Posts by R Soul

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

The PO now MUST compensate ALL of those who have been cleared

That's going to be difficult. At least two of the PO's victims committed suicide.

Re: Quite right

"If the CONservative Party had any sense of decency and ethics"

Is that the same Conservative party that's lead by the lying shagger Boris (cronyism, sleaze, deceit, incompetence, etc)? Or is it some other Conservative party?

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

Re: America's turn?

How? ICANN has no jurisdiction over ccTLDs.

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Re: "They have to change from time to time because the domain name business changes"

DNS has been declining in importance ever since the dawn of the search engine and Web browser bookmarks and people no longer need to remember domain names or type them in.

You're right to say end users don't give a shit about DNS. They never did. And nowadays they don''t see domain names any more. They don't need to know or care about that, just like few of us need to know or care how our homes are supplied with water, electricity and so on.

The trade in domain names is declining in importance. That's not true for DNS. It's still there in the background making every tweet, web visit, email, VoIP call, cat video, etc possible. Try switching it off on your network and see how far you get.

" issuing decision notices instructing operators to play nicely with others"

Ofcom can do that to telcos, not to ISPs or CDNs. Imagine how bad it would be if Ofcom decided BGP policy.

We - the UK Internet community - put Nominet in charge of .uk. Nobody else was involved in that decision.

Handing over .uk to some other organisation is an option. But be careful what you wish for. Nominet's core registry operations are rock-solid. They've not been affected in any way by the current or previous boardroom fights. That could be put at risk if they have to be moved elsewhere. And who's to say if new owners would be less greedy, more accountable, more transparent, etc than a reformed Nominet that was responsive to its members?

Ofcom has no powers to intervene. UK does not regulate the Internet - apart from trying to stop kids frorm accessing porn sites.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

Re: Call the RAC?

They're not "our expensive missiles", they're the USA's. We only lease them.

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

Re: Every company has/should have Succession Planning

"There must surely be a wealth of talent within Nominet that can rise up in the organization and fill vacant places."

I'd be stunned if there wasn't. But put yourself in their shoes. Would you want to join a board that's split down the middle and facing massive structural problems? Maybe once the boardroom cull is over and the dust has settled, but not now. Meanwhile, just keep the head down until the new board is stable enough to think about succession planning.

Big problem: Nominet members won't know how many votes they're casting in decision to oust CEO, chair

Re: The real story?

Why would Russell Haworth need to borrow money for a £1M house or gold-plated Ferrari? Surely Nominet's given him more than enough dosh to pay cash for these things?

Mind you if he does get sacked next week, I suppose that could upset his plans to buy a small country.

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

"Forcing the situation where the company will be driverless until another hurried meeting can be arranged.".

That's no big deal. A break of a few months between the old and new boards won't matter much. Nominet's core registry and DNS functoon will continue to work just fine regardless of what's happening (or not) in the boardroom. As proven by the bomb-proof registry service it has provided while Howard and his cronies have been in charge.

Remember that Belgium recently went over a year without a government and the machinery of state - collecting taxes, running an army, keeping the lights on, etc - carried on as normal. If a country can manage for that long without any leadership, I'm sure Nominet could too.

ISP industry blasts UK Telecoms Security Bill for vague requirements, high costs of compliance

Re: Vague requirements ?

This is collecting personal data. I thought that the data-protection-act/GDPR said that what data is being collected, and why, had to be clear and easy to understand -- so why vagueness ?

Data protection and GDPR doesn't apply when the data is snooped^Wgathered for law enforcement purposes. Have a nice day.

The vagueness is deliberate. Internet connection records (or whatever) can mean whatever the snoopers want them to mean. Future changes and mission creep won't have to bother with the inconvenience of getting a new law passed or parliamentary scrutiny. That can all be done with a quiet word behind closed doors in Westminster.

Pressure builds on Nominet as members demand to know leadership's contingency plans for when they’re fired

"somebody please call OFCOM"

Jesus wept! If Ofcom is the answer, it must have been a very, very stupid question.

Does anyone reallythink government or Ofcom intervention will change Nominet for the better? Would they make the organisation more efficient or more transparent or more accountable?

For the hard of thinking: take a look at the somewhat less than stellar performance of any of the government-run registries - Companies House, DVLC, Passport Office, Land Registry, etc, etc.

Re: gov.uk

Many commentards, including me, have asked why the government has not decided to get involved.

It's not that hard to work it out.

