* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Small ISPs 'probably' won't receive data retention order following IP Bill

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If I said the next thing a say will be a lie and the last thing I said was the truth

"They state that they don't have any monitoring or filtering systems in place. They point out that they could be forced to in the future and that they could be forced to lie. "

It's not just that.

Virtually all smaller ISPs resell services from larger ISPs - which means they can be snooped anyway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Look at the details to find the devil

"There have been many cases of disgruntled Plod and other Gov officials deliberately searching in secure databases for ex-partners or even just the neighbour who won't stop cutting his lawn at 8am on a Saturday. "

As in criminal prosecutions for doing it, thankfully.

The interesting part is when standover tactics have been used to try and get the discovering parties not to file complaints.

Alan Brown Silver badge

" if ISP A is required to do some task to comply with the law, it can simply outsource it to IT company B and present the invoice to Mr. Plod. "

For maximum effect, IT company B is a company setup by ISP A for the express purpose of doing the work and billing through the nose.

PROFIT!

Surprise, surprise. BT the only Universal Service Obligation provider in town

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Who else has £1B a year to invest?

"OpenReach turn over.......... around £5b

BT turn over.......... over £20b"

Don't believe a word of that.

Openreach is not a separate company and as discovered with Telecom NZ's Spark/Chorus circus, the way those figures are arrived at are incredibly suspect.

It is in BT's interest to make Openreach's income and expenditure figures look as sick as possible in order to dissuade the government from forcing a demerger. Therefore by creative accounting techniques we all know and loathe - they will do exactly that.

As for the money BT's been given for rural broadband, most of it's been pissed up a wall, not spent where it's supposed to have gone.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nationalise openreach

"The trouble with that is that it puts Virgin and B4RN and Gigaclear out of business. "

NO, absolutely, it doesn't.

The lines company ends up selling to all comers equally. What happened in New Zealand is that the "competitors" got the same deals on leased access that the incumbent was getting AND the option to run their own cables in the ducting. which they took with gleeful abandon.

One unforseen and very welcome outcome of the demerger was that with the dead hand of head office released from the handbrake, the lines company was now incentivised to go out and find customers to sell services to, resulting in a _very_ rapid diversification of its customerbase and the company being extremely approachable.

The ironic thing is that 2 years after the split, the former incumbent telco was crying foul and that the (regulated) line charges were far too high - despite competitors being charged less than half the previous rates it had been charging them and despite those figures being set by the regulators based on figures originally provided by the incumbent. It then demanded special treatment to a loud chorus(pun intended) of laughter from every other player in the market. (It's arguable that regulated rates have subsequently been set too low, but the market in NZ is still vibrant.)

The other part that the incumbent was crying would sink the demerged linesco - pension liabilities - proved to be smoke and mirrors. In fact the linesco is in robust health whilst the old incumbent is looking rather shaky.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Not sure if Openreach actually "own" anything:"

Given that Openreach isn't even a registered business, it can't own anything.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"A relative put a lot of work and a considerable amount of money in getting costings to set up an ISP not too far from Cambridge where -- at the time -- there was no (known) plan to upgrade the exchange."

Same thing happened in Surrey (Cranleigh).

Several years after killing the competition and 2 years after the promised provision date (which was 2 years after the private outfit would have been providing broadband) , BT _started_ installing the equipment to be able to do the rollout.

Blatent anticompetitive behaviour, but ofcom won't deal with that and the competion commission won't touch telecoms companies when they pull this stuff as it's supposedly ofcom's remit.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Calling our bluff, are you?

"So which foreign telecoms operator do you want to see buying a demerged Openreach?"

I don't. Look at the New Zealand model and the way it revolutionised the market there. No single entitity is allowed to own more than a small chunk of the company - and after the experience there with hostile telecomms takeovers the rules were written with teeth instead of trusting that business would do the right thing.

It worked there and was implemented there BECAUSE of what BT was pulling with Openreach (Telecom NZ proposed the BT/Openreach model as a way of staving off govt regulation, NZ's competition authority looked at what's happening in the UK and said "nyuh uh, no way")

And the way NZ did it is duplicatable too - make demerger a condition for any further funding for broadband rollout. No need to try and haul it through the courts if you can simply not pay them if they don't.

Stay out of my server room!

Alan Brown Silver badge

"lets not even get into the problems we had caused by microfine metal dust getting through the ventilation filters and into the systems"

Next time you have to deal with that kind of thing, bear in mind that air turns corners better than microfine dust does and add a centrifugual intake filter followed by an electrostatic plate. It makes the world of difference.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"By company fiat ONLY IT equipment is to be in this room."

