* Posts by dinsdale54

133 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2015

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Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

dinsdale54

Those numbers seem low even if it's not London.

A relative started on 40K straight out of University as a junior dev and was on 60K within 18 months. That was 5 years ago.

Crypto scams rake in $5.6B a year for cyberscum lowlifes, FBI says

dinsdale54

Re: Friend got scammed....

While learning about security is a sensible precursor to getting in to crypto, I'd start with considering the complete lack of any value to start with.

A friend is a greybeard programmer and at least 20 years older than anybody else he works with. All his team were in on crypto except him. At their last meeting he discovered that every one of them was out a decent amount of money from their 'investments' I think the smallest loss was about £8000 up to >£30,000. Somewhere somebody made money from them but the net is a large amount of energy was expended to move money from them to somebody else.

At least Charles Ponzi had a believeable story he was touting around the markets. Crypto doesn't even have that.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

dinsdale54

That was my approach however the movies I purchased on google play have been nerfed and can't be played in a browser at anything higher than 480p anymore. Oh well, I guess I can find an HD copy on torrent somewhere so I can watch what I actually paid for.

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

dinsdale54

Re: "CIOs cannot turn their back on cloud."

Gartner generally aren't wrong because they ask their customers what they plan on doing, then write a report saying 'this is what everybody wil be doing'

The people they interviewed then have an 'independent' report to support doing exactly what they were already planning on doing.

Nice work if you can get it.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

dinsdale54

Re: apostrophes for fun and profit

Personally I'd say the book is only being read by a single pedant.

Historically this goes all the way back to Which Tyler - the leader of the pedants' revolt.

Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate

dinsdale54

From Gridwatch - which I like because of the dials :

UPDATE

Tuesday 9th July

The TLS certificate on https://data.exelon.co.uk has expired, rendering their website and its data inaccessible

Regards Webmaster @ templar.co.uk

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

dinsdale54

Re: 50 vs 500

Also doesn't include the power needed for containment - the 6,000 tonne magnet for example.

As fusion was "30 years away" when I was young (30 years ago) I will remain skeptical.

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

dinsdale54

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

I agree with some of this. He does seem to actually be trying to answer questions and isn't suffering from the intermittently faulty memory of many of the witnesses.

However on the technical side - which I guess is why most of us are here - the issue I have, and this was the same with his colleague Anne Chambers, is the clear assumption that the system was working fine and if they couldn't find a problem in the data after a cursory check then there wasn't a problem and it was somebody else's fault. To find bugs you have to actually go looking for them.

The whole culture of the PO and ICL/Fujitsu seems to have been to see everybody else as the problem when a good hard look in the mirror was needed.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

dinsdale54

Re: Attention customers

On the plus side, at least these bags got delayed due to a fault, not just because the baggage handlers couldn't be bothered to load the bags onto the plane and fucked off home - I'm looking at you, Firenze airport.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

dinsdale54

Re: Too complex!

Early systemd looks exactly like a copy of the Solaris SMF - which fixed a number of issues with the init system - dependencies, parallelism etc.

I recall there was discussion at Sun about whether it was too big a change to the traditional init system. Systemd took that big leap as a starting point and has spent the next 15 years trying to devour all of Unix.

I have no idea whether that was always the plan or it's just a case of feature-itis.

Snowflake denies miscreants melted its security to steal data from top customers

dinsdale54

Re: Any chance

Think how much the fine will be after the admin fee is added!

Starlink offers 'unusually hostile environment' to TCP

dinsdale54

Re: We love it.

The issue that forced me to learn about this (referred to in another post) was a customer backing up data from Tokyo to Singapore IIRC. Plenty of bandwidth but significant packet loss.

My company ended up re-writing the data transfer protocol to use multiple tcp connectrions and making the send windows proportionally smaller. Packet loss then caused much smaller retransmits.

dinsdale54

I see lots of comments about how Starlink is fantastic - which I agree with - but it's not what Geoff is discussing.

