Posts by uro

Adobe confirms UK looking into its $20b Figma deal, EU probe 'expected'

Adobe is lying

Adobe's chief product officer Scott Bellsky told Bloomberg the company was commited to a free tier post-acquisition.

Adobe has previous for promising a product's existing price model would remain as-is after takeover which is a bare-faced lie, history already demonstrates this if you look back when they bought Allegorithmic, creators of Substance Painter & Designer, within a year they canned Allegorithmic's existing pricing models including those available via the Steam platform and integrated them into Adobe's own pricing model which is far more expensive with less end-user options than before they bought Allegorithmic.

Adobe is an anti-consumer company, if they can sucker you into their platform they will bleed you dry with their exorbitant monthly fees, they force people to sign up "monthly" contracts in actual they bind their customers to a 12 month agreement hidden in the small print - even if you only want to use their product for say 3 months - you are contracted to pay via the small print for the full 12 months even though their product is advertised with monthly fees.

Samsung slaps processing-in-memory chips onto GPUs for first-of-its-kind supercomputer

I'd imagine when PIM becomes more accessible/available then AMD's Orochi software will be used by a lot more developers since they then only need to program gpu code once for the Orochi API and run their code on any gpu architechture available to them.

Orochi is open source and MIT licenced, it is gpu hardware agnostic and easily extendable to support more hardware API's than HIP and CUDA which is supports at the moment, coding once and running anywhere will be a boon in eliminating manually translating code for different GPU compute API's.

https://gpuopen.com/orochi/

https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/Orochi

It's official: UK telcos legally obligated to remove Huawei kit

This weeks CISA Vulnerability Bulletin has 16 seperate vulnerabilities in Cisco software and firmware, out of all the network vendors I frequenty see Cisco in CISA Bulletins, Juniper less so, no idea about Huawei as I haven't seen any items reported by CISA on them for a while, they may have even stopped reporting on them due to the US sanction regimes in place.

Fujitsu and Japanese Uni propose 'endorsement layer' to make the internet trustable

With an already highly propagandised media in the west where we have mainstream news organisations openly reporting with political bias and being under the control of state-entities & western oligarghs where they are editorialised into pushing the political views and agendas of their owners instead of a real "free press" where journalists report factual information with source citations and investigate all claims political or otherwise without fear or favour and the freedom to whistleblow when it is required, how can we lay any trust in an "endorsement layer" when our current mainstream media is so openly politically & socially manipulative and morally corrupt.

Unless this "endorsement layer" is 100% transparent in ownership, funding streams and operation with the software stack fully free open-source I dont see it going anywhere, they are trying to set up an informational root-of-trust, an information firewall, but as with any root of trust how much trust do you hold in any organisation operating it, no less one that is filtering the very information you consume?

Say for example a botnet manipulates a piece of information in this "endorsement layer" to push it to a high level of "endorsement" what will they have to combat that? Already on social media networks today you can easily find posts full of unverifiable content and political smear campaigns being pushed by networks of bot accounts to increase their exposure and engagement to such a high level that people will take those posts as fact just on the weight of the number of likes/shares/retweets without any source citations.

You can even see this information manipulation at work with search engines, Alphabet/Google frequently derank results that do not adhere to western hegemony and that of its owners, quite often pushing easily debunked results and unrelated results in their place and thus defacto firewalling the internet by acting as the information police.

People often decry China's "Great Firewall" project, this will be nothing more than the same if it is not a 100% open, transparent and accountable platform with regular auditing - one that will admit in the open and publicise if anything "endorsed" by it turns out to be false and/or manipulated information.

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

Re: It's official

> I thought it was ironic that an engineer employed by Intel has submitted a kernel patch that improves the performance of AMD chips. A nice example against fanboyism there...

The initial patch was submitted by AMD after they discovered the issue, the Intel engineer, Dave Hansen, cleaned it up and simplified it, so credit is due to both AMD and Intel for implementing the fix.

Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.0-AMD-Chipset-WA

Who's growing faster than Nvidia and AMD? Rising datacenter star Marvell

> "The Ethernet switch ASICs, which now fall under Marvell's Prestera brand name, competes with ASIC product lines like Intel's Tofino, Broadcom's Trident and Tomahawk, Cisco Systems' SiliconOne and Nvidia's Spectrum."

You can also find the Marvell Prestera ASICs in TP-Link's 10GbE business switches, I picked up an unmanaged one last year due to scarce supply of all things 10GbE at reasonable pricing due to the global component shortages, and Marvells 2019 aquisition of Aquantia seems to be paying off with the inclusion of their PHYs.

TPLink's TL-SX105 5 port 10GbE switch has a Marvell Prestera 98DX8208A ASIC paired with a quad-port Marvell AQrate AQR413C-B0-C 4th Generation PHY and a single port AQR113C/AQR113 giving it its 5th 10GbE port, there's also an unpopulated area of the board market out complete with traces back to the ASIC for an SPF+ cage, probably for a dedicated uplink port on an unannounced model.

It's a decent switch for SOHO if you're working with large files/datasets/media daily and dont like having to wait on file transfers to complete, provided you pair it up with decent CAT8 cabling to take advantage of the higher operating frequencies available.

Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia are top sources of online misinformation

Re: Saudi Arabia?

Dont fret, they missed out the BBC too, the UK state news agency who as recently as 2018 were highlighting Ukraine's Nazi Azov problem, then just this last week they put out a 20 minute video report saying the Azov Battallion weren't Nazis at all.

Nvidia promises British authorities it won’t strong Arm rivals after proposed merger

If the regulators want to know how Nvidia operate they just need to look at the past two decades of Nvidia selling GPUs to consumers, they have bought up competing companies and done very little with those technologies in order to control & manipulate the graphics market.

Much in the same way that other big-tech giants (google, facebook, et al) have bought out competing platforms & technology - not to push technology forward nor to give consumers more choice - but to ensure they remain on top of the pile and their vast revenue streams are protected - protected because they eliminated all of their competition and the regulators sat back and watched them do it.

For generation after generation of graphics cards Nvidia have raised MSRP prices for very little performance gains, more recently they have started pushing software gimmicks in leau of advancement in graphics technology - you just need to view their CES presentations to see that, there's been very little advancement on the hardware front year after year.

Their latest upcoming GPU release, the RTX 3080 12GB does not even come with an MSRP, this is a deliberate strategic move by Nvidia to use the current sustained trend of middlemen and scalpers to push prices of consumer graphics cards skywards which will result in an "unofficial MSRP".

This will have the effect of making Nvidia look justified when it's next series, the 40x0 series, will come to market with 4080 GPU SKUs having an MSRP starting at over $1000 - giving middelment & scalpers the scope to further push consumer prices up far above the massively inflated prices they are at right now.

We're fast heading towards a place where mid-range graphics cards, which is what the x080 sku's are & are worth no more than $400-$500 in real hardware costs, come to market with MSRPs of more than 2x-3x the actual value of the hardware.

For the CMA & other regulators to assume that Nvidia will not use these same strategic tactics to control the entire Arm ecosystem by steering the Arm IP in a direction which Nvidia wants and not what Arm's licensees request & require as well as massively driving up licensing costs while doing so - increases which Nvidia will shoehorn in after this merger goes through and a practice which they have historically done throughout their history as a company - is putting blind faith in a company that time after time very publicly demonstrates that it is only interested in controlling and manipulating the technology sector to feed its own comporate greed, not for the advancement of technology in itself and certainly not to the benefit of the licensees nor the end-user consumers of products created with Arm IP.

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Insider Preview, attempts to defend labyrinth of hardware requirements

Forcing hardware upgrades in the midst of a global silicon glut, how to do PR the Micro$oft way.

The whole forced hardware requirement on updating Windows 10 to 11 is a really bad PR move considering the entire world is in a silicon glut at the moment and to be quite honest for the froseeable future until new silicon fabs are constructed & those currently under contruction are fully operational for chip pricing and availability to fall back to "normal" levels before many people will even consider upgrading hardware, nobody wants to pay much higher than MSRP for silicon that is out of date within a few years.

