* Posts by jms222

298 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2016

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Virgin Media? More like Virgin Meltdown: Brit broadband ISP falls over amid power drama

jms222

Cambridge

Thank you Reg !

Business service been down here since yesterday (Monday) morning the the cunts don’t even acknowledge an issue.

I thought it was due to rain as a small amount of that such as we get in East Anglia does seem to upset their flaky wiring.

Just got a call from them and visit imminent, Might just be my cable.

How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank

jms222

Sparcs

I do remember that Sparcs of about twenty years ago would indeed drop you into the Open Firmware prompt if the keybioard was removed where you could type c to continue (having replaced it of course).

Watt the heck is this? A 32-core 3.3GHz Arm server CPU shipping? Yes, says Ampere

jms222

Drivers ?

> The bigger problem that has held ARM back in data centre is about drivers

Let's just assume that unless you're tasked with building drivers, this has been done and you have a working network stack and filesystem.

Leeds hospital launches campaign to 'axe the fax'

jms222

It's all true

I've had to get my G.P. to fax a referral through to the hospital before. The system is shit.

Similarly the "electronic" prescription service seems to delay prescriptions by whole days.

Where the surgery have emailed me letters _they_ sent they are scans of prints.

In order to get a prescription waiver card you get a form from the chemist, take it to the G.P. (who actually issues the prescriptions to the chemist) then send it off then get a card through the post which you take back to the chemist. It's as if they're on a mission to waste as much taxpayers' money as possible.

'World's favorite airline' favorite among hackers: British Airways site, app hacked for two weeks

jms222

Damp squib/squid

Now get off your pedalstool!

Revealed: British Airways was in talks with IBM on outsourcing security just before hack

jms222

So presumably the server was running dodgy code. They need to look at whether this was preventable or detectable.

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

jms222

mobile vs desktop versions

> some of these sites don't have a "go to desktop version" button

Browsers generally have this on a menu.

A couple of things I do regularly.

web.whatsapp.com request the desktop version to use it on an iPad

news.bbc request the mobile version (on your full fat OS) to get playable video rather than Flash error messages

jms222

Explorer filenames

We've been here before.

Remember when Windows Explorer started chopping file extensions by default so we started to get emails with stuff.pdf.exe and the like ?

Benchmark smartphone drama: We wouldn't call it cheating, says Huawei, but look, everyone's at it

jms222

VW

So it's like the VW thing which they all probably do anyway.

No, eight characters, some capital letters and numbers is not a good password policy

jms222

Same as mine

Wow. I use those especially "password" for absolutely everything and have never had any trouble. What are the chances ?

Tax the tech giants and ISPs until the bits squeak – Corbyn

jms222

Isn't the BBC

Sorry but isn't the BBC one of the largest "online" entities there is as well as being on the journalism side of the fence ?

Use Debian? Want Intel's latest CPU patch? Small print sparks big problem

jms222

Throw the license in the bin

I am no legal beagle but to me it's very simple. The microcode is necessary to make the device you have already bought work better. It can't be resold and can only be used on a specific device.

So assuming you want that and do due dilligence just use it and get on with life.

I'd like to hear an opinion from somebody qualified but don't think it has any weight.

Oh my Tosh, it's only a 100TB small form-factor SSD, SK?

jms222

Sign me up

"Expected to" and "could have". Wow.

Intel finally emits Puma 1Gbps modem fixes – just as new ping-of-death bug emerges

jms222

Virgin Media Hitron

Recently moved from Virgin Media residential to Business "Essentials" because the latter is cheap especially for the VAT registered (otherwise shit).

As part of backing up I shunt some data over the (wired) network through the router for the simple reason that it's there and avoids having other switches powered up. With my old Super Hub (model 1) the rate was about 120MB/s as expected. Did the same at the weekend through the Hitron CGNv4 thing and got half of that with gaps of several seconds with almost zero rate. Same procedure with the same equipment as before otherwise. Tried some pinging and noticed _some_ pings taking several milliseconds. So I wonder whether the wired side is not (like) a switch chip as one would hope but maybe goes through the Intel rubbish.