I've put in more time than I ever wanted to dealing with high latency jittery networks with packet loss. You can get in to all sorts of issues with large send and receive windows causing enormous retransmits at significant jitter or small amounts of packet loss. ~1% packet loss on a high latency network will pretty much remove your ability to to large data transfers, regardless of the theoretically available bandwidth.

The congestion control algorithm makes a big difference here. There are lots of them - which is a sign that none work well for all use cases. The author is making sensible suggestions as to which ones are well suited to Starlink.

Return to office mandates had senior employees jumping ship

dinsdale54

A friend who did a couple of years working in Japan for a large computer manufacturer described their decision making process exactly like this. Meetings are where decisions are communicated, not made.

It does put the onus on the manager to ensure they talk to all the relevant people and listen to them but get that right and it's an efficient process.

A couple of IT projects I worked on for the military were similar. It took a while to understand the culture but it worked well - If you had a good manager.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

dinsdale54

Re: Who's next

You know Mohels do circumcisions for free?

They don't get paid. The just collect tips.

I'll get my coat

Security pioneer Ross Anderson dies at 67

dinsdale54

Re: Serpent

The AES spec determined that all entrants would use a 128 bit block size and at up to at least 256 bit key size. I believe Rijndael did offer larger block sizes but once it became AES that feature was dropped.

At the time, encryption was very CPU heavy. No custom functions in mainstream CPUs like today. We sold quite a few nCipher cards to customers wanting to run VPNs and suchlike. Limited use cases for them these days.

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

dinsdale54

They own the cabinet but not the lamppost.

So, no because ensuring 'appropriate community engagement has taken place' = NIMBY. No danger of getting anything installed if you have to get approval from the locals.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

dinsdale54

Re: We dont go for "uptime" records

Yes, that's generally a good policy. The time to find out whether a system restarts is not when you are trying to restart everything after a power outage.

Yes, there are likely caches in RAM which need to be rebuilt and will increase latency for a while.

Some years back I had an angry customer (investment bank) to deal with. One of our servers had crashed and taken down a trading application - despite being in a failover cluster. What the bank then discovered was that they didn't know how to restart the service - about 20 applications on a similar number of servers. The services had to be restarted in a specific order - which they didn't know since everything had been running for several years uninterrupted.

This is when I also learnt the lesson that the more somebody shouts at you, the more likely that it's their fault.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

dinsdale54

Some years back, a colleague who had just joined from another Unix server company recounted a similar story.

They were running benchmarks on the soon to be released next gen systems and up to their neck with both hardware and software issues needing to be fixed before anything would run successfully. His WTF moment happend when the CEO passed him in the corridor and said 'I hear you are getting great benchmark numbers on the new systems'

It had only taken about 3 layers of management speak for the message to completely reverse from the truth.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

dinsdale54

Re: Call it molehilling.

ICANN wouldn't be able to charge for that.

They'd just collect tips.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

dinsdale54

Re: Likewise ...

In my many years in presales I dealt with a - thankfully - small number of really unpleasant organisations and individuals.

I once suggested a sales incentive where the top sales rep in the company won the right to tell a customer of their choice to go fuck themselves - regardless of the financial consequences.

I have never seen such enthusiasm from the sales reps for a reward scheme!

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

dinsdale54

Re: So what was actually wrong?

Here's the code and the explanation of why it's moronically stupid.

This extract from EPOSSCore.dll has been written to reverse the sign of a

number and is equivalent to the command :-

d=-d

Public Function ReverseSign(d)

Ifd<o Then

d= Abs(d)

Else

d=d-(d*2)

End If

ReverseSign = d

End Function

Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary

mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

dinsdale54

Re: The possibilities are infinite

Read this witness statement / watch the testimony. It's depressing.

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn00620100-david-mcdonnell-witness-statement

TL;DR :

The part of the system that was core to subsequent issues was known to be a badly written POS before launch.

