* Posts by Xalran

319 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Apr 2020

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Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

Xalran
Alert

Re: Root cause

They area already setting high voltage infrastructure on fire in Germany, so the rest of Europe is probably not far from sabotaging water and blocking drains.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Xalran
Devil

It can still be done...

You can still do it with any email client that gives you access to the mail header before it gets sent.

For example you can still do it with Thunderbird.

At one point it was even possible iwht Outlook, but they seem to have removed that option.

Now I won't give you how to do it... If you're a real Vulture you either already know or it won't take long find the way.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Xalran

Re: Not new just worse

If it's not embeded as a printed circuit in the black box that controls everything, it's one of the many wire that comes out of it and go to various locations in the car...

Xalran

Re: can I turn them off

It's embeded deeply in the car control unit ( you know that not so little black box that controls everything in the car and can't be opened ).

As for the minimal, it's minimal due to :

- the number of SIMs

- the usage

It's on the order 1 to 5 Euros per year per SIM card. Many Car Constructor uses Telecom Network IaaS provided by Telecom Equipment Vendors or Major Telecom Operators.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Xalran

Re: Fluoroacetonitrile

I wouldn't be surprised if when burning it turns into CFC ( ChloroFluoroCarbon ) beside LiF and HF.

It would make for an interesting and nasty mix... I really wouldn't want to be remotely near a burning EV with that kind of battery. At least not without an acid resistant, full life support suit.

Xalran

Re: Tesla owners complained....

nowadays, it doesn't matter, especially in Europe, all the new vehicles ( and most of the recent ones ) be it EV or ICE can be bricked from a borg-cube. They all have, hidden deeply in their electronics a nice 4G/5G phone to call home the ( or be called by ) borg-cube.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

Xalran

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

Most of the cables in the English Channel nowadays uses the holes where trains go swooooosh!!!!...... Also known as the Channel Tunnel.

Why bother taking the risk of having your cable ripped by a French/English/Belgian/Irish/Spanish/whomever trawler that ply the Channel waters when you have a nice hole in the ground where the only risk is an eventual burning truck every few decades.

Now the power cables between UK and France are not in the Channel Tunnel due to technical reasons.

The main reasons is that the electromagnetic disturbances caused by a DC current cable would be massive on the tunnel installations.

Also IIRC the power cables have been put in a trench that has been refilled with the local sand so they can't really be caught by an anchor...

But all that is specific to the English Channel, everywhere else in the world telecommunication cables are just sitting duck to a stray anchor except when they come near the coast ( they are hidden in sand within a few miles of the coasts )

Xalran

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

For some cables they don't even have to bother (AAE-1 specifically) they can damage/destroy the ground station in Yemen without having to play grappling hook with the cable.

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Xalran

Re: No WFH - WTF

The French branch of a Swedish $TELCO company was reimbursing IKEA desks and/or office chairs ( from a selection ) or up to 500€ if you didn't want to go IKEA.

It assumed you had the room to install an office somewhere... Most of those that used it found room for it, others just went for an office chair...

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Xalran

When I dealt with servers, the standard SUN Rack was rated to host 3 V880/V890, since each of those beast was weighting between 150 and 200Kg ( depending on configuration ), the rack had to be able to hold at least 600Kg. ( and obviously the raised floor had too )

( don't ask me how you service the top V880/V890... just remember one important thing : those flimsy anti-tilt bars on a SUN Rack that can be extended from the bottom are probably not enough, I never tried it, I used Schroff racks with a massive and heavy plate bolted at floor level ( raised or not ) that was doing the job )

Data wrangler Zuckerberg becomes world's least likely cattle rancher

Xalran
Coat

Evil Magnate Volcano Lair ?

Why does that ring a bell ?

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Xalran

Re: "If a printer is connected to the internet, the update downloads automatically"

why bother ?

And in many cases, people don't have enough control over the triple play box to block a specific outgoing traffic.

A Home Printer should not be on a network, any network... It should be connected through an USB cable.

That way it can't stealth update it's firmware while your computer is off.

US fusion energy dreams edge closer to reality, Congress permitting

Xalran

Something Important To Remember

Something Important to Remember about the energy involved...

The Energy Generated is more than the Energy Delivered to generate said Energy Generated....

It's not the Energy Used to create the x-ray beam that delivered the Energy Delivered.

The Energy Used is still several factor higher than the Energy Generated.

FCC really, truly won't give SpaceX nearly a billion bucks for Starlink rural broadband

Xalran

Re: The problem with the Last Mile...

