Posts by Lee D

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Re: Lack of mobile coverage

Don't use SMS based OTP - it's far from secure.

Use TOTP, which can be done on an offline app (so long as the real-time clock is vaguely accurate).

I work in an exclusive private school in the middle of a large suburban town.

We can't get or use 3G, 4G, 5G on the premises - no signal on any network, with any phone. If you hang out the window and point towards the tower you can maybe send a text or have a phone call. We get complaints from people hiring our facilities all the time (and things like contractor's phones, and card-readers never work). The local tower was supposed to be upgraded to 5G but the NIMBYs got there and blocked it.

I live in (admittedly) rural Oxfordshire. I found out the other day that my car GPS tracker that I bought over a decade ago can do GPRS tracking to a Traccar installation which I can pull into Home Assistant. I thought it was just SMS-based, and that the GPRS wouldn't actually work that well.

Then I discover that the car "disappears" in two parts of the journey on my way home down a the M40 motorway due to signal dropout. And that it never sees the car as "home" because it drops out more than 500m away from home and can't get a signal, so it just assumes it's still travelling somewhere... (which is rather annoying and I'd have to expand the limit to nearly 1km to make it reliable!).

I used to run my previous house on 4G alone - for home automation, CCTV, VPN, general browsing, gaming, downloads, etc. Never had a problem.

I can barely get Facebook loaded on my 5G phone at home where I am now, and it often drops out for even basic calls.

A friend of mine calls me about once a week on his commute home from work. The call drops out at the EXACT same point on his M25 motorway journey every time. Without fail. Just a basic GSM call.

Sorry, but coverage is still sucky. I can't remember the last time it was this bad.

I was even eyeing up a new Draytek router as they do one with 5G dual-sim built in now, and I'm not sure I can justify it. Even with external antennae, being fixed, and orienting towards the towers, I don't think I'd actually gain much if the DSL went out and I have to fall back to 5G.

Another thing that should be nationalised - the core mobile phone network should own and offer services to ALL providers from ALL towers, and everyone else is just a reseller. Because there is no way that I'm THAT disconnected from civilisation that I should be affected by calls dropping near/along the M25, the M40, and major towns on a daily basis.

Here's hoping Bezos or someone get their act together and offer a Starlink alternative that isn't run by a complete twit.

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

I reckon almost everyone who worked on it.

What it indicates is a culture driven by nonsensical ideas enforced upon the "underlings" by marketing / management, and absolutely nobody cares enough (because they're highly paid, they've seen others who have been sacked for less, etc.) to actually fight for it.

This is what happens when you fill your upper echelons with yes-men, and stamp out any kind of feedback from those below.

Brit council fumbles Oracle Fusion launch, leaving SAP to die another day

Why does government have to reinvent the wheel in every parish, council, county, etc.

It's payroll. Why is there not a centralised government payroll for all government purposes. Especially when it reports to... government services (e.g. HMRC, state pensions, etc.).

Why is every place having to procure their own thing, from the commercial sector, make it interact and be compatible, and support and change it themselves?

There is only one answer - because it's the only way you can get backhanders.

"Parallel Payroll Running "

Well... at least that sounds like they're doing it vaguely sensibly and running both at the same time and comparing output from both for anomalies.

Starlink offers 'unusually hostile environment' to TCP

Almost like NASA went out of its way to make appropriate protocols for space-based communications.

And that you could piggyback TCP on any of those if you needed to.

BT delays deadline for digital landline switch off date

I moved into a flat, refused to activate the landline or broadband (3Mbps down, 1Mbps up? Get outta here. And they wanted £160 + VAT to reactive the landline which at that point was still giving me a dialtone).

After 6 months, the line was dead... as in totally dead, dead-dead, nothing there dead. Not a neighbourhood problem (everyone else had working phones, obviously).

Stayed like that for 5 years while I lived there.

Re: Laughing stock

Been pitched since 1802, mostly by the French!, most early attempts - back to 1881 - were abandoned, was politically supported by Churchill during his time, cancelled by the Labour party in the 70's, etc.

Eventually started as a privately-funded project under Thatcher (1979), for £2.6bn wasn't completed until 1994, some 80% overbudget with eventual finance costs 140% higher than expected. It took until 1999 for Eurostar to make its first profit, in 2005 they were nearly bankrupt, and they're still struggling (and traffic not back to even 2008 levels since COVID / Brexit).

Killed 10 workers building it.

Sounds like a British project to me.

It has been "due to be switched off" in June, etc. of every one of the last 8 years, to my knowledge.

They just keep bumping it forward.

And the BBC own/run the transmitter,I believe, it's their transmitter for long-wave stations, the National Grid just use it for sending teleswitch data. They've said when it dies, the long-wave will be switched off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station

A business provides a service the customer wants for a price they can afford.

Electricity companies - aside from ridiculous overcharging based on clearly mathematically-unsound estimates, to profiteer from holding your funds and with estimates increasing on price rise and just before every winter (and dropping just before every summer) - are gouging people. Hell, my "storage heating" rate was recently changed to be MORE than the standard night rate. That means that using storage heating costs more money and is actually far less efficient (through storage losses) than just putting a convector heater in their place (which is exactly what I've done).

