Posts by Paul Crawford 5668 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
You seem to forget that the recent UK government has out-sourced immigration to employers, so they have to collect stupid amounts of data to avoid being liable for employing someone how is not allowed to work.
The same bunch of useless fsckers who were not satisfied with Windrush, so brought us Brexit, and all the extra load of that...
Oddly similar to the university I used to work at. At one point the professor and his side-kick went on recruitment trips to France and Singapore, both resulted in about 10-20 MSc or similar students per visit (around £100-200k or more in fees). Then the central office dictated that was inefficient use of resources to pay £2k per trip as they had a recruitment department anyway, so it stopped. Following year has 3 students, year after the related MSc course was cancelled.
I think you can understand why Dundee lost out...
At my previous employer we had a "server room" that was one of the retired professor's office, free as as the university's engineering department was in decline due to no new staff being appointed. A Sun rack in there with a 5kVA UPS, redundant server heads, and around 100TB of storage started to sink in to the wooden floor due to the high pressure around its feet and so we moved it live - literally running - to the other end of the room that was a concrete floor to allow the estates team in to replace the floor with a thicker plywood flooring in place of the modest chipboard originally used.
Then we moved the rack back again, slowly and with it still running (kept network cables in place, unplugged UPS feed), to it intended location once more.
When the facility was decommissioned in 2019 we had to dismantle the rack, as the newer lift was smaller and it did not fit in as it previously did on delivery 10 years previously, and I was astounded by how heavy the rack alone was, it must have been the best part of 150-200kg without equipment as each side needed two-three folks to manhandle it down the stairs.
Cloud - someone else's computer, and you dance to their tune...
Most of that 'dark' data though could be migrated to tape archive and consume no power, just with a 15 min or so wait if it is ever needed and has to be brought back to network access. Some storage systems allow that to happen automatically based on rules for last access times, etc, but presumably MS can't/won't do that, either due to stupid file indexing refreshing access, or since getting big users to pay more is a better route, and damn the environment!
Having a web interface is not the fundamental problem.
Having it public-facing is the first big problems, then having it coded by monkeys that seem to lack any basic ground-up design security is you next big problem.
The main advantage of SSH command line in terms of security is it depends on SSH to have done authentication properly before you get in. While those projects have had a fair share of bugs over the years, it is nothing compared to the web monkeys...
The main issue with Huawei is how close it is to the Chinese state, so they can and would do as the CCP requests in the future. You might argue the same applies to other big names and their respective governments, but they are in more democratic countries so there are better checks & balances, not perfect, but a damn sight better that the CCP now allows. Open source solution instead?
The UK has analysed their code, etc, as part of Huawei's attempt to prove it was not spying and indeed the UK did not find any backdoors. But they did find piss-poor coding practices and difficulties in replicating build environments that would yield identical binaries, nothing nefarious, just piss-poor practice (e.g. not fixing version numbers of libraries and compilers per release version, etc). Maybe no backdoors, but plenty of loose windows and vents.
However, other big network companies like Juniper, Cisco, Fortinet, SonicWall, etc, have not had the formal scrutiny that Huawei has had so we don't know how good their code is, but on this sort of evidence it is the exactly the same piss-poor category.
Regulations now are all sockets of 32A or below need 30mA RCD "additional" protection if used by normal folks (i.e. not electrically skilled or electrically instructed). That also applies to any cables hidden less then 50mm from wall surfaces that are not fitted with suitable mechanical protection like heavy metal plate, or have earthed armour/sheath that would disconnect by over-current MCB trip if penetrated by a screw/nail/etc.
So unless you have both a very particular cable route and have the fridge hard-wired to a FCU or similar (i.e. not a 13A plug/socket) it is no longer acceptable.
If device is connecting to a server, that server cost is recurring
That is fine if it is something I elect to use but here they don't give you any option to use your own choice of server, or WiFi, or your own SIM, etc.
Basically it is more IoT shit (but maybe better made) where you depend on them deciding to keep the service running, and any company who takes them over.
In my friend's case, the RCBO feeding her freezer in unused room tripped but other stuff was on, so it would not be obvious until too late that something was wrong.
These day's if WiFi is down due to sharing a circuit with stuff like a freezer folks know there is a problem damn soon and can deal with it.
True, but no justification for a subscription service. After all the device itself is not cheap.
They could offer it over wi-fi to an email account of your choice to generate an alert for free, or perhaps as an extra-cost option if you really wanted SMS by someone else, but fsck-them with a rusty pole for a mandatory service charge to make the bloody thing work.
Fundamentally the "traditional" OK like Windows (NT branch...), Linux and MacOS are all based on the assumption that programs are secure to a large degree as they are tested and installed by the administrator, and thus each user is responsible for accessing their own data and restricted from accessing other users.
But the problem with Windows (more often then Linux/MacOS) and similar machines today is two fold:
- Users install any sort of crap as there is no skilled administrator in charge, in fact very few machines are multi-user
- Users run all sorts of crap because scripting, both web pages and stupid things like auto-run and document macros.
And the goal of malware has changed, it used to want your machine's resources for other purposes, so needed admin rights, but now it only needs your rights to run ransomware. Linux/MacOS has been less script-y and less easy to run than Windows, but they are all going down the poxy route of stupidly complex build models / library dependency and web-everything with its inherent scripting for practically all web sites today.
I'm surprised if they all have 7kW usable, as that represents a lot of phones being powered in years gone by (I think 40mA at 50V per phone was the case, so 2W, and so would a cabinet have a thousand phones attached?).
