Posts by Phil O'Sophical

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Unreliable and Incorrect are not the same thing. Servers may or may not be available (which is why it's a redundant network design), but when they are available they MUST be correct.

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Re: questions like…

The logical answer to all of those is "emigrate". The next problem is "where to?"

It's not corruption, it's just incompetence.

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: Nice try.

But an NI pastie is a different animal, served with 'a chip' (meaning a portion of chips) as a pastie supper. And now I'm hungry, and hundreds of miles from a decent pastie. Damn.

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Re: Embedded insecurity

AFAIK they get their maps from https://www.here.com/ and (at least for Skoda) they encourage people to log in to that portal and submit fixes.

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Techically there's no such thing as a UK driving licence. There's a GB licence, and a N. Ireland licence. Driving tests were only introduced in NI in the mid-1950s, neither of my parents ever passed one.

Brit broadband grilling descends into farce over targets and definitions

What clown appointed "the government minister for digital economy, Baroness Liz Lloyd CBE", whose background is law and history?

Dame Chi Onwurah is an electronics engineer with extensive hardware and software experience. It shows.

UK.gov accused of Grinching Christmas by ignoring phone theft scourge

Re: Erm

That's the point of deterrent sentences. How many of those prison places are occupied by the career crooks who see an occasional few months behind bars as just the price to pay for their lifestyle? If instead they knew they were looking at 1-2 years each time, would it change their behaviour? If it truly works as a deterrent you'd expect to see fewer people in jail over time.

There's also the possibility of non-custodial sentences, such as financial or social penalties.

At the moment there's an assumption that if the crime results in a relatively small financial loss to the victim, the sentence should be small. That completely ignores the far greater psychological effects of something like a house burglary, or the cumulative effects on a society of seeing things like shop theft being ignored.

Re: Erm

No point in streamlining the processing when the courts just smack them on the wrist and let them go. Some proper deterrent sentencing might help, and would also be an incentive for the police to catch them.

Ford shifts gears to build batteries for datacenters

Re: “underutilized electric vehicle battery capacity”

Not really a surprise. The early adopters have all bought theirs by now, and everyone else has realised that they are more expensive to buy, insure, fix, and in many cases run than conventional cars. In the UK, Reeves adding 3p/mile doesn't help.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Re: Vehicular MP3 player.

Maybe 20 years ago I had a car (Mazda 6, IIRC) with a single CD player, and the option to add a CD changer. Some digging around the internet revealed a small black box that took an SD card, but appeared to the car like a CD changer and plugged into the harness at the appropriate place in the glovebox. Its only peculiarity was that the SD card had to be structured like a CD changer, so 6 "discs" (directories) named CD01 - CD06, each containing many music files of various formats, numbered something like 001-xxxxx.mp3, 002-xxxxx.mp3 etc. Once that initial rather clunky setup was done (a small script on my PC solved that) it worked really well: the controls on the Radio/CD operated it, and the display showed the details taken from the embedded tags.

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Re: Obvious Question

How do they read the strength of the light reflected from the selected bit without the absorption and diffusion of that reflected light by intervening bits from causing inaccurate results?

AFAIK it's done by playing with focus, each beam enters the medium as a diffuse, spread, beam which passes around the other bits. They are all focussed to converge only on the desired bit.

Trump gives state AI regulation the presidential middle finger

Re: Ruling by royal decree

They probably will. They don't understand, or don't want to believe, that it's Trump's incompetence which has got them here.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Nifty-Looking Desktop Computer Cases

The usual item is a pot plant, especially one that needs regular watering, with the result ---->

screen messages

I think we've all worked with people, even apparently intelligent ones, who are completely incapable of reading a message word for word from a screen.

"Storage manager waiting for tape to be loaded"? You're likely to be told that there's a message about there being no Dymo supplies in the cupboard.

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

Re: Tully

> Four metres!