The EV will charge wherever I want. It will not use fuel. That, in itself, is enough for fuel independence. If it's at home for the weekend, it's a giant additional battery bank so the surplus I generate (which I have ZERO intention of feeding back to the grid) will be stored and not wasted. By retirement, my EV use will be minimal, and it will happily charge from the panels I can fit - even with the cheapest of today's panels - between uses enough to cover almost all journeys.

"Hint: if it was that simple everyone would have abandoned utility companies a while ago."

It didn't used to be. Would you like to see my 6000W pure-sine inverter connected to a LiFePO battery bank run all my appliances? Because it's already capable of doing so. And it cost comparatively nothing. You couldn't do that even 20 years ago - 7KWh of lead-acid is a wall of batteries weighing stupendous amounts that you have to replace every few years. 7KWh of LiFePO I could fit in a small under-sink cabinet without a struggle, on the original shelves (I wouldn't but that's how light they are), and give 10+ years no problems at all.

And the cost? For 18 months after moving in, I would refund the SURPLUS that my electricity company was stealing from me on the basis of their made-up estimates, sink it into a battery, a panel, or a piece of kit, and hence next month would be slightly more refund AGAIN. (They have now returned to some resemblance of common sense, but still "over-estimate" the day before every price increase, the day before every bill is issued, etc.). Literally in the "this is my fun hobby" scales of money, adding on little by little. I have flexi planels, bi-facial panels, normal panels, I have some on a shed with an angled bracket, I have some flat, and I have some VERTICAL stuck on the front of my south-facing porch - all produce enough to payback in a reasonable time) I have used old lead-acid from family's cars, changed for multiple LiFePO, I started with a "toy" charge controller, moved up to one capable of 60A - 2.8KW @ 48V, I started with a small existing inverter (150W square wave) up to a 6000W pure-sine. I have used approximately 2% of the available surface area, and 0% of my south-facing roofspace (was waiting to check permissions).

I regularly generate 2/7'ths (limited entirely by battery usage at the moment, but with batteries and available panel space, easily covered completely) of my daily average energy requirements with what is basically still a hobby-setup, in the UK at London latitudes.

And this is STILL an "amateur" setup according to solar forums I frequent. That's without heatpumps, just conventional convector heaters, or an efficient water heater through the last two winters. My house rated a "D" for energy efficiency on purchase because of the lack of sufficient insulation (but that's a nonsense because it's AMAZING at holding heat - concrete tiles really help. There's so much more I could do - I bet I could get usage down to 5KWh on average (it's really the winter heating that hits hard).

And if that's *TODAY'S* tech... imagine what 20 more years will do for it, with everyone using batteries, solar, heatpumps and EVs because everything else has moved that way.

Even if it comes to me paying a standing charge only for "grid backup" electricity, using my car only for smaller journeys and "topping up" at the station of my choice, or even using my employer or public chargers, and using only what I need to use... that's more than a viable future.

And if I can do it in a tiny bungalow, I assure you that most households could do it. Hell, the council properties either side of me both have heatpumps because that's what they fit nowadays. It won't be long before councils start installing solar on all their properties as part of the "insulation" / "heating replacement" / etc. schemes they apply to those on benefits and living in council houses.

Welcome to the present... not even the future. Drop me £20k today (and maybe a £20k EV car) and I'd be energy independent by tomorrow afternoon, for the vast majority, and that's just with today's tech. (P.S. I don't actually rely on tech increasing - even things like CPU speed plateau... but my system is far from the most efficient or best money can reasonably buy).

Winter - the panels were giving me 1KWh and that's what I based the figures on. There is room for 10-fold expansion.

I'm only limited to 2KWh at the moment because of batteries.

It's a bungalow - no problems with access.

I have my eye on a grey-water pump / filter / header tank to reduce usage - pumps from any outside water butt, underground storage tank, etc. to the header, tops up that header from mains water if it needs to, but then uses separate plumbing to grey-water setup (e.g. toilet, garden hose, etc).

From there, yes, there's a further set of stages necessary to make it potable but they make those setups as well so it can be done in two stages depending on the amount of usage.

Already have a header tank for feeding the hot water tank but cold is at mains pressure - and with a large greywater tank outside, at ground level, you have as much toilet-flushing as you like. Hot water is an immersion heater at the moment, easy to convert to a dual-element using any spare solar to heat or go direct heating or possibly heat battery (but very expensive).

Waste water is charged along with used mains water - so the above would mean I'd be paying next to nothing for it anyway and would likely retain it.

However, I have seriously looked into incinerator toilets. Basically a large automated kiln. Moves all the waste behind the toilet in a sanitary manner, burns it using only electricity for hours, only by-product is vented steam (non-nasty) and sterile ash you can use on the garden. They have them on boats and Arctic stations, etc. And you can keep using them and it just adjusts the burn-time, so it's not like you have to wait for the cycle to finish because you can go again. I was looking into it because at one point I was considered a mobile life and a vehicle with a chemical toilet isn't my idea of fun, but an incinerator toilet... that could work without the "ick" factor (and without many consumables).

