* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Because many people are "known" to them. It simply isn't possible to monitor all of them, short of internment."

Loony neighbour reports are easy to deal with because there will only be one or two reports about the person of interest. You can eliminate that kind of noise pretty easily.

However, when someone is being reported by multiple sources - and those sources include credible people like various Imams (and the head of one of the UK's largest anti-terror muslim charities telling them "This guy is off his rocker and dangerous, you need to act NOW"), then filing it under non-urgent isn't appropriate.

That said, the security apparatchik is understaffed and underfunded, but not making best use of intelligence provided isn't helping their cause (FWIW, internment of potential terrorists would cost at least 100 times as much as the shortfall in funding now being talked about, probably 1000 times. There are sound financial and psychological reasons to avoid doing it)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The number of people known to authorities is just too large for this to be feasible."

Yes, BUT.....

When the senior people in an anti-terrorism focussed muslim charity (who have experience and qualifications in such things) ring up and say "XYZ is acting bloody strangely, menacingly and in my opinion is dangerous" then attention should be paid to the quality of the source and weighted accordingly.

Because that's exactly what happened in this instance - and that wasn't the only source.

Ditto cases where multiple reports are being filed, especially from community leaders such as multiple Imans (which happened in Manchester)

It's one thing to "gather intelligence" and quite another to collate such reports and (not) act on them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"If they started to disappear without trace though, that might give the rest of them some food for thought "

That worked so well for Pinochet, didn't it?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"But what else do you expect when parliament does not have one science or engineering degree between 650+ people."

the same issue is happening in the USA, and now there's the start of a campaign to get people with actual science degrees into politics.

i'm sure that will end up well.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Like the ones used in star-ships."

I'll settle for a bambleweenie 5000

First successful Hyperloop test module hits 100mph in four seconds

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Snake Oil

"In fact train companies often make more money by buying up unused land next to a small town, building a train line and station to it, and then sell the land off for housing."

Substitute "more money" for "more money than ever made from operating the railway line" in most cases.

Hyperloop One teases idea of 50-minute London-Edinburgh ride

Alan Brown Silver badge

"That crosses the divide between two tectonic plates."

Lots of engineering projects do, and there are few shear forces going on there so it's relatively straightforward

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The Spain to Morocco route appears to have plenty of (one-way, non-paying) traffic potential, but I can't see the economic case."

If you can carry freight, then there's a screaming case for it, given the volumes of such going northwards.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: UK Fault lines

"We stll get earthquakes (magnitude 3 or 4 max) even in southern England."

In geological terms the Southeast of England gets regular large quakes (5.8-6.5 or so every 350-450 years) and as it happens is more-or-less due for one "any day now" (the sequence centred in the Channel ideally should have had a bump in the last 200 years but nothing big enough has happened, which makes any likely quake that much more likely to be larger than smaller)

This sequence is recorded in recent history - 21 May 1382, 6 April 1580 - there should have been one in the last 100 years, but it hasn't happened. As SE England isn't built for them, the effects are going to be devastating (buildings were only generally made of brick/stone after the Great Fire of London and increasingly so in the last 200 years - but with no reinforcing)

These intraplate quakes are caused by africa colliding with europe. Think of them as ripples. :)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sudden loss of vacuum

"Like say with a small explosive device that would inevitably be smuggled on by terrorists at some point?"

This has been thought of. Apart from the obvious security stuff:

1: The thickness required for the tubes means any bomb in a pod is unlikely to damage them.

2: Unlike aircraft, pods don't need to be built as lightly as possible, so they're able to be _much_ more robust to bombs (to the point where the biologicals would be paste before the pods get compromised - and each pod's only going to hold 8-25 people)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: You have obviously not understood the bubble economy

" meaning that the investment makes a loss. Something China is now finding out."

Bubble investment in land is certainly that way in China.

