to domestic customers, and BT and other business providers have offered it for a long time, but because they have hoarded IPv4 they can use it as a competitive advantage over newcomers to the market who cannot buy large blocks of IPv4 addresses easily or cheaply.

SpaceX is about to launch its first Starlink internet satellite sporting a sun visor following complaints by astronomers

no Vanta Black?

surely Elon's heard of vanta black?

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

Hard tabs should always be 8 character width

If you want any other indentingb use spaces and an editor that does it right

Podcast Addict banned from Google Play Store because heaven forbid app somehow references COVID-19

Re: Yet again, screwed over by Google

Pinephone from pine64.

Re: Well there's the problem

"His job is to make sure relationships between developers and Google remain well and good."

Google need a metric shit-ton more of people who actually listen to people and act.

Magecart malware merrily sipped card details, evaded security scans on UK e-tailer Páramo for almost 8 months

I guessed it would be php

Before I even started reading this I thought "bet it's php" and I was right

What do you mean your eardrums need a break? Samsung-owned JBL touts solar-powered wireless headphones you don't need to charge

samsung audio brands

I recently discovered that Samsung own AKG and B&O (via Harmon), and now I find they own JBL.

It makes me wonder whether there's anything electronic you can buy which isn't made by, or doesn't have Samsung components inside of it?

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

Outbound firewall?

So there are people in enterprise IT who don't put third party devices into a sandbox where they have restricted access? Who are these people and who let them loose in the network?

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Re: 10.15 Catastrophe

Why doesn't the Apple update tool scan for 32 bit and warn you?

See you in Hull: First UK city to be hooked up to full-fibre broadband

can we stop calling every internet circuit "broadband"?

just because marketroids call it broadband, doesn't mean we have to. please use the correct term unless quoting someone verbatim.

thanks

SPARCs fly as Oracle recharges Arm server processor designer Ampere with $40m

Ampere forever tainted?

sad, I thought Ampere would be an interesting path to Arm based servers. But now they're tainted by Oracle.

Margin mugs: A bank paid how much for a 2m Ethernet cable? WTF!

at a previous job, there was an IBM server that needed to be moved from one computer room to another. It could have been unracked, lifted onto a trolley by a few people, and re-racked in half an hour. IBM's charge? over £2k.

we couldn't move it ourselves as it would have invalidated the support contract.

Re: Not just business

LED TV? You mean an LCD TV with LED backlight?

don't fall for the marketing scam.

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

Using the cloud doesn't absolve you of the need to design your platform

I've heard so many times that you can migrate your on-premise servers to the cloud in a more or less 1:1 mapping and let your cloud provider do all the work of maintaining uptime and data integrity.

And yet again we have proof that you still have to put in the effort to ensure you have geographically diversified replication and backups.

Virgin Media blocks Imgur, literally tens of people rage at UK ISP

use 1.1.1.1 instead, Google will monetize your dns searches.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Re: Google Docs

a former employer of mine had been using dropbox but as the company grew switched to G drive to save money.

they couldn't work out how to set permissions, and accidentally exposed a spreadsheet of everybody's salary details. it caused quite an upset for some!

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

Re: Mozilla are only partly right

That's true, but a really canny website could require people to put the hostname/ip address into their local hosts file and thus not need to appear in the public DNS

It's official! The Register is fake news… according to .uk overlord Nominet. Just a few problems with that claim, though

bring back the use of .gb

bring back the use of .gb and make the registry a proper charity

Anyone else find it weird that the bloke tasked with probing tech giants for antitrust abuses used to, um, work for the same tech giants?

huh? I think you missed the sarcasm flag.

Pai has been a disaster as far as consumer rights are concerned.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Large copies? Always use rsync with append-verify.

Re: I've done this

Building a hackintosh on qemu/kvm is very easy these days

No backdoor, no backdoor... you're a backdoor! Huawei won't spy for China or anyone else, exec tells MPs

Re: quite sensible

In the UK it's called "technical measures" which mean backdoors, key escrow, wiretaps, anything they want basically with no discussion or appeal.

Top Autonomy exec Sushovan Hussain: Bond villain or Mob boss? Both, say prosecutors

How did the auditors miss all that?

Seems to me that HPE failed to get auditors who were competent, and should be suing them!

Yes, I may have advised 'some' investors to flog their Autonomy shares, analyst tells High Court

Why aren't HPE suing the auditors who they paid to value Autonomy? Provided Autonomy's books were completely laid bare to the auditors, then all fault must lie with them and/or HPE for making an unwise decision.

Ignore the noise about a scary hidden backdoor in Intel processors: It's a fascinating debug port

How does this affect someone with root access on their virtual machine, on a multi-tenanted physical host?

