* Posts by Vic

5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007

Comcast's Xfinity home alarms can be disabled by wireless jammers

Vic

Re: I may be an idiot, but...

in defense of PacketPusher, criminals usually get caught because they really are morons.

Sure, but most criminals don't get caught.

The ones who are already doing time aren't the ones who are going to be attacking your security...

Vic.

Vic

Re: I may be an idiot, but...

If you have the knowledge, skill, and cash to acquire such a device, are you going to be breaking into houses?

You are making the common mistake of thinking that criminals are morons.

If that were true, why haven't we caught them all?

Vic.

HSBC COO ‘profoundly apologises’ for online outage

Vic

Re: Does HSBC rely on a private cloud of some kind?

I would say a cloud failure storage/network/automations is the likely cause.

Quite possibly. DNS shows signs of someone hacking at it with a blunt blade, but as the SOA record appears to be missing, it's hard to tell whether that happened this screw-up or last...

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Vic
FAIL

Re: "complex technical issue"

Complex technical issues often boil down to fairly simple managerial ones,

Like "has some clueless numpty turned up issuing orders and igniring the people with some idea how this works?"

Vic.

No, drone owners – all our base are belong to US, thunders military

Vic

Re: Reminds me of advice..

Herc transport traffic out of RAF Lyneham.

Lyneham is a ghost-town airfield now. If they want to use it, they issue a NOTAM first :-(

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Vic

Re: 3,000+ feet eh?

3,000 feet is in the title of this post?

And have you never seen thread drift without a change of title? It's quite common here. It's why I always quote what I'm replying to, in the rather forlorn hope that respondents will read the words and not just make up a conversation that isn't there...

nothing I've ever flown had a ceiling below 3,000 feet

Nor I. but there is a difference between that ceiling height and a statement that "no aircraft is going to notice any difference in pressure going past a mere 3,000 feet". If you refer to the PA-28 POH, for example, you can see the effect of pressure altitude on engine performance in Fig. 5-9 (p 5-17) and on climb performance in Fig. 5-11 (p 5-5-19). There are additional graphs there to show other effects; I'm not going to mention every single one. But the point to take away from all this is that altitude has a marked effect on aircraft performance.

which is def. 'hundreds of metres' and just on the edge of 'thousands'

3000ft is less than 1000m; describing it as "thousands" would be misleading.

Maybe there are such beasts, but even the cheapest of toys are capable of flying off the top Ben Nevis, never mind Scafell.

I'm quite suire that is the case. I'm also absolutely certain that you're going to notice the change in performance at that altiutude. And thus to say that "no aircraft is going to notice any difference in pressure going past a mere 3,000 feet" would be entirely incorrect. Like I said.

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Vic

Re: 3,000+ feet eh?

no aircraft is going to notice any difference in pressure going past a mere 3,000 feet.

And you've just proved that you don't fly.

But besides that, the post I was responding to said "there is nothing obvious in the airframe of my drone that prevents it from doing hundreds or thousands of metres". And that is very different from 3000ft.

Vic.

Vic

Re: 3,000+ feet eh?

I'm no physicist

Clearly.

there is nothing obvious in the airframe of my drone that prevents it from doing hundreds or thousands of metres

Yes there is. Air is not of uniform density all the way to the stratosphere.

Vic.

Day 2: Millions of HSBC customers still locked out of online banking

Vic

Re: still not working, even for BIB..

How are you getting 20s?

I'm executing "dig +trace www.business.hsbc.co.uk".

I'm getting between 0 and 20 seconds

You're not doing a full recursive lookup; you're just querrying your upstream servers. So the first time you try, there is no record there. and that server performs the lookup. For the next 20 seconds, you get the remnants of that record (which is why the TTL drops below 20s), until is is expired. At that point, your enxt request starts the lookup cycle again.

Use the "recurse" switch to avoid this behaviour.

Also, can you think of ANY scenario where this might be appropriate?

Nope. Short TTLs are only really useful for switch-overs. This looks like someone's forgotten to lengthen it again afterwards.

Vic.

Vic

Re: still not working, even for BIB..

"The server at www.business.hsbc.co.uk can't be found because the DNS look-up failed."

It looks like they've been having fun with DNS :-

www.business.hsbc.co.uk. 20 IN A 193.108.75.150

20s TTL for the A record? That's nasty...

Vic.

Library web filtering removes info access for vulnerable, says shushing collective

Vic

Re: Censorismship

Mind you it has yet to be seen if the shortening of publication cycle is necessarily an improvement, since it seems the first victim has been spelling, and the second victim was likely logical thought

I think you might have those two in the wrong order...

