* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Really a power failure?

I've also run into cases of people unplugging stuff they shouldn't, to plug in stuff they shouldn't.(*)

And denied doing it - until confronted with CCTV evidence, then still tried to deny it.

(*) In one case, a toasted sandwich maker. That kind of shit belongs in the kitchen.

Drones over London caused aviation chaos, pilots' reports reveal

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmmm...

"Notably UFO sightings have dropped in inverse proportion..."

That, and bird sightings.

Britain's on the brink of a small-scale nuclear reactor revolution

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: And what about solar?

"although worth noting that if you've got a monsoon season, there will be several months of very low direct sunshine, and that needs to be given some thought."

Contrary to popular opinion, monsoon isn't months (or even weeks) on end of overcast skies.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Has there been anything beyond some marketing graphics yet?

" they came up with a different SMR concept, the PBMR, and they had a proof of concept plant built and working (IIRC). "

Pebblebeds are still being developed. The german ones had some safety issues which you'd kind of expect being an experimental setup and got shut down as a result.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: £875 per household per year!

"[2] mean you no longer get much rainfall (check how much civilisation in the Sahara!). "

This is one area of great concern for climate scientists. The effect on ~3 billion people of the asian Monsoon failing or significantly changing its pattern is something that should give pause for thought.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: £875 per household per year!

"Yes, we've built modern civilisation on cheap energy - which is now destroying modern civilisation. Not very bright."

The issue that I see is that developing countries need cheap energy to keep developing - and if "we" don't give them nuclear power, LFTRs, etc then they'll easily burn as much coal/wood/oil as we've stopped burning. Preventing them from doing so is not an option unless you fancy an all out war between the global haves and the have-nots which will make Egypt vs the Sea People look like a friendly match between Arsenal and Spurs.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I hope they succeed ... but! Economics!

"You could perhaps build hydro schemes where possible, and nuke where hydro can't be done. "

Once you have MSRs down pat, you don't _NEED_ solar, or windmills or hydro.

The environmental impact of hydro is a lot greater than people realise, apart from the death tollls when dams fail there's a substantial methane component from drowned biomass.

NZ is in an arguably unique position, being in the roaring forties and having the southern alps to build dams in - but even there the easy wind has already been pretty much tapped out and hydro went from being 80% of the energy source in the country in the 1970s to 20% in the 1990s. Clyde dam is an example of prioritising energy over safety and a decently large quake is going to be a big wakeup call.

Most of the rest of the world simply doesn't have the kind of terrain and low population that NZ has.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I hope they succeed ... but! Economics!

"It is simply not possible for the whole of the USA to be becalmed at one time."

It doesn't matter. The economical maximum for carrying electricity is about 1500 miles. Beyond that the grid losses become so high that it's a losing proposition.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Renewables are not as green as its promotors claim

"Globalisation - buy some socks made in a poor place. People get rich. Rich people have fewer children."

And whilst that may sound trite, it's actually true.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"back in t'day they just dumped the spend rods in to a swimming pool that was on site."

That's actually a fairly sensible way of keeping them safe until they decay enough to handle without killing people. Water is a _very_ good neutron absorber.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Underground

"This technology is going to take so long to develop the cash might as well go on fusion research. "

Except that unlike fusion systems, the USA ran a working Molten Salt reactor between 1964 and 1968, the identified problem mainly being corrosion and certain metals plating out at cold spots. Research got killed by Nixon in 1972 for political reasons - primarily being no jobs for the boys in southern california, but compounded by the fact that the MSRs were virtually impossible to weaponise so the military was against it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Underground

"Build like there will be a super landslide in Norway"

FWIW the next Storegga Slide will probably occur on the Leptav Sea continental shelf - and probably be larger.

In the other direction, the main risk comes from the Canary islands. It's worth noting as all the UK's west-coast/irish sea nuclear plants are in the firing line when that breaks.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Placed underground you say ?

" not a huge passenger/cargo aircraft designed to fly as heavy as possible. "

The locomotive tests outmassed and out "grunted" any aircraft you could think of.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wasn't Fukushima a "fail-safe" design?

" Protecting emergency power supplies, including diesel generators and batteries, by moving them to higher ground or by placing them in watertight bunkers"

This in particular was pointed out _DURING CONSTRUCTION_ by GE engineers, who demanded that the generators be moved to higher ground for safety reasons.

