* Posts by Yes Me

1735 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2008

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

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Headmaster

Re: anything that plugs into a wall....

5, surely, there's not even an RFC for SOCKS4.

Scanning phones to detect child abuse evidence is harmful, 'magical' thinking

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Big Brother

Who's behind this?

Nobody else seems to have suggested that the true instigators of this nonsense may well be the signals intelligence agencies. They've been stretching the legal limits of surveillance and denigrating public access to powerful e2e cryptography for several decades, with limited success. Now, maybe, they've found a winner: make child abuse the excuse for what they have always wanted to do. It only needs a few gullible politicians and journalists to fall for it.

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Stop

Re: Sponsorship...

Anyone who knows Ross knows that is not the case.

Last week's US export controls could mark start of trade war

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Re: China doesn't hold all that much US debt

Yes, but I upvoted VoiceOfTruth because the only mistake in that post is the comment about debt. Deficit financing and Keynesian policies are mighty fine, much better than the supply-side voodoo economics favoured by right wingers ever since Reagan and Thatcher. None of that is the reason why the US Empire is in decline. Now the China has a modern economy, their size "trumps" the USA. That's all.

Biden cuts off China's Yangtze, 30 others from US chipmaking gear

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Unhappy

Sad

Sad to see an empire at the end of its days trying to defeat the more powerful new empire, rather than figuring out its place in the new world order.

It's the same fallacy as that behind "Make America great again." It's depressing that Democrats as well as Republicans imagine that banning high tech sales will have any effect on China except giving them even stronger reasons to develop their own high tech. This is not the way to improve respect of human rights in China.

If you need a TCP replacement, you won't find a QUIC one

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Angel

TimBL's day job

When HTTP came along in the early 1990s, it wasn’t trying to solve an RPC problem so much as an information sharing problem, but it did implement request/response semantics.
Tim Berners-Lee's day job when he designed HTTP was implementing and supporting RPC for physics experiments. He'd known about RPC since at least 1980. It was no coincidence that he implemented request/response.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

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Boffin

Re: They removed Paris....

Most importantly, that leaves space for a new icon... suggestions?

UN's ITU election may spell the end of our open internet

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Re: Nobody ever took "New IP" seriously

But it still doesn't matter if it does end up in an ITU-T recommendation. Nobody cares, because that isn't where the Internet's technical standards come from.

Been there, done that, sat in meetings in Geneva, even before Zhao Houlin became S-G. All hot air, contributing to climate change.

P.S. As you probably know as well as I do, fringe workshops at IEEE-sponsored conferences are great for getting publication counts up, especially for grad students and early-career academics, but they don't mean diddly-squat as far as deployment by ISPs goes.

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Re: Who's paying the piper?

Because whoever operates your default DNS server has decided not to resolve that particular name, or because your local ISP has intentionally blackholed the necessary route. Mine hasn't done either of those things, so if I want to look at RT's absurdist propaganda and lies, I can do so.

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Happy

Nobody ever took "New IP" seriously

Sovereign countries already do what they want and control what they want. It's always been a delusion that the Internet was open and free everywhere. That's not to say that protocols and security mechanisms haven't been consciously designed to encourage open access and privacy, but, actually, governments do govern, for good and for evil. For example, they switch off the Internet or block certain apps and services whenever they find it convenient.

So, although some of the ideas suggested by Huawei etc., in more serious places than the ITU, are technically interesting, nobody ever took "New IP" seriously, either as a technical proposal or as a political strawman.

Since the ITU has had a Chinese Secretary-General since 2015, I also think the fears of having a Putin acolyte replace him were pointless. The S-G doesn't make decisions at the ITU; they are made by nation-state representatives. That's not to say the S-G has no influence, but they don't take the decisions that count. There is no way "New IP" would ever make it through the ITU process, and even if it did, the Internet would ignore it.

Good to see the first female S-G, but I'd rather it was somebody from a smaller country. There's no scope for US hegemony at the ITU either.

The web's cruising at 13 million new and nefarious domain names a month

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WTF?

Their fault

I blame Bill Clinton for this. Or perhaps Al Gore. Or, really, Ira Magaziner. They were so sure that commercialising the DNS registration function was the right thing to do, back in 1998.

I though at that time that .com registrations should have been priced at about $2000. But the free marketeers won, and we got... 13 million new bogus domains a month.

Mankind is doomed.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

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Headmaster

Re: Carpets are nothing compared to tobacco smoke.

our office gal
Woke, at all?

CERN draws up shutdown plans to save energy

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Facepalm

Re: Propaganda

I don't think it's "merely" an extra. Stopping Nordstream 1 became pretty much inevitable the day that Putin launched his lunatic invasion, but it's a tactical problem. Scrapping Nordstream 2 was a fatal blow to the long-term strategy of depending on Russian gas. That strategy was an enormous blunder, committed in slow motion over several decades, triggered by German Greens and their irrational hatred of nuclear power.

