Posts by MatthewSt

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

Re: One Time Pads.

Or... you could publish it somewhere _and_ make a stink about it not being you but secretly tell people that it is you! Plausible deniability and misdirection...

Microsoft reveals what a growth mindset does to the letter ‘A’

Re: "to small details like graphics and icons"

And you don't want your marketing department shipping code, so keeping them occupied with logos means everyone wins!

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

That may be so, but people tend to use the term "politics" nowadays for all sorts of things. You think police shouldn't shoot black people? Can't talk about that at work, it's too political. Think women should be paid as much as men? Sounds like a political issue to me.

Brit MPs and campaigners come together to oppose COVID status certificates as 'divisive and discriminatory'

Re: Not "divisive and discriminatory", but essential

If we're all about choice, am I (as a business owner) free to refuse entry to someone who can't prove they're vaccinated / negative, to protect myself and my staff?

Or does your right to choose override my right to be safe?

Not saying you should but we're told it's possible to land serverless app a '$40k/month bill using a 1,000-node botnet'

Functions (et al) are only cheap if they're not used all the time. There's 2.6 million seconds in a month, so to run a 1cpu 1gb RAM function all month would set you back £31.50. For £29/month you can get a 2ish CPU box with 4gb RAM in Azure.

Just depends how lumpy your workload is

'There was no one driving that vehicle': Texas cops suspect Autopilot involved after two men killed in Tesla crash

Re: "more of a super-cruise-control"

Apart from that's not what autopilot means. Autopilot is a pilot aid, designed to take the mundane tasks away from the pilot. Eg the "cruising" part of the flight. It doesn't change altitude because of turbulence, it doesn't route around weather, it just flies in the direction you've told it to.

Hence why 2 pilots are still required on commercial flights.

What Tesla are marketing _is_ autopilot, it's just no one outside of aviation seems to realise how limited autopilot actually is

Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge

As opposed to the current methodology where they could just put something on there anyway, without the faff of a court order or needing to fix something.

If your argument is that they'll go beyond the remit of the court order, why is this scenario any different?

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Re: Copy Protection Blues

I think it was Tomb Raider or one of the other "early" PC games on CD that had an intentionally "corrupt" file system record. Basically the file table referenced the same parts of the CD multiple times so that the 650mb disk "appeared" to contain a couple of gb.

You couldn't copy it using the standard software as they didn't do a "byte for byte" copy but tried re-creating the filesystem... and there wasn't enough space on the new CD!

Microsoft OneDrive for Windows 7 drives off a cliff for business users

TLS 1.2

My money is on that now being a firm requirement, and while Windows 7 does support it, it's not enabled by default out of the box

NSA helps out Microsoft with critical Exchange Server vulnerability disclosures in an April shower of patches

Re: "updates to protect against new vulnerabilities in on-premise Exchange Servers"

More likely that Microsoft use O365 as a major testing ground so the patches are already deployed on that before the patches are released

Staff and students at Victoria University of Wellington learn the most important lesson of all: Keep your files backed up

Re: Noobs

It's the IT department's responsibility to back up certain locations, it's the user's responsibility to make sure that they save the files to those locations

It's unfortunate that they've not configured OneDrive properly, because there's a tickbox that effectively says "store the desktop in OneDrive" which would have been a safety-net in this scenario

Microsoft customers locked out of Teams, Office, Xbox, Dynamics – and Azure Active Directory breakdown blamed

Re: I guess they are going to miss their SLA?

I thought the same thing... But that doesn't come into effect for another couple of weeks!

Having said that, they still missed the 99.9% one anyway!

UK.gov about to release £500m funding for Shared Rural Network targeting countryside 4G notspots

Re: Where's my crack pipe when I need it???

Internet radio is quite tolerant of drop outs. It's buffered and delivered over TCP for the most part, so as long as you can receive data probably about 20% of the time you won't notice any gaps. It's also only heavy in one direction, and tolerant of latency

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Re: Nice article

Most people tend to understand it if you liken it to a primary school playground. All the kids are your devices, the teachers are the access points, and everyone is shouting and screaming. Basically it's a miracle any messages get across!

EncroChat hack case: RAM, bam... what? Data in transit is data at rest, rules UK Court of Appeal

End to end encryption

If EncroChat (like others) offers "end to end encryption" and the messages were not encrypted when acquired, then by the platforms own definition they weren't in transit

Microsoft delays disabling Basic Authentication for several Exchange Online protocols 'until further notice'

Re: Easy to say....

Apart from it's not deemed OK, which is why we have 2FA and Captchas and other interactive login mechanisms.

Thunderbird supports the new auth scheme with IMAP quite happily

Re: Modern authentication is not a standard

Modern auth works well with IMAP as far as Thunderbird is concerned. My understanding is that your OAuth access token is passed as a password (or something like that) so you use existing browser based auth flows to obtain that

No cards, thanks, we're contactless-less: UK supermarket giants hit by card payment TITSUP*

Re: Best to always carry some cash

How many did you bring if you've still got some left after 25 years? Or do you go back to re-stock every now and then?