Also after the slight rain we had last week (and I do mean slight here in East Anglia) the connection went for a whole day and after the main external fix even a soft reboot of the thing did not recover it and I had to power cycle. So much for the many 9s availability they quote.

It's a phone with a peel, but you'll have to wait a bit more for retro Nokia

jms222

Wasp T12 Speechtool

Does it have compressed widescreen, sympiot keyboard with large '5', Sharonized ceramic cast body with yellow / black HazTape graphics, intelligent thermotones, voice authority enhancement, text insult dictionary and card expansion flange ?

No I thought not.

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

jms222

Booting time

Yes it's a benchmark but if you really _do_ boot a lot you should look and sleep and hibernation options like we've had for years. Other advantage is things are where you left them.

Drink this potion, Linux kernel, and tomorrow you'll wake up with a WireGuard VPN driver

jms222

There is no proper installable device driver system

Unlike Microsoft Windows, Linux has absolutely no concept of an installable device driver system.

I mean you plug something in and the appropriate driver is fetched based on USB or PCI IDs even if this sometimes takes a minute or fails.

Instead if you wonder where those Gigabytes went it is because you have

* Every possible X server

* A kernel with tweaks and loadable modules for every CPU (and I don't mean those from Intel and AMD), every motherboard and every USB device the kernel ever catered for

* Every timezone

* Every locale

* A really flaky system of boot relying on initrds that seem to get re-build several times per update so now you have hundreds of megabytes in /boot alone and the thing won't boot when these go wrong which they do

Brit competition bods to probe Experian and ClearScore merger

jms222

Parasites

Close them both down and re-purpose employees into something genuinely useful like picking veg. Or sanitising telephones.

Capita still squats on top of the UK's software and IT services heap

jms222

Chisholm trail

Our council had contracted Carillion to manage https://www.greatercambridge.org.uk/transport/transport-projects/chisholm-trail/ along with Tarmac. Luckily Tarmac have taken over their part (i.e. the actual work) but guess who the council have got in to do "management".

The local Chisholm Trail has been discussed for decades (along with re-opening Chesterton Sidings as Cambridge North which has finally happened) and should be great when done.

I regret not standing up at the last local meeting I went to and asking that without meaning any disrespect to the people present what does the council intend to do when Capita go the way of Carillion.

Core blimey! Apple macOS update lifts boot from MacBook Pro neck

jms222

So powerful it can't be used

That's the problem with modern devices.

They have got so powerful (time energy/time kind) you can't actually run them all so it's always a compromise with whole areas of die being shut down for periods.

Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

jms222

Dandy Highwaymen

and spend their cash on looking flash.

It walks, it talks, it falls over a bit. Windows 10 is three years old

jms222

Linux subsystem for Windows is _really_ good and well thought out to the extent that it could be used for production.

Another data-leaking Spectre CPU flaw among Intel's dirty dozen of security bug alerts today

jms222

> Intel invented speculative execution

They most certainly did not.

Microsoft might not support Windows XP any more, but GandCrab v4.1 ransomware does

jms222

Still run Me

I still run a fully connected Windows Me system (DOS software, ISA cards) which until recently (months) had no firewall. Never had a problem with malware.

Sueball claims Apple broke hacking laws with iOS batt throttling code

jms222

All low power devices

All modern battery-powered devices have this compromise between being able to power up properly, performing at benchmarks for willy-waving purposes and not costing too much.

The power supply itself is also a balance between being able to charge and power the thing at full tilt and itself being not too expensive or large. For example when the Microsoft whatever was found to discharge even when powered under load a little while ago.

Nothing new here.