The guy brought in to assess the system and remedy issues wasn't allowed to rewrite it and was moved on when he complained.

The was pressure from government to launch on schedule.

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

dinsdale54

Re: Vicious circle with high demand

You might want to check on that.

Uber have been pissing money away for years but they are now profitable.

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2023/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Second-Quarter-2023/default.aspx

Sadly, this profitability appears to have coincided with their service getting much worse - in London at least.

Robocar tech biz sues Nvidia, claims stolen code shared in Teams meeting blunder

dinsdale54

Re: Puzzled

Quite! This isn't slashdot (yet)

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

dinsdale54

Re: Other VLIW systems

If somebody says they have a new architecture and part of the pitch is 'we can fix problem [X] in the compiler' - You should probably run rather than walk away.

At the couple of places I've worked where there was a compiler team - they were usually very cautious about what was achievable. It was the processor architects with some clever pet project who handwaved away significant problems as something for the compiler.

Apple might have to pay that €13B EU tax bill after all

dinsdale54

Or an 'error of judgement' :)

TBF this is actually largely how tax law works. If you are found liable for a tax bill, the govt just wants the money. If you pay up, you generally are in the clear (apart from little people doing their tax returns obviously)

The important bit is not to keep evading tax after being investigated, that's when they throw the book at you. See Lester Piggott / Bernie Ecclestone. In Bernie's case, it was more of a leaflet they thew at him, in exchange for another £650 million.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

dinsdale54

Re: I've always been curious...

Sounds like a Bolt action rifle would be more appropriate.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

dinsdale54

Re: Gorgeous aircraft

My main memory is that they were noisy. I flew pre refurbishment and sitting in a window seat you had to speak up to the cabin crew in the aisle. Excellent wine list! I believe the work of Jancis Robinson.

The interior was small but once sitting down it was fine. The seats were comfortable, if a little vintage looking and you were only there for a bit over 3 hours.

I was booked for a 2nd flight when they were grounded.

I also cycled to Heathrow to watch the last commercial flights land there - 3 Concordes landing one after the other. It was VERY busy on all the perimeter roads.

Oh yes, the windows got hot to the touch.

Teardown reveals iPhone 15 to be series of questionable design decisions

dinsdale54

Re: It cuts Apple’s costs, so they do it.

Agreed.

A pilot at DHL told me that the cargo needed to cover the cost of the flight was half a palette.

Planes are expensive compared to most ground transport but for high value items it's still noise on the bottom line.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

dinsdale54

Re: False

That's getting in to the weeds. There was evidence given during the enquiry that testing was taking place, concerns were raised about the quality and it was signed off for release anyway. The module that came in for the most criticism was the 'cash accounts' module that deals with --- in branch transactions.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

dinsdale54

The quality of a product is inversely proportional to how often it is renamed.

I can't really think of any counterexamples from my working career.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

dinsdale54

Re: Maybe not.

Get a second hand Thorens TD150/TD160. Should be possible at that price.

If you also spend a bit more for a better arm then you effecively have a Linn Sondek with at least one zero missing from the price.

I ripped all my remaining vinyl and sold my TD150 to a mate so he could do the same thing.

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

dinsdale54

Re: Opensolaris anyone? @containerizer

Sun converted from BSD to SVR4 to try to end the Unix wars which set Unix back several years. On balance this was sensible.

Given that a lot of SVR4 IS SunOS, it wasn't a major technical challenge but it did result in a fair bit of change for existing users without any immediate benefit.

Sun was very innovative for many years. SunOS and then Solaris introduce a load of advanced features - some mentioned previously - so if you were on Solaris, you could do things that other people couldn't. In the early years there was NFS, NIS, RPC and then later SMF, Zones, ZFS, DTrace etc.

Working with Solaris was a good place to be for a long time.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

dinsdale54

Re: Concorde, so loud

They were stupidly inefficient at low speed and when using afterburners. At mach 2 and 60,000ft they were incredibly efficient. The problem was getting up there.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

dinsdale54

Additionally, Perhaps El Reg could consider not filling an article about how Twitter is difficult to access with endless links to Twitter. Duh!

