Posts by Lee D

Virgin Media to chop 800 jobs in Wales call centre

Re: @ Simon 4

Well, technically, if you want to be like that, no home in the world has a fibre connection. Nor, probably, the vast, vast majority of workplaces.

Unless you put an SFP direct into your machine and connect by fibre straight to a switch which connects by fibre only to other switches which all connect only by fibre to a fibre leased line, etc. Or you are using some magic Wifi->optical light device that doesn't translate to copper in between. And even then I could argue that the SFP interconnection to your machines bus is "copper".

FTTP and FTTC are both very different things, both sold as fibre. Most people don't know, understand or care about the difference. But claiming semantics on the word fibre to mean "everything being fibre" is just wrong.

And I guarantee you that it makes almost no difference as the "coax" won't be the bottleneck anyway (which will actually be artificial rate-limiting) - DOCSIS 3.1 can go up to 10Gbps full duplex. EuroDOCSIS is technically slightly faster than that I believe.

(P.S. please point at the cheapest electronic component of your home Internet setup, the one most likely to be a bottleneck more than any cable, device, or incoming feed... yep, it's probably the £30 box that converts all your fancy high-speed stuff to some pathetic percentage of a shared Wifi channel).

If only there was an ISP who could offer their workers and telesales/support staff some way to work securely at home over the Internet?

Honestly, shouldn't "call centres" be dead by now? Just give them a home connection, and monitor every X calls at random to make sure they are doing the job.

Certainly, you would then be able to hire the cheapest labour available to you, regardless of location. And you're not telling me that it's any more expensive to pay for a business line to them, and give them the same IP phone and terminal as they have in the call center, when you're not paying rent, business rates, facilities, etc. etc. for a building to house that same equipment and personnel instead. Not to mention locally competitive salaries.

Remote-working is now PERFECTLY VIABLE for anything involving an ordinary computer and a telephone line. Hell, say that they have to have the web-cam on all the time while working, if you're that worried. They'll stick it in their spare room, and you could even snatch the customer call away from them and put it to any other operator immediately if you think their children screaming in the background is distracting.

Blame everything on 'computer error' – no one will contradict you

Sorry, it's still "not my problem, gov."

If they are blaming me, they need to identify the action I need to take to resolve it. Which I can do for them. And then likely nothing will change.

And, yes, had those conversations ANY NUMBER of times, for the big-boss and associates. Not once has it ever not been "They need to tell me what to do then". If it wasn't, it would already be fixed.

(P.S. "Just open up all your firewall ports, disable all security, run as administrator" is not a valid course of action. And NOT ONCE has it ever resolved any problem an outside vendor has experienced).

Helpdesk analysis:

- "Faults" caused by not following instructions, switching things off, etc.: 20%

- "Faults" that aren't faults at all but the system operating exactly as designed: 20%

- "Faults" caused by literally performing obviously destructive acts (deleting files, rebooting and losing their work, clicking Don't save, restoring factory settings, etc.): 20%

- "Faults" caused by third-party software / services that aren't perfect but that we have zero control over (e.g. Word decides to crash, "why doesn't Microsoft just make a button for that", or the web service goes down, etc.): 20%

- "Faults" caused by users literally expecting miracles (e.g. why can't I edit this 50dpi scanned PDF as if it was just a Word table? Expecting their ID card (from the 20 other cards in their wallet) to magically open the door when it's 30 feet away from both the door and the card reader, etc.): 19.9%

- Actual, real, physical hardware faults: 0.1%

IT is a real shitshow of having to cope with other people's idiocy and inadequacies. Nobody expects the car salesman to be the guy ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR DESIGNING the new BMW or whatever, but in IT it that's exactly what they expect.

I had one just now - why can't we log into <web service provided by third party which has zero integration with our systems and was bought independently of the IT department>.

I don't know... have you tried their support line?

My PC is on fire! Can you back it up really, really fast?

Yeah, right.

Have you tried getting a toddler that's not your own away from the sandpit?

I agree in principle. In real life, especially with other people's children (whether spoiled-brat from private school, or ignored-hooligan from state school), it just doesn't work like that.

I work school IT.

I was in a primary school once and got a call.

"What should we do if the printer is smoking?"

Although alarm bells did go off (in my head at least), there are certain classrooms where the printer is in front of a bright window in the morning, and the heat-vapour from the warm-up, plus the evaporated water from damp paper makes it look like wispy clear/white smoke is coming from them. The printers actually came with a manufacturer's sticker saying that it was normal and expected.

"What colour is the smoke?" I ask.

"It's like... black and smells of fire."

"Er... I think your printer is on fire, could you unplug it immediately?"

"Well, I'm waiting for my job to come out still."

Turned out, when I literally RAN to the classroom after a few seconds of "UNPLUG IT!" down the phone, that it was actually on fire. There was a heated roller at the top of the printer near the paper exit. When the paper exit was blocked, the paper would curve back on itself, re-enter that roller underneath and form an infinite paper loop of doom.

The printer was unable to detect that condition, and so would keep printing, wrapping more and more and more paper around the mummified roller, and keep heating. By the time I got there, there was a centimetre-thick layer of black, charred and quite obviously smoking paper wrapped in a perfect, compressed roll (almost ashen in texture when we later extracted it).

I hate to think what would have happened if someone hadn't been watching. Not least because the REASON the printer managed to wrap the paper in the first place was a huge stack of papers and books on the top of the printer blocking the exit path. And the reason the roller got hotter and hotter was that either side of the printer were... huge stacks of papers and books literally suffocating the side and rear vents.

We changed those printers, but not before HUGE warnings about not blocking the vents and exits like an idiot.

The only equipment I've ever seen actually catch fire, though, was a 10-year-old PC in a learning support department that... well... basically just decided to go up in flames for no reason whatsoever. The PSU just went pop, lit up and flames came out the back. The PC was so old that I didn't even try to diagnose the black charred mess, though, and binned the whole thing immediately. Again, just lucky people saw as the power didn't stop and the flames would have just caught other things if it had been allowed to continue.

I've also had Ni-Cd/NiMH battery chargers in a classroom (left overnight with two 9V batteries in them) go bang and spray acid over the entire carpet area where children normally sit in the mornings. Fortunately, it happened during a break time. The school banned all classroom charging after that.

Apart from the first story, though, there was literally no warning or anything we could have done to prevent it, everything was PAT-tested or in good condition and there was no indication of impending failure of the PSU/battery or anything else, and it was just sheer luck that saved us.