As I say, I have seriously considered most things. Where I'll actually draw the line? I'm not sure yet. Depends on the behaviour of the utilities, future prices, life events (e.g. wheelchair as you point out), and so on.

This is actually part of my "retirement plan".

I'm in my 40's and bought a house (for the 3rd time in my life) just before the point at which any mortgage would fall into my retirement. I did it deliberately, so I had one stable place to see out the rest of my working life and retire to, with any luck.

Part of that decision was:

- an all-electric house

- the ability to mount solar panels

- being able to have driveway parking

- the potential for an EV charger

With a goal of being utility-independent by retirement. Electricity suppliers are now an industry that wants to do nothing but profiteer from me, so I decided to start cutting them out of my life. Same for fuel costs.

I'm already getting there - over a year in and I can supply 2KWh / day of my 7KWh / day consumption, and I have a system *capable* (but not wired to do so) or running all the appliances in my house so long as I'm careful. I now have "permission" (really just a confirmation that I don't need permission) to install solar panels on the entire roof.

I bought a car new many years ago and that was purchased at the time with the intention of being the last ICE car I purchase. The next car, when this one dies, gets old, starts failing, isn't compliant, or is too costly to run, will be all-electric. Another few years at most, I reckon.

And then the combination means: No fuel costs. No electricity costs. The whole house running from battery / electricity (maybe not even the grid at all by that point - not one penny going to an electricity supplier!).

And I have plans to eliminate water requirements too but they haven't been so nasty to me personally (polluting all the local rivers aside) so maybe I'll stay on my water meter (which instantly divided my water bill by TEN!) and keep feeding them a pittance.

I'm even evaluating the same with Internet - I lived 4G-only for 5 years, I have looked intently at Starlink (but can bring myself to give that man money, so maybe a rival in a few years instead) and I'm not reliant on my landline at all and don't really care about it (all I need is Internet, everything else can run over it, and I can make Internet redundant enough to cover almost any scenario with a bit of outlay).

If I'm spending £20-30k on a giant moving battery, I'm going to want to be benefiting from that when the car's parked in the driveway too.

It is.

But not for free.

Try not paying your landline phone bill and then see how many emergency calls you can make.

At least on mobile it would TRY to put that call through for you (and even ramps up the transmit power / priority to prioritise you above everyone else) even if you had no contract or SIM whatsoever.

I live rurally, on the cusp of an AONB in a village whose entire parish has about 100 people in it total (and that includes all the farmers in remote fields that just happen to come under its catchment).

Mobile reception is quite poor in the entire street (my car tracker cannot report when within 500 yards of my house, I get 1-bar on the other two major networks).

Power cuts are regular and especially in inclement weather, and also are often caused by falling trees.

I don't have - nor need - a landline.

I have a cheap UPS which would run a phone for over a day. You're talking 10W at most. That UPS in fact runs my routers, several RPis, switches, PoE cameras, alarms, the rest of the cabinet and lots of peripherals for 2 hours, no problem whatsoever. And when it runs out, I bought the cheapest of cheap solar panels (shoved on top of a shed) which charge a battery that can *LITERALLY* run the whole setup for over 24 hours (2.4KWh, 100W total draw) without issue. And that's with all the losses as the solar charges the batteries which power the inverter which run the UPS which powers the cabinet and all the things inside it.

I didn't even bother buying a phone for this house. Mobile works well enough, and Internet stays up on the UPS alone for 2 hours.

Not being funny - but what kind of emergency are you envisaging which wouldn't be similarly affected if, say, a rural tree fell on a rural telephone line somewhere else in a rural village? Which is a far more likely scenario.

And if you struggle, do you really think BT are going to go out of their way to help you? In this day and age? Their USO soon won't include voice lines, you have to accept that.

Or you could get yourself a 4G antenna, a UPS or a cheap solar panel if it's so critical to you. Because the cabinet batteries are going to disappear, and I don't think you're going to stop that. So either you make provision for this thing you have which most people nationwide DON'T require, or you expect BT to special-case you because you insist that a landline is your only viable contact point (but yet you're not important enough to have Redcare or similar).

Hell, a damn Starlink (*spit* Musk *spit*) would do a better job.

I also lived 5 years with only 4G (and that wasn't a great connection, so I bought an antenna to help stabilise it), and was seriously considering 4G and/or Starlink where I am because mobile phone connectivity isn't guaranteed here at all. Or anywhere in fact.

He says, sitting inside a multi-million pound workplace situated dead-centre in a town with house prices that I couldn't hope to ever afford in 5 lifetimes, where I can't get anything past GSM and nor can anyone else who ever works/visits there.

6 hours at 10W for a phone?

I damn well hope so.

Re: Reality bites

You don't need full fibre to digitise your voice line.

They will continue to provide landlines, but they will be ADSL/VDSL only. The voice part will be dead.

Digital Voice is just a SIP trunk running over that DSL connection.

I work for schools and we've evaluated this so many times in so many schools over the last 10 years.

Pretty much every school is SIP.