IIRC parts of the UK lake district get 3-5 metres per year, the west of Ireland can see 2m in mountain areas.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Re: Vehicle weight?

they go flying off the car and hit the pavement, and then are killed by head injuries when they land.

How long until the government makes helmets mandatory for pedestrians...

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

In the door analogy, if you don't have permission to check that the door is locked then you don't have the right to check it, even by a gentle push. If the owner has set an alarm but forgotten to lock the door you could trigger an 'intruder alert ', and be responsible for any costs related to handling it, even if you had the best of intentions.

Pension portal launch fail sends Capita running to Microsoft for help

by the end of Wednesday, 23,500 members had succeeded in registering on the site.

So, only 1,676,500 to go, then?

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Re: It also took Zoom down

> cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

ITYM cried out in glee and put the kettle on

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

Re: Current NASA situation

Might be simpler just to swap tanks, returning the empty to earth for the actual refill.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Vendors...

This makes me think of the far-too-many vendors whose installation instructions contain a note to the effect "if it doesn't work, turn off your security software and try again". They never seem to learn.

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

Re: Energy generation mix

Renewables are cheaper than other forms of generation

Not the way that UK energy policy prices them, they aren't.

Poop-peeping toilet attachment has a different definition of 'end-to-end' encryption

Commenturds, shirley?

London grid crunch delays new housing amid datacenter boom

When it comes to housebuilding, planning committees pay little attention to limitations on roads, sewerage, doctors, dentists or any other aspect of infrastructure, despite their grand words. Why should we hope for electricity supply to be the exception?

Dorset Council ditching customized SAP for £14M Oracle overhaul

Re: What the fuck are UK local authorities doing

The people who get themselves elected to councils don't do so because they want to help their local communitty. They do so because they want to show off how clever they are, and how much better they are than anyone else who might have been elected. Ergo, they can't possibly do things the same way as any other council, because then they wouldn't be making a unique difference.

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Using 6 words instead of 1

Yes, we had the same issue with asian countries. For software that was to be used by technical people (i.e. not "joe public") the Japanese and Koreans didn't care, they were fine with English.

The French and Canadians, on the other hand,...

Re: Oh FFS -

Presumably you made sure that a 20 character string in English that became a 50 character string in German (gotta love those compound words) didn't break your apps?

That's the difference between:

Internationalization (I18N): Making sure your code can handle translated strings without breaking screen layouts, etc.

and

Localization (L10N): Doing the translations into the desired languages (which may also require updating metadata about position of variable tokens within the strings)

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Re: System manages to already be broken before implementation starts

It worked OK for me, even allowing for having to switch from laptop to phone and back. It was a faff but it worked.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

The BNC was an early VCR connector rather than networking

It long predates VCRs. It's a smaller (Baby) connector derived from the wartime radio "N" connector, for military antenna cables. It's still in wide use today because both the 50ohm and 75ohm variants have constant impedance beyond 1GHz, so are very popular for professional radio installations (as are "N" connectors, for lower-loss applications).

> It was about the size of a garden hose but less flexible.

It had a minimum bend radius of around 25cm, IIRC. Didn't stop people trying to pull it into standard conduits, though...

ARCnet existed before Thinnet.

And woe betide the network admin who didn't throw away every bit of 93Ω ARCnet cable when upgrading to 50Ω 10base2. I spent the best part of a week trying to diagnose a problem between two clustered μVAXen, which would work fine until network traffic reached a certain peak, at which point collision numbers would go through the roof and everything stopped. The problem was eventually traced to a short leftover piece of ARCnet cable in an underfloor duct.

Re: Things that didn't happen

Standing on forks used to be very common. Sometimes they'd put a pallet on the forks, if you were lucky.

Or: https://thekilpatrickgrouppa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/forklift.jpg

FCC sounds alarm after emergency tones turned into potty-mouthed radio takeover

Ah, the joy of in-band signalling. The phone companies learned about that the hard way back in the 60s, haven't radio stations caught up yet?