How to avoid pesky border controls: Be a robot truck driver… or insanely rich

Re: Thermodynamic Pedantry Alert, Engineer's response

Only if you have an old fridge. They stop running nowadays if you leave the door open (whether you meant to or not)

NHS COVID-19 app is trying to tell Android users something but buggy notification appears stuck on 'Loading...' screen

Re: Google Play Services

The message had gone from mine too, but I opened the app and it's back. It must just get unloaded after a while.

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

Distributed options

It'll be interesting to see if any distributed (in the decentralised sense rather than the federated sense) systems start gaining traction because of this.

This better not be a cruel prank: Microsoft promises 99.99% uptime for Azure Active Directory from 1 April

Re: Paying customers only?

Considering the SLA is usually a refund of what you've paid, they could technically offer you the 25% refund but you'll still get nothing

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

Re: Command line?

I would imagine that it has to go through many layers of planning because it will have to have both the accessibility and internationalisation updated, and any documentation for it would also need changing. Not impossible by any stretch, but I doubt it could be done with less than a person-week of resources, and they're too busy removing useful functionality out of Control Panel to update legacy UI

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Re: Why terrifying?

Most of what you've described is already there :)

There are 2 standards (because why only have one...) and Tesla (like Apple) do their own thing. The car won't move while it's plugged in, and the car and charger negotiate the amount of power to draw using very small amounts of power until the connection is considered safe. The cables also lock at both ends so can't be disconnected while live.

Daytime work charger or cheap overnight home charger is all most will need

Re: So ...

As someone who's done a long day of driving in an EV, I can say that range and charge speed are probably already there for 95% of cases. The car I've got will easily do 200 miles from 100%, and (using the most conservative numbers) does about 3 miles per kWh. A lot of the motorway charge points now are 50kW/hour, going all the way up to Tesla's 250kW/hour. Sadly there's usually only 2-3 at each service station, which is the real risk at the moment.

Did 400 miles in a day the other week, and ended up spending a total of 80 minutes at service stations plugged in. All in 15/20 minute bursts, because by the time you've gone to the toilet, got a coffee etc you've added another 50 miles of range. If you stop for lunch it would be even more.

UK on track to miss even its slashed full-fibre gigabit coverage goals, warn MPs

Re: vague aspirations of "being a world leader in 5G"

Unless you microwave relay between towers (which, if you set up in a mesh fashion, may actually be more efficient than running fibre everywhere) or Starlink back to a central location

As you're going to be running power to a base station anyway it's not going to cost that much more to run connectivity, and it a 5G station can do 200 homes (for example) then that's 199 fewer locations to run fibre to

They were not the cloud you were looking for, insists Amazon Web Services in unsealed JEDI protest

Re: "In particular, DoD ignored Microsoft's...

They patched their systems at the same time as AWS did...

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

Why wait for manufacturing when you can just have shipping - https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery

Delay upgrading the UK's legacy border systems has added £336m to taxpayers' bill

Easy tiger, next you'll be telling us that we should be able to live and work in other countries too!

'Massive game-changer for UK altnet industry': BT-owned UK comms backbone Openreach hikes prices on FTTP-linked leased line circuits

Re: This is exactly WHY...

@maker - the problem is that BT can easily sell it as a loss if Openreach make profit on it, because they're all part of the same group. If it costs Openreach £10 to provide it, they sell it to "everyone" (BT and competitors) for £50 but the end customer usually only pays £30 for it:

Competitor - Not worth buying because they lose £20

BT - Sells it to the customer for £30, pays Openreach £50 (loses £20)

OR - Sells it to BT for £50, only costs £10 (gains £40)

The BT/OR group is still £20 up, and the competition don't get to use it because it's "not economically viable"

Compare the same scenario where Openreach sell the service for £20:

Competitor - Purchases it and makes a £10 gain

OR - Sells it to competitor and makes a £10 gain

BT - Purchases it and makes a £10 gain

OR - Sells it to BT and makes a £10 gain

BT/OR is actually £30 up in this scenario, but now the competitor has an advantage too because they don't have to build their own network. Additionally, they probably have to reduce their retail prices (so let's say they both knock £5 off to be competitive), now BT/OR is in exactly the same position but dealing with twice as many customers for the same margin.

BT/OR are hoping that a higher price will keep more customers on their BT network basically, and let them charge more for it

Re: This is exactly WHY...

Doesn't matter if they raise the price for BT, it's just numbers on a spreadsheet at that point

GitHub's journey towards microservices and more: 'We actually have our own version of Ruby that we maintain'

Roland6 is actually wrong in their claim that "the first step was the architectural decision to break up the monolith into microservices". The actual first step is building the monolith in the first place. Without that step, it's pointless trying to turn a monolith into microservices

Re: Own version of Ruby

https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/ - this post seems to suggest that they haven't run their own fork for a while

Amazon's ad-hoc Ring, Echo mesh network can mooch off your neighbors' Wi-Fi if needed – and it's opt-out

Popcorn?

