Posts by Lee D

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.

Re: It's bad to say....

I always use a subnet calculator (http://jodies.de/ipcalc). Anything else is just going to introduce errors, because a lot of things WILL still work with an incorrect subnet.

For instance, the range I inherited was 48.0/22 (255.255.252.0) - that's a really odd range.

They were using the 48's for client DHCP initially (again - NO IDEA WHY, it's within a local range!). Then they needed more addresses, so some fool decided to do the above (which gives you the 48.49.50 and 51's). But they didn't update the subnet everywhere. So what you get are a lot of computers that can get an IP, log on, talk to the gateway, connect to the Internet, etc.

But when you try to talk to printers or, say, anything broadcast - DLNA, Chromecasts, Airplay, etc. then it doesn't work properly.

And you get things like... the 48's are filtered for web, but the rest aren't. All kinds of issues. And I guarantee you that the CCTV, access control, etc. guys will just read it as their bog-standard, "we-don't-know-why-just-type-it" 255.255.255.0 no matter how much you highlight the fact because they don't understand what a subnet is (or a VLAN or VPN or STP or anything, for that matter).

The solution, of course, is to stop faffing about and use well-known subnets. Very few places have IT big enough to worry about broadcast floods, etc. and hence want to limit their subnets down to the bare minimum necessary, but no IT department that understands the issue... just use the whole damn range and a bog-standard subnet and be done with it.

Then you have the numbering issues? Then don't. Nobody needs to care about IP addresses any more. I wouldn't be able to tell you the IP address of any of the 1000+ devices on my networks except for a) the gateway, b) the primary and secondary DNS, c) the main DC (which is actually the primary DNS anyway, but I don't actually NEED to know that, I could just use it's name!).

At home is the same. My router gives everything a name. Sure, at one point you have the IP there but it's DHCP and then you "reserve" the lease and it's permanently on that address but... more importantly... you then just give it a name. Anything that doesn't have a name will autodiscover, I assure you (e.g. Chromecasts by using the broadcast address).

And it's a damn sight easier for grandpa to remember to type in "backup" into his browser than "192.168.0.182" for his backup NAS, or cctv, or printer whatever else.

As far as I'm concerned, if I don't need to know anything more than gateway and DNS (the two things you really CAN'T refer to by a DNS name), then nobody else does either. I've memorised my VLANs and subnets on each VLAN, though. That matters. But the IP of individual machines? Nope.

And, to be honest, it REALLY shouldn't matter. Anything that needs to talk to a server should be using the name. Because then transition and retirement is much easier because you just change what the name resolves to without having to have two machines with the same IP trying to failover to each other etc. as you make the switch. Anything else should be picking up a random from DHCP, or literally a "fill-in-the-gap" on your static lists as necessary.

Too many simple problems are caused by referring to machines DIRECTLY by IP or MAC. Whereas we solved that problem for the Internet by making them all invisible behind a chosen nomenclature.

Do you know, I don't even know my outside static IP. Because it literally doesn't matter as NOWHERE is it referred to, except the DNS records of my domain. And yet I have a dozen or more outside services for hundreds of users.

Make your life simple. Choose simple, well-known subnets (the entire 10.0 range is perfectly fine for a local network, nobody will ever have that many devices that it will matter, without having a switch capable of handling such things). Name everything. Use the .1 and .2 as gateway, DNS, etc. done.

I'm implementing my rule again, Reg.

When YOU BOTHER to put an IPv6 address on your website, as already supported by your browsers, DNS host, webserver, content delivery network, and everything in between... THEN you can be sarcastic about a poor IPv6 deployment statistic.

It's companies like you that are precisely the problem. "We've got our IPv4, and it would 'take effort' to make everything work for IPv6, so why bother?" is the attitude you've given for... what... 8 years? Maybe more. I'll check my comment history where I have about half-a-dozen annual "Yeah, we're going to look into that next year" things.