The government isn't going to get involved unless the DNS for .uk fails or Nominet is on the brink of an insolvency event. If Nominet's directors want to award themselves huge salaries, that's no big deal in the overal scheme of things. Just like it's no big deal when that happens in a university or a hospital trust. These things should be a big dea of course. But in today's neoliberal world it isn't. Market forces are supposed to sort this out, not governments or regulators.

Spotify to introduce lossless audio streaming: Better sound or inefficient gimmick?

Re: All recorded music is shit

WTF?

How could anyone possibly hear anything after standing in front of a valve amp and a 4 x 12 cab?

Re: Analog kid in a digital world...

Bang and Olufsen kit was never the best. It was usually the most expensive though.

Their $$$ CD players had exactly the same electronics and firmware as Philips players that cost a tenth of the price or less. Apart from the price, the only difference between them was the prettiness of the box that housed said electonics. Oh and you couldn't buy Bang and Olufsen kit in Dixons.

Re: Analog kid in a digital world...

"perhaps you have misremembered your professor?"

Most definitely if he remembers B&O kit was the best.

Want your broadband fixed? Best write to your MP, UK's Zen Internet tells customer

Most U.K. homes have access to Virgin’s network

As if that's any comfort. The only good thing to say about Beardie's fibre is they're not Vodafone. Or Talk Talk.

Nominet claims effort to replace its board with 'safe hands' is invalid, refuses to put it to member vote

Re: 2021's Brassneck Award goes to.. Nominet!

No.

The Charities Commission oversees registered charities. Charities are not neccessarily not-for-profit organisations. And lots of not-for-profit organisations are not charities.

Nominet used to have a charity and that would have been within the Charities Commission's domain. Excuse the pun. But Nominet shut it down.

Nominet vows to freeze wages and prices, boost donations, and be more open. For many members, it’s too little, too late

Re: Once they're all fired

Of course not. If Nominet cuts its prices - a very, very big if - the registrars who sell names to the public are highly unlikely to pass along that reduction. They'll pocket the difference as extra profit for themselves. That's what usually happens whenever a registry cuts prices.

The biggest registrars have high volume, low margin business models. A few pennies off the registration fees they pay to a registry will go straight to their bottom line.

Besides, if Nominet cut their fee by say £1 a name (a ~ 25% reduction), who's really going to notice if a registrar sells .uk names for £9 a year instead of £10 (a ~10% reduction)? Assuming they reduce their prices to reflect the lower wholesale price.

UK Test and Trace chief Dido Harding tries to convince MPs that £14m for canned mobile app was money well spent

Re: WT...

That was the average rate. If you take away the zillions Dildo handed out to her cronies, that leaves a few thousand people on minimum wage in call centres - less if they're in Bangalore.

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

Re: Rights to operate

They are deligated to whoever the people ruling said country.

Few ccTLDs have been delegated to governments. Most were set up before governments were aware of the interwebs.

In other words, in our case, the UK government determines who gets the .UK contract.

What contract? AFAIK there is no contract between ICANN and the UK government about .uk or between the UK government and Nominet.

Momentum builds behind campaign to fire Nominet CEO, board – though success still far from certain

Re: Fork it!

You don't seem to understand how the DNS works. There can only be one registry for a top-level domain. Nominet is the .uk registry. People simply can't take their business elsewhere if they want .uk domain names.

In principle some other organisation could be appointed to run .uk. But the mechanism for doing that is unclear. Who decides? How? And once that new organisation was appointed, you're back where you started because something needs to be put in place about governance, oversight, policy making, membership arrangements, contracts, etc, etc.

UK Prime Minister Johnson knows not when 400k+ deleted records from police DB will be back

Re: Johnsons fault or click bait?

I bought this up way back in the first months of this over exagerated crisis and still no one has answered why the NHS is so clearly unable to learn from countries who are curing more patients. It surely cant be that damned hard to find out what doctors in Germany, France, Poland, Spain are doing that makes them so much better at curing people than our doctors.

It's not an over exaggerated crisis. Ask the relatives of the 100,000 or so who have died of COVID19 in the UK. Or the 400,000+ who have died in the USA. Or.....

The reason the NHS is unable to learn from other countries is because it's being lead by incompetent and quite probably criminally negligent fuckwits. Do you remember that Boris took NO precautions when he visited COVID19 patients just before he got infected?

