Posts by john.jones.name

Former NASA astronaut and Shuttle boss weigh in on fixing Hubble Space Telescope

the USA have other scopes with same sort of design pointing at earth

I suspect there is a lot of shared systems.

maybe get them on the phone and point out the same things could happen to their equipment...

‘Fasten your seat belts, raise your tray table, and disconnect your Bluetooth headsets from the entertainment unit’

qantas never crash

Qantas gave up on in seat entertainment

they simply equip users who want a screen with a managed iPad and wired headphones

people who already have an iPad/android/windows simply can connect to the Wifi and download the entertainment app

everything is an app...

the App simply is a HTML interface to the onboard server which can stream movies or audio (podcasts)

basically like a netflix in the sky

WTF are United Airlines thinking ?

UK enters negotiations on a digital trade agreement with Singapore

yes singapore wash

basically singapore have ZERO tax on things like software so basically lots of software companies setup there and they now want to sell into UK...

this is exactly like ireland only much worse...

UK watchdog blesses Virgin Media and O2's union, says there's no risk of market distortion or competition loss

ipv6 and gaming

IPv6 why use it ? its faster, it makes your game response times faster, xbox/playstation recommend and say this.

network investment

@idiot taxpayer here again

why invest in this DSL thing I already have banks of 56k modems

its not like they are ever going to make bigger web pages or ask my to do meetings on the internet are they ?

oh wait

just look at if they do IPv6

Sky yes

BT yes

EE yes

Andrews & Arnold yes

Zen yes

Three yes

Virgin Media no

o2 uk no (while EU o2 does)

talks to the level of investment in their network even if you do not use IPv6

Western Australia rushes out legislation after cops access contact-tracing data to investigate serious crimes

WA gov incompetance

the WA government proved themselves incompetent when they went with a checkin that was not private

the testing rates are terrible and so it spreads and no one is aware...

They could have stood up and used this on apple and google

https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing combined with a private QR check in log that only gets sent when requested

oh I dont know much like New Zealand... so WA gov is worse than NZ...

let that sink in...

Snakes on a Plane meets The Simpsons as airline creates ‘whacker’ to scare reptiles away from parked A380s

yeah but Africa just got hippo's and wild dogs

Australia has far more deadly animals and we dont go round hitting the bush we just walk to school and worry about magpies

If your internet wobbled last weekend, you have Vodafone India to thank for it

RPKI and DNSSEC....

vodafone idea need to get it sorted ASAP

they have nothing modern

no IPv6

no DNSSEC

no RPKI

no DANE

wonder why everyone is leaving to Reliance...

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

Some products have DANE

Microsoft Office 365 lacks DANE support yet the feature is coming to Exchange Online servers....

so yes they both are planning to support DANE and not at the same time...

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/support-of-dane-and-dnssec-in-office-365-exchange-online/ba-p/1275494

GMAIL can support DANE now if you get the MX right and sign your own domain so technically gmail is more secure.

I hope Microsoft product managers might pay attention and follow through...

Lenovo's latest gaming monster: Eight cores, 3.2GHz, giant heat sink, two fans. Oh, and it has a phone bolted on

APAC will eat this up (inc Australia)

Honestly I see this doing exceptionally well in APAC

what would have been nice is the ability like the Motorola desktop mode to the Edge+ to a display over video-enabled USB-C or USB-C-to-HDMI.

basically allowing Playing mobile games on the big screen as a bonus it allows a controller and big screen...

UK's National Cyber Security Centre recommends password generation idea suggested by El Reg commenter

passphrase

exactly

Mimecast bins SolarWinds and compromised servers alike in wake of supply chain hack

no DNSSEC and no enforcement of its own cipher preference

their DNS servers still do not have DNSSEC (pretty basic) even though it can be abused and their website enforcement of its own cipher preference is not present.

not exactly a good look.

Fix the DNSSEC ASAP for your customers sake

AWS throws its home-grown Arm CPUs at new memory-intensive instance type

type of ram ?

not all RAM is created equal...

How fast is read time and write time for not cached entry ?

How much cache does core have and what is the hit rate ?

Does storage detect Errors ?

