Posts by Hubert Thrunge Jr.

Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk

Re: 2024 finally Year of the Windows desktop

I'm sorry, I only work in command line.

I use PC-DOS5.

It’s official: Vodafone and Three to tie the knot in the UK

Re: Lies

Only if you have approved phones running their tweaked firmware allegedly.

My Cat S62 supports SMS over WiFi but not on O2. I have to go outside and be patient. According to O2 its not supported by them and they won't turn it on, even though it's a feature supported by the version of Android on the device. With VoWiFi they turned it off when I updated my contract for similar reasons, I told them I'd cancel my business contract and take it to a provider that would play ball if they didn't turn it back on and after a "I'll just check with manager". They refuse to budge on SMSoWiFi.

Since SMS is currently 2G dependant, and they're going to turn that off soon, you'd think they'd join the 21st Century!

If you have the latest iPhone or Samsung on contract with them, it all works.

Facial recog system used by Met Police shows racial bias at low thresholds

Re: Did they

He's running the SPG Retirement Centre, so doesn't have the time, unless there is someone who walks on the cracks in the pavement, or possesses an offensive wife...

Now get out!

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

I don't

I don't run an ad blocker on YouTube, I run it on my browser, so that's OK then.....

And I block pop ups from most sites.

£11.99/month - just not worth it when you consider I pay £7.99 for Netflix.

With the detritus that is on YouTube, £3.99/mo is the max I'd want to pay. Maybe £11.99/yr then....

Google/YouTube, load the Blunderbuss with grapeshot, take aim at your foot, fire!

ChatGPT hasn't been around for long and Nvidia already wants to put a leash on it

What could possibly go wrong...

I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

And...

“I don't want to insist on it, Dave, but I am incapable of making an error.”

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Statistics show that Smart Motorways are safer per mile travelled than any other type of road in the UK.

The issue as with all roads is the people who drive on it.

People say "I won't drive on the Smart Motorway because it doesn't have a hard shoulder - it's not safe".... The same people are happy to drive up the A1 still doing 85-90 with the possibility of coming across a moped doing 28, a tractor or other farm machinery doing 20, or lycra clad fanatics with numbers on their bums "racing" and not paying any attention to other traffic.

If they really want to make roads safer then they need to introduce time expired licencing with tougher mandatory re-tests every 5 or 10 years. Now that should make people happy about road safety.

UK Prime Minister wants £800M to spend on big British iron

You ve all missed the point

It's actually a quantitative easing project - pump £800M into the tech/IT industry on a zero delivery development project.

Like ESN which has gobbled £5.8Bn so far and produced nothing.other than excuses.

Still £800m is a lot of BBC model B's on a very large Econet. That would be super!

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

Ai....

Open the bomb bay doors Hal....

The Bombay Doors are a 1960s tribute act.....

Sony, Honda collaborate on 'premium' electric vehicles that are born in the USA

Sony Playstation Car?

If you press X O L1 then R2 followed by Start it'll park itself.

Not sure which bottom makes it jump the queue. I think that one is only available on Audi's and BMWs

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

So not running on a 386 then

And there was me hoping that this whole thing was still running on a 386/25 based box with a 20Mb HDD and 5-1/4" drives.

Silly me.

As the bloke at the Council IT department said "Look after your server"...

UK police to spend tens of millions on legacy comms network kit

Moon on a stick

This is what happens when you want the moon on a stick, yet nobody had planted the seed that would grow into the tree that would supply the stick.

I recall phrases like "it'll be an app that will run on our Blackberry phones", and the alarm bells going off in my head.

The people who wanted the ESN had no idea about anything to do with Comms, RF, or reality if the truth is known.

They were just desperate to dump Airwave and it's growing costs as the tapering contract signed by the minister at day one meant that it just got more and more expensive.

When Macquarie decided to get rid of Airwave, the Home Office should have bought it and that would have ended the massive cost burden in one hit, but they seem to be allergic to owning anything. Should have been in-house from day one.

One thing ESN has done is accelerated the development of secure apps and functions within the 3GPP standards.

It's a cluster-f**k of a project. It will never do what it was asked (D2D being one function) and let's not forget, the only reason it's EE and Motorola, everyone else walked away.

Amazon puts 'creepy' AI cameras in UK delivery vans

FFS Wake Up!

Haulage and distributon fleets have been fitting camera & driver monitoring systems for years.

The emergency services have had cameras for years.

