Posts by Paul Crawford 5665 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
GCHQ did an in-depth review of Huawei kit and found nothing.
Not quite. They found no deliberate back-doors, but they did fine piss-poor coding practices and a real struggle to get repeatable builds of firmware as a result. Why have a secret back-door if your windows are open?
Flip-side is they did not review other vendors and, based on the high score CVE from Cisco, SonicWall, Fortinet, etc, they don't seem much better.
We need to do something, and so far in the UK that "something" has been too little, too late, and largely renewables. But the issue of grid frequency with said renewable sources is solvable, it just needs a bit more consideration in how you design the inverters so they offer a "synthetic inertia" that can help pull/push the overall grid towards the correct nominal frequency value as spinning turbines naturally do:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/squared/dispatches-from-the-grid-edge/solving-the-renewable-powered-grids-inertia-problem-with-advanced-inverters
Are any of us really surprised?
The decision to flog off yet another UK business years ago is pretty much indicative of the UK government mind-set on anything technological. Or perhaps more accurately, a lack of any sort of functioning mind when it comes down to science and technology. The results are all rather predictable.
The report already states that encryption is the minor issue in prosecuting child abuse. But it is cheaper to make stupid laws and shriek "we are thinking of the children!" than to properly resource the police and social services to tackle that actual problem.
AI designing more AI-like robots, what could possibly go wrong? Oh yes, a factor in the 1974 Westworld film (which also introduced the idea of machines having failures that looked very much like a virus in living organisms)
With any luck it won't be as deadly, but given it is likely to be used for teledildonics I shudder to think where humanity will go with this.
They won't, unless you have an OS and matching applications for it in wide use.
Microkernels might catch on for IoT and similar but the effort of rewriting an OS and porting applications, or even just trying to make the API completely compatible is huge. It is why Windows is still in common use, because XYZ business demands ABC package and that is all that matters. Linux has taken a lot of areas, most cloud and web servers for example, and it is what I use myself for almost everything, but it has not replaced it for many and never will completely while something, somewhere, needs win32 compatibility to some odd or undocumented aspect.
Add a new OS, rinse and repeat after 15 years.
You could ask the same of SpaceX - will any of them make money without tapping gov for subsidies ever?
The USA is a special basket-case of crap internet and reasonably wealthy folks in the sticks who might be able to pay, but as you point out there are huge areas that are without decent connection precisely as they lack money to make it worth businesses going there (yes, i know, gov policy and corruption pays a part as well). Even with its ~1M subscribers Elon has been whining about how much it costs to provide this service and can governments please help. Yes, Ukraine is an unusual case but he was wanting *way* more than the advertised $600 deposit and $100/month to provide connections per terminal.
Maybe worth thinking beyond the "Has model X been seen to spy?" sort of question in to the "Can they update X to spy if desired by the CCP?" question.
But maybe more fundamentally "Should I be putting $$$ in to a company that is more than complacent in the abuse of minorities and even of genocide?". True, many, MANY countries and companies are not squeaky clean on this point, but sometimes the right thing is to make some sort of a stand for democracy, however small. The banned company list is not every Chinese company, just those with known links to CCP activities.
Surely that would be standard procedure on any secure site?
Yes, it should be. But then gov ministers should not leave secret documents on public transport, or use personal email for gov business, or out-source IT to cheapest company their cronies own who use overseas servers and staff.
Sadly I can think of many UK companies that were bought out by overseas firms and then closed, with any products that are still made coming from China, etc.
Also many good & useful product dumped as they were either not profitable enough, or they didn't fit whatever goal the new owner was going for. All causing end-users a headache or to have to cancel whole product lines.
But wait! Our glorious leaders and now trying to bribe with public money encourage Softbank to IPO ARM in London as well as NY, that will make all the difference!
I remember how for NT or w2k having a SCSI disk really increased the system performance. I think SATA delivered a bit of the asynchronous access / out of order gain but it was always poorer (but cheaper) then SCSI, and had stupid "lets increase possible space by factor of 2, again" sort of compatibility issues.
So apart from various levels of self-harm, just what do you suggest that we whingers should do?
If you sit like a frog being slowly boiled, do you expect it ever to get cooler?
Migrate from Windows in steps. Create a VM for windows and put all Windows-only and can't be easily replaced stuff in that. Many other things (web, email) already run on mac or linux perfectly well, better usually. Look at what alterative you have, many Windows programs have Mac versions so you get that one step further away (OK different set of issues there) with minimal issues of data or GUI changes to worry about. Also many FOSS choices can work on all 3 platforms.
Will it be perfectly the same? Will it be very easy? No, but otherwise why complain to MS who, just like Google and Facebook, don't give a flying monkey's about you or your privacy.
I use Chromium on Linux when I have the sad misfortune of being unable to avoid a Teams meeting. Currently also with uBlock Origin but for how long it supports that I don't know.
No Google spyware and it works, at least enough to be present. And no crap about having to have a MS account to install the shit in the first place to join some other organisations choice of video call software.
Just checked both my home and work locations in Tayside and neither has any plans for BT fibre. However we do have City Fibre here and at least they deliver great speed for the money. Also the local ISP Fibrecast UK is good to deal with and one of those offering services via the City Fibre network.
I had VM cable and, to be fair, it was usually reliable and fairly speedy, but in recent years I noticed they deliberately throttle VPN use for fsck them!
The "hard" part of running fibre is money. Years of insufficient investment, no government strategy beyond letting the markets decide, and some pointless voucher schemes that BT/Openreach would get based on promises they never get round to delivering.
Basically the same reasons so much else of the UK lags behind the EU and South Korea, etc.
I think only the USA is worse in terms of good internet service for all among developed countries, for much the same reasons.
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