* Posts by Dave Null

80 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2020

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UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Dave Null

TCNs are "secret" in the UK

hence the WaPo breaking this - whoever leaded it knew that Technical Capability Notices are not discussed in UK media...

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Dave Null

great for blackmail...

...access dodgy site, which knows who you are and exactly what you've been watching...

Fujitsu does not trust Post Office in use of Horizon data in future third-party prosecutions

Dave Null

Re: You'd think

if you've ever been involved in any ERP deployment (even a "simple" one) then you'd have less confidence that it's readily doable...

UK government plays power broker with small modular reactor suitors

Dave Null

this is going to be critical to staying relevant in the DC business

Given all the major cloud providers are struggling to expand capacity at the rate their customers want, this is going to be key. Designating DCs as CNI will hopefully make planning for SMR deployment to power DCs easier given at the moment it is not clearly defined how a private enterprise could leverage SMRs to power DCs as MS/Amazon/Google all want.

There's probably a revenue stream for the UK Gov by providing SMRs as a service to private enterprise in scenarios like this.

UK gov report to propose special zones for datacenters, 'AI visas'

Dave Null

clear regulation for SMR?

Given MS, Google and Amazon have all expressed interest in using SMR reactors for powering DCs, and the UK has in Rolls Royce, Amentum et al a manufacturer that can make them but no clear regulation about deploying them, this seems to be an area where some clear regulation could help.

Dave Null

Re: Bargain basement

I really don't think this applies to skilled AI workers working for the large tech companies

Microsoft turning away AI training workloads – inferencing makes better money

Dave Null

Re: "we are literally going to the real demand"

they choose what they sell and they are selling the mature solutions with highest demand. The market will decide if this is the right decision. MS have no responsibility to do everything every customer asks, they build SKUs and sell them...

Keir Starmer tells regulators to chill as Microsoft exec takes wheel of advisory council

Dave Null

Less regulation - relating to SMR power for DCs?

I wonder if part of the "less regulation" approach, rather than being aimed at things like less AI regulation, might include making it easier for private SMR nuclear power for DCs. Currently I'm unclear on what the regs are around this and MS, Google and AWS have all expressed intent to power DCs with SMRs. After a chat with a friend who works on these for a major engineering firm current regs are fairly unclear on how these could be legally deployed by private companies and where.

Irish power crunch could be prompting AWS to ration compute resources

Dave Null

Re: Irony

this is 100% true for Azure DCs. I suspect the future will be SMR powered DCs and Oracle have just announced their first.

Also when siting DCs you need to take into account latency. All the big players are starting to create new regions due to capacity issues and encouraging customers to go multi region where possible, as well as dissuading new customers from deploying to existing resource-constrained regions.

Dave Null

Re: Irony

When you site a DC, you do a whole lot of worst-case thinking. This includes things like not building near fault lines, taking into account geopolitical potential in the area etc etc. Building next door to a nuclear power station adds a whole lot of potential worst case, whether from accident or military conflict. Not saying it won't happen, but you don't just plonk these things down next to the nearest cheap power if you're a major player.

Public clouds are 'dirty' about VMware's on-prem push, says Broadcom CEO Hock Tan

Dave Null

as someone from a public cloud, we're watching through our fingers...

...as broadcom raise customer prices massively (like 8x in some cases) and customers are coming to us with a "screw VMware, we want off ASAP" attitude. This is a problem entirely of Broadcom's making and they should not be surprised. They publicly said that effectively they're gonna rinse their top customers who will take a while to migrate off whilst letting all the small customers churn off the platform, make out like bandits for a couple of years and then let the product die. It's a damn shame.

Automation needed to fight army of AI content harvesters stalking the web

Dave Null

Removal pain incentive?

If an AI company were to crawl a site's contents against the robots.txt policy, I presume that site could then press legally for the removal of their content from the AI. I suspect this would be non-trivial and expensive for the AI company question. Perhaps it needs a test case to sharpen the issue.

Firms skip security reviews of major app updates about half the time

Dave Null

this aged well...

Great PR, Crowdstrike...