Chinese govt investment in infrastructure (particularly the HS rail network) is pragmatic and well thought out. The kinds of mass movements which occur in holiday periods (especially chinese new year) already mean massive economic disruption and the improved railway network has paid for itself in dealing with that. The off-peak stuff is just gravy - and vastly improved transportation availability means that it's becoming practical for businesses to operate in the interior (where people are) instead of the coastal strips (requiring people be transported to the factories and accomodated)

The USA's economic boom was closely tied to (and physically close to) the massive rollout of the military road network after WW2 (civilians call them Interstates). Chinese economic development is already showing signs of clustering around the high speed rail network.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Um

"I admire Musk's achievements, but he is throwing far too much money away at a hilariously impractical idea."

The idea's been practical for 60 years. It's the costs of starting up that's the hurdle.

Trains are running as fast as they can practically go. Air friction requires megawatts to overcome and the practicalities of getting power from trackside to locomotive are difficult (pantographs don't work well at 350km/h). Running partially evacuated tubes with maglev means that you can go faster with less energy input AND propel the things more easily because the difficult parts are all stationary.

From the point of view of reducing carbon consumption, a decent fast rail system alone is enough to knock out the economics of london-edinburgh commuter flights, as even Amtrak's east coast corridor did to shuttle airlines between Boston and Washington DC. Hyperloop would do that for longer trips and is the probably face of a more-electric future.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Um

"Because if that happens when a train is in motion, all the passenger will die in the resulting colossal wreckage."

No, they won't. A leakdown will result in rapid (but not deadly) deceleration of the capsules and the system is intended to "leak some" and be fitted with vacuum pumps at regular intervals. Fitting escape hatches at regular intervals is relatively straightforward as they can't be opened unless pressures are equalised anyway.

Switching is relatively straightforward, essentially using a tube-version of railway stub switches (which are commonly used in rollercoasters too). It's the speed of these switches which is going to determine the arrival cadence of pods.

WRT submarine tunnelling, in many ways this is an easier problem to solve than the civils for penetrating mountains and building viaducts as for the most part the tubes can be prefabricated, then sunk and stabilised at a given depth.

The simple solution for coping with the inevitable areas where tight radii or elevation changes are unavoidable is to slow down for those sections. It's not as if the pods are uncontrolled.

The bigger problem is that I can't see a passenger-only hyperloop being economically possible(*) and the last thing you want to do is have special freight pod sizes which mean everything has to be repacked out of ISO containers as this _really_ destroys freighting economics (railways only kept their viability by moving away from "wagonload" mixed freight to moving containers and dedicated cars). The tubes need to be big enough for a pod carrying a shipping container to run in them and at that point you're starting to approach (or exceed) the mass of a railway wagon, with all the civil engineering requirements that go with it.

(*) loads are cyclic for starters. Freight can run at night, and interspersed with passenger traffic in low periods. Railways have never managed to break even on passenger-only transport without massive subsidies.

To heck with the laws of physics... we will squeeze more juice from these processors

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Boltar

"Obviously if a program is I/O bound then no amount of fancy coding is going to significatnly speed it up"

If the I/O bound is caused by trying to work on too much data in the first pass - most of which you're then going to throw away - then fancy coding (as in changing the order you work on things) makes a huge difference.

This is one of the primary reasons for optimizing database joins and selects. Get it right and you can see speedups of 100x or more.

Alan Brown Silver badge

The issue isn't just bandwidth

Memory latency has barely changed in the last 20 years. When a processor sends out for data and can spend thousands/millions of cycles waiting for it to actually arrive, there's a obvious area for improvement if this can be solved.

(DDRn means you can get more words in per request, but the ~60ns latency for random requests hasn't changed. There are lower latencies if you can get words from an adjacent row or in sequential order, etc but REAL chances of this happening in a multiuser system are slim to negligible.)

Yes, profiling and the 95/5 rule still apply, but this is one of those problems that solving would result in across the board improvements in performance - and it could also result in simpler processors. A large chunk of the support logic (and power consumption) inside a modern CPU core is dedicated to trying to predict what addresses will be asked for next and having it ready before the ALU asks for it. This kind of predictive prefetching and pipelining isn't terribly successful at predictions (usually about 30% at best) but it's still better than not trying at all, although longer pipelines looking further ahead isn't the answer -Netburst proved that.