There are more than a few reasons that you need to be able to evacuate (herd) 500 children out the door in under two minutes, however, and practice it regularly. If you've ever seen a good fire evacuation in a school they are astoundingly impressive given the clientele being managed (e.g. two people gathering 20+ nursery-age children in seconds).

LLVM contributor hits breakpoint, quits citing inclusivity intolerance

Wow... first, The Reg does have a contingent of exactly the kind of people I didn't expect, albeit small. Everything from trans-hate up.

However, I think the pertinent quote is:

"The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just

writing a good compiler framework."

Which seems to me to be quite insightful. When nobody ASKS your religion or political view, in an unrelated forum, then you can't be discriminated against for it. And what the hell kind of relevance does religion or politics have when writing a compiler?

Maybe my workplace (a school) is blessed but I can't ever remember race or religion or politics being mentioned, discussed or relevant except as required by the curriculum or as it naturally occurred in conversation. And when discussed, it's a discussion. Not anti-feminism, anti-anti-discrimination and everything that's happening here.

And people miss the difference between things like "pro-feminism" ("women are better") and "equality" (men and women differ only in ways that shouldn't matter to the job at hand).

Do you know what? In the same way that what concerns me more than a president shagging a porn star is that he thought he needed to buy her silence to cover his embarrassment at doing so, not just say "Yeah? And?", I really don't care about your sexual preference, chosen gender, religious affiliation or politics. I'm happy to discuss your opinions but I really don't care about anything that chops you into X amount of groupings.

And I'll tell you what - an article like this that has prompted such a conversation? It demonstrates exactly WHY I don't care about that stuff. When we're talking tech together, it's fun. We're all equally techy if different areas and it works well and that's why I come here, to talk tech. When we're talking this stuff, all the prejudices and ignorance come rushing to the surface and it really exposes an underbelly of racism (and anti-anti-racism which are different things), trans- and homophobia, and all sorts.

This guy wanted to write a compiler, and complained that EXACTLY the type of stuff these comments have turned into gets in the way of doing so, purely because it has nothing to do with writing a compiler. I happen to agree with him.

Shocking. Lightning strike knocks out neuro patient's brain implant

Re: I have a DBS installed

Yep, you have absolutely no idea what the outcome of a lightning strike could be anyway. An inch to the left and it might have fried you, implant or no implant.

You can't defend against lightning strikes like that (even the surge protector suggestion is silly... surge protector just don't kick in fast enough or to a high-enough current... they are to stop related *surges* on the local electrical circuits (i.e. hopefully 99.9999% of which goes straight to earth), not 10 million volts straight to the device). I'm sure it'll be covered under their £50k "connected equipment" guarantee, though, you just won't be around to claim it.

To be honest, you're just as likely to die from holding a mobile phone as you plug it in while being (quite literally) struck by lightning.

Exclusive to all press: Atari launches world's best ever games console

£30 for a Raspberry Pi 3B+

Install RetroPie.

Forget all this expensive nonsense, unless you want to buy an old Atari off eBay and plug the joysticks into a £10 chip that converts them to USB for you.

Blighty: If EU won't let us play at Galileo, we're going home and taking encryption tech with us

This is what happens when you take your ball home because you don't want anyone else to play with it.

You end up with a crap game that you're playing on your own, while everyone else is out in the park enjoying themselves without a ball at all.

Hands off! Arm pitches tamper-resistant Cortex-M35-P CPU cores

Re: Smart streetlight? FFS, why?

"Ok, perhaps it would be useful for the streetlight to report its ON/OFF/dimmed state to a central system"

Bang. Now you need an Ethernet, 4G or even one-wire protocol connections back to a central point, which requires more than a dumb processor.

It's not about what you want to do but how you do it.

Do you want a custom protocol over a custom wire reporting back to custom software on the status of a bulb that you can switch on and off? Or do you just want to IP everything from the traffic lights to the streetlights to the road sensors and send all the info over the same wires from 10 different systems to one location where some larger computers can actually process it?

There is some sense to IoT. It's how you deploy it that matters (i.e. Ethernet chips are 10-a-penny nowadays, and you're already cabling to the thing and powering the electronic circuits - so PoE might well be cheaper than two separate cables - but if you just plug it into the city, you're an idiot. VLANs, RADIUS, port-isolation etc. are MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS).

But when a Raspberry Pi can be had, one-off, for £20 and is a 1GHz machine with gigabytes of RAM, Ethernet, Bluetooth, USB, Wifi, GPIO, etc. then I can't imagine that the IoT device side of things even figures in the expense of a town-level network. For a start, I bet it's MORE EXPENSIVE to buy a simple remote-controlled, timed, on/off switch that works on a streetlight than it is to buy some mass-produced, centrally-controlled, standardised thing.

The enemy of security is commodity and laziness. These kinds of devices are commodity, proven by the fact that you could knock one up, connected and with a SIM card (or eSIMs nowadays) and relay electronics, for less than the price of a little plastic cover in a certain shape.

The problem left is laziness. Don't just Ethernet your streetlamp and not even bother to secure it from attackers.

Doom and Super Mario could be a lot tougher now AI is building levels

Was the AI subject to the same interface as the human?

Did the AI discover the value of units or was it explicitly told?

Did the AI discover the statistic involved or did it know that it could reach X squares at a time, and do 56 damage at that range?

It's EASY to make an AI that wins. It's EASY to make a bad AI. It's very hard to make an AI that wins enough to be fun, without "cheating" (as you describe) or outperforming the player in every single respect. An AI should LITERALLY have the same mouse-input as a player can give, through the same programming interface as the player's mouse. That's it. That's all they get. I'll let you "read" statistics directly rather than interpret the screen but any AI has inherent advantages that allow it to submit 200 orders across the map where a player can barely click on a menu, or scroll to the region that's alerting.

What you describe are heuristics. Rule-based. You have told it where, when, what, how many, and under what conditions to do something. A human told it what to do, what the rules of the game are and PRECISELY whether or not that shot would kill the unit involved. It didn't learn (machine learning), infer (intelligence) or discover for itself.

Look...

AI doesn't exist.

It can't even PLAY Mario, let alone design a level (go look up MarI/O - it trains on one level and then can only complete that level, maybe, if nothing changes at all. Further training on more levels means it becomes crap in general).

AI is currently just "brute force and heuristics". We don't have anything capable of playing these games, except literally "try every combination quickly and choose the one that gives the biggest score". That's not AI. And it doesn't work well (e.g. getting stuck in loops, being untrainable for a general level rather than specific ones, etc.). And that's the easy bit (or we'd all be level designers... have you seen the messes that the Mario level creator game makes when people are let loose on it?).