I mean, at least you did eventually get around to SSL. But, honestly, you should restrain yourself from sarcastic IPv6 comments until you at least have an AAAA record on a beta-domain:

https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3atheregister.co.uk&run=toolpage#

Your DNS hosting provider is "Cloudflare"

For anyone else, it would just be annoying but for a TECH SITE it's downright rude. It's like writing articles dissing Windows 10 for not keeping up to date while running XP in all your offices.

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.

And I'd have to dig out the line I used for everything from telemarketers to complaints departments:

I don't care what your SYSTEM is capable of. That's not my problem. Your poor implementation is your own fault.

I'm asking you to remove me from the database / not call me again / delete my record / whatever. How you do that is up to you to sort out and having inadequate processes doesn't excuse you that obligation.

THIS is your formal notification that I've given notice / asked you to remove me / informed you of your error / cancelled your direct debit / whatever. If I still continue to be present on your database / get phone calls / be charged for that good/service / etc. then this will come up in court.

P.S. I've recorded this message / put it in writing / copied in your head office / whatever for a reason. I will present this evidence in court if you fail to deal with the situation.

Otherwise, literally, every company would just put in a convoluted process that says "Oh, well, we can't remove you from our mailing list because our data manager requires the blood of a virgin, a form filled out in triplicate and a holiday in the bahamas as part of his process, and then he has to go through and tippex out your name from a million pieces of paper" and use it as an excuse not to follow the law.

Jeff Bezos purple prose reveals Amazon Prime's passed 100m customers

Re: 99m, 999 thousand, 999 now

I'm sure you've had a bad experience but, for the majority of people I speak to, they have Prime because it's just that good.

My employer uses Amazon for Business... we order everything from pens and paper through to hundreds of iPads via it. It's basically our biggest supplier. Everyone I speak to about the customer service, the delivery, etc. is over the moon with it and believes they've transformed shopping.

Hell, I could order random computer parts and have them within 2 hours as we're part of a Prime Now area. And I've done that and it works.

Our employer actually has an "Amazon cupboard" where staff can order all their stuff to the work address (because there's always someone there), and it gets put into the cupboard and at the end of the day someone delivers it to people's offices if they haven't come to collect it (personally, I get a message on my phone saying it's here AS THE GUY presses the button with the receptionist to say he's put the parcel in there, and then I wander up there).

If your post office is terrible, though, they don't have much recourse. They'll never know that unless everyone tells them, and there might be nothing they can do about it. Prime for me means next-day, every time (unless I decide to get a £1 credit on the video store and have it delivered whenever, when it generally arrives... the next day). If anything, I only ever seem to get notifications that my delivery will come EARLIER than the delivery estimate, especially for non-Prime items.

I don't see how "stuff supposed to be delivered by the postie" really translates into how Amazon "should employ more staff", though. Sounds like your post office need to pull their finger out.

To be honest, I can't fault Amazon on much at all. They didn't have a business account, and all my former employers have used them for lots of things. Now they do. Their customer service was absolutely faultless every time I used it. The returns procedure is wonderful (I've received replacements BEFORE I could even box up the faulty item to take back).

About the only thing I think they don't have up to the normal standard: The food delivery thing is just mediocre. I think that's because of their partnered supermarket in the UK (Morrisons?). It was okay but Asda/Tesco/Sainsburys do a much better job. Oh, and if we could cut out the ChromeCast/Firestick rivalry and just let all the apps work on both devices seamlessly, that would be great. I'm not going to buy a Firestick just to watch a free movie, Amazon, when I already have a Chromecast, so give it up.

Yes, I have Prime. I use Prime Video (and bought videos too). I've tried Prime Fresh. I've tried Prime Music (but it's not a big product for me, but it does just work). No, I don't have an Echo or any other surveillance device. I don't use Prime Photos. I had a Kindle but I gave it to someone and just read my books on my phone now. I don't have any of the bolt-on subscriptions like Family, Music, Reading, Twitch, etc.

But I absolutely would struggle to fault the "I want that, click button, oh look it's arrived" part of the service. I literally spend enough online - mostly through Amazon - that £79 for a year's worth of postage is actually money-saving. Everything else is just a bonus. And, to be honest, if I click the "No Rush Delivery" button for things, I can buy enough movies over the course of a year with the savings to build up a video library worth £79.

