Posts by Strangelove

Britain dusts off idle spectrum for rail and emergency comms

Why we need spectral segmentation -

As a radio guy I have t say there are very good reasons we cannot have a one size suits all digital radio network.

Firstly that the ranges needed and bandwidth needs of different systems are very different, so the power levels at the transmission end of things, (100km for air traffic control - 50W at VHF, WIFI within a house, 0.1 watt - mobile phones, less than km to the base station, less than 1 watt.

Then there is the problem of co-siting a receiver trying to scrape up the odd picowattt from afar cannot do so near a transmitter on an adjacent frequency without filters - of the analogue kind, to give many tens of dB of rejection. In a small system you can time multiplex, but as the area gets bigger keeping it in sync gets harder and the time lost to change-over increases...

Then there is physics - different frequencies need different size antennas, and that lends itself to different transmitters and receivers.

Its all tricky and horses for courses. If you have mains supplies you could just use cables.

M,

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

Re: Yikes -

Canada might be the US' (sic) biggest supplier of various things...

But more importantly for Canada, is the US Canada's largest, or even only customer ?

If the oil and gas and bits of bent steel and other things can be exported further away - perhaps to Europe, for example, where there are far more potential customers than the USA, then its not such a loss to them, and for Canada to use up its fossil fuel more slowly and have some left for the end game when prices will be really high, may yet well be the wisest move ever. They will of course have to use metric units.

If it is worth moving container ships from China to Holland, and it is, it must be worth moving stuff from Canada to Europe as well...

And there is a patriotic factor, I can imagine many Canadians taking this quite personally.

Mike

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

Well in the UK you can buy a sim for cash in the supermarket, but to make calls on it you have to activate it, and for that you need a debit card or similar - which makes it linked to an identifiable person. (or a legal entity like a business, with identifiable owners or directors)

Unlike in the films, organizing a truly anonymous phone is quite convoluted, and also illegal, and its not really a problem.

Banks have successfully managed proof of IDs for a long time - and to open a child's account, needs a responsible adult to put their ID to it, usually a parent or legal guardian. I see no reason why getting a digital ID linked to a flesh and blood person who can be arrested if it is mis-used should be any more difficult than the opening of a bank account.

Then like a bank statement, or a phone bill ,the user (or the responsible adult) gets a monthly statement saying what sites have been registered to that ID.much as you see the phone bill on your bank statements.

At this point the responsible adult may look at that statement and query why Jimmy's junior digital ID has been used on some dodgy websites - and Jimmy is in much the same trouble he would have been if caught with a packet of ciggies or a pile of unsuitable illustrated literature ...

What happens next will be as sensible or not as the parents, but there is then at least an official audit trail of who permitted what - unlike now when there are lots of unconnected places holding information.

And that is probably how it will need to work.

Mike.

Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious

Or, a radical comment here for those worrying about advertising revenue when companies split- why not charge for the service? - gmail without ads a penny a message, however many searches without ads the same, or if that is too hard, pay to 'belong' for a month at a time, When the web was young E-payment was hard - its not any more.

Far more honest about who is serving who.

The hardware of the internet and the services running upon it are not free, in many ways they are more expensive in terms of lost time and effort than if they were paid for in the normal way of a gas bill or whatever, - one could have a system that was more honest about that.

M.

PS I know it wont happen. free internet that exploits you is a right for some reason.

Command senior chief busted for secretly setting up Wi-Fi on US Navy combat ship

The problem is not that the enemy can intercept the wifi traffic - they probably cant, at least not at any sensible range, even if it is not encrypted, but that when there is a need to go dark, and the big button is pushed that turns off the RADAR the VHF & HF comms and presumably the Starlink uplink transmissions at the same time, the WiFi will still be warbling away with the RF equivalent of painting a 'shoot me here' roudal on the side of the vessel detectable as a bump in the noise floor by direction finding and ranging kit for miles.

Things that transmit are only permitted under a very limited set of conditions, and being officially approved and under the control of a single order from the captain is one.

And then the MP or equivalent will worry if this was a connexion onto the internet, how do you avoid users revealing what they are doing, either deliberately or accidentally allowing secure information to leak.

But the main charge is probably about not following the correct process - because if folk are likely not to do that on one area of activity then they are seen as a risk to the rest of the team in any area.

