* Posts by Yes Me

1735 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2008

Wow, what a lovely early Christmas present for Australians: A crypto-busting super-snoop law passes just in time

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Re: "Ship! Come back!"

Well, nothing in factual reality has changed since https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1984 so like all anti-crypto legislation, this will make the bad guys more cunning and the only victims will be the innocent or very incompetent bad guys.

Huawei CFO poutine cuffs by Canadian cops after allegedly busting sanctions on Iran

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Megaphone

Canadians as puppets

I have no idea whether she's guilty of anything, but it's beyond stupid of the Canadians to play this game as American puppets. The whole anti-Huawei campaign seems to be commercially motivated - now that the Chinese have learnt to compete on both quality and price, let's find some other way to stop them!

Huawei gets the Kiwi 'yeah nah'* as NZ joins the Chinese kit-ban club

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Angel

Re: Huawei gets the Kiwi 'yeah nah'

Washington once again leans on a vassal

You obviously didn't read where the head of GCSB said that the decision wasn't the result of 5 Eyes pressure. We all believe him, of course. It was all his own staff's work, of course. He never hears from the NSA, of course. He's quite unaware of whatever goes on in Washington, London, Ottawa and Canberra, of course. (Particularly ignorant about London and Ottawa, in this case.)

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Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

Nokia Networks and Ericsson sell in the US, so they must include NSA-approved backdoors.

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Flame

Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

The "security" argument is supported by the following evidence: zilch. This is blatant toadying to the Americans plus the usual Kiwi thing of pretending to be independent but actually copying Australia. But it's not over yet and hopefully this will end up on a Ministerial desk in Wellington soon enough.

NASA's Mars probe InSight really has Mars in sight: It beams back first pic after touchdown

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Happy

Well done

This is the best news of the year. (Not that there's been much competition.)

Ethernet patent inventor given permission to question validity of his own patent

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Re: Two minds about this ?

Patenting the obvious is a career-enhancement in many big hi-tech companies; the world leader is IBM, not Cisco. The issue is that patent examiners are under pressure to shift paper off their desks as quickly as possibly, and granting a patent is much less bother than denying it, because then there'll be follow up and all kinds of botheration.

And BTW when you take a job with one of these companies, the small print in the terms and conditions that you sign specifies that anything you invent belong me. It isn't a matter of choice.

London flatmate (Julian Assange) sues landlord (government of Ecuador) in human rights spat

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Childcatcher

Won't someone think of the cat?

I feel much more sorry for the cat than for JA. It seems he isn't willing to empty its litter tray. I'm sorry, but when a cat agrees to live with you, emptying the litter tray is part of the deal, and you can't delegate it.

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

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Re: This is affecting the enthusiasts ...

"... if your Windows 10 is running half decently, you should never change its software."

It would be lovely if that was allowed.

IBM won't grow, says analyst firm while eyeing flatlining share price

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...developing countries

"there must be potential to sell their systems in developing countries"

Nah. Their price point is way too high. If I was packaging for a developing country, I'd start with a Pi and open source code, and work down. IBM doesn't have that in its genes.

IBM's problem for 25 years has been too low revenue per employee. You can't fix that by applying more managers to the problem. IBM's main business skill for 10 years has been "resource actions."

All bad.

The only way is up, baby: IBM UK sales down, profit down, headcount down

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Unhappy

Re: Is IBM still a thing?

Well, I sold my last few shares recently and the pension fund appears to be more or less solid. So I don't really care any more, but yes, apparently they still have a few employees and even some actual customers. It's a shame, but although Gerstner did get the ship to turn 20 years ago, his successors have failed. He listened to technologists; his successors only listened to accountants, and even believed their own hype.

Day two – and Windows 10 October 2018 Update trips over Intel audio

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Re: Edge?

What's "Outlook"?

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Re: Edge?

"I sideloaded Firefox"

Waterfox rocks, if you don't like the Firefox nannies.

Australia, US and Japan want Huawei local submarine cable project

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Flame

Re: China's loans come with no strings attached.

Why "Hmm"? And don't you think that Western loans come with strings?

This is all just cheating. PNG is a sovereign nation and it may deal with whomever it wants. And they've done a deal already. That should be the end of it.

To beat China, you have to offer better value for money in the first place, not cheat by attempting to undercut them later.

What's Big and Blue – and makes its veteran staff sue? Yep, it's IBM

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Re: Not Surprised

Yep. I remember when I first worked at IBM Hursley hearing a couple of old farts discussing an urgent customer issue with CICS. One of them was saying something like "I remember this same problem coming up about 30 years ago." I daresay they then went and fixed the problem.

