* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

BT's spam blocker IDs accident claims as top nuisance call

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: re: Truecaller

"Doesn't Truecaller slurp your whole contact list"

Only if you let it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"My GP's surgery and the local council both use "Withheld" - presumably for privacy of the recipient. "

My GP has a note on the patient field saying I don't answer withheld numbers along with instructions on how to switch withholding off.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"My landline is the spam trap. It's the number I give out when I'm not sure why and I can't be bothered arguing about why they need a phone number. "

I have a 070 for that. £1.50/min serves to discourage all but the most determined spammers.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: it could divert 1.6 billion nuisance calls a year.

"For consumers with no call bundle with BT, maybe."

Perhaps someone needs to explain how interconnect charges work. BT get paid for terminating calls originating from other telcos (and vice versa).

One of the reasons that telcos started paying attention to scam calls was because of fraudulent accounting data getting injected into the network resulting in them not being paid for the calls.

Hell desk to user: 'I know you're wrong. I wrote the software. And the protocol it runs on'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hilarious!

> His software complies with the protocol RFCs *exactly*.

Not always.

As one example, the RFC for DNS states that IP(v4) addresses are 4 decimal addresses separated by dots. Many people have been caught out after reading that and writing PTR records with 0-padding to make it easier to read/sort - and promptly found out that the software (written by the same person) interprets that as octal.

It turned out that resolvers also took 0xNN as hex and you could even feed them a single decimal number. Spammers had a field day with that for a while.

My suggestion that either the RFC and program documentation should be changed, or the software should be altered to conform with the RFC didn't go down well (several years before spammers started abusing resolvers).

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stalk the stalk

> "Fine!" I replied, and stalked out of the office muttering under my breath.

Ticket closed with "plugged in unplugged monitor", etc?

Our ticketing system allows us to summarise users, it's clear there are a few with "issues" that lie between the keyboard and the chair.

Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon's lawyer, UK supporters rally around Marcus Hutchins

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "98 per cent of people charged in America take a plea deal."

"Actual profits (i.e. excluding salaries) are around $700m per annum in return to investors. This creates an enormous incentive to incarcerate people. "

Up to and including bent judges sentencing people in return for kickbacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal - and if you think that's an isolated case you're sadly mistaken.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "98 per cent of people charged in America take a plea deal."

Add to that statistic that most states have laws on the books that convicted felons can't vote.

IE: accept a plea deal and you're disenfranchised.

This has been used to systematically disenfranchise the poor.

Horsemen of the disk-drive apocalypse will ride upon 256TB SSDs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: return on investment

"what I wonder is if at that same moment flash price will go down, I mean down to the same pricing as hdd for equivalent storage space."

In short: "no" - flash pricing is largely(*) dictated by supply and demand and right now demand is vastly outstripping supply. This isn't a rerun of the days of the Dramurai cartel.

Until there is surplus manufacturing capacity there won't be a price war.

(*) There are minimum costs set by needing to pay back the investment.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Then explain MIL SPEC erasure standards"

They were a response to military practice of "blow it up" - some drives were able to be reassembled and read and it was in the days when drives were horrifically expensive/reusable.

If you're that concerned about someone accessing the data on your (ex-)drive, take a blowtorch to the platters.

From a pragmatic point of view, on a 10GB+ drive your desireable data is a very small needle in a very large haystack and voice coil servo-tracking technology is quite different to the stepper motor imprecision of the drives that were tested by Peter Gutmann more than 25 years ago (which is what the multiple overwrite strategy is intended to counter)

Alan Brown Silver badge

" There are research papers where they succeeded in reading data that had been overwritten 4 or 5 times."

Yes, on 10 and 20MB MFM drives of the early 90s using stepper motor head positioning

Peter Gutmann did a followup paper a few years later stating that the difficulty of extracting information from more modern voice coil HDDs (of the mid to late 1990s) rendered it effectively impossible. He also had words to say about people believing various voodoo relating to erasure procedures.