Mike

BT delays deadline for digital landline switch off date

Re: Market farces => predictable effects

yes, the report into Lancaster cock-up should be compulsory reading for town planners and enthusiastic technologists generally - the time to recover is far longer then folk like to imagine and the speed that mobile phones died etc was quite impressive.

https://qeprize.org/news/citys-four-day-power-cut-offers-lessons-whole-uk-new-report-highlights

Many other places in the UK are really just as brittle, some possibly more so, they just have not had a decent "wake up" event yet.

In the detail. the problem with the fibre to the house protocol is that it does not have a fallback to a really low power mode - the kind of mode where 2 AA cells keep it going for a week if you make no calls.

It would be hard to add it now, but it certainly could have had, by sleeping the laser and waking up for a few milliseconds every minute, but that sort of power cut survival thinking was never written in. The problem is not the power to make a 999 call lasting half a minute, the problem is staying keeping listening at full bandwidth just in case a packet comes in for you that needs processing.

But it does not matter, the fibre to most homes is not a guaranteed service, so there is no need to pay compensation when it stops, as the lack of power to the user kit has cunningly been made the user's problem.

Mike

Intel tells mobo makers to go easy on the BIOS settings amid CPU instability reports

Re: 4096w

well for a transient overload lasting 100uS or less the energy is not coming all the way from the power supply - there is simply no time for the control loops in any normal voltage regulator to adapt and wind things up and down again in that sort of time frame.

So it all falls back to the reservoir of charge held locally in the form of decoupling capacitors, which as we know from the past is something to be cheaped out at your peril. (much like the tank on the toilet defines the available flush size, not the thickness of the supply pipe in the street or the municipal reservoir) and capacitors can degrade with heat and the age of the board. So in a sense it is very much analogue.

Mike

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

In the UK at least very few of the urban area mobile phone base stations have any battery at all - so if the are substation transformer fails, you cannot use your mobile to call it in. Once we have completed the transition to fibre based telephones, you probably won't be able to use a land line to call it in either, as the new IP based systems have no requirement for battery backup, while the old copper system where contractually obliged to.,

However, if regulatory changes ever require back-up batteries I can see this being done to help fund it.

Mike

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

So, comments seem to agree that IP6 has far more addresses than anyone could ever need - so many in fact that every single networkable device I own could have one that was unique on the planet. And of course utterly impossible for me to remember.

As a non network person, neither of those looks like a good thing to me. ..

My ADSL router is 192.168.1.1, and also, very usefully when logged in at there place, so is everyone else's making logging into the thing to set up the firewall something that we have a sporting chance of managing.

Rather like knowing the toilet is upstairs over the kitchen in all the houses built in a given style it saves you having to ask, althhough in most houses the home owner knows where the loo is. they probably do not know the address of their own router

Each house has half a dozen items and they will be 192.168.1. something, and that one 3 digit no can be written on it in crayon if we need to know it for static routing.

as someone who does embedded programming where every byte of RAM counts, to waste two lots of 128 bits in every packet on source and destination seems a waste of RAM, clock cycles and microamps if the thing we want to talk to is on the same LAN anyway.

I suspect that the folk who want IP6 actually want to do things that are more complex, but they are such a small fraction of the total of computer users, that they are outweighed by the rest of us where routing for the backbone and the shortage of non-local addresses is of no interest - so long as the DNS works...

Would a simpler IP5 have caught on? Perhaps IP6 is it a bit like plan 9 one step beyond what is usually needed.

Mike

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Re: Explain again to me

Well the files have to get from the drawing office and onto that £100k metal cutting marvel somehow, and if the alternative is posting a 3,5 inch floppy by courier, a network connection, hopefully via some sort of LAN with its own firewalls etc starts to look very sensible - 'Email the drawing over from the other office, and we can get it cutting by lunch time for you' is a common refrain in my business, where a lot of things are milled from solid magnalloy!

Mike

So much for Pakistan’s plan for digital economy – it’s turned off the internet

Re: The Internet

Well this is also the reason that countries with dubious regimes ban private ownership of short wave radios, make it very hard to get on the air as a private citizen, no CB or FRS provisions, very high barriers to ham radio if it is permitted at all, etc. Not a new effect, just all about disrupting any sort of communication the govt cannot censor.

One of the reasons I get upset about folk who think protecting the radio spectrum does not matter - the real kind not the internet streaming kind... Oh, and that has been the case for a lot longer than the internet.

Mike.