Getting back to the OP, kudos to CERN for being public-spirited.

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Coat

Re: 1.3 TWh per year

Hard to tell, since nothing can escape them. My experience with jam doughnuts is that the jam escapes only too easily.

IBM wins contract to support NHS App

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Re: So they will be killing off older people then?

They already have PR text available for use if that ever gets out:

"Discrimination of any kind is entirely against our culture and who we are at IBMNHS, and there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our companyhospitals"

Bye bye BoJo: Liz Truss named new UK prime minister

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Childcatcher

Re: That's It I'm ....

"New Zealand - is imaginary"

Not entirely, but cheese really is expensive (to be blamed entirely on profiteering, as far as I can tell). Cost of living is a problem everywhere today.

nzherald.co.nz

Nadine Dorries promotes 'Brexit rewards' of proposed UK data protection law

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Coffee/keyboard

Pick any one of two

I assume that was sarcasm, since it is so wildly untrue.

But just in case: what all the affected businesses will do is choose between:

A. Go bust

B. Go offshore

Either way the UK will be rid of them.

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

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Re: Good for another 110 years

Was the condenser made of brass plates? I used to have a couple of beautiful brass variable condensers that came out of a pre-war (WW II, that is) radio, but alas no more, I left them at home when I went to university and they vanished without trace when my parents moved house.

Source: IBM disguised Watson Health layoffs as a 'redeployment initiative'

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Same old...

I suppose there's nothing to be done in a country with at-will employment as the norm. How does it work out in countries with effective employee-protection laws? That makes this sort of trickery much harder.

(Ex IBMer here, but I left before I was shoved, fortunately.)

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

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Facepalm

Re: Backups and Restores

Once upon a time I ran a reasonably large program development computer for our group, and a person we'll call Ed (not his name) was charged with making a daily backup of the "big" 66MB disk (yes, this really was once upon a time). That was a manual copy to a spare disk pack on a spare drive. I also insisted that Ed did a weekly backup to mag tape, a much slower job that Ed hated but he did it anyway.

One fine day the disk stopped working. Ignoring some ominous noises, Ed said "Ah-ha, I know what to do" and quickly removed the active disk pack and popped in yesterday's backup. Pressed the button, and the ominous scraping noises resumed.

Well, that took a while to sort out... but he never complained about having to do the backup to tape again.

Network congestion algorithms have design flaw, says MIT

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Free lunch

"CCAs have to choose at most two out of three properties: high throughput, convergence to a small and bounded delay range, and no starvation"

Is this supposed to be news? The people who design and implement congestion control for a living have known this for many years. It's nice to have the maths, but the absence of free lunch has long been known. The closer you get to a bounded delay target, the more traffic will be completely excluded because admitting it will increase the delay.

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

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Tap, tap, tap

I have the impression that tapping enabled is the Windows default. But yes, it is completely maddening: trying to find the place to disable tapping without accidentally tapping yourself into hyperspace.

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Re: There's no keyboard!

If this helps, I've generally found female help desk people a lot more helpful than their male colleagues. So the misogynist users are actually losing out.

That said, I've been on both sides of the support desk at various times and I can confirm that Some Users Are Arseholes, regardless of pronouns.

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Facepalm

Umm...

No checkpoints in a 5 week job? Tsk tsk. BAD programmer.

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

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Coat

Re: Reap what you sow

I'll have you know, sir, that British Bureacracy is quite simply the best in the world!

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Re: Reap what you sow

So what? You would expect the larger, richer economies to contribute more.

There's this thing called "society" you see, where the better off help the worse off. I think it was often called "Christianity" in the old days, although most religions encourage such behaviour.

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Re: Reap what you sow

What you get from a collaborative research programme is much more than money. You get collaboration. As was pointed out repeatedly before the referendum and during the May regime and again during the Johnson regime, losing Europe-wide collaborative research would be disastrous.

Guess what, they didn't listen, and it's a disaster. It's not just about the money.

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

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FAIL

Thinnet to Earth... Thinnet to Earth...

We once had a colleague, let him be known as Anon, who knew much more than we did about electricity, so when he found that none of the Thinnet cables that arrived in his lab had properly earthed shields, he carefully soldered them all to earth (or ground, as it's known in Umrika). And then he told us that our Ethernet had an unacceptably high error rate despite his improvements.

We then explained the concept of earth loops to Anon and removed all his helpful solder. With all the 50 Hz electricity gone, things worked much better.