That's your authorisation to transfer the non IT stuff to a dumpster.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Another one has a little broom specifically to get rid of the vermin feces. I recommend against sitting on the chair in that particular closet.

The best one I've seen was a crawl space full of our old friend vermin feces along with fiberglass insulation and broken glass. "

Sorry, can't work on that, Environmental health breach.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It has never been a model of a room, because it is simply a converted broom cupboard.

For that reason, the door is never locked."

Hasp and padlock.

Vent grilles on the door, with a suitable fan attached.

And a policy of "anything not authorised to be in here will immediately go into the dumpster"

Alan Brown Silver badge

" before I could come in to turn the air con back on."

Oh, I'm sorry, it's been cooked,. It'll take 3 days to get replacement parts.

Watch how fast you get your own AC

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Blocking the fire escape with crap in the room most likely to have a fire? The directors will be in court, explaining it, if someone gets hurt."

Likewise if someone gets injured by the fire supression system.

Some of them are surprisingly sensitive and bottles of inergen run to about £1500 a shot to refill.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Next up, the requirements of OSHA and state variants have the most interesting regulations which have Director frightening fines, including prison time attached."

I've been told that something like this actually happened at $orkplace many years ago, with the fire brigade inspector making the point rather forcefully and clearly.

NASA trying to rein in next-generation super-heavy lifter costs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: James Hansen will be furious

"Well, you can prove anything with facts, can't you."

When you start looking at the professions of the average "Climate change denier" scientist, you start finding something rather interesting - most of them don't have any kind of qualification that's remotely applicable to the field.

People at the sharp end of climate research are worried that things are a _lot_ worse than they're allowed to let on. When they start pointing to where things are likely to go, they get shut down as panicmongering, so they're rather sensibly shut up and hunkered down.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: James Hansen will be furious

"Diesel for passenger cars didn't take off in the US as it did in the rest of the world because gasoline here was relatively cheap."

Also because the USA had a good market for the diesel being produced and didn't have growing unsaleable lakes of the stuff.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: James Hansen will be furious

" The massive demand for light fuels like gasoline mean that heavy crude oil had to be cracked, at great expense, "

The ironic thing being that gasoline was used for engines because it was nuisance byproduct of kerosene refining (for lighting), and kerosene ended up being used for jet engines because it was a nuisance byproduct of gasoline refining. :)

UK PM Theresa May's £2bn in R&D still a drop in the ocean

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Confederation of British Hypocrites

"Maybe we need an R&D Levy on businesses?"

Perhaps we need to emulate the australian example (other countries too) where R&D spend gets a 150% tax credit.

Barnet Council: Outsourcing deal with Capita has 'performance issues'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: cheap?

"I never believe an accountancy figure..."

The question to ask an accountant when they're promoting things as cheaper is "Have you factored in any goodwill impact?"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's Barnet council that has "performnace issues"

"If the first few examples of a new Airbus or Boeing fell out of the sky occasionally, would the airlines just issue press releases saying "well, every new machine has teething troubles", and expect everyone to be happy?"

It's the kind of thing you'd expect British Leyland manglement to say - and councils seem to be the final resting place of a lot of ex BL manglement.

AI, AI, captain: Royal Navy warships to set sail with computer officers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Put it on Britain's new carriers!

An AI doesn't need to physically abandon ship, merely transfer its code elsewhere.

It probably left the boat before giving the warning.

UK warships to have less firepower than 19th century equivalents as missiles withdrawn

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What about that railgun?

Do you really want a gun that self-destructs after a half dozen shots?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Non-USA options may be better value

"Well if you ignore us being amongst the leading countries in satellite technology."

That's _despite_ the UK government, not because of it.

The government has spent most of the time I've been working in this field trying to shut everything down, but likes to claim glory when anyone manages to succeed despite their efforts.

Many of the UK's most promising space scientists have ended up working in completely unrelated fields thanks to the pitiful support successive governments have given the area. The ones who stay are so badly underpaid that they're constantly struggling just to survive.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"we end up doing stuff eg like spending £4bn on Nimrod MRA4, and then scrapping the whole lot."

The MRA4 shouldn't have been built in the first place (the RAF wanted other, better, larger sensor trucks) and once the safety deficiencies became insurmountable they should have stopped.