Well they know what's needed to replace the last copper mile... It's called fiber...

The main problem is that it costs money to set it, and none of the operators wants to pay for it.

That's why USA is lagging behind in fiber deployment compared to other countries like in Europe.

In Europe in most countries there's a requirement that the operators needs to cover a specific percentage of the people and a specific percentage of the country in a given time.

Sure it can't really be applicable at the USA level, but at each state level it is probably applicable... if the states can do it.

Activist Investor Elliott calls for a management reboot at Crown Castle

Xalran

Re: Elliott

Don't worry, if it's not done already Telstra, Optus and friends will create a shell company to dump their towers into...

All the operators around the world are doing it ( or have done it ). In some case, they also dumped the fiber network too.

It's the good old CAPEX Vs OPEX scheme...

Companies hates CAPEX as it's money that depreciates over time, incurs taxes, stays in the bottom line and it's blocked in actual physical assets.

they prefer OPEX, because they can adjust it as they see fit, it's flexible, it's not in the bottom line and it's only tied to the paper it's written on.

As for Elliot, they are like a Hyena gang, they find a target and kill it by stripping it of everything that has any amount of value leaving a skeleton that has no internal real value.

Vultures have a better behaviour, they only swoop in when the target is dead and removes the interesting bits from the dead body.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Xalran

Unions are not optional

Elon forgot a small detail in that mess... in Sweden, Unions are not optional, to the point that companies can't do anything affecting employees without their agreement.

Another thing : European Workers Unions are not like American ones. And a given union in a country can cover lots of jobs in many branches of the industry.

( for example : a given car maker union is jusst a branch of the wider metallurgy union which is just a branch of an union that covers everything tied to the industry... But that also has branches in banking, TV, and more )

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Xalran

Re: The New and Improved "Bovine Adjustment Implement"

Don't spray it... Use it in a SMD ( Small Methanization Device ) to get Methane to power up the Improved Bovine Adjustment Implement.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Xalran

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

A bit of both.

While it would have been nice to visit all those exotic destinations, I'm not fond of tropical climates.

And the way the paperworks needed for travel in $CORPORATE is such that basically It was impossible for me to get anybody relevant to start booking stuff for me.

Self booking is the rule, but for that you need a puny thing called a "Network" which is a number/code in SAP telling beancounters on what to invoice the costs from a trip ( as well as the hour spent working on a given project )... And I didn't have that number/code, It was technically what I asked with the "Who's going to pay" question

Xalran

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

I relate... I almost did something similar...

A global update was to be performed on Firewalls that managed VPNs, and I was asked bu $CORPORATE to babysit to process ( parse : be on site to press the reset button ) on all the firewalls I was in charge of.

I pointed out that I would need some serious plane travel into remote locations ( like Wallis & Futuna, that's somewhere in French Polynesia in the Southern Pacific ) and that in some case, by the time things were finished I would have to wait there the next week plane, and then asked the stupid question : who was going to pay ? [because I was going to do a full around the world trip, spend a week here and there ( generally a nice tropical island ) for 5 minutes of waiting or at worst a day or two, and all those plane trips being way longer than 4hours I was entitled to at least premium if not business premium on the flights ]

There was a blank for about 30 seconds and I got told that that needed to be sorted [ obviously they hadn't thought of it ]... a few days later, I got an email telling me that finally they were going to take the risk having nobody on site and if an Issue occurs they'll tell me to ask the custmer to press the button.

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

Xalran
Devil

I wonder what...

The PFY intended to do with QUICKLIME...

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Xalran

Re: Ouch!

It's worse than that in French...

welding and soldering are translated as souder.

The difference is made by the equipment used :

Fer à Souder : Soldering Iron

Poste de Soudure ( à l'arc ) : ( arc ) welding station

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic

Xalran

Re: What happened to .....

It's gone commercial, even if Airbus wasn't involved in it.

https://beyond-the-sea.com/en/

I saw a news that the first ship just did it's first Atlantic crossing a few weeks ago...

World checks it's not April 1 as Apple signals support for full US right-to-repair rule

Xalran

Re: "They use third-party parts"

Not even the 4th shift...

I'll give an example related to IP and fiber networks. SFP modules, lets say a Finisar 1GB SX module, can come in with many other companies brand on it.

It can come with the -RB tail to tell you it's an Ericsson Approved module

It can come with the -SU tail to tell you it's a Summit/Extreme Approved module

It can come with a Cisco reference, making it Cisco Approved,

It can come with a Juniper reference ,making it Juniper Approved.