I get the whole TPM thing, all my systems have TPM 2.0 along with Secure Boot, security is paramount in an ever connected world (and also secure virtualization which M$ are pushing heavily).

However, there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of systems out there that do not support TPM 2.0 or it is only available via a TPM 2.0 module for the motherboard (which the enablement of may or may not even be accessible from the BIOS depending on vendor) and which have already have had any available stock vacuumed up to be resold at massively inflated prices on ebay.

By forcing this on those users in the current silicon climate there are going to be an awful lot of people running Windows 10 (or still running Windows 7 *gasp*) for a very long time past Micro$oft's proposed sunset date for W10.

The most insane thing of all is Micro$oft not adding a feature to their "PC Health Check" app do the leg work and return the meta-data from users running it to build a database of supported hardware that way.

Alternatively they could use their insider builds to harvest meta-data on compatability from people running those (they probably already are), because evidently Micro$oft have only tested the last two generations of cpus and nothing prior to that, not even their own Surface books.

With that insider build datamining they could easily scrape that data back to Redmond and at least begin to formulate a database of compatible hardware from that data in addition to their "PC Health Check" app, which in turn would allow them to better inform their userbase of potential hardware vs. software conflicts preventing them upgrading their operating system to the latest patched version.

That would potentially allow the big OEM's to inform their clients (and regular users to infrom themselves) whether they need to upgrade their entire inventory of office computers this year, next year or within the next five years, thereby saving everyone a lot of hassle and expense, although that may be part of their plan, we are talking about Micro$oft here after all.

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

This just demonstrates that Nominet board members and staff think they are above and beyond scrutiny, they seem to think they are beyond reproach, that they are in some way untouchable through their continued support and back rubbing of each other, they have long since circled their wagons.

The only way to fix this is for entire board to be sacked, with staffers suspended until such a time as an open investigation into their actions is completed.

I'd suggest another EGM is held at the earliest opportunity, with the ousting of the entire board and suspension of staff due to the internal corrupt practices we are watching unfold infront of us being high on the agenda.

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

Failing Grayling would no doubt throw cash at a registrar that is hastily set up and doesn't have any domain registrations under its belt, such is his pattern of behaviour.

While Reg readers know the difference between a true hacker and cyber-crook, for everyone else, hacking means illegal activity

"It's a matter of some frustration, and we do what we can. But expecting the mainstream media to differentiate between a cracker, hacker, skimmer or script kiddie is asking a lot of education in the small sound bites their viewers depend on."

It could be argued that its a complete failure on the part of mainstream media in such that in order to create the controversail headlines they use to actively drive sales (which they do with with everything), they have completely failed their readers & customers by not fully explaining in non-technical terms the differences between, hacking, cracking, scripting, skimmer, black-hat, white-hat, etc.

While I agree that hacking is not a crime, due to the "small sound bite" sales driven bias in mainstream media and the complete lack of explanatory content within each article, it has been widely projected as a criminal act rather than a cause for good.

Apple slapped with €60m lawsuit from Italian consumer rights org for slowing down CPUs in old iPhones

iOS 11.2 killed my IPhone 6S+, I have replaced the lightning port (just in case, even though it was clean) and the battery for a genuine Apple battery and the handset is kaput, it wont charge nor power on.

It turns out from research and watching a few Louis Rossman videos that it's most likely burned out the silicon in the power/charge IC on the phones' board - something I have no tooling to be able to replace, let alone any available spares to replace the chip with.

Thankfully most of my data was already backed locally up via itunes, I create a backup whenever I plug my phone into the PC/itunes which wasn't too long before Apple bricked my handset, so I restored onto a new iphone 12 and grabbed the rest of my data from the cloud.

All in all it was a complete pain in the arse experience, Apple Support did reach out on twitter offering the usual "send it in and we'll take a look*" (* and charge you exhorbitant fees for each component that needs replaced), given its the power IC they'd most likely replace the entire board, the same board which has all my data stored on it. So I would in effect get a repaired / entirely different handset back without my data onboard along with a large bill.