Pretty much every fire plan, etc. includes "staff can use their mobile phones".

We gave up trying to preserve this nonsense and just went to modern ways, after realising that a member of staff with a kid with a broken leg won't even bother to look for a landline, they'll use their mobile. And at that point, what are you providing?

And in a power cut, the phones are all PoE and can be powered for 20+ minutes (enough to evacuate the school or make/check other arrangements for emergencies).

You want to not be cut off at home? Buy a mobile phone. Or a UPS. Problem solved.

Because that's exactly how BT were doing it anyway - the UPS was just in the street cabinet that you didn't see.

Gosh, absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they just AREN'T DOING IT.

I had BT reps in my office the other day - they weren't bothered at all about analogue lines and migrating. I've had a dozen calls about it this year, and some specifically to "upgrade" and when I tell them that would likely mean culling half the analogue lines because we basically don't use them, they never get back to me. (All the important stuff like emergency lines are already GSM etc. in preparation).

I had Vodafone send me through stuff about my home line being obsolete EIGHTEEN MONTHS ago and that I had to move to "Digital Voice" (a SIP trunk with my home phone number attached to it). Still nothing. And that's literally just sending me an adaptor box to go on their router, and then turning off the analogue voice portion of the line. Nothing!

I wouldn't mind but a) I never use my landline for voice and don't even have a phone connected to it, b) I already have a SIP setup and would just ask for the details and plug them into my existing voice-capable router (you can do this, it's just a SIP account) and c) I don't need or use any adaptor and threw their router away because it was naff compared to mine.

It's like the smart meter rollout - every time I log onto the website to check my electricity account, I'm blasted with ads to upgrade to smart meters. I would literally do it here, now, today. But I'm on a radio teleswitch meter (which is controlled by a radio signal from a VALVE-based radio station in Droitwich which the BBC own the entire world stock of those valves and have said when they run out, they will shut the whole site - including teleswitch - down with it). Every time I ask, they tell me "not yet".

Strangely every year they push back the deadline on that radio station too, presumably they still have a valve left and think they can just keep bumping it forward.

When the inevitable happens, and they try to demand access to my property to change my meter in a massive rush because they couldn't be bothered to do it up untilnow, they can go stuff themselves. They've had 18 months to sort it out just for me and can't be bothered, and that situation has been ongoing for... what... 10 years?

For the telephones? I'll switch the second you press the button, and you can press the button now. Hell, I wouldn't even have noticed if you'd already done that (but they haven't). But the fact of the matter is that there's no profit in it for you, corporations will likely review everything at that point and realise that if everything's just a SIP line they could move or get it cheaper elsewhere, and that means the companies have NO INTEREST in switching you over whatsoever.

Uncle Sam to inject $50M into auto-patcher for hospital IT

You mean like a dozen software packages already provide, e.g. Bitdefender, Sophos, etc.?

Let me tell you why you don't want to just slap patches into every bit of software nationwide without testing.

Stuff will break and the downtime will be FAR longer than from a ransomware attack, and the vendor WILL NOT CARE because you didn't use their patching mechanism and/or they'll just put out patches that require the latest version of everything and tell you to upgrade everything else if you want to stay current - so your little desktop software update would end up in mutli-million dollar upgrades to your backend databases and services across the board, if you want it to keep working.

Good news: The iPad Pro 13 is a bit more repairable

Re: And nobody cared...

I have literally never cracked a screen, never used a screen protector, never required a repair, all my old mobiles are still in perfect condition (I gave them away too) and most of them reached at least 5, often 8-9 years before I changed them out.

2 years is NOTHING, especially for the most expensive consumer phone. It's barely out of the expected statutory warranty for fitness for purpose (unless you're Apple, who actually argued in a court of law that they only design them to last one year... and no, I'm not joking).

Also - what's the point in buying a phone deliberately more expensive so it can be "thinner", and then having to protect it by making it fatter with 3rd-party add-ons? Makes no sense at all.

Apple phones are notorious in every IT department I've worked in to the point where I would routinely ask people when they were brought to us "Did you crack your screen?" Even if they weren't there to get their phone repaired (e.g. a personal phone or just to add MFA), the answer was almost unanimously Yes for Apple products. And about 5-10% for other brands.

My phone's taken falls down marble staircases, from ladders, lofts, onto concrete, etc. and everyone did the "OOoohh! That's gonna be broke!" gasp. Each time I picked it up, put it back in my pocket and said "It's fine, it's not like it's an Apple".

And nobody cared...

Either you buy an iPad and suck up repair costs, or you would steer well clear of them.

Tesla self-driving claims parked in court

Re: Wonder what took so long

I have had that too.

I had accumulated - in writing - two months of paid holiday because of various incidents where I went above and beyond and was permitted to "roll it over" to the next year, and so on.

The employer was completely baffled by it and "had no documentation". No problem, not only did I have the documentation, but so did my previous boss who had since left the company but had ALSO supplied the documents from his own emails to confirm it.

