Posts by jollyboyspecial

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Sounds like a case of the wrong switch. I've come across similar before.

A depot I used to support had a small portacabin as the office. This cabin had one desk with a computer, a phone and a printer plus the overhead light. That was the extent of the electrickery in the "office". There was just enough room in there for a the desk and chair and a small comfy chair for visitors.

So one day we got a ticket that the PC was very slow to respond. Service desk asked what they meant by "slow to respond" the site manager said it took ages to open email. The only application he used most of the time. The RJ45 connected to the main depot building in which was an aging Cisco 1700 series router with a pitifully slow ADSL connection. Quite why the router was in the main building and the PC outside in a cabin I know not, but that's how it was set up. Anyway the connection was so slow that remote controlling the PC to investigate simply wasn't an option.

So I traipsed out to site. The manager was sitting at the desk when I arrived. I asked him to close and re-open the email app which it did pretty quickly. He opened an exiting email without issue. I sent him an email from my phone and there was no real problem there even given his very slow connection. So I asked if this was a continuous problem or intermittent. He explained that the specific issue was that he spent a lot of time out in the depot, but each time he came back to the office it would take an age to open his email app to check his emails. I asked why he was closing the application every time he left the office. Could he not just lock his PC? He denied that he was closing the application.

I was racking my brains to wonder what he was doing. Could he be opening a new instance of the application every time he came back to the office? Maybe the rather crappy old PC was simply running out of memory. So I decided to get him to show me the issue. I suggested we go for a walk and then he could demonstrate. So he stood up and hit the "light" switch. Off went the light and I could hear the PC fans spinning down under the desk.

I looked at the switch. It wasn't a light switch, but a fused spur switch, half way down some trunking that ran from the double socket by the desk to the ceiling. More trunking ran across the ceiling to the light. And further trunking ran along the top of the wall at ceiling level to the corner behind the door. From there more trunking ran down the wall and disappeared behind a coat on a hook. That switch was cutting the power to everything in the cabin. I checked outside and sure enough overhead power, ethernet and phone cable ran the few feet from the main building to the corner where the trunking terminated. The power ran down to that switch. The power also rain to the light fitting and then in traditional style a cable ran from the fitting back through the trunking to a switch hidden behind the coat and a hi-viz jacket. The coat was the manager's the hi-viz had been there since the day he began work at the site and he'd never thought to move it.

He had genuinely never noticed the light switch and was using that fused spur switch to turn the lights on and off.

Quite why that fused spur switch had been installed at light switch height I don't know. But his predecessor had managed to set up the PC to auto logon. What he saw as it taking ages to open email was the PC booting up and logging in and then him opening the email app.

We'd have noticed the issue much sooner if the router had been sited in the logical place rather than on a little shelf in the depot toilet (yes really). We monitored all the routers with SNMP, so had the router been in the office we'd have seen it powering down several times a day.

So I got onto facilities and had the cabin wired properly with it's own little dis board. As a courtesy I also got the bloke a decent up to date PC as the one he had looked about ten years old. Unfortunately there was not much I could do about the DSL connection on a line that was about 7km long.

'Nobody in their right mind would build a naval base here today': Navigating in and out of Devonport

I've often wondered if the deep water channel wouldn't we a bit wider and deeper if there wasn't that ridiculous breakwater which must contribute to silting. I suppose it made sense from a defensive point of view when it was built 200+ years ago, but it must have a severe impact on currents. But of course in the early nineteenth century you weren't dealing with big ships.

Apple warns of arbitrary code execution zero-day being actively exploited on Macs

"And while you're letting Apple's machines patch themselves up, consider that the company appears not to have fixed a similar remote code execution flaw in the macOS Finder, despite third-party researchers trying to fix it."

This is pretty standard. Make a big fanfare about the stuff you are fixing because it's an easy fix in order to try to bury the news of the stuff that you're not fixing because it involves a bit of effort.

Thatcher-era ICL mainframe fingered for failure to pay out over £1bn in UK pensions

Funny how the system only seemed to have faults that resulted in non-payment or under payment. It's a very convenient fault that doesn't result in overpayments.