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

Re: Not as green as 25kv overhead

Hydrogen at moderate pressure is not difficult to transport - those of us old enough to remember the old coal gas in the UK may not have realised it was about 50% H2, and about 10% CO and the rest methane,ethane and other odd bits of H and C etc . While leaks were indeed a thing, as they are with methane, the carbon monoxide was the most dangerous aspect in terms of accidents, when coupled with meters that cut the gas off, until you put a coin in, and when you did, the gas just came back on again immediately . Leaking through the sides of pipes and valves, at least at low pressure, is no worse than methane. At hundreds of bar, as you may need for storage, another matter altogether - and at high pressures leaks can self ignite as well.

Qualcomm demos sub-700MHz 5G data calls via Chinese telco upstart

Not sub 700MHz really, more like sub 800MHz

The international designator N28 refers to

703 – 748 MHz Uplink (phone transmitter) 758 – 803 MHz (Downlink - base-station transmitter)

In the UK that sits over the top end of the TV allocation and nudging an ISM band and above that we have the GSM 900 kit. Other countries may well have other things in that spectrum too. Larger antennas at both ends of the link of course, but also to scale with the waventh larger range, and that makes for larger rural cell sizes, fewer sites and power supplies needed. Like TV won't really go over the horizon but is less worried by buildings, trees rain, and all the things that scatter shorter wavelengths.

What a good eye-dea: Battery-less, grain-of-sand-sized 2.4GHz transmitter to help save your eyesight

Translating. The voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) has a cleaner spectrum (lower phase noise) than previously published efforts (an osc nominally produces a single frequency, but has an intrinsic width to the 'skirts' on either side of the spectrum ). The Authors of the paper made good use of the complementary nature of the 180nm CMOS foundry process to achieve this (perhaps some cunning symmetry allows a degree of noise cancellation ? That is just a guess) . Similar cunning has got the power consumption down (or DC to RF conversion efficiency up ) Even so -33dBm is only 500 nano-watts of transmitter power, and that rather weedy signal plus the small antenna conspire to explain the short range between implant and reader. Which in a clinic full of eye patients may actually be an advantage, rather than a drawback.

WannaCry ransomware attack on NHS could have triggered NATO reaction, says German cybergeneral

There is an assumption here by many that all military action is large, missile and shooting stuff.

It is not, and the range of military responses should be expanded to include both electromagnetic and cyber counterstrike capabilities as well. This in effect permits actions that would otherwise be illegal.

77 Brigade may be well known, but other countries will have their more or less well advertised equivalent, and much as Russia can take itself off the internet before doing something very nasty, I am pretty sure at a push we can do similar too, though it may need more signatures.

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

End of the "wild west"?

There seem to be a very high incidence of users and defenders of extreme pronogrpahy in the El Reg readership. Maybe something to do with working with computers affects the way the brain handles and judges sex, as it is a very different position to that I see from people who are my neighbours and co-workers.

Actually there is a far wider problem to be addressed, and that is the control of all kinds of inappropriate content, content that incites violent or anti-social behaviour is a similar problem. And access is as 'flat' as it has ever been. In four clicks from opening browser, I can look at some Arabs beheading a European in the name of some sort of freedom of expression, and as it makes me feel ill, and wakes me up at night, I suspect there will be others more or less susceptible and impressionable who would also benefit from not seeing it, thank you very much. Similarly all sorts of sexual acts of greater or lesser risk to health are also visible. I also wonder if this leads to other folk being pressured to produce ever more extreme content.

I agree that the current proposal is about as much use as a wet paper bag, but in the longer term some sort of control is needed. As an internet user myself, and a parent of two teenagers, both of whom have had the sense to tell me about what they have been shown online by friends, I can see immediately that the "wild west" era of an unregulated internet needs to (and will sooner or later) draw to a close.

To demand otherwise is tilting at windmills.

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Kit exists off the shelf to track radio transmitters on the move and to jam them,

http://www.chemringts.com/products/electronic-warfare/resolve

A UK company, by the look of it advertising on the web to sell stuff abroad.

Someone needs to write out a requisition order.

Pirate radio = drug dealing and municipal broadband is anti-competitive censorship

Well it suggests there needs to be a legitimate way to allow these sort of operations, and at the same time keep a register of who is running them, as in the wrong hands they have some small scope to cause trouble. There are pastors and pastors - look at the trouble we have had in the UK with 'hate preachers' for comparison.

Arguably the internet would be a far better place if it was policed somewhat as the radio spectrum is already, so there was clear responsibility for who did what, rather than the other way about, and I suspect that if folk keep buggering about as they are now, that day may well come sooner rather than later.

Registry to ban Cyrillic .eu addresses even if you've paid for them

Re Printf() - but not all programming languages are English based

BASICOIS has French keywords for example (and is quite like basic) and there are several cyrillic languages that I know not what they do.