If you operate a haulage company and wish to go to London, under TFL rules you have to meet the DVS requirement for vehicles over 12T gross weight. That requires 360 cameras, plus a raft of other "safety" requirements (to make up for the inability of people to look the f**k where they're going).

In the case of "witness cameras" as fitted by Amazon, they give them (a) recordings of any incidents where "your Amazon vehicle clipped my car and broke my mirror" which are usually settled privately and not via insurance - they're a money maker for the scum of society, (b) in the event of a real accident where it's not the driver's fault, they provide the video evidence to back it up, thus saving the drivers skin from prosecution, and persecution. And then (c) driver profiling - where the G sensors in the camera detect high load / sudden brakiing, they can review the footage and see if the driver was driving like a twat or if that mysterious black dog did indeed run out in front of the van.

The vehicles are already fitted with telemetry for both delivery tracking and security, that data is also used for driver profiling, which in a responsible organisaton - as Amazon claims to be - will lead to driver training to reduce incidents, and thus reduce the chances of a vehicle being off the run due to accidents, and the subsequent delays in deliveries (and payouts because it didn't turn up).

Going back to the emergency services, most ambulance fleets have full camera systems now for not only driver monitoring, but for crew and patient safety. Some fleets are still hampered by backward union demands who claim "they'll use it against us" rather than "that patient assaulted me, look at the video footage for proof"

Have you noticed how some fleets used to be full of dents and drive vans that looked ready for the scrapyard, and now suddenly they're all dent/scrape free? That's because of two things - cameras, and the driver has to pay the insurance excess if they caused the damage. As if by magic, they actually give a f**k about their work equipment now.

I shall decend from my soapbox, and have a G&T to calm down.

Meta says it's building world's largest AI supercomputer out of Nvidia, AMD chips

Judgement Day

Listen and understand. That Facebook A.I. Bot is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with, It doesn't doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it will absolutely not stop,ever, until you're banned.

US prosecutors: Chinese walkie-talkie-maker Hytera stole Motorola secrets

Re: Sepura

And their biggest supplier in the UK is Airwave,. Which is owned by..... Motorola

Secure boot for UK electric car chargers isn't mandatory until 2023 – but why the delay?

Re: Secure boot is going where?

Does a Chelsea Tractor count?

Dutch nuclear authority bans anti-5G pendants that could hurt their owners via – you guessed it – radiation

Re: To save us all.. we could just..

It's most certainly still there. When I looked out of my bathroom window at 0645, it marker lights were glowing red like a homing beacon.

If RF radiation is so dangerous, all of us living within a mile of it should be dead. When it was analogue, it was 1MW EiRP, one meeeeeelion watts. Not the piffling power of a 5G cellular base station (which could be as low as 100mW for some of the kit I've seen)

Pics or it didn't happen: First images from China's Mars rover suggest nothing has gone Zhurong just yet

Re: Cold War II in SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE....

Ak Ak! Ak ak AK!!

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

Meanwhile in the UK....

Crapita could have done a better job at deleting many more accounts and actually get paid for it by Government.

Wonder if the miscreant has sent them his CV, sounds like he'll be a good catch when he's finished doing bird.

Copper broadband phaseout will leave UK customers with higher bills and less choice, says comparison site

£5Bn from Government

With the small profits that BT/Openwretch group makes, why is the government throwing cash at them.

As someone who lives in the sticks, the government subsidy (Gigabit Voucher) for BT bringing me FTTP-OD is a waste of time because BT are not interested in connecting me unless there are six in the "group buy", considering my nearest neighbour is another half a mile away, and so-on, and I'm a SME so *should* qualify for £5K of govt cash.

Not according to BT, it's their Rural Voucher scheme for me... £750 max, eh, it says up to £3K, no says BT, not how they do it, It's pay £13K or not have it. As there are no alternative "pipe" providers out here, I'm royally stuffed.

BT don't give a shit about customers, only that HMG is daft enough to keep spunking billions of £££ into their open mouth, all to give to their shareholders.

Man arrested after UK school finds wiped hard drives on devices connected to network

Memories...

Reminds me of my HNC Computer Studies Year 5 course work back in the early 80's, We had to write some code to do some simple I/O on the college's BBC Model B's, all the work was stored on the shared drive, and a new lecturer managed to wipe the whole drive a few weeks before grading. The entire year group were awarded "merits" for it, except me. Being a smug git, I was working in 6809 based hardware and had my own Dev kit, so produced hardware, working code, and write-up to head of electronics and bagged a distinction.

Wayward lecturer got away with a slap on the wrist. I remembered him as a maths teacher at my previous upper school, he got the sack from there for being useless.