They ALSO managed to "lose" my contract, which stipulated my required notification period. Which turned out to be 2 months, not the three months they were claiming. Again - I had a signed, certified, encrypted document that proved otherwise, and an identical copy was eventually found in my previous boss's mailboxes when they bothered to look (which wasn't until AFTER I demonstrated that I had a copy of that document).

Which was fortunate... because I had just told them that I was done with their nonsense, lying, attempt to force me out, lay the blame on me, complete ignorance of my situation, and even that their OWN AUDIT had found them wanting but that I was doing everything I was supposed to. So when they continued to lie - about the outcome of that audit report, plus other things, plus trying (so, so, so badly) to catch me out, I was able to say "Fine. I quit."

With two month's notice to give.

And 8 weeks holiday owing.

Whoops. They later tried to claim that I "couldn't do that". And HR disagreed, once all the documents were actually in front of them.

I walked that afternoon, never went back, and had a replacement - better - job which I held for 10 years within 10 minutes of opening my front door that evening (partly thanks to my old boss who'd left for similar reasons).

I hate to think what later caused the organisation to be investigated, several scams to be revealed, the entire senior management sacked, and even government regulators to step in just days later on the basis of two simultaneous anonymous whistle-blower tip-offs... with documented evidence...

The top bods were never allowed to work in the industry again.

Re: Wonder what took so long

It is an increasing trend in all things these days that people just lie with impunity.

I mean, politicians have ALWAYS been known for it, but have you seen the nonsense they spout nowadays?

For years, I have been telling employers that they want things in writing, that a salesman's promise (no matter how friendly, well-established, how many of our competitors use them etc.) is worth nothing and they would never listen.

But yet whenever it turns out that they WERE lying, they have absolutely zero basis to do anything about it because it was all verbal and "face to face" etc. Strangely, they are then ultra-grateful when I *DID* keep records, do have things in writing and have - in the past - screwed several vendors to the wall for lying and/or trying not to deliver things they promised (sometimes in the range of £10,000's of equipment that they said wasn't in a quote, for example, when it was... and I was the only person in the company with a copy of that. Even vendors lying outright about what their software does / does not support on £100,000+ contracts... and I told them from the start it wasn't true, they stuck to their guns, and 2 years later it turns out I was right. And only *I* have the documents and research to prove it. This has included such doozies as: "Yes, our cloud-based thin-client office solution can run 100% of your software perfectly, including those AD-based Windows-only software-restriction-enforcing security softwares. By the way, everything runs on Wine." and "Smoothwall is 100% incompatible with Chromebooks and can never work with them". These were £100,000+ consultancies trying to sell us their stuff and berate their competitors and/or existing systems. Strangely I proved both wrong in the space of 10 minutes each time. But it was based on 18 months of lying in each case and nobody believing little old me because I wasn't a multi-million pound consultancy firm, right?.

I cannot get through to them how RIDICULOUS it is that they rely on these "in-person" representations in any way, and that unless it's literally in an email or on paper, we cannot assume it's going to ever happen no matter how nice the guy seemed. All those "Yes, we could add that feature", etc. promises mean nothing. And often you're in those meetings BECAUSE they haven't delivered on what the initial sales promises were and now they promise to, but won't put anything in writing.

It seems I'm the only person in the world who actually makes records, keeps notes and demands things in writing. And guess what? If you're not willing to put it in writing, I'm just going to have to operate on the basis that it's never going to happen. There is no alternative. "Yes, we can add that." "Okay, so we won't have that feature, please take that into account when you plan projects and budgets around this software." They get miffed about that. Even when a decade later they still don't have that item.

I've had it with vendors, support providers, even employers doing it ("Well, sure, we can pay you that, and that's a good start date for us, but we can't put that in writing as we're still employing the other guy at the moment"... cool. Come back to me when you can and until then I'll operate on the assumption that this isn't going to happen. Somehow they seem to take offence at that).

I'm now at the point where, starting from being a very cynical teenager, my cynicism is at its peak. You won't put it in writing? Not interested. Simple as that. Politician says ANYTHING, and they're from any colour party? I honestly don't care. It means nothing to me. Whether that's something to my benefit or devastating, I can't act on that information with any reliability.

And its the way it's going the world over. Musk is a serial liar, without consequence. Trump. Most of the UK politicians (and though I'm sure there's a slim possibility that it's "not all", they are all working together and defending each other... it's like watching your co-worker lie through his teeth to a customer and not correcting them, so I treat them the same). The water industry.

As far as I'm concerned nothing said, quoted, aired, broadcast, promised or implied can be taken as the truth, and even when you have everything in writing they will try to wheedle their way out of it via every possible opportunity.

It's one of the reasons I intend to be utility-independent by retirement. I don't believe a word these companies are telling me about price-rises and diversifying and moving to green energy and cutting out internal combustion engines, and not profiteering, and all the rest. So I'm planning my future not to be reliant on ANY of them. Even if it costs more.

In the modern age, only those who have no position of responsibility are held to their words in court.

Veeam adds support for VMware alternative Proxmox to its backup software

Re: Another step in the inevitable fall of Broadcom

Worked out well for MySQL - the developers all just moved to MariaDB and carried on.