Vic.

Brit cuffed for Kyrgyz 'horse penis' sausage quip

Vic

Re: Not post-pub crawl nosh, but rather...

Cock and cockle casserole?

There's a book about that.

Vic.

2016 in mobile: Visit a components mall in China... 30 min later, you're a manufacturer

Vic
Joke

Re: Wearables come with inconvenience?

Speaking of deaf users, some have had their light-bulbs connected to their doorbells for years.

I saw a documentary on that a while back - Tomorrow's World or somesuch...

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Vic

Re: Wearables come with inconvenience?

But has no heart rate monitor, no maps / navigation, no support for email, messaging, no support for notifications from any app on your phone, no activity monitoring, no calendar integration for events and reminders, no support for apps etc.

That's how I want it. My watch is there to do one job and do it well. It does...

Vic.

Vic

Re: Wearables come with inconvenience?

My watch would last 2 days without a recharge

Mine does about 5 years...

Vic.

Here – here is that 'hoverboard' you've wanted so much. Look at it. Look. at. it.

Vic

Re: Comparison 36x electric fans with 8x mini jet engines

I guess the idea doesn't really fly because it's too noisy.

Pah. This is how you make a noise.

Vic.

Microsoft in 2015: Mobile disasters, Windows 10 and heads in the clouds

Vic

Re: CAD software

but the traditional metaphor would be "vise"

That depends on which language you're speaking; this side of the Atlantic, we'd still say "vice".

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Vic

Re: RE Microsoft in 2015: Mobile disasters, Windows 10 and heads in the clouds

Please will you name your company so we can all avoid it?

Look at his posting history. His employer isn't hard to guess.

Vic.

Intel completes epic $16.7bn Altera swallow, fills self with vitamin IoT

Vic

Re: FPGA don't run programs

Then someone is designing a custom CPU implemented using an FPGA.

No, that's not the case.

Modern compilers allow block functionality to be specified in C. The netlist generated is purely the logic described by the C code; there is no discrete processor.

The tools these days are very impressive, even if the implementation of some of them leaves quite a lot to be desired[1]...

Vic.

[1] I was given the task of finding out why a certain compiler is twice as fast on Windows 7 as it is on Linux on the same hardware. A bit of profiling showed that the Linux version was spending 90% of its time in gettimeofday(). The "port" was simply gluing a compatability layer under the Windows version, and that layer really wasn't well-written...

Vic

Re: internet-of-things (IoT) and FPGAs?

Any IoT chip will be an SoC / ASIC. An FPGA is simply too power hungry.

For IoT, you're certainly right. But IoT is the current buzzword to get people to read the press releases; it's going to become purloined to mean "smallish computer" once corporations realise how little sensor stuff they're going to selll...

FPGA are only for volume too low for ASIC or prototypes

Maybe. Back in the '90s, I was using SRAM-based FPGAs for video processing - a kind of reconfigurable coprocessor. It made the image crunching much more effective (at the cost of development effort, naturally). I'm rather looking forward to using these new Intel chips to do more of the same.

Now this is not necessarily tied to low-volume applications; the reprogrammability of the FPGA can be of use when you need many different operations to be availble from time to time. The NRE of ASIC goes up steeply with complexity, and the field-programmability of FPGA also allows for in-the-field upgrades. Whether a product makes sense in that situation depends heavily on what Intel produce, and at what price point. But it could be interesting :-)

Vic.

Dear Santa: Can gov.UK please stop outsourcing?

Vic

Re: The bizarre logic of outsourcing

In reality the tea-ladies ( or gentlemen) may not be making widgets themselves, but may be instrumental in ensuring that the widget makers are productive.

Many moons back, I worked in an engineering department that had its own secretaries. When we wanted something typed up, we'd scrawl a rough-out of what we wanted, and one of our divine secretaries would transform that into something we could send to customers.

Then, we all got access to computers. All of a sudden, we engineers could write our own letters - so we lost our secretaries. The bean counters saw this as a huge cost-saving.

In reality, we spent three times as long on every bit of paperwork, at double the hourly rate. It cost the company a fortune...

Vic.

Vic

Re: a thought

Are there cases where a tenderer scopes out the processes, bungs 10% (example on top) and then when they take it on find out that the [public body]'s functions are actually more complex/higher volume than anticipated?