ICANN distances itself from radical proposal – which it funded – to give nations a role in internet governance

Re: "a board dominated by African heads of state"

Very few European monarchs have any degree of real executive power, for the most part their role is as an impartial guarantor of democratic process.

The current fiasco in the USA is a clear example of how merely having an elected head of state does not provide any safeguarding of democratic process.

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: Hang on

It sounds to me that the problem is that OVHC does have physical access to the data held in France, they're just being told by OVHF not to touch it because of internal sovereignty rules.The Canadian courts are ordering OVHC to reach in and grab it anyway.

One option might be for OVHF to firewall off the Canadian subsidiary's acces, if that can be done quickly and in a way that doesn't break their customers' applications. A big if.

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

Re: Let's take what Dijkstra said with a pinch of salt

I've always felt that the real problem with BASIC is that it lent itself to being (over)simplified, so no two BASICs were the same, especially in the early home computer days when people were trying to cram interpreters into 8K and programs into 2K of memory or less. That certainly made it difficult to learn programming with it, since it was hard to impose style or rules on something so inconsistent. ANSI BASIC, with its decent structural features, isn't a bad language.

That said, there is nothing wrong with GOTO, when used judiciously and with purpose.

I'd agree, although the F77 computed GOTO was never my favourite construction, almost as bad as the Arithmetic IF...

Ukraine first country in Europe to get Starlink satellite phone service

Re: Ukraine to get first...

Why? just Why?

Least worst option at the moment?

Britain plots atomic reboot as datacenter demand surges

Re: it's hard to see how slashing regulations is going to cut down that timeline by much.

Environmental rules are like tax laws. Whenever someone finds a loophole it gets fixed by adding yet more rules, rather than by fixing the existing ones. The result is warts on top of warts that are ever more onerous to cope with, and inevitably add yet more loopholes. The only real solution is to start again, but no government will ever do that.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: 'Not by accident'

> But do you carry a PC in your pocket to plug it into?

Phone with a USB-C socket?

Re: Ooer!

IIRC FIPS-140 has some interesting details about anti-tamper switches an physical destruction at the more extreme levels of compliance.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Those were the innocent days...

Yes 400 days uptime probably means 400 days without a kernel patch. Security? Who needs that on a mail server...

Self-replicating botnet attacks Ray clusters

Re: I just . . . what?

it doesn't have authentication built in. When clusters are exposed to the internet – as they frequently are – this poses a huge security hole

AI, designed and run by Real Idiots.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Not an attack or malicious activity?

Probably used an excel .xls spreadsheet, and hit 64k lines.

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: The Masses Will Get An Agentic OS And Will Not Complain

here in the UK people voted for the Tories for 14 years

And all they got was 14 more years of New Labour.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: First time user

a compiler where the installation instructions don't match the GUI of the IDE into which it is supposed to be installed

I used to work with a truly excellent QA engineer. Every time she tested a new release of the product, no matter how well she knew it, she would take the documentatioin for that release and follow it exactly. She would then file bugs against the product or documentation as necessary.

Re: The person who writes documentation

In my experience the best way to do that is for the assigned writer to be part of the development team, sitting with the developers and using the product as development proceeds.

Good documentation is like security, it needs to be done with the product, not bolted on afterwards.

Louvre's pathetic passwords belong in a museum, just not that one

Re: lazy stereotypes

Have to admit to imagining response of high ups when been told about security flaws was along the lines of a Gallic shrug & a long drag on a Gauloises.

And the classic French reply of "Bof!" ?

Re: Nothing new

Why bother hacking passwords when you can just shin up a ladder to an open window and grab a few million euros worth of jewellery?

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Re: Having tried vibe coding

I'd encourage you to look at what people did beforehand.

Sound advice for any 21-year-old in any situation.

Don't expect it to be listened to, though.