Two cuffed over suspected smishing campaign using 'text message blaster'

Dave Null

Most likely explanation: it's a conventional SIM sending texts

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-homemade-mobile-antennas-cant-evade-operators-sms-paul-walsh-1tgyc/

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

Dave Null

sceptical...

as a long term MSFT employee (and full time remote for the last 6 years) there has been no RTO, so I suspect they're using non-representative data to produce this report...

Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO

Dave Null

pump and dump

No idea why everyone's acting surprised. They did this before with Symantec. The investors will make out like bandits for the couple of years that customers take to migrate off this dead platform. VMware will die. Shame that such a good platform has been deliberately killed, but this is the business plan of Broadcom.

All other cloud providers are scrambling to help customers off VMware - for a large org this isn't a quick or easy process though and could easily take a year or two.

Broadcom's stated strategy ignores most VMware customers

Dave Null

nearly unbelievable, if they hadn't done the same with Symantec a few years ago

So from an MSFT side what we're hearing from customers is those top 600 are facing licence increases of 17x in some cases. Moving a LORG off VMware is potentially a 2-3 year project so they're banking on, well, making bank from them for that period, whilst the angry customer offboards to a competitor. They don't care, they know it'll cause the death of VMware, they want a short term profit from those customers who are locked in. Feels almost like piracy.

Lots of customers going to AVS in Azure for easiest migration path then reconsidering their options to go either Azure IaaS or Stack HCI, neither of which are an easy or quick option. I'm sure GCP and AWS are seeing the same.

Plus for those top 600 customers on VMWare you've got to ask what the support is going to be like given all their team are going to be jumping ship at the earliest opportunity and there's obviously going to be no investment in the product going forward.

It was a solid platform, and investment capitalism has killed it and hurt thousands of companies dependent upon them.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Dave Null

Re: A brilliant testament to analysis

and if you read the linked MS article, that is exactly what they did when they advised customers with an advanced threat profile to use bitlocker plus PIN. Problem is it's a management nightmare especially if you don't use network unlock.

SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

Dave Null

I doubt SAP buy cars at all

Company cars are almost always leased from leasing companies. It would be rare for a large company to do this direct from manufacturer, they would go through a leasing provider. I can understand why they might be reticent to allow employees to spec Teslas though given long repair times and uncertain resale value due to constant random discounting which tends to make leases expensive on these vehicles...

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Dave Null

I can't wait for the tinfoil hat, 15 minute city brigade to hear about this...

<This is going to be *a disaster* meme>

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

Dave Null

Re: Need the EU to step up…

This. Microsoft has always supported technical debt, and it harms everyone ultimately. It means that cruft stays in OS and apps, it hampers development and it slows progress and improvements to security and reliability. Historically the thing that killed old PCs is that the new OS just runs slow/badly on it and I can see why a line in the sand needs to be drawn by MS at some point. This dependency on hardware support for security features is relatively new in that it's a binary yes or no for W11. It's going to annoy a lot of people, but what's the alternative? Allow customers to run old OSs forever or force people into the current? I think if I were controlling it i'd allow consumers ESUs for free/low charge for a period of time, which is probably what they'll do.

Larry Ale-ison institute invests in Oxford pub linked to Tolkien, CS Lewis

Dave Null

Re: Licensing authorities should regularly inspect it

bravo sir

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Dave Null

there are worse...

Working 2nd line support for a large pharma company. Got sent into a restricted area with animal testing - negative air pressure zone so nothing outside could get in to contaminate experiments, which also meant that nothing in there with moving parts like CPU fans could leave without going thru an autoclave which would obviously kill any PCs - so fixing a lab machine had to be done in situ. Spent an unpleasant hour reimaging a lab PC whilst a worker gutted mice and chucked them in a bin a few feet away.