Raspberry Pi prepares to boot up a London listing

I think that's great for hobbyists and I use them myself in this way.

I think running a general purpose OS on a cheap device means that we'll be overpaying for glorified systems running on a cheap locked-down Pi for decades to come in all kinds of contexts.

Avigon Alta, formerly Openpath, formerly part of Motorola, is an access control system that consists of a Raspberry Pi, a small GPIO hat, a USB GPIO / relay board, and cloud software.

Ask me how I know.

Also nComputing used to sell thin-client boxes and then just slapped a RPi 3 in a box with rdesktop as their ENTIRE PRODUCT instead.

Tesla nearing shareholder vote to grant Musk $46B

Seems like a great way to alienate more customers, to me, but what do I know?

The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation

Are we gonna fund this "GPS alternative" almost to completion and then vote to leave it too?

Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'

Re: $2.5 million is not a lot of money for SpaceX

Gosh, a failing company bankrolled by a billionaire investor to personally profit?

Elon's never done that before *cough* Tesla *cough*.

Tesla has been near bankruptcy several times. Boring Company, SolarCity, etc. are secretive about their actual profits and mostly bankrolled.

All using investment, subsidies and billionaire-bankrolling to pretend they're profitable, but actually are likely haemorrhaging money on a daily basis in real terms.

2023: The Boring Company's annual revenue (not profit!) is $2.7M. The Boring Company has raised a total funding of $908M over 3 rounds. Assuming they aren't making a loss (so that revenue is all going on operations), that's enough to stay in operation for 300 years even if they did nothing.

What's with AI boffins strapping GoPros to toddlers? We take a closer look

Re: Yeah that is bound to work

"Just throw more data at it."

Everyone knows that the secret sauce to turn binary signals into actual intelligence is more processing / data / time. We've known that since the 60's right?

One day we will hit that magical universal data barrier beyond which everything magically turns into intelligence, and the world will be changed forever.

Because, you know, those supercomputers running for decades across billions of machines on every continent analysing the entire world's data going back 40 years... that's what's inside every cat, dog, monkey, ape, elephant, giraffe, dolphin etc. right?

They have all that ability, and that's why they're smart, and plants don't which is why they're dumb.

Just a *little* more funding and OBVIOUSLY we'll hit that magic universal constant this time that'll turn our little sand machines into the world's greatest intelligences.

Encrypted mail service Proton hands suspect's personal info to local cops

Re: Simple rule

So why is anyone sending an ultra-secret message expecting anonymity from an IP address that is tied to them?

Walking down to the local McDonald's or cafe to send the email would have been better security, and even that's a dumb idea if you do that more than once or are already under surveillance (correlation attacks, etc.). A certain Mr Bin Laden found that out the hard way (though he did evade detection for quite a while!).

The fact is that you can't secure a sloppy user. It's just not possible. And almost universally the people who desire the utmost privacy, anonymity and security (e.g. criminals) are often some of the most sloppy.

It's almost like if you set up a company anywhere that you're subject to the laws of that country, isn't it?

And if you want to operate a business, take money, provide services then - by definition - you're subject to the laws of the country that you operate from (and, potentially, others).

Also, using an end-to-end encryption email service doesn't guard against the metadata you provide that service - such as timings of email, source and destination, account details, credit card details, even website cookies, etc. etc. If you thought that, for even a second, maybe you should not be the guy who sends ultra-secret stuff around.

If you desire perfect security, then you simply can't use a commercial service that's hosted in any country. It's honestly that simple.

And do you know what the best advice for encryption also is? Never roll your own.

If you want to send a message to someone and don't want anyone to know the contents of that message, that's easy enough. If you don't want ANYONE, EVER to ever discover that you sent a message of any sort to a person who you never want identified and want it to be impossible to determine who, what, when or whether that message was sent... now you've just made your task a thousand times more difficult. And the answer - offline or online - is never "employ a third-party".

At this point, you're into the realms of hiding messages in blockchain data, dealing exclusively with the system end-to-end yourself, and only transacting everything in anonymised and "washed" bitcoin (good luck getting that untraceable by the way - again, the metadata at both ends will get ya!), and that's the kind of stuff that attracts FAR MORE attention than anything else.

Encryption is not to protect your privacy. It's to secure the contents of a message. As demonstrated, it's not even very good at doing that because authorities' ears prick up when you try that.

If you want absolute anonymity in perpetuity, or even within your lifetime... I'm not even sure there exists a way to do that with any certainty at all.

Undersea cables must have high-priority protection before they become top targets

Re: To replace even a fraction of the capacity in undersea cables

Or we could just lay a hundred such cables spoking out of the country to all kinds of other destinations, and monitor them.

Should be easy to spot something cutting dozens of cables, and you should be able to repair them all without major impact or loss of service.

"Resiliency" doesn't just mean making the cables tougher to cut through - it should also mean planning for continued operation in the face of more than the expected number of failures.

And, yes, other tech can help. But we should be laying more cables, to more places, with more safeguards, and using more technologies, to utilise more methods, to communicate via more and disparate paths, objects, countries and technologies.