Finding that the airframes were essentially all one-offs (virtually no interchangable parts) meant that the cost would have at least doubled and it was only then that the handshake agreements between politicians and captains of industry could be reviewed.

The RAF _could_ have acquired a bunch of A330s and fitted them out with MRA4 avionics for a lot less.

The big purported advantage of the Comet Airframe (being able to shut down 3 engines inflight and stay on station with one for enhanced endurance) isn't that big a deal considering the small onboard tankage (and it was enhancing that tankage which caused a lot of the safety issues). The small size of the aircraft is emphasised by the fact that of stupid canoe underbody had to be fitted to hold everything needed (reducing range even further - in other words the engine hack was something to keep the aircraft usable)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Actually the heavy guns and battle ships were made useless by planes fist and missiles later"

ISTR a documentary from 25 years ago about battleships making that point.

That same documentary pointed out that going to high rates of fire meant that smaller guns (and therefore smaller ships) could be used and that had serious knock on effects with maneuverability, etc, meaning less armour was necessary (The size of these boats is more determined by their ammunition capacity than anything else), with missile defence forming active armour meaning even less static armour.

The same documentary ALSO pointed out that due to changing engagement modes since the end of WW2, the primary use of 4.5" autocannons is for onshore bombardment, not engaging other ships. Think of them as a howitzer with a _very_ large and versatile ammunition store and devastating accuracy thanks to their gyrostabilised mounts and not getting knocked off target by recoil.

(A related documentary went into machine gun development, pointing out that a single modern footsoldier has more firepower than an entire regiment of 200 years ago.)

Aircraft carriers and support groups have pretty much been rendered obsolete by landbased antishipping ballistic missiles coming in at mach10+ - China's DF21-D and DF-24s being a case in point. As with Battleships it will probably take 40 years before militaries notice.

Fire alarm sparked data centre meltdown emergency

Alan Brown Silver badge

" Do not use a 13A fuse if the cable from the plug is rated at 3A! "

Correct. The fuse in the plug is there to protect the wiring, not to protect the bulb holder.

Similarly the circuit breaker is there to protect the building wiring, not your equipment, on the basis that your equipment might go bang but having the building burn down too is generally regarded as a bad idea.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Temperature

"All of the expensive stuff was really sensitive to environmental anomalies and would happily cook itself in under an hour if the air-con failed."

Which is why our last resort is a thermostat set to 35C wired across the server room emergency power cut off circuit. Nothing like a crowbar to ensure things go off and stay off.

Origin of the beasties: Mirai botnet missing link revealed as DVR player

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Does it matter?

Yet more IPv6 FUD.

Most IPv6 boxes offer the same firewalling on IPv6 as they offer on IPv4. The only difference being that they don't need to do NAT as well (they're also usually operated in lockstep, so opening external port80 on the IPv4 external interface to internal host Foo port 80 opens access to Foo port 80 on ipv6 too)

Some have independent IPv4/IPv6 firewalling rules but they invariably default to the same as IPv4 - block everything inbound unless requested otherwise or opened by a helper app.

Post-outage King's College London orders staff to never make their own backups

Alan Brown Silver badge

"But o course, as pointed out, users need to trust your company backup."

You gain that trust by demonstrating that the process works and is tested. Not by fiat order from the top.

Such orders frequently make people who weren't previously thinking about backups start panicing and generating their own, which is yet more data to possibly lose on the train.

'Pavement power' - The bad idea that never seems to die

Alan Brown Silver badge

"In parts of the world where sunshine is plentiful and reliable, then PV's a great idea. "

In parts of the world where sunshine is plentiful and reliable, solar hot water systems are a much better idea. You can use them to drive Solarfrost cycle cooling systems (modified low-temperature ammonia pumps) and as it gets hotter you get more cooling.

It can even drive freezing systems (solarfrost will go to -30C for 60C input) and stirling motors for water pumping or circulating fans.

Low tech, low maintenance, more efficient overall than converting to electricity and then driving AC with it - the PV systems can be downsized enough to provide for lighting/entertainment systems.

Suitable building desig, solar chimneys and awnings are also a lot better than trying to bruteforce the cooling using AC.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Biomass/Timber burning releasing tons of CO2, 2GW

Much more tons of CO2 than you realise.

Drax is fed by clearfelling old-growth north american forests (using oil) and the clearcut land releases a shitload of CO2. It's then chipped (using oil) and transported to the power station (using oil).

The process uses more oil than would be consumed by directly generating electricity with the stuff.