Our politicians keep changing policy, almost on a daily basis. They're throwing money at their cronies to spunk up against the wall. Anyone remember the promises of "world beating test and trace" (brought you you by Typhoid Dildo and Deloitte's consultants at zillions/day)? How about ordering the planeloads of useless PPE? Or wasting millions on the unused and largely unstaffed Nightingale hospitals? Or our political overlords facing no consequences at all for ignoring the lockdown rules - like going for eye tests in Barnard Castle?

The doctors in those other countries are probably no better or worse than ours at curing COVID19 patients. They are however better resourced and co-ordinated. Germany for instance has pro-rata more ICU beds and nurses than we do. Testing and tracing is done bottom-up rather than top-down. Which means it's done by people who know what they are doing. ie not DIldo Harding. Lots of other countries have had far clearer messaging on the public health aspects too. So proportionately fewer people get infected or spread the virus. Which means their health professionals get more time than ours do to care for patients.

Re: Johnsons fault or click bait?

There is no individual to blame

That's even more stupid than anything Trump ever said!

Of course individuals are to blame:

1) whoever authorised the deletion of the data (or let it happen)

2) whoever didn't keep proper backups

3) whoever is in charge of IT operations at the PNC

4) whoever is in charge of the PNC

5) whoever signs the cheques to Fujistu

6) whoever issued the contract to Fujitsu to run the PNC

7) the politicians and officials at the Home Office who oversee this omnishables

The politicians and officials aren't to blame for the actual data deletion of course. They are however to blame for the circumstances (outsourcing, crappy compliance, unclear accountabilitty etc) which caused that.

The missing data didn't spontaneously disappear. Somebody made that happen. Others were/are in charge of the processes and procedures which caused it. Those processes and procedures didn't materialise out of nowhere. Somebody created them.

Leave.EU takes back control – and shifts its domain name to be inside the European Union

Re: ....and the beat goes on.............

I didn't call you a liar. But if the cap fits..... I said I didn't accept your assumption.

You're now trying to deflect the truth. It's irrelevant whether Rees-Mogg currently works for his investment company. He essentially owns and controls it, albeit at arms length while he ponces about the Palace of Westminster. He's a co-founder. Incidentally Rees-Mogg gives his occupation at Companies House as Investment Manager and a Director - not politician.

Your sophistry about an EU fund for EU investors is beyond silly. Rees-Mogg set this up at the same time as he was telling everyone that Brexit would be good for British business because it would be free from EU regulation and red tape. Can't you see the hypocrisy that's staring you in the face? If Brexit was going to be so wonderful, surely Johnny Foreigner would be banging on the doors of Somerset Capital Management to do business with them in the UK now the EU shackles have come off. Which would mean there would have been no need to set up a financial vehicle in Ireland.

You're also strangely silent about Rees-Mogg's company making extensive use of offshore tax havens. Don't you want British companies to pay British taxes?

According to the Irish TImes Somerset Capital Management's Irish collective asset management vehicle is MI Somerset Emerging Markets Feeder Fund:

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/irish-investment-vehicle-linked-to-hardline-brexiteer-rees-mogg-warns-of-brexit-risks-1.3529280

Re: ....and the beat goes on.............

No. I meant what I said.

Assuming you're telling the truth (and I don't) makes no difference. If Brexit is going to be the bowl of cherries Rees-Mogg claims it's going to be, why has his firm set up a fund in Ireland? Isn't he supposed to want to be free from all that EU regulation and red tape? Or is he just another lying hypocrite?

Whether he works for his firm or not is irrelevant. Has this toff ever done any work anyway? He remains a person of significant control (major shareholder, director, etc) even if that's had to be disguised behind trusts and shell company proxies because he's an MP.

Here's some info from his entry in the MP's register of interests:

1. Employment and earnings

Partner in Somerset Capital Management LLP, 146 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 9TR; investment management.

As a client of Somerset Capital Management (SCM), I provide services to The Chestnut Fund, an investment fund. (Registered 27 November 2012)

7. (i) Shareholdings: over 15% of issued share capital

Saliston Ltd; holding company

Somerset Capital Management LLP; investment management

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/210104/rees-mogg_jacob.htm

According to Companies House, Rees-Mogg owns > 75% of Saliston Ltd. Which has significant control of Somerset Capital Management. Various other Rees-Moggs are directors, including his wife and at least one daughter.

You're trying to make out he's got nothing to do with this company. That's clearly not true. Though you might well be about 22 Carlisle Street - isn't that Private Eye's office?

Re: ....and the beat goes on.............

You forgot Jacob Rees-Mogg, the MP for the 18th century. He's moved his investment/stockbroking business to Dublin.