The Japanese management smiled, nodded and completely ignored the demands.

During the crisis, they refused outside help until it was much too late (the USA had emergency generating equipment ready to go from Okinawa, but couldn't move until authorised. It could have been onsite before the batteries gave out) - in a series of cockups reminiscent of Japan Airlines flight 123.

The meltdowns were 100% avertable right up to about 6 hours before they happened. It took a goodly amount of hubris and spectacular series of management screwups in the years leading up to and the hours after the tsunami to allow them to happen. It's worth noting that quite a few other plants along that coastline were hit and _none_ were damaged, because they'd taken note of the safety issues and sorted them. Having caused 1500+ deaths in the ensuing panic evacuations, TEPCO manglement should be stripped of their pensions and permanently barred from ever doing business again.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Placed underground you say ?

"it's disposal that needs sorting out. "

That's the rub. Right now with uranium-fuelled systems we're throwing away at least 80% of the mined metal enriching it to 3% from the natural 0.5% or less(*) and then throwing away 97-98% of the energy content of the fuel at the other end when it's "spent"(**)

It's a bit like picking an entire apple orchard, keeping one tree's worth of apples, making cider with it, drinking one glass and binning the rest.

(*) "Depleted uranium" is favoured by the military as it burns nicely inside tanks, but it's a nasty environmental toxin, worse than lead. It's also an essential component of hydrogen bombs, being what you make the cases of the things out of to get the multi-megaton yield

(**) The military love the used stuff too, extracting plutonium from it to make bombs.

The USA regards the energy expenditure of enriching uranium for the civil nuclear program as a classified military secret, but the power feeds into the facilities where they do it give a clue that it's extremely high. (power feeds into the centrifuges are also the giveaway for Iran's enrichment program)

All this stuff can be "burned down" happily in a LFTR-type reactor, resulting in that 97% output waste becoming less than 1% (the entire waste output of a 900MW nuclear power plant over a 60 year lifespan is enough to fill a single olympic size pool), as well as eating all the "depleted" stuff too.

It's technically possible to make weapons out of LFTR technology, but the various isotopes are so thoroughly mixed up that you'd need a _very_ large set of centrifuges to do it and some of those isotopes are so hot that you don't want to be anywhere near them(***), which should dissuade most terrorists from trying (being dead before they reach the boundary fence is a good persuader) and the power requirements of refining from the fuel are so noticeable that any country trying would be spotted quickly - especially after what India managed to pull with CANDU technology.

(***) Hot as in "fatal radiation dose in seconds"

Uranium tech is a dead end anyway - it's rare, expensive to refine and sources are limited. Thorium is the better long-term solution and as it happens we have megatons of the stuff already mined and ready for the technology. That's why so much effort is being put into making LFTRs commercially viable.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Underground

"Wasn't Fukushima a "fail-safe" design?"

No, not by a long shot, not even in someone's imagination.(**) Those kinds of features(*) only became mandatory after TMI and that plant significantly predates the TMI accident. It was running more than decade past its design end of life for starters.

(*) A failsafe nuke plant can scram and cooldown indefinitely without needing external power _at all_

(moderating rods self insert under gravity when the power goes off instead of needing to be levered into place, thermosyphon system for continuous cooling circulation) - Fukushima had none of that - and that's without even going into the need for redundant feed locations into the control rooms that didn't exist at most plants before TMI (one of the things that came out of TMI was that the redundant control systems which did exist all exited/entered the control room via the same hole/cableways and as such constituted a single point of failure in case of a fire. That particular change requirement was also propagated to other technology thermal plants.)

(**) And the japanese can be quite imaginative in their failures. Look up Monju sometime. How do you dispose of several tons of slightly radioactive sodium in your basement?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sounds sendible but...

"Incidentally, the thermal trace of a sub is a problem when you're aiming for a stealthy, invisible vessel, and the designers want to minimise it, but unfortunately there's nowhere else to dump the surplus heat."

This is why the newer diesel-electric class boats such as Australia's Shortfin-Baracuda Collins-class replacements are making some navies nervous. They don't (quite) have the endurance of nuke boats but they're a lot harder to detect and they can stay underwater for a few weeks at a time.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Heat engines

"So a 300MWe plant will be rejecting nearly 600MW of heat per hour.... Laws of Thermodynamics can't be beat..."