Customer loyalty requires loyal staff. IBM seems to have forgotten that.

Microsoft pulls plug on IPv6-only Wi-Fi network over borked VPN fears

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Re: Why do we need IPv6

Well, now we have run out of IPv4 addresses, except for a few still available for developing countries. And yes, we've worked around the shortage with NAT, otherwise the Internet would have jammed up ten years ago. But do you really think we should have left our grandchildren with a network limited to 4 billion addresses when we can reasonably expect hundreds of devices per person in the world? What kind of sense would that make?

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Re: IPv5

Do you really imagine that people didn't think of that?

There's no such thing as "backwards compatible" with IPv4. Even if you add one bit to the address, let alone 32 or 96 bits, IPv4-only hosts are unreachable without either a dual stack or an address translator.

Nit: IPv5 was defined in October 1990, also known as "Experimental Internet Stream Protocol: Version 2."

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Shame!

"THERE IS EFFECTIVELY NOTHING TO CONNECT TO"

You don't use Google or Facebook then. Perhaps that's wise.

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Re: Two questions if I may

1. The benefit is improved access for users (such as millions of smartphone users) that have native IPv6 support that is actually faster than their translated IPv4 support.

2. I don't know what their hold up is. Many sites get IPv6 by simply asking their CDN provider to switch it on. But at least where I sit, El Reg doesn't seem to use a CDN. So maybe it's their server load balancer that can't handle IPv6. Most of them can.

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Re: It’s not going to happen

Sorry to disillusion you, but IPv6 is rolling out in a pretty big way these days. On account of we've run out of IPv4 addresses.

The story is about trying to run an IPv6-only network, as opposed to a dual stack network. And what it shows is that it's still premature to run IPv6-only on a general purpose BYOD network. Dual stack is a very robust solution. NAT64 is brittle. That shouldn't be news to anyone.

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Re: Welcome to the real world, MS

Well, I suspect that the IPv6-only network where they made this great discovery was the one at IETF meeting 100 in Singapore last November, where IPv4 support was switched off experimentally during some sessions (but a NAT64/DNS64 service was available to reach IPv4-only sites). It was expected and observed that many corporate VPNs were broken by this.

UK.gov isn't ready for no-deal Brexit – and 'secrecy' means businesses won't be either

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WTF?

Re: Here's my plan...

Imposing an arbitrary period of 2 years to disentangle your economy is not realistic, therefore this expectation should never have been written into EU law.
You do know, don't you, that it was a British official who drafted Article 50?

That aside, here's the plan, apparently: Replace more than 40 years development of paperwork and IT systems for handling trade with Europe in less than 6 months, including specification, design, coding, debugging and go-live.

Good luck with that.

The internet – not as great as we all thought it was going to be, eh?

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Windows

an entirely new network?

"Really, I'd be on board with someone building an entirely new network,"

Been watching Silicon Valley, have you? I think it paints a pretty accurate picture. There will never be a "new" Internet any more than there'll be a "new" road system. We patch up old roads and install new, faster and safer, ones, but the road system itself is not replaced. The Internet's the same. It's a bit different from when I first used it in the 1980s. The web's a bit different from when TimBL first showed it off or when Mosaic came out. Remember when Microsoft used to sneer at the Internet? Expect change to continue, but it will always be continuous change.

UK.gov finally adds Galileo and Copernicus to the Brexit divorce bill

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booming before Brexit

"Things like manufacturing and tourism are already booming before Brexit has even happened."

Is there something in the word "before" that you don't understand?

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Flame

good for democracy?

You know what would be really good for democracy? The House of Commons doing its job (as the legislature in a representative democracy) by voting for the good of the country, not for the good of certain political parties. That would fix Brexit in a heartbeat, now that the facts are in.

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

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Re: Criminal wants record of crimes expunged so he can continue his criminal ways

An "entrepreneur" wants to conceal his record so that he can gull people into investing, is how I read it.

Here's another problem. http://squaremilenews.blogspot.com/2017/12/ for example is easy to find (thanks to the court case; I'd never heard of it) and it's easy to speculate whether one of the cases they reported in December triggered the lawsuit in January. But that risks even more harm than the original Google result, and the risk applies to every convicted person mentioned recently on the site. So what ABC has done is make things worse for ABC and a bunch of other people.

Good news, bad news, weird news – it's the week in networking

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Re: Boeing, Cisco and ... LinkedIn???