In any case I opted for the more future-proof option of a new handset. Some of you will be asking why go back to Apple - better the devil you know, I've never liked Android nor trusted Alphabet/Google, if Blackberry were still making their own handsets with their own OS I'd have jumped back to them.

So for anyone saying the accusation that Apple deliberately release software updates that throttle and/or brick older handsets is false, you are talking bollocks.

Users complain iOS 14.2 causes some older iPhones to overheat, rapidly lose charge

Re: Either the iOS 14.2 update bricked my IPhone 6s+ or it killed the lightning port &/ battery

I have already checked for lint/dirt in the port and its as clean as it can be, I even blew it out with compressed air just for good measure, prior to the 14.2 install everything was working and the handset was charging as I charged it prior to updating.

The replacement lightning port and battery should be here by the end of the week, I'll know for sure if its bricked after that.

Either the iOS 14.2 update bricked my IPhone 6s+ or it killed the lightning port &/ battery

Last week I decided to plonk the latest Cupertino$oft v14.2 onto my Iphone 6s+, so in preperation I fully charged the battery as I always have done.

I then ran the built in software update, everything installed normally as is usual with previous Cupertino$oft updates, so far so good, I then updated any apps that required updating post-os update as per norm.

It was nearing the midnight hour, so I plugged my iphone in to charge overnight and headed off to the land of zed.

The next morning I awoke, alarmless - my iphones alarm never fired - funny as I never disabled it, so I grabbed my phone and tapped the home button, nothing, nada, not even a blip on the screen nor any audible unlock sounds. (My handset has never had any battery drain nor power issues up until I installed 14.2)

Is it dead? I don't know, but I have tried every single trick in the book to get the thing to start up without any success, different chargers, cables, etc, you name it I have tried it.

I sent a tweet to @AppleSupport about it and the person on the end of the account was very polite and helpful, in DM's they tried searching for any free repair schemes they might have available for my handset (using IMEI as I couldnt get to the serial# as you can only get that on Iphone6s+ from within the OS), they came up empty.

Next, they offered to locate my nearest Apple store or repair specialist, I informed them that due to my remote location the nearest Apple anything was hundreds of miles away and would involved various methods of transport including ships/aircraft and overnight stopovers, they also offered for me to mail it in to them for repair - my phone has personal & business data onboard that I will not risk a third party gaining access to so that option is completely out.

The iPhone will not charge at all & obviously due not charging it will not power on anymore, so I have ordered a replacement lightnight port and battery (both genuine apparently, time will tell) for the iphone 6s+ which should be arriving any day now, hopefully those will fix it at least long enough to slavage my data off the thing.

If all goes well, post repair I shall plug it into my PC, grab a backup and then tranfer everything to a new handset I aquired meantime, however if after replacing these component it also sucks the battery dry in a short while and bricks it again I will let @AppleSupport know about it and the only thing that changed on my handset prior to it bricking was the OS.

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Excel is the scourge that just wont die.

I can literally hear the life-blood of programmers and scientists being sucked out them in the background upon reading this article.

I'd have thought surely by now we'd have an open document format for sheets which is both backwards and forwards compatible with databases (either directly or via db extension), so instead of passing around a dinosaur file format you could just send a database along with it's rules, table links & functions, and the end user could then load it into their own database or into their office suite of choice and not be tethered to Micro$oft.

Windows 10 October 2020 Update arrives: Nothing that will drop your jaw, but we've had enough of 2020's fun surprises anyway

Re: Update blocking info

I had the same issue with v2004, refusing to install on Zen2+X570 meanwhile my i7-4770k system from 2012 updated to v2004 without issue.

I checked all my motherboard, chipset and peripherals for updated drivers and I was already on the latest driver for all of those, so I went through the MS Update Assistant to force v2004 onto my system and everything worked perfectly fine post install and I never unplugged any peripherals pre-update.