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Battery life

Apple's reputation for long battery life isn't going to help them much....

Start the journey with a 300 mile range and 20 miles in it says you have 30 miles left, then suddenly dies on you...

You plug it in, but it takes four hours to get to 1%.....

Just let this sink in: Capita wins 12-year £1bn contract to provide training services to the Royal Navy and Marines

How does this incompetent bunch of fools keep winning contracts.

Oh, I forgot. OJEU rules do not let you take an organisations past performance into consideration as it may disadvantage new bidders trying to win contracts. As they have no track record, you have to discount the track record of every other bidder and treat them all as new.

Normal human beings learn from their mistakes, to really f**k it up requires things like OJEU procurement rules.

Perhaps after Brexit is sorted, the leadership of Crapita might have unfortunate accidents.

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

I be in East Anglear.

My main client has a fleet of six Nissan electric vans that sit at their central workshop pretty much un-used because they can't do a round trip (loaded at sensible road speed) from Mildenhall to Norwich and back. Two trips to Cambridge (about 28 miles each way) and they're flat - when used to ferry people so are empty of kit.

Hydrogen is the answer - stop looking at "blue" hydrogen, it's "green" hydrogen you should be looking at, using solar and wind power to provide the electricity to split water molecules.

As for bio-fuels, using algae requires no land. And biomass fermentation can be done using waste, not prime food crops or land.

Porsche are looking at synthetic fuels too. The infernal consumption engine should not be written off so quickly.

I feel this whole mad race to electric cars by 2030 is a folly. The UK does not have enough generating capacity to cope with it, even if only half of the daily road users convert to leccy cars, unless you only want to work 3 days a week, and have power cuts from 8pm so there's enough to charge Mr Smug's Tesla down the road. People keep comparing us with Norway when it comes to electric car take-up. They have over five times the generating capacity we do in terms of KWh / punter.

As for Monsuier Tesla..... Merde, it 'appens!

And when we've got rid of all of this carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, what will the plants "eat"?

King Kanute politics gone mad.

Firefighters to UK Home Office: Yeah, maybe don't turn off emergency comms network before replacement is ready

Omnishambles

Whichever way you look at it, it's a shambles.

It was born out of the will to get out of Airwave as fast as possible because the original PFI terms were crippling.

The solution was not ESN, it was hold Airwave to account for the missed performance targets that happened every month, and withhold payment until they sorted themselves out. As Macquarie ran the business with an empty bank account, they would have been forced into administration, and HMG could have bought them for £1 - thus owning the network, and then only having the running costs to pay, not the exorbitant fees that they were being charged. They could then instruct Motorola to upgrade the network to TEDS2 or better, and then go out to tender for a composite device that could do high speed data over LTE leaving critical voice on the now government owned Airwave network.

Nope, can't do that because government seems to be allergic to owning things.

What we must also remember bus that EE won the network deal because everyone else pulled out, and Motorola won the implementation deal because... everyone else pulled out. They could see it was a poison chalice, and would be fraught with issues due to unrealistic timescales with it needing 3GPP standards that still don't all exist yet, and hardware that also didn't exist.

And six months ago they gave Crapita an expensive lifeline to do something that was already easily possible - a bit of VoIP routing. FFS you can do that with a Raspberry Pi and a copy of Asterisk!

Still, it's all keeping me gainfully employed!

I refer the reader to my subtitle.. omnishambles!

Only surprise for OnePlus fans with firm's latest tilt at the mid-market is a sub-€400 price tag

Dunking

My old One Plus Two survived three dunks into buckets of water. The last time I didn't even bother with the box of rice in the airing cupboard trick, I just carried on using it.

Capita, Fujitsu and pals tuck into slices of £3bn London NHS framework

What could go wrong?

Fujitsu, Crapita, Atoms, et Al.. oh wait....

How do I set up the reminder to this post when it all goes titsup in about 12 months?

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Nationalise The Outsource..

Once they've nationalised it, and realised that they can't actually do it themselves, they could outsource it to Crapita. What could be worse?

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

A solution

Set up a Yahoo! Group for it....

Oh wait....

You should really get an Android or iPhone, says Microsoft: No more app updates for Windows Phone 8.x holdouts

Someone mention Nokia?

Powered up my N9 the other day, still works.... The phone that should have been.....

Hello Moto! UK Home Office shoves comms giant another £82m to stay on Emergency Services Network gig

Re: going for a record fail.