Disk density has increased by a factor of 1000 since that followup paper was written. If you want to ensure your hard drive is truely erased, take the platters out and heat them past their curie point, otherwise ATA secure erase is sufficient unless you're facing 3-letter agencies with 9-figure budgets - and they're more likely to use "monkey wrench" decryption when pressed anyway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

HDD confusion

"an SSD can have more parallel read/write access streams inside it than a disk drive with six or seven read/write heads feeding a SAS or SATA interface"

Erm, Hard drives only use one head at a time. Trying to parallel them leads to all sorts of problems thanks to track alignment issues and they gave up trying decades ago. (it also means only one set of head drive logic is needed and switched between heads as required)

Openreach pegs full fibre overhaul anywhere between £3bn and £6bn

Alan Brown Silver badge

"BT have a huge stick to threaten government with, of c£11bn of unfunded pension liabilities on their balance sheet"

This is exactly the same FUD used by Telecom NZ to try and prevent the split there. It turned out that once the lines company (which employed the most staff) had the dead hand of head office removed, it was profitable and the pensions liabilities weren't as big an issue as made out.

Looking at what happened in NZ since 2011 shows what can happen if the split is done right - and remember that NZ's regulators specifically looked at the kinds of market abuse perpetrated by BT, and said "no, not here"

Re-identifying folks from anonymised data will be a crime in the UK

Alan Brown Silver badge

> Define "eye-watering".

A long time ago in another country, the CEO of a company I worked for sent out this message:

"I have no desire to go to jail for something one of my staff has done, therefore I wish to state in no uncertain terms that in light of recent legislation, undertaking the following activities is expressly prohibited for employees of this company at any level from the coalface to the boardroom."

That's the kind of thing that gets attention.

Largest ever losses fail to dent Tesla's bulging order book

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So Tesla issues no dividends, makes no profit and the shares are several $100 each....

"It costs about 3x more to compress or cool than to make in the first place. It's intellectually satisfying ("pollution" is water) but otherwise it's an enormous waste of money, given most of it made in CA is from natural gas anyway."

The only practical way to produce hydrogen without carbon is using nuclear powered process heat and if you're doing that you might as well tack on a few carbon atoms to make it easier to handle. There are more hydrogen atoms in a litre of gasoline than a litre of LH2 and if you're making synthetic octane the pollutant levels are low.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Clearly you and apparently others, have no clue how Hydrogen Fuel cells work."

Most of us have a pretty good idea how they work. The reality is that hydrogen under pressure is a bitch of a substance to work with on a number of levels.

Embrittlement, leaking through most materials (permeation), explosive deflagration (tanks bursting due to pressure cycling) - and that's just on the cars.

Canadian ISPs do not Canuck around: Bloke accused of piracy grilled in his home for hours

Alan Brown Silver badge

> After being told where it was waited at the toilet door for someone to come out of the pass locked entry door. He then walked very quickly over to the door and got his foot in to stop it locking.

Presumably "security" have educated their staff about unaccompanied visitors?

Alternatively, pass doors near the public toilets have been updated to a dual door system?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The true nature of big corp

> When I enquired if I could have a lawyer present the HR bloke said "No sorry you can only have staff or union."

This is Mr Jones, QC, representing the Union.

Another day, another British Airways systems screwup causes chaos

Alan Brown Silver badge

"BA (well, IAG) is trying to sell itself to Qatar who want control. "

That could be "interesting" for BA/IAG manglement. Qatar run a _very_ tight ship and concentrate heavily on both 'making sure things don't go wrong' and 'getting it right when things go wrong'

They'll look right past the profit statements at customer satisfaction levels and those stories may badly impact the sale price. I can see large chunks of upper and middle management being shown the door.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I feel sorry

"Just because there's not a box on a spreadsheet for "Money saved because we were nice to people and they continued to use us", doesn't mean it shouldn't be accounted for."

It is. Accountants call it "goodwill" and it's a substantial part of most company bottom lines.

When an ongoing concern is sold, it's the part of the sale price that isn't accounted for by the assets.

The problem is invariably that management/sales don't get "goodwill" when they come up with their harebrained scams to save money - bringing up "goodwill impact" with accountants is always worthwhile if you think that PHB is doing something incredibly stupid.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "If you know why BA's shonky IT keeps going to sleep in the mornings...."

