Posts by Technogeek

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Anyone not heard of IPv6?

This is just stupid, we have IPv6 which does not have an address space problem, moreover it also addresses many of the fundamental weaknesses in IPv4 which is way beyond the end of its retirement age. IPv6 has been at large on the Internet since IPv6 day in 2000 and here we are 24 years later pissing about with IPv4. Of course there is money to be made in releasing that block of IPv4 addresses so we are never going to junk IPv4 with all the myriad of hacking issues it allows.

Voyager 2 found! Deep Space Network hears it chattering in space

Re: But how?

Sun and Earth Pointing: The spacecraft are designed to keep their high-gain antennas pointed toward Earth, and their solar panels. oriented toward the Sun. This ensures that they can maintain communication with Earth and continue to receive power from the Sun for their systems. They don't comb for a signal as that would consume propellant which over the life of the mission is now very low. Just pointing at the sun and knowing the time from the ultrastable clock allows a compute of the change of antenna orientation from sun to earths orbital position. The futher away the spacecraft from earth the smaller the angle of change requred to adjust for Earth orbital position round the sun. By now it's probably very small.

I've followed the voyager missions since their launch in 1977 and being a space nerd I would have been sad if the end of this voyager was caused by human error. What is gobsmacking is the sensitivity of the ground station to be able to detect the carrier with the voyager dish 2 degrees off beam, wow!

Call me nostalgic or whatever but I've seen stuff going on long before most of you readers were even born! I don't remember the unix timestamp of 0 as I was still watching 405 lines TV of Apollo back then.

Visa Europe fscks up Friday night with other GDPR: 'God Dammit, Payment Refused'

Re: Wake up call

Yep, I remember those days (shit that long ago?) but at least you didn't need leccy to power it all up. I paid for petrol one day in a power cut, the attendant had to hand pump the fuel into the car. Then using a torch so we could see in the attendant hut he "embossed" my card on the carbon paper and gave me the customer copy. Statements came in the post and I wrote cheques for the card balance each month. Easy peasy lemon squeezy :-)

Wake up call

This has to be treated as a "wake up call". Imagine the chaos that will ensue if the Internet gets totally screwed or even partially screwed. Not only no credit cards but no just in time transport to feed us all and loads of zombies staggering helplessly round the streets smashing their heads against their dark fondleslabs!!!

Large systems like Visa become single points of failure for society, the impact from being unavailable is profound. Its a fools paradise to think you can prevent this sort of event from happening again. Imagine a scenario where all the under sea fibre cables are snipped by a not so friendly submarine, what about all the Internet Of Things going dark, all the lost services from AWS, Google and others. Me? I'm off to Mars on a BFR :-)

Greedy datagrabs, crap security will KILL the Internet of Thingies

Upgrade and re-boot my brain

Before IoT really gets anywhere, we will all need a brain upgrade followed by a re-boot. We already suffer from information overload or withdrawal symptoms so dealing with all the nagging crap messages from household appliances is going to be impossible.

Imagine for instance sensors in your kitchen detect that you are about to lower a Mars Bar into a deep fat fryer - all the lights start to flash and a virtual avatar announcer pops up and waves it's finger at you for being so naughty!

Imagine for instance you are about to engage in a sex session with your loved one, but IoT detects that she has forgotten to take the pill for a few days cos her brain has been overloaded with Take that pill..dammit woman messages. You get all lovey dovey and at the critical moment your IoT virtual avatar announcer pops up and says neenah neenah neenah can't go in there matey.

The list of possibilities for mischief/practical jokes with IoT is endless...

The bigest problem is going to be when we are all plugged in switched on and then phut...who will be able to cope!

LTE's backers vow to KILL OFF WI-FI and BLUETOOTH

Another homogenised attempt to dominate the world

Any communications protocol that uses RF is open to vulnerabilities and the more complex the protocol the larger the attack surface is going to be. Imagine a scenario in a number of years time when LTE is ubiquitous and then someone discovers an unpatchable vulnerability. Yeeha the so called cyber criminals empty everyone's bank account, or a hostile country takes the opportunity to shut everything down and keep it shut down!

If everyone starts wandering about the planet festooned with LTE devices all jabbering away to each other both the spooks and the marketing boys are going to have a field day tracking your every step. This can and already is done with WiFi enabled devices WITHOUT your device even connecting to anything, it just has to be turned on. Your jabbering devices will give away so much info about you despite data being encrypted.

Where critical infrastructure is concerned (such as TETRA) we need heterogeneous systems to prevent a common mode failure that takes everything down. Safety critical system frequently deploy systems designed by different teams in order to avoid common mode failures.

LTE will no doubt infiltrate many aspects of life either by design or simply by reduced cost and become ubiquitous by default.. The ultimate cost to society could me massive, nature abhors homogeneity for good reason.

May the Borg be with you :-)

SMASH the Bash bug! Apple and Red Hat scramble for patch batches

Re: Because the flaws were very different

The person probably didn't have their glasses on and hit the wrong vote arrow, either that or they just don't understand sensible and enlightened comments.

Google gets gentle Street View slurp slap from UK data cops

Re: More stalling. It should have been Deleted ages ago. Why is the G-man dragging its feet?

The fact is that anyone who wants to expend resources on slurping WiFi base station info can, there's nothing stopping them. Just put the right kit in the boot and drive round all the UK's roads for the next millenia and hey presto. In between times folks chuck out kit and the map end up looking moth eaten. Of course it's the principle of the matter that someone like Google has the resources to slurp it, process and then keep us all guessing why? I think we have a lot more to fear about the smart phone in our pockets, out smarting us and allowing uncle Sam, GCHQ and the Missus to know where we are at all times. My neighbour gets all jittery about Google sat view on maps showing his un-planned walled garden and expects the town hall snoops to swoop in any time soon and tell him to go drain is pond. Fact is every tool has both good and evil uses!