Oh I'm going to enjoy reading the comments for this one!

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

If they're saying it's 0.26% of all adults in the UK then they're probably not far wrong, if anything they could be over!

No such thing as a Three lunch: Hutchinson CK to sell tower biz to Cellnex

Re: surprised

That's not going to improve coverage, and they stated they're only staying with them because they're already on a good deal...

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: Good

Yeah, because the 74 year old they've just ousted was a young whippersnapper in comparison

Blazor: Full stack C# and Microsoft's pitch for ASP.NET Web Form diehards

It doesn't really mention Blazor, but this article has some details into the different layers at the "framework" level - https://fearofoblivion.com/understanding-cross-platform-NET-and-why-NET-5-is-important

I suppose "independent" was used in the wrong context there, which may have confused things further. ".NET" at the moment covers a large number of things:

* "Full" .NET Framework that ships with Windows

* NETCore (soon to just be .NET 5)

* Mono / Xamarin (Blazor used to be based on this version, it may not be anymore)

What I was trying to say is that if you consider .NET to be the runtime components, then .NET is indeed being sent to the browser. In the same way that in the example you've given you ship .NET with your app to the server. Just because it's not installed separately doesn't mean that it's not there, it's just bundled in alongside the app.

As much as NETCore runs on both Windows and Linux, it's different files (the framework pieces) that you deploy alongside your app. In this regard, WebAssembly is just another target that the framework runs on top of.

Hope that makes sense. It's tricky to explain without pictures, and I couldn't find an existing article that links it all together.

Depends what you mean by ".NET". Technically it's entirely the opposite of what you said, because Blazor is a completely independent implementation of the .NET runtime and base libraries. So it's .NET (in terms of the standard / platform) but If your definition of .NET is "the stuff that ships with Windows" then you're correct as it's entirely different.

Download Size

I like the emphasis people place on the download size... considering that the article page downloaded 4.7mb of resources!

Network driver issue shaves 12 more hours off Microsoft's '365' infrastructure, and yeah, it was Exchange Online again

Re: UK Reseller Confusion

I'd recommend this video from 2015 - https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3186. 15 seconds in they say it's running on 65,000 servers (but that includes SharePoint I think).

Deployments are done in batches (about 54 minutes in), monitored for results and then continued. That Means that problems won't always affect everybody, and may affect different people (if the order of the batches is rotated).

Microsoft to rethink crash-prone Visual Studio extension model, shift towards cloud

Necessary Extensions

It's all well and good saying that VS Code has more extensions, but that's because a lot of the functionality that those extensions provide is already baked in to full Visual Studio

Ready for pull rate limits? Docker outlines 'next chapter' as Google tells customers how to dodge subscriptions

Re: Caching?

Because the images have a hash based on their contents it doesn't matter _where_ you pull them down from as long as you've validated the hash. They're effectively signed (unless there's a weakness/collision discovered).

On the flip side of this, they should be the easiest thing in the world to cache, because you're downloading them based on a request that indicates the contents that you want to download. The image for a particular hash will _never_ change, so your caching can be based off LRU and you're sorted.

Even Microsoft have worked out how to do this, and their build agents have a certain number of popular images cached _on the build server itself_.

Finding remote working a bit of a grind? Microsoft staffers feel your pain

Re: PsyOps BS from MSFT

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/microsoft-surviving-first-three-weeks-as-a-remote-employee - might just depend on the job you're applying for, as they didn't seem to be against remote work 13 years ago

Bitcoin value jumps as PayPal says it will accept cryptocurrencies... once it has the kinks worked out

Re: "The Kinks" being ownership

So this is no different from all of the other "exchanges" out there. I suppose as they deal in real money too, PayPal are less likely to get hacked or go bust shortly after losing everyone's coins at least!

Remember the days when signs were signs and operating systems didn't need constant patching?

_Need_ Updates

They've always _needed_ constant patching, just constant patching didn't used to be available!

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

Re: Using a computer where pen and paper would have sufficed!

My first gig was an Access 2000 database on a co-ax token ring network...! A switch to 100mb Ethernet, separate the screens into an MDE and the backend to SQL and they were well on their way! For a small business, as a front-end to a "real" database it's a great product. Centralised backup and easy for admins to modify (but not end users)

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble, Azure also unwell

Re: Cloud uptime

If you absolutely rely 100% on something and it costs your business when that something is not available, then buy a service that costs more than $5/month. You get what you pay for.

We're not being had, because if email is down for a few hours we do something else. Everyone has desktop Outlook installed so can still reply to the backlog that they already have, we have documents sync'd to our desktop so can work offline etc.