US spook-sat buzzed the International Space Station

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: No need for the tinfoil hats

"To service satellites" or so they say. ;)

How exactly does one service a racehorse?

Hotel guest goes broke after booking software gremlin makes her pay for strangers' rooms

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bah!

"Or is it that UK credit card protection law is so unbelievably naff that having your current accout raped to bedrock is better in every way than invoking it?"

UK credit card protection law is pretty good - but just as important is that most banks offer (on paper) similar guarantees on debit card transactions AND protection against unauthorised direct debits.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: never use a debit card for credit ?

"Not for long - 2018 it will be outlawed for Visa and Mastercard (not Amex but few people use that anyway) in the EU*."

It's prohibited in most countries under the terms of the merchant agreement. The standard way around that is to offer discounts for cash.

On the other hand, Australasian banks charged so much for small transactions in the 1990s that allowing customers to use debit cards could effectively result in them taking 35% of the payment in fees (access/rental charges plus per transaction fees and a calculated monthly fee based on transaction volume and average size) - making it cheaper to take credit cards.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: One of my pet peeves

"You can't find who to call, you get put through to a script reader who takes you through all sorts of obvious irrelevances, then they try to blame you, next tehy pass you to a department who make you explain it all again."

In the case of an egrarious breach - but of relatively small monetary value - then a small claims filing has a tendency to slice through such obstacles like a white hot knife through butter.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Sounds like a lawsuit"

"After a stunt like that on a credit card:

1. Everything will be refunded. That is part of your credit card agreement."

It was on her debit card

- There's a (voluntary) scheme here in the UK which gives similar rights to credit cards (but it's voluntary and banks have been known to not honour it)

- There's no such scheme in in the USA - if a scammer dings your debit card you're on the hook no matter what. (Yes, even if it's visa debit and suchlike)

So yes, lawsuits aplenty, and I'd imagine a PCI compliance audit for the hotel for a fundamental breach of the rules about handling card details.

It would have been easier if it was charged to her credit card as Visa would have shut down the hotel gateways quickly (being on the hook for card-not-present fraud). With debit cards requiring the issuing bank to OK the transaction there are no pending transactions to raise alarms.

Ex-MI5 boss: People ask, why didn't you follow all these people ... on your radar?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not the Internet?

"What it does include on modern laser printers is the serial number encoded as a yellow dot pattern so that prints can be traced to the machine that printed them. You need a x25 magnification tool to see it. "

Yellow dots are highly visible as dark spots if you use a UV lamp. Not all printers do this stuff and some which do, have the option to disable printing the code.

'Fat boy' flies: ISRO's heavy rocket fails to blow up

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: And the UK gives "aid" to this country.

It's worth noting that virtually all of the "aid" comes with strings attached requiring that the recipients buy from XYZ british suppliers or trade with same.

It's a roundabout way of subsidising things back home.

The internet may well be the root cause of today's problems… but not in the way you think

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Christian Berger: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

"A company does not make money out of thin air!"

Banks do. The whole deposit/loan/deposit/loan thing gears the supply up and as a result the banks are responsible for far more "money" in circulation than the treasury.

When treasury was trying to pump liquidity into the economy, banks were sitting on it and reducing their gearing. Conversely, when treasury was frantically trying to do the opposite in stagflation days, interest rates kept climbing because more and more money was circulating.

No hypersonic railguns on our ships this year, says US Navy

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: When the missile is doing mach 8...

"Unless you hit it with something of greater mass, it's still going to hit you."

1: It can be deflected

2: At mach 8, if you damage the skin, air friction will do the rest.

3: If it breaks up, you have a lot of smaller impacts, which the armour can handle.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Railguns vs lasers

"a railgun isn't much good when you run out of rods"

True, but if you're not having to carry round 3-4 bags of cordite per shell (of about the same size) then you can fit a lot more of them onboard - and one of the bigger problems with needing the cordite is what happens when something coming the other way gets into your powder magazine.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Downsides

"ISTR that was a big problem with early railgun experiments."