IME, it's the other way round: the contract is for all the services the original body *thinks* need doing. It's only some months down the line that they realise their in-house boys were doing a whole lot more than that, and growing the contract to cover those services that are no longer costed involves a significant change in the outsourcing contract.

In particular, I've yet to see an outsourcing contract involving TUPE that doesn't increase costs, decrease capability, or (more usually) both.

Vic.

Firms must ensure shared service suppliers have 'sufficient financial resources'

Vic

Re: Oh great..

now we're regulating common sense? Ah, yes, I forgot, it's not that common.

Common sense is now so rare it should be considered a superpower...

Vic.

Software bug sets free thousands of US prisoners too early

Vic

Re: A SERIOUS case of """What if"""

So if someone was released 100 days early, and spent 300 days outside jail without doing anything wrong, then that should take care of the 100 days early.

It would be easier to consider the time since release as time on parole; if the subject has stayed on the right side of the law in that time, the sentence should be considered served.

Vic.

No, Kim Kardashian's plump posterior's pixels did not break the App Store – just this El Reg man's mind

Vic

Re: Getting Off Of The Planet.

As of now, you can't really "get off the planet" in any meaningful way.

Mr. Musk seems to be trying to do something about that...

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Vic

The OED describes English usage

Does it? Do you personally know anyone who uses emojis, whether of zelebrity arses or otherwise?

Vic.

Oracle ordered to admit on its website that it lost the plot on Java security

Vic

Re: To fix this problem...

You get the bin, extract it to /opt/java/##/jre_$version (where ## is 32/64 depending on the version).

And as soon as you do that, you are working outside the package manager, so you have to track changes and updates manually. If you forget one - you've got non-updated code on your production box with all the issues that entails.

I don't see why you would bother with RPMs or DEBs when you know that this can break dependencies

Because RPMs and DEBs merely state the dependencies for the package manger to enforce[1]; the dependency is still in the code whether you use automated tools to resolve it or not.

Vic.

[1] You can over-ride that if you know how, opf course, but that's often not a good idea.

Vic

'Java was designed for set top boxes. If you are writing a settop box you should be fine'

Java is actually quite poor for STBs; the environment there requires low-level hardware access and reasonably good real-time performance. Thread control is a must.

You could write a STB UI in Java - but that's a small part of the overall problem.

I once went to some Java symposium. The salesman aked me what my target project was, and his face fell when I mentioned set-tops...

Vic.

Facebook hammers another nail into Flash's coffin

Vic

It still has some of the best animation tools around for the money.

Do you have any affiliations you'd like to disclose, perhaps?

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Vic

a member is barred from further uploading

Hmmm. We could really do with a button for "I'm really suspicious of this post". Or is the "report abuse" button to be used for that?

Vic.

Vic

Re: HTML5?

The one where those twats have those hilariously jolly "dang poot" and "gosh snap" messages?

Whenever I see those, my first reaction is usually "Thank $deity for that", as I'm generally more interested in the text content than watching the same info being narrated to me by a talking head...

Vic.

Free Wi-Fi for the NHS, promises health secretary Jeremy Hunt

Vic

Re: Hunt the Cunt

if the cap fits… and it does so obviously here

Jamies Naughtie's on-air fuck-up is one of the funniest thing I've heard in years...

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Vic

The telephones they provide are ludicrously expensive.

That is, however, a problem of their own making. The NHS buys enough telephony that it would be cheap and simple to have some metered phones available to patients at cost/a small profit.

But they don't; they get in the rip-off merchants. And now the country is going to spend £1B largely to counter that decison...

Vic.

DEAD MAN'S SOCKS and other delightful gifts from clients

Vic

Many years ago, I was working for a largish optics company.

One morning, I walked through the accounts department to find it a ghost town. The department was missing - just the Finance Director was still there. They'd had a fileserver failure, and the support guy couldn't make it in until Monday, at which point it was a wipe-and-restore job, probably taking several days. As this was Wednesday, that was looking like a week of not working, and the FD was about to melt into his own despair.

It was a NetWare system, and I'd done some support for that about five years previously. I offered to take a quick look. He seemed convinced that, as long as I didn't actually set fire to the building, there was nothing I could do to make anything worse...

It took me 10 minutes to diagnose the problem. It took me 20 minutes to summon up the courage to do what I thought needed to be done. And then the fileserver was backup, with everything running.

I came into work the next day to be told that the FD was looking for me. Worried that I had screwed up, I went to see him with some trepidation. To be met by a large grin and a larger bagful of beer...

Vic.

Vic

Re: Sometimes you don't mind quite as much

Needless to say, payment was of the type shown in the icon.