And now Daddy Johnston is getting himself a French passport.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Re: At least Trump has finally conceded

Were the morons who invaded Congress the coup clutz klan?

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

Re: holding address?

Or can you get away with putting in a fake address in Europe and no one checks it, pretty much like no one verifies the whois info for a .COM .CO.UK etc

Nope. I think Eurid does some (probably half-assed) checking. If they didn't check they'd be in breach of their contract for running the registry. Which could have unpleasant consequences. BTW that registry contract gets renewed every 5-10 years or so and is just about to go out to tender again.

Nominet checks the contact data for all their registrants:

$ whois -h whois.nic.uk theregister.co.uk

Domain name:

theregister.co.uk

Data validation:

Nominet was able to match the registrant's name and address against a 3rd party data source on 13-Jun-2017

Re: Not my best New Years day.....

"What concerns me is we had no visibility of the address when managing our domains and no way of knowing this had a UK address."

That's utter bollocks! Somebody provided that UK address when the domain name(s) was registered. This should have been recorded in your company's asset register. You also have a duty of care to keep that info up to date. For instance so you get timely notifications from your registrar and the registry about renewal or expiry of those registrations. Those dates should be in your company's asset register too.

It's also unreasonable to expect your registrar - the domain provider? - to check the contact data in their database and in the registry's. That's *your* responsibility. Nobody else is going to know the internal structure of your business. Or be sure which parts of the contact info - that you provided - correctly reaches the people in your organisation who look after your domain name registrations, pay bills, etc. How could any registry or registrar possibly know if you did or didn't want to link a UK address to some domain name?

Welcome to the splinternet – where freedom of expression is suppressed and repressed, and Big Brother is watching

Re: The USA model is not perfect ...

Good job Europe's mass media is in the hands of powerless leftie billionaires like Berlusconi, Murdoch, Springer, Lagardere, the Barclay twins, Bertelsmann, Lord Harmsworth, Bouyges, etc.

No amount of Glasgow handshaking will revive this borked kiosk

Re: At least this Glaswegian kiosk is bang up to date on the operating system

"using a Howitzer while hunting grouse"

Since the hardware has to be impregnable to the Glasgow weather as well as vomit infused with Buckfast and deep-fried Mars, it's hardly surprising the vendors over-spec'ed the software just to be on the safe side.

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

Re: And in the year 2022

And this is different from the rest of the USA (or the world) how?

.org owner Internet Society puts its money where its mouth is with additional IETF funding

How else do you expect the IETF to be able to become self-sufficient? The commitment from ISOC will give the IETF the time and resources to become financially independent. That sort of thing is almost impossible when your day-to-day finances are unpredictable, managing cash-flow takes up too much time and the financial focus is finding the money to keep the lights on.

The IETF currently has to budget one year at a time. That makes it very hard to do long-term financial planning or build up prudent reserves. These considerations get even harder when a pandemic has put an end to physical meetings for over a year. They're harder still when you have contracts with the venues who were hosting those meetings, some of which will still have to be paid for.

Sponsorship and meeting fees are the IETF's only source of income besides ISOC's support. Iif not enough people show up, an IETF meeting will run at a loss and screw up the finances for a year or more.

The IETF lost over $1M on the March meeting which had to be moved on-line at short notice. It's hard for most organisations to recover from a loss on that scale. It's harder still to do that and somehow break even by the end of the financial year.

‘Father of the Indian IT industry’, Tata Consulting Services founder F. C. Kohli passes, aged 96

This guy didn't pass (what?). He died.

Calls for 'right to repair' electronics laws grow louder across Europe

Re: Go away boy, you bother me.

"The UK, and other nation states, didn't have input into EU technical and safety regulations"

They do - and have always had that ability.

UK doesn't any more because it left the EU and no longer has a say.

Re: Go away boy, you bother me.

>>>>> So the UK is in fact relinquishing control.

Exactly!

Re: Go away boy, you bother me.

There are shitloads of regulations for electrical products over and above the sodding plug - recycling, safety, materials, electomagnetic radiation, power consumption, etc. Most of these apply across the EU.

So provided Brexit Britain obeys those pesky rules from the unelected dictators in Brussels, all will be well. Manufacturers can continue to sell the same tat across the continent. But then the lying fuckwits like Johnson, Farage and Cummings won't have taken back control. And we can't have that, can we? This'll mean UK has to introduce its own regulations for tellys, microwaves, lightbulbs and so on. That will be a smaller market for manufacturers to bother about.