And if you put a non approved module ( or one approved by another brand ) into an equipment most of the time they will whine about it, even with the plain Finisar one, but that's it.

But in the end they are all the same exact SFP module with the same exact specifications and they are all built in the same factories, it's just a set of bits in the firmware that tells the label branding.

And the Finisar ( without any other label ) SFP is way cheaper than any of the branded ones...

The only difference is that during productions a few bits were burned in the ROM to define a given brand and a brand specific label was put on the SFP.

Xalran

Re: "They use third-party parts"

You know that you can block a mobile phone to ever be used once it's been stolen ?

It's called IMEI blacklisting, and at least in Europe it's mandatory for the $TELCO.

If you're phone gets stolen, you give the IMEI to the police, and voila, the phone can't be used anymore in any country that share the blacklist.

The nice thing is that you can't change the IMEI of a mobile.

The caveat is that the phone can still be used in countries/ on telecom networks that don't have and share the blacklist.

Tell me Huawei: Chinese giant wants to know what made EU label it high security risk

Xalran

Re: This is oversimplistic.

Marvell is not a *key infrastructure player*... It's like Qualcomm a semiconductor vendor.

True they have a package of nice IP tied to 5G and to the silicon they sell, but they are not infrastructure vendors.

In telecom Key infrastructures players are not many : and are easy to identify :

- Nokia

- Ericsson

- ZTE

- Huawei

- Samsung ( mainly for Korea )

- NEC ( mainly for Japan )

You can add Cisco & Juniper because nowadays telecoms means IP Transport and that's about it.

EU threatens X with DSA penalties over spread of Israel-Hamas disinformation

Xalran

Re: Only X ?

It can be as simple as looking at the number of people reporting false information/disinformation for each platform and then hitting the one with the largest number of reports.

Here in France we have a centralized reporting tool : https://www.internet-signalement.gouv.fr/PharosS1/

Once reported, the platforms have 24 hours to comply.

There's probably the same kind of tool in all the EU countries...

X confuses the masses by removing all details from links

Xalran

Re: Cats and Vultures

"What on Earth were the banks thinking of to lend him money in the first place?"

Easy : Banks only lend to people with money... And Musk has a lot of money ( even if it's held under the form of company shares, so it varies, but even at it's lowest that _a lot of money_ )

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

Xalran

Re: Won't someone think of the rodents?

the worst that would have happened would have been Windows 3.1 to crash back to DOS...

Then it's DOS CLI to find back the files. ( or Norton Commander/PCTools )

After all Windows 3.1/3.11 were just GUI on top of DOS... Even 95/98 were also GUIs on top of DOS, they were just better at hidding it. It took W2K to really remove the DOS from the boot path.

EU right to repair updates pass latest hurdle

Xalran

Re: That's Phillips screwed then.....

As far as I can tell they are and will have to adapt.

It's not just Apple that was targeted by that EU ruling, but all the companies that makes stuff with a rechargeable battery... so mouses, keyboards, shavers, and more will have to adapt.

( at least that my understanding of all the legalese )

Russian allegedly smuggled US weapons electronics to Moscow

Xalran

Re: Why bother?

Since the provided equipment until recently is from the 1970s era, it's relevant for it to be a bit dated compared to '80s.

For example : the AMX10-RC was designed in 1970, the Leopard 1 was designed between 1956 and 1961 and the 2 in the 70s , the M113 is also a '60s beast, and the Bradley design date back to 1963...

Strangely, your Orcish friends didn't manage to grab a Caesar ( '90s development ), Challenger 2 ( '90s development ), M270 MLRS ( '80s development ) or HIMARS ( '90s development )...

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Xalran

2/3G going the way of the Dodo...

Lots of stuff in the comments... Anyway.

Why is 3G ( and by extension 2G ) going the way of the Dodo ?

It's a simple frequency matter. They need to go to make room to 5G. ( and to a lesser extend to a better 4G )

In Europe ( and UK ) :

- most of the 2G Frequencies are in the 900Mhz and 1800Mhz range.

- most of the 3G Frequencies are in the 900Mhz and 2100Mhz range. ( I guess you start to see the issue )

- most of the 4G Frequencies are in the 700MHz, 800Mhz, 900Mhz, 1800Mhz, 2100Mhz and 2600Mhz range ( now it should start to become obvious )

- most of the 5G Frequencies are in the 700MHz, 800Mhz, 900Mhz, 1800MHz, 2100Mhz, 2600Mhz and 3500Mhz ( now it should be obvious )

you can only cram so many channels in a given frequency range...