BT Wholesale wants the channel to give SMBs a nudge before copper sunset in 2025

That 2025 target is already slipping. It doesn't seem that long ago that the promise was that all premises would be full fibre. Then Openreach admitted that it was only going to be PSTN and ADSL that would be switched off. So copper to the premises will still be a thing long after 2025. Plenty of premises will be on VDSL G.Fast or FTTC as Openreach term it without any apparent sense of irony.

What is G.Fast really for? Well that's allegedy up to 1Gbps over copper so as long as they get one customer on a full gig over that technology they can claim that they met their promise of getting every premises on 1Gbps *capable* technology by 2025.

Full fibre to the premises is going to hit a bit of a wall. As it stands Openreach are putting in fibre all over the country, but in order to meet the short timescales they are only putting it overhead. Any premises with an underground d-side are only going to get FTTC services.

As such Openreach are still going to be relying heavilly on large sections of the existing copper (and in some places aluminium) network for many years to come.

BT and Openreach may insist that they are on target but I don't believe they are. There are a lot of commercial premises out there still on DSL even if they are online. I know I look after quite a lot of them. A lot of retail sites rely on a network connection for little more than card payments. These are exactly the premises that have no availability of FTTP or FTTC services yet. Worse still a lot of these premises do not have a decent mobile signal to speak of.

And that's where the plan to switch off PSTN is potentially a bad one. Whether you're talking FTTP or FTTC you need mains power to run the necessary router, modem, ONT or whatever that will be needed to connect a phone, even an old school PSTN one. So you'll need mains power to make a phone call. So what do you do in an emergency when you don't have mains power? Pick up your mobile? Sounds good doesn't it? Unfortunately the mobile networks are lying to us about coverage. My own house has zero signal indoors and a very patchy signal outdoors. I was recently staying in a house with no signal at all unless you were willing to take a walk. So imagine the situation of a power outage and a medical emergency. That might sound like a perfect storm of bad fortune, but when you think about it that's no so unusual. In unexpected darkness trips and falls are much more likely than under the glare of electric lighting. Power outages are more common in rural settings as indeed are mobile not spots* So there you are on the floor in the dark you crawl to the phone and find there's no dial tone. So you whip out your mobile out of your pocket because you're used to being able to make calls at home due to the wonder of wifi calling but there's no signal. So then you have to wait there at the bottom of the stairs with your compound fracture waiting for the power to come back on so you can phone for an ambulance.

I don't, however, blame BT or Openreach for any of this. This is a target that was set for them by Ofcom and the government a decade ago.

*Another thing about being out in the sticks on Openreach's wonderful new network is that there's a good likelyhood you'll be on copper over a mile from the nearest DSLM with VDSL sync speeds that make current 20 year old ADSL speeds look impressive

Beijing wants its internet to become 'civilized' by always reflecting Marxist values

The regime in China has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism in practice. But then there has never been a "communist" country that has practiced Marxism.

In every one of those countries Marxism was just a way of conning your way to power by convincing the population then installing yourself as a dicator andtaking control of the whole damn country and its means of production.

Apple emergency patches fix zero-click iMessage bug used to inject NSO spyware

Every vendor is going to tell you their platform is secure. It's a given. What worries me is the confidence of the Apple faithful that the statement is true. It's good to be cautious, but it seems that most of the Apple faithful are not, because they believe that all iThings are 100% secure.

If a vendor advises you to run some sort of malware protection then they are telling you to be cautious. So if you took a kicking and you didn't have any malware protection then the vendor could argue with some credibility that it was your own fault for not using protection. If you took a kicking and you did use malware protection then the vendor could argue that the malware protection provider was at fault. The Apple approach of telling all their users that there's no need for malware protection is surely flawed.

If somebody were to try to sue what would their defence be? They can't say you should have used protection, they are the ones who told you it wasn't necessary after all. And if you did have some sort of protection installed they couldn't blame the vendor of that app because they'd told you such an app was necessary.

The biggest protection against being pwned is not a secure platform. It isn't malware protection. It's caution and the actions and configurations that result from that.

But the scary thing about this vulnerability is that you don't need to open an attachment to get pwned. Any sensible person will have their messaging app to only accept messages from known contacts. That same sensible person will, through an abundance of caution, choose not to open attachments even from people they know unless they can verify the attachment is valid. But even with that reasonable level of caution you wouldn't have been protected in this case. Really what sort of developer thinks it safe to download and activate an attachment even if the end user hasn't told the app to do so?