Previously on my i7-4770k system Windows Update itself b0rked that machine from recieving any updates (even the usual minor suspects - dotnet, defender etc) and I had to force it to update to v1909 by using the often never mentioned Upgrade-In-Place option, ever since it has been fine and v2004 installed first time with no issues.

IMO the Windows Update system, while it is great for keeping everything updated, is not free of its own self-defeating flaws which I have experienced twice on two entirely different systems running different versions.

In any case I'm going to let the v20h2 update hold off for a week on both systems before I take the plunge as I'm fairly sure there will be the usual MS-snafu of something breaking along the way that hasn't been reported yet.

2020 hasn't been all bad – a new Raspberry Pi Compute Module is here

Re: Still needs cooling

The heat issue with the RPi4B is pretty shocking, aside from industrial use these are targetted towards getting kids into compute/robotics/etc and they could easily burn themselves if they touched the SoC.

I did some benchmarks using openbenchmarking with the RPi4B to compare it against the Odroid N2 in performance and thermals:

Stock : So hot it was thermal throttling all through the benchmarks - Min: 62C / Avg: 78.9C / Max: 85.2C

With XL heatsink: cooler than stock but not a great improvement - Min: 55.5C / Avg: 74.91C / Max: 84.2C

With a heatsink + Noctua 60mm PWM fan at 3.3v: Manageable - Min 35.1C / Avg: 43.92C / Max: 51.6C

As Above but at 5v, diminishing returns - Min: 33.6C / Avg: 40.82C / Max: 47.7C

Odroid N2 Stock (Comes mounted to a heatsink out of the box) - Min: 35.5C / Avg: 41.05C / Max: 48.7C

The N2 blew the RPi4 away in benchmarks, it's currently in my living room operating wirelessly via a dongle as a CoreELEC/Kodi system attached to the TV and video playback is flawless on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, Twitch, plus I have the option to dual boot into Ubuntu should I feel the urge.

Comparatively the RPi4B is not the great video playback device that the RPi foundation tout it to be as it drops frames and buffers all of the time, even when wired into eth - my RPi4B is currently running node bots and n8n for IoT stuff, which they are perfectly siutable for.

Price wise the N2 is more expensive, but by the time you kit out a RPi4B with all the extra stuff you require just for it to run cooler then it is arguably more expensive than other SBC's like the N2.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation really do need to sort the thermal issues with their products out before i'll dip into my wallet for another one when competing products are better, run cooler and are much more capable.

Google wants to listen in to whatever you get up to in hotel rooms

It's not just Nest devices..

In a recent update to the Youtube app on iOS devices the app now requests access to your microphone in order for you to "Tell us what to search for giving you more accurate results by using your microphone".

While that may sound convenient for the great uninitiated, where privacy is concerned I'd rather not have a web-app listen to what im saying whenever it wants to and especially not from a data slurper such as Alphabet.

iOS does give you the option to not permit this of course, but I do wonder just how many people have tapped through the request popup and allowed it while not realising the full implications of giving unfettered microphone access to one of Alphabet's apps.

Ex-boss of ICANN shifts from 'advisor' to co-CEO of private equity biz that tried to buy .org for $1bn+

The shadiness over this issue also brings into question all of the previous TLD domain sales ICANN have done.

How long has this been going on for inside the walls of ICANN?

How many of ICANN's staff and board members, current or former have been involved in the selling of TLDs who also have undeniable links to and vested interests in the registrars who purchased those TLDs?

I'd say a full audit by the AG is in order and long overdue to ascertain whether ICANN is fit for purpose, whether any other shady deals have been done with insider information, how intertwined the staff & board members are with registrars, and whether they even are a non-profit anymore.

Take for example their recent licence amendment deal with Verisign, the .COM registrar, where from 1/1/2021 Verisign will pay ICANN $4mil USD for five years, totalling $20mil, and gain the ability to increase .COM prices by 7% / year in the last 4 years out of each six-year extension, how is that non-profit? how is that in the interests of the internet as a whole?