The trick is to find uses for the "waste" heat - hence the push for district heating (and cooling!(*)) systems driven from them.(**)

(*) https://entropyproduction.blogspot.co.uk/2005/10/solar-thermal-cooling.html - yes it says solar but any suitable heat source will do. Solarfrost.com have been working on these kinds of systems for 20 years.

(**) In some countries the district heating is used to warm greenhouses and extend the growing season as well as defrost critical roads. It's not just something for housing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: no, still NIMBYish

"The flip side is that SMRs still need lots of cooling water. "

Water-moderated ones do, because of the low temperatures they run at and their very low thermodynamic efficiency.(*)

Molten salt reactors run a LOT hotter(**), are a LOT smaller (not needing to be pressurised and not needing the associated pressure vessel and containment vessel) and as such they can dump directly to atmosphere via cooling towers (which could possibly be large enough to run a vortex and generate more power from the waste heat) and as a nice side effect they can't leak radioactive steam/water or cause radioactive hydrogen explosions.

The OTHER nice side effect is that if you use molten salt fuel (LFTR) designs you can load follow almost as quckly as gas or hydro plants without the risk of neutron poisoning as the pesky Xenon can be drawn off and stored until it breaks down or reinjected later, avoiding any prompt-critical excursions.

Alvin Weinberg should be hailed as a Hero of Humanity, after inventing the water moderated reactor for nuclear submarines he became gravely concerned by the safety issues of sizing them up to GW scale (especially the pressures!) and developed molten salt systems as a safer alternative in the 1960s - The USA ran a molten salt plant at Oak Ridge between 1962 and 1968 but Nixon killed it in 1972. Oh, what could have been.

(*) They're also intrinsically unsafe as they rely on high pressure, high temperature water being in contact with radioactive materials. Steam explosions are a fact of life and the fact that nuclear plants are 300,000 times safer than coal ones is down to careful management and paranoid design standards. It's still better not to mix water and fissionables.

(**) Water-moderated reactors top out about 450C. Most molten salt ones are just getting started at that temperature and are designed to run at 600-900C, with fission reactions self-limiting about 1100C (which is about the temperature of the inside of a conventional fuel rod) and the molten salt itself boiling at 1300-1600C depending on the exact chemistry used. The extra heat on the hot side means that conventional cooling towers can be used instead of relying on dumping heat to water, which in turn means the power station can be located away from shorelines (tsunami risk) and rivers (which tend to follow faultlines). Yes, you can dump heat to water for greater efficiency, but the greater safety margin afforded by not doing so(**) is worth considering.

AGR plants (UK's main design) can also run bloody hot and don't really need water cooling but they have their own sets of problems such as radioactive gas containment when things go pear-shaped. This isn't helped by not being designed to handle a full temperature excursion to 1100C

(***) And not having to derate your output in hot weather in order to preserve the local wildlife. This is a fundamental weakness of any plant using rivers or shallow seawater areas for cooling.

Wannacry: Everything you still need to know because there were so many unanswered Qs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: PITA

"even the stuff that was only used to type up a few notes; not networked, no database, no vital records."

I discovered more than a few of these would shit all over their bios after 1/1/2001 and effectively lose their date at every reboot. Not healthy to have computers which suddenly think it's 1/1/70 if the users don't notice.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: PITA

re: Millenium Bug

3 memorable incidents which happened in the runup to that (memorable as in they happened to me):

1: A lot of NTP systems crashing in February 1999 as the seconds since january 1 1970 exceeded 2^31 +1, including every Allied Telesyn router using NTP and virtually the entire Internet in China going titsup for 24 hours as a result.

2: A lot of security systems discovered to lock up if the clock advanced to 9/9/99 (which was regarded as a test date) and stayed locked up forevermore.

3: The complete brainscrambling of the Palmerston North NEAX61E telephone switches (80,000+ lines plus national call switching) thanks to memory corruption which was only exposed when y2k software was loaded in and the switches rebooted. To compound it, that scrambled crap had been written to the backup tapes for 18 months or more with the only clean backup discovered being 24 months old - The entire area had no dialtone for 18 hours and restoration of the backup plus replay of all the changes made since that point took in excess of 6 weeks.

Alan Brown Silver badge

The part that worries me

As a large org with BYOD policies and SMB enabled (with passwords on anything writeable) is the risk of someone getting infected externally then scrambling the samba file shares despite them residing on *nixen.