The magic TUPE roundabout: Council, Wipro, Northgate all deny employing Unix admins in outsourcing muddle

All of which shows why this business of using TUPE to move employees around when public sector contractors change is a huge game of trying to avoid responsibility. It's not about providing a service. It's not about paying people's wages. It's all about arse covering.

Re: Are they being paid?

"this would have meant they were jobless, stranded between three organisations that all said they weren't responsible for employing the duo."

In what way does this imply that they are being paid?

I have seen a similar but less complicated situation once before. A company sold a load of it's business to a competitor, many staff were TUPE'd. One particular team turned up for work after the takeover and did their jobs for a couple of weeks until payslip day came round. Nobody got a payslip, so they phoned HR who told them "it's probably nothing to worry about, things are a bit complicated with TUPE, but don't worry you'll get payed". Two days later no pay arrived in bank accounts. More frantic phone calls to HR got the response: "who are you exactly?"

Turned out in this case that the HR department of the old company had forgotten to include a whole team in the TUPE paperwork so the new employer didn't pay them. Somehow the same HR department had simply removed the team from their payroll. This problem was sorted out in less than 24 hours so there was no need for a tribunal.

Re: Are they being paid?

I don't think it's so much whether they are being paid as to who owes them their severance pay. It appears they were working their for about 8 years so that would be eight weeks of redundancy pay (I think) plus another month in lieu of notice.

Off yer bike: Apple warns motorcycles could shake iPhone cameras out of focus forever

Re: What did you expect?

Well a quick straw poll about my mates has found seven Apple owners who have had camera problems, not just with bikes but even with their phones mounted in cars and on push bikes (that's road bikes not mountain bikes). And only one who has had similar issues with another brand.

Now of course we have no evidence that any of those eight phones issues were caused by vibration. But in conjunction with Apple's announcement it seems likely. Or it may just be that the camera's in apple phones are overly sensitive to damage.

And therein lies a problem with Apple. They make a big deal of their phones' water resistance, but they are also very resistant to paying out warranty claims for water damage.

Maybe it would be better if they just put a note on their sales material - "Look these things are a bit on the delicate side which is a bit of a problem for a mobile device really, so if you're going to be doing anything more active than sitting on your arse you might want to consider a different manufacturer."

Re: What did you expect?

Except that plenty of other brands of phone have absolutely no problems with being used on a bike.

It Just Works

That is all

ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

"In this case, Proton received a legally binding order from the Swiss Federal Department of Justice which we are obligated to comply with. There was no possibility to appeal or fight this particular request because an act contrary to Swiss law did in fact take place (and this was also the final determination of the Federal Department of Justice which does a legal review of each case)."

How does this fit with their assertion that they don't keep IP logs?

Anybody replying that they have to know the IP address an email originated from just think for a second. The emails are only traversing their servers. If they don't want to keep logs they don't have to. Once the email has winged upon it's merry way then they don't need to keep anything at all.

Now they may be required by Swiss law to keep such logs and that's fine by me. I'm not one of those people who thinks that companies should break the law just to keep their customers happy. However what I do believe is that they must be in breach of contract for stating that they don't keep IP logs when clearly they do.

There are anonymous email servers in all sorts of countries who would wipe their collective arses on request from Europol. Just a thought.

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

Re: My ten cents (or pence)

I think your ten cents is plugged.

Firstly there is no left in US politics. It's all just different degrees of right. Secondly it the extreme right who do no allow debate and indeed go to great lengths to prevent debate. Hell, they don't even want folks they don't like to be allowed to vote.

Being a country boy myself I couldn't agree more. Farmers hereabouts mostly hate the hunt and always have done. But since they are mostly tenants they have no right to prevent the hunt crossing their land. However one hunt a few miles distant was forced to relocate quite a long way because local landowners who were not part of the hunt forbade the hunt from crossing their land.

And yes a lot of hunts claim that they are only dressing up in ridiculous clothes and carrying out arcane ceremonies in the name of pest control. At the same time these hunts will not only encourage the breeding of foxes but also ban tenant farmers from shooting foxes as pest control. After all if the farmers carry out their own pest control then there would be no need for chinless twats on horseback wearing ridiculous clothes.