Without an audit there will forever be a cloud of doubt hanging over ICANN's ability to act independently, without prejudice and not for-profit.

UK intel committee on Russia: Social media firms should remove state disinformation. What was that, MI5? ████████?

What the..

"This report reveals that no one in government knew if Russia interfered in or sought to influence that referendum, because they did not want to know. UK government has actively avoided looking for evidence that Russia interfered."

...

'the government said it had "seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU Referendum" and that "a retrospective assessment of the EU Referendum is not necessary"'

UKGov being told by a comittee's report that it has been negligent on its duties to the UK's national security, responds by being negligent about national security, you literally could not make that up.

The lunatics have most definately taken over the asylum.

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Re: California AG should open a full investigation into ICANN

I wouldn't put a maximum on any specific country, instead they should enact a minimum number of board members per region (NA, SA, EU, Asia, Africa, etc), with something like 2 for each region then the remainder would be wildcards.

Anyone with any affiliation's to domain registrars / resellers should automatically be non-electable to the ICANN board as they have direct conflict of interest.

California AG should open a full investigation into ICANN

IMO the California AG should open a full investigation into ICANN, it's board members and their outside interests, there's clear conflicts of interest going on here.

For an organisation that is meant to be open, transparent and non-profit to be actively chartering shady deals like this proposed by EX-CEO's who have insider knowledge of ICANN's operations as akin to insider trading using quickly spun up shell companies - this needs to be fully exposed and investigated.

ICANN needs to be reset into a proper non-profit organisation with an independently elected board - where members have to be elected every 5 years (including maximum allowable time on the board, say 10 years / 2 terms), ICANN neeeds to have a fully audited and publicised decision making process for each and every transaction they oversee, instead of being the shady closed group that it has turned into.

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

Great, more personal data leakage from UkGov agencies.

That's another 5 UKGov agencies where personal data can leak to unscrupulous actors, we'll see more targetted spam, phishing and data being sold on the darknet.

The whole RIPA act is a massive breach of human rights, it's RIPE for being abused by anyone with access to it, meanwhile the IPC only has 50 people to check up on those who already have access, this is yet another UKGov scheme that is poorly thought out, poorly legislated, poorly implemented and massively understaffed to be checked effectively - all this ontop of breaking the human rights act.

Intel's 10th-gen Core family cracks 5GHz barrier with H-series laptop processors

According to Anandtech's press-release review these CPU's are last years Coffee-Lake rebranded and binned for voltage profile to allow the high clock, with any silicon changes being minimal and most likely hardware mitigations for Intel's own security bugs.

Those high clocks will only work on 2 cores on the CPU too, so it's basically a baseless headline of "look we OC'd a laptop to 5Ghz+", it is highly dependant on the way laptop manufacturers opt to cool their laptops, it has to be operating within it's secondary power envelope and running Intel's Thermal Velocity Boost before it will ever boost that high.

Throw in Intels recommended PL2 turbo power limit for the i9-10980HK of 135w and your going to be hunting down power outlets most of the time to recharge the thing.

This is Intel trying to protect it's mobile computing marketshare with a rebranded flawed product, this announcement is not dissimilar to the 2018 Computex demo they did of the 28 core Xeon (rebranded for PR as a desktop part) running a highly overclocked cpu to all-core 5Ghz and just happened to not mention the thing was using an industrial grade water chiller to prevent it going on fire.

Samsung says it has the future of DRAM sorted after success with new EUV process

"Already shipped a million units to good reviews, now says DDR5 will launch in 20201"

I knew DDR5 was a while away for consumers but 20201 seems a tad rediculous.

Firefox to burn FTP out of its browser, starting slowly in version 77 due in April

No need for ftp in a browser.

I haven't had the need to use FTP within a browser for a very long time, if Moz can bin the protocol I dare say no end-users would notice and it would free up Moz engineers for other projects.

I use WinSCP ( https://winscp.net ) for all my SCP/FTP/FTPS/SFTP/S3/WebDav needs, it's open source (GPL-3.0, https://github.com/winscp/winscp ) and is much more user friendly than FileZilla's terribad GUI.