Oracle demands dev tear down iOS app that has 'JavaScript' in its name

What a brilliant way to ensure that nobody ever talks about your product ever again.

And the "trademark enforcement" nonsense? Just rubbish. You can use trademarks so long as you're not passing off. Otherwise every product called "... for Windows" would be in breach of trademark (yes, Microsoft tried it, they failed). And you'd be able to sue someone for saying, say, "DVD Collection Organiser".

Sorry, but Oracle are just setting out to destroy every possible reason to ever go near one of their properties, and I can't fathom why. Everything they touch dies, forks, or is something everyone runs from. The whole Java/Dalvik thing, MySQL/MariaDB, OpenOffice, the whole Sun brand, etc. etc. etc.

Elon Musk's latest Tesla Model 3 delivery promise: 6,000... a week

That graph just makes me piss myself.

That's quite literally an "Elon Musk Self-Appreciation Fund", because that's huge amounts of money to piss away and never make a profit, and not fulfill even a quite rubbish production level promise. Ford are pushing out ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more cars for not much more money ($7bn income in 2017, selling 5-7 MILLION cars worldwide every year - that's 1000 times as many cars for only 10 times the income!).

I honestly don't get why Tesla get any publicity at all. They make fairly basic cars, from fairly basic components (nothing special, just the bog-standard tech in terms of motor, battery etc.), sell next-to-nothing, exist only because of a sugardaddy pumping money into them, can't even get a factory working, miss every target, automate-everything only to then claim humans-do-it-better, skirt bankruptcy constantly, and still can't do basic things like stop the automated stuff killing people by forcing drivers to drive still.

Chrome 66: Get into the bin, auto-playing vids and Symantec certs!

Re: Googe and your data

"That's all gone up in smoke now that the US Congress Critters have decreed that your data wherever in the world it is held is fair game. If the Feds decided that your cat video is really a call to arms for ISIS, they can get it from Google. No ifs, no buts and poof, it is gone to DC"

Not true.

They try. Of course they do. And they decree things. And they have absolutely zero power of enforcement in doing so.

Because compliance with the US law AUTOMATICALLY means deliberate non-compliance with the EU law.

The only exception being carved out (by Microsoft, who like Google have a US and EU subsidiaries that are completely different entitiies) is data on US citizens stored on EU servers (because US data law is so lax that can happen).

But the US can demand, decree, order, cite and write what they like. Nobody at Google (EU) can *allow* even the *potential* for an entity outside EU to access that data (even the US Privacy Shield stuff is a load of nonsense and not really at all EU-compliant, hence is only relevant if you're in a US jurisdiction anyway), or co-operate with such, without being collectively AND personally sued into oblivion.

Same way that the US can decree they own all of the North Pole, or space. They can say what they like. It doesn't mean it's true.

Especially when, if they REALLY wanted the data, they could just file a request to an EU court which is quite capable of granting it legally given due cause. They don't because they know it would be refused.

But the "US can get all your data" is still nonsense and hyperbole.

It's like me being a magistrate and ordering the coffee shop down the road to provide the full names and addresses of every employee of the franchise they are under who live in Outer Mongolia. 1) They are unrelated entities, 2) they don't have access to it, 3) Outer Monogolia would beg to differ about whether you're allowed it or not, even if someone DID want to risk imprisonment.

Literally, someone in Google or Microsoft's EU headquarters can go to jail for ALLOWING a way for anyone at Microsoft (US) access to "personal data" that's stored on or on behalf of EU citizens within the EU. Despite Microsoft probably having less of a business relationship with Microsoft (EU) than they do with Google (US).

Re: Ok, so you have fixed some bugs

Google has one of the most compliant data protection policies I know, for the UK/EU at least. iCloud/Apple has literally NEVER issued a data-protection compliant policy. They still have a line that basically says (paraphrasing but the brevity and gist is correct) "we can send all your data anywhere any time we like". How they've got away with it, especially pushing iPads in schools, I can't imagine and with GDPR it's a death-sentence.