"And if you could get the best people, it'd cost as much (or more) than it does as hiring your own employees and nobody would bother offshoring."

The only time you should ever consider outsourcing your core business(*) is when you need to get rid of large numbers of staff(**) and have no other options.

(*) An airline is a massive IT and logistical operation which happens to fly aircraft and the aircraft can be wetleased.

(**) EG: when you have twice as many as are actually needed thanks to featherbedding management not being detected for a decade or so, or when a change in technology would cause massive redundancies but the staff won't have it(***)

(***) EG: shipbuilding - it was refusal to move to modern methods that killed UK yards - the workers in Japan were actually better-paid than the UK ones, but produced 10-15 times more output.

Flash fryers have burger problems: You can't keep adding layers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: we're running out of options

It's still denser and easier to do in the factory than have precision mechanical components at these kinds of scales out in the field.

Going to smaller geometry on 3D is a non-starter because not only dies it reduce the number of write cycles and increase errors, but it makes the device significantly _slower_ - that was the other compelling reason to go back to larger geometry.

Don't forget: we _already_ have 2.5" 16TB SSDs and the driving force on cost is availability, not the need to make more layers. Demand vastly outstrips supply and whilst you can add more production capacity, those etching machines don't come cheap.

Etch a stretch: 3D NAND layer cake flop leads to 'string stacking'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: TEM?

If you can't go fast enough on one machine, use multiple machines to keep up the production speed.

If you love your email standards, SMTP your feet: 35 years later

Alan Brown Silver badge

The spam problem: older than you might think.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc706.txt

Nov 1975

Sputtering bit-blasters! IBM's just claimed densest tape ever record

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Long live tape !

You're paying £20 too much for LTO7 (assuming Sony)

and I can buy Sony LTO6 tapes for £16+VAT. More bang per buck, so holding off on using LTO7 until they come down.

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ""A piano could drop on her head tomorrow""

"Umm! I can point you in the direction of a purveyor of fine anvils for a small consideration."

Or you could contract out to the Orbital Anvil Delivery System

Ohm-em-gee: US nuke plant project goes dark after money meltdown

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Nuclear is dead. And it has been killed by radiophobic bureaucrats"

As long as your nuclear systems involve water and radioactives mixing with each other, you have a problem. Add pressure and high temperatures and it's compounded.

Similar problems with graphite/gas systems - gasses leak

Similar problem with metal cooled ones (sodium burns, lead's problematic)

Having designs you can PROVE are intrinsically safe would go a long way towards solving the objections - and things haven't been helped by the lack of designed-in control safety, etc.

The nuclear tea kettle was fine as a proof of concept and to power submarines (low power requirements) but it should never have been allowed to be scaled up to dangerous sizes.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Why aren't much safer Thorium Reactors being built already?"

"However if you can form a company to design such a reactor (or help fund one if any exist), then get a test reactor built (because getting someone to buy one "off the plan" is going to be pretty difficult) then you're home and dry."

Discounting the test system that WAS built 50 years ago (Oak Ridge Experiment) and killed before it went into the breeding test phase.

Fortunately, "someone" is working on a new test reactor (actually a pair) - the chinese government.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fukushima not a big enough warning ?

"In a recent LA Times article on deactivated San Onofre reactor it was mentioned that the US has 79,000 tons of spent fuel rods with no storage plans."

Keep them in the pools at the plants for 2 centuries (the nuclear waste from a 800-1000MWe reactor over its lifespan is about enough to fill an olympic pool), then they're safe enough to handle (radiation levels are only slightly higher than a new rod at that point).

If Thorium-fuelled molten salt reactors become viable, they can eat the "waste" as supplementary fuel, along with the preprocessing waste (85-95% of mined uranium is tossed out during the enrichment process as "useless" U238 depleted uranium - which is ideal for making h-bomb casings, but works well as supplementary LFTR fuel). A LFTR with continuous inline chemical reprocessing would produce 1% of the waste of uranium reactors, most of which is actually useful material such as helium or other gases that can be onsold after sitting around for 5-20 years to allow remaining fissiles to bake out.

