Posts by Flak

Ofcom refuses to bite over Openreach's fiber freebies

BT is still at it!

Having worked in Telecoms competing against BT as the incumbent for much of my working life, this does not surprise me at all, but shows again that Ofcom has BT in its various guises running rings round it.

The regulatory Laissez Faire attitude is problematic for one major reason: You cannot reverse time.

So, if you wait and see whether some anticompetitive practice is damaging - the damage will be done. And this is death by a thousand cuts - I have lost count how many times something was argued not to be damaging at all - only for reality to catch up and prove the opposite.

We need a stronger regulator with a bit of foresight who will be able to identify these kinds of issues and then set/enforce equitable principles and rules for the benefit of the wider market.

BT promises 5G Standalone for 99% of the UK by 2030

I don't believe it

Curious to see how well this article will age.

I simply don't believe this metric at all.

More than happy for history to prove me wrong.

Previous form:

R100 in Scotland - originally due to have completed by end 2021 - now planned to be done by March 2028 (some delays caused by a challenged procurement process for one of the three region lots), with public funding increasing from £600m to some £640m for 'enhanced coverage'.

In short, I am not holding my breath...

Enterprises sticking with Windows 10 could shell out billions for continued support

Now there is a business model...

I wonder if anyone ever thought of forcing paid for upgrades.

Everybody needs good neighbors – especially ones who sell you solar energy

Peer to peer electricity sharing - the practicalities

Would be really interested to see how this is actually achieved.

I like the idea - a lot - but there are some considerations - regulatory, safety, insurance, practical - I am sure there are others.

You cannot use the grid to share - as then you would just be paid the export tariff. So do you have a private distribution infrastructure to one neighbour - or a few?

Building your own power sharing infrastructure will need to be done properly - not an extension lead slung across a fence - or it becomes a safety risk.

Does this impact the insurance policy? Probably a new one for them, but I can imagine what they would say.

Do you have neighbours you would be able to do this with - and not fall out with???

Re: Had Solar + Battery installed nearly 3yrs ago

Very similar experience and numbers - with the difference that I have a 10 year interest free loan to pay for the infrastructure (6.5kW panels and 10kWh battery), installed just over 2 years ago.

Well worth it and looking to break even after around 8 years.

Boffins say tool can sniff 5G traffic, launch 'attacks' without using rogue base stations

Incredible (but to be expected)

Quite crazy when you consider that mobile devices are likely to negotiate new encrypted sessions so regularly.

Probably so fundamental that an improved protocol to establish sessions is needed.

Every question you ask, every comment you make, I'll be recording you

The statement used to be: If it is free, you are the product

Now this can simply be shortened to:

You are the product!

Huawei chair says the future of comms is fiber-to-the-room, which China has and the rest of us don’t

PoE

The problem with Fibre to the room infrastructure is that you then need an NTE that converts optical to electrical - and this needs power. And/or a wireless access point, which also needs power.

I have seen fibre to the room installations in the UK that also deliver TV signal (Sky and/or Freeview). All of the sudden you have three devices requiring power and a not very elegant in-room delivery.

PoE with 10Gbps delivery to a room should be sufficient in all but the most demanding deployments for a long time to come.

Realistic question - what equipment / application would be able to use this at line rate and what is the actual Internet feed to a building aggregating all of those connections? I suspect that most will top out at 10Gbps anyway.

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

Dear Santa...

Unfortunately my wife does not follow the Register, so I may need to drop some hints.

Actually saw the Space Shuttle Discovery coming in at Washington Dulles Airport in 2012 on the back of a 747 - totally unplanned and just happened to be there that day. Spectacular!

Had a second chance encounter with a Space Shuttle in NYC when the Enterprise came up the Hudson River on a barge a couple of months later. The crane to lift it from the barge to the deck of the Intrepid was the same one that lifted Sully's plane from the Hudson.

Just 15 buyers are in charge of £14B in UK central government tech spending

Information and experience asymmetry

There is a huge information and experience disparity between buyers and sellers.

I have worked on the supply side for public sector IT & Telecoms services for over 25 years and I have NEVER come across a buyer who fully understood:

- what the actual client need is (rather than a 'want' from whoever shouts loudest in the client organisation),

- what they were buying,

- what was technically possible,

- what was commercially feasible or competitive,

- what was realistic from a risk perspective,

- what the interdependencies are with internal or partner teams, processes & technologies.

Our team on the supplier side would be deeply involved in several procurements for one service type every year.

On the buyer side, you are often faced with one person who is (at the time a certain service is being procured - say once every 5 years) just at the right level in their career where they get to do this once. They were too junior the time before and may have moved on to another role the next procurement comes around.

That is not a fair 'fight' and actually not ideal for both the buyer and the seller.

HMRC: Crooks broke into 100k accounts, stole £43M from British taxpayer in late 2024

No financial loss?

