Posts by Doctor Syntax

Amazon S3-izure cause: Half the web vanished because an AWS bod fat-fingered a command

Re: Availability Zones

"If that is too difficult to manage for you, then set the appropriate expectations with your business managers and users. Your product is too cheap to support that high of an uptime requirement."

We keep hearing people saying things like this. And we have to keep replying that marketing has set inappropriate expectations with these very people who are the ones who make the decisions. They've been told that cloud someone else's computer is cheap and that it's resilient.

"This whole fiasco is probably a good example of why developers should not be put in charge of the IT systems"

To some extent I take objection to this. Back in the day it was possible to be in charge of development and operation and be paranoid about stability and uptime. It encouraged not developing what you knew you couldn't run. Times have changed and not, I think, for the better.

But some cloud someone else's computer usage is shadow IT, paid for with a company credit card by people who don't see the need for all the costs and time needed for the detailed stuff which enables in-house developers and operations to combine to provide reliable systems. Don't assume either real developers or operations get anywhere near such deployments. Again, sales and marketing by providers have to take some responsibility here.

And whilst you're extolling operations, don't forget it seems to have been Amazon's operations staff who grew fat fingers in this instance.

Passport and binary tree code, please: CompSci quizzes at US border just business as usual

You want me to write code? I'll need a purchase order and my hourly rate is...

OK, you're a professional engineer.

US Congress to NSA: How many Americans do you illegally spy on?

I'm sure Congress has the power to extract an answer if they want. A quick bill to reduce the Director's salary to $10pa until such time as it's answered would do the job nicely.

We found a hidden backdoor in Chinese Internet of Things devices – researchers

To have a door you must have a wall to put it in. The truly amazing discovery would have been if they'd found any evidence of walls.

You're mulling GitHub Enterprise. Not keen on on-prem hosting. You don't totally hate cloud...

"GitHub has offered an on-premises version of its software to enterprises since 2012"

Alternatively anyone can run their own git server on their own hardware. What am I missing here?

$310m AWS S3-izure: Why everyone put their eggs in one region

Are we holding it wrong?

Not the Cloud, not Amazon but the internet as a whole.

Looking back at the origins of the internet it was preceded by separate networks which had a weird and wonderful spread of technologies.* The internet came along with its own protocols to connect these individual networks together but the original emphasis was on those individual networks. Local came first and the internet only provided what wasn't local.

Now that we're almost all using the same internet protocols to run our LANs the distinction between local and remote has been blurred. We've forgotten to put local first but we're relying on an internet designed under the assumption that we would.

Even if we go along with the old Sun slogan that the network is the computer we shouldn't extend that to believing that the internet is the computer. This was a reminder of that.

*I remember one which consisted of little terminal boxes each with a single RS-232 connection daisy-chained together with coax. TV aerial coax with TV aerial connectors.

Re: "companies should consider building redundancy into their cloud instances "

"A cursory glance at the documentation would have educated you."

Does the marketing provide the same education? The decision makers all too often are those who not only wouldn't give documentation even a glance, nor would they understand it even after prolonged study. Those who get to read the documentation are those who have to read it to implement the decisions above their heads.

Cheaper than running your own data centre. Simple. We take all that hard stuff off your hands. That's what sways decision makers.

Two-thirds of TV Licensing prosecutions at one London court targeted women

Capita have just fallen out of the FTSE 100 this quarter. Is it too much to hope it's the start of a long decline in their fortunes? A rapid decline would be too much to hope for.

Frustrated by reboot-happy Windows 10? Creators Update hopes to take away the pain

Re: Fedora restarts to update...

"when I used Fedora for about 6 months it had updates and needed rebooting pretty much every week"

It's a long time since I used Fedora but AIUI it might not be a bleeding edge distro but it does follow a faster release cycle than others so I'm not surprised. If you want stability you go with a distro with a slower cycle such as Debian stable and accept you might be running older versions of applications.

Re: Serious question here...

"Even in Linux, unless you restart the running processes that are using a patched file, they will keep on using the previous version."

In general processes running services will be individually restarted during the update without a reboot. Processes running a shared library will continue to run the old in-memory library. In general there's an assumption that such processes won't be long-lived and the new library will then be used next time they're run; in the interim there may be two versions of the library, both memory resident, one not yet finished with and one in use by processes started after the update.

What always amazes me is the relative speed of doing all this. One factor may be the fact that the greater number of Windows boxes puts a greater load on the servers and their networks so that they throttle the bitrates. Another might be that as Linux updates are much less disruptive they're pushed out as a available so that each is smaller; this, of course, has the additional advantage that a fix gets pushed out Right Now rather than waiting until the next big patch release.

Re: After seen that dialog text, I've one more reason to avoid Windows 10

"it shows the attitude of those behind Windows 10"

And the attitude shows exactly who it is who are behind it: marketing. They're the ones with the built-in insincerity to write this crap.