The dangers of radiation exposure are vastly overblown, usually by the same people who think nothing of jumping in a jet and flying off on holiday somewhere (Youtube: the 20 most radioactive places on earth - the final place is a kicker )

Alan Brown Silver badge

"For tornado and earthquake proof, what magnitude on their respective scales is the design supposed to withstand?"

The problem with PWR designs is that they're a _giant_ pressure vessel, filled with _tonnes_ of water at 400C and 20-40 atmospheres and the nooclear stuff is in the middle.

That makes them akin to a balloon waiting for a pin.

Steam explosions are bad enough but when there's the added complication of loose radionucleides getting into the biosphere AND the fact that the natural temperature of fission reactions is around 11-1200C AND that water is corrosive when it's extremely hot and under pressure (not to menion the fact that nuclear plants add boric acid), you have a problem when the water gets out.

That's why the buildings are so big (containing the steam) and there are so many backup systems to make sure the reactor never runs out of water.

Other designs would use coolants which don't need to be pressurised around the hot stuff (which changes the entire protection design requirement), wouldn't boil below the natural temperature of the reaction (so don't need pressurisation) and wouldn't let water get in contact with radionucleides.

Thats the premise of using gas, lead, sodium or molten salt cooling, but let's be honest - using a metal that burns furiously in contact with air isn't the brightest idea (but the USA, UK, Japan and Russia have all done it and all found out why it's a bad idea - lookup "monju") and lead cooled fuel rods are a problem if they get cold as the russians found out the hard way on a couple of submarines.

Gas cooled systems work well, but the gas can still leak out (and has on occasion - UK AGRs).

Molten salt systems freeze at 300-400C so any leaks don't go far, the fuel is dissolved n the salt so you can chemically reprocess on the fly using flow reactions (not critical chemistry, you only need to clean it enough to keep the reactor running) and will happily sit there at 1400C without doing anything nasty.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let's be real. This has been a long time coming.

"A clean slate design to build reactors that didn't power submarines and didn't need enriched Uranium (and all the issues around bomb making that go with it) would be a very different beast."

And such a beast has existed since the 1960s, funded by the USAF.

Lookup the Oak Ridge Experiment.

Facebook pulls plug on language-inventing chatbots? THE TRUTH

Alan Brown Silver badge

Looks like a pidgin - you see similar conversations developing between people with a limited common language set who want to trade.

UAV maker swipes at sponsor of opaque Qinetiq drone study

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bringing facts to an argument BALPA et al is clearly dodging:

"In general aviation (GA), windscreens don’t need to be certified to withstand birdstrikes"

General aviation is usually single engine. Experience is that a duck hit on climbout at 500 feet gets nicely macerated by the prop before it hits the screen - enough that you can't see, not because it's broken, but because of the mess smeared over the outside.

And yes, I've seen the youtube videos of when they've broken.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Spanners..

"Birds are by far a bigger hazard than drones. "

And the number of bird observations by pilots around Heathrow has dropped in a very direct relationship with the increase in the number of drone observations.

It's hard enough to see either in a light plane travelling 80-90mph, let alone in a jet doing 150-200mph in approach phase. It's also surprisingly hard to see another light aircraft flying directly towards you until it's less than 100 metres away - and that's somehting with a 10 metre wingspan.

Openreach to split from BT... so they'll be 'Legally Separate'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: FTTP

"LOL you do understand what blowing fiber down the ducts mean ?"

Perfectly. I've even done it in a past life as a telco goon.

"he not saying the the fiber has been burnt out"

Nor am I. I'm saying that long copper lines are at risk of lightning strike and end up expensive to repair, so replacement runs are usually done as fibre overlays.

The question of whether that fibre gets to premises along the route is another matter for the reader to discuss.

Ofcom lifts sword, eyes up BT's duct and pole rental costs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "In its on-going efforts to break Blighty's broadband dependence on BT..."

Unless and until Openreach's plant is cleaved from BT, the situation will continue.

There's a very good reason that New Zealand's regulators refused to let Telecom NZ simply split off the lines company functions whilst retaining ownership of the plant, which is what BT have done - and the result was turning a poster child for "How NOT to privatise your telco" into one of the most competitive markets in the world - in a period of less than 5 years.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Also having an alternative line in from day one, helps to keep you involved in future procurement and maintenance of their network infrastructure which can lead to other work..."