The environmental effects of the clearfelling are a disaster all by themselves.

Can you say Greenwash?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It's clear that a sustainable overall solution would have to be based primarily on nuclear and augmented, where possible, with renewables as the specific environment where the deployment is taking place allows"

LFTRs and other molten salt nukes can load follow and are _much_ cheaper than renewables once deployed. They can provide "peaking capacity" when renewables drop out, but that's also knowin as load following and because they're way cheaper than wind/solar, renewables are an expensive pain in the ass that will rapidly be kicked off the grid.

Conventional nukes can't load follow, so you need fast "peaking capacity" - inefficient open cycle generation - to fill the gaps when solar or wind drop out. Renewables suppliers get preferential power rates and are not required to pay for the upkeep or operation of these backup systems, or the grid overlays required to handle large unpredictable power flows that weren't in the original designs.

Either way, greenwashs system will end up as monuments to folly. They can't provide anywhere near close to enough electricity to allow us to replace carbon emissions (demand will rise by a factor of 6-8 over current baseload. Renewables - at best - could just match current baseload.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"We have a PV system running, at work. No subsidies whatsoever. It cut down the electricity bill by about 90%, so accounting are purring like kittens. And it's very economically viable, considering that a system with a projected lifespan of 25 years should have paid for itself in 3, even taking into account expected drops in efficiency."

How big was the grant (subsidy) you got to install it?

What value is the feedin tarriff you're getting?

I've seen feedin rates up to 45p/kWh being bandied about. As my electricity costs 14p/kWh, it's clear that your feedin is being paid for by consumers.

And if you honestly expect to get 25 years out of a solar PV installation I have a couple of bridges I'd like to sell you. It'll be down to 50% capacity in 8-9 and half that again by year 16, if the inverters haven't blown by then or some other silicon failure knocked it out.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It's not possible to run an economy based solely on them, yes. "

And it's a bloody expensive distraction from investing in the technologies which can.

If all the money invested in solar/wind R&D went into LFTR, we'd have working commercial examples by now. As it is, if/when LFTR rolls out, those windmills and PVs will be expensive nuisances (unlike conventional nukes LFTR can load follow, but it's a _lot_ cheaper per Wh than conventional nukes, let alone solar or wind, as the cleanup costs are far lower than conventional nukes)

CERN boffins see strange ... oh, wait, that's just New Zealand moving 2m north

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: More a storm than a quake

"It also helps being on thicker sediments rather than rock"

In general, no. The sediments end up springing and amplifying the motion, That's why Mexico city (old lake bed on 200m of sediment) and christchurch (old swamp on 100-300m of sediment) got hit so hard.

One 6.4 quake (Dannevirke) I experienced had an epicentre on the other side of a mountain range. Because my location was on top of 400 metres of sediment the rolling and damage was a _lot_ worse than other locations closer in, sitting on rock.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: More a storm than a quake

"A story I've heard repeated in several differing formats goes roughly like this. "

Yup, that's par for the course in New Zealand. Corrupt behaviour comes in many forms - right up to the point of taking over Transparency International's NZ branch to get them to toe the party line.(*)

New Zealand only classifies bribery as corruption. Cronyism, Influence peddling, the kind of institutionalised thieving described and "minor" stuff like Tax/Customs and Welfare department staff systematically selling people's personal data to private investigators(**) are all either "not illegal, therefore not corruption and therefore OK" or "Isolated cases of employee fraud". As a result Cronyism in particular is rife in every part of the country's structures.

Of course ordinary kiwis will get quite nasty if you point out that the emperor has no clothes. They've been drinking the Kool Aid for decades.

(*) 100% govt funded, 100% opaque, kicked out its transparency activists, attempted to pull the wool over eyes outside the country. The wheels are starting to fall off that particular little wagon - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_International#Internal_scandals - but TINZ is still trying to parrot the official NZ position for the most part (TIUK have distanced themselves from the NZ operation)

(**) Yes really, from every office in the country. I had the misfortune to be peripherally involved in the discovery of it happening. There was a lot of retaliation against those who (accidentally) unearthed it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: More a storm than a quake

> 6.2 (this is the size that did in Christchurch)

6.2 isn't particularly big in the NZ scheme of things. I've ridden motorcycles through the epicentre of a couple that size (thought my front wheel was coming off both times, but stayed upright)

Christchurch was doubly unlucky in that most of its buildings had already been badly weakened by the 7.2 plus constant aftershocks AND that the 6.2 was extremely shallow plus directly under the city.