A pub I used to frequent had the dodgiest old multicore you've ever seen between stage and desk. It was forever causing problems - but they had no budget to replace it.

So when pairs started failing, the landlady would call me in and I'd resolder a few ends and get it working again. And she'd buy me beer whilst I was doing so.

It's amazing how long it can take to redo half a dozen joints...

Vic.

Skilled workers, not cost, lured Apple to China says Tim Cook

Vic

Re: Sure you can put them in a room...

aiming its lenses to Canon/Nikon/Sony users looking for the "ultimate quality"

I've got an old Sony Mavica. It's only a 5MP array, but it's got a Zeiss lens on the front.

The glassware really does make the difference...

Vic.

Windows for Warships? Not on our new aircraft carriers, says MoD

Vic

Given the £14Bn IDS has wasted on Universal Credit, really?

I always read "IDS" as "IBS", and it makes no difference whatsoever to the meaning...

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Vic

Re: Ah joke wallpaper ...

It's just The Register taking another opportunity to have a dig at Microsoft

Strangely, your posting history probably doesn't support your making that sort of allegation...

Vic.

Vic

Re: Pedant alert

Great idea! But lets make it capable of Mach2 as well, so it can get in and out fast

They failed there, then. It goes nowhere near Mach2 :-(

The current-era Lightning II is quite a bit slower than the 1950s Lightning...

Vic.

Sanders presidential campaign accuses Democrats of dirty data tricks

Vic

Gee, I've got a friend there, called Brian. Do you know him?

Fight Boy? I know him well.

We went drinking together a few weeks ago. He's a lightweight.

Vic.

Vic

Re: To all Americans

the lessor of evils

That's a marvelous image...

Vic.

Juniper 'fesses up to TWO attacks from 'unauthorised code'

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Re: I Can Hardly Wait for Self Driving Cars

Best lesson I learnt from a sage university prof, "it is mathematically impossible to prove a program is correct".

Well, if he actually said that, then he's wrong. It *is* possible to prove code correct.

What he probably said is that is is infeasible, and that's a more realistic statement. The closer you get to correctness, the harder (and more expensive) it gets.

Vic.

Vic

Re: Questions

the bit about a skilled attacker would not leave any trace in the log files of their presence tends to point a spookhaus doing this

No, I don't think so. It's merely a recognition that, if you've rooted the box, it's a trivial matter to cover your tracks.

Vic.

Vic

Re: Where is the QA?

Comprehensive QA extends the production cycle, making it slower to ship 'new, improved' features.

Actually - no, that's wrong.

Decent QA stops the "knock it out the door in Friday afternoon before you go home" shipments, but those are inevitably the ones that bite you. They fail in the field, leading to expensive retro-fitting, embarassment in front of cuistomers, lost sales, etc.

Doing the job properly gets working product to market more quickly than having to go through a release cycle three times because you haven't bothered to check if the machine even boots...

Vic.

New bill would require public companies to disclose cybersecurity credentials

Vic

Oh good grief...

the Cybersecurity Disclosure Act of 2015 would oblige companies to add details of which, if any, of their directors know about online security in filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission

And so we get to see the Dunning–Kruger effect in action again.

Vic.

iOS banking apps security still not good enough, says researcher

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Re: NWhat you need to do

In the UK that would get you a spell in jail

On what grounds?

Vic.

ICO slaps HIV support group with £250 fine following email blunder

Vic

Re: It's 2016 for cripes sake....

Not here it isn't...

Vic.

MoJ digital software glitch sends thousands of divorcees back to negotiating table

Vic

Code has bugs; tests have bugs.

That's why you get a different group to write the tests. The chances of both groups making the same error are small, so if you get a discrepancy, you investigate. Sometimes it's the test. Often, it isn't.

Vic.

T'was the night before Christmas, and an industrial control system needed an upgrade

Vic

Re: "This is a skanky hack"

I have also left 3 lines of comment per line of code, just so that I could understand

I once wrote some meta-python to take a WSDL file and produce a set of python methods respresenting everything in the WSDL.

The code without comments was a dozen lines. The file I committed was nearly 100 - I was pretty sure whoever was going to touch it next wouldn't have appreciated it if I'd just left terse commenting...

Vic.

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Re: Which movie was this?

The comment was extremely useful - it said: "This is a skanky hack"

I once left a comment that said "This next bit is evil. Look away now". I had to bless a perl structure because the CGI library I was using didn't return what the documentation said it would...

Vic.