Not to mention that having an alternative supplier in the premises gives an _instant_ discount in BTO's asking prices.

Red Hat acquires Permabit to put the squeeze on RHEL

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It is a huge pain you can't add more disks to a parity raid though"

That's the one painful assumption of ZFS - that you have enough money to just build a complete new vdev to migrate data across. raidset resizing/reparity has been on the linux TODO list for at least 6 years.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"For me, at least, ZFS is about a lot more than dedup."

Yup - and dedupe is something that you DO NOT DO unless you know what you're doing. It's a 2^n-1 problem and whilst ZFS eats memory at the rate of about 1GB per TB of disk (for its caching), it consumes _at least_ 5 times as much if you enable dedupe (sometimes 25 times as much) along with a helluva lot more CPU.

WRT ZFS expansion: you CAN swapout 1TB drives for 6TB ones. Once you've done all drives in the vdev it will automatically expand to the new size - and not before.

As far as licensing goes, CDDL was deliberately designed to be incompatible with GPL, however ZFS on linux is a big thing, works well and is easy to install (it's part of several distros including Debian and its derivatiives) - all you have to do to avoid licensing issues is: Don't ship ZFS with the OS, add it after installation.

Dirty carbon nanotubes offer telcos chance at secure quantum comms

Alan Brown Silver badge

reason for the wavelengths

nothing to do with the amplifers(*) and everything to do with the windows of tranparency in optical fibre

(*) The amplifiers are (of course) created to operate at the optimal frequencies, not the other way around.

NAND that's that... Flash chip industry worth twice disk drive biz

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Rebuild times

I have 32TB at home. Rebuild takes about a day on an idle system (ZFS) and up to 3 days if busy.

dedupe is limited by ram, not drive speed. (it's a 2^n-1 problem, not linear scaling)

Inside the ongoing fight to stamp out govt-grade Android spyware

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Legit purposes?

"Someone determined enough and with enough power can just ignore the law, wipe out anyone who dares interfere, and replace them with sympathizers. "

There's a conspiracy theory that this is being worked towards by calling a constitutional review. Once 2/3 of the states call it, anything's on the table (including wiping the document altogether).

US spies hacked our phones over the air, claim pipeline protesters

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: In other news

"You failed to mention that the UFO was piloted by a dinosaur."

And Jimmy Hoffa was acting as loadmaster?

Virgin Media mulls ditching 1 in 3 UK facilities, starts £20m spend audit

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Virgin on demand (not)

"They will then mess you around forever neither fulfilling your order nor admitting they cannot deliver."

Invoice them for no shows.

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: the problem with clueless amateurs...

"I mean he works for the same employer that makes Red Hat (which considers it a good user ID), FFS."

If you've ever been a redhat customer, you'll discover that the same attitude pervades the company.

Flaws in web-connected, radiation-monitoring kit? What could go wrong?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Joking aside are these the most potentially seriousl vulnerabilies seen outside of Stuxnet?

"this could be exploited by bad actors to bring in a nuclear device through a seaport in a shipping container."

Whereas all they need to do now is hide it in a shipping container full of bananas.

Linus Torvalds pens vintage 'f*cking' rant at kernel dev's 'utter BS'

Alan Brown Silver badge

"For me (note my handle) it seemed always strange how super-duper-extra polite the US style is. "

It's about what you might expect when the person being criticised may turn out to be a special snowflake with poor self control, impulse issues and a concealed handgun.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"is it never possible that Linus is wrong? Does he never say BS?"

He gets things wrong regularly - and admits it, and sometimes calls himself evil names in public for it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"He needs to learn some social skills."

He's got plenty of social skills. The harsh reality is that being "nice" and using "soothing" language simply results in clues bouncing off the clueless.

Adding a few barbs tends to make them stick.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: As I've said before ...

"As long as it works, and has equal performance, and doesn't change the userspace interface."

Linus isn't the only one who'd heave a sigh of relief. Some of those decisions made a long time ago when we were younger, more foolish and had less grey hair seem less smart with 20+ years of hindsight. kernel NFS in particular must die.