It's worth watching "When a city falls"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIlxoV6uG3Q and "Three years on" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO0x5WRE8rY

The fact that so many people died was down to pressure not to condemn buildings which should have had 20 foot exclusion zones around them (the busload of people that had the shopfronts fall on them(*)) and a couple of fraudulent engineers with fake qualifications signing off a building as safe when it wasn't (CTV building). The guy on the port hills who got killed by dislodged boulders was simply unlucky but a good half of the deaths in town were preventable.

(*) I grew up in christchurch in the 1970s. Those 19th/early 20th century brick buildings were expected to be mashed at the first large quake (as was the Cathedral) and they were known to be badly weakened. Traffic should never have been allowed to be running close to them until fixed.

Huawei sues T-Mobile US: Why can't we be FRANDS with benefits?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: NDA is the sticking point

FRANDS are almost universally done under NDA.

T-mobile is using this argument to try and paint itself as the good guy after being caught with its hands in the cookie jar.

Adult FriendFinder users get their privates exposed... again – reports

Alan Brown Silver badge

passwords:

"Certificate management firm Venafi claimed that private information such as passwords appeared to have been protected using only the obsolete SHA-1 hashing algorithm."

If so, that's _marginally_ better than previously when they were stored in plaintext.

Bloody robots! 860k public sector jobs to be automated by 2030, say researchers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ummm

"...unless we have another big war to soak them all up."

If you've ever studied history you'll know that populations decimated by war or disease make up those numbers - and then some - within 20 years.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: fantastic

> what's the betting that these people will be "redeployed'?

"No new hiring, reduction by attrition, sinking lid policy"

It will take quite a while for this to percolate through to manglement.

Meantime those most recently hired will be seeing their career path (promotion by seniority) starting to fizzle out as there will be no new warm bodies to work under them.

Britain must send its F-35s to Italy for heavy overhauls, decrees US

Alan Brown Silver badge

Erm

Did I imagine the announcement that they'd be maintained by BAE at Sealand?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Widow Maker

"I'm guessing the frequent high G loadings on jet fighters fatigues the airframe much quicker than that of a bomber "

Yup. Fatigue cracking in the spars is not to be sneezed at - and is why, even without a meatsack onboard there are lifetime airframe limits for aircraft (as in, only allowed to pull so many 9G turns, etc). They don't fly so well if a wing falls off. (Yes, I know about the unwinged F16, but it wasn't pulling a turn at the time)

IPv4 is OVER. Really. So quit relying on it in new protocols, sheesh

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IPv6 is OVER!

"phone numbers would be 40 digits long"

When phone numbers were standardised so that 11 digits was the maximum needed to dial almost all international numbers, it was regarded as excessive.

13, 14 and 15 digit numbers are popping up all over now and the world's phone routing network is so messed up it makes the BGP4 tables look tidy.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Where I am working right now

"Dear CFO, at some point (the timing of which is hard to predict) there will be customers and/or suppliers and/or other parts of our business that do not have IPv4 addresses because all the IPv4 addresses are in use by other people. "

This is already happening. Large chunks of SE Asia are only getting onto the Internet (IPv4) via CGNAT gateways and you can't connect to their systems/resources (which is important when doing some kinds of transaction control).

Of course those same areas of the world generally have ISPs who will look at you like you just sprouted a second head when you ask for a IPv6 /48

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Where I am working right now

"Because of IPv6's colon cancer."

I saw the same criticisms made about IPv4's dotted quads.

That's what DNS is for. Deal with it.

China's moon rover dies of extreme old age, after two-and-a-half years

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Or didn't believe it?"

The extremes are even worse than can be simulated in an earthbound thermal vacuum chamber - and unlike spacebased stuff (which can rotate to spread the heat evenly), this kind of abuse tends to make things break in relatively short order just on uneven thermal expansion/contraction.

Leaked paper suggests EM Drive tested by NASA actually works

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It just might be low energy photons providing the thrust

"Photons having momentum is first level undergrad stuff"

The point is that the microwave photons in question are being emitted into a _sealed_ container, so the momentum imparted in one direction should be cancelled when they hit the other end of it.

The fact that it isn't 100% cancelled out is where the controversy is coming from.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So these papers "leak"??

"while this particular way of Nature's working is not readily apparent all around us"

It may actually be additional proof that the universe really does have more than the 3 dimensions we perceive (as does the way a neutrino keeps rolling through various flavours when observed)