But Google have always guaranteed EU- or UK-only data storage and never to move your data out and done it on day one of new legislation every time.

By comparison, you should be berating Apple, not Google.

And Google banned ad-blockers because IT LETS A PIECE OF SOFTWARE READ EVERY PAGE AND SEND IT TO A REMOTE SERVER, including secure pages. But, hey, keep bashing them on their privacy too and use your ultra-safe Safari "we can do what we like, up yours EU law" instead...

Re: Security Certificates

Not if you have any kind of certificate pinning. Welcome to several years ago.

And I don't care that they were sold to Digicert. Digicert picked them up and they were signed by the same certs, and I'm being forced to renew them earlier because the signing company has had all its certificates removed from browsers. Game over. I don't care who owns them now, before or since, they're dead to me as they required an out-of-band re-signing because of the incompetence of one of their signing parties... and that's just not compatible with my use of SSL.

To be honest, with LetsEncrypt wildcard certificates now valid in the wild, who cares about any of the CA's at all any more?

Re: Security Certificates

Oh, I just stopped using them.

I don't see why any reputable security company would want to be associated with renewing certificates with the name of someone guilty of complete ineptitude with regards security certificates.

RapidSSL have been bugging me for weeks, but I have no intention to renew with them.

Guess who's still most moaned about UK ISP... Rhymes with BorkBork

Er... what's happening with broadband prices lately? The lowest is ~£20 a month and Zen is:

Unlimited Broadband (12 Month Contract)

Up to 17Mbps Download Speed

Up to 1Mbps Upload Speed

For the first 12 months £28.00/mth

Then £32.99 per month

Sorry, but that's quite high for the cost of their most basic bog-standard, at-the-end-of-the-day BT-provided line. And their fibre offerings are more expensive still (£46.99 per month? That's almost SkyTV territory, and certainly on a par with A&A ISP, who have a vastly better service and reputation all round).

Cisco backs test to help classical crypto outlive quantum computers

Re: Encryption is complicated enough already

I don't think AES is at all safe in a post-quantum world, no matter what keys you choose.

A comment I found from 2013: "The best known theoretical attack is Grover's quantum search algorithm... this allows us to search an unsorted database of n entries in √n operations. As such, AES-256 is medium term secure against a quantum attack, however AES-128 is broken, and AES-192 isn't looking too good. With the advances in computational power (doubling every 18 months, etc.), no set keysize is safe indefinitely."

And that's the worst-case example of just using a QC as nothing more than brute-force on the keys, not even taking advantage of any particular exposed weakness, etc.

A QC will radically change the landscape of encryption forever, because it just works in a very different way. It's not a case of "just increase the keysize" any longer. The solution is IMMEDIATE. The keysize barely matters, it affects only the size of the QC that you need build, not the time to solution. Once someone starts building decent-sized QCs and joining them together you won't be able to make the key large enough to be practical for you to use, while impractical for them to build a machine capable of breaking it instantaneously.

AES is dead in such circumstances. As is pretty much every conventional encryption algorithm. That's why post-quantum cryptography is an entire area of research and relies on things which we have but which we DO NOT yet use in the ways we'd need to to make them post-Q safe. Even ECC cannot escape this and requires reinvention to be valid post-Q.

Think about how it works - it's no longer a case of just "making things laborious" in terms of brute-force. That's gone, in a post-Q world. No amount of brute-force can withstand instantaneous calculation. What works is literally: you get billions of possible answers (hashes used on an enormous scale as an integral part of the basic encryption system which they currently aren't), or you have to build a quantum computer so huge that your adversary can't afford it.

The latter is literally just a matter of time and effort again, though.

Post-Q instantly invalidates all currently deployed encryption methods overnight. They all become nothing more than plaintext, in effect. Now matter how carefully you chose your keys, how big they were, how well you secured them, or what flaws may exist in the algorithm, etc.