We all know this, because we all know that the computer players are either hand-fed WAY more information than is available to the human (i.e. exact co-ordinates and angles that will head-shot you), and/or they are pathetically easy to "distract", "confuse" or just plain lure into obvious traps (which is why in a game one hero wades through thousands of AI opponents).

AI - even in modern computer games with studios pumping millions into their development - can just about work out how to play a nice game against humans given every advantage in the world (in terms of processing, latency, data available, pre-fab calculations rather than training themselves etc.). They are either "too perfect" because they are literally instructed to always get the perfect shot, or useless/unconvincing because they have to be instructed to pretend they don't know how to take the perfect shot (e.g. "take the perfect shot, add a random failure element to simulate a human").

And almost all AI is just human-controlled heuristics. Because genetic algorithms, deep learning, etc. always end up in a single good result for a small dataset and then fail miserably as the dataset scales or they fall out of their training comfort zone.

More Brits have access to 1Gbps speeds than those failing to muster 10Mbps – Ofcom report

"I can still download a 10GB file more than 500 times faster than I can over my supposed 1Gbps connection at work."

So you think they have no other users whatsoever?

Likely their internal network is highly contended, 24 hours a day, in a university. Just because it says "1Gbps" doesn't mean that you have a direct 1Gbps feed to the Internet all to yourself.

P.S. I run a school network on 100Mbps. It work absolutely fine for 600+ users every single day. The only complaints I get are people like yourself who say "Why does speedtest.com not say 100Mbps when I run it?". Answer: Because you're nowhere near the only person/service/computer sharing that.

NetHack to drop support for floppy disks, Amiga, 16-bit DOS and OS/2

Re: I just want to be worshipped as a god by another universe of conscious beings, 'k?

When you return after several decades, there's just one tactic being used by everyone which basically consists of "attack everything, throw everything at everyone, steal every item, scoff all the food".

AI really doesn't have a way to learn at all. It's just a "natural selection" of algorithm parameters, usually chosen pseudo-randomly.

We can't even get Mario to complete any given Mario Bros level - look up Mario AI... it's fine if you train it forever on one simple level, but then it has to be completely retrained for any other. Or even if you slightly move one block.

Don't believe the AI hype. It's brute-force and showmanship, that's all.

ZX Spectrum reboot firm's shareholders demand current directors go

Re: It's getting boring now...

Indeed.

I bought my second Retropie device only this morning. RPi 3B+ with RetroPie installed, a bunch of controllers (could have bought SNES-like or re-used original controllers from a variety of retro systems with adaptors and a bit of wiring, but I have a set of XBox 360 controllers and the dongle for them despite never having owned a modern console, and they are the best controllers for pretending to be everything from Playstation to N64 to Kempston to SNES to Megadrive, etc. controllers).

Eventually, I'll buy myself a flat-pack cocktail arcade cabinet kit, stick that in there with a monitor, and spend a few days wiring in arcade joysticks and buttons too, but there's no reason I could have made a retro Pi-top with ZX Spectrum games, a mini Pi handheld battery powered console with some Amiga titles or whatever else I can think of.

I love my Speccy. I still have three of them. But getting them to work is infinitely more frustrating in the modern age than even the dodgiest of RAM packs or PSU from back in the day. If I want nostalgia, I fire up an emulator.

Anyone fancy a four-player game of Warlords in a few months time when I've found a bunch of suitable trackballs and put the cabinet together?

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.

But it's still a death-knell in the project and company, as far as I can see. That new person is going to spend most of their time sorting out the mess and complying with the law and that's going to take weeks, which brings them right into IndieGoGo's threat deadline of seeking action against the payments people made towards the project.

"Administration" looms ever closer, I reckon. Sad if you had money invested in it, but to be honest if I had been one of those people, I'd have had a small claims action against this company over a year ago.

Europe fires back at ICANN's delusional plan to overhaul Whois for GDPR by next, er, year

That's a good way to lose 50% of your revenue overnight, not to mention be involved in hefty lawsuits (with governments no less, let alone corporations), and to instantly lose your claim to being an international institution.

You think that if they did that, the EU wouldn't be able to set up a bunch of rootservers overnight, inform all their registrars that they were the definitive rootservers for the EU domains now, and then ICANN wouldn't be forced to offload all queries for .uk, .eu, .fr etc. to those servers in order to restore connectivity?

People forget just how large a market the EU is. In many cases it generates American companies more revenue than the continent of America itself.

RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP

"Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP"

I'm okay. I believe in GOTO 10.

Incredible Euro space agency data leak... just as planned: 1.7bn stars in our galaxy mapped

Re: Real science

You need to read up on your history of quantum physics, and relativity, and quite a lot else.

Because those whole areas only exist because the (quite ordinary, but difficult-to-solve) maths gave only one logical result - that "these things follow" (meaning things like relativity and quantum phenomena) was the result of the maths. Literally the equation that someone said "Well, that can't be right" but knew they'd done their maths properly... that turned out to have interpretations in physics hitherto unheard or dreamt of.

It was only years later that anyone put a physics name to them, and the larger portion of a century before they were observed to be true.

Sorry, but you can't poo-poo maths without destroying all of modern physics. And maths told you how the world worked, it just took 100 years for geniuses to actual understand what that meant and observe it.

Blighty stuffs itself in Galileo airlock and dares Europe to pull the lever

Re: Next stop, the EU army.

Excuse me a second while I play devil's advocate here:

"And there you have it..

The 'Pro Mixedraces' that want to see White People gone.

That want to see Black People gone

That want to see Asian People gone

That want to see African People gone

Not just the borders, but everything about those people and cultures.. Oh wait "we dont have cultures" according to a bunch of virtue signalling retards..

And yet its the "Everyone stay their own race forever party" that are branded xenophobic.

I do love watching this Orwellian double speak.."

Honestly, I don't see a problem with... integrating with the other countries on the continent that we live in. Interbreeding. Having croissants in the morning, Italian coffee in the afternoon, a good plougman's lunch, a paella for dinner.

You make it positively sound as if "mixing" with any non-British people will somehow destroy "us". Where every single culture on Earth is basically a mash-up of every culture that came before it (we were all Romans at one point, all Africans further back, and all related to Genghis Khan one way or another). Do you know - not one culture in the history of humanity has ever survived on its own. We were invaded by the Vikings. We then invaded large parts of the world. The world invaded each other and those parts we'd already invaded (but were by no means the first to do so).