And another thing that is always denied but definitely happens is the release of foxes specifically for hunting. Some hunts will bring in foxes from other hunts if they can't find one locally to hunt. Others will capture and keep a fox in the days running up to the hunt and release and often starving and injured fox for the hunt. This is also handy for PR purposes. "Look it's not some cute furry animal, it's a crazed vicious beast!"

They are angry at the countryside alliance for maintaining an illegal database of hunt saboteurs? Seems fair enough. So why not go after the countryside alliance?

The assumption that any gun licence holder is automatically affiliated with the countryside alliance is utter nonsense.

For me whether they are willing to go to jail is no more relevant than their spelling of the word offence. I'd be more interested to know if they are willing to accept the true consequences of their actions. Lets consider some activist decides to take action against somebody on the list. If damage or injury is caused by that is this anonymous coward going to take responsibility for that?

"I just put the information out there if somebody else uses it to commit a crime that's not my fault" is a pathetic and cowardly position. All the more because the perp has chosen to remain anonymous themselves.

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

1.25 metres?

It would be potentially very difficult to manage a reasonably long sea crossing (say the atlantic) while being able to guarantee that you wouldn't encounter any waves over four feet during the crossing. But that isn't the biggest potential problem. The biggest problem would be encountering seagoing vessels.

The unit of measure for fatbergs is not hippopotami, even if the operator of an Australian sewer says so

Re: Skateboarding Rhinoceri?????

Which begs the question: what is the plural of Australian?

Australii? Bruces? Bruci?

How much is that in London buses?

Hold on though if you think the plural of hippopotamus is hippopotami doesn't that mean the plural of London bus is London bi?

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

Re: Why?

An awful lot of businesses store data that they have no right to store. Well when I say "right" what I mean is they store data above and beyond the data that they have declared that they store. And then they tend to keep that data way beyond their need to store it even if they have a clear data retention policy. How many businesses actually have one of those?

The reason for all the above is laziness.

When you are making a sale or even just dealing with an enquiry you may need to enter data which doesn't need to be kept beyond the processing of the sale or enquiry. But a lot of organizations don't bother removing that excess data because that takes effort. Then when it comes to data retention how many organizations actually have a process to regularly delete expired data? Very few. I've dealt with multiple organizations who wrote up retention policies because they had to, but never had any intention of implementing them.

The attitude seems to be that there's no issue as they will never get audited. Until the shit hits the fan when there's a data breach that is.

In a case like this the fact that a lot of the data is out of date is probably the biggest issue. There have been cases in the past where "activists" (stupid word, stupidly applied) have leaked data such as membership lists* of a particular political party or group, but a lot of the data was probably out of date. Imagine some member had moved house and the new residents were targetted by some other "activists" (who of course had noble intentions). Would the original "activist" who posted the data be willing to take responsibility? Of course not.

*In the case of one such leaked list it was not the membership list that the "activists" claimed it was, but a mailing list which could have had a totally different purpose. We've all received marketing material before as a result of being included on some purchased mailing list of questionable origin haven't we?

Re: "British Association for Shooting and Conservation"

You're all forgetting that you can't catch COIVD-19 when shooting grouse. Or you can't at least according to our Tory government.

Re: "British Association for Shooting and Conservation"

Makes you wonder how nature managed before firearms were invented

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

Nothing rattles a cage like mention of Brexit does it?

However don't I recall that McDonalds shakes are called "shakes" and not "milkshakes" because they don't actually contain enough milk to be classified as such? If that's the case then then didn't actually run out of milkshakes because they didn't actually sell them in the first place.

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

Back in the day

Around the turn of the century we bought a bunch of servers with quad Xeon 550 processors. Pretty beefy at the time given that most of our Intel servers were pentium 2 or 3 dual or even single processors. The organisation still had Motorola mini computers in use running some proprietary software. The senior IT management were keen that we should buy similar boxes for this job as they thought anything with an Intel processor was a desktop toy. However the project manager had decided on MS SQL and so Intel was seen as the best architecture, especially once the bean counters saw the relative prices.

When the next project needed servers itanium surfaced. Having been told Intel was now pretty much compulsory, senior IT management were very keen on Itanium. However we were lucky that the bean counters didn't like the idea ones little bit.