For example if I log into an SFTP account with WinSCP and then need SSH terminal access I can open a PuTTY instance and login with one click from WinSCP's GUI, whereas FileZilla would mean opening a seperate terminal in PuTTy and then logging in there.

There's a bunch more QoL stuff WinSCP has which FileZilla skipped a beat on, such as master passwords to lock the application and encrypt stored credentials.

European electric vehicle sales surged in Q4 2019 but only accounted for wafer-thin slice of total car purchases

Re: Vehicle cost is a barrier to entry for the majority

"Curious about your claim of all-renewable power because unless they're on an isolated grid, they'll be pumping electrons from coal/gas/nuclear as well as 'renewables'. Especially at night on a calm day, ie no wind/solar, in which case it'll more likely be gas powered electrons. "

I live on a windy island in the north of Scotland, we have been exporting 100% renewable energy for a good few years now by using a mix of wind, tidal, wave and some solar energy generation.

SSE have a 2MW battery installed for storing excess energy as well as load balancing the local grid (fyi it was the first grid connected battery installed in the UK back in 2013).

It's very rare we have to import any electricity, should that need ever arise then with the volume of renewable generation in Scotland any imported energy will come from the nearest generation outside the local grid - which is the 398MW Maygen tidal generation array on the seabed between us and the Scottish mainland where it connects to the national grid.

We actually have to turn off generation at times due to lack of interconnector capacity to the national grid (should be rectified when OfGem stop argueing amongst themselves).

So instead of turning generation off we divert it into hydrogen production locally - it's pretty daft in anyone's book to turn generation off and not collect free energy from non-fossil resources.

That hydrogen is then used for the heating of some Schools & Community Centres, used to power ferries when docked overnight, by some council vehicles, to fuel hydrogen refuelling stations and there's even a gin distillery prototyping it's use for heating their stills instead of using LPG.

I hope that satifies your curiousity a bit, now we just need the price of vehicles to come down to sane levels so everyone here can benefit and not just the middle-upper classes.

Vehicle cost is a barrier to entry for the majority

With average UK salaries ranging between £19,000 - £34,000 (dependant on job, age, experience, etc) and with BEV's anywhere from £30,000-£60,0000++ and Hydrogen Vehicles's starting around £50,000++ they are too expensive and out of reach of the majority population, until the purchase prices come down to parity or less than the current prices of fossil fuel vehicles they will be reserved for above average earners.

In my area we have plenty of EV charging points and a few hydrogen fuelling stations all fuelled by renewable energy sources (excess energy is diverted to hydrogen production when the grid can't take anymore juice), for me it is not a lack of recharging or refuelling points but the cost of the vehicles that are a barrier to entry for all but the richest in society.

With this high cost to entry the new green revolution is going to be very slow indeed to transition away from fossil fuels.

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

It's not just Laptops and Smartphones

It's not just laptops and smartphones - outside of silicon melting and the whole battery lifetime debacle - most electronics can easily be repaired.

Usually it will be capacitors, smd-capacitors, or sometimes a fuse that will go bad and are easily repaired if your willing to grab a multi-meter & soldering iron.

Outfit's like Apple will generally tell you that your equipment is FUBAR because they are trained to expect that you will easily pay up for convenience and rather than have the problem diagnosed properly they will just tell you that "the mainboard is bad we need to replace it", when it's probably only one or two bad capacitors which could be easily replaced.

I had a 5 year old 24" 1080p monitor go bad a month ago - I knew something was up with it prior to it turning non-responsive when occasionally it refused to power on without disconnecting and reconnecting it from the mains outlet.

I tested the power supply with a multi-meter and another monitor to rule that out - all good.

So I opened the monitor up, inspected and tested the capacitors on the boards - one visually bad and another not gaining capacitance.

I opted to replace all of the capacitors as if one went bad knowing my luck the others would be near EOL too (fyi capacitor lifetime is rated by hours).

