Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Re: abbreviated, with substitutes

Where's the black pudding?

soda and potato farls.

And that's why the bacon has to be fried, not done in the oven. Briefly dip both sides of the bread in the bacon fat, remove it and pour off the excess fat. Then return the bread to the pan and fry until crisp. I learned that trick from my Dad. Crispy bread, not soaked in grease.

OK, you're paying data charges in the EU, but you can still roam free in, er, Iceland

Re: Mobile reception is pretty good actually

Doesn't it all fit in one cell?

Huawei hits the highway as Volkswagen signs to put 4G in 30 million vehicles

Oh great. IoT gadgets in cars, connected via 4G. What could possibly go wrong.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Re: Get s bag of D20s and Scrabble set

The total is a number 0 to 26 which I use for any letters required in a password.

You have a 27-letter alphabet?

Re: If you value your security get a hardware random number generator -- or two

at best its going to be some kind of pseudo random number generator seeded with some number derived from a source like the time between two keypresses (or just the time).

There are much better approaches than that, but in any case any DRBG used for passwords and other crypto should at least be written to comply with NIST SP 800-90B, and preferably be tested by an approved lab, especially if it's being sold as a password generator and not just used to simulate a dice roll in a game.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Re: For once the most obvious outcome actually occurred

useful vendor-agnostic setup

A big problem with vendor-agnostic designs is that it makes it very easy to swap between vendors, and the vendors hate that. As a result they invariably implement the design (which tends to be lowest-denominator) as specified, and then add some "extensions" which make their solution more appealing to their customers, but which are of course incompatible with the additions from other vendors. The result is that the agnostic part is buried under a bunch of proprietary extensions which create the same vendor-lockin as before. Apple and Microsoft are past masters at the "embrace, extend" model.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs break out of nuclear hellscape home and into people's hearts

Re: Hot and spicy

Watch out for the radioactive hybrid terror sausages.

Ah, the Fukushima sizzle!

Re: Rovio Ltd should be interested

My money's on Shaun & Gromit.

One good deed leads to a storm in an Exchange Server

who was really at fault here?

Lucas, for multiple reasons. A "potentially suspicious" email could still have contained business-related confidential or personal data, no emails should be automatically forwarded out of the company mail system. Also, if he's on a day off then he should have either arranged for his colleagues to cover him, of let them know he wasn't really off, anything else could lead to duplicated work (as it did).

IT management biz Kaseya's VSA abused to infect businesses with ransomware

They didn't sieze 3D printers in general, just those that were being used to print guns. No doubt they also siezed the paper and pens found in that office, for the same forensic analysis.

Re: Ghost Guns

They can 3D print reliable rocket engines, guns shouldn't be that much of a challenge.

This always-on culture we're in is awful. How do we stop it? Oh, sorry, hold on – just had another notification

Re: Not office hours? No contact

I see too many companies that expect their employees to take their phone with them and return calls when they are on holiday, maternity leave, etc.

I see too many employees that think their company expects that, and of course after a few times doing it they've set their boss's expectations to assume they're happy with it. Too late to complain about it then.

Re: This is unnecessary

Dunno about you, but I wouldn't want to work for a company that treated its staff like that anyway.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: Three words:

Hogzilla, surely?

Leaked Apple memo tells employees that they'll be coming into the office at least 3 days a week from September

Re: First world problems

crime scene cleaners or artificial insemination technicians!

The WFH options there don't bear thinking about...

Record-breaking Kuwaiti heatwave triggers inadvisable TikTok expletive outburst

Re: Why are they getting all the heat?

Be careful what you wish for...

You wait ages for a neutron star and black hole to collide, then two pairs come along at once

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

The "once a month" is relative to us observing the events on Earth.

Obviously, but the comment in the article says "A merger between a galactic void and the densest type of star probably occurs within a billion light years of Earth about once a month". The events did not happen within a month of each other, they were observed from Earth in that period.

Observed from somewhere else they might have appeared 1m years apart or more.

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

My point is that one of these happened 900m LY away, and the other was 1bn LY away, so even if they were recorded a few days apart by the time the signals reached us, there was actually 100m years between these two events. If they were both at the same distance then I would agree with you.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

occurs within a billion light years of Earth about once a month

Given that the signal will take anything up to a billion years to reach us, they can't really claim the event itself 'occurs once a month', though.

‘Fasten your seat belts, raise your tray table, and disconnect your Bluetooth headsets from the entertainment unit’

Fly the unfriendly skies

IIRC United were one of the last hold outs of central aisle-mounted TV screens and those horrible rubber-tube pneumatic headsets. They were also one of the first to charge for any alcohol, even the plastic mini wine bottles, on transatlantic flights. I stopped flying with them years ago, and won't be back.

Study finds crayfish treated with antidepressants become more outgoing, adventurous

Depressed crayfish

feeding antidepressants to crayfish can make them more outgoing and adventurous

They've probably been hearing about what happens to their cousins in the Marshall islands, no wonder they need cheering up.