In the MS world I remember a PFE getting a call out for UK military for a sharepoint problem. Despatched to an address where it became immediately clear that it was an airbase and no, that wasn't where the server was. Straight into a transport plane and off to Iraq greenzone, after being allowed a phone call home to tell his wife that he probably wasn't going to get back home for a few days :-(

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Dave Null

the problem with this

...is that the kneejerk "why should we pay for software config" means that now BMW will have to create a new SKU - a BMW with the heated seats fitted, vs one that does not. This adds cost and complexity on the assembly line and supply chain. Say, for example, that the cost of all BMWs rises by £20 as a result, and those that pay for heated seats to be fitted pay an additional £300 (to pluck some numbers from the air). Is that a good deal, or would it be better for everyone to save £20 on their car, and only those that want heated seats pay an extra fee?

Microsoft would rather spend money on AI than give workers a raise

Dave Null

all the real bitching is on Blind

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

Dave Null

Congrats for an article that entirely avoids any detail

An entirely history based article, that covers precisely none of the issues of competition right now. You could have at least done some basic homework, compared market size and sales data across platforms etc etc - but no, just a "M$ is bad" article that could have been written in the 90s. Sigh.

UK watchdog blocks Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition

Dave Null

Unicorn Poop

Microsoft has been in business in the UK for 40 years, and is pretty much the largest corp in the world. Pissing off the UK whilst at the same time mouthing crap like "Unicorn Kingdom" is a stupid and shortsighted UK policy that will a) likely reduce MS investment in the UK, and b) make the UK even more of a digital irrelevance as no UK company has the power to host planetary scale AI like the big boys do.

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

Dave Null

Upstream Cloudflare/BGP error?

https://radar.cloudflare.com/as5089?range=1d

BBC to staff: Uninstall TikTok from our corporate kit unless you can 'justify' having it

Dave Null

Corporations should have an MDM policy. Fight me.

You connect to corp resources, you get a corp mobile device management policy. This enforces things like:

* encryption

* PIN/passcode complexity

* Block/allow list of apps that can be installed

* Remote wipe (with granular control of work-only resources using Android Work Profile)

* Conditional Access to corp resources (e.g. you have to be patched and up to date on OS etc)

This is TRIVIAL to set up. There are loads of options for corp IT and if they are an M365 user they can just enable InTune in the management console and it'll do it for them.

IMHO ALL corps that care about security should be doing this now. This also should apply to gov/civil service etc.

Here's how Microsoft hopes to inject ChatGPT into all your apps and bots via Azure

Dave Null

Re: Be afraid, be very afraid

why are you conflating words with tokens? A token in 1 access to the API, not one word

Dave Null

Re: Data residency

This is FUD. MS have a Trust Center that details EXACTLY what is done with data and their model isn't to monetise it like google. It'll offer an org very granular control over where their data resides. They spend millions on this already for their existing offerings, it's a key differentiator from google

Phở no! Vietnam's last working submarine cable glitches out

Dave Null

Re: Once is happenstance

Possibly although it's possible that degraded perf on the last cable is just down to the entire countries' connectivity coming through it...

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Dave Null

Re: Not on my watch...

that's because the default blocklists for a lot of these products have tickboxes for things like nudity, alcohol, gambling etc. Someone's just gone with everything

Dave Null

I've seen worse...

I remember a 2nd line engineer at a large pharma company in the UK once creating a gold image for (I think) an NT3.51 image. They accidentally included their personal profile in the image. Which included a *LOT* of MP3s, dubious NSFW images etc. It got deployed to a reasonably large number of people and they only realised when a scan of a network discovered things that really shouldn't be there...cue a lot of backpedalling and work to remediate without telling management...

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Dave Null

Dude, it's *Charlie Munger*

...he might be old but he is *not* an idiot, he's one of the most successful investment gurus out there and very very well advised...

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Dave Null

How are you conflating online services being down with a local install of Libre Office?

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Dave Null

Re: Seeking out competition

I think you need to up your meds

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Dave Null

Mark the discussions, not the essays

Oxford Uni sets a LOT of essays for students. They are marked, but the marks aren't really important compared to the marks given to sessions with tutors where you are asked to discuss your essay. Kind of hard to cheat in that scenario and also protects the need for trained human educators...

