Posts by Yes Me

Re: Civilian note

I don't think that improving (IPv6) connectivity in the Asia-Pacific region is a hobby-horse. It's more like, say, being able to sell most of the (US) 847 area code numbers and use the proceeds to improve 5G coverage in rural Illinois.

Anyway, I've known Jun for 20+ years and whatever he does always works out brilliantly well. My only comment is Kampai!

Re: Use a real FTP client

"I can see why pulling an afterthought FTP function from a browser is a good idea."

It was not an afterthought. I don't recall for MOSAIC, too long ago, but the code was already in Netscape and I expect that's the origin of the code in Firefox. The ftp: schema is as old as http:. The full set of schemas defined in RFC1630 in June 1994 was:

http Hypertext Transfer Protocol (examples)

ftp File Transfer protocol

gopher Gopher protocol

mailto Electronic mail address

news Usenet news

telnet, rlogin and tn3270 Reference to interactive sessions

wais Wide Area Information Servers

file Local file access

Promises, promises...

"The UK government will now not join Europe’s new Unified Patent Court (UPC) despite promising only last year that it would."

Just another political declaration from Johnson regime #1 that is being abandoned by Johnson regime #2. No suprise at all, unfortunately. All those moderate promises made before the election were lies. Barnier will not give one millimetre in the negotiations, in the face of such deceptive behaviour. If you made any bets on a decent FTA with the EU, you've already lost your money.

Re: Good

It was drivel from the start, just part of the obfuscation of how economically disastrous Brexit would be, with an absurdly low cost estimate of course. Unless cancelled soon, it will be precisely as successful as Blue Streak.

Re: You have (the right) to remain silent

The way it works in the US is that your freedom of speech is multiplied up by the number of millions of dollars you are willing to spend on airing your laudable or obnoxious ideas. As I understand it that has been confirmed by the Supreme Court: spending millions to support a particular politician is part of your freedom of speech. If you don't have millions to spend on TV ads, you remain fully entitled to announce in your local bar that you hate Donald. Good luck with that.

6 eyes?

"unless it was a 5-eyes member"

Erm, Germany, the part-owner of Crypto AG for many years, was not and is not in 5-eyes. Also, do you seriously believe that 5-eyes is the only intelligence sharing system in operation?

Re: Meanwhile in China..

"If the phone really is backdoored by its local spook department, no govt-supplied app needed, that will hardly be a world first, will it?" No indeed. The full story of Crypto AG is out now (behind the Washington Post paywall) and, well, all their kit was backdoored by the CIA for several decades.

The belief that American companies are to be trusted and that Chinese are not is very quaint.

Re: "Huawei is a private-owned company, nothing to do with the Chinese government.."

Have you studied the history of (say) the British computer industry. In 1970, you could have written

"ICL is a private-owned company, nothing to do with the British government."

People would have laughed very loudly. To quote Wikipedia: "ICL was an initiative of Tony Benn, the Minister of Technology, to create a British computer industry..." It didn't work out, but that's beside the point. All this is business as usual: of course the Chinese government supports Huawei, but that doesn't mean they control it.

Re: It makes me smile

It's so infuriating. You impose free market capitalism on the world and they turn out to produce better, cheaper products, and your own anti-trust laws make it hard to protect yourself. So you have to invent national security concerns. And then you have to send your dirty tricks people to other countries to make them kowtow. It's just awful. How can you be expected to make Amurrica great again in such conditions?

I was glad to see the Guardian report that Trump was apoplectic about it, but unfortunately it was untrue: regrettably, he didn't have an apoplexy.

Who wins here?

I don't know about Samsung, but in reality Ericsson and Nokia are partially, if not largely, North American companies. Don't be fooled, all the security stories are bogus, in that everybody building such equipment (a) commits security blunders due to sheer complexity and (b) includes wire-tapping backdoors where possible, because their customers all require it. Huawei is the victim here, not the criminal.

Cisco is certainly very worried about Huawei becoming cheaper/better in core routers and switches too, but apparently they haven't successfully lobbied the black helicopter people in Washington DC and northern Virginia about this.

Re: It stinks.

"public exposure of Domain name renters rather than only via a warrant with due cause. Opposing GDPR."

Er, the whole issue with GDPR compliance was that the public whois database intentionally exposed the identities of name holders (ever since the DNS was invented), but GDPR made this illegal in the EU and required legal protection of the information. So you can't simultaneously criticise ICANN for both. Either public exposure of name holders is good, or respecting GDPR is good. You can't have both.

"The fact you have to rent your name for ever."

Not quite sure what your issue is there. You object to a service fee for maintaining the clerical records of a registration, or what?

Now if you'd mentioned the evils of domain name squatting or domain name theft, I'd agree, but that isn't part of ICANN's job anyway.

Generally speaking, the blanket criticisms of ICANN are a bit shaky on facts. Some of their decisions have been very dubious (the whole XXX farce, for example) but once they made the fatal early decision to allow infinite expansion of the TLD space, they had set the Great Panjandrum in motion.