Green MSP calls on Scottish government to stop spending £4.7m a year with AWS after Amazon 'dumping' allegations

it seems likely that manufacturers could make a '10 year computer' with replaceable parts and upgradeable storage and RAM &c

Wouldn't be necessary if companies like Microsoft stopped producing ever more unnecessarily bloated versions of their OSes.

UK competition watchdog launches investigation into fake review epidemic across Google and Amazon

Does anyone actually pay much attention to 5* or 1* reviews? I always assume that 5* are fake, and 1* are vindictive, so I usually read the 2* & 4* and make my own call on whether they are believable.

Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU

Hardly a surprise

Enforced free roaming was costing the phone companies a fortune, they were already trying other tricks to get the money from somewhere else. The business users won't care about this, their company pays, and for the personal users most hotels & similar places have free WiFi these days. I'd be hard pushed to use 25GB when roaming on holiday (I rarely even go above 5GB at home), so this definitely looks more like a way to grab back some money from captive business users.

Hungover Brits declare full English breakfast the solution to all their ills

Re: Monopoly

It will be interesting to see when the lockdown ends, whether people will accept having only one drug on the pub menu

I'm certainly suffering from cravings for a Full English (with black pudding), they'd better not take that off the menu.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Re: Huh

It can also require major engineering work where tunnels and bridges don't have the clearance for catenaries. Dual-mode trains that can switch between H₂ & overhead are a more versatile option for tracks with less frequent trains.

US Navy starts an earthquake to see how its newest carrier withstands combat conditions

Re: Didn’t they think of trying it on a scale model?

personal carbon footprint

From an electromagnetic catapult on a nuclear-powered ship?

Re: That truck video is Awesome!

To get them to skip properly they would have to impart some spin, which would be entertaining but might not be popular with pilots for the real launches. Could explain some of the UFO sightings, I suppose.

Mind the gap(ing mouth): London's Underground to get ubiquitous mobile phone coverage

Karaoke Compatible with Equaliser Options

Sadly I suppose we're not taking about Edward Woodward here?

Post-lunch snooze plans dashed as the UK tests its Emergency Alerts... again

Re: Easy Opt-out...

social media would do the rest

We're doomed: remember Orson Wells and the War of the Worlds? Now think of that shared by Fæcesbook.

UK gains 'adequacy' status on data sharing with EU, but making that stick all depends on how much post-Brexit law diverges

a Brexit goon-squad of Tory MPs

Ah, nothing like a bit of unbiased reporting, is there?

Leaving aside the political cracks, "These restrictions limit AI because they prevent AI organisations from collecting new data before they understand its potential value and they also mean that existing data cannot be reused for novel purposes" is actually an interesting point. Much of scientific discovery has come from serendipity, those "I didn't expect that, I wonder why it happened" moments, and it would be unfortunate if this was prevented.

Instead of prescribing, in advance, the data as collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes, effectively trying to second-guess how it will be used, perhaps it would be better to define the things it MUST NOT be used for, and leave any grey issues to be decided by courts if necessary? It's that old difference between "everything not explicitly allowed is forbidden" and "anything not explicitly forbidden is allowed", which has always been a difference between European countries.

the ruling on the UK being an adequate jurisdiction to share data with would be reviewed on an ongoing basis as UK legislation diverges from EU law.

Which is exactly how it should be (and applies vice-versa if EU law diverges as well, of course).

Want to keep working in shorts and flipflops way after this is all over? It could be time to rethink your career moves

Re: Not only Brits!

That's why those 'digital nomads' travel around the world and pay no taxes anywhere

Doesn't work that way. Normally you pay tax where you are "resident", which often means 183 days of physical presence, but if you manage not to be resident in any one place long enough you will then be taxed based on where you are "domiciled", and that's a much more flexible definition. Have a UK passport & own UK property, or a UK bank account, or even just still have family in the UK? Then you're likely to be determined to be domiciled in the UK for tax purposes unless you can prove that you were genuinely resident for tax purposes somewhere else.

It's the same for most countries in principle, the days when you could live on a boat & claim to be non-resident anywhere are long gone.

Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a 'sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee'

Network failures

In hindsight, this was completely predictable

Doesn't require much hindsight, it's an example of the "Byzantine Generals problem" described by Leslie Lamport 40 years ago, and should be well-known to anyone working on highly-available systems. With only two sites, in the event of network failure it's provably impossible for either of them to know what action to take. That's why such configurations always need a third site/device, with a voting system based around quorum. Standard for local HA systems, but harder to do with geographically-separate systems for DR because network failures are more frequent and often not independent.

In that case best Business Continuity practice is not to do an automatic primary-secondary failover, but to have a person (the BC manager) in the loop. That person is alerted to the situation and can gather enough additional info (maybe just phone calls to the site admins, a separate "network link") to take the decision about which site should be Primary. After that the transition should be automated to reduce the likelihood of error.