You know what, I do want to see all those countries gone. And referenced only as regions within something we call "the world", that can speak with one voice, work once without duplicating that work 200+ times over, while preserving local history, culture, language, etc. Pretty much any idyllic scenario you want to reference, from Star Trek's perfect universe to any other work of significant fiction, idolises just that scenario, doesn't it? I don't remember in 2001: A Space Odyssey everyone being horrified by the idea that the first interstellar traveller was a white American. He was just a guy, wasn't he?

Honestly, we need to stop this petty-squabble shite, for everything from nationalities, to languages, to races, to sub-factions of certain countries, to religions, to political leanings. Britain within the EU is no different to California in the United States. It doesn't agree with certain things, has some things pushed on it for the sake of legal homogeneity, has certain independence, has its own accents, has its own localities, has its own "borders", has its own laws, has its own taxes, etc. but its still American too and supported (and argued with) by the other states.

Scale that up, and that's how Britain was in Europe. Now we're basically suggesting "California hates being in America, we're going to break off and be our own independent state once again". That sounds stupid to me, hence so does Brexit.

You know what I want to see gone? People thinking that their country of origin matters. Why the hell is it even on passports? You either have citizenship, and all the rights and privileges that come with that, or you don't.

Orwell wrote other books apart from 1984, you know. America has been reading too much Animal Farm. Let's not try to go their way either.

Oh, and it's double-think. Or new-speak. Double-speak isn't an Orwellian term at all. Maybe try reading that book you're alluding to.

I got 99 secure devices but a Nintendo Switch ain't one: If you're using Nvidia's Tegra boot ROM I feel bad for you, son

Re: An Nvidious flaw

I don't think that they ARE that serious about having multiple Switches in a single household. I don't think that's their plan at all.

That's a niche market at best. How many Joy-con things can you join to one Switch anyway?

Re: An Nvidious flaw

I feel that, after a certain amount of time on the market, no anti-piracy measure is of any use. It's there to protect first-day, really, isn't it?

The Wii didn't really suffer from pirateable games, did it? And some devices there was probably no copy protection at all and yet they survived just as well - everything from the NES/Gameboy, I should imagine.

Though I get why they have to TRY to put it on, they know just as well as we do that it's ultimately just a hindrance. So they have to look like they're trying, limit the obvious, make it clear that there are "hacked" and "unhacked" devices and that it's not easy for one to change from one to the other (granny isn't going to do it, is she?). At that point, the people who WANT a hacked device - you're not really going to stop them, are you? They'll happily unsolder every ROM and replace it with a custom one if they want, and then sell them to others who want that kind of device.

I can't imagine it hits their sales that much - such people would rather spend £200 on the hack than £50 on a game anyway.

I think, like Steam, Nintendo get the balance right. I can't ever remember being hindered by their copy protection or usage polices (e.g. "you can use your account on one machine at a time", etc.). They put in enough that I'd think "Bah, not worth messing with", even as a tinkerer, but not enough that I'm swearing at the machine to just play my game.

A lot of other places get it a lot more wrong.

Amazon and Netflix join Hollywood to lob sueball at 'Kodi' service SetTV

There's nothing wrong with the app. It's supplied without modules. It's illegal to supply it with modules like that. And they don't endorse, condone or assist piracy.

It's like suing VLC for it letting you play RTSP streams of Hollywood movies - the problem is the people streaming, not the people making media software. You could go so far to clamp down on Kodi modules that connect you straight to such services, but again it's the module's fault, not the player. No different to giving out a list of RTSP streams and something that loads them into VLC as a playlist.

It's such misdirection that frustrates when it comes to enforcement. Kodi has nothing to do with it, the same way that Hoover has nothing to do with a Vileda vacuum cleaner.

As such, rather than worry about the software being used, people should be shutting down those people quite openly streaming Hollywood movies over bog-standard website streams that rarely get shut down or changed, hosted on well-known services and portals, and seem to survive for years without hindrance (while also peddling a ton of spam, adverts and malware).

Why you would want to watch like that, I can't fathom. Streaming is the worst way to watch a movie, but apparently popular with the kids. If it's not randomly blocky and horrible, it cuts out and stops.

Same as the BitTorrent site whack-a-mole - don't blame BitTorrent... find the sites offering things they shouldn't and the user's uploading and sharing stuff illegally.

Amazon, LG Electronics turned my vape into an exploding bomb, says burned bloke in lawsuit

Re: Health Hazard?

I don't care about the risks - I imagine it won't be long before we discover that vaping is just as dangerous, especially if you're just buying random oils off websites and burning them into your lungs. Yep, open fires etc. are just as toxic but I breathe significantly near an open-fire about once a year, whereas smokers and vapers want to shove it down your throat everywhere you go. Risk = exposure x substance type.

But I have the same problem with e-cigs as with cigs - they stink. They make YOU stink. That stink follows you on your clothes, hair, and everything you touch. And you often become immune to it and can't tell. Never sold anything on eBay and marked it as "from a smoke-free home"? Because LITERALLY anything can stink like a smoker if it's around them long enough. Obviously things like kiddies soft toys but all sorts of other stuff - and then you need to give that to grandma or whatever as a present.

Smokers become immune to their own stink. Non-smokers can literally tell if you've had a smoke in the past week because you still carry the stink on you. I've had any number of smokers try to put one over on me saying they hadn't had a quick one, and you can out-smell them every time. Vapers are no different in this regard.

I was on a date once, in the garden of a crowded London pub. Some guy literally DOZENS of tables away was smoking some apple-flavoured junk. Literally, the clouds OBSCURED entire people, they were that solid, big and wide, and came every 10-15 seconds. People were trying to eat. People were trying to talk. And this idiot kept on doing it, even when people moaned and moved tables.

I imagine everyone went home that day stinking of apple, god knows what the guy himself smelled like.

It's got nothing to do with your risk, I literally don't care if you die. I won't be close enough to be at risk while you're smoking it. But you will stink for the rest of the day/week and that's no less obnoxious than going to the gym, not showering, and then coming into the office and getting close to everyone (yes, have advised people in martial arts clubs etc. to go and shower first because it's just rude to come in stinking like that when people have to be in close contact with you).

It's "dangerous", sure, but that can be mitigated. It's the anti-social aspect that matters more. And that carries over from smoking to vaping.

Not to mention, I find the paraphernalia, messing about, distraction while you're talking to someone, a grown adult sucking on something like a baby, "building" the vapes in the first place, the noises associated with it, discussions about wattage and coils and whatever else, and the overall dependence of an adult on some sucky-toy to be just as annoying.