'[...] The tax collector's assurance they have not suffered any financial loss as a result of the fraud case' is somewhat misleading.

Every tax payer has suffered financial loss!

BTW I would like to understand how MFA was circumvented - and what has been done to ensure that cannot happen again.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

There is Wifi and then there is Wifi! You want the second kind.

1) Home hub Wifi, with all access points unaware of each other, shouting over each other and on default settings. Clients drop off the Wifi as soon as they leave the coverage of their home hub. There is often some sub-par public Wifi in corridors (and possibly even lifts), interfering with (and being impacted by) home hubs in apartments. This is like trying to have a conversation in a noisy pub with the music blaring.

2) Radio planned and properly designed Wifi, with APs connected to a controller. Clients can roam between APs across the whole building, it is possible to have private wireless networks configured and connected to in-apartment LAN ports. Much more efficient design and more akin to a corporate office setup. This assumes a single Wifi and broadband provider across the whole building. A far superior solution compared to 1.

Yes, have and use LAN ports also, but most client devices don't have physical ports anymore and the convenience of Wifi is compelling for most day to day use.

If I was staying in an apartment building, this difference could well be the deal maker or breaker!

LegoGPT is here to make your blocky dreams come true

El Reg, where the Lego and LLM Venn diagram circles meet

This is the kind of news I come here for!

Delta Air Lines class action cleared for takeoff over CrowdStrike chaos

$$$

With $4.7bn in profits in 2024 the vultures are circling.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Calculator and non-calculator exams

Adaptation is needed similar to what has happened in maths exams.

Any work outside a controlled classroom environment must assume that AI is used by a student. 'How to' should be part of the curriculum and examination.

In an exam setting, this can be controlled for and non-AI questions could be assessed.

Both need to be taught and practiced and should be examined and graded. That way, there is still 'value' in education.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Mega vs Micro

These kinds of projects are great - particularly when they are close to renewable generation sites.

Let's not forget microgeneration, micro-grids and micro-storage, however (in-home, EVs, etc.).

At scale, this can have a similar or greater effect and may also reduce the need for grid augmentation.

Vodafone aims to offer satellite-to-phone connectivity starting later this year

Timing is everything!

5 low earth orbit satellites (cruising altitude of just over 500km) will provide very intermittent service.

Apparently orbiting the earth twice a day, the photoshoot for this call will have been timed to perfection, both in terms of start time and duration.

Putting that aside, it is a fantastic achievement to have bi-directional comms between standard mobile phones and satellites, given the distance.

I am not sure how much cover this will be able to provide, even with a much enhanced roll-out.

Starlink is apparently planning a launch of direct-to-device mobile services from their 7000 current satellites.

Startup plugs AI datacenters into biogas-powered energy

Some systems thinking at last.

Now add to that district heat networks - to use the waste heat.

Any other thoughts? I am sure there are quite a few additional systems / requirements that could be complementary.

Patch procrastination leaves 50,000 Fortinet firewalls vulnerable to zero-day

Oops

looks like a series of unfortunate events!

There is scope (and need) for improvement!

Business value from GenAI remains elusive despite IT spending boom

Try, baby, try!

Gen AI is going to be a bit like post-it notes, which people didn't know what to do with at first, but no home and office can live without today.

Through experimentation (both ad hoc and planned larger projects) winners will emerge - in terms of use cases, adoption best practice, applications, etc.

Hang on in there and, to paraphrase the Orange one's inaugural one liner: try, baby try!

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

EV tanks and aircraft

I somehow have the feeling that green credentials are at the bottom of the priority list in warfare.

If there is an electric propulsion option, it will be for other reasons (e.g. stealth or nuclear underwater capability and/or endurance).

Google must face £7B UK class action over search engine dominance

Failed Regulatory Oversight

This is just one of many recent examples where regulatory oversight should have prevented an issue rather than letting it get too far.

Quite often the damage is done and it is hardly possible to get it undone after being left unchecked for too long.

What other search engines are out there? A quick (Google) search reveals some names, but most consumers default to Google, just because it is there embedded in their devices.

Why does it take an individual to take this action when it should have been the CMA?

Other failing UK regulatory environments include - I am sure there are a few more:

Monopolies and Mergers Commission, then Competition Commission and now CMA (Competition and Markets Authority)

Ofcom (Broadcast and Telecoms)

Ofgem (Energy)

Ofwat (Water and Sewage)

FCA (Financial Conduct Authority)

ICO (Information Commissioner's Office)

Interested to see where this will end up, but the timescales are far too long, which is one of the problems - Google's market position is too entrenched already.

UK government plays power broker with small modular reactor suitors

Re: Energy Security

My focus was particularly on energy security rather than pricing / costs.