Scientists find gasses from Earth in rocks from early Moon

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GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

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Re: emoji

Wrong question. If a criminal buys a set of picklocks and uses them to break into a house, you might reasonably ask whether the seller is at fault.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

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When??

" I'd say that TCP/IP had won by the year 2000. "

1989 in my book, and others would say sooner. Everything else became legacy long before Y2K. Of course, not all corporate IT departments realised it immediately.

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

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It says here that only 13 KDF8s were manufactured. The delivery list is a bit incomplete (https://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/Maincomp/Eel/ccs-n3x1.pdf) but maybe we can tie down the location anyway.

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Re: Always remember

Was that downvote your daughter or your wife?

IBM board probes claims of fudged sales figures that led to big bonuses for execs

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Devil

All to be expected.

Long overdue, I fear. First, IBM was a technology company run by engineers, salespeople and lawyers. It was well on the way to irrelevance when they put a businessman in charge (Gerstner). He pulled it back from the brink but then handed over to accountants, and finally to a techie who has clearly been snowed by the accountants. The accountants didn't know how to manage but did know how to make bad numbers magically look good. Until they didn't, which is where they are now.

Apple network traffic takes mysterious detour through Russia

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Re: This is why all traffic should be encrypted

If they were trying to receive traffic in bogus servers, they could provide bogus certificates. But there's nothing in the report to suggest that. It's equally likely they just wanted a look at the traffic for a while or just to blackhole it for fun and annoyance.

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Re: Yet IPv6 networks were built to rely on and assume both BGP and DNS work perfectly.

If only if it was that simple. It isn't.

Apple v Chicago streaming service tax battle ends in hushed settlement

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Re: Am I reading this right?

ISPs carry bits, and pay for the right of way. Streamers sell entertainment, and that's taxed in Chicago. All makes complete sense, and there's no reason a streaming service should be exempt from paying taxes like any other business.

Huawei under investigation for having tech installed near US missile silos

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Stop

Mass paranoia

It's just like mass hysteria except that it's infected only US politicians, and nobody who actually understands technology.

Just because you failed doesn't mean you weren't right

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Paris Hilton

Re: Failure analysis: Step One

Excuse me, but I think that would apply in the upper layers of UK society too. Arizona is not a social desert, in any case.

Paris because, well, I'm sure she'd never say that.

SCOTUS judges 'doxxed' after overturning Roe v Wade

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Right-turn-on-red is not a Federal rule. It's a state or local decision.

Meta's AI-based Wikipedia successor 'may be the next big break in NLP'

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Thumb Down

Metacrap

universal, uncurated and unstructured knowledge source

i.e. less accurate and more full of crap than Wikipedia

COO of failed bio-biz Theranos found guilty on all twelve fraud counts

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Re: Methinks it's lawyers all the way down on this one...

From what I've read she was very self-deluding and he was just bad. The two juries seem to have reached a similar conclusion.

Europe passes sweeping antitrust laws targeting America's Big Tech

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Re: They are not equal...

All your data belong Cloud

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Unhappy

Re: Not good

people who are ethically "challenged."
But some of those get elected to jobs in, say, the Kremlin or 10 Downing St.

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

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Thumb Down

DID end

I think this is DID on arrival.

did:whatever_you_like:random_identifier is a recipe for an unholy mess. The only ones that will work out of the box are did:dns:<valid DNS domain name> or did:email:<valid email address>.

Tim has blown this one big time IMNSHO.

DARPA study challenges assumptions about distributed ledger (and Bitcoin) security

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FAIL

Impossible

Using IPv6 addresses as identities is impossible. They are topological addresses (exactly like IPv4). The IPv6 addresses of my laptop change whenever I move to a new network, and the IPv6 addresses of my smartphone change when I move from WiFi to cellular or back.

Because of the way Internet routing works, it cannot be otherwise.

("Addresses" in the plural, because any up-to-date IPv6 host uses temporary addresses to protect privacy: it isn't an oversight that IPv6 addresses are not tied to identity, it's a design goal.)

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

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Re: While ya'll

All true, but it doesn't change the fact that the US is trying to prosecute someone for doing the job of a journalist. At least they haven't simply assassinated him, which is the procedure adopted by Israel and Saudi Arabia, among others.

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

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Meh

Foresight

I'd just love to see Ginny Gone-Lately's actual emails with the HR woman. But I don't expect I ever will. There's a reason why IBM years ago had the foresight to enforce 6-month expiry on all internal emails.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

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Re: Easy to miss something trivial

Too easy to confuse with the ANY key

IBM ordered to pay $1.6b to BMC

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Re: IBM rejected the decision and said it intends to appeal the ruling.

Even the IBM of 20 years ago wouldn't do it, but with today's IBM that seems devoid of principles, anything is possible. I'm with the judge.