It's been a problem probably a lot longer than you think - the Nazis had the same problem back in the mid 1930s.

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Triangulation is never based on sites in close proximity so where are BA's three sites? How could all three fail?"

2 of the three are within 2 miles of each other.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Complete and utter rubbish... and Unforgivable.

"On-line UPS systems take the input power feed, convert it to DC to charge the batteries, then they have inverters that take the DC from the battery and convert it into clean AC for the data center. Unless the UPS is in bypass mode for maintenance, this is the case at all times for all modern data center UPS systems."

For larger sites, Flywheel UPSes are the same (incoming mains drives the flywheel motor-generator), but allowable dropout time is usually in the region of 15-20 seconds.

The ATSes are as described and gennies are on the input side of the flywheel.

This gets around the _substantial_ issues associated with battery maintenance, but indroduces its own dangers - a 2 ton magnetically levitated flywheel in a vacuum chamber with _that_ much stored kinetic energy is not something to mess with, lest it exit its chamber (and the building) at ~100mph.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: UPSs suck

"And because only the servers were "protected" by the UPS, and the 100+ PCs were not, data was still lost with each power outage."

Modulo the point that leaving data on client machines is a "really bad idea"

In that case, you need a whole building UPS. If you've got £3-1100k to throw at the job (depends on sizing) I can point to a few suppliers. These come as 20-40 foot shipping containers (again, depends on size) so be prepared to lose a couple of car parks.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: UPSs suck

"They're not very reliable. And often *cause* problems, up to catching fire."

Only if you don't maintain the things properly. They carry significant energy and MUST be respected. Don't put them in the same rack (or room) as the computing equipment, they need their own environment.

And yes, I've had one "catch fire" - after being put into service following a 6 month furlough due to a blown power transistor.

PHB of the techs had insisted it be stored outside because it was cluttering up the workshop, where it'd gotten damp - it was only under a tarp instead of being properly wrapped up. About 12 hours after it was hooked up to the load, it decided it didn't like its environment anymore and would make that fact clear by smoking up a storm.

Staff reaction to the rancid smoke filling the building? They opened a few windows as they came in at 5am (This was a radio station). And it wasn't until management arrived at 8am that the building got evacuated.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: My theory

"Electrical Codes have surge standards to take "ordinary" inside the building shenanigans. They are useless to handle trees and construction equipment bridging two phases of 1300+ V (or one phase to the local distribution lines)."

But you design your switchgear on the incoming side for those possibilities regardless - and the obvious one in many countries of a 6kV or 11kV distribution line falling on the 240V lines where the distribution is above ground and poles are susceptable to cars.

Most DCs have a dedicated 11kV feed and local distribution transformers but you'd be surprised at the kinds of _shit_ that comes up the power lines

It's not just the USA. UK power feeds are far from clean, with 1920s power standards still being acceptable in terms of dropouts, short brownouts and spikes. Our 2 large online UPS systems see an average of 5 notifiable events PER DAY. The stored kinetic energy (flywheel UPS) is used several times per week and the diesels are run in anger 3-5 times per month - mainly due to incoming power being well out of spec, rather than a complete outage.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: DR plans

"to actually get down and test the DR plan by flipping off the power to the primary DC?"

Anon BA staffers have already posted into other threads that's EXACTLY what used to be done.

Whatever the borkage is, it's recent.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: When You Don't Test And Train And Your Setup Sucks...

"One especially warm weekend a customer's aircon failed and the computer system got so hot that the only sensible thing to do was condemn it"

How many people running datacentres DON'T have a crowbar set to drop on the power if room temps go over a set limit? (usually 35C)

Alan Brown Silver badge

It might be 230 from the substation in Sweden, but it's 252 at my wall socket most of the time.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: UK FAST - 2009

"admitted that both the primary and backup SQL boxes had been connected to the same power bus"

I don't even hookup the two rack PDUs to the same power bus, let alone systems which are supposed to be failovers.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Electrical Interlocks

".Or the generator crankshaft or coupling gets sheared off with the shock load. Seen examples of that..."