'Plane Hacker' Roberts: I put a network sniffer on my truck to see what it was sharing. Holy crap!

jms222

Bike Garmin

My GPSMAP60C will occasionally have me and my bike leap a mile and back again in seconds. That's a bit fast. Wouldn't surprise me if poorly written software picks up on this sort of thing and puts a black mark against you.

(A newer Garmin said I had done 24,000 miles in about twenty minutes between Impington and Dry Drayton.)

Who fancies a six-core, 128GB RAM, 8TB NVMe … laptop?

jms222

I don't

because anything you would need such a machine to run does not belong on a mobile device.

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

jms222

shutdown silliness

> I used the shutdiown -h

Very easy. Don't use the shutdown command.

If you want to stop the machine use the halt command (perhaps with "-p")

If you want to reboot use the reboot command (with "now")

Documentation suggesting use of the shutdown command is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Relive your misspent, 8-bit youth on the BBC's reopened Micro archive

jms222

I might have a light bulb to replace

The paper tape reader on our Elliott 903 is playing up.

Good chance it's the light bulb or crap on the optics but I'm so looking forward to working on it as opposed to knocking out C code as I am right now.

If it's not optical then it's into the "initial instructions" (bootloader) I go.

A volt out of the blue: Phone batteries reveal what you typed and read

jms222

No news

So if I can insert arbitrary hardware with a battery into somebody's phone I can sense what the user does with it. Making use of various sensors in said hardware. Please explain why this is interesting again.

Come to think of it I could replace THE WHOLE PHONE and man-in-the-middle all interaction with it.

OpenBSD disables Intel’s hyper-threading over CPU data leak fears

jms222

Hypermarketing

It's only a way to come up with a large thread count without costing more in silicon.

If you're really lucky a hypermarketing fictional thread is worth 15% of a real one. But it more likely to slow things down.

So glad I have an honest i5.

The performance advantage of the i7 over the i5 has a lot to do with the larger cache not so much HT.

Tech rookie put decimal point in wrong place, cost insurer zillions

jms222

Yes it's all coming back. I too chose alternative proxies. Anonymous: Late nineties I think. I was one of those who bought and still has on the shelf the £100 Surfboard box and subsequently got a £5 monthly reduction to compensate when they started supplying the kit.

Of course you can dig around in cam.misc (but perhaps not using VM's broken servers) for more.

jms222

Inktomi proxies

I was told that the CambridgeCable/NTL/VM Inktomi proxies which would leave you with web pages with half the images missing back in the day only came about because somebody got their decimal point wrong when calculating bandwidth requirements for the whole company.

US govt mulls snatching back full control of the internet's domain name and IP address admin

jms222

IPv6

Is this a good opportunity to sort out the transition with an absolute minimum of NAT silliness ?

Intel teases Optane DIMMS, but you may need a new Xeon first

jms222

DDR5 ?

Don't the non-volatile modules aspect of DDR5 supersede this anyway ? Intel would rather you didn't know.

http://tinyurl.com/yazwcxj8 (Register article)

Cold call bosses could be forced to cough up under new rules

jms222

Clear Eco Systems / Approved Energy Systems

I actually had one this morning from a lady working for "Clear Eco Systems" wanting to look at my inverter. Yes she was aware of GDPR but since she claimed it was all free and they weren't selling anything...you get the idea.

So please set your auto dialers to 01484442048 and anything associated.

Church of England will commune with God for you via Amazon's Echo

jms222

Animal sacrifices

Don't certain dickless religious types get animals slaughtered by phone especially around Hajj time so they can feel better about themselves ?

Project Lightning, you say? Virgin Media's fibre rollout is pretty glacial

jms222

Same here, maybe cancelling

I got them to drop from forty something back down to twenty something some months back but I had a go at them a few weeks ago about their still broken NNTP service. During the security bollocks I said I would cancel my Direct Debit to prove it was me. The next payment date is about now so I expect them to contact me and we can discuss various things.

What I really want is not a fictitious download speed but a sensible upload and IPv6 and people their end who even know what IPv6 _is_.