And I grew up in a house with a 40-a-day smoker, so I'm pretty immune to most of the effects by now. (Though my girlfriend could always tell when I'd been to my parents, even if they hadn't smoked while I was there...)

Citrix sues VDI challenger Workspot

What the hell is up with your spelling this morning, Reg?

Misspelled words, missing characters, literally every article thus far published.

Brains behind seL4 secure microkernel begin RISC-V chip port

"In Apple phones, the microkernel forms the basis of the secure enclave that helps secure the device against unauthorised access."

You mean that one that all the law enforcement agencies are buying the software that lets them into it?

This is part of the problem - even with a "provably" secure microkernel, you still have to see what it is that you have proven, and quite what that means for taking over or leaking information from the applications themselves.

Basically, when something is compromised, you can say "Well, it wasn't the microkernel which does almost nothing but pass basic information back and forth, it must be in one of the myriad services which actually contain all the real code that does stuff". Reassuring, I'm sure.

Two's company, Three's unbowed: You Brits will pay more for MMS snaps

Find the 100Gb Mifi offer on Three. It used to be available, but it's not been around for ages.

40Gb is the most they do for anything in terms of HomeFi, MiFi or tethering.

For mobile broadband, correct. For phones? There are plenty of "unlimited" deals.

http://www.three.co.uk/Store/SIM/Plans_for_phones

"1 month Advanced plan

All-you-can-eat minutes

All-you-can-eat texts

30GB Personal Hotspot"

https://www.giffgaff.com/sim-only-plans/

£20 goodybag

Always On*

Unlimited

Unlimited

What they all have, though is tethering limits (e.g. the 30Gb hotspot thing above). But on a phone, it's easy to get an "unlimited*" setup. That unlimited* isn't actually unlimited is a minor point in comparison to not being able to go over 50Gb on ANY 4G PROVIDER for mobile broadband no matter how much you're willing to pay.

Good.

The only thing I have Three for is data, as the only other people who do a decent mobile broadband allowance are Vodafone and they're too stupid to post me a SIM when I ask for it, but then won't let me sign up with my details again to request another.

And every time Three adds incentives to stop people using traditional services and "use your data instead", it suggests that they need to increase their data allowances even further.

But then, I only ever do month-to-month contracts, because I can then just swap out the SIM any time I like without arguing over what is a "material change to the contract".

Honestly, though... if someone sells a 100Gb 4G SIM on pay-monthly that allows tethering for that full amount... someone shout, because I haven't found one. The 100Gb packages on Virgin don't say they allow tethering and their own "mobile broadband" SIMs only go up to 10Gb. Vodafone does a 50Gb one but are incompetent. Three do 40Gb. Everyone else (Giffgaff, O2, EE, etc.) has silly "unlimited (***********)" clauses or don't allow the full amount of data for tethering (which is what mobile broadband is considered as).

Time to ditch the front door key? Nest's new wireless smart lock is surprisingly convenient

If keys are a problem, buy an electronic door lock.

RFID/Mifare fobs are dirt-cheap nowadays.

The real problem is - house insurance. If you are broken into, you have to show that they forced entry. If your lock can be opened without showing signs of forced entry, your house insurance won't cover you. Even if it did, they require it to be up to a stated British Standard.

If you're prepared for your house insurance to be invalid (or do without entirely), sure, change your locks. It's really easy. But not for some cloud-connected shite. GSM-controlled and RFID-controlled locks are everywhere in business, they are bog-standard access control items. They also do everything this thing could possibly do, without all the hassle and expense.

And then if you want all that stupid integration stuff (When lock opens, alarm turns off? Really?), you can easily get a home controller that does that. But I wouldn't touch Nest for it.

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

Re: "It’s about pressing a button on your keyfob to find out where you parked your car"

I find it much easier to just text my car, and it gives me a GPS link, which I load into a GPS radar app, which walks me to within feet of it.

Not a fancy car. Just a £20 GPS tracker box off Amazon tied to the radio circuits and a £5 / month giffgaff SIM and some free apps.

Also, it was great for knowing when my other half was coming back from her evening courses... I would activate the "text on motion" function once she was there, and when she moved it on her way back it would text me and I knew to get the plates ready for the KFC she would get on her way back.

You mean the re-sample of Under Pressure by Queen / Bowie?

"I stopped watching commercial TV before 1990. An advertising impact study once asked me about a TV advert. I could remember the rather wooden public figure delivering the product endorsement - but couldn't remember which company it was for."

They stopped running the "easily-turn-off-and-on-able" ads because everyone thought they were for British Gas, I think.

Re: Swearing in the South

My era is defined by:

"Re-record, not fade away, re-record, not fade away"

"I'll be your dog!".

"There's somebody at the door!"

"Happiness... is a cigar called..."

Creaky NHS digital infrastructure risks holding back gene boffinry, say MPs

Re: 200GB to store a genome? Surely not!

What happens if you PKZIP it?

Planned European death ray may not need Brit boffinry brain-picking

Re: Coherent beam combining

Hard to do.

Certainly difficult to make battlefield-resilient.

Throw a stone at it, make a small dent and the beams would no longer be coherent.

I think that the next time you have an infantry-vs-infantry battle, it's probably already game over anyway.

WW3 will be fought from a computer desk. Actual people on the ground is reserved for "peace-keeping" (i.e. making sure those people without the expensive weaponry don't get hold of it).

The days of even things like tanks, etc. are numbered.

To be honest, nobody is going to pitch professional-army against professional-army again without things getting very bad very quickly. Which is why it's a bit pointless and alarming to teach people that armed forces like that are good careers to go into. Anything serious happens, you're laser/chemical/nuke fodder. Anything non-serious and you're just going to be asked to fight against a bunch of people that last year you armed to help them fight against a different bunch of unarmed people.

If a major first-world power ever declares war on another first-world country again (not just a concept or easy-pickings or the Middle East, etc.), then we have precisely zero chance of things like chemical usage restrictions actually being abided by. People can't even abide by them now - everything from Russian spies to chemical weapons in Syria.

One of the reasons that we really should be just bringing the military home, using them for defence (lovely how they use that word but never "offence" when describing it officially), and absorbing their ENORMOUS cost into something a bit more useful.

Samsung-backed gizmo may soon juice up your smartphone over the air

I'm not sure that you want to have a beam of anything pointing at you to charge your phone.

Anything directional (i.e. not really subject to the inverse square law) and of sufficient power is going to interfere with things. Everything from inducing a current in your credit cards in your wallet to generating all kinds of RF or reflections.