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

Dave Null

Fairly obvious reasons

No, running crypto mining in the cloud where you're paying for your compute isn't going to be cost-effective. How could it be?

So it follows that pretty much any cloud crypto mining is *probably* someone doing something they shouldn't, on someone else's dime. Folks with access to their company's Azure subscription who thought they'd do a bit of unofficial mining that they don't have to pay for, etc.

There are definitely specific use cases where you might want to do crypto mining, e.g. creating a dev environment for testing, and for those instances you ask and are granted permission.

For everything else, blocking it seems kinda sensible. MS aren't stupid, this is being done to protect people.

Why did Microsoft just buy fiber optic cable company Lumenisity?

Dave Null

Re: Remember a story

I love how facts get voted down here <sigh>. MSFT signing off

Dave Null

Re: Remember a story

Microsoft's own "Project Natick" proposed a solution to this as well: containerised submarine DCs.

https://natick.research.microsoft.com/

I forget the exact quote but a very high percentage of the world's trading centers are close to water, so this offered a way of using the sea for cooling and low latency by being physically close to the trading floor. Using Azure Stack HCI you have pretty much feature parity with standard Azure and a single management plane as well for this.

At the other end of the scale, MS invested in LSEG so there's probably some commitment on the LSEG side to use Azure Cloud, you would imagine: https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/12/london_stock_exchange_ms/?td=rt-3a

Dave Null

In their own words

See https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/12/09/microsoft-acquires-lumenisity-an-innovator-in-hollow-core-fiber-hcf-cable/#_ftn1

It's a spinoff company from Southampton Uni, which is pretty cool, and I think Southampton also worked with MS a couple years ago with Project Silica for data archiving in glass.

If you can shift bits 47% faster between HCI, then that's pretty awesome in an HCI data center, of which MS has hundreds across the globe.

Seems a very smart buy to me!

Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit?

Dave Null

Low carbon?

it needs a fucking rocket to get there.

Once there, there's zero cooling as there's no convective cooling in space.

Why?

Imagine surviving a wiper attack only for ransomware to scramble your restored files

Dave Null

I'd imagine once the Yttrium APTs are in your system, they plant and engineer a bunch of future vectors for follow up attacks.

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

Dave Null

This is a dumb article trying to be clever. FOSS is great, but to argue there is NO commercial software that's worth paying anything for is plain stupid.

To think that you, with your little cute DC of a handful of servers, can compete for availability with a commercial cloud platform is also stupid.

There is nothing wrong with a professional artist paying for Photoshop, for example, and no, GIMP is not a useful alternative.

Here's how 5 mobile banking apps put 300,000 users' digital fingerprints at risk

Dave Null

biometric HASHES

From the headline it reads like people's fingerprints were stolen. From reading it, what was stolen were fingerprint hashes. There will be no way to convert these back to a representation of individuals fingerprints. Bit of a clickbaity headline...

Microsoft extends life of cloud servers from four to six years

Dave Null

it's a case of MS having vast amounts of concrete data on reliability of its fleet, which is custom hardware. They know way more about its performance and reliability than the vendors themselves do and indeed have negotiated custom warranties with the components. When you run at planetary scale you can try things like "what if we run a DC at a slightly higher temp, can we see any difference in hardware reliability? Can we save energy on cooling?" or "what if we extend hardware life, do we see any increase in storage errors?"

It's foolish to replace functional kit when you don't need to based on an arbitary lifetime. Do it based on changing hardware requirements, or improvements in perf or reliability. A fixed "best before" date doesn't make a lot of sense, particularly when you have billions of cores...

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Dave Null

Re: Mostly agree

Jeese, if you can't work this out then I really worry about you.

It's the stock marker for Microsoft. It means "Microsoft".

Supply chain blamed amid claims of Azure capacity issues

Dave Null

I do hope you're not an IT professional as that is the dumbest comment I've read in a while. I challenge you to operate at 99.99% availability

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

Dave Null

Re: Just goes to show..

Honestly, this is EXACTLY the sort of snidey, malinformed comment that infests the Reg's comments sections and makes me hate reading them

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