I paid less than £2 for 5 different capacitors rated at 9000h (as high a rating as I could get), a couple of days waiting on the post, an hour replacing caps and I had a fully working monitor, it's been a few weeks and no issues so I'd say it's all good, at least until the next time the caps go.

The largest issue I found while repairing my monitor was the lack of any service manuals - manufacturers don't publish these anymore, probably to protect their service departments' revenue.

Row erupts over who to blame after NordVPN says: One of our servers was hacked via remote management tool

One out of 3000 servers with improperly audited security, audit's are usually wide sweeping events which by design delve deep to scrutinise infrastructure, especially security audit's.

Given they never picked up on common out-of-band management and boot loader hardware & associated software installed on the machine by the manufacturer their audit (as well as pre-purchase/rental) policy must be completely lacking and not fit for purpose.

I'd hedge a bet that the majority of the 3000 servers they rent/own come with out of band management pre-installed by the manufacturer (whether enabled or not) and that there was also more than one out of 3000 servers with the same lacklustre security audit done on it, my bet is wholly reliant on said black-hat's publishing details they find floating around of any further deeds that may have occured.

Now to sit back and bathe in the glory of thousands of Youtube channels releasing apology videos for their paid endorsement of Nord's Virtual Public Network

Plusnet is doing us proud again with early Christmas present for customers: Price hikes

Re: We'll do you proud!

I've been with PlusNET for years, when my only option was ADSL they went out of their way to fix one of BT's screw ups at my exchange which resulted in my ADSL going from a stable 12/1(Down/Up) to 2-0/0.2-0 (variable) making it entirely unreliable and unservicable.

I switched to FTTC with PlusNET as soon as it became available a number of years ago and went for their 80/20 Mb/s package and have never had any issues with it.

I tried PlusNET mobile, which is a reseller venture piggybacking on EE and using their frequency bands which give poorer reception - it was utterly attrocious, I had to travel 3 miles away to the other side of town just to get service to be able to activate and register my sim card.

Needless to say I switched back to my old mobile supplier and swore never to go near any mobile reseller products ever again regardless of price.

So i'd hedge a bet on a lot of those complaints towards PlusNET coming from their mobile/reseller products as they are wholly reliant on spare capacity on the poorer frequency bands within EE's network.

Promise of £5bn for rural fibre prompts Openreach to reach for the trench-digging diamond cutter

Re: "new tech"

Shetland Islands Council invested £1.1m in 2011 to connect the islands to the Faroese SHEFA2 sub-sea fibre cable which lands on the islands and setup Shetland Telecom to manage it (https://www.shetlandtele.com/).

SIC took these steps as BT Openreach and C&W were refusing to connect the islands to "superfast broadband" due to the costs & technical challenge of installing fibre over long distances, stating that their existing copper network ADSL combined with Micro-Wave link to Aberdeen on mainland Scotland was sufficient at the time.

The main contractor Tulloch Developments used a Ditch Witch, one of the first in the country back in 2011, so it's only taken 8+ years for BT Openreach to discover "new tech".

https://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2011/01/19/ditch-witch-carves-out-future-of-superfast-broadband-in-shetland

There's a few videos from 2011 on Youtube of the ditchwitch in action in Shetland.

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has been used in a number of industries as well as archaeology for well over a decade, heaven help BT Openreach if they ever need to be inventive and do anything in a hurry.

Interestingly after SIC completed phase 1(connection from SHEFA2 in Sandwick to Lerwick) of the project and began phase 2 (connecting more parts of the islands to the fibre network) BT Openreach tried to lease capacity from SIC/Shetland Telecom.

Hacker House shoved under UK Parliament's spotlight following Boris Johnson funding allegs

Interesting that they changed their UK address the very same day they are mentioned in the HoC:

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09678695/filing-history

As well as the registered address of their other UK company, Innotech Network Limited:

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08424712/filing-history

107-111, Fleet Street, London, England, EC4A 2AB appears to home a rather large number of dissolved / liquidated / dormant and active companies - fairly disproportionate to the number of offices available in a 4 storey building.