Post-Q cryptography has to be a reinvention from first principles, which is why things like SPHINCS just don't have any resemblance to a current encryption system. Currently we USE encryption to build hashes. Post-Q we'll use hashes to build encryption.

Re: Encryption is complicated enough already

Sourcing 4TB of truly random data is probably harder than just stopping a quantum computing attack.

Re: Encryption is complicated enough already

Yeah, I'm a mathematician.

I just tried to read the paper on SPHINCS, written by that Dan J Bernstein guy. I can't see the reasoning for something to be post-quantum-safe, to be honest. It's all described as being so, there's lots of proofs and algorithms written around it, but the actual reasoning for why it's post-quantum safe is dubiously obscured or absent.

It seems to hinge on hash-algorithms not being quantum-attackable but I can't see why that's a valid assumption if someone can build a large enough quantum computer. Presumably the number of items that COULD hash down to a tiny single hash are huge, so you don't know what was actually hashed to get that result.** ("A recent result by Song shows that these proofs are still valid for quantum adversaries")

The rest is about eliminating mid-states of the hash calculations - most hashes started with a number, and then each byte of data you incorporate gives you a new hash. You then use that hash to mix in with the next byte, and so on. Presumably "stateless" hashes don't have those intermediary hashes available, but it's not clear how. (I could be really wrong here, but it suggests that you compute a tree of keys for the size of the message you want to encrypt BEFORE you start, and each key is basically a one-time key used only for that particular part of that message. Then you encrypt each byte/word/whatever individually? It kinda makes sense, but I can't see what it adds, so long as the states are kept secret).

Basically, we just need one bad assumption ("Hashes are safe against quantum, while nothing else is") and the whole thing falls apart.

** This is how I analogise quantum computing, it's vastly inaccurate but it gives you the idea. If you are after, say, two large prime numbers that multiply out to a known number (the basis of public-key cryptography), then in traditional computing you have to basically try all the reasonable combinations until you hit the right one, which can take longer than the age of the universe.

In a quantum computer, you build the machine backwards. Here is a machine that multiplies two numbers, you design it to do so. Then you plug in the ANSWER you want. The magic of quantum effects then automatically provides you with the only state that could have possibly resulted in your desired state given the "circuits" you build and the condition you placed on the answer. Instantaneously.

Presumably a quantum computer, because there is only one right answer, is very good at breaking traditional prime-based public-key cryptography, but when it comes to hashes - well, an entire infinity of data sets could hash to the same value (just not EVERY data set), so just working from the hash backwards doesn't work - you don't gain any knowledge about the actual data that was hashed in the first place.

Thus building the core of encryption on thousands and thousands of tiny such hashes, it's possible that it makes the number of possibilities so vast, even with instantaneous discovery of every single one, that it becomes infeasible.

To me, though, if you had a large enough quantum computer, you could easily get those infinities of answer, and perform a known-plain-text attack and similar by pre-loading the circuits to take account of that as well. Much harder, but still theoretically breakable. I wouldn't know how much more complex, but maybe it does make it complex enough that it's infeasible. There's also talk of time-based hashed and other factors, which might well make it more difficult.

Note that all good encryption methods are immune to known-plaintext attacks.

Could be absolute tosh from a physics point of view, but it's an analogy that appears to work.

Router ravaging, crippling code, and why not to p*ss off IT staff

"In all, Akamai estimated that around five million routers could be vulnerable to hijacking via UPnP exploits: miscreants can use the flaws to rewrite networking tables, and turn devices into proxy servers. "

Yep. If you didn't know this, you didn't do your research and turned on UPnP because it was "convenient". UPnP is an unauthenticated protocol that allows ANY LOCAL USER to open ANY PORT to the world and direct it to ANY internal machine. Yes, your kids clicking one thing doesn't just break the computer they are on, it can put a permanent port forward of your CIFS/SMB port out to the public Internet for all the see, if it wants.

Most routers have terrible UPnP implementations too, so that it's not just local users, so that settings can persist, so that the user is never aware they're being accessed, etc.