UK.gov: We're not regulating driverless vehicles until others do

Ban only on new models after 2040

Under the current plans, it is not that existing cars, even ones from 1923, will suddenly be illegal on the road, but that all new cars from that date cannot be internal combustion engined.

As regards charging, I think there is a big under-estimation of the energy needed, its not the cost of the charge point at the motorway services, though that will be bad - I went through a large one the other day and in a moment of boredom, counted, 12 pumps, all busy and a change of car on each average every 4 minutes, so 15 cars per hour, per pump, so 180 cars per hour. Not very scientific, but lets say each of those would take equivalent to half a tank on average - your Tesla has a 60kWh battery, so say each car needed 30kWh of charge, that's 5400 kilo-watts of additional supply.

( that is five to ten times the transformer at the end of the cul-de sac supplying a typical housing estate in the UK.) Certainly possible, but expensive. But how many motorway services and similar fuelling stations would we need ? perhaps some hundreds to cover the country ? So we need a few gigawatts of extra generation and transmission. Possible, certainly, but not without co-ordinated effort, and investment, both so far conspicuously absent.

Gmail is secure. Netflix is secure. Together they're a phishing threat

Well as a happy user of the dots and the plus signs, I must say I like gmail the way it is, but then I have long name with a hyphen in it that makes it quite rare.

Surname-mine+me Surname-mine+wife Surname-mine+child all land one one place for easy onward sorting.

Moving the dots when signing up for spam-like things makes it easy enough to auto-filter on the dots to put it in the junk mail pile.

But I came to Gmail from using freeserve that did the extension into may names even more uniquely, and was pleased to find that it was at least possible.

Less pleased to see that despite

"+" and "-" signs being legitimate characters in Email addresses a number of organisations seem unable to handle them, including my bank.

Previously

Mynet@ freeserve.co.uk

would pick up

[e-mail]

you@mynet,.freeserve.co.uk

[e-mail]

or I could log in with one of those and see just the filtered view. If only something like that had become an agreed standard.

BBC's micro:bit retail shipments near

Re: Well done BBC making this available to buy

Nice to see them, and the one my youngster brought home was great fun, making a wearable "happy birthday" scrolling badge within about 10 minutes, though the fun of adding the "happy birthday" tune was was rather marred by the fact we managed to blow it up within an hour, as far as I can tell by having it running on battery and plugged in to USB host at the same time - now the KL26 USB interface chip just gets painfully hot and the PC does not recognise it.

More generally I think the coding side is pretty slick, and impressive, - and I do quite a lot of embedded coding for work ,and I know how hard it is to explain to non-techie types- this is a good introduction, so long as you don't mind it being all on-line.

However, the support for users is thin.

Key hardware detail is missing, what is the acceptable range of battery voltages, or speaker resistances one can connect to it, or the maximum load one can put on the IO pins - simple stuff, that might have saved us from disappointment.. I'm sure there is no need to keep the circuit and the whereabouts of the chip datasets secret either.

M.

High-speed powerline: Home connectivity without the cables

Re: A tip if your Powerline is next to router but inexplicably slow

"Presumably some sort of inductive interference."

more likely coupling direct via the wiring I'm afraid - most of the plug in power supplies are very much designed down to a cost, and the maximum permitted levels of conducted interference into the mains required for CE marking are not anything like strigent enough to guarantee reliable co-existance, they are more set at a level that means you should not annoy next door. Anything more than that is a bonus. As noted, above by others, by declaring the mains plug is not used for power, but solely for communications, the PLT folk allow themselves to inject a much higher level into the mains than everyone else- about 40dB more, or typically a couple of watts of RF- comparable in power to a mobile phone.

This is a silly regulatory loophole, originally intended to permit high signal levels in properly shielded communication cabling but not in power leads, and needs to be shut. Right now there is too much big money in it however.

Scouts take down database due to 'security vulnerabilities'

Probably a good job we didn't actually follow instructions (again)

We were actually instructed by TSA (The Scout Association) to destroy all paper copies of youngsters records, such as addresses, medical detail like allergies, religion etc, once we had it all typed into the Compass system (which would have been a mammoth task if it wasn't already in OSM and therefore reduced to a bit of cut/paste and a few hand edits for things like telephone area codes which it needed in its own funny format.)

Luckily, perhaps, I don't think anyone in our group at least actually did so, which is as well, as it looks like we will need to go back to what we did before, at least for a while.

Not to mention the fiasco that is the loss and confusion of leader training records ;-)