Posts by -martin-

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

It's just another step down, in our race to the bottom...

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

That's interesting...

I'd never thought about the impact of ipv6 - no internal NATing required... So literally every device is adressable - and therefor track & traceable on the wider Internet. Whereas with IPv4+NAT it's only the boundary of private networks... Can understand why they're pushing for it now!

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

As an embedded developer - working the other side of the cloud, I see very poor implementations in the cloud - that's why it costs so much money, as well as drive to store so much useless data and statistics - that no one ever really looks at, except for kicks!

Use embedded philosophies in the cloud and the costs plummet. Stop using these silly frameworks - most backend developers don't even understand bit fields...for example.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Well this turned into a bit of troll fest! Yes that's most of you...

The strange coincidence of lynch and his codefendant dying within days of each other...is hard to rationalise!

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

1984

We've already had a hypothetical dry run. It wasn't good.

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Trust filters down from the top, it has to be mutual.

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

It seems to me that it's all a result of moving further away from reality - virtualising everything, just adds another layer of indirection...

Australian PM and Deputy threaten Facebook and Twitter with defamation liability for users' posts

The problem with social media is anonymity - enforce person-user relationship and lots of these problems go away.

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

We need something better

The thing is, a password or whatever is like needing to memorise the pattern of your house key and type / draw it each time you want to get into your house. Passwords are an archaic mechanism, we need something better... With the house key, we don't care what it is, we just want to stick it in and turn it to unlock the door. We need something comparable in the online world that is as easy and secure.

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Other case where trying to run 'a service' as a for-profit business... It's all about the money, not the service... Everyone loses.

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

Why can't they (all tech companies) just stop messing with things that work perfectly well. Why do they feel the need to change it all, not making anything better in the process, and more often, breaking the things that do work. They're just changing things for the sake of it. For something to do... Well this should've been a new thing, it's not an upgrade... If anything it's a downgrade. I'm close to giving up on all this crap and going back to a simple phone and a laptop (with Linux on it, because Microsoft are no better at this).

There are DDoS attacks, then there's this 809 million packet-per-second tsunami Akamai says it just caught

Why can't ISPs themselves detect and block these at source?

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

I definitely abuse the 80 character limit, my editor has a nice vertical line at 80 chars so I can easily see this! I do split lines when I feel it's necessary, but more generally, if the line is long - maybe a print to log or something - I wont split it (who cares if you can't see the end of the line, it's generally not interesting anyway), a big 'if' I will generally split, but at sensible splitting places, not arbitrarily at 80 characters - which often makes code ugly and unreadable.

It would be interesting to know how many of these devices/monitors people complain about are still in existence - and would actually be upgraded to the latest Kernel -- I see so much modern stuff stuck on Linux 2.6.32, that I find hard to believe that anything with 80 char limits would end up running anything close to Linux 5... And if you're using an ancient monitor for kicks or something - upgrade or suck it up, it's 2020!

UK government buys off Serco lawsuit with £10m bung. Whew. Now Capita can start running fire and rescue

It's just like everything else in this country....a race to the bottom.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

No Hammers, but still brute force

I had an old Compaq laptop given to me, in the mid nineties - I was still at school and used it for learning to program and school work. The hard disk started to fail on startup, you could hear it trying to spin, but couldn't - a wack (from my fist) used to sort it out...for a while. Then it stopped. While I kept some important stuff backed up on floppy disks, I didn't have enough disks for everything. So I proceeded to take the disk apart, and manually move the heads out of park. Believe it or not, this actually worked and continued to work for some months..pop the top off, flick heads out, pop the top back on and slot it back in, by the end I wasn't even putting the screws back in. Oh, and I did this with the power on!

Two years ago, 123-Reg and NamesCo decided to register millions of .uk domains for customers without asking them. They just got the renewal reminders...

LCN did the same.

It's happening, tech contractors: UK.gov is pushing IR35 off-payroll rules to private sector in Finance Bill

Seem like our government is systematically destroying the UK! From within, own goal after own goal... Wheels will fall off soon!

High-end router flinger DrayTek admits to zero day in bunch of Vigor kit

They also have a bug in all their routers with connection tracking. It is possible to have two connections randomly cross over - meaning traffic for one connection goes to another connection.

I found it by having around 100 devices with TLS connections to cloud server. Each of these devices also connected (TLS) every 3 minutes to a different server to send a small packet and disconnect. After some time the TLS connections got crossed resulting in confusion and ultimately RESETs being sent and connections dropped.

Informed DrayTek, along with a ton of wireshark dumps from inside, outside, and cloudside but they didn't do anything about it...

Openreach pegs full fibre overhaul anywhere between £3bn and £6bn

No. It will cost BT / Openreach 6-7 Billion and they should be using their PROFITS to fund it. Not pushing the cost to the consumer. They already get enough out of us - for a substandard service, and no doubt there are some mighty salaries and bonuses involved...

Take that, gender pay gap! Atos to offshore hundreds of BBC roles

Do these companies just add Million or billion onto the end of the numbers? How can things possibly cost this much!

'Nobody's got to use the internet,' argues idiot congressman in row over ISP privacy rules

I think EVERYONE should run a web crawler! How much fun would that for the dickheads to sift through!

Cyber-security pro? Forget GCHQ, BT wants to hire 900 of you

The salaries are way too low to attract any good people, let alone pro's.

TalkTalk hired BAE Systems' infosec bods before THAT hack

"...customers think that we're doing the right thing."

> However, following delivery of the company's first half financial results for 2015/16 this morning, TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding downplayed churn concerns – the fear that customers would leave for a rival. She stated that customers who had initially attempted to leave after the breach had changed their minds, adding that there were "very early indications that customers think that we're doing the right thing."

No, I am pretty certain that it is because you are charging them to leave - the full amount of the contract up to the end. Which I will add, is very poor service.

Bankruptcy could see RadioShack close doors for good – report

Re: Tandy UK etc went the same way. Maplin beware, you are next!

You absolutely hit the nail on the head.

Sad, but probably for the best

On a business trip to the U.S a couple of years ago, we needed to get some resistors and a current clamp quickly and so they took us to a Radio Shack.

I can only say that I was seriously disappointed! Mind you, the Radio Shack I remember are from films - like Short Circuit... But still, I expected more, and what I experienced was pretty much what @DerekCurrie describes above. The staff seemed extremely disinterested and largely unhelpful, the store didn't really know what it was selling, quality didn't appear as good the prices would suggest. It was the worst customer experience I had in the U.S.

Sad, but probably for the best.