Virgin Media email customers enter third day of inbox infuriation

dinsdale54

Re: gmail ntlworld

To be fair, Google discontinued offering an email service to ISPs (which VM were using) so VM had no choice but to move it.

I had mostly moved to gmail many years before that when blueyonder were only offering a 30MB mailbox and gmail was offering 7GB. I still have some historic emails on VM that I need to dip in to once in a while. While I can now log in again, all emails before Monday evening are absent. As usual VM have offered no explanation or ETA that's anything other than $TIME+6hrs.

Crypto catastrophe strikes some Atomic Wallet users, over $35M thought stolen

dinsdale54

I kept all my money in $SINGLEPOINTOFFAILURE has been stupid for as long as savings have existed. Crypto just seems like a good way to herd the financially naive into one place.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

dinsdale54

Re: COW

COW storage which saves you having to Moove it Moove it

Fujitsu bags £142M UK government work since Horizon probe announced

dinsdale54

Don't forget the Horizon bit of Fujitsu is ICL as was. You would have to travel a long way to find a more useless bunch of fuckwits still operating.

My guess is that there are a bunch of entrenched systems that only they have the people to manage/develop and therefore they are still winning business.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

dinsdale54

Re: Bing Knows

I had a similar experience a couple of years back. After having my problem resolved after speaking to the call centre, I was asked to fill out a survey and the guy told me than anything less than a 9/10 would result in an investigation in to what went wrong with his response.

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

dinsdale54

Re: The final nail....

Snap.

Virginmedia, despite their sewage level customer service and constant price gouging have, until now, provided a fast, reliable broadband service for the 20+ years I have had them. It's their one redeeming feature. I am now in the position that 2 of the 3 worst outages in 20 years have happened this week.

Communityfibre called to ask if they could cable up our block of flats. They are currently offering 4 times the performance for half the price. Like you, I'm off as soon as the new fibres are installed.

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

dinsdale54

In my drunken youth - which was many years ago, before my drunken middle age, we used to dial the japanese speaking clock from public phoneboxes on the way home from the pub with our traffic cones. I assume somebody was paying.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

dinsdale54

Re: Ahh...yes, metrics

Many years ago when at working for a large computer manufacturer, I saw a presentation given to the operating system development team, who were extremely skilled but also very Ivory tower. One slide was in the form of problem/solution.

Problem : The sales team only sell what we pay them to, not what we want them to.

Solution : THIS IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG.

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

dinsdale54

Unsurprising.

I've posted this before but cloud is very good for lowering Capex. Opex? not so much. For known demand it's little more than expensive hosting.

At a previous job we had a customer who moved their SQL Server production databases in to AWS. Successfully. This is quite an achievement. They then discovered they were Amazon's biggest customer in the country (many million $ per year) So moved nearly all of them back on prem.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

dinsdale54

Re: What a load of cobblers

I, for one, am very pleased to hear that you won't eat your nephew.

FTX CTO and Alameda Research CEO admit fraud, pair 'cooperating' with Feds

dinsdale54

Institutional embarrassment

The cynic in me says that the speed this is progressing means the aim is to give the various parties a quick slap on the wrist and then pretend it didn't happen. There are too many supposedly smart people looking really dumb who would like all this to go away.

I _really_ hope to be proven wrong.

Swiss bankers warn: Three quarters of retail Bitcoin investors are in the red

dinsdale54

Re: Factually wrong

Some good advice - although obvious - from an investment fund manager was "decide before you start whether you are investing or speculating because the stock market is a very expensive place to find out.

The crypto market has proved to be an even more expensive place to find out.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

dinsdale54

Re: And.... "He's Fired"

Indeed.

One of my more enlightened bosses described his job as a "two way bullshit filter" He once showed me the sheer numbers of pointless requests he was filtering out from above in order to let me get on with my job.

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