Every sovereign nation should ensure (if at all possible) that there is no or little dependence on other countries in terms of some of the essentials - energy, food and defense in particular. This is a policy rather than economic decision.

There are positive economic consequences in the medium to long term, however, if that independence is achieved (you mentioned price shocks earlier), as was brought into rude focus through geopolitical changes.

Energy Security

Investment in nuclear energy is absolutely vital to ensure the UK's energy security.

Contrast this with the insane exit from nuclear energy in Germany.

Brit telcos to clash in high-speed mmWave spectrum showdown next year

Should be called HmmmmWave

I understand the fascination with speed for mobile communications.

Economic operators also understand the cost reality, because cell sizes shrink as the frequency increases (up to perhaps 200m on a good day). There is virtually no penetration of solid objects and you pretty much need line of sight. In order for base stations to deliver the achievable radio throughput, each base station needs fibre backhaul.

The hardware cost, backhaul cost and simple logistics of delivering many additional base stations will mean that, realistically, there won't be blanket mmWave cover except perhaps in top traffic city centre areas and possibly event venues.

So don't get too excited about top speed wireless comms for consumers yet.

Happy to be proven wrong.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Conspiracy Theories

I was disappointed to see no conspiracy theories regarding this incident involving a certain global hardware company and the missing gentleman, but suspect the first post (of which there is only the evidence of deletion) may have contained some speculation.

On a different note, my thoughts are with his family.

UK crimebusters shut down global call-spoofing outfit that claimed 170K-plus victims

Regulation please

I am normally a 'less is more' person when it comes to regulations, but in this case it is needed.

This is what is needed:

Originating caller carriers must only accept display caller IDs where the originating caller 'owns' the number. This may be a main office number or even a non-geographic one.

At least that way there would be traceability and accountability.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Canary releases? More like guinea pig

Would not like to be a canary in this scenario...

Netherlands arm of KPMG fined $25M for cheating in exams

The conclusions are damning, and the penalty is a reflection of that.

Hopefully they will also feel some further consequences with companies thinking twice before paying KPMG a king's ransom for their services, knowing that this went on.

Why do companies think that taking shortcuts is a good thing? This may work in the short term, but hardly ever in the long term.

FAIL, because that is what the automatic exam result should be for anyone caught up in this.

Vodafone, Three hustle to tie knot before regulators crash wedding

No brainer

What a silly question to ask - when you have four operators and that goes down to three, it is inevitable that there will be a reduction in competition.

And this is NOT good for the consumer.

End of!

UK council won't say whether two-week 'cyber incident' impacted resident data

Ah, trust...

So hard to gain, so easy to lose:

"[the council's] website is still safe to use, and that they [users] may trust emails coming from council sources, including any attachments that come with them."

Right...

UK tech titan Mike Lynch's US fraud trial begins today

More than one guilty party

Not pre-empting the outcome here, but IMHO:

- Lynch and Hussain did some creative accounting

- HP too keen and inadequate DD

- KPMG and Deloitte - auditors sleeping on the job

Lady Justice is catching up with Mr Lynch now...

Cop shop rapped for 'completely avoidable' web form blunder

Checking it twice

Surely this is exactly the kind of situation where, prior to a service going live or being changed, you would want to ensure there are no unintended consequences.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Real Time

Not real-time communication in computing terms, but communication that takes real time!

I take my hat off to the team that still supports this wonderful piece of equipment which just keeps on giving.

IAB Europe's ad consent popups pose privacy problem

Re: But here in Blighty ...

Another Brexit benefit.

Open for business & stuff the consumer.

Shut it all down, please

The term 'charade' is used in this article, which is not strong enough.

It is a murky morass.

We are pestered several times a day by these stupid popups which are still designed to beat us into submission (consent). They are not transparent! Who reads the long list of companies under each category, let alone understands who they are or what they do - and what they do with 'your' data?

And more recently the notion that you also consent to 'legitimate interest', adding further sliders you have to undo (I thought that was illegal already).

Solution:

Make 'no consent' the default and not require removing consent from legitimate interest categories. Have a button on a website where the operator can put forward all the arguments why someone should consent. And if someone continues to browse, they don't...

Simple. And overdue.

Oh - and what happens in the UK???

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

Drones as a Service?

My evil little mind took no time at all to consider this scenario:

Load flying taxi with incendiaries or explosives (no passengers, no pilot) and request a flight to your desired destination.

Icon to the right for obvious reasons...

What countermeasures are in place or planned?

A Space Shuttle goes vertical for one last time

Exciting!

For anyone even remotely interested in the Space Shuttle this will be a 'must see'.

I was in NYC on the morning of 06 June 2012 when the Space Shuttle Enterprise came up the Hudson on a barge, to be lifted on to the Intrepid aircraft carrier - by the same crane which lifted UA1549 from the Hudson in 2009! Made our way down to the pier where hundreds of people had gathered to watch the spectacle. It took about 3 hours to attach the lifting frame and then lift the shuttle up on the flight deck of the Intrepid. Would love to go see it now.