That, in any sensible country, would mean laying lots more fibre in the sea, laying fibre through the Chunnel, more satellites and more groundstations, more radio communications (e.g. microwave across the Channel is completely viable), better inland telecoms network, etc. etc. etc.

A long time ago, we realised that the telecom network was vulnerable to being severed. So we built a nationwide series of microwave telecoms towers that are still up today (e.g. Stokenchurch). That way if London suddenly disappeared, we could still communicate across the nation. It was a major undertaking, and provided lots of resiliency. And then we abandoned it because "the Internet" got so much better at that.

To solve the problem all we need to do is use EVERY viable technology to communicate with EVERY viable destination as much and as resiliently and redundantly as possible.

You should be able to pipe a port-mirrored cable direct to the Kremlin and it shouldn't make any difference.

If you aren't encrypting securely, the least of your problems is someone tapping an undersea cable.

That's the whole point of encryption - you should be able to post your public ("encrypting") key front page of The Times, along with your encrypted data. It shouldn't reveal anything at all about their contents or your private key.

It's why it's called public-key encryption, it's why known-plain-text attacks haven't worked for decades (except on inherently broken protocols), and it's why encryption exists.

Secure communication over an insecure channel.

Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough

Re: Me? A cynic?

He's a rather mediocre techy guy acting as the absolute worst salesman in the world, masquerading as his idea of a "cool guy", propped up only by bankrolling otherwise-failing companies (Tesla was near bankruptcy several times) based on a MERGER with Paypal many decades ago that made him an accidental billionaire.

I have never found any redeeming feature in the man.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: "The frunk is powered and shouldn't be closed manually"

Have they not heard of clutches, ratcheted gears, etc. in this auto manufacturer?

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: incinerator toilet (all-electric, no water, burns your waste down to sterile ash)

The "kiln" part of the toilet is behind and isolated... the seat is literally just a seat which the waste goes into (into a bag, normally), and that bag is then moved into the incinerator kiln part and burns for HOURS until its ash. And normally you can continue queuing up multiple bags and keep using the loo and they just pushed into the kiln by the system and it just increases the time it burns for.

Common on ships and oil rigs and places like that.

It was a tiny one-bed bungalow with single occupancy, ever since it was built in the 60's.

The council tax rate doesn't reflect anything like that - it was just a scam based on ridiculous figures however it was come by.

Water meter is pretty much the only way to tell, however, and removed all profit from Thames Water (which I'm not even a tiny bit sad about).

Told my neighbours, so it's up to them what they do with that information.

I moved house and got a water bill for approximately 10 times my normal usage.

I demanded a water meter.

Surprise, surprise, my bill was literally decimated. No idea what the previous guy was doing, or whether they've just been overcharging that property by 10x for decades, but they weren't going to do it to me.

In fact, it was so good that the account credit from those first few months overpayment is STILL covering my water bill (and will for a while yet) nearly 18 months later. I reckon another 6 months usage before I pay another penny (my Direct Debit is literally £0 at the moment and has been for 18 months).

Re: I like my smart meter

I have a small amateur solar setup but not for cost reasons.

- Resiliency

- Independence

- Fun

It doesn't "feed back", it's entirely isolated. And it runs my "critical" things - CCTV cameras, computers, entertainment, router, etc. Basically it's like a giant solar UPS, in effect. All my stuff rides out power cuts and all I've had neighbours knock and ask how my lights, computers, etc. are still active and nobody else's are. Because when the whole town blacked out, I just switched on the lamp that's connected to that circuit, and carried on playing my online game which didn't even jitter.

And now I don't have to be subservient to any electricity provider. They overcharged me ludicrously (2x actual usage) when I first moved in. So I refunded EVERY month after giving an actual reading, and spent it on solar. I plan to be utility-independent by retirement, and I'm starting with electricity because that's the easy one. I don't even care if my solar costs me more than their electricity per unit. I don't have it for that. I have it so that THEY don't get my money for their poor service (blackouts, cost increases, poor metering, etc.).

Plus... it's fun to set up a solar setup for a geek. Part of which is monitoring it and tweaking it. Which I do with RS485. Smart meters are of no interest to me (except to get me off this ridiculous antiquated tariff and stop me having to read my own meters each month). But as things expand I will be putting my own meter into the fusebox (DIN rail meters are pretty cheap, and I could have one on each circuit if I wanted). And it will all plug into Home Assistant, so I can check usage anywhere in the world, not just my front room, and not requiring useless apps and meters that go obsolete.

I don't think utilities understand what they're setting themselves up for now that home solar is not just viable but actively profitable at scale. The worse their service becomes now, the quicker they will die and become irrelevant.

Hell, I've got my eye on an incinerator toilet (all-electric, no water, burns your waste down to sterile ash) and a greywater filtration system (£1000, pumps your water butt into a loft header tank and you can keep things separate and flush with greywater, or you can build what is basically a giant pond filter / UV / osmosis system and get free water forever more. I'd honestly rather suffer that complication and expense than give Thames Water another penny.

BBC have said absolutely not - they will be de-commissioning not only the radio, but the site, all the services running on it (including longwave services) and everything reliant on it.