Equifax reveals full horror of that monstrous cyber-heist of its servers

jms222

> because Equifax ran an unpatched and therefore insecure version of Apache Struts

Only partially.

Software like Struts will always have problems like this.

The question is how is it that the database server's outgoing data rate jumped from its normal level to something to complete an entire export in (guess) hours and nothing got tripped to put the brakes on ?

At the very least there must suddenly have been queries for more than individual records. How were these even allowed ? We're not talking about an organisation that doesn't have the resources to implement traps for such things even if the implementation was done with trained monkeys.

jms222

but a cheque

but it should be a cheque definitely not a check. They do enough "checking" as it is.

Unfortunately I can see banks filling the hole left by credit reference agencies. I'd like to be able to claim that they can't possibly get it wrong.

It's really only them and the land registry that the best handle on what I own and how much money I may or may not have.

We just wanna torque: Spinning transfer boffins say torque memory near

jms222

NV DDR5

The most interesting feature of DDR5 apart from it being one up from DDR4 is that it integrates non-volatile memory onto the same interface.

So the lines between volatile and not memory will get blurred anyway. Like core memory.

AWS sends noise to Signal: You can't use our servers to beat censors

jms222

Mythical solution

In the case of a local provider here Mythic Beasts that supply IPv6-only hosts they look at the hostname in SNI BUT CANNOT or DO NOT DECRYPT and use that to TCP proxy a possibly IPv4 connection to an IPv6 host. I have only recently got my head around it.

I have slightly abused the facility to fire up a parallel webserver also on TCP port 80 but on a specially selected IPv6 address (of my /96) even though I do have a single IPv4 address. They do validate that you control it though by a DNS TXT record or perhaps other means I forget.

Obviously you have to set your A and possibly AAAA records to their proxies.

I'd be interested to know if other providers use this method.

Productivity knocks: I've got 99 Slacks, but my work's not done

jms222

IRC and Usenet

I think IRC and Usenet will outlive Slack, Whatsapp, Discord and many others I have already forgotten about.

Get the FTP outta here, says Firefox

jms222

Gopher

Does Gopher still work ?

Cinema voucher-pusher tells customers: Cancel your credit cards, we've been 'attacked'

jms222

Kill all middleman companies

Wouldn't it be better to ban all voucher, Christmas hamper and similar middleman companies ?

T-Mobile Austria stores passwords as plain text, Outlook gets message crypto, and more

jms222

as plain text

Yes there _is_ a good reason to keep them as plain text. Certain protocols demand it. Kerberos and CHAP for example.

The popular salt/hash method demands that the password is transmitted plain and nothing ever goes from with HTTPS and dodgy certificates does it.

Having plain text passwords at both ends and using them for crypto actually _avoids_ the need to send your password as plain text (over an encrypted channel admittedly) and the security problem that might arise as a result if your webserver is owned.

Security problems are usually the result of stupidity like not putting the authentication server in a separate sealed box where passwords go in but never come out.

Britain's 4G is slower than Armenia's

jms222

Maldivian experience

I was amazed how good my mobile connectivity was on a liveaboard boat in the Maldives was last month.

Even when we weren't near one of their many little islands.

Planning on forking out for the new iPad? Better take darn good care of it

jms222

French ?

> "French cars continue to sell, despite such gems as having to remove a bumper to replace a headlight bulb"

Friend recently bought some fancy headlamps and complaining about having to do exactly this to his Astra van.

Though I suspect you have to drop the engine out of a Renault to release the bumper.

Here's the list of Chinese kit facing extra US import tariffs: Hard disk drives, optic fiber, PCB making equipment, etc

jms222

Good for us ?

So there is presumably lots of scope for us in the UK to buy goods from one party, add a new label and sell them on to the other.

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

jms222

AS/400

> And when you install that binary, you perform the last pass of compilation to

> whatever processor architecture your computer has installed

Like AS/400 then.

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