Better Off With Maps And Nokia to coin a phrase....

And now here's Tom on Jupiter with the weather: Thanks, Karen. Still a bit breezy on the Great Red Spot, but it's easing up

I blame climate change, on Jupiter caused by those Martian tourists!

Japan on track to start testing Alfa-X, fastest train in the world with top speed of 400kph

The planned East West Railway here, effectively re-laying the Varsity Line between Cambridge and Oxford is part of HMGs plan for fast transit routes between the two great technology and education centres. Govt want it fast. Yet the local councils are doing what the French coal community did between Paris and Calais. If it goes the way the local councils want it, it'll still be quicker to drive there (especially along the new Oxford-Cambridge Expressway) or catch a train to London, the across to Oxford. Just the reason they closed the line in the late 60s (the crap DMUs didn't help then either).

Hams try to re-carve the amateur radio spectrum in fight over open or encoded transmissions

Re: "nothing but lose privacy"

Sorry but that's bollocks.

The JARL "own" DStar, Kenwood make radios to support it,

There are bits that are Icom developed in relation to linking, but DPlus, irdddb, etc makes that all irrelevant.

There are more open source DStar nodes and repeaters out there than there are Icom by a very long way.

There have been radio adapters designed and published as open source designs.

Yaesu is with System Fusion is the walled garden.

Here's a race condition we can get behind: Neural net learns to keep up with 'skilled' amateur track driver in robo-ride safety experiment

Re: Control of a vehicle in varying driving conditions

Definitely worth an upvote for mentioning Phil Hill. The Millennials wouldn't have a clue who he was, thinking you really meant Damon, not Phil.

Perhaps they should add a Gilles Villeneuve mode too... Oh imagine the carnage! But we'd get there much faster 50% of the time, the rest of the time the car would have crashed or broken

Secret mic in Nest gear wasn't supposed to be a secret, says Google, we just forgot to tell anyone

Paranoid Android

Just because you're not paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you....

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Robots (misprint)

No no no.... You'll find its one in four would sleep with a Robert. They mis-heard / mis-read the question and started thinking about Robert Downey Jr, or similar.

Either that or they consider their Ann Summers Rabbit a robot?

LG's beer-making bot singlehandedly sucks all fun, boffinry from home brewing

Makes 5L you say?

Hmmm do they offer discounts for people wishing to buy 14 in one go?

Is there a pod for Abbot Ale?

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

Compensation required

I demand compensation.

I was unable to post a picture of my breakfast on instagram/twitter/facebook/etc... this morning.

I also wish to know who to send the overtime bill to, as a shitstorm of emails hit me the moment I walked through the door at home and the WiFi connected.

Thank you for not listening. It's been wonderful.

UK's national Airwave terminal procurement framework awarded to Motorola and Sepura

government allergy to ownership

When Airwave was bought by Motorola just the other year for £816m (ish) it makes you wonder what planet the Home Office are on.

They should have bought it instead, this saving around £300m which is more than the ESMCP project would save them over the same period.

They just seem to be allergic to owning anything in-house these days.

UK Home Office admits £200m Emergency Services Network savings 'delayed'

Omnishambles

Whichever way you look at it, it's a shambles.

Motorola WHOLLY own Airwave, and paid just over £800M for the network and all of its contracts.

Had the Home Office had some people with a bit of common sense they would have bought Airwave and then they'd have however many years they would have liked for ~£800M not three for £1.1Bn

As for the project, it's what happens when you want the moon on a stick, where the seed for the tree hasn't even been planted yet!

It'll be ready in 2023, maybe. Maybe not.

Britain mulls 'complete shutdown' of 4G net for emergency services

How much?

The numbers I was given for thr ESN portable device were £1100 for the "phone" and £500/yr for the SIM / Network management.

There is currently no mobile device and the only "gateway" type device that they *need* is around $8000

On Airwave, a portable (in volume) is around £400, the DH are charged £900/yr/terminal.

Vehicle sets last a long time. Most are heading for 15yrs now. Portables, under contract, can be refreshed every 5yrs in the Ambulance contract.

What Motorola should be doing now is upgrading the Airwave network to TEDS2 with its more useable data rate, and having a composite device that can use 4G where high speed data (for video etc) is required.

I do get a feeling that there is great unhappiness in the Home Office that Motorola won it (pretty much by default), and had it been Pye or Burndept, things might be happier for them....