UK dev loses ownership claim on forensic software he said he wrote in spare time and licensed to employer

teach them how to use dd

anyone can create a clone from a device using dd

I would hope that most forensics teams would know and use dd rather than some commercial toolset that would be trivial to subvert with a aggrieved principle author...

the mind boggles

Snapdragon X65: Qualcomm says its next-gen 5G modem handles up to 10Gbps downloads, knows if you're holding it wrong

I cant see a single Qualcomm 5G modem CPE win

I see Balong 5000 modem everywhere

if they are serious they need to do a Home office modem

(its not like there is a pandemic and people are working from home or anything)

Choc horror: The UK's Information Commisioner probes its own mammoth £6,248 Hotel Chocolat spend

was it fair ?

if 500 each got a equal share then all power to them

If the directors only got a share...

the Vegan chocolate box is around £12.50

anyone from ICO wants to post as anonymous to say if staff got chocolates ?

Nominet faces showdown with British internet industry: Extraordinary vote called to oust CEO, board members

security... won't someone think of the webservers...

when someone reefers to security I always want to scream that's your job... The Base not an extra that you should be praised for...

For example the nominet web server does not even enforce its own cipher preference so maybe just maybe you should fix that BASIC thing.

This is a public facing supposedly security conscious root of trust type organisation and it cant even get its website security right... who knows whats going on behind the scenes.

I have no pity

After 11 years, Australia declares its national broadband network is ‘built and fully operational’

Fibre to the Premises

5G is a joke you only have to look at a coverage map of Australia to understand that they can only install Antenna masts where there is Fibre... your essentially sharing a Fibre connection

Maybe the current bunch of bastards (Australia slang for members of parliament) get in again the NBN might well be sold off to the highest bidder and the highest bidder will maximise the shareholder value by doing what telstra has done for the last years, the bare minimum to keep the money rolling in (nothing but repair and slow upgrades to existing infrastructure) there will be NO INVESTMENT.

if australia wants to be connected then INVESTMENT is the only way things will IMPROVE.

Vote for the bastards that INCREASES investment and provide for a way to EARN money in diverse places rather than just in the city (which has plenty of fibre).

UK firm NOW: Pensions tells some customers a 'service partner' leaked their data all over 'public software forum'

Re: 2%...

NOT a great idea... fines impact the organisation BETTER to impact the executives FINE the BOARD members take their house/pension and you will see security and response being prioritised

banks do this when you get a loan why cant regulators...

Expect €5m cloud, says European Centre for Midrange Weather Forecasts

only JUST in the UK as of December 10th

Dublin tried to entice ECMWF to relocate it was only recently that they renewed the UK Government commitment to build new headquarters and research facilities for ECMWF on the University’s Whiteknights campus, as confirmed by the UK Science Minister, Amanda Solloway, on 10 December.

“We welcome the clear statement from the UK Science Minister Amanda Solloway, which highlights the strong UK commitment to relocate ECMWF’s core work to new premises at the University of Reading.

“Reading is one of the world’s leading scientific centres for weather, climate and environmental science. The combined power of researchers based at the University of Reading, including units of the UK Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council, plus the core work of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, will continue to represent a scientific force that benefits the whole world.”

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

chip looks like the Annapurna Labs

this is general purpose mid range ARM stuff that is cheap hence why they are putting it into a NIC yes it can run linux and do offload for the main general purpose processor.

really this is general purpose processor being pushed into places to replace application specific integrated circuits that used to do offload, basically the complete opposite of what the exec is talking about...

dont let the details get in the way of a good story for the executive...

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

NO OpenGL ES 3.2 still ?

still no OpenGL ES 3.2 so graphics is a real pain... everything else is nice but OpenGL ES 3.2 would mean it rocked as a games device

Adobe updates Creative Cloud: Pushes out Illustrator for iPad and full sky replacement in Photoshop

Re: What does "Content Authenticity" even mean?

its the reverse from what you think it is... its not about the ability to remove meta data its about ADDing

if you want to be able to prove that the photo was taken by bob and has not been altered i.e. hash signature preservation even after editing (prove you just altered the white balance and nothing else)

its all meaningless if websites strip the metadata

the websites...

until websites support correctly:

http://www.embeddedmetadata.org/social-media-test-results.php

Instagram is the worst offender and could be turned around easily...

make sure your websites correctly attribute images/text and do not strip metadata.