Basically, this is achievable today. Get a large directional antenna and just point it at the "magic charging spot" by some magic dot-tracking method. But putting, say, even 10W down it is going to attract the attention of radio licensing agencies before long. Anything non-directional is subject to inverse-square law (so something 40cm away would need to be 1,600 times the power of something 1cm away). There's a reason that even directional antenna use - though it might come under power limits measured in Watts - isn't allowed if it allows a certain gain overall.

To then harvest it without anything else in the path inducting a current from it is going to be really tricky. And you don't want to have the e-cig in your pocket ignite because you walked between a guy and his phone charger.

The energies we're talking about, really the only viable method is very-close-contact induction and acceptance that there'll be some loss, or a conductive cable to "channel" it down so it's not going through the very insulating free-air.

Inductance works great for electric toothbrushes, maybe a very low power phone, etc. Everything else, you really don't want to be inducing even targeted, directional beams of EM power towards. Especially when a 50p cable does the job at stupendous efficiency without side-effects.

The low-power, harness-what's-there is more viable but you should be able to tell that even that's a bit of a cop-out. Sure, it'll keep, say, a wireless sensor blipping once a second, or find your lost car keys by having them suck up wifi energy and send out a short burst of data, but that's about it.

Honestly, you may as well just point a laser at the center of a QR code using a movable arm. That's basically what you're doing, but with RF, but at least a laser beam doesn't spread out, induce currents, etc. in surrounding materials. And you would have a chance of cutting out instantly if the laser detects that it's reflecting back or lost the QR code because something's got in the way.

Basically charge-by-high-power-laser is more viable and I could probably make you one today. 10W would be quite dangerous, though, and a bit naff for charging.

BT pushes ahead with plans to switch off telephone network

Re: Voice quality

VoIP sounds shite only if you don't bother to QoS.

A VoIP channel is TINY in terms of bits-per-second. Sure latency will delay things. Jitter will make it wobble. But those don't tend to matter for a... what? 64Kbps stream over a 10Mbps channel? That's a HUGE amount of loss before you're affected. Latencies of 100ms on voice traffic are not noticeable and if you have more than 100ms ping to even the other side of the planet, you have bigger problems on your connection.

But what matters is that your phone call doesn't get superseded by Fred over in the office loading his Facebook. His packets can wait, and he'll never notice. Yours can't.

It's very easy to demonstrate. When a workplace first gets a VoIP phone in-house, warn them that it will happen. You can put in the most expensive switches in the world and massive redundant fibre connections and all sorts, and even on switchboard-only calls, it'll work. For one phone. Two phones. Three phones. But before you even get into silly numbers (say a dozen), or if there's a particular time when everyone logs in... the phones will start to distort and cut out. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at it at that point.

At that point, everyone starts getting rubbish service and it sounds bad. So you VLAN off the voice traffic, and apply QoS to it. Now watch as you can go to 100, 200, 300 handsets and no problems. On the same networking, the same expensive (or cheap!) switch. The same Internet line.

The problem with telesales people on VoIP is either that they don't have the IT people to know this, or they are all working from home over their home ADSL router (more common than you might think... lots of people do telesales jobs from home, dial into the switchboard from a phone they are given to plug into their router, and off they go). Nobody sets QoS properly. And it affects NOTHING else when you do it right, while making the phones all "just work". I've demonstrated this phenomenon on everything from the cheapest Netgear to the most expensive Cisco, with less than a dozen phones each time. Works fine at first, then ordinary network usage interrupts it and it fails. Apply QoS on the same switch and then you can expand enormously without issue.

I've seen contractors who carry around Ethernet IP phones and just plug them into people's networks expecting it all to magically work... and invariably they say it works where the IT is well-managed and doesn't anywhere else they try it - even if they're the only person on the network. Because the QoS isn't automatic.

And QoS applies not just to the local network, but to your wireless ("Airtime Fair Sharing") and outgoing packets too. Your router has to know to deal with the voice packets FIRST before it worries about your Counterstrike game. It has to respect QoS and pass it on (it'll likely be ignored by the ISP, but you never know) just the same as the switches. Your Whatsapp traffic isn't QoS'd because I think it goes out over untagged encrypted protocol which your smartphone / wireless / router doesn't understand or respect. That's why it does that.

The number of times I've had calls FROM people selling me VoIP where I literally can't hear their call (and it's not us... at various places and times I've had analog, ISDN and SIP so we know our calls were clear).

When we started buying local IP handsets, the problem came within a dozen and I QoS'd and four years and a hundred handsets later we're fine. When we started going down the line of SIP trunking, I did the same - made sure the traffic was VLANned, that entire VLAN was QoS'd on the switches, prioritised on the router, firewall and wireless points. Made sure that the outgoing SIP ports were forced to max priority so they retained that QoS when they went out to our ISP, etc. Literally never had a problem, even with user's maxing out the connection on an hourly basis.

Voice traffic doesn't care about bandwidth and retransmission, like other technologies. TCP will just "try again" so fast that you'll never notice a problem. But VoIP needs to be jumping the queue for every tiny little packet it sends because it NEVER tries to send it again, it's already too late by then. If it can't jump the queue - from the phone to the network to the switch to the firewall to the router to the Internet - then it will be bad. If it can jump the queue, it's literally so miniscule that nothing else will notice or care. The actual bandwidth it consumes is pathetic.

To be honest, even "wireless" IP phones have more problems than cabled ones. Because you can't stop someone on the same channel but another SSID or just plain interference from "jumping the queue" and holding up the voice traffic.

If you are expecting VoIP and you're not in control of QoS... you're on your own. It might work, it might not. If you are MANAGING VoIP - apply QoS from day one on everything in the path. Then, quite literally, you can run a entire company switchboard from a dodgy old ADSL line.

As an aside, we abandoned all our analog and ISDN lines last year, after many years of waiting for approval to do so. They were more likely to provide poor performance (everything from rain affecting the cables, to things literally falling off the telegraph poles) and we had more faults on ISDN than I care to remember. We retain one emergency line only so we can dial 999 if the system goes off. But everything else is entirely SIP. I haven't had a complaint about call quality for a year.

Re: Oh well

Same way as it does now?

Battery-backed units in the cabinets/exchanges which provide service for a limited time? We tend to call them UPS in the IT trade. If only someone had come up with a way to UPS IP-based technology, eh?

To be honest, though, I manage a school's IT and our procedures just say "call 999". But in all the meetings we have, we are quite aware that we're much more likely to be able to do that safely from out on the playing field with a mobile phone than trying to call from a landline.