BlackBerry Z10 'share-price pump' lawsuit is back from the dead

Re: Z10 Became Quite Good

I had a Z10, and until my current device (OnePlus 2) it was the longest amount of time I kept a phone without killing it. In fact, I resurrected it and gave it to my phone-destroying daughter who would normally kill a phone within a month or two. If I put a battery in it, then it'll still work, albeit with a cracked screen and a poorly loudspeaker.

I liked the OS, I loved the messaging hub. But I was sold on the Nokia N9 and meego, so preferred the tap & swipe UI.

Half the world warned 'Chinese space station will fall on you'

They'll do anything to avoid import taxes....

Will it carry a CE mark?

Or will the package be marked as a "Gift" or "Children's Toy" to avoid any duty when it lands?

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

Kempston Keyboard & Joystick

Who had one of those as an upgrade to their Sinclair?

As a teenage yoof, my friends and I "tested" the prototypes of those as the founder of Kempston Micros was out maths teacher.

He was a very clever guy, but not much of a teacher sadly, or we were just a completely unruly bunch!

He left the school and set up Kemspton Micros and the rest is history. One of my classmates went on to write software for him while he was at university.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be!

BBC Telly Tax heavies got pat on the head from snoopers' overseers

Make the letters stop....

Though thinking about it, what will I use to light my fire?

After four phonecalla, six emails to the Crapita team tasked with dealing with it, they refuse to acknowledge that my other house, which was a bit of a building site for a while, is unoccupied, and has no television of any sort.

So, the letters keep coming.

I take them to my new home and use them when I light the fire.

I'd have to buy a newspaper if they stop, and I have difficulty grasping the concept to paying for biassed reporting whatever side.

We don't get free papers out here in the sticks, and with no current Foot & Mouth outbreaks, there are no sheep to burn either.

Deep joy.

Putting the urgency in emergency: UK's delayed emergency services network review... delayed

Re: New last minute technology to extend Airwave's life

Motorola (who now own Airwave after snapping it up for peanuts) have been deploying IP based TETRA base stations for over ten years, so that's hardly being tested.

What is to be done to extend Airwave to *at least* 2023 is upgrade the entire network to their latest hardware and offer support for TEDS Release 2.

My gut feeling is that Airwave will become part of a hybrid ESN solution where critical voice goes over the TETRA network and data goes over the EE LATE network, with some VoLTE services where they want to use it.

Overall, it's an Omnishambles. Which ever way you look at it, it's a shambles!

You won't believe this: Nokia soars back into phone-flinger top 3

N900... N9...

I had a N900, loved it, even though it was feature limited until the indie Devs came up with features like MMS for it. Still got two of them somewhere, one is running Mer now.

I grabbed a N9 as soon as they were released. It became one of the longest used phones I've ever had as I used to kill phones in a year. It lasted almost two years before battery life tailed off to make it unusable for me. I resisted Android, went BB10 with a Z10 - great phone. Replaced that with a Jolla, drowned it within a week, so bought another one! Still got it. That's where the N9 was going.

Had Nokia not had Elop, and pushed the N9 globally from it's proper planned launch date, I honestly think the world would be a different place. The iPhone was still in its infancy, it's features were nothing to write home about and lots of things we took for granted didn't work. The N9 was full multitasking, even android didn't do that at the time. The OS was years ahead, but it was murdered by Elop, aided and abetted by the Symbian developers who thought they had a future...

Nokia would have been no.1 and Meego would be on other devices.

But, that didn't happen, and we have HMD selling Nokia's marque in the market, and they are doing very well.

I bought a Nokia 5 for my lads 13th birthday. Well under £200 and much better than a Shenzhen Special Landfill Android jobby.

Nokia 8: As pure as the driven Android - it's a classy return

Signal strength

-110dBA is silence.

-110dBm is a weak RF signal.

Used iPhone Safari in 2011-12? You might qualify for Google bucks

Where there's a blame, there's a claim.

So, in the unlikely event of this case actually being successful, what are you going to do with your payout Mr Compoclaimant? Buy a bottle of water from the vending machine in the foyer? Nope, you don't have enough...

I can see the queues to sign up for this being.... not long at all.

Total waste of judiciary time, and just another "Lawyers Get Rich Quick" scheme, even if Google were in the wrong. Horse, door, bolted. Or are you still looking for Shergar?

Vanity, thy name is: M1SCO company car reg plates for sale

Re: Many

Around here, when I was a lad, there was a Porsche 944 with the registration 10 RAL, with the spacing slightly different. She looked like she did too.

Not to mention ol' Stavros Parrish with PEN 15 (which he sold some years back)