Posts by BanburyBill 27 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jan 2016
Ah, but do you remember the old ICT A-level syllabus? Problem solved by doing all the documents in a mind-numbing once-through waterfall - stopping at implementation - and where using a programming language (apart from Excel) could result in you losing marks. At least you actually get to touch a computer these days. And we are talking, er, A-Level Computer Science here. Not A-Level Hyping Gen AI.
This sounds suspiciously like a purveyor of courses - is the BCS still largely a certification business? - demanding the syllabus include New Shiny! That coincidentally fits their offerings.
The Budvar brewery is in České Budějovice (the German name for the town was Budweis), not Prague, and is totally worth a trip. They're still lagering everything the produce properly, watching the bottling plant is, as usual, a joy, and there's even a railway depot onsite - much malt arrives by train - so you can get a little Czech trainspotting in as well.
I've talked to network ops who don't give a toss about your personal data, but have malware interdiction on their minds. Spotting then blocking malware by perturbing the DNS names the malware uses is, they say, common practice, easy and cheap. Do away with it overnight, and watch the malware volume on their networks explode. They fear that for this, and regulatory reasons, they will now be forced towards deep inspection/MiMing your traffic, having to spend a truckload of money on the kit to do that, and end up in a world with less overall privacy as a result.
Also, given Mozilla's direction has been to redirecting your DNS to CloudFlare without even an opt-in, only an opt-out which might be designed for ensure the tech naive will click without understanding it? That's good for everyone's privacy? Really?
Yep. I was one of the early Dyn donators back in the day, and got one of those emails. Now, you may choose to interpret that chunk of corp-speak as meaning your service will continue. OTOH, if you go over to https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/dyn/technologies/ecommerce-customer-faq.html, you will find:
Q: I was an early free Dyn user and donator and had historically received no-cost services for life. Why do I have to pay?
A: We truly appreciate your support throughout the years. While we are discontinuing the availability of services received at no-cost, you may be surprised by how affordable the DNS service is within OCI along with outstanding capabilities with this service. If you are interested in moving to a new provider, here is an article on the 10 best free DNS services to help you choose: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/best-free-dnshosting-providers
Now, this is Oracle. Given a choice between a vague message that might mean nothing will change, or something more concrete indicating that you will now have to pay (knowing Oracle, through the nose) to use their 'outstanding' (which, translating Oracle-speak, probably means 'awful') service, I know which I'm believing.
What He Says. Put the Virgin 'router' straight into modem mode, connect to OpenWrt router, check line quality, fit (or remove) attenuators as required, chose Google/Quad9/Quad1 or any other public resolver for your DNS, and you'll be right.
That's my setup. I have a lot of folk in my area whinging over their VM connection on FB, and I've been rock stable for months, modulo one few hour outage caused (I think) by them rolling my DHCP lease.
Military expenditure seems a bit of a slippery number. SIPRI has France: $57.8bn, UK: $47.2bn, Germany: $44.3bn, Italy $29.2bn. So, is the UK is the military giant that dwarfs the rest of the EU? And as Brexit tanks the pound and the rest of the economy into the ground, we'll continue to go backwards militarily. Except in our imaginations. Cue yet more WWII docos.
Even worse, the end-to-end network that leads from ATC centre to VHF uplink to aircraft has no end to end error detection. Individual links, yes, but no way to spot corruption in the routers. I'm glad to see the IETF process being used here; less likely that that sort of networking 101 error will get through.
OK, so explain to me. In detail. How do you increase the size of an IPv4 address *without* changing IPv4 packet structure in a way that will require updating the software (and very possibly hardware) on every router on the planet? Hint: extending the header, or changing field usage therein fails that test.
The designers of IPv6 weren't (and aren't) idiots, and they weren't (as often suggested) detached academics either, unless you think the likes of Cisco, Google, Nokia and Ericsson are detached academe.
OpenWRT is Very Excellent. But this is a .0, and yes, 18.06.0 has fallen foul of a kernel bug on some platforms - https://bugs.openwrt.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=1541. For me this is screwing up IPv6 between wired and wireless hosts in my network. I'm an ar71xx, so on 4.9.111. Many other targets are on 4.14.52, and so are unaffected.
ICAO Phraseology (which is the formulaic construction) does help, but still leaves space for misunderstanding especially when accents are involved. But it isn't used in the US. An ATC controller trainer once advised me that one should prefer flying to left pond with native English-speaking flight crew for that reason.
ATC digital messages are CPDLC, not ACARS.
Plus ca change. In the early days of the Overland Telegraph to Darwin (~1870), they kept getting line breaks because the local Aboriginal people found that the ceramic insulators made excellent sharp edges when broken, so climbed the poles and made off with them. Chief Engineer Charles Todd (the town of Alice is named after his wife) deflected this by ordering old broken insulators be left scattered around the poles after construction and maintenance.
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