Re: Hmmm

"People don't reboot."

One thing I've noticed on Linux is that after a kernel replacement the machine won't hibernate, it has to be shut down. Perhaps if reboots weren't built into the Windows update the same thing would happen. That would mean users would be forced to reboot but only at a natural break in their work - other than those who'd simply leave the thing running overnight.

"When of when will they learn to listen again to their users instead of their marketing 'experts', advertising executives and UI theoreticians?"

They may have been listening to their developers explaining how difficult it is to avoid reboots given the actual OS structure.

Yahoo! dysfunction! meant! security! warnings! were! ignored!

Re: The entire Yahoo board should be sacked

"If you need to hire someone to turn a failing organization around, you hire someone who has done it at least once before."

Bernard Woolley wants a word with you. He can't work out how such a person could possibly exist.

US-Europe Privacy Shield not worth the paper it's printed on – civil liberties groups

Re: Uhm

"There's no evidence that's the case and the joys of an actual democracy rather than a pretend one"

Really? You can't have been paying attention.

We've had a series of Acts of Parliament attempting to legitimise HMG's spying on us, all ending with the words "Investigative Powers Act": Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 and most recently Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The reason for these is that the govt activity in this respect keeps getting struck down by courts and the govt then insists on a new Act to legitimise their activities.

The most reliable courts in this respect are the European ones; basically a UK court will ultimately hold Parliament sovereign whilst an EU court will enforce EU legislation and the European Declaration of Human Rights. The only Parliamentary check in recent years has been the Lib Dems in the coalition who held back the govt during that period.

Maybe there's a chance that we could get a Lib Dem govt in a few years time when the backlash against what Brexit eventually does to the economy hits both the current major parties but that's a fairly long shot.

AWS's S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn't get into its own dashboard to warn the world

Re: Excelsior!

"never tell me that the days of progress are over."

They're not. The direction of progress, however...

"why do web authors insist on loading JS from the 4 corners of the internet"

In fact, why do they insist on using so much of it?

Re: @Lotaresco

"Chances are the clock in a mechanical timer is an electric one."

Ha. A few weeks ago the clock on the CH boiler had a little problem. It would run until it came to the start of an on period. It's an electric clock so I'd expect it to work unless the mains went off but with mains behind it why should it fail like this? Replaced under warranty and I took the old one apart. It's a battery operated quartz clock with the battery charged, as far as I could see, by a diode & dropper from the mains. Presumably when the battery goes on the blink it doesn't have quite enough voltage to trip the switch.

As a price for the clock not stopping when the mains goes off - I can live with that as it would be just another clock to reset - I have a timer that fails to work at all after a few years service.

Re: The Cloud...

"ps. is there any way to automatically format a link without having to remember html ?"

OTOH if the link is made explicit everyone can see where it goes before they click. I rather like that idea.

Re: eh, feller, nukes kill op-amps. get off my lawn!

"while tubes, on the other hand, will just keep on working."

Travelled in London much?

Re: Bad, but not that bad

"Any critical service like that should be built with multi-region availability."

So if you want your light switch to work it has to be built with multi-region availability. Or is this an install-time option?

Re: World's tallest house of cards?

Doesn't anyone take Engineering 101 any more? What do all those fools in "risk management" departments do all day long?

What's he talking about? Engineering? Risk management? Why does he think we need those? We've got MBAs.

"a whole bunch of javascript widgets, some of which... were hosted in the failed region of AWS"

A whole extra area of cloud-based fail waiting to happen.

Re: So what we now know is...

"If an S3 region becomes unavailable, S3 itself should route applications to another region that hosts a redundant automatic copy"

That would make things simple for users. Chris Mellor's article points out that S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. So now we know that's simple for Amazon, not for the user.

Re: "Any critical service like that should be built with multi-region availability. "

"BTW in real engineering there is the idea of a Licensed engineer."

Who needs an engineer when you've got an MBA?

" Someone complaining they couldn't change their mouse sensitivity?"

From the Razer site:

Razer Synapse is our unified configuration software that allows you to rebind controls or assign macros to any of your Razer peripherals and saves all your settings automatically to the cloud. No more tedious device configurations when you arrive at LAN parties or tourneys, as you can pull them from the cloud, and get owning right away.

Controversial opinion alert: Privacy and the public cloud – not just possible, but easy

So we make life safe for storing data in the cloud by making sure the data's encrypted and then we store the keys in the cloud. Do we encrypt them there? If so where do we store the keys to the keys?

Re: Embedded?

"For that matter, plenty of executives don't give fucks about fines."

No, they'll just sack the IT manager who didn't stop them doing it. Who said life was fair?

Actually I've worked for companies who took security seriously They'd have been on the A/C's side.