This is why they're supposed to have shear pins

Alan Brown Silver badge

The problem with this timeline

Is that it was reported to be issuing random destinations on boarding passes on Friday

The contractors have come out swinging too - "we do not recognise this scenario" is a polite way of warning BA that anything further is likely to result in legal action.

Just 99.5 million nuisance calls... and KeurBOOM! A £400K megafine

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can't pay?

"then run the new business as a manager "under" the named director."

That's actually a criminal offence - the problem is detecting it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

it'd be nice if the DPA and other legislation had statutory minimum damages per offence. It'd make going after these scammers a lot easier.

How Lexmark's patent fight to crush an ink reseller will affect us all

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "patent exhaustion doesn't apply when patented goods are sold outside the US"

"I thought godless commies should be held at arm's length."

Except they found religion - as with most people they worship at the altar of the trading currency.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: AARP

> On a bad day, the rest of the population "has no idea of the value of money". There, I've said it.

About 1/10,000 what it was in your day, grand-dad.

Lexmark patent racket busted by Supremes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ink v Toner

"Problem with getting a laser/colour laser is the cost of the toner."

Doesn't evaporate, doesn't clog the heads and generally for the same price as the toner, inkjet refills will only give you 1/4 to 1/5 the number of pages (or less) with continuous usage.

The price quoted for genuine Oki stuff is around the £70 mark for black (3500 pages) and slightly less for each of the 3 colours. Experience here is that you'll replace 2-3 blacks for any other colour and 2-3 Cyan/Magenta for every Yellow, so the costs aren't as bad as you make out.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Lexmark loses twice?

"Who actually needs to print things any more?"

There was the old joke that the paperless office was anything bit, but in the last 4-5 years we've seen a marked reduction in print volumes after 3 decades of yearly increases that showed no sign of decelerating.

It's actually caught us off guard inasmuch as the printers we have now are vastly oversized for the job they do.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Takes me back

"this cartridge will self destruct in 10 pages".

I've seen plenty of third party toner and ink cartridges which did that. Office Depot/Niceday being prime offenders.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Or just MAYBE some company will get a bit smarter

"In fairness this is really only the case at the very cheap end of the market"

Have you priced ink for Designjets and similar large printers? There's a reason there's a healthy market for aftermarket continuous-ink systems for these things and only a small fraction of it is the convenience of not having to change out cartridges at inconvenient moments.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "They just accept ink is made from virgin unicorn pee or something."

"Often, the manufacturing, packaging, warehousing and delivering cost more than what's inside."

The oft-quoted example being a certain 4-letter brand of red and white Cola.

The content of the 330ml can is worth less than 1/2 of the metal IN the can. That's when you pick it up after being manufactured, packaged and delivered to a corner store near you. The entirity of the rest of the cost is marketing and store markup.

(There are odder examples. Mr "I bought the company" Karman tripled the price of the razors being sold and by doing so pushed them into a marketplace which previously wouldn't consider touching them because they were so cheap.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What about other measures?

"some that'd been recycled many times so the bearings were shot"

This is about the only area where I could see a chip being useful (counting the returns to base).

As for coffeemakers - those pod or packet based things are evil and should be banned.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If only lasers were always better

"The problem I have with lasers is"

You're using the wrong kind of laser.

The curling is happening because the printer you're using is running the card through a curved path when it applies heat (fusing) and probably at too high a heat because you told the printer it's plain paper instead of heavier stock.

Either iron your card, or find a laser which has a "straight through" path for heavy stock (they still exist) and settings for such things.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What about other measures?

"If the printer will ONLY accept encrypted communications coming from such chips, things get tricky. "

In a bunch of jurisdictions, it could result in restraint of trade prosecutions. Australia being one country that springs to mind.