Despite the fact that we have leased lines, SIP trunks, analog and ISDN backups (for emergency calls only), we recognise that we're actually much more likely to want to be OUT of the building before we worry about that. And then if O2, EE, Vodafone and whoever else are ALL down, and we can't pick up the Wifi to SIP-dial, that that's a scenario that may call for extreme action like - going to the nearest house and borrowing their phone and hoping that's not affected.

999 call handling won't change, because the other end is almost certainly IP-based by now, at some point anyway. The call handling centre MUST be IP in this day and age, surely? With analog backups, sure, but it must be IP for the first-hop and local devices?

But to be honest, 999 calls must be literally THOUSANDS OF TIMES more likely to come from a mobile handset nowadays. Because you can flee AND call, rather than have to stay in the emergency area. Sure, for an injury, you could call on a landline but then you're tied between the landline and your patient unless he happened to collapse in a very convenient location.

I think we're being spoiled nowadays, given that only a generation ago, it could have to be a run to the local phonebox (Remember those? Remember the years of being taught how to use them to dial 999?).

I'm not saying they shouldn't provide 999 services and backups and everything else, but surely nowadays calling 999 can be done by one of DOZENS of methods. Hell, Skype even lets you dial 999. I don't see that IP conversion would inherently degrade or change the system for doing so.

Seems to be the obvious thing to do and has been for decades.

I'm almost at the point of suggesting that 999 call-handling should have some rule-changing, to be honest.

Everything in my workplace is IP - from the phones on the desk, to the fax machine, to the GSM alarm systems to the SIP trunk. There are no longer any analog or ISDN lines or anything of the sort still active, because there's no need for them to be and they have disadvantages despite being actually on-the-premises still.

Its seems only logical to plan for an IP-only future in terms of telecoms, even things like video, mobile telephony (all modern handsets do SIP, so the 4G etc. network is really only providing a data backend), etc.

I imagine it means a lot of clutter removed from exchanges and only legacy lines having a kind of conversion equipment, which can be phased out by moving everyone to "proper" fibre connections as necessary.

It just makes much more sense.

The get-out-clause also disappears from BT's books - they can't just blame demand for not having cabled your area properly yet. If you have all-IP exchanges and all-IP cabinets, there's no reason that some manky old line can't support stupendous speeds even if it's shared with the rest of the village once it gets to the exchange. That won't stop them trying, though.

I can quite easily believe now that there are households and businesses all over the country that are pretty much IP-only, internally and externally, for everything from telephony to CCTV.

OK, this time it's for real: The last available IPv4 address block has gone

Transition.

You've gone from "Just add an IPv6 address to the device already running NAT on the front-end of your Internet connection" which is centralised, easy to diagnose and easy to revert to "set up IPv6 local DHCP which could interfere with local services if they aren't already set up for IPv6, while making sure that all your internal access lists, subnets, etc. are also configured for IPv6, etc. etc. etc." not to mention "now you have to consider that every machine has a globally routable IP", so your firewall config just expanded from securing ONE IP to an entire subnet on a protocol you aren't familiar with.

Worrying about NAT literally held everyone back. NAT isn't broken. It works for the vast majority of the world. You know how we know? Because the vast majority of the world has a NAT router on their DSL connection. And the solution to "poor" IPv6 deployment is now likely to be carrier-grade NAT on IPv4. Ironically, the "problem" cited by everyone like yourself - spewing NAT-hate - actually CAUSES PEOPLE to stay on IPv4, which means ISPs are forced to NAT them as they can't get any more public routable IPv4 addresses.

Nobody is saying "stay like that forever", but the initial transition is literally an hour of work, for a site with an unlimited number of existing machines, with no changes to internal services whatsoever. But NAT-fear stopped people doing that, because "with IPv6 you should ditch NAT too", etc. etc. Which turns it into a 6-12 month project of testing and reconfiguration.

Your post is the epitome of demonstrating my explanation. NAT or not-NAT has nothing to do with security either. I'm not even claiming that. NAT is a "sensible default" applied to the technology that happens to translate to a "block all incoming" as the final rule by the way it works, and that should be your default rule anyway.

What you did was tell people: You're an idiot to use NAT, turn it off. When everyone is using NAT and there are no inherent problems with a proven technology that serves a practical purpose. And because you conflated that with "here, have a bunch of new-style IP addresses", nobody moved to new-style IP addresses because they were afraid they'd also have to change EVERYTHING about a technology they've been using successfully for decades.

P.S. Your IPv6 router/firewall, no matter how basic it is, still has to keep track of connections. Stateful firewall is the norm. If it's not, you should worry. And though connection tracking on IPv6 does technically take up slightly more memory... there's no way you should be hitting limits on any router advertising itself as IPv6-capable.

P.P.S. I've run Bittorrent on NAT'd connections, like I imagine the majority of the world has. It's never dropped unrelated connections. That's a factor of "crappy router" not NAT. I've literally never witnessed the symptoms you describe (but sheer bandwidth can fill up your outgoing line, which knocks your users for six if you have asymmetric connections and they can't get TCP request and acknowledgements etc. back out. Solution: QoS, not removing NAT.)

I lied:

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

21%

IPv6 is present in all modern smartphones - it's a requirement of the protocols involved.

IPv6 is present in all modern communication protocols - including DOCSIS.

IPv6 is present in all modern operating systems. It took decades to get it in there.

IPv6 is present in all modern switching/routing hardware. It took decades to get it in there.

Nobody is going to supplant IPv6.

You know what hindered it? That NONSENSE about it meaning that every device had to have a globally addressable address. That was the problem. Nobody wants their local devices to have an address like that. NAT is perfectly fine. And converting a NAT network to IPv6 consists of this... add IPv6 to the gateway device. Done. Everything else can be done at leisure, or stay IPv4 into perpetuity - nobody would ever care.

That nonsense literally held back adoption, because who the hell wants to go through every switch, router, server, client, phone, printer, etc. and give them all IPv6 addresses and then address them only by that? Nobody. Internal networks, it does not matter how they operate. That's why they're internal.

But the anti-NAT brigade set us back 10 years on IPv6 because of that.

You are not going to get anything but IPv6 for the next 20 years. Deal with it. Activating it, using it testing it, and understanding it takes about an hour tops for any IT professional, with a deployment plan then going into normal change management.