So you need to free the range from the stuff that used it ( say ditch the 2/3G in the 900Mhz/1800Mhz/2100Mhz ) in order to reuse it for a new purpose. ( say 5G )

That's also what occurred with the 700Mhz range, it was used by the TV broadcast, and with DVB-T they freed most of the range to be reused in mobile phones.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Xalran

you could have a bunch of Kv... as long as there's less than 200mili amperes going through you'll stay alive.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Xalran

*Were people really PAYING for low-resolution background images for their phones for "a few years"?*

Yep, lasted for about 6/7 years between the first ones that could be bought and installed through WAP and the last ones that were sold and put on the phones through early 3G.

For the tech savvy : it lasted as long as GPRS and EDGE where the only option in town, once 3G came ( and the smartphone craze ) all those companies when the way of the Dodo or moved to Internet.

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Xalran

Re: Expertise

I went for awk...

Xalran

Re: Expertise

those embeded ^Z reminds me of a call worthy of *On Call*

the short version is : backbone router upgrade failed, On call engineer had to go on site as remote access was dead, he found that only half the configuration was loaded and had to reload the other half through the local serial port... post-mortem showed several ^D & ^Z hidden in the configuration file... Configuration reload had stopped at the first one. ISP was unhappy and requested a verification tool.

( and putting the conf in vi and :set list was not an acceptable verification tool... despite the fact that it's how we found out )... Got a kludgy shell script wrote in 10 minutes that they probably still use.

Let's give these quadruped robot dogs next-gen XM7 rifles, says US Army

Xalran

Re: Geneva Conventions

Well, seeing how *some* countries, despite being signatory, consider the Geneva Convention and it's various addendums... by targeting civilians, using scorched earth strategy, Rape/Pillage/Plunder and so on..

Even if an addendum was written on autonomous weapons, it first would have to be signed by countries, and then actually upheld...

Xalran
Coat

K9

I wonder why nobody went the K9 way... with the rotating ears/antennas and the complete ground effect ( with wheel )...

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Xalran

here in France, Orange ( Former Wanadoo/France Telecom ) initially offered Usenet, 1Gb webspace and a few more things almost nobody cared about...

The few more things almost nobody cared about were the first to go more than a decade ago... then 7ish years ago Usenet was put on the chopping block, and now the 1GB web hosting will be a gonner on September 5. We still have the ability to have multiple email addresses ( up to 5 ) with the Internet access, and the Internet Access is nowadays a mandatory triple play box that you have to rent with a MAC address lock. ( so you need a router that can have MAC addresses configured if you want to try to get rid of the triple play box )

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

Xalran

Re: This project must not be allowed to happen

*That might be true, but if there is any construction at the airport, which seems to be continuous, parking is full where you wanted to park and must now visit a lot further away. Just as you park up you will see the shuttle bus headed away so you have to wait 10-15 minutes for the next one to make its loop.*

I'm not dumb enough to go to the airport with a car... that I don't own anyway. For ORY, from home, I have two options, both are about 20 minuteish... and reliable enough ( bus line, a bus ever 10 minutes, RER + Orlyval, one train every 5 to 7 minutes ) and soon I'll add a direct subway ( which will reduce the trip to 12 minutes )

There's always construction works, but they are a non issue.

* I would guess you have no luggage, even carry-on and your boarding pass doesn't have the code "SSSS" meaning a trip to the back room and a bit of groping prior to departure. *

Just a carry on backpack... and the SSSS code doesn't exist here, so no back room groping. At worst you're tagged for a shoe & hand brush to check if you handled drugs or explosive, and it takes a minute for the result. ( which occurs while your putting back in your bag and pockets all the things you removed from there for the security check so no delay )

As I said, this is only valid for flight inside the EU ( + Norway and Switzerland ), for flights across the Pond it's another matter... ( and CDG is much further away )

Xalran

Re: The real problem with Concorde.....

The main problem of the Soviet Concordsky was that the spy didn't manage to get the exact values used for the wings.... they only managed to steal "work in progress" values which led to a double angled wing on the TU-144 while the Concorde has a double curved one. This forced the TU-144 to have canard wings in front... because the Soviets wanted to have, and show their supersonic before the West.

Xalran

Re: The real problem with Concorde.....