Yes they're backed up every night and yes I have triggers picking up if too many SHA256 signatures change in any given file share, but the restoration time is still a hassle.

Vista has only just gone "end of life" - which means it's a sacking offence to connect one to the network here without written permission, but Win7 is still alive (barely), so there's still a risk.

Perhaps monitored canary traps/honeypots are an appropriate defence against this kind of thing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I blame Microsoft

"I don't. I blame the network administrator."

This. Or whichever idiot overruled him.

Having dealt with NHS "network administrators" - who told me "You're very arrogant and you're talking gobbledygoook about viruses and IP addresses which I don't understand, I refuse to deal with you." and "I'm the administrator here, I know what I'm doing" - about a machine which was spewing crap all over the Internet. (And the boss, who sympathised but had no power to overrule the administrator), I'll say that a good chunk of the issue lays with the matter of adequate training coupled with Dunning-Kruger writ large.

Another similar discussion was had with a "NHS administrator" about a webserver used for GP patient bookings which was firewalling out around 2/3 of TalkTalk's entire UK ADSL IP allocations. "It works fine for me, you're making it up"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: SMB shares

"Organisation that spent 2 long days helping, last weekend was infected from a BYOD over VPN, owned and used by a very senior person in the org."

You don't have to help if they're sabotaging themselves from within. In fact I'd hold up my hands at that point and tell them any further work is chargable.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This sure beats reading newspapers

"Indeed, all the "experts" using this as an excuse to bash the NHS are looking pretty silly right now. "

Oh really? That would be the NHS which left port 445 open to the world instead of firewalling it on the border routers?

The top doc, the FBI, the Geek Squad informant – and the child porn pic that technically wasn't

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: $500 enough to put it there yourself?

"If the evidence is found to be planted you'd be guilty of possession of child porn yourself. "

In this particular case, the image is "a still from a known CP video, of a known victim, but isn't CP itself"

So, the feds got a warrant, on a dubious source, for an image that wasn't CP, because it came from a known video/victim - and didn't see fit to make proper disclosure to the judge OKing it.

So apparently, this particular method of evidence planting would be a get out of jail free card.

Stilll dodgy as all hell - and quite likely to result in an abuser going free.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is repair?

"I would think Best Buy would want to discourage this,"

The MD has come out and said being paid bounties is a violation of corporate policy, Hopefully that means the people involved will all be looking for new jobs soon.

Don't gripe if you hand your PC to Geek Squad and they rat you out to the Feds – judge

Alan Brown Silver badge

Multiple levels of fail here

1: This story has been run before

2: $500 bounty means that the geek squad is acting as agents of the state (fruit of the poisoned tree)

3: trawling deleted files - major ethics violations

4: trawling files at all - again, major ethics violations. I'm surprised that some outfits haven't turned this around, given the reputation of "Geek Squads" for lifting "interesting" stuff off customer drives (eg: honeypotting for "interesting" software showing up elsewhere after the host PC has been into Best Buy)

I'm not defending pervs at all, but it's clear that:

a: Best Buy has a major liability on its hands.

b: Any court case bought as a result of "geek squad" discoveries has a high chance of being thrown out - which is NOT good for anyone - expecially victims or those who may end up falsely accused.

There's a reason that rules for evidence gathering and chains of custody exist. Circumventing them is bad news and anyone who attempts to do so should find their career unceremoniously stomped into the ground. It's corrupt behaviour and needs to be treated as such.

That said, if someone runs across illegal material whilst working on a client's PC, in most countries they're required to notify the authorities. Bounties don't enter the equation because failing to do so makes one an accessory after the fact.

Bloke charged under UK terror law for refusing to cough up passwords

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The USA Equivalent Situation...

"Now it has been changed so that silence legally counts against you."

Same in the USA thanks to a couple of (dubious) legal decisions.

Current advice is "Don't talk to the police when they ask questions. Demand a lawyer"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "used only in extreme terrorism cases"

"The French Resistance were terrorists by today's definition."

And they were called "terrorists" by the Nazis.

Meantime a good chunk of the population there actively supported Nazi points of view, to the point that France actually sent a greater proportion of its jewish population off to be exterminated than Germany did.

Remember also that Germany welcomed jewish refugees with open arms in the 18th and 19th centuries and was a bastion of enlightenment right up until the early 20th century. It only took 20 years to turn that around, which should be a sober reminder to anyone saying "it can't happen here"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ugh

"Coppers were duly called, and threatened to arrest me on terrorism charges if I didn't cooperate and give my address."