A moment's Googling will tell you that Gaurav Dawra recently moved from Cisco to LinkedIn. Also, LinkedIn has every reason to be interested in inter-domain routing & in access from planes, like any large content provider.

Huawei pleads with FTC to overturn US ban, says it's 'anticompetitive'

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This paranoia has a purpose

China has been getting more & more aggressive towards the US...

If you mean that Chinese companies have been getting better at competing in capitalist economies, yes. But there's no reason to fear backdoors in their kit compared to anyone else's. Why do you think Cisco put backdoors in? Because governments (plural) required them.

The kind of paranoia fostered by the Pentagon does indeed work strongly in favour of the American military-industrial complex. But the motivation is profits for US industry.

(It isn't impossible to observe whether a box is generating and sending traffic back to base, whether the base is in the US, China, or somewhere else. You'd need a fibre tap and some expensive DAG cards...)

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Pirate

Huawei isn't China...

Huawei isn't China, it's a Chinese cellphone manufacturer.

It's a major rival to Cisco, and cheaper. I think you'll find that Cisco's lobbyists have been active. Competition is great, unless you're the one who loses.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

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Headmaster

Why it's better to have the EU funding R&D

So tell me again why it's better to have a central political government like the EU controlling R&D? Apart from a large unaccountable taxpayer-funded budget, I suppose.

Firstly, the EU isn't a 'government'.

Secondly it doesn't 'control' R&D. It funds some projects and not others, within a general framework that is a consensus between the 28 EU governments. This is a good thing, because it avoids duplication and encourages broad, diverse research teams, which are well known to be more effective than inward-looking local teams.

Thirdly, it isn't unaccountable. Actually the EU auditors are much more nosy than any national R&D auditors, in my experience. They claw back inappropriate expenditure.

And finally, as someone else noted, the total EU R&D budget is a drop in the ocean compared to national R&D budgets.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

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Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

"you don't need to persuade people to give up NAT to persuade them to move to IPv6."

People, in the sense of domestic or cell phone subscribers, don't need to know anything about it.

If you mean professionals running small office networks, they might need to know, but not necessarily.

If you mean professionals running enterprise or campus networks, they mostly know already. Including the knowledge that you can run your IPv4 connection through NAT+firewall, your IPv6 connection through firewall only, and get exactly the same security protection.

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Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

When it changes is when your home network includes internal routers and many wired and wireless segments that are not bridged together. That's coming real soon now and only with IPv6 and HNCP (Home Networking Control Protocol).

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Headmaster

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

Just because a sensor has an IPv6 address doesn't mean it's exposed to the open Internet. Just because a baby alarm with an IPv4 address is behind a NAT doesn't protect it from a malicious user. Security is a completely separate thing from addresses, and NATs are not security devices.

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Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

The difference is that for IPv6, things work just fine without NAT. Your firewall works just the same in both cases.

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Happy

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

Anybody running a web site who wants visitors will continue to run IPv4 indefinitely. Obviously. But what is happening now (in some countries but not others) is increasing numbers (I mean millions) of subscribers, especially cell phones, whose primary connection is IPv6, with IPv4 being a second-class service. As major sites react to this (as Google and Facebook did long ago), the major sites will support IPv6 natively as well as IPv4. Obviously, because they want to provide first class service to everybody.

That being so, it doesn't really matter when the elusive tipping point arrives. Sites will add IPv6 support one at a time. Subscribers will move to IPv6 without knowing it. One day you'll look around and it'll be all over.

Submarine cables at risk from sea water, boffins warn. Wait, what?

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Re: Not really a big issue

Salt water is not good for cables designed for normal duty. So as well as building the dykes round the equipment, you'd also have to replace the cables going inland. And you'd need to construct an access bridge or something. It's all presumably feasible, but costs real money.

ICANN't get no respect: Europe throws Whois privacy plan in the trash

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...that will cause the Internet to fragment

No it won't. Spitting control over certain TLDs is the most that would happen, and that won't split the actual network.

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the ultimatum card

I don't see why splitting off the authority over certain TLDs, if it could be achieved, would lead to splintering of the Internet in any way. These are only names, which map to IP addresses. The root servers would figure out where to get the authoritative records from, even if some TLDs were administratively under ICANN and others under EUCANN. Splitting the authority doesn't split the network.

That said, it is hard to see how ICANN can be so obtuse on this issue.