UPnP is, was, and always will be a ridiculous idea for "convenience" when 99.9% of the world doesn't need to open any incoming ports anyway, no, not even for gaming. Only if YOU are hosting the server do you need to do that, and even then with an intermediary server on the Internet, you can still host games with ZERO open ports. Companies are just lazy and ask UPnP to open up port X to the world while you're playing your game rather than deploy even a single intermediary server.

And if you have UPnP on... tell me how the average user is supposed to know what's open, why and when it opens up? Because I've never seen a router that had that level of detail outside of big commercial things. Literally, UPnP is just a trojan horse that can unlock all your network firewall protections in seconds because ANY user asked it to, even unwittingly, from a games console, mobile phone or PC.

Donkey Wrong: Arcade legend Billy Mitchell booted from record books amid MAME row

Re: Original Hardware?

The original boards are dying.

There is no modern equivalent chip for most things.

It's hard to even READ the old memory chips, let alone have them work in a game.

CRTs are hard to buy.

Anything to do with preserving an arcade machine in its original state is difficult, very technical, expensive, and ultimately will be useless as they will become harder and harder to get as time goes by.

I'm not saying "don't do it", but be aware. And most people honestly don't have the time, money or resources to pull it off. It's £1000 for a basic cab with a working board in it, before you even start. A CRT can cost you an absolute fortune and very soon won't even be made any more. With suicide-chips and dying memory etc. it can be difficult to even get an old board working. And even making a cabinet that could house an old machine would still cost hundreds.

It's a niche, specialist, collector sport that most people will have absolutely no interest in. I'd love to re-live the 80's. I sit there reading disassemblies of 80's Spectrum games. I can program in the Z80 assembly language. I love the nostalgia. But there's no way that I could justify maintaining an old arcade board against replacing the innards. I'd keep them. Of course, I would. But I wouldn't even try down the path of getting them working if they didn't turn on.

It's not lazy and pig ignorant to understand all that technology and, given unlimited funds and time, being able to covet it and restore it. But that's not what even the geekiest of geeks can manage, afford or dedicate themselves to. There's a reason MAME exists. It's to preserve the originals as best we can before they all die. Because they will all die. And it's not even going to be possible to get hold of one in another 20-30 years, because arcades are very different places now (and I can't see the kids now wanting to get one of those modern ticket-spewing things working in 30-years time for their nostalgia).

But I can get Pac Man working on something that looks and feels like an old arcade, which everyone will enjoy playing on and my daughter could get a feel of how it used to be. It would take all my spare time to build such a cabinet from parts and get it all working. That's not lazy or pig-ignorant. It's just reality.

I have three ZX Spectrums upstairs that I have 1) kept from the 80's, 2) repaired from a boot sale job, 3) sent off for specialist restoration and RAM/ULA replacement. Guess what? None of them work anymore, even though they all did at some point. But Spectaculator? It plays all the games I remember, how I remember, on a big-screen TV for people to enjoy.

Whois is dead as Europe hands DNS overlord ICANN its arse

Re: I think its fine to not have details public

"And important part of malware email handling consists in finding out who they are from, or who they are redirecting you to."

And you rely on the domain names given to be definitive, do you?

If you want to handle malware, you go for the IP "whois" (e.g. AS lookup), which is an entirely different kettle of fish. But domain names resolve to IPs. What makes you think they can't just change the domain they are using in seconds?

There's no practical reason to have publicly visible names and addresses (except of abuse contacts at the ISP in question) for anything any more. It used to be there so you COULD call up John Bloggs who worked at X University and talk about a problem with his system. Nowadays, that's just not feasible.

And a vast, vast, vast portion of domains are now owned by private individuals. It's like requiring me to put my name, home address and phone number inside the front cover of every book I write, song I record, game I create, etc. which is just silly.

It's outdated. It's illegal (always has been in the EU, which is why Nominet gave the whois opt-out for personal information - the GDPR is nothing more than ratification of DPA case law into written statute). It's stupid. And it's useless, because of the sheer number of ways to put fake information there because it has way less verification than even an SSL certificate. It should have died decades ago.