The Endeavour in its new location will no doubt be spectacular! Just hope it will still be accessible - even in the vertical position.

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Oops

Chickens coming home to roost!

CDW settles in lawsuit with rival reseller over Cisco sales

Caveat emptor!

Always remember that a dominant player in the a market may decide to get ahead of themselves and engage in anticompetitive behaviour.

Smaller players will typically play 'nice' in order to win business.

Your choice...

Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140K for sending 80M+ spams

It is companies like these that make me ashamed to admit I studied Marketing

However... I have never worked in B2C marketing because it never sat right with me.

Can we see some proper fines please? £140k for 80M messages is a business expense, not a fine.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

16000ft iPhone drop test

Now that is real quality!

A candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records?

Would like to know what terminal velocity the iPhone achieved and what kind of surface it landed on. I suspect it was not concrete or tarmac.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

Bring back the art of low bandwidth coding

A couple of years ago had a Masters student work at our company. He was working on a Masters project using LoRaWAN, an IoT wireless protocol. He was trying to get some ambitious interactions between an end device he had built (with e-ink display) and an application he had written. In his mid/late 20's and studying software engineering, he never had to work in a bandwidth constrained environment. As he investigated ways of getting a lot of information across a very constrained wireless link, I pointed him at legacy technologies and protocols which had already solved many of these issues out of necessity, indicating he may want to dust off some of these for his work.

Voice services don't need HD quality - 8kbps or even less may be fine where bandwidth is scarce.

SMS should still be considered an essential.

Networks need to be built so that these services can run even where signal strength is weak. Backward compatibility with lower frequency / longer range services must be maintained to provide those services!

NAT, ATM, decentralized search – and other outrageous opinions from the 1990s

Year End Reminiscing

Thank you for the memory lane, which pretty much spans my career in this sector, which much of it spent in the carrier / service provider space.

My fascination at the beginning was with ISDN and SDH as deterministic technologies, followed by (Frame Relay and) ATM. I was obsessed with QoS which I thought was absolutely vital for services such as digital voice and video. And it probably was at the time, with other packet based technologies such as Ethernet and MPLS and real time, rate adaptive codecs for voice and video still in their infancy.

I remember talking to a client about their Cisco CallManager installation (early 2000's) and they told me they ran it on a LAN that didn't have QoS enabled. I could not believe it at the time and asked them about performance. Some 500 staff used that system in a single building (calls out still relied on ISDN30) without any complaints from staff. Their view was that bandwidth overprovision made QoS on the LAN irrelevant to them.

Today, I see their outrageous opinion as visionary. It has borne out in reality where people work from home on domestic Wifi with voice and video calls.

Another outrageous opinion came from a UK local authority IT director who said around 2010 that he would like to see his whole council just communicating over the Internet - not via an MPLS VPN. To me he was a total heretic at the time, but I think today this would be (almost) entirely possible.

Keep them coming please, always willing to learn.

While some may not stand the test of time, others will and may prove to be prophetic!

Nearly a million non-profit donors' details left exposed in unsecured database

DonorView

DonorView? At least it is living up to its name!

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Must have taken a leaf out of the Orange Blimp's playbook.

Say what you like with impunity, thanks to the First Amendment.

No consequences at all - except for a few people who believed Autopilot meant what the word implies - and some dead or injured people (drivers and innocent third parties) who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Unbelievable!

NTT Data to monitor ten million hotel guests and sell data about their sleep

We are all lab rats!

Just surrender to the inevitable. NOT!

Progress towards 'Gigabit Europe' is slow, with UK also lagging

Re: "42% of users stated their current internet was sufficient for their needs"

Ordinary users in a household with 2 or 3 people will quite happily make do on a VDSL service - We have 67Mbps down and 18Mbps up and that takes care of all our streaming and video chat / conferencing requirements.

From December this year I will be able to get FTTP and I am tempted to get the full speed connection - not because I (first world) 'need' it - but because I 'want' it. Have worked in IT & Telecoms all my career and remember selling 34Mbps 'High' Speed Internet services for >£100k annual rental. Getting 30x that speed at my house for 1/200th of that cost is mind blowing.

I don't see a mass migration to fibre, in the short to medium term, but in the long term people will appreciate and want it.

For now, it is speed demons and geeks...

Equifax scores £11.1M slap on wrist over 2017 mega breach

Is that it?

It is lovely to read that they have invested so much in cyber security - after the fact!

The fine does not represent the actual loss and distress caused to their customers, who, I hope, voted with their feet!

US construction giant unearths concrete evidence of cyberattack

Top marks for the headline!

"construction giant unearths concrete evidence"

Who comes up with these?