* Posts by Paul Crawford

5636 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007

Cyberlaw experts: Take back control. No, we're not talking about Brexit. It's Automated Lane Keeping Systems

Paul Crawford Silver badge
Gimp

Re: So let’s forbid anything that’s new?

Stop being afraid of everything new, stop putting laws that will hinder progress towards lower fatalities.

I find your lack of faith disturbing

Nearest to Darth Vader =>

United, Mesa airlines order 200 electric 19-seater planes for short-hop flights

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: The elephant on the plane

I guess if you have N cells and discharge them one by one the you have a count down to empty even if you don't know the progress accurately for each cell?

Would need to have some cycle/wear levelling so they are all roughly the same "age" and so each one getting to cut-out voltage is representing a similar amount of energy used.

Boffins find an 'actionable clock' hiding in your blood, ticking away to your death

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Interesting research, we are one step closer to having a Machine of Death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_of_Death

Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: NASA pores over moth-eaten manuals ahead of switch to backup hardware

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Most of us have done it at some point, perhaps a new firewall rule that blocked SSH, or a reboot command that failed to complete as a remote machine hung on failing hardware and crap firmware that never times-out, etc, etc.

That amp it up to 11 !

BOFH: Where there is darkness, let there be a light

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Anything with a network connection can be scanned

Isn't that a cat-o-ten-tails?

Researchers warn of unpatched remote code execution flaws in Schneider Electric industrial gear

Paul Crawford Silver badge

It is not just the usually poor by design aspect, once commissioned no one really wants to update stuff in case it breaks something critical. No one (or very few) have a whole off-line duplicate to test, so it comes down to "are you feeling lucky punk?"

So as above, start by assuming your control system is vulnerable and lubed ready for every curios and/or kinky internet punk to probe, then design your network access from that point onwards.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

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Yes, even China was surprised that the year of the cock should last more than 12 months.

Chinese chip designers hope to topple Arm's Cortex-A76 with XiangShan RISC-V design

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More likely a concern that they don't have spyware in them!

There is something incredibly ironic that the more trust worthy CPUs might end up coming from an untrustworthy authoritarian regime trying to rid itself of import restrictions and the threat of untrusted hardware.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs break out of nuclear hellscape home and into people's hearts

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Re: Rovio Ltd should be interested

Or for Shaun the Sheep?

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

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Re: What’s wrong with just releasing software that does what the user expects?

Don't go asking for a teabagging!

Disco classic Rasputin and pop anthem revealed as reasons Twitter suspended Indian politicians

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: So, Twitter was actually doing its job

Oh those Russians Americans

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: So, Twitter was actually doing its job

Rasputin on Youtube : fine ?

Maybe youtube is paying some of its advertising royalties to the copyright holder?

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Paul Crawford Silver badge

We found the O/0 mistakes in satellite orbital elements of all things, must have been manually re-typed from printouts or something in the 80s. So our parsing code had to do a bit of fixing-up occasionally...

Devilish plans for your next app update ensure they never happen – unless you start praying

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Being randy would suggest that hands go wandering, so are they virgins with themselves? And in which orifices?

Would that count for any goat-worrying ceremonies?

Google to bake COVID-19 vaccine passport support into Android with Passes API update

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Idiocracy, by mandate

However, your point about the rise of Idiocracy is quite right.

The UK has had a decent vaccine roll out, perhaps the only thing they have not utterly coked up, and soon most will be vaccinated (or at least have been offered it). At that point the need for any passport is gone, and in the short window of many to near-all being done it is not worth the discriminatory nature or the effort for what should be a couple of months.

Ah, but is this a stick/carrot to get anti-vaxxers to change? Who knows. Personally I would wait and if they start dying off due to stupidity then it is Darwin 1, YouTube 0

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Idiocracy, by mandate

Yet anyone who complains about the new normal is a conspiracy theorist.

To be fair a lot of them are conspiracy nutters claiming Billy Gates is putting 5G in vaccines as implants, etc, etc.

Oh dear, Universal Windows Platform: Microsoft says 'no plans to release WinUI 3 for UWP in a stable way'

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Witch one? ActiveX? Silverlight? Universal windows that only works on some versions?

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Paul Crawford Silver badge
Gimp

To any visitors

Squeal like a piggy! Squee! Squee!