It was not just French... IIt was a cooperation between France and UK ( imagine Frogs and Rosbeefs cooperating to snub Rednecks )

Xalran

Re: This project must not be allowed to happen

Last time took the plane ( it was just before COVD lockdowns ) I only had to be at the airport gate 15 minutes before... which meant reaching the airport ( in my case ORY ) half an hour before and spending about 15 minutes navigating security and corridors to the gate... not 3 hours.

Now this is valid for most EU Internal flights, and s definitely not valid when you fly wth some specifc companies where there's multple layers of security checks on top of the airport provided ones ( El Al for example )

I can't imagine any company not offering a special fast lane through security along with supersonic flights, since the ticket price would be high enough to provide that kind of service ( and the people paying for supersonic flight expect that kind of service )

Hacktivists attack Japanese government over Fukushima wastewater release

Xalran

Re: Natural tritium

they probably are not even aware that the largest source of Uranium in the world is the oceans...

It's just cheaper, for the time being, to dig it out of the ground than filter mllions of cubic meters of water.

Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock paywalled features

Xalran
Facepalm

software lockout on heated seats ?

Erm, did it occurs to anybody that heated seats are just resistors and can be controlled by a button ( controlling a an adjustable resistor, or just an on/off button )... Instead of a computer.

Until recently ( and according to the rented car I had two week ago, ) it was controlled by buttons, so it shouldn't be too hard to just bypass the whole computer thing, hardwire a button ( I know it's not easy on some touchscreen mad modern cars, especially Teslas ) and you're done.

Next they are going to tell you ABS is optional ( since it was at some point in the past... 30ish years ago, it's not far fetched ) and you will have to pay a rent for a proven safety feature...

Hide and seek in outer space highlights a battle here on Earth

Xalran

Re: Troubles in Physics

"though natural plutonium has been hypothesised"

I'll points you towards Olko and it's natural reactors... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

over their *operational time* they produced the whole set of fission products you'd expect to see coming out of any nuclear power plant n the world.

The French version of the page state that it's estimated that about 1.5T of Plutonium was produced :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9acteur_nucl%C3%A9aire_naturel_d%27Oklo

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Xalran

Re: With apologies to Phil Collins

well technically I'm an Illegal Engineer... and have been so for about two decades.

While I don't know the Texas thing, here in France Engineer is a Title ( technically ) only people with an Engineer Diploma can have.

And they ( technically ) are the only ones allowed to be employed in engineer roles.

That's the Letter of the thing, now it's been shrugged off by the whole industry and people that have what we call a DUT or a BTS ( university technology diploma or superior technician diploma ) or ( more lrarely ) lower diplomas with enough skills and experience are given engineer unofficial titles so that they can be employed in engineer roles.

Xalran

Memories

Remember the day I did a Site Survey in a $TELCO operator building ( built in the Stroger/rotary era ) where said $TELCO wanted to locate it's main bunch of Network operation datacenter....

On the top floor, just under the roof.

The main issue was not the lack of HVAC ( it was in the building and you could clearly see the external part on the roof of the more recent part of the site. ), nor the 10cm high raised floor ( we had 6m of ceiling clearance ), not even that fact that an uninsulated zinc ( Paris favorite ) roof was going to be a PITA to deal with for the HVAC...

Nah, the main issue was the hoist anchor, that couldn't handle more than 500Kg and it was going to be more or less impossible use a crane, because of the trees between the street and the building, to lift all those Heavy SUN racks to the 7th Floor. ( stairs and lift were not an option, the last set of stairs was barely large enough for one person and worthy of any medieval dungeon for it's rotation )

In the end they chose another location that only involved pushing them around on their rollers.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Xalran

ROGUE or MUD ?

That is the question...

Since it's the BOFH I'd say MUD, ROGUE is too mainstream for the BOFH and the PFY... and they have servers to spare to set up a full MUD with only two players.

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

Xalran

Re: Wait ... there is more

Dual stack has been operational for at least a decade in France wth ISPs.

Ok, you need the right triple play box and usually a fiber access. though Free is known for also dong dual stack on xDSL lines.

Now I agree with you that we will have to dual stack for quite a while as there's still CPE, PE and backbone stuff here and there that don't handle IPv6 well or not at all, and you can't really force a company that owns it's PE to replace it because of IPv6.

US Air Force's Angry Kitten turns Reaper drone into fierce feline of electronic warfare

Xalran

Kittens...

And next we will have Exploding Kitten pods...

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