Transport for London data pilot: We want to keep tabs on dockless bikes and e-bikes

dumped - gyro

the operators can easily see if the scooter is lying on its side (they have a gyro in the tracking package) and also can obtain the location via GNSS / Wifi / Bluetooth

they could start to report users or at least warn them to prop it upright in a safe place...

but thats ot really in the companies intrest and they will only do it if regulated to do so...

gbfs is pretty much useless for the regulator and gives no feed of the routes taken nor if it was dumped on its side vs standing upright it has things like android pay which is not really relevant for a regulator...

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

its how you correct that matters

People make mistakes.

The important thing is how you correct mistakes

Australia are you paying attention.

'Mindset reset' contributes to £1bn extra costs and another delay – 2 years this time – for Emergency Services Network

how is software called Kodiak supposed to work ?

how is software called Kodiak supposed to work if the handsets are all IP ala 5G stand alone and they go out of range then do they create their own network no matter the provider they where using ?

someone clearly does not understand how networks actually work... unless I'm missing something ?

Equinix warns it's infected with ransomware, promises it can carry on regardless

customer details ?

Have customer details such as people who are authorised to have access been compromised ?

(i.e. my details )

I have a sneaky suspension they have and the longer they deny it the more customers that will swear never again...

Reputations are everything and this is not the time to fudge or use a play book for a security investigation.

Remember the Titans: Yubico jangles new NFC and USB-C touting security key

standard = Webauthn

Webauthn :

It is currently supported in Windows 10 and Android platforms, and Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari (both mobile and desktop) web browsers.

Nominet backtracks on .uk domain expiration money grab, critics still fear sweetheart deal to come

exactly Not fit for purpose

they have not benefited security

they have not benefited the domain holders

they have not benefited the networks (domain registrar is not a network)

they have benefited themselves.

I would love to see a well thought out legal challenge to their "oversight" I suspect that the legal dept has a greater payroll budget than their technical dept...

payroll say's everything

Palantir: Never made a profit, we do something with family-separating ICE, we just lost $580m – please join our IPO

your right

its a tool built in java to search across information sources... nice but realistically this is what perl was created for, you have to wonder why the gov agencies did not do this themselves if they have that sort of budget but it's the American way... expensive consultants.

If they can spend that sort of money to get into gov contracts then maybe just maybe they can live of the fat of maintenance although with things transitioning it's going to be hard regardless of the politics.

Supreme Court rules against Huawei in long-rolling Unwired Planet patent sueball: Take the licence terms we set or else

2 things

1/ they are a patent troll and infact boast about it with 16 employees and no products. What it does have is a portfolio of more than 2,000 patents, mostly acquired from Ericsson AB.

2/ I wonder if they paid for the courts time ? otherwise the UK tax payer forked out for exactly nothing...

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

DNSSEC validation

if they validated the DNS response signatures then they could stop doing that...

Arm, Vodafone flex their muscles to show Cisco they’re fighting fit on the edge

would that be a 16 core machine ?

Features

16 Cortex-A72 CPU cores, running up to 2.2GHz

18MB cache/on-chip memory

Up to 16 Ethernet ports

Supported Ethernet speeds include 1, 2.5, 10, 25, 40, 50, and 100 gigabits per second

114Gbps Layer 2 Ethernet switch

Up to 24 PCIe Gen3 lanes, supporting ports as wide as x8

50Gbps security accelerator

100Gbps data compression/decompression engine

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

Re: less than ideal

There are no T&C's on the William Gates Building stop being provocative and spreading misinformation

The mail being delivered solely through Microsoft networks is an issue.

less than ideal

Security wise it would be less than ideal if they transitioned all their MX records to exchange online, some dept's would have T&C's they could not use i.e. software security research into vulnerability of Microsoft products means data can be compromised when flowing through Microsoft's network...

plus Microsoft while it has said they will support DANE for some office365 they have not committed for all which would disavow some grant applications while Exim has supported that option for years.