Sorry, but you can make all the excuses you like, like The Reg does. All my servers, domains, etc. are IPv6 capable and have been for years. It really doesn't take much and things like log-file analysers and custom-made sticking-plaster scripts are the things that need time to be converted. The protocol support? It's just there. In your device, in your OS, in all the things you use that OS on.

And deploying it affects nothing IPv4-wise, so there's no reason not to. Do it using ipv6.yourdomain.com and say it's a test. Google report that something approaching 10% of their traffic is IPv6 now. It's not going anywhere.

CEO insisted his email was on server that had been offline for years

Re: Deleting emails

I have every email I've ever sent or received, ever, back to... pre-2000 certainly, probably a few years before that if I dig around in my old Hotmail archives.

Because... well, email is so small compared to everything else that there's no reason to delete them. Additionally, having a HUGE stock of source data means that an email from an old friend won't be put into spam by my Bayesian-filtering mail client. Plus... wow, I mean, does it save your backside. "That's NOT what we agreed, and I can prove it", say I, with instant narrow-down searches of nearly two decades of email in fractions of a second.

In work, I make things work the same way. People tell me they are deleting their old email. Why? What are you hiding? Did you get the "you're running low on space" email? No? You know why? Because it's set ludicrously high - the point at which our 1000+ users would start to fill up the server's storage - and nobody ever reaches it despite having well-advertised, public addresses that thousands of customers and suppliers use to contact us all the time. I think in 4 years, that email went out twice, and both times it was "Yeah, you have a lot of email, but it's nothing in server terms. Don't worry about it." and I doubled their warning threshold.

Because literally "server storage for email" divided by "number of users" gives me a potential average mailbox size in the 10's or 100's or gigabytes. And pretty much Exchange says that the average mailbox is less than 2Gb. So I can afford for some heavy users because almost nobody else is using the storage available. Their roaming profile, however, could well be in the 10-50Gb size, even WITHOUT the documents folder (which is redirected to a network share).

My email retention policy? Don't delete email. No point. You're going out of your way to permanently remove data that might be useful to you for no real reason... And sucking down even a 10Gb mailbox to a new machine is going to take... hold on... 1Gbps network... 8Gbits in a Gbyte... 80 seconds? That's just not worth worrying about for a one-off only on the machines that you've NEVER used before.

And I don't worry about how users organise their own inbox. Why worry? It's up to them, hinders only them, and I have Powershell search tools that basically ignore folder structure anyway if I need to find something in them.

To be honest, I have EVERY mailbox ever made on my system still present too. 4 years, and I have 80+ users come and go every year. Why do I keep them? Because that involves zero effort and provides safety (users do sometimes return, sometimes we need to pull things from old mailboxes, etc.) and costs nothing. If I was getting tight on space, I'd just archive the oldest of them off the live systems. I still wouldn't delete them, though, just put them somewhere else. And we have backups and archives and retention policies and all the normal so even users deleting every email (rather than just throwing it into a folder to get it out of the root inbox) makes no practical difference to the size of the storage required for the mailboxes.

IT people whose systems are so underspecced, and who have so much time on their hands that they worry about a handful of old email for a few dozen users who keep everything? They really need to re-evaluate their systems and working practices. If you're on a budget, just archive mailboxes once a year and throw them on a cheap NAS, who cares? At least you'll still have everything.

But literally my users are instructed "Don't delete anything, there's no point. And especially not email, which is so tiny as to be pointless". You desperately need storage (unlikely, we don't quota either)? Then a video is the size of a thousand photos, which are each the size of a thousand documents. So long as you're not emailling around video directly (you idiots), don't worry about it.

Motorola Z² Force: This one's for the butterfingered Android lovers

Re: At £500 it would be a steal

Most I've ever paid for a phone is £200.

Sorry, but these people are living in la-la land.

I'll happily pay £30 a month for a BUCKET load of data.

I'll happily pay £200 for a device.

But not £60 a month for a device with a pittance of allowance on credit, and not £500-1000 for a device on its own.

Sorry, literally all the "new" phones are out of my price range, mainly because they do a TON of things that I just don't want/need them to do.

SpaceX finally Falcon flings NASA's TESS into orbit

I did actually research THIS LAUNCH specifically before writing this post(*)... and they just pushed the second-stage out of orbit. Apologies will be accepted in the form of cash, credit card, Bitcoin or Paypal... no cheques please.

Same as the Tesla-in-orbit. Great gimmick. Now where's it going to end up. It's hard enough to launch through the space junk now without encountering 100-year-old space junk returning on a huge chaotic orbit because a private firm just shoved it away from Earth with no way to tell where it would end up.

(*) The reason... because ALMOST EVERY LAUNCH they do that claims to "land back" in some fashion actually fails - even if it's only one rocket, one stage, or that they have to abort the landing, the "we re-use rockets" thing is only technically correct.

More often than you might think they destroy the drone-ships that they are landing on. They don't publicise it much because they can just say "Hey, we re-used a booster from flight A" and everyone just goes "cool" without checking facts... *cough*.

Except for the second-stage of the rocket, which they now just fire out of orbit, apparently.

Nice to know that we're not just littering our planet but the rest of the solar system too.

Cutting custody snaps too costly for cash-strapped cops – UK.gov

Re: They know, you know

That's part of the problem, but the real problem is that nobody is BOTHERING. If you delete at the police station those systems inform the central police computer. But if you delete from the central computer, it just lets all the copies of that data (why are there copies anyway?) linger around and orphan themselves with no central control.

The problem is not "we don't know how". The problem is "we put in too many different systems that it's a hassle to do".

To be honest - my brother got into his 40's without a passport or driving licence or any other formal photo ID. He has bank accounts and everything normal, but he only has a birth certificate and a range of information to provide as identity.

He certainly has a national insurance number but that's hardly ID (take note America, SSN's are NOT ID!). But can you really imagine someone being briefly arrested and then immediately being able to provide national insurance numbers etc.? I can't. I can't even imagine that such an ID is even useful - if I give you my NI number, would you be able to tell me where I'm living? Not with certainty. I don't inform ANYONE at NI when I move house, unlike DVLA, etc. Do I have to login to some portal and provide NI to actually do anything? Not really.

The closest we have to actual ID is the government gateway (which used to issue individual client certificates but is now just username/password). That lets me renew driving licence, passport (even change the photo), file tax returns, etc. so it's pretty central and integrated. But we don't use that for anything like that - the closest is when you have to get one of those codes from it where the DVLA certify who you are so that you can hire a car.

And I think we're now scrapping GG, aren't we? I know there's been talk of it. The ID card debacle basically put the nail in the coffin of central integrated services.