Posts by gitignore

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

The only time boot times _might_ be a genuine issue is if you have an autoscaling group in cloud ; if your boot time is too long, by the time you scale up, the spike in traffic has gone (yes Windows Server, I'm looking at you). Chances are though, if you are scaling that dynamically you would be better off using something cloud native instead of VMs to do the task.

But otherwise, my laptop gets rebooted in two situations: 1, I forgot to plug it in and the battery went flat, 2. Bios updates. Probably about once a month, I can live with that.

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Re: 5G sucks here

Jeez, someone's trigger happy on the downvote.

Sadly, on _my_ (android 14) Pixel 5, that option isn't there.

Double checked just now following VonDutch's instructions. Definitely not there. Network locked maybe? It's an EE device on some ungodly contract from work.

Re: 5G sucks here

Sadly, on Pixel 5, that option isn't there.

5G sucks here

So where I live, 5G is synonymous with 'no internet' - the base station connected with a lovely strong signal but the backhaul must be run off a 36k modem or something. I was _entirely_ unprepared for what would happen if I asked the question 'how do I disable 5G on my phone' :-O Blimey, people are weird.

Websites clamp down as creepy AI crawlers sneak around for snippets

Financial and Environmental cost

We found that over 90% of our traffic was Bot related. After adding entries to robots.txt , and sending a % of 429 responses (thanks google for ignoring robots.txt), it's down to a still high, but manageable, 30%. Quite a few bots identify themselves in the agent string as a normal client rather than a bot which makes filtering them quite complex.

Financially we've saved about $5k / month in cloud costs, and all that processing and serving of pointless traffic inevitably has an energy cost as well. The scans kill the content caches as they just pull anything with a link rather than just hitting popular items like real customers do, so our cache hit percentage is now way higher, and we're not training competitors' AI systems with our data any more.

Next step is to detect the bot and serve it junk, though I think I'll struggle to get signoff on that project!

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: 100Amp

My favourite fuse fact: given a sufficiently high current, some fuse types will vaporise and continue to allow current to flow through the metal vapour.

Cloudflare debuts one-click nuke of web-scraping AI

Google bot is the worst

Google completely ignore robots.txt - over 90% of our traffic is from googlebot ; they seem to have got in a scan loop and are just smashing the site all day every day. The worst of it is we can't block it because the remaining 10% is paying customers driven to the site by google :-/ They have a form to fill in, but who knows if that will be effective (hint - it hasn't yet). I did discover yesterday though that our CDN (not cloudflare) have a tarpit function so the AI bots might be meeting that soon...

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

"(c) the Cockrell breading unit which emanated all sorts of sounds and an amount of smell"

Is that where chicken nuggets come from?

Vanishing power feeds, UPS batteries, failover fails... Cloudflare explains that two-day outage

RCA

I was taught years ago to do root cause analysis, to find the root cause of a failure.

I don't think, in 20+ years in the IT industry and some in EE before that, that I have ever seen a _single_ root cause of an issue. It's almost always a confluence of several unlikely intersecting issues.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Plasma

My favourite factoid about fuses is that if they are sufficiently feeble, you can pass enough current through them to vapourise the metal inside - which then becomes a nice conductive plasma. So they _should_ be specified with a maximum breaking capacity as well as a rated current.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Flight ready

I once worked with a 'technical assistant' who got the 120v heater line mixed up with the 5v logic line. This was on some Quite Expensive military flight hardware. The heater part certainly worked! Job title was subsequently shorted to 'technical ass' :-)

Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'

Migrate to FOSS

As a SaaS provider we are gradually migrating everything over to FoSS - operating systems, databases, runtimes. So much simpler to manage as well as being about a third of the cost overall. Running cloud native architectures really helps too, rather than just porting your old microsoft SQL server over as-is.

Zoho creates browser with 'Open Season Mode' for when you don't care about privacy

Open Season

I wonder if 'Open Season' mode will work with ancient out of band firmwares from the likes of Dell and Cisco that always trip the TLS and Java warnings? Accessing things on a private network with the security turned down would be really useful for those machines where the firmware is no longer upgradable but are otherwise perfectly good machines.

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

Dynamic load

Where cloud excels is if you have a dynamic or cyclic load - so you can spin up 500 nodes to process a sudden influx of workload, and then throw all but two of them away for the remainder of the day/month/year . Think the Wimbledon or Superbowl web servers for example. Where it sucks (financially, at least) is when you have a constant baseload of work, where you end up paying a flexibility premium for a service that is running at constant load 24/7 .

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: fratzonic chambered exhaust

I do like the idea of the EV making a noise like a milk float tinkling away, while it accelerates from 0-60 in <4s . Maybe ice cream van sounds would be good too - can you imagine the doppler shift effect as it went past on the motorway!

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Re: Alternative uses

-> It makes you wonder what would happen if a car encountered a "person" while screaming up the motorway?

what, like a passenger ?

Ransomware attack on UK water company clouded by confusion

Re: Passport scans and driver's licenses?

probably staff rather than customers?

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Pardon?

What is it with comms lecturers and the inability to make themsenves understood? I had two who you basically had to lip read from, even if sat in the front row - they spoke in standard RP but were so softly spoken you could only tell than in an anechoic chamber. Fascinating subject but damn, the lectures were hard going.

Europe proposes tackling child abuse by killing privacy, strong encryption

Book Ciphers

The trouble with book ciphers is that the interceptor can look at your encrypted text and come up with a custom 'book' as the key to claim that you sent whatever it is they want to pin on you.

UN mulls Russia's pitch for cybercrime treaty

My borders are your borders, for now.

"arguing that the language [...] violated the idea of state sovereignty." Russia owes me a new keyboard for that one.

Riverbed Technologies files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following pandemic 'headwinds'

Load balancers

IIRC they had a really nice load balancer product which they bought from Zeus, then palmed it off to Brocade who thoroughly shat on it. Shame really, traffic managers that aren't just skins on the Cloud equivalents would have a place in the market these days, albeit niche. WAN optimisers are beyond pointless these days - I commissioned a 40Gb link a couple of years ago for about £500 in equipment and £400/month in rental - didn't need it to be that fast, it was a few quid cheaper than a 10Gb link so I thought why not?

Laptop option on the way for ortholinear keyboard hipsters in form of MNT Reform add-on

cost saving

I assume the main driver for this is around ease of manufacture and cost saving rather than any ergonomic benefit.

In the lab: Robotic AI-powered exoskeletons to help disabled people move freely without implants

Why walking ?

There seems to be an obsession with walking for disabled people ; what in my experience is way more of a problem is not being able to use your hands, or not being able to sit. This invention requires good core control (which many people with cerebral palsy struggle with) and assumes you don't have contractures. For walking, for many (not all, obvs) situations, the wheelchair is an adequate tool. On the positives, getting yourself vertical has lots of benefits.