"There are 2 dozen pages of paperwork you have to fill out if you want to go that route and my lawyer will make sure you fill in every single one of them. Do you really want to be tied to a desk for at least the next 3 days?"

Blighty's buying another 17 F-35s, confirms the American government

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I'm in the mood for being a downvote magnet

"the F-35 itself is stealthy only if it carries very few weapons and hasn't picked up a pebble scratch off the runway."

And isn't wet, and hasn't overheated.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I'm in the mood for being a downvote magnet

"I reckon the F35B will be pretty spectacular, once it's RFS."

I reckon the crashes will be, at any rate. The things are so tubby that all an opposing plot has to do is let the things fly into the ground.(**)

These were never intended as air superiority fighters(*). That's the F22's job along with enemy ground defence supression. The "cheaper" F35 was supposed to be doing ground support work.

(*)The fact that they're being sold as such to "allied countries" _and that those countries are buying that scam_ says a lot about military procurement.

(**) A war situation may well be all standoffs and missiles at 35 miles, but there are plenty of other times when aircraft get up close and personal without firing a shot. Encouraging the other guy to fall out of the sky is all part of the game.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: F-35A

G: For "germany" - we made it especially for those guys, with all the addons they wanted. The only fair weather fighter they need! You can call it the Widowmaker!

Huawei spied, US federal jury finds

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Innovation...

In short: yes (their bridge builders are pretty amazing, amongst other things)

The USA was and is a hotbed of intellectual property theft, only turning to litigation against others when it suited them to do so (ask the Lumiere Brothers how much Edison stole from them, etc)

You'll find similar robots sitting in the Underwriters' Laboratories where they've existed for many years. UL are pretty much the pioneers in robotising usage simulators, but many manufacturers have adopted the same technology to ensure they pass UL's torture tests. In this case it looks remarkably like not-very-modified SCARA pick'n'place robot.

For now, GNU GPL is an enforceable contract, says US federal judge

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I think people quite understand that US/EU law won't take kindly to ripping off GPL or other licenses on code, so they don't try - unless they're in a country that wouldn't care less about doing that."

As a number of people have found out, it doesn't matter if the violation happens in China. Once the product containing the offending item shows up in a Berne-respecting country the _distributor_ and _seller_ are responsible - as LIDL, ALDI and Logitech Europe have all discovered the hard way (again, when lawyers get involved, they start realising it's cheaper to settle/comply than fight it. Harold Welte in particular has pushed over 100 commercial entities in europe into GPL compliance)

As they're large buyers, when they start pushing back on their upstream, chinese makers start taking notice, etc.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Double edge

"The problem is that the only remedy for a failure to "abide by the rules" is to claim damages. Excepting that some jurisdictions make provision for statutory damages, this usually means demonstrating an actual loss."

Breach of GPL is copyright violation. As the copyright holder (plaintiff), you can require that all distributed infringing copies be recalled and destroyed, plus demand court and legal fees as a starting point - which the court will be minded to give, because the respondent was uncooperative.

etc etc.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It is not a contract, at least not in the UK. A contract absolutley has to have an exchange (e.g. £1) to bind it. No money, no contract. There's no monetary exchange when you download GPL code."

in which case if you make a derivative work and fail to comply with the contract conditions you can be done for simple copyright violation.

Do you really want to do that?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: One point of criticism though...

The hard part about enforcing GPL is that (of course) the only entity with any standing to enforce it is the copyright holder.

In general, unless you're a large company with an army of lawyers at your disposal, if you want that to work, you need to assign copyright to the FSF.

What you _can_ do is notify the author of the code block of the violation and Cc the FSF. They do send out warning letters on letterhead and that's frequently enough to scare abusers into complying.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That's different:

"The GPL says you are entitled to make a copy provided you comply with certain conditions. "

And this is why there have only been a handful of GPL cases in the world _ever_.

Attempting to argue it's not a contract (or its validity) turns it into a copyright violation case (which has severe penalties). Attempting to dispute the contract's terms invalidates it, which..... turns it into a copyright violation case.

In virtually all cases companies which have been confronted with evidence of their GPL violations take their lawyers' advice ("Settle. Now. Comply with the license.").