NexDock 2: Electric Boogaloo. Crowdfunded laptop shell sequel touts less plastic, more pixels

sentio superbook?

whatever happened to that? and how is this one different, other than offering a more modern USB-C port?

Re: RPi Compute Module

if you want an R-Pi laptop, consider instead the PineBook Pro.

Re: Server room tool

you still need a VGA socket for datacentre work.

and a serial port. but an R-Pi would solve that.

Re: Some crowdfunded devices work out well

did you ask Planet for a replacement keyboard mat?

Google sparks online outcry after its currency converter goes haywire for third time this year

Google apologises by buying Ghana

Google apologised and, somehow in the process of paying compensation, accidentally ended up owning Ghana.

"We're not sure what to do with it" said Sundar Pichai. "We're thinking of bulldozing the entire country flat and covering it with photovoltaic cells set at 30 feet above ground level, giving free shelter from the sun to the inhabitants. It will pay for itself in under 15 years and make us the largest energy supplier in the world".

Amazon WorkSpaces two years on: Are we ready for cloud-hosted Windows desktops?

even now, years later, workspaces are not great... for a start, amazon need to shut down them down for maintenance every week (typically a Sunday), so every Monday it's like booting up a desktop computer from cold. Not very useful if you have some long running software!

Amazon Prime Air flight crashes in Texas after 6,000ft nosedive

Re: We all thought the same!

actually, according to gapminder, the planet's population is only increasing because people are living longer.

How politics works, part 97: Telecoms industry throws a fundraiser for US senator night before he oversees, er, a telecoms privacy hearing

Re: Pretty much business as usual, but...

that's the fundamental problem. to get the funding to be elected, you have to make so many promises that any kind of ethics take second place to fulfilling those promises.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

One problem is that at the low end we have R-Pis and competitors, all sub $100 for the boards. At the higher end of that we have Rockchip RK3399 boards which tend to be in the $80 to $120 range depending on RAM, eMMC and wifi capabilities. All of these are built on older Arm cores - the RK3399 has A72 cores which are a good few years old now!

There's then a big jump to get boards with higher spec cores, and most of those for "professional" users as "board support packages" for businesses developing phones or tables, and cost many many hundreds of $$, far from affordable. You can look on 96boards and you'll find the Kirin 970 (Arm A73) at roughly $300. I couldn't find anything there with newer Cortex cores.

Then you have the problem that Arm don't have good linux support for their GPUs, usually a binary blob, and little or no 3D acceleration. AFAICT people end up using kernels and drivers from Android builds and then bodging a linux desktop on top of that.

Gigabyte have a cavium thunderx workstation, but for that price you can buy a pretty decent Intel laptop! The Socionext dev/workstation is over $1000.

So, really, it seems to me that Arm don't care about anything other than Android or small embedded devices, maybe they care a bit about Windows (with the new replacement of Windows-RT) but I wonder who's doing all the work on the GPU side to make Windows run on it? If Arm cared, they would be actively supporting native development on Arm-based workstations.

Apple are really doing their own thing, their processors closely resemble Arm processors when seen as a black box, but AFAICT their bionic processors (which are really good!) are completely custom design. I hope that they do release affordable devices like Mac Minis with Bionic processors, and they don't lock them down, so they can be re-purposed for other operating systems!

I do welcome the competition in the market, as I think there are many workloads where, say, an Intel Atom would have sufficient performance, and so an Arm would be too.

But if you look at the price/performance ratio of an AWS instance running Arm, it's not really different from an x86 server.

I tried to deploy some of $WORK's requirements on an Arm/Graviton instance, but other than the simplest service, I got into dependency hell, with some packages simply not ready built for arm.

Sysadmin's three-line 'annoyance-buster' busts painstakingly crafted, crucial policy

Re: Putting dates in names

>> copy system_restart to system_restart_YYMMDD_<Your initials here>

no, use YYYYMMDD. did you learn nothing at the end of 1999?

Boffin suggests Trappist monk approach for Spectre-Meltdown-grade processor flaws, other security holes: Don't say anything public – zip it

the price of zero day vulnerabilities

The price of zero day vulnerabilities has been increasing over the years, very significantly for some platforms.

This suggests that either it's getting harder to find significant vulnerabilities, and/or that the value of a security break-in has increased a lot too.

So even if the "white hats" decided that trying to find vulnerabilities was a bad thing and stopped altogether, the "black hats" have a big financial incentive to carry on, and of course the latter will do their best to keep them secret which makes things less secure for everybody and reduces the chance of a fix.

Personally, I'd prefer to keep going with the good guys finding bugs and getting paid for responsible disclosure, I can't see a better way other than revolutionising the way software is developed so that such bugs are made unlikely or impossible to make!