Closest to 'deliverance' I could see =>

It's about time! NASA's orbital atomic clock a boon for deep space navigation – if they can get it working for long enough

Paul Crawford Silver badge

The clocks are but one thing for navigation.

You need to know where they are with sufficient accuracy!

Who would cross the Bridge of Death? Answer me these questions three! Oh and you'll need two-factor authentication

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: As I see it

Ah, but you are making a school boy error in assuming that the bank wants to eliminate fraud vis near-perfect security.

What they are actually doing is reducing fraud to the point that it is cheaper than increasing security measures.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Fuck CAPTCHA's.

Exactly, get a job in politics.

Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Colour me surprised

Disgusting, those unelected eurocrats doing things to help me!

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Brexit, the gift that keeps giving....

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: If it's not on the side of a bus...

Even when it is, it still won't happen.

Have you tried turning server cores off and on again? HPE wants to do it for you from GreenLake

Paul Crawford Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Is this meant to be Oracle-safe?

The best way to be Oracle safe is not to use them. Otherwise they have you in a financial gimp suit for Larry's pleasure.

EU court rules in Telenet copyright case: ISPs can be forced to hand over some customer data use details

Paul Crawford Silver badge

For those not understanding your reference, here is a summary article on ACS:Law

https://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-anti-piracy-law-firm-torn-apart-by-leaked-emails-100925/

And the matching Hitler rant for Andrew Crossley's downfall:

https://vimeo.com/15463930

It's 2021 and a printf format string in a wireless network's name can break iPhone Wi-Fi

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Also after me:

Use static code analysis tools, and actually deal with the gcc -Wall checks

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Here here

Because the camera's software is Windows-only.

We had some Vivotek cameras and the software recorder/manager supplied by them was surprising not crap, but it was over 5 years after UAC was enforced by MS that they fixed their software to not require the poor minimum-wage sod checking stuff to be administrator.

I am sure there are better options, but when faced with stuff that "works" mostly and spending weeks trying to find a better alternative you just put it on a Win7 VM for no updates and firewall the hell out of it.

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Idiots

I can imagine a hammer being taken to the camera. Every day.

BOFH: When the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East, only then will the UPS cease to supply uninterrupted voltage

Paul Crawford Silver badge

One of the guys I worked with would unplug the network cable(s) and then see if anything stopped. If nothing went bad for a month then it was deemed safe to power the thing off for almost certainly good, as the HDD had little prospect of spinning up again.

Ex-NSA leaker Reality Winner released from prison early for 'exemplary' behavior

Paul Crawford Silver badge
Joke

They just don't listen, do they?

Must be the ears...

Thailand bans joke cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Just ban all crypto currencies.

Same here. When I first heard of them I presumed folk were performing some sort of useful computation in return for money, a bit like a commercial SETI system. Then I found out the moronic truth :(

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Just ban all crypto currencies.

Oh MS, Adobe, etc, are doing very well out of making folk pay to keep accessing their own cloudy data.

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: There still remains......

More it applies to "service stations". Typically a motorway stop will have something like 6-8 pumps, so we are looking at something like 20MW available to provide 10 min charges for long-range support to commercial drivers, holidaymakers, etc. While folk would love to see 800 mile charge ranges I strongly suspect that we won't see that ever, but rather improved battery power density will be used to have a lighter and safer battery pack so cars in crashes don't go all Ford Pinto on the occupants.

Are any existing service stations going to be able to afford it?

If not then we are looking to move society in to a position where car and van use is largely local with long distance by train and similar. Not necessarily a bad thing, but without many fast charge points we will struggle to deal with the large number of people relying on on-street parking that has no reserved areas and local authorities who lack the budgets to electrify them. Even assuming the local infrastructure has enough capacity.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: There still remains......

They love selling electricity.

And they hate replacing infrastructure that costs serious money to do. If you want a new supply you will be charged something like £120/m for the cable route for a domestic 3-phase arrangement (max load around 70kW, assuming the local substation has spare capacity). If you wanted the 2+MW that the above commentards have discussed for a 10 min charge you would have your own substation and 11kV supply. Have you tried asking the price for that?

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Lets face it, there are so many slang words for sex-related parts or activities it would be hard to not come across one. But really looking for names related to a male chicken is always going to end badly, probably by chocking it.

$28m scores mystery bidder right to breathe same air as Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos in Blue Origin flight

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Time to update the Rowan Atkinson sketch

I thought that Willie Nelson was an illegal wrestling move?