Many have attempted to bluff their way through it when initially confronted but when lawyers get involved they quickly realise that the more aggressively they defend the claims, the bigger the penalties are that they may face.

GPL exists precisely _because_ of abuse of Creative Commons and is expressly aimed at preventing it.

PC repair chap lets tech support scammer log on to his PC. His Linux PC

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Does the UK have something like 'donotcall.gov' where you can report scammer calls?"

Yes: Actionfraud.police.uk

New Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters can't transmit vital data

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Presumably treated cotton"

Washing with a small amount of alum suffices nicely.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "How did so many idiots get into positions of power?"

"Clearly someone is doing it wrong."

That depends if "it" is 'hiding true unemployment figures' or something else.

Padding out the Civil Service is a time-honoured way of cheating.

US Coast Guard: We're rather chuffed with our new Boeing spy drone

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Is the U.S, Coast Guard lending personnel to the RN?

"All Americans ought to go and find out how the Canadians describe the war of 1812."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVC677-YmfM

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @ Ledswinger -- £10m a year for a drone?

"The days of "Rule Britannia" ended on the first of September 1939."

More like the early months of 1914. From that point on it was simply nostalgia.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: £10m a year for a drone?

"That's because the bulk of your budget goes to pay for the NHS."

Ahem*bullshit*ahem*

62% of the treasury tax take goes on state pensions, with another 5-7% or so (it's hard to get straight answers from anyone) going on pensioner voting bribes like fuel allowances, pensioner housing allowances and free travel (the latter 2 going to councils for disbursement).

This figure is only going to get bigger. The majority of the Boomer cohort have yet to hit retirement age and the pensioner population will only start to peak around 2029. Meantime the number of working taxpayers continues to decline primarily due to reduced birthrates since the introduction of the pill in the early 1960s.

Everything else is paid for from what's left over. NHS costs are rising rapidly primarily due to an aging population, not because of advances in medicine(*), however the cost related to paying for pensioner medical care isn't broken out separately from the general budget and as such is nearly impossible to quantiify.

(*) The longer people live, the more likely they are to get cancer (which is expensive to treat) or other age-related diseases (which also tend to be expensive to treat) and spend more time in old folks homes (which are expensive to run). The problem is that budgetary assumptions were made for a long time based on a return to 1950s birthrates (which never happened) and people retiring at 60 then living to 68, instead of the 80-85 which was normal even in the 1970s and the 85-90 which is normal now.

Secure email service builds newsletter bomb defences after attack pummels their inbox

Alan Brown Silver badge

Blacklisting

Spamhaus and various other DNSBLs _DO_ blacklist non-confirmed mailing lists.

I forsee much gnashing of teeth over the next few days on the part of the marketroids.

Alan Brown Silver badge

25 years on

and listbombing is STILL a thing?

sheesh!

Rich professionals could be replaced by AI, shrieks Gartner

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: generations away

Forget the promises.

We don't have flying cars or housemaid robots - but did you see George Jetson playing video games, using a tablet or talking on a mobile phone?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: In five years we could have Triage AI

> Meanwhile, court lawyers (or barristers in the English system) engage in human-to-human interaction: between judges, juries, etc. Uncanny Valley prevents any non-human from being effective there

Yes, but courtroom action only accounts for a small fraction of the law. The vast majority of legal work is paper shuffling. It wasn't that long ago that the average law firm employed several people and frequently entire floors in office buildings just to hold, memorise and pull records. Then in the 1980s firms in places like New York City started scanning/OCRing everything and moving their paper to barns in the countryside because the office space was far too valuable to be tied up with stacks. Fast forward a few years and all that scanned paper was now being used as input to document engines instead of as just "photos of pages" and ended up becoming directly searchable.

As time goes on, this stuff gets crossindexed, etc etc and decisions supporting/opposing results are all tied in and the result is that someone with a modicum of legal experience can quickly find out whether a particular case has any chance in court long before it ever actually goes near a courtroom - and most cases are settled at this point. Only the fuzzy cases or new law go to courtrooms for anything more than rubberstamping. (or brain-dead clients who won't accept the lawyer's opinion)

The vast majority of this stuff has happened "invisibly". Offices continued doing the same work with fewer support staff (phone operators, typists, clerks, secretaries) as people retired. It may continue to do so into the future or it may hit a knee point as it did in other industries where entire factories or mines or tunnelboring systems are now operated by 1-2 people.