Congratulations IBM for 'inventing' out-of-office email. You win Stupid Patent of the Month

As I've said before, patent offices should bear all defendants' costs when stupid patents like this are successfully challenged with compensation for any other costs incurred, for instance by not being able to make use of whatever it was while the case was pending.

Yes, I know the objection, it's taxpayers' money. Well, it's up to the taxpayers to stop it. Make some compensatory savings in the patent office; chuck out the patent examiners who were responsible, claw the money back from them, whatever.

Uber: Please don't give our London drivers English tests. You can work out the reason why

Re: Only English?

Dammit, New Johnston.

Re: The Knowledge

"A+ driver, but very bad at killing. Still alive, will not hire again Nobody'll be hiring him again"

Re: Please do this TfL. @MyffyW

"Except in an episode of Eastenders many, many years ago"

I would hate myself if I could remember any dialogue from any episode of Eastenders.

Re: Scam

"maybe everyone should pass a test!"

AIUI everyone else does.

Re: Only English?

"You mean EU road signs? The ones that are the same there as here?"

I think they're due to be rewritten in Olde English script complete with pictures on pointing hands.

(OK I do know about Margaret Calvert. And Now Johnston.)

Re: but!

"Maybe one day uber will grow up enough to swallow their pride"

I doubt pride comes into it; to have pride requires some minimal moral sense of self-worth. Self interest is sufficient explanation for all their actions

Re: The Knowledge

"I got in a minicab recently and asked for Harrow on the Hill station. I got dropped off at North Harrow tube station"

And if you ask to be taken to the Ritz the hotel thinks you might get accidentally taken about a couple of hundred miles out of your way to Brighouse instead.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/londons-ritz-hotel-orders-namesake-yorkshire-ballroom-to-choose-new-name-after-80-years-a3472671.html

Re: The Knowledge

"The badges and licences were there to show that your driver wasnt a murderer . I think you could do that with an eBay like feedback system"

But so few murder victims leave negative feedback.

Tuesday's AWS S3-izure exposes Amazon-sized internet bottleneck

Re: Optional DR/Resiliency

"If you want a backup system, it will cost you what the real system cost, again, and a bit more for whatever tech to make it fall over."

There are different degrees of the extent to which you might need to provide resilience. What you describe is a full-fat failover. However, it might be satisfactory to have a DR contract which is much cheaper - you have access to a system which might actually be bigger than your own on which to restore your backups. If your DC is in your normal premises the time to get the DR contract invoked and running might be of the same order as the time taken to get your staff established in whatever temporary offices they've made provision for. OTOH this wouldn't suit a business which has to be running 24/7. But one size doesn't fit all.

Germany, France lobby hard for terror-busting encryption backdoors – Europe seems to agree

Re: 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed'

"It worked in the XVIII century when the government didn't have tanks and bombers, and soldiers had mostly the same weapons, and artillery was slow to be deployed."

I assume the US gun lobby would be quite happy to be able to restore that balance.

Re: "accusing a democratically elected politician of being 'the death of democracy'."

"paralyse the constitutional court (or put your lackeys in it)"

A good safeguard is to have your head of state appoint the court who can then keep the head of government in check. The US's problem is that they vest the same roles in one person.

Amazon's AWS S3 cloud storage evaporates: Top websites, Docker stung

Re: Service Health Dashboard

"what we believe will remediate the issue."

Sigh. remedy or maybe ameliorate but make up your mind.

It's not "high error rates", it's total failure to accept connections!

I suppose 100% counts as high.

Re: But....

"It just means you don't spend a boatload upfront on kit."

It also means your interests aren't necessarily at the front of the queue when it comes to recovering from this sort of (not) outage.

Re: But....

"Doesn't mean people do though."

Maybe because it's been sold as cheaper than running your own data centre.

When IT try to persuade the business to make provision for this sort of thing it's probably dismissed as IT being profligate again or even IT trying to bump up costs so their own service is still competitive.

Re: But....

"Deploy in the cloud by all means but still backup, replicate"

We used to call that keeping a dog and barking yourself.

Fiscal '17 was a record year for us, says Workday CEO

"2017 was a record year for us"

I know I might have nodded off a bit this afternoon but I didn't realise I'd missed a whole year.

Up close with the 'New Psion' Gemini: Specs, pics, and genesis of this QWERTY pocketbook

"It's not a total replica of the old keyboard - it uses a magnetically sprung mechanism, just for one example of a difference."

But if the original wasn't broken, why are they fixing it?

IBM UK: Oh, remote workers. We want to be colocated with you again

Re: Been there done that

"My bees are much less trouble."

I hope you're paying them properly.

Re: unpopular comment with daytime tv fans

"obviously there are exceptions but remote workers sat at home quickly become the biggest loafers in any company."

From what are you extrapolating this? Are you telling us is that either this is you or would be if it was on offer to you?

"It does actually kinda work"

You mean it's a faster way to produce bullshit?

"but I can't think of a better name for it"

Bovine laxative.