Hurry up and make a deal on post-Brexit data flows, would you? Think of UK business – MPs

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Re: @ Loyal Commenter

"Except on topics of sovereignty, economics, immigration, trade"

Those are all points that are either unaffected by Brexit, or made worse:

1. Sovereignty. EU members keep their sovereignty. Yes, a few matters are delegated to the EU but (as Poland and Hungary are currently showing in an unpleasant way) sovereign powers are not removed.

1a. Since Brexit would make both N.Ireland and Scotland much more likely to leave the UK within a few years, the sovereignty argument rings pretty hollow anyway.

2. Economics. Every serious analysis shows that Brexit will be disastrous for the UK economy. Multiple industrial groups have started moving operations out; the others are begging the government for a very, very soft Brexit. These aren't commentators or academics: these are literally the captains of industry. If they're worried, I'm worried.

3. Immigration won't stop after Brexit: when we need workers, they will come. Most people don't come here except to work, anyway.

4. Trade. See point 2. If we lose all our free trade agreements overnight as well as losing free access to the EU market, our trade in both goods and services will not stop dead, but it will decline dramatically, the balance of payments will get much worse, the £ will collapse further, and the country will be impoverished. Do you think food's expensive now? Just wait for Brexit.

DNS ad-hocracy in peril as ICANN advisors mull root server shakeup

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Will the consolidated root servers have the capacity to function...

I haven't read the white paper, but I read this as talking about consolidating the number of operators, not the number of servers. In any case the server addresses are all unicast addresses, i.e. in reality there are many instances of each of the apparent 13. So I don't think there's any issue about redundancy and DDOS resistance; this is an admin thing.

Time to dump dual-stack networks and get on the IPv6 train – with LW4o6

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main benefit

The main benefit is that if the ISP has no more IPv4 addresses, you still get connected...

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they definitely do IP address tracking

Not only Netflix. Gmail, for example, treats frequent IP address changes as suspect*. They seem to have improved a bit recently in how they handle IPv6 privacy addresses, but it can still be a problem.

*Tunnelbear into the UK and they tell you that somebody in Slough has got your password. But that's only IPv4 since Tunnelbear isn't doing IPv6 yet.

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Re: "Where does the 4 to 6 interchange take place?"

You've missed the point - because there are still lots of IPv4-only sites, the traffic needs to be sent onwards over IPv4. As those sites progressively add IPv6 support (hello The Register, are you listening?), users won't need this as much, but as long as there's a single IPv4-only site in the world, this feature is needed.

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What extra complication?

..."no reason why I'd want to my home network to be IPv6 - a lot of extra complication and hassle"

Really? Do you have any internal routers? If not, there's no hassle, it just works. If yes, once they have HNCP support, there's no hassle, it just works.

Cryptography is the Bombe: Britain's Enigma-cracker on display in new home

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The Poles never get sufficient credit...

Actually, I don't recall reading a single history of the GCCS work that didn't start with the Polish work. So I think they do get due credit. Realising that purpose-built machines could attack weaknesses in machine-generated ciphertext was a major insight. However, their relatively simple Bombas worked against a relatively simple form of Enigma; it got precisely nowhere against military-grade Enigma as used during the war. Turing's Bombes were a good deal smarter.

Google cloud VMs given same IP addresses ... and down they went

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IPv what?

Let's hope these were duplicate IPv4 addresses. Duplicate IPv6 would be unforgivable.

UN's freedom of expression top dog slams European copyright plans

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Facepalm

Re: This is long overdue

If only RFC3514 and RFC8136 had been implemented, we'd never have had this problem to solve.

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Happy

Re: The EU listen? Don't make me laugh

Actually, the EU policy makers do listen, not so much to the UN, but to stakeholders in the EU member states. That's one of the good things about being in the EU, as opposed to being outside but forced to adopt EU rules in order to obtain trading rights.

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FAIL

I'm fully aware of the issues ... ?

" I'm fully aware of the issues of using checksum but it's really the only simple option..."

So what earthly use is a simple option that doesn't work?

Oh, and my book, published by a major publisher's EU-based office, is readily available with a bit of Googling, from a site (guess where) outside the EU. Such a law is utterly trivial to defeat, and therefore utterly pointless, whether it uses trivial checksums or very sophisticated machine learning.

ICANN pays to push Whois case to European Court of Justice

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Coat

Board photo

Somehow a photo of the board does not restore confidence. I don't knew fully why.
I think you'll find the same goes for any corporate board. What I don't quite get (being personally acquainted with at least 20 of the present or past board members) is how ICANN become so arrogant, for arrogant it certainly is. Without that problem, a lot of their decisions would be less inexplicable.

Of course, there's no way back now from the fundamental blunder of defining any new gTLDs at all.