But if they are digging up pavements to put in a single charging point from a cabinet, why not go the whole hog and dig further to put in proper cabling for multiple charging points?
Just over a decade ago I had to convert a set of 3.5" floppy disks that my father had created using a Sharp "electric typewriter" and had problems in getting a working FDD, as well as the issue of converting the Sharp format in to something that could be read by a text editor. Eventually managed to image the floppies using 'dd' and then mounting them and running chkdsk from DOS in a VM (as newer disk utilities screwed the layout for some reason), and finally copying files off for conversion by a small C program I developed.
Thankfully never had to deal with FDD since!
The news was enough for Wipro to file a complaint in Bengaluru city court that Dalal had not adhered to his employment agreement, which it claims prevents him from working for 10 named competitors for a period of one year from leaving Wipro.
Would Wipro be paying his full salary for the year while he sits around not working for a competitor? If not they should go swivel!
My entire department has, and needs, admin rights
There are some situations when that makes sense, but you can also add steps to make it harder to accidentally type in your own password for admin, rather than having to su to another account/password pair that has such rights, not allowing such machines for web/email use, etc.
But for most businesses, and most jobs, the elevated privileges aspect should be granted to a few who have demonstrated the care and responsibility needed to use it.
NAT has it's problems for when you do need to connect peer to peer, but solutions were found.
Alas, I am thinking of UPnP which blew away many of the security gains from NAT's default behaviour!
But it is a tricky problem for Joe Average who has no networking knowledge at all but wants XYZ service to "just work".
I think it's more correct to say if became more important for network operators at a time of rapid growth and limited technical skills. I don't think anyone was particularly against NAT as a transitional arrangement, but it clearly wasn't and isn't the desirable default position.
NAT solved two very pressing problems as the internet got much bigger:
1) The ISP only needed to assign a single public IP address, useful as IPv4 started to become scarce
2) The default of NAT is to block incoming connections, in the early days of Windows being open to all that would save you from being pawned in under 15 mins. Still handy for all sorts of crap-by-design and/or never updated/fire-walled stuff on your LAN.
Later on it also provided a small degree is anonymity as the public IP was not tied to any specific machine (though in reality it was to a household in most cases). So NAT has been an astonishingly useful tool, much to the annoyance of the IPv6 champions where every device being uniquely addressable and available seemed like a good idea at the time.
has there been some new discovery since 3G?
Not "discovery" as such, but just the capability in cheap silicon to implement better error-correction and fancy beam-forming to make better use of the spectrum through spatial re-use and cancellation of reflections, etc. However, having the better capability on tap does not seem to translate in to good handling of poor signal situations, but I suspect that is a decision by the telcos/standard as to what is needed to sell it.
- Throughput x 100 (from 50-70 Mbps typical to up to 10Gbps in 5G - Multi carrier component, mmWave). 7GBps already observed in the wild.
But never seen in any real-world situation in a town or city near you.
The x10-100 goals are all very well, but a more sane approach would be to cover more country with usable (or any) speeds, and maybe to focus on reducing the need for high traffic on phones. For example, improving fixed line services everywhere, and reducing the bloat that comes with much internet services these days.
While the driver has some liability for not being in control, the real issue is how "autopilot" has been promoted and named as if it does everything for you. Sadly the driver was probably too dumb or distracted to actually read the manual and understand the system, but the simple fact you can rely on a seriously imperfect AI model is the BIG elephant in the room.
There should be a proper exam needed before any driver is allowed to use features like this to establish they know what it can, and cannot, do.
Really it is Tesla executives who should be facing jail-time if any is to be dished out. In fact, for all systems the law must make it clear that those at the top bear ultimate responsibility for bad decisions and misinformation, no matter how they occur, in a company's products or service.
The question then is that if the ultra-rich are so worried about the planet's future, why aren't they shaking their infinite money trees to do something about it instead of digging holes just to save their own hides?
Sadly, I am not in the least surprised. Why would I be when considering the sort of mean sociopath who makes it to the top of these exploitative corporations?
While backdoored hardware is quite possible, the real risk is when software is crap (sadly VERY common) and/or the company behind it can be compelled to push out special version upgrades on the gov behalf.
True, that applies to a significant degree in the west as well, but democracies have more checks & balances than an increasingly autocratic China (or Russia, etc, but most of them lack the impressive manufacturing capacity China has).
From our own experience you get a leased gigabit fibre line from £600-750 + VAT per month depending on where in Scotland. So about 10-40 times the cost of domestic connections.
The difference is it is 1Gbit/sec, not "up to" and there are not "fair use" provisions. Basically if you get "gigabit" domestic fibre it is "up to 900Mbit" but typically shared with 31 others (maybe more) on a passively split/multiplexed GPON network, so your peak-time speeds could be as low as 28 Mbit. Unlikely to be that low, but that is worst-case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPON
Seems like a lot of effort to make the victim sprout this stuff, when ten seconds with Google would get you the same result,
Ah but the difference is AI is being sold as a "solution" to costly humans as your company service face. Imagine the fun and reputational damage when $BIGCORP has examples of advising people to harm themselves, or that a competitor is a better?
That is worth a thousand Google searches :)
If a business doesn't require an "always on" VPN into the corporate network
Again we are looking at the difference between a properly secure machine that only works over a certificate-based VPN to the mothership (with content/end-point filtering, etc, to the ultimate WAN), and your typical machine from your typical company (or BYOD use).
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines...
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