Remember too tossers like Rees-Mogg want to do away with regulations and red tape once they've told Johnny Foreigner who's boss. If that means allowing the sale of asbestos-riddled toasters or fridges that double up as electrocution devices, that's just fine. Market forces can sort that out. It's only his servants and other riff-raff who will be at risk anyway.

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Bollocks! In the right hands and with the right tooling, scripts and the occasional bit of hand-editing is just fine for managing Big DNS. That's how it still gets done. The registrars and ISPs who manage zillions of domains use a back-end database and write their own SQL scripts or whatever to generate their zone files and name server configurations, Most TLD registries do this too.

You can arrange for those tools and scripts to perfectly fit the organisation's IT operations, processes and procedures - trouble ticketing, change control, backups, testing, support handling, etc. That isn't possible with bloatware enterprise DNS "solutions" and crudware IPAM systems. With these you change your processes to fit what these piles of shit offer. Which usually isn't much - apart from a glitzy UI which impresses the IT directors who will never have to use it.

Another problem with enterprise DNS and IPAM systems is you end up with someone who knows how to drive these heaps of cruft - if you're lucky - but knows fuck all about DNS. Or how to configure and troubleshoot a name server.

BTW, DNS wasn't around in the 1970s. And neither was vi or emacs. The 70s and early 80s Arpanet used the hosts.txt file.

Swiss spies knew about Crypto AG compromise – and kept it from govt overseers for nearly 30 years

Re: Many years ago ...

Your former employer must be world class idiots if they were gullible enough to believe the sales brochures and marketroids that said these devices were secure.

Even if the CryptoAG kit hadn't been nobbled, the sensible approach would be to assume the major sigint players could crack the cyphertext and not use these devices for the really important stuff.

Besides, many countries don't care if Russia, USA. China, etc can break their day-to-day crypto. They assume that happens and just suck it up. What matters to them is their neighbours/regional rivals can't read their encrypted traffic. The weakened CryptoAG hardware is likely to be good enough to pass that test.

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

Re: Sadly, no international jet-settng for me

Er, no. BA doesn't do any sort of photo ID checking for UK-only flights. Neither did the long-dead BMI.

Photo ID proves nothing - certainly not that you are you. Photo ID can be faked - ask any college kid in Trumpland. Unless that ID card is tied to DNA samples, fingerprints, other biometrics and the mother of all databases that were New Liebour's wet dream.

Having gate staff and airline personnel carry out usually needless checks on photo ID actually makes their job harder. It at least doubles boarding time.It's even worse when some doddery granny has put their purse with said ID at the bottom of one of their carry-on bags. Or was it in their coats?

ICANN begs Europe: Please fill in the blanks on this half-assed GDPR-compliant Whois we came up with

Re: Time to get rid of ICANN?

no, it's you who is missing the point.

companies like facebook, twitter, google, amazon, apple, etc already have total control of the user/victim experience. they make sure their sheeple are kept locked inside their platforms wihout needing their own noot. so there's no need for them to bother with the expense an hassle of arranging their own replacement root. it doesn't give them any more control than they've got today. once you step into their walled gardens, they've already got you by the balls.

if they did use their own alternate roots, the authorities and ambulance-chasers in just about every country would have them in court faster than you can say class action anti-trust lawsuit.

UK national debt hits 1.46 Apples – and weighs as much as 2 billion adult badgers

I don't understand these new-fangled units. What's the debt in areas the size of Wales?

We have Huawei to make the internet more secure: Dump TCP/IP to make folks safer says Chinese mobe slinger

Re: Let's stick to facts...

The ITU documents mentioned in the article are freely available on the IETF web site. Visit https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1653 or google for ietf liaison statement 1653.

One of those documents, TSAG-C83, is written by Huawei, China Mobile, China Unicom and CAICT - China Academy of Information and Communications Technology which is a branch of the Chinese government. TSAG-C83 says: "As the WTSA-20 is approaching, it is the right time for ITU-T to consider designing a new information and communications network with new protocol system that satisfies and serves for the future. There are great opportunities for ITU-T to play a leading role in a strategic transformation and pay more attention to the new future network research with New IP protocol system. As the international technology and standard organization, ITU-T is suggested to take a long-term view and shoulder the responsibility of a top-down design for the future network."

That makes it very clear what China's and Huawei's intentions are. There's no mischaracterisation at all. China's actually saying New IP *IS* about top-down control.

What was it you were saying about sticking to the facts?

Re: IPv6

[Citation needed]

Where are the specs for this protocol? Is there an open source reference implementation?