Ireland warned it could face 'rolling blackouts' if it doesn't address data centres' demand for electricity

it'll not get better

When everyone has to charge electric cars as well.

BT sues supplier for £72m over exchange gear that allegedly caused wave of ADSL outages

denied the steel contacts in the JT blocks were at fault, telling the court: "A break in a contact as described would cause a continuous fault, being a physical or electrical break in connection. Neither would (without external factors for which the Defendant is not responsible) cause intermittent (i.e. irregular or non-continuous) faults."

Bare steel will rust, and I've have thought that copper wires pushed straight into IDC slots on rusting steel would certainly lead to intermittent contacts, and even "rusty-bolt" diode effects that would play havoc with ADSL.

BT 'welcomes' whopping £2bn investment by French telco Altice

Re: But what about Brexit?

All our infrastructure owned by the French.

Well, they know better than to buy their own infrastructure companies, with their huge debts and un-fireable workforces.

'I put the interests of the country first': Colonial Pipeline CEO on why oil biz paid off ransomware crooks

Re: So "Coloni4l123!" then?

Speak friend, and enter?

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

Re: It's all about timing

There is probably a reason why the time is now instead of letting it continue.

The original ElReg article said that the legal permissions they had to run the sting were time-limited, and reaching their end, so it was time to use the info gathered & start the round up.

It's completely unsupportable. Yes, we mean your brand new system

Re: Small steps

The real kicker of problematic is people at a company dictating a specific system and or sub-system.

In my experience this is the biggest driver of shadow IT. To take a recent example, our corporate IT group decided to replace the in-house wiki & document-sharing platform that we had been using for years with a different, more modern one. The argument was that it was newer and more supportable. This was simply imposed on the company without consultation (beyond the C-suite).

For many of the basic sales/marketing users who used it to upload plain info, HowTos, etc. it was just the usual pain of learning a new system. No big deal - "they'll get over it". The development organization, however, was a big user of in-house tools, specific to our products and processes, and they produced HTML output. The new wiki system would not render HTML without new plugins which were not part of the deployment, and were clunky & unfriendly to use in any case.

After a few months of trying to adapt, various parts of the development org opted for the obvious solutions, they started to re-purpose lab systems as standalone web servers. They served the HTML and the wiki system just became a front-end to them.

Is this maintainable? Sort-of. In most cases the systems were stood up by the team that needed them, so when someone leaves they rot until someone else figures out how they work, which depends on how well the initial developer of the system documented it. Does it get patched in time? Sometimes, when people remember. Does it respect the in-house security rules? Best-effort, but obviously IT don't audit it. Does it allow the development teams to get on with their core work, and make money for the company? Absolutely.

That's what causes shadow IT.

Apple settles with student after authorized repair workers leaked her naked pics to her Facebook page

Re: How to tell if you're stupid.

poster child for stupid.

Stupid or not, there's still no excuse for someone who happens to find those photos then sharing them. That's what Apple has paid up for. If the repair tech had simply admired the images and fixed the phone there wouldn't have been a problem.

Flying dildo poses a slap in the face for serious political debate

Re: Is this...

For a moment I read that as 3ft 36inches, and thought "that's quite some dildo".

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

Metacharacters?

Brit retailer Furniture Village confirms 'cyber-attack' as systems outage rolls into Day 7

Re: A cyber-attack and no data had been leaked

Trains run Debian? Who knew.

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

Not new

Using ordinary drives in a RAID enclosure can also do that, at least for READ operations. The controller parallelizes read requests, distributing them around the disks, and using whichever disk has the heads in the best place for a particular request, that's been around since the 1980s at least. Looks like the Seagate solution is just to put this in one drive box & call it a single disk.

US slaps tariffs on countries that hit Big Tech with digital services taxes ... then pauses them immediately

Re: About bl**dy time

by moving them automatically to a tax heaven.

Only because the tax laws allow it. Fix them, don't just add more complexity. The more complex they are, the easier they are to avoid.

Re: About bl**dy time

If Company G generates revenue in country X

If it generates profit in country X, it should pay tax in country X. Paying tax on revenue does not make sense, it's a bodge to get around the fact that tax codes are stupidly complex. The fix is to simplify them, not to add yet more bodges on top of bodges. That just creates even more loopholes for tax lawyers to exploit.

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

Re: hard to support

Of more practical use would be building the thing with a duel role as a hospital ship.

Britannia was, but had such a long service life that it eventually became obsolete in that role before it was needed.

Re: Great British Engineering

that never happened during her operational life.

The problem was that being a 1950's design, Britannia's engines burned heavy bunker oil. Since recent Navy ships all burn light diesel they couldn't send Britannia anywhere (to the Falklands, for example) because they would have had to send a special fuel tanker to accompany her. Not only uneconomic, but impractical since it just created a two-birds-with-one-torpedo target.

TCP alternative QUIC reaches IETF's Standards Track after eight years of evolution

QUIC’s best trick is to allow a client and server to send data, even if they have never connected.

Just like X.25's "fast select" from the 1970s?