Basically, it's a legacy usage to try to cover the entire country with a single transmitter - and that's just not compatible with modern processes any more. That's why the only equipment connected to it is still valve-based, they've never upgraded it, not even a little bit.

They have no plan, budget or intention to do anything but shrug and say "Told you so" because it's been "being decommissioned" for decades now.

POTS switch-off has been DECADES in coming, including warning for years. Redcare etc. are so antique that it's laughable and Redcare's IP options have been available for decades now.

That said, I *still* have a POTS line, despite Vodafone (who manage my Openreach line) telling me repeatedly over the last 18 months that they'll be switching me to Digital Voice (which is basically a SIP trunk for your home phone number, and cutting off the voice on your landline but retaining the DSL connection). Not happened yet.

BT have been chasing me professionally for about 20 years about the same too (but that was ISDN switchoff at first). Still not happened anywhere. I met with BT guys only yesterday - no mention of any culling of landlines yet when mentioned.

The fact is that you'll have to move on, eventually, there is no question of that. No service is perpetual. But 2G will outlast 3G considerably. Maybe even 4G depending on how things go. "1G" (GSM) will likely be around for decades to come.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for my home phone to come into my already-entirely-SIP household where I can then add it to my existing SIP trunks. Because, since moving in, I've never bothered to use a phone on the BT socket and don't even own such a device. I haven't even bothered to connect the landline voice port on my router (which can turn it into a SIP line for you). I don't even KNOW what my landline number is.

And all services that might rely on something like a landline are more important than "let's just cut this off". Speaking from experience - elevator emergency controls (we just replaced ours with GSM!), home care alarms (being replaced with GSM), burglar alarms (GSM alongside the landline for emergencies already) etc. and none of them are "4G" or "5G" at all.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: "and people can add their private Teslas to the available pool"

And in the law of certain countries (e.g. the UK), I'm responsible as the registered owner of the vehicle for whoever drives it.

If someone uninsured or disqualified drives it, my car can be confiscated and even crushed, I can be liable for speeding tickets etc. (e.g. if Tesla refuse to pay for them), and so on.

There are myriad *LEGAL* issues to sort out long before anything like this becomes reality - and it has to include absolute and complete responsibility for the vehicle and its actions no matter what the driver's doing to Tesla, not anyone else.

Until that happens, this is all just "flying car" nonsense (we've had flying cars for decades... fact is that you need to be a licensed pilot to fly them and they need to go through the same certifications, maintenance and accountability of any other aircraft).

Re: My Bullshit Meter Just Exploded

Was someone sitting in the roadster at the time?

Because firing space junk around is not the same as humans "being on Mars" as promised.

Re: My Bullshit Meter Just Exploded

We were supposed to be on Mars at least 3 years ago (depending on which instance of him saying it you refer to).

Strangely, nothing's left Earth's influence in decades.

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

Re: Shocking. Absolutely shocking.

I would also pitch for parallel systems. I don't understand how large projects EVER decide to play switcharoo in the middle of active use of the system and think that's acceptable.

At this scale, I'd want parallel systems with the same data put into them and see what happens.

IT consultant-cum-developer in court over hiding COVID-19 loan

If only we were part of some kind of shared Europe-wide organisation with agreements that allowed us to pursue him after he fled to Poland...

Wing Commander III changed how the copy hotkey works in Windows 95

Not employers, but I'm part of Amazon Vine.

I get to select a bunch of stuff from a huge list of Amazon items (new incoming items, etc.), they send them to my house the next day (even though I'm not Prime), and I get to keep the items so long as I write a short honest review of them (and it can absolutely pan the product and they don't care).

I currently have 400+ items in my house from such a venture, including everything from tools, network SFP+ fibre modules, plates, kitchen appliances, clothing, all sorts - basically anything that Amazon sellers think they need a review of to boost their sales for a new product.

Last week I reviewed a £120 conference webcam, £200 of DisplayPort KVM switch, light fittings, several nice summer shirts, a wok, multiple USB-C devices (docking stations and the like), lightbulbs, a £200 pop-up desk socket with USB-C and wireless charging, an OBD scanner, LOADS of silicone sealant, etc.

If they don't ask for them back in 90 days, they're yours to keep. I've been doing it far longer than that and so far.... zero items needed to be returned.

"Eat your own dogfood".

Shame that ever since, I find it absolutely unbelievable that there are Windows admins working at Microsoft who AREN'T tearing their hair out at ridiculous changes, stupid legacies, and dumb and undocumented procedures and fixes EVERY SINGLE DAY. Server and client. New and old OS.

I don't understand how it could be possible to work on the Microsoft AD team, for example, and still not have fixed that "search" dialog in AD where the dialog always includes User but never Computer and you have to manually select it each time. And, please, you are NOT telling me that all of Microsoft only tests on Azure and never touches their own AD management tools any more.

I've said before... give me an hour in a room with all the developers, free reign to have my changes implemented, and a month to get them all into the OS and distributed. Windows would be a far better - and yet almost identical functionally - beast in a very short space of time.