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Re: Beer Definition

When is a beer not a beer? Well there are those who say that beer should only contain water, hops, malted barley and yeast. But that creates problems for such things as wheat beer, not to mention those beers that use varying amounts of rice in place of barley to save money.

But that's not the worst of it, depending on which country you live in the is a very long history of using flavourings other than hops. The likes of spruce make a perfectly palatable alternative for example.

So there question is where do you draw the line?

Remember early purity laws didn't even include yeast in the list of permitted ingredients.

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

Those conspiracy theorists who claim that Tesla successfully developed wireless power delivery but was silenced also claim something else even more ridiculous. The story going back all those years was that Tesla was not only going to deliver power to homes without any cables, but he was also going to do it for free.

Yep that's right not only did Tesla manage to come up with a way of transmitting power that nobody has managed to replicate, but he cam up with a way of generating power at zero cost. Well when you think about less that zero cost. After all building his transmission towers an generating infrastructure would have come at considerable financial cost, plus of course the cost of ongoing maintenance.

Now the first time I heard that particular nonsense it came from somebody who told me the 100mpg carburetor story. If you don't know that one it's another American crackpot theory. It goes that somebody invented a new type of carb that would enable a big American V8 to achieve 100mpg. All a carburettor does is turn fuel into aerosol to mix it with air. Almost any carburetor can do that to the most efficient ratio when properly set up, But even with a properly setup carb an old American V8 (this story dates to some time around the 1960s) is such an inefficient design that no matter what carburetor you fit to it you are looking at a tiny fraction of the supposed 100mpg claimed. Oh and not only did the fuel companies kill off this miracle carburetor. According to the myth the fuel companies somehow bought up the patents and disappeared them.

And there are more. Did you ever hear the story of the hundred year lightbulb? It's great conspiracy theory/urban myth where somebody managed to buy up and disappear patents. And once again not only did somebody manage to design a lightbulb that would last 100 years according to the myth it was much more energy efficient and unsurprisingly it would have cost a fraction of the cost of a traditional tungsten filament bulb to manufacture.

That's the trouble with all these conspiracy theorists. They start out with an idea that might just be plausible at first encounter and then add more an more implausibility to it until nobody in their right mind could possibly believe it.

But hold on, what if all the extra implausibility was added by THE MAN in order that nobody would ever believe it?

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

Astronaut? Really?

He calls himself "astronaut" apparently. But I think it's reasonable to say that you are only an astronaut (or a cosmonaut) if you were in space for at least as long as Gagarin managed. By which measure it seems Bezos fell short by at least 100 minutes.

Some have suggested that one complete orbit (which Gagarin did achieve) others have said that by modern standards only achieving a stable orbit should qualify you as an astronaut.

Either way what Bezos must surely notice is that hardly anybody cares for his antics. Indeed this particular stunt seems to have made him even less popular than he already was.

Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

Silly Marketing Bollocks

The idea of a "workstation" in terms of PC seemed to start back in the eighties when I first started working in IT. Go back a bit further and there were Mainframes and Minis and of course pathetic little desktop PCs. There were also those mythical beasts Workstations. Bigger and clunkier than a desktop PC but more powerful. Probably something like a mini but being used by a single user. Then some marketing drone decided to start calling their high end PCs Workstations to make them sound more impressive. You know the sort of thing, it was a PC with a bigger and more impressive case and rather than the normal cream case that every PC had in those days it was probably black maybe with a faux brushed titanium front plate and some dimly glowing purple LEDs rather than the usual jolly bright green and red LEDs to be found on plain vanilla machines. Oh and of course they came with a really big monitor to prove how important the user really was. And this being the days of CRT monitors such a beast required a bigger desk just to that the back of the monitor didn't overhang by a couple of feet.

I really thought that sort of nonsense had died out around about the time people started referring to their desk as a workstation. Unfortunately it seems not.

Re: The tiny sounds neat...

This is the problem with using non-standard units of measure. Beer can size is not a global standard, but soda/fizzy pop cans tend to be more uniform than beer cans.

Nelson's columns and London buses are only useful if you know how big one is. And as for an area three size of Wales who can visualise that. It is however amazing how often the BBC in particular like to report that an area the size of Wales has been affected by forest fires, flooding or deforestation.