All of Cambridge's email data transmission would flow through Microsoft and they can use that Meta Data... if you think adverts targeting you are creepy...

Bored binge-watchers bork beleaguered broadband by blasting bandwidth: Global average speeds down 6.31%

data from measurement lab

The actual data came from measurement lab and is open for anyone you don't need to use their report

you can test yourself here :

https://speed.measurementlab.net/

its actually interesting to see what people get

the data is actually here with a map already :

https://datastudio.google.com/s/tA4mKm65BqY

John Jones

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

"issues"

Adding to Barclays issues list:

1/ Servers allow client-initiated renegotiation (DOS risk)

2/ http://Barclays.co.uk not DNSSEC signed (MitM allowed)

3/ Use messagelabs and Agari so USA get all messages

(most industries need not care but when your a bank it is a bad thing)

Working from home on Virgin Media's broadband? Too bad. Outage hits English capital

actually you pay for it

yes the upgrade might be risky but the reward is you can sell a higher bandwidth package... thats how it works... people vote with their wallets

personally I would prefer if ISP's would charge the contract owner if they got notified of bad traffic just like they do with corporate contracts.

that would force people to actually put some effort into not have infected virus laden machines lingering on their home wifi and incentivize people

having a network that supports things like DNSSEC and IPv6 would be useful not only for scalability but for network admins helping the end user track down which machine was the problem & billing, much like mobile networks do now (most mobile networks are IPv6 )

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

Solution, Billing = $

Quite easy

Bill the endpoint

This incentivizes both the ISP and the End User

The ISP can do it easily enough within the existing T&C's because their was "effort" to process the IP logs, say $10 which is waived instantly if they phone/email and declare they have cleaned up their network/PC/router

That would be attractive to the ISP (sicne people are lazy they get to keep a portion) and reward people who take care... (while educating people to the cost)

honestly I don't know why they don't do it...

Electronic health records firm Epic Bristol bags £454m in UK deals as creaking care sector chases digital transformation

another closed system with no upgrade path

whoever was on the pannel should be taken out and given some tea because clearly they cant be sane

A 2014 report by the RAND Corporation described Epic as a "closed" platform that made it "challenging and costly for hospitals" to interconnect with the clinical or billing software of other companies.[18] The report also cited other research showing that Epic's implementation in the Kaiser Permanente system led to efficiency losses.

does it link to anything else without costly "variations" ?

good luck

Australia's contact-tracing app still basically borked on iOS, says new bug report – and GAPPLE API version tested

Re: some tech journalism please

actually I rather like someone in the tech press actually following up on stories

(I used to call it journalism/professionalism)

if your actually interested in the background I suggest you research using the information in the article as a starting point, that's what I did and found this :

COVIDSafe's new payload encryption scheme :

https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing

Scottish cops dangle £6m for help understanding 160TB treasure trove of structured and unstructured data

a single rack

not exactly a data lake if your requirements is a single rack of storage and CPU even if data doubles this is not high amounts of data infact do they not have camera's in those police cars ?

An Internet of Trouble lies ahead as root certificates begin to expire en masse, warns security researcher

start using DANE and CA if you must

honestly yes many systems use a certification authority and its time to move on to a DNS based system where you can choose your CA (self signed or with a CA) it also nicely describes what legal system ( jurisdiction ) applies, .uk or .de

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7671

easy to deploy today with your existing certificate with usefulness for SMTP and in the future HTTPS

British Army pulls up its SOC: New regiment to do infosec work even civvies will recognise

sort out STIX and DNSSEC

Can they please sort out DNSSEC deployment so that devices can actually verify the host names of what they are connecting to ?

Namesco email 'scripting error' has last bastion of Demon Internet holdouts scratching their heads

buy a real domain or/and use https://mailbox.org

I miss demon internet... move yourself to your own domain and maybe use https://mailbox.org a secure hosting company

Had a bad weekend? Probably, if you're a Sectigo customer, after root cert expires and online chaos ensues

TLS cert in DNS -> DANE

"integrate the CA functionality into their external DNS server"

you can do that now with DANE for example backward compatible for browsers :

https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/06/lets-encrypt-dane/