If HAL did digital signage. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that...

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: I'm sorry...

Dried frog pills. Those are the best!

Well, second only to licking the hypnotoad...

We've been shown time and again that strong encryption puts crims behind bars, so why do politicos hate it?

Paul Crawford Silver badge
Pint

"the kiloscrote bust"

Have a beer on me for that phrase!

Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a 'sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee'

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: NTP

You still need to sync the atomic clocks together in the first place, and to keep them agreeing afterwards (depending on the level of time accuracy you need)!

For that you need something like GPS to do it, so really it comes down to how many will pay extra for an atomic clock reference oscillator in addition to the GPS receiver and outdoor antenna, etc. Many should do it, if they are running essential services, but usually the bean counters say no...

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Fail-over failure

We used to have one of the SunOracle storage servers with the dual heads configured as active/passive and linked via both a Ethernet cable and a pair of RS232 lines. That was, allegedly, so it could synchronise configuration via the Ethernet link and had the RS232 as a final check on connectivity to avoid the "split brain" problem of both attempting to become master at once.

It was an utterly useless system. In the 5+ years we had it as primary storage it failed over a dozen times for various reasons and only occasionally did the passive head take over. We complained and raised a bug report with Oracle and they just said it was "working as designed" because it was only to take over if there was a kernel panic on the active head. Failing to serve files, its sole purpose in life, due to partial borking was not considered a problem apparently.

The conclusion we had was paying for professional systems by big companies is a waste of time. Sure we had a soft, strong and absorbent maintenance SLA but we would have had less trouble with a singe-head home made FreeNAS server and a watchdog daemon running.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

NTP

For classic NTP operation it is recommended that you have 4 or more time servers configured on each client so they can detect problems including a broken/false clock source. That could be costly in hardware, so you might have 1 or 2 local servers from GPS that offer precise time due to low symmetric LAN delays and back it up with ones across the internet at large that can catch one of the GPS going massively stupid but only offer accuracy, on their own, to several/tens of milliseconds.

Baby Space Shuttle biz chases dreams at Spaceport Cornwall

Paul Crawford Silver badge

I am surprised they are not looking to RAF Machrihanish for landing as it has a 3km runway and was one of the emergency landing options during the Space Shuttle program.

PrivacyMic looks to keep your home smart without Google, Alexa, Siri and pals listening in

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: misses the point

Probably in the USA where there are more breaks than content, so coordinating them would be difficult.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The best time to build a semiconductor foundry is 5 years ago

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Optimistic?

People complain about UI changes and install legacy GUI's to keep the old feel.

No, they do it to avoid the loss in productivity that comes from fscking around with an interface that works perfectly well.

Take the Windows GUI as an example, and compare the layout of win95 with win10 - can you point to a single change that actually makes life easier?

Security is an architectural issue: Why the principles of zero trust and least privilege matter so much right now

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Oddly with the limited number of IPv4 addresses we ended up with NAT as the default for home routers and most small businesses, that automatically made "default deny" the standard for incoming connections. Of course that only lasted until we has UPnP breaking it for any dodgy software running on the user's PC, or the design goal of IPv6 offering access by default for ever device in existence.

And this highlights one flaw in the idea of authentication access to the network, as soon as someone's PC (or other device) is compromised it gets their access credentials, and often that is done via pull-requests now (email or web site malware) and so it can do the same to everything they have access to. So while such network rules might help reduce a free-for-all in the LAN, it really is not dealing with your typical ransomware attack for small business or home users. For they they need a immutable copy of important files, and some means to wipe and re-install the machine(s) impacted by it. The cloud-based accounts on offer promise this, but at what cost in on-going expense and in privacy?

How to use Google's new dependency mapping tool to find security flaws buried in your projects

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Library bloat ?

The advantage of shared libraries is they get updated for security & bug fixes by the system update process. Or should do...

The advantage of statically linked libraries is the program keeps working.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

How do you know that has not already been implemented in one of the other 1.63M libraries?

If someone else cannot realistically discover the presence of such a library, or its quality/supported status, how useful is it?

Paul Crawford Silver badge

indexing, scanning, and monitoring 1.63 million JavaScript libraries

Does that not strike fear in to your heart? Surly the number of useful libraries must be a lot, lot, less! How many of them were written by someone not bothering to check if it is already standardised, and making new and exciting